The Moon and the Other Read online

  A blast of steam flew into his faceplate, obscuring his vision. He lost his balance. The mountain of broken ice that towered above him began to slide, then fall, slowly, inevitably. Pieces drummed on the helmet, shoulders, and back of his clumsy suit. He dropped the cutter and tried to move but it was useless. For the second time that shift Erno was buried in ice.

  But this time he would not wake up back in the control room. He tried to move. Even with the magnified strength of the suit’s servos, he could not budge. Everything was black. His left arm was twisted at an odd angle, and a shooting pain lanced his hand. He felt the cold creep up his arms. He withdrew his right one from the sleeve, but his left was trapped. His hand was going numb.

  What was that verse he had read just the other day? Something about the thousand ill turns of fate. Hafêz had that one right.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  NIGHTLIFE WAS NOT A SPECIALTY of the Society of Cousins. The free enterprise zone closed down after midnight, so Mira was surprised when she heard voices as she and Carey moved along the row of closed shopfronts.

  “Hide,” Mira whispered.

  She ducked into the alcove. Carey slipped behind the statue of Tiresias in the center of the concourse. Three women and a man came around the bend. The man stumbled a bit on the low steps that circled the trees. One woman giggled and the other two caught him, arms around his waist.

  “Wake up, Stevie!” the laughing one said. “We need you tonight!” The others laughed, too.

  Stevie shrugged off their help. With his dark hair in his eyes, he reminded Mira of Marco. “I’m ready—always ready.”

  The heliotrope sun tunnels in the concourse roof were folded closed, and the partiers missed Mira in the shadows. Once they were past, Carey came out from behind the statue. “Stevie’s got his work cut out for him,” he said.

  “Augment,” Mira told her Aide, and it superimposed details from the last colony architectural survey over her vision. At the back of the alcove, instead of a blank wall she saw a door. She felt around for the frame, but found nothing.

  She backed away. “There’s a door under there.”

  Carey pulled the crowbar from beneath his long coat. He set the pointed end against the corner of the wall and drew it back to strike.

  “Wait,” Mira said. “A tram.”

  Along the tramway suspended from the roof of the tunnel a double car approached and slid by, almost empty, windows glowing.

  Mira said, “Okay.”

  Carey rammed the thin edge of the bar into the wall with a crunch. Bits of stucco flew away and drifted to the pavement. He kept at it, quick and remarkably quiet, until he hit the door. He took off his coat, then took up the bar again. She admired the way his shoulders worked beneath his shirt. The rubble gathered around their feet. In a few minutes he had the doorframe completely exposed.

  Mira put on her spex. “I’m recording,” she said.

  Carey unlocked the door with a code breaker he had gotten from some lover of his who was a constable. They slipped through a vestibule into a big room.

  The place had once been a club called the Oxygen Warehouse, closed down a decade ago after the riot that Thomas Marysson had provoked with one of his standup routines. Mira had been fifteen back then, newly adult and wrapped up in her own problems, but her younger brother, Marco, had followed Marysson obsessively. When Marysson caused a fatal vacuum blowout, the Matrons closed the club and hoped it would be forgotten.

  Mira tried the lights, and one of the small spots lit a low stage. The rest of the room was a dark jumble of overturned tables and chairs. Behind the bar stood the remnants of a dismantled tea synthesizer.

  Carey stood on the stage, facing out. Mira kept him in the shot: She would edit all this out later. He addressed an invisible audience, “Let me tell you what it means to be an untreated sociopath.”

  “No one’s laughing,” Mira said.

  “Tough crowd.”

  “Hold this,” she said, unclipping a lamp from her belt. “Move to the bar, then sweep across the tables and end on the stage,” she told him. “Don’t get too far ahead of me.”

  “Who are you ordering about?” His voice was a little slurred; he had drunk a bulb of Perceive before they’d left her place.

  “You,” she said. She turned the spex directly on him.

  He reached into his breast pocket. “I brought you something.” He withdrew a small box and held it out to her.

  Puzzled, she opened it. It contained a little horse made of black glass. A tiny white blaze gleamed on its face. “I had Val make it for you,” Carey said. “He’s getting good, isn’t he?”

  He clearly intended it to mean something, but given how free Carey was with gifts, there was no way to know what. Just as quickly as her heart rose, she pushed it down. “It’s lovely.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.” She set the little box on a table. “Let’s do this.”

  “All right.”

  They ran through a tour of the wreckage, then did it again for good measure. Mira shot some inserts. A shard of broken glass glinting in the dust. A spray of dried blood on the edge of an overturned table. A constable’s baton in the shadows by the stage.

  Carey grew bored long before Mira was ready to quit. He wasn’t really a member of the Discussion Group. Just a man a lot of members had slept with, or wished they had.

  He rubbed two fingers across the floor and smeared grime across his nose. “Hey, Mira—help me out. Do I have dirt on my nose?”

  She came over and peered into his face. “I can’t see anything worth paying attention to.”

  “You need to look more closely.” He took the spex from her face and placed them on a table. He put his hands on her waist and pulled her to him. The kiss went on for a while, his tongue flicking lightly over hers, delicate, not forcing.

  She never ceased to be astonished that he wanted her. Still, it was no fun if it was too easy. So when his hand slipped into the back of her pants, Mira pushed him away. He lost his balance, but graceful as always landed on his hands and bounced back up. She snatched a chair and held it between them. “Get back!”

  Faster than she could react, Carey seized a chair leg and twisted it out of her hands. She turned; he caught her shoulders. As they fell he flipped around so that she landed on top of him. Mira grabbed his hair with both hands and pulled his face to hers, wrapping her legs around him. Their teeth bumped and she cut her lip. She laughed. She pulled off her shirt and he suspended her in the air, kissing her breasts, her belly. When they had her pants off, he nipped the inside of her thigh with his teeth, a sharp little stab of lovely pain, and then his warm mouth was on her, and she leaned back on the gritty stage with her fingers in his hair, pressing his head down into her.

  After Mira had come, they lay beside each other. She leaned over him and bit his nipple. Now he did not wait—he was on her, sliding into her, at first rough and insistent but then slowing. He put his hand, fingers splayed, onto her belly and pushed down on it as they moved together, gradually rolling into a rhythm. Carey became more insistent, she could hear his breaths, and it built and built until he shuddered and came, and she did again, both of them spontaneously bursting into laughter.

  She rested her head on his shoulder, in the circle of his right arm. He was warm and he smelled good. She placed the fingertips of her right hand against those of his left. Her hands were so much smaller than his, and darker. They might have been different species.

  Her mother would have told her how risky it was to get attached to a man like Carey Evasson. Mira had suffered listening to her mother’s complaints about the things various feckless boyfriends had done to her. It was so weak, thinking about boyfriends, especially at her mother’s age. It was embarrassing, to the point where Mira vowed to make neither that mistake nor any of the legion of mistakes her mother had made. Yet here she was lying next to Carey, running her finger down his taut belly. Teenaged girls loaded images of him into their pixwalls.

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sp; The longer they lingered, the more chance someone might notice the break-in. Mira pulled on her pants and padded across the room. She switched on augmentation and found a door around a corner at the end of the bar. It opened on a much larger space, the cavelike warehouse into which the club had been built. Rock walls here, and a high roof; some of the old bioluminescent fixtures still glowed faintly. She passed a rack of old oxygen cylinders. As she walked, a little tentative, around the chilly warehouse, her Aide told her, Call from Roz Baldwin.

  “I’ll take it,” she said. “No video.”

  “Mira?” Roz’s voice in her ear.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Can you put me in touch with Carey? He’s not answering.”

  “I haven’t seen him.”

  Roz let a silence stretch. Mira did not attempt to fill it. “Well, if you see him, tell him I need to speak with him.”

  “If I run into him I’ll do that, Roz.”

  “Okay. See you tomorrow.”

  “Bye.”

  When Mira slipped back into the club, Carey was pulling on his clothes. “Did you get a call from Roz?” she asked.

  “I didn’t answer.”

  “She just called me.”

  Carey pulled his thick blond hair back and tied it behind his head.

  “Are you and Roz fighting?” she asked.

  “Not really.”

  “What’s it about?”

  He looked at her ruefully. “Val.”

  Carey seldom mentioned him, but here it was, the second time tonight. “What about Val?”

  “Roz doesn’t want him hanging around with any masculinists. She says Hypatia is just using me to get at my mother. Not very flattering, is it?”

  Not flattering, probably true. Mira laughed. “Your mother was Matrons chair. Do you think everybody wants you just because you’re good in bed?”

  Immediately she regretted it. Carey looked hard at her. He pulled on his boot. So beautiful in the stark shadows, his brows drawn together. He stood, stomped to settle the boot, floated off the floor, and came down lightly.

  She picked up the box with his gift and put it into her pocket. In the vestibule, as they were about to leave, he said, “I don’t think I’ll come back with you tonight.”

  “Carey, you know—I’m sorry. I know there’s more to you than that.” She heard the need in her voice and despised herself for it.

  He shrugged into the long coat and picked up the crowbar.

  “In two days I’ll be posting the videos,” she said. “I could use your help. Meet me in the garden near the Men’s House at oh-two-thirty?”

  After a moment: “Okay.”

  Mira slipped her spex into her pocket. She poked her head out into the street; it was deserted. She stretched up to kiss Carey; he kissed her back, barely.

  “Thanks for helping,” she said.

  “Solidarity.” He shook his head, low-lidded eyes on her, and swiftly disappeared down the concourse.

  Love is just a feeling, she told herself.

  • • • • •

  FROM The Odd Side of the Moon: Lunar Utopias and Social Experiments

  #5: THE SOCIETY OF COUSINS

  . . . to the mating and social structures of bonobos, its accompanying practices are not exactly like anything seen on Earth.

  The locus of power in the Society of Cousins is the family. Typical Cousins families are large, extending to mothers, sisters, daughters under the age of fourteen, brothers, lovers, husbands, and sons. One way to understand Cousins social structures is to realize that everything is designed to foster co-operation in young women while encouraging the isolation of young men from one another.

  At age fourteen, girls reach their majority and must leave the family to make their way in the world. At this point, though still in school and under the influence of mentors and friends, they lose any legal tie to their mothers.

  A Cousins girl grows up knowing that her success in life is going to be dependent on her ability to make alliances with other girls and older women. Young women live together. They gossip, they compare feelings and opinions, they gang up on one another and watch one another’s backs. They do each other’s hair. They sleep together. They fall in love. They tell jokes and complain and listen to one another complain. They start enterprises and run for public office. They argue about what they will do with their lives and calculate who among the older women they might cultivate.

  Certain charismatic and accomplished women gather to themselves circles of younger ones as lovers, protégés, sister-wives. Two or more Cousins women may go to the government center and register, select a middle name or have one given to them, and establish a new family, but more commonly young women will marry into an existing family headed by one or more of these matriarchs. The affectional nature of the family is undeniable, but as political power in the Society arises from the family, some families function as political organizations.

  Because each generation of females must separate from its parent generation, there is less opportunity for nepotism. Leadership of a family always passes outside of genealogy, to someone who has “married in.” A matriarch may convey her authority to a sister, but ultimately, it must go to someone who is not a blood relative.

  It is possible for a Cousins woman to live alone, but it is rare. Such cases seem to be as often a matter of temperament as of political statement.

  • • • • •

  Opposite the university café, plastered onto the wall of the next terrace up, was Mira’s most recent graffito, a two-meter-wide video retelling the myth of Actaeon. A stag flees through a stylized forest, pursued by a baying pack of hounds. The dogs corner the stag and leap upon it. Close-up of the stag’s frightened eyes; it lifts its head, mouth open as if trying to speak, but all that comes from its throat is an animal cry. The dogs tear the stag to pieces.

  Mira nibbled at a warm biscuit and eavesdropped on the three women at the next table.

  “What is she trying to prove?” the pale woman of about Mira’s age said. “This ‘Looker,’ whoever it is, can’t be a woman.”

  “Looker isn’t a woman,” the second said. She was older, with gray hair and very dark skin. Mira had seen her before; she was part of the Amarillo family, a professor of engineering.

  The third, wearing a red, low-cut top, took a sip of tea and said laconically, “It says, ‘Made by a Woman.’ ”

  “She makes Actaeon into a hapless victim of the insane bitch Diana,” the pale woman said.

  “It’s not a new reading,” the third said. “Ovid’s version ends with a debate about whether the goddess was fair to him. After all, he was just attracted to Diana, that’s natural. But she turns him into a stag. A beautiful potent male animal, unable to speak.”

  “He lowered himself to that. He violated her privacy, objectified her. He could have turned away as soon as he realized where he was. Looker makes that part plain. Instead he ogled her.”

  “You look at the naked goddess, you pay the price,” the one in red said.

  “So it’s wrong for him to feel lust?” the fair woman asked. “You never feel lust?”

  “Of course I do, darling—when it’s appropriate.”

  “What about the dogs? They’re his dogs, and they’re all male, and they tear him to pieces.”

  The woman in red smirked. “Man’s best friend.”

  “Looker isn’t teaching mythology,” said the engineering prof. “It’s a provocation.”

  Mira wished she could keep eavesdropping, but she had to get all the way to Materials at the end of the West Concourse. She left the café for the metro.

  The university café was on the northeast terraced slopes, overlooking the heart of the colony, the largest domed crater on the moon. One of the architectural wonders of the solar system, the Fowler dome testified to all that the Society of Cousins had accomplished through an ethic of co-operation. Every Cousins child had drilled into her that it wasn’t engineering that had built the dome, but a cu
lture that surrounded and constrained the demonism that had almost destroyed the Earth and that still ruled the other lunar colonies, Mars, and the Jovian satellites.

  Most of the crater’s floor was given over to farming, but a wedge from the center to the southeast crater slopes made up Sobieski Park, with its pond, amphitheater, and sixty-year-old oaks. From the center of the crater’s floor rose the kilometer-tall Diana Tower that supported the dome. Rim to rim, the dome stretched more than four kilometers. Its exterior was covered with several meters of lunar regolith, shielding the inhabitants from radiation, but its opaque inner surface was a screen. Today it glowed clear blue with high cirrus clouds. A repair crew, tiny at this distance, hung suspended on a scaffold from that sky.

  A flyer wearing a bright blue-and-white skinsuit and wings like some human jaybird soared low over the terrace, then banked, beating her mechanical feathers as she climbed upward again. Others lifted themselves on the thermals hundreds of meters above the perimeter road, or swooped down over residential complexes or fields of soybeans before rising on updrafts. Though she had not flown in seven years, Mira remembered that feeling of freedom.

  She descended to the metro and caught the next train for West. She found a seat. “News,” she told her Aide, and settled back to read her preferred print reports projected onto her right eye’s visual field.

  A story from Earth about a strike by uplifted racehorses: video of the thoroughbreds picketing Churchill Downs. A review of the latest Leila Eskander musical epic from Persepolis. A hair’s-on-fire editorial on the threat presented by male gangs should the initiative to expand the franchise fail.

  People on the train were talking about trouble in the Kamal Hestersson district: protests by the helium miners, who claimed that the low status of their jobs should qualify them to vote. More of these protests all the time. Across the aisle from Mira, a little woman with brown hair told her friend the patriarchies were supporting the troublemakers.

  As it passed from the crater into a concourse, the train rose from underground and became an elevated tram. This concourse was commercial and fairly busy at this hour, numbers of Cousins like her passing through on their way to the airlocks, others opening shops and diners, some men working the mita cleaning the streets. Here and there Mira saw a woman wearing a red armband to show her sympathy with the Reform movement. The heliotropes were full open now, and sunshine, broken by the leaves of the trees planted down the nave of the lava tube, flooded the north side of the concourse, falling on shopfronts, ivy-cloaked walls, and the flags of the walkways. When the tram passed the Tiresias statue, Mira saw sealer sprayed around the seam of the door they had broken into, light against the dark stucco.