Leaping to the Stars Page 7

  I couldn't ask how adults sorted this stuff out, because so far all the evidence showed that adults couldn't. So why bother? I was angry and depressed and confused—and hurting worse than ever.

  Dad had promised us a great vacation, and then a great adventure, and then a great new life on a new world—and I'd made the mistake of letting myself believe again. And just like every time before, I got hurt. Only this was the worst of all, because this time we'd gone too far. There wasn't any way to set it right. It was over. Dad was gone.

  I felt lost. At least when he was alive, I could hate him for all his broken promises. For not being the dad I wanted. Now, all that was left was to hate myself, for not saying what I should have said when I had the chance. What he and Mom never said either. Once upon a time, I used to pretend that I was adopted and someday my real parents would come for me. But now I knew that Mom and Dad were my real parents, because I was turning out just like them.

  We were quartered in a tube-house, just like all the other tube-houses on Luna; functionally identical to the one I'd just been rescued from and the vehicle which had carried us here and the one we'd been living in back in Texas—a hole in the ground with air and electricity.

  We sat around talking for an hour or two, everybody getting caught up on everything. Carol Everhart sat with us for a while. She had a health monitor on me and she was watching my readouts on her clipboard. She said I was in pretty good shape, all things considered. Periodically, her phone would ring and she'd step to the other end of the cabin to talk quietly to whoever. After a bit, she came back and told me that the launch committee was setting up a special training regimen for me, but with everything I'd just been through, they wanted me to rest for a bit. They'd come by in a few hours to talk about the monkey.

  And then it was seven a.m. and Mom and Douglas had to leave for their training sessions. Stinky went too. Everybody was still assuming we'd be able to boost.

  I couldn't sleep, I'd slept enough on the flight back, so I took another long shower and pulled on a fresh jumpsuit. When I came back upstairs, everyone had gone to their separate classes. There was a note on the table; if I needed anything, there was a security contingent next door, and Mom's friend, Bev, was napping in the aft cabin. I poured myself some orange juice and sat down at the table with the dead monkey in front of me.

  "I don't know what's wrong with you," I said to it. "If it's something I did, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what I said—about you being a bad monkey. I mean, I know you can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, but so are Douglas and Stinky too—that doesn't mean I don't love them. We're family. And you're part of our family too. We all agreed. It's bad enough we lost Dad, I don't want to lose you too. And not it's not just because we need you. Yeah, we do, but … well, we like you too. You make Stinky laugh. You make me laugh. And Douglas too. Nobody does a farkleberry like you. Stinky misses you and so do I. I wish I could just press your reset button and have you come back like before. 'Cause if you don't come back, we're stuck here on the moon. And if you do come back, we get to go see dinosaurs and save lives. So … I'm asking you, if there's anything I need to say or do, or anything, just please let me know. Please?"

  I went on like that for awhile, just saying whatever I could think of. I held it in front of me and spoke to it like it was a real person. I didn't know if it could hear me or not, I just assumed it could—the same way a person in a coma can hear what's going on.

  But nothing happened.

  I sank back on the bench, defeated. It wasn't much of a seat. Most Lunar furniture is either inflatable or webbing. This was a thin piece of board with a foam pad, Lunar luxury.

  I was still sitting there when Mom's friend Bev came yawning into the room and began puttering around in the food-prep area. She started making breakfast smells. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes, only opening them again when I heard a noise in front of me. I must have dozed off; Bev had cooked a whole feast. Without asking, she put a mug of hot chocolate in front of me; then she came back with eggs over easy, bacon strips, cornbread, and a sauté of tomatoes, onions, and Portobello mushroom slices.

  "Thank you," I grunted. I wasn't feeling very grateful, but I didn't see any reason to be rude either.

  She sat down at the other end of the table with her own breakfast. She didn't say anything, she just buttered her cornbread slowly and carefully. I knew she was doing it on purpose. She was making herself available to listen … if I felt like talking.

  Without looking up, I said, "If you're trying to make me feel better, you're wasting your time."

  "I know that," she said. "I've been there. You're going to hurt for as long as it takes." She resumed eating. "Pass the salt, please."

  I slid the saltshaker in her direction. "What do you know about it?" I regretted the remark even before I finished saying it.

  "I lost two sons, less than a year apart," she said. She finished salting her eggs and put the shaker aside.

  "Oh." I felt like a jerk. "I'm sorry."

  "It doesn't stop hurting," she said.

  "Then how do you live with it?"

  "I thought you said you didn't want me to try and help you."

  "I don't. I was just asking." We both ate in silence for a while. "The mushrooms are good," I said.

  "We'll be taking spores to Outbeyond," she said. "Portobellos are a good substitute for meat; you can build a nourishing meal around them. They have a chewy texture and a good flavor. They don't need a lot of condiments, and you can use them in all different kinds of recipes. Even cookies."

  "Huh? Cookies?"

  "I'll show you. I like cooking," she explained. "I like discovering all the different things you can do with food. Where do you think recipes come from? Somebody has to invent them. That means somebody has to test and experiment—and eat—until they get it just right. I like doing that, especially the eating. It's my way of having adventures without leaving the kitchen."

  "I never thought of it that way."

  She nodded. "Most people don't. Most people eat without even looking at what they're eating, let alone tasting it. They're missing the whole point. Good food isn't just about eating, it's about feeling good in your life."

  "You're talking about morale … ?"

  "That's one word for it, yes. I prefer 'satisfaction.' We're going to need a lot of it on Outbeyond. We have to feel good about the work we're doing or we'll lose heart. So I'm making that my job. I signed on as a menu specialist. I told Commander Boynton to pack lots of spices. We're going to need them. There's a lot you can do with noodles and beans and rice, but only if you have the right spices. Onions, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, all kinds of sauces—everything adds its own kind of taste and texture."

  "Kind of like arranging a piece of music and deciding what instruments to include?"

  "Kind of," she agreed.

  "I never thought about food that much. I just ate."

  "I noticed." She pointed at my plate with a smile.

  "It was good. A lot better than the food we got back in Texas."

  "Wait till we get to Outbeyond. I'm excited about all the new flavors we might find there. What if we find something that's even better than chocolate?"

  Better than chocolate? I sipped at my cocoa. I couldn't imagine it. There was a lot I couldn't imagine.

  "All right," I said, finally. "How do you live with it?"

  She knew exactly what I was talking about. "You celebrate the gifts left behind."

  "Huh?"

  She looked across the table at me. She had very sharp eyes. "What did your father give you that you wouldn't have had otherwise? What difference did he make in your life?"

  "Not much," I said, too quickly. "He was never really there."

  "Oh? Then why are you feeling so bad?"

  "Because—oh, never mind. You wouldn't understand."

  "You're right," she agreed. "I was never a teenager. I was born old. All adults were born old."

  "Well, maybe you were a teenager o
nce," I conceded. "But things are different now."

  "Yep, you're right. When I was a girl, we didn't have angst. We had to make do with sad songs and an occasional blue funk." She picked up her plate and headed toward the disposal.

  "You're making fun of me," I said.

  "What was your first clue?" She put her plate into the compost bag. I could almost hear Alexei's voice: "Waste not, want not. Everything is fertilizer. Even you."

  "I thought you were trying to help me."

  "You told me not to try. Are you done?"

  "Yeah, I guess so." I handed her my plate and went back downstairs to the cabin I shared with Douglas and Stinky and tried to sleep.

  REQUIEM

  Just about the time I was ready to fall asleep, Boynton and Everhart came by. Bev poured tea for us and made herself inconspicuous at the other end of the cabin.

  Boynton and Everhart said they'd arranged personal security for everyone in the family, especially me. Boynton said that the situation was getting critical, and there was talk of boosting the last modules off Luna, even before we knew if the monkey was going to come back to life or not.

  That was the real issue—the monkey.

  The colony's experts were divided. Some of them said that the monkey could be rebooted. Others said that maybe it should be wiped and reprogrammed from scratch. All of them were guessing—but they all felt we had to do something. There was too much at stake. We couldn't just sit and wait.

  I shook my head. "I think the monkey should be left alone and given time to heal; it's been through a traumatic experience. If we try to fix it, we might do even more damage."

  Boynton looked grim, but he listened politely. Finally, he said. "Consider the other side of it, Charles. If the monkey is trapped in some kind of endless psychotic loop, we'd be doing it a favor, wouldn't we?"

  "What does Douglas say?" I asked.

  "He agrees with you. He thinks we should wait."

  Carol Everhart said, "The monkey belongs to your family corporation. We can't do anything without your agreement."

  Boynton said, "What we'd like you to consider is this. If it doesn't give some sign of recovery in the next six hours, we want to run a series of non-intrusive diagnostics. Nothing that would disturb it."

  "The HARLIE core is quantum based," I said. "You can't do diagnostics without disturbing it. I'll have to talk it over with Douglas."

  "There are some tests we could run—"

  Abruptly, Bev Sykes came back to the table and began gathering up all the mugs—her way of hinting that it was time for us to go to Dad's memorial service. Someone had finally thought to schedule it. Nobody had given it any thought while I was still a prisoner of the invisibles. Now that I was back, it was one more loose end that had to be tied up.

  The service had been set up in the main lounge of the station, one of the few structures that wasn't built out of cargo modules. Even though it wouldn't have been much back on Earth, it felt positively roomy on Luna. There was a row of chairs up front for the family.

  Mom and Douglas and Stinky all came in together. Bev and I came in with Boynton and Everhart and four security men in black. I didn't recognize many faces, but there was a respectful turnout of colonists and Loonies.

  Carol Everhart whispered to me, "A lot of people knew your Dad's work. This is their way of showing their support for you and your family. They're taking time off from very critical jobs. You should be honored."

  I nodded, without really hearing. I was noticing something off in the corner of the room. A keyboard cockpit.

  Boynton stepped up to the podium and talked for a while about Dad's commitment to his family, blah blah blah. And then Douglas stood up and told some personal stories about Dad. And even Mom stood up to rhapsodize about why she'd married Dad and what a great musician he'd been. And then it was my turn, except I didn't have anything to say, so I went over and sat down in front of the keyboards instead and began switching them on. I recognized most of this equipment, it was pretty standard stuff.

  Without really thinking about it, I started playing the soft movement from Dad's Beethoven Suite. He'd written it for me, as a practice piece, and it was the first thing I played whenever I sat down at a new keyboard. It was my warm-up. He'd based it on the seventh Symphony—the slow movement. Dad used to play it to demonstrate that in the hands of a genius, even the simple repetition of a single note could be profound.

  I was out of practice, so I played slowly and deliberately, and it almost sounded okay—it sounded a lot like a dirge, so at least it was appropriate for the moment, but I didn't want to stay there, so I segued gently into the Largo from Dvorak's Symphony Number Nine From the New World. Mom used to sing to it whenever I played it. "Going home, going home, I am going home … " Dad would have complained that I was sloppy, but I don't think anyone else noticed.

  And then, finally, I finished with Schubert's Ave Maria. If the keyboardist knows what he's doing, using choral voices as instruments, the effect can be positively unearthly. Dad had taught me that trick too, so I played it exactly as he'd showed me. It must have worked; the short hairs on the back of my neck started standing up.

  It wasn't until I took my hands from the keyboard that I realized that people in the room were weeping. And there were tears running down my cheeks as well. I found my way back to my seat, barely noticing the applause, and fell into Mom's hug.

  And now, Carol Everhart was talking. Something about how Dad's music was his legacy and how I'd just demonstrated what a gift he'd given all of us—and how I'd just shared a small piece of it. I looked up at that. Yes. Dad's love of music was a gift. That's what he'd given me. Even with tears still rolling down my cheeks, I had to smile. I could stop wondering now.

  I sat back in my chair, only belatedly realizing that the monkey wasn't where I'd left it. I looked around in confusion—

  And then Douglas poked me and pointed.

  There it was. Dancing around on the floor in front of me, and giving me a glorious double-chocolate, hot-fudge farkleberry, with whipped cream and a cherry on top. It yanked down its pants, made melodious and joyous farting noises, and waggled its hairy little butt at me.

  I grinned at Boynton and pointed.

  The monkey was back.

  And its timing was perfect.

  A HASTY EXIT

  Four days later, we boosted.

  But first I had to spend three days in intensive training sessions, mostly all the stuff I needed to know about space suits and hatches and launch procedures and free fall, a lot of which we already knew from our misadventures with Alexei. It was hard work, and I was still recovering, so they put a health monitor on me and kept me pumped full of vitamins.

  Whenever I wasn't in training, I was in Med Bay, with doctors and machines looking in my ears and nose, down my throat, under my arms, and in places I'd be embarrassed to talk about, even to the doctors who were looking. They were looking for congenital conditions, infections, viral exposures, genetic potentials, chronic liabilities, and all the other stuff that might need attention either now or someday. I was given fifty different kinds of injections; some active, some passive, and a few time-release things which wouldn't take effect for a year or six.

  And there were a lot of other details to attend to as well. The station dentist had to clean and treat my teeth. And the tailoring machines had to measure me and fabricate underwear, shorts, T-shirts, shoes, and jumpsuits in my size. And there were daily sessions with the psych evaluation team. They were particularly worried about the Dingillians because we were last minute additions, we'd never been properly screened, and we were leaving with almost no preparation or training. We were—in the words of Dr. Kohanski—"the perfect opportunity for a multiple psychotic breakdown."

  I just looked at him and said, "If I was going to have a psychotic breakdown, don't you think I would have had it by now?"

  "It doesn't quite work that way, son," he replied. But he signed the release. He didn't have much of a choice.
If he didn't sign, I didn't go. And neither did anyone else.

  On Tuesday, we packed our travel bags and sent them on ahead. They were launching the last three cargo modules and our personals were loaded into one of the supercargo slots. We were each allowed thirty kilos of personal items. Between us, we barely had that much. Dad hadn't let us kids bring much up the orbital elevator, and we'd left most of that behind at Geosynchronous. Mom and Bev only had a single case between them; neither of them had expected to end up on the moon. So we filled the rest of our cargo allotment with things like chocolate and coffee and large bottles of spices and other stuff that Bev said would be useful when we got to Outbeyond.

  We were scheduled to board Friday night and launch at six a.m. on Saturday, but just past midnight on Wednesday, Carol Everhart woke us up for an unscheduled launch drill, which didn't make a lot of sense if you thought about it, but I was too sleepy to think and Douglas was busy with Stinky, and Mom and Bev weren't paranoid enough yet to figure it out. I think Mickey knew what was going on, but he wasn't saying anything. I got the feeling he was unhappy about something.

  The bus was another cargo pod on wheels. Mom was complaining even before she finished fastening her safety-belt. "Why is this necessary now? Couldn't we do this tomorrow? We need our sleep. Look at Bobby. He doesn't even know what's happening."

  Carol was passing out mugs of hot coffee. But she stopped in front of Mom and answered bluntly. "This is it, Ms. Campbell. We're launching tonight."

  The bus was already rolling up the slope of the crater. Mom barely had a chance to gasp. "Huh—?" and "What—?" and "Why—?"

  Carol answered bluntly. "Lunar Authority is about to confiscate HARLIE for the public good. They just went into emergency session. Two marshals are waiting at Judge Cavanaugh's apartment with John Doe warrants. As soon as the council votes, he'll sign them. And we'll be served with the papers as fast as they can fax the copies to Outbeyond Processing Center." She said that Boynton estimated twenty minutes between the vote and the knock on the door. Maybe less. So as soon as the session was called, he'd ordered us transferred.