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"I see. I think."
"I don't think you do, since you've never had a child. But
I promised myself I'd put my own life on hold until she was
grown. I've missed two promotions because of that, and I don't
care. This hurts more than that, because I think we could have
been good for each other." He touched the bottom of my
faceplate since he couldn't reach in and lift my chin, and I
looked up at him. "Maybe we still could be, in ten years or
so."
"If I live that long."
"It's that bad?"
"It could be."
"Hildy, I feel--"
"Just go away, would you? I'd like to be alone."
He nodded, and left.
#
I wandered for a while, never getting out of sight of the
bubble of light that was the tent, listening to Winston barking
over the radio. Why would you put a radio in a dog's suit?
Well, why not.
That was the kind of deep question I was asking myself. I
couldn't seem to turn my mind to anything more important.
I'm not good at describing the painful feelings. It could
be that I'm not good at feeling them. Did I feel a sense of
emptiness? Yes, but not as awful as I might have expected. For
one thing, I hadn't loved him long enough for the loss to leave
that big a cavity. But more important, I hadn't given up. I
don't think you can, not that easily. I knew I'd call on him
again, and hell, I'd beg, and I might even cry. Such things
have been known to work, and Cricket does have a heart in there
somewhere, just like me.
So I was depressed, no question. Despondent? Not really. I
was miles from suicidal, miles. Miles and miles and miles.
That was when I first noticed a low-grade headache. All
those nanobots in that cranium, you'd think they'd have licked
the common headache by now. The migraine has gone the way of
the dodo, true, but those annoying little throbbing ones in the
temple or forehead seem beyond the purview of medicine, most
likely because we inflict them on ourselves; we want them, on
some level.
But this one was different. Examining it, I realized it
was centered in the eyes, and the reason was something had been
monkeying with my vision for quite some time. Peripherally, I'd
been seeing something, or rather not seeing something, and it
was driving me crazy. I stopped my pacing and looked around.
Several times I thought I was on the track of something, but it
always flickered away. Maybe it was Brenda's ghosts. I was
practically touching the hull of the famous Haunted Ship; what
else could it be?
Winston came bounding along, leaping into the air, just as
if he was chasing something. And at last I saw it, and smiled
because it was so simple. The stupid dog was just chasing a
butterfly. That's probably what I'd seen, out of the corner of
my eye. A butterfly.
I turned and started back to the tent (the dog), thinking
I'd have a drink or two or three (was chasing) or, hell, maybe
get really blotto, I think I had a good excuse
a butterfly
and I turned around again but I couldn't find the insect,
which made perfect sense because we weren't in Texas, we were
in Delambre and there's no fucking air out here, Winston, and
I'd about dismissed it as a drunken whimsy when a naked girl
materialized out of very thin air and ran seven steps--I can
see them now, in my mind's eye, clear as anything, one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, and then gone again back to
where ghosts go, and she'd come close enough to me to almost
touch her.
I'm a reporter. I chase the news. I chased her, after an
indeterminate time when I was as capable of movement as any
statue in the park. I didn't find her; the only reason I'd seen
her at all was the very last rays of the sun reflected from far
overhead, not much more light than a good candle would give. I
didn't find the butterfly, either.
I realized the dog was nudging my leg. I saw a red light
was blinking inside his suit, which meant he had ten minutes of
air left, and he'd been trained to go home when he saw the
light. I reached down and patted his helmet, which did him no
good but he seemed to appreciate the thought, licking his
chops. I straightened and took one last look around.
"Winston," I said. "I don't think we're in Kansas
anymore."
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Ezekiel saw the wheel. Moses saw the burning bush. Joe
Smith saw the Angel Moroni, and every electro-preacher since
Billy Sunday saw a chance at good ratings in prime time and
more money than he could lift.
Hayseed farmers, asteroid miners and chronic drug abusers
have seen Unidentified Flying Objects and little guys who want
to see our leaders. Drunks see pink elephants and brontosaurs
and bugs crawling all over everything. The Buddha saw
enlightenment and Mohammed must have seen something, though I
was never clear just what it was. Dying people see a long
tunnel full of light with all the people they hated while they
were alive standing at the end of it. The Founding Flack knew a
good thing when he saw it. Christians are looking to see Jesus,
Walter is looking for a good story, and a gambler is looking
for that fourth ace to turn up; sometimes they see these
things.
People have been seeing things like that since the first
caveman noticed dark shadows stirring out there beyond the
light of the campfire, but until the day of the Bicentennial
Hildy Johnson had never seen anything.
Give me a sign, O Lord, she had been crying, that I might
know Thy shape. And behold, the Lord sent unto her a sign.
A butterfly.
#
It was a Monarch butterfly, quite lovely in its orange and
black, quite ordinary at first glance, except for its location.
But upon closer examination I found something on its back,
about the size of a gelatin capsule, that looked for all the
world like an air tank.
Yes, dear ones, never throw anything away. You don't know
when you might need it. I'd had no use for my optic holocam for
quite a while, since the Texian isn't equipped to print
pictures. But Walter had never asked me to give it back and I'd
not gone to the bother of having it removed, so it was still
there in my left eye, recording everything I saw, faithfully
storing it all until capacity was exhausted, then wiping it to
make way for the new stuff. Many a wild-eyed prophet before me
would have killed to have a holocam, so he could prove to those
doubting bastards he'd really seen those green cocker spaniels
get out of the whistling gizmo that landed on the henhouse.
Considering the number of cameras made between the Brownie
and the end of the twentieth century, you'd think more
intriguing pictures would have been taken of paranormal events,
but look for them-- I did--and you'll come up with a bucket of
space. After that, of course, computers got so good that any
picture could be faked.
But the only person I had to convince was myself. The
first thing I did, back in the tent, was to secure the data
into permanent storage. The second thing I did was to not tell
anybody what I'd seen. Part of that was reporter's instinct:
you don't blab until the story's nailed down. The rest was
admission of the weaknesses flesh is heir to: I hadn't been the
soberest of witnesses. But more importantly . . . this was my
vision. It had been granted to me. Not to Cricket, that
ingrate, who'd have seen it if he'd said he loved me and thrown
his arms around me and told me what a knuckle-headed dope he'd
been. Not to Miss Pulitzer Prize Brenda (you think that, just
because I gave her the big story, I wasn't jealous? You poor
fool, you). Just me.
And Winston. How could I have thought that gorgeous hound
was ugly? The third thing I did back in the tent was give that
most sublime quadruped a pound of my best sausage, and
apologize for not having anything better--like a Pomeranian, or
a Siamese.
#
We're not talking about the butterfly now. That was
amazing, but a few wonders short of a nonesuch.
It was an air tank on the insect's back. With suitable
enlargement I could make out tiny lines going from it to the
wings. The images got fuzzy when I tried to find out where they
went. But I could guess: since there was no air for it to fly
in, and since it seemed to be flying, I deduced it was kept
aloft by reaction power, air squirting from the underside of
its wings. Comparing this specimen to one mounted in a museum I
noted differences in the carapace. A vacuum-proof shell?
Probably. The air tank could dribble oxygen into the
butterfly's blood.
None of the equipment I could identify was what you'd call
off-the-shelf, but so what? Nanobots can build the most
cunning, tiny machines, much smaller than the air tank and
regulator and (possibly) gyro I saw. As for the carapace, that
shouldn't be too hard to effect with genetic engineering. So
somebody was building bugs to live on the surface. So what? All
that implied was an eccentric tinkerer, and Luna is lousy with
them. And that's just the sort of hare-brained thing they
build.
All this research was being done in bed, in Texas.
On my way home from the celebration I'd stopped at a store
and bought a disposable computer, television, recorder, and
flashlight and put them in my pocket and smuggled them past
temporal customs. Easy. Everybody does it, with small items,
and the guards don't even have to be bribed. I waited till
nightfall, then got in bed and pulled the covers over my head,
turned on the light, unrolled the television, dumped the
holocam footage into the recorder and wiped all traces of it
from my cerebral banks. Then I started scanning the footage
frame by frame.
Why all the secrecy? I honestly couldn't have told you at
the time. I knew I didn't want the CC to see this material but
don't know why I felt it was so important. Instinct, I guess.
And I couldn't have guaranteed even these measures would keep
him from finding out, but it was the best I could do. Using a
throwaway number cruncher instead of hooking in to the
mainframe seemed a reasonable way to keep the data away from
him, so long as I didn't ever network it with any other system.
He's good, but he's not magic.
It was an hour's work to deal with the butterfly and file
it under Wonderments, Lepidopterous. Then I moved on to the
miracle.
Height: Five foot two. Eyes: of blue. Hair: blonde, almost
white, shoulder-length, straight. Complexion: light brown,
probably from tanning. Apparent age: ten or eleven (no pubic
hair or bust, two prominent front teeth, facial clues).
Distinguishing marks: none. Build: slender. Clothing: none.
She could have been much older; a small minority prefer to
Peter Pan it through life, never maturing. But I doubted it,
from the way she moved. The teeth were a clue, as well. I
pegged her for a natural, not modified, she just grew that way.
She was visible for 11.4 seconds, not running hard, not
bouncing too high with each step. She seemed to come out of a
black hole and fall back into one. I was being methodical about
this, so I got everything I could out of those 11.4 seconds
before moving on to the frames I was dying to examine: the
first one, and the last one.
Item: If she was a ghost, then ghosts have mass. I'd been
unable to find her footprints among the thousands of others
there on the crater rim (I had noted a lot of the prints had
toes, but it meant nothing; lots of kids wear boots that leave
prints like bare feet), but the film clearly showed the prints
being made, the dust being kicked up. The computer studied the
prints and concluded the girl massed about what you'd expect.
Item: She was not completely naked. In a few frames I
could see biomagnetic thermosoles on the bottoms of her feet, a
damn good idea if you're going to run over the blazing rocks of
the surface. There was also a bit of jewelry sticking to her
chest, a few inches above the left nipple. It was
brass-colored, and shaped more like a pressure fitting than
anything else I could think of. Conjecture: Maybe it was a
pressure fitting. The snap-on type, universally used to connect
air hoses to tanks.
Item: In some of the early frames a slight mist could be
seen in front of her face. It looked like moisture freezing, as
if she had exhaled. There was no sign of respiration after
that.
Item: She was aware of my presence. Between step four and
step five she turned her head and looked directly at me for
half a second. She smiled. Then she made a goofy face and
crossed her eyes.
I made a few more observations, none of them seeming very
relevant or shedding any real light on the mystery. Oh, yes:
Item: I liked her. Making that face was just the sort of thing
I would have done at her age. At first I thought she was
taunting me, but I watched it over and over and concluded she
was daring me. Catch me if you can, old lady. Doll-face, I plan
to.
Then I spent most of the rest of the night analyzing just
a few seconds of images before and after her appearance. When I
was done I wiped the data from the computer, and for good
measure, put it in with the glowing embers of the fire in my
kitchen stove. It crackled and popped nicely. Now the only
record of my experience was in the little recorder.
I slept with it under my pillow.
#
Next Friday, after putting the Texian to bed, I went back
to Hamilton's and purchased a two-man tent. If that puzzles
you, you've never tried to live in a one-man tent. I had it
delivered to the rover rental office nearest the old mining
road, where I leased a vehicle from their second-hand fleet,
paying two months in advance to get the best rate. I had it
tanked full of oxygen and checked the battery level and kicked
the tires and had them replace a sagging leaf spring, and set
off for Delambre.
I set up the tent in the exact spot where we'd been seven
days before. Sunday night I struck the tent, having seen
nothing at all, and drove back to park the rover in a rented
garage.
The Friday after that, I did the same thing.
#
I spent all my weekends out at Delambre for quite a long
time. It was enough that, soon, I had to trade in my nice new
suit for a maternity model. If you've never worn one of those,
don't even ask. But nothing was going to keep me away from
Delambre, not even a developing pregnancy.
It all made sense to me at the time. Looking back, I can
see some questions about my behavior, but I think I'd still do
it again. But let's try to answer a few of them shall we?
I only spent the weekends at the crater because I still
needed Texas to give my life some stability. I still would have
kept coming back until the end of the school term because I
felt I had a responsibility to those who hired me, and to the
children. But the question didn't arise, because I needed the
job more than it needed me. Each Sunday evening I found myself
longing for my cabin. I guess a true Visionary would have been
ashamed of me; you're supposed to drop everything and pursue
the Vision.
I did the best I could. Every Friday I couldn't get out of
the disney fast enough. I attended no more churches, unburdened
my soul to no more quacks.
It's a little harder explaining the pregnancy. A little
embarrassing, too. As part of my efforts to experience as much
as possible of what life had been like on Old Earth, I had had
my menstrual cycle restored. I know it sounds crazy. I'd
expected it would be a one-time thing, like the corset, but
found it not nearly as onerous as Callie had cracked it up to
be. I hadn't intended to let it go on forever, I wasn't that
silly, but I thought, I don't know, half a dozen periods or so,
then over and out. The rest is really no mystery at all. It's
just what happens to fertile nulliparous centenarians who know
zip about Victorian methods of birth control, and who are so
un-wise as to couple with a guy who swears he's not going to
come.
The real mystery came after the rabbit died (I boned up on
the terminology after I got the news). Why keep it?
The best I can say is that I'd never ruled out
child-bearing as something I might do, some day, some distant
day when I had twenty years to spare. Naturally, that day never
seemed to dawn. Having a baby is probably something you have to
want to do, badly, with an almost instinctual urge that seems
to reside in some women and not in others. Looking around me, I
had noted there were plenty of women who had this urge. Boy,
did they have the urge. I'd never felt it. The species seemed
in fine shape in the hands of these breeder women, and I'd
never flattered myself that I'd be any good at it, so it was
always a matter of someday.
But enough unsuccessful and unplanned and ununderstood
suicide attempts focuses the mind wonderfully. I realized that
if I didn't do it now, I might never do it. And it was the one
major human experience I could think of that I might want to
have and had not had. And, as I said, I'd been looking for a
sign, O Lord, and this seemed like one. A bolt from the blue,
not on the order of the Girl and Butterfly, but a portent all
the same.
Which simply meant that every Friday on my way to Delambre
I gave serious thought to stopping off and having the damn
thing taken care of, and every time, so far, had elected to
keep it, not exactly by a landslide.
There's an old wives' tale that a pregnant woman should
not visit the surface. If that's true, why do they make
maternity suits? The only danger is of coming into labor while
in the suit, and that's not much of a danger. An ambulance can
get you from any point on Luna to a birthing center in twenty
minutes. That was not a concern to me. Nor was I neglecting my
duties as an incubator. I got roaring drunk that once, but
that's easily cured. Each Wednesday I visited a check-up center
and was told things were cooking nicely. Each Thursday I
dropped by Ned Pepper's office and, if he was sober enough, let
him poke me and thump me and pronounce me as fine a heifer as
he'd ever come across, and sell me a bottle of yellow elixir
which did wonders for my struggling rose bushes.
If I kept it to term, I intended to bear it naturally. (It
was a male, but it seems silly to think of an embryo as having
a sex.) When I was about twenty it seemed for a while that
birthing was soon to be a thing of the past. The large majority
of women were rearing their pups in jars, often prominently
displayed on the living room coffee table. I watched many a
neighbor's blastocyst mature over the years, peering into the
scope with all the enthusiasm one usually brings to viewing
Uncle Luigi's holos of his trip to Mars. I watched many a
mother scratching the bottle and cooing and goo-gooing to her
secondtrimester fetus. I was present at a few decantings, which
were often elaborately catered, with hired bands and wrapped
presents and the whole megillah.
As is so often the case, it was a fad, not a tide of
civilization. Some studies came out suggesting that Screwtops
did less well in later life than Bellybusters. Other studies
showed the opposite. Studies frequently do that.
I don't read studies. I go with my gut. The pendulum had
swung back toward the "healthy mother/child bonding of vaginal
delivery" and against the "birth trauma scars a child for life"
folks, but my gut told me that, given that I should do this at
all, my gut was the proper place for it to grow. And now that
my uterus has been heard from, I will thank it to shut up.
#
The frames recording the girl's appearance and subsequent
seeming exit from this dimensional plane revealed several
interesting things. She had not materialized out of thin vacuum
nor had she fallen out of and back into a black hole. There
were images before, and after.
I couldn't make a thing of them, given the low light and
the mysterious nature of the transubstantiation. But that's
what computers are for. My five-and-dime model chewed on the
images of twisted light for a while, and came up with the
notion that a human body, wrapped in a perfect flexible mirror,
would twist light in just such a way. All you'd see would be
distorted reflections of the person's surroundings, so while
not rendering one invisible, it sure would make you hard to
see. Up close it would be possible to make out a human shape,
if you were looking for it. From a distance, forget it. If she
stood still, especially against a background as shattered as
the Delambre junkyard, there would be no way to find her. I
remembered the nagging headache I'd had shortly before her
little show. She'd been around before she decided to reveal
herself to me.
A search of the library found no technology that could
produce anything like what I had observed. Whatever it was, it
could be turned off and on very quickly; my holocam's shutter
speed was well below a thousandth of a second, and she was
wrapped in the mirror in one frame, naked in the next. She
didn't take it off, she turned it off.
Looking for an explanation of the other singular thing
about her, the ability to run nude, even if for only seven
steps, in a vacuum, produced a few tidbits concerning the
implantation of oxygen sources to dispense directly into the
bloodstream, research that had never borne profitable fruit and
had been abandoned as impractical. Hmmmm.
I put myself through a refresher course in vacuum
survival. People have lived after exposure of up to four
minutes, which is when the brain starts to die. They suffer
significant tissue damage, but so what? Infants have lived
after even longer periods. You can do useful work for maybe a
minute, maybe a bit longer, work like scrambling into an
emergency suit. Exposures of five to ten seconds will likely
rupture your eardrums and certainly hurt like hell, but do you
no other real harm. "The bends" is easily treatable.
So wait a minute, what's all this talk about a miracle? I
determined in fairly short order that what I'd seen was almost
surely a technical marvel, not a supernatural one. And I was a
bit relieved, frankly. Gods are capricious characters, and the
biggest part of me had no desire to have it proved that one
really existed. What if you saw your burning bush and it turned
out the Power behind it was a psychopathic child, like the
Christian God? He's God, right? He's proved it and you've got
to do what he tells you to do. So what if he asks you to
sacrifice your son on an altar to His massive ego, or build a
big boat in your back yard, or pimp your wife to the local
honcho, blackmail him, and give him a dose of clap? (Don't
believe me? Genesis 12: 10-20. You learn the most interesting
things in church.)
It didn't diminish the miracle one bit to know it was
probably man-made. It excited me all the more. Somewhere out
there, in that huge junkyard, somebody was doing things nobody
else knew how to do. And if it wasn't in the library, the CC
probably didn't know about it, either. Or if he did, he was
suppressing it, and if so, why?
All I knew was I wanted to talk to whoever had made it
possible for that little girl to wrap herself in a perfect
mirror and make a face at me.
#
Which was easier said than done.
The first four weekends I simply camped out, did very
little exploring. I was hoping, since she'd come to me once,
she'd do it again. No real reason why she should, but again,
why not?
After that I spent more time in my suit. I climbed a few
alps of rubble, but there didn't seem much point in it after
the first few. It stretched as far as the eye could see; there
was no way to search it, or even a small part of it.
No, it seemed to me it was no coincidence the sighting had
come at the base of that monument to high hopes, the Starship
Robert A. Heinlein. I set about to explore as much of the old
hulk as I could, but first I visited the library again and
learned something of his history. Herewith, in brief, is the
saga of failed dreams:
The Heinlein was first proposed in 2010, by a group known
as the L5 Society. It was to be humanity's first interstellar
vessel, a remarkable idea when you consider that the Lunar
colony at the time was quite small, still struggling year to
year for funding. And it was to be another twenty years before
the keel was laid, at L5, one of the Trojan libration points of
the Earth/Luna system. L5 and L4 enjoyed several decades of
prominence before the Invasion, and thrived for almost forty
years afterwards. Today they are orbiting junkyards. Economic
reasons again.
The ship was half completed when the Invaders came. Work
was naturally abandoned in favor of more pressing projects,
like survival of the species. When that seemed assured, there
was still very little effort to spare for blue-sky projects
like the Heinlein.
But work resumed in the year 82, A.I., and went on five or
six years before another snag was hit, in the form of the
Lunarian Party. The loonies, or Isolationists, or (to their
enemies) Appeasers, as they came to be called, had as their
main article of faith that mankind should accept its lot as a
conquered race and thrive as best it could on Luna and the
other inhabited planets. The Invaders had reduced all the works
of humanity to less than rubble in the space of three days.
Surely this demonstrated, the Loonies reasoned, the Invaders
were a different breed of cat altogether. We had been extremely
lucky to have survived at all. If we annoyed them again they
might come back and finish the job they started.
Rubbish, responded the old guard, who have since come to
be known as Heinleiners. Sure they were stronger than us. Sure
they had superior technology. Sure they had bigger guns. God's
always on the side of bigger guns, and if we want him back on
our side, we'd better build even bigger guns. The Invaders, the
reasoning went, must be a vastly older race, with vastly older
science. But they still shit between two . . . well,
tentacle-heels?
This was the flaw in the Heinleiners' reasoning, said the
Loonies. We didn't know if they had bigger guns. We didn't know
if they had tentacles or cilia or good honest legs and arms
like you and I and God. We didn't know anything. No human had
ever seen one and survived. No one had ever photographed one,
though you'd think our orbiting telescopes would have; they'd
been looking, on and off, for two hundred years, and no one had
seen them check out of the little motel known as Earth. They
were weird. Their capabilities had thus far admitted of no
limits. It seemed prudent to assume they had no limits.
After almost ninety years of jingoism, of
rallyround-the-flag rhetoric and sheer pettifogging bombast,
this sounded like a good argument to a large part of a
population weary of living on a perpetual war footing. They'd
been making sacrifices for nearly a century, on the theory that
we must be ready to, one, repel attack, and two, rise up in our
wrath one glorious day and stomp the bejesus out of those . . .
whatever they were. Live and let live made a whole lot of
sense. Stop our puny saber-rattling round the ankles of these
giants, and we'll be okay. Speak softly, and screw the big
stick.
Eventually all our forward listening posts in near-Earth
orbit were drawn back--a move I applaud, by the way, since
they'd heard nothing and seen nothing since Invasion Day. It
was commanded that no man-made object approach the home planet
closer than 200,000 kilometers. The planetary defense system
was scaled back drastically, turned to meteoroid destruction,
where at least it saw some use.
How all this affected the Heinlein was in the ban on
fission and fusion explosive devices. The R.A.H. had been
designed as an Orion-type pusherplate propulsion system, to
this day the only feasible drive if you want to get to the
stars in less than a thousand years. What you do is chuck
A-bombs out of a hole in the back, slam the door, and wait for
them to go off. Do that every second or two. The shock wave
pushes you.
This needs a big pusher plate--and I'm talking big
here--and some sort of shock absorber to preserve the dental
work of the passengers. They calculated it could reach about
one-twentieth of light-speed--Alpha Centauri in only about
eighty years. But it couldn't even leave L5 without bombs, and
suddenly there were no more bombs. Work shut down with the main
body and most of the shock absorbing system almost complete,
still no sign of the massive pusher plate.
For forty years the friends of the Heinlein lobbied for an
exception for their big baby, like the one granted to the
builders of the first disneylands for blasting purposes.
Changing political winds and economic pressure from the Outer
Planets Confederation, where most fissionables were mined, and
the decline of the L.P. combined to eventually bring a victory.
The Heinleiners celebrated and turned to the government for
funding . . . and nobody cared. Space exploration had fallen
out of favor. It does, periodically. The argument not to pour
all that money down the rathole of space when you could spend
it right here on Luna can be a persuasive one to a population
more interested in standard of living and crippling taxation
and no longer afraid of the Invader boogeyman.
There were attempts to get it going again with private
money. The perception was the whole thing had passed its time.
It was a white elephant. It became a regular subject in comic
monologues.
The ship still had some value as scrap. Eventually someone
bought it and strapped on some big boosters and lowered it
bodily to the edge of Delambre, where it sits, stripped of
anything of worth, to this day.
#
The first thing I noticed about the Heinlein during my
explorations was that it was broken. That is to say, snapped in
half. Built strongly to withstand the shocks of its propulsion
system, it had never been meant to land on a planet, even one
with so weak a gravity field as Luna. The bottom had buckled,
and the hull had ruptured about halfway back from the stem.
The second thing I noticed was that, from time to time,
lights could be seen from some of the windows high up on the
hull.
There were places where one could get inside. I explored
several of them. Most led to solidly welded doors. A few seemed
to go further, but the labyrinthine nature of the place worried
me. I made a few sorties trailing a line behind me so I could
find my way out, but during one I felt the line go slack. I
followed it back and couldn't determine if I'd simply tied it
badly or if it had been deliberately loosened. I made no more
entries into the ship. There was no reason to suppose the girl
and anyone she lived with would wish me well. In fact, if she
did, she certainly would have contacted me by then. I would
have to resort to other tactics.
I tried magnetic grapplers and scaled the side of the
hull, trying to reach the lighted ports. When I reached them I
was seldom sure I had the right one, and in any case, by the
time I got there no light could be seen.
It began to seem I was chasing ghosts.
I got discouraged enough that, one Friday night, I decided
to stay home for the weekend. I was getting quite big, and
while one-sixth gee must make it easier to carry a baby, we're
none of us as strong as our Earth-born ancestors were, and I'd
become prone to backaches and sore feet.
So I decided to rent a rig and take a trip to Whiz-Bang,
the new capitol of Texas. Harry the blacksmith had just got a
new Columbus Phaeton-$58.00 in the Sears catalog!--and was
happy to let me try it out. (Mail-order was our polite fiction
for Modern-Made. There would never be enough disneys to
manufacture all the items one needs for survival, there's just
too many of them. Most of the things I owned had arrived on the
Wells-Fargo wagon, fresh from the computer-run factories.) He
hitched a dappled mare he assured me was gentle, and I took off
down the road.
Whiz-Bang is in the eastern part of the disney. The
interior compresses about two hundred miles worth of
environment into a bubble only fifty miles wide, so before I
got there I was into a new kind of terrain and climate, one
where there was more rainfall and things grew better. Purely by
chance I was passing through at the height of the wildflower
season. I saw larkspur, phlox, Mexican hat, Indian paintbrush,
cornflower, and bluebonnets. Millions and millions of
bluebonnets. I stopped the horse and let her graze while I
spread my blanket among them and ate a picnic lunch. I can't
tell you what a relief it was to get away from the foreboding
hulk of the Heinlein and the bitter white rock of the surface,
and hear the song of the mockingbird.
I pulled into Whiz-Bang around noon. It's a bigger town
than New Austin--which means it has five saloons and we have
two. They get more of the tourist trade, which New Austin does
not work to attract, which means they have more small shops
selling authentic souvenirs, still the main means of livelihood
for two out of five Texans. I strolled the streets, nodding to
the gentlemen who tipped their hats, stopping to look into each
shop window. The merchandise fell into four categories:
Mexican, Indian, "Primitive West," and Victorian. The first
three were all hand-made in the disney, certified genuine
reproductions-with a little fudging: "Indian" artifacts
included items from all southwest tribes, not just Comanche and
Apache. But there were no totem poles and no plastic papooses.
Suddenly I realized I was looking at the answer, if answer
there was. I was standing at the window of a toy shop.
#
I felt like Santa Claus as I drove once more down the
mining road and across the rising rim of Delambre early that
Sunday morning. I certainly had a sleighful of toys, in a
vac-sack tossed on the passenger seat. It was about two days
past full noon.
"On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer," I cried. The ride in
the country and the new plan of attack had buoyed my spirits,
which had been at a low ebb. I stopped the rover and quickly
deployed the tent. I spoke not a word but went straight to my
work, setting out all my presents . . . oh, stop that, Hildy. I
laughed, which no doubt caused my big round belly to shake like
a bowl full of jelly.
What I'd done was first to make a Whiz-Bang toymonger a
very happy and much wealthier woman. She'd followed me out of
the store, carrying my boxes of trifles, not quite kow-towing,
stowing them in the buggy for me. Then I'd driven back to New
Austin, pausing only to pick a bunch of bluebonnets, which I
mailed to Cricket. No, I hadn't given up yet.
I'd exercised little selection in the toy store, ruling
out only the ranks of lead soldiers and most of the dolls.
Somehow they just didn't feel right; maybe it was just personal
prejudice. But now I sweated the choice of each of the four
items I wanted to lure her with.
First was a tin-and-pewter wind-up of a horse pulling a
cart, brightly painted in reds and yellows. All little girls
like horses, don't they?
Next was a half-meter Mexican puppet in the shape of a
skeleton, made of clay and papiermбche' and corn husks. I liked
the way it clattered when I picked it up, dangling from its
five strings. It was old and wise.
Then a Kachina doll, even older and wiser, though carved
and painted only months ago. I chose it over the sweeter, safer
white man's dolls, all porcelain and pouty lips and flounces,
because it spoke to me of ancient secrets, unknown ceremonies.
It was as brashly pagan as my elusive sprite, she of the funny
face. Reading up on it, I found it was even better, as the
Kachinas were said to exist among the tribe, but invisible.
And last, my most fortuitous find: a butterfly net, made
of bent cane and gauze, with a glass Mason jar, wad of cotton,
and bottle of alcohol for the humane euthanizing of specimens.
Just the sort of toy parents could put together for a pioneer
child, if the child had a biological bent.
None of the toys would be much harmed by vacuum, but the
sunshine on the surface is brutal, so I placed them where
they'd stay in the shade, near the hull of the Heinlein, and
arranged little lights over them so they'd be easy to find.
Then I went back to the tent.
I didn't have much time to stay if I was to be back for
Monday classes, and I spent that time unprofitably. I couldn't
eat anything, and I couldn't read the book I'd brought along. I
was excited, worried, and a little depressed. What made me
think this would work?
So in the end I struck the tent and took one last tour of
my little toy tableau, which once more was undisturbed.
The next week was hell. Many times I thought of looking
for a substitute and getting the hell back. You want a measure
of my distraction? Elise caught me dealing seconds, and it's
been seventy years since that had happened.
But the week did crawl by, faster than any ordinary garden
slug, and Friday afternoon I turned the editorial chores over
to Charity with instructions to keep the libel suits down to
three or four, and broke all records getting out to Delambre.
#
The Kachina was gone. In its place was something I didn't
recognize at first, but quickly realized was a Navajo sand
painting. These are made by dribbling different colored sands
onto the ground and they can be amazingly detailed and precise.
This one wasn't, but I appreciated the effort. It was just a
stick figure Indian, with war bonnet and a bow held in one
hand, a tipi in the background.
She'd taken the horse and carriage, too, and left a
vac-cage about the right size for taking your pet hamster for a
stroll on the surface. But inside was a horse. A living horse,
ten centimeters high at the shoulder.
I hadn't seen a horselet in years. Callie had given me one
for my fifth birthday, not as small as this one. Not long after
that people like David Earth had succeeded in getting that sort
of gene tinkering outlawed. You could still buy minis on Pluto,
but the most that was allowed on Luna these days were perpetual
puppies and kittens. When I was young you could still get real
exotics, like winged dogs and eight-legged cats.
Somehow I didn't think this beast had been purchased on
Pluto. I held the cage up and tapped on the glass, and the
horselet looked back at me calmly. I wondered what I was going
to do with the damn thing.
The butterfly equipment didn't seem disturbed until I
looked at it more closely. Then I saw the monarch at the bottom
of the jar, still, apparently dead. I put the jar in my pocket
for later examination, left the net where it was, and hurried
on to find that my last offering had been taken. The skeleton
puppet was gone, and where it had been was a scrap of paper. I
picked it up and read the word "thanks," written in pencil.
#
I pondered all this on the drive back to King City. I
didn't know whether to be encouraged or crestfallen. Three of
my toys had been taken, and three other toys left in their
place. I had never expected this. My hope had been to gradually
lure her out with gifts; the idea of trading had never entered
my mind.
So it was good that I had finally made contact, of a sort.
At least, I hoped it was she who had left the horse, butterfly,
and painting. It was still possible another sort of prankster
entirely was at work here, but I didn't think so. Each gift
told me something, though it was hard to know just how much to
read into each one.
The horselet was illegal, so she was telling me she didn't
give a damn about the law. The painting, when I examined the
photo I took of it, proved to be of a Lipan Apache brave, not
just a generic "Indian." That meant to me that she knew the
gift came from Texas . . . and that I lived there? Might she
come to me? You're getting too far-fetched, Hildy.
The butterfly was the most interesting of all, and that
was why I had not erected the tent but was on my way to Liz's
apartment in King City. Of the people I knew, she'd be the most
likely to be able to give me the help I needed with no
questions asked.
#
Before I got there I stopped and bought another computer.
I used this one to doctor the images from my recorder,
completely wiping out the background from those crucial seconds
until I had nothing but the nude figure of a girl running
against a black background. The impulse to protect the story is
a deep one; I had no reason to mistrust Liz, but no reason why
she should know everything I knew, either.
I showed her the film and explained what I wanted from
her, managing to befuddle her considerably, but when she
understood I was answering no questions she said sure, it would
be no problem, then stood watching me.
"Now, Liz," I said.
"Sure," she said, and did a double-take. "Oh, you mean
right now."
So she called a friend at one of the studios who said,
sure, he could do it, no problem, and was about to wire the
pictures to him when I said I'd prefer to use the mail. Looking
at me curiously, Liz addressed the tape and popped it into the
chute, then waited for my next trick.
"What the hell," I said, and got out the butterfly. We
both looked at it with the naked eye, handling it carefully,
and she wanted to let her computer have a go at it, but I said
no, and instead ordered an ordinary magnifying glass, which
arrived in ten minutes. We both examined it and found I had
been right about the propulsion system. There were hair-fine
tubes under the wings, which were somehow attached to the
insect's musculature in such a way that flexing the wing caused
air to squirt out.
"Looks kind of squirrely to me," Liz pronounced. "I think
it'd just fall down and lie there."
"I saw it fly," I said.
"If that'll fly, I'll kiss your ass and give you an hour
to draw a crowd." She waited expectantly for my response, but I
didn't give her one. It was obvious she was being eaten with
curiosity. She tried wheedling a little, then gave it up and
turned to the horse. "I might be willing to take this off your
hands," she said. "I know somebody who wants one." She tickled
it under the chin, and it trotted to the edge of the table
where I'd released it, then jumped down. A scale model horse in
one-sixth gee is quite spry.
Liz named a price, and I said she was taking bread from
the mouths of my children and named another, and she said I
must think she just fell off the turnip wagon, and eventually
we settled on a price that seemed to please her. I didn't tell
her that if she'd asked, I'd have given it to her.
The pictures arrived. I looked at them and told her they'd
do nicely, and thanked her for her time and trouble. I left her
still trying to find out more about the butterfly.
#
What I'd obtained from her was a strip of images suitable
for installing inside a zoetrope. If you don't know what that
is, it's a little like a phenakistoscope, but fancier, though
not quite so nice as a praxinoscope. Still at sea? Picture a
small drum, open at the top, with slits around the sides. You
put the drum on top of a spindle, paste pictures inside it,
rotate it, and look through the slits as they move past you. If
you've chosen the right pictures, they will appear to move.
It's an early version of the motion picture.
I put the strip inside the zoetrope I'd bought at the
Whiz-Bang toy store, twirled it, and saw the girl running
jerkily. And I'd done it all without the aid of the Lunar
computer net known as the CC. With any luck, these images still
existed only in my recorder.
I went right back out to Delambre and put the zoetrope in
a location where it couldn't be missed. I set up the tent,
fixed and ate a light supper, and fell asleep.
I checked it several times during the weekend and always
"I don't think you do, since you've never had a child. But
I promised myself I'd put my own life on hold until she was
grown. I've missed two promotions because of that, and I don't
care. This hurts more than that, because I think we could have
been good for each other." He touched the bottom of my
faceplate since he couldn't reach in and lift my chin, and I
looked up at him. "Maybe we still could be, in ten years or
so."
"If I live that long."
"It's that bad?"
"It could be."
"Hildy, I feel--"
"Just go away, would you? I'd like to be alone."
He nodded, and left.
#
I wandered for a while, never getting out of sight of the
bubble of light that was the tent, listening to Winston barking
over the radio. Why would you put a radio in a dog's suit?
Well, why not.
That was the kind of deep question I was asking myself. I
couldn't seem to turn my mind to anything more important.
I'm not good at describing the painful feelings. It could
be that I'm not good at feeling them. Did I feel a sense of
emptiness? Yes, but not as awful as I might have expected. For
one thing, I hadn't loved him long enough for the loss to leave
that big a cavity. But more important, I hadn't given up. I
don't think you can, not that easily. I knew I'd call on him
again, and hell, I'd beg, and I might even cry. Such things
have been known to work, and Cricket does have a heart in there
somewhere, just like me.
So I was depressed, no question. Despondent? Not really. I
was miles from suicidal, miles. Miles and miles and miles.
That was when I first noticed a low-grade headache. All
those nanobots in that cranium, you'd think they'd have licked
the common headache by now. The migraine has gone the way of
the dodo, true, but those annoying little throbbing ones in the
temple or forehead seem beyond the purview of medicine, most
likely because we inflict them on ourselves; we want them, on
some level.
But this one was different. Examining it, I realized it
was centered in the eyes, and the reason was something had been
monkeying with my vision for quite some time. Peripherally, I'd
been seeing something, or rather not seeing something, and it
was driving me crazy. I stopped my pacing and looked around.
Several times I thought I was on the track of something, but it
always flickered away. Maybe it was Brenda's ghosts. I was
practically touching the hull of the famous Haunted Ship; what
else could it be?
Winston came bounding along, leaping into the air, just as
if he was chasing something. And at last I saw it, and smiled
because it was so simple. The stupid dog was just chasing a
butterfly. That's probably what I'd seen, out of the corner of
my eye. A butterfly.
I turned and started back to the tent (the dog), thinking
I'd have a drink or two or three (was chasing) or, hell, maybe
get really blotto, I think I had a good excuse
a butterfly
and I turned around again but I couldn't find the insect,
which made perfect sense because we weren't in Texas, we were
in Delambre and there's no fucking air out here, Winston, and
I'd about dismissed it as a drunken whimsy when a naked girl
materialized out of very thin air and ran seven steps--I can
see them now, in my mind's eye, clear as anything, one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, and then gone again back to
where ghosts go, and she'd come close enough to me to almost
touch her.
I'm a reporter. I chase the news. I chased her, after an
indeterminate time when I was as capable of movement as any
statue in the park. I didn't find her; the only reason I'd seen
her at all was the very last rays of the sun reflected from far
overhead, not much more light than a good candle would give. I
didn't find the butterfly, either.
I realized the dog was nudging my leg. I saw a red light
was blinking inside his suit, which meant he had ten minutes of
air left, and he'd been trained to go home when he saw the
light. I reached down and patted his helmet, which did him no
good but he seemed to appreciate the thought, licking his
chops. I straightened and took one last look around.
"Winston," I said. "I don't think we're in Kansas
anymore."
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Ezekiel saw the wheel. Moses saw the burning bush. Joe
Smith saw the Angel Moroni, and every electro-preacher since
Billy Sunday saw a chance at good ratings in prime time and
more money than he could lift.
Hayseed farmers, asteroid miners and chronic drug abusers
have seen Unidentified Flying Objects and little guys who want
to see our leaders. Drunks see pink elephants and brontosaurs
and bugs crawling all over everything. The Buddha saw
enlightenment and Mohammed must have seen something, though I
was never clear just what it was. Dying people see a long
tunnel full of light with all the people they hated while they
were alive standing at the end of it. The Founding Flack knew a
good thing when he saw it. Christians are looking to see Jesus,
Walter is looking for a good story, and a gambler is looking
for that fourth ace to turn up; sometimes they see these
things.
People have been seeing things like that since the first
caveman noticed dark shadows stirring out there beyond the
light of the campfire, but until the day of the Bicentennial
Hildy Johnson had never seen anything.
Give me a sign, O Lord, she had been crying, that I might
know Thy shape. And behold, the Lord sent unto her a sign.
A butterfly.
#
It was a Monarch butterfly, quite lovely in its orange and
black, quite ordinary at first glance, except for its location.
But upon closer examination I found something on its back,
about the size of a gelatin capsule, that looked for all the
world like an air tank.
Yes, dear ones, never throw anything away. You don't know
when you might need it. I'd had no use for my optic holocam for
quite a while, since the Texian isn't equipped to print
pictures. But Walter had never asked me to give it back and I'd
not gone to the bother of having it removed, so it was still
there in my left eye, recording everything I saw, faithfully
storing it all until capacity was exhausted, then wiping it to
make way for the new stuff. Many a wild-eyed prophet before me
would have killed to have a holocam, so he could prove to those
doubting bastards he'd really seen those green cocker spaniels
get out of the whistling gizmo that landed on the henhouse.
Considering the number of cameras made between the Brownie
and the end of the twentieth century, you'd think more
intriguing pictures would have been taken of paranormal events,
but look for them-- I did--and you'll come up with a bucket of
space. After that, of course, computers got so good that any
picture could be faked.
But the only person I had to convince was myself. The
first thing I did, back in the tent, was to secure the data
into permanent storage. The second thing I did was to not tell
anybody what I'd seen. Part of that was reporter's instinct:
you don't blab until the story's nailed down. The rest was
admission of the weaknesses flesh is heir to: I hadn't been the
soberest of witnesses. But more importantly . . . this was my
vision. It had been granted to me. Not to Cricket, that
ingrate, who'd have seen it if he'd said he loved me and thrown
his arms around me and told me what a knuckle-headed dope he'd
been. Not to Miss Pulitzer Prize Brenda (you think that, just
because I gave her the big story, I wasn't jealous? You poor
fool, you). Just me.
And Winston. How could I have thought that gorgeous hound
was ugly? The third thing I did back in the tent was give that
most sublime quadruped a pound of my best sausage, and
apologize for not having anything better--like a Pomeranian, or
a Siamese.
#
We're not talking about the butterfly now. That was
amazing, but a few wonders short of a nonesuch.
It was an air tank on the insect's back. With suitable
enlargement I could make out tiny lines going from it to the
wings. The images got fuzzy when I tried to find out where they
went. But I could guess: since there was no air for it to fly
in, and since it seemed to be flying, I deduced it was kept
aloft by reaction power, air squirting from the underside of
its wings. Comparing this specimen to one mounted in a museum I
noted differences in the carapace. A vacuum-proof shell?
Probably. The air tank could dribble oxygen into the
butterfly's blood.
None of the equipment I could identify was what you'd call
off-the-shelf, but so what? Nanobots can build the most
cunning, tiny machines, much smaller than the air tank and
regulator and (possibly) gyro I saw. As for the carapace, that
shouldn't be too hard to effect with genetic engineering. So
somebody was building bugs to live on the surface. So what? All
that implied was an eccentric tinkerer, and Luna is lousy with
them. And that's just the sort of hare-brained thing they
build.
All this research was being done in bed, in Texas.
On my way home from the celebration I'd stopped at a store
and bought a disposable computer, television, recorder, and
flashlight and put them in my pocket and smuggled them past
temporal customs. Easy. Everybody does it, with small items,
and the guards don't even have to be bribed. I waited till
nightfall, then got in bed and pulled the covers over my head,
turned on the light, unrolled the television, dumped the
holocam footage into the recorder and wiped all traces of it
from my cerebral banks. Then I started scanning the footage
frame by frame.
Why all the secrecy? I honestly couldn't have told you at
the time. I knew I didn't want the CC to see this material but
don't know why I felt it was so important. Instinct, I guess.
And I couldn't have guaranteed even these measures would keep
him from finding out, but it was the best I could do. Using a
throwaway number cruncher instead of hooking in to the
mainframe seemed a reasonable way to keep the data away from
him, so long as I didn't ever network it with any other system.
He's good, but he's not magic.
It was an hour's work to deal with the butterfly and file
it under Wonderments, Lepidopterous. Then I moved on to the
miracle.
Height: Five foot two. Eyes: of blue. Hair: blonde, almost
white, shoulder-length, straight. Complexion: light brown,
probably from tanning. Apparent age: ten or eleven (no pubic
hair or bust, two prominent front teeth, facial clues).
Distinguishing marks: none. Build: slender. Clothing: none.
She could have been much older; a small minority prefer to
Peter Pan it through life, never maturing. But I doubted it,
from the way she moved. The teeth were a clue, as well. I
pegged her for a natural, not modified, she just grew that way.
She was visible for 11.4 seconds, not running hard, not
bouncing too high with each step. She seemed to come out of a
black hole and fall back into one. I was being methodical about
this, so I got everything I could out of those 11.4 seconds
before moving on to the frames I was dying to examine: the
first one, and the last one.
Item: If she was a ghost, then ghosts have mass. I'd been
unable to find her footprints among the thousands of others
there on the crater rim (I had noted a lot of the prints had
toes, but it meant nothing; lots of kids wear boots that leave
prints like bare feet), but the film clearly showed the prints
being made, the dust being kicked up. The computer studied the
prints and concluded the girl massed about what you'd expect.
Item: She was not completely naked. In a few frames I
could see biomagnetic thermosoles on the bottoms of her feet, a
damn good idea if you're going to run over the blazing rocks of
the surface. There was also a bit of jewelry sticking to her
chest, a few inches above the left nipple. It was
brass-colored, and shaped more like a pressure fitting than
anything else I could think of. Conjecture: Maybe it was a
pressure fitting. The snap-on type, universally used to connect
air hoses to tanks.
Item: In some of the early frames a slight mist could be
seen in front of her face. It looked like moisture freezing, as
if she had exhaled. There was no sign of respiration after
that.
Item: She was aware of my presence. Between step four and
step five she turned her head and looked directly at me for
half a second. She smiled. Then she made a goofy face and
crossed her eyes.
I made a few more observations, none of them seeming very
relevant or shedding any real light on the mystery. Oh, yes:
Item: I liked her. Making that face was just the sort of thing
I would have done at her age. At first I thought she was
taunting me, but I watched it over and over and concluded she
was daring me. Catch me if you can, old lady. Doll-face, I plan
to.
Then I spent most of the rest of the night analyzing just
a few seconds of images before and after her appearance. When I
was done I wiped the data from the computer, and for good
measure, put it in with the glowing embers of the fire in my
kitchen stove. It crackled and popped nicely. Now the only
record of my experience was in the little recorder.
I slept with it under my pillow.
#
Next Friday, after putting the Texian to bed, I went back
to Hamilton's and purchased a two-man tent. If that puzzles
you, you've never tried to live in a one-man tent. I had it
delivered to the rover rental office nearest the old mining
road, where I leased a vehicle from their second-hand fleet,
paying two months in advance to get the best rate. I had it
tanked full of oxygen and checked the battery level and kicked
the tires and had them replace a sagging leaf spring, and set
off for Delambre.
I set up the tent in the exact spot where we'd been seven
days before. Sunday night I struck the tent, having seen
nothing at all, and drove back to park the rover in a rented
garage.
The Friday after that, I did the same thing.
#
I spent all my weekends out at Delambre for quite a long
time. It was enough that, soon, I had to trade in my nice new
suit for a maternity model. If you've never worn one of those,
don't even ask. But nothing was going to keep me away from
Delambre, not even a developing pregnancy.
It all made sense to me at the time. Looking back, I can
see some questions about my behavior, but I think I'd still do
it again. But let's try to answer a few of them shall we?
I only spent the weekends at the crater because I still
needed Texas to give my life some stability. I still would have
kept coming back until the end of the school term because I
felt I had a responsibility to those who hired me, and to the
children. But the question didn't arise, because I needed the
job more than it needed me. Each Sunday evening I found myself
longing for my cabin. I guess a true Visionary would have been
ashamed of me; you're supposed to drop everything and pursue
the Vision.
I did the best I could. Every Friday I couldn't get out of
the disney fast enough. I attended no more churches, unburdened
my soul to no more quacks.
It's a little harder explaining the pregnancy. A little
embarrassing, too. As part of my efforts to experience as much
as possible of what life had been like on Old Earth, I had had
my menstrual cycle restored. I know it sounds crazy. I'd
expected it would be a one-time thing, like the corset, but
found it not nearly as onerous as Callie had cracked it up to
be. I hadn't intended to let it go on forever, I wasn't that
silly, but I thought, I don't know, half a dozen periods or so,
then over and out. The rest is really no mystery at all. It's
just what happens to fertile nulliparous centenarians who know
zip about Victorian methods of birth control, and who are so
un-wise as to couple with a guy who swears he's not going to
come.
The real mystery came after the rabbit died (I boned up on
the terminology after I got the news). Why keep it?
The best I can say is that I'd never ruled out
child-bearing as something I might do, some day, some distant
day when I had twenty years to spare. Naturally, that day never
seemed to dawn. Having a baby is probably something you have to
want to do, badly, with an almost instinctual urge that seems
to reside in some women and not in others. Looking around me, I
had noted there were plenty of women who had this urge. Boy,
did they have the urge. I'd never felt it. The species seemed
in fine shape in the hands of these breeder women, and I'd
never flattered myself that I'd be any good at it, so it was
always a matter of someday.
But enough unsuccessful and unplanned and ununderstood
suicide attempts focuses the mind wonderfully. I realized that
if I didn't do it now, I might never do it. And it was the one
major human experience I could think of that I might want to
have and had not had. And, as I said, I'd been looking for a
sign, O Lord, and this seemed like one. A bolt from the blue,
not on the order of the Girl and Butterfly, but a portent all
the same.
Which simply meant that every Friday on my way to Delambre
I gave serious thought to stopping off and having the damn
thing taken care of, and every time, so far, had elected to
keep it, not exactly by a landslide.
There's an old wives' tale that a pregnant woman should
not visit the surface. If that's true, why do they make
maternity suits? The only danger is of coming into labor while
in the suit, and that's not much of a danger. An ambulance can
get you from any point on Luna to a birthing center in twenty
minutes. That was not a concern to me. Nor was I neglecting my
duties as an incubator. I got roaring drunk that once, but
that's easily cured. Each Wednesday I visited a check-up center
and was told things were cooking nicely. Each Thursday I
dropped by Ned Pepper's office and, if he was sober enough, let
him poke me and thump me and pronounce me as fine a heifer as
he'd ever come across, and sell me a bottle of yellow elixir
which did wonders for my struggling rose bushes.
If I kept it to term, I intended to bear it naturally. (It
was a male, but it seems silly to think of an embryo as having
a sex.) When I was about twenty it seemed for a while that
birthing was soon to be a thing of the past. The large majority
of women were rearing their pups in jars, often prominently
displayed on the living room coffee table. I watched many a
neighbor's blastocyst mature over the years, peering into the
scope with all the enthusiasm one usually brings to viewing
Uncle Luigi's holos of his trip to Mars. I watched many a
mother scratching the bottle and cooing and goo-gooing to her
secondtrimester fetus. I was present at a few decantings, which
were often elaborately catered, with hired bands and wrapped
presents and the whole megillah.
As is so often the case, it was a fad, not a tide of
civilization. Some studies came out suggesting that Screwtops
did less well in later life than Bellybusters. Other studies
showed the opposite. Studies frequently do that.
I don't read studies. I go with my gut. The pendulum had
swung back toward the "healthy mother/child bonding of vaginal
delivery" and against the "birth trauma scars a child for life"
folks, but my gut told me that, given that I should do this at
all, my gut was the proper place for it to grow. And now that
my uterus has been heard from, I will thank it to shut up.
#
The frames recording the girl's appearance and subsequent
seeming exit from this dimensional plane revealed several
interesting things. She had not materialized out of thin vacuum
nor had she fallen out of and back into a black hole. There
were images before, and after.
I couldn't make a thing of them, given the low light and
the mysterious nature of the transubstantiation. But that's
what computers are for. My five-and-dime model chewed on the
images of twisted light for a while, and came up with the
notion that a human body, wrapped in a perfect flexible mirror,
would twist light in just such a way. All you'd see would be
distorted reflections of the person's surroundings, so while
not rendering one invisible, it sure would make you hard to
see. Up close it would be possible to make out a human shape,
if you were looking for it. From a distance, forget it. If she
stood still, especially against a background as shattered as
the Delambre junkyard, there would be no way to find her. I
remembered the nagging headache I'd had shortly before her
little show. She'd been around before she decided to reveal
herself to me.
A search of the library found no technology that could
produce anything like what I had observed. Whatever it was, it
could be turned off and on very quickly; my holocam's shutter
speed was well below a thousandth of a second, and she was
wrapped in the mirror in one frame, naked in the next. She
didn't take it off, she turned it off.
Looking for an explanation of the other singular thing
about her, the ability to run nude, even if for only seven
steps, in a vacuum, produced a few tidbits concerning the
implantation of oxygen sources to dispense directly into the
bloodstream, research that had never borne profitable fruit and
had been abandoned as impractical. Hmmmm.
I put myself through a refresher course in vacuum
survival. People have lived after exposure of up to four
minutes, which is when the brain starts to die. They suffer
significant tissue damage, but so what? Infants have lived
after even longer periods. You can do useful work for maybe a
minute, maybe a bit longer, work like scrambling into an
emergency suit. Exposures of five to ten seconds will likely
rupture your eardrums and certainly hurt like hell, but do you
no other real harm. "The bends" is easily treatable.
So wait a minute, what's all this talk about a miracle? I
determined in fairly short order that what I'd seen was almost
surely a technical marvel, not a supernatural one. And I was a
bit relieved, frankly. Gods are capricious characters, and the
biggest part of me had no desire to have it proved that one
really existed. What if you saw your burning bush and it turned
out the Power behind it was a psychopathic child, like the
Christian God? He's God, right? He's proved it and you've got
to do what he tells you to do. So what if he asks you to
sacrifice your son on an altar to His massive ego, or build a
big boat in your back yard, or pimp your wife to the local
honcho, blackmail him, and give him a dose of clap? (Don't
believe me? Genesis 12: 10-20. You learn the most interesting
things in church.)
It didn't diminish the miracle one bit to know it was
probably man-made. It excited me all the more. Somewhere out
there, in that huge junkyard, somebody was doing things nobody
else knew how to do. And if it wasn't in the library, the CC
probably didn't know about it, either. Or if he did, he was
suppressing it, and if so, why?
All I knew was I wanted to talk to whoever had made it
possible for that little girl to wrap herself in a perfect
mirror and make a face at me.
#
Which was easier said than done.
The first four weekends I simply camped out, did very
little exploring. I was hoping, since she'd come to me once,
she'd do it again. No real reason why she should, but again,
why not?
After that I spent more time in my suit. I climbed a few
alps of rubble, but there didn't seem much point in it after
the first few. It stretched as far as the eye could see; there
was no way to search it, or even a small part of it.
No, it seemed to me it was no coincidence the sighting had
come at the base of that monument to high hopes, the Starship
Robert A. Heinlein. I set about to explore as much of the old
hulk as I could, but first I visited the library again and
learned something of his history. Herewith, in brief, is the
saga of failed dreams:
The Heinlein was first proposed in 2010, by a group known
as the L5 Society. It was to be humanity's first interstellar
vessel, a remarkable idea when you consider that the Lunar
colony at the time was quite small, still struggling year to
year for funding. And it was to be another twenty years before
the keel was laid, at L5, one of the Trojan libration points of
the Earth/Luna system. L5 and L4 enjoyed several decades of
prominence before the Invasion, and thrived for almost forty
years afterwards. Today they are orbiting junkyards. Economic
reasons again.
The ship was half completed when the Invaders came. Work
was naturally abandoned in favor of more pressing projects,
like survival of the species. When that seemed assured, there
was still very little effort to spare for blue-sky projects
like the Heinlein.
But work resumed in the year 82, A.I., and went on five or
six years before another snag was hit, in the form of the
Lunarian Party. The loonies, or Isolationists, or (to their
enemies) Appeasers, as they came to be called, had as their
main article of faith that mankind should accept its lot as a
conquered race and thrive as best it could on Luna and the
other inhabited planets. The Invaders had reduced all the works
of humanity to less than rubble in the space of three days.
Surely this demonstrated, the Loonies reasoned, the Invaders
were a different breed of cat altogether. We had been extremely
lucky to have survived at all. If we annoyed them again they
might come back and finish the job they started.
Rubbish, responded the old guard, who have since come to
be known as Heinleiners. Sure they were stronger than us. Sure
they had superior technology. Sure they had bigger guns. God's
always on the side of bigger guns, and if we want him back on
our side, we'd better build even bigger guns. The Invaders, the
reasoning went, must be a vastly older race, with vastly older
science. But they still shit between two . . . well,
tentacle-heels?
This was the flaw in the Heinleiners' reasoning, said the
Loonies. We didn't know if they had bigger guns. We didn't know
if they had tentacles or cilia or good honest legs and arms
like you and I and God. We didn't know anything. No human had
ever seen one and survived. No one had ever photographed one,
though you'd think our orbiting telescopes would have; they'd
been looking, on and off, for two hundred years, and no one had
seen them check out of the little motel known as Earth. They
were weird. Their capabilities had thus far admitted of no
limits. It seemed prudent to assume they had no limits.
After almost ninety years of jingoism, of
rallyround-the-flag rhetoric and sheer pettifogging bombast,
this sounded like a good argument to a large part of a
population weary of living on a perpetual war footing. They'd
been making sacrifices for nearly a century, on the theory that
we must be ready to, one, repel attack, and two, rise up in our
wrath one glorious day and stomp the bejesus out of those . . .
whatever they were. Live and let live made a whole lot of
sense. Stop our puny saber-rattling round the ankles of these
giants, and we'll be okay. Speak softly, and screw the big
stick.
Eventually all our forward listening posts in near-Earth
orbit were drawn back--a move I applaud, by the way, since
they'd heard nothing and seen nothing since Invasion Day. It
was commanded that no man-made object approach the home planet
closer than 200,000 kilometers. The planetary defense system
was scaled back drastically, turned to meteoroid destruction,
where at least it saw some use.
How all this affected the Heinlein was in the ban on
fission and fusion explosive devices. The R.A.H. had been
designed as an Orion-type pusherplate propulsion system, to
this day the only feasible drive if you want to get to the
stars in less than a thousand years. What you do is chuck
A-bombs out of a hole in the back, slam the door, and wait for
them to go off. Do that every second or two. The shock wave
pushes you.
This needs a big pusher plate--and I'm talking big
here--and some sort of shock absorber to preserve the dental
work of the passengers. They calculated it could reach about
one-twentieth of light-speed--Alpha Centauri in only about
eighty years. But it couldn't even leave L5 without bombs, and
suddenly there were no more bombs. Work shut down with the main
body and most of the shock absorbing system almost complete,
still no sign of the massive pusher plate.
For forty years the friends of the Heinlein lobbied for an
exception for their big baby, like the one granted to the
builders of the first disneylands for blasting purposes.
Changing political winds and economic pressure from the Outer
Planets Confederation, where most fissionables were mined, and
the decline of the L.P. combined to eventually bring a victory.
The Heinleiners celebrated and turned to the government for
funding . . . and nobody cared. Space exploration had fallen
out of favor. It does, periodically. The argument not to pour
all that money down the rathole of space when you could spend
it right here on Luna can be a persuasive one to a population
more interested in standard of living and crippling taxation
and no longer afraid of the Invader boogeyman.
There were attempts to get it going again with private
money. The perception was the whole thing had passed its time.
It was a white elephant. It became a regular subject in comic
monologues.
The ship still had some value as scrap. Eventually someone
bought it and strapped on some big boosters and lowered it
bodily to the edge of Delambre, where it sits, stripped of
anything of worth, to this day.
#
The first thing I noticed about the Heinlein during my
explorations was that it was broken. That is to say, snapped in
half. Built strongly to withstand the shocks of its propulsion
system, it had never been meant to land on a planet, even one
with so weak a gravity field as Luna. The bottom had buckled,
and the hull had ruptured about halfway back from the stem.
The second thing I noticed was that, from time to time,
lights could be seen from some of the windows high up on the
hull.
There were places where one could get inside. I explored
several of them. Most led to solidly welded doors. A few seemed
to go further, but the labyrinthine nature of the place worried
me. I made a few sorties trailing a line behind me so I could
find my way out, but during one I felt the line go slack. I
followed it back and couldn't determine if I'd simply tied it
badly or if it had been deliberately loosened. I made no more
entries into the ship. There was no reason to suppose the girl
and anyone she lived with would wish me well. In fact, if she
did, she certainly would have contacted me by then. I would
have to resort to other tactics.
I tried magnetic grapplers and scaled the side of the
hull, trying to reach the lighted ports. When I reached them I
was seldom sure I had the right one, and in any case, by the
time I got there no light could be seen.
It began to seem I was chasing ghosts.
I got discouraged enough that, one Friday night, I decided
to stay home for the weekend. I was getting quite big, and
while one-sixth gee must make it easier to carry a baby, we're
none of us as strong as our Earth-born ancestors were, and I'd
become prone to backaches and sore feet.
So I decided to rent a rig and take a trip to Whiz-Bang,
the new capitol of Texas. Harry the blacksmith had just got a
new Columbus Phaeton-$58.00 in the Sears catalog!--and was
happy to let me try it out. (Mail-order was our polite fiction
for Modern-Made. There would never be enough disneys to
manufacture all the items one needs for survival, there's just
too many of them. Most of the things I owned had arrived on the
Wells-Fargo wagon, fresh from the computer-run factories.) He
hitched a dappled mare he assured me was gentle, and I took off
down the road.
Whiz-Bang is in the eastern part of the disney. The
interior compresses about two hundred miles worth of
environment into a bubble only fifty miles wide, so before I
got there I was into a new kind of terrain and climate, one
where there was more rainfall and things grew better. Purely by
chance I was passing through at the height of the wildflower
season. I saw larkspur, phlox, Mexican hat, Indian paintbrush,
cornflower, and bluebonnets. Millions and millions of
bluebonnets. I stopped the horse and let her graze while I
spread my blanket among them and ate a picnic lunch. I can't
tell you what a relief it was to get away from the foreboding
hulk of the Heinlein and the bitter white rock of the surface,
and hear the song of the mockingbird.
I pulled into Whiz-Bang around noon. It's a bigger town
than New Austin--which means it has five saloons and we have
two. They get more of the tourist trade, which New Austin does
not work to attract, which means they have more small shops
selling authentic souvenirs, still the main means of livelihood
for two out of five Texans. I strolled the streets, nodding to
the gentlemen who tipped their hats, stopping to look into each
shop window. The merchandise fell into four categories:
Mexican, Indian, "Primitive West," and Victorian. The first
three were all hand-made in the disney, certified genuine
reproductions-with a little fudging: "Indian" artifacts
included items from all southwest tribes, not just Comanche and
Apache. But there were no totem poles and no plastic papooses.
Suddenly I realized I was looking at the answer, if answer
there was. I was standing at the window of a toy shop.
#
I felt like Santa Claus as I drove once more down the
mining road and across the rising rim of Delambre early that
Sunday morning. I certainly had a sleighful of toys, in a
vac-sack tossed on the passenger seat. It was about two days
past full noon.
"On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer," I cried. The ride in
the country and the new plan of attack had buoyed my spirits,
which had been at a low ebb. I stopped the rover and quickly
deployed the tent. I spoke not a word but went straight to my
work, setting out all my presents . . . oh, stop that, Hildy. I
laughed, which no doubt caused my big round belly to shake like
a bowl full of jelly.
What I'd done was first to make a Whiz-Bang toymonger a
very happy and much wealthier woman. She'd followed me out of
the store, carrying my boxes of trifles, not quite kow-towing,
stowing them in the buggy for me. Then I'd driven back to New
Austin, pausing only to pick a bunch of bluebonnets, which I
mailed to Cricket. No, I hadn't given up yet.
I'd exercised little selection in the toy store, ruling
out only the ranks of lead soldiers and most of the dolls.
Somehow they just didn't feel right; maybe it was just personal
prejudice. But now I sweated the choice of each of the four
items I wanted to lure her with.
First was a tin-and-pewter wind-up of a horse pulling a
cart, brightly painted in reds and yellows. All little girls
like horses, don't they?
Next was a half-meter Mexican puppet in the shape of a
skeleton, made of clay and papiermбche' and corn husks. I liked
the way it clattered when I picked it up, dangling from its
five strings. It was old and wise.
Then a Kachina doll, even older and wiser, though carved
and painted only months ago. I chose it over the sweeter, safer
white man's dolls, all porcelain and pouty lips and flounces,
because it spoke to me of ancient secrets, unknown ceremonies.
It was as brashly pagan as my elusive sprite, she of the funny
face. Reading up on it, I found it was even better, as the
Kachinas were said to exist among the tribe, but invisible.
And last, my most fortuitous find: a butterfly net, made
of bent cane and gauze, with a glass Mason jar, wad of cotton,
and bottle of alcohol for the humane euthanizing of specimens.
Just the sort of toy parents could put together for a pioneer
child, if the child had a biological bent.
None of the toys would be much harmed by vacuum, but the
sunshine on the surface is brutal, so I placed them where
they'd stay in the shade, near the hull of the Heinlein, and
arranged little lights over them so they'd be easy to find.
Then I went back to the tent.
I didn't have much time to stay if I was to be back for
Monday classes, and I spent that time unprofitably. I couldn't
eat anything, and I couldn't read the book I'd brought along. I
was excited, worried, and a little depressed. What made me
think this would work?
So in the end I struck the tent and took one last tour of
my little toy tableau, which once more was undisturbed.
The next week was hell. Many times I thought of looking
for a substitute and getting the hell back. You want a measure
of my distraction? Elise caught me dealing seconds, and it's
been seventy years since that had happened.
But the week did crawl by, faster than any ordinary garden
slug, and Friday afternoon I turned the editorial chores over
to Charity with instructions to keep the libel suits down to
three or four, and broke all records getting out to Delambre.
#
The Kachina was gone. In its place was something I didn't
recognize at first, but quickly realized was a Navajo sand
painting. These are made by dribbling different colored sands
onto the ground and they can be amazingly detailed and precise.
This one wasn't, but I appreciated the effort. It was just a
stick figure Indian, with war bonnet and a bow held in one
hand, a tipi in the background.
She'd taken the horse and carriage, too, and left a
vac-cage about the right size for taking your pet hamster for a
stroll on the surface. But inside was a horse. A living horse,
ten centimeters high at the shoulder.
I hadn't seen a horselet in years. Callie had given me one
for my fifth birthday, not as small as this one. Not long after
that people like David Earth had succeeded in getting that sort
of gene tinkering outlawed. You could still buy minis on Pluto,
but the most that was allowed on Luna these days were perpetual
puppies and kittens. When I was young you could still get real
exotics, like winged dogs and eight-legged cats.
Somehow I didn't think this beast had been purchased on
Pluto. I held the cage up and tapped on the glass, and the
horselet looked back at me calmly. I wondered what I was going
to do with the damn thing.
The butterfly equipment didn't seem disturbed until I
looked at it more closely. Then I saw the monarch at the bottom
of the jar, still, apparently dead. I put the jar in my pocket
for later examination, left the net where it was, and hurried
on to find that my last offering had been taken. The skeleton
puppet was gone, and where it had been was a scrap of paper. I
picked it up and read the word "thanks," written in pencil.
#
I pondered all this on the drive back to King City. I
didn't know whether to be encouraged or crestfallen. Three of
my toys had been taken, and three other toys left in their
place. I had never expected this. My hope had been to gradually
lure her out with gifts; the idea of trading had never entered
my mind.
So it was good that I had finally made contact, of a sort.
At least, I hoped it was she who had left the horse, butterfly,
and painting. It was still possible another sort of prankster
entirely was at work here, but I didn't think so. Each gift
told me something, though it was hard to know just how much to
read into each one.
The horselet was illegal, so she was telling me she didn't
give a damn about the law. The painting, when I examined the
photo I took of it, proved to be of a Lipan Apache brave, not
just a generic "Indian." That meant to me that she knew the
gift came from Texas . . . and that I lived there? Might she
come to me? You're getting too far-fetched, Hildy.
The butterfly was the most interesting of all, and that
was why I had not erected the tent but was on my way to Liz's
apartment in King City. Of the people I knew, she'd be the most
likely to be able to give me the help I needed with no
questions asked.
#
Before I got there I stopped and bought another computer.
I used this one to doctor the images from my recorder,
completely wiping out the background from those crucial seconds
until I had nothing but the nude figure of a girl running
against a black background. The impulse to protect the story is
a deep one; I had no reason to mistrust Liz, but no reason why
she should know everything I knew, either.
I showed her the film and explained what I wanted from
her, managing to befuddle her considerably, but when she
understood I was answering no questions she said sure, it would
be no problem, then stood watching me.
"Now, Liz," I said.
"Sure," she said, and did a double-take. "Oh, you mean
right now."
So she called a friend at one of the studios who said,
sure, he could do it, no problem, and was about to wire the
pictures to him when I said I'd prefer to use the mail. Looking
at me curiously, Liz addressed the tape and popped it into the
chute, then waited for my next trick.
"What the hell," I said, and got out the butterfly. We
both looked at it with the naked eye, handling it carefully,
and she wanted to let her computer have a go at it, but I said
no, and instead ordered an ordinary magnifying glass, which
arrived in ten minutes. We both examined it and found I had
been right about the propulsion system. There were hair-fine
tubes under the wings, which were somehow attached to the
insect's musculature in such a way that flexing the wing caused
air to squirt out.
"Looks kind of squirrely to me," Liz pronounced. "I think
it'd just fall down and lie there."
"I saw it fly," I said.
"If that'll fly, I'll kiss your ass and give you an hour
to draw a crowd." She waited expectantly for my response, but I
didn't give her one. It was obvious she was being eaten with
curiosity. She tried wheedling a little, then gave it up and
turned to the horse. "I might be willing to take this off your
hands," she said. "I know somebody who wants one." She tickled
it under the chin, and it trotted to the edge of the table
where I'd released it, then jumped down. A scale model horse in
one-sixth gee is quite spry.
Liz named a price, and I said she was taking bread from
the mouths of my children and named another, and she said I
must think she just fell off the turnip wagon, and eventually
we settled on a price that seemed to please her. I didn't tell
her that if she'd asked, I'd have given it to her.
The pictures arrived. I looked at them and told her they'd
do nicely, and thanked her for her time and trouble. I left her
still trying to find out more about the butterfly.
#
What I'd obtained from her was a strip of images suitable
for installing inside a zoetrope. If you don't know what that
is, it's a little like a phenakistoscope, but fancier, though
not quite so nice as a praxinoscope. Still at sea? Picture a
small drum, open at the top, with slits around the sides. You
put the drum on top of a spindle, paste pictures inside it,
rotate it, and look through the slits as they move past you. If
you've chosen the right pictures, they will appear to move.
It's an early version of the motion picture.
I put the strip inside the zoetrope I'd bought at the
Whiz-Bang toy store, twirled it, and saw the girl running
jerkily. And I'd done it all without the aid of the Lunar
computer net known as the CC. With any luck, these images still
existed only in my recorder.
I went right back out to Delambre and put the zoetrope in
a location where it couldn't be missed. I set up the tent,
fixed and ate a light supper, and fell asleep.
I checked it several times during the weekend and always