Fiction River: Moonscapes (6 page)

“In case you’re wondering, I’m no longer in that line of work,” Nick said. “I’ve been... replaced. Downsized, I suppose you could say.”

“And I could also say I was sorry to hear that, but I’m not sure that would be the truth.”

Such an odd mixture of emotions. Nick wondered if every child who hadn’t received a yearly gift from him would react the same way to seeing him after they’d grown up. Had that been part of the reason no one would hire him? What if it wasn’t his age, but some long-forgotten and never quite forgiven slight that bubbled to the surface like an unscratchable itch just at the sight of him?

Felicity Parker straightened her shoulders and gave him a small smile. “Besides, now that I’ve gotten to know you, I don’t believe you would have allowed yourself to be pushed aside if provisions hadn’t been made for things to continue after you were gone.”

She was right. There were still good little boys and girls in the world, and a system was in place to take care of all of them. It wasn’t as personal a service as Nick had provided, but things changed as the world changed.

“Like your husband did,” Nick said gently.

“Yes, like Lincoln did.” She put the drink back on the corkboard coaster. “You asked me why I allowed you in the program. Why I overruled every one of my mission specialists who told me you were too old. Why I ‘took a chance’ on you, as I believe you told Ms. Wells.”

She leaned forward, elbows on the table, her hands cradling her drink. The pilot made a slight course correction, and sunlight flowed from Nick’s shoulder to his chest as the sun came more fully into view. The air in the cabin smelled stale like all recycled air did, but now he caught a whiff of her perfume and it masked the smell.

“I’ve always been a realist,” she said. “I trusted what I saw with my eyes, what I experienced, that was what I knew to be true. When my sister passed away...” Her voice caught for just a moment, but her eyes remained clear, her gaze steady. “When she died, that was the end of my childhood. Then I met Lincoln. He was a dreamer, the opposite of me. He told me once that you encouraged him to follow his dreams, but he was never quite sure you were real. I knew you were.”

And she’d never told him. As sure as he’d ever been about any of his kids, he knew that Felicity Parker had never told her husband that Nick was real.

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” she said. “I don’t believe in fate. I believe in taking advantage of opportunities when they walk through my front door.”

“I’m an opportunity?”

No one at any of the other places he’d applied had thought of him that way. They’d taken one look at him and dismissed him as useless.

“You encourage the dreamers,” she said. “We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t encouraged my husband. I expect that the people on this mission will need encouragement if we’re to succeed.”

All of that was more flattering than Nick had expected, but he wondered if he deserved it. Like Felicity, many of the people he’d be living with on the moon hadn’t been among his good kids.

“Now it’s my turn,” she said. “I want to know why you applied for the program, and I don’t want one of the pat answers you gave on the psych evaluations.”

He’d written what he’d thought were the expected responses to any question that had even skirted around the edge of “why.” Apparently his answers hadn’t been as clever as he’d thought.

“I wasn’t ready to be put out to pasture yet,” he said. “Everywhere I went, no one else seemed inclined to give me a chance to prove I was still capable of anything beyond a quick game of checkers. What’s that catch phrase everyone’s so fond of? Think outside the box?” He shrugged. “Can’t get much more outside the box than going to the moon.”

He could see the disappointment in her eyes. He deserved it. She’d been more truthful with him than he had a right to expect, and he’d given her only a partial truth in return.

“This colony’s going to make it,” he said. “I don’t know that for sure, but I can feel it in my bones. The people you’ve put together, they’re exceptional at what they do. They say the technology’s sound, and I trust that it is. People are going to do what people everywhere do, and the colony’s going to grow.”

Nick had seen the precursors of that. Some members of the team had already paired off. He wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. The mission’s payload included provisions for the children that would inevitably result.

“You might want me along to encourage the dreamers,” Nick said, “but that’s not my only job.” He could feel the old twinkle in his eyes again, and saw the reflection of it in Felicity Parker’s slow smile. “I guess I never did like the idea of being downsized.”

***

Nick enjoyed the moon more than he thought he would. Lower gravity meant less pressure on his bones, and he felt like a young man when he got out of bed in the morning. That alone more than made up for the cramped quarters and the rough years when no one was sure the colony would last.

The colony had survived. More than that, it had grown as Nick knew it would. Over the years the colony had added a nursery and then a schoolroom. Felicity Parker tutored the colony’s children in math and science, and Nick handled what colleges would have called “the humanities.” They didn’t criticize the kids but instead encouraged both logical and creative thinking, and celebrated their students’ successes no matter how small.

“We’re creating a society,” Felicity Parker said to him one night over cups of instant hot chocolate.

Alcohol still hadn’t made its way into the colony’s food systems, but sheer demand had overcome the embargo on chocolate. Powdered hot chocolate wasn’t as good as the kind Nick’s wife used to make on top of the stove back on Earth, but after not having had any at all for years, the instant tasted like heaven.

“Better than the one we left behind?” Nick asked.

“I believe it is.” She gave him a long look. “Are you ready for tonight?”

The colony had no trees to decorate, of course, and no chimneys to shimmy down, but those were minor details. Nick had adapted, just like he’d adapted to the recycled air and the need to wear an environment suit whenever he exited a building. What was important was the small satchel resting in the corner of his cramped room. The bag was stuffed to overflowing with gifts for the colony’s children.

As she had every year, Felicity had overridden the safeguards that kept the colonists from creating frivolous things with the technology that made it possible for the colony to exist. With the safeguards off, Nick had created the kind of gifts for each of the kids that would encourage their dreams—dreams he’d learned about by listening to them as he taught.

He finished off his hot chocolate before he lifted the satchel. Felicity Parker had become a good friend. Her help in assisting him with the reversal of his downsizing was invaluable. The biggest change Nick had made in how he did things this time around was due to her.

Nick no longer kept lists of who was good and who was bad. “Good” and “bad” were no less harmful labels than “old” and “slow” and “useless.” Kids were kids, and every kid deserved to know someone believed in them.

Just like Felicity Parker had believed in him.

Nick winked at her as he left his room and enjoyed the quizzical look she gave him in return. No matter. She’d find out what the wink was all about soon enough.

This year he’d created an additional gift and tucked it beneath the other gifts at the bottom of his satchel so she wouldn’t accidentally catch sight of it. He’d leave the gift at her door after he’d delivered all the rest. It was a totally frivolous gift, something that she’d wanted when she was seven but didn’t believe she deserved.

It was long overdue.

Introduction to “
The Toy That Ran Away”

Scott William Carter last appeared in our third issue,
Time Streams
, with the well-received story, “The Elevator in the Cornfield.” His short stories, more than fifty strong, have appeared everywhere from
Analog
and
Realms of Fantasy
to
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
and
The Los Angeles Review.
His very first novel,
The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys
, won the prestigious Oregon Book Award in 2011. Since then, he’s published ten novels. The latest is
Ghost Detective
.

Before he started “The Toy That Ran Away,” he had an inkling he’d write about private investigator Dexter Duff searching for a sophisticated child’s toy. Then he received an invitation to
Moonscapes
.

“Suddenly,” he writes, “I had a setting, which is sometimes all you need to fit all the pieces into place.”

The Toy That Ran Away

Scott William Carter

The white mansion, with its marble pillars and terraced windows trimmed with gold, impressive and a bit gaudy, was exactly how I pictured a Unity Worlds Ambassador of a terraformed moon like Vanga Seven would live. Like he had something to prove.

The air was cool on my face, the sky a hazy lavender with the onset of dusk. The planet Vanga itself loomed over the horizon, a dull gray oval, like a giant smudge that nobody could wipe away. The mansion was high in the hills of Trenton, high enough that I was breathing heavy despite being in the best shape of my life—at least for a private investigator who spent far too much time with his feet on a desk. When I glanced over my shoulder, down the grassy hill, I saw not only amber domed rooftops and a scattering of mirrored skyscrapers, but also the ocean beyond and below the floating city’s perimeter walls, blinking through a dusting of clouds.

It was not my first time on a city in the sky, but it still felt strange to look
down
and see clouds.

I placed my hand on the scanner and said my name. Without a word, I was buzzed inside. In the fading light, I walked up the wide steps to the front door. Leaves from the overhanging trees rippled in the wind like yellow scarves. Ambassador Jachin Strawn walked out to greet me.

“Mister Duff,” he said.

He smiled the practiced smile of a politician. Since the holo had been a headshot, I was not prepared for how big he was. His white turtleneck was so tight it looked like it had been painted on his chest, and his huge muscles had the too-perfect look of a statue. His hair was as white as his turtleneck, which I knew he must have done deliberately, to give himself a seasoned look. Men who bioshaped always made me think they were compensating for something.

“Call me Dexter,” I said.

I extended my hand, but I was still feeling dizzy from the long stepdock passage from Earth, and I stumbled. Strawn caught my arm, his fingers clamping on my flesh felt like metal. When I righted myself, we locked eyes, and he was looking at me the way I imagined a lion might look at a circus performer who had just pulled his head out of the lion’s mouth—as if he were saying
I could snap you in half and there’s nothing you could do about it.

We shook hands. His pupils were dishwater gray; pigment loss was often a side effect of bioshaping.

“I see my message got your attention,” he said.

“Your credit transfer did,” I replied. “That was a lot of money to give me on faith.”

“Faith has nothing to do with it. Your reputation precedes you. I hear you’re good at helping people.”

“When it suits me,” I said.

“And my request suits you?”

“It has me intrigued. You really want to pay me all that money just to find one of your daughter’s toys?”

He laughed without any warmth at all and gestured toward the door. I followed him into an entryway that had a green marble floor and a high ceiling. A chandelier floated suspended above, hundreds of ice-like shards filling the room with light. We passed an invisible fountain, water trickling from one pool to another in midair, and finally entered a spacious living room with plush white furniture. The far wall was entirely glass, and because his mansion was high in the hills and at the edge of the floating city, the window looked out on the tops of clouds and an endless stretch of shimmering ocean. It was a rich person’s view of a moon that had been transformed into a perfect paradise ... which of course was why all the rich people were floating above it. The view from below wasn’t quite the same.

Sitting in a rocking chair, so still I didn’t notice her until she looked up from the handheld on her lap, was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Her long blond hair seemed to glow with its own light. She wore a tight white turtleneck similar to her husband’s that hugged all of her perfect curves, and a loose-fitting dress that fell past her ankles. But the longer I looked at her, the more apparent it was that her body was just as sculpted—the legs a bit too long, the cheekbones a little too pronounced, the blond hair a little too perfect. She was attractive only in the way that a doll could be attractive.

“This is my wife, Meladine,” Strawn said.

“Pleasure,” I said.

She smiled. Then, as if she was embarrassed, she lowered her gaze. Strawn looked at me.

“Perhaps you’d care for some tea?”