Pumping Up Napoleon (13 page)

‘I always said I'd see the Moon before I die.' The voice at Gavin's elbow startled him.

She bobbed gently, using, he noted at once, the appropriate handles. This ought to have soothed him, but the fact that she was smiling, evidently quite at peace with herself and the Universe, irritated Gavin so much he broke the company code and retorted: ‘It's not all it's cracked up to be, you know'.

‘No?' she said. ‘It looks good from here.'

They were long past the Neutral Point and accelerating towards the Moon, though you couldn't tell how fast the ship was going. Behind them the Earth had dwindled to a bright blue disk; the lunar sphere hung before them, pockmarked, shadowed and mysteriously empty, apart from the sprinkle of red and white lights on the Sea of Tranquillity. Stubbornly, Gavin persisted. ‘Neil Armstrong's footprint,' he said. ‘I ask you. How does anybody know for sure that's Neil Armstrong's footprint?'

‘Have you seen it?' said the old lady. ‘I'm Moira, by the way.'

Gavin didn't give his name and he even put his hand over his name badge, as if he were putting hand on heart. He said, ‘I've never seen it and I don't want to. You might as well look at
my
footprint in the dust.'

‘You're probably right,' said Moira. ‘Or mine. Perhaps I'd like to see mine.'

‘The Moon is full of footprints. It's not like you think it's going to be.'

‘How do you know what I think?' said Moira, her head on one side as if she really did have a mild interest in his answer.

‘You'll see. It's all canned music and souvenirs. You can't just wander about. They make you see things whether you want to or not.'

‘Is that so bad?' said Moira.

‘It is for some people,' muttered Gavin sulkily. ‘Anyway, I got cleaning to do. And,' he added as a clincher, ‘I'm not supposed to talk to you passengers.'

Without asking, she took a cloth from his pack and began making circular motions on the glass. ‘Look at that,' said Moira. ‘My face among the stars.' When she said it, Gavin looked at his own reflection, something he usually avoided doing as much as possible. He was wearing the expression of a man with a bitter taste in his mouth.

Moira didn't speak again for some time. She rubbed at the glass with her borrowed cloth and looked at the lights in the dark. ‘Have you ever seen a shooting star?' she said.

Gavin couldn't resist scoffing: ‘Not up here,' he said. ‘And not down there.' He pointed at the Moon. ‘No atmosphere!' In the weak lunar orbit things either disappeared off into space or kept going round and round, eventually falling onto the surface, where they stayed, because no one would go and pick them up.

He remembered his first trip, leaving home, when it had all seemed like a big adventure, as well as something to do until a better job came along. How he'd loved to see those bright streaks of burning rubbish flare and fizzle out as they tried to touch the Earth. But now, he knew it was just another kind of pollution. Soon the rest of the Solar System would be polluted too, and eventually the Galaxy and then the Universe…

A flash of diamond-bright sparks flew past the window, ice crystals catching the light of the sun. ‘Oh!' exclaimed Moira. ‘How lovely!'

‘Urine,' said Gavin. ‘It's the voiding hour.'

‘Isn't it marvellous,' said Moira, shaking her head, ‘how even your own waste products can look wonderful in space?'

Gavin couldn't bear it; he gritted his teeth and rubbed harder, as if he might rub out the stars, while Moira made dreamy circles with her cloth. ‘I've always wanted to be an astronaut,' she said.

‘It's nothing special,' said Gavin. ‘These days everyone's an astronaut.'

Moira was in the observatory often after that, or bouncing off the walls of the service corridor, poking into spaces no passenger should know about. Though Gavin saw her, he always hid until she'd gone away. So he couldn't tell the Captain anything much about her when she went missing.

They had docked in the orbit of the Moon by then, and the passengers had all disembarked. Moira's absence wasn't noticed until the whole contingent went through immigration and the numbers didn't add up. A search was made of the area, all the restrooms were checked, and every cupboard in the transit shuttle was opened. There was no sign of Moira.

Gavin and the rest of the ferry crew were put on alert and ordered to check every locked and unlocked space on board the ship and every item of inventory for clues. Then Gavin was summoned to the Captain's quarters. ‘You were seen talking to her in the Observatory,' he said. ‘We have it on visual. What were you talking about?'

‘Nothing much,' said Gavin.

‘What we're after,' said the Captain, ‘is some clue as to her state of mind. We're not trying to apportion blame.'

Not yet, thought Gavin. Blame will surely follow.

‘How did she seem to you?' said the Captain.

Gavin tried to remember. She had smiled a lot – and she said she wanted to see the Moon before she died.

‘Captain!' A voice in the air interrupted Gavin's thoughts before he uttered them. ‘One of our space suits is missing.'

At first no one believed an old lady like that would know how to operate an airlock or even want to try. The space suit was fitted with a standard locator device, but it had been turned off. There was a whisper among the crew that murder had been done, and some of them looked sideways at Gavin. He didn't mind: it would encourage them to leave him alone.

Then the visuals for that area were checked again and the whole crew saw Moira standing in the airlock and waving goodbye. She even blew a kiss as she stepped out backwards into space.

That night, with a full set of new passengers safely on board, the story was officially put to rest. It seemed Moira had no relatives on Earth to inform and so the Captain would be spared the difficulty of writing any letters of regret.

Half-past-one by the Tokyo clock. The ferry left the Moon's orbit and Gavin went back to polishing the Bubble Observatory. It was quiet; just how he liked it. But the smell of the cleaning rags caught the back of his throat. Angrily, he rubbed harder.

Then his heart lurched as a star-shaped object crossed the face of the Moon. He knew at once what it must be: Moira in her white suit, spreading her arms and legs to the Sun.

Pressing his fingers to the glass, Gavin saw himself – a ghastly open-mouthed reflection superimposed on the face of the receding Moon – and it scared him. But what made him truly uneasy was the suspicion that, if he had been able to get up close, he would have seen that Moira was still smiling.

An Intergalactic Amnesiac in Search of an Identity

The voice says, ‘Open your eyes'.

My mind tugs at my eyelids but nothing happens. Then a finger touches my eyeball and peels back the lid. Light stabs me in the brain; I see, as if through water, a white shape floating.

The details of the picture organise themselves and the form comes into focus. It has long hair and its teeth are bared. Instinctively I bring my legs up and push off from the bed with my arms; but instead of executing with ease the lazy back somersault that would me take me to the top corner of the room, well above this creature who wants to bite me, I can hardly raise my legs. Out of breath with the effort of trying to move, I lie helpless, as the creature bends over me.

‘Don't be afraid,' it says. ‘I'm a doctor. My name is Dr Margaret McKinnon.'

Over her shoulder I can see off into space: it is beige, except for a long interruption where heads and torsos float by in both directions.

‘What's your name?' says the doctor.

‘I'm….' That's as far as I get. I don't know what to say next.

‘Don't worry,' she says. ‘We'll try to help you remember.'

‘Look within yourself,' she says. ‘Do you see anything? Anything at all?'

I look, but there is nothing.

‘I'd like you to try this,' she says, holding open a black velvet bag. ‘I'd like you to put your hand inside and pick out one marble.' She bares her teeth again, to encourage me.

‘What I want is for you to get better,' she says. ‘The bump on your head is healing nicely, but we need to find out, if we can, where you belong.'

She has asked me a lot of questions about:

my name

my age

where I live (alone or with others)

the name of the current leader of this country

the circumstances in which I received my injury

my ability to remember anything.

All is dark. I slide my hand inside the black velvet bag; my fingers touch a heap of rounded, clinking objects, cold and hard. Closing on one, I pull it out into the light. It is a sphere, almost transparent, with a wing of white inside it.

‘It's a marble,' she says. ‘Does it remind you of anything?'

Something seems to give inside me; but I shake my head. She lets me hold the bag; I bring it up to my face and breathe in the smell of cloth, and air that has been kept in darkness; the marbles click against each other as the bag shifts. I raise a handful to the surface. Some are clear with curls of colour inside, some have surfaces of hazy blue, or are crusted with yellow or milky-red. They look like gaudy moons.

I lie down and close my eyes. Pictures appear in my head and I use the words I have to tell her what I see.

We're outside the dome. My feet are busy pushing the dust into ridges, and flattening these into plateaux. My mother taps on the service window, but the clerk doesn't come. Her irritation is like a low hum in my mind.

We're joined together by a long white cord, which she has looped over her arm. She keeps tapping on the window with the hard edge of her shopping list, a rectangle of white plastic with a keypad and a small screen, which I could be playing a game on if we were inside and I could take off my gloves.

I push my boots together and when I take them away again a wave of sand has formed between them. Pinching a hold of my mother's padded trouser-leg to steady myself, I stand on one foot and move the other, smoothing out the wave with the sole of my overshoe.

Mother gets nervous about air locks and space suits; she likes to keep us zipped up until we're safely home again. We usually go over on foot, even though mother says it's dangerous because of all the bricks left lying everywhere that you could stumble over. But she doesn't like to drive either. She says she would drive if they built a proper road (they could use some of those bricks) instead of letting traffic run across the depressions in any direction.

I wouldn't mind but she won't let me bounce; we have to get along by shuffling because she's afraid I'll land badly and snag my suit on a brick or trip over a brickbot. They're the only other things moving out here and if you stand between them and the sun they stop. They can go anywhere but mostly they only move far enough to shovel more sand into themselves. Then they just sit and cook a brick; so now there are bricks lying around everywhere, just waiting for someone to pick them up and build something with them.

My mother taps harder. Inside, they must hear the knocking; but it's always like this. I shuffle away from my mother, making ripples in the dust as I go. When I reach the end of the cord mum is still at the window. The people inside look at the dark bubbles of our heads and look away.

I pick up a brick.

She jerks me off my feet and the brick leaves my hand and lands with a ploff. As I rise to the end of my tether I see her unclipped shopping list floating near, as if it will be happy to wait until she's ready to remember its existence. But she tugs so hard I somersault over her head and helmet-butt the list. My mother jumps for it but her fingertips just send it flip-flopping away. As I come slowly down she goes up again. We must look pretty silly to anyone watching from inside.

On the way home I want to jump high, to see if I can look over the horizon, but like I said, mother's afraid I'll tear my suit and the nothingness will get in.

The red moon is rising; out in the depression brickbots are working, unconscious of the approaching shadow. One of them lays a brick right in front of us. Like moon chickens, my dad says.

And suddenly I remember: I have a father. Even when I open my eyes, I can hear his voice, calling me. ‘Daniel,' he's saying. ‘Daniel; don't throw that!'

‘Don't throw what, Daniel?' asks Dr McKinnon. I wish I could remember because she seems so pleased with me. She's all teeth. ‘Did he mean the brick?' But that can't be it.

‘You haven't been listening!' I tell her.

‘Don't worry,' says Dr McKinnon. ‘You've done well.'

Apart from Dr McKinnon I have visits from the dietician, the physical therapist, a lady with a trolley full of books and a woman who brings tea. I don't know their names.

Dr McKinnon has her name printed neatly on a badge fixed to the lapel of her white coat. There is a nurse in blue and he has his name written on a strip of paper tape, stuck to his blue tunic. I can read it. ‘Marion,' I say, pointing.