Woman Who Loved the Moon (12 page)

The equipment van came screeching around the corner then. Tom pulled it up past them, and backed with a roar of his engines. “Cars,” Zenan muttered. “Oh, watch it!” Paul caught Christy’s arm. The doors of the van, jarred by the forceful jerky halt, came flying open, and something black came careening swiftly out.

For Christy the events resolved suddenly to a series of stills. She sprawled where a thrust of Paul’s arm had put her. The cable wheel bounded high in the air as it hit a projection in the ill-paved road. The thick cable unwound like a whip cracking. Paul seemed to leap to meet it. She heard the sound as it struck him, saw him fall—and saw the wheel roll past him, stringing cable out behind it, to hit the curb, where it shattered and sat. Cable uncoiled like a snake around the jigsaw wreckage of wood.

She stood up slowly. Her palms and arms and knees and chin hurt, and the taste of gravel stung her lips. She walked to Paul. It took her a long time to reach him, and when she did her knees gave out suddenly, so that she sat thudding to the ground.

The cable had lashed him down; there was a black and purple bruise across his right cheek. His eyes were open, but he looked up at the sky without seeing it. She interposed her face between his eyes and the sky. Nothing changed. In one hand his fingers were clenching a skyhook. He tried to hook the cable, she thought. She touched his hand. The fingers lolled loose. The hook rolled free with a clatter. She reached for it, and used it like a cane, prying herself up off the street.

Leo came round in front of her, hiding Paul from her. He took hold of her shoulders. “Come away, Chris,” he said. “We’ve called the ambulance.”

“He doesn’t need one,” she said. “And I don’t either.” They circled her: Leo, Zenan, Jake, Gus.

“Christy,” said another voice, a stranger’s. The circle broke apart. Jordan Granelli stood in front of her, his fine hands extended to her. “Christy, I’m so sorry.”

“Yes,” she said.

He stepped up to her and took her hand. “Don’t be afraid to mourn for him, child,” he said. “I know what grief is. We all do. Chance takes us all, and she gives nothing back. There’s no way to make the weight any lighter. We feel for you.” He stepped back, spreading his arms in supplication and sympathy. Christy felt the first tears thicken in her eyes. She stared at him through their distorting film.

Behind him, in macabre mime, Zenan cranked an ancient imaginary camera. From a distance came the high keening of the ambulance.

Granelli turned his back on her as one of the sound men approached him. The man asked him something, pointing at the loose cable. She heard his answer clearly. “Of course we’ll shoot! Get someone to help you move that thing back. And wipe it clean, first.” Leo turned, his face whitened with anger. Jake looked shocked.

“Mr. Granelli,” Christy whispered, to herself, to Paul. “Mr. Death, who always happens to other people.” She walked towards him. The metal skyhook was cold and hard and heavy in her palm. She swung it: back, forth, back, forth—and up.

At the last minute Jake saw her, but Zenan was in his way. Jordan Granelli turned around, and screamed.

They reached her by the third blow—too late.

The Saints of Driman

When I wrote this story, a friend of mine had recently died. His name was David Mason, and he was a science fiction and fantasy writer. He’d written five novels for Lancer, none of which is in print today. He lived on a houseboat in the San Francisco Marina. He was an irritating, irascible, difficult man, and I liked him very much. After he died, I wrote this. It went to a number of magazines and anthologies. They rejected it. Finally my newly acquired agent sent it to the New York literary magazine,
Antaeus
, for their “Popular Fiction” issue. They published it.

David would have laughed...

* * *

Ares-Ak

Kimbel 15

How easily I write that designation on the page!

After four years, the names of the months of Driman seem natural to me. I mark our survey records with the changing dates and months. There are no seasons here. There is only the omnipotent, omnipresent heat. Kimbel 15—and in Ares-Ak they give names, not numbers, to the years—and Mary is still sick. This will be The Year the Strangers Go Home.

She is feverish, dehydrated, and partially delirious. We’ve never been sick here, before. It began two days ago. Morgan has already sent a message capsule. He curses the heat, and stamps around his room muttering to himself. I leave. I escape to the shops, to the cool white tile of Pir’s temple, to the dry green of the succulent gardens. The people of Ares-Ak are used to seeing me in their streets. Only children sometimes trail after me, to stare at my foreign dark hair and skin. Morgan they follow in procession, as if he were the Pied Piper. He hates the city. He leaves it to me.

Mary keeps calling for water, water. Her forehead, throat, chin, and nose have a waxy, yellowish sheen. Her lips are purplish-red. Her cheekbones and eyelids are flushed. She drinks in gulps, like a baby. She sweats desperately. I gave her an alcohol rub this morning: that lowered the fever a little, but it rises, as the heat rises, and breaks at night. It’s 38.8 now.

She keeps calling. I just went in and bent over the bed, but there is nobody behind her staring eyes. Just Fever.

I have to get out of here. I’m going for a walk.

Mary is better. She knows me when I come in, but the fever dries her throat out so that she can barely talk. We are giving her fluids intravenously. Her mouth is sore, but she drinks uncomplaining the water and cactus juice I bring her. The Drimanese doctors gave us some supplemental drugs: an antihydrotic that we can’t match in our medikit, and an antipyretic that seems to work faster than our own Old Reliable, aspirin. Morgan is useless. His hands shake when he helps me lift her. She noticed it this morning and her poor mouth made a moue of laughter at me. But we are still going home, Morgan says. “Our work’s done,” he said to me at lunch. He’s never asked me if my work is done. He disapproves strongly of my interest in the Saints. Religion makes him nervous; he prefers politics. “We can make a report on the data we have,” he growled, as if he thought I would argue. I didn’t. I know better than to fight with Morgan when Mary is sick and cannot calm him down. And—I want to go home, too. I want to see a waterfall, an ocean, a field of green grass, a mountain. Driman has none of these. Oh, there is an ocean of sorts—a green, sluggish pond that stirs dimly to the sun’s pull. I want to see a hurricane. And god, what I wouldn’t do for a moon! I would dance naked in the moonlight, shamelessly lunatic.

I saw a Saint today. She was sitting in the dust in the marketplace. She was gaunt as an old stick, and glowing, with that crazy joy that wells from them. I squirmed my way across the square and planted myself in front of her. No one looked at me. It was hard to notice anything but her. She exhaled calm and peace. It’s hard to believe she’s slowly starving to death. When Mary saw her first Saint, she said to me in mock Scots, “‘Tis no’ canny, lass,” to make me laugh. I find the Saints awesome, and infuriating, and I am angry at myself for having ignored them for so long. Soon we will leave—and dragging information out of Pir is like pulling one’s own teeth!

* * *

Ares-Ak

Kimbel 19

They are sending a ship for us.

A capsule came today, dropping into the desert like a spent bullet. Morgan rode a chorn out to get it. I hate those beasts, ugly fat things like giant armadillos. Feet and chornback are Driman’s means of transport. The planet is hideously short of fuel. In an emergency you can obtain an electric vehicle from the city government, but it must be a real emergency, not a personal or ceremonial one. When our ship came falling out of the sky, the Drimanese met it with chorns. Their planet has taught them to be tightfisted with what they have.

Morgan accepts this. He dislikes the city; he enjoys riding into the desert on an armored pig. He would be snugly happy in a tower in the dunes, while I would go mad there. And yet—he cannot bear to be truly alone, and I hug my privacy to me like lust.

What odd people we are!

The ship must make two stops before it can land on Driman. Morgan is seething. “She could die in a week!” But he doesn’t really think Mary will die, though her fever spikes and subsides, spikes and subsides, making palisades on the chart we keep at her bedside. She’s eating again: the soft pulp of the pinwheel cactus, and a few meager mouthfuls of soup. Last night, she says, she dreamed of a red fruit, and woke with the taste and texture of apple on her tongue.

I wonder—do the Saints dream of food, as their bodies waste away? Does hunger ever fight its way through holiness into unholy dreams?

* * *

Ares-Ak

Kimbel 20

I asked Pir about the dreams of Saints today. I couldn’t tell if he was amused or shocked. I know him better than any other

Drimanese, he taught me his language, and I still can’t read his expression. Sotoko, his disciple, definitely disapproves of me; I can read
his
face like a book. He thinks Pir wastes too much time talking to me. Pir’s accessibility sometimes accentuates the mishaps in our conversations, when I forget the “yes” is not a vertical nod, but a toss of the head. I translate to myself each time he does it:
That means “yes,” Lex.

“Do Saints dream?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. It seems likely. But I know very little about the Saints.” He is a priest, yet he claims ignorance of the Saints. I have asked him several times where the Saints come from, and what kind of spiritual training they undergo to achieve their transcendent state. I told him the story of the Buddha. He looked surprised, and then gave that brisk negative shake of his bald skull. I presume he meant that their training does not parallel the story at all.

Where
do
the Saints come from? The word I translate as “saint” is related to the word for sacrifice. It might better be translated “one who sacrifices.” Why? But this mystery I won’t have time to solve. The ship will be here in eight days.

* * *

Ares-Ak

Kimbel 21

Mary asked me today, in her new hoarse voice: “What are you working on, Alexa?” I sat on the bed and deluged her with my speculations about the Saints. Morgan doesn’t want to hear it. I exhausted her, and broke off in mid-spate, feeling like a rat. She was all whited out. Morgan came in. He smelled of chorn. Chorns smell like shit.

“The ship will be three days late,” he said.

Mary said: “Good! I’ll have time to get so much stronger, they won’t believe I’ve been sick.” Morgan said something trivial, and pulled me out the door. He yelled at me in a whisper for having gotten her tired. I told him to go fuck a chorn. I am not responsible for Mary to
him.
He has left her white and tired enough days and nights on Driman.

I am tired of Morgan.

* * *

Ares-Ak

Kimbel 23

The Saint came back to the marketplace today.

She is noticeably weaker. My fingers itched for a venipuncture kit, for tubes and needles and slides and a centrifuge and my microscope. The Drimanese might honor that desire. Their own biochemists have done some stupefying work. But I suspect they would not like me to apply it here. I want to
know
—what is going on in that emaciated golden body? This holiness is devouring; it eats up its bearers like flame. I asked Pir: “Is it forbidden to the Saints to eat?”

He said, “No. They no longer want to.”

“Do they want to die?”

He didn’t answer. It was a foolish question. The symbol of his religion, which they name The Path, is a circle with a line bisecting it north and south and extending out beyond the poles. It resembles the Terran mathematical symbol for the empty set. In the temples it is elaborated: a huge wheel, with many lines through it, and standing at top and at bottom, two human figures. It’s the Wheel of Fortune. We who are on it only see half of it, living as we do within the limits of time. But Death is just the underside of the Wheel, and the Wheel is forever turning. Saints know that Death and Life are equal turns of the Wheel. They go beyond our human uncertainties; it’s a seductive fate.

But where do they learn their fiery happiness? The monasteries attached to the temples are for priests. Where are they taught to smile, and cease eating, and gaily starve into death? I’ll ask Pir again tomorrow. Maybe he’ll tell me. Ares-Ak has been generous to us, letting us prick and poke and probe and pack away specimens, holo records, observe what we please. They accept us with astounding equanimity. Could it be that suspicious curiosity is
not
the normal emotional reaction of the universe?

Maybe it’s just mine.

* * *