Nova 1 Read online

  They were literally perched up against the walls, as close to making a conjoinment, I suppose, as it is possible in Moon gear, and quite oblivious to my approach. The boy had taken off some of his bottom castings and arranged his helmet in a strange way so that it concealed all of him but his mouth. One of their newer perversions, I suppose. The girl was lying straddled across him, her face in his lap, her hands somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulder-joints.

  It made no difference to me at all. They could do what the hell they wanted, it livened up the blasted place. But I caught a piece of rock in a heel and went down, slowly, on my posterior and there was something of a clatter. When I stood up, they had broken apart and were staring at me.

  “What are you doing here?” the girl said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the commander of the Enterprise I said, “and I’m taking a walk around the Dome. What’s the difference? Who’s bothering you?”

  “What’s the difference he asks,” the girl said. She turned to the boy. “Tell him what the difference is.”

  “I know you,” the boy said. “You’re the little idiot who loves to come by and make speeches in our meetings about how were all escapists and we should come home to the real world. I know you damned well.”

  “I don’t care what you do,” I said. I meant it, at least in the particular. Although I could make efforts now and then to talk sense to them collectively, it was really none of my business what individual idiots wanted to do. For that matter, it was not my fault that service compels me, now and then under the contract, to give a kind of reenlistment talk to the troops. “You can stay here and grow old for all I care. You can even bring children onto the Moon, if you can stand it.”

  “Get this,” the girl said in a high voice. “Listen to him; he thinks he’s clever.”

  “I don’t like idiots,” the boy said, standing slowly and tilting his helmet so that I could see his eyes. “I don’t like them on my territory and I particularly don’t like asinine platitudes. I’m just coked up enough to beat the hell out of this guy, if you don’t mind, Deborah.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I’ll sit and watch.”

  “Now listen,” I said. “I don’t even know who the two of you are. Outside the Dome, I have nothing to do with you at all. I was just taking a walk, and I’m going back to my ship. So lets adjourn this.” I was trying to be reasonable. Even with scum, I’m told it pays.

  “Sure he’s going back,” the girl said. “Into the little ship and off in the sky. What do you want to be when you grow up, baby, a pilot?”

  But you can’t be decent. They’ll get you all the time, although you should know better. I felt the old, painful congested rage moving within me. I think that all things being equal, then, I might have hit her, but the boy got to me first.

  He caught me with a sneak punch behind the right ear where the metal is thin, and he must have knocked me out for a moment, because the next thing I knew, I was already in the process of getting up and he was looking at me, leering. I was in pain. His eyes, full and round, seemed to take the terrible knowledge from me, but what he did was to hit one fist against the other. I could hear them clang.

  “Good,” he said. “Here we go again.”

  “No. Don’t do it,” I said. “I’m warning you, now, I don’t want to get involved, but you better not try a thing more.”

  “Got that,” he said, and threw a fist at me, missed, and poised again.

  That was when I lost control. “You trash,” I screamed and took my gun from the inner pocket, and shot him, just once, in the head. The projectile went all the way through, of course, just as they said it would. He fell in front of me.

  “He’s dead,” the girl said. “You killed him.” But she didn’t move.

  But I was still concentrating on the boy. “You son of a bitch,” I said, and shot him again, for good measure, then in the fit that I could barely understand, but had had too often to resist, I turned on the girl and raised the gun to her eyes.

  “You want it too?” I said.

  She shook her head and said nothing. Her eyes rolled and she staggered back.

  “I could do it, you know. I don’t have to put up with this kind of thing from the likes of you. Nobody wants you. Back on Earth, you don’t even exist except as a convenient statistic. I could wipe out the whole damned colony and say it was one of your feuds and that would be the end of the whole thing.”

  “No,” she said, still backing. “No, no. What’s wrong with you?”

  There was plenty, but I was far gone. They had touched, together, the reservoir of pain, grief, need within me. And they’ll do it to you every time, long past the point when you can take it any more.

  “I won’t put up with it,” I said to her flatly, and shot the girl through the heart. She fell before me soundlessly, the metal of her suit gliding to rock as if it were rubber.

  I was still angry. I could have incinerated the Moon itself if I had had the equipment.

  But I managed to put away the gun and got back to the ship.

  I thought about filing a report on it, but decided not to: they could as likely have killed each other. Probably would have, eventually, if I hadn’t interceded. So I simply made a note in the log to that effect—that I had found the two bodies scattered in a crater—and left it at that.

  I haven’t been outside since. My two-man crew brings the mail and messages back to me. I know perfectly well that the colony knows what happened and what I did, but that’s all right with me because there’s nothing they can do. Filth, discards, their word means nothing to Earth, and I transmit all the word myself, anyway. And if one or two of them ever wanted to go back to report what happened, they’d have to go in my ship.

  So the hell with them.

  The hell with the whole boondoggle. My year ends in three months and I’m going.

  Aside from the events I’ve transcribed here to explain my feelings, nothing ever happens on the Moon.

  HEXAMNION

  by Chan Davis

  It has been over ten years since the last, new, Chan Davis story appeared, so it is a pleasure to welcome him back to the ranks. During the forties his name was a familiar one in the magazines, but since then stories like “Adrift on the Policy Level” and “The Nightmare” could be found only in the anthologies. The author is a professor of mathematics, a pure mathematician whose recognized ability brought him a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study. Yet he is still an involved man who speaks out for what he believes in, so much so that his protest politics earned him dismissal from one university position and a six-month prison sentence. A wonder and a delight in an era when men in high stations were knuckling under to the McCarthyites. Here he blends science and humanity in a story with the absolutely correct title.

  You’ll never understand, Frank Coglan. You’ll never know how it was. You think the hardest part of your learning is over—eight weeks, and Ruth and Jay say how fast it was, very delighted—but you’ll never learn really.

  I remember the first day you came. Ruth and Jay had told us long ahead of time (as much as they could: the main thing for us was seeing you and talking to you). The last few days we had hardly been listening to them, we were too busy talking among ourselves about how we could include you.

  Naturally, while we talked we moved, back and forth across the room—you know us . . .

  Well, no! I know us. You don’t know. That’s just the most obvious part of all you’ll never know. You don’t know how we moved while we talked about you, because it’s never been the same since, and never will be. It’s gone. The six of us know. Ruth and Jay may know—they seem to understand almost everything about us.

  You’ll never know.

  The ease and trust we had we’ll never have again. And of course what we were talking about that day was how to include you.

  Really that was illusory, as we found out. Really this was just the last few hours of—well, of us. The Init
ials.

  You think I’m sentimentalizing if I think of the Garden of Eden now? You think our years in our quadrant were false even before they were disturbed, like a catatonic’s dream? Well, maybe Adam and Eve were doomed from the beginning to lose their Garden; that depends on who’s telling the story. But if the story means anything, I can tell you this about Adam and Eve, when they had fallen: they felt they had lost something.

  Vara and me getting dressed that last morning. Just like every morning before it. You know the belts we wear: soft fiber-glass braid, joined to a shoulder halter, all in bright frank colors. We always dressed together when we waked, boys and girls, and Vara and I tied each other’s belts on; A-Dzong and Haidee; Maria and Ted. Easy enough to get dressed one by one, in separate alcoves, Earth-style; but it was part of our life to do it together, in the middle of the room. Not really in pairs. During that quarter-hour after we waked up in the morning, each of the six would touch every other.

  All day, every time one of the other Initials said to me, “Emilio,” there was a joining which reached back in time to the waking together, and a feeling of the safe sleep before that. It was a feeling and poetry reaching farther. I never could have talked about it then because I had never had the experience of not having it. And who would I have needed to talk about it to?

  We didn’t have any feeling of impending loss, or savoring the last hour before you came. Just that the side of the room with the door was important. You know the six arms of the room, extending out from the central area in all three perpendicular directions. A lot of our “games,” as you call them, use the six arms as a symmetrical “playing field,” but now one arm was special. It was the first time anything important had ever been expected at the door.

  I remember circling-four with Vara, A-Dzong, and Haidee, leaving a place in the middle for you, the unknown newcomer who wouldn’t know how to “play”; Maria and Ted in fast trajectory toward us, down the two arms perpendicular to our circle; me taking the main push of Maria’s momentum, A-Dzong most of Ted’s, so the circle of four was set precessing.

  “Emilio, how can he join that if he’s not used to free-fall?”

  “He just has to be at the center.”

  “But—he can’t just be there, he has to . . .”

  “I know,” I said, but I didn’t know how to finish.

  The four of us touched down on alternating comers of the central well, while Maria and Ted bounced back to us from the ends of two of the corridor arms. They met and circled, facing the door. The rest of us came out, each spinning about the axis leading to the door; drifting slowly away from the door; watching the door. Oval of dull blue ceramic, the same as the surrounding wall, spinning in my field of view as I spun.

  Ted said hollowly, “Frank Coglan,” expressing our anticipation and making fun of it at the same time. We laughed lightly, uneasily.

  A gentle chime said the intercom was now on, and Jay’s voice said, “Frank Coglan’s here, kids, he made the trip fine.”

  “Good.”

  “Maybe he’s still a little bit rocky from free-fall, he’s not really used to it yet—”

  “No, I’m all right,” we heard your voice on the intercom.

  “Want to join them right away, Frank?”

  “Sure.”

  We were together facing the door from the opposite end of the room. The door opened and we saw you, dressed in slacks, shirt, and harness-belts like ours.

  “Hello,” we said.

  “Hi, kids,” you said.

  Then we laughed. Great way to get off on the right foot with the newcomer! Looking back, I see that none of our reactions was right. But after all—it was the first time we’d ever looked at a strangers face and said hello. It was the first time we heard anybody but Ruth and Jay call us “kids.” The situation was exciting, upsetting, and funny. It wasn’t just the way you looked.

  But it was that too. Here was a person in the room with us, the same size and age . . . but all flattened up! Your elbows held close in, touching your waist! Your chin in, almost touching your chest! Your legs and spine practically in a straight line! And staying still! To us it gave the irresistible impression that you were bound in an invisible hammock.

  We laughed.

  I guess we looked funny to you too. Had Ruth and Jay given you a look at us through a one-way window? I doubt it.

  You just smiled and waited. You had been prepared for a shock, so you took it better—

  No, that’s not the reason. We had been prepared too. I knew stories where the new kid was taunted by the neighborhood gang.

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  Then you laughed, offhand. “That’s okay.” You looked around, reached out a hand to steady yourself. (Steady yourself? Why? That’s what we automatically said to ourselves. Why not just push off, stay in motion toward another wall?)

  You said, “Gee, this room’s so small.”

  “Small?” said A-Dzong. “Is it? How large are rooms in New York?”

  “Oh, it’s much bigger than most rooms, but my God, you’ve spent sixteen whole years here.”

  And we hung on that, evaluating our lives from your vantage. That was the conversation for a good hour. Fascinating, for us. “Prison!” you said at one point. I wonder what Ruth and Jay thought, listening on the intercom.

  But you see what had happened? The new kid had become the boss, just like that. We’ve been just a bit off balance ever since, and you, with your lifetime of meeting new people and new places, have been more at home in our quadrant than we have. To him that has shall be given.

  “How come you had to stay in here all by yourselves?” you asked.

  A-Dzong said, “Well, you know what the plan was. Space travelers were always clumsy because in free-fall they kept their lifelong habits of moving in gravity. So we were the experiment of learning how to live in free-fall. The six of us were brought up here as infants, without any of this sitting and crawling and standing you do down on Earth. We just moved in what seemed the natural way. If we’d been able to see Ruth and Jay, we’d have copied their motions and not invented our own way.”

  “I know, I know, but to stay in this quadrant for sixteen years? Why wouldn’t they let you out eventually, for God’s sake?”

  “We never asked them.”

  “Well,” said Vara, “but they did say this: until we were nearly full-grown, there was danger that our habits wouldn’t be fixed, and we’d lose the good of the experiment. Then the last few years they figured we needed to stay in familiar surroundings while we learned about society.”

  “Read books about the Earth, and so forth.”

  “You mean up till then you never had fairy tales or stories or anything?”

  “Until we were eleven, that’s right.”

  “They thought that might give us things to imitate too,” added

  A-Dzong, “and keep us from inventing our own ways. And it would have.”

  “Just Ruth and Jay talked with us. About the station, space flight, plenty of things. And we read. But not about how people act.”

  “Until you were eleven.”

  “That’s right. Even then, no illustrated books or movies.”

  “But didn’t you want to go out into the other quadrants?”

  “Well, we’ve been there a few hours at a time, because we couldn’t learn the station thoroughly otherwise. Ruth and Jay stayed out of sight then.”

  “Didn’t you ever want to see them?”

  Vara said, “I guess free-fall isn’t the only reason we’re different from other kids.”

  I’ve thought a lot about that, Frank Coglan. Did Adam and Eve throw tantrums wanting to see Heaven? How big was the Garden, and did it matter to them?

  That’s a perfectly uninteresting question, isn’t it: understanding the emotions of our childhood. What’s interesting is understanding the common human condition, but we’re just the Initials, only six of us, and our condition is peculiar to us. All that we’re called on to do now is
to teach you, and the others that are coming up, how to live in free-fall—and to fit into your social ways, since you can’t accept ours, or even notice them except with impatience. Right?

  Even with Vara, you’ll always be setting the standard, never adapting to her. I can see.

  I didn’t notice at first that you were attracted to Vara.

  “Sexually attracted” is an expression like “crowd” or “rainstorm” for us: we learned all the vocabulary because the great foreign Earth was an intricate marvel, but we weren’t sure how any of it might apply to us. Our beautiful touching all day long we never called caresses. Our elaborate trajectories we never called dances.

  Because the things the books said with those Earth words didn’t seem to describe us.

  If you want to know if boys touched boys among us and girls touched girls, the answer is yes. But not at all as often as boys touched girls.

  You don’t know, because it was never natural after you came. Once, the second day, you laughed when you saw us all holding hands and called us a “daisy-chain.” We were startled and drifted apart. You never made fun of us after that, but still we often stayed apart when inside we were aching for that contact. Our constraint came from the fact we couldn’t include you, maybe. Or that we couldn’t explain. Or maybe it was personal, Frank Coglan, to your own cocky self.

  So there was this, which we couldn’t put into irrelevant Earth vocabulary to tell you, and in our minds it was all mixed up with the way to live in free-fall, which we were trying to teach you.

  Ruth suggested, “Teach him how you play ball,” and that was good for a few hours. When each of us threw from the end of one of the arms, with three different balls (one for each perpendicular corridor), and you stood near the center and watched, you could begin to see why our posture might be efficient. And you could see how accurate a ball game in free-fall can be. I don’t think any game on Earth calls for three small balls to meet in mid-air, for instance.