Space Is Just a Starry Night, Page 3
Tanith Lee
Edwards now shrugged. This was what their conversation was always likely to become, now.
Shrugs, shrugging things off.
For a while they did not speak at all. Beyond the see-through, liquid black, a shark’s carapace, space rushed like a sea.
“Three hours. Guess I’ll sleep awhile,” said Edwards.
“Yes,” she said softly. You were always good for that.
In childhood, she thought, that was where she first heard stories of werewolves, as of vampires, ghosts, ghouls, and dragons. That plethora of fearsome exotic things that plagued the lives (fictionally?) of mankind. To her, they had that element of old pagan supernaturals. They were like the dark wood, the coming of night — events, beings, over which man had no control — or very little — but which nipped endlessly at his heels, no matter how clever he was or how high he built his walls. Like the Greek god Dionysos, in the Bacchae, they broke through reason, demanding tribute in a dark leopard-speckled by moonlight.
Crisium Base 15 was long and low and ugly. Appearing through the faint shimmering mist of the nighttime moon, it caught the transport’s headlights gracelessly.
It was built for its purpose, nothing more.
Bayley (Chrissie at Crisium — an old tired joke) looked at it with familiar but no longer interested disapproval. How unlike the mooted fairy-tales of crystal domes and delicate glacial structures, pure as if carved from moon-frost, on the covers of old magazines. The moon had been romantic, then possible. Then it had been living Science Fiction, then the money ran out, and it became nowhere you could go. Finally, things changed. And there it was again, like something someone had just invented, all the way up in the air — and accessible, for a few.
Bayley parted from Al Edwards in the lock foyer. She checked in, then took the moving walk straight to her quarters. There were only five other persons on the base this month. She had not even looked at the names and meeting Edwards, her once-lover, had felt only mild irritation. Like the base, he was old news. He didn’t matter now.
In her cabin, she took another shower, to get rid of the static from the journey.
Beyond the see-through, here set in long, curved windows, she watched the blue-chalked earth lambent in the blackness. It gave more light than the full moon ever gave on earth, edging the long strands of the boulder-strewn plain with rifts and darts of thin pale silver. Indigo shadows stretched backward from every object, shadows that shone, as earth shadows did not.
Nothing was out there, only men, men and women, from the various bases. And yet, now and then, you saw them, nearly everyone did, those sudden, half-glimpsed forms that came and went at the corners of the eyes…like “seeing cats” — but nothing like that really.
The first time, though she had been warned, Bayley had been scared — entranced. What had it been, that luminously slender apparition — almost like a floating stone, yet light and weightless — borne transparently along by legs of finest glass — and with embers-of-opal eyes? Turning — only a swirl or flick of vapor. You knew it was an optical delusion, a moon delusion. Uls, they were playfully called: unreal lunar sightings. But also, you knew it had been there. A phantom of something lost long ago, or else a ghost that had traveled with you.
It was noisy at dinner.
Pal Al was in good form, as were the other three men on the maintenance team. Bayley, the hygiene operative, sat modestly, listening to their grouses and sallies and then, when they had broken out some beers, to their jokes and full-scale complaints. She volunteered little, beyond accepting a can. Fevriere and Sporch she knew from previous stints of duty; Edwards she knew from long ago. The fourth man, Case, was red-haired and loud. The geologist, Reza, a haughty woman from Central Industries, had taken her food in her cabin. All this, predictable.
By 23 on the GMT clock, Bayley felt more than ready to leave the main saloon. She had shown willing, as you had to, but now Case and Sporch were well into a beery, angry diatribe. She’d heard it all before.
As she started to get up, Fevriere spoke to her very low, under the blare of hearty whinging.
“Bayley — can I ask you —”
“What, Fevriere?” Silence. She said, “I’m ready to turn in. Tomorrow is a long day, and it’s getting on for midnight.”
“Sure. Just a word.” The silence again. Then: “You’ve seen uls, haven’t you?”
“Yes, now and then.”
“You log them?”
“At first. But well, everyone sees them. Almost everyone. Now and then.”
“Yes. I have too, sometimes. But Bayley — have you ever heard things?”
“Of course. Whisperings, sighs — it’s to do with the air-pressure in the suits and —”
“No, I don’t mean — look, Bayley. You were here on the last shift. Did you come across that story going round?”
She said, cautiously, putting down the half-full can, “Which story?”
“About something that came down here on one of the survey ships. Something that had got in the hold somehow, lay up by the energy vent — got out when the ship touched down over by C. Serenum?”
“Fevriere, I’ve heard lots of stories about things stowing away on ships — carriers, survey vessels — I’ve heard of alien things flying in on meteorites too, and landing smack in the impact crater, and then just getting up, shaking themselves, and sprinting off over the rocks.”
“That wasn’t the story,” he said. His narrow dark face was serious, uneasy.
“What did you see, Fevriere, and what did you hear?”
Edwards, Case, and Sporch had ambled away back towards the bar dispenser. They were going to need detox tablets tomorrow when the machine checked their levels. Fevriere leaned toward her even so, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, and she heard Case laugh leeringly, pointing them out, as if they were two kids caught in a clinch in the back of a car. She ignored that and listened.
Fevriere said, “It was from the side of my eye, like always — but I turned, as you always do. I turned, and for a second — it was still there. It was white, like the desert-sea. Like ice-glass. It stood up like a man, but it wasn’t in a suit — nothing. It didn’t need one. Eyes. I saw eyes. Then it gave a sound — a cry. A kind of — I heard it.”
“You couldn’t, Fevriere. Sound doesn’t —”
“I’d swear, not in my head. That’s what frightens me most.”
How did the story of the wolf, the werewolf, start? Some drunk scenario maybe, like the one tonight, but with a spooky storyteller theme rather than a grievance recital.
She hadn’t been there that time. She hadn’t heard it. Only that other occasion, last month — no, six months ago, going down one of the ramps, riding the roller-mop, and Box and Ryan, talking at the edge of the hydroponics area.
What had they said? She could not recall the words, only the substance. About a wolf, about a wolf that ran across the surface of the moon. They were saying it had been spotted by several outside teams, and from two or three bases. But the whole thing could have been a spoof. Ryan thought he was court-jester. And bases sometimes liked to play tricks on each other — out of boredom, or rivalry.
Why a wolf, though? Or, why a werewolf?
In all the stories, the werewolf — part man, part beast — was roused to shapechange at full moon. The three nights, approaching full, total full, and diminishing full. The moon would drive a werewolf crazy. And that was when it was deep inside the forests and mountain places of the earth.
So what if a werewolf were on the moon, no longer subject to that reverse-telescopic far-off view, but here, in the middle of the view, on the face of the snow-white satellite, running between the boulders and leaping in and out of the craters, the sourceless spanglings — the tidal pull all around, the lunar tide coming and going over its body and over its savage brain —
But nothing could live on the surface, not without a suit, not without air or life-support.
Even in the peculiar and unsubstantiated tales of foxes, go
phers, and rabbits that had stowed away and got here in the baggage holds or electric vents…these little critters were found and rescued before they could escape into the airless icy death outside.
C. Serenum, the tiny “ocean-bed,” only mapped west of Crisium in the first years of man’s return, was void. Nothing landed there. There was nothing to land for, even for the survey teams.
We go a little mad, perhaps, she thought, lying on her bunk in the dim light and the gleam of the flaming stars beyond the window, in the night of space. Of course we go mad. We’re lunatics, aren’t we.
Bayley rode the roller-mop along the lit-up corridors. She had traveled maybe two miles, through the spider-web of the base complex, meeting no one, for this month the base was scarcely manned at all.
A mechanical apparatus moved continually about, it and the mop nimbly avoiding each other, with no attention needed from her. In most sections other robotic life went on, the deciphering, weighing and measuring, the assessment and notation of things. Lamps twinkled, tinselly wires strummed like harps.
Once, ghostly, at an intersection of the corridors, Bayley heard the distant cursing of the mile-off, but already unmistakable Case.
Outside it was lunar day. Darkly bright, the sky the color of chocolate tin-foil.
Reza’s lab was shut tight, and the neon keepout posted on the doors. All the other laboratories were locked up and unoccupied.
“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,” murmured Bayley as the mop veered by Reza’s lab and round to the central maintenance station. Presently, she glimpsed Al Edwards climbing like an overalled monkey across one of the rigs. He did not notice her. Frankly, in the carrier, she had been surprised he even remembered her. They had been together only a few months. He hadn’t seemed to bear a grudge, but then, neither had she. What had she seen in him?
Where the corridor ended in a ramp, passing down beside the see-through, an uls shivered across the corner of her eye. It was like a statue of milky ice, moving, rushing, among daggers of aquamarine. Bayley did not turn. Over the steady noise of the roller-mop, she did not expect to hear any other fainter sound. And so, the slender piping siren notes, rising, falling in her ear, were imagination — an ula — unreal lunar audition.
Not even a wolf-howl. You would think your brain, in its inventively deranged moments, would still get that right. If it could supply the uls of a white wolf-thing, upright, with long hair of milk-ice and beryl, it could surely also lay on the throaty music of such a child of night.
But it was no longer a child of night, this wolf, naturally. It was now a child of space and moon.
Would it be wonderful to be a werewolf, then, brought here, by accident or design, forced through the magnetic ecstasy of lunar transformation, and kept always thereafter transformed, by proximity to, contact with, the fully engorged lunar disc:
Or would it be an agony — a horror?
At the bottom of the ramp, the roller-mop swam through into hydroponics, and Bayley looked up between the pagodas of green and bronze mutated leaves.
I’m being rational about it now. Trying to figure it out. True madness.
A light water-spray flew across the high ceiling, a dragonfly of peppermint rain, and the leaves tinkled, also turning their faces upwards.
Everything changed here, and having changed, stayed changed.
That too, was why you came to this place?
“Hi, Chrissie. Look, I have some whisky.”
“Good for you.”
“Wait, wait — I thought we might share?”
“Share what, Al?”
“The bottle. Perhaps…a little warmth?”
This was predictable too. Bayley shook her head. “No thanks, Al. No sore feelings, but I’m tired.” How often this or similar scenes? But this man had a partial obligation to misunderstand, so gently does it.
“Or you’d rather be with Fev,” Edwards snapped, sure enough.
“Fevriere? You’re kidding. Fevriere, as you and Case are obviously the last to know, is — er — sharing with Sporch.”
“Really? Right. So —”
“Good night, Al. Take care.”
She remembered how she had once thought it would be, off-earth. Only the best chosen for the moon, the most fit, the most intelligent and able. And with that would go courtesy and finesse, maybe even artistry and charisma.
But it was like the built bases and stations. The buildings were functional and squat, and the people who came down there were ordinary in every particular, except for some relevant routine skill or talent. And so you got the creeps like Edwards, and the geegs like Case and Sporch, the nervous ones like Fev, and the beautiful clever rotten ones like Marisha Reza. And the failures, like Christina Bayley.
“You know your trouble,” said Edwards, in the morning.
“Yes, I know my trouble.”
“Don’t get funny. It’s why we split up.”
“Did we split up?” Careful, she thought. We are here on this shift for eleven more days, and if we row, four square miles of Base 15 may not be big enough for both of us. “Sorry, Al. What’s the matter?”
“You.” He slouched there glumly. He had a magnificent body (had that been what she saw in him? Probably. That and the rich brown hair and the smile.) But even so, despite his work-outs in the gym and his active physical job in maintenance, he was starting to alter somehow. Thickening a little; bending, burly, and aggressive. His eyes were way too small. Had they always been like that?
Yes, Al, actually we split up because you slapped my face twice one night, when you were high, and I knocked you out stone cold and left. That was why, Al. But we won’t go into that.
“You see, Chrissie, your problem —” Yes, always my problem, of course — “you can’t relate to anyone. I mean, can you?”
“I’m sorry.” She sounded quite contrite. Too contrite? Apparently not.
“Damn it, Chrissie. You might just as well be one of your fucking machines. The roller-mop, the wall-skinner — you just do what you think we’ll expect. Think that makes us happy? Think you got us fooled, huh? Well think again.”
She thought, I didn’t make you happy when I clocked you, Al, and you woke up with a bruised jaw. Nor did I reckon I would.
She said, calmly, “Look, Al, this isn’t the place. Why don’t we — well, discuss it, next break? Somewhere more private, over a drink. Back on Earth.”
He grinned.
So I’ve done what you expect, given in, because you are so irresistible. And you are fooled. She thought, I’ll deal with all this then, back on Earth. But a sour surge of rage went through her, because, unless she could get the rostas changed, she might have to quit her job if this kept up. There were other bases, of course. But each one had its established hygiene unit. It had taken her four years to get here. Four years after the other four, training for lab work and work on the surface — failing to make the grade.
“Oh ho, here’s the Witch Queen,” said Edwards.
Naturally he hated the Rezas of any world even more than the Chrissies. The Rezas would never say Yes.
“Hi, Rez. Seen the wolf yet?”
Reza looked at him, her china-pale face immaculate, ink-black brows lifted over ebony eyes.
“Wolf?”
This, Bayley thought, is almost ritualistic now…
“Haven’t you heard the stories, Rez? We’re haunted by a werewolf. Came up on a carrier and stayed out on the surface. Been seen by teams from Crisium Bases 13 and 9. And out at C. Serenum, by several passing craft —”
“Bayley,” said Reza, turning her back on Edwards and addressing her apparent quarry. “You’ve finished corridor-and-general-cleanse yet?”
“Yes.”
“OK. Then I want you to carry out a task for me, outside. The other cleaning work can wait. You are the only one on-base this month that I can trust with this.”
Queen Reza.
Bayley heard Edwards swear softly.
“All right,” said Bayley.
“Why can’t you do it, Rez?” said Edwards.
Reza again ignored him. She handed Bayley the sandwich-sized match-coder, turned, and walked beautifully away.
“She sure has a lovely glide,” said Edwards. “Pity she’s a bitch.”
Bayley and he were apparently comrades again, providing she held out the promise of more.
Reza was working on the Point Ridge, Bayley thought, that was what the match was for, mineral deposits, the trace of ancient humors and oils.
It would be good to get outside. Away from all of them. Surface work was the thing she had wanted to do in the beginning, but not been good enough for; at least her training meant that sometimes she got sent on these errands, by others of greater ability.
A machine. Am I really what he said? Come on, don’t fall for that. They always tell you you’re to blame. But perhaps I am.
When she was suited up and had the sleigh ready by the lock, Bayley turned once, looking back into the web of the base.
Yes, I am a robot, with them. I always was. Acting. Giving them what I think they want and will put up with. Attacking as a last resort. Running away.
She walked into the lock.
The sleigh followed her, and the doors closed without a sound.
Sometimes there had been dust, and long ago earthly arguments about how this dust (noted in relayed visuals) could exist, since the idea of Moon Dust was long ago relegated to fantasy. Generally it was put down to some camera fault. Yet too, there seemed to be “dusty seasons,” not logical, like winter or fall, simply, now and then, there. Satin, pearly, with unseen, unheard winds to stir it, rustling, like autumn leaves.
Out there, there were sounds. On the plains, in the mountains, you heard them, everyone did. Voices made of thinnest platinum, the calls and flutings of invisible birds, nacre-spun nightingales and hawks of hollow electrum. And the roar — like an ancient train, some said, like a tidal wave; and someone else, like an avalanche or forest fire. And sometimes voices spoke inside your head. They…whoever they were, if ever they had been, or were to be anyone, vocal ghosts of time. Usually only one or two words. As with the light-colored male voice Bayley heard once speaking, clear in her left ear, as she waited with others to load chippings on the slopes of Mount Tranquility. “Deft Amereen,” he said. She did not know what it meant. Some other language?
