MOON AND THE OTHER - Hardcover

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John Kessel lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife, novelist Therese Anne Fowler. He is a professor and the director of creative writing at North Carolina State University. He is the author of The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, Corrupting Dr. Nice, The Moon and the Other, and Pride and Prometheus.

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The Moon and the Other

CHAPTER

ONE

AS ERNO WORKED, HIS AIDE whispered Persian phrases into his ear.

Can you direct me to the immigration center?

He would repeat the words after the cultured voice, intent on his accent, while he did the mindless labor that, back in the Society of Cousins, would be managed by an AI. He’d been studying doggedly since he’d come to Persepolis. Each shift enlarged his hoard of workplace idioms, of terms necessary to carry on a political conversation, of pickup lines—even of ways to express his feelings.

His body lay elsewhere, strapped to a frame in a control cubicle, but he perceived himself to be deep in the cold of Faustini crater, linked to a Remote Operating Device that gave him the strength and reach of a giant. There, in perpetual night, he loaded carriers with heaps of billion-year-old ice. There he cut and scooped and carried, under the glare of the lights, in service of Persepolis Water and Cyrus Eskander, the Shah of Ice.

Would you speak more slowly, please? I can’t understand you.

He watched the other RODs spread across the floor of the crater. The flare of a plasma cutter dazzled his plugged-in eyes. When the ice-laden regolith calved and avalanched, tremors made him shift on his plugged-in legs. If he looked up and adjusted the gain on his eyes, he could see a brilliant star-strewn sky. He didn’t look up very often.

Sometimes he would take a break from language lessons and ask his Aide to read him Persian poetry. He still had that—he still, sometimes, could be swept away by words. When he was high, like the seventeen-year-old he had once been, he even fantasized writing some ghazals. Such verse was hard to master, hiding knotty psychology beneath a zigzag surface. The Persians were all about wit, ingenuity in concealing motives, and complex status games. He liked the old poems best, the works of Sa’di and Hafêz.

If that Shirazi Turk would take my heart in her hand

For the mole on her cheek I’d give Bukhara and Samarkand.

This metaphorical Turkish lover with a mole: Was Hafêz proclaiming the depth of his love for her, or his self-disgust at feeling desire for someone so low on the social ladder? Both at once? The story went that when Hafêz was hauled before the Emperor Tamerlane for failing to pay his taxes, Tamerlane upbraided him for saying he would give these great cities, the jewels of the empire, for the blemish on his lover’s cheek. Hafêz replied that such poor judgment was the reason he was indigent.

Erno knew something of indigence, and poor judgment. The back of his head still throbbed from last night’s brawl, and he had trouble focusing. They were working a notch in the depths of the basin. The RODs operated by Taher Neeley and Devi Singh were down the line from him. The cart that followed Erno was almost full, shy only a few hundred kilos of capacity. Here the percentage of frozen water was the highest in the basin, blocks and sheets, at depth, which was why they had followed this notch so far. Dark walls towered over them, a canyon where the only light came from the blue arcs and the cutters. When he touched the beam of his cutter to the rock and ice, steam rose immediately. Dark blue glints among the powder and stone. He had to widen the beam to a millimeter so the vapor would not refreeze as soon as he cut it.

The external temperatures here were among the coldest in the solar system, as low as forty degrees Kelvin. If you weren’t careful you could create a pocket of vapor and cause an explosion. Machines regularly malfunctioned in such cold. Metal crumbled, ceramics became conductors, and even the most hardened processors were prone to soft upsets: Some stray cosmic ray sets off a circuit in a CPU and there you are with a flaring jet, a dead communicator. In the days when people instead of RODs did this work, the fatality rate among ice miners was the highest on the moon.

That is lovely, but it costs too much. Do you have a less expensive one?

It was hard to concentrate. Lately Erno’s thoughts had been drifting back to his home in the Society. He wondered what his sister Celeste was doing. Or Alicia—the last time they had slept together, they had fought. He could hardly remember the details. More than ten years had gone by, and it seemed like it had happened to another person. He imagined himself sitting on the soccer field below the Men’s House, looking down on the floor of the domed crater. Now he worked in a society where men held the highest status, yet he had never felt more powerless.

In the years of his exile Erno had learned a lot about what his mother had called “the patriarchal world.” Places that Tyler had described as utopias. And Tyler was right: This outside world manufactured utopia, but it was only available if you could pay for it. There were many ingenious, lovely things to be found in Persepolis. Most of these things Erno would never have.

May I escort you home? Are you doing anything tomorrow?

Erno was twenty meters deep in the notch. The glare of his cutter threw broken reflections through the surface, flares of light that shot back at odd angles when it struck fracture planes deep within the walls. He moved the cutter a meter to his right.

A flash and concussion.

Slowly, the entire wall of ice-laden regolith towering above him collapsed. He heard Devi’s cry, doubled, in both his phones and from somewhere in the background of the control center where his body lay. He backed his ROD off a step, but already the ice was sliding around it in a slurry of black chunks, glinting with reflected light. It was at the ROD’s ankles, its knees. He struggled to wade through. Ahead of him, Devi’s ROD was riding the cart; Taher’s hesitated and came back for Erno. The avalanche knocked Erno down. Taher was ten meters away, three meters; he was standing over Erno, trying to pull aside the heaps of rubble. It was useless; in seconds Erno was buried completely, and his eyes went dark.

Then pearl gray nothingness as the system pulled him back. He blinked hard once, twice, and reoriented himself to the sweat and disinfectant stink of the operators’ cubicle. He released his wrist restraints, reached up and rolled the thinking cap to the back of his scalp. He started to disentangle himself from the rack.

Beside him, Taher was peeling off his own cap. “Avazi ashghale bishoore kesafat!” he said, and Erno knew exactly what he meant.

• • • • •

The population of the moon came to about 3.2 million people, most on the nearside, in twenty-seven self-contained colonies scattered over thirty-seven million square kilometers. The largest was Persepolis, at five hundred thousand people, and the smallest Linne, in the Mare Serentatis, at fifteen hundred. In addition there were scientific stations, industrial facilities, and exploratory outposts. There were even hermits, extended families of antisocial loners dug into holes in the sides of rilles, or living in metal huts buried under three meters of regolith on desolate maria. The colonies were constructed in lava tubes, in networks of manmade structures buried in canyons, in multilevel underground cities carved out of billion-year-old rock, in vaults and corridors, in ancient volcanic bubbles, and in a few domed craters like the one that housed the Society of Cousins.

The earliest colonies were scientific research...