Closer the Moon

(dedicated to Dara Rei Onishi)

Donald C. Wood

Well, life has thrown me for yet another loop.  Like a punch in the face came the good and the bad, gripped tightly in the same fist.  It all started with a telegram.  Can you believe they still exist in this day and age?  Rest assured, most of you won’t be receiving one (assuming you even know what they are) because the Federal Parcel Service only keeps those around for old sticks in the mud like myself.  Oh, I do have a Personal Communication System at home, and it’s got one of those Videphones in it, but I’ve never used it – not even once.  I’ve always refused to.  No matter what anyone says, no amount of technology can replace the experience of talking face to face with someone.  It can’t even hold a candle to it.  I’ve never settled for those cheap imitations.  It’s the same with books – you know, those things with “pages” and words printed on them.  I have books, not a Litpad.  I swore long ago that I’d never use one.  When something new comes out I find a way to get my hands on a printed copy – in whatever form.  Digitized letters on a screen just don’t do it for me.  And there’s no way I’ll ever get one of those newfangled Holocoms.  The last thing I want to do at home is be visited by a 3D life-sized image of someone on another planet eons away.  That would likely just give me a heart attack.  No, I’m afraid that the old Digimemo is about as far as I’ll go.  But alas, mine developed some kind of bug a few years ago, and even though some friendly Federal gentlemen came out and supposedly fixed it – twice – it still doesn’t work.  See what you get for relying too much on high technology?

              Now, where was I?  Oh, yes – I was going to explain my experience with good, bad, and the moon.  The telegram arrived while I was watering my plants on the veranda.  Observant readers may have guessed that I would have genuine, non-genetically engineered flora, and they would be correct – all of my plants are of the original species: a fact that may easily be verified by a quick DNA scan or a visit to the Federal Botanical Research Institute in New Atlantis.  As soon as the telegram came I tore it open (quaint, yes?) and read the contents.  It was an invitation to the Collins High School centennial celebration.  I hadn’t been to Mare Tranquillitatis in six years, but I reasoned it was time for a return – you know I’m not so young anymore.  I reserved a spot on a transport for the next morning, packed my bags, and arranged for a neighbor to see to my plants.  Riding the eltram is always fun.  Of course most people prefer their own vehicles, but with all that business of charging cells and refilling nitrogen tanks, what’s the point, anyway?  You don’t have to fool with that if you take the el.  You can sit back and relax while watching the cityscape zip by, and they even serve you drinks.  What I like best about it is that it runs through the old section, where you can still find brick buildings with graceful, old-fashioned arches and solid, heavy foundations – very different from everything they put up today.

              Fortunately I was able to get a window seat in one of the newest, fastest transports – the YX-M12 Sub-Space Hypertrans.  These I do like – while I’ll take the old eltram over a new speeder any day, when I leave Mother Earth swiftness and safety take precedence over my carefully cultivated (and highly prized) eccentricities.  I leaned back, and had dozed for only a few minutes when the ship began to move forward.  It slid smoothly along the launchway until the rocket-arm caught it and catapulted us out of the terminal.  I only barely felt the main thrusters fire, and in a matter of minutes we had broken free of the planet’s atmosphere.  Those new transports have the best gravity-buffers and pressure equalizers available – you can’t feel a thing.  As soon as we had achieved a steady orbit I spotted Earth Station One floating freely in the blackness of space.  It was just as it used to be.  This I had expected, for only a month or two earlier a friend had come to see me on his way back home from a five-year stint on ES1, and had given me a far more detailed run-down of the place than I had really needed.  But the chance to host an old buddy doesn’t come along just any day, and I love to show off my plants.  We docked at one of the ports for a total of about twenty minutes.  A few passengers got off and a few others took their places, but the woman next to me was sound asleep.  I didn’t care whether she had intended to disembark or not – avoiding hassles was all I cared about – so I didn’t try to wake her.  At the next port was docked a vessel similar to ours, but it had no windows for passengers and it was emblazoned with a big Federal seal near the cockpit.  Written along the side were the words “MARS CARGO EXPRESS.”  Clearly, I thought, the government was spending far too much of our tax credits on the new Mars base if they needed to use ships like that one to haul supplies.  Wasn’t it supposed to have been self-sufficient by now?  Heck, all of the moon settlements are, and it’s just a big dead rock.  And then there’s that Titan base – but don’t get me started on that one.

              The cabin full again with passengers, we backed away from the port just as soon as the docking clamps had released and I watched the station on the screen.  First it filled the field of view and then it fell away, growing smaller.  We turned and I lost sight of ES1, but had an excellent view of Africa out my window.  I almost imagined I could spot the glimmer of all those solar arrays they recently set up in eastern Namibia.  But my view of our earliest bipedal ancestors’ homeland was soon lost as we pulled further away from the glimmering stratosphere and began the second and last leg of our journey.  The ship slid more smoothly through space than it had on our approach to ES1, and it and Mother Earth both shifted into our blind spot, and I leaned back and closed my eyes.  Since I had been a high school teacher, and mainly in charge of seniors, my students had always been nearly fully-grown.  Of course they changed with time, and seeing them later was always nice, but it was never hard to figure out who was who even when meeting up with them 10 or 20 years later.  Colleagues never changed that much, either.  The main thing that happened to most everyone, since we were on the moon, was that their bodies would invariably grow in height.  If you’ve never spent much time there, then you may not realize that even though gravity levels in the cities are kept fairly close to that of Earth, there still is a difference.  They’ve done some studies on that, and most seem to suspect that the lower mass of the moon might play a greater role than the artificial gravity.  But anyway, I sat there and thought about seeing them again, and wondered if many students would come at all.

              I must have dozed a few minutes, because soon a steward startled me by offering some coffee – made from beans grown at the Russian agricultural station outside Serenity City.  I gladly accepted, and drank it with natural lunar sugar.  Within ten or fifteen minutes they were announcing our arrival at the moon.  I still saw nothing out my window except stars, but soon the screen came on and there she was – as beautiful as ever.  She grew larger on the cabin screen, and then seemed to coyly tilt away from us as we approached the surface from an increasingly shallower angle.  Blackness to the sides and gray below: that’s what it’s like up there, but along the horizon line I saw the golden tinge you sometimes get when the light from the sun hits the moon just right.  Don’t ask me what causes it – I really don’t know.  I looked down from my window and found that we were passing right over Tycho.  Memories of all the times I went there with students came back to me – those field trip were great fun, and Tycho Station wasn’t really such a bad place as it was always made out to be.  It was just old.  But then I spotted it – that old station had grown at least ten times in size since I was last there!  Gone was the creaky little modular outpost, replaced by one big brightly lit angular structure that seemed to compete with the crater itself for attention – something like Frank Lloyd Wright gone mad.  And it contrasted sharply with magnificent Tycho – sharp corners jutted out this way and that, and part of it even obscured a small section of the rim.  The star-like effect of the rays was all but ruined by the presence of the new monstrosity.  I had been happy about the establishment of the original outpost all those years ago, but the new one had no appeal for me.  I sadly watched it pass by and then fade into the distance as we made our way to the lunar capital.

              Crater upon crater slipped by beneath.  I gazed once in a while at the rough terrain, anticipating the many meetings with former colleagues and students I hadn’t seen in far too long.  Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t even think to check the cabin monitor until I had felt the main thrusters shut down and the reverse boosters fire.  I looked up and saw Tranquility City spread out before me, welcoming me back again.  It was a little larger, and a little brighter, than before, but not so different.  A few other vessels crossed our path as we glided towards the main space traffic terminal.  As we gradually descended I spotted Armstrong Park, with the memorial marking the exact location of the Apollo 11 landing site.  Of course, I was looking down through the transparent dome, and since the ground is now covered by grass it certainly doesn’t have the same look as it did when Armstrong and Aldrin took their historic steps there over two centuries earlier.  At least most of the other Apollo sites are still pretty much as they always were.  But Armstrong Park isn’t a bad place.  It’s one of the nicest on the moon – if you want something more like Mother Earth.

              I have to admit, even though I’m no great fan of all the technological leaps and bounds the Federation seems to be making from day to day, I appreciated the fact that introducing the YX-M12s to the fleet had cut the moon trip down from nearly two and a half hours to a mere 32 minutes – not counting the layover at ES1.  Roger was waiting for me when I walked through the gate – sitting there nonchalantly in one of the lounges along the promenade, looking like he had nothing to do in the world.  “There you are, old man,” he said.  Roger’s a little younger then I am, although he had retired first – taken it early despite the cut in pension.  Being unable to contain his insatiable appetite for seeing other worlds, Roger had shipped out practically the next day for Mars.  But I was glad to see him.  I slapped him on the shoulder and asked how life was on the red planet.  “Fine,” he said, if you like freezing your ass off and eating the same old crap every single day!”  Turns out, as I had suspected, the truth about that place differs from the official Federation line – but I won’t go into that here.  We walked together to the tramline.  It turned out that he had just arrived an hour earlier – straight from Mars.  I asked him if he were going back, to which he replied, succinctly, “No.”

              Roger said that he had had enough of Mars, and that he was in need of something totally new – farther from Earth, this time.  And just when I thought – hoped – he had finally come around and seen the light, he started talking about Cassini’s division and…you guessed it…the Titan base.  The fool had his heart completely set on going.  I said he was too old, but that didn’t work: he simply said, “You’ve come back to the moon, haven’t you.”  I said that the moon is close, but he countered again.  “And as those deep space transports get faster,” he said, “Titan just gets closer.”  I wasn’t ready to give up, so I tried one last tactic – accusing him of helping to encourage the Federation to step-up its plundering of the moon’s resources; all of those deep space vessels would be dry-docked without lunar thorium for their fusion reactors.  Stepping on the bandwagon only encourages them, I said.  And it seemed that I had finally gotten through, because he said, “yeah, there is that.  Too much pressure on the mining facilities does increase the chances of another accident.  Poor Jexia.”  This caught me by surprise.  I knew, of course, whom Jexia was – she had taken my position at the school six years earlier.  We had exchanged letters (yes – letters) for a couple of years after my return to Earth, so I felt that I knew her relatively well.  After all, the things people write in a letter are different from what they say in person – and certainly different from what they say over an intercom.  I stopped in my tracks and turned to face Roger.  I think I stuttered a couple of times as I told him that I hadn’t heard from Jexia in about three years.  I was dreading his next words even as I spoke, wondering in the back of my mind whether I might be able to negate the moment and reverse the course of time with just the right phrase – like some sort of magic spell.  But he spoke, saying, “You mean…you never heard what happened?”  The surprise on his face was as hard to miss as that ghastly new Tycho station.

              Now, I don’t need to tell you what it means when someone starts a sentence with a phrase like that.  It can only mean one thing.  “Well,” he began anew, scratching his head and looking downward as if struggling to compose a poem, “you know she was from one of those mining settlements out there near Copernicus.”  I said I already knew that, and urged him to continue, although I didn’t fully want him to.  “I heard that she went back home for a while during the mid-year break, and that…you know – when the thorium in one area is depleted they usually move the entire settlement.”  Again, I told him that I already knew that.  Frankly, I was getting a little impatient.  “Well,” he started again,” they had just moved to a new spot, and no one knew that some mining had already been done there – probably illegal, years before – and they just happened to set up their living module over a sinkhole.  Fortunately she was the only one home when it collapsed, but…she was trapped in the rubble and asphyxiated before they could get her out.  She died.”  My legs nearly gave way, and I had to lean on his shoulder to stay upright.  “I can’t believe I knew about it and you didn’t,” he said, leading me to a chair in one of the lounges.  “Even on Mars, I heard about it,” he continued, and I think he apologized for not letting me know.  I understood – I assigned no blame to him – he had simply assumed that I had heard.

              Sitting in the chair, I tried to make sense of what he had said, but it just didn’t register.  Since so much time had passed, the period for mourning was long over – this I knew.  But down inside I felt that I had to express my sense of loss, even though I hadn’t exactly been that close to her.  The thought that she was doing well in the school and enjoying her job and life had been, I suddenly realized, important to me.  In my retirement, I wanted – needed – to know that there was continuity at the school where I had given so much of my time and energy…much of my life, actually.  That the continuity I had imagined involved people with whom I had been in direct contact – that I was at least in a small way connected to the place – had after all been comforting.  It had allowed me to stay away but not feel so distant.  But then to learn that the line of succession had been broken in that way, and that the bright, young girl – so radiant – had disappeared many months earlier shook me to the very core.  I felt that I should contact her family and express my condolences, but what would they say?  How would they feel?  No doubt they had been seeking closure for quite some time, but it was all new to me.  The wounds were fresh.  There could be no closure in my case, I knew, so soon.  And yet, I also felt that it was a bit ridiculous of me to make a big deal about her death, for in truth I was of little consequence in her life – it could just have easily been any other teacher she had replaced, and I could just as easily have had any other successor.

              These thoughts span round and round in my head, and all the while I searched my mind for a clear image of her face, but all I could find were shadowy reflections of her self in there, as I had seen her.  Although I could remember how I felt when we first met, I could not recall exactly how she looked.  Then I wondered, what had she really meant to me?  Finally I heard Roger’s voice again.  He was asking a question, but I couldn’t understand him.  I managed to say something – I think it was the predictable response: something to the effect that I couldn’t believe it was true.  “It’s true,” he said, suggesting I check the data on his Litpad.  As you might guess, I refused.  I’m sworn to protect my virtue, you know.  But I did suspect in a way that written records might be necessary for letting the truth sink in.  It just didn’t feel right to accept Roger’s report as fact without some verification – however reliable a friend he really was.  The pad he had spoken of was in his hand, just within my grasp, but I did not want to break my promise to myself – my promise to avoid all those newfangled contraptions everyone feels are so critical to their very existence.  But I was in need of the written word – I had to have it.  Roger moved his hand closer to me, and mine rose instinctively to meet his, and then I felt the cold metal case of the device on my fingers, and they gripped it gingerly.  Roger pushed a few buttons on the side, scrolling down file after file of data.  There must have been an entire library of materials in there, and it went by and went by until what I had needed – but not wanted – to see appeared in the screen.  It was Jexia’s obituary.

              So it was true.  She was gone.  The words on the pad’s screen cut through me as deeply as had those from his mouth.  And I felt like a fool.  I had been totally in the dark, even just down on Earth.  And he had heard the news on Mars.  On top of that, it took a piece of technology I had rejected all my life – and blamed for the demise of the printed book – to bring the truth.　What the hell kinds of choices had I been making all these years, I asked myself a few times.  And then came the greatest question of all: had I always been alone, with my plants, my antiquated tools, and my carefully-crafted eccentricities only because I had chosen to reject the new and take the leap into the twenty-third century?  These ideas gnawed at me until I heard a new voice.  It was the sweetest I had ever known – new but strangely familiar.  I looked up, and saw this girl standing there.  She was shining like an angel, looking straight at me, and her face was beaming, and I knew I had seen her somewhere but I thought that she couldn’t have been a student of mine.  And yet she kept looking at me, and her face told the whole story of how I had been her favorite teacher, and how I had inspired her so, and then her words began to do the same, and I stood, and we talked, and it took me far, far away from the sadness I had felt over Roger’s news.

              Later, I did attend the anniversary celebration at the school, and met up with a few old coworkers and some more former students, but nothing that happened there compared to what I had experienced at Port Tranquility, and no face stuck in my mind like that of the girl who had been so happy to see me.  As I watched Tranquility City speed by beneath, I thought about her, and about Jexia, and I wondered what I was going to do about my communications, and I wrestled with the problem of what I ought to do about…change.