Kessel - The Moon and the Other

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ALSO BY JOHN KESSEL

FREEDOM BEACH ( with James Patrick Kelly )

GOOD NEWS FROM OUTER SPACE

MEETING IN INFINITY

THE PURE PRODUCT

CORRUPTING DR. NICE

THE BAUM PLAN FOR FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE AND OTHER STORIES

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright 2017 by John Kessel

Jacket photographs copyright 2017 by Thinkstock

The Night Visit and What Do We Really Need? from The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door by Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn. Copyright 2008 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Interior design by Brad Mead

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kessel, John, author.

Title: The moon and the other / John Kessel.

Description: First Edition. | New York : Saga Press, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016036740 (print) | ISBN 9781481481441 (hardback) | ISBN 9781481481465 (eBook)

Subjects: BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / General. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure. | GSAFD: Science fiction. | Fantasy fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3561.E6675 M66 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.54dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036740

F OR T HERESE

T HATS WHAT HISTORY IS: THE STORY OF EVERYTHING THAT NEEDNT HAVE BEEN LIKE THAT.

CLIVE JAMES, Cultural Amnesia

A S E RNO WORKED, HIS A IDE 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. Hed been studying doggedly since hed come to Persepolis. Each shift enlarged his hoard of workplace idioms, of terms necessary to carry on a political conversation, of pickup lineseven 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 cant 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 didnt 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 thathe 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 Sadi and Hafz.

If that Shirazi Turk would take my heart in her hand

For the mole on her cheek Id give Bukhara and Samarkand.

This metaphorical Turkish lover with a mole: Was Hafz 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 Hafz 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 lovers cheek. Hafz 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 nights 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 werent 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.