real moon

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E. K. Gordon Page 1

A novel in progress, by E. K. Gordon

Real Moon

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E. K. Gordon Page 2

Chapter 1

Beck Morain opened her eyes. Clear tropical sky, sashed by a lavender

contrail. Had won her a design award, that sky, the island, and the ocean that gave

both formin an apparently endless expanse the judges had said.

Virtality design, eco-class, first place.

But was she happy?

The tabby catclock turned its face to her: 8:14.

Shit!

She jumped up and voiced the cave off, squirming like a child against the

vylon hammock, sealed until it returned her to realground. In a 10 by 10 cube of

acousto, lens-rimmed squares. The lense lines glinted bright around the black

squares. Above her the tactile arrayfrontal lobe of the rooms brain.

With a liquid-velcro rasp, a sigh, almost, of regret, the hammock separated

from her bodysheeth and let her out. After ninety-six hours in virtual reality.

And why was she not happy? Water ran over her wrists as she patted her

face dry.

Because I cant get virtual water to run over wrists the way realwater does.

Or sunlightshe pressed her face to the striped towel that had been hanging in

sunlight angled in through the bathroom windowto linger on cloth this way.

But I will.

She resented the thirty minutes in transit in reality. Foul smells, and the hard

plastic subway seat hardening the muscles of her back.

At New Eden she rode the elevator down to sub 7 and strode past her three

assistants to the design cave. Biggest, best, costing more than a 20st

century space

shuttle.

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It was a line the company used. More than a 20thcentury space shuttle, she

said now, peeling the dress from her sheeth. And what am I doing with it?

OmariNeal, face to screen, said, making mousquito bites.

And make em I will thank you. Those homeschoolers gonna have frakking

orgasmic mousquitto bites.

Omari laughed and looked up from the screen. Young, from the islands, dark

with dark-framed glasses, just out of a top polytechnic.

She gave a few instructions before going into the cave. For a routine

morning of haptics design, finishing off River of Grass. Or so she thought. So they

all thought.

Like an air bubble in a patch of wet cement, the main dome of Peary Crater

Prison sat very small in the half-mile wide saddle between two bright peeks,

among the tallest on the moon. Near the dome, smaller buildings and the drifting

dust motes of suited mena dozen or so near the edge of a shallow pit wherein

scores more worked, moving in jerky hops or swiveling bowlegged strides. Banks

of towering lights circled the pit. (The peaks of the two mountains remained ever

in the sunlight, but in the valley between them night came and stayed for half an

earth month.)

The men wore bright foil suites far less bulky than early spacesuites, bullet-

shaped helmets screwed on like the lids of wide-mouthed jars. Lockedon, and

only the guards with keys, can openers they were called. Because the easiest way

to die here, the first prisoners had found, was to unscrew your helmet and let the

paper bags of your lungs void into the vacuum.

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Near the pit sat a long low cart. Tilted between it and a platform midway up

the sloping side of the pit was a three foot wide belt laden with rocks of various

sizes. Two men worked arranging the rocks as they toppled in, ocasionally

signalling to the workers below. Beyond the glare of the lights the sky was agate

black and starless.

One of the forms, the taller, leaned back to gaze up at the nearer of the

peaks. On its summit stood a kind of slim lighthouse, and from the top of that rose

a solar arrayblue panels beaded along paired poles that extended, like the wings

of a dragon fly, fifty meters from either side of a center beam.

Wings drinking sunlight. Astazi felt it. Drinking to fill the belly of the

prison. Small sips from the inexaustible river ever rushing past. Rushing home.

I must see it

The other prisoner stopped pushing rocks. In a hundred-five, hundred-ten

hours you will.

The prison hunkered half way between crater floor and peek. A faint path

showed, lit part way by the pit lights. And when he left the perimeter of artificial

light, his feet would sense, would know the way to the top . . . already they moved:

one small step, another, thena long floating leap. . . .

Are you crazy man, theyll cut your temp off! Theyll

With a thumb flick, stopping the voice.

She popped the sliding door with her elbow and went in.

New Edens main design cave was a twenty-by-twenty black-tiled box, each

one-meter square tile rimmed with 3 centimeter wide lense-lines. At the juncture of

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floor and ceiling shone a wider line studded every meter with a speaker portfor

auditory and olfactory stimstreams. The caves specs ran to six printed pages, with

more memory than all the computers in a turn of the millenium city. The speakers

could drop a pin onto velvet ten meters from your ear so youd hear it.

Without the bodysheeth, though, the cave was nothing more than a maxed 3-

D theatre. Which was why haptics designers earned double the rest. Do-ouble. In

five years shed have enough to go independent. Goodbye mousquitoes.

She walked to the hammock that dangled by spider-web cords from the array

in the center of the ceiling. Then she tipped her head back, eyes closed. The neural

plant in her frontal lobe activated the array and the hammock opened for her.

Arms at her side, she fell forward, as one falling into water. The hammock caught

her and closed with a dryfwisp, becoming one with her sheeth, nonotube molecule

to molecule. Then it lifted her into a standing position a meter or so from the floor.

Standing on air, she said River of grass, final draft.

The Everglades National Parkcirca 1980 appeared. Hot humid day, a slight

breeze, in neural memory a red-domed tent that shed slept in the night before

(alone of course, this being an educational virt). She took a few steps on the

wooden walkway. Yes, too smooth on the soles, but the heat good, almost hot

along an unshaded stretch.

She spent the morning searching out wellsspots where the stim stream

dropped off. Once she had those filled in, which might take the rest of the week,

she planned to insert one last interaction, maybe an alligator splashing the

perspecs. No biting though, no virtual pain. Nothing interesting. These were the

limitations she hoped to free herself of, and soon.

But she didnt know just how soon, and how free.

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He climbed on rocks not unlike the rocks of his mesa, up heights no higher.

Yes the suit encumbered but the 1/6th

gravity released. As he climbed nearer the

sunlight, he grew colder and colder; had expected it. As the guard sitting bored

before a screen expected him to turn around. Everyone even the new guys knew

how long you could survive on the surface without heat. Long enough perhaps to

climb the nearer peak, but not to get back.

He climbed on. With his mind he shrunk the core of his being to a fierce hot

coal between lungs and heart. Pulled his fingers in from the fingers of the glove.

Climbed.

The golden upper link of the sun, blinding light blunted by the helmets

faceshield. A few steps more and he saw as much as anyone still on the surface

could see: half the bright orb in slow-motion ascent, no rays because no

atmosphere carried them, but still the heat and the power. The glory.

On the other oddly close horizon nothing, yet. He climbed faster, the coal

cupped now like a match between palms. Earth hung lower, shyer. She would

make him climb all the way. I am coming, he said aloud into the can, the helmet,

as if she could hear him as if she had been waiting.

She had been waiting. He faced her, just above the lunar horizon, the

bottom third in shadow. Africa was on its side, horn pointing left at the south pole.

Over the Pacific the mandala of a young storm. The star at his back, its masculine

heat pouring over him on its way to her. And the sun-siphoning wings silent ten

man-lengths above him. He was a wing, a solar panel, a leaf imbibing light.

He was a mortal man. Would they cut oxygen next?

Turning from earth to sun he spread his arms, palms open, and inhaled

deeply. A zephyr of the solar wind entered him and fanned the fading coal bright.

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The temp reading on his faceshield showed negative 20 farenheit. In the shadows

it would plummet thirty or forthy more.

He bounded in one leap to the edge. Was it fifty feet, a hundred, to the level

place below? Not knowing, he lept, rolling as he landed to the edge of that plateau.

Leaping again, in a few places having to walk, long strides, then leaping where

there was a ledge and a chance . . . It took him nearly an hour to get down, and a

broken arm, and three frostbitten toes.

But he had seen her, he could go on, he could make it to the morning.

Beck paused long enough on the sunny walkway to trigger the alligator. It

surfaced in the shallow water a few feet below her and opened its long jaws, then

glided away. She moved to the other side of the bridge, as she assumed most

perspecs would do, to watch the alligator snatch an egret by the leg and pull it

under. The thrashing about sent water splashing up onto the walkway and over the

legs of anyone standing there.

Omari, run the last ninety seconds again please.

The alligator surfaced, glided away, lunged for the bird, splashed. The

haptic stream was well synced to visual and auditory, but she wanted a little more

impact, maybe a little higher on the leg. In educational virtalities the kids were

required to wear virtual sweatsuits over their sheethsyet another limitation.

She sat down on the bench where shed designed in a reality cone, voiced on

the design board and set to work. It would take her the whole morning to revise

the splash, but they were in good shape, ahead of schedule. Just as she was

starting, she noticed the almost imperceptible drop in resolution that came when a

new perspec logged in. As she was turning toward where the realdoor would be,

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expecting to see Melleck, River of Grass went dark. Before her eyes had adjusted

to flat cave, a program shed never seen before started up.

She stood on the deck of a ship, a battleship or an aircraft carrier --

something big. Instead of guns and towers with antennas and what-not on them,

though, the deck was covered with shacks. And around the shacks, walking,

sitting, tending animals, were people.

The floating nation of New Singapore.

She was about to voice-out the cave and raise hell with somebody when she

felt herself enter an avatar body that was walking toward the end of the deck. It

looked down at a patch of open water between ships, then dove in.

When she opened her eyes again she was under the water, her legsstrong

young legspropelling her deEper. Vapid! she thought, tethered to reality by the

barest thread. The sense of water against her skin, pressure against her eardrums

as she swam downward, even the taste and smell of the water, oily, metallic, less

so as she went deEperall way past anything Infinitereality had.

Then she stopped thinking as the strong supple body she found herself in

stroked deEper. The program was a piggyback, so she couldnt make choices,

could only ride along into the darker, colder water, toward what appeared to be the

sky-scrapers of submerged Singapore.

And what a ride! Shed been everywhere and done everything in virtality,

but this simple dive had ten times more haptics veracity than shed ever

experienced, and something more, something unnamable. She was picking up a

feeling for the city below. Whether it was coming through the bodysheath or the

neuralplant in her frontal lobe she couldnt tell. But it was coming, and strong.

Though her lungs were aching to breathe, her heart was aching even harder to

touch one of those buildings below. My country, she thought/felt (and also

thought: how can I be thinking this?)my initiation.

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She knew she must not only touch one of the submerged buildings but bring

a piece of it back. Her lungs aching, she swam through a glassless window and

grabbed the first thing she saw. It was an old-style computer mouse, floating,

covered in barnacles, connected by a mossy cord to a barnacle covered mass. She

pulled it free and swam out through the window, kicking off the wall to speed her

ascent.

She rose toward the underside of New Singapore, part of her, as in a lucid

dream, knowing she would be able to do what seemed impossiblefind a place

between the densely packed hulls to surface.

Sure enough, the avatar headed for a patch of open water. She/he broke

through open-mouthed and gasping.

And now the program got stranger, better. Leaning over the side of the ship

was a small group of watchers, a family she guessed. And she felt they were her

family. Looking at them, recognizing them (they were smiling), she crossed the

border all hardcore virtality users long to cross: she forgot reality, she became the

avatar in the virtality.

The diver raised the barnacle-encrusted mouse in his left hand and waved it

back and forth. This was the day of his first salvage dive, and he had triumphed.

The family clapped, neighbors and younger children crowded behind them

clapping. Older kids and teenagers, seasoned salvagers, watched from the rigging.

He had won their respect. His mothers brown, intricately-wrinkled face was soft

with love and bright with joy. A salvager in the family meant better times.

Reaching up for the rope ladder that hung from the ship, Beck cried out

when she was yanked back to the walkway in River of Grass, which seemed a

crayon drawing compared to the other virtality. How long had that clip been?

Three minutes, half an hour? She didnt know. She voiced off River of Grass and

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remained in the dark in the hammock remembering the pressure on her lungs, the

faces of what for those brief moments felt like family.

This program waspastvapid. Haptically, it was groundbreaking.

Emotionally, it was magical. She had longed to reach the submerged city, had felt

a genuine mix of excitement and sadness, and when she found the open water and

surfaced, what she felt for the three who were waiting was nothing if not love.

With what technology had the designer simulated longing, excitement,

sadness, and love?

And the emotions were not plot driven. True, she already knew a little about

the tragic history of Singapore, might have been expected to feel something when

she realized she was swimming toward an entire submerged nation, its once

affluent inhabitants now among the poorest in the MAW. But the rest, her feeling

for the small happy group on the deck, seemed indEpendent of the story. And here

was the strangest thing. She had a feeling, too, for the avatar body she had ridden.

It seemed to her more than a camera-generated perspective. She had the sense of

having met with a real person. He was about twelve years old, very thin, wiry, a

water rat. Someone . . . his friends called him that. Yes, the water rat, the

youngest, the good swimmer. Sing.

Lights, she directed, for knowing the name (it was as if shed heard it) she

felt afraid.

When she stepped from it, the hammock parted from her sheeth with a

bristley sigh and collapsed into itself, like a tossed aside nightgown. It was the

best available, could transmit a billion gigabytes of data per second into her sheath.

But a name, emotion? Impossible.

Omari knew little. At first I thought it was a pop-up that somehow got

through, he said, standing and pacing, which shed never seen him do, his

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immersadesk looking naked without him in it. Then this intractable memory draw

hits and I figure virus. But then I tapped into the visual, and he cocked his head

backward, chin inholy crap.

Right? But how did it get through the firewall? Nothing gets through New

Edens firewall.

This did. He slid into his desk. I captured visual anyway.

She watched over his shoulder. Without the amazing haptics it was just

home video. But there might be something there, a trace to the source. Because if

they could find the source, the designer, she might be able to learn how theyd

done itthat water like realwater, that sunlight. To think there was some tool out

there that she didnt haveher ego wanted it. But more than that her body craved

it. To go under again, to that depth. To be a hand in the glove of the perfect

virtality.

She put a hand now on Omaris shoulder, watched with him as the diving

boy found the open water and surfaced. This is big Omari.

I know.

Totally knew. But why . . . us?

He turned and looked up into her eyes. Why New Eden?

He was smart, she knew, and talented. But was he hungry? Was he as

hungry as she had been at 25, and still was, even more so, at 30? Did he want to sit

at that immersadesk typing code for the next five years of his life?

She bargained not. Why us?

He looked around at the screen, his well-shaped head tapering in short-

cropped hair to his white shirt collar. Then he looked back at her, agreeing to what

neither of them knew yet, exactly, but agreeing, silently agreeing to work for her,

for the two of them, and not in this new matter anyway for New Eden.

I dont know, he said.

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Well lets find out.

On it.

Omari spun and began typing. Beck went back to her Everglades, and sat in

the virtual sun remembering that other, more real sun, and the perspective that she

had merged with for those few minutes, his named even coming into her mind,

like a ray of reallight, like the smell or salt.

Before his climb, the quiet new mans youth and seeming passivity had

made him a target, doomed to die or comply. After the climb, the news

circumnavigated maindome before the cast on his arm had even hardened. Two

surface hours with temp cut. Guys working on the surface had seen him leaping

down from the peak. Like something flying, one said. Like water falling.

Even Mardura Sittang was impressed. Wanted him for a cellmate.

Sittang had come in the first ever transport and was himself a legend. A

MAW (most-affected world) terrorist sentenced to life, he had survived the years

when surface workers were steamed alive so often by solar flares prison lingo

named them lobs(for lobsters). Inside wasnt so safe either. Asteroids pierced the

domes pretty regularly, until better materials and warning systems were shipped

from earth. Virtality wasnt let in until the fifth year, when sensory deprivation

insanity had cut the workforce by a third.

Sittang was more than a survivor though. Though the loss of bone and

muscle mass had made him a small, weak man, his skill with virtality systems gave

him great power. Because half the guards were addicts, and what he could do with

a pair of goggles and gloves made you forget you were 92,000 miles from home.

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He kept the prisons cave running, which made him only slightly less important,

and significantly more in demand, than the techs who kept oxygen pouring from

the greenhouses.

So when he said I want him, he got him.

Astazi limped into the cell, right arm in a cast, left arm dragging a duffle

bag. He saw a skinny brown-skinned man twice his age sitting on a neatly made

cot, back to the wall. On that wall was a pic of city skyline, gleaming skyscrapers,

blue bay. Brown eyes almost hidden by unruly black-grey bangs watched him.

The one who likes the cold. Surprisingly robust voice, the English quick,

consonants hard.

No its heat I like. Stepping forward as the door slid shutbehind him. For

the heat I endured the cold.

You been here now what . . .

Twenty-three days.

Talk to me about endurance in another few weeks, Sittang said, lying

back, child-like frame hardly depressing the mattress. Lunar weeks.

They walked along the shore, a perfect man, a perfect woman. Becks

avatar looked much like she did, except younger, about twenty-five, thinner and

taller, her hair a darker black than her real hair. She wore a plain one-piece

bathing suit, yellow. Baylee wore black swimmers trunks. By birth he was half

Vietnamese, half French, and most of his forms were based on a popular French-

Vietnamese actor. He worked as a post-climatechange therapist in one of Europes

stadium caves.

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Baylees avator changed from time to time. The only real thing about his

avatar, he had told her, were the eyes. They were dark pools within an almond

shape, the inner corners dipped down, and they closed to bright straight lines when

he laughed.

She had told him what had happened that day at work.

The program just took over the cave?

Well, I was on-line, needing more memory than we had, and someone must

have hacked in.

Some genius, Baylee said.

Yes. Id give anything to meet her.

They had reached the end of the white sand. Beck turned and sat, her feet

where the farthest lapping of the small waves sometimes reached.

How can you be so sure its a woman? Baylee sat beside her. He was

wearing the tight black swimming trunks he usually wore to the island.

Well, because most haptics designers are, and because of the feelings that

came through somehow, Baylee; it was like I knew the family watching from the

deck, and then when the program ended, like I had lost the diver forever. And I

knew his name.

Baylees head snapped toward her, so fast it left tracks. How could you

know his name?

Why are you so shocked?

Well the neural box in your brain picks up sensory stimulation, nothing

more. How could you get his name? And what was it? A gull overhead

screeched and she made a mental note to lower that down a few decibels. And

anyway, he went on, if it was a piggyback program like you said the point of

view was entirely designed.

Thats the thing, she said. I was in a body, not a designed point ofview,

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and I felt everything that body did, not just physically but emotionally. Thats

why I think maybe the designer was a woman.

It could have been a man.

Granted. A wave unfurled over the tops of her feet. She saw it, and

noted a slight temperature change in her skin there, promptly conveyed through the

unseen hammock into her sheath, but it wasnt anything like the touch of water on

her body in that program.

So, said Baylee, what wasthe boys, or whatever is wass, name?

Sing, she said.

Sing, repeated Baylee meditatively. Sing what?

I dont know.

Sing as in sing a song?

I guess.

He stood up then and walked out into the bay up to his knees. Did I ever

tell you, he said, his broad back to her, how much I love this program?

You have, she said softly.

I dont think I could go on without it.

She followed him and stood beside him, his hand in hers. You sound so

sad.

Oh, he said, old things . . . and problems with my . . . patients, their lives

are so desolate. In his hammock back in France she imagined he had heaved a

deep sigh, but the system didnt convey it. This boy, he said, or whatever: you

say you felt something for him?

Yes, it was so strange. When it was over, I felt so sad that Id neversee

him again, and I mourned, as for a family member.

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Hmm. He gazed out at the low sun. Though he was a good twenty feet

away now, she could hear his voice and his breathing as if he were beside her.

They liked it that way. I hadnt expected. . . .

What?

Oh, he looked at her and back at the virtal sun, to be so tired, I guess.

Im tired, and some things that I thought were so important . . . seem less so,

now.

Like what? She knew he had lost his mother during the China war (or

what North Americans called the China War, anyway), and he never spoke of his

father. For once, she longed to be in reality looking into his real face. Then she

might glimpse where this sadness came from, might sooth him.

As usual, though, he avoided her question and dove into the water. He was a

powerful swimmer. Knowing this she had put the reef far from shore. He would

be gone, she knew, a long time.

Later that night, after they had made love and were lying in each others

arms, he whispered, its not Sing, as in song, but s y n g, Syng.

How

Just a name Ive heard before, he said, a common name, Syng.

Oh.

In her sleep that night she was diving down toward the underwater city

again, but this time when she entered a skyscraper through its glassless window

what she found was a marble-sized diamond. Instead of bringing it to the surface

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as salvage though she swallowed it, and the weight inside her carried her down,

past the many floors of the skyscraper to a crowded city street. In the dream the

crowds frightened her and she swam into a public virtality booth, but instead of a

cave there were rows of stall-less toilets. She went from one to the other but each

was filthy. At the end of the rwo she found Baily sitting on one. It didnt look like

him but in a dream way she knew it was. His face was contorted with strain and he

seemed not to notice her, even after she said his name. Then she was saying it over

and over and people were banging on the far away door to get in.

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