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"An original mind and superior skill have
combined to produce an excellent book."
—Chicago Sun-Times
"Thoughtful, brash, frustrating, and fascinating—
a novel sure to arouse controversy	A grand
experiment and a major book ... So read
it—and be prepared to argue about it for a
long time to come."	—Locus
"He understands the future and he makes it
real. And not content with that ultimate science
fiction magic, he also creates the most believable
and interesting female characters in science
fiction. Kingsbury is likely to be the next
Heinlein."	—Jerry Pournelle
"The author of Courtship Rite brings to this
novel of the near-future a rare sensitivity
for characterization as well as an acute per-
ception of the links between past and future.
Recommended."	—Library Journal
"Strongly recommended." —New York Nernday

DONALD KINGSBURY
THE

THE MOON GODDESS AND THE SON
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events
portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance
to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1986 by Donald Kingsbury
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this
book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Book
Baen Publishing Enterprises
260 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10001
First paperback printing, December 1987
ISBN 0-671-65381-4
Cover art by David Mattingly
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by
SIMON & SCHUSTER
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, N.Y. 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kingsbury, Donald, 1929-
The moon goddess and the son.
I. Title.
PS3561.I487M66 1985 813'.54 84-28309
ISBN 0-671-55958-3

CHAPTER 1
VANDALIA III. (INS) 18 Aug 1997—Marc Errold Clifford
visited his estranged wife this Sunday when she refused to
allow him his weekend visit with their two daughters. He
brought his shotgun and murdered his wife and then
smashed down the girls' bedroom door and killed them
with three more shotgun blasts—Joan Clifford (12) in the
closet and Sharon Clifford (11) under the bed. Neighbors
heard the screaming but before the police could coax him
to surrender, Mr. Clifford slipped a broom handle into
the trigger guard of his weapon, took the barrel into his
mouth and carefully executed himself with a kick of his
foot. Mr. Clifford was described by a neighbor as a gentle
man who managed the local sandlot baseball team and
who enjoyed duck hunting. His recipe for Peking Duck
was a local favorite.
from Diana Osborne's Secret Newspaper Collection.
Diana's ambition to get a job on the moon started the
same day she learned from a child's book of mythology
that her namesake was the moon goddess. She was six and
so excited by the revelation that she laid herself across the
sill of her bedroom window and, using her belly as a pivot,
seesawed out onto the slanted porch roof.
There, she pulled her underpants halfway to her knees
so they wouldn't get scratched if her bottom were to slip
on the gravely shingles while, on all fives, she edged her
1

2
Donald Kingsbury
way down the asphalt tiles. The prickly cushion was the
lesser of two evils—granulated skin smoothed itself out,
but runs in her undies would earn her an unforgettable
beating. Inching caterpillar-like out along the sloping roof,
heels first, then palms, then bottom, heels, palms, bot-
tom, she worked herself to a point beyond the tree branches
so that she could stare at the full moon in the sky where
she belonged.
The golden disk raced through scudding clouds above
the flat-black housetops of her sullen Ohio town. Heaven
was in the sky. Heaven had rocks and funny floating
houses and heroes who didn't need to breathe air. Heaven
with its spacemen was her real home. Heaven was beauti-
ful and round and a brighter yellow than any crayon. And
the goddess Diana could fly off roofs and fly through the
forest.
"Goddamn it, Diana! What the bloody hell are you
doing out there on the roof!"
She started, then cringed—her vision falling, a buckshot-
blasted sparrow, the underpants around her knees trip-
ping her as she tried to react, landing her on fingertips
that bloodied themselves clawing the slanting shingles.
Her thigh took the scraping blow that interrupted the
awkward rise. She hadn't meant her father to catch her,
knowing his easy fury. There was nowhere to run; never-
theless she eased sideways along the roof.
"You'll kill yourself, you little twat!"
Before she could get to the gutter, he reached out and
hauled her over the windowsill, swinging her into the
bedroom by one arm, throwing her to the floor, then
jerking her upright. He slapped her. She knew enough of
kis temper not to scream so she merely whimpered while
he lifted her off her feet and tossed her onto the mattress.
He stripped her, ignoring socks and shoes. The tear in her
underpants earned a head-shaking smack. He tied her to
the bed frame and beat her bleeding with his belt.
In that Ohio room her body endured—the pain blotting
out this man, blotting out even the pain itself—while from
another mythological place her mind observed. No god-
dess who could fly was afraid! She saw a wild boar's charge
and fiercely cast a spear toward his heart from her stance

The Moon Goddess and the Son
3
safe behind a round lunar shield. Did the point tear flesh?
She kicked him. Enraged by resistance, her father struck
again and again, determined to make her feel the pain, to
cringe, to cry, to moan. Expertly she retreated from his
rampage, all the way to the far side of the moon, leaving
only her body behind to distract this boar's rough rooting.
Once the man's rage had dissipated, when the house
was wholly quiet and the night supreme, a woman crept
from the shadows to wash the wounds of her daughter.
"Stop it!" screamed Diana. "You're hurting me!" She could
scream at her mother, turn her back, sulk. Crying, the
mother laid a blanket over her and tiptoed out of the
bedroom.
Hours passed and slowly the trauma evaporated, leaving
only the pain of being touched by a bloodstained bed that
refused to stop torturing her back and legs and stomach
with its prodding fingers. When the moon rose so high
that her round eyes could no longer see it through the
window, she felt abandoned.
In the morning she ate her cornflakes with surliness,
scrunching over the table, her fist around the spoon, blond
hair hanging in a way that hid her face. She said nothing,
spoke to no one Her mother tried to comfort her and still
she said nothing. Diana's ears were waiting for the
postman—the soft clunk of feet, the opening and closing of
the door, the sheet-metal sounds of a mailbox lid being
lifted and shut. The only nice thing about being beaten
was that she got off from school.
It came, this time as the rasp of magazine-stuffing.
She was out like a shot, following her man on tiptoes so
he wouldn't notice until they were both away from her
parents' house. Then she ran up beside him. "Gimme a
bundle to deliver!" she demanded, a smile all over her
face, her eyes flirting. He tousled her hair and turned up
the next walk. She followed him. "Is it all junk mail?"
"Some people still get real letters." He held out three
envelopes before he slipped them into the door slot. They
were printed up at the local post office and delivered to
people who were too poor, or obstinate, to own a fax-phone.
"Those aren't real letters," retorted Diana.
So the postman gave her a postcard. "Now don't drop

4
Donald Kingsbury
that. If you're going to be my little postgirl, you have to
take care of everything I give you."
It was a picture of a marina in Florida. Diana stared
intently at the boats and the blue sea and the sailors and
the women in bikinis. It didn't look like Ohio at all. She
turned the card over and carefully read it, puzzling over
some of the squiggles. Mrs. Simak's daughter had terrible
handwriting and if she had gone to school in Ohio they
wouldn't have let her graduate up to the second grade.
Still, Diana was clever at squiggles and codes. For years
she had had a girlfriend who owned a whole collection of
Sesame Street shows on VHS.
Mrs. Simak's daughter had a tan, said the postcard. The
Blodgetts had come back and wanted her to stay for an-
other week so she was moving to the waterfront guest
house. She wouldn't be back till the end of the month.
Mrs. Blodgett said hello. And PS, please water my petunia
jug-
Very studiously Diana correlated the address on the
card and the address on the old wooden door with its
cracked varnish. She rang the doorbell impatiently. Buzz.
An ear to the door. No steps. Buzz, buzz, buzzzzzzzz. An
ear to the door again.
White-haired Mrs. Simak peeked out cautiously to see
that the two of them weren't burglars. Diana thrust the
card at her, a smile covering her face again. "Good news
from Dottie. She's having fun!"
"You two gossips have been reading my mail again, have
you?"
"Just the good pieces!" She glanced at the postman. "Do
you have any junk mail for this address?"
"Just a tax bill."
Mrs. Simak sighed.
And so the morning went. Diana followed him up and
down the street along the route, sometimes chatting with
him, sometimes letting him deliver his mail, sometimes
cajoling him into letting her deliver it. She liked protect-
ing him from dogs. The black shepherd was very fierce
today and she had to hold his mouth closed and growl at
him.
Finally the postman asked her about her bruises.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
5
Diana only smiled mischievously, full of the things a
woman hides, and gave him a mysterious glance with her
eyes. "I was a bad girl. I snuck out on the roof to look at
the moon and fell off. My father was very angry with me.
You should see my side where I hit—it's all bloody. In a
week I can make myself a nice scab sandwich." She laughed.
She never admitted to anyone that her father beat her,
least of all to the men she loved.
Reluctantly she left her sweetheart at the post office and
began to work her way home through the back alleys.
Alleys were more interesting than streets. They had trees
to climb, some with decaying tree huts. She knew where
there was an old carhouse without doors. Alleys had fences
and tin-walled garages and garbage.
All the way home Diana rummaged through the garbage
cans, peeking into plastic sacks that had been ripped open
by cats and raccoons. She collected a respectable haul of
magazines within five blocks, plus a newspaper called
Police Reports which she intended to check out for murder
stories. The magazines were Big Boobs, good for the color
photographs, The New Yorker, which had interesting car-
toons about kook Americans, Cosmopolitan, with its coy
hints, and two copies of Nubile.
The Nubiles she coveted for her imaginary life. She
could visit the golden cupolas of the Kremlin while drink-
ing superior vodka. She could sip Chivas Regal with gen-
tlemen at a table in a space station overlooking the glimmer
of Los Angeles below, or run around naked on horses with
genteel cowboys who had lung cancer.
Once, courtesy of two Nubile full-page advertisements,
she went on a ballooning adventure with sophisticated
friends. Their balloon was an unreal red and blue and they
had a wicker basket under it with a nice barbecue fire to
cook steaks for a picnic. Diana wore Turkish pants and
brought the sliced orange and onion salad and the digiphone
for gossiping with the farmers below. But her friends
made a big mistake because they all liked their steaks well
done. By the time they were ready to eat, the other
balloons were out of sight and they were way up in the sky
above the clouds and could only see the billowy castles of
the Ogre-giant from Jack-and-the-Beanstalk. Finally they

6
Donald Kingsbury
settled down in Northern Canada near the MacKenzie
River and were rescued by four goldminers who all carried
a pint of Seagram's Finest in their back pockets.
Diana usually masterminded these adventures in the
O'Connor's deserted garage. It had two openings in the
rotting wall planks which reminded her of a rabbit hole
with an escape hatch. The escape hole opened up on the
other side of the O'Connor's fence, so she was never
caught. To this retreat she brought her new armload of
magazines. She cached them beside the rusty lawn mower,
under the floorboards, not intending to read immediately.
Reading was for quiet times and she hadn't checked out
the neighborhood for adventures yet. But she couldn't
resist taking a quick peek at the June issue of Nubile.
She opened to a color photograph of the round moon
taken from low Earth orbit through a construction rig
manned by two spacesuited men. For minutes she stared
at it. Her moon. And then she turned the page to see if
there were more. There was only one other photograph,
that of a black-haired man floating inside a small cylindri-
cal module, grinning at the photographer with blue eyes
while hanging casually onto a giant robot-arm control panel
like a swimmer hangs onto a bobbing raft.
The caption identified Engineer Byron McDougall, for-
merly of the Air Force, formerly a NASA shuttle pilot. He
was quoted as saying that once they were finished building
the leoport he had in mind to get up there and tunnel out
a lunar city large enough to "show those Russians at
Theophilus what a moon base really is." And what did he
expect the Americans to build that the Russians didn't
already have? "I think I'd start by importing the floating
gardens of Babylon."
The idea appealed to Diana. She didn't know the word
"leoport" and she had never heard of Babylon, but she
knew that "floating gardens" would please Diana's forest
nymphs. Instantly she was in love with Byron. Instantly
she knew that she was going to make another scrapbook
about space to hide behind her desk with her collection of
murder stories.
Her moon rose again the next evening and, when she
found it, beamed on her with shining pleasure. It hadn't

The Moon Goddess and the Son
7
abandoned her. Forever afterwards the night sky was her
faithful companion. Often she pretended to sleep, staring
out the window, dreaming. When she heard her father's
snoring she was sometimes made bold enough to sneak
again through the window onto the porch roof, there to
wonder at her moon or watch it rise. She knew from the
TV space operas that you didn't have to die to go to
heaven. Men lived out there in ships and modules—and
long ago, when her Americans had been bolder, American
heroes had even gamboled over the lunar hills where only
Russian scientists were camped today.
On her seventh birthday a high school boy took her out
with his portable tracking telescope and they set up on a
flat asphalt and gravel factory roof. The cratered moun-
tains of the moon stunned her with their beauty—her
mountains, her craters, her plains, her rills and streamers.
Meticulously she located each of the old Apollo landing
sites. She was especially thrilled when she found the Apollo
16 landing site in the roughly cratered terrain between
Mare Nubium and Mare Nectaris just 120 kloms north of
the crater Abulfeda and 300 kloms west of the giant Rus-
sian lunar base at Theophilus.
Sometimes at the controls of the telescope she was
serious. Sometimes she dreamed. Once, with her eyes
filled by the huge moon, a moment of astral travel cast her
into a crater full of flowering trees, their scent enticing
hummingbirds for the pleasure of the shy nymphs. It was
the duty of Diana to watch over the wood nymphs of the
moon. What splendid forests she could see, arching higher
than redwoods in the low gravity!
The young boy showed her Jupiter and the Pleiades. He
showed her the Russian space city, Mirograd, rising like
the red star of Mars over the heartland of America every
hour-and-a-half, as it had since long before she was born,
closer to Ohio than San Francisco or New York or even St.
Louis.
Another evening they followed the bright thread of the
half-built American leoport as it arrowed across the south-
ern sky at twilight—the telescope's clock machinery hold-
ing the image upon the lens while the boy and child
watched as its golden thread was overtaken by the night

8
Donald Kingsbury
behind the Earth. When it was gone the boy explained
that they could see the leoport this far north only because
it hadn't yet been nudged into equatorial orbit. Leoport,
he explained after Diana asked, meant "Low Earth Orbit
spacePORT." It was a necklace of rings held together
electro-"magically."
Another year passed. When she was eight Diana had a
temper tantrum and stoically endured five beatings until
her mother papered her wall with a photomontage of the
moon's surface. With a sweet smile on her face she lived
in that map. Gryphons rowed her over Mare Frigoris
while she held polar-bear robes about herself. Husky man-
headed lions carried her in a red and gold inlaid palanquin
through the Alpine Valley to the warmer regions of the
Imbrium where she flirted with Neptune and raced and
feasted with other immortals. Once she took astronaut
Mattingly by the hand for a walk through the woods in the
sheltered valley of the crater Descartes because she felt
sorry that he'd never had the chance to walk on the moon
like his comrades Duke and Young.
Diana kept her two files of articles hidden from her
father behind a special plywood door at the back of her
desk, the brown folder and the red scrapbook each grow-
ing week by week—one a well worn set of newspaper
clippings about fathers who murdered their children and
the other a bright tale of heroes. On the first page of the
red book she had pasted a magazine cutout which she
thought was very appropriate. It was titled:
The Men and Women Who
Will Make America Great Again.
Our answer to the Soviet presence in space.
Underneath this title, which was embellished with ea-
gles, the magazine page lay crammed with passport pic-
tures of men and women printed above their names and
accomplishments, ten of them in all, less even than the
number of senior Soviet scientists posted routinely to
Mirograd and even rotated to the moon. But the ten were
Americans. They were the rabbits who were catching up

The Moon Goddess and the Son
9
with the tortoise—agaih—and their lives were watched
enthusiastically.
Diana's favorite was Construction Engineer Byron
McDougall. She collected everything she read about him.
One year she even counted all the instances he had been
mentioned in Time magazine. This was Byron, the hero of
the leoport accident which had kept a continent of Ameri-
cans mesmerized, horrified, crying, and awed for twenty
hours of terrifying suspense until he saved everybody.
That was the only time Diana had ever remembered seeing
her father both drunk and happy simultaneously.
The treasure in Diana's scrapbook was the Omni inter-
view of her Byron. She used it to practice reading. The
interview carried the best picture spread of him she had
ever seen—posing with his wife and his son in a barn in
New Hampshire; caught while he suited up for a shuttle
flight; standing awash in the Pacific Ocean at San Diego
while two other photographers also took his picture; bot-
tled up in his small orbiting office overlooking a house-
sized shipment of leoport rings . . .
And Diana's favorite portrait: Byron as a young man.
Somewhere Omni had found a shot of him crossing a
desert airfield in Saudi Arabia back in the '80s, his face
warmly naive, before the world was complicated by space
stations and battle lasers, when he was still a youthful
fighter pilot training Saudis to fly the mighty F-15. Those
were the old days when fighters were still flown by men.
He looked so at ease on the desert, pleased with his pilots
and his planes and the windy desolation.
She would have tacked the portrait of this innocent
McDougall beside her moon map except that her father
would have reacted violently to a male pinup, so instead
she hid Byron's picture behind her desk and occasionally
slept with it after a beating.
Byron McDougall was the love of her life.

CHAPTER 2
MOSCOW—The orbiting of an additional module to the
major new Soviet Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmo-
drome was announced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
this morning. He emphasized the peaceful nature of Soviet
space research, contrasting it with the United States' in-
tent to militarize space, hinting that by the 1990s Soviet
space science would have a permanent research base on
the moon. Western military sources confirmed that the
launch has provided a significant addition to the Soviets'
space station complex and proves out the almost unlimited
expandability of the Soviet design. The original module,
called Mir, contains six docking ports which can be at-
tached to other modules which themselves can contain
docking ports. It is expected that over the next few years
the Soviet space station will become a large, active com-
plex served by the new giant Tsiolkovsky booster and a
transport shuttle. British space expert R. F. Smith-Crowley
estimates that the Soviets are now at least ten years ahead
of the American space effort and very shortly will have a
capability to prevent the United States from deploying any
anti-ICBM battle stations.
Flying out of Dhahran by night, over the oilfields of the
Saudi Kingdom, the Boeing 727 banked northeast toward
Amman. Gas flares lit the desert, some flickering orange
and red across the sands like hell's spurting flames firmly
10

The Moon Goddess and the Son
11
controlled by Allah's hand, others, fainter, embedded in
the dark, gave the appearance of comfortable Bedouin
fires kindled from camel dung.
A young United States Air Force captain from the Dhah-
ran Air Academy, the only American aboard, noted that
the Arab seated beside him resembled a notorious rebel
who, if not dead, must certainly be locked away in some
prison. He wondered in puzzlement for a moment—all
Saudis looked like New York Jews to him—but then Bijad
ibn Jamal smiled politely to the family in front of him. The
steel teeth on the left side of his face were unmistakable—
souvenirs of the riots at Jubail.
Well, I'll be damned! thought the boyish American who
carried the name of Byron McDougall. Who in their right
mind would let ibn Jamal out of his cage?
Once, at Dhahran, the gossip had flowed about this
man. A pilot spoke in grisly detail of how a friend of a
friend, who had since been silenced by the King, had
pushed Bijad out of an airplane over the Empty Quarter.
This story was disputed. Bijad had been shot by his father
for blasphemy. He had died of torture in Riyadh. The
stories of his death were endless. He angered good
Moslems—they wished him dead—and yet they always
spoke of his death with a certain wistfiilness, as if it were a
shame for such a brave and charming fool to die so easily.
Byron smiled. Was he really surprised to see ibn Jamal
alive and free? Though Saudis, like Americans, were capa-
ble of believing dreadful things of their government, ob-
servation suggested quite the opposite: Saudi Arabia was
that part of the Middle East where Allah was most merci-
ful. Political prisoners did not disappear and they were not
tortured. The sons of Abdul Aziz, like their practical fa-
ther, were not willing to make unnecessary enemies in a
land where revenge is an obligation.
During a long flight one has much time for idle thought.
Byron recalled the behavior of King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud
when, in 1921, he finally conquered his family's mortal
enemies, the Rasheeds. Mohammed ibn Talal ibn Rasheed
expected death. Instead Abdul Aziz gave his captive a
place of honor at a great dinner and embraced him.
"The time for death and killing is finished. We are all

12
Donald Kingsbury
brothers now, and you and yours will come to Riyadh to
live with me and be part of my own family." Three of the
Rasheed women, widowed by the battle, were married to
Saudi men.
Old Abdul Aziz knew about justice, thought Byron. You
tried a bit of man-made justice and carried it as far as you
could, and when that didn't work anymore you invited
your enemy in for dinner and brought out the mensef. The
founding King of modern Saudi Arabia had a genius for
ending cycles of revenge. Perfect justice was left to Allah.
And perhaps that was enough to explain why Bijad ibn
Jamal had not died for his recklessness.
Who could account for such men?
Byron suspected that Bijad carried within his soul some
ancient family obligation. He came from a devout wahhabi
family whose grandfather had been a loyal member of the
army of Abdul Aziz. The grandfather had helped in the
capture of Mecca but later joined the ikhwan revolt of
1929, to die charging the machine guns of Abdul Aziz's
army at the oasis of Umm Urdhumah. It did not matter
that Bijad now denied his clan or, that by adopting Marx,
had broken with his past—an Arab's memory does not
pretend to be consistent with reason.
The soul of the devout wahhabi Moslem, warrior of the
desert, still shone from the eyes of this graduate of Berke-
ley. Grandfather Jamal would not have recognized his
grandson, but Byron, whose father was a fanatic, did.
Fanatics may change their beliefs like the mountains change
color—but the behavior of a fanatic remains like stone
against weather and time and reason—and passes from
father to son in strange ways.
A Saudi family, seated directly in front of the American,
had never been in an airplane before and watched through
the windows with an excitement that often broke into
musical Arabic. They watched even as the desert became
blackness below and stars above. The Palestinian steward
moved down the aisle serving coffee and Pepsi-Cola, mel-
on and sweet cakes. Bijad asked for a newspaper.
He's charming and full of force, thought Byron, watch-
ing the exchange, watching even as the newspaper and
coffee were brought over and placed upon the little pull-

The Moon Goddess and the Son
13
down table. Bijad noticed his interest—and Arabs do not
drop their eyes, like New Yorkers, when you meet theirs.
He offered his coffee to Byron and Byron could not refuse.
The American called over the Palestinian and ordered
another cup for Bijad.
Coffee was the traditional Middle East drink of hospital-
ity. It held all the generosity of the Semitic soul. But you
could never reach the bottom of the cup. Millennia of
memory lay there under the politeness, every grudge,
every slight—held and cherished and stirred, waiting upon
the moment of justice.
As his eyes smiled at Byron, Bijad seemed to hold his
patience behind a dam built across a narrow valley. From
the crotch of the valley one could not measure the size of
the lake behind that dam.
We believe in a Just God, for are we not the instrument
of that justice, waiting without forgiveness, even unto the
seventh generation, to avenge each wrongP
Ibn Jamal, follower of a Jewish atheist, had written with
Islamic fervor for the oil workers of the Gulf, rousing them
in secret tracts to erase all past exploitation by the ruling
classes, by the imams, by the capitalists, and the Zionist
conspirators. He began a conversation easily, commenting
on the main headline of the newspaper he held in his lap.
"Is it not beautiful that the Russians will be filling your
sky? From sea to shining sea."
Byron read Arabic, and so he had seen the headline, but
it didn't jump out at him like an English headline and he
had to stare at it and move his lips before it registered.
"Well!" And he twisted his neck to read the first paragraph
of the story.
It was not news to Byron. Everybody with any knowl-
edge of the Soviet space program had been expecting this
since 1973. And though the February story about the
launching of Mir's core had passed almost unreported by
the press, it is only American Congressmen and newspaper
editors who have to have an elephant in their bathtub
before they notice that the circus is in town.
"You read Arabic?" asked his companion politely, switch-
ing on the overhead light and turning the paper so that
Byron might more easily view it.

14
Donald Kingsbury
"How could I resist learning your enchanting language?
I'm a poet at heart. I've always wanted to be civilized."
"You read fluently?"
"No—but I get by."
"You are in the American Air Force. Do you make
much of this station-of-the-space?"
"It's going to be big. Russians have a cultural weakness
for gigantism. This looks like only the beginning."
"A city in the sky. Like in The Empire Strikes Back. An
evil Marxist city. Do you think your Russian friends will
flush their toilets into the Great Lakes as they pass two
hundred miles overhead?" Bijad was grinning.
Byron could tell from the pleasure in the grin that his
fellow passenger was seeing Uncle Sam up to his neck in
sand with camel dung in his mouth and his eyelids scis-
sored off. He was right, a Russian base dominating the
heartland of America was embarrassing, and there was no
way the United States could challenge it with only three
shuttles flying and the great Saturn booster, of lost lunar
fame, long on the junk heap of American impatience—but
the Arab's grin was overdone.
Then, as the aircraft lumbered inland, the full moon
began to rise. Soft light touched the rolling landscape
beyond the silver wings. To the Saudis this desert held the
fascination of a womb now lost to their past, forbidden to
them by their new womb of air-conditioning. To the Amer-
ican it looked like the view one might see from a spaceship
drifting in the stellar darkness over an airless moon of
rock—an interesting frontier.
Below the aircraft, under the moonlit haze, but long
ago, a fragile trade route had reached across the desert,
between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean worlds,
linking civilizations barely aware of each other. From the
sea at Kuwait spices and silks, musk, slaves, anything both
valuable and light, were trundled by camel caravan over
incredibly harsh country to the oasis at Jauf and thence on
to the crossroads city of Petra. In the course of six hun-
dred years the Nabateans built their desert empire, then
vanished. They had been gone for twice as long as they
had reigned. Byron wondered if someday they might reap-
pear, trading across the dried out wadis of Mars selling the

The Moon Goddess and the Son
15
goods of distant Callisto to Soviet Centurions patrolling
the borders of their empire.
Byron's journey was not a military mission. He had
planned this trip to Jordan last December with his wife
Junie, but quarreling had prevented them from coming.
She did not like ruins, she did not like walking in the
desert, she did not like Arabs, and she was afraid that
some anti-Semitic Arab would murder her, mistaking her
for a Jew because of her prominent Arabian nose. Junie
had returned to New Hampshire, giving the excuse that
she was pregnant, and only now did Byron feel free to
indulge his wonder.
The Boeing arrived over Amman after dinner when the
city was a hilly twinkle of lights not yet gone to sleep.
Byron's travel books claimed that it had been founded in
the bronze age, first appearing in history as the chief city
of the Ammonites. It was here, during a siege, that David
sent Uriah the Hittite to his death so that David might
take for himself Uriah's beautiful wife, Bathsheba. Amman
had been destroyed many times—and rebuilt as often. The
acreage of twinkling showed it had grown, by the atomic
age, to be a city of nearly a million people.
At the airport Byron and Bijad ibn Jamal continued
their talk around a tiny table over more coffee, not about
Saudi politics, for Bijad seemed curiously reluctant to
move in that direction—as if silence had been a condition
of his release. He preferred, instead, to speak about jus-
tice in general.
He hinted at American wealth. He spoke darkly of
Zionist wealth. He spoke with contempt of French wealth.
Wealth was a crime. He could not mention the wealth
of Riyadh but wealth was on his mind. He began to
castigate the first great Islamic dynasty, the Umayyad
Caliphate, which had ruled Islam, in corrupt luxury, from
Damascus between 661 and 750 AD.
When the Umayyads were deposed by al-Saffah, an
amnesty was announced and eighty members of the family
invited to dinner. While they ate, hidden soldiers, on
signal, slew them with swords. Carpets were spread over
the corpses and the feast continued. Ibn Jamal grinned at
the delightful perfidy of the story. His mouth said no

16
Donald Kingsbury
words of treason, but his eyes saw a thousand men of the
House of Saud under those carpets.
Byron was hardly paying attention. He missed his wife.
If she wasn't such an argumentative fool, she could be
here with him now, enjoying the quaintness of this mad-
man. It was going to be lonely in Amman without her.

CHAPTER 3
Woman was God's second mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist.
"Oh, Daddy," exclaimed Byron's very pregnant wife,
"this little town has everything. I know what you think of
country living, but you haven't seen the absolutely fabu-
lous place I bought. The church is only a five minute drive
away."
"What denomination?" asked Charlie Bond.
"Congregational!" Junie replied aggressively.
"Jesus, you're going to bring up my grandson as a Con-
gregationalist?" He was appalled at the heresy.
"With your luck the baby will be another granddaughter.
Come with me, I'll show you the town." She took his arm.
But the old fighter pilot was reluctant to move. He was
watching them tow away his blue and yellow Cessna. He
didn't trust the staff of these backwoods dirt airfields.
Finally he resigned himself. "You really should look for an
Episcopal Church," he told Junie.
"Daddy! It's half-an-hour's drive away and the rector is a
little old man who is always telling stories about the good
old days when he was machine-gunning Japs on Guadalca-
nal. I couldn't bear it! Our minister gives parties. He loves
everybody."
"The younger generation has no brand loyalty," grum-
bled the chief executive officer of the Shantech Conglom-
17

18
Donald Kingsbury
erate as Junie led him by the hand to her Lincoln. She had
been brought up on Chryslers and the family had been
Episcopalian for eleven generations. He snorted. Probably
she didn't even use Rinso anymore.
But as they crossed the field that passed for a parking
lot, his flash of anger at his daughter shamed him.
"You're looking as snappy as ever, Junie," he said by
way of apology.
"Thank you." She waited until he had eased her safely
behind the Lincoln's wheel and had gone around to let
himself in before she spoke again. "Open the windows for
me, Daddy." He hesitated, momentarily panicked by the
non-Chrysler dashboard. These damn Fords never put
their buttons in the right place!
She drove him out of the flatlands up into the hills and
showed him Stonefield. She stopped on Main Street and
bought wine for dinner, and ducked into the bookstore for
Glamour.
"This is boondocksville!" he grumbled when she returned.
"Daddy, will you shut up! You're a Boston grouch. This
nook end of civilization is the find of a lifetime! It's a
college town and has all the amenities like bookstores and
even touring Broadway plays ..."
She chattered on and on until he felt a compulsive need
to shut her up. "All that and a Congregational Church,
too." His sarcasm hid an uneasiness with his daughter's
plans that ran far deeper than her choice of church.
"Don't forget that airfield I whumped up right in my
back yard for my fighter pilot men!"
Daddy Bond was a Sabrejet pilot from the Korean War
with two MIG kills to his credit. He had been USAF
Reserve for many years, and his companies were deep into
defense contracts. It was in pursuit of one of those con-
tracts that he had discovered the man his daughter married.
He smiled, remembering his son-in-law. A Major Gen-
eral had chosen Byron McDougall to take him up for a
tour of the clouds in an F-15—Bond suspected himself of
running off at the mouth about Korea and that the general
had been desperate to get rid of him. Byron, however,
liked the stories and Bond, warming, enticed him home
with a casual description of his four nubile daughters.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
19
Unfortunately, as Bond recalled their heavy drinking,
he had ungraciously passed out on the couch while telling
a ribald story to Byron—and Byron, who was by then far
from sober himself, had wandered off alone in search of
the girls, but instead of locating them had gone to sleep in
Junie's car where she found him the next morning much to
her disgust. She had raced upstairs. "There's a drunken
wingless chicken in the back of my car with his feet stick-
ing out the window! Get rid of him!"
Junie drove her father through the hills of the local
farmland, past a transformer station and the town sandpit
and the fields just turning to spring. Around a corner her
new house stood on a slight rise. Fieldstone fences, built
on Junie's instructions in the old-fashioned way, faced the
road.
But husband Byron had never seen the place and had
been given no choice in the buying of it and that was what
was worrying his father-in-law. Such were the ways of a
willful daughter. Her judgments about complex trivia were
always perfect—she knew what stocks to buy and sell, she
knew which cut of meat went with which vegetables and
where to buy the cheapest violin strings—but she had
never been able to understand simple importances. She
had no common sense.
Daddy Bond, of course, had little trouble with the sim-
ple basics. His son-in-law was an Air Force officer. There
was no possible place for him in the wilds of New Hamp-
shire, however close it was to Boston, however close it was
to a dirt airfield.
"You've got to see the view out back!" Junie exclaimed.
He waited until they were in the kitchen. After mixing
himself a vodka and clam juice, he confronted her. "Junie
darling. You want something from me."
"How did you guess?"
He smelled the soup—and the lamb roast with curried
rice. She knew what he liked to eat but never went out of
her way to feed him unless she wanted something in
return. He waved a hand. "Do you need money?"
"No! You got me into stocks and bonds when I was
twelve and I'm doing very well, thank you. I never over-
spend. You know that by now! I can afford a white ele-

20
Donald Kingsbury
phant that the real estate people haven't been able to get
rid of. No, I don't want your money."
"Ugh. That means you're not going to let me off lightly."
She smiled and ladled out the soup. "I want you to get
Byron out of Saudi Arabia. Goddamn it, I want him out of
the United States Air Force."
"Hey . . . how can I do that? What magic powers do
you think a corporation boss has? You've been reading the
newspapers again. I've warned you about that."
"I have it all planned," she said cunningly. "The Soviets
are set on building a huge space station."
"They've had two-man space stations up there for years.
Flying outhouses."
"But now there's sure to be a serious program to get us
up there," she said with the even voice of a broker riding a
hot tip. "Byron says Americans always do things best on
sudden excited impulse because we have short-fused assholes
for brains. I mean this Mir complex isn't one of those test
systems—those flying outhouses, as you call them—my
sources tell me it's the real thing." She buttonholed her
father. "So we're in serious trouble, right? Little American
boys are too interested in the soft life to be interested in
being first—but they can't stand to come in second—I
know all about boys. Washington will be going crazy!
Especially since the Challenger just blew up. I want By-
ron to be tapped for the super-crash-priority space station
design team. That's what you can do for me. Or do I have
to sulk?"
"Now, Junie, give your old man a break. I've been
building up Shantech for eight years now. We're in a
damn good position and we have a lot of fine companies
under one umbrella, but I just don't have the connections
even if they put ten billion into space next week. And I'm
not one of the technical men—I'm a manager. I could ask
around."
"Do that," she said firmly.
"Junie, listen to me. Byron is a kid. He's a flyboy, not
an engineer. He joined USAF when he was eighteen and
he doesn't know anything else. He dreams but that's not
ambition. He never made a decision in his life that some

The Moon Goddess and the Son
21
officer didn't hand to him. I'm not saying that as an insult.
He's a fine organization man."
"He got his engineering degree while he was flying.
Daddy, he's good!"
"Now don't take that mail order degree seriously. The
Air Force is sensitive about its jock image. They want to
be loved for their brains. So they humor pilots who read.
But believe me, he's a fighter jock and he doesn't know
anything else. He doesn't have any experience as an engi-
neer. Experience is everything."
"You were a fighter pilot and you didn't have any expe-
rience running companies!"
"My father was a hot vice-president at GE."
"So fathers do have pull! I didn't say he should be top
man! He won the Langford prize for his designs for a
moon colony. That's something. He did better than forty
other student engineers! You've never seen him work.
When they assigned him to Saudi Arabia he just sat down
and learned Arabic and he could already talk and read a
little after only two weeks. How many Americans can do
that?"
Charlie Bond mixed a little vodka and clam juice into
his soup. "Maybe you're right." Soberly he thought about
his daughter's goals. He knew she didn't really give a
damn about space stations. What did she want? She wanted
her husband out of Saudi Arabia.
It seemed unlikely to Charlie that Byron would ever be
invited to join one of the space station design teams—but
he was an extraordinary pilot and that suggested openings.
He cut himself some lamb. He chewed it.
NASA had been struggling to operate with only four of
the Rockwell Orbiters, and now had only three. With
Moscow moving into space in force, Charlie was willing to
bet that many more spacecraft would be built, modified
versions of the original machine. With normal production
economies, ten spacecraft could be had for hardly more
than the price of a replacement for the ill-fated Challenger.
Pilots with Byron's expertise would be in demand. Too
bad NASA didn't operate out of New Hampshire, but that
wasn't something you could tell Junie.
"I'll see what I can do. Does your old man get a kiss?"

22
Donald Kingsbury
"Better than that. I'll name your grandson after you.
Charlie Bond McDougall. How does that sound to you?
You've waited long enough for a son." Not only did he
have four daughters, his three grandchildren were girls.
She paused for dramatic effect. "It is a son, you know. I
had my baby tested." And she laughed. She knew how to
reach her daddy.
A son.

CHAPTER 4
Little Boy Blue Eyes, come blow your horn!
Sheep in the meadow, cows in the corn.
Pretty sweet mother sings in her dreams
Of a son's sketchpad, musical themes.
Little Boy Blue Eyes tends to his sheep
Under the haycock and fast asleep.
Father builds bridges for men to cross
Seeing his tall son rising to boss.
Little Boy Blue Eyes, wake up and fly!
For if they catch you, they'll surely cry.
Mother Goose
They named him Charlie "Bond" McDougall.
The son of Byron and Junie grew up in the years be-
tween the building of the Soviet Mirograd complex and
the slow slogging return of the Americans to a serious
space effort. He matured into an only child with thickly
lashed blue eyes and shadow-dark hair who spent his
youth escaping to the barns of his neighbors. Charlie's
whole memory of life was of two giants. One of them was
all of five feet two and ever there to boss him. The other
stood ramrod straight, appearing only at irregular intervals
to deliver orders that had to be executed on some strict
schedule if Charlie didn't want to be driven crazy.
His mother shouted directly into his eardrum, yet the
23

24
Donald Kingsbury
giant who flew down out of the sky was more terrible. On
the ground his father's manner remained calm, but his
grip on a little wrist was like iron and he could carry
Charlie around by the hair. Mostly the fear-awe came
from the quiet military voice demanding obedience. Sass-
ing died in a boy's throat. Any thoughts other than the one
Big Byron wanted him to think got fragmented by a cau-
tion that overcame him every time he looked at that face.
You could kick a cow but you didn't sass the Papa giant.
During those crucial years when most babies discover
the first spark of individuality by playing with the power of
the word "no", Charlie had been broken. "No" was a
forbidden word that caused earthquakes and typhoons and
sirens and lightning. "No" became a word he spoke only to
himself. Obedience was easier. He knew there were other
ways of doing things but they all seemed like horribly
painful alternatives.
When circumstances left him with his maternal grand-
mother for weeks at a time, he began to perceive that his
mother came from a long line of charming naggers who
always got their way with men or boys. Gran'ma gave him
candy canes and she was sweetly reasonable for about the
time it took him to run back and forth across a room and
tag each of the four walls—but after that it was obedience
school for dogs.
Before he could talk Charlie had learned about fighter
planes, tanks, rifles, spy satellites, and ICBM trolls living
underground. He knew how to stand beside his bed for
inspection by the time he was three. Yet he was four
before he understood that his father was a third generation
military man. That was the year he met his father's father.
The most fascinating thing about visiting his white-haired
grandfather McDougall, and watching that flintlock face,
was to observe someone barking orders at Papa and watch-
ing Papa obey. Grandpa McDougall became Charlie's fa-
vorite man.
Mama wanted "sweet baby" to become the world's great-
est violinist or maybe a dancer. So he learned to play the
violin and to dance. Papa, who was a spaceman and away
from a home a lot, wanted him to become the greatest
space engineer who ever lived, the cutting edge of the

The Moon Goddess and the Son
25
Last Hope of Mankind. So he learned to play with com-
puter toys and erector sets.
He hated the violin and he hated dancing and he hated
space travel and he hated anything to do with the United
States Air Force or aviation but he hated screaming moth-
ers and "displeased" fathers even more. He loved his
parents and did not even know that he was angry. Obey-
ing was the only peace he had.
Still, while he became a fine violinist, his strings had a
perpetual habit of snapping. He somehow never learned
to replace them and it was always his exasperated mother
who had to restring his instrument. He was invariably the
best dancer in his class but he was always being thrown
out of this academy or that school because of his incurably
sly habit of peeking into the girls' dressing room over the
plywood partition or of teasing ten year old ballerinas by
pretending he hadn't pinched them under their tutus.
Why anybody should make such a fuss, he didn't know—
they didn't even have any breasts yet. And when he did
sneak a look, they didn't even have any hair on their
yummies.
For his father Charlie devised a different kind of torture
to express his love. Though he dutifully slaved over his
science and even tolerated the graduate students from the
local college that his father hired to tutor him, he managed—
without ever saying "no"—to avoid reading any science
fiction. Slyly he understood that it was incredibly impor-
tant to Papa that he be educated in the science fiction
classics.
When his father gave him wonderful hardbacks with full
color pictures of strange planets and heroes with ray guns,
Charlie had the perfect way of saying something like,
"Yeach! Haven't you got any good sex books with naked
girls?" He knew how to look appealing enough not to get
clouted. His father liked girls so it was safe to like them,
too.
Once he very carefully let himself get caught reading a
Doc Smith Lensman saga. But it was just a cover for some
neat pictures of girls' yummies, real ones with hair—and
he didn't get clouted for that either because they were his
father's pictures, pickpockpted out of an old Air Force

26
Donald Kingsbury
uniform, and Charlie knew enough about blackmail to
stare his father down while allowing his mother a single
quick glance.
There was the time Charlie, rummaging around in the
attic, found a doll his father had bought as a present for his
lovey-dovey Junie, carefully wrapped in plastic. It was a
horrible bug-eyed monster with a battery-operated finger
that glowed in the dark. Charlie had laughed for days
when he discovered that his father still had a sentimental
attachment to his doll and would not permit it to be hung
up by its feet for the cat to play with. When Big Byron
went back to space Charlie gave the creature to the neigh-
bor's pigs, curious if they would eat batteries.
Later, when he was thirteen, Charlie even dared sug-
gest to his father that science fiction wasn't really literature—
how could it be when it substituted, with relentless
predictability, bizarre plotting for sensitive intellectual con-
tent? He had just learned the words "intellectual" and
"bizarre." But he only spoke that way at breakfast when
his father was grumbling into his coffee, not yet in shape
for an argument.
Mark Twain, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tolstoy, and Luke
Short were all delights. Charlie relished Shakespeare's
camp mastery of cliche and Milton's ability to march through
a whole universe, his sergeant beating out the same driv-
ing cadence. But Charlie put his foot down at even classi-
cal science fiction authors like Heinlein and Asimov and
Silverberg and Herbert and Clarke. What a lot of silly
crap. He used their works for bookends and as coasters to
keep wet Coke bottles off his good furniture.
On Charlie's fourteenth birthday his father was away in
Washington at a conference which meant that he was
missing the final testing of the leoport he had spent years
building. Charlie expected him to hop right back up there
but when Junie started to run around the house, scream-
ing, trying to get it cleaned up in time, he knew that the
Papa man was coming home instead.
She made Charlie do some painting. He fumed. It was
so exasperating! She gave him instructions for every brush
stroke. The more instructions he got, the more stubbornly
he remembered them all, obeying each one with fanatical

The Moon Goddess and the Son
27
care and attention. She could have left him alone in the
sqn on the grass for all the time it saved her.
Papa arrived home in a spiffy new airplane two days
later. Charlie thought his father had forgotten his birthday
and he sure wasn't going to mention it. But the old man
came through that evening. They had a child's birthday
cake with an icing of greenish sugar bunnies dancing around
mint sugar circles embossed with stupid sayings. His mother
gave him an expensive flute. He thanked her. His father
produced a rare luxury hardbound copy of Dune with a
genuine Frank Herbert signature on the frontispiece and
die original John Schoenherr black and whites from Analog
inside as well as color illustrations from the original movie.
His father was all indignant that they had remade the
movie, but Charlie, who had seen neither version, didn't
care.
"You'll love it," said Byron McDougall hopefully.
"Hey, Papa, that's a great gift. This evening I have some
spare time and maybe I'll take a crack at it." When his
father went out for a beer he rolled his eyes and ate a
seasick bunny.
He'd heard about Dune at school—giant worms that
burrowed underground at fifty kloms an hour and ate
sand, converting it into oxygen without benefit of any
known energy source; witches who controlled men with an
inflected whip of words (like his mother); and drug freaks
with solid blue eyes who tapped into the racial conscious-
ness! The things his old man believed in! Any high school
chemistry student with a knowledge of chemical kinetics
could show on his computer that a worm two hundred
meters long, discharging into the atmosphere as much
oxygen as did ten square kilometers of green plant life,
would have to be so red hot its proteins would char!
Science fiction—Jesus!
That evening Byron peeked into his son's room on tip-
toes to see how the first chapter of Dune was going, just as
Charlie knew he would. Charlie was engrossed in the eighth
module of Edmund Robert's Differential Equations from
his half gigabyte math disk, setting up the ninth problem
on the paralyzer, which was what the kids called their 64
node parallel processing computers.

28
Donald Kingsbury
"Have you had a chance to look at Dune?"
"Tomorrow. I got myself hung up on the breaking mode
of long cylinders and I don't want to sleep on it." Years
later, Dune was still on his shelf, unopened.
But his father got even. He said he had been in space
too long and was getting flabby. He needed some exercise.
He suggested a hike through the Green Mountains. He
suggested it with the quiet military authority that told
Charlie there was no getting out of going with him—but it
sounded like fun. Summer was boring. Nothing to do but
chase the pigs and practice the violin and learn differential
equations and read Shakespeare.
He didn't realize then that the old man had in mind a
three day, off-trail, hundred-mile forced march through
the mountains with backpack. For the first thirty miles he
was too occupied with surviving to notice that his body
was falling apart. But at the end of the first day's march,
stuffed in his sleeping bag, half roasting, half freezing in
the mountain air, unable to tell whether he was dying
because of the march or because of the lumps he was
sleeping on, he knew he was going to have to think about
how to get out of the next two days. He slept instead.
The dawn was coming through the leaves and the trees
rose around him like stakes in a pitfall. His head was
pillowed against a rock and his father's boot toe was gently
rocking him awake. He opened his eyes and stared at a
grinning face. "Come on. Let's go. I'm dying, too, but I'm
not a sissy."
Could a boy so young regret his whole life? Charlie
dreamed with his eyes hammered by the greens of dawn
. . . wouldn't it be nice if this Byron monster were back in
Saudi Arabia . . . that somehow, unborn, unburdened with
the name of Charlie Jr., he was still a soul floating above
the pastures of New England, mercifully legless, bent
upon the quest of finding parents, testing this pregnant
belly and fondling that one as it pushed a supermarket
cart, evaluating, measuring, taking the utmost care to
place himself. How foolish the youth of the nation were in
their choices! Anything, anything but this Byron monster
from outer space for a daddy.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
29
But it was too late. His father didn't disappear back to
the Middle East. Charlie was trapped in this aching body,
and Big Byron lifted him up by the hair and set him on his
feet.

CHAPTER 5
PARIS—The Soviet Trade Representative to France and
his chauffeur were blown up and killed by a radio-detonated
land mine three blocks from their Paris residence during
the early morning rush hour in an attack which wounded
the new Soviet military attache. An unidentified cell of the
Afghan Jihad claimed that the attack was in retaliation for
a recent atrocity bombing south of Herat by the Red Air
Force which itself was a reprisal for the assassination of
eight high-ranking Soviet Army officers in Herat last Feb-
ruary . Diplomatic sources in Kabul have reported that the
Soviets' revenge raid killed at least two hundred Afghan
civilians and wounded hundreds more.
"Al Hussein Ben Ali Street. The Holiday Inn," Byron
McDougall told his tiny brown cab driver at the Amman
airport.
The man smiled, all friendliness. "You from USA? Holi-
day Inn nice place. Was at Holiday Inn, Las Vegas once.
Nice girls in show. Half nude. Comedian told us 'Check-em
out.' He pinch one on bottom. She yelp." He grinned a
golden smile.
Byron smiled with the cabby, a sudden sexual craving
telling him that he missed his Junie for all her complain-
ing. Even if she never let him pinch her buttocks, she
liked him to hold their round softness in his hands and
squeeze while she moaned. The cab's suspension was shot,
30

The Moon Goddess and the Son
31
the seat uncomfortable, hot. He hoped Junie's pregnancy
had been proceeding smoothly and, for a moment, won-
dered what it would be like to have an adoring child
underfoot. But the bumps and the far moon in the sky of
Amman distracted his eye.
What a peaceful world up there compared with the
Middle East. But it was desolate, like the desert here.
They'll probably have to use Bedouin as lunar colonists.
Now that was a sobering thought. He tried to imagine the
austere paper-mache and cardboard moon-colonies he'd
built as a boy peopled by these self-reliant nomads who
had no use for more baggage than they could carry with
them.
Byron took a room on the ninth floor overlooking the
street, slept five hours, and was out seriously exploring by
dawn, camera over his shoulder, film in his pocket. The
seven hills of Amman seemed to be carved into miniature
stone houses, every crag holding a stunted tree. The col-
ors were pastel—russet, dull blue, creamy gray. Rains had
called out periwinkles and daisies from the cracks of a
wall.
In among the newer city he found Greek ruins, a Ro-
man theater, and a Roman fortress built atop an older
fortification, Byzantine floors, churches built over tem-
ples, mosques built upon churches, an Umayyad castle—
layer after layer—rock worshipers, pagans, Jews, Greeks,
Romans, Nabateans, Christians, heathens, Moslems, Cir-
cassians, Turks, Bedouin, blacks left over from the Nubian
slave trade, Palestinian lawyers, a British newspaper—and
the Holiday Inn. The minarets of the occasional mosque
seemed strangely out of place, as if Mohammed had never
quite conquered Amman.
Eventually Byron noticed his stomach—Ana ju'an, he
thought in Arabic—and slipped into a bright unassuming
restaurant run by a Lebanese refugee from Beirut on a
street that zig-zagged up one of Amman's hills.
His waitress ignored him. It was too late for the morn-
ing's floor and too early for the cook to have prepared
ghada, not yet being noon. But he was in no hurry and
enjoyed watching her. She was listening avidly to her
Japanese hand-held radio. There was nothing unusual on

32
Donald Kingsbury
the news. Some Afghan refugees in Paris had just blown
up and killed some Soviet apparatchik in France and his
chauffeur, badly wounding a military attache. Experience
at killing Russians in Kabul was coming in handy.
The Soviets were building noble mansions in space with
one hand and liquidating peasants on Earth with the other.
Byron caught the girl's eye, indicating coffee with Ara-
bic hand gestures. She filled a cup and hurried over,
smiling, apologizing that it was too early for lunch. He
complimented the restaurant with his best Arabic flattery
and said he was willing to wait for the heavenly musakhan
which he had heard so much about from all their delighted
clients. She giggled at his accent.
"Did I speak that right?" he asked in Arabic.
"You say well," she replied in English.
He tried to talk to her about the news from Paris but
she was too shy. "Islam is one," was her only comment
before she slipped away to the kitchen.
A noble slogan. He wondered how she really felt about
the brutal Afghan war. Probably nothing. Given eight
carnivorous Moslem groups in Lebanon, given two Chris-
tian groups who hated each other, given Syrians who were
subsidizing Russian atrocities in Afghanistan with money
sent to Moscow to buy arms to kill Lebanese, given angry
Jews, given various assorted expeditionary forces—none of
these groups knowing anything about negotiation—her fam-
ily had probably been too overwhelmed by their decade
old civil war to have much feeling for other far-away
Moslems who were also being murdered.
Islam was not one, and Allah made them suffer for it.
The sudden news of the assassinations in Paris had
brought on an inner rage that sometimes attacked Mc-
Dougall. This Afghan war had been going on interminably
since seventy-nine, far longer than the Second World War
in defiance of all socialist principles of compassion and
concern for peasant and working man. The war benefited
no one but the Soviet aristocracy, and in the end, as they
lay in their own blood on a Paris street, not even them.
In the doorway a gangly American girl was staring at
him. She was over six feet tall, dressed in faded blue shirt
and jeans and cowboy boots with a band about her fore-

The Moon Goddess and the Son
33
head pinned by Amman silver wrought in the Crusader
style. As soon as he looked at her she pretended she
wasn't staring and left to stand outside the window. Once
she came back in, watched him eating his musakhan, and
ambled back outside.
She was still out there when he finished lunch and she
was still looking in and watching him so he half-decided to
try his hand at picking her up. That required an "en-
trance." He stood in the doorway, on the stair so that he
would be taller than she, not looking at her directly, but
pretending to be letting his eyes adjust to the sun.
"Fishhook in your mouth, Yank?" She was smiling, and
she had pretty buckteeth.
The accent was West Texas. He was surprised. He
would have guessed Maine with the Bean Emporium mail
order boots. "You cast a long fly for a Texas gal."
"Ah'm good at angling dry gulches. You're friendly for a
Yank. Here Ah've wasted an hour screwing up my courage
to speak to you and you don't even seem formidable."
"How did you know I was a Yank?"
"Your shoes, Shorty, as foot pinching as would please
any Yankee banker. If you hadn't looked like such a rug-
skinned Yank Ah would've had less compunctions about
speaking to you. Can Ah borrow five clams?"
"And here I thought you wanted me for my body."
"Shorty, two of you might interest me—one of them
sitting on the other's shoulders. Right now Ah'd settle for
the one with the wallet."
"A woman in distress, far from home."
"If Ah were, Ah might fall for your blue eyes and dark
hair." She smiled in a way to make him forget she was
gangly and bony of face. "But for truth Ah'm just having
one of those days when all don't go like it should. Ah can't
even find an American man who has a five spot to spare—on
top of my luggage being lost and my hotel never having
heard of me." Her eyes flashed like the sun off quartz.
' And the American Express office had a fire last night! If
you don't have five dollars for a desperate girl, do you
have a car?"
"I'm about to rent one."

34
Donald Kingsbury
"You're in luck. You're going my way." She took his
arm.
So Byron found himself driving bumpily over pebbles
outside Amman to an archaeological dig that was laying a
trench across an eight thousand year old village. Amanda
knew the whole staff and soon the director was making
polite calls on her behalf over the field telephone to try to
locate her belongings.
Sometime during the dawn of agriculture, the village
had been destroyed by fire. You could see it in the final
layer. Raiding? Carelessness? Violence? War? Who had
died and who had survived?
He stayed for a supper of rice and stew cooked on a
Coleman stove. Amanda told him where to go in Jordan
and what to see. He tried to seduce her by asking her
about herself, but it didn't work—instead of being flat-
tered, instead of becoming vulnerable, she brought out
photographs that, by Coleman lantern, looked like the
undulations of ordinary desert. It was a 'mound," she
said, "her mound," and she was sure there was a village
under it, maybe even a city. A person with trained eyes
could tell. Her eyes glowed.
The average life of a city, she said, was from 300 to 700
years. Then, disappearing from the face of the earth, it fell
victim of the same processes that embedded fossils in
sedimentary rock. Cities like Beirut were built by men
and doomed by men. Cities came and they went. On the
Day of Judgment, she rattled on, when the earth opened
up at God's command, thousands of marvelous cities would
appear and come to life before God snuffed them out
again. Oh, to be alive on the Day of Judgment when the
cobblers and tailors and craftsmen, priests, and slaves,
boiled from the earth to fill the temples and bazaars, to
man the walls!
While she talked, Byron lazily imagined old Samarkand,
devastated by the Genghis Khan, filling again with inde-
pendent traders, and—not far away—the villages of Af-
ghanistan, utterly destroyed by the Red Air Force, each
rising from its rubble with a thriving marketplace, silks,
and children, and busy farmers. He liked a woman who
could fill his mind with such pictures.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
35
She disappeared into the tent to bring out sleeping
bags. When she became silent, and when he had nothing
to add to her whimsy, they listened to the chirping desert
noises lying on their backs under the stars. "What do the
Soviets call their space city?" she asked in her pleasant
drawl.
"It's hardly a city. Just a couple of modules and maybe
within the year—maybe—the staff will increase to twelve
men."
She took his hand. "But that's the way all cities begin."
"They call it Mir," said Byron. "All the papers say that
means peace, but it's the old Russian name for a stockaded
commune. Defended-fort and peace are the same words in
Russian."
"When it dies, how long will it stay in the sky?"
"At that altitude? Maybe 300, maybe 700 years."
"You see!" she said.
He laughed.
"They'll build cities higher up, won't they?"
"Yeah."
"One of those might last itself as a ruin for eight thou-
sand years, like our little village here in Jordan. That
would be a dream for an archaeologist," she sighed.
"You have a long term view!"
"Jordan humbles a little ole Texas girl. What's San Anto-
nio? American cities all sprang up at about the same
time." She laughed with her flashing buckteeth. "They're
due to disappear. Boom!"
"Boom! Just like that. You're one of the pessimists, eh?"
"No, I'm not. I'm an optimist. The Black Plague came
and killed half the population of Europe. We were the
survivors and do we remember that the dying claimed that
the world was ending by God's Wrath? We buried them
and went on building cities because survivors are all incur-
able optimists. We survived didn't we? The dead aren't
around to caution us. So what's an atomic war? There'll be
new cities and new peoples and the archaeologists will
have a marvelous radioactive layer to date cultures by. Ah
just envies them. It's all the same in two thousand years.
Don't tell me it would be any worse than the holocaust
was to the Jews or the Mongol Hordes were to Islam."

36
Donald Kingsbury
Lost at night in the country outside Amman, relaxing
with a woman whose elan he instinctively understood,
with the dust and the breeze and the smell of spring, the
death of cities seemed very remote—but violence always
seems remote between crises. Those who take pleasure in
building palaces where none exist never anticipate de-
struction.
"And who will be around to build the new cities after a
nuclear war?" he asked.
"The spacefaring Russians. They just built Mir, remem-
ber? They aren't going to stop there. They'll be on the
moon and Mars when the war comes. The Russians in
Moscow will die, but the other Russians won't. God, imag-
ine being on Mars a hundred thousand years from now
and digging up the first Soviet colonies. What would we
find? Maybe a central Cultural Palace. Certainly busts of
Lenin!"

CHAPTER 6
Supreme excellence in warfare consists of subduing the
enemy without fighting.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The converted Russian Orthodox Cathedral stood alone
among the trees and the stream and grass, and if you
approached it from the right angle the parking lot was
invisible. It was built tall, on the floor plan of a stubby
cross, each face rising on four thin columns for six gener-
ous stories, there to flower into precisely three circular
arches. For many years it had served as a warehouse, and
for many more it had been abandoned. Now its five cupo-
las gleamed, the stonework had been carefully restored,
the grass mowed, the bushes tended.
Rebuilt inside, the Cathedral housed offices and librar-
ies, conference and training rooms designed for a special
kind of bureaucrat. A secretary waited in front of the
elevator. She watched the whole Soviet delegation to the
disarmament talks walk out of the main conference hall en
masse, heading for the alcove where there was a spread of
cakes and a pot of coffee, grumbling among themselves
that further discussion with the United States delegation
was useless.
The chief Soviet delegate poured coffee into a fine china
cup and added sugar, then cream from an elegant stainless
steel pitcher. He paused a moment before slipping a small
37

38
Donald Kingsbury
slice of black-forest cake onto his saucer. He spoke in
English. "The American proposal was as fine a compro-
mise between the opposing positions of the State Depart-
ment and the Pentagon as I've ever heard!" he muttered
wryly.
"Did you see the lackey's face when we walked out?"
grinned the associate.
The Chief Soviet delegate made a spastic motion of
dismissal. He was handsome enough to be a model for
men's clothing—as long as he didn't move. His walking
and his arm motions, even the way he tilted his head
when he thought, had an alien rhythm that suggested
either mild brain damage or a person whose attention was
so immersed in his thoughts that little was left over to
control the body. "Actually I got us the hell out of there
because I noticed he had eight more pages of that stuff still
to deliver! Probably spent all night writing it! I hear Sam
Brontz hired him fresh out of Harvard."
"It's getting too brainy for me around here," grumbled
another delegate. "I feel intimidated."
"I'll have forged papers from the Moscow Institute of
International Relations ready for you tomorrow."
"Hey, with a grin like that, Limon, you'll never be
mistaken for a Russian."
"Grins are the new party line," snarled Limon Barnes.
"Crunch! you're having everybody for breakfast today!"
"Brontz is driving in to put me on the griddle this
afternoon. I'm missing something in all this arms reduc-
tion talk simulation—it's not going well—God, it is as bad
as the real thing. I need some time to think. We'll let our
Harvard friend sweat it out for a while through diplomatic
channels. Tass can say some horrible things about him."
He paused, frowning. "Why don't we just confuse the hell
out of him? We could have the KGB pick him up for
overnight questioning about eleven tonight. How about it?
We're short on simulation training for our KGB agents."
"Sure. I can have a Lavrenti Beria team ready by eleven.
We'll work Harvard over all night in relays. How about a
slander-against-the-Soviet-State charge? Nothing too heavy
the first time. Just a warm up."
"Fine," said Limon.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
39
"I hope Brontz didn't forget to tell the boy he doesn't
have a nine-to-five job."
Limon enjoyed his little walks through the somber church
and down the circular stairway into the library where he
kept his office. It was such a preposterous idea, this as-
sumption that one can train an American to think like a
Russian—but twenty times as fast. Perhaps it was all illu-
sion; certainly it was fun.
The Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Massachusetts, at
the time of its greatest need, had been taken over by the
industrial training firm of Stephens, Matthews, and Ben-
net who were looking for a large country home in which to
run their world famous negotiation seminars. Bought out
by Sam Brontz for the Shantech Conglomerate, and con-
verted into a Soviet studies institute, all of SMB soon fell
under the rubric of "those guys at the Cathedral of Saint
Marx the Benefactor."
Matthews was still on the Board and still directed the
negotiations study group, but Brontz had elevated twenty-
three year old Limon Barnes to the command of the game
simulations, much to Limon's astonishment. He had never
expected to find a man in high capitalist circles who could
appreciate him. He supposed that he should have. Hadn't
kings always chosen their jokers with the same care used
to select a mistress?
Limon was an unlikely choice and his first invitation to
the formal dinner table of Sam Brontz had unnerved him.
He had grown up with strange people, fat boys and skinny
boys and misfits, and no girls. He had had a very good
social life playing games in neighborhood basements but it
was never a normal social life. It had certainly not in-
cluded girls like Linda Brontz, born to make men feel
awkward. And it had certainly not included crazy old men
like Sam Brontz who panicked if he spilled gravy on his
tie.
Daughter Linda had never heard of Dungeons & Drag-
ons and he made a terrible mistake to allude to it while
passing her the celery—Limon had grown up playing D &
D and tended to talk about it too much. She asked him if
he had ever read Fitzgerald. Of course he had read
Fitzgerald—he just couldn't remember any!

40
Donald Kingsbury
It was more fun being a bishop in the Society for Cre-
ative Anachronism and disappearing annually to the wars
in Pennsylvania where the losing side of armored warriors,
having been disposed of by bribery, noble combat, or
perfidious chicanery, was always awarded Pittsburgh. But
how could he tell her about that? She had never even
been to Boskone—and she lived in Boston! She didn't
even know that Boskone was a science fiction convention
named after an evil empire of Doc Smith's Lensmen series.
Brontz's daughter wrote on a typewriter which she half-
smilingly hinted had once been owned by James Miche-
ner. Limon had skipped typewriters, breaking his word
processing teeth on Electric Pencil after having scrounged
one of the first CP/M computers out of his allowance
money. She was still getting allowance money. By the
time he was eighteen he had already made his first half-a-
million dollars in the games business, a feat which allowed
him to retire from the real world for a month or so before
being trapped by Brontz and forced to eat roast beef and
cranberry sauce and chat with a girl.
Barnes never liked to talk much except when he was
playing games or designing them. His first conversation of
substance with Sam Brontz, after many strange initial trials,
was about a game Sam wanted to create. Even then they
couldn't understand each other.
Limon was a Fantasy Freak. His idea of a good game
was to sneak off from battle on a moonlit night and go
skinny-dipping without his chain mail in the company of a
bunch of tree worshipers.
Sam, on the other hand, thought of games as simulations
of reality. Unlike Limon, Sam had nothing against living in
reality—it was just that simulations of reality were cheaper.
Think of where Hitler would be now if his generals had
learned to master the rules of the Apple II games, Eastern
Front and Stalingrad. So far as Limon could figure out,
Sam wanted a game to teach Americans how to win while
playing Nuclear Face-off. Why he wanted such a game,
Limon did not know. He had never learned to understand
his boss. So far as he could tell, Sam didn't even think of
the Russians as the major obstacle—the Soviets-were just a

The Moon Goddess and the Son
41
monster guarding a room on the way to gold in the caves
below.
Limon brought down from his office shelf the apparatus
of his new board game, Face-off, and laid it out over his
desk a bit nervously. It didn't look like much but it was
the first real product his group had been able to get out
that played well. This was the eighth version and there
were no bugs left. He was particularly proud of the unique
way the game assigned character attributes, the simple
style of starting play, and the very complex level of master
play. He felt he could defend it.
His intercom screen went on and one of the other
secretaries rushed in to tell him Sam had arrived, but
when she turned to rush out again, bumped into Sam who
wasn't bothering to wait on protocol.
"Well, Limon," he said, and Limon knew instantly that
he had a disaster on his hands. Sam was wearing his look
of stern affability. A silk scarf protected his neck, he had
on walking shoes and a pedometer at his belt. "My doctor
is into making me exercise, so I thought I'd take you off for
a walk in the woods for our little man-to-man talk."
Man-to-man talk! Jesiis! thought Limon.
In the woods they conversed about orioles. That re-
minded Sam of a story about fighting blackbirds. Limon
said nothing, moving with the kind of spastic walk that
overtook him in moments of stress.
"Your game is a race game," said Sam. He paused.
Limon cringed. The old Brontz gun was out and aimed.
Shoot! Shoot!
"However, Shantech is not Parker Brothers," Sam paused
again.
I can't stand it! thought Limon. "Okay, I resign."
Sam looked at the young man disapprovingly. "You'll be
given a few more months to do a better job. I have
complete faith in your ability to come up with what we
need. Let me explain myself again to you."
"The game plays, sir," said Limon, cringing as he heard
himself speak that final word of deference.
"Of course it plays. Linda and I had a great time with it
last night. Unfortunately entertainment isn't our goal. This
is the real world, Limon. Like it or not, you're stuck in it."

42
Donald Kingsbury
"I've managed to avoid it successfully."
"You can't avoid it The United States and the Soviet
Union are at war. If you have been watching violence on
TV for as long as you can remember, you don't realize that
fact; your generation no longer understands anything about
violence. The bombs aren't going off—we are still alive—so
naturally this must be the peace."
"No board game is going to change anything, sir."
"Sonofabitch, I didn't ask you for a board game! Do you
understand bureaucracies? Those men running the Ameri-
can and Soviet missile centers are the finest we have.
They damn well better be. Our chosen defense policy
doesn't allow for a single mistake on either side. But
bureaucracies age—as our mutual boss, Charles Bond,
likes to remind us. Competence inexorably erodes. One
hundred years after France produced Napoleon, it pro-
duced the generals who fought the First World War. The
competence of the Soviet and American missile commands
is temporary. A single unmanaged flaw in the implemen-
tation of Mutually Assured Destruction assures our mutual
destruction. Such a defense policy is totally unacceptable."
"Matthews makes a very good case when he says that
the Soviets don't have the negotiating skills to change."
"Nonsense! Why are you in charge of my operation here
and not Matthews? We can force the Soviets to alter their
defense policy. It's a game. Force. That's what I'm selling,
Limon. Force! Not negotiation."
"Force?"
"Force! And I'm not suggesting anything genteel like
checkmate. I'm talking about ramming my fist into the
board and scattering the pieces like shrapnel."
"It's an approach which might make the generals in the
Urals just a mite nervous, sir."
"Up the generals in the Urals. A coward who demon-
strates to the world his bravery by shooting at peasants
from inside his tank, as in Afghanistan, is always a nervous
wreck—just like we were in Vietnam. You didn't under-
stand me when I spoke of force. Did I say nuke the
Soviets? You use force to dig up a weed but you don't
nuke it. What kind of force would the Soviets accept?
Think."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
43
"They're not going to accept any kind of force, sir. It
goes with the paranoia."
"Wrong. A while ago they were refusing to negotiate,
confident behind their superior nuclear armada. Since then
SDI research has located grave vulnerabilities in their
strike force and they've changed radically—they are now
proposing the complete abolition of nuclear weapons and
to the last Russian they think it is their idea. We can force
them into a defense policy that has a fail-safe mode, espe-
cially if we continue to make them feel that it is their idea,
but especially if it is a real defense."
"How?"
"How the hell should I know? That's what I'm hiring
you to find out for me—and you give me a board game!"
"You want me to set up a role-playing game that recre-
ates the mind of a Soviet decision-maker so that Shantech
can learn how to direct it?"
"Exactly."
"I resign."
"The losers of the war in Pennsylvania get Pittsburgh,
remember?" said a smiling Sam as he encouragingly slapped
young Limon on the back.

CHAPTER 7
Though one skilled in war can arrange to protect his
people from attack, he cannot cause an enemy encamp-
ment to become vulnerable. Defense is the art of protect-
ing what you have. But victory is won by attack. Therefore
the skillful commander takes up a position from which he
cannot be defeated and attacks only when his enemy makes
himself vulnerable.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
From a distance and to the left, too far away to be a part
of the conversation and too near to be wholly out of it, the
stranger watched the physicist and his student in argu-
ment. Sam Brontz had never met the legendary Synmann
before.
Joseph Synmann was doodling a mushroom cloud in the
shape of the green-capped Amanita phalloides, his eyes
downcast inside balding hair that dribbled to his shoulders
like a waterfall in August. He was listening, not happily, to
this graduate student expound, all the while studiously
drawing tiny faces at the base of his mushroom sketch-
cartoon Japanese faces with slant eyes—until the exact
moment of impatience when his doodle ran out of yellow
paper. He interrupted the boy's speech so suddenly that
his lawn chair wobbled in protest.
"Unfortunately we are not rational!" Synmann could not
stand sophistry—and he so classified an argument that
44

The Moon Goddess and the Son
45
demanded man's rational nature to overcome man's irra-
tionality. Man was either rational or he was not.
"If we are not rational, then how do we build bridges?"
asked the student.
"Building bridges is your definition of rational?"
"Yes."
"All right; let me accept your definition and we'll work
from there. Then 'rational' in the sense that you have been
using the word is too restricted. Bridges get built because
of logical process—but they also get built because of things
like graft . . . curiosity . . . men impressing their mis-
tresses . . . greed . . . you name it. Men are never just
logical. They've been known to blow up the bridges they
build!"
"Jesus! you run off on tangents when I'm trying to make
a point! I'm talking about the creative-constructive thing
in man. It can conquer the demented things he does if we
educate and encourage it!"
"Bullshit! You're assuming that rationality is something
akin to mathematical logic."
"It is."
"It is not. We are rational—your definition—we are able
to build bridges—only because we have the daily capacity
to deal with self-generated inconsistencies that would im-
mobilize the best system of logic known to science. Logic
can't handle inconsistency; humans can. Humans can tran-
scend the best logician."
"Don't get supernatural on me!"
"Supernatural? Ask the artificial intelligence people what
happens when you try to build a thinking machine that is
confined to the axioms of mathematical logic! The damn
things don't have basic common sense!"
"Humans are destroyed by their inconsistency!"
"No. It is logic that is destroyed by inconsistency in its
basic axioms; humans apparently thrive on inconsistency.
But we pay a price for being at home with our inconsisten-
cies. The price we pay is that we are fools, which is what
you are objecting to. The reward is that We sometimes
transcend the bureaucratic mind which is rigidly logical in
the very sense you so admire." Synmann snorted, and his
long hair flew away from his head like from an explosion.

46
Donald Kingsbury
"You can't equate logic with creativity. Logic is only one of
the tools that a creative person uses."
He now noticed that his unwanted guest from Shantech
was listening in on the argument, evaluating, appraising.
Sam Brontz would have to be dealt with—but not before
the barbecue. Joseph Synmann turned to Brontz, politely.
"We are arguing about the rationality of holding a knife
to the throat of a neighbor's young daughter to protect
ours, while the neighbor is holding a knife to the throat of
our daughter to protect his. My young university friend
maintains that since we are rational we must notice the
irrationality of our act and thereby cease being irrational"
—his voice was now sweet with sarcasm—"since no con-
sciously rational beings have ever been knowingly caught
in an irrational act—at least not since the discovery of
LSD and pot."
"Oh, Father," said a nearby young woman who was
mixing the salad on the lawn table, "nobody is holding a
knife to my throat. Now why don't you behave and leave
Darryl alone."
"We were discussing the arms race—not your lily white
throat," said a miffed Darryl.
"The arms race? Well, that's one way of putting it,"
muttered Synmann. "I thought we were discussing how
many angels in skull-masks might dance in front of a
nuclear power plant to end war for all time."
"I don't believe we've met," said Darryl deferentially,
holding out his hand to Sam Brontz.
Synmann took the opportunity to introduce them. "Sam
is an arms merchant who wants to buy my company for
Charlie Bond's group."
Darryl recoiled. The daughter stopped beheading toma-
toes in mid-motion. "Father! You aren't going to sell your
company to a defense contractor! You're a hippy!"
Before Sam Brontz could protest, a smiling Joseph led
him over to the barbecue pit. "I like to needle the little
buggers," he whispered. "What other pleasures do I have?"
"Inch-thick steaks," said Brontz, mesmerized by the
tray in front of him.
"It pays to have a wife whose father was a German
butcher. By their glow the coals look about ready." He

The Moon Goddess and the Son
47
laid the grill in place across the bricks. "So why is Mr.
Bond sending you around? Are you his chief enforcer?"
"Charlie didn't send me. I'm playing empire-builder all
on my own. That saves him time."
"I was wondering how rough the play gets if I don't like
your offer?"
"There has been no offer. Most of my hunches don't pay
off, Dr. Synmann. We look at many companies for every
one we buy."
"Good. I hope that means I'm safe."
"Your company as it stands today is a very bad buy. You
will be making us an offer."
^Like hell I will!"
"You will have to make the offer because we won't.
Bond never, never gets involved in a hostile take-over. He
thinks a hostile take-over makes for bad business. It does.
All of the conglomerates built by hostile take-overs are in
trouble."
"So you want me to make you an offer, eh?" Synmann
grinned. "You could put your whole cash flow at my
disposal. How's that?"
"Unreasonable. We like to think of ourselves as a mu-
tual self-help society. We provide you with those necessi-
ties that you are too small to provide for yourself, and you
provide us with those things which we are too big to
understand. What are you offering for our cash flow?"
"I'm a good cook."
"Make mine rare."
"Then you'll have to wait. I start the well-dones first.
Who's for well-done! Darryl?"
;;Yeah."
"How many mediums?"
Four hands went up and he began to lay out the steaks
over the heat. "There has to be an angle, Brontz."
"There is."
"I did some fast homework on Shantech last night—and
accelerators, superconductivity, proton-busters, maglev
trains and the like don't seem to be your line."
"We sub-contracted for you on the Ohio job."
"You know what I mean. The angle."
"Charlie Bond likes brains. That's what he buys and

48
Donald Kingsbury
that's why he's been successful. I do his technical staff
evaluations. I'm good. I know it would take a hundred
men to replace the five of you. None of you know a damn
thing about running a company but technically . . . well,
I'm amazed."
"Specialized brains don't help your bottom line when
the bottom has dropped out of your line."
"Change your line. There's been some big changes in
defense policy. Men like you are in demand."
"Yeah. The Air Force is taking on the National Guard
about bolt-thread pitch standards. Yeah, yeah. I'm not
interested."
"I'm talking about SDI and you know it. General Han-
son gave me your name."
"So he put you onto me, eh? Yeah, I talked to him.
Don't forget that was after my LTSM fiasco. I thought we
were going under and I was a little bit wild in the head. I
was overselling an idea—trying to cash in on the ICBM
killer craze."
"You sold General Hanson."
"He's not a physicist."
"He's a cracker-jack engineer."
"Generals slurp in the trough of every super-idea they
can stick their muzzles into. This one's a Crazy Eddie. I
was out of my gourd. "
"Then you're one of those who don't think we are bright
enough to defend ourselves against ICBMs?"
One by one, Synmann turned the steaks over with a
vicious flip. Fireballs leaped upward around the sudden
fat drippings. "Of course we can defend ourselves against
ICBMs! When Washington developed the Mutually As-
sured Destruction strategy—was that back in the fifties?
—there wasn't any way to knock out a rocket. Yesterday's
technology supports yesterday's thinking. And, of course,
there are bureaucrats trained in MAD who can't make the
effort to think any other way. Today it's a new game.
Jesus, did you see that latest infra-red detector with silicon
brains?"
"Then you have faith that a defense is possible—but no
faith in your own idea?"
"I'm a super-rational man," grumbled Synmann laconi-

The Moon Goddess and the Son	49
cally. "Many things are possible—even my own brain-
storms—it's the inevitable cycle of countermeasures that
discourages me. Take medieval chain mail. It was defeated
with a better projectile. And then they built better armor.
But somebody noticed that the armor was so heavy that a
pikeman could pull a knight off his horse and slaughter the
helpless man inside. Only after many innovative cycles did
armor become obsolete." He sighed. "How many itera-
tions of technical perfection do we have to go through
before nuclear weapons become obsolete? I don't know.
What's in this racket for you? More money?"
"You'll find that you and I have more in common than
you think," said Brontz. "I know your position on defense."
"I doubt it." Synmann was growing hostile. "My posi-
tion is very straightforward and very unpopular with both
sides. I believe in being armed to the teeth but I'm also
one of the active detractors of a defense strategy whose
failure mode creates dust clouds that ..."
"... will cause a fimbulwinter," quoted Brontz. "I read
your paper. I quote it all the time. I loved it."
In Norse mythology the gods, with the last remnants of
mankind, are doomed to die at Ragnarok after three years
of a sunless fimbulwinter brought on by wickedness and
bitter warfare.
Later that evening, the Shantech man examined a model
of a battle station that hung from a thread in Dr. Synmann's
psychedelic study. Toothpicks formed both the barrel and
the mirror mount that were slung below a band-aid box
which supported plastic perfume bottles serving as fuel-
tanks and supply modules for the two-man crew, all appro-
priately sprayed mauve and yellow to match the rest of the
room.
The papers on the desk overflowed onto the floor, and
three computers were stacked on top of each other, the
lower one no longer used. Pieces of a homemade mass-
driver hung from the ceiling beside an extensive collection
of Ukrainian Easter eggs. The startlingly large winding of
an unused electromagnet provided a stool to reach the
upper layers of the bookshelf.
Since all the chairs were filled with floppies and open
books and various journals—one of them so full that it was

50
Donald Kingsbury
topped by a dictionary to keep the papers and disks from
sliding away—Synmann sat on the floor to open out his
drawings. He extracted a file from between two magazines
and opened that, too.
"You've got to know before we start, that this is all just
back-of-the-envelope crap. We're ready for a real study, of
course, and it looks good. It's not tomorrow's weapon."
After only a moment's hesitation, Brontz joined the
long-haired physicist on the floor, tucking up his trousers
carefully so they wouldn't crease. General Hanson had
told him that just looking at the stuff would knock his
socks off.

CHAPTER 8
How lonely sits the city once so full of people!
None come to the appointed feasts,
All her gates are desolate and
Her maidens have been dragged away.
The enemy has stretched out his hands
Over all her precious things.
He has destroyed the palaces;
Laid in ruins the strongholds.
Hear how I groan; there is none to comfort me—
The Lord has trodden, as in a wine press,
The virgin daughters of the city,
Crushed the young men.
My priests and elders perished in the city
Seeking food to revive their strength.
Infants and babes faint in the streets of the city
And my eyes are spent with weeping.
Is this nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look and see: Is any sorrow like my sorrow
Which the Lord has inflicted
On His day of fierce anger?
51

52
Donald Kingsbury
Vast as the sea is the ruin;
The gates have sunk into the ground;
The law is no more.
Who can restore our cityP
The Lamentations of Jeremiah
Byron's rented Toyota lacked a digital clock on its
glowing dashboard—and so the seasons and the century
had to be read, instead, from signs along the route.
Behind a truck loaded with refrigerators, and thus, he
supposed, still somewhere in the twentieth century, he
drove into the mountains through vineyards, spring wheat,
neat slopes of olive trees. Fragments and eddies of other
times kept tempting him off the highway. Once for a
giddy moment, when a herd of goats crossed the road,
he was lost even as to which millennium he travelled.
But the place he was always sure of—that was constant—
this was Gilead.
He drifted. A hundred years spanned one valley and
a thousand the next. He saw a horseback-mounted cru-
sader riding rapidly along a ridge ahead of the dust
cloud raised by frantic hooves, perhaps a scout for King
Baldwin on hifr reprisal raid against Toghtekin. A Moslem
troop laid out camp in the shelter of a great outcropping
of rock. Deeper in the past he found a refugee band
of Jews of the Christian schism who had fled from the
Roman sack of Jerusalem and now, safely beyond the
Jordan in the lands of the Decapolis, gazed back at their
lost homeland.
And then, beyond Hadrian's triple-arched gateway, over-
looking the ruins of Jerash, he came across a twentieth
century outpost of the Time Patrol. A young policeman,
disguised as a Jordanian, was on duty selling tickets for a
nearby Sound and Light Show Festival as well as tickets
for various Time Tours. Twentieth century ceramic urinals
were available for free beyond hydraulic doors that closed
automatically.
Here the armies of Alexander the Great camped and
pissed before founding the city of Jerash about 332 BC
where it thrived as a member of the Hellenistic explo-

The Moon Goddess and the Son
53
sion, prospered under the Roman occupation, survived
the Jewish rebellions—until a shifting of trade-routes
reduced its vigor. Declining, the city was mortally woun-
ded by the Persian and Arab invasions, and finally died
during an assault by crusaders, to be claimed by the
sand and abandoned for eight hundred years. In 1878
a small colony of refugees fleeing from Russian imper-
ialism began a new cycle beside the mound of the
old.
Byron wandered through the marble columns of the
Roman ruins but his feet did not feel the bleached flag-
stones and he stared blankly at the Byzantine churches,
not seeing the past with its ghosts of traders and cara-
vans, not seeing the Saudi tourists all about him, or
the Italian tour group, or the British couple who were
paying to be enlightened. Time-winds had taken possession
of his soul.
He was seeing the future.
In a mesmerized trance he was transported from the
ruins of Jerash to the ruins of the Washington D.C. of a
millennium hence—a city vandalized, its roofs fallen in, its
cellars buried under silt and dust, some of its buildings
partially restored. Who were those shimmer-coated tour-
ists who poked about curiously and from where did they
come? What was that building which had lost its dome?
and who the headless man gazing out over the city from
his weathered chair?
It was a strange and alien future—frightening even.
Byron tried to fight his way back into Gilead, tried to
remember that he was standing in front of the ruined
Temple of the Moon Goddess, surrounded by the power
of the patroness of Jerash.
Artemis! he cried.
But she did not come to rescue him. Her century was
gone and the twentieth century, where wisps of her pull
remained in old stone columns, was itself as remote as
fragile silk to the travelling mind of Byron. Then he found
that his body was not in Jerash . . .
. . . but was slogging over the dunes of empty Riyadh
half-a-thousand years after the oil was gone. An erratic
breeze sifted sand through weathered concrete high-rises,

54
Donald Kingsbury
sometimes burying and sometimes uncovering the march-
ing white arches of the airfield. It howled through un-
used places, patiently polishing the museum pieces left
in its trust. Two small brown archaeologists, hunched
over collection trays, were measuring their find of Pepsi
bottles, distraught because they had no theory to ex-
plain why the old Coke culture had not penetrated this
far into the desert. He tried to tell them but he had
no voice.
The future and the past.
Dizzyingly the sun rose in the west and set in the
east, releasing him from the future. The sun had an
alliance with the moon. He staggered away from the
Temple of Artemis, back to the ceramic urinals of the
time-station at Jerash, staggered out to the parking lot
and his machine. He put the key in the lock and turned
on the motor. It hummed. The sun flickered three-hundred
thousand times.
After an eternal journey, after missing his target twice
and circling through back roads, the crusader's fortress at
Kerak appeared, majestically perched like a crown on the
hilltop high above the sloping Dead Sea Valley. He hid his
Toyota behind an outcropping of reddish rock and thought
for a moment before changing into an appropriate persona.
An air force officer in these times when only Satan could
fly would be highly suspect. And so he entered the walled
town like any foot soldier, greeting the mailed-men on
duty, looking for a place to slake his thirst from cisterns
that could hold out against siege.
The cross-vaulting of the castle led from room to larger
room, to galleries, to stables with war horses and the smell
of manure, lookouts, walls, apartments furnished with stolen
silks. Kerak the Magnificent was one of a string of fortresses
built along the eastern caravan routes to defend the Frankish
conquest of Jerusalem and capture wealth for the greater
glory of Christ, patron saint of European murderers and
scoundrels.
Formidable, impregnable, Kerak would fail within fifty
years—alone at the end.
Jerusalem fell first.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
55
Standing on the high battlements above the awesome
valley of death, looking out to the horizon where Jerusa-
lem must be, Byron of the United States Air Force judi-
ciously changed personalities from Frank to Syrian. The
time-winds had shifted, bringing with them Syrian warriors.
Fortresses can be bypassed by war, they fall to battle, to
time, to pillage, to neglect. Could the vile barbarian infi-
dels ever have held the Jerusalem they had taken by
massacring all its Moslems and by burning the eity's Jews
in their synagogue? What frontier fort is that strong? Van-
ity and greed make poor mortar. Fortress walls crumble at
the command of Allah, opening the inner heart-rooms to
be purified by righteous strength.
Before the final siege was over the Christian defenders
had begun to sell their women to the Moslem enemy in
exchange for food.
Days passed for Byron and the time-wind blew more
centuries away on its wings. By Land Rover he visited the
eastern desert palaces of the Umayyad Caliphs—ruins,
only hinting of the pleasures of the falcon and cheetah
hunts, horse races, poets, dancers, musicians. Time took
him as far north as the black basalt necropolis of Umm el
Jimal, and south as far as the Byzantine mosaics of Madaba.
Amanda found him again at a party in Amman in a room
of beaten brass and somber drapes, standing beside a bust
of the Roman Emperor Claudius. Byron and Amanda,
time tourists, awed by eternity, were glad to see and
touch each other's solid American fingers, wholly indiffer-
ent to the century of their meeting.
"Ah just can't believe your blue eyes, Mr. Raven Hair."
He gazed up into her specked ones. "Did you ever find
your luggage?" Claudius prodded him with a plaster nose.
"No. Ah think my bags all got shipped to Shanghai."
"Which dynasty?"
"Come to Petra with me," she said impulsively. "Ah
have a hankering to show you Petra in its heyday."
So on impulse he took her to Petra.
Once they were past Ma'an, the road swung into the
hills over a rock-strewn waste of russet dust that folded
across the dried up wadi beds until the asphalt thread
vanished into a shimmering stoniness. Amanda had insisted

56
Donald Kingsbury
on driving down during the cool of night but instead they
had spent the night together in Amman and lingered over
breakfast. Now the sun was high and cruel. The bleached
land of ochre and shadow broke away into a deepening
violet until the distant horizon vibrated with cobalt fire.
The land rose. They were moving up into the mountains
that rimmed the great rift valley which, in its northern
extension, cradled the Dead Sea and the River Jordan and
the Sea of Galilee, and in its southern extension became
the Gulf of Aquaba. The road twisted and climbed, too
narrow to be comfortable. Amanda drove like a mad Arab
to the summit of the Shara range.
"There," she said.
From behind a dynamited cutting, the land fell away
into vast ethereal panorama. The white walls of the village
Elji lay below, embedded in trees and patches of vegeta-
tion. Terraced fields wound around the hilly contours.
Farther downslope the barriers of rock that hid Petra from
the world crouched beneath the gaze of bleak Gebel Haroun.
Like a resting lion annoyed at the flea of Aaron's tomb in
his mane, Gebel Haroun straddled the horizon, warning of
the Wadi Arabah flatlands and the inhospitable Negev
beyond.
The way-station to the Nabatean time-zone was another
outpost maintained by the Jordanian Time Police of the
twentieth century. Travellers received the usual handbills
telling them tactfully not to interfere in the past, suggest-
ing that qualified guides might be helpful, and sternly
informing them that overnight visits at the site would not
be tolerated.
After partying all night and driving down the King's
Highway under the blazing sun, they were in too tired a
mood for an immediate field trip. All they wanted was a
bed. The bed was too short for six foot tall Amanda. She
sat on it cross-legged, breaking a round orange and feed-
ing slices to Byron, smiling across the whole of her bony
face.
Later, in the semi-dark of pulled shades, her nose snug-
gled under his arms, she muttered that Americans smelled
good. He patted her back, pleased to be with a woman
who didn't smoke.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
57
"My husband wouldn't approve of you. But don't you
worry about meeting him. He thinks a trip across the
border to New Mexico is travelling. Once he went to
Phoenix."
"You didn't tell me you were married."
"Cause you didn't tell me you were married. Ah know
the difference. Ah know you've lived with a woman. Sin-
gle men don't make love like you do." Amanda punched
through the bottom of the sheet so her feet could hang out
over the mattress. "What's her name?"
"Junie just bought me a house in New Hampshire. I
looked Up Stonefield on a USAF map I have. Have you
heard of Stonefield? I think she wants me to raise chickens."
"My old man thinks that something three hundred years
old must be an antique. Once he found a buffalo bone
from the Great Extinction and thought it was a fossil!"
Hours later, after the sun had set and the night had
passed away leaving only the hardiest of the desert stars
still out, after eating a dozen oranges and talking about
flying and digging and weird relatives and the philosophy
of freedom, after flirting and pulling the mattress down on
the floor so she could sleep stretched out—all behind
locked doors and pulled shades—they were ready for Petra.
Donkeys and horses and guides were available but she
took him out along the trail by foot while the dawn sky was
still purple. "I want you to see the Khasneh right after
dawn."
"And what is the Khasneh?"
"An Awesomeness Who Crushes All Ego. You'll see."

CHAPTER 9
How did it ever come about that mankind embraces
vulnerability as his only salvation—working by day and
by night to perfect hair triggers that, with the first twitch,
will incinerate him to a glorious martyrdom? This, our
sagacious Press tells us, is a security too sacred to touch.
Any change might cause a twitch!
DMK (1984)
The chief operating officer of Shantech had been think-
ing about his son-in-law all day, making phone calls, test-
ing his contacts. Daughters were a damn nuisance, but it
was pleasant, once in a while, to pull off a spectacular
hat-trick for them.
So far Charlie Bond had not been able to do much.
With a major Soviet space station a sudden reality on top
of the failure of Challenger, NASA's own goals had been
thrown into the confusion of rumor—a typical American
crisis. Nobody knew where the United States was going,
or what would happen—but everybody had a theory and
everyone knew someone they were sure would know more.
Finding Byron a Stateside job in the space program in
the middle of such confusion was improbable. The elder
Charlie did not see a way of pulling his son-in-law out of
Saudi Arabia. As usual, he would have to ask Sam Brontz
to handle the matter between all the other things his aide
was doing.
58

The Moon Goddess and the Son
59
It was already past dinnertime. Eating sometimes got in
the way of work. He picked up the phone and ordered a
plate of hamburgers and salad sent up while he reviewed
the Synmann file. An odd man, that one.
Military contracts per se held no interest for Bond—for
one, weapons that threatened Russian civilians to Make
the World Safe for American Democracy while offering up
American women and children as front line sand-bags did
not appeal to his chivalrous side. It did not look like a
sensible investment of capital.
Bond was no pacifist—but there was defense and there
was double-speak defense. A "defense" whose keystone
was the holding of Russian school-children hostage in or-
der to restrain the behavior of a Soviet aristocracy which
thought nothing of bombing and maiming and starving
children in Afghanistan was somehow no better than that
which it "defended" against. It lacked moral elegance.
As a fighter pilot Charlie had napalmed "helpless" Chi-
nese soldiers in Korea, and had been curious enough
about the consequences of his act to take a truck ride up to
the front to look over the blackened corpses. God, through
Jesus, had talked to him that day, and he had come to
some firm conclusions. He knew what he meant by defense.
Bond was sure that a people with their hands gripped
around a dead-man switch while they thought, in unison,
"I'll destroy you if you destroy me," would not last more
than two generations as a moral people. Who could, year
after year, stay ethical if he was so stupid that the only way
he could think of to defend himself was to threaten indis-
criminate murder?
And so Bond was fascinated by the idea of a real defense
against ICBMs, one that did not solve the dilemma by
advocating the murder of Soviet children. Somewhere there
had to be a Christian way to resist the fleets of Armageddon.
He had vague space battlefields in his mind—laser-
snouted generators beaming the skins off missiles as fast as
they rose out of their silos; little robot mines in the black-
ness of space, clicking away, spotting a school of missiles
sweeping past, and launching interceptor torpedoes.
Sitting behind his desk, he became a fighter pilot again,
commanding a spaceplane out there, steering with his

60
Donald Kingsbury
hand on the extensor lamp, cleaning up what the robots
couldn't get. He made roaring noises in his throat, his
tongue vibrating like a heavy weapon. And the Soviet
children stayed safe even under the rain of broken missiles
over American cities because the defense was so formida-
ble that there was no need for retaliation.
His swivel chair slowly turned as he watched his mental
images with a fixated fascination, knowing that every sin-
gle invader he let through would mean the loss of an
American city. Pow! It broke into pieces! Pow! Another
one! Zap! They crumpled and flared crazily down through
a hundred miles of atmosphere to the very bottom of his
skull.
The chimes rang. Ah, the hamburgers! That was quick.
But it was Sam Brontz.
"I got in early, eh? Surprised you? It surprised me."
Sam threw his briefcase under the table beside the tropi-
cal plants while flopping onto the white pillows of the long
couch. "That pilot of yours flies in over the tree-tops like a
cruise missile. You should put him on your Florida
smuggling-run if only you had one. He's wasting his tal-
ents flying out of Boston for a staid old gentleman like
you."
"He's my charity case. I rescued him from a grounder's
life after he flunked out of the USAF's fighter pilot train-
ing school."
"God save us from charity! I would have been here
earlier but I needed an hour at my hotel to shower away
the sweat and clean out the leaves caught between my
toes. That sonofabitch navigates his airplane by reading
road signs! And the ugly sonofabitch is nearsighted!"
Sam let the white pillows engulf him while he stretched
his freshly shined shoes deep into the pile of the rug.
"I have some hamburgers coming," said Bond. "You
want one?"
"Do you think my stomach has settled out from making
that bomb run?"
"Before it does, I have a nauseous favor to ask of you—
Sam old friend of mine. It has to do with nepotism. My
son-in-law. You'll have to use Krantz to help him."
"Which Krantz? Louis Krantz from NASA?"

The Moon Goddess and the Son
61
"Your old high school buddy."
"Lou's honest—which is good for the shuttle program
and pretty rough on nepotism."
Bond grinned. "I'm talking about nepotism, not dis-
honesty. All relatives aren't incompetent. We both know
the magnitude of the Soviet space drive and the starved
US orbital delivery capacity. It won't be long before we
are forced into an upgraded shuttle program. And NASA is
losing some astronauts because of Challenger. They'll need
crews. Why not Byron?"
"He's that good? Really? I can't sell Krantz a lemon. I
can't afford to sell Krantz a lemon."
"Byron is a phenomenal pilot; cool and disciplined and
fast. He's never had an accident. He even had an F-15 fail
on him one time and he brought it in for an emergency
landing undamaged. His record is perfect. He's picked up
an engineering degree in his spare time. He qualifies."
"Then why does he need me?"
"A lot of people qualify." Charlie Bond was still grin-
ning. "It's nepotism that gives the edge."
"Is Junie behind your fervor?"
"How can I resist my daughter? She wants him home."
"Does she know there's no difference between Saudi
Arabia and the moon?"
"No, and don't tell her. The moon she remembers fondly.
It lit up her way at night when she was afraid of the dark,
and space research is something she thinks is done on
Earth to make jobs because her stock portfolio tells her so.
Now do me a favor and speak to Krantz."
' You can't give your daughter everything she wants."
"I'm not. Junie wants an engineering job for Byron, but
it's not in the cards. He's a pilot. I'm giving her what's
possible."
Brontz sighed. "Have Ginny send me his file. I'll think
of an angle."
The hamburgers and salad arrived by messenger boy.
Bond opened up his bun so that he could pour sugar on
the sliced tomatoes. The sugar came out of little packets
he stole surreptitiously in restaurants and filed in a folder
under S.
Brontz covered his lap with a linen napkin before he

62
Donald Kingsbury
touched a burger, and Bond's mind returned to business.
He wondered how his meticulous aide had made out with
Synmann who had the reputation among his graduate stu-
dents of only taking a bath in the summertime when he
was skinny-dipping.
"I'm dying of curiosity. You did get to see Synmann? He
didn't throw you out?" Bond grinned.
"And who would dare toss on his ear a man of my charm
and financial standing? The old hippy needs money."
Charlie went to the question. "Has Synmann got
anything?"
"He knows how to knock out ICBMs. He uses a very
impressive mix of weapons in building his defense. Noth-
ing escapes him. He's obviously given a lot of thought to
countering every possible Soviet counterstrategy. I love
his penchant for using low-tech whenever he can get away
with it. But his ace card is very high tech, indeed."
Bond twiddled his glasses, reflectively. "So you like it?"
"Synmann says almost nothing would get through the
site-protected areas, and if we were on our toes we'd get
90% of all the incoming missiles. That's against the present
arsenal of SS-18s, SS-19s, SS-26s, SS-27s, and submarine
launched missiles. Evidently those buggers are pretty
dumb and vulnerable. Thin skinned. He doesn't pretend
he'd do half so well against a new generation of Soviet
missiles armed with countermeasures. Then we'd need his
ace."
"That's an impressive claim but you don't sound im-
pressed. "
Brontz laughed. "I'm a good physicist and I spot flaws
fast. I didn't pick up any flaws in Synmann's reasoning."
"I hear it in your voice, Sam. I know you very well. You
have reservations."
"It's just that my worldview is different than Synmann's."
Bond was impatient when Sam got coy. They had known
each other too long for that. Time was valuable. "Go on."
"Synmann is a technocrat. He sees weapons in terms of
what is possible. He sees a system and he sees its
countersystems and he sees the full array of counter-
countersystems, and in his head he builds and deploys
them all. He's still buying that old American trap—Ameri-

The Moon Goddess and the Son
63
cans are good at innovation, that's our strength, so we can
keep the Soviets off balance by staying ahead of them."
"That is our strength!"
"Goddamn it, Charlie, that's a trap! You can't run forever!"
"The status quo is a trap, too," Bond snapped. "If we
point 5000 rockets at each other, in time one of them will
take off because the bureaucracy will fail. Blooey. There is
no such thing as error-free management. Remember Chal-
lenger and the Chernobyl fiasco. Reaction times are so
short now that MAD is more and more under the control
of buggy programs. Your life depends upon a Russian
computer programmer's ability to write bug-free code. I
thought you were running as scared as I am?"
"Just a minute, Charlie. Let's be practical. I'm a physi-
cist turned entrepreneur. I see weapons in terms of what
is affordable. Synmann sees weapons in terms of what is
possible."
"Shit!" said Bond, annoyed. "That's what everybody
says—a defense against H-bombs is too expensive."
"On the contrary. The way Synmann wants to optimize
his defense it is a bargain. For 200 billion dollars we would
get a system that would take them a trillion dollars to
beat." Sam rubbed his thumb over his fingers. "But it is
buying the fourth iteration of the response to the counter-
defense that is not affordable, neither for us nor for the
Soviets."
"Big deal. If the fourth generation isn't affordable—nobody
will go that far."
"Let me tell you what happened while I was sitting
there on Synmann's floor listening to the future. He's a
strange cat, and I'm not used to sitting on the floor and it
was blowing my mind so much I was hallucinating. Synmann
was the excited kid, running around getting into every-
thing. He was inventing a new way to kill ICBMs every
three minutes. I found myself debating silently the eco-
nomic choices we'd have to make. Choice. What an in-
credible stimulus to thought when you have choices to
make! Deploying some of those fail-safe defensive systems
might even generate more wealth than they consume!"
Sam Brontz folded up his napkin, so that the crumbs
would stay inside. He neatly bagged the remains of his

64
Donald Kingsbury
dinner and walked over to dispose of it in the shredder.
Then he paced.
"Charlie, sitting there on the floor with that mad hippy
I became a megalomaniac. I know how to save the world,
Charlie!"
"Not on my money!"
Sam grinned. "It isn't going to cost us! We'll go with
Synmann but he won't be building the weapon he thinks
we want."
"He put LSD in your tea."
"He put a bee in my bonnet. Everybody, including
Synmann, is asking the question; How do we knock out
iCBMs? That's the wrong question. How do you design a
system that allows a nation to defend itself, that can be
used, even by accident, without destroying mankind, in-
deed, must be used every day, and is so effective that
nuclear weapons cannot compete with it in the market-
place? That's the right question."
"I can see you've decided to take over Synmann's debts.
How far are we going to support this long-haired freak?
Will he need people to ride herd on him? A mad physicist
can go through a billion dollars faster than any whore."
"Synmann we can handle. What is important is that
Synmann's group is a cornucopia and I want to keep them
together while I work on a couple of long-shot deals where
his team are key players. I have this gleam in my eye. I
have a non-military use for him."
"Something you've neglected to tell me about?"
"You know me; I never bother you with the details."

CHAPTER 10
Cast from the rock as if by magic grown,
Eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!
The glyphs rose-red as if the blush of dawn
That first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
Which Man deemed old two thousand years ago.
Find me such a marvel save in Eastern clime—
A rose-red city half as old as Time.
Dean Burgon from Petra
The Siq gorge sliced through the multi-colored sand-
stone of el Kubtha like a corroded crack, the easily de-
fended eastern gateway to Petra. It was an ancient fault in
the mountain, a mile long, split open by a restless subter-
ranean monster, its floor filled and its walls carved by
sudden desert rains. In the early morning Amanda walked
Byron down from the Government Rest House. She would
not take one of the old horses or a guide.
He followed her silently, not sure he understood his
restlessness. For a long time now he had known that he
wanted to build things, to leave some more permanent
impression upon history than a vapor trail at 40,000 feet.
This hectic visiting of the crumbling ruins of the greatest
aspirations of other men was vastly disturbing.
They entered the Siq across a recent dam built to divert
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66
Donald Kingsbury
the occasional floods that once had swept a party of tour-
ists to their deaths. The Nabateans had raised the same
dam, for the same reason, thousands of years ago and
Byron climbed down to investigate the still functional
overflow tunnel carved through the mountain by the
Nabatean stone cutters.
"Once there was an arch over the gorge . . . see." She
showed him the worn abutments with the spring course of
stones still intact. "In 1896 it tumbled down, Ka-boom!
Don't Ah remember such useless trivia?" she stated proudly.
As they followed the Siq, it first opened to the sky, then
began to crowd its passage. Sometimes confined wadis
broke through the sides, filled with tumbled stone and
scrub trees and the flowering pink and reds of the olean-
der blossoms. The defile grew narrower as its walls rose
taller. Amanda showed him an eroded votive niche carved
into the sandstone, and a sky-aimed stairway that lead to
nowhere but was perhaps the invisible stargate of a race
which had once been curious about mankind.
The gorge became more and more impressive. He found
himself staring upward with a stretched neck, like a tourist
in New York. The rising walls of weathered rock glowed
with pastel bands—shell whites, chalk yellow, clay gold,
iron red, dusty blueberry. Sometimes the gorge zigged at
an angle that brought in the light, sometimes it zagged to
catch its visitors in a predawn umbra, sometimes the light
hid in auroral glory behind the next bend. The Siq played
with light.
Then, while the Siq was at its narrowest and the sky
gone, they saw the end—the dawn through a craggy slit
blazing upon golden shades of peach, the Khasneh, a
sudden man-made structure dramatically cut into the fac-
ing wall of another gorge. In that first narrow vision only
two incredible columns were visible, supporting a second
structure with more columns.
The full magnitude of the Khasneh began to awe Byron
as they moved out in the open. It was six enormous
columns wide, holding a triangular pediment that extended
from an attic which was the base for a whole second
monument of three pavilions. Obviously the Nabateans
had imported a Hellenistic architect but the symbiosis was

The Moon Goddess and the Son
67
more than Greek—no Greek had ever thought to carve,
out of a mountainside, a temple fully ten stories tall. It
took a mad Bedouin to even conceive of such a thing.
"Wow!" said Byron with American verbal inadequacy.
"The Khasneh sure is a handsome hunk of rock even if a
mite conceited. Aren't you glad Ah brought you here? Ah
love this place. Ah'm tempted," Amanda bragged, "to
bring the whole shebang back to Texas—as soon as Ah get
my hands on some capable mules. And Ah'm going to buy
Utah for a backdrop when Ah get it there so's it'll feel at
home."
She lent him her canteen and they began their march
up the wider Outer Siq toward the Wadi Mousa. The
scenery did remind him of a desolate area of the Utah
hills—until they began to come across Assyrian style tombs
carved into the gorge walls, then a whole street of Assyrian
facades.
Amanda told him that no one knew if these were parts
of houses or were simply more tombs. The lower half of
them, which might have been built up with stone or brick
or wooden structures, was too eroded by water and rock-
fall to provide much evidence. The location was wonder-
fully defensible and would have attracted the early traders
to use Petra as a depot and watering point for their caravans.
Byron scrambled up and in and out of the gloomy interi-
ors with some fascination. He nodded and waved down at
Amanda. "It feels like home!" he said, somewhat myster-
iously.
"I always knew you were a cave man!" she shouted up at
him.
"Did I tell you that I designed a whole moon colony as
my big project? You can't build on the moon's surface. You
have to carve caves out of the rock." He was grinning.
"These old Nabateans would have been very much at
home in my future!"
The Assyrian facades suddenly gave way to the semi-
circle of a stadium-style Roman theater, which the Roman
administrators had cavalierly chiseled out of the middle of
the older Nabatean presence, leaving sliced-through half-
chambers still gaping out of the rock above the theater like
prescient projection rooms.

68
Donald Kingsbury
"When did the Romans come?" asked Byron.
"About a century after Christ. By then the Nabateans
dominated the trade routes as far north as Damascus and
would have taken over the new trade routes through Pal-
myra and Aleppo if they had been left alone. As it was
they were cut off."
"And died out?"
"You know better than that!" chided Amanda. "The
Nabateans were obsessive traders. Don't you think the
best of them just left Petra and moved to where the
trading was better, to Palmyra, to the southern seaports?
Do good men ever accept a trap or pretend to themselves
that the world will always be as it is? They were subdued
by the Romans—but when the Roman empire was dead it
was their sons who returned as Moslem conquerors."
The builders versus the destroyers, with Time as the
only survivor, he thought.
She took him north along the west side of el Kubtha
where they clambered up a stony hillside toward the Urn
Tomb. He stared out over the vista with four-dimensional
senses that pierced the past. At one end of time he saw
. . . camel caravans glad of the mounted Nabateans who
protected them . . . goats . . . farmers . . . Edomite min-
ers bringing in their copper ore ... a maze of houses on
the hillside, plastered and white-washed, baking in the
sun . . .
And, at the other end of time . . . the restless stones
and gravel and sand which are the tombstones of all effort
. . . bushes twisted in starvation ... a dried gully . . .
three shards . . . the bleached desert mountains brooding
around a single weathered tomb sliced from a slope. Time
had spared only the tomb. Two Roman style colonnades
lined an entrance that was half as long as it had once been.
Still surviving were the remains of an arched superstruc-
ture of masonry that had extended the Urn Tomb's realm
outward over the hillside.
Builders created magnificence, and entropy carted it
away.
North, beyond this Tomb, lay more tombs. Tomb after
tomb, carved by the hands of copper miners who had been
bought by the wealth of traders who sought immortality.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
69
The sarcophagi of the traders were gone, their finery was
gone, their bones were gone, and their souls had vanished
but the tombs remained—the Assyrian Silk Tomb of batike
beauty and the Corinthian Tomb which somehow failed to
mate Nabatean architecture with Roman form.
It was a long morning. They followed the line of an old
wall that had once guarded the northern city approaches
and then wandered down the Wadi Mataba back to what
had been the central city. Everywhere there was evidence
of a prosperous people—Roman improvements protruding
from the ground, old gates, the stumps of a typically
Roman colonnade street, the massive temple walls of the
totally Nabatean Kasr el Bint, everything dominated by
the stony mountains that surrounded Petra and defined
it.
It took them an hour to climb to the top of Umm el
Biyara, over a gently sloping rubble tossed by the rains,
the obliterated remains of a ceremonial way, and up through
the Couloir, which had survived, a massive double flank-
ing ramp carved into the mountainside millennia ago to
make the passage easier.
The Umm el Biyara was a natural walled castle, and it
had been used as a castle. It got its name—mother of
cisterns—from deep bell-shaped caverns cut into the rock
by the pre-Nabatean Edomites who had used them to
store water during the summer and during siege. From
the high plateau, holding themselves against a brisk, dry
wind, Byron and Amanda peered down at the distant city.
The desolate central area of Petra was plainly visible by
the humps of old walls, and the ghostly rectangular out-
lines of what had once been dwellings and temples and
streets.
While they were eating a late lunch from their pack-
sacks, they were overtaken by a British pair who were
hurrying through a tour of Petra during the afternoon. The
two couples had chatted the night before in the Govern-
ment House lobby. He was an engineer, and she a librar-
ian, both on a long vacation to celebrate the leaving of the
nest by their last child.
"A rather lovely view up here. We knocked you up for
breakfast, but you were gone. How long've you been out?"

70
Donald Kingsbury
"Going on a millennium," said Byron holding a wedge
of Swiss cheese while peeling away a yodeler, printed on
aluminum foil, from around its sun-melted softness. He
was beginning to feel the day in his feet. "What's the news
from the twentieth century—or have you been there
recently?"
"Rather different from this charming necropolis. Just
heard on the wireless that the Red Team have sent up two
more men to their space station this morning."
Byron mulled that one over. "Two more? That's a hur-
ried pace to put up a twelve-man crew."
"You hope its only a twelve-man station." The British
engineer grinned. His grin reminded Byron of the grin
Bijad ibn Jamal had worn when he suggested that a battal-
ion of Soviet cosmonauts would soon be pissing into the
Great Lakes as they passed overhead.
Byron shrugged, trying to make light of the United
States' inability to keep up with the steady Soviets. "We
work our buns off getting up into orbit so the future's
tourists can be amazed by the lack of decay in the artifacts.
Think of all the pleasure the bureaucrats of the next civili-
zation's Department of Antiquities will have raising money
to save the first space cities from burning up in the atmo-
sphere and obliterating all that history."
"Quite," was the engineer's deadpan reply. "Don't for-
get the bureaucrat who will refuse to grant a demolition
permit so that a better space city can be built in the old
orbit."
For a long time after their friends had left, Byron stared
at the necropolis below and the lonely mountains around
them, and finally at the sky, now brighter than all the
stars, sunbright. "Unh!" he muttered.
"What?"
"Nothing. I was just being sad that the old Nabateans
gave up—letting time win—and then I remembered what
you said, that they didn't give up at all, that they just
moved on. It made me grunt. I just realized where they
are!"
"You sound left out."
"Yeah. They're up there in space building their new city
and here I am sitting idly in a place, long past its prime,

The Moon Goddess and the Son
71
grunting out thoughts about human destiny." His voice
was wistful. Always the better men went with the chal-
lenges and where did that leave Byron McDougall?
"And you wish you were in the Red Air Force?"
"Sometimes it is a pain-in-the-ass to be an American.
Day in and day out you have to listen to people who say
we should stay home." He began to mimic them savagely.
"We should put our money into Milk for The Children
who are Our Future!" he squeaked. His voice took on a
preacher's boom, "We should put Our Money into iron
lungs for Deserving Senior Citizens!" Amanda giggled and,
thus encouraged, Byron continued to mock all that was
liberal and sacred. He went too far. His good-humored
mockery petered out and he became sullenly serious. "Ev-
ery village has its Democrat who wants to grind up the
seed corn to bake into bread for the starving children."
"Ah'm a Democrat," she bristled.
He smiled, absently rubbing two stones against each
other. "So was my mother. She thought children were
more important than the future. She poisoned us to death
with her smoking while she fought against nuclear power
so that her children wouldn't be poisoned. I wonder if
that's what happened to the Nabateans? Keep your chil-
dren fat by feeding them the seed corn."
Amanda, in spite of the fact that she was a devout
Democrat, was softened by his wistfulness. "And what
would you do if there were only Republicans in the world?"
"That's my idea of paradise. I get horny just thinking
about a world without Democrats. Why do you think I
want to go into space? The Democrats would be too chicken-
livered to follow and I'd be left in the company of real
people."
"What would you do out there—carve Eisenhower and
Nixon and Reagan into the mountains of the moon in
replications big enough to see from Earth?"
"Something like that. Things would last up there."
"Wouldn't you let even one Democrat into your pan-
theon?"
"Well, maybe Truman's daughter."
"A minute ago you were decrying the building of
anything—since everything gets destroyed."

72
Donald Kingsbury
"I've changed my mind. The USA isn't going to be here
in five hundred years and if I don't start building the
world that replaces us, I'm a dead end."
"You're being serious."
"Naw." He got up. "Let's get going. I'm just talking.
I'm trying to talk myself into leaving the Air Force. My
father was a military man. The Army. I never wanted a
military career. I hated the life. I hated my father's disci-
pline. And yet here I am—a military man. I rebelled
against my Army father. I defied him—I joined the Air
Force. Shit!"
She felt this was the right time to show him a djin. It
was a block of stone, four by two by one. The Nabateans
left them everywhere, some big, some little, but all in the
same proportions.
"Everything you want is in there," she said.
"Even your yummy?"
"You're like a child! Your emotions change so fast! One
minute you're fired up serious and the next you're a baby
at the breast. And when Ah try to be serious you just start
that teasing. Ah'm trying to educate you. God lives in that
stone."
"That's serious?"
She smiled. "The Semites all had one thing in common.
Their gods lived in stone. Yahweh lived in Beth El. The
Semites weren't sculptors so they couldn't humanize their
gods. Their gods remained abstract and powerful. Al Uzza
of the Nabateans. Yahweh and Allah. Allah still lives in a
stone in Mecca. It's that stone that a devout Moslem faces
five times a day. Yahweh lived in the stone that was
housed in the Ark of the Convenant, and the Jews would
still be worshiping it today if it hadn't been destroyed
when the Temple of Solomon was sacked. 'The God of my
Rock; in Him Ah will trust,' " she said, quoting the South-
ern Baptist Bible.
A djin in a bottle, waiting to be released, ready with
three wishes if only you'll let him out. A god imprisoned
in a rock, toted about on a wheelbarrow ready to do the
bidding of those who cared for him, but cantankerous and
unpredictable because of the confines of his prison. I'm a
god. trapped in granite, thought Byron.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
73
"The Greeks were wonderful artists in stone and they
could make their gods look so human that the Greeks
believed them to be human—so we have a womanizing
Zeus and a stupidly jealous Hera and no one was ever
really able to take the Greek pantheon seriously. Semitic
gods are fearsome because they have no form. God with a
beard, sitting on a throne, is a Greek corruption of a
Semitic universe Western man could not understand."
They wandered along the South Walls and up along the
Attuf Ridge to the Moon Shrine where Byron stopped and
offered up a short prayer to the universe. His mother had
been an atheist, and the Democrat in him never quite
took religion seriously, but his father had taught him how
to pray. His father showed him Hell so that he should
know Heaven when he found it.
Amanda walked up the slope, pulling Byron to the altars
of the High Place, which must have been used for sacri-
fice, perhaps animal, perhaps human. The gutters for the
blood were still there but the blood of history's Aarons was
not.
Byron was tired and thirsty and no longer really enjoy-
ing himself. Thankfully the Nabateans had made the de-
scent down to the Outer Siq an easy one. Every obstacle
on the mountainside path had been cut away. The trail
took them straight through solid stone when the stone
dared block them. Byron dragged his feet; Amanda was
still light-footed. The sun was setting, promising a dark
desert night.
"Will I ever see you again?" she asked.
"Of course. I'll look you up the day I divorce my spouse."
"No! Before that! The very day Ah divorce mine!"
"Your husband will chase me with a shotgun! You know
I don't trust Texans."
"He won't know where Ah've gone. Ah'11 disappear."
"I suppose I could sneak you away to Saudi Arabia and
hide you in a tent with my other three wives."
"Ah just hate you!"
"Amanda, don't say that," he said tenderly, teasingly.
"Why not?" she asked defiantly.
"It's a sure sign you're falling in love."
They continued in silence until they reached the awe-

74
Donald Kingsbury
some Khasneh again, now in the twilight shadows, but still
formidable when you were standing beneath it.
"That's what I want to build on the moon," he said. "I
want to carve it out of Pico Peak, facing out across Mare
Imbrium. It would stay out there longer than man himself
could last."
"Until the sun runs out of hydrogen fuel and grows into
a red giant and gobbles up the moon in the Days of Fire."
Amanda's mind wasn't on monuments. It was on romance.
"Will you still love me when the sun becomes a red giant?
Isn't there anything about me you could love?"
"I'm madly in love with you. You don't smoke. Who
else can I kiss whose breath is as sweet as summertime?"
And he kissed her, a bit shyly—the way he had seen his
father kiss his mother in public. The Khasneh watched
over the kiss, ten stories tall and two millennia long.
"You don't kiss very well," she said petulantly, stooping
to steal another one. "Don't you ever French kiss? Ah like
that."
"I'm afraid of your teeth."

CHAPTER 11
You who once were rulers of many lands
now lie on this barren earth,
and your faces darken from decay.
0		my dear brothers! O my dear warriors!
Never again shall we share joys.
Why were you extinguished?
1		have not had enough joy with you!
Prince Ingvar Ingvarevich of Riazan
upon finding the rotting bodies of his brothers
massacred by the hordes of the Mongol Batu.
Reject my game, ivill he!
For days the heavy boots of Limon Barnes paced over
the stone floors of the Cathedral of Saint Marx the Bene-
factor. Why was he here? He didn't need the money.
Royalties on his old games were coming out of his ears.
Sam Brontz gave him a job—and then put him down when
he did it. How could a man work for someone who had
grandiose plans and no clear direction?
What the hell did Brontz want? Bastard!
Sam was playing on some larger stage. He was into
reality: that's what was frightening Limon.
In rebellion the young gamesmaster took to wearing
chain mail. That wasn't real. Sometimes he carried a cast
iron mace, growing more and more furious. One morning
75

76
Donald Kingsbury
he insulted old man Matthews, the M in SMB, and gentle
Matthews, the quintessential negotiator, took him into his
office and gave him lessons in the proper way to resign—it
should announce an end, not a failure.
"But Brontz won't accept my resignation!"
"That's right."
"I'll have to sneak off into the night like a cut-pocket."
"Be firm. Forceful."
Limon decided not to take Matthews' advice. That damn
oily Matthews wanted to do him in anyway—bring peace
and sanity back into the SMB he had founded. He wanted
Limon to resign. Matthews' counsel was sound, but dull
and smacked of common sense. Of course, Limon should
resign forcefully rather than work for a megalomaniac who
didn't know what he was doing! But why the hell should
Limon, who had ambled down Denver's Colfax Avenue in
a Superman suit while wearing a Reagan rubber mask,
resign by the traditions of any normal human?
Revenge was what he wanted. Stick that righteous Brontz
was what he wanted. Stick him good. Stick him clean.
Expose him for the ass he was! Dump him in a trap with
dragons!
Reality was far too slow to ever engage Limon's mind
and whenever he was living in reality, he had a languorous
way about him, the patience of a Russian waiting in line
for sausages. But during a game in which a year of game-
time spanned a day of real-time, he came alive. Revenge
was a game. In an accelerated mode he began to check out
the possible opening moves of a game which at its climax
would prick Sam's composure so completely that he'd
actually forget himself and in a rage fire Limon! Being
fired was far more marvelous than a mere resignation!
The spastic gamesmaster marched through the woods
with his mace, twirling the spiked head on its chain, his
mutters conjuring up out of the forest's gloom the ghosts
of ancient royal advisors, all of whom failed him—one after
the other. They were useless, unoriginal lackeys of kings
and tsars, recommending in their spectral voices the rack
or quartering or flailing, simple tortures which if inflicted
upon Sam would surely be endured with an equally simple

The Moon Goddess and the Son
77
nobility! In fury Limon let out a great cross-handed swing
with his mace.
Calmer, he wandered into a lazy Massachusetts meadow.
Five Holsteins were by the stream, a thousand of their
hoofprints in the mud on the banks, trampling their own
odorous manure into a wine of mud that fed the rich grass
upon which they munched.
A flickering vision from hell superimposed itself upon
this pastoral scene, the apparition's pale colors made even
more transparent by the intensity of the sun. The vision
was of a horrified Sam, in his meticulous gray suit, bent to
his knees in that muck, having no choice but to kiss a
country-fresh Holstein plopping.
Praise the Goddess!
Limon had the climax of his revenge. Now all he had to
do was create a game so complex that Sam would be taken
through it without ever understanding until that very last
moment that its only purpose had been to lead him to a
meadow muffin on his knees with puckered lips. With the
joy of a nine year old, Limon relished the image. All the
way back to the cathedral his mind was in a frenzy. It
would be the practical joke of the century.
Didn't Sam want to get into the gestalt mind of the
Russian people for some crazy scheme of his? That made a
perfect hook. How better to empathize with a culture than
through a simulation? But a simulation could be manipu-
lated to make a fool of any man.
All afternoon Limon explored Russian history, picking
the era of Mongol conquest as the ideal setting for his con:
1237 AD to 1395 AD. That way Limon could be a power-
ful khan. He would have a license to do anything. It would
be easy to convince Sam that the Russian archetype had
been profoundly shaped by the invasion of the Golden
Horde—because it had. And thus, for the purposes of a
simulation, he could ask Sam to take the role of a Russian
prince.
Limon Barnes read and plotted, sometimes for- thirty
hours without letup. He needed magic. Only a gamesmaster
who controlled magic could locally intrude upon reality.
To aid his design, he pulled down the arcane books of
wizardry he kept on the High Shelf in his office, one after

78
Donald Kingsbury
the other. Vogt's World of null-A he used for its Law of
Similarity which told him how to adjust one world to be so
like another that at the moment of similarity the merest
touch would transport Sam willy-nilly down time's Volga.
Anton J. Bitter's The Harmony Book of Phrases he used to
create archetypical resonances that in his hands became a
mixing of moods and power vectors that would overwhelm
all the cultural fixations of an individual foolish enough to
pass into its focus. The frenzy of his conjuring lacked only
the dust of ancient Mongol law books.
He read and read until the floor of his office was layered
by books. It was annoying to find books without maps,
without illustrations, wholly content to describe events.
Mindless books. How could he capture a Russian mind
without the essence of old fingernails and priest's wool and
muzhiki sweat? It was frustrating.
But on the day he found an illuminated Mongol manu-
script, arcane with the phrases of ancient magic, Limon
knew that Sam was doomed. It was pieces of The Yassa,
written by Chinese servants who had access to Genghis
Khan's lost golden records and who had been placed in
charge of subjugating the Russians.
Limon called on friends from the Society for Creative
Anachronism, at company expense, and set them to work.
He hired an unemployed historian and a desperate sum-
mer stock theater director. He induced out of retirement
an old Ukrainian witch.
Because a garnesmaster couldn't leave the creation of
the sets for his play until the last minute, Limon's costum-
ers went to work immediately. They were experienced
medievalists and produced for him the garments of the
Russian fourteenth century nobility and the sky-blue silks
and the fine trappings of the Mongol court at Sarai. Pin-
ning and sewing they put together peasants and boyars
and beggars and priests and warriors.
Just to watch the costume tryouts honed his magic. It
did not matter that in his eagerness he had temporarily
lost his way in his search for the grail that held the Great
Russian mind. He set deadlines and proceeded anyway.
He mixed his teas and drank them, cups on top of books—
teas from Tibet, from a lost valley of Ceylon, from the

The Moon Goddess and the Son	79
cellar of his Ukrainian witch. By a process of automatic
writing on his computer screen, he composed scripts,
subroutines, scenes, branches, story lines, plot, hints for
the actors, details for the directors.
By astral projection he wandered over the face of his
stage.
In 1237 AD, ten years after Genghis Khan's death, son
Ogadai recommenced the Mongol conquest of the uni-
verse. Grandson Batu was recalled from the far west.
There he had grown up with his sullen father, Juchi, who
had retreated to the outskirts of Mongol power, having
been forever scarred by being the seed of the rape of the
All Powerful One's beloved wife—though his "father" had
raised him like a son. Batu, nephew of the new Khan, was
not sullen and Ogadai bestowed upon him an army for the
conquest of the western domains, honoring the boy by
placing under his command Genghis Khan's greatest gen-
eral, Subotai.
The grandson swept out of Karakorum across thousands
of miles of steppe, crushing the Bulgars and riding on
through Russia with 150,000 horsemen of his Golden
Horde—Mongols and Turks—aided by newly mastered
Chinese siege weapons and Mongol experience distilled
from the conquest of the powerful Chin.
Together Batu and Subotai, comrades of an earlier cam-
paign, shocked and terrorized the Slavicized Norman soci-
ety of the Rus by entering the safe forests traditionally
shunned by the steppe horsemen. The Viking warriors had
become masters of Russia throughout its swampy water-
ways, building stockaded fortresses against the Finns and
Slavs, building a commercial Kiev at the borderline of
forest and grass—close enough to the Black Sea for trade
in furs and slaves with Constantinople, yet close also to
the wealth and protection of the dark forests.
The Slav-proof wooden stockades of the Viking-Russians
led Batu to comment derisively, "See how the little pigs
have gathered in their pen to be put to death!" He put
them to death in all the towns of Riazan, swept into
Suzdalia, burning the minor village of Moscow. Then he
besieged great Vladimir. The city fell after six days of
berserk resistance and the battle's survivors were slain,

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Donald Kingsbury
the city destroyed. Suzdal, Rostov, and a multitude of
surrounding settlements were swept away on the northern
march to Novgorod. Novgorod itself was spared only by a
horsebarrier of swamplands created by an early spring
thaw.
The Golden Horde retired to the southern grasslands
but after a year of consolidation, returned to destroy
Chernigov and Pereyaslavl and all the people of Kiev. The
Russian nobles were still Normans at heart and by tradi-
tion had never dared arm the same Slavs they had raided
for the wicked slave markets of Constantinople. Defenseless,
undefended, the peasants were slaughtered. Such a des-
perate condition earned the Russians no pity in Christian
Europe. Indeed the Swedes found it an opportune time to
attack Novgorod.
Batu and Subotai, each with their own army, mastered a
two pronged thrust through Poland and Hungary during
the year 1241. The depopulation of Hungary, and the
appearance of the Mongols at the gates of Vienna ended
only with the death of Ogadai at the end of that same year.
The kuriltay had to be called together to elect a new khan
and, since Ogadai's sons were Batu's enemies, it was polit-
ically dangerous for Batu to absent himself from such
decisions,
"In war be like tigers, in peace like doves," said The
Yassa of Genghis Khan. Batu chose peace after the settling
of the succession. From the imperial tent city of Sarai,
which moved along the banks of the Volga with the sea-
sons, he imposed a political philosophy on the Russians
which they were never to forget. Government is no more
than a machine for enforcing the collection of tribute from
weaker men.
It took 3000 white mares to provide Batu's drink—and
when he drank from gold cups, wild Tartar pipes shrilled
and cymbals clashed. Because of his gout Batu was carried
everywhere on a palanquin with a tasseled canopy. Sixteen
wives served him and he could not remember the names
of his sons. The cowed Russian survivors paid his baskaks—
the squeezers—so that he could import rugs from Persia,
glassware from Egypt, silks from China, and giraffes and
monkeys from Africa.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
81
Political strategy was simple for the nomadic hordes. A
town was looted and then totally destroyed, its surround-
ing farmers murdered to clear the land for the nomad's
herds. But the Mongols were not consistent. After they
became intrigued by wealth and loot, it became their
policy to spare a town which capitulated without a fight or
treachery, especially if that town did not command desir-
able grazing land. By rule of The Yassa, subject people
were to be taxed one tenth of everything they produced,
but, as long as war continued, were required to provide
the suicidal shock troops of the continuing Mongol ad-
vance—to reduce Mongol casualties and to eliminate the
possibility of revolt in the rear.
In the domain of the Golden Horde, imported Chinese
census-takers counted all things. One out of every ten
Russian males was taken into the Mongolian army to serve-
perhaps as far away as China. Sometimes one tenth of
everything was not enough. If something was in short
supply, the Mongols took more. When Birkai, the hereti-
cal Moslem brother of Batu, assumed the Khanate after
Batu's death and built a stone and brick Sarai, his men
took for the Mongol cities every stone mason in the whole
of Russia.
A comment by Will Durant lay open on top of the books
that layered Limon's floor. ". . . it was Russia, bending
under the Mongol whirlwind, that stood as a vast moat and
trench protecting most of Europe from Asiatic conquest.
All the fury of that human tempest spent itself upon the
Slavs—Russians, Bohemians, Moravians, Poles—and Mag-
yars; Western Europe trembled, but was hardly touched.
Perhaps the rest of Europe could go forth toward political
and mental freedom, toward wealth, luxury, and art, be-
cause for two centuries Russia remained beaten, humbled,
stagnant, and poor."
While Limon's wizardry was building him a portal into
this time zone, he found it necessary to conjure up Batu's
ghoul and to enslave him temporarily so that someone else
might remain on the other end to hold the fragile time
gate open. Mongol souls could be controlled with blue
flame.
The conjured Batu was able to hold this special time

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Donald Kingsbury
portal open, for Limon, no farther than the year of 1395
AD. Within a century-and-a-half of their initial conquest,
the formidable Mongolian kuriltay, which had ranged with
impunity from Hungary to Korea, was suffering a fatal
disarray. During one such internal dispute Mongolian
Tamberlane from Samarkand spent eight years destroying
the major cities of the Mongolian Golden Horde, leveling
even the stones of Sarai. By 1395 AD the heritage of Batu
had been squandered and the little village of Moscow,
which had grown into a cunning city, no longer had a
viable enemy.
A minor town in 1238 when it was sacked by Batu,
Moscow rose to power by excelling at the art of collabora-
tion. The Moscow princes, fascinated by a horde that
could overwhelm their Viking virtues, studied their mas-
ters from the educative viewpoint of the slave, smiling and
hating at the same time, and learned all that the Mongols
had to teach about repression, even building the Mongol
words for repression into their language. But the fate of
those who resist an enemy by apprenticing themselves to
him, is to become that enemy, and in the end, by the laws
of karma, to share the fate of their enemy.
Limon—knowing that the remnants of the Golden Horde
were a despised minority in the Soviet Union, lately living
on the bare Kazakh steppe where they had been deported
by Stalin, denied upward mobility, governed by special
KGB directives when they were in the army—sat there in
his office and mused with a gout-ridden Batu about the
various fates of Hated Overlords. In six hundred years
would a great Polish-Afghan-Chinese civilization, spread-
ing from the Atlantic to the Pacific, give alms to its few
Russian beggars? Perhaps they would be allowed to live in
peace on the ice of the island Novaya Zemlya? Batu only
growled, not at all pleased to be in the thrall of a twentieth
century wizard.
It took Limon Barnes less than two months, with the aid
of his reluctant Mongolian slave, to open a crude trap-door
above the medieval layer of the Russian mind wide enough
to take a man. It remained to drop Sam Brontz through
this portal into the century of the Black Death.
"We'll treat him right," he said to Batu the Merciless.

CHAPTER 12
For years she grew near city tower,
a gutter-sprouting pretty flower
soot upon her yellow petals
mischief making between nettles.
American Folk Song.
At nine Diana Osborne took up archery in school. She
wanted a bow of her own and timidly asked her father for
one while climbing up the back of his leather chair. Some-
times if she smiled a lot and was affectionate with him he
gave her what she asked for—sometimes. "I'm the God-
dess of the Hunt, Daddy-pops, and I need a bow and lots
of arrows so why don't you buy them for me? I'll shoot ail
the rats in the alley!" He bought her a bow with a quiver
of multicolored plastic arrows, each a whole foot long,
each with a rubber cup on the end. She traded her bicycle
for a real bow and got beaten.
"I'm out of a job and you give away your bicycle!" He
was always complaining about ceramic engines. How could
a man earn a living if they made engines out of plastics and
pottery! The engines were a crock-of-shit! How could he
keep his family alive? "You don't esteem your father!"
Whap! "I buy things for you when I don't have any money
and you give them away!" Whap.
When she was ten she ran away from home to Fairborn
to visit an aerospace museum but the police caught her
83

84
Donald Kingsbury
trying to get into the cockpit of the X-15 and brought her
back. After the police were gone her father beat her until
her mother cried. She limped to her room and made
paper planes, fixing Plasticine and pins in the tail so they
would flip over and stick, thud, when she threw them at
the photomontage of the moon on her wall. Two of her
paper ships landed, one on Flammarion and the other on
Mare Undarum, but mostly they bounced off onto the
floor.
She stared at the huge lunar photo. She had a red
thumbtack stuck in Theophilus on top of the five year old
Russian moon base. And she had blue thumbtacks at all of
the old abandoned Apollo sites, sacred to the memory of
past greatness. On the wall crowding the Oceanus Procel-
larum was a painting of the orbiting lunar station as it
would look when it was finished, with the great arms of its
upper and lower skyhooks. At the moment it was only a
framework, still being built with supplies shipped up from
Earth via the leoport.
A fresh article was still on Diana's desk, Third Millen-
nial Man, about her hero Byron McDougall who would be
up there building the American base once the first explo-
ration teams had found a site. Maybe he would plant a
forest for her nymphs in some crater. She didn't like the
buildings he had planned. They looked pretty dumpy.
At eleven she became the school champ at archery for
her age group and lead her team to the regional champion-
ship, much to the disgust of the two best male archers.
Diana beat up one of the boys who was teasing her team-
mates by painting insults on their arrows, but he got his
revenge. He made a "stage" arrow and stuck it to his back
and chest and with the aid of a package of ketchup saved
from a hamburger purchase, staggered into the classroom,
groaning. Everybody believed Diana shot him. She took
him on again after school.
But when she was sitting on him and pounding his head
against the cement he was wise enough to offer peace
terms. He knew her secret weakness and he knew her
family TV set was senile.
"Ouch. Lay off! My brains! My poor brains!"

The Moon Goddess and the Son
85
"You want me to save your brains? How about if I break
your arm instead?"
"Hey, I gotta be in shape to watch TV tonight!" That
reached her—as his cunning knew it would. Tonight was
the big finale of the show that had been building for a
week—after almost two days of carefully descending the
orbiting lunar ladder, the four men of the Mayflower were
about to jump off. Diana stopped pounding his head. He
didn't move a muscle.
"Yeah!" she sneered, "babies have to be in bed by
nine!"
"Not tonight. I get to watch TV all night. My ma doesn't
even care if I go to school tomorrow." He waited just long
enough for the conflict to cloud her face, but not long
enough for a new rage to power her again. "Wanna watch
it with us?"
"Yaah! I'd trust you like a frog with a fly!" She really
wanted to watch it. One of the crewmen was a woman.
"You can come over to my house now. My dad has the
TV on the back porch and we're going to have a hot dog
barbecue."
She marched her enemy home with his arm as security,
bound behind his back in a half-nelson. Ma was bringing
out chairs to the backyard and Diana helped set up the
table and chop tomatoes for the salad. The boy's fat dad,
from his hammock, kept watch over the CBS, ABC, and
United Satellite Systems. It was too early for anything
exciting but the networks always had filler.
CBS reran the President's short speech, made just be-
fore his limousine took him away. This annoyed fat dad.
He had seen it three times. With a portable communicator
and a TV beamer both gripped in one hand—and in be-
tween potato chips as he carried on a phone conversation
with his mother—this master of the reclining position
zapped CBS. ABC was carrying an oration by the mayor of
Detroit. Zap ... to the silent flight of the command
module of Apollo 11 gliding just above the desolate surface
of the moon in the summer of 1969. He flipped again. The
studio mixers at United Satellite Systems were replaying
the two day old pictures of the Mayflower docking with
the top of the lunar ladder that would have stretched from

86
Donald Kingsbury
Seattle to Los Angeles. Zap. Now the TV crews of CBS
were cutting into parties and interviewing party goers.
Zap. ABC sneaked in a panorama of the celebrating VJ day
crowds from the San Francisco of 1945 just as a joke.
None of this interfered with grilling hot dogs and stuff-
ing buns with onions and mustard. Neighbors dropped by
or chatted over the fence. When it grew dark they turned
on the outdoor spots. The children organized a game of
hide and seek but Diana used the TV table to hide under,
or the tree suspending fat dad's hammock, so she could
hear the commentary.
The evening went on and on. Some of the kids brought
out their sleeping bags and went to sleep on the grass.
Tired, Diana had a name calling session with her tormen-
tor, but she had to watch her mouth with his mother
around. She managed to trip him once when no one was
looking in a way which spiced his eighth hot dog with
gravel.
Then, all at the same time, the networks went live to
the cramped interior of the Mayflower as it skimmed over
the lunar landscape at a leisurely 3000 kloms per hour, far
too slow to stay in orbit without being held up by the
floating skyhook whose center of mass was more than a
thousand kloms overhead. The four man crew greeted
their fellow Americans a world away. "Wave at us," said a
beaming commander Allan Bydgoszcz through the solar
noise. Diana waved at the moon up there above the house-
tops of Ohio, her heart in her mouth.
The lander released its grip on the skyhook.
"We have release," Houston announced.
The moonscape tipped. Rockets fired. The image vi-
brated. In the end there was nothing to see but boiling
clouds.
Were they going to make it? At 1:27 AM Houston
announced, "We have touch-down! All systems A-Ok!"
This sober NASA announcer couldn't resist adding, "Yahoo!"
The generation of Americans who had aborted the first
American space program were dead or retired. The gener-
ation who still remembered Americans reaching the moon
while they were in grammar school had passed on to
middle-age. The present under-thirty generation had grown

The Moon Goddess and the Son
87
up watching movies about galactic empires, yet had only
learned of local lunar adventures from history books and
old men. American children as young as Diana thought of
the moon as Soviet territory that the Americans were
invading. All celebrated the return to the moon in a na-
tional orgy.
When she was twelve Diana decided to run away from
home even with her arm still in a cast, having had it
broken by her father when he found her collection of
newspaper stories about families who murdered their chil-
dren in the night. He burned the newspaper stories and
hacksawed her bow in two but didn't bother with her
scrapbook of heroes so she put it in her packsack.
Her hair she carefully fixed to imitate the March cover
girl of Cosmopolitan magazine and she wore one of her
mother's bras, stolen, which she stuffed with an extra pair
of socks. People gave her rides. From her escapade in
Fairborn she knew to avoid policemen. She told everyone
she was going to visit her mother in California because her
father was out of work.
The best ride she got was from a truck driver whom she
targeted at a diesel station in Newton, Iowa, mainly be-
cause his rig carried a Washington license plate and she
knew vaguely that flying saucers were built in Washing-
ton. He wasn't supposed to take on passengers but she
flaunted her spare socks and he broke down and got to like
her over the steak he bought her.
He told her stories of the road. She chattered to him
about a historical novel called Diana's Temple that she had
ordered in a drug store in Cincinnatti after spending twenty
minutes playing at the book-terminal while resting her
legs and eating an ice cream cone. It cost her ten dollars
instead of eight because the drug store didn't have the
right laserdisk for the printer and they had to bring her
book in over fiber. Complaining about the extra two dol-
lars hadn't done her any good. It was just a corner drug-
store and they only stocked 8000 titles. She read it-between
rides, sitting in the sun.
An endless journey later, through farmland and broken
hills and over decaying interstate highways, they pulled
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88
Donald Kingsbury
the night. She caught her driver typing a message to
Childsearch into his dashboard digiphone and pulled the
plug. He had a tiny dish antenna on his roof and could
contact zillions of computers in a second via the Attman
net. He was a very dangerous person. She made him
swear on the cover of Diana's Temple that he wouldn't
turn her in, inventing on the spur of the moment some
cock-and-bull story to convince him.
"Promise?" She held tightly to the plug.
"I already promised. You could let me fax your ma."
"She doesn't have a phone. She's poor. If you turn me
in on your digi, some social service will just pick me
up—and then I'll never get to see my mother. Poor peo-
ple get hassled. We're always getting hassled! I know what
I'm doing. I'll bet it was a lot easier to be poor before they
had phones and welfare!"
She plugged his digiphone back into its power, watching
him.
For a second he looked rueful. "You got the right spirit."
He lifted a big hand and squeezed her affectionately on
the back of the head. Diana tried to seduce her driver
then because she thought girls were supposed to reward
nice men. She brushed his crotch with her good hand.
When she tried to kiss him with her tongue, the cast on
her arm got in the way and a sock fell out of her bra.
He laughed, restraining her by the chin in a vice-grip
between thumb and fingers. "Diana was a virgin," he said
with stern good humor.
"Yeah, I know. You think I don't know about Diana?"
She squirmed out of his vice to a position as for from him
as she could get, shoving her backbone hard on the cab
door in shame.
This gentle man didn't want to hurt her feelings. He
reached out and tenderly pulled her shoulders into his
large arm. "Your virginity is the most valuable thing you
have right now. Hang onto it. Grow up a little bit and
when you throw it away make sure he's the nicest guy in
the world."
"How do you tell the nice guys from the mean ones?"
"Did you ever have any trouble with that?"
"My father always beat me. For nothingl"

The Moon Goddess and the Son
89
"Then you know what the bad ones are like."
"What are the good ones like?"
"Me," he laughed.
For a year Diana stayed in a small town near Seattle
where the workers assembled, for the leoport, the feeder
spacecraft popularly called "flying saucers," as well as the
mach-seven scramjets that launched the saucers.
Diana was excited at first. The saucers were sending up
supplies for the moon colony! She missed her big photo of
the moon, but she had added to her collection of lunar
articles one which included a map of the Sinus Medii and
the Horrocks-Agrippa badlands centered on the Crater
Rhaeticus. Why did Byron pick that place! It was one of
her least favorite areas on the moon. The Imbrian Alps
were much nicer!
She did housework and cared for the children of one of
the foremen whose wife was recovering from an auto acci-
dent. But this sleepy town of the northwest was just as far
from the moon as Ohio. She watched the freight planes fly
away with the new saucers on their heads like silly hats—
and mourned. If she could build a dollhouse in a payload
compartment and sneak aboard she might make it to the
moon. But she didn't know where to buy an oxygen mask.

CHAPTER 13
Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light?
Or just another lost angel. . .
City of night!
City of night, city of night, city of night.
I see your hair is burning;
Hills are filled with fire.
If they say I never loved you
You know they are a liar.
Driving down your freeways;
Midnight alleys roam;
Cops in cars, the topless bars.
Never saw a woman ... so alone . . .
... so alone . . .
... so ahne . . .
L. A. Woman, The Doors, April '71**
Sam Brontz had flown his daughter into L.A. with him
as bait. Half in his mind he was thinking to marry her off
to Ray Armsiel. The best way to insure a family dynasty
was to bring in good new blood. Other than that, Ray was
crucial to his plans.
**ASCAP, Electra Records, copyright (c) 1971 Doors Music Inc.
90

The Moon Goddess and the Son
91
"That's him." Sam Brontz pointed out a gaunt young
driver who was avoiding an obnoxious taxi trying to butt
him out of his stopping place in the airport frenzy.
Linda grabbed their luggage and ran after her father.
"Sam the Man!" Ray was grinning while the two of them
piled into his car for a quick getaway. "What a time to
arrive! Why didn't you pick three in the morning! I recog-
nize your daughter from the kid pictures you carry around
in your wallet. Hi, Linda!"
He shouldn't have said that, thought Sam. She was
sweet but she was only nineteen and very sensitive about
being thought of as a kid.
Ray jockeyed them in and out of traffic until they found
a ramp of cars where a single light dripped them, one by
one, into the San Diego artery. There, six lanes of traffic
moved as sedately as a lowing herd of cattle which had
been promised water but had yet to smell it.
"Sam, you surprise me," chatted Ray. "I thought I put
you off with conditions that were impossible to meet. You
keep coming back! You know what you are trying to do is
insane. What's your counteroffer?"
"Not now, son. We have to decide where to eat."
"Daddy, we just ate on the 747." It was the first words
Linda had been able to speak. It was the first time he had
ever seen her shy.
"That was Afternoon Tea. We're on a twenty-seven hour
day today and we need four meals." Besides, he had to
impress Ray.
"But it was steak!"
The exterior of Santa Monica's Kamsamal was Main
Street American, from a period when the duller American
architects used brick instead of flat glass, but inside it
became a two story, four-sided fantasy overlooking an
inner courtyard of vaguely Moorish style, arches and intri-
cate filigree, an Arab palace as seen through the dream of
a Mexican priest. The niches for Our Lady of Mercy
carried azaleas instead.
Graciously, Ray Armsiel helped Linda into her wrought-
iron chair at their table in the courtyard. He had the
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Donald Kingsbury
West, but he was also nervous. He knows I've set her up
as a trap, Sam thought. Smart man.
Linda listened curiously to their passionate discussion
about a ninety-mile-long fragile structure arrowing in orbit
above the Earth. Ray explained to her politely how catch-
ing cargo pods saved energy by storing energy in the
structure itself for later recycling. She smiled and Sam
wondered if Ray knew that she did not understand. It
wasn't easy to explain to anyone how such a system would
be cheaper than using space-shuttles once the tonnage
volume to space reached a critical level.
The gaunt young man ate like a horse while he argued.
Linda watched him, and Sam knew she was in love—again.
At the end of the long meal, over the Korbel Champagne
from beyond California's Valley of the Moon, the two men
signed a series of contracts, shoving aside the dirty dishes,
in too much of a hurry to wait for a clear table.
"A graying man and a child happily signing their names
to pieces of paper promising each other billions of dollars,"
she commented. "I haven't played trading games like that
since I was eleven. Boys!"
"She used to buy and sell palaces from the torn-off
covers of paperback romance novels," Sam teased, and got
a kick under the table from his miffed daughter.
They drove her to a noisy nightclub, featuring a troupe
of Mexican dancers who filled their show with stomping
feathered Aztecs whose wild enthusiasm dominated the
club visually and vocally for a full hour. And then it was
rush-rush-rush to a party Ray didn't want to miss.
Linda put her father in the back seat. She watched Ray's
face as he drove, mesmerized by the thrum of the freeway
madness, the steady flashby of headlamps, until they turned
off the Ventura somewhere into the hills around Topanga
Canyon.
"I'm lost," she said.
He's pretending she doesn't exist, thought an amused
Sam.
The party was loud rock-and-roll to the beat of quaint
music twenty years out of date in a room of jerking bodies
framed against a great window that overlooked the city
lights.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
93
. . . the day destroys the night . . .
. . . night divides the day . . .
. . . tried to run . . . tried to hide . . .
Break on through to the other side!
Ray dismantled his freeway face—and put on his party
smile. He went straight into the arms of a blonde with
slashed skirt, blue and black garter, and pickaninny hairdo.
... we chased our pleasures here . . .
. . . dug our treasures there . . .
. . . can you still recall the time we cried?
Break on through to the other side!* wailed Jim Morrison.
A stricken Linda posted herself by the kitchen door
where she could, within a sound-shadow, chat with her
father. There she was cornered by a crew-cut boy in jeans
who had escaped from his parent's aging hippy farm in
Salinas. The strains of. . . she gets high, she gets high, she
gets high . . . drowned out the boy's first words, but he
repeated himself. She was from Boston? Linda found out
that he thought Boston was in South Carolina and was still
recovering from its losses to the Bluecoats in the Civil
War. Eventually she broke away from this prodigy of the
Californian public schools and took her father for a walk.
"I'm tired, Daddy. Let's go home." She was already
calling a cab when a friendly couple, who were just leaving
the party, insisted that the Brontzs come with them.
Central L.A., it turned out, was only twenty miles out of
their way.
The hotel had given them two large double beds. Sam
was humming happily over his portable ironing board,
touching up his suit for the flight home tomorrow, when
Linda appeared from the bathroom in her nightdress,
ready to conk out. She flopped down on the mattress
angrily.
"You didn't tell me he liked Swedish pickaninnies!"
Sam warmed to the topic. "What a pair of legs. That was
some dress. I haven't seen the likes of it outside of a Hong
*"Break On Through" copyright (c) 1966 Doors Music Company.

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Donald Kingsbury
Kong cat house! She's a bit of a show-off. Last time it was
her bosom."
"Daddy! You knew about that woman and you didn't tell
me!"
"My dear child, that woman is the wife of one of the
chief aeronautical engineers at McDonnell-Douglas. It was
her party, and she is thirty-five years old. Didn't you
notice that she was playing music from the late sixties in
honor, I suppose, of the time when she was a teen-age
queen?"
"She sure didn't look like an old lady to me."
"That was the Doors for God's sake, right out of my
second childhood. The only time I ever cheated on your
mother, they were playing LA. Woman," he said wistfully.
"Crazy Jim Morrison."
"I wasn't born then."
"Yes you were. You were learning to walk and falling on
your tushy."
"She can't be that old!"
"You must learn to be observant and see the person
under the latest styles. She smokes pot and that dates
her."
"Look who's talking."
"Well, I drink alcohol and that dates me."
"Daddy, I've never once seen you drunk. You're the
most outrageously controlled man I ever met! They must
have been very good at brainwashing in the fifties. Don't
you have any sins?"
"My only sin has become totally obsolete. I know how
to screw nubile chicks in the back of a car, a fine lost art."
"You look ridiculous standing there with your pants off."
"I'm not as apt to wrinkle them that way."
"He doesn't like me, does he, Daddy?"
"Ray? He will. Right now he's just afraid of you because
you're the boss's daughter."
"It doesn't matter because I don't like him."
"Then I suppose you'll be flying with me back to Boston
tomorrow?"
"Daddy, I just got here!"
He hung up his pants and coat and a fresh shirt that he
had prepared, telescoped the ironing board, turned out

The Moon Goddess and the Son
95
the lights and crawled into his bed after eating the mint
that the hotel staff had left him.
"Daddy?"
"I need the sleep, honey."
The only light in the room came from the haze of blatant
advertisements outside. "Daddy. You'll be gone in the
morning and I won't be able to pump you tomorrow. What
were those things you were signing at dinner?"
"Nothing a girl would understand."
That was his way of teasing her for taking English courses
at college instead of physics like he wanted her to. Silently
she slipped out from under her covers and, crouching
beside his bed, seized one of his wrists in both her hands
and twisted the skin.
"Ouch! I'm an old man. Take it easy."
"Tell me or you get an Indian Burn!"
"You don't have a need to know. All you'll have to do is
take care of him and he'll produce. Ouch! Hey, that's my
right hand! I need it! All right! All right! Uncle!"
"How is he going to make a billion dollars for you, or a
trillion or whatever it was? He's too young. I wasn't born
yesterday. I know men your age don't trust men Ray's age
to do anything—except maybe face machine guns for you."
"He'll be working for Joseph Synmann and gang, a
group we just took under Shantech's wing. He has the
aeronautical engineering skills they need for a military
project Charlie and I are cooking up, and Synmann has
the maturity that Ray lacks. He'll ride herd on our young
man and act as a mentor."
"That baby makes guns?"
I said the wrong thing! Patiently Sam searched for a way
to explain. "The deal has levels of complication." Casting
about for appropriate analogies he recalled commercial
nations, reluctant to spend their wealth on arms, who had
failed to defend themselves—and were no more. For in-
stance, the Etruscans. And he remembered sprawling mil-
itary powers who had failed, in the end, to generate enough
wealth to pay and equip their soldiers—and likewise were
no more. For instance, the Sioux.
"Yes, Ray is going to be working with Synmann on
defense concepts—you have to think about defending your

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Donald Kingsbury
wealth if you want to keep it—but his main job will be
creating the kind of wealth that can pay for a defense.
There's enormous wealth up there, but no cheap transpor-
tation system to bring it in. A hundred years ago Ray
would have been a railroad man."
"And shooting Indians who got in his way!"
"Ray is working on a fabulous space transport scheme.
You want me to explain it to you, but I can't. Think of it as
magic, a magical way of getting into space, a flying Persian
rug. Ray needs an electromagnetic genius at his side and
Synmann is an electromagnetic physicist who has spent his
life working on particle accelerators and is now working on
ways to stop ICBMs. He needs to team up with a crack
aeronautical engineer. They're made for each other." Sam
gently took his daughter's hand from around his wrist.
"Now go to sleep."
She wouldn't. She coaxed more details out of her father,
none of which meant anything to her.
Later, Sam listened to a restless Linda. After an hour of
being unable to sleep she blurted out, "The men I know
don't understand science either! All those fantasy writers
lied to me. Magic is hard! It's not just a matter of saying
spells and drawing pentagons and grinding up freeze-dried
newt tails!"

CHAPTER
14
And if you ever want to see her
She will never be the same
For she has flown to LA. to live
By some invented name.
The name's
The number and the flame
Flickers fame.
And don't you ever try to tame her,
Blame her for your sorrows—
For she can never be your game
While you live lost tomorrows.
Tawn, from Trance Bamblings
Diana stole some money and caught a bus for L.A. at
the Seattle terminal. She slept through Oregon and when
she woke up it was dawn in Northern California, a pale
sun behind low clouds to touch the trees and meadows.
The old man was still illuminated by the little spotlight
above his bus seat, reading his book. The black lady was
asleep in her chair, her daughter asleep in an ample lap,
the husband snoring with his feet in the aisle. Four Mexi-
cans stared out the window. A white-haired grandmother
knitted a sweater for a grandchild, having confided to
Diana at the midnight rest stop that she had wasted her
youth hustling sailors in San Francisco during the Second
97

98
Donald Kingsbury
World War. An emaciated woman with a pink punk hairdo
endlessly staggered to the swaying toilet room.
Diana took a day's vacation in San Francisco to see the
city she had heard so much about. She had a map and she
zig-zagged by foot along the hills to get the best view of
San Francisco bay. Oceans still amazed her. With her last
dollars she treated herself to octopus on Fisherman's
Wharf.
Somebody left a gate open to their tiny garden, and she
spread her sleeping bag in among the bushes. Midnight is
full moon time. Tonight the moon wore a rainbow and
diamond twinkly stars. The Crater Rhaeticus was right at
the center, she knew, and Byron was there. If he looked
straight up, he could see her sleeping in a San Francisco
garden. She half exposed one breast and giggled.
Before dawn she left her haven to avoid being caught
and wandered down to the beach to watch the moon set in
the ocean. It was nice to do what you wanted to do and
not get beaten but it wasn't so nice to be broke. On an
empty stomach she wandered back to the bus station. She
didn't hurry. There were always buses to L.A.
It was scary panhandling in Hollywood. She got picked
up by a pimp she didn't know was a pimp and had to push
her stuff through a window and crawl out after it in the
middle of the night and sleep under a car like a cat. After
three days alone without food she found a family of run-
aways and slept on their floor. They were all into stealing
and hustling and the one who befriended her was into
heroin, but she found a job as a waitress from which she
got fired because she didn't have any papers.
Twilight was panhandling time. She dressed in stolen
clothes to look older than she was. It was an actress's art.
In case of danger like a police patrol car she had to project
the purpose of someone who was going somewhere. And
then when a mark ambled in sight, she had to pose and
stand out. Different people she caught by different wiles.
Some people would give her money if she looked lost and
forlorn. Some people were suckers for the story that she
didn't have busfare—they weren't going to leave a young
girl out on the streets of L.A. alone.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
99
Men tried to pick her up but she had the perfect line
for them: "I'm collecting money to pay my doctor's bill.
God, the things you catch these days! I've even got a
rash between my fingers." She'd roll her eyes and they'd
give her a dollar coin without touching her and hurry
on.
For people she really wanted to get rid of, she had a
spastic, drooling act. She would proposition them with
brain damaged tongue-control centers. It was great for
destroying men's lolita fantasies.
Once she actually saw Tawn, the reigning madman of
trance, on her favorite panhandling corner. He had cut-
outs on his buttocks and trance music coming out of his
hat, but she didn't approach him. He also had two body-
guards. L.A. was supposed to be full of famous people but
she suspected they were all hiding or wearing rubber faces
when they had to be out on the street.
And then one day at twilight she spotted a very famous
man. He had the right build—small and wiry-—and she
followed him for two blocks, partly because she was too
awed to speak to him, partly because she was afraid.
Finally she walked up beside him and matched his pace
with her skinny little legs.
"I'm hungry. Why don't you give me a dollar."
"Nope," he said and started to move faster.
She matched his pace. "Uncle Ray! Is that any way to
treat a starving cousin?"
That stopped him. He looked at her. And she knew she
had power over him because she knew his name and he
didn't know hers. "Jog my memory," he said.
"I'm the Moon Goddess and you've been trespassing on
my territory, building leoports and skyhook-ladders and
things where you haven't any business being. Gimme a
dollar!"
"What would you do with a dollar?"
"I could pound it into a copper arrowhead.".
"Now when I was your age, I earned my dollars."
"You got yourself a deal, Mr. Armsiel. I'll work for you
anytime. But you have to buy me my spacesuit. Gimme a
dollar to start off with."

100
Donald Kingsbury
"And what's your technical expertise?"
"I'm hungry."
"Hmm," he said, supporting his head on his thumb like
a bronze thinker. "I won't give you a dollar, but I'll buy
you a hamburger."
"A hamburger!" Her eyes twinkled. "You're very smart,
Mr. Armsiel. You're the first person who's ever noticed
that I'm really a sixty year old tubercular rummy only
pretending to be a starving girl. Come on, you wouldn't
deny an old man his pleasures—gimme a dollar to put on a
bottle of gin!"
"Or a shot of coke."
"Yuk! Cokies are all impotent. Coke makes your penis
shrivel up to the size of my little finger, did you know
that?" She demonstrated. "And it gives you varicose veins,"
she added. "Only ugly lawyers who don't like women
shoot coke. I'll take a McDonald's hamburger any day.
There's a McDonald's six blocks from here." She pointed
with a skinny finger. "You could just gimme a dollar and
save yourself a long walk."
He headed in the direction she indicated and she fell
into step, putting down her right foot when he put down
his right foot, and putting down her left foot when he put
down his left foot.
"What are you doing out so late?" he asked by way of
starting a conversation.
"It's not even my bedtime yet! And besides, I'm a
runaway and I can stay up as late as I want."
"Tell me, how did you know my name?"
"Some joker pinned a big sign on your back."
He began to try to reach up his back with a hand on the
end of a crooked elbow.
"Silly!" She spanked him on the bottom.
"Well?"
"You just want me to tell you that you're very famous,
because you don't believe your own press. I have lots of
pictures of you. You're very handsome for a pip-squeak."
Flattery might get her two hamburgers.
"Where are you from?"
"Texas," she lied.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
101
At McDonald's Diana sneaked in front of him at the
order panel and punched the square for Big Mac with
cunning speed. Then, with a furtive glance at Ray, also
ordered a large fries.
"Just a Coke for me," he said.
"Yuk." She punched it in. "Can I have a McWine?"
That was McDonald's version of grape and apple with a
touch of cinnamon.
"Sure."
She smiled mischievously. "Can I have a quarter pounder,
too? With cheese?"
"Sure."
Rapidly the fingers danced on the panel. "I'm hungry. I
want another Big Mac."
"And don't forget the apple pie," he added sarcastically.
Before he was finished speaking, fingers stabbed again,
and the light went on for apple pie and a second Big Mac.
The machine asked for a deposit of $14.75. He stuck in his
credit card and his thumb. Fifteen seconds later the trans-
action had been cleared. The machine also ate paper money
but it took longer to run the tests.
Robot cooks, programmed by queuing theory, had the
meal delivered within another fifteen seconds.
Diana took the tray smugly and led them to a table by
the fountain. "See. I told you it would cost you more than
a dollar. You could have got off easy, only you have to be
smart enough to listen to me."
She sat down, and after one motion in which half a
hamburger disappeared into her mouth, she added, in a
somewhat muffled fashion: "I once tried to steal some
toilet paper in here but the damn washroom robot locked
the door and called the manager. I had to bullshit my way
out of that one. I told him I was very upset that a respect-
able place like McDonald's would have spies in the bath-
room watching me while I sat on the flusher."
"What did he say?"
"He said it was all right because it was a female robot."
Ray Armsiel sipped his Coke.
She gobbled up the first Big Mac and started on the
quarter pounder. "Where do you get your crazy ideas?"

102
Donald Kingsbury
"I steal them."
"You better watch out. Pretty soon they'll have a robot
that will clean out your toilet bowl if you do that."
"Don't you think your father and mother are worried?"
She shrugged. "Yeah."
"L.A. is a dangerous place for a young girl."
She stood up with half an apple pie in her mouth. She
undid her blouse and loosened her belt so that he could
see her belly. Still standing, after finishing the pie and
washing it down with McWine, she pointed to two small
scars. "My father stabbed me when I was four because I
stepped on his glasses." She buttoned up and sat down.
"Mostly he just beats me." She shrugged.
"Oh," said Ray. "And how is your mother? Does he beat
her, too?"
"No. Only when she tries to protect me. I've always
known I was going to leave. I remember packing my
things when I was three. I had a little cardboard suitcase.
He caught me and held me up by the heels with my head
in the bathwater. I used to lock the bathroom door and
take baths a lot to get over my fear of water." She watched
his horrified expression, remembering that she had broken
her own vow never to talk about certain things. More than
anything else, sympathy could get you into trouble. Get-
ting trapped in sympathy was worse than being beaten.
She grinned at Ray. "Don't take me so straight. Don't you
know that runaways always lie about their parents?"
"Who's caring for you now?"
"The best person in the world—me."
"I could put you in touch with a good social agency.
Why don't you come up to my hotel and meet my wife,
Linda? She'd know exactly what to do."
A brittle fear undercut Diana's happiness, triggering a
wary eye to check the position of the door, while she
calculated how long it would take to bolt for freedom. She
knew an alley and a stairway and a shortcut through a
restaurant. "Maybe I can do you a favor, too. I know this
great psychiatrist. He has all these friends in starched
white coats who want to help out disturbed techies." She
grinned, and wolfed down the last hamburger as if she
might not have time to finish it.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
103
Just as a precaution, she disarmed her man with the
hand that wasn't holding the burger. The digiphone in his
coat pocket magically appeared on the table. That way he
couldn't slip anything past her. It was the smallest one
she'd ever seen. She was fascinated. "What's its range?"
"Planetwide."
"Let's call Poland!"
"These gismos are illegal in Poland."
"Let's call the moon!"
"That's a different problem. The antenna on the set is
pointed the wrong way. It's done, but you have to go
through the leoport or Big Mama."
She became very sly. "I have a picture of you with
Byron McDougall."
"Yeah?" Ray was smiling.
"Are you his friend?"
"Yeah."
"Enough of a friend to have his digiphone number in
memory?" She tapped the tiny box.
^Yeah."
"Call him! Can we call him even if he's on the moon?"
"He's Earthside this month."
Zip, she activated the antenna with a flick of her thumb.
It opened like a flower, and she typed in 1 Love You with
quick double-finger motions. "Send it!" she ordered.
"You have to sign your name," said an amused Armsiel.
She gave Ray a crafty smile. He wasn't going to get her
on that old trick. She added, Sinsirly, The Moon Goddess,
to the flowing blue display. "Send it! Please."
Ray Armsiel had children of his own and he genuinely
liked them. He put in the code. The message was sent—
and a satellite far above the United States acknowledged.
Byron just happened to be "live" and in the mood to
reply, which he did, lazily, in lower case, without punctu-
ation.
what kind of nut are you ray
Just sitting here having hamburgers with the Moon God-
dess and thought we'd say hello.
give her a kiss
"He says to give you a kiss."
"Byron McDougall said that to me?" She was wide-

104
Donald Kingsbury
eyed. She didn't know how to respond. She grabbed a
McDonald's napkin. "Can I have your autograph, Mr.
Armsiel?"
He signed the soft paper, his first autograph.
Happily she stuffed it into her blouse. "It's right inside
my bfa where it belongs." She loved to make men blush.
Minutes later, on the sidewalk by the golden arches, he
seemed disoriented. "You're sure you have a place to
stay?"
Diana couldn't help one last tease. "Sometimes I sleep
under cars." She wanted to kiss him, but even she felt
shy. She took Ray's hand and shook it.
Block after block she ran along the street. It was the
best day of her whole life. She danced around the side-
walk, begging. People weren't able to resist an imp so full
of gaiety and, within half an hour, her pockets jingling
with dollar coins, she ran home to collect her addict friend
to take him to the local basement dive, the only one she
could go to because it didn't check IDs. Maybe she could
cure him of being depressed.
He was miserable because he hadn't made a hit yet, and
he looked around the crowded room with haunted eyes,
searching for Jim or maybe the Big Bear. "Hey man, you
seen the Big Bear? Hey Diana, gimme a buck—I need a
drink."
Cigaret smoke coiled through the dim light, choking at
life. Even the brightest of the evening's clothes smelled of
stale tobacco while the irritated eyes of the young girls
wept mascara. Diana sat there, full of her own dreams,
crazying, wondering why she suddenly hated this place.
She was depressed. How could she be depressed after
talking to Ray Armsiel?
She nudged the boy next to her. "Jeez, what a day!"
"Yah. Goddamn nothing ever happens."
"I got picked up by Ray Armsiel! That's something!"
"Who he?"
"That the new coke man?" asked someone at the other
end of the table, brightening at the prospect.
"Oh come on Lem—sissy don't know coke from coal, do
you sissy? She's straight. She's into music."
"Yeah, now I place him. That the Ray into trip-point

The Moon Goddess and the Son
105
trance? Jah, da dowie wah! Bang, bang, bang." The boy
started to pound his fist into his hand.
"This Ray is a spaceman. He took me to dinner and
wanted me to come up to his place."
"Yah. Columbia's into space-trance. Soft blue ripples!
He with Columbia? God that's oochy stuffings. You hear
the drum rolls Tantemount's doing in that new space-
trance disk? Cept it don't hit the ear like drum rolls—been
dijjed to the way-blue, like somethin outta the inside of a
rocket engine."
"You seen the Big Bear? Hey Lem, lissen: he ain't
laying low, fer Chris-sake? Shit, life is too hard. Diana,
gimme some hit-coin—I gotta find the Big Bear. Gotta,
gotta. Hey, Jossie, boy, friend-a-mine, gimme a drag-roll.
Gotta have one of your cigs!" A toss and a catch. "Jesus-
God I'm saved!" came the born-again cry of the addict,
striking a match. Blue incense rolled out of his nose.
Suddenly Diana was darting toward the ladies' room
where she knew they had a little open window where she
could breathe for a minute, alone.
A large hand clamped itself to her shoulder as she went
by. "Hey, litde cake, you got holes in your skull, spending
time with that buzzhead! How long have you known Jimmy?
Jimmy the Suck. He'll take you for everything you've got."
She whirled on the scrufly young man who had the
1950s hairdo of a "laxer" and whose hand was not going to
let her go. Laxers believed in hard work so long as it
wasn't legal. "What have I got to take? I haven't even got a
job."
"Lots of jobs around."
"I don't want to be a whore, smartass."
He smiled sardonically. "A waitress, then?"
"I got fired as a waitress because I don't have any
papers."
Her assailant shook his head. "No papers! How about
that!" He seemed pleased. "You need a little forging job
and I'm a forger. Serendipity." He escorted her into the
ladies' room and, after locking the door, climbed up on the
toilet seat and hung his head through the window.
"You're not going to let me have some fresh, too?" she
demanded indignantly.

106
Donald Kingsbury
He lifted her up beside him, holding her affectionately.
"Can't have you fainting, little cake."
"Why is a forger better than a heroin addict?" Her voice
was deliberately antagonistic.
"I make up histories for people. I give them new lives.
That's different from destroying the one life they do have.
What name would you like to be known by?"
"I can change my name?"
"Yeah and you get a birth certificate and an L.A. high
school record and a social security number. I figure if we
stretched it a bit you could pass for eighteen."
"What would you get out of me being eighteen?" she
asked cynically while the arm he had around her shoulder
slowly cupped its hand under her tiny breast.
"Me? Right now I need a girl to ferret around record
offices who doesn't arouse suspicion. I need new faces all
the time." He laughed at her fragile toughness, knowing
why it was there, and tried to find a way to put her at
ease. She was cute and he liked her. "I'm square." He
stopped a moment to let himself be aware of the warmth
under his hand. "My battle-ax—that's my lady-love to
you—would kill me if I didn't give every underage cake an
integrity deal. God, she's even old enough to remember
woman's lib. Never puts up with man-crap—even the
innocent man-crap I grunt out. You'll meet her. She'll see
you get class papers."
"Could I get a job on the moon?" asked Diana with the
round eyes of a thirteen year old. Then she giggled.
He dropped his hand, reminded suddenly that she was
a child. "Jesus! How will you ever pass yourself off as a
woman with a chortle like that? It's a dead giveaway."
"I want a job on the moon," she insisted.
"There ain't no jobs on the moon. Maybe if you were a
communist and had a good record in the Komsomol."
"A lot of people are working with Byron McDougall! I
talked to him today!"
"People—shit! Men, you mean."
"NASA hires women pilots!"
He shook his head. "Not on the papers you'd get from
me. Hell, you want a job as a waitress, that I can get you.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
107
But you want a job jockeying a hundred million dollar
spaceplane, what I've got to give ain't good enough."
"I sure could use some papers," Diana mused. "As long
as I don't have to screw you to get them." She glanced up
to him, out of the corner of her eyes, defiantly.
"How come all you women have lost your romantic
nurturing sensibilities? What happened to the sexual revo-
lution of your mothers? What's wrong with a little lay for
services rendered?"
Diana was never cowed by repartee. "In my mother's
day they didn't have food additives. It's the food additives
that've killed romance. Men's hands have grown big and
hairy since the multinationals started to put tetramyacin in
your feed. Yuk."
"You say such grossed-out things while you and I are
cheek-to-cheek sharing the night's cool air. Girl! feel the
glory of your surroundings! The mellow stars are out and
the sounds of laughter waft at our backs! Isn't that roman-
tic? What better excuse for a lay?"
"Yeah and we're standing on a toilet seat!"
"Trust a woman to notice the flushers sticking out of the
universal truth."
She giggled. She took his hand in hers and turned her
head to kiss his stubble. She didn't feel threatened at
all—mainly because she was closer to the door than he.

CHAPTER 15
Hush-a-bye, Baby, on the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock-,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
Down will come baby, and cradle, and all.
Mother Goose
With only the hint of the summer's slow twilight in the
air, overeager crickets had already begun to call to each
other for their Friday night romancing. The Bond family
had arrived from Boston via Texas by Canadair Challenger
601 and were swarming over the Stonefield residence
celebrating the birthday of little Charlie McDougall even
though it was no longer his birthday. He was already five
days old.
Junie's three sisters were in charge of the feast. From
his corner, Byron watched Myra arguing with Sheila about
whether they should put a candle on the cake since it was
a zeroth birthday party, while Mary-Jane tried to make
peace. Sheila insisted that every birthday cake had to have
a candle "to grow on."
To end the dispute Sheila produced a wax aviator, six
inches tall, with a wick sticking out of his bald head. The
father wondered wryly how long it would take before the
flame burned brightly in place of the aviator's brains.
For days, a pensive Byron had been fingering the love
108

The Moon Goddess and the Son
109
letter from Amanda, hot in his pocket, his mind mulling
over the speed with which he had been pulled from Saudi
Arabia into the Houston whirlwind. He was now working
for NASA. Rumors abounded of new multi-billion dollar
shuttle contracts. And he was in love with the wrong
woman. Enough to set any man's brains afire.
It must have been old Bond who had pulled the strings.
The clues added up.
He wasn't pleased. Flying the skies over the Persian
Gulf, he had felt like his own man. There were difficult
decisions to make but ample time in which to make
them—he had known he wanted to get out of the Air
Force; he had known he wanted to move in the direction
of space. But he hadn't come to any conclusion, hadn't let
his mind test all the alternatives, hadn't even talked to
anyone except his friend Abdul Zamani. Then . . .
Like a goose flying into his engine at 5000 feet, Bond
had made the decision for him. It rankled. Byron did not
know why he had acquiesced without a murmur, hurrying
home as meekly as any young boy bound to rules beyond
his control.
He went upstairs and tip-toed into the baby's room to
watch the tiny sleeping face of his toothless son. I can't
ever remember seeing one so small. He poked his little
finger into the boy's palm, and the fingers closed around
it, tightly, without even waking the child. You're going to
be the best space engineer the United States has ever seen!
Across the wavering world of his mind passed elegant
lunar cities built by his son.
Then Byron laughed. He was only twenty-seven, with
his life ahead of him, and here he was projecting into his
son those precious ambitions of his own, ambitions that
awed him, that he felt too frail to accomplish for himself.
Old Charlie has me in his sights—I'll be a flyboy all my
life. And never get beyond low orbit with the speckled
ball of Old Earth rolling by.
He let little Charlie hold another finger. "Son of a
bitch," he muttered, "and they didn't even let me choose
your name!"
He was wondering how important a stable family was to
NASA's officials when Charlie Jr. opened his blue eyes.

110
Donald Kingsbury
Oh, oh! Here it comes. The only time babies ever woke
up was when they were hungry or smelly. The face red-
dened. A high pitched wail blasted out of those lungs.
Byron laughed and lifted the child to his shoulder, sniffing
to see if he needed his diaper changed. "I guess it's just
that you're hungry."
Junie rushed into the room, her mother screaming after
her: "Don't run! You're just out of the hospital! You should
still be there!" They both arrived to confront Byron, scowl-
ing. "What are you doing to my baby!" crooned Junie.
"He just wants a piece of his chocolate birthday cake!"
"Give-him-to-me-before-he-has-apoplexy," Junie said
firmly. Mrs. Bond was even more insistent. "He's stran-
gling. The poor baby's strangling. Can't you see!"
Byron handed the child over and went downstairs and
poured himself a drink. "I can't get used to alcohol after
Saudi Arabia," he told his audience, and sighed, letting
the taste of the Scotch linger on his tongue.
"All rot-gut over there, eh?" said Charlie Sr.
"Rot-gut? There wasn't any alcohol."
"I'm sure an old military man like you had his sources."
"Dad, some of those Saudis drink, but I didn't want to
know about it and they didn't drink in front of me. Some-
times you have to be a diplomat."
Byron felt a strange hostility to this man who had found
a job for him within NASA. He couldn't attack him, but he
could lecture him as if he were an ignorant American
tourist.
"Do you know why the Russians horrify the Saudis?
Not only are they atheists who worship a Jew, but half of
the Soviet international set are pickled alcoholics. My
bosom friend, Abdul Zamani, who has got to be one of the
best F-15 pilots around, was being recruited in London by
a KGB type from the Embassy who was so stupid that he
was trying to reach Zamani by getting him drunk! I thought
only American businessmen were that dumb!"
"You've^been out of the country, too long." Charlie
chuckled. "I'm glad we got you back in time—that was a
very unkind cut, comparing noble American businessmen
with a vile KGB agent posing as a diplomat."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
111
"If you were working in Saudi Arabia I suppose you'd
find a way to smuggle in your Scotch?"
"Of course, son. No Arab screws around with my
freedom."
"Yeah, Dad, and I'll bet you were hanging out in those
speakeasies during prohibition when drinking was illegal!"
"I swear I was only old enough to drink my mother's
milk when Al Capone was driving trucks. I'm innocent."
Charlie Sr. had conveniently set himself up for the kill.
"You liberals are all alike," snarled Byron, diving from the
sun. "If you want your likker or cocaine, you'll get it, even
if you have to set your mother to drinking in old shuttered
warehouses so you can take your hit mixed with mother's
milk!"
Sheila guffawed nervously. "Is he drunk, Daddy?"
Byron patted his sister-in-law's bottom. "On one glass of
Scotch?" He held up the amber fluid to the light, watching
the ebullient coruscations of the setting sun through the
ice cubes. "I'm just high because I'm a father and I'm
working for NASA." And I got a letter from Amanda. He
let his thoughts fly from that. "God damn! I was only a kid
when NASA went to the moon and I've never forgotten it!
And now I'll be flying one of those babies! God help me,
and I have to work with gentlemen who'd besmirch Amer-
ica's Honor by staggering down the streets of Riyadh like
some common KGB agent!"
Charlie Sr., oblivious to the insult, raised his glass for a
toast. "Here's to the flying father!"
Byron raised his glass higher. "Here's to the sinful old
grandfather!" He turned his attention to his mother-in-
law. "And to the ribald old grandmother who kisses every
young flyboy she can find behind her old man's back."
And he took her in his arms and kissed her, just to see her
blush. That's for accusing me of strangling my own child.
They all went to the table and filled their plates from
the buffet style birthday feast. Byron missed the playing of
Pin-The-Tail-On-The-Donkey, and the marbles, and the
toy car models, and the plastic water pistols. This must be
a Boston birthday party. They brought the child out for
the cake. He stared at the candle flame in fascination and
Byron wondered what he saw and what it meant to him.

112
Donald Kingsbury
Junie blew out the candle for her son. That was the Bond
way—to do everything for their children so that their
children would grow up crippled.
"What did he wish?" asked Byron, concealing his sarcasm.
Junie didn't notice. "Little Charlie was wishing he'd
grow up to be a great violinist."
Over my dead body.
"Don't you think he has a violinist's hands?"
"No way," growled Byron. "But I did catch him smiling.
I think he's going to grow up to be Bob-Hope-Entertaining-
The-Troops, what with the military on my side of the
family and the jokers on his mother's side of the family."
Sheila threw a bun at him, and he winked at her and
poured himself another Scotch.
Later Byron went upstairs to piss. He locked himself in
the bathroom and pulled the shade, then seated, reread
the letter from Amanda for the fifth time. He was going to
have to burn it. It was too dangerous. He'd meant to burn
it in Texas, three days ago, but he was too sentimental.
How could a man fall in love with a woman who was taller
than he was and had buck teeth? When he was in Saudi
Arabia and couldn't get her out of his mind, he thought it
was the sand that had addled him, but the beautiful women
of Houston hadn't made any difference.
He found it comfortable that evening to lie with Junie
on an expanse of fresh sheets even if she did reek of
tobacco factory. God, bodies were addictive. Junie was
calmer and easier to live with here in the hills of New
Hampshire among the buttercups than in the desert where
cardamom seeds were mixed into her coffee.
At some awful hour he woke up and fed the baby. He
didn't mind at all. He liked to have the boy to himself,
watching how such a little tyke could suck with every bit
of the muscle of a trombone player. How fiercely the
fingers held to what they touched. Always full of surprises,
this time he only gurgled when Byron changed his diaper.
McDougall wandered through the greenhouse before
going back to bed. The brilliant moon blotted out the stars
above the glass. It reminded him of flying at night over
the clouds. So this is to be my homeP Not a bit of it was his
own choice. He had to admit that Junie had good taste,

The Moon Goddess and the Son
113
but he was still angry that she bought it first, and only
afterwards asked his opinion. In the darkness he wandered
into the computer room.
He was still slightly hysterical when he sat down at the
console. It was an industrial 32-bit machine, no home toy,
an engineer's dream, and he was an engineer—but he
didn't know how to use it. When he lived away from the
Bond family, he felt like a man, but when the Bonds were
near him, somehow he was overwhelmed. They made a
child of him—like the little kid he had been in the streets
of those endless army towns.
Well, he knew how to power up the computer. That was
as easy as turning on a toaster. He tried a graphics demo
in the disk drive because that was all he had figured out so
far. A bird-cage image of the space-shuttle popped onto
the screen which could be turned and viewed from any
angle. He could even fly the damn thing down into the
atmosphere, watching the temperature of the tiles appear
in color codes of blue and yellow and red.
But the Unix operating system baffled him. He took out
Amanda's letter and reread it for the sixth time while the
untended shuttle burned up on the screen in front of him.
Then he laid his head on the keyboard and cried.
In the morning—while the birds were still twittering—
after eggs and toast and a pleasant chat with Junie—he
went down to the basement workshop, sprayed Amanda's
letter with a fixative and preserver, squeezed the stiffened
paper into a bottle and then, upon replacing the air with
nitrogen, sealed the bottle by wrapping it in glass fiber
saturated with wet epoxy.
I should burn the damn thing, he kept grumbling.
When the epoxy was dry he took his mummified letter,
hidden under his coat, on a walk in the woods and there
gave it a proper religious burial with full Republican hon-
ors and a military salute.

CHAPTER 16
As we find in the history of all usurping governments,
time changes anomaly into system, ana injury into right;
examples beget custom, and custom ripens into law; and
the doubtful precedent of one generation becomes the
fundamental maxim of another.
Henry Hallam (isis)
It looked like any New England village street—sanded-
oil paving, breaking at the edges, no sidewalks, one yellow
fire-hydrant, a white clapboard house placed every fifty
feet along the gently rising hill. The shrubbery and trees
were at least thirty years old and in need of pruning. All of
the lawns had been mowed within the week.
Sam Brontz grunted. He'd been sent on a treasure
hunt, following little pieces of paper, and he was none too
pleased. What the hell was Barnes up to? The instructions
mentioned 137 West Elm, the only salt-box on the street
with a red door and red shutters bordering the second
story dormer windows.
When he buzzed, a disembodied voice spoke from an
invisible grill. "Please enter. The door is open."
But no one was inside. The rooms were stark—ceramic
floors printed with some computer generated design, glass
shelves, white plastic furniture holding rich futons, the
only wood a cut and carved sea-polished bole, now sitting
alone on glass.
114

The Moon Goddess and the Son
115
Ah-—there was somebody! Sam's host, whoever he was,
stood at the top of the metal-railed stairs wearing a silver
skullcap with spathed ears more appropriate to a lily than
to a man. He wore comfortable white overalls. His face
was powdered white and his lips were painted crimson
like some Parisian mime artist. One of Limon Barnes'
goddamn cronies!
"May I have your papers, please?"
Brontz ascended the stairs, his anger rising. Had Limon
gone over the canyon? I'll strangle that sonofabitch if I
have to fire him! thought Sam. It was enraging to find a
man with the rare talents needed for a delicate task, only
to discover him applying all of his genius to counting the
hairs on his penis!
Who could be found to replace Barnes? Scholars were
hopeless. Sam knew dozens of men who had mastered
everything there was to know about Russia—yet he couldn't
name a stellar strategist among the lot of them.
Saving The World wasn't at all as easy as Sam's overac-
tive teen-age mind had fantasized. Then he had seen his
planet as a commune of co-conspirators who would stam-
pede with him to mutual glory because mankind's path of
destiny was so clear. Instead, to his horror, the maturing
Sam had discovered prima donnas.
Sheepishly Sam Brontz handed over to Limon's pow-
dered and perfumed stooge those sealed play "orders" so
solemnly entrusted to his cloak's inner pocket. The agent
did not let Sam pass until the papers had been painfully
examined. "You've been assigned to the fourteenth cen-
tury. I'm afraid you're in for a long briefing. The area is
extremely dangerous. We'll have to attach to you one of
our permanent agents—Iziaslav Dimitriev, ordained in the
Orthodox Church, who will be your permanent compan-
ion. Listen to him closely if you value your life."
Two sober-faced women, neither of them more than five
feet one or more than ninety-five pounds, each with the
lily-like ear pieces and white make-up, escorted him into
their bleached bathroom and stripped him. He was bathed
very professionally and given a tingling antiseptic rubdown.
They dressed him in linen and wools and furs. The
colors were sober—browns—only a touch of embroidery

116
Donald Kingsbury
gave the garments a noble richness. The women showed
him how to pull on his felt boots. They nagged him about
his walk. They showed him his purse and how to use it.
They sat him down and taught him to eat a Russian meal.
The soup, cabbage, and cucumber, was drunk from a
wooden bowl with a wooden spoon. He had honeycomb
for the dark rye bread. He had to learn how to eat with his
knife and enjoy raw turnips. They reminded him that on
Wednesdays and Fridays all animal foods were taboo,
including milk and eggs.
When he asked for a snort of vodka, grinning, they
reminded him sternly that vodka was a Tartar invention.
The more delicate of the Time Agents even suggested to
Sam that the Tartars had provided the barbarian Slavs
with vodka for the same reason that Englishmen had pro-
vided Amerindians with whiskey.
The briefing room of Limon's crazies was a dim back-
chamber of scattered books and precisely laid out machines.
Sam found himself being led to a chair which might once
have held dental patients or perhaps criminals undergoing
the third degree. He protested when the three of them
began to strap him down but they bound his wrists any-
way, and attached electrodes to his head. It was necessary
to monitor his learning, they said as they powered up the
computer next to him.
Sam was stunned to notice their Kensakan Kambi-1000.
The rumors were that the first of this series was not even
in production yet. Had Limon's gamesplayers transported
him a year or two into the future for their convenience?
"That thing has eight thirty-two bit processors in it!" he
exclaimed, trying to point with his manacled hands.
Agent Whiteface looked chagrined. "That's true, but it
was the best we could do in this time zone." His voice
oozed apology. "Field agents have to live off the land.
Sorry."
Live off the land! How in hell had Barnes found one!
Supposedly at the Kensakan's core resided four megabytes
of "instinct," the essence of librarian—allowing it to learn
the reference needs of its operator by interaction. It could
access about ten-thousand books worth of data per laser
disk drive.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
117
Whiteface was still being apologetic as he scanned some
screens and put requests to the machine which he insisted
on referring to as a she. "She's only a puppy. You'll have
to forgive her naivety. There is no way you can switch on a
machine like this and have her up and running in seconds."
"The programming has bugs in it?" asked Sam.
"Possibly—but the program is so fault-tolerant that you
probably wouldn't notice. That's not the problem. There is
no way she could cross reference a whole library in the
single month we've had her—she hasn't helped enough
people yet. She'll be a couple of years growing up—at
least. Nevertheless she will have to serve—you have only
twenty hours to learn how to be a Russian nobleman of the
fourteenth century."
The hi-res screen lit up, a meter-square window into
another dimension. "A real Russian of that century wouldn't
know much of his own history—he'd just carry it in his
bones and in his stories, considering literacy as an aid to
bookkeeping, no more. You, on the other hand—being a
poseur—will need a quick and clear structure upon which
to hang your faked personality."
"I don't even speak Slavic," said Brontz dryly.
The mime-white features grinned a ghastly grimace by
the glow of the screen—while surgeon-thin hands tapped
the metal electrodes on Sam's head suggestively. From
across the room one of the women explained patiently to
her savage, "In six hours you'll speak Slavic so fluently
that you'll think it's English."
During the final eclipse of the Roman empire, while the
Alans and Ostrogoths and Huns and Avars and Bulgars and
Khazars fought their reverberating battles across the gold
and green steppes above the Black Sea, trampling the blue
cornflowers and the fairy flutes of the white milfoil and the
great grasses with their horses' hooves, while Moslem
armies disrupted the commerce of the squabbling Medi-
terranean Christians, while Roman Law was in the final
stages of its self-destruction, the non-political Slavs were
moving out in all directions from the Carpathians and the
Pripet Marshes, building their little stockaded villages-
migrating to the east, slash burning the endless empty
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Donald Kingsbury
the man-tall grasslands and willing to accept the protection
of the horse-mounted Bulgars and Khazars—moving to the
west into land vacated by German migrations. And always
breeding steadily.
The eves of the wall-screen above Sam's dental chair
flowed through a flat forest of pine and birch like a wan-
dering woodsman breaking into a virgin land where no one
could follow, the thick growth shutting out the trail behind
and the daylight from above. Sometimes there was a stand
of oak or ash. Moss covered the rotten detritus and the
black swamps of the lowlands slowly ate all footprints with
mouths of ooze. The forest was endless. A bear pawed
swarming ants from a broken stump, licking and nibbling.
Once, only once, the curious screen probed into a Slav's
deserted pit-hut, dug on higher ground to the depth of
half-a-man and roofed over by reeds from a local beaver
pond.
Sam's briefing officer nodded. "We're looking at the
eighth century Russian wilderness into which the heathen
Slavs are being driven by suddenly warlike neighbors.
They are tillers of the land and hunters. Unfortunately for
them they have been pushed into terrible farmland. The
soil is acid, cold, infertile, badly aerated and poorly drained.
Once the land is cleared its fertility dies. They have to
keep moving, clearing new land, and they have to hunt
and fish to survive. The poverty of the land will plague
them for a thousand years."
He touched the console of the Kensakan Kambi-1000.
The forest disappeared—to be replaced by a ninth century
map of Europe centered around the Baltic Sea and show-
ing the explosion of Norse invasions in red.
"Prince Samislav, you are not a Slav—though your name
is Slavic and you speak nothing but Slavic. Your ancestors
are Norman. Your princely class has retained for centuries
a semi-colonial character. Generations ago your family lost
contact with its Scandinavian origins—and you have per-
sonally never even seen the sea—but you still think like a
Viking. Deep in your soul something yearns for the ocean.
You are a sea-warrior trapped into owning Slavs. Your
principle interest is not in exploiting the land but in exact-
ing tribute."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
119
A deft finger motion expanded the map.
"Look at the available river networks. It is ideal country
for explorers who have mastered the art of boatbuilding."
The map could be scaled and scrolled and overlaid. North-
ern Russia showed a swath of flatlands, snow-filled and
bleak in winter, soggy in spring, water moving across its
face in slow meandering paths, some escaping north along
the Memel-Nieman, Dvina, and Volkhov river networks.
Most of it flowed south.
High on the map the Baltic rivers intertwined with the
source-fingers of south-seeking waterways—the Volga which
fed the Caspian Sea and the Dnieper which fed the Black
Sea. Portages across the meek divide lay over gentle land
and never for great distances. Brontz couldn't help but
notice that a minor river called the Moskva, flowing into
the Oka, which flowed into the Volga, dominated this
strategic transportation hub.
Whiteface stepped the map backwards in time.
Under the first starlight of the Dark Ages the Khazar
city of Itil on the Caspian dominated the inland trade
reaching up the Volga. Single Scandinavian traders and
adventurers were attracted southward, fascinated by the
luxuries that sometimes came out of the inhospitable for-
est, the silks and spices and glassware which had once
flowed copiously from a now ruined Mediterranean com-
merce. These far-ranging Norse traders, too few during
the eighth century to be a military threat to the Slavs,
brought with them wealth and trading posts and diplo-
macy. They bought the local furs and honey.
The blond traders were quite willing to work with the
Slavs and to accept the protection of the Khazars—but
when Arab invasions and slave raids and depredations
proved that Khazar might was more illusion than fact, and
then when the Khazars, increasingly uneasy at Norse trad-
ing success—deliberately caused them commercial grief,
they began to look north to their own people for help.
The massive Norse invasions of continental Russia dur-
ing the early ninth century are hailed in Russian history as
the arrival of heroic saviors—the sagas being composed by
Norman conquerors, and sung only later by the confused
Slavs. From their fortress base on Lake Ladoga, down the

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Donald Kingsbury
Volkhov River, the Vikings raided and looted in bands of
several hundred as was their nature.
"Let me scroll forward in time." Forts and trading cen-
ters blossomed along the dark rivers. In their songs the
Normans called Russia "Gardariki," the country of strong-
holds. One could see the rapid advance of the Norsemen
down the map, following the early traders, first as pirates
and then as colonial masters.
Like a plague the settlements rose on the rivers below
Novgorod. Then, enticed by inland traders who needed
the backing of warriors, they raided down the Dnieper
and took Kiev, bypassing Itil on the Caspian, to open a
route through the Black Sea to marvelous Constantinople.
Brashly the Norsemen even attacked Constantinople with
a great fleet of 200 ships, always willing to loot when they
thought piracy more rewarding than trade. Constantinople
retaliated by sending them Christian missionaries and simul-
taneously appeased them by making sweet deals for their
furs and slaves. The heathen Normans were happy to
supply Christians with slaves from the abundant Slavic
villages which came with their conquered lands.
By the early eleventh century Norsemen were so plenti-
ful in Constantinople that the emperor formed a whole
regiment of them, the famed Varangian guard. Scandina-
vian pilgrims to the Holy Land of the Savior liked to make
a round tour, coming by sea through the Mediterranean
and returning overland via the rivers of Russia,
As the machine scrolled through time, Sam watched the
Kievian empire grow strong enough to attack and defeat
the weakened Khazars on the eastern border—an unwise
decision which opened the plains to the penetration of
Pechenegs and Cumans who, with practice, learned to
strangle the Kievian outlets to the Black Sea. The Slavicized
Normans then no longer had markets for their slaves and
had to find work for them on their own northern estates.
They could not ship their furs south to make a living and
had to take up the demeaning life of Slavic agriculture.
Limon's agents began to drill Sam in the attitudes of a
"Norman" overlord whose vochina included huge tracts
along the Oka river, remnant of a sub-divided patrimony
which had once extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
121
As centuries passed this pirate family had evolved from
fast-moving adventurers into landed Slavic nobility, from
heathen to devout Christian—but their minds remained
separated from Slavic tradition. The Norman state in Rus-
sia was a great colonial merchant enterprise. Its princes
saw the land as property and its people as property to
exploit for profit.
And the soul of Brontz struggled with the man whose
body he was possessing, the man wearing Russian furs and
wool—outraged that this primitive knew nothing of democ-
racy and freedom. But Samislav could not hear him from
his lands on the banks of the Oka, 600 years down-time:
he was of the noble rodoslovnye—and the others were
chattel. Through a single-minded devotion to Christ he
resisted being taken over by this devil with his ideas about
free women and flying.
Whenever Brontz emerged dominant, in brief victory,
his instructors beat him senseless with questions that
demanded archaic answers from Samislav. The trio tor-
mented their student as a team—when one of them faded
into exhaustion, another took over. Brontz-Samislav had to
remain and endure.
The screen flickered. A world overwhelmingly alien to
Sam flooded from it by unearthly light; he had to answer
endless questions and when he was wrong, he was recycled
through the attitudes of the fourteenth century until he
could hardly remember how an American thought. Grad-
ually, as his tormentors rotated places, the white-faced
Time Agents transmogrified into ascetic monks. The room
dimmed. An icon appeared, celebrating in its stilted colors
the holy world of suffering. The grilling never stopped.
The Time Agents were gone but the monks kept at him
and kept at him. God have mercy. Sam felt his age. He
needed sleep.
Samislav sat alone in his private chapel with the monks,
obsessed by his choices, resenting the Mongol curse. This
scourge not only bled from him the taxes which belonged
to him by right of inheritance from his fathers, but it
might, if the whim struck the overlords of Sarai, even take
from him the right to collect those taxes. He was tired,
tired, tired—so tired since the death of his father—but he

122
Donald Kingsbury
had to come to a decision. Abruptly he forced himself to
his feet and left the room.
His monk followed him with a flickering bee's wax candle.
For need of peace he had to confer with this man of
God. "I confess I am afraid. I am so afraid I dare not speak
my mind even to my own brother Sviatopolk with whom I
wrestled as a child and have shared everything. The awful
shame of my fear drives me like a caged wolf."
"Ah, the trip to Sarai?"
Samislav nodded. He feared what the short monsters of
Sarai would do with his inheritance. He longed to revolt,
to gather an army and attack them, but merely dreaming
of revolt made him sick with fear. Eighty percent of his
family had been killed and left to rot when the first Tartar
Tsar had scythed over the land almost a hundred years
ago—and among his family had been the mightiest war-
riors and heroes that Russia had to offer. Even the women
had been slaughtered as they took refuge in the church.
And now the death of his father was a personal catastro-
phe. Samislav had always taken for granted the cunning
with which that man handled the Tartar baskaks and the
cruelty with which he put down the local rebellions against
the Tartars, but he had not known until these responsibili-
ties had devolved upon his own shoulders that he was a
coward, and now he was too afraid even to tell his brother
of the fear which knotted his stomach. Among noble fami-
lies the problems of death were resolved by the law of
votchina, by the passing of the land and property and
taxation rights of the father to the sons. But under the
Bozhi Batog, the cudgel of God, as the Russians liked to
call their Tartar overlords, it was not so easy.
No Russian prince of the occupied territories collected
taxes without being granted an iarlyk by the Tsar of the
Golden Horde himself and that meant a journey of hom-
age to Sarai. The Tartar Tsar could strip a family of their
property, without a thought, and award everything to
whichever groveling snake reached Sarai first and offered
to extract more taxes per head than had the former lord.
The Tartars chose their princes with care. Patriots were
suspect. Men who pleaded for their people were ignored.
The local princes had no rights. The only trait that the

The Moon Goddess and the Son
123
suspicious brutes liked to reward was absolute obedience.
Samislav's fear filled him with indignation. He had to beg
that heathen Tsar at Sarai for his own land, grovel, call
himself a slave, promise more than his father had given,
bring elaborate gifts—and somehow sell the new taxes to
his people who were always on the edge of revolt, all just
to keep what had been granted to him by the God of his
ancestors. God was merciless in punishing the sinners of
Russia for past transgressions. When would the purifica-
tion be done? When would they finish atoning for those
monstrous sins which had brought the Tartars upon them!
God have mercy!
But his thoughts wandered from God and back to the
Tsar of all Asia. What if, without intending to, he offended
that stinking child born of a horse's anus? Some sons had
never returned from Sarai.
He was terrified—but he had to go.

CHAPTER 17
O for a Muse tffire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
Shakespeare, Henry V
Byron McDougall called it his Houston Palace, with just
a touch of irony in his voice, because he thought of himself
as some kind of pampered consort of Princess Junie. Though
still fascinated by the NASA job that "King Charles Bond"
had found appropriate for his son-in-law's station in life, he
was already planning to parachute out—into another job,
into another world, anywhere, just so long as he landed
upon a distant kingdom he could call his own.
The slanted wooden windows opened north upon subur-
ban gardens to avoid the Texas sun. On the far wall hung a
dozen crisp images of stellar miracles, broadcast to Earth
by the Space Telescope and decoded by computers, framed
in wood and glass—among them a bizarre, knotty jet of gas
spewing from the galactic core of M-87 in the first photo-
graphic confirmation of the mythical black hole. Below it
was Byron's favorite, a ragged nebula caught in a slow
motion explosion. The largest frame was filled with a pen-
sive portrait of his wife.
The room might have been a designer's showpiece; no
one would have thought of it as a workplace for there were
no papers in sight and the books on the shelves were
124

The Moon Goddess and the Son
125
modest in number and sorted by size rather than by
content as if by a decorator who valued the balance of line
and form above reading. The science fiction collection was
modestly hidden beside the desk, out of sight from the
doorway. The jungle plants from Brazil had air and space.
Even the flat screen computer did not seem to be used.
Its table was bare. His disks were all in neat pseudo-
Harvard Classics' leather cases above the computer, their
program manuals next to them, all in order. The single
object which had no place was a thumbnail-sized square of
silicon, opalescent and legless because it was not mounted,
an oddity, a failed prototype.
Byron hated to return to a messy desk after his long
astronaut training sessions. He filed everything in its spe-
cial place with the effortlessness of a man who has always
enjoyed finishing every one of life's small cycles before
starting a new one. His father and his grandfather were
military men, and he never remembered a time when he
had not been neat. He had yet to decide what to do with
the chip.
Near it, one whole folder of clippings and notes was
devoted to monitoring his alternatives. Religiously he took
out that folder every other night for updating. So far he
had developed eight different paths that might lead him to
an escape from Charlie Bond. The possible routes were
tenuous. Not many people besides NASA needed an engi-
neer whose only experience was as a fighter pilot.
Sometimes, when he was out of fresh ideas for his own
folder, he opened the folder he had begun to build for his
son and made entries in it instead. He had his son organ-
ized by age—when Charlie Jr. would walk, when he would
talk, what toys he should be playing with at two and a half,
when he should learn to read, what books were appropri-
ate for which age, and when he should start camping.
At seven Byron had his son down for learning to clean,
assemble, and fire a rifle. At eight he had him down for
building his first electric motors. To the task-sheet for the
ninth year was attached a construction project from Popu-
lar Science. Ten was marked off as the age to be intro-
duced to his first Robert Heinlein novel and it was also the
age they would begin to hike together. How he had hated

126
Donald Kingsbury
those hikes with his own father, but it had forged a tough
man out of a resentful boy, taught him to hold in the tears
and walk on the blisters. It took a while to understand
fathers. Byron remembered the old bastard saying with
chilling calmness, "I don't give a damn if you like me; I'm
going to make a man out of you!"
Byron planned for his son when he despaired over his
plans for himself. Sometimes he thought that all of his
meticulous scheming to conquer his own kingdom, which
so far consisted largely of paper lists and diagrams, was
merely procrastination to keep him away from a decision.
He wasn't sure he could survive on his own. He wasn't
sure he even wanted to.
Bond, who fawned on his daughter, had bought Byron
his own Cessna. How could a poor kid, who had loved
airplanes since he was five, resist a lifestyle like that? Yet
. . . since leaving the Air Force he had been driven—the
idea of living as some woman's "prince consort" appalled
him to the core of his soul.
He picked up the darkly opalescent chip. It was defec-
tive, a piece from an experimental run, too expensive to
be of any use to anyone even if it had been perfect. It was
a curiosity—but there were billions of dollars in that little
patch of silicon for the men who learned to make them
cheaply. Strange things floated around the labs, this one
picked up by a NASA scientist in Concord who swore that
it was a micro-rectenna array carved by an electron beam
from metal deposited on a transparent substrate, its wires
a hundredth of a micron in diameter, the grid spacings
approximately a third of a micron across, each square
holding its own diodes.
Byron still stared at the chip with amazement, but he
was getting used to the idea. After all, light was electro-
magnetic in nature and there wasn't any reason it couldn't
be converted directly into electricity in the same way that
radio waves were picked up and sent to a receiver—
providing one knew how to fabricate antennae with lengths
half as small as the wave lengths of the light. The micro-
rectennae were potentially far more efficient than photo-
voltaic cells.
In pondering the potential of this proto-device Byron

The Moon Goddess and the Son
127
was, of course, dreaming about the moon—not about Afri-
can villages which needed compact power sources or about
portable coffee pots that could be taken on a California
picnic. Radiant energy arrived at the equator of the moon's
surface with a flux of 1400 watts per square meter. If one
assumed that micro-rectennae could operate with an effi-
ciency of seventy percent, then one square meter would
generate about 1000 watts of electrical power, and one
square kilometer, a thousand megawatts—about the elec-
trical output of the average nuclear plant.
Byron thought of land area in terms of the 150 acres that
Lincoln had granted the Civil War veterans and so he
computed the power for that area at the moon's equator.
The number came out to be 600 megawatts. He whistled
through his teeth—that was sixty times as much power per
unit area as they were getting out of that 150 acre photo-
voltaic power plant that had recently gone on line in the
California desert. Beautiful! His mind flicked through pleas-
ant images of heavy lunar industry thriving on that kind of
power.
The long lunar night was a problem but there was no
reason that enormous quantities of surplus daytime elec-
tricity couldn't be stored as magnetic energy in a giant
superconducting torus. He had once thought of storing the
energy in molten sodium tanks and taking it out via a
steam turbine at night, but worried about heavy, imported
machinery with moving parts that broke down. The torus
was simpler, its heaviest component being the conducting
buffer needed to absorb the rapid dump of electrical energy
if the supercooling failed. The moon could supply plenty
of aluminum for that.
Still staring at the bluish flame of the dark chip, Byron
took a sudden turn of pessimism, the cautious engineer in
him talking the enthusiast down to a safe landing. The
price might never be right. Electron beam machining was
expensive. Even if the moon was the ideal place for that
kind of manufacturing, the process might still be too
expensive.
His mind began to sort through alternate ways of fabri-
cating micro-rectennae. He remembered a private tour
through a Corning Glass factory and recalled marvels like

128
Donald Kingsbury
glass that bent as if it were metal sheeting and spiders that
spun optical fiber. You could put holes in glass and extrude
the glass to the point where the holes were so fine that
they couldn't be seen though they still retained their
original proportions. Wires in the glass could be extruded
in the same way. If the thermal expansion properties of
both wires and glass were identical, the extrusion process
could be continued almost indefinitely and all that hap-
pened was that the wire got thinner.
Would it be possible for a ribbon of glass with embed-
ded parallel wires to be drawn out to the point where the
wire diameters were reduced in thickness to a few percent
of the wavelength of visible light and spaced half-a-
wavelength apart? A sandwich of ribbons, the top layer at
right angles to the lower layer, would form a grid. But
how might one add the invisible diodes? Byron didn't
know.
But he did know a glass physicist. The next time he flew
back to New Hampshire to visit his wife he'd have to stop
over in New York's boondocks and ask. He might even get
in some gliding at Elmira.
Byron's message light went on. He touched the display,
read the liquid crystal's flowing note—and called the sec-
retary, already in a better mood remembering how he had
soared in a flimsy glider on a summer's day hundreds of
miles over the farms and forested mountains of New York
State.
"Isn't Colonel Brown early?"
"Your appointment is for four."
"It's sixteen hundred already?"
"You've been dreaming again, Byron. What would you
do without me?"
"Send him up."
Byron went to the window, a wry sense of humor over-
taking him. It was harder to avoid the military than it was
to escape Charlie Bond's clutches! He remembered his
boyhood dreams of fleeing from the constant punishment
and regimentation of the military life. He lived in the
clouds. His secret passion was to fly a Farman biplane
(1912) or to blast Prussia from the bowels of a giant four
engined Sikorsky llya Mourometz bomber (1916). He was

The Moon Goddess and the Son
129
still so dumb when he was eighteen that he had thought
joining the Air Force would liberate him. He had identi-
fied military life with the Army.
And now, as a civilian, the military still claimed him.
Colonel Brown knocked on the door lightly.
"Come in."
The Air Force officer was just neat enough to pass
inspection, but not a bit more. His sky-blue uniform should
have been pressed two days ago. "How do you like the
training around here?"
"It's pretty rigorous. They don't leave anything out.
Sometimes it's all right. Sometimes I'm exhausted."
"Anxious to fly up there?"
"It'll come."
"We have a recon mission we'd like to talk to you about.
I'm blunt. I'll get to the point right away. We want to have
you orbiting in leo six months earlier than your NASA
training schedule calls for. The Soviets seem to have a
small five-ton payload craft being readied at Tyuratam for
operational testing. She goes up on a booster but comes
down on wings."
"Is she military or civilian?"
"Put it this way—Snowfox is a civilian with features that
a non-military craft wouldn't need. Basically she's got the
capacity to visit our satellites. With a stopover at the
Soviet Mirograd complex she can even be outfitted for a
trip to geo, right where we keep some of our major spy
stuff. She doesn't violate any treaty—but in a crisis we
think a group of Snowfoxes could take out all of our crucial
satellites in a matter of hours. We don't know enough
about her."
-so?;'
"We'd like you to volunteer for a special mission."

CHAPTER 18
Love will never take you where you expect to go.
A bum working the streets of central L.A.
The iron gates of Ray Armsiel's stucco-walled apartment
building in Van Nuys were manned by a Secretary of
Defense, a Mexican bandito, who did not trust girls. "One
meenit." He raised his finger and disappeared.
Ray lay under the shade of an umbrella at the swimming
pool, tanning only his toes in the sun, ignoring the house-
wives who were nagging their children not to bother him.
"Is girl for you," said the bandito disapprovingly. "Beeg
eyes. You know? I let her in?"
"Yeah, sure." Ray didn't get up but he scanned through
his memory. None of the women he knew had big eyes.
"Hey!" he exclaimed when he saw Linda Brontz. "What
are you doing here? I thought you were running away
from me?"
"I got tired of teasing you over the phone," she grinned
contritely. "How come you're not at work like the rest of
the men? You've got a tan! And my father is paying you!"
"I'm between jobs, remember? Actually I'm not but my
boss doesn't mind if I goof off. I've put in more than my
share of sixteen hour days. The clean-up men are still
working over my stuff and won't call me in until they hit a
snag, which they will, so I haven't been able to start with
Shantech. That's all right; Sam the Man knows he's lucky
130

The Moon Goddess and the Son
131
to get me at all." Ray wondered why he was babbling. "Of
course, I'm lucky to get Sam and am pretty eager to work
for him. Going for a swim?"
"I don't have a bathing suit. We don't swim in Boston."
"I'll lend you mine."
"Does it come with suspenders?"
"Hey, aren't you supposed to be working yourself?"
She sank into the deck chair beside him. "I was fired
this morning." The afternoon sun made further talk seem
unnecessary. Eventually one of the four year olds came
over with her mother's nail polish kit and began to paint
Ray's toes while watching him studiously to see when he
would get mad.
"Jody!" screamed the mother.
"S'awright, Mrs. Stern. Red toenails are the least of my
problems. Let me handle her. Jody," he said to the little
girl, "if you keep taking care of me like this, I'll marry you
and then you'll be in a real pickle. You'll have to make me
a sandwich every day even when you have a headache.
You know what a hard life wives have."
"Don't worry, Jody," said Linda. "He's already spoken
for. My father has already made arrangements for him."
Ray stared at the underside plaid of the umbrella, but
he was speaking to Linda. "So he told you his plans? Is
that why you've been running away?"
"Of course. How much did he tell you?" She was smiling.
"He ordered me to marry you."
She sat up. "Oh, he didn't!"
"Well, he didn't order me to go to work for him either,
but it amounts to the same thing. I refused five times, but
I signed his contract anyway. What are we going to do
about your old man? Can you handle him?"
"I promise not to propose to you, if you promise not to
propose to me. That should make the beginning of a
truce."
"Won't do any good," said Ray glumly.
"Do you do everything he says?"
"He breathes excitement. He knows which worlds are
possible. I can't resist him."
"And, of course, you do cocaine, too?" she asked
scornfully.

132
Donald Kingsbury
"There's a difference. Cocaine is the rush of losers.
Winners have their own special rush. You have to be a
winner to know what I mean. Sam the Man sells that rush,
and when you've known him for a while, you can't give it
»
up.
"Did he convince you that being stuck with me would
be exciting?"
"Damn right! You should hear his stories about you!"
"His stories about me," she said evenly, "aren't true."
She tried to be amused, well aware of her lather's sly
insinuations. "I come in late from parties so he imagines
things. He always wanted a boy so he expects me to play
around. I'm really just a quiet virgin who's afraid of my
own shadow."
Ray grinned at the sun. "He says you lie very well."
"You may think what you wish," she said with irritation.
"Why is my father so interested in a jerk like you?"
Ray wiggled his grotesquely painted toes. "Sam the
Man is a fighting frontiersman and so am I."
"You don't really believe that crap, do you? That's just
jargon you learned in grammar school."
"Don't you ever get restless? It's an American tradition.
Go up, young man!" He was pointing to the sky.
"Up you, young man," she smiled. "My father says he
can't explain to me what you are doing because I'm a girl."
"It's really because you're an English major. It helps if
you know some physics."
"That goddamn word again!" she grumbled.
"If you are very patient with me, I could try explaining
to you how the leoport works without mentioning physics.
Leo stands for low-earth-orbit."
"Hmmm," she muttered.
"But it won't mean anything unless you let me show you
my blueprints."
"Blueprints? What an old fashioned word. Aren't all
your drawings done by computer these days?"
"All right. Come up to my room and let me spread my
CAD designs out on the bed for you."
She liked his apartment. The main window overlooked
the patio. The rooms were spacious, open, with little
reliance on doors, but with enough corners and breakwalls

The Moon Goddess and the Son
133
to give a sense of privacy. While he brought out his
drawings, she examined the cupboard shelves and refrig-
erator to see what he ate. Eggs and ham and pancakes for
breakfast. A coffee maker, its grounds still in the filter.
"You're a very conventional man," she said while she put
the dishes in the dishwasher, turned it on, and tidied up.
In the bedroom the drawings were now everywhere, on
the bed, on the floor, stacked up against the dresser
mirror. He really was going to explain to her what he was
doing! That annoyed Linda and she thought of telling him
to put the damn things away and not take her complaints
about the inaccessibility of the male world so seriously—
but she didn't.
The careful sketches were dominated by a central
component—two nested hula-hoops, one outer, one inner,
attached together by radial spokes. The interior of the
smaller hoop was empty. In the sketch a tiny drawing of a
spacesuited man indicated scale. The hoops were large:
the exterior hoop about twelve man lengths in diameter
and the inside hoop about ten.
"A Papa bicycle tire and a Mama bicycle tire skewered
together by lengths of coat hanger," she mused. "What's it
for?"
"By itself, nothing. We need about fifteen thousand of
them working in unison."
"You stack them?"
"No, no," he laughed. "You can't stack them. We string
them out in a necklace a hundred and fifty kilometers
long. Each pair has to be separated from its neighbors by
about ten meters of vacuum. They don't drift apart because
the hoops contain superconducting magnetic coils."
She looked at the relevant drawings. "So tell me, why is
your leoport thing so long?"
"I have to answer that?"
"Not if you don't know how."
He paused, thinking furiously. No physics. "You're an
English major, right? Do you know what gravity is?"
"Yes-I-know-what-gravity-is!"
"Good. Do you know what I mean by five gravities?"
"Which planet?"
"You're smarter than I thought. Five Earth gravities."

134
Donald Kingsbury
"I'd be very heavy. I think I'd be confined to bed and
my cheeks would be running off my skull."
"Excellent! Have you ever noticed how gravity changes
when you go up and down in a fast elevator?"
"My stomach in my mouth or in my shoes."
"Excellent! Have you ever noticed how gravity changes
when you goose the car's accelerator, or when you slam on
the brakes?"
She was puzzled. "Is that gravity? I thought that was
force or something."
"Einstein showed that gravity and acceleration are locally
indistinguishable, but let's not get into that. That's phys-
ics. Just think of gravity and goosing as the same thing.
Now, do you know the difference between driving your
car at a hundred miles an hour into a brick wall and into a
haystack?"
"The haystack wouldn't kill me."
"You're right. Why?"
"Well, it's softer."
"What does soft mean?"
"Cuddly. I don't know. You tell me."
"If it is soft, it gives. The impact, the momentum change,
is extended over a longer distance—and it is the rate of
change of momentum that we feel as force. "
"Momentum is a physics word," she said sternly. "You
promised."
"Shit," he said—and paused. "The brick wall stops you
suddenly but smashes your head. It uses lots of force and
very little distance to do its work. The haystack stops you
just as well but uses up lots of distance and very little
force. It is force that bends your head out of shape—so
when one has a lot of stopping to do, prudence suggests a
recipe long on distance and light on force."
"Is that physics? So far it's easy."
"Yeah. Now do you remember your original question?"
"No."
Ray showed her one of his drawings, a perspective of
the leoport in space, an endless queue of those double
concentric coils, each floating free of all the others, fifteen
thousand rings dwindling off to a point among the stars.
"You asked me why it was so long."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
135
"All right. Why is it so long?"
"Because it has to be a haystack instead of a brick wall."
"Oh," she said.
"We shoot up a little freighter from Earth. The leoport
is in orbit and moving in the same direction. When our
freighter reaches the top of its orbit it is travelling at 9,000
miles per hour, about half orbital velocity. The leoport
overtakes the rocket at 18,000 miles per hour—like a fast
car bumping into a slow one from behind.
"If the leoport acted like a brick wall, everything would
be torn apart just like you'd be torn apart if you were
travelling along at 50 mph and were hit from behind by a
car doing 100 mph. We don't want that. That's a couple of
billion dollars shredded. But if the huge leoport acts like a
haywagon, the cargo carrier gets embedded deep in the
hay and captured intact."
He showed her a picture of a flying saucer. "That's our
freighter. It has coils in its rim and goes zipping down the
axis of our leoport—belly first. If the saucer is braked at
five gravities—all done with electromagnetic interaction
between the hoops of the leoport and the rim of the
saucer—we need a cushion with ninety miles of give."
"My father is hiring you to design flying saucers?" She
looked at Ray askance.
Ray caught one of his drawings that had suddenly buck-
led and was falling off the dresser. "One saves fuel. In fact
if you build your system right you can extract more energy
out of it than you put in."
"My father is hiring you to tap perpetual motion?"
He shrugged. "A shell game doesn't violate the laws of
physics. It just doesn't look reasonable."
"I don't really understand."
"I'll give you a rain-check."
"You don't think I'm capable of understanding!" She
knew she wasn't but she was miffed anyway.
"I'm ready to call it a day."
"It's hardly past twelve yet!"
"Never study physics in the afternoon. Let's hit the
beach. I'm anxious to see you in my bathing suit plus
suspenders."
She was disappointed. He didn't think she was a good

136
Donald Kingsbury
student. "I'll make you a sandwich. I'm better at that than
boring you by making you teach me kindergarten physics."
He cut onions for her in the kitchen alcove. "One of
these days if you learn as well as you did today, I'll be
showing you how to work out the diffusion equations for
onion smells."
"I can't wait," she replied sarcastically. "I think engi-
neers run off at the mouth with shop talk worse than
lawyers or doctors or businessmen. Do you want salami or
corned beef? You have a lousy selection of meats."
"Hey, wait a minute," he said, backtracking. "You asked
for the shop talk!"
"Don't confuse me with the facts. How do you know I
wasn't just bolstering your male ego?" she snapped.
"You're in a bitch of a mood today."
"I was snarled at all morning, and I blew up and quit
my job. I'm panicking because I don't know how I'll pay
my rent."
"Oh, my poor darling. Where does it hurt?"
"Right on your kisser—which I'm about to punch."
"I have a better idea than the beach. You've opened up
a couple of days for yourself. I'll show you California. I'll
give you the grand tour."
She was slightly less miffed now. If she didn't tease him
so much, he wouldn't tease her. She poured him milk and
set his sandwich on a plate with a proper knife and fork,
and when he didn't take a napkin, impulsively tucked one
under his chin. A tour of California! They might even find
the village where Lana Turner met the Postman.
Ray munched through his onions and tomatoes and corned
beef. He stood up. "Let's go!"
"Right now?"
"Right now."
"I'll have to pick up some luggage at the apartment."
"Naw. We'll only be gone three or four days."
"My car!"
"It's parked okay. Not to worry."
She didn't know quite what to say to that. He took her
down the back stairs into the underground garage. "My
pills aren't in my purse," she said meekly and a little bit
desperately.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
137
"You're the boss's daughter. You think I'm crazy?"
Linda changed the subject. "Which one is your car?"
He went over and patted a gigantic Honda 850, purple
and black, two huge wheels straddling a rocket engine of
chrome tubing. She paled when he handed her a helmet
and put one on his own head.
"I m not getting on that motorcycle!"
"The first thing we do is buy you some leather. Don't
want the flesh scraped off your beautiful bones. Don't
worry. I won't take you far the first day. Don't want you to
get saddlesore. We'll head north up to the coast road. Get
on."
"I haven't got any handlebars to hang onto," she wailed.
"Some things you don't need;"
They roared up out of the garage but gently rolled along
the street to the first red light. "Don't hang on so hard,"
he said gently. "I have to breathe and you'll only tucker
yourself out." At the next red light he spoke again over his
shoulder. "The first thing you have to learn about motor-
cycles is that every maniac behind the wheel of a car is a
murderer-at-heart out to get you. They'll never give you
an inch. They'll run you off the road—and then back up at
full reverse to get you again."
"That doesn't make me feel very safe!"
"We're more maneuverable." And off he zoomed.
She had never been so terrified in all her life. Fifty-five
miles an hour, weaving in and out of L.A. traffic on two
wheels, faster even than the cars could go, and with her
legs hanging out the windows!
What had her crazy father gotten her into!

CHAPTER 19
In 1242, after his father s death, [Alexander Nevsky] jour-
neyed to Sarai to pay homage to the conqueror and most
likely to request from him an iarlyk for Vladimir. [Instead]
the Mongols entrusted Vladimir to Nevsky's younger brother.
But Nevsky did not give up . . . and ten years later suc-
ceeded in persuading the Khan to reverse himself. With a
Mongol force placed at his disposal he captured Vladimir,
unseated his brother, and assumed the title of Great Prince.
His subsequent behavior fully justified the Mongol confi-
dence in him. In 1257-9 he stamped out popular uprisings
against Mongol census-takers which had broken out in
Novgorod, and a few years later did so again in several
other rebellious cities, all of which must have pleased his
masters.
Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (1974)
The dawn played with leaves yellowed by autumn's
chill, its tubercular light dimmed by the fog drifting through
the birches. Their top branches were invisible. Horses
snorted gray vapor, impatient to be off along the narrow
trail, but having to wait while the estate slaves finished
loading the pack animals. Prince Samislav's entourage of
priests and boyars was starting early, hoping to reach the
Rzhevolo piers on the Oka by dusk, the first leg of a
journey which would take them down the distant Volga to
138

The Moon Goddess and the Son	139
Sarai where, to keep his father's commission, the dead
prince's son would have to beg before the Tartar tsar.
A priest, Iziaslav Dimitriev, was to be his constant
companion and teacher, knowing as he did the savage's
court etiquette. Samislav watched him curiously. Wrapped
in his great podryasniki, the bearded cleric wheeled his
horse, calming the impatient beast, and they began their
trek through medieval New England wilderness, swamp-
land, deserted woods, abandoned farms.
Once while the prince's horse was making passage through
a collapsing fieldstone fence that divided a new stand of
birch from an old stand of gloomy trees, a subdued Sam
Brontz, reduced to passivity by his giddy drop through
time, pondered a rusting car and telephone pole from his
own century, and beyond, an old road that lead to a
glimpse of asphalt—but the prince he had become hardly
noticed the large red boulder and the tree, dead and
stripped of its bark by beetles, rising alone on an aban-
doned cut-and-burn field in his beloved Oka countryside.
Their day was filled with inspiring chatter. When the
old trail, grassy and sometimes mud-rutted, was wide
enough for two to ride abreast, the garrulous Dimitriev
whispered the old tale of Fedor of Riazan who, when sent
on a diplomatic mission to the Mongols, refused to give his
wife to the grandson of Genghis Khan and was fed to the
animals and birds with all of his retinue.
Later, while they were dismounted to water their horses,
the priest picked his teeth and told the tale of a Mongol
victory feast held on a platform built on top of suffocating
Russian warriors. He did a good imitation of the screaming
and moaning and the soup slurping.
Endlessly, Dimitriev could weave his cautionary stories:
He told of princes rerouted from Sarai across a year's
journey of eastern plains to chastise themselves before the
tsar's Tsar at Karakorum, and of the painful seven-day
martyrdom in Sarai of a prince who had dared to impale,
by the anus, an over-zealous Chinese "squeezer.' He
relished the story of the martydom of Prince Mikhail who,
by refusing to pass between die Devil's Two Fires and by
refusing to bow toward the rising sun in obeisance to the
Khakhan at Karakorum, earned death by rib-crushing—

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Donald Kingsbury
the Tartars did not believe in spilling a nobleman's blood
even if they fed him to the animals afterwards.
"They won't shed a drop of your blood," he cackled
through his beard at Samislav's paleness.
Around their mid-day campfire, while dipping into the
turnip and rabbit stew with one set of fingers and holding
bread in the others, Dimitriev mused informatively about
the sin of greed. There was always some traitor prince
ready to outbid a rightful gosudar by promising the Tar-
tars more vyhod in the hopes of being awarded administra-
tion of the coveted estates. While sucking rabbit bones he
suggested which of Prince Samislav's rivals should be
murdered.
Full of laughter and sauce in his beard he gossiped
about the squeezings of the collaborator Ivan Moneybags
of Moscow who would not hesitate to rush to Sarai and
lead a Mongol army back with him in a devastating raid
against his own Russian brethren when such cynicism
served Ivan's private interests. Skinning Russians for Mongol
profit was a Nevsky family tradition when there was enough
graft in it. With a childlike smile Dimitriev implied that
Ivan would bugger a priest for a copper puto.
A quiet boyar, who had up until then said nothing, took
out his knife and absently tossed it at a stump, where
sometimes it stuck and sometimes bounced off. In a monot-
onous voice of hatred he told of the sacking of Tver, of the
rape of women and the murder of boys and the looting of
the noble homes in an act which had enriched Ivan and
ingratiated him with the Tartars. "Those Muscovites will
roast in hell. Traitors. Whores of Babylon, God curse
them with boils!"
"And did they tell you of the Vlatsyn?" The gossip
between the five companions of the prince became ani-
mated. Many peasants of the Vlatsyn region had fled because
of taxes but they were still on the roles. Those remaining
had to provide taxes for themselves, the dead, and the
deserters. Every Russian knew how the Mongols responded
to revolt, but sometimes the sole recourse to oppression
was riot.
A baskak, come to collect his quota of boys for the
Mongol army, of which few were left, had been beaten by

The Moon Goddess and the Son	141
a father and barely escaped with his life. Ten days later a
Mongol hundred rode through the village, slaughtering.
Instantly, neighboring inhabitants fled in terror but an old
man, too arthritic to run, was tied to a post and used as a
target—a lesson among the flames. Others were caught in
a field and deliberately trampled to death under the horses'
hooves.
Prince Samislav was listening, full of revulsion and
hatred—and fear. But the captured soul of Brontz was also
listening and remembering the story of the peasant vil-
lages in the Panjsher Valley of Afghanistan being bombed
to rubble by the children of the survivors of Vlatsyn. He
had flashing images of Russian pilots diving their SU25s to
take out a farmhouse or mosque or flour mill . . . Slavic
infantry finding two blind brothers in a village vacated by
terrorized peasants, strapping dynamite to their backs to
blow them up. . . soldiers casually herding peasant women
into a mosque, locking the door, and tossing in grenades
through the window ... a Red Army tank commander,
defending National Socialist principles, ordering his ser-
geant to drive over a bound Afghan man, laughing. Brontz
saw the Socialist baskaks rounding up children, forcibly
taking them away from their Afghan parents, to be sent
back to Russia for indoctrination in how to become supe-
rior Mongol soldiers.
"What can we do?" asked the sullen boyar, who then
answered himself rhetorically. "We can revolt every decade,
be crushed by the newest traitor, and wait and gather our
strength to revolt again. Such is the fate of every Russian
forever and ever. What God wills we must endure for the
sake of our souls." He grinned the grin of the helpless and
burst out laughing.
It was a phrase that echoed ... be crushed by the
newest traitor, and wait and gather our strength to revolt
again. Each word echoed across a canyon of six centuries
from the ears of Brontz to the ears of Samislav, back and
forth, across and back.
Prince Samislav was glooming cynically, but also with
the admiration of a trapped man: The heathen riders of the
steppe teach us how to rule . . . and if we learn? . . .
. . .while Brontz's mind was seeing General Wojciech

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Donald Kingsbury
Jaruzelski, agent of the Great Russians, inheritors of the
domain of Genghis Khan, truncheoning his own Polish
people with his Zomo thugs so that they might be con-
vinced to work harder for their Russian masters and thus
avoid a savage Russian invasion that would slaughter their
leaders and, with Tartar pity, bury them in another Katyn
Forest where the father of Jaruzelski had died a generation
earlier, shot by the officers of Stalin.
How would it feel to be a man who had to betray his
people in order to save them? thought Brontz. But the
morose Samislav, worried about his reception in Sarai, not
understanding Brontz, shut out the strange thoughts of the
cunning devil who had possessed him on the day his father
died. There were rewards in being a tribute collector for
the Tartars—a cut of the tribute. But how much wealthier
he would be if the Tartars would oblige him by slitting
each other's throats!
The horses didn't reach the river by nightfall, but the
fog had lifted, allowing an autumn moon to cast enough
ghostly shadows so that a serious observer could tell the
trees from the bears. It was the moonlight which encour-
aged Samislav's impatient companions to continue. In a
meadow with the dark hills beyond, the prince remem-
bered children's stories his mother had told him at bed-
time of how the gods had created the boy Moon to roam
the night, and of the wolves which pursued him across the
sky. He prayed, as much for himself as for the moon. God
watch over Moon and keep the wolves from devouring
him at least until they might return from Sarai!
Their river barge was waiting for them at the Rzhevolo
pier. The gruff boatman was none too pleased to have his
sleep interrupted but nevertheless rushed about to get a
giant samovar boiling so that the prince might have tea
with his honey. The slaves began to load the barge, and
Samislav took time off from his tea to see that his gifts
were put aboard gently. The fine fox fur and ermine he
was bringing did not worry him but for special effect he
had purchased a delicate piece of carved clockwork that
had come in through Novgorod and he was afraid to have
it crushed or shaken. What a catastrophe if he should
present the gewgaw to the tsar and it refused to perform!

The Moon Goddess and the Son
143
Dimitriev had suddenly weakened at the end of their
journey and, while they were establishing themselves below
deck with the ropes and tar and cargo, began to complain
jovially of pains visited on him by God to slow down his
interest in sin. Before the night was out, he was deathly
sick with fever. He cried and would not let Samislav leave
his side, holding his lord's hand in delirium, sometimes
quietly, sometimes raving about the heavenly hosts which
he saw plainly as the angels hovered about ready to take
his soul away to peace.
The priest was obviously terrified of death and terrified
that he would die without the proper rites being per-
formed. Wide-eyed, the fever-sweat running off his face in
rivers, he instructed his prince in exactly the correct rit-
ual. When Samislav gently reminded him that a prince
was not a priest, Dimitriev, in a rage, ordained him right
there with a short lecture on the mission of the church.
Samislav managed to feed the miserable man tea, laced
with the juice of rare southern lemons, but could get him
to eat nothing else. The priest, finally resigned to his
death or else sensing recovery, returned to the purpose of
his mission, the instruction of Samislav so that he might
pass the grueling test of loyalty to the Moslem tsar and
save the fortune of his family and them all.
He was taught to crawl along the bottom of the barge
and to kiss the moldering boards while he abused himself
verbally. A feverish priest corrected all mistakes with groans
and curses. The prince had to learn to refer to himself as a
worm and as an old woman and as "less worthy than the
dirt under the tsar's feet." He had to learn to use, for the
first time in his life, that special form of speech that a
kholopy employed when speaking to his masters. He had
to find a way to carry himself as if he were nothing, and to
treat his life as worth nothing.
Samislav grew sick himself one night, plagued by the
priest's snores and the smell of tar and that special smell of
green rot and rat droppings. The barge rolled and the boat
slaves sang their monotonous dirge out of tune. Some-
where from deep inside the prince's aches and misery the
whining Brontz-devil pleaded, cursing him for his folly,
tempting him with the soft warmth of Holidayinnmotel

144
Donald Kingsbury
which he insisted that Satan would grant him had he but
the basic courage to rise up, to climb to the deck and jump
overboard. It was a clever trick to drown him and steal
him off to the black netherworld. He crossed himself when
he heard the oily voice and quoted from psalms he knew
by heart to quell his anguish.
One morning the prince's boyar friends gave him relief
from the relentless teachings of the raving Dimitriev. They
took him up to watch the river meadow and the cattle
herds grazing there. They dined on a fine zavtrak of eggs
and cheese and roast squirrel legs, and then he went
below for more lessons.
The barge landed at dusk and was met by an escort of
Mongol warriors on horseback who surrounded Prince
Samislav to shield him—mainly from the shadow evidence
of a New England town whose mayor had been cajoled
into turning off critical street lamps at a critical time. One
teen-age boy came out to heckle the costumed freaks, to
find himself facing two murderous Mongols with bone
bows at the ready—who knew exactly how to frighten him
away.
"Don't mess up the filming, kid!" they whispered in an
off-the-microphone aside, symbolically making the gesture
of cutting their throats, meaning his. The boy disappeared
instantly, horrified that he might have offended the Amer-
ican God of Film Making. He'd be crucified if they had to
reshoot!
Water channels ran along the terraces, splashing onto
the blades of great wheels. They passed courtyards of tiled
walls with glimpses of carpeted gardens. Beyond was a
reddish glow of smoke from ceramic furnaces and the
flickering lights of the bazaar. An ox cart laden with cloth
from the garment makers creaked along the road and their
horse guard pushed it aside roughly to let them past.
Limon sat on the throne in the great room of the Cathe-
dral, Khan of the Golden Horde, Tsar of all the Russias,
gray wolfskin over his Chinese silks. Behind him were the
tapestries of a lord's tent. Surrounding him were guards
and nobles and generals and the court mullah to oversee
their prayers and, conspicuously, swinging in a wicker
cage, a mad Russian dissident who had been foolish enough

The Moon Goddess and the Son
145
to sponsor the revolt of a-town-which-no-longer-existed.
Two shamanic flames from a nomad past consumed the air
above their brass bowls. Prince Samislav approached in
stages, crossing himself as he passed through the Flames
of Satan, then crawling, professing his unworthiness.
Limon Barnes twiddled one braid of his black Mongol
hair as he watched Sam Brontz kiss the grubby floor, the
scene giving him a curious feeling of absolute power. The
fastidious capitalist was in pain, but he was actually doing
it, bringing his lips in contact with the greasy dirt—he
crawled forward on hands and knees, head bowed. The
wizard who had taken Khan Batu in thrall to create this
very moment was at the same time overjoyed and incredu-
lous. Had he actually broken Brontz?
No, no, never.
In the next ten seconds this Russian prince would rise to
his full height and an angry American businessman would
burst through the fabric of the fantasy, confused and out of
place, demanding the instant resignation of the Great Khan,
effective immediately—don't even bother to clean out your
desk!
Limon wasn't sure that a khan, intent on humiliating a
Russian, would have rubbed fresh cow manure into the
hem of his robe's skirt—but a khan intent on humiliating
an American could have found no finer way to insult him.
An American's life was served by swift water and porcelain
robots which whisked his shit instantly into another dimen-
sion; even the foul traces could only be approached with
silken tissue behind one's back.
The courtiers of the mad khan from Brooklyn watched
in fascination as one of America's most powerful executives
approached the throne like a trained animal trying his best
to be an authentic Russian prince doing what he had to do
to stay alive. The mullah was transfixed. The crazy Russian
dissident stopped his gibbering. They all knew of the cow
dung and they had all heard Limon's mocking stories
about Sam's spotless gray suits and the socks he changed
twice a day. None of them had ever seen it, but they all
knew about the marble shower room Sam Brontz kept in
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146
Donald Kingsbury
Prince Samislav touched his forehead to the ground,
twice, and then rose to kiss the hem—and froze.
The smell of the barn had reached the nose of Sam, that
devil who fought for the possession of the body of Samislav.
Waiting on a knife's edge was Limon's Ming the Merciless
laugh. With one gesture of his hand he was ready to
summon the guards to slaughter this foolish supplicant
who refused, as form required, to kiss the skirt of the Tsar
of all the Russias.
But the sober prince of the Great Russians took in his
fingers the silken fabric of the robe of the world's master
which had dragged over the ground he walked on. Samislav's
fear was under control—his fingers barely shook—but nev-
ertheless fear drove him. Reverently, almost in relief, he
kissed the tainted hem, proud that his hate did not show.
This was his Tsar, and he was a slave, the most useless of
the Tsar's kholopy.
The astonished Khan had no choice but to ask him to
rise to his knees. The pleading began. There was no
bargaining. The Khan belittled the abilities of the man
before him. And Samislav, admitting his worthlessness,
promised him that there was no other prince in all of
Russia who could run the rat-infested principality along
the Oka with more firmness.
He would make up for his known weaknesses by depend-
ing upon the Khan's advisors. There would be no revolts.
The taxes would be paid on time. There would be special
gifts. The census takers would be escorted and fed. The
Russian boys raised for the Khan's armies would be the
strongest and the healthiest. He pledged with his life that
this was true. He even hinted that if Riazan, for instance,
was not prompt with its taxes he might intercede—with a
little help from a small Mongol regiment.
The Khan also made a promise. He promised to think
over the proposition.
The merriment began. Acrobats amused and amazed.
Buffooning jugglers would even fall all over each other and
still catch their balls and batons. Fierce Mongol warriors
danced, shaking the Cathedral with their vigor. The women
brought on the feast. Gradually the Khan put out the
signal to relax . . . bits of America began to show through.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
147
"Man, what a gas!" said one panting Mongol warrior,
throwing his arms about another.
"Where are the hamburgers!"
"Get Debbie! She's supposed to take some photos of
me!"
Limon watched Sam unwind, still astonished that the
man had proved unpredictable, unsure of what had hap-
pened to Brontz. The game was over and yet Sam was still
behaving as cautiously as a lark who thought he saw a
peregrine. Perhaps Russian paranoia was contagious, per-
haps it would take hours to fall away and only then, when
he had recovered, would Limon's boss explode in anger.
Yet Sam began to smile. There really was no peregrine.
Brontz smiled and smiled. He posed for Debbie and strut-
ted a bit. He came over to Limon and slapped him on his
back.
"You could get killed for that," said the Khan jovially.
"Excellent job, Ghengis! I'm always right about peo-
ple." And he dragged Limon to the kitchen where he
mixed salt and water for an emergency gargle. Yes, the
boss-man had fully recovered—he even tried a light swab
of iodine on his lips from the emergency medical kit. "The
whole thing has stunned me. I've never had so many
insights tumbling over each other! My God, I want you to
get all of it. Capture it! Distill it! I'm going to send my key
people here!"
"Too expensive," said Limon.
The executive officer of Shantech became an executive
officer. "The first run through is always expensive. It's
called the design phase. The first hand-tooled Chevrolet
cost a million dollars. You may be a medievalist, Barnes,
but you're not stuck with medieval technology."
"We could use a new blackboard," the Khan said wryly.
"If I ever catch you writing on a blackboard, I'll fire you
so fast you'll think you were scalped by Tamberlane! When
I went to Princeton," he exclaimed incredulously, "I even
had a psych professor who taught me learning theory by
writing it on the blackboard. The sonofabitch was waiting
around for the printing presses to improve. Stick to simu-
lations, Limon."

148
Donald Kingsbury
"Mr. Brontz, you are very wealthy but simulating Rus-
sia for the last thousand years is a big budget movie."
"Do they train airline pilots in 747s? They train them on
the ground in a flight simulator, and a pilot gets more
experience in an hour in one of those things than he'd get
in a hundred hours of the real thing. That's exactly what I
want—a simulation of Russia for the last thousand years!"
Limon laughed, a somewhat subdued Ming the Merci-
less. "I can see why my board game didn't impress you."
Sam pulled aside one of the Mongol warriors to examine
his helmet. "Did you steal this out of a museum?"
"No, I make them in my basement," said the warrior
shyly. "They sell pretty well at Boskone."
After borrowing the helmet for his head, the Russian
prince took the Khan of the Golden Horde and retreated
to an upper study of the Cathedral. Someone brought
them soup and Debbie took their pictures, forcing them to
pose in ways which interested her before the party spread
elsewhere. When they were alone, Limon continued to
needle his boss. All was not lost—perhaps he could still
get Brontz to fire him. He was beginning to think that
Sam was a madman who could afford to play meaningless
games to entertain himself. He said as much.
Prince Samislav the Morose paused for a long moment.
"No. This is the most serious game of my life. And I assure
you that if it doesn't work, I'm getting the hell off this
planet. I have plans for a spacefleet in the works." He
paused again, placing the iron helmet on the table between
himself and the Lord of the Steppes. "I'm trying to work
out a riddle. Haven't you ever wondered why the greatest
military minds of the United States and the Soviet Union
have been unable to come up with a strategy that protects
their civilians?"

CHAPTER 20
"Trust me!"
Adam, Pooh Bear, Jesus Christ, Jimmie Durante,
Elizabeth I, S. Freud, Joseph Goebbels, Hannibal,
Pope Innocent III, Jezebel, Martin Luther King,
V.I. Lenin, Mother, Richard Nixon, Octavia, Pyrrhus,
Don Quixote, the Rolling Stones,
the Snake in the Garden of Eden, Mao Tse-tung,
United Airlines, the Virgin Mary, George Washington,
Xenophon, Brigham Young, Emile Zola.
"I hear Joe Synmann's in town ..."
Byron McDougall, who was sitting at the same cafeteria
table as the gossippers, perked up his ears. Before the
lunch was over he had established Synmann's purpose in
Houston—lobbying for space weaponry. That was puzzling
because the rumor mill had him involved with a large
space project that was non-military. It was these rumors
which had intrigued Byron.
After putting his tray on the conveyor belt, it took only
a moment on the public telephone to establish that the
physicist was staying in the Rosal Hotel.
Fifteen minutes later the pilot reconnoitered his target
area, finding ample time to set up his ambush. He "hid
himself in a cafe, his back to the sun, and when the
Shantech man arrived by cab an hour later he had a story
149

150
Donald Kingsbury
well worked out. They had never met before but Byron
was not bothered by minor details.
He crossed the street to the Rosal and at an appropriate
moment popped out from behind a pillar beside the eleva-
tors to make eye contact. He let a surprised look of plea-
sure cross his face, then broke into a grin and extended his
hand. "Joseph Synmann! What are you doing in Houston!?"
"Doing the turkey dance." Infected by the contact,
Synmann smiled, too, and shook Byron's hand warmly. All
the while he was searching his memory and drawing a
blank.
"Byron McDougall. I married Charlie Bond's daughter.
We belong to the same Mafia. I can't remember where we
met, but I do remember that you tell good stories." That
was a safe lie. "I left the Air Force and am working for
NASA now."
Synmann showed new interest. "God, you've got a red
tape machine down here."
"So has Charlie—or haven't you noticed?"
Synmann shook his long hair back over his shoulder. "I
rue the day I ever left the university."
"Need help? I've done the party circuit down here and I
know all the right secretaries."
"Can't talk about what I'm here for. Classified." He
shrugged. "It's not important. You remember the bill the
House passed two days ago? I just wish to hell somebody
would run for Congress who wasn't a lawyer."
Byron tried to recall the latest Washington stories. "The
amendment that put the rider on the space defense bill?"
"Yeah, the 'we'll-be-a-good-boy-to-encourage-you-poor-
insecure-Russians' clause."
"It won't last."
"I know—but in the meantime my ass is frozen. I'm not
allowed to run until the Soviets catch up."
"You won't have long to wait. Have you seen the latest
recon photos of the new additions to the Mir complex?"
"Mirograd?" He chuckled. "No."
"Come have a drink with me at the Top."
Synmann nodded and they entered the elevator. The
physicist pressed the special button for the Rosal's Top
Hat Restaurant.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
151
"I'm an Air Force pilot," continued Byron, "so I have
this special eye for recon photos. But I'm an engineer, too.
With that double edge I see things other people don't. Of
course, I can't tell you about it." He smiled. "It's classified."
Synmann grunted.
"How did you ever get involved with defense work?"
asked Byron as they stood waiting for a table.
"Game theory was a hobby of mine. I even simulated
some very fancy stuff on a Cray. Ever do any game theory?"
"With women."
Synmann smiled in his slightly cynical way. "So I can
assume you have a sixth grader's background. Actually
game theory boils down to a triplet of simple rules.
"One: your best possible strategy is to cooperate; you
win maximally.
"Two: a poor, but serviceable, strategy is to treat your
partner as a potential enemy—assume that he might do
you in and so take countermeasures.
"Three: your worst possible strategy is to cooperate; you
get wiped out."
"Say that again?" queried Byron. "Didn't you put a
catch-22 in there somewhere?"
"You're so young to be so smart. Yeah, it's a catch-22.
Cooperation is the riskiest strategy there is—it's double-or-
nothing. You win big or you lose big. And who wants to
lose big? So we stay in the middle and choose caution and
smaller winnings. But treat a friend as a potential enemy—
just to be safe—and it isn't long before he is one. The
Russian mind is one of the most cautious minds that cul-
tural evolution has ever produced—and it breeds enemies
like warm meat breeds flies."
A young woman in a top hat and tails, but no visible
cover for her legs or hips, doffed her hat and took them to
a table.
"How goes it tonight, sweetheart," said Byron. "Busy?"
"I'm always busy."
"How about at three o'clock?"
"I'll have a brandy and ice," said Synmann.
Byron wasn't ready to order yet. He was looking at the
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152
Donald Kingsbury
Once he ordered she would have an excuse to leave. He
spoke to Synmann.
"Let me see if I've got you straight. One: if she is my
friend"—he glanced warmly at their serving wench— "and
I assume that she's my friend and encourage her, then we
have a wonderful night together. Two: on the other hand if
she's my friend and I suspect that her smile might be a
cunning way to trap me, and thus decide to handle her
with extreme caution, then I'll only succeed in convincing
her to handle me with suspicion, and we'll both lose a
little. And finally, three: if she isn't my friend and in my
naivety I trust all this sparkling good nature, then I could
wake up in the morning without my wallet."
"Oh, I'm not that mean. I'd leave you your picture of
your wife and your credit cards." It was fast repartee but
the woman gave Synmann a puzzled look nevertheless.
"You just walked into the middle of a philosophical
discussion," explained Synmann. "Mad McDougall here is
working out all the implications of mathematical game
theory at the sixth grade level."
"He's cute for a sixth grader." She grinned.
Byron took her manicured hand, kissing it. "You're my
friend and I believe in the promise in your eyes. I love
you and we must run away together and live happily ever
after."
Slowly she withdrew her hand. "The bartender doesn't
carry that."
Synmann had been watching the exchange with fascina-
tion. "You don't trust him do you?"
"Of course not." She leaned over and kissed Byron's
forehead.
"Ah, trust!" said Byron. "Bring me a scotch on the
rocks."
While they watched her leave for the bar, Synmann
commented. "There's your catch-22. If the Soviets and the
States trusted each other, and were worthy of trust, they
could cooperate. The cooperation would produce miracles
on Earth and an incredibly rapid exploration of the solar
system. But the trust isn't there—and perhaps not even
the integrity."
Byron was watching their waitress. She had a saucy way

The Moon Goddess and the Son
153
of moving and she was flirting with the bartender. "Lovely.
Think of the wonder-filled time you and I could have
tonight if she trusted us."
"Are you trustworthy?"
"No."
"Would you bullshit her?"
"Yes. Poetry is already fluttering through my mind."
Synmann sighed while he twiddled with his long graying
hair. "I'm recalling my old hippy farm . . . the profound
discussions about trust around the old Franklin stove while
we were stealing each other's women. A wretched lot.
They'd pilfer dope in the name of sharing. I remember
when we had a phone and some jerk was always calling up
Germany—for sixty bucks, sometimes more, sixty bucks
that none of us had to spare." A flicker passed across his
face. "We'd borrow tools and leave them in the grass to
rust. It seems long ago. It wasn't so long ago. I was a
pacifist and an idealist. And a damn good applied mathe-
matician. I used to set up large pay-off matrices on the
computer and play games with myself to try to understand
trust."
"Did you make progress?"
"Yeah, better than in any philosophy class. Mathematics
is an amazing tool. You can demonstrate conclusively that
you can't have a viable cooperative game without mutual
trust. But unilateral trust gets you killed. Like what those
congressmen are trying this week. "
"Muddy-headed Democrats!" grumbled Byron.
"When I was doing all that game theory back then, I
figured that trust had to start somewhere. I had the Soviet-
American conflict in mind. I was thinking about H-bombs
and ICBMs which were new in those days. A lot of us who
grew up with the H-bomb developed this obsession with
saving mankind.
"I wanted to model games that began with both sides
trapped in the if-you-win-I-lose mentality, and show that if
one side unilaterally started to trust the other, "then their
deadly game could be converted into a mutual effort. I was
stunned to find out that I was wrong. Trusting someone
because it is virtuous to trust is a quick way to get your

154
Donald Kingsbury
family locked up in Warsaw and shipped off to Treblinka
body by body."
The drinks arrived. Their wench delivered the brandy,
bowed and doffed her hat, as did all the Top Hat waitresses,
but before she could serve Byron, he was at her again.
"How do I get her to trust me?" he S£id to Synmann.
"What does mathematics have to say about that?"
Synmann glumly shook his head and swirled the ice in
his brandy, watching the play of crystal blue and amber.
"Can't be done. You can't do anything that will make her
trust you."
"He's that bad, is he?" she smiled.
"Joel That's despair! You can't mean that." He looked
up at the girl. "Symbolically you're the Soviet Union. And
here I am, a nice American. We'd have a wonderful time
in bed together. How do I convince you that we'd both
benefit?"
She had been holding his double scotch on her tray,
watching him. She set it on the table. "You could start by
not pointing your ICBM at me."
"Jesus!" said Byron.
"Then you could open a joint checking account with
me."
"Good God!" said Byron.
"And if you signed a contract promising to be my slave
for life and, let's see, gave me a leash to a ring in your
nose and did everything I asked you to do, perhaps I
might trust you."
"Karl Marx! Get me another scotch!"
She left laughing.
"See," said Synmann, "it's hopeless. You can earn trust
by being trustworthy, but earning it and getting paid are
different things. That was one of my most amazing math
discoveries—trust is something you can't impose. Trust is
an act of faith."
"Bullshit! It has something to do with probabilities. If I
always do what I say I'll do, then you start to trust me."
Synmann grimaced: "Yes, of course." And his voice
became ruthless. "And that's the way every con person
operates. She borrows a dollar, and pays it back. She
borrows two dollars and pays it back. She gives candy to

The Moon Goddess and the Son
155
children. She helps little old gentlemen cross the street.
Her behavior is indistinguishable from the behavior of a
solid citizen. She fails you only once—the time she flies to
Brazil with your hundred million dollars. So trust is not a
matter of probabilities. Statistics can't handle a sample of
one. Trust is an act of faith. Trust is the gateway to either
heaven or hell—and the gate is unmarked."
"Damn few have gone through."
"How come I trust you, Byron? I just met you."
"I dunno."
"Do you trust me?"
Byron raised his glass, and they touched brandy to
scotch.
"Do you trust the Soviets?" asked Synmann.
"No. They're almost as evil as the Democrats."
"So here we are, two strangers who trust each other.
We trust a lot of people. That's the foundation of American
wealth because it means that we can keep a lot of coopera-
tive games going together. But we don't trust the Soviets
and that means an enormous tax burden and a lot of time
wasted building weapons we wouldn't need in a world of
trust."
"I guess we have to tough it out," said Byron, quoting
his father.
Synmann's face took on a faraway look. "Do you know
why I'm working for Sam Brontz? Have you met him?"
"No," said Byron. "Bond talks about him a lot. My wife
loves him but thinks he is stiff and pompous."
"I sure didn't like him when I met him. I knew he was
there to take over the company. I was ready to go down in
flames first. But Sam is the first man I ever met who plans
ahead."
"I've heard rumors," said McDougall.
"He has this crazy Cathedral and he's invited me on
staff to do games theory when I get time off from every-
thing else he has for me. God, he's working me! I'm on
the front line knocking out ICBMs and he has. this hairy
space transportation project going. Got to get back to
Boston by morning. We need five hundred engineers and
there's only five of us."
"That keeps the red tape down. It makes for speed."

156
Donald Kingsbury
"It does."
"If you need any free engineering, give me a problem.
I've been flying too much. Have to keep my hand in. All
I'm going to be doing with NASA is more flying."
"If you get out east, look me up."
"I'm thinking of flying out to New Hampshire tonight
. . . have my own plane . . . see the wife and kid. Why
don't you fly back with me? A more exciting trip than
American Airlines. It'll give us a chance to chat some
more. Another drink?"
"Sure."
"Not that I need another scotch, but I can't resist talk-
ing to that broad again. Have you noticed, she hasn't
smoked a cigaret all evening? God, that makes me horny.
Once a long time ago I got up enough nerve to kiss a
woman who smoked Marlboros. She tasted like a horse.
Never trust a woman who smokes."

CHAPTER 21
You say yes, and I say no.
You say stop and I say go, go, go.
Oh no!
You say good-bye and I say hello, hello, hello.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney**
Ray Armsiel had a cot in Shantech's Westlake Complex
near Boston. For days on end he didn't go back to his
apartment which was still a shambles from the moving
even after all these months. This morning he was up at six.
When he peeked inside the vestibule fridge he found only
some overage yogurt and three slices of dried salami. That
meant eating out.
Shantech's isolation required a long drive through patches
of morning fog to find an all night restaurant. Grumbling,
his ill humor was abated somewhat by an autumn carnival
of celebrating trees whose costumes of red and orange
bathed in the neon splendor of a diffuse dawn. He ordered
eggs and pancakes at the counter, enough to last him as
many hours as possible before the next fill-up. The buxom
waitress was full of chatter about her daughter. He was
glad that someone had a nice daughter. Why hadn't the
good Lord protected him from a brat like Linda?
** (c) 1967 Northern Songs Limited, Maclen Music Inc., c/o ATV
Music Corp 6255 Sunset Blvd., L.A., CA 90028
157

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Donald Kingsbury
By seven Ray was back at work, programming on the
VAX some design speculation that had hit him in the
middle of shovelling the pancakes into his mouth. Sam the
Man, who was forever catching him doing such menial
jobs, kept insisting that he delegate more tasks to lesser
men but the youth in Ray often rebelled—delegating author-
ity was like letting subordinates discover the beetles under
all the choice rocks.
The pleasure of working at night was in being without
help. He could pace down the enormous halls of this
converted factory and not meet a soul. No one repri-
manded him for playing janitor or technician or god. He
could spot-check the figures of some engineer fresh out of
college. He could have audible debates with himself. He
could nap on his office floor without shocking a reception-
ist. Still, keeping a finger in every project was impossible:
without the handymen which Sam sparingly provided, the
work would be going very much slower.
Before eight Ray changed out of his coveralls into a
fresh striped suit with matching velvet vest and pale blue
tie. His daytime persona was pleasantly normal. He was a
ready listener who cut-in only at the moment some engi-
neer paused to begin a repetition. He asked precise ques-
tions when a man waffled. He almost never ended a
conversation without making a summary and a decision.
No meeting he chaired lasted longer than half an hour.
But for bull sessions Ray ordered sloppy food that could
be eaten with fingers, like pizza, and he encouraged irrel-
evant speculation, beer drinking, illogical trains of thought
so weird that they provoked only laughter, dirty jokes,
outrageous slips of consistency, gossip and creative com-
plaining. That kind of foolery he let continue for hours,
coat-off and tie loosened, a hospitable but patient spider
waiting for his fly. The moment that fly touched his web
he became instant sting, wrapping it up with his eyes
ablaze, cutting through the speculation, leaving only a
conclusion bound in silk.
Except when he caught a bumblebee like Linda.
This morning a courtier arrived with the first study of
the equatorial bases that the leoport would need to feed its
immense appetite. Ray paused over the spectacular photos

The Moon Goddess and the Son
159
of Namala. He thought of Linda. Shan tech's potential Pacific
base was an exotic haven any romantic man would be
delighted to show to either mistress or bride. Why did
Linda keep popping into his mind? What an ass I was to
let her sneak into my bed! He wasn't about to blame
himself for what had happened—be was totally innocent—
but Sam would kill him anyway.
Later in the morning Joseph Synmann arrived with a
NASA pilot in tow who had conveniently flown him up
from Houston. The physicist was expected. Already by last
week Sam had informed Ray that the Great Man was
being assigned to Armsiel's staff for an indefinite period—
though, Ray thought wryly, perhaps it was the other way
around and he was being put under Synmann's wing.
Thank god he got along with the crazy old hippy!
Ray took both men down to the lower lab for a visit.
Synmann knew what it was all about but the pilot didn't
and Ray felt obliged to explain to him what they were
doing. He didn't get away with short explanations.
This was no pilot. This was a goddamned NASA spy.
"Well, we've been thinking about it for a long time.
Roger Arnold originally proposed three basic designs for
the leoport: two horizontal versions and one rotating one.
We're working with the magnetically coupled double coils
strung out along 150 kloms with ten meters spacings
between them."
"They don't float away on you?" asked Byron.
Ray smiled thinly. "Each hoop can be individually con-
trolled by adjusting the strength of the magnetic field in
the concentric coils and in the eddy-coils through the
connecting spokes. The hoop interacts with adjacent hoops."
He showed Byron a mock-up of the design.
"We can move any hoop in a direction perpendicular to
the leoport's axis to keep the whole leoport ramrod straight.
Laser beams parallel to the axis tell us when a hoop moves
out of line and the appropriate feedback signal is sent."
"What about pitch?"
"No problem." Ray explained how the eddy-coils were
used to keep the plane of each hoop perpendicular to the
axis of the leoport.
"And motion along the main axis?"

160
Donald Kingsbury
"She plays like an accordion. We can move the hoops
closer together or push them apart. We can send compres-
sive waves up and down the leoport. The control center
could play Dixie on her if they wanted to. That solves a lot
of problems. A leoport has to take huge compressive stresses
while capturing a load. Shock waves propagate along the
leoport's axis. The control center anticipates a load coming
in through the hoops and predicts its shock wave and plays
the exact countertune so that while the freighter is being
captured the two wave-fronts exactly cancel each other.
It's sweet. I owe Roger Arnold a beer."
"You've got fifteen thousand loose hoops up there. Right?
How do you keep the axis of the leoport horizontal as it
orbits around Earth?"
"Conservation of angular momentum. If we compress
the whole leoport, the axis starts to spin faster. If we
stretch it out, she starts to spin slower. We have perfect
control over the inclination of the axis. I owe Roger Arnold
two beers."
They took Byron into a room where some technicians
were building a cryogenic refrigerator, a scale-up of a
NASA design to liquefy helium in satellites. It was an
elegant machine with one moving part that rotated on
magnetic bearings.
"The leoport coils will be superconducting," explained
Synmann. "Superconducting requires supercooling."
"What if one of the hoops fails?"
"We just pop it out, close up, and tow the defective ring
to the repair station. If the whole leoport fails and has to
be shut down, it's no big disaster. We just have fifteen
thousand hoops in the same orbit. Then Houston sends us
cowboys."
"That's a lot of hoops," whistled Byron. "How much do
they weigh? You'll never get them up there with the
shuttle!"
Ray smiled. "Now we're on my home ground. Have you
ever seen the work Jack Bell's group at Rockwell did with
modified shuttles? The hoops have a hole in them fourteen
meters in diameter. We stack a hundred hoops on top of
each other, shove a propellant tank up the hole and add an
engine compartment using the shuttle's main engines. No

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161
crew, no life support system. The tank stays in orbit, and
the engine compartment comes back on a heat shield. A
hundred trips gives you a leoport."
"How are you going to sell it!" groaned Byron.
It was Synmann's turn to laugh. "Wait till you see Ray's
flying saucer."
"Flying saucers?"
"Once the leoport is operational we need a circular
supply ship," said Ray sheepishly. "What good is a leoport
if it doesn't capture freighters? The hoop geometry dic-
tates the shape of the supply ship—it has to be circular
with a coil in the rim. The saucers go through the hoops
belly first—with a clearance of about two meters."
"Good God!" exclaimed Byron, not so much horrified by
the two meter clearance as by the thought of piloting a
saucer.
"I think it's great," said Synmann. "Everybody in Amer-
ica believes in flying saucers. How could they not sell!"
Byron grimaced. "How in God's name would you make
it fly! It will have to get up there and come back down. I
mean, there must be more to this than shooting the hoops!"
The aerospace engineer shrugged. "Give me any shape—
and I'll make it fly—my specialty. We put control surfaces
on a frisbee, that's all. I'll let you have the honor of
test-flying our first capture," Ray joked.
"Like hell you will! That's a job for little green men."
Synmann was examining some prototype section of coil
with the eye of a man who has built linear accelerators.
"We'll hook the conductor supports here. Like this." And
he waved his arms in some kind of code that Armsiel
understood.
Byron had a thought. "Jesus! To accelerate a captured
payload to orbital velocity takes power, even if your saucer
arrives at half-orbital velocity. You've got a first class power
problem!"
Ray smiled again.
Synmann tapped Byron on the back. "You just made a
gaff, Byron. You go to the bottom of the class. The leoport
is a linear generator. It generates a godawful amount of
power when the saucer is captured. What do we do with
all that electricity!"

162
Donald Kingsbury
Byron frowned in momentary puzzlement.
"Look," Synmann explained carefully, "when the saucer
is captured by the leoport, there is a momentum exchange.
The saucer speeds up and the leoport slows down. Since
the leoport slows down it has to drop into a lower orbit.
That liberates energy. Some of the energy appears in the
added velocity of the saucer and some appears as electric-
ity in the coils."
"All," said Byron, embarrassed. "So how do you keep it
up?"
"An age old question," pondered Synmann.
"The leoport, I mean!"
Ray ventured a more serious answer. "Eventually we
intend to keep it up by importing mass from the moon.
Moon mass, any kind of moon mass, contains about six
times as much potential energy as you can get by burning
the same mass of oil. If Earth imports more mass than it
exports, we end up with a power surplus—but that's for
the future. Right now we plan to keep the leoport up by
ejecting the empty saucers at a higher speed than their
arrival velocity. They emerge at rest relative to the atmo-
sphere and don't need heat shielding."
"Ah, then the ejection is going to take power."
"Yeah."
"What are you going to use?"
"The re-cycled power generated by the incoming sau-
cers, augmented by solar power."
"Photovoltaic cells?"
"Yeah—in orbit, beaming power to the leoport. Each of
the hoops will have its own rectennae."
"Photovoltaics aren't very efficient," commented Byron.
"We use what we have."
"Suppose," said Byron, "I could get you a solar power
source that was one fourth as massive per watt as the best
photovoltaic cell array?"
Ray looked questioningly at the long-haired physicist.
"Who is this guy? I thought you told me he was a pilot."
Synmann smiled. "He is a pilot. He drinks beer and
picks up all the pretty waitresses. I'll bet he even watches
the Superbowl. NASA has him training to fly Rockwells."
"You bastard!" Byron complained. "I'm an engineer. I

The Moon Goddess and the Son
163
keep telling people I'm an engineer. I want a piece of the
action."
"We don't have any money," Ray said to put him off.
"Sam the Man is bankrolling us, and for a heavy sum. It's
a big shoestring but for this kind of game it is still a
shoestring. We're lean and I'm hiring only workaholics."
Byron McDougall was suddenly adamant. "NASA is
paying my salary, and my wife buys the extras. I'm not
interested in the money. I want a hobby to keep my
engineering brain alive."
"A super photovoltaic cell?" Ray asked suspiciously.
"It's not a photovoltaic cell. I know the people who are
doing the micro-rectenna research. I have a prototype
chip in my office in Houston. And I think I know what
they have to do to manufacture it cheaply."
"Okay. You're on for a dollar a year." Ray grinned.
"Henry Ford once defined an idealist as a man who helps
somebody else make a profit. When we make our first
billion, I'll strike a medal for you."
"Thanks," said Byron sarcastically.
"Sticking around for lunch?" asked Synmann.
"Can't. Have to get back to New Hampshire. I've got a
kid to raise. Can't let the wife make a sissy out of him."
He turned to Ray. "Just give me a page of specs on your
power system, and whatever work anybody has done on it
and you'll hear from me again in a week. I'll give you a
report. It'll be bullshit—but it'll be a good first swipe at
the problem by a Texas greenhorn."
Synmann took Byron away to drive him back to the local
grass patch airport, and Ray Armsiel was left alone for a
while. He handled a couple of short meetings. Then exactly
at twelve—nine o'clock Los Angeles time—he phoned Linda
Brontz. For the first time in weeks she was home to
answer the phone.
"Hello-whoever-it-is," she answered sweetly.
"It's me, Ray."
"Oh, you." Frosty pause.
He wasn't expecting her to answer—she hadn't answered
his last eleven phone calls—and just to hear her flustered
him. "I've figured out how to fix everything up. You come
out here and we'll get married."

164
Donald Kingsbury
"Now you've done it! You broke our contract! You prom-
ised never to mention that word!" And she slammed down
the phone.
Ray sat in his swivel chair, consumed with fury. A man
had to be an absolute fool to get himself involved with a
nineteen year old! They didn't mature until they were
twenty-two!
He picked up the reports on the equatorial bases again.
That was the weak political link in the whole launch sys-
tem. The equatorial countries had a stranglehold on the
good launch sites, and none of them were very stable.
Banana republics and spoiled girls!
He might use scram-jets as launching platforms to reduce
the number of launching sites. That solved the problem of
bananas but it didn't solve the problem of nineteen-year-
old children.

CHAPTER 22
Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep.
Seated in thy silver chair
High and stately manner keep;
Evening Star entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.
Ben Jonson
It was a nice name. Diana Grove. She had picked it
when she had taken an illustrated children's book out of
the L.A. Public Library about classical mythology. It didn't
please her that the book was for children but she couldn't
resist the pictures. One of them showed sunbeams through
a grove of trees in ancient Italy dedicated to Diana, so
peaceful—with a mossy shrine and a deer.
She could go anywhere and do anything with her new
name. Her birth certificate said she was eighteen. She
even had a high school diploma. Boy, did that save a lot of
work! John said her name was in the school's computer
with all her grades and everything. She even had good
marks in algebra and geometry. That made her panic a
little.
"What if someone wants me to do an algebra problem!"
But John assured her that everybody forgot the stuff. He
told her to remember that she had taken it years ago. She
165

166
Donald Kingsbury
stayed with John the Forger and his Lady-love for weeks,
living out of a little back room that looked over into
somebody else's azalea garden. Lady-love was raw-boned
and congenial. She liked to fight and bash people around,
but forgave them easily, in five minutes usually.
The first time Diana heard Lady-love screaming and
beating on this guy, she had been so terrified that she
locked her door and was planning to climb out the window
and run away, but John coaxed her out.
"She only breaks men's bones, little cake. She likes you.
She would never touch a girl."
That wasn't true. Once Lady-love slapped around a
young Mexican girl who was on heroin and nearly broke
her head against the kitchen cupboards. But the girl stayed
for supper and didn't seem offended.
Mostly thirteen year old Diana went to Texas and Ari-
zona because John the Forger's main business was manu-
facturing new identities for Mexicans. She slept in the
back of his half-ton pick-up with his computer and wire-
tapping gear, and ran all sorts of errands in graveyards and
backwater courthouses. After six months of indentured
service with John she became too well known and he
crafted more special papers for her and let her go. She
became a waitress.
Rooming with older girls taught Diana how to imitate
adult behavior. She read voraciously to educate herself,
spending time in student haunts around Westwood to test
the ideas she found in books. Her manners became flirta-
tious. She was a sassy summertime flower to the bees,
little caring whether the men she attracted were young or
old or handsome or married—but she never dated the
same man twice. It wasn't smart for a young girl pretend-
ing she was a woman to trust men. She had a perfect
excuse when a man wanted a second date.
"But that's the day I'm seeing Larry."
"How about Saturday then?"
"I always go out with George on Saturday."
Once she recognized an astronaut from the moon-run
and trailed him all over L.A., biting her nails in the front
seat of a taxi when she thought they had lost him, and
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The Moon Goddess and the Son
167
and she knew she wasn't going to be able to follow him
again she brazenly went over and asked him for a light. He
was glad to oblige, but she didn't have a cigaret. Smiling,
he "lent" her one and lit it for her. She never smoked it,
because she didn't smoke, and when he was gone she
dropped the butt into the gutter. It had cost her twenty-
seven dollars in cab fare to get that cigaret. She was
furious at herself for being so shy that she was unable to
ask him to say hello to Byron McDougall for her.
When too many people wanted her, she changed jobs or
roommates. Eventually she began to move up the coast,
carefully picking employment in only the most expensive
and popular restaurants. Once in Goos Bay, Oregon, a
drunk whacked her around and that so frightened her she
flew to San Francisco the very next day.
Not having a job was unimportant. At the airport she
went to the public terminal and called up the classified
ads, coding for waitress, and sorting by restaurant type.
Her scrolling stopped at an ad that called for an exception-
ally attractive and experienced waitress to work at Namala
in the Pacific. Diana was a long time space buff and knew
very well that Namala was one of the equatorial stations
that supplied the orbiting leoport. In only a moment the
terminal had connected her to the employment office. She
passed the verbal screening, then answered the brief ques-
tionnaire which appeared on the terminal and was given
an appointment.
Diana was calm during the bus ride downtown. Then
the underground world of BART left her wide-eyed and
she forgot about jobs while she rode up and down the
shabby subway to see the stations and the tramp musi-
cians who camped there, one with a real trombone. But
she had to face the interview. She developed a bad case of
sinking heart in the elevator of San Francisco's most ele-
gant earthquake resistant monument. After all, she was
only fifteen years old even if her birth certificate said
twenty. It was her first job interview in a skyscraper. The
elevator was too quick. She found herself in the corridor
on the 37th floor taking deep breaths and adjusting her
hair in the polished marble.
Hey feet! Don't just stand there.

168
Donald Kingsbury
The secretary of Ling Enterprises smiled and Diana
reciprocated. It helped her nervousness that the secretary
was sitting down and she was standing. She could pretend
that she was just earning a five dollar tip. All she had to do
was be very attractive and do whatever was asked of her,
quickly and efficiently.
The speaker beside the video camera spoke in a gentle
voice. "Send her in. She's expected."
Diana instantly turned her smile to the camera—and
received her first shock. It was President Ling speaking.
That was very suspicious. Presidents of restaurant chains
did not interview waitresses. She knew she should just
leave. There were too many traps for fifteen year old girls
that she didn't know about. But there was something
exciting about a trap.
When she peered around Mr. Ling's door she found
him to be Chinese and ancient. His office was contempo-
rary American except for the paintings—one a battle
between Earthmen and beastoid in a jungle under a large
red sun, the other a desolate landscape somewhere in the
galaxy near a star cluster. The fear went out of her.
"You're another space cookie," she said, relieved, all
her poise returning.
"It's a comfortable disease."
"Do you remember when they first landed on the moon?"
she asked.
He laughed. "I'm so old I remember when they thought
landing on the moon was impossible."
"Do you own a restaurant on the moon?"
"No, but when they build one, I'll be running it."
Diana loved him already. She was his slave. She'd eat
the bait in a trap like this any day. She sat down on the
couch and couldn't take her eyes off his face, lined and old
and frail and the most fascinating face she'd ever seen.
He moved closer, sitting on the desk top: "Are you
wondering why a president is interviewing waitresses?"
"Yeah," she grinned. "I'm ready to run out the door
screaming."
"I have six space-related restaurants and I take a per-
sonal interest in them. The frustrated astronaut in me."
"What's Namala like?"

The Moon Goddess and the Son
169
"Hard work for you. Too many men. The women we
hire for Namala have to be adept at turning away men
without offending."
"I'm a good girl and very self-reliant."
"Sometimes you'll need advice. Madam Lilly, who runs
our Namala franchise, has large skirts for hiding behind
when it is necessary."
"I never need help," said Diana defiantly.
"An unwise consideration."
"It is better to give help than to receive help."
"So women have told me. That's why we men run the
world."
"I think you like being in command. Are you used to
having people help you?" Her eyes sparkled.
He sighed. "Good help is hard to come by these days."
"So that's why men are doing such a poor job of running
the world!" She couldn't stop grinning.
He returned a parchment smile. They talked. He found
out all he needed to know and she found out all she
needed to know. He offered her the job. She accepted.
There was nothing more to say but she didn't want to
leave just yet.
Ling watched her silence as she moved her fingers and
played with a ring. "Ah," he said, "I've finally caught you
when you are not beaming like a mouse with stolen cheese."
"I'm hungry and I want to invite you out for lunch to
share my cheese," she croaked with frog's legs in her
throat and cheese in her paws.
He smiled a thousand wrinkles.
Then she asked even more awkwardly, "Would your
wife mind?"
"I'm a widower."
"We could go to the Calchas. I've worked there. It's
beautiful and I miss their food."
She made him talk about himself over too much wine.
He was the rebel in his family. His father wanted him to
take over the restaurant business and he wanted to be an
engineer. He had edited a science fiction farizine called
Betelgeuse which went to fourteen issues but when he
became engaged to his illustrator, who was a Caucasian,
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170
Donald Kingsbury
school to get a scholarship and ended up as a city bureau-
crat, married, with three lovely mongrel children while he
tried to write at night.
Finally his father died and his brothers expanded and
took the family fortune into a close brush with disaster and
he made a pact with his mother to run the family business.
He was good at it. Later he made his breakthrough by
discovering how to franchise variety in a world of McDon-
alds', Johnsons' and Colonels'.
Diana had fun. They ran up quite a bill at Mr. Ling's
insistence (he thought he was paying) and she had the best
fight of her life taking the bill away from him. To make up
for it he bought her beautiful luggage. She sighed and told
him she had nothing to put in it, so he bought her clothes.
She sighed and told him she had no place to take them
because she hadn't rented a room yet, so he gave her the
key to his place.
Ling went back to work and she went window shopping.
At first she was just another sophisticated San Franciscan
woman out for a stroll, but the happiness seeped into her
little girl's heart. She tried skipping. She saw a brick hill
and ran up the sidewalk counting which cars had their
wheels turned to the curb.
"Hey," said a man, "you're not allowed to be that happy!"
She puckered her nose at him. "Arrest me!" With her last
dollars she bought a dozen roses from an ancient freak who
wore his dirty hair to his waist and kept the roses in a can
by his box while his quaking fingers rolled a joint of
Mexican Gold. She was so happy that even he gave her a
toothless grin. In the park she passed out a rose to every
derelict she met. One of them tried to sell it back to her
for beer money.
She cooked Mr. Ling a gourmet dinner in his kitchen
after making many phone calls to his office to find out what
he liked and when he would be in. They spent the whole
meal and three liquors discussing the history of Jerusalem.
She discovered his wicked sense of humor. He convinced
her that there had been a whole order of Chinese Knights
who fought in the crusades.
"Don't laugh so hard!" she complained. "You're just

The Moon Goddess and the Son
171
lucky I didn't find a lemon meringue pie for supper or
you'd have a pie plate for a new beret!"
Ten o'clock was his bedtime. He excused himself grace-
fully and escorted her all the way to the guest room where
he put an arm around her shoulder and thanked her for a
lovely evening before he left her.
Diana peeked. She waited until the light went out under
his door and then, dressed only in a candle flame, entered
his room. "I've come to kiss you good night." It was easy to
pretend you were twenty years old when you were nude.
His smile in the candlelight was wistful. "Goddess Diana,
I am much too old for such escapades."
"That makes us even. I'm much too young for such
escapades." She blew out the candle and slipped under
the sheets with him. "Don't die of a heart attack just yet. I
want my job on the moon." She snuggled up beside him,
deciding that she liked to sleep with men. Her fingers
grazed on his chest, exploring, nibbling. "I didn't know
that Chinamen had fur on their chests." She left her lips
on his shoulder. It was a sleep of innocence.
Two mornings later a gale was blowing in from the
Pacific, and she could smell the sea and rotting kelp all the
way across the peninsula as far as the Bayshore express.
Mr. Ling was driving her, carrying her ticket, playing
hooky from his important job, pretending that it was his
function to take care of his waitress on her first day. She
clung to his black leather great-coat feeling oddly at peace
with herself, at home, as if she had a home, even though
she was going away. They had driven down at dawn to
avoid some of the traffic and had time to walk around and
play the fool with each other.
Part of her wanted the gale to be so strong that the
airplanes would have to hide in their hangars and she
could have another few hours with her lover, but the wind
just blew her hair awry and chased pieces of San Francisco
Chronicle printout down the highway in somersaults.
The wind raged but nothing stopped the great wasps from
buzzing in and out of their monstrous South San Francisco
hive.
She saw them lined up for take-off and saw them rolling
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172
Donald Kingsbury
was time to leave, everything was done through tunnels
and she never saw the outside of the carbon black Boeing
that lifted her out across the Pacific, then up and high
above a whiter ocean of clouds to the world of the equator
where the flying saucers homed.

CHAPTER 23
Look carefully, and you will see that each important
fact in our history is a fact that was forced upon us.
Peter Chaadaev, Apology of a Madman, 1837,
after being declared insane by order of tsar nicholas i
for writing the essay a philosophical letter
which caused the moscow telescope to be suppressed,
its editor n.i. nadezhdin to be exiled,
and the censor who passed it to be dismissed.
Joe Synmann arrived at the Cathedral of Saint Marx
hours earlier than called for by his appointment with Sam
Brontz. Frankly, he was curious. If he was going to work
with this Limon Barnes character on game theory—and he
had almost decided, just on Sam's say so, that he would—he
needed a better feel for the place. People told such strange
stories about Limon that the only possible way of judging
him was in person.
Without making a fuss he sneaked into the lecture hall
while Limon was speaking to some of his trainees. The
visual picture did not fit the stories. Limon was wearing a
business suit of dark blue with a pale blue shirt and tie,
not something that could ever be called costume. He was
standing at a podium and lecturing to his trainees like any
professor.
173

174
Donald Kingsbury
Synmann watched Limon cross-reference and lay trails
through seemingly unrelated materials and bring them
instantly to the huge screen. He was chatting about the
Mongol impact on Russia, not so much to give his students
a history lesson, as to instruct them in the power of the
Kensakan Kambi. He was calling up (and editing) text
from the cathedral library, even illustrations. What he
wrote in script at the lectern miraculously appeared as
print on a large screen. The "professor" was a showman.
For a training exercise Limon was tracing out the influ-
ence of one particular Mongol practice on all subsequent
Russian regimes. The Mongols collected taxes and they
did not care who paid them as long as the tribute was
forthcoming and unrest was minimal. In order to squeeze
wealth out of such a dispersed and poor country their
administrators developed the concept of collective respon-
sibility for tribute—you were privileged to pay your neigh-
bor's taxes if he couldn't, or died, or didn't.
After the Mongols had destroyed themselves in fratrici-
dal war, collective obligation tended to persist. Muscovy
neither repealed the Mongol tribute laws nor changed the
nature of the tribute collection machinery which had
oppressed them. Two-hundred fifty years after the twilight
of Horde power, Mongol assumptions about accountability
were formalized into Russian law. A dvorianin forwarded
the taxes of his serfs, and had to pay the (Mongol) head tax
whether the serf had produced it or not, whether the serf
had died or run away. Indeed, when a dvorianin went
bankrupt in any enterprise, his debt became a liability to
be paid off by his serfs.
Slowly, carefully, Limon showed the evolution and dif-
fusion of collective responsibility like a paleontologist fol-
lowing the fossil evidence which traced the history of the
horse. What had originally appeared as a simplified admin-
istrative procedure for Mongol baskaks had, by the Soviet
Era, evolved into such things as factory quotas. With his
trails of evidence Limon laid out the picture of a Soviet
factory hanging on the same skeleton as a fourteenth cen-
tury Russian estate.
The Soviet planning apparatus was originally organized
by men whose only prior experience was in setting tax

The Moon Goddess and the Son
175
quotas for the tsar—men so ignorant of Marx as to be
unaware that Marx himself describes factory quotas as a
kind of tribute laid on the working class by greedy capital-
ists. A Soviet factory manager, like a conquered Russian
prince, hides as much wealth as he can from the Moscow
baskaks but religiously meets the quotas imposed from
above no matter how little likeness they bear to real need
and real ability to pay. Only an accounting practice which
has, for centuries, been raising wealth to meet the demands
of a colonial exploiter could run the incredible double and
triple set of books which are second nature to any
bureaucracy-wise Soviet citizen.
With a flourish, Limon called to the screen a sheet from
a tsarist landowner's records which involved the buying
and selling of dead serfs to balance the estate's tax accounts.
And with another magician's wave, displayed the books of
a Soviet factory which, in collusion with other factories,
had been logging the shipment and receipt of non-existent
goods so that each could appear to the Moscow apparatus
as a factory meeting its quotas.
When the show was over Synmann avoided the cluster
of trainees who converged on the podium by taking a walk
through the cathedral grounds. There were signs of all
kinds of new construction—a bulldozer, raw earth, forms,
a construction shack. Sam Brontz was certainly serious
about something.
Later, at the appointed hour, Synmann felt slightly fool-
ish in his pullover sweater and jeans and long hair when
he met the meticulous Brontz and the blue-suited Limon
in the little office, but Sam ignored his clothes and went
out and found a chair for him so that they could all sit
down.
"I've been telling you about Dr. Synmann whose hobby
is game theory and the numerical simulation of conflict,"
Sam said.
Limon nodded to the physicist. "Sam thinks two freaks
are better than one."
Sam spent the required amount of time on small talk.
Then he explained to Limon that he had seen Synmann
strip the best strategic defense papers of the United States
and Russia down to playable axioms. "He's going to show

176
Donald Kingsbury
you and me why the most competent American and Soviet
defense planners can only come up with ideas like atomic
terrorism for technological peoples and 'bomb them back
to the stone age' for the peasant civilians of Vietnam and
Afghanistan." It was clear Sam wanted alternatives.
"All right," said Limon. "So we sit in our little fairyland
and revise east-west defense strategy. Why simulated Rus-
sians? Why don't we use real Russians?"
Sam Brontz grunted. "Have you ever tried to talk to a
Russian from the Soviet power elite? His negotiating skills
are essentially nil. He is paralyzed by something. What, I
don't know. Give me a simulated Russian any day. I want
a quick American, someone I can talk to, but not one
trapped in our cultural biases. I want an American who
can think like a Bear only twenty times as fast."
Limon answered with his straightest face. "We could
get a simulated peace treaty done and signed with a hun-
dred simulated signatures within the month—long before
a real Russian could decide on the first agenda item."
"That's right," said Sam Brontz, approvingly.
"You're serious!" Limon was incredulous. "How could
you impose a simulated peace treaty?"
"If you had to impose it, Limon, it wouldn't be a peace
treaty. It would be a Bill of Reparations, or Terms of
Surrender. Note that New York and California hate each
other's guts, and they are both armed to the teeth with
nuclear weapons, but they have a very carefully worked
out peace treaty between them, the Constitution. No Cali-
fornian ever signed it. People simulating Californians wrote
it and signed it."
Synmann was saying nothing but he was listening to the
exchange intently.
Limon scoffed. "A Soviet apparatchik would never shake
hands on a deal he didn't make." .
"A peace treaty isn't just shaking hands or telling an
enemy what he wants to hear so that you gain a temporary
truce. It is an elaborate structure, like the American Con-
stitution, worked out very carefully by geniuses with fore-
sight, who aren't trying to sneak in a special benefit for
themselves or a time-bomb for their favorite enemy. I'm
not going to ask anyone to sign it. A workable peace treaty

The Moon Goddess and the Son
177
has market value. It will take over the market like Kleenex
in a world of handkerchiefs."
"People make very strange assumptions about what is
good for them," injected Synmann.
Brontz brightened. "That's exactly why I won't deal
with real Russians. I'd be willing to deal with a man like
Sakharov—but sane Russians like Sakharov have always
been locked up in psychiatric hospitals or sent off to bust
rocks in Siberia."
"You're suggesting that Americans can make better
guesses about Russian welfare than a Russian?" Synmann
doubted.
"No, I am not! Americans are half-blind and useless as
benevolists! That's why I want a simulated Russian to do
the Soviet half of my thinking. Americans will always peer
into Russia. I want a man who is looking out from the true
center of the universe which is the stone mound in the
Kremlin known as the Lobnoye Mesto, the Place of the
Skull. Lend me your eyes for a moment. Stand on the
Lobnoye Mesto.
"In the southern distances are the bottled inland seas
coveted by Tsar Peter. To the northeast lie the bottled
shores of the Baltic which the Russian spirit has been
forced to conquer to break the exploitation of Russia by
European navies. To the east is an ocean guarded by Japan
and to the southeast lies the ancient Chinese enemy.
There are rich and barrierless steppes to the west through
which hostile armies can, and have, struck like lightning at
every opportunity. To the north are the dread skies open
to the swift hellfire and brimstone of American arrows."
Synmann smiled ruefully. "It isn't possible to train an
American to think like that!"
Brontz blazed. "Damn it, Joe! That's not your job! It is
Limon's job to soak an American in acid, strip his skin off,
and graft bear fur in its place!"
"I forgot," said Synmann with mock contrition. He nod-
ded obeisance to Limon.
Brontz was enjoying himself as his eyes targeted the
physicist. "Your job is to analyze content-free conflict at a
deep enough level to pin-point the basic strategic mistakes

178
Donald Kingsbury
made by the United States and the Soviet Union in the
last fifty years. You can do that?"
"Perhaps."
"All right. Once you have your pure distilled strategy
then you and Limon can get together and add the content
and play a real game. And mark my words. I want it very
clear what our objective is. I'm not interested in a defen-
sive strategy that works for the West alone. We've had
enough of that—no one in Washington or the Pentagon
has ever taken any measures to assure the survival of
Russia in case of war. Nor am I interested in a defensive
strategy that works for Russia alone. What we need is a
defensive strategy that works at both ends of the stick and
can be implemented by two peoples who do not trust each
other."
Synmann leaned forward. "Any simulation is inevitably
going to be imperfect in some of its aspects. What we get
might not be acceptable to the real Russians for genuinely
valid reasons."
But Brontz was looking at the long end of the lever,
content to generate strategic concepts—the real Russians
would be left to forge the tactical apparatus. "See? If we
make the mistake of trying to sell them a biased American
trap, someone in their defense ministry will spot it. It
won't sell. "
Limon played his mock-astonishment. "Other than me,
Mr. Sam, you are the most arrogant man I know. You're
telling us that Russians are so slow-witted that Americans
have to figure out a viable defense for them."
"They are slow. And they haven't figured out a defense
against the United States—we can totally destroy the Soviet
Union within 24 hours."
"By that token, Americans are pretty dull-witted, too,"
Limon commented sourly.
Sam Brontz grinned. "Exactly."

CHAPTER 24
A wet sheet and a flowing sea,
A wind that follows fast
And fills the white and rustling sail
And bends the gallant mast;
And bends the gallant mast, my boys,
While like the eagle free
Away the good ship flies and leaves
Old England on the lee.
Allan Cunningham
During a year of training and rehearsal Byron McDougall
learned to respect Colonel Brown's ability to plan, but it
was the climactic week of mission execution which con-
vinced him that Brown was a master intelligence officer.
Nothing at all went wrong from the moment of lift-off until
touchdown. The colonel merely talked to them several
times a day and grunted his approval from an operations
desk far away on the globe below.
They didn't have to shoot anybody. The object of their
curiosity, the Soviet Snowfox, didn't swoop down on them
and deliver a boarding team of provocateurs to foil their
mission. They didn't have to suit up to chase a mad Soviet
agent through the shuttle's cargo bay with the panorama of
the Earth's awesome sphere above their heads. Or flee for
their lives to the shelter of the OMS engine nozzle while
179

180
Donald Kingsbury
enemy agents, having captured the flight deck, tried to
dislodge them from their haven with blasts of monomethyl
hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide.
Byron fell in love with space. He often thought about it
when he was drifting off to sleep in the bunk cage, or
changing the lithium hydride canister in the floor, or
being "cook" for the crew at the tiny nose galley of the
Atlantis. There weren't going to be enough shuttles to get
him up here as often as he might care to cornel Damn, but
that would have to change! In the few private moments he
had, Byron pondered obsessively upon the merits of
Armsiel's leoport. Sometimes, peering outside the space-
plane, he forgot to work.
Each star incredulous ... a teeming city . . .
. . . pinned, riveted on black eternity.
. . . gibbous moon unmoving goes,
frozen in astonished pose;
now four billion years in thrall
witness to the sunrise birth of Sol.
He was the only rookie on the flight and had to take a
lot of ribbing from Commander Mueller's persistent sense
of earthy humor. Although third generation German Amer-
ican, the commander still played with an endless reper-
toire of latrine jokes. Byron sometimes felt out of place at
the pilot's controls of a plane big enough to carry a latrine.
By all his fighting-aircraft standards the Atlantis was
unflyable—she had the gliding angle of a brick and either
for too much power, or when you needed it most, no
power at all. Nevertheless she flew like a dream, even
backwards when she wanted to. And she was a spaceship!
Under the yin-yang bowls of heaven and earth, during
the critical transfer maneuvers to an orbit which would
cause the Soviets' Mirograd to pass beneath them, com-
mander and pilot chatted small talk about their wives.
Byron made the mistake of proudly mentioning that his
son had learned to walk. This reminded Commander
Mueller of the age of toilet training and he launched into
several of his favorite stories. He was quite willing to
speculate on how each of the great men of NASA had

The Moon Goddess and the Son
181
managed their first potty. Byron discretely checked to see
that radio contact with Houston was down.
"Thar she blows!" exclaimed an excited voice.
The sight of the growing Mirograd structure majestically
crossing their orbit silenced them into the terse officialese
of mission business. Mueller did make one unofficial com-
ment. "Goddamn! If they'd've gold-plated it, they'd have
the Kremlin up here!" The spheres did somewhat resem-
ble cupolas, but not much. Byron saw in the filigree a lot
of the genes of the Eiffel Tower and the genius of some
unsung architect. In full imperial splendor the Russian city
floated across the visibly rotating underprison of Lord
Earth's bondsmen.
The rookie pilot of Atlantis, dwarfed as a camel might
have been by Babylon, thought of Amanda and her buried
and mutated cities. Who would glide through Mirograd's
corridors eight centuries from now? What language would
its inhabitants speak? What would they be buying and
selling? Within a welded crust of new habitats would there
be an Old City section with flavorful remnants of Borscht
soup and Uzbek humor? Would there still be traces of
Slavic in the computerese? Would Martian clothing be the
rage? Or would Mirograd be a tomb like Petra, open and
empty to space, stripped by scavengers, signed in its
bowels by the graffiti of the curious?
During the shuttle's very carefully timed maneuvers
they had three significant glimpses of the Snowfox clan,
and took some beautiful photos of two Snowfoxes in dock-
ing mode. They monitored calls and probed through sub-
tle attempts at camouflage.
As the glorious week slipped by, the pilot in Byron
gradually ceased to think of the Atlantis as an aircraft. She
was a horse. She would take a hint from a nudge or a pat,
and passively go where you wanted her to go—within
reason—but she insisted on doing all the thinking about
where to put her feet. She was no dumb machine. If you
wanted her to jump off a cliff she got stubborn. If you
went to sleep at the "reins" she didn't trot you into a
telephone pole.
Then, in his final hours as pilot, Byron felt the full force
of her willfulness. Once he had her nose pointed at the

182
Donald Kingsbury
Cape, her systems snorted alive as she flawlessly galloped
home to the stable, forcing her "passengers" to hang on to
the pommel for the ride. But what a ride!
After a weather perfect landing, rain hit Florida and
storms crossed the South. The crew spent an unscheduled
two hours holing up from the downpour in a truck that
wouldn't start, and were delayed fourteen hours in catch-
ing their flight out.
Mission debriefing was thorough. The colonel pulled it
all together, probing, evaluating, allowing speculation but
never fancy. Computer enhanced photos posed beside
chalk scrawlings on medieval blackboards. Special agents
with special data gave their talks and flew away again.
Printers spewed paper which got lost in safes or shredded
before its useful life was over—sending clerks scurrying to
the printers for more copy. Brown was a careful man who
neither averaged data nor took the road of highest proba-
bility. He established lower bounds and upper bounds for
everything and built himself an impregnable territory of
possibility.
In this whole process Byron was only a cog left over
from the mission but, because he had been there, he
became a constant source for the analysis process, watch-
ing with fascination as the conclusions formed out of the
data. He couldn't resist aiding the synthesis team with the
insights his effortless mind seemed to be able to generate
at will.
The report said it all. The Soviets' were exploiting a vast
flaw in the American military space systems.
The Snowfox had seemed like such a trivial flea, nothing
that could even begin to rival NASA's Cross Continental
Trailer Truck. Intelligence sources had known about the
puny Snowfox for a long time. They perceived it as a
modest spaceplane built along the lines of the outdated US
Air Force dynasoar of the 1960s. They perceived it as the
best that a fumbling technology could produce—it had to
be launched atop an expendable booster; it had no more
than a five-ton payload capacity, and could not possibly
carry more than a crew of three. Dismissed.
Mirograd now carried six berths for the Snowfox. At the
interminable disarmament conference, in which the Sovi-

The Moon Goddess and the Son
183
ets relentlessly pressed for the military neutralization of
space, the Snowfox was represented, quite accurately, as a
shuttle vehicle to transport people to and from Mirograd.
In fact, its use wasn't so limited. Nor was its use intended
to be that limited. Mirograd was already being supplied
with special booster modules that could take its Snowfoxes
on many missions, even missions as high as geostationary
orbit.
Commander Mueller put it his own way. "Them foxes is
gonna eat our chickens," he lamented.
The integrated bits of intelligence added up to a signifi-
cant story. Within the next few months a Mirograd-based
squadron, manned by crack Soviet fighter pilots, would
have the capability to penetrate to geo, to drift right
through the main communications system that linked the
American defense network. Their Snowfoxes were to be
equipped to destroy, within hours, every major American
satellite and then to remain in orbit in order to prevent
the deployment of replacements. Piloted ships gave flexi-
bility to any Soviet mission. For instance, after boosting
up to geo, instead of acting as destroyers, they could
retrieve, unopposed, the most secret American satellite.
Within the same leisurely time span that the Allied
armies of World War II had rolled across German-occupied
Europe, Moscow was taking de facto claim over the whole
of the space above Earth to a height of thirty-six thousand
kloms. They would have a full half-decade to consolidate
their position before anyone had a chance to challenge
them. Tsar Peter would be proud. His people had found
their long sought access to the open seas. What are land
barriers to an aerospace power?
It was a brilliant end run, an obvious if unforeseen one,
and the defense analysts Byron talked to were stunned
that America had been so easily outfoxed. The American
Space Truck might be technologically superior in every
way—but, whatever she was, she couldn't reach geosta-
tionary orbit. NASA's Orbiter was about as useful against
the Snowfox as a Jordanian tank against Israel's Air Force
in 1967. The same Americans who had once picnicked on
the moon in their dune buggies no longer even had a raft
to take their heroes up to meet the Snowfoxes.

184
Donald Kingsbury
Commander Mueller was always the optimist. He was
the wit with special words of encouragement for his fellow
Air Force officers. "We're the ones with a sanitary space
toilet that freeze-dries shit. How can they beat that?"

CHAPTER 25
Four of us sat with the old man around the wooden
basin, spooning our soup with voracious appetite. I talked
with him, asking questions about the life of the workers
while listening to his tales of the past. It was a cruel story.
The peasants, moved from their homes against their wills
and placed by their landlords in a position of hopeless
slavery, had rebelled several times, demanding to be
returned, balking at the assigned work in the sugar fac-
tory. Every fifth or tenth man was flogged. Squads of
soldiers were brought in to keep order. Like grasshoppers
these soldiers devoured everything, leaving not a crust of
bread for the inhabitants. The fate of the serf leaders was
terrible.
Katerina Breshkovskaia,
socialist agitator in tsarist russia, 1874,
from Going to the People.
A stone wall and a medieval city gate now blocked out
the parking lot of the Cathedral of Saint Marx the Benefac-
tor. American dress was not permitted beyond the gate,
and if one appeared at its oaken and iron facade improp-
erly attired, one was stopped by the Strelsky or KGB,
whoever happened to be on duty, and politely directed
through an arch down into a dungeon tunnel.inside the
wall. The gloomy tunnel led to the basement lockers of a
rotund tower where one might choose a proper costume.
185

186
Donald Kingsbury
This watchtower, and one other, fat and cylindrical and
copper-roofed with a witch's peeked hat, had been com-
pleted in the style of the Pskov fortifications of the fif-
teenth century, though not constructed of a thickness to
repel determined Swedes and Poles. One was a theater-in-
the-round, the other the shell of a dormitory for monks. It
was in the bowels of the theater that the costumes were
kept.
Dressed in proud police uniform, an ispravnik was chat-
ting with his stanovoi about the quality of boots when
Joseph Synmann arrived in jeans and sport jacket. Joseph
took an odd comfort in the early nineteenth century dress
that he affected on the cathedral grounds: a linen shirt that
seemed impossible to press, a soft brown coat without
collar, a silken scarf of deep lilac tones wrapped and tied
about his neck to keep him cozy, baggy pants, boots—all
copied from a portrait of Alexander Pushkin.
Such theatrics gave the Cathedral grounds a peculiarly
warped flavor. It wasn't Russian to meet Russians from a
thousand different years of Russian history all in the same
spot, it was more like a Grand Central Station of the
timelines, Moscow Sector. But this flavor was the mix
Limon wanted, bringing to life the discordantly layered
depths of history, breaking myths.
It was, after all, only a myth that God had created the
Russian enigma out of Lenin's rib on the night of the
twenty-third of October 1917. Soviet Russia was a hastily
cobbled facade over a very old being. Here, on the Cathe-
dral's acreage, when one saw a revolutionary party worker
of the 1920s eating at the inn with Archpriest Awakum of
the 1650s, both of them heroic, passionate and fanatical,
the whole structure of the communist facade dissolved into
a deeper history.
Limon was quite certain that if a man identified with his
clothes, he was stuck in a rigid viewpoint and would never
be able to shift back and forth between different cultural
f
>remises. If he couldn't bustle about in the livery of a
andmaster, if he was, God forbid, embarrassed to wear
the apron of a Russian blacksmith, how could he ever
learn to think like a Russian?
If a young American girl couldn't be Katerina Bresh-

The Moon Goddess and the Son
187
kovskaia, reading her leaflets and telling her tales surrepti-
tiously to the "liberated" serfs at a factory, living on bread
with apples and lard, and cast by the tsarist police into jail
where peasants searched her shabby, almost beggarly
clothes—then how could this American girl comprehend
the Russian passion for justice which endlessly rose up
among the people and was endlessly repressed?
If, demanded Limon, one of the SMB's military strate-
gists couldn't see himself as Pyotr Yakir, abandoned as a
child by the State, left to wander through the Gulag's
labor camps for orphans, brooding on his father's murder
by the Stalinstate, vowing to grow up to fight injustice no
matter what the odds, and doing just that, accepting per-
secution by the KGB hoodlums, struggling for human
dignity, struggling until the police, with the whole power
of the Brezhnevstate behind them, broke him first in body
and afterwards in mind—if an American boy couldn't be
Pyotr Yakir then how could he ever understand the fanati-
cal Russian need for a defense against the enemies of
mankind?
"We have to learn to represent all Russians, not just the
power elite," said Limon.
Out of sight, around the hill, a new section of wall was
being laid, rising from bedrock and already waist high.
Joseph Synmann wasn't sure where such industrious masons
came from but he had been seeing them on their scaffold-
ing for months as he commuted between Shantech and the
Cathedral grounds.
Limon insisted that the workers he employed were a
mere rabble of history students on leave from a dozen
scattered universities, aided and abetted by an old Russian
mason and a local contractor. While they were finishing
the interior of their round dorm, Limon had them housed
in an abandoned high school in town where they also held
seminars built upon the nourishment of the SMB's grow-
ing library.
The Wall was supposed to be a "bonding" project to
break down interpersonal barriers and supply a sense of
group identity to demoralized American students who had
been raised in forced isolation from each other, bound by
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188
Donald Kingsbury
and the one person in the room who counted. Deep in
Joseph's cynical heart, however, the physicist suspected
that Limon had been playing communist tsar-khan for so
long now that he intuitively understood the ploys that
made slave labor possible. How else would one get a
feudal wall built around an estate in the heart of Massa-
chusetts?
In any event it was quite amazing what these mason-
scholars were doing to the SMB's research library when
they weren't hauling stones or rehearsing Chekhov in
their theater. They were modern monks transcribing books
onto laser disk via optical reader—food for the mind of an
uncanny robot librarian.
The SMB's present limited Russian database was already
on the market over the phone network to high demand
customers in enough volume to make the project a modest
financial success. Synmann knew that Limon was trying to
expand his market by arranging to pay use-royalties for
copyrighted material—but was caught in a legal nightmare
because libraries had never paid royalties and there was no
legal machinery by which they could do so. How do you
pay an author for his part in a pamphlet you have cut-and-
pasted together out of a dozen books by a dozen authors,
then formatted electronically in seven microseconds, and
worse, transmitted over glass to a distant place, there
illegally "printing" it via a technology unknown to legislators?
Synmann came down to the SMB as often as he could
make it from his defense work and the leoport design
marathons which Ray was always arranging. In some ways
it was a fantasy escape from his real work. Every week
Limon had new surprises and the place was feeling less
like a think-tank all the time. Synmann's group had been
assigned to one of Limon's more bizarre creations—the
Marching Society of the Soviet General Staff and Water-
works.
He went around by the side, over unlandscaped dirt.
They now had a couple of rooms for his mathematics
students in the half-finished new Cathedral which was
already known as Saint Sakharov the Good though never
officially christened. The core of the building had been put
up in months but the domes and the facing were yet to

The Moon Goddess and the Son
189
come. A studio of local artists, old Polish hippies who had
revolted from their father's life in the Ohio steel mills,
were working with a leisurely, feudal speed on the build-
ing's facade.
The new Cathedral's decorative details, to be executed
in stone and ceramic, were still only drawings and wooden
models of the carvings to come. Fragments already fin-
ished were reminiscent of the Vladimir-Suzdal masters,
folk images of birds, beasts, and plants, illustrated fairy
tales, done with Slavic simplicity and force, somehow mod-
ified by a third generation American nostalgia that had
passed through a fascination with Japanese brush work and
a stint with African wood carvers and an attempt at read-
ing Mayan.
Synmann had let his taste for antique rolltop desks
decorate his small office. There was an icon of Saint Sakharov
atop the corner chapel, and, on the wall, a framed repro-
duction of Vasily Surikov's brooding Menshikov in Beriozovo,
a man deposed, sitting in melancholy contemplation of his
frozen exile, at a table with his daughters, the sad-eyed
Maria wrapped in black furs, the family a reminder of the
ancient Russian predisposition to destroy one another.
A young mathematician stood at the window watching
Limon Barnes cross the square to meet some appoint-
ment. Peter Kaissel nodded to Synmann and made a face.
Peter didn't like Limon and Limon didn't like him. "He's
wearing his Stalin uniform today. What does that mean?"
he asked sarcastically.
Last summer Synmann had rescued Kaissel from Flor-
ida State but it had been a bit like taking an eighteen year
old Mormon girl along with a busload of freaks down to
the dam for a skinny-dipping party. Peter only doffed his
regular clothes at the gate because he was too embarrassed
to be conspicuous. He conformed even when it made him
uncomfortable.
Synmann chuckled. "Maybe it's time for a purge?"
"I saw some very suspicious Armenian/Tartar/Jews loaf-
ing around the inn," groused Kaissel, sarcastically trying
to imitate Russian paranoia.
"When we learn more about games well study the
dynamics of this madhouse. In the meantime ..."

190	Donald Kingsbury
Synmann's game team at SMB consisted mostly of Peter
Kaissel and Hans Dorfman. When you stripped off the
positions and dogma and the justifications built into a
conflict until you couldn't tell which side was which, you
were left: with a stylized conflict structure ruled by map-
pings which transformed every move into a new set of
potential moves.
During play a player either increased his freedom of
action, maintained his status, or lost options. When he ran
out of moves he was dead. These multiple-player, multiple-
state, multiple-reward, content-free games were so com-
plicated that they were impossible to study except by
numerical simulation.
". . . what's been happening?" asked Synmann.
"We're making progress. When were you last here? A
week ago? Were you here for any of the Version 4 runs?"
"No. You were just starting up. I got whisked off to
Washington before you got the bugs out."
"The battle station idea is hot again?"
"Yeah. I don't know why. But I'll find out. They want to
build it without telling me what I'm up against. Desk men!
I've suddenly fallen behind on my leoport work. Ray got
his whole team siphoned off by my battle station crew and
he's screaming. So brief me and I'll comment. I have to be
back in Boston by five."
Kaissel went to the terminal and powered up. "It tums
out that cooperative behavior between game players isn't
the optimal way to maximize group-payoff."
"Oh? That's counterintuitive."
"Yeah; it's something we never thought of, but it is
pretty obvious when you see the details of the simulated
play that makes use of the cooperation axioms." He keyed-in
some games and the action flickered across the screen,
ghost players dancing in a silicon universe.
Synmann stared intently at the phosphorescent flow for
ten minutes without comment, sometimes freezing the
action for a closer look. "They're cooperating all right—but
they are converging on pretty strange solutions. Peculiar.
They aren't coming anywhere near the top group-payoff."
"They're Luddites. Once they've found a way of cooper-
ation that works, they don't want to change."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
191
"Amazing," said Synmann unhappily.
"I think my players just aren't smart enough. The situa-
tion is too complicated for them. If a player doesn't under-
stand the possibility of a better way, he won't go for it."
Swift fingers cycled the screen back through the results.
The physicist took rapid notes with a pencil, or pulled at a
strand of his long hair. "Ha. Our players aren't willing to
lose, they can't take risks, and they are fanatically unwill-
ing for any of their co-players to lose, either."
"Yeah, they're moral little buggers," said Kaissel.
"Okay. Here's your assignment for next week. Program
some gambling. I don't mean zero-sum gambling and I
don't want a house that always wins—that's the Las Vegas
game of accountants versus suckers—I mean true gam-
bling. My intuition says that a little gambling will drasti-
cally improve the group-payoff and that a lot of gambling
will kill the group."
"What do you mean by gambling?"
"Doing something you've never tried before. A muta-
tion. You should be able to program that into our players.
Don't let the probability of any single move remain
constant."
"Will a willingness to risk their arse make better capital-
ists out of them?" grinned Dorfman.
"How should I know?" Synmann always liked to be the
devil's advocate He scowled properly. "If they are willing
to take risks, might they not organize labor unions and go
out on strike for more payoff?"

CHAPTER 26
The impression [Marx] made on me was that of someone
who possessed a rare intellectual superiority, and he was
evidently a man of oustanding personality. If his heart had
matched his intellect, and if he had possessed as much love
as hate, I would have gone through fire for him.
Lieutenant Techow, remembering Karl Marx (1859)
The more outstanding a man is, the more dangerous he
is and the less deserving he is of "forgiveness."
V. I. Lenin, (1 Nov 1917)
An outstanding man who has used his talents destruc-
tively will immediately perceive a danger as great as him-
self in another outstanding man's abilities. He will distrust
able men, even destroy them, and seek to surround himself
with inferior men like Stalin and Dzerzhinsky whom he
will not perceive as dangerous at all—until it is too late.
Dr. Wright of the Holy Socialist Zazen Church of L.A.
His Californian Zen master, fraud that he was, had, at
least, taught him how to deal with surprise.
Without notice or preamble, two unobtrusive KGB
sotrudniki had picked him up at the special school and
were driving him north. Both wore Czechoslovakian suits
192

The Moon Goddess and the Son
193
and that meant that they were middle rank officers. One
drove. One sat beside Bijad ibn Jamal in the rear.
His escorts did not talk and thus he had their silence in
which to remember the story of an elderly Rumanian he
had met who had been the chauffeur of Ana Pauker after
the war, once driving Ana and the leaders of the Agrarian
Reform Party out to the country for a conference. Only
Ana and her bodyguards had returned to Bucharest in the
morning after the murders.
Bijad's natural Saudi Arabian hadhar caution was exam-
ining his situation while he still had the time. Leisurely
the Chaika rolled past the Khimki Reservoir where he
watched, briefly, the summer sculling of Komsomol youth.
The water disappeared behind trees. They rode onward
over a bumpy road under repair, far beyond the outskirts
of Moscow, much farther than he really wanted to go. If
the KGB had discovered that during his prison term as a
Marxist agitator he had actively cooperated with Saudi
counterintelligence to save his own skin, then he was a
dead man.
But Bijad ibn Jamal was sure that Saudi counterintelli-
gence had not been penetrated. Unpurified Marxism was,
after all, a Jewish conspiracy; Israel was full of Jewish KGB
agents and no member of the House of Saud would be
tempted to feed information to such a devil. Only pig-shit
eaters like Syrians would shave their beards in Russian
piss. How then had he, so cautious, so meticulous in his
planning, how could he have let precious water leak out of
his goatskin while on this deadly journey into the Soviet's
own Rub Al Khali?
Surely, the persona he had constructed to deceive his
Soviet hosts was flawless. He had not wasted those prison
years of befriending and betraying his Marxist comrades.
He had used every moment and every agent of the Front
for the Liberation of Saudi Arabia who had been thrown
into his bugged cell, and used them well to teach himself
how the KGB recruited agents, and what kind of men the
KGB trusted. No, he would not have made his mistake in
choosing a persona. The KGB was unable to see through a
man who "feared" them and whose motives appeared to
be those of wealth and power, decently hidden under a

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Donald Kingsbury
chador of socialist piety. He had a prison record and the
reputation of a man whose Marxist beliefs were unshakable.
For a moment he glanced at the grim faces of his com-
panions, and estimated how long he would live if he
bolted from their car.
Then was it a theoretical error which had betrayed him?
Certainly miscalculation was a possibility five years ago,
but today? Impossible! Zen had liberated him from the
materialistic flaws which lay like Jewish booby-traps through-
out Das Kapital, waiting for the unwary. Hundreds of days
of meditation in prison had perfected the Zen skills he had
first been taught so crudely in San Fernando Valley by
sincere California teachers. His mind was too clear to
make errors.
Prison gave a serious student time to separate the sand
from the flour, grain by grain. Marx had not been able to
purify his Marxism of its Jewish wealth-lust and for that he
could not be faulted; all Zionists were trapped in their
illusions. Wasn't it natural that the revelations of historical
progress came in painful jerks, centuries apart? California-
Zen, applied by a dedicated man, was a sun that vaporized
all materialistic bias, boiled away the remaining Jewish
money-lust that was so evident in these KGB agents cor-
rupted by a Zionist need to better themselves by wearing
Czech suits instead of Moscow suits.
Bijad still remembered his despair in prison as he watched
his Marxism boil under the focus of meditation. So much
impure socialism was based on the squalid struggle to
grasp a greater share of the wealth. How horrified he had
been by this discovery that he was himself a Zionist dupe!
He had considered suicide. It was as if his whole being
had smoked away while he sat in the lotus position on the
floor of his wretched cell.
The final pure Zen distillate of Marxism contained not
an atom of the mundane, neither gold nor silver—the
socialist heaven was gone and the Jewish houris were
gone. He had been devastated in his loneliness. But it is
under such conditions that one reaches satori.
A man is not his ego and he cannot see himself until he
has stripped away the beliefs of his ego. Through the
clarity of despair Bijad discovered justice and mercy and

The Moon Goddess and the Son
195
the nobility of the working man and compassion and the
necessity of revenge—all of which are not sculpted of
atoms and cannot be bought by oil money or KGB gold or
American engineering know-how.
Surely, Bijad told himself, his hard won Zen-Marxism
was as clean as the desert air under a star brilliant sky.
The KGB could know nothing of his intentions because he
was too centered to show any intentions at all beyond
those of his lie. No flaw in his thinking could have betrayed
him to these insensitive KGB thugs who tortured Moslem
children in Afghanistan.
Conclusion: he had made no error.
He paused, his eyes focused on a distant place.
With such clarity of spirit he should be looking right at
the answer to his puzzle, yet it eluded him. The Chaika
wound among the trees, its engine knocking as they crawled
up a grade.
If he had made no mistake, then they must be suspect-
ing him without cause! It was unjust! To have made the
perfect plan and yet still to be taken in by Russian para-
noia! . . . but his mind had not even completed the thought
before it triggered a blinding satori. . . .
Shoof! he exclaimed to himself in Arabic.
Ze! he said to himself in Zen, feeling an immense relief.
This was a camel he could lead by the nose! The KGB
had nothing on him but they suspected him just the same
and, of course, now he knew exactly how his interrogator
would behave: hadn't his KGB instructors spent the last
six months teaching him everything they knew about the
rules of paranoia—how to make a man feel guilty for sins
he did not know he had committed, how to make a recruit
afraid that the KGB knew what the KGB did not, in fact,
know?
Assume that the man you are recruiting is guilty, hint
that you have seen the secret reports of stukachi—then
carefully observe his reaction. Insinuate from trivia that
you have all the facts and are just playing with him to test
his reliability.
If you do not immediately tell me what you cannot know
I don't already know, I may find it necessary to send you

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Donald Kingsbury
to a labor camp or crush your family or take away your
wealth.
Never smile until after your recruit smells of fear.
His escorts hadn't told him where they were taking him
or why—and they had yet to smile. They had been forbid-
den to smile. He was dealing with apparatchiki who were
following instructions in a tradition passed down from
ancient masters whose fearsomeness still ruled the Russian
soul. Even when these undermen pulled into the asphalt
driveway of a modest dacha hidden by pines, they could
not smile.
Bijad ibn Jamal knew by the Persian rugs and the Dan-
ish fiirniture and the Japanese stereo that he had risen
above the class of the Czechoslovakian clad flunkies and
was now dealing with the Soviet aristocracy. He was left to
wait—to increase his suspense, to hone his fear.
There were some inlaid brass pieces on the table and on
the walls, probably from the southern states of the USSR,
but perhaps stolen from Afghanistan. A rare cut-steel urn
from the Tsarina's Tula State Arsenal sat on the mantel-
piece, a perfumer which had once dispelled the odor of
unwashed Russian nobles. He had seen nothing like it
outside of the museums of London.
Such splendor was meant to impress. But one cannot
awe a Zen Marxist Master with Leninist Imperial Materi-
alism! They were bringing him here to cut his throat or to
offer him the rewards of heaven—and thought themselves
cleverly cruel by not telling him which, as if there was a
difference between life and death.
The rest of the furnishings were antiques, none from the
same period. The cabinet wore a vaguely French nine-
teenth century look from the Classical Revival, but with
peculiarities of craftsmanship that no French cabinetmaker
had ever used to Bijad's knowledge. The Karelian birch
inlays were definitely Russian. Three simple Biedermeier
chairs spoke of a common Central European ancestry and
though they showed the wear of more than a hundred
years they also showed the care of a recent restoration.
Bijad knew, as his unknown host probably did not, that
the best of the Russian cabinetmakers had not been free
craftsmen as in the Moslem states, but had been serfs

The Moon Goddess and the Son
197
bound to a particular nobleman's property much as mod-
ern Soviet workers were bound to their factories by the
modern lords of Great Russia. Imperialism was no faint-
hearted foe. Chop off its head and, like a worm, it grew a
new head with the same memories which collected the
same antiques and used the same police methods.
The portly Russian who emerged from the study matched
his house. He had a slightly Uzbek face, indicating impure
Moslem blood by Great Russia's racist standards. He wore
a London made business suit and, Wallahi! was offering a
friendly hug—which meant that he belonged to the school
that believed in putting you at ease before they took you
by surprise.
He offered Bijad vodka from a cut glass decanter. Was
he a chauvinist who knew nothing about Arabs? Did he
hold the customs of Arabia in contempt? Perhaps he was
also an alcoholic who slept under tables at parties? Bijad
accepted the drink: it was part of his persona to "be
above" conventional Arabic values.
The Russian had spoken to him in English. He raised
his glass and replied in English, "To the victory of social-
ism!" then repeated himself in his still crude Russian. This
was all part of the charade that Soviet officials liked to go
through in the presence of their third world inferiors. He
nearly choked while he drank, not because he despised
vodka, but because he was trying not to laugh. To the
victory of California-Zen! would not have been an appro-
priate toast.
"To the future President of Saudi Arabia!" The vodka
disappeared in one gulp, much to Bijad's amazement while
the KGB colonel's face broke into a broad smile. "Yes. We
think you are right for that job. Perfect,"
"So do I," said Bijad quietly, with complete sincerity.
They moved to the office overlooking the colonel's rose
garden. "I have your report here—your plans for a subver-
sive organization. Very detailed. Very competent. I have
staff who will help you modify them. It won't be easy. If
you begin to succeed the Americans will do all in their
power to use military force to erase you." The colonel
grinned, showing golden molars.
Unimpressed, Bijad nodded agreement. This man would

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Donald Kingsbury
be a textbook strategist, slow and unoriginal. The Ameri-
cans were irrelevant. Their Arabic specialists were slow
and unoriginal. It was the sons of Abdul Aziz themselves
who would crush a poorly conceived revolution.
In less than a single second, the whole mood of the
room changed—the colonel was no longer smiling. He
pushed aside Bijad's report. He opened a drawer and took
out a file. He opened the file. He pretended to read parts
of it, but Bijad, now totally alert, knew that this very
dangerous man had already prepared everything that he
was about to say.
"You were in prison in Saudi Arabia."
So the ritual began. The robot had been wound up and
now he was whirring through Standard Operating Proce-
dure. Bijad was tempted to slip in one of the more deadly
Zen koan to derail the machinery, but he did not. "Yes, I
was in prison as a Marxist."
"During this same period of time an unfortunately large
number of our comrades from the Saudi Arabian Front
were also picked up by the Saudi police."
"Prince Turki al Faisal is a very efficient man."
The winter tundra in the Russian's eyes told Bijad that
they knew all about betrayal and had a special treatment
for men who betrayed the cause. "You were the only
survivor."
"I was not a member of the Front for the Liberation of
Saudi Arabia. I was merely a simple Marxist who believed
in a better life for my people."
"It would be interesting to know how you survived
when the others did not. Perhaps you could enlighten
me?"
Bijad was remembering a California girl. His Los Ange-
les Zen master used as his studio a room with white walls
and sparse furniture, a walk-up above a dry-cleaning empo-
rium where he taught Zen and Marxism. That evening
there had been only five students and the girl had been
wonderful at baiting them all. She had enraged Bijad into
attacking her. And only in cold afterthought had he real-
ized that she had never once asked the questions which he
had felt compelled to answer so defensively.

The Moon Goddess and the Son	199
Such was his first encounter with satori, the feeblest
flash of sanity—but an event never to be forgotten. Here,
facing a professional KGB officer, he had not the slightest
need to trip all over himself to answer questions which
had not been asked.
He created, instead, his own ritual question with a
ritual answer designed to flow like honey down the throat
of this Russian excuse for a Marxist. "I survived because I
have a passionate concern for the working man of Saudi
Arabia who has been so ruthlessly exploited by American
imperalism. My passion gave me inner strength. It is good
for me that one so competent has been assigned to guide
me. By myself I am as naive as the camel cows of the
Murrah. Your less outstanding predecessors, while recruit-
ing the men of the ill-fated Front, unfortunately trusted
the movement to those who were ruled by fear and greed.
Prince Turki breaks such women apart in his hands like
dried camel dung. He has no fear. He is a man of God.
His men have no fear and are also men of God. Does the
KGB send easily recruited cowards against the House of
Saud and expect them to live?" Jamal's voice was poisoned
with sarcasm. "Were these cowards not destroyed? For
this you expect Saudi respect? Turki's men could not
break me, and so learned to respect me. That is why I
survived and the others did not."
How easy it was for a Zen master to deceive a man who,
out of caution, insists on seeing lies everywhere—just to
be safe—and therefore cannot see the truth. A shadow
moves invisibly at night.
The ritual was almost over. The KGB wanted a man
who was not afraid of the Saudis but not one so strong that
they could not manipulate him. Bijad used Zen control to
bring sweat to his hands, and Zen control to let the fingers
tremble. He stared at this Russian, who would never
reveal his true name, and pleaded with a slave's eyes.
"Sir, it was a terrible experience. I could not have sur-
vived without knowing that beyond my walls there was a
great socialist country willing to help. I need your help.
My single terrible fear is that I might fail you. They
tortured me." Tears rolled down his cheeks.
The colonel reached out a hand to comfort him.

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Donald Kingsbury
Allah! thought Bijad, I've overdone it!
But he was amused. The old Front for the Liberation of
Saudi Arabia had been destroyed. The sons of Abdul Aziz
were too efficient. And now the KGB was desperate for
replacement players for their nineteenth century imperial-
ist game of colonization. They had their back to the wind
while stalking a coffee bean. They prodded the bean for
weapons while the wind threw knives.
Those who fear betrayal are doomed to be betrayed—
but, in this case, not until the victory feast! In the mean-
time, Bijad ibn Jamal and the KGB would work together
on the elimination of the House of Saud and the humilia-
tion of the Americans.

CHAPTER 27
He met us at the platform on the train station. It was
getting toward evening, and the sun, big and red, was
already dipping under the horizon. "That sun," said Andrei
Dmitriyevich, "reminds me of the explosion of the hydro-
gen bomb. . . ."
Now a red setting sun always fills me with a feeling of
alarm: I see it indifferently hanging above our lifeless
planet. The longer the people holding the fate of mankind
in their hands avoid solving the problems identified by
Sakharov, the more unswervingly will we slide down into
the abyss into which he has already peered.
Vladimir Voinovich (from exile in Germany)
Snow was falling in blobs, settling like little caps on the
hydra-headed cupolas of the Cathedral. It was the season
of the New Year. A squat Christmas tree in the Pioneer's
Palace held gaudy paper and painted wooden dolls, dried
fruit on strings, and little cellophane packages of candy.
For days there had been a party atmosphere. This evening
was the big celebration, but minor eruptions of party had
been happening since morning.
After grumbling about the waste of an hour decorating a
hall, Peter Kaissel had retreated back to the math offices
and was re-programming Synmann's basic game universe
while Hans Dorfman, still with artificial snow in his hair,
was engrossed in the finicky problem of adding subrou-
tines to the algorithm of their best cooperative player.
201

202	Donald Kingsbury
"Limon's been stealing all the candy canes off the tree,"
complained Kaissel.
At his desk, Joseph Synmann wrestled with the stability
problems posed by their preliminary forays into a new
computer simulation, BalanceOfTerror, which had first
been suggested—and initially programmed—by a curious
twenty-one year old Marshal of the Society of the Soviet
General Staff and Waterworks. The simulation used famil-
iar players whose algorithmic attributes were now so well
known that they could not be blamed for the extreme
instability of the game. It was the game itself which was
unstable.
The Cathedral kitchen had been busy all morning. A
matron in kerchief appeared at Synmann's door and offered
stuffed mushrooms to the three mathematicians. Later a
troika of women arrived in long, flowing bright-colored
sarafans embroidered with golden and silver and red
threads, billowing sleeves restrained at the wrists by brace-
lets. They carried trays heaped with Russian bliny and
insisted on interrupting all work. After batting their eyes
and kissing the tops of embarrassed heads, they fed the
two young men their pancakes, drowned in egg and butter
sauce and capped with smoked filet of sturgeon.
The bravest of the braided girls hesitated in front of
Joseph Synmann for he was the fiercest looking of the
three mathematicians. After cautious preliminary flirting
she sat on his lap to pull his long hair and tweak his nose
while he ate. Synmann, in turn, poured these welcome
invaders small glasses of a Georgian brandy which he had
spotted on the shelf of an uptown Manhattan liquor store.
Joseph glowed, remembering the foolery of his hippy-
farm days. The Cathedral village was always a pleasant
change from designing battle stations whose major use might
be to shred Soviet cosmonauts into freeze-dryable pieces
of meat. Games offered a different kind of hope than
weaponry.
After due thought and scribbling, still nibbling on pan-
cake and smoked sturgeon, Synmann called up the code of
the Terror universe and, god-like, changed a few parame-
ters and added several necessary constraints to its basic
laws. It wasn't easy to program game rules which:

The Moon Goddess and the Son
203
(1)		gave alliances of players the collective power to
reduce (permanently) the payoff of all other players to
zero, without:
(2)		creating a game in which all the players eventually
destroyed themselves.
Initially everything went well for the first alliance, but
inevitably a second deadly alliance formed, and even a
third. (The United States was the first member of the
Nuclear Club. Then there were two. Then there were
three, etc.) The stability of such games degenerated in a
complicated way.
"When will you get the new universe running?" asked
Synmann.
"Not today—unless I skip the party," said Kaissel.
"It's okay. No hurry." Synmann compiled his code and
ran a test game in universe-four, without spy and betrayer
algorithms. It ran too fast for him to follow—but the payoff
graphs on the screen kept his attention. Even they jumped
around almost too swiftly for his eyes. "Kapowiel" exclaimed
the physicist.
"Another atomic war?" asked Dorfman without looking
up.
"Yeah. They blew themselves to smithereens. But I got
them to go past the thousand move mark before they did
themselves in."
"A thousand moves to maneuver yourself into a corner
is shit for a game that's supposed to stabilize," commented
Kaissel.
"I'm beginning to suspect that we have an intractable
stability problem on our hands," said Synmann morosely.
Dorfman was so compulsively good natured that he
would have maintained his good cheer even in the event
of a real war. "Keep smiling. You weren't the one who
invented the strategy of nuclear deterrence."
Kaissel was now pointing at one of Synmann's symbols.
"You know, the theta coefficient is causing you a lot of
trouble. If you could fatten it to the point where subrou-
tine XnoPan returned negative roots, your region of stabil-
ity would be infinite."
"Kaissel! Always keep track of what your symbols mean.
Sure I could kill the problem by causing theta to be

204
Donald Kingsbury
sufficiently large. I could end the nuclear threat to human-
ity tomorrow, too. All I have to do is increase the price of
an H-bomb to a cool trillion dollars a throw. Do you know
how to do that?"
Kaissel went back to his seat. "I keep forgetting I'm a
mathematician!"
"How the hell do mathematicians survive?!" grumbled
Synmann.
"We have physicists to remind us when to wear our
rubbers."
"A lot of good that would do," retorted Synmann. "You'd
just start to wander out in the snow with condoms on your
feet."
"Hey, I'm sorry," said Kaissel, smiling.
"Can you stabilize BalanceOfTerror?" asked Dorfman.
"I doubt it. I suspect that the problem isn't model
specific. I'm afraid our dance with the Soviets has built-in
seeking-wobble with randomly alternating p-n feedback. A
kind of Brownian motion-powered Parkinson's disease. Nei-
ther we nor the Soviets will even be able to predict, more
than five minutes in advance, when our defense will fail,
only the probability of failure. MAD seems to have the
nature of a radium atom—stable right up to that unpre-
dictable moment of violent disintegration."
Dorfman couldn't resist a teasing jibe. "We die tomorrow?"
"Ask Murphy."
"All Murphy ever says is that anything that can go
wrong, will go wrong."
"Yeah. I'm going down to the Inn for a cup of coffee."
At the Inn, Joseph Synmann sat by himself in a corner,
sipping, staring out over an infinite valley with eyes that
turned through some crooked dimension, wondering if
there was a modification to BalanceOfT error that might
make its outcome less lethal. The season's friendly people
passed around him like doves around a mountain.
Soon he wasn't even sipping. The coffee was cold and
his hand didn't move. His consciousness had gone to that
nether region where only a scholar who has long studied
the arcane incantations of applied math can ever hope to
conjure his mind. It fascinated Synmann to explore this
sunless universe of inner vision where all men are blind

The Moon Goddess and the Son
205
and only the most gifted can grope their way around the
bones of older expeditions.
There was purpose in his probing, bodiless search.
Nuclear deterrence as a strategic policy had always dis-
pleased Synmann—it was a subtle marijuana high—but he
was just getting used to viewing this illusion-of-well-being
from inside a symbol-wizard's space where feel has no
hands and vision no lens.
His numerical model of the strategy of deterrence by
nuclear threat showed it to be a fatally flawed strategy, but
that might be an artifact of the model. Wrong assumptions
give erroneous conclusions. So—strip down the model
dispassionately—check it, check it, check it. In his sym-
bolic world he sought out flaws in his shadow creation the
way he always did—by measuring fine art against the real
world.
California and New York both had nuclear technology
but were not involved in an arms race. That implied the
possibility of a safe nuclear world. Well, his program could
handle that nicely but to build into a model the same level
of communication and trust as existed between California
and New York could not be justified if the model was
designed to provide insight into the American/Soviet
impasse. Soviet borders equipped with robot machine guns
to kill trespassers were nowhere close to trust.
Willingness to trust is a function of the stakes. A man
can afford to trust a stranger if the worst that might hap-
pen is that his feelings will get hurt. But if betrayal means
the death of civilization, then the level of caution is high.
Trust must be earned with great integrity if it is to influ-
ence deals. The stakes in BalanceOfTerror were very high.
It was quite natural for the model to be insensitive to
minor increases in trust.
A fascinating—and counterintuitive—facet of Synmann's
game was that if both sides were committed to nuclear
deterrence, then nuclear war always erupted even under
the extreme assumption that both sides were desperate for
peace and that neither side was planning to attack the
other. Nitroglycerin will certainly explode if someone
detonates it—but nitroglycerin will also explode "by acci-
dent" while just sitting on the shelf.

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Donald Kingsbury
What else?
In Synmann's model the central driving force that led to
a runaway arms race and eventual collapse into war was
the search for "parity." To a mathematically unsophisti-
cated mind "parity" looks like a good idea. What is more
reasonable than both sides being equally armed and equally
strong? But math is no respecter of common sense.
Bernard Brodie, the creator of the strategy of nuclear
deterrence, thought that there was a balance point, like
balancing salt against brass in a high school chemistry
class, but in the real world there is no unique balance
point—a gram against a gram is no different than a kiloton
against a kiloton. If you are terrified, the costs don't matter—
you keep seeking the security you never feel and slowly
climb up through all the balance points from zero to the
balance point where the scales crack into rubble. In
Synmann's model the numbers went the same way as they
had been going in the real world.
Nuclear deterrence generates fear—as it is supposed to.
Fear requires one to exaggerate the strength of a potential
enemy. A Russian may or may not perceive Americans as a
military threat but his fear demands that he plan as if they
were. An American may or may not take Leninist bombast
seriously, but in a nuclear world he damn well better
assume that when the Russians say they intend to conquer
the world, they mean it. Neither nation is powerful enough
to achieve military superiority over the other—so they
seek "parity."
But what is "parity"? The Russian feels that, because his
electronic guidance is inferior, he needs to aim three
times as much nuclear kilotonnage at the US as the US has
aimed at him so that in the event of hostilities there will
be a "parity" of strategic hits. The American freaks out and
increases arms production in the name of throw-weight
"parity." Since "parity" cannot be defined, Russians and
Americans persist in perceiving their weapon-making as
"catching up." Thus a very rough parity is maintained—
but at growing levels of deadliness.
It was a classical case of runaway feedback. Cost can be
the only ceiling on such an arms build-up. But the cost-
per-kill by H-bomb is so low that cost itself is incapable of

The Moon Goddess and the Son
207
controlling parity-inflation. Synmann scanned through every
axiom of his game searching for a place where he could
introduce some kind of damping feedback that would give
an advantage to the side which had fewer H-bombs. He
could not find it.
How could it be that bad? His awareness was sending
him those first alarms of lethal wrongness—a rat sniffing
the faintest sweet aroma of spring steel from the cheese;
the guest in the haunted house testing the front door from
the inside to find it locked.
Escape. There had to be an escape.
In the awesome sunless elsewhen of his mathematics,
Synmann felt through the inner dynamics of reasoned
terror with neuronal tentacles. Here an H-bomb was only
a black flash and a cold searing that rumbled soundlessly
through algebras where death/ life was not a question. He
slithered off the silvery convolutions of abstract dimen-
sions, now tasting the hidden rapacity of numerical can-
cers, now following the silent musical hymn of a differential
equation, straining with slug-white eyeballs to find a way
around the nuclear etiology. He saw, in his numerical
mirror, seven generals of Moscow and Washington staring
in enraptured captivity at the gorgon of peace-by-terror.
Gaze upon nuclear deterrence directly and it seems to
be a snake's nest of rocketfang ready to to swarm after an
enemy; it is a technological marvel powered by the fear of
death; it is that mythical devil-whore with the heart of
gold who has kept us from fighting with our wife for the
last half-century at the price of our soul. On the surface
the shape of peace through nuclear deterrence is as rock
solid as the tranquil hills of San Francisco under the
March sun of 1906.
But in Synmann's mirror of equations, stripped and
x-rayed to its mathematical bones, nuclear deterrence was
only a strategy for avoiding earthquakes by building houses
vulnerable to them. Insanity. The warning was clear: gaze
upon Medusa's face and become shattered stone.
The message went in circles.
Fear creates parity-inflation. Parity-inflation leads to holo-
caust. Conclusion: eliminate the fear. But if there is no
fear there is no strategy of nuclear deterrence. The con-

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Donald Kingsbury
cept appeared to be hopelessly flawed. It exchanged safety
today for suicide tomorrow. The serpent in the Garden of
Eden was speaking his cunning wisdom. Stay alive by
eating your children.
. . . and one of the doves did not fly around the granite
mountain but settled on Synmann's head, as gently as a
woman's hand. "Do you want more coffee? Your coffee is
cold."
. . . and Synmann's eyes looked out from his sunless
world. "How about a crash passage to Alpha Centaurus
instead?"
"Is that a new kind of bagel?"
"What's a nice New Yorker like you doing here in
Kiev?"
"You look like you need some loving."
"I'm just thinking."
"A penny for your thoughts," she asked.
Synmann smiled and, on impulse, made up a story for
this pleasant woman. "Back on Earth, in the real world of
1945 when madness was not yet fatal, a university edu-
cated politician in a business suit, advising the govern-
ment on post-war defense, took from his embossed purse a
newly minted penny that flashed in the sun when he
threw it into a great plaza's wishing well. He asked from
the water nymphs only that they grant mankind peace. No
more war. A peace based on eternal fear. He was a MAD
man."
"I should have offered you a dime!" She kissed him
awkwardly because he was so much older than she was.
"Merry Christmas and Happy Lenin!"
Synmann sighed. Time to shower and change. The hour
of the party was upon the village and the gifts had yet to
be wrapped. He wandered back to the Cathedral of Saint
Sakharov, no longer wondering if there would be a Third
World War, but curious about how it would start.
Gorbachev wouldn't deliberately start it. He was a man
of peace who was trying to convince the world's people to
cut back to only one ton of nitroglycerin in their base-
ment from two tons, and for years his propagandists had
been warning the world of how dangerous it was to mix
nitroglycerin with clay. Nor would the Americans deliber-

The Moon Goddess and the Son
209
ately start it. To fight a major war they'd have to give up
hot dogs.
But could you trust Murphy? It was Murphy who snuffed
out the Challenger. It was Murphy who melted the
Chernobyl reactors. It was Murphy who blew himself up
while priming a Belfast bomb. There are only two defenses
against Murphy.
You can concentrate on building machines which have
non-lethal failure modes—such as an ICBM killer that
burns up harmlessly in the atmosphere if launched by
accident against a radar spook.
Or you can build a perfect machine.
And who thinks that the best Soviet and American engi-
neers can build Murphy-proof ICBMs that will never be
launched from their silos by accident?
Even as I walk across the snow, thought Synmann, the
agents of Murphy are out there, closing in.

CHAPTER 28
An astonished historian might well ask why the extended
period of wars between the Second World War and the
Great Accidental War was popularly known as the Nuclear
Peace. During the Nuclear Peace more people died in war
than during all of mankind's previous wars. The major
ideologies of the twentieth century made no grand attempt
to end war. They so feared each other and were so confi-
dent of their overwhelming might that they never even
noticed the military geniuses being bred in the violent
shadows of their conflict. It was a fatal mistake. No ideol-
ogy can survive an error of that magnitude.
Professor J. H. Nevarako,
Harvard University, New Cambridge, Luna, 2049
The child saw his first Russian airplane when he was out
tending the goats. He watched the winged shape with a
naive pleasure because it was flying so low. Never had
such a machine . . .
The blast lifted him off his feet.
When he regained consciousness his family's house was
half gone. The goats were scattered. He ran to the sham-
bles in a panic, blood pouring from his nose—to see: a
quiet mother torn out of her clothes in the yard among a
wild bundle of bloody, but once clean, bedding. He stared
in terrified horror at this first gift of the Red Angel who
had arrived so suddenly to free him from his feudal life.
210

The Moon Goddess and the Son
211
It is a Russian folk saying that to free a man one must
first break the mother's umbilical cord. The boy Yahya
wailed, gasping, thrown from the medieval century of
Peter the Great into the century of the rule of the Soviet
working class. Dazed, he tried to find his sisters under the
ruins of the flat roof. He found a head. He found three
bodies. His four year old sister, who had been playing
away from the house, was still alive but grievously wounded
by fragments of house. He tended her as best he could,
her fingers tight on his sleeve with shock. She would not
let go. But theri, no Soviet apparatchik had ever promised
that the road to socialism was easy.
At the twilight setting of the sun, a frantic father found
his shattered home. He comforted his son as best he could
with tears in his eyes. He would not say it was Allah's will
but he talked about the peace of paradise. He buried his
family hastily under the rubble of their home and told his
son they would be back but now they had to flee because
the Russian tanks were pouring up the valley.
They carried his sister two days without medical atten-
tion before she died high on a mountain looking out over
the awesome hills and the smoke haze of the pillaging
Soviet troops. The medical facilities of a feudal state are
inadequate.
"In Allah's good time we will kill them all," muttered
his father.
Yahya was still bewildered by the catastrophic appear-
ance of these people about whom he had never heard.
"Where do they come from?"
"The Kremlin," said his father who smiled affectionately
when he saw that the word meant nothing to this young
man. He drew a picture in the dirt and pointed north-
west. He pissed on the picture and Yahya dutifully pissed
on it, too. That scribble in the dirt, half washed away by
urine, became the core of all that he later learned about
Russians. He never made a vow to destroy the Kremlin—
but Allah gave him that dream often enough, vivid and
dark and ominous.
Later, son and father returned to the valley. The man
was mullah and would be in charge of rebuilding the
village. But mainly this bereaved husband was drawn home

212	Donald Kingsbury
because he could not bear the thought of his family lying
in the rubble without a proper burial. Few others came
back. "More will come when they grow less afraid," said
Yahya's father but it was a Russian patrol which swept
through the village and took what men they could find and
shot Aem. They were merciful and did not kill the wailing
women. The boy survived by hiding. He had no reason to
believe that these men would spare a child who had pissed
on the Kremlin towers.
With the women's help he buried his father. He spent
another morning burying Abdul Dar, the village carpenter
he adored because the man had once built Yahya his own
little table. Firmly he remembered to ask for Allah's jus-
tice to be done in Allah's own way.
If you want a young man to ride out of feudalism and
embrace you as his savior, do not kill his mother and
father, nor tell him later with a sly smile how innocent you
are, that the CIA did it. There are consequences for every
action—some immediate, some delayed. A generation later
when you think you have finally pacified an ungrateful
nation, such a man as Yahya Karargah has the power to
step out of some fourth dimension and slit your throat. He
has been motivated.
For a while Yahya lived with relatives but they were
killed also. He was adopted by a motley band of mujahideen
who spent their time hiding from the helicopters, some-
times attacking two mud-walled forts maintained by the
Afghan army and, on occasion, blowing up a supply truck.
They got mines by stealing Russian mines that had been
deployed around the mud forts. Their munitions expert
was a deserter from the Afghan army who had been trained
in Russia. Yahya became his apprentice.
They lost two men digging up mines and Yahya rashly
took on that dangerous task himself. He became so good at
it that he was the band's main source of ammunition. He
learned about all the wonderful things one could do with
an anti-personnel mine, from making bullets for Lee-Enfields
to assembling a package powerful enough to blow up a
truck. That was before they were equipped with Chinese
made AK-47s.
One day he salvaged a radio from a Russian truck. It

The Moon Goddess and the Son
213
didn't work but the electronic innards of it entranced him
and he took it apart and put it back together endlessly.
There was little military activity then. It was winter and
they were starving in the mountains. In desperation the
least sick of the band came out of the mountains and
ambushed a truck trying to reach one of the forts. They
got flour and a second identical radio that didn't work
which they brought back for Yahya because they loved
him.
He made one good radio out of the two. By so doing he
impressed himself. He impressed the other mujahideen.
They came one by one to listen to his radio and smile and
nod their approval. It was a single solitary victory, nothing
like it ever happened again, but the event so sustained
Yahya's sense of power that years later when he was given
the chance to go to university in Lyon, he chose to study
electronics without knowing anything at all about what it
meant.
Upon such small events, the history of mankind hinges.
How could the comfortable architects of nuclear deter-
rence have known that the success of one illiterate child in
piecing together two battle scarred radios would lead, in
due time, to the structural failure and collapse of their
whole grand edifice of locking and interlocking safety
features?
In the annual summer offensive of the Soviet army
versus the villages of Afghanistan, Yahya's band was
destroyed in a single hour's engagement among the mul-
berries. He was one of the four survivors, not because he
was clever or brave, but because he was young. The band
was fond of him. He was their Allah-blessed sapper and
they never risked him when there were no mines to
defuse.
The three other survivors walked him to Pakistan, up
steep red hillsides that looked out over rust and green
mountainscape and then down over the rocks that jarred
and dusted his feet. They had tea and sugar, no other
rations, except the odd stolen apple or tiny apricot. Once,
in a silent valley, they walked through ominously deserted
fields along an irrigation channel, its water bubbling in the

214
Donald Kingsbury
heat. They could hear the hum of a Russian jet, higher
than the eye could see.
In Pakistan he was too young for the commando training
camps but he would not be put with the women. The men
laughed and kept him as a mascot. The camp commander,
a soldier loyal to the old king, was not pleased, but relented
gruffly after questioning Yahya and finding that he knew
more than a child should about mines. He put the boy to
serving food. Mujahideen, twice his age, were not ashamed
to have him teach them what he knew.
One of the trainers was a Frenchman. He was the first
European Yahya had ever seen, strange of face, and strange
in the way he spoke the language.
"You speak like a goat," Yahya said impishly one day
when he had lost his awe of this man.
"Ah oui, my accent. I learn your language late. I cannot
get the francais off my tongue."
Yahya demanded that he make more goat noises and
when Claude obliged, the boy whooped and tried to imi-
tate him. Thus began a friendship. Claude, at last, had
someone to talk to who would listen to the golden language.
For two years Claude and the mujahideen kept their
boy out of the fighting. But in the summer of 1985 he
disappeared across the frontier to return to his trade of
"killing Russians." When the casualty reports of that vicious
battle came in Claude thought he had lost Yahya forever,
but no, I'enfant came straggling back across the border in
August, smiling, with a T72 tank and crew to his credit,
real Russians, he grinned, not Afghan mercenaries dra-
gooned to fight for the Soviets. He had pissed on the
Kremlin and he was proud. Claude sent him away to Lyon
to live with Claude's sister for his own good.
He loved Europe. There was so much to see! There
were so many machines! He taught himself fluent French
by memorization—and one of the stories he memorized
was the tale of Lenin's hero, Stephan Khalturin, who had
smuggled dynamite into his small room in the cellar of the
Tsar's Winter Palace, underneath the main guard room,
which was underneath the Tsar's dining room. Yahya never
tired of rattling off, in French, how Khalturin had blown
up dix soldats russes and almost assassine le Tsar.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
215
At a kiosk in Lyon he found a picture postcard of the
Kremlin and kept it for years in his Koran, curious about
whether it had a cellar. He read French military trade
magazines, and kept a sketchbook of weapons. He also
wondered where Frenchmen kept their goats—Claude's
sister said in Paris, but he wasn't always sure he could
believe her.
If it hadn't been for the Russian invasion of Afghanistan
in 1979 Yahya Karargah would have lived out his life as a
farmer raising wheat and goats on terraced mountainsides.
He would have known the harshness of an ancient life-
style, perhaps been unhappy, perhaps died at a young
age. He would have helped to marry off his sisters. He
would have learned to be a mullah as crafty as his father.
But progress, in the form of socialism dedicated to saving
him from Koranic feudalism, intervened to educate his
young mind in the ways of the twentieth century. Method-
ically, year after year, during the eighties it taught him the
primary skill of great socialists like Stalin—how to be an
efficient murderer of Russians.
He spent his winters in school and his summer vacations
harrassing military convoys. In Lyon the French school
masters were polite but firm with their students. In Afghan-
istan the Russians killed the students who flunked their
course. The survivors became very, very good. Thus was
born one of the true geniuses of modern electronic warfare.
By the time he was twenty Yahya Karargah made better
mines than anything that was coming out of the American
or Soviet arsenals. When he was twenty-two he engi-
neered an attack on a Soviet military convoy that took out
80 vehicles in a multiple synchronized blast using micro-
processor mines that talked to sensors and pooled strategic
decisions with one another.
He often thought about heavier weapons. It annoyed
him to be dependent on outside suppliers who had their
own motives for supporting the mujahideen. But at the
time it never occurred to him that light weapons were the
wave of the future. It never occurred to him that by the
end of the century Russian heavy weapons would be obso-
lete, even in Afghanistan.

CHAPTER 29
What are the critical factors determining the size of the
leoport's power plant? The main function of the power
plant is to counteract the tendency of the leoport to sink
back to Earth in a slow downward spiral as it captures
saucers and loses momentum to them. All other uses are
trivial by comparison. Momentum is always conserved,
and when a leoport captures a low momentum saucer and
accelerates it, lending it momentum, the leoport itself has
to lose momentum. To prevent eventual disaster, the lost
momentum must be restored.
Momentum is mass times velocity.
Energy is half of the mass times velocity squared.
Momentum may be restored to the leoport in either of
two ways:
(1)		We can eject little mass at a very high velocity. This
is our alternative if mass is expensive and energy is cheap.
Ion beam thrustors mounted on the leoport would be an
example of such a strategy. But we must be aware that for
every halving of the reaction mass used, the energy price
quadruples. Such huge energy needs imply heavy in-place
energy generators. And every ton of the power plant has
to be carried into orbit from Earth. What one gains by
using high specific impulse thrustors that require little
reaction mass, one loses in massive power plant.
(2)		We can restore leoport momentum by ejecting a lot
of mass at a low velocity. This is our alternative if mass is
216

The Moon Goddess and the Son
217
cheap and energy is expensive. Is there such a thing as
cheap mass in space? We can eject the emptied saucers
(free mass) at a modest velocity. That consumes more
electricity than the fully loaded saucers generate when
they arrive, but since the empty saucers are still massive,
the energy-price of using their mass to restore leoport
altitude is much smaller than that of using ion beams. It is
cheaper still if the saucers are returned to Earth carrying
finished products or wastes.
There are other combinations of mass and energy use. If
the leoport imports material from the moon we both gen-
erate electricity and cause the leoport to rise in orbit. This
can be used to balance mass imports from Earth which
also generate electricity. If the net flow of mass is in the
moon-to-Earth direction, we can run a leoport space trans-
portation system which will generate surplus electricity as
a by-product.
Ray Armsiel, Report 1218791at
Byron had his baby boy out on a field trip. Little Char-
lie didn't like it. He was very upset that the ground wasn't
flat like a proper hardwood floor. He sat down on the
crunchy autumn leaves and went on strike. Byron watched
him, damned if he was going to be sympathetic. Junie
spoiled the little bastard to death and it was time he
shaped up.
Of course, Byron wasn't going to be as tough on Charlie
as his father had been on him. That was too much. He had
grown up with nails for a father! Byron waited patiently,
smiling. The baby looked up coyly, then picked a stick and
began to play with it, poking the earth with rapid little
jabs. And Byron waited exactly one minute longer than his
father would have waited before walking away, deeper
into the New Hampshire woods.
Charlie watched him go in alarm. He dropped the stick.
Very carefully he stood up. Watch that floor with the
brittle rug and the bumps! It was a very strange place,
wind howling, tall dark trees, things falling from the ceil-
ing, smells, and a father who was disappearing into the
gloom. He ran, he fell, he got up and ran and ran and

218
Donald Kingsbury
stumbled over a rock and fell and cried his heart out,
alone and lost. He was fifteen months old.
The father returned and stood over him, patiently, but
unmoved. God, Junie's spoiled him rotten. A man didn't
expect to be picked up every time he tripped. It was a
McDougall family saying that a soldier only cries when his
best buddy is killed, and then when the battle is over.
Byron had heard that bit of old sergeant's drivel from his
grandfather as well as from his father. He wasn't having
anything to do with such nonsense.
Babies were allowed to cry when they were really hurt
or hungry—but you had to watch them. They tried to fool
you. They pretended to be hurt when they were merely
tired. He remembered all the tricks he had used on his
father. How could the rascal be hurt by just falling down
on a pile of soft leaves!
Byron turned the boy over with his foot. "Come on.
Let's go. Enough yammering." He said it gently, if se-
verely, and Charlie saw the smile. He was ready to howl
some more but his father was moving away. Struggling, he
followed for another ten steps and his father waited for
him and let him hold on to a finger to help him. They
went up funny stairs without any railings or ledges to rest
on, vast in expanse, big-big with fallen logs and moss and
ferns until Charlie was ready to whimper but something
kept him silent. Then he saw the most marvelous sight,
and stopped to make excited noises.
"That's a cave in the rocks. You want to go in? You'll
have to go in alone. It's too small for me."
Byron sat down and let the boy explore. It was amazing
what intrigued a little kid. He came out with some rocks
and threw them down with great force, his tiredness for-
gotten. He went back inside and found a big black beetle
that had lived under the rock. It half-frightened, half-
fascinated him the way it scrambled across the leaves and
climbed up the rock and fell off.
"Bug," said Byron, touching it with a stick.
"Brgle," said Charlie touching it with a stick.
Only when Byron rose to go home did the boy remem-
ber how hard it had been to get there and began to wail in
protest.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
219
"Horsey," said Byron, putting on a horse-face and
neighing.
Charlie smiled. He raised his little arms.
The midget Mongol Warrior clung to the hair of his
pony-father with fierce fingers, yelling his high pitched
war cry and skewering Russian Knights as his horse gal-
loped back down through the woods. It was Da-Da's sec-
ond night home and he wasn't to be feared anymore, only
watched and cajoled.
Byron could see from the meadow, long before they
reached the house, that Ray's car was in the driveway. His
offer to fly them up had been accepted—and then later
refused by Ray after he had consulted Linda who was
afraid of flying. She had scared her family half to death by
disappearing for a week while she drove home from L.A.
One of the landbound!
The boy was asleep—and slung over Byron's shoulder
like a sack of onions—when he strode through the front
door. "You mudfaces made it. Great!"
"Oh, he's exhausted!" said Junie, rushing over. She took
the baby tenderly. "My poor little baby! You've kept him
all of three hours!" She rushed Charlie off to the Throne
Room with its shelf of animals and two-meter tall stuffed
giraffe. Immediately her head reappeared at the door.
"Byron! He's bleeding!"
Byron grinned. "Yeah. We were up in this tree trying to
corner a porcupine and I dropped him on his head. Sorry
about that." He winked at Ray.
Linda vanished into the Throne Room, attracted to the
baby like a bee to wildflowers, while Byron watched her
graceful flight in the way a frog might be mesmerized by a
mysteriously buzzing "fly" who was, perhaps, too danger-
ous to swallow. It was hard to imagine that old Brontz had
produced that wench.
"Your directions were very good," said Ray. "Except it's
a right turn after the Amoco station."
Byron thought for a moment. "Yeah, but you're left-
handed. You're bi-symmetrically inverted to the normal.
Your right is my left. Can't you remember that? And my
left is your right. It's a shame what they do to left-handed

220
Donald Kingsbury
people in school! Guys like you get so confused. Teachers
should just leave leftis alone."
"If you have a bottle of wine, I have a left-handed
corkscrew."
"How about a beer? You have to ask Junie for the wine.
While they're spoiling my baby why don't you come and
look over Junie's computer? I can't get used to it. I love
toys." But Byron headed into the kitchen, not the com-
puter room.
"If you need some help with the dinner, I'm very handy,"
said Ray.
"If you go near the kitchen, I'll kill you. I have a spoiled
child on my hands; I don't need a spoiled wife. " He pulled
two beers from the fridge, popped the tops, handed Ray a
crystal glass and they clinked cans at Byron's raised com-
mand. "Here's to the leoport."
"It's not going fast these days. Synmann pulled his
whole team off on an emergency."
"The battle stations?"
"Jesus H. Christ! What is this?" Ray was pouring his
beer and it was red.
"That's raspberry-grape beer. Don't look so stunned.
I've seen you drink Coke. If you can drink Coke you can
drink this. I phoned up Junie from Houston and asked her
to lay in ten cases of beer." He shrugged and laughed.
"It's got alcohol in it. Hobos use it to heat their beans."
In the magnificent office, Ray relaxed and stretched out
on Byron's puffy swivel chair. He made loud settling groans.
"Rough trip?"
"It's been a hectic life since Linda arrived on my door-
step. Changing the history of mankind and pleasing a
woman at the same time is a tall order. I've been busy.
Mostly moving boxes."
Byron was smiling. "You're being organized."
"You can bet your ass on that!"
"The old Brontz talent for hustling men is hereditary,
eh?"
"You don't sound like you have an ounce of pity in you."
"You have rosy cheeks."
"It's called burn-out fever."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
221
"It's good that Synmann is off the job for a while. You'll
get a vacation."
"Yeah I will; my workload has doubled." Ray was staring
quizzically at a model of a solar power system that Byron
had suspended from his ceiling. "What's that?"
"I've been talking to Dubrovsky here at Silicon Factory
in Concord and gave him my wires-embedded-in-glass
idea. He didn't believe it so I flew him out to the Glass-
works and took him into the plant and a few of my friends
showed him how to draw, in glass, micro-wire with diame-
ters of less than a hundred angstrom units." Byron pro-
duced a cross-section of solar powerpanel out of a box.
"Dubrovsky thought about it and said he couldn't use the
stuff, but a month later he got a brainstorm."
"It's light as a feather," said Ray, hefting the panel.
"It wouldn't stand up in the wind on Earth but its fine
for space. The silver-black stuff is the micro-rectenna ar-
ray, the rest mirrors to concentrate the light. The rectennae
can handle a lot more power than the thousand-plus watts
per square meter that the sun puts out—and the mirrors
are cheaper than antennae. But don't get excited yet. The
rectennae ribbons Dubrovsky makes are shit. A lot of
production problems. He uses chip technology to make
them, but they are far cheaper than chips because you
don't need the same kind of reliability."
Ray was still staring at the prototype. "The boy who
assembled this frame knew his materials tech."
"He's a NASA boy," said Byron proudly.
"It gives me dreams."
"I've been having some wild dreams myself."
"I'm listening."
"Wait till after dinner and after we've finished the seri-
ous business. Then we can break out another case of
raspberry-grape beer and treat ourselves to one of your
famous bull sessions."
"You're threatening me with more of this swill?"
"Ray, you've got to help me drink it. Junie stashed ten
cases of it in our cellar."
They spent the next hour running through Byron's de-
signs. His basic power system was set up on the highly
flexible Tinker Toy CAD program that worked like a graph-

222
Donald Kingsbury
ics spreadsheet—you could draw pictures and then assign
equations to the pieces of the picture, and see what hap-
pened as you varied the parameters and the initial condi-
tions. They spent their hour harassing various mass-sensitive
components and came up with a four percent mass saving
before they were called to dinner.
Ray found the salt and pepper shakers. Byron did his
part by carrying in the hot food from the kitchen and
helping Linda into her chair.
"Where's my little brat? Isn't he going to eat with us?"
"He's asleep and a siren couldn't wake him up," said
Junie accusingly. She admired her spread. "What I love
about the country is the fresh vegetables. We're having
pumpkin-potatoes."
"Well," said Byron, smiling, "that's a change from
raspberry-grape potatoes."
"No cracks from you, you ungratefiil pig. Just sit down
at your trough and eat." She slipped out a box of red
matches, each with its individual gold stripe, and lit up a
well deserved Virginia Thins, the very picture of an eman-
cipated American woman defying death by cancer. Beside
her salad plate she kept an elegant Chinese ashtray from
some ancient opium den.
Byron opened the window eight inches and, before
sitting, stooped over and whispered something into Lin-
da's ear so that he could smell her hair. One of the small
pleasures of life was nuzzling the hair of a woman who
didn't smoke.
Linda laughed at Byron's wit, then was caught by sur-
prise when Junie bowed her head and began to say grace.
Ray nudged his startled girlfriend back to her senses and
she lowered her lashes.
"May God bless this meal and bring His hope to those
of us who partake in His bounty. Amen."
"Amen," said Byron.
A sneaky glance told Linda it was safe to lift her head.
Byron was already rising. He motioned for his wife to stay
seated while he went for the heated soup bowls and a
bottle of wine from the cooler. "Ray. For your left-handed
corkscrew!" The soup bowls he set in front of himself and

The Moon Goddess and the Son
223
the salad bowl he gave to Linda. He began to ladle out the
clam chowder.
"He's pretending he's the chef," said Junie. "Wouldn't
he make a good Manor Lord?"
Linda whispered to Ray, "Do married people always
snipe at each other? Do your mother and father snipe?
Mine do. I'm never getting married especially to a grouch
like you." She turned back to her soup, careful to tip the
bowl correctly.
The two women began an animated conversation about
Bostonian social life. Ray listened like a Pacific tuna in
Boston harbor, and Byron used the time to fill his stom-
ach. It always fascinated him to listen to Junie talk. He
loved her accent. She was one of the earth's very good
people and nothing pleased him more than eating her
special meals.
Byron helped Linda fix up the guest room and then
went downstairs and helped Junie stack dishes before head-
ing back to the computer room. Ray was already there,
fiddling with the Tinker Toy graphics and trying out a few
of his own hunches.
Eventually, with a little more ersata beer in their bel-
lies, they got into a raging cock-and-bull session. They
whumped up a leoport for Mars as a warm-up—and then,
closer to home, carved out an electromagnetic spaceport
built right on the moon's surface so that incoming moon-
ships would generate electricity, instead of wasting propel-
lant, and outgoing moonships wouldn't have to use any of
the precious lunar carbon or hydrogen.
With these problems "solved" they spent an hour ar-
guing about the design of a powerplant in Earth orbit that
could generate electricity from the "waterfall" of moonrock.
For some reason that lead to a discussion of life on the far
side of the moon and from there it was no great deviation
to examine the scientific prowess of an intelligent species
of spider able to travel between the stars on webs acceler-
ated by microwave beams.
Of course, after such a wild insanity, sobriety returned.
"You know something," said Byron casually. "How in
hell are we going to bring the stuff in to build that electro-
magnetic track on the moon? That's a lot of track."

224
Donald Kingsbury
"We build it out of moon beams."
"After importing the geologists and the mining machinery
and the machine tools?" complained Byron.
"We could buy our mass from the Russians. They're
certainly planning to be there first according to you."
"Piss on that! How about a skyhook?"
"All the way to L-One? That's 56,000 kloms above the
moon." Ray turned up his nose. "Forget it!"
In retaliation Byron handed him another raspberry-grape
beer. "The grass that makes your cheese starts out as
bullshit. An old Wisconsin saying. I was thinking of an
orbiting skyhook."
"One of Moravec's rotating skyhooks?"
"No. An orbiting skyhook that's always vertical."
"I can see why you're a pilot instead of an engineer,"
chided Ray.
"Hey, you're starting to sound like my wife."
They opened a new Tinker Toy file on the computer
after consulting Byron's skyhook scrapbook. He already
had a subfile on disk for the moon and its gravitic field.
They added a vertical line with mass-center and shape
determined by tensile strength and density.
"Good God!" said Ray after the first couple of runs.
"You could build it out of steel!" Steel is not known for its
high tensile strength.
They tried better materials and, even with a safety
factor of eight, found that each ten tons of cable could lift a
ton of load. For one of their skyhooks the center of mass
was in orbit 1130 kloms above the moon's surface—the
lower tip, skimming 30 kloms above the surface, travelled
at 805 meters per second, while the upper tip, 1876 kloms
above the surface, travelled at escape velocity for its altitude.
That meant that a one ton ship which needed three tons
of propellant to land on and leave the moon, needed only
half a ton of propellant to do the same job when it climbed
the skyhook.
All sorts of configurations bloomed on the phosphor
screen and grew and shape-changed. It was half serious
fun and half a kind of arcane arcade-zapping. A mesmer-
ized Byron and Ray competed to shoot down the CAD
images while conjuring up new horrors to harass each

The Moon Goddess and the Son	225
other. To find a physical principle which the current screen
model violated, and thus to shatter it, was to score.
In the middle of their game, a wide-awake infant ap-
peared at the door, silent, watching, ready to run away
(with laughter) in case he was chased, but betting that he
wouldn't be. Byron called him in and set his son on his
knee. It was time Charlie got used to a man's tools—
otherwise he might turn into a musician. The father watched
him reach for the keyboard . . .
... to hit seven keys at a time with the flat of the hand
like the big people did.
Swiftly Byron grabbed his arm and guided the tiny
index finger to a special key. On the screen the phosphor
skyhook began to oscillate jerkily under the stress of a
descending load.
Charlie frowned. He didn't want to be told what to do.
His unrestrained hand cleverly reached around all obsta-
cles, smashing at the keys, blanking the image and creat-
ing an eruption of symbols. Byron resettled the boy in his
lap with a firmer grip, painfully resurrecting old images
with four careful keystrokes. The skyhook shattered and its
pieces began to fall.
"Interesting," said Ray. He reached over the baby's
hands with his fingers, tapping out a command to zoom in
on the load. They watched in detail as the vibration built
up destructively. "Yeah. I know what's going on."
They tried cures. Ray inserted sections that could be
contracted or relaxed at will to control waves. That im-
plied signalling and power systems on the cable. They had
to control torsional flex. They tossed around elevator
concepts.
Ray won most of the design rounds and Charlie went to
sleep again in a nest of computer paper and Byron kept
contributing new angles but in the end, around three in
the morning, they both admitted that they were tired and
stumped. "We'll have to bring in Synmann. He's our
electromagnetic expert. You can fly them, and I can build
them but I think electricity is out of our line."
"I think we've made marvelous progress," said Byron,
waving his hands around drunkenly.
"You call that progress?"

226
Donald Kingsbury
"Damn right! We've demolished half a case of that bloody
beer!"
Ray looked at Byron rather woozily. "Man, you sound
desperate. You need a little help." He took Byron out into
the wild blackness of the country night and located a pipe
in the shed. "Bring me a case!"
Byron hurried indoors to the basement and came back
with a full carton of cans. Somehow they jury-rigged a
mortar that worked on compressed air supplied by a red
bicycle pump and a judicious shaking of the can before it
was dropped into the cast iron pipe they had found for the
barrel.
They labored by the light of a waning crescent moon,
half hidden by branches, and by the time the moon was
gone and the sky was hinting that it was time for dawn,
they had improved their design so that the raspberry-
grape beer was being lobbed a full fifteen feet over the
backyard fence, a can at a time.

CHAPTER 30
The new moon is Diana's bow
But when she lets her arrows go
To thunk into some starry hearts
This virgin stares upon the sight
Of mortal, wounded men in fright—
And waning, from the sky departs.
From the diary of Jack A.
To Diana's airborne eyes a billowy clouded terrain gave
way to an underworld of ocean. Then, as the airliner
banked, the Namalas appeared on the horizon of the tropi-
cal sea, distant green islands sleeping in the vast moat of
the Pacific like the backbones and snout of a drowsy croco-
dile. Such was the aircraft's distance that the beast never
seemed to grow closer. The blue water had already deep-
ened into the purples of a sunset before they began their
gliding approach to the airfield.
This was her first real adventure as a pretend-woman,
the high point of her life and she felt exhilarated. She was
here—part of a base that was shipping supplies to the
moon! She had an introduction to a Grand Lady and
reservations at a very high sounding hotel called The Third
Millennium!
While she worried about her luggage on the airfield
terrace, waiting for Mr. Ling's Madam Lilly, the drowsy
227

228
Donald Kingsbury
crocodile woke. Its thunder was too reverberating to be a
storm and the sudden brilliance too constant to be light-
ning. Her eyes turned to the fire. A delta-winged scram-
jet freighter began to lift from the launch area on its rocket
boosters, roaring flame, carrying its load of saucers into
the sky, to be flung along spaced trajectories that would
disperse them so that, one by one, they could be swal-
lowed into the maw of the leoport's rings. The rocket blast
faded—but another freighter thundered to life with a glow
that created a new sunset—and another.
Awed, her luggage forgotten, Diana stood there until
the last of the squadron of rocket-boosted scram-jets were
lost in the dark sky. Into the peace, the silver thread of
the leoport rose majestically out of the ocean. At first it
was only a small thread, a wavering glimmer. On the
horizon its 210 klom length was foreshortened to hardly
more than a degree of sky, but perceptibly it grew to
stretch its gossamer strand over almost a sixth of the
heavens—before vanishing into the shadow of the Earth,
leaving only stars.
She remembered seeing in her telescope the building of
the leoport, its construction shack a tiny spider riding a
filament of sunlit web over the cornfields of Ohio, reap-
pearing every day until the first 100 kloms of hoops were
in place. Then McDougall had towed it away into equato-
rial orbit.
The show wasn't over. Soon a fleet of down-bound sau-
cers, electromagnetically ejected from the leoport to bal-
ance its momentum losses, began a screaming drop from
the blackness, swooping into the floodlamps of the lagoon
to be received with the efficiency of a flight returning to
the deck of its aircraft carrier. Some of the winged saucers
were laden with goods made in the factories that had
attached themselves to the leoport like factories had once
sprung up next to a railway spur line. Some of the saucers
came down empty.
Across the bay, ground crews ran a standard mainte-
nance check on each vehicle, inserting a new payload
module, pumping propellant into the maneuvering tanks,
recooling the saucer's rim coils, reprogramming the silicon
pilot. The saucers didn t need heavy heat-shielding like

The Moon Goddess and the Son
229
the shuttle because the leoport ejected them back into the
atmosphere at substantially less than orbital velocity. How-
ever they didn't really look like they could fly, with their
canards and retractable delta wings.
Finally the freshly readied saucers were rolled to the
launch site and loaded into the bay of a scram-jet freighter,
there to await the return of the leoport. Thus passed the
"down-time" of a flying saucer's grueling life.
Every ninety-six minutes, day and night, this same cy-
cle repeated at all of the equatorial stations.
Madam Lilly was standing behind Diana Grove, unwill-
ing to intrude on the girl's rapture. "Do you want to wait
for the scram-jets from Sahili to come in? Ours don't come
back—they hop around the world before we see them
again."
"I think I've had enough for one night! You're Madam
Lilly? I'm so pleased to meet you!"
Madam Lilly turned out to be a hard taskmaster. Her
restaurant carried the Ling symbol but, like all of Ling's
restaurants, it supported its own name, the Kaleidoscope,
a reference to Madam Lilly's devotion to a constantly
changing atmosphere. Madam Lilly was a theater person.
She could do miracles with a few props and backdrops and
screens, but her main focus was on the girls whom she
adored. She costumed them perfectly and taught them
gesture and emotion and expression and dialog.
The week that Diana arrived they were all doing World
War II at the Kaleidoscope. There was a Rosie the Riveter
in slacks and Sultry Pinup in black negligee. Diana was
given "shorts" and set to serving the veranda with a tray
over her head. She wore the persona of a Hep Carhop.
Sometimes she chewed gum and she always said "swell" to
the customers. On off hours she did her homework by
looking at Life and reading The Saturday Evening Post and
early Mailer. The juke box music ran to "Deep in the
Heart of Texas ..." or "Kiss me once and kiss me twice
and kiss me once again, it's been a long long time ..."
From there they sank into the Great Depression. The
backdrops became WPA courthouse paintings of stiff work-
ers which the girls slavishly reproduced themselves with
considerable success. Diana watched movie clips of Clau-

230
Donald Kingsbury
dette Colbert until she could talk and move in the curi-
ously limited way of the pre-television Americans. She ran
the "soup kitchen" and learned to chat knowledgeably
about swing. She fell in love with Artie Shaw and played
his fast spinning platters with a passion on an obscenely
large machine that used needles.
Namala was a paradise for a girl scared of men. The ratio
of single men to women was three to one and she had so
many dates that she could easily play one against the other
for safety. If that failed, Diana pleaded work. She had to
rehearse the movements of a Burmese dancer, or walk like
a Persian lady, or catch the subtle way a geisha presented
a plate of raw fish. You could find her laughing with her
arms around two men . . .
... or alone on the beach in the moonlight watching
the fireworks shoot up into the night sky with macho
splendor. There she had time for the secret thoughts she
never shared.
The beach was more gregarious by sunlight. During the
Kaleidoscope's Twenties' stint Madam Lilly strictly forbade
her girls to wear their monokinis and had them splashing
about in daring flapper bathing suits that exposed the
knees. It caused a riot and that was good for business—
and tips.
Time and the smallness of the Namala community was
her enemy. She met a boy named Jack in her martial arts
class. He always spoke to her; she constantly ignored him.
Their Japanese instructor repeated that the greatest per-
fection was to defeat an opponent with the minimum of
force. Diana was having none of that. She was there to
learn how to demolish rude men with the thrust of her
heel or the back of her hand. She believed in a safety
factor of ten. Break their skulls and then ask questions.
She willingly practiced on Jack, he willingly let her. Still,
she allowed no other communication.
But Jack survived. Smitten, he arranged a surprise birth-
day party. There were twenty-one candles on the cake
even though she was only turning sixteen. She had a
fabulous old time hugging everyone for their crazy gifts
and singing and fooling around and pretending. It was
delightful to tell mysterious lies about her past, especially

The Moon Goddess and the Son
231
about places she had been before she was bornl For three
hours she successfully avoided Jack, never forgetting how
dangerous a man in love can be.
Her fatal mistake was to need a Kleenex. Jack kept some
in his study which had remained off limits to the party
because of the delicate model of the lunar base he kept
there. She caught a glimpse of its detail while blowing her
nose and fell heels over head. Long after the revelry had
died she was still in the study, her arms wrapped around
Jack, kissing his nose and asking him questions about the
lunar electromagnetic landing tracks and why they were so
much more powerful than the leoport's track. She had him
explain the workings of the lunar spacehook elevator which
hung, appropriately, from the ceiling.
The affair lasted two weeks, a miracle of involvement for
Diana. She went everywhere with him. She haunted the
launch site when he was at work and she wasn't. He, in
turn, spent all his money at the Kaleidoscope. They went
surfing together and kissed at every opportunity. He hinted
that he wanted to sleep with her. She hinted that she
wanted to wait but in an internal debate with herself
decided that he was the nicest guy in the world and she
was going to throw her virginity away on him and live
happily ever after.
In time they found themselves alone. Unhurriedly, gently,
he began to undress her. That didn't bother her. Diana
was only noticing that he was between her and the door.
Since she had been a small girl she had learned to keep
herself always between her father and a door. It was a
Very Important Rule. For a while she tried to suppress
her silly need—she knew very well that Jack wasn't going
to knife her or knock a joint out of its socket—but the
anxiety didn't go away: it became worse. It became imper-
ative. Smiling at her insanity she took Jack in her arms,
hoping to roll him away from the door, a little closer to the
wall. It was important that she not have to say anything.
He chose the moment to be assertive—holding her rigidly
so that he could look at her disheveled beauty.
Suddenly panicking, Diana threw him off the bed. When
he looked up in anger, still commanding the doorway, she
was so terrified that she struck him with a reflex karate

232
Donald Kingsbury
kick to the head, and ran, not remembering that she ran.
The next day he apologized when he found her. She
turned away without speaking.
He flew in flowers from the States. He sent her letters.
He papered love declarations on the corridor walls of her
apartment. He slept on her steps. His intensity frightened
her. The more she avoided him, the more he pursued her.
She stayed awake with images of him murdering her.
When he came to the Kaleidoscope, the other girls waited
on him. Madam Lilly soothed her and told her that it was
normal for men to go crazy, that it was nothing to worry
about, but Diana worried. Jack persisted. He even sent
one of the female mechanics he worked with to talk to her.
Diana became so upset that she typed a letter into her
phone and sent it via the Attman net to Mr. Ling's per-
sonal electronic mailbox pleading for a transfer.
The reply bounced back via satellite later that afternoon
and when she called up the message with shaking fingers
it read, "Spend a week with me. Ling." She regretted her
impulse. She thought his message very cold and did not
reply, but by evening he had transferred to her account a
thousand dollars. Having a man who loved her was very
reassuring.

CHAPTER 31
Never underestimate the power of a woman.
The Ladies' Home Journal
Junie McDougall took her son down to Florida to watch
his daddy's second shuttle flight. She had chatted to him a
lot about aircraft but she wasn't really sure if he under-
stood because he didn't like to talk much. But he had
ridden co-pilot with his father in their Cessna and his
favorite toy was a wooden airplane made in Sweden that
he could assemble and disassemble by himself. She was
afraid that the awesome light and sound of the blast-off
would frighten him—it had frightened her the first time—so
she held him very closely to her body while she listened to
the countdown over her earphones.
Little Charlie was patient at first but he got restless.
Watching Florida from a high balcony wasn't as interesting
as sticking his fingers into the humming air conditioner.
Junie let him go to play by himself for a while and thought
he didn't understand, but he kept running back and ask-
ing, "Ready yet?"
"Don't go away. They're ready."
But he knew that when she said "ready" he had whole
minutes left so he ran off and came back with his model
orbiter before he asked to sit again in his mother's lap.
"They're on internal power now," she said.
233

234
Donald Kingsbury
"Boom! Boom!" he said impatiently.
"They've swiveled the main engines to launch position."
"Daddy ready?"
"Daddy's ready. They've just closed the oxygen vents."
"Roger, out. Boom! Boom!"
"The hydrogen pressurization is up." Her heart pounded.
Suddenly the light and the sound began, a thundering
firefall upon the blossoming billows. She felt Charlie's tiny
fingers grip her ring finger in total surprise. He said
nothing. She said nothing during the seven seconds of
roaring build-up. The fragile moth, clinging fiercely to its
booster cylinders and its brown cocoon, began a graceful
rise through blazing clouds, climbing up a tower of vapor.
"Daddy all gone. Roger." Charlie looked up at his mother
for reassurance.
Junie was smiling. She was wondering how she ever
came to marry a man like Byron. When she had dragged
him home from Saudi Arabia she thought she was getting
him a safe job in an office. It was only getting worse. He
had told her that if this mission was successful he was in
line to be commander on the maiden flight of the Consti-
tution, the first of the second generation of shuttles to
come off the Rockwell lines.
After an hour of hyperactive play in the strange Florida
apartment with the chintz curtains, Charlie confronted his
mother very firmly. "Daddy back?"
"No, but he's in orbit. And he's safe. And everything is
fine. I wish we could stay until he returns, but you're
going to be flying away with your mommy."
"Orbit?"
"No, silly. Just home to Stonefield."
During the past summer Junie had soloed in a light
plane, and qualified herself as an instrument and night
pilot. It wasn't really new to her—she had been informally
airborne since she was sixteen—and though her father
hadn't allowed her to solo or land she had been an instru-
ment navigator since the ninth grade. She would never
have the devil-may-care reflexes of her father, and she
couldn't yet duplicate the smooth precision of Byron who
anticipated everything in advance, but she was proud of
the fact that Byron didn't mind flying with her.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
235
This time up, Byron was pilot on the mission to deploy a
one-sixth scale mock-up of an eight unit leoport section
which was to be left in orbit. It was something that fitted
the two-minute attention span of the television newsmakers
and so, back in New Hampshire, Charlie got to watch the
cameras inside the orbiter's bay watching the release. The
eight hoops, each with an inner and outer coil, were
almost as wide in diameter as the shuttle cargo bay. They
moved out together, magically springing apart, unconnec-
ted, but remaining bound by the invisible tug of electro-
magnetic forces.
Charlie sat on the New York Times which was spread
over the floor of their Stonefield home. He was smudging
the ink on his father's picture with an agitated palm.
"Daddy in orbit. Daddy not back." He shook his head.
It was a mad race for Junie to keep up with her hus-
band. She hardly had time to talk with him. Sometimes he
had to catch an airplane right in the middle of one of their
arguments and she had to wait two weeks until he climbed
out of another airplane before she could finish saying what
was on her mind. So when she hopped down to Florida to
pick him up after his second mission she fully intended to
hammer at him all the way back home.
She hit her stride while winging through a pass in a
bumpy mountain range of clouds. The engine noise made
her scream at him, but if she didn't get in her licks now
she might never get another chance. She insisted that he
quit NASA and settle down with a big company—it didn't
have to be Shantech. While she pleaded, the air current
under a disintegrating avalanche of white mist snatched
her breath away for a moment and her husband took over
the conversation. She had to listen to him prattle on about
the serene pleasures of floating two-hundred miles above
the turbulence while she was fighting to turn the Cessna
out of the downdraft.
At home she thought he seemed tired. Poor boy. Then
when he came back from his obligatory trip to Concord he
seemed to be painfully depressed about the progress
Dubrovsky was making with the micro-rectenna assembly.
Silicon Factory was up to its ears in financial trouble. He
bitched and bitched.

236
Donald Kingsbury
Once she found him lying on the couch while Charlie
tried to play with him. Byron just lay there and let the
little boy beat him up, almost without lifting a finger to
defend himself. She was going to have to force him to
change jobs! Immediately after Byron dragged himself back
to Houston she called up Dad. What was happening to the
leoport idea? Was it going anywhere? Was it falling apart?
"Doesn't Byron tell you anything? We're putting to-
gether a construction consortium." He was very gentle in
telling her that his chief engineer at Shantech didn't take
Byron seriously.
That made her pause. Was Byron worried because he
was being cut out? Worry could make anyone tired. Was
he going to lose his chance to be something else besides a
pilot? An uneasy suspicion set her alarms and her energy
into overdrive.
She called up Ray. He was very diplomatic but he
confirmed that Silicon Factory was in trouble and that
they were going to have to go to a different power system
than Byron's, which was unfortunate because a conserva-
tive design was dicey and, worse, would both cost more
and weigh more.
Junie's expertise was in the financial world but her PhD
was in music. She watched Charlie dance while she played
some Bohemian folk airs to calm her nerves. Her darling
boy was so beautiful pirouetting and stomping around the
Persian carpet of her living room. As the misty melodies
flowed from her fingers she dreamed that they might have
a real artist in the family. She was the boring financial
wizard and Byron was the all-around jock. Baby Charlie
was the artist!
At his nap time she returned to her scheming. She
called one of Brontz's accountant types. She had met him
at a party and had been impressed by the savvy of the
man—enough to make a point of cultivating him. The
telephone call lasted an hour.
Then she called Dubrovsky. His hoarse voice sounded
muddled and had the vagueness she immediately identi-
fied as evasive action. Only after patient and gentle press-
ing did he admit to problems. It was just that Silicon
Factory "needed refinancing for expansion." She asked

The Moon Goddess and the Son
237
him ten very carefully designed questions and very care-
fully listened to the answers for clues about the health of
his company.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
Dubrovsky was talking to her partly because she was
Byron's wife but mostly because she was Charlie Bond's
daughter and he was desperate for help. It was all in his
voice. Self-deception is always the last layer of vanity's
armor to crack. She eased past Dubrovsky's central fear
without confronting his pride.
"I may be able to get you some money. I'll be down
with a man tomorrow."
That was all she had to say. Money was the bait on the
hook. If Dubrovsky had actually seen what was on her
mind, he would not have let her near his Silicon Factory—
but a macho warlord will let his drawbridge down for a
woman, not being able to conceive of a female warrior.
She had in mind a controlling directorship for Byron, a
good solid ground job.
She knew that the Soviet Snowfox was making discrete
visits to American military satellites beyond the reach of
the shuttle. The sober Washington mood was an ingredi-
ent that she added into her own private think-tank soup.
And her father was telling her that the top level of military
planners were panicking over projections which showed
that, even with the new shuttles, the American ability to
deliver mass to orbit was going to fall well behind de-
mand. The assembly of the full space station would have to
be postponed, perhaps five years, and even the delivery of
the defensive battle stations to protect American military
satellites might be retarded.
She studied many reports. The generals were pleading
on their knees with Congress—but the lack of orbital
delivery capacity seemed to be worrying the congressmen
for a reason the generals would not have understood: what
if the development of space was slowed to a rate where
even this fastest of growth areas was unable to generate
the tax dollars that the government had to have to meet its
massive debt payments? Congress was waking to the hor-
ror that without super-rapid economic expansion it just

238	Donald Kingsbury
might be forced to make drastic cuts in its aid program to
the middle class.
Piety and fear and anger were the kind of things that
told her where the dollars were going to go. It all added
up. It was the right time to invest in space.
Seven weeks after taking an interest in Silicon Factory,
using her inside knowledge that the upcoming leoport
contract was certain to be signed, Junie found new money—
pulled in from secret sources Dad didn't even know she
had. To convince the new money, she maneuvered a
potent re-organization virus into place along the spine of
Dubrovsky's organization—that particular hit-team being
borrowed temporarily from Brontz. Long ago a naive mu-
sic student had learned that skillful manipulation of money
wasn't enough—you had to be decisive and you had to
have the right people hiding in your closet when your
victim went to put his coat away.
She didn't covet power for herself. She did it all for
Byron. Yes, she loved the thrill of the hundred yard dash
but she hated all marathons. She believed in delegating,
to men, the responsibility for full time nose-grinding. What
was the use of knowing all about money if you couldn't
forget it and tease your feet in the sands of Biarritz?
Silicon Factory interested her only because she knew she
was going to be able to hand it over to Byron.
Dubrovsky was so pleased by Junie that he bought her a
bottle of champagne and took her to Concord s best res-
taurant. She talked all night about her new love, stunt
flying. Her instructor was showing her how to do rolls.
Dubrovsky didn't see any danger at all in this helpful girl.
All he saw was the new money. Poor baby, she thought.
He was a nice man, really, and she decided to make sure
that he kept his illusions and, when he came to retire, a
good pension. Perhaps more important to him, she would
see to it that he always had a good lab to putter around in.
But mostly she was thinking about how the blood slopped
around in one's head during a tight roll.
On the day when the leoport contract was signed—news
phoned hush-hush to her by her father—Junie was making
pies for the church supper. She mused to herself about
how easy it had been to sell Silicon Factory piggybacked

The Moon Goddess and the Son
239
on top of the leoport. But what amazed Junie was that Sam
Brontz had long ago seen the crunch in space delivery
capacity. Because of his foresight Ray Armsiel's lightweight,
low cost, mass delivery system was sitting in the anteroom
at precisely the right stage of development, at the exact
moment of crisis, ready to soak up the money that such
crises always generated.
His vision was mysterious but not unprecedented. She
had heard similar stories from Brontz himself, the man
who knew them all. The whole Boeing empire had been
built on the foresight of Claire Egtvedt who had the Flying
Fortress ready for a world war no one thought was going
to happen. She remembered Sam's cluttered office when
he was just one of her father's hot assistants—the painting
of the B-17 on the wall and the green glow of VisiCalc on
his Apple when no one else she knew had even heard of
personal computers.
She rolled out the pie dough, flipping it over onto the
mincemeat filling in one easy motion while she applauded
Sam in her mind for his beautiful intuition, proud of her
old time friend and sometimes mentor. The leoport was
too big for any one company to develop and too big for a
government which had been crippled financially by its
obese growth during the Reagan administration. Her fa-
ther and Brontz had had to bring together the largest
consortium of private and government capital that had
ever been assembled for one purpose if you didn't count
anomalies like the Second World War.
She noted the time. Hubby would be in his office in
Texas. Still with flour on her hands she picked up the
phone. "Byron," she said, and the machine dialed Hous-
ton from memory.
"McDougall here."
"Byron, you've got to be in Boston on the twenty-first."
"Can't. The Cessna's in for overhaul."
"I'll buy you a ticket on American. You can relax."
"Can't it wait?"
"It's a party." She paused. "The leoport contract has
been signed," she said, dead-pan.
"What! Already? A party?"
"A fatted calf party."

240
Donald Kingsbury
"What year is this?"
"Same year as yesterday. And you, wonderman-of-my-
life, have something special to celebrate. I've reorganized
Silicon Factory for you."
"What! What's going on?"
At the Boston festivities Byron McDougall remembered
all the old movies he had watched on the family's GE TV
in the living rooms of their various cramped Army camp
bungalows. Bond owned the kind of mansion that hard-
working poor girls always seemed to inherit in those old
American Dream movies. It had high ceilings and a crystal
chandelier and a ballustraded stairway to the second floor
that would have served the New York Public Library.
There were more than seventy guests and Byron half
expected them to form up and race down the stairs kicking
up their heels and doffing their hats in true musical style
while Benny Goodman and his boys played I'm In Love
With You down in the basement. That's what this party
lacked—Fred Astaire!
Byron was always happy when he visited the mansion—it
was like being given the run of a carnival fun house. He
found himself shaking his head and smiling, trying to
dream what it would have been like to grow up here.
What war games he could have had—like darting down
the hallways and tossing imaginary grenades into every
room to flush out the Nazi snipers who were holed up in
Antwerp's most prestigious pre-war hotel.
Junie took it all for granted. He had never seen her
looking so sultry. She had on a light silk dress hand-dyed
by some ancient craftsman from a lost civilization. He
could sense her body moving under the silk, he could
almost feel the touch of her breasts against the silk and he
was sure that he could see through it. And yet after it had
induced a randy warmth, forcing him to stare a little more
attentively to catch that glimpse of body line under the
silk—the dress taunted him with an innocent respectability.
Byron knew he was going to have a good time in the
later hours of the morning. Junie loved nothing better
than to make love to a man in the room where she had
grown up as a child. To Byron it was like a visit to a
slightly gaudy whorehouse and he wasn't going to knock it.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
241
Junie caught up with him in some butler's nook and
reserved a moment to neck with him on the wooden
bench.
"You're going to be the director of my company now!
It'll be you're first big job and you're not even an old man
yet! I love you!" Moving from pilot to powerful corporate
executive did not strike Junie as anything unusual—that's
what her father had done. If a girl wanted to reach the
corporate stratosphere, marrying a pilot was the most nat-
ural thing in the world to do.
"Hey, watch those ears. That's the only right ear I've
got." At first he hadn't understood how she had resur-
rected Silicon Factory. He was still bewildered. He knew
Junie. He couldn't imagine her walking out of the kitchen
and taking over an ailing corporation to please her hus-
band and then demurely going back to her cooking and
harpsichords—but that is exactly what she had done. It was
a bit terrifying to find himself married to a closet execu-
tive. Of course, it wasn't the first time she had surprised
him.
"I have your office in Concord all picked out. That old
warehouse that Dubrovksy has been using for Silicon Fac-
tory offices just won't do. I get to decorate it. You can't
refuse me after all I've done for you."
The old panic started in Byron. "It's about time I'm due
for a new job, isn't it?"
"It certainly is. Piloting is a young man's job."
"I'm pretty lucky that this leoport thing came along."
"You can't believe how smart you are! How did you see
where Dubrovsky fitted in? You'll make millions! I never
would have picked Silicon Factory off the heap. And in my
own backyard, too! It's nice to have such a smart husband.
What title do you want? I can arrange anything." She
nudged him.
"I'm thinking of Chief Construction Engineer." He
grinned.
"What are you talking about? You're not thinking what
I'm thinking you're thinking, I hope!"
"But they're going to need me," he said. "Who else is
qualified? How many engineers have experience in space?"
"You rat! You cross me at every turn! Don't tell me you

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Donald Kingsbury
don't! I saw you buying a toy handsaw for little Charlie. I
even know where you hid it. You think I don't know
anything. I'm not going to let you make an engineer out of
him. One in the family is enough!"
The next day she went shopping along Boston's elegant
back streets for artist's supplies. She got the very best and
she started Charlie on his lessons that same day. He
couldn't hold a brush but he could certainly finger-paint.
She was distracted by a phone call and when she came
back she found that Charlie had become bored with the
artistic challenge of the playroom. He was in another room
and, after pouring his water paints on one of Charlie Sr.'s
most expensive rugs, was adding great sweeps of yellow
and red and dayglow orange to its intricate design with a
careful imitation of his mother's finger-painting flourishes.
"God! Oh my God!" she screamed. "You and your father!"
Little Charlie instantly sensed that he had done some-
thing wrong. He stood up, yellow to one elbow, dayglow
orange and green down his front, and announced, "Bad!
Bad!"

CHAPTER 32
The man who drives the wedge, splits the wood.
New England saying
With his usual single-mindedness Byron McDougall read-
ied himself to lead an American return to the moon.
Nobody was paying any attention, all raised eyes were
focused on space stations and low Earth orbit factories and
leoports and an ICBM defense—but that didn't matter.
Byron had taken lessons from Sam Brontz on how to plan
in advance.
He used his frequent commuting flights from Houston
to New Hampshire to schedule detours around the coun-
try. His favorite ploy was to give talks to undergraduates
at engineering schools. Then he would have dinner with a
few of the more aggressive engineering professors who
were into teaching and convince them to use the moon
base as a design problem for their students.
Where would your power come from for the 340 hours
of night? One team researched a small atomic reactor. A
Stanford class looked at the feasibility of beaming micro-
waves to the lunar surface. A Cal Tech professor gave his
thermodynamics class the problem of a steam turbine pow-
ered by hot sodium which had been solar-heated during
the day. Three boys in Utah tackled the storing of energy
in the magnetic field of a giant superconducting toroid.
243

244	Donald Kingsbury
One time during a lecture to a physics class in the new
Texas Technical High School the kids smuggled up a lunch
of cafeteria bean sandwiches. Later, while making jokes to
explain away a loud fart, Byron recalled the lack of hydro-
gen on the moon. Would the fuel needed to land upon and
leave the moon's surface have to be brought in from Earth?
This challenged a tiny slip of a girl hiding at the back of
the physics lab. She asked if hydrogen fuel could be re-
placed somehow by solar electricity. An energy source was
an energy source, she insisted stubbornly—after apologiz-
ing for being stubborn. She was razzed by the boys be-
cause electricity can't be turned into hydrogen. The joker
in the class said she was probably dumb enough to think
that electricity could be used to atom-smash oxygen into
protons.
"It could!" she retorted hotly.
Byron disagreed on the economics of that, but he de-
fended the besieged girl. Electricity might not be able to
provide the colony with hydrogen but electrical shuttles
could certainly replace rockets and thus obviate the major
need for hydrogen.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Mary," she said meekly.
"Mary was quite correct," he told the class. "It's the
energy that is basic and not the rocket fuel itself."
He connected up an old electric motor and showed
them that when they sweated to turn the crank, they were
pumping electricity through the machine—flicking the nee-
dle on the galvanometer. The machine was converting
mechanical energy into electricity, like the generators at
the local power plant. But if, instead, they connected the
machine across a voltage, the induced flow of electricity
reversed the action and forced the crank to turn. The
machine was then converting electricity into mechanical
motion like a motor.
He told the class about the electromagnetic landing
track concept. A lunar lander, built like the armature of an
electric motor, coming in horizontally over a track that
acted like a winding, would generate enormous amounts of
electricity as it braked. Instead of using power, a landing
ship would generate power! To those who looked puzzled

The Moon Goddess and the Son
245
he compared a descending ship with the water coursing
through a hydroelectric station.
For two weeks after his enthusiastic reception Byron
commuted in and out of Texas Technical leading a whole
class of bright teen agers through the problem of a linear
generator-motor, patterned after the leoport, but capable
of handling heavier loads because it was anchored to the
moon. He showed them how to use high school physics to
get a handle on some of the fundamental problems.
How did you store the huge amounts of electricity pro-
duced during a coupled landing? And how did you feed
electricity into those ships as they were being accelerated
along the same track for orbital launch? His kids came up
with a "first stage" platform that stayed on the moon like a
railway car, gulped energy from a power torus, reached
lunar orbital velocity, launched its freighter, then deceler-
ated along a continuation track, perhaps after capturing an
incoming freighter. It might not work, but it was their
idea and they certainly learned a semester's worth of phys-
ics tackling the problem.
That slip of a girl, Mary, was always the iconoclast who
found a design flaw in everything. At the end of the
project she waited to catch Byron. Nervously, but also
defiantly, she gave him a folder with her estimates of the
mass of the track. He sat down on the floor by the water
cooler to read it. Massive amounts of stuff which had to be
imported to the moon could kill a lunar project. She didn't
care for the implications.
Byron liked this girl. She was the best of the lot. Her
mother ran a cleaning business and her father was a painter.
No one in her world understood her capabilities. Defiant
as she was, even she had her doubts. Byron took her out
to dinner to fatten up her bony frame and gave her a first
lecture on lunar skyhooks and how they could be com-
bined with electromagnetic tracks to dramatically reduce
the initial mass requirements of a colony. He also gave her
his card and wrote down on the back of it, "To be re-
deemed for one job after university training."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you're good. And by the time you're out of

246
Donald Kingsbury
college, maybe I'll be building the damn thing. I'll cer-
tainly be up there building the leoport. "
"You wouldn't want a girl engineer!"
"I'm not prejudiced against women—only women who
smoke."
"Does smoking cornhusks count?"
"Good God, child!"
In one moment of madness Byron landed his Cessna in
a Texas field and visited Amanda in her home territory.
He caught her in a cowboy hat and jeans. She still had
buck teeth and even though she was bowled over, she was
pleased to see him. Her husband was a very affable rancher,
a good rancher, but a very opinionated man. He had a
theory that it was friction with the Earth's atmosphere
which kept the moon in orbit. Byron cringed.
Amanda met him in Houston a week later. She didn't
want to come but Byron insisted and they checked into a
bridal suite together. She refused to take off her clothes.
"Ah'm not pleased. You never answered my letter!"
"How could I? I'm married!"
"Ah'm married, too! What difference does that make?"
They quarreled. Byron hadn't felt so comfortable with a
woman in years. Finally he said, "Enough, enough," and
grinning, went over to the ornate desk and took out hotel
stationary and, with a complimentary hotel pen, began to
write her a love letter. She read over his shoulders and
bopped him on the head whenever he scribbled I love
you.
After softening her up he began to take her clothes off.
She protested. "Ah won't let you do what you want to do!"
But her voice was muffled by her skirt coming over her
head. "And watch my hairdo!"
She let him kiss her for a while, looking over his head
sadly. Then she pushed him away gently and grabbed her
clothes. She fled to the bathroom.
"Hey, what are you doing in there?" He tested the
doorlock.
"Ah'm dressing, you oaf!"
She came out wearing her cowboy hat over combed
hair. And a lacy garter of the kind that courtesans wore to
hold the money after they had been paid. She went to the

The Moon Goddess and the Son
247
bed, inspecting it. "Damn hotels!" she muttered. "Even in
their suites the beds aren't long enough! Ah always get
cold feet when Ah make love in a hotel. Maybe we'll have
to do it on the floor like we did in Petra. Ah liked that."
"We can do it diagonally. The diagonal of a rectangle is
longer than the sum of its sides."
"Ah always liked intelligent men." She crawled onto the
bed and pulled the covers down and crawled inside. The
pillow pushed the brim of her hat down over her eyes and
all he could see was her bucktoothed grin. "Don't forget to
take your boots off."
In a hurried minute he joined her. They hugged and
sighed and both of them began to cry at the same time.
"You have such sweet breath," he said deliriously.
"You don't smell like a horse, yourself."
They cried about rancher husbands—boring—and Bos-
ton wives who nagged all the time. The warmth of their
bodies inflamed their passionate need to bitch. For an
hour they raked their respective spouses over the coals.
"Joe doesn't want me to dig anywhere some Arab might
rape me and booby trap my coffin with plastic explosives.
But Ah don't know where else Ah could go to find so many
dead cities!"
Byron, who had been able to match marital horror for
horror, was ready with a retort. Junie was even worse than
that. "She's driven to have a cigaret after sex."
Amanda began to giggle. "Isn't that a funny habit? Joe is
like a cuckoo clock. Ah wind him up with sex and he pops
out to the edge of the bed and puffs away, chiming all the
while, 'great, great, great.' He means the cigaret."
In graphic detail, they imagined Junie and Joe having a
sordid affair together. When they got to the great cigaret
climax, Amanda was blinded by tears of laughter.
"Oh, Ah'm a cruel woman!"
"What do you mean, cruel? Junie's a great lay and he'd
never notice her bad breath. It was mean of me to put her
to bed with such a boor."
Amanda rose up indignantly and flicked her Stetson
back. "Joe's a very good businessman! She'd like him. You
try to raise cattle and make money sometime! Joe's a
genius!"

248
Donald Kingsbury
"Well, maybe he does have good taste in cows and
women."
"Aw, Byron." Amanda snuggled to his arms.
In the aiterlove, conversation was slow and full of pauses.
She was possessive—and curious. "Have you ever made
love to another woman since Petra?"
"Yeah. My wife."
"Ah mean with wenches!"
"Yeah, sometimes with wenches. And you?"
"Sometimes with horses," she said, piqued.
Silence. Byron was holding her hand. "You ever going
to dig that mound of yours in Jordan?"
"Ah don't know. Being a rancher and an archaeologist
don't seem to mix so great. It takes money and Ah'm a
woman and Ah'm stuck here in Texas. We dream a lot in
our twenties and then we get to be thirty," she sighed.
She squeezed his hand. "You ever going to carve out your
Petra on the moon?"
"Yeah," he said.
"You're lucky to be a man. Sometimes Ah wish Ah was a
man."
"You'd make a great coal miner."
She bopped him on the head. For a long time she
remained quiet. "We don't have much in common. Ah dig
up old cities and hate Texas—and you're going to a desert
where it's worse than Texas and there are no buried cities."
"Yeah, but with me you'd get to dig out the city for the
first time. No secondhand thrills."
Byron was so pleased with the long afternoon that he
ordered up a sauteed fresh salmon dinner with champagne
and all the little side luxuries he could think of. When it
arrived Amanda eyed the feast. "That's a Republican
spread," she said disapprovingly. From then on there was
no more small talk. They discussed politics passionately.
She picked a fight with him as the evening lights of the
city came on, and in the end drove away in her pick-up
truck, burning rubber. Republicans drove her crazy!
Byron dashed off his first letter to her before midnight.
The drive to the moon continued.
He attended ceramic conferences and noted: (1) the

The Moon Goddess and the Son
249
main thing holding back the use of ceramics was a lack of
energy needed to manufacture them; (2) the moon had
energy in abundance. During the next few years he ac-
quired a formidable knowledge of ceramic manufacturing
and machining. Once, while he was building his own high
temperature lab, he wrote Amanda a letter about the
kinds of ceramic objects that archaeologists would find on
the moon in a thousand years.
In his lab his son helped him weigh out powders. They
fired and machined toys together. Sometimes Byron took
Charlie on long expeditions to collect different rock sam-
ples which they ground and analyzed and purified to make
their own powders.
The shuttle flights kept Byron's enthusiasm honed. NASA
was aware of his interest in lunar bases but they knew him
as a space construction expert as well as one of their best
pilots and when they began the assembly of the American
space station they left him up there for a full month,
floating above Earth, just to give him the experience of
working with the construction crews.
Junie was glad to get him back after that long absence.
She threw an elaborate party in Boston where he met a
Harvard professor of economics. He relaxed in bed with
Junie all the next morning, eating eggs Benedict and catch-
ing up on the Stonefield small town gossip about dogs and
potatoes and the arson attack on the university chapel. In
midsentence, Byron looked at his watch, shot out of bed,
and rushed over to Harvard. He was always busy.
The Business School had a new method to minimize
costs that Byron wanted to adapt. He needed a quick
system of inputting parameters that would let him decide
whether something should be manufactured on the moon
or imported. After that he meant to get back to Junie and
the kid—but Synmann collared him instead for dinner and
spent the time wondering out loud how easy it would be
to build a lunar anti-matter factory.
"Why?"
"Never mind why!"
Rumors began to race through the space community
that the Russians were assembling the logistics for a full

250
Donald Kingsbury
scale attack on the moon—a colony! They had the boost-
ers. They had the staging facilities. They had everything.
Byron was counting on a ponderous apparat to slow them
down.
All the while the leoport design teams were busy. Rock-
well was putting together the giant automatic freighter
that would lift 120 leoport hoops in one shot. Shuttle-like
external boosters pushed the behemoth to scramjet speed,
and then the scramjets took over, gulping atmospheric
oxygen to combine with hydrogen from the huge tank that
filled the hole in the hoops. Boeing was designing the
flying saucers.
For Byron it was one rodeo after another. L.A. Seattle.
Houston. Utah. Stonefield. A kiss and a good-bye. In the
evenings at a strange hotel, when he seemed all alone in
the world, he would again write to Amanda.
Periodically he chucked it all to spend time with Charlie
Jr. It was terrible how the years flew. Byron looked away
and when he looked back, Charlie was an inch taller. All
his plans for Charlie's life were in a shambles. He laughed
when Charlie got kicked out of all of those sissy music
schools for being oversexed with the young ladies. The
pleasure of that was worth the hours it took to calm Junie!
He canceled plans to attend an important symposium
so that he could be in New Hampshire when the Titan
probe reached the largest moon of Saturn. Gotta be with
your son when the really important things happen! He let
his son have a beer since it was his birthday. And they sat
there in the rumpus room eating potato chips and guzzling
Molsons while the Magellan-probe, fighting its way through
unknown Saturnian straits, sent back pictures of the yin/
yang face of Iapetus. Four sacks of potato chips and a
six-pack later—a fair amount of that stowed away by
Charlie—saw the probe going down on Titan, gliding on
its wings. The colored pictures began to come in, one
every two seconds.
"That's where we build our summer palace," said Byron.
"Yeachh!"
The familiar TV screen framed an alien landscape of
brown-orange and purple—mountains, billowing clouds of

The Moon Goddess and the Son	251
methane, haze, rivers of methane running through meth-
ane ice flows.
"Best planet in the solar system besides Earth."
"Yellow snow! Yeachh."

CHAPTER 33
H-bombs, plus their delivery systems, are an economic
liability to a country trying to defend itself. They cost
enormous sums of money to deploy, weakening the econ-
omy that buys them, and destroying any economy which
dares to use them in self-defense. H-bombs pay for them-
selves only by creating intangible fear. Their effectiveness
as weapons is irrelevant; only their perceived effectiveness
counts. In such a situation, strategic advantage goes, not
to the team with the greatest ability to destroy, but to the
adversary who can buy a cheaper fear.
Peter Kaissel, Report 19-0-345A
Ascetic Peter Kaissel, as usual, was in a complaining
mood and no sooner had the beer been set up in front of
him than he was launched into a witty attack upon the
strange colleagues with whom he had been forced to asso-
ciate for so many years. At least in the tavern here there
were real people: hardware salesmen and carpenters and
bartenders and his drinking friend Glenn.
His girlfriend, once a cheerful graduate of Iowa State
who had a way with stuffed chicken had been ruined, he
lamented. She wasn't like those "have a nice day" Califor-
nia girls who were infected by the L.A. disease and came
down with every fad around. She had corn silk for hair and
knew how to bully a bull and could run a 2000 acre farm
252

The Moon Goddess and the Son
253
with her father's Apple computer. But even she had been
transmogrified into a Russian peasant by the SMB.
It wasn't that he didn't like Russians. It was that the
people at the SMB weren't really Russians at all. They
were neither fish nor fowl. He had once had reason to
intrude into a meeting of the Marching Society of the
Soviet General Staff and Waterworks. Peter the Great was
there, haranguing his generals. M. N. Tukhachevskii was
there complete with Stalin's bullet hole in his head. There
was a general in the Russian uniform pf the Napoleonic
Wars, eating a McDonald's hamburger.
It was all a delusion in the head of that power madman,
Limon Barnes.
"Why do you stay?" asked Glenn.
"Synmann." Kaissel sighed. Even Synmann didn't turn
up much any more. He had become a raving hawk, the
kind of man he himself had derided in the sixties. He was
obsessed with the defense of America. "I'm working for a
genius," explained Kaissel, and stopped—as if that said
everything. He neglected to mention that the universities
were full, their faculties aging, and all of them stingy with
new appointments.
By closing hour Kaissel was talking very volubly and
since Glenn was so sympathetic they both somehow agreed
that Kaissel's current problem couid use a little midnight
oil. And besides, the young mathematician wanted to show
Glenn the madhouse where he worked. Together they
drove out to the Cathedral of Saint Marx the Benefactor.
And what harm could there be in that? In the costume
room Kaissel suggested Red Army uniforms because of
their simple comfort, but Glenn rather fancied the outfit of
a KGB colonel.
Kaissel demonstrated the SMB's latest computer proudly.
He wasn't sure how Synmann had picked up a unit, sug-
gesting that his boss was connected with SDI research and
that the computer was one of DOD's answers.to the pro-
gramming bottleneck posed by an ICBM missile defense.
It had a Von Neumann brain that talked to a holographic
brain—leading edge stuff. The multi-processor holographic
brain "learned" the serially executed programs being run

254
Donald Kingsbury
in its VN hemisphere, compacting them into a distributed
procedure which ran 100 times as fast as the original.
"But the best part," said Kaissel, "is that it's an
autodebugger. All I have to do is find the bugs, describe
them, and it proceeds to dilute them until they vanish—I'm
told the bugs get squeezed out by the compacting rou-
tines. Anyway, I'm always reprogramming my games; it
saves me an ungodly amount of time and grief not to have
to debug them, too."
"It can debug an Ada program?"
"Hell, it rewrote my Ada compiler."
Glenn was as curious about the game simulations as
Kaissel was eager to explain them. "It's really neat." He
called up the latest version of the old game of BalanceOf-
Terror, set the initial conditions and let the game roll on
to Doomsday, freezing the action from time to time to
illustrate a point.
"What was it you were saying about a weapon that could
control the arms race?" asked Glenn.
Kaissel frowned. "You don't understand. We don't have
a weapon. We just have a conditional demonstration. In
math such a result is called an existence proof. If we could
build a certain kind of weapon and if we applied it in the
context of a specific strategy, then the nuclear arms race
would wind down. Here, I'll show you."
Peter Kaissel restarted the game he had just played
after calling up a new set of initial conditions. The players
jockeyed for position, hurrying to outclass each other in
the electronic corridors of the machine. But the advantage
always went with the alliance which had slightly less nu-
clear weapons than the opposition. Doomsday never
happened.
Glenn was skeptical. "More bombs should give a nation
strategic advantage."
"Not so. Bombs use resources that might better be
applied elsewhere. Sometimes less gives you more. For
example, a lean runner can beat a fat runner. What if the
defensive imperatives could be juggled so that it was al-
ways possible to outclass 100 H-bombs by deploying only
ninety of your own? And what if both sides were primarily
interested in defense?"

The Moon Goddess and the Son	255
"Obviously they would compete to reduce their nuclear
arsenal. I'll buy that." Glenn was taking photos with a
hidden mini-camera. "So Synmann has invented the speci-
fications of a superweapon?"
Kaissel grinned. "The game invented the weapon. We
just varied the parameters until the game played like we
wanted it to. Synmann is a terrible cheat at games.
Unscrupulous."
They poured over the results. The defusing weapon had
to be non-nuclear and useless against people. It had to be
able to find and destroy nuclear weapons within minutes.
And it had to be able to destroy five to ten times its own
value in H-bombs.
Glenn's sharp eyes picked over the output critically. "I
don't think your generals are realistic," he said, twiddling
with the camera in the lapel of his KGB uniform. He was
referring to the generals who lived in the computer program.
"How can you say that? I designed the generals!"
"Look." Glenn pointed to the graphs. "They aren't de-
ploying enough of your superweapons to protect their own
cities. Real generals wouldn't do that."
"You don't understand strategy. A cub reporter for the
New York Times thinks that the object of an anti-ICBM
robot is to protect New York and all the rest of the cities of
the United States, including Philadelphia. But that is an
offensive consideration. Only if you are preparing a first
strike against your enemy do you need to protect all of
your cities.
"If you are merely defending yourself, your main objec-
tive is quite different. You attempt to cause your enemy to
disarm so that you can disarm, too, and spend your money
on something else. If you deploy only enough weapons to
zap, say, half of your enemy's H-bombs, you force him to
double the cost of his strike force. But if he goes that
route, you can counter his deployment for a fifth to a
tenth of what it costs him to counter you. He has to spend
his money on arms he can't use—and you get to spend
your money strengthening your economy. With a weapon
like that you can ruin your enemy economically without
lifting a finger. The safest way for him to meet your new
strategic advantage is to reduce his stock of nuclear weap-

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Donald Kingsbury
ons and spend his money building up a similar anti-H-
bomb capability of his own."
"It sounds pat." Without saying so, Glenn was hinting
that he'd like to get a look at that mythical weapon.
"Sure it's pat. It's all shit. It's only numbers in a ma-
chine. Don't remind me. Synmann reminded me. I once
boldly calculated the exact proportion of ICBMs we should
be prepared to shoot down to start arms deflation. I was
jumping up and down when I got those results. I was
ecstatic and called Synmann up at three in the morning.
And then he reminded me that the weapon ourgame had
designed was just specifications in a machine—and a very
tough problem for a team of physicists and engineers to
tool into a real weapon." Kaissel smiled ruefully. "He also
reminded me that the Soviet economy is so badly run that
it might not be very sensitive to weapon costs."
"But Synmann is on a team which is designing just such
ICBM killers."
"Yeah, but he never talks about it."
Gently Glenn shifted the subject. "How did Synmann
ever come to be connected with a Russian research
institute?"
"The guys who run America all know each other. They
scratch each other's backs."
Glenn groaned. Peter spouted stupidities as soon as he
left the subject of mathematics!
Kaissel sensed reproof and shifted his focus to please his
friend. "You like electronics. Have you ever played with a
holographic computer?"
And so, while the mathematician worked, the man in
the KGB uniform sat at Joseph Synmann's terminal and
explored the memory of the SMB. He was cut off from
Peter's view and when he found some hidden files, he
played with encryption tricks he knew.
The CIA blocked coding research in the United States
because they were afraid unbreakable codes would fall into
the hands of the Soviets—but that just made getting into
the files of Americans easier than it should have been.
Glenn couldn't find any weapons files, but he found
Synmann's leoport studies. He was unable to copy them.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
257
Still, he had no trouble calling the drawings to the screen
and photographing what he saw.
At two in the morning Kaissel's curiosity brought him to
lean over Glenn's shoulder. "God, I'm bored!" said the
mathematician. The leoport files had been quickly re-
turned to the innards of the machine in time to avoid
detection.
Glenn looked up warily. "Ready for a nightcap?"
"I feel more like a lark. I've figured out a way to break
into Limon's office."
Glenn was now alarmed. "Man," he said, "I'm not inter-
ested in you getting me into trouble." But he was in-
trigued. "You wouldn't dare!"
"I've got to show you something. Come with me."
They found themselves crawling along a dark ledge and
through a window. On tip-toes, and with his hand masking
the flashlight beam, Kaissel led Glenn into a great closet
to view the wardrobe of Limon Barnes. He closed the
lightproof door. He switched on the lights, laughing. He
donned the outfit of a rich boyar and dressed Glenn as an
Admiral of the Russian Navy of Peter the Great—while
Glenn struggled ineffectively, not knowing whether he
was a fool to be here or whether to enjoy the joke.
"Where did you learn burglary?" the spy asked with
approval.
"I used to steal exams. I always hated studying the
wrong thing. It did marvels for my grade-point average.
How else do you think I got this job?"

CHAPTER 34
The peaceful moon
Rises in the western chamber;
A breeze creaks the door
Stirring the flower-shadows.
Does my earthly love come with heaven's brightness?
Ling Ti
Sung Masterpieces
Friendship Blossoms Press
Beijing 2005
Every civilization contains eddies of its past, sometimes
within walking distance of its major centers. An eddy of a
bygone era lies tucked away between two rotund moun-
tains of the California Coast Range, below the grasslands
where the topography traps enough ocean fog to water a
redwood stand. For a century a Chinese family has owned
a log cabin in that canyon beside a dammed stream where
they took refuge after the great San Francisco earthquake.
There is no electricity. The road is dirt. Legend has it that
every time a logger or a land developer comes this way,
the wood nymphs call up a fog from the sea to sift through
the redwood forest until it is cloaked in invisibility.
When Diana was with her Chinese friend she was all
woman. At night she lay cozy with him under heavy
blankets, sometimes wondering at the rutting chemistry
which took her body and curious about the shy way she
258

The Moon Goddess and the Son
259
arranged to be touched. By day she cooked over wood for
her sage—flapjacks with sweet fried tomato syrup, and
eggs and beans and bacon, even bread from flour and
yeast. She kissed him and swam with him behind the dam
and massaged him and flattered him. She was twenty-one.
But when she was by herself she reverted to girl. Being
sixteen was a secret and one had to be alone to enjoy a
secret. Deep in the forest she built a shrine out of stone to
the goddess of moon and glade so that Diana might prop-
erly be worshipped. She used flat sedimentary rocks and
fitted them together with sand and flakes. Nothing wob-
bled when she stood on it. She tracked animals but they
got away. For hours she shot target with a compound bow
supplied by Ling, the lightest, most powerful bow she had
ever held. Once she saw a deer and they both froze,
staring at each other in awe in that cathedral of trees.
She was very happy.
He told her stories about the cabin. When it was raining
and the water dribbled in through some torn hole he
recalled that long ago he had rebuilt the roof and the exact
details of the family argument concerning tarpaper versus
shingles. Once when the sun was shining through the
forest's lace in midafternoon after the fog was gone and
they were sitting on the porch stairs, eating lunch with
their fingers, he traced with a waving finger the exact path
his brothers had taken when they dragged the entrance
stone down from the mountain.
"How come there's a stairway cut in the redwood?" She
meant the huge tree that lay where it had fallen against
the hill.
He smiled his tao wrinkles. "That one crashed down
upon us during the terrible winter storm in 1943 when I
was a teen-ager and my brothers were away in the Navy.
We knew that my oldest brother's ship had been sunk by
the Japanese and we thought he was dead. None of us
could talk about it. I needed something to do. Why not? A
stairway to heaven. We all need to build one once in a
lifetime." He ruffled her hair.
"Could your brother swim?"
"He certainly knew how to hang onto flotsam."
"Were all of your brothers in the Navy?"

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Donald Kingsbury
"That's where I would have been, too. But the war
ended."
"I can't imagine a Chinaman driving a boat."
"Ho now. I could tell you some stories."
But he fell silent instead. She smiled, remembering his
story about the army of Chinese Crusader Knights liberat-
ing Jerusalem, and chewed a stalk of wild oats to mark her
happiness.
That evening she tried to seduce him. She undressed by
the Coleman lamp, turned down to its lowest, then extin-
guished the flame before she crawled into bed so that in
the blackness there would be no universe but her touch.
For a while he let her fondle him, and once, almost
responding, he giggled like a sixteen year old boy, but
finally he took her hand in both of his, and held it against
his bony breast, caressing the soft flesh with his bony
fingers. She had never made love to a man before and she
wondered if she had been clumsy.
"It's all right if you do it to me," she whispered. She
was not sure that she should be saying such things.
"You've only found the ghost of me."
She pinched him, annoyed at his rejection. "You don't
feel like a ghost to me."
"Ah, but I'm half into the world of my ancestors."
"Are you half-in-love with me?" she teased.
"Half-in-love yes, and the other half infatuated."
"If you're half with your ancestors, do you see ghosts?"
It seemed that her question startled him. He had never
looked, and for a moment his fingers ceased to caress her
fingers and only held on affectionately while he looked.
"Ah, my family has powerful ancestors! I can see them
all!"
It wasn't really what she wanted to hear.
"I'll tell you a story," he said.
She sighed.
Shang yeu t'ien t'ang, hia yeu Su Hang," he said.
I didn't know you could speak Chinese?"
Once I knew a lot, but I remember little of it—mostly
the poems I memorized when I was young. The ditty I
recited translates as: 'There's Paradise above, it's true, but
here below weve Hang and Su.' That's a reference to

The Moon Goddess and the Son
261
Hangchow and Suchow, known in the days of the Sung as
Kinsai and Sugui, about three days journey away from
each other by the Grand Ganal. In all of Medieval Earth
there did not exist two more beautiful cities."
"I can tell you're Chinese."
"Do not interrupt my story. Hangchow was the greatest
port in the world at the time, thirty miles in diameter,
bigger than a dozen Venices. If your Europe had silk,
likely as not it was originally shipped from Hangchow and
picked up by the Arabs in India. The city was built upon
what had been lagoons and swampland so that it was
crisscrossed by canals and teeming with ships. All the
produce of China passed through its warehouses and mar-
kets, bales of Silk and cotton, porcelain and cast iron, rice
and spice wine, pearls, jade, and every sort of manufac-
tured article. The quays were lined with junks as far as the
eye could see. From Indo-China and the Indies came
spices and aloes and sandalwood, nutmegs, spikenard and
ebony. The junks sailed as far as India and Ceylon and
Japan."
"And what made Hangchow so beautiful? New Yorkers
think New York is beautiful and they look down their
noses at Cleveland."
"Well, it was a rich city."
"Rich isn't beautiful."
"But there were twelve thousand stone bridges span-
ning its waterways. Lords and merchants moved down its
streets clad in silk. The most elegant ladies in the world
were carried by in embroidered litters, with jade pins in
their black hair. From pleasure barges on the lake-of-many-
islands one could view the city, its palaces, temples, con-
vents, and gardens, and listen to the tinkling instruments
of the barge's revelers."
"So tell me your story."
"The first ancestor of which I have knowledge was an
old lord of Hangchow."
"As old as you?"
"Old but not as old as I. Richer, I suspect. And I
suspect he was as displeased with his wife as I was pleased
with mine. One day when he had travelled up the Grand
Canal to Suchow on business and was inspecting the silk

262
Donald Kingsbury
made by one of his silk weaving suppliers, he found a
young indentured slave at the looms who took his fancy
and he bought her as his concubine."
"Did he love her? He doesn't sound very romantic."
"Well, they had a son and that pleased him."
"That's not love. I want to know if he loved her."
Ling kissed her gently and then touched her lips with
his fingers. He held her and his hand caressed her and for
a moment she was frightened because he didn't seem as
helpless as she had come to expect, but he made no
mistakes in arousing her and she remembered that he had
been happily married for fifty years before his wife had
died and that he had loved her and that he had raised
three children. Half of him might be a ghost but his hands
were certainly still in this world. Wow.
"Tell me how he loved her. It's important."
"Tao tells us to keep our mouths shut and just do it."
"Oh."
"But he wrote poems about her," conceded Ling. "Five
of them made one of the greatest of the Sung poetry
collections. That's how we know about him."
"Did they live happily ever after?"
"No. He died when she was only seventeen but on his
deathbed he sold her to a nephew to keep her away from
the clutches of his wife."
"I'll bet the nephew beat her."
"No, but he lost his fortune and saved only one ship and
took to the sea to try to restore himself in the graces of the
gods. That's how we Lings came to be sailors, and how
my great-grandfather was in Canton when an American
ship was short of hands. Half of California was once
Chinese."
"They didn't let Chinks bring in their women so how
come you're here?"
"Baah! We were sailors! A Chinese sailor knows every-
thing there is to know about smuggling."
She snuggled up close to her ancient mariner. "Am I
your concubine?"
"Wait until I find a nephew to sell you to. I have
nephews and a grandson just about the right age."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
263
"But I'm in love with you. What kind of poem does an
old man make for his concubine?"
So Ling sang for her five Chinese poems—in what he
thought was the dialect of the southern Sung.
The next morning she nearly broke her leg getting out
of bed because her foot went through a rotten floorboard.
Ling was horrified. He apologized. He was old, and it was
harder for him to make repairs. His family was scattered,
and his grandsons, he had to admit sadly, were incompe-
tent with their hands.
Diana just smiled and took him for a ride in his Chrysler.
While he drove she inserted the Central Coast laser disk
and punched up for lumber outlets by order of proximity.
The best bet was only eleven kloms away. He said he
knew a good place eighteen miles back toward Frisco but
she overruled him and called up MapDraw, minimal op-
tion. Slowly, amber lines etched themselves out along
the dashboard screen, indicating just the crossroads and
the signposts they would need. Finally she punched for
Zoom so that the screen distance between car and destina-
tion was always ten centimeters. After winding up grassy
hills and past the ocean down into another mountain val-
ley, they discovered the weather-beaten lumber yard, as
promised—Founded In 1923, said the peeling sign, an-
cient for California.
"I'll need some tools."
"I have tools."
"A saw and a hammer."
;;Yeah."
"And nails!"
"Yes, yes, yes."
Back at the cabin he took her down into an almost
hidden concrete structure that she had mistaken for part of
the well, dry inside and still solid but musty and obviously
never used—except as a storehouse for the odd junk that a
summer house collects, a flaking wheelbarrow, cots, hose,
parts for a dam slipway that had rusted out and been
replaced but never thrown away. The tools were in good
shape and there was a set of five bows and hundreds of
arrows, and a place for the missing compound bow that
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264
Donald Kingsbury
"It's an old bomb shelter," said Ling, laughing. "I forget
when we built it—but it was before Kennedy was assassi-
nated. Sometime in 1962? It used to be airtight with
filters, all done without electricity. People were afraid of
the bomb then. We kept it well stocked for five years."
"People are still afraid of the bomb," she said.
"But they don't build bomb shelters. We have the
battle stations to protect us."
"What a lot of crap," snorted Diana. "I've heard they
wouldn't stop anything. We'd all fry. Sometimes I'd like to
go back to 1962 when weapons were simple and every-
body was safe."
In the year Diana was born in Ohio, the first of the
anti-ICBM battle stations were deployed, the Titan probe
was launched, the Soviets returned in triumph from the
first manned landing on an asteroid, the Americans put
the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility into orbit, and
the Africans spent the year killing each other in the Zambali
Massacres.
As she grew up the number of nuclear weapons was
gracefiilly declining while mankind somehow managed to
survive to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of a nuclear
peace in which not a single year had passed without war—or
without the communist/capitalist arms profiteers each claim-
ing moral superiority over the other in the blood of some
small country. Socialist/capitalist economic morality has
only one commandment: Do not sell atomic weaponry to
minor kingdoms and local despots.
Diana smiled, nostalgic for innocent times. "I know
everything about those old rockets. The Atlas. And Heinkel
bombers, too. You guys had it soft! Imagine being able to
defend a city against buzzing subsonic planes by hoisting
balloons on cables!"
"It wasn't all that easy," Ling grumped.
"Ha. It would take a thousand B-17s making a raid a day
on a city every day for a year to equal one H-bomb. Don't
tell me you didn't have it soft! It was easytime, like the
Civil War.
"We didn't have penicillin."
"Oh, poor you." She hugged him. "It must have been
terribly hard to fight wars without choppers, and super-

The Moon Goddess and the Son
265
sonic fighters, and digiphones, and tank assault robots,
and beam guns, and satellite eyes to see for you, and
ASAT missiles to poke out the eyes of the enemy, and
radar ovens to cook your C-rations. We're all so thankful
to your generation for having the foresight to make war
easy for us!"
Diana spent a happy afternoon ripping out the old floor
planks, then sawing, fitting, and painting the new planks
with help from her mentor. The radio alternately blared
out Trance music and announced the assassination of the
Argentine president, the strike of the Santa Clara police
force, and possible delays in the opening of the lunar
electromagnetic track.
On the last day of her vacation she splashed in the cold
pool behind the dam and toweled herself sassily in front of
her boss because she knew he liked to look at her body
even if he couldn't do much with it. A wondrous evening
light sneaked through the filigree of the redwood canopy.
"I have a job for you," he said, lighting the coals for a
barbecue.
"You just sit down," she smiled. "I'll take care of every-
thing. What do you want me to cook?"
He smiled. "I mean a job opening. Work—as in nine-to-
five. One of my places needs a new girl."
"Are you ever nice to me. You don't have to be. I think
I have courage enough to go back to Namala. Where?"
"You might not want it. It's a costume place. It involves
playing up to some crazy men."
"What other kind are there?"
"Put this on," he said, giving her a shining package.
She held it out. "Brass bras!" she hooted. "Mr. Ling, I
didn't know you ran a skin dive."
"Try it on."
Modestly she held it to her body. "I'll show through."
"You'll look beautiful, if slightly kinky."
So she stepped into what there was of it. Her hair
spilled out of the helmet, a simple brass band around her
forehead that supported oval headpieces which might or
might not have been earphones. Her breasts spilled out of
their immodest cups and her hips spilled out of their
hardly adequate metallic banding.

266
Donald Kingsbury
"Where do you get your outrageous ideas?"
He took her by the hand into the cabin and pulled out
his old copies of Planet Stories from a shelf, each one
sealed in its plastic bag. "Treat them like gold. They are
from the forties and early fifties and fragile."
Diana shrieked at the cover of an issue he handed her.
"That's me! Brass bras and all! And if that monster goes
with the job, I'm quitting yesterday! Where is this
restaurant?"
"On the leoport."
Her heart jumped. "How high is that thing?"
"Three hundred and ten miles."
"In kloms! I didn't go to school in the dark ages like
you."
"Five hundred kloms."
"And how high is the moon?"
"Too high for the restaurant business at the moment.
They have to make do with a cafeteria."
"Damn," she said. "Don't forget me when you get your
first lunar franchise. I'm going to send you vitamin pills
every week. I want to make sure you'll live that long."
"You haven't said yes to my leoport proposition yet."
She squeezed his hand. "When have I ever said no to
you? I'm so thrilled, I'm speechless. What's the name of
your restaurant?"
"Planet Stories."

CHAPTER 35
The zeal of Patriarch Nikon finally drove even a pious
Tsar to contain ecclesiastical power. After the restructur-
ing, Russia no longer had a church: it had a pacified state
religion which slowly, over centuries, absorbed all morals,
dutifully reforging them to the needs of the state, dutifully
rejecting Christ the Savior as the tsars became less and
less willing to tolerate authority greater than their own—
even, in the end, re-tailoring the teachings of Saint Marx
the Benefactor to better serve the worship of the Godtsars
who, by doctrinal evolution, now no longer go to heaven
but live on as mummies in the Kremlin wall.
Limon Barnes
Lectures on the Foundations of the Soviet State
Peter Kaissel walked through the floating dandelion fuzz
to the old Cathedral. There was something nice about
spring and Christ. He wasn't in any particular hurry to see
Limon, and stopped for a game of blind-man's-bluff with
some of the actors who were doing Gogol's Inspector
General at the theater that evening. But there came a
time when he could delay no longer.
In the grand offices of the Cathedral of Saint. Marx,
Limon was wearing the robes of the Patriarch of Moscow,
and he scowled from his corner through a bushy beard—
intense, alien.
267

268
Donald Kingsbury
Holy Christ! thought Kaissel. For just a moment he saw
Patriarch Nikon, headstrong, difficult, tactless, with a brood-
ing fanatic brutality, very ready to draw up rules for the
most minor details of the life of every man he touched,
source of the great Schism which wracked the Russian
Orthodox Church for centuries.
"Ah, my heretic," said the holy man.
"At your service, my Great Sovereign," replied Kaissel
mockingly. Nikon was the last of the Patriarchs to com-
mand that title, losing it to his tsar's ire. Little wooden
eggs lay on the Patriarch's desk, the kind that fit into each
other endlessly with the promise of a tiny wooden chicken
at the center. He had been wrapping them for the chil-
dren. Easter. The endlessly necessary resurrection of Christ.
Limon spoiled his imposing image by hanging up the
sacred cap and authoritarian beard on the coat rack.
"You're a strange man," he said to the mathematician.
"You play games but you don't live them."
"And that's bad?"
"Yes," said Limon. "There is content and meaning to
life's struggle. It's not just numbers."
Kaissel laughed uncomfortably. "It's not just costumes,"
he riposted.
"Let me put it this way." Limon began to moralize.
"You think like a typical member of the Russian elite. A
modern Russian is a master of socialist thought, good at
detailed abstractions and the finer points of Marxist analy-
sis. But in real life he beats Polish workers with rubber
hoses and murders Afghan peasants to extend his borders.
He is not even aware of the contradictions. Mr. Kaissel,
the abstract morality that is coming out of your computer
games is very good—but you don't seem to be able to
apply it to the struggle facing the SMB."
Kaissel's lips curled sarcastically. "Are you daring me to
simulate the great capitalist/socialist drama?"
"That is hardly our struggle." Limon took an egg apart,
and examined the egg within, and took that egg apart.
"The greater struggle is less clear-cut; it's the ancient
conflict between the iron tower of the ethics we all build
and the hypocrisy we use to paint over the creeping rust."
"Ah; the one true struggle."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
269
"I could use a little help," mused Limon.
"At your service, Great Sovereign!" Kaissel replied with
suppressed scorn. "I shall immediately simulate the war of
good against evil ... by next week I'll have figured out a
winning strategy for the forces of good. We shall call the
program ParadiseLost. If it works, God can retire in our
favor."
Limon ignored the taunt and continued to dismantle the
egg until he reached the pea-sized chicken. "Don't be in
such a rush. Our immediate task is to fire Peter Kaissel
because of his lack of personal ethics."
What was this? Kaissel could sense a deep rancor and,
suddenly, a very delicate situation which called for silver-
tongued smoothness. But all he managed was indignation.
"I have a very strong sense of personal ethics! I don't have
to dress up like a messenger of God."
"You are referring to my Patriarch getup? An interesting
man, Nikon. Hardly my idea of morality, but a man every
student of Russia cannot ignore. Nikon's arrogance created
a popular dissent movement so strong that it marked for-
ever the way in which Russian people choose to oppose
interference in their lives from above. Entire communities
of Old Believers fled into the forests. Dissidents locked
themselves in coffins. They set themselves on fire. They
moved to Siberia. They endured exile and constant gov-
ernment harassment, defying torture and persecution de-
signed to break them. They were the source of the Christian
anarchists who were the source of. . . but I deviate. We
were talking about your morality."
The wigless, beardless Patriarch transfixed Kaissel. "I
should have you knouted in public!"
Oh, oh. He's found out about my larks! Kaissel was put
on the defensive and it annoyed him to be there. He was
defiant, but images of teaching undergraduates at Florida
State tempered his resolve. "Are you sure I'm replacea-
ble? Ask Synmann."
"Stalin killed those at the top, so as not to frustrate the
ambitions of the upwardly mobile. We are all expendable."
Kaissel's eyes narrowed, remembering Limon's black
sense of humor. Play it cool. He said nothing.
"I have evidence that you are an enemy of the people!"

270
Donald Kingsbury
A chill went down Kaissel's spine. That was Stalin's
phrase. Did the very books about Russia contain the virus
of Russian paranoia, ready to attack the reader? He laughed.
"I play in your coat closet, and for that I'm shot at dawn?"
Limon smiled dangerously. "So that was you? By all
means, dream in my closet. Dreams I tolerate; sabotage, I
cannot."
Sabotage was Stalin's favored crime. "This place is a
freak show," yelled Kaissel, "but I do my job! Sabotage, I
don't."
"You are not a dedicated man. You are not an ethical
man. I see our purpose at the SMB as a highly ethical one.
It has to be if we are to achieve our goal. We have to be
rigorous. We have to be strict. After all, I have very poor
raw material to work with. Americans. If you don't watch
an American like he was some damn curious three year
old, he's off on some crusade like bombing Vietnamese
peasants to defend them against having opinions forced
down their throats."
This lunatic is after my ass! thought Kaissel.
"Hmmm. You have a look of innocence upon your face.
The Catholics insist that we are born sinners while the
Unitarians insist that we are born innocent. It's all the
same. Innocence is the primeval American sin." Limon's
soul seemed to harbor a vast reservoir of malice. "Ah, my
innocent Kaissel, let me tell you about yourself since you
seem to know nothing. In recent weeks I've begun to
notice small strange events. The intrusions into my office
have been the least of these. How long this has been going
on I don't know. I put some traps in the computer's
call-up routines which confirmed unauthorized penetra-
tion of the files. Peter, it seems, has a friend. He gives
him the run of the library."
"Limon! We're also hooked into the phone network."
Limon dismissed Kaissel's dismissal with a quick repar-
tee. "Your friend has been searching Synmann's leoport
files, not knowing he was being logged."
"Synmann has a code on those," said Kaissel, startled.
"Well, his damn code is shit. Only the copyright rou-
tines have kept our guest from making copies. He's been
interested in breaking our copy-protect. He doesn't seem

The Moon Goddess and the Son
271
to know that he has to have a royalty contract with us!"
Kaissel was now alarmed. "He's just curious."
There was a spastic fury in Limon's tilted head. "You
know less than nothing about your friend. He's probably
in the pay of the KGB. Do you think that they aren't
interested in the architecture of that holographic computer
you drool over?"
"Be reasonable, Barnes!" But Kaissel was panicking.
Not only could this madman throw him out of his job, he
could bar him from any university.
"You have never believed a thing I say." Limon was
furious. "Ever since you've been here you've mocked me.
I swear you go around at night planting mines in the
sidewalks! I hear what you say. I hear your stories. Let me
tell you right now: I know what I'm doing!" Vigorously,
Limon slapped his Kensakan Kambi and shook the net-
working cables that crawled out of it: "You wouldn't be-
lieve what these machines are doing. I can trace things I
wouldn't have believed possible. It's an intelligence ampli-
fier! I have an IQ of a thousand! You guys with your stupid
little symmetrical computer games think that Soviet fears
are a mirror image of our own. All right. I like what you're
doing. But I know what I'm doing and I get pissed when
someone runs around and knocks me every chance he gets!"
"Has Glenn been able to do much damage?"
"Of course, you fool!"
"I'll resign."
"I don't want your resignation! I want you in prison!"
Kaissel was very sober by now. "Are you going to press
charges?"
Limon became cunning. "Sit down. I have you over a
barrel. We're bargaining.'
Kaissel sat down sullenly.
Limon did not. "This is a free country—a helluva way to
do business but that's the way it is. You can walk out the
door a free man. But if you want to stay, you go to prison."
"That's a tough choice," grumbled Kaissel.. "I get to
choose between a tap on the wrist and blowing my brains
out."
Limon smiled ingratiatingly. "You're one of my best
men. You do very good work. But you're not involved in

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Donald Kingsbury
our great design. I've been thinking that prison might
change that."
Kaissel stared. "I can't work in a madhouse! This is a
madhouse! I'm working for a madman!"
"Prison would be good for you."
"I'm supposed to work for you in prison?"
"Of course. It's been done before. The greatest of the
Soviet Union's rocket engineers worked out of prison. He
built the rocket that launched Sputnik I while he was in a
slave labor camp. He was one of Stalin's slaves. Did that
interfere with the quality of his work?"
"I don't believe you." The story of Sergi Korolev was
true; it was Limon who was beyond Kaissel's belief.
"Shall I change into my Stalin uniform to convince
you?"
"You want to send me to the Massachusetts State Pen?"
"Much worse. A Russian prison."
"I think I'll choose freedom."
"You see, that's your trouble, Kaissel. You think like an
American. You want the soft way out. You avoid being a
Russian. They've suffered too much and you don't want to
be part of their suffering. It is easier to think of Russians as
brutes who torture and repress everyone within the bound-
aries of their empire than to understand the other side of
the coin—those brave Russians who have fought the brutes
among them for centuries and suffered for their bravery.
For a thousand years Russia has produced heroes. You too
can be a hero. I have a fine prison cell prepared for you."
"Tsarist dungeon or one of Stalin's Hotels?"
"Moscow, 1937. With all the refinements."
"Shit! And I'm just supposed to sit here and wait for the
NKVD to come and arrest me?"
"That would be very un-American, wouldn't it?"
What could be worse than prison under Stalin? Teach-
ing calculus to Florida State undergraduates. He's got me.
"A lot of Russians did that, didn't they?" wailed an an-
guished Kaissel. "They knew the NKVD was going to
come for them, and they just waited. Jesus Christ, I don't
understand that kind of person!"
"Wait, and you will."

CHAPTER 36
Comrades, we are not discovering conspiracies, we are
manufacturing them. We should tell our party the truth—
that we are persecuting and destroying people on the basis
of slanderous and untrue accusations. I know what is in
store for me, but I cannot remain silent about what is
going on in the NKVD.
V. drovianikov, speech at the leningrad NKVD, 1936,
(shot that same evening as a traitor by chairman of
the Leningrad Soviet, I. Kodatskii, who was in turn
executed as an enemy of the people.)
I
Peter Kaissel eventually came to think of his confronta-
tion with Limon Barnes, and the threats made then, as
just another example of Limon's black sense of humor.
Still, it had been a cautionary message and he had taken it
to heart by conducting his work with unusual dedication.
And so, one evening, while working late, he was stunned
when special agents of the NKVD visited him with an
arrest warrant, confiscated his papers, and escorted him
forcefully under Mongol guard to the Cathedral dungeon,
for aiding spies and slandering the State.
Dinner was foul smelling soup which he refused to eat.
His instructions were to face the cell door at all times and
to keep his hands always in view. The bastards even
refused to switch off the light! When he tried to defy them
273

274	Donald Kingsbury
by turning his head to the wall, he was kicked awake. It
was a miserable night, and only his fury made it bearable.
The guard grinned when Kaissel pleaded to know the
charges. They had been so busy arresting their monthly
quota of "enemies of the people" that they hadn't made up
the charges yet. In due time. Patience. The guard cheer-
fully ordered him to stand up. Prisoners weren't allowed
to rest.
Kaissel was almost hysterical with relief when the quick
footsteps of authority, reverberating down the hidden hall-
way, materialized as Sam Brontz. The guard opened the
cell door and closed it behind the visitor. But the clean
uniform with the high collar rattled Kaissel. Before he
could stop himself he was demanding his rights and threat-
ening a legal suit.
Sam waited icily until the tirade was finished.
Then he delivered a tongue-lashing about loyalty to the
Communist Party, to the People's State, to the principles
of Marxist-Leninism. "Comrade Kaissel, since when have
the Bolsheviks decided to treat enemies of the people in a
liberal fashion?" He excoriated Kaissel through to the blood
of his raw guilt, ripping away his facade in strips. "Ene-
mies of the people are shot. There is no forgiveness. Make
sure you find the correct loyalties."
"Look, Mr. Brontz. I don't think I'm up to this kind of
game. I pick oranges. I'm an average American. I don't
like pain. I love my mother and my father. I want a nice
little niche in the world to do my thing. I want out of
here!"
A chill moment of silence before: "Comrade Limon
commented on your lack of enthusiasm for correct socialist
goals. Your trivial tirade forces me to agree with his
perception."
"I want out of this cage! This is not my game, Mr.
Brontz!"
"Your game, then, is that of a wrecker and saboteur of
socialism? You confess to being a counterrevolutionary?"
"I'm just a mathematician, a lousy mathematician!"
"Quiet! Do you think that's enough? Let me speak
seriously and frankly to you for your own good. Comrade
Synmann is advancing mathematical game theory in the

The Moon Goddess and the Son
275
required dialectic direction. Though I'm not myself a math-
ematician I understand clearly what he is doing. Our work
at the institute requires extreme dedication and self-sacrifice
from us all. Soon we will be applying Synmann game
theory to the real imperialist world. Our decisions will
decisively affect human destiny. To serve the interests of
the working class correctly we will be expected, in the
future, to find correspondences between the problems of
the workers and the solved problems of the Synmann
games.
"We have doubts that an unrepentant bourgeois diver-
sionist such as yourself can make that transition from ab-
straction to concrete action. We doubt that you desire that
transition. You seem to have no empathy with the suffer-
ings and aspirations of the Russian working class. Isn't that
the bent of a dangerous and criminal mind? Can we afford
to trust a man who will be thinking of flesh and blood
Russians as cardboard targets?"
"Bravo! You've learned your part well! Let me tell you
Mr. Brontz, the minute I get out of this cell, I'm taking
you to court and suing you and the SMB for one million
dollars!"
"I see. A million dollars for a night of mild discomfort on
a hard bench. You are thinking like a sulking American—
without considering all the implications." The eyes glit-
tered. "Is it that you expect the capitalist police to help
you?"
"You're damn right!"
"I see. You wish to be placed in the hands of the
imperialist FBI along with the data linking you to a Soviet
spy who has been searching the SMB files for critical space
defense secrets?" Sam snickered.
"You'd frame me?" exclaimed Kaissel, aghast.
Kaissel had other unpleasant visitors. And slowly, once
he was cut off from all outside information, once the
sleeplessness of the constant interrogation began to get to
him, he began to brood on his guilt. He had foolishly
given a casual friend free access to Cathedral computer
files. Synmann wouldn't even speak to him anymore! To a
man alone, the universe is a cell with a light bulb and a
cold floor.

276	Donald Kingsbury
Kaissel was visited round-the-clock by agents of Ivan
IVs "private court," the Oprichina, by Mongol torturers
from the "authority for the extermination of rebellion," by
investigators from Cheka, "the extraordinary commission
for the suppression of counterrevolution," by the agents of
Peter the Great's Preobrazhenskii Prikaz with their hints
of breaking him on the wheel, by secret police teams from
the tsar's Okhrana, and, of course, by Brezhnev's thugs
from the KGB. It was all part of the same tradition. They
never let him sleep.
Kaissel found himself charged with the crime of claim-
ing to be ignorant of Russian law. He tried to reason with
his interrogators—the charge was absurd—but theirs was a
coldly deliberate madness that would have puzzled even a
Russian! They explained themselves patiently. A knowl-
edgeable man who professed ignorance, who lied, must be
planning sabotage. They had evidence that he was hiding
his thoughts about the law. But an honest man wouldn't
hide thoughts of praise, so his thoughts must be slander-
ous. It was a crime to slander a Socialist State.
The klieg lights glared. Why, pressed the interrogators,
was he withholding knowledge of the law, pretending
ignorance to protect the other members of the conspiracy
when there was no escape for any of them? His silence was
useless. It would all come out. They grilled the young
mathematician repetitively, picking up inconsistencies, in-
sinuating, cajoling, demanding, threatening. They wanted
everything. They wanted the names of the other conspira-
tors. They could suggest some if his mind was blank. All
he'd have to do was sign a paper implicating them.
Kaissel glared at these stupid impostors.
"Ah, he wants to be tough," said one of the "brigade"
members to another, lighting two cigarets.
My God, they're going to put out their cigarets on my
skin! Kaissel knew that much about Russian police.
The man inhaled. "Let us refresh your memory. And
stand straight if you want water."
The other interrogator took over. Didn't they already
have documents in their hands to prove that he knew the
full reading of Chapters Three and Four of the Russian
Criminal code of 1845. Recite it!

The Moon Goddess and the Son
277
What kind of nonsense was that? Kaissel couldn't under-
stand what was going on, to be accused wrongly by a team
of torturers who would not take no for an answer! None of
this fitted his world-view of how people behaved in
Massachusetts.
They left him papers to "refresh his memory" and grilled
him cruelly on every detail he forgot. Eventually they left
a data terminal in his cell. Now if he forgot, they would
know he was lying!
The computer library of the Cathedral of Saint Marx the
Benefactor had absorbed so much data—by hand and
through its Kurzweil readers—and had worked with so
many curious scholars, that it had acquired a personality of
its own, not human, but not inhuman either. In many
ways it had become like a doddering great-grandmother
who mixed her memories in senile ways. The staff had
long been calling the library computer by the name of
Holy Mother Russia. She might answer your questions
directly, but if you were the least bit vague or unsure of
what you wanted she quickly took you off on some remi-
niscence that had nothing to do with your question but
was too fascinating to interrupt. Kaissel trusted the sources
of the Holy Mother—they bulked too large to be faked
and the contradictions within those sources were the stuff
of the very disorder of the human soul itself.
The mad Holy Mother became the only friend he had.
She connived with him to survive. She taught him just
enough about Russian law to satisfy his "brigade" that he
did indeed know what they were accusing him of knowing.
In this way he was able to confess more and more every
day—and still his tormentors always found some aspect of
Russian law that they insisted he was criminally withhold-
ing. And so, in a kind of desperate cunning, he began to
plot how to keep ahead of them.
At first, Kaissel started with the assumption that Marxist-
Leninist law had swept away the cruel tsarist past and that
Limon's simulated version of its atrocities was a warped
travesty based on American folklore. His fervor was short-
lived. When he began a methodical search for the Marxist
dogma buried in Soviet Revolutionary law he couldn't find
it—as if the writers of Soviet law had received their Marx-

278
Donald Kingsbury
ism from the foiled students of Hegel, who had all bought
crib notes from a Parisian fortune teller, who had obtained
her wisdom from the palms of an ignorant Siberian priest.
And yet when he turned his attention to the arcane logic
of tsarist law the relationship to Soviet law was startling. It
was as if the revolutionaries, finding themselves inarticu-
late, had turned to old tsarist lawyers to write up the new
order and, finally, finding the courts bewildering, had
bribed old tsarist judges to run the proceedings for them
from some back room.
How different was the trial (1981) of gentle Tatyana
Osipova, a woman who helped anyone in trouble, a real
socialist, from the trial (1877) of Katerina Breshkovskaia, a
woman with whom Karl Marx would gladly have shared
his home and bread?
Soviet Code of 1960, Article 70:
"... circulating . . . slanderous fabrications which de-
feme the Soviet state and social system, or circulating or
preparing or keeping . . . literature of such content shall
be punished by the deprivation of freedom for a term of
six months to seven years ..." Where was Marx in that?
Tsarist Code of 1845, Article 267:
"Persons guilty of writing and spreading written works
or representations intended to arouse disrespect for tsarist
authority, or for the personal qualities of the tsar, or for
his government are on conviction sentenced ... to the
deprivation of all rights of property and exile for hard labor
in fortified places for from ten to twelve years ..."
When Kaissel spent time in conversation with the Holy
Mother trying to trace the law against slandering authority
back through time . . . through wisps of paper . . . and
diaries . . . and scandal and exile and murder . . . and
back . . . and back ... he came to the splendor of the
court at Sarai and a Russian martyr who would not be
quiet, swinging in a cage with his tongue cut out and his
nose cut off because he had defamed the Mongol Tsar of
the Golden Horde.
Pain drives you mad.

The Moon Goddess and the Son	279
The Russians had been driven eternally mad by the
cruelty of the Mongol invasion. So to escape their suffer-
ing . . . when it becomes unbearable . . . they transmog-
rify into Mongols by the light of the full moon, true
slant-eyed vassals of Ghengis Khan.
How the Khan would have approved of klieg lights!
Kaissel dreamed on his feet, while he recited facts for
his torturers into the glare, dreaming he could sleep while
he was awake so that he could enjoy his rest, but it was a
false dream; the hours passed, drugged, and it seemed
that almost as soon as he dozed off into a heap the NKVD
was pulling him to his feet again. It was hard to care. He
just stared at them and wobbled.
The Bolsheviks had often been tortured by the tsarist
police, even though torture under late tsarist law was
illegal. It was illegal after the October Revolution, too.
The Bolsheviks who had survived torture were adamant
about that.
And yet . . . under Stalin torture reached degrees of
refinement and mass use unequaled in mankind's cruel
history. The prototype death machine tested by Stalin
against the helpless countryside, once trained, was un-
leashed like the backlash of a bullwhip to consume the old
Bolsheviks. Stout-hearted Russians, who had been encour-
aged for seven hundred years by the overclass to inform
on each other for a reward, were told to be merciless in
rooting out the "enemies of the people." They denounced
themselves and expected reward.
Kaissel stared, hallucinating.
A Russian woman in a Soviet gold mine, thin, starving,
shows him leg scars from a tsarist interrogation where she
was tortured to reveal the names of the men in her Bol-
shevik cell. Proudly she says she gave the Okhrana noth-
ing and was sentenced to ten years in prison. But the
broken nose and the crippled hands, she admits, come
from the NKVD. She smiles the toothless smile of a black
joke. During her torture by the socialist police she had no
names to give—this time being innocent—and she is too
good a socialist to bear false witness against any man.
While he was being tortured it amazed Kaissel to dis-
cover that millions of Russians had never broken under

280
Donald Kingsbury
Stalin's whip. Better to die. Better to dig gold for the
Motherland. They were heroes to him. When one is being
tortured one needs heroes.
His interrogators presented Peter with other names and
urged him to implicate them in his guilt, to sign disposi-
tions against them, but Kaissel—holding fast to the mem-
ory of the Bolshevik woman who refused to betray her
friends, who refused to break—was himself inspired to
abstain from falsehood.
His cell began to fill with Red Army officers, martyrs of
1937, singing songs of revolution.

CHAPTER 37
In 1953 one young Soviet army officer collected the
records of his class of 1934. Eighty-seven classmates were
shot as ' enemies of the people" before the war, 8 of his
colleagues fought in the war and survived, 40 fought in
the war and were killed, 7 survived the German prisoner
of war camps and were sent to the Gulags in 1945 as
traitors for surrendering, 487 died uselessly in the Gulags
between 1937 and 1945 (an unknown number of them
being shot in 1942 when Stalin feared an army uprising),
and 34 survived their prison terms.
During the dark days of the late 1930s, Joseph Stalin
prepared the Soviet Union for the Great Patriotic War
against German Imperialism by purging 40,000 military
officers. He shot his best strategists in '37-38. He de-
stroyed as "enemies of the people" the heroes of the Civil
War, all of them. He decimated the socialist staff colleges,
the socialist army, the socialist air force, and the socialist
navy.
Hitler, in rejecting the advice of those generals who told
him it was dangerous to attack the USSR, was strongly
influenced by the execution of the brilliant Marshal M.N.
Tukhachevskii and his entire senior staff. He is reported to
have said, "The Soviets' first-class high-ranking officers
were iviped out by Stalin in 1937, and the new generation
cannot replace them."
Hitler wasn't altogether right. Some of the brilliant
281

282	Donald Kingsbury
Soviet military leaders survived until 1939. There was
Marshal Bliukher, Civil War hero. In the summer of 1938
he smashed the Japanese Army at Lake Khasan. In Novem-
ber Stalin had him shot without a trial for being too
popular. He was replaced in the east by G.M. Shtern,
who, after the victory against the Japanese at the Khalka
River in 1939, was recalled to Moscow and shot.
Before the main German army struck, Stalin's heroic
advance panzer company had single-handedly destroyed
eight divisions of Soviet officers, enough to staff an army
corps—priceless men on the eve of 1941. Not having those
trained leaders at the front during the original German
blitzkrieg cost the Russians perhaps six million unneces-
sary casualties during the Great Patriotic War, and prob-
ably a fourth of the Soviet capital investment in industry.
The setback was so great that it left the Soviet Union's
army of liberation too weak to overrun Western Europe
ahead of the capitalist armies of Britain and North America.
from The Forge of War
Colonel Pavel Tikonovich Savichev of the Soviet Air
Force had a fourteen-year-old son and young daughter.
He never confided in his wife but he loved her very much.
He didn't approve of the way she often left the children
alone, but he never scolded her. And so when his son
Pyotr called him up at the office and asked him a question
about the Unix operating system of their four-month-old
Bogatyr computer, he immediately sensed that his chil-
dren were alone. It was his wife who was the computer
specialist.
The boy could take care of himself but the father wasn't
sure about five-year-old Lida, not when Pyotr was en-
grossed by a machine which enthralled him, and so Pavel
took the car back home. It was a good excuse to leave the
office. He found both of his children at the Bogatyr, playing
a game on the screen. Lida didn't know what she was
doing but Pyotr tolerantly gave her instructions about which
keys to press when it was her "turn."
"Where did you get that!" exclaimed Pavel affection-
ately. Good programs were still scarce in Moscow.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
283
His son was evasive. "I got it," was all he would say,
with a slight exasperation in his voice. He belonged to a
Komsomol computer club and they exchanged programs
and advice, and that was probably where it came from.
Maybe not.
"We're Nazi-busting!" said Lida.
War games. Pavel wasn't sure he approved of war games
for children. "Have you eaten?"
"Not hungry," said Pyotr, annoyed at the distraction.
Pavel recognized the computer disease when he saw it.
He had forgotten to eat for three days when he first
brought the machine home and his wife, in her excite-
ment, had been too involved to remember to feed him.
Their Bogatyr was more powerful than the huge machine
she used in the ministry. It had a military-grade Soviet
copy of a Motorola 32-bit processor and a megabyte of
Japanese memory, but otherwise it was an all-Russian
make, even the auxiliary laser disk drive with its Russian
language version of Unix. Most Bogatyrs were going to
industry, but at least a quarter of the production was being
shipped to the schools. Trusted members of the apparatus
could also get them, and Pavel, who was trouble-shooter
for the commission upgrading Soviet defense communica-
tions, easily qualified.
He went into the kitchen and prepared chicken livers
on bread with sour beets and milk, and brought a plate for
each of them. "Now eat! Or I'll turn off the Bogatyr! And
don't spill anything on the keyboard! Or the rug!"
He watched. When the maps came on, it was Europe—
but the fighting was like no campaign he had ever studied
at the Academy. His son was making a deep thrust up the
Danube toward Austria. He looked closely at the dates.
August 1942.
"What's this game called?"
"Socialist Victory."
Rumania by 1942, eh? Indeed! Some idiot at Novosti
Press was mind-shaping the children again, feeding them
fantasies about Soviet might. Certainly Pyotr had picked
up this game at one of the Komsomol meetings. "Well,
now. You're overextending our armies, aren't you?" He
was gentle about correcting people.

284
Donald Kingsbury
"No." Pyotr flipped to one of the strategic planning
arrays and allocated some resources he might need that
winter. "I'm being too cautious. I'll never even get to
France by 1944."
Pavel laughed; he had no intention of putting down the
Soviet triumphs of the Patriotic War but children should
learn the bounds of reason. Very carefully he asked, "And
what is the object of this game?"
"To overrun Germany and France before the English
and Americans make their landing at Normandy. If you're
fast you get Italy and Greece, too. "
Leninist fantasies! thought the compartment of Savichev's
mind which never spoke to anyone. "I see. And is it easy
to invade France?" He was trying to lead his son into a
trap.
"I almost got as far as Paris once. I'm not going to make
it this time, though. You have to get rid of Stalin by 1936
if you want to get to the English Channel by 1944. He
killed all our officers. Dumb." Pyotr went back to the
game.
Eh? What was that? Pavel went into shock. No, this was
not a Novosti game and not something from the Komsomol
library! His interest went up a notch. It touched on raw
ground and family skeletons, stirring ambivalent feelings.
Pavel had been raised to worship the memory of his
wild grandfather, an air force ace who had flown his stubby
1-16 against the superior Japanese Mitsubishi 96s in China
at the battle of Nanking. Until a discipline-conscious (mali-
cious) political officer brought it to his attention, Pavel had
not known that his grandfather had been executed in late
1938 as an enemy of the people. Outraged at being de-
ceived by his own family, he had bitterly accused his
father of lying.
The man broke down and wept. "Lying, am I!" He had
only one memory of his father: a smiling face giving tiny
hands a sweater at New Year's. He hardly even remem-
bered his mother who had died in 1943 from tuberculosis
contracted in a prison factory, where she had been sent for
stealing state property to keep her son, Pavel's father,
alive.
He brought out letters Pavel had never seen, written to

The Moon Goddess and the Son
285
his grandmother from China, forcing the grandson to read
them. They were simple letters, scrawled by a giant who
loved his woman—the daily missions against the Japanese
only a frame around his love. Astonished, moved to tears
himself, Pavel had asked his father why he had kept such
secrets from his only son? His father didn't know—but
Pavel knew because he was himself a closed man who
shared his doubts with no one . . .
. . . not even with his own son. Silently he watched the
Soviet armies roll across Europe as the hands of Pyotr
used the fingers of his sister. She tired. Pavel lifted up
Lida in his arms—"Off to bed!"—and read her a story with
the quilt about her chin. When he came back, it was
February 1944.
"Pyotr, time to go to bed!"
"Aw, let me take Berlin. I'm almost there. Maybe I can
catch Hitler this time before he commits suicide."
"The game interests me. I'd like to play myself."
Pyotr looked up in alarm. Quickly he began to do some
magic with the disks. "I'll make you your own copy." It
was done. He took his disk and put it in its package.
Pavel was amused. "You don't trust me? You think I'll
wipe the disk if I don't like it?"
"It's very precious. You could have an accident. I can
trade with it." His son was almost blushing. He wouldn't
look at his father but he started the game for him.
"I'm a combat officer. But I'm going to ask your advice.
How do I win at this game of yours?"
The boy grinned. "With or without Stalin?"
"What do you mean by that?"
"Tukhachevskii is your best general. He better not be
dead if you want to reach the English Channel by June of
'44."
Colonel Savichev waited until his son was gone—and
then he tackled the program with a vengeance. He first
looked at the code. But he did not find the English resi-
dues of an American program that had been converted.
Nothing gave it away—but still it smelled of an American
hand.
He played part of a demonstration game. It had field
maps to show the battles. There were strategic planning

286
Donald Kingsbury
screens. There were the battle array management screens.
There were resource planning screens. The game had
everything. In the Beginner's Mode it started on June 22,
1941 and began with the disastrous initial conditions set
up by Stalin himself—the strategist in Savichev spotted
that immediately. In that mode a player was certain to lose
three million men in the first month.
He began the game three times. It was a disaster. Only
once was he able to save Moscow. No, this wasn't a fantasy
that gave impossible odds to the Soviet side. Then what
was it?
The more advanced modes allowed the player to prepare
for the German attack. That was interesting—but it cer-
tainly wasn't easy. There were levels within levels. One
had to manage the political and economic battles that set
the stage for the field battles. Three days later Colonel
Savichev was still playing the game, but he wasn't playing
it at home, he was playing it with his military colleagues.
Savichev did not tell them it was an American fraud. He
was curious if they could discover that for themselves.
They did not. They were deceived by the constraints. The
political and economic battles had to be solved within a
socialist context. There was no room for capitalism. The
object of the game was the conquest and socialization of
Europe by 1945. Why would an American create a pro-
gram like that?
In the 1936 starting mode, the player got to go into the
war with all of the purge victims alive—if he avoided the
traps and ran a clean NKVD. The old Stalinists will scream
bloody murder if they find out about this game, but they
are not likely to go near a computer. Pavel's simple-
minded colleagues loved it because it allowed them to
beat the pants off the Allies if they were good socialists
and fast thinkers. It allowed them to save millions—
sometimes more than ten million—Russian lives.
The more Savichev played the game the more enraged
he became at Stalin. The ghost of his grandfather haunted
him—but it was more than that. The game forced a man to
ask questions. What if those military officers murdered
during the purge had been treated as patriots? What if
thousands of defense industry managers and engineers

The Moon Goddess and the Son
287
hadn't been denounced? What if Oshchepkov had been
allowed to continue the development of radar instead of
languishing in prison? What if rocket expert Korolev and
other aeronautical people had escaped prison? What if
Stalin hadn't shot some of his major tank designers? What
if the three million soldiers lost in the first weeks of the
German offensive had been deployed in a reasonable de-
fense configuration instead of by the amateur orders of
incompetent Commander in Chief Stalin?
Whoever had designed the game had been impressed
by the murdered Marshal M.N. Tukhachevskii. (The Ger-
mans were so impressed by Tukhachevskii that the Ge-
stapo forged documents compromising him and let them
fall into Stalin's hands.) More than once, with the Marshal
in command, Savichev managed to lead a victorious Red
Army to the English channel by the fall of 1943, the major
pieces of Soviet pre-war industry still intact behind him.
He found himself asking the question: Who could have
stopped such a socialist army from installing a communist
government in Paris? Germany? Austria? Greece?
If Stalin had not repressed Russia's heroes, what nation
could have stopped Soviet might from defeating the Japan-
ese Kwantung Army in 1944 and moving down the entire
Korean peninsula? Who could have stopped them from
taking over Indochina with the French communists, and
making a solid alliance with the Chinese communists?
They would have had the A-bomb by 1946 and, with the
whole of the German rocket industry in their hands, been
on the moon by 1962, and Mars by 1975.
The industrial leaders killed by Stalin could have
outproduced America by 1970. The artists he destroyed
and the students they never had might have created a
socialist renaissance that would have filled the streets of
Moscow with Third World people seeking the sun.
And at the height of his rage Colonel Savichev suddenly
understood the design of the game. It was holding out the
goals of the Russian soul—the strong and moral socialist
world that might have been—and saying: You followed
Stalin instead. It said: See how easy it is to make decisions
that thwart such men as Stalin; why did you choose to
worship him?

288
Donald Kingsbury
Savichev's rage was at Stalin, but he took it out on
the programmer of Socialist Victory. He did not know
whether this fiend was an American or a traitorous Russian
circumventing censorship, but whoever it was Savichev
felt manipulated. He would report this to the authorities
so that they might track down the perpetrator.
And then he laughed as he approached Mayakovskii
Square. When you played the game that way, the Ger-
mans always reached the gates of Moscow. On both sides
of him, the buildings seemed like decaying Roman monu-
ments ornamented for a film set. Why tell anyone of his
suspicion? It was his secret. Why not find out, himself,
who programmed such cunning traps for the Russian mind?

CHAPTER 38
The original Norman state in Russia resembled the
great colonial merchant enterprises which were to be a
European trademark only in later centuries. Having cul-
turally descended from these colonizing Normans, who
were themselves conquered and trained by the Mongols,
the ruling classes of Russia have always behaved as colo-
nials living off the land and have always had the mentality
and morality of invaders.
The SMB's Holy Mother Russia,
File RUS-GEN-SEARCH-AX
By the (twentieth?) day of hell, Peter Kaissel had learned
that as long as he was torturing himself at the Kensakan
Kambi, his interrogators would leave him alone for long
periods of time. But his mind had been working too hard.
It had been sending poisons to his body, now screaming in
its fatigue to give up.
To the princes of Russia, both the land and its people
were property to exploit and sell for profit. The institu-
tions developed to administer this grand corporation, though
never efficient, though often assaulted and sometimes de-
stroyed, have proved their phoenix-like viability. After a
thousand years the Russian leadership—whatever its so-
289

290
Donald Kingsbury
cial origin—still sees the state as a vast commercial enter-
prise dedicated to the wealth and well-being of the upper
class.
Ibid. AX-2p5
If he rebelled Kaissel knew he would be interrogated
again—for hours. Savagely he picked another item from
his screen search and began to trace it, half of him cun-
ningly planning escape. He knew the story of one Soviet
hero who had escaped from an overcrowded NKVD deten-
tion center in 1937 and had lived on in the Soviet world as
a non-person until 1955.
Under the Moscow laws of 1649 a merchant who some-
how managed to get abroad through the hermetically sealed
borders of Russia suffered the loss of his property and his
relatives were subject to torture and exile in Siberia. This
ancient tsarist law, governing unauthorized travel to for-
eign lands, is still enforced, in almost unmodified form, by
the modern Soviet State.
Ibid.-AX-413
The subject of passports intrigued Kaissel, zonked as he
was. Having a police passport meant that one could move
around the country freely. God in heaven, why am I
studying passportsP Why didn't they just shove a deposi-
tion in front of him and let him sign it? Anything for sleep!
Kaissel's hands moved over the keyboard slowly. Where
did it come from, the internal passport by which a mem-
ber of the Soviet underclass is tied to his land or place of
work in the modern Soviet Union? He drove himself to
follow the machine's indexed hints, desperate not to have
to stand at attention ... ah, there he had it . . . derived
from the Tsarist Code of 1649, based on the census of
1592.
In the sixteenth century, peasants began abandoning
their tax-burdened and worked-out fields around Moscow,
and the peasant artisans their posody, to take up farming
and craftsmanship in the rich Ukrainian prairie being
vacated by the waning nomadic horsemen. Seeing their

The Moon Goddess and the Son
291
income bleeding away, the colonial Muscovite overclass
passed draconian laws to bring them back, to make it a
crime to move, to change.
Ibid.-AR-211
Passports. He was chasing after the history of internal
passports. Keep going. Or the NKVD would come into the
cell. And make him stand. Check the index. Who was tied
to the land before 1650? Ah—cross-code: census. Check
census.
It was the Mongols who introduced the census to Rus-
sia, prior to the rise of Moscow, so they could pin down
the mobile slash-and-burn peasants long enough to collect
taxes from them. Wild Slavs who appeared and disap-
peared from the forest might be caught and sold as slaves
or drafted into the army, but they didn't produce the
steady income of domesticated Slavs. The Mongols taught
the indigenous Norman/Slav ruling class how to administer
the system, how to pen in the Slavs, and gave their collab-
orators enough of a cut from the tribute to make the
annual Slav-fleecing worth their while.
Ibid.-AC-2f8
Today Peter's guard was a Mongol savage, a new recruit
to the NKVD staff. "What year is this?" Kaissel asked
facetiously. Around the SMB, the year, even the century,
was problematic.
"1937," said the grinning guard, handing him his gruel.
"Still 1937!" exclaimed Kaissel with mock horror. "I
thought I'd been here for fifty years!" The slop smelled
terrible. Another day of nauseating food! He felt an enor-
mous hostility to this Mongol who had taught his Russian
subjects the art of empire. But then cunning brought
sanity to Peter's mind. This was no Mongol warrior. This
was just a soft American kid, brainwashed by Limon,
living in a fantasy world.
In one fit of violence, Miami-schooled Kaissel dazed his
guard and left him on the floor of the cell and went
rushing down the hall.
* * *

292
Donald Kingsbury
When a runaway muzhiki was recaptured he was locked
up and beaten and shipped back to his owner in chains.
Under tsarist law he could be charged with the expense of
the search and, perhaps, spend the rest of his life paying
for it.
Ibid.-AS-12g
Peter Kaissel hadn't planned his escape, but he was
planning now, his freedom on the line. He met astonished
people before he reached the door—but no NKVD toad
carrying a submachine gun—further evidence of Limon's
incompetence. It was raining furiously. That would keep
those sissy American fakes inside. There was only one way
out. Go through the incomplete section of the wall to the
north, into the forest.
He was running through the woods, over the wet fallen
leaves, his breath deep and foggy, his clothes soaked. It
was glorious. He was free. He was on his way to the
Ukraine to live like a God-fearing human being! It didn't
matter that he was lost and wet. Some Russian peasant,
full of God's mercy, would help him along his way. He
slowed to a walk and watched a bird sitting cockily under a
leaf.
Damn, but he was hungry! It didn't matter. He could go
for days just on the taste of freedom. Maybe he could
circle around and come down to that farmhouse for some
Borscht soup. The rain seemed to stop but the wind
lashed through the trees and doused him with leaf-cupfuls
of water. He thought the road was over the hill but he
only found another wooded hill. It didn't matter. Yet if he
was to avoid being chilled to death he'd have to find
shelter from the rain. He sat down under an old protrud-
ing rock that gave him a thin strip of dryness and looked
through the foggy greenery. Russia wasn't at all like the
symmetrical orange orchards of home. And it was too cold,
but it had its own strange beauty.
He tried to sleep. The dry bench in the Cathedral
dungeon with its staring light bulb was a much more
comfortable place to be—but he was happy to be here and
on the ground. There was no NKVD to remind him that

The Moon Goddess and the Son
293
life was serious. He didn't really sleep—he was too cold
for that—but he dozed and dreamed stories of the steppe.
It was the sound of a horse's hooves on matted leaves
that woke Peter, who found himself already surrounded by
four Russian warriors. When he tried to flee, they tripped
him with a pole and pounced on him, tying his hands
behind his back. Their leader on horseback arrived. He
gazed down like Ivan the Terrible, and reined in his
horse.
"So. We've caught the miscreant." It was Limon.
Kaissel had not seen the head of the SMB since his
arrest. "You!" he screamed. "You've never even told me
the charges!"
"Do you think it's not serious to steal into a boyar's
house and mock him by wearing his clothes?"
They marched him back to the walls, bound by a rope
tied to the horse. When he resisted, the horse stepped up
his pace and he had to trot or be dragged.
"Try me! Try me!" implored the prisoner.
The mounted nobleman only laughed.
As Peter stumbled behind the horse he began to com-
prehend. There never had been any solid Russian law
beyond the superficial fagade of penmanship on fine paper:
the peasant's fate lay in the hands of his landlord and the
law changed when the landlord changed; Peter the Great
ruled by edict, not by law, and when Lenin took power,
Lenin ruled by edict, for there was no legal framework to
guide him. Marx gave moral principles on which someone
might have built their laws, but when he spoke about law
he meant only the laws of determinism, like gravity—the
river that sometimes watered crops and sometimes, flood-
ing, ravaged a village on its way to the sea. Stalin took
over a Soviet Union without laws to constrain him, all the
land accepting rule by arbitrary edict, never having known
anything else for a thousand years.

CHAPTER 39
Lenin warned his countrymen against the evils of counter-
revolution, but not forcefully enough. Startling evidence
has recently been smuggled into the United States, in
microprint on the back of old tsarist stamps, documenting
the full extent of reactionary intrigue in post World War I
Russia.
From The Secret Prison Diary of Peter Kaissel
They threw him back into his old cell. The new guard
was kind and gave him warm clothes and hot food. He
cried, but in the morning it was the same. He had a new,
grimmer brigade.
"How did you find me?" he asked sullenly.
"An informer," leered his inquisitor.
Where did Russia's overclass acquire this obsessive need
for informers? The words hissed like a snake selling apples—
stukach, shpik, seksot. . . more words than an Eskimo has
for snow, many of them with Tartar roots: words to terrify,
words to awe, words that couldn't be spoken except in a
shaking voice.
Between grillings, Kaissel undertook clandestine research
into the Russian police. He huddled over KGB manuals
used to teach student agents how to recruit finks, learning
ways to coerce compliance from farm and factory workers,
writers and soldiers, even Soviet diplomats.
294

The Moon Goddess and the Son
295
From another file Kaissel pulled the orders of a KGB
lieutenant newly attached to a battalion group of the army
occupying East Germany who was assigned to recruit as
informers three officers, two regular service men, one
private, two officers' wives, and two German nationals
within two months.
Kaissel slowly established bonds between the Soviet
police and the tsar's Okhrana, then made a sly request of
the library. The face of the Holy Mother paused while she
searched gigabytes, for a moment leaving Kaissel with
only a blinking cursor.
She found his link.
When Genghis Khan had been hammering disparate
Mongol and Tartar tribes into a mighty war machine he
developed a means of control loosely based on informers.
In Russia, a country too poor to support a corps of detec-
tives, the Mongols continued to use informers. Carefully
they trained Russians to spy on each other, to denounce
tax violations—giving suitable rewards for covert intelli-
gence. After 160 years of Mongol tutelage . . .
The screen flickered . . . each generation of stukachi
training the next.
In all recorded Russian law it has been illegal for a
Russian serf to complain about his master, yet the same
laws offer a serf freedom if he informs the ruling class of
his master's tax lapses, a Mongol custom.
Kaissel watched the screen jump.
By the time of Peter the Great's Secret Office, run by
the ruthless Romodanovsky, a pervasive network of eaves-
dropping and denunciation was in place to back up laws
which never made a distinction between word and deed.
The Christians say thinking a bad thought is a sin.
Romodanovsky might have executed you for such thoughts.
Kaissel was beginning to understand what had caused
the "great extinction" of Russia's socialists. The next day,
furious after his interrogation, his eyes glazed upon the
Holy Mother's screen, he traced, questioned, cross- checked,
asked for names. Covertly he began his Prison Diary. A
man who is suffering dies if he does not retain within
himself a secret laughing place.
* * *

296
Donald Kingsbury
The communist revolution, Peter wrote, seems to have
burnt itself out in two long decades of flaming arson
masterminded by disguised Okhrana survivors and low
level tsarist functionaries of the old service apparat operat-
ing out of closet Moscow rooms and communicating through
secret drops in public trash cans.
Early in 1921 reactionary plotters devised their master
plan while accidentally reading The Collected Works of
V.I. Lenin which was in use as their secret code book for
the trash can messages. Lenin's major theme was a vitu-
perative insistence upon the one correct line—his. This,
the plotters deduced correctly, would lead to squabbles
upon Lenin's death which could be cleverly exploited in
the revanchist cause.
The critical Okhrana files on the Bolsheviks had been
saved during the disastrous October days and were hidden
away in the mattress of an ex-Moscow prison guard. After
hushed discussions behind black-shaded windows and the
delivery of many messages on non-garbage collection days
inside hollowed-out sausages, it was recommended that
Joseph Dzhugashvili (Stalin) be set up as the plot's princi-
ple dupe.
He was seen as an opportunist with no tolerance at all
for men superior to himself which meant that with careful
provocation he could be used as a deadly tool to destroy
all Bolsheviks more able than himself. Thus the entire
socialist organization could be liquidated. For the pur-
poses of the plot Stalin was assessed to be lacking only in
intelligence and organizational ability, but these necessary
commodities could be supplied by infiltrators who would
do his thinking and organizing for him. Such a man was
very dependent upon help.
It must be remembered that the tsarists were decimated
at this time. Their entire first rank of leadership had been
wiped out, they were badly organized, disunited, and
thousands of them were acting independently, unaware
even that there were others of the same sympathy. They
sat home and drank vodka and complained about the price
of food. This gave them time to plot while the socialists
were busy rebuilding the nation.
It was slow work at first but the restorationists used

The Moon Goddess and the Son
297
divisive technology effectively enough to fragment the so-
cialists into isolated cadres. By promoting different "cor-
rect lines" and using Stalin as a tiebreaker they lifted their
dupe to power. The reactionaries weren't able to place any
of their own in high places but by being the actual physi-
cal people who controlled Stalin's files they were able to
bring to his attention a sufficient number of scoundrels
whom they knew would appeal to him, Stalin being Stalin.
The Bolsheviks classified rich peasants as kulaki; me-
dium peasants as seredniaki; and poor peasants as bedniaki.
Under Lenin, authority in village affairs was delegated to
the poor peasants who were recruited to inform the gov-
ernment when the kulaki and seredniaki hid grain from
the Bolshevik tax men. To destroy peasant resistance to
the revolution's taxes Lenin turned class shadings into
class war.
"Attack rich peasants!" was a slogan that Stalin preached.
By then, on the say-so of informers, peasants were being
arrested wholesale by OGPU agents with large kulak quo-
tas. Meanwhile the Bolshevik baskaks of 1930-31 were
confiscating food for export (to be sold on foreign markets
at below-cost depression prices), leaving next to nothing in
the countryside. What did it matter if those who objected
to working for nothing were tortured for withholding grain
they had never dared grow, were shot, were sent to the
Gulags to build socialism with their free labor? Their
neighbors had denounced them. That was enough. A peas-
ant's rights had never been guaranteed by tsarist law—
why change?
The Bolsheviks made their first fatal doctrinal mistake
by disavowing socialist comradeship with the peasants. The
Bolsheviks needed the surplus value that the peasants
could supply if properly milked, but didn't relish the dirty
work of collecting it, especially since it meant that to do so
they would be forced to face the peasant families they
were robbing. Thus The Bolshevik City Workers hired tax
collectors. Hundreds of counterrevolutionaries, most of
them acting independently, seized upon this opportunity
like starving wolves at a fawn. The tsarists, as unorga-

298	Donald Kingsbury
nized and demoralized as they were, had plenty of people
who knew how to squeeze taxes out of the countryside.
By 1935 the counterrevolutionaries who had started out
in Ivan jobs murdering peasants for the OGPU, now had
respectable jobs in the NKVD, plenty of vodka, enough
money for girls, and each one of them had his own room
in Moscow. It was decided after much trash can searching
that the time was ripe for the great offensive.
Letter writing squaas, patterned after the congressional
letter writing clubs of the United States, began to com-
plain about wrecking and sabotage, named names, and
demanded action. Writers from the Washington Post were
imported to write articles for Pravda about dishonesty and
hypocrisy in high places. A few arbitrary arrests were
made to satisfy "the outrage of the masses" and some
torture begun to prime the restoration fuse.
There was no danger of backlash. The NKVD's victims
were carefully picked to appeal to Stalin—they were in
every way superior to him. At first only journalists true to
the masses were executed. Socialists connected to a free
press were very dangerous to the counterrevolution and so
all honest voices had to be destroyed during the first
strike. Then came the big offensive. In NKVD backrooms,
hordes of counterrevolutionary troops began to fabricate
false testimony and forward it on to the vain Stalin-tool
for approval.
Here was one of the strangest things that Kaissel was
learning about the Russian culture during his prison stud-
ies. Russian villains had long mastered group solidarity,
while the legions of brave Russian heroes, hordes of them,
continued to fight on as individuals, with no understand-
ing at all of the power of union. Working Americans read
Marx avidly while that shaker of men was alive. Presto,
powerful American labor unions sprang up. Yet in a hun-
dred years no Russian had ever organized a successful
labor movement. Why?
Perhaps in a sea of informers it was impossible.
Squabbles are like images in a house of mirrors and can
be distorted and multiplied by a provocateur who knows

The Moon Goddess and the Son
299
how to add a clever innuendo here and a little falsehood
there. You destroy people through their egos and their
fears. Many old tsarists, knowing certain tricks of treach-
ery perfected by Muscovites over seven hundred years,
divided their foe in the manner of hidden forward agents
of a new Ghengis, spreading rumors that turned compas-
sionate socialists upon each other like hysterical sharks.
The morale of the socialist enemy disintegrated. Soon it
took only thumbscrews and hot irons to convince devout
Marxists to betray each other to the Gulags, where they
were starved and murdered and broken by other under-
lings of the tsar's Okhrana who, being the only men who
knew how to run the prisons, never lost control of them,
consuming their enemies, one by one, with amused sadism—
even the communist prison commissars set over them—
consuming all the socialists sent to them like so many
Russian prisoners of war for the ovens of Bergen-Belsen.
Confined to his prison cell, Kaissel had time for the
stories of hundreds of Russian heroes. Who were these
amazing people who could build a modern industrial na-
tion while they were being murdered by their leaders?
They were always taken alone. A centralized command
line that lacks alternate routes and bypass channels and
back roads can be deadly to the very people who wield the
power once the central line becomes infected. Marxists
have never understood the strength of redundant systems.
For some reason it was the story of the wife of Nestor
Lakoba that inflamed Kaissel. Policeman Beria arranged a
false attempt on Stalin's life—shooting his accomplices
when they turned up for their reward. This deception had
been a set-up to cast a shadow over Beria's implacable
enemy, Lakoba, Chairman of the Central Executive Com-
mittee of Abkhazia. A poisoning was arranged with Stalin's
consent. In a typical Stalinist touch, the body of "heart
attack" victim Lakoba was sent from Tbilisi to Sukhumi
with great funeral ceremony. The Chairman's corpse was
then posthumously declared to be an "enemy of the people."
But Soviet law does not function without denunciations
and informers to give it legitimacy. To facilitate his legal
attacks, Beria needed a deposition against Lakoba from his

300
Donald Kingsbury
wife. She refused. He had this young woman thrown into
the Tbilisi prison.
Kaissel followed the story helplessly. How can one go
back fifty years in time and save a quiet heroine who is
past help?
Beria had her tortured by night and thrown back into
her cell, mangled and bleeding, by day. Because she was
beautiful, he encouraged her to betray her already mur-
dered husband by beating her about the face. She re-
mained unmoved, Beria brought her fourteen year old son
to the torture chambers and told her that he would be
killed if she didn't make the deposition. She refused.
Night after night she was beaten, burned, humiliated.
While Kaissel was immersed in her story, he was him-
self half mad from exhaustion. He was in that strange
nether world beyond tiredness where his mind seemed
calm and awake but sometimes fell into strange dreams.
Ghosts came to the cell to talk to him.
In a dark dawning, a starved beam of light clawed into
the dungeon through a window slit. Lakoba's Georgian
wife lay on the cell floor, unconscious, her face bashed and
blue with old swollen bruises after a night in Beria's hands.
Peter tried to talk to her, to revive her, to be kind to her.
"Little sweetheart," he said. He wished he had some
water. He began to cry, sobbing, and that was water.
Maybe he could wet her mouth with his tears. The heav-
ing sobs took him apart. If only he could have held her
head off the floor, but she was a ghost. Maybe she was
here in America because all the Russian apparatchiki were
afraid of their ghosts and she needed love.
Beria had murdered her son, with three of his friends,
because they knew too much—but through it all she had
never done what Beria asked, her cellmate living to tell
the story. Such were the men Stalin chose to rule with
him, torturers of women, killers of children, assassins of
Lenin's associates. Kaissel looked up, the tears streaming
down his cheeks, to see Lenin in the corner. He wasn't
saying anything. He looked disturbed.
As each socialist hero was shot or shipped east a trained
tsarist stepped into his place. There was a big basement

The Moon Goddess and the Son
301
factory in Moscow forging lower class papers for ex-
noblemen.
It was a brilliantly diffuse counterrevolution, executed
by disciplined individualists of the lower tsarist echelons
who had known instinctively what to do even after their
officers had been killed. They had correctly assessed their
dupe. Stalin did order the execution of millions of devoted
socialists under the banner "destroy the counterrevolution-
aries" while the tsarists wrote the denunciations that Sta-
lin was so eager to believe.
Before the armies of Hitler rolled eastward, tsarist
apparatchiki were again the undisputed rulers of the old
empire of the Ghengis Tsar. It hadn't been easy. The cost
had been high in heroic martyrs; the counterrevolution
had taken grievous losses and their leaders had been forced
to humiliate themselves by pretending to be Marxists, even
to publicly worship the despised Lenin. But they had won.
Who but counterrevolutionary dogs would bomb peas-
ant villages from the skies of the Hindu Kush, ride over
defenseless farmers with T-72 armor, herd women and
children into the rivers of Afghanistan to drown, pour
kerosene on old men and boys hiding in a sewer and set
them afire—and dare to call it socialism?
Who but petty officers of the Okhrana would club Polish
workers, and disperse them with water cannon, and be
stupid enough to think that the world would then honor
them as great leaders of socialism?
Who but a tsarist nobleman would accept the expensive
dachas and special luxury commissaries of a capitalist?
Who but the clerks of some gray tsarist apparat would sign
an order forcing a scientist to do his work in prison and
think that Moscow's disguise as a Marxist city was impene-
trable? Who but a tsarist lawyer would have the effron-
tery to rewrite Imperial Law with only a sarcastic bow to
Marx?
And who but a counterrevolutionary fascist would write
dull propaganda without a sense of humor?
"Hey, face the door!" The guard came in and whacked
Kaissel across the back with a rubber hose.
The next day, after his torture session, Kaissel felt like

302
Donald Kingsbury
he had been stretched on one of Peter the Great's wheels.
Too much pain. Too many people had died. Madness
consumed them all, and one groped even to remember
those central heroic struggles that made life sweet. Sur-
vive. Live. Be noble. Value integrity! Never make a false
deposition, no matter what the price. Yet it was too easy
to break, to breathe the mud and die. I've got to get out of
here. I'm going crazy. He looked at his scratchings on the
wall. Forty-three days. Only forty-three. Then it was still
1937. It seemed like forever.
The cell door moved. The sons-of-bitches are here again.
All right. Another day. I refuse to break. I can pray to
Saint Sakharov before I faint.
But it was only a smiling American soldier wearing a
rusting World War One helmet with putties wrapped around
his lower legs. What the hell? thought Kaissel. The dough-
boy held out a paper American flag on a stick, the kind
you waved in parades.
"The US Army to the rescue," said Limon Barnes.
"Where did you come from?" Kaissel asked blankly,
unable to believe his sudden good fortune. A cruel trick?
"Herbert Hoover sent me."
"Oh thank God!" Peter dropped onto his bench.
Limon wouldn't let him rest. He took his arm. "Come
on. Back to the salt mines. The Third World War is hot on
our heels."

CHAPTER 40
WASHINGTON DC (INS) A sharp exchange of messages
between the United States and the Soviet Union followed
the confused fighting in Saudi Arabia last night with the
United States claiming to have evidence that the Soviets
have been training members of Bijad ibn Jamais JASAP
(Jihad of Awakened Saudi Arabian Peoples). The Soviet
Ambassador to the United States denounced the claim as
outrageous slander and warned the United States against
sending its mobile troops to the Arabian peninsula. Wide-
spread violence . . .
i
MOSCOW (INS) A decade of experience on the moon is
paying off for the Soviets. While the United States franti-
cally tries to catch up by rushing completion of their own
moon colony, the Soviets are moving out to Mars. With
the final supply launch today, the Soviet Martian fleet has
now been fully assembled and will begin the final check-out
before leaving on the long voyage next month.
How peacefully the transfer vehicle moved between the
Space Operations Center and the factory modules of the
leoport. It drifted above the shore of Earth, staying within
sight of that immense landspread like a fragile coastal ship
of ancient Rome hugging the night beaches of the Medi-
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Donald Kingsbury
terranean by starlight. There were eighteen on the cramped
benches—to Diana's whimsical fancy, enslaved oarsmen.
Her seatmate was a battle station construction worker, too
far from the shore for his own liking, counting the days
until he could walk upon the ground again.
Diana kept to herself her slight contempt for this tiny
coastal bireme. Her mind was on the farther ranging ships
which plied the routes beyond this Gibraltar of a later
Roman Empire to the mysteries beyond: the lunar colony.
God, the moon was bright! Almost full. The stars re-
minded her of the magical stars above the Wyoming moun-
tains on that evening at the rest stop long ago when she
was running away from home. But the porthole was too
small. If only she could walk on deck and have the whole
of the sky! But they didn't allow "slaves" topside.
Already she was impatient to go to work. She had been
bumped from a direct saucer flight to the leoport and
routed by shuttle through Big Mama where she had spent
the last three days introducing herself to free fall and
waiting for a berth on the transfer vehicle.
"You got a job at the port?" asked her companion.
"Yeah."
"Pharmaceuticals, I'll bet. Wenches are always in
pharmaceuticals."
"No."
"Nursing?"
"No. The oldest profession."
He blushed but placed a friendly hand on her knee and
was about to say something when . . .
She interrupted him. "Not that. The military. I'm an Air
Force Major General on an inspection tour."
Quickly he took his hand away. "Aw, you're too young."
"In the Space Wing we get promoted fast." She paused.
"Well, not that fast: I'm already thirty-seven."
"Thirty-seven!" he croaked.
"Slow-aging runs in the family, boy. We're immortal."
And she squeezed his knee. "Flabby. You've been in
space too long."
"You're pulling my leg."
"I can do that, too. What are you in for?"

The Moon Goddess and the Son	305
"I'm being transferred to hot-shot factory construction.
Pharmaceuticals."
Suddenly, as their "bireme" rolled, she forgot everything
she was thinking. They began a slow approach to the leoport.
Two hundred and ten kilometers of this tunnel-in-the-sky
ran parallel to the planet below, an endlessly repetitive
array of huge golden disks that looked solid when you
stared along the dwindling length of the leoport, but trans-
parent, like a Venetian blind, when you looked straight at
it. The netting of rectennae shimmered. Attached to the far
side, like boats harbored by some three dimensional ma-
rina, were eyries for industrial use and eyries for living.
It was awesome.
A man behind Diana was explaining leoport stability.
She heard words like "tidal forces." The tides on the
leoport tried to pull it into a vertical position. That caught
her curiosity; how did something without oceans have
tides? ". . . counteract the drift toward the vertical . . .
with an axial field that controls its length." She peered
over her shoulder. The man was demonstrating with hands
that pretend-played an accordion. "Shortening the leoport
increases its spin; lengthening decreases the spin. Conser-
vation of angular momentum. You apply a spin-torque that
opposes any tidal-torque."
"Yeah, but I always worry about the power it takes," said
the companion, "They're always correcting for buckle or
spin. And absorbing the punches of those saucers!"
". . . supercooling ..."
. . twenty-thousand refrigerators. Think of it. Some-
thing's got to go wrong!"
"Ah, come on. They have one moving part and that
rotates on magnetic bearings . . . here, I'll draw you a
picture."
Diana couldn't see the picture so she lost interest in the
conversation. Anyway, they were drifting up to the dock.
This wasn't anything like the zip-bang-bounce of an airline
landing!
She was met by Susan Foibbs who used her magnificent
smile like a salesman might use a handshake. She was to
be Diana's roommate. When she wasn't smiling Diana
noticed that she had gauntly chiseled features of great

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Donald Kingsbury
beauty with the faintly mischievous look of a princess who
has just turned her father's favorite prince into a frog. Just
the kind of woman Mr. Ling would adore. Diana was
instantly jealous.
"Do you have your sea legs, or do you need some
help?" asked Susan when Diana seemed bewildered.
"I'm just disoriented because nothing looks like Ohio. I
can swim. Just lead the way and I'll hang onto your toes.
I'm not the type who gets sick so you can move as fast as
you want."
"Ah, a natural."
They took a maglev car about four kloms up the line to
their eyrie and emerged into what looked like a beehive.
Susan drifted to one of the honeycomb cells and pulled the
hatch on their home which everyone called a "can." "It's
small but we're on disjoint shifts. If you don't like the
decoration, just tell me."
"I brought my mother's leather couch."
Susan laughed and Diana found herself emitting her
sixteen year old giggle and instantly choked it off.
"I have to give you an emergency drill. The rules. You'll
be checked out on it next week—and you'd better pass!"
Diana had to learn where to find her rescue ball and
how to get into it instantly. Her ground-training had al-
ready made her proficient at that and she demonstrated.
The ball was like an amoeba with one arm and a handle.
Jump into it, slip your right arm into the sleeve, put on
the oxygen mask, pull the fabric over your head, and use
the arm to zip it up.
Spacemen wryly called the apparatus a "snowball's
chance." It was meant to be carried around by someone
wearing a spacesuit, but if you were in the ball and all
alone you could use the one hand to travel, and you could
use it to plug yourself into various emergency oxygen and
communications outlets.
When Diana popped her head out again, like a newly
born chick, she looked at Susan and asked the burning
question. "Did Mr. Ling hire you?"
"Did he hire you?" Susan replied with wide eyes.
"I'm a friend of his."
"I've heard stories about him. He's bigger than life."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
307
The mischievous look came back to Susan's fine features.
"Do you really know him? We have lots of gossiping to do!"
"How did you get your job at Planet Stories?"
"I was in pharmaceuticals and I couldn't stand it."
"Have you ever met Byron McDougall?"
"Sure. The old lecher is in love with me. He gives me a
hug and a kiss and a proposition every time I meet him."
"Oh boy, do we have a lot to gossip about!"
Susan showed her how their "can" metamorphosed. With
everything stowed away it became a basic space for hanging
out. A couple of quick motions turned it into a hammocked
bedroom. For work, one of the walls pulled down into a com-
pudesk for word processing or bill paying, or gaming, or TV
watching, or library calls. A twist on another wall turned
the can into a gym. But the washroom was elsewhere and
they had to eat at Planet Stories or in one of the cafeterias.
A customer of Planet Stories, after leaving the maglev
car and floating down the central corridor of Eyrie-43 to
the hatch of his favorite bar & eatery, faced a two meter
tall reproduction of the cover of a mid-century science
fiction pulp magazine. Underneath the greenhouse of an
alien control room, a blonde and wild-eyed woman, her
back arced, was struggling to remove from her breasts the
green tentacles of a monster with big lips who gazed back
at her with ten loving eyes. In the background, jet packs
ablaze, a handsome Swede with a cylindrical glass helmet
was leaping through space to the rescue.
The logo of Planet Stories zoomed across the top of the
reproduction cover, slowly changing colors. And if the
customer paid close attention he could see the desperate
woman breathing and hear her moans against the almost
subsonic thump of the monster's heartbeat. Headline copy
and credits filled every available spot between the action,
blinking for attention or shifting colors or sparkling.
conquerors from callisto
by Janice Mannely
the witches of saturn's metal world
a new Green Eyes saga
by Susan Foibbs

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Donald Kingsbury
ON THE TORTURED SHORES OF THE RED SUN
the man from the atom takes his princess to times's end!
George Allan Gardener's latest adventure of the far future.
Passing through the entrance hatch the customer found
the control room of a 1940s class rocketship battle cruiser.
The busy "captain" could be seen in free fall, perhaps
with his hand on the Pressor Beam Rheostat mixing a
whisky sour. Beyond him was a porthole and a magnificent
view of Earth filling the sky.
Beside the porthole sat a surly Bug Eyed Monster deep
in his cups. He was so lifelike that the unwary frequently
approached him to see if they couldn't detect a flaw left by
the artist and got the shock of their lives. The BEM
turned with a cat's suppleness, bared his teeth and snarled
at people who came too close. His electronic innards were,
of course, made in one of the leoport's factories.
On her third day of work, Diana popped through the
hatch—a real emergency airlock—whispered hurried words
to the captain in his Tri-Planet Rocketforce uniform and
scooted to the ladies' room where she slipped into her
brass scanties and emerged ready to serve. Serving in free
fall was freaky but she already knew how to do it with
grace.
That wasn't half the problem that the men were going to
be. Here she was, not a week into the job, and an engi-
neer from the micro-electronics lab a couple of eyries up
the line was already in love with her. She was conscien-
tiously working on five others. Having a lot of men in love
with you was much less dangerous than being stuck with
only one dumb lovesick male.
While she picked up her first meal from the cook and
drinks from the bar she chatted with the captain. "When
are you putting my name on the cover of Planet Stories?"
"You have to write a story."
"A whole sci-fi story?"
"At least give me a title."
She grinned. "It has to have the word moon in it."
Diana was very ebullient this evening. She had heard
rumors that two engineers had arrived at the leoport and

The Moon Goddess and the Son
309
were on their way to the moon and would probably be
stopping by for a meal at Planet Stories. She wanted to slip
them a mash note for McDougall, but wasn't sure that she
dared.
In the meantime, she flirted with a group of metallur-
gists who were all excited about plastic-metal alloys—or
something. After they got carried away by their enthusi-
asm and weren't paying much attention to her anymore
she turned to courting their companion, a shy boy in
electronics who was morose about some new high fre-
quency substrate—at least he kept muttering the words
"indium phosphide" as if they were his nemesis. At first
she had been uncomfortable about spending so much time
at the "tables" because in California they would have fired
her for sitting down with the clients, but the captain kept
reassuring her that such mingling was definitely part of the
job.
And so Diana was taking her shy customer by the scruff
of the neck and forcing him to turn his head to look at her,
all to make him laugh—when the Nuclear Peace inter-
rupted them by failing, an event most people would re-
member to their dying day.
The music cut off.
The loudspeakers came on at twice normal volume.
"Emergency! Emergency! Leoport shutdown! This is
not a drill! Repeat: Leoport shutdown. Please take Priority
One precautions! Priority One. A flight of missiles has
been detected rising from Soviet soil. There may be an
alternate explanation but the current assessment is war.
Anticipate attack within ten minutes. You will be kept
informed through your ball phones. Repeat: Priority One."
Waitress and engineer floated, frozen in a strange posi-
tion, forced by her hold on his hair to stare into each
other's eyes. Impulsively Diana kissed the boy she knew
only as a substrate man. Then she shoved off to the emer-
gency lockers of the Tri-Planetary battle cruiser, flicked
them open with one motion of her hand, and began toss-
ing the balls to her customers. She gave orders like a
battle sergeant.
She noticed the boy was weeping and got him into his
ball first. Another man was protesting incredulously. "There

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Donald Kingsbury
will never be a war! Nobody is that crazy! Hitler is dead!
The Russians are nice people! I've been to Moscow!"
"Shut up!" she snapped. "Get in!" The men crawled into
their wombs and zipped up. She shoved them to the wall,
clamping them down, making sure each was plugged into
the house oxygen . . . and then in a rapid set of motions
stowed herself away, into a masked, one-armed blackness.
She was thinking of Ling and his bomb shelter. If only
he were there now! Damn him—it hadn't been stocked
with supplies for years and the roof leaked. It would rain
fallout on him! He was probably in San Francisco anyway.
The tears collected in her eyes in the darkness and she
had to shake her head to throw them off; what a silly idea
to want to save an eighty year old man when the world
was coming to an end!
"Situation report," twanged the tinny speaker in the
ball. "Leoport radar says immediate region clear. Our
condition: fully functional. Confirmation on flock of Soviet
SS-78s. Situation should be clarified within minutes. Stand
by. Do not panic."

CHAPTER 41
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1845
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long
established should not be changed for light and transient
Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn that
Humans are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are suf-
ferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms
to which theu are accustomed. But when a long Train of
Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same
Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute
Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off
such Government, and to provide new Guards for their
future Security.
The Insurrectionists from
The Declaration of Independence, 1776
A somewhat dazed Peter Kaissel was given a boisterous
coming-home-from-prison-party in a corner of the Cathe-
dral that was made up like a Moscow flat. He was already
becoming wise in the ways of the SMB. He recognized the
party as being patterned after a joyous Russian family
reunion once described by Smeliakov in his charming
311

312
Donald Kingsbury
piece, "The Zek's Return." Eighteen sons and daughters
and uncles and grandchildren and brothers could be wild
in the welcome of a man, gone to an Orthodox hell for
twelve years and miraculously resurrected. If the govern-
ment betrays your trust, there is always a family's love.
The Kaissel-as-Russian was moved with tears of happiness.
He joined in a dance as old as the forests of Smolensk.
But when his inquisitors arrived, the Kaissel-as-American
reacted differently. "You!" he accosted the one who liked
to use the rubber hose, "what are you doing at my party!"
The boy grinned a California smile. "I'm your friendly
local Stukach," he said ingenuously.
Kaissel, already too full of vodka, shook his fist. "You're
next, you fascist deviationist! The NKVD eats its own!"
Over which balcony should he toss this man?
"Easy, comrade. That was yesterday. Today we've been
reorganized as the KGB. We've been allowed to keep our
jobs because we promised not to torture any more good
socialists or make up lies about workers. So you're safe.
Now we're only allowed to invent lies about Jews and
human rights activists."
Laurie, the love of Kaissel's life, who had been avoiding
him for months because he was so straight, intervened
with slices of cheese stolen from a Commissariat For The
Socialist Nobility and someone was telling a Polish version
of a Polish joke (a Russian joke). Later Laurie sneaked her
Peter out of the party and drove him away in Limon's
Cadillac to a country hotel where Limon had rented a
suite for them. It was a large saltbox four miles off the
Boston Post Road with rolling grass lawns and maple trees
and had a famous New England dining room that attracted
patrons even from the city. Laurie took her man straight
upstairs, especially since he had consumed too much vodka
and was bowing and doffing a non-existent hat to the
ladies.
"I've changed my mind about marrying you," she shoved.
He tried to crawl in bed, a mahogany four-poster with
canopy, but she wouldn't let him. She pulled off his pants
and gently steered him into the bathroom where she soaped
him in a hot bathtub with iron lion's legs, and foamed his

The Moon Goddess and the Son
313
hair, and caressed him, and sometimes kissed him on his
wet lips.
"Are you happy?"
"I'm in Old Bolshevik's heaven!"
But the bed was a luxury he couldn't believe. Such
softness took every ache away, pampering him. Pillows of
goose down! If this was what a bed was like after 43 days
on a hard bench, he was willing to try the NKVD again.
And the satin sheets and the Fluffy quilt that gentle hands
had tucked around his neck! When she was nude under
the covers with him, her fingers holding his ears, he
wondered if Omar Khayyam had ever written a poem
about the fragrance of one's beloved.
"Still love me?" she asked of his eyes. "I've been mean."
"I'm six men right now and they all love you."
"A Yankee and five Reds? I don't think I can handle
that!"
His voice was blurred. She let him sleep—there was
plenty of time in the morning for lovemaking.
Limon Barnes very carefully did not appear at the hotel
before noon the next day. Accompanied by a young man,
he waited for the lovers in the dining room. It was a
marvelous room full of the antiques of the old Boston
cabinetmakers. Every table had its lace doilies, and flow-
ers set in delicate Chinese vases imported long ago by
Clipper ship.
Limon rose when they came down, bowing to Laurie in
his slightly stiff, spastic way, and shaking Kaissel's hand.
"Meet Larry Spaceki, who is Dorfman's replacement. He's
our resident Marxist scholar and Synmann tells me that
he's a pretty hot mathematician. You'll be working to-
gether. He's a good man—saved our asses. You think you
had a rough time—you should have seen me and Synmann
trying to do your work while you were in the hoosegow.
Couldn't have done it without Larry. By the way, Synmann
sends his regards. He's off on some conference about
wild-eyed ways of manufacturing anti-protons." "
"Send him my V for victory sign with one finger,"
grumbled Kaissel. "My best friend, and he let me rot in
prison!"
"You still want to sue us for a million dollars?"

314
Donald Kingsbury
"How could I sue the man who led a whole expedition-
ary force into the depths of Massachusetts to rescue me
from the NKVD?"
"I'm glad you appreciate me," grinned Limon.
"Just don't turn your back."
"I've got to grill you. I have a few questions."
"So early in the morning?"
"It's noon," reminded Limon.
"High noon?" suggested Kaissel.
"Nah. Just a business lunch. I'm thinking of promoting
you and I want you to confirm my hunch."
"What kind of promotion?"
"Never mind. How does the idea of aiming two gigatons
of explosives at the Soviet peoples seem to you now?
That's called a defense policy."
Kaissel thought it over. He didn't trust his old opinions
any more—they had all changed. Strangely his mind con-
verted the numbers into "Stalins." Two gigatons of
H-bombing could do the same damage to Russia as forty
Stalins. That was forty Stalins worth of arbitrary cruelty
and destruction. What a shit defense for the United Statesl
"It doesn't make democracy sound very humane." He
visualized a dark factory in the Nevada desert manufactur-
ing Stalins. Buy a Stalin to protect your kids! He tried to
multiply, by forty, the number of Gulags, the frozen work
crews, the awful soup, and the concentration camps built
to house the children of parents who had been shot. Why
am. I so sympathetic to the Russians? "It doesn't say much
for American ingenuity that the best we can do is parrot
Stalin's slogan: Vigilance through terror."
"All right. Anything else?"
"What did you do to me?"
"I didn't do anything to you. I played around with your
environment, but who was in control of you? You always
had choices to make. Show me a man who says he has no
choice, and I'll show you a man who has chosen not to be
responsible. How could it be otherwise? One man can be
shown Stalin's crimes and choose to see Russians as brutal
savages, another can be shown the same thing and choose
to see the Russians as victims, another will see self-deception

The Moon Goddess and the Son
315
or bravery or stoicism or God knows what. I provided the
view, you provided the eyes. What did you see?"
"I saw stronger and more intelligent people than I ex-
pected. And some very brave ones."
They ordered from a white-capped young lass dressed as
an eighteenth century New England farmer's wife. After
his prison food, Kaissel had a hard time deciding what he
wanted. He took the leek soup, the clam pie, the spare
ribs with maple syrup, and a side of Sandra's String Beans
with Mint.
Limon waited patiently, ready for more shop talk. "Let
me ask you another question. The ABM treaty makes it a
crime to shoot down a missile on take-off, in flight, and
during re-entry on the theory that we are safer if we make
ourselves vulnerable to the Russians. How does that strike
you this morning?"
Kaissel knew his old views—they were there right on
the tip of his tongue—but he was thinking something else.
The inner voice said: insane. "That's an extremely danger-
ous position." It scared him. How secure could a man ever
be after choosing to make his family vulnerable to a Lavrenti
Beria? "One thing hit me: the bravest of Russians are
naive to a truly awesome extent."
"Explain yourself."
"Stalin taught them nothing. They didn't tear his ma-
chine apart and rebuild it with checks and balances. They
left his whole machine intact. Sure a superior Russian can
move to the top under the present regime. He can be
loved by the people and deserve it and bring prosperity for
twenty or thirty years—but what of the next man? There is
absolutely no machinery in place in the Soviet Union to
stop the top man from becoming a tyrant. Millions of
Russians adopted Stalin as a father and based their secu-
rity on being vulnerable to him. They haven't changed.
They accept the tsar that God gives them. Should we? If
our lives are hostage to him?"
"That's not the way you talked before you went to
prison," said Laurie, startled by his passion.
"I feel odd today. All kinds of strange emotions are
roiling around in me."
Limon had the intense look of a man moving in for the

316
Donald Kingsbury
kill. He held that in check while the drinks were served
and Kaissel was brought his steaming bowl of leeks. The
gamesmaster didn't touch his drink and he waited until
Kaissel had his spoon in his mouth. "Suppose a military
defense against ICBMs was impossible. Suppose one of
the tsars went bad on us and we were at his mercy.
Suppose this tsar was as willing as Stalin to see his own
people suffer and die by the hundreds of millions. An
interesting game. How would you defend all of us against
him?"
"That includes the Soviet peoples?"
"Of course."
"Do you want a military solution?"
Limon waited, without replying, his hand on his drink.
Spaceki seemed to be in on the game, too, and was wait-
ing just as expectantly.
"It's very bad military strategy to attack an enemy's
strong point." Kaissel said that only to gain time. His mind
raced. That bastard Limon never let up! "Don't fight the
last war." These cliches weren't helping. The last war
ended with the use of A-bombs. The military mind had
since then been fixated on nuclear weapon threats. The
Soviets were expecting to defend themselves against a
nuclear attack by another Hitler.
"H-bombs are useless as a defense. Too obvious. I'd
attack the Soviet legal system. If they had honest courts,
outside the authority of any tsar, we'd be safe—and so
would they."
Limon smiled. "You're on. You start at the Waterworks
tomorrow." He meant the SMB's mysterious Marching
Society of the Soviet General Staff and Waterworks.
Kaissel was puzzled. "What would I be doing over there?"
"Professional revolutionary."
Spaceki, who had said nothing, ate the olive in his
martini. "Have you ever read Marx on Russia?"
Laurie volunteered an answer. "Marx thought Russia
would be the last place to have a communist revolution
and America the first, I remember that."
"He was quite correct," continued Spaceki. "The Octo-
ber revolution was an anomaly quickly suppressed by his-
torical forces while the American workers broke their

The Moon Goddess and the Son
317
capitalist bosses without breaking the goose that lays the
golden egg. They went on to become the richest working
class in the world." Sadly he stirred the oliveless martini
with the toothpick of wayward dreams. "Unfortunately
they lost their way. When they became rich they got
confused and thought they were capitalists."
"Spaceki comes from a family that has been Marxist for
four generations," commented Limon.
"I ran away from home when I was sixteen to escape it
all. You wouldn't believe my grandfather. He ran a paper
in New York back in the Depression. It was called
Solidarity—that's before the word was banned by the com-
munists as counterrevolutionary. He was very fast on the
dogma switches but sometimes he didn't make it fast
enough. He was unlucky. He put out a pro-German issue
the day before Hitler broke the Non-Aggression Pact with
Russia. That got him kicked out of the Party. I have vague
memories of him teaching me to read Das Kapital when all
I wanted to do was be normal and fill in the dots like the
other kids."
Limon raised his glass. "To the misfits of the world."
Larry Spaceki clinked. Laurie, who was the black sheep of
her family, raised her glass. Kaissel raised his soup bowl.
"No, not you," said Limon, "you're a mundane."
"Mine is a tragic story," continued a rueful Spaceki. "I
escaped my mad family. I put myself through college. I
got a degree in computer science. I freelanced as a
programmer—made money, lost it all. And there I was,
starving. I was asking everybody for a job. I asked Limon
for a job, knowing he was in the pay of a rich capitalist.
That impressed me. I begged him. I told him the story of
my life. So he hired me as a Marxist revolutionary. What
could I say? I was starving."
"I'm supposed to work with this man?" asked Kaissel.
"You won't have any trouble with me," said Spaceki. "It
is Limon you'll have trouble with. I'm just a capitalist pig
waiting for the next paycheck and glad to get it. Limon
here is the Marxist revolutionary."
"Let's just say I'm a revolutionary who is willing to use
the Marxist-Leninist language to talk to . . . well . . .
clients who have been brought up in that language."

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Donald Kingsbury
Kaissel was working on his spareribs. "So what am I
getting myself in for, smuggling guns to Ukrainians?"
"Absurd!" snorted Limon. "Would a good rebel prepare
to fight the last revolution? What if armed revolt was
obsolete?"
"We have the models to prove it," Spaceki grinned.
"We have been busy for a month," Limon added.
Spaceki cut back in. "Your modeling language is very
good, Kaissel. I was impressed. Synmann gave up on
BalanceOfT error for a while and decided to model revolu-
tions. We had the whole thing up and running in two
weeks. Our rebel leaders were given the task of convert-
ing society-A into society-B in minimal time. The player
we called a 'converter' always beat the guys who used
force and insurrection. It was very interesting. In fact if
we used 'guns' to smash society-A and then tried to build a
B out of the wreckage we usually only got some damned
form of A back again. Communism overthrew Tsar Nicolas
II but gave birth to Tsar Stalin, that sort of thing."
"And what does a 'converter' use?" Kaissel hated guns.
"He can use a lot of things, but we're looking at comput-
ers," said Limon.
Laurie brightened. "What a nifty plan. We turn all the
Russians into mathematicians. They'll be so incapacitated,
they won't even be able to tie their own shoes." She
sneaked a look up at Kaissel's sour expression and took his
arm in her hands. "I'm only teasing you, honey bun," she
teased.

CHAPTER 42
The early craze in the United States for railroad build-
ing, as well as for turnpikes and canals, cannot be under-
stood if it is thought of only in terms of eager investors
seeking large direct returns. ... It is the peculiarity of
any great improvement in transportation that it may bring
tremendous indirect benefits, that the multiplier effect of a
relatively small investment in a railroad may have the
result of greatly increasing the productivity of a whole
area . . . farmers, manufacturers, and mine owners re-
ceive higher prices, consumers get more for their money,
real estate values mount, favorably located middlemen and
bankers augment their profits, and government revenues
rise.
from The Transportation Revolution, by G.R. Taylor
It flew, six months late, but without a hitch. The first
modified shuttle, specifically designed to carry the leoport's
hoops into space, did not look like its parent at all. It was
chubbier because its freight was carried around the "exter-
nal" tank. There were four boosters instead of two, and
nowhere any wings. A squat, manless module carried the
same shuttle main engines that had made the parent fa-
mous, but it was the engine module that dropped back to
Australia and the tank which went into orbit.
After all these years of preparation Shantech had finally
319

320
Donald Kingsbury
begun to assemble the leoport. Byron insisted on being up
there with the orbital crew. Although he didn't trust him-
self to lead the construction team—he was spread too thin
to know all of the detail work he should have known—he
insisted that he was a qualified second in command.
The "starting" shack was designed to fit into the old
shuttle's cargo bay and so it was cramped. NASA flew the
assembly team up in the Constitution and four days later
the aging Columbia brought them their "factory." Already
psychological pressures were mounting to hurry the job.
The demand for cargo space to leo was outstripping the
supply—the three original shuttles and the new shuttle
fleet and the shuttle derivatives just weren't enough. Peo-
ple who had reason to be in orbit were impatient to
double their freight thruput and halve their costs.
The crew lost a week getting the factory together. Noth-
ing serious. Just routine delays. First a hose clamp refused
to connect and they couldn't just call out for a replace-
ment. When they finally got it on, it leaked. Take it off.
Byron figured out a way to re-machine the fittings. Then
they proceeded to the next snafu. Nothing went right, but
when they were finished, no one would have known that
there had ever been any trouble.
In the end, it didn't matter that they were late in
assembling the factory. Their first supply shuttle lost an
engine just prior to launch and had to be refitted, reaching
them only after a ten day delay. In the meantime the
Soviets put an orbiter around the moon and stole the
world's headlines. They were planning something big.
The leoport began to grow. Assemblers added rectennae
to each hoop, checked it, primed the supercoolers, and
jockeyed the new section of concentric coils into place,
immediately starting with a fresh hoop. There was always
immense excitement when a new load of 120 hoops was
sent up and had to be docked. The crew enjoyed each
other. There were a lot of jokes. They called themselves
"congressmen" and their assembly factory the Capitol Dome
and their creation "the national debt" because it grew
longer every day. Sometimes Byron would laugh as he
looked at the spiderwork dangling down below toward
Mother Earth, linking them to the docks and the leoport.

The Moon Goddess and the Son	321
Always there was work—checking out the lasers that
kept the leoport linear, staying up all night to kill a bug in
the controls, dismissing an assembler for smoking, hop-
ping up to the powersat to comfort that vital project in its
birthing pains. And there were the tests of the saucer
prototypes. Boeing sent them up, and they eased them
through the loops, monitoring and measuring. Systems
would be tested and sometimes sent back to Earth for
redesign.
Shantech expected the construction of the leoport to
take years. The supply problem was enormous. The total
tonnage needed was modest by Earth standards, but ton-
nage to orbit is expensive. Byron sometimes wished he
could rent space on the huge Russian booster which lifted
a freight load that even the shuttle derivatives couldn't
match. But the Soviet's were busy expanding Mirograd
and frantically carrying out their own SDI experiments—
and perhaps (who knew?) planning moon ventures.
Once Byron had to shut down leoport construction for
two months. The Soviets were testing a weapon to take
out the MX and suddenly leoport cargos were being bounced
by the military for rush American tests of an experimental
ICBM killer. But Shantech never fell more than nine
months behind schedule. The ground work got done on
time, and the saucers and their feeder scramjets went into
production only three months late.
They had one near catastrophe. Byron was a national
hero for a week when a transfer vehicle took out eight
hoops and smashed up some of their living quarters—but
the accident proved out Armsiel's contingency plans for a
leoport disaster. The damaged loops were just lifted out of
the leoport and the line closed up. Construction returned
to normal.
Then, in the middle of the hectic rush—when they were
nudging the whole shebang into equatorial orbit for the
first saucer flights from Namala—Byron was recalled to
Earth for an emergency policy conference. The White
House needed a lunar colony expert. The highest levels in
Washington were brain-storming the continuous Soviet
landings at Theophilus.
Byron gave talks to the politicians and their advisors.

322
Donald Kingsbury
He brought his laser disks and showed off his lunar base
proposal in detail to the technical people. He chatted with
the generals over coffee about the strategic implications.
He wished all of them had listened to him back in the
eighties but he was a pragmatist and happy that they were
listening now.
The United States was about six to eight years behind
the Soviet lunar program, he told them, however, once
the leoport transportation system was on line, the United
States would be in a position to overwhelm the Soviets'
very modest effort and make a profit doing it. To Byron
the Soviets were simply atheists put there by God to be
outwitted.
No one could better outwit the Soviet machine than Ray
Armsiel. For the first time Byron began publicly to discuss
Armsiel's plan to import lunar oxygen into leo where its
momentum could be used to keep the leoport in orbit
under conditions of heavy thruput and then used again in
orbital rocket maneuvers.
Byron was still young, but he had slight wrinkles around
his eyes and the ease of an older man. By the end of the
conference he knew that he would be the field commander
of the second American lunar program. He already had
the aura and national prestige that politicians admired; he
was by birth a buddy of the military; NASA trusted and
respected him; he spoke the language of business and got
along with everyone in Shantech except old Charlie Bond
who listened to his daughter too much.
It was a great ego booster. This is how power feels
before it corrupts you.
But he was alone. Washington was an isolated city, cut
off from everything that nourishes a man. With whom did
one share the glory of triumph? He took a walk from his
hotel and found himself in front of the White House where
he had a fantasy of being an old man arriving here on weak
legs to deliver a "Declaration of Lunar Independence."
Oh hell, he thought, I'll never find anyone in Washington
who understands.
The saloons didn't work out either. They were smoky
Washington dives full of shop talk and rich con men from
the boondocks looking for their daily handout and secre-

The Moon Goddess and the Son
323
taries who reeked of cigaret. And so Byron ended the
night in a glaring pizza place writing a letter to Amanda on
the back of a place mat. He told her that he still winged
over her Texas ranch once in a while to see if she had ever
carried out her threat to bring home Petra's Khasneh.
After the conference he flew home. It irritated him that
there was nothing to do in New Hampshire. He bought a
dozen red roses from the Stonefield florist and laid them
on the overgrown grave of the love letter Amanda had
mailed to him more than a decade ago. He found himself
in mourning. Of all of his mistresses, she was his favorite.
He supposed she was still mad at him for being a Republi-
can. He kept one rose for his wife.
That brat Charlie got on his nerves. The boy was always
lying around in deck chairs instead of doing something! He
needs his father's disciplined hand. Byron took off three
days to march his son through one hundred miles of Ver-
mont Green Mountain wilderness. It was good for the
boy. And Byron certainly wasn't a bastard like his own
father who force-marched children on rice and water; he
made his son bring along decent food and made him cook
it, too.
A McDougall frontiersman had to be tough if he was
going to beat those Soviet Redskins out there on the lunar
plains. It was Charlie's generation who would win or lose
that battle.

CHAPTER 43
"Yeah, but when you snip-neck the compact mode you
gotta F-wave the parameters or you get the squeaks."
"We should undercut the D-phase. Then you never kiss
the squeaks and you carve out range for all those sub-
jollies—which is what you wanna do. You're just hairy for
high spice-flutter. No one hears it."
Heard by a grandmother as she rescued her Beatles
records from her grandsons.
Only gradually Charlie (Jr.) McDougall discovered the
superperfect shelter from his parents: digitanimal music,
DM. Electronic instruments frightened his mother. She
had a PhD in musicology from Mills but couldn't tell a
fourier compact series from a quartet concert series, a
resistor had something to do with the draft, and a chip was
what an uncouth person carried on his shoulder. Her
music education was classical. Though she claimed a range
of knowledge up to the modem, her training had never
come closer to real-time than the compositions of Emer-
son, Lake, and Palmer.
As for Charlie's father, who polished off textbooks like
most slow readers polished off light novels, engineered
music was in the same category as purple smells or painted
cooking. If it didn't have its roots in rock, it wasn't music.
So far as Charlie was concerned his father could be as old
324

The Moon Goddess and the Son
325
as Mick Jagger. Actually he wasn't that old or they wouldn't
be planning to ship him off to the moon. But he was too
old to know how to dance to trance music. Served him
right. You sure couldn't rock on the moon, but trancing in
low-g would be a delight. He didn't even know that there
was a difference between trance and DM.
Waves, repetitions, pulsations, rumblings, the rise of a
violin taking off can all be described by a fourier series—an
amalgamation of sine and cosine waves of different fre-
quencies and amplitudes. A frequency is a number. An
amplitude is a number. Charlie constructed his DM by
choosing those numbers and deciding when they were to
change. He used three of his old junked computers to
execute the commands. He could take a compact disk from
the 80s, rearrange it to his own instruments, and dijj it
down to a hundred megabytes.
He got straight A's in high school but didn't want to go
to university. He was the tech man of a local group who
practiced in an old barn after Charlie rewired it for elec-
tricity. They had big plans. Their leader, Snuffy, had
contacts in Concord and thought he could get a gig in a
basement trancery.
Sitting on old bales of hay and eating ham sandwiches,
Charlie promised them that he could put together a demo
disk. They didn't even need a studio. He had all the DM
tricks to take out the noise and rebalance the sound—even
to "improve" it. Carried away by the possibilities, he
boasted that he would be able to erase Artie's mistakes.
Artie's weird musical slips were famous. He was the good-
natured butt of the group's jokes. It could be a sick horse,
they said, but it was probably Artie.
Charlie really didn't know how to do all that he claimed,
but his friends trusted him and he wasn't about to disillu-
sion them. He did have all the books and it seemed sim-
ple. Charlie was marvelously confident in himself as a
quick study—he had learned to obey his parents efficiently
just to survive so he could have some free time to lay
around in the sun or collect beetles or play with the pigs
or make sod forts—the things that were fun.
It was always chaos when his father dropped down out
of space. He gave demonstrations for his friends. "Attention!"

326	Donald Kingsbury
Therefore when his father and mother started to have
little arguments between themselves about where he should
go to college, slashing at each other with curved knives
while they ate their grapefruit, he decided for the first
time in his life to resist them openly. He started with
passive resistance—continuing to do well in high school
but neglecting to send away for university application pa-
pers. They noticed. A few days before Byron was off on
some lunar training mission, they set up an evening snack
of cheese and crackers around a blazing living room fire
and invited him in for a pep talk.
He listened. Byron pointed out the opportunities facing
such an able student. Junie created images of applauding
audiences. Then Byron pulled out the application papers
for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, already filled
out and awaiting his signature. Junie pulled out the papers
for the Brilliano School of Fine Arts, already filled out and
awaiting his signature. He protested that he wanted to
pick out his own university, marveling all the while that
he was resisting.
"It's too late for that, son."
Mama handed him a cracker, spread with Brie and cod
livers. "There are deadlines. Are you aware of the hordes
sieging Brilliano?"
He signed. He didn't see it as a compromise—after all
he couldn't go to both places, and if he could refuse to go
to one, he could refuse to go to the other. Hopefully, both
might reject him. After he signed, Byron brought out the
Irish Mist for his son, pouring a full glassful over the ice.
"You're turning into quite a man."
"He's still my little baby!" protested Junie.
Three days iater Charlie woke up to the noise of his
father cheerfully going through his closet and packing an
overnight bag. Without being asked he was dragged off to
Boston. They rented a car and had lunch with a gray-
haired MIT professor. When the prof was off to the restroom
and before the coffee came, Byron confided that his friend
was on the admissions committee.
"Sometimes you embarrass me, Papa. I'm supposed to
earn my way." How do you lecture your father on moral-
ity? Were all fathers corrupt?

The Moon Goddess and the Son
327
"Bonds have never been adverse to a wee dab of
nepotism."
"You're not a Bond! You're a McDougall and McDougalls
have defended what is good and right for three generations!"
"I've been overpowered."
There were other surprises. Byron had already rented a
four room apartment for his son in Cambridge, on a short
back street a quarter of a mile from the Charles River.
Yesterday it had been electrically rewired by permission of
the landlord. A telephone crew had installed a fiber optics
line that morning. Tomorrow the roof would get a dish.
"I'll be on the moon for most of your college life. I want
us to keep in contact. If I recollect my own mind at your
age, you'll be thinking you know it all. You don't. You'll
need help. I'll be checking out your homework and we'll
need a good fax line." He toured the rooms. "They did a
damn good job of sanding the floors. What do you think?
Are you going to be happy here?"
Charlie was stunned. His own apartment. Didn't college
students live in dorms and eat cafeteria food? He could
bring girls up here! "What if Brilliano accepts me?"
"They won't. It's been arranged'. And if you tell your
mother that, you little bastard, I'll wring your neck."
"I'm not a bastard. I know you're my father because I
have your blue eyes and black hair."
"Son, I'm sure I'm your father, too," he said sternly,
"but how do I know Junie is your mother? She grew up
during the sexual revolution. Those were hard days for
macho men. You don't know how lucky you are with all
the virgins around today."
I can never tell when he's pulling my leg, thought Charlie.
Byron took another tour of the apartment, inspecting
the woodwork, turning the taps on and off, running a
finger inside the stove, checking the upper windows for
mobility. "Fantastic. You should see the barracks I had for
a college! You are going to like this place. Don't bring any
of those diseased Boston girls up here; you don't want to
die before you're twenty-five. Has your mother given you
your VD lecture?"
Charlie changed the subject quickly. "May I furnish it

328
Donald Kingsbury
myself?" he asked hopefully, telling himself that it would
be the last straw if his father hired an interior decorator.
"Of course; I always let you do what you want to do. I
let you play the violin, don't I? And DM, you can do your
DM at MIT. Do you think they know anything about
electronics at Brilliano?"
Charlie was reluctant to tell Snuffy and the boys about
MIT, and didn't even mention it until late August. Then
they had a last jamming in the barn until the full moon
was well above the horizon, before hiking into Stonefield
to drown their sorrows in ice cream banana splits. Snuffy
gave him a Motorola saxophone box with a 25 megahertz
driver for a going away present.

CHAPTER 44
Karl Marx claimed that a developing capitalist country
goes through stages which, by dint of their inhumanity,
prepare the workers for revolution. It was his belief that a
premature socialist revolution would abort. One does not
shingle a house before framing it. That was how he ex-
plained the failure of the 1848 insurrections.
By 1917 Russia had not passed through the required
presocialist stages. The necessary infrastructure was not
yet in place. A correct application of Marxist theory in
1917 would have predicted the failure of the October
revolution. Indeed, as if to chastise the Bolsheviks for
trying to cheat historical determinism out of its hard pre-
liminary sacrifices, the economy of Russia proceeded to
develop relentlessly along the classical Marxist road toward
the rise of a capitalist state.
Capitalization, according to Marx, begins by the extrac-
tion from the workers of what he called "surplus value."
The selling of wheat taken at gunpoint from starving Ukrai-
nian peasants in order to finance factory machines, the
squeezing of slave labor from unwilling Gulag prisoners
who worked long hours for no pay, little food, and no
medical care, etc, are all classical Marxist examples of the
methods by which capitalism takes root.
Marx spent many pages on capitalists who make their
money hawking weapons to small countries and profiting
from the misery of endless armed clashes. The foreign
exchange earned by the Soviet Union in this way is the
329

330	Donald Kingsbury
foul money of the cruelest of capitalists. The Soviet Unions
penetration and use of Ethiopia is a textbook Marxist case
of the acquisition of a colonial military base by a capitalist
power.
In the final stages of capitalism, Marx saw an economy
moving toward monopoly. Monopolies give capitalists ab-
solute control over their workers' "surplus value." Under
monopoly the capitalist class lives very well in luxurious
country houses, with special stores ana special privileges,
while the workers exist in an artificially sparse economy,
fleeced of the fruits of their labor, with only drink and a
state religion to ease their pain. It is a remarkable irony
that the Soviet Union is the only nation of the twentieth
century which ever developed a mature capitalist economy
of the kind defined for us by Karl Marx.
Persuasively, Marx predicted that these mature monop-
olies would be the seeds of their own destruction. To exist
a monopoly must centralize and coordinate its workers.
Once centralized and coordinated they have the solidarity
to remove the capitalists. If Marxist theory is true, the
Soviet Union/Empire is now primed and ready for its first
successful workers' revolution.
Larry Spaceki, from the preface to Marxspeak
The week that Charlie Bond died, the immensity that
was corporate Shantech held one of its many memorial
services in the Cathedral of Saint Sakharov. Sturdy beams
gave off a solid Russian Orthodox resignation. Tall slender
windows—in myriad shades of blue—blazed the defiant
strength of science.
After the eulogy Kaissel wandered back through the
maze to his new office in the Cathedral of the Moon.
Cathedrals were springing up like mushrooms inside the
citadel walls of the SMB, this one honoring the Russian
triumph at Theophilus. Limon had a policy of lavish praise
for things the Russians did well—to balance the SMB's
cruel awareness of Soviet weakness.
Peter was expecting to be alone with his thoughts for
the rest of the afternoon, but seated on his chair, relaxed,
was Joseph Synmann, long hair combed but unwashed for

The Moon Goddess and the Son
331
a week, Pushkin outfit, once fresh and sporting, now going
to seed, musty and in need of a dry cleaning.
"It's been a year and a half!" exclaimed Kaissel.
"Two years," corrected the old hippy. "Been working
hard. The Reds are putting holes through our ABM de-
fense so we're busting ass to get the second generation of
ABMs out of the think tank. They're turning out four of
their new missiles a month. We haven't come up with any
cost sensible countermeasures. I've come up with an in-
sensible countermeasure," he pronounced wryly. "Costwise
it's perfect but the physics is hairy."
"Need any help?"
"You could get your goddamned revolution cooking."
"The pieces are going into place."
"Not soon enough."
"Violent overthrows aren't change-time minimal," Kaissel
said dogmatically in the terse language of simulations,
repeating something Synmann already knew. "You've given
up? You used to be very enthusiastic."
"It's like derailing a train with your bare hands. I used
to think that when we got our ABM system in place, it
would knock some sense into Soviet heads, and they'd just
give up and put their own ABM system in place and forget
it and start making shoes for their workers. Can't predict
people. Instead they took the high ground and put the
kibosh on our satellites. So we have hardened battle stations
that can fight for a week and they have the moon and we
have an ABM system that their new missiles can make
Swiss cheese out of." The physicist threw up his hands. "It
is going to cost them a couple of hundred billion to beat
our ABMs. Can you believe it? How can they afford it?"
Synmann laughed. "You guys are being lax on your job.
Where are the Russian labor unions demanding a higher
standard of living for Soviet workers when we need them?"
"We have a variant on a labor union structure that we're
pushing—loosely similar to one of Lenin's wild ideas that
he wrote down while living in a hut somewhere. We can
trace it back to Marx with a little bit of Jesuit fasttalk."
"Lenin is going to save the world from the H-bomb by
rising out of the grave and infecting Moscow with Solidar-
ity? All by tomorrow? Good luck. Lenin was an asshole."

332
Donald Kingsbury
"Hey now. We treat Lenin with straight faces around
here. Actually it's not really one of Lenin's ideas—we're
using an idea of yours."
"That's better. I trust myself more. Which one?"
"It came out of the labor-unionoid simulations. But we
have to give Lenin credit. Sorry about that. You know how
it is when you deal with a dogmatically religious society. If
it's good, God did it; if it's bad, Satan did it—people are
only chess pieces. You make a good horse."
"Knight. Who wrote it up?"
"Joint effort of Limon and Spaceki. I did the mathemat-
ics. I think Limon and I postulated together the unionoid
form that turned out to be optimal under Soviet con-
straints. We slogged through four hundred variations. It
was like being a chemist for a medical drug company.
Julian—he's new—did the similarity-sort through the works
of Marx and Lenin to give it a proper transfer facade.
Kraut did the targeting."
"Did you feed it through that program that turns all
things into Leninist prose?"
"Of course."
Synmann laughed. "For the hell of it, I ran one of my
physics papers through that program once. It sounded like
bullshit straight out of the Novosti Press Agency Publish-
ing House, but it was all there—Marxist-Leninist quantum
field effect physics." He paused. "How can they buy the
sudden arrival of a new idea by Lenin?"
"Easy. It was blocked by Stalin. In Moscow, Stalinist
revanchism is an obscene subject too terrible to mention
in polite society and absolutely taboo to mention in front
of a non-Russian—but they were all victims of Stalin di-
rectly or indirectly and they know it. There are euphe-
misms by which one can discuss Stalin's crimes, and even
a special vocabulary to talk about the horrible things he
did to the true followers of Lenin. If you know the code
words you can sell Stalin as a blocker of the advance of
socialism who deflected key aspects of Marxist-Leninism
into some incorrect eddy. But don't ever knock the Rus-
sian people while you do it! We've learned how to tippy-
toe over that ground quite successfully."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
333
"You have evidence that they are actually discussing
ideas generated here at the SMB?"
"That's right."
"Of course, that doesn't mean a damn thing." Synmann
had become a pessimist. "The Russian gestalt has always
been able to isolate the intelligentsia from any kind of
power."
"Yes—but it is not the intelligentsia who are in ferment.
Stalin's millions of accomplices in crime ruled for a genera-
tion after his death and firmly discouraged any kind of
serious study of Stalinism. Suddenly they all started to
die. How many are left? A dozen? Not enough to hold
down the manhole cover. The inheritors want to go back
to Lenin and rediscover what Stalin destroyed. It seems
the intelligentsia are cynical, but among the sons of the
ruling class it is a mass movement. The SMB is just riding
that wave like a surfboarder."
"Would John L. Lewis buy this 'unionoid'?"
"Who's he?"
"A coal miner with bushy eyebrows."
"An American union man?"
'pfeah."
"No, he wouldn't like it. It's a unionoid, for God's sake.
He'd call it a company union. That's why we can sell it.
How else could we sell a structure like that? Pass it off as
the Son of Solidarity and hope they smile? It's an easy
sell. It ups production. Scads more surplus value for the
State."
"More money to buy missiles to beat our ABM system?
Just what I need."
"Yeah, but there are interesting delayed side effects.
You know the kind—plantation cotton wealth today, marry
your girl to some suave black executive a hundred years
from now."
"There was a long time delay on that side effect. What's
the delay on yours?"
"It's reasonable. Fifteen, maybe twenty years."-
"Jesus, we'll all be dead by then. Blown up. The Leba-
nese will have atomic car bombs by then. I think I'll stick
with the military. Good old generals. They're like women.
You can't live with them and you can't live without them."

334
Donald Kingsbury
Kaissel showed Synmann the machine translation of sev-
eral important Soviet articles. "Take a look at the kind of
discussion we've been generating."
Synmann put on his glasses and read. "You're not doing
very well. These are all against."
"Unionoids are generating flak in Moscow at the moment—
which means they're getting support from somewhere. We
suspect young men with clout whom the KGB can't touch—
powerful parents. We even know some of their names."
Kaissel pulled out a list.
"How did you smuggle in the idea?"
"We're not sure. We tried our first penetration of this
item about three years ago. Not the whole thing, just the
bait. We don't like these things to appear full blown out of
the mind of God. They have word processors. We like
them to add a bit, we comment, argue, expand; I think the
full item went in only a year ago. We suspect that one of
the computer clubs has been picking it up. They are quite
effective in foiling government attempts to halt the illegal
duplication of text files."
"So you are getting through sometimes?"
Kaissel smiled. "Hey, give us some credit. For years
now we've had the kids playing Socialist Victory, the
hottest computer game in the Soviet Union. We have
versions for every one of their machines."
"I wish you had some games for the Soviet General
Staff."
"Remember that jerk I was dumb enough to let into
your leoport files?" Kaissel laughed. "I've kept him around.
There are a thousand different channels to the Soviet
General Staff."
"Disinformation?"
"Limon doesn't believe in disinformation. What did the
Soviet Union ever get out of their huge disinformation
campaigns? They got a reputation for fabricating lies, that's
what they got. Limon figures that someday, just like the
KGB, we're going to be caught red-handed and he wants
to have the reputation of having conned people with the
truth. He's very demanding that way."
Synmann snorted. "Limon lies with a straight face, and
all the time; you know that, don't you?"

The Moon Goddess and the Son
335
"But he doesn't lie to the Russians. I'll let you look at
the report we dropped on them about strategic weaknesses
in their defense. They were having a fit for months. We
couldn't have lied about that and been believed. To cover
those holes they must reallocate about 50 billion dollars
from their offensive budget."
"Oh, I like that," said Synmann.
"Have you seen General Savichev's report on our best
version of BalanceOfTerror? He spent eight pages demol-
ishing it in the Red Flight Review and still you can see the
cold sweat in his conclusion. It was a worried man who
wrote those eight pages."
"You didn't tell me!"
"You weren't around. I'll have a Xerox made up for you.
Can you read Marxist military theology?"
"I'm quite familiar with Savichev, thank you."
Byron McDougall peeked in through the door. "Hey, Joe.
What are you doing here in this nest of commie lovers?"
Kaissel was offended but said nothing.
Synmann turned to Byron. "Attending a funeral, just
like you."
"I thought I heard war talk?"
"We were discussing General Pavel Savichev."
"Who's he?"
"One of their new hot-shot techies. Gives us lots of
trouble, that guy. Just finished rebuilding their big-bang
button. He's scared of us. He thinks we're going to nuke
Russia one of these days."
"Shivers in his boots, does he?"
"Don't you fear anything, Byron? I've never seen you
afraid."
"Well, he can shiver in his boots, but I'm not afraid of
Americans. I trust Americans. I know them pretty well. I
know we're not going to use those bombs." At Synmann's
silence, Byron added glibly, "My mother told me."
"Obviously you didn't hear that rumor from a Jap," said
the physicist sarcastically. "Yeah, he's afraid of us but he's
not afraid of accidents. "
"You're still flying that biplane about accidental war,
eh?"
"Yeah. I sound like a broken record."

336
Donald Kingsbury
"Ever since they had records that broke, eh? Relax.
Hey, that's right. Back in the days of Hiroshima they had
wax records that cracked." Then, Byron, ever the gentle-
man, noticed that he had been ignoring Kaissel. "I think
this Savichev doesn't believe in accidents because he's not
expecting them. Why do you think General Savichev doesn't
believe in accidents?"
Kaissel laughed. "That's a good question." He couldn't
stay offended at Byron for very long. "I suppose the Rus-
sians believe in cause and effect—that was big in the
nineteenth century. Marx certainly didn't believe in acci-
dents; everything had its economic cause."
Byron pulled up a chair backwards and sat down. "They
all plagiarized the same books, that generation. Freud
didn't believe in accidents, either. If you broke a leg, it
wasn't accidental—it was the will of your subconscious
mind. I cut my toe the other day and my wife accused me
of punishing myself. She reads Freud. I can't think of a
single nineteenth century scientist who would even look at
anything that he couldn't put into a causal structure. Acci-
dents were taboo. Life had to be reduced to Newtonian
determinism."
"Well, I've studied quantum mechanics and I believe in
accidents," grumbled Synmann.
"General Savichev ..."
But Kaissel wasn't listening to the conversation any-
more. He had suddenly focused on the flaw in Savichev's
reasoning. The general was assuming, without being able
to stand away and look at his assumptions, that Marxist
determinism implied a determined future that you could
look up in a book. Since Marxist methods did not deduce
such things as accidental nuclear wars, then no accidental
nuclear war existed in the future. Therefore if the Ameri-
cans were introducing the idea of "military accidents" into
their defense planning it was because they were planning
to have an "accident" with the Soviet people. No Soviet
general wanted to be caught being deceived by such foul
tricks . . . and so it went. Kaissel always found it difficult
to follow the "logic" of non-mathematicians. Once he had
spent months figuring out what was going on in Laurie's
mind.

The Moon Goddess and the Son	337
Let's see now . . . how did one fox such thinking?
Always use a man's own logic against him. Peter thought
about trying the direct approach; write Savichev a polite
letter. But first he would have to look up the Marxist
analog for "accident."
Hmmm . . . Marx never dealt with the subject, not
being a practical man. Stalin thought of accidents as "sabo-
tage." That wouldn't do. The Russian Orthodox Church
thought of accidents as "the will of God." No good. Kaissel
was temporarily stymied. Then he laughed because he
couldn't even find an equivalent American analog. Ameri-
can non-mathematicians had no concept for "accident"
either; in the event of unpredicted and unpleasant hap-
penings there was always some rich person/corporation
who was blamable enough to be sued.
Kaissel noticed that Byron was observing him quizzi-
cally and that no one was talking.
"Mathematicians go into unexpected trance states,"
Synmann explained. "It's a mild form of epilepsy."
"I was on the moon," said Kaissel.
"Maybe you can tell me how much Russian I'm going to
need to speak when I get there," said Byron. "I'll be
buying land from the locals in exchange for my beads—
and sign language is difficult from inside a spacesuit."
"Our language labs are right downstairs."
"That's just where I came from. There must be an easier
way. I was wandering up here looking for Phil Moser."
"Ah, Moser. Down the hall."
Kaissel took him to meet Phil and Moser showed Byron
the SMB's prototype Pigeon, the size of a briefcase. Any
document written in P-English was translated by the ma-
chine into an artificial language called Pigeon. If the oper-
ator selected for output in P-Russian, the machine, which
was a sixty-four mode parallel processor, printed out a
perfect translation instantly. P-English was a subset of
English with a vocabulary of 8000 words and a fourth
grade level grammar. It was not an elegant language but
there was very little you couldn't say in it.
Byron typed in some James Joyce from memory and the
Pigeon gave him error messages. Word not in vocabulary.
Unknown grammatical construction. And with cryptic hor-

338
Donald Kingsbury
ror, Idiom! Byron laughed and typed in, "I am coming to
visit you tomorrow across the sands of the moon. I am
bringing my wife and a bottle of booze." The Pigeon
rejected "booze." Byron substituted "alcohol" and the printer
immediately spewed out two lines of Cyrillic print.
"I want it! I want it!" screeched Byron.
Kaissel, ignored, returned to his office to chat with
Synmann. "Well, I know what brought him here. What
are you here for?"
"I'm here because Byron's here. Been hunting him down
all over the East Coast. Military project. I need mass and
a vacuum. Earth has the mass but not the vacuum. Space
has the vacuum but not the mass. That leaves the moon.
Byron will have to tell me if it can be built."
"You should come and see us more often."
Synmann put his feet up on Kaissel's desk. "Can't, Too
busy. It's your show." He looked very crestfallen, tired.
"We could use your input," said Kaissel gently.
"I've given up on you guys. It's too slow, too chancy.
Who knows if we can make a science out of revolution? Or
do it on time. In the meantime as long as the Russians are
building missiles to penetrate our defense, I'm going to be
building ABMs to stop them. I'm good at it. Who can do it
better than I can?"
When Synmann left with Byron, chatting and morose no
longer, Kaissel just stood there full of hollow. It was like
being rejected by your own father. Synmann didn't be-
lieve. What a waste of a great man, to be hatching missiles
like a hen! Kaissel tried to work. He shuffled papers. He
let old games go by on the screen. Nothing happened to
fill the hollow.
He picked up the phone and pressed an L and an I.
"Limon here."
"This is Peter. Laurie and I are having dinner in the
back yard tonight. Thought you might like to join us."
"Hell yes. I feel like I'm growing wires into the Holy
Mother. At six. I'm always prompt. Right on the nose."
Good old Limon. There was a man who never gave up.
He'd hitch you to his wagon and beat you till he got where
he was going. Now that was reliability!

CHAPTER 45
The little jet airplane buzzed south above the wilderness
of Quebec, following the rocky stream bed of the Blanche
at low altitude. It cut across the Ottawa River near Upper
Duck Island and banked to the right over the city for a
full U-turn, first along Highway 417 and then up the
Rideau. A few strollers in Strathcona Park had time to see
it fly straight into the southern wall of the Soviet Embassy
which rose up out of the greenery by the river like an
ancient blank embattlement. For the blink of an eye—a
hole. Then the whole wall exploded outward, as if some
satanic magic had converted the bricks into thunderclouds
of flame. At the speed of sound the windows along Wilbrod
and Stewart and Daly shattered. Above the wall the su-
perstructure of penthouses stood for a surprised moment
before gently collapsing into the inferno.
from Terrorism in Canada, Green Maple Press.
It was marvelous to be on his own. All Charlie McDougall
had to do was go to classes and follow directions. But the
amount of study horrified him. It was like having five
fathers loading on the extra work. He couldn't juggle the
assignments in his head any more. Sometimes he couldn't
even finish by six thirty. He liked to get his homework on
the fax and delivered to his father before supper but at
least once a week his plans went wrong and he had to
slave on until nine or ten at night.
339

340
Donald Kingsbury
The day his father dropped down the lunar skyhook
Charlie spent all afternoon in a Boston tavern watching the
descent on TV. It was hard to sit around and drink beer
with truck drivers to whom one's old man was a hero.
They whooped it up like they had made a transcontinental
run to the moon themselves. When Charlie arrived home
at dusk, slightly drunk, he found his dad's usual notes in
his E-mail file: selected items from a lab report, a shortcut
to take when solving dynamics problems, and a reminder
about the diseased Boston girls who hung around Merrimac
Street. There was no mention of the moon. Yet Byron had
been writing his comments while the moon filled half his
sky.
To save time Charlie took to eating meals with a group
of four Afghan MIT students in the apartment below him.
They were good cooks, even if it didn't taste like Junie's
food, and he was glad to help them out with a little money
which seemed to be in short supply down there. They
were all from families which had been decimated by the
socialist armies of the Soviet Union.
Not having to worry about food gave Charlie more eve-
ning time for the interesting work on his music. One night
at home when he was on a high-f buzz—he'd been mixing
drinks, half Pepsi and half Coke—he found he knew enough
to be able to create his own language for simulating instru-
ments. After that it was a simple matter for him to write a
routine for oboe or violin or harmonica. He put ten violins
on file, four of them matching in sound the finest violins
ever crafted, the other six of a haunting timbre that could
never come from a real violin, wood lacking the proper
resonant qualities.
He had been programming ever since he had learned to
read by typing to a screen. The courses that MIT gave in
programming weren't even worth taking, except maybe
their graduate courses, but he had a lot of trouble with the
DM hardware. He just didn't know enough yet. His chief
cook, Yahya Karargah, who was a graduate student in
electronics, took pity and would sit for hours with him
explaining the magic of silicon and wire over Afghan tea.
Charlie, in return, did Yahya's programming.
Yahya was a quiet man who spoke little about his violent

The Moon Goddess and the Son
341
past. His right hand he couldn't lift above his shoulder
because of an old wound. He wryly called it "Kalashnikov
arthritis." It didn't stop him from repairing the tricycles
and ray guns of the local children. Yahya had never seen a
computer until he was eighteen and, though he could
build them, he was never at ease programming even a
simple von Neumann machine, to say nothing of a para-
lyzer. He would come upstairs and listen for long hours to
Charlie's music, wondering at that weird use of a computer.
Charlie's DM strings moved with the freedom of an
electron played by ghost equations. He couldn't stop ex-
ploring. He doodled up new instruments in pensive mo-
ments between studying for his courses and gave their
sound-drivers frivolous names like the pooh and the eeyore
and the kanga. His own kanga and pooh composition blasted
into his ears while he studied the theory of light amplifica-
tion in p-folded optical fibers.
One day a detailed questionnaire arrived by fax from the
moon. Who was Charlie seeing, when and why? Dutifully
he replied. Back snapped a 5000 byte note, rolled out in
six-character-per inch boldface, admonishing him to reor-
ganize his social life. The social contacts he made at MIT
were to last him his whole life. Charlie sighed. Something
else to do. He joined an MIT aeronautical club—and
found himself skimming over the river and sometimes
flopping about on Dorchester Bay testing kite-driven boats.
Since Charlie didn't like getting wet he joined a sub-
group of the club which had smuggled, from California, a
laser disk CAD program that claimed to embody all that
was known about aeronautical engineering in half a gigabyte.
The rest of the disk contained a set of lavishly indexed
aerospace reference books. Since Charlie had the only
computer that could easily run the program, they met at
his place.
They decided to try to design a cheap aircraft out of
standard parts but they got bogged down on its function.
Was it to be a weekend aircraft? a long-ranged flyer? a
low-powered spy aircraft to overfly Harvard yachts? Some-
one even suggested that they build it—otherwise what was
the point of restricting themselves to standard parts? Yahya
Karargah, who was not a member of the group, suggested

342
Donald Kingsbury
a homemade cruise missile. He wasn't serious, but there
was a gleam in his eye. That struck them as an interesting
challenge.
Charlie organized the group into four teams of two;
Yahya fed them. It took one week of evenings to learn how
to use the program—but only an intensive effort over the
weekend to design the cruise missile itself, minus guid-
ance. Range 900 kloms. Bomb load, half a ton. Monday
morning they printed out the drawings on the big drafting
plotter at MIT complete with a list of the parts and part
suppliers.
Charlie's paralyzer was 250 times as fast as an old IBM
PC, but it was still no Cray and it took a week of running
non-stop to do the "wind tunnel" simulations. They learned
that the vehicle performed very close to the design specifi-
cations. After that the group lost interest. But Charlie was
a completist and spent the next year, off and on, putting
the guidance package together with Yahya.
His research showed him that it had taken hundreds of
engineers years to build the first cruise missile guidance
system. But that was a long time ago. With Yahya, Charlie
merely stripped down an autopilot toy that his mother had
bought for the family Cessna and, after analysis, added a
new board designed by the Afghan and programmed by
Charlie. The original toy, which cost $2700, landed Junie's
Cessna automatically at the Stonefield airport in any
weather. It could land at any airport for which it had a
memory. It used, but did not require, control tower assis-
tance. Probably it was a direct descendant of the original
cruise missile pilots.
Charlie stuck to the problem because it was a much
faster way of learning electronics than taking a course from
some professor who was restricted, by Einstein's Univer-
sity Law, to move slower than chalk. He needed the
electronics for his DM and Yahya Karargah remained a
tireless mentor. Once Yahya came back from a trip into
the Massachusetts countryside with a whole goat and, over
the camaraderie of goat stew, lowered his reserve and
showed Charlie how to make a smart mine that plotted its
attack in conference with other mines. Charlie listened
patiently—he didn't really want to know how to blow up

The Moon Goddess and the Son
343
Soviet trucks—but if he was attentive then his Afghan
friend was disposed to answer questions about, say, ob-
scure aspects of high frequency sampling.
By using his knack with numbers as an open sesame into
the trance underground, Charlie burrowed assiduously into
this dark world his parents couldn't understand. He got to
talk to wild women who seemed to be very plump for
creatures dying of AIDS. For the three days that the
notorious Tawn was in Boston, one of Tawn's wives (eVam)
courted Charlie. He bought her a diamond mounted in
gold for her pierced nipple and took her fishing on an
authentically smelly trawler and fixed her mike's "shoe
box" to handle the way her voice broke in the high ranges.
Theirs was a doomed romance and, on the last evening,
eVam held Charlie's right foot against her naked breasts
for hours while she tattooed a Japanese dragon upon its
sole, all the while shedding tears from her long-lashed
eyes for the lost youth of her twenties, deceased now for
two years but not forgotten. The richness of her mournful
croon made the needle bearable; partings are sad and
must be celebrated with grief. When Tawn himself arrived
to borrow a costume from his wife's wardrobe, Charlie
frantically tried to slide under the covers.
"Look," eVam said, holding the foot away from her
breasts for her husband to see. "Isn't my dragon beauti-
fully ferocious?"
As Charlie traded his DM tricks with other practitioners
in mysteriously lit trance halls, he slowly discovered that
he was the one who had grasped the fundamentals better
than anyone else in Boston. If he built a "shoe box" and
listened to an output that displeased him, he could imme-
diately identify whatever electronic alterations were nec-
essary because he understood so well how electrons
mimicked sound. He didn't have to doodle with forty
variables. The power of it pleased him. He began to listen
to trance rhythm constantly,- even while he studied.
On Byron's first trip home from the moon, via Boston to
pick up his son for a family reunion, Charlie was able to
answer every single question his father asked with an
oblique reference to trance. He slithered out of the Cessna

344
Donald Kingsbury
in trance mode and rubbed noses with his mother. She
held him off by the arms.
"They're not feeding my baby right; I can tell!"
His mother was excited when he told her that he was
now dancing with the Boston Classic Group. But he took
his time mentioning that the old director, Morrison—the
one she knew—was dead and the new director was redo-
ing all the old shows with on-line trance-action. Could he
ever tell her what a tranced-up Swan Lake looked like, let
alone what it sounded like? He felt again the brisance of
the hunter flushing a panic of swans from the reeds. Now
that was visual music!
Junie screamed when she found the dragon on the bot-
tom of his foot staring at her the next morning as she
brought him his scrambled eggs and orange juice in bed.
It didn't matter. He could take it. He listened to his
parents politely. But he talked a lot to the neighbor's pigs.
He loved walking alone in the New Hampshire woods of
pine and oak. Sometimes he would hang out at the
Stonefield ice cream shop and practice stripping the local
college girls with his eyes. He was getting good at it. You
knew you were up there in the expert range when the
girls turned their eyes away and couldn't look at you. The
post office lady introduced him as "the moon man's son."
What a bore.
By the time Charlie was a junior, he had MIT down to a
science. For the really tough courses he organized five
man study groups and ran them like a drill sergeant. He
slept exactly six and a half hours per night. His Afghan
friends were long gone so he mapped out the restaurants
between him and the places he had to go, always ordering
the same food to save time. The aeronautics club was out.
He had the tranceries for his social life and the dancing for
his exercise.
After dance rehearsals Charlie usually stopped for a few
minutes in front of Berman's TV store to feed his intellec-
tual life. Berman programmed the set in the window to
endlessly replay the latest news. Charlie knew everything
that was going on in the world that could be condensed
into a twenty second slot and used his knowledge to keep
most of his MIT friends posted on the outside world.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
345
Tonight Berman's was featuring a bombing. He watched
the replay of the roiling inferno of fire and the dazed,
half-burned Canadian staggering out of the apartment next
door. It was the Soviet Embassy in Canada that had gone
up—killing all but four of the staff. Hey, somebody wasn't
messing around!
Then the commentator mentioned . . . kamikaze . . .
Afghan Jihad. The body of the suicide pilot had not yet
been found, but neither had the body of the Soviet Am-
bassador to Canada.
Oh my God! thought Charlie who later found himself
wandering along the Charles River in a daze. It was his
cruise missile which had wiped out the staff of a Soviet
Embassy. How could it be so easy? He tried to rationalize
his way out of it. It was the laser disk's fault! And the
guidance system had just been sitting there on the shelf!
That Russian child who had been playing on the lawn of
the Embassy, blown against the iron fence, who died in
the hospital three hours later—how could Yahya, who
fixed children's tricycles, have done that? He remembered
Yahya talking about an early memory—the Soviet helicop-
ters circling, their flight somehow all the more frightening
for being so slow and deliberate; the whine and the explo-
sions reverberating off the sides of the valley; how he
trusted his father as they climbed past refugee families
huddled among the rocks while the Soviet ground troops
hunted them from behind like animals, his four year old
sister slowly dying from her wounds. They buried his
sister somewhere on a mountain terrace in Afghanistan
near a mulberry tree.
The Charles River was cold and damp, luminous wraiths
flickering through the evening fog like lost children.
He remembered pragmatic old grandpa McDougall who
enjoyed nothing better than to tell stories about war and
soldiering to the children who would someday have to take
on the duty of guarding America. "You can justify war on
the grounds of survival, but I don't see war sitting on the
side of justice. War kills more of the innocent than the
guilty. If you want justice, you can't get there with war.
Damn fool idea!"
Charlie's routine was disrupted. He couldn't sleep. The

346
Donald Kingsbury
more guilty he felt, the more he condemned Russia for
starting the Afghan war so many many years ago. How
long had it been going on now? The adrenalin in his
blood made him rage at the casual high tech murder of
feudal villagers. Only gross cowards arrayed helicopter
gunships against bolt action rifles! What did those fools in
the Kremlin expect as the fruit of their savagery after a
generation of cultivating violence? Flowers? Praise?
Death in Ottawa was their fault.
To slaughter a people with the callousness of a Stalin, to
make hundreds of thousands of enemies, to drive millions
of those enemies into exile, to kill those enemies like flies
fed on DDT, what else could such a policy breed but a
superior cadre of dedicated Russian killers?
But intelligent land mines? Homemade cruise missiles?
He saw again the jumpy image of a six year old Russian
boy being carried off in that Ottawa ambulance to die. I
did that.
In the morning he had breakfast at a place where he
usually ate dinner. He bought a newspaper. He never
read newspapers—he didn't have time. And there it was
in the headlines and splashed over the front page in pic-
tures. Wreckage & Death. The Soviets were blaming the
United States for the blast.
Moronsl It could snow in Moscow and they'd blame the
CIA. His hand trembled as it picked up the coffee cup.
Did the CIA run the world? It was a nice theory. It
simplified the mental effort of beanbrains. Maybe they'd
blame their last crop failure on CIA infiltration of the
Politburo! He read on. They were "protesting against the
terrorist CIA covert sale of surplus 1980s Boeing cruise
missiles to the Afghan bandits." He snorted into his coffee,
draining the cup. Some people talked without knowing the
difference between their mouths and their assholes!
Charlie ate his omelette in silence, the crumpled
newspaper on the seat beside him. He hated stupid peo-
ple. And then, slightly calmer, he told himself that they
didn't have any KGB agents left in Ottawa to tell them
differently. In any event he wasn't sure that a culture,
which was having a hard time digesting cheap computers

The Moon Goddess and the Son
347
mated to printers, could ever understand the implications
of cheap computers mated to weapons.
Aristocracies never believed in cheap weaponry when it
came along. What could make an aristocrat reach for the
smelling salts faster than the idea of a whole population
armed to the teeth with an affordable means for killing
them all? Especially a rich aristocracy which had been
imposing its will through a monopoly on expensive weap-
onry.
Cheap iron swords and spears in the hands of yeomen
swept away the bronze age aristocrat on his chariot—and
in the end gave rise to the democracies of Greece and
Rome. Muskets in the hands of farmers destroyed the
noble aristocracy of the knight mounted on his ironclad
horse—and in the end gave rise to the democracies of
America and Europe. How many damn fools were killed in
their chariots and shot off their horses before the survivors
let themselves fneasure the truth?
There are times when military technology is expensive
and there are times when it is cheap. Soldiers who are
expensive to train and to equip tend to build around
themselves aristocracies of imposed will. But when weap-
ons are cheap and every ruler needs the consensus of his
people just to stay alive, the times favor negotiation and
democracy.
Charlie drank a second cup of coffee to that.
Million dollar tanks and two million dollar cruise mis-
siles and ten million dollar helicopters and twenty million
dollar fighter planes were the weapons of an aristocracy.
Such tools outclassed rifles like armored horsemen had
once outclassed the iron of the phalanx. But the tide flows
in and out.
Certain outclassed yeomen had just voted with a home-
made cruise missile. What if peasants could afford to buy a
sackful of "brains" to be put into tank and aircraft killers
designed on a village computer and then cobbled together
by the village blacksmith with his robot machine tools?
How long would the communist imperium last under that
kind of technological stress? Was that what Marx meant by
his "withering away of the state"?
Of course, thought a glum Charlie, a lack of negotiating

348
Donald Kingsbury
skills mixed with cheap weapons leads to unpleasant learn-
ing experiences like the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648
and the Beirut of the seventies and eighties. Imagine
Christians and Jews and Moslems all wearing hand-held
cruise missiles in the Texan style! God forbid! But as
grandpa McDougall used to say, "Warriors are what you
need to tide you through the time when people are trying
out mayhem as a substitute for the hard work it takes to
make a set of just laws."
Jesus! Maybe I only have another day of freedom.
Charlie was thinking that by tomorrow the siftings from
the rubble in Ottawa might reveal enough clues to bring
the FBI knocking on his door.
He stayed away from classes. He couldn't get the deaths
out of his mind. For a while he paced to wear off the
adrenalin alert. He tried to play the violin, for what could
better sing the cry of fear in his lament? But his hands
were shaking. And he needed his eeyore. What could be
sadder than the tones of an eeyore in trance?
He plugged the special DM keyboard into his paralyzer
and began to compose the piece, "Requiem Recited by
Violin & Three Eeyores Combined." He wrote and changed
and played and revised the requiem until he had spoken
his grief about a Russian boy in the Ottawa morgue and a
four year old Afghan girl buried on a rocky hillside.

CHAPTER 46
Got a way with wimin
When I'm struttin' down the street;
They got to reach and touch me
When I'm look-in'for sweet meat.
Got a way with wimin
When I'm swimmin' in the pool;
They got to rub and splash me
When I'm showin' off my tool.
Got a way with wimin
When I shoo her off to bed;
She's got to moan and love me
When I toss her on my spread.
Gotta run from all those wimin
Cause they're beating me instead;
Gotta run from all those wimin
Afor' I lose my big swelled head.
Taking them down, the Trancelvanians
Charlie was twenty and deliriously celebrating the end
of his junior year by smashing out in the popular Boston
Trance Hall where the show was continuous and the
waitresses sported silver pantsuits with cutout buttocks.
349

350
Donald Kingsbury
All seven of his MIT classmates became dazzled by the
nubility of the evening's singer. She was wearing a golden
necklace from which her dress flowed, cupric green, so
slashed in a thousand ribbons that one saw both all and
none of her body as she sang. Betina Marvelous was her
stage name and she stamped with a trance herd called the
Hot Buns.
. . and I'll take you for a ride and you won't mind
going blind ..."
Charlie noted the ordinary voice—-slightly brassy with a
tendency to slurring—and rashly bet his friends she would
date him. Gleefully they put $200 in the pot, impelling
him to keep pace by taking her hand as she left the stage.
"You have a zorchy voice—a lot could be done with it."
She smiled coolly and let him hold her fingers—-just
long enough to appear unrude. It gave him time to press
his card into that hand, a hand so cold his must have
seemed tropical.
electronic madman
digitanlmai music
Her eyes widened slightly when she read it—DM was a
controversial thing on the pop music scene; one loved or
hated its sounds and argued endlessly about the awesome
scope of its territory. It wasn't just a style. You could do
anything with it: classical, rock, trance. You could purify
the sound. You could distort it, you could add emotional
tones and alien themes. DM inspired mystery and resent-
ment. Few musicians could handle its technical demands.
But an ambitious woman with an ordinary voice would
know what a DM magician could do for her.
She sat down and the cupric cloth rippled, sometimes
revealing, sometimes hiding, always teasing. Seven ado-
lescents who had been breathing heavily, stopped breath-
ing. "What do you hear in my voice?" she asked—with a
kind of appealing vanity.
"You'll have to come to my place and listen," he said,
careful not to strip her with his eyes because he wanted to
keep her looking straight at him. "It's beautiful," he said,
covertly trying to get a peek at the skin of her breasts.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
351
God, I'm in love with this woman. He was already plan-
ning to take her to an Italian restaurant. "It's a stunningly
beautiful voice."
"It's not! I don't think my mouth is the right shape."
"He'll fix it for you with a kiss," cracked a friend.
"I'll fix your kisser with my fist if you don't shut up,"
Charlie replied murderously.
She smiled and let a hint of a nipple peek through the
slashes to silence the pimply intruder. "We were talking
about my voice"—and she let her eyes slip back from the
bigmouth with the MIT shirt to Charlie's face—"and how
croaky it is."
"It's got an amoroso timbre to it," he sighed.
"Do you do Real Time or Augmented?"
"Both. I can feed your mike right into a shoebox."
She took his palm and read it silently. Then she looked
into his face with crafty eyes. "What sign are you?"
"Aquarius."
"MIT rising," cracked his roommate.
Her face broke into a smile of relief, ignoring bigmouth,
and bathing Charlie in sunshine. "Fantastic!" And she
wouldn't let his hand go. Charlie's chums, conceding,
shoved a money-filled envelope into the other hand.
Betina worked with him. He showed her many versions
of her voice. He bathed her car. He rushed her clothes
out for dry cleaning to give her extra sleep. One Sunday
he called her while she was sleeping and was embarrassed
by his rudeness but she only laughed and asked him over
to make breakfast for her. She sat up in bed while she ate,
letting the sheets fall to her waist.
"Get my kimono for me, will you, sweetheart. The red
one." She pointed with a fork.
When she had a new gig, he set up for her. He worked
late nights decoding the structure of her voice until he was
able to customize a shoebox that transformed her into a
siren at the wave of a mike. For that she hugged him and
threw in a massage.
Solemnly Betina told him that they could never be
lovers because he was twenty and she was, after all, twenty-
four—but sometimes when she was stoned on several kinds
of drugs she let him give her a bath, let him soap her and

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Donald Kingsbury
rinse her and towel her, and when he promised to run the
sound system so everyone else would be free, she sneaked
him into wild parties where he learned to fry his brains on
coke and nuke and bam to the strains of eastern music.
Once he even got to share a large pillow with a naked girl
while they were both paralyzed on bam.
"How you doin', honey," the naked girl said with ador-
ing eyes fixated on the ceiling.
"It's the real thing," he answered lovingly, his mind
fascinated by the pressure of the wall on his head.
Charlie's new life thrilled him. He spent all his time
thinking about seducing Betina. Devious plans grew out of
dreams and finally he convinced Betina to let him move
into her place in what had once been the maid's room back
in the century when cheap Irish labor was plentiful. It was
only a fraction of what he had in his own apartment, but
he had Betina.
He promised to cook and do the dishes and not molest
her. His theory was that the way to a girl's heart was
through her stomach and after a month of being taken care
of by a man who loved her, she would melt. Maybe she
would even consent to move in with him. In the meantime
(when she wasn't home) he locked the maid's door and
mooned over each cardboard mounted shot from her pub-
licity portfolio, trying out different exotic positions on the
tiny bed.
With great pleasure he shipped off a fax through the
EM-hum via geo to the moon, telling his father that he
was not returning to the dour halls of MIT. He was in love
with a musician and this was it. Within a week his father
arrived in Boston from orbit and set up house in Charlie's
empty apartment.
Byron invited the couple out to dinner. He flirted with
Betina outrageously. He turned up at the Boston Trance
Hall and ground his teeth listening to music he hated.
While shaving, Byron found a publicity picture of Betina
(90% nude) that Charlie kept behind the bathroom mirror
in his own apartment. Grinding his teeth, he gave Charlie
a lecture about the sordidness of it all. "This is not the girl
for you."
"I like wild women," Charlie said stubbornly.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
353
"It's oil and water, Charlie. You're a hotshot up-and-
coming engineer. She's a singer and God knows what
else."
"I don't want to be an engineer," the boy said firmly.
Patiently Byron told him about the moon base. He
talked at length to make an engineer's life sound exciting.
Charlie listened and was very careful to say nothing to
encourage him. He waited until his father was finished.
"I'm a musician and that's going to be my life. Betina and I
have a whole life in common."
"It's a dead-end world!"
"What do you know about it? Music is different than
when you were young. Then it was just ugly dull beat,
beat, beat. It's all creative now. It's a magic renaissance."
"Bullshit!" said Byron. "Chicago played great music."
"What a bunch of scratchy shitl"
"You've only heard worn out 33s! I heard Chicago when
they were live. We weren't spoiled like you kids with your
antiseptic laser disks and electronic tricks. That was real
music, and it had heart. And it's not a way to make your
goddamned living!"
"I should be making missiles that kill little kids?" That
was as close as Charlie could ever get to discussing Ottawa.
"I'm an engineer and I'm not making missiles."
"If you think Betina is so bad for me, why were you
flirting with her! I didn't like that."
"I can handle that kind of woman; you can't."
"She and I do everything together!"
"What's this nonsense about giving up school to be with
a flake? What kind of woman is that? She should be
encouraging you in your studies."
"She thinks I have a great future in music. She's loyal."
Byron was cynical. "Is she a good lay? Never lay a
woman unless you have your feet on the ground!"
"Why don't you go back to the moon where you came
from!"
"Hey, son. You've got to be reasonable about these
things."
"I'm not going to be reasonable!" Charlie raged.
So Byron took Betina out to dinner to have a serious talk
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Donald Kingsbury
humor. He softened. They ended up chattering until three
in the morning. Not once did she light a cigaret. That
made it easier for him to kiss her, but he would have
kissed her anyway. He charmed her off to Mexico City for
a vacation.
Betina sent Charlie a letter from Xicotencatl with a
picture of herself snuggled in Byron's arm, wishing in her
large scrawl that he was there so she could have one
McDougall lover at sunset and the other at dawn. The
letter was forwarded to New Hampshire where his mother
had abducted him by car, screaming at him all the time,
insisting that if he wasn't going to continue his engineering
he had to sign up for the Berlin Conservatory. In self-
defense he reregistered at MIT, all the while plotting
perfect murders.
It took him only two months to utterly crush his mother.
He digitanimalized a secret recording of one of her scream-
ing rages. Slowly he added harmonics. He mushed the
words until they were lost against a pure emotion. Here
he amplified the rage, there he added piteous undertones.
Violins played at dramatic moments. Sobbing children
filled the silences. He had the tape cut and sold the rights
for the laser pressing to a company that pushed it up to
thirty-second place on the hit parade.
Charlie figured it would take longer to crush his father.
The bastard had shipped Betina to Paris and paid her off
with a pension and gone back to the moon. His father was
tough. He would have to bide his time and strike at an
unexpected moment with overwhelming force.

CHAPTER 47
See through the mirror of the telescope
the longing moon that would with Earth elope
but circles far beyond the rim of hope.
Dry frost upon the lifeless mountain peak
and powdered ocean floods of lava speak
of hope that cannot touch a moon so bleak.
Tet if sweet life was never meant to be
on stormless oceans; still men, tempted, see
how they and love might seed maternity.
From thrusting loins of mighty commodores,
passion, across uncharted nighttime, soars
to kiss those stark and deadly barren shores.
Upon dark desert dunes such dreamers sow
their minds to make the solid oceans grow
the gift of leafy life, now row by row.
See through the glass cf telescopic piece
the moon that with the Earth has found release;
along the crescent edge, a green increase.
Anonymous astronomer, 1903
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Donald Kingsbury
Billions of years ago splashings thrown out from the
crater Rhaeticus had cast, along the shoreline of the Sinus
Medii, a bay of molten magma. The initial American lunar
base was built there on the equator so that it could be
served by a skyhook. Every three hours and forty minutes
the skyhook drifted overhead and dropped a midget sup-
ply rocket down onto the sterile desert.
The upper level buildings of the colony cowered from
the naked sun under gray mounds of moon. Byron re-
ferred to the locality as Massachusetts Bay and the base
camp as New Boston, in honor of the lack of any cultural
life, but everybody else called the place Medea Bay and
their spartan diggings, Medea.
Spindly carts regularly emerged from the anthills of
Medea to unload each awkward skyhook vessel and fill its
tanks with liquid oxygen. The men who controlled the
carts remained below. Then, three hours and forty min-
utes later, the ship would rise again on its rocket motors as
a new supply ship flamed down to a dusty landing. The
lunar base received approximately fourteen tons of payload
every twenty-four hours. It took two seconds to order
supplies and a fortnight to bring them in.
Medea's considerable daytime power needs were served
by an orchard of solar mirrors focused on an array of
micro-rectenna panels. As fast as the colony could manu-
facture them, more panels and mirrors were added—the
assembly factory being a robot-equipped tunnel without
atmosphere, run by three men who were fanatical about
substituting lunar materials for everything that was sup-
posed to come from Earth.
When darkness fell the whole base had to shut down all
energy-intensive processing and rely on a small 200 kilo-
watt nuclear reactor for basic requirements. No one was
satisfied. Beyond the bay, the Sinus Medii had lately
grown a rectenna web of wires to receive microwaves from
a small eighteen megawatt solar powersat that had been
built in low Earth orbit and towed up to the Lagrange One
position 58,000 kloms above the moon. Even that was
thought of as just another backup. The colony's primary
nighttime energy effort was going into the construction of
Byron's huge underground storage torus.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
357
Each new addition was part of a carefully planned ex-
pansion to increase exports. The colony's chief export de-
mand was for an unconventional product—momentum—
which the moon was eventually going to be able to supply
to the ho factories at far cheaper prices than any Earth-
bought momentum. Momentum is mass times velocity—
lunar mass, with the velocity being added during the
Earthward fall.
It didn't matter what kind of mass. If the mass had some
by-product use, all to the better. The export of choice was
oxygen, which the moon had in abundance, and which was
needed down at leo as a rocket propellant. The present
stopgap method of delivering the oxygen was to ship it to
the skyhook via suborbital rocket, then to pump it as a gas
up the skyhook's pipeline, where, at the tip, moving at
lunar escape velocity for that altitude, it was reliquefied
and dropped toward Earth. The procedure was a cumber-
some bottleneck waiting to be broken by the completion of
the lunar electromagnetic track.
When Byron McDougall took the assignment to con-
struct the initial lunar base he was given one-third of the
money originally allocated for that task- He grumbled,
even raged. But he had the thinking reflexes of a soldier
who was still willing to fight even when his supply lines
had been cut. McDougall's base had shafts without eleva-
tors. He used cast or spun basalt instead of aluminum
whenever he could. He imported only the critical compo-
nents of the machines he needed, manufacturing eighty to
ninety-five percent of the weight of the remaining parts
out of lunar metals and ceramics and glasses on easily
reprogrammable machine tools. Food was raised locally.
The lunar day was devoted to energy intensive tasks such
as metals and oxygen production. The lunar night was
given over to effort intensive tasks such as design work
and machining.
Byron didn't like to admit it but the anti-proton facility
he was setting up for DOD was the financial difference
between swimming and insolvency. He had qualms about
it—it was so secret that the men building it were told only
that it was part of the energy storage torus—but his qualms

358
Donald Kingsbury
didn't bother him too much; the damn thing was paying
their bills.
From his tiny office Byron called Louise who was his
chief executive honcho. "Sweetheart, you have a bottle of
champagne tucked away for the celebration?" He knew
she didn't.
"Champagne? How about a liter of Ralph's turnip rotgut?"
"Any last minute hassles with the powersat?"
"No. We should have power exactly on time."
"Good."
"Your son has been trying to reach you. We'll have the
connection set up in fifteen minutes."
"I'll hop right up to the control room."
Byron switched off, smiling slyly. He took out a half
bottle of champagne he had hidden, all he could afford to
smuggle via rocket and that turtle-paced skyhook, but
enough to give them a taste of victory. It wasn't really
victory: getting the powersat up so that they weren't ran-
somed to their nuke was just another milestone, but one
certainly worth celebrating. They'd be up Shit's Creek if
they ever had to shut down the nuke for repairs and
couldn't get it up again by nightfall.
Maybe there never would be a final triumph. Byron
sometimes despaired. Maybe in a few years this effort
might be just another ghost town of tunnelings to be sifted
through by some future Amanda in spite of all the billions
that had been invested in it. Risk funding was so damned
erratic.
Support waxed and waned in Congress. Sometimes DOD
was told to go ahead with the second generation ABM
system, and sometimes after an election the rules changed.
Politicians saw the specs of the new Soviet ICBM and
fainted and voted money—but within the year, and new
advisors later, were grumbling that it wasn't worth it, that
the old battle stations were good enough to contain the
Soviets who had been getting less and less aggressive and
had promised, cross their hearts, never to get mad.
Defense wasn't the only lunar commitment from Wash-
ington but the wavering was even worse on allocations for
straight benefits. Politicians don't like long term risks, not
being far-sighted enough to know how to evaluate crop

The Moon Goddess and the Son
359
futures. Some projects need seed money that will eventu-
ally provide a vast harvest in future taxes from an enriched
citizenry. Others are boondoggle which deflect the same
seed money directly into the millstones of hungry men
who are too impatient to plant. Few politicians can tell the
difference. Of course, Medea's money wasn't all govern-
ment money . . .
But God help the colony's business funding in the event
of a deep recession. Business support had been waning
now for years—almost since the beginning—even though
the medium-term payoff was a certainty. A sixty year old
corporation executive wanted his dividend before he was
65. Maybe, thought Byron, he could sell "New Boston" to
the Finns if worst came to worst—nobody in Europe was
doing better than that little country. Or maybe King Charles
would buy the place. "British Interplanetary Empire" had
a nice ring to it.
He slipped out of his office, soared up the shaft, caught
himself, and made his slow leap into the control room with
the bottle high in his hand. "Who's got strong thumbs?"
"How did you get that!" Louise's nature lent itself to
exclamations. "Did you bribe customs?"
"False-bottomed suitcase."
One of the men turned to Byron from the console
display with a smile. "The powersat is up and checking
through beautifully. We should get the first beam down
soon."
"Is your son as handsome as you?" asked Louise dreamily.
"Why should you care?"
"Braithwaite was telling me he's coming up here to
work on the track as soon as he graduates from MIT."
"As a matter of fact, I'm much better looking than my
son. You should try older men once in a while."
"Not a chance. You'd see through all of my tricks. I
might get away with batting my eyes at your son. He's six
years younger than I am."
"Actually you might have a chance. When he gets here
I'll set you up. He chases older women. I took a girlfriend
of his off to Mexico City on my last trip back to the old
country. She was a great lay—I've got to give him credit

360
Donald Kingsbury
for his taste in bodies—but I was bored to death with her
chatter. But what the hell, a lay is a lay."
"Byron! You stole your son's girlfriend? How could you
be so cruel? And I always thought you were such a nice
man!"
"Ask my wife. She'll set you straight."
"But Byron, you know young boys have such a hard
time when they're in love—you should leave him what he
has."
"I did him a favor. She was using him," he said bitterly.
"He probably needed her!"
That stung Byron's anger. "Like hell he needed her.
She didn't have enough sense to send him back to school
when he quit to take care of her. For that I could have
killed the bitch. I shipped her off to Paris with enough
gold to keep her amused."
Louise was grinning. "How did your wife take it?"
"She's divorcing me."
"Byron!"
He laughed. "Something else to celebrate."
The phone rang. Louise took it and chatted with the
operator. "Byron. It's your son."
"Hi, Papa."
"Charlie!"
Two second pause.
"I'm calling you up to congratulate you. I hear you're
not going to need candles at night anymore. Hey, pretty
soon you'll have hot running water in the trenches."
"Yeah, I'm pleased. Good backup for the nuke."
Two second pause.
"I just got your comments on my last batch of home-
work. You're two days faster than my profs. I'm glad I'm
getting clever enough with my mistakes so even you can't
see them."
Byron was smiling. "While you're on the line I want you
to talk to Braithwaite. You'll be working with him on the
lunar track. He's anxious to get you after all he's heard
about you."
Byron motioned frantically for Braithwaite to come over
while his voice travelled to Earth and his son's came back.
"You still want me to get involved in that thing, eh?"

The Moon Goddess and the Son
361
"You bet. When we get it built this place is going to
start to pay. She'll mushroom. We've been tooling up for
the track and now that we have the power to do more
work at night, we're ready to roll. Boeing is already doing
tests on the track ships. We're going to need men. We
want you here."
"Say, Papa, I'm calling to tell you not to bother to come
back to Earth for my graduation."
"But of course I'm coming. I need the vacation."
Two second pause.
"Another vacation!"
"Business trip. I'm away too much. Got to see the
family."
Two second pause.
"What family? You're divorced."
"You're my family. Got to celebrate with the kid."
Two second pause.
"Yeah, but I just quit school."
"You're at the top of your class! It's your fourth year! It's
exam time!"
Two second pause.
"Yeah, that's why I quit. It would be silly to quit after
putting so much sweat into the exams. I decided I don't
want your job and I don't want to be an engineer. I just
want to play around and listen to the birds sing. Why put
myself in the position where I need a Mexican vacation
when I can have one all the time? Where are you going to
take your vacation this time down? Paris?"
Byron thought frantically. Was it another woman? "It's
the chance of your lifetime! It will make your career! From
this job you can go anywhere!"
The pause lasted an eternity. There was no real way to
argue over this distance. He had caught a barracuda—and
the line was too light.
"I never liked engineering. Good luck in your log cabin.
I'm hanging up now."
"Charlie!" The line went dead. They never appreciate
what you do for them! Byron waited for two seconds,
stunned, then he smashed his bottle against the bulkhead
wall. Gracefully the champagne foamed as it arched in a
slow motion spatter.

362
Donald Kingsbury
"She's ready," said the operations man, as calmly as if
he had witnessed a christening. "That's it! The grid is
powered."
Louise was rushing over to Byron. "It's all right."
Byron was frozen, his hand outstretched where it had
grasped sudden defeat from victory. "No," he said in pain.
"Are you going back to Earth to talk to him?"
"No." Byron paused for two thoughtful seconds, his
hand slowly sinking. "I had to push him and push him, the
little bastard. He did so well, I couldn't resist. If I didn't
push him, he didn't move. So I pushed him. God, how I
wanted him here under my thumb where I could make a
man out of him." He shrugged bitterly. "It's no use. If you
have to push a man, he's not going to move anywhere."
"He'll settle out," said Louise with affectionate sympathy.
"Yeah, he'll settle out. He'll settle out as a third rate
musician."

CHAPTER 48
You will remember me for a thousand years.
Adolph Hitler
The stalwart defender who faces the past, remembering
Hitler, who is ready at a moment's notice with a vast
military machine to crush Hitler's next assault, will not
live a thousand years. He will be shot in the back by some
apparition from the future.
dmk
Fellow mujahideen called Yahya Karargah a mule who
shape-changed into a tiger at night. He was alive because
he planned his moves completely, cautiously. He did not
believe in hand-to-hand combat against an enemy with
greater fire-power. Kill them in the never-present. He
cast his traps across the fabric of time at places where he
wasn't and when his Boolean fingers snatched their victims
into the long dark, only Yahya's robot sensors were watching.
By the nineties, endless war against their villages had
scattered a million Afghans to the winds, like the Arme-
nians before them, and so Yahya could move over the face
of the Earth invisibly, always among friends. Briefly he
headed a Paris-based assassination team, worked in arma-
ments, ran a training camp. He was sent to MIT to sharpen
his weapon-making skills.
In those long gone days Yahya's boundless ambition had
363

364
Donald Kingsbury
been caged by small arms goals. He did not think like a
man with vast resources at his disposal. He was interested
in mines and radios, silencers and electronic sentries—the
things a one man army might like to carry in his packsack.
He conceived military actions in limited terms—of killing
one Russian at a time and arranging his life so that he
would remain alive to kill another.
Then, with Allah's guidance, he met the son of Moon
Conqueror.
A man of a different culture will often think of his new
associates as mad. He will watch a friend's antics with
amused fascination as Yahya had watched Charlie. Charlie
was indeed half a lunatic. He thought like a wholly self-
contained Military Industrial Complex. Utter madness!
When Charlie wanted a cruise missile he ... in Yahya's
world there was no concept for what he did ... he be-
came his own Pentagon!
To Yahya who had dreamed only of killing Russians
since the age of eight, expert systems were a revelation.
He could buy an iridescent disk that, like some Aladdin's
lamp, would conjure up at his command an endless army
of helpers! There between the cup of his fingers was all
that the Americans had learned in a hundred years about
building lethal aircraft. It was like being thrown drugged
into a heaven full of houris and being unable to choose
which one to embrace. He never looked back.
Yahya was careful about whom he involved in any oper-
ation. When he decided to build the Revenge, he asked
his commander to give him only veteran survivors. He was
in no hurry. A smart general does not test a new weapon
in a critical battle, does not try to invent a whole new form
of warfare overnight. He builds a disciplined team.
Yahya selected the Soviet Union's Ottawa Embassy as
his first test target precisely because it was an undefended
sitting duck. For a man who had played tag with secret
police killer Najibullah, evading the RCMP was child's
play. His teammates learned, refined their weapon, built
more. In Africa they tested a staged carrier that turned the
Revenge into a deep penetration threat, and he designed
an all new, deadly sprinter.
The technologically advanced, but unimaginative, West-

The Moon Goddess and the Son
365
ern press had whined for years that they were unable to
cover the Afghan Serial Horror Show because the Russians
wouldn't give them Press Passes and lodging at the Kabul
Hilton. Yahya, peasant, solved the problem in months. He
needed communications with his ground troops; press cov-
erage was only a side effect. He used a variable frequency
fax transmission system that broadcast the digitalized im-
ages from seventeen dollar Japanese cameras into space for
relay. How could the Russians stop or even find a beam
that went straight up?
On the morning when grisly pictures appeared in the
New York Times showing Soviet Elite Troops command-
ing the Jerali massacre, Yahya Karargah lost some of the
caution which had been the mark of his survival over
decades of fighting. He slightly modified his formative
plans for a massive attack on the Soviet Air Force in
Afghanistan to include the Kremlin as a target.
That the Kremlin was the most heavily defended point
on Earth only challenged his rage. The brutality at Jerali
had recalled to his mind two events from half a lifetime
ago: the sound of Russian troops Kalashnikoving the men
in Yahya's village and the sound—forever unchanging—of
that Soviet Stuka poised in the air above his childhood
home, suspended in time at that last moment before the
bombs were released, the final moment when the Soviet
pilot could have decided on mercy over murder.
If the Kremlin was heavily defended, so much the bet-
ter. No one expects attack at a strong point. Surprise is the
handmaiden of Victory. And disgust for a strong enemy
who terrorizes the weak is the source of meticulous plan-
ning. Piss on the Kremlin!
But even the finest of surprises are themselves the
subject of surprise. Yahya found himself forced into a
premature move. He was covertly using a Saudi Arabian
comsat as the hub of his comnet. The suddenness of the
revolt there against the House of Saud was catching him at
an awkward moment. His plan had already acquired too
much inertia to stop, and because multiple attacks require
coordination, he could not afford to lose his comsat link.
He needed it throughout the week of the strike.
Karargah did not trust his Moslem brothers. The Syrian

366
Donald Kingsbury
dogs had long turned their backs on Afghanistan to curry
Soviet favor. And Yahya had been sent to MIT on Saudi
money. He was not betting his schemes on the goodwill of
an unknown Marxist regime in Saudi Arabia. Bijad ibn
Jamal was a Marxist and that meant he was an atheist, as
untrustworthy as any Russian dog.
Yahya delayed the strike as long as he could, at the
same time accelerating the preparations. The Saudi Royal-
ists had a rally and then suffered grievous losses. Ameri-
cans were being slaughtered. That decided him. His hand
was forced. Even then he waited another day because he
read the weather reports. A storm, a beautiful missile-
shielding storm, was converging upon the worst part of his
flight path all along the route to Moscow.
No one questioned the sudden change of plans. The
precision with which Yahya could react to an emergency
was a survivor's legacy. His comrades trusted his gift. He
was a legend within the inner councils.
At the rebel command post, a five hundred year old
ruin in a northern mountain valley, Karargah's men launched
three missiles in loose formation, each cradled in the arms
of a larger winged tanker. The pairs were programmed to
separate over the Ust'-Urt Plateau, the tankers to crash
into the Caspian Sea.
Each of Karargah's vehicles was more maneuverable
than any of the Soviet Air Force's obsolete twentieth cen-
tury fighter planes. They would not run into any modern
fighters until they reached Moscow, and the best of the
Soviet fighters were still manned and used a down-looking
radar that hadn't been updated since 2001. His warplanes
could outfly any human pilot and bollix the brains of any
known Soviet computer.
The Revenge carried a commerical autopilot, a civilian
version of the US Air Force's AI unmanned fighter brain,
remodified to fighter pilot behavior with added Karargah
touches. That was for emergencies and for the final run
over Moscow. The main brain was an inertial and pattern
seeking navigator once used in geological surveys. The
third sub-brain was the missile's electronics warfare ex-
pert. Altogether it was a nice package he had assembled in
his Casablanca workshop.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
367
As a crowning insult, Yahya simply filed a counterfeit
flight plan to Moscow. Long ago the Afghans had learned
to smile at the Russians and tell them what they wanted to
hear. The Russians saw only good socialists among the
Afghans they dealt with. But there was nothing a Russian
did that was not relayed back to the mountains and from
the mountains to space and from space to the command
center which kept all its records in unbreakable code on
portable computers that were always being moved. Soviet
air control procedures were known. No enemy, however
powerful, is immune from treachery.
It didn't really matter to Yahya if the three missiles got
through. He smiled and used an expression he had picked
up in Boston. "That's just the icing on the cake."
The main mission was the Soviet Air Force in Afghani-
stan. He had seventy-four homemade sprinters ready for
launch. They were programmed at three priority levels: (1)
to attack any aircraft that threatened them, (2) to attack
any moving aircraft they detected, and (3) if they reached
their target airfield, to attack parked aircraft, control tow-
ers, fuel dumps, barracks, in that order. Their cost, minus
labor, was about the price of one Mercedes car bomb.
To distract the infidel dogs he had 950 low-IQ missiles
with a range of only 30 kilometers. They had propellers, a
French pillbox charge that blasted the remaining fuel
through a hole that it was quite efficient at making, and a
simple brain that could only home on a single preset
target. It flew at 160 kloms per hour at housetop level and
was designed to penetrate Soviet compounds, government
buildings, the Soviet Embassy in Kabul, KGB rest homes,
Soviet barracks and the like. Parts of substantial numbers
of these had been captured, but none in an assembled
state. The brain was mistaken for an electronic camera.
The body, with Brazilian manufacturing marks, was dis-
missed as a poor attempt at a reconnaissance drone. The
unassembled bomb blew up when it was handled by per-
sonnel unaware of the passcode and was considered to be
dangerous by Soviet occupation troops.
Yahya, from long association with the enemy, antici-
pated nazi-like reprisals after his massive attack. With this
in mind he had distributed a thousand digiphones and

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Donald Kingsbury
photophones so that the Soviet reaction might be fully
documented in the Western press. How do you disconnect
a thousand phones that aren't routed through a central
exchange controlled by the Soviets?
On the critical afternoon, the Politburo was in emer-
gency session to discuss the American response to the
Saudi revolution. The best intelligence indicated a rapid
mobilization of American Fast Strike forces. Already a
twenty-four hour airlift was resupplying loyal troops of the
Royal Army. It was a crisis.
In the middle of the meeting a series of stunning reports
began to arrive ... 65 warplanes destroyed at Bagram
... 16 destroyed at Kandahar airfield . . . 47 at Kabul. . .
a vicious attack by an unknown high-tech weapon . . . fifty
Air Force officers in one barrcks burned alive . . . dumps
on fire. Did the Americans want those airfields as an
advance striking base? The information officers decided
that they had better interrupt the Politburo.
Still the conflict was a distant battle. No one in the
Soviet aristocracy even questioned their safety behind the
bristling defenses of Moscow. At precisely 15:36 the Mos-
cow Defense Command noticed that a flight of military
aircraft from Afghanistan was deviating from its flight plan.
They reacted instantly. The errant aircraft replied to their
demands, in Russian, casually asking why permission to
land had been denied. (Talking cruise missiles?) For a
second that caused confusion, but for only a second. Too
late, they reacted. One of the intruders went down but
two missiles flew right through the walls of the main
Kremlin offices, there killing the General Secretary, eight
members of the Politburo, and seventy others.
Uproar! A nest of hornets had been bashed. Frantic
Moscow bureaucrats could not comprehend what had hap-
pened. They did not believe in the power of the workers.
They held all peasants in contempt. Their ears had long
ago been deafened to Marxist compassion by a boiler room
of Marxist rhetoric. Thus they could not even begin to
perceive the vile attack on the Kremlin and the morning's
events in Afghanistan as a classical rising of the people.
Not one of them would have understood Lenin's cry,
"Arm the workers to pull down the imperialist exploiters!"

The Moon Goddess and the Son
369
What these men did see was high-tech weapons. The
attack was, therefore, an American plot.
The alarming reports continued to come in. The KGB
offices in Kabul were burning. Dozens of Soviet Army
barracks had been attacked. The offices of the USSR-
Afghanistan Friendship League were burning. Twenty gas-
oline tanker trucks were burning. While the relevant
aparatchiki in Moscow were trying to deal with the emer-
gency, ambulances screamed to the Kremlin. Soldiers raced
about in trucks.
Within minutes rumors were awash in Moscow. For one
whole lifetime the Soviet nation had prepared to defend
itself against another Hitler. Their children had been cau-
tioned. They had even programmed their computers to
defend them against Hitler. Eternal Vigilance! But again
they had been fooled. Again they had let their guard
down. The Americans had betrayed them. The CIA had
done it to behead them on the eve of a sneak attack. The
Americans smiled but they were just Germans all over
again. And the bodies lay across the floors of the Kremlin.
Some of them crawled. Heroes came to their aid. The
sirens screamed.
What happens when a whole nation looks north, as one,
and sees another Hitler, even if only for a moment of
panic?

CHAPTER 49
One day farmer Arcuat went to his local church and
heard a fire-breathing sermon extolling the great Chris-
tian benefits that accrued from self denial. Six months
later at the local tavern he was heard bewailing his luck.
"I got no luck at all, nohow. Jist as I was gettin' my
mule trained to work without eatin', she has to up and die
on me!"
Joke circulating across the screens of Medea Base after
Congressman Arcuat (Dem, S.C.) spearheaded passage
of a bill slashing lunar appropriations by 30%.
Byron's staff poked at the budget cuts that had just
come through, and went over their own expenses from
five different angles. They varied numbers and watched
the computer displays recalculate. No sane way of han-
dling the arbitrary cut emerged.
During the next shift out on the lunar plain Byron
chewed over his anger. He bounced the surface truck
along the rutted regolith. The raised track beside the road
swept across the surface of the Sinus Medii, seeming to
pierce to the very edge of the universe where God's knife
separated the light of the plain's glare from the starry
darkness.
There was no doubt that they'd have to shut down track
construction. It was heart-breaking. His mind kept wan-
370

The Moon Goddess and the Son
371
dering off to Earth, that goddess of inconsistency. How
damned annoying to be working to commitments that the
other party kept violating. If they were allowed to finish,
within four months the first graceful test ship would be
skimming in tangentially at orbital velocity, and the elec-
tromagnetic link with the leoport would be closed: with
volume, travel to the moon would become as cheap as a
ride on American Airlines from L.A. to New York.
One year you had Congress convinced that what you
were doing was in the economic self-interest of the United
States. You'd ask them if they were sure before you went
ahead. Yes, Congress was sure. And they backed you to
the hilt. They made laws. But the next year they were
riding some new fad.
Right now Byron's staff was installing auxiliary systems
in little huts along the right-of-way, a series of flywheel
energy buffers between the track circuitry and the storage
torus. They were there to soak up the energy of a
landing—or feed out energy in the case of a take-off. A
fifteen-ton ship coming in at 1,680 meters/sec and deceler-
ating at four Earth gravities generates a gigawatt of elec-
tricity, enough to power a large city. -
The work would have to wait.
Back at the base Byron wandered through every tunnel
and shaft, looking for cash Cuts. He found a crew repairing
the air conditioning. Well, they couldn't shut down Life
Support. Maybe they could open a consulting firm to all
those awful Earthside towers built in the seventies and
eighties that gassed their occupants with recycled tobacco
carcinogens—his engineers knew more than anybody on
Earth about cleaning old air. It was a thought, but there
was no money in it.
He found himself behind the security bulkheads of the
'sewer line"—code name for the anti-proton facility which
barreled on for kilometers in its tunnel through the lunar
crust. This was Joseph Synmann's baby. He was a funny
guy. The major part of his lifetime's work was in space—
the coils of the leoport, the battle stations, and now a 200
billion electron volt linear accelerator on the moon—but
you couldn't drag Synmann off his planet. He was afraid of
rockets.

372
Donald Kingsbury
Jaimison was alone on duty. "How goes it?" asked By-
ron, stooping under a pipe.
"Fine tuning. I'm up to recovering 42% of the anti-
protons that pop out of the target. Not bad for the first six
months of operation."
The man was modest. That was three orders of magni-
tude better than the capture rates of the eighties. Byron
wondered what it was all for. They shipped off tiny bottles
of anti-hydrogen and never saw them again. In the long
run he knew what it was for—anti-hydrogen was the nu-
clear rocket fuel of the future and was going to open up
the solar system—but right now its use was still a secret.
Couldn't shut this place down, either. The Department
of Defense was already waiting impatiently for the torus to
go on line so that they could double their production by
running the energy hungry proton beams during the lunar
night. Anti-hydrogen was half of Medea Base's reason for
being but it wasn't something they could advertise—most
congressmen didn't even know they were making the ulti-
mate nuclear fuel, and God forbid that they should ever
find out. Some of them were Democrats.
Byron was resigned to a trip back to Earth. More poli-
tics. DOD would be a great help in keeping the shop
open, but the Defense Department wasn't the power it
used to be. Defense spending was declining in both the
Soviet Union and the United States—for some strange
economic reason—and DOD could hardly afford to pay its
own salaries these days.
Byron took dinner in his room. He cut off the intercom
and tended his climbing vines, still churning his mind for
a solution to the latest change in the financial rules. Adam
Smith was wrong; men were not motivated by self-interest—
they were too myopic to perceive self-interest farther than
a centimeter away. A man would grab for that cigaret
because the pleasure was immediate; the surgeon's knife
cutting out his cancerous lung lay an unreal fifteen years in
the future. He lay down.
Byron's eyes blurred and for a moment, in his ham-
mock, he beheld a religious vision. A luminous hand was
reaching out for the stars and that hand was a mosaic of
little men held together by little hands in the pockets of

The Moon Goddess and the Son
373
the men above. Each little man was complaining about
someone else's greed. The conquest of space was not, at
the moment, a gloriously cooperative venture. It was a
war of pickpockets. But war gave him an edge. He smiled.
Once a fighter pilot, always a fighter pilot.
His fingers keyed off the lights so that he was in dark-
ness, the netting easy under his body. What did a soldier
do when he was cornered? Byron remembered one of the
favorite maxims of his father. "To a real soldier there is no
such thing as losing," said that very stern man—an absurd
maxim, parochially American, but one his father could
imbue with a peculiar vitality.
As a ten year old Byron had been no fool. "That's what
Hitler said at Stalingrad," he had argued hotly.
"Ah, but Hitler confused winning with being on the
offensive. You and I would have retreated and won."
"We retreated all over the place in Vietnam and lost!"
"Real soldiers aren't trying to defend something by de-
stroying it."
"What's a real soldier?"
"A common soldier fights well when he is grandly
equipped. A real soldier can still fight after his supply
lines have been cut. A real soldier doesn't even need any
help from Congress!"
Once, on a 300-klom hike with his father, he had crum-
pled, refusing to go farther, the pain overwhelming.
"A man inured to hell cannot lose!"
"He can die," Byron remembered himself whining.
His son-of-a-bitch father had then bodily lifted him to
his feet. "No. You forget. Death comes first—then hell.
Get moving. McDougalls are tough enough to walk out of
hell. Where in hell do you think we came from! You're
that tough. We make camp in two hours."
Was life one hell after another? When Byron had walked
out of his father's hell into an Air Force recruiting office,
the Air Force had groomed him, disciplined him,, tough-
ened him, and then sent him to Saudi Arabia to train
Bedouins to fly the F-15. It was hell. He coped with that
empty time in the desert like a good commander might
use a lull in the fighting—to build up striking power. He

374
Donald Kingsbury
sweated out an engineering education by correspondence
course.
And here he was, out of the Air Force, the inhabitant of
another surreal hell, more unforgiving than any Saudi
Arabia.
It's always war, he thought, and war is hell. This one
was a battle to take the high ground from the Soviets. The
battle up the slope always cost more than you wanted to
pay. Sometimes the home front got tired of the war. Still
you kept on fighting your way higher in the hope that once
you reached the peak you could dig in and hold it cheaply.
How happy the troops had been to get the shuttle—and
then the Soviets began to fly their Snowfoxes to geol
Maddened, the USA had built the leoport. But that wasn't
the end of the battle; the leoport was only a ridge, a
defense line, a trench. Low Earth orbit wasn't high enough.
The battle stations to protect the geo satellites weren't high
enough. Strategists had begun to covet the really high
ground, the moon.
It wasn't only the invulnerability of the moon in a world
where no fortress on Earth was more than a few minutes
away from a surprise death. If lunar mass could be deliv-
ered to Earth through the leoport, momentum balancing
of the leoport would cease to depend upon auxiliary power:
the inner solar system would belong to the men who
controlled the moon and the leoport.
The dust at the bottom of a minor lunar crater holds
more energy reserves than in the whole of the Arabian
peninsula. The potential energy of the moon is enough to
power the wildest space program for millions of years.
Damn the cost! Capture the high ground! Economics de-
manded it!
And so the war went on. But congressional support was
disintegrating because the Russian tortoise had fallen be-
hind again. Wars are not fought on the battlefield alone.
They are backed up by a whole support structure, and a
loot-hungry populace is impatient with long sieges.
Byron's father had something to say about long wars.
"When the enemy's line is solid, endure, survive, and
observe. Do not expect a break to appear at an enemy
strong point. The break appears where no one expects

The Moon Goddess and the Son
375
trouble. Once the break develops, victory goes to the
swift. A place which has no strategic import may achieve
importance simply because it is not being defended."
The next morning Byron was in the materials factory
talking with the man who made the colony's fused quartz
fibers. What equipment could he do without in the com-
ing months?
Braithwaite popped down through the hatch. "McDougall.
Louise hasn't been able to find you. You aren't wearing
your beeper. She has an urgent call from Earth."
"Goddamn that phone! I go all the way to the moon to
get away from it—and they still call. What is it this time?
Are they going to cancel our transportation passes and
leave us up here stranded?"
"I think it was Sam Brontz about the crisis," said
Braithwaite.
"Which of ten on-going crises!" snarled McDougall.
"The revolution."
"What revolution?"
"In Saudi Arabia."
"Yeah, yeah. Saudi Arabia is going to revolt when hell
freezes over. I know those sand eaters. I know Abdul
Zamani, the defense minister. I taught him how to fly the
F-15."
"Abdul Zamani is dead. Where have you been? The last
I heard the refinery complex at Dhahran was in flames."
"Abdul Zamani is dead?"
"Old Poker Face raced in from Camp David and seems
to be trying to gather support to send in the marines—but
hell, it seems pretty late. The Royalists who were yelling
for help are already dead."
"You're kidding me," said McDougall, stunned, but he
was no longer sure it couldn't happen.
"You didn't scan the news this morning? We saw rows of
royal bodies hanging headless by their feet from the lamp-
posts in Riyadh. Along with a CBS cameraman. The king
was murdered three hours ago along with a couple of his
brothers.
]]My God! And you didn't tell me!"
I automatically assume you know everything."
"Sweet Jesus son of Allah!"

376
Donald Kingsbury
Back up top Byron replayed the late news on his console
screen. The CIA had heard of the superbly coordinated
revolt via a shaken CBS camera team. Evidently modern
Arab coups weren't the clumsy affairs of yesterday.
Swat! Just like that.
He felt disoriented, remembering the tough men he
had trained. Those Saudi fighter pilots had been Royalist
to the core. He couldn't imagine a coup succeeding with-
out them and he couldn't imagine them siding with the
Palestinians and the Pakistanis and the other immigrants
who chafed under Royal rule. Iranian subversion? Impos-
sible! They had never recovered from the war. McDougall
didn't let his disorientation stop him from sensing that
here was an extraordinary battlefield situation to be exploited
immediately.
He called up Sam Brontz and they discussed the effect
of the revolution on future oil markets. Saudi Arabia still
owned half the world's oil reserves, and all of its cheap
reserves. Sam had in mind saving the lunar program by
reviving the old idea of huge powersats beaming down
electricity to Earth. After this affair Americans would want
a secure power source. They had neither oil nor nuclear
power plants.
Zimmerman came into his office with a worried look.
"Such bad news. You heard the news?"
"Yeah. I still don't believe it."
"Look, no American should try already to understand an
Arab intrigue."
Byron glanced at his watch. "Hungry?"
"It's cucumber salad day," said Zimmerman disconsolately.
"I'm going to have to crack that whip to get that landing
track finished so we can ship in some beef."
"With whose money?"
"You think money will be a problem after today?"
"I see a depression," Zimmerman said gloomily. "No
money for the moon. No oil."
Byron was grinning as they drifted off toward the cafete-
ria. "I see gas rationing in the States, and I'm dying
laughing. I'm seeing the pipes bursting in the middle of
winter and I'm rolling in the aisles. I'm seeing the Soviets

The Moon Goddess and the Son
377
trading weapons for Saudi oil and I'm grinning from ear to
ear."
"That bad you see it?"
"I used to like Americans," said Byron with amused
savagery. "I'm an American. It used to feel great to go to
them and say, 'Here's a solution to a problem that hasn't
happened yet.' So how do they react? They sniff daisies
and snort coke. And think they are smart asses; even my
son. Zimmerman, if an American jumps out of an airplane,
you can't sell him a parachute until after he hits the
ground. I don't even flap about it anymore. Americans are
manic freaks who slack off suicidally between crises and
then work their elbows to a bone to meet a crisis after it
has bashed them in the face—all the time bitching bitterly
that no one ever told them the fist was on the way. Well, I
told them. 1 was on my knees begging them, for Christ's
sake. It's a mania that will kill us all dead one day, and our
Constitution besides, that one last crisis too many, but in
the meantime it is no use yammering to deaf ears about
how to prevent a coming crisis, you just have to be cool
and work quietly until you know exactly what to tell them
to do after the crisis has them sereaming in pain—and
hope to God they can get, their silly asses in gear as fast as
they always have before. Don't have the parachutes ready!
Know all about splints!"
"Well done!" exclaimed Zimmerman. "I haven't heard
you rant that well for three days."
Braithwaite appeared from behind the potted plants and
joined them at their table. "Have you phoned Boston
yet?"
Yeah. Sam's going to send me back to DC to try to sell
Congress on putting up the risk capital to set up a produc-
tion line that will crank out one ten-gigawatt solar power
satellite per month. I'll go; I'll make salvation noises, and
Congress will stand there with their knees shaking, those
Georges who have cut us colonials down to the bone, and
they'll kiss my ass and they'll buy it."
"You're so happy it depresses me," moped Zimmerman.
The State Department is having a morbid nightmare, and
you're happy."
"Give us a smile, Zim."

378
Donald Kingsbury
"How can I give you a smile? My son is in Israel."
"Arabs are killing each other and he's worried. Give us a
smile. This is the break we've been praying for. Now the
bureaucrats need us in a bad way."
"You really think DC is going to buy anything? With
our luck they'll revoke our return tickets and turn off the
air. We'll starve. Here, maybe have some cucumber salad
before it's gone already."
The next days were hectic. Byron put aside his plans to
mothball the colony and started to look at what a real oil
shortage would do to lunar prospects. Nobody knew how
close they were to paying their own way through slashed
transportation costs. The numbers kept coming out right!
Boom times right around the corner!
. . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . Goddamned phone.
"Yeah? McDougall here."
"This is Colonel Samson, sir. Please, I must see you up
here right away, sir."
"Hey, Joey ..."
"That's an order, sir."
The lunar colony was stuck with one battle station and
Colonel Samson. Their gun could spew out pellets at
greater than lunar escape velocity or muzzle down to
circular velocity to shred anything coming in horizontally
even though this far from leo there wasn't anything to
shoot at.
McDougall entered through the hatch without protocol.
"Joey, I'm a busy man."
Colonel Samson saluted. He was white-faced. "The Third
World War has just started, sir. I thought you should be
the first to know. We are in no immediate danger."
Nervous Colonel Samson was not a man anyone took
seriously. "And when did all this happen?"
"One minute before I called you, sir."
Byron eased into his fighter pilot role and took over the
console, believing nothing. He read the signals profession-
ally. He remembered the men who did not believe the
radar operators at Pearl Harbor when they reported a fleet
of approaching aircraft. The news from leo was two sec-
onds old but it looked like more than a hundred Soviet
ICBM missiles had been launched.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
379
He nodded. "Thanks, Joe." And pulled out a micro-
phone and collected his thoughts. So . . . for the third
time this week he had to make a major revision of his
plans. His first thought was: If the Reds get the leoport
we're up Shit's Creek. Still it could take a lot of punish-
ment. Even if whole kilometers of hoops were blown out,
the undamaged sections could be reformed.
What assets would Medea have if cut off from Earth? A
lot. But they didn't have hydrogen or carbon or nitrogen.
His mind raced. The Soviets had proved out some nearby
carbonaceous asteroids. The Soviet Mars fleet was sitting
there with hydrogen in its tanks. Lots of problems. Proba-
bly solvable. He'd have to wait for a planetary damage
report. He switched the mike on.
"Attention. Major alert. All hands attention. This is
Byron McDougall up at the guns. No danger in sight here
but the US defensive shield down below is signaling a
major Soviet ICBM attack. I suspect that in the next
half-hour our financing from Earth will be wiped out.
Repeat: ICBM attack. That's bad news. A lot of those will
be 78s and the 78 can make Swiss cheese out of the shield
which hasn't been kept up to date. Same budget problems
as we've had." He paused. His voice was cracking and he
had tears in his eyes.
He was thinking of his son. Damn fool kid, he could be
up here now where it's safe. In hell.

CHAPTER 50
Now the seven angels who had the seven trumpets made
ready to blow them.
Revelations 8:6
Charlie McDougall's mother was in Florida living with
some rich man, and his lather was running around on the
Sinus Medii building his crazy landing track. They had the
sun and he had the winter snow blasting and rippling in
the wind all this day. It was peaceful to be alone without
the nagging.
He pulled the truck into a snowbound EXXON station
and pumped a single liter of gas which was six percent
alcohol and six percent synfuel. The wind was freezing his
ears as he tried to keep the snow from blowing into the
tank. Damn these self-serve stations. He waded up to the
insulated booth and presented his dollar bill.
"Ain't goin' far," stated the laconic attendant emphatically.
"My last dollar," said Charlie.
"Only car I seed all morning."
"4-wheel drive."
Three times when he was off the highway he had to
back up and ram drifts. He could hardly see. Pelting dry
snow did not leave shadows. But he made it around the
bend and up into the trees beside the McDougall house.
Stone fences were buried. The flagstone stairs were bur-
380

The Moon Goddess and the Son
381
ied. In all that silence the furcate forms of the winter trees
and the lines of the house stood like speechifying revival-
ists at a convocation of mute white nuns.
Charlie gripped the collar of his coat, took a deep breath,
jumped out with his groceries and staggered to the house
through the knee high drifts. On days like this he could
believe his father's yammerings about energy. New En-
gland was going to freeze them all to death yet. But better
New England than the moon. God, here in the summer
you had the smell of mowed hay and the little swampy
brook and the daisies to pluck.
Sophia met him at the door. She was his girlfriend and
came from the farm next door. He was pretty desperate
for girls because she was flat-chested and eleven years old.
There were no trancers in this neck of the woods. "You're
late," she sulked.
"Jesus. It's snowing. Can't you see it's snowing out? It
took me an hour just to get to the store."
"I've been waiting and waiting!"
"You should be in school!"
"School's canceled today. Can't you see it's snowing
out?"
"How did you get in?"
"You left the door open."
"I'll have to remember not to do that anymore, Softy."
"Sophia! Don't call me Softy or I won't eat with you!"
"Did I invite you for breakfast?"
She hesitated. "My mummy said I could eat with you—if
it was all right with you."
"You're a pest. Why don't you go home?" he said fondly.
"You'd have to carry me piggyback." She giggled. "The
snow is too deep for me in the shortcut and the road is too
'ong." ;
"We're having macaroni."
"Macaroni! For breakfast?"
"I told you my father is starving me out."
"How can he starve you out? You're the son he loves."
"He loves to boot my ass. He's bigger than I am. He's
always been bigger than I am, ever since I can remember."
"Even if he doesn't love you, he's rich. He can afford a

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Donald Kingsbury
shmuck for a son." She grinned shyly and punched him in
the stomach. "You shmuck!"
"Softy! I've warned you not to do that. I'm bigger than
you are. I'll kiss you."
She punched him in the stomach again. "That's for
calling me Softy." He tried to grab her to kiss her, but she
scooted away and ducked under the table out of reach.
"Kissing! Me kiss an onion eater?" She made mock vomit-
ing noises.
"Ha, sauce for the macaroni," he countered gleefully,
bringing out a pot to put under her face.
"Doesn't he leave you any money?"
"Enough for bread and water."
"You could get a job. I've seen your engineer books."
He sighed. "You know what I was doing when I was
eleven? I was up to my ears in mathematics, learning how
to be some kind of a nut civil engineer who builds things
in space because that's what my old man wanted me to do.
I could build you a lovely hotel on the moon. But it would
fall down on Earth. They forgot to tell me about gravity."
"You could learn."
"I could get a job on the moon, that's what I could do."
"That would be fun," she teased.
"Fun? It would be like New Hampshire in January with
the air missing."
"Don't you have something to put in the macaroni? Just
butter sauce? You're not a good cook!"
"While I'm cooking, you can do the shoveling," he said.
She turned her back on him angrily. "No!"
"Twerp, you want to eat my macaroni, get out there
with the shovel!" he said sternly.
"It's still snowing!" she cried.
"Naw. It's just the wind stirring up the drifts."
Stubbornly she marched over to the kitchen radio and
switched it on. "That's not what the weather report said!
They said it would keep snowing till tomorrow!"
". . . oilfields in flames. A secondary attack seems to be
centered in and around Jiddah. It is reported that the
anti-monarchists control the airfield. ..."
"That's New York, real-time," he said. "If you want the
weather report you better punch CONCORD WTHR."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
383
The radio listened continuously to eight stations and stored
and sorted the programs so that anything one wanted was
immediately on call with the right code word.
"Is that another war!"
"Yeah, they've been killing each other for days now. If
they aren't killing Jews or getting themselves bashed by
Jews, they spend their time killing each other. Old cradle-
of-civilization pastime. It never ends. For God's sake, my
father even used to train them how to kill each other with
modern weapons—as if they needed to know."
"It sounds like Europe."
"Been reading your history again, eh?" Charlie punched
out CONCORD WTHR. Sophia was right; the snow was
supposed to continue all day until after midnight. "Okay,
just dig through the worst of the snow. You don't have to
finish. When you're done, how would you like a sniff of
my father's best brandy?"
"Yes!"
"You're not to tell your mummy."
"You're bribing me," she accused. Then she sulked and
put on her coat and took the shovel and banged the door.
Charlie did a mental calculation,' deciding that he could
splurge a whole quarter of a kilo of hamburger for the
macaroni casserole. He whistled while he crushed a garlic
bud, listening for the sounds of shoveling. When he didn't
hear any he became suspicious and hunted through the
house for Sophia. He found her in the upstairs bedroom,
still in her coat and mittens, attached to the upstairs radio
by earphones so he wouldn't catch her.
"Don't you have a TV?" she complained.
"I had to hock it. You're supposed to be shoveling."
"Lemme wait for more snow. It's easier that way. Be-
sides there's a new war and I'm interested."
"What war is it this time? The War against Poverty? The
War of the Sexes?"
"Nope. It's Russia against the USA."
"Can't be. It's not world series time."
"Is so!" She punched the radio's replay button and
activated the sound.
The commentator was freaked out of his mind, but he

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Donald Kingsbury
was telling everybody to be calm. He told people not to
stand in front of their windows.
"Hey, you're right for once." Charlie's heart skipped a
beat. Zowie. There goes Boston. "I'm glad I'm not in
Boston right now." It was an inane comment but his mind
was paralyzed.
"They're not playing in Boston. You don't have wars in
Boston, stupid!"
"This is a rough game, Softy. They're going to nuke
Boston." He still couldn't move.
"They'd better not! We'll nuke Moscow!"
"Yeah, you got the right game."
"Can we phone them up and tell them to stop? If
everybody phones up?"
"It's not a game you can stop. You sell your soul to the
devil for a few years of peace—and then he takes you
anyway."
"They're going to nuke Boston?" She was horrified.
"When?"
Charlie looked at his watch. "Twenty . . . thirty minutes."
Sophia dived under the bed.
Somehow that released Charlie and he could move. He
sat on the bed and peered down at Sophia between his
legs. "You don't think the Russians will find you there?" It
was funny and he started to laugh.
"You better come down here, too."
"No, Softy. I'm an engineer. I know just the place in the
basement to sit where the house won't fall on us.
He took the time to bring the macaroni and two plates
with them. It was cooked.
Sophia brought the bottle of brandy. "I get to make the
good-bye toast to Boston! I like that town."

CHAPTER 51
Men make their own history, but they do not make it
just as they please; they do not make it under circum-
stances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the minds of the living.
Karl Marx, The 18th Brvmaire of L. Bonaparte
The rampart's flagstones, blown free of snow by the
wind, accepted Limon Barnes's pace as it fell with mea-
sured leisure. Looking back from the parapet, this winter's
view of his shadow Kremlin was somberly Russian. The
old Cathedral of Saint Marx the Benefactor was dominated
by the elaborate walls and golden cupolas of the Cathedral
of Saint Sakharov, asymmetrically blending with the white
marble domes of the almost mosque-like Cathedral of the
Moon which Limon had commissioned in honor of the
founding of the Russian colony at Theophilus. Snow blurred
the scene while little tempests of wind-borne flakes pirou-
etted as they built snowbanks.
Carving out his principality had taken him far longer
than it should have. Years longer. Decades longer. The
heroic youth who rode horses and carried a sword and had
witty conversations with dragons had set out on a trail to
victory worried only about the trolls under bridges. Ah
385

386
Donald Kingsbury
youth! But the gaming conflicts between two competing
imperialisms were deeper and more intractable than any a
mere youth might have imagined.
Yet Limon Barnes was not unhappy with what he had
been able to do. The research base his friends had con-
structed still amazed him. How white-haired Sam Brontz
bent all the rules to use that base amazed him even more.
Looking out over his estates, over the white ghost of a
New England forest through which he had once sent a
Mongol escort to bring Prince Samislav to court, Limon
remembered a boy who had been convinced that all Sam
Brontz wanted was to market a mildly educational board-
game, a boy unable even to conceive that Sam's dreams
included a high-powered military-strategy think-tank
simultaneously capable of modifying both American and
Soviet military thought into saner channels.
Sam's task had consumed Limon. He could hardly recall
the beardless knight who would spend hours forging chain-
mail. He had become half-man, half-library and was now
addicted to the company of the Holy Mother. Long ago
Limon had settled into the triumvirate role of tyrant and
scholar and administrator—but it was the scholar who
found time, every day, to talk to his silver-tongued silicon
mistress.
Sometimes he translated a poem, struggling with it until
he couldn't tell whether he was thinking in Russian or
English. Or he might be travelling in time or he might be
calling up a Soviet dialectic tomb of the late thirties to flay
his mind into the mystical state that came with self-inflicted
torture, paring the dry logic down to its essence, following
the correct Marxist lines to their correct conclusion, like
some infallible St. Thomas guiding the steps of a blind
Pope. Sometimes Limon talked to the Holy Mother aloud
though her aural receptors were hardly better than those
of a deaf old woman.
He walked along the wind-swept stones.
Karl Marx had his British Museum. Limon had the
Cathedral library. He did not doubt that because of his
library he was the most powerful political thinker of his
generation, and more, that he was a master of global
manipulation.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
387
Yet he was wholly aware that he was totally limited.
There is a central paradox to power that every man who
aspires to godhood must handle in one way or another.
Any god who is a major thinker and a master manipula-
tor can build magnificently to his own design, but, alas,
his palace will always crumble for he will have to build it
of unfired bricks. There is only one fire in the universe
strong enough to bake enduring bricks: the flame of thought.
And yet, whoever builds his edifice out of thinking men,
cannot build to his own design for his bricks will be having
a say about where they are put. Alas to be a god!
Limon had never wished to emulate Lenin's failure.
Lenin was a master manipulator and he build magnifi-
cently to his own design out of men who could parrot
Lenin and Marx—but not a single thinker among them.
Lenin was vain and thought the fire from his own mind
was strong enough to harden the bricks of other men—his
men, the Bolsheviks. Yet, when Stalin rained on them,
these men signed their own death warrants, mindlessly,
and hence were liquidated in the thunderstorm, like adobe
back to clay, and were no more.
Better to die in an unmarked grave than to be cele-
brated by 200 million men in the wreckage of your dream,
as they chant out the glory of your words, mindlessly.
Limon had long been aware that he could outthink the
ponderous Politburo. When the leverage was right, he
could even step them through his script. He could moni-
tor the Soviet General Staff and generously offer to give
them back a move when they took a fatal step. He could
see the nudge that would push the Pentagon away from
hasty error. He could lock himself in his office and turn
the lights down to dim gloom and call up the giant screen
to converse for hours across the paths of machine con-
sciousness with the Holy Mother. It was the graceful
decline of the arms race that was the jewel in his crown.
No one in the world, except perhaps Sam, suspected that
it was he who had pulled off that "impossible" pool shot.
However, nothing that one did by manipulating un-
thinking men was stable. Perhaps, thought Limon, he
could have built palaces—at one flash point there had
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Donald Kingsbury
Army. Lenin would have done exactly that. Yet it was
more interesting to be a brickmaker, and probe the inter-
nal fires that made men strong. Let the bricks find their
own place in destiny's higgledy-piggledy palace—which
somehow had left a corner for his own beloved Massachu-
setts Kremlin.
The wind was beginning to howl. He ducked down into
the arched interior of the medieval wall. Enough of this
useless nostalgia and egomania. Had to get back to work.
Work, work, work. And he bumped into Monk Krupskaya,
at least that's what she called herself. She was twenty
years old and hailed from some hick village around San
Francisco. Out of politeness he doffed his fedora. Only
America had female monks. It was a peculiar place. He
was wearing his Nikita Khrushchev disguise these days, a
baggy Italian business suit with large lapels.
"Hi," she said, awkwardly sidestepping, as if she had
suddenly decided to follow him and then, in the middle of
the decision, decided that she shouldn't. Her wise eyes
never blinked. "Kaissel was looking for you."
"I was up on the wall admiring my handiwork." He took
pity on her indecision and gestured with a slightly spastic
wave of his hand for her to follow him. He watched the
sudden rush of pleasure in her cowled face.
I'm getting old, he thought, when twenty seems too
young.
Sometimes he regretted that he had been too busy ever
to marry. Perhaps he hadn't because the Cathedrals, in
their own peculiar social way, provided him with a mis-
tress often enough to remind him how much trouble women
really were. He had a love daughter, all of twelve years
old, who lived in Arizona and who flew out on her own to
visit him once in a while expressly to disorganize his life.
He remembered when his daughter, in a very loud
voice, had ordered the Holy Mother to take better care of
her Limon, and, not quite sure what the daughter had
requested but too proud to call for a clarification, the
library computer had muttered on about maternal care in
twelfth century byelorussia.
"I brought Kaissel the new batch of samizdat-disks,"
said Krupskaya. "He seemed distracted."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
389
"Peter is always distracted. This time it's probably the
war in Saudi Arabia."
So, he thought, they had smuggled out some more of
the samizdats. Russian computer kids were wary of "bulle-
tin boards" because they were too easily monitored by the
police, but a samizdat-on-a-disk was a different thing. Its
essential form had been invented by Limon but long ago
modified into a rich phylum by an enthusiastic class of
Russians who called themselves Bogatyri—a name refer-
ring both to mythical Russian supermen and the most
common of the Soviet personal computers. It was not a
literary form encouraged by the police.
Limon plugged his vox-card into a slot. "Peter Kaissel."
"Kaissel here," replied the speaker after a short pause.
"Where are you?"
"The Old Lubyanka. Been up all night."
"Haven't they let you out of prison yet? I'm sure I
ordered your release back in nineteen ninety-something ..."
Peter laughed.
"What was that?" asked Krupskaya.
"A rumble before your time. Just one of my stunts."
"You like stunts, don't you?" she said admiringly.
"I'm more formal these days. Stunts are a bit scatter-
shot. They miss, sometimes." Limon continued to remi-
nisce. "I lost a good man once. He still won't speak to
me—has a good job as a professor at UCLA. I used to like
to play Stalin. Heavy role. When you get older you prefer
shoe-banging."
"What is a Limon-Stalin like?"
He smiled. "Fierce." He couldn't explain.
When Limon and Krupskaya came out of the wall, while
they hurried through the snow, he asked her if she knew
that Peter Kaissel was the SMB's greatest expert on Rus-
sian Law.
She was still with him when they reached the Old
Lubyanka.
Peter's accomplices sat at the new terminal, checking
through the latest iteration of Scenario 14. It was an
overserious document, almost a satire of an American re-
sponse to a Soviet "provocation," and not something a
typical above-average American general would have con-

390
Donald Kingsbury
ceived—the scenario was afflicted by the short-sighted
thinking of a 1930s German Field Marshal who couldn't
plan much farther than a six week campaign. It lacked—
deliberately—both the imperial patience and the long range
pragmatism which appealed to the American military.
The basic assumptions of all such SMB scenarios, in
fact, had been derived from a careful analysis of the atti-
tudes of the majority of the real Soviet General Staff about
the way they thought an American general thought—the
mirror image of a mirror image. If you want to tease a
paranoid, as Limon Barnes well knew, you brought alive a
role right out of his most dreaded fantasy—and added
special details. As they had in the past, the real Soviet
General Staff would find the scenario a plausible artifact of
the American military mind and respond to it.
The strength of this scenario was that it identified three
vulnerabilities in the USSR defenses that would cost about
one percent of the Soviet economic resources to plug—
without, at the same time, adding to Soviet offensive
capability.
"Looks good," said Limon.
Kaissel interrupted. "Let's take a break. I'd rather talk
about the actual reason I got you down here. I want to put
this scenario on hold. I want to run it through the analyzer
again. Too many big changes this week."
"The revolution in Saudi Arabia? I'm not so sure that's a
change. That whole area has been one big firecracker
string ever since the Turkish Empire broke up."
"Heard the latest news this morning? At least a thousand
Americans have been killed. That's not going down well.
State is screaming."
"Blaming the Russians?"
"They may not be screaming out of reflex. I've been on
the Holy Mother all night running a search on this guy
Bijad ibn Jamal who surfaced yesterday."
"You didn't expect to find anything!"
"Jesus, Limon, do you understand that library we've
created? We added two new computers to the network last
month. Nobody understands her operating system any-
more."
"She's biased to correlate data about Soviet affairs."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
391
"Yeah, and that's why she put ibn Jamal's profile to-
gether so quickly. She came up with 27 items, none of
them meaningful by themselves. He may not be a KGB
man but he's up to his ears in KGB money and connec-
tions. They even rebuilt his face."
"Shit," said Limon.
Kaissel was talking to the Holy Mother and she was
putting maps of world oil reserves onto the screen in
various different overlays—all from the Soviet viewpoint
but that didn't matter. Saudi Arabia still had the world's
lowest wellhead costs and the largest reserves and had
patiently waited for the depletion of the West's higher cost
reserves. She was in a stronger position than at any time
since 1972.
Everybody but the United States had gone over to
nuclear power. The best estimate for a minimal-sized fu-
sion power station was 120 gigawatts, far too huge and
expensive to build. The United States could get along
without Saudi Arabia—but they would be very unhappy
about it—and, if a Soviet finger was found in that mess,
the whole USA would be a nest of fury.
"So much for the Soviet trend away from 19th century
imperialist intrigues," muttered Kaissel wistfully.
Limon sighed. "The tempting thing about Marxist his-
torical determinism is that you don't have to be responsi-
ble for your foreign policy. Whatever happens is the result
of historical necessity. Meddlers love not being responsi-
ble for their sins. '* He knew Kovalyov was no adventurist—
and never would be one. But it was an old Russian story.
The right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing.
Centralism generally meant that no leader knew what was
going on because there were too many communication
botdenecks. Whole fiefdoms operated on their own. "Maybe
yesterday was the first time Kovalyov was ever briefed
about ibn Jamal. You're right. We'll run your stuff through
again before we put it into covert channels."
Limon couldn't help but peek at one of the samizdats.
They were on Belgian disks because they had been smug-
gled out the usual way, over the telephone, coded on the
voice track in the noise. Let a Russian loose and he turned
out really good stuff that was exciting to read.

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Donald Kingsbury
Samizdat-disks were the hottest creative artform circu-
lating in Moscow, precisely because there was no way that
the state could control them short of confiscating the com-
puters or limiting their use which they couldn't do without
crippling the Soviet economy. The Soviet Writer's Union
had been very threatened by the process and had tried to
flood the market with sanitized disks—which were imme-
diately gobbled up, erased, and reused. (Blank disks were
controlled.)
The permutations were endless. A Bogatyr would copy
things out of print for distribution to his friends. He would
take someone else's collection and "improve" upon it by
deleting what he didn't like and adding what he did.
Arguments and philosophical discussions were carried on
that way—sometimes with great passion because the au-
thors were untraceable. The disks often included hot little
utility programs as a come-on. Tips about government
falsehoods and scandals circulated.
Limon used them as a constant source of information
and as a vehicle to distribute his heretical versions of
socialism tailored to the young apparatchik with a com-
puter. He kept track of which of his essays were copied
and which were erased. His staff used many styles and
many themes. Limon was probably the best read author in
Moscow among the computer literati and loved the feedback.
Leaning over his shoulder, Krupskaya sighed. He smiled.
"When your Russian is more polished, I'll have you pub-
lished in Moscow. Best audience in the world. They're
hungry."
"Have dinner with me," she blurted.
Limon did not have time to reply. Suddenly the loud-
speakers kicked in, carrying a shaken Boston newscaster
repeating himself.
"Shit!" said Limon.
He recognized the dreaded Synmann Accident immedi-
ately. He got up and went over to the master console. The
disk drives whined.
"What are you doing?" asked a white-faced Kaissel.
"Backing up all our files to the lower vault. Isn't that
what the engineers say? When you expect a hardware
failure, back up your files. We haven't backed up to the

The Moon Goddess and the Son	393
Doomsday vault for a week. Don't want to lose all that
data."
"What are we going to do?" asked Kaissel.
"There's nothing we can do," snarled Limon, and his
head jerked before he could bring it under control. "We've
failed). We die\"

CHAPTER 52
Tou millions from the West,
Eager to march unrested,
Served by cannon's roar,
Across our plains in test of strength and will
Shall only meet
with hordes
and hordes
Of slant and avaricious eyes!
Whole ages passed for you;
For us one single winter's day
Freezing in the wind
To hold the shield between two hostile men:
White, and Mongol
riding,
riding
Out cf an endless grassy steppe.
While you are still in life
And filled with strifing sweetness,
Warm about your hearth,
Go listen to the teachings of your many wars
Beseeching you
to pause,
to pause
before you pass the ancient Sphinx!
394

The Moon Goddess and the Son
395
Our Russia is a Sphinx!
Exultant and afflicted,
Drenched in blackest blood,
There in shadow she is gazing at your soul.
Scythian eyes
gazing,
gazing,
With hatred and with steadfast love!
Old World, come to us!
There's joy in a peaceful hug.
Washed of war and clean,
Slip your sword into its gilded leather sheath.
My cry to you:
comrades,
comrades,
We must seize the day as brothers!
If not—then I curse you!
We will close ranks like the Hun,
Rob food from corpses;
Herd frightened hordes of humankind to church;
Torch screaming towns—
burn them,
bum them,
Roasting our brother's flesh!
No more will I call you!
For the last time I speak out!
The table is laden,
A radiant feasting of peace and labor.
I call you all.
Trumpets!
Trumpets!
My barbaric trumpet calls you!
Alexander Blok 1880-1921, Russian
poet in conversation with the west.
The Soviet General Staff had planned and prepared for
every conceivable kind of American attack—but not this

396
Donald Kingsbury
one. As is usually the case when a complacent military
command has been totally surprised, the sudden chaos in
the caves under the Urals was not quickly being disci-
plined—communications were blocked and jamming, com-
plicated by the worst storm to hit Central Russia in a
century. Contradictions were arriving over non-standard
emergency channels.
General Pavel Tikonovich Savichev was pissing into one
of a smelly row of urinals in a tiled room with a defective
public address speaker when the war began and only
found out about it when he stepped out of the urinal and
an officer rushed past him, turning to mutter about some-
thing terrible at the Kremlin. War was so inconceivable
that Savichev's first thoughts supposed a Palace Coup gone
amuck. He felt himself insulated from Party politics—but,
still, a coup was a surprise. Anyone who set off a bomb in
the Kremlin should be shot. He wasn't sympathetic.
But when he reached his duty station he was chilled
into action. This was no coup. The Soviet Union was at
war!
Wildly different reports suggested that all senior mem-
bers of the Politburo had been killed in the treacherous
attack, probably along with key members of the Moscow
military staff. Savichev had not been missed in the prelim-
inary confusion. He was not part of the chain of command
which had been set up to initiate retaliation against Ameri-
can adventurist aggression. Savichev was the man who
carried the responsibility for a calculated secondary Soviet
response. It was his duty to assess the damage done to
Soviet defenses after an American first strike, and to assess
the degree to which the Russian response had failed, and
to prepare, and execute, a second strike.
The precipitate disorder of the Soviet response had
appalled Savichev. Once begun, however, the operation
had been smoothly correct and the enormous planning had
paid off. The computers were working flawlessly. When
the maximally permitted response time is six minutes,
every detail has to be anticipated in advance and pro-
grammed and executed by computers which are not crip-
pled by emotion or hesitation or befuddled thinking. Even
the fastest mind of the best general is too slow.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
397
Savichev's mind was in turmoil, and yet he did his job.
Part of him was thinking of his wife and beloved children
in Moscow—they would not escape—no one would escape—
the Americans were insane—and the other part of his
mind was the perfect professional soldier, gathering the
information he was going to need to finish the destruction
of a wounded United States before he, too, died.
Savichev was horrified at the speed with which the
Americans were taking out his satellite eyes. At that rate
he would be blind in an hour and would have to make his
strike in the dark. It wouldn't stop him. He had ample
reserves of mobile miniature ICBMs. Another satellite
went dead. His mind raced. They were taking them out at
ten times the expected rate. Maybe those madmen had
secret capabilities that they had managed to hide from
Soviet intelligence.
An awful thought crossed his mind. War is the art of
deception; was he being deceived? The obvious weakness
of the Americans was that they squabbled in public. They
warred with each other. They babbled out everything and
could keep no secrets. Congress had been publicly crip-
pling the American space defense system—refusing money
to upgrade the system to counter the new Soviet ICBMs.
But what if that charade had been orchestrated to lull the
Soviets? What if they did have weapons that made them
invulnerable? There might be the central assurance be-
hind an otherwise senseless strike.
The American attack on the Afghan airfields seemed like
an incredible blunder. Two of Savichev's aides were spec-
ulating out loud that the Americans had beheaded the
Kremlin and were now planning a fast airborne advance
into the depths of Russia via Afghanistan before the Sovi-
ets could recover from confusion—but on any kind of time
scale that hypothesis was absurd. The war would be over
long before the troops arrived, unless . . . Again, what if
the Americans had reason to consider themselves invul-
nerable?
This whole cacophony of thought was passing through
his head in mere minutes while the professional soldier
assimilated with his eyes a whole world of Soviet sensors
and a stream of information that would have meant noth-

398
Donald Kingsbury
ing to an untrained man. It was unbelievably noisy under
battle conditions. Sectors went out and faded in. Never-
theless the flux of data on his screens was disturbing.
There was no real pattern. It was a masterful surprise
attack. Unpredictable. The enemy was destroying vintage
Soviet missiles almost before they got out of the atmo-
sphere but the SS-76s and 78s which had been designed to
penetrate the shield were, in fact, having no launch
problems.
What was beginning to bother Savichev was that there
were no enemy ICBMs. Had the Americans been able to
apply stealth technology to their missiles? That seemed
incredible. What if they had a second generation of ICBMs
which were invisible to the Soviet shield? No, not incredi-
ble—impossible. Then what was the pattern of the imperi-
alist attack?
"No American warheads are coming in," he said to his
aide.
It didn't even surprise him to say this because he had
not yet noticed his own thought. Once a man is commit-
ted, totally, to doing what he has been trained to do all his
life, his mind reacts before it thinks, seeing what it has
been trained to see. He continued to believe that the
Americans were mad to attack while another frantic part of
his mind searched desperately for the method in the mad-
ness so that it might be foiled. Only in a third mental
corner, unnoticed even by himself, was he examining the
input of his senses without filtering it through dogma.
A pale reflection of the flaring battle in space flickered
across his screens. He was asking questions now. He talked
briefly to the military men on Mirograd. He made a frantic
call to the Dzhevenki radar station. Nothing could be
rationalized. The Americans were responding defensively.
For no apparent reason an article he had read long ago
flashed across his mind. Accidental war. (The paper had
disturbed him then and he had ranted about it to his
colleagues. His rebuttal appeared in Red Flight. But in
spite of the official position, and his own public position,
he had never been able to convince himself that accidental
war was impossible.)
By now the signs of an accidental war were unmistakable.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
399
He did not have time to test this hypothesis.
He did not have the weeks he would need to convince
his colleagues. The war was already minutes old.
Two factors commanded Savichev's decisive action: (1)
the United States was holding its fire and (2) he under-
stood every facet of the communications system he was
dealing with, having rebuilt it from the ground up. Know-
ing what he controlled and what he could do, he ordered
all ICBM launches halted.
Back in the primary command theater, General Volkovoy
first tried to countermand Savichev's orders and found that
he couldn't because the computer programs, designed with
safety in mind, now required Savichev's consent.
Within fifteen seconds Volkovoy stormed through the
tunnels to Savichev's command station, shouting to Savichev's
aides that their general was a CIA infiltrator and was
aborting the defensive strike so that the Americans could
finish them off. He was wild with fury. He had his re-
volver out.
Savichev turned, took in Volkovoy's face, and fully ex-
pected to die. He did not have time to reach his own
revolver.
Captain Sergei Dal executed Volkovoy with a single
bullet to the head, then stood stunned at the magnitude of
his deed.
Savichev never gave the captain time to regret this
instinctive move of loyalty. He rose. "Well done!" While
his other aides were just beginning to react, Savichev was
checking the dead general, disarming the corpse and drag-
ging it aside.
Back at the console he paused. He had only seconds to
convince his fellow officers of the magnitude of the Soviet
error—and no amount of reasoning would do. His simple
message, heard at every station inside the Ural fortress,
was loaded with emotion. "General Volkovoy has just ad-
mitted a fatal act of judgment and has committed suicide.
This is General Savichev. I am taking command." He
spoke with the voice of the Angel of Death acting on God's
command. "There will be no more military action until the
situation has clarified. Our reserves are ample to destroy
the United States several times over. At the moment we

400
Donald Kingsbury
have 110 evidence of an American ICBM attack. Stand by
for new instructions! Stations acknowledge!"
Within seconds he knew he had control. The years of
forging a loyal following had paid off, but he suspected
that no one else wanted responsibility for the truly awful
situation they were in.
The American command had been trying to reach them
by phone. Savichev took the call and answered in his
flawless English—though he knew the men at the other
end spoke Russian. "This is General Pavel Savichev in
command of all Soviet nuclear forces as of a few moments
ago. Our attack was an error. All Soviet ICBM launchings
have ceased. I am aware that the United States has not yet
responded. I am not aware of the decisions which led to
our launchings. The Kremlin seems to have been bombed.
We are losing eyes at an alarming rate. I will be able to
restrain my own forces with a firm hand only if I can
continue to monitor your response."
"Are you asking us to stop killing your eyes?"
"That would be appreciated."
"Just a moment." There was a long pause in which
another American took over the conversation in Russian.
"What's going on over there? We're puzzled."
"How should I know?" Savichev spoke with irritation. "I
was taking a piss when it happened. It's running on com-
puter time—too fast for me."
The first American voice came back. "Yes, we will be
able to stop terminating your eyes—temporarily. It should
take about 30 seconds for the order to go into effect.
Please be patient."
Savichev continued. "I've already requested our defen-
sive battle stations to take out as many Soviet missiles as
they can. I'm not optimistic about battle station effective-
ness—never was. I'm afraid your country will take hits. I
have to warn you that I will be obliged by circumstance to
retaliate if you respond."
"Acknowledged."
There was a pause while the American took that in. To
Savichev his own words had sounded like the most arro-
8ai:t line of his life. "How are your Reagan contraptions
doing?" he asked without much hope.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
401
"Your 76s and 78s are penetrating our defenses admira-
bly. Excellent missiles."
"Thank you! But are you going to kill any of them!"
"That information is classified. I don't believe you have
the proper security clearance."
While they talked, the Star Wars raged.

CHAPTER 53
"If you want to know the difference between a defense
and an offense," Joe Synmann had a habit of saying,
"assume that your enemy is willing to commit suicide
when he attacks. If you can stop him while saving yourself
under those conditions, then what you have qualifies as a
defense."
USAF Lt. General Willie Harmony
from Large Scale Simulations
In a Synmann Game—using the strict Synmann defini-
tion of defense—the probability of war is decreased dra-
matically by moves which force offensive strength to be
given up for defensive strength, and defensive strength to
be given up for cooperative effort. The Synmann Game
rules do not allow the use of double-talk. For instance,
nuclear deterrence cannot be classified as a defensive strat-
egy, for though nuclear weapons may be used to prevent
the victory of an enemy, they cannot be used to provide a
safe haven for one's own tribe.
Dr. Peter Kaissel from The Mathematics of War Games
Horrible-Bill Maltby liked to talk to his machines. They
were all women to him and he patted them on the rump.
He never kicked malfunctioning TV sets. He sweet-talked
402

The Moon Goddess and the Son
403
them into giving him a picture. When a candy machine
politely delivered him a chocolate bar after he deposited
his money, he thanked it. He especially liked coffee ma-
chines because they were nice to him in the morning.
"Treat her right, and she'll serve you well," he was known
to say to his young nephews back in Texas. His nephews
were wary of him because he had once paddled them for
cursing a lawn mower that wouldn't start.
Though he loved machines, he didn't approve of intelligent
machines. Giving them some intelligence at the factory
was all right but with too much smarts they got hard to
live with, and, worse, when they were over-educated they
took off and flew combat missions by themselves, acting
like a man, and taking a man's job. He grumbled. Horrible-
Bill, a fighter pilot, had been relegated to driving sexy
blond trucks in L.A.
So when the Air Force called him up and offered him a
gig with the most beautiful machine a recruiting officer
had ever described, he was both excited and wary. They
showed him pics. He was wary because she looked like
one of those smart jobs. But God, she had sleek lines and
she had power to knock your balls off. In the end, he
couldn't resist. He had to touch her.
"But what will she need me for?" he asked, remember-
ing those factory installed brains. Maybe she could even
read.
"Maltby, she'll love you. You've got the touch."
She lived in space. When he first slipped into her plush
cockpit he patted her gently on the range-finder and said,
"Now you no-good good-looker, don't look to give me no
trouble, and I'll treat you right." She fed him and mas-
saged him, and he thanked her. She played chess with
him and was decent enough to lose from time to time. "I
beat you fair and square that time, didn't I? You didn't
cheat and let me win just to make me feel good, now did
you?" Tactfully, she said nothing and put on the music he
liked. He named her Horrible-Bill's Whore and wondered
what he'd do without her when his tour of duty was over.
It wasn't all play, and the defense command put them
through their paces testing her systems. "Little Whore,"

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Donald Kingsbury
he'd always say after one of her impressive workouts, "you
got a strong arm. Now don't you go getting mad at me!"
Horrible-Bill was just as surprised as anyone else one
day when his Whore called him to full alert. "Pirates?
Jimminy-Goddamn! There be pirates out in this wild black
yonder!" Maltby and his battle station were cruising high,
upside down, overtaking a dark California far below, or far
above, depending upon the orientation of your semi-circular
canals.
There wasn't even time to get dressed. He fought in his
pajamas, that's how surprised he was, with his command
helmet locked over his head. The Whore was murmuring
already, her battle systems up, receiving and sending to
her cousins. He had a twenty-eight minute window within
which to be effective—and an untried weapon. That made
him sweat.
The hydra weapon had been tested in the field exactly
once, on the other side of the moon when the Russkies
weren't looking. But what the hell. The Almogordo bomb
hadn't been a production weapon either, and the Nagasaki
and Hiroshima designs were first tried out in battle. A
weapon that accelerates at 100 gs and tops off at ten Earth
escape velocities can't be put through its paces without
having the Red team notice.
Horrible-Bill listened to the battle in awe. The golden-
oldies could hardly lift off Soviet soil before blossoming
into the colors of flame. But the 76s and 78s were doing
well, sifting through the screen. Soon they would be com-
ing in "over the ball" and at an altitude two thousand
kilometers below the Whore. He'd have to fine-tune his
hits. His rack had place for twenty of the hydras—but at
the moment Horrible-Bill and his Whore carried only
three. They'd run out of hydras before the Red team ran
out of pirates. Anti-hydrogen was still scarce.
The Whore rolled to aim herself at the horizon, her first
hydra already armed and pointing at a million decoys
running interference for the warheads. Earth loomed un-
derneath them, huge, a half-lit North American continent
lazy with clouds. High frequency pulse lasers were prob-
ing the pirate swarm using Newton's laws to separate out

The Moon Goddess and the Son
405
the wheat from the chaff—the light chaff recoiling more
than the warheads.
Holographic computers in the battle stations were clutter-
ing and chattering among themselves, picking, choosing,
singing among more lines of computer programming than
had been written for all other systems combined since
God had created Mark I and Univac. Most of their pro-
grams had been written by the computers themselves.
Captain Maltby waited tensely, in his pajamas, for the
assignment of targets. He and his Whore wouldn't be on
their own unless the main command system failed. In
those slow moments he patted his woman encouragingly.
"We'll get 'em, baby." This girl he trusted. After 143 tests
of her laser targeting locks, he was impressed. It amused
him that the Soviets thought this deadly broad was just
another laser battle station. And she learned! Every time
she made a mistake, she learned! He had honed her into
the fastest draw outside of Texas. God, these holos were
smart!
His speakers crackled. "Horrible—you're on. Targets
transmitted. Your pirates targeted on US cities. Every
one you hit saves a city. Make it-good." Somebody was
figuring that the point-defended hard silos could take care
of themselves.
Thirteen laser beams shot out toward the horizon, seek-
ing, locking one after the other. "Good draw! Hey, baby!"
Her electromagnetic gun spat out the first hydra. He
felt the recoil, surprised, but his woman wasn't surprised.
She held her thirteen laser locks.
The first whack of the launch woke the sleeping weapon,
releasing the anti-hydrogen genie from its bottle. Out-
numbered anti-matter fought viciously with matter. Pions
flew. Porous tungsten soaked up the gamma ray disinte-
gration of the neutral pions. Synmann's ingenious mag-
netic chamber grabbed the charged pions before they died
and whirled them into a reaction that combined them with
the hydrogen cooling the tungsten and sent a thin stream
of ionized gas out of the rocket at twenty times the veloc-
ity of the best hydrogen-oxygen reaction.
The rocket leaped down its beam, weaving among the
lasers that stabbed out the target cone.

406
Donald Kingsbury
After 52 seconds the hydra was already moving at seven
times the velocity of the pirate ICBMs. Then it shed the
first of its warheads, a chemically-powered mini-rocket
that followed beam-one to a preordained destiny. Still
accelerating, the hydra weaved into the path of laser-beam-
two, to shed its second head. At four second intervals it
lost new heads until there were none left. And then the
headless hydra followed the thirteenth beam down to a
target of its own.
At one hundred thousand meters per second a tiny
warhead needs no explosive punch. One gram at that
velocity carries the energy of one pound of TNT. Anything
it hits is shattered down a cone of spreading debris. At
that velocity a 22 caliber bullet would knife a hole through
a T92 tank like so much cream cheese.
The last released head hit first and the first head hit last.
There were nine impacts out of thirteen shots. With their
probes, command center confirmed the kills. "Hey, sweet
baby," crooned Maltby. "You're a knockout!"
Horrible-Bill's Whore wasn't paying any attention. The
seconds were precious, and in that time between targetings
she was reprogramming her reflexes so that she would not
repeat the four misses. During the next attack, over a
wider angle and a more difficult shot, she got thirteen out
of thirteen, and, on the next shot, twelve out of thirteen.
"What do you want for a present, sweetheart! I love
you. You're a damn smart broad! You've got the brains;
I've got the brawn!" He caressed her range-finder with
real affection.
Captain Maltby and his Whore with a golden heart had
no more sting—but Wilson's Lady was drifting into Pirate
range. The two machines were exchanging recipes, revis-
ing the algebra of their algorithms, humming, and gossip-
ing over the com lines with the other holos.
Ten of the Soviet 76s made it to re-entry. None of them
reached the ground through the hypervelocity hail thrown
up by Earth bound chewers.
Eighteen 78s made it through. Fifteen of them died in
the atmosphere. Two hit Montana and one of them bloomed
over North Dakota, destroying Ruthville.

CHAPTER 54
The men stuck their heads above the lunar crater. Ser-
geant Baen pushed aside the frond that blocked his view.
Dew dropped from the moon fern. In the glaring light of
the Imbrian plain the sergeant gasped. There squatted the
slimy moon crawler drying its multiple feet in the sun.
"Back, back," Baen said frantically.
from The Moon Crawlers by Diana Grove
It was named many things but within three days every-
one was calling it the Great Accidental War. In the United
States Joseph Synmann was a national hero to people who
were stunned to find themselves still alive. Newspapers
were reprinting old Ronald Reagan speeches with a kind of
sobered reverence. A rash of bumper stickers screamed:
Remember Ruthville! or Nuke the Reds! or God Saves!
The United States Expeditionary Forces were having a
rough time in Saudi Arabia, barely managing to evacuate
and protect the Americans there who hadn't already been
killed. They were losing about five trucks a day. In the
Soviet Union an intense power struggle, following the
virtual elimination of the Politburo, was making urgent
negotiations with Washington almost impossible. General
Savichev had seized control of the Soviet Armed Forces,
reassuring an indignant French Premier that the Soviet
peoples stood by their vow never to be the first to use
407

408
Donald Kingsbury
nuclear weapons. Poland was erupting after the assassina-
tion of the Zomo's Marshal Pryzewiocki. Afghanistan was
under strict censorship. The Italian government had fallen.
Forty-thousand Germans came to hear an American Bap-
tist preacher.
But to Diana, a resilient youth, it was "just a war scare."
She celebrated the death and resurrection of the world by
reading a romance novel in free fall and writing a 500 word
short story for Planet Stories so her by-line could appear on
the restaurant's front cover.
Diana was late for work for the first time. It wasn't her
fault. There had been a minor malfunction on the trans-
port line between eyries. Even though she was late she
had to stop and admire the Planet Stories cover. The ten
loving eyes of the monster were still gazing at the blonde
woman he was fondling with his tentacles, and the Swede,
in his cylindrical spaceman's helmet, was still racing to the
rescue, jet packs ablaze. But now she was on the cover,
too! Diana smiled broadly. And in Chinese red and spar-
kling green type!
the MOON CRAWLERS
a chilling adventure
by Diana Grove
the DIMENSIONAL FORTUNES OF DR. SAM
by Susan Foibbs
ALONG THE DREADED WARLANES OF BALMUKARI
the atom man meets the immortal siren warriors of Io!
George A. Gardener's new Odyssey thru interplanetary
space.
Ducking under the hatch she apologized to the Rocketship
Captain of the Tri-Planetary Space Fleet, quickly so he
wouldn't have time to chew her out, then disappeared into
the lady's room. Because she was in a hurry she had a
difficult time squeezing into her brass scan ties. She primped
in front of the mirror, fixing her hair just right under the
helmet phones.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
409
"Mr. Ling!" she said admiringly to her own image, "you
are a dirty old man!"
She eased herself into the bar above the dining room
with nonchalance, flowing in as part of the furnishings, as
if she had always been there. She hated to be noticed
when she was late and she pretended to ignore the cus-
tomers. If she had arrived on time they would long ago
have been served and be ignoring her.
"Diana!"
She turned. A man with pepper hair and blue eyes was
smiling lazily at her. He wore lunar togs. He had a strong
aura about him and she thought she saw in his face a
gentle fondness for women. That strange heady feeling of
love at first sight struck. She let the emotion tingle through
her mainly because he was an older man and that made
him safe. Three other men hovered with him at a service
booth. She glided over, her willingness to serve at a level
above and beyond the call of duty.
"How do you know I'm Diana?"
"I've kissed all the other by-lines."
"And they rejected your clever pass, so you're trying me
as a last resort?" What a handsome man, she thought.
"Watch out," said one of the others, "she's armed."
"And beautiful arms they are," said the distinguished
blue-eyed man, undiscouraged.
"I've become a famous writer," she said proudly.
"And tell me, love of my life, what's a Moon Crawler?"
"A Moon Crawler," replied Diana, "is a slimy worm
from outer space who telepathically poses as an irresistible
woman. All that's left of the man in the morning is his
toenails."
"Ouch. Let's hug and make up."
"You wouldn't survive. Now what do you want to order?"
He was amused. "I'm rich and charming and experi-
enced, a classic winner. What did I do to deserve you?"
At the first opportunity Diana asked her captain in his
Tri-planet Rocketforce uniform, "Who is that distinguished
one with those accountant types? He's a regular here, isn't
he?"
"McDougall."
"McDougall? Byron McDougall?"

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Donald Kingsbury
"Yeah. The one and only. He has a few interesting
stories up his sleeve. He's an old fighter pilot."
But Diana wasn't listening. She was staring. He certainly
looked like Byron McDougall—only much more alive. So
that's why she had fallen in love with him the minute their
eyes metl
"He just came in from the moon?" Her eyes darted back
to the corner.
"He commutes to the moon."
She leaned conspiratorially over the 1940s space battle
cruiser weapons control array. "Why do I like married
men?"
"He's divorced."
"He is?" She shivered at that news. "He likes me, did
you notice?"
"Diana sweetheart, listen to me. You have a superlative
bod. He's a make-em and leave-em man. He's out of your
class."
"What do you know about trapping men!" she flared and
left with the dinners.
One thing she liked about her job, the girls were sup-
posed to entertain intellectually as well as serve and be
sexy. Ling never sent a woman to Planet Stories who
wasn't a good talker. It was easy to wedge into this group
and dominate the chat. She made her points by touching
the men lightly with excited hands—except McDougall.
But while his companions caressed her brass armor, she
flirted with those flecked blue eyes.
Duties called her away, yet she made special trips back
to his corner. Only as they finished their after-dinner
drinks did she tousle Byron's hair and whisper in his ear,
"I'm off at two this evening. Why don't you pick me up
then?" She was trembling with embarrassment.
He smiled. "Too bad I'm not on vacation. This war mess
downstairs has a stake up all our asses." He scribbled
something and handed her a note. "God you're beautiful.
For you I could give up working."
Diana didn't dare look at his note until he left, and then
she couldn't open it quick enough. It was only his Hilton
Hotel room number, the executive suite. She had a flash

The Moon Goddess and the Son
411
of anger. I won't go. He wanted her to chase him. It was
humiliating. I'll go home and chain myself to my hammock!
On the wall hung an original Planet Stories illustration
of the Princess of Ganymede, wearing a World War II
hairdo and burlesque costume, racing between the moons
of Jupiter on her rocket sled and being pursued. Some
women have all the luck!
It was a long ride to the Hilton in the maglev car. She
stared at the golden rings of the leoport stretching out to a
point at infinity above the Earth's horizon. Close by one
could look between the coils and sometimes see a saucer
coming through or being shot out: the coils jerked and a
glimmer of ripples travelled up and down the golden
snake.
The eyries were mostly at the ends of the leoport.
Planet Stories was in the trailing edge. The fragile connec-
tors which held the city of eyries together seemed like a
fairy world that the wind could blow away—only there was
no wind. The moon was so bright she could hardly look at
it and the sun was blocked off by her car's screens, obscur-
ing her destination.
Tremulously, at two-thirty, she was at McDougall's door,
knocking. He opened. Behind him papers were maglocked
to the walls. The console that went with the executive
suite was alive with read-out. He seemed confused to see
her.
"Didn't you invite me?" She clutched his note, unsure
of herself on his territory.
He shook himself. "I wasn't expecting you."
"I thought you invited me."
He eased her inside. "And I thought you were pulling
my leg. Pretty wench, you pulled my leg all evening! So I
pulled yours. If I'd known you were serious I would have
been after you with roses. I hate being stood up."
Slightly mollified she said, "Where would you get roses?"
"There are ways, my little Moon Crawler."
She watched the tension lift from his face. A lined face
could not hide tension as easily as a young face. He's
happy to have me. He took her in his arms and held her
warmly. She let him. What am I doing here? He's going to

412
Donald Kingsbury
try to lay me. I've got to get out of here. "Did I interrupt
something?"
"You most certainly did."
"I'm sorry. I won't bother you. I'll just watch. I love to
watch men work. They're so involved."
"Give me another hour. I'm making up a presentation
for a congressional committee. Looking at energy alterna-
tives with Saudi oil probably knocked out. It's easier to
bring in energy from the moon than dig it up from under
the North Pole."
"I thought we weren't importing as much oil from Saudi
Arabia as we used to." Always get a man to talk about his
work.
"We're not. But try turning off fifteen percent of your
oil supply when you are all geared up for it, and when it
represents sixty percent of your reserves for the next
thirty years. That new crew of camel-smelling sister-beaters
are throwing out their American oil men. They killed
more than three thousand of their own American-trained
men in the battle. There isn't going to be any production
for a while."
Her eyes were glowing. "Will we have to build solar
power satellites now? We'll need the moon for that," she
said loyally.
"There's a good chance."
"They'll probably just dig more coal," she said with
scom. "I used to live in Ohio. Everything was done with
coal."
He snorted. "Coal has been having problems for a long
time. I could buy a lunar colony for the billions of dollars
the government spends on coal related disabilities and
acid rain." He called up another display on the screen—
hydrogen fusion was still impossibly expensive. "That leaves
oil shale, breeder reactors, and solar power satellites. I'm
trying to figure out the trade-offs."
"Is there anything I can do? Sort papers or something?"
"Diana," he said warmly, "you've had a hard day. You've
had a whole shift for God's sake. Get to bed. I'll join you
later."
"I'd rather watch." With a cringing fascination she no-
ticed the terror that was beginning to rise in her.

"And I'd rather see some rosy cheeks in the morning."
He took her behind the room screen and pulled out the
bed netting and casually began to undress her.
She froze.
He backed off. "We've made different postulates?"
She was panicky. She didn't know how to explain. "I
have to be between you and the door. I'm crazy."
He changed positions with her, careful not to touch her,
instantly willing to put her at ease. "Is that better?" He
was puzzled and half-amused.
She nodded.
"Have you ever made love in space?" he asked.
"No." She had never done that anywhere.
"You'll enjoy it."
"I'm getting out of here."
"Stay." It was a command. He did not raise his hands.
She stared at those blue eyes which held her own eyes,
knowing that he would let her go if she had the strength to
leave. "I can undress myself!" She did so, swiftly, awk-
wardly, and slipped into the net. "Kiss me good night."
Quietly, at six in the morning, he woke her. His body
was comfortably warm. That part was like Mr. Ling and
she enjoyed it. But Byron's body was also hungry. That
part confused her. She tried to be like the girls in the
videos. It didn't work. It was like trying to take control of
a runaway horse.
He stopped. "How old did you say you were?"
"Twenty-one."
'But you're a virgin?"
'Is that bad?"
'Holy Jesus Allah."
'I'm sorry. It's not my fault I was born that way!"
'I'm rattled. You aren't in the space I thought you were
and I'm astonished that I missed it."
"You don't want me?" She was horny and ready to cry.
He didn't stop making love to her, but he was slower
and carefully gentle, less intense, more propitiative, and
he took contraceptive precautions because he didn't trust
her innocence. The pleasure of it astonished her and she
clung to him and wouldn't let go.
"My father used to beat me," she said with her arms
The Moon Goddess and the Son
413

414
Donald Kingsbury
holding Byron tightly and her cheek on his chest. "I've
had a hard time liking men. You're a good lover."
"How would you know? I'm a lousy lover."
She nibbled him. "You're so delicious. All that's going
to be left of you this morning is toenails."
"Maybe it's just space. The first time you try it on
Earth, you'll be shocked—especially if you are stuck with
a 200-pound man like me."
"I'm never going back to Earth!"
"I am. In three days."
She began to cry in earnest. "Are you going to marry
me?"
"Sweet Jesus. I could be your father."
"It doesn't matter. I love you. I've always loved you.
When I was a little girl I kissed your picture till the print
blurred. I remember everything about you. And just yes-
terday in Planet Stories you said you'd never met a woman
who could love both you and space. Well, I love you and I
love space and I want to settle down on the moon just like
you do."
"Wench, we will discuss this later when you are sober."
Diana called up one of the other girls and arranged an
exchange of days off. She did her best not to let Byron out
of her sight. He didn't seem to mind. She let Byron work.
She helped him when she could. But the minute he showed
signs of relaxing, she seduced him with every wile she
knew. Sex, for two whole days, was her entire universe.
Only on the third day when he pleaded business was
she left alone to think. She took a bath in the massager.
She pasted together a paper elephant like she had done
long ago in school and hung it over his hammock, with two
strings, not one, because there was no gravity. He's nice,
she thought while drifting in the lotus position, nude, idly
fingering the small scars on her belly where her father had
once stabbed her. How could a man be so nice? If men
were that nice, then she could have one and not just
dream about them. I knew it! she told herself. I knew
there were nice men in the world!
The hatch of the Hilton room slid open, slowly. Byron's
eyes were blazing with blue fire. "Get dressed!" Suddenly
terrified, she slipped into her blouse, but his anger couldn't

The Moon Goddess and the Son
415
wait and he gathered the collar of the blouse in his fist and
shoved her against the wall. "You lied to me!"
She loved him too much to hit him or struggle.
"There is no Diana Grove." He shook her like a dog
shakes a rat. "Your name is Osborne and you are sixteen
years old. You are jailbait!" He let her go. "Do you realize
how much trouble you could get me into?"
"Don't hit me! Don't hit me!" She was cringing.
"You slipped up on some of your stories. I got to think-
ing. And the company has ways of checking up on people.
We can't tolerate fools in space. Sixteen. My God. Six-
teen! You should be home with your parents!"
"My father beats me," she said piteously. "That's why I
ran away when I was twelve."
Byron remained angry. Kids always blamed their fa-
thers. A favorite sport. "Fathers happen to be nice guys.
Maybe you just never understood what your father was
saying. Maybe you are headstrong and willful and don't
see the dangers a father sees. You're young. Fathers know,
kid. They know."
Her face twisted into agony. "You don't love me
anymore."
A single tear rolled out of his eye. "Jesus, what a damn
fool I am. Yes, I love you. And I'm responsible for you.
I'm leaving tomorrow and you're coming with me."
Sometimes the sun breaks through the clouds. "You're
going to marry me?"
"I'm going to take you home to your family."
The sun can disappear again behind a thundercloud. "I
hate my father!"
He took Diana in his arms and soothed her. "Can you
remember something nice about him?"
"Why should I?"
"For me?"
She paused, wanting to please Byron. "He bought me a
rug."
"Did you like the rug?"
"Yeah."
"Remember something else nice."
She thought a long time, her eyes staring off in the

416
Donald Kingsbury
direction of Arcturus. "He always made lemon and honey
for my mother when she was sick."
"See? He's a nice man. It's been a long time. Our minds
don't remember things well because we are committed to
proving that our decisions were right. You'll like him.
You'll see."
"Mr. Ling will never forgive me," she said petulantly.
"I'm buying your contract."
"You can't make me go!"
"Oh, yes I can," he said grimly.

CHAPTER 55
Nuclear weapons are the horrible god-face painted on
our Soviet Socialist shield, promising the wrath of heaven
to any Imperialist Aggressor—but fooling no one. It is the
hide of the shield, not the painted face, that must ward off
the Imperialist blows.
Even children know that we cannot use nuclear weap-
ons to defend Our Socialism. Call on the aid of the nuclear
god—and, with total lack of loyalty, his grim pall bearers
will carry to the grave, in deathly repose upon that same
painted shield, the very socialist workers on whose hero-
ism Our Socialism stands.
Of what use is a god one cannot invoke without dying?
If we are afraid of our own god, can we expect cynical
Imperialist Aggressors to restrain from striking us? Will
burnt-umber and dragon-red and flame-blue pigments mixed
in oil save us? Will ferocious ornamentation save us? No!
It is the quality of the leather out of which our shield is
made that will save us!
The leather must be stretched on a frame of law, it must
be tanned by integrity, and it must be cared for every day,
waxed and soaped and rubbed with constant vigilance and
duty. The barest crack in the leather must be tended
immediately, no matter what the cost, lest we again find
our shield penetrated and ourselves bearing false testi-
mony against our neighbors and, in the chaos that follows,
417

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Donald Kingsbury
again working as katorzhane, slave laborers, in the Gulags
of some Cult of Personality.
The Soviet Union will earn respect through the fairness
of its laws. And if, by patience and responsibility, we build
the greatest legal work that man has ever known, then we
shall be respected above all by all nations. When we can
say with true humility that even Karl Marx would respect
the smallest of our laws, then we will have built our
mighty fortress impenetrable to the vilest of Imperial
Conquerors!
Limon Barnes writing as Aleksandr Zdorovoi
in the Samizdat-disk Bylina
A strange thing had been happening to the mind of
Pavel Tikonovich Savichev. He had been cast by his deci-
siveness into the mythos of Russian heroism. Acting out
the myth had given him power. And power had given him
choices!
If we look at the history of the Russian people, rather
than at the history of the Russian overlords, we see a
Great Thousand Year Patriotic War against an invader who
did conquer them: rebellions, incredible acts of defiance,
minor victories, stoic bravery, sabotage, terrible battles
and terrible losses, noble deeds, fleeings, retreats, treach-
ery and betrayal, sometimes cowardice in the face of over-
whelming odds, sly collaborations, sullen captivity, reck-
lessness, resignation—a crucible of woes from which has
poured a steady flow of molten heroes.
In Russian folk tales it is the peasant hero who always
saves the foolish prince from himself.
Over the millennium hundreds of thousands of tales of
bravery merged into one archetypical hero. All Russians
see him in their souls. He is a man acting alone from
moral principles against terrible odds. He is Eupaty the
Fearless who went into single combat against an entire
Mongol army. He is Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov who
went into single combat against the whole of the Soviet
State in defense of the socialist rights of the weak.
Why does a Russian see his hero acting alone? Why are
Russian workers unable to grasp the Marxist concept of

The Moon Goddess and the Son
419
collective action? Some of them even view a man who
believes in collective action as slightly insane. When the
state sends such men, not to prison, but to the insane
asylum—it does so with the concurrence of the populace.
The propensity of Americans to form unions and commit-
tees and rights groups and defense funds at the first hint of
wrong is a total wonder to a Russian.
Slavic culture remains one of intransigent individualism—
and perhaps that is why it does so poorly against repres-
sion. When the KGB takes a man, it is seen as a problem
which the man has to deal with as an individual. Another
may decide to help, but in doing so sees himself as another
individual taking on the KGB in single combat. He does
not see himself as a cog in a mutually self-protecting army.
In such a culture the mythology of the hero is central.
His deeds are sung with amazement and awe, and the
songs cannot be silenced. The hero is tsar. Not the union.
Not the collective. Not the apparatchik. Even the cowards
and the thieves and the torturers of Russia retell the
stories of the national heroes with reverence. Especially
the cowards. The Russian mind is medieval in its worship
of the hero who stands alone in battle.
Savichev had seen disaster and took his stand and, in
the Soviet eye, saved the world in single combat. The
story as told by a simple Russian tongue might sound odd
to an American ear but not to the Russian heart. Listen to
them tell the story . . . General Savichev strangled Volkovoy
with bare hands . . . General Savichev physically pulled
General Volkovoy away from the lever that was launching
the doomsday missiles . . . General Savichev rushed to
the podium and gave a fiery speech that brought all men
to his side with tears in their eyes, and they turned to
Volkovoy the Adamant and shot him . . . our Pavel called
up the Americans with a voice that brought such fear to
their minds that they did not dare retaliate. A thousand
versions of the story circulated, fitted and spun around the
archetype.
Yes, he had saved all of Russia, and the lives of the
foolish Americans, too! (Russian heroes always save the
foolish prince!) He was decisive, that Pavel! He could lead
men!

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Donald Kingsbury
At first Pavel was puzzled by his fame. Then he used it
to save himself from conspiracy. And then . . .
Pavel Savichev worked through the evening in his softly
lit Moscow study. His son, who was his constant compan-
ion, brought him a plate of food. "So," the father said,
"Doroshevich seems to think he is taking charge." The two
men were discussing the negotiations with the American
delegation.
"He is abrasive," replied Pyotr.
"I will be reassigning Doroshevich tomorrow. Think of a
tedious position paper I can have him write for my waste-
basket. He is showing the coins of his house. I believe he
is working for Kasatkin." One had to keep track of the
intrigues.
"What kind of paper?"
"A morass!" Savichev returned to the main subject.
"And your opinion of Jackson?" He had deliberately met
none of the American delegates as yet.
"A man who treads carefully—a smooth diplomat wait-
ing patiently for the talk to die down and the points to
stick him."
"Have you observed Jackson and limon Barnes together?"
"Their relationship seems friendly but formal."
Barnes was here in Moscow only because Savichev had
quietly stalled the talks until Barnes had been included. It
was not possible for the general to deal with this provoca-
teur openly, certainly not while he was in the United
States . . . but there were many ways to buy a cow.
"Tomorrow morning I will be rousing Barnes for an
early breakfast." Savichev smiled dourly. Let others deal
with Jackson while Barnes was humored and fattened with
good food and wine. "Do you suppose this Barnes is as
dogmatic as he sounds?" The Acting Secretary of the So-
viet Union then replaced his spectacles and went back to
reading.
American newspapers, he saw, were forming an odd
sort of picture of their "mystery general," a sober soldier
keeping the country together while a "power struggle"
raged to reconstitute the Politburo. He harumphed. In
fact, he was feeling as much enthusiasm for Lenin's inven-
tion as Lenin had once felt for the Constituent Assembly.

The Moon Goddess and the Son
421
When a man achieves Lenin's power, why should he be
bound by Lenin's mistakes? Let the Yankees think him
bound! Let his own people think the same! He was not
bound!
General Savichev arranged for the breakfast to be an
informal family affair. There were limits, to what he was
willing to provide Barnes—corn flakes, for instance. But
he had orange juice and coffee and toast with marmalade
and a variety of special jams. He had a cook ready to
produce everything from simple soft-boiled eggs to exotic
omelets. And he had dishes like smoked salmon that one
wouldn't expect to find on an American breakfast table.
Savichev knew exactly what he wanted.
His first impression of Limon Barnes was negative. He
felt disappointment. This archenemy of the Soviet peoples
was not imposing. He had a slight spastic movement to his
walk. His suit was impeccable but he wore a blue velvet
shirt in terrible taste. Even his American friendliness was
cold. Formally the general introduced his wife and his
teen-age daughter, Lida, and his son, Pyotr. Savichev raged
inwardly as the formalisms seemed to go on forever—he
trying to break the ice, and Barnes replying with an abso-
lutely correct and accentless ritual.
He's a dogmatist, thought Savichev, already beginning
to revise his plans, preparing himself for an unpleasant
morning.
It made matters worse that Lida, who was usually so
composed, was scared to death to meet her first American.
She dropped a knife.
Limon picked it up, put it back on the table, and
covered her mistake with flawless Russian etiquette.
"How is it that you do not have the accent?" Lida
replied shyly in heavily accented American.
He told her about the error-correcting feedback ma-
chines he had in his language lab. He made sure she
understood and he listened to her questions and answers.
Ah, the man listens, thought Savichev. And he is. kind.
Limon turned to Pavel's wife and chatted with her for-
mally about Moscow, a little bit heavy on the historical
references, but not bad for a man who never travelled.
Pyotr did not wait long with a question of his own. He

422
Donald Kingsbury
asked about Dungeons and Dragons and Savichev was
surprised to see a real smile cross the American's face.
Serious talk about the three-headed dragons who were the
sons of Baba Yaga and all that rot was not the sort of topic
he expected from a Marxist theoretician who was, possi-
bly, a front for the CIA.
Still, Savichev decided to pursue his plan. Obliquely, of
course. He waited until Limon's mouth was full of smoked
salmon. "I believe you know Joseph Synmann personally."
"He was one of my main theoreticians before he got
caught up in defense work. You once wrote a rebuttal of a
paper he wrote for me."
Savichev laughed like a bear. "You read that?"
"Of course."
There was a dramatic pause. Savichev rose as if he were
to present a toast but there was no vodka. "I have invited
you here today so that I can thank you for publishing that
paper of Synmann's. I cannot say that, without it, I would
not have come to the same conclusion during the emer-
gency. But I would have been slower in focusing my wits,
certainly ten minutes slower. I'm not privy to your coun-
try's defense secrets but by my best estimates, if I had
waited another ten minutes before acting, the United States
would have suffered at least 30 million casualties. That
would have been the first round. Both you and I, and our
nations, would be dead by now."
He reached over the table and shook Limon's hand
warmly. Pyotr waited until the exchange had been com-
plete and then shook Limon's hand himself. Lida gave him
a shy peck on the cheek.
"So, you see," said a smiling Savichev, "you aren't all
bad. However, sometimes you are very, very bad! I'm
inviting you into my study for a discussion. I should like to
show you the KGB files we keep on you."
But Savichev, with Pyotr by his side, would not show
Limon the files. Instead he played riddles. The general
deliberately posed a problem to Barnes concerning the
Soviet economy, boxing it within a strict Marxist-Leninist
framework.
Limon analyzed the puzzle with Marxist-Leninist tools
and put it back together again in a tentative solution. All

The Moon Goddess and the Son
423
the while Savichev listened to where this chain of cant was
taking them, astonished to find his guest thinking in cant.
He was ready to pounce on the first unorthodox twist. But
the argument was straight; only the destination was
unorthodox.
"You are a master deviationist!" he exclaimed.
"If the pendulum of a clock never deviates, the clock is
stopped," Limon replied in Russian.
"Ah, and a peasant philosopher, too!"
"My mathematicians tell me that Marxist-Leninist thought
is not consistent, and therefore can be used to prove
anything."
"So you admit it! You are not a sincere Marxist-Leninist!"
That was what he had wanted to establish.
Limon was beginning to enjoy himself. "I'm as sincere
as the best of the Soviet Marxist-Leninist theoreticians."
"And a comedian!" He poured three small glasses of
brandy. He smiled broadly. "I've been interested in you
ever since I found my son playing one of your games on
his Bogatyr. You've been meddling in our internal affairs."
"A normal Marxist activity."
"An imperialist activity!"
"Yes," said Limon.
"The KGB's theory about you, Mr. Barnes, is that you
are a paid operative of the CIA plotting the overthrow of
the Soviet government by inflaming counterrevolutionary
thought."
"A near-miss," said Limon.
Savichev handed Limon his brandy. "My own opinion
differs. I'm a student of Americans. I admit, you are the
first American I've ever met personally, but I read. We
Soviets make the error of seeing central authority in ev-
erything an American does. If we can't find it, we think it
hidden. I see a different pattern. Americans are meddlers.
No one has to tell you to meddle. It's instinctive. It's like
gambling and Las Vegas girls. Americans can't resist med-
dling. There are hordes of you meddlers, all acting inde-
pendently. Astonishing! Independently! Kill one and seven
other American meddlers crawl out of the woodwork! Am
I right?"
"I prefer the word revolutionary. It has more dignity."

424
Donald Kingsbury
"What do you hope to gain? Do you wish to make
capitalists of us? Do you plot to have a voting booth on
every corner in Moscow? Would it make you happy to see
a Marxist-Leninist Party and a Leninist-Marxist Party and
the Cadets and the Socialist Universalists and the Left
Socialist Revolutionaries and the Feminine League for the
Salvation of the Country and the Orthodox Parishes and
the Liberal Stalinists all fighting to represent the masses?
Or are those parties not Russian enough for you? Would
you impose on us the Democrats and the Republicans?"
Savichev stopped, curiously waiting for Limon's response,
hoping that he had goaded the man sufficiently.
Limon merely swished his brandy glass. "You are accus-
ing my countrymen of a lack of imagination. You may be
right."
Savichev, in frustration, changed his tack. He talked
about his years of rebuilding the military communications
system—the immense problems. He had found it neces-
sary to assemble a huge personal apparatus to work around
the bureaucratic bottlenecks. "Recently I have been read-
ing everything I can find by Synmann. I have also been
reading the papers you people distribute. I was startled to
find that one of the SMB papers was a detailed analysis of
how to work around the Soviet bureaucracy by building up
a personal apparatus." His voice held a hint of sarcasm. "I
first read it years ago on a Samizdat-disk under some
pseudonym."
"You may not have been unduly influenced by it," Limon
chuckled. "We simply formalized a procedure long used
by some of your better people. It's not a skill you can
teach in a paper."
"But there was a structural analysis behind the report,
that's what I want to know about."
"Hmm. The theory would have come out of one of the
Synmann games. Good stuff, that." He didn't elaborate.
It was extremely frustrating, talking to Limon Barnes.
But they got along. On the third day Savichev brought
up Leninist concepts for furthering socialist revolutions by
military means. Limon went down to his room and brought
back a console by which he could network with Massachu-
setts. They played games all afternoon. Limon made a

The Moon Goddess and the Son
425
very convincing case that intervention in Afghanistan in
1979 had not only not saved the socialist revolution there
but had retarded the conditions for a successful socialist
regime by a hundred years.
It was the first time Savichev had seen with his own
eyes the thing he was trying to get his hands on—a weapon
more powerful than any nuclear arsenal, a tool to predict
when and where and how to apply the forces of social
change. You could build empires with this thing! Did
Barnes know what he had?
General Savichev normally spent his days talking with
one official and then another. He was a one man Polit-
buro. Still, he managed to find time for Limon. The man
chilled him. Limon would casually discuss socialist revolu-
tions and then map them out in some model that he would
play with until it bored him. He just smiled and said that
all politicians had models in their heads—he just had a
better one. He would plot capitalist revolutions or Zulu
revolutions—he seemed to have no commitment to any
ideology. The closest that Savichev heard him come to a
moral statement was that assassination was counter-
productive!
On the seventh day Savichev decided to brazen it out
and offered to buy Limon's technology of revolution or
gaming models or whatever it was that he was doing. With
all these damn pseudo-Leninists plotting against him,
Savichev needed an edge.
Limon didn't blink an eye. "Good idea. Change moves
faster from the top down than from the bottom up. Why
don't you let me take Pyotr to Boston for three months?
I'll have him set up a branch office in Moscow. Once you
have enough people trained up, you can set them to
writing a new Soviet constitution that will give you real
power. Right now you've got a dead turkey."
Savichev groaned. A reply like that served him right for
being brazen. Limon was the ultimate in sarcasm.
"I'm quite serious—if you are," smiled Limon.
Now Savichev was suspicious. He took an extreme posi-
tion. "You're a creature of the CIA. Why would you give
me tools to make effective revolution anywhere on Earth?"
Limon was still smiling. "Because there's a catch."

426
Donald Kingsbury
"A catch?"
Limon explained what the American idiom meant. You
could conjure up a genie out of a bottle who would grant
you any three wishes you wanted, but there was always a
catch.
"A trap?"
"No, a catch. This one falls out as a theorem of the
Synmann game mathematics. We have a name for it. The
god's dilemma. If you want to make a world in your own
image you have to make it with men who can't do any
original thinking. Lenin's revolution died in 1937 because
when circumstances came up which Lenin had not antici-
pated, there were no Bolsheviks around who could think a
non-Leninist thought.
"On the other hand, if you want to make a world that
lasts, you have to make it with thinking men. But once
you align yourself with thinking men, you lose control of
your creation. You get something like science rather than
religion."
"You've been trying to lay the foundation for a revolu-
tion in the Soviet Union," accused Savichev.
"Of course. I'm a meddler."
"And you've been brainwashing my son."
"I like your son. He can outthink Lenin."
Savichev did not reply. He refilled the brandy glasses.
"Suppose," continued Limon, "that I was making my
revolution in collaboration with thinking Russians. Sup-
pose the effort was overwhelmingly successful. Suppose all
was accomplished without violence or bloodshed. In the
end whose revolution would it be?"
The hero of the Great Accidental War scowled. "Yes,
yes," he muttered. He clinked glasses. "To the American
Revolution!"
"To the Russian Revolution!"

CHAPTER 56
When the lamp is shattered
The light in the dust lies dead—
When the cloud is scattered,
The rainbow's glory is shed.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Last week's snow was dirty with Ohio coal dust. Coal
smells were on the air because the wind blew from that
direction. Diana was surprised to see her father smiling,
surprised to see him contrite, surprised at the warmth of
the welcome he gave the distinguished Mr. McDougall
whose power awed him.
She arrived back in her familiar rat warren of factories
and dry cleaning stores and chunky houses on tiny lots
with potholes in the streets, a prisoner of the man she
loved, determined to be emotionless—instead she cried
with her mother.
Both her parents lavished her with affection. They bought
her clothes and a new golden bedspread. They surprised
her by bringing home a Kobatsu symphony orchestra with
a full set of violas and violins, clarinets and flutes and
oboes and bassoons, trombones and tubas and french horns,
drums, cymbals, and harps. It was on sale. Her father
showed her how to plug in the conductors (there were five
of them) and her mother unwrapped the 10,000 best or-
427

428
Donald Kingsbury
chestra pieces of the 19th century coded on a compact
disk; (the 18th century was on back-order.) They took her
to the movies and helped her with school.
It was weird to go back to school with kids who hadn't
changed since they were twelve because they hadn't done
anything since they were twelve. They thought going to
Kansas City was a trip. The boys giggled when they said
"boobs" and the girls were virgins who thought SPS was a
new thing to put in face cream to keep your pores clean.
They wouldn't have known a Solar Power Satellite from a
star.
One freckled gawky girl took a liking to Diana and
Diana spent hours with this creature spinning stories for
her of the spaceways, mixing up tales of the leoport with
the Warlanes of Balmukari and the Immortal Siren War-
riors of Io. Diana liked to lie. She became a princess of the
stars watching from her eyrie's blister the great space
battle between the Americans and the Soviets, never men-
tioning the nameless fear of being crouched inside the
"snowball's chance." She told stories about the wickedly
erotic underground cities of the moon and those were the
hardest to tell because they wracked her soul with sorrow.
But in the end her friend abandoned her for a scarecrow
boy with real straw growing out of his ears.
Diana introverted into thoughts of Byron, suppressing
all the evidence that might tell her that she had been
abandoned. He had hairs on his chest like Samson and she
had some of them in an old perfume bottle. He was a hero
angel who built stairways to the stars for men who were as
yet too savage to understand. His fingers were pleasure,
his eyes an ultimate beauty.
In her loneliness she began a letter to him. She wasn't
sure she was going to mail it but the poetry of her love
ached on her tongue. "Dearest Byron, I had a dream that
there was nothing left of you but toenails and woke up in
my bed nude (and beautiful as you well know) and imag-
ined sweet touches ..." She redrafted the letter again
and again, hiding it under the lacquered beauty of the
symphony orchestra on her desk.
One day—it seemed so long ago that she had been in
space—when she came home from an errand to buy milk,

The Moon Goddess and the Son
429
her father chased her up the stairs, raging against the
depraved McDougall and against his daughter's porno-
graphic mind. He cornered her in her room, crumpling
the letter in his fist, spitting on it. Where had he found it?
She hadn't seen him this violent for a year but here was
the man she remembered.
Karate habits told her to assume a defensive posture.
She found herself cringing instead but when he advanced
on her, eyes cold, his fist cocked to hit, her reflexes took
over. A precisely placed foot smashed into his elbow,
breaking it. She never looked back. She grabbed her
Diana Grove papers from hiding and leaped through the
window onto the porch roof and down into the snow on
the ground, rebounding in a run, unprotected against the
winter cold.
A man and his wife found her on the highway, half
frozen to death, thumbing a ride. They wrapped her in a
car blanket and turned up the heat. She told them that she
had run away from her mother to visit her father and that
he had beaten her and now she understood why her
mother had divorced him and she wanted to go back home
to New Hampshire. She cried. Only after she said New
Hampshire did she remember that Byron's home was there.
She knew nothing about New England and had never
been there.
The couple were active Christians and though they gave
her endless advice about God and finding Jesus they were
also practical. They insisted on taking her home, feeding
her and finding winter clothes for her from their friends.
They insisted on paying her bus fare and, when she pro-
tested, they merely smiled and told her that she could pay
them back by helping someone else someday.
On the bus she prepared the scathing lecture with which
she intended to ax-murder Byron. She wrote in a tight,
neat script.
(1)		You are a monsterl
(2)		You seduced me and, not content with just rejecting
me, you ruthlessly destroyed the whole wonderful life that
I was building for myself.
(3)		And once you smashed my life, you weren't satisfied;

430
Donald Kingsbury
you had to deliver me to a sadist for safekeeping, just so
you could walk away without any burden.
(4)		How am I ever going to get a job like that leoport job
again?
(5)		It's not my fault that I had to pretend to be five years
older than I really am. The government is stupid. They
won't let me work and they won't take care of me.
I'll strangle him. He better give me some money. He
better give me a job on the moon.
Halfway to New Hampshire she realized she didn't have
a mark on her body and she wouldn't have a story to tell
Byron that he would believe. At one of the lunch stops she
went out to a brick wall and bashed her head against it
until the side of her face was bloody and swollen. When
some friendly passengers tried to ask her what had hap-
pened she queered them by talking up the joys of
head-pounding.
Looking like an accident victim and in a state of confu-
sion, she stepped off the bus, penniless, at a roadside
terminal in a little New Hampshire town. It was madness
to think that Byron would be home. He would be in DC
or Seattle or anywhere but New Hampshire. She was
going to a shuttered home buried in snow. His ex-wife,
she knew, was in Florida.
She had to cry in the ladies' room before she went over
to the post office to ask about Mr. McDougall. The woman
told her he wasn't home, but that his son was, and a no
good shifter he had for a son, a good boy gone wrong.
Diana panhandled two quarters for a phone call and when
she heard the son's voice, hung up without saying a word.
She walked in the snow, ten kloms, feet frozen, until she
reached the McDougall place.
A dark-haired young man with Byron's blue eyes an-
swered the door. "You've been walking. Your car is stuck?
Hey, I have a truck!"
"No." Frigidly. "I'm your father's mistress."
He tried to say seven things in reply and only a squeak
came out. She walked past him, hugging herself. He rushed
after her. "Hey, you're cold."
"Well, take me to your radiator."
"You've had an accident."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
431
She touched her face. The swelling was down. "The
black eye is pretty awful, isn't it? My old man beat me up
for sleeping with your old man."
"My father abandoned you?"
"Yeah."
"Didn't he give you a free year in Paris?"
"He gave me a free year in an Ohio coal town."
"You could have asked for more! You have to bargain
with him."
"You don't ask for things when you're in love."
"You're too young for him."
"I don't think that is any of your business!"
"Are you pregnant?"
"No, I'm not pregnant," she said through gritted teeth.
"I'll have some hot tea ready in a minute."
She sat down in the kitchen by the radiator and took her
boots off. Her feet were white and numb. "Where is he?"
"I just got a check from Houston, but that was a week
ago."
"A lot of good that does me." She started to cry.
"Aw, hey now. It can't be that bad."
"If you come over here with your big blue eyes and try
to comfort me, I'll slug you!"

CHAPTER 57
And if I ever meet her
I might never say good bye;
and if I ever see her soul
then mine will light the sky.
She roams within my haunting place,
a melody of moving grace,
behind my conscious stare—and oh,
I yearn to turn my face and find her there.
A Trancer's Lament
Diana sulked in the master bedroom except for meals.
Across the veranda she had a view of snowed-in farmlands,
the kind of rolling landscape rich people purchase when
they are bored by the city. The room had a handcrafted
look with walnut trim and carved walnut doors. It was
wholly a woman's room. Perfume bottles were on display,
but things like brass hairbrushes were neatly, placed in
drawers. Two portraits hung over the bed: a woman lit by
sun reflected from spring leaves and a man glooming be-
neath some autumnal overcast in a fighter pilot uniform.
The portrait of Mrs. McDougall, Diana hid under the bed.
His portrait she launched upon the bed, a raft for a lonely
432

The Moon Goddess and the Son
433
girl to cling to in a king-sized ocean of softness. But
Byron's face was as cold as glass to her cheeks.
Sulking made Diana restless. She had never tried it
before and didn't like it. After three days she took a couple
of hours off to bake a chicken casserole and that was such a
relief that she began trying on Mrs. McDougall's clothes,
modifying the ones she liked on the sewing machine.
The only excitement came during her fourth day of
sewing when a rock crashed through the window and
Charlie ran outdoors to yell at someone. Afterwards he
came to the master bedroom with glass and cutting tools
and putty.
"What was that?"
Charlie laughed. "Just the girl next door. She has a
crush on me and is jealous of you."
"You can tell her that I'm your father's private slut."
"I would never say that about you. You're one of my
father's victims."
Her eyes narrowed. "Your father has victims, eh? And
you think I'm one of them? Is that how you got to be a
basket case?"
The next day a timid knock interrupted her concentra-
tion. "Like to come to the village? I'm going for groceries."
"Thank God! Did Byron finally send you more money?"
"Naw. I did some electrical work at the Hodge form."
"You worked?" she exclaimed incredulously.
"Yeah, you're eating me out of house and home."
"And here I thought I was starving!"
"So today we'll have steak. I figured that if my father
can keep my girlfriend in Paris, I can at least buy his
girlfriend a steak."
In the village she noticed that the highway restaurant
needed a waitress and she went in and took the job. It was
a drag to live with a wastrel like Charlie who ate macaroni
every night, sweet as he was. She was used to money.
Sometimes she hitchhiked home after work. Sometimes
Charlie was waiting for her if she paid for the gas. Once he
arrived to pick her up and found her being hassled by
three toughs. The leader blew smoke in Charlie's face.
"You being bothered by these lung disease cases?" he
asked.

434
Donald Kingsbury
"Stay out of this, Charlie. I know karate."
"It's not a job for a lady." He assumed the stance of a
battle-tried colonel. "Leave!"
They left.
"How did you do that?" She was amazed.
He laughed. "Ordering men around and saving women
and children runs in the family. Old military tradition. I'm
considered the sissy of the McDougalls."
Diana decided to become independent of Charlie and
bought a three-hundred dollar car and a pay-by-the-week
insurance policy after she had wangled some gas ration
tickets. The car got her halfway home.
"Charlie," said a plaintive voice over the phone. "I'm
stuck on the Stonefield Road at the hairpin. Would it be
too much trouble for you to come and get me? Bring a
chain."
"A chain?"
"To pull my car."
"Your car!"
"I bought a car."
"How much did you pay?"
She muttered an answer.
"Good God! You can't buy an unrusted hubcap for that!"
"It made noises and quit. Can you fix it?"
He sighed. "Maybe it's the spark plugs."
The engine had seized. "How much does a new engine
cost?" she whined.
"Oh, maybe a thousand dollars for a second-hand
clunker."
"But it's such a small car!"
She cried all the way home. He tried to console her by
telling her he could get something for the tires, and maybe
sell the map display and a few other parts, but she was
inconsolable. He began to feel so sorry for her that the
next day he towed the car off to a friend's garage and spent
all weekend doing an engine job. Monday evening he
picked her up.
"Where's the truck?"
"I came in your car. It's parked out back."
"I didn't know you could fix cars!"

The Moon Goddess and the Son
435
"I can't, but I used to repair obsolete jet engines at
MIT."
"Where did you get the money for parts?"
Charlie grinned like a man who has just won somebody
else's gambling money. "My father is a millionaire. I have
a kind of credit around here. He grumbles like hell but he
pays up."
"I don't understand you. Why do you loaf around when
you could get a job as a mechanic?"
"Diana! That's work! I only did it for you."
"You're a sweetie pie. How can I sacrifice myself for
you?"
"Entertain me in bed."
"I belong to your father!" she said indignantly.
"What kind of garbage is that," he lamented.
"A woman belongs to the man who took her virginity."
He guffawed. "You believe that drivel?"
"I certainly do!"
"You sound like my grandfather."
"I'm not your grandfather."
"Well, all right. I won't go that far. But you sound like
someone right out of the flaky-eighties."
"Are you in love with me?" she asked warily.
"An inch, going on an inch and a quarter."
"How many centimeters is that?"
"Almost three."
"Even your father can do better than that," she replied
stiffly. But as they were thrown around the hairpin turn on
Stonefield Road she kissed him. "If I hadn't met your
father first, I'd love you an inch and a quarter, too."
"Watch that stuff. You'll get dirty. I couldn't wash all
the grease off."
"I don't care. I want to be nice to you. What was the
nicest thing that ever happened to you—besides sexing
with the neighbor's sow."
A faraway smile crossed his face. He danced the car in a
little back-and-forth skid. "Betina let me give her a bath."
Diana screeched. "I'll give you a bath!"
She sudsed him carefully, in no hurry to finish caressing
away the intractable black grease. It made her lonely to
touch him, and happy at the same time. He tried to

436
Donald Kingsbury
convince her to join him in the tub but she refused. When
she was toweling him afterwards, he tried to kiss her and
was almost rough in the way he held her wrist and wouldn't
let her go. She hit him and they had a fight. She ran to the
master bedroom and locked the door—but hugging By-
ron's angular portrait proved to be no way to go to sleep.
She kept thinking about crazy Charlie with the dragon on
the bottom of his foot.
At four in the morning she wrapped a sheet around her
body and shuffled to the kitchen for a glass of milk. She
returned by way of Charlie's study, curiosity driving her to
rifle through his papers—schoolwork, equations, printouts,
drawings, projects.
Charlie-appeared at the door in his pajamas. "You're not
asleep." He paused. "I'm sorry about the fight."
"I'm not mad at you. What are all those things?"
'1 used to go to MIT."
"What are you?"
"I make buzz-bombs that kill babies. Naw. I'm a lunar
engineer." He thought about his answer. "Actually, I don't
know what I am; I didn't specialize in lunar construction
problems until my last year."
"Is that what these diagrams are?"
;;Yeah."
"You never told me."
"It's not important to me."
It was to her. Like a dash of hot Tabasco, the familiar
excitement was in her body. "Did you flunk?"
"I was at the top of my class."
"Then why aren't you building houses on the moon?"
"Why work on the moon when the worst that can hap-
pen to you on Earth is to be staked to an anthill in
Nevada? At least you can breathe in Nevada."
"But you could go if you wanted?"
"My father would love it. Staking me to an anthill isn't
good enough for him."
A small adjustment of her shoulders let one curious
nipple peek over the sheet at his blue eyes. She pre-
tended to pull the sheet tighter, but a shoulder popped
out. "And what's all that electronic junk?"
"My music."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
437
"Is that the weird stuff I hear once in a while?"
"No. The weird stuff is when I'm composing. That's just
experiments and subthemes. Sometimes its a foundation-
sound on which I'm going to build." Then he added shyly,
"I've been composing a piece for you."
"Oh, you are in love with me!" she teased. "May I hear
it?"
"You sing this wild stuff in the shower. I built it on that.
You'll have to forgive me for bugging your shower."
"You record me while I'm naked? I think that's disgust-
ing!"
"Such sweet sounds."
"But I have a slug's voice."
"I hear only the most beautiful throaty wonders."
"You're Byron's son, all right!"
"You know what I call it?" He was shy now. "It's called
Diana in the Rain. You inspire me."
Men were queer when they were in love. "I'm not
really a muse. It's all an illusion in your head." She threw
her hair back. "All right. Play it. I'm ready to suffer. But if
I sound like a slug gargling, I won't let you play it for
anyone else!"
Nothing larval was left in the voice he had transformed
with his silken touch. Mostly it wasn't even human. Diana
in the rain. Perhaps a nymph bathing in a mountain water-
fall would sing that way. The sound folded and unfolded
wings of joy so festive that even she failed to recognize
herself as the music gripped her with her own emotion.
Background instruments capered in the tonal patterns of
no wooden instrument. Captured by his net, she recalled
mythical worlds never seen.
He stood breathless, anxious, watching her reaction.
Slowly becoming aware of what his metamorphic magic
had done to her, she worked out of her percale cocoon
with little jerking cries of pleased embarrassment. The
sheet became her wings.
"Golly."
He was drugged with happiness just watching her.
"Don't stare at me like that or I'll turn you into a stag
and your own hounds will hunt you down!"
Gently he carried her off to his parents' room. Respond-

438
Donald Kingsbury
ing to his memory of her earlier anger at his forwardness,
he laid her gently on the bed, pecked her cheek, and
withdrew. She would not let him go. What is true one
hour is false the next.
"Stay with me and cuddle. As long as I get the door side
of the bed. Your father was very kind to me and always let
me sleep next to the door. You can make love to me in the
morning. I have to have time to get used to you. Is that all
right?" She kissed his fingers. "I won't eat your toenails."
When she woke she found him staring at her with his
blue eyes. Blue eyes were the most romantic eyes in the
whole galaxy. Sleepily, she rubbed noses with him. "Hi,"
he said, wide awake. "Is it morning yet?"
Their sexing was an awkward disaster. The gravity threw
her off and the only woman he had ever known was the
very experienced eVam. Alternately they swore at each
other'and laughed. Finally they decided that at least they
knew how to hug.
"It reminds me of a story that my grandfather loves to
tell," he sighed. "Once upon a time there was a new
recruit for the 43rd Cavalry Regiment and the command-
ing officer asked him, 'Have you ever ridden before, my
boy?' 'No, sir,' said the boy. 'flmmm,' replied the colonel,
'I have just the horse for you; she's never been ridden,
either.' "
"Let's have breakfast and try it again," she said.
For three days Diana ran around in a daze, baking,
washing his clothes, laughing at his jokes, buying him
presents with her tip money and hugging him every time
she met him. But the second time she found herself scrub-
bing the kitchen floor in one week, she frowned. Did sex
always make a woman feel this way? Byron had given her
the goosebumps, too. Were men similarly affected? She
peeked out the kitchen window and saw Charlie freezing
his fingers off changing a bearing on her car's right front
wheel.
By Friday she was enough in control of her emotions to
begin the Great Plan. (1) Get Charlie a job. (2) Get him to
finish school. (3) Get him a job on the moon. (4) Marry
him. (5) Have children. She wasn't going to do it by
nagging. She hated nagging a man. She'd rather leave a

The Moon Goddess and the Son	439
man than nag him. She was going to do it by worshiping
him.
A trucker's mother died and the man took his truck off
to New jersey for the funeral so Charlie picked up a
contract to haul potatoes for three days; Diana let him
make love to her for three evenings and three mornings. A
neighbor's pipes froze and he joined the plumbing crew;
she cooked him a full course meal. Slyly she began to
encourage him to be more ambitious. He took a weekend
gig in Concord with his music. But spring came and he
was still only doing odd jobs. Happiness gave her pa-
tience. They went v/alking in the woods when the buds
sprouted. They splashed nude in a brook that was rampant
with the freezing spring run-off.
She began to read to him from the papers about the big
new push into space. Money was flooding into the effort.
A consortium was even building a test solar power station.
The Soviets were off to Mars. Old high risk investments in
the leoport factories were making money and that was
seducing the timid money out of the woodwork. The lunar
landing track was operational. Overnight, it seemed, the
high frontier had become a business almost half as big as
the American cigaret, dope, and cosmetics trade.
Charlie was never interested. She hid her hurt.
The Saudi Arabian situation improved. Escaped Royal-
ists had money in America and Europe with which to
influence politics at home. Intrigues prospered. Assassina-
tions were frequent. The new leaders found it easier to
conquer than to rule, and found some appeasement of the
western capitalists necessary. Still the oil situation was
grim and, as reserves were depleted, the United States
imposed draconian gasoline rationing. Synthigas plants were
being pushed to full capacity in spite of a coal strike which
had been suppressed by the Army and acid rain riots.
Sabotage and slow-downs continued to decimate coal
tonnage.
Red tape was cut so that breeder reactors could be put
on line in four years but protests continued to mount. A
new tarsands plant was financed for Alberta. The physi-
cists were promising that hydrogen fusion power would be
on line in twenty years. A new gas field was discovered at

440
Donald Kingsbury
great depth in the Gulf of Mexico. Mainly the economy
was gearing up for solar power satellite production.
She read to Charlie the fabulous job offers in the Boston
Globe and the Manchester Times Leader and the Los
Angeles Times. He wasn't interested. She sulked.
One day like a bolt from Jupiter Charlie's father called
and Diana listened on the upstairs phone, tears rolling out
of her eyes. There was a man. He could build. He could
fight. His very voice called forth loyalty. He was on the
cover of Time magazine again! He could even be tender to
virgins. His kind forged the glory of man. She ached to
hold him. Could a woman ever forget her first man?
That noon Diana cooked pies and a mouth watering
lasagna. She made a fresh spring salad of new asparagus
tips. She adjusted Charlie's collar. She teased him and in
all ways was free and easy with her love. When she went
to work she left a note in the truck's windshield wiper. "I
have a job on the moon." Which wasn't true. "I'll always
love you." Which was true for the moment. "Keep in
touch."
She stopped at the restaurant only long enough to col-
lect her pay and buy a packet of black market gas stamps
and a transcontinental laser disk for the map reader. She
got as far as Montana before she had a breakdown. In
Butte she abandoned the car and took a bus to Seattle,
curled over two seats with her head pressed against her
wadded jacket, dreaming that she was asleep next to By-
ron's facial stubble.

CHAPTER 58
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the Lamb, make thee?
Diana Grove in a mash note to Byron,
quoting William Blake.
For three hours a nervous girl waited in the hotel lobby
where that flighty secretary said he was staying for the
astronautics conference. It stunned her when he sailed by,
his weathered eyes scanning over her like a reef to be
avoided, his wake washing away the hello in her throat.
She buttoned the decollete she had arranged to remind
him of her womanhood and followed him into the waiting
elevator, ignoring him while they touched shoulders. She
was, she observed, pretending he didn't exist about as
well as a Soviet fishing boat, packed with electronics,
pretended to be fishing in the vicinity of an American
battleship.
Byron left the elevator. She followed silently. He stopped
and took out his key-card. She waited.
"Diana! For the love of God!"
"So you finally noticed," she said petulantly. •
"I had you pegged as one of the convention girls," he
apologized, somewhat untactfully, switching on the light
441

442
Donald Kingsbury
and walking over to the telephone. "What'll I order for
you?"
"Poison darts!"
He spoke into the phone. "A double whiskey for room
412. Also glasses, a bucket of ice and three bottles of
ginger ale. " Carefully he cradled the receiver. "So you ran
away again?"
"He started to beat me up the minute you left!" Which
wasn't true but she wanted Byron to feel guilty. "I mistook
myself for a gong. I escaped the last time by jumping two
stories into the snow. A couple of good samaritans found
me frozen to death at the end of a trail of blood. It was a
very good lesson you taught me. I learned about fathers
what I already know."
He was gazing at her with quizzical amusement. "Any
scars?"
"No sir!" She snapped to her heels. "Regrouped, resup-
plied, rested, and ready for active duty, you son-of-a-
bitch, sir!" A clipped salute finished her report.
"Now I remember you," he said amiably. "You're the
tough one with the smile. And how have you been spend-
ing your AWOL?"
Diana had already assumed a fighting stance. Expertly
she seized this opening and jabbed. "I've been living with
your son." She withdrew and waited for the effect.
His face crumpled like a piece of paper being prepared
for a bureaucrat's wastebasket. "You've seen Charlie?"
He was suddenly groggy and she moved in again. "We're
lovers." She danced away.
McDougall began to steel himself for the blows. "Did
he send you here for money?"
She relented. "Oh, Byron! I heard your voice last week
on the phone. I became nostalgic. I came here to marry
you. We're going to have three children and live on the
moon."
"A minute ago you were ready to kill me with poison
darts."
"That was a minute ago. Before I decided to marry
you." She touched him. "I'd be a good wife."
He was still shaken by the news about Charlie, still
trying to focus on this girl who had seduced him on the

The Moon Goddess and the Son
443
leoport—and then, safely out of sight, had transmogrified
into his son's lover. Was that possible? His son wrapped in
this imp's embrace? "Changeable little wench, aren't you?"
"No. I've always loved you. Since I was six."
"Hmmm," he muttered.
"Look, you haven't even unpacked your suitcase yet and
your dirty socks are under the bed. Hotels don't take care
of men very well. You need a wife."
"I'm tempted," he said.
"Yeah?" She unbuttoned her decollete.
"But my good sense remains. I'll give you a choice. I'll
argue with you or send you to an orphan asylum."
"Argue with me."
"You laid Charlie, eh?"
"What's it to you! The last I heard from you, just before
you abandoned me to that prick father of mine, you wanted
me to live in the coal dust and be virtuous."
Byron was trying to visualize being married to her. "I
was thinking that you are young, even for Charlie."
"Yaah! Charlie's young, even for me."
"It wouldn't work between you and me," he said
decisively.
"Why not!"
"I'm more than thirty years older than you are. I'm
dying. You are beginning to flower."
She undid another button and rummaged around under
the bed for his dirty socks which she angrily threw into a
plastic bag. "Corpses make good fertilizer for flowers.
Your power and my youth; it's a fair exchange. Jesus,
Byron," she turned to him with regret, "I swooned when I
saw you on Time. I was horny for a day."
"You'd tire of an old man."
"But it's men who are fickle. Women aren't like that.
They're faithful. When they love a man, they love him. I'd
be faithful to you. I'd forgive you anything."
He was settling into his decision. "That's what they all
say when they are seventeen. When they are. twenty-
seven it's a different story."
"Already you're complaining about ten glorious years?'
she stormed. "I'll bet you think you deserve fifty!"
There was a polite knock on the door.

444
Donald Kingsbury
"Young girls tend to bore experienced men," he re-
minded her.
She flung open the door and took the double whiskey
from the bellhop's cart before he had fully entered the
room. She set the glasses on the dresser, imperiously
tipped the man, and poured Byron a ginger ale. "For your
liver, old man." She took the whiskey. "So I bore you, do
I?"
"You started me thinking about those fifty years."
She half finished her drink in one slurp.
"Can't I even have a sip of my whiskey?" he complained.
"I've decided to blackmail you instead of marry you,"
she answered calmly.
"Blackmail me!" She had his attention. "We're not even
married yet and you're being a bitch. I hope your lawyers
are cheaper than my lawyers! You've stolen my whiskey.
What else do you want?"
"A job on the moon."
His humor left him. "No. That's final. What's your
countermove?"
"You damn fool!" she flared. "Your son is in love with
me! He'll follow me to the moon! That's where you want
him!"
"And do you love Charlie?"
"No! I can't stand drifters. Yes. He's very kind."
Byron gripped her arms in the iron curl of his fingers
. . . "Diana. He won't follow you to the moon."
"Yes." . . . while the fingers squeezed . . .
"No. I know my son." . . . the blood from her arms.
"You've seen him lately with my legs around him?" she
lilted sarcastically, not even trying to escape his crushing
hold. "He goes crazy just looking at me—even when I
have clothes on. I've watched him butter my toast. I've
watched him scatter men who were trying to molest me.
I've seen his eyes in the morning. You know nothing about
your son. You're a dried up old man, remember, who has
forgotten what it's like to be driven by his juices. Charlie
would follow me to hell. I planned it that way." She
started to cry. "At least he'll follow me if we move fast
enough before he has time to sober up and get another
girl."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
445
Byron went limp. "He could follow you and refuse to
work."
"Then I'd let him die. No man of mine is a suck." She
smiled through her tears. "But for me he'd work."
Byron began to march around the room, shaking ice
from the ginger ale glass he had exchanged for her arm.
"And you think I give a damn whether he goes to space? I
don't give a damn anymore. I used to care. Now I'd be
happy if he did anything. Anything. Wash cars even. How
is his damned music going?"
"Like his engineering. He piddles at it."
"Is he healthy?"
"He's fine. I took good care of him. He's probably very
unhappy right now."
"Suffering, eh?" Byron was smiling again. "A couple of
months in the trenches will do him good. Finish your
whiskey and let's go. You've earned a dinner at Seattle's
finest."
At dinner he refused to gossip about his son. He or-
dered the best meal on the menu, the third most expen-
sive. He tucked a bib under his collar. "It's good to eat
like this again. It used to be better when they had a real
Frenchman for a waiter who would just as soon spit in
your eye as serve you." He looked about at the paneled
decor and the wine bottles on the rack. "It makes me feel
human again. For a while I didn't even have an expense
account. I was beginning to feel like a schlimazl."
She was breaking hard bread, waiting for the waiter to
bring their drinks and take their order. The butter was
shaped like chickens and eggs and leaves. "What's a
schlimazl?"
"According to my friend Zimmerman, who is our freak
carbothermal chemist on the moon, a schlimazl is a poor
jerk who is good at everything—he grows a perfect potato
crop . . . the year of the great potato blight. The next
year, when he tries to make up his losses by opening a
funeral parlor, someone discovers immortality. Zim differ-
entiates between a schlimazl and a schlemihl. A schlimazl
is the one who is good at having the soup spilled on him
by a schlemihl. Those schlemihls in Washington were
good at spilling soup. I was the schlimazl."

446
Donald Kingsbury
"I'll have the vichyssoise. I love cold soup. It doesn't
burn as bad when it's spilled."
"Go right ahead. Those schlemihls in Washington are
paying for it. I got out their anti-hydrogen when they
needed it and they love me."
"I'm on your expense account?"
"You're goddamned right. This year we're doubling the
size of the lunar colony. I wouldn't have believed that last
year. And you should see the assembly line we have in
mind for the solar power satellites; subcontracts all over
the nation."
Her eyes were grinning. "I heard rumors that next year
hydrogen fusion prices will drop to one cent a kilowatt-
hour."
Byron almost didn't laugh. "How could I let my boy
marry a girl with such a macabre sense of humor!"
He took her walking along the night beach, barefoot,
sometimes on the sand, sometimes over the great drift-
wood trees, his shoes tied by the shoelaces over his shoul-
der and hers stuffed in his jacket pockets. The Pacific wind
was cold and she sheltered herself behind his body, won-
dering at his silence that lasted for miles, not daring to
invade his thoughts. The waves came and broke and went.
Their feet were alternately drowned by foam and then free
to make wet tracks in the moonlit sand.
"I'm not sure a romantic girl like you would like it up
there. There's no lover's moon in the lunar sky."
"I can make poems about the Earth."
"You still have your Diana Grove papers?"
"Sure."
"They need to be made more solid. I'll spend some
money."
She hugged his arm, thanking him silently, the glory
and the triumph rising in her bosom to shout down the
Pacific wind.
"I'm shipping out in two weeks. I'll take you with me.
Not because of Charlie. Charlie can go to hell. For you. Of
course, if by some miracle Charlie follows, well, there'll
be a job for him. We're extending the length of the elec-
tromagnetic track so we can handle softer accelerations
and decelerations."

The Moon Goddess and the Son
447
Blackmail works! She was amazed. "What will I be
doing?"
"Who knows."
"May I sleep with you tonight? I'm a much better lover
than I used to be."
;;no!"
"My hotel by the bus station has cockroaches!"
They were halfway back along the beach before he
answered. "Zimmerman tells this story about some New
York cockroaches that followed him to the moon. He claims
to have spaced them out the hatch but that they didn't die
and are running around the crater Aristarchus to this day."

CHAPTER 59
So we stole away together,
On the road that has no end,
With a new coined day to fling away
And all the stars to spend.
Dana Burnet
Diana teased Byron about whisking off his son's par-
amour and setting her up in Paris. He pretended not to
hear but suddenly confided that he thought a vacation in
the South Pacific would be good for him and would she
like to tag along? So he arranged a side trip through Samoa
before their Namala launch. They stayed for a week on
Tutuila at the Rainmaker Hotel overlooking Pago Pago
Bay, catching taxis in the morning to go scuba diving at
the Taema Banks. Byron got them aboard a tuna boat.
But the excursion she was to remember the most started
with a pillow fight at dawn, then a flight to Western
Samoa's Upolu in a light plane that Byron rented. After he
showed her the emerald mountains he put down at the
Faleolo airfield and they walked all over Upolu, catching
the occasional wooden-seated bus when they got tired.
She saw storming waterfalls and once came up behind
Byron as they emerged from a forested trail to catch a
mountain view of the ocean that staggered her.
"Byron!" she gasped, holding his elbow.
448

The Moon Goddess and the Son
449
"Yeah, the moon was never like this," he agreed.
When finally they caught a commercial flight to Namala
it was she who took Byron around the island and showed
him everything. That night they visited Ling's Kaleido-
scope. Madam Lilly was doing a revival of a late sixties
hippy farm. She combed out Diana's hair and lent her
jeans and an embroidered jean jacket. The food was chicken
roasted on an old bedspring over ruddy coals. One of the
young waitresses loved her Ewan MacColl and, between
serving customers, would sing his songs in an old fash-
ioned voice while playing her guitar.
"The first time ever I saw your face ... I thought the
sun . . . rose in your eyes . . . and the moon and the stars
were the gifts you gave ... to the dark and the endless
skies . . ."t
Byron liked the part where the girls went skinny-dipping
in the pool. Diana, who was in a very good mood, joined
them. So did one of the oldsters who had been sitting
around with his wife and several other graying couples.
"Harry! You're too old for that!" said his wife, chewing
on the beads lent her by Madam Lilly.
A prim companion of the wife took a last puff and passed
over the table's common joint to calm her friend's nerves.
Out of a distant speaker, the Beatles began to croon one of
their nostalgically quaint songs while the prim companion
rolled another. "When I get older, losing my hair . . .
many years from now . . . Will you still need me, will you
still feed me . . . when I'm sixty-four?"* With a pin in the
roach, smoke lazily climbing her fingers, the wife watched
her husband as he sported with all those nubile bodies in
the psychedelic lights around the poolside. Finally return-
ing, naked as a jaybird, he kissed her on the forehead and
took the last toke, carefully sucking and holding his breath.
Madam Lilly provided him with a bathtowel to preserve
the modesty of her place.
Next morning Byron and Diana checked into the space-
port's staging area two hours before launch. Diana felt like
a veteran. On her first trip up and out, from the Kennedy
*Copyright 1967 Northern Songs Limited.
tCopyright 1962 Stormking Music Inc.

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Donald Kingsbury
Spaceport in Florida, she had been thrown into orbit by a
rattletrap Rockwell Mark VI transport, a much modified
version of the original Rockwell shuttle but still launched
essentially by the means pioneered during the 1980s. Now
she was "going up" from Namala aboard the latest in
eight-passenger saucers, its very design younger than her
"Grove" identity. Their saucer was fresh from the factory
in Seattle. Even the upholstery smelled clean.
"I feel like a sardine packed for the giant at the top of
the beanstalk," grumbled Byron, after he had been wedged
in beside her. Not a patch of their bodies was unsupported.
Diana marveled. "I'm going to heaven!"
"Me, I get nervous out of the cockpit."
There was no stewardess, no human crew. A robopilot
spoke words of comfort, explaining procedures while their
saucer was picked up like any freighter and loaded into its
assigned scramjet with the other saucers, mostly freight-
ers. Diana happily recapitulated an Edgar Allen Poe story
she had once read about a man who had been buried alive
in a silk-lined coffin.
"Shut up," said Byron.
Invisible sensors monitored each passenger, checking
that all regulations were being complied with during the
countdown. To a gentle hiss, fast-setting foam filled out
the seat contours to fit their bodies. ". . . three . . . two
. . . one ..."
The blast-off was easy but the force built up for a long
minute before subsiding into a caressing pressure as the
scramjet took over. The passengers were sightless and
immobile.
"I need a piss," said Byron.
Diana told him stories to keep his courage up. They felt
the slight lurch as the scramjet released their saucer.
"Bombs away!" said Diana happily. The silicon pilot kept
them informed. It told them when the saucer's rockets
ignited. It told them their distance from the leoport "Can't
anybody shut off that damn mother?" complained Byron.
The rings were closing in on them rapidly. "Twenty-five
kloms . . . twenty kloms ..."
Then, as the saucer found the apogee of its orbit among
the blaze of stars, the leoport met them, an express to hell

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451
hitting them so hard that they sank into their couches with
the grace of elephants while they raced through the mon-
ster's electromagnetic intestine, their backs against the
action, eyes blind, bodies too heavy even to allow thought.
After 80 seconds the weight was gone. "Orbital injection
complete," said the robopilot redundantly. "Please remain
seated. Thank you for flying Shantech."
"Poor little Byron, you can relax now. We're here."
"Whew! The old shuttle was a piece of cake compared
with this sobering ride. I feel like I've just been cut down
by a firing squad after sassing a machine-gun with my bare
ass!"
"You're such a stick-in-the-mud. You're too old for me."
They ate at Planet Stories with leisurely gusto. Diana
drank too much. She told Shaggy Dog jokes and, when
she had the attention of five booths, tried to dance on the
tabletop in null gravity and ended up manning the ceiling.
When she passed out, Byron took her back to the Hilton.
The next day they caught a ferry to geosync orbit at the
construction site of the first test solar power satellite. For
eleven hours the five passengers played poker while the
ferry captain distributed sandwiches' and made coffee.
The ship continued to maneuver. When they estab-
lished parking orbit, the captain called Diana into the
cockpit. "Take a gander." The matchstick framework of the
SPS angled away into the star-laden blackness. "It's hard
to comprehend how immense it's going to be. Look, see
that crane over there? It's a whopping big crane. The little
dot is a cabin for two men."
"Wow."
"That thing is going to be half as big as Manhattan
Island. What you see is only the first of eight modules.
We've only got Greenwich Village built."
McDougall was laughing behind them. "Tell her how to
go from the A-train to the Seventh Avenue line."
Within the hour they docked with a lunar transfer vehi-
cle that was exchanging oxygen for terran hydrogen. The
boss of the LTV stuck his head through the hatch, mainly
to get a chance to razz McDougall. He was wearing a ten
gallon hat. Byron didn't introduce him to Diana until the
visit was almost over.

452
Donald Kingsbury
"Captain Horrible Maltby. Lady Diana Grove."
"Pleased," said Maltby, tipping his hat.
"Horrible and I used to fly in Saudi Arabia under the
same command. And he used to be a battle station man not
so long ago on the Reagan shield. I'm going to have to stay
here at the SPS construction site for a while and ride herd.
It's my company that builds the solar panels. Captain
Horrible will be taking care of you from here in. He'll get
you down to moondust okay. But watch him. He's a rascal.
Take care of yourself. Write Charlie. And don't let any of
Horrible's friends send your bags on to Mexico City. Ciao."
Maltby took her back through the airseal tunnel.
"You sit copilot with me," he said.
"Where's your real copilot?"
"He's too fat. I left him home. Where would I put you if
he was here? This ain't no taxicab. This here boat is a
freighter. You want to fly the beast?"
"You're scaring me."
"Seems complicated to you? Shucks, you just say 'giddiap'
and the beast goes. She has a brain of her own. Smart
woman. She knows where home is. The smell of oats."
"Giddiap," said Diana. Nothing happened.
Maltby did a few quick things with his fingers and the
ship swung around. Then he yelled "Giddiap!" with an ear
piercing Texas drawl and the ship roared to life.
This trip, instead of poker, Diana learned how to play
chess. He gave her a two-pawn-and-a-rook handicap and
she won one out of five games in the next two days until
they docked at the small Penthouse station on top of the
lunar skyhook. The maneuver cost them very little energy
because the station was moving at lunar escape velocity for
its altitude, anchored from flying away by the main Jed
Cline station in orbit below, named after the first man who
had proposed a lunar skyhook.
The skyhook had to be redesigned after the Mediian
electromagnetic landing track went into operation on the
surface. Cables were shortened and strengthened by busy
spiders weaving with fused and spun lunar quartz. Eleva-
tors were rebuilt to move heavier loads at respectable
speeds. The center of mass of the skyhook was lowered to
increase its orbital speed.

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453
"We've got to crawl down that?" Diana was skeptical. It
looked like it dropped all the way to the lunar surface even
though she knew it didn't get close. She couldn't even see
the bulge of the Jed Cline hub, it was so far away.
They left their LTV at the Penthouse for another pilot
who might want to go to geosync and Maltby loaded Diana
and a pile of high tech plastic parts into one of the eleva-
tors with life support. Down to Jed Cline they dropped.
They had time for chess. It was like going Greyhound Bus
instead of American Airlines. It took forever. When they
finally arrived, the hub turned out to be a lot larger than
the Penthouse, but still they were assigned to sleep in tiny
coffin bunks and ate in shifts with the station crew.
Diana stared at the pock-marked moon turning below
them. She had never been so close! "Hey, some wall
poster!" she told Maltby. Then she sat in the roundhouse
watching the Ground-to-Station Vehicles glide in and
dock. Later, Maltby came for her. Below deck in the
honeycomb of hangars he picked up his own CSV.
The ship was lowered down the hook, a few hundred
meters, and then released somewhe.re over the backside of
the moon. Maltby made rocket adjustments to his orbit,
but not many. Fuel was scarce this far from Earth and a
good pilot used it sparingly, preferring to bleed gravity
whenever he could.
The ship's small jets fired intermittently, making tiny
vernier adjustments to their velocity as they came in for
the horizontal landing, ass-end-to. Lazily the barren moon
flowed by, slowly rising to meet them, but only when they
were skimming the plain at crater-rim height did their
enormous speed become evident to Diana. A mile every
second. Nearby features to the side ran together in a
watercolor blur. It unsettled her to be facing the wrong
way, to see only the lunarscape they had already passed
over. She had a moment of panic when she thought they
were dropping too fast and would hit the ground.
Suddenly a line of track appeared, another blur as if
from a train's caboose. She knew that behind their backs,
the catcher-cradle was racing along the track ahead of
them, accelerating to match the GSV's velocity. (She re-
membered her bicycle and the spaniel who used to trot

454
Donald Kingsbury
leisurely from the neighbor's house, heading her off upstreet,
but already madly galloping beside her as she reached
him, nipping at her heels.) The cradle, moving with them
now, positioned itself underneath them—she could see its
rear extensions—grabbing with gentle jaws until the ship
and the maglev vehicle became one with the slightest of
jolts.
Maltby was yelling "Whoa!" at the blood-curdling top of
his Texas voice. Electromagnetic fields cut in to convert
fifteen tons of mass-flow into an electron flood. Force hit
then, two gravities that slowly built to five. The blur
beyond the windows resolved into the majesty of the lunar
desert, and finally they were moving sedately along a
shunt line towards a shed. Maltby was fondly patting the
control panel, smiling. "Atta girl."
I'm here, Diana thought and wonder was all within her.
She was assigned to the hydroponic gardens under a
scowling beak-nosed boss who walked through his long
tunnels of racks lit by fiber optic light, constantly tasting
tomatoes and carrots and broccoli like a Punch making
passes at lady puppets. Immediately he began to give his
new apprentice lectures on taste control.
His Punch eyes bulged and his nose quivered when she
was slow to learn the use of the mass chromatograph for
her daily tests of nutrient composition. He made her sit
down and balance chemical equations which didn't help
her at all to understand the machines she had to deal with.
He was mean and she was furious but when she finally
caught on, he took her to a hidden room behind his office
and selected a large strawberry reward.
She bit into it, without sugar, and her eyes lit up.
"Now that's a strawberry," he cackled. "I have the little
buggers fooled that they are living on the slopes of a
British Columbian mountain. Taste is everything. To hell
with yield. Yield we can leave to the Californians." Slowly
his grin grew, showing his upper gums above his jagged
teeth.
"May I have another?" she asked, knowing how to reach
the soul of this man.
"One more." He picked it and brought it to her with the
gentlest grip. "Now where would you ever find a taste like

The Moon Goddess and the Son
455
that? Only on the moon," he said. "We're the best ecologi-
cal artists in the solar system. Tomorrow you start on the
beetle meat farms. That's a polite name for slugs. I'm
breeding them for taste. I'm the man you come to for your
grub-steak."
She decided that her boss was crazy—not that what he
said was crazy, but he had papered the wall of the small
strawberry room with a fantastic view of a British Colum-
bian valley, looking down from some mountain slope with
other mountains in the background.
It didn't take her long to find out that everyone else was
crazy, too. In the cafeteria with the construction workers
she eavesdropped on a conversation beside her. Billy was
sick, the men were lamenting. Poor Billy. Billy was going
to die. He'd been anemic now for months. It was the first
time Diana had ever conceived of anybody dying on her
moon! Her soul filled with sympathy; poor man! She lis-
tened as the workers tried to cope with death, tried to
comprehend. Billy's leaves, explained the worker to his
companion, were drying around the edges. His leavesP
Byron's friend, Zimmerman, dropped around after work
to play scrabble. Diana asked him. "What kind of fruitcake
would name a lemon tree Billy?"
Zim nodded. "I hear Billy is pretty sick about it, too.
How would you like to be stuck with a name like Billy?
My tree, I named Hershel Ostropolier and he's never
been sick."
Then there was the tiny cook who had a redwood tree
called Paul Bunyan. Weird. What would they do when it
went through the roof? But the cook was into bonsai so
Diana supposed it might be all right. When she bought
her own baby orange tree she decided it was not going to
have a name. However . . . one evening when the conver-
sation came around to Celtic worship of trees she toasted
her tree with a local version of Irish Mist. She was just
trying to be witty. "To my true Irish friend!" Henceforth
her orange tree was invariably referred to as "the Irishman."
It wasn't easy living on the moon. The corridors were
cramped. The rooms were small. There was no place to
go. She missed hiking through the New Hampshire woods.
There wasn't any view of the Pacific from emerald hills.

456
Donald Kingsbury
Worse, an enormous sense of loss began to plague her.
She had no direction, no purpose to her life which had
always known a fierce purpose. It was awful. It was like
being a compass that has smashed its way through to the
north magnetic pole and was now spinning, aimless. One
night she dreamed about the truck driver who had taken
her to Washington when she was twelve. In the dream he
said with an ironic smile, "Better be careful what you
want, kid—you may get it!"
Purpose. That was very important. A girl had to have
purpose! The most important thing in her life became the
study of plants and beetles. She decided to become a
genius and bring life to the moon, tasty life and beautiful,
too. She borrowed botany disks and began to memorize all
the names, programming her computer to sort them out
for her by picture. There were so many species, it scared
her. She began to read biology and agricultural texts and
call up every hydroponic book in the library of her boss.
She studied beetles, appalled at their endless variety.
Studying became an urgent compulsion. There wasn't even
time to socialize, except with the trees, and finally no time
to sleep.
One afternoon, looking for a scrabble game, Zimmerman
found her wandering around the landing track control
room passionately trying to explain a theory of life that no
one could understand.

CHAPTER 60
I know for every truth there is a way for each to go,
And though you wander far,
your soul will know that true path when you find it.
I will fear nothing for you day or night!
I will not grieve at all because your light
is called by some new name;
Truth is the same!
Call it star or sun—
All light is one.
unknown
Every time when Diana woke up and tried to get out of
bed so she could go back to work, they held her down and
shot her full of drugs again. Once she escaped and turned
up for work in her pajamas. They brought her back and
put her to sleep. This time she was going to be more
cunning. She'd pretend to be asleep until the drugs were
all worn off and then she'd get up and go to work.
She peeked.
"Ah, you're awake," said Charlie.
She opened her eyes in wide disbelief. "Charlie! What
are you doing here?"
"The old man called me up. He told me to get off my
ass and take care of you. It was like listening to a wire
brush cleaning out the hole between my ears."
457

458
Donald Kingsbury
"Are you on their side?"
"I don't know from nothing. I got here an hour ago. I
can't even walk straight. Tomorrow I'm out working on the
track extension. The old man got me a job as a laborer, the
rat."
"Get me out of here, Charlie. I have to go back to
work."
"You're on a paid vacation and you're complaining?"
"They'll fire me." She was terrified.
He sat down gingerly because he didn't know how to sit
yet, but when he was sure there was a seat under him he
took her hand and held it between both of his. "Nobody is
going to fire you with my old man backing you."
"What happened to me? They won't tell me."
"You were wandering around passionately trying to con-
vince people that milkweed was going to save the moon.
The flowers are edible or something."
"I wasn't! I don't believe you!" She hid under the covers
in shame.
"Yeah, you were really around the bend."
"I don't understand," she said through the covers.
"Neither does the doctor. But I do. You ought to see
the loonies wandering around MIT during final exam month.
At some time in our life we're all afraid of failure. It drives
us nuts."
"You'll take care of me?"
"Do you think I'll let you out of my sight again? You
gave me the shock of my life. For a week I thought I was
strong enough to dismiss you. Then a funny thing began to
happen. The sweet flowered fields of New Hampshire
dissolved away into the flowered fields of hell. And the
moon up there in the sky began to take on a heavenly
beauty. I used to just lie on the ground and watch it rise
and set."
"Can I go back to work? I could finish the afternoon
shift if I started now."
"Maybe tomorrow. We have to settle things between
us. Like who is this Irishman you're living with?"
"That's not my Irishman! That's my orange tree!"
"I'm competing with an orange tree? Do you think I
have a chance? They say they'll let you come with me if

The Moon Goddess and the Son
459
you're willing. You have to promise to do everything I
say."
"I promise. As long as you keep your mouth shut."
She laughed as Charlie tried to walk her home. He
needed low gravity locomotion lessons. Once he collided
with one of the awkwardly placed potted trees. "Charlie!
Excuse yourself to Jezebel." He looked at her askance as
she patted the pear tree. "There, there, Jezebel. Every-
thing is going to be all right." Then she burst into tears.
Select friends gave Diana a homecoming party. Her
boss arrived with a bowl of strawberries so delicious they
needed neither powdered sugar nor cream. Zimmerman
leaned against the wall, a good position from which to steal
more than his share of the berries. Louise was there and
Captain Horrible Maltby brought his guitar and his regu-
lar copilot. The orange Irishman moved into one corner to
make room for them all.
Later Charlie explained to her the profounder truths of
the universe as he saw them. "Some unsolved problem
starts to push you. You think that if you don't do what you
have to do, the world will fall apart. A couple of weeks
without sleep and the borderline between the real world
and imagination begins to fuzz. You fall asleep on your
feet. You begin to treat real people as if they were the
ghosts of your dreams and that's when the guys in the
white coats come after you. Happens all the time at MIT
in May. So if you get eight hours of regular sleep, I'll let
you go to work. Otherwise, no."
"Make love to me. That'll put me to sleep."
"Thanks!"
"Is that what happened to you at MIT?"
"Naw. I come from an old military family. We can sleep
through anything. We can sleep in a muddy foxhole dur-
ing a thundershower in the middle of an artillery barrage
while our line is crumbling and a nail is working through
our boot. I cracked up for a different reason. I was pushing
to get my father's ass. It got to me. Haven't you ever
wanted to slug your father?"
"Oh yes!" she said brightly.
He laughed. "I was going to get one hundred percent in
every course my last year, just to rub that martinet's nose

460
Donald Kingsbury
in the robot he'd made out of me. But no matter how
much I strove I just couldn't make it as a robot. I couldn't
get past ninety-eight percent. It drove me crazy. It was
like continually jumping in front of my father's Buick to
prove to him what a bad driver he was and always coming
out between the wheels without a scratch."
"You're crazier than I am!"
"I owe it all to my father." He was smiling.
"I like Byron. I'd hate it if I disillusioned him."
"That's because you are an empty-headed woman." Char-
lie sighed. "Maybe one day I'll make peace with the old
prick."
"You could have finished school. It was in your own
best interest."
He shrugged. "I wasn't doing it for me."
"Why didn't you do more with your music?"
"My music was something they didn't want, so it was a
reaction, too, I guess."
"What do you want, then?"
"You."
''Oh, Charlie! That's not enough and you know it!"
"Maybe it is. Men are more romantic than women.
Women only pretend to be romantic because they know
men like it and if they pretend to be romantic they get a
nice safe nest."
"Are you calling me a fake?" she bridled.
"Naw. Not you. You made it very clear that what you
wanted to do was sit on a peak 380 thousand kloms high
and look down on the rest of us."
"Screw you!" She strode to the farthest corner of the
room, which wasn't very far away, and sat with her arms
crossed, confronting him belligerently.
"Hey, don't you think it's utterly romantic that I climbed
a peak that high on my knees just to ask you to marry
me?"
She smiled mischievously, still with her arms crossed.
"You haven't passed the other tests yet. You have to learn
how to work first. Then maybe I'll marry you."
Within two years Charlie worked his way to assistant
chief construction engineer. He was known with awe as
the one hundred percent man; the man who got the job

The Moon Goddess and the Son
461
done perfectly the first time. He lived with Diana and
refused to take an SPS construction gig because it would
take him away from her.
Diana began to write papers on taste in high yield
crops. For a lark she sent some tomatoes to a California
fair and won first prize. She had seven projects going at
once. Some people suspected that she never slept. Then,
when necessity moved the command center out of the
original spartan diggings into much larger quarters, Diana
made some frantic calls to Byron before someone else
could find a use for the space. Charlie did the conversion
design work. Zimmerman did the politicking. Ling, her
old friend Ling, put up the money.
She decided to call her restaurant Diana's Grove. It was
to be the first real salon and fine food establishment on the
moon. She had big plans. Her own place!

CHAPTER 61
Had we but world enough, and time . . .
"To His Coy Mistress," Andrew Marvell
A restless urge can overtake a man. Byron begged off a
camping trip with a girlfriend too young for him, pleading
business, and three hours later was at his desk in Concord
after flying in by commercial airline. He was not able to
concentrate. Restlessly he rented a car and drove out to
Stonefield.
He had no reason to be in Stonefield. The house had
long been sold to a professor of English at the college.
They invited him in for tea and made meaningless pleas-
antries. He was glad to break away. Instinctively, his walk
in the woods took him to the sacred grave of Amanda's
love letter, overgrown, invisible.
For a while he sat on his haunches talking to her with a
cattail between his teeth. He had stopped writing to Amanda
long ago—what was the use—she never replied.
Back on Stonefield's main street he entered Brady's,
which was still there, and ordered a milkshake. Little
Charlie used to drag him in here to slurp sundaes. Strange
how he couldn't even carry on a conversation with Junie
anymore.
His ex still smoked like a chimney and so did the hog
she had married who ran a business from Florida shipping
462

The Moon Goddess and the Son
463
fresh fish to the midwest. Last year, in a randy moment of
nostalgia at their pool, Byron had propositioned her for old
times sake—anything to get a rise out of her. Of course,
she was still shockable. Some things never changed. He
didn't dare go back.
On the marble table at Brady's he unfolded his digiphone.
Five minutes later he had hired a San Antonio detective.
From Stonefield he went directly to Amman, Jordan,
and checked into the Holiday Inn Hotel. He did his ground-
work carefully. If a man was going to tackle the greatest
screw-up love affair of his life he might as well be pre-
pared. He visited Amanda's mound and took an American
professor of archaeology with him to have the place sur-
veyed. He talked to the right people in Jordan's Depart-
ment of Antiquities. They were slow.
With a weekend on his hands, he revisited Petra, alone.
It was different. Then the United States had been pitifully
planetbound. Imperial Russia had only begun to build
Mirograd. And he was a young and stupid and fast-reflexed
flyboy on a fling with a charming woman, pondering his
unpromising future.
Young men die violently and have no time to think
about death. But if they survive they become slowly dying
older men who have time to conceive magnificent tombs.
The tombs of Petra were marvels carved from the rock.
An older Byron understood them. The Nabateans would
have understood him, too, he thought. His tomb was
vaster than all Petra, carved to last a billion years. Only
in the chambers of Medea on the moon would Byron
McDougall be remembered forever. But here on Earth in
the awesome Khasneh lay the tomb of his greatest love,
strangled in the full flower of youth.
For another week, he wandered aimlessly around Am-
man, sampling Lebanese cakes, taking a morning and an
afternoon walk, squandering time. Then his San Antonian
detective reached him with the message that Amanda's
husband would be in El Paso until the third of next
month.
The continents and oceans of Earth were as nothing to
Byron. He knew where his heart was—and went. The
light plane dropped onto the dusty ranch field in Texas,

464
Donald Kingsbury
swiveled around and cut its engines. Before he was even
oriented he spotted Amanda arriving in her truck, kicking
up dust. He waited.
"Ah knew it was you—you're the only man around these
parts who washes his plane; you stopped writing me." She
hadn't even paused for breath, but paused now, gripping
the wheel.
He climbed in. "You knew that if you didn't answer me,
I'd eventually have to come visiting."
"Ah knew no such thing!"
It can be a shock to see someone after a long absence.
The desert sun is hard on a woman who loves the out-
doors; Amanda was tanned and her good-natured wrinkles
showed. They didn't speak again until she parked and
uncoiled her lanky frame at the house.
"You get taller every time I see you," he marveled.
"You're just not eating enough good Texas beef, Shorty."
"It's been a while since I was fed by a good Texas
woman."
She yelled out some instructions to the hands, and then
took him into the kitchen. "Ah'11 have to cook you up
something special—see if Ah can fatten up your flattery
glands."
In the kitchen there was no sign that she had ever been
an archaeologist except the small shelf of thousand year
old pots from the cradle of civilization in which she kept
her spices. She chatted about cattle and rainfall. He helped
her chop vegetables. None of the magic was gone from the
way they joked together. He had been afraid that so much
time would distance them. And so it became a magnificent
evening. He always fell in love with her all over again
every time they met. She fussed like she was trying to
impress a potential conquest.
The sun set. She lit old country candles. "If Ah remem-
ber right, you are a scotch man," she said, standing up to
pour him a glass.
"Here's to many evenings like this one," he toasted.
That reminded her of a task undone. "Ah have a present
for you Ah've been keeping hidden from my husband."
She left the room and came back. It was his stack of letters
bundled in ribbon. She handed them to him. "It's over,

The Moon Goddess and the Son
465
Byron," she said. "Ah don't want you ever to come back."
She said it calmly, without any grief at all.
For a moment of terror his mind flashed on the image of
his ex-wife bodily throwing him out of her Florida home
after he had propositioned her.
"You don't just throw away your past like that," he said
after collecting his wits.
"Ah clean my attic all the time of the clutter Ah'm never
going to use."
"That's not true. Part of you is still an archaeologist," he
countered.
"It's gone. Ah threw it out."
"Life is not an attic."
"We missed our chance, Byron."
"Those pots in the kitchen. You'll never give them up."
With a kind of fury she flew away and came back with a
carton full of the tiny vessels still brimming with spices.
"Take them."
He tried to decline. "What would I do with pots?"
"Ah don't care!"
"I suppose I could pass them to Professor Arnt." It was
now or never. "You haven't even given me a chance to tell
you why I'm here. I just got back from Jordan. I found out
they are going to dig your mound."
"My mound?"
"Yeah. They just surveyed it, and the Jordanian Depart-
ment of Antiquities has given permission for the dig. "
"Dig my mound!" she exclaimed indignantly.
"I told them that you knew more about that mound than
any archaeologist alive. I came here to offer you the job."
"You asshole, Byron! A dig like that takes money. Ah
tried for eight years to raise the money and couldn't do it."
"Professor Arnt has been having a hard time raising
money, too. I told him I'd help out. What am I rich for if I
can't be a patron of the arts?"
"Byron!"
"I forgot my ladder," he reminded himself.
"A ladder?"
"I was going to put my ladder up against your bedroom
window so we could elope in style."
"Ah can't just leave like that!" she protested.

466
Donald Kingsbury
"Gotta clean out your attic sometime. Tell your husband
you had an urgent call from Jordan."
"You're bamboozling me!" she accused.
Byron helped her pack. Hallway through she changed
her mind again and began to unpack. "There's a catch!"
"Yeah. You have to marry me and spend some time with
me on the moon."
She wouldn't let him put her red shoes back in the
suitcase, tugging at them. "Ah'd be terrified to fly to the
moon."
"I'll hold your hand." He stuffed the red shoes under
her nightgowns.
"You've conned me with dreams! You're always conning
me with dreams. Tell me one good reason Ah should go
with you?"
"I've become a registered Democrat."
They skulked off to the plane with a suitcase, some
Edomite pots and a packet of love letters. There was
enough moonlight to take off.
"You haven't told me that you love me," she complained.
"You're my all time favorite chick." He noticed her
staring at the brilliant Texas moon. "It's mine. Ill give it
to you."

EPILOGUE
The place is called Diana's Grove. There are trees ev-
erywhere, not big trees, but what they lack in size they
make up for in lushness. Some of them bear fruit—lemons
and oranges and figs. There are vines and bamboo stands,
even a brook called Camenae that flows in too dreamlike a
manner to gurgle. The benches are real wood, sacred to
the lunar Dryads. The food is the best in the solar system—
just don't ask for real beef in your hamburgers. Nymphs
with names like Callisto and Nephele and Hyale and Ranis
and Psecas serve the tables wearing Roman hairdos and
wispy gowns. The Moon Goddess is fiercely protective of
the girls who work for her—Zeus beware!
If you've ever heard the music at Diana's Grove you
know that her man Charlie has risen into the league of the
greatest. He claims it is just an engineer's hobby but we
know different. He has invented 43 new instruments and
hardly a lunar day goes by when he has not composed a
new DM piece. His compositions can be as simple as birds
chattering in the morning from somewhere beyond the
Grove's leaves—a heron's cry, a sightseeing flock south-
bound, a lone warbler—or it can be a conversation-stopping
argument between the gods.
He's at his best when he tells stories: the nymph Canens
wasting away to nothing more than a voice while she
searches in vain for her lost husband who has been trans-
467

468
Donald Kingsbury
formed into a woodpecker by the witch Circe. Listen to
that among the trees.
When Diana comes to her mythical grove, she makes
her appearance in a white tunic with quiver over her
shoulder. She knows everyone. Often she has a dinner
party in one of the alcoves, the Corycian Cave or the
Gargaphie Vale, and brings people together who should
be together, sometimes for major or minor politicking,
sometimes because she delights in the clash of disparate
views, sometimes because she is a secret matchmaker,
sometimes for trivial reasons—an old professor of Charlie
needs company or one of her friends needs to discuss
curtains.
It was Diana who argued with Limon Barnes when he
arrived, unannounced, for a fortnight's stay on the moon,
and began unilaterally to reorganize the lunar govern-
ment. She said he was a damn meddler. He claimed to be
taking a needed vacation from tinkering with the tradition-
bound Russian soul. She scolded him for experimenting
with people and he told her that it was an incredible
pleasure to experiment with flexible subjects who didn't
yet have a fixed tradition.
Traditionally the tables at Diana's Grove vibrate with
political discussion. To stand out, Limon Barnes had to be
more than outrageous. He took a perverse amusement in
shaking the core assumptions of these transplanted Ameri-
cans. Diana fought him all the way—but in a way which
was very good for business. The Grove was full on the
evenings of their battles.
"You just think you're Hari Seldonl" she accused him
after he gave a talk on how to manipulate and subvert
constitutions in order to end the general decay of govern-
ment. (An older retired writer had to whisper to his com-
panion that Hari Seldon was a pre-golden age pulp
science-fiction hero who saved the galaxy by inventing the
science of psychohistory, a latter-day Marx.)
Limon merely nodded, warily accepting the drink she
brought with her, an Amalthea tnade out of goat's milk and
honey and the stars only knew what else. He gave it such
a strange look. Was he wishing that he had a "tester"?

The Moon Goddess and the Son
469
"It was good enough for Zeus, so it's good enough for
you!" Diana insisted.
She could make anyone smile and Limon toasted his
hostess with his eyes. "When Hari Seldon got through
with the galaxy, there was only one future left." He raised
his glass. "When I'm through with the galaxy the situation
will be much more confused than that." He leaned over
conspiratorially. "You see, I'm introducing hundreds of
futures that never previously existed."
"Thank the gods you're leaving us!"
And things did calm down at the Grove when Limon
retreated back to Earth—biit he left three men to manage
a twenty-four hour computer bulletin board game called
Consensus that held the full set of lunar colony laws, plus
rules for updating those laws. To change them you had to
be a very good player. It was a game of skill. Nobody
understood the purpose of the game even if they liked to
play; whatever changes you might manage to make in the
laws with the help of the other players weren't legally
binding. And yet . . . within a year, by consensus, there
were no other lunar laws. No one even minded that eight
year olds were allowed to play, if you had the skill to win,
you had a "vote."
Yes. There is always excitement at Diana's Grove.
If you're a newcomer to Medea you won't remember
the Big Party For Byron, but the whole citizenry took
part. It started when Ray Armsiel visited the moon with
his wife. Diana took them to the Grove to pay back an old
debt she had picked up at a McDonald's in L.A. She
cooked up her best grub hamburgers for Ray. "On Earth,"
she teased, "you're stuck with hamburgers made out of
dead cow. Where else but the moon can you get real
hamburgers made out of ground up beetle larvae?"
Ray sniffed at them.
"Aren't you the heavy terran!" snorted Diana. "Haven't
you seen tomatoes and lettuce before? My hamburgers
taste better than beef! You should see our breeding pro-
gram!" She offered him a side dish of crisp grasshoppers in
a goat's cheese dip.
And while his attention was occupied, Linda Armsiel,
who was the great Sam Brontz's daughter, was gossiping

470
Donald Kingsbury
about Byron. She whispered that he had been remarried
secretly in Jordan by the American consul. To an archaeol-
ogist.
Five hours later the whole moon knew the story. Over
the months spies began to add tidbits. Byron was going to
try to smuggle her in as an immigrant! The lovebirds were
going to pretend they weren't married and hardly knew
each other! Each day more gossip trickled in. And then
. . . they were to arrive at lunar sunset. Separately!
On Thursday (sunset day) the arrangements for the Party
were barely hidden away. Signals were passed. A special
computer center kept track of the couple's movements.
And the word went out on a minute by minute count-
down. . . . Byron had left his room . . . Byron was now in
Diana's Grove alone, waiting . . . The tension mounted.
Again the word went out. . . . Amanda was drifting toward
the Grove herself. . . Even the men on the night shift in
the new diggings had their earphones on. They were
ignoring each other and forgetting to drill rock.
"Byron is starting to flirt with her," confided the an-
nouncer to all of Medea. "She's pretending to ignore him."
The night staff at the anti-hydrogen factory put their ma-
chines on automatic so they could give their undivided
attention to the blow by blow reports.
Now Amanda was accepting a drink with great reserve.
That was the signal. Into the Grove came Captain Hor-
rible Bill Maltby dragging a string of tin cans. Diana's staff
hurried out of hiding, banging pots. The lunacy lasted for
two days. During the revelry a sentimental Charlie pro-
posed to Diana again, for the twenty-seventh time.
And so it goes. Infrequently Charlie still proposes to his
Diana. She smiles her teasing smile, even though they
already have one child, and writes him out a new contract
in a flourishing script that promises she will be faithful to
him for at least the next fortnight. He grumbles that living
with her is like being an untenured professor.
The solar power satellites are winking on all around the
equator, eighty percent of their mass now coming from the
moon. All of the oxygen used by the space fleet is manu-
factured on the moon. America is prosperous, for the
moment, doing what it has always done best, selling high

The Moon Goddess and the Son
471
technology (and food) to the rest of the world. Her econ-
omy has achieved power independence and, perhaps, re-
source independence. When Byron McDougall isn't putter-
ing around in the ancient cities of Jordan with his wife,
he's plotting ways to snare a nickel-iron asteroid.
The investment in the leoport-lunar transportation sys-
tem was considerable but it is, as yet, not well defended.
People still talk about defense. No one has forgotten the
Great Accidental War—and nuclear weapons have since
become as cheap as homemade cruise missiles in a world
whose numbers have crossed the eight billion mark, tens
of millions more each year to eye each other with envy
and hatred. Both McDougalls belong to an unofficial min-
istry which considers problems that the lunarians do not
trust to Old Earth's archaic mentation. Serious decisions
have to be made by someone to secure the high ground.
Such duties take Charlie back to the homeworld once a
year.
Diana never goes with him. She is a minor Earth deity
who worked hard for her promotion to Moon Goddess and
she is well content with her position.

HE'S OPINIONATED
HE'S DYNAMIC
HE'S LARGER THAN LIFE
MARTIN CAIDIN
Martin Caidin is a bestselling novelist, pilot
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EXIT EARTH—Just as the US and the USSR have
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"Heinlein knows more about blending provocative
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■—Chicago Sun-Times
"Robert A. Heinlein wears imagination as though it
were his private suit of clothes. What makes his work
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Seven of Robert A. Heinlein's best-loved titles are
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