MISQUOTING THE STAR

by David Bartell

Second chances aren’t always what the people getting them think….

No one wanted to be remembered as The Voice at the End of the World, so when the asteroid nicknamed “Big Bastard” exploded into the Earth, the event went unnarrated. No one wanted to direct the angles from the cameras on the Moon, on the Earth, in their orbits and Lagrange points, so the video feeds cycled mosaics of them all, automatically. Some of the refugees on the Moon wanted to gather for support during the last hour, and in the Shoemaker Pod 4 mess hall, the images were projected onto a flat wall.

When there is video of a disaster, some people watch once in horror, and then never want to see it again. Others watch over and over, transfixed, trying to cure their souls of numbness. Antoinette Washington sat in the mess hall, but her eyes were not glued to the screen like most people’s. She fidgeted on an aluminum stool, and her hands wagged uncontrollably, as if the brown stub of her missing ring finger was frantically warning the rest of her of an oncoming amputation.

“It’s going to be all right, Miss Washington,” said an accented voice behind her. She turned to see a young man, an African, she recalled, though his name escaped her. His skin was light for an African, a similar shade to her own. But while she was a golden brown, he had cinnamon freckles on his broad, sharp cheeks and short hair with a rusty sheen.

“Call me Netty,” she said.

“All right,” he said. “It’s going to be all right, Netty.”

She nodded, but could not speak again. Her mouth had inexplicably filled with hot saliva. Nothing was going to be all right, mister, she thought. Not nothing, never.

As a caption counted down to fifty-nine seconds, her blood first rushed to her head and then collapsed away, leaving her faint. Her whole body shook. As the administrator of this lunar pod, she didn’t want to be seen that way. Besides, she had never been much for kumbaya.

She heard people cry out among stifled sobs, and someone vomited as she rushed out of the small cafeteria and into a seldom-used inflatable corridor that led behind the dorm ring. The countdown haunted her, and she fixed the number “59” in her head, unwilling to let the inevitable event unfold. Her hands were numb, and she fumbled to pull back the plastic curtain that was her door. Once inside, she fell onto the cot, shaking.

Blood rushed hot through her ears, and she could hear it, chattering like a multitude of souls passing away. Her heart hammered, and she felt like she had swallowed Big Bastard, and now it was going to break out. Then she imagined the asteroid exploding through her head, and the voices instantly hushed, all but one. It spoke the name of the African man in the mess hall: Hendrik Izaaks. Then, it too was silent.

Her bed was soaked with tears when she awoke. She was feverish and had to urinate. As she lifted herself onto her side, she saw streaks of blood on her half-deflated faux fleece pillow, dried, except where the tears had melted together with them.

She felt herself breathe, but her breath stopped short, as if she had suddenly inhaled the burning air of Earth. An avalanche of claustrophobia fell over her, paradoxically giving her the urge to close herself away in the washroom. As the administrator, she had a private bath. She sat on the tiny toilet and threw up on the floor. Months of dread broke from her soul, twisting her stomach, cracking her bones. “It’s all over,” she repeated, convulsing with dry retches and sobs. Mother Earth had passed away.

The cameras on Earth had gone out—all the broadcasts cut off at nearly the same time—and no satellites were responding. Only fifteen were even picked out of the flotsam by passive radar, and they were all dead. The plan was that if anyone in bunkers beneath the Earth survived, they would wait until it was safe to raise an antenna. The seven lunar bases waited in agony to receive some signal that there were survivors. No signal came.

The next step was to send probes to Earth orbit on reconnaissance, once it was determined that there were no dangerous obstacles to spaceflight. In fact, there were tens of thousands of rocky fragments streaking through space, heading away or falling back to Earth in tangled paths. Some struck the Moon, forcing the refugees to hunker down even longer.

During those torturous days of dark thoughts and blaring alarms, Netty stitched herself together. Except for losing herself during Earth Zero, she had comported herself with all the dignity and professionalism she had learned as mayor of Washington, D.C. Now it was time to defer contemplation and grieving and to focus on the many critical, immediate tasks in her oversight.

She walked to work, taking a brief moment to wonder whose idea it had been to make the tubular ceilings a sky blue. She sighed. It was not time yet to think about her grand vision: to take advantage of the holocaust and rebuild a more idyllic society.

“How are you, Miss Washington?”

Netty turned to see the genteel African with the freckled, boyish face. He seemed an unabashedly simple man, wonderfully out of place in this dangerous, complex prison of theirs. For reasons she did not understand, he reminded her of home. More than that; the home of all homes, she thought. He was a mystery.

“Hendrik Izaaks, how are you?” she said with practiced but genuine cheer.

“I am fine,” Izaaks said. He jerked slightly, as if suppressing a cough. “And you?”

“I could complain, but it wouldn’t do any good,” she said. “I was just heading for the diner. Would you care to join me?”

“I am happy to accept.”

They entered the mess hall together. People had dubbed the room the Double-wide Diner, since it was made from two modules put together, forming the largest single public space in Pod 4. The name seemed appropriate to the quality of the food as well. Lunch was rehydrated soup that looked like dishwater, for lack of artificial colors. It tasted better than it looked, and Netty sipped as if to savor it. The GP had advised her to eat slowly, to help prevent digestive problems. Her companion ate heartily.

“It’s good,” he said.

“So, Hendrik. Tell me about yourself. You’re from Africa, right?”

“Yes, I am from Khomasdal, Namibia. But my name is Oscar. Hendrix is one of my roommates.”

“Oh, then the roster must be wrong. I have a Hendrik Izaaks listed. I remember distinctly, because there is another person on the roster named Hendrix, with an ‘x.’”

“That’s my roommate. My name is Oscar. Hendrik was my father. He was meant to come here, but sent me instead.”

Netty’s head grew hot. “Excuse me?” she said with restrained indignation. There was to be no seat substitution whatsoever on the starfish that brought the refugees to the Moon, and this was the first irregularity of which she had heard. It was not her job to decide on those rules or to verify identities, but she was tasked with keeping the peace now. If news of this got out, it could create a textbook problem: intense, escalating personal resentment. There would be jealousy, suspicion, accusations of rigging, irrational actions, and possibly violence. Most everyone had lost all of their family and friends, and any hint of rule breaking would undermine the tenuous sense of fair play that gave some little rest to the dead.

“My father was very lucky to have received passage,” Oscar said. He stared at the table, a faraway look on his face. His eyes were red, not abnormally so, but she perceived him as a very sensitive man, since he was holding back tears. “In the end, he could not leave my mother behind. So he gave his luck to me.”

“Your father sounds like a remarkable man,” she said. “Tell me about him.”

“Whew!” Oscar said. “He was a good man and a very good father. But he did some bad things.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

Oscar’s faintly Asian-looking eyes widened, and he coughed. “Not that bad,” he said. “I must now tell you what he did, or you will think worse of him.”

“We’ve all done bad things, I think.”

Oscar looked down again. “Yes, we have. My father killed a lot of elephants. There were very few left, and he killed the rest of them.”

“So that’s how he bought a seat on a starfish,” she said. “I heard people were paying a lot of money for odd things like elephant tusks, in the last few years.”

“Ah, people are very superstitious when there is trouble. They look to anything for luck. The price of their superstition bought me my seat.”

She finished her soup and sucked once on the plastic spoon to get the last bit of flavor from it. “Oscar, it’s not your father’s fault the elephants are gone. Maybe someday we can atone for that, by growing new ones.”

“There are elephants on the Moon?”

“No, there’s no room for animals like that. But they do have a DNA bank, so it’s possible, if we can recreate their habitat.”

A repeating pattern of three long honks and one short over the sound system signaled a possible emergency.

Netty stood up. “Excuse me. That’s a meteor alert. I have to go, but next time, I’d like to hear a story about how Hendrik Izaaks was a good father.” She got up off the tiny stool, and Oscar motioned that he would return her food tray. She bounded through the open bulkhead and into the main corridor. She’d learned to jog in the Moon’s feeble gravity and recalled rushing about Washington like this. There was one thing she did not regret leaving behind: heels.

The command center looked like Houston Control, but was really more of an office, linked to similar offices in all of the pods, except China’s Chi Yue base. Her pod was one of four cobbled onto the slopes of Shoemaker Crater, near the larger base at Shackleton, at the lunar South Pole. The Shoemaker pod group was one of seven such bases, not including the independent Chi Yue. While the modules in her pod were connected by various types of corridors, the four pods were each separated by a mile, on average. The bases were scattered for statistical safety—a deliberate diaspora around the Moon, built in anticipation of deadly debris from the asteroid collision with Earth. Each campus was self-sufficient, but with the full complement of around ninety people each, plus some livestock, they could survive for only about a year.

If all went well. The alarm was subdued in the control room.

“Incoming!” Molyneux told her as she arrived at her desk. He was a middle-aged man, old by refugee standards, who still had a beer belly, despite the anorexic rations.

“How big? How close?”

“Looks like it will hit close to SMP3. It’s about four meters long.”

“Oh, God.”

There were thousands of fragments of Big Bastard and shattered Earth still looking for things to smash, and a direct hit could be devastating, even to the buried parts of the pods. There were many near misses, and one hit that caused irreparable damage to one of the pods over on the far side. Warnings were very brief, and this meteor impacted a few hundred yards from Shoemaker Pod 3 before they could converse further. Without knowing exactly where the debris might hit, there was little effective preparation, other than battening down.

A camera feed showed an overexposed flash and a rush of dust. Divots of lunar rock and soil shot miles in all directions, and frantic voices in the Pod 3 command center shouted of impacts and pressure drops.

“There are people in there!” said one voice, and another demanded “Who?” while still more drowned out the reply.

It took extraordinary effort for Netty to screen the voices out, but her immediate concern was her own Pod 4. A meteor could break into pieces, spread out for miles, and a really big one could make a new crater out of the whole complex. All reports showed green for SMP4. Shoemaker Pod 3 was a mile away, and this hit was a minor one.

Still, as the reports became more coherent and rescue parties reported in, she learned that three people were known dead, killed when a large hole tore through a dirt mound and then the thin-walled corridor beneath. The people had been behind a strong door, but it had jolted loose, and there had been no emergency oxygen nearby. Five other people had been injured on the other side of the smashed corridor, and although they reached an oxygen cache, they had each suffered blunt force trauma, decompression, and near suffocation.

“We’ll send a medical team over to assist,” Netty promised. She dispatched the team—all of her medical professionals except one. She kept a general practitioner home, in case they needed him. She saw the team off as they left an airlock and boarded a pair of battery-powered jaw rattlers.

Later, there was a series of virtual briefings. During the final meeting, the administrator of SMP3 had a nervous breakdown in front of everyone. Not only were there casualties in his pod, but one of his starfish was damaged beyond repair. That meant not all the refugees would be able to return to Earth, but no one was willing to discuss that ramification of the incident. Netty failed to see how a mental meltdown would help anything. We can’t have that, she thought, when we’re rebuilding a world.

After the ordeal, Netty headed to her room for a rest. She took a deep breath and let her shoulders slump as she veered wearily through a dark service corridor that paralleled the main corridor. Sometimes she just wanted a little privacy in this sardine can. The deaths pricked at her heart like hot voodoo needles, and radar anigraphs—animated graphics—haunted her thoughts. The network was tracking an awful lot of debris that could fall down on them, and the anigraphs were sick cartoons, forecasting hails of rocky bullets.

The main corridor was an interior one, but this narrow outside hall was exposed, never having been completely covered by protective soil. It had been part of the original fragile structure that housed the construction crew and now served only the purpose of redundancy.

Halfway down, she halted. A shutter was open—a breach of rules. Netty cursed and went to the window. Probably someone was curious to see the meteor—the window did face roughly toward SMP3—but opening a shutter was expressly against the rules, especially when the alert was sounding.

“How the hell do they think we’re going to make it, if they can’t follow a simple rule?” she nearly shouted.

This was the kind of thing she had no patience for. Couldn’t people put their curiosity aside for just a few months? Their home world was gone, and their pod was little more than a silk tent in a war zone. Any mistake could be fatal. Even if they were able to return to Earth, they’d be very lucky to survive there for long. Humanity had had thousands of years to learn to rise to occasions like this one, and the command staff, at least, had been carefully hand-picked. There was no excuse. She would get nothing less than perfection out of her pod.

Before she closed the metal plate, she chanced a look out herself. Pod 3 was not visible because of an intervening rise, but she did see the Earth. It was the first time she’d seen it with her own eyes since the hit. Mother Earth hung in the air like a cat’s plaything, having been batted about and left for later. Brown clouds shrouded the planet, and she could not make out any distinct features at all—not a single ocean or continent. In another month or two, they’d send orbiters to begin scanning the ground.

She closed the shutter and tightened the wing nuts. She was spent, but needed to talk to someone, so she turned into the B Ring to see if her friend LaDonna was home. The “door” to most rooms was the ubiquitous Mylar sheet, so the custom was to stand back and announce oneself.

“Knock knock?”

LaDonna drew back the curtain. She was a tall black woman, her once-glorious hair shorn into a no-fuss brown halo. She was wearing her pajamas—standard issue fleece, plus size narrow, white.

“Bless my stars, if it isn’t Antoinette Washington, the woman they named Washington, D.C. after. Come on in!”

“Stop that. How can you be so … so…”

“Happy? I insist on happiness, that’s how.” She waved an arm around her tiny room. “If I don’t have that, what do I have?”

“You have Derrick.”

“Derrick is my happiness, but he’s on duty, so you can have his chair.”

LaDonna sat on her hammock, letting Netty take the rocking chair. This was a short-backed aluminum frame, padded with a thin white bath towel. LaDonna’s husband had bolted a bent scrap of metal plating to the bottom to form the rocker. The chair felt good, and rocking in the reduced gravity was slow and soothing. Maybe she should try sleeping on a hammock, too.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Netty said.

“Me either. Just you keep coming around, and maybe a little will rub off on you.”

Netty smiled and patted LaDonna’s hand, marveling at her strength.

“You’re all wound up, girl,” LaDonna said. “Relax!”

“I’m all right. Some other PA just had a nervous breakdown, so now I don’t need to.”

“Whoever screened your psychological profile knew what they were doing,” LaDonna said, smiling. “But I’ll tell you what. If men can break down and blubber like I seen them do, we can fix ourselves for a little cry, too, can’t we, child?”

“Does that include a good scream? The big things make people cry, but it’s the little ones that make me pull my hair out. Listen to this. On my way here, I found a window open—the shutter, I mean—of course, the windows don’t open. This was right after a meteor shower! How could anyone be so careless?”

“I guess it’s hard not to rubberneck.”

Netty beseeched with open palms. “Just imagine you had the chance to eliminate world hunger. You could wipe things out, like racism, poverty, and war.” Her arms lifted, as if in benediction. “That’s the silver lining here, isn’t it? We can start over and do it right. But the world will be a precarious place to live, just like here. We can’t afford to have any fools screwing things up.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m thinking to set up a series of come-to-Jesus meetings. There’s just no excuse for second best right now.”

“We just lost all the people and places and things we ever loved. That’s about the best excuse you could ask for. You can’t go around all idealistic, all the time.”

“With everything we love gone, our ideals are all that we have left.”

LaDonna scrunched her eyebrows, indicating that she did not buy that reasoning. “And just how far are you willing to go to reach this ideal of yours?”

As far as I need to, Netty thought, but it was too audacious a thing to say, even to LaDonna. “We’re going to build the world over, and get it right this time.”

They sat quietly for a moment, and Netty did relax, her thoughts wandering. She smiled to herself and chuckled.

“What is it?” said LaDonna, leaning forward.

“Oh, I was just thinking about something else.”

“Is this something else a man?”

“How on Earth did you know that?” Netty said, immediately feeling the word “Earth” boomerang back to slice through her midsection.

“I saw you in the diner with that African. What’s his name?”

“Oscar Izaaks. And you’re right. He’s cute, with all those freckles.”

“Cute? Lady, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but ‘cute’ just ain’t you.”

“No, he really isn’t my type. But under the circumstances, I don’t have the luxury of choosing my type. Besides, there’s something so—I don’t know—endearing about him. He comes from a simpler time, a simpler place.”

LaDonna sat back in her chair and nodded slowly. “We’re all refugees, here, aren’t we? Sounds like your Oscar is something of a refuge.”

Netty nodded, and moisture oozed from her eyes. That got LaDonna started, and they shared a tearful hug.

Netty had never seriously considered marriage. As a girl, she was told marriage was a custom that worked only for white people. Now, to rebuild Earth, it seemed dutiful to consider children, and trying to find a man and build a relationship while also building a world would be overly complicated. With so few eligible men around, she would marry out of duty and convenience. Fondness or love would be welcome, though not required. She inhaled deeply. In a way, a no-strings model of marriage was liberating.

Oscar coughed as he sat with Netty in a corner of the Double-wide Diner. “I heard that some people died in one of the pods,” he said.

“Three,” said Netty. “But just now, I’d like to get my mind off all that. Tell me about your father.”

“Well, he was very proud of his people, you see. Of our mixed blood. I am the only one left from our line, and he expects me to continue our legacy.”

“It’s a wonderful gift.”

“A gift with a price. My father was not so proud of me. I was the dark one in the family.”

“Excuse me?”

“My skin is darker. It’s a very dangerous pride, you see, to be what they called ‘colored.’ You must not be too dark.”

“Well,” she said, trying not to look as aghast as she felt. “We’re going to end all that. When we return home, there won’t be any racism.”

“That is good. I am not like my father.”

“You say that,” she said, studying his face, “as if you are glad not to be like him.”

“I already told you about the elephants. He respected them, until an American hunter hired him to kill them.”

“How so, did he respect them?”

“When we were children, he told us many stories about the elephants. Nama folk tales.”

Netty warmed again. “Maybe those stories are a more important legacy than your blood. Tell them to me.”

“There is one story about a woman, a human, who married an elephant. She tricked him into marrying her, so that she could steal his livestock.”

Netty smiled at the idea of an elephant keeping livestock.

“One night,” he continued, “the elephant’s wife took some goats and cattle and ran off with them. The elephant chased her, but before going, he told his mother that if something bad happened to him and he fell, she would know it because the whole Earth would shake with the crash. Just as the elephant was about to catch his wife, she escaped through a crack in a cave wall. He tried to follow, but the crack closed on him, and he fell. When his mother felt the whole world shake, she knew that the elephant was dead.”

Netty shivered at the prophetic tale.

“So you see,” he said, “my father felled the elephant, and the whole world fell with it.”

“You’re very down to earth, do you know that?”

“What does it mean, ‘down to earth?’”

She warmed inside. That he did not know proved the point. “It means I like you.”

Oscar coughed again. She shrank back. Oscar was the first person she had seen being sick on the Moon. Everyone had been screened and given a clean bill of health before being allowed on a “starfish” ship to the Moon.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s always too cold.”

“You really should take care of that cough.” She held his gaze for a moment, and then he looked away in discomfort.

“It’s your turn to tell me something now,” he said.

“You want me to tell you about that meteor?”

“Tell me what your dreams were, before this disaster.”

Netty smiled faintly. What a lovely request to make. Revisiting old dreams often put a healthy perspective on them. “Those dreams are long gone,” she said. “But you know what? I have a new dream.”

“Martin Luther King, Jr.”

“Not hardly!” Netty laughed. “I’m just a YoCo from Maryland who won a few debates.”

“What is a YoCo?”

“Young cosmopolitan.” Her smile froze, then dropped.

She had just laughed. Netty would never forget where she had been or who she was with the first time she laughed after the Earth was hit.

“Let me hear your dream.”

“My dream is to rebuild the Earth, a little bit at a time. We’ll start with a village. No dictators, no wars, no racism, nothing like it was before. This time we’re gonna do it right! No one will care whether you’re black or white or colored—that’s what your people call themselves, isn’t it?”

“Yes. We’re Basters. We were. I’m the last one.”

“‘Colored’ is bad enough, but that other term is so degrading.”

“It’s okay. We’re Basters. My ancestors were proud not to be too closely related to those around them.”

“Hmm.”

“You have a good dream, Netty. I want to help you achieve it.”

Netty shivered. For the first time, a promise of destiny whispered in her ear, and it shot through her body, making her tingle as if from an electric shock. She was fond of Oscar and attracted to him, and now, for the first time, she had reason for deeper feelings. She took his hand firmly. “You will.”

Oscar coughed again, a deep, rattling wrack.

“Oscar, I want you to see a doctor today. Unfortunately, most of the medical staff has gone to Pod 3, but there’s a GP around.”

“GP?”

“General practitioner. He can help you with that.”

She was worried about Oscar being contagious. She suddenly realized that since he had come to the Moon under false pretenses, he might not have been properly screened. What if he had brought some dangerous infection to this nearly germ-free environment?

Netty retired with mixed feelings. She was pretty sure that she could love Oscar, if she allowed herself to. He was more intelligent than she had first thought, and his simplicity was an attraction, both personally and professionally. Having someone like him as a husband would prevent complications with her work. It was time to be practical, she told herself, as never before.

On the other hand, she was boiling over the fact that Oscar had managed to circumvent security to come here. There was just no excuse for that. Maybe it wasn’t his fault. Maybe he was just taking an opportunity given to him. But none of that mattered. If he had some nasty disease and it spread, Oscar would be like an open window in a meteor shower. What if she had to shutter him, too?

The next day she received an e-mail at her desk from the GP, Dennis Simon, who requested a meeting with her, about a “Hendrik” Izaaks. His office was simply a shelf of a desk at the corner of the general clinic. Simon looked to be in his early forties, his thin hair graying prematurely, his face unwrinkled. He needed to cut his eyebrows, but like so many people here, especially the men, he showed few signs of grooming.

“Mr. Izaaks has tuberculosis,” the doctor told her. “I don’t know how that could have been missed—it was one of the standard tests.”

Her heart sank. “That is a mystery,” she said, unwilling to betray Oscar’s secret. There was little point to that now. Moreover, she felt closer to him personally than she had felt to anyone in years—not quite motherly or possessive, but protective. “Can you cure him, or do you need help from one of the other doctors?”

“Absolutely, I can cure him,” Simon said, frowning at the insinuation. “But right now, Hendrik is contagious, and he shares a room with three other men. Can you arrange private quarters? I can keep him here, but it would take up space that might be needed by the patients from the other pod.”

“He goes by Oscar,” Netty said. “And yes, I can arrange something.”

The private room was a large storage vault, with a real door. It was climate controlled—rare for a storage room—and was warmer than Oscar’s shared quarters. The room was nearly full of plastic crates, so that despite its size, it was cramped. Oscar’s nylon mesh hammock from his room was hung from stays on the walls near the door.

Oscar coughed. “I feel like I have soggy groundnuts in my chest.”

Netty looked at Oscar with sympathy. His mouth was open and drawn, as if from exhaustion. “I’m really sorry, and I’m sorry about the confinement.”

“It’s okay,” he said, suppressing a cough. “I don’t want to infect anyone else.”

“That’s really noble of you.”

“I am not a noble person. I should have told you earlier.”

She tried to make eye contact, but could not. She helped wrap his blanket around his shoulders. He was a treasure, like the priceless keepsakes in this vault. “Oscar, what’s wrong? Doctor Simon says he’ll have you out of here by Christmas.”

“I have not been honest with you, Netty.”

“You have more secrets, don’t you?”

“Just one. A very terrible one.”

She leaned to hug him, but he shied away. The hurt look on his face pained her, and her shoulders shook. There was a barrier between them, and as she realized that, she also grasped the depth of her love for him. Her hands reached for his, but were not met. “You know you can share anything with me.”

“Netty, I have AIDS.”

She gasped and suddenly felt as if she had just used up all the remaining oxygen in the pod. The walls closed in around her as her vision tunneled in. Oscar’s concerned face seemed to swim, breaking into puzzle pieces. She did not want to faint, the way she had lifting off from Earth.

“Are you all right? Sit down. I’m very sorry to give you a shock.”

Netty sank into the rope hammock. She tried to stay sitting up, but in low gravity, on a swaying, squeezing bed, her body did not know how. Then her right earring caught in the mesh, and she relaxed. The earrings were her mother’s, and she did not want to lose them.

“I have HIV, Netty. That’s why my father sent me in his place. He hoped there would be a cure.”

Her head would not clear, and she didn’t want it to. “Does Dr. Simon know?” she said.

“Only you.”

“Okay, my dear. Okay.” Netty had a claustrophobic urge to leave the room. “Listen, I’ve got to do some things—I’ve got to go. I’ll check on you tomorrow. Okay?”

She struggled to get up, but couldn’t get out of the hammock until Oscar helped her.

Netty lay on her own cot, for once relishing the icy tang of its aluminum rail. It reminded her of her cousin’s brass bed in Charlotte and how they used to tussle on it as girls. Thoughts of home and family drifted in the air, and she tried not to think of Oscar. She turned on some Neo Jazz. It was the first time she played music since the asteroid Big Bastard hit, and she could not stomach it. It was too soon for music.

A Christmas star twirled silently from the ceiling, a precious family heirloom. It had also been a metaphor during her rookie year as mayor. “In government transitions,” her press manager had said, “the lights on the tree don’t know what to do without a star on top. You need to be that star even before the election.” She had found that rather pompous, but her manager milked it, and it stuck. Now she was used to it.

She remembered Christmas with her grandfather, who had died of lung cancer when she was very small. To her, he was a font of wisdom, and she daydreamed that Big Bastard might have somehow revived him so that she would meet him again. There were no smokers left now, but she knew that there were tobacco seeds in storage. Who in their right mind thought they would ever have any beneficial use?

The applicable phrase that had been thrown around during the last few years was “what would Noah do?” Well, he wouldn’t have brought tobacco. There were some who had gone around quoting Emerson, to the effect that even weeds are useful plants whose virtues had yet to be discovered. But Netty knew of no one who thought it was a good idea to preserve deadly microbes, two by two, or otherwise.

When people were screened to go to the Moon, some of the old Ellis Island rules were revamped. The new rules were debated endlessly, but when you can only save a thimble-full of people, there are no good rules. Incurable, communicable diseases were strictly forbidden. Netty might have to quarantine Oscar indefinitely. Worse, she was afraid that she couldn’t let him return to Earth. He would have to remain in exile, filling some function in the permanent lunar base for the rest of his life. It was an authority she had, but using it had never occurred to her.

Unable to sleep, she paced through the halls for a while, until she found herself at LaDonna’s room. “Knock, knock, knock,” she whispered.

She heard some fumbling about. Derrick grunted, and LaDonna’s head and shoulder wrapped around the curtain.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Netty said, “but can I interest you in a little walk?”

“Okay, but at this hour, there’d better be a big sale going on.”

“Sorry.”

“All right, let me put something on. It’s better to be up all night than have to get up early! Besides, jogging beats organized tai chi any time of day.”

They warmed up by strolling to B ring, where they began a pajama power walk. As cold as it was in the pods, pajamas were the default dress code for most people. Netty typically wore her pajamas to work, with a jacket over top. The jacket was standard issue, a sort of navy blue business coat with an inner thermal layer. She still wasn’t used to it, feeling half naked without real clothes and deodorant, but she was saving her good clothes for resettling Earth.

LaDonna slowed her pace. “Next time, remind me to wear a bra,” she said.

“I’m sorry. If you want to go back—”

“Don’t worry. I’ll just consider this research for my book.”

Netty thought LaDonna was kidding, but sometimes she couldn’t tell. LaDonna liked to pull surprises. “What book?”

“I’m going to call it ‘Never Jog on the Moon without a Bra.’”

Netty smiled faintly. “That’s one book I’m glad I don’t need.”

No one else was about, which was unusual. Being so close to the lunar South Pole, the floor of Shoemaker was in eternal shadow, while the rim enjoyed days of light. There, the Sun seemed to roll sleepily along the horizon, before disappearing for days. Pod 4 was lower in the crater than the other pods, nearer to the subsurface ice, and received only a few days of sunlight, when the Moon was so inclined. The long nights had lulled people into every conceivable sleep schedule. With the lights dimmed and no one about, it felt like real night.

“You believe in God.”

“Uh-oh, here it comes,” groaned LaDonna.

“Is this another Genesis, or are these the end times?”

“You know, I’ve forced myself to ignore all that philosophical shoeshine people have been shouting at each other.”

“But what do you think? Someone claims that the creation story is told twice in Genesis, because the first civilization rose and fell, and all records of it were lost. The garden of Eden was the second chance, and Noah had the third. So when we repopulate the world, it will be the fourth creation.”

“Everybody’s got some way of rewriting the Bible out of all this.” LaDonna fell into a rhythm, bouncing her shoulders and rapping. “First we cast out of paradise; out in space it’s cold as ice. Singing songs in such a strange land; can’t see my face in front of my hand. Then we done broke the seventh seal; in Noah’s ark, in the belly of the whale.” She stopped and laughed. “You can forget all that. It’s simple, sister. We on da Moon.”

They exchanged greetings with a bleary-eyed maintenance man on his rounds, completed a lap, and continued on. LaDonna did not ask why Netty was up and needing company so late, and Netty was glad she did not ask. Netty stopped short when a dark shape slunk along a cable conduit at the edge of the floor.

“What on Earth was that?” she said, regretting the painful, habitual phrase. The dark shape was gone.

“That was Felinity.”

“A cat?”

“Uh-huh. You don’t know about Felinity?”

Netty fumed. “As the PA of this pod, I don’t suppose I’m authorized to know about Felinity, like everyone else is.”

“Oh, well! What you gonna do?”

After five laps, Netty was finally feeling sleepy and had no idea what she would do about the contraband cat. They stopped at LaDonna’s room and held hands for a moment. “Thanks for jogging with me.”

“Go represent.”

Netty shook her head. How many times had she protected or covered for a person of color in her office who had not measured up in one way or another? Of course, they had deserved her help, but it always hurt. “Those days are over. No more embarrassment. The only black folk left don’t need anyone to apologize for them. We don’t need to represent, because we just are.” Her lips quivered with sincerity. She let go of LaDonna’s hands and turned to go.

“You gonna tell me what’s really wrong?” LaDonna said.

Netty looked at the floor, and shook her head. “I’m not very happy with God right now.”

“I hear that.”

“So if he does exist, he better not show his face in my damned pod.”

Netty was awakened at an early hour by a call from her medical staff chief, Dr. Bhatti, who was over at Pod 3. He described the condition of each of the patients and asked for permission to keep the contingent there for a few more days. Because Bhatti sounded nervous, she asked if there was some other problem.

“Actually, there is,” he said. “While cleaning up the mess, the crew found some unexpected human remains outside the complex.”

“What do you mean, ‘unexpected?’”

“They are fragments of bone that don’t belong to any of the deceased.”

Netty rubbed her eyes, which were not focusing. “What you do mean? What’s going on?”

“Someone was thrown up by the asteroid impact. He landed here with the other debris.”

“That’s ridiculous! Someone can’t be thrown all the way to the Moon.”

Bhatti narrowed his eyes. “They can. It is a good guess that this fellow was sitting in his truck when he was ejected into space, along with many tons of earth.”

“His truck?”

“There were metal fragments near the bone splinters, including part of an engine block.”

“You’re joking.”

“It was a Chevy. I don’t know the model.”

Netty’s mind went blank. “Okay,” she said. “Bring me up to speed.”

She wanted to ask Bhatti about cures for AIDS, but decided to wait until she could do so in person. Meanwhile, there was always the GP.

Doctor Simon’s “front door” curtain had been pleated by hand to look like an oriental fan. Netty had passed it uncounted times when going through C ring, but hadn’t known it was his. Unable to sleep and unwilling to wait until office hours, she went to see him as early as she felt comfortable.

“Knock, knock?”

A woman answered, but did not pull back the curtain. “Yes? What is it?”

“Is the doctor in?”

“Just a minute.”

Dennis Simon came quickly to the door, evidently having heard Netty’s voice and anticipating an emergency. “Yes, Ms. Washington?”

“Is there a cure for AIDS?”

Simon stood quietly, looking down at the floor. He had a distant expression. He raked his thin hair back on his head and nodded slowly, then more assuredly. Extra skin under his chin wobbled in the low gravity. “I think so. Why?”

Netty felt a warmness incubating within her. “In the offing,” as her grandmother used to say. She thought that Oscar’s news would kill the emotion, but it had not. Instead of giving up on him, she wanted a solution. She had once saved a failing hospital in the District, so why couldn’t she find a cure for Oscar?

She went to his temporary room in the storage area. She told him that Doctor Simon believed he could cure the HIV, and described Simon’s untried technique. To date, there was no actual cure for the virus, but Simon’s work with dialysis had led him to research the possibility of combining transfusions with blood filtering. He had personally invented a new kind of molecular filter and would have it recreated here in a matter of hours. While there were no guarantees, she told him that it was critically important, since, as a carrier, Oscar posed a great risk to the guests and crew of SMP4.

Oscar stared at the floor as she spoke, hardly moving. Once he made a deep sigh, and once he suppressed a deep cough, a remnant of his fading infection.

“So, what do you say?” she asked.

“I don’t think I can do that,” he said.

“Why not? You want to be cured, don’t you?”

Through gritted teeth, he said, “Yes.”

“And you don’t want to be quarantined, do you?”

“No.”

“Then what—” Netty knew her frustration was showing, and calmed her voice. “What seems to be the problem?”

“You are saying that my blood will be replaced with clean blood, blood from a bank.”

“Exactly.”

Oscar’s eyes darted over the storage boxes, as if looking for something. “But it won’t be Baster blood.”

“Eventually all your blood would be replaced with a similar type.”

He shook his head. “Then I cannot do it.”

“This has to do with your father, doesn’t it?”

Oscar still would not look at her. “My father was typical of our people. He was very proud of our mixed heritage and sent me here to preserve our blood. But he was always fighting himself. Sometimes he would even blame me, the dark one, for what he was. But I understood. Do you know what it is like to hate the race that is half of your blood, while hating the other half even more?”

“I think I do,” she said, working it out. “You’d be both a racist and the object of that racism. Each half would hate the other, by definition. But your father also found something to be proud of.”

Oscar nodded. “He was a great man, but I disappointed him. I will not do it again. I will not let the doctor flush away the last of our blood like so much waste.”

Growing angry, she felt like offering some choice words, but refrained. “It’s DNA that defines your race, you know. You’ll always have that.”

Oscar appeared to be only half listening. “If I find a wife from South Africa, at least our children would have similar blood.”

That hit Netty hard in the stomach. She exhaled and couldn’t take a breath. He didn’t love her, or even imagine loving her. What had endeared him to her suddenly tasted bitter. “There ought to be someone like that, in one of the other pods,” she said with attempted detachment. Already she was applying a professional instinct, starting to divest herself from a personal entanglement. It wasn’t working, which made her angry with herself, and with Oscar.

She stood with him, feeling an overwhelming urge to demand an answer to the obvious question: Just how did you get HIV in the first place? She forbade herself from that. Instead, she addressed his myopia. “Oscar,” she said, her voice teetering, “if you’re not cured, your line has to end with you anyway.”

He made no reply, but left, shoulders hanging. It’s worse than he imagines, she thought. The quarantine might have to be permanent. Not everyone was going to return to Earth, and he was a prime candidate for staying behind. After everything the people of her diaspora had been through, this disaster, as hellish as it was, provided the chance to start over, and to do it right. She was proud of every person on the Moon, especially those of color. There were no blemishes, except Oscar’s virus. She would not be the one to unleash that microscopic vampire into a virgin world.

Netty focused on her work. The PA at SMP3 called, requesting a personnel exchange. He had recovered from his breakdown, but always sounded like he was exhausted. Of the recent fatalities, two were reclamation specialists, leaving a gap in that department. Netty transferred two of hers, a bright-eyed grad student named Aria, who had majored in ecology, and Aria’s boyfriend, who had received training in water management. That left her with four specialists in her own department. Not enough, but it was the best compromise until someone else could be trained or brought from a pod at Shackleton.

It was December, and a man from communications made an appointment for an interview. His name was Duke Liu, a young Chinese American with a keypad and an infectious grin. He met her at her desk.

“Christmas is coming,” he said, “and we’re putting out a special newsletter for all the pods. It’s called the Christmas Star, and I’m contributing a column. I got an idea from something I read about you.”

“You’ve piqued my curiosity.”

“I read something from your memoir that said your management style was like a Christmas tree. Could you explain that for me, in your own words?”

Netty smiled at the man’s journalistic tone. It seemed quaint, under the circumstances. “Well, that’s something I’ve never been entirely comfortable with, but it stuck, so here I am, the proverbial star atop the tree!”

“Was the idea that you were the star on top of the tree, and the constituents were the thousand points of light?”

She shook her head, but he was keying something in, and did not see her. “It originally had to do with the way government workers become unproductive when new leaders are elected,” she said. “It’s not that they’re not good workers, but it can take quite a while for political appointees to settle in and for everyone to adjust to new policies. So during the transition, I just tried to keep some light shining through the confusion.”

Liu lost his place typing, stared at the pad, then looked up. “Uh, I think I get it,” he said.

“It was the government employees who were the lights, not the citizens. But leaders should be like a beacon to everyone, of course.”

“That’s great,” he said, keying something in.

Netty recalled that this was the man who led the daily tai chi sessions, which was about the only exercise available outside of jogging in thermal slippers. He’d used some Chinese jargon in his class, so maybe he could answer a question for her. “Do you speak Chinese?”

“I’m the official translator for this pod. Did you need to send a message to Chi Yue?” he said, referring to the name of the independent Chinese base on the other side of the Moon.

“Not at the moment, but I may eventually. It’s good to know you’re around.”

“Any time.”

“You know, I’ve been wondering, what does Chi Yue mean, anyway?”

“It can mean red moon, or naked moon.”

“So which is it?”

“Both. It was intended to be poetic.”

“Well, they are both appropriate. I’m sorry for interrupting. Did you get what you wanted?”

Liu grinned. “Yes, ma’am!”

As she headed home at the end of her day, she thought she saw Oscar in the clinic, which was adjacent to the command center. Both were at the hub of the pod. She stopped in to find Dr. Simon plugging an IV hose to Oscar’s upper arm.

“What’s this about?” she said, wavering between hopeful and suspicious.

“This is the blood transfusion we spoke about,” Simon said. “Didn’t Oscar tell you?”

Oscar met her stare, not looking away. “I decided to do it,” he said, his face sagging like a caricature of a sad puppy.

“We’re almost complete,” the doctor said. He made a clinical smile. “We’ll need to have a blood drive to replenish the reserves.”

A confusion of relief, grief, and shock fairly muted her. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Thank you, Netty,” said Oscar.

She left them, walking laps instead of going directly home. This news was unexpected, and though she should have been pleased, she was uneasy. Oscar had looked tired and pale, and she hoped that he would be all right. Probably his condition was normal, under the circumstances, she thought. Yes, and he might be cured after all!

Encouraged, she quickened her steps. On the Moon, you can cover a lot of ground that way, provided you don’t hit your head on the ceiling first. When she turned to the C ring, she bumped into Dr. Bhatti, the chief of her medical staff, whom she had loaned to Pod 3. They exchanged greetings and paced together, since both were exercising in the traditional counterclockwise fashion. She had spoken with him several times in teleconferences, but this was the first time he told her about the tragedy face to face.

The patients were recovering, and the mysterious bone fragments were indeed from a recently deceased man on Earth. He had literally ridden his truck to the Moon, in the most spectacular vehicle crash in history. This revelation chilled her own bones, and she shivered. She felt as though many of her problems would vanish, if only they would turn up the heat a little. She needed a vacation at Pod 1, where the fusion reactors were. It was supposed to be toasty there.

“I want to ask you about something else,” she said. “Is it possible to cure Trojan HIV-X by replacing a person’s blood?”

Doctor Bhatti stopped, so that she had to walk back to where he was. His bald, asymmetric head and flaking skin made him look like a potato. His thick eyebrows bent into a glower. “Where did you get that idea?” he said.

“It’s an experimental treatment I heard about, using special filters and a total blood replacement.”

“No, that’s ridiculous,” he said, his raspy voice raising to a high pitch. “Where did you hear about that? Where?”

“Is there a problem?” she said, stalling.

“There should be no one here with HIV!”

“I know that.”

“You have been consulting Doctor Simon, haven’t you?”

“To be honest, yes.”

“He should not be here either. He does not know what he is doing. He knows nothing about microbiology!”

“So you can’t cure AIDS that way?”

“Of course not!” Bhatti was chewing the inside of his lower lip, the veins on his forehead darkening almost to green. “You do not need to replace the blood. Affinity hemodialysis can target just the HIV. Even peptides from crocodile blood could do that, if we had any. But HIV-X hides inside the cells of other tissues, not just blood.”

“You’re sure? There’s no new technique that can filter out HIV?”

“Ms. Washington, that makes no sense at all. If you are going to replace all the blood anyway, why would you bother to filter it?”

“Oh, I see.” Put that way, Simon’s procedure seemed preposterous.

“Has this procedure been performed already?”

She hesitated, but the glare of his grave, sunken eyes, further shrouded by long, untrimmed eyebrows, saw through her. “We may have a problem on our hands,” he said. “There may be a lot of equipment to sanitize, not to mention a lot of tainted blood to dispose of. We may have to throw some things away.”

Netty smoldered. “This is no way to run a sustainable medical facility.”

“Or to ensure the health of a population,” said Bhatti. “The tiniest error here can ruin our independence entirely. We’ve already seen what can happen in an emergency, over in Pod 3. What if, the next time, we are unable to help?”

On her way to work the next morning, Netty was tempted to stop by the clinic and start a firestorm. She did not. It would take more time, and a formal investigation, to decide what to do about Simon. Instead, she focused on Oscar, exercising her authority to invoke the guest-to-crew program for the first time. Everyone in the pod could be enlisted to perform whatever job was assigned by the PA.

She stopped in on the department head of Reclamation. She told him that she had a new worker for him, but the recruit wouldn’t start until after the holidays. That done, she went to the clinic to tell Oscar. Whenever she delivered bad news, she preferred to have something positive to say as well.

Oscar was not there. Doctor Simon had her take a seat. He made his ritual, curt smile, which diminished his credibility by its inappropriateness. “The procedure wasn’t working,” he said. “I’ve stopped it.”

Her heart sank at the sadness of the confession. She smiled sadly back. “What went wrong?”

“Nothing went wrong. There just doesn’t seem to be a way to get every trace of virus out. It was a good effort. Worth a try!”

“The other doctors are back now,” she said with a dash of gall. “Did you ask them for help?”

“W-we have conferred about it, yes,” he said. As chilly as it was, sweat was gleaming on his forehead. “We are in agreement that we cannot cure Mr. Izaaks at this time.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, for Oscar’s sake.”

“Of course. The clinic is fully sterilized, and we’ve irradiated the contaminated blood, for fluid recycling. Now,” he said, looking beaten but hopeful, “I suppose you have some hard decisions to make.”

“I’ve already made them,” she said. “Oscar will stay here for the rest of his life, and the medical board will decide about you.”

“Knock, knock!” LaDonna had come early to Netty’s. They both had the day off, and they had planned to braid what was left of each other’s hair. The dry, chilly air had made their hair brittle, and though they each had a small supply of extensions, they were saving those for some other occasion.

“Come on in.”

“The Christmas Star is online,” LaDonna said.

Netty brought up the paper on her notebook. “Is my interview in it?”

“The link’s right there. ‘Our Christmas Star’ by Duke Liu.”

Netty’s eyes widened. “What’s this?” She read: “Though humble, Miss Washington’s reputation as a Christmas star is not unfounded. ‘I want to be a beacon, leading people to the promised land,’ she said.” Well, that is not what I said!”

“That’s the press.”

“Oh, it’s not that. Duke is not even a real journalist. He’s quite nice, but I’ve always hated being misquoted.”

“There’s also an announcement there,” LaDonna said, to change the subject. “They’re showing The Sound of Music at the Double-wide Diner this afternoon. Derrick suggested we meet him there.”

“Let’s just do our hair instead. I’m not in the mood for a tearjerker.”

“Tearjerker? That’s one of the feel-goodest movies of all time.”

“These days, any movie that has singing mountains, raindrops on roses, and kids frolicking outdoors is a tearjerker,” Netty said.

“I see what you mean.”

“Cornrows?” asked Netty.

“Don’t make me hungry,” LaDonna said with a laugh. “Go ahead and try, but ain’t no corn gonna sprout out of this head!”

Netty set to work on LaDonna’s hair, wanting to occupy her fingers. As they did their line dance across her friend’s chafing scalp, her mind wandered, trying not to think of The Sound of Music. LaDonna worked a little vacuum nozzle, sucking up the dandruff and broken bits of hair. That would keep them out of machinery, and make recycling easier.

But honestly, who would want to watch that movie? What kind of cockeyed optimism could anyone have now? All humanity’s achievements were gone, all history burned or buried. Graves were overturned, roads crushed or pulled like taffy, cities ruined, pyramids and other ruins ruined forever. The hills were not alive with the sound of anything—especially not music.

And what was in that Liu’s head, to twist such words into her mouth? She had not said anything about leading anyone to a promised land, she was sure of that. “Do you suppose that Liu was only writing what he wanted to hear?” Netty said.

“How should I know?”

“He does have a point, I suppose. A leader has to have somewhere to lead people to.” And people to lead, she thought. “Maybe I needed to hear what he wanted to hear.”

“Spoken like a true leader,” LaDonna said.

Netty’s fingers worked LaDonna’s crumbling hair into tight rows, moving like a knitting machine that was missing a hook. She had long ago learned to braid with her missing ring finger, and as she watched that finger move, she wondered whether her great-grandmother’s wedding ring would stay securely on the stub, should the occasion arise.

Humanity had been amputated too, and she had believed that everyone left was a true gem. Yes, there were jewels; but there were also people who improperly screened refugees, people who left shutters open, administrators who broke down under stress, quack doctors, cat smugglers, and a man with AIDS. And a PA who would abandon that man because she thought he was the only one who could wreck her vision. People would walk the Earth again, diamonds in the rough, all. Despite her authority, her duty was not to winnow, but to polish.

“You’re going to let Oscar go home, aren’t you?” LaDonna said, craning to see Netty’s reaction. Netty turned away, feigning indifference. LaDonna could not sit long in silence, so she hummed a few bars of My Favorite Things, as if she heard it all the way from the diner.

“You shut up and sit still,” said Netty. “I can’t let you return to Earth with your hair looking like this.”

Copyright (c) 2008 David Bartelll

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Oscar’s departure from Earth was described in “Misquoting the Moon” [March 2007].)

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