Clarke County, Space
For Damaris, Genevieve, Rachel, and Lilli—
a capricious quartet of siblings
And for Arthur, Elvis, and Bobby Zimmerman—
an unholy quorum of influences
“… I see the main use of space colonies as religious. They should be built, not as industrial enterprise, but in the spirit of the old cathedrals, like Canterbury. We should take it all very slow and build in meaningful earth-stories and myths. Clearly space colonies have more to do with myth than science or industry. I want the connection between the Indian Coyote stories and the space colonies to be very direct and clean. I want the building of the colonies to encourage folk life and country music and old time religion, not discourage it. I want the colonies to have a lot of winos and ne’er-do-wells hanging around the computer consoles, singing and praying and spitting and telling lies.… In my head I’m against all this space stuff. But in my heart, if they’re goin’ to build ’em, I want to be on one. I want to go to heaven, by hook or crook. I’d feel a whole lot better about it, though, if that guy hadn’t hit that golf ball on the moon. I sure do dread being locked up in outer space with ten thousand golfers.”
—Gurney Norman
Two years later, I found myself sitting on a wooden bench on Canaveral Pier, just outside the little bar that’s located at the end of the boardwalk. The bar has a name, but even after having lived in Cocoa Beach for more than twenty years, I can never recall it. I doubt, in fact, that any of the residents know what the bar is called. One local says to another, “I’ll meet you at the bar on the pier,” and both people know which bar it is. It’s sort of like Clarke County. If someone mentions Clarke County, it is seldom asked where it’s located.
Canaveral Pier, along with the nameless bar, had been rebuilt by the town in 2018, after the original pier had been destroyed by Hurricane Judy two years earlier. It was just as well that Judy obliterated the original pier, considering that it had been slowly crumbling into the ocean at the time, a victim of the relentless battering of the Atlantic surf and its own decrepitude. The hurricane only saved the local taxpayers the expense of having it razed anyway.
The new pier was stronger, its timber reinforced with concrete and lunar aluminum donated by Skycorp and shipped from the Moon, yet it was a near-exact duplicate of the original pier, with arcade booths and food kiosks lining the boardwalk. The town could have just as easily replaced the pier with an artificial island similar to Disney SeaWorld, farther up the coast in Daytona Beach, but the residents and the Brevard County Chamber of Commerce, in their wisdom, opted for a replacement pier instead. The new pier retained the old-style, no-tech flavor of the twentieth century: weathered, whitewashed wood planks that burned the soles of your feet in summertime; ice cream that melted into gooey rivulets running down your knuckles and tasted slightly like salt, games that relied on keen eyes and a good throwing arm rather than biocybe implants at the base of your skull.
One of the small pleasures of the nameless bar on the pier were the old coin-operated telescopes on the deck outside the bar. You used to see a lot of them in the last century, on the overlook above Niagara Falls or on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, but they’re mostly gone now. The telescopes had crashed into the surf when Judy had totaled Canaveral Pier, but they had been salvaged from the wreckage and lovingly restored to the new pier. The telescopes—big round steel objects mounted on thick posts, a quarter for five minutes—were obsolete, of course. Even a cheap pair of fiber-optic binoculars had many times their magnification, and only one of the two telescopes worked at all.
But I loved the telescopes. They were reminders of the first time I had visited the bar, back in 1985 when I was a much younger man: in my twenties, a novice reporter for a midwestern newspaper, who had lucked into covering the launch of Space Shuttle Mission 51-D. That was the one in which a U.S. Senator, Jake Garn, had been sent up on a junket, doing little more than getting spacesick for the dubious benefit of science. A moment in history. The night before the launch a Canadian photojournalist and I had sat out on the deck, getting ripped on tequila and beer chasers, cracking awful jokes about Barfin’ Jake while an endless string of Jimmy Buffett songs had rolled out of the jukebox inside.
Those were the good old days, the pioneer years of the Space Age. Back then, when you dropped a quarter into one of the telescopes, you could view the old Titan and Atlas gantries along the Eastern Test Range on Merritt Island, south of the larger shuttle launch facilities at the Kennedy Space Center—Pads 39A and 39B and the original Vehicle Assembly Building, looming like a monstrous white block above the flat marshland. Next to the VIP stands and the Press Mound in the KSC, the bar deck was the best place from which to watch launches. It still is, even though the press has long since relinquished the Mound to the tourists.
Reporters rarely turn up for the Cape launches any more and the tourists would rather go to Disneyland. Finally, space travel became routine. The Titan and Atlas gantries are ancient history, replaced by pads for Big Dummy HLVS and various one-shot satellite carriers and the rugged old Mark II shuttles that lift off each day. NASA is still the landlord, but it’s the private companies—Skycorp, Galileo International, Uchu-Hiko Kabushiki-Gaisha, Cheap Thrills inc.—which haul most of the freight and people to orbit.
They always said the day would come when seeing a space launch would be as exciting as observing trucks leaving from a loading dock, and eventually they were right. Now only the geriatric farts like me show up to watch when the rockets go. This is an impatient age. If medical science hadn’t kept me alive this long, I would be tempted to say that progress sucks.
And so … well-preserved at the age of ninety-three, one of the last of the original spacehounds sat on a wooden bench in the meager warmth of the afternoon sun on an early spring day. Retired from chasing deadlines, I wrote an occasional, redundant history of spaceflight, or sometimes banged out a science-fiction novel for the hell of it. Mostly I relished old memories, sometimes flew up to the University of Missouri for alumni reunions and to deliver lectures to bored undergraduates at the journalism school. As a venerable veteran journalist and self-acknowledged geezer, I never expected to get another tip on a hot scoop in my life.
For my past sins, though, God gave me one. A phone call placed to me by a name without a face had brought me to the bar without a name, and now a stranger pushed open the glass slide-door and walked out onto the veranda. He stepped in front of me and asked if I was who he thought I was.
“If I’m not,” I replied, “then I owe Social Security a lot of money.” It was a favorite line, calculated to make young turks respectful of my seniority. He smiled benignly. This one seemed reverent enough, so I decided to give the cranky-senior-citizen bit a rest. “I take it you’re Simon McCoy,” I added, returning his smile.
“Yes, sir. Thanks for taking the time to see me.” McCoy stepped forward, with hand extended. Half-rising from the bench to shake his hand, I took a closer look. Tall, slender, longish but well-groomed blond hair, wearing a white cotton sports coat, baggy plaid trousers and a blue bow tie, carrying a shapeless white Panama hat in his hand. Faint British accent, like an Englishman who’d immigrated to the States as a child. Athletic grace, which made me slightly envious: he could still climb a flight of stairs without effort, or turn a young woman’s head.
He sat down on the bench next to me. One of the bar robots—a concession to modern times, albeit not as charming as a waitress—rolled out onto the deck. McCoy ordered a Coke and I asked for a Dos Equis. The hell with my doctor’s admonition to stay away from alcohol; if you can’t drink beer in retirement, then what good are your so-called golden years? After McCoy had slipped in his credit card with instructions to run a tab, the robot disappeared back through the sliding door. He gazed at the stumpy little machine as it exited. “If it still existed I would have asked you to meet me at Diamondback Jack’s.”
I shook my head. “Jack’s hasn’t been around for twenty years. It burned down in …”
Then I stopped. Diamondback Jack’s had been a beer joint on Route 3 on Merritt Island, a dive for pro spacers which only the locals had known about. How could someone this young know Jack’s? It was hardly the kind of place where someone would put up a historical marker. “How do you know about Diamondback Jack’s?” I asked.
McCoy shrugged nonchalantly. “I’m something of a history buff. When I visit a place I like to snoop around. Find out some local history, that sort of thing.” He waved his hand towards the distant launch pads up the coast. “I guess we’ll have to settle for this.”
“No loss,” I replied. “If we sit here long enough we’ll probably see a launch. The weather’s good, and Uchu-Hiko usually sends up a cargo vessel on Wednesdays. It beats looking at pictures of dead men in a broken-down bar.”
McCoy laughed, absently fondling his Panama hat in his hands. “I’m surprised. One would think, as long as you’ve been here, writing about space, you would be too jaded to watch rocket launches.”
I was about to reply, when the robot rolled back out onto the deck, its tray loaded with our drinks. McCoy picked up his Coke and raised it to me. “To your health.”
“Such as it is,” I grumbled, tapping my bottle against his glass. Time to end the small talk. “When you called me you said you knew something which might interest me. Mr. McCoy, I hope you’re not a writer and this isn’t a ploy for an interview. I stopped giving ‘last of the breed’ interviews years ago.”
He shook his head. “Nothing of the kind. Please, call me Simon.”
“Okay then, Simon, what’s on your mind?”
“I understand you’re writing a new book,” he said casually. “About the Clarke County incident a couple years ago. The Church of Elvis, Icarus Five, the evacuation and all that.”
I was taking a sip when he said this. His words made me choke and sputter; beer sprayed over the knees of my trousers. “Goddammit!” I snarled.
“Oh! Terribly sorry.” Instantly apologetic, he pulled a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and hurriedly began sopping at my pants.” I didn’t mean to get that kind of …”
I knocked his hand away. “Who told you about my book?” I demanded.
It was a serious matter. If McCoy had said I was fooling around with someone else’s wife, it was something I could have denied. If he had simply inquired about my new book, I would have told him that I was cranking out another SF potboiler. Neither inquiry would have upset me. But there were only a few people, supposedly, who knew that I was doing an investigative work about the events of 2049 in Clarke county. My editor and my agent knew better than to blab, and my wife was always sworn to secrecy. As for my sources … well, journalistic sources always have their own interests at heart, and the sources for this story were already treading on thin ice by aiding me in the first place. Nobody should have told a complete stranger what I was researching.
Unfortunately, McCoy had already caught me by surprise. There was no use in pleading the First and Fifth Amendments now. To his credit, he didn’t look smug. “Never mind how I know,” he said. “There’s things you should know about the incident. That’s why I called you.”
I almost laughed. It sounded like the same shtick every working reporter experiences: the mysterious source who suddenly calls on the phone, claiming to know in whose closet the skeletons reside. Sometimes it’s disgruntled employees or nosy neighbors with an axe to grind. There’s rarely anything they know which can be verified. On occasion it’s a wacko, like the woman who bugged me constantly when I worked the city beat on a paper in Massachusetts, with her claim that the mayor and the entire city council were involved in a prostitution ring. You learn to hang up when they start babbling about conspiracies, or at least before they start outlining their plans to run for President.
“I doubt there’s anything you know that’s new to me,” I said. “But thanks for the beer.”
To my surprise, McCoy didn’t get annoyed. He sighed and gazed out at the ocean. “I was afraid it was going to be like this. You’re supposed to have an arrogant streak.”
“Who’s being arrogant?” I said. “I’m being realistic.”
He looked back at me. “I suppose you think I’m another nut case.”
“Oh, no. Not at all.”
“The fact of the matter is,” he continued, “you know little more now about the incident than what you could have gleaned from news accounts of the time. Your book will be nothing more than a rehash of the standard story. No new facts. Not only that, but you’ll be dead wrong on most of it.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And you know better, of course.”
“Yes, I know better.”
“And what’s the source of your information?” I was willing to play along for a while. He had bought me a beer; it would have been rude to leave right away.
“I was in Clarke County at the time.”
I nodded and shrugged. “So were about eight thousand other people. Most of them didn’t know what was going on even when the colony was being evacuated. It’s like saying you were in San Francisco when the quake hit. That doesn’t make you a seismologist.”
“That’s true. Being there doesn’t give me any special insights. Yet there’s more than that.”
I smiled politely. “I’m all ears.”
He paused, looking down at the beach. There was a pretty little girl in a swimsuit on the edge of the surf, feeding scraps of bread to a cawing gang of sea gulls circling around her. She looked fascinated and frightened at the same time. “I hope she doesn’t get pecked by one of those filthy birds,” he commented. “If I told you how I know …”
McCoy hesitated again. “You’ve probably heard this line before, but … well, if I told you right away, you’d probably think I was crazy. So I don’t want to tell you, at least not now.”
I reluctantly took my eyes away from the child. At my age, it’s difficult not to envy youth. “You’re getting warm. You sound a little more reasonable than most insane people I’ve talked to, though. So give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just get up and leave.”
“Does getting the story straight for your book count?”
“Everyone uses that excuse. Especially the ones who are crazy. Try again.”
He smiled. “All right, try this. You’re a storyteller, when it comes right down to it. You like hearing a good tale, and you like telling one even better.”
I had to grin. He had me there. “So far, so good. Keep going.”
“So here’s the deal,” McCoy continued. “I’m going to tell you a long and rather detailed story, and all you have to do is listen. You can take notes and ask questions, and when I’m done, you can decide whether it makes sense for you to incorporate my story into your book.”
McCoy hesitated again, then added, “If you’ll hear me out until the end, I’ll tell you how I know these things, although I doubt you’ll believe me. So all I want from you is an afternoon of your time.”
“When you’re my age,” I said, “an afternoon is a great thing to ask for.”
“It’ll be worth it.”
I thought it over. I had already written off this afternoon. I hadn’t been planning to return home before dark, and who knew? Perhaps McCoy was on the level, and even if he was a crank, maybe this would be fun. Indeed, in my news-room years, I had sometimes amused myself by listening to crank calls from the UFO abductees and conspiracy mavens. “I suppose, of course, that you want to be mentioned in my book as a source.”
McCoy didn’t bite. He shook his head. “Not at all. In fact, I insist that I not be mentioned. My aim isn’t cheap fame. I only want to make sure you get the story straight.”
He paused, then added, “For the sake of future generations.”
“Future generations,” I repeated. “That sounds rather grandiose, don’t you think?”
McCoy didn’t reply. “Okay,” I said. “If you’ll buy me another beer, I’ll listen. Tell me a story.”
“Well, then …” Simon McCoy leaned back against the bench and stretched out his legs, balancing his coke on his stomach. “Once upon a time there was a very frightened young woman named Macy …”
1
Departure
(Wednesday: 11:15 P.M.)
She had anticipated that the main passenger terminal would be crowded, and she was correct. The long Memorial Day weekend was approaching, and despite the late hour people were scurrying along the concourses and walkways of the vast airport, on their way to catch flights to all the usual vacation spots: Bermuda, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Sydney, St. Thomas, New York, Ho Chi Minh City. A group of little Japanese kids crowded against a railing, staring at a replica of The Spirit of St. Louis suspended from the ceiling, while beneath the antique airplane the holographic ghost of Charles Lindbergh, dressed in flying leathers and jodhpurs, delivered a prerecorded lecture on his flight.
Today, thanks to suborbital travel, you can fly to Paris in less than an hour, the young pilot commented as a baggage autocart rolled heedlessly through his body, but in 1927 my solo flight took almost thirty-four hours and was considered the most dangerous flight yet.… Yeah, Chuck, Macy thought as she turned away. Tell me about dangerous flights.
At least the vast numbers of men, women, and children swarming around would make it hard for her to be spotted, if indeed she was being followed. Even if one of Tony’s goons found her here, a quiet abduction would be difficult. If someone grabbed her, Macy could scream rape, draw attention to herself, perhaps spook whoever it was into retreating. Above all else, Tony always wanted family business to be done quietly.
She hurried down the concourse towards Gate 27, passing through the security smartgate, which automatically scanned her face, verified her identity and the presence of the passenger tag on her ticket, and probed her body and the contents of her nylon shoulder bag, Macy’s single piece of luggage. She glanced at a status screen as she walked by: 11:17 P.M. Tony was supposed to have picked her up at the compound at ten o’clock when he came back from “business.” Even if he was his usual tardy self, she had little doubt that her absence from the Salvatore mansion was already known.
At this minute they would be searching for her. Macy had done her best to cover her trail, prepurchasing her ticket on the Amex card bearing her Mary Boston pseudonym, and bribing the cab driver who had picked her up in Ladue to forget her face. Yet she knew that Tony would quickly run through all the possibilities; undoubtedly, someone would already be on the way to Lambert Field, to see if Tony’s woman was trying to catch a plane. Maybe that someone was getting out of a car even now, out on the sidewalk in front of the terminal, striding in through the automatic doors she herself had passed only fifteen minutes ago.…
Cut it out, she told herself. Don’t panic now. Just get on the shuttle down to Texas and you’re home-free. You’ll be out of St. Louis. Then in another couple of hours you’ll be on Matagorda Island, and an hour after that, you’ll be off the planet.…
She harbored no illusions that putting 200,000 miles of outer space between her and St. Louis would be enough to keep her from Tony Salvatore and his goon squad. It would stall him, but not stop him. Yet all she needed was time and a little distance. Then she could get revenge, erase Tony from her life once and for all. The contents of her shoulder bag would see to that, once she delivered it into the right hands. So she hoped.
She found Gate 27, the United Airlines flight to Dallas-Fort Worth. The waiting area was crowded, but while there were still a few seats vacant, she did not sit down. She had to keep her face hidden a few minutes longer. Instead, Macy turned her back to the concourse and faced the wall, fixing her eyes on an ad screen.
By coincidence, it was displaying an animated holo of Clarke County. It rotated gracefully in space, the gentle silver-gray orb of the Moon gliding past in the background as the TexSpace logo shimmered into existence in front of the colony. Macy stared at it, and smiled for the first time since she had climbed over the wall surrounding Tony’s mansion. Three days and she would be there.
The screen went blank, and in the moment before a chorus line of Las Vegas showgirls began goose-stepping across the screen, she glimpsed in the black panel a reflection of the scene behind her. About twenty feet away, standing next to the gate entrance, was a man in a suit, perfectly ordinary—except for the fact that he was watching her. Not with the eyes of a casual stranger sizing up a beautiful woman who happened to be by herself, but with the gaze of a person who was discreetly keeping track of her movements.
A chill electric wave coursed from the nape of her neck to the bottom of her spine. Macy slowly turned away from the screen, forcing herself to stare out the windows overlooking the apron where the airliner nuzzled against the passenger walkway. In the reflection of the window she could see herself, and further away, the man in the suit was still watching.
She began to turn in his direction, and a fat man with a bawling kid in tow lurched into her. He stopped and excused himself before pushing past, and the kid trampled across the toes of her boots. When they were gone and she dared to look back again, the man in the suit had disappeared.
Macy Westmoreland would have panicked at that moment—absolutely flipped, lost her cool, bolted for the ladies’ room or the nearest security guard or even, God forbid, to a phone to call Tony to say that she was sorry, she was coming home now, please don’t have anyone kill her, or whatever opportunity came first—when the gate agent picked up her mike and announced that United Airlines Flight 724 nonstop from St. Louis to Dallas-Fort Worth was ready for boarding. Even before the agent had done the bit about carry-on bags and persons needing assistance, Macy was pushing her way towards the ramp.
FBI Special Agent Milo Suzuki watched as the woman shoved and squirmed her way to the front of the mob of passengers, almost falling over an old man in a wheelchair as she thrust her ticket into the hand of the ticket agent. He could hear the protests of the other passengers and caught the sour look on the agent’s face. There was a brief exchange between the agent and the woman, then the agent reluctantly ran her optical scanner over the ticket and allowed the woman to be the first person aboard the aircraft.
Suzuki shook his head. “And away she goes,” he whispered to himself. When it came to shaking off a tail, the woman was an utter amateur.
He walked away from the gate to the nearest phone booth, in an alcove just off the concourse. Shutting himself inside and picking up the receiver, he pulled out his datapad and, after connecting the interface to the phone, dialed the number to the St. Louis field office’s computer. Once he was logged in, he typed on the pad’s miniature keyboard: WESTMORELAND, MACY—CROSS-REF SALVATORE.
Within a few moments, the computer downloaded the file into Suzuki’s datapad. A head-and-shoulders photo of the woman who had just boarded the airliner appeared on the screen. There was more information, of course, but this was all that Suzuki needed to confirm that it was, indeed, Tony Salvatore’s mistress who had boarded a jet to Texas.
He opened a window on the screen and dialed into United Airlines’ passenger reservations computer. At first, the AI system would not permit him access to the passenger list, until Suzuki typed in his federal authorization code—in effect, showing the computer his badge. Once in, he typed in Macy’s name again. No record of Macy Westmoreland was entered in the United Airlines passenger manifest. Suzuki pursed his lips, then studied Westmoreland’s dossier again. Bingo: she had a couple of aliases, chief among them “Mary Boston.”
REQ. ITIN. 5/29/49: BOSTON, MARY, he typed. This name the computer recognized; it immediately printed out Mary Boston’s travel itinerary, gathered from the flight reservations she had made through the airline. Milo studied the schedule, tracing it with his forefinger, frowned and then smiled.
How interesting. Macy Westmoreland had used her “Mary Boston” Amex card to purchase bookings all the way to Clarke County. United 724 would get her to Dallas-Fort Worth, where she would catch the special TexSpace commuter helicopter to the Matagorda Island Spaceport. From there, she was scheduled to catch the TexSpace SSTO Lone Star Clipper to Clarke County, traveling in First Class. In fact, she already had a room reserved at the LaGrange Hotel in the colony.
“So why are you running away from Tony, babe?” Milo Suzuki muttered to himself. He saved the information he had gathered within the datapad’s memory bubble, then logged off and disconnected the pad from the phone. Well, it didn’t matter to him. He had followed Macy from the Salvatore compound, where he had seen her climb over the wall from his stakeout point up the street, and now he knew where she was going. All he had to do was contact the Dallas field office and have her picked up when United 724 landed there. There had to be some usefulness in the fact that Tony Salvatore’s bimbo was apparently going AWOL.
He had just tucked the datapad into his pocket and had pulled his phonecard out of his wallet, when the door to the phone booth suddenly slid open and a man shoved himself into the booth. Milo Suzuki had just enough time to clumsily bring up his hands and open his mouth before the squat barrel of an oversized pistol was pressed into his sternum.
Suzuki looked up into the impassive face of the intruder. “Golem …” he said.
Without a word, the intruder slapped the gun’s barrel into the palm of Suzuki’s upraised right hand and squeezed the trigger. There was a soft whufff! as a tiny sliver was fired into the FBI agent’s hand.
“Yow!” Suzuki jerked back from the sudden sting. It was the last thing he ever said.
Two cc’s of sea wasp venom—the secretion of a jellyfish found only in the Indian Ocean off the Australian coast, the rarest and most lethal natural poison known to man—was already coursing through his bloodstream. Within seconds it entered his heart. Suzuki’s eyes widened as his heart began to beat wildly out of control. Gasping, he clutched at his chest and sagged against the back wall of the phone booth until, half a minute after the dart had been fired into his hand, he collapsed and died.
The intruder caught Suzuki with his gloved hands and carefully settled his corpse onto the booth’s seat. He looked over his shoulder to make sure he had not been seen, then he quickly and artfully positioned the dead man’s arms, legs, and head so that it appeared as if Suzuki was just another exhausted commuter catching a few quick winks in a phone booth. When the FBI agent’s body was eventually discovered and examined, it would seem as if Suzuki had suffered a fatal cardiac arrest. The dart itself would dissolve within ten minutes; only a thorough autopsy would reveal the tiny puncture mark in his right hand.
The Golem pocketed his hospital-issue sedative gun; made of plastics and protected with a computer-fouling stealth chip in its handle, it had passed through the smartgate without raising any alarms. He then reached into Suzuki’s coat pocket and retrieved the agent’s datapad. He tucked it into the inside pocket of his own jacket, and stripped off his gloves and carefully backed out of the phone booth.
He shut the door of the booth, then strolled down the concourse without looking back. The United Airlines jet was taxiing away from Gate 27 as the killer reached the main terminal; by the time Suzuki’s body was discovered by someone impatient to use the phone, the Golem would be long gone from St. Louis International Airport.
The Golem knew that Macy Westmoreland was aboard the plane, unreachable by him. But the G-man had found something and put it into his datapad; that information would make it easy for the organization to track down the boss’s girl. She’d got a small headstart, but nothing more.
The Golem was a soldier who only carried out orders. This time, though, he hoped he was the one who got tapped for the inevitable wet job.
He had to admit it to himself. He enjoyed his line of work.
2
The Coyote Dream
(Friday: 6:59 P.M.)
In an elliptical orbit that varies between 100,000 and 200,000 miles from Earth, Clarke County glides through the darkness of cislunar space like an enormous, elaborate child’s top. From a distance, it’s nearly impossible to appreciate the size of the artificial world, for there is nothing else nearby to which one can compare it. Closer, though, with tiny OTVs and zero g “free-flier” factories parked in orbit around it, the vastness of the space colony becomes overwhelmingly apparent. With an overall length of 5,250 feet—just shy of a statute mile—and the broadest width, the circumference of its bowl-like central primary mirror, of 2,937 feet, the colony is dwarfed only by the solar power satellites in geosynchronous orbits closer to Earth.
Even so, Space Colony LH-101US is more staggering than the thirteen-mile-long SPS satellites. The powersats, after all, are unmanned solar collectors, while the first true space colony is home to thousands of people. Essentially a Bernal sphere, surrounded at each end by torus clusters arrayed along axial shafts, solar vanes and giant mirrors, Clarke County is the largest space station ever successfully built. The Great Pyramids of Egypt could be constructed within the biosphere, and the largest skyscrapers on Earth would all be diminished in stature if Clarke County were to be brought home.
Yet engineering feats are one matter and the human condition is quite another. People have lived together in communities for thousands of years, but no one has yet built a successful Utopia. You can transform sterile, cold lunar rock into air and water, living soil and comfortable houses, a new sky and a new home, but you can’t so easily change human beings. In every town there are as many stories as there are the people who make up the community: some good, some bad, some absurd, and some that are best left untold.
Technology changes, and each age develops its own miracles. People, however, are as noble, ornery, vile, and downright weird as they always were.
Same as it ever was …
John Bigthorn sat on the front steps of the Big Sky town hall and waited for the sun to go down. It was the end of his duty shift; he had left one of his deputies, Lou Bellevedere, in charge of the cop shop, with a warning not to try to call him with any problems, because he was taking off his beltphone. It was dinner time and the town square was nearly vacant. Across the square, Ginny DeMille was closing the doors of Ginny’s Café. She spotted the sheriff through the window of her little restaurant and waved to him, and Bigthorn was waving back when the alarm on his watch beeped.
Bigthorn mentally counted back from five, and at the exact instant his countdown reached zero, night fell on Clarke County. As the colony’s halo orbit brought it once again behind Earth’s shadow, a wave of darkness started on the eastern hemisphere of the biosphere, above his head, and quickly raced down the walls of the world as a solid terminator line. As nightfall moved across the habitat, it left behind sparks and ovals of light as photosensitive timers switched on house and street lights. Finally the terminator line reached Big Sky, and as it raced across the square the street lamps turned on as the bell in the meeting hall steeple chimed seven times. From the far-off livestock sector in the Southwest quad, on the opposite side of the biosphere, he could dimly hear the roosters crowing. Directly above his head, from the promenade outside the LaGrange Hotel, the touristas attending the daily Sundown Cocktail cheered and clapped their hands. In space, there’s no such thing as a tequila sunset. Without a twilight time, night had come to Clarke County.
Bigthorn rose from the steps, pulled his dayback over his left shoulder, and began walking out of Settler’s Square, passing a statue cast from a solid hunk of lunar aluminum. “The Final Shift,” the statue was named: an exhausted-looking beamjack in space armor, helmet dangling from his right hand, staring upwards in perpetual awe at the artificial sky of the world he had helped build. A plaque at the base of the statue was etched with the names of the forty-seven men and women who had died—so far—during the construction of the colony. Every few weeks the sun rose to find that someone had climbed up on the statue during the night to place a pair of sunglasses on its face, crazily changing the Lost Beamjack’s lonesome courage into blissed-out goshwow.
As Bigthorn left the square behind and walked down Western Avenue to cross the Heinlein Bridge above the New Tennessee River, a New Ark member driving a fertilizer cart stopped to offer him a lift. Bigthorn climbed into the passenger seat and the electric cart whirred the rest of the way off the bridge, down the sand-paved road into the relative darkness of the South hemisphere. Here, the only illumination came from the ankle-high lights lining the road. About halfway to South Station, where the farmer was destined to park his cart for the night at the agricultural center, Bigthorn got the longhaired man to let him off on the side of the road. The New Ark farmer didn’t ask questions as he braked the cart, only wished him a good evening. People knew about Bigthorn’s occasional retreats to his hogan on Rindge Hill.
The hill was a hill in name only—little more than an ornamental mound that rose a couple of hundred feet above the serried rows of double-planted corn and potatoes, covered with a small glade of maple and elm trees. Once he had carefully made his way through the croplands, Bigthorn climbed the hill in the darkness, disdaining the use of the flashlight hooked to his uniform belt, until he reached the hogan.
It was a low, six-sided cabin with a single door through which he had to bend almost double to enter. There was a round hole in the ceiling and no windows; its design was identical to the traditional Navajo hogan. It differed only in that it was not built of logs. Cut timber was too costly to be shipped from Earth, and the biosphere’s transplanted trees were too few and too valuable to be used as lumberstock. Instead, like almost every other house-sized building in the colony, the hogan was built of bamboo.
It had taken a lot of quibbling with the County Zoning Board to get them to allow the sheriff to build his hogan in the farm section. The three-member board, for a while, insisted that he place it in the postage-stamp backyard behind his house in Big Sky, or in Challenger Green, the small public park in LaGrange. The problem with both sites, which the board myopically couldn’t see, was that they afforded little privacy. Especially Challenger Green, where he would have been pestered and photographed by tourists. Bigthorn had no desire to make a weekly appearance as a sideshow attraction. Come see Chief Runnamuck perform his sacred peyote ceremony; free admission, no camera-flashes allowed, postcards available at the souvenir stand.
Fortunately the New Ark, which was in charge of the colony’s agricultural project, recognized that as a Native American he needed a place for spiritual retreat. They had taken his side against the Board, and finally a compromise was reached: Bigthorn was given a small plot of land on Rindge Hill, on the condition that it not be permanently inhabited.
Thus the hogan was completely bare except for a small fire-pit in the middle of the packed-earth floor, a little pile of cedar twigs in the corner, and the fire extinguisher which was kept there in compliance with the usual safety codes. Bigthorn closed the door, gathered some of the twigs and racked them together in the pit, lighted them with a match, then unzipped his dayback. After unrolling a small wool blanket next to the pit, he began to undress in the flickering light of the fire.
John Bigthorn was impressive when fully dressed. Naked, he was almost breathtaking, six and a half feet of solid muscle under dark red skin, an apparition of the fierce nomadic raiders who had been the forerunners of the agrarian Navajo nation. No one was there to admire him, and if there had been any visitors, he would have used his authority to shoo them away. A Navajo sweat-bath is not meant to be seen by Anglo eyes.
However, his hogan was sometimes used for purposes other than his sweats. Teen-agers, for instance, occasionally appropriated the hut for their own rites of passage; more than once he had found empty wine bottles and used condoms on the floor. He didn’t really mind, since a hogan is only a windowless shack when not being used by one of the Dineh, the People. No used rubbers were on the floor this time, so either Big Sky’s kids were getting less adventurous or they were once again sowing their wild oats down on the Strip. Bigthorn made a mental note to pay a visit to the Chateau L’Amour. If the whorehouse was admitting underage tricks again, he’d have to suspend Bonnie’s brothel license.…
Bigthorn shut his eyes and settled cross-legged on the blanket. Time to stop thinking like a cop. He breathed in the fragrance of the cedar smoke, felt the rising heat begin to open his pores, heard the fire gently snapping in front of him. He sat with his back stiffly erect for a long time, long trails of cool sweat oozing off his face and chest. He let his mind empty and his body relax, and after a while he decided that he was ready to dream.
Out of the pack came a leather flask of water and a sealed plastic bag. He took a sip from the water, then unsealed the bag. Inside was a small, pale yellow peyote button, broken off the stem this morning from the potted rows of peyote cacti he secretly cultivated in his house.
The first time he had taken peyote he had been eighteen years old and living in Lukachukai, his hometown on the reservation. On his eighteenth birthday his grandfather had escorted him to the lodge in the rocky hills above his hometown, where elders of the town’s Native American Church had gathered that night to celebrate his passage into manhood. Such is the difference between the Dineh and the Anglos. The white man makes his rite of passage by screwing a cheerleader in the parking lot, the red man by eating peyote and walking tall with the spirits.
“This isn’t meant for gringo hippies,” Grandfather Abe had told him inside the lodge, pressing the fleshy button into his hand. “The Great Spirit gave the peyote to the Dineh so that they could have the means to walk with him before they died, to see beyond this world. It’s not dope to be taken for kicks, Johnny. It is a holy sacrament, just as the white man drinks wine and eats bread in his church. The only good thing that bastard, Richard Nixon, ever did was to make peyote legal for us so the DEA wouldn’t bust our heads.”
“Who’s Richard Nixon?” he had asked.
“Shut up and eat your peyote,” Grandfather Abe had replied.
Fifteen years later, John Bigthorn took another peyote button and crammed it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully on its foul-tasting tenderness. He swallowed the pulp and washed it down with another swig of water. Then he sat and stared into the low flames, letting the sweat drip off his forehead into the fire.
He had fasted all day in preparation for his sweat, but as usual the peyote made him sick. Nauseous, he managed to crawl out of the hogan before puking next to a tree. It was cold outside the hogan, so he crawled on hands and knees back into the hut, forgetting to close the door behind him. He was weak now. A dim electric current buzzed behind his eyeballs. Guts cramped, unable to sit upright, he sprawled on the blanket and stared up at the ceiling, watching the smoke from the fire as it drifted up through the chimney hole, wafting out into the darkness.
Presently, he rose with the smoke and soared upwards, through the hole, out of the hogan, into the fishbowl world of Clarke County. Rising on a thin thermal like an eagle, his eyes swept over the dark centrifugal countryside. Below him, beyond the dark curving band of the river, lay the lighted streets and houses of Big Sky, spread out like a neon sand painting.
He continued to rise, nearing the axial center of the biosphere, passing the taut cables of the Gold Line axis tram, and his eyes followed the New Tennessee River as it traveled upwards along the equator to the East hemisphere above his head. Up there—now below him—lay the brighter lights of LaGrange, where rich touristas like the ones who used to bargain with Grandmother Sally for her blankets and silverwork prowled the overpriced shops surrounding O’Neill Square or sipped expensive drinks on the hotel promenade.
Now he was in the center of the world. Physical laws dictated that he should have remained there, suspended in gravitational equilibrium, but he was no longer part of the physical plane. Instead, he passed through the axis and continued to soar towards LaGrange, his arms and legs outstretched. He could see, under the street lights, tiny figures walking, riding bicycles, sitting on their porches. He wondered why those who happened to look up could not see him, a naked Indian flying through the sky. The thought was hysterically funny and he laughed aloud. His laughter echoed around the world, unheard as much as he was unseen. I fly, I am invisible. Get as drunk as you can, wealthy white people, but you’ll still never be able to do this.…
Then he felt his attention being drawn, almost involuntarily, away from LaGrange towards the farm zones in the South hemisphere. His flight was taking him away from people into the dark emptiness above the livestock area. Looking down, he saw movement on Eastern Avenue in the Southwest quad. An animal was on the road, visible in the lights, and he wondered if one of the goats or pigs had managed once again to escape from the grazing lands. As he swept closer, quickly descending, he realized that the animal was neither a pig nor a goat.
It was Coyote.
Coyote sat on his haunches and waited until Bigthorn dropped lightly to his feet on the road a few yards away. You’re the guy who keeps the law, right? Coyote asked.
“Yes, I am,” Bigthorn replied.
Hmm. White man’s law. Coyote absently scratched behind his ear with his right hind leg. Can’t even keep the fleas out of this place. Well, listen, there’s danger on its way here. You’d better come with me. I need to show you what’s going on before it’s too late.
Coyote stood up and began to walk away, heading south up the road. Bigthorn hesitated. Coyote was the great trickster. One could never trust him completely. He had managed to deceive the frog people out of their water, after all, and he had seduced Spider Man’s wife. But Coyote seldom lied outright, or at least not to one of the Dineh. If he said there was some sort of danger, there was probably a grain of truth in his words.
Bigthorn followed Coyote until they reached South Window, the broad band of thick lunar-glass panes that stretched entirely around the southern half of the biosphere. They stepped over the rail and walked together out onto the window—in the back of his mind Bigthorn knew that Henrietta’s Heroes, the window-cleaning crew, would be pissed off when they found his footprints on the glass—until Coyote stopped.
Okay, Coyote said, look down there.
He looked down. Through the window, reflected in the polish of the South secondary mirror, the stars wheeled past, planets and constellations and distant galaxies moving in parade as Clarke County rotated on its axis. Coyote sat back a few feet, watching him expectantly.
It was beautiful, but it was nothing Bigthorn hadn’t seen before. “What am I supposed to be looking for?” he asked.
Numb nuts, Coyote replied. Give ’em eyes, tell ’em there’s a big problem, show ’em where it’s at, and they’re still too stupid to see for themselves. Remarkably, Coyote spoke with the voice of Bigthorn’s grandfather. He raised a paw and jabbed it at the window. Look for a star that’s moving differently from the others, you stupid turd.
Bigthorn peered carefully at the turning starscape. Yes, there was a star moving on a different track from the rest. It gained brilliance as it grew closer, began to evolve in a more angular shape. He realized that it was an approaching spacecraft.
“I see a ship,” Bigthorn said. “Is the danger aboard the ship? Which one is it?”
Coyote smiled a canine smile, the grin of a god. Watch carefully, keeper of the gringo law.
Bigthorn looked back at the ship. Suddenly, it exploded, transforming itself into a white sphere of nuclear energy that pulsed outwards with terrifying speed and force. He heard Coyote laugh—his grandfather’s laugh—and when he looked up, Coyote had vanished. The darkness of night was swept away in the sudden, horrible glare.
Bigthorn only had time to realize that Coyote had tricked him, too, before the Shockwave ripped through the window, glass exploding around him, slicing through him, in the first moment of the destruction of Clarke County.…
He was out cold for a long time.
When he awakened, Bigthorn found himself curled against the wall on the floor of his hogan. Every joint in his body ached. His mouth was cotton-dry and he was hungry. Sunlight streamed in through the smokehole and the open door. The fire in the pit had long since burned out, leaving a small, cold heap of ashes. And he was no longer by himself.
Jenny Schorr was sitting on her knees a few feet away, smiling. As he twisted around on his back, painfully, she held out his clothes to him; she had folded them neatly. Her eyes drifted down his body, hovering for a moment over his crotch, and she let out a low, coy whistle.
“Hoy hoy,” she dryly commented. “Injun brave have heap good body.”
“Thanks. Go to hell.” Bigthorn closed his eyes for a second, then took the clothes and, sitting up, placed them in his lap. His head felt as if someone had hammered a rail spike through his skull. “What time is it?” he rasped through his dry throat.
“Nine o’clock … Saturday morning,” she said.
“Oh, great.” He lay his head against the wall. He should have been on duty an hour ago. “Did Wade send you out here?”
“He was worried, but he didn’t know where to find you.” Jenny’s smile grew wider. “I had stopped by to … never mind, but he checked the message board when your home phone didn’t answer. Blind Boy Grunt knew where you were.”
Bigthorn squinted at her. “He did?”
She shrugged. “No kidding. Right there on the screen.” He stared at her and she continued. “‘Bigthorn—Rindge Hill. Howling with the coyotes.’ That was it. So I came up here to check it out, and looky what I found.” She nodded her head. “For this kind of show, I’m glad I did.”
“Whoopee.” Bigthorn bent forward and snagged the leather flask he had brought with him, unstoppered the cork and took a long, soothing drink. Looking back at Jenny, he saw that she was still admiring his body. “C’mon, what’s the matter? Never seen a naked man before?”
“None like this.”
“Gnngh.” He was embarrassed. “If and when I find out who Blind Boy Grunt is, I’m going to twist his goddamn neck.”
Jenny nodded her head. She was still transfixed by his groin, and it was making him distinctly uncomfortable. “You know,” he said, “a Navajo hogan is a sacred place during a sweat.”
“Really now?” A wicked smile spread across her face. “If you want sweat, I’ll be happy to oblige.”
He frowned, not catching her drift. “Hmm? I don’t understand.”
“Let me try to be a little more clear, then.” She shook back her long blond hair and began to unbutton her white cotton blouse. “Maybe if I take off my clothes and lie on top of you,” she said softly, “we could work up a little more sweat, hey?”
Bigthorn stared at her speechlessly as she removed her shirt, untucking it from her jeans. Her breasts were lovely. He would have loved to touch them. In the back of his mind, he had always wondered what Jenny Schorr looked like in the nude. Yet now that he was about to find out, he didn’t want to know.
“Only if your husband says it’s okay,” he murmured.
“Neil?” Jenny shrugged. “Oz the great and powerful lost interest in this sort of thing a long time ago.” She lay her shirt aside and reached for the top button of her jeans. “Saving the world takes a lot out of a man, y’know.”