The Lunar Module hatch popped open. Leonard’s boots emerged sole-first as he crawled backwards onto the egress platform. The sun glared against the black velvet sky just above the S-band dish atop my full-scale replica Eagle. Earth was in half-phase to my left, over the long-abandoned ruins of the spaceport. About a dozen or so tourists in tightsuits sat in the bleachers.
Detective Solomon Zhou studied the silver-haired woman seated across from him in his office. She claimed, and the report verified, that she’d been in a coma for the last seven years. Yet, she remembered things from that time. Awful things.
Madeleine stalks through the streets of London, her net transmitting a careful stream of instructions, left here and right now. The voice of her AI is Bowie, his proper Britishness soothing, with a hint of the devilry she’d heard in her Thomm’s voice, so many years ago she’d forgotten.
“We’re close to departure, ma’am.” How easy it would be to hide my emotional anxiety behind protocol and procedure, to blame the intellectual rigor of exploration for my emotional detachment. From the trees that line the field’s edge, the whirligigs screech and hoot. They crowd the branches below their nests and skitter in the light of our transport vehicles. The fleet of shuttles blaze like a star cluster in the twilight. The throbbing hum from the propulsion systems has set the gigs on edge.
I woke, curled and alone on a rumbling dark bus, remembering someone I’d done my best to forget. Remembering the Other Me. It had been a long, cold day. A double-socks, leggings-under-jeans kind of day. You couldn’t stay outside more than a few minutes without feeling like you’d lose some extremity or patch of skin to the cold. I was running away from home.
You must know, first, that every moment is merely one of a constellation spread across the sky of my life. These moments, here with you, are the only ones that matter, the only ones I never want to leave.
There are snowmen in the desert. Two lines of them, in fact, flanking the bandstand and continuing behind it, although I can’t make out how many linger back there. I doubt the world of Berrion has seen many snowmen in its time. It’s hot as hell here even at the high latitude of the northern continent. The land at the equator? Intolerable for humans.
A woman. Warmth. Love. Just out of reach. The back of my neck. Itching. Burning. A sudden change—the ground shifting beneath my feet, catapulting up, up, up. Clawing at my neck. Searing. An inferno. Slipping backward, falling, tumbling. The woman, her hand outstretched. Too late. Too far. Gone. I yell out her name. Darkness. “Richie? Richie, wake up!”
“STAY OFF GROOMED SURFACES” headlined the resurfacing status page as I skimmed alongside the track groomer, staying well clear of the hundred meter booms snowing frozen nitrogen onto the drag strip. Cockpit audio whooped, startling me ...
A six-foot brown Indian man, with one blue eye, one nostril, full lips, and dishwater blond wispy hair, is dressed in denim jeans and shirt. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow, exposing blond hair on his peach-colored forearms. Cracked, leather-topped, diner stools separate him and another man from each other and from me.