John Barnes - Mother of Storms

“For what?” he says. Caught her sunbathing; it figures.

“So the tabloids can’t do another story about perverted astronauts looking at their naked ex-wives over the phone and talking nasty, that’s why. You’ve got an image to protect, Captain America.”

“They promoted me a long time ago,” he reminds her.

“You’ll always be Captain America to me,” she says, and the screen comes on. “Is there news or is this just a hello call?”

“Oh, just a hello. Timed to get a look at your body, of course.”

She grins and moves as if to flash him. One of the several counselors they’d gone to had pointed out to them that they were both “socially retarded, as tends to be common in bright people, and that’s why you act like a couple of teenagers around each other.” It took Louie and Carla days to realize the counselor thought there was something wrong with it.

He gives her his best construction-worker whistle. She asks, “So they’re keeping you busy for once, you bottomless pit for taxes, you?”

“Yeah. Although to tell you the truth, I’m starting to wonder if I’m actually doing anyone any good by being up here.”

“Not your worry, love, it’s really not. We’ve talked about all this before. If it weren’t for the scientists, the whole world might as well disappear up its own virtual-reality asshole. If there’s no exploration, that’s just what will happen. And robots do not explore, they just go and look. Somebody’s got to be there to feel like bold Cortez upon a peak in Darien.”

“You’re quoting poetry at me again.”

“Well, it’s not a dirty limerick, so I’m sure you haven’t heard it before, but yes, I have been exposing you to poetry. It’s part of that continuing process that ran through our courtship and marriage, love—you know, eating with utensils, washing yourself—say, speaking of which, you’re looking pretty spruce today. You must be doing a lot of interviews or something.”

He tells her about reading the data and the graphs. She tells him about getting her old job back, and “better yet, being allowed to do it on remote. So I’ll probably be looking at that data myself.”

“Well, if you like, I’ll be happy to download it to you.”

“Please do.”

He pushes a couple of buttons, and the data is transmitted. They talk a little longer, but there isn’t much to talk about, so they hang up quickly.

An hour later, Carla calls Louie back. “Are the numbers really that high?”

“I didn’t really know they were high. They’re just numbers to me. They went up fast for a couple of days but they’ve been pretty steady since.” He grabs a terminal and types on it for a moment. “Yeah, those are the numbers.”

“No wonder they’re getting so excited about it. That’s really high, Louie.”

“Well, that would explain why they’ve been asking me to downplay it while I talk to this kid from UT. I’m supposed to sound the way old-fashioned airplane pilots did when they told you ‘Well, we’ve got a little turbulence here and maybe a bit of engine failure, but I just wanted you folks to know that I expect to be on time or a bit before, except of course for that little old piece of wing that just dropped off.’ They might at least have told me that when I was saying there was nothing to panic about, I was lying.”

“Well, until my department gets it figured out, they still won’t know what these people ought to be panicking about, you know. And anyway, I’m not so sure that panicking will do them any good.”

“So next time I have to go play Serious Scientist again with the kid from Texas, it won’t be unjustified if I suddenly say, ‘Jesus, these numbers are high. Let’s cut the crap, we’re in deep shit, we’re all going to die!’”

She giggles. “Oh, a little unjustified, but think how much excitement it’s going to cause the PR types. And most of them just don’t have enough adventure in their lives.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that. Well, take care… I still kinda miss you, you know.”

“I’ve been known to miss you too. Let’s make that date for sure—when you get back down, we’ll get together and have some sex and some fun, then get on each other’s nerves so we can remember why we both live in tin cans hundreds of miles from anyone else.”

She’s still teasing, but it’s getting near the mark, and Louie doesn’t want to get into any emotional things this particular time. So he says, “Well, then, it’s a date. You take care,” and she says, “Take care,” and they hang up.

He looks at his schedule and it’s still twenty minutes until he has to pretend he knows what he’s talking about with that damned kid. He stretches out, letting himself float free in the observation bubble—the nearest thing to a spacewalk without a suit you can do, if you ignore the glass walls on all sides just a foot or two away—and lets himself run through the list of all the things he’s supposed to do when and if there’s time. Unfortunately, most of them are fully up to date, and the ones that are not are just pointless duplicates of ground-based work.

Not unlike the pointless duplicate of ground-based work that he’s supposed to do in the next few minutes…. He really wishes he could stop thinking like that. He looks out at the big old Earth rolling by underneath, and admits to himself that he’s such a cranky old bastard it’s no wonder that he’s lonely, or that he has trouble admitting it.

Well, he hasn’t powered up the telepresence unit on the moon in ages. If they ever start serious lunar operations again (instead of going along as passengers with the French—god, it kills Louie, three times a year, to see the French go to the moon, not even a country anymore but just a state in the USE, and maybe one time out of three they take along an American astronaut as a passenger! )—if ever that big stupid clumsy nation of Louie’s gets it together enough to get back out there, it is very likely going to be Louie who drives the robots to get the American moonbase opened back up.

He sets the timer, pulls on a scalpnet, muffs, and goggles like an ordinary XV rig (except that the muffs are equipped with an alarm so that if anything goes wrong in the station he will hear it), slides his arms into sensor gloves, plugs the feedback into the jack behind his ear, and codes in.

His eyes open on the Sea of Storms, and he stands up in his robot body. He looks down to see the unnaturally thin limbs—the antimatter power source is inside the long metal “torso” and the motors are located at the joints, not needing the leverage that real muscles do, so that for every practical purpose he’s a walking skeleton, with a body that looks like a flexible gas hose and arms and legs like those on one of those men made out of muffler parts that used to stand in front of car repair shops when he was a kid.

He walks out of the little cave where the telepresence robot is parked—it returns there automatically when anyone is done with it, so that he imagines that on the lunar surface, at the end of a busy shift (if there ever is one), twenty or thirty robots might suddenly stop what they are doing and all walk back to the cave to stand against the walls—must be spooky to watch them do that.

The light here is flat and harsh, the shadows and sky black. There’s nothing that isn’t familiar from a thousand training tapes; this is where lunar mining experiments were conducted, and where a nice job was done of demonstrating that the “ores” available on the moon are just plain rock, so low-grade that it’s always cheaper to make the stuff on Earth and ship it up, even though you’re fighting a lot more gravity. But at least while the experiments were going on, there were people walking around up here, next to the robots….