Finally they were set, and they sat in the sleeping car in a circle of six, around the pile of components that sat under the master detonator. For a long time they just sat there cross-legged, breathing slowly and staring at it. Staring at each other, in the dark, in perfect redblack clarity. Then Naomi put both arms out, placed her hands carefully on the detonator's button. Mute Elijah put his hands on hers — then Freeman, Hester, Solly, finally Oliver — just in the order that Jakob had taken them. Oliver hesitated, feeling the flesh and bone under his hands, the warmth of his companions. He felt they should say something but he didn't know what it was.
'Seven,' Hester croaked suddenly.
'Six,' Freeman said.
Elijah blew air through his teeth, hard.
'Four,' said Naomi.
'Three!' Solly cried.
'Two,' Oliver said.
And they all waited a beat, swallowing hard, waiting for the moon and the man in the moon to speak to them. Then they pressed down on the button.
They smashed at it with their fists, hit it so violently they scarcely felt the shock of the explosion.
They had put on vacuum suits and were breathing pure oxygen as they came up the last tunnel, clearing it of rubble. A great number of other shafts were revealed as they moved into the huge conical cavity left by the Boesmans; tunnels snaked away from the cavity in all directions, so that they had sudden long vistas of blasted tubes extending off into the depths of the moon they had come out of. And at the top of the cavity, struggling over its broken edge, over the rounded wall of a new crater.
It was black. It was not like rock. Spread across it was a spill of white points, some bright, some so faint that they disappeared into the black if you looked straight at them. There were thousands of these white points, scattered over a black dome that was not a dome. And there in the middle, almost directly overhead: a blue and white ball. Big, bright, blue, distant, rounded; half of it bright as a foreman's flash, the other half just a shadow. It was clearly round, a big ball in the. sky. In the sky.
Wordlessly they stood on the great pile of rubble ringing the edge of their hole. Half buried in the broken anorthosite were shards of clear plastic, steel struts, patches of green grass, fragments of metal, an arm, broken branches, a bit of orange ceramic. Heads back to stare at the ball in the sky, at the astonishing fact of the void, they scarcely noticed these things.
A long time passed, and none of them moved except to look around. Past the jumble of dark trash that had mostly been thrown off in a single direction, the surface of the moon was an immense expanse of white hills, as strange and glorious as the stars above. The size of it all! Oliver had never dreamed that everything could be so big.
'The blue must be promethium,' Solly said, pointing up at the Earth. 'they've covered the whole Earth with the blue we mined. '
Their mouths hung open as they stared at it. 'How far away is it?' Freeman asked. No one answered.
'There they all are,' Solly said. He laughed harshly. 'I wish I could blow up the Earth too!'
He walked in circles on the rubble of the crater's rim. The rocket rails, Oliver thought suddenly, must have been in the direction Freeman had sent the debris. Bad luck. The final upward sweep of them poked up out of the dark dirt and glass. Solly pointed at them. His voice was loud in Oliver's ears, it strained the intercom: 'Too bad we can't fly to the Earth, and blow it up too! I wish we could!'
And mute Elijah took a few steps, leaped off the mound into the sky, took a swipe with one hand at the blue ball. They laughed at him. 'Almost got it, didn't you!' Freeman and Solly tried themselves, and then they all did: taking quick runs, leaping, flying slowly up through space, for five or six or seven seconds, making a grab at the sky overhead, floating back down as if in a dream, to land in a tumble, and try it again. It felt wonderful to hang up there at the top of the leap, free in the vacuum, free of gravity and everything else, for just that instant.
After a while they sat down on the new crater's rim, covered with white dust and black dirt. Oliver sat on the very edge of the crater, legs over the edge, so that he could see back down into their sublunar world, at the same time that he looked up into the sky. Three eyes were not enough to judge such immensities. His heart pounded, he felt too intoxicated to move anymore. Tired, drunk. The intercom rasped with the sounds of their breathing, which slowly calmed, fell into a rhythm together. Hester buzzed one phrase of 'Bucket' and they laughed softly. They lay back on the rubble, all but Oliver, and stared up into the dizzy reaches of the universe, the velvet black of infinity. Oliver sat with elbows on knees, watched the white hills glowing under the black sky. They were lit by earthlight — earthlight and starlight. The white mountains on the horizon were as sharp-edged as the shards of dome glass sticking out of the rock. And all the time the Earth looked down at him. It was all too fantastic to believe. He drank it in like oxygen, felt it filling him up, expanding in his chest.
'What do you think they'll do with us when they get here?' Solly asked.
'Kill us,' Hester croaked.
'Or put us back to work,' Naomi added.
Oliver laughed. Whatever happened, it was impossible in that moment to care. For above them a milky spill of stars lay thrown across the infinite black sky, lighting a million better worlds; while just over their heads the Earth glowed like a fine blue lamp; and under their feet rolled the white hills of the happy moon, holed like a great cheese.
Sacrament
by MATT WILLIAMSON
Matt Williamson's fiction has appeared in
Ever watch TV and think the ads are funnier than the sitcom they interrupted? Or see a beautiful photo in a magazine, only to wonderingly discover it's an advertisement? Moments like these blur the boundaries between art and advertising, a borderline that grows increasingly unclear in this era of corporate sponsorship of the arts.
Matt Williamson spins a world where art and advertising have collided on such a large scale that a Nike art project can fill Times Square, and an Apple light show can be seen from outer space. The world is loaded with art- advertising objects so massive and inescapable that an international war has erupted over its imperialist presence. Or perhaps that's just the view of our protagonist, a character who maintains his own uncertain boundary between art and his life's work as an intelligence extractor.
It's not an easy craft, pulling information out of the unwilling. It takes special tools, a unique skillset and a sense of intuition that can't be taught. It's a gift. A talent. It's easy to see why some people might call torture an artform.
But it's only in a truly broken world that anyone would.
Bones are not organs, under the Protocols. I've got that stuck up on the wall in the locker room, the briefing room, big signs, all caps: BONES ARE NOT ORGANS.
That leaves a lot of running room. The kneecap? What you can do with the kneecap? That alone will get you farther than you need to go, in almost every case. The kneecap. The chin. The lowest knuckle on the forefinger. Those are
my favorite bones.
I always say, you can tell my guys in a crowd. From their hands.
The trick is, can you keep him lucid. Can you keep Ali sharply focused on the Program all the way through. Part of it is physical control, part of it is drugs, and part of it, I say a little facetiously but not totally facetiously, is artistry: the artistry of the lead interrogator. Before the pinpoints, before Suspensions, we couldn't keep a guy from passing out. Wake him up with ammonia, it's not the same as having him alert. Now we've got pinpoint synthetics
