And he’s like, “Oh.”
It’s weird, he don’t look scared or nothing, just like, tired.
“I see,” he goes.
And then he laughs! Not like really laughs, but like, a little sad sort of laugh. Know what I mean?
“All this hatred!” he goes, “I should be honoured really I suppose. It’s almost like being loved.”
“You what?” I go.
“Never mind, Carl,” he goes. “Don’t worry about it.”
He puts the kettle down slowly and then he goes, “Someone put you up to this, I suppose, Carl? You were never much of a one for thinking things up for yourself.”
And I’m like, “Mind your own business.”
Which he nods and sort of sighs.
“Listen Carl,” he goes, and he’s really slow, like he’s thinking out loud. “Listen Carl. My wife died a while back and she was the only person in the world I really loved. And then my career sort of petered out, as you may have heard, not that it was ever much of a career and not that I was ever much cop at my job-as you probably know better than most, I’m afraid. So I really don’t have a huge amount to live for. Oh, I get by alright. I potter around. I weed my garden. I do the crossword. I watch TV. But really it doesn’t make much difference to me if my life ends now or whether it goes on for another 20 years. Do you see what I mean? I mean: if you really need to shoot me, well, be my guest!”
Well I’m like, “What the fuck?” but I don’t say nothing.
“But listen Carl,” he goes, “I don’t know who put you up to this but, you know, you are very easily led. I do suggest you think very carefully about whether it’s actually in your interest to shoot me. You really do need to think about that.”
And I’m like, “Fuck off, don’t give me that deskie shit now! Don’t give that concerned shit,” but I don’t say nothing.
(Which I really don’t want to hear this stuff, though, and it’s doing my head in as such.)
“I’m worried for you, Carl,” he goes, “It probably sounds strange, but I really am.”
Which then-yeah?-I can’t stand it no more.
“Fuck off!” I shout at him. “Fuck off you stupid deskie bastard. Just leave me alone, alright? Why can’t you never leave me alone?”
And I hate the bastard, I fucking hate him, know what I mean? I never hated no one like that in my whole life.
And he goes, “Carl! Carl!”
But I’m not staying to listen to this shit. I’m off out of there, mate. I’m out of there. I slammed the front door so hard it broke the stupid coloured glass. Red and blue and green splinters all over the poncy little path.
“You didn’t do it, did you?” goes Laf.
I don’t say nothing.
“Give me the gun, then,” he goes.
I give it him.
Well he just drives off then without saying nothing and I spend all day trying to find my way back to the Fields.
Back home my mum’s been on the booze and she’s like snoring in front of the telly with her false teeth half out, the ugly slag. So I nick some money from her p urse _yeah?-and go down the Locomotive. If I’m lucky some bastard will want a fight so I can kick his fucking head in.
It don’t make no difference though, does it? I won’t never see that Valour-Hall now.
The Clear Blue Seas of Luna - GREGORY BENFORD
Gregory Benford is one of the modern giants of the field. His 1980 novel, Timescape, won the Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award, and is widely considered to be one of the classic novels of the last two decades. His other novels include Beyond Jupiter, The Stars In Shroud, In the Ocean Of Night, Against Infinity, Artifact, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, Sailing Bright Eternity, Cosm, and Foundation’s Fear. His short work has been collected in Matter’s End and Worlds Vast and Various. His stories have appeared in our Seventh, Ninth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Annual Collections. His most recent books are a major new solo novel, The Martian Race, a non- fiction collection, Deep Time, and a new collection, Immersion and Other Short Novels. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine.
We tend to think of the Moon as cold, silent, serene, a bleak and barren sea of rock where nothing moves and nothing has happened since the birth of the Solar System, but the fast-paced and pyrotechnic story that follows shows us quite a different Moon, one that boils beneath its placid surface with energy, intrigue, and purposeful activity-and one that can be a very dangerous place indeed…
You know many things, but what he knows is both less and more than what I tell to us.
Or especially, what we all tell to all those others-those simple humans, who are like him in their limits.
I cannot be what you are, you the larger.
Not that we are not somehow also the same, wedded to our memories of the centuries we have been wedded and grown together.
For we are like you and him and I, a life form that evolution could not produce on the rich loam of Earth. To birth forth and then burst forth a thing-a great sprawling metallo-bio-cyber-thing such as we and you-takes grander musics, such as I know.
Only by shrinking down to the narrow chasms of the single view can you know the intricate slick fineness, the reek and tingle and chime of this silky symphony of self.
But bigness blunders, thumb-fingered.
Smallness can enchant. So let us to go an oddment of him, and me, and you:
He saw:
A long thin hard room, fluorescent white, without shadows.
Metal on ceramo-glass on fake wood on woven nylon rug.
A granite desk. A man whose name he could not recall.
A neat uniform, so familiar he looked beyond it by reflex.
He felt: light gravity (Mars? the moon?); rough cloth at a cuff of his work shirt; a chill dry air-conditioned breeze along his neck. A red flash of anger.
Benjan smiled slightly. He had just seen what he must do.
“Gray was free when we began work, centuries ago,” Benjan said, his black eyes fixed steadily on the man across the desk. Katonji, that was the man’s name. His commander, once, a very long time ago.
“It had been planned that way, yes,” his superior said haltingly, begrudging the words.
“That was the only reason I took the assignment,” Benjan said.
“I know. Unfortunately-”
“I have spent many decades on it.”
“Fleet Control certainly appreciates-”
“World-scaping isn’t just a job, damn it! It’s an art, a discipline, a craft that saps a man’s energies.”
“And you have done quite well. Personally, I-”
“When you asked me to do this I wanted to know what Fleet Control planned for Gray.”
“You can recall an ancient conversation?”
A verbal maneuver, no more. Katonji was an amplified human and already well over two centuries old, but the Earthside social convention was to pretend that the past faded away, leaving a young psyche. “A ‘grand experiment
