Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (50 page)

In the mess hall, Tamsen and Spitzer are seated on the floor by the powercycler vent. Contact with mission control is still nil. On the calendar, the 30th is circled in red. This month’s poster: a picture of a salivating mastodon-wolf looming over the caption: “The world cannot exist half-slave and half-food: Fight for Freedom!” Vinegar Tom sits backward on a chair, slouched forward and smiling wide at me. It doesn’t help my already sour mood: no more chess, no more liquor, even the prospect of shipping off-planet seems impossibly far away, as if we wouldn’t survive each other’s company another day. The three of them pass around foil stripped from an air duct and a twin-pronged nosetube and a lighter rigged from the grill box’s heatcoils.

“Keep sporing,” I say as I crouch between them, “and you’ll sour the meat.”

After Spitzer discovered you could freebase the mold—”sporing,” he named it—I opted out. How do you go 98% while spun on fungus? It’s practically a Class-1 drug, complete with four-hour euphoria, hallucinatory episodes, tingling. It also had a nasty tendency to gum up Vinegar Tom’s intestinal system if he didn’t take the right precautions. Yes, people need outlets.

“Can we go claim some mountain in the name of us?”

“Can I please plant the flagpole?”

“Can we sleep together now?”

Sporing also does wonders for the skin. The three of them are tinted gold, Tamsen the deepest. She has dark blonde hair to match, arms and legs that I’d only assumed were well-toned until recently, and a small tight face I started wanting to kiss too late. She sprinkles more spores onto the foil strip, clicks the lighter until the coils at its tip redden. Then, positioning the tube in her nose, she inhales deeply. These are the only times I ever see her relax. Relaxed people—lazy people—worry me.

Tamsen looks straight into my eyes and says, “You’re a lovely man.” This has all the meaning in the world, and none of it. “Has anyone ever told you how lovely you are?” I try to forget her moans, the image of her body thrusting under Vinegar Tom’s. How she could go for a guy without a nose was beyond me. “I mean it, Murph. You’re glorious.” She passes the foil to Vinegar Tom and leans back against the wall. “Like a baby’s mobile. The kind with the lights and funny animals.”

Spitzer laughs at her. I want her to go back to being serious. My wife was serious.

“You want to hear something fucked up?” asks Vinegar Tom.

I don’t.

“When the Donner Party got stranded in those mountains, they say they only fed the body parts to the youngest children.
The youngest children,
like three-year-olds. They did it even though they knew help was on the way. Isn’t that fucked up?”

Tamsen kicks his chair, but not hard enough to knock it over. “Has anyone ever told you how morbid
you
are?” Her eyes are lit up, her face radiant with spores.

Spitzer clucks his tongue and swings his arms together like a batter. “Another moon shot for Noseless Tom Jackson.” He, too, is shining.

The air vent kicks into a louder second powercycling stage. It sounds like a roar coming from the drooling, tusked wolf on the wall. I feel my lungs squeeze in. After a year, even the canned oxygen has begun to taste stale.

“That
Dreammold!
’s something else,” Vinegar Tom finally says. “All that canary yellow.” He reaches under his chair for two bottles: one of industrial-grade white vinegar and one of Pepto-Bismol. The vinegar kills the spores in his stomach; the pink stuff keeps the vinegar’s acid from eating more holes. He takes chugs from both bottles and grimaces after each.

Tamsen says, “It’s mustard, if anything.”

“Mustard?” Spitzer throws up his arms. “It’s gamboge. Pure gamboge yellow.”

I say, “I always thought it looked like cheese.”

They stare at me—”Cheese.”—they shake their heads.

“It’s goldenrod.”

“No, it’s a mix of lemon and sunglow.”

“Call it Peridot.”

“In some language somewhere, it means ‘precious’ and ‘ripe.’”

“Freedom yellow.”

“Yellow-bellied coward.”

“Macaroni and cheese,” I amend.

Vinegar Tom claps me on the back. “Like Tamsen says, you’re a lovely guy, but the moon ain’t made of cheese.” Everyone but me exchanges chuckles between spore passes. They take solace in this negative definition:
it’s not cheese.

I stand up. They watch me with big pupils, sclera yellow at the corners. Tamsen says to stay, holding out the foil and lighter. On the calendar, the 16th, today, is already crossed out. Fifteen more days of what? With Tchaikovsky gone, they’re all I have. “Hell,” I say, crouching back down and reaching for Tamsen, “I am lovely, aren’t I?”

I take out Buggy 2. I tell the others I’m going for a drive through Hell’s Half Acre. I tell myself, if I can cut through the mold inside Tchaikovsky’s ship, there might still be some vodka left to sip on. I’m sporing like fuck.

The moon looks dead and nothing and grayscale, all everywhere forever. Rilles, ash cones, dark-halo craters, basaltic lowland seas, a deep regolith of iron and magnesium. The whole Oceanus Procellarum. It’s enough to lie down and never get back up, but not right now. Right now, there’s all this water,
inside the moon,
where we can’t even see it. And this mold, canary or freedom or piss yellow, is growing out of it, growing right now! I drive straight toward Tycho, fast. Leave it all behind. I drive and lean back in my seat and am satisfactorily lightweight because instead of thinking about the moon, I’m thinking about what’s gone. Denver. Donner Pass. Nights in winter. I’m reciting lines over a defunct vidchannel: “
Goodnight clocks and goodnight socks, goodnight little house and goodnight mouse.
“

I daze out. My eyes close while I speed across an ancient seabed. Crystal clear, I remember lying in their bed, the nightlamp warming my face, their cold feet crowding around mine. My wife comes in to check on us. I don’t need her to smile to know that if the world ended at that exact moment, there’d be nothing she’d change. When I open my eyes, all thoughts go, like air through a crack in my helmet.

There’s the moldline, as sick and as yellow as ever.

The latitude’s all wrong; the Russian’s ship is still four miles south. But here, at the edge of that advancing fungal bloom, stands Tchaikovsky.

It’s him all right. Not flesh and silver and Kevlar; instead, he’s made of mold, completely and utterly.

Mold: Jesus.

After I climb out of the buggy, I don’t know whether to ask him for the secret of sustainable water or cleave him to pieces.

“Ve vant to vin,” he says in a gurgling version of his accent. How I can hear him with the radio out, I am at a loss to explain. He opens his fist to reveal a toppled king piece carved of mold. I think of Vinegar Tom knocking over my own king and that dredges up all the ire the sporing had anchored down.

“You’re not going to
vin
this time,” I say. “No hallucination could, cosmonaut or not.”

“No hallucination.” He pounds his inflated chest once with a fist that could easily be mistaken for a cheese wheel. “Ze cosmetic is ready!”

“That’s what a hallucination would say.”

He shrugs.

I don’t have the patience for this kind of high. My eyes itch, my sinuses suddenly burn. I tilt my head back until it passes. All across the sky, stars flash. In-between them don’t flash millions of other stars, dark, as if forgotten or not even there. Below, the Earth looks painted on space. Out of the blue, I miss things. Afternoon thunderstorms. Playgrounds and fruit snacks. Creaky wooden stairs.

The euphoria’s already slipping. I find myself unable to walk away without asking, “What’s happening? What’s the
Dreammold!
doing?”

“It grows, vhat else?”

“But you. It. I don’t know.”

“I, zis part.” He flashes a peace sign before he joins the two fingers. “It is me.”

I look down at where his feet should be: only mold. “Do you still have all that vodka on your ship?”

“Does ze sleepy dog lie?”

“Great,” I say. “You’ve got seven moves to win.”

When the Russian laughs, the whole sea of mold ripples behind him. “Zis is good, Afraham Lincoln,” nodding his helmet as he goes on, “Free ze slaves, you can. But do not beat zer kitchens before zey are handbaskets.”

I have no idea what that means. But where his mix-ups were once amusing, now they’re sad, screwy lessons. More than ever, I wish I was standing in front of my wife.

He raises his arm to pound to his chest again, but then stops. Sometimes, even Tchaikovsky knows he’s made a mistake. “Zis, no, I am meanings somezing else. How you say, every cloud has dead horse.”

I taught my wife chess before she was my wife. It was a struggle at first. She wanted to flirt and I wanted her to be quiet. “You’re getting better.” I told her this when she wasn’t. But when I made the offhand wager that if she ever beat me I’d marry her, then she caught on quickly. She was always black. She favored the horsies. “Chess,” I once taught her, “is about all the moves you don’t make.” Sometimes we’d leave the game for the morning, having found each other’s feet under the table and then our clothes on the floor. One night she told me, “I think it’s more about the moves you can’t make anymore.” I said, “Maybe, honey,” to which she answered, “They tell you the next move.” I didn’t argue; instead, I tried thinking her way for once. That night she beat me for the first time.

When I return to the moldline with the chessboard, Tchaikovsky is gone and I’m missing my only knight. Vinegar Tom, I’m sure. When I get back to base, I’ll dump out all his Pepto-Bismol. For now, I don’t have any tools to carve a new piece. But there’s the mold, of which I grab a handful. I measure out the perfect size.

“You ever seen one up close?” Spitzer asks.

The four of us are north of Tycho, cutting mold squares and tossing them into the grill box. With the base radio still dead, we’ve had to break out the two-way walkie-talkies in our emergency kits. Thankfully, with a week to go, this is our last harvest load.

“I’ve seen pictures,” says Tamsen.

“The Megafaun Wars,” Spitzer says between strokes. “Sounds so far away.”

“One kissed me on the nose before I chopped it off.” I’ll believe a butcher on this.

I keep cleaving into the mold. Every fifth chop I wipe down the bladeface.

“Murph?”

I throw down my cleaver and I take up two baling hooks and I lift the mold square with a heavy grunt.

“He’s seen them all right,” says Vinegar Tom as he wipes off his own cleaver. “Old Murph had them over for breakfast one morning.” I picture his bucked-tooth grin in the darkness of his helmet. “Thing was, those Megafauns didn’t like his wife’s cooking. They sent it back; they wanted something fresh, something—”

The mold square in my grip doesn’t hit the ground before I’m already lunging for the bastard, ready to broil him in the grill box. As my head bangs into his chest, we both lose our footing. We hit the mold in a slow freefall—me punching his kidneys with the T-hook handles and him beating down on my back with the cleaver’s butt. Our suits are so thick we can’t really feel it, but it feels good to punch what’s soft and alive. Tamsen and Spitzer shout. Vinegar Tom slams my helmet with his and I pin his arms down in a bearhug. Then something tackles the both of us. We go rolling. Deeper into the mold, we punch and roll until we can’t anymore. Now all I can see is Tom’s name patch and all I can feel is something moving underneath us, then not. Tamsen keeps shouting.

We bury Spitzer in his suit. It was strange how we hadn’t even heard him gasp when the T-hook cracked his helmet. It only took seconds, I imagine.

I lock myself in my cabin. I flick off my radio. The walls are too close to pace more than four steps. I can’t sleep. Don’t want to eat. Don’t want to be near anybody but the Russian and even that sounds like an ordeal. I sit down at the same old chess game and plan the same old moves. Rd1+, Rd2+, Ne3, Rg2++.

I flip the game board into the air. The pieces scatter. I carve whatever pleasure I can out of stomping and grinding and smashing them until I’m surrounded by a gray haze. At this point I turn off the light, switch on my headlamp, and imagine my body atomizing in space, all everywhere forever.

A knock at my cabin door.

Tamsen: “You want to spore?”

Ten minutes later, I’m calm, cool. Tamsen’s yellow eyes glaze over as she sits on the bed opposite me. She cried while we buried Spitzer. I told her over the radio to pull it together, get serious. I’m sure she blames me. But there’s no sign of it now. I have to hand it to her, she would make a lovely lady to share a house and a family and a pet with. “Has anyone ever told you…” but then I don’t know what I’m trying to ask.

“Told me what?”

Rising moments of sheer ecstatic nothing. Then: “Do you know any stories?”

“Only the worst.”

“I remember one, that’s all.”

“Better be a good one.”

“
Goodnight comb and goodnight brush.
“

Tamsen sprinkles more spores onto the foil strip. “Weird beginning.”

“
Goodnight nobody and goodnight mush.
“

Tamsen burns the spores, inhales, hands it off.

“
Goodnight to the old lady whispering
—” With the next toke, the sinus burn fades into this raincloud adrizzle inside my face. It’s a slick, puffy kind of high. I can’t remember the rest. Instead: “I saw you and Tom.”

Tamsen goes into a loud coughing fit.

I shrug a little. “It’s fine. We’re all leaving soon.”

After she recovers, there’s this look on her tinted face that says all the things I haven’t thought of yet: that she already knows, that she’s sorry it happened this way, that if this wasn’t the moon and the earth wasn’t dry and the animals down there weren’t huge and thirsty, we wouldn’t be up here, we wouldn’t even be us. I lean over to hand her the foil and lighter, but then I stay close. There is a place, on her jaw, that is still colored a fine peach, a place that I am now kissing, it and only it.

Another knock on the door.

Vinegar Tom comes in,
Desperate Passage
in hand. His skin practically glows. “You don’t look so hot,” I say, my voice catching on my lips still shaped around the kiss.