Near + Far (25 page)

The Cluster used to be a fundamentalist-founded station that ended up selling its space to private concerns in order to fund itself. The remnants of the church were there. They ran the greenhouses that grew food for Luna, where most of the water got processed too. The stuff at the market there was always fresh and good and cheaper than in stores.

A jazz club had bought space, and a tiny government office matched its grander counterpart in Luna. And there was Xanadu, which was a co-op of five wealthy families. Along with a scattering of individuals who dealt in rare or hand-crafted goods.

There was always music there, and it had enough reputation for being dangerous that all but a few tourists steered clear.

His name was Star. He would be alright with me. I knew enough to keep him safe.

We ate berries and sat beside rippling water. He told me about Earth—never about the people, but the landscape. Trees, pines and sycamores and madrona, maples and honey locusts and cedar. He talked about cliffs that were bound with color: yellows and reds and deep browns. Everything grew there, it seemed.

He talked about rain, about slow gray clouds and tearing nor'easters. Rain drumming on a tin roof versus its sound on slate. Fine spring mist and the hot rain that fell during drought, coin-sized and evaporating too quickly. Rain on sand, echoed by waves. Thunderheads, gathering themselves over the ocean. He had lived beside the sea for a few years, he said.

I wondered who he had lived with.

So much was unsaid. It was like a cloud in the room. We relaxed despite it.

He didn't know where he was staying. He had no luggage. I approved of that. I stick to plas-wear and carry no souvenirs other than the rooms inside my head. Even my ship, where I spend more time than anywhere else, is unpersonalized. I liked it that way.

I was staying with Pippi. Star had money, or so he said, and asked where a clean hotel was. I steered him to Blizz, which caters to the Gate regulars, and went back to Pippi's.

She was surprised to see me. I hadn't felt like going out on a trip, I said, and offered to take her out to dinner.

All the time we were eating sweet potato fries and tempeh steaks, I tried to figure out how to tell her about Star.

I don't know what kept me from just blurting it out. That was usually the level we communicated at. Straightforward and without pretense.

I felt like a shit keeping quiet. Eventually it would come out and the longer it took, the worse it would be.

I wasn't prepared to see him at the door the next day.

Pippi answered the door. "Bless you, my dear little friend!" she shouted over her shoulder.

"What?" I scooted back in my chair, glimpsed his hat.

"You got me a present!" She reached out her hands, "Come in, come in."

Her place is tiny. Three of us made it feel crowded. We stood around the table, bumping it with our hips.

"How much do you cost?" Pippi asked Star.

He looked at me. "I don't do that anymore."

"Then why are you here?"

"I came to see Podkayne."

Pippi was unembarrassed. She shrugged and said, "Okay."

He wanted advice about buying into the colony, where to pick a spot. I made him buy me lunch in return for my advice, and we took Pippi along since she knew better than I where the good deals were.

"Over there in Cluster, someone told me a month or two ago," she said. "He was saying the Church is going to sell off more space, and it's going to get gentrified. It's a long ways off though, over an hour by tram." She licked barbecue sauce off her fingers. Star pushed a wipe across the table towards her.

"I don't think he likes me much," she said to me, later.

"I don't think he likes humans much," I said. "He makes allowances, but I think he'd be just as happy dealing with mechanicals only."

"Not many mechs up here," she said.

"Why?" I said. "You'd think it would be ideal for them. No rust. Less dirt. Fewer pollutants in the air."

"It would make sense," she said. "What does it say about us, we're so crazy we pick a place even mechanicals don't want to live?"

Maybe ten thousand on the face of the moon. The space stations ranged in size from a few hundred to a few thousand. Twenty thousand on the surface of Mars. I didn't go back there much, even though it was where I had grown up, after my parents died in a crash. Maybe two or three thousand existing around the bounty of the Gate, another hundred pilots and vagabonds and Parasite-ridden.

The few, the proud, the crazy.

Why had Star chosen to come up here?

I asked.

He said, "There's too many living things on the planet."

"Why not Mars? It's enough people to qualify as civilization."

"They're spread out and it's dusty. Here it's clean."

"You like the sterility up here," I said. "Then why think about living over in the Cluster? It's the most organic spot on the moon."

His face never smiled, just tilted from one degree to another. "It's a controlled organic."

"But what do you want to do?"

"Live," he said. "By myself, with a few friends." He nodded toward me. "According to my own devices."

"What about sex?" I blurted out.

He froze like a stuck strut's shadow. "I beg your pardon?"

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to intrude. It's just that I was somewhat interested, but only if you were."

He shook his head, mere centimeters of rejection. "I'm afraid not."

Words I'd heard before. Including what he said next. "We can be friends, though."

"He's not interested," I told Pippi.

"Screw him," she said. "Let's go play Sex Rangers."

We climbed into the virtual suits and tapped in. I found someone interested in fooling around on a rocky shore, underneath fuzzy pines. The suit's as good as sex, any day—releases all the tensions you need released, in my opinion—and a lot cleaner.

Afterwards we logged out and ate pizza and watched a deck about boxing. Pippi said the guy had an 87 percent chance of winning (he did), 54 percent chance by knock-out (he did not).

"I asked Star to come mining with us," I said to her when we were getting ready for bed. I took the couch; she had a fold-down bunk.

"You did what?"

"He'll be an extra pair of eyes. Not like he'll take up oxygen."

She paused. "Fair enough."

He was good enough at spotting. He learned the difference between ice and metal fast enough to satisfy impatient Pippi, who hated explaining things. I focused on getting us close to the debris that swirled in and out of the Gate. You never knew what you might find. One guy picked up a device that fueled a company in food replication and yielded over forty patents. One pilot found a singing harp. Another the greasy lump that ended up becoming snipship fuel.

You never knew.

Pippi and I had a routine. Star didn't intrude on it much, went to the secondary display and focused on looking for mineral spikes.

Usually we chatted back and forth. There, Star was an intrusive, if silent, presence. Pippi ended up thumbing on the usual newschat channel. Nothing much. An outbreak on Mars, but small and well-contained. An ambassador stricken but rallying in order to continue his mission through the Gate. How much he looked forward to being the fifth human through the interstellar passage that allowed us access to the wild and varied universe. How much he looked forward to opening new trade channels.

Who knew what he might find out there?

"What's this?" Star said.

From afar just a glitter. Then, closer, a silver-sided chest, the size of a foot locker but covered with golden triangles. An odd, glittery powder encrusted the hinges and catch as it spun in space.

We brought it in.

Pippi's gloved hand reached to undo the latch. I waited, holding my breath.

Nothing hissed out. A glass sphere inside, clouded with bubbles and occlusions. As Pippi slipped it out of the gray material surrounding it, we could see oily liquid filling it.

"Could be useless," Pippi said, her voice unhappy. "Plenty of stories like that before."

"Could be beaucoup bucks," I pointed out.

"Of course," Pippi said, her voice loud and angry, "it's the time you bring someone along, to split it three ways, that we actually hit a lode."

"I don't want any claim," Star said.

Flummoxed, I stared at him. What must it be like, to have enough to not need more, to have just that one extra layer against yourself and poverty? My parents had left me enough to buy my snipship, but all my capital was tied up in that rig.

"I just wanted the company," he said. "I thought it would be interesting."

"Fucking tourist," Pippi said. "Want to watch the monkeys dance? We'll kiss for another five grand."

He backed up, raising his hands. His feet clattered on the deck. Before he had moved quietly. Did he choose to make that sound to remind us he was a machine?

"Thought we'd just love to take the walking vibrator on tour?" Pippi said. When he remained silent, she turned on me. "See, it doesn't have anything to say to that."

"He," he said.

"He? What makes you a he, that you've got a sticky-out bit? I bet you've got a sticky-in bit or two as well." She laughed. Meanness skewed her face.