Tropical ecologists didn’t last long on the Moon.
When HR added the Biome Nucleus Accumbens Response Test to its examinations, the number of freak-outs among the colonists suddenly reduced from a costly two out of three to a mere one out of five.
Suburbanites, accustomed to the clean geometry of their beloved square yardage, fared poorly on the Moon as well, and the Corp’s ACMR had been good at weeding out those applicants, as well as the ones who labeled their favorite childhood ages as those swaddled between zero and five. The tiny exam room was a test in and of itself to eliminate the claustrophobic. But the B-NART, as it was fondly called, was considered the most reliable predictor.
The examiner had been imperceptibly pleased as Rawling completed the testing, the sieve of her professional demeanor draining all but the slightest wrinkle in her forehead. Within a matter of weeks, he was there to replace a gabbling operator who had garnished every inch of his control room with a mosaic of magazine strippings. The covers of the equipment repair handbooks were entirely obscured by red crescents and navy ponds, while the board itself had levers growing flower-like from a field of greens, fern, emerald, shamrock, and lime. Rawling scraped orange origami cranes from the ceiling with a large pole, gently sloughed the rest into a salvage container, and got to work chasing the Roosters.
There was no way to cheat the B-NART. It was deceptively simple, just a series of still pictures flashed before an applicant while a ‘trode took note of any response. The examiner watched surreptitiously for facial expressions, but Rawling noticed when he looked away, overwhelmed, from the lush swelling of a rainforest canopy. The xeric shrubland followed that, and then a crowd of coniferous trees jockeyed to fit into the frame. However the ‘trode measured, the immediate rise or fall of his brain’s biochemistry would scribble its proof of the ice sheet’s impact. The examiner could inscribe his smile, his relaxation back into the chair. He did not look away, as he suspected others had at the nearly featureless white. There was no vegetation or wildlife in the shot; it was extreme, it was severe, it was beautiful, it was home.
Most of the other eighty Corp colonists had mild to moderate color hunger, partially alleviated by their gym built in colors more commonly found in a kindergarten classroom. Rawling retreated to the corner wearing the least garish weight pants he could pluck from the bin, while the others tumbled around like party balloons, laughing if it was their day for mandatory art or envious if it was not. He liked them well enough beneath his disappointment, and they liked him back in a comradeship born of knowing they would only be together for a short time. No one had to create an in by making someone else an out. Rawling watched the camera monitors as they followed certain people more than others, and he thought of the signal relay to the psych room where each colonist’s conduct was being gauged and calculated, compared to previous days’ measurements and flagged for intervention should an uptick or downtick exceed the allowable behavioral deviations.
Penguin was slightly less than half-complete, and Rawling’s predecessor in his waning days had let the Roosters meander about the regolith by his own mysterious calculation, creating a square of road here and another there, without connection or apparent reason. Rooster One had paved a partial circle around Zach Crater, many kilometers off course as it waited for further instruction, while Roosters Two and Four had been corralled by their own clogging dustloads in the Nimibius sink. Rooster Three, on the other hand, was headed west, sporadically stopping to make a road patch at inexplicable places and intervals, and it seemed only luck had kept it from soaring over some steeper decline than its machinery was meant to handle.
Rawling didn’t know if the man before him had activated the Roosters’ thermal covers during the last nightspan, and the equipment wasn’t built to withstand long exposure to cold temperatures without protection. The rest of Penguin road from the South Pole to the equator would have to wait until Rawling could bring all the Roosters back to the garage for a long maintenance; and on a requested assessment as to when he projected Santa road from the equator to the North Pole could begin, he wrote an addendum about why it was not feasible to estimate at this time.
His first act was to file for shift extensions instead of placement in after-hours group support. Rooster One he guided back to Penguin with minimal difficulty; it labored along trustily to the road and then he placed it on automatic map all the way to the garage. Two and Four couldn’t roll up and out of the Nimibius. Their dustloads would have to be cleared manually, on site, and since Rawling wasn’t cleared to leave the module for long excursions he sent a crew after them.
Rooster Three dodged capture until he began to suspect some interference in the wiring, either by purposeful design, original flaw, or temperature damage. He cut off its power completely and left it dead in the highlands. A second crew was dispatched to retrieve it with a hauler.
As Rawling’s adjustment to lunar life included not a single call to the psych crisis number, he understood when the butter yellow Thera-Drone was dispatched to monitor this unusual circumstance. He tried to wave it off. It took a full month before the Roosters could roll onto Penguin from the garage, their solar concentration mirrors held high over the vehicular bodies on new struts, ready to burn the rubble of the regolith into road the rest of the way to the equator.
Rawling breathed. He signed up alone for his first hike, since the other newbies had grown inured to the sights. Many stayed in to attend the future artists’ forum. But Rawling had no interest in poring over the work of Earth’s greatest painters, no plans to enroll in art school when his four months ended, and no eagerness to hear stories about programs in the Costa Rican canopies over fervent green crayon doodles.
Perhaps an ice sheet wasn’t the best analogy for the Moon, but it was what Earth could provide. The lunarscape wasn’t one of monochromatic bleakness. It was nuance at the very essence of the word, if only one knew how to see. As he moved across the surface, he was reminded of his father’s labored display of a series of grasses at the botanic garden. To everyone else, it was grass. Grass was grass, generic, some of it light and some of it dark, big deal, and to which his father responded that children were children, generic, some of them light and some of them dark, and who cared which ones you took home anyway?
The Thera-Drone wanted to talk about difficulties, so Rawling satisfied it with a simple fixation on the alien moment he stepped away from the last rung of the ladder onto the Moon. The experience overpowered him, the sight of the Earth so unreachable, and his stomach plummeted. He was frenzied to claw his way back to it, beneath the roil and seethe of cloud cover, safe under the hug of an atmosphere. He thought of the billions of years it had taken Earth to create him, him and every single thing that he had seen, heard, felt, and thought, every chemical that made up the composition of his trembling body, and just how lightly he had stepped away.
The Thera-Drone could do nothing with this; it was everyone’s story. Rawling was allowed to get on with it after sitting through a dazzlingly disorienting color display to ameliorate the expected effects of the hikes. But he found that he liked the way that color sneaked up on him once outside, small, occasional astonishments in the lunarscape among the saturation of grays and browns. A wrinkled band of titanium blue slightly visible in a mare, green glass beading lying in subtle wait amidst the soil. Restrained yellow in a highland rock. He preferred the hint, the suggestion, the coy peek when in comparison Earth’s color was overpoweringly pornographic.
Around a crater he passed the small hills that other colonists had made from ejecta, those who loved the Moon with their primary color hearts. They satisfied their need for configuration in mounds and spirals, wrote their names in anorthosite script. They had loped thoughtlessly across the regolith with hand scoopers to pluck at the soil and design a Moon they could understand. But who was he, far younger than the meanest, most infant pebble, to move a rock that had lain in the same place for billions of years, if not with reverence?
Rawling had assumed they would be different, the lunar colonists. He had been hungry to meet them. But they were largely the same as they had been on Earth, planning on Monday what they would do on Saturday, planning on Saturday how to brag about what they had just done when they returned Monday, interested in their work but not absorbed, and never fully present anywhere.
Sometimes sadness swept him away as he stood at the controls monitoring the Roosters’ progress, and the alert light would have to pulse frenetically for his attention. Other times he found himself furious at recreation as the others gamed with paint samples, the shade names covered up for them to guess. He entered nothing about himself in the computer Quick Friends Program, so that no one would come up to him and say, “Stanford, eh? What year? How long did you work for Radcliff Robotics down in La Jolla? What are you doing to do when you get back?”
He was absurdly pleased when Rooster Three continued to defy his directions, ambling away from the others and getting caught in a rille, or simply shutting down while in performance of its duties. Each time it broke, Rawling had to put in a request to go outside and retrieve it, which meant many hours away from the module. Navigating alone in the lunar wild, a breath from death, one meteorite peppershot from breaching his suit, he was exhilarated, lonely, terrified, and free. Every pulse of his heart magnified, he found it ironic that he only knew what it was to feel alive on a world that had given no life at all. Rooster Three received many companionable pats, as if it were a friend colluding with him.
When Rawling returned to the module and saw that one person teetering on a freak-out was stumbling along only by marking X’s on a calendar, he boiled over with rage. Then he oscillated to his normal mildness again, shocked at himself.
The cameras must have noted the slight agitation that had shown in his face. They followed him more often, and so he made an effort to join in conversation at his mandatory art session about a recent scandal. A woman working in southern Solar Power had fulfilled her four-month stay and applied for a two-month extension, an unheard of thing to do, and it had been granted. The colonists were thoroughly disturbed over their sculptures. He tried to mirror their expressions as the camera bobbed around the room.
“She might never walk again! And what about cancer?”
“Released liability, probably. Head-case.”
“Not a head-case. We went to MIT together. Sort of intense. But stunning. What a waste.”
“A wheelchair when she returns!”
“What if she just kept staying on here?” Rawling blurted over his unformed mound of clay.
Even the camera stopped swiveling to stare at him. He connected to Quick Friends as he ate alone the next morning and looked the woman up, Q. Munroe, her beauty indiscernible in a bleached-out ID shot and, like in his file, nothing more. Someone walking behind his table noticed his screen and soon the conversation was underway again, and then a debate broke out about the exact shade of orange that described her hair. The majority settled on polished mahogany, with several holdouts declaiming persimmon, rust, or vermilion. To Rawling her hair was more the volcanic glass of Shorty Crater, an observation that he kept to himself.
Then one of the deckers in sotto voce passed along that he had never seen a care package with her name on it, as if this were some sort of nasty little peccadillo that explained her overstay. Rawling left the room disgustedly as that snaked among the tables.
At least she wasn’t itching like the others to sit on a bar stool surrounded by captives hooked on the line, “Well, when I was on the Moon…” She hadn’t loved the Moon in hypothesis and wasn’t going to love the Moon in retrospect. These were gross assertions on his part concerning her character; for all he knew she could be some insane closet terraformer bent on making an atmosphere and planting still fields of wheat outside the hydroponics lab.
But he dreamed of her that night, with hints of olivine pooling in the maria of her eyes. She moved lightly to him as her bones cratered under translucent skin. They shook they heads together at a Thera-Drone’s ocular noise exhibit of Earth, then weaved atop the Roosters among the rocks jutting like molars from the regolith. He woke up embarrassed at his subconscious mind.
He wanted to talk to her. There was no lunarly reason for him to go down to Solar Power, so he sent the real woman a friendly e-mail hoping to strike up a conversation. He didn’t expect a response and was not unsatisfied. No response came.
Rooster Three made a break for it, shucking its thermal protection for Four’s wheels to get tangled in. The Corp ordered Rawling to catch Three and remove it from the line until its operating system could be entirely replaced with new parts. As he took the long way around to recover it, out wheeling cheerily around a central peak in a crater, he felt like he was condemning it to euthanasia.
It was a ridiculous idea, and he was grateful the Corp could not monitor thought since he had driven the distance to the Rooster arguing with Q. Munroe in his head about her extension. She would age prematurely under the radiation. Her hair would thread with plagioclase before its time.
Don’t bring Earth here, she snapped.
The Moon’s Eve, he said on the way back, trying to be humorous. The first human experiment.
I experiment with Her; why should I not let Her experiment with me? She answered.
You’ve anthropomorphized the Moon, he said. Rooster Three trundled behind them. They headed back to the garage, and he killed Three while the cameras watched.
Then he put in for his own two-month extension. He wondered once if word would get back to the real Q. Munroe that someone else had decided to stay. She likely wouldn’t respond, not the sort to care for gossip, but they would both be there in the safety of a small community even if they never met.
The colonists were gentle with him most of the time, having concluded that one ran away to the Moon, not to the Moon, and that terrible trauma must inspire such decisions. They stuffed his box with countless pictures of Earth, sweet crayon drawings and tentative watercolors and ink.
Thought you would like this, scribbled atop a rendering of a monarch butterfly. Isn’t it beautiful, spelled a school of fish in a sea of aquamarine. The colonists caught him in corridors and related all the reasons he should go back. The decker demanded that Rawling show some loyalty to Earth, some love for something that drew him home. Where was his patriotism? How could he prefer a lifeless rock? What was there to love about the Moon?
But he didn’t love the Moon, not an Earth love of red and pink, petals and giddiness. He had no squeal of affection in his heart for those rough edges and white curves. What he felt he could hardly describe. It needed to be parsed out slowly, this absorption, and for that he needed more time. This place was more than their little lab experiment. He wanted to see what the Moon was, and he wanted to see what they would turn it into, and he was not ready to let go of that terrible feeling while outside that centered him completely in himself. The obvious antonyms to the other colonists, Earth to Moon, life to death, beauty to devastation, he did not understand. Where was the devastation in a world made up of pieces falling from other worlds? The antonym to life wasn’t death, it was stasis, and most of the other colonists were the only stasis here that he found.
In a way, it made him think quite well of himself, as if some formerly unsuspected pioneer spirit was shining through. The Moon would vent the lesser applicants back to Earth, leaving only those in the crucible for whom there could be nothing else.
Then there was a change when he went into breakfast, furtive looks and repressed glee.
“Lost her nerve,” someone whispered. The departure board on the wall had Q. Munroe’s name on it, a month early. Rawling could see the Thera-Drone heading in his direction.
He staggered into a suit and went outside, ostensibly to prep the newly rebuilt and compliant Rooster Three. He walked instead of loped, neither careful of small craters nor planning his steps on a gravity that barely seemed to want to release him entirely. He wished he could shove his gloved hands in pockets and kick a rock without tripping.
But he could not. He had come for community first, the most Earth-like desire of all, and that was not the terms that the Moon was going to offer him. If he could only reach out to the Moon through middlemen, was there anything left for him when they had been scoured away? The Moon was brutal in its honesty, all it had was right there for him to see. He was here for the Moon, or he wasn’t here at all.
Rawling stared over the highlands until he could not longer bear the harshness. Then he looked to the stars, hoping for further clarification.