Story Excerpt
Minnie and Earl Have a Kitten
by Adam-Troy Castro
In the old days, there were two places on the Moon, out in the open and not inside a constructed habitat, where you could take off your helmet and enjoy a breath of fresh air, surrounded by the deadly vacuum.
Everybody who had been on the Moon long enough to be trusted with the secret knew about one of them, Minnie and Earl’s home. That went without saying.
The other was half a world away, and doesn’t have much to do with this story.
There was nothing to do there but breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, and there’s nothing about these activities that requires much in the way of conscious thought, so its main attraction was as a place to be alone and think, an attribute that was not unusual in a place where just to be locked inside a moonsuit, hermetically sealed from other human beings, also offers the same elemental pleasure.
Sometimes, though, you needed more than that.
And so, if you were among those in possession of this little secret, you could take a short detour from the usual barge routes between one outpost and another, climb a steep but unchallenging ridge, take your seat at the pinnacle, and remove your helmet.
The radius with atmosphere was only about thirty meters, and yes, I know this made no sense. There were plenty of things that made no sense on the Moon, in those days.
I went twice, once to confirm the ridiculous story I’d been told by a coworker named Carrie Aldrin No Relation, and once on the day I’m talking about, about a week or so after being told some things even more life-changing and needing the time apart from other human beings. I sat on top of the ridge, well within the line of stones that had been placed there to mark the spot by some pilgrim before me, took off my helmet, and took a deep breath, smelling the most idiosyncratic element of the place, aside from my continued survival in this spot on a world never meant for life: the invigorating scent of mint. My eyes burned, but then they were already. I’d been weeping on and off for a week or so: not in hysterics, or in the depression that had bothered me much of my life, but with the recently increased activity of my tear ducts.
If you want some explanation of how and why that place existed, I can’t tell you. There is no answer in the narrative that follows.
It was just one of the weird things about the Moon.
But it was a good site for those unresolved questions. There was air, and there was radiation protection, and there was even a light filter that kept the unprotected eyes from being blinded by the glare of sunlight reflected off lunar landscape. Hell, there was even that taste of mint. And so I could ask myself:
What’s so special about me?
Nothing, I told myself. There’s nothing special about you.
Why me, then?
Because they like you. And maybe because there’s nothing special about you; maybe that’s the whole point.
It doesn’t seem fair.
Oh, Tish. As if you haven’t learned by now that the Universe isn’t fair.
I had yet to make my decision, on that day in the place that should have killed me. I had yet to justify it to myself, a person somehow alive even though there had many times in my life when I would have rather not been. It loomed large before me, though, and I knew the shape that it had to take; the tremendous difference it would make in my horizons, and in the horizons of Mankind. I knew I would say yes. I knew that. And I also knew that if I did, it would be because I secretly thought that it belonged to someone else.
I gave myself ten minutes in that spot that never should have existed, and then I put my helmet back on, checked the seal, and descended the slope, in the process traveling between a place that permitted life and another with a vacuum that much would have preferred my death.
It was not, I promise, in the top three impossible things I had endured this week.
* * *
To those of us who knew Minnie and Earl, who regularly visited the unassuming clapboard home that unaccountably sat in the middle of hostile lunar landscape like a Norman Rockwell painting that somehow got dropped into one of Chesley Bonestell’s, a place that enjoyed its own atmosphere and perpetual summer day with nothing but a white picket fence to separate it from the deadly conditions on the lunar surface, that sweet couple was more than a phenomenon the combined forces of the scientific community had never quite succeeded in figuring out; they were what they were apparently only interested in being: good neighbors.
They were a home away from home for those of us building the first lunar colonies, where we could do could go for a hot dinner and some friendly conversation, where we could rekindle our senses of community, in between all the crises that went along with living in an environment that was not nearly as forgiving.
For most of us, they were lifesavers.
For me, they were even more.
On the day that changed everything, for me and as it turned out for everyone else, Rebecca Boosler and I were doing routine maintenance on one of the emergency supply caches out on the lunar plains. It was, as we said in those days, like every job on the Moon in that it was the worst job on the Moon. The materials occupied a climate-controlled bunker that was meant to last a hundred years as long as somebody dropped by every few weeks to check the seals. Doing this check was grunt work that normally required only one person, but since my recruitment—something that still made no sense to me—the powers that be had been assigning me as part of teams, and so it was me and Boosler, collaborating on a job meant for one.
Nothing was out of order today, and I was on one of the last items of my checklist, replacing a small component in the surface airlock, when Boosler’s voice came through: “I have a call coming in.”
I checked, and I saw that I did not. This was not unusual. We all had our private channels. Whatever it was clearly had nothing to do with this job we were doing together; probably some change to her own work roster, that would affect me only in that I would do the next shift or so with someone else. You cannot shrug in a moonsuit, but I managed to communicate one with my acknowledgment, “Roger that.”
Boosler walked away.
Which was silly. One meter of lunar vacuum affords as much privacy as sixty. I was just as cut off from her communication either way. But she took those few steps away, a gesture of requiring privacy that I noted and thought nothing much about, because it was, like so much we did on the Moon, one of the vestigial terrestrial behaviors that persisted in muscle memory.
I rededicated myself to my task, found myself stymied by a small complication caused by a minor manifestation of incompetence on the part of whoever had examined the tech before me, and was sufficiently irritated by that person’s asshole quotient to mutter bad things about his mother, about his ancestors, and about their improper behaviors at home. Most of those people would have objected to my obscene characterization of their family dynamic, but speaking it kept my temper occupied until I came up with a workaround that would keep the equipment functional until Boosler and I could return with the components for a more respectable fix. That took about seven minutes. (And that’s a genial fiction that flies in the face of the way things worked on the Moon, back then; all our activities were recorded, and so I happen to know from later perusal that it was seven minutes, thirty-two seconds.)
Only once I was done did it occur to me that Boosler had been gone an awfully long time.
Intersuit communications were normally pretty brief. We didn’t interrupt whatever deadly important stuff we happened to be doing to just chat. We exchanged the necessary information with as much professional brevity as possible and got back to whatever we happened to be doing. The only exception was during vehicular travel, when you were taking a tractor or a barge on some multiple-kilometer drive across a familiar and boring route; then, in the stultifying tedium of the foxhole, there was nothing to do but talk, to exchange bullshit stories, or to insult each other in creative ways. You always needed to be comfortable with the people you worked with. But nobody called from base, or some other work detail, just to shoot the shit.
I left the vestibule and saw nothing in the direction Boosler had gone but the expected lunar landscape, cold gray rock bright enough to wash the stars from the black sky. A cluster of bootprints about twenty paces away could have been left by a prior maintenance team and could have been the archeological evidence left by Boosler, pacing as she processed whatever her unknown caller had to say to her.
This was, I think, part of the data that contributed to the unease I would later write off as intuition. People didn’t pace in moonsuits. They were sufficiently difficult to move in to mostly discourage absent or subconscious activity like pacing, and limit movements to the decisions we made out of conscious volition: i.e, the deliberate choice to go there, instead of there or oh hell why are you there. Pacing implied excess emotional energy, not that I thought this in so many words; it just added to my background data.
I could see our barge from where I stood, but could tell that she had not returned there.
What I could see from my vantage point was a single line of prints branching away from that messy cluster and curving away to the right. I tracked that until I found her, standing a pointless and unlikely distance away, at a right angle to me, the golden sunshield of her helmet a gibbous curve fixed on the horizon.
And here’s where that most unlikely hypothesis, intuition, comes in. Under atmosphere, when you see an acquaintance standing alone at that distance from you, her gaze fixed on nothing in particular, you process any number of physical cues about her emotional state. You pick up on her posture, on her nervous tics, on the set of her eyes, whatever part of her facial expression is visible to you. You don’t need much to know whether she’s bored, or apprehensive, or wool-gathering, or just plain pissed off. But in a moonsuit, all that is hidden. Whatever body language might be there to see is swallowed up by an insulating bubble of white material meant to keep her alive, and that golden faceplate designed to reflect away all blinding glare. The most appropriate comparison is to an advertising icon of many years ago, the Michelin Man, a humanoid made up of automobile tires, but that guy had a default smile to give him an identifiable personality, and a moonsuited figure didn’t communicate nearly as much.
And yet, for no reason at all, the mere sight made the bottom drop out of my chest.
I didn’t know why. But I immediately knew she was bereft.
Something was terribly wrong.
I transmitted on our group channel. “Booze? What was that?”
She turned toward me, her golden face-plate a gleaming oval. It was physically impossible to discern a single feature. She might have been beaming ear-to-ear in rapturous glee for all I knew. There was no way to tell, but I knew, in the absence of evidence, that something was wrong.
Her return transmission was steady enough. “Tish? You done?”
Booze never called me Tish, or Leticia. She always called me Deveraux. No protocol reason. Nor had it ever been a way of keeping me at a distance. I always figured she just liked saying it more, appreciated the vague elegance of my surname when contrasted with Boosler. But I was Tish now.
I felt a single drop of perspiration crawl down the back of my neck. “Affirmative. All issues optimal for now. But, Booze—”
“New orders.”
It might have occurred to me, then, that while she had six months of seniority over me, we were equal in rank. Any new orders coming in for us would have come in for both of us at the same time, over the channel we shared with Base. There was no good reason to keep me out of the loop. But I don’t think it occurred to me then, not consciously; it was just another subtle manifestation of weirdness, coming in on top of others I had not yet factored in.
There was, I find now, already so much.
I said, “Is it an emergency?”
“Details to follow. Wrap up and join me in the barge. We need to motor in five minutes.”
And this was nothing like Boosler, not at all the way she treated me: a little bit more like a lost puppy than I sometimes appreciated, but with friendship I absolutely did appreciate, in this high-tech but still primitive place where hanging out was something done at a little square table in a communal room that smelled of rubber seals and body odor. For various reasons I had never had a lot of friends; in part because dealing with other people had never been something I was any good at, and in part because I had never believed myself worthy of it.
I had always been as brittle as fine crystal. I was good at what I did, but I was also secretly sure that there was something terribly wrong with me, some yawning void that could not be hidden, and that everybody else saw. I sensed Boosler’s sudden curtness and knew that the problem, whatever it was, had to be the result of some catastrophic screw-up on my part, one serious enough to obliterate the facade of adequacy that had not really been fooling anybody.
(If this seems like a strange mental state for anyone accomplished enough to have landed a job on the Moon in those early years of colony construction, rest assured that it was nothing unusual. Astronauts are human, and as subject to self-esteem issues as anyone else. If it’s true of celebrities who can command stadiums filled with cheering fans, it can also be true of astronauts; and if you still don’t believe it, look up that pivotal early figure, Buzz Aldrin. Or that other figure from my own era, Max Fischer. Even action figures can be made of glass. And as far as I was concerned, I had other reasons.)
In any event, I wrapped up what little there was left to do, and I returned to the barge, plugging my suit into the vessel’s larger air supply and helping Boosler with the checklist that needed to be completed before we could get back underway. During the several minutes this took, I found no clues in the opaque mirror of her helmet, but I did notice several intervals where she was slow to answer me, and an interval of several seconds where the words “—ing radio silen—” came through and I realized that she was actually maintaining two separate conversations and that she had accidentally switched back to our shared channel in the middle of an exchange with Base. But what they were actually talking about, and why it was being kept from me, was impossible to know.
Then she completed whatever the negotiations were, and said, “All right, Tish. I know this has got to be driving you crazy. I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep you out of the loop for a while yet. The general agreement among those in charge is that we’ll both be better off delaying the complete briefing until we reach our destination.”
She had the perfect astronaut voice, all business, trained to total professionalism even in a crisis. But I sensed the tension behind it. Her voice hadn’t broken, but it wanted to.
I didn’t waste time arguing over the secrecy. I just said, “Is everybody okay?”
This was risky work. We’d had fatalities. I’d met and after all of one conversation immediately fallen quietly in love with one woman who’d arrived at the project on Friday and was gone by Sunday, never to return, thanks to an injury that had condemned her to a future on a disability pension. There had been a blowout in a lava tube only a couple of weeks ago, which could have had a horrific death count all by itself. Before that, we’d had a problem with a perfectly sane coworker named Destry, who suffered a chemically-induced psychotic break thanks to a contaminant in his air supply and ended up being the technical bad guy in what turned out to be the first actual gunfight in the history of lunar exploration. So we were always prepared for catastrophic news. On the Moon, as anywhere in space, the question, “Is everybody okay?” possessed a gravity far greater than one-sixth.
But she said, “It’s nothing like that. As of last check-in, everything’s optimal. The Moon’s had a quiet day. Us, the Chinese, the Israelis, everybody.”
Again, the moonsuit eliminated context. I just had the curve of her face plate, and the sense of something complicated going on behind it.
“But it is an emergency?”
“Yes. Further details on a need-to-know basis.”
“Come on. Booze. At least tell me where we’re going.”
She put the barge into Drive. “We’re going to see Minnie and Earl.”
Now, I’ve already told you a little bit about Minnie and Earl, about the house where they lived, about how clearly impossible it was and how it was just something we lived with, on that very strange time on the Moon.
What I haven’t stressed is that they hosted nightly get-togethers in their very middle-American living room, and that once their existence was shared with newcomers, usually a few months after our arrival on-site, every one of the international projects took turns as guests.
Minnie and Earl were family, with all the love that implies.
And so, that just gave me more to worry about. “Don’t tell me something’s gone wrong with Minnie and Earl!”
“No, they’re fine. You know them. They’re always fine. I don’t think they’re ever anything but fine.”
“But—”
“Tish. You’re exhausting me. I told you, we’ll have a full briefing later. Until then, I concur with the need for secrecy.”
Even if she hadn’t said the words, I would have recognized what I’d heard in her voice.
You’re exhausting me.
I knew I had a history of pushing people too far, of making too many assumptions about what license our friendships entitled us to, of becoming the presence who needed to be pushed away before I trespassed too much. It hurt coming from Boosler, but it was not unprecedented, and her clear frustration with me did what needed to be done and shut me up.
But by then that devil intuition had struck, big time.
This was going to be awful.
And it would be.
But not completely awful.
* * *
I’d come close to dying six times in my life.
Once, when I was six months old and the whole family came down with a raging fever that came close to putting all four of us in the ground. There was a lot of that going around then. It was one of what we then called “vest-pocket pandemics,” that at the time came around at the approximate rate of once every three years, each time killing a lot of people and driving society into a panic from which it was declared we would never recover. Nobody in the family died, and the infection gave us an immunity that, it turned out, prepared us for the epidemic so much worse than that one, that came after that and killed one billion people.
Another one happened when I was ten years old, only four days past that birthday. I happened to lose all sense of situational awareness just in time to cross a busy street. I heard the blaring horn and knew I was dead. The fleeting terror was not nearly as frightening to me, in the years to come, as another unmistakable feeling that I’ve been dissecting ever since: relief that it would all soon be over. What struck me from behind was not the car, but another human being, shoving me out of the way. And the hip I heard breaking was not my own, but that of the Samaritan who saved me.
There were a couple of other incidents, here and there. I don’t need to go into them. Life works that way. If you are a human being, navigating a world with sudden drops and sharp edges, you have had close calls. Hell, they’d multiplied since my assignment to the lunar project. I could tell you stories.
But there was one in particular.
I was thirteen years old and with my family on a beach at an artificial resort the developers called Erehwon. It was one of those places built to replace the beaches the world had lost the previous couple of years: a shoreline constructed out of permaplastic and scavenged rock, a beach of reclaimed white sand, a line of transplanted palm trees, a hotel complete with casino to reclaim the immense costs of development.
My parents had tolerated my sister and I exploring the resort’s amenities out of their sight for ten hours a day, but had laid down the law on this particular afternoon: today, at least, we would enjoy it as a family. “Enjoy” was of course a flexible term. I was going through a phase when time in close proximity with my parents was the definition of misery, and I was letting them know it with stormy sulks. They did the best they could to ignore it, but it is not always easy to summon grace in the proximity of a teen who is most happy when sharing aggressive unhappiness.
At one point when my sister had already fled to the water, I was curled up on the lounge and scowling in resentment, and my father said, “You’re really going to be like this all day?”
“That’s my plan.”
“It’s a stupid plan,” he said.
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
“It’s not a good look, button.”
I had my arms crossed. “I don’t care.”
A certain glance passed between my father and mother. I perceived from that glance that I was making them miserable, and I was glad; also deeply self-loathing, because the objective part of me also hated that I was doing it and deeply wanted some dignified exit back to normalcy. Until then I was gambling with their patience and risking the inevitable parental blowup that would give me an excuse to remain sullen and uncooperative the rest of the day. This is how the adolescent game of chicken is played.
Whatever negotiation passed between my parents, it was my mother who delivered the result. “You’re giving us no excuse but to order you. Go away. Sulk somewhere else if you want to. But you better be back in the room by five to change for dinner.”
“Fine,” I said, letting them know that I resented this decision like I resented all others.
I stormed off, both rolling my eyes at all the foolishness they expected me to deal with, and feeling those eyes burn from the conviction that my parents hated me and that they were right to.
The beach was not crowded. There were about six or seven families on a stretch of white sand two kilometers long, some of them huddled in cabanas and others bouncing inflatables in the water. I did not see my sister and I did not want to; she was part of the world, and therefore part of the problem. But there was otherwise nobody to talk to, and—with the inescapable logic of my age and state—nothing to say to them even if I wanted to. I contemplated punishing everybody by going back to the room and curling up on the bed with the blackout curtains shut, thus burdening them forever with the knowledge that their insensitivity had made me sabotage my own vacation while they cavorted and gallivanted and refused to see me at all.
I’m not saying this made any sense. I’m saying it was the way I felt, there beneath the brilliant blue sky on a perfect if artificial white beach beneath the glorious rays of the sun. It was the way I felt, and I saw no way out of it that would not amount to surrender.
So I stormed around and resisted having any legitimate fun until I happened to glance out to sea and see something that interested me: a group of kids my age standing in waist-deep water about a hundred meters out. They were white boys, mostly, new to the resort and still flashing bellies as pale as the clouds, and I supposed that I could have made my way out there and talked to them, but what really interested me is that they were so far out and still able to stand. I happened to know that the water was deep much closer to shore, but there’d been talk of a sandbar that permitted wading and broke up the nastier surf before it reached land. Those boys had reached it. Beyond them, other bathers raced around on the new generation of recreational vehicles—surf-skimmers (a then-novelty, hovering flatforms with handlebars) and I saw one figure who could have been my sister achieving air, even hearing what could have been her cry out an exultant whoo.
This had been one of the factors setting me off, that day. We had both been looking for our turn on the vehicle. But the rentals were pricey, and parental indulgence was a substantial privilege that I’d been denied because of my nastiness during an earlier eruption. At another time Cori might have given up her own turn out of solidarity, but I’d been a little shit to her too, and so she’d gone off alone, cementing my conclusion that literally everyone was against me and that I was condemned to an existence where everyone mistreated me and it just wasn’t fair.
Again. It was objectively nonsense. But it was very real.
I decided to go swim out to that sandbar myself. But I did not want to spend any time with those boys. I wanted solitude. And so I walked further down the beach, past a concealing outcropping of coral rocks, and also as it happened past an unmissable sign that read END OF RESORT PROPERTY, DO NOT PROCEED PAST THIS POINT. What mattered to me was that while I could still hear the distant cries of those cavorting in the water, I could not see them, and could confidently construct the premise that I was in a world of my own.
I left my pink flip-flops on the beach, just above the tide line, and I stepped into the water, where the sand turned soft and toes could dig into it while the ripples danced around them.
It was unexpectedly warm, that water. Too warm, I knew, and also too acidic and filled with particulate plastic, but these were global problems that I did not want anywhere near my mood, which as always threatened to descend into a bottomless pit. Better to exercise the generalization, once spoken by my father, that it was impossible to be depressed in a swimming pool. This was the ocean, but I supposed that it applied.
The sea bottom dropped off quickly, and I was already waist-deep when I discovered one reason why this section of beach was closed: the rock formations that rose on shore were just part of a formation that continued underwater, and I found them instead of a smooth, sandy path to deeper water. They were sharp, and they were nasty. I could have, should have, cut myself to ribbons and be forced to retreat, which would have had the positive benefit of preventing what was about to happen; but I had a physical grace and a paradoxical belief in my own indestructibility, and so I scrambled over the stone shelf and hopped back down into the deeper and rougher water on the other side, which as expected turned out to be over my head. I opened my mouth at the wrong moment, gulped sea water, surfaced sputtering, and for just one heartbeat entertained the idea that I was making a big mistake, before my stubbornness drove me on. I glanced off to my left and saw those distant white boys standing in that only waist-high water, deeper out, and took strength in the knowledge that I would only have to swim out that distance before I could stand on my own two feet.
There were, as I paddled outward, two factors among the Universe of things I did not know.
One was that the sandbar was strongest where they stood.
The other was that the place I was relying on had a powerful undertow.
A third, which I did know but was in my adolescent stupidity not paying any attention to, was that the waters were monitored only up to the boundary I had passed; if I ran into trouble, no lifeguards would be hitting the water to save me.
As I’ve said, I was stupid. Unforgiveable, even. The cause of trouble wherever I went.
But the water was warm, and I was a strong swimmer, and my limbs seemed tireless, and as I swam out to the depth where those boys were standing, the currents seemed a factor that could be calculated and dealt with, not subject to the chaotic elements of the Universe at all. I might have known that by avoiding observation I was taking foolhardy risks, but I certainly felt alive, free, and for the moment at peace.
When I paralleled the boys, I stopped kicking and let my legs descend into cold water, in search of support. They found none. I issued a mild curse, shifted position, and this time brushed sand. It was still neck-deep water, but after a couple of additional kicks I found the rising curve of the sand bar and located its top, a place that was actually less than waist-depth. My bikini bottom cleared water.
I might have issued a whoo. Why not? Even at that age, I had an explorer’s spirit and a firm grounding in the premise that I already knew, that sometimes one climbed mountains or swam out to the sandbars for no better reason than because they were there. I felt accomplished, medal-worthy, even a little euphoric; the embryonic form of the feeling that would sometime lead me to the Moon.
I heard some cries in the distance: the white boys, who had spotted me and who were cheering my arrival. If it were just one of them I might not have heard, but together they were an amplified chorus. I grinned at them, and waved, and again I had a brief thought that might have been enough all by itself to save me: that I was being silly and that I ought to swim over to join them. But I was no longer insulated from my emotions by the anti-depressive effects of the cool sea water, and I also got a grumpy flash of the opposite thought, that my life still sucked and I still needed to be miserable to punish everybody.
Past the boys, a lone dark figure on a surf-skimmer curved back around, to check out what they were yelling at. She was tiny at this distance, impossible to identify had she been anywhere else, but as she slowed to an idle and made a hat-brim of her palm, to minimize the effect of the Sun’s overhead glare from her view of me, I knew that it was Cori, enjoying the fun that I’d been denied. She flashed teeth. It was just happiness to see me, but in my head it was hostile, resentment that I had anything.
Have I mentioned that we were twins? Identical twins, as it happened. We were mirror-images, with identical features, identical frames and identical ways of holding them, and identical intellect. We were both prodigies, years ahead in school even if—another source of resentment—her patient disposition had always given her the edge when it came to studying. Our resemblance was close enough to have been frequently described as spooky, but there was one terrible thing that separated us, the thing that had launched today toward unpleasantness: her emotional palate had always run smoother than mine, smooth seas that were always under control, whereas mine had always been chaotic and tempest-tossed.
You want to know why I sometimes hated her? Because I had never been, and could not be, like her. I couldn’t help being a little bitch, always feeling sorry for myself, and it was an incessant source of self-loathing.
So she waved, and I did not wave back. Instead I looked away, intent on playing the little asshole to the end. I looked away and muttered something that would have started a fight had she been close enough to hear it, and I spent the next few seconds in furious contemplation of my life’s incessant suckitude, and in the process I shifted position on the sandbar and found the downslope on the sea-side. I slipped from waist-depth to shoulder-depth, and was sufficiently startled to thrash. I kicked myself further away from land, and then the current got me and the shore receded with stunning speed.
I was not angry enough to want oblivion, not at that moment. But I was too off balance to think. The distant boys, pooling their voices, screamed something that sounded an awful lot like an advisory to swim sideways. But that made no sense. I was using my best stroke, flawless in execution, a million miles away from anything as impractical as swimming sideways, and the shore was still receding, all my strength not quite succeeding in returning me to a depth where I could stand. I gasped and swallowed water and knew that I was spending all the strength I had against natural forces that were larger and more powerful than myself. Thirteen years were all I was ever going to have, and it was all I deserved, and it was not right that it was all I deserved, but at least all my problems were over, and that was all I had time to think, before I swallowed more sea water and began to choke.
I remember thinking that if not for the raw ache in my throat, all this would not have been so bad.
* * *
In life there are things you get used to and things you don’t.
I never wanted to get used to the home of Minnie and Earl.
It was a phenomenon studied with equal levels of obsession by those of us on the Moon, and from our support systems back home. We all agreed that it was terribly, terribly important, with unimaginable repercussions for our future as a space-faring species; and also, paradoxically, that maybe it was just one of those things best written off as a miracle beyond our ken, a practical joke on the part of the Universe that we might have been better off just accepting until the answer decided to reveal itself.
They were two old, midwestern white folks who happened to live in a cozy little house on an acre of grass in an otherwise unremarkable spot on the lunar landscape, and they inspired intense passionate debate over whether they were as human as they appeared to be, aliens pulling off a wholly persuasive disguise, some kind of solid projection by an advance race that wanted to study us but didn’t want to venture close enough to catch our cooties, or perhaps something even stranger, some manifestation of Clarke’s law that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
About all that everybody agreed on was that that it was pretty damn wonderful that they were good neighbors who enjoyed spending time with us.
Like everybody else, I came close to losing what sanity I possess the first time I was taken to visit them, and like everybody else, I came to love them and soon arrived at the conclusion that I never wanted to get used to them. The sense of wonder, the sense that this mystery posed no possible threat, felt too precious to be insulted by measurements.
Boosler pulled up next to their fenced-in lot in the same jumble of tire treads and boot prints that the early colonists had been compiling since Armstrong and Aldrin made what was not then acknowledged as, but has since been generally agreed to have been First Contact. “Go in.”
I said, “You’re not coming? I thought we were going to be briefed together.”
“I’ve already been briefed. The old folks will make sure you’re in the loop.”
“Booze? You’re scaring me.”
“I know,” she said, and though the professional calm never left her voice, I also thought I picked up a hitch in her voice, the belated slip after an hour and twenty minutes of nearly silent transit. “And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. But this visit’s all yours.”
There is a simple human habit of studying the other human being’s face once they’ve said something that makes no sense, and I gave it a second now, even though her face was hidden from me. I happen to believe now that the eye contact I was denied would not have helped; Booze’s wall was too high, her stoic front too impenetrable even without the extra added barrier of faceplate.
After a moment, I said, “Roger that,” and began the process of switching over to my suit’s air supply.
Once I was done, I muttered something about seeing her later at base and hopped down from the cab. I circled around the vehicle to the picket fence’s front gate, the one next to the old-fashioned mailbox with the little raised flag indicating a recent delivery: and I had no doubt that there would be magazines and circulars inside, though it had been forever, as far as we could tell, since Minnie and Earl had received a bill.
I flashed back to an advisory I’d been given, about the early stages of our doomed attempts to understand their presence, when somebody had hit on the idea of pocketing a time-share brochure that Minnie and Earl would not possibly miss, and subjecting it to analysis to determine whether it was really terrestrial paper; and such it had turned out to be, but that unhelpful result had not been worth Minnie’s sad and sorrowful later advisory to the perpetrator that stealing mail was rude and that he would not be welcomed in their home until he apologized for disrespecting their privacy.
On the Moon, in those days, it was not dangerous to get Minnie and Earl mad at you, but it was sure as hell mortifying.
I opened the gate and stepped inside, my boots landing on bright green lawn instead of brittle lunar soil. As always, the closed environment of my suit did not stop me from registering the thousand and one subtle changes that went along with the drastic changes of my surrounding space: the sunlight now filtered by a planetary atmosphere, the sense that my cooling systems were no longer laboring to keep me comfortable and alive, and muffled but clearly present, birdsong. None of which made any sense, of course, but that was an inherent part of visiting Minnie and Earl. That was the part of it that conveyed nothing but delight. I could not get used to it, but I was currently far more troubled by the other mysteries of the day.
I stepped away from the gate and began to dismantle my suit. Etiquette at Minnie and Earl’s dictated that visitors should feel no self-consciousness stripping to whatever we had on underneath, right out there on the nice green lawn, rather than track lunar soil into the house. I could not quite process the logical consistency of this provision, since in practice anyone who was staying for dinner was then expected to bring their dusty suits upstairs to be left in a traditional visitor’s coatpile in the bedroom, but this was again an old problem and I did understand the necessity of complying with local house rules.
My real problem was that visitors who knew that they were coming to visit Minnie and Earl usually took care to have comfortable terrestrial garb on underneath, and I’d had no idea I was coming and was therefore in the most comfortable skivvies I could have under a moonsuit, a light gray t-shirt and very flimsy briefs of the same shade. It was a little like showing up at a garden party wearing a bathing suit and clutching an inner tube. But it was not to be helped, and so I dutifully stripped down to what felt like a bright August day, in an American Ohio.
I heard a lawnmower, though I knew that I would not encounter one. The distant sound of lawnmowers was a permanent part of the ambience here. I heard birdsong, and knew it quite likely that I might run into a sparrow or cardinal before the day was over. I smelled a whiff of barbecue, as always knowing that the jovial old boy who had fired up the grill was just an element of the milieu who would not do what such guys often do and show up to ruin anybody’s day with an angry polemic about the Presidential election. I saw a Monarch butterfly flutter past, and found myself wondering if it was actually a representative of its sadly vanished species or something else, something far more advanced and alien.
I called out, “Minnie? Earl? Anybody?”
It occurred to me that every other time I’d been here I’d come as part of a large group, as just another participant of the happy if baffled get-togethers all of us got to have at Minnie and Earl’s house. I’d never been here alone, never when not surrounded on all sides by other human beings whose origins I knew, whose birth planet could be reported with some degree of certainty. But from the silence around me, and from Boosler’s assertion that this visit was for me alone, I might have been the only human being present—at least, if I credited the common wisdom that Minnie and Earl were probably anything but.
Why weren’t they out on the porch, giving me a hearty welcome as they greeted all of us every time we dropped by?
I felt uneasy again.
And that’s when I was indeed greeted by a genuine, unambiguous alien intelligence.
He came trotting around the porch, tail wagging, jaw agape in that delighted smile common to all golden retrievers. He was joy personified, as all his kind are whenever they see someone they know, and even if I forced myself to remember that the big broad grin of our canine brothers has more to do with respiration than happiness, the rest of his body provided enthusiastic testimony that my arrival had still made his day.
For just this heartbeat, the sight of him was enough to banish all worry. “Miles! Hey, Miles! Who’s a good boy?”
I went to my knees. He barreled into me with the heedless energy common to his kind, licking my cheeks and whining with canine urgency. I did not remind myself that he was probably no more ordinary dog than Minnie and Earl were ordinary people; that he might have been simulation, or artifact, or strange visitor who had just chosen this form as they had chosen theirs; I mean, I knew that, but whatever he was happened to be very talented at being a dog, and the nature of the species was that they are very talented at being a friend when you need one. I scratched him all over, complimenting him for being such a good dog, and he inhabited radiant happiness at me for being there, and for a few seconds all was right with the Universe, even those parts of it that didn’t make any sense.
Eventually he stepped back and spun in circles, anxious for me to do whatever came next.
Etiquette dictated that I gather up the components of my moonsuit and bring them as far as the porch, so I bent to the task.
He closed his fanged mouth on my wrist.
Domesticated dogs possess an uncanny talent for gripping other living creatures with a mouth filled with knives and not breaking skin. It can communicate play, and it can communicate urgency, but they have a way of making you know that it is not malice.
Miles appealed to me with his moist, brown, impossibly wise eyes, exactly like the eyes of every other other golden I have ever known.
No. Come with me.
“Come on, boy. I can’t just leave them here.”
He tugged again, this time adding a whine for emphasis.
No. It’ll be okay. This is more important. Come with me. Please.
“Okay. I understand.”
He relinquished my wrist but remained at my heel, shepherding me up the three wooden stairs to the homey porch with its potted plants and hanging swing. I noted the defiant little cactus being contemplated by the clay figurine of a comical little Mexican man in striped poncho and sombrero, a new addition, and I must report that I had the brief thought, That’s racist, before that thought was quashed by a second, No, this is Minnie and Earl’s house, of course it isn’t.
We entered the house. I called out to Minnie and Earl, but they didn’t answer. I began to feel like an intruder. But Miles nudged me in the direction of the narrow stairs to the second floor, and I obliged him, taking his direction to a bedroom I’d explored before, one that showed every sign of past occupancy by a bright and much-beloved son. There were shelves lined with his favorite books, which included Twain and Asimov and Bradbury and Harlan Ellison and the Hardy Boys, but also Frederick Prokosch and Joe R. Lansdale and Charlie Jane Anders and N.K. Jemisin. I recalled one of the few concrete things Minnie and Earl had told us about themselves, that they’d had a son and that he’d died in some war, long ago; though I somehow doubted that the vintage of the books provided any real intelligence about what that war was or when it had been fought; I had no doubt that the boy had been real and that his absence had broken the heart of his parents, but I also had the sense that the conflict in question had been long, long before any of the copyright dates and that this had somehow not stopped him from reading these particular volumes and many others, from god alone knew how many eras. In any event, the newest book was decades old.
I had never seen the Jemisin before, but it looked well-thumbed. A datum I could not possess enough context to interpret.
There was no TV, no laptop, of any vintage.
(There never had been. Minnie and Earl occasionally had movie nights, centering on classic Hollywood and at least once featuring the incomprehensible attendance of the vintage deceased stars who had been in the selections in question, but no televisions were involved. They were of the opinion that movies needed to be projected in darkness. I suppose I would only confuse you by specifying that they managed this without the presence of a projector.)
The bed was made, complete with mounds of big fluffy pillows and a comforter decadent enough to make even someone as deeply awake and on alert as I was wont to curl up for an immediate midafternoon nap. An antique pulp magazine in mint condition, not yellowed in the slightest, sat on the pillow: the October 1940 issue of Astounding magazine. It happened to be the first publication of a story called “Farewell to the Master,” by one Harry Bates, and I happened to know that it was the basis of two motion pictures called The Day the Earth Stood Still, one terrific 1951 version with Michael Rennie and one subpar 2008 version with Keanu Reeves. Its significance here, as the only unshelved book, escaped me. A single page of lined yellow paper, torn from some spiral notepad and still bearing the ragged streamers that remained when the sheet was ripped from the wire, bore three lines in a practiced cursive that I presumed to be Minnie’s:
Hello, Leticia.
We didn’t want to embarrass you.
We left clothing for you in the closet.
Please freshen up, get presentable enough to satisfy yourself, and join us in the den at your leisure.
(Over)
I’d already noticed that there was writing on both sides. I admit to flashing a grin at the (Over), an advisory that I felt only a cute old lady would leave.
I flipped the sheet to read the other side.
It read:
In a little while, we’ll be answering some questions for you, that your friends have wanted answered for some time. You can share as much of it as you want, or not.
Why we chose you is something else we’ll talk about, but please be patient. Let us do it this way. Until then, just know that you are welcome, and that we care for you as much as we care for any of your people, which is very very much indeed.
Humanity as a race and you as an individual are loved on a scale that I promise you you cannot even imagine.
(Over)
This second (Over) puzzled me until I flipped the sheet again and saw the closing paragraph on a page that bore no sign of its previous contents.
Take your time. Lie down if you like. Give Miles a snuggle if you want. We’ll be ready when you are.
Love,
Minnie.
Out of reflex I flipped the page again, and this time found the opening paragraphs, repeated. I had no doubt that I could just go on flipping the page over and over, for hours if I wanted to, and the letter would just go on repeating forever, the same way it would have if it had been written on two sides instead of three. I guessed that the third side, that little casual but still stunning demonstration of the advanced technology at their disposal, was there to remind me of the kind of beings I was dealing with, a reminder that I should take take seriously anything that they took seriously.
And this was itself unusual. Minnie and Earl had never engaged in such cheap tricks, not in any of our casual get-togethers. They didn’t have to. Their house, their little plot of land, was itself a scientific impossibility, to the extent of qualifying as miracle. They sometimes dropped crazy references to famous people they’d met, major historical events they’d attended, but this was a parlor trick. I somehow knew that I was being kept off-balance, for some reason.
“You are,” Miles said.
Had I been drinking water, I might have done a spit-take.
But there the dog was, smiling at the great joke he’d just pulled. Which happened to be the default expression of every golden retriever I had ever met. His tongue lolled.
I got the impression that he was more intelligent than I had ever been, or ever would be. It wasn’t the clichéd, As far above us as we are to the lowliest ant kind of thing, still being hauled out late in this second consecutive century of Star Trek reboots, but it was absolute confirmation of something I’d quietly suspected for many visits, that he was sure as shit a lot more than just another dumb dog.
I had no doubt that he could have carried on an extended and fascinating conversation with someone a hell of a lot more erudite than myself, any time he wanted.
But I said, “That’s all you’re ever going to say to me, isn’t it, boy? You’re gonna be like that ancient cartoon frog and not say another damn thing in front of any other witnesses.”
His bright grin broadened.
Yup. Your species is so silly.
I said, “Am I condescending to you by calling you boy? Or when I tell you that you’re a good dog?”
The smile vanished, in the way dog smiles do when things suddenly get very serious. Their perspiration needs usually prevent them from suppressing those grins for long, but they know what facial expressions human beings respond to, and they know what a serious one requires. I interpreted this look as a mortified apology, and again assigned it a specific text. Oh, please don’t think that. Don’t suppress your natural responses. Besides, I love being called a good dog. It’s my identity.
“Fine,” I said. “If that’s what you want. But you’re not a good dog. You’re a great dog.”
His tail thumped the hardwood floor.
I went to the closet and checked out the hanging clothes, all of which happened to be my size. There were shelves with socks and undergarments and a fine array of comfortable shoes. I decided to humor the rural ambience and put on a light denim skirt with white blouse, and sneakers over white socks. There was a full-length mirror on the back of the door, and I regarded myself in silent judgment, because my immediate reaction was that I looked like I was trying to be twelve. But when in Rome, as they say.
I turned to Miles. “I guess it’s time to do this.”
His tail resumed its floor-thump.
I headed for the stairs, the very good dog—a part of his identity, regardless of anything else he was—following close behind.
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Copyright © 2024. Minnie and Earl Have a Kitten by Adam-Troy Castro