Sea of Tranquility(24)

I watched footage of that press conference in my sister Zoey’s office, three hundred years after the fact. The president behind the lectern with her officials arrayed around her, a crowd of reporters below the stage. One of them raised his hand: “Are we sure it’s going to be a supernova?”

“Of course not,” the president said. “It could be anything. Rogue planet, asteroid storm, you name it. The point is that we’re orbiting a star, and all stars eventually die.”

“But if the star dies,” I said to Zoey, “obviously the Earth’s moon goes with it.”

“Sure,” she said, “but we’re just the prototype, Gaspery. We’re just proof of concept. The Far Colonies have been populated for a hundred and eighty years.”





2


The first moon colony was built on the silent flatlands of the Sea of Tranquility, near where the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed in a long-ago century. Their flag was still there, in the distance, a fragile little statue on the windless surface.

There was substantial interest in immigration to the colony. Earth was so crowded by then, and such swaths of it had been rendered uninhabitable by flooding or heat. The colony’s architects had set aside space for substantial residential development, which sold out quickly. The developers lobbied successfully for a second colony when they ran out of space in Colony One. But Colony Two was built a little too hastily, and within a century the lighting system on the main dome had failed. The lighting system was meant to mimic the appearance of the sky as viewed from Earth—it was nice to look up and see blue, as opposed to looking up into the void—and when it failed there was no more false atmosphere, no more shifting pixelations to give the impression of clouds, no more carefully calibrated preprogrammed sunrises and sunsets, no more blue. Which is not to suggest that there wasn’t light, but that light was extremely un-Earthlike: on a bright day, the colonists looked up into space. The juxtaposition of utter darkness with bright light made some people dizzy, although whether this was physical or psychological was up for debate. More seriously, the failure of the dome lighting removed the illusion of the twenty-four-hour day. Now the sun rose rapidly and spent two weeks crossing the sky, after which there were two straight weeks of night.

The cost of repair was deemed prohibitive. There was a degree of adaptation—bedroom windows were outfitted with shutters, so people could sleep during the nights when the sun was out, and street lighting was improved for the days without sunlight—but property values declined, and most people who could afford it moved to Colony One or the recently completed Colony Three. “Colony Two” drifted out of common parlance; everyone called it the Night City. It was the place where the sky was always black.

I grew up in the Night City. My walk to school took me past the childhood home of Olive Llewellyn, an author who’d walked those same streets two hundred years ago, not too far out from the moon’s first settlers. It was a little house on a tree-lined street, and I could tell that it had been pretty once, but the neighborhood had gone downhill since Olive Llewellyn had been a child there. The house was a wreck now, half the windows covered up and graffiti everywhere, but the plaque by the front door remained. I paid the house no attention, until my mother told me she’d named me after a peripheral character in Marienbad, Llewellyn’s most famous book. I didn’t read the book—I didn’t like books—but my sister Zoey did and reported back: the Gaspery-Jacques in the book wasn’t anything like me.

I decided not to ask her what she meant. I was eleven when she read it, which would have made her thirteen or fourteen. By then she was already a serious, driven kind of person who was obviously going to excel at everything she attempted, whereas by eleven I already had the first suspicions that I might not be exactly the kind of person I wanted to be, and it would be awful if she were to tell me that the other Gaspery-Jacques were, say, a strikingly handsome and generally impressive person who was extremely focused on his schoolwork and never committed petty theft. But nonetheless I began to secretly regard Olive Llewellyn’s childhood home with a degree of respect. I felt connected to it.

There was a family living there, a boy and a girl and their parents, pale, miserable-looking people who possessed this weird talent for conveying an impression that they were up to no good. They had an air of having gone to seed, the whole family. Their last name was Anderson. The parents spent a lot of time on the porch, arguing quietly or staring into space. The boy was surly and got into fights at school. The girl, who was about my age, liked to play with a hologram in the front yard, an old-fashioned mirror hologram who danced with her sometimes, and that was actually the only time I saw the Anderson girl smile anywhere near her house, when she was spinning and leaping and her holographic double was spinning and leaping too.

When I was twelve, the Anderson girl was in the same class as me, and I learned her name was Talia. Who was Talia Anderson? She loved to draw. She did backflips on the field. She looked much happier at school than she did at home.

“I know you,” she said abruptly one day, when we were in the cafeteria line together. “You’re always walking by my house.”

“It’s on my way,” I said.

“On your way to what?”

“Well, on my way to everywhere. I live at the end of the cul-de-sac.”

“I know,” she said.