A Dusk of Demons Page 16
He asked her: “Did you ever get to visit there? Rome, I mean?”
She nodded. “We spent a year there once. Father—your grandfather—had lived there when he was an art student.”
“What’s it like?”
“Oh, well . . .” She looked at him. “You’ve seen modern Rome in the films. That one last week.”
“I know. But I mean—what’s it really like?”
She looked away from him. “It’s so long ago, Marty. I don’t remember properly.” She looked through the window toward the ramp. “I think that’s your father.”
Marty glanced at his finger-watch. “It’s too early for him.”
“He said he might get away early today.” The door opened, and she said with what sounded like relief: “Hello, darling.”
They kissed, and his father said: “Hi, boy. They let me off the leash half an hour before time. How about you and me heading up to the reservoir and catching us two or three trout for supper?”
• • •
The reservoir, like the park in which it stood, was one of the things intended to make life more natural. Keeping the recirculated water of the Bubble in this small open lake meant an extra cost in filtering and purifying plant. All such costs had to be very carefully considered. The Moon colony did what it could toward paying its way by mining and refining precious metals which were rocketed back to the mother planet, but apart from that its value lay in the less commercial fields of astronomical, selenographic and interplanetary research. The taxpayers back home footed the bill, and there was small scope for luxuries. This one, though, was regarded as justifiable. The water in the lake was only a degree or so below the Bubble atmospheric temperature of 18° centigrade, and trout flourished in it. Anyone who wanted to fish for natural protein was at liberty to do so. Other fish were grown in tanks. Meat came from the factory farm, with battery chicken as the mainstay.
Marty and his father made their way through the park to their usual fishing spot. There were four carefully trimmed lawns, flower beds and borders, a clump of shrubbery. Everything was calculated for economy and for the carefully planned balance of life in the Bubble. The flowers were specially bred to last and all the shrubs were evergreens: deciduous plants could have been trained to adapt to a world with no seasons, but their falling leaves would have been a nuisance.
The lake had been constructed asymmetrically, in a distorted kidney shape. The Bubble itself had to be a regular hemisphere, but as far as possible things inside it were given irregular shapes and lines in an attempt to avoid monotony. Even so, even with a part of its rim left in the irregular black basalt of the Moon’s natural surface, the pool could not seem anything but artificial. Anyway, there was not an inch of its border, of any place inside the Bubble, that was not as familiar to Marty as the walls of his bedroom. Nothing changed. Changing things would have cost money.
They fished in silence for a time. During lunar night the Bubble was artificially lit by high-poled lamps which were faded out toward the end of the twelve-hour day through a rheostat at the electricity plant. At the moment they were still fully lit. Marty could see the others fishing around them, twenty or thirty, each in the place to which he came automatically. He thought of a feature film he had seen on TV about salmon fishing in Norway, with a thigh-booted man standing out in a torrent that foamed around his legs, and the valley empty to the distant gray horizon.
His father said: “You heard about Paul.”
It was not a question. Marty nodded. “Yes, he told me.”
“I was talking to his father today. There’s a medical factor involved. You know what a long streak Paul has turned into. They’ve always known that rehabilitation to Earth gravity is tougher on tall Lunarians—it’s pretty obvious why—and recently they’ve come to the view that if you leave things too late you get permanent posture trouble. The doctors think Paul’s that sort of case.”
“I see.”
“The Millers aren’t happy about it, but they have to put his health first, of course. They’ve only got three years of contract to run, but it’s a long time.”
Marty asked: “Where will he be living, on Earth?”
“With his grandparents in California. Just outside San Francisco.”
“Sounds like a good place. We’ve been doing the United States in geography.”
“Pretty good. I’m from New England myself.”
Marty knew that, and also knew it was something his parents did not normally talk about. In the Bubble there was a good deal of general talk about Earth—about what TV showed was happening there—but people did not speak much about their own earlier lives.
After a pause, his father said again: “The Millers have only three years to go themselves. That helps.”
“I suppose it does.”
His father cast, and the line floated out across the placid, unrippled waters. He said: “Fifty generations of fish that have never seen a real fly but they still rise to the lure. This is a tricky problem, Marty. I’ve not talked about it before because it’s just about impossible to explain it. Some people send their children down when they’re four or five. That means they grow up as strangers, with strangers. There’s a case for it. You can make a case for doing it at any age. The Dickinsons sent Clive when he was twelve because that was the age for entry to Peter Dickinson’s old boarding school in England.
“We gave it a lot of thought, your mother and I. We decided to keep you till you were ready for a university. Maybe we were being selfish—I don’t know. One of the arguments on our side was that you and Paul were such buddies—had been since you crawled around a sandpit together, before you could walk. I guess that one has kind of blown up in our faces.”
Marty did not say anything. His father went on: “We’ve been thinking about things again. We decided you are old enough to make a decision for yourself. If you want to go down, we’ll fix it.”
“Where would I live?”
“We’ve got relatives in different places. You could have a choice.”
His father had spoken evenly and casually, but Marty realized there was nothing casual about this, nor about the decision he should make. He was excited, and guessed the excitement could have shown in his voice. He was a bit ashamed and, realizing that, realized something else—that it really would mean leaving them, for six long years. He would be down on Earth and they would be still up here in the Bubble. He imagined seeing his mother’s anxious face, not in reality but on the flickering circle of the visiphone screen, rationed to a few minutes at a time. He said quickly: “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to go down.”
“You’re sure of that? You could give it thought. You don’t have to make your mind up right away.”
“I’m sure,” he said. “I’m fine here.”
“Then I’m very glad. Especially on account of your mother. Life here is more of a strain on some people than others. They miss things more, things they knew back on Earth. Your mother does.”
But you don’t, Marty thought with sudden resentment. He looked at his father’s tall, upright figure, the strong chin, high-cheekboned face, steady gray eyes. You’re happy enough here.
“It would have been rough for her if you had decided to go. It’s going to be pretty rough for Mrs. Miller.”
The excitement had gone; in its place there was a sick feeling in his stomach. He had been offered the trip to Earth and had turned it down. He was stuck with the Bubble.
His father said: “Hey, you’re not watching your line! That looks like a big one.”
• • •
He went with the Millers by crawler to the launch station. It was six miles away along the edge of the Sea of Rains, as a precaution against blowups damaging or maybe even destroying the Bubble. The caterpillar tracks took them steadily with occasional jolts across the Moon’s surface, from time to time plunging through dust pockets and sending dust scattering on either side, a shower of floating sparks in the rays of the risen sun.
Nobody
spoke much. At the launch station they went on board with Paul and saw him for the last time, with all of them crowded together in the capsule. There was the bunk in which he would lie, cushioned for takeoff. And for landing. It was hard to believe that in a few weeks he would be breathing the air of Earth, not inside a protective dome but out of the whole wide sky of the planet.
Paul said: “You’ll write to me. I’m counting on that.”
“Sure,” Marty said. “You, too. If you don’t find you have too many other things to do.”
But he would, of course. Paul said: “I won’t. Bye, Mom, Dad. I’ll visiphone you right away, soon as I land.”
Mrs. Miller kissed Paul. Mr. Miller put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing hard. Then they had to get out and take a cabin across to the control center. From the viewing level they heard the relay of the countdown, and saw the exhaust gases rise in a fiery cloud from the pit before the ship itself began to rise, sliding out of its sheath, slowly at first and then faster and faster until it was a gleaming, vanishing speck in the sky. That was when Mrs. Miller started crying.
She had stopped by the time they took the crawler back to the Bubble, but the silence was worse than on the way out. Marty left them at the main airlock to make his way home. Mr. Miller said: “Thanks for coming along, Marty.”
Mrs. Miller said: “You’ll come and see us still?” Her hands held his lightly. “We wouldn’t like to lose touch with you, Marty.”
As if one could lose touch with anyone inside the confines of the Bubble. He said: “I won’t lose touch, Mrs. Miller.”
JOHN CHRISTOPHER is a pseudonym of Samuel Youd, who was born in Lancashire, England, in 1922. He is the author of more than fifty novels and novellas, as well as numerous short stories. His most famous books include The Death of Grass, the Tripods trilogy, The Lotus Caves, and The Guardians.
ALADDIN
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Also by John Christopher
From Aladdin
THE TRIPODS SERIES
The White Mountains
The City of Gold and Lead
The Pool of Fire
When the Tripods Came
The Lotus Caves
The Guardians
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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This Aladdin hardcover edition November 2014
Text copyright © 1994 by John Christopher
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The text of this book was set in Venetian 301.
Library of Congress Control Number 2014944605
ISBN 978-1-4814-2019-8 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4814-2018-1 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4814-2020-4 (eBook)