The Moonborn: or, Moby-Dick on the Moon Page 9

  “How do you know?” I whispered, my hands clutching the armrests of my leather seat. Her seat had armrests too but she clutched nothing but the steering saucer in her hand.

  “It’s zig zagging,” she whispered back, although there could be no logical reason why. The creature was far below us, unable to hear, a distant, slow-moving herbivore.

  “Can it hurt us?”

  “Remember I told you that the majority of these are harmless? This one is no exception.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “You need to grab your saucer,” she said. “You’re going to fire when I tell you.”

  “Can’t you fire?”

  “I’m not firing,” she said. The bot grew below us. The craters grew too as we sank, approaching both the bot and the surface. As it came into view, I saw the wear of time on its surface. I saw what it was that we fought. Machine made by man, the first to the place, the trailblazer that faced extinction from its own maker.

  Let’s stop a moment, and take a closer look at how this creature got there.

  Eight

  First came the Eagle, the Apollos, the small step and the giant leap. Then came a handful more sun-gods, the men reaching out and touching the rock above their heads.

  But then came the great pause, the pregnant absence, the abyss of travel. Men and women orbited, but they had abandoned the grasp at lunacy, the dreams of colonies and bases.

  Until the commercial travel, of course, the Brandts and their capitalist friends, the Rumfords and Wests and their companions. But before there were any Moonborns, before the First Moonling, first there came the robots, the AIMs, sent to map the new land.

  Before any permanent settlement came to the Moon, first came the pioneer robots.

  Moonborn and his crew, they called them mappers, to distinguish them from those who came later.

  Their purpose held clarity from the beginning. A fully realized machine, launched up there to map, to document, to classify and learn every nook and cranny and crater.

  But like every human-created object, like every artificial intelligence machine, every robot, it became irrelevant and obsolete, a dated entity crawling for no one. The programs had all been dismantled, and there had been many: Mobi Moon, Gamelan Maps, Trueblue Lunar, and so on and so on. The mapping projects had been brave and bold but, once completed, what was there to do with these solar-powered, machine-learning, constantly developing creations? What good did they do?

  They did nothing. They served no one but themselves, served nothing, broken forgotten pioneers in a place where all had become known.

  This is the creature that I destroyed, as Q took a quick, sweeping course over it. I zapped it with a laser and it was dead.

  Nine

  “Two robots destroyed,” Moonborn announced, to the crew gathered in the library.

  He and Starboy had landed the Ozymandias on the great whiteness, by the charred and shattered remnants of the helpless mapper. The crew, all of us, carried the remnants under the great beam of the Oz, melting it once again into the surface.

  Some of us drank coffee, others champagne, others sparkling cider. All I knew was my own glass, a flute of champagne, trying to dull the rattling from the destruction of that defenseless machine.

  Should I have felt guilt?

  Is it killing if the creature never lived?

  “We take pride in these victories,” Moonborn said, looking flushed with joy and self-congratulation, a fevered and giddy and self-admiring reassurance that all of it, all of it, was going exactly to plan. “After dinner we celebrated the killing of one robot and now, before many of us have eaten breakfast, we celebrate another. And this is a cause for joy, for celebration, for everything. Let us glad-hand, let us back-pat, let us gather in joy and in communion. Let us tell ourselves that this is everything we have come here to do, and in some sense, it is.”

  This concerned me. I looked around at the faces of the others in the crew and found some relief in seeing that, yes, it concerned them too.

  “In former days,” Moonborn continued, “men and women carried money. Doubloons, they sometimes called them. Galleons, other times. Gold pieces, shiny, glittering. You could carry one in your pocket and take it out, flip it in circles, pay for a drink or a meal, a horse or a house or a car. But now, we don’t do any of that, do we? We have money, but it has no physical manifestation. And I understand it, I do. I can bring back paper books and vehicles with no self-driving capacity, I can bring back clothes made of cloth, but I have to accept my limits, and one of those is that I have managed to introduce no physical currency. It is what it is what it is.

  “But that is not the purpose of this speech, nor of this gathering. And, yes, I’ve called all of you to the library to celebrate yet another victory, another squashing of our mechanical enemies. But that is not it, that is not all. There is one particular enemy that I wish to discuss, one particular creature that we must discuss. One enemy, one foe, one devil of metal and mechanics and mace.

  “It is the artificial intelligence machine to end them all, the AIM for which we aim, the crippling and defeating beast of the Moon’s far side. They call it, or I call it, the White.”

  “The white bot? The white AIM?” Q responded quickly, seemingly before Moonborn had finished his flourishing speech of honor and glory.

  “That is the one,” Moonborn said cautiously, eyeing Q as she spoke.

  “They call it Cetus,” she said. “You know that I know this robot, Adam.”

  “I do know,” he said.

  “And this is the reason we are out here? To destroy a particular AIM?”

  “We are here to destroy all of them,” Moonborn answered. “But there is one in particular that will give us the hardest time, one that is quickest, the most clever and the most awful of them all. The White will give us the worst chase, the toughest destruction, the deadliest killing.”

  “Captain Moonborn,” a new voice chimed in. Starboy, that pale and sneering and small man. The man who, from everything I had seen, had shown nothing but a loyalty to Moonborn, a thoughtless and questionless unwavering commitment to the direction of Moonborn’s sails.

  “Starboy,” Moonborn said, looking to his new challenger.

  “Captain Moonborn, we know what the White did to you. And those of us who don’t know, you can be assured that they will know, moments after this gathering is adjourned.”

  A silence lingered. No one dared speak. No one dared interject into the silence that followed Starboy’s statement. This silence belonged to Adam Moonborn, to the questions and the challenges pointed at him.

  “Thank you, Dunn,” Moonborn said. “Thank you for keeping me honest, or whatever it is that you are doing. Yes, yes, it was the accursed White that took my family. And I’ll chase him through the Moon’s dark sides and far sides and around perdition’s flames before I give this up. And yes, yes, yes. This is what you have joined me for, men and women. Crewmembers. To chase this white AIM, the White, on all the empty seas and over all sides of the Moon, until he spouts black blood and ceases to exist.

  “What say you, crew? Will you take this on? I think you look brave.”

  “I’ve come here to make the Moon safe, Adam,” Starboy said.

  “Are we not making the Moon safe by destroying the White?”

  “I am game for the crooked jaws of deadly bots, Adam, and for the jaws of death too, if it comes in the way of our business. But I came here to hunt robots. All the robots. All the AIMs. I came here to hunt robots and to make the Moon a better place, a safer place. A greater place. I am not here for vengeance. I am here as Vice President of Lunar Operations for Gamelan Corporation. You know that. I know that. They know that.”

  “No one has said that anyone does not know that,” Moonborn answered. His voice stayed stern, steady, confident, but something had crept in. A tremble I had not heard before.

  “Vengeance on a dumb machine, Adam! You said that it was more than this. This is blindness.”

&n
bsp; “We can finish this conversation later.”

  “Not when you’ve involved the entire crew. They aren’t here to die for this one machine. Jennifer Curtis did not fly here from Earth to tell your story, just to die. And Ishmael. What of Ishmael?”

  “That’s enough, Dunn,” Moonborn said. “How can the prisoner escape his walls unless he attacks them?”

  “What?” Starboy stared at him, humorless, enraged. His pale face had become red, the ghost now blushing.

  “The White is the prisoner’s wall. The White is the Earth, holding us back and holding us down. The White is the failures of our past, the chains that giants wear. It’s the Sun and the Earth, insulting us. The stars mocking us. I am not angering you, not intentionally. This is not about you. This is not about any of you, nothing to do with all of you. This is my voyage, my Ozymandias, but you are all my crew, the crew, the crew meant to end this thing.”

  “Adam.”

  “No, no. No. Look behind us. We leave a wake of destruction already.”

  And with that, Moonborn left the room, and us in it.

  Discussion Questions on the Text Thus Far

  1. In this section, we have seen the further influence of outside sources. What significance do these other books hold?

  2. What have you learned of robots in this section? What effect will this new knowledge have on your life?

  3. Did Ishmael have any option but to kill the robot? What would you have done? Did he kill an innocent creature? If so, why? If not, why not? What is innocence, and how does it apply to robots?

  4. What is it to live? Does a robot live? Does a robot die?

  5. What is Ishmael to do?

  6. Where is he to go?

  Canto Five: The West

  One

  From there, it became serene, tranquil, smooth.

  At least, for a few moments it did.

  The emptiness and quiet of a full day in the seas of the Moon, the crew of the Ozymandias lured into sleep and relaxation. Not the non-stop business I’d anticipated, not the chaos and movement of the first two days, but a floating through a lunar sky and sea, a ship hovering, existing over the blank slate of that foreign land.

  It became a brief abyss of peace and calm, after the first and second killings, and before the rest of them.

  We reached something on that third day: the dark part of the Moon.

  Two: or, “A Funny Way of Day and Night”

  From Stephen Monahan’s The Stranger’s Guide to the Moon:

  As we already told you, the Moon has a funny way of handling night and day. The days last for a month, as do the nights.

  But do you understand why? And do you understand how it might impact your visit up here?

  The Moon always faces the Earth in the same way.

  Think about that. Do you understand what that means?

  Notice that every time you look up at a Full Moon, it looks exactly the same. That same face, or woman, or rabbit, or whatever it is that you see: it’s always the same, isn’t it?

  That’s because one side of the Moon is always looking at the Earth, and the other side has never seen the Earth.

  We call them the Near Side and the Far Side. Or the Earth Side and the Space Side. Some people call them Side A and Side B, a silly reference to an old thing called vinyl records.

  Some people like to call them This Side and the Other Side, regardless of which side they’re on when they’re talking. But that can get confusing!

  At all times, half of the Moon is in darkness, and half of it in light. It is for that reason that you might call them the Light Side and the Dark Side. But remember: the light and dark are always moving around. They don’t stay still. They might move a lot slower than light and day on Earth, but that doesn’t mean they’re not moving!

  Three

  We moved toward the lunar west, toward the dark part of the Moon. We still had a view of Earth, when we wanted it. The Moon waxed, in the eyes of Earthlings, steps on its path from crescent to half to gibbous to full. A waxing gibbous, to the Earthling eye; a Moon nearing full.

  To us, all we saw was that it was day for the first few days, until we reached the dark.

  The mood had shifted. Silence hung around the ship now, thick, an anxiety and uncertainty like humidity or pollution. While the first two days saw action, with a robot killed after dinner on the first night and before breakfast on the second, we had seen nothing new and our saucer hovered along.

  I waited to be told what to do, waited to learn what would be next. Meals were no longer announced or conducted in any formal way, but we ate when hungry. I stood guard in the Bow Deck, wandered the halls, and looked at the stack of papers and books Moonborn had given me.

  I pondered the disagreements between Starboy and Moonborn, and what they meant for the ship and the journey.

  The evening of the third day, with no watch until the next morning, I wandered to the salt pool in the Port Quadrant. I had not been there yet, having been uncertain and nervous about using the various facilities of the Ozymandias.

  I wore my swim trunks, a towel around my neck, flip-flops on my feet, from my cabin to the salt pool. I had been uncertain if this fell within etiquette, before seeing Nikolai doing the same thing the day before.

  And then I reached the salt pool and saw Q and Jennifer Curtis, in their swimwear, sitting in the dimmed blueish lighting. They wore dark, long-sleeved, fashionable swimwear, matching. Of course the swimwear matched. Their swimsuits, just like mine, had been provided to them.

  They stared at me. I had interrupted an important conversation.

  “What are you doing here?” Q asked.

  Self-awareness and anxiety washed over me in a pathetic wave. Waltzing in thinking I’m James Bond to discover two beautiful women in a salt pool, only to remember that I’m a seven-foot tall galoot in a place where people rarely break six feet. A bumbling buffoon, a confused giant, the kind of man who repels when he attempts to attract. I like to imagine that I’m a tall dark stranger when really, I’m just a strange man who is too tall. I mean, I am tall, but kinda in a weird way, and I’m mildly dark, and because I am timid in social situations, I often remain a stranger.

  “I’m here,” I attempted, “because, um, is it okay? Is the salt pool open?”

  “We were in the middle of a conversation,” Jennifer Curtis answered. “For the book. The one I’m working on.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Your book.”

  “But you can join us,” she said. “You may offer contradicting opinions.”

  “I will join you then,” I said, setting my towel on one of the chairs near the small salt pool. It should be noted that this pool was small, strikingly small, but not to the point where my legs would be curling up or anything. It was large enough so that no one had to be within one another’s personal space, but small enough that no one would be doing laps. The pool was for leisure, escape, but not exercise.

  I stepped into the lukewarm saltwater, lowering myself into it. I looked at the two women, making an effort to only make eye contact and not look at their bodies.

  I think I need to clarify here that I have described these women in relation to their looks only because I think it’s important, not necessarily because of what it says about them but because of what it says about Adam Moonborn and the world he lives in. Let’s remember that Moonborn put this crew together. Captain Moonborn put this crew together. He chose who joined him on this great crusade, and it just so happens that the two women were both good-looking, and each in a different way. Each one, also, in a way where I did not feel comfortable talking with them or interacting with them in close spaces, which made this conversation particularly uncomfortable.

  Basically, I’m trying to clarify that their looks are important to the story, but I’m not objectifying them.

  “Well,” Jennifer Curtis said. “Are you settled?”

  “Um, yes. Yes, I am.” I realized now that the two of them had been watching me with some amusement as I less
-than-gracefully settled into the salt pool, almost certainly grunting with exertion and effort as I did so.

  “I said, before you got situated, that you might be able to provide contradicting opinions.”

  “About what?” The idea that this salt pool would be a refreshing experience now seemed so distant, abstract, fleeting.

  “The rift between the brothers,” Jennifer Curtis answered. “How did it become so deep, and how did you land where you landed? The general consensus is that Adam Moonborn is a pariah in even the furthest branches of the Brandt family. Only fools join his errands.”

  “I said you probably don’t have any of the money,” Q added. “Which is fine. None of us have money either. The only wealthy person on this ship is Adam Moonborn. You don’t have to pretend to be on his scale.”

  “But is that it?” Jennifer Curtis asked.

  “Not quite,” I said. “There’s something more. Something the two of you can probably guess.”

  “You’re a flesher,” Jennifer Curtis answered. “Like all of us. You’re the one.”

  “I am,” I said, and here I wondered, again, if Jennifer Curtis knew me. If any piece of her remembered me, from the two times we had crossed paths. If she knew who I was and how I really fit in, the real shape of my jigsaw piece.

  “Wishing for the past,” she said. “Nostalgia. I was telling Q here that this entire journey, well—I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone or anything more quixotic.”

  “Quixotic,” I repeated. The lies, they had become too intertwined, too twisted, too labyrinthine at this point for me to add another layer of pretend. Quixotic. I knew that I’d heard it, in my days of wishing I were a writer. I’d heard it and could not remember what it was, what it meant, and I was too tired of pretending to pretend, in this moment, that I knew what the hell she was talking about.