Real Moon

A novel in progress, by E. K. Gordon

E. K. Gordon Page 1
Chapter 1

Beck Morain opened her eyes. Clear tropical sky, sashed by a lavender
contrail. Had won her a design award, that sky, the island, and the ocean that gave
both form – ―in an apparently endless expanse‖ the judges had said.
Virtality design, eco-class, first place.
But was she happy?
The tabby catclock turned it‘s face to her: 8:14.
―Shit!‖
She jumped up and voiced the cave off, squirming like a child against the
vylon hammock, sealed until it returned her to realground. In a 10 by 10 cube of
acousto, lens-rimmed squares. The lense lines glinted bright around the black
squares. Above her the tactile array—frontal lobe of the room‘s brain.
With a liquid-velcro rasp, a sigh, almost, of regret, the hammock separated
from her bodysheeth and let her out. After ninety-six hours in virtual reality.
And why was she not happy? Water ran over her wrists as she patted her
face dry.
Because I can‘t get virtual water to run over wrists the way realwater does.
Or sunlight—she pressed her face to the striped towel that had been hanging in
sunlight angled in through the bathroom window—to linger on cloth this way.
But I will.
She resented the thirty minutes in transit in reality. Foul smells, and the hard
plastic subway seat hardening the muscles of her back.
At New Eden she rode the elevator down to sub 7 and strode past her three
assistants to the design cave. Biggest, best, costing more than a 20st century space
shuttle.

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 It was a line the company used. ―More than a 20th century space shuttle,‖ she
said now, peeling the dress from her sheeth. ―And what am I doing with it?‖
Omari Neal, face to screen, said, ―making mousquito bites.‖
―And make ‗em I will thank you. Those homeschoolers gonna have frakking
orgasmic mousquitto bites. ‖
Omari laughed and looked up from the screen. Young, from the islands, dark
with dark-framed glasses, just out of a top polytechnic.
She gave a few instructions before going into the cave. For a routine
morning of haptics design, finishing off River of Grass. Or so she thought. So they
all thought.

Like an air bubble in a patch of wet cement, the main dome of Peary Crater
Prison sat very small in the half-mile wide saddle between two bright peeks,
among the tallest on the moon. Near the dome, smaller buildings and the drifting
dust motes of suited men – a dozen or so near the edge of a shallow pit wherein
scores more worked, moving in jerky hops or swiveling bowlegged strides. Banks
of towering lights circled the pit. (The peaks of the two mountains remained ever
in the sunlight, but in the valley between them night came and stayed for half an
earth month.)
The men wore bright foil suites far less bulky than early spacesuites, bullet-
shaped helmets screwed on like the lids of wide-mouthed jars. Locked on, and
only the guards with keys, can openers they were called. Because the easiest way
to die here, the first prisoners had found, was to unscrew your helmet and let the
paper bags of your lungs void into the vacuum.
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 Near the pit sat a long low cart. Tilted between it and a platform midway up
the sloping side of the pit was a three foot wide belt laden with rocks of various
sizes. Two men worked arranging the rocks as they toppled in, ocasionally
signalling to the workers below. Beyond the glare of the lights the sky was agate
black and starless.
One of the forms, the taller, leaned back to gaze up at the nearer of the
peaks. On its summit stood a kind of slim lighthouse, and from the top of that rose
a solar array – blue panels beaded along paired poles that extended, like the wings
of a dragon fly, fifty meters from either side of a center beam.
Wings drinking sunlight. Astazi felt it. Drinking to fill the belly of the
prison. Small sips from the inexaustible river ever rushing past. Rushing home.
―I must see it –‖
The other prisoner stopped pushing rocks. ―In a hundred-five, hundred-ten
hours you will.‖
The prison hunkered half way between crater floor and peek. A faint path
showed, lit part way by the pit lights. And when he left the perimeter of artificial
light, his feet would sense, would know the way to the top . . . already they moved:
one small step, another, thena long floating leap. . . .
―Are you crazy man, they‘ll cut your temp off! They‘ll –‖
With a thumb flick, stopping the voice.

She popped the sliding door with her elbow and went in.
New Eden‘s main design cave was a twenty-by-twenty black-tiled box, each
one-meter square tile rimmed with 3 centimeter wide lense-lines. At the juncture of
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floor and ceiling shone a wider line studded every meter with a speaker port — for
auditory and olfactory stimstreams. The cave‘s specs ran to six printed pages, with
more memory than all the computers in a turn of the millenium city. The speakers
could drop a pin onto velvet ten meters from your ear so you‘d hear it.
Without the bodysheeth, though, the cave was nothing more than a maxed 3-
D theatre. Which was why haptics designers earned double the rest. Do-ouble. In
five years she‘d have enough to go independent. Goodbye mousquitoes.
She walked to the hammock that dangled by spider-web cords from the array
in the center of the ceiling. Then she tipped her head back, eyes closed. The neural
plant in her frontal lobe activated the array and the hammock opened for her.
Arms at her side, she fell forward, as one falling into water. The hammock caught
her and closed with a dry fwisp, becoming one with her sheeth, nonotube molecule
to molecule. Then it lifted her into a standing position a meter or so from the floor.
Standing on air, she said ―River of grass, final draft.‖
The Everglades National Park circa 1980 appeared. Hot humid day, a slight
breeze, in neural memory a red-domed tent that she‘d slept in the night before
(alone of course, this being an educational virt). She took a few steps on the
wooden walkway. Yes, too smooth on the soles, but the heat good, almost hot
along an unshaded stretch.
She spent the morning searching out wells – spots where the stim stream
dropped off. Once she had those filled in, which might take the rest of the week,
she planned to insert one last interaction, maybe an alligator splashing the
perspecs. No biting though, no virtual pain. Nothing interesting. These were the
limitations she hoped to free herself of, and soon.
But she didn‘t know just how soon, and how free.

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 He climbed on rocks not unlike the rocks of his mesa, up heights no higher.
Yes the suit encumbered but the 1/6th gravity released. As he climbed nearer the
sunlight, he grew colder and colder; had expected it. As the guard sitting bored
before a screen expected him to turn around. Everyone even the new guys knew
how long you could survive on the surface without heat. Long enough perhaps to
climb the nearer peak, but not to get back.
He climbed on. With his mind he shrunk the core of his being to a fierce hot
coal between lungs and heart. Pulled his fingers in from the fingers of the glove.
Climbed.
The golden upper link of the sun, blinding light blunted by the helmet‘s
faceshield. A few steps more and he saw as much as anyone still on the surface
could see: half the bright orb in slow-motion ascent, no rays because no
atmosphere carried them, but still the heat and the power. The glory.
On the other oddly close horizon nothing, yet. He climbed faster, the coal
cupped now like a match between palms. Earth hung lower, shyer. She would
make him climb all the way. I am coming, he said aloud into the can, the helmet,
as if she could hear him as if she had been waiting.
She had been waiting. He faced her, just above the lunar horizon, the
bottom third in shadow. Africa was on its side, horn pointing left at the south pole.
Over the Pacific the mandala of a young storm. The star at his back, its masculine
heat pouring over him on its way to her. And the sun-siphoning wings silent ten
man-lengths above him. He was a wing, a solar panel, a leaf imbibing light.
He was a mortal man. Would they cut oxygen next?
Turning from earth to sun he spread his arms, palms open, and inhaled
deeply. A zephyr of the solar wind entered him and fanned the fading coal bright.
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The temp reading on his faceshield showed negative 20 farenheit. In the shadows
it would plummet thirty or forthy more.
He bounded in one leap to the edge. Was it fifty feet, a hundred, to the level
place below? Not knowing, he lept, rolling as he landed to the edge of that plateau.
Leaping again, in a few places having to walk, long strides, then leaping where
there was a ledge and a chance . . . It took him nearly an hour to get down, and a
broken arm, and three frostbitten toes.
But he had seen her, he could go on, he could make it to the morning.

Beck paused long enough on the sunny walkway to trigger the alligator. It
surfaced in the shallow water a few feet below her and opened its long jaws, then
glided away. She moved to the other side of the bridge, as she assumed most
perspecs would do, to watch the alligator snatch an egret by the leg and pull it
under. The thrashing about sent water splashing up onto the walkway and over the
legs of anyone standing there.
―Omari, run the last ninety seconds again please.‖
The alligator surfaced, glided away, lunged for the bird, splashed. The
haptic stream was well synced to visual and auditory, but she wanted a little more
impact, maybe a little higher on the leg. In educational virtalities the kids were
required to wear virtual sweatsuits over their sheeths – yet another limitation.
She sat down on the bench where she‘d designed in a reality cone, voiced on
the design board and set to work. It would take her the whole morning to revise
the splash, but they were in good shape, ahead of schedule. Just as she was
starting, she noticed the almost imperceptible drop in resolution that came when a
new perspec logged in. As she was turning toward where the realdoor would be,
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expecting to see Melleck, River of Grass went dark. Before her eyes had adjusted
to flat cave, a program she‘d never seen before started up.
She stood on the deck of a ship, a battleship or an aircraft carrier --
something big. Instead of guns and towers with antennas and what-not on them,
though, the deck was covered with shacks. And around the shacks, walking,
sitting, tending animals, were people.
The floating nation of New Singapore.
She was about to voice-out the cave and raise hell with somebody when she
felt herself enter an avatar body that was walking toward the end of the deck. It
looked down at a patch of open water between ships, then dove in.
When she opened her eyes again she was under the water, her legs – strong
young legs – propelling her deEper. Vapid! she thought, tethered to reality by the
barest thread. The sense of water against her skin, pressure against her eardrums
as ―she‖ swam downward, even the taste and smell of the water, oily, metallic, less
so as she went deEper – all way past anything Infinitereality had.
Then she stopped thinking as the strong supple body she found herself in
stroked deEper. The program was a piggyback, so she couldn‘t make choices,
could only ride along into the darker, colder water, toward what appeared to be the
sky-scrapers of submerged Singapore.
And what a ride! She‘d been everywhere and done everything in virtality,
but this simple dive had ten times more haptics veracity than she‘d ever
experienced, and something more, something unnamable. She was picking up a
feeling for the city below. Whether it was coming through the bodysheath or the
neuralplant in her frontal lobe she couldn‘t tell. But it was coming, and strong.
Though her lungs were aching to breathe, her heart was aching even harder to
touch one of those buildings below. My country, she thought/felt (and also
thought: how can I be thinking this?) – my initiation.
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 She knew she must not only touch one of the submerged buildings but bring
a piece of it back. Her lungs aching, she swam through a glassless window and
grabbed the first thing she saw. It was an old-style computer mouse, floating,
covered in barnacles, connected by a mossy cord to a barnacle covered mass. She
pulled it free and swam out through the window, kicking off the wall to speed her
ascent.
She rose toward the underside of New Singapore, part of her, as in a lucid
dream, knowing she would be able to do what seemed impossible – find a place
between the densely packed hulls to surface.
Sure enough, the avatar headed for a patch of open water. She/he broke
through open-mouthed and gasping.
And now the program got stranger, better. Leaning over the side of the ship
was a small group of watchers, a family she guessed. And she felt they were her
family. Looking at them, recognizing them (they were smiling), she crossed the
border all hardcore virtality users long to cross: she forgot reality, she became the
avatar in the virtality.
The diver raised the barnacle-encrusted mouse in his left hand and waved it
back and forth. This was the day of his first salvage dive, and he had triumphed.
The family clapped, neighbors and younger children crowded behind them
clapping. Older kids and teenagers, seasoned salvagers, watched from the rigging.
He had won their respect. His mother‘s brown, intricately-wrinkled face was soft
with love and bright with joy. A salvager in the family meant better times.
Reaching up for the rope ladder that hung from the ship, Beck cried out
when she was yanked back to the walkway in River of Grass, which seemed a
crayon drawing compared to the other virtality. How long had that clip been?
Three minutes, half an hour? She didn‘t know. She voiced off River of Grass and

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remained in the dark in the hammock remembering the pressure on her lungs, the
faces of what for those brief moments felt like family.
This program was past vapid. Haptically, it was groundbreaking.
Emotionally, it was magical. She had longed to reach the submerged city, had felt
a genuine mix of excitement and sadness, and when she found the open water and
surfaced, what she felt for the three who were waiting was nothing if not love.
With what technology had the designer simulated longing, excitement,
sadness, and love?
And the emotions were not plot driven. True, she already knew a little about
the tragic history of Singapore, might have been expected to feel something when
she realized she was swimming toward an entire submerged nation, its once
affluent inhabitants now among the poorest in the MAW. But the rest, her feeling
for the small happy group on the deck, seemed indEpendent of the story. And here
was the strangest thing. She had a feeling, too, for the avatar body she had ridden.
It seemed to her more than a camera-generated perspective. She had the sense of
having met with a real person. He was about twelve years old, very thin, wiry, a
water rat. Someone . . . his friends called him that. Yes, the water rat, the
youngest, the good swimmer. Sing.
―Lights,‖ she directed, for knowing the name (it was as if she‘d heard it) she
felt afraid.
When she stepped from it, the hammock parted from her sheeth with a
bristley sigh and collapsed into itself, like a tossed aside nightgown. It was the
best available, could transmit a billion gigabytes of data per second into her sheath.

But a name, emotion? Impossible.

Omari knew little. ―At first I thought it was a pop-up that somehow got
through,‖ he said, standing and pacing, which she‘d never seen him do, his
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immersadesk looking naked without him in it. ―Then this intractable memory draw
hits and I figure virus. But then I tapped into the visual, and – ‖ he cocked his head
backward, chin in – ―holy crap.‖
―Right? But how did it get through the firewall? Nothing gets through New
Eden‘s firewall.‖
―This did.‖ He slid into his desk. ―I captured visual anyway.‖
She watched over his shoulder. Without the amazing haptics it was just
home video. But there might be something there, a trace to the source. Because if
they could find the source, the designer, she might be able to learn how they‘d
done it – that water like realwater, that sunlight. To think there was some tool out
there that she didn‘t have—her ego wanted it. But more than that her body craved
it. To go under again, to that depth. To be a hand in the glove of the perfect
virtality.
She put a hand now on Omari‘s shoulder, watched with him as the diving
boy found the open water and surfaced. ―This is big Omari.‖
―I know.‖
―Totally knew. But why . . . us?‖
He turned and looked up into her eyes. ―Why New Eden?‖
He was smart, she knew, and talented. But was he hungry? Was he as
hungry as she had been at 25, and still was, even more so, at 30? Did he want to sit
at that immersadesk typing code for the next five years of his life?
She bargained not. ―Why us?‖
He looked around at the screen, his well-shaped head tapering in short-
cropped hair to his white shirt collar. Then he looked back at her, agreeing to what
neither of them knew yet, exactly, but agreeing, silently agreeing to work for her,
for the two of them, and not in this new matter anyway for New Eden.
―I don‘t know,‖ he said.
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 ―Well let‘s find out.‖
―On it.‖
Omari spun and began typing. Beck went back to her Everglades, and sat in
the virtual sun remembering that other, more real sun, and the perspective that she
had merged with for those few minutes, his named even coming into her mind,
like a ray of reallight, like the smell or salt.

Before his climb, the quiet new man‘s youth and seeming passivity had
made him a target, doomed to die or comply. After the climb, the news
circumnavigated maindome before the cast on his arm had even hardened. Two
surface hours with temp cut. Guys working on the surface had seen him leaping
down from the peak. Like something flying, one said. Like water falling.
Even Mardura Sittang was impressed. Wanted him for a cellmate.
Sittang had come in the first ever transport and was himself a legend. A
MAW (most-affected world) terrorist sentenced to life, he had survived the years
when surface workers were steamed alive so often by solar flares prison lingo
named them lobs (for lobsters). Inside wasn‘t so safe either. Asteroids pierced the
domes pretty regularly, until better materials and warning systems were shipped
from earth. Virtality wasn‘t let in until the fifth year, when sensory deprivation
insanity had cut the workforce by a third.
Sittang was more than a survivor though. Though the loss of bone and
muscle mass had made him a small, weak man, his skill with virtality systems gave
him great power. Because half the guards were addicts, and what he could do with
a pair of goggles and gloves made you forget you were 92,000 miles from home.
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He kept the prison‘s cave running, which made him only slightly less important,
and significantly more in demand, than the techs who kept oxygen pouring from
the greenhouses.
So when he said I want him, he got him.
Astazi limped into the cell, right arm in a cast, left arm dragging a duffle
bag. He saw a skinny brown-skinned man twice his age sitting on a neatly made
cot, back to the wall. On that wall was a pic of city skyline, gleaming skyscrapers,
blue bay. Brown eyes almost hidden by unruly black-grey bangs watched him.
―The one who likes the cold.‖ Surprisingly robust voice, the English quick,
consonants hard.
―No it‘s heat I like.‖ Stepping forward as the door slid shut behind him. ―For
the heat I endured the cold.‖
―You been here now what . . .‖
―Twenty-three days.‖
―Talk to me about endurance in another few weeks,‖ Sittang said, lying
back, child-like frame hardly depressing the mattress. ―Lunar weeks.‖

They walked along the shore, a perfect man, a perfect woman. Beck‘s
avatar looked much like she did, except younger, about twenty-five, thinner and
taller, her hair a darker black than her real hair. She wore a plain one-piece
bathing suit, yellow. Baylee wore black swimmer‘s trunks. By birth he was half
Vietnamese, half French, and most of his forms were based on a popular French-
Vietnamese actor. He worked as a post-climatechange therapist in one of Europe‘s
stadium caves.
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 Baylee‘s avator changed from time to time. The only real thing about his
avatar, he had told her, were the eyes. They were dark pools within an almond
shape, the inner corners dipped down, and they closed to bright straight lines when
he laughed.
She had told him what had happened that day at work.
―The program just took over the cave?‖
―Well, I was on-line, needing more memory than we had, and someone must
have hacked in.‖
―Some genius,‖ Baylee said.
―Yes. I‘d give anything to meet her.‖
They had reached the end of the white sand. Beck turned and sat, her feet
where the farthest lapping of the small waves sometimes reached.
―How can you be so sure it‘s a woman?‖ Baylee sat beside her. He was
wearing the tight black swimming trunks he usually wore to the island.
―Well, because most haptics designers are, and because of the feelings that
came through somehow, Baylee; it was like I knew the family watching from the
deck, and then when the program ended, like I had lost the diver forever. And I
knew his name.‖
Baylee‘s head snapped toward her, so fast it left tracks. ―How could you
know his name?‖
―Why are you so shocked?‖
―Well the neural box in your brain picks up sensory stimulation, nothing
more. How could you get his name? And what was it?‖ A gull overhead
screeched and she made a mental note to lower that down a few decibels. ―And
anyway,‖ he went on, ―if it was a piggyback program like you said the point of
view was entirely designed.‖
―That‘s the thing,‖ she said. ―I was in a body, not a designed point of view,
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and I felt everything that body did, not just physically but emotionally. That‘s
why I think maybe the designer was a woman.‖
―It could have been a man.‖
―Granted.‖ A wave unfurled over the tops of her feet. She saw it, and
noted a slight temperature change in her skin there, promptly conveyed through the
unseen hammock into her sheath, but it wasn‘t anything like the touch of water on
her body in that program.
―So,‖ said Baylee, ―what was the boy‘s, or whatever is was‘s, name?‖
―Sing,‖ she said.
―Sing,‖ repeated Baylee meditatively. ―Sing what?‖
―I don‘t know.‖
―Sing as in sing a song?‖
―I guess.‖
He stood up then and walked out into the bay up to his knees. ―Did I ever
tell you,‖ he said, his broad back to her, ―how much I love this program?‖
―You have,‖ she said softly.
―I don‘t think I could go on without it.‖
She followed him and stood beside him, his hand in hers. ―You sound so
sad.‖
―Oh,‖ he said, ―old things . . . and problems with my . . . patients, their lives
are so desolate.‖ In his hammock back in France she imagined he had heaved a
deep sigh, but the system didn‘t convey it. ―This boy,‖ he said, ―or whatever: you
say you felt something for him?‖
―Yes, it was so strange. When it was over, I felt so sad that I‘d never see
him again, and I mourned, as for a family member.‖

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 ―Hmm.‖ He gazed out at the low sun. Though he was a good twenty feet
away now, she could hear his voice and his breathing as if he were beside her.
They liked it that way. ―I hadn‘t expected. . . . ―
―What?‖
―Oh,‖ he looked at her and back at the virtal sun, ―to be so tired, I guess.
I‘m tired, and some things that I thought were so important . . . seem less so,
now.‖

―Like what?‖ She knew he had lost his mother during the China war (or
what North Americans called the China War, anyway), and he never spoke of his
father. For once, she longed to be in reality looking into his real face. Then she
might glimpse where this sadness came from, might sooth him.
As usual, though, he avoided her question and dove into the water. He was a
powerful swimmer. Knowing this she had put the reef far from shore. He would
be gone, she knew, a long time.
Later that night, after they had made love and were lying in each other‘s
arms, he whispered, ―it‘s not Sing, as in song, but ―s‖ ―y‖ ―n‖ ―g‖, Syng.‖
―How—―
―Just a name I‘ve heard before,‖ he said, ―a common name, Syng.‖
―Oh.‖

In her sleep that night she was diving down toward the underwater city
again, but this time when she entered a skyscraper through its glassless window
what she found was a marble-sized diamond. Instead of bringing it to the surface
E. K. Gordon Page 16
as salvage though she swallowed it, and the weight inside her carried her down,
past the many floors of the skyscraper to a crowded city street. In the dream the
crowds frightened her and she swam into a public virtality booth, but instead of a
cave there were rows of stall-less toilets. She went from one to the other but each
was filthy. At the end of the rwo she found Baily sitting on one. It didn‘t look like
him but in a dream way she knew it was. His face was contorted with strain and he
seemed not to notice her, even after she said his name. Then she was saying it over
and over and people were banging on the far away door to get in.

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