0500 hours, UD/UM, Annum 700
You didn’t get off-world by disobeying labels. Sure, Luna’s just barely off-world, but it’s a step. And an excess of curiosity never took anyone extra-solar. But…wouldn’t the Company want to know about an undocumented seed? How else can I contact them? What if it isn’t a seed at all? Sid took a deep breath and resumed flipping through the supply manifest in his lap. If he could only find the right sequence of little black symbols, that mysterious cube on the storage pod shelf would be canonized. He could flatten all the questions roiling in his brain, together with their co-morbid discomforts. Weight: 1.931 kilograms. Diagonal: 10.098 centimeters. Indexed by size it should appear between the H3 refinery (R-09) and the pizzeria (A-16). But here in the book it wasn’t, and there on the shelf it was: smooth, grey, featureless like the rest of them. Distinguished from the other seeds only by the label that had crept into his vision that morning, revealed by the removal of E-87 for its scheduled implantation. A white sticker pressed neatly against the cube’s outward face, bearing its singular proclamation in the same brutal typeface normally reserved for serial numbers and other alphanumerics of unknown import: NOT FOR LUNAR BURIAL.
Huh, was all the contemplation Sid had allowed himself before suiting up for the trek to Zone 4. His job operated on the asset’s time: little E-87 was to be buried to the correct depth in the correct spot at the correct hour, so that it may bloom as the itemized and proprietary realization of humanity’s starfaring ambitions. For the first couple of months he had checked the manifest before each implantation, curious to see what new monument to homo intrepidus he was bringing to bear. That habit was long faded by the time he set out with E-87 in hand and hardly a thought in his head, excepting the usual refrain. A chorus he now hummed to himself with a bleached, singsong ritualism: Probably another pancake house.
1043
Probably so, in the case of E-87. But what of that strange cube at the back of the shelf? As he returned from the morning’s burial he could feel a point of fixation set itself spinning in his mind, very slow, accruing the unanchored debris he was afraid to realize populated his mental cosmos. Building until the mundane realities which would not assimilate – his boot crushing moondust, his bum knee’s protest against slow and looping treks around inconvenient craters, the pressure of the auger magnetized to his chest – were pushed into insensate periphery like the vanishing taste of a dog’s head that was also the Buddha in last night’s dream.
1830
Hmm, only two squelches tonight, thought Sid as he watched the automatic mess prepper churn its massive drum and position its nutripositer to deliver a grey slurry of algorithmically calculated quantity and constitution onto his aluminum tray. Although he’d steeped himself in technical jargon and the recondite miscellanea of terraforming history in advance of his application to become a Gardener, he now regarded his station’s machines mostly with short, caustic phrases which took their verbs from the noises with which they distressed him. Noises indicating disrepair or, according to a possibility he could not help but entertain on the most clanging and cavernous nights, ill will. Shower’s skurging again. Holovisual receiver bzzrts twice. Two squelches. Down from the usual three, and a far cry from the spaceman ice cream of his grandfather, which for all its utilitarian chalkiness was at least infused with a sense of collaborative continuity. A late but well-meaning reply to pre-historic confectioners mixing milk and wine and wondering at the same questions later millennia would immolate with burning rocket fuel.
0045
He hadn’t replaced the mystery seed in the storage pod. It sat a stride’s length from his cot, resting on the worktable with the scales and calipers and other instruments of fruitless inquest. Together they formed an angular jumble which, to the discomfort of a sleepless Sid, refused to be mistaken for the shadow-men and vaguely canine visions his childhood furniture had collapsed into under cover of Terran darkness. Staring now at the seed and absorbing the hateful identicality of silhouette and subject, Sid felt more apart from those youthful unrealities than ever. The reality was this: photonic crystallization arrays would revolutionize humanity’s colonization of new worlds; because of its proximity to Terra, Luna was a natural site for the technology’s fledgling field test, the first entirely photo-crystalline city; a war had raged for the exclusive right to develop Luna; a rival to the Company had put its weight behind an Orbital Projector which could purportedly beam a photo-crystal array (and thereby a city) directly onto the lunar surface; the Company, freshly victorious in a series of unpleasant but wholly vindicating legal battles involving allegations of planned obsolescence against a best-selling line of artificial kidneys, had backed a program of geo-implanted, time-release projectors; the Company had won the war on the back of an advertising campaign focused on the human touch of their Gardeners, the down-home Terran sensibility of a planted seed nurtured into a bountiful future; the Company had been awarded the contract by a planetary council disinterested in fronting the bill for the construction and maintenance of a continuously-projecting satellite; the mystery seed read NOT FOR LUNAR BURIAL; Sid’s beating heart bore no such label.
0200
Finally, sleep. And then a voice from everywhere, composed of many voices, all at once the jagged bzzrt of the holovisualizer, the ringing collapse of a massive steel chamber, and the cold condescension of a scolding dentist: “Dreaming workers on Terran satellites: if you are hearing this, the physical component of the counter-program has begun. The Companies will not permit you to understand events occurring on the planet’s surface. Our signal is not yet powerful enough to transmit a complete visualization. You will now receive what we are able to convey.” There came a dull flash like the onset of a migraine, and the abyssal black was impinged by those languid dapples of purple and green which haunt the vision of rumored Terran sects who press their palms to their eyes in mournful and wailing rituals of self-abacination. Sid struggled to make anything solid from the blots, but perceived an adumbration of something massive and necessary, violent and alive. To his left, a web of narrow alleyways by which stumbling heretics might arrive at hidden plazas; to his right, a genome separating and annealing with a new alphabet. The voice continued: “Laika was not given a choice. You will have one."
0538
Today’s implantation was all the way out in Zone 6 with M-33, a whale of a seed which Sid had clocked at 22.814 kilograms. If it was in fact another pancake house, it was a triple stack. Even so, his stride today was infused with an easygoing bounce which he paradoxically attributed to the extra 1.931 kilograms with which he’d needlessly freighted himself. Sid patted the mystery seed attached to his bandolier as he crested another identical hill. Of course, he had no intention of planting it. There was nothing except its absence in the manifest to indicate it was not a genuine Company product, and it was common knowledge that to defy an official advisory label was to spin a misery roulette. Certainly owners of Company cookware who ignored the prominently visible suggestion that their frying pan’s keenest shine be achieved with the exclusive application of proprietary cleaning agents regretted their gamble as they drew their final, shallow breaths into boiling lungs. Luckier dissidents driven by anarchic manias to rip tags from Company mattresses were paid out a lifetime of double-takes and quickened paces as they began to notice the same black vehicle at restaurants and parks, the same measured footfalls stalking their evening walks. And so he buried the triple-stack and not the mystery. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a frisson of vertiginous glee at the fact that he could have. It need only be fastened a bit too loosely to his bandolier next time, to tumble as he shifted his weight, perhaps landing with its label face-down in a hole meant for a noodle shop. He need not even notice. This last provision, he knew, was pure fantasy. Sid had a sense that he and the mystery seed were now and perhaps had always been ineluctably entangled; one could not endure the slightest coincidence without the other’s immediate awareness. Its immediate judgement and hunger.
1910
All the subversive reverie in the galaxy couldn’t distract from the firecracker soreness dancing in Sid’s knee that evening. A hot bath would’ve been his grandfather’s prescription, but the shower was standing room only, and in any case the station’s plumbing was electronically locked on a time-release schedule. Instead, Sid once again grunted at the mess prepper’s offering (tonight the oils and fats had failed to homogenize; he’d have to have a look at the rotary drum) and swiveled his seat to face the holovisualizer. According to the schedule he’d drawn up before leaving Terra, tonight was the first game of the baseball postseason. Though his station clock displayed the hour, the only way to track the passage of time on a larger scale was the set of calendars he’d brought and marked himself. Tonight, baseball; six days from now, after thirty-eight long months, the shuttle home. Except that after the visualizer converged its composite images with unusual alacrity, Sid was not looking at the showdown he’d been anticipating. Instead, a greyscale Tael Lachlan was pitching the storied shut-out which had cemented him as a hero in the nascent days of the sport. A legacy rerun. Why wasn’t tonight’s game being broadcast? As a child, Sid had sat solemnly focused on a stopwatch amid the excitement of packed Terran stadiums, so that he could begin his cheers and lamentations precisely 1.3 seconds after the crowd indicated a momentous play. In this way he could be sure to cheer and lament alongside his grandfather aboard the New Dawn Station, who at such moments must have turned from the broadcast to the blue giant in his viewport and smiled. Here in his tin can of a station, Sid had no viewport and no stopwatch. Only a fraying hologram which replaced an amiable second-and-change with the yawning gulf of centuries.
0200
“...will not permit you to understand events occurring on the planet’s surface.” The familiar polyphonous voice reciting a familiar missive exploded into Sid’s being. The force of it instantly glassed the shimmering dreamstuff of his sleeping mind into a tactile approximation of the city he’d grown up in, alike in shape and character but composed of smooth obsidian. “Our signal has increased in power. You will now receive what we are able to convey.” Sid saw crowds of people teeming through the streets, limping veterans and aphasiacs drawing glyphs in the air, bandaged amputees and sturdy young women armed with bricklayers’ trowels, all rushing to the eastern coast where a massive humanoid shadow gave the appearance of perfect stillness even as it grew to consume the crimson sky, silently treading the ocean floor toward its frenzied congregation. Beating against this human tide was a mixed force of local police officers and Company private security operators. Though overrun and largely ignored, they spilled what blood they could. An elderly woman stretching a jewelry box above her head in an offertory gesture was yanked to the glassy black pavement. A one-eyed boy wearing a bathrobe three times too big was shot dead as he sprinted toward the coastal jubilation. Bounding amid the chaos was an enormous black dog whose coat possessed the same umbral quality as the approaching visitor. It let the pilgrimizing throngs weave unharmed between its haunches, but bared its man-sized fangs at trembling officers, whose blows against it produced geysers of boiling ichor. “Look well,” said the voice. “You will remember little in the waking world.”
And then a second voice, singular and much nearer, said “Hey, Kiddo.” Sid looked to his left to see his grandfather beckoning from an alley. He followed and the city melted away, replaced by the shaggy auburn carpet of his grandfather’s den. “Question: do you remember the cat’s eye?” asked his grandfather, cool and heavy with an unfamiliar gravity.
“I…” Sid began and found his dream-mouth slack and uncooperative.
“After I returned from my first mission, you asked what Terra looked like from space. I said it was like a big blue marble.” Sid nodded comprehension. “And then you ran to your room and grabbed your bag of marbles. You pulled out that sky-blue cat’s eye and asked, ‘like this?’ I laughed and said ‘No, not exactly,’ but it didn’t matter. That cat’s eye became the world to you. You swore you’d take it into space one day, so you could hold it up next to Terra and compare. I said that sounded like a fine idea. You took it everywhere with you.”
Suddenly, Sid was choking back tears. “Until…”
“Until we lost it. You accidentally kicked it somewhere while we were building a marble solar system, and never saw it again. Cried until dinner time.”
“Cat’s eye…”
“What I never told you, kiddo, was that I found it. That same night, I heard Spike choking and quivering under my bed. I tried to help him, but by the time the cat’s eye rolled out it was too late. So next morning I told you he’d gone real peacefully, and we gave him a proper funeral.”
“I don’t…”
“I tried to toss the cat’s eye after that. I tried and tried again, but it kept turning up in strange places. Gloveboxes, sock drawers, closet shelves…”
The multitudinous voice boomed once more: “Laika was not given a choice. You have one now.”
0740
The mystery seed is the Cat’s Eye. The mystery seed is the Cat’s Eye. This sentence, alarming and meaningless to his conscious mind, was the only thought Sid could formulate as he buried the last of the scheduled seeds in a shallow cavity he’d hacked from lunar rock, with an auger that bucked and wheezed and finally gave out completely. Five days until the homebound shuttle. The holoviziualier didn’t even play reruns anymore. The storage pod lay ransacked in a final useless search for some misplaced logbook which could explain the existence of the Cat’s Eye. Absent both distraction and solution, Sid had only to polish the possibility of dissent against that little white label in his mind. NOT FOR LUNAR BURIAL, and is the air getting thinner?
- - - -
The shuttle hadn’t come. His augur was working again. He’d used it to punch a hole in the mess prepper, a hole whose perimeter tore and bloodied his gaunt frame as he squeezed himself into the prepper’s central drum. With one hand forced behind his back, clutching the Cat’s Eye in a death grip, and the other scraping the drum’s metallic wall for what sustaining residual grit it could find, he reflected on the fact that each person’s shape is at any given moment a subsection of a larger sphere representing their entire range of motion, each possible orientation they could take. Although the same mass can be rearranged in nearly infinite ways, most people instantiate so few of these arrangements in their lifetimes. He was grateful that obsession and necessity had driven him to explore unknown configurations. Grateful as well for the final bit of grey muck he scrounged from the mess prepper’s drum. He clambered out of his improvised access panel and broke off the nutripositer’s nozzle with a weak blow. This would be his token. At the behest of the Cat’s Eye, he had taken to burying symbolic pieces of the station’s systems as they failed: first the holovisualizer, then the showerhead when it had begun to sputter a green-brown bile, then the clock as it came to insist on strange and troubling non-hours. The instructional sticker on the Cat’s Eye was as pristine and unassuming as the day he’d found it, but he sensed another, older will pushing against the label from within. When everything else was buried, what then?
1232 Hours, 07/July, Annum 802
Director Lindholm stretched his hand in a weak grasping motion after signing what must have been the day’s hundredth request for personal leave. It was funny: his father had moved mountains to secure even a handful of attendees for the first Flowering Festival (“You Are Cordially Invited to A Celebration of Uncle Chuck’s NEWEST and MOST EXCITING Location,” the mailer had read), and now this one, for an undocumented seed years after the Luna project had announced its completion, had come together almost automatically.
Call it a job well done; it was no exaggeration to say that the Flowering Festivals had kept the Company solvent in the previous century. The formula was simple: following certain unfortunate but necessary actions executed by the Company during what most now called the Dog Riots, the Company was keen to reverse their public image. The public, anxious to put that unpleasant tumult behind them, was keen to grant such a reversal. All that was needed was an opportunity, and Director Lindholm’s father had found one while studying proposed timetables for Luna flowering dates.
R&D advocated a long wait between implantation and flowering, insisting that the projectors needed ample time embedded within the lunar soil in order to align their arrays properly. Marketing argued for a whiz-bang, sudden and total flowering, offering the entire commercial district up at once to well-monied shoppers. Damned if he understood the technology, but Lindholm Sr. recognized a happy compromise when he saw one. The strategy would be a gradual one, using the least-promising seeds as test runs for the infrastructural effects of early flowering. Individual clients would be happy to get their fifteen minutes in the spotlight, and the public would be hammered with a rapid succession of opportunities to consider the Company’s admirable qualities, its unparalleled contributions to human progress and the lifeways we all hold dear. A clean-up crew would be sent to dismantle the remnants of the planting operation, and once all the seeds had flowered, Luna would be open for business.
So it came to be that on 03/August of the 702nd Annum, Mayor Stendahl extolled the virtues of Uncle Chuck’s Flapjacks as a small gaggle of onlookers shuffled nervously and a lone ice cream vendor watched his wares languish and drip. But Lindholm Sr. believed in his strategy, and by degrees a public eager to cohere around a common set of ritual polities rewarded his vision. By the middle of the century, the Dog Riots were a small footnote in poorly circulated history texts, while the Flowering Festivals were like holy days in their grandiosity and magnetism. Many businesses had engineered their seeds to transmit special messages to Terra upon flowering, and these were broadcast live on lavish holostages around the planet. Thunderous applause rolled along streets still dark with blood as a colossal image of May Lee the Noodle Girl winked and entreated crowds to try the three out of this world new flavors available at Graceful Noodle Luna. Even after the final seed had flowered and Luna had largely become an unremarkable shopping mall for a bored public, grassroots versions of the festivals popped up every year, parties that made up for their lack of an occasion with even greater decadence and histrionic genuflection to the original occasion, the expansion of mankind’s bubble of commodity into the heavens.
When Director Lindholm learned that the Company had received a transmission from a newly flowered seed, he felt a rush of excitement. He would be acting director during a genuine Flowering Festival! That the seed’s inclusion in the Luna project was not mentioned in any Company records was of little concern; such clerical errors were common, and well-timed surprises were a frequently employed corporate tactic. Smart money was on Uncle Chuck’s having purchased a second seed, forgotten in the wake of their underwhelming first showing, which was now flowering of its own accord. There was some mild unease when comms technicians suggested postponing the festival on the grounds that the seed’s transmission was encrypted, displaying only a message reading “FOR LIVE BROADCAST ONLY” on Company visualizers. But even this was not unheard of for a flowering transmission. When anticipation for such broadcasts was at its apogee, details as small as the angle of a mascot’s arched brow could lead to ruin if acquired too early by a corporate rival. Ultimately Director Lindholm’s sympathies lay with the grassroots re-enactors he quietly counted himself among, those still carrying a torch for the propulsive glory of the Luna project. And so, the new festival went forward with advertisements playing up the mysterious element, promising a day of nostalgic yet modern family fun in celebration of “AN EXCITING SPONSOR YET TO BE REVEALED.”
Now, noting the empty office, Director Lindholm joked to himself that the ads had worked too well. Then he resolved to stroll down to the plaza and observe the merriment. Observe the merriment? Oh, hell, he’d join the fun. He rounded the corner of the block whistling a jaunty tune, and the scene he encountered struck him like a painting titled All That Life Should Be. Pink and swirling evening clouds looked down on children’s laughing hopscotch chants; tufts of dandelion settled on the noses of infants cradled by young mothers who removed them so tenderly that the little ones dreamed undisturbed dreams of tickled hares; prim little girls enjoying popsicles made in the image of Laika the Space Puppy with gumball eyes were hoisted onto the square shoulders of gentleman fathers too drunk with joy to mind the sticky red syrup dripping onto their crisp white cufflinks. At the center of it all was Mayor Stendhal, ancient but vivacious, standing upon the holostage with a microphone in hand. He cleared his throat and immediately had the crowd’s rapt attention.
“Folks, I know you’re not here tonight to hear my speechifying. And so I ask, are you ready to celebrate the bravery and tenacity of AN EXCITING SPONSOR YET TO BE REVEALED?”
A raucous cheer.
“Are you ready to welcome AN EXCITING SPONSOR YET TO BE REVEALED into an unprecedented era of concordance and opportunity on worlds unknown?”
“We are!”
“Well, then, let’s listen to this special message from AN EXCITING SPONSOR YET TO BE REVEALED!”
A button was pressed and the placid cheer was shattered. A voice like a million voices roared at the firmament of the world. It was a voice unfamiliar to everyone in the plaza, unfamiliar in fact to everyone on the planet except a handful of centenarian recusants rotting in forgotten prisons for forgotten crimes, those called traitor hounds who bent double in howling laughter as the manifold voice birthed by its speech a new cosmology.
its moon is a powerful lung its moon is a willing lung afferent terror impulse firing .5 limbic cycle stimulus is non-stimulus is terminus is stimulus its moon is the lung that swallows the body its moon is the life that swallows the corpse its moon is a powerful lung its moon is a willing lung afferent terror impulse firing .7 limbic cycle terminus is stimulus is non-stimulus is stimulus its moon is the lung that ejects the non-body its moon is the love that swallows the hate its moon is a powerful lung its moon is a willing lung afferent terror impulse firing .9 limbic cycle stimulus is terminus is stimulus is terminus its moon is the lung that changes the poison its moon is the lack that swallows the bounty efferent terror impulse firing
And then all of it - the wafting pollen, the children’s popsicles, the pink whorls of starry twilight - was gone in a deafening gasp.