Bears Discover Fire

The infirmary smelled like a Tennessee hayfield, bringing back sudden memories of childhood and summer. The Shadow was standing in the shadows under the magnolia, looking—worn out. Like an old person, I thought, he was fading away.

Dr. Kim was staring straight up at the stars. His spraypipe had fallen from his fingers, onto the floor. He was dead.

Dr. Kim had left four numbers in an envelope marked “Sunda,” with instructions that they were to be called as soon as he died, even though they lived in four different time zones, scattered around the Earth. They were his children. Most of them were awakened from sleep, but they weren’t surprised; Dr. Kim had already said his good-byes.

As I watched Hvarlgen making the calls, for the first time in years I felt lonesome for the family I had never had.

I wandered from Grand Central back down to East. Dr. Kim’s body had been put in the airlock to decompress slowly, and the room was empty except for the Shadow, which stood silently at the foot of the bed, like a mourner. I lay down on Dr. Kim’s bed and looked up through the magnolia, trying to imagine what his eyes had last seen. The dawn light still hadn’t touched the dome, and the galaxies hung in the sky like sparks from a burning city.

Hvarlgen came to get me, and we held a brief service in Grand Central. Dr. Kim’s body was still in the airlock, but the Portable Dante and the spraypipe on the table represented him. The lunies attended in shifts, since they were preparing the station for incoming. Hvarlgen read something in Old Norse, then something in Korean, then a bit from the King James Bible about the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Then we suited up.

Burial on the moon is illegal according to at least three overlapping legal systems, but Hvarlgen didn’t seem to mind. Here’s Johnny and Sidrath had made LOI (lunar orbit insertion) and told her to finish before they landed, so they wouldn’t be compromised by her bending of the rules.

The dawn was already halfway down the mountains by the time we locked out. Soon the raw sunlight would be racing, or at least loping, across the crater floor. The station would be livable for several more weeks, at least until mid-morning; but as we didn’t have proper suits for a sunlight EVA, even a dawn EVA, we would have to hurry.

It was my first EVA in years. One of the lunies and I were the pallbearers (only two are needed on the Moon), while Hvarlgen followed in her fat-tired EVA chair. Even though we had decompressed Dr. Kim’s body as slowly as possible, he had still swelled in the vacuum. His face was filled out and he looked almost young.

We carried him a hundred meters across the crater floor, to a fairly flat stone (flat stones are rare on the Moon), following the instructions we had found in the envelope. Dr. Kim had picked out his grave site from his bed in East.

We laid him faceup on the table-shaped rock, the way. they used to lay Indians so the vultures could swoop down to eat their hearts. Only here was a sky too deep for vultures. Hvarlgen read a few more words, and we started back.

The crater floor was half lit by the mountains to the west. The sunlight had painted them from peak to foot; so that we cast long shadows—the “wrong” way. In a few weeks, as noon approached, with its 250-degree temperatures, it would cook Dr. Kim into bone and ash and vapor; until then he would lie in state letting the stars which he had studied for over half a century study him.

When we locked back in, the chimes for incoming were ringing. Here’s Johnny and Sidrath had timed it all perfectly. Hvarlgen rolled off on two wheels to meet them; I was in no hurry. By the time I got to Grand Central, it was empty—everyone was greeting the Diana at South. I walked back down the tube to East. The bowl was gone; it had been returned to Other for Sidrath’s arrival. But the Shadow didn’t seem to notice. He was standing at the foot of the bed, no longer faded. For the first time he seemed to be looking directly at me. I didn’t know whether to say hello or good-bye. The Shadow seemed to be receding faster and faster, and me with him. I lost my balance and fell to one knee just as I “felt” what came to be known, much later, around the world, as the Brush.

III

Four days short of eleven months later, there was a knock at the door of my Road Lord.

“Major Bewley?”

“Call me Colonel,” I said.

It was Here’s Johnny. He was wearing a faux leather suit that somehow told me he had gone ahead and taken retirement. I wasn’t surprised. He was on his way to Los Angeles to live with his sister. “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

“Better than that,” I said. “You’re spending the night.”