Something Made of Vacuum

Tom put his head down, lifted their dinners from the serving cart to the table, said a silent grace and applied himself to his steak. He said nothing for a long while, and then only remarked, “This is good.”

“Tom ...” Helene said, and stopped.

“Helene, you don’t have to explain anything to me. Four days ago was before you met me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s on the other side of a door.”

“I want to talk.”

“I want you to eat some of this excellent steak first,” Tom said. “Also, mashed potatoes. Also, don’t talk with your mouth full. I’ll still be here, but if you let this dinner get cold, as a fanatic foodie I’m going to be offended.”

Helene smiled a little and asked, “Do I have to eat my beans before I can confess?”

“No, I’ll give you a dispensation on the beans. Seriously, right now I want to concentrate on eating a fine steak dinner with a beautiful woman. If you still want to turn on the soap opera afterward, I’ll listen then. Meanwhile, is this a great steak or what?”

Helene cut off a slice, chewed it thoughtfully and said, “It’s good. I’ve had better steak back home, but we have a lot more steak houses than you have here and anyway those cost more. For the price, this is prime.”

“Ooh, so now you’re going to undercut me as Mr. Gourmet? That’s a low blow. That gets me right in my manhood.”

Helene said, “I’m sorry. I … have some disadvantages as a girlfriend, I know.”

“Joke, joke! Helene, relax, it’s okay. Anyway, here’s our Couples Rule: if you disagree with me about food, you’re wrong. If you disagree with me on any other subject, you’re right and I’m wrong, okay? If we hold to that, we’ve got no problems.”

“I submit meekly,” Helene said.

When they had finished their food, Helene said, “I have been on the Moon for ten days, now. We have existing customers here in Theophrastus, so I had a bunch of appointments lined up with them and I was working through the list. I was able to get some pretty good orders, actually. Then I went to a company called Rimbold Provisions, which is one of our biggest accounts, and I met a guy named Jacob Hibarger. He gave me a big order, we went out to dinner and we wound up spending the night in my hotel room. I didn’t know he was married.”

“Did you ask him?”

“As a matter of fact, no.” Helene looked Tom in the eye. “Tom, I’m not like that usually. I’m not. But this was going to be my adventure, I’m like 400,000 kilometers from home, I figured I was never coming back here and he was kind of hot. You know, for a guy I figured I was never going to see again, anyway.”

“So what happened after that?”

“Turns out that his wife is the daughter of the Rimbold who founded the company. Yeah, he’s a gold-digger in addition to his other charms. Daddy found out, called my company back on Earth and canceled all their orders. Monday when I went to the wedding with you, I hadn’t heard about the fuss and I still thought maybe I’d have dinner again with the guy that night. When I got to the Moon suit place, I found out I’d been fired and kicked out of my hotel. And then you became my friend.”

“Not a very exciting story,” Tom said. “You wouldn’t be the first person who had a little fling on a business trip, that didn’t end well. I guess you should have asked the bastard if he was married but he probably would have lied anyway. Helene, nothing happened. I mean, as far as you and me. You were single, you thought he was single, you’re allowed to go to a room with him if you want. If you want me to, I’ll go punch the guy in the nose for you, but otherwise we don’t have an issue.”

“It wouldn’t have happened to a Moon Man woman.”

Tom smiled ruefully. “Well, not by surprise, anyway. First of all, if a Moon Man woman winds up in air town without her suit, meets a guy and doesn’t tell him that, she’s on the prowl. Second, if he knows she’s a Moon Man, then he knows it’s going to be a one night stand, and if he doesn’t know it, she does. And third, there wouldn’t be any automatic record when she’s out of her suit, but being the people we are, the first thing she’d do when she got back to the village would be to tell all her girlfriends. That would put the story on record and then everybody would know it.”

“What in the world do you people gossip about if you already know everything?”

“We re-hash the good parts. Helene, we can’t possibly hide any aspect of our lives from each other so we don’t even try. We know, in a way I don’t think anybody else does, that people lead messy, sexual, unplanned lives with lots of mistakes. We learn not to be judgmental because that’s how we have to be.”

“You’re not judging me?”

“Of course not.”

Helene was silent for a long time. Finally she said, “Let’s go back to the hotel. I suppose the police will know where to find us.”

They summoned a car and rode back to the hotel without speaking. Helene led them to the storage room where their suits were. Both suits had been nicely painted in similar “sun” designs. She said, “Tom, I’m going to get the technician to get me suited back up. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I feel the need to have that suit around me now. You were right, I got used to it pretty quickly.”

Tom called for a male technician. They were escorted to separate rooms and re-suited. When they met again in the hotel lobby, Helene went to the desk and rented a storage locker for her clothes, then arranged through the concierge to purchase a cheap suitcase for her journey home. Tom watched from a distance. When she took the elevator to their room, she used up so much space that he was obliged to wait for the next car.

Presently they were back in the room together, but in Moon suits with their helmets off. Helene sat on the floor, already better practiced at that procedure, and Tom sat facing her. Helene looked into her helmet and spoke to the suit, then had a phone conversation with someone. “Okay,” she said to Tom, “the cops say I can go. They’re going to charge the Hibarger woman with making that landing but let her go otherwise. I get a feeling what she really wanted was to keep her husband in anxiety for three days so she could forgive him and have wild apology sex. They’re probably going at it right now.”

“What do you want to do now?”

“I want to sit here for a few minutes, for one thing.”

Tom sat with her for a while, then glanced into his helmet and said, “Helene, I can see you’re upset.”

“Shut up!” she yelled, then said in a lower tone, “Yes, I’m upset. I’m sorry I yelled at you. But Tom, we are starting a new relationship rule here and now. From now on, you know nothing about me except what you can see with your eyes and what I tell you about myself. Got it? If you ever again look at even one of those 38 data points from my suit, I swear to God I will never talk to you again. Say yes and don’t say one other goddam word.”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“Let’s go home.”

Helene re-attached her helmet even before she reached the elevator. They took a car up to the rim airlock. Tom donned his helmet at that point, they cycled through and rode the monorail back to the village. As they drew near, Helene could see players dancing for a game of pitch and toss, presumably a different shift. Ships rose and landed in Sinus Amoris field. They landed behind the terminal building and walked into the village.

Tom said, “You probably want to go to bed without talking to anybody, right? I didn’t look at your suit data, I’m just guessing. It’s been a long day.”

“Yeah.”

“Here, stop a moment.” Tom put his interface finger up to the port on her arm and said “I’m going to raise the ‘Do Not Disturb’ flag on your suit. That means nobody will talk to you and nobody can see your suit data. It stays in place until you try to talk to somebody else, then it will be relaxed automatically.”

“That woman Oksana said the suit won’t take an order like that.”

“Oksana is not a Moon Man. She thinks she knows all about us but she doesn’t. All of us need to raise that flag once in a while. But Helene, if you leave it on too long people are going to worry about you. I’m going to worry about you.”

“Put that flag up for me, Tom, and thanks. I’ll see you in the morning. Right now I need vacuum and the Night sky and not to have to talk to anybody.”

“Okay. Don’t say anything else or you’ll break the spell, or at least, take down the Do Not Disturb flag.”

They walked into the village. Helene went to her sleeping position in the Easterday compound, plugged herself into the post and sat down to sleep. No one else looked at her face; the ‘social’ light inside her helmet that would have illuminated her face was dark. She looked up at the stars, then slept.