Something Made of Vacuum

Sinus Amoris village did not have restaurants as such, but anybody could walk up to another family’s food carts and ask to buy whatever they were having at the non-family price. When she awoke, Helene rose and left the Easterday area without speaking to anyone, then found the Campbell family at their shift’s supper time, eating a dinner called Sweetness Yields to a Sentimental Taste. Her “Do Not Disturb” flag was still up and her face dark; they politely allowed an automatic purchase arranged between her suit and theirs without any human conversation, and she walked away with three six-packs of a meal based on dumplings filled with meat she could not identify, balls of mixed vegetables and sweet buns. It was delicious, but she ate it without much attention as she walked toward the landing field.

At a word to her suit, she set up an appointment with the ship’s chandler Susanna had recommended to her. The appointment was for an hour hence. When she arrived at the edge of the field, she sat on the ground, eating her food and looking up into the Night sky. Two spherical ships landed and three took off during the time she was watching, all of them in cradles with Moon Man harbor pilots. Buses came and went at the passenger terminal, and Moon Man crews supervised robots loading and unloading cargo. Helene watched the bustle without moving.

When the time came, she rose, stowed the empty sixpacks in a compartment in her backpack the suit had to locate for her, and waited while little mechanical arms washed her face. On a whim, wishing to look like other Moon Men women, she also allowed the suit to apply makeup to her face, murmuring instructions while the manipulators pulled up cosmetics from some source hidden inside the trunk of her suit. Finally she walked up to the offices of Quiboon Supply, which apparently employed both Moon Men in an empty square at one side, and air-towner employees in a pressurized building. Jacque Weatherall, the man Susanna had sent him to see, was a Moon Man waiting in front of the building.

Helene walked up to him. He looked at her, waited silently, then finally scribbled on a tablet computer and held it up in front of her. “YOU HAVE TO TALK TO ME FIRST,” he had written.

“Oh, hi!” Helene said. “I’m sorry. Can you hear me now? Jacque Weatherall?” The social light inside her helmet went on.

“Yes, I am,” Weatherall said. “Susanna told me you’d be coming, and I guess you’re not too familiar with our customs, eh? Unless I touch to your interface port and force it, you have to speak first to take down a Do Not Disturb flag.”

“Oh, yeah, they told me that.”

“Let me just tell you some things that Moon Men already know. Politeness requires that I can’t look at any of your history now unless you tell your suit to release your records. But if you don’t release your records, that kind of implies to us that you’re not trustworthy. I won’t criticize you for it, but other people who don’t know that you’re from Earth will be a little dubious about you.”

“Suit, release all my information,” Helene said quietly. Jacque considered the data in his helmet for a while and then said, “Okay, nothing that I need to worry about for a business transaction. How are we going to do this?”

“I’ve given up hoping the company will rehire me, at least until I get back home. But if you give me an order, I’ll send it in. I’m sure they’ll fulfill it and they will probably pay me a free-lance commission, which isn’t as much as I would make regularly but it would be nice to have.”

“Good enough. I need some items. How much leeway does your company give salesmen to dicker on orders?” Jacque asked.

Helene smiled. “You can’t expect me to tell you that. You’re the customer. But I will say I can work with you a little bit.”

“Helene, you’re with the Moon Men now. I do expect you to tell me that, and honestly. We don’t keep secrets from each other, even for a business deal.”

“Six percent,” Helene said after a moment. “They won’t accept an order with a discount bigger than that.”

“Looking at your price sheet, we don’t even have to go that deep,” Jacque said. “Four and a half percent puts you a little bit below what I’m paying for meat and a full percent under what I usually have to pay for grains and greens. How about four and a half off? Will the company still pay you a commission at that rate?”

“Yeah, yeah, that will work,” Helene said. “But shouldn’t we … I mean, kick this around and negotiate a while?”

“Moon Men don’t do that to each other.” Jacque mumbled to his suit in quick-speak for a while, and a document ordering two metric tons of beef, shrimp, tuna and specialty meats appeared in Helene’s display, along with an order for several tons of wheat and corn. He had also ordered soy sauce, barbecue sauce and other condiments that were inconvenient to prepare locally, in hundred-liter lots.

“Thank you!” Helene said. “That … that seems like a lot.”

“Space ships are like cruise ships on Earth,” Jacque said. “Gobble, gobble, gobble. We supply ships in two other ports beside this one, so we’ll use that much up before next sunset. If it’s good, and you can hold that price, I can order that much or more every month.”

“Jacque, thank you for the company and thank you for me, personally. I can’t tell you how much this means to me. I’ve always been proud of my ability to negotiate a hard deal but it hasn’t worked so well this trip. Getting an easy deal, it’s nice.”

“I’d rather buy from a Moon Man than a mouth-breather any day,” Jacque said. “I know you’re not really a Moon Man but you came to me in a suit and let me see your data, and that makes me comfortable.” He hesitated, then said “Helene? I don’t want to say anything very personal, but you did let me look at your record and I have some advice. I think you need to go talk to the women in the village. You’ve met some of them, right?”

Helene said, “I will never get used to this. Yes, I have met a few women. They were nice to me but it’s not like any of them are close friends.”

“You still don’t understand Moon Men. You don’t need to be close friends to have close conversations around here.”

Helene smiled. “I know women like that back home. Never met a man who understood it, though.”

“Yeah, we’re a little weird that way. Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if there’s any difficulty fulfilling that order, okay?”

“Sure thing. Thanks again!”

Helene walked back into the village and found Gloria Beacon at the food cart, along with another woman and a man she didn’t know. “Hi, Helene,” Gloria said. “It’s my day to cook.”

“Hi, Gloria. Is Tom around?”

“I’ll have to show you how to get the location of any Moon Man. But no, Tom’s not here. We just packed him off to go to his spice shop. He was mooning around and when we got a look at his numbers and you took down your Do Not Disturb flag, we knew we had to get him out of the way. You got him pretty worked up, girl.”

“Didn’t seem that way to me. I thought he was damn calm.”

“No. Anyway, you’re in time for lunch. We’re making A Taste of Shadow in the Sunshine, with my own special spice blend. It’s got ...”

“I don’t need to know,” Helene said. “I’m sure it will be delicious.”

Gloria grinned. “Let me school you a little in Moon manners. When a cook wants to talk about food, you don’t get to not listen.”

“I’ll remember that. Tell me about whatever it was you just said.”

“The heart of it is seasoned lamb sausage packed into mushroom caps,” Gloria began, and continued talking for several minutes, her hands busy in the food cart, while other members of the Easterday family drifted in and chatted with each other until the food was ready. Susanna showed up and appeared ready to launch into a conversation but Gloria said, “Hold on to that, Susanna. Let us finish eating. I want to get in on this.”

Most of the Easterdays were on shift at the field. One man, identified in Helene’s display as Tom’s cousin Enrique, showed up with a car and collected two dozen packages of sixpacks to be delivered on-site.

Helene sat on the ground with the men and women of the family whose jobs allowed them to eat lunch together. She ate her meal thoughtfully, trying to understand the gastronomical logic that informed the sequence of tastes. Once she mentioned this, everyone else tried to explain it to her. When they had different opinions, they tried to explain the correct theory to each other. Helene did not have to talk much to keep the conversation going.

The eighteenth and last bite was a ball of dense chocolate cake with fruit compote in the middle. Everyone was effusive with praise for Gloria and other cooks. The beverage afterward was spiced chai, and Helene sipped it from the container fixed to her helmet and listened to the conversation around her. Eventually Gloria finished cleaning her food cart, with water that was carefully stored for recycling, and came over to sit by Susanna and Helene. Most of the others rose to go back to work.

“I don’t want it to sound like I’m sending you away,” Helene said, “but don’t you have to go work?”

“I’m a bookkeeper. I work for six little companies over at the field, but I don’t have to go in on any particular schedule,” Susanna said.

“And I’m supercargo whenever my company has to load up a ship,” Gloria said. “But we don’t happen to have anything going out until tonight, which is why I signed up for kitchen duty. I’ll probably wind up working late, but I’m off right now. Helene, Tom thinks you’re having a temporary fling with him because you actually are, aren’t you? You know you’re going back to Earth.”

Helene winced, then sighed. “I am so not a real Moon Man. It gives me whiplash every time you suddenly dive off the high board into the deep end like that.”

“I don’t understand,” Gloria said.

“Oh. I guess it’s an Earth thing. We have swimming pools full of water, with a shallow end and a deep end. A diving board is this springy thing you jump off of to fall into the water. When you dive off the high board, you splash into the deep end of the pool and go far down.”

“I get it,” Gloria said, smiling. “I’ve never seen a swimming pool except in a movie, once – and I sure don’t want to see one, that sounds scary – but you’re saying I suddenly started talking about emotional stuff. Okay, what do I do? Take a couple of practice swings before we get to the deep stuff?”

“No, no.”

“Helene,” Susanna said, “Tom takes you as seriously as he can. But you had a fling with a guy the night before you met him, and now you’re having an affair with him, and then you’re going home and you’ll find another guy. There’s nothing wrong with that. Tom understands that you’re giving him as much as you’ve got to give.”

“It’s wrong as all hell!” Helene said. “It’s wrong even if I’m the one who’s doing it. Honest to God, I don’t understand you people. You spend all this effort and energy to cook delicious food when you’re hungry, but when you want loving, you just go into town and open up a can of boyfriend.”

“A can of boyfriend!” Gloria said, and they all laughed. “I like that! I’ll remember that.”

“Okay, okay,” Helene said. “But still. Tom brought me into air town, we were lovers, now I’ve put myself back into my can and he thinks that … I don’t know, he thinks I can do that. I think he can do that. But that’s not who I am, or anyway, it’s not what I want.”

Gloria said, “You want him to be jealous of this other guy you banged? Or do you want him to feel hurt because you had sex with another man? Or do you want yourself to be more hurt about having to go home than you actually are?”

“Maybe all of those. I can’t think.”

Susanna said suddenly, “Gregor and Yeni came back this morning. They’re at work at the field now. They looked wonderful – radiant, really. You and Tom were good friends to them when they needed it and you patched them up real good.”

Helene looked at her. “Showing love to friends,” Susanna continued, “that’s love. That counts. What I’m trying to say is that you don’t need to ask whether you are capable of love, or whether Tom is, because you are. You demonstrated that.”

“Oh, I always knew I was capable,” Helene said. “I was in love with a guy before, it didn’t work out. It’s too early to say I’m in love with Tom and I’m not in the most stable shape anyway because I am on a business trip and I did have a one-nighter with another guy and I want Tom to take me seriously at the exact same time I’m running away from him and I feel like this suit cuts me off from humanity and ...”

“Helene! Take a breath!” Gloria said.

“… and I need to stop and breathe,” Helene said. “I don’t know what I want. No, wait, I do. I want Tom. But I also know I can’t have him.”

“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere,” Susanna said. “Now, you know Tom’s a straight-arrow even for a Moon Man, and as a group we’re kind of famous for having sticks up our butts.”

“You all and I actually do have a tube up our butts.”

“Helene, congratulations!” Gloria said, smiling. “You have found a topic of conversation which is considered in bad taste to mention even for Moon Men. Not many people over the age of three have managed that.”

“Wow, I didn’t think that was possible.”

“Anyway,” Susanna said, “what I’m getting at is that you won’t be able to hold on to Tom without marrying him. Some men are different, but I’m pretty sure that’s what Tom will say. So that kind of puts the fish on the grill, doesn’t it? Do you want him bad enough to marry him, or not?”

“I just met him four days ago!” Helene said.

“Understood.”

“I just barely know him. I’ve never seen him in clothes that I didn’t pick out for him. Maybe he’s a mean drunk. If he wants kids that’s a problem, and if he doesn’t want kids that’s a different problem. Maybe he watches porno inside his helmet when it’s opaqued.”

“He does,” Gloria said after a moment, studying the display in her helmet, “but not very much, not as much as most guys, in fact, and nothing really icky. Well within normal parameters.”

“And he has no more concept of privacy than you do. Gloria, Susanna, I was not raised here. I can’t make that jump. I need to have personal space. I don’t know if you can understand that, but it’s really as important as oxygen, at least for me. And you can’t ask me to give up looking at clouds in the sky, and swimming, and driving with the window down and ... and ... my whole planet, for God’s sake.”

“We’re not asking you to give up anything,” Gloria said quietly. “You’re negotiating with yourself.”

“I don’t want to live on the Moon!” Helene said, and began to cry.

Gloria put her hand on Helene’s shoulder, and Susanna did the same on her other side. They said nothing while Helene cried herself out.

“You might be able to talk Tom into going back with you. He loves you, even if neither one of you will say it. I think he might go if you asked him,” Susanna said.

“Give up his whole world?” Helene said, sobbing. “I could never ask him for that. I’d hate myself, and if he did go to Earth he would hate me after a while.”

After a long while, Gloria said “You need to tell Tom what you told us. It’s always better to talk these things out.”

“I can’t talk to him. I can’t see him. I can’t keep him and I can’t give him up. I can’t go and I can’t stay.”

“You don’t have to do anything right away,” Susanna said. “If you don’t want to stay with our family I can find you somebody else here who will take you in. You could even go back to air town and we’ll tell Tom not to go after you.”

“Thank you,” Helene said. She stood up. Her face was still wet. “Really, thank you both more than I can say. But I’ve got a signature move I always use in situations like this.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m going to run away.”

She walked away toward the terminal building on the field, being careful to stay inside the street lines until she was out of the village.