Something Made of Vacuum

Breakfast for the Easterday family was spoonfuls of oatmeal and berries, bacon cleverly tied into bite-sized knots, melon balls and coffee. Helene and Tom sat together on the ground, chatting with a few of the two dozen family members spread around them. A woman wearing a suit painted with a scene of sunset over a lake walked up and Tom said, “Hey, Susanna. How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I wanted to talk to Helene for a moment. Helene, I’m Susanna. I’m a second cousin to Tom.”

“Hi,” Helene said. “I met you at the wedding. I mean, I didn’t actually meet you, but ...”

“But I got drunk and they talked about me, right?” Susanna said. “Hang on a moment.” She walked over to the food carts, manned this morning by other Easterday family members, and accepted two six-packs and a flask of coffee. She plugged one six-pack into the helmet of her suit, and returned to sit by Helene.

“I’m sorry,” Helene said. “I didn’t mean to bring that up.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Susanna said. “You’re new around here, so let me just say that if you’re going to be a Moon Man, you’ve got to learn to let the embarrassments go.”

“Well, I’m just here temporarily. But people forget your embarrassments after a while.”

“Nah. People forget but the network never does. For the rest of my life, anybody who’s interested can find out that I’ve gotten drunk at three weddings – so far, I mean – and done a bunch of other stuff. Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk about. Girl, you had some kind of day yesterday, didn’t you? What a bunch of jerks!”

“So now everybody can see that, too?”

“If you know how to ask, which we all do. Anyway, I know a guy here who is a buyer for a ship’s chandler, and he’s not a customer of yours now but I can set you up with an appointment if you want. He’s an ex-boyfriend but we’re still friends and I guarantee he’s not as much of a jerk as those other guys.”

“I wouldn’t guarantee that,” Tom said. “I used to play poker with that guy.”

Tom’s sister Glory happened to be in their conversation group. “Is that Jacque Weatherall? I used to know him, haven’t seen him for a few years though.”

“Yeah,” Susanna said. “He’s a buyer for Quiboon Supply now. They’re pretty big, they have contracts with a couple of ship lines.”

Helene took a deep breath. “Yes, I would, and thanks,” she said. “But could you make it tomorrow instead of today? I feel like I’ve really got to take a day off.”

“Sure thing. Hey, it’s Wednesday, which is my day off. You want to come meet the Wednesday Ladies Club?”

“What’s that?”

“Women who have Wednesday off. We get together to do stuff.”

“I wondered about that,” Helene said. “Another thing you don’t seem to have here is the concept of weekends.”

“The ships come and go twenty-four hours a day,” Tom said. “Everybody’s on one time shift and gets one day off a week. I’m a Wednesday myself. I’ll tell you another thing the Wednesday Ladies Club does, though. They get humiliated by the Wednesday guys playing Pitch and Toss.”

“In your dreams, loser,” Susanna said cheerfully. “We have teamwork. You bump into each other running in circles.”

“Pitch and toss?” Helene asked. “You mean like matching pennies?”

“No, it’s a game we play that involves tossing into the pitch,” Susanna said. “Also dancing, which is another thing little boys aren’t good at. Anyway, we have a women-versus-men game today. Want to be on the team?”

“I’ve never played before. I don’t even know what it is,” Helene said.

“See, that’s the beauty of it. You will still be better than any of the Wednesday Mister Machos, like Tom here.”

“Helene, if you come to this game you will watch us blind ’em with science,” Tom said. “Oh, and there’s a rock fall after lunch, too. Actually, this would be a good day for you to take off. Lots of entertainment today.”

“A rock fall?”

“We’ll tell you about it, it’s a thing we do,” Susanna said. Another woman came up, a black lady with a cheerful grin, wearing a design of elongated, stylized green dancers against a yellow background, with an abstract design in her wedding-oval. No one introduced her, but Helene’s display identified her as Gloria Beacon.

“Gloria,” Susanna said, “can we put Helene on the team for today?”

“No problem!” Gloria said. “Helene, if you’re done with breakfast why don’t you pop off that sixpack and we’ll take you to the field? I’m the captain for today.”

“I thought I had one more bite,” Helene said, twisting the knob.

“No, you’re done.”

“I will never get used to how everybody knows everything I do,” Helene said, detaching the sixpack. She handed it back to Tom’s cousin Hector at the food cart.

“I went to Earth once,” Gloria said, “and I could never get used to being lonely like that. Come on, we’ll take you to the field and show you how to play. I’ll pick up my kids on the way.”

“Are you going too, Tom?” Helene asked.

“In a little bit,” Tom said. “Us Wednesday guys have got to plan our victory party, you know.”

“Your pity party, you mean,” Susanna said.

“Hey, we win 54.5% of the time!” Tom said.

“Now that’s just rude!” Gloria said with asperity.

“I guess you can just look up the win-loss records,” Helene said. “Like everything else.”

“Of course we can,” Gloria said. “But it’s bad sportsmanship to say it like that. Now we’re mad, boys, so I’m pretty sure today will even up the odds. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

Gloria collected her two little children, and with Susanna formed up a party of Wednesday women and their kids who were too young for school. Some of the women were carrying baby balls as well. They stepped into the “street” and ambled out to the playing “field,” another featureless expanse on the edge of the nearly featureless village. The equipment there was unfolded and laid on the ground. They worked together to erect a set of monkey-bars and other playground equipment for the kids.

“Why don’t you just leave this set up?” Helene asked. “I mean, it’s not like you’re short of room.”

“If we set it up permanently, it would, you know, be there,” Susanna said. “If everybody did that, pretty soon there would be stuff everywhere you look. I mean, it wouldn’t make much difference for this, because every shift uses the playground, so it’s set up most of the time. But it’s not hard to take it down at the end of one shift and set it up next shift.”

They parked the kids in the playground, with one mother keeping watch on them all. “The kids are playing exactly the same game here they play back home,” Helene said with satisfaction, watching them. “It’s called Let’s Run Around Like Small Crazy People.”

“You know it. Here, on Earth and on absolutely every other planet,” Gloria said. “You’d think they would be tired after a few hours but they rest for twenty minutes and they’re ready to go again. Me, not so much.”

They went to the athletic field and set up the “pitch,” which was a circular chain-link fence twenty-four meters in diameter and ten meters high. There was one opening on either side, just big enough for one Moon-suited person, which Helene’s display identified as a “wicket.”

“Okay, let’s show you how it’s done,” Gloria said.

“Isn’t there a ball of some kind?” Helene asked.

“Oh, no. On the Moon, if you throw a ball it can go clean over the horizon, and if it’s on the ground it doesn’t roll too well in the dust. Can’t make a game out of that. No, we’re going to toss …” – she looked around – “Sandara, here.” One of the other women grinned and walked closer.

“Hi, I’m Helene,” Helene said. “I’m new here so she has to explain everything.”

“I know,” Sandara said. “Hi.”

In Helene’s helmet, an overlay image suddenly made Sandara appear to be outlined with a bright red border. “I’m Captain for this game, so I get to pick who will be the ‘Bright,’” Gloria said. She raised her voice slightly and said, “Ladies, let’s toss her once to show Helene what we do.”

Four women grabbed Sandara by the arms and legs. Gloria said, “Ready. Steady. Go.” They launched her up into the star-spangled sky and a timer display appeared in Helene’s helmet, counting the seconds.

Sandara soared up, spinning a little, her arms wide and her legs together like a high-board diver. She reached her apogee and slowly fell back. The others raced to get under her and caught her precisely with eight hands. They lowered her gently to the ground and her red outline blinked off. Helene’s timer stopped at 28 seconds.

“Okay, so during an inning, everybody has to be outside of the pitch,” Gloria said. “The way to make a score is, I turn somebody on to be the Bright and then we toss her over the fence into the pitch. Once she leaves the ground, we’ve got twenty or thirty seconds to get four players into the pitch to catch her. The other team is trying to get four players in there, too. Nobody’s allowed to block the wickets. If our team catches her, we get one point. If the other team catches her, they get two points, so we don’t want that. If nobody catches her, she’s not in danger because it’s easy enough to land on your feet, but we lose four points and the other team loses three. So both sides have to work together to make sure somebody catches the Bright. Once the play is over, everybody has to get out of the pitch and the other team picks a new Bright. Okay so far?”

“I guess,” Helene said dubiously.

“Then one more thing.” Cheerful Latin music filled Helene’s ears, strongly rhythmic. “It’s like for basketball, you’re not allowed to move without dribbling the ball? In this game, you have to be dancing all the time. If you don’t stay with the beat, the referee will throw you out. You can be as fancy as you feel like, but just stepping from one foot to the other is good enough. Try it.”

Helene stepped back and forth, and the display in her helmet gave her feedback on how well she was doing, measured in the number of milliseconds between a beat in the music and the time each foot touched the ground. Gloria watched the same display in her helmet and finally said, “Good enough. One other thing – don’t touch or bang into anybody else, that’s not allowed. There are a bunch of other rules, of course, but you just go where everybody else goes and try to get inside the pitch if you’re close to the wicket when the Bright goes up, and you’ll be fine.”

Helene stopped dancing. “I don’t have to play. I can just watch. I don’t want you to lose.”

“You’re here and you’re a Wednesday, so we want you to play,” Gloria said. “Come on, it’s fun. If you can’t do anything else, I’ll make you the Bright. The Bright does nothing except maybe trash-talk the guys while she’s in motion.”

Several other women had arrived at the field, and then the men trotted up in a double line. Helene looked at them and said in a low voice, “Suit, have those guys been drinking beer already?”

“Yes,” the suit said, and in her helmet view each man was labeled with his blood-alcohol level. Tom was sober but several of the others had worked up a pretty good load considering that it was early morning for the first shift.

There was one female referee and one male; to Helene’s eyes their suits were surrounded by a yellow outline. They took up positions away from the pitch, and the two teams spaced themselves to form an even circle around the perimeter of the pitch, men on one side and women on the other, all facing outward. Apparently it didn’t matter how many players were on each team as long as both teams were the same: four men were left out and stood to one side providing infield chatter.

The referees chose and started the music, a popular tune in a style Helene was not familiar with, possibly from one of the colony planets. She stepped from one foot to the other in place. Some of the women did more ambitious steps, still standing in place.

The referees picked the women’s team to start by consulting a random number generator, a whistle was blown and Sandara’s suit lit up again. Gloria took off running to the left, her feet still moving to the dance rhythm, and in a moment everyone was in motion.

Gloria had not mentioned that the team danced forward and backward, trying to confuse the men, and continuously tossed the Bright between them. Sandara, true to her mission, kept up a steady stream of chatter aimed at goading the men. Helene danced after the pack, trying to keep her rhythm.

At a signal from Gloria, Sandara was lofted high into the sky by the women who happened to be holding her, toward the inside of the pitch. Helene froze for a moment, looking around, and discovered she was second-closest to the wicket. She ran pell-mell for the opening until a whistle sounded in her helmet. “Off-rhythm!” the woman referee called. “One minute penalty.” Helene was forced to run away from the pitch, then watched as four women and six men danced inside, careful not to jostle each other. Sandara was caught by three women and one man. Since the women had the majority, they got the point.

Everyone danced out of the pitch, took up the circular formation, and at a whistle, one of the men became the Bright and was tossed.

Helene was allowed to re-enter the game for the next inning. The referees switched the music to a waltz, which disrupted everyone’s concentration, and the Bright was almost but not quite dropped.

A game was sixteen innings. Helene was the Bright for the eleventh inning. She kept her arms and legs tightly together, her eyes wide, and was tossed like a spinning bundle of lumber. She had been too distracted to listen to the Brights previously, and in the confusion of being tossed between the fast-moving women, discovered she could not think of anything to yell. Finally, as two of the women launched her up toward the pitch, she just hollered “Yeah! You guys stink!”

“That doesn’t work for Moon Men!” Tom yelled as he raced through the wicket. “We never smell each other!”

“You guys are dumb!”

“Okay, might have something there.”

“Ahh!” Helene yelled, and was caught by Tom and three other men inside the pitch and lowered gently to the ground. Two points to the men.

The game ended with the women winning, 21-19. Both teams were sweaty and worn, and they joked with each other as they took down the pitch. The rolled-up fence was left on the ground for the next teams to erect.

The men went back into the village for more beer, and the women went to the children’s playground to watch the kids, gossip and also to drink beer, which a number of them had thoughtfully stockpiled before hand.

Some of the same women who had been willing to leave their kids on the monkey bars for an hour while they were playing, now had trouble sitting together because they wanted to jump up and catch their offspring whenever the kids tried to show off a trick for Mom. Eventually Helene found herself in a group of women who were less twitchy, seated on the ground off to one side of the park. It included Gloria, who was an experienced mother, and Susanna, who had no kids. Helene had never liked beer that well on Earth and saw no reason to start with flat beer, so she was drinking coffee.

The village grid extended to the playground, and there were several of the utility posts sticking up from the ground. Helene checked the price, found that it was more expensive than the Easterday family outlets, and decided to put off taking a bath. Gloria Beacon, however, plugged herself in and luxuriated in a rinse. “Whew, did I need a day off!” she said. “You gotta work up a sweat before you can relax when you’re all tense from working all week, right?”

“You know it!” said a middle-aged woman named Myra, seated next to a woman named Golda. Helene’s display identified them as married to each other, and on a second look, she noticed they had matching images of a forest in silhouette over their hearts.

“What do you do, Gloria?” Helene asked.

“I’m a stevedore. I load up cargo on the outbound ships. I mean, I don’t load them up, the robots do that. I supervise the robots.”

“Gloria and I work together,” Myra said. “She does the cargo, I do food and water and supplies, and the ship’s stewards get the passengers settled. We all have to coordinate to get everything balanced to within a couple of kilograms. If one side of the ship is heavy, the harbor pilot yells at us. That would be Golda, here.”

“Especially,” Susanna put in, “because the stewards are supposed to get all of the passengers in their seats for takeoff and there’s always one prima donna who decides it’s her right to get up and go potty.”

“Couldn’t you let a computer decide where everything gets stowed?” Helene asked.

“We can and we do,” Gloria said, “but there’s always last-minute changes and things nobody remembered to list and, you know, stuff that needs an intelligent decision. Last week I was loading the Tropical Princess and they had a shipment of live geese to … whatever planet it was going to, I forget. Anyway, the birds were in wire cages but they were able to move back and forth and I couldn’t figure out any way to immobilize them. I finally told the stewards we were going to have to put them right smack on the center axis so they couldn’t affect the balance as much, and the only place that had enough space was the passenger dining hall. I made ’em stack up those crates in the middle of the floor and lash them in place, and of course the poor geese were honking and banging into the walls of the crates like crazy, and there was goose poop all over because that’s what geese do when they’re upset. Once they got up into transfer orbit, the stewards had to move all the crates to a regular cargo hold and get the place cleaned up and deodorized before the lunch meal. They were honking and complaining worse than the geese!” Everybody laughed.

“Helene,” a woman named Deloria said, “you need to get your suit painted. When you’re wearing plain white, you look like a minister or something. You’re from Earth, how about a globe?”

“You can look up in the sky anytime and see Earth,” another woman chimed in. “Besides, she’s too young and pretty for something as stodgy as that. Maybe a mythological creature? What country are you from, Helene?”

“United States,” she said.

“My family came here from Prester John,” she said. “I don’t know much about Earth countries. What kind of mythological creatures could you use?”

Helene smiled. “Road Runner and Coyote?” she said. “Batman? Anyway, I don’t think that’s what I want. I’m going back to Earth in a couple of weeks anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t want to be half-dressed for two weeks. Listen, we have some real artists in Sinus Amoris and you’ve got enough money to get something really good. Why don’t you let us connect you up? I mean, even if you go back to Earth you’re going to want pictures of yourself to show your friends, right? You should be dressed right.”

“Even if?” Helene said. “Of course I’m going back to Earth!”

“Well, how about Tom?” a woman Helene had never met asked. “You’re just going to leave him?”

“Tom and I do not have a relationship! We’re not dating, we’re not not-dating, I just barely know him! What is wrong with you people?”

“What did Tom say?” Gloria asked calmly.

Helene was silent for a long moment, then said, “He said he was in love with me and he’d deal with it.”

“See,” Gloria said, “men aren’t real good at relationships. They don’t look at all the data. Women, we’re better at reading all 38 numbers.”

“Oh, my God,” Helene said. “38 numbers? You’re going to tell me what that means and it’s going to be something weird and I’m going to hate it, right?”

“Probably,” Deloria said. “38 is how many data points your suit collects about your body, all medical stuff to make sure you’re healthy. But when you grow up with it, you can look at somebody else’s numbers and see patterns.”

“Specifically,” Susanna said, “we can see how your numbers change when you’re around Tom, and we know you’re hot for him.”

“Why don’t I know that?”

“Because you’re from Earth and you don’t always understand your own feelings. Other people can see things you’re not admitting to yourself, honey,” Gloria said. “But you’ll figure it out eventually.”

Helene looked from one woman to another. All had turned on the social lights that let them see each other’s faces. She turned her helmet light off. “I’ve been here three days and already you old biddies from the village are trying to marry me off to a local boy!” Helene said. “I feel like we ought to be down by the river washing clothes together on the rocks or something. This is … this is the smallest small town any city girl ever got stuck in! My great-great-grandparents back in Poland lived in a crammed-up little ghetto and I’m pretty sure they weren’t as gossipy as you are.”

“You’ve been lonely and isolated all your life,” Gloria said, “and now you have to get used to being in a group of friends who understand you. I know that’s hard.”

“You’d be surprised how much you don’t know,” Helene said. She tried to stand up but tilted over, and was caught and pushed upright by the other women. With as much dignity as she could muster, she turned and walked back into the village.