The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [231]
Earth gravity turned me giddy. The robot eased me back to the bed and seemed to listen when I spoke, though its answer was nothing I could understand. When I stirred again, it helped me to a chair and left the room to bring a human physician, a lean dark man who wore a silver crescent on a neat white jacket. Briskly efficient, he listened at my heart, felt my belly, shook his head at what I tried to say, and turned to leave the room.
"My friends?" I shouted at him. "Where are they?"
He shrugged and walked out. The robot stood watching till I felt able to stand and then took my arm to guide me outside, into a circular garden ringed with a circular building. Its lenses followed intently while I walked gravel paths through strange plants that edged the air with scents new to me. The other doors, I thought, might be hiding my companions, but it caught my arm when I tried to knock. When I persisted, it drew a little silver baton clipped to its waist and beckoned me silently back into the room.
Under its guard, I was treated well enough. Although my words seemed to mean nothing, it nodded when I rubbed my lips and my belly, and brought a tray of food: fruits that we have never grown on the Moon, a plate of crisp brown nut-flavored cakes, a glass of very good wine. I ate with a sudden appetite.
Silent most of the time, now and then it burst into speech. Clearly, it had questions. So did I, desperate questions about these remote children of ours and what they might do with us. It listened blankly when I spoke and locked the door when it left the room, with no hint of any answers.
Haunted by our images along that monumental avenue, I slept badly that night, dreaming that they were lumbering in hot pursuit while we fled across a lifeless landscape pitted with deep craters those black insects had eaten into the planet.
Terror chilled me. Did these people want to sacrifice us in that sacred circle? Drown us in the Nile? Feed us to the insects? Freeze us into silver metal and stand us on guard against the next invasion of heretic clones? I woke up shivering, afraid to know.
Next morning the robot brought an odd-looking machine, and admitted a slim, quick little woman who looked a little like Dian, though she was wrinkled and dark from a sun that never shone below our Tycho dome. Perhaps a sort of nun, she wore a tall silver turban and fingered a silver Moon pendant. She set up the machine to project words on the wall.
The moon is distant from the sea, And yet with amber hands She leads him, docile as a boy, Along appointed sands.
Familiar words. I'd heard Dian recite them in a tone of adoration, though I was never sure exactly what they meant. They became stranger now, as the woman chanted them like a prayer. She repeated them two or three times in the same solemn tones and then read them more slowly, watching through dark-rimmed glasses to see my response, until at last I could nod to a spark of recognition. Vowel sounds had simply shifted. Moon was mahan, see was say.
She came back again and again, using her machine to teach me like a child. Even when the sounds became familiar, everything else was baffling: plants and animals, clothing and tools, maps of the world and the symbols of math. Yet at last I was able to ask about my companions.
"Uhl-weese." She frowned and shook her head.
Unwise. Why, she didn't say. When I tried to tell her we were visitors from the Moon, she scolded and seemed to pity me. Caressing her sacred pendant, she spoke of the paradise the Almighty Five had made of the Moon, where the blessed were allowed to dwell in an everlasting joy.
Paradise, unfortunately, was not meant for the likes of me. Pretenders who unwisely tried to steal sacred things or powers were to be consumed forever by the black demons in their hell beneath the earth.
In olden days, she told me darkly, divine fire might have descended to redeem my errant soul. In these