It was just rising, almost full. But it was like a miniature Earth, blue and brown, white at the poles.
“Terraformed,” Matt said.
“Made like Earth?” Martha said. “Maybe that’s where the people are.”
“It’s not impossible,” La said, “though you’d think the person who made this obelisk would check there before going a million times farther away.”
“It could have been later than the obelisk, though. Matt looked at the artifact, and then the Moon, “Like people came back, but didn’t want to settle on the Earth.”
La nodded. “It’s too radioactive, if it’s all like here. Short-term exposure wouldn’t hurt, but if you settled here, you’d have reproductive problems. Sterility, or at least a high frequency of mutations.”
“So we should look at the Moon,” Martha said. “Can you go that far?”
“Easily. Anywhere in the solar system. But it would be smart to check the rest of the Earth first. Let’s go up into orbit and look around.”
They did one pass in low-Earth orbit, passing North America in a line from Baja California to Maine, all sterile ruins, then back down through Africa, a gray tundra. The radiation wasn’t as bad elsewhere, but there were no signs of human habitation anywhere.
Up in a higher orbit, where they could see the planet as an entire globe, there were still no cities or obvious ports or roads. The gamma radiation diminished to a negligible trace in Africa and most of Asia, but there was still no sign of human life.
“Might as well try the Moon,” La said. “We could get there in a couple of hours, accelerating halfway, then decelerating. But to save energy, I’d rather blast for a few minutes and drift weightless for a day or so. Can you handle that?”
“Yes!” Martha said, before Matt could express an opinion.
They accelerated for a few minutes, and then were falling free. “You might as well go rest,” La said. “Come out when you’re hungry.”
Martha was more efficient at swimming through zero gee. She was waiting for Matt in their room, semi-sitting in a chair.
“This is funny,” she said. “Furniture is kind of useless.”
He grabbed the bed and perched at an odd angle, and laughed. “I guess to sleep, you have to slip under the sheet and hope it holds you in place.”
“At least you can’t fall out.” She rummaged through the bag and came out with the porn box, and looked at it, frowning. “I guess this is as close as I’m going to come to an actual Passage. Could you watch it with me and explain things?”
It was not Matt’s idea of a first date, but it was certainly interesting. She knew about fertilization in a vague way, bees and flowers, but hadn’t been taught anything about the mechanics of it. The other girls had told her the man sort of peed into the woman, and that was all she knew.
“Is this what they mean by rape?”
“When the woman doesn’t want to do it, yes. Or if she’s not old enough. Under eighteen, where I come from,” he added optimistically.
“The sisters warned us about rape, but they couldn’t describe it. Of course, they were virgins. They’d never seen anything like . . . what we just saw. But it doesn’t look like it hurts.”
“It can . . . when it’s rape, it does. The point of rape is to hurt, to dominate. But that’s not what they’re doing here.”
They watched several performances, fast-forwarding through the repetitive parts, and he explained which could lead to pregnancy and which were more or less for fun.
Of course his formfitting superhero costume did nothing to hide his own sustained reaction to the show and its audience, and she couldn’t help noticing.
“May I see?” He let her roll down his trousers. “Oh . . . so if you were circumcised, this would be—” One touch was enough.
She had just seen several examples of ejaculation, but none in zero gravity. Out of instinct as much as observation, she grabbed it and pumped up and down a couple of times, and the result was a kind of sticky spiderweb expanding in three dimensions. Fortunately, there was a tissue dispenser on the table by the bed, and they chased down the mess, laughing together.
He was startled by how matter-of-fact she was about it, but realized she was carrying a different set of cultural baggage. Like most men, he’d been more or less obsessed with the processes of erection and ejaculation ever since the first times they had happened, but she’d never given them much thought before the past hour. It was a process, not a fixation.
He tried to clean himself and put everything back where it belonged, but that was also something he’d never done in zero gravity, nor in a skintight Superman suit, and as he fumbled, slowly rotating, she had another giggling fit when he mooned her, upside down.
Finally he sat half-perched on the bed, with a semblance of dignity, though he was sure he could never be completely dignified with her again. Which was probably a good thing.
“How often does that happen?” she asked, when she was able to catch her breath again.
“Um . . . as often as possible?”
“But it can’t be pressure, like having to pee? Fathers go all their lives without doing it.”
That confused him for a moment. She meant priests. “It’s hard to explain. It hasn’t happened to me since the day we met.” Well, once. “It’s not at all like peeing. It’s more or less, well, voluntary. Sort of.”
She gave him an odd look, floating in midair with a tissue in her hand. “It’s something you want to talk about but don’t want to talk about.”
“Yes . . . I do, but I suppose . . . yes.”
“This part I think I understand: You want to put your thing in me and do like the men in the pictures. Don’t you?”
He tried to think of some answer other than an emphatic affirmative. “Of course I do, but . . . we haven’t really known each other very long.”
“And then there’s the getting married first part. There don’t seem to be any Fathers around.” She picked up the box and studied the gymnastics taking place. “Of course, these people can’t be married—you didn’t have marriages with two men and a woman back then?”
“No. In fact, I doubt that any of the people in those pictures are married to each other.”
She nodded. “They don’t seem to know one another very well. They’re actors?”
“Or just people off the street, friends of the guy with the camera. I don’t think they have to pay the men very much.”
“Even though they’re sinning, and probably going to Hell.”
“I doubt that any of them believe that.”
“You don’t.” She looked straight into his eyes. “You actually don’t believe in God at all, do you?”
He paused. “No. No, not really. The universe—”
“I’m not sure I do anymore, either. It’s like all my life they’ve told me what to believe and only let me see and read things that agreed with them. Until I met you. This really ordinary thing, they didn’t even hint about it. It makes me, it makes me so angry!
“And now we’re headed for the Moon in this machine, run by a godlike apparition that claims to be a machine as well. A Moon that looks like a little Earth—except that Earth itself doesn’t look much like Earth anymore!” She sobbed suddenly and pulled herself down to bury her face in his shoulder.
He put his arm awkwardly around her back, trying to think of anything he could say that would be a comfort. “We have each other, Martha. I trust you, and you can trust me.”
“I do trust you.” She looked up with a weird grimace that became a laugh. “You can’t even cry in this stupid world. The tears don’t run off.”
He wiped her eyes with the side of his hand. A few tears sparkled away in midair.
“You’ve been kind,” she said. “I’m so ignorant, and you could have taken advantage of me.” His face felt hot; he’d been trying to figure out a way of apologizing for just that. With the wrong judge and jury, what he’d just done could get him jail time for indecent exposure. Or, with another, be shrugged off as humorous sex education.