It was a thought born in the animal fear of this new thing in the sky, and Matt worked to suppress it.
But the thought would recur. Everything he loved was fragile. Everything he loved might be forfeit to this nameless new moon.
The thought was persistent. The thought was true.
A year passed.
Part One
New Moon
Chapter 1
August
The crisis some people call “Contact” continues to preoccupy Congress and the Administration as elections approach.
We call it “Contact,” but as Senator Russell Welland (R., Iowa) observed last week, contact is the thing most conspicuously lacking. The spacecraft—if it is a spacecraft—has circled the Earth for more than a year without attempting any kind of signal. On the sole occasion when it displayed a sign of life—when it emitted the structures that occupy our major cities like so many monuments to the ineffectiveness of our air defenses—it was an event impossible to interpret. It’s as if we have been invaded by a troop of extraterrestrial mimes, deranged but very powerful.
Or so the conventional wisdom would have us believe. In the City of Rumors, nothing is taken for granted. Recent high-level international summits—including several underreported jaunts by the Secretary of State—have sparked suspicion that genuine “contact” of some kind may be imminent. According to unofficial White House sources, back-channel lines to the Germans, the Russians, and the Chinese—among others—have been buzzing with traffic for at least a week. Coincidence?
Who knows? Clearly, however, something is afoot. And Congressional leaders of both parties are demanding to be let in on it.
A year and some months after the immense alien Artifact parked itself in a close orbit of the Earth, Matt Wheeler spent an afternoon wondering how to invite Annie Gates to the party he was hosting Friday night.
The question was not whether to invite her—obviously he would—but how. More precisely, what would the invitation suggest about their relationship? And what did he want it to suggest?
Pondering the question, he washed his hands and prepared to see the last two patients of the day.
In a town the size of Buchanan a doctor ends up treating the people he sees at backyard barbecues. His last patients were Beth Porter, daughter of Billy, a sometimes-patient; and Lillian Bix, wife of his friend Jim.
The two women, Beth and Lillian, were posed at opposite ends of the waiting-room sofa like mismatched bookends. Lillian paged through a Readers Digest and dabbed her nose with a hankie. Beth stared at the far wall, absorbed in the music that seeped from the headphones of her Walkman like the rhythmic rattling of a pressed tin pie plate. A few more years of this, Matt thought, and he’d be treating her for hearing loss.
The teenager was first up. “Beth,” he said.
She gazed into space.
“Beth. Beth!”
She looked up with the resentment of someone startled out of a dream. The resentment faded when she recognized Matt. She thumbed a switch on the cassette player and pried the phones out of her ears.
“Thank you,” he said. “Come on in.”
As he turned, Annie Gates stepped out of her consulting room with a file folder in hand. She glanced at Beth, shot him a look: Good luck! Matt returned a smile.
Annie Gates wore medical whites and a stethoscope around her neck. Unlike Beth and Lillian, Annie and Matt were a matched set. They were business partners. They were professionals. He was sort of in love with her. He had been sort of in love with her for most of a decade.
Matt Wheeler had been practicing primary-care medicine in this building for fifteen years. He had grown up in Buchanan, developed what he thought of as “the medical impulse” in Buchanan, and after serving his residency in a Seattle hospital and passing his general boards he had hightailed it back to Buchanan to open a private practice. His partner then had been Bob Scott, a dark-haired and high-strung Denverite who had interned with him. Together they had rented this suite, a waiting room and three consulting rooms on the seventh floor of the Marshall Building, a sandstone legacy of the Hoover era planted firmly at the intersection of Marina and Grove.
Matt and his partner had understood the perils of family practice, or thought they did. The real money was in specialties, in “doing procedures”; the hassles were in family practice. Not just patient hassles—those they had been prepared for. But insurance hassles, Medicare and Medicaid hassles, paperwork hassles… in time, a crippling, skyrocketing overhead. Dr. Scott, professing a nostalgia for city life, bailed out and left for L. A. in 1992. Last Matt heard, he was working at the kind of corporate storefront clinic sometimes called a “Doc-in-the-Box.” Bye-bye hassles. Bye-bye independence.
Matt persevered. He couldn’t imagine a life outside of Buchanan, and he couldn’t imagine any work more satisfying than the work he did, at least when he was allowed to do it. Celeste had died around the time Bob left for California, and the new demands on his time had been, perhaps, a blessing in disguise.
Bob Scott’s replacement showed up in June of that year: a young female internist named Anne Gates. Matt had not expected a woman to show interest in the partnership, particularly not a young blond woman in a businesslike skirt and a pair of black-rimmed glasses that amplified her eyes into something owlish and fiercely solemn. He told her she’d have to put in long hours, make house calls, cover at the local ER, and expect nothing spectacular in the way of remuneration. “It’s not city work,” he said, thinking of Bob Scott’s defection and the cut of that Perry Ellis skirt.
Whereupon Anne Gates informed him that she had grown up in a farm town on the prairies of southern Manitoba ; she knew what small towns were like and Buchanan didn’t look so damn small to her (though it did look decent). She had survived a residency in an inner-city hospital where most of the ER patients had been gunshot wounds, knife wounds, and drug ODs. She had emerged from this ordeal still believing in the fundamental value of primary-care medicine, and as far as “remuneration” went, she would be happy to live in the absence of cockroaches, get more than five hours’ sleep in a given week, and treat at least the occasional patient who didn’t initiate the relationship by vomiting on her.
Whereupon Matt Wheeler discovered he had a new partner.
They had worked together for nearly a year before they discovered each other as human beings. He was recovering from Celeste’s death and what interested him about Anne Gates in that unhappy time was, for instance, her remarkable finesse with fiber-optic sigmoidoscopy, a procedure he loathed and dreaded, or her uneasiness with cranial injuries of any kind. They shifted patients according to each other’s weaknesses and strengths; Anne ended up with many of his geriatric patients, and he took an extra share of pediatrics. But she was also a woman and Matt was a widower and there were days when the vector of that equation did not escape him. On the first anniversary of her arrival in Buchanan, he took her to dinner at the Fishin’ Boat, a restaurant by the marina. Soft-shell crab, shallots in butter, margueritas, and a prearranged ban on doc-speak. By the end of the evening he was calling her Annie. They went to bed for the first time the week after that.
They were passionately involved for most of that year. The year after, they seemed to drift apart. No arguments, but fewer dates, fewer nights together. Then the pace picked up for another six months. Then another hiatus.