The Romantic Education of Joshua Altschuler

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She was there waiting when I landed. I can’t tell you how much that lifted my spirits. I had ditched it all, leaving my old life behind. I was adrift. She was my redeemer, my new start. 

We had come into Earth orbit, and before long, we could see them looming. There was a large displayscreen in the passenger cabin of the Rockship, and their image overwhelmed me. I was only passenger, so I sat at the front to let the scene cocoon me. 

On that screen, the twin cylinders, rolling in place toward one another, were breathtaking. They are twenty kilometers long and six in diameter. Their size makes them appear to spin slowly, like a mixer in molasses. The sun hits one side of each as they rotate, lighting them to blinding brilliance against the gauzy background of Earth. We were nearing their  curious armadillo end plating, studded with tiny projections of cams, laser positioners, clamps, and lights. 

The habs are built in pairs to counter rotate. That minimizes the corrections needed to keep them turning smoothly. They need to spin to generate the feeling of normal earth gravity in space. They looked like impossible hemicylinders with their solid metal envelopes, walling out the many dangers of space. No windows for them, so, away from the dim illumination of Earth’s reflection, the shadowed halves were almost invisible. The pair I was heading for were Elysium and Utopia. I had assumed that the names were just the ordinary hype you expect in a commercialized society like ours.

I needed to move away from the Einstein settlement at the North Pole of the Moon, where I had lived for three years. It was too painful to remain there amid the wreckage of a life. They had pulled the chain on the EarthWatch project. I was rendered totally redundant.  I eagerly accepted my sister-in-law’s invitation to move to Elysium. I was anxious, as any person in transition is. It was a leap into the unknown, yet it was a welcome escape. I was moving not so much to forge a new life as to escape an old one. But my generous sister-in-law was taking more of a chance on me than I was taking on her. Her losses were much worse than mine, and so was her vulnerability. 

I had concentrated on the process of the trip. That calmed me somewhat. I have a predisposition to dissociation and I’m also trained to pay attention to the little pieces. Focusing on things and their workings to escape my anxieties always helps me. And it was easy. There was a lot to look at.

When you come into Elysium you have been pre-spun to the same rate of rotation as the cylinder. After you land the best is yet to come. How could  they not consider the visual effect of coming in with twenty kilometers of landscaped terrain hitting your eye as soon  as you stepped onto that down elevator? The outer wall of the cabin is all glass. Elysium was built to resemble the Dalmatian Coast of what was Croatia at the time of the Impact. It must have been astoundingly beautiful in the original, because even that copy was mesmerizing. I had never seen so much open air, so much beauty,  before. It was dizzying. As you walk out, you are unsteady on your feet.

On my way to the Moon, they did not trouble me with that sight. I can understand why. After absorbing the initial shock of a subterranean creature surfacing, I would never have left it. Who would?  I understood, then, what paradise was. It computed, then, why some people on Earth  were addicts of the mind bath, that sneaky tech from our interstellar friends. What other way were stricken people going to live in a world they loved? It was an insidious gift. For its users, everything in their own private world is suited to them. To get everything you want is maximum misfortune. What more seductive addiction could you imagine?

In our tiny settlement on the Moon, with its interconnected scientists, it was an open secret that there were aliens. The UN had been able secure the alien Cthaw signals from public knowledge on Earth. Yet they could not conceal the disturbing consequences of that knowledge. It was no mystery that basic research had been shut down. Governments were delighted to be able to eliminate all the expensive contrivances that basic scientific research  required. It’s no violation of security to point that out. It is happening everywhere. 

People might not know the reason, but everyone was aware of the facts. They relieved me of my duties at EarthWatch on the Moon. They called it rotation, but no one replaced me. I was an astrophysicist. No more of my kind needed up there. And before they let me leave, I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Not that it will do them any good. This truth will out.

Now we depend for our survival on the kindness of strangers six light years away. They publish their daily issue of EarthWatch collision predictions. That is now our only protection, because our own EarthWatch lab has been disbanded. Their report is better than ours, and more reliable, they say. 

Yet, for me, the situation calls for caution. There were negative indicators. Our centuries of radio broadcasting have apprised them of the worst we can do. In my estimate, they have little reason to like us, and no reason to protect us. It is significant that they do not allow reciprocal communication. We remain ignorant of their nature. Does letting our guard down with such partners seem reasonable to you? 

It is not for me to decide any more. My superiors have spoken. That chapter of my life is done. Now, I hope to be a good real estate agent.

My sister-in-law stood in the lounge of the 'airport'. It was styled just like that. No ticket counters, of course. There were black plastic sculptural waiting chairs though, and a small autochef snack counter run by some enterprising merchant. They surrounded an open waiting area. The displayscreens in the enclosure showed vids of shuttles and Rockships coming in and out. The announcements were localized to fons in the area. 

I was singular in more ways than one. The Moon was not a common source of immigrants. The Earth was that, and thousands were coming up on the same generous terms I had taken from the Moon. When faced with an indefinite future of their monotone, ferret life on Earth, who wouldn't want to live in a physical paradise with sun and beaches and quaint architecture?

She didn’t wait, and called to me, her hapless unemployed brother-in-law:

"Oh, Joshua, I am so glad you are finally here! How are you? Thank you for coming to  help."

This from a fem whose husband, my brother, had died just two weeks before. She had started a new business, then already successful, and ran it solo. She was greeting me, her hermit brother-in -law. I hardly knew her; I am a poor correspondent. Over the years, she had heard little from me. Yet, her greeting was so sweet that my delinquency induced shame. I’m sure she could more easily have hired one of the many immigrants to Elysium who were arriving daily from Earth to assist  her with her real estate business rather than me. 

Since they had finished Elysium and Utopia seven years previous, thousands had been flocking to the opportunity of a new life in a place where the skies were not eternally shrouded with toxic yellow gas. What benefit an anti-social astrophysicist was going to be to her real estate business was, surely, questionable. My skill set was not at all applicable, but she took pity on my plight and welcomed me in.

My previous experience didn't seem to matter. I was immensely grateful for her charity and determined to be of use to her. It wasn't money. They had to give me a pension when they released me. I had been a tenured professor when I had gone up to the Moon. They had maintained my status with the active cooperation of a grateful university. It was a bonus to have one of its staff doing cutting-edge work in space at no cost to them. All they could then do was to detach me from my position. They still had to pay me until they gave me alternative employment. Fat chance of that! There was no need for my kind. The Cthaw textbooks had revealed all we could conceivably need to know about the Universe. They said there was no more need for theoretical science. Why search for answers if you have them already?

My reply to her was stilted. I had gotten out of practice expressing authentic emotion:

"Oh, you know Miriam, I am always ok. I'm a bachelor. I live alone. I'd rather talk about how you are. I am so sorry about Michael. I didn't appreciate how sick he was. These days, you assume they are going to be able to cure everyone."

"Thank you Joshua. He'd been sick for a long time. There are still some kinds of cancer they can't cure. They can keep you going for a long time, though. He's been in clear sight of death’s door for over ten years. There was nothing to do and no point in worrying you. Michael was funny that way. His cancer is one of the reasons we never had kids, and why we came away. It wasn't even a shock when he had a crisis. It had happened several times before. This time, unfortunately, he didn't pull through, that's all."

Then she broke my heart.

"I haven't got anyone left, Joshua. Michael told me a lot about the early days with you. I thought we might be able to be brother and sister the way we could have been if anything were normal in this world."

It was obvious from her spontaneous display of emotion that she felt deeply. I could see why Michael had loved her so much. Oh, she was beautiful, all right, but she was so much more. She had opened up to me so quickly I was breathless with it. Some part of me considered it almost indecent. But, of course, it wasn't that. It was human.

"You know I've never spent enough time on relationships, Miriam. I will try to deserve being related to you."

She blinked to control her tears: "I can't ask for more. Welcome." 

Then she came over and hugged me. I was aware of the perfume of her. The sweet smell of woman. Her hair brushed the side of my face and blinded my right eye. I had lived on the Moon for three years, and it was, no doubt, sensory starvation, but I wasn't ready for hair. Hair didn't need to be banned in LEO. Under low gravity, like on the Moon, hair shed is suspended in the air. It was unhealthy and clogged the environmental systems. So, we had to shave it all off. They tried depilatories for a while, but they didn't work out for physical and psychological reasons. People liked shaving better. You get used to seeing people without hair, but you have been raised to think hair is attractive.

I couldn't tell her that that her hair knocked me out, though, could I? She would have thought I had a weird fetish. Maybe I do. But my tenuous hold on the social graces made me keep it buttoned whatever it was.

Here, in normal one gee gravity, they don't have any problem with shed hair and skin any more than they do on Earth. So, everyone walks around with that beautiful adornment and they don't even notice it. I stayed silent. I got my reward. With a queenly sweep of her arm, she turned and stretched it out to usher me into to her world.

It was stretched out ahead of us like a kaleidoscope dream. Large bodies of blue water dotted the landscape and structures that were indistinct in the distance were echoes of quaint seaside houses. Buildings, many tile-roofed in orange and yellow, lined the shores, alike in difference. Here was a red roof and there, a yellow one. Now mustard colored walls and then, adobe brown. They were laid out in clusters with beaches between them and small boats on the bodies of water. The closer ones seemed to be dropping fishing nets into the water. Others were coming up with gleaming, dancing fish. The sky overhead was filled with puffy white clouds which obscured, but did not hide, the land overhead on the other side of the cylinder. Its distance did not hide that it echoed what I saw in front of my eyes. And I, fortunate one, was to be living there.

I didn't really hear what Miriam said next. It was something about going home. She said a home! Clutching my small yellow bag of personals, I followed her up a dark brown brick road. The ground was warm under my feet. We walked between discrete houses of the sort that had not been inhabited on Earth for at least fifty years. If they hadn't been knocked down to make way for the communal housing that was the only practical solution to living, they sat moldering and dissolving in the noxious fog that blanketed Earth. 

We seemed to be approaching a village, with shops and little seaside restaurants peopled by laughing customers. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time. That, too, cheered me. My mood was lifting. I realized then I had a future. Perhaps not one I would have chosen, but one that offered prospects.