Luna

Episode 2: Homecoming

Kino MacKenzie looked around the passenger cabin, leaned back in his seat, tapped his temple, blinked several times, summoned his Mind-pad and thought “Text Calypso”.

While focused on the message hovering in front of his imagination Dr. MacKenzie took off his smudged wire-rimmed eyeglasses licked them and cleaned them with the hem of his white thawb, the long-sleeved ankle-length Saudi tunic favored by all desert dwellers. Kino MacKenzie, “Mac”, was heading home to his desert city in the Life Zone. He placed his glasses back on the bridge of his bronze nose. “Calypso, Mo ghrá  ,I’ll be Mooring soon. Home by 0900. I owe you an airship vacation. Hello summertime hibernation. Much to tell you re: Paris. Love you miss you. Mac.” 

Send.

Mac sipped his drink and looked out at the dark night sky. Tonight, the stars were visible through the haze. Out here in the west they are more visible. Save for when dust storms stir the air.

Time for personal work. Tap. Think. Open memoir. Intro notes. Think write. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. He laughed. Delete.

“It was the time of great innovation. It was the time—“another sip. “It was the time of great decimation.”  Decimation. He liked that word. Described it all.

Save. His eyeglasses were already smudged again. To hell with it. He was done with anything resembling work for now. Kino tapped his temple and blinked back to the present moment in real life, where he turned in his seat to give himself the real life reward of the panoramic vista they were floating over as night began to give way to the approach of morning, and  Mac released his cares while slowly drifting over the desert, savoring the weightless sensation of this serene ride on this western bound airship on a moonlit night.

He must have dozed off, or had he? The sky was lighter. Mac rubbed his eyes in time to catch sight of a turkey vulture soaring up ahead in the distance, looping in circles. He followed it with his eyes as the zeppelin passed the bird that seemed to barely flap its enormous, outstretched wings. He turned in his seat to watch the yellow-beaked red-faced creature corkscrew high into the heavens on one of the thermals that were now gently buffeting the blimp.

It was a full flight. Some passengers studied the sight of the shadow cast far below by the electric airship, which resembled a whale’s shadow swimming across the ocean of dunes, populated with mesquites and saguaros far below, while others talked projects, plans and news as the sun rose behind them.

“This is your captain, Saleen Templeton.” Her smooth calm voice was as buoyant as the ride. “We’ll be landing in Tucson shortly. We are about 30-miles out from where the temperature is 110-degrees.”

Mac stretched out in his seat. He laid there mesmerized by the airship’s two silent gigantic electric propellors, props the size of London’s Ferris wheel on the Thames, spinning on both sides of the sleek white zeppelin into blurs as it slowly wheeled around the backside of the scorched Santa Catalina mountains in a graceful arc.

Coming into view to his right was the white dome of the fusion reactor, white as a pearl in the morning light north of Tucson, there, near the ancient Biosphere ruins, out among the sand dunes.

The passenger seated next to him leaned in to appreciate the same view. “I designed her. Name’s Tang. Solomon Tang. Fusion Engineer. From Livermore. Call me Sol.”

“You designed that Reactor?”

“Yes sir.  I’m heading back to Tucson to oversee construction of the next one. No offense but you look like you’ve been traveling for days. You getting off in Tucson?” Sol’s thick black eyebrows arched like a puppy’s.

Mac repeated the young man’s name. “Sol?” Mac held out his hand. “Con mucho gusto. Pleasure. MacKenzie. Kino Mackenzie… Yeah. I’m just coming back from speaking to the Paris Agreement Signatories meeting. Cannot wait to be home in my own bed.”

“How was Paris?”

“Hell of a trip. “

“What did you talk about?”

The pilot spoke. “We will be passing through a patch of thermals up ahead so please fasten your seatbelts.”

Kino fumbled with his seatbelt. “Sustainable desert cities. Tucson’s a model city.” His habit was to speak in lists. “Rainwater harvesting. Aquaponic gardening on an industrial scale. Civic-”

The blimp hit a thermal saving Sol from Mac’s list by slowly see-sawing up and down like a clipper riding a gentle wave. This alarmed an elderly woman sitting in front of them.“Goddam terrorists! We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” Her wife held her hand and as if scolding her said, “It’s a thermal, dear. “ A group of startled Chinese passengers chattered about the fuss and then laughed.

Mac smiled. “Blimp virgin.” He continued, “The attendees were most interested in my one-in-one-out policy, an ordinance I wrote for our life zone’s council. We’re unique in that we have sufficient rainwater for everyone and for all our infrastructure needs if we harvest every drop and our small population remains static.”

He emphasized the words “if” and “static" in a practiced fashion.

“Ah, an eco-fascist. Like me.” Sol laughed. Mac barely smiled. Again the zeppelin gently nosed up and then nosed down and then up again. Mac recognized an Icelandic accent from the passenger up front who was whooping.”Ríða vindinum! Ríða vindinum!”

Sol looked to Mac for an explanation.

“Means ‘ride the wind’.”

“You speak whatever that language was?”

“Icelandic.”

“I’m impressed. I have a question about your one-in-one-out policy. What about children?”

“Native born offspring can stay under two conditions. One, by the time the firstborn is 18, in order to remain, a family member has to leave, or a family member must have died. And two, they must pursue a trade essential to the community. You’re either with the space program, a food producer, a builder, a health worker, in robot maintenance or-”

Once more the airship see-sawed up and gently down and back up.

Sol took advantage of the pause. “Hey, Mac, another question. Can you help me get permanent residence? They’ve given me a temporary visa. What does it take to get permanent residence? I’m meeting someone special. Someone I’d like to spend some time-uh-what can you do for me? Do you accept bribes? Do you take Crypto carbon currency?”

“Sorry. Only currency I accept is rainwater.”

“Mac, I’m not serious. It was a joke.”

“Well, I am. On this issue. There was a lot of discussion about how to enforce the strict civic immigration end of it. Outside of the life zone in Tucson there’s nothing but scorched wilderness and oceans of sand on all sides for hundreds of miles. Our rainwater makes us possible.”

Sol had to know. “Were you in Paris when the terrorist attack happened?”

“Yes. I had finished my talk. Some friends said we should escape and tour Sainte-Chapelle, it’s a cathedral on ‘City Island’, an island in the middle of the River Seine. We were inside looking at these amazing stained-glass windows when the stabbings took place. We heard the sirens outside. Gendarmes directed us off the island across the bridge to the Left Bank and then closed all the access points to the island. The French used nano drones to take out the attackers. From where we were standing on the riverbank, we watched them fly overhead like a swarm of bees.”

“Wasn’t it the Guardians of Gaea who took responsibility? “

“Yeah. I saw that. Looked to me like the work of Los Nihilistos. Or the Communal Brigade.”

“Hate to doom spiral, Mac, but I wonder if there will be copycat attacks.”

Sol had struck a nerve. “I always thought our transit hubs and our spaceport would make ripe targets for fanatics. I worry about my wife.”

“You’re married?”

“Yes, I am. Her name’s Calypso.”

“What does she do?”

“She consults with Nostromo, the Asteroid Mining consortium.”  Mac felt it would be too prideful to tell his new friend that Dr. Calypso Montaño taught at the College of Planetary and Lunar Sciences, was head of the new Dante Lauretta Asteroid-Sciences department and was on the boards of Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Boeing and Space-X at the Diaz-Borman Space Port.

“You have kids, Mac?”

“Yeah. We have a teenage daughter. And my dad living with us. And we have an adult son working in the Antarctic. He’s a medic with a geo-engineering team. You have family, Sol?”

“No. No kids. No wife. Not in this world.”

“Hm. Well, we feel safe where we live. Protected by oceans of sand on all sides. The flow of climate refugees finally slowed to a trickle. No hurricanes or tornados. Many of us escaped the Great Die Off.”

“I’m the only survivor in my family.”

“Sorry to hear that, Sol.”

“From 8 billion human beings to less than 300-million in our parent’s lifetimes.” Both men looked beyond the luxury they were in, away from each other and into the past. Sol whispered, “What we survived. What our parents and grandparents survived.”

Mac nodded. “Viruses. Water wars. Famines. And it’s not over yet.” After a period of uncomfortable silence Mac cleared his throat and asked Sol, “So what’s your plan for the next couple of days?”

“I’m here to manage the construction of our second reactor out past the Diaz-Borman Space Port. Nothing too exciting. I’m just glad I can keep working nights. I love the nocturnal life out here in the hot zones. I don’t know anyone who can take the days out here anymore.”

Mac nodded. “Hot lifers are out of their minds. Can’t pay me enough to do day labor. Look over there. High up in the sky. Contrails from an early morning liftoff from the space port.”

Sol said,” I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow. I’m going out to the new reactor site south of the city to look at repurposing a nearby missile silo as living quarters for the reactor engineers. It’s a cluster fuck at the site because yesterday while doing exploratory digging our team located a mass grave of undetermined age. That’ll mean delays. Most likely climate refugees. End of the 20th century. Central Americans. Texans. Floridians. We have records, indicating a refugee camp was not far from the site. A big one.”

Mac placed his hand on Sol’s right arm. “I’ll look into it. See what I can find. I was an archaeologist doing digs here long before I got into sustainable cities. There were war crimes. Awful things. Crimes against humanity.”

As the clipper cleared the back of the Catalinas below and Tucson came into view to the south, Mac pointed out the glistening white bullet train rocketing down beneath them from beyond the shimmering mirages to the north, slithering south across the dunes towards Mac’s desert city where his family waited for his return beneath its vast protective quilt of solar panels, shade sails and any found recyclable rusting junk that could reflect light and cast lifesaving shade. From this height the city looked like a sprawling mosaic made of millions of tiny mirrors. With a barely audible whump the ship see-sawed up and down again, moving some passengers to whoop.

“Ride’em, cowboy,” joked Sol, gripping the arm of his seat.

The helium clipper began its graceful descent, following a semi-circle defined by the jagged Tucson Mountains. Mac couldn’t help himself. He had to point out to Sol the small range that formed the western edge of the city was “the prehistoric rim of a volcanic crater” as the lighter than air dirigible circled back into the wind and into the blinding morning sun, toward Tucson International Airport.

The captain interrupted their chatter. “Hello y Buenos Dias y Wilkommen y Huānyíng. We will be landing shortly. Prepare for mooring.”

Mac looked to their right. “Well, you are in luck Mr. Tang. If you squint you can see one of the massive ore haulers to your right, south of the city, way, way out there, the black thing, suspended in the sky just beyond the Santa Rita mountains. Most likely been out somewhere between Mars and Jupiter for years, waiting now for its clearance to land. Usually carries billions of dollars’ worth of minerals. Platinum, palladium, silver. Or zinc. My wife said the next one up will be delivering water mining equipment to Mars. “

Mac saw a wet bulb weather alert on his watch, excused himself to glance at the alert hovering in front of his imagination and said,” Hm” and scanned the southern horizon. “See any monsoon clouds out there, Mr. Tang?”

“No. You?”

“No. Not yet. We could be in for it.”

As the airship lined up to dock at its home port dead ahead the passengers gawked at the helium and hybrid airships down below. They were being tugged from their cavernous stables where they were secured for the duration of yesterday’s sandstorm, floating and bobbing as they were lined up and moored next to their respective passenger terminal gates.

Mac was proud of his desert city. “We’re the biggest transit hub west of Lake Mississippi.” Sol thought to himself “and I thought I was a nerd. I hope he doesn’t start listing transit hubs.” Mac gathered his things and brushed the curtains of his kaffiyeh away from his smudged eyeglasses. Sol tugged his kaffiyeh on his head and wrapped it around his collar in a rakish fashion. Both men put on their shades and promised to get in touch.

Mac said, “Looks like we moored.” As he slipped his book in his arm bag Sol said, “What are you reading?”

“Just a techno-thriller. An old Clive Clancy. Too much dialogue so far and a lot of exposition. Writer’s just dumping information on the reader. I like action.”