Read Online Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Free Book Online Page A

enough to adopt some of Earth’s customs. Or maybe some of the customs of where she lived, a place that proudly called itself the Midwest, even though it was in the middle of no part of the west as she knew it, a place that liked its old names even better, even though the regions it referred to had less meaning than they historically did.
    She lived in Iowa.
    For a while she had lived near the flat farmland in the center of the region, but she had moved to the bluffs near the Mississippi River after her second son was born. She hadn’t thought of those farmlands until the night she learned about what the media was now calling Anniversary Day.
    In those farmlands, the darkness would be richer, and the Moon even brighter.
    But here in Davenport, right after Anniversary Day, the residents had started turning off lights at dusk, even the automated ones. Everyone gathered in the historic Prospect Terrace Park overlooking the river, where some major treaty, now completely unimportant, had been signed long ago, and she found herself part of “everyone.”
    She hadn’t been to Prospect Terrace Park in more than a decade, and not at night since her children were little and wanted to attend the July summer fireworks party that had continued for centuries, unbroken, from a barge on the Mississippi.
    The Anniversary Day gatherings didn’t have the festive feel of the fireworks parties or even the annual park blues festival, held in September just before the weather changed.
    In fact, she had never in her life experienced anything like these gatherings. She had come to the park on a whim. Her backyard was small and not set up for stargazing. Usually, she didn’t look up at night at all. She didn’t like to think about what was out there in the known universe, the things that could come for her—and hadn’t so far.
    So, when she heard about Anniversary Day, she thought about the best place to look at the night sky, and decided on the least developed park, the one that some historical society deemed too important for “services.” There were bathrooms at the end of the road, near the very controversial parking lot, but nothing more except benches that were replaced every decade or so as they wore out.
    When she drove up the first night after the bombings, she was surprised to see that dozens of others had the same idea. Human, Peyti, Disty—it didn’t seem to matter. People from all species had gathered and were looking up, some with real telescopes and some using the scoping feature in their eyes.
    She hadn’t even thought of a scope. Her eldest son Takumi would have brought one—something high tech and modern. He probably would have been able to see the recovery effort that was going on in all of the ruined domes, down to the broken bits of buildings.
    But she hadn’t spoken to him or her other children, not since the day after Anniversary Day. All of her children—grown now—lived on Earth, for which she was very grateful. They had their own lives and their own careers, and if they needed her, they would contact her on their links.
    She had raised them to be self-sufficient, and they had become so, but they didn’t ignore her either. Right now, they were probably dealing with the fallout from the Moon’s disaster in their various businesses, not to mention dealing with the friends they might have lost in all of the bombings.
    No one outside of Earth seemed to realize just how close Earth and the Moon really were. Their cultures were linked, primarily because the Moon operated as the gateway into Earth itself.
    Still, she had learned that the Moon, as perceived by the people on Earth, was more than a gateway, more than yet another civilized place. The Moon controlled the tides. It had an ancient mythical component. Her youngest daughter Toshie had studied the Moon extensively for years, and loved the ancient portraits of the uninhabited Moon as seen from Earth. Toshie particularly loved the purported Man in the