Brian Plante - Moondance

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MOONDANCE

by Brian Plante

JERRY NOONAN NOTICED the damage to his robot immediately at the start of the

shift. In his RC rig at home in New Jersey, he raised and lowered his arm,

but on the Moon the corresponding manipulator flopped about uselessly. It

also hurt like hell, and he had to turn down the feedback circuit until the

arm felt nearly dead. Some sort of accident had left its metal skin

deformed,

and the servo motors were responding erratically. The bastard on the previous

shift had messed him up good.

The job of raising and joining the huge cables that would support the dome

over the Huygens crater was grueling work, and Jerry was damn well not going

to work an entire shift with a bum manipulator arm. He radioed the problem in

to his unit chief and was given permission to take his robot over to the

repair shop. Better to spend a few hours in the shop getting a new arm than

struggling with the thing for a whole shift. Damage among the robots was not

uncommon in a job like the doming of Huy gens crater, and Jerry had been to

the repair shop a few times before, but this time he met Audrey.

"Aww, did the big burly cable-hauler hurt his poor little paw?" a feminine

voice from the inverted funnelshaped repair robot spoke into his earpiece.

Swell, Jerry thought. A lady robot mechanic.

"It was like this when my shift started," he said.

The repair meth circled once around Jerry's barrelshaped body, looking over

the damage before cradling his broken manipulator in its own metal arms.

Jerry could not tell how many legs this meth had under the round bumper

"skirt" of its body, but he noticed how the meth wiggled from side to side

as it moved, a most unusual gait for a robot. It was an incongruously

feminine walls.

"Wow, you really did a number on this arm," the meth said.

"I said I didn't do it," he responded. Even though she handled his

manipulator

gently; Jerry pulled away sharply, as if he were hurt. With the transmission

lag, his robot did not mirror the more for another second and a quarter, but

all the lunar robot operators were used to dealing with the time delay. "The

operator before me left it like this. If I could work around it, Id leave it

like it is, so the bastard would have to deal with it on his own shift."

The mech moved forward to scoop up the broken manipulator again, this time a

bit more forcefully, making Jerry wince with pain back home in his RC unit.

"Hey, I just fix them," the meth said. "Nothing personal, okay, buddy?"

"Jerryy. My name is Jerry Noonan."

"Pleased to meet you, Jerry Noonan. I'm Audrey."

"Audrey. You know, we don't get too many female operators up here on the

Moon."

Audrey chuckled and said, "and at these prices you won't get too many more."

"Huh?" Jerry mumbled.

"You know, the old bar joke about the talking kangaroo."

A joke? I'm sorry, I don't get out too much anymore. Not to bars, anyway."

"Too bad. Bars can sometimes be . . . useful," Audrey said as she attached a

wire harness into the test socket of his damaged arm. She walked her robot

over to a console on the other side of the room, again bouncing and swaying

in her unusual fashion.

"You walk funny for a robot," Jerry said.

"Funny?"

"Not funny ha-ha. Just different for a robot. It's kind of a girlish walk."

"Hmmm. Being a woman, I suppose I can live with that. You better turn down

the sensitivity on that arm now, or this might hurt a bit."

Jerry just barely felt a jolt of power surge through the manipulator before

he turned off the feedback. Without him controlling it, the arm began

flailing up and down under the mechanic's overriding commands.

"That didn't come out right," Jerry said. "I like the way you walk. It's

very feminine, if a pointy, metal cylinder can be feminine. Do you move like

that on purpose, or is it just the way you walk naturally?"

"Hmmm. I've never thought about it too much, so I suppose it's natural.

Probably something carried over from my dancing."

"You're a dancer?"

"Not a ballet dancer or anything like that," Audrey said, bouncing back over

to Jerry's side. "Just some social dancing on the weekends. Jerry, this arm

is shot. I'll just replace the whole thing, okay?"

"Yeah, whatever it needs. Do young people still go out dancing much these

days? It's been so long since I've been out, but I used to go dancing

before-"

Jerry was about to say "Before I was married," but just then she popped off

the fault, manipulator, and he fell silent as he gaped into the empty socket

where his arm had been.

Audrey shimmied over to an equipment locker and unpacked a replacement

manipulator. "All kinds of people go out dancing," she said from across the

room. "Not just young people. It's a very human thing to do."

"I don't know," Jerry said. "I guess it was fun when I was the right age for

it, but you get older and settle down."

"I certainly hope not," Audrey answered. "It's when you stop doing young

things that you start getting old."

"Hmm. Maybe you're right, but I just don't feel like going out much anymore."

"Come on. You don't sound so old to me.

"How old do you think I am?"

"You sound too young to be sitting at home. What are you, thirty-five? Forty?"

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Brian Plante - Moondance

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