Through the glass ceiling, the earth could be seen like a memory frozen in time. Suspended, distant, silent…there was no longer any way to know it except through the newscasts, the histories, the legends. To those who lived under the glass, the earth did not even seem like a home world any more. It had become an icon, a remembrance, a collection of vivid mythologies about what it meant to be human.
“Come here, I have something for you,” the old woman said.
She was sitting on the bed and holding an object in her veiny hand. Laura closed her eyes when she reached for it, afraid to touch the woman’s skin because it was old and brown and might rub off. And anyway, Laura did not really want anything from her. After all, what could this old lady possibly know about the things that mattered to her…about neurotones and floatball and stomps and filamines.
But Laura also knew that the woman sitting on the bed did not have anything much to give. Her parents had explained all that to her. Times were hard and her wealth was gone. That was the reason she was living with them in the first place. Laura had been to her room and knew that there was hardly anything in it. It was not filled with stuff like all the others, but bare like a cell.
Laura also knew well enough to be polite. It was her birthday and this woman, like it or not, was her Nana, her grandmother. That alone made whatever gift she had for Laura matter in some way. Or at least worth being pleasant about.
And then there was that rumor that her grandmother had fought in the Neo war. But it was hard to connect the soldier she had heard about with the thin wrinkly woman sitting there at the edge of her bed holding a birthday present for her. Laura had seen the flickers of the world in upheaval and the armies clashing. The only ones spared the turmoil of that time were on the Moon by then. New settlements there filled the Clavius crater and from that great distance you could watch the destruction in minute detail onscreen or just gaze up and watch the blue marble of the earth floating delicately in space and wonder why all that difficulty was necessary. Up there in the lightness of the lunar orbit, the mud of the earth seemed ghostly.
When the war was over, Nana too had come to the moon and had a family and made and lost her wealth. Now it was sixty years later, new turmoils on the earth, another spin of the galaxy, and Laura looked at her grandmother with soft eyes. She was only thirteen that day but she understood what it meant to give when you had nothing much.
The object she took from the old woman was round, about the size of a grapefruit, and wrapped in some old paper. Great, she thought to herself, a piece of fruit. The hydrogardens were teeming with them. Wait until I tell the others. Oh boy.
But when she peeled back the yellowing paper, she found a ball inside. It was an odd ball, lumpy and heavy, maybe one of the first balls ever made. It crackled when she squeezed it as though filled with beans or rice, and it was covered with red leather crudely stitched. The skin was flaking off in parts. It was gross and old but she tried to mask her disgust with a weak smile.
The ploy did not work.
“Your mother said you were just made captain of your floatball team,” the woman said.
“Yes but I couldn’t pitch with this ball, it would fall apart.”
“This one really should not be played with.”
It was worse than she thought. Not just any grungy old ball but one that you could not even play with. At least you could eat a grapefruit. Laura hefted the ball once and tried to imagine how far she could heave it in the thin gravity of the Moon once her grandmother went to sleep.
“You see, I made that ball,” the woman said proudly.
“Oh,” Laura said.
“I know it doesn’t look like much,” the woman said, “but that ball is special.”
Please, Laura thought, don’t tell me that it is a magic ball that grants wishes or anything like that. I’m thirteen, not some dumb kid.
“Let me tell you about that ball.”
“Um…Mom’s expecting me to help with dinner,” Laura lied.
But the woman ignored her, or did not hear, and continued.
“When you see a thing, sweetheart, it isn’t always what you think.”
“I know.”
She did know that. That was one of the things she knew. Sure. But on the other hand, knowing it somehow never seemed to matter very much. And besides, a lot of the time what something turned out to be was even more boring than what you thought it was in the first place.
“That’s not just any ball there. That is a great ball. It had its moment in the sun. It’s just old now. That’s all.”
“Did you hit a home run with it or something?” she asked.
“Home run!” the woman scoffed. “Home runs are pigeon shit. This ball here stopped a war.”
There were no pigeons on the Moon but Laura knew what they were from school and the word shit coming from her Nana’s lips quickly got her attention. The word war got it undivided. Seeing that, the woman leaned back on the bed and crossed her legs.
“What I’m going to tell you is true. It is something that really happened. It happened to me, a long long time ago. Before even your mother was born. When I was still a young woman back on Earth. I was only seventeen years old, just a bit older than you, no life yet to speak of. I didn’t even own a flagon; I wasn’t old enough. But of course I was just old enough to die for my country. You’re always old enough for that.”
The woman paused for a moment to size up her audience. Laura was sitting on the furthest edge of the bed, legs dangling, tossing the ball from one hand to the other. She had her mother’s eyes…kind but firm. And she seemed to be paying attention. The woman found this encouraging and continued.
“Just before the Neos invaded, I joined the national army. I was really too young but they didn’t care too much and they took me right in. They thought youngsters would make fine heroes. Or corpses. It doesn’t matter. In war you need both.”
Laura knew that her Nana had fought the Neos, had even won a medal. But she had never talked to her about it before. In fact, she never actually thought of her Nana as being anything but old. It was a shock to think she been young once, had a whole life before she was her grandmother.
“So me and Simma and her brother Erno and Milo and that other one, with the bad skin, we all joined. What was his name?”
“Nana?” Laura announced like referree.
“Oh well, anyway, it really all just turned out to be a lot of marching and shooting. It was a lark. We didn’t know. Now don’t get me wrong. I was young but I was not an idiot. I had a good head on my shoulders. Always have. I had no ideas about becoming a hero. Not like Erno, who had the mind and body of a jackass. He saw himself coming home to a big parade. But me, no. I knew what war was.”
“To tell the truth,” she went on, “as soon as we were called up everything changed. There was the constant sound of the bombardment. Lightbombs going off all day long. And maserfire. It’s very loud, you know. And we were knee deep in mud, eating out of polybags, going to the bathroom in an open pit. I started to huddle near a boy called Avi, a real big ox this boy was. I guess I was hoping that no one -- not the corporal or even god himself -- would notice me. I thought I’d be safe that way.”
The woman stopped and seemed to get lost in a reverie. Laura was sensitive enough to wait for her to dwell there but she quickly grew impatient.
“What happened, Nana?” she finally said.
“One day we got the call to advance into this town called Valenka. Someone blew a whistle and there we were, pulling ourselves through the dirt and clawing our way over the top of a bomb crater at the edge of the town. The whole place was on fire, the land chopped up by explosions, smoke so thick your lungs felt like bricks. We were supposed to advance across a field into the town itself. It was only about 100 feet away but it would have been easier to cross Hell itself. Snipers in the town began to cut us down. I was lucky and missed being hit. I fell back into the crater. Others, alive and dead, fell in on top of me. There was a layer of bodies three or four thick. I could hardly breathe. I had to fight my way up through all the arms and legs.”
“Holy luna,” Laura said.
“There was a standoff like that for a few days. The Neos were positioned in the buildings of the town and we were stuck in this crater. It seemed crazy to me. These two groups of soldiers, kids really, who had never met, all with families and sisters and plans for the future, trying to slaughter each other over a town no one had ever heard of. And then for some reason, no one knows exactly why, the shooting stopped. We were pinned down and in a sense so were they. I guess we all just ran out of energy. Or ion packs maybe. We couldn’t leave, we couldn’t move. Nothing. We just sat there. After a while we began talking, telling stories, making up lies about our travels. This went on for hours and I got bored. So I took out some raw beans, leatherine straps from a munitions box, my needle and some string, and sewed up the ball you have there.”
Laura looked at it again with a certain amount of respect. It was old and ugly but it had made it though a battle to end up in her hands. All the way from the Earth. That was pretty atomic.
“So it’s really kind of a beanbag,” she said, trying to sum up.
“Wait, you’ll see,” the woman said. “You remember the big boy Avi who was next to me in the trench? Well it was his bag of beans I used for filling up the ball and when he found out, he got very angry. He was big, you know, he liked to eat. I thought he would hit me but instead of that, he took the ball I made and heaved it out of the crater towards the town. We heard some maserfire and figured that they thought Avi had heaved a startle bomb. Then the maserfire died and the ball was gone and that was the end of it.”
She stopped at this point to make sure that she still had Laura’s attention. She did. Laura was holding the ball and staring directly at her grandmother, waiting. She went on.
“But that wasn’t the end of it. Because after about an hour we heard a thud on the ridge just above the crater. We tossed to see who would pop up and find out what had landed. You know, it could have been a body or a shell or anything. Guess who lost.”
“You?”
“Right. So I slowly poked my head over the ridge and what do you think I found? The ball! Someone on the other side had actually caught it and thrown it back. It was just sitting there a few feet from the crater. Well, after a great deal of debate, we fixed up a rope with a loop on the end and spent an hour trying to lasso the ball in. But when we finally got it back in our hands, the corporal, who was a real idiot, came down to our end and saw it. She decided that the ball was a bomb, so she grabbed it and tossed it back. Guess what?”
“They threw it back again?”
“Exactly. Back it came. Then Orlo, who was a soccer player in school, took off his pack and his helmet and gave it a great kick and sent it flying. There was a long pause. But sure enough, back it came. And that’s the way it went, back and forth and back all day long. We made up rules among ourselves, kept score, took turns kicking or throwing it. We made up names for the soldiers on the other side too, foreign sounding names, and made fun of their accents. They were probably doing the same thing.”
“So you played ball with your enemies in the middle of a battle.”
“Amazing isn’t it? For twenty-one hours, there was no war. No war at all. Just two groups of kids playing ball in a field by some strange rules. The world was going to hell, horrors everywhere you looked. But for one single day, it was all gone. Life was as it should be, an excuse for idleness, for nothing so serious as throwing a ball back and forth.”
“Then what happened?” Laura asked with great excitement. She had forgotten to act interested because she had accidentally become it.
“Then?” the woman said. She was getting very tired from the exertion of telling the story and her mind was wandering. She stretched out on the bed, resting her head against the temperfoam. “I don’t know. Night fell. The ball ended up in the middle of the field somehow. Soon after that Orlo, the soccer player, was dead. Simma and Erno too. And then the war was over and I was no longer young. I had no time for balls and things. But I’ll tell you something. I was no longer afraid either.”
“Mom said you won a medal.”
“Things aren’t always…” the woman offered. Her eyes were beginning to close.
“But Nana, if it ended up in the middle of the field,” Laura asked, detecting a slight glitch in the tale, “how did you get the ball back?”
“Back?” she repeated, almost asleep.
“Yes. You know, back so you could give to me.”
“Oh…one day the enemy retreated and we crossed that field. The ball was just lying there in the mud. I picked it up and kept it ever since. But it isn’t just a ball, you see? It looks like one but it is really a kind of bag. A container.”
“Container?” Laura repeated.
“Yes. Inside is a hesitation, an idle moment. A pause in the tumbling flow of things. You see? Everyone needs that in their lives, not just soldiers. And that’s why I’m giving it to you, dear. As a reminder. Don’t become too consumed with things. Pitching floatballs or anything else. Life goes too quickly. Make sure you take time to be idle. To dawdle. See what I mean?”
Laura looked up from the ball to answer that question only to find that her grandmother’s eyes were closed. Laura could not tell if she had fallen asleep or was just resting but she did not think she should disturb a woman who made a ball that stopped a war. And so she simply got up, bounced the ball once, then dropped it onto the paper wrapper. That was when Laura noticed a small tag that had gotten stuck to the paper. She picked it up.
It was a sales tag that read, “Beanbag Ball, Fun for All, Made on the Moon.”
Laura thought about that and then thought…no matter. She was a moongirl, a Dianan, a selenite, and like everyone else there she was beyond delusions. Up there, they watched the Earth from a great height, saw the waxing and waning of humanity on the surface below, and waited in their dark silence for the world to come around again. Waited for the cycles of hope and hate to run their course. They had learned patience on the Moon and knew how to accept what was.
Laura too.
Besides, she was thirteen now and old enough to know that, in any case, the gift had not been the ball at all.
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