The Very Splendid Mary Clendennin

After the eerie near-silence of the maglev train, it felt paradoxically good to hear the crash of the waves on the beach. Kyle bumped his shoulder up to adjust the strap of his duffle, ("Gotta have a duffle for the shuttle" his father used to say, which caused Kyle's mother to roll her eyes and shake her head and Kyle himself to giggle with glee) and continued down the path to the village. He almost felt like whistling a little tune to himself, he was so caught up in the excitement of finally getting to see this place. But he wasn't much of a whistler, or a singer either really. He had always been a quiet little man in a quiet little office, and today was no different somehow, even though he had left the office trillions of miles away in another sector of charted space.

The excitement felt forced though, somehow, as if it were a costume he slipped on, a mask to hide the melancholy behind it. He was here, on the vacation world he and his wife had long talked of visiting, on paid vacation from his job, and he was all alone.

Kyle stopped, closed his eyes, and just stood there for a moment feeling the sea spray on his face.

He was here. That was what mattered.

His smile slipped back on, Kyle opened his eyes and made his way into the little artificial seaside village that was his destination.

"WELCOME TO OCEANSIDE" the unimaginative sign on the dirt road that led into town read. Kyle knew the pleasure world's designers had intended this to be a rustic throwback to Old Earth. A fishing village, with beautiful ocean views and cozy cottages, classic small-town pubs and country maids waiting to bat their pretty lashes at the out-of-town stranger. It was the type of place people living on lunar colonies and waystations in space often imagined when they thought of Old Earth, but never really existed, at least not in this idyllic sense. And it only existed here if you were willing to overlook the green tint to the oceans, the three moons in the sky and, of course, the "villagers".

For Kyle, there was also a nostalgic feeling to the place. His parents had owned a beach house when he was a child, in a village not too dissimilar to this one, and he had visited often as a boy, playing in the sands, watching people frolic in the surf. He took a moment to smell the sea air, remembering.

"Welcome, stranger!" called a friendly fellow unloading boxes of fish from the back of a horse-drawn cart. He set down his box and strode over to Kyle, holding out a hand. Kyle took it gladly. "What's your name, there, fella?"

"Kyle Braxton," he said, knowing this was part of some automated routing to introduce him to the village. The friendly townie would tell him the local spots, a nice inn to bed down for the night, maybe even introduce him to a few ladies, if Kyle said the right trigger phrases. Artificial intelligences were good, but even they needed help.

"Well, now, Mr. Braxton," the mustachioed "man" said, "what brings you to our fair town, sir?" He had doffed his bowler hat and now held it in his left hand, clutched close to his coveralls. His mustache was quite impressive, the kind of puffed out beauty that curved down the sides of his mouth to end in greased points. A friendly, green-eyed, red-faced walrus of a man.

"I'm on vacation," Kyle said, saying the word with soft deliberation. "I'm here to relax for a few days, see the sights."

He hoped this was enough for the AI to go on, because he really had nothing else to say about this rather spontaneous trip. Even on the shuttle down, he had asked himself why am I even here several times.

The only answer he had was the sinking feeling he had felt as he read the email on the screen, the email in which is wife Debra had enumerated all the reasons she was filing for divorce, not least of which was the fact that he worked a dead-end job in the filing office on a data storage satellite in orbit around one of twenty-six identical moons and had not had time off to spend with her in almost a year.