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eBook Category: Science Fiction AnLab Award Winner, Nebula Award(R) Nominee
eBook Description: An elderly man returns to a tamed, tourist attraction moon, far different to the one he knew some seventy years ago when there as one of the early pioneer developers.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Analog, 2001
Fictionwise Release Date: January 2003

607 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [79 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [70 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [61 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [220 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [70 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [98 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [134 KB] , hiebook (KML) [170 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [96 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [57 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [72 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [100 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [96 KB]
Words: 20926
Reading time: 59-83 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"In "Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl's," Adam-Troy Castro gives an unlikely yarn of the high frontier, reminiscent of the fantastic tales of the Old West, the Mysterious East and Darkest Africa told by our grandparents. Instead of lost Eldorado, Max Fischer, lunar pioneer, comes back to the moon in his dying days seeking a fabulous treasure from his youth. "Sunday Night Yams..." owes and acknowledges a debt to Bradbury's Mars is Heaven. Castro cleverly works in many of the other heroes of science fiction and the manned space program as well. This story is about the lost futures of SF--The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, 2001, and the lost futures of NASA. On a different level Max's need to validate a fantastic but real event of his own youth echoes strongly with all our thoughts about ageing. Reading this compelling story gave me a nostalgic frisson for what might have been and what could still be. My best advice is to keep an eye on the dog."--Jay Lake, Tangent Online (Learn more about Tangent Online, the Internet's leading SF&F short fiction review website)

Frontiers never die. They just become theme parks.

I spent must of my shuttle ride to Nearside mulling sour thoughts about that. It's the kind of thing that only bothers lonely and nostalgic old men, especially when we're old enough to remember the days when a trip to Luna was not a routine commuter run, but instead a never-ending series of course corrections, systems checks, best-and-worst case simulations, and random unexpected crises ranging from ominous burning smells to the surreal balls of floating upchuck that got into everywhere if we didn't get over your nausea fast enough to clean them up. Folks of my vintage remember what it was to spend half their lives in passionate competition with dozens of other frighteningly qualified people, just to earn themselves seats on cramped rigs outfitted by the lowest corporate bidders--and then to look down at the ragged landscape of Sister Moon and know that the sight itself was a privilege well worth the effort. But that's old news now: before the first development crews gave way to the first settlements; before the first settlements became large enough to be called the first cities; before the first city held a parade in honor of its first confirmed mugging; before Independence and the Corporate Communities and the opening of Lunar Disney on the Sea of Tranquility. These days, the Moon itself is no big deal except for rubes and old-timers. Nobody looks out the windows; they're far too interested in their sims, or their virts, or their newspads or (for a vanishingly literate few) their paperback novels, to care about the sight of the airless world waxing large in the darkness outside.

I wanted to shout at them. I wanted to make a great big eloquent speech about what they were missing by taking it all for granted, and about their total failure to appreciate what others had gone through to pave the way. But that wouldn't have moved anybody. It just would have established me as just another boring old fart.

So I stayed quiet until we landed, and then I rolled my overnighter down the aisle, and I made my way through the vast carpeted terminal at Armstrong Interplanetary (thinking all the while carpet, carpet, why is there carpet, dammit, there shouldn't be carpeting on the moon). Then I hopped a tram to my hotel, and I confirmed that the front desk had followed instructions and provided me one of their few (hideously expensive) rooms with an Outside View. Then I went upstairs and thought it all again when I saw that the view was just an alien distortion of the moon I had known. Though it was night, and the landscape was as dark as the constellations of manmade illumination peppered across its cratered surface would now ever allow it to be, I still saw marquee-sized advertisements for soy houses, strip clubs, rotating restaurants, golden arches, miniature golf courses, and the one-sixth-g Biggest Rollercoaster In the Solar System. The Earth, with Europe and Africa centered, hung silently above the blight.

I tried to imagine two gentle old people, and a golden retriever dog, wandering around somewhere in the garish paradise framed by that window.

I failed.

I wondered whether it felt good or bad to be here. I wasn't tired, which I supposed I could attribute to the sensation of renewed strength and vigor that older people are supposed to feel after making the transition to lower gravities. Certainly, my knees, which had been bothering me for more than a decade now, weren't giving me a single twinge here. But I was also here alone, a decade after burying my dear wife--and though I'd travelled around a little, in the last few years, I had never really grown used to the way the silence of a strange room, experienced alone, tastes like the death that waited for me too.

After about half an hour of feeling sorry for myself I dressed in one of my best blue suits--an old one Claire had picked out in better days, with a cut now two styles out of date--and went to the lobby to see the concierge. I found him in the center of a lobby occupied not by adventurers or pioneers but by businessmen and tourists. He was a sallow-faced young man seated behind a flat slab of a desk, constructed from some material made to resemble polished black marble. It might have been intended to represent a Kubrick monolith lying on its side, a touch that would have been appropriate enough for the moon but might have given the decorator too much credit for classical allusions. I found more Kubrick material in the man himself, in that he was a typical hotel functionary: courteous, professional, friendly, and as cold as a plain white wall. Beaming, he said: "Can I help you, sir?"

"I'm looking for Minnie and Earl," I told him.

His smile was an unfaltering, professional thing, that might have been scissored out of a magazine ad and scotch-taped to the bottom half of his face. "Do you have their full names, sir?"

"Those are their full names." I confess I smiled with reminiscence. "They're both one of a kind."

"I see. And they're registered at the hotel?"

"I doubt it," I said. "They're lunar residents. I just don't have their address."

"Did you try the directory?"

"I tried that before I left Earth," I said. "They're not listed. Didn't expect them to be, either."

He hesitated a fraction of a second before continuing: "I'm not sure I know what to suggest, then--"

"I'm sure you don't," I said, unwillingly raising my voice just enough to give him a little taste of the anger and frustration and dire need that had fueled this entire trip. Being a true professional, used to dealing with obnoxious and arrogant tourists, the concierge didn't react at all: just politely waited for me to get on with it. I, on the other hand, winced before continuing: "They're before your time. Probably way before your time. But there have to be people around--old people, mostly--who know who I'm talking about. Maybe you can ask around for me? Just a little? And pass around the word that I need to talk?"

The professional smile did not change a whit, but it still acquired a distinctively dubious flavor. "Minnie and Earl, sir?"

"Minnie and Earl." I then showed him the size of the tip he'd earn if he accomplished it--big enough to make certain that he'd take the request seriously, but not so large that he'd be tempted to concoct false leads. It impressed him exactly as much as I needed it to. Too bad there was almost no chance of it accomplishing anything; I'd been making inquiries about the old folks for years. But the chances of me giving up were even smaller: not when I now knew I only had a few months left before the heart stop beating in my chest.

They were Minnie and Earl, dammit.

And anybody who wasn't there in the early days couldn't possibly understand how much that meant.