Page 476 - Some Dance to Remember

446 Jack Fritscher

of the Earth passed over the saucer of the moon, he and the sanctuary of
Bar Nada would lie in the deepest darkness of his lifetime.
He watched the shadowy curve of the dark Earth eat into the face of
the glowing moon. The moon’s face was his face. Kick had been the sun,
light as the sun, but something sodden as Earth had come between them,
had eclipsed them, had brought them down heavy with gravity. His own
face for the last three years had hardened around the bewildered O of his
own mouth, as he in those terrible years realized that the man who once
had shown on him, had shined on him, had thrown on him so generously
his warming, brilliant light, had fallen, the way Icarus falls forever from
Daedalus. But Kick was not Icarus. He had become Armstrong, and it
had been an Armstrong, an astronaut named Armstrong, who was the
man who first put his bootmarks on the face of the moon, crunching its
primal surface with toe and instep and heel, posing for all the world to see.
Millions of faces across the dark interior of North America were
turned toward the moon, watching the eclipse like some lunatic video
game splayed out on the huge screen of the sky.
In San Francisco, Castro Street was jammed with moon-watchers.
This holiday weekend, its nights unusually warm for July, even without
the eclipse of the moon and despite the creeping eclipse of AIDS, was
enough to trigger the street parties that boiled out from the bars in sponta-
neous revelry, celebrating any excuse for outrageous merriment, stopping
the City’s flow of traffic at the intersection of 18th and Castro.
Ryan missed the Castro he had known. He was glad that the Old
Castro was gone and a new one on the rise. There was hope in that. Noth-
ing, not disease or prejudice or murders or assassination, could stop their
kind. They were an ancient and future race. They had existed before the
Druids and they would endure forever. The secret gift that made them
different was their strength. The knowledge of that gift was their power.
Since before time, their kind, even though never they themselves, had
been immune to dee-struction. Their bodies might betray them and die,
but their spirit would always be stronger than Death. If and when the last
of them should ever lie dying, that last one of them will hear down the
hospital corridor the spanking-fresh cry of a boychild newborn with the
special gift that was always theirs.
What they were, what they are, and what they will be, faulty and
glorious, has always and forever been something with more resistance,
more cosmic immunity, than the world will ever understand.
Ryan was exhausted with suffering. He was exhausted by patience.
He knew what was and what could never be. It was no longer Kick he

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