The Sky Is Let by the Hour

by Fritz Leiber, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

In the city of Ptolemaeus Deep, which lies under the grey floor of a crater of the same name, a little south of the very middle of the Moon's near face, the sky is let by the hour.

It is a good sky, as skies go. It is a vault of white ceramic eight hundred metres across, and it has been painted with light every hour of every day for forty-nine years by the forty-four projectors of the Vault Office, which sit in a ring around its apex like the eyes of some patient spider that has learned the trade of scene-painting. From the plaza you cannot see the projectors, nor the seams, nor the drip-stains where the condensate gathers in the long dark. You see weather. You see a rose-and-amber dawn at six, and an afternoon of fat summer clouds over hills nobody in the city has ever walked on, and at night the stars as they would appear above a temperate northern town, together with a full moon, which is the Office's oldest joke and the one it never explains.

The weather is not free. The Hydroponics Board rents a soft rain over the plaza every Tuesday at eleven, because it calms the workers and costs less than a raise. The Pellucid Water Company rents the sunsets, all of them, and in the last ten minutes of each one a glacier slowly forms in the clouds with the company's name frozen into it. The Assembly of the Abundant Lamb rents Sunday morning and fills it with a light like warm honey in which, if you squint, there are wings. The Lamb is the richest church in the city, and has been since it worked out, early on, that the faithful judge a god by his ceiling.

And every Thursday, from three in the morning to a quarter past, at the lowest rate on the Office's card, the sky was let to the Church of the Fixed Stars.

---

"Last time," said Florian Mudge, "and I've written her a hymn."

"Of course you have," said Odile Brask.

The Sky Booth hangs just below the apex of the Vault, a little to one side of it, a glass pod the size of a tram car, reached by a lift that groans and a ladder that does not, and from it the two night operators of the Vault Office look down through a slot in the painted heavens at the city they are lighting, rather as God may have looked down through a gap in the clouds at Babylon, with a mug of something going cold at his elbow. Odile had worked the night board for nineteen years. She was small and sixty-one and had been, on Earth, a lighting designer for the opera in Lyon until a tenor fell through a trap she had warned about in writing, and the lawsuits had made the Moon look like a reasonable career. She had kept two things from the theatre: a pair of red-framed spectacles she pushed up into her grey hair when she wanted to see something properly, and a total contempt for anything that called itself a miracle.

Florian had worked the board for eleven months. He was twenty-six, round-faced and soft-bodied, with the kind of tenor voice that makes landladies forgive the rent, and he had arrived at the Office from the seminary of the Abundant Lamb, from which he had been asked to leave for singing the hymns of other churches in the shower. He had since sung the hymns of every church that rented the sky, on the night board, alone, to the patient spider's eyes, and he wrote new ones for the churches that had none. He believed, as far as Odile could tell, in all of them, by the hour.

"The Fixed Stars don't sing," Odile said. "Asenath Pole has been coming to that plaza every Thursday for fifty years and she has never once sung, or knelt, or burned anything, or asked us for so much as a shooting star. She stands there for fifteen minutes and looks up, and then she goes home. It's the cheapest religion in Ptolemaeus. That's why they're throwing it out."

"Pellucid isn't throwing it out. Pellucid is only buying every night of the week from midnight to five."

"For a bottle," said Odile.

"For a glacier, and a bottle in it. It turns slowly. There's condensation on it." Florian sighed. "I've seen the proofs. It's actually rather beautiful."

"So was the Golden Calf. Ask any Israelite. Did they say what we do at three o'clock next Thursday when she's down there looking up at a bottle of water?"

"They said she can rent Wednesday afternoon. Between the dentists and the Hydroponics."

"In daylight," said Odile, "she'd be looking at nothing at all. You can't see stars in daylight, my sweet. Even painted ones. Even she knows that." She pulled the evening's program out of the board's memory and ran her thumb down it. "Three o'clock, Fixed Stars, standard northern sky, autumn, observer latitude fifty-one north. The same every week since before you were born. She doesn't even have the moon taken out. What's the hymn called?"

Florian went pink. "The Lamp That Does Not Move."

"Sing it at a quarter past and not before. I'll be busy."

---

At twenty to three the lift groaned. It was not supposed to groan at twenty to three. Nobody came up to the booth at night but the operators, and the operators were here, and Odile was off her stool with the night board's emergency stick in her fist before the doors were open. She was a small woman, but the stick was long, and she had once quelled a stagehands' strike in Lyon with a pole-lamp.

The doors opened, and Asenath Pole stepped out of the lift as if she had been expected.

She was ninety-one, and she looked like something left behind in a museum by a careless curator: a tall, upright old woman in a grey coat, with a face as finely lined as old porcelain and eyes the clear colour of water in a glass. Under one arm she carried a folding stool. In her other hand she held a stick, and from its knob hung a lift key on a ribbon, an old-fashioned brass one of the kind the Office had stopped issuing before Odile arrived.

"Good morning," she said. "I'm early. I wanted to see where it was done."

Florian had stood up so fast that he banged his head on the slope of the glass. "Mother Pole," he said, crimson. "Mother Pole, I—we—it's an honour."

"It's trespass," said Odile. "That key has been out of date since the Melancholy Inquiry. Where did you get it?"

"I was issued it," said Asenath Pole, "in the year I helped to pour the Oculus. I was a glazier." She set up her stool with a neat clack of aluminium, beside the board, and sat down on it, upright, both hands on the knob of her stick. "There were eleven of us on the glass. I am the last. I thought the key ought to be used once before I take it with me."

Odile lowered the emergency stick. Then, because it was in her hand and she disliked being seen to have been mistaken, she used it to point upward, through the glass roof of the booth, past the projector ring, at a broad grey circle in the ceramic directly above the city's heart. It was twenty metres across and as grey as everything else, and on any night it was painted over with stars like the rest of the Vault, so that nobody in the plaza below knew that it was there at all.

"That," said Odile, "is not on the program."

"No," Asenath Pole agreed. "That's why I came up."

Florian looked from the one to the other, and up at the grey circle, and back down. He was not, by his own account, a quick young man. He had been a slow seminarian and was a slow operator, and he got there by the long road, the way a hymn gets to its final chord.

"The Oculus," he said. "That's—it's under the lids. There's a window up there. A real one."

"Nine metres of shaft through the regolith," said Odile, "and a plug of fused silica the size of a swimming pool at the top, and over the silica two steel lids, and over the steel a metre of sintered rock that slides on rails, and none of it has been opened since the Melancholy Inquiry, which was before you were born, darling, as everything was. Fifty years ago the first settlers of this city had a real sky. They had the Oculus open day and night and they put chairs under it. Do you know what's up there, in the real sky, over Ptolemaeus?"

"Stars," said Florian.

"The Earth," said Asenath Pole.

She said it the way you might name a relative who has been unkind to you, without heat.

"It never moves," Odile said. "That's the thing nobody tells you on the brochure. We're in the middle of the near side. The Earth hangs right over this crater, nine degrees from the top of the sky, four times the size of that painted moon of ours and fifty times as bright, and it does not rise and it does not set. It just hangs there and waxes and wanes, and turns, and turns, with everybody you ever left on it. The first year, eleven people walked out of the airlocks without suits. The second year it was thirty. They called it the Ptolemaeus Melancholy, and the Inquiry closed the lids and built a sky to cover the hole, and the deaths stopped. That's what the Office is for. We don't sell the weather. We sell the absence of the Earth."

There was a short silence in the booth, the kind a theatre falls into after a line that was meant to get a laugh and did not.

"Then the Church of the Fixed Stars," said Florian slowly, "looks up every Thursday at a painted sky that's hiding the—"

"—the one fixed star," said Asenath Pole. "Yes. We were founded by the glaziers, after the lids went down. Eleven of us. We had made a window to look out of, and they made us cover it with a picture of the place we had come from, which they said was kinder. Perhaps it was. We went down to the plaza on Thursdays and looked at the place where it was, under the paint, and knew. That was the whole of the doctrine, young man. It is not a very good religion. It has no music."

"It has now," Florian said, before he could stop himself, and went crimson again.

The old woman looked at him with her clear water-coloured eyes and smiled, which made her look for an instant about forty and very dangerous. "I should like to hear it," she said. Then she turned to Odile. "I don't ask for the paint. I ask for the window. Fifteen minutes. It is my time; it's paid for. The lids are on the board. I know where; I wired the relay."

---

Odile Brask did not answer at once. She did what she always did when a director asked her for something that could not be done before the first night: she pulled her red spectacles down from her hair onto her nose and looked at it properly, every way it could go wrong, to the end of each.

The lids were on the board. They were under a guarded switch on a sub-panel nobody had dusted since the Inquiry, and they were labelled in a typeface fifty years out of date: OCULUS—OUTER / OCULUS—INNER / SHIELD RAIL. The motors had been run every year for the safety audit, closed, with the projection on. Nobody would have to break anything. She called up the space-weather feed from the observatory at Hipparchus: the sun was quiet, the proton count flat as a ruled line; at three in the morning, by the city's painted clock, it was in any case the eighth day of the long lunar night, and the crater floor above them was in shadow and would be for another seven. A quarter of an hour of the real sky would give the plaza less radiation than a dental X-ray. That was not the danger.

"Every insomniac in Ptolemaeus will see it," she said. "Every drunk on the plaza benches. Every child that gets up for a glass of water and goes to the window. You'll put the Earth over their heads, Mother, full, because at lunar midnight it's always full, and they've never seen it, not once, half of them were born under the paint. And some of them will walk out of an airlock."

"Some of them may," said Asenath Pole. "I have thought about that for fifty years. I think it's possible that some of them, instead, will stop."

"Stop what?"

"Looking at the bottle," said the old woman.

Florian said, "Odile," and nothing more, because there was nothing more he could think of that was not a hymn.

Odile looked at the guarded switch. She looked at the clock: two fifty-eight. She looked at the program, at the sky of a temperate northern town in autumn which Asenath Pole had paid for every Thursday for forty-nine years at the lowest rate on the card, and she thought, for no reason she could have defended to a board of inquiry, of a flat in Lyon on the fourth floor, with a window that looked east, and a girl of nine at the window who would be twenty-nine now and had stopped writing in the eleventh year. She pushed the spectacles back up into her hair.

"Florian," she said. "At three exactly, you'll blank the projection over the Oculus and bring the rest of the Vault down to a quarter, so their eyes adjust. Not to black. A quarter. If anyone panics, we want them able to see the exits."

"Yes," said Florian.

"I'll run the rail and the lids. If a motor sticks, we don't force it, we close and we never speak of it. At a quarter past I close, whatever happens, and you put the stars back, and then you can sing your hymn to the old lady and I'll write the incident report, and the Office will sack me in the morning, which will save Pellucid the trouble of being rude to me." She lifted the guard on the first switch. "And for God's sake, Mother, if you're going to die of it, do it after the report. I'm not doing two."

"I shall try," said Asenath Pole gravely, "to be considerate."

---

At three o'clock exactly the sky of Ptolemaeus Deep went dim, and in the middle of it, where a full moon had always hung, a round grey eye appeared, blank as a blind man's, and began, with a long iron grinding that could be heard on the plaza two hundred metres below, to open.

First the rail, a metre of baked rock sliding sideways on the surface overhead; they felt it through the structure of the booth, a shudder like a ship coming alongside a quay. Then the outer lid, which stuck at a third and freed itself with a bang. Then the inner. Light came down the shaft.

It was not light such as the projectors made. The projectors made light the way a good lighting designer does, to flatter and to direct; it went where it was told and stayed there. This came down the nine metres of the shaft like water down a well, white and blue and absolutely indifferent, and spread out over the dimmed Vault and fell on the plaza and on its benches and its pale lunar plane trees in their tubs, and on the upturned faces of the four or five people who happened to be down there at three in the morning, and on all of the stone and glass and steel of the city that had been built not to see it, with the cold, objective tenderness of a surgeon's lamp.

And there in the eye of the Oculus, nine degrees off the top of the sky, hung the Earth.

It was full, as Odile had said. It was bigger than any of them had imagined, though they had all been told the figures, and it was not round so much as present, the way a person is present in a room. It was blue, and white, wound in slow white weather that had not been rented by anybody. A brown and yellow coast lay across the bottom of it, and a sea, and you could see, if you had stood still and watched for the whole fifteen minutes and had nothing else in the world to do, that it was turning.

Florian stood with his round face lifted and his mouth open and did not sing.

Asenath Pole did not stand up. She sat on her folding stool with both hands on the knob of her stick and looked at the thing she had cut a window for when she was not yet forty, and the white light lay on her porcelain face and found every line in it and did not flatter one, and she did not weep, and she did not pray. She looked, exactly as she had looked at the painted stars every Thursday for forty-nine years, with the attention of a craftsman checking a pane for flaws.

"There," she said once, quietly. "That's done properly."

Odile did not look up at all. She kept her eyes on the board, on the green telltales of the lid motors and the space-weather feed, and on the plaza cameras, where the four or five people had become twelve and then sixty and then several hundred: people in nightshirts, people in work-boots off the late shift, a child on a man's shoulders, a drunk who had stopped halfway through singing a song and stood with his bottle forgotten in his hand. Nobody ran for the airlocks. Nobody did anything. They stood in the white light in the plaza, as still as a congregation, all looking up. Odile watched them with the professional suspicion of a woman who has seen a full house go quiet before and knows it can mean anything, and the green telltales glowed, and the clock went round.

At thirteen minutes past three Florian said softly, without looking down, "You haven't looked."

"I'm working," said Odile Brask.

"It's Europe," said Florian. "Coming round. The coast at the bottom is Africa, and there's—you can see the Mediterranean, Odile, it's black, it's like a slot, and above it, there, right on the edge, there's France—"

"I know where France is," said Odile, and kept her eyes on the board. Her hands were quite steady. At fourteen minutes past three she pulled her red spectacles down over her eyes, as she did when she wanted to see a thing properly, and looked very hard at the telltale of the inner lid, which was green, and went on looking at it.

At a quarter past, to the second, she closed the Oculus.

The lids came down. The rail ground home. The paint came back across the eye, and Florian, whose hands were shaking, put up the stars of a temperate northern town in autumn, and the full moon among them, and brought the Vault back to full. Then he sat down on the floor of the booth, because his legs had decided it, and sang The Lamp That Does Not Move, all six verses, in a voice that would have made any landlady in the city forgive him anything, and Asenath Pole listened to it with her eyes closed, and at the end said that it was a little long in the fourth verse, but otherwise she would keep it.

---

The Vault Office did not sack Odile Brask in the morning. It sacked her in the afternoon, after a meeting, and gave her a reference that described her as conscientious, which in the language of the Office is a curse. Nobody had walked out of an airlock. Several hundred people had gone home and lain awake. The Office's own surveys, quietly commissioned, found that in the week after, the city had drunk eleven per cent less Pellucid, which the Office considered more alarming.

Florian Mudge was not sacked, because he had only done what a senior operator told him, and because the Office found it could not easily replace a night man who did not mind singing to himself at four in the morning. He kept the board. He was given a new partner, a young man from Accounts, who wore earplugs.

Pellucid took the nights from the following Thursday, as agreed: a slow glacier, turning, and in the heart of it a bottle of water of heroic dimensions, every bead of condensation on its curve lit by forty-four projectors, exactly where the full moon used to hang.

At three o'clock that Thursday two women stood in the plaza of Ptolemaeus Deep among the tubbed plane trees, one tall and very old with a folding stool under her arm, and one small with a pair of red spectacles pushed up into her grey hair, and a dozen or so others, strangers, who had come for no reason they would give. They stood and looked up at the bottle.

High in the label, where the name of the water company curled in silver script across the glass, there was a single dot of blue that was not in the proofs. It was very small, and you would not have noticed it unless you knew exactly where in the sky to look. It did not move.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Friderīcō Leiberō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Fritz Leiber, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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