Here on the sweet green grass of the outfield, or digging his spikes into the red dirt of the batter's box, or circling the bases, or even sitting at ease in the dugout with his friends—his friends, not fans of Sparky, the television boy—he felt a magical calm that existed nowhere else in his life. It was the uncomplicated happiness that generations of boys before him had felt on the diamond. It was his own private thing.
If fact, life would be darned near perfect at that moment but for two things: he was hungry and his toes hurt.
The hunger was a familiar thing by now, and he could deal with it. He pulled a candy bar out of his pocket, bit off a hasty chunk, and stuck it in his cheek, conscious of how much he now resembled those black-and-white heroes of the game back on Old Earth. Only there it had not been a wad of chocolate and nuts in their cheeks, but a chaw of tobacco.
So here he was, Jackie Robinson in the outfield, crouching slightly, ready to explode in a blur of motion, the moment stretching, eternal....
Sparky could no more play ball at a regular King City park than he could walk into a Pizza Palace franchise and order a slice and a Coke. But this field was different. This was the recreation dome of the Plain People of Luna: the Outer Amish.
That's what they were called when they first moved to Luna, anyway. Later, groups relocated to Mars and even more distant points. Some now called the original settlers Old-Order Outer Amish, but it was cumbersome, and names stick long after they've lost their original meaning.
When Sparky first started visiting here, he had been told the saga of the Amish and Mennonite communities on Luna. They had come from Germany and Switzerland, settled in the lush farmland of Pennsylvania, and did what sects always do: they split into other sects. The plainest of the Plain People avoided things like cars, electricity, and telephones. Basically, if it wasn't mentioned in the Bible, the Amish felt they could do without it. Some felt cars were okay, but chrome was vain, so they painted it black: the Black Bumper Mennonites. Most didn't wear buttons, and the men never grew mustaches because that reminded them of the Prussian military, which they were fleeing. They were the original conscientious objectors.
Sparky had thought it would take a great leap of logic for Amish to board a spaceship and leave for Luna, but was it really that different than crossing the Atlantic? America wasn't mentioned in the Bible, but the moon was. Once there, of course, they could not survive entirely with Biblical technology, but they did surprisingly well, and used as few modern things as possible. What had drawn them was the prospect of twelve two-week growing seasons per year. Farmers to the bone, Amish had actually been in the agricultural forefront in matters like crop rotation and soil conservation. They were familiar with hybridization, and genetic engineering was only breeding and selection speeded up, or at least it was to the schismatic leader of the Outers. And they had never been averse to accepting a little help from their neighbors. So while they themselves never entered a bioengineering laboratory, they were instrumental in developing the first strains of Lunar-adapted crops. They put up domes, conditioned the Lunar dust with compost, bacteria, worms—whatever was needed—plowed the resulting soil, planted, and harvested. The new breeds of plants drank the intense sunlight beneath the UV-filtering plastic domes and grew so fast "it could break your arm if you held it too long over a corn seedling," according to Sparky's friend Jan Stoltzfus, the boy who had first invited him into the Amish enclave. "Two weeks of summer growing season, and two weeks of winter... without the snow!"
Self-sufficiency had always been their ideal, but they also had to make a living, so much of the produce they grew was taken into King City and sold at a public market, to health fanatics, antichemical believers, and the very wealthy, at astonishing prices.
"These are crops just as artificially produced as those grown on any corporate farm," Jan had pointed out, enjoying the joke on the "English." "Our food tastes no better and no worse than anyone else's. The only way to distinguish it is our fruits and squashes and melons and tomatoes tend to be a bit smaller, sometimes a lot smaller, more like back on Old Earth. And you find the occasional blemish on a tomato, the odd worm in the apple.
"And do you think we eat it? Very little of it. We buy our vegetables at the market, just like ordinary folks, and bank the difference."
Their lives had seemed full of odd contradictions to Sparky when he first started coming out here. They read old-fashioned books by the light of candles or kerosene lamps, but kept their orchard trees thriving during the two-week "winter" with banks of grow lights suspended overhead. They plowed the ground with teams of horses and wood-and-iron plowshares, then baled hay for the cows with gas-powered machines. In one dome they might heat with a wood-stove or a fireplace—they could not afford real wood, and so used compacted waste from various outside agricultural concerns—and in the next dome over it was thought to be ethical to heat with methane gas. They had endless arguments over what was proper and what was not. But they were good people, and there was one thing they all agreed upon: television was the tool of the devil.
He had been out at the Amish settlements location scouting for a story arc that would have involved an Amish boy and girl. The plan fell through quickly when it became clear the Plain People did not like to be photographed, to have a "graven image" made of them—who knew?—but while there Sparky had made an interesting discovery. Nobody knew who he was. This was a revelation to him. Of course, nobody had a show that everybody watched, but these were surely the only sane people on Luna who had never heard of him.
He began showing up for baseball games, informal gatherings where sides were chosen up on the spot. At first, he was picked last, and he loved it! At any park in King City he would be the first pick every time, regardless of talent or lack of it. Worse, as a practical matter, it was impossible for him to play. Do you really want three hundred photographers clogging the first-base line? Jostling for a shot in the shower room? Clamoring for interviews in the dugout? Even in the pathetic league they formed for studio children Sparky saw little point in playing. Those kids knew who signed their parents' paychecks, and would not work very hard to strike him out or catch his rare fly balls. Sparky got no charge from that sort of competition.
But the Amish gave him something he hadn't had since he was eight: a chance to be just another kid. They knew he was famous, and rich, and it made no difference to them. All that was an "English" matter, not part of their world. If he wanted to play with them, he'd better be good.
He never got past mediocre, and that was okay. The first time he'd been chosen second to last was one of his best days. He'd earned that measly promotion. When you're rich and famous, and don't have the ego of John Valentine, you never know what you've earned. Whatever Sparky did worthy of praise was always the result of a team of people employed to make him look good. He never forgot that, no matter how many awards came his way.
Sometimes he wished he had inherited his father's massive self-assurance, but most of the time he was happier to be the way he was, a moderately insecure fellow with a touch of the impostor complex, that maddening feeling that people secretly know you aren't as good as you're cracked up to be, that they know you know it, and that they know you know they know it.