“And it stinks.” Birgit was sitting up in bed and lowered the book she was reading. “Polio is one thing, but that ointment makes me doubt your judgment.”
“Yeah, doc. Take a break.” Wafiyyah rolled her head on the pillow. “We aren’t going anywhere.”
“Wash your hands.” I stopped Ana Teresa in front of the sink. “And your face. We’re going to sit down. Fifteen minutes. That’s all, and then you can come back and sort if that still seems like the best use of your time.”
It helped that she knew, really, that I was right. She scrubbed her hands, and the outside of the meal pack, splashed water on her face, and then stayed bent over the sink. Water dripped off her chin and nose back into the reclaimer.
It would get whisked through tubes and pipes to one of the water recyclers, which would filter, irradiate, and reprocess the hell out of it. That would be a good target for Icarus. Break all of them and it would shut down the lunar colony. Not from polio, mind you, but just from simple dehydration. The South Pole outpost mined lunar ice, but it wasn’t like you could just melt a block and drink it.
I watched the water drip off of Ana Teresa’s nose and thought about how much damage I could do in sixteen minutes to the water reclamation system.
She drew in a breath and straightened, turning to the air dryer. Wiping her hands briskly under the heated air, she looked like she was trying to form a to-do list behind her eyes.
I poked her in the arm with my plastic block of food. “Favorite song?”
Ana Teresa’s teeth bared as if she were going to bite me. “What?”
“We’re taking a break. What’s your favorite song?”
As she snatched the meal pack off the counter, there was a fair chance she might murder me with it. I was probably only saved because Birgit said, “Mine’s ‘When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,’ which is more on point than I’d like…”
“Mine will fix that.” Garnet laughed breathlessly. “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”
Over on her bed, Wafiyyah said, “Hymne à l’amour.”
From around the room, song titles sang out from a chorus of women’s voices. I grinned at them. “I’ll see if we can get some of that in here for you ladies.” I leveled the meal pack at Ana Teresa. “You?”
“I don’t know.” She looked down at the meal pack. “Can we go eat now?”
I did not push the song issue, because it wasn’t the battle I needed to win. I got her into the hall. She started to sit down on the floor, but I caught her arm. “Come on. Actual break. Upstairs.”
Either she realized it would be faster to stop arguing with me, or some small part of her mind knew a real break would help more than anything. I was using it as an excuse to get her alone, but I also wasn’t wrong. She followed me to the stairs and we went up.
Each of the large lunar modules is built using the same plan, which is the most efficient way to do it, but there are variations because they were manufactured at different times, applying lessons learned from previous modules. Midtown was dug into the surface of the Moon, with a large translucent dome. The science module rested on the surface of the Moon, and we had pushed lunar regolith over it to mostly bury the thing. It did not get Midtown’s translucent dome, to make it easier to control the temperature for various science experiments.
It got windows. The very top of the module was a lounge, ringed with windows looking out across the lunar landscape. It was night and the Earth cast silver-blue light across the Apennines mountain range.
Ana Teresa stopped, staring at the soft, rounded slopes of the Apennines, which rose from the Mare Imbrium cloaked in black velvet. During the two-week night, by earthlight, the Moon is a fairy landscape filled with blues and silvers and a black that rivals space. It occurred to me that Ana Teresa had been a flight surgeon on both Earth and Lunetta, but she was a first-timer on the Moon. She’d seen the lounge before, but we’d arrived during the day and had been in crisis mode since. There was every chance she had never seen the Moon at night.
She dropped into one of the chairs and let out a sigh that told me I’d been every kind of right to pull her out of sickbay. For that matter, my own sigh was not much shallower.
Gazing out at the undulating hills, Ana Teresa tore the meal open and took a bite. I followed suit and the square coated my tongue with waxy residue. I let her sit and stare. I say “I let” as if I wanted to do anything else myself. I will never get tired of looking at the Moon.
She swallowed. “Thank you. This is…” She gestured at the landscape with all the eloquence I think any of us can muster the first time.
“It is.” I sighed and let myself settle back in the chair.
“How’s your arm?” She glanced at the cast.
“I was in the centrifuge yesterday and this morning before my shift started.” This was true. Since Myrtle had forced me, I had been reminded of how good exercise was for me, even when it hurt. It was twenty minutes where I had direct control. And now that Ana Teresa had started talking, I needed to exert control and swing the conversation over to my question. I gnawed off another bite of whatever. “Enjoying your meal?”
Ana Teresa snorted. “The only compliment I will give it is that it is better than my mother’s cooking.”
“Oh dear. I thought all mothers were supposed to be paragons of virtue in the kitchen.”
“Mm. Alas. After the war, she became fascinated with Italian food and collected Italian cookbooks and magazines.” She rolled her eyes with a fond smile. “She does not speak Italian.”
“How … How does that work?”
“She tried to make food that looked like the pictures. I thought I did not like pasta.” She held up the bar. “This, at least, is not pretending to be something else.”
“True. At least you survived it.” I wrinkled my nose. “Some of the early meals in tubes … Some things should never be pureed. I thought they were trying to poison us.”
“Nutritionally complete does not signify good.”
“Speaking of poisoned food … Do we need to watch out for contamination? As in, could polio taint food somehow?”
“No. Unless that you were ingesting feces or spit. Polio does not survive outside the human body and certainly would not survive the requirements of food processing of the IAC.”
“Sure, I can see that. But people bring treats up to the Moon in their CPKs, like…” I snapped my fingers as if it had just occurred to me. “Like, Curt brought candy Easter eggs up to share with people. He just picked those up at a five-and-dime. Maybe something like that got tainted.”
Ana Teresa laughed in my face. “Candy eggs?” She laughed harder, in that way people do when they are overtired and something isn’t really funny. “Viajar na maionese …—It is not like this how polio works. Candy eggs … Ahahaha…”
I laughed with her, holding up my hands in surrender. “I just asked. Pilot! Not a doctor!”
“Very clear!” She wiped her eyes, still chuckling. Taking a deep breath, she stretched. “Thank you for this. But I should stop putting smoke in a bag and delegate sorting fabric to one of the people who recovered.”
The tricky thing about polio was that even after people felt better, they could still be shedding virus, so we were keeping them isolated for safety. I nodded and took a last bite before folding the wrapper around my waxy square. “Before you go…”
“More candy egg hypotheses?” She stood, and her posture was a little less dragged down than it had been.
I did not see fit to answer such impertinence, I just walked to the long curve of windows that had been at our back and beckoned to her. She followed and I heard the moment when she came close enough to the glass to see Earth.
A soft gasp behind me. “Mãe do Céu…”
I flicked off the light switch. Hanging over the dark edge of the Moon, the waning gibbous jewel of our home planet hung in a field of crystal stars. I looked over my shoulder at Ana Teresa. The blue-silver earthlight traced the tears on her cheeks like rivers fro
m home.
TWENTY-SEVEN
ALGERIA PLANS SALES TO CANADA OF WHEAT WORTH $500 MILLION
OTTAWA, April 30, 1963—Algeria is on the brink of concluding a $500,000,000 foreign aid wheat deal—the biggest in her history—with Canada. An official announcement is expected early next week that an agreement has been signed with the Canadian delegation for the sale of 250,000,000 bushels of wheat to make up for shortfalls after repeated hailstorms devastated crops last autumn. The agreement would cover a period of three years, with most of the grain for delivery in the next twelve months.
The lamp I’d clipped to the side of the worktable gleamed on the helmet I was working on. In case anyone thought that I had only one job in the science module, they would be wrong. Suits still needed to be reconditioned, and I was the only person in the SciMod who was trained and certified in that and in good health.
For all that, I was humming as I replaced a helmet seal.
Since I had talked to Helen and the Lindholms, I’d felt … lighter, and not just because we had gotten out of the centrifuge room. We had a plan. We had talked, and worked the problem, and delegated the way a goddamn team should. A moon full of incredibly smart people, most of whom had multiple advanced degrees, and the Feds had decided to trust none of them.
Discarding the worn, sweaty seal in a biohazard bag, I leaned back and looked toward the screen that we’d cobbled together from some bedsheets and a couple of tethers. A sign warned people to do a verbal check before coming into the area where I was working, ostensibly so we could avoid contaminating a suit that I’d just cleaned.
But really, it was so I could have a little privacy. Closing my eyes, I listened. Fans. The regular creak and pops of metal as cooling fluids were pumped along pipes in the ceiling. Way down the corridor, I could just make out a murmur of human voice, but not enough to tell who was talking.
Satisfied, I opened my eyes and pulled the helmet toward me. I tipped it back and pulled the pad out of the back of it. I’d need to launder it before putting it back in. That was important for hygiene. More important, in this moment, was not a question of hygiene but rather the piece of paper tucked in behind the pad.
N—
I’m not sure how I got designated secretary, but here’s what we’ve learned.
Checked the port first and your CPK was still there. We have the contents.
E. says the translation they used for the verses is the Douay-Rheims 1899 edition. It’s a Catholic text.
H. says that of the people on your original list, only three are Catholic: Imelda Corona, Curtis Frye, and Catalina Suarez Gallego.
H. made a list of people who have F initials who would have had access to the BusyBee and were on our flight. That adds Faustino Albino Rios as a possibility and reinforces Curt’s potential.
On my last shift in LGC, I worked my way through the flight logs, looking for people on either list who would have gone to The Garden since our arrival to see if any of them could have stolen the fertilizers. Besides us, no one from our ship has gone out there.
We’ve been thinking. We found Curt on our way to the port, which means he could have been coming from it. The sabotage on our BusyBee was clumsy and hasty, which would be consistent with being sick.
We think Curt is probably our man. He’s in there with you. Got any ideas?
Meanwhile, go use the centrifuge room. Eat something. Get some rest.
M—
* * *
Of the possible outcomes for the codebooks, I had not expected them to just be sitting in a hangar. The fact that they were made me think that maybe they actually had slipped under the radar the way Clemons and I had hoped. The problem was … Frisch knew they existed. That the Lunar Colony Administrator hadn’t retrieved them was extremely concerning. He had an opportunity to send secure reports to Clemons and wasn’t.
I didn’t understand why.
The radio was playing when I walked into the men’s ward. Guillermo was sitting on the edge of his bed, which was a tremendous improvement. “Come on! Comparing Eusébio with that new kid Pelé? You watch. His ten goals were a fluke and that’s—Oh.” He saw me and suddenly didn’t know where to look. “Hi, Nicole.”
“Hello.” I smiled at him, pretending not to notice the way all the men were either staring at me or studiously finding Anything Else to look at. “How was the game?”
“Oh, it was great. Real good.” He glanced at Kadyn, who gestured at him with a sort of “go on” gesture. Guillermo shook his head. “Do you ever go to football—soccer?”
“Not usually, no.” I carried a clipboard in one hand. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Earth or the Moon, it makes you look so official. I flipped a page on it, as if checking a note. I truly did need to do therapy with the boys, but I could start with anyone. I didn’t want Curt to be Icarus, but I couldn’t think of anyone on the Moon I would want it to be. There were things on Earth he couldn’t have done, but those could have been done by a collaborator.
He didn’t have a way to retrieve the fertilizer material. But neither did anyone else on our list. I laid the clipboard on the end of Curt’s bed and smiled at him. “How are you today?”
Behind me, I heard a whispered, “Ask her,” and “No, you ask her.”
“Finer than froghair.” But Curt frowned, glancing toward the voices, so there was no pretending that I hadn’t heard.
“Ask me what, boys?” I pulled on my ridiculous black rubber glove and peeled the covers back from Curt’s legs. Nearly two weeks in and they were starting to lose their muscle.
Curt rolled his eyes. “The news was on right before you came in.” His voice sounded stronger today, which was good, since we had no capacity at all to deal with breathing paralysis. “The coded messages? I told them it was none of their business.”
Ah … Frisch had said it had made it into the news. I had been wondering how long it would take to work its way through the community. This was the downside of providing radio for the boys.
“It’s our business if the IAC is sending her up to spy on us!” Guillermo sputtered.
In the far corner, Hans was sitting on Kadyn’s bed, playing cards. “You know, when I started coming up, we had to wear health monitors so they were getting telemetry on everything we did.”
Thank heavens for Hans. He hadn’t been coming to the Moon as long as I had, but long enough. I winked at him as I took hold of Curt’s foot in my good hand and rested my rubber-clad cast against his knee. “Don’t forget the hot mics. Nothing like having the IAC listen to, and record, everything you say. And do. Potty time was extra fun. Being on CAPCOM I once heard a male astronaut close the pee valve too early and—”
The collective gasp of horror from the men in the room as they all simultaneously imagined pinching their manhood in the vacuum valve was deeply satisfying.
I flexed Curt’s foot. “Push against my hand.”
“But that’s not the same as coded messages.” Kadyn looked at me as if I’d betrayed him personally. Although the betrayal might have been from the pee story. But probably not.
I sighed, because the fact of the matter was that I had been sent to spy on them. As I pushed Curt’s leg to bend the knee, I used the same line I’d used on Frisch. “It’s true. My husband and I have a private code that we use to talk about his political career.”
“They say you sent a message to the Mars Expedition.” Guillermo leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “How is that about politics?”
Kenneth must be having to work hard to thread this needle at home. If we could talk, I would tell him to feed me to the wolves. It was the smart thing to do, because, as a woman, I could plead foolishness in ways he could not. I could do that on Earth as the wife of Governor Wargin. I could not do that on the Moon.
“In that instance, I sent a message for Dr. York, since he was in the hospital. We have similar strategies to deal with long separations from our spouses, so he felt comfortable asking for my help.” I left out the part w
here I had bullied Nathaniel to let me help. I looked away from Curt for a minute and gave Guillermo a sad smile. “There’s someone you miss at home, right?”
“Yes! Of course, but I don’t send coded messages.”
“Do reporters follow you when you’re back home? Do people go through your trash? Do they write about you in opinion columns and judge you by the clothes you wear?” In the widening of his eyes, I could see that no, of course they did not. That had not happened to anyone in the way it happened to the original astronauts and the first six “astronettes.” I was also the wife of a politician. And here was the truest thing I would say to Guillermo. “There is not a moment of my life in which I’m not subject to public scrutiny. Don’t begrudge me a way to talk to my husband with some semblance of privacy. Do not begrudge that for Elma.”
The fans whirred around us, and on the radio, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” played with the tight harmonies of The Shirelles. Guillermo watched his feet as if they were the most important things in the world. He could move them now, so maybe they were. If I were being charitable.
I slowed my breath and moved Curt’s leg through the exercises prescribed. Up. Down. Out. In. Up. Down. Out. In.
Curt touched my hand. “I’m sorry.”
I lowered his leg. “Don’t be.”
But my mind jumped ahead. If the coded messages had come out, people would have found our very easy First Letter messages. Which meant they would know I had been told to look into the explosive stores. They knew I was, in fact, sent to spy on their operative on the Moon.
I’m sure Clemons was looking into who on Earth had leaked copies of our teletype letters, but I still needed to figure out who on the Moon was Icarus. And nice though he was, Curt was our best bet.
I switched to his other leg. “How about you? Anyone special back home worth sending coded messages to?”
I’d been hoping for a flinch or a catch of breath or anything, but Curt just laughed. “Yeah. My mom.”
The Relentless Moon Page 25
