Everything went dark.
TWENTY-NINE
POLAR EXPLORER’S BODY FOUND AS GLACIERS MELT
By John Schwartz, Special to the National Times
NUUK, Greenland, May 3, 1963—The ice cap of this northern nation gave up one of its secrets today, as the body of the scientist and explorer Alfred Wegener was uncovered by the receding snow and ice.
Alfred Lothar Wegener, who came up with the concept of continental drift, died on a Greenland expedition in 1930.
Wegener proposed in 1912 that the Earth’s continents were once joined but broke up and drifted away from each other. Wegener was not the first to notice that the east coast of South America seemed to fit together with the west coast of Africa, but he assembled a wealth of geological and fossil evidence to support the theory. While any schoolchild can see that the eastern South America could nestle snugly against western Africa, Wegener did the scientific work of assembling geological and fossil data that substantiated his claims; finding similar fossils of animals and plants across a vast ocean suggested that the separate continents had once been joined in a supercontinent he called Pangea. Mainstream geologists, however, disputed his theory, which languished until the 1960s, when the developing field of plate tectonics showed the underlying mechanism of continental movement.
“Climate change is a global crisis, but it can surprise us with good news,” said Peter Harrer, Wegener’s grandson. “I am pleased that we will be able to return my grandfather’s remains to his ancestral home instead of the bleak Arctic wastes.”
“I found her.” Soft hands patted my arms and ran down to grip my right wrist. “There’s a pulse.”
It was dark. Blinking didn’t fix that.
My left arm was a pulsing, stinging, hot-and-cold ache. Water dripped in my face and the air smelled like a thunderstorm. “The picnic will get wet.” Even as I said it, I was pretty sure that didn’t make sense. I frowned, trying to sort out why it was dark. The clouds were hiding the stars, I guessed.
“I’ll find Dr. Brandão.” A young woman with a Swiss German accent spoke from across the room.
Another woman, maybe Arabic, said, “Careful you don’t get shocked! Everything is wet.”
“There’s no power.”
It felt like dragging my brain through sludge, but I finally got a little traction. Shocked. I’d been shocked. I swallowed and my throat hurt. “I’m all right. Just stunned.”
“Stunned?!” The woman who had taken my pulse sounded honestly offended. I knew her name. Arizonan. Imelda. “You were thrown across the room. I can still see the arc burned into my eyes.”
“Just give me a brandy and I’ll be fine.” I pushed myself up on my right elbow. Every muscle in my body ached, but something was very wrong with my left arm.
“A brandy?” Imelda did not sound as if she had gained any more confidence about my wits.
“It’s something my mother used to say. Hit by lightning three times.” The room was so dark, I was getting phantom flashes of color at the edges. “Just to confirm … The lights are out?”
“Yes.” Her hand was still on my wrist. “Just rest until we get the doctor.”
“Stärneföifi.” That was Birgit, who said she’d find Ana Teresa. “The door is shut.”
“Yes. We lost power.” I wanted to curl protectively around my wrist, but sat up, feeling a little more present. There was some reason that I didn’t want Birgit to leave, but I was having trouble dragging it out of the morass. “Airlocks automatically close.”
“You can still open it, right?” A breathy voice right on the edge of a whisper. Garnet. The computer who had been seeing Kadyn Murphy.
“Yes, but we can’t see to check the Delta-v pressure.” That might not be reliable even if we could see the gauge. “Did anyone notice what time it started?”
A general murmur of apologies and demurrals went through the sickbay. I rolled onto my knees, right hand resting in a shallow puddle of condensation. The cotton padding inside my cast was damp and cold against my skin. I sighed and let my head drop. It was raining. We didn’t have a working intercom, and I was the only person who could walk.
Theoretically walk. I hadn’t tried to stand yet, and Mother was always wobbly for a while after a lightning strike. I didn’t even have a nine-iron to lean on. At least no one could see me struggle as I sat back on my haunches and decided that standing would need to wait for a minute. A drip splashed on my head and ran through my hair.
“All right, ladies … Let’s work the problem.” I closed my eyes, which bizarrely made it easier to think, even in a dark room. “Roll call and status.”
“Birgit Furst. Unharmed … Do we talk about the polio?”
Wincing, I turned toward the sound of her voice, which was to my right and presumably near the door. “Only if you are having a status change or need immediate medical assistance.” Why flag something when I was the only person in the room who didn’t have it?
“Imelda Corona. Unharmed.” She was still next to me on my right side.
“Garnet Cunningham. Unharmed.” An ironic phrase, since the computer was one of the hardest hit and could barely whisper. Ana Teresa had put her on pure oxygen, but it wasn’t that much more than the normal air here. We use an argon/nitrogen mix to reduce fire danger, but oxygen was still a higher percentage than on Earth.
I shuddered, imagining that arc in one of the old pure oxygen capsules.
“Wafiyyah Zinat Abbasi. Unharmed.” Also, still in bed and slightly behind me, which made it easier for me to build a mental picture of where I was in the room.
I was perhaps a meter from the wall the intercom shared with the outer door, so I had not been blown clear across the room. I’d probably fallen back and the process of sitting had made me seem to be farther away than I was. That meant the storage closet would be to my left on the other short wall.
“Good.” Something else was wrong, besides the water dripping, and my arm, and the blackout. The blackout was … there should be emergency lights. It shouldn’t be this dark. “Someone else will be working the larger problems, so let’s solve just the things in this room. Light. Water. Door. In that order. Any chance someone has a flashlight?”
“The light Dr. Brandão uses to check our eyes is battery powered,” Imelda said. “I think it’s in one of the cabinets.”
“Good call.” If the door was to my right and the supply closet was to my left along with most of the beds, then all I had to do was find the door and feel along the cabinets to the left. “Birgit, have you found the door?”
“Yes, but I haven’t done anything with it.”
“Good. The light should be in one of the drawers to the left of it.” I crawled one-handed through patches of water toward her voice, not quite trusting myself yet to stand in the dark. “Just talk randomly so I can follow your voice?”
“I can look for it.” She grunted and fabric rustled. “Which drawer is it in?”
Her voice was coming from higher than it had. I stopped. “Did you just stand up?”
“I dragged myself, yes.” It sounded as though she were hopping next to the counter. “I also get strength in my left leg back, but it won’t support me. Yet. Which drawer?”
I squinted, as if that would make my memory clearer. God, I hurt. “Second set from the door. Top drawer. I think.”
Metal rattled and I crawled in that direction. There was something else. Something I should be thinking about. Even if I hadn’t just been shocked, the mugginess would make it hard to think. It honestly felt like a summer night on Earth and made me wish for one of Mother’s sandalwood hand fans.
I stopped crawling. “The fans are off.”
“What?” Then Imelda gasped as she caught up. “How much breathable air is in here?”
From her bed, Garnet whispered, “We have oxygen tanks.”
“Good girl.” But people in the rest of the colony would not, and it had finally occurred to me that there was no light filtering in from the view
port in the door. Power was off in the hall, too. The rooms were big enough that it wouldn’t be a problem for a couple of hours, but it would become an issue. “So, we’re fine, once we get lights in here we can start addressing the water. Leave solving the power issue to the team in maintenance.”
“Found i— Gopferdammi.” Metal clattered and bounced. The snap of glass cracking. Something metal rolled across the floor. “Of all the stupid … I’m sorry. I dropped it.”
It sounded as if the bulb had broken, too. Swell. “Easy to do. Go back to bed and be careful of glass.”
“But it’s … it’s so dark.” Garnet’s voice sounded a little shaky. “What are we going to do?”
There’s a thing that happens to people when they are helpless. They become afraid of things that in their normal life wouldn’t faze them at all. Garnet probably had not been afraid of the dark since she was a tiny kid, but trapped in a box, unable to move, and with rain dripping on her face? The dark was the one thing that seemed fixable.
“There will be another lightbulb … Heck. Probably there’s a box of the eye thingies, because the IAC loves redundancy.” I reversed course, trying to find my way to the storage closet. Water dripped along my back. “Hey, Garnet, talk to me so I can find the storeroom. Where did you grow up?”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I winced. I was so discombobulated that I had asked the question we’d stopped asking after the Meteor and I knew the answer.
“I … I grew up in Delaware.” The state that didn’t exist anymore. In the dark, we were all remembering the day the Meteor slammed into the Chesapeake Bay. Her voice got stronger as she talked, so that was something. “It was a funny little house, white wood. My great-grandfather built it and added on a bit at a time. The thing I remember most is two giant magnolias out on either side of the front walk. These were ancient. The trunks were so big around that I couldn’t reach, even with my face pressed against the bark. The branches bent down to the ground and it was hollow inside. We played house in there.”
I barked my shoulder against the metal upright of her bed and sent a jolt down my left arm into my wrist. I grunted, tucking my head as if that would keep me silent. Jesus … it felt like I’d broken my arm again. But I had a cast on. I sucked in a breath and tried to sound casual. “Found you.”
“I grew up in an apartment. We had balconies, but no trees,” Wafiyyah said. “Your house sounds magical.”
“It was.” She gave a little laugh. “No one ever asks about it, so it’s like it stopped existing that day. I mean … you know.”
“Where were you?”
“My cousin was getting married in Texas, so we were all out there.” She asked the dark, “What about you? Do you remember where you were when the Meteor hit?”
God. Yes. I had been reading the paper in the breakfast room with my parents when the housekeeper came in and turned on the radio. She hadn’t said anything, just turned it on with her face as white and starched stiff as the tablecloth. We’d thought it was another war at first. I set my jaw against the memories of that room getting smaller and smaller as we listened and I felt my way down Garnet’s bed to the wall.
“I was at school in Constantine. Teaching,” Wafiyyah said. “I heard trucks passing right next to the school. I remember the students, they were standing and running to the window to see what was happening, the way we had when soldiers roamed the city during the war. Except there were no trucks. Later, the principal turned on the school radio and we understood what we heard.”
Wall. I patted it until I found the door to the storeroom.
“You could hear it? From Algeria … Jesus.” Imelda’s voice sounded as if she’d made her way back to her bed, which explained why I hadn’t bumped into her. “I was out riding with my fiancé. We came back to the house and his mother met us on the front porch. Weeping. I did not think she was human before that moment.”
I grabbed the doorframe to steady myself and clawed my way to my feet. I had not been this sore since the survival training they made the astronauts do in the desert. I did not quite keep a groan to myself as my muscles protested every movement.
“Nicole, are you okay?” Birgit asked.
“Just practicing vocal exercises. Ooooooeeeeeeoooooo…” I felt my way into the storeroom, trying to remember how the medical staff had it set up, and a constellation of blue-green stars floated around the walls. I started to laugh with relief. “Oh, bless the IAC and their redundancies.”
“What?” Garnet’s covers rustled. “What is it?”
“Everything is labeled with glow-in-the-dark paint.” I had turned the lights on in here before I went out, so they’d had time to charge before everything shorted. But the sickbay’s overhead lights had been off, so any glow was minimal. “So, that’s one thing going right.”
“Two! You weren’t killed.” Imelda’s voice sounded markedly more cheerful.
“Give me time…” Keeping my left arm pressed against my stomach, I scanned the shelves looking for the eye flashlight thingies and the batteries. “While I’m doing this, see if you can work the problem of the water. Prime concerns are your safety and limiting supply damage.”
“Roger, wilco.” If Wafiyyah had access to a clipboard, I think she would have started making notes right then.
In sickbay, the girls were tossing ideas around, identifying the problems and the goals. I held on to the shelves and let myself have a second to breathe until I spotted the eye thingies, which were labeled “ENT pocket lights.”
When I carried them out, the girls clapped. I held one under my chin to illuminate my face. “Welcome to the Lady Astronaut slumber party!” After the complete darkness, the room seemed lit like a dinner party with a thousand tapers. “Do we have a solution for the water?”
Imelda shared a thumbs-up with Wafiyyah. “Yes, we do.” She pointed to Ana Teresa’s rolling stool in the corner. “And if you get that for me, we can even help.”
* * *
“You were electrocuted last night and I am only now seeing you?” Ana Teresa glared at me as she snapped her gloves into place. The fact that we were in an improvised sickbay in Le Restaurant in Midtown did not reduce the fury behind her gaze, which felt unjust since I had come to her on my own.
“Technically, I was shocked. Electrocution results in death.” The curtains drawn around the examining table did not do much to shield us from the women housed here. “And technically, it was this morning.”
If it hadn’t been unhygienic, I think she might have spat on the floor. Instead, she muttered in a long stream of Portuguese.
“Sorry?” I smiled at her as if she were not obviously cursing me out. “Come again?”
From the other side of the curtain, Birgit said, “She’s saying that pilots are terrible and that astronauts are the worst. That you could have a propeller through your body and you would insist that you are fine. That she’s met donkey’s rumps with more intelligence than—”
“I do not need you translating, thank you very much!” Ana Teresa faced the curtain with her hands on her hips. “And it was mule’s ass. Not rump. Also, your cast is a mess and will have to be replaced.”
I covered a grin. There was something I needed to talk to Birgit about and I could not, for the life of me, remember what it was.
“Sorry. The water was just … everywhere.” I sat on the examining table and kicked my legs as if I weren’t exhausted and in pain.
“The water, I do not blame you for.” She took my left hand, turning it over, and I gasped.
Ana Teresa looked up sharply at me, and carefully manipulated my fingers as if I were a manikin. She tapped my index finger, where I’d picked up a small wound, and made a satisfied sound. “Ooh! Jellinek’s mark.”
“What?”
“The electricity entered you there.” She peered at the other fingers. “Haven’t seen one outside of literature.”
“Oh.” I made a note that the way to get Ana Teresa to smile was to present a nove
l symptom.
“Do you have any idea how lucky you are that you weren’t killed?”
“Yes.” The short had knocked out power in the entire science module. It had fried things so badly we had needed to move everyone out and into Midtown until the maintenance team finished repairs. Those would have to wait while they got the module dried out, and it had to be completely dry—including inside the walls—or risk another short.
It was nice, I suppose, to have a change of scenery. The men were housed in the library. The women in Le Restaurant. It was not ideal, but the best available option. Watching Eugene organize and run the operation had been a joy. I’d been more than happy to just go where I was pointed.
The pain in my arm ranged from a dull throb to a bullet punch. Any effort to help with recovery made it worse.
She walked behind the examining table. “Remove your shirt, please.”
I froze. Funny the moments that will snap something into focus that you know and have shoved to the side. I hadn’t been eating. “Oh, but it’s just my arm.”
Ana Teresa gave a long, aggravated sigh. “Shirt. Off.”
Here’s the thing. If I fought her too much, she would write that up. So I pulled my shirt over my head and waited with it clutched to my chest as if I had virtue to protect.
She touched a spot next to my left shoulder blade. Ana Teresa pulled her hand away and stood behind me silently for a moment. Then she raised her voice and shouted at the curtain. “I will feel better about eavesdropping if you talk amongst yourselves.”
Beyond the curtain, the silence sounded like a rabbit caught in the open and then a conversation sprang into spontaneous life about Garnet’s concern for her sourdough starter, which she hadn’t been able to feed while in sickbay.
“Put your shirt back on.”
As I did, the conversation outside sounded more like people talking about favorite pets than bread-making. Which I suppose it was. What kinds of pets can you have on the Moon? Yeast.
Ana Teresa walked around to her cart and pulled open a drawer. She picked up a foil pouch of bacon cubes, tore it open, and held it out to me. I didn’t recoil, but the breath I took was too short and too fast to be casual.
The Relentless Moon Page 27
