The Relentless Moon

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The Relentless Moon Page 33

by Mary Robinette Kowal


  I am fortunate in that I can often delay my reactions to intense events. It is useful when you are in a plane that is going down. It is useful when you have been blindsided in a political conversation. It is useful when your husband has been killed.

  The television cameras turned off and I covered my face with my hands. The veneer of resolve that I had pulled around me was cracking and I could not let it yet. Eugene’s hand rested against my back again and he tried to pull me into a hug.

  I straightened, drawing in a breath, and stepped away. “I’m all right.”

  Eugene glanced at Myrtle, who had watched from a safe space behind the cameras. Helen stood in the shadows there, arms wrapped around her core. Her lips were tight and the tear tracks on her face nearly undid me again.

  I looked down, straightening the sleeves of my hastily dyed dress. There were no mourning clothes on the Moon, but Myrtle used to work for a company that dyed hair. She went to someone in the chemistry department and handed them a formula. Helen used to be a computer and remembered that someone in the pool used to be a seamstress. One of the artists in my gallery had strung the necklace from pieces of lunar breccia, rocks pulverized and melted together by meteors. For this one day on the Moon, I looked like Mrs. Kenneth T. Wargin.

  My cheeks were wet and I smeared the moisture away with a hasty swipe of my palm. “Do you have my folder?”

  “Maybe you should take a break?” Myrtle pulled it out from under her arm.

  I shook my head. Opening the folder, I looked for the next thing to do. I am an astronaut and I am a politician’s wife. A politician’s widow. We had made contingency plans. All of the business of death written out on the pages inside so I would not have to think. The first page had a list of names and phone numbers. Relatives, funeral parlor, lawyers. All with a check mark next to them. The cats were staying with Nathaniel. The movers had emptied our things from the Governor’s Mansion. I turned the pages, moving down the order of operations for grieving.

  I put a check next to “funeral.”

  Interment was next, but they would drive him to Wichita, where he would be laid to rest in the family plot. The process of letting me see the burial in that remote cemetery could have been done but I had felt selfish about adding a layer of complexity to a day that would already be difficult for his terrestrial family.

  And after that … there was nothing. I stared at the empty page. If I were home— And home was where, exactly?

  I swallowed the rock in my gut. If I were on Earth, there would have been things I could have done, but from here, everything associated with the business of death was finished. There were people on Earth who had handled everything in my absence. I had made phone calls and decisions and delegated, but my presence was not required.

  And now? I closed the folder.

  The fans of the room buzzed around me. Gray snow flurried at the edges of my vision and goddammit, I knew what that was. I did not have time to faint. I stared at the cables of the television camera, trying to breathe the dizziness away. On the floor, the cables curled like snakes; where they weren’t taped down, they writhed in the air current without enough weight to overcome the coil of the wire. The snow receded and the fans quieted to a hiss.

  I looked up at the young man who had run the cameras. “Thank you.” He had a name. I had met him before, but in that moment he was just another young white man from engineering. I walked to him and pressed his hand with the illusion of sincerity. “Thank you so much for your kindness today.”

  His eyes were damp. “Ma’am, I’m so—”

  “Thank you.” If he told me he was sorry for my loss, I might scream at him. You do not scream at the staff. “Would you mind giving me a moment to…” I let my voice trail away.

  He ducked his head and backed out of the room, leaving me alone with Myrtle, Eugene, and Helen. Looking at the door he had closed behind him, I said, “What has been happening with Icarus?”

  Beside me, Myrtle stiffened. She would not approve and I knew all of her reasons for thinking I should stop and rest, so I faced Eugene instead. His face was fixed and impassive. For a moment, his eyes cut to Myrtle, and I could imagine her mouthing instructions behind me.

  Eugene twisted his head to the side, “Nicole…”

  “They killed my husband. Don’t you dare finish that sentence with anything else but a plan to brief me on what I’ve missed.” I gripped the folder in both hands, the cast scraping against the paper with a hiss. “What did you learn about the controls of the lunar shuttle we came in on?”

  His fists tightened and he looked at the floor. Pursing his lips, Eugene shook his head as if losing some silent conversation. Then he straightened his shoulders and faced me. “Not conclusive. The thruster itself is fine. The hand controller had debris in it, which could have caused the intermittent failure. However, it was not actually impeding anything when they opened the controller. It could have moved on impact, which is why I didn’t have problems, or it could have been generated by impact.”

  “Faustino?”

  Behind me, Myrtle said, “Why don’t we have this conversation in the cafeteria?”

  I frowned. “It’s not open.”

  She and Helen exchanged glances. Helen cleared her throat. “It reopened this morning. Halim landed with the vaccines on Thursday so we were able to lift quarantine.”

  “Oh. Right.” I had been told he had landed. It just hadn’t stuck. I had spent the past three days locked in the AdminMod making calls or sleeping under a blanket of Miltown. The cafeteria would be full of well-meaning people who would want to console me. “It’s not secure.”

  “No, but given what you just broadcast, I’m not certain that security is a concern.” Myrtle walked to the door. “And lunch would be good for all of us.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Myrtle stopped at the door, bowing her head. “Kenneth would want you to eat.”

  “Kenneth doesn’t want me to eat. Kenneth is not looking down on me from Heaven and worrying. Kenneth is dead.” I was away from him for three months at a time. I only got to hear his voice once a week when I was on the Moon. I should not feel his absence with every breath I drew.

  And sometimes I didn’t. For a moment, while engaged with something else, he still existed in the world. He was still on Earth, in his office, working or playing with his kitten or talking to a constituent or going to the opera. I balled my hands into fists, fighting the grief and rage that filled my throat. “What … What is the status of Faustino?”

  “You’re allowed to take time to grieve.”

  “This is how I grieve!” My voice tore my throat. “The people who killed him are out there planning who knows what, and you want me to take a nap? Have a little snack? Rend my garments and weep?”

  Helen stepped out of the shadows. “Yes. That is what we want. We have been working and I promise you that we will keep working until we find these people and stop them.”

  I had to remind myself that they were grieving too. Kenneth had been good friends with all of these people. We had lost Terrazas. I bit my lip and looked down at the folder, riffling the useless pages. “I’ll tell you that you get two choices with me: you can have me reasonably functional and busy or you can have me stop. Completely.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Oh, I do.” The months of numb despair after that final miscarriage rose and tied the grief of losing Evelyn Marie to the loss of my husband. Would it have been easier if she had lived? My eyes burned again and I wiped at them with the back of my hand. “I will eat. Not enough to make any of you happy, but I will eat.”

  Food is fuel. I had a job to do and I knew the consequences of not eating. I knew the path I was on. But knowing and stepping off the path are two different things.

  “Nicole…”

  “I’m assuming from the way you are refusing to answer the question that Faustino is dead.”

  Eugene took a step toward me. “Yes.” He flexed his hand, which h
ad scabs on the knuckles. I wasn’t sure if those were new or from … Wednesday?

  Had I let four days slip by since we learned about Terrazas? “Are you going to tell me how?”

  “According to Ruben, he went skiing.”

  “Skiing.” I was missing something. “We’re on the Moon.”

  “Faustino had been up before. There are places where the regolith is powder. Wood skis, obviously, would be destroyed, but one of Ruben’s friends has a PhD in materials science and was able to craft skis out of a packing crate. Several of them snuck out to do this.”

  The levels of rage and incredulity that boiled beneath the surface of my skin could have cooked veal. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Eugene’s smile was grim. “That was what I said. Ruben defended it by telling me that they were not using any new materials. I explained that this was not the point.”

  These … these children had no understanding of how dangerous the Moon was. The colonists flew up here and lived in a dome that had a goddamned rec area and we let them come, undertrained, because that was the only economical way for the IAC to scale increasing the population on the Moon.

  “And they knew he’d gone out and said nothing?”

  “Ruben did not. Or, at least, not this time. He was down with polio and afterward thought Faustino was just in a different module until we made the announcement and he started to wonder.” Eugene ran his hand over his hair. “We found Faustino where they said he’d gone. Walking distance. He’d fallen on his PLSS and had a hiss out.”

  I shuddered. The Personal Life Support Systems were less bulky than they had been when we’d started coming to the Moon, but still a cumbersome backpack. You had to lean forward to balance the mass. Any time you fall, there’s a worry that this will be the time you split a seam on your suit or pop a hose in the PLSS and all your air would hiss out. It’s a fast way to die, but not instant. Faustino would have had time to know what was happening.

  “Shit … Have you told people?”

  “While you were asleep.” He cleared his throat. “Myrtle … ah … she had them—”

  “There he goes making me the villain.” She crossed her arms, giving him a mock glare, and turned back to me. “I had them turn off the loudspeaker in your compartment. You can be mad at me all you want, but it was the first time you’d slept.”

  Eugene cut back in before I could object. “To get ahead of your questions: there was no BusyBee at the site. We still don’t know where it is.”

  It wasn’t possible to walk on the Moon and not leave a trail. There was no wind or weather to obscure your tracks. Things could be hard to see during noon-days when the shadows were straight down or during the two-week night, but even with that, the tracks to an airlock would be clear. “Have you looked for tracks out—”

  Eugene nodded. “We’ve checked all of the airlocks. There are no tracks walking away except for Faustino’s. No one else is missing. We think it had to be taken by either Curt or Birgit, with Curt being the most likely.”

  “What are—”

  “To be on the safe side, I’ve confined both of them and have them under observation at all times.” Eugene walked all the way up to me and put his hands on my shoulders. “I will brief you on all of this. I promise. I’ll even give you the choice of your quarters or the cafeteria, but I need you to walk out of this room. Wait— Hold that objection. You need to be busy. You need a purpose. I understand that. Right now, I have a base full of people who are grieving and terrified. I need you to set an example.”

  That. That was what Kenneth would want me to do. “Goddammit, Eugene Lindholm. You do not play fair.”

  “No.” He smiled even though tears were building in his eyes. “No, I do not.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  EARTH-FIRSTER ACCUSED

  Figure in an Anti-Space Group Is Charged

  By GLADWIN HILL

  Special to The National Times

  KANSAS CITY, May 11, 1963—Shane James Cox, a 20-year-old auto mechanic who does charity work through the Catholic church with Meteor refugees, was charged late last night with assassinating Governor Wargin.

  Cox was arrested at 7:15 Friday evening, nearly forty-eight hours after the assassination of the governor, in the White Cliff district, five kilometers from where the governor was shot. Chief of Police Alex Charlemagne announced that Cox had been formally arraigned at 1:40 a.m. Central Time yesterday on a charge of murder in the governor’s death. The arraignment was made before a justice of the peace in the homicide bureau at Police Headquarters. Captain Dennis Poole, head of the homicide bureau, identified Cox as an adherent of the right-wing “Earth First.” This group is the same that Gov. Wargin’s widow accused in her eulogy at his funeral, lending credence to her allegations that they have been attempting to sabotage the space program.

  By the time we finished passing through the gauntlet of my peers, I had developed a set of rote responses that rolled easily out of my mouth.

  “Thank you, that’s very kind.”

  “Yes, he was the love of my life.”

  “And how are you holding up?”

  This last one saved me, because I could fall back on listening to them talk about polio or Faustino with a concerned expression that I’d honed over decades at Kenneth’s side. I had learned the trick of nodding at the right places and tilting my head in response to a change in their tone that worked even when I had stopped being able to understand them. I don’t know if the fact that they seemed to feel better was depressing or heartening.

  I dropped into a chair in the conference room that Eugene led me to. It was tempting to rest my head on the smooth tan Formica that covered the table, but I would never lift it again if I did. Myrtle set a sip-pack of water in front of me.

  I glared at her, but I picked it up and drank because my mouth was so dry that it crackled. My head ached. I rubbed the space over my right eye and looked around the room. “An upgrade from your office?”

  “I wanted a map.” Eugene pulled out a chair for his wife, nodding to the lunar map on one wall, which was dotted with bright red thumbtacks. “My secretary suggested this.”

  “Your secretary?” I lowered my hand. “Does that mean I’m fired?”

  “No offense, but you’re a terrible typist.”

  I held up my cast as if I wouldn’t have been terrible without it. “No argument.”

  Helen walked over to the map and drew a circle with her finger on Mare Imbrium around Artemis Base. “We have been working with the assumption that the pilot of our missing BusyBee must have walked back from wherever he left the ship. That means we have a two-kilometer radius around the main colony as well as around each of the way stations.”

  She pointed to each of the red thumbtacks that dotted the lunar landscape in a straight line between Artemis Base and The Garden and the lava tube at Marius Hills. The way stations were essentially BusyBee shells sans engines and placed every two kilometers, which was the formal IAC “walkback” range for an astronaut in a lunar spacesuit.

  “But if he’s carrying extra air, that range gets bigger.” My head felt like I was at the bottom of a gravity well. If I didn’t keep moving, I was going to sink through the chair and pass out.

  Myrtle opened a packet of crackers and slid it in front of me. “Right. Looking at the logbooks, I think the BusyBee was actually taken on April sixteenth, three days after we landed.”

  I pushed the crackers out of my way and turned back to Helen. The room seemed to follow a little too slowly. “How do we lose a BusyBee for three weeks?”

  Eugene leaned forward in his chair. “That … That is one of the things keeping Frisch on my list of people possibly involved. I still think Curt is our man, but can’t ignore the fact that Frisch’s record-keeping about the BusyBees was incomplete. Inventories come in from each of the outposts and the hangar here. Procedurally, he should have assigned someone to track and oversee those. He did not.”

  “You think it was deliberate or fuzzy brai
n from poison?” As I thought about how to figure out which scenario we were facing, I let my eyes lower. The folder was on the table. For a moment, my ribs seemed to fold in and pinch my lungs.

  Goddammit. Just one hour. I wanted to get through just an hour without being reminded. Why had I even brought that in here? I pressed my fist against my mouth. They were still talking and all I could do was try to control my breathing.

  Clearing my throat, I kept my head bent until the tears passed. “Are we missing other equipment?”

  Myrtle nodded. “Some things are natural attrition, like office supplies, tubing, or wire. I’m working with the secretarial department to do a full audit of the books, and the worrying things, so far … Oxygen tanks. CO2 scrubbers. Two missing radio units.”

  I lifted my head so quickly the room swam with gray spots again. I blinked them away, keeping one hand on the table for stability. “Remote-control bomb.”

  Eugene’s eyebrows went up and his mouth dropped. “That’s where your mind goes first? Not listening post? Not that there are two people involved?”

  “Tubing. Wire. Fertilizer. Acid.” There was something else. Something had tickled at the back of my brain as they were talking, but focusing was slow. “Signal it with a radio.”

  Eugene wiped his hand down his face and stared at the ceiling. “Swell. And here I thought we were getting things under control.”

  The door opened, and Halim Malouf bounded in, with the grace of an Algerian film star. Like all the original astronauts, he was a compact man and seemingly chosen for his photogenic properties as much as his prowess as a test pilot. Even now, with his hair matted down and the impressions of a “Snoopy” cap on his forehead, he was handsome. “It worked! I was able to wipe— Oh.” He saw me and all the cheer bled out of his face.

  He crossed the room and knelt next to me, taking my right hand in both of his. “I am so sorry about Kenneth. We were en route and they didn’t tell us until we landed. My dear … if there is anything I can do, you must let me.”

  “Thank you, that’s very kind.” My eyes were burning again.

 

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