The sudden topic shift tilted the floor under me. “Excuse me?”
He rubbed his mouth and chin, looking again at the report on his desk. I waited, giving him space as if he were a mark I needed to draw out. Or just a friend, who needed to get his thoughts into alignment. In my seat, I was a picture of calm attention, but my heart raced.
“I asked the astronomy department to look at Earth.” Eugene’s gaze lifted for a moment, his mouth quirked sideways. “I wanted to know if another meteorite had hit.”
Once upon a time, we worried about A-bombs. Those, at least, diplomacy could keep in check. One had hoped. The Meteor … I swallowed. “I take it there are no signs of another strike?”
He nodded. “But Kansas is dark. They used the infrared observatory, and even through the clouds, they should pick up lights. Electricity. Something … They can see Chicago. All of Illinois. Michigan. L.A. is a glowing mass. But all of Kansas. Most of Missouri. It’s dark.”
FORTY-SEVEN
Artemis Base Mission Log, Acting Administrator Eugene Lindholm:
May 31, 1963, 1834—Four days without IAC contact. Met with the agriculture department today to discuss plans for accelerating work at The Garden as part of a long-term contingency plan. We have food stores set for six months. It is unlikely that we will need to be growing all of our own food at the end of that time, but much like the situation post-Meteor, if we wait until it is necessary, it will be too late. I would rather plan ahead for making the lunar colony self-sufficient and discover that we do not need it.
There’s information you can act on and information you can’t. Knowing that Kansas was dark … What could we do with that? Nothing for Kansas. Nothing for Nathaniel. Nothing for Helen’s husband. Nothing for my ancient cat. Or my husband’s kitten. Nothing for the thousands of men and women who worked at the IAC.
But for the Moon, we could try to prepare the lunar colony, as best as we were able, for an extended period on our own. We could try to keep Icarus from destroying more things. I say this as calmly as I can, but my insides were a sodden mass of despair and fear. I wasn’t afraid for us on the Moon. I had trust in the people I worked with. It would be hard, but we would work the problems as they arose.
My fear was about the news we did not have. Kansas was dark.
Not knowing is the worst.
In the evening on the thirty-first, Eugene and I sat at a desk in comms, headphones over our ears with a staticky connection to Marius Hills. Eugene had his eyes closed, listening to Myrtle and Halim—who am I kidding—he was listening to Myrtle.
“There’s no indication the BusyBee was here.” She sounded beat. “There are footprints, but we followed them all over and there are no blast-off patterns in the regolith at all. It’s dark, but … I dunno, baby. I don’t think it was here.”
“Could they have wiped the pattern with oxygen tanks the way Halim wiped his footprints away?” Eugene rested his head in his hands.
Halim answered. “No. Blowing the dust around wouldn’t have hidden the color change from the landing blast.”
I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, it probably meant we didn’t have to worry about the BusyBee crashing into the domes. On the other, we still had no idea where it was. If we were lucky, Icarus had parked it someplace and never been able to go back to it.
If we were unlucky, this was a wild goose chase to distract us from finding the real thing.
With his head still in his hands, Eugene said, “Tell me about the footprints.”
“They crisscross the area, mostly running northwest by southeast, with some excursions to the side. We think there are two sets.”
I asked, “Two as in two people or two visits?”
“Two people. Maybe.”
Eugene opened his eyes and looked at me. “Two.”
Curt and Birgit. Possibly. Or possibly one of them and an unknown other. The possibility remained open that one of them was innocent of all of this and yet another party was the coconspirator.
“Can you tell me what makes you uncertain there were two people?” I twisted the cord of the headset in my fingers.
Halim filled in the gap. “They’re both wearing medium boots. The stride length is different, though. One of them is doing the skip-hop. The other is shuffling. It’s either two people, or one hauling things.”
“That’s a good observation.” It was. The suits were modular to make them as customizable as possible, but there were still a limited range of sizes. Extra-small, small, medium, large, and extra-large. “I’ll ask the suit techs what size Curt and Birgit wear.”
“I’m not going to hold my breath on that,” Myrtle commented dryly. “We’re not going to get lucky enough that one of them wears an extra-small.”
“Alas. You are probably correct.” Most of the people tended to use mediums or larges, so a medium boot didn’t narrow it down as much as if they’d seen an extra-small. “What about stride length? Did you measure the distance between steps?”
“N-no … Sorry. Damn.” Halim sounded annoyed with himself and sighed. “You could use that to tell height, couldn’t you? I’ve read my Sherlock Holmes, I just didn’t think.”
“It’s all right. It’s not like there’s been a study of forensics in lunar gravity.” I gripped the cord so tightly my fingers turned white. I wanted to be there. I wanted to be able to look at the things they were looking at and assess it on my own. “Too much to hope that you could you tell anything about the depth of the footprints?”
Silence at the other end for a moment and I could imagine Myrtle and Halim looking at each other, negotiating who would answer me. Myrtle said, “We also didn’t check that. How would we go about it?”
“Slide a ruler vertically into the impression. See how many millimeters deep it is from bottom to the rim.” I shook my head, even though they couldn’t see me. “It’s all right. I was just curious.”
Eugene had let me have my tangent and brought us back on target. “Where did they go? The footprints.”
“We didn’t find an origin point.” Halim cleared his throat. “The problem is … it’s quite dark. The Earth is only at a quarter and waning. We’d like to go back out there with more work lamps tomorrow. It would mean staying overnight, but—I asked the geologists here about other lava tubes in the area. We were apparently within a couple of dozen meters of a skylight for a large one, which connects to the main Marius Hills site.”
Myrtle joined in and I could almost see her leaning forward as if she could touch Eugene’s arm with her earnestness. “They have to go somewhere. I suppose there’s a possibility we’re seeing tracks from a geologist on legitimate business.” She laughed, but there was no humor in her voice.
Eugene rubbed his temples. “I want a specific plan before I’ll even think about authorizing you to go into a lava tube.”
“Roger, wilco. We’ll have that for you in the morning.”
If I were Myrtle, I would have so much more to say my husband, but the radio just buzzed with the static awareness of present witnesses. Halim and I were occupying the space between them.
I cleared my throat. “Hey … I’m pretty beat, so I’m going to play it smart and get some shut-eye. Halim, you’ve been doing double duty, so let me nursemaid you for a change. Go to bed.”
“I’m all right.” He did sound unfairly alert. “Myrtle has had the longer day. I can finish the debrief if—”
“Halim.” I cut in and gave up on subtlety. “They’re a married couple. Let’s you and me get scarce and let them have some time.”
“Oh.” I could hear his blush over the airwaves.
Eugene looked up and mouthed, “Thank you.”
I winked and nearly fled the room. I was fine. I was tired. But that was all. The hollow running down my middle was just fatigue. The jittering under my skin was nothing that I was going to cater to. Twenty-three days since Kenneth had been murdered. I just needed to wait this out.
Stopping in the
corridor, I pressed my hand against the wall. The jittery feeling did not dwindle.
And then the tiny part of my brain that has a sense of self-preservation asked: What did you have for lunch?
When had I eaten last? I closed my eyes and breathed through my teeth. When had I last filled out my log? For that matter, where was my log? What kills me is that I know I forget to eat when I’m stressed. Nothing about this was surprising. And yet. Here I was again.
I drew in a breath and straightened. Fine. I would go to the cafeteria. I would get something to eat. I would find my logbook. Then I would make decisions about what to tackle next. I would do things in that order.
I walked out of the AdminMod, pausing to perform the ritual of passing through an airlock with all the minutia of Delta-v checks and the ripple-bangs of ratchets catching. The Midtown side hissed open and I stepped through into shouting.
I raised my head, trying to pinpoint where the sound was coming from under the parabola of the Midtown dome. The far side moving toward the gallery. I leaned forward, digging in to build momentum into a lunar lope. If they did anything to my gallery, I would flay them.
Coming down the street, I burst into the clear area in the middle of the dome. Central Park. Someone had pulled up plants from Central Park. I know they are dandelions and prickly pear and at home I would think they were weeds, but here? Here it was like seeing someone set fire to Yosemite.
Across the park, moving in a knot, people were herding a hunched figure down the street. I ran forward to the edge of the group, desperately wishing Eugene were here.
“Hey! HEY!” Drawing in a deep breath, I bellowed, “Laaaaaadies and geeeeentlemeeeen!” as if it were the start of a masquerade party.
The incongruity broke the crowd’s fixation on the figure in the middle, and I grabbed that moment of silence and ran with it.
“Senior astronaut in the house! Who has a status report for me? Stat.” They turned, blinking, faces flushed from shouting, and looked at each other as if passing the hot potato with their gazes. I spotted Jennifer Weaver in the mix. A former flight attendant turned astronaut, her blonde hair was pulled back into a loose bun and she looked dangerously pissed. “Jennifer. Report.”
She drew herself up and pointed behind her. “I came in after the shouting had started, but Emmett said Imanol was trying to steal plants.” A young white man stood hunched against the wall of the gallery, with a dandelion clutched in his hands, white taproot like a contrail of guilt. A Basque botanist from Spain, if I recalled correctly, from the rotation before ours. So one of the group of short-timers who should have gone home when our ship arrived. I didn’t know him well.
“I told him I wasn’t!” He shook his head.
Emmett Baldwin was being held back by a knot of other people. A colonist, but a long-timer. One of the astronomers. A Black man, with small dark scars on his forehead and arms. He’d been in Harlem when the Meteor hit and somehow survived for months before getting out. “You have a plant! In your hands!”
“I’m doing my job!” Imanol started to step toward me, but Jennifer blocked him with a hand to his chest. “I’m supposed to rotate plants with The Garden so we can optimize the rootstock for the conditions here. We got off-schedule with … during the quarantine. So there’s overgrowth and stress and—”
“You were just ripping them out of—”
“I’m supposed to, you big—”
“That’s enough.” I stepped in between the two of them, desperately wishing Eugene were here. A Black man and white man going at each other and I was about to have to side with the white man. I did not like that dynamic. “Imanol, you go back to work.”
“You’re going to let him just throw them away?” Emmett’s face went red and he clenched his fists. “We can’t afford to be wasting food—”
“Hold it. Stop. You’re getting written up and you need to think about how you want me to frame that when I speak to Major Lindholm.” I walked toward him as I spoke, getting closer than I really needed to, trusting that he was reasonable. “I’ll give you a moment to decide what you’d prefer. Do you want a chance to explain this to me, before I make my report?”
He sputtered, looking around the group for help. I kept my gaze fixed on him, not giving him even a hint of uncertainty in my stance. Finally, he sagged, just a little, in the arms of the people holding him back. Some of the tension leaked away and he nodded. “But I want to be on record that this is a shitty policy.”
“We have not begun our chat yet, but I’ll make a note.” Now, I looked around the group. “Thank you for your attention in this matter. I’ve got it from here. If there’s anything you think should go into my report … Jennifer, can you collect statements for me?”
She nodded with the calm competence I expected from her. Really, I expected it from all of them, which made Emmett’s outburst all the more troubling.
I walked to the door of the gallery and pulled it open. “In here.”
The people holding him let him go reluctantly. One of them had a red welt on her chin where she’d taken a blow, but she turned calmly to Jennifer as if nothing had happened. Emmett went into the gallery and stopped, just inside the door.
I stepped in, shutting the door behind us. He was staring at a small bust of a Black woman in a space helmet that stood on a makeshift plinth in one corner.
Walking to his side, I joined him in looking at the sculpture. Ed Dwight had done it on his last rotation as an experiment. She looked up, as if gazing into space, and had a yearning expression that seemed to beg to go beyond. He’d fiddled with a composition of regolith and water and filler and come up with something he called luna cotta. It sculpted differently than terra cotta did, with a higher grog content, but the tiny grains of glass made the clay sparkle in the light. I loved her.
She wouldn’t survive a trip down to Earth.
“What happened out there?” I kept my voice soft.
Emmett sighed and dropped his gaze to the floor. “I genuinely thought he was stealing food.”
“I gathered. Why?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s been five days … Kansas is dark. No one is coming, right?”
I’d meant “what action made you think he was stealing,” but he’d answered “why would someone steal.” The trouble with being surrounded by smart people is that they can paint a picture as well as we can, but Emmett had a perspective I did not. I’d been safely in the middle of the country when the Meteor hit. He’d been living in a part of New York the powers that be had just “forgotten” to evacuate. He had survived, not only the initial blast, but the acid rains and the cold and the months of scarcity.
And as an astronomer, he had access to the telescopes. He could see and understand the dark patch with visceral clarity.
“All we know is that they’ve had a massive blackout. That would affect launches.”
“Not from Brazil. Not from the Euro spaceport.”
“Right. There you go, see?” I said with a lightness I did not feel. We could move the people of Ground Control, but the main relays for the Outer Space Tracking Network had been built in Kansas. With the state dark, any ship that came our way would be navigating without ground communication to back them up. It would all be up to the pilot and Nav/Comp on board. “We’ve been sending them an APAF signal via Morse, so Earth knows we’re fine. That’s going to reduce urgency to get to us. We have stores laid in for six months, and that’s not counting The Garden.”
“It’s not producing yet.” He lowered his hand and kept looking at the sculpture.
“Here, I will gently point out that keeping people from doing their jobs is not going to speed that up.”
He bent his head, jaw clenching for a moment. “He didn’t say any of that stuff about optimizing rootstock. Just that he was pulling plants. Didn’t tell me he worked in agriculture.”
“All right…” I thought through my options. Emmett and I did not overlap much other than when I flew him out to one o
f the observatories. He was a long-timer on the Moon and generally pretty easygoing. The past months had been … brutal. “I’m going to talk to Eugene, informally. I’ll tell him it was a misunderstanding and that my judgment is it won’t repeat. Is that correct?”
He swallowed. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Is there anything I need to address with Imanol?” I turned to face Emmett directly. “It is not my experience that you would jump immediately to trading blows with someone.”
His mouth worked for a moment as if he were swallowing several responses. Squinting, he looked back up, but still not at me, at the sculpture. “There was some language. Not the first thing he said. But … Why didn’t he just tell me what he was doing?”
“I see.” I wasn’t going to make him tell me exactly what Imanol had said. That was clear enough. “I’ll address that with him. I’ll use some … language of my own.”
He gave a little laugh but didn’t look like he really believed me. Fair enough. Trust was earned by actions. Kenneth always said that our collective actions meant there were centuries of work to be done to prove ourselves trustworthy.
I stepped back, toward the door. “Thank you for talking with me.” I paused, watching him still looking at the sculpture. “Do you like art?”
Emmett looked around, scars pocking his forehead and making a bare spot in one eyebrow. “Mom was a sculptor. She would’ve liked that piece.”
I looked at the luna cotta, with her gaze of hope and longing. Wasn’t that why we were all up here? Trying to build a place for the future. “I’ll handle things with Imanol and Eugene.” I gestured toward my makeshift bench. “Stay here as long as you like.”
As I left, he was settling on the bench, hands clasped in his lap like he was praying. Meanwhile, I was about to … educate a young man who would not understand why he was in trouble when what I wanted to do was rain down righteous indignation on him. Eugene had been right that keeping the community together would be the hard part.
The Relentless Moon Page 44
