by Wil McCarthy
And then another noise: a series of rumbling tones, like low blasts of tuba music. RROO! RROO!
“Attitude jets are firing,” Capcom warned.
Alice wasn’t sure she would have felt anything, if the images of Earth in the view screens hadn’t begun a slow spin around them. As it was, she felt a hint of dizziness.
Ignoring Capcom, Maag reached Lee and poked at something under her helmet visor. The suits had a big orange button there marked PURGE, supposedly for situations like this. But a panicked Lee was batting at Maag, trying to push her away. Maag responded by grabbing a fistful of Lee’s harness strap and leaning into the button with the plastic armor of her spacesuit elbow.
That did the trick; there was a kind of farting sound, and Lee’s helmet barfed out a cloud of, well, barf.
“Orbital burn in fifteen,” Capcom warned.
Then Maag was fumbling one-handed with the visor latch on Lee’s helmet, saying “Hold still, you fucker, hold still.”
And then the latch was open, and the visor was rotating up and away from Lee’s face, and Lee was coughing and spitting and screaming into the passenger cabin.
“Fucking fuck! Fucking . . .” And then she vomited again, launching an arcing stream of it over Maag’s shoulder, across her faceplate, and up toward the empty cockpit.
“Son of a . . .” Maag said.
“Get the fuck off of me,” Lee spluttered. “Let me up. Let me up!”
Without gravity to hold Maag down, Lee did manage to throw her off fairly easily. Of course, Maag was holding onto Lee’s straps with her left hand, so she just sort of pivoted up into the space above the seats, but that was the moment when Capcom said, “Two, one, initiating orbital burn NOW.”
Maag became heavy again, falling toward the back of the passenger cabin. She caught herself with her left hand, pivoted some more, then cried out in pain and fell squarely on top of Alice.
As it happened, Alice was no stranger to situations of this type. When you jumped out of planes for a living, it sometimes happened that somebody’s chute didn’t open. Twice in her career, Alice had arrested somebody’s fall—once by flying down to a dude who had hit his head on the way out of the plane. At three thousand meters she’d tucked in her arms and shot downward face-first, and at two thousand she’d flared and slid a hundred meters laterally, and grabbed the dude and octopused every limb around him and pulled the cord on her primary. BAM! It was too much weight too quickly, and she had nearly dropped him right then, and nearly again several times during the descent, until she’d finally groped her way to one of his dangling carabiners and clipped him to her harness, taking some of the weight out of her arms. And then the fucker had woken up!
His name was Bill Gonzales, and he was strong. He wrestled her for a moment, yelping and squawking in alarm, but she had him from behind, and she was saying “Calm down, Gonzales, calm down, I’ve got you. Calm down. I think you hit your head. Can you look at the horizon for me? Find a spot to orient. I’ve got you. Can you, yeah, can you grab onto my waist? Brother, you are heavy.”
The second time this happened, things were nowhere near as calm. A guy called Florida, coming down on a streamer, had landed squarely on her canopy and collapsed it, and before she knew what was happening the two of them were tangled up together in a mess of unbreakable parachute cords.
Almost without thinking she pulled her boot knife and started slicing, with the ground rushing up at two hundred kph. And suddenly everything was in slow motion, and she had plenty of time to see where the problems were, and she tied Florida to her left leg and then cut everything else, and while he screamed and thrashed she pounded her reserve chute from the sides, took what felt like a very long breath, and pulled the cord. Then the world went back to normal speed, and the chute opened with a sickening jerk that felt like it had popped every joint in her body, and then the two of them were coming down into a canopy of trees—in cartel country, Panama!—with the hum of bullets in the air all around them.
Alice got a medal and a promotion to Senior Master Sergeant for that one, and she never figured out if it was for saving Florida’s life, and her own, or because she broke three bones in her right hand, or because she pulled out her service pistol with that same hand, and started returning fire, and happened to hit somebody who happened to be in view of her jump camera.
(There had been some talk about her meeting the President in the wake of that incident—Yano, not Tompkins—along with a handful of other decorated Spec Ops. But it was election season, and Yano was trying to appease his base by distancing himself from the not-so-secret war against the Cartels, and then he lost the election, so the thing had never quite come together. But apparently Alice had been on some sort of presidential short list after that, which was one of the reasons the new President, Tompkins, had thought to interview her for the RzVz job. So in a way, that incident had been her ticket to outer space.)
Anyway, when Maag landed on her, the situation was familiar enough that she knew exactly what to do, and mild enough that she almost laughed while doing it. But her medic voice kicked in instead.
“I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Just hold still.”
To Lee, Maag said, “You’re welcome, asshole.”
But Lee was still mostly just coughing, so Alice said, “Easy now. We don’t know what’s going on there. We’ll give her a proper evaluation in a minute. Just hang tight.”
It was a hallmark of the Maroon Berets, that they could speak soothingly to a patient while simultaneously firing a weapon or barking orders at a subordinate. Because patients had to be kept calm, for both medical and tactical reasons. Until this moment, Alice had never really considered how creepy that was, or what it said about her that she’d taken to it without any specific instruction. But of course Maag didn’t know any of that. All she heard—all anyone heard—was Alice’s soothing voice. They would form their opinions around that—everyone except Dona and Bethy—and think she was a nice person, and it would work out to her advantage. And this thought brought with it the slightest flicker of shame, passing over her and then gone, at least for now. No time for shame right now.
The burn lasted thirty seconds, with Capcom counting up the numbers, now that he could get a word in.
“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Burn complete. Colonist Aagesen, please return to your seat and buckle in. We’ve got another hour before station rendezvous.”
Ignoring him, Alice said, “Hang tight, Lee. We’re going to examine you and see what’s going on.”
“Fuck off,” Lee said, gasping, struggling blindly with her seat buckles. Panic attack? Without waiting to be asked, Maag floated up off of Alice and took a position between the cargo canisters and Lee. Alice unbuckled herself and flipped up over the seat, locking eyes with Dona for a moment before gripping Lee’s heaviest strap and settling down to clamp her knees against Lee’s arms.
Alice said, “Hold still, soldier. I’m a medic, and I’m going to check you out. Can you take a few deep breaths for me?”
But Lee was panicking, not really responding in any meaningful way, and it occurred to Alice that she might, among other things, be feeling claustrophobic.
“We’re monitoring Lee’s vital signs from here,” Capcom warned. “If you don’t stay put, you could be liable for any injury you cause.”
“Is there a way to shut that guy off?” Alice asked no one in particular. Then, to Maag: “Can you get her helmet off? That’s a, yeah, that’s a latch. Good. Now rotate and . . . lift, I think? Right. Good.”
Maag lifted the barf-stained helmet away, handing it off to Dona. Alice held Lee by the cheeks and looked at her pupils, which were maximally dilated, so that it was impossible to tell what color her eyes were.
“Breathe for me,” Alice instructed. “That’s right, your job right now is just to breathe. I know you’re a doctor, but right now you listen to me. Breathe. That’s right. Maag, can you get these gauntlets off her hands?”
At this point, Jeanette
piped up, saying, “I think you can relax, Capcom. We’ve got things well in hand up here.”
To which Capcom replied, “Ah, shit. I’m going to get some coffee. Please don’t break anything while I’m gone.”
3.1
21 March
✧
St. Joseph of Cupertino Monastery
Shoemaker-Faustini Plateau
Lunar South Polar Mineral Territories
My Dearest Father Bertram,
Is it strange, to be the abbot of a place that hangs above you in the sky? You are so sorely missed in this, my chosen exile, as you breathe fresh air not from canisters and walk beneath blue skies. Blue! Already it seems incredible that any sky would dare so bold a color.
It is I, your most humble Brother Michael, writing to you from the third hydroponic module, which we jokingly refer to as the Greenhouse, since it has been modified to grow, beneath its pink and blue diodes and opaque, non-glass ceiling, things that actually sprout from dirt. Our food supply comes, much like that of Nevada’s hippy Burners, from plants grown in water troughs and bathed in our own bodily wastes, but our future comes from the—well, I almost said “earth,” but of course this is regolith. More anon.
May I call you dearest? Although your title is Fa and mine is Bro, I think we both know that my feelings for you—unrequited though God requires them—be neither filial nor fraternal. Although one must observe, “Platonic” is hardly the word for it either, since Plato was assuredly a practicing member of our little club. But if love must dwell separate from physicality, must it also dwell in silence, or shall it, in private letters, dare to speak its name out loud? For dearest you are, and shall remain, as should surprise no one.
Your missive addressed three urgent interrogatives, which I shall endeavor to answer as thoroughly as would a corporate functionary called upon the carpet by his superior to answer for actions deemed unauthorized. I hope to persuade you of both my diligence and my frugality—two qualities thought useful in a man of my position, although I recognize it matters more how such things land than how they’re cast. And so we shall see, nicht wahr?
As to the question of “why in heaven’s name shipments of water have been halted when we’ve got eight new brothers prepping for launch,” you are wise to inquire. It’s true that proximity to the ice mines of fair Luna was the primary concern in selecting the site for our moonastery. However, what Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station (or Moonbase Larry, if I prefer) doesn’t advertise is that their water (like all such) is eighty-nine percent oxygen, whereas the rocky Moon herself is forty-five percent, and as my gran would say, them economics don’t rightly square. Truly not.
As irony would have it, among the many apparatuses and apparati sold to us by Larry Killian’s merry band there sits an emergency oxygen generator that, when hit with fabulous amounts of electricity, reduces a shovel full of sand into a pail of oxygen and a fused brick of elemental silicon, plus a little bolus of slag for which no use has yet been found. The process requires methane, but returns it intact, and so costs nothing but electrons, with which we are liberally supplied.
Listen: the bricks, if stacked, will vacuum weld most impressively into an airtight wall of rainbow black, like the feathers of a raven, and it turns out the emergency oxygen can be breathed by God’s servants even in the absence of emergency. Or (as Sir Larry no doubt regrets) reacted with still more methane to produce the very water we neglect to purchase, though it be plentiful and close at hand. This may also answer your second question, namely, “why the frig are we having tanks of methane soft-landed from orbit?” I trust that frig is now clarified sufficient, for what I’m doing is simply cheaper, by a factor so considerable that, should your thoughtful attention turn toward it, may be found persuasive. And yes, and yes, Sir Larry Eddie Killie himself fairly protests that his oxygen generator isn’t meant for such hard duty. I do hear him, and yet a moment’s calculation tells me we can buy a new generator every three months and still come out ahead. Whose fault is it that moonwater costs more than expensive machines?
And so one is forced to ask, as we settle into this lifelong, life-shortening task of figuring out how humans can live as happy extraterrestrials: are we in it purely for the good of the future? Shall we shore up the local infrastructure at greater expense to God’s church, or shall we go thriftily into tomorrow with a cheat from Orlov Petrochemical? I await, with eagerness, your counsel in such matters.
As for question three, I am having so damn many seeds shipped up (and thus nearly erasing the aforementioned savings) because hydroponics is a losing game. Every gram of food grown in sewage is grown of atoms born on Earth and merely recycled. It admits no participation from Luna herself or, if we buy aqua vitae from Sir Lawrence, no participation save that million-dollar glass of water.
And so it makes sense, to me at least, that most of my personal kilograms hauled moonward were allocated to the seeds of Earthly plants, that I might discover what groweth in the soils of Our Lord’s other creation. And a ghastly endeavor it was, for kilogram after kilogram perished badly, ere I found what adornments Luna would permit on her skin.
The soil smells like gunpowder, or the dried-out dust of a mineral hot spring, and this reeky sulfur (being roughly two percent of the local regolith by weight and ninety-nine percent by pungency) doth slay the nitrogen-fixing bacteria I also transported. And so I found I must be satisfied, in the beginning, with plants that fix the nitrogen themselves, for there is no nitrogen, and I mean none, in the soils of Lune. This, too, must come from Orlov Petro, as I thought was well explained to His Holy at the very beginning of this venture. Here at my elbow (and also at my knee, for quarters are tight) Brother Giancarlo, being a Vatican astronomer by former profession, attests to such, although in the shuffle of this and that, we can perhaps forgive its forgetting. It is, after all, the least visible and reactible component of the air we breathe. So yes, I am also having tanks of nitrogen dropped from the sky! Mea culpa, Bertram, I thought at least this one portion of the endeavour would not surprise you. Apologies if it were not explained with sufficient oomph to penetrate a human skull.
In any event (or perhaps not in any, but in some), I can now report seed-to-seed growth of four fixers, being (by common name) blue lupin, sweet clover, bird’s-foot trefoil, and alfalfa. As it happens, although the lupin is known mainly as an ornamental flower and secondarily as a weed, its seeds are a sort of bean and, though bitter, a delicacy in ancient times, and still today in some parts of the world. Bird’s-foot trefoil is an inaquatic relative of the lotus, whose flowers, while non-nutritious themselves, have an antispasmodic effect on the digestive tract and can thus improve the absorption of other nourishments, thereby wringing extra calories from any meal into which they’re sprinkled. Alfalfa sprouts are edible, as any Nevada Burner or Vancouver hippie could tell you, and while calorically poor, are a source of vitamins B and C, the latter of which may be quite difficult otherwise to acquire in a land without fruit trees. Sweet clover is inedible, alas, but (as our mass spectrometer insists) pulls more nitrogen from the air and into itself than all others combined, and so earns a place as a servant of Saint Joseph.
Once these proud pioneers have grown and gone to seed, I remove them from the soil, and weigh them, and then bake the moisture out of the soil and weigh what’s left, and the difference between that and the starting mass is the Gain—what the plant hath wrestled free of Luna to become, for the first time in eight billion years, living matter. And dearest, if such an alchemical transformation is not called a miracle then I don’t know what possibly could be. I am humbled beyond words (yes, I! Wordless!) to be even present for it, much less participant.
And then! Bertram, I then save the seeds from these plants and grind the rest back into the dust, making of it an alien humus that can sustain less hardy crops, that need their nitrogen prepackaged in organic forms. Like a dried-out skeleton, the Moon has plenty of calcium, and like a rusted old sportscar it has plenty of iron and magnesium. No sh
ortage on these fronts! Compared with Earthly earth it’s deficient in sodium and potassium, though, and we find here that carbon is but one part in a hundred thousand of the soil. Of all the tested nitrogen fixers, these four plants, then, are the ones that take their carbon most efficiently from the CO2 we brothers exhale, which comes ultimately from Orlov’s methane and Killian’s emergency oxygen. And so, even mixed with the corpses of clover and lupin, our soil remains lethally starvaceous to most of what grows back home. Any farmer who found himself parked over such impoverished dirt would surely sell out to developers and see it converted forthwith into suburb! Of course you will ask: Could I not fertilize the soil by pooping in it? Indeed and of course, if I only desired to invalidate the whole experiment. The question is, what grows here, not on the atoms of Mother Earth we bring here with us.
It matters to me, and I like to think it matters to Our Father Who Art, that OP’s methane and nitrogen come not from Earth but from near-Earth asteroids, and that they also become alive here beneath our humble roof. Might not this greening be an ultimate purpose for which God created Adam afirstplace? I do like to believe we’re at the beginning of history, here, as one with the first neolithic goblin-men to scatter seeds deliberate and harvest what they planted, and that the future (though they know us not as individuals) will subsist on the crops we here develop.
(In Ages Middle, toward the end of Ages Dark, monasteries not only trained friars and priests in their childhood letters but, by preserving and endlessly copying the manuscripts of Ages Roman and Greek, whilst nurturing strange crops and livestock the world had forgot, became civilization’s sole experts on many aspects of ancient life, including sanitation and medicine, and formed the nuclei of colleges that would blossom into the world’s great universities in Ages Renaissant. Is it vanity to dream of future days here in space, where the Church plays such a role again in the secular lives of human beings? Surely this thought drives His Holy and the most generous donors who back this monastery, or why else indeed are we here?)
