by Wil McCarthy
“Sierra Juliet Zero Niner on final,” said the pilot. “Thirty seconds to touchdown.”
“Sierra Juliet Ground Actual, Roger that,” I answered.
And there he was, dropping from the black sky like a wiffleball on a tongue of gray-white gas and then blasting, at what seemed the last possible moment, a sterner toot from his arse that did indeed kick up rocks. We couldn’t hear them pinging off the hull of the airlock, but I felt the impact vibrations of several through my hands and feet. And then the lander was down, and Purcell ne’er did get a look.
“Sierra Juliet Zero Niner is down. Powering down. Sierra Juliet Zero Niner, engine power at zero,” said the pilot.
“Roger that. We’re coming outside,” said I.
Out we went, Brother Purse and I, to greet our long lost. The pilot had already gotten up and thrown open his door, and came down the ladder first to show the others how it was proper done. I waved to him, and he waved back, then got out of the way of his passenger monks, who began to shuffle one by one down the ladder, bulky in their cladding and each carrying a ballooned-up duffel of personal crap.
“Welcome,” I said to them, the rules of radio jargon being looser for feet on the ground than birds in the air. Various answers came back, until the pilot said, “Cut the chatter, people. Brother Michael, I have a schedule to keep, and I need someone to escort me to Shackleton.”
“Roger, we can do that,” I assured him, though it were exceeding inconvenient. By agreement and purchase, this lander would remain here at the monastery, a second and larger lifeboat for the evacuation of God’s servants. In the event of dire emergency, it would allegedly truck nine Brothers back to Transit Point Station, though of course one hopes it stands there eternal, slowly outgassing whilst the monastery prospers. I do sometimes shiver to think this place may still be standing a millennium hence, steeped in long traditions hatched this very year, with ne’er an emergency God’s own can’t handle on site, for why else plant Saint Joseph’s flag here at all?
It turned out the pilot’s name was Eduardo Halladay, and I didn’t know him previous, but Harvest Moon also follows the EVA buddy system, so he couldn’t simply walk to Moonbase Larry on his own recognizance, nor could his escort walk back alone, so it was me and Purcell both who must accompany him, whilst Giancarlo donned a suit unassisted and came outside to help the Brothers in, for they’d been sealed in their General Spacesuits for an hour and more already.
I hugged them each in turn and bade them play Armstrong and Aldrin in the dust awhile, for the airlock holds only three bodies at once, and even when Geo got outside, it’d be four cycles in and four cycles out to get all eight of them inside, which is two hours of standing around.
I regretted the risk to Geo, compressing and decompressing repeatedly like that, but he was the only one who knew the mechanisms and procedures of ingress; these newborns couldn’t do it without him. I regretted also the waste of water, for Geo would be showering dust off his suit with the others and then stepping back outside still damp, and the sublimating vacuum would suck the moisture away to infinity.
You have asked where water goes, in what ought to be a closed system, and this is one answer, though not a primary one. The habitat modules themselves are thirsty, for truly anhydrous materials are unnatural, and anything moon-made will drink a bit before it settles down. We lose near half a barrel every time we hook a new module up! Too, my slow winning of loam and vegetation from the sterile Moon puts a lot of water into other forms, as biological processes convert it into lipids and hydrocarbons and acids amino, and other assorted biomass. And yes, our suits and modules leak. The grinding dust works into every seal and joint, leaving gaps, leaving scratches through which the odd molecule can worm its way out, and though each Harvest Moon dwelling is guaranteed for fifty years unmaintained, good practice calls for an overhaul every ten. Even for a base as young as ours, the loss of consumables is not only measurable, but measurably increasing month by month. If we’re to stand a thousand years, we may need to build spare parts ourselves, or rely on the equal longevity of Sir Larry’s corporation.
Anon, we brought Pilot Eddie over to his peoples, and returned to find two monks still outdoors. The airlock, as I said, will only take three at a time, and so even relieving Brother Geo of airlock duty, still we needed fifteen minutes for Purcell and Duppler to go inside, and another fifteen for me and Ovid.
Outdoors alone with Ovid, I could sense nervous energy spilling off him in waves, and it made me consider how jaded I myself had already become to the novelty of this world. One hundred ten days in situ and already finding it so routine that I could forget, if only momentarily, that Brother Eggs, despite an hour and more on the surface already, was laying eyes upon all of this for the first time. I watched him play with his shadow, making a sort of puppet show of it. In another few hours the sun would begin slipping behind one of the low hills and cast the Valley of Saint Joe into twilight, but for now it was high enough to cast the ground into a bar code of hab shadows and the bright streaks betwixt ’em.
“You’ll get used to all this,” I told him.
“I hope not,” he replied, but with no great emphasis or conviction. He sounded simultaneously exhausted and juiced, and that I could fully understand, for I’d felt it all myself these seven fortnights ago.
Monastic tradition discourages prattle, and radio safety rules discourage chatter, so Saint Joe’s is a quieter place than even you might suppose, Bert-o, and so Ovid and I stood there in mostly silence for most of the next fifteen minutes, until finally the diode lamp outside the airlock switched from red to green, indicating the chamber within was fully evacuated, and one could safely open the outer hatch without the pressure of the air times the area of the hatch creating a force sufficient to tear one’s arm out of its socket.
(One can imagine all sorts of safety interlocks that would make such an accident impossible, but in the end it’s dire practice to introduce anything to a door that might ever keep it from opening when men need it open. There are even explosive bolts to take the thing off its hinges entire, should such be necessary at some point afuture.)
Eggs and I went inside, and closed the hatch behind us and, with gestures and by example, I bade him set down his duffel and sit on the bench.
“Twenty minutes?” he asked. I declined to answer, and bade him again to sit. Standing in Lunar gravity is no great chore, even with a Heavy Rebreather upon one’s shoulders, but it is difficult to meditate or pray that way, and I find my de- and recompressions in the airlock not an inconvenience but an enforced peace to be sought and savored. Here’s fifteen minutes where no tasks can possibly be performed, Bert, and there’s no better time to clear the mind. Best acquaint Eggs with that from the outset.
The airlock has a pressure gauge inside of it, but I found I could gauge for myself the rise in air pressure by the deflation of Ovid’s duffel. Airtight so that it might carry an atmosphere to protect whatever personals he’d brought to this new life, it slowly shrank from a tire-hard cylinder to a flaccid shrivel of rubberized fabric, like a life raft bleeding out on a beach. When our time of meditation was done, it seemed scarcely large enough to hold his belt and habit. Had I really brought so little myself, and most of it seed? I felt a pang of homesickness then, for all the things left behind, not only in abandoning Earth, but in the choice of monastic life itself, which we do not choose because it’s easy, but rather because it ain’t.
It being the time, I opened the inner hatch, stepped through it, beckoned him in behind me, drooping duffel and all. We showered away the dust of Lune, and then wrestled each other out of our bulky outer shells. The space underwear, contaminated through even briefest contact with the exterior of a freshly washed suit, also came off and went into the laundry lock. Finally we exited (or entered) into the station proper, where bustling activity forced us to dodge nude between our Brothers on the way to our cell (or module, if you prefer), for mine was now to be shared with Ovid. We dressed, and then j
oined the others in the module jokingly referred to as the Great Hall, which serves as both refectory and chapel, with benches enough to seat eleven Brothers, albeit barely, and upon the wall a cedar Jesus crucified and varnished with antiquity, from a vault of Vatican treasures to feel us wealthy at least in prayer. And beneath Jesus a camera and video screen which you have never seen, for these are how we see you when it’s time for Mass, and oh how I wish that were not the only time or way to hear your voice. That and confessional, aye, about which more another time.
(When we’ve a full complement of twenty-five, Harvest Moon will have us equipped with a double-wide Barrel Vault that will serve as an actual Great Hall, for a thousand years God willing, and this room will be relegated to classroom space for those we educate, but that day is another two hundred in our future, which seems an eternity and then some.)
The meal, which had been printing on the CHON synthesizer all day long, from a program keyed in by Giancarlo that morning, and for which I’d been harvesting and lightly pickling vegetables all week, was bland and dull by what I hope will become the culinary standards herein, but sufficient to welcome our Terrestrial kin and to give them surcease and succor afore evening prayers and first sleep in what is, I can see through their eyes, quite spare and tight surround even by monastic standards.
But thus we learn not only to subsist and endure, but to build lives for ourselves whose example may, in God’s name and Jesus’ image, serve to inspire every soul who comes here afterward, to dwell upon the Moon.
I am, very yours and very truly,
Brother Michael Jablonski de la Lune
1.8
23 April
✧
ESL1 Shade Station
Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1
Extracislunar Space
After all the expected rigamarole of docking and disembarking and greetings by members of the station crew, Alice found herself in a module that was practically made of windows. Big ones, bigger even than those of the view-at-your-own-risk observation lounge at the Marriott Stars.
In the room were a paunchy Caucasian man with streaks of gray in his beard, and a lanky half-Asian woman with long, red-brown hair, and bright blue eyes that couldn’t possibly be natural. She was also paunchy! Correction: pregnant.
“Are you going to be okay here?” asked Derek, hovering by Alice’s elbow. It was a vaguely corporate thing to say, having nothing to do with her being okay. Rather, it was a polite way of telling her that he had business elsewhere, and was going to deposit her and run.
“Fine,” she said to him without turning. Her eyes were on the man—Igbal Renz—and on the Earth hovering behind him like a white-and-blue racquetball.
He didn’t look regal or wealthy or powerful. He looked like some fattish nerd, vaguely distracted and vaguely dissatisfied. She knew he’d made his money in something called Deep Belief Motion Control Networks, which had made possible all the robot waiters and butlers everyone seemed to be going nuts for these days. Space was something of a second career for him, albeit one he’d been throwing his energy behind for a decade and a half.
“Lot of windows,” she said to him by way of greeting. She tended to greet new people brusquely, and this was doubly true if they held any sort of power over her, or thought they did. But the window thing was true, and worth remarking on, since windows in space were potentially very dangerous, and even the Marriott Stars had been cautious about them. It made her feel vulnerable, as if she were standing at the bottom of the deep ocean, in some sort of air-filled Christmas ornament. But really, she’d only said that out loud to buy herself a moment to size up this man, whom fate had decreed was her enemy.
She’d been sizing up ESL1 Shade Station itself through the windows and rearview mirrors of the Dandelion for the last several hours, and from the inside for the last several minutes as Derek brought her here. “Esley” was as different from Transit Point Station as TPS was from the Marriott Stars. First of all, almost everyone here was female. Other than Derek Hakkens and Igbal Renz, she’d only seen one dude, versus about fifteen women. (Luckiest dude in the world, he probably thought. Or maybe not; was a man surrounded and outnumbered by women any better off than a woman outnumbered by men?)
Second, only about half the people she’d seen were wearing coveralls. The rest were in a mix of track suits, yoga pants, stretchy posture shirts, sports bras and running shorts, and even just 3D-printed space underwear all by itself. The half-Asian woman beside Renz appeared to be wearing some sort of loose-fitting maternity pantsuit, complete with a floaty white cardigan that seemed about as impractical as humanly possible.
Renz himself, though, was unremarkable. He had on the same blue coveralls as Alice and Derek and all the other new arrivals. Although his beard was partly gray and his hairline was a bit receded, his hair was cut short in a not-quite-buzz cut that, while practical for zero gravity and probably done for him by a barber helmet, didn’t particularly suit him. He looked like someone who spent about ten seconds a day worrying about his appearance.
There was something about his eyes, some intensity Alice couldn’t quite pin down, but his posture was a lazy zero-gee slump. Not a fetal position, but also not like someone ready to leap up and kill a tiger. His right hand was fidgeting with something, though, a golf ball or something like that, and the deft movements of his fingers made Alice instantly cautious. There was something going on there.
“Windows? Really?” Renz asked her, with a funny mix of annoyance and amusement. His voice was higher and more gravelly than she would have expected. Without warning, he turned and hurled the golf ball at one of the windows, like a major league baseball player launching a fastball. It struck the window with a cracking noise that chilled Alice’s blood, then it bounced away and commenced rebounding all over the room.
“Jesus!” Alice said, shielding her face and attempting to duck.
When the motion of the ball had mostly died down, Renz told her, “Thank you for your feedback.”
“Jesus fuck,” Alice elaborated. “What the fuck?”
“These plates are ten thousand layers of microlaminate diamond-sapphire-polycarbonate, manufactured right here on the station.”
“From what?” Alice wanted to know.
“From near-Earth asteroids,” he said, as though it should be obvious. That throw had tumbled him across the room, but he caught himself easily, never taking his eyes off of her. “It takes a shitload of power, but we’ve got about one million shitloads to burn. You have any other engineering advice?”
Alice didn’t. Goddamn. If Renz’s goal had been to jostle her out of her own head and into this room with him, here and now, he had most definitely succeeded.
“Interesting,” Renz said, studying Alice. Studying Alice, who’d been trying to study him! “I thought you didn’t scare easily. Pam, would you play the video file, please?”
The half-Asian woman—Pam—gestured with one of her hands, and suddenly all of the windows were opaque screens, and all playing the same video stream. It showed sky, cords, a human elbow, and some trashing billows of parachute fabric, and with a shock Alice realized it was the body cam footage from her in-air rescue of Florida Jones. She watched her parachute collapse as he landed on it, watched the two of them tangle in a mass of cloth and cords. Watched her hands cutting cords, tying cords, and pulling open the reserve chute, right at the last possible second. She watched the two of them falling through the trees. Her hand was out of sight when it drew the pistol, but the video clearly showed her aiming and firing and firing again. A human figure dropping in the sunlight-dappled shadows below. A human life ended forever, because of her. In self-preservation, yes, but she felt a stab of guilt about it now, perhaps more than she ever had before. She’d never had to watch this! The video ended, and looped back to the beginning again. The audio was off.
“You fired those shots with a broken hand?” Renz asked her.
“I thought this footage was classified,” Alice answered, somew
hat indignantly. It seemed, somehow, an invasion of her privacy.
“Freedom of Information Act,” Renz said. “Our background checks are thorough, and when I heard about this incident, I had to know. I’m going to be honest with you: we need a lot more people like you up here. We’ve got all the smartyskirts we can handle—PhDs who cry when they break a nail—but nobody with this kind of ice water in their veins. Look at that! Look at you. That’s where you break your hand, right there. Snap! See? But you don’t even pause. You just assess what needs doing, and you do it. Like that. Like that. That’s what we need up here. We need cool heads when accidents happen, which they do.”
Alice wasn’t quite sure how to interpret that. Clearly, Renz had little patience with incompetence, and she could definitely relate; in the Maroon Berets, incompetence of any kind could get a whole platoon killed. The same thing was probably true here as well, so “breaking a nail and crying about it” would definitely be something Alice would have a problem with—if such a thing had ever actually, literally happened. More likely it was metaphor or hyperbole, though, and there was no telling exactly what Renz actually meant. Did he have a problem with women? If so, then why was he talking up Alice’s combat skills?
She was still digesting both the praise and the potential misogyny when Renz continued, “I originally wanted you for an astronaut, plain and simple. Lots of EVA duty, outside in a spacesuit. Calm-headed, like that. Hell, I still want that, but unfortunately the situation up here has changed. With the naval blockade and the attempt to sneak people onto our station, we’re under new kinds of threat, and I think you have skills that apply there, as well. You spent some time with that woman, Dona Obata. What did you think about her?”
