The Next Continent

by Issui Ogawa

  The evening meal was punctually observed. In fact this was the only part of the schedule that was. Like clockwork, the five Chinese strictly adhered to the two-hour meal period, but there was no private time afterward. The crew never observed the scheduled start of the sleep period at 2200. Instead of private time, they worked late into the night on facility repairs, harvesting the experiments in White Tiger and preparing for the next day. Once, around four in the morning, Sohya woke to use the toilet and heard the animated voices of Peng and Cui coming from White Tiger, audible over the round-the-clock basso profundo hum of fans heard everywhere on the base. It sounded like an argument.

  And after every task was finished, there was communication with Beijing Control. Cui had been constantly checking his wearcom during that first day’s tour not only to monitor the time but to send text updates to Beijing. His refusal to do updates via voice link reflected his irritation with having to do them at all. This was not hard to understand. He even had to contact Control when he visited the toilet.

  Yet there were times when Cui set aside his usual dour mood. One evening after dinner, Ma suggested they watch a movie together, and Cui revealed another side to his personality.

  The movie was not streamed from Earth; Ma had carried it with him on a memory card. It was not the kind of entertainment Beijing would have transmitted via one of their communications satellites. It was an erotic comedy from Hong Kong. Tae looked away in confusion. Sohya was embarrassed for her, but Cui paid no attention. For a short time, he became a different person, exploding with laughter throughout the film. Still, the rest of the time he was difficult to approach, while Peng and Jiang were easy to deal with.

  After several days, the reason for the irregular scheduling suddenly dawned on Sohya.

  A huge amount of the crew’s time was monopolized by repair work. Each crew member was occupied with something during waking hours, but a third of the work was devoted to repairs to the cooling system, the air and water purification devices, and the base power supply. Next in terms of demands on their time came looking after the creatures and harvesting the experiments in White Tiger. These tasks clearly limited the time available for other scientific work, so the only solution was to skimp on sleep. Even the crew’s strict adherence to the evening meal schedule was an artifact of the overburdened working day. Without at least an unhurried evening meal, they would not have been able to cope with the pressure.

  It seemed to Sohya that Kunlun Base was barely holding together, or at least operating at the limits of its capacity.

  The coolant leak they saw that first day proved to be a daily occurrence, and a sweet smell wafted throughout the base from pools of ethylene glycol beneath the floor. The solar panels installed outside the modules were exposed to direct sunlight with no intervening atmosphere to reduce its intensity, so the older panels were beginning to sustain damage. This sometimes pushed the base’s power supply to dangerously low levels. As an outsider, Sohya might never have noticed this, except for something that occurred just after they had bedded down on the fourth day.

  Sohya was about to doze off when he heard a crash and opened his eyes. The endless whirring of the purification fans and the droning of the reverse osmosis unit made for a surprisingly noisy environment, and it was never easy to sleep. Sohya drowsily opened the door to his sleep station to find Peng lifting a familiarlooking tank from the floor.

  “Still working, Commander? Don’t you guys ever get any sleep?”

  “Sorry to disturb you. Please go back to bed,” said Peng. He glanced at Sohya and tightened a valve on the tank. Sohya heard a loud click and without thinking, asked, “It says ‘SFOG’ on the tank. What does that stand for?”

  Peng shook his head slightly, looking uncomfortable. “So you noticed that. It stands for Solid Fuel Oxygen Generator.”

  “Oxygen generator?” Sohya said sleepily. “Are we short on oxygen?”

  “Of course not. Everything’s fine. We do this all the time.”

  “Oh, okay…” Sohya climbed back into his hammock and closed his eyes. He needed the sleep.

  When he woke the next morning, he collared Jiang to ask about the oxygen generator. The young taikonaut smiled wryly.

  “You’re right. That’s not standard procedure. We normally generate oxygen from electrolysis. SFOG doesn’t need electricity. It heats potassium chlorate to generate oxygen in emergencies. Commander Peng probably noticed we didn’t have enough power to keep the oxygen level nominal.”

  “Are we going to be okay?”

  “It’s a temporary problem. The base is crowded right now.”

  Sohya had learned that not only the power supplies were stretched to their limit. He was also impressed by the crew’s calm in the face of potential disaster. The reality behind their government’s patriotic promotion was that the base was barely functioning, and only thanks to the tireless work of the crew. Keeping Kunlun going had almost become the crew’s sole reason for existing.

  The afternoon of the sixth day, Sohya and Tae suited up and ventured outside onto the surface. The moment they emerged from the air lock, Tae called out in amazement. “Wow! Look how long the shadows are!” The two-week lunar day was nearly over. The sun was hanging just over the horizon. Instead of the colors of sunset, the shadows of the base and of Jiang’s legs seemed to stretch endlessly, razor sharp over the plain.

  Jiang pulled his excavation tool from the regolith. It looked like a standard shovel, but Sohya assumed it must be specialized. Surely the Chinese would not bring anything less all the way to the moon.

  “What sort of tool is that?” Sohya asked.

  “It’s just an ordinary shovel,” said Jiang.

  Deflated, Sohya and Tae watched as Jiang walked to White Tiger and began shoveling sun-drenched regolith against its side. Regolith was banked against the third of the module closest to the docking node, apparently piled there by hand. Over and over, Jiang scooped regolith against the module in a monotonous rhythm. “I’d ask you to help if we had any extra shovels,” he said. “In this gravity, it’s easier than it looks.”

  “Why are you doing that?” asked Sohya.

  “Protection from charged particles. The moon doesn’t have a strong magnetic field like the earth does. Solar proton events and cosmic radiation are a constant danger. For short-term visitors to space like you, drugs give enough protection. But if you stay for a year, cumulative exposure gets to be a real problem.”

  “What does the radiation do?” asked Tae. “Does it make holes in the base?”

  “Holes? No. It can cause cancer though.”

  “Cancer!” she said fearfully. Jiang smiled.

  “Don’t worry. In four years, we’ve completely covered the habitation module. As long as we go there when we get a solar storm warning, we’re fine. Before Crew III finished covering it, they had to take shelter under the water tank.”

  “So the life sciences module comes next, because of the creatures inside.” Sohya looked up at the four-meter-high module. Regolith was piled against it to a height of only about eighty centimeters. It was like using a spoon to bury an elephant. “At this rate, it looks like it’s going to take ten years to finish.”

  “Including the new module, we plan to have it done in twelve.”

  “Wow. That’s…a pretty long-range plan,” mumbled Sohya. Tae picked up a discarded solar panel and made as if to help Jiang dig, but he stopped her.

  “No—you might cut your gloves on the edge. And be careful, there’s a lot of trash around here.”

  They took a closer look at the surface around them. An intermittent trail of objects of all sizes extended outward from the module’s dump hatch—canisters of exhausted drying agent, discarded electronic components, even the mummified remains of animals. Some of the detritus was close to the module, but other pieces were some distance away.

  “There’s a trick to evacuating the air from the dump chamber. If you release the outer hatch with a little atmosphere inside, the trash
flies out nicely. Too much atmosphere and the decompression might damage the hatch. It’s fun to get it just right and see how far you can shoot the trash. My cooking-oil toss holds the Crew IV record, at 15.55—” Jiang looked toward the garbage trail and stopped. “Uh-oh. Somebody beat me. That’s a seaweed cultivation case, isn’t it? I guess Cui’s the new record holder.”

  “How can you do this?” yelled Tae. The two men wheeled in surprise. She stood with hands on hips as if defending the lunar surface. “Don’t you remember what we did to Earth? And now you’re doing the same thing here?”

  “Well, we can’t take it back with us,” said Jiang. He resumed his leisurely digging. “It’s all we can do just to get supplies up here. We can’t even take back the trash, much less anything of value from the surface. You should see the other side of the base! When a new resupply vehicle is ready to dock at the medical science unit, we use the leftover propellant in the old one to blast it a short distance away. That’s twelve vehicles in four years, scattered all over the place. If you could get them back to Earth, collectors would pay a fortune.”

  “I mean, this whole base…” pouted Tae. “It’s falling apart, it smells, it’s in the middle of a garbage dump. Can’t you do something about it?”

  “That’s a little unfair,” Sohya interrupted. “Everyone here is working hard to help humanity push into space. It’s going to be a bit jerry-rigged in the beginning. They’re using their knowledge and ingenuity to deal with the problems in a positive way. Don’t you think that’s impressive?”

  “But Grandfather said that was the wrong way to do it!”

  “Mr. Toenji?” asked Sohya, baffled. “What did he say?”

  Tae suddenly looked away. “I can’t talk about it yet. I promised. I’m sorry.”

  Something that Sohya had not given much thought to before suddenly loomed as potentially significant. He had always assumed that Tae had been imposed on him so an old man could give his beloved granddaughter the trip of a lifetime. It was the kind of indulgence not uncommon among the wealthy. Still, it was out of proportion for an indulgent whim. It was hard to believe anyone would casually hand over three billion yen to fund a pleasure trip, even someone with personal assets several hundred times that. And it would not be surprising if Tae had been given some sort of goal. But even so, what sort of responsibility could she be expected to fulfill? As Sohya pondered this question, Jiang spoke up.

  “You’re certainly paying enough, Aomine. I’m not sure we’re worth it though.” Jiang was shoveling faster now.

  Sohya was briefly speechless. “Isn’t there something more important for you to be doing here? Geological research? Gathering samples? I’d like to know more about soil testing—”

  “Crew II’s data is in the computer, complete with visuals. I’ll give you a copy later.”

  “What about Crew IV’s research?”

  “We’re not doing any.”

  “You’re not?” Sohya was dumbfounded.

  “That’s right,” Jiang said simply. “With only three crew members, and with these facilities, there’s nothing left to research. We’ve done everything. We tried making concrete out of regolith, but there’s no water ice anywhere around here, so there’s not a lot we can do. Maybe at the south pole…Anyway, whatever it is we might be doing, we haven’t got the people, the equipment, or the funding.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Maybe because they can’t afford to send a bulldozer to bury the modules.”

  Jiang’s cynicism was understandable. Beijing Control rode herd on the crew with a schedule controlled to the minute. Of course, even manual labor was important if it helped protect the base. Still, what was the point of such a minutely choreographed schedule?

  A short distance away, Tae was playing at stepping on her own shadow. One set of shadows danced happily in the silence. Another shortened and lengthened in a monotonous rhythm. Sohya was lost in thought.

  [6]

  THEY WERE UP early the next morning. It was departure day.

  The crew rose even earlier than usual and furiously began making launch preparations. There was nothing to retrieve from Xiwangmu 5, but research materials and several hundred commemorative boxes had to be loaded into the Chang’e spacecraft. The small boxes contained shards of regolith, Chinese flags, and cards postmarked by the taikonauts. Back on Earth these “postcards from the moon” would fetch high prices. Sohya had seen something similar at Dragon Palace. He had never been able to understand this passion humanity seemed to have for setting up post offices on mountain peaks, at the bottom of the ocean, and on other planets.

  Sohya and Tae were carrying very little. The Gotoba plan assumed the production of concrete from regolith, but simulated regolith had already been synthesized on Earth from Apollo-era samples. A bigger question was the load-bearing capacity of the surface. Sohya had already obtained the needed information from Jiang and transmitted it to Earth. The rest of the video and audio data was loaded into Sohya’s wearcom, which he used as a camera/ recorder.

  Those four who were going home today had a more important task to complete. They had been able to spend the Earth–moon leg of the journey in Xiwangmu 5. But during the three days till touchdown in the Gobi Desert, they would be confined to the Chang’e spacecraft, and unfortunately the toilet had been removed to make room for extra payload. Not that it was impossible for male taikonauts to satisfy physical requirements in space, but evacuation would require the use of plastic bags, an exceedingly embarrassing procedure considering that a young girl would be on board. They would have to use drugs and the weightless conditions to help weather the three-day journey. Tae in particular was deadly serious about obtaining a detailed explanation of the drug and its effects.

  Naturally, the most important task was the handoff of the various base responsibilities. The crew formed pairs—Peng with Feng, Jiang with Ma—to jointly confirm the condition of the equipment and ensure that nothing had been overlooked. Cui, however, had little to do and idly wandered around. It had fallen to him to stand in for the Crew V member whose place had gone to Sohya and Tae.

  He would be spending another year on the moon.

  Like it or not, the two Japanese felt his glance falling on them from time to time. The situation was unfortunate. Cui’s resentment at being bumped by two feckless tourists was understandable. Still, they had hoped to get to know him better.

  They had no idea how impossible that would be.

  WITH LAUNCH PREPARATIONS complete, everyone gathered in the Black Tortoise module. Crew III’s Chang’e was waiting at the north end of the module. After launch, the plan was for the remaining crew to move the latest Chang’e into position—the service module’s landing gear was equipped with treads for this purpose—where it would stay for the next year, ready for an emergency departure if needed.

  Peng, Jiang, Sohya, and Tae were in their space suits. Feng, Ma, and Cui faced them in the usual work clothes. Once again the camera was feeding images to Earth in real time. Peng stepped forward.

  “We depart Kunlun Base with an abundant store of precious research accumulated over the past year. We have no doubt that we leave the base in capable hands. Please strive to maintain this base for another year, as the pinnacle of the glorious scientific achievements of the People’s Republic of China and humanity’s farthest outpost.”

  “We humbly accept this duty,” said Feng, “and pray for your safe journey home.”

  The exchange was formal and conventional but emotional just the same. The two commanders shook hands. Scientists Jiang and Ma exchanged similar words. Then all eyes fell on Sohya. He had assumed something like this would take place and prepared accordingly, but the thought that he would be heard in more than a hundred countries was still daunting. He cleared his throat.

  “This is a magnificent facility. I have the deepest admiration for the dedication and passion you bring to the advancement of science. The lunar environment was thrilling. I almost wish I were staying
longer. I leave with the hope that you will enjoy life here on the moon over the coming year.” Sohya shook hands with Feng and Ma, but Cui ignored his outstretched hand. It suddenly occurred to Sohya that he had neglected to praise China. Perhaps Cui had taken offense?

  Sohya looked at him and froze. The man’s expression was terrifying. His eyes were blazing. He was biting his lower lip as if the honor of his parents had just been trampled on. Sohya was struck dumb.

  Sensing the situation, Peng quickly turned to Tae. “Miss Toenji, would you like to say something?”

  “What? Oh, sure. The food was really good. Much better than we get in Chinatown back home.”

  The others laughed nervously. Sohya was relieved. At least it now seemed unlikely that Cui would follow with more highflown phrases about the People’s Republic.

  Jiang glanced at Cui, urgently signaling him to begin. Cui gulped as if swallowing something hard and opened his mouth.

  At that instant there was a loud bang, like a gunshot, from somewhere inside the base. Everyone froze and stared at each other. Perhaps ten seconds passed.

  Then the cry of an alarm sounded. They flinched again. Almost simultaneously the two commanders shouted, “Pressure warning!” and sprinted toward the Topaz node, with Ma close behind. Jiang sprang to the equipment control panel. He took one look at the numbers streaming across the display and yelled, “Pressure drop! Azure Dragon! Cargo docking hatch sealed! Node junction nominal! It’s not the air lock. Whipple shield—it’s a meteor strike!”

  Jiang’s words were barely audible over the keening of the alarm. Feng and Ma, already out of the module, almost certainly could not hear him.

  “Cui! Take care of her!” Sohya pushed Tae toward him.

  “Sohya! Wait!” she called out, but he was already running, diving through the hatch to follow the others. He had trained for just this sort of emergency. The damaged module had to be identified immediately and sealed off.