Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2016

  A Kindle Scout selection

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  For Kristin, Katy, and Piper,

  the reasons I could draw from personal experience

  to write a kick-ass female hero.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  ZERO

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  PART TWO

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  PART FOUR

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  PART FIVE

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  SIXTY-FOUR

  SIXTY-FIVE

  SIXTY-SIX

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus’ rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.”

  —George Steiner, “Modernity, Mythology, and Magic” lecture, Salzburg Festival, Guardian, London (August 6, 1994)

  ZERO

  The Girl on the Moon

  September 5, 2034

  Bathed in nothing but soft earthshine, Mount Hadley was a charcoal-colored rent in the starry sky. The landscape to the west and south could have been a blasted, empty desert on Earth at night, except the sense of something alien, something primeval, intruded. The stillness was a presence, covering the land like water in a lake.

  Conn wished she could have toured all six Apollo landing sites, seen everything the first moonwalkers saw. But she would settle for indelible memories of the alien desert she shared with the Apollo 15 astronauts.

  And she was looking forward to being home. Sleeping on a pillow. A shower. Walking normally. If she had been offered two extra days on the moon she would have gladly accepted, but if she needed to leave now, she left with a sense of closure, of accomplishment.

  She clambered back up into the lander and repressurized it. She stowed her helmet and gloves within reach but left the rest of her pressure suit on. “I think I can fly her as long as my hands are free,” she radioed Gil Portillo, CapCom in Brownsville. Like the Apollo astronauts, she stood while flying the lander. Normally without a pressure suit on. But now she wanted to be mostly suited in case the epoxied patch and duct tape she had used to fix the gash in her hull didn’t hold.

  The computer did most of the work on liftoff, anyhow. She didn’t have to sight out the window and look for obstacles and flat landing spots.

  She went through the launch checklist, vocalizing each step, and each was confirmed by Gil. The pressure was holding at nine hundred sixty millibars so far. Conn glanced at the patch in the hull. Then she spared a last look at the surface outside. She saw her footprints in the regolith. She smiled.

  Launch checklist complete. Jake and the command module had emerged from around the far side and were on their way to meet her. The world would be watching her liftoff. Peo would be watching. Thoughts were cycling through her mind too fast to follow. She realized she was exhausted.

  As the descent engines came online, a whine filled the lander. She focused.

  “Firing descent engines,” she said, and tapped the screen. Her knees bent as the lander rose a meter off the ground, clearing the way for the ascent stage to fire. Last one off the moon. She felt a stab of regret.

  “Ascent engines online,” she said. “Firing.” She toggled a switch.

  The descent engines quit without the ascent engines firing and she dropped a meter back onto the ground with a crash. She lost her footing. Her helmet fell on her, slow motion in the lunar gravity.

  She scrambled to her feet. Fear gripped her heart and squeezed. In eight tries, nobody had ever failed to blast off from the surface of the moon. And this wasn’t the time for the first. She was utterly alone.

  Willing herself not to panic, she backed out of the warning screen, typed the command for the correct menu, and retried the sequence. Crash. No ascent engines.

  “Conn, let’s back up and go through everything again,” Gil said. “We both missed something, that’s all.”

  They went through the checklist again, making sure of every step. Again a whine. Descent engines fired. Ascent engines online. Fire, Conn willed as she toggled the switch.

  Nothing. Dropped again. Something was going to break if they kept this up.

  Conn’s eyes were already leaking with frustration and exhaustion. She didn’t want Brownsville to think she was crying. She sniffed and got herself together.

  OK, no big deal. Something’s not working. We’ll fix it.

  They would have to.

  PART ONE

  The moon? It is a griffin’s egg,

  Hatching to-morrow night.

  And how the little boys will watch

  With shouting and delight

  To see him break the shell and stretch

  And creep across the sky.

  The boys will laugh. The little girls,

  I fear, may hide and cry.

  — Vachel Lindsay, The Congo and Other Poems (1914)

  ONE

  The Aspiring Astronaut

  August, 2025–August, 2028

  Conn wanted to be an astronaut. At fifteen, she was looking at eight more years before she could apply as an astronaut candidate. Unless she crammed those eight years into five or six. Graduate at the top of her class. Earn an accelerated college degree. Learn to fly. Master some other impressive discipline, maybe playing the piano. She could do all that in six years. Five.

  To get ahead in high school, she bought and read and mastered textbooks t
hat were two years advanced for her level. She didn’t have a natural aptitude for math or science, but that just meant she had to conquer her subjects through overwhelming force of will. Trigonometry and chemistry and whatever else the Chicago Public Schools wanted to teach her didn’t stand a chance. Her energy and appetite for learning were so expansive that they thrilled some of her teachers and counselors—and troubled some others.

  Mastering senior-year classes as a sophomore, she gave some thought to applying for astronaut training years early. The youngest astronaut candidate ever: no degree, no pilot’s license, no Chopin, but they were all foregone conclusions. She knew enough about astronautics, and especially travel to the moon, to ace any NASA test on the subject, she believed. She had followed Peo Haskell’s journey to the moon that closely in 2022, at age twelve.

  At twelve she had already wanted to be an astronaut. Peo Haskell gave her footsteps to follow, and a destination. The moon: three, four years later she still obsessed over the moon. She knew everything there was to know about it. She knew what it was, how it got there, and the physics that kept it there. She knew its lore, its history, and its place in popular culture. She knew everything about everyone who had ever been there, including Peo Haskell.

  Peo Haskell: a woman who wanted to go to the moon, and then just went—with her own money, her own company. Conn idolized her. Conn would become everything Peo Haskell was. All she needed to do was build a knock-their-socks-off astronaut candidate application. But she didn’t see that as an obstacle, just an opportunity.

  She could accomplish anything. Her mind was a perpetual motion machine, constantly urging her to new heights. School was a breeze, the future bright.

  Until the summer between her sophomore and junior years. The summer when her timeline fell apart. When she couldn’t rouse herself to pick up a calculus textbook. When she didn’t want to fiddle with her sister Cora’s Casio keyboard. That summer she felt untethered and adrift. What was the point of all her hard work, really? Things that made her happy, she banished. She ignored people who tried to talk to her. She spent much of that summer in bed.

  In junior year, her energy returned, and she hated herself for squandering a whole summer. She decided she had just pushed herself too hard. But if so, she was doing it again. She taught herself a first-year college engineering curriculum. She read ravenously, got good enough to appear proficient on the keyboard. She was beyond physically fit. She burned brightly for three or four months.

  Then followed another drastic dip. She wanted nothing, did nothing, nothing but sleep, it seemed. But then she had the energy to conquer the world again. She cycled between dramatically high and frighteningly low energy, each state lasting a few weeks at first. By the summer before senior year it was just a few days each.

  She started to miss school during her low times, the worst parts of the cycle. She cried a lot, doubted herself a lot, wondered a lot whether it was any use studying so hard, learning so much—or learning at all.

  When she felt her worst, it was impossible to remember that she would inevitably come out of it feeling invincible. To Conn, both states seemed permanent while she was living them. She spent half of her life doing, thinking, and feeling nothing. The other half she spent believing in her bones she could do anything.

  Literally anything.

  One autumn day in 2027, during senior year, Conn felt as though she had run out of vector calculus to learn, and she couldn’t stay still. She ripped off fifty push-ups, fifty sit-ups, and ten chin-ups. She could feel the blood pumping through her circulatory system, hear each squeeze of her heart, visualize each ragged breath feeding her oxygen and venting moisture and poison.

  She ran up, down, up, down, up her building’s four flights of stairs until her muscles trembled. She burst out onto the building’s roof. It was cold, and Conn shivered in her sweaty sleeveless shirt and sweatpants. She stepped to the edge of the roof and looked down on Division Street. She felt a familiar adrenaline rush. She could barely contain it. But she hesitated, then darted back down the stairs to her first-floor apartment, looking for her winter jacket. It was too cold to jump off the roof and fly without her coat on.

  She had to learn to fly to become an astronaut. So she was going to do it.

  It might have been some deeply buried part of Conn that stopped her, coat in hand, in front of her dad’s bedroom door. Dad was paying bills on a tiny desk. He looked up and saw the coat. “Where are you off to?” Conn’s mind almost drowned him out. She stammered. Why couldn’t she tell her dad she planned to jump off the roof and fly? Was jumping off the roof bad? How could it be? And yet, she couldn’t tell him, couldn’t face him if she did. She told him she was going to take a shower instead. She did, and in the shower, she started to shake. She was still shaking afterward when she went to her dad again and said, “I think I need to see a doctor.”

  # # #

  Conn was bipolar, her doctor said, what they used to call manic-depressive: a disorder easily treated with a daily regimen of Symbyax and Levalil, antidepressants and mood stabilizers. The combination eliminated her manic episodes, but she spent most of the next month in a shallow version of one of her lows. Her doctor added Wellbutrin to the mix, and then Conn was her bright, engaged self again.

  But she had just been disqualified from becoming an astronaut.

  Having what was considered a moderate-to-severe mental disorder, and needing drugs to manage it, shut an otherwise grade-A candidate out of NASA and the ESA. It wasn’t strictly necessary to be trained by NASA or the ESA anymore, but it meant a leg up. Two legs up, and into the rocket on its way to orbit, as far as Conn was concerned.

  The summer after she graduated from high school, Conn stopped taking her medication, hoping against hope that her disorder was instead a phase she’d grown out of. If it was, and she could get a doctor to pronounce her cured, she might yet have a chance to train as an astronaut somewhere. It didn’t take even two weeks to learn that her disorder hadn’t receded at all, and was still only held in check by her daily regimen of drugs.

  As down as Conn had felt half the time before her diagnosis, it was nothing compared to the sense of loss when she realized she would never go into space. She had self-identified as a future astronaut for so long, and now she had no future. And she couldn’t even wallow in her disappointment. The Wellbutrin made her too constantly, superficially happy.

  She finally accepted, kicking and screaming, that she could become an astronautics engineer. She could build the rockets that took astronauts into space, or even the space station they were going to. Not everybody who worked in space travel got to go into space themselves.

  She had applications out to schools that would have impressed NASA or ESA recruiters by name alone, and had even been accepted to some of them. But without a chance of going into space, and not needing to pad her résumé, she chose her hometown Illinois Institute of Technology. Her education wouldn’t suffer, not really—Illinois Tech’s Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering department was world-class in 2028. It didn’t hurt that she could live at home, and could avail herself of in-state tuition and scholarships.

  Those factors influenced her choice. What made up her mind was that her hero, Peo Haskell, would be starting at Illinois Tech at the same time—as a visiting professor of aerospace engineering.

  TWO

  The Opportunity

  August, 2028–April, 2030

  Her first day of freshman year, Conn found Dr. Haskell’s office, and after several self-pep talks, was ready to meet the world-famous entrepreneur, astronaut and engineer. She found herself instead in front of the desk of Susan, the MMAE department admin. Susan had been physically placed so that to get to any of three department professors’ offices, including Dr. Haskell’s, Conn would have to go through her.

  Could she please see Dr. Haskell? She would only take a moment of her time.

  “Are you taking her Heat and Mass Transfer class?”

  Well, no, she w
as technically just a freshman, but—

  “Dr. Haskell only advises graduate students,” Susan said, seeming to be awfully satisfied with herself while doing so, “and will only see undergrads—with an appointment—who are taking her Heat and Mass Transfer class.”

  Is that her only undergraduate class? That’s for seniors only.

  “This semester, yes, it is. Dr. Haskell is a professor of aerospace engineering,” Susan said, rather unnecessarily, in Conn’s view, “and doesn’t teach chemistry, or calculus, or materials science, or any other first-year, basic engineering courses.”

  Surely Conn could make an appointment to see Dr. Haskell just to introduce herself—

  “If you have any questions about the first-year curriculum, you could ask a professor who teaches it, or you might speak with Dr. Dutta, who does advise undergraduates.”

  Right, I have Dr. Dutta for Intro to the Profession. Conn winced—she couldn’t have vocalized a more freshman-sounding course.

  “Dr. Dutta has office hours posted on the board over there.” Susan swept a careless gesture toward a department bulletin board. “And his office is on the first floor.”

  That was that.

  Conn blinked at Susan. Didn’t Susan realize Conn was here, instead of MIT or Cal Tech or Michigan, so she could work with Peo Haskell? What was she supposed to do if she couldn’t so much as talk to the professor until she was a senior?

  She vowed not to be deterred. She vowed instead to be patient. But it wasn’t going to make freshman year go any faster.

  It wasn’t like she had anything else to distract her. She had taught herself the first-year engineering curriculum in junior year of high school.

  She wasn’t a friend-maker. Second day of freshman year, she was surprised and delighted to find Jody Guidetti, who went to her high school with her, in her General Physics I class, the name of which Conn now resented.

  Jody was tall and wiry, with close-cropped dusty blond hair, and when he smirked, it looked like a grimace, and vice-versa. He was nobody Conn had hung out with. He hadn’t taken any honors classes like Conn had. He mostly spent his high school career playing basketball, and he was good enough that most assumed he would go somewhere on a basketball scholarship.