Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  The security company confirmed that the office had been bugged.

  SEVEN

  Missions

  February–May, 2032

  The Saturn mission would be a tour of the neighborhood, an ambitious effort orbiting no fewer than five of the ringed planet’s moons and landing on both Titan and Tethys, it was decided.

  Even with Grant and Al taking engineering classes, the three mission astronauts were well into mission planning. Two, Callie and Grant, had been trained by NASA. Al had washed out of the same training with a bad knee—but Peo wanted his mind and skills on the mission, and he was nimble enough to complete Dyna-Tech’s own liftoff and landing safety training.

  The mission was still two years from departure. The spacecraft was under construction in orbit at Gasoline Alley. It would be ready for a test drive come New Year’s Day, 2033. The fourteen-month wait after that for launch would give the spacecraft a boost in speed from swings around Venus and Jupiter.

  Conn was jealous just thinking about it all. But at the end of the day, she was doing what she had set out to do: working to get other people into space. And all before she had even graduated from college.

  # # #

  As the weeks went on, Conn struggled to gauge Peo’s attitude toward sending her own people to the moon for the rendezvous on September 2, 2034. On one hand, Peo seemed to relish the idea. On the other, she feared stepping on NASA’s or the ESA’s toes: they were still her biggest customers, or at least her biggest source of astronauts.

  But it was more complicated than that. On Tethys, they were looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life. In 2025, an Indian probe had landed on the small, icy moon, which was nearly bisected by an enormous trench called Ithaca Chasma. The probe found tantalizing evidence of what may have been life deep within the trench, put there by a comet or asteroid striking the moon. If there was life in the Ithaca Chasma, Peo wanted to know it. And prove it. Finding life, and discovering that it did originate from an asteroid, might prove that life on Earth was once extraterrestrial, too.

  But now, whatever beings had orchestrated the moon shower survey were probably going to show themselves only six months after the Saturn mission launched. A full year and a half before astronauts landed on Tethys. That she might miss out on being the one to prove there was extraterrestrial life drove Peo to distraction—literally. Planning for the Saturn mission thus became more and more Skylar Reece’s responsibility as Peo mulled a 2034 moonshot.

  The Saturn project suffered, in Conn’s opinion. At one meeting, Conn spoke up—she had been doing that a lot by then—to suggest matching the orbit of a band of Saturn’s rings and spacewalking out to get samples. Conn understood Peo’s strategy: every opportunity to impress people back on Earth and to inspire their imaginations was good for business. The astronauts spacewalking and reaching out to touch Saturn’s rings would make an indelible mark on the human imagination. Grant thought it was an inspired idea, but Conn didn’t mention that.

  Skylar Reece scotched the idea. “Safety first, science second, there is no third,” her mantra had become. “That’s a huge safety risk with no appreciable benefit to the science.” Conn had to defer, but she knew if the idea had come from Peo, and it was the kind of idea that would, they would have at least roughed it out on the back of a napkin to prove why it wouldn’t work. Or, more likely, how it could.

  # # #

  Peo gained some leverage over NASA and the ESA when someone at the ESA cracked the animation code and shared the information with NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos. The three agencies determined that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, let alone the invitation to meet them, should remain secret for the time being. But Peo’s sources in the agencies were good, and knew what they were looking for, so she knew what was going on. She let them all know via Wawigdin that she had a copy of the animation, too, and had figured it out before they had, but she hadn’t gone public. And she wouldn’t, if given certain consideration.

  That was how the Dyna-Tech-funded mission to the moon was born.

  NASA, the ESA, and Roscosmos got approval in their various jurisdictions for a joint crewed mission, largely on the premise that it was bad for the West if China did it alone. Scott Daniels, an astronaut who had clocked five hundred hours in space, sixty-five of them outside, would represent NASA and be the lunar lander pilot. Didier Gonalons of the ESA would serve as the command module pilot. And Erik Tyzhnych, a forty-eight-year-old veteran cosmonaut, was coming out of mothballs to be the commander. Tyzhnych, whose nickname in astronaut circles was Eyechart—which was what his name looked like: a row on an eyechart—had last been in space seven years ago. It came to light later that Tyzhnych had been promised a moon mission long ago, which had never materialized, and there were those at Roscosmos who felt they had to honor that promise.

  China announced its moon mission crew shortly after the NASA/ESA/Roscosmos joint mission was introduced to the world. Yu Bo would pilot the command module, while Luan Yongpo and Cai Fang landed on the moon.

  All men. Peo vowed to have a woman on her crew.

  Peo tried to talk Callie Leporis, commander of the Saturn mission, onto the moon mission, but she refused. As tempting as being the first woman on the moon was, she was the commander of the Saturn mission, so it was her baby, and the science and destination were too exciting for her to give it up.

  Peo still wanted one person who had been training for the Saturn mission to join the moon crew. When Callie said no, she persuaded Al Claussen off the Saturn mission by making him the moon mission commander. Peter Goshen replaced him going to Saturn, with twenty-one months before liftoff to get up to speed.

  The command module pilot for the moonshot was Jakob Dander, and Peo wouldn’t accept anyone else’s name in nomination. He had been Peo’s command module pilot for her own ill-fated mission in 2022. “Jake deserves to be part of a moon landing,” she said, and that was that. He had been thirty-one the last time, and he would be forty-three when he reached lunar orbit again.

  Peo still needed a woman. She was effectively shut out from any astronaut currently employed by NASA, the ESA, or Roscosmos, so she turned to her private network and signed up Ashlyn Flaherty. Flaherty was NASA-trained with less time in space than might have been ideal, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Peo had used her before, as a contractor who helped test and refine new equipment in Brownsville and at Gasoline Alley. Flaherty had worked for both Roscosmos and the ESA as a contractor, too, always going where she needed to go and doing what she needed to do to get into space.

  Before the announcement, Conn said to Peo, “Seriously. You won’t think about going yourself?”

  “No,” Peo said. “I barely survived the training at forty-nine. Ten years and one cancer later, I just won’t be able to do it right.”

  Flaherty became a household name, an instant celebrity: soon to be the first woman on the moon.

  Peo put Hunter Valence in charge of the moon mission—on paper. His name went on a lot of memos and reports, though everybody understood that it was really Peo calling the shots.

  Conn started to lose herself in the Saturn mission. She could hardly believe that she was playing a part in a moon landing. But a part of her was so disappointed she couldn’t go herself that she often didn’t even want to think about it.

  If Peo couldn’t give Saturn her undivided attention, that shouldn’t mean that Skylar Reece had carte blanche to do what she wanted. Conn spoke up more frequently, many times just to get the room thinking about things in a different way than Skylar. She knew Skylar complained to Peo about Conn not toeing the line, though Peo never said anything about it. The implicit support made Conn smile.

  EIGHT

  Graduation

  June–December, 2032

  After the moon shower, in March, 2024, the teenage Conn’s eagerness to meet the presumptive aliens who had apparently surveyed the moon wasn’t universal. A name that appeared often in Conn’s moon shower m-files was that of Glenn
Bowman. Bowman was a former Catholic priest turned lifestyle coach, who became famous as a counterpoint—whenever the feeds had someone on to provide reasonable insights on the moon shower, they could count on Bowman to give them the opposite. He warned that the event was an ill omen. It had been but a prelude to the evil the monsters behind it would visit on the human race in due time. He was fundamentally antiscience. No technology he could imagine could create the effect of the moon shower. It was a display of otherworldly power, a demonstration meant to intimidate and make people feel helpless and hopeless. His point of view was sensational, while he himself was articulate and engaging, and he didn’t lack opportunities to hold forth. As the moon shower receded in time and no alien activity followed it, Bowman went into hibernation, but he never really went away.

  Now, as the three missions to the moon took shape, Bowman was again wherever any feed or channel needed him, predicting doom. If anything, he had become more vitriolic since the moon shower. The world didn’t know why there were three missions going to the moon at the same time, but Bowman blamed it on his evil aliens from the start. And the number of people who took him seriously slowly grew. And the more people who took him seriously, the more dangerous he was.

  # # #

  On the eve of graduation in June, Conn took Grant out to dinner.

  “Time to go back to Texas,” Grant said. He would return to where his two crewmates were elbow-deep in designing the Saturn spacecraft.

  “I’m going to miss you,” Conn said, and she would. She had given it a lot of thought, and that was what she decided.

  Grant looked at Conn, and Conn imagined she could hear his heart thumping. He was about to say something it took a lot of courage for him to say. Conn wished he wouldn’t.

  “I want—I’d like you to come with me,” he said.

  Conn had prepared for this, including what she would say to let him down easy. She wouldn’t tell him the truth—that she was terrified of what Grant would think of her if he knew she was bipolar; that she couldn’t drop everything she knew and scotch all the plans she’d made to go be with someone who might fall out of love with her; he would try and argue with her if she told him the truth.

  So she had a plan. It went by the wayside when she started talking. In the moment, she found herself resenting Grant for putting her in the position of having to let him down, easy or otherwise.

  “Just like that,” she said. “Postpone my degree. Maybe keep working for Peo, maybe not.”

  Grant’s brow furrowed. “Well, you’d be in Brownsville, and I’m sure you could work out of the offices there.”

  “Unless Peo has gotten used to having someone at her right hand. And that’s where I am, Grant—at Peo Haskell’s right hand. Peo Haskell! But you think I should give that up.”

  “We can talk to Peo together,” Grant said. “I—” He didn’t know how to finish.

  She so wanted to tell him the truth. But she couldn’t stop what she had started. It had too much momentum.

  “Look, I get it,” Conn said. “You’re going to be leaving. For a long time.”

  “Not for almost two years, Conn.”

  “And you’re worried I won’t wait for you.”

  “That’s not it at all.”

  “I think I’m staying here. And I think,” Conn said, and she thought she could hear the blood rushing to her face, “this relationship isn’t going to work long distance.” It was as though she was listening to herself talk, without any input into what she was saying. “I think you ought to go back to Texas and build your spaceship, and I’ll stay here. That’s what I think.”

  Grant looked stricken, and Conn realized her staying would be awkward. So she got up and left.

  # # #

  Conn graduated with barely acceptable senior year grades, other than her A in Professor Haskell’s Heat and Mass Transfer class and her required Interprofessional Project, which was, in her case, credit for working at Dyna-Tech. It didn’t matter—she had her degree in aerospace engineering, and already the best job someone her age and in her field could hope for, as far as she was concerned.

  Other than Grant’s. She would rather have had Grant’s job, all things being equal, but she tried not to dwell on that.

  Peo fully supported her in her breakup with Grant, which surprised Conn a little—she half expected Peo to be mad that she had emotionally harmed her star astronaut.

  “With everything else he has going for him, it’s not fair if he has you, too,” Peo told her. It made Conn smile, a rarity right around then. The women were spending some time with Frappuccinos in a sleepy Starbucks.

  “I felt like I couldn’t be jealous of Grant,” Conn confided. She wasn’t sure why she was talking about it with Peo, but it felt good to talk to somebody. “Like I was obligated to be happy for him, and that was it.”

  “Now?”

  “Now I’m almost beside myself. If I’d gone to NASA, I would so ace their training. I’m in amazing shape, I know my science, I’m twenty times more confident than I was before you hired me. I’d be young, smart, spaceworthy, borderline attractive—”

  Peo tsk’ed.

  “I could have everything he has. But my brain is broken, so I can’t. I try not to let it upset me, but now that Grant and I are broken up—”

  “You’re more free to feel sorry for yourself.”

  Conn blinked. “I might not put it that way, exactly...”

  “No criticism intended,” Peo said. “I know from not being able to go into space for health reasons. Only in my case, I got to go several times before God came to collect His fee.”

  Conn sighed. “I wish you would think about going to the moon,” she said.

  “And I wish thinking about it didn’t make you so glum,” Peo said.

  # # #

  Conn now worked full time for Dyna-Tech—but school wasn’t over. Peo had Conn take classes toward a certification as a paralegal. “I need someone who can do routine legal things without charging me nine hundred dollars an hour,” Peo said. Conn privately didn’t want to bother with paralegal training, but grudgingly found she had an aptitude for it.

  School wasn’t over in another sense: Conn remained at Peo’s right hand in Chicago. The Illinois Tech MMAE Department turned a blind eye to the arrangement. They’d known they were getting somebody who ran an aerospace company when they hired Peo, and had promised her the freedom to keep doing it.

  November, 2032 arrived, the tenth anniversary of Peo’s mission to the moon. Conn handled requests for interviews with Peo. When Peo was on her game, like now, she was a master at ingratiating herself with an interviewer, making her points and avoiding questions she didn’t want to answer. Conn wished she could teach people how to do it because she’d get rich if she could.

  Conn always found herself enjoying public and media relations work. It couldn’t be a priority for her, but she felt comfortable doing it, and she always had success at it. It was one more way, along with the paralegal training, that she was branching out, contributing.

  As attention turned to Peo and her company for the anniversary of her moonshot, Peo authorized interviews with the Saturn astronauts, but not the moon astronauts, on the grounds that the latter were training more intensely. Really, it was Conn’s suggestion to get the Saturn mission more airplay. None of the three Saturn astronauts were terribly charismatic, but their excitement and deep belief in their mission came through as though in large print.

  On November 15, ten years after the liftoff of Peo’s trip to the moon, Callie Leporis spacewalked to the Saturn spacecraft at Gasoline Alley and mimed breaking a bottle of champagne on its hull, christening it the Bebop. Peo held her tongue at the name, which was inspired by an anime series the three astronauts had all loved as tweens, teens, and even adults.

  “Go watch whatever they’re talking about,” Peo told Conn. “Make me not hate the name, somehow.”

  “I’ve seen it already,” Conn said. “Cowboy Bebop. A bunch of coolly disinterested
characters mope around the solar system. I don’t get the big deal.” Peo just sighed. The crew was entitled to name their spacecraft, and Peo wouldn’t veto it just for being stupid.

  In December, the sixtieth anniversary of the last steps on the moon—which was also Peo’s sixtieth birthday—gave the media another excuse to come calling, this time almost exclusively about the moon mission. Conn screened interview requests, wrote press releases, and did her best to keep the coverage on message: a historic three-craft trip to the moon, one of them privately funded. Without her guidance, the favored spin was that Dyna-Tech was stealing NASA’s thunder. And they were, to some extent. But all NASA had to do was send up a female astronaut of their own and they would have gotten exponentially more coverage, if that’s what they were after.

  NINE

  First Woman

  December, 2032

  Conn and Peo celebrated Peo’s sixtieth birthday with dinner at Franco’s. Conn had fettuccine Alfredo. Peo, on a no-wheat diet, had London broil, with garlic mashed potatoes. The food was rich and delicious, lending a sense of indulgence to the occasion.

  “I didn’t know what to get you, so I didn’t get you anything,” Conn said, as she had on Peo’s last two birthdays. In reality, Conn had learned over the years that Peo didn’t like or want birthday gifts.

  Peo just looked at Conn. Glasses clinked at another table. Conn put her fork down. “What’s the matter?”

  “You’re a remarkable young woman,” Peo said, and her eyes sparkled—tears, near to brimming over. Conn frowned, and put her hand on Peo’s as Peo continued. “You’ve been an asset to my company and a good friend to me. I’m very fortunate to have hired you, those three years ago.”