Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  Callie had a boyfriend, a lawyer named Marcus Weiss. They had been together for three years, and the idea that these star-crossed lovers would be rent asunder by Callie’s mission to Saturn captured the public imagination. Petitions were e-signed by thousands demanding the two get married before Callie left. Truthfully, as Conn knew from having befriended Callie, she and Marcus only got along as well as they did because they so rarely saw each other in person. That might mean their marriage would actually survive her round trip to Saturn, but it wouldn’t be anything either of them would want when she returned.

  Callie was comfortable in the spotlight, but was grateful that Conn had come along to take some of the glare. Callie told Conn she would be delighted to never hear the words “first woman” in regard to herself again. She would be the first person, or among the first people, to do a great many things; qualifying her accomplishments by calling her the first woman discounted them, as far as Callie was concerned.

  Among all the celebrity gossip and human interest reporting, the media was asking questions Callie was glad to hear raised. If they indeed found extraterrestrial life on Tethys, what did its presence mean philosophically? Religiously? What did it tell us about the origin of life on Earth? Conn followed the debates, wishing she could tell everybody arguing over the existence of microbes on Tethys about the aliens she was going to meet on the moon.

  The media asked: how would three people survive without killing one another in a small space together for two-plus years out and two-plus years back? The answer was that the crew, now that Al Claussen was back, had been selected for their adaptability and compatibility with one another. The three had trained to work together in close quarters, as well as to leave one another alone, as alone as could be. Each astronaut took seriously the possibility they would get sick of one another, but all were confident they would make it work.

  The media asked: should anybody be allowed to spend this much money on space exploration, with so much going on at home? For most, the question answered itself. It wasn’t their money, and they didn’t have anything to say about how it was spent. Others advocated a space tax: one-third of the cost of the endeavor. Close to 100 percent of advocates of the space tax believed it would raise money, rather than effectively ending space exploration by increasing its cost by 33 percent.

  A few days before liftoff, before the astronauts had to enter quarantine, Peo entertained the crew with a lavish going-away dinner. The party was attended by nearly everybody who was putting up money for the expedition, which meant a lot of prominent and powerful people.

  Grant was unattached at the party, and he and Conn spent most of the time together, talking, really communicating for the first time since Grant left Chicago. Conn no longer felt that their issues had been wrapped up neatly, nor the pangs of regret. Instead she felt genuine affection and admiration for Grant. For his part, it was evident to Conn that he still carried a torch, but they had both grown up over the last two years—that, and Grant’s imminent departure, likely kept either of them from making any declaration they might regret in the morning. Conn was relieved to learn that they could be real, adult friends.

  The launch from Brownsville was well-covered. The media had settled on calling it a mission to Saturn, after some fits and starts referring to Titan and/or Tethys, and it fit well with one of the most glamorous aspects of the mission: the spacecraft would match orbits with one of Saturn’s rings, and Callie Leporis would spacewalk out and take samples. A human being would reach out and touch Saturn’s rings. It fired the public’s imagination, and was terrific for the mission and for Dyna-Tech business.

  Peo was glad Conn had thought of it.

  SIXTEEN

  In Space

  January, 2034

  With Al Claussen going to Saturn, Conn would be in the lander all by herself. The way Peo had been in 2022.

  On a crisp, clear day in January, Conn got her first chance to inspect Hippeia at Gasoline Alley. There was a great deal of fanfare and coverage: everyone wanted to see the soon-to-be first woman on the moon make her first trip into space.

  She sat strapped in to the Space Station Ingress Vehicle (SSIV) atop an Strummer I-IV rocket, a titanium/beryllium flyer (Space Station Egress Vehicle; SSEV) attached to the spacecraft’s back. She had tightened her straps as tight as they would go, and she could move her head, and flail at the instruments in front of her, but that was it. On every surface, tactile switches and dials sprouted like fungus around windshields, touchscreens, and inputs manipulated by gesture. Looking at the layout as though for the first time, Conn had a hard time believing everything had a unique purpose. Out one window, she could see inland; out the other, she could see the Gulf of Mexico and, just barely, bits of the Texas coast.

  Liftoff was like getting weighed down by a bag of rocks, and as the rocket thrust the craft into the Earth’s sky, she felt as though somebody extremely heavy was pressing down on her chest, to the point where she thought she might burst. She was learning to fly.

  Today, she instinctively wanted to be up front, in control, pitching, rolling, feeling the press of engine thrust again in response to her swipe. But she had to settle for being a passenger on her first flight.

  Zero-G was every bit as strange and wonderful as it felt beneath the waters of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab pool. She undid her buckles and floated above her seat, except there was no above anymore. Her world was truly three dimensional now—three hundred sixty degrees. It felt familiar, almost comfortable, and she remembered her NASA training gratefully.

  The rocket was pointing at the space station, and they were hurtling toward it. So maybe it was OK to think of herself as going forward to look out the cockpit window. Gasoline Alley looked like a child’s toy suspended from an invisible ceiling. Conn tried to get the station to look real to her. At last, as they got closer, she could see places where the exterior was scarred or charred, and it began finally to look like the enormous construct it was: a feat of imagination, effort, and, to go by how no one module seemed to go with the ones adjacent, humor. The chain of bulbous or boxy modules stretched out a dozen wide and two deep, connected by fragile-looking transit tubes. The modules were mismatched in color, shape and size. Not even a child would play with something so strange, or so wonderful.

  The moon mission command module was visible docked beside where they were parking. She figured the lunar lander couldn’t be far away.

  She disembarked in her full pressure suit: she would remain suited for the entirety of this quick trip. She saw a figure behind one of the modules’ windows pointing something at her, and thought it must be a range finder, or an instrument to read her suit data: she learned later that a pool of news feeds hired two astronauts bunking down in Gasoline Alley to follow Conn around with handheld cameras. It was surreal.

  She heard Meridith Williams’s voice over her radio: “Conn, to your left.” There she was, waving Conn over to stay outside an airlock as her transport pilots went in. She drew once again on her NASA training to cross the twenty feet to Meridith. Meridith pointed above her head, several thrusts with her finger: Conn looked and saw the lander tethered on a long line above.

  “We needed a bay for the command module,” Meridith explained as she located the winch that would reel the lander to them. She braced herself and pulled a lever. The tether went taut and the lander began to descend. No, it was simply moving, Conn reminded herself: there was no up or down.

  The lander came to a stop almost close enough to touch. Meridith motioned Conn to hoist her way up to its hatch. “We’ll pressurize it once you’re in there,” Meridith said; unnecessarily, Conn thought. They wouldn’t pressurize it before she opened the hatch: they’d have to do it all over again, and also they’d kill her.

  Conn clambered to the hatch and opened it. She was bulky in her pressure suit, and it took a good five minutes to maneuver inside far enough to close the hatch behind her. She followed Meridith’s instructions to pressurize the lander.

 
; Conn was glad to see that the lander retained much of its tactile instrumentation, even though much of what Peo did in 2022 was computer-controlled now. Peo insisted that nothing important on the lander be controlled via swipe, or other finger or hand motion on a smooth surface. She, and now Conn, had to be able to feel everything. Dials were actual dials, turned when necessary by hand. Switches were physical toggles. There were levers, pedals, and buttons. Many of the redundant ones might eventually have to go to save weight, but until then, they all were at Conn’s disposal. The lander looked like it was ready for her.

  And it needed a new name. Conn loved the name Hippeia, after a chariot-borne goddess, and it would still be significant since it would again be called upon to bear the first woman to the moon. But it also carried the symbolic baggage of Peo’s abortive journey. Floating in the lander now, Conn had the idea of holding a contest: let middle schools across America suggest names. She’d commit to using one of the names for the lander, and do her best to persuade Jake to use one for the command module.

  Conn floated in the vehicle she was going to make history in for twenty-five minutes. No matter how real the mission had felt before, it had never felt as real as it did now. She was going to the moon.

  An astronaut with a camera peered in from outside. Conn braced herself and pulled down the sun screen. She felt prepared now to tell the design team what she needed and didn’t need from the lander. Time to go home.

  She agreed to let a mounted camera record her return to Earth in the Indian-made space flyer. She had been reluctant to allow one on the way up, because she was afraid she would throw up or do something equally embarrassing.

  It was after she returned from Gasoline Alley that the dark side of celebrity caught up to her.

  SEVENTEEN

  Celebrity

  January–March, 2034

  The trouble started with TMI, a celebrity gossip feed, which did a biographical segment about Conn that reported that her mother had abandoned the family a few months before her death when Conn was five years old. If this was true, Conn wasn’t aware of it—she remembered her mom being around until she died. But it perturbed her that her dad was reluctant to talk about it: he gave no quotes to TMI, and refused to even discuss it with Conn or her sister, Cora. And Peo instructed Conn herself to refuse to comment, although Conn desperately wanted to make a public statement to the effect that the TMI report was bullshit.

  A week later, the site, The Lone Gunman, published the police report from Conn’s traffic stop the previous November. Conn had been stopped for a broken taillight on her rental car, but according to The Lone Gunman, she had been pulled over on suspicion of impaired driving. The Lone Gunman couldn’t explain why there had been no field sobriety test administered but it took pains to insinuate that Conn was let off the hook because of her celebrity.

  Conn suspected that someone had doctored the police report, but who knew? As far as the world was concerned, it was official, and there was nothing she could do to effectively rebut it.

  Conn’s stress level was through the roof. At her worst, she told Peo she might not want to even go to the moon, if these smears were going to keep up. Peo didn’t believe her any more than she believed herself.

  “You’ll go,” Peo said. It sounded less like encouragement and more like a statement of the way things were.

  But the hits kept coming. January turned to February, and it came to light that Conn’s sister, Cora, had been charged with driving under the influence when she was seventeen—only a 0.02 blood alcohol level, not enough to impair her driving, but Illinois had a zero-tolerance policy for minors. Her driver’s license had been suspended for three months. Because she was a minor, the arrest was kept out of her permanent record. But somebody had dug around and found out.

  Half a dozen feeds and sites covered the revelation about Cora as hugely important news, and used it to imply that recklessness ran in the family. Conn called Cora to apologize but Cora wasn’t in the mood to talk. She was humiliated. Having the incident not appear in her permanent record was supposed to ensure that nobody, no prospective employers, no friends or even family, found out about it. That was shot to hell. Conn felt about an inch tall. She had really thrown a wrench into Cora’s life.

  Peo took all these smear campaigns hard, convinced they were punishment for her refusal to cooperate with the CIA and Homeland. She called Deputy Director Raich at the CIA and offered her full cooperation. Raich said she appreciated the call and would await Peo’s list of who knew about the alien invitation. Peo got it to her the next day.

  But it didn’t help. Two weeks later, a story revealed that Conn’s dad had been the subject of an investigation by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services when the girls were nine and seven.

  This, Dad would talk about. He’d gotten into a fight with Conn’s fourth grade teacher, who called DCFS out of spite, and the agency was legally obligated to investigate any accusation that children might be in danger, regardless of the credibility of the source or an obviously malicious motivation. The teacher was fired (this incident being among the cumulative reasons), and the DCFS gave a positive report of the family situation and Dad’s parenting.

  But the details and nuances didn’t matter to the likes of TMI and other sites that preyed on celebrities. And now, as far as much of the public was concerned, Conn made family life so hellish that her own mother abandoned her, then she was raised so sloppily by her dad that the government had to step in. Many were the times Conn screamed at her monitor or into her pillow at night.

  She always feared that the next revelation would be about her being bipolar. But three of the four stories to date were sourced in some kind of public record, and Conn had never disclosed her condition on as much as an employment application. Her dad hadn’t sought concessions for her in high school, with Conn only a few months from graduation after her diagnosis, so Chicago Public Schools wasn’t even aware. Maybe it wouldn’t come out.

  When February became March, it was time to put the moon mission aside and devote all of the company’s attention to the Saturn mission, scheduled to depart on March 19. Peo hired a full time PR person. Conn tried not to see it as a personal failure.

  On March 23, four days after the Bebop launched for Saturn, TMI reported that Conn was bipolar-A and couldn’t function normally without constant medication.

  EIGHTEEN

  Cancer

  March, 2034

  Peo gave an exclusive interview to Popular Science the week after the revelation. “Of course Dyna-Tech has been aware of Conn’s condition. She’s a remarkable, bright, brave, accomplished young woman who, like twelve million other Americans, is successfully managing bipolar disorder.”

  Privately, Peo tried one more time to put a stop to the smear campaign: she called the Director of the CIA to remind her of Peo’s full cooperation with their vetting of her employees. The Director’s response was noncommittal about the entire situation, even whether the federal government was behind the attacks at all. Well, if they weren’t, they could certainly make them stop.

  So Peo called Nate Petan, Director of NASA, and informed him she would go public with word of the alien invitation to the moon on April 3 (the first business day of April) unless the attacks against Conn stopped immediately and completely.

  “I don’t have anything to do with that,” Petan protested.

  “I don’t care,” Peo retorted. “Either you’ve got the pull to stop them, or NASA is so irrelevant that there’s no reason for me to keep quiet anyway.”

  That night Peo and Conn had dinner together.

  “I’m going to need to scale back my activities at Dyna-Tech,” Peo said. “Doctor’s orders. Actually, she thinks I should take a leave of absence from Illinois Tech as well. I may do that next semester.”

  “That’s OK, I’m busy next semester anyway,” Conn said, thinking of her moon mission. She thought of little else, most of the time.

  “The cancer has moved to my st
omach,” Peo said.

  Conn felt her face redden. She felt helpless. “What are they going to do?”

  “Try irradiating it, but they’ll probably have to remove it.”

  “Oh, no. Peo, I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m getting radiation therapy now. Have to leave for Chicago tonight, I’ve missed one.”

  “Don’t do that,” Conn said.

  “Conn, I’m so sorry about these attacks against you. They’re—”

  “They’re not your fault,” Conn said.

  “They are,” Peo said. “It was almost certainly my treatment of Raich and her Homeland friend that brought this down on you. I want you to know—” Conn made a sound to interrupt, but Peo talked over her “—I hope it doesn’t need to be said, but I want you to know without a doubt that none of what has come out, even considered in the worst light possible, is even close to an issue for me.”

  “I know,” Conn said, “and I appreciate that. I don’t appreciate your blaming yourself. You’re sending me to the moon. You’re giving me what I’ve wanted since I was eight years old. And as for the CIA and Homeland people, you did the right thing. They can’t come in and act like they’re entitled to something of yours just because they decide they need it. That’s not how it works.”

  “It’s exactly how it works, more often than you think,” Peo said. “What do you think taxes are?”

  “I think taxes are enacted by a legislature with the authority of the Constitution,” Conn said. “Not some deputy director of something deciding what’s yours is hers.”