Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  There were more surreptitious recordings of the Pelorians, presumably from Wrangel Island, played in their original, guttural, menacing-sounding language, then translated. The translation often bore little resemblance to what was actually said. But only Conn knew that for sure. She would hear, “We must gradually become accustomed to the pressure level on this world if we’re to survive; if weaker Basalites are killed, that is regrettable, but possibly necessary.” The feeds would play the passage and superimpose upon it the caption, “We must keep the pressure on, killing is inevitable.” It was frustrating. She wondered why they didn’t ask Daniels to translate. Then she felt ice around her heart as she realized they probably had, and Daniels was probably helping them.

  It was frustrating that no one had ever heard the Pelorians say, “Boy, it’s a good thing we built that fortress on the moon, so we can be ready to repel the attack by...” whoever. Or perhaps there were such recordings, which were being withheld to keep the public’s enmity focused on the Pelorians.

  The sight of Pelorians milling about a military fortress only a quarter of a million miles away incited more repulsion and hatred than Molly Imrie’s space station vid had. When the aliens’ appearance was combined with the provocative pictures of the fortress, scare-shots of the forgers, and the inability of anyone (supposedly) to get onto Wrangel Island—well, the government didn’t exactly have its work cut out for it when it came to vilifying the Pelorians. The dominoes fell with the faintest of breaths from the CIA, NSA, and other American federal agencies. They deftly transformed this alien people, whose first official act after contact was to save a woman’s life on the moon, into the stuff of national nightmares. The American administration effortlessly cajoled Congress into funding a new, more advanced generation of weapons and delivery vehicles—spacecraft, essentially, that could fly to lunar orbit and do their damage from miles up.

  Conn wondered if that had been the idea all along: why Daniels didn’t offer the Pelorians anything of value on their first trip to the moon. Was the American government so cynical—so beholden to the military-industrial complex—that it would take first contact with an alien species as an opportunity to arm itself for war?

  She wanted to go on the feeds and argue Pelorian beneficence. She wanted to take the world by the collar and shake it for lapping up what it was being fed. But she wanted to talk to Persisting first. She wanted to hear him deny unequivocally that his people were up to no good: to tell her what they were afraid of, and how a fortress on the moon would help. But she still couldn’t initiate contact with anybody from Basal. Even their e-mail addresses vanished after a few uses. She had always been at their mercy when it came to contact, and she’d never liked it. And apparently Persisting didn’t want to talk to her.

  As her frustration mounted, Conn finally had to stop seeing Daniels. If he was complicit in making the Pelorians out to be the ultimate enemy and ignoring the unknown, greater threat, she didn’t want anything to do with him. For his part, he no longer seemed to want someone who understood him—now he wanted someone he could impress with his moon-hopping exploits. He would have no trouble finding somebody like that. Despite the breakup, Conn still couldn’t imagine being involved with someone who had always been Earthbound, any more than she could imagine being impressed by the Grand Canyon anymore.

  They broke up in December, as Congress failed to adjourn on time, instead passing emergency legislation which banned the use of avatars outside the military. This, despite the fact that the tech was still incomplete, and nobody could build them at all. To Conn’s relief, she was still free to use pressure field tech. She’d had the Pelorians release it worldwide, but she managed to be the owner of the first company to perfect the technique of manufacture and portability, and market it. It made Dyna-Tech a pile of money, before other firms caught up. And she was already devoting serious resources to exploring other ways the technology could be exploited.

  Also in December, Laura Haskell-Lefebvre, Peo’s biological daughter, decided the ten million dollars she had been paid to drop her contest of the will was agreed to under duress, and she wanted to resume the fight. In other words, Conn figured, the ten million dollars ran out.

  It was a headache at a time when niggling little distractions made Conn blow her top. She described Laura routinely in the saltiest language and vowed to destroy her utterly. It was extreme behavior, but also becoming more the norm for Conn. Her friends barely recognized her. Jody made himself scarce. Pritam stopped visiting from Chicago.

  More surreptitiously recorded—and wrongly translated—Pelorian talk surfaced every couple weeks. Conn finally, in a fit of fury more than from a desire for justice, went on Hayley Brigham’s feed and called what was fake, fake. Hayley played several previously released snippets of recorded Pelorian speech, and Conn calmly translated. There was nothing contentious or provocative about what the Pelorians were actually saying. Their words had been deliberately mistranslated to make the Pelorians seem like a threat.

  “Why would the government do that?” Brigham asked Conn.

  “They must want a war,” Conn growled. “And the Pelorians aren’t doing anything to give them one.”

  “What about you? Wouldn’t they realize you can correct any mistranslation?”

  “But I haven’t been,” Conn said. “They must have thought I had better things to do than to stop an unnecessary war built on lies and pretenses. Not anymore. I’m here to say that I’m going to do whatever it takes to make the world understand the Pelorians are our friends.”

  Conn’s efforts did little good. By Christmas, America wasn’t simply agitating for war with the Pelorians, a majority of its citizens believed a state of war already existed.

  There was little serious talk about laying siege to Wrangel Island, violating Russian sovereignty in the process: Russia was already on high alert over Chinese troop movements. A year’s cheap, abundant power had put China in an enviable economic position, and it used its surplus to bolster its own war machinery. Targeting Wrangel Island when the Russians were twitchy and expecting a fight with a superpower was likely ill-advised. Though the noisier feeds posited that it might be ideal timing since Russia was concentrating on their southern border, not the Arctic Ocean.

  Weapons and military vehicles for use from lunar orbit were starting to come off of manufacturers’ assembly lines, and by all accounts, there would be a fleet available by the spring equinox. Dyna-Tech, which had in any case avoided government contracts over the last ten years, didn’t bid on any of the work.

  Conn came to understand that the Pelorians really were going to be attacked and possibly eradicated, and she had been doing nothing about it. She vowed publicly to spend the new year fighting the military-industrial complex that had used the twenty-first century equivalent of yellow journalism and jingoism to agitate the population. She couldn’t wait for a call from Persisting anymore.

  So it was in this frame of mind—fighting for her company, fighting for the survival of her Pelorian benefactors, fighting her own newly angry, bitter frame of mind—that Conn attended a New Year’s Eve party in Washington, DC, thrown by NASA for the power brokers that controlled its financial future.

  She was unaccompanied. She was resplendent in a forest-green gown with a plunging neckline above which hung an emerald necklace. She was in demand, her celebrity—as far as NASA and its benefactors were concerned—barely dimmed by time or subsequent events. It may have died down a little in the year-plus since she first walked on the moon, but it was rekindled that night.

  One blemish on an otherwise enjoyable evening: Glenn Bowman was there as a guest of the senior senator from Florida, a warmonger whose mission of the previous few months had been to elevate Bowman to the level of expert in human-Pelorian relations. As Bowman and Conn exchanged pleasantries, Bowman leaked contempt from every pore to an even greater degree than Conn did.

  Midnight approached, and Conn was in her element. Most of the time, she dreaded parties, social ga
therings of any sort, but once at one, she played her part with élan.

  Come five minutes to midnight, someone pressed a small noisemaker into Conn’s hand.

  She was delighting a Senator from Texas’s chief of staff and his wife when thirty seconds to midnight arrived. She gamely counted down the seconds with her fellow partygoers. Five, four, three, two, one. She blew vigorously into the noisemaker and applauded. The chief of staff took her up in a formal dancing pose and twirled her a couple times to the notes of “Auld Lang Syne”; she laughed genuinely.

  Soon, it was time to go. New Year’s parties peter out quickly after midnight, and it seemed to Conn the only people who stayed much past were too drunk or horny to realize the party was over. She started for the exit that would lead her to the coat check. She felt dizzy, and grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself. She was tipsier than she thought.

  She lurched toward the exit again, her stomach now roiling, sparks going off in her head. The room swam. She listed one way. “Are you all right?” someone said nearby. She overcompensated the other way, and kept going, and then fell. She hit her head on a table.

  She woke up as bystanders tried to administer first aid. She had a goose egg on her temple, she was sprawled in a most unladylike fashion on the floor, and the core part of her, the central part of her being, understood that she was poisoned, and minutes from death.

  PART FIVE

  A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him.

  — Aesop

  FIFTY-THREE

  The Fundraiser

  January–February, 2036

  It was a clumsy attempt. It might have worked if Conn had sat down and passed out—everyone was likely to assume she was drunk, and she would not have received such prompt first aid.

  She remembered a vague metallic taste on the mouthpiece of her noisemaker. She remembered the waiter who had pressed it into her hand. He could not be found. Glenn Bowman was her first suspect, but Conn was skeptical that he could make a waiter completely disappear. She suspected government involvement. And if it was the US government, it shed some light on who tried to strand her on the moon—whether she was ready to accept that prospect or not. The government could have tried to keep the avatar and pressure field technology out of the equation so that they could claim that the Pelorians had taken without giving. Had they been planning this run-up to war that long?

  She hired three bodyguards, who rotated eight-hour shifts each day and were nearby wherever she was, wherever she went.

  She redoubled her efforts to rehabilitate how people saw the Pelorians. The government continued to release snippets of Basalese meant to condemn them as enemies of humankind while Conn made herself available to the feeds as a responsible translator. She understood that being the only human being to fully comprehend Basalese had made her a target of the government, in its haste to produce new weapons and new enemies to use them on.

  She debated Glenn Bowman again. The venue was 360’s Pelorians feed, and the debate was moderated by Anderson Cooper. Anderson, in his sixties, had been a sane and skeptical voice in the run-up to war, and he was not receptive to Bowman’s ever-more strident act. The only drawback to the event was Cooper’s emphasis on Conn having survived an assassination attempt. She would just as soon have kept that out of the discussion. The general public thought she was either paranoid or making it up, to go by the feed coverage.

  Bowman was getting close to being off his rocker—Conn thought even his supporters would say so. Wide-eyed, waving wildly, rising from his seat three times, Anderson had to rein him in several times, and Conn found herself shrinking from him as often. Opinion polls post-debate showed Bowman losing a small percentage of supporters, but further energizing those that stayed with him. So much for his supporters seeing how unhinged he was becoming. Conn genuinely feared violence from them—from him. She dreamed she was on the ground, on her back, looking up, and there was Bowman; she couldn’t move as he raised the pistol, aimed it at her head, and shot—

  Post-debate, she wrote opinion pieces for the limited segment of the population that still read them. She threw her effort and her money behind several moderate congressional and senatorial candidates whose primary seasons were underway. There was a nascent movement to draft her as a candidate for president, which didn’t interest her, but it illustrated her unique identification with the antiwar, pro-Pelorian political minority.

  As much as the United States rattled its sabers in the direction of the moon, it was China’s threat of war against Russia that dominated the feeds in January and February. Neither country was a full-fledged ally of the United States, though a majority in the United States were on Russia’s side.

  At an aerospace engineering conference in Chicago, Luan Yongpo defected, seeking asylum in America. He cited his antiwar beliefs, and though he was talking about China warring against Russia, he was also pro-Pelorian. When Conn learned that, she offered him a job. He spoke passable English, but of course, he and Conn could communicate in Basalese. Conn went a little easy on him with the language, but did challenge him, and he was a quick learner. He began to pick up the structure and rules of the language that Conn had acquired on her second visit to the moon.

  Luan (who Conn, as a friend, called Yongpo) had an engineering background to rival anyone’s at Dyna-Tech, and Conn put him to work on the fifth-dimensional travel project, which showed tantalizing promise. The team was certain it could build a spacecraft to specifications—that part was already underway, ETA on the vehicle: sooner than later. They believed they could install one of the Pelorian computers into the spacecraft and have an interstellar vehicle. Conn also tasked them with understanding how it all worked so it could be replicated and repaired. Yongpo’s involvement would hasten the time when that was possible, and that made Conn very happy.

  The Saturn mission had the planet in its sights. Interaction was increasingly impossible, as electromagnetic transmissions now took more than seventy minutes to reach the Bebop. But the crew was in good spirits. There had been a rough patch or two on the journey, but Callie Leporis was grateful for that: she said that if everything had gone perfectly, she would think they were due for a disaster. Conn read between the lines: the crew sometimes wanted to strangle one another, but they kept their wits about them. And it was getting them to Saturn.

  Conn wondered aloud whether the fifth-dimensional prototype might be ready in time to collect the Saturn crew from Titan, and bring them home much quicker. Her team assured her it was unlikely enough as to be almost impossible. Conn had enough of Peo in her to hear that as “maybe.” She pushed the team to imagine the Saturn crew when they were working, and think about how little they themselves would want to spend four-plus years with the same two people in an enclosed space.

  Conn didn’t get Grant’s and the others’ hopes up. But she continued to push her people hard.

  Laura Haskell-Lefebvre succeeded in getting her agreement not to contest Peo’s will nullified. Conn suspected somebody had leaned on the judge who decided in Laura’s favor.

  In February, some of Conn’s chosen congressional candidates started winning their party’s nominations for the general election in the fall. One Senate candidate even defeated an incumbent for the nomination. (The incumbent simply switched parties, and barely anybody noticed.) Conn boosted a candidate for president whose views on the Pelorian issue were more in keeping with her own—he had no chance of winning, but with Conn’s backing, he was involved in every candidate debate during primary season, so his views got a fair airing.

  One February evening, Conn was hosting a fundraiser for Brett Lipton, the Senate candidate who had defeated the incumbent in the party primary. She was in a smart black party dress accented with an understated diamond necklace.

  The venue was the grounds of a donor’s ten-million-dollar estate in LA. Conn was popular with Hollywood, and her party was well attended, even at fifteen hundre
d dollars per plate. She brought two of her bodyguards.

  Booze flowed, as did checks made out to the Brett Lipton for Idaho Political Action Committee. Lipton himself was a star, impressing everybody, especially those who were meeting him for the first time.

  Late in the event, one of Conn’s bodyguards, Asher Janus, approached her, laid his hands on her arms. “Everything’s OK,” he said, “I just need you to stay right”—he seemed to set her in a particular spot—“here, for a minute.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll explain everything, I promise. Just please don’t move.” He withdrew.

  As Conn spun around to question him again, something ripped through the bun of hair on top of her head. Simultaneously, a woman screeched as Brett Lipton staggered forward and fell on his face, his dark hair wet and slick.

  Conn dropped to a crouch and waddled quickly to what she hoped was safety. Asher Janus was on her in a second. Conn shook him off, calling for help. Wyatt, her other bodyguard, was there in an instant, and Conn pulled herself behind him.

  Wyatt and Asher faced one another. “Whose side are you on?” Wyatt asked. Asher sneered at him, then recovered himself.

  “I thought Conn was in danger,” he said, palms forward. “I put her where I felt she was safe.”

  “You put me where they had a clean shot at me!” Conn shrieked.

  “I was trying to help!”

  Wyatt, unconvinced, got between Asher and Conn, and eyed Asher with a sneer of his own.

  Conn let the police deal with Asher. She didn’t know whether to trust Wyatt, but she got enough sense that he and Asher were at odds over the attack that she warily allowed him to remain with her the rest of the night as the police took statements, and then to take her home.

  Brett Lipton was dead on arrival at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Shot in the head.

  FIFTY-FOUR