Conn marveled at it, even as rudimentary as it was. Dyna-Tech would be instrumental in establishing the first one for humans, when pinpoint vertical landings were possible and traffic to and from space was sufficiently high. She felt a pang of regret, knowing she wouldn’t be part of it.
Persisting said, “One of these spacecraft—there, that one—has a course to Tethys for you that will take six and a half days. Are you interested?”
Conn knew it might be the best she could do, but that Grant’s odds of survival for another week without medical attention were long. “Can they, I don’t know how it works, hold it for me?”
“I can ask them to hold, and let us know before wiping it.”
“Please do.” Conn desperately needed a shorter route. “And Persisting, I haven’t thanked you enough for what you’re doing. You and your people.”
“On your seas, vessels that are able to render assistance to a crew in distress are obligated to do so. It’s been so for thousands of years. We are bound by a similar, much older tradition.”
“Still. Thank you.”
They inched among the rocketships, slow enough that the normally silent sled made whup-whup-whup noises. Conn watched as passengers and crew of the recently landed spacecraft disembarked. Their movements, Pelorians in their “real” form, were fluid enough to be creepy—if Conn shared Glenn Bowman’s opinion of the race, she would liken it to oozing. While in motion, their nine limbs were used for balance and direction changes, not to bear their weight. Bowman would call their color vomit green—to Conn, they were the color of the eyes of her childhood cat Maggie.
There was a spartan outbuilding where passengers and crew could wait to board a spacecraft, nothing more than bleacher-type benches and a roof on stilts. It was currently empty.
“Why do you have to sit?” Conn asked, almost to herself.
“Pardon?”
“Here, where everybody knows you’re an avatar. Why do you have to sit? To rest?”
“Avatars are not robots, Conn. Rest is beneficial.”
Conn asked Persisting why the total package of technology and instructions for making avatars hadn’t been released before the United States declared war. “Precisely because we feared war, and we are not interested in facing an army of avatars.” Conn made a soft snort. She had upheld her end of the bargain. But she had to admit, the Pelorians had made the right choice.
Over the next forty-five minutes, Persisting fielded results from course calculations. Then he suggested a tour. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have time—that I’d have a good result for you quickly,” he explained. “But would you like to see the village while we wait?”
They sledded a kilometer inland until they were among the structures Conn had seen earlier. For as far as the eye could see, there were other, shorter buildings, wide and long, native pine, unadorned but for what looked like a sealant. Families lived in them: three adults with one, two, or three children, Persisting explained. Other low buildings near the path to the spaceport were vehicle storage, medical care, food processing, common areas for recreation, town meetings and the like. From the coast, Conn had been able to see the watch tower, a radio tower, a three-story...what? Boarding house? A massive forger, one-third the size of those on the moon.
Some Pelorians hurried between buildings. Not hurried, exactly, but walked with purpose. “A simple, temporary genetic manipulation lets them take in the nitrogen in your air and expel it as waste before it can poison them,” Persisting explained. “Provided they don’t overdo it.” Sledders went by with breathing apparatuses. “Most who are able are on the moon, building what you call the fortress,” Persisting said.
“What do you call it?”
Persisting seemed to think about what to say. “We’ll stick with fortress. Here on the island live the families and children of the moon workers, and others who for various reasons cannot or do not contribute. The families: one parent will work on the moon for a number of days, then swap places with another, then that one with the third, and then over again, if they are all able.”
Craning her neck, Conn spotted an array of what might have been satellite dishes, or possibly solar panels. She asked which they were.
“Both,” Persisting said. “There are dozens of other villages this size, each with a population of five or six thousand.” Wrangel Island was half again as big as Delaware, so there was more than enough room, but Conn, even aware of how many Pelorians there were in total, had pictured a tiny village with a thousand living in it. She was way off. “This was the first. We call it Outpost.”
Persisting abruptly stiffened.
“What?” Conn said.
“Twenty hours,” Persisting said.
“Twenty hours?”
“I assume you’ll take it.”
Conn squealed. “Yes! Yes. Please.”
“The spacecraft, I regret to say, is on the moon. Looks like you’ll be paying a third visit. With so many journeys between here and the moon already, or between your space station and the moon, a quick fifth-dimensional course should be easily calculated.” It was as much as Conn could hope for.
They sledded back to the spaceport. I’m coming, Grant, Conn thought. Just hang in there one more day. Now the clock was ticking.
FIFTY-NINE
Tethys
April 19–20, 2036
It was dark—the middle of Wrangel Island’s mid-April six-hour night—when Persisting’s avatar blasted them off in a small rocketship. The craft reached orbit with little in the way of apparent Gs. How they did that was one more thing Conn wished she knew. But only out of curiosity, and no longer because she could profit from it.
The instruments in the cockpit of the spacecraft were laid out in triangular formation, the obvious choice for a life form with three limbs in front at all times. There weren’t nearly as many instruments as in one of Conn’s command modules, and they appeared to be mostly fail-safes, because Persisting’s avatar barely touched anything. The seats in the spacecraft were long, flat platforms: no backs, no legroom to speak of. A harness had been rigged, clearly after the fact, for an avatar. Conn tried to understand and memorize what Persisting was doing to fly the spacecraft. Otherwise, she belted herself in and hung on, standing until they reached zero gravity.
As they circled the Earth, Conn thought about Grant. When she thought she was going to die on the moon, she had banished him from her mind. Now he was in front of everybody. Was he the answer to her constant question: is there anyone in the world who cares about me unconditionally? When there’s nothing in it for them? Conn had always felt like Grant wanted more from her than even a good friend would. He wanted her to drop everything and come with him to Texas, after all. But that, she had finally concluded, wasn’t because he had gauged the pros and cons and decided being with Conn was mathematically better than not being with her. It was precisely because all he wanted was Conn. He wanted all of her, and that scared her, but he wanted her. Not what she could do for him. Not as a vendor.
She wondered too whether Persisting was her friend, or a customer. Well, he wasn’t the latter anymore, but he was still helping her. That counted for something, didn’t it?
By their second orbit, a fifth-dimensional course had been calculated for the moon that would take four and a half hours. Conn willed herself not to be impatient. She’d made the trip twice, and taken two and a half days to do it each time.
“The spacecraft we’re—sorry, I’m taking to Tethys,” Conn said. “Was it scheduled to be doing something else? I mean, was the owner using it—”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Conn,” Persisting said. “We are bound by law and tradition to render succor to fellow travelers in space, same as you on your seas.”
“I know, but...” She banished any guilt she felt. She needed the craft more. She had a better question. “You seem to think I might not come back. Is the owner going to be worried about that?”
“I doubt the owner knows how your Grant was injur
ed. Some of us monitor your feeds because we need to know what’s going on with you, but most don’t pay any attention, if they could even understand them in the first place.”
“Wait. You have evidence these Aphelials are in the system picking off spacecraft. Shouldn’t you warn your people?”
“Matters are being handled in a responsible way,” Persisting said.
“Shouldn’t we tell the owner why I’m going?”
“There is nothing to be gained. The only explanation necessary is that another spacefaring traveler is in need of rescue, which is true.”
Conn dropped the subject. Persisting began to show her the fundamentals of flying a Pelorian spacecraft to and along fifth-dimensional space.
As they traveled, there was nothing to see out the windows—literally. Persisting assured her it wasn’t a real void, they just couldn’t perceive what was “out there.” It was disconcerting, either way. If anything, Conn thought, a void should feel bigger than space, but it was just the opposite. She felt suffocated by the nothingness.
Before long, they achieved lunar orbit, and an hour after that, they descended inside the fortress walls to a veritable parking lot of similar spacecraft.
“Where did all these come from?”
“The forger, mostly. Most of us traveled here on arks. Now we need much smaller craft, so we’re building them.”
Before they left Earth, Conn asked Brownsville to work up a location on Tethys for Grant and the Bebop. The information was scheduled to be ready for her when she checked in later. Brownsville’s computer systems wouldn’t “talk” to the Pelorian spacecraft’s, so Conn would be navigating by the stars.
Conn and Persisting disembarked in their pressure fields. Conn was walking on the moon for a third time.
She loped along beside the avatar, whose gait was not nearly as practiced. She felt a surge of pride: she was better at walking on an alien surface than her alien friend was.
They reached the craft she would be using. “I have—the real me has—made the necessary arrangements. You need only board, and go.”
“Thank you, Persisting,” Conn said, feeling real affection for her friend. “I can’t—everything you’ve done today—”
“I’ve done so that you can spread the word about the Aphelials,” Persisting said. Not because she was his friend? The affection that had bloomed in Conn faded into something sadder.
“Of course,” she said. “But be that as it may—I’m grateful.”
# # #
There was an electromagnetic transmitter/receiver in the spacecraft. Conn set it to the right frequency. Then she panicked. I’m on the far side, she thought. They won’t be able to hear me. Fully expecting it not to work, she hailed Brownsville. The connection took. Conn relaxed. Persisting and his people must have their own satellite network up here, she mused. Makes sense, with hundreds of thousands on the far side of the moon.
Conn spent twenty minutes transcribing and then going over the math she would need to find Grant.
She was standing, as on the rocketship. No harness for her this time, though. A screen before her read (in Basalese), Course calculated. Press GO.
She pressed GO.
The spacecraft launched, and Conn lost her footing and hit her head. She pulled herself up against the acceleration and hung on to what she could find that didn’t move. Conn diligently went through the proper sequences to fly the spacecraft that Persisting had shown her. Soon, the acceleration was over, and outside was the void. Less than twenty hours to Tethys.
Conn removed and charged her pressure field collar. Air pressure: Persisting had gone over that with her. She found a pressure level reading on the spacecraft: it said 1.008. Assuming 1.000 would be normal for sea level on Basal, the level in the spacecraft was just about right. To make it feel like sea level on Earth, it would have to be 1.500. She wouldn’t adjust the pressure that high, because she didn’t want to risk hyperoxia from so much more oxygen in the alien air.
She swiped at a screen to up the air pressure to 1.250 by adding three parts helium and one part oxygen. The pressure would make the journey tolerable without a T-field, and the oxygen level wouldn’t be dangerously high.
Eventually, her last twenty-four hours caught up to her.
She slept for what felt like hours. Then was awake for hours, and realizing she had no way to tell time on the spacecraft. She knew time by a uniquely human measure: a minute was one sixtieth of one twenty-fourth of a rotation of the Earth. There was probably a clock staring at her from the instrument panel, but she wouldn’t know what it meant. Her Wear’s charge had worn out.
What told her she had arrived at Tethys was Saturn. The spacecraft dropped off its fifth-dimensional track, and the magnificent ringed planet filled her starboard-side window. Her jaw dropped, and she fought tears. The sepia rings dominated the top half of the view. The rings and the pastel stripes of the gas giant were both in motion—something no picture had ever shown her, something she couldn’t make out on the warden’s small monitor. The result was so vibrant, so immediate. Conn felt a tug at her gut like she hadn’t felt since stepping out onto the surface of the moon for the first time.
A soft light began to blink on the instrument panel. The screen said she was in orbital proximity to the target moon, and asked: Perform orbital insertion? She selected YES. The engine fired, and rocked her, but she held on. The screen asked whether the craft should orbit at some particular distance. She didn’t know what measurement the distance units represented, so she selected YES, and planned to figure out how to get closer if necessary.
The spacecraft slid into an orbit around Tethys, a moon all of five hundred thirty kilometers wide. Her orbit had to be close to stay in rotation around the moon rather than get tugged toward Saturn. As it was, the orbit the screen was portraying for her was highly elliptical, one side of it drawn toward the planet.
Grant was on the dark side of the moon. She went to the window and looked not to the surface, but for the stars she would use to do the math that would tell her where Grant was.
She did the math, sweating all the while. It was geometry and trigonometry she’d done a hundred times in sims and on her way to and from the moon. She didn’t realize how important it was to have someone backing her up until she was utterly alone. She double-checked her own work.
Then she was able to call up a high-definition image of the corresponding area of the surface on her screen, centered where the Bebop should be. It wasn’t there—but it was in the picture, maybe a kilometer and a half off her calculations, a tiny circle of artificial light in a dark ocean. She let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding: she had really found it.
Persisting had told her what to do next. She pressed her finger just to the side of the location of the Bebop. The screen prompted her: Land at chosen point? She chose YES.
The engine erupted again, braking her. Her orbit dropped even lower. Landing on Earth’s moon, there had been a point when she could feel gravity take hold of her, root her to the floor. She did not feel the same sensation, that the negligible Tethys gravity had taken hold, as she sunk toward the surface.
Conn worried she would have to find a flat place and set down manually, like with her lunar lander. But the computer did all the work, dropping her gently onto the surface of the moon. She shrugged into the backpack with her air tanks and turned on her pressure field. Someone—Persisting, or the spacecraft’s owner—had been thoughtful enough to supply boots and gloves—each a size or two too big, so they probably belonged to the “Tip Gerniss” avatar.
She found the option to depressurize—same sets of controls as for adding helium to the air. When she was confident she could, she opened the hatch of the spacecraft. She dismounted down a short ladder and set foot on the surface.
She felt an immediate wave of relief. The Bebop was no more than half a mile away, lit up like an oasis in the desert of dark. It was a soft dark—the reflected glow of Saturn, enormous in the sky, showed he
r every crevasse and crater for as far as her eye could see, offset by a barely discernible pink-gray.
She hoped Grant was still alive.
SIXTY
The Rescue
April 20, 2036
Walking on Tethys was unlike anything Conn had experienced. The tiny satellite had only about 1.5 percent of the gravity of Earth. Weighed down by her O2 tanks and the associated airtight bubble around her head, she weighed all of five pounds. She couldn’t bound like on the moon: if she went too fast, she risked achieving escape velocity. She shuffled toward the Bebop, trying and usually failing to drag her opposite foot when she stepped.
Before she had emerged from her borrowed spacecraft, she had tried to hail Grant on the short-range electromagnetic transmitter on board. Nothing. Either the instrument didn’t work, or Grant couldn’t answer.
She was shaking. She did not want to happen upon the crushed, dead bodies of Al Claussen and Callie Leporis. She was worried Grant might be dead, or beyond saving. Mostly, she was freaked out that she was only in her pressure field, exposed (seemingly) to the vacuum.
Tethys did not have the regolith, the mountains and canyons, or the character of the moon. It was literally a ball of ice, though water ice so cold that it may as well have been rock. If Conn risked losing her footing, it was because she was going too fast for the low gravity, not because it was slippery.
Presently, she made it to the Bebop. Having gotten used to seeing it docked at the space station, Conn felt it looked surreal and out of place on the alien landscape. Its lights illuminated a large circle of Tethys around the craft.
She realized that Grant would have to not only be alive, but awake and in good enough shape to depressurize the spacecraft before Conn could open the door, or the blast would kill them both. She wished she had a radio connection to Brownsville. To anyone. She felt very alone.
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