Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  “Any pillows, cushions?” Conn asked. There were none. The inside of the spacecraft was spartan, nothing around strictly for comfort. “Do those captain’s chairs recline all the way?” They didn’t. Maybe once they were weightless, the chairs would be an option for Grant. But even in the tiny gravity of Tethys, Conn didn’t want to put any undue pressure on his abdomen. They left him on the floor, for the time being.

  Conn and Yongpo both knew that if they didn’t come up with a very quick fifth-dimensional course back to Earth, it was all for nothing. Yongpo did his thing with the navigating computer. When he had specified the coordinates for Gasoline Alley, they waited.

  Conn explained why the computers they were given might not have worked. According to the Aphelial, the Pelorians had tricked them, with no intention of giving them anything that worked. “That could be,” Yongpo said. Then he smirked. “But they gave me enough. Me and my team. Brooklin Simmons, she made the real breakthrough.”

  “Seems like a lot of aliens are underestimating us lately,” Conn said, and told him that the Aphelial hadn’t known they had been to the moon.

  Once explanations were out of the way, Yongpo was free to be freaked out that he had killed an alien being. Conn commiserated, but insisted it had been an accident, and not Yongpo’s fault. “If you’re going to be upset about anything, be upset that you almost got me,” she teased, trying to make him feel better.

  For the next few hours, they took turns sleeping and monitoring Grant. Yongpo hadn’t slept on the trip out, excited as he was to be traveling in the fifth dimension. Conn let him have a couple hours while she paced in the light gravity and waited for the computer to be done. Grant was in and out of consciousness. Conn was able to let him know the basics of what was going on, if not every little detail. She promised Grant they would be home soon. Conn was pretty sure he smiled at her.

  Yongpo was awake when the computer was done finding its way home. He eagerly swiped through two screens. Then his shoulders sagged, even in the microgravity of Tethys.

  “Sixteen days,” he told Conn.

  SIXTY-THREE

  The Ride Home

  April 21–May 7, 2036

  Yongpo had forgotten water.

  He had a pack full of MREs and protein bars. There would be enough food, if they decided to take the sixteen-day route home. But the water tanks would dry up quickly. And Conn didn’t like Grant’s chances for sixteen more days without some serious medical attention.

  Yongpo was beating himself up. First he killed the Aphelial, now, he feared, Grant and Conn. And himself.

  Conn did some math. “If we try again, we have a two-percent chance of getting a shorter route out of the computer,” she said. “But I don’t know what else we can do. We can keep Grant comfortable, but somebody needs to look at him for possible internal bleeding.”

  “Each course takes, let’s say, six hours to compute,” Yongpo said. “Our chances of getting him home in less than sixteen days from right now go down with each try, because we lose that six hours each time. But would it be better to travel for sixteen days, or spend the next ten trying to get a two-day course?”

  “I understand where you’re coming from,” Conn said. “But six hours is four tries a day, forty in ten days. We could easily go forty more tries without getting anything shorter. And by shorter, we could mean fourteen or fifteen days. A route that takes three days or less? Four tenths of one percent chance.” She’d gotten here in twenty hours, he in under seven—their luck had to have run out.

  Yongpo threw up his hands. “We have to keep trying, hope against hope for the best.”

  Sixteen days was a gift for a trip that would otherwise take seven hundred fifty. If Grant had made it this far, maybe he could make it—they had plenty of painkillers, and there would be no gravity. Could they go the majority of sixteen days without water?

  “We don’t have to!” Conn cried, and Yongpo looked at her strangely. “Yongpo, the moon we’re on is water ice. We chip enough off to fill the tanks as best we can. We’ll get enough for sixteen days, easy.”

  “Radiation?” Yongpo prompted.

  “It’s water,” Conn said. “The only water we’ve got. The regular radiation treatments we get for going into space should take care of it after the fact.”

  “You don’t want to keep trying? I’m not sure, but we might be able to keep the sixteen-day course in memory, come back to it if after a few tries we haven’t done any better.”

  “But all the time we dawdle is bad for Grant. How about this. See if you can keep the sixteen-day course in memory. If so, let’s calculate one more, while we’re getting water. If it comes in longer than sixteen days, we go with the first one.”

  Yongpo grimly agreed. Conn rummaged for something that would chip ice. Yongpo fiddled with the computer. “It looks like I can—just barely,” he said. “The computer has enough memory, it looks like, for two courses.”

  “Then do it,” Conn said.

  Conn had a screwdriver and a putty knife-like implement she was all too familiar with: it was how you spread epoxy when you were patching your hull. Paired with them were the two heaviest things they could manipulate with one hand: the armrests from one of the captain’s chairs. Yongpo sealed his suit and Conn turned her pressure field on. They went into the airlock, depressurized, and went outside.

  “We’re just going to strike the screwdriver and the knife. Hit it straight on, so you don’t bend that thing.” Yongpo had wound up with the putty knife.

  They found promising-looking cracks in the ground and went to work chipping the stone-like ice into portable chunks. It was slow going. They had to be careful that the rebound from hammering their tools didn’t lift them too far off the ground. But thankfully, Conn thought, as much as the ice behaved like stone, it was still H2O and easier to break apart. They worked for two hours, each making two trips to the airlock with arms full of ice. Conn was tired and sore, wanted a break, but kept at it.

  After another hour and a half, they had both made one more trip to the airlock, and had enough for another armful. They got in and shut the door behind them. Yongpo repressurized, and they hauled their ice to the water tanks—Yongpo took the intake valve apart, providing just enough of an opening to shove their chunks through.

  Soon, they had all their ice in the tanks, except for a few chunks melting in a basin for Grant. Yongpo reassembled the valve. He fist-bumped Conn.

  Grant said it still hurt to breathe, but it was no worse. When the water was ready, Conn gave him a drink and two Roxies. She gave him the tube of burn ointment so he could use it on himself if he wanted to.

  Grant thanked her.

  “Thank me when we get home,” Conn said.

  # # #

  The computer delivered its new course back to the space station: six hundred and two days.

  They set up the sixteen-day course as their route. They gingerly moved Grant to one of the captain’s chairs, as reclined as possible, and strapped him in.

  Yongpo selected GO. The Gs were a nightmare for poor Grant, who moaned pitiably when he was strong enough to make any sound at all, but there was nothing to be done about it. It seemed like forever, but eventually they were no longer accelerating and outside, the stars went away.

  Over the next sixteen days, Grant hung in there, even improved a little, thanks to antibiotics and painkillers. Yongpo and Grant got to know one another better. Yongpo had the most exotic life of the three: test pilot, mountain climber, brilliant engineer, youngest astronaut in the Chinese program, selected for the moon mission when he was about Conn’s age (he was now thirty), celebrity, defector. He may as well have had The Right Stuff tattooed on his forehead.

  Conn shared little. She was intimidated by the life stories of her friends. Anything she had accomplished was all because of Peo.

  “Peo didn’t carry you to the moon,” Grant said. “You trained and succeeded on your own.”

  “Peo didn’t carry you out to Saturn to rescue Grant,
” Yongpo pointed out.

  Conn understood what they were getting at, but she felt she would never be able to shake the deep-seated feeling that she was a fraud, a nothing that Peo had built into a young version of herself. Now that Peo was gone, so was everything that was important to Conn.

  Except, just maybe, the brutally injured man strapped to a captain’s chair. She and Grant had “alone” time when Yongpo slept. They talked just to pass the time, not to gain any deep insights. Except once, when Grant tried to thank Conn again. It might have been the twelfth time.

  “I’m just sorry you couldn’t save any more of your investment,” Grant told her.

  Conn flushed. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not trying to be a jerk about it,” he said, “it’s just I understand why you came all the way to Saturn.”

  “Do you?”

  “You put a lot of money and effort into the mission,” he said. “Which is great, hey, I got to go to Saturn because of it.” He regarded Conn, and seemed to sense for the first time that she was troubled. “Am I wrong?”

  Conn reminded Grant that she no longer owned Dyna-Tech, and in fact she had been in jail until she broke out to come rescue him.

  “Well, I don’t care why you did it, when you get right down to it. I’m very grateful. I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough. I was a goner out there.”

  Conn smiled and said he didn’t have to thank her any more than he had. When he drifted off to sleep the same as Yongpo, Conn’s eyes reddened and she sniffed, and she tried hard not to cry.

  # # #

  Like Yongpo, Conn had been in too much of a rush to think of absolutely everything, and she had to go the return trip without her medication. The adrenaline of the rescue had probably made her somewhat manic, and in the monotony of the return trip she came down hard. It was how she explained her reticence and the occasional red eyes.

  Yongpo and Grant gave her a wider berth the closer they got to home, and Conn was torn between being grateful and resenting it. During their fifteenth day of travel, Conn could tell for certain that she was coming out of her trough and becoming manic again. As far as she was concerned, it hit at just the right time.

  Grant survived the trip, always in terrible pain. When they arrived at Gasoline Alley, he squeezed their hands before they whisked him away.

  “What do you do now?” Yongpo asked. Conn got the impression it was the first time he had wondered about that: was the jail-breaking fugitive from justice going to turn herself in? If not, what would she do, where would she go? Conn had been able to think of little else, recently, and had settled on a course of action.

  “I’m going on the news,” she replied.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  The News

  May 7–14, 2036

  The three astronauts had talked it out at length. Who was telling the truth: the Pelorians who told them the Aphelials were the threat to humanity, or vice versa? Yongpo’s default position was that perhaps neither of them were truly a threat, that they were simply rivals: Conn had done business with the Pelorians before the Aphelials had a chance to make their pitch, and the Aphelials were sore losers. Conn loved his optimism and carefully considered his opinions, but she couldn’t see a reason why they both couldn’t do business with the Earthlings if that was all either of them wanted. And the Pelorians weren’t building a nuke-proof fortress on the moon for nothing.

  Grant, who had never met a Pelorian, thought it was clear that they were the threat. He felt bad about saying so because Conn had been fooled by them as publicly as anyone in the world, but it wasn’t Conn’s fault, he said. Her friend, Persisting, had done a great deal for her personally, and had saved both her and Grant’s own lives.

  “Why haven’t they just exterminated us, then?” Conn said. “They probably could, with all the stuff they’re capable of building with those huge forgers.”

  “Well, doesn’t that come next, according to your Aphelial? They live on a remote island in Russia. They give the Chinese nitrogen power in exchange for the Chinese conquering Russia. They use Russia’s nukes on America and probably China. That way, the most powerful countries in the world are all out of the way, but one of them is habitable.”

  “It is strange that they only had avatars studying the United States,” Yongpo said. Conn didn’t mention her theory that there hadn’t been an avatar invasion of the US at all, that it had been a pretext for war.

  Grant said, “what I want to know is: if they’re not constructs, basically big puppets, if they’re really living beings with a full consciousness, then aren’t they entitled to all the rights and dignity of any other sentient being? Any person? The Pelorians use them as tools. How is it OK to use living beings like that?”

  “They upload their own consciousness into them,” Conn said. “The being deciding to use it...well, becomes what he’s using. That makes a difference, right?”

  Yongpo said, “My question is, if they’re living beings, what do the Pelorians use to make them?” Conn shuddered.

  Conn thought consciousness—uploaded though it might be—made the avatars free agents, with life uniquely their own. It made sense, she supposed, and it also explained the Pelorians’ reluctance to give humankind the full avatar tech, possibly fearing being judged the same way the Aphelials judged them.

  “Look at it this way,” Grant said, circling back to their threat assessment. “The Pelorians asked for a meeting on the moon not thinking anyone would show up. If no one did, it would confirm that the moon isn’t currently being used, that it doesn’t belong to anybody, and they could do what they wanted with it. Whatever that is.” She posited that the Pelorians were intentionally cryptic about their invitation, making it difficult to figure out, but in a way they could say later should have been clear.

  “If they supposedly studied us so carefully, you would think they would know how the US was going to react,” Conn suggested.

  “Not necessarily. You were surprised that they arrested you, weren’t you? Should you have known?” Conn didn’t have an answer.

  For her part, she distrusted Murrdip Hangzhii. He had killed two people with a wave of his wand and severely wounded another. And then didn’t render any aid, as was his supposed duty to travelers in distress. In fact, he treated the Saturn crew the way he did believing they were avatars. If avatars are beings entitled to rights and dignity, as the Aphelial seemed to believe, how could he discard them so callously?

  Put it all together and there was just something menacing about him. He certainly seemed to have contempt for the human race.

  “Maybe that’s it,” Grant said. “Maybe they don’t give a crap about us one way or another. But they aren’t actively trying to wipe us out, either. And they would stop the Pelorians from doing so if they could, not out of any concern for humanity, but because the Pelorians are these awful outlaws Mr. Murrdip made them out to be.”

  Nothing was decided, and Conn wasn’t yet persuaded that she’d been so wrong about the Pelorians. She was determined to find out for herself.

  # # #

  Conn’s first stop back on Earth was NewsAmerica, where she found that Grant’s rescue was not that big a story. Even Conn’s escape from prison was somehow not enough to persuade Hayley Brigham to interview her live on the feeds. She had to settle for a second-tier personality, Ethan Wilkins, and a second-tier feed dedicated to space exploration: the first tier was taken up by the state of war with the Pelorians—and the new China-Russia war, which had officially broken out while the astronauts were traveling back to Earth. Neither side had used nukes yet, but the world was understandably holding its breath.

  Nonetheless, Conn was a story, and would be a bigger one if she were arrested at the NewsAmerica studios. She sought a kind of asylum there. Once the federal government knew she was back on Earth, and where she was, they would come to get her. A producer, who was an admirer of Conn’s, held the feds off until the scheduled time for the interview by promising to publicize the hell out
of any arrest they made on her premises. The feds stood down. They were arresting Conn in the first place because they wanted to avoid publicity for her cause.

  At the appointed time, Ethan Wilkins interviewed her. Conn hadn’t restarted her medication. She didn’t have time to be sick for days. She planned by a superhuman effort to keep herself on an even keel for as long as she would need to do what she had to do. She didn’t know if she could do it—but she knew she didn’t have a choice.

  She told the world she had been arrested for nothing graver than being supposedly pro-Pelorian, and had been held without charge for weeks. Wilkins was skeptical on the air. “How did you escape?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Conn said. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.” Such as the warden who had essentially freed her.

  Wilkins asked, “Are you aware that Warden Kohler of FCI Dublin herself disappeared shortly after you did?”

  “No,” Conn said, deeply troubled.

  Wilkins asked her the big question: was she pro-Pelorian? A state of war existed between the United States and the Pelorians, according to Congress and the president, and giving them aid and comfort would be treason.

  Conn said, “I don’t know what to think about the Pelorians in general anymore. I know that I have a Pelorian friend, who doesn’t want war and isn’t an enemy of the United States.”

  “How has he shown you he’s your friend?”

  “He saved my life on the moon, and then he saved Grant Loomis’s life at an expense I literally cannot repay.” She was thinking about the destroyed spacecraft, and the eight thousand dollars she had to her name. “I’ve learned something about the value of friends since my first journey to the moon, and I value him tremendously. In fact, I need his help one more time. I hope he’ll see this, and I hope he’ll come.”