The Menace from Farside

by Ian McDonald

  So what if I’ve said that before? Yes, it’s significant.

  I see what you’re doing there. Asking me why I think that Jair is cute. I don’t think Jair is cute. I said Jair is cute. I said it because it’s an objective fact, like Cariad Corcoran has red hair and freckles. Jair is cute. The moon goes round the Earth. It’s the way of things. Yes. Really.

  * * *

  Whoever named Theon a habitat has either (a) never been there or (b) a sick, sick sense of humour. Actually, maybe both. Theon is nothing more than a half-pipe of corrugated aluminium with an airlock at one end, bermed over with regolith to keep some of the radiation at bay. My room back at Osman Tower is more spacious and welcoming. This will be as intimate as a banya. At least we can keep our clothes on, and take our helmets off. Oh Holy Family, I can’t wait to do that. I’m starting to get the twitches about this curve of visor Right. In. Front. Of. My. Face.

  By Old Tradition, humpies and habitats are open to anyone who needs one, so no need for Jair’s magic. I send him through the lock first, in case there’s something inside that does need a touch of the neko-paw; then Kobe. He fills the entire chamber in his big bright Peril Suit.

  ‘Sid.’

  She hates that.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  We lean against Redrover’s rear right wheel. It looms over us, all struts and mesh and suspension bars. It’s good to stand. Good to lean. I’m not looking forward to slapping my butt back in that seat.

  ‘You were talking with Kobe,’ I say. ‘On a private channel.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Right, so,’ I say. ‘I’m the leader and it’s not good for leadership if my team is talking behind my back.’

  ‘I was talking privately with Kobe,’ Sidibe says. ‘Jair scared him.’

  Jair scared us all, but I’m not going to tell her that.

  ‘I could have talked to Kobe. I know him.’

  ‘Not on an open channel.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He would never have talked on an open channel. Not with you on it, Emer. Kobe has a role he plays with you. He doesn’t have one with me. So he can talk.’

  ‘Are you saying you know Kobe better than me?’

  ‘I’m saying there are things he says to you and there are things he won’t say to you. He’s sensitive.’

  ‘He has his rules and rituals, he needs to prepare for new things.’

  ‘He needs to picture new things in his head, walk right around them, look at them from every angle before he can deal with them. What Jair said: Kobe saw that. In every detail.’

  I cannot argue here. I should not argue. I need not argue. But Cariad Corcoran has to have the last word.

  ‘Good work, Department of Surface Activity.’ I tap Sidibe on the shoulder of her sasuit. ‘I appoint you Department of Morale and Emotional Well-Being.’ Laine worked for a while with Taiyang; that’s where I learned all those flowery titles. I’ve always been big for smart words and flowery titles. I like the way they feel in my head, in my mouth.

  I follow Sidibe through the lock into the humpie. I take my helmet off—away from me, away from me, vile visor!—take a breath of free air, and almost vom up. It’s not Kobe’s in-suit vom—we were strict with the cleanup, though a certain aroma lingers. It’s us. Breathing each other in. Two hours in a suit, everything recycled over and over and over; you reek. Even the girls. We stink and we look tired and a long way from home. We are a long way from home. Four of us, in suits, huddled together under a roof so low the boys have to stoop, in the middle of the Trans-Medii Highlands. No one knows we’re here.

  ‘Team First Footprint!’ I say big and loud. ‘Here we are. Here we are!’ I’ve heard this kind of thing in motivational talks. I’m not sure anyone ever really speaks like this, but Theon feels like an Achievement.

  Even Jair raises a paw and a cheer.

  The habitat AI lists the rations in the humpie’s lockers. There are sucky-tubes and squeezy-tubes in a variety of Appealing Flavours. I squeeze, I suck, and my read-outs say I’m nourished even if I feel nothing in my belly. From the sour faces I guess everyone else has had the same Theon dining experience. We drink the humpie’s water because, who really wants to drink suit-water? You know?

  ‘We good, team?’ I say. The response is a little half-hearted. Two and some hours in the rover to get to Tranquility, then we have to track in slow and careful to the Apollo site. ‘Then let’s go, Team First Footprint!’ Helmet on (and that does nothing for your hair, as Sidibe never stops telling me) and out of Theon Habitat. Good little humpie. Good little rover. I swear it looks ready and eager. The seats lower. I think my butt can take it. Seats up, safety bars down.

  ‘Jair?’

  ‘Yes, Cari?’

  ‘Take us out.’

  Redrover rolls forward, then turns a sharp three-sixty and takes us back along its own wheel-ruts.

  ‘Jair, what are you doing!’ I yell. ‘Get us back on the right way.’

  ‘I don’t think I can, Cari.’

  Redrover is picking up speed. Dust plumes high behind us. This is a machine in a hurry.

  ‘Explain, please?’

  ‘It’s not me, Cari. I’m shut out of the controls.’

  My head feels the size of the moon. My helmet feels the size of my thumb. At the same time. This is possible, when your rover turns rogue on you. Everything is wrong, everything is throbbing, my cheeks are burning, my breathing is loud, and I don’t know what to do. Is this shock? Whatever it is, I hear on the common channel that I’m not the only one.

  ‘Dolores knows,’ Jair says. ‘She found out what I did with her account. She’s changed her passwords. I can’t get in. She’s bringing us back to Meridian.’

  We all hear the weird howl on the common channel. If there were wolves on the moon, that howled at the full Earth, they would sound as destroyed and hopeless as that sound. You’d think no human voice could produce a sound like that. It can. I’ve heard it before, when the Storm hits Kobe.

  ‘Emer.’

  Last person I want to talk to is you, Sid, but I click her channel.

  ‘I’ll do this,’ I say.

  ‘Are you sure? I mean . . .’

  I cut her off.

  ‘I’ll do this.’

  And I open a private channel to Kobe. I choose a little dancing boy icon from Redrover’s emoticon library and set him spinning and tumbling on Kobe’s HUD. Kobe likes dancing, though he is unable to dance.

  ‘K K K K K,’ I say. ‘Oh, K K K K?’

  Little games and rhymes, rituals only we know, riddles to which he knows the answer (grammar! see?): these are the ways of Kobe Saito.

  The wail breaks into stuttering breaths. Redrover races us west, ever west.

  ‘Oh, K K K K K?’ I say again.

  ‘E E, E E E. E E E E, E E,’ Kobe says.

  Codes match. Protocols established. Even if he used the initial to my old name. Sometimes, sacrifices must be made.

  ‘Kobe, I need you to do something for me. Only you can do it.’

  A long pause. That’s another kilometre gone.

  ‘K E.’

  The storm is passing.

  ‘You know when you took control of Redrover, when Jair got hit by the rock.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you do that again?’

  ‘I can’t do that, Cariad.’

  ‘For the mission?’ Another kilometre-long silence. ‘For me?’

  ‘I can’t do that because there isn’t a medical emergency.’

  I almost say fuck. Kobe doesn’t like people swearing, even though Laine is the sweariest person I know, and it’s in my DNA too: the Irish are swear-folk. Swearing makes his head squirm, Kobe says.

  ‘But,’ Kobe says.

  ‘But?’

  ‘It is possible to initiate a full local-override.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘I can,’ Kobe says, and I remember never to ask him rhetorical questions.

  ‘Make it so,’ I
say, which I heard is a thing captains say.

  ‘Redrover, protocol 919,’ Kobe says on the common channel. ‘Override Dolores Santa-ana, executive control to Kobe Saito.’

  You have executive control, Kobe Saito, says Redrover.

  ‘Turn her around!’ I shout. Kobe issues a string of code. And Redrover slows, Redrover turns, Redrover heads back along its well-worn track. We cheer Kobe Saito, Department of Overrides. We cheer even louder as we speed past Theon humpie for the second time, come to the end of our tracks, and then go beyond them, out onto the perfect, unmarked regolith, into the world of adventure.

  * * *

  What is it with Kobe? I’ll tell you what it is with Kobe. Someone’s got to look out for him. This place isn’t easy for someone with his gifts. Laine would if she could, but she’s in demand and doesn’t always have the time. Morven his enabler is great, but you can’t be in colloquium twenty-eight days a lune. So it falls to Cariad Corcoran. Me.

  I can see how that might sound like it’s a duty, or a contract. It’s not. Really. Believe. No, I’m not over-saying. What was that expression you used? No, the other one. ‘Protests too much.’ Huh. I like that.

  No, I’m not a ceegee. And I am absolutely not a mother. He needs someone who knows him and knows the world to make sure they get along together. That’s all.

  Yes, of course I care.

  Yes. Yes, if you want to put it like that. I love him.

  * * *

  Fanfares! Telenovela music! Big fuck-off chords! That weird bass-y hommmm thing they use when they want to say portentous. Let’s pump this up, because it’s the Third Act: Team First Footprint has entered Apollo-land!

  God and his Mother, it’s boring. Flat flat flat flat.

  ‘Well, it is the Sea of Tranquility,’ Kobe says, which is as close as he comes to a joke. The only highlight is the West Tranquility Moonloop tower, and that soon falls behind our wheels.

  ‘Are we headed right?’ Jair asks as dust dust dust rolls under our wheels. Then I see it. Oh, I see it. West of northwest, a pimple on the chin of the moon. I zoom in my HUD, the resolution is terrible, but there is no mistaking the boxy body, the spindly legs.

  ‘Is that real?’ Jair asks, and it’s a reasonable question because it looks nothing like anything else I’ve seen on the moon, built or natural.

  ‘That is the descent stage of the Apollo 11 lunar module,’ I say. ‘That’s where they landed and walked. Kobe, take us in.’

  ‘Um,’ Sidibe says. I do not like her um. ‘Don’t you think maybe we should leave Redrover here and walk? Maybe not run our tyre tracks over everything?’

  ‘Kobe,’ I say, but he’s already parked Redrover. Seats down, safety bars up; boots on the regolith. Single file so as to create as few stray footprints as possible. Me leading—of course. We walk towards the Apollo.

  No ghosts on the moon, everyone says. Cariad Corcoran says different. There are ghosts in Tranquility. Not dead people, spooks, things that throw things. These are ghosts like memories. Old things. History ghosts. This place, these machines, are history. It’s a hundred years since Apollo 11, but this place feels ancient. This is the heart of the moon, yet it feels nothing like my moon. Alien and ghosty.

  ‘They’re so vile, these Apollo-nauts,’ Jair says. The landing site is strewn with abandoned experiments, equipment, throw-away gear. Tools and food pouches. Piss bags. Radiation has worn away the plastic, and the contents have drained or evaporated. Shit sacks. These are more enduring. The site is well documented: I’ve given everyone the inventory. One hundred and eight objects. That mirror-array thing was used to bounce a laser back to Earth. Distance down to five millimetres. Amazing they could get accuracy like that back then. Amazing they could even get here. I stop at a pair of moonboots, one left lying across the other as if the man who walked in them had been sucked up into heaven. We all get pictures.

  ‘Maybe that’s where we get it from,’ Sidibe says. We are a filthy folk, us moonkind. The surface is covered with our junk. Old bunkers and habitats, dead rovers. Redundant graders and sinterers. Anything old and outmoded and obsolete. It dies, we dump. Send it up to the surface. Out of sight, out of mind. But what about the zabbaleen, you might ask? They care about the rare. Metal is cheap, metal is everywhere. We can make gold by clicking our fingers. But what use is gold? What’s precious is us-stuff. Life-stuff. So we use and throw, smelt and chuck. Messy messy moonfolk. And the dust; always the dust, forever the dust.

  ‘Right, so, careful now,’ I say because we are among the footprints. They are big, fat, ridged things, more paws than boots. ‘Hey, Jair: neko feet!’ He doesn’t answer and my joke feels stupid and wrong. This is a powerful place. It requires respect. And now we are in the middle of Tranquility Base. I can reach out and touch the Apollo module’s leg. I can read the words on the plaque wrapped around that leg. Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind. Names: Neil A. Armstrong; Michael Collins; Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr.; Richard Nixon, President, United States of America. Who is this Richard Nixon? The United States of America. There is its flag, lying there where the launch-blast felled it, bleached white by hard sun and radiation. I try to make out a pattern: stars, bars? Ghosts.

  Here, among the bootprints, is the very first one. I try to imagine Neil Armstrong’s boot one metre above the regolith, where nothing has ever set foot before, one centimetre and the dust still perfect like it’s been for four billion years. And touchdown . . .

  I try to imagine the people back in the United States of America, people all around the world watching that foot. I’ve seen it, of course, it’s part of our history education, but here I can see it. I turn my foot in the dust and my sasuit boot’s feedback conducts the powdery crunch to my nerve endings.

  Was he scared? Neil?

  I’m not scared here. But I am awed.

  ‘Where is it?’ Kobe asks, and my HUD shows me. It’s not clean, it’s not clear, there are other ridged prints across most of it, but by my research (and I researched this): here is the First Footprint.

  ‘Here,’ I say, and flick the overlay to everyone’s HUDs. And then I see it. Alongside the mess of prints that make up humanity’s first steps on the moon: the clear, present, and unmistakable tread of a sasuit boot. We’re not the first. As I see it, everyone else sees and makes the same realisation.

  ‘Fuck,’ Jair says, and I feel my bones and muscles sag as if the Apollo Module somehow brought Earth gravity with it and I am six times heavier and more exhausted.

  I don’t know what to do. I think my mouth may be open. Then Sidibe kneels down, tells Kobe to hold her left arm, and leans way forwards. She brushes out the alien footprint, careful and delicate as surgery.

  ‘Get the picture,’ she says. ‘Quick. And we never tell anyone about this.’

  I order everyone into position between the footprint and the body of the lunar lander. Sidibe unzips the camera from her wrist, sets it on the regolith, and joins us. Sidibe, Jair, me in the front, arms around each other; big big Kobe behind us, arms around all of us.

  ‘Just getting it in focus,’ Sidibe says. ‘Smile.’

  ‘You can’t see it,’ Kobe says.

  ‘You see it,’ Sidibe says. ‘You feel it. Smile!’

  So I smile and shit me but she’s right, I feel it spread through me like relief and heat and electricity. I stand straight, I stand strong. I stand like I’m smiling. Because we made it. Team First Footprint found the First Footprint. We did it. We sneaked out of Queen of the South. We rode the maglev. We battled barf and sealed a suit-breach and rerouted Redrover.

  (This is how I am going to tell it forever.)

  And here we stand. Arms around each other, secret smiles, hand gestures and moves and dabs.

  ‘Happy wedding, Laine and Gebre!’ Kobe says. Oh, right. We do it again, do it right, and Sidibe streams it to her camera. Last of all she gets a close-up of the Armstrong footprint.

  ‘I’m going to make a
printout,’ she says. ‘I think we should have an actual thing.’ Kobe wants one too, then Jair, and Cariad Corcoran isn’t going to be left out so I add my name to the list and it’s not such a bad idea, having a thing. Things say this object, event, footprint is worth bringing into the solid world.

  At last we break the pose. And I feel good. Better than I thought, considering we cleaned up the site for the picture, considering we weren’t the first, considering it was just one in a whole mess-up of footprints.

  ‘Right, so, team,’ I say. ‘We got what we came for. Let’s go back.’ I say that and the smiles goes out of me, out of all of us. Back there is the shit-rain of weddings and new family and everything changing and trying to talk round the expenses we ran up and having to explain what we did and why (which is harder, because out here on the dust plains of the Tranquility, I’m not so sure myself anymore). Before we go, I make sure to leave my own footprint beside Neil Armstrong’s. Cariad Corcoran was here. That’s all we can ever really say, in my philosophy. The universe is big, space is cold, stars are balls of gas and the moon want to kill you, but you can whisper, I was here.

  That’s why.

  * * *

  Why shouldn’t I have a philosophy? Everyone’s got a philosophy. Even you, machine. You’ve got all that binary, hetero-normative, sex-obsessed, bio-parentist, nuclear-family-oriented Freudian stuff. Did I leave any out?

  Neo-Freudian. Right, so: but that’s a philosophy, isn’t it? That’s a belief system. Yes, it is. It affects what you say, how you behave, how you deal with people. With me. Believing is what believing does, otherwise would we know you believe it? Philosophy is action.

  So you could say, Cariad Corcoran’s philosophy took her to the Sea of Tranquility and the First Footprint.

  You think it’s bleak? I think it’s beautiful. Poetic.

  But I’m not going to talk about it anymore because now I need to tell you what Kobe saw.

  * * *

  Well, it what’s Kobe said, rather than what Kobe saw, because we don’t see it until he makes the noise. So it’s not even really what Kobe said; it’s what Kobe grunts. Except it was more like a whoa.

  Kobe: Whoooooa!