“But it was important. He should have understood.”
Grandfather patted her shoulder and turned away. “You’re showing me now why he didn’t want you to come here. I think he knew it would take you too. I’d give my life for this place… have given my life. He didn’t want to lose you to that fanaticism.”
“Too late,” she whispered.
~~~
Mariah began working in the labs the next day. A series of chambers recreated the environment in The Valley as it now was, and, through a progression of projections, to how it would be over time. They worked in each to produce plant-life that would survive. Working from terrestrial stock was unavoidable. They had the advantage of plants with generations of adaptation to low gee, but adapting to pressure, temperature, and sunlight extremes remained to be conquered. Their efforts were still in an infant stage, Mariah saw at a glance; this being her specialty. Until recently all efforts and funding had been directed into the atmosphere project alone, not the future that could bloom from it.
Other areas worked on building the atmosphere in a suitable mixture, and evaluating the impact on the changes here to the surrounding moonscape such as tracking faults and fissures in the nearby mountains.
Mariah willingly played on her grandfather’s name to get into every area. Being only a post-grad intern, she wasn’t expected to produce any useful work. Capitalizing on that she moved freely through all aspects of the project, making sure she was an accustomed sight everywhere. It took a bit more time to get Grandfather to take her outside the bubble, however.
The suits excited her. All her life she’d known the bulky, clumsy pressure suits that encased her in a shell, cut off from the world that was her home. This suit, made especially for The Valley, was different. It was semi-porous, made of a snug elastic material. Mirco tubing and conductors laced through the suit provided heating or cooling as needed. The air pack contained standard pressurized canisters coupled with an air pump to pull in the thin outside air. This supplemental system greatly expanded the range of the air supply. The helmet had even been redesigned, being a more rigid version of the town’s bubble.
Mariah felt her skin tingle as they stepped out of the bubble lock into the open valley. It was not excitement but the pressure change, something she’d never felt in quite this way in standard suits. Minuscule portions of her skin were actually in contact with the exterior of the moon. The idea thrilled her.
With the elastic suit Mariah could run, jump, and dance as she’d never been able before. She didn’t even mind the cameras of the tourists being trained on her. Cavorting like a child, Mariah knew no Earthsider naked beneath their atmosphere could feel as free as she did now. Light enough to fly, she wished for wings. This was her world, her Luna, as she’d never known it before. Gentler, more moderate, this Luna reached out to welcome her while the other Luna spread tendrils of death from every shadow of its harsh emptiness.
“How long can a human survive exposed on the surface?” she asked Grandfather, then shut off the radio link.
Smiling indulgently, Grandfather boosted the volume on his external speaker. “You couldn’t. The air at the peak of Mount Everest is thick as soup compared to this.” Thin though the air was, it still transmitted his voice back to her as sound waves. After enjoying the novelty, she settled down and let Grandfather show her around key points of the project.
The water stream came out a pipe hidden in a rock at one end and was reclaimed at the other end of its run where they measured the rate of evaporation. Along its path it flowed over land that had never before known water. Mariah delighted in the sound it made as it ran, tumbling over rocks and then over a mini-waterfall. Crews along the edges tended the precious lichens and moss. In a still pool they introduced algae, hoping it would survive the dark phase.
Grandfather took her up the side of one of the mountains to a battery station. Electricity generated by sunlight in abundance during the day was stored in the batteries for use in the long night. As they climbed Mariah felt the prickling of her skin increase. If they climbed to the peak they’d be in near vacuum, beyond the capacity of the suits to sustain them.
Returning to the enclosed town made Mariah claustrophobic. Raised in enclosed spaces, suddenly anything other than an open sky suffocated her.
As part of her training she volunteered to take measurements of atmospheric densities in various locations. This let her keep the suit, returning each day to walk on the surface of the moon. Giving all the appearance of wide-eyed innocence and eagerness to learn, she kept her real purpose to herself. From her luggage she took the end result of a project she’d worked on from its beginnings as a junior high science project all through her post-graduate studies in genetics and botany. The years and the work came down to a few seeds… preciously few.
After using the atmosphere density information to find the optimum location, with the added criteria of being as far as possible from the normal activities of the other techs and scientists, Mariah took the seeds outside. Despite the flexibility of the elastic suit she couldn’t feel the fine seeds through the gloves. Watching them trickle into the ground she’d prepared, Mariah thought of the hope and promise in these tiny objects. Covering them carefully, she watered them. It was the first day of the lunar light phase.
Day after day the unrelenting sun beat down on the fragile vessels of new life. Each day Mariah brought water. When the temperature climbed too high she brought ice to cool the soil so the — hopefully — sprouting seeds wouldn’t be baked to death before they had a chance to live. She violated Grandfather’s rules about plants being able to survive without human intervention. Terrestrial farmers carefully nurtured and tended their crops and always had. Insisting on things growing naturally in such a wholly unnatural environment was nonsense, she decided. She knew he had his reasons, and they were sound, but quicker results were needed. The impatient members of the human race weren’t going to wait generations more to see a payoff from their investment.
On the tenth day Mariah was greeted by the sight of tender green shoots poking up through the gray lunar soil. Wishing she could touch them, stroke them, encourage them, she watched the struggling young plants with her gloved hands folded. That day she stayed out to the very limits of her air supply.
After five days of darkness the plants began to yellow. Anticipating that, Mariah turned on the grow-lights she’d brought. Shielding them from view, she rigged them with batteries. She added a heater the next day.
By the time the sun returned the plants were nearly ten centimeters high. They grew rapidly in the sunlight. Ice in the soil wasn’t enough to cool them anymore. Mariah kept the full sun on them, she’d bred them to take extremes, but put a battery operated cooling unit nearby. Edges of the young plants crinkled in the unrelenting sunlight. When one died, Mariah added a panel to block the sun part of the time.
By the end of the next dark phase two more were dead, and of the remaining three only one seemed to really thrive. If she could get seeds from that one, the next generation she bred would be stronger and more tolerant yet.
Mariah ceased to be impressed by the idea of being on the surface of the moon beneath a colored sky without a true pressure suit. She found herself looking instead at the moonscape around her, wishing she could touch the soil with her bare hand, and could touch the brave little plants she enticed to grow there. It would never be, not unless the news from the cities changed. When the air fees rose they blamed The Valley project. Water, ice, minerals… any cost or shortage was blamed on the project.
They had to see. They had to be made to see that it would work, could work, if only they didn’t abandon the baby before it had a chance to live. If only her little plants survived to show them how far the project had come, to show them just what the face of Luna could look like if they were only patient.
Mariah sat by her plants on the second day of the next light period. It was the most pleasant time in The Valley. The temperature was balmy, but not hot. Look
ing up at the thin, dark sky, it seemed to Mariah that there was a hint of something in the air. Grandfather had been working these past several weeks on the production of clouds — ground fog, more realistically. A lot of water had been pumped in from the nearby distribution center to supplement The Valley’s own Lunar ice supply. There were grumblings about rationing and shortages in the cities. Propaganda nonsense, Mariah knew, but the allegedly intelligent citizens of the moon believed it. Wild claims that Grandfather was strangling the moon by bleeding all its resources out into space were rampant.
If only they could see this. One of the three remaining plants was dead. The second didn’t look as if it would survive much longer, but the third… oh, the third! The bud at its top had just began to open. Red petals peeked out of the green, colors unknown before on Luna now grew in native soil not beneath a dome or bubble, but beneath Luna’s own sky.
Mariah sat by the plant for a long time, looking at it, thinking about the future of her home world. Even with its light gravity, the moon would one day have air one could breathe without masks or helmets. Water would flow openly on the surface beside forests and fields. This is what Mariah thought as she looked at one struggling blossom on one spindly plant.
Or so it is believed. Looking back now we can only imagine her thoughts and motivations. We can reconstruct pieces of her actions. The rest is no more than a guess, but still a guess that has become legend.
What is indisputable is that she was on the surface when the attack came. The sound of the tunnel airlock being blown out would have carried to her across the lunar surface through the thin atmosphere her Grandfather had labored a lifetime to create. She would have seen the cloud of dust from the explosion, then the ground would have trembled beneath her feet as the shock wave rolled across Alphonsus Crater toward the bubble town.
She would have felt the rush of air out of The Valley.
In her suit, though inadequate for vacuum, she could have made it to the bubble airlock. She had breathable air enough. She never tried.
It is certain Mariah finally did get to touch the naked surface of the moon. She was found with her cheek pressed to the ground. She’d taken off one of the suit’s gloves, too. In her tightly clenched hand was the soil of Luna. Her body lay over the top of her helmet, pressing it down to the ground, keeping the air within it from escaping. Under the helmet, its bloom intact, lived the first flower on the moon.
THE END
Silver Lady
One face she kept ever hidden from the lustful, yearning eyes that sought her secrets. With the other she taunted their deepest desires, toying with their imaginations. She teased their fantasies, veiling herself in chaste darkness one moment, flaunting her silver, unobtainable radiance the next.
Madness seized some who looked full upon her bared face. The tormented howls that rose toward her spoke of the anguished craving she provoked. Lost, they were, these cries, lost in the dark gulf that surrounded her.
She waited. Someday would come the lover’s touch of these frantically scrambling souls. Someday…
And then they came – oh! Brave, foolish questers who dare challenge the courage-draining emptiness to gaze upon her hidden face. Breached was the lure she’d withheld from their eyes.
What now? As they left her alone once more. Would they not return to her waiting embrace?
A bare flicker of time and they who had probed her from afar returned to caress her and make her theirs. Sweet, their lover’s whisper, “We came in peace for all mankind.”
The End
Silence At the Fall of Night
A single letter stared out of the flickering screen.
Huddled in darkness, Melanie hugged her knees to her chest and shivered. Her eyes locked onto the screen, onto the letter that invaded her solitude. Melanie floated unmoving, not really seeing it, not acknowledging its existence.
Only the faint light of the monitors and controls penetrated her den of night. Letting the currents of air turn her, Melanie faced the huge quartz port. Beyond it, the planet hung, enveloped by a blackness broken only by the flare of lightning through distant, silent storms. The blue/white bursts of lightning used to make her cry, trembling with the anguish of horrible memories. No longer. She only saw the darkness that surrounded the light. Darkness. Darkness and silence. Wrapping them around her like a comforter, she watched the globe slip by.
Ten more minutes to the terminator. Ten more minutes to the light. She shuddered.
The letter was still there. She could feel it burning into her back. Not until the first rays of the star crested the curve of the planet did she turn around and face the screen.
It was the letter “R.”
No, not truly an “R.” It was backwards. A backwards “R.”
“Ya,” Melanie whispered, pronouncing the Cyrillic letter in a voice husky from disuse. One letter that said too much. “Ya means I.”
It was from him. The Other. The unseen, unheard, evil one. The enemy. Melanie knew he was there. Always, always he was there, riding his ship in an orbit that kept the planet between them. It was a message from the other ship.
Her mind blank of coherent thought, Melanie let the letter fill her eyes until the dazzling light of the sun reached the port, filling the dark womb of her ship with scorching brightness.
Slamming her hand down on ‘clear,’ Melanie opened her mouth in a long, soundless scream.
~~~
Each orbit took her over a different part of the planet in an endlessly repeating pattern. She used to remember how many orbits there were in a day, twelve… sixteen… twenty… It didn’t matter. There was no more day or night, only dayside, nightside, over and over, orbit after orbit.
Pressed flat against the port, Melanie watched the world drift by. If she held very still and breathed lightly, the microgravity would pull her mass down against the window. For three orbits she had been thus.
The ship quivered as a thruster fired, automatically correcting her course. How many orbits since I had to do anything? she wondered vaguely. One hundred? One thousand?
Dayside of the planet. A desert painted in hues of rust and rich gold gave way to the glitter of a sapphire ocean. Deepening shadows highlighted towering clouds as the world slipped into the shadows of twilight. Tears accumulated in her eyes with not enough gravity to pull them down her cheeks. A soft lullaby whispered through her mind.
A few more minutes to blessed night. Then she’d turn around. In the darkness she’d be able to face what she knew awaited her on the comm screen. Melanie had heard the soft chime beckon for her attention. How long had it been since that first offending message had appeared? Thirty orbits? One hundred? Or had it never really existed at all? Melanie wasn’t sure.
Around her the air grew stale. Fighting the urge to pant, she remained still. She’d gone to rip out the control circuits for the air flow to find they were already gone. After smashing the secondary controls, she’d lain against the window waiting for the final night to come over her.
Then the chime had sounded.
On the planet, as the night became complete, Melanie saw lights dusting the nightside, their patterns forming the shapes of cities. A faint smile curved her lips. So everything was all right after all.
Click. With a hiss the vents filled the chamber with freshly scrubbed air. Melanie gulped, the rush of oxygen making her dizzy. Triple redundancy in the air systems, she realized dully. She blinked. The cities had vanished… All that remained were the pale green streamers of the southern aurora, their ghostly tendrils playing through the night. There had been a lot of auroras since… And a lot of lightning.
The air flow wafted her nearly weightless body from its position. Melanie steeled herself to face the comm screen. More of the foreign, invading characters awaited her. Edging panic, Melanie translated the words, “I am Misha. You?”
He wanted her to speak to him.
Melanie spent the next fifty-seven orbits in the back of the ship, hiding among the hydroponic
s tanks, as far from the comm screen as she could be.
~~~
There were five more messages before Melanie answered. “Go away!” was all she sent. Misha responded with a long, excessively cheerful narrative about how he had been manipulating his orbital maneuvering system for months (How many orbits is that?!) to put his craft into a position where he could get a message to her around the curve of the planet. The message was cut off in the phrase, “short of fuel now, but…”
With a cool, relaxed certainty, Melanie slapped the airlock control. It was so clear, so obvious. Simply step outside into the nothingness and… The airlock wouldn’t cycle. Puzzled, she studied it. The outer door was open. Left open from the outside. She wondered who could have left the ship and not returned.
The continuation of the message came as her ship, falling in its endless orbit, passed over the ragged shapes of fjords. Clouds like frosting glazed the coastline. “But it was worth it,” the message said.
Stars That Sing the Requiem Page 3
