Arthur Byrne describes it to me from the bubble world of his air-conditioned rental car. I can hear the rustling of paper over the phone, the latest findings strewn around the front seat of his Toyota. It is suppertime in Galway, Ireland. Cabbage and mash and a call from the astro-archaeology symposium some five-and-a-half thousand miles away.
“Arthur,” I tell him, “I’m out of that game. You know this.”
But an old friend like Art is not so easily dissuaded. While I retreated into programming and remote sensing, he became a field investigator. Orbital surveys of defunct satellites, season-long expeditions to the Lagrange Points; he knows the inner system like a lover’s face while I still get lost on the way to my own office. Now he is on Earth again, in California at the annual gathering. Long days in lecture after lecture and long nights drinking on the burnt grass outside the speakers’ rooms, I guess I should have been there too. But it’s the same every year, is it not? Wrong, Arthur tells me, because now it seems that someone has found it: “The greatest lost relic of the Space Race,” he says. “Untouched, preserved for the century and a half… Someone has finally found Apollo 11”.
Though of course, we’ve all seen Apollo 11. We’ve all floated over the grey wastes and descended to the clear dome of Tranquillity Base. It’s the stuff school trips are made of, interactive holograms and checklists under glass. We’ve all had the tour and been disappointed by the stubby little platform which remains, nothing but landing pads and empty fuel tanks. Where is the actual Eagle, the ascent stage? Where is the spacecraft that Armstrong and Aldrin flew? It is the question the guide is most often asked and he tells everyone, with near-superhuman patience, that after rendezvousing with the command module, Eagle’s ascent stage was jettisoned into lunar orbit and impacted “at a still unknown location”.
That was July 21st 1969, before the radar tracking of Apollo hardware was in practice and before the anomalies of lunar gravity had been fully mapped. For the last hundred and fifty years the ascent stage was a needle in a 38 million square kilometre haystack, a cratered, mountainous dustscape the size of Asia; a surface which, despite lidar altimetry and satellite mapping, still remains less well charted than the valleys and plains of the Earth’s ocean floors. Not that this stopped people looking, archaeologists in spacesuits circling the moon or peering down at the fines and regolith via orbital observatories controlled from Pasadena or Darmstadt or Tsukuba. A lot of people have spent their lives looking for that module, many of them good friends wasting away on one promising lead after another. Like Arthur is doing. Like Lena did, in her own backwards way.
There’s something which lures them in, you know. Apollo; it has a magic to it, the aura of another age. We were obsessed with it, growing up on the boggy hillsides of west Limerick, in parishes which seemed forever stuck in some unrelenting twentieth century. Handmade and heroic, Apollo was of a piece with that young world. While the net buzzed constantly with new developments, fusion drives and radiation shielding, we weren’t old enough to understand it all. Apollo was simpler, bolder; three men in a metal can slung from sphere to sphere. A good Irish name on one of them too: Michael Collins. Not the guerrilla in the grainy pictures but the man who stayed in orbit while the others made the landing. The most isolated human being there has ever been.
Of all of us, Arthur was the most taken with the Collins myth. I suppose he had to be, the way Lena and I formed a separate universe of our own. For years he devoted himself to Apollo’s esoteric loneliness. He travelled all across the United States, to every site which manufactured components for the program. He oversaw studies of gravitational dynamics and orbital projections, led eager postgraduates in field trips across the rilles and wrinkle-ridges of the lunar surface. If Eagle was out there then he meant to find it, retrieve and restore it so it might inspire once again. For Arthur, you see, the study of Apollo was not just facts and figures. No, it was something more, an act of resurrection, an effort to recreate the pure optimism of that first real human embarkation to the stars.
Now, with the jet scream of Miramar booming across the sun-baked freeway, Arthur is babbling down the line about coordinates and magnetic signatures. His voice is wild, an echo of the dark wind threatening my windows here in Galway. Perhaps that’s why I half expected Arthur to be despondent, the prize of his life’s search found by someone else.
“But you don’t get it,” he says. “This is brilliant. They might have it marked on a map, but someone still has to go up there and bring it back.”
I’m stunned. If someone discovers it, if someone—
“I’m going,” Arthur says, “I’m going up there to find it and I’m asking you to come with me.”
2
Apollo. God of light and of the sun, of truth and prophecy and medicine, music and poetry and art. A name with attractive connotations for the greatest human undertaking of the day, a name with power. I consider its implications on my flight along the coast of Africa, south from Ireland to rich little Gabon where the elevator touches down. As the plane banks over the ocean I can see it, a single stroke from Earth to sky, thin as a hair, with multistorey cars racing up and down like the chariots of the God himself. I meet Arthur, fresh from California, in the terminal lounge. Yes, Apollo. Call and even I will still come running.
We had grown up together, Arthur Byrne and I. His father was a farmer, a steward of cruel land who had resisted the convenience of twenty-first century technologies. Old Denis Byrne had looked only to the past and it had held him back. His patchwork hills were just not viable and had not been for generations. I remember once he caught us playing with a model spacecraft, a battered old Shuttle or an Orion we had built out of a kit. The old man couldn’t stomach it, his own boy tempted by the stars. I can still hear him ranting as he tried to wrest the spacecraft out of Arthur’s hands. But Art was always quick, or at least he was before so much time away from Earth. Together we raced into the high fields and buried the model deep inside a wyne of hay. Though of course we lost it all the same. Like animals with a trinket or a morsel of food, we soon forgot where it was that we had hidden it.
Years later, once we had left for university, it became rare for Art to ever see his father. Yet he was the old man’s son whether he chose to admit it or not, and he too was fascinated by what had come before, by the history of a future which by then was playing out around us. His doctoral work was little more than an extension of the games we’d played as children, writing reconstructions of the early missions to be used in classrooms. Immersive holographic learning through which students could insert themselves into the story, play the part of engineer or astronaut. But by then Arthur too was playing a part. It was Lena who first noticed it, the gradual transition from academic to aesthete. She was already sick at that point but we got married anyway, and while Arthur was off retrieving Saturn upper stages from solar orbits and refurbishing them for exhibition, we were honeymooning down in Venezuela. That was our life from there on out: Earthbound, relinquishing the sky to Art as micro- or zero-gravity only worsened Lena’s illness.
Then, the Taurus-Littrow incident on the edge of the Sea of Serenity. Arthur convinced UNESCO to open up the Apollo 17 site. He had the notion of returning it to Earth. Not just Challenger’s descent stage or the Moon buggy, but the entire valley, every rock and boulder, every abrasive kilogram of lunar dust hoovered up, shipped down the elevator and recreated on the homeworld. There was talk of Nevada as its destination, out in the desert beneath a dome which would mirror that constructed at Tranquillity. An outrageous project, but then authenticity has always meant everything to Art. It took him years to piece together all the funding but the accident raised questions, four members of his team killed in the crash of a support craft. Blameless Arthur could only watch as the investigation dragged on. Twenty-two months of interviews and inquests, nearly two whole years of bad publicity. Quietly the investors began to disengage.
Arthur lapsed into his more obsessive tendencies after that, my best fri
end retreating into sims and archives, though I didn’t even notice. Those were the years of Lena’s final decline, her own body having turned against her. Muscle atrophy not unlike that suffered by the early space travellers; inability to chew or swallow, eventually to breathe on her own. She died of complications from a respiratory infection, at home, in the early hours of a summer morning, her immune system too weak to fight it off. In the final months she had refused all treatment. Nothing I said could change her mind and the only thing that mattered was finishing her book, that massive study of astronauts in the popular imagination. Hers was the flipside of Arthur’s solitary inquiry. Apollo; it had taken the pair of them and left me alone in a barren, sterile world. A dead place without Lena’s love or Arthur’s company, a thin layer of fine grey dust settling on every mark and scar and memory. My own private Moon.
3
The Earth falls away beneath us, a brief shock of g as the survey capsule fires its engines. I have loved and feared trans-lunar injection all my life, the moment when one leaves the prudent gravity of home and embraces the promise and the peril of space. The moment when anything can happen.
“I never thanked you,” I tell Art. “Not properly.”
“Hmmm?”
“After Lena died—”
He looks up from his instruments.
“—I thought I was on my own.”
“Yes, well,” he says, and moments pass.
After the service for Lena I spent numb weeks alone in our apartment. The university called it compassionate leave but it was a collapse, pure and simple; concentrated, vertiginous grief of a degree for which I had no frame of reference. I was drawn to the places which were hers: the armchair beneath the lamp in the corner of the living room, the worn leather sofa beneath the shelves in the study.
Of all things it was her book which roused me, ghost of her enthusiastic self. It was months before I could open up her database but when I did I found it waiting. Her last request had been that I shepherd the manuscript through to publication. I had been avoiding that, not out of cowardice but because I knew it would be the last thing we would do together. Yet even when I did begin I had no idea what to do. The introduction crippled me anew, a tyranny of blank screens which dragged on for months. In desperation I had the house AI synthesise a composite introduction from a hundred different monographs and festschrifts, a kind of Frankenstein document from which I hoped to glean patterns or elements or some kind of inspiration to overcome my block, but still nothing; nothing could do justice to how I felt about her.
That was when Arthur re-entered my world, arriving at my door one October morning.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I missed the service.”
He had been off-planet, he told me, wielding a cane with a knuckle of Armalcolite embellishing its grip as he had not yet restored his muscles fully. His presence was a jolt; it woke up memories of lying on the hillsides of home and pointing out the constellations, of lunches and endless teas in college commissaries, of the first and last time he tried to set me up with a girl. Lena; her empty chair between us in the living room, neither of us wanting to sit in it. We talked all night about her. Her enormous smile and the way she doubled over when she laughed; how she would stare at you through her big, awkward glasses when she was drunk; the fact that she was smarter than Art and I combined.
That was how I decided on the intro to her book, a conversation between Arthur and myself, her husband and her oldest friend. An expert in the person and an expert in the field, we cast the best times of our lives into words which would endure. It was a dialogue with an unspoken presence, Lena herself, an absence in the heart of the text who, though always present, could never be addressed.
“Hey,” Arthur says, his hand on my shoulder. Somehow I had nodded off, weightless in the cabin’s womb of straps and harnesses and blinking lights.
“Where are we?” I ask, but the answer is clear from the grey, impacted hemisphere which looms ahead of us, its fiercely lit mountain peaks bright like negatives of their own black shadows. And then, as it swells closer again, the ever-present handiwork of man: mobile mining rigs to strip the foothill regolith of volatiles, radio towers, domed craters housing thousands, the glint of life from the skylights of lava tube laboratories and the strobe of marker posts designating hard packed highways across the dusty surface.
Here so the long culmination of selenological time.
The endless footprints of humanity.
4
All day we circle above the Ocean of Storms, not a body of water but a basaltic plain, a vast and ancient lunar blemish once thought to be the harbinger of tumult, inclemency, and poor fortune on the waves of Earth. Curious how those who worked the sea could ascribe such power to a desert. Or perhaps it isn’t; maybe similar superstitions take hold among the inhabitants of Copernicus or Aristarchus when they look up through their domes and see the bright blue waters sparkling above them, the dust and the oceans linked forever in the minds of men? I have been to neither of those cities, two great settlements terraced inside the impact basins of Procellarum, and so I cannot say.
Lena would have gone of course, had things been different, and Arthur surely has been there, dragging himself noisily along the velcroed sidewalks from the assay office to the breaker’s yard to any other nook or module which might have held the secrets of Apollo.
And what will I do if we really find it, that wreck of dreams, that race memory of metal? Palm pressed to the cool glass of the observation bubble, I tell myself that it’s impossible to guess. A lie of course; I know exactly why I’ve come here.
“The point of it is mystery,” Lena told me once. It was a winter’s night perhaps a year after we were married. We sat across from each other at the table while the articulated limbs of the autochef gathered up our empty dishes. She was still herself back then. Warm. Lively. I remember the look of absolute certainty on her face as she gesticulated wildly, causing the apartment’s slender robot to swerve and duck.
“Look at it up there,” she went on, sweeping the fork towards the window and the cold moon which dipped low above the bay. I could see the glint of lunar settlements spread across its face and, closer to home, the running lights of shuttles darting back and forth along the coast.
“Everyone talks about politics, about the Cold War and the Space Race,” Lena was saying, “but in spite of that, on a deeper, fundamental level we just wanted to know what was up there, you know?”
“I know.”
She smiled. “The point of the book isn’t just how astronauts are portrayed, it’s what they represent for us. It’s trying to understand why they have such a hold on our imagination, about why we bother to tell their stories at all.”
“The mystery of mystery?”
“You’re an ass,” Lena laughed. “You and Art both.”
It was a point between them, the role of the space archaeologist.
“If Arthur has his way,” she said, “there’ll be no mysteries anymore.”
“There’s barely any now though, is there? Really?” I poured more wine in her glass and then in mine. “There’s a few hundred tonnes of misplaced scrap whirling around the inner system—”
“It’s the idea of it,” she said. She closed her eyes as she sipped her drink. “The notion that there are things we don’t know from only a century and a half ago. Frontierism ought to have its mysteries, don’t you agree? Roanoke Colony, the Franklin expedition, Dasein’s landing? It’s an impetus for others to explore.”
“You’re contradicting yourself.” I leaned forward, one elbow on the glass table, my head resting on that hand. “Surely the point of exploration is to find answers.”
“Ah, but they’re not real answers to be found. They’re sigils, they’re myths. The early settlers of America, the polar explorers and the Martian colonists? All of them made their own mythologies. Foundational texts wrought from things they could not understand. Things which, frankly, were downright impossible.”
&
nbsp; “Like not knowing where a crucial part of Apollo 11 is?”
“Exactly. That kind of mystery; that’s a driving force. Honestly, I hope we never find it. It would hurt, I think. It would hurt a lot of things. The mystique of the twentieth century, the reputations of the pioneers—”
“The place of astronauts in the popular imagination?” I smiled.
“You are an ass,” she said. “But I love you all the same.” Reaching across the table she took my free hand in her own and squeezed it gently.
“Contact,” Arthur says.
I look across at him, the cabin restraints suddenly tight against my chest. There’s a hint of gravity, just for a moment, as his fingers move in complex patterns over the sensors and the little ship responds with thrusters to reduce our speed.
Arthur taps the screen between us, magnifies the image, and there it is: Eagle, resting on its side, almost unrecognisable. Without the gold skirt of the descent stage discarded at Tranquillity, the lander is hard to describe. A grey module buried so deep in the lunar dust that it’s no wonder satellite lenses could not resolve it. What’s visible is awkward and boxy, its shape not anything there has ever been a word for. I have seen realistic fabs and mock-ups, even 14’s recovered Antares floating in the Smithsonian, but still the size of it astounds me: so small! Room enough for two men just to stand; only barely room for them to sleep. An airy matchbox anchored onto tanks and thrusters and a cowled equipment bay that’s been crushed by the force of impact.
“Gently…”
I look at Arthur but he is not talking to me. He is coaxing our own little craft towards the surface, down to a rendezvous with, what? History? Destiny? I cringe at words like that but it’s true, Arthur has been waiting his whole life for today. He’s invested as much effort into finding this as Lena did into hoping it stayed lost.
Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014 Page 7
