by Neil Clarke
In the nearly shadowless sunlight the ground was washed-out, two dimensional. Trish had a hard time finding footing, stumbling over rocks that were nearly invisible against the flat landscape. One foot in front of the other. Again. Again.
The excitement of the trek had long ago faded, leaving behind a relentless determination to prevail, which in turn had faded into a kind of mental numbness. Trish spent the time chatting with Karen, telling the private details of her life, secretly hoping that Karen would be pleased, would say something telling her she was proud of her. Suddenly she noticed that Karen wasn’t listening; had apparently wandered off on her sometime when she hadn’t been paying attention.
She stopped on the edge of a long, winding rille. It looked like a riverbed just waiting for a rainstorm to fill it, but Trish knew it had never known water. Covering the bottom was only dust, dry as powdered bone. She slowly picked her way to the bottom, careful not to slip again and risk damage to her fragile life-support system. She looked up at the top. Karen was standing on the rim waving at her. “Come on! Quit dawdling, you slowpoke—you want to stay here forever?”
“What’s the hurry? We’re ahead of schedule. The sun is high up in the sky, and we’re halfway around the moon. We’ll make it, no sweat.”
Karen came down the slope, sliding like a skiier in the powdery dust. She pressed her face up against Trish’s helmet and stared into her eyes with a manic intensity that almost frightened her. “The hurry, my lazy little sister, is that you’re halfway around the moon, you’ve finished with the easy part and it’s all mountains and badlands from here on, you’ve got six thousand kilometers to walk in a broken spacesuit, and if you slow down and let the sun get ahead of you, and then run into one more teensy little problem, just one, you’ll be dead, dead, dead, just like me. You wouldn’t like it, trust me. Now get your pretty little lazy butt into gear and move!
And, indeed, it was slow going. She couldn’t bound down slopes as she used to, or the broken strut would fail and she’d have to stop for painstaking repair. There were no more level plains; it all seemed to be either boulder fields, crater walls, or mountains. On the eighteenth day she came to a huge natural arch. It towered over her head, and she gazed up at it in awe, wondering how such a structure could have been formed on the moon.
“Not by wind, that’s for sure,” said Karen. “Lava, I’d figure. Melted through a ridge and flowed on, leaving the hole; then over the eons micrometeoroid bombardment ground off the rough edges. Pretty, though, isn’t it?”
“Magnificent.”
Not far past the arch she entered a forest of needle-thin crystals. At first they were small, breaking like glass under her feet, but then they soared above her, six-sided spires and minarets in fantastic colors. She picked her way in silence between them, bedazzled by the forest of light sparkling between the sapphire spires. The crystal jungle finally thinned out and was replaced by giant crystal boulders, glistening iridescent in the sun. Emeralds? Diamonds?
“I don’t know, kid. But they’re in our way. I’ll be glad when they’re behind us.”
And after a while the glistening boulders thinned out as well, until there were only a scattered few glints of color on the slopes of the hills beside her, and then at last the rocks were just rocks, craggy and pitted.
Crater Daedalus, the middle of the lunar farside. There was no celebration this time. The sun had long ago stopped its lazy rise, and was imperceptibly dropping toward the horizon ahead of them.
“It’s a race against the sun, kid, and the sun ain’t making any stops to rest. You’re losing ground.”
“I’m tired. Can’t you see I’m tired? I think I’m sick. I hurt all over. Get off my case. Let me rest. Just a few more minutes? Please?”
“You can rest when you’re dead.” Karen laughed in a strangled, highpitched voice. Trish suddenly realized that she was on the edge of hysteria. Abruptly she stopped laughing. “Get a move on, kid. Move!”
The lunar surface passed under her, an irregular gray treadmill.
Hard work and good intentions couldn’t disguise the fact that the sun was gaining. Every day when she woke up the sun was a little lower down ahead of her, shining a little more directly in her eyes.
Ahead of her, in the glare of the sun she could see an oasis, a tiny island of grass and trees in the lifeless desert. She could already hear the croaking of frogs: braap, braap, BRAAP!
No. That was no oasis; that was the sound of a malfunction alarm. She stopped, disoriented. Overheating. The suit air conditioning had broken down. It took her half a day to find the clogged coolant valve and another three hours soaked in sweat to find a way to unclog it without letting the precious liquid vent to space. The sun sank another handspan toward the horizon.
The sun was directly in her face now. Shadows of the rocks stretched toward her like hungry tentacles, even the smallest looking hungry and mean. Karen was walking beside her again, but now she was silent, sullen.
“Why won’t you talk to me? Did I do something? Did I say something wrong? Tell me.”
“I’m not here, little sister. I’m dead. I think it’s about time you faced up to that.”
“Don’t say that. You can’t be dead.”
“You have an idealized picture of me in your mind. Let me go. Let me go!”
“I can’t. Don’t go. Hey—do you remember the time we saved up all our allowances for a year so we could buy a horse? And we found a stray kitten that was real sick, and we took the shoebox full of our allowance and the kitten to the vet, and he fixed the kitten but wouldn’t take any money?”
“Yeah, I remember. But somehow we still never managed to save enough for a horse.” Karen sighed. “Do you think it was easy growing up with a bratty little sister dogging my footsteps, trying to imitate everything I did?”
“I wasn’t ever bratty.”
“You were too.”
“No, I wasn’t. I adored you.” Did she? “I worshipped you.”
“I know you did. Let me tell you, kid, that didn’t make it any easier. Do you think it was easy being worshipped? Having to be a paragon all the time? Christ, all through high school, when I wanted to get high, I had to sneak away and do it in private, or else I knew my damn kid sister would be doing it too.”
“You didn’t. You never.”
“Grow up, kid. Damn right I did. You were always right behind me. Everything I did, I knew you’d be right there doing it next. I had to struggle like hell to keep ahead of you, and you, damn you, followed effortlessly. You were smarter than me—you know that, don’t you?—and how do you think that made me feel?”
“Well, what about me? Do you think it was easy for me? Growing up with a dead sister—everything I did, it was ‘Too bad you can’t be more like Karen’ and ‘Karen wouldn’t have done it that way’ and ‘If only Karen had . . .’ How do you think that made me feel, huh? You had it easy—I was the one who had to live up to the standards of a goddamn angel.”
“Tough breaks, kid. Better than being dead.”
“Damn it, Karen, I loved you. I love you. Why did you have to go away?”
“I know that, kid. I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry. I love you too, but I have to go. Can you let me go? Can you just be yourself now, and stop trying to be me?”
“I’ll . . . I’ll try.”
“Goodbye, little sister.”
“Goodbye, Karen.”
She was alone in the settling shadows on an empty, rugged plain. Ahead of her, the sun was barely kissing the ridgetops. The dust she kicked up was behaving strangely; rather than falling to the ground, it would hover half a meter off the ground. She puzzled over the effect, then saw that all around her, dust was silently rising off the ground. For a moment she thought it was another hallucination, but then realized it was some kind of electrostatic charging effect. She moved forward again through the rising fog of moondust. The sun reddened, and the sky turned a deep purple.
The darkness came at her like a demon. Behind
her only the tips of mountains were illuminated, the bases disappearing into shadow. The ground ahead of her was covered with pools of ink that she had to pick her way around. Her radio locator was turned on, but receiving only static. It could only pick up the locator beacon from the Moonshadow if she got in line of sight of the crash site. She must be nearly there, but none of the landscape looked even slightly familiar. Ahead—was that the ridge she’d climbed to radio Earth? She couldn’t tell. She climbed it, but didn’t see the blue marble. The next one?
The darkness had spread up to her knees. She kept tripping over rocks invisible in the dark. Her footsteps struck sparks from the rocks, and behind her footprints glowed faintly. Triboluminescent glow, she thought—nobody has ever seen that before. She couldn’t die now, not so close. But the darkness wouldn’t wait. All around her the darkness lay like an unsuspected ocean, rocks sticking up out of the tidepools into the dying sunlight. The undervoltage alarm began to warble as the rising tide of darkness reached her solar array. The crash site had to be around here somewhere, it had to. Maybe the locator beacon was broken? She climbed up a ridge and into the light, looking around desperately for clues. Shouldn’t there have been a rescue mission by now?
Only the mountaintops were in the light. She aimed for the nearest and tallest mountain she could see and made her way across the darkness to it, stumbling and crawling in the ocean of ink, at last pulling herself into the light like a swimmer gasping for air. She huddled on her rocky island, desperate as the tide of darkness slowly rose about her. Where were they? Where were they?
Back on Earth, work on the rescue mission had moved at a frantic pace. Everything was checked and triple-checked—in space, cutting corners was an invitation for sudden death—but still the rescue mission had been dogged by small problems and minor delays, delays that would have been routine for an ordinary mission, but loomed huge against the tight mission deadline.
The scheduling was almost impossibly tight—the mission had been set to launch in four months, not four weeks. Technicians scheduled for vacations volunteered to work overtime, while suppliers who normally took weeks to deliver parts delivered overnight. Final integration for the replacement for Moonshadow, originally to be called Explorer but now hastily re-christened Rescuer, was speeded up, and the transfer vehicle launched to the Space Station months ahead of the original schedule, less than two weeks after the Moonshadow crash. Two shuttle-loads of propellant swiftly followed, and the transfer vehicle was mated to its aeroshell and tested. While the rescue crew practiced possible scenarios on the simulator, the lander, with engines inspected and replaced, was hastily modified to accept a third person on ascent, tested, and then launched to rendezvous with Rescuer. Four weeks after the crash the stack was fueled and ready, the crew briefed, and the trajectory calculated. The crew shuttle launched through heavy fog to join their Rescuerin orbit.
Thirty days after the unexpected signal from the moon had revealed a survivor of the Moonshadow expedition, Rescuer left orbit for the moon.
From the top of the mountain ridge west of the crash site, Commander Stanley passed his searchlight over the wreckage one more time and shook his head in awe. “An amazing job of piloting,” he said. “Looks like she used the TEI motor for braking, and then set it down on the RCS verniers.”
“Incredible,” Tanya Nakora murmured. “Too bad it couldn’t save her.” The record of Patricia Mulligan’s travels was written in the soil around the wreck. After the rescue team had searched the wreckage, they found the single line of footsteps that led due west, crossed the ridge, and disappeared over the horizon. Stanley put down the binoculars. There was no sign of returning footprints. “Looks like she wanted to see the moon before her air ran out,” he said. Inside his helmet he shook his head slowly. “Wonder how far she got?”
“Could she be alive somehow?” asked Nakora. “She was a pretty ingenious kid.”
“Not ingenious enough to breathe vacuum. Don’t fool yourself—this rescue mission was a political toy from the start. We never had a chance of finding anybody up here still alive.”
“Still, we had to try, didn’t we?”
Stanley shook his head and tapped his helmet. “Hold on a sec, my damn radio’s acting up. I’m picking up some kind of feedback—almost sounds like a voice.”
“I hear it too, Commander. But it doesn’t make any sense.”
The voice was faint in the radio. “Don’t turn off the lights. Please, please, don’t turn off your light . . .”
Stanley turned, to Nakora. “Do you . . . ?”
“I hear it, Commander . . . but I don’t believe it.”
Stanley picked up the searchlight and began sweeping the horizon. “Hello? Rescuer calling Astronaut Patricia Mulligan. Where the hell are you?”
The spacesuit had once been pristine white. It was now dirty gray with moondust, only the ragged and bent solar array on the back carefully polished free of debris. The figure in it was nearly as ragged.
After a meal and a wash, she was coherent and ready to explain.
“It was the mountaintop. I climbed the mountaintop to stay in the sunlight, and I just barely got high enough to hear your radios.”
Nakora nodded. “That much we figured out. But the rest—the last month—you really walked all the way around the moon? Eleven thousand kilometers?”
Trish nodded. “It was all I could think of. I figured, about the distance from New York to LA and back—people have walked that and lived. It came to a walking speed of just under ten miles an hour. Farside was the hard part—turned out to be much rougher than nearside. But strange and weirdly beautiful, in places. You wouldn’t believe the things I saw.”
She shook her head, and laughed quietly. “I don’t believe some of the things I saw. The immensity of it—we’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ll be coming back, Commander. I promise you.”
“I’m sure you will,” said Commander Stanley. “I’m sure you will.”
As the ship lifted off the moon, Trish looked out for a last view of the surface. For a moment she thought she saw a lonely figure standing on the surface, waving her goodbye. She didn’t wave back.
She looked again, and there was nothing out there but magnificent desolation.
1995, Revised 2018
Robert Reed is a prolific author with a fondness for the novella. Among Reed’s recent projects is polishing his past catalog, then publishing those stories on Kindle, using his daughter’s sketches for the covers. His novella, “A Billion Eves,” won the Hugo for Best Novella in 2007. His latest novel is The Dragons of Marrow.
WAGING GOOD
Robert Reed
1
The spaceport resembled a giant jade snowflake set on burnished glass. Not a year old, it already absorbed much of the moon’s traffic. Unarmored and exposed, the port didn’t have a single combat laser or any fighting ships at the ready. Fat new shuttles came and left without fear, a casual, careless prosperity thriving below. Who would have guessed? In the cold gray wash of earthshine . . . who could have known . . . ? When Sitta was growing up, people claimed that Nearside would remain empty for a thousand years. There was too much residual radiation, wise voices said. The terrain was too young and unstable. Besides, what right-thinking person would live with the earth overhead? Who could look at that world and not think of the long war and the billions killed?
Yet people were forgetting. That’s what the snowflake meant. For a moment, Sitta’s hands trembled and she ground her teeth. Then she caught herself, remembering that she was here because she too had forgotten the past, or at least forgiven it. That’s when she sighed and smiled in a tired, forgiving way, and blanking her monitor, she sat back in her seat, showing any prying eyes that she was a woman at peace.
The shuttle fired its engines, its touchdown gentle, almost imperceptible.
Passengers stood, testing the gravity. Most were bureaucrats attached to the earth’s provisional government—pudgy Martians, with a few Mercurians an
d Farsiders thrown into the political stew. They seemed happy, almost giddy, to be free of the earth. The shuttle’s crew were Belters, spidery-limbed and weak. Yet despite the moon’s pull, they insisted on standing at the main hatch, smiling and shaking hands, wishing everyone a good day and good travels to come. The pilot—three meters of brittle bone and waxy skin—looked directly at Sitta, telling her, “It’s been a pleasure serving you, my dear. An absolute joy.”
Eight years ago, banished from Farside, Sitta carried her most essential belongings inside an assortment of hyperfiber chests, sealed and locked. All were stolen when she reached the earth, and that’s where she learned how little is genuinely essential. Today, she carried a single leather bag, trim and simple. Unlockable, unobtrusive. Following the herd of bureaucrats, she entered a long curling walkway, robot sentries waiting, politely but firmly asking everyone to submit to a scan.
Sitta felt ready.
Waiting her turn, she made the occasional noise about having been gone too long.
“Too long,” she said twice, her voice entirely convincing.
The earth had left its marks. Once pretty in a frail, pampered way, Sitta had built heavier bones and new muscle, fats and fluid added in just the last few months. Her face showed the abuse of weather, save around her thin mouth. Toxins and a certain odd fungus had left her skin blotchy, scarred. Prettiness had evolved into a handsome strength. She needed that strength, watching the robots turn toward her, a dozen sensitive instruments reaching inside her possessions and her body, no place to hide.
But these were only routine precautions. More thorough examinations were endured in Athens and the orbiting station, and she was perfectly safe. There was nothing dangerous, nothing anyone could yet find—
—which was when the nearest robot hesitated, pointing one gray barrel at her swollen belly. What was wrong? Fear began, and remembering the sage advice of a smuggler, Sitta hid her fear by pretending impatience, asking her accuser, “What’s wrong? Are you broken?”
