by Neil Clarke
“You know, fifty years ago astronauts couldn’t take more than seven pounds of material with them,” she said to a camera one day, in a slightly different format than she had related the same statistic, earlier, for this network’s ratings rival. “For perspective, that’s about the equivalent of a small palmtop computer-printer. I’m glad I’m coming up here now,” and here she lifted an ostentatiously thick hardback book and set it on a shelf.
“Do you like to read, Sergeant Rickles?” asked the newscaster, after a four hundred thousand mile pause.
“Very much so,” she said, loading the shelf with more leather spines. “And the folks at Harper-Doubleday were kind enough to provide me with some of my favorites.”
On the first supply flight, two months later, nearly ten million viewers tuned in as the Vice President toured the completed Fort Discovery moonbase and presented Virginia with a signed first edition of the President’s autobiography. Virginia thanked the Vice President and his entourage, then made them all tea on the facility’s infrared induction cooktop.
The early supply shuttles came in so fast Virginia was less afraid of loneliness than of not getting her work done.
Though the primary purpose of her mission was, simply, to live on the Moon—to prove to the skeptics that space exposure was not lethal, to advertise the products and technologies that would fund later NASA missions, and to excite people about the possibility of luxury moon tourism—a few genuine experiments had attached themselves along for the ride. All were designed to look after themselves, but they required calibration and monitoring, and it wasn’t long before Virginia began to resent the interruptions.
“But I told you, I don’t need any more food!” she yelled at the monitor one day, while the deputy director listened impassively. “I’ve got fourteen crates out there. Isn’t the idea that I’ll be self-sustaining anyway?”
“Never hurts to have a backup. And the food will definitely be eaten. We’ll use it on other missions.”
“And paint? What the hell do you expect me to do with paint?”
“Benjamin Moore is donating twelve million dollars and all the labor and supplies to paint the next two space shuttles, Virginia. Use your imagination.”
So Virginia painted childish murals on the walls of the kitchen and living area, murals of trees and deserts and fish under the sea. Then some station got the bright idea to encourage children to send their drawings and poems to the moonbase, with the envelope addressed, “Sgt. Virginia Rickles, Fort Discovery, The Moon, U.S.A.,” and Virginia’s murals disappeared under reams of paper and wax.
An unexpected resurgence of Virginia’s popularity came when the President and Executive Host booked a luxury shuttle cruise and requested a stopover at the moonbase.
They could not have come at a better time. The hydroponic garden had really taken off; the Plexiglas window in the mess was a sheet of green, dotted with tiny flecks of red fruit. Some of the experiments were beginning to yield definitive results, and an automatic physical had just pronounced Virginia in better shape now than when she arrived on the moon.
The Executive Host was much taller than he looked on television. Virginia found herself smiling whenever he said anything to her.
“You know, my mother was a First Lady,” he told her on their third day, while they walked through the hydroponic garden with the news crew tagging discreetly behind.
“I know. I watched her special on expanding the White House when I was a kid.”
“You and everyone else. She never really got over that, how controversial it became.”
“I never understood why. I thought the new wings were beautiful. She had exquisite taste.”
“Well, she’d be happy to hear you say so.”
“Was it strange to move back after the election?”
“A little. It was like visiting your old high school.”
“I never did that.”
“Visited?”
“No, went to high school. I was homeschooled.” The Executive Host looked at her then. He did not find her a pretty woman, though there was something attractive in her utter health. There had been one unexpected physical result of long-term space exposure; her pupils were permanently dilated, with a mere sliver of brown surrounding the black like a hemisphere of chocolate truffle. The Executive Host wondered if she thought of herself as a Cortes or a da Gama, hacking through a jungle of vacuum to find a new world.
The President caught up with them then, looking worried. They were needed back on Earth, she said. The situation with some other country was deteriorating. Even as the President mentioned who, Virginia felt the name of the enemy sliding away from her mind like a bar of wet soap.
America was too distracted for space now. Even the elementary schools stopped sending her pen-pal messages. She continued to broadcast faithfully every week, explaining a piece of technology in simple terms, talking about her AIBO as if it were a real dog. She had to stop showing it, though; it had shorted after wandering into her shower stall.
“No, no, everything’s under control down here,” said the Deputy Director. There was an unusual amount of background noise. “We’re going to send up another shuttle to collect the seedlings.”
The shuttle never arrived. It was blown up, and there was no money to build a new one. The only things left were the commercial craft and the communications satellites, all turned inward.
“You’ve never asked,” he said to her on another night. He had starting calling a few times a week. She brewed two mugs of coffee when he called, let one become cool and bitter while she drank the other and listened.
“I’ve never asked what,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Never asked to come home. Never asked to get off the base.”
There is a long pause, during which the director thinks about Virginia. He realizes she has no replacement halogen bulbs. He realizes he wants her to drink that second cup of coffee, that it will break some small unsullied chunk of his heart if she throws that cold liquid down the reclamation drain. He realizes he expects to die soon, possibly within hours.
“Well, you’ve had a lot on your mind down there,” she says finally, swirling her index finger in the dark liquid. Virginia is thinking that she has never, in her life, thought of anywhere on Earth as “home.” This base is not home either, just a place reflecting all the entities that have encased her; an old mattress with the springs poking through. “I always knew this was going to be a long mission. I trained for this, I wanted this. I’m better equipped, literally and figuratively, to be alone up here than any astronaut outside of Russia. I’ll be okay.”
The director’s pause is shorter. He knows if he opens his mouth to tell her that there is no Russia anymore, he will never be able to forgive himself.
“That’s true. Now, tell me about the EKG readings.” Virginia drinks her cold coffee while the Deputy Director’s heart flutters like a bicycle streamer, waiting for the bombs to begin again.
Four weeks later, Virginia tries to raise the Deputy Director. It is difficult to make a call; there is a lot of interference. She eventually gets a signal, but the control room is empty. Though there are no windows on the station, a camera is always trained on Earth. The view when she switches on her video screen is cloudy and unhelpful.
The wall calendar tells her it is Christmas.
She has found a gift for herself. It was shoved in the corner of her bunk, where, on some unremembered morning shortly after her arrival, she used it to stop a shelf from wobbling. The manual for the AIBO. It is in Japanese, but she has many different language dictionaries, and it might allow her to fix the toy.
When Virginia was small, her mother and stepfather lived, very briefly, in a bed and breakfast in northern Vermont. She was with her mother just on holidays then, and the first one she spent there was Christmas. There is very little she remembers about that Christmas; it passed in a smear of dry turkey and presents reflecting generic, girlish interests not her own. But she r
emembers the fire in the massive stone fireplace, glittering off the wineglass tipped in her mother’s loosening fingers.
The children’s drawings do not burn so bright, in the glass dutch oven on the induction cooktop. But she watches anyway, whistling tunelessly.
There are two symptoms of long-term space exposure. The first, the dilation of her pupils, causes her little discomfort except to make the white plastic of her surroundings luminously bright. The second she discovers with no warning one day while she is masturbating furiously in the shower; a faint tingling on the pads of her fingers irritated by repetitive motion. She gives up after a few minutes, simply collapses to the fiberglass floor of the stall and lets the reclaimed water sluice over her head.
Behind the bathroom is a small gymnasium; a rack of free weights, a yoga ball, and an elliptical crosstrainer. Her mission briefs stipulate she spend twenty minutes in here every day, but lately she has been stretching it to two hours. She runs through her routine and then improvises workouts never attempted before; hooking her knees around the handbars of the elliptical crosstrainer and powering it with her hands, strange balletic swings with her wrists and feet strapped to five pound weights. Sometimes she passes out from exertion and awakens later, clammy with sweat.
She has not increased her food intake. Her hips winnow down to knobs. Her clavicles work like dull knives trying to cut through the peel of a saltwhite tomato.
“I wonder if there’s still a Disney World,” she says to no one in particular one day. She hasn’t spoken in weeks, just sat at the table with the unchanging white light growing brighter and brighter.
“I wonder if there’s still a Disney World,” she says again, to taste the flavor of the echoes that come back to her off the gleaming plastic surfaces. “I never went to Disney World. I can’t remember if I ever wanted to. Maybe when I was really young. I think I once saw a special on the travel network about the underground passages in Disney World. They were carpeted, and the announcer said they were cooler and quieter than the park. There was a plush bench against a hall, and Snow White and Winnie the Pooh were sitting next to each other. Just . . . talking. I remember wanting to visit there—not the park, the underground passages. I wonder if they still exist. I wonder if the passages protected the workers. Maybe Snow White made a barricade and is trying to tunnel her way back to the surface. Maybe there are armies down there, battalions of Mickeys trying to save America. I’m an American. America. I’m a citizen of the United States of America.”
And here Virginia cries, finally. She hasn’t cried in two years. She cries because of the strength of the heart beating in her chest, she cries because even her great immunity against loneliness is still mutable, still sieved with tiny holes of feeling through which the whites of the countertops can pass. She cries because she realizes, finally, that she is only forty-three years old.
One day, Virginia is methodically going through every drawer in the base.
She is counting all the spoons, all the screwdriver bits, all the Band-Aids, and organizing them along more whimsical lines. The drawer of all things that smell sweet will be next to the drawer of things that are yellow. She is not sure, yet, into which the pencils will go.
She finds many nuts and bolts; four tall ones, sixteen stumpy little ones, four with wing screws. Her idea comes to her almost without thought, and she has broken out the silver cans of Benjamin Moore paint. The alternating teal and lime colored squares go on the table, and Virginia is as bouncy as a child waiting for them to dry enough to play chess.
She begins the next day, but it is no good. The chess squares begin to gnaw at her mind; no amount of workout-derived blackouts can keep them at bay. She tries sneaking up on the game, shoving pawns along senseless lines while passing between the kitchen and gym. She sees the eyebolts in her sleep, which has a gray hue from the light passing through her eyelids to her gaping retinae.
“I need another game,” she decides one day. “If I’m playing two games at once I won’t be able to plan as far ahead.” The kitchen agrees with her.
She plays this game with spice canisters against herb tins, on a black and pink field much larger than the other. The games reproduce exponentially. Sheets from experimental schematics against pieces of a page-a-day calendar with jokes about cats. Components of a microscope against burned-out lightbulbs. Balls of wadded duct tape against knots of her own hair. The surfaces of her base become a fractal meadow of colors, echoes of which invade her sleep and give her dreams of peaches that taste of onion and sawdust.
It occurs to Virginia one day that she can go outside, collect some rocks for more chess pieces. Virginia has never left the station. There is a suit in the airlock; it is slightly too large for her and has a faint chemical smell.
Virginia trips as the pop of expanding air knocks her off balance. Her cosseted shoulder bumps softly against the portal jamb. She takes a few steps outside, dizzy with fear.
Above her, the black is a twitching membrane the color of chloroform. Being under it makes her skin feel nauseous, like licking a battery with some shameful orifice. Her eyes quest around for something normal to latch onto, and they find the Earth. She stands, buffeted a little by the processes of her body in the low gravity, and stares at the Earth, shrouded in a scum of cloud, only interrupted occasionally by a thin slash of blue. She stares, thirsty for land, and finally she sees it, an obscene brown bulge, the Florida peninsula denuded. She goes back inside the base and tries to calm the knocking of her heart.
Virginia attempts suicide only once.
She is outside again; she walks in the suit every day now. It makes its own oxygen, recharging enough in the evening to give her eight hours of breath should she need it. There are many rocks outside, and she has carved some with an arc welder, making a landscape of rough-hewn squirrels and jellyfish.
She is shaping some stone with her absurd spatula mittens into an approximation of a sleeping cat. The mittens tremble, stop. The stone cools quickly. The arc welder bounces slowly when it pillows into the sparkling dust. Virginia reaches behind her back and locates the small jet pack, meant to be used to locomote quickly in the low gravity.
She switches it on and lies back, and the obscene black sucks her up like a milkshake.
After an hour the pack runs out of fuel. She has no way of knowing how far up she has gone. She just lies there, her eyes aching with abyss. Her mouth moves, a mephitic lullaby of nonsense syllables rocking her someplace beyond sleep.
But she does not clear the gravity well, and after five additional hours she comes to a soft landing in the dust. For a few moments she holds her breath. Then she stands and follows her homing readout back to the base.
“All right,” she says later, to the kitchen. “Maybe not today. But it’s okay. I know it’s there for me now. No rush.”
Next Christmas, she burns the AIBO in the dutch oven, the little pieces of doggy head glinting oddly in the firelight.
Thirty-one years pass.
PART II
The mission crew of the BRSCG Sangre de Christo stands outside the hemisphere of pitted polycarbonate and tries to understand what they are seeing.
Around them, the moon rocks have been carved into a forest of skyscrapers and half-licked Tootsie pops. Mutant snails with spider legs gambol through the razor shadows. Faces stare up from arcane root structures, surrounded with spaceboot prints. Matteo, the mission leader, curses softly under his breath and wishes that their political officer were there to atomize their surroundings with holy water.
Behind him, Lourdes approaches the portal door with a large diamond drill. At a nod from Matteo, she flicks the switch and starts cutting through the outer airlock.
Matteo turns, stares at the gibbous Earth. He thinks the light-sprawl illuminating the cloud cover just at the horizon line might be Guatemala City. In the privacy of his mind he still names it thus, in the precise English of his Jesuit lizard-memory. La Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción is clunky to him. Commandeered prose, l
ike the components of the ship that brought him here. Like what they are doing to this building.
Next to him, the communications officer tugs his elbow.
The airlock portal has opened. From the inside.
For a few moments they just stand there, their breath misting the inside of their helmets. Matteo moves first, his half-hop looking oddly enthusiastic. The rest follow. Once inside the portal, repressurization is soundless within their helmets. A long pause, during which Lourdes fingers the controls of the diamond drill, and then the inner portal opens.
They walk inside, slowly. Before them is a warren, lit by sputtering lightbulbs and covered with senseless tessellations of paint and organic matter. Lourdes kneels, staring at a phalanx of neatly balled dust. The only piece of recognizable architecture is a wall, so designated because a portal yawns in it; ropy vines crawl through, overspreading the space above his head with stalactites of banana.
In his ear mike, Lourdes screams softly.
Matteo approaches. The space where she is looking was once a kitchen, now painted matte black and covered with powdery drawings of dogs and computer chips. A glass pot sits on the stove, full of burning gingerbread men. And on the floor, an elderly woman covered in a curtain of moon-colored hair crouches. Her eyes are black pools. She is thin as a skeleton.
“Your hands grew back,” she says after a moment, looking at the burning cookies. “That’s nice.”
Inside the Sangre de Christos landing shuttle, a small digital recorder plays Gloria Estefan, and everyone but Virginia is dancing.
The Guatemalan astronauts are friendly with each other. They have trained together for years—learned to read the argots of dozens of dead empires, guessed when gold could be replaced with copper. They had all received Extreme Unction on a live television broadcast before taking off on this, the first space mission since the war. But now they are here and alive, and they celebrate, drinking aguardiente from plastic bags. The political officer snoozes with his feet on the table.
