by Neil Clarke
Lourdes is the only other woman. Her left hand grabs invisible cloth and throws it around like a matador as the men hand her over from one to the other. Between songs, Lourdes talks to Virginia; quick bursts of furtive pidgin English dropped while she watches the political officer. She has no idea if Virginia can understand or not.
“Someday, I would like to be a nun. Maybe there will be convents here when I am older. We could be called Las Hermanas de la Señora de la Luna,”she confides seriously. “Do you know what that means?”
Virginia shakes her head.
“You can be our hermit. You’ll bring us luck!” She giggles. Virginia cocks her head quizzically, reaches toward Lourdes’s jawbone with the tips of her fingers. She touches, then shies away as if she has been shocked.
“No, it’s okay, see?” she takes Virginia’s hand again, brings it to her face. “Real. Verdadera.”
Virginia’s hand trembles there, papery and warm on the down of Lourdes’s face.
“Verdadera. We aren’t going to disappear, Miss America. You’re safe now. You’re with friends.”
One of the other crew members sweeps her up then, and she dances, throwing a smile to Virginia. Smiles are interesting. Virginia wishes her face would do that.
“Friends,” she says, thinking of antique automobiles. No one hears her.
“I keep telling you, she isn’t capable of understanding the Creed!” Matteo in his stateroom, speaking to the Commissariat.
“This isn’t my decision, Matteo. This comes directly from the Holy See. And she must be baptized as well.”
“She’s an old mad woman. She’s been alone for decades.”
“She’s an American. She’s an enemy of the Guatemalan people.”
“She doesn’t know who we are! I don’t even think she understands a word we say to her.”
“You speak English. I’m prepared to absolve you if you need to translate the Creed for her.”
“She needs a doctor. She needs to be back on Earth.”
“That is out of the question. She’s a political liability, and you can’t spare the weight.”
“I doubt she weighs more than eighty pounds. We can leave the diamond drill. We’ll get it on our next visit.”
“Absolutely not. You think there are many of those left? She’s waited this long. She can wait a little longer.”
“This is insane. It would be kinder just to kill her.”
“Are you accusing the Holy See of fallibility?”
“I . . . no, of course not. Forgive me.” Matteo switches off the console, sits on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands.
The next morning, Virginia isn’t in her bed.
Lourdes discovers her absence first, going into her bedroom early in the morning with a cup of mate and a hairbrush. The blanket is folded into an origami swan on the bed; it reminds Lourdes of the napkins she has seen in pictures of bourgeois restaurants. She drops the mate to the floor. The cup bounces as she screams.
Matteo is the one who discovers the missing space suit.
Lourdes begged to go out looking for her, but the political officer pointed out that they could wander for hours and never find her. He said a brief mass to Saint Anthony and Saint Joseph of Cupertino, and then told them all to get back to work.
But no one could. Lourdes paced back and forth, a string of coral rosary beads in her fingers. The political officer drank a little tequila from a hip flask and went back to sleep. Matteo played chess, flicking his eyes back and forth to the outside camera feed. He saw her first, stumbling back to the station, and shouted to the others to give way, leave room at the airlock.
Virginia stepped back in, took off the helmet. They all looked at each other, inexplicably bitter and relieved.
Then Virginia speaks. “Queen to G5, queen takes rook. Then bishop to H3, check,” she says in flawless Spanish.
“Madre de Dios,” whispers Lourdes, running to Virginia and throwing her arms around the bulky suit. “Està un milagroì”
“Excellent,” said the political officer sleepily. “Now she can be educated!”
Matteo swallows angrily. He turns and his eyes alight on the chessboard.
“King to D4,” he says, shoving the pieces.
“Bishop to A5,” she says, her head still resting on Lourdes’s shoulder.
“You’re very good, Miss America. Or do you have a name?”
There is silence then; Lourdes is afraid to move. Then she feels a tiny drop of water fall into the hollow of her neck.
“Virginia,” she says. Then, “Bishop takes pawn.”
Matteo does his best.
He tries to teach her to swear allegiance to the principles of Catholic Socialism. Virginia is absently poking her fingernail into a sore she has worried into her cheek. Her other hand is wrapped around Lourdes’s wrist, tapping out a meandering staccato rhythm on the veins. The red coral rosary is around her neck; the beads make soft, knucklebone sounds as she sways her neck back and forth.
“Matteo, just stop it!” cries Lourdes. Last night, she offered timidly to stay in Virginia’s place; a request she knew would be declined, but she made it anyway. They are almost out of power. The commissariat has not changed his mind; the political officer refuses to intercede. They are returning to the Earth, and Virginia must remain. The thought makes Matteo furious and Lourdes sick. But there is nothing for it. And he will tell her, now.
Matteo stands. “You’re right. Miss Virginia?” he looks at her, switches to English. “Miss Virginia, we have to leave. We have to go back to Earth. Only for a little while, you understand? You can stay here. You don’t have to go back to your base. We’re going to leave you the music player, and we’ll be back soon. Maybe a few months.”
Virginia looked at him, and he was afraid for a moment she had relapsed, that his words just fell into the black hollows of her eyes and made no impression. But then her jaw collapsed, her head ducked into the painful sharp shoulders. She clutched Lourdes, howling pitifully.
“No, no no!” she screamed. Lourdes was sobbing now, saying she was sorry, over and over again, in Spanish, English, even in Latin.
Then, suddenly, a fist reached out, flashing with a whisper of silver as it landed alongside Virginia’s neck. Her black eyes rolled back in her head and she fell still, twitching. The political officer withdrew the needle, his soft hands catching her on the way down.
“There,” he said. “Now we can leave in peace.”
Matteo punched the man in the jaw and he fell like a stone.
Lourdes and the political officer made the last sweep through the station, making sure they missed nothing. Matteo was already handcuffed in the shuttle. Virginia was in a life bed, still sleeping. Once it was switched on, the life bed was designed to keep all vital signs steady, provide nutrition, and keep her comfortable until they came back and woke her up.
Lourdes kneeled next to the life bed and took the thin hand in hers.
“I am sorry, Miss Virginia. I will be coming back soon. I have already volunteered to join the first order here. We will be back in a year, maybe a little longer. You will never be alone again. I am sorry.”
Virginia’s eyes do not stir, but she squeezes Lourdes’s hand.
“No more thinking,” she says, so softly Lourdes can barely hear. “No more thinking.”
“No more . . . yes, that will do.” The political officer was behind Lourdes; she had not heard him, but he heard Virginia. As he walked out of the station, she could see a look of excitement on his long face.
Matteo was penanced to ten years of missionary work for insubordination, and thus not present when the political officer presented his plan for Virginia. She would never have been allowed back on Earth, Matteo reflected later. She would have been stoned in the street, or sent to one of the criollo gulags. He should have known that the real reason they wanted her to remain was so they could figure out a way to humiliate her.
Maybe it was kinder anyway, he told himself. She got
her wish. Maybe her last feeling before they lobotomized her was some ponderous gratitude.
A camera crew went back with the political officer, to perform the operation. They only broadcast the result, not the operation itself; if Virginia fought for her life, cried and begged for consciousness, Matteo never learned of it. Overall, it was disappointing television; a woman with no mind might just as well be daydreaming. It was the political officer who found the solution. He got the idea to place a video monitor in front of her vacant face, its display reading static. The angle made it look like it was sprouting from her neck like a flower on a milk-colored stem. The image was broadcast all over Guatemala, put on the backs of playing cards and graffiti’d on buildings; a pair of bony shoulders draped in the bloodied remains of an American flag, topped by an empty screen staring into nothing.
When Sister Lourdes and the nuns returned one year later, the first thing Lourdes did was lift Virginia’s limpid body out of her life bed, and move her back into the corner of the mess. Then she turned on the music, and cried a bit, and picked up their conversation where they had left off.
Virginia dreams static dreams of space, sitting in the corner of the Guatemalan station/convent. She is washed, fed, her hair is combed. On feast days the nuns will dress her and carry her on a fiberglass bower through the corridors. Her eyes remain open, staring into nothing—little jewels of cotton-dry amber, the pupils retreated to some empty cardboard box inside. And on Saturday nights, a swirl of frantic life surrounds her, the voices of people dancing and laughing, as her heart echoes the leftover moments away.
2010
Jack McDevitt has been described by Stephen King as “the logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.” He is the author of twenty-three novels, twelve of which have been Nebula finalists. Seeker won the award in 2006. He has also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Robert A. Heinlein Lifetime Achievement Award. The International Astronomical Union has put his name on an asteroid. His current books are The Long Sunset, released by Saga, and a story collection, A Voice in the Night,from Subterranean.
McDevitt has been an English teacher, a naval officer, a customs officer, and a Philadelphia taxi driver. He is married to the former Maureen McAdams, and resides in Brunswick, Georgia.
THE CASSANDRA PROJECT
Jack McDevitt
It’s an odd fact that the biggest science story of the twenty-first century— probably the biggest ever—broke in that tabloid of tabloids, The National Bedrock.
I was in the middle of conducting a NASA press conference several days before the Minerva lift-off—the Return to the Moon—and I was fielding softball questions like: “Is it true that if everything goes well, the Mars mission will be moved up?” and “What is Marcia Beckett going to say when she becomes the first person to set foot on lunar soil since Eugene Cernan turned off the lights fifty-four years ago?”
President Gorman and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Alexandrov, were scheduled to talk to the press from the White house an hour later, so I was strictly a set-up guy. Or that was the plan, anyway, until Warren Cole mentioned the dome.
It was a good time for NASA. We all knew the dangers inherent in overconfidence, but two orbital missions had gone up without a hitch. Either of them could have landed and waved back at us, and the rumor was that Sid Myshko had almost taken the game into his own hands, and that the crew had put it to a vote whether they’d ignore the protocol and go down to the surface regardless of the mission parameters. Sid and his five crewmates denied the story, of course.
I’d just made the point to the pool of reporters that it was Richard Nixon who’d turned off the lights—not the astronaut Eugene Cernan—when Warren Cole began waving his hand. Cole was the AP journalist, seated in his customary spot up front. He was frowning, his left hand in the air, staring down at something on his lap that I couldn’t see.
“Warren?” I said. “What’ve you got?”
“Jerry . . .” He looked up, making no effort to suppress a grin. “Have you seen the story that the Bedrocks running?” He held up his iPad.
That started a few people checking their own devices.
“No, I haven’t,” I said, hoping he was making it up. “I don’t usually get to Bedrock this early in the week.” Somebody snorted. Then a wave of laughter rippled through the room. “What?” I said. My first thought had been that we were about to have another astronaut scandal, like the one the month before with Barnaby Salvator and half the strippers on the Beach. “What are they saying?”
“The Russians released more lunar orbital pictures from the sixties,” He snickered. “They’ve got one here from the far side of the Moon. If you can believe this, there’s a dome back there.”
“A dome?”
“Yeah.” He flipped open his notebook. “Does NASA have a comment?”
“You’re kidding, right?” I said.
He twisted the iPad, raised it higher, and squinted at it. “Yep. It’s a dome all right.”
The reporters in the pool all had a good chuckle, and then they looked up at me. “Well,” I said, “I guess Buck Rogers beat us there after all.”
“It looks legitimate, Jerry,” Cole said, but he was still laughing.
I didn’t have to tell him what we all knew: That it was a doctored picture and that it must have been a slow week for scandals.
If the image was doctored, the deed had to have been done by the Russians. Moscow had released the satellite images only a few hours before and forwarded them to us without comment. Apparently nobody on either side had noticed anything unusual. Except the Bedrock staff.
I hadn’t looked at the images prior to the meeting. I mean, once you’ve seen a few square miles of lunar surface you’ve pretty much seen it all. The dome—if that’s really what it was—appeared on every image in the series. They were dated April, 1967.
The Bedrock carried the image on its front page, where they usually show the latest movie celebrity who’s being accused of cheating, or has gone on a drunken binge. It depicted a crater wall, with a large arrow graphic in the middle of a dark splotch pointing at a dome that you couldn’t have missed anyhow. The headline read:
ALIENS ON THE MOON
Russian Pictures Reveal Base on Far Side
Images Taken Before Apollo
I sighed and pushed back from my desk. We just didn’t need this.
But it did look like an artificial construct. The thing was on the edge of a crater, shaped like the head of a bullet. It was either a reflection, an illusion of some sort, or it was a fraud. But the Russians had no reason to set themselves up as a laughing stock. And it sure as hell looked real.
I was still staring at it when the phone rang. It was Mary, NASA’s administrator. My boss. “Jerry” she said, “I heard what happened at the press conference this morning.”
“What’s going on, Mary?”
“Damned if I know. Push some buttons. See what you can find out. It’s going to come up again when the President’s out there. We need to have an answer for him. “
Vasili Koslov was my public relations counterpart at Russia’s space agency. He was in Washington with the presidential delegation. And he was in full panic mode when I got him on the phone. “I saw it, Jerry,” he said. “I have no idea what this is about. Ijust heard about it a few minutes ago. I’m looking at it now. It does look like a dome, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Did your people tamper with the satellite imagery?”
“They must have. I have a call in. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear something. “
I called Jeanie Escovar in the Archives. “Jeanie, have you seen the National Bedrock story yet?”
“No,”she said. “My God, what is it this time?”
“Not what you think. I’m sending it to you now. Could you have somebody check to see where this place is—?”
“What place? Oh, wait—I got it.”
“Find out where it is and see if you can get me some imagery of
the same area. From our satellites.”
I heard her gasp. Then she started laughing.
“Jeanie, this is serious.”
“Why? You don’t actually believe there’s a building up there, do you?”
“Somebody’s going to ask the President about it. They have a press conference going on in about twenty minutes. We want him to be able to say: ‘It’s ridiculous, here’s a picture of the area, and you’ll notice there’s nothing there.’ We want him to be able to say ‘The Bedrocks running an optical illusion.’ But he’ll have to do it diplomatically. And without embarrassing Alexandrov.”
“Good luck on that. “
The Bedrock story was already getting attention on the talk shows. Angela Hart, who at that time anchored The Morning Report for the World Journal,was interviewing a physicist from MIT. The physicist stated that the picture could not be accurate. “Probably a practical joke,’ he said. “ Or a trick of the light.”
But Angela wondered why the Russians would release the picture at all.
“ They had to know it would get a lot ofattention,’ she said. And, of course, though she didn’t mention it, it would become a source of discomfort for the Russian president and the two cosmonauts who were among the Minerva crew.
Vasili was in a state of shock when he called back. “They didn’t know about the dome,” he said. “Nobody noticed. But it is on the original satellite imagery. Our people were just putting out a lot of the stuff from the Luna missions. Imagery that hadn’t been released before. I cantfind anybody who knows anything about it. But I’m still trying. “
“Vasili,” I said, “somebody must have seen it at the time. In 1967.”
