by Neil Clarke
She backed off a few steps.
“If I come with you,” she asked in a small voice, “will I see Kareem and Sofia again?”
A pause again, longer this time.
“Of course you will,” Alissa the ant-woman said finally. “They are right here, waiting for you.”
Liar.
Slowly, Tyche started backing off. The ants moved, closing their circle. I am faster than they are, she thought. They cant catch me.
“Where are you going?”
Tyche switched off her radio, cleared the circle of the ants with a leap and hit the ground running.
Tyche ran, faster than she had ever run before, faster even than when the Jade Rabbit challenged her to a race across the Shackleton Crater. Finally, her lungs and legs burned and she had to stop. She had set out without direction, but had gone up the mountain slope, close to the cold fingers. I don’t want to go back to the Base. The Brain never tells the truth either. Black dots danced in her eyes. They’ll never catch me.
She looked back, down towards the crater of the Secret Door. The ants were moving. They gathered into the metal sheet again. Then its sides stretched upwards until they met and formed a tubular structure. It elongated and weaved back and forth and slithered forward, faster than even Tyche could run; a metal snake. The pyramid shapes of the ants glinted in its head like teeth. Faster and faster it came, flowing over boulders and craters like it was weightless, a curtain of billowing dust behind it. She looked around for a hiding place, but she was on open ground now, except for the dark pool of the mining crater to the west.
Then she remembered something the Jade Rabbit had once said. For anything that wants to eat you, there is something bigger that wants to eat it.
The ant-snake was barely a hundred meters behind her now, flipping back and forth in sinusoid waves on the regolith like a shiny metal whip. She stuck out her tongue at it, accidentally tasting the sweet inner surface of her helmet. Then she made it to the sunless crater’s edge.
With a few bounds, she was over the crater lip. It was like diving into icy water. Her suit groaned, and she could feel its joints stiffening up. But she kept going, towards the bottom, almost blind from the contrast between the pitch-black and the bright sun above. She followed the vibration in her soles. Boulders and pebbles rained on her helmet and she knew the ant-snake was right at her heels.
The lights of the sandworm almost blinded her. Now. She leaped up, as high as she could, feeling weightless, reached out for the utility ladder that she knew was on the huge machine’s topside. She grabbed it, banged painfully against the worm’s side, felt its thunder beneath her.
And then, a grinding, shuddering vibration as the mining machine bit into the ant-snake, rolling right over it.
Metal fragments flew into the air, glowing red-hot. One of them landed on Tyche’s arm. The suit made a bubble around it and spat it out. The sandworm came to an emergency halt, and Tyche almost fell off. It started disgorging its little repair grags, and Tyche felt a stab of guilt. She sat still until her breathing calmed down and the suit’s complaints about the cold got too loud.
Then she dropped to the ground and started the climb back up, towards the Secret Door.
There were still a few ants left around the Secret Door, but Tyche ignored them. They were rolling around aimlessly, and there weren’t enough of them to build a transmitter. She looked up. The ship from the Great Wrong Place was still a distant star. She still had time.
Painfully, bruised limbs aching, she crawled through the Secret Door for one last time.
The Moon People were still there, waiting for her. Tyche looked at them in the eye, one by one. Then she put her hands on her hips.
“I have a wish,” she said. “I am going to go away. I’m going to make the Brain obey me, this time. I’m going to go and build a Right Place, all on my own. I’m never going to forget again. So I want you all to come with me.” She looked up at the Magician. “Can you do that?”
Smiling, the man in the top hat nodded, spread his white-gloved fingers and whirled his cloak that had a bright red inner lining, like a ruby—
Tyche blinked. The Other Moon was gone. She looked around. She was standing on the other side of the Old One and the Troll, except that they looked just like rocks now. And the Moon People were inside her. I should feel heavier, carrying so many people, she thought. But instead she was empty and light.
Uncertainly at first, then with more confidence, she started walking back up Malapert Mountain, towards the Base. Her step was not a rabbit’s, nor a panther’s, nor a maiden’s silky tiptoe, just her very own.
2012
Michael Alexander (1950-2012) held advanced degrees in chemistry and pharmacology and read deeply in many other fields. He was an amateur astronomer and paleontologist with a keen interest in history and a love of science fiction. His stories, published in Fantasy & Science Fiction and Analog,reflect this range. In 2010 he achieved a long-held dream and attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop where he met K.C. Ball. K.C. called him her brother from another mother. They were working on a sequel to “The Moon Belongs to Everyone” when Michael died. Those of a fanciful bent may imagine the two of them continuing that work now.
K.C. Ball fell in love with books at a very early age and credited an elderly librarian with feeding her habit. She learned how to turn writing into a profession by working as a newspaper reporter, Public Information Officer, and a Media Relations Coordinator. She moved to Seattle, Washington, in 2007 with her life partner, Rachael Buchanan, where they married in 2013.
In 2008, she began writing full time and the next year won the Writer’s of the Future Award with her story, “Coward’s Steel.” She met Michael Alexander at the Clarion West Writers Workshop and the two formed an instant and lasting bond. K.C. had a quick wit and a wonderful sense of humor and always seemed to bring out the best in those around her. She passed suddenly on August 25, 2018, and is sorely missed by all who knew her.
THE MOON BELONGS TO EVERYONE
Michael Alexander and K.C. Ball
Mankind has always ventured into the unknown.
We take risks, accept surprises and adapt to new experiences. Such quests are worthwhile in and of themselves. They represent one way in which we express the human spirit. This country was built on that willingness to take risks. America is a great nation and a great nation must remain an exploring nation if it wishes to maintain its greatness.
I say today that the sky is no longer the limit.
I pledge that our nation will venture out into the unknown. We will take the risks, accept the surprises and eagerly await what lays beyond the bounds of our world. What we start today with my words will lead to an American walking on the surface of the Moon before the end of the next decade. And before twenty years have passed, I expect to see Americans venturing to Mars.
I want John Gillespie Magee’s hopeful words to become America’s reality. “With silent lifting mind, I have trod the untrespassed sanctity ofspace; put out my hand to touched the face of God. “
—President Richard M. Nixon, State of the Union address,
11 January 1962.
26 NOVEMBER 1979
I eased from the staging-shack airlock, just at the edge of the mammoth cylindrical melting tank. Beyond the open lip of the tank, a forty-feet-long hollow tube of ice waited, gleaming in the raw sunlight. I couldn’t shake the notion it was a mammoth bullet ready to be loaded into the barrel of an enormous gun.
Sixty miles below Odysseys selenocentric orbit, the Moon’s sterile surface looked pristine, crater walls and mountain peaks casting crisp black shadows in the harsh sunlight.
I moved toward the ice. Maneuvering in a pressure suit still felt cumbersome despite eight weeks’ recent training. The resistance of the sandwiched layers of the suit. A steady flow of chilled air. The constant hiss of communications gear.
All that hadn’t become second nature. Not yet.
But I had all the practice I
could ever want ahead of me, a twelve-month work contract at Rockefeller Base, with an option to renew. In less than six hours, I’d be on the Moon.
All through the weeks of training, I’d looked forward to being on a different world, doing different work. Beginning a new life. My past refused to let me go, though.
“Laura Kerrigan,” a man shouted, as I disembarked the cislunar tug at Selene Station.
A big fellow arrowed toward me, swimming the station’s zero-gee as if he’d been born to it. He reminded me of Thomas Mitchell, the actor who played Scarlett’s father in Gone with the Wind.
Wide and solid, graying. Just a bit past sixty, maybe.
“How the hell’s your old man?” he called, as he drew near.
I didn’t know the man, but his face jarred loose memories of training-document photos. I’d played job-related undercover games too long to flinch at his approach. I let him wrap his arms around me in a friendly bear hug.
“I’m Tom Garver, Kerrigan,” he whispered in my ear. “Call me Tom. Pretend I’m a friend of your father. Ask me for the tour I promised you.” The name produced more memories.
And so I called him Tom, we played our little scene and I gave up what sleep I might have managed, in the little time I’d have on Selene Station, to ride pillion with Garver on an open-cockpit work sled across the five-mile gap to Odyssey.
The Mars ship.
“I’m construction manager,” Garver said, on the low-power suit-to-suit link, during the ride. “I got a situation that fits your old line of work. I’d be gratefUl for your point-of-view.”
I heard: You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
It couldn’t hurt to look. God knew I could use a friend in power. That was all I could ever do, though. Look. I no longer wore a badge, couldn’t officially investigate anything.
That bastard, Liam Childs, had seen to that.
I reached the melting tank’s shadow-line. A thin fiberglass cable stretched into the darkness of the tank from the big eye bolt melted into the near end of the ice tube. Sixteen tons of reaction mass for the voyage to Mars, waiting to be melted, and another chunk of ice would be on its way up from the surface in less than three days.
“Odyssey, I’m ready.”
“Roger.” Garver’s baritone rumbled in my headphones.
A thin line ran from a tie-off on the shack bulkhead to an anchor point half-way along the ice. Two suited figures waited for me there. One of them held a heat-cutter.
I focused on memorized procedure. Hook a suit safety line to the cable. Squeeze a quick burp from the maneuvering unit. Don’t use your hands on the line to stop unless you have to. I slid along the line, burped the other way at what I figured to be half-way, and stopped just short of the suited figures.
Just like I knew what I was doing.
The glare visors hid their faces from me.
“Who’s in charge?” I asked.
“I am.” A woman’s voice. She lifted her arm, showed a red supervisor’s band ringing the bicep of her white EVA suit.
Should have spotted that.
I turned to the second figure, the suit marked by a blue band. “You the one who found it?”
“Yeah.” A man’s voice. He tapped the frozen surface with a gloved finger. “Came to rig the lines to pull the ice inside. Saw that in there.”
I moved close to examine the glittering surface, wiped my glove across the ice. “That looks like a—”
The woman interrupted, sounding insistent. “It’s a foreign object in the ice.”
“Yeah,” the man said. “A foreign objectI He sounded as if he wanted to be somewhere else.
“How long will it take you to cut into that?” I asked.
“A few minutes. No more than five,” the woman said. “It’s warmed up quite a bit.”
“Do it.”
“I’m going back inside.” The man tugged at the safety line and pulled himself around to face me.
I blocked his way. “I want that opened. You need to—”
“I don’t need to do anything. This sort of stuff isn’t in my contract.”
The radio crackled. “Garver here. You two want to finish out your contract and get your bonus, do what you’re told.”
“No argument from me, Boss,” the woman said.
Nothing from the man.
“You hear me, McAlvany?” Garver demanded.
“Copy,” the man said, at last.
The woman pulled herself into position and helped the man brace the tip of the cutter against the glistening surface of the ice.
“Clear,” the man called.
He keyed the unit. The resistance coil inside the thin shaft heated fast. The cutter eased into the ice. vapor streamed off into space. With the surety of a butcher opening a carcass, the man ran the cutter in a smooth circle two feet in diameter.
Finally, he backed away. He and the woman braced against their tethers, pushing at the disk with their booted feet. They muscled it into the cylinder.
I got no argument from either one when I waved them to the side. I pulled myself into place and peered into the hole.
The top of a suit helmet showed itself. Its side had been badly dented, but it remained intact. I reached through, still awkward in the suit, grabbed the locking ring and spun the suit.
“Well?” Garver demanded.
I studied the cold, dead face within the helmet. No sign of trauma. Then I rotated the helmet away, so I could examine the rest of the suited figure. A ragged gash ran along the left suit leg.
“It’s not an empty suit,” I said. “There is a body inside. Might be a suicide or unreported accident, but I wouldn’t rule out murder.”
A pause. “Copy that,” Garver said.
I had time to consider what I’d seen outside on the lonely float along the ship’s central corridor. With the minimum light and the quiet, the ship felt sterile, as if it were waiting to be used. As well it should, it was brand new.
We’d read all about Odyssey in orientation classes. A two-year build. Eighty men and women in orbit, sixty on the surface of the Moon. Twelve months of work, three months rotated back to Earth to rest and recover.
That’s what the documentation said, anyway.
Construction had been completed three weeks ago, three days behind schedule. Garver and his finish crew were racing to catch up. Some of the orbital crew still waited on Selene Station for a berth back down to Earth.
Those who remained on-board were there to finish electrical tests, bring the NERVA reactors to full functionality and handle the last of the water uploads.
The schedule had no flex. The launch window for America’s first manned interplanetary shot—on 1 January, 1980—drew near, and all Americans knew that if the ship didn’t launch, the Russians would win the race to Mars.
The remaining workers bunked in the staging shack, back by the melting cylinder. Garver had set up quarters in the crew dormitory onboard Odysseyinstead of staying in Selene Station. I wasn’t sure I’d care to do that. Empty, the ship felt spooky, filled with strange echoes. It smelled funny, too, like the stink of long-used, over-loaded electrical equipment.
At least, I half-expected that.
“First time you go through an airlock, take off your suit,” an instructor had told me, at the tavern down the road from the Florida training site. “You’ll catch an acrid odor. The smell of ozone. We call it catching a whiff ofvacuum.”
He had plied me with drinks and stories most of the night, hoping for the same poke and tickle Childs had been after.
Neither had succeeded.
I grabbed the anchor bar mounted outside Garver’s office, to brace against reaction, and knocked.
“Come on in,” Garver called.
I pushed the door open, pulled myself inside. The room was good-sized, designed as quarters for six crew members. Military tidy, too, but full of Tom Garver. Books velcroed to every open surface. Engineering plans and photographs taped to bulkheads.
A fram
ed photo of Garver in dress Naval uniform—a full commander—hung on the bulkhead above the built-in desk. A shot of Garver and President Reagan, shaking hands, shared the wall.
Scribbled notes stuck here and there. A floating ten-foot-long scale model of the ship, tethered at four points to a work table, took up the center of the room.
Sections of the scale model had been pulled away to show compartments. Two long cylinders in front of a shielded section containing the NERVA nuclear propulsion units, their heat exchangers looking like big ribbed wings. The ship’s ancestry was evident. It had been birthed from modified upper-stage sections of the Saturn V rockets, as had Selene Station.
The place reeked of Captain Black tobacco. I wondered how Garver kept a pipe lit in weightlessness, not to mention how he got away with smoking in the first place.
The man had to have serious clout.
“Thanks for going out there, Kerrigan,” Garver said.
“If I can call you Tom, you can call me Laura.”
“All right, Laura.” The construction manager straddled a saddle at the work desk. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair in a crew-cut, over a round, deeply seamed face that demanded trust. I hoped such trust would be deserved.
Garver waved for me to join him before a compact television monitor. “Come look at this,” he said.
A color broadcast flickered on the screen. Garver tapped it. “Sent a crewman with a hard-wired camera out so I can tape everything while they pull the body out of the ice.”
I watched over Garver’s shoulder. Whoever handled the video camera knew enough to shoot with the Sun. The picture almost matched broadcast quality, caught all the details.
“Good camera work,” I said.
“Good camera,” Garver said. “A Betacam. Great for location shooting. Networks haven’t seen one yet. I got six. They’re for the mission, all mine until the ship leaves.”
“I don’t know that one.”
“State-of-the-art from Sony.”
Japanese?
“Yeah. The little bastards turn out good product.”
