Girl on the Moon
Authors: Jack McDonald Burnett
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2016
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For Kristin, Katy, and Piper,
the reasons I could draw from personal experience
to write a kick-ass female hero.
“Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus’ rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.”
—George Steiner, “Modernity, Mythology, and Magic” lecture, Salzburg Festival,
Guardian
, London (August 6, 1994)
The Girl on the Moon
September 5, 2034
Bathed in nothing but soft earthshine, Mount Hadley was a charcoal-colored rent in the starry sky. The landscape to the west and south could have been a blasted, empty desert on Earth at night, except the sense of something alien, something primeval, intruded. The stillness was a presence, covering the land like water in a lake.
Conn wished she could have toured all six Apollo landing sites, seen everything the first moonwalkers saw. But she would settle for indelible memories of the alien desert she shared with the Apollo 15 astronauts.
And she was looking forward to being home. Sleeping on a pillow. A shower. Walking normally. If she had been offered two extra days on the moon she would have gladly accepted, but if she needed to leave now, she left with a sense of closure, of accomplishment.
She clambered back up into the lander and repressurized it. She stowed her helmet and gloves within reach but left the rest of her pressure suit on. “I think I can fly her as long as my hands are free,” she radioed Gil Portillo, CapCom in Brownsville. Like the Apollo astronauts, she stood while flying the lander. Normally without a pressure suit on. But now she wanted to be mostly suited in case the epoxied patch and duct tape she had used to fix the gash in her hull didn’t hold.
The computer did most of the work on liftoff, anyhow. She didn’t have to sight out the window and look for obstacles and flat landing spots.
She went through the launch checklist, vocalizing each step, and each was confirmed by Gil. The pressure was holding at nine hundred sixty millibars so far. Conn glanced at the patch in the hull. Then she spared a last look at the surface outside. She saw her footprints in the regolith. She smiled.
Launch checklist complete. Jake and the command module had emerged from around the far side and were on their way to meet her. The world would be watching her liftoff. Peo would be watching. Thoughts were cycling through her mind too fast to follow. She realized she was exhausted.
As the descent engines came online, a whine filled the lander. She focused.
“Firing descent engines,” she said, and tapped the screen. Her knees bent as the lander rose a meter off the ground, clearing the way for the ascent stage to fire. Last one off the moon. She felt a stab of regret.
“Ascent engines online,” she said. “Firing.” She toggled a switch.
The descent engines quit without the ascent engines firing and she dropped a meter back onto the ground with a crash. She lost her footing. Her helmet fell on her, slow motion in the lunar gravity.
She scrambled to her feet. Fear gripped her heart and squeezed. In eight tries, nobody had ever failed to blast off from the surface of the moon. And this wasn’t the time for the first. She was utterly alone.
Willing herself not to panic, she backed out of the warning screen, typed the command for the correct menu, and retried the sequence. Crash. No ascent engines.
“Conn, let’s back up and go through everything again,” Gil said. “We both missed something, that’s all.”
They went through the checklist again, making sure of every step. Again a whine. Descent engines fired. Ascent engines online.
Fire
, Conn willed as she toggled the switch.
Nothing. Dropped again. Something was going to break if they kept this up.
Conn’s eyes were already leaking with frustration and exhaustion. She didn’t want Brownsville to think she was crying. She sniffed and got herself together.
OK, no big deal. Something’s not working. We’ll fix it.
They would have to.
The moon? It is a griffin’s egg,
Hatching to-morrow night.
And how the little boys will watch
With shouting and delight
To see him break the shell and stretch
And creep across the sky.
The boys will laugh. The little girls,
I fear, may hide and cry.
— Vachel Lindsay,
The Congo and Other Poems
(1914)
The Aspiring Astronaut
August, 2025–August, 2028
Conn wanted to be an astronaut. At fifteen, she was looking at eight more years before she could apply as an astronaut candidate. Unless she crammed those eight years into five or six. Graduate at the top of her class. Earn an accelerated college degree. Learn to fly. Master some other impressive discipline, maybe playing the piano. She could do all that in six years. Five.
To get ahead in high school, she bought and read and mastered textbooks that were two years advanced for her level. She didn’t have a natural aptitude for math or science, but that just meant she had to conquer her subjects through overwhelming force of will. Trigonometry and chemistry and whatever else the Chicago Public Schools wanted to teach her didn’t stand a chance. Her energy and appetite for learning were so expansive that they thrilled some of her teachers and counselors—and troubled some others.
Mastering senior-year classes as a sophomore, she gave some thought to applying for astronaut training years early. The youngest astronaut candidate ever: no degree, no pilot’s license, no Chopin, but they were all foregone conclusions. She knew enough about astronautics, and especially travel to the moon, to ace any NASA test on the subject, she believed. She had followed Peo Haskell’s journey to the moon that closely in 2022, at age twelve.
At twelve she had already wanted to be an astronaut. Peo Haskell gave her footsteps to follow, and a destination. The moon: three, four years later she still obsessed over the moon. She knew everything there was to know about it. She knew what it was, how it got there, and the physics that kept it there. She knew its lore, its history, and its place in popular culture. She knew everything about everyone who had ever been there, including Peo Haskell.
Peo Haskell: a woman who wanted to go to the moon, and then just went—with her own money, her own company. Conn idolized her. Conn would become everything Peo Haskell was. All she needed to do was build a knock-their-socks-off astronaut candidate application. But she didn’t see that as an obstacle, just an opportunity.
She could accomplish anything. Her mind was a perpetual motion machine, constantly urging her to new heights. School was a breeze, the future bright.
Until the summer between her sophomore and junior years. The summer when her timeline fell apart. When she couldn’t rouse herself to pick up a calculus textbook. When she didn’t want to fiddle with her sister Cora’s Casio keyboard. That summer she felt untethered and adrift. What was the point of all her hard work, really? Things that made her happy, she banished. She ignored people who tried to talk to her. She spent much of that summer in bed.
In junior year, her energy returned, and she hated herself for squandering a whole summer. She decided she had just pushed herself too hard. But if so, she was doing it again. She taught herself a first-year college engineering curriculum. She read ravenously, got good enough to appear proficient on the keyboard. She was beyond physically fit. She burned brightly for three or four months.
Then followed another drastic dip. She wanted nothing, did nothing, nothing but sleep, it seemed. But then she had the energy to conquer the world again. She cycled between dramatically high and frighteningly low energy, each state lasting a few weeks at first. By the summer before senior year it was just a few days each.
She started to miss school during her low times, the worst parts of the cycle. She cried a lot, doubted herself a lot, wondered a lot whether it was any use studying so hard, learning so much—or learning at all.
When she felt her worst, it was impossible to remember that she would inevitably come out of it feeling invincible. To Conn, both states seemed permanent while she was living them. She spent half of her life doing, thinking, and feeling nothing. The other half she spent believing in her bones she could do anything.
Literally anything.
One autumn day in 2027, during senior year, Conn felt as though she had run out of vector calculus to learn, and she couldn’t stay still. She ripped off fifty push-ups, fifty sit-ups, and ten chin-ups. She could feel the blood pumping through her circulatory system, hear each squeeze of her heart, visualize each ragged breath feeding her oxygen and venting moisture and poison.
She ran up, down, up, down, up her building’s four flights of stairs until her muscles trembled. She burst out onto the building’s roof. It was cold, and Conn shivered in her sweaty sleeveless shirt and sweatpants. She stepped to the edge of the roof and looked down on Division Street. She felt a familiar adrenaline rush. She could barely contain it. But she hesitated, then darted back down the stairs to her first-floor apartment, looking for her winter jacket. It was too cold to jump off the roof and fly without her coat on.