Girl on the Moon (24 page)

She had plenty of time to think about all this after they gave up on her.

There came a point at which it wouldn’t do any good to keep trying to send an unmanned spacecraft full of supplies and air to her. Turning some SSIV or other craft into a lunar lander was not a thirty-six-hour job. It would take months, if it could be done at all. Jake Dander, helpless in the orbiting command module, had his whole life ahead of him. Peo eventually understood that and ordered him to leave Conn and come home. To Jake’s credit, he refused until the final mathematically determined moment after which two people wouldn’t have enough air to get back, no matter how creative they got.

Conn spent her last hours exploring. Brownsville was up in arms, wanting her to conserve her oxygen. But Conn was on the moon, and she would be damned if she would sit quietly and breathe shallowly, when there was no hope of rescue anyhow. She walked around Hadley Rille and the base of the mountains, artificial lights ablaze in her hand and on her head, until she only had about thirty minutes’ worth of air in her tanks. She wanted to set some aside in case she decided to kill herself on the surface.

She returned to the lander. She spoke to her dad. She thanked Brownsville. She thanked Peo for everything good in her life. Grant asked to speak with her but by then she didn’t have the time, with the lag between the moon and the
Bebop
. Or at least, that was her excuse. She hoped Grant would be happy. She looked out the window at the stars and wished him Godspeed.

Then she shut down the comm with Brownsville. No one needed to hear her die.

She couldn’t figure out how to kill herself in a way that would be faster and less painful than hypoxia. She had always thought the tales about astronauts taking cyanide capsules with them when exploring new frontiers were untrue, because death by cyanide—nausea, dizziness, spasms, gasping for air, agony—was surely worse than asphyxiating to death, which would at least cause euphoria and unconsciousness before you died. But reclined against the wall of her lander, softly singing her favorite Feelstronauts song, she revised her opinion. Dying by your own hand, no matter how, would be preferable in a lot of ways to waiting for it to happen to you. All that said, she didn’t have the means or the stomach to end her own life early, so she would stick to running out of air. And she would do it out on the surface.

She wriggled into her pressure suit. Her O2 levels were so low that the suit thought it was a bad idea to put it on, but she turned off the alarms and ignored the warnings. She commenced the depressurization sequence. Her heart thudded in her chest. The lander depressurized with eight minutes of air left in her tanks.

She reached the crank to open the hatch—when someone pounded on it from the other side.

She jumped, startling herself backward and onto her ass. Again.

She opened the hatch. Buzz Aldrin was outside.

In Basalese—for she wasn’t certain the avatar was being controlled by Persisting—she said, “A small amount of air left. You rescue me. Please do not wait.”

Buzz offered his hand. She took it, and he led her to his sled.

“If longer than five minutes. I will die,” she said.

“Do not worry,” the avatar said. She couldn’t help it, though. They sped across the ridge and out over the canyon, Conn automatically wincing and bracing for a fall, which did not come. She thought about radioing Brownsville that she was going to be all right, but she wasn’t sure that was true. Not just yet.

The sled sped toward an enormous spacecraft, about half a football field long, balanced on four legs on the lunar surface. It was bullet-shaped, with fins, aerodynamic. Conn deduced that it must be used in atmospheres, too. Its nose tapered to a point. It was a burnished gray that blended with the lunar landscape. It looked like a spacecraft illustration from the fifties, and she wondered if whoever had drawn the first one back then had actually seen one of these.

Her air was almost gone. Her breaths were ragged and shallow. Buzz—who identified himself as Persisting—hustled her off the sled and up a ramp into the belly of the great rocketship.

Inside, Buzz drew her into an embrace, and the pressure field enveloped her. “Take your helmet off,” Persisting said, in English, “very carefully.” She did. There was air filling the room, and she tried to gulp it down—but there wasn’t enough to satisfy her lungs, yet. “Pressurizing,” Persisting said. “You’ll get enough air soon.” She waited, taking measured, shallow breaths, grateful for each one.

She looked around. She was in a cosmic mudroom. What she took to be work aprons and tool belts hung with tools and instruments, air tanks, everything you would need for an EVA when you had a pressure field and didn’t need a suit. The room was dark and gray and somewhat creepy.

“How did you know I was in trouble?” She vocalized the question, but in the thin air her voice sounded small and far away.

“Your feeds,” Persisting said into her head. She could almost see him shrug—
no big deal
.

“You must not monitor them constantly,” Conn said with a wry smile. “It took you long enough.”

“You are what I believe you call a
vendor
of ours now,” Persisting said. “Until somebody gives us a better deal, we want you to stay in business.”

He sounded like Peo. No: he sounded like her, Conn.

She felt ashamed for having resigned herself to dying. She had let Peo down.

Finally, Persisting told her the pressure was at an acceptable level, and she could remove her pressure suit if she wished. There was a difference in pressure—as Persisting explained, they had split the difference: less than she was used to, more than he was. Her ears popped. But she could breathe normally at last.

As “normally” as she could do anything, standing on an alien spacecraft with an extraterrestrial being.

September 8–9, 2034

Eugene Cernan, last man to walk on the moon until recently, ambled into the mudroom with a pressure field collar. “To make you more comfortable,” Persisting said. “Now that you’re safe, we’ll reduce the pressure to our normal level.”

“Will I be able to breathe?” Conn thought the question sounded ridiculous—
oh, no, you’re right, we hadn’t thought of that
—but she was concerned.

In response Persisting gestured to a breathing bubble: a 360-degree see-through helmet that formed an airtight seal on the shoulders, fed oxygen from an attached backpack. “If you feel short of breath, you’re welcome to use it,” Persisting said. Gene Cernan had helped Conn on with the pressure field collar, and she put the breathing bubble on over it. She was concerned that it would interfere with the pressure field, but the two were obviously made to work together.

“Do I get to see what you really look like?” Conn asked. “Ever?”

Persisting said, “In fact, the intention is to use these avatars
in all our dealings with humankind. We have a team of them based on twentieth century historical figures ready to interact with humans on Earth.”

“Twentieth?” Her voice sounded stronger inside the breathing bubble, too loud, in fact. She reminded herself that Persisting wasn’t “hearing” her the normal way.

“Recognizable thanks to television, motion pictures, the Internet, and so on. But not currently alive. That would be—I believe you would say creepy.”

“I suppose I agree. Does yours look like Buzz Aldrin even with its helmet off?” Persisting gestured toward some inscrutable equipment, and almost immediately there was a hiss of depressurization. The pressure would only be reduced to the level of the Basalites’ home atmosphere, not all the way to zero, but the hiss sounded menacing. Conn fought off an irrational fear that the Basalites had saved her life only to kill her with a nonfunctional pressure field.

“The helmet does not come off.”

“Oh.” Conn didn’t know if that meant it physically couldn’t, or that it wouldn’t.

Conn tried to imagine a triune being somewhere in a spacecraft manipulating the Buzz Aldrin avatar. She decided that her new friends were right, and it was a good idea to use human-looking avatars. But she wanted to see what Persisting looked like.

“I see the utility of using avatars to interact with people,” Conn said, tiptoeing around—as though she needed to walk softly and quietly for the pressure field to work. “But you and I do business together. Hopefully, we’ll have a long partnership, beneficial to both of us. I’m not going to run away screaming when I see you.”

“Be that as it may,” Persisting said, and then nothing else.

Conn dropped it. “I need to contact my people,” she said.

“There is a pressure field around our spacecraft. Protection from micrometeorites and radiation and such. It interferes
with electromagnetic transmissions of the type your radio uses.”

“Is there a problem using communications person-to-person in pressure fields?”

“There may be some negligible occasional interference, but what you need to say and hear will find its way through.”

“That’s good,” Conn said. She briefly imagined her big victory getting pressure field tech undermined by the fact nobody could communicate while wearing one. She was relieved that wasn’t the case.

“If I might take your radio from you so we can determine the correct frequency, we can send a message that says—well, what do you want it to say?”

“Can I speak the message myself?”

“No.”

Conn was startled by the answer. “Um. Well, just say what happened. They’ll get the gist. Will you speak the message?” She was really asking if it would be in English.

“Another who speaks English. I am...
attached to your hip
for the duration.”

“Which will be how long, exactly? Light can get from the moon to Earth in 1.2 seconds—”

“Remember that this close, the longest a fifth-dimensional journey can be is the time it reasonably takes a living being to make the trip in our three-dimensional spacetime,” Persisting said. “Or, that’s the prevailing theory. We can expect to be traveling for something less than forty-one hours.”

“It takes us two and a half days.”

Conn could almost see Persisting smile. “I said ‘reasonably.’ In any event, we’re trying to get you home as quickly as we can. We have no food for you, you see.”

“Oh. At worst, I can survive on just water for a couple days.”

“We are hopeful it won’t come to that.”

“I’m very grateful, you know. I was minutes away from suffocating to death.”

“I am glad I got there when I did.”

Later, Persisting consulted with the avatar Alan Shepard, and reported to Conn that there was no reply from Brownsville. “They’ve got to still be listening,” Conn said, glumly. “The command module is on its way home.”

“Is there another frequency you would like us to try?” Conn hadn’t gotten her radio back.

“If there is, I wouldn’t know what it was,” she said.

“Perhaps you will be home before that becomes necessary,” Persisting said. “We have a fifth-dimensional solution, and once we enter fifth-dimensional space, it should only be hours before we arrive.”

Conn said that was wonderful, thanked Persisting again, and wondered, “Where exactly are you going to take me? Drop me off, I mean?”

“Your space station,” Persisting said.

“Great! I can give you a tour.”

“That would be most gracious.”

And it was that simple. They arrived at Gasoline Alley some five and a half hours later. During that time they were able to get the news to Earth, and get confirmation of its receipt: Conn was alive and OK and in the capable hands of the Basalites.

The Basalite rocketship couldn’t dock to an airlock, but the pilots arranged to tether to an unused docking bay.

They depressurized the rocketship’s airlock. Conn led the way, mouth full of a loaner O2 breather. She had a momentary, intense panic spell as she stepped out, part of her brain insisting that she wasn’t dressed safely, but it passed. One thing she would have to adjust to was that she didn’t have any thrusters, or any other way of moving or changing direction if she wasn’t adjacent to part of the station.

As she floated from the rocketship’s airlock toward the station’s, she saw faces pressed against almost every available window. She realized her rescue would be a big deal. Not to mention that she was spacewalking in her underwear. She smiled.

In between the two airlocks, there was Earth. It took her breath away. Earth had been her guiding light on the moon, so brilliantly blue. She realized how much the promise of coming home meant to her when she lost it. Lost everything. Now her home loomed, overwhelming the enormous space station. Conn had to consciously stop herself from gawking.

They made their way toward the station airlock. Conn’s freedom of movement amazed her. She had full range of motion in her arms and legs. She felt like she was flying.

They went inside, Persisting’s avatar’s pressure field remaining on due to the relatively high pressure. Conn had already gleaned that “Buzz’s” pressure suit wasn’t really a pressure suit, just decoration. She mused that the Basalites would have to wear their pressure fields constantly in Siberia.

Once the airlock was pressurized and the two floated into the station proper, there was an eruption of applause. Some people hooted and whooped. Conn felt herself blush. Buzz Aldrin seemed confused.

“They’re applauding,” she told him. “They’re happy that you rescued me.”

Some people clapped her on the back. One woman hugged her.

She found signs pointing her to Operations, and was finally able to lead them in that direction.

The crowds dispersed until they were in a corridor that was empty save for one brave soul, who sidled up to shake Conn’s hand. “I’m glad you made it,” she said shyly, and then, to Buzz Aldrin, “Hello.” When Persisting offered his hand, the woman took it gingerly. Out of the corner of her mouth, she said to Conn, “Is this really an alien?”

“Close as it gets,” Conn replied. When she and Persisting reached the operations center, everyone there gave them another ovation. It made her smile again, more out of relief than anything. She ought to have felt self-conscious dressed in her water-cooled underwear, and nothing else, but she didn’t. She just wanted to go home.