Girl on the Moon (25 page)

September 9–10, 2034

Persisting thanked Conn for the brief tour, and retreated back to the rocketship. Conn pictured him being mobbed by well-wishers who wanted to shake his hand. Presently, the rocketship itself untethered, and Conn was left once again with a feeling like there wasn’t enough ceremony in their parting.

She arranged to use the station’s comm link. She reached Brownsville. She spoke with Hunter Valence—surely not CapCom, but at this point Conn’s mission was beyond formalities.

“We heard from the Basalites that they had you alive,” he said, “but I don’t think we believed it until just now.” Conn could hear general joviality in the background.

“I’d like a ride home, please,” Conn said, “but first, I want to talk to my dad and Peo.”

Her dad hadn’t understood why she had to be given up for dead on the moon, and finding her alive and speaking with her, he seemed angry. Conn knew he was just that way—good feelings were foreign. He was allergic to them.

She wasn’t able to talk to Peo. She was assured that Peo knew she was OK, and she could try again later. It didn’t sit well with her, but there wasn’t much she could do from orbit.

She would share a ride home with Jake Dander, as planned, when the command module arrived in a few hours’ time. Conn ate her fill, prepackaged, processed space food—real food was so close! Earth was right there!—and was given quarters to sleep in. She did, hard, for hours.

The reunion with Jake was close to tearful. He could barely hold it together.

“I left you and saved myself.”

“You’d be dead now if you hadn’t.”

“There would have been enough air for me till you were rescued.”

“I didn’t
want
you to stick around running out of air when there was nothing anyone could do.”

They would take their Indian-made SSEV flyer down through the atmosphere and land at Seguin Field, part of Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, as originally planned. Conn knew enough about how to fly the SSEV to do so if Jake passed out or went insane, but she was happy to leave it to him otherwise.

The vehicle was a two-seater, with little room for anything else. Conn was still wearing only her underwear and the pressure field collar; Jake was down to his flight suit.

The drop through the upper levels of the atmosphere was fiery and bright, with random eruptions of color. The flyer’s titanium/beryllium belly had a special ceramic coating that burned away during reentry. Conn saw it—or imagined she saw it—melting off. Underneath, the titanium and beryllium absorbed a great deal of heat. As the plasma burned away behind them, and the craft shook violently, Conn and Jake were pressed down with the subjective weight of five times Earth’s gravity.

Once there was no more ionized gas to burn, Conn lost all sense that they were moving at all for a while. They glided over most of the Pacific Ocean; they seemed perfectly still but for the odd islands streaming by.

When they were over North America, it looked more like they were coming down. Fast. In fact, Conn got dizzy with the speed. But she was determined, after all this, not to land covered in vomit.

They needed just about all of the mile-and-a-half runway after touchdown, but their chutes deployed without incident, slowing them to a stop. Seguin and Texas State Police and Randolph AFB security were keeping a throng of well-wishers back from the runway. The crowd was certainly the biggest the auxiliary airfield had ever seen.

Earth gravity made Conn feel huge and heavy, and she imagined Jake’s forty-plus-year-old bones weren’t taking it any better. Still, Jake laughed and slapped her back, and Conn grinned at him. They were home.

There had to be three thousand people at the airfield, maybe five hundred of them media. It was muggy. Conn felt conspicuous in her full-body underwear. As if reading her mind, a Dyna-Tech employee appeared with a windbreaker for her.

Getting past the crowd to the van waiting to drive them the four and a half hours to Brownsville was a chore. Conn shook many hands, then just let people shake hers, limp. She signed autographs and accepted the adulation gamely. She was relieved when they made it to the van.

“You’ve got media events scheduled pretty much the minute you hit the ground at Brownsville,” the driver said. Conn took the hint and went to sleep.

She awoke, groggy, with someone shaking her shoulder. She wanted to kill whoever it was. “Conn, I’m sorry,” the driver said. “We’ve been rerouted to Peo’s hospital.”

“Is she OK?”

“I don’t know anything, Conn. I really am sorry.”

Peo looked so fragile. She had wasted away. Conn couldn’t understand it. When she was stranded on the moon, Peo had been thundering and raging and moving heaven and Earth to try and get her back—how could things have taken such a drastic turn so quickly?

Conn asked the critical care nurse, “Is she going to be OK? Can you tell me what’s going on?”

“I can, because she listed you as her next of kin on her paperwork.” Conn felt a catch in the back of her throat. Peo had a daughter, Laura, closer to Jake’s age than to hers, but Peo and Laura had not been close since at least Peo’s moonshot. “She’s not well at all. She underwent a great deal of stress, and it’s in the exhaustion after so much stress that cancer, or illness of any kind, is so dangerous. She took a turn for the worse last night. Today, we’re just trying to keep her comfortable. Let her fight. She’s good at that.”

“When is she going to wake up?”

“I don’t know. For now, please stay as long as you want.”

Jake and the driver weren’t allowed into the CCU, so Conn left Peo to go update them. “Why don’t you drive Jake back,” Conn suggested. “There’s nothing you can do here.”

“I’m sick of leaving when the going gets tough,” Jake said. “I’ll stay here, in case you or Peo need me.”

Conn did convince the driver to leave. Someone would be back in the morning, unless Conn or Jake called for them sooner.

Conn sat in a hard-back chair, which had been spirited away from the nurses’ station. The heart monitor next to Peo’s bed beeped in a steady rhythm, and gave Conn some hope.

Conn dozed, and awoke to find Peo looking at her groggily.

“Hey,” Conn said. “I’m back.”

Peo smiled. In a raspy, low voice she said, “I knew you’d make it. You just had to hang in there.”

“Don’t talk so much,” Conn said. “You’ll hurt yourself.” She held Peo’s hand, as limp as her own had been after twenty minutes of hand shaking earlier.

“I’ve been privileged to know you,” Peo said.

“Don’t talk that way.”

“You are...everything I...tried to be.”

“Easy. Please, Peo.”

“Huh. Everything’s swimmy.” With that, Peo drifted back to sleep.

She didn’t wake up.

There she goes, gang. The moon.

— Fred Haise, Lunar Module Pilot, Apollo 13, April 14, 1970

January, 2035

They touched down at Sheremetyevo Airport after an uneventful flight from China. Conn had never been to Moscow. She was traveling a lot in the last six months in her new role as owner and Chairman of Dyna-Tech, per the terms of Peo’s will. To no one’s surprise, Laura (Peo’s biological daughter, as it pleased Conn to consider her) had responded by gearing up for the fight of a lifetime contesting the will—despite the fact that Peo had more than provided for her, leaving her a holding company that produced steady income independent of Dyna-Tech. But Dyna-Tech was the golden goose, and Laura felt entitled to it because of her DNA. Conn did what she figured Peo would have done, faced with a similar nuisance: she bought Laura off. It cost her a nice round ten million dollars, but peace of mind was worth every penny. Peace of mind, and moral superiority: if she, Conn, thought there was something hinky about a will, she would like to think she would fight it no matter what. Laura, it seemed, wasn’t that way.

As the flight attendant opened the cabin door, Conn gave Scott Daniels a perfunctory smile. They stood, and Daniels retrieved their carry-on luggage from the overhead compartment. Conn hadn’t been in a talkative, or really interactive, mood the whole way from China, so she gave Daniels a quick peck on the cheek.

“More where that came from?” Daniels said. They’d been together three weeks, and Daniels was still a relentless flirt. Most of the time, Conn liked that.

“On the condition that I get to take a shower first,” she said. “And maybe sleep for twenty-four hours.”

That wasn’t in the cards. Conn, Daniels, and two diplomats, who were probably actually spies, had been dispatched first to China, now to Russia, with the goal of exploring the possibility of sharing Basalite technology. Specifically, the proprietary Basalite tech each nation had bargained for on the moon. Conn couldn’t fathom why either China or Russia would share, circumstances being what they were, and nothing on their dud of a trip to China had made her think differently.

Conn understood that Daniels and the so-called diplomats were actually tasked with gathering as much intelligence about the tech as they could. Conn, a private citizen, was really only along because it would open doors these men couldn’t otherwise get through.

There had been a tectonic shift in geopolitics after humankind’s representatives met the Basalites. Russia, it was rumored, had acquired the know-how necessary to use the Basalite telepathic ability to speak directly to another’s mind—which, to Conn, meant they could read minds. Persisting had said that his mind could only pick up what a person intended to say, but Conn, and Daniels, had always been suspicious. If he could read the outgoing messages of other brains, what was to stop him from reading the rest?

But it was no rumor that Russia had acquired the survey technology the Basalites used to investigate the moon. The Kremlin had already tested it by surveying whole small cities in mere minutes, and touting the results as fantastically accurate. The military applications were obvious to the people paid to worry about such things. Russia was already testing ways to weaponize the tech, delivering bombs or lethal projectiles instead of probe-drones.

The Chinese had the secret to using nitrogen as a fuel. They could create cheap, limitless power from the gas that made up seventy-eight percent of Earth’s atmosphere under more-or-less ordinary conditions. They had already begun vigorously improving their infrastructure with as many power plants as they could crank out. Nobody knew what the Chinese had given up in exchange, but the world’s most powerful economy was about to get more powerful—possibly exponentially more. The considerable amount of money they no longer spent acquiring, processing and distributing other types of power could be thrown at the world economy—or used to beef up the nation’s military might. Both scenarios were scary.

Less than nothing had come of Conn and Daniels’s visit to China. China knew it could dominate the world economy with cheap, clean, abundant power—provided no one else had it, too. They couldn’t keep the knowledge under wraps forever—people had to work in all the power plants they were building, and some of them had to know how they worked. But they were keeping it secret for as long as they could.

Conn gave a second thought to Daniels’s insistence that tech be shared by all humanity, in exchange for rights to the moon nobody had. It was looking smarter and smarter. She also often thought about the possibility that he had engineered the sabotage that had left her stranded. If it had been him, she was taking the
keep your enemies closer
advice up to a pro level.

They filed off the plane and trudged to baggage claim and customs. Conn had an impromptu cheering section in the airport proper. Another, smaller crowd of well-wishers on the maglev train. A still small, but enthusiastic crowd at their hotel. Conn’s visit, and its details, were clearly news.

She had become numb to her celebrity, and since it hadn’t let up after months, she was glad to be numb. But also concerned: at times it felt like one of her lows, as though she had stopped taking her bipolar meds again. Part of her would have welcomed her mania as a way of coping with all the energy and attention being a global celebrity demanded. Giving interviews, glad-handing, posing for pictures, generally trying her very best to be Earth’s sweetheart. Sometimes, it felt that taking her medicine left her unable to give all that people expected of her. But she had too much experience off her meds to be foolish enough to try it with the world watching. She was liable to say something that sounded completely insane while she was manic, and she’d be saying it to a billion people.

She would have welcomed her low times just as much. At times, what was demanded of her was that she keep quiet, be unfailingly polite, and lay comparatively low. Even on her meds, she sometimes felt a stray hopeless feeling, or abstractly considered suicide—but she knew she wouldn’t act on it. As long as she was taking her medicine, anyway.

She didn’t get the sense that Daniels even knew she was bipolar. The
world
knew, thanks to the muckraking into her personal life she endured before going to the moon, but Conn didn’t credit Daniels with enough attention to the feeds to know, or at least to understand. She didn’t love Daniels, but she loved that about him. She used to be terrified that people would treat her like she was broken. Now that everyone knew she was bipolar, she’d moved on to being angry with people who would treat her like she was fragile. She couldn’t be involved with someone like that. It was among the reasons she gave herself for not being with Grant.

After their return from the moon, Daniels and Conn both needed a change of scenery. Conn found hers in northern California, Sunnyvale, company headquarters and the operations center for Gasoline Alley. Coincidentally or otherwise, Daniels, a native Nevadan and UC Davis grad, found his new scenery in the foothills of San Jose. He intended to spend a great deal of quality time at the University of California’s mountaintop Lick Observatory, trying to “remember what got me into this line of work in the first place”—a penchant for astronomy. He ended up spending quality time with Conn.