Girl on the Moon (36 page)

A helmet-cam feed blinked onto Yongpo’s display, and Conn breathed a sigh of relief. Almost immediately, Conn saw what looked like a Pelorian hover-sled, only bigger, more elaborate. The...
thing
riding it was gray-green, humanoid, but bubbling—rippling, Conn couldn’t decide the best word. She heard, “Brownsville, is this one of your—” and she stabbed the button to stop the feed. She couldn’t watch what came next.

Conn
, Conn heard in her head. She instinctively looked around for Persisting’s avatar.
I believe I am directly below you. If you can hear me, please say so
.

Gray-green, on a big hover-sled, bubbling or rippling, humanoid
, Conn thought to him.

You are describing an Aphelial. Conn, the front desk has been notified to watch for you, and me. Descriptions of us both were given
.
It may not be safe to retrieve Hannah Ryan’s identification
.

“Yongpo,” she said, in a low voice, “can you get me out of here without passing the front desk?”

“Are you in trouble?”

“I’m afraid I am. You might also get in trouble if you help me.”

Yongpo rose to his full height. “I will help you,” he said gravely. Conn smiled.

Conn, they are reading the names of everyone who is signed in. If they know Hannah Ryan’s ID was taken...

“We have to go now. And”—she kissed him on the cheek—“thank you.”

They took the stairs eighteen flights down. As they walked, Conn directed Persisting to meet them. Yongpo was clearly excited about some progress he’d made with the fifth-dimensional problem, progress enough that he was leaving for Gasoline Alley the next morning. But Conn didn’t have time for that at present.

At the bottom of the stairs, Yongpo led her down a long, narrow hall to an exit door. “Smokers go out here,” Yongpo said. “They’re the only ones who use it.” Yongpo shoved the door, which opened too easily. He stumbled, and the wallet that had been holding the door open fell at his feet. The lone “smoker” outside was Persisting’s avatar. It was his wallet.

They were wary of returning to the car, so after fifteen minutes on foot, Conn and Persisting were several properties west of Dyna-Tech headquarters, sitting outside in another building’s smoking area. Persisting asked one of the smokers if he could bum a smoke. Conn sank into a wooden folding chair. She was tired, but infused with adrenaline. It gave her a headache.

“There is only about a one-in-four chance that one hundred computers calculating fifth-dimensional routes with an upper limit of seven hundred fifty days will discover a route that takes two days or less,” Persisting said.

One hundred spacecraft making the course computation was far more than Conn could have reasonably asked for. “When will the computations be ready?”

“For so short a distance, hours only. They will be complete at different times, but the quickest? Five and a half hours.”

“Then it makes sense to try again if we don’t get a one- or two-day route the first time, doesn’t it?”

Persisting admitted that it did. “However, I can’t guarantee we will be able to tie all spacecraft up for another six hours—”

“We’ll deal with it,” Conn said. “I really appreciate your help. Will whatever spacecraft we take have medical facilities, or is that just a shot in the dark?”

“You will be able to treat injuries on any of them, but the extent to which you can, as you’ve guessed, is a
shot in the dark
.”

“Why am I saying
we
and you’re saying
you
?”

“If you insist on taking a spacecraft out to Tethys, where Aphelials have already destroyed two crew members and quite likely left the last one alive only to lure rescue craft to the scene—I’m afraid I can’t go with you.”

“Could you even control your avatar from that far away?”

“No.”

“So in addition to it being foolish, there’s that, too.”

“Yes.”

They sat in silence for a time.

“I do wish I could talk you out of going,” Persisting said.

“Why?”

“You have proven an expert at
getting the word out
, as you say. You manage feed content well. Someone will need to convince Earth that the Aphelials are a threat. It would be terrific if you could also convince them that we’re not, but one thing at a time.”

“Persisting, I’ve escaped from jail. I can’t go on Hayley Brigham and talk about the looming Aphelial invasion. I’ll be arrested.”

Persisting seemed to think about this. His avatar looked troubled. “Well, you have a better chance of being able to help out here than in jail, wouldn’t you say?”

Conn smiled. “I would.”

They sat for a while, wary of attracting attention with any furtive movement. Then they called a car service to take them to Half Moon Bay at Persisting’s direction, paying cash. Stowed at the beach, out of the way, with a mini “cloaking” device hiding them, were two sets of pressure field collars and air tanks.

As they wriggled into the backpack apparatus for the tanks, then put on and powered up the collars, Conn said, “I don’t swim very well.”

“I’ll hold your hand,” Persisting said, and he did: they walked, then paddled their way out to where the water got deeper, Conn sticking close. Then, they went underwater, hand in hand, Persisting more or less dragging Conn behind him, kicking with a lot of inefficient, wasted motion, to a bullet-shaped vehicle that rested on the ocean floor.

They were off to Wrangel Island.

April 18-19, 2036

Grant was still alive. Conn was able to tap in to a feed while
en route
under water—the tech that allowed her to do that was a mystery to her—which shared a Dyna-Tech press release that said that Grant was hydrating and resting. Dyna-Tech was no longer putting out any video showing him suffering. Conn approved.

It wasn’t lost on Conn that even if one of the hundred Pelorian spacecraft came up with a day-long route to Saturn, and even if they could get to that spacecraft in hours in order to launch, and even if she could precisely find Grant on Tethys (She hoped Dyna-Tech could help with that), and even if she could stabilize Grant and make him well enough for a journey home, they would then have to rely on the course-computer on the spacecraft for a return route.

All would be for nothing if lightning didn’t strike and give them a very short return trip. A route that took a year and a half, or even months or weeks, wouldn’t do them any good, considering Grant’s injuries. Persisting had said there was a one-in-four chance that one hundred course computers would come up with a one- or two-day course among them. Therefore, there was a 75-percent chance that one computer would fail to calculate that short a course in its first one hundred tries.

Routes to Saturn started to come in. They were a year long, several weeks long, two years long, five months long. Persisting cautioned Conn against despair, but it was difficult to avoid as ten, twenty, thirty spacecraft failed to deliver a route that would save Grant’s life.

They arrived at Wrangel Island. Conn shuddered to think how fast they must have gone to arrive in so few hours. The tiny harbor they surfaced in was kept free of ice, but floes bobbed and jostled with one another just beyond. Ashore, what Conn saw startled her: at the foot of gently rolling hills dappled with snow, a field with what looked like empty oil barrels strewn across the bare, dead land. “We found it this way,” Persisting said, reassuring her. “The former Soviet Union had a military presence here fifty years ago. We leave it this way around our harbor because the polar bears avoid it.”

At his saying “our harbor,”
Conn noticed for the first time at least two dozen other bullet-shaped sub-marine craft bobbing in two rows to their left. There was room for many more. Conn wondered how many were on the ocean floor off Half Moon Bay, or elsewhere off the west coast of America.

Conn left her pressure field on against the cold, and they mounted a hover-sled similar to those the Pelorians used on the moon. They wound their way along the coast, and it wasn’t long before she spotted some polar bears. Inland, on the other side of the hills, Conn could just see the tops of some artificial structures. There seemed to be one or two sled-paths diverging from the coastline toward them, but Persisting stuck to the coast.

Before long, Conn could see a number of “rocketships” standing nose up along the shoreline up ahead. As they approached, a spacecraft dropped out of the sky, firing jets intermittently to retard its acceleration, until it touched down vertically among the others. She saw repairs or maintenance being done on two of the spacecraft. No longer using Gasoline Alley, the aliens had obviously thrown together Earth’s first spaceport.

Conn marveled at it, even as rudimentary as it was. Dyna-Tech would be instrumental in establishing the first one for humans, when pinpoint vertical landings were possible and traffic to and from space was sufficiently high. She felt a pang of regret, knowing she wouldn’t be part of it.

Persisting said, “One of these spacecraft—there, that one—has a course to Tethys for you that will take six and a half days. Are you interested?”

Conn knew it might be the best she could do, but that Grant’s odds of survival for another week without medical attention were long. “Can they, I don’t know how it works, hold it for me?”

“I can ask them to hold, and let us know before wiping it.”

“Please do.” Conn desperately needed a shorter route. “And Persisting, I haven’t thanked you enough for what you’re doing. You and your people.”

“On your seas, vessels that are able to render assistance to a crew in distress are obligated to do so. It’s been so for thousands of years. We are bound by a similar, much older tradition.”

“Still. Thank you.”

They inched among the rocketships, slow enough that the normally silent sled made
whup-whup-whup
noises. Conn watched as passengers and crew of the recently landed spacecraft disembarked. Their movements, Pelorians in their “real” form, were fluid enough to be creepy—if Conn shared Glenn Bowman’s opinion of the race, she would liken it to oozing. While in motion, their nine limbs were used for balance and direction changes, not to bear their weight. Bowman would call their color vomit green—to Conn, they were the color of the eyes of her childhood cat Maggie.

There was a spartan outbuilding where passengers and crew could wait to board a spacecraft, nothing more than bleacher-type benches and a roof on stilts. It was currently empty.

“Why do you have to sit?” Conn asked, almost to herself.

“Pardon?”

“Here, where everybody knows you’re an avatar. Why do you have to sit? To rest?”

“Avatars are not robots, Conn. Rest is beneficial.”

Conn asked Persisting why the total package of technology and instructions for making avatars hadn’t been released before the United States declared war. “Precisely because we feared war, and we are not interested in facing an army of avatars.” Conn made a soft snort. She had upheld her end of the bargain. But she had to admit, the Pelorians had made the right choice.

Over the next forty-five minutes, Persisting fielded results from course calculations. Then he suggested a tour. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have time—that I’d have a good result for you quickly,” he explained. “But would you like to see the village while we wait?”

They sledded a kilometer inland until they were among the structures Conn had seen earlier. For as far as the eye could see, there were other, shorter buildings, wide and long, native pine, unadorned but for what looked like a sealant. Families lived in them: three adults with one, two, or three children, Persisting explained. Other low buildings near the path to the spaceport were vehicle storage, medical care, food processing, common areas for recreation, town meetings and the like. From the coast, Conn had been able to see the watch tower, a radio tower, a three-story...what? Boarding house? A massive forger, one-third the size of those on the moon.

Some Pelorians hurried between buildings. Not hurried, exactly, but walked with purpose. “A simple, temporary genetic manipulation lets them take in the nitrogen in your air and expel it as waste before it can poison them,” Persisting explained. “Provided they don’t overdo it.” Sledders went by with breathing apparatuses. “Most who are able are on the moon, building what you call the fortress,” Persisting said.

“What do you call it?”

Persisting seemed to think about what to say. “We’ll stick with
fortress
. Here on the island live the families and children of the moon workers, and others who for various reasons cannot or do not contribute. The families: one parent will work on the moon for a number of days, then swap places with another, then that one with the third, and then over again, if they are all able.”

Craning her neck, Conn spotted an array of what might have been satellite dishes, or possibly solar panels. She asked which they were.

“Both,” Persisting said. “There are dozens of other villages this size, each with a population of five or six thousand.” Wrangel Island was half again as big as Delaware, so there was more than enough room, but Conn, even aware of how many Pelorians there were in total, had pictured a tiny village with a thousand living in it. She was way off. “This was the first. We call it Outpost.”

Persisting abruptly stiffened.

“What?” Conn said.

“Twenty hours,” Persisting said.

“Twenty
hours
?”

“I assume you’ll take it.”

Conn squealed. “Yes! Yes. Please.”

“The spacecraft, I regret to say, is on the moon. Looks like you’ll be paying a third visit. With so many journeys between here and the moon already, or between your space station and the moon, a quick fifth-dimensional course should be easily calculated.” It was as much as Conn could hope for.

They sledded back to the spaceport.
I’m coming, Grant,
Conn thought.
Just hang in there one more day
. Now the clock was ticking.

April 19–20, 2036