Girl on the Moon (6 page)

That afternoon, Conn was working in Peo’s office. They hadn’t let Gale Jennings know about their solution to the animation yet—he’d been unavailable so far, and it wasn’t anything to leave a message about, even over Wawigdin. Conn’s Wear shuddered—she had set up an alert to let her know if there was any news about
China+moon+mission
. The Chinese had set the liftoff date of their crewed mission to the moon as August 28, 2034, arriving August 31. Two days before September 2.

“We were right,” Conn told Peo. “They did decide to go to the moon based on the animation.” Peo frowned and swiped at her Wear. Conn frowned herself, not understanding Peo’s reaction. “At least we know somebody will be there representing the human race, right?”

Gale Jennings appeared on Peo’s Wear screen. “I thought I would be leaving a message,” Peo said, “but OK. I know what the animation means. Why did you really give it to me?”

“Because I knew it would be of interest to you. I knew that it might be an opportunity
for you.”

“The Chinese paid you,” Peo spat. Conn gawped at her.

“Peo, you know how these things are,” Gale said. “It’s not retail, price tags on everything, pay at the register. I do what I can to nurture my relationships. That benefits you, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Gale, we’ve had this conversation before. Make whatever moves you need to, just let me know who’s on the board. I’ve warned you about playing me like this.”

“You know what I can say for absolute certain? If I’d gotten the animation and hadn’t been asked by the Chinese to find out what it meant? I would have passed it on to you anyway. It’s right up your alley, for Christ’s sake.”

“Fine,” said Peo flatly. “Anything else for me?”

“Not now.” To Conn, it sounded more final than that.

They disconnected. Peo was furious enough that Conn didn’t want to set her off.

“I told him we’d figured out the animation,” she said, through nearly clenched teeth. “But he didn’t ask me what the answer was.”

“He already knew,” Conn said. “But I thought he wanted us to figure it out for him.” Now she was confused.

“Before you go today,” Peo said evenly, “find me a contractor who can sweep this office for listening devices.”

Conn’s jaw dropped. “No problem. I’ll take care of it.”

Conn found a security company and volunteered to wait to let them in and out.

The security company confirmed that the office had been bugged.

February–May, 2032

The Saturn mission would be a tour of the neighborhood, an ambitious effort orbiting no fewer than five of the ringed planet’s moons and landing on both Titan and Tethys, it was decided.

Even with Grant and Al taking engineering classes, the three mission astronauts were well into mission planning. Two, Callie and Grant, had been trained by NASA. Al had washed out of the same training with a bad knee—but Peo wanted his mind and skills on the mission, and he was nimble enough to complete Dyna-Tech’s own liftoff and landing safety training.

The mission was still two years from departure. The spacecraft was under construction in orbit at Gasoline Alley. It would be ready for a test drive come New Year’s Day, 2033. The fourteen-month wait after that for launch would give the spacecraft a boost in speed from swings around Venus and Jupiter.

Conn was jealous just thinking about it all. But at the end of the day, she was doing what she had set out to do: working to get other people into space. And all before she had even graduated from college.

As the weeks went on, Conn struggled to gauge Peo’s attitude toward sending her own people to the moon for the rendezvous on September 2, 2034. On one hand, Peo seemed to relish the idea. On the other, she feared stepping on NASA’s or the ESA’s toes: they were still her biggest customers, or at least her biggest source of astronauts.

But it was more complicated than that. On Tethys, they were looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life. In 2025, an Indian probe had landed on the small, icy moon, which was nearly bisected by an enormous trench called Ithaca Chasma. The probe found tantalizing evidence of what may have been life deep within the trench, put there by a comet or asteroid striking the moon. If there was life in the Ithaca Chasma, Peo wanted to know it. And prove it. Finding life, and discovering that it did originate from an asteroid, might prove that life on Earth was once extraterrestrial, too.

But now, whatever beings had orchestrated the moon shower survey were probably going to show themselves only six months after the Saturn mission launched. A full year and a half before astronauts landed on Tethys. That she might miss out on being the one to prove there was extraterrestrial life drove Peo to distraction—literally. Planning for the Saturn mission thus became more and more Skylar Reece’s responsibility as Peo mulled a 2034 moonshot.

The Saturn project suffered, in Conn’s opinion. At one meeting, Conn spoke up—she had been doing that a lot by then—to suggest matching the orbit of a band of Saturn’s rings and spacewalking out to get samples. Conn understood Peo’s strategy: every opportunity to impress people back on Earth and to inspire their imaginations was good for business. The astronauts spacewalking and reaching out to touch Saturn’s rings would make an indelible mark on the human imagination. Grant thought it was an inspired idea, but Conn didn’t mention that.

Skylar Reece scotched the idea. “Safety first, science second, there is no third,” her mantra had become. “That’s a huge safety risk with no appreciable benefit to the science.” Conn had to defer, but she knew if the idea had come from Peo, and it was the kind of idea that would, they would have at least roughed it out on the back of a napkin to prove why it wouldn’t work. Or, more likely, how it could.

Peo gained some leverage over NASA and the ESA when someone at the ESA cracked the animation code and shared the information with NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos. The three agencies determined that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, let alone the invitation to meet them, should remain secret for the time being. But Peo’s sources in the agencies were good, and knew what they were looking for, so she knew what was going on. She let them all know via Wawigdin that she had a copy of the animation, too, and had figured it out before they had, but she hadn’t gone public. And she wouldn’t, if given certain consideration.

That was how the Dyna-Tech-funded mission to the moon was born.

NASA, the ESA, and Roscosmos got approval in their various jurisdictions for a joint crewed mission, largely on the premise that it was bad for the West if China did it alone. Scott Daniels, an astronaut who had clocked five hundred hours in space, sixty-five of them outside, would represent NASA and be the lunar lander pilot. Didier Gonalons of the ESA would serve as the command module pilot. And Erik Tyzhnych, a forty-eight-year-old veteran cosmonaut, was coming out of mothballs to be the commander. Tyzhnych, whose nickname in astronaut circles was Eyechart—which was what his name looked like: a row on an eyechart—had last been in space seven years ago. It came to light later that Tyzhnych had been promised a moon mission long ago, which had never materialized, and there were those at Roscosmos who felt they had to honor that promise.

China announced its moon mission crew shortly after the NASA/ESA/Roscosmos joint mission was introduced to the world. Yu Bo would pilot the command module, while Luan Yongpo and Cai Fang landed on the moon.

All men. Peo vowed to have a woman on her crew.

Peo tried to talk Callie Leporis, commander of the Saturn mission, onto the moon mission, but she refused. As tempting as being the first woman on the moon was, she was the commander of the Saturn mission, so it was her baby, and the science and destination were too exciting for her to give it up.

Peo still wanted one person who had been training for the Saturn mission to join the moon crew. When Callie said no, she persuaded Al Claussen off the Saturn mission by making him the moon mission commander. Peter Goshen replaced him going to Saturn, with twenty-one months before liftoff to get up to speed.

The command module pilot for the moonshot was Jakob Dander, and Peo wouldn’t accept anyone else’s name in nomination. He had been Peo’s command module pilot for her own ill-fated mission in 2022. “Jake deserves to be part of a moon landing,” she said, and that was that. He had been thirty-one the last time, and he would be forty-three when he reached lunar orbit again.

Peo still needed a woman. She was effectively shut out from any astronaut currently employed by NASA, the ESA, or Roscosmos, so she turned to her private network and signed up Ashlyn Flaherty. Flaherty was NASA-trained with less time in space than might have been ideal, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Peo had used her before, as a contractor who helped test and refine new equipment in Brownsville and at Gasoline Alley. Flaherty had worked for both Roscosmos and the ESA as a contractor, too, always going where she needed to go and doing what she needed to do to get into space.

Before the announcement, Conn said to Peo, “Seriously. You won’t think about going yourself?”

“No,” Peo said. “I barely survived the training at forty-nine. Ten years and one cancer later, I just won’t be able to do it right.”

Flaherty became a household name, an instant celebrity: soon to be the first woman on the moon.

Peo put Hunter Valence in charge of the moon mission—on paper. His name went on a lot of memos and reports, though everybody understood that it was really Peo calling the shots.

Conn started to lose herself in the Saturn mission. She could hardly believe that she was playing a part in a moon landing. But a part of her was so disappointed she couldn’t go herself that she often didn’t even want to think about it.

If Peo couldn’t give Saturn her undivided attention, that shouldn’t mean that Skylar Reece had
carte blanche
to do what she wanted. Conn spoke up more frequently, many times just to get the room thinking about things in a different way than Skylar. She knew Skylar complained to Peo about Conn not toeing the line, though Peo never said anything about it. The implicit support made Conn smile.

June–December, 2032

After the moon shower, in March, 2024, the teenage Conn’s eagerness to meet the presumptive aliens who had apparently surveyed the moon wasn’t universal. A name that appeared often in Conn’s moon shower m-files was that of Glenn Bowman. Bowman was a former Catholic priest turned lifestyle coach, who became famous as a counterpoint—whenever the feeds had someone on to provide reasonable insights on the moon shower, they could count on Bowman to give them the opposite. He warned that the event was an ill omen. It had been but a prelude to the evil the monsters behind it would visit on the human race in due time. He was fundamentally antiscience. No technology he could imagine could create the effect of the moon shower. It was a display of otherworldly power, a demonstration meant to intimidate and make people feel helpless and hopeless. His point of view was sensational, while he himself was articulate and engaging, and he didn’t lack opportunities to hold forth. As the moon shower receded in time and no alien activity followed it, Bowman went into hibernation, but he never really went away.

Now, as the three missions to the moon took shape, Bowman was again wherever any feed or channel needed him, predicting doom. If anything, he had become more vitriolic since the moon shower. The world didn’t know why there were three missions going to the moon at the same time, but Bowman blamed it on his evil aliens from the start. And the number of people who took him seriously slowly grew. And the more people who took him seriously, the more dangerous he was.

On the eve of graduation in June, Conn took Grant out to dinner.

“Time to go back to Texas,” Grant said. He would return to where his two crewmates were elbow-deep in designing the Saturn spacecraft.

“I’m going to miss you,” Conn said, and she would. She had given it a lot of thought, and that was what she decided.

Grant looked at Conn, and Conn imagined she could hear his heart thumping. He was about to say something it took a lot of courage for him to say. Conn wished he wouldn’t.

“I want—I’d like you to come with me,” he said.

Conn had prepared for this, including what she would say to let him down easy. She wouldn’t tell him the truth—that she was terrified of what Grant would think of her if he knew she was bipolar; that she couldn’t drop everything she knew and scotch all the plans she’d made to go be with someone who might fall out of love with her; he would try and argue with her if she told him the truth.

So she had a plan. It went by the wayside when she started talking. In the moment, she found herself resenting Grant for putting her in the position of having to let him down, easy or otherwise.

“Just like that,” she said. “Postpone my degree. Maybe keep working for Peo, maybe not.”

Grant’s brow furrowed. “Well, you’d be in Brownsville, and I’m sure you could work out of the offices there.”

“Unless Peo has gotten used to having someone at her right hand. And that’s where I am, Grant—at Peo Haskell’s right hand. Peo Haskell! But you think I should give that up.”

“We can talk to Peo together,” Grant said. “I—” He didn’t know how to finish.

She so wanted to tell him the truth. But she couldn’t stop what she had started. It had too much momentum.

“Look, I get it,” Conn said. “You’re going to be leaving. For a long time.”

“Not for almost two years, Conn.”

“And you’re worried I won’t wait for you.”

“That’s not it at all.”

“I think I’m staying here. And I think,” Conn said, and she thought she could hear the blood rushing to her face, “this relationship isn’t going to work long distance.” It was as though she was listening to herself talk, without any input into what she was saying. “I think you ought to go back to Texas and build your spaceship, and I’ll stay here. That’s what I think.”