No, she had to keep a positive attitude. Rescue was on the way. She and Takshin just needed to hunker down and wait.
But was Takshin all right? If he did not come inside on his own, she would have to go out and find him.
He did not come back during the ten minutes it took her to put on her spacesuit. The electronics in it were dead, but the oxygen flow could be controlled by a manual valve. The suit had insulation good enough that she was more likely to end up uncomfortably hot than freezing to death.
It took two minutes to crank the inner airlock door open manually, and another two to crank it shut behind her.
She hated to waste any oxygen, but without power for the air pumps, there was no choice but to vent the airlock into vacuum.
Leaving the outer airlock door open in case she needed to get back in quickly, she headed toward the mining end of the SMC-18.
“Takshin?” she called out as she approached the entrance to the shaft, then realized how foolish that was in a vacuum, with no radio.
Luz spotted his footprints in the regolith heading into the shaft. There were none coming out, so he must still be in there.
The cable attached to the winch was loose. She picked it up and gave it a tug, hoping Takshin would reply with a tug of his own. Instead, there was barely any resistance. She pulled the cable up and found that it had been cleanly sheared at the end.
She tied the end of the cable into a slipknot and hooked that to a carabiner on her spacesuit.
Luz took a couple of slow breaths to get her nerves under control. Holding her glowstick out to light her path, she said, “That is how one earns hazard pay,” in a parody of Pyotr’s Russian accent, then stepped into the shaft.
Forty-five degrees’ down-slope would be a very steep ramp on Earth, but it was manageable on Luna. After several careful steps she was far enough inside that the starlight faded. A few lunar dust motes drifted around in the dim green light cast by her glowstick.
Beyond the edge of the light, the shaft seemed to extend forever, as if she could drop off the edge of the universe.
Thirty-eight meters from the top of the shaft to the edge of the black sphere. She could do this. Takshin had to be somewhere in the next thirty meters or so. Unless he had gone inside the black sphere. She would cross that bridge when she came to it. Or not.
A sudden tremor shook the ground beneath her feet. If not for the weak gravity, she probably would have tumbled down the shaft.
Moonquake? They did happen from time to time, usually as the result of tidal stresses. Just her luck for there to be a moonquake in the middle of all this craziness. But no, the more likely explanation was that this was all related to that black sphere.
The green light from her glowstick began to fade.
A sinking feeling settled in her gut … and the glowstick went completely dark.
Of course—glowsticks stopped working if they froze solid.
Luz swallowed hard, clutching the now useless glowstick as if to hang onto her sanity with it. She could not afford to hyperventilate with limited oxygen.
“Wake up! Wake up!” she whispered, mostly to herself, but also to her glowstick, her suit, her helmet, her radio, the entire SMC-18. “Just turn back on!”
She was about to turn around and climb back out beneath the stars when she glimpsed a flash of light in the depths of the shaft. Before she could decide whether she had imagined it, the flash repeated. Three seconds later, it flashed again.
White light. Repeating every three seconds. Just like the emergency beacon on their spacesuits.
Takshin was down there, and something had triggered his emergency beacon. Which somehow worked, unlike every other piece of electronic equipment.
Luz cautiously took step after step, always making sure she had firm footing before taking the next step. Twice she had to stop as tremors shook the ground.
The flashes of light were too brief for her to accurately judge the distance or see any details up ahead—until she almost tripped over a spacesuited leg on the floor of the shaft.
She got down on hands and knees, feeling her way around Takshin’s body—she hoped it was not a corpse. When she found his helmet, she put hers up against it, hoping the sound of her voice would conduct through to him.
“Takshin! Are you alive?”
There was no reply, and his body did not move in response to her query. She listened hard, and thought maybe she could hear him breathing, but it was so faint she could not be sure.
“Don’t worry, I’m going to get you out of here,” Luz said.
Hoisting him into a fireman’s carry was awkward, but in one-sixth gee she could handle the weight. What she had not considered was the forty-five-degree upward slope, which her ankles just could not handle. Instead, she had to walk backward. Three times, she almost lost her balance due to ground tremors.
Relief flooded over her as they emerged from the shaft into starlight.
And then she turned around and saw the SMC-18: the giant vehicle was tilted almost completely onto one side, sinking several meters into the regolith. As she watched, it sank another meter, as if the regolith and the bedrock beneath it had turned to quicksand. It reminded her of an experiment she had seen in a geology class involving a marble placed in a vibrating container full of sand.
Nothing in the seismology of this place had even hinted at such a possibility.
The main airlock was on the buried side. There was an emergency airlock on the side that now pointed toward the stars.
There was no point taking Takshin inside if they were just going to end up buried. But if they were going to survive until rescue came—if rescue came—she needed to salvage oxygen canisters, and maybe water and food.
Luz carried Takshin about a hundred meters, to what she hoped was a safe distance from whatever was happening. She then loped back to the SMC-18, which had now sunk more than halfway into the ground.
After clambering up the former bottom of the vehicle, she hauled herself atop the emergency airlock door. As soon as she started cranking the door open manually, a rush of air came out, its moisture condensing into white crystalline vapor.
She lowered herself into the airlock and cranked the outer door closed. If not for a bit of starlight coming through the airlock’s window, it would have been pitch dark inside. Working mostly by feel, she found and opened the valve to pressurize. Then she cranked the inner door open about a half meter.
The first thing she needed was another glow stick. Fortunately, there was an emergency supply locker on the wall next to the emergency airlock. Unfortunately, that wall was now a ceiling. Luz reached through the opening into the main cabin and unlatched the door of the locker. After fumbling around a bit, she found something that felt like a glowstick and detached it from the Velcro that held it in place. She activated it and was relieved when it started to glow.
The SMC-18 jolted as it sank farther into the ground. She did not have much time left.
Next to the airlock door on the other side was a rack with oxygen bottles. She cranked the door the rest of the way open. She reached over and pulled a bottle off the rack. She was able to reach two more, but did not dare lean out any farther for fear of falling out of the airlock.
Luz cranked the inner door shut. She attached the three oxygen bottles to carabiners on her spacesuit.
By the time she exited the airlock, the door was almost level with the lunar surface. She jumped as far as she could, and landed on normal regolith. Then she headed back to where she had left Takshin.
When she was about twenty meters away, she realized Takshin was not alone. Another figure in a SMC-logoed spacesuit was bent over him. Rescue had arrived!
“Am I glad to see you!” she said, before remembering that her radio was still out. Overwhelmed with relief, she took the final few strides to join the figure next to Takshin.
The figure turned to face her. In this dim light, the photosensitive diamondglass faceplate should have been transparent, but instead it was mirrored.
She could see her distorted reflection.
Then she saw the name stenciled just below the left shoulder on the spacesuit: Takshin Zalpuri.
She backed away slowly. The doppelganger made no attempt to follow her. It turned its attention back to Takshin.
She remembered seeing a horror holo about scientists in Antarctica reviving an alien creature that could absorb and mimic other beings. Was this a shapeshifter that had been imprisoned in the black sphere, and now it was free? At least it had not absorbed Takshin.
The creature straightened up and turned toward her.
Luz braced herself for an attack, but instead the creature just dissolved into a formless swarm of glittering dust and then dispersed, leaving her alone with Takshin.
Whatever that thing had been, it didn’t seem to mean any harm. Relieved, she sat down beside Takshin on the regolith. Best to just wait here, conserving energy and oxygen, until the real rescue arrived.
She looked out to where the SMC-18 had now been completely swallowed up. “Goodbye, Sammy,” she said.
The regolith rippled out from near the shaft they had drilled. A huge thump lofted her almost a meter off the ground. After she bumped back down, she could feel the aftershocks.
Waiting here no longer seemed like the best option.
She lifted Takshin over her shoulders and started following the SMC-18’s tracks back toward Base. Takshin’s beacon was no longer working, but hopefully the rescue party would spot them anyway.
Luz staggered over the rim of a small crater and tumbled to the ground. Takshin’s body rolled away from her. She had no idea if he was alive or dead. She had replaced his original oxygen bottle with one of the three she had salvaged. She had kept two bottles for herself, and was now on the second. If he was in a coma, he would be breathing a lot less than her, carrying him. And if he was dead, giving him the one bottle would turn out to have been a waste.
But at this point, she could not carry him anymore. Hopefully, they were far enough away from the black sphere now to be out of danger. She was not sure how long it had been since she had felt a tremor. She would go on alone, and if she found rescue, she would tell them where to find Takshin.
She rose to her feet and kept walking.
Luz was so, so tired. Her head ached so much she could barely think. Her breathing was shallow and rapid.
Why was it so hard to breathe? She knew she knew the reason, but it took a minute for her to dredge it up: carbon-dioxide poisoning. The scrubber must be overloaded.
She was suffocating in this helmet.
She had to get the helmet off or she would die.
Her gloved fingers fumbled at the latches on the helmet. Finally they came free.
Air whipped at her face as it streamed out of her suit. That bought her a moment of clarity in which to realize the utter stupidity of what she had done—unless she could get the helmet back on quickly.
The air stopped flowing out as she managed to get her helmet latched on again.
But there was no longer a hiss of oxygen coming into her suit. The final bottle was empty.
Luz sat down on the ground. This was as good a place to die as any.
She looked up at the sky. It was lunar night, Earth was below the horizon, so there was no chance of seeing Argentina one last time. But as compensation, the sky was filled with stars. She did not remember ever seeing so many stars before.
She tried to pick out a familiar constellation, but the stars seemed to be multiplying, dancing around.
A glittering swarm appeared before her, eventually resolving into a figure in an SMC spacesuit. The name stenciled below the left shoulder was Luz Trunso. The helmet diamondglass was mirrored, and Luz saw herself in distorted reflection.
“Hello again,” she said. “I don’t suppose you could help me? I’m out of oxygen.”
The figure before her raised its hands and unlatched its helmet. Slowly, it raised the helmet off its head, revealing a duplicate of Luz’s face.
But then it morphed.
“Morphed into what?” asked Pyotr.
Luz lay in a hospital bed in Selene Mining Corporation Base. They had told her Takshin was still in a coma in the room next door, but the doctors were optimistic he would recover—the extreme hypothermia had probably saved his life.
She could not recall the face of the alien. It was like trying to remember the scent of a lullaby, the sound of a rainbow, the taste of starlight.
Luz shrugged. “The face of an angel.”
Pyotr shook his head. “That is very weird hallucination. Lack of oxygen can do that. You are lucky we found you when we did.”
“I know,” Luz said.
“As for black sphere, I say it must have been bubble of vacuum in bedrock. That is why no seismic vibrations. When bubble is pierced, ground collapses underneath SMC-18. Is total loss. There is no need to mention hallucinations in our report. Just confuse things.”
“Thank you, Pyotr.”
After Pyotr left, Luz stared at the SpO2 readout on the medical monitor: 99% oxygen saturation in her blood.
She held her breath and waited for it to go down.
It held steady for five minutes before she gave up and started breathing again.
Eric James Stone is a Nebula Award winner, Hugo Award nominee, and Writers of the Future Contest winner. Over fifty of his stories have been published in venues such as Year’s Best SF, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and Nature. His debut novel, the science fiction thriller Unforgettable, has been optioned by Hollywood multiple times. The son of an immigrant from Argentina to the U.S., Eric grew up bilingual and spent most of his childhood years in Latin America. He majored in political science at BYU and then got a law degree from Baylor. He did political work in Washington, DC, for several years before shifting careers to work as a programmer and sysadmin. Eric lives in Utah with his wife, Darci, an award-winning author herself, in addition to being a high school science teacher and programmer. They have two children.
Find him at ericjamesstone.com.
Pagliacci’s Joke
Travis Heermann
The circuses are gone.
And with their demise, the age-old symbol of joy and pathos—the clown—has been corrupted into an object of horror and ridicule. Children are taught to fear and disdain us.
But what about those of us for whom the laughter and delight of children is the very blood in our veins, the sustenance for our souls? When the elephants are gone, the trapeze is still, and the circus is buried in an ignominious grave, where do i pagliacci go?
We put on our faces like we always have. Like my forbears, I keep i pagliacci within me.
And in this dark time, a time of cruelty, callousness, and greed, if I could not entertain children, I would protect them. I traded my slapstick and my big rubber hammer for a Glock and a Taser, my red nose and my floppy shoes for handcuffs and pepper spray. A strange transition perhaps, but how else can I drink the stuff of life itself?
Now I walk the halls of Johnson Elementary, all quiet vigilance, but my heart sparkles during recess when the giggles rise and the music of children at play fills the schoolyard.
Children’s eyes widen at my sleight-of-hand antics. Their eyes roll at my jokes, but still they laugh.
They run up to me and say, “Do your dance!” And I slip easily into my old soft-shoe.
The teachers ask me, “Where did you learn to do all that?”
I say, “In the company of angels and demons.”
At the beginning of a new school year, little Tisha Jackson takes my finger one day and leads me out into the playground. “Watch!” She jumps into a series of cartwheels, somersaults, and attacks the monkey bars like a trapeze artist. I laugh and applaud, “Bravo! Bellissima.”
Her gap-tooth grin sustains me for the day. “My daddy is a policeman, too.”
I lean close and say conspiratorially, “I’m actually not a policeman.”
Her eyes widen. “Really?”
“Actually I’
m a clown in disguise.” It is more fun than saying I’m only a security guard.
She makes a sour face. “I hate clowns.” Then she bounces away like a beach ball.
The next day, though, she takes my hand again and guides me toward the swings, asks me to push her.
The eyes of some teachers narrow.
But at the apex of her swing, Tisha cries, “Wheeee!” And all other concerns go away.
Every day, the children gather around me.
“Tell us some jokes!”
“Do your dance!”
“Do the trick with the thing!”
“Very well,” I say. “I’ll tell you all a very old joke. A man goes to the doctor, deep in melancholy—”
“What’s a melon-collie?” Tisha asks.
“It means terribly depressed,” I say.
“Oh, like my momma sometimes.”
I clear my throat and continue, “A man goes to the doctor, terribly depressed. He says, ‘Doctor, the world is such a difficult place. I feel all alone in a harsh world, surrounded by mean people. I’m afraid of what lies ahead.’
“The doctor says, ‘We can easily treat that. Pagliacci, the world’s most famous clown, is performing tonight. Go and see the performance. He will make you laugh.’
“The man starts to cry and says, ‘But doctor, I am Pagliacci.’”
The children stare at me for a moment. Some of the teachers chuckle. Others cover me with scowls of disapproval and hurry the children along.
As he shuffles away, one of the boys says, “That’s a dumb joke.”
So I tell other jokes and content myself with whatever audience I can manage, and their laughter is electricity in my tissues.
It’s a Tuesday, and I’m walking the halls between classes, and I hear glass break. I chase the echoes through the hallways. My feet hurry into a half-run as I check the entryways. Another pair of footfalls echoes in the corridors. Heavy boots.
Limned in stark daylight spilling through the open door, his silhouette casts a long black shadow. The AR-15’s shadow curves across the floor to become a scythe. He’s reaching for the first classroom doorknob.
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