Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  “Is it Gene’s?” I said. I stared out at the sparkling surf and smiled.

  “What?” said Hellar. He bit his lips, thought for a moment. “Oh. I see.”

  “It’s Gene’s,” Eva said. “I used a potion that last night. I’d been preparing it for days.” She looked at me and winked. “You aren’t the only alchemist among us; I have learned a craft of my own, you know.”

  “And that,” Hellar said, “may be a neat solution to the problem of the bad dogs. If the baby somehow comes along with us.”

  “Yes,” Eva said. “I suppose you could think of it that way. But what will it mean—after we answer the call?”

  “Surely only good will come of this,” I said. “But let’s go and find out.”

  We held hands, Eva between Hellar and me, and walked naked across the sand, returning the way we had come forth: naked, except that each of us had in our hands the fishing lure that Gene had given us. I could feel Eva’s lure pressed against my skin where she held my palm.

  The water was warm, as it should be with the sun sinking into it like a hot stone and heating it up. We stood in the lap of the waves and watched the top of the sun disappear, steaming and red, beneath the ocean in the west.

  “Do you think it will be the same dream we left before,” Eva said, “or another one?”

  “This is the dream,” Hellar said. “I thought we were straight on that.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” I told him, “of anything.”

  We walked into the sea, and it covered us over, and we breathed in the water and drowned.

  I rose from the holding casket and stretched. After a moment, my eyes cleared. After another moment, I had feeling in my fingers and toes. The others were standing near me, also stretching and yawning. Grooming robots hovered near us and the whisk of their vacuuming wands sucked away the dandruff of dry skin cells that sloughed from us in tiny avalanches.

  “Aaah,” I said, priming my vocal cords as I’d been taught. So were the others.

  “Aaaah,” we all said. “Aaah, aaah.”

  I turned to the nearest robot. “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Two thirty p.m.,” it said, “November 19, 23,596 AD. Thursday.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Did you say twenty-three?”

  “Yes.”

  “How far are we from Earth?”

  “Just under two hundred lightyears. West, along the short arm of the Milky Way, of course.”

  “Of course. That was the way we were headed when I went to sleep. Eleven thousand years ago.”

  “We have found a very nice planet,” said the robot. “I have been instructed, sir, to ask you if you feel that mental reintegration is complete.”

  “Come again?”

  “During the lengthy virtual dreaming stage of our journey, your mentality was separated out to prevent systemic deterioration and the random creep of neurosis that a journey of such a time scale might induce. A side effect was the possibility that some portions of you might fail to reintegrate. Might settle, so to speak.” The robot shot a puff of air over me as a final touch in the cleaning. “How are you? Are you quite re-mixed and stable, sir?”

  I rubbed my eyes, blinked several times. “I . . . don’t know about that,” I said.

  “In that case, sir, I have been instructed by the ship’s mind to ask you to look at your hand.”

  “Look at my hand?”

  “Yes, sir. The ship’s consensus virtuality bids you to have a look at your left hand. While you were asleep, some mild genetic restructuring was performed by the sleeping casket mechanism.”

  I glanced down. There, in my left palm, were the three lures. They seemed to be embedded just beneath the surface, but I touched them with my right index finger and they actually were the surface. If you looked closely, you could see that each lure was made from my own skin. There were tiny capillaries of blood flowing through them. Three signs of contentment—lost or gained? I could not say.

  I could feel them, Hellar and Eva, within me, in a way I never could before the voyage, before we journeyed into the commons. I was conscious of being a voice, their voice, as I’d never been conscious of it before. And the voice of the other, the new one, growing with the part of me that was Eva. Little Gene. Who knew what strange aspect he would add to the totality of our personality when he came into his own. What was I going to become? Something that had not been before. When the time came, would I have the words to say what it was like being me?

  But, for now, there were other things that needed doing, and the one thing Tan—me—was good at was taking care of the business of the moment. I am the ego, after all. Those within me need me to speak and to act for them. That’s why I came out from the commons. Otherwise, I might have stayed. I was very happy there.

  And I almost touched the moon.

  I went forward to see where we were. A robot stood at the helm, where it had stood for thousands of years, ready to adjust the course if the helm veered from true. It had not veered. The tiny singularity which supplied our gravity had neither disappeared nor engulfed us. All the machinery had done its job; we had found the place for which we were looking. I walked past the robot and gazed out the viewport.

  The planet was a beautiful place, at least from up here. And though a part of me was going down there soon, a part of me would always stay above it all—the old man in the moon, hanging tranquilly in the sky, no matter what might befall those below. It was a funny way for people to end up after all these years.

  “The ship’s mind bids you good morning, sir,” said the robot at the helm. “It says to wish you . . . good fishing.”

  “Good morning,” I said, still considering the planet below us. “Good morning, Gene. From the rest of you.”

  HOME FRONT

  by Sarah A. Hoyt & Jeff Greason

  Pioneers on Earth frequently had to worry about local inhabitants who were unfriendly (often with good reason), but the Moon has no such dangerous neighbors; unless they’re imported . . . or self-imported.

  We were being invaded and it was impossible.

  I know it happens all the time on Earth. We studied history and I’ve read and watched movies about invasions and wars and countries fighting each other. Dad was in the military, before he got his degree and came to the Moon. He said there was hardly ever a time when some place on Earth wasn’t at war with some other place.

  But we were on the Moon. There were only twenty adults and five kids, at least in our part of it. The adults were all scientists, and none of them military. Mom said it was a chance at a new beginning, a clean break with the old Earth rivalries. That with infinite space there would be less war.

  I was the first baby born on the Moon. Mom had wanted to name me Eos Prometheus, but dad laughed and said no. Our last name is MacDonald, so he knew just what to name me.

  My name is Robert Anson MacDonald. I don’t think Mom ever got the joke. I only did because I have the same reading tastes as dad.

  My first hint that something was wrong came when I was exercising in the centrifuge room. Okay, it wasn’t a room exactly. The entire place we live in is a vast cavern, a tube really, created by lava flow.

  But the tube has two branches. In the upper one we have laboratories and living quarters. The skylight entrance from the outside of the Moon leads to the lab, and then there’s living quarters, and then the lower branch. Where the upper branch was a later flow that blocked the entrance to the lower branch. Later, as the lava that blocked that join cooled, it cracked and you got a rockfall, which still looks like it blocks the way, until you look closely. The centrifuges were past that rock fall, and then, past the centrifuges was the long cavern. It was part of our pressure and all, but not living space or labs. Eventually, the adults said it would be labs. For now it was recreational space, most of the recreation being clearing the floor of rockfall and scree. But we also shot and ran there.

  So, we were in the centrifuge space, and there were lights, and beyond it was t
he long cavern, not very obvious because it was dark.

  We had the type of centrifuges where you lay on your back and are centrifuged around your head. Dad calls them short-arm centrifuges. He says they used to have another type, but people used to get sick.

  We didn’t get sick. It wasn’t bad. It was just really, really boring. There were four of us kids—there were more kids, but some people sent them to Earth. Mom’s parents had never forgiven her not sending me to them when I was born—and we used the centrifuges while the adults were working, during the “day”. We also used them way more than the adults, because no one knew what growing up with 1/6th gravity would do to us. Considering how much we were prodded, measured and examined, I think we were as much guinea pigs as the guinea pigs in the lab.

  And I didn’t mind, not really, except as I said, the centrifuges were boring. Most of the other kids used headscreens or watched movies. Except Mary, who was six months old and just slept.

  Me? I used to go into my head and design space ships. In six months I was going to go to Earth to study aerospace engineering. I’d gone through most of what I could learn long-distance. So, I was lying there and designing a space ship.

  Which I think is why I was the only one to hear the shots.

  The first one sounded odd, and I thought it was just some lab equipment malfunctioning. Then there was another one, and this time I was sure it was a shot. My dad and Mrs. Li, my friend Laura’s mother, used to be sharp shooters, and they both practice shoot—and taught us kids how—in the long cavern. It’s not real shooting. It’s a computer system with a mechanical device on the pistol, but it simulates the whole thing, the recoil and the sound, and it records it all so you can better your performance. Dad said it was the only way to give us kids something competitive to do. I wasn’t that great at it, but I enjoyed it. And I knew the sound really well.

  So when there was another shot, I was sure. Then Mom screamed. I’d know Mom’s voice anywhere. Before she became a scientist, she was an opera singer. Dad said you could hear her voice all over the habitat when she was enthusiastic. Now she sounded half-angry and half scared.

  It didn’t make any sense. Yes, sure, I read dad’s books and the science fiction of the twentieth century, where people in colonies went mad and all shot each other. In this particular colony the worst people did was shout at each other when they disagreed on scientific hypothesis, and not even much of that, since every person had a different specialty or slant on a specialty.

  There is a way to stop the centrifuge before the programmed time. I reached for it and turned it off, then waited for the centrifuge to slow to a full stop.

  Even with it stopped, most of what I could hear was the sound of the other three centrifuges that were working.

  I held my breath. It seemed to me there were unusual noises coming from the lab on the higher arm of the habitat. Like stuff being pushed, and thrown over. But my heart was beating so hard it was difficult to be sure.

  I got out of the centrifuge, trying to make as little noise as possible, not that anyone would hear me above the centrifuges, and crept to the rock pile that blocked view of the entrance.

  The centrifuge room was lit, but on sort of dim light, so as not to interfere with people reading or watching movies on their devices.

  The corridor outside was far more brightly lit. It was the “back end” of living quarters. No one has separate rooms, really, but living quarters for the various families are separated with plant shelves and “walls” made of packing materials. Each “front door” to a family’s space opened onto a “hallway” which was really around four feet of the original space left open. That hallway was always lit, so people could come and go to the centrifuge room, or the lab, on the other side of the living quarters, or even the long cavern.

  So, I was behind a rock pile and in the semi-dark looking out at a brightly lit space. Which meant I was practically invisible. Which was good because there was an invader in the hallway.

  The colony—Luna City as the adults call it—was established and is financed by private companies, even if we’re all American. That means that we get people who are employed by the child companies of our company from all over the world visiting, sometimes for a week or two, to look at what we were doing. We were always kept out of the way for that, but of course we spied.

  My head had been so full of going back to Earth to study and all, that it was entirely possible I’d have missed the announcement of a visitor. Except that this was not a scientist, or even one of the investors. None of them had ever worn a uniform or carried a machine gun.

  As I stood there, watching the man look around at the rock pile, then trot out of sight into this relatively small space that was like a side-flow where the two lava flows had met, and which led to a long tapering area, used mostly for storage.

  He came back, looked again at the rock pile, then towards living quarters, and, obviously thinking it was the end of the habitat, turned around and went back the way he’d come. I watched. The back of my brain told me that this was a People’s Republic of China soldier.

  I knew it from the star on the helmet.

  Look, I hadn’t paid a ton of attention to tensions on Earth, or Earth politics. I suspected I’d do more of that once I was actually on Earth, but it had always seemed remote and unimportant from here on the Moon. But I’d seen the news programs the adults watched, I remembered Dad saying that China was like a beautiful lacquered vase with the smooth surface hiding the cracks, and that the fact that they were in trouble made them more dangerous. I also remembered the uniform and the star on the hat. Oh, the man was Chinese, too, but that didn’t mean anything. So were Laura Li’s family, but they were Americans.

  I didn’t think this man was. Another thing I noticed as he walked away was that he wasn’t used to 1/6th gravity. Sure, he was somewhat used, and he must have trained for it. But he walked funny as people did when they were new here. Like . . . they were doing a slow walk that looked almost comical. The visiting people did that and worse, the first few times they came up. They got better if they came up fairly regularly.

  And again, none of the visitors ever had machine guns.

  As he walked back up the hallway in front of the quarters, I slid back into the room. I was sweating.

  Suppose that the People’s Liberation Army had come in. I couldn’t understand how, since the Earth’s skies were watched by multiple security satellites, and people kept an eye on launches. But suppose they’d made a Moon shot and got here, somehow, unwatched, and came in . . . I suppose through the skylight and airlock outside the labs.

  I listened. There were still sounds of thumps, and shouts that sounded like orders, but I couldn’t even tell the language. They’d have rounded up all the adults. They’d have them under guard. One of the invaders, probably followed closely by others, had come to the end of the living quarters, and looked and, from that angle, had thought it was a rockfall and the end of the tunnel. He or they had gone back. Did they even know there were kids here? If they found out what would they do?

  When we had visitors, they were all from our company, and we were kept out of the way, because otherwise, Dad said, we’d become the Child Protective Services cause celebre, since no one was quite sure what physiological changes we’d have from growing up on the moon. I mean, the company knew we were here and appreciated the data, but casual visitors didn’t need to know.

  As for what the invaders would do, that question couldn’t be answered because I had no idea why China would invade a private facility. I knew a lot of the research was secret, but there would be other ways to intercept the information. So why were they here?

  I couldn’t answer that, so I had no idea what they’d do to us. Or to the adults, for that matter. It could be anything from killing to holding us hostage. In either case, it wouldn’t be good. I tried really hard not to think they might be killing Mom and dad right now.

  I wasn’t a child. I was one of the “kids” just because
I wasn’t one of the scientist-colonists, but I wasn’t a baby who needed his parents. Still, odd couple though they were, and even if I wasn’t utterly dependent on them, I didn’t like to think of Mom and dad getting killed, much less by an unexpected invasion for which they hadn’t been prepared.

  I got my screen from my pocket, and brought up Laura’s number, and texted “Stop your centrifuge. Don’t say anything.”

  For a long while, it seemed like she didn’t respond. I now wonder if it was in fact only a minute or two, but it seemed longer. Her centrifuge slowed down and stopped, and she got out of it, and looked around. When she saw me, her eyebrows went way up.

  She comes about to my armpit, but she’s fifteen, and in general she’s very sensible.

  I shook my head at her, then got close and whispered what I had seen. Her eyebrows went up more, and it looked like she was going to argue, but she didn’t. Instead, she went to the entrance to the centrifuge area, staying behind the rock pile, and listened for a while. Then she came back. She took my screen and silenced it, then she silenced her own, then she texted me, “I hear strangers’ voices.”

  I nodded.

  She stopped there, looking at me, as though she expected me to have some kind of answer. I texted back, “I don’t know what to do, but I think they’re holding our parents captive.”

  She nodded. Then she texted, and Colton’s centrifuge slowed down, even as I was reading the three way text, with her telling Colton everything we had figured out. Colton is fourteen and resents that we’re older and that we’re planning to go to Earth soon. It’s like we’re doing it on purpose to leave him behind with only Mary who can’t even talk, and all the scientists obsessed with their own projects. Sometimes I think he suspects us of being older just to upset him.

  So I wasn’t surprised when he came up to us scowling. Before he could open his mouth, both Laura and I had fingers on our lips, indicating silence, which made him scowl harder.