Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  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.

  PART FOUR

  There she goes, gang. The moon.

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

  FORTY

  Russia

  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 poss
ibility 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.

  Very few people on Earth understood what it was like to go to the moon and meet aliens for the first time. Her relationship with Daniels was often contentious, sometimes caustic, but they each had something the other couldn’t find anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere: someone to truly share with.

  The point of their being in Moscow a day earlier than their “diplomat” colleagues was to reunite with Erik Tyzhnych, have a few beers, hear all about the deal he made with the Basalites—intelligence gathering. Daniels didn’t seem to mind using his fellow moon walker that way. And ultimately, Conn knew, he hoped Eyechart would be an ally in their efforts to explore the sharing of the alien tech.

  After barely stopping at their hotel, they caught another maglev train to Roscosmos, where they were unhappy to hear that Eyechart wasn’t available, and they had to talk to his boss instead.

  FORTY-ONE

  Trouble

  January, 2035

  Evgeny “Gene” Pepelyaev was waiting for them in the cafeteria. “Erik is monumentally busy,” he told them, in good, barely accented English. “Those Basalites, they always have something to say, but they won’t teach anybody else their language. The burden of translation falls on Erik, I’m afraid.”

  “Can’t the Basalites speak Russian?” Conn asked.

  “Erik interprets for us conversations we’re not meant to be a part of.”

  Conn and Daniels looked at one another.

  “I completely understand how busy Erik must be,” Daniels said. “That’s why I confirmed this meeting with him well in advance.”

  “I deeply regret the conflict in his schedule. Perhaps I can be of assistance instead?”

  “Doubtful. No offense,” Daniels said politely, but Conn could feel him seething. “We can wait until he’s free.”

  “I’m not sure that’s advisable.”

  “Look, Mr. Pepelyaev—”

  “Gene.”

  “Gene. We’ve been on a plane for eight hours and we rushed over here so we wouldn’t be late. We’ve planned to go out for drinks and dinner. We went to the moon together, you know? I haven’t seen him since. If you have this idea that we’re going to try and wrangle information out of him, we’re not.” They were, Conn knew. “We’re going to be joined by two other Americans tomorrow and the four of us are going to try and wrangle information out of your trade representative. That’s tomorrow. There is no reason to keep us from seeing Erik today.”

  Pepelyaev just smiled. “I’m not keeping you. Erik is busy. Would you like to talk about the Basalites?”

  Conn was starting to get angry herself. “What about them?” she said.

  “Why don’t we start with the free, limitless power they’ve apparently given our Chinese neighbors. We’re all deeply concerned about the balance of economic power in Asia.”

  “How balanced is it now?” Conn said.

  Another smile. “I don’t mind telling you, we—Russia—feel we’ve gotten the short end of the stick, as you say.”

  “Wish you had asked for nitrogen power?” Daniels asked, with a smirk.

  “Were you able to find out what exactly China gave the Basalites in exchange for nitrogen power?” Gene asked, looking down at his own knees.

  “Does that mean you don’t know, or you just want to find out if we do?”

  Gene’s smile became more of a grimace. “All I know, Mr. Daniels, Ms. Garrow—may I call you Scott, and Conn? Thank you—is that we bargained with them in good faith and have given them several hundred square kilometers of land, which, believe me, they are using. In exchange, we’ve received their survey technology, which will come in useful, to be sure, but the sleeping dragon to our south has received a much greater boon. If we decide to...renegotiate, we would like to know what pieces everybody on the board is playing.”

  “They gave me faster-than-light travel,” Conn said, more out of pride than anything.

  “And you’re welcome to it, Conn. You are unlikely to declare war on Russia in the coming decade.”

  Conn had to concede the point, but was firm in her belief that her company had gotten the most out of the Basalites, nitrogen power or no nitrogen power. Provided they could reverse engineer everything.

  “Nobody is going to believe you only got surveying tech out of the Basalites,” Daniels said. “I heard you also got the tech to upload languages and information directly into the brain.”

  Pepelyaev gave no reaction. “I don’t know where you might have heard that, Scott. My understanding is that kind of information transfer only worked when the originator has a Basalite brain. We evidently don’t have all the lobes and such necessary.”

  “You heard this how?” Daniels asked.

  “We were promised that technology, and then didn’t get it. Do you begin to see how we are feeling about our new friends from Basal?”

  “Unfortunately, it doesn’t surprise me. Gene, you’re not Erik’s supervisor at all, are you? In fact you don’t work for Roscosmos. You’re more of a...civil servant. Right?” Daniels was accusing Gene of working for some more intelligence-centered part of the Russian government, Conn gathered. She had gotten the same strong impression.

  “In the end, we all serve the people of Russia. Do you know what the Chinese gave the Basalites in exchange for nitrogen power?”

  “We do, but we were told in confidence,” Daniels lied. “I’m sure you und
erstand.”

  Pepelyaev slapped his thighs and rose. “Thank you for indulging me as long as you did, Scott, Conn. Again, I regret that Erik is otherwise disposed. I’m sure he was looking forward to seeing you both.” He shook hands with them and left them gawping after him.

  “So that’s it?” Conn said.

  A woman arrived who described herself, in heavily accented English, as “public relations.” She offered a tour of the Russian spaceflight operations center, a half-hour’s drive away in Korolev. Conn wanted to say no. Really, she just wanted to go back to the hotel. They could afford to be rude given how they had just been treated by Gene Pepelyaev.

  But Daniels said, “Never seen it. That OK with you, Conn?”

  It didn’t matter what Conn said, so she said it was.

  There was awkward small talk during the drive, and even Daniels was irritable by the time they arrived at Russian mission control. He perked up on the tour. Conn didn’t.

  The building, and tour, were dominated by two large flight control rooms with rows of open work areas, each demarcated by a keyboard and fone projector. Enormous screens loomed at the front of the room for mission data. Russian satellites were controlled here, and it was still the heart of operations for the old International Space Station. The Roscosmos workers gave Conn the most enthusiastic affection she’d gotten so far in Russia. As they walked from one part of the complex to another, they formed a trail of employees behind them. At the main flight control room, the group had its picture taken with Conn and Daniels. Conn smiled for the camera, and stayed polite, and remained tucked in her numb shell. She wanted to go home. She would settle for the hotel, but she wanted to go home.