Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  The lander’s contact light came on, and Conn cut the engines, musing that very soon, no human being who had ever lived would be as experienced as she was at landing a spacecraft on the moon. They dropped the last two feet to the surface. Daniels squeezed her shoulder, and she was pleased to have had a live audience this time.

  There was nobody to congratulate them on the radio. Jake was rounding the near side. Conn didn’t know what the range was on the Pelorians’ telepathy, but she said in Basalese, “We are here. We are friendly.” There was no response in her head.

  “We come in peace?” Daniels snarked. He had made it abundantly clear that he didn’t want to come in peace.

  The two astronauts suited up. Conn had lost the battle with NASA and the US Senate over her plan to use personal pressure fields. The concern was that antagonistic Pelorians could remotely shut down the tech, exposing the astronauts to the vacuum where they stood. To Conn, it seemed that if the Pelorians wanted to kill them, they would die, whether they made it easy for the aliens or not.

  Their plan going forward was: find a Pelorian and ask to see what they were doing. Not terribly complicated, other than it assumed they could actually find a Pelorian. Daniels had advocated landing inside the perimeter because there would be Pelorians inside. What would they be doing outside? Conn second-guessed herself.

  She thought landing outside the secured area would be a show of good faith, of good intentions. She expected the Pelorians to come out: after the two-and-a-half-day escort, Conn and Daniels were certainly expected.

  They depressurized the lander and opened the door. At the foot of their ladder, a dozen Pelorians stood in a half circle with weapons aimed and ready.

  FIFTY

  The Threat

  August 31, 2035

  Conn squeezed her eyes shut in anticipation of some ray-gun blast incinerating her. It didn’t come.

  Instead, they heard someone speaking Basalese in their heads, making no effort to keep it simple. “Deliver,” she understood; “military home,” probably; “command center,” or something like that; “meet,” then a name. The name meant Purposefully.

  Seeing the Pelorians on a vid was no preparation for seeing a group of them in person. Their tangle of limbs made it difficult to tell where one ended and another began. In a close group, they gave the sensation that they were slithering. Conn’s felt a clench of fear in her insides, but she kept calm.

  The foremost of the group stepped forward. He was balanced on six limbs, and faced her with three more—two of which held a weapon low, either because he wasn’t going to hurt them, or to allow him to see out of the eye in the middle of the three limbs. Head-on, balanced as though on hind legs, the Pelorian looked like nothing so much as a multi-limbed frog.

  As the group shifted and moved, Conn could see that some in the back were on hover-sleds. Conn secured the lander’s hatch. She and Daniels obeyed gestures and each mounted different sleds, each behind a Pelorian driver. Conn had to lean forward and rest her hands on the back of the driver for balance. She didn’t want to touch them, but she reminded herself that her pink, spindly, bilateral, apelike body probably disgusted the Pelorians on some level.

  Presently, they came to a gate in the barrier. Above it was a parapet where guards could watch and where, Conn presumed, they could drop boiling oil, or otherwise repel the unwelcome.

  “Boiling oil. You would pour. On those entering. The gate?” The driver of the sled, making an effort to be understood. What Conn understood was that he had just read her mind. She tried to remember if she had possibly said something out loud, or intended to—enough that she would have sent the boiling oil bit to the communication center of her brain.

  “It would be effective,” she said.

  The Pelorian gave a mental screech combined with a growl. From context, Conn understood it to be laughter. “Yes, it would,” the Pelorian said. “I will steal. That idea.”

  She decided that her thought must have been close enough to speech to be picked up. The other possibility, she wasn’t prepared to deal with just then.

  The sleds entered the gate single file. Daniels was on the sled behind Conn’s. They turned left and sped up. Conn estimated they must be going thirty kilometers an hour. She dug her fingers into the back of the Pelorian driver and shut her eyes. Finally she had to lean down farther and wrap her arms around the alien as best she could. She tried not to think about how squishy it felt.

  They rode for at least forty-five minutes by Conn’s reckoning. During that time, she made a supreme effort to keep her thoughts from the communication center of her brain. The Pelorian driving the sled had nothing else to say, either. She wished she could look behind her and satisfy herself that Daniels was still there.

  Their journey ended at a tent. A Pelorian lifted the flap of the tent up; as Conn and Daniels stepped inside, they passed through a pressure field.

  Three Pelorians awaited them. The tent was big enough to hold about twenty. There was what Conn took to be a work surface along one side, with a Pelorian regarding material that looked like papers strewn across it. He turned their way as they entered, but then went back to his work. The other two regarded the humans in a way Conn felt was contemptuous.

  “We will need. A way back. To our spacecraft,” she said. The Pelorian who Conn gathered from his bearing was Purposefully clucked and said something she couldn’t follow to his comrade. “Before there is no air.”

  The second Pelorian crept up to Conn, and motioned for her to take her glove off. “Pressure is for us,” he said—or that’s what Conn got out of it. “Your hand will be well.” She took off her glove. She ground her teeth and let the Pelorian grasp her hand. His skin was rough, like the back of a frog. Synapses fired in her brain, a familiar sensation. Language. He motioned for her to replace her glove. He didn’t offer to take Daniels’s hand.

  Purposefully said, “I would not have made it through this meeting if we had to converse like toddlers. I have given you the full understanding of our language—structure, usage, all of it.”

  “What about my companion?” she asked, in a way Daniels could understand.

  “I’m sure you can translate for him.” Conn relayed the information to Daniels, who didn’t like it, but couldn’t do anything about it. “Now, you have come to observe what we are doing.”

  “Are you able to read my mind?” Conn was deliberately keeping it simple so she wouldn’t have to translate what they both were saying, if she could help it.

  “I am able to read your feeds. You made a good tactical decision, not landing within our compound.”

  “We only observe, and speak.”

  “Frankly, I doubt you have anything interesting to say,” Purposefully said. “I didn’t want you here. We were too late to stop you safely. But you’re here now, and you probably wish to hear me speak about what we are doing here.”

  “We are concerned. You may attack us.”

  She heard the mirthful screech/growl again. “We are about eight hundred ten thousand. You are seven billion. You believe us that stupid?”

  “We want to guarantee the safety of all seven billion,” she said, pausing to translate for Daniels. “And your technology is far superior.”

  “We want to guarantee your safety as well,” Purposefully said. “This base is part of our means of doing that.”

  “He’s saying they’re building this to protect us?” Daniels said.

  “Shush,” Conn said. “How does this base guarantee our safety?”

  “We use iron, aluminum, and silicates to build fortress walls, war machines, equipment,” Purposefully said. “If you or we are attacked, we use this as a base to fight back. We are digging out underneath the mountain and will be bunkered there, safe from bombs.”

  “Who is going to come bomb you? Not us. Who?”

  “It is a dangerous universe,” Purposefully said.

  “That’s not a good enough answer,” Conn said. “Who are you afraid of?”

&nbs
p; “I am authorized to give you every assurance that we are not building here out of some aggression we wish upon you. I am also authorized to offer you a tour. Would you like a tour?”

  “Ask him why this is all hidden from us,” Daniels said. Conn did.

  “We needed a crater and a mountain, and we’ve got them here,” Purposefully said. “Some consideration was given to the fact you wouldn’t be able to see it until much of it was already complete.”

  “And now it’s too late for us to do anything about it.”

  “That is the hope. We are burrowing under the mountain in part because of you and the weapons at your disposal.”

  “And yet you want us to believe this is all here for our protection,” Daniels said as best he could in Basalese.

  “Believe what you want,” Purposefully said and waved a limb dismissively at them. “You have nothing to fear from us.”

  As the astronauts took their leave, Purposefully asked whether they intended to depart right after their tour was over. Conn got the impression it was less a question than a suggestion. She felt some pride when she responded that it was still Earth’s moon, and as long as they stayed out of the Pelorians’ compound, they would go where and do what they pleased.

  The other Pelorians, Imagining and Abounding, ushered them out of the tent. Outside, Imagining said, “If you have at least another three hours’ air, we can do a tour right now.” They did, and they did. For two hours, they sledded around munitions stores, portable antiaircraft weaponry, radar shacks, temporary quarters, stanchions with lights to dispel the two-week lunar night, and the enormous, fifty-foot-high, fifty-foot-wide, one-hundred-fifty-foot-long “forgers”—the machines turning the lunar soil into machines. And one very tall, very long wall.

  The burrowed-out area under the mountain was off limits to them. Imagining told Conn it was purely residential, and presently housed tens of thousands. Daniels barked a laugh. Conn told him to behave.

  Conn was unsuccessful getting Imagining to talk about what threat the Pelorians feared.

  After two hours, Imagining made his way back toward the lander. Thirty kilometers per hour, over rocks and hills and gouged-out valleys, zigzagging to avoid larger boulders.

  Conn kept Jake up to date as best she could when he was on the far side, and she was confident he passed everything along to Brownsville and the CIA and NSA and all the other federal agencies interested in their mission.

  Imagining and Abounding dropped them at the lander, then sledded back the way they came.

  Conn approached the hatch. Daniels stopped her and motioned at it. It was open. They hadn’t left it that way.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Return

  August 31–September 2, 2035

  Nothing was missing, though plenty of things were where they shouldn’t be. The astronauts pressurized the lander and took off their suits, and then went about stowing and securing everything again.

  Conn wanted to know who the Pelorians were trying to protect them from. Daniels frankly disbelieved everything Purposefully had said. “There isn’t any threat, Conn,” he said. “If you buy into that, you’re a sucker. They’ve got you fooled.”

  “Think about it,” Conn said. “They may be under the mountain because they’re afraid we’ll nuke them, but the rest of the precautions are there for somebody else. What would a twenty-foot fence do to stop us? It’s for a ground assault. And why so many antiaircraft weapons? For our fleet of attack spaceships?”

  “Shoot us down before we nuke ’em.”

  “We’re assuming we would nuke these...people. I don’t think we’re that dumb. I doubt they think so, either.”

  “We’d do it, all right. We’re probably working on the scenario right now.”

  “That’s insane,” Conn said. “They call it the nuclear option for a reason. You don’t do it first. You don’t do it at all, unless you have no other choice.”

  “Have you seen these guys’ tech? We let them finish their fortress, how are we going to stand up to them?”

  “Why haven’t they already attacked us, if that’s what they want to do?” Conn asked.

  “Conn, you’re smarter than this. They’re waiting until their compound is done.”

  “Their compound on the other side of the moon. They have an island in Russia. Why do they need a fortress on the moon to attack us?”

  “God only knows what they’re cooking up on that island,” Daniels said. “Did you ever wonder why they wouldn’t let you in to film?”

  “Because someone from my party wiped out one of their avatars?”

  “I seriously doubt it,” Daniels said. “I think that was a pretense.”

  They didn’t have anything on the mission plan for another three hours. Conn voted for sleep. Daniels voted for the first sex ever on the moon.

  “You don’t think that some of the tens of thousands of Pelorians here have had sex already?”

  “We don’t even know if they do it,” Daniels argued.

  Conn grinned at the term. “’Do it,’” she said. “Are you fifteen?”

  “Not quite, but you know I’m at least, like, ten, eleven.”

  “Don’t stop believin’, pardner.”

  “Come on. What do you say? We can sleep after.”

  After an appropriate contemplative pause, she said, “OK.” Another broad grin on her face.

  One more first for Conn on the moon.

  # # #

  They went back outside to look around. Daniels wanted to stick close to the Pelorian fence, Conn wanted to go in the other direction, where nothing was disturbed. They compromised and went south, then west, toward the five-hundred-kilometer-wide crater Hertzsprung.

  As they stood at the precipice of the crater, Conn mused that if it had been Daniels who tried to kill her last year, he had a perfect opportunity to finish the job now. She’d seen a movie where somebody had pushed Benjamin Bratt off a cliff on Mars. She wondered if Daniels had seen it. Probably—like her, he would watch anything with astronauts in it.

  She thought about Grant and Callie Leporis and Al Claussen, in the vast gulf between Jupiter and Saturn at the moment, seven months from arrival at Saturn; she imagined how they would feel seeing an alien world for the first time, the magnificence, the strangeness. She was looking forward to swapping stories with them.

  She goggled for a moment, realizing she was on the far side of the moon. What people used to call the dark side, unaware that it got exactly as much sunlight as the near side. A place that no human could watch in real time. She and Daniels were utterly alone...if you discounted some fraction of eight hundred and ten thousand Pelorians up the crater rim.

  Maybe Daniels was right. Maybe they hadn’t attacked yet because they just weren’t ready. Had they not infiltrated human society and lied about it, until a rogue avatar spilled the beans?

  But what if Daniels was wrong? They were building their fortress to protect themselves from something. What if we nuked or otherwise did away with the Pelorians and then whatever they were afraid of showed up?

  Conn made a conscious effort to let these thoughts leak from her mind. She was seeing the ultimate sight: the far side of the moon, on the rim of its largest crater. Nothing on Earth would ever be similarly wonderful to her again.

  She was even glad to share the experience with Daniels. She thought he was basically all right, as long as he wasn’t currently trying to kill her.

  # # #

  There was science to do—there would always be science to do, until a human presence on the moon was nothing special anymore—and they did it. Some of it was classified, some not. Some was fun: bounding along the surface at speed, sensors providing data to better study the gait necessary to move on the moon. Some was dreary and repetitive: sifting through regolith looking for a particular shade of gray the geologists wanted them to find.

  But after only two days, it was time to return. Jake and the command module had been in an orbit that brought him to within twelve miles of th
e compound, getting more and better reconnaissance photos. He was clearly anxious to be done and get home.

  Blasting off the surface of the moon went routinely this time, and Conn let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Her rendezvous with the command module—her first—was textbook. She impressed Daniels, which made her smile.

  When they got back to Earth, all three astronauts were immediately debriefed. Conn had to postpone the shower she had been looking forward to. She stuck to her guns: the fortress was not an aggressive act toward humans; to the contrary, it bespoke a different, worse threat, the nature of which they had to discover. The CIA agent leading the two-hour debrief did not betray any feelings, but Conn guessed that the agency would find Daniels’s testimony more appealing. She was right.

  FIFTY-TWO

  The Good Fight

  October, 2035–January, 2036

  Conn tried everything she could think of to keep a lynch mob mentality from forming. The Russian reconnaissance photos were joined now by some of Jake’s from the command module and Daniels’s vid shot on their tour of the Pelorian compound. The forgers—the enormous machines that took in silicates, iron, aluminum, magnesium, chomped it up, and spat out walls and machinery—loomed ominously in the American psyche. In the official accounts, they were “what the Pelorians claim are ‘forgers.’” The public was encouraged by the media and Bowman’s publicity machine to see through that claim, into the Pelorians’ dark hearts.