Girl on the Moon

by Burnett, Jack McDonald

  The walls of the spacecraft were largely flexiglass, a material that could pass for burlap—pliable, light, but tough. With the inside of the spacecraft pressurized, it was stretched close to its limit. But it still wouldn’t make much noise if Conn rapped on it. The hatch was the same. But the frame of the hatch was solid. Conn knocked. Then she had an inspired idea.

  She put her breathing bubble right up to the door. Her voice would carry through the bubble, through the wall and through the pressurized atmosphere. “Grant!” she called. “It’s Conn. I’m here to take you home. But you need to suit up and depressurize, so we can open the door.”

  Nothing. Conn tried her best to press her ear into the wall. Nothing, still.

  She knocked on the hatch frame, and repeated her message. Then a third time. Nothing in response. She willed herself to be patient.

  If Grant was dead, or even unconscious, Conn had done this all for nothing.

  She couldn’t think that way. He had heard her. He would open the door soon. Conn would figure out how to get back to Earth. And it would take no more than days, so Grant could get the medical attention he needed.

  Conn paced around the Bebop in widening circles. If she did this long enough, she would come across Al’s and Callie’s bodies. She didn’t want to find them, and yet she did—why? To say goodbye? She couldn’t bury them in ice as thick as the moon’s rock. To say something for them? To them?

  To apologize?

  She glanced back at the spacecraft. She gasped. She shuffled over to it as best and as fast as she could. It was true: the walls had deflated slightly.

  The spacecraft was depressurizing.

  Now Conn just had to hope Grant had sealed himself inside his pressure suit first. She dismissed the concern. This was working. Grant was going to be OK.

  After a good ten minutes, Conn thought the walls had stopped deflating. She watched intently for another few minutes. It seemed the spacecraft was depressurized. If she was wrong, she could kill Grant herself.

  She hurried to the hatch, trying to block out all negative thoughts. She undid the seals, cranked the handle, and the hatch detached from the frame. Grant was sprawled facedown before her, fully suited, not moving.

  Conn had no radio to talk to him with. She knelt and gently rolled Grant’s helmet so the faceplate was showing. Conn pressed her bubble to it. “I can carry you, but it’s going to hurt,” she said. “I’m sorry. Can you help?” Conn saw him mouth Thank you.

  The same low gravity that would let her carry Grant would probably minimize how badly it hurt to be moved, Conn thought. She puzzled out how best to do it. She knelt again and pressed her mouth to the faceplate: “Can you roll over?”

  No response, but Grant had gotten his helmet on and sealed, and had done the depressurization sequence. Surely he could roll over. She began. It didn’t go well. If it hurt that much with Tethys gravity, Conn shuddered to think how it would hurt when they got back to Earth. Gasoline Alley, she thought. I’ll have to take him there, at least for his emergency care. They weren’t equipped like a hospital on Earth, but they had a clinic. They treated plenty of injuries there, and needed to be ready in case of some pretty gruesome ones, so Conn held out hope Grant would be in good hands.

  She gently helped Grant roll over. He was stiff as a board—he had to be in so much pain. Plus, God only knew how much internal bleeding he’d suffered.

  Eventually, Conn got him in a position where she felt confident she could lift him with an absolute minimum of discomfort—which would still be a lot. She got her arms underneath his air tanks and knees, and lifted him off the floor. He stiffened again, and Conn sucked in a breath, but she kept going. She carefully went down the ladder to firm ground. Then she started, slowly, so as not to jar Grant, toward Conn’s vessel.

  When they were no more than fifty meters from Conn’s Pelorian spacecraft, it was suddenly, silently crushed like an aluminum can.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Close Encounter

  April 20, 2036

  Conn screamed. As much from frustration as fright.

  The Pelorian spacecraft was wreckage. From some part of it, water sprayed upward, turning into ice within moments. Then the leak froze over, too.

  Looming over it, on an elaborate vehicle that looked like a Pelorian hover-sled in the same way Saturn looks like a beach ball, was a tall, humanoid figure. In the light from the Bebop and Saturn, behind and to his left, Conn could make out certain details. He was clothed in what looked like a skirt or a kilt. He had a head of long hair. What she could see of his skin was gray-green, and shimmered—to her, it looked like the Aphelial was wearing an industrial-strength pressure field. In the Dyna-Tech feed, Conn had thought the skin of the crew’s attacker had rippled. That was probably it.

  Conn briefly wondered why she assumed the alien was a he. But he was enormous, eight feet tall, if Conn could judge properly, and solid in a way that suggested muscular. One hand held a bar in the front of the vehicle, the other a long staff of some kind.

  Conn’s mind reeled. Grant had just been condemned to die on an alien moon. They both had been condemned to die. After all she’d done to get there. “What did we do to you?” she shrieked.

  “Speak your native language if you wish to address me, ho-teppid,” Conn heard in her mind, in Basalese.

  “I’m just trying to save this man’s life!” she barked, in the same language. The figure couldn’t hear her, but what Conn had to say was definitely making its way to the outgoing message center of her brain. “I just wanted to get him home. Now you’ve killed him, just like the others!”

  The alien replied, “You ho-teppi are the ones who treat them as though they are not alive. Discard them when they no longer serve your purpose.”

  Conn didn’t know the Basalese word for fuck—Daniels was right, they didn’t have sex—so she used the English one. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “When you—the real you—are finished with this boud-bahn, ho-teppid, what will you do? You will discard it like a used set of clothes. Except: you don’t wear any clothes, do you? Really?”

  This thing thought she was an avatar under Pelorian control. “I’m not a—whatever, a boud-bahn. An avatar. I’m a human being. From Earth. So quit calling me ho-teppid, too, while you’re at it.”

  “You think telling me you are human will save you? How dull do you think I am? Humans can’t so much as fly to their moon.”

  “I’ve been there three times, idiot,” Conn spat. “This man and his two friends, they came all the way out here. Just to get crushed to death by you. You’re a fucking monster.” She needed to learn the Basalese equivalent of fuck, in the hierarchy of curse words.

  “If you are really human—”

  “I am, damn it!”

  The alien said nothing, for a time. He approached until he was about ten meters away, still at least that far above her. Conn backed up a little. She hoped Grant was unconscious when this thing killed them.

  “You know Teppuri—the language,” he said. “You came in a ho-teppan spacecraft.”

  “They taught me the language. Took about three minutes. And they helped me come rescue this man. Calculated the course, lent me the spacecraft. They’re my friends, and you can go to hell.” She also needed to learn the Basalese equivalent of hell. “Are you trying to talk us to death? Get it over with, asshole.”

  “They,” the alien said, with what almost sounded like a laugh, “are not your friends, Earthling.”

  “They don’t go around crushing my spacecraft and my coworkers.”

  “This is an interesting development indeed,” the alien said. “Humans are not a spacefaring civilization. They might never be. That is my information. This is not so, you say?”

  “Oh, my God, you’re dense. I’m human. Like him. And here we are.”

  “So suddenly you can go to your moon multiple times and fly here to the sixth planet? The ho-teppi gave you the technology? I felt sure they would keep it from you.
Teach you some magic tricks and leave you bound to your planet. That has been their way for centuries.”

  “I went to the moon, Earth’s moon, and this man came here, because of one person, one human, named Peo Haskell. We have a space station. We’ve been back to the moon. I don’t know what to tell you. The Pelorians—the ho-teppi—arranged to meet us for the first time on the moon.”

  “A whole space station?” the alien said, hint of amusement present again. Conn wanted to punch him in his huge, smug face. “If they set a meeting on your moon, I am quite sure they expected you not to join them. What did you mean, we’ve been back to the moon? Surely if you had been there once, you would have kept going, had a presence on other planets by now.”

  “Seriously. If you’re done killing people, then I have to go—my trip back to Earth just grew to two years. He’s not going to make it. Go anally probe yourself.” Tears of frustration leaking out of her, she turned back toward the Bebop.

  It collapsed into wreckage.

  “You fucking asshole!” Conn shrieked in English.

  “Relax. If you are telling the truth, and you are human, I’ll take you home myself.”

  “Then do that and quit destroying shit! That thing cost millions of dollars!” She tried to calm herself. “Two of us aren’t going to fit on your little hover-sled there.”

  “We will manage until I recall my spacecraft, currently in orbit. But first, you must tell me about your interactions with the ho-teppi. How have they managed to convince you they are friends?”

  “We could have this conversation on your spacecraft.”

  “Let us have it now.”

  Conn sighed. She didn’t want to blow her ride home. “They exchanged technology for a place to live, on Earth,” she said. “And more technology for use of our space station and some...other services. They built a huge base on the moon. I don’t know what information you’re looking for.”

  “None of this technology involved spaceflight, did it?”

  “As a matter of fact, it did. They gave me fifth-dimensional travel.”

  “Working fifth-dimensional travel?”

  Conn fought a chill. “I have a brilliant team trying to figure it out.”

  The alien did laugh then. “This place they arranged to live in. Would it be considered a great, powerful nation?”

  “Kind of,” Conn conceded.

  “One with great and powerful weapons of war at least?”

  “I suppose you could say that.”

  “And have they also arranged for another great nation to go to war with it?”

  Conn didn’t say anything.

  “The ho-teppi are nobody’s friends. They are outlaws. They will take over the country after this second power conquers it for them. They will use its weapons of war to obliterate remaining powerful nations. They have likely been infiltrating and studying those other powerful nations with boud-bahn. That in itself is immoral. You are yet a backward civilization, but where ethics matter, creating a clone and uploading a copy of one’s consciousness into it is the highest offense. We made the technology illegal a thousand years ago. They do it in the millions.”

  “I—they said they control the avatars. I didn’t know—” There was a light approaching from behind the alien: his spacecraft, Conn figured.

  “For being tricked by the ho-teppi, you can be forgiven—especially by me. After all, we may be related.”

  “We may what?”

  “What is your name?”

  “Conn. Constance. Constance Ashley Garrow.” The light behind the Aphelial was growing fast.

  “My name is Murrdip Hangzhii. There are no words for it in Teppuri. Conn, I am sorry to have to bear these tidings, but your planet has suffered an invasion. And it sounds like you have been happily assisting it because it appeared something was in it for you.”

  Conn reddened. She didn’t know if he meant you as in humanity, or you as in her, but if he was right, either one would do. And she didn’t even get faster-than-light travel out of the bargain.

  “You are not the first to be taken in by these...tricksters,” he said.

  “Why do you say we might be related?” she asked, as the spacecraft closed in enough to take on some detail behind the alien. Hang in there, Grant, she thought. It won’t be long now. “Are you originally from Earth?”

  That laugh.

  “No, Conn. We are not originally from your planet. You, in a way, are originally from ours.” Conn felt the prickle of gooseflesh.

  Then she noticed the approaching spacecraft wasn’t slowing. In fact, an engine fired, burping exhaust. “Forty thousand of your years ago—”

  Conn dropped flat on her back while trying not to jar Grant. The descending spacecraft struck the alien, and barely missed Conn on its way down.

  SIXTY-TWO

  The Way Home

  April 20–21, 2036

  Conn couldn’t believe her rotten luck. She stood carefully and peered around, but couldn’t see Murrdip Hangzhii anywhere. His mangled sled cartwheeled to her right in the low gravity of Tethys and the soft light from Saturn.

  Her right leg was black with engine exhaust. She gently put Grant down and checked thoroughly for any breaches or leaks in her suit, then Grant’s. She found none. Grant had done an amazing job patching his suit after his injury.

  The spacecraft looked Pelorian. Conn wasn’t surprised that the most efficient spacecraft design would catch on independently with different cultures. But now, unbidden, a hint of hope welled up in Conn. Was this Persisting, come to save them? No, he couldn’t have changed his mind, calculated an hours-long course and gotten here so soon after she did. The hope deflated out of her.

  She remembered that Persisting said he couldn’t control his avatar from that far away. But if Murrdip Hangzhii was right, that was just a lie on several levels. Starting with: it wasn’t really Persisting who said it.

  The spacecraft stood inert. If it was the Aphelial’s vehicle, and the Aphelial was alone, she had to find a way inside. But she had no idea if it was pressurized or not. If it was, opening the door would kill her as violently as Murrdip had died.

  Her only hope seemed to be that Murrdip would miss some check-in, and his friends, wherever they were, would come looking for him. If that didn’t happen within hours, she and Grant were dead—they no longer had a spacecraft with air in it to wait in. They would last only as long as their respective O2 tanks. They were also out the Bebop’s food and stores.

  She bent and carefully scooped up Grant again. Suited, with life support, he weighed about six and a half pounds.

  A hatch opened. Hope surged in Conn. Her last hope, her last chance to save Grant and herself was—

  “Human?” she wondered aloud. The humanoid wasn’t eight feet tall, and it wore a Dyna-Tech pressure suit. That didn’t make any sense. Was Persisting’s latest-model avatar a humanoid in a Dyna-Tech space suit? If so, why? After hearing what the Aphelial had to say, Conn wondered whether it was to infiltrate Gasoline Alley.

  The figure, unsure of its footing, carefully rounded the spacecraft to the far side and did not reappear. Conn was puzzled. She went around the spacecraft herself.

  The figure stood over the mangled body of Murrdip. Conn felt her gorge rising. The figure turned. Approached her.

  Now she could see past the faceplate.

  “Yongpo?” Conn said.

  # # #

  The good ship Cai Fang had an airlock, which Conn wouldn’t have guessed from the outside. But it meant the spacecraft could always be pressurized.

  There was nothing to lay Grant comfortably down on, as Conn had hoped. There were two human-sized and -shaped seats, in front of a spacious cabin. Conn lay Grant on the floor, then removed his breathing bubble and the O2 tanks. Yongpo undid his helmet. Conn engulfed Yongpo in a tight hug, laying her head on his shoulder.

  “What’s going on? Tell me everything.” Conn set about trying to gently take Grant’s pressure suit off him. Yongpo knelt to help.


  As they worked, he told her how he solved the fifth-dimensional problem. Or thought he had: but his solution meant that the computers the Pelorians gave them all had it wrong. He was stuck, sure he had it right but in possession of strong evidence that he was wrong, when the Pelorian-model spacecraft was finished and declared spaceworthy. Yongpo decided that as an engineer and a scientist, he had to test his findings—and as a friend, he had to come try to help Grant. “I am just sorry I couldn’t reach you to let you know before you left on your own.”

  Conn thought the apology was adorable. She kissed him.

  Flustered, Yongpo continued: the first course he plotted along fifth-dimensional space would get him to within a hundred meters of the Bebop in six and three-quarters hours. He couldn’t believe it. He knew the course could have come back at a year and a half or even three weeks and the trip wouldn’t have been worth it. But now, there was no time to waste—he borrowed a pressure suit and got going, all the while trying unsuccessfully to contact Conn.

  Yongpo had been prepared to be the only one there. Hitting and killing an alien, then seeing Conn, nearly convinced him that the fifth dimension must have driven him mad, or something.

  Grant moaned in agony. Yongpo’s hands shook. By the time Conn got the suit off, Grant was back to being unconscious from the pain.

  “He said he thought he had broken ribs and maybe his collarbone,” Yongpo said. That meant there could be internal bleeding. A lung could be punctured by broken ribs, or could have collapsed during the attack.

  Yongpo had filled a travel bag with as many first aid supplies as he could from Gasoline Alley. Among them was a topical burn ointment heavy on the opiates. Conn liberally applied it to Grant’s midsection and neck, his two most tender places judging by his reactions when they were taking off his suit. Next, she injected Grant’s rear end with the strongest antibiotics in the bag. Conn knew that only rest would heal broken ribs, and there was no use wrapping them—in fact, it might do more harm than good. Conn was pretty sure Grant had also broken his arm. That she wrapped and put in a sling to keep it as motionless as possible.