Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  She fell silent—not weeping now, just no longer communicative. Stormie mouthed “we should go” to Frank and pantomimed the cut-off signal across her throat. He signaled her to wait.

  “Miss Holly,” Frank said, “if James cannot return to work, I will need to take care of our business matters from here. It will be … inconvenient, but should not be too difficult. Please tell James that I will handle everything as best I can. But I will need to be able to access all of the files on his computer, and I have not been able to find our network on the Web. I can access some of our shared documents in the cloud, but James had a dedicated server. Is it possible someone turned off his computer equipment? The small unit on top of the filing cabinet in his office?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes, I’m sorry. I went to his apartment Monday and picked up his tablet—I thought he might want to have it, but he hasn’t been able to use it yet—and I turned off everything electrical I could find. I can go back and turn it on tomorrow. Will that be okay?”

  Frank frowned, and his right hand, balled up into a fist, bobbed up and down a few times. He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “That will be very helpful,” he said in a low voice. “If I may, what time do you think that will be? If I know, I can make arrangements to access the server and retrieve what I need.”

  “I can go by there at seven, on my way to work.”

  “Thank you,” Frank said, “that will be most helpful. And again, please tell James that I will do my best to take care of all of our financial and contractual matters—and will be most happy to turn them back over to him when he has recovered.”

  Stormie said, “And please let us know if there are any changes, or—” and it seemed strange to be saying this from so far away, with no chance of making good on it in any meaningful way, “—if there’s anything we can do.”

  Jim’s sister’s attitude toward the gesture didn’t surprise Stormie at all.

  She laughed. Quietly, to be sure, and not for long, but it sounded genuine.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  * * *

  Tuesday, 19 June 2035

  Stormie could barely stand to be around Frank. He’d gotten morose, moody, and barely said two words at a time without either getting sullen or snippy. They were still helping out with the station’s environmental systems, and Frank said he was tired from doing Jim’s job and his, so Stormie took on a little extra technical work—she was content to leave all the business work to him—but it didn’t seem to help his mood or his attitude.

  It was a great relief when their names finally came up on the manifest of an outbound flight, and for a few minutes she wondered if she could go without Frank in order to have a little break from him. But she figured things would get better once they were in place and could establish a more-or-less permanent routine. Jim’s condition had improved to the point that he and Frank were e-mailing back and forth, and he’d moved to his sister’s house around the middle of June, but he still couldn’t take back his financial role.

  Just give it time, she told herself.

  The last few days before they boarded the ferry were especially tight: the station seemed much smaller when their fellow colonists, the Petersons and the two replacement couples, showed up. Stormie had never particularly liked Angela Beacon and was a little disappointed when she was picked to be Chu Liquan’s replacement; as for the Richards couple, he was a little too energetic and she had the shakes pretty bad when they arrived.

  So Stormie’s relief was palpable the Tuesday they left the station—they could have a reunion or welcoming or whatever at the colony, where they’d have a little gravity to keep from bumping into one another. Transit to the Moon took the better part of two days, and on the back side of the summer solstice they landed on its dusty surface.

  “Welcome to Mare Nubium,” said Maggie as she, Rex, Frank, and Stormie checked their pressure suits. The Adamsons, with whom they had left Earth, had been at the colony for two weeks already.

  The landing area was on a slight rise that had been baked solid by repeated landings and liftoffs. The elevated position gave a good view of the colony area to the south; the Sun had not been up long, and its low angle left long shadows behind the soil-mounded habitats and threw the outer wall of Mercator Crater into sharp relief. High above the crater wall, the partial Earth hung in the black sky; even though it looked smaller than it had when they were on the station, Stormie turned down her helmet display so she could see it better, and involuntarily fluttered to her tiptoes as the realization hit her that she was finally here, after so much trouble and travail. She strained to stand still and soak it in; she wanted to dance, to skip, to take off running under the earthlight, across the Sea of Clouds. Mare Nubium stretched away to the horizon to the north, a uniform plain unbroken except by a few boulders and other features Stormie couldn’t differentiate. Craterlets, probably.

  “It feels good to have some weight on my feet again,” said Rex. Stormie agreed silently.

  Maggie said, “Yes, Lord. And just think: here we are, walking on the sea of clouds.”

  “I believe I am the only person here who can claim this,” Frank said, and Stormie was surprised after weeks of grousing to hear a playful lilt in his voice, “since I have the closest ties to Nubia on Earth. But in the name of my ancestors who dwelt among the clouds, I have come to the Sea of Clouds in pursuit of peace and prosperity, and hereby name myself Frank the first, King of Nubia!”

  They laughed together, and Rex said, “Bravo, your Majesty.”

  Stormie’s radio crackled with an unfamiliar voice. “I thought you were from Kenya, Mr. Pastorelli.”

  With no auditory clue as to what direction the caller was, Stormie turned almost a full circle before she saw two trucks driving toward the landing area. They moved slowly, along well-worn paths.

  “That is correct,” Frank said.

  “And the ancient land of Nubia was actually part of Egypt, wasn’t it?”

  Stormie tightened her gut, thankful that the status monitoring in their suits was much less comprehensive than it had been in the Apollo days. Frank sounded unperturbed, which calmed her only a little bit.

  “That is true,” he said. “The southern part of Egypt and the northern part of Sudan.”

  “Okay, I see the connection, then. Since Kenya borders on Sudan, eh?”

  “That is the general idea, yes,” Frank said.

  “Well, then, your Highness,” the sarcasm was so thick Stormie nearly choked on it, “I hope you’re not one of these high-and-mighty royal types. ’Cause there’s a lot of work to be done, and the little stunt you pulled with the cargo manifest means you’re going to be doing more of it than you bargained for.”

  Before Stormie could ask what stunt the unidentified caller meant, he continued, “Attention colonists and flight personnel, this is Acting Colony Director Needham. Two Multi-Purpose Vehicles are now approaching your position. Colonists, please follow the flight personnel to the marked safety area and wait there for the vehicles to stop—do not approach until they are in position and signal you.

  “New personnel, please note: wherever there is a solid path, do not deviate from it. It has been fused to reduce dust contamination on the suits.”

  We know all this, Stormie interrupted in the privacy of her mind.

  “MPV-1 will move into position to unload cargo from the transit vehicle. Flight personnel will be taken to the reception area after the freight is secured. New colonists will collect their personal goods and board MPV-2 to be taken inside immediately. The Adamsons will meet you in the Gateway reception area and orient you to your quarters and accessible areas of the complex.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Pastorelli, I would like to see you in my office one hour after you cycle through the airlock. Habitat Four-Delta. We have a lot to discuss.”

  Stormie shuffled over to Frank, who had accepted their two small personal bags from the flight engineer and was already standing in the safety area: a four-by-five-meter area
with a curb around it. It reminded her of evaporation ponds or collection basins on Earth.

  She waved to get Frank’s attention and gave him the universal “I don’t know” signal: hands held out, rotated palms up. The light was such that she could see Frank’s face inside his helmet. He shook his head and turned away to look at the approaching vehicles.

  The nugget of hot anger in her gut, that had started growing when Needham was hassling Frank, turned as cold as the shadows on their new home—and burned worse.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Razor-thin Margins

  Thursday, 21 June 2035

  The prefabricated habitats were laid out in a loose, open-ended grid: one primary north-south line of habitats, crossed by two main east-west lines, with branching “fingers” that provided open space for multi-purpose vehicles to drive up to every module. The east-west rows were referred to as numbered avenues, while the north-south columns were called A through E streets—often with the phonetic alphabet. If someone said, “I’ll meet you at the corner of Third and Bravo,” there was only one place on the colony map they could possibly mean.

  Some habitats continued to take on special names. The dome at the intersection of Second Avenue and C Street was still officially Grand Central and unofficially the Pimple; the tunnel just north of Grand Central, considered the “100 block” of C Street, had taken on the name of “Gateway” since it was where most people entered and exited the main facility.

  The Gateway reception area was a wide spot in the first habitat, just past the decontamination area—which was not decontamination in the true sense of the word, but retained the name because “de-dusting” area sounded odd. Stormie and Frank marshaled through according to Jake’s instructions; they had learned the procedure during their training, but this was the first time doing it to combat real lunar dust.

  “The dust is worse than I ever thought,” Jake told them. “Really abrasive, so get as much off as you can and hope you don’t react the way I have.”

  “How’s that, Jake?” Rex asked.

  “I probably shouldn’t tell you. Don’t want to be the psycho behind your psychosomatic hallucinations.”

  “Oh, come on,” Rex said. “We can handle it.” Maggie just smiled. Frank acted as if he hadn’t heard.

  “Well, alright. After I got here, I started feeling like there was dust on everything—so much so that I started to itch. But I knew it was bad when I started feeling like I had dust in my mouth, and tasted it, too.” He drank from a clear polycarbonate flask and swished the water around in his mouth for emphasis. “Anyway, if that suit you wore in here fits you good, you might think about stowing it yourself. Everyone’s starting to claim their own suits that they can take good care of, instead of swapping out from the lockers and trusting that routine maintenance will take care of things.”

  Jake briefed them on other aspects of colony life as he showed them their quarters, but everything was almost identical to the training program. Besides the obvious difference in having to be careful how they walked in the low gravity, the only differences Stormie noted were marginal. The facility was cast from the same mold as the Utah training site; the smell, for instance, was close to but less plastic than the mockups in the Cave.

  By the time they got to Gary Needham’s office, Stormie’s anger and confusion had metastasized; the pressure was like something horrible growing inside her. If she had been able to talk to Frank alone, to find out what was going on, it might have abated.

  Needham’s “office” was singularly unimpressive. It was ostensibly part of Central Control—it was the room next door—but half of the compartment was stacked with containers of preserved food, some small pieces of test equipment, and several unopened transit cases.

  Needham slid his stool into a corner and stood propped against the precarious-looking stacks. He motioned them into the cramped space and invited Stormie to sit. She hesitated, unsure whether to assert her independence or to accept his hospitality. She chose in favor of politeness, and sat.

  “Mr. Needham,” Frank began, but the acting director waved him silent.

  “As much as I was being formal on the radio, because it helps me stay in control when I’m pissed off, I really don’t prefer it. I’d just as soon you call me Gary.”

  “Very well, Gary. And I am Frank, and this is my wife, Stormie.”

  “Ma’am,” Needham—Gary—said, and tipped a nonexistent hat. The pantomime was almost charming, but didn’t lighten Stormie’s mood. “You prefer ‘Stormie’ over your given name?”

  “As long as we’re being informal, yes.” She did nothing to soften the edge in her voice.

  Gary nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s get down to business. Frank, I appreciate your desire to get up here and set up shop, but you really screwed the pooch with that swap you arranged. I don’t care what kind of financial difficulty your company is in, I don’t need you interfering with the cargo manifests. It just so happens that I consider those crates you bumped to be a higher priority than your living, breathing bodies.”

  Stormie tried to parse what she’d just heard, but hearing two revelations at once confused her. Frank “arranged” a swap, apparently to get them on the flight manifest … and what financial difficulty?

  “I am sorry if I caused you any inconvenience, Gary, but on the station we were redundant with the local staff. They were kind enough to help get us on the flight, in appreciation for our help. Now that we are here, we can—”

  Stormie grabbed Frank’s arm. “What financial difficulties?” she asked. “And what crates? Why were they such a high priority?”

  “You said you did not want to be involved in the financial discussions,” Frank said.

  “Well, I want to be involved now.”

  “Perhaps this is not the best time.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Gary cleared his throat to get their attention, and Stormie let Frank’s arm go. “I’d love to watch the two of you go a few rounds,” Gary said, “but in twenty minutes I’m due in the garage to help tear down one of our vehicles that went Tango Uniform yesterday. And I’m sure you two have plenty to keep you busy setting up your workspace.

  “Besides, it’d be better if you threw some humor into your act and did it in Grand Central and charged admission. We’re a little light on live entertainment just now.

  “As for what the crates were, they were key parts of the EBM system. How familiar are you with it?”

  “I know the basics,” Stormie said. Frank nodded his assent. In the same way that she and Frank couldn’t disassemble and rebuild any of the rockets they rode on, and could only do minor maintenance on the rolling vehicles operated at the colony, all the two of them knew of the Electron Beam Melting system was what it did and the barest details of how it worked. Like any 3-D printer, it fabricated complex shapes by fusing a raw material powder layer by layer, but in this case it used a metal powder under a vacuum environment. The tight computer control, the precise electron beam, and the carefully maintained environment produced distinct shapes that required minimal finish machining, were very homogeneous and practically void-free. Stormie had once done an industrial hygiene survey of a rapid-prototyping facility that had some EBM equipment, but because it was automatic and autonomous all the hazards associated with it were well-controlled.

  “Part of the difficulty in keeping some of our equipment operating has been the inability to fabricate all of the spare parts on site,” Needham said. He patted the stack of transit cases behind him. “The AC packed every one of these habitats as full as they could, but they couldn’t send everything. We’ve had some things that’ve worked better than expected, and others that are barely holding on. Like the LSOV—we can’t seem to keep the thing flying. So I arranged to temporarily change the industrial layout and set up the EBM system early, so we can use some of the native titanium—once we reduce it out of the ilmenite and grab the iron and the oxygen—to make our own parts as needed.”

 
Stormie was thankful he didn’t feel the need to explain all the chemistry of the process, but her heart panged with the realization that if she wanted to know the details she wouldn’t have Marilyn Chu around to give them to her.

  “But it’s not like an EBM rig just magically sets itself up once we get the parts here. I was hoping that when we got the beam generator and the 3-D imaging microscope—which, that’s what was in those two crates you bumped off the flight—we might be up and running in a month. If nothing went wrong with anything else, we might cut that to three weeks—say, the middle of July. And that’s just to get the first parts off the line. Trial runs of simple stuff.

  “But the squirrelly flight schedule to and from L-4 means we won’t see those parts here until then, which puts us into August before we can start making simple things like tools, let alone the kind of complex parts we’re going to need.”

  Stormie could think of nothing to say that would make the situation better. She wanted to come to Frank’s defense—she clenched her jaw to keep from just expressing her faith in him—but she was afraid of making the situation worse. And she was still a little mad that he hadn’t told her what was going on.

  Frank looked at her for a second, hesitation in his eyes. He wondered if he had done the right thing. She reached out to him again, but this time she didn’t grab his arm. She brushed her fingertips down his forearm and held his hand, as firm and secure as any time they had walked together. Frank smiled a tentative, lips-only smile at her.

  Frank said to Gary, “Again, I am sorry for adding to the inconvenience, Gary. It was not my intention, and I would like to make up for it in some way. But, if I may: why was the EBM system not included as standard equipment for the colony?”