by Bob Goddard
“He’s still here…”
“So, it is the New Zealander, Darren Griffiths. Yes?” Sokolova raised her eyebrows.
“How…! How did you know that?” gasped Ngomi.
“You think I am blind? Whenever Darren is near you, your eyes sparkle, you laugh like a child. Of course I know you are sleeping with him. Why not?” said the Governor, with the hint of a smile.
“But…” Ngomi’s forehead furrowed with puzzlement. “But all pregnant women get sent home in disgrace, don’t they? I timed this so I would be at home before it showed. And Darren will join me later this year when his tour is finished... would join me, if we ever get to leave this hell-hole!”
“Listen, Tamala,” said Sokolova in a softer voice. “If you are having a baby and you and Darren are happy about it, then I’m pleased for you. We need some good news right now. If you are still here, and yours is the first baby born on the Moon, you will make history. It might be a hell-hole, like you say, but it is the safest hell-hole for your baby right now.”
“You’re not angry with me?” asked Ngomi, wide eyed with surprise.
“No, I’m not angry with you, Tamala. I’m angry with that bloddy iceberg!” She gestured towards the heavens. “Now go… lie down, breathe deep, whatever you have to do.” She allowed herself a brief chuckle. “I have work to do. Now go. GO!” She waved the African woman towards the door and turned back to her screen.
As an afterthought, she added, “And go see Doctor Rozek. Get a proper check up. Tell her you have spoken to me and this news is to be kept just between the three of us for now, okay?”
“Okay Nadia. Thank you.”
* * * * *
Moon, 2087
“Ah, Tamala!” Dr Yasmine Rozek looked up from her desk, over her old-fashioned glasses and smiled. “So, you’ve finally come for your regular check-up. About a month late, isn’t it? I was beginning to think you were avoiding me!”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Yasmine. Yes, it’s true. I was putting off coming to see you. I was afraid to, really.”
“Whatever for? I don’t bite, you know!” The Egyptian woman’s eyes were wide with questions.
“I was waiting for my pre-flight medical – I was due to go home next week – you would have discovered my secret then.” Ngomi allowed herself a half-smile.
“Secret? You’re not sick, are you? Come closer, Tamala.” The doctor beckoned her forward. “No, in fact you look radiant, my dear. Ah! Let me guess…”
“Yes. I’m pregnant. I have just broken the news to Nadia. She told me to come and see you and that we should keep this between the three of us for now, please.”
“Well, my goodness, Tamala! What are we going to do with you? Come, sit down. You can’t go home next week, now our shuttle is postponed. So we can’t ship you back to Earth for being a naughty girl and getting yourself pregnant on the Moon, can we?” The doctor smiled broadly.
“It seems you will have to wait another month to get yourself and your baby back to Malawi. We’d better take good care of you until then, hadn’t we?” She lifted her diagnostic wand from the desk and reached for Tamala’s arm.
* * * * *
Earth, 1504
Despite the icy wind cutting across the wooden rowing boat, Yonaton was pleased to be away from the Pelican. Much as he loved his sturdy merchant ship, the current ‘cargo’ made the Pelican feel cramped, smelly and uncomfortable. There were twelve brutish arms-men – the Cardinal’s Convertors – plus three adolescent priestlings. Worst of all was the oppressive presence of the Cardinal himself. Unpredictable and vindictive, the fanatical Cardinal of Loming seemed determined to upset the natural rhythm and harmony of life on board.
Yonaton had no quarrel with anyone who needed prayer and ritual to add comfort and meaning to their life. But he despised those who felt the need to impose their beliefs on others. And to force ‘belief’ at the point of a sword was utterly ridiculous, in his opinion.
Oh well, all he could do was try to warn the natives and encourage them to make themselves scarce. He’d already spotted movement in the trees, so Chief Masceola had someone keeping pace with them, seeing where they were going, what they were up to.
Whoever it was, they must be maintaining a fair trot, he thought, since the flood tide was speeding the boat up the estuary. Mammed and Benyamin were keeping up a steady rhythm with the oars from the two rowing benches, while he steered from the stern.
The Pelican’s rowing boat could hold seven if necessary: himself, Ben, Mammed and the four regular crew members. So there was plenty of room for the saw, adzes, mallets and wedges on this early morning expedition to cut a new plank for Pelican’s bow.
Since their takeover by the Cardinal, there had been a second rowing vessel stowed on the ship’s deck. This was the Cardinal’s personal launch, which was twice the size of the Pelican’s modest boat. At a pinch it could carry all the Convertors, junior priests and the portly Cardinal at the same time.
But he wouldn’t be using it today, reasoned Yonaton, as it could only be launched from the port side of the ship. That would remain tilted up towards the sky until high tide righted the stranded vessel. By the time the ship’s deck was level enough to facilitate swinging the long and heavy launch over the side and lowering it to the water, the tide would be ready to turn, Nobody would try to row up the estuary against a strong ebb tide. The three mariners had a day ashore with no fear of being followed.
This suited Yonaton perfectly. If the Chief was true to his word, he would lead them to a mysterious burial site he had mentioned the last time they were here, three years ago. The way he described its strange carved stones had sounded intriguing. It had to be worth a look before the Cardinal discovered it and set his Convertors to work with their sledge hammers.
Yonaton had witnessed this ‘destroying the signs of Satan’ as the Cardinal called it, on several occasions. He’d seen the piles of dust and rubble after they had been pulverised and wondered why. How could a few strange carvings on stones be so dangerous that the Cardinal felt it necessary to erase them? Did they really create evil spells that had to be destroyed, or did they threaten the church in some way? And were the rumours true that the Cardinal could read them and kept samples of his own hidden in the crypt of his church?
Yonaton had never had time to interpret any of the odd lines and squiggles he had seen before they were smashed. But the more he knew about the Cardinal the more he wanted to know what it was they said. Perhaps this was his chance to save something, to hide a piece of the carved stone and take it home to study. Maybe Lucy would be able to figure it out. He smiled at the thought, but his teeth chattered in the icy wind.
“Hey Ben, I’ll give you a break from rowing,” he said. “Come and take the tiller.”
“It is okay Yonny, my friend,” said Ben with his lopsided smile, continuing his steady strokes with the oars. “This job is warming me up nicely.”
“That’s why I want to take over the rowing. I’m freezing sitting here.”
“Maybe you should have put on more clothes, Papa Yon,” called Mammed from the forward rowing seat, with a giggle.
That set Benyamin off laughing, and Yonaton too, a few seconds later. The rowing became haphazard, with Ben and Mammed tangling their oars together.
“Here Yonny,” spluttered Ben, “You can have these oars now. I’ve lost my coordination completely.”
* * * * *
Moon, 2087
Nadia Sokolova finally had a chance to catch her breath and gather her thoughts. It was 21 hours UTC, the clock time chosen for Armstrong Base since the beginning. The French had objected to the adoption of London time and the choice of English as the language of the colony. The British didn’t like distances measured in kilometres. But these dissents evaporated when the Moon colony’s practical obstacles were revealed, all those years ago.
Nadia had been just 20 then, on leave from the Russian military academy in the summer of 2068. That was when her cosmonaut father, Ser
gei, had told her he was on the planning committee of an exciting new space project…
A Moon colony!
“Just imagine it printsessa,” he said, his eyes shining, “a permanent colony of scientists and technicians living on the Moon. And your father will be one of them!”
The announcement had not gone down well with Nadia’s mother, Tatiana, who unleashed a volley of Slavic curses in protest. Stupid man! If he thought she was going to go and live on the Moon.
“No, no. Not wives. Only cosmonauts.”
So? All she would see of him was a postcard on her birthday!
“No, no. They don’t have postcards on the Moon, moy golubushka.” She was always ‘my darling’ when he was in trouble.
So, what then? He would send her a piece of Moon rock for Christmas? She wanted a husband here on Earth, not spinning around the universe like a Sputnik!
“It is only for a set period, maybe three years, then I will come home again.”
She didn’t want to be the wife of The Man In The Moon! Anyway, he was too old for all this space nonsense. Let some younger man go. She wittered on for hours.
In the event, it was Nadia, not her father, who got the honour of being one of the first five Moon colonists in August 2078. It was a full ten years after the project had started and three years later than the original launch date. Setting up the first international project of this size had been an organisational nightmare. Each country contributed a small percentage of its GDP to have one of its citizens included in the colony. With only three exceptions, every nation agreed to take part for the sake of scientific advancement and worldwide cooperation. Being included brought political kudos and nobody – except for the dictators of a few pariah states – wanted to be left out.
ISCOM’s management committee laid out the skill requirements for the colonists. The Gender Equality Commission saw to it that equal numbers of men and women were included. And so the fledgling colony of ‘Lunies’, as they liked to call themselves, slowly took form. They would be based, they learned, near the Moon’s south pole. It had ample water frozen in craters and a mountain that received perpetual sunlight to power the facility. It would be named after the first man to set foot on the Moon – Neil Armstrong.
It turned out that her mother had been right about one thing. By 2078, aged 51, Sergei was considered too old for the rigours of an extended Moon mission. He would remain on Earth and be the chief liaison between ISCOM and Roscosmos. But he didn’t have to pull any strings for his daughter to go in his place.
Nadia had passed her military training with flying colours, despite a disciplinary hearing in her final year. A male student pilot, high on vodka and testosterone, had grabbed her breasts in a show of bravado for his friends in the college bar. He woke up half an hour later in the campus medical unit with a blinding headache and a broken nose. Sergei Sokolov had taught his daughter self-defence.
Word of Nadia’s lethal right hook rattled around the faculty and landed her in front of the big-hats. They made it clear that brawling between students would not be tolerated. But the wrinkles around their eyes told a different story, of amusement and respect. Already the head of her year in flying skills and tactical judgement, Nadia was recognised as that once-in-a-generation star pilot, destined for great things in the Russian Air Force.
From fast jets she progressed to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. She was flying shuttles to the space station when father Sergei told her that it was she, not he, who would be going to the Moon. His mixture of pride and disappointment was soon smothered in an avalanche of love and cream-laden cooking. His wife seemed determined to keep his cholesterol levels so high he would be grounded permanently.
The memory raised a weary smile and Nadia decided to speak to them both on a party vidcall. But not now. It would be 22 hours at the ISCOM headquarters in Darmstadt and her father would be on his flight home for the weekend. And in St Petersburg it would be one in the morning and her mother would have been asleep for hours.
No. It would be better to call them in the morning when it would be the start of the weekend. Then her father would be home and they could be a family once again, even if she was as far away from her parents as any human being could be in 2087.
Although used to long days as Governor of Armstrong Base, Nadia felt particularly exhausted tonight. It had been a hell of a day. The shock news that morning and the weight of responsibility that followed had taken it out of her. The rush of adrenalin that had fired her crisis planning had long since drained away, leaving a nagging doubt that she might have forgotten something.
Safety was paramount. Ever since Matheus de Souza died during Nadia’s first spell on the Moon, she had decided no more lives would be lost if she could help it.
It had been a stupid accident. The Brazilian mining specialist had made the classic mistake of confusing mass with gravity. He had been driving through the old mine workings inside Malapert Mountain. The buggy that he could lift with one hand in the low gravity had a mass of half a ton and proved impossible to stop on the loose surface. His collision with one of the rock support pillars had cracked several of his ribs, puncturing a lung and rupturing his spleen.
Despite the best efforts of Jolene Blackwell, the American biologist on the team, there could be no surgery without medics and equipment shipped from Earth. They arrived five days later, just two hours after he died.
His death cast a shadow over the fledgling colony and plunged Nadia, the mission commander, into a crisis of guilt and self-doubt. The enquiry absolved her of all blame. She’d been out on the surface, supervising ice extraction at the time. The others confirmed she had drummed safety into them daily.
While he could still speak, the injured de Souza had told them he alone was at fault. Reckless exuberance in the low gravity conditions had been his undoing. But it left Nadia wondering what more she could have done. She suggested a simple but effective addition for all Moon vehicles from that point onwards. The aptly nicknamed ‘Sokolever’, when pulled, drove spikes into the surface like an anchor. In an emergency it brought the car to a rapid, if undignified, halt.
The other change she insisted upon was a permanent surgeon-medic and a fully equipped surgical facility for Armstrong Base. There had been several more accidents in the nine years since, but no more fatalities, thanks to her foresight.
Despite her exhaustion, Nadia couldn’t relax, couldn’t switch off her analytical brain, and that bothered her. She had long been able to tune out the neural babble that clamoured for attention before a mission, in the way her father had taught her. But tonight was different. She felt the full weight of 297 lives on her shoulders and couldn’t shake off the persistent feeling that she’d forgotten something. Had she overlooked some vital element needed to keep them all alive in the weeks – possibly months – ahead?
Some cosmonauts, she knew, resorted to drugs to deaden their minds and find sleep. Some used alcohol, although there was none of that on the Moon. But she shunned tranquilisers and intoxicants in any case. They fogged the brain the day after, just when it needed to be razor-sharp.
Her father had explained his method of focussing thoughts on a favourite place of peace and tranquillity. Hers was their winter dacha near Petrozavodsk where the virgin snow sparkled. They would skate and sail on the ice of the lake or cut holes through it to catch fish for supper.
But tonight her mental image of ice and snow kept turning into Moon dust and craters. She reached for her last resort, plugged in the earbuds and turned up the volume. It was her favourite rasplavlennogo metalla or molten metal music as they called it in the west. Twenty minutes of delicious, mind-numbing sound wiped her brain clear of worry and Nadia fell into a deep, satisfying sleep.
* * * * *
Earth, 1504
Yonaton pulled long and steady strokes on the oars and thought about how proud he was of his daughter Lucy. She had the guts and the gumption to stand up to the Cardinal and his crackpot ideas. Like that time
six years ago…
The Cardinal had been imposing religious influence into all areas of public life, expanding his power and control. His Church of Emersionism had been holding daily classes for Loming’s children for years. The church school was a breeding ground for his extremist ideology, but it was the only choice. After the Cardinal was voted Mayor in a controversial election, he decreed that all children must attend school and that only the School of Kris could charge fees.
The two pence per day it levied infuriated impoverished families and those with many children, but swelled the Cardinal’s bulging coffers. It was just another tax, another infringement on public liberty.
When Sam and Lucy’s first child, Peter, was five years old, Lucy announced that she wouldn’t be sending him to the Cardinal’s church school. She would be teaching him at home, instead. Lucy’s mother had taught her to read and write, an unusual idea for girls at the time. She had read every book she could lay her hands on.
Sam was delighted at saving two pence per day, and knowing that Peter’s young head would not be filled with religious clap-trap. It didn’t take long for neighbouring mums to ask if Lucy would teach their children too. She was happy to oblige. Soon she was running classes for 30 and would have taken more if she could have fitted them into her parlour.
Inevitably the day came when the Cardinal paid a visit wearing his purple robe and tall hat. It was just as the children were arriving for Lucy’s morning class. He pushed his bulk past the mothers waiting by the door and bellowed: “You are running an illegal business here.”
“I am not running a business,” Lucy replied, quiet but confident.
“Nonsense! You expect me to believe you teach these children for free?”
“You may believe it or not. It is the truth. These mothers pay nothing to have their children attend my classes.”
“That’s right,” chipped in one of the mothers. “Lucy charges us nothing. And she’s a very good teacher. My son can already—”
“SILENCE!” he shouted in fury. Then, pointing a fat finger at Lucy, “I will prove that you are receiving payments and then you will be in very big trouble. Shut down this illegal business at once or face the consequences.”