Joker Moon Page 20

  A crew was finishing rigging a tent over the court, and Theodorus had ducked into the shade. Direct sunlight caused him difficulties. A tall nat woman—another stranger—was talking to him, making notes on a clipboard and occasionally shouting into a walkie-talkie. Another nat, a man she vaguely recognized, stood listening. He had steel-gray hair and ramrod posture.

  Theodorus saw her, finally, and smiled. “Mathilde! Mathilde, come meet Vickie. Vickie is going to be handling press for us from now on.”

  Us?

  “I’ve done okay handling my own press so far,” Mathilde said. The woman had the courtesy to laugh.

  “For the companies, of course,” said Theodorus. “She’s the one who put all this—”

  The last word was obliterated by the beating sound of a helicopter swooping in low and fast. Very low. Very fast.

  “Where did you find that pilot?” asked the man with the unnaturally perfect posture. “He’s a menace!”

  Theodorus said, “Joanna? She’s one of Malachi’s hires. Her personnel file does make for colorful reading.”

  When he’d spoken, something clicked in Mathilde’s memory. “General Sampson,” she said, recognizing him. Mike Sampson, a man long in the employ of the Witherspoons. A man who had twice walked on the Moon.

  “Miss Maréchal,” said the general. “It’s good to see you. Quite a day.”

  A joker, snouted and scaled and wearing Theodorus’s household livery, walked up deferentially and handed a slip of paper to Vickie. The tall woman gave it a glance, grimaced, and said, “I have to go handle this, excuse me. It was lovely to meet you, Mathilde.”

  The messenger started to shuffle off as well, but Mathilde caught him by the shoulder. “Amos!” she said. “Aren’t you going to say hello?”

  The joker cast a glance from Theodorus to the general. “Hello,” he said quietly.

  Mathilde knew she should let the man go, but asked, “How is Orson?”

  Amos brightened. “He likes it here. Likes working in the library.” Then, seeing that Sampson was staring at him closely, he said, “I have to go rake the paths now,” and exited.

  When he was out of earshot, General Sampson said, “Who was that man? It seems like I should know him.”

  Mathilde said, “Yes, you should. You buried his mother on the Moon.”

  The general didn’t seem to take that as an insult, and in fact, Mathilde wasn’t sure she meant it as one. More of a correction, she thought, and then was gratified when Sampson said, “You’ve hired on Eva-Lynne’s two sons. I think I should go talk to him, if you don’t mind.”

  Theodorus waved him on, and Mathilde found herself alone, for the moment, with her oldest and best friend.

  “Happy birthday,” she said.

  He hummed a note, then said, “Sing it! Sing the song!”

  She laughed, but humored him. The people pitching the tent joined in, and then everyone on the yard, and they all cheered at the end, but then the two of them weren’t alone anymore, not really.

  But she asked him anyway. “What is all this? What has Vickie put together for you? These people didn’t all come out here to file stories on you turning twenty-one. And why is Mike Sampson here?”

  Theodorus shook his head. “No, sadly, the reporters did not come for my birthday. They came because of our new venture. That’s why Mike Sampson is here, too. He’s to be our CEO. The public face.”

  There he was using the plural again. Our, us, we. Who did it mean?

  “Why don’t I know what this ‘venture’ is?” she asked.

  “Because it’s a surprise,” he said.

  “Clearly,” she said.

  “No, I mean a surprise particularly for you. It’s a present, partly anyway. A present from me to you.”

  “And I have to wait for the cameras before you’ll tell me what it is?”

  He smiled again. He reached into the pocket of his elegant jacket and pulled out a laminated badge held by a lanyard. “You won’t need this for another few years, really, but by that time, there’ll be so much work. So much to do.”

  She took the badge. She saw that it featured a legitimately flattering headshot of her, next to her name and a line that read EMPLOYEE #1. There was a logo, and a company name.

  WITHERSPOON AEROSPACE, it read.

  She opened her mouth, but no words came out. She shook her head, felt tears coming to her eyes.

  “Don’t you like it?” Theodorus asked.

  “Of course I like it, you big idiot,” she said. “But what does it mean? Are we going to start building rocket ships? Satellites? Orbital observatories? What?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes to all of that.” Then he smiled again. “To start.”

  Luna Incognita

  by Leo Kenden

  “HE SAYS HE SAW a ghost.”

  Belka’s voice was barely a whisper, for which Grigori was grateful. Not that the tiny joker was capable of shouting even in the direst circumstances. But given the early morning, with Grigori barely awake on his hard sleeping mat in a tent on the surface of the Moon, a whisper was welcome.

  Grigori shook off the troubling dream he had been having of his wife, Maya, complaining about their flat. He sat up and attempted to stretch, and saw a human less than one meter tall sitting on the edge of a silver equipment box, one of its tiny hands tugging at the thin blanket that had covered Grigori.

  “He being Sergei?” Sergei being the joker-cosmonaut who inhabited the support tent, separated from Grigori and Belka by a few millimeters of metal-coated fabric.

  Belka nodded. “I heard him stirring around an hour ago. He was talking. Cursing. Screaming, ‘Leave me alone! Get out!’” Belka had his own quirks, among them an intolerance for profanity. Grigori wondered how his little joker crewmate had survived an hour, much less a dozen years, in the Communist Party apparat and the Soviet military. “He was also moaning and crying out, like a man having a bad dream.”

  “What about Terenty and Viktor?” They were the other two nats in Grigori’s crew, bunking in the tiny cave beyond the support tent.

  “Silence.”

  Grigori was grateful for that much, though Terenty, in particular, was usually sullen.

  “How do you know Sergei wasn’t dreaming? It was our sleep time.” For the three nats, that is. Sergei slept like a cat, whenever he was not working or eating. Belka required fewer than four hours of sleep and used the quiet hours to perform maintenance, a task he seemed to enjoy—and the wretched state of Soviet manufacturing made mandatory.

  “He was moving around. I could hear his feet scraping.”

  That was a bad sign. Over two months, or to be precise, fifty-eight days, the one sign that Sergei Petrushenko was happy was his willingness to sit silently in a lotus position, disassembling broken equipment that Belka would then repair and reassemble.

  “Did he have a session?” Grigori meant a communications session with Control. The Soviet Union had a single deep space communications facility near Sochi in the Crimea. It was only in line of sight with the lunar base for perhaps eight hours out of every twenty-four. A relay satellite in high Earth orbit was supposed to augment Control, but it had failed early in the mission.

  Grigori tended to let Sergei and Viktor handle these sessions. With the three-second lag between question and response, with the frequent signal interference from aircraft going into Sochi, the whole experience left him frustrated.

  The Luna effort was intended to establish a small base on the Moon; it carried water, food, and other supplies sufficient to support the crew for three months, with resupply to follow.

  At the two-month point, in spite of careful management, the crew’s supplies of oxygen and water and especially food were dangerously low, and the equipment that should have allowed for renewal of those resources kept failing.

  Those issues, not to mention the stress of daily command, left Grigori prone to snap at whichever flight director happened to be on duty.

  At forty, a Party member a
nd holder of a Hero of the Soviet Union medal due to his victory in a “space battle” with an American Hornet spaceplane, Colonel Grigori Kolesnikov was immune to serious punishments. While Pavlov, the lead mission director, could call him names, Grigori’s flat, his pension, his wife’s job, his daughter’s education, all would be preserved.

  Granted, there were great challenges to leading the Soviet Union’s first manned lunar landing mission, aka Luna 87. Launched from Soviet Central Asia, the “plucky five” (according to TASS) had accomplished a successful three-day climb to the Moon, then landed in the Ocean of Storms.

  Grigori could easily imagine the TASS and Radio Moscow presentations, upbeat accounts of “our hero cosmonauts” as they “dug a foothold in the newest frontier!”

  The grim reality, however, was three nats, two jokers, all five dirty and hungry and struggling to survive in an environment that threatened to kill them several times a day as they waited for a resupply that might not arrive in time.

  They could just board Luna and take off again, but Grigori would never allow that. He thought of Arctic and Antarctic explorers of the past, especially Shackleton. He would be a hero, or die trying.

  “I spoke with Control,” Belka said. “It only lasted ten minutes.” As usual, Belka focused on extraneous matters like duration without sharing content, a trait that almost drove Grigori to murder.

  “And.”

  “Oh, it was fine. No criticism. We have been the subject of a story in the American Life magazine.”

  Only Belka would think this important. “Was there any operational news?”

  “The next launch has been postponed another two weeks.”

  Grigori felt ill. “Did they say why?” Even as he voiced this, Grigori realized that the answer didn’t matter.

  “One of the Carriers isn’t assembled.” The Carrier was the giant rocket launcher that put elements of the Luna into orbit. Grigori and his crew had used three of them during the first phase of their own mission.

  The upcoming resupply mission required two launches, one for a cargo vessel that would fly unmanned to a landing, the other for the propulsion and braking stage.

  “Did they offer any advice about how we’re supposed to survive an extra two weeks?”

  “They say their calculations show that we have enough oxygen and water.”

  “Easy for them to say, sitting there in sunny Crimea.”

  “I think the calculations were performed in Moscow.”

  For the second time this morning, Grigori wanted to murder Belka. The tiny joker was oblivious. “What do we do about Sergei’s ghost?”

  “It will keep for ten minutes,” he snapped. Grigori opened a bag of nutrient—it was too crude and organic to be called food. Unfortunately, before Grigori could transfer any of the slurry from bag to mouth, the bag leaked, spilling greenish goo down the front of Grigori’s no-longer-white T-shirt. Two months of lunar life had eliminated any interest Grigori might have had in the scientific observation of the slow—to Earth-trained senses—descent of the material down his shirtfront to the fabric floor. He did have time to catch some nutrient and stuff it in his mouth, providing at least a few calories.

  He could have simply grabbed his midday nutrient bag, but with the delay in resupply, he preferred to pretend that this meager breakfast would do. But now, with some Sergei ghost nonsense to confront, and the inevitable complaints from Terenty and Viktor, Grigori was going to be in a mood.

  To forestall the immediate, knowing that his blood sugar was in flux, Grigori unzipped the curtain to the support tent.

  The separation between the tents was barely worthy of the name, yet the environments were different. The hab unit was large enough to hold three sleeping mats, a hot plate, food storage lockers, and containers for clothing.

  The only “hab” function housed in the support tent was the toilet, little more than a covered bucket.

  All the other equipment crowding it was the oxygen generator, the air scrubber, various pumps and power lines—still connected to the Luna lander—and the patch panel for all devices, plus a bed of sad-looking plants. It was noisy, but Grigori had learned that all spacecraft were dangerously noisy.

  And here, in the near dark, was Sergei Petrushenko—tall, pale, almost birdlike—crouching at the far end of the tent like a crane in a cage. “Good morning,” Grigori said, hoping for normality. A discarded nutrient bag suggested that Sergei had already consumed breakfast. So far so good.

  But then the joker launched into his litany of complaints. “The converter is working at thirty percent capacity,” he said. “And the seeds are not responding to lunar soil.”

  Sergei’s tone suggested that this was Grigori’s fault. “Maybe our leaders should have sent farmers, not engineers and pilots,” Grigori said.

  Complicating matters—Sergei’s joker ability was breathing carbon dioxide, not oxygen. He was an organic air conversion tool. Without him, the Luna mission duration would have been six weeks, not months.

  Grigori often wondered about Sergei’s life prior to his enrollment in the cosmonaut corps. He, Terenty, and Viktor had only been teamed with Belka and Sergei twenty days prior to launch, so they’d had little time to bond as a unit. Two months of confinement in the tents and cave had not resulted in improved personal interactions. The workload was too consuming.

  All Grigori knew was that Sergei had had a difficult life in the Kolyma gold mines—part of the Gulag—living at the bottom of a pit where the air was toxic to nats, tolerable only to him. “Belka heard you moaning.”

  “I’m terrified.” A cold statement, no denial.

  “We all have strange dreams,” Grigori said. “Frightening ones.” In this he was telling the truth; Maya’s anger was legendary. “Just remember you are one of five humans on the Moon. Nothing can hurt you here—”

  “—Except the Moon.”

  “Is it more dangerous than Kolyma?”

  “In Kolyma I knew the bullies,” he said.

  Grigori knew that he had to be direct. A busy day loomed. “Well, tell me what happened.”

  “I saw a ghost.”

  Only a few words, yet they confirmed Grigori’s growing sense that Sergei’s mental state had been deteriorating since the landing.

  Not that his own had survived that hour of horror without cost. The twelve-meter-tall Luna vehicle had been designed to land automatically, much as half a dozen unmanned probes had.

  But as the retro-rocket fired, with the lunar landscape rising to meet them, and Grigori, Viktor, Terenty, and Sergei strapped in standing positions in the tiny crew cabin—Belka in an alcove behind them—the radar had simply stopped working. “Are we hovering?” Grigori had asked, since the figure for altitude was frozen at a thousand meters. Grigori’s pilot eye told him they were lower than that—and continuing to drop toward a cluster of low hills on the edge of the Ocean of Storms. He waited three seconds for Viktor, the systems specialist, to say or do something, then he grabbed the control yoke and flew Luna himself.

  He did not have the luxury of extra fuel—ten seconds at most. But it was enough to shift the landing point a hundred meters to the lunar north, allowing Luna to settle on relatively smooth ground … even though there was a tilt, caused by a slight slope in the surface.

  A Soviet fighter pilot with eight hundred hours in the air, three hundred in actual combat, he had endured numerous near disasters, but nothing as terrifying as this. As Terenty, Viktor, and Sergei pummeled one another in celebration, and Belka giggled from behind, Grigori urinated into his cosmonaut diaper.

  Since then, in spite of the glorious first Soviet steps on the Moon, the deployment of scientific instruments, and the establishment of a crude but working habitat, many things had gone wrong. The most nagging problem wasn’t technical: it was Terenty’s open contempt for Belka and Sergei. Like most Russian nats, Terenty thought of jokers as subhuman.

  Belka and Sergei knew it, but Sergei had taken it hard. As he had learned to do with t
he tall joker, Grigori resorted to humor. “Where? How close was he?” If he spread his arms, Grigori’s fingertips were within half a meter of the tent’s y-axis. It was deeper in x, of course, because one side extruded into the cave.

  “She,” Sergei said.

  Terenty emerged at this point, sleepy-eyed, grumbling, “Why so much noise?”

  Terenty and Viktor had chosen to bunk in the cave, a fissure perhaps three meters wide and slightly higher when Grigori and the crew first reached it.

  They had chopped away at the fissure to widen it. A week of difficult labor convinced them that with a fabric barrier erected at a narrow juncture several meters deep, an air pocket would be created. There were no detectable leaks through the lunar rock.

  The crew had set up its mining and processing gear there, and while the equipment generated a constant drone punctuated by hisses and clanks, Terenty had surely heard Grigori’s conversation with Sergei.

  “Sergei saw a ghost,” Grigori said.

  “Naturally,” Terenty said dismissively, sidling past toward the hab tent. Given the cosmonaut’s stocky, blocky frame, this was a tricky maneuver.

  Grigori chose to let him go, turning back to Sergei. “The ghost is a she?”

  “A beautiful, dark-haired woman.”

  Now Viktor emerged, grinning. “Does she fuck?” Clearly he had overheard, too.

  “She was five meters tall,” Sergei said.

  “Ask if she’s got a shorter friend.” Viktor disappeared through the opening to the hab tent.

  Grigori turned to Sergei. “Where was she?”

  “Out there.” He pointed toward the tiny plastic window on the north side of the tent. “Watching.”

  It was still lunar night and the light from a crescent Earth was too faint for illumination. All Grigori could see was a few square meters of lunar soil, some small rocks, and the footprints and skid marks he and the others had left when transferring equipment from the lander to the tents.

  “Nothing, no footprints for a five-meter-tall woman,” he said. “Watching or otherwise.”

  “No, she’s gone.”

  “Then why did you tell me to look?”