2020 (16 page)

My heart skipped a beat. “There’s a trip I have to take tomorrow,” I told her. “A long ride out in the transfer van to the Armstrong Site. How about coming along?”

* * *

That night, late, I lay on my bunk listening to Web audio again, that great throwback. Of course we run on a different “day” up here, with our light/dark cycle adjusted to Earth’s, so my atrium window was a soft blanket of darkness.

“Thanks for taking my call, Art,” I heard a male voice say, a voice heavy with a tired slur, a familiar voice. The hair rose on the back of my neck and I sat up. “First-time caller, long-time listener, Art,” the voice said.

I heard the clink of a silver flask. I could almost smell the thick sweetness of Southern Comfort.

The call was brief, even by Art Ball standards. “We have a voiceprint on you, General Manager Stewart,” Art Ball snarled. “We’re not taking calls from you New Solar Order people.”

You could hear Barry starting to protest as he was cut off, but only half his word came out, and his “Arrrr . . .” made him sound like a dog.

“Wild card line, east of the Urals, you’re on the air,” Art said to someone else. “Can you imagine that guy?”

* * *

“A road?” Claire said. “A road on the moon?”

“A track,” I corrected her. “Nobody’s allowed to build a road on the moon. This isn’t something you can see from Earth. We run semi-inflated treads and make a hundred kilometers per hour without leaving much impact—the embedded track guides us around boulders, crevasses, collapsed lava tubes.”

She moved the picnic basket the hotel kitchen had packed for us back with the folding chairs and tables, the crates of bunting, the box of collector-quality flags, the EVA suits, the spare life-support stuff, the tools. My assignment was to scout a media event at Tranquility Base—Stewart was considering pulling out all the stops—and the rear of the transfer van was stuffed with equipment we’d want down there.

Claire leaned against the thick lexan window, trying to get a better view. “It’s so different when you’re not spacesick,” she mused. “So clear. It’s like my eyesight’s better.”

“No atmosphere,” I reminded her.

In my mirror Blue Moon’s main dome was receding rapidly. Ahead lay boulders and craters sprinkled across the regolith stretching away to the horizon, a horizon on which you could see the very shape of the moon’s curvature.

“Amazing,” Claire agreed.

I accelerated and toggled in the object radar to avoid any unpleasant surprises.

“This is really out there,” she said quietly.

* * *

The run to the ’69 landing site, Tranquility Base, takes you east along the shore of the Sea of Serenity to a break in its high bordering ridge near the Plinius Crater. From there what we now called Armstrong Site is a straight drive south across the center of the other major lowland in this quadrant of the moon, the
Mare Tranquillitatis
. To reach the site, you traverse the Sea of Tranquility until you reach a long feature called the Rima Hypotia, just north of the lunar equator, and then you turn east.

Along the way, especially near Plinius, you encounter ridging, massive rimes and collapsed lava tubes, but those aside, you also see wonderful flat patches across the regolith. You see every kind of landscape the moon offers.

We had a long talk, Claire and I, as we drove. I recalled how as a kid my dad had told me about watching the first moon landing when
he
was a kid and how, when I’d first set foot on the original landing site I’d felt connected to him in a way that had surprised me, connected with some dream of his in that Detroit suburb in whose backyard he watched the heavens. Maybe I was overdoing it, but even now, I told Claire, Tranquility Base seemed to me a sacred spot, a spiritual place, not unlike Machu Picchu, I suggested. “Or Haleakala, that enormous high caldera in Hawaii.”

“That’s where I’ve seen this landscape before,” she mused. “It’s like being around the Hawaii volcanoes.”

“Only up here it goes on forever. That’s what I like about the lunar surface,” I told her. “It’s raw planet, as primitive as it gets.”

“You don’t want to see it become terraformed?”

“Not me. I like it just the way it is. Full of promise. Old and tough and full of promise.”

* * *

She saw it first, a reflected blip of light from the replica lunar lander that had been installed at the site. “There it is,” she said.

Sure enough, in the middle distance the spidery legs and drum-shaped body glinted in the sunlight. We closed in quickly.

“There’s the American flag,” Claire said when she spotted the little Old Glory left by Armstrong, with its horizontal batten to make it wave. I started telling her how it had been knocked flat when the Apollo crew had taken off, and how NASA had reconstructed the site, when she wondered out loud about debris around the lander. I thought at first she was seeing the scientific instruments the crew had left behind, the ESAP equipment, the passive seismometer.

Then I noticed the crude writing on the lander’s side.

The childish yellow letters read,
NOTHING COULD BE FINER THAN TO MAKE IT WITH A MINER
.

I brought the van to a stop, rubbed my eyes, and sighed. “I don’t suppose I should be surprised,” I said. “They tagged the starter’s pod on the golf course last year with the same color paint.”

Ration wrappers and beer tubes littered the site near a burst waste cylinder. The white bunting hanging from the ladder turned out to be toilet paper. “They’ve trashed the whole site.” To my great dismay I saw dozens of fresh bootprints stomped at the foot of the lander’s ladder.

“So rude,” Claire said. “Those people from the bar?”

“Two years ago they put laundry soap in the Falls of Diana.”

“So adolescent. That tag is obscene.”

I unbuckled my harness and moved some cartons to fish out the toolbox and service supplies. After rooting around I turned up with a can of hydraulic fluid in the emergency kit. Then I started struggling into my EVA suit.

“Where are you going?”

“I think this’ll get the paint off,” I told her, waving the can. “I’m going to try to restore things as best I can and clean up out there. But hey,” I added when I saw her pulling on the baggy leggings, “not you.”

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

* * *

Once on the surface, Claire bounced around in her silver EVA suit like a kid at soccer practice. “Look at Earth,” she blurted when she caught her breath. “So bright and blue and white. Walking around out here, it’s like heaven, like I’m in heaven.”

As for me, I felt like hell until I saw how well the hydraulic fluid dissolved the yellow paint from the metal shell of the replica lunar lander. I used the bunting I’d brought along to rub it clean. It took a while. Eventually I improvised a rake out of the LEM ladder and started to systematically wipe miner footprints from the regolith near the lander. Claire walked ahead, picking up litter, stowing it, detrashing the site.

As I raked I realized that Armstrong’s famous bootprint was in there somewhere, but I had no choice except to obliterate it along with the miners’. When Claire finished her sweep of the site, she came around behind me and scattered handfuls of regolith to obscure the little furrows from my rake. It sounds easy enough, but out there in the clumsy suits, it was slow going.

Two and a half hours later, Tranquility Base looked like a museum exhibit again, except for the missing Armstrong footprint.

As it was perhaps the most famous single footprint in human history, we needed to replace it somehow. First we downloaded archival images from NASA’s website and studied them carefully. My plan was to step gingerly
on
the passive seismometer so as not to leave tracks, then to bounce up the ladder and position myself as Armstrong had. From there it would be a simple matter of a hard step down from the bottom rung.

“Wait,” Claire said.

“Make it quick,” I said. “We’ve got about twenty minutes before we get into reserve life support.”

“What’s your boot size?”

“Eleven 2E. Does it matter?”

“According to NASA archives, Armstrong had small feet. His boot size was nine and a half.
Narrow
.”

“Where the hell are we going to find such small feet?”

She pointed down to her boots. “Nine and half. Narrow.”

So we traded places. “One small step for Claire,” she said just before she jumped. “One large step for all Clairekind.”

* * *

Because we’d lost so much time cleaning up the site, I radioed in a negative report on the scouting trip and we had to drive straight back. Still, the drive was breathtaking, the sun high and slow across the sky, the Earth slipping to our left and then setting. We were both a little giddy at what we’d done.

From the moment we docked at the main dome, you could sense that the atmosphere at the resort had turned hectic. Less than twenty-four hours remained until the contest’s conclusion. More Hyatt people had come up to join the partygoing journalists and hotel guests in a kind of last day’s frenzy of food and wine and excess.

The big table on the dais in the Copernicus Room was askew, crowded with half-empty glasses of wine, coffee cups and abandoned room service plates littered with stale food. I found Stewart stretched across three chairs in the corner, drunk and sullen. Candace, who had been conducting virtual press conferences Earthside since early morning, was desperate, her voice hoarse. I took over for her, worked for eight hours straight, fielding questions and calls, infusing false cheer into our dismal numbers, pretending surprise and pride that “Luna,” ahead all week, looked like it was going to finish first.

Claire and I became separated once I started to work, but then she really disappeared, into the gym, I supposed, or to take a nap after our excursion. Then it was dinnertime and I’d been too busy to connect with her, and I frankly was relieved that she wasn’t there for the humiliation of the final night’s banquet—half the chairs empty, Stewart incoherent and helped to his room. During the gazpacho I was passed a note from Claire telling me she’d gone out on another EVA, entirely on her own, a walk around the dome to collect some rocks to take home, that she would find me later.

But when I looked for her at midnight, she was nowhere to be found. I dragged myself off to my room, fatigued beyond belief after the long day, and threw myself on my bunk.

* * *

I couldn’t sleep. An active solar flare sent a wave of broadband static across all the communications channels, and the web audio link I lay there listening to reminded me of radio in the old days, fading in and out, conversations washed by flurries of audio snow. . . .

“Loyal caller, long-time listener, Art,” a female voice said, a voice velvet with seductive breathiness, a siren’s voice, eerily familiar. “Call me ‘Heavenly Ten.’ I used to call you from Earth. Remember me? You were so my hero.”

Art’s voice changed. “My god, I
do
remember you. Is that you, ‘California Ten’? It’s been . . . years. What can I do for you?”

Art recognized it too, or at least the program of his AI did, some deeply enduring quality of that voice. I remembered hearing a voice like that while listening to Art Ball when I was a kid. Almost all of Art’s callers, then as now, were men, but once in a while you’d hear that siren’s voice and the whole conversation changed, moved as if a step to the side. The voice seemed to speak directly to an old subroutine in the AI, to open a secret trapdoor: Ball had always had a weak spot for women who did call, not for the tough ones or the airheads, but especially for women whose breathy voices promised some unseen sybaritic redemption—as his audience had been mostly male, the old-fashioned attitudes had been part of his appeal. The trap door was apparently still programmed in the AI, and you could hear him responding.

“I’m
so
mad at you, Art,” the voice pouted.

“Oh my god,
why
?” And you could hear it, the genuine nervousness in his voice, the uncertain edge that comes from loss of confidence.

“You betrayed all of us women who love you when you blew off that moon contest. If you’d only supported it, think how many of us would be looking up there right now. And next week and the week after that. Gazing at the moon because it meant something.” I thought
Candace
? then remembered her hoarse voice. Still, something familiar. “But that’s all right,” the voice went on. “I understand, Art, why a romantic idea like
NAME THAT MOON
wouldn’t appeal to you. You’re too old to be romantic anymore. I’ll bet you never sit with Ramona outside your trailer in Parump looking at the moon on a beautiful night. . . .”

“Awwwoh,” Art moaned. “You know, Ten? You might be right. It would have been romantic.”

“Might be?”

“Ramona is going to be annoyed with me.”

“As she ought to be. You’re letting those liberals from the New Solar Order pick the name of the moon.”

Art moaned again. “What name do you suggest? Just tell me. I’ll log onto that website and vote myself.”

“What really matters is that your listeners call.” Now I heard something else in the voice, a kind of marketing savvy hiding behind the voice changing circuit.

A couple more sentences and I was sure. The voice belonged to Claire.

I looked at my watch. Two 
A.M.
, twelve hours until the end of the contest. It was too late now to change the result, I decided. Still, I was touched down to my toes and smiled as I shut down all the circuits in my cubicle and settled back on my pillow. I told myself: Claire had tried to help, and it would all be over soon.

* * *

I overslept. When I woke I took a long, hot shower, and slowly got dressed without logging in. On the final day of the contest, at the final hour, I went directly to the Copernicus Room to see the wreckage.

Barry Stewart, I was surprised to see, was on his feet, wearing a fresh suit and clean shaven. He was gesturing with animation to a larger knot of media people than I’d seen all week. Judging from equipment logos, new techs had also flown up. I recognized four network heavy hitters in the restricted area behind the dais, covering the story in holo presence. There was a special electricity in the room. A middle-aged guy with a recent face-lift waved cheerfully to me from another crowd, I waved back—he looked very familiar, but I couldn’t recall his name. Candace came striding by and I asked her who he was.