Short Story- 125% in Astronomy Class

Lunar Colonist Personal Log
Colonist: Meg Elison, Procellarum Settlement
Compact Date: (Earth) April 30, 2040
Current Date: (Luna) Selene 19, 15 P.C.

Yesterday, Eowyn Axon and I set out across Mare Humorum in VGER, my beat up old buggy. All morning we had a great view of the waxing Earth and I told her stories about what it was like to live in California. Eowyn has lived here all her life; her parents brought her over when she was just a tiny thing. She’s like all the alphas around here: tough, wiry, pale. They take nothing for granted. They never lived in a world where anything was made to be used once and discarded or anyone was permitted to waste time or energy. Eowyn has good parents, and I knew that she would be fun to take along on this drive, despite her young age.

I wasn’t surprised when VGER bit the dust. Really, he was a hackneyed contraption from another age and I was shocked he had made it this long. I named him for the wayward spacecraft from Star Trek, but my husband always says we should have called him Millenium Falcon, for all the jerry rigging and prayers he has demanded for his services over the years. Eowyn and I were more than halfway across Mare Humorum, singing an old Beatles song, when VGER spluttered, jerked, and coughed to a stop. Surface dust kicked up a tiny bit around the tires and somehow I knew this would be my buggy’s last hurrah.

I climbed out of the vehicle, checking my suit first and gesturing to Eowyn to stay in the cab. Outside the tinted windshield, the mare was hot and bright. Not at the peak of the day, but getting there. I circled around to check the drive train. Sure enough. Busted, in the exact weak spot I had attempted to patch twice before. I sighed. “VGER wants to be one with the Creator. Looks like you’ll get your wish, old boy.”

I climbed back into the buggy, still cursing the thing.

“Eowyn, I hate to tell you this…”

She looked at me with her calm blue eyes. “It’s dead, right?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. Like a true Lunar child, she skipped moaning her woe and went straight into problem solving. I let her do so, watching all the while. This child is fascinating; I am sure she will end up leading her colony someday.

She looked at the small digital topography readout in the dash, still functioning thanks to our solar electricity. “Gassendi Colony isn’t far from here. It’s closer than heading back home to Procellarum. We could make it in about a day and a half. That is, if you’re up to it.”

I fixed her with a stern glance. “Child, I’m not even as old as your own mother. I was your age when I came here. I can hike as far as you can.”

She nodded, unperturbed by my reproof. There was no time for inconsequential banter. “Do we have enough supplies to make it across?”

I looked over my shoulder into the cargo area. “I’m carrying more than the legal requirement of just about everything. And I’m always packed for two, since John and I usually set out together. I’ve got oxy and scrubbers and even our geology kit.”

She frowns a little. “Old people. Always digging up rocks.”

I smile back at her. “Digging up rocks got you here, kiddo. If we didn’t dig up rocks, you’d never plant potatoes.” She’s right; geology is a hobby for those of us who dreamed of what we would find up here. (Geology is the old word and we debate changing it all the time. Lunology. Lunography. Maybe the alphas will make the change.) I remember when we had nothing but MREs from various countries who sent us aid by slow derelict rockets in the early days. “Digging for rocks” as she called it was what the Water-Witches, my first Lunar outfit, did to find ice. Our digging yielded the first Lunar reservoirs, and is making our case for independence from Earth.

She was already working. Reaching behind her, she produced two food ration packs. “We won’t be out there long enough to starve to death. Probably.” She looked at me levelly. Alphas have no sense of humor. “So let’s eat now, before we leave.”

We sat in the car another half hour, and watched the Earth rise higher. We ate and she asked me questions as they occurred to her.

“Could this have happened back on Earth?” She stared and the blue half-lit orb was reflected in her eyes.

“Sure,” I said. “Earth cars broke down all the time. When I was a kid, cars ran on a fossil fuel derivative. It was scarce and only got scarcer, so we went to war for it. And when they weren’t out of fuel, their tires would pop or they would collide with one another… anything could happen.”

“But if you got stuck, couldn’t you just wait for help?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. There were certainly more people around who might help, if they wanted to. But the odds weren’t really better. I know every family on this side of Luna. They all trust me, and would stop to help if they saw us. Back on Earth, nearly everyone is a stranger and would just as soon let me rot on the roadside as stop to lend assistance.”

She countered. “But on Earth, you wouldn’t die. Everything is so close, you could just walk somewhere in an hour.”

I nodded. “You could, mostly. If you broke down on a major freeway, getting out of your car could get you killed. People wouldn’t stop.”

I saw her digesting this. Alphas have a respect for life that we pilgrims had to learn. We grew up swatting bugs off our shoulders and eradicating dandelions on our lawns. The alphas and the native kids who are soon to follow them fairly worship the turnips they grow out of precious potted Terran soil. They accept no weakness, no laziness in one another… but fragile and tenuous life is to be nurtured and revered. Survival and dependence has bred reverence in the new world. I’ve watched the young share water the way we used to take communion.

We finished eating and set about packing to walk. As I had told Eowyn, I carried the legal requirement for oxy, scrubbers, food, water, shelter, and a number of inessential toys. Our day packs were constructed to carry 25kg each and I knew we would have to pack judiciously, efficiently.

Eowyn was busily parceling out oxy while I thought. I set my pack beside hers and together we packed.
“We each need four bottles of oxy. That will keep us going for the entire walk, provided we rest. That’s 10kg each right there. “

I agreed with her, and reached for the next necessity. “We have to scrub our CO2, that’s two packs each to stay ahead of it. 2kg. After that, we need water. How’s your suit reservoir?”

“I’m about out. You?” I checked my straw on the right side of my helmet. “Yeah, I’m dry. If we load one liter into our suits each, we’ll need about 3 liters apiece, that’s 3.3kg to carry.”

“I’ll carry the suit repair kit.” Eowyn’s mouth was set. I knew, everybody knew, that her older brother had died following a suit tear during a disastrous mission to Newton. Boromir’s body had been left behind, and he had joined the small but remembered number of bodies left exposed and pitiful rather than waste the resources necessary to bring them back and dispose of them.

I offered her no argument, but she didn’t wait for one, either. She stuffed the tape in her bag, muttering, “1.5kg.”

“I’ll bring rope. We’ll more than likely have a little climbing before Gassendi. There’s 5.5 for me, since I’m taking the spidersilk. Might as well take the emergency tool kit, too. Never know what you’ll need out there. We might have to carve out hand-holds. That’s my pack full.”

Eowyn stood considering. She chose a flashlight lantern, stuffing its awkward shape into a mesh divider on the exterior of her pack. I cocked an eyebrow at her. “Flashlight?” It was something I would expect from a pilgrim. Sometimes we forget there are no wild beasts, no fast moving cars. We account for our instinctive fears of snakes and Audis. Those instincts are dead now, and I couldn’t figure why Eowyn would pick the light. It weighed 3.5kg. She saw me staring, waiting for an answer.

“Just to see where we’re going. Or in case we get stuck. We can signal with it.”

An idea struck me. ‘Hey! Speaking of signaling!” I rummaged under the cargo shelf. “I have a radio in here somewhere. We might get someone to come after us in another buggy. Oh, where the hell is it?”

The radio popped free in my hands, out from under a part of our shelter. I clicked the button to detect the LPS satellite network, but nothing happened. Dread and disappointment dawned as I realized John had cannibalized the batteries for our base signaler at home a week before. I had wanted to replace it, but none were available. “Damn. Never mind the radio…”

Eowyn shrugged. She pulled out the second flashlight. “Here. We’ll set this one up on the buggy as a beacon. In case… in case… you know.” She set the lantern on the buggy’s back end and turned it on. I opened my mouth to protest the waste of power, but shut it again. She was right. It could be seen for miles, and might save us.

As Eowyn shouldered her pack, I took out my rock abrasion tool and looked around. A good-sized rock was nearby and I moved it over next to the buggy. Using the abrasion tool, I cut our message into the stone:

Meg Elison & Eowyn Axon
Of Procellarum Colony
Headed to Gassendi’s Gates
Selene 19, 15 P.C.

I carved an arrow to indicate our path, knowing full well any fool could triangulate Gassendi from here and see where we’d gone. Still, it made me feel like a Girl Scout stacking stones and I couldn’t resist. I turned to Eowyn, grinning. “Know where we’re going, alpha?”

She actually smiled back. This might be fun. If we didn’t die in the attempt. “’Not all who wander are lost,’ right?”
“Right.”

The walk to Gassendi was long. The day got hotter for a while, and then bitterly cold. As night fell we were shivering in our suits and resting was a dubious pursuit. We sat back to back, supporting one another in a brief, uneasy nap. We awoke for the last time just as the warmth seemed to be returning. The spidersilk rope helped us scale a number of smallish craters. I managed to roll down the lip of one like a log, and how I didn’t destroy my suit I’ll never know. Eowyn, seeing me fall, flung herself after me, grasping furiously for the repair kit, ready to save my life. Her haste made her fumble and it slipped from her gloved fingers. We watched it spin away, gaining altitude, finally winking out of sight. Her eyes registered terror. I took her hand.

“Eowyn, until you use it, a tool is just a good luck charm. It’s gone. But we didn’t need it. See?”

She looked me over. “Let’s be careful.”

I laughed. ‘Oh, alright. I’ll stop living so recklessly. You, too, though. No more death defying leaps.”

About 35 hours had passed when I first saw the lights of Gassendi Colony. I was frozen, and I’m sure Eowyn was, too. We were far hungrier than we thought possible after so short a time, but we had walked endlessly. Water had held out fine. The rope had saved us, and in the homestretch as we covered the flat expanse of basalt before the base, we had tied it around our waists. “Like people used to do when they climbed mountains,” I told my companion.

“Why did they climb mountains?” She sounded out of breath, but curiosity is often more pressing than breath.

My oxy tasted thin, but I knew by the numbers I should be safe. “Because they were there, kid. Same reason we came here. If it was new and unknown, we couldn’t keep our hands off of it. It’s just our nature.”

She digested that as I wrested the flashlight from her pack. Aiming it at a watchtower in Gassendi, I flashed a pattern and hoped it would be seen. I was so exhausted I could have lain down and died there. Luck was with us, and the headlights of a buggy grew in the distance. Bone-weary as we both were, we trudged toward the light.

A short, friendly-looking man leaped out of the buggy when it stopped. He offered his hand. “Zoltan Balog, Gassendi Borderlands.” His accent was European, sounded like Hungarian. Time was I would have obsessed over nationality. Luna changes things. I took his hand and shook, stiffly. “I’m Meg and this is-“

Dr. Balog was already nodding. “Eowyn Axon. Your father is worried sick.”

Feeling a bit like chopped liver, I watched Dr. Balog help Eowyn into the buggy before turning back to me.

“And you, Dr. Elison. Your husband put up a bulletin on the net about you. Is it true you drove out in an unsafe antique vehicle?”

I bristled. “VGER is not an antique.”

Balog rolled his eyes. “Representative Barth was just lecturing us all on the importance of women in the colonies. If we can’t recruit any, can we at least take care of the ones we’ve got? You two disappear and it’s like a reproductive emergency back at Procellarum. You know Eowyn is one of only five girls on that end that haven’t had kids yet?”

I waved him off. “Genetic variation, blah blah blah. Barth’s still ticked that his bid for emperor didn’t take. Now he’s just meddling in the young peoples’ sex lives.” I sighed. “I am very sorry I took two functioning uteruses out for a walk. Won’t happen again.”

Balog good-naturedly handed me into the buggy and I set the instruments for him as he circled around to re-enter. I could hear Eowyn breathing steadily, already asleep. Balog turned to me. “You can sleep, too. I already radioed that I found you both.”

“No, I’ll stay up with you.”

I was long gone by the time we reached Gassendi Gates, dreaming of the tiny edifice I had left as a monument in the middle of a dry sea.