As Emma fell into sleep, a rough hand grabbed her shoulder.
She froze. Her eyes snapped open. The sky, full of ash and smoke, retained a lingering purple-black glow, enough to show her a lithe, crouching silhouette. It, he, leaned over her. She was pushed onto her back. She could smell Runner: a thick, pungent, meaty smell of flesh that had never once been washed.
In the back of her mind she had rehearsed for this, from the first day here. Don’t resist, she told herself. Don’t cry out. She had seen the Runners copulate, every day. It would be fast, brutal, and over.
For a moment her assailant was still, his breath hot. She stiffened, expecting hands to claw at her clothing. But that didn’t come. Instead a head, heavy, topped by tight curls, descended to her breast. She felt shuddering, a low moan.
Gingerly she reached up. She explored a flat skull, those extraordinary brow ridges like motorcycle goggles. And she touched a swollen mass on one temple. Her assailant flinched away.
It was Fire.
He was weeping. She remembered how he used to go to the old woman, Sing, for comfort, before she died. She wrapped one arm around his back. His muscles were hard sheets, his skin slick with dirt and sweat.
He reached up and grabbed her fingers. With a sharpness that made her yelp, he pulled her hand down towards his crotch. She found an erection as stiff as a piece of wood. She tried to pull away, but he pushed her hand back.
Gently, hesitantly, she wrapped her fingers around his hot penis. His hand took her wrist and pushed it back and forth.
She rubbed him once, twice. He came quickly, in a rapid gush against her leg. He sighed, released her wrist, and lay more heavily against her.
Half-crushed, barely able to breathe, she waited until his breathing was regular. Then, gingerly, she pushed at his shoulder. To her intense relief, he rolled away.
In the morning. Fire scooped up his embers and ash, and the Runners dispersed for their walk. It was as if none of the previous evening’s events had ever happened.
Reid Malenfant:
In the last hours he had to endure a visit from an Apollo astronaut: a walker on a now-vanished Moon, eighty-five years old, ramrod straight and tanned like a movie star. “You know, just before my flight we had a visit from Charles Lindbergh and his wife. He had figured that in the first second of my Saturn’s flight, it would burn ten times more fuel than he had all the way to Paris. We laughed about that, I can tell you. Well, Lindbergh came to see me before I flew, and here I am come to see you before your flight. Passing on the torch, if you will…”
And so Malenfant, with a mixture of humility and embarrassment, shook the hand of a man who had shaken the hand of Lindbergh.
It was, at last, the night before launch.
At Vandenberg, he stood in the crisp Californian night air. The BDB’s service structure was like an unfinished building, a steel cage containing catwalks and steps and elevators and enclosures. A dense tangle of pipes and ducts and tubing snaked through the metalwork. The slim booster itself was brilliantly lit, the sponsors” logos and NASA meatballs encrusting its hide shining brightly. Its main tanks were full of cryogenic propellants, and they spewed plumes of vapour into the air. No doubt in violation of a dozen safety rules, hard-hatted technicians, NASA and contractor grunts, scurried to and fro at the booster’s base, and electric carts whirred by. It was a scene of industry, of competence, of achievement.
Malenfant stepped into an elevator and pushed the button for the service structure’s crew level, three hundred feet high. He was escorted by a single tech, a Cape ape in clean-room regalia of a white one-piece coverall, latex gloves and puffy plastic hat. Malenfant had met the guy before, and they nodded, grinning; he was a somewhat grizzled veteran, long laid off by NASA but rehired for this project.
They rose vertically in the clanking, swaying steel cage. Beyond the cage flashed steel beams, cables and work platforms, mostly unattended now. And beyond that was the hide of the main tank itself: sleek, smooth, coated with ice where the cryogenic fuels had frozen the moisture out of the night air. It was such an immense cold mass that Malenfant felt the heat being drawn out of his own body, as if he were some speck of moisture that might end up glued to that glistening skin.
The elevator came to a stop. He stepped out, turned right, and walked over the access-arm catwalk. The walk was just a flimsy rail that spanned the rectilinear gulf between the tangled, rusted gantry, and the sleek hide of the booster. An ocean breeze picked up, laden with salt, and the catwalk creaked and swayed as if the gantry were mounted on springs. He grabbed a handrail for support. Through the chain-link fence he could see the lights of the base scattered in rectangles and straight lines over the darkened ground, and the more diffuse lights of the inland communities. The coast was black, of course, swept clean of habitation by the Tide.
This was a noisy place. The Pacific wind moaned through the complex, and the huge propellant pipes groaned and cracked as rivers of the super-cold fluids surged through them. Fuel and wind: it was a noise of power, of gathering strength, and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled.
He reached the end of the walk. He stepped through the white room, the cramped enclosure where he would be inspected one last time before the launch, and he faced the streamlined fairing that would protect the Moon lander during launch. There was a hatchway cut into the fairing. A small wooden step led up to the hatch, a touch of home-workshop mundanity amid all this shining hardware.
From here he could see into the cabin of the lander itself: small, crammed with supplies, and with two canvas-frame couches side by side. The light was a subdued green. Instrument panels on the wall glowed with softscreen displays and telltale lights. It was like looking into a small cave, he thought, an undersea cave crusted with jewels.
Malenfant had been through it all before. Every space project, as it developed, became entangled and complex beyond the understanding of any single human. But from the astronaut’s point of view that proliferating tangle reached a certain maximum, until, after some indefinable point — as the booster stack crept forward through its integration schedule, as launch day approached — the whole thing began to simplify, to focus.
In the end, he thought, every mission reduces to this: human beings climbing into the mouth of a monster, to be hurled away from the Earth. And all the technicians and managers and fundraisers and cheerleaders and paper-chasers in the world can do nothing but watch.
Emma’s mother and her sister’s family were staying in apartments on the ASFB. They had invited Malenfant to join them for Mass, celebrated by the base’s Catholic chaplain.
Blanche Stoney, the mother, was an intimidating seventy-year-old. She offered Malenfant her hand without getting out of her chair. The sister, Joan, a little younger than Emma, had raised four kids alone, and had looked exhausted every time Malenfant had met her. But the kids were all now young teenagers and, it seemed to Malenfant, remarkably well behaved.
The priest said Mass for the family in a cramped living room.
Malenfant, upright in his civilian suit, tanned walnut brown by the desert sun, felt as out of place as a spanner in a sewing basket. But he endured the ceremony, and took his bread and wine with the others. He tried to find some meaning and comfort in the young priest’s familiar words, and the play of light on the scraps of ornate cloth, the small chalices and the ruby-red wine.
The priest had asked Joan’s two eldest boys to serve as altar boys. They did fine except during the communion service, when the younger boy held the chalice upside down so that the hosts slid out and fell to the carpet, fluttering down one by one. In the background a softscreen showed live images of the preparation of the BDB. There were a lot of holds. Malenfant tried not to watch the whole time.
When it was done, the priest packed up and went home with promises to call during the mission.
Joan brought Malenfant a beer. “I think we owe you this.”
Blanche, the mother, snapped, “But you owed us your presence here tonight.”
“I don’t deny that, Blanche.”
Malenfant spent some time trying to explain the technicalities of the mission to them — the countdown, the launch, the flight profile. Joan listened politely. At first the children seemed interested, but they drifted away.
In the end Malenfant was left alone with Blanche.
She skewered him with her gaze. “You wish you were anywhere but here, don’t you?”
“Either that or I had another beer.”
She laughed, clambered stiffly out of her chair, and, somewhat to his surprise, brought him a fresh can.
“I know you try,” she said. “But you never really had much time for religion, did you? To you we’re all just ants on a log, aren’t we? I heard you say that on some “cast or other.”
He winced at the over-familiar words. “I think my wisdom has been spread a little thin recently.”
She leaned forward. “Why are you going to the Red Moon? Is it really to find my daughter — or just vainglory? To prove you’re not too old? I know what you flyboys are like. I know what really drives you. You have nobody here, do you? Nobody but Emma. So it’s easy for you to leave.”
“That’s what the Vice-President thinks.”
“Don’t name-drop with me. What do you say?”
“Blanche, I’m going up there for Emma. I really and truly am.”
With sudden, savage intensity, she leaned forward and grabbed his hand. “Why?”
“Blanche, I don’t—”
“You destroyed her. You started doing that from the moment you set your sights on her. I remember what you used to say. You bake the cakes, I’ll fly the planes. From the moment she met you, she had to start making sacrifices. It was the whole logic of your relationship. And in the end, you fulfilled that logic. You killed her. And now you want to kill yourself to get away from the guilt. Look me in the eyes, damn it, and deny that’s true.”
For about the first time since it happened, he thought back to those final moments in the T-38, the clamour in that sun-drenched sky. He remembered the instant when he might have regained control, his sense of exhilaration as that huge disastrous Wheel approached.
He couldn’t find words. Her rheumy eyes were like searchlights.
“I don’t know, Blanche,” he said honestly. “Maybe it’s for me. Without her, I’m lonely. That’s all.”
She snorted contempt. “Every human being I know is lonely. I don’t know why, but it’s so. Children are consolation. You never let Emma have children, did you?”
“It was more complicated than that.”
“Religion is comfort for the loneliness. But you rejected that too, because we’re just ants on a log.”
“Blanche — I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m sorry.”
“No,” she said more softly. Then she rested her hand on his head, and he bowed. “Don’t say you’re sorry. Just bring her back,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Where do you think she is now? What do you think she is going through?”
“I don’t know,” he said, honestly.
Shadow:
