Shine Shine Shine

success and failure. The humans had landed. They would colonize the moon.

While Phillips and the rest walked around making footprints and repairs, Maxon took the cargo container down on a tether. Lowering the massive box full of mother robots in low gravity was a breeze. He could almost manage it on his own. He thought he might say, “You boys stay here and clean the shit out of your pants while I finish the mission,” but then he didn’t say it. Sometimes it’s better to say nothing.

Maxon didn’t think, Look, this hapless little biological sliver has redeemed itself. Look, it has survived. Look, the plaintive little push toward the cosmos has won us a foothold in the universe, a first footstep out. He didn’t think, Suck it, universe. We’re here, which is what Fred Phillips said he’d thought. He only thought about the latitude and longitude, and how it was exactly as he had imagined it. No more poignant, no less grand. Just exactly how it had looked in the plans; that’s how it was.

Maxon and the robots reached a cave that had been identified and mapped by ultrasound and chosen by geologists as the site for the future colony. Maxon maneuvered the cargo box into the spot where it was supposed to stop, stood beside it, and opened the main door. It was dark in the lava pipe. Dark and cold. He had a light, and a warm space suit. Did he remember being stuck down in a well, and crying to be let out? Did the lava pipe bring back memories of that fear? He did not, and it did not. Wells were not in his memory.

Did he remember being expelled from the womb, thrust from that dark pipe to another, through the years of misunderstandings, approximations, and nervous fixations? Did he feel the pressure of the lava pipe on his body, forcing him onward, downward, toward the completion of the mission? Did the baby in the womb understand the father in the lava pipe, setting up the robots, fixing the cameras, laboring for hours in the darkness? Or did she only know this: Now it’s time for us to come out.

At the time they had agreed upon, Phillips and Conrad pulled Maxon up from the pit on a rope. One of his thumbs was crushed, and he was hungry. Otherwise his arrangements on behalf of mankind in launching the robotic construction of a lunar colony had been a complete success. The robots chugged and whirred on below the surface, mining their materials, creating their children, teaching them to walk, move, mine, create children of their own. For ten years, the world would watch on cameras as the colony took shape. In twelve years Maxon would come back with his son Bubber, freshly graduated from MIT, and open the airlock. Everything just as he had left it to be.

* * *

SUNNY HELD HER BABY and wiped the blood from her face. They lay together on the rug. The baby was on Sunny’s chest, and Sunny’s back was on the ground. Every breath felt like a miracle, pain free. There was no cry, no knife, no scale, no iodine. Pressed up against her mother’s heart, wrapped in a red silk scarf from the hat rack, the baby lay blinking. Sunny’s relief was so intense that she felt she might be able to go to sleep right there, but she knew that while they were getting cold, the neighborhood was in a hot panic. She could hear the ambulance outside, and lots of voices. She didn’t want Bubber to be alarmed, coming home with the nanny from the pool. She pushed herself, still sitting, to the door, scooting herself carefully along so as not to disturb the little bundle. At the door she reached up, flipped the bolt, and turned the handle. Right there were Rache and Jenny, standing on the step. It was as if they were waiting, ready to come in and have sandwiches or drink margaritas. They were just waiting, each with one foot on the stoop.

“Look,” said Sunny, and she pulled the scarf back to show the baby’s face. “She’s here.”

“Sunny,” said the women. Those friends of hers said, “Sunny, she’s amazing. And she looks just like you.”

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my husband, Dan Netzer, and my friend Andrea Kinnear for understanding and interpreting Maxon for me, and writing the equations, proofs, and code snippets in this book. I came to you with a messy idea and you translated it perfectly into math.

Thank you to my agent, Caryn Karmatz Rudy, and my editor, Hilary Rubin Teeman, for the vision you had for this book. When I think back to that very first draft, I am struck by the way you both made the book immeasurably better.

Thank you to Sara Gruen and Karen Abbott, whose early support, ongoing wisdom, and loving encouragement have been invaluable in birthing this book.

Thank you to my early readers C. J. Spurr, Bekah James, Kate Bazylewicz, Heather Floyd, Kristen DeHaan, Sherene Silverberg, Patricia Richman, and Veronica Porterfield.

Thank you to the December mothers, the Quilt Mavericks, Cramot, and all my Norfolk Homeschooling comrades, for cheering me on, and for your radiant examples of excellent mothering.

Thank you to Susannah Breslin, who refused to let me settle, and kept pulling me back out of the sleep of motherhood, and making me be better.

Thank you to Joshilyn Jackson, who has been my fierce champion, and without whom this story would not have become a book.

About the Author

LYDIA NETZER was born in Detroit and educated in the Midwest. She lives in Virginia with her two home- schooled children and math-making husband. When she isn’t teaching, reading, or writing her next novel, she plays the guitar in a rock band. Visit her on her Web site at http://www.lydianetzer.com or Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/lydianetzer.

Books to Read in Trees: An Amazon.com Exclusive Essay from Lydia Netzer

When I was a child, I read in a tree.

My favorite reading spot was 20 feet above the ground, in a natural seat formed by the branches of an enormous pine tree. I often scuffed my knees on the climb up, book shoved into my waistband, fingernails dirty with the sap I absently picked at while I read. Raised by two school teachers with jobs in Detroit, I only had access to my reading tree during summer vacations.

In Detroit, we lived in a condo, we went to the library, and I read material the library deemed appropriate for children: Judy Blume, Marguerite Henry, Madeleine L’Engle, Susan Cooper. In Pennsylvania, in the summer, we lived on this isolated old family farm, and I read the only material my mother deemed appropriate for humans: 19th century British literature.

It was tough getting those lousy hardbacks to stay in my waistband all the way up the tree, but I managed to stick it out through George Eliot, most of Dickens, Ivanhoe, and the Brontes. American lit was off the table, even the stuff from 100 years ago. Harpoonists sweating half-naked over oars? Lusty puritans cavorting in the northern woods? Extracted heart throbbing in the baseboards? Forget it. I guess my mother figured out that if I could wring any damaging sexual content out of The Mayor of Casterbridge, or if I still wanted to procreate after stomaching the gloom of The Mill on the Floss, there was nothing she could do.

I know it wasn’t all prudishness. She was proud of my willingness to put away the horse books and sci-fi for the summer, and delve into something toothier and challenging, that I could only wrestle with in the absence of school, and the city. In the company of trees and the occasional woodpecker I could pine for those lordlings and bold orphans, and fear consumption and workhouses and the disapproval of maiden aunts.

Now I’ve sent my son and daughter up that same tree, with Percy Jackson novels or American Girl books tucked into their belts. I did not inherit the wary eye with which