Gardner Dozois: The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 18

Now Roz wished she knew where Helen was, what she was doing at just that moment. What had she gone through when she was fourteen? Nothing as bad as this.

As she moved away from Fowler across the lunar surface, Roz tried to stay to the shadows. But there was little chance of anyone spotting her. What she needed to do was lose Carey’s suit somewhere that nobody was likely to find it for thirty or forty years.

It should not be so hard. These were the rumpled highlands, a landscape of hills, ridges, craters, and ejecta. Around the colony the ground was scuffed with a million bootprints. Roz hid hers among them, bouncing along below the eastern rim of Fowler.

She then struck off along a side track of footprints that aimed northeast. A couple of kilometers along, she broke off from the path and made a long leap to a rock scarp uncovered with dust. She landed clumsily but safe, and left no boot marks. She proceeded in this direction for some distance, aiming herself from rock to rock to leave as few footprints as possible. The short horizon made Roz feel as if she was a bug on a plate, nearing the edge of the world. She kept her bearings by periodically noting some point ahead and behind so that she would not get lost. That was the biggest danger of surface hopping, and the source of the rule against ever doing it alone. It would be easy to explain Carey’s disappearance as an intoxicated boy getting lost and running out of air. A broken radio, a faulty locator.

A kilometer on, Roz found a pit behind a group of ejecta boulders. Deep in the shadow on the north side of the largest, she dug away the top layer of regolith and stuffed the suit into the pit. She shoved the dirt back over the suit. By the time she was done, her hands were freezing. She stood back on a boulder and inspected the spot. She had kept most of the scuffs she’d created to the shadows, which would not change much for some time in the slow lunar day. Roz headed back along the path she had come, rock to rock, taking long strides in the low gravity until she met the traveled path again. Up above her, a third of the way across the black sky from the sun, angry red Mars gleamed beside Jupiter like an orange eye.

Her air supply was in the red when she reached Fowler’s north lock. She was able to pass through without seeing anyone; the festival was still going strong.

Roz stowed her suit in an empty locker, set the combination, and walked back around the rim road toward Eva’s apartment-the long way, making a three-quarter circuit of the crater. On the southeast slope she stopped and watched the lights of the festival. When she finally got home, she found an empty glass sitting on the living room floor, and the door to Jack and Eva’s room was closed. She went to her own room, closed her door, undressed. There she found Carey’s ring in her pocket, warm from the heat of her own body.

Through all of Eva’s quizzing of Roz the next morning, Jack sat drinking juice, ignoring them both. Roz was stunned by how calm he looked. What went on inside? She had never thought that there might be things going on inside her father that were not apparent on the surface.

Then the searches began. Over and over Roz had to retell her story of parting with Carey at the festival.

At just what time had she last seen Carey? What had Carey said? In what direction had Carey gone?

Jack threw himself into the “search”-but whenever Roz looked at him, she saw that he was watching her.

As the search stretched beyond the first days, Carey’s friends came up and sympathized with Roz. For the first time kids who had held her at arms’ length confided in her. They shared their shock and grief.

Roz supposed that, from the outside, her own terror looked like shock. Colony security used volunteers from the school in the searches, and Roz took part, though never in the northeast quadrant. Every time one of the parties returned she was petrified that they would come back with Carey’s pressure suit.

Near the end of the third day, Roz was sitting in the apartment, clutching Carey’s ring in her hand, when Jack brought Eva back with him. Eva was so sick Jack almost had to prop her up. Jack fed Eva, made her take some pills, and go to sleep. He came out of their room and shut the door.

“What happened?” Roz asked.

Jack pulled Roz away from the door. “I caught Eva on the edge of a precipice. I think she was about to jump off.”

“Oh, Jesus! What are we going to do?”

“She’ll be okay after she gets some rest. We need to take care of her.”

“Take care of her! We killed her son!”

“Keep your voice down. Nobody killed anyone. It was an accident.”

“I don’t think I can stand this, Dad.”

“You’re doing fine, Roz. I need you to be my strong girl. Just act normal.”

Just act normal. Roz tried to focus on school. The hockey game against Shack-leton was postponed, but the practices continued. When it became obvious that Carey wasn’t coming back, Maryjane moved up to take Carey’s place in Roz’s line. At night Roz squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her palms against them to drive thoughts of Carey’s body from her imagination. She would not talk to Jack about it, and in his few hurried words with her he never spoke of that night.

Roz hated hearing the sound of Jack’s voice when he talked to Eva or anyone else, so casually modulated, so sane. Just act normal. When he spoke with Roz his voice was edged with panic. Roz vowed that she would never in her life have two voices.

Maybe Eva had two voices, too. After the searches were ended, Eva seemed distressingly normal. Roz could tell Eva was upset only by the firmness with which she spoke, as if she were thinking everything over two or three times, and by the absolute quality of her silences.

At first Roz was afraid to be around Eva, she seemed so in control. Yet Roz could tell that at some level Eva was deeply wounded in a way she could not see in Jack. The only word Roz could think of to describe Eva was a word so absurdly old fashioned that she would have been embarrassed to say it aloud: Noble. Eva was the strongest person Roz had ever met. It made Roz want to comfort her-but Roz was too afraid.

The weeks passed, and they resumed a simulation of ordinary life. Eva took an interest in Roz that she had not while Carey was still alive. For Roz’s second-semester practicum, Eva arranged for Roz to work successive months in the colony’s four materials cooperatives Air, Water, Agriculture, and Fabrication.

Roz was glad to spend more time out of the apartment.

With Air, Roz worked outside in the southwest industrial area, helping move lunar regolith to the grinder.

Various trace elements, including the H3 used in fusion reactors, were drawn off and saved. After grinding, the regolith was put in a reduction chamber with powdered graphite and heated to produce carbon monoxide, which was reintroduced to the regolith in a second chamber to produce CO2 . The carbon dioxide was separated by a solar-powered electrochemic cell. The carbon was recycled as graphite, and the O2 liquefied. The excess was sold to other lunar colonies or traded for nitrogen.

With Water, she worked at the far end of the ice cavern, where the ice was crushed, vaporized, distilled, and refrozen. Some of the water was electrolyzed to provide oxygen and carbon, a rare element on the Moon.

With Agriculture, she shoveled sheep and guinea pig shit, and moved chicken wastes to recycling for fertilizer.

With Fabrication, she did quality control for the anhydrous production of fiberglass cables coated with iron. Any contamination of the fiberglass with water would compromise its strength and durability.

Structural materials were one of the colony’s other major exports.

Everything she learned during her practicum was so logical. Everything she felt when she was in the apartment with Eva and her father was insane. While she worked, when she could forget the expression on Jack’s face when she’d found him standing above Carey’s naked body, the colony felt like home. The minute she thought about that place that was supposed to be her home, she felt lost. Looking down from the balcony of their apartment on the interior of the crater, she saw the spire that supported the dome as a great tree spreading over the Cousins’ lives. Behind her she heard Jack’s and Eva’s voices, so human, so mysterious.