Lydia Netzer: Shine Shine Shine

She saw a beautiful long-legged six-year-old with a face like a valentine, and bright ropes of orange hair flashing in the sun. Hair just like Bubber’s. She was carrying a bamboo stick, and expertly piloting a small sailboat around the pond at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The wind was brisk, spraying water from the fountain in a wide arc and whispering in the beech trees. The boats moved fast, some almost lying down sideways, about to capsize. But the red-haired girl put her stick right against the divot on the deck of her bright blue boat and gave it a big push away from the wall, her eyes intent on its progress. She does that really well, thought Sunny. She is an expert; she must do it all the time. My name is Emma, said the girl to a little boy standing next to her. Emma.

She saw a fierce, happy nine-year-old cantering on a chestnut pony across a meadow full of comfrey and mint. She had her hands buried in the pony’s mane and her bare heels dug into its sides, making it go faster. Her sunny hair was short now, cut off at her chin, bouncing in wavy layers. The girl was laughing, her knees pinned to the pony like a clamp, teeth bared. Sunny knew her breath was coming short. Sunny knew she had to push this baby out. Maybe it was the wind in her face, cantering across the meadow. Maybe it was everything in her body pushing on down. She whisked along the deer path, parallel to the tree line. Those were Maxon’s woods. Stay in the meadow, girl.

She saw the girl again, older, on a rocket to the moon. She was asleep in a bunk, her hands thrown back over her head and wrists knocking into the wall, her chin up, as if she were resisting some invisible restraint, some band across her belly, some wire in her head. She wore a white leotard with long sleeves, and Sunny could see it was just a little bit too short in the arms, a little bit too wide in the waist. She was covered by a thin, plastic sheet. Wake up, Sunny thought. Let me talk to you. Do you remember being born? Did it all come out all right in the end? At what moment did you know: I’m alive! This woman is my mother!

The girl grew up, she was twenty now, and she was leaving the family on the moon. They were all there: Sunny, Maxon, and Bubber, to say good-bye. Sunny wore a gray cardigan, pulled tight around her. She smiled and waved at the girl, while her tears fell down. Maxon and Bubber stood still as statues, right next to each other, exactly the same height. They wore space suits and rigid expressions. But the girl went over and kissed them both, hugged them, clamped her hand under Bubber’s armpit playfully to make him laugh. Sunny saw Bubber put his arm around his sister and pull her tight around the shoulders. Don’t go, she wanted to say to the girl. Bubber needs you. I need you.

She saw the girl on Earth, taking a human shape, living a human life, falling in love, making friends. She would visit the moon, but she would never really go back. She would be okay. They would all really miss her. Sunny would visit sometimes, but she could never ignore the distraction of the moon. She could always see it. It made her feel critical of her daughter. It made her feel rushed and anxious. She always went back, but the girl never did. Her place was on Earth. Sunny had known that this would happen. Come out, Emma, so I can have my time with you. I’m waiting for you, I’m going to help you get there. I’m going to be on your side. Whatever happens.

MAXON WAS NOT MOVED by the sight of the moon’s dusty surface. There was no desolation magnificent enough to distract him from unloading the robots and getting on with his work. He was moved, however, by the sight of the lava pipe, a huge chasm in the moon’s surface, on the back side of a newer crater. The pipe went down for miles, an old vent for a hypothesized prehistoric volcano, now just a tube riddled with caves and protected from meteors and the sun. They had landed so well, so perfectly close to the place they were supposed to land, that he had found the lava pipe almost immediately. He felt, in that moment, a surge of triumph. I’m right, he thought. I was right. Here it is. This is the difference between 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.