Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

When Aisha spotted Jingyi through the window, for a second she thought she was seeing a reflection in the glass. Suited to the neck but bareheaded, her helmet gripped in one hand by her side, Jingyi had to be standing behind her, facing away from her into the room.

But she wasn’t.

Aisha knelt on the floor and wept. It was Jingyi who had kept her from giving in to despair. It was Jingyi who had shaped the plan into something real, and found the strength to pursue it. But when she’d faltered, when she’d fallen into doubt herself, all of Aisha’s attempts to lift her spirits and restart the virtuous circle of encouragement that had kept them both sane and striving for close to a year had come to nothing.

Aisha sobbed until the grief loosened its hold on her, long enough to grant her a choice: follow Jingyi into the darkness, or step back and try to skirt around the edge of the abyss. She rose to her feet and returned to the crib, then lifted Nuri into her sling. She could not afford to be crushed. Not by this, not by anything. Her daughter was fast asleep; Aisha even managed to put their shared suit on without waking her. Then she went out to pack for the trip.

The buggy’s trailer, with its open tray, looked like something she might have hired back in Dunedin to move a few pieces of furniture between share-houses in her student days. She didn’t shy away from the memory; she pictured Gianni beside her, smiling and teasing her as she fretted over the placement of each item in the tray. The struts were all short enough to fit, but she didn’t want them rolling back and forth. She hunted around in the workshop and found some cable ties, then she stood patiently binding the struts into a set of linked bundles that she could anchor to the tray at the corners.

She’d already folded the sheet of glistening silica fibers that she and Jingyi had spent the last four months weaving, but even in this compact form it was so bulky that when she squatted down to pick it up, it blocked her view completely. She fetched a sled with a pull cord, flipped the bundle onto it, then dragged it across the workshop floor and out onto the regolith.

As Aisha glanced up at the crescent Earth, Nuri woke and started crying. “Shh, shh!” It was impossible to stroke her through the suit, but Aisha managed to nudge breast and baby together, and once Nuri clamped her mouth in place she stopped complaining and just fed, more or less contentedly. “We’re going for a drive,” Aisha explained. “How about that?”

Jingyi was facing west: the way they’d planned to travel together, chasing the sun. Aisha saw no reason to lay her friend to rest; she must have locked the suit’s joints to keep her body upright, so she’d clearly had no desire to end up horizontal in the dirt.

Nuri stopped feeding to grizzle with displeasure, then pungently defecate, but her diapers were as magical as Aisha’s and there was nothing to be done but endure the smell.

Aisha finished packing, then she covered everything on the trailer with a tarpaulin and started pulling the straps into place.

When she was done, she looked up at the Earth again. She’d always been good with landmarks; one glimpse of a distant spire and she could find her way home. But she was about as close to home right now as she could ever be on this world, and the idea of climbing into the buggy and driving until pretty much the opposite was true felt suicidally wrongheaded. How mortifying would it be if a rescue team finally arrived, a mere twelve months late, only to end their mission cracking each other up just by whispering, “She headed for the far side ?”

Jingyi’s memorial statue remained resolute. “All right, I’m sticking to the plan,” Aisha told her. “Just like you should have done.”

“A honeymoon in Fiji! Thank you!” As Aisha embraced her father in gratitude, he interjected testily, “There’s more in the envelope. Have a proper look.”

Aisha flushed and did as he’d asked, wondering if the airline ticket and hotel booking were accompanied by some needlessly lavish spending money. But the extra slip of paper she’d missed was another kind of ticket entirely.

“I checked with Gianni before I bought it,” her father informed her. That had been prudent: the lottery’s prize was strictly for couples, and if she’d won only to find that her husband really couldn’t face the journey, it would have made both of them miserable. Better not to have a ticket at all.

That night, as she and Gianni lay in bed, she’d talked down their chances. “One in a hundred thousand,” she’d mused. “I’d have better odds of getting into the astronaut training program.”

“Only if you applied.”

“Yeah, well.” Going into space was the kind of thing that was easier to imagine at twelve than at twenty-seven. She was touched that her father recalled her childhood ambition, but he seemed to have taken it more seriously than she had herself. “And really, there’s no chance of us winning. They’ll give it to a Chinese couple.”

“Why? Just because China and America are squabbling doesn’t mean the company’s going to start blacklisting people from every other country.”

“No, but it’s a marketing gimmick. ‘Honeymoon on the Moon!’ Who else are you going to target but your biggest market?”

Gianni was bemused. “It’s a lottery with thousand-dollar tickets. If you mess with the outcome, that’s not marketing savvy, it’s fraud.”

And then, after all her cynicism and carefully managed expectations, the company livestreamed the draw. Five digits plucked from the hiss of the cosmic microwave background determined the winners, and the marketing department would just have to live with it.

Aisha’s class of moonstruck nine-year-olds gave her handmade bon voyage cards, with postscripts ranging from impressively specific requests for certain kinds of lunar minerals to pleas for photos of various action figures (enclosed) posed on the surface. She and Gianni passed their health checks and were whisked away to the Gobi Desert, where the centrifuge rides and spacesuit training felt more like scenes for a mockumentary than anything that would really serve them in their role as Spam in a can. But Aisha let the company’s PR machine drag them along its strange conveyor belt, all the way to the launchpad.

“This is like being prepped for an operation,” Gianni decided, as they waited in their flight suits for the car that would take them to the Chang’e 20 itself.

Zhilin, the pilot, was amused. “Only if you mean the kind of brain surgery where you’re awake the whole time.”

“Are you ever afraid?” Aisha asked him.

“I was afraid the first time,” he confessed. “It’s a strange thing for a human to attempt, and it’s only right that it feels unnatural. But that’s true for anything our ancestors didn’t do: driving a car, flying a plane.”

“Walking on a tightrope between skyscrapers,” Gianni joked. Aisha wanted to punch him, but Zhilin just laughed.

From the gantry, looking out across the stark gray plains, Aisha waved cheerfully, knowing that her father and her students would be watching, but once she was strapped into her seat in the tiny cabin she gripped Gianni’s hand and closed her eyes.

“It’ll be fine,” he whispered.

She waited for the engines to ignite, wondering what had ever made her yearn to leave the Earth. She didn’t need a pale-blue-dot moment to convince her that her home world was a fragile oasis. And if she couldn’t inspire a love of science in her students without an overblown stunt like this, she was the worst teacher ever born.

When the moment came, she could hear the inferno unleashed beneath her, a wild conflagration that rattled all the flimsy structures that stood between the flames and her flesh. When Gianni squeezed her hand, she imagined the two of them spinning away into the air, lighting up the desert like a human Catherine wheel.