Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

They found a wardrobe full of spacesuits next to the air lock, and pulled a few out. Qi investigated the possibility of fitting her baby into her spacesuit with her, but it didn’t look like that would work; the babe would be trapped below the helmet ring, and there would be no way to reach her directly down there. Nor enough room to keep from squishing her. Nor a steady supply of air. Qi cursed and began poking around in one of the station’s spacesuits, sticking her arm up through the helmet ring and the like. Fred went down a hallway and found the storage room containing the motorbikes Ta Shu had mentioned. No sidecars, but luckily they were not actually motorbikes but rather motored tricycles, with two wheels in back, and a long duo of seats made to hold two or even three people. Their batteries were plugged into the wall, and there must have been a photovoltaic solar panel on the roof of the shelter, because the batteries’ gauges showed they were all fully charged. Emergency transport, as Ta Shu had said, and so always ready. Suitable for getting from one shelter to the next, if there were no other options. As now.

Fred unplugged one trike’s battery and wheeled it into the main room. Its rear axle was short, sized to fit through the doors and air lock. They could both sit on it. Fred could drive while Qi held her baby in her arms. It seemed like it might work.

“How does it look for getting her into a spacesuit?” he asked.

“Scary.”

“But you can do it?”

“I guess we have to.” Her face was set in the masklike expression Fred had seen so often in China, now grimmer than ever. “Let me nurse her one more time, see if I have any milk. We’re going to have to keep her in her suit until we get to another shelter.”

“I know. Ninety-seven kilometers, he said. It shouldn’t take too long.”

“It better not.”

She sat and offered the babe a breast and the girl latched on hungrily. Fred got into his spacesuit from the rover and toggled through its gauges, saw that he had wrecked them when he had disabled its GPS. A pointless exercise. He pulled out one of the station’s spacesuits and checked it out. Looked like it had air for seventy-two hours, hopefully well more than they would need. “We should wear these,” he told Qi. They would be GPSed again, but it couldn’t be helped. He pulled one of the suits on, then a helmet; snapped it onto the suit, turned everything on. Again it all checked out. He got the trike into the air lock.

Qi pulled the babe off, and with a kiss to her forehead inserted her headfirst into a spacesuit helmet, which she had lined with a towel around the back side, so that the girl now lay on a kind of pillow. She stared up through her faceplate, a very unnerving sight, evoking some dreamlike or cinematic memory, maybe the star child from the end of 2001 , but also various horror-film nightmares. Qi’s face had turned to stone. She pulled the spacesuit up over the girl’s legs and snapped suit to helmet. The suit was nearly empty, so that Qi could fold up the legs, then on Fred’s suggestion wrap them with duct tape to make sure they didn’t inflate when they aerated the suit. The resulting pad could be used as a kind of cushion under the helmet. She would be able to hold the whole arrangement in her arms, though it made a bulky package.

Qi then got into her suit, and they checked each other’s seals. They turned on her suit and the baby’s suit. All seemed well. Qi carried her girl as if in a wad of swaddling clothes, and they went to the air lock. They crowded in with the trike, closed the inner door, opened the outer door, felt the draft of air fly out into the vacuum. Fred pushed the trike by the handlebars out onto the lunar surface.

When they were outside, Qi handed Fred the baby and got on the backseat of the trike, hissing as she did so. Again he was hearing her voice in his left ear, a weirdly intimate disjunction of the senses: she was inside his head again.

“Do you want to ride sidesaddle?” he asked her.

“No. Wait—yes.”

She got off and got on again sitting sideways. Fred gave her the baby and swung his leg over the seat in front of them. Electric motor. Accelerator on the right handlebar, as on a snowmobile. In fact the trike resembled a skeletal snowmobile, now that he thought of it. He tried to give them the easiest start possible, keeping his feet on the ground until the trike began to move. It moved, he lifted his feet onto the running boards, and off they went. Qi reached her right arm around his waist and clung hard to him. The babe was cradled in her left arm and Fred could feel the babe’s spacesuit boots shoving him in the back.

He drove them slowly back toward the main road, scared to death he would somehow tip them over or toss Qi off. The two rear wheels kept that from happening. Possibly a tricycle was more like a car than a motorcycle, in terms of stability. But it was a narrow trike and the g was lunar. Twisting the handlebar gently, which gave the thing a bit more speed, made it feel a little easier to steer. He tested the turn of the handlebars by making a few gentle S-turns, feeling the resistances and balances. The fact that they were on a smoothed roadway helped. Being in one-sixth normal gravity seemed helpful in some ways, dangerous in others, but he couldn’t be sure what was what, and didn’t want to test any aspect of it. Were they balanced, was he balancing them? It was harder to tell than he would have liked.

He rode them onto the main road and turned left as gently as he could, which resulted in him almost running them off the far side of the road. He completed the turn just before that happened, straightened their course. No disasters so far. Now only ninety-five kilometers to go.

It was near midday. Even seen through the heavily polarized and tinted faceplate of his helmet, the landscape was ablaze. The few shadows remaining were like cracks in white porcelain. If they had been riding cross-country they would have been doomed to tip over, no matter the extra tricyclic balance; he couldn’t see well enough to discern bumps and dips in time to avoid them. On the road it was easier, being nearly flat, though they did jounce side to side pretty often. The road was also reliably hard—not as solid as asphalt, but about like packed gravel, and sprayed with a fixative. When he took a brief glance back over his shoulder, he saw that a small dust plume was lofting behind them despite the fixative, hanging there in testament to the light g and the fineness of the dust that covered everything. But it was behind them, and Fred was happy to ride away from it into the blasted clarity of the road ahead.

Unseen bumps sometimes cast them hard to the side, and then he had to steer back the other way without too much of a panic or he would overcompensate them into a fall. Sometimes Qi’s arm around his waist clutched so hard it felt like she was trying to cut him in half. It was very hard to remember that everything had to be done about one-sixth as emphatically as it would have been done on Earth. That kind of touch took a lot of athleticism, and he hadn’t been a great athlete on Earth, not an athlete at all in fact, never comfortable on bikes or snowmobiles, and never once in his life on a motorcycle, a mode of conveyance he had always considered ridiculously dangerous. And yet here he was, gripping the handlebars as hard as he could and trying to see the road surface through the tint of his faceplate and the blinding glare. Too often it felt like the wheels under him were not quite in contact with the ground.

The speedometer embedded in the handlebar dashboard said they were going forty kilometers an hour, and that felt a bit too fast, with the view ahead jouncing toward him, and the thing between his legs and under his hands vibrating and bucking—but he was in a hurry. Grimly he held the throttle in place and rode the dips and bumps as best he could. Despite the rapid succession of little panics jolting through him, they were not actually coming very close to tipping over. Although one time they went over an unseen bump and the whole vehicle launched off the ground and flew without warning, scaring him; but quickly enough they came down, and he jerked the handlebars through the teeny adjustments that felt necessary to keep going straight ahead, and on they went. He kept holding his breath for too long at a time.