Authors: Jack McDonald Burnett
Purposefully said, “I would not have made it through this meeting if we had to converse like toddlers. I have given you the full understanding of our language—structure, usage, all of it.”
“What about my companion?” she asked, in a way Daniels could understand.
“I’m sure you can translate for him.” Conn relayed the information to Daniels, who didn’t like it, but couldn’t do anything about it. “Now, you have come to observe what we are doing.”
“Are you able to read my mind?” Conn was deliberately keeping it simple so she wouldn’t have to translate what they both were saying, if she could help it.
“I am able to read your feeds. You made a good tactical decision, not landing within our compound.”
“We only observe, and speak.”
“Frankly, I doubt you have anything interesting to say,” Purposefully said. “I didn’t want you here. We were too late to stop you safely. But you’re here now, and you probably wish to hear me speak about what we are doing here.”
“We are concerned. You may attack us.”
She heard the mirthful screech/growl again. “We are about eight hundred ten thousand. You are seven billion. You believe us that stupid?”
“We want to guarantee the safety of all seven billion,” she said, pausing to translate for Daniels. “And your technology is far superior.”
“We want to guarantee your safety as well,” Purposefully said. “This base is part of our means of doing that.”
“He’s saying they’re building this to protect us?” Daniels said.
“Shush,” Conn said. “How does this base guarantee our safety?”
“We use iron, aluminum, and silicates to build fortress walls, war machines, equipment,” Purposefully said. “If you or we are attacked, we use this as a base to fight back. We are digging out underneath the mountain and will be bunkered there, safe from bombs.”
“Who is going to come bomb you? Not us. Who?”
“It is a dangerous universe,” Purposefully said.
“That’s not a good enough answer,” Conn said. “Who are you afraid of?”
“I am authorized to give you every assurance that we are not building here out of some aggression we wish upon you. I am also authorized to offer you a tour. Would you like a tour?”
“Ask him why this is all hidden from us,” Daniels said. Conn did.
“We needed a crater and a mountain, and we’ve got them here,” Purposefully said. “Some consideration was given to the fact you wouldn’t be able to see it until much of it was already complete.”
“And now it’s too late for us to do anything about it.”
“That is the hope. We are burrowing under the mountain in part because of you and the weapons at your disposal.”
“And yet you want us to believe this is all here for our protection,” Daniels said as best he could in Basalese.
“Believe what you want,” Purposefully said and waved a limb dismissively at them. “You have nothing to fear from us.”
As the astronauts took their leave, Purposefully asked whether they intended to depart right after their tour was over. Conn got the impression it was less a question than a suggestion. She felt some pride when she responded that it was still Earth’s moon, and as long as they stayed out of the Pelorians’ compound, they would go where and do what they pleased.
The other Pelorians, Imagining and Abounding, ushered them out of the tent. Outside, Imagining said, “If you have at least another three hours’ air, we can do a tour right now.” They did, and they did. For two hours, they sledded around munitions stores, portable antiaircraft weaponry, radar shacks, temporary quarters, stanchions with lights to dispel the two-week lunar night, and the enormous, fifty-foot-high, fifty-foot-wide, one-hundred-fifty-foot-long “forgers”—the machines turning the lunar soil into machines. And one very tall, very long wall.
The burrowed-out area under the mountain was off limits to them. Imagining told Conn it was purely residential, and presently housed tens of thousands. Daniels barked a laugh. Conn told him to behave.
Conn was unsuccessful getting Imagining to talk about what threat the Pelorians feared.
After two hours, Imagining made his way back toward the lander. Thirty kilometers per hour, over rocks and hills and gouged-out valleys, zigzagging to avoid larger boulders.
Conn kept Jake up to date as best she could when he was on the far side, and she was confident he passed everything along to Brownsville and the CIA and NSA and all the other federal agencies interested in their mission.
Imagining and Abounding dropped them at the lander, then sledded back the way they came.
Conn approached the hatch. Daniels stopped her and motioned at it. It was open. They hadn’t left it that way.
August 31–September 2, 2035
Nothing was missing, though plenty of things were where they shouldn’t be. The astronauts pressurized the lander and took off their suits, and then went about stowing and securing everything again.
Conn wanted to know who the Pelorians were trying to protect them from. Daniels frankly disbelieved everything Purposefully had said. “There isn’t any threat, Conn,” he said. “If you buy into that, you’re a sucker. They’ve got you fooled.”
“Think about it,” Conn said. “They may be under the mountain because they’re afraid we’ll nuke them, but the rest of the precautions are there for somebody else. What would a twenty-foot fence do to stop us? It’s for a ground assault. And why so many antiaircraft weapons? For our fleet of attack spaceships?”
“Shoot us down before we nuke ’em.”
“We’re assuming we would nuke these...people. I don’t think we’re that dumb. I doubt they think so, either.”
“We’d do it, all right. We’re probably working on the scenario right now.”
“That’s insane,” Conn said. “They call it the nuclear option for a reason. You don’t do it first. You don’t do it at all, unless you have no other choice.”
“Have you seen these guys’ tech? We let them finish their fortress, how are we going to stand up to them?”
“Why haven’t they already attacked us, if that’s what they want to do?” Conn asked.
“Conn, you’re smarter than this. They’re waiting until their compound is done.”
“Their compound on the other side of the moon. They have an island in Russia. Why do they need a fortress on the moon to attack us?”
“God only knows what they’re cooking up on that island,” Daniels said. “Did you ever wonder why they wouldn’t let you in to film?”
“Because someone from my party wiped out one of their avatars?”
“I seriously doubt it,” Daniels said. “I think that was a pretense.”
They didn’t have anything on the mission plan for another three hours. Conn voted for sleep. Daniels voted for the first sex ever on the moon.
“You don’t think that some of the tens of thousands of Pelorians here have had sex already?”
“We don’t even know if they do it,” Daniels argued.
Conn grinned at the term. “’Do it,’” she said. “Are you fifteen?”
“Not quite, but you know I’m at least, like, ten, eleven.”
“Don’t stop believin’, pardner.”
“Come on. What do you say? We can sleep after.”
After an appropriate contemplative pause, she said, “OK.” Another broad grin on her face.
One more first for Conn on the moon.
They went back outside to look around. Daniels wanted to stick close to the Pelorian fence, Conn wanted to go in the other direction, where nothing was disturbed. They compromised and went south, then west, toward the five-hundred-kilometer-wide crater Hertzsprung.
As they stood at the precipice of the crater, Conn mused that if it had been Daniels who tried to kill her last year, he had a perfect opportunity to finish the job now. She’d seen a movie where somebody had pushed Benjamin Bratt off a cliff on Mars. She wondered if Daniels had seen it. Probably—like her, he would watch anything with astronauts in it.
She thought about Grant and Callie Leporis and Al Claussen, in the vast gulf between Jupiter and Saturn at the moment, seven months from arrival at Saturn; she imagined how they would feel seeing an alien world for the first time, the magnificence, the strangeness. She was looking forward to swapping stories with them.
She goggled for a moment, realizing she was on the far side of the moon. What people used to call the dark side, unaware that it got exactly as much sunlight as the near side. A place that no human could watch in real time. She and Daniels were utterly alone...if you discounted some fraction of eight hundred and ten thousand Pelorians up the crater rim.
Maybe Daniels was right. Maybe they hadn’t attacked yet because they just weren’t ready. Had they not infiltrated human society and lied about it, until a rogue avatar spilled the beans?
But what if Daniels was wrong? They were building their fortress to protect themselves from something. What if we nuked or otherwise did away with the Pelorians and then whatever they were afraid of showed up?
Conn made a conscious effort to let these thoughts leak from her mind. She was seeing the ultimate sight: the far side of the moon, on the rim of its largest crater. Nothing on Earth would ever be similarly wonderful to her again.
She was even glad to share the experience with Daniels. She thought he was basically all right, as long as he wasn’t currently trying to kill her.
There was science to do—there would always be science to do, until a human presence on the moon was nothing special anymore—and they did it. Some of it was classified, some not. Some was fun: bounding along the surface at speed, sensors providing data to better study the gait necessary to move on the moon. Some was dreary and repetitive: sifting through regolith looking for a particular shade of gray the geologists wanted them to find.
But after only two days, it was time to return. Jake and the command module had been in an orbit that brought him to within twelve miles of the compound, getting more and better reconnaissance photos. He was clearly anxious to be done and get home.
Blasting off the surface of the moon went routinely this time, and Conn let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Her rendezvous with the command module—her first—was textbook. She impressed Daniels, which made her smile.
When they got back to Earth, all three astronauts were immediately debriefed. Conn had to postpone the shower she had been looking forward to. She stuck to her guns: the fortress was not an aggressive act toward humans; to the contrary, it bespoke a different, worse threat, the nature of which they had to discover. The CIA agent leading the two-hour debrief did not betray any feelings, but Conn guessed that the agency would find Daniels’s testimony more appealing. She was right.
October, 2035–January, 2036
Conn tried everything she could think of to keep a lynch mob mentality from forming. The Russian reconnaissance photos were joined now by some of Jake’s from the command module and Daniels’s vid shot on their tour of the Pelorian compound. The forgers—the enormous machines that took in silicates, iron, aluminum, magnesium, chomped it up, and spat out walls and machinery—loomed ominously in the American psyche. In the official accounts, they were “what the Pelorians
claim
are ‘forgers.’” The public was encouraged by the media and Bowman’s publicity machine to see through that claim, into the Pelorians’ dark hearts.
There were more surreptitious recordings of the Pelorians, presumably from Wrangel Island, played in their original, guttural, menacing-sounding language, then translated. The translation often bore little resemblance to what was actually said. But only Conn knew that for sure. She would hear, “We must gradually become accustomed to the pressure level on this world if we’re to survive; if weaker Basalites are killed, that is regrettable, but possibly necessary.” The feeds would play the passage and superimpose upon it the caption, “We must keep the pressure on, killing is inevitable.” It was frustrating. She wondered why they didn’t ask Daniels to translate. Then she felt ice around her heart as she realized they probably had, and Daniels was probably helping them.
It was frustrating that no one had ever heard the Pelorians say, “Boy, it’s a good thing we built that fortress on the moon, so we can be ready to repel the attack by...” whoever. Or perhaps there were such recordings, which were being withheld to keep the public’s enmity focused on the Pelorians.
The sight of Pelorians milling about a military fortress only a quarter of a million miles away incited more repulsion and hatred than Molly Imrie’s space station vid had. When the aliens’ appearance was combined with the provocative pictures of the fortress, scare-shots of the forgers, and the inability of anyone (supposedly) to get onto Wrangel Island—well, the government didn’t exactly have its work cut out for it when it came to vilifying the Pelorians. The dominoes fell with the faintest of breaths from the CIA, NSA, and other American federal agencies. They deftly transformed this alien people, whose first official act after contact was to save a woman’s life on the moon, into the stuff of national nightmares. The American administration effortlessly cajoled Congress into funding a new, more advanced generation of weapons and delivery vehicles—spacecraft, essentially, that could fly to lunar orbit and do their damage from miles up.
Conn wondered if that had been the idea all along: why Daniels didn’t offer the Pelorians anything of value on their first trip to the moon. Was the American government so cynical—so beholden to the military-industrial complex—that it would take first contact with an alien species as an opportunity to arm itself for war?
She wanted to go on the feeds and argue Pelorian beneficence. She wanted to take the world by the collar and shake it for lapping up what it was being fed. But she wanted to talk to Persisting first. She wanted to hear him deny unequivocally that his people were up to no good: to tell her what they were afraid of, and how a fortress on the moon would help. But she still couldn’t initiate contact with anybody from Basal. Even their e-mail addresses vanished after a few uses. She had always been at their mercy when it came to contact, and she’d never liked it. And apparently Persisting didn’t want to talk to her.