Authors: Niko Perren
“We’ve resurfaced the whole planet,” said Sally, pointing through the window. “That green rectangle is the Wulong Panda Preserve. Everything around it is farmed. The browns and reds are exposed soil.”
They reached the East China Sea, a hundred shades of dazzling blue under rows of fluffy spring storm clouds. The telltale boundaries between man and nature checkerboarded the rugged islands of Japan. Then came the Pacific Ocean. It faded into darkness as they glided to Earth’s shadowed side. The sea flickered with the moon’s pale reflection, occasional patches of clouds like ghosts over the black waters. They met the sun again over the Andes, a blaze of light that cleared the horizon in seconds.
They left Earth behind at the horn of Africa, a sickly brown expanse of blistered dirt. For six minutes, the Earth departure stage engine pushed them higher. And then, it was only physics. “This is max v,” Rajit said. “Earth's gravity is already slowing us, but we’ve now got enough momentum to get in front of the moon” – he motioned above his couch – “which pulls us out of Earth’s influence. The math is beautiful.”
“Are we clear to stow suits?” asked Sharon.
“Yes,” replied Earth. “And we’ve arranged a surprise for you. There will be a blacktie dinner in the lower cargo bay, followed by a formal reception.”
“Copy that,” said Sharon, unbuckling. “Do I wear heels?”
“Speaking of shoes,” said Sally. “Wiggle your toes, Jie.”
“What?” He hadn’t even noticed his feet cramping. “How did you know?”
“We clench our toes when we’re falling. Probably some old monkey instinct to keep us in the tree.”
They changed into light blue coveralls, struggling in the limited space like college students in an old-fashioned phone booth. Sally pulled a plastic squeeze tube out of stowage. “Vanilla goo?” she asked, reading the label. “It’s good and sticky so it doesn’t make crumbs. There wasn’t time to put in proper air filters.”
“Do I have a choice?” asked Jie.
She dug in the compartment. “There’s also chocolate goo. Or green goo.”
“Green? Really? They called it that?”
“That’s what it says. I guess nobody could pin down the flavor.”
“I take the vanilla,” said Jie.
Sally floated it over, and Jie squeezed the bland, scentless paste into his mouth. He washed it down with a gulp of lukewarm water.
Yum, yum.
Earth’s surface sped away at thousands of kilometers an hour, its curvature increasing as if they were watching a fisheye lens imperceptibly gaining strength. At four hours the planet was visible in its entirety for the first time, an immense shadowed sphere with an arc of blue and green along one edge. The whole crew gathered at the portals, awed to silence.
Cheng and Zhenzhen are down there. Maybe already on the flight home to China.
It all snapped into perspective. At any moment, millions were having breakfast, while millions more were going to bed, or going to work, or making love. All on the same wet ball of rock. Breathing the same thin haze of atmosphere, that fuzzy line on the horizon marking the edge of life’s fragile hold. The borders on the map that so many had died to defend lacked any meaning from here. As arbitrary as the names of the plants and animals.
***
Gradually, it turned from an adventure into a trip on the world’s worst budget airline: cramped seats, tasteless squeeze tube meals, and a suction hose urinal, all set against a mindscape of low-grade worry. On the plus side, they lacked the leg shackles that had briefly been the rage in the United States after the hijackings in ‘42. And nobody had needed a bowel movement so far. It was possible, in an emergency, but filling a plastic with feces was hard to manage in zero gravity, even without the obvious effects on the poorly recycled cabin air.
They watched a movie to pass the time, a story of a New York cop who realized that his illegally cloned brother was working for the mob. Sally, the token extrovert, pried everyone for personal information. Rajit had a math degree and hoped to teach at a university in India on his return. Sharon played bass guitar in a rock band. Little snippets of color that Jie would never have thought to ask for.
Isabel was curled up to conserve space, one hand on the window’s edge for stability.
“So Isabel?” asked Sally. “Who are you going to miss?”
“My husband,” she said, a wistful expression passing over her. “And my parents. The four of us spent last week at their place in Amazonas. How about you, Sally?”
“My friends at Xinjiang Space Center,” said Sally without hesitation. “Being so isolated creates a unique community. Every year we drive into the mountains for Yuri’s night and throw a huge party. DJs. Dancing. It’s beautiful.”
“Yuri’s night?” asked Jie.
“Yuri Gagarin,” said Sally. “First man in space, on April 12, 1961. This’ll be the first Yuri’s night I’ve missed in ten years.”
“Yuri would understand,” said Sharon.
***
“Commencing lunar capture burn.”
The EDS engine engaged one final time. After three days of bored weightlessness the return of gravity felt out of place, an outside force pulling Jie into the padded seat. The spacecraft slowed, shedding the excess velocity it had been steadily gaining on its fall towards the moon. And then, with one more bang of explosive bolts, the lunar descent capsule separated. The EDS drifted slowly away, on a ballistic trajectory that would see it slam against the lunar surface shortly before their own arrival. Of the 3 million kilogram monster that had left India, only a tinfoiled pocket of air remained: five astronauts and 70,000 kilograms of equipment.
“OK, Shield One, that was the final course correction before we set you down. You’ve got a few minutes to look at your new home. Enjoy the view.”
A pockmarked wasteland hung outside the window, immense in the spangled blackness. Bleak. Lifeless. They swung low over the lunar North Pole, within 50 kilometers of the surface. The shadows grew long, giving everything a sinister, foreboding look. It was as if the moon were alive somehow, hostile. Jie shivered.
Yet the four-day-old memories of Cheng on the beach were so fresh he could still smell salt.
They passed into the moon’s shadow, a vast blackness lit only by stars, a hole in the sky. They strapped in, but it almost seemed unnecessary. The half-G descent had none of the violence of the ride into low Earth orbit. No wonder the engineers had been able to cobble together a lander so quickly.
“Five kilometers, four kilometers.”
The details of Malapert Mountain started to resolve, a long, low-angled ridge that towered above its cratered surroundings. Unlike Earth, whose poles moved in and out of sunshine with the seasons, the moon had no rotational tilt. From an unobstructed vantage point on the lunar poles, the sun perpetually circled the horizon. Malapert Mountain, a “peak of perpetual light” at the South Pole, was the best such point. Its summit was high enough that the surrounding terrain blocked the sun just two days a month, giving ample solar power. And since the same phenomenon kept the lowlands around the mountain in eternal shadow, large amounts of valuable water ice had been preserved there, which the first astronauts had mined out of the impenetrable darkness.
“One kilometer,” said Capcom. “We’ve got a good lock on the landing beacons.”
“XPOS. Landing beacons. It’s taken all the adventure away,” complained Sharon. “Apollo 11 had no idea what they were heading for. They had to dodge a boulder field. Neil Armstrong landed with 30 seconds of fuel remaining.” Was that a hint of envy?
This is scary enough already, thank you.
Sally drummed her fingers, the sound just audible in the silent capsule.
The monitors showed the landing field now, a flat section of ridge close to Malapert summit. Abandoned equipment lay scattered across it. Tire tracks marked the rubbly ground. It was hard to get a sense of scale in the unfamiliar terrain. Not one bit of color was visible on the surface: just grays and whites and blacks. Jie jiggled his leg in nervous anticipation.
“One hundred meters. Fifty meters. Twenty meters.” Jie let out a breath.
We’re as good as down.
“Ten meters, eight, five meters.” The engine cut off to protect the capsule from backsplash. A moment of freefall, followed by a gentle jolt.
“Whooooo!” Sharon’s cheer shattered the silence so abruptly that for one panicked moment Jie thought there’d been a malfunction.
He added his voice to the hoots and cheers.
I’m on the moon.
Jie felt insubstantial, though it was hard to tell if it was the feeble gravity or the adrenaline coursing through his system. Harsh light from the empty world outside flooded into their cramped cocoon, making it seem colder, somehow, than Jie had ever imagined possible.
NO MATTER WHICH country, no matter how different the language or the culture, international airports existed inside a bubble of Western civilization. Tania sat in a fake Irish pub in the Halliburton Airport in South Sudan, drinking coffee from Guatemala that cost a week’s local wages. The pub had been crowded for the lunar launch, but now the passengers had drifted off and the screens showed a baseball game from Beijing.
What if Steve doesn’t show up?
Even finding a hotel would be a challenge here. She’d done some belated reading on the plane, and Al Qadarif wasn’t a place where a single Western woman could move around safely. In fact, a convoy of armored vehicles couldn’t move around safely. Like most countries in this lawless region, power existed locally, bound to the central government by only the thinnest of threads. Medieval city-states had returned, with crime syndicates and multinationals as the new royalty.
A tall man with stubbly blonde hair stepped out of the flow of passengers. “Tania Black? Steve DeBeers.” His short-sleeved, button-up shirt, tucked into khaki pants, made him look like a missionary.
Is he a missionary?
Tania knew little about Steve, other than that he worked at one of the refugee camps and had some nebulous connection to Ruth.
And I’m trusting him with my life.
“Sorry about the delay,” he said in a strong South African accent. He took her backpack before she had a chance to stop him. “Gun battle on the highway. Burned out vehicles all over the place.” He saw Tania’s expression. “No worries. Happens all the time. We’ll take a side road.”
Steve led the way past the row of chain stores, past the armed guards, and into the chaos outside. The airport loading area looked like the mutated offspring of a street market and a parking lot. Dark, long-limbed taxi drivers swarmed around them, shouting, “Where you go? Where you go? I take you!” For once in her life, Tania didn’t feel tall.
Steve grabbed Tania’s arm, plowing a path through the crowd like a human icebreaker, dragging her in his wake.
“Don’t ever, ever take a taxi,” he warned over his shoulder. “Most of the drivers are honest. But the ones who aren’t will sell you straight to the syndicates. You don’t want to know what they’d do to you while they’re waiting for ransom.”
His beatup white jeep was easy to find. He’d left it illegally parked in the passenger pick up lane, creating a minor traffic jam. An airport guard in military clothing stood next to it, brandishing his automatic rifle and arguing with the honking taxis. Steve gave the guard an elaborate handshake and slipped him a bill.
“Ladies first.” He held open the door for Tania. The cargo area was a jumble of supply boxes, hidden from curious eyes by the tinted glass of the cracked windows.
He started the car in a cloud of black smoke.
Gasoline? That explains the stench.
They inched into the traffic. The transportation grid hadn’t made it here, so everyone was driving their own vehicles – not very competently, judging from the number of dents and scratches. Steve slow-motion-slalomed around giant potholes in the crumbling asphalt.
“So where are we going?” asked Tania.
“The refugee camp tonight,” said Steve, turning down the sun visor, which came off in his hand. “I’ll run you into the preserve tomorrow morning. I should warn you though,” he smiled as if the thought appealed to him, “it could be dangerous.”
Dangerous?
Coming from the same man who’d just said gun battles were nothing to worry about. “What is it you do at the camp?” Tania asked.
Please. Don’t be a missionary. Be something tough.
Steve swerved, cutting off a taxi. The driver yelled something in Arabic, and Steve pulled a gun out of his vest, waving it out the window.
He turned back to Tania. “I’m head of security,” he said. “I used to work for a private military corporation. Soldiers are one of the biggest exports from this area.” He swerved around a broken down car, stripped down to a rusting frame but still blocking one of the lanes. “If there’s a festering conflict, you can bet there are Sudanese mercenaries on both sides of it.”
Shiny new buildings, protected by electric fences, rose at random out of a sea of tin shacks. Starving figures crouched on the sidewalks, hands outstretched, while men and women in business suits strolled past, chatting on their omnis under the watchful umbrella of their machine-gun-toting bodyguards. Wealth existed here, but it was unevenly spread, like cold butter.
“A military background doesn’t sound like a promising path into aid work,” observed Tania.
“I made the mistake of getting to know some of the soldiers I was supposed to recruit,” said Steve. “Just desperate people, trying to help their families, and I was sending them to their deaths for a few dollars.” He slammed on his brakes to avoid a skeletal dog. “You know how my PMC cut medical costs?” He made a pistol with his fingers.
***
Civilization faded, as if they were travelling back in time: buildings transitioned to clumps of mud huts, exhaust fumes became a heat haze. A child played on the road, chasing a scrawny chicken with a stick. The asphalt all but vanished, the potholes so continuous that only the occasional hint of gray showed that there had once been pavement. “An Islamic warlord seized South Sudan ten years ago,” explained Steve. “He built roads and schools, but he was assassinated. The US Government. Radical Islamists. Depends who you talk to. That was the last time this country saw a paving crew.”
They jounced past a mother and father, shadow thin, with three spindly children trailing in a line. A strap around the father’s forehead supported the canvas bag holding his family’s life possessions. The mother, her breasts shriveled and empty, carried a bawling, potbellied baby. They stepped off the track and stood watching, eyes white in their dark faces, as the jeep passed. Steve didn't slow. Tania averted her gaze.
Steve spat out of the window. “The Western world helped cause these problems. We wanted to help, so we brought in just enough aid to let the population explode. But we had no appetite for real change. What’s the point of saving a girl’s life, if she’s going to be beaten, and have her clitoris hacked off, and then raped to produce the next generation of misery? Are we
reducing
suffering?” He pointed at the dead grasses baking in the hot sun, cropped short by goats. “Even before the drought this was a desert, able to support only a few nomadic tribes. People shouldn’t be living out here.”
“My goal is to change that,” said Tania. “The UNBio preserve money is supposed to educate people. Provide them places to live. You can’t care for the land if you’re starving.”
“That’s why I’m helping you,” said Steve. His voice trailed off as he stared down the road. “Not that I think you’ll succeed. I’ve seen too much horror to be an idealist anymore. But you still believe you can make a difference. I want to remember what that’s like.”
***
They passed more families, bone-thin, plodding in the terrible sun. The flat land stretched in every direction, withered bushes, the occasional patch of tinder-dry grass, cracked soil shimmering as the heat boiled the dead earth. The first body, a child, lay in the middle of the braided track, bloated and covered with flies. Steve drove onto the desert, one wheel in the soft sand, maneuvering the jeep past. Tania nearly gagged at the smell.
“It’s going to be a bad year,” Steve said. “We’re ten months without rain. And last year’s famines used up what little extra food the world had stockpiled.”
Another body. A woman, laying naked next to the road, vacant eyes staring into space. She jerked as they passed, raising her arm, trying to sit up. For a moment she looked straight at Tania, and as their gazes met Tania was exposed to the full depth of the woman's terror.
She’s going to die here. A meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.
“Stop!” yelled Tania. “Stop!” Steve swerved in surprise, and his head snapped to look at her. “We've got to help her,” Tania pleaded.
Steve fixed his eyes on the road. “She’s beyond saving.”
“I saw her. She sat up. We’ve got space next to the boxes.”
Steve clenched his jaw, hands locked on the steering wheel. “Ruth told me you could handle this,” he said. He stopped, then accelerated backwards into the dust cloud behind them.
Tania jumped out and ran over to the woman. Flies swarmed, climbing into the woman’s eyes and nose. She moaned. Steve’s eyes flicked over her, the detached assessment of someone who had seen this too many times. “Her family left her because she was too weak,” he said quietly. “See, they even took her clothes. She’ll only take up medical resources that can be used on somebody else.”
“We’re here,” Tania insisted. “We have space.”
“No.”
“What will her treatment cost?” asked Tania. “I’ll give you the money.”
Steve sighed. “No money. You’ll work the infirmary tonight. Deal?”
They shifted some boxes and lifted the woman into the jeep’s back seat. She weighed almost nothing, and her papery wrinkled skin gave no indication of her age.
Tania offered the woman a sip from her water bottle, but it dribbled out of her mouth.
“I’d burn that bottle if I were you,” said Steve.
He rolled open the windows to combat the smell, then slammed the jeep into gear. They bumped down the road in silence, the woman dying in the back. The stream of people grew denser, old men, families with sunken-eyed children, bawling toddlers walking alone. More bodies too, stinking and foul in the hot sun.
So many people.
They rumbled through the remnants of a fence onto a cracked mudflat. Rows of makeshift plastic and cardboard shelters mingled with tattered UN High Commission for Refugees tents. People rose like black reeds from the scraps of shade under which they had been crowded, waving and cheering, only to sink down again when they saw that it was just Steve’s jeep.
“Over 100,000 people live here,” said Steve, gesturing at the ramshackle tent ghetto. He dropped his arms in defeat. “The whole of sub-Saharan Africa is like this. Entire cultures, wiped out.”
The woman moaned and slid onto the jeep’s floor. Tania steadied her, choking back revulsion at the sour scent of decay and the feel of coarsened skin. A cluster of more permanent buildings sat inside a gated compound, protected by double rows of razor wire. Two young men with automatic weapons saluted and swung the gate open. The jeep rolled to a stop outside a green medical tent.
“Wait here,” Steve said.
He emerged moments later, followed by two tall Sudanese men with a stretcher. They carried the woman into the stifling tent. A row of fans kept the flies off packed lines of people lying on dirty blankets. Steve found a spot for the woman, and after a few false starts managed to insert an IV. He stroked her forehead, saying something in Arabic.
Tania nearly hugged him. “Thank you.”
“Steve, what the hell’s this?” A female doctor, a vertical frown line etched deep between her eyebrows, pointed at the woman on the floor. Steve shrugged and they stepped out of Tania’s earshot. The doctor nodded, glared at Tania, and then strode over. “Steve says you’re mine for the evening.” She snapped Tania some latex gloves. “Come.”
Tania stayed in the medical tent until late into the night, cradling malnourished infants as they guzzled bottles of formula. The volunteer staff all had the same looks of despair, the same haunted eyes, as much a part of the uniform as the stained lab coats. “Every hour I sleep is an hour I could be saving lives,” said a male nurse, pausing for a moment amongst the sprawled patients. “How can I rest?”
Just after midnight, two orderlies picked up the ends of a sheet, carrying out a body.
“Oh, no!” said Tania.
“Yours?” asked the nurse.
Tania nodded, feeling as worn as the land.
“She was too far gone,” said a doctor, rolling on fresh gloves. “And what sort of life would she have had anyway? Abandoned by her family.”
The orderlies returned, supporting a ragged teenager with a badly infected foot. They laid him in the dead woman’s spot. He looked up at Tania and smiled with hope.
***
Tania and Steve rattled out of camp as dawn’s first light rose behind the dark outlines of the tents.
Did I even sleep two hours?
A lone generator droned at the medical center, filling the silence left by roosters that had been eaten long ago. They drove into a featureless desert. The tire tracks forked and rejoined where drivers had tried to bypass rough patches or sandpits. Several times Steve stopped at a junction, as if trying to remember the way, but it never took him long to decide, and they never had to backtrack.
After a few hours of silent driving they reached the edge of a broad valley with a dry riverbed running through it. “The preserve’s over there, in those low hills,” said Steve. “The border with Ethiopia follows the river course.” Steve pulled a pair of digital binoculars from under his seat and played them over the landscape, letting the software search for people, but double-checking himself.
Even without the binoculars, Tania could see the web of tracks where goats had stripped the land after some long ago rain had brought brief life.