The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

This Is Not the Way Home GREG EGAN

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.

In the flight simulator, she’d watched the simulated rocket’s progress on a screen in front of her, helping her translate every burst of noise and thrust into the language of stages and separations, but now she shied away from interpreting the cues, afraid of getting it wrong and convincing herself that the worst was over when it was only just beginning. The force of the engines and the shaking of the cabin made her teeth ache in ways she’d never felt before; this wasn’t brain surgery, it was some kind of gonzo dentistry.

And when everything seemed still and quiet, she refused to trust her senses. Maybe she was just numb to the onslaught, or she was blocking it out in some kind of dissociative state.

“Aisha?”

She opened her eyes. Gianni was beaming madly. He took a pen out of his pocket and released it; it floated in the air like a magic trick, like a movie effect, like her phone doing a cheesy AR overlay. She’d watched 2001 a thousand times, but this couldn’t be happening to her in real life.

He said, “We’re astronauts now. How cool is that?”

Three days later, when they disembarked at Sinus Medii, Aisha was jubilant. She summoned up her twelve-year-old self to gaze in astonishment at the blazing daytime stars and the ancient fissured basalt stretching to the horizon, then she waddled precariously forward across the landing pad like her grandmother performing water aerobics. She knew that if she did X, Y, or Z she would instantly die a horrible death—but she was no more likely to enact one of the fatal blunders she’d been warned against than she’d ever been inclined to open a window in a tall building and jump out.

Medii Base was a sprawling complex of factories and workshops open to the vacuum, but the sole pressurized habitat was about the size of a small suburban dwelling, albeit with a greenhouse in the back. Zhilin introduced the honeymooners to the staff: Jingyi, botanist and medical doctor; Martin, roboticist and mining engineer; and Yong, geologist and astrophysicist. These double-degreed geniuses all looked about thirty, and Aisha was intimidated at first, but that soon gave way to a kind of relief: envying them would be like envying an Olympic athlete. She wanted to enjoy the experience for what it was and emerge without any delusions or regrets: there’d be no if only she’d done a PhD, or it was not too late to leverage her flight hours as a passenger into a new, interplanetary career.

Jingyi sketched the whole complex system of nutrient and energy flows supporting the hydroponic crops, responding patiently to all the questions Aisha’s students had passed on to her. Martin showed them the solar-thermal smelter that was processing basaltic rubble into useful materials—albeit, so far, mostly just the silica fiber for Yong’s baby. The Moravec skyhook was a rotating cable, its length a full third the width of the Moon. Yong had spun it up to the point where the low end swung backward above the surface so rapidly as to momentarily cancel out the velocity due to its orbit. It was like a spoke on a giant wheel rolling around the Moon’s equator—except that the imaginary track it was rolling on was several kilometers above their heads, so there was no risk of decapitation even at the top of the most exuberant bound. One day the hook would grab vehicles and supplies and sling them away toward Mars. For now, it was just a beautiful proof of concept, a tireless, hyperactive stick insect doing cartwheels over their heads.

Back in their room, Aisha Skyped her father. The three-second delays were impossible to ignore, but she’d had worse between continents.

“You’re healthy?” he asked. “You’re not sick from the journey?”

“Not at all.” She’d done all her vomiting in the ship.

“I’m so proud of you. Your mother would have been so proud!”

Aisha just smiled; it would have been heartless to protest that she’d done nothing more than accept his gift.

When they finished the call, she flopped back in her chair and sighed. “Where are we, again?”

“Are you jealous of my sister scuba diving on the reefs?” Gianni joked. They’d given her the Fiji holiday; it would have been greedy to take both.

“No.” Some commentators had written sniffily that a smelter was hardly a tourist attraction. But in truth, nothing could be mundane here.

“They won’t have put cameras in the room, will they?” Gianni asked. Aisha hoped he was joking; whatever their role, it was still a notch or two above contestants on reality TV. But she shut down the computer anyway, just to be safe.

They kissed, tentatively, wary of performing some simple movement that would lead to a pratfall here. Anything that wasn’t Velcroed or magnetically locked to the floor might as well have been a banana skin.

She said, “Once we’re inside the bag, we should be right.” They undressed each other, trying not to laugh, unsure just how quiet they’d need to be to keep their neighbors from hearing.

“When your father asked me if I’d go on this trip, I almost said no,” Gianni admitted.

Aisha frowned. “Well, that’s a real turn-on.”

“I was trying to be honest.”

“I’m joking!” She kissed him. “I almost chickened out a dozen times myself.”

“Then I’m glad we both stuck with it,” he said. “Because I’m pretty sure this is going to make us happy for the rest of our lives.”

Aisha had switched her watch’s default display to Dunedin time, so she wouldn’t miss her appointment to talk to the school. She woke around six, showered, then stood by the sleeping bag and prodded Gianni’s shoulder with her foot.

“Do you want to get up and have breakfast?”

He squinted at his own watch. “It’s two a.m.!”

“Only in Beijing. Come on… you need to be sitting next to me when I call the kids, or they’ll just spend the whole hour asking me what you’re doing.”

When they’d eaten and made themselves presentable, they sat down in front of the computer and powered it up. It booted without any problem, but when Aisha opened Skype, it told her that she had no connection to the internet.

“Maybe we’re out of view of the dish,” Gianni suggested.

“I thought they had us covered around the clock.” There were ground stations in Mongolia, Nigeria, and Honduras, and no one in the training camp or on the base had mentioned a particular time window for contacting Earth.

Gianni frowned. “Did you hear that?” The gentle thump had sounded like the air lock’s inner doors closing.

They walked out into the common room. Martin had just returned from outside; he was still suited, and holding his helmet.

“We’re having communications problems,” he said.

“Oh.” Aisha hesitated. “Is it going to be easy to fix?” Forget about her disappointed students; Martin and his colleagues were stuck here for another four months, and if they didn’t have the right replacement parts on hand, the link could remain broken until the new crew arrived.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “There’s nothing wrong at our end.”

“Okay.” Aisha wasn’t sure why his tone suggested that this was bad news. “So when we switch over to a different dish…?”

Martin said, “We should have been through one handover already.”

“So the problem’s at mission control?” Gianni suggested.

“No.” Martin sounded harried. “We should be getting carrier from the dishes themselves, whatever’s happening at Dongfeng.”

Aisha was bewildered now. “How can there be two separate problems at two different dishes, halfway around the world?”

Martin shook his head. “I have no idea.”

The other members of the crew joined them one by one, either woken by the conversation or alerted by their own devices to the broken link. Yong talked over the technical issues with Martin, then went out to perform some supplementary tests. Aisha gathered that Martin had successfully established contact with a portable, self-contained transceiver that mimicked the protocols they would normally be following with a ground station. Medii’s own antenna required no active measures to keep it aligned; the Earth was essentially a fixed target, with all the careful tracking delegated to the other end. But Yong had a theory about some obscure defect that might still blind them to a distant transmitter without stopping them connecting to the proxy.

Gianni tried to make light of it all. “At home we just flick our modems on and off, but here you need to check in case we’ve jumped into another dimension where the dinosaurs stayed in charge down on Earth.”

Only Zhilin laughed, but then, he’d once flown commercial airliners. He had to be accustomed to setting his passengers’ minds at ease—no matter what was going on inside his own head.

Yong returned. “It’s not us,” he declared. “The problem’s back home.”

Jingyi and Martin gazed down at the dining room table, but Gianni couldn’t tolerate silence. “So maybe the Americans hacked all the Chinese ground stations? In some kind of… preemptive cyberattack?” He stopped short of spelling out the reason, but the recent tensions had revolved around rumors of weapons in orbit.

Aisha said, “I didn’t think things had got that serious.”

Yong turned to the couple. “You had some sightseeing scheduled, and I’m already suited up. The next dish won’t be in view for five hours, and there’s nothing we can do just by sitting here worrying.”

Aisha and Gianni got into their suits and the three of them cycled through the air lock together. Aisha did her best to surrender to the spectacle and concentrate on perfecting her regolith gait. Never mind that the ground around them looked like it had been melted in a nuclear blast, and the claustrophobic confines of her suit made her think of fallout protection gear.

Yong was in the middle of explaining a theory that the farside had fewer maria than the nearside because a collision with a second, much smaller satellite had thickened the Moon’s crust there, when Aisha noticed a high-pitched, metronomic beep.

“Does anyone else hear that?” she asked. She was afraid it was some kind of alarm, though she’d been told that even a malfunctioning suit would always manage to give a polite, informative message in the occupant’s preferred language.

“Sorry, that’s the beacon from the skyhook.” Yong did something and the sound went away. “I listen in to it sometimes, just to reassure myself that it’s still up there.”

“How could it not be?” Gianni wondered.

“A micrometeor could cut it in two.”

“So what would a micrometeor do to us?”

“Don’t worry, we’re much smaller targets.”

By the time they were back inside, the wait was almost over. Martin sat hunched over the console in the common room, gazing at the screen. Aisha tried to prepare herself not to take another dose of dead air too hard; there might be an entirely innocuous reason for it that hadn’t occurred to any of them.

“Nothing,” Martin announced. “They’re all down.”

Gianni said, “Can you try tuning in to one of the NASA dishes?”

“They won’t be pointed at us.”

“What about TV broadcasts?”

Martin grimaced impatiently. “The only antenna sensitive enough to pick up that shit is on the farside, precisely so it doesn’t have to listen to it.”

Gianni nodded, chastened. “Okay. So what’s the upshot? We should just relax and hope they get things working again soon?”

“Sure,” Zhilin replied. “No internet for a couple of days. That never hurt anyone, did it?”

As the silence stretched on, Aisha found herself equally committed to two ways of viewing the situation. On the one hand, for her and Gianni the inability to communicate with Earth was just a mild inconvenience—and in the short term, at least, that was probably also true for the base’s longer-term residents. And assuming that the problem with China’s network of ground stations wasn’t being treated as a state secret, no one’s relatives would have reason to be worried about the lack of contact. Her father would still be anxious, but at least he’d know why he hadn’t been able to talk with her.

On the other hand: short of hostilities, cyber or otherwise, what could have happened at three separate sites that was taking so long to repair? And if Beijing and Washington were merely sulking with each other, that shouldn’t have stopped the ground stations in Spain or Australia showing enough goodwill to step in and make contact with Medii, just to let them know what was going on.

But even with Gianni, Aisha stuck to version one, and shut down any pessimistic speculations. “We won’t need clearance from Earth to take off and head home,” she reminded him. “It’s not like it’s so crowded out here that we need a flight plan approved by air traffic control.” Zhilin would probably prefer to get a weather report before he took them all the way to Dongfeng, but in principle, they could still make the journey even if Earth’s whole population had ascended in the Rapture, and the last soul to depart had turned off the lights.

Aisha woke to the sound of Gianni repeating her name. “Something’s happening!” he whispered. “They’ve been sitting in the common room, arguing, and now some of them have gone outside.”

“Arguing about what?” Aisha wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but Gianni seemed too agitated to be told to stop worrying and go back to sleep.

“I don’t know, they were speaking Chinese.”

She said, “Maybe someone realized that the problem is at our end, after all, and they’ve gone to fix it.”

“I’ll go and find out.”

“No, just…” It was too late, he was out of the sleeping bag. Aisha watched him dress by the red glow of the safety lights. She was tired of the constant undertone of anxiety and paranoia, but in two more days they’d be heading home, and in five all their questions would be answered.

He left the room, and she heard him talking to Jingyi. At first their words were too soft to make out clearly, but then Gianni started shouting. “You’re fucking kidding me!” he bellowed.

“Please, don’t try anything!” Jingyi implored him.

Aisha clambered out of the bag and went to join them. Gianni was pacing the room, hugging himself.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“They’re going home!”

“What?”

Jingyi said, “They’re afraid that if things are difficult, Earth might not send another ship for a long time.”

Aisha was stunned. The Chang’e 20 could only take three passengers and the pilot, so all six of them could not return together, but the idea that Earth would abandon the base’s crew seemed deranged to her. “So we’re the ones stranded here instead?”

Jingyi shook her head. “You’re guests; you’re here to make the company look good. They’ll try much harder for you. But we signed up for one year, and we’ve trained for longer stays. There won’t be the same pressure on them to help us.”

Aisha was torn between indignation and a degree of sympathy: maybe the deserters’ logic was sound. But if five days of silence really did mean that things were going badly on Earth, she very much doubted that all it would take to resurrect billions of dollars’ worth of sabotaged infrastructure would be a little extra pressure on the public relations front.

Gianni said, “I’m going to stop them.” He walked over to the air lock and began putting on his suit.

Jingyi turned to Aisha. “You need to talk him out of it. It’s too dangerous for anyone fighting out there.”

“I’m just going to talk to them!” Gianni retorted angrily.

“You can talk to them here,” Jingyi replied, gesturing toward the console. Gianni ignored her, but Aisha went with her and sat down at the microphone.

“Yong? Martin?” she tried. There was no response. “Please. Can we discuss this?”

Gianni had everything but his helmet on. “They’re not going to turn around and march back in because you asked them nicely!”

“So what do you think you’re going to do to change their minds?”

“They can’t ignore me if I’m standing right in front of them.”

Aisha said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to confront them.” The suits didn’t exactly tear easily, but she did not want any kind of altercation in the vacuum. “They’re probably inside the ship by now, anyway.”

“We’ll see.” Gianni fixed his helmet in place and stepped into the air lock.

Aisha felt numb. If she went after him, would that just make things worse? When she heard the outer door close, she hit the button beside the microphone. “Gianni?”

“What?” He was breathing heavily, as if he was trying to run. The launchpad was five hundred meters away, but there was no way that he could overtake the men who’d left ten minutes earlier.

“Just leave it. They’ll probably send another ship within a week.”

“Fuck that! This is our ride home, and they don’t get to take it.”

“Just come back!”

Gianni did not reply.

“I have to go and get him,” she decided.

As Aisha was putting on her suit, Jingyi looked on forlornly. Why hadn’t she left with the others? There was room for her on the ship. Maybe they’d decided to draw straws to pick a babysitter to stay behind. Or maybe she was just too decent to walk out on a pair of novices who might not survive for one day on their own.

When Aisha emerged from the air lock she saw Gianni in the distance, bounding across the rock like a kangaroo wrapped in tinfoil. She couldn’t make out any figures moving around the launchpad.

“Come back, you idiot!” she implored him. “We’ll be fine here!” Even if the wait turned out to be a year or two, Jingyi knew how to keep the crops growing and the base habitable.

Gianni kept running. Aisha waddled forward as briskly as she could, resigned to the fact that she’d never catch up with him.

When he reached the launchpad, she waited, hoping he’d accept the evidence of his own eyes. Zhilin would be going through the final system checks, and nobody was going to step out to debate their plans. Maybe the pricks would end up in prison for this; Aisha was unsure of the legal issues, but she recalled a sea captain being jailed for leaving his foundering ship while his passengers remained trapped below deck.

Gianni climbed the ladder to the hatch. Aisha couldn’t make out exactly what he was doing, but she assumed he was pounding on the hull.

“I’m not leaving until you come out!” he shouted.

“Give it up!” Aisha begged him.

She heard the rattling first through his radio, then she felt the slight vibration of the ground through her boots. She stared at the lander; she couldn’t discern any flames from the engines, but maybe they were too diffuse.

“You need to get down,” she told Gianni, hoping he’d heed the note of terror in her voice when he’d ignored all her other entreaties.

“They’re bluffing!” he retorted. “They’re not going to take off.”

“Jump and run, or I’ll never forgive you!” She could see a ghostly blue light now, flickering around the base of the lander. “Jump!”

“Shut off the engines and come out,” Gianni commanded his adversaries. Aisha had once watched him stand, immovable and unflinching, in front of a carload of thugs, ordering them to step out and face him after they’d shouted insults at her. When he thought he was right, he thought he was invincible.

The lander ascended: five meters, ten meters. Aisha emitted an involuntary sob, then held her breath as Gianni finally let go of the railing. Free-falling, he parted from the spacecraft with a dreamlike lethargy, tumbling slowly into the blue fire of the exhaust.

The buggy needed sunlight, so Aisha kept it moving at a sedate sixteen kilometers an hour; there was no point in outracing its energy source. With the sun all but frozen in the sky, the subtle changes in the light to which she’d grown accustomed were held in abeyance, leaving her with a sense of stasis that was only rendered stranger by the flow of the terrain. She watched the vehicle’s progress on the GPS, and tried to distract herself by attempting to match her ground-level view of a crater or rill beside her with the corresponding features on the satellite map, but after a few days the endless variations on the same theme began to make her feel as if she were stuck in some barren, procedurally generated computer game. The verisimilitude was stunning, but she wanted someone to slip up and insert a shock of greenery, a building or two, a human figure.

Nuri mounted sporadic protests against her own, far more monotonous view. Aisha tried to soothe her without implying that the screams were unwarranted; no one should accept this kind of sensory deprivation, even when they had no choice but to endure it.

The suit recycled as much water as it could, and Aisha piped in liquid meal replacements from the tank at the back of the buggy. When she told the suit to make her faceplate opaque, it wasn’t hard to sleep, at least when Nuri was in a cooperative mood. The buggy had plotted a smooth, safe path across territory that had been mapped down to the centimeter, and that probably hadn’t changed in a billion years. It was not as if they were at risk of hitting an animal or going aquaplaning.

As they approached ninety degrees longitude, Aisha looked back at the Earth suspended above the horizon. Whatever the idiots had done, she doubted that they’d managed to render the whole blue world uninhabitable. Maybe they’d lost the means to send a radio signal—let alone a rocket—to their nearest neighbor, but that had been true for most of human history. So long as the air was still breathable and crops could still grow, to return would be worth the struggle.

“Why doesn’t the skyhook come lower?” Aisha had asked Yong. A gap of six kilometers above the base seemed excessively cautious.

“Because if it came much lower here,” he’d explained, “it would strike the ground at other points in its orbit. There are six locations where one hook or the other comes swinging down; the orbit needs to be high enough that all of them have some clearance.”

Six months later, when Aisha and Jingyi had been gestating the plan, they’d contemplated tweaking the skyhook’s orbit into an ellipse that came in low over the base while still avoiding the highlands of the farside. But the hub’s ion engine would take months to execute the change—and in just two weeks the farside and nearside would rotate into each other’s former locations.

So instead of making the orbit eccentric, they’d kept it circular but shrunk it as much as the safety margins hard-coded into the hub’s navigation system allowed. At the point on the farside opposite Medii, the bottom of the cable would come within ten meters of the ground.

When the buggy reached its destination, Aisha looked up into the star-filled sky, trying not to cower into her seat at the thought of the thousand-kilometer-long whip tumbling toward her.

Nuri woke and started crying. “I know,” Aisha commiserated. “Your mother stinks, and you’re tired of staring at her chin.”

She climbed out of the buggy and walked around for a few minutes, just to let her muscles know that their enforced idleness was over, then she unhooked the trailer and set to work.

She detached the roll cage from the buggy, undoing all the bolts and lifting off the tubular frame. Then she took the sheet of woven silica from the trailer and maneuvered it into the buggy, carefully positioning the loops of the connecting cords around the holes where the cage would reattach.

She took twelve of the struts from the trailer and assembled them into a rectangular tower half a meter high, fitted two extra bars across the top, then had the buggy drive up onto it. If she hadn’t practiced the whole thing a dozen times back at the base she would have been panicking already, but by now this part seemed as unremarkable as automatic parallel parking.

Nuri redoubled her wails. “Shh, my darling, it’s going to be fine,” Aisha promised. “Just think of it as monster trucks meets Lego.”

She attached a second tower to the first, and made it a full meter tall. The buggy crossed over without complaint; it knew its own abilities well enough to assess her request and decide it was achievable. The integrity of the tower, though, was outside its domain of expertise; it was up to the builder to ensure that the structure was sound.

Level by level, she raised the scaffolding, and the buggy followed. When the tower was seven and a half meters high, she climbed down and stepped back to inspect it. Jingyi had seen her get this far in the rehearsals, but apparently that hadn’t been enough to convince her to come along for the ride.

Aisha went to the trailer and fetched the magic box Jingyi had found in Yong’s workshop. She woke it from its sleep and checked the status of the skyhook. It was due to make its next pass over the site in about twenty minutes.

If the lunar GPS was still accurate and both she and the skyhook were employing the same coordinates, the magnetic hook at the bottom of the cable would descend directly over the buggy, stop half a meter above the top of the roll cage, then ascend again. With the magnet switched off, the buggy wouldn’t move a millimeter, but she had to be sure that the encounter really played out that way. She climbed the tower again, and turned the dash cam on the buggy up toward the sky.

As the time approached, Aisha lay flat on the ground. The hook could not be coming down so low here as to strike the rock; the effect on the whole cable would have been unmissable. But if the real safety margin turned out to be less than advertised, she might be none the wiser until the proof smacked her in the head.

Nuri turned her face toward her, though they couldn’t make eye contact. “You’re my beautiful girl,” Aisha declared soothingly. “You know you are.”

She waited a few minutes, in case the timing was off, then rose to her feet; the suit did its best to help.

The tower remained standing, the buggy undisturbed. Aisha had the suit access the dash cam and play back the footage in slow motion.

Her faceplate went opaque, then filled with stars. “Skip forward until something changes,” she said.

A circular silhouette moved toward her, growing, blocking out the stars. It slowed as it approached, as if she were looking down at a very large Frisbee tossed into the air, approaching the top of its arc.

She froze the image when the silhouette began to retreat. From the apparent size, the height was close to what she’d expected, but the thing was off-center by about six meters. She’d have to take the tower apart and rebuild it in the right location.

She took her time, instead of rushing to try to get the job finished in one orbit; if the tower collapsed and flipped the buggy, that would be the end. She hummed to Nuri as she worked; singing would have been nicer, but it made her throat dry.

Five hours later she was done, strapped into the buggy, perched high above the rock. She told the hub to power up the hook’s electromagnet, and programmed the switch-off time to the millisecond. Now the whole process was out of her hands.

Nuri was asleep. “We’re going to see your grandfather,” Aisha whispered. “Very soon.”

She sat watching the countdown projected in red onto her faceplate. At T-minus two, she was ready to believe that nothing would happen and she’d stay stranded forever. By T-plus two, the feeling of half her Earth weight pressing her into the seat had already gone from a shock to a kind of ecstasy. The landscape was falling away around her ever faster, but the buggy hadn’t yet tipped by any perceptible angle; the hub was still an unimaginable distance above her.

Nuri woke, but she did not seem troubled. Perhaps she found the greater pressure against her mother’s skin more comforting. Perhaps she’d always known that she needed more weight, more force, more friction if she was ever to thrive.

Aisha talked to her, explaining what was happening, then hummed for a while as she fed. Ten minutes into the upswing, the ground lay to her left, a sheer wall of gray rock like a distant cliff face. But down was still down in the buggy; the centrifugal force overwhelmed mere lunar gravity. And as the cliff slowly receded and tilted into an impossible roof above the dark slab of the magnet, she finally perceived the whole world of her prison as a mere disk in the sky again. Whatever happened now, at least she was free of it.

A few degrees past upside down, the magnet switched off and the buggy fell away into the void. Aisha grabbed at the seat, at the dashboard, but then the weightlessness lost its sense of danger, and once the magnet was out of sight there was nothing to tell her she was moving.

Nuri grizzled half-heartedly, then went quiet and contemplated the change. “We’re astronauts now!” Aisha told her. “How cool is that?”

They’d left the Moon traveling faster than most rockets, and the blue world grew more rapidly than it had diminished on the journey out. The buggy rotated slowly, taking hours to complete a turn, and each time the Earth rose over the dashboard Aisha could gauge its increased width against the instruments below.

The suit saw no difference between the lunar surface and deep space; it kept scrubbing the air and keeping the temperature tolerable. The liquid meals had transcended their distinctive unpleasantness and blended into the general background of itchiness and filth. Aisha’s stomach had bloated like a famine victim’s, but she wasn’t famished.

Two days after the hook had released them, the Earth filled almost half the view. Whatever errors she’d made in her calculations, at least she hadn’t dispatched the buggy straight into the sun. She gazed down at Africa, and took heart to see the cities lighting up as night fell.

She’d been afraid of cutting off the solar power prematurely, but as she followed the continent below into night she started unfolding the silica sheet and drawing it around the buggy. Inside this strange tent, she could just make out the objects around her by the lights from the dashboard.

They needed to scrape through the air where it was dense enough to slow them down and keep them from escaping the Earth’s pull, but not so dense that it would melt the improvised heat shield. She and Jingyi had pooled their knowledge and done their best with computer models, but the base had no local copies of any reference work that dealt with atmospheric density profiles—and even with perfect knowledge of the subject, they could never have accounted for the vagaries of mesospheric weather.

Aisha felt the first trace of heat through her gloves where she was touching the buggy’s chassis. As she drew her hands in, the drag force itself came to her aid, pushing the seat firmly away from her so she strained against the belt like a passenger hanging upside down after a car crash. In front of her, the sheet began to glow a dull red, and radiant heat shone into her faceplate; the suit would be desperately sequestering thermal energy in its phase-change alloy, but that would only help for a while.

Nuri grew restless, but not distressed. Aisha was not in pain yet, but it felt like the times she’d lain too close to an electric radiator on a cold night, and the initially comforting warmth edged toward something damaging.

The force eased off; the glow faded. Aisha checked the data on the buggy’s accelerometer. The whole spike had lasted four minutes: not as long as her calculations had predicted.

She fed the numbers into her model. The buggy had shed enough velocity for the Earth to capture it, but it would swing out to an apogee some hundred thousand kilometers away. And though it would come in close again, it would be moving more slowly than at the first encounter, so the drag would be less. The model showed an excruciating succession of incremental changes, taking sixty-three orbits in almost fifty days before they were low enough to parachute down.

To remain in Medii, hoping for rescue, had been untenable. Any gamble had seemed worthwhile—even if the narrow path home would be flanked by fiery death and slow starvation. But now she understood why Jingyi had made her own choice: what she’d feared most was watching her friend, and the child she’d delivered, perish beside her as the food ran out, the water dried up, the air went stale.

Aisha gingerly opened the tent to give the suit a chance to radiate some heat away. Maybe there were errors in the model still to unfold, in her favor. She felt Nuri shift and nuzzle against her, the broken skin of a rash on her daughter’s cheek warm against her own skin.

Chance wouldn’t save them. If she left this to chance, they would die.

She watched the planet slowly recede. Their speed and altitude the next time they entered the atmosphere were immutable now. Which left… what? The drag would depend on their shape, and the area they presented to the airflow. The sheet was much bigger than the buggy’s frame, in preparation for its later role as parachute, but if she tried to trail it behind her at this point, the unprotected buggy would fry. If she’d brought half the struts from the tower, she might have stretched the sheet out into a larger shield, but they were all sitting uselessly back on the farside.

Nuri slept and woke, fed and shat, oblivious. Aisha could not have faced her dying as a three-year-old in a medical emergency, as a teenager in Medii’s slide into disrepair, or, if the machines all proved resilient, as the loneliest centenarian in history.

But she could not face this either.

She closed her eyes and pictured the beautiful fabric she and Jingyi had toiled so long to weave, billowing out above her as the buggy drifted gently toward some green field or calm sea. Spread out by the force of the air alone. But when they grazed the unbreathably thin mesosphere… how much pressure would it take, from within, to puff the tent out like a balloon?

Not a lot.

Aisha opened her eyes and did some calculations. It was possible. She believed she could spare it and survive.

She forced herself to wait until the perigee was just an hour away, to keep the batteries charging as long as possible. Then she spread the sheet around the buggy and knotted the cords as tightly as she could around the hole at the back. It would not be a hermetic seal, but it only had to retain its contents for a few minutes.

She checked the time, then told the suit to start venting.

The tent remained limp and crumpled.

“Vent more,” she commanded.

“That would put reserves below safe levels,” the suit replied.

Aisha placed her gloves against the sides of her helmet and turned it. The suit tried to dissuade her, but Jingyi had proved that it could be done. As the seal was breached the air hissed out and the tent inflated, the fabric taut against the vacuum.

Aisha reversed the twist. She took a breath. It felt inadequate. She took a deeper one; she was dizzy, but she was not suffocating.

The silica balloon began to shudder, buffeted by the thin, fast air outside. Aisha felt the growing heat on her face, breaking through her light-headedness.

The drag pushed her forward: a little weaker than before, but much more than her dire calculations had predicted for the status quo. She watched the time pass, until she was weightless again. Three minutes.

She crunched the accelerometer data. Six more orbits, and they would be spiraling down to Earth.

Nuri started babbling happily, making sounds Aisha had never heard before. Aisha let herself weep, for Gianni, for Jingyi, for whatever havoc she was yet to find below.

Then she composed herself and started singing softly to her daughter, waiting for the time they could look into each other’s eyes again.