Ride the Moon: An Anthology (18 page)

A spider skitters across the forest floor. She carries a white sac on her back, eggs heavy inside. She searches for the perfect spot, wandering through the foliage of each bush she comes across. And then she finds it.

Carefully, she pulls her egg-sac from her abdomen and attaches it to the underside of the leaf. She nudges it, making sure it's safe, then skitters away, an intoxicating freedom in her step. She finds a spot on the branch of a nearby bush and waits the night, moonbeams shivering down onto her back. She rests, her task complete. By morning, only a husk remains.

The edge of the sun turned purple-green two days before sunset. They crowded into the Pasture to watch as the discolouration bled across Sol's sinking face. Under the dome's layers of polarized polyaluminum, they muttered and swore, tromped the carbongrass and scared the rabbits until Jacob forced them to leave. For a few hours after Sol was gone, the stain of the coronal mass ejection lingered above the craggy horizon as a luminous glow.

Like a halo for the angel of death
, Jacob thought.
The question is, do you pray to God to protect you, or pray to Sol for mercy?

He came in from the Pasture and laid down the sleeping rabbit, another one of the big females. He secured the strap across the chocks, pinning its head in place. Before he could hit it with the shockstick, Captain Donnelly stepped into the abattoir with Dr. Irina Kolevsky and a thin, nervous-looking man Jacob didn't know. They looked around at the dozens of skinned, headless rabbit carcasses hanging in their racks, each a pink and gray anatomy lesson.

“It's about time you brought him, Donnelly,” Jacob said. “I've got to get another thirty-two rabbits culled to meet the carbon dioxide balance numbers the committee gave me. I'm taking all the matriarchs first.”

“Um, won't that disrupt the breeding cycle?”

With one big hand on the rabbit, the other holding the shockstick, Jacob turned toward the newcomer who'd spoken. “Yes, that's right,” Jacob said, “The females eat like locusts when they're in full breeding mode. Without the matriarchs bossing them around, all the young females will get pregnant in a matter of days. Growing embryos soak up lots of carbon.” He paused. “You are Terry Jardin, aren't you? The biosystems guy from Farside?”

The other man flushed. “Um, no. My name is DeSilva.”

Donnelly said, “Enrique DeSilva, meet Jacob McHenry-Xiang, chief biosystems engineer for Nearside Base.” Donnelly waved his hands back and forth as he made the introductions. “DeSilva here is an expert in plant physiology.”

“I don't give a damn who he is. Where the hell is Jardin? I need his expertise—we've got calculations to run.”

“Dr. Jardin had a suit malfunction during the evacuation,” Donnelly said. “A fatal one. I'm sure DeSilva here will be able to work with you. He was Dr. Jardin's assistant.”

“Ah, not an assistant, exactly,” DeSilva said. “I'm a postdoc from the University of Florida. I came up here to study -”

“Yes, that's fine,” said Donnelly. “Jacob, he's going to assist you in rebalancing the biosystems to handle the increased load. We've got three days until the plasma storm hits and we're going to need to be creative in how we address this crisis. I expect you two to make it happen ASAP. To that end, Dr. Kolevsky here will go over the atmosphere numbers with you again.” Donnelly turned to face the woman. “As we discussed, Dr. Kolevsky, please make Jacob fully aware of the situation and help him to revise his figures. I want you to bring the new numbers to the emergency committee briefing this afternoon. Is that clearly understood, Doctor?”

“Yes, Captain,” she said, “I heard you.”

Without waiting for a reply from anyone, Donnelly left.

There was a moment of silence, interrupted only by a scrabbling sound from the rabbit's nails on the table. Cursing, Jacob applied the shockstick to the base of its skull and it went still.

“I try to shock them before they wake up,” Jacob said, “so they won't feel it.” He hung it by the feet on the next set of hooks over the collection trough. “The gene-enhancements make them go into hibernation when the sun goes down, but this stainless steel table is so cold...” With one hand on the rabbit's neck, Jacob picked up the big loppers, the ones with the long, curved blade. “I hate it when they wake up.” He held the tool, but made no move to use it.

The silence returned.

“Um, listen,” DeSilva said, “Dr. Jardin showed me how to do that. Can I, ah, help you?”

Jacob sighed and said, “Yeah. Apron and gloves are in that cabinet against the wall. Go find something that fits.” His eyes still fixed on the dead rabbit, Jacob heard DeSilva walk over to the equipment locker.

“Jake?” Irina had come close, her voice low and quiet behind him. “Are you OK?”

“Is that how you were told to begin? Soften me up by asking me if I'm OK?” The blade crunched through the rabbit's neck. With three snips, the head was free; he tossed it into the reprocessing bin with the others. Jacob watched the blood pulse into the collection trough, errant droplets arcing high and wide in the lunar gravity.

She said nothing.

“No, Irina, I'm not OK,” he said. “We're all gonna die if we do it their way.”

“You don't know that.”

“It's the outcome with the highest probability, and that's as good as I've got. You have the atmosphere numbers, you know what we're dealing with here.”

“Of course I do. I helped write the original recommendation, remember?”

“Then how can you help them? Knowing what you know about how the biosystem works, how can you possibly be going along with them so blindly?”

“Jacob, for the last time, I'm not blindly going along with anyone. I don't want to kill all the rabbits any more than you do, but we are running out of options. Yes, the rabbits are a source of protein for us, but the fact is, air is more important than food. It'll take us months to starve to death, but without air we all die in a week. It's that simple.”

“Dammit, Irina, there's nothing simple about it. I could kill every rabbit in the warren and our oxygen consumption would only go down by two percent.”

“Why do you insist on using the most pessimistic assumptions about -”

“And having killed them all, we not only lose the only means we have of converting cellulose to useable food calories, but the carbon dioxide capture efficiency of the Pasture goes right to hell. Without the rabbits in there grazing them down, the carbongrass goes to maturity in five days and full dormancy in nine.”

“Don't lecture me, Jacob, I know how it works.”

“Yeah? Did you forget that dormant grasses don't fix carbon dioxide, don't make oxygen and don't transpire water?”

“They don't shut down completely during dormancy and you know it.”

“Efficiency drops so low they might as well. We're gonna need every fraction of a percent if we're to make it until a rescue comes. Look, forget about the rabbits as a food supply, OK? Without them, the Pasture can't replenish the air or filter the water. Did you people even read the report?”

“Oh, so now I'm ‘you people'? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Ah, excuse me?” DeSilva stood off to the side, shifting his feet. “I don't mean to interrupt, but, um...”

Irina crossed her arms and turned away. Jacob turned to snap at him, then stopped himself, and drew another breath before speaking. “Yes?”

“I just wanted to let you know that I'm all set,” DeSilva said. “If you could show me which females I should bring in, I can get out of your way. Leave you to your, uh, discussion.”

Jacob glanced at Irina, then said, “Right, let's go.” He stepped away from the table, toward the door to the Pasture.

Irina put a hand on his arm. “Jacob,” she said, “we need to talk about this. Seriously, I mean. I have to be able to tell them something.”

“Tell them... tell them I'll be consulting with Dr. Enrique DeSilva, a subject matter expert who worked with the chief biosystems engineer at Farside.”

“Hey, um, listen, I'm not really an expert in -”

“Will you do that for me, Irina? Just tell them I'll have a revised estimate by nine o'clock tomorrow morning?”

She shook her head. “Tonight, Jacob. They'll be deciding this tonight.”

“No!” He slammed the table. “They don't ‘decide' anything in here! They don't know what they're doing! When it comes to the biosystems, they only advise and request—I decide!”

“Jacob, please! Things are different now. The system is stretched past the breaking point. They're scared. We're all scared.” She rubbed her eyes, red-rimmed with fatigue.

After a moment, Jacob took off his gloves and lightly stroked her hair. “I know, Irina. I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm just trying to keep them from doing something stupid, something that looks like it might buy some time but will kill us all in the long term.”

Irina reached up and pulled his hand to her cheek. “Is there even going to be a long term, Jake? Is there?”

He caressed her and said, “I don't know. But we have to act like there will be, don't we? Or we might as well give up now.”

She held his hand, cupping it to her lips before kissing his palm and letting him go. As she straightened, she said, “I'm sorry, Jake, really, I am, but I need to give them some kind of concession. Something, anything. Please.”

Jacob sighed, then pulled his gloves back on. “Fine. Tell them we'll do all the rabbits the committee originally advised, plus an additional fifteen. Will that be enough to hold them off? Can you get them to see reason?”

Her mouth twisted into a half-smile. “That's asking a lot of military administrators, but I think it should calm them down. For now, anyway. After the storm hits, though? It'll just depend on what happens.” She walked past DeSilva, but stopped at the door. “Jacob, rational calculations took a backseat to emotions after the last rescue shuttle left. They're not going to start asking for volunteers when there's even a single rabbit still breathing. It's just not going to happen.” With that, she left.

Jacob leaned against the table and closed his eyes.

“Um, hey, I'm sorry for interrupting you two. I didn't mean to cause any trouble.”

“Forget it.”

“Listen, can I ask something?” DeSilva's voice was a little unsteady. “What did she mean about asking for volunteers?”

“It means that some of us are going to be heroes before this is all over.” Seeing that DeSilva didn't understand, he said, “This coronal mass ejection is the biggest solar plasma storm we've ever recorded, by a factor of at least ten million. It's bad enough that it's headed right toward us, still worse that it would hit when it was nighttime here at Nearside. Farside Base is a much bigger facility, outnumbering us three-to-one.”

“Right, because of the radio astronomy station and the helium mines.”

Jacob nodded. “It would have been much better for us to be able to evacuate over to your place instead of having all you guys come here. The radiation and ion scouring from the coronal plasma is going to make Farside leak like a punctured tire, so we are all stuck, crammed together here. Have you done any calculations of Nearside's life support carrying capacity?”

“I've been trying,” DeSilva said, “but I don't even know how many people came over.”

“Well, there's been a lot of reassuring blather from the emergency committee in the Base Administrator's office, but I've seen the numbers. I know better than anyone what kind of a load our biosystems can handle.” Jacob waited for DeSilva to ask, but his expression made it plain that he feared the answer. “Under starvation rations,” Jacob said, “the food will hold out longer than the air. That's assuming the rabbits keep the Pasture at peak photosynthetic capacity and the chemical carbon dioxide scrubbers hold out. After that, we suffocate.”

“So the volunteers she's talking about are -”

“- are people willing to go outside and vent their suits.” He pushed aside the skinned and gutted carcass. “The sooner they start asking people to make the ultimate sacrifice, the greater the chance the rest will survive until Earth can send another shuttle.”

“My God. But how long will that be? When will they be able to launch?”

Jacob opened an equipment cupboard and set up a second workstation on the steel table, a few feet away from his own. Chocks, loppers, gutting knife and hanging rack, all standard issue.

“That depends on how many people are left alive on Earth after the storm passes, if they still have launch capability and if we're anywhere on the priority list.”

“What if they can't send a shuttle for us?”

“Then we'll need more volunteers.”

“And if they don't get enough willing volunteers?”

Jacob walked to the curtainwall and held it back for DeSilva. After a moment, the younger man went through and Jacob followed him into the Pasture.

Days later, when the coronal mass hit, the Sun's superheated plasma swirled around the moon like a stream flowing around a rock, leaving Nearside Base in a relatively sheltered calm. The dome was lit with swirling colours, interrupted by bright electrical discharges, each the size of a continent. Jacob heard a stuttering whine from the intake vents and smelled the warm, fetid air as it poured into the Pasture.

“The rabbits are awake,” said DeSilva. “I think they're sick, though.”

“No, they're just groggy,” Jacob replied as he continued to work through calculations at a whiteboard as he spoke. “The light from the plasma woke them early.”

“Oh.” DeSilva looked up, then looked away. The view was hypnotic, but behind the glowing cloud was the Earth, now suffering an unknown fate. He said, “I think I liked it better when we could see what was happening back home.”