The Relentless Moon (Lady Astronaut Universe #3)

by Mary Robinette Kowal

I bit the inside of my cheek and let my husband pray. If there were a God, he would not have blown the rocket. He would not have slammed a Meteor into the Earth. But it gave Kenneth comfort and I would not deny him that, even if what had saved those people was science. Redundancies and methods and practice had saved them.

My husband leaned into the microphone. “I should hope that the IAC does not relocate, because that would pull thousands of jobs away from hardworking Kansas citizens. I pray the protesters from last night come to realize that space is the biggest industry, by far, in Kansas and also in our neighbor Missouri. Losing that would be devastating to our economy at a time when we are just beginning to recover from the Meteor. Besides, if Kansans were the sort of people cowed by fear, they wouldn’t live in tornado alley.” Inside, I applauded the way my husband had turned the question to his own ends. Otherwise, I stood there with the same smile of quiet support that all of the speakers received. The questions continued on, with one man in a rumpled gray suit after another asking about changes in safety measures—too soon to tell—about causes—too soon to know—about when launches would resume—too soon to know—a different version of wanting to know what happened—still too soon to tell.

The men laughed and Mr. Whitney turned a little red. There’s nothing wrong with being short, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have hit an area that he was sensitive about, but let me tell you a joke that is not funny. When you see a woman with stitches in her chin and ask her what she did to make her husband angry. There are two scenarios. The first is that she’s happily married and you’ve insulted their relationship. The other is that her husband is abusive and she will not thank you for endangering her by drawing attention to it. In the range of possibilities in between, there’s not a single one in which a joke about being a battered woman is funny.

It takes me longer than I like to stop being defensive and masking that with anger. Most of my life, even as a pampered only child, I’ve had to push to be allowed in the room. There are boxes that people want to put me in and I resent it. The fact that Kenneth keeps me, still, in the anorexia nervosa box infuriates me. Because he’s right. Because there had been space in my schedule to eat. Because I had been just busy enough to justify skipping a meal. Because I’d been hospitalized twice for it over the course of our marriage. Because every time I came back from the Moon I felt heavy—which I know was just gravity but not all of me knew that and I had to fight to have an appetite.

I’ll give him this. Every word Nathaniel sent to Elma was true. It’s amazing how many lies one can tell with the truth.

I opened my eyes and smiled at our butler. “Right. Thank you, Chu. Will you let the governor know that I’ve run down to change and will be in—” “Darling, I was beginning to wonder if you’d make it.” Kenneth appeared from the dining room, dressed in his tuxedo. We’re old school that way, still dress for dinner and all. But honestly, you never know when some diplomat is going to turn up. In any event, Kenneth always looks so dapper that I enjoy our little ritual.

His war injury meant that he’d never be declared fit for space travel and as far as he was concerned, if we couldn’t get everybody off the planet then no one should go. He didn’t seem to understand that the Earth was like the Titanic. It was going to go down. We didn’t have enough lifeboats for everybody, but that didn’t mean we shouldn’t try to save as many people as we could.

Our marriage was in trouble, because the warning bells had been ringing and I hadn’t been paying attention. Kenneth was focused on politics. I was focused on space. I could not remember the last time we had gone somewhere without an agenda.

Laughter rippled through the cabin. There were no flight attendants. Just twenty-eight astronauts and colonists, strapped into couches with our feet in the air and a desperate need to pee. I reached up to close my visor, the polycarbonate hissing against the rubber seals. It clicked into place, leaving me with the metallic tang of bottled air, the hum of my suit fan, and the crackle-pops of rookies triggering their VOXs with excited breaths.

“True. It’s hard to get men to give a health report accurately under the best of circumstances. For all I know, ‘under the weather’ actually means dying. They all think they can out-macho a germ.”

Eugene leaned back in his chair to stare at the ceiling. “The challenge … The challenge with that approach is that the clearest example of sabotage relies on my testimony, and I’m Black. We’ll need a higher level of proof.”

“What I’d like to address specifically is how I want you to approach this. It is very easy to fall into the trap of blaming someone else for the problem. Blame does not lead to solutions. The IAC sent us here to build a home for the future. We have done that. There are people who want to destroy our work—but I want to be clear. The physical presence of mankind on the Moon is not the accomplishment of which we should be proudest. It is not what frightens them. What we have created here is a community. That is what they want to destroy by making us suspicious and fearful of each other. We have seen this path on Earth. We have seen the wars and injustices that fear leads to. My challenge to you—the problem I want you to work—is how to keep our community whole. I believe that we have the best of humanity here on the Moon and I believe—I know—you are collectively capable of solving the problems ahead of us.”

“So what I want you to hold in your head is that I am a Black man and if you hurt Curt, or let him hurt you, it will all come down on me. People won’t know that you were a spy in the war. What they’ll know is that a Black man ordered a white woman—a grieving widow—into a dangerous situation. They’ll wonder what sort of ‘savage’ would do that. Do you copy?”

“Yes. Altruism. This entire space program is basically a eugenics project.” He sat up, leaning toward me as if he could convince me of his righteousness. “You haven’t thought about the people who won’t get to come up here? The people who don’t have the right education because they’re the wrong color? Or the ones whose health is just a little off-nominal?” I did not scream at him. I did not shout that I thought about that every day, because I had a husband with a heart condition. I had a husband. I did not take Curt’s bait any more than I already had. I waited out the heat, pushing air through my clenched chest, and then I sat in the chair. I bent down to pick up my list of questions from the floor.

She glanced over her shoulder and frowned. “Is there … Do they need help with gear?” Eugene and Myrtle were stepping back into the BusyBee. He had his hand on the hatch and was pulling it shut. I caught Mavis’s arm and steered her toward the donning room. “No.” Smiling around a jealous ache, I walked away from them. “They need to do a private debrief.” A moment of confusion crossed her face, then a grin appeared like the sun popping over the horizon of the Moon. Mavis winked. “Got it.” The BusyBees had many wonderful qualities. One of which was that they were soundproof.