Fiction River: Moonscapes (19 page)

Everything on Verdant had adapted to the moons’ bizarre cycle. Rachel suspected that humans were, too. In some weird way, the humans on the planet were being absorbed into the thirty-year Cycle, their genetic makeup mutating in ways that could not be predicted by using thirty-year-old DNA from people who had died in Cycle madness at the last perigee.

Aisha was grasping at straws.

***

The thrumming in her blood kept her awake so that when she heard Eliane’s door open, she was immediately alert. Rachel had intentionally turned all the lights off but that hadn’t discouraged her daughter, who now appeared, fully dressed with a wrist beam illuminating her way. Eliane headed straight for the main door.

Rachel fumbled for the control panel on the couch, where she had been sitting, and the lights came up. Eliane didn’t even pause, but kept going straight for the door. Rachel watched as she yanked on the lever that kept the door closed. It didn’t budge. Eliane kept pushing and pulling, her efforts growing more frantic and more uncoordinated by the moment.

“Eliane,” said Rachel. She stood up and the blanket fell to the virid wood floor. “Eliane, no, sweetheart.”

It was as if Eliane couldn’t even hear her. She pulled and pushed against the door, her breath coming in gasps. Rachel reached for her daughter and gently pulled her away. Wisps of Eliane’s dark hair brushed against Rachel’s cheek.

“Come on,” she said, turning her toward the bedroom. Only then did she see Sam standing in the doorway of the third room. He had pulled on his pants, or maybe he’d slept in them, but his chest and feet were bare. His blond hair was tousled and his face was flushed as if with fever.

“Everything all right?” he asked. He had the thinness of all young things before they reach their maturity, but his shoulders were wide and his arms corded with lean muscle.

Rachel shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “She was trying to get out.”

He nodded. “It’s calling her.”

Something cold slid down Rachel’s scalp. “What is?”

His eyes glittered. “Verdant.”

***

Eliane tried three more times to escape into the night and with each try she grew more frantic and less capable of understanding her mother. After each struggle to get her back into bed, the girl would fall asleep exhausted until the next surge struck.

The last time, Sam had to help Rachel, even though his skin burned with fever when she touched him. She didn’t dare give him anything because she didn’t know how the medication would interact with the C15. In between making sure he drank, changing the cool cloth on his forehead and checking in on Eliane, Rachel was stumbling on her feet. She even considered tying Eliane down but knew at once that her daughter would harm herself trying to get free.

Rachel sat down on the lounger to take a little break and her eyes slid shut, just for a minute. Just long enough to try to still the singing in her blood, like a whisper in the night.

She slowly became aware of something howling in the distance and startled awake from a breath of cold air on her face. It carried the wild scent of Verdant’s storms: earth, torn vegetation, and the metallic tang of lightning.

Eliane was out.

Rachel scrambled for the control panel, cursing her decision not to update to a voice activated one, and finally hit the right control for the lights. She saw at once that the front door was still firmly closed and for a brief, nightmarish moment, she was twelve again and her mother had just left, locking her inside the shelter.

“Eliane!” she called but she knew her daughter was gone. Still, she ran to both their rooms, just in case. They weren’t there.

Then she was running for the south tunnel, following the howl of the wind. The sliding panel stood wide open and as she pushed into the tunnel, the automatic lighting came on. The floor was littered with twigs and leaves that had blown in when they opened the outside door. Only as she felt the cold air on her feet did Rachel realize that she was barefoot. Uncaring, she ran for the door. The wind grew stronger the closer she came, howling like a mad thing, or maybe she was the mad thing, and when she finally burst out of the tunnel, the wind and rain slammed into her, knocking the breath from her and shoving her to her knees.

“Eliane!” she screamed and the wind screamed back at her. Drenched and cold, she stumbled to her feet, trying to see in the inky darkness. Somewhere above, behind the storm clouds, Castor and Pollux were at perigee. She felt it in the thrumming of her heart, the tingling in her fingers. This was what she had felt when she was twelve. This was why she had beaten her fists against the door until they were bloody—not because she wanted her mother, but because she wanted to be outside.

Now terror beat down the exhilaration as twigs flew past her, some whipping her bare arms and face, drawing blood. Her feet dragged against the pull of the earth, as if she were suddenly heavier.

“Eliane!”

The wind abated momentarily, and she stood still to listen. There! A faint keening over by the stone wall that tried to keep the park at bay. But when she tried to run toward it, she found her feet trapped by grasses that had grown spontaneously over them. Bending down, she ripped at the coarse fibers until they finally let go.

She ran toward the wall, ignoring the battering her bare feet were taking on the stones and twigs littering the path. Then she tripped over a twisted root and sprawled face first on the ground. As she lay there, winded, she could feel the stealthy creep of grass growing up over her legs and arms. She scrambled to her feet, her heart filling with horror.

Was this what had happened to her mother? Had she fallen and been trapped by grasses? Was her skeleton even now in the park beyond the wall, nothing more than an indistinct hump in the forest floor?

“Eliane!” she screamed, looking about wildly. “Where are you?”

Within the space of a minute, the drenching rain slowed to a spatter and the wind quieted. Rachel kept moving, afraid of standing still. Then the clouds parted, allowing the twin moons to shine down on the storm-tossed landscape. And in that light, Rachel found her daughter.

At first, she thought Eliane stood behind a tree stump, with only her face showing. Then Rachel blinked and saw. A whippet tree had grown around Eliane, consuming her. In the moonlight, Rachel could see the sleek bark of the young tree growing up around Eliane’s shoulders and upraised arms. Her face was raised to the sky, her beautiful long black hair moving in the breeze as if it had a life of its own, her eyes open and no longer seeing anything.

“No.” Rachel blinked, trying to make sense of what she was seeing, all the while moaning, “No, no, no.” She tugged her feet free and stumbled toward her daughter but even as she touched Eliane’s cold cheek, bark reached up to cover the flesh.

A scream of horror rose from Rachel’s chest but before she could release it, a muffled sound caught her attention and she turned toward it, only then noticing the hump of grasses next to the whippet tree. To Eliane.

It moved and she jumped back. Then she realized what it was and dropped to her knees, frantically tearing at the tough strands, ignoring the cuts to her hands and the insistent grasses tugging at her feet and legs.

“Sam!” she screamed. “Sam, help me!”

After a moment, the movements inside the hump grew more frantic and she desperately tore at the grasses until a hand suddenly emerged, reaching for the sky. Rachel swallowed a scream and grabbed the hand.

“I’ve got you, Sam! I’ve got you!”

***

Year Fifteen of the Third Perigee was the first time we had adapted enough to Verdant to become… palatable. Of the population of five hundred thousand people on the planet, we lost over eighty-thousand, most of them young, but some of all ages. Nobody under the age of puberty was taken.

We still don’t know how perigee causes the madness. Something about the moons’ pull triggers a response in Verdant. Whatever the cause, the effect is deadly.

Aisha’s experimental drug worked well enough to keep Sam from succumbing completely to the call of the planet, although he will bear the scars on his body for the rest of his life, as I will on my feet and legs. Ten years after Aisha’s death, Sam and I continue the work she started, though we both know that we will forever be trying to catch up. Verdant is clever, and adaptable, and very patient. In the hundred and twenty-one years since we first landed, our rate of attrition has grown higher every perigee.

We must persevere, for in the eighteen years since we lost so many to the Cycle madness, every single child born on Verdant has had the Verdant gene.

Introduction to “
Moonfall”

Fiction River is only six volumes old and already Lisa Silverthorne, like Annie Reed, has become a regular. Lisa has appeared in our second, fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes, with more to come, we hope! Her short fiction has appeared in sixty other venues in genres from romance to science fiction.

“Ever since Sojourner landed on Mars,” she writes, “I’ve been fascinated by rovers….capturing images that make our sense of wonder burn hotter….I was incredibly affected when Sojourner and Spirit went silent. But Opportunity and Curiosity are still out there, still carrying on the vision that began that July in 1969. ‘Moonfall’ is dedicated to those intrepid little rovers that have changed the world, enhanced our vision for the future, and stolen my heart.”

Moonfall

Lisa Silverthorne

Spaceport America

Sierra, New Mexico

“Orbital insertion successful. Booster separation complete. Heat shields active,” Senior Research and Development Engineer, Jack Morgan announced, swiveling his chair around in the small, brightly lit control room.

Cassandra Bailey sat beside Jack in the back of three rows of desks that faced two wall-mounted 120” screens in the windowless, trapezoidal control room where she and her team had camped since the orbiter reached Io, a moment they’d anticipated for a decade. A green Data Frontiers banner, lettered in crisp, white Helvetica, hung on the wall of the control room and lab space leased from Spaceport America, New Mexico’s commercial spaceport.

She gripped the edge of the black desk, staring at the large, front screens that shifted from static to black as she awaited connection to the data-collector bot. She was exhausted, eyes watering, but her wrinkled khakis and green Data Frontiers polo made it obvious that she’d slept at the office last night. And not very well. The soft, dull thrum of computers softened the room’s palpable silence, scent of old coffee mixing with sweat and a hint of aftershave. She glanced at Jack who sat to her right and then around the room at the rest of her team: four men and two women. This mission was the culmination of her career. She had to get it right.

“Status check on DOV,” Cass replied.

“DOV’s instruments are online. Dropping heat shields. Initiating first braking burn,” said Jack, his deep, velvety voice filling the painfully quiet room. He wore a blue striped dress shirt and khakis, two-day’s beard shadow on his sun-washed skin. “She’s decelerating within acceptable parameters. Moonfall in nineteen minutes sixteen seconds.”

Cass let out a breath, clenching her eyes closed against the assault of data and readings rolling past on her workstation’s three monitors.

“C’mon, DOV, Cass whispered. “You’ve got to make it to Io.”

Everything was riding on this moonfall. Everything.

“Nervous, Cass?” Jack asked as he leaned back in his chair, hands on the keyboard, his handsome face illuminated by a row of monitors.

“Terrified,” she said in a half-whisper.

“Don’t trust your team?” he asked, that dangerous dimple punctuating his smirk.

With that shaggy black hair and large, moon-bright grey eyes, Jack was still devastatingly handsome at forty-five. They hadn’t been together for over ten years, yet she still found him attractive.

Cass snorted at him. “I followed you from California to Quebec to Russia and back again, Jack, until you took this job. I let you hand-pick the team. And I’ve spent every day including Christmases and birthdays with all of you for the past ten years. I think we’re way beyond trust here.”

Jack Morgan was a god in the industry. At twenty-five, he had degrees from Purdue, MIT, and CalTech. At twenty-nine, he was a Senior Design Lead, on the JPL fast track to becoming a mission director when Cass entered his team as a baby engineer. She became his right hand professionally and personally until their messy breakup. She left JPL (with a broken heart) for Lockheed Martin, engineering unmanned crafts that delivered payloads to the International Space Station. Later, she worked for SpaceX while pursuing her PhD at CalTech. Her dissertation led her to New Mexico and her own commercial startup.

Cass threw herself body and soul into every aspect of Data Frontiers, securing funding, building a team, and securing essential industry partnerships. She hadn’t come up for air and thought about life outside of work since she was sixteen. At forty, she’d finally learned to trust her skills and instincts, but she couldn’t help wondering what her life might have been like if she’d thrown as much effort into her private life as she had her career. Would she and Jack have stayed together?