Fiction River: Moonscapes (10 page)

“Entering the Charon-Pluto corridor,” Hydra announced.”

“Thank you.” Carrie approached the computer panel in the same way she always did. “Check Earth communication,” she instructed, watching carefully as the link was established.

“Communications normal,” Hydra replied.

“Thank you.” Then Carrie quickly severed the main wire and the two backups to the signal.

“Communications severed,” Hydra replied in the same soothing inflection.

Charon smiled. “Thank you. I will investigate.”

At the center of the transit between Charon and Pluto, she engaged the thrusters and caused three short bursts to push it out of orbit and toward Charon. Then she pulled the fuel injection signal boards so they could no longer be used to boost the pod back into orbit.

An alarm sounded. “Orbital decay,” Hydra stated. “Adjusting.”

Carrie waited.

“Fuel depleted. Prepare for crash. Prepare for crash.”

Carrie crawled onto her bed and strapped in. She curled into a fetal position, protecting her head and neck. At long last she would get her freedom.

“Calculating impact velocity.”

Carrie laughed. What did it matter what the velocity was? Either she would live or die. The numbers told her nothing.

Without a thick atmosphere, there was no extreme heating. In fact, outside of a feeling of falling quickly, there was no fear at all.

The icy impact threw her body against the restraints. A scraping sound surrounded the pod as it burrowed into the ice. When Carrie could no longer hear or feel movement she untwisted from her position and gazed around the pod’s interior. Nothing was crunched. Nothing was out of place.

For once Carrie was thankful for the engineers of the Earth-Space prison system. In building a pod to last seventy or more years, they had taken into account the possibility of impacts from space debris and built a shell that would withstand a great deal of stress.

“Image screens,” Carrie called to Hydra. “Let’s see our new home.”

One of the screens was inoperable, likely destroyed in the crash as it was placed at the part of the pod now buried in the ice. However the screens on the side and top revealed the beauty of the crater her impact had formed. The icy surface glistened in a blue and white sheen. The rim heights of the crater appeared to be at least three times the size of her pod. Best of all she could see Pluto, in all its dark glory, a comfort in the sky.

Carrie reconnected the Earth communication signal. First she sent her final painting. The one titled
Home
that she had completed seven years ago. It depicted the pod on Charon’s surface with the Pluto moon in view. An environmental dome covered the entire new crater. Beneath the pod an island had been constructed, and the ice beyond the island heated to form a watery moat. She also sent a message with her final digital painting.
Charon is no longer a prisoner.

Ten hours later, she received
confirmation that her painting and message had been received. She disconnected the communication link for the final time. She no longer needed the contact of Earth. She no longer wanted to be monitored or told what to do. She no longer cared whether her paintings were the most popular or would eventually be eclipsed by artistic works from a prisoner of Eris or perhaps a prisoner of Ceres or some numbered newly discovered satellite. She had found her home and she was at peace.

Over the next twenty years, Carrie made occasional forays onto the ice to gather inspiration, to imagine Charon as an outpost for others who needed a free life. She filled her days with books and music, art and science. She recorded all she thought and experienced in her diaries, though she no longer sent them to Earth for examination. She doubted anyone would ever find them, or her. She’d been so long without communication with another human that she was unsure if the Popess still existed, or if some other structure had changed the politics on Earth.

In the end, Carrie was grateful for her imprisonment. Not for the circumstances which caused it, but for the chance to be the fullest human she could and to be free of the strictures of a society she never understood.

On her eighty-third birthday, Hydra awoke her with a greeting. “A birthday transmission from Earth.”

“How can that be?” Carrie asked. “We disabled all communications more than forty years ago.”

“It is an orbiting body,” Hydra responded. “It is using a signal of light flashes from ancient times.”

Carrie sighed. They’d found her. “Translate,” she finally said after several minutes.

“The message says: You are forgiven. Happy Birthday. We agree Charon can be transformed. We will land near you and begin building a dome for habitation.”

Carrie sighed. She was unsure how to feel about the news. Was it good to have been the one to prove human’s could survive here? What kind of society would form? What would be their rules? Who would they punish for infractions and where would they be sent?

The next day, Carrie watched a large spaceship maneuver and land softly on the ice a short distance away from her pod. Then two individuals descended a ladder, clad in what she could only believe were some type of environmental suits—though they looked nothing like the ones that existed seventy years ago. The suits fit more close to the body. It appeared one person was male and the other female. They shuffled uneasily on Charon’s surface, trying not to bounce in the small amount of gravity.

“A transmission indicates two Earth people approach,” Hydra said.

Carrie laughed. She could see that herself.

“They wish to enter the pod and greet the great artist, The Prisoner of Charon. They bring a new environmental suit for you to join them and others on their ship.”

“I see,” Charon responded. “I will meet them.”

“You have not used your environmental suit in more than ten years,” Hydra stated. “I am unsure of its efficacy. You should wait for their entrance.”

“I will meet them.” Carrie said again.

She painstakingly dressed in the old fashioned, heavy environmental suit. She wished she had been able to create her own dome. She wished she had already heated the water and formed a moat around her pod. But it was too late. It seemed that Earth had found her.

“Play my symphony for Aristophane’s
The Frogs
,” she instructed.

The music immediately sounded all around her. Carrie exited the pod remembering the banter in the scene between Dionysos and Kharon.

Dionysos: Now stretch your arms full length before you.

Kharon: Come, don’t keep fooling; plant your feet, Pull with a will.

Dionysos: Why, how am I to pull? I’m not an oarsman, seaman, Salaminian. I can’t.

Kharon: You can. Just dip your oar in once, you’ll hear the loveliest timing songs.

Dionysos: What from?

Kharon: Frog-swans, most wonderful.

Dionysos: Then give the word.

Kharon: Heave ahoy! heave ahoy! ...

Dionysos: My hands are blistered very sore; my stern below is sweltering so...

Kharon: Stop! Easy! Take the oar and push her to. Now pay your fare and go.

Dionysos: Here ’tis: two obols.”

Carrie opened the visor to look back to her pod. She imagined the moat between herself and the visitors. Gazing one last time upon her home of seventy years, she turned away and disconnected her air.

With her last breath she waved to the two Earth people as they entered their boat to cross the river Styx.

Introduction to “
Caressing Charon”

Writer and artist, Ryan M. Williams, has published more than ten novels and a wide variety of short stories in fantasy, science fiction, romance, and mystery. “Caressing Charon,” marks his first appearance in
Fiction River
, but not his last. He has another story coming up in
Fantastic Detectives
.

“Caressing Charon” came out of Ryan’s love for classic science fiction and what we know at this point about the Pluto-Charon system. That combination allowed him to come up with an old-fashioned science fiction story with a modern feel.

Caressing Charon

Ryan M. Williams

On the fourth day without word from the
Veil
, Sharon went outside and looked up at Pluto hanging in the sky overhead. She bounded across Charon’s icy surface—it was a dirty snowball of a moon—in great seven-league steps like a superhero.

Okay, so each leap wasn’t seven-leagues, but it was still pretty freaking amazing. Zero-gee on the ship always felt like falling. Falling and falling for months on the way out. Here gravity held sway but only a fraction of that on Earth. Far less, even, than on Earth’s moon.

Her spacesuit smelled of days of sweat and trapped farts. She hadn’t left her suit since the trouble started. The others didn’t even notice when she left, they were too busy having sex. Almost non-stop. They’d take breaks to eat, sleep, and even use the lavatory, but that was all that they did. The six of them had been sent by their commander, Angie Tran, to establish a toehold on Charon and evaluate its potential to resupply the
Veil
. At first, that’s what they’d done.

Until it all changed.

The holographic heads-up display highlighted a dot in a bright orange highlight. A point of light that moved in the sky across the Pluto’s rusty face. The
Veil
. Two weeks ago, she’d gotten the message that Angie Tran had abandoned the ship for Pluto’s surface, leaving McMurty in charge.
That
didn’t make any sense at all. Angie would never give up command of the ship or the mission. It was all their petite commander had ever dreamed of, or had wanted. She’d made that clear on the way out. Never pairing up with anyone.

Sharon landed, and slowed, one smaller bounce following the next. No way to come to a sudden stop, not without toppling over onto the crusty ice. Windmilling her arms didn’t help, but that was instinct. She’d always been tall, pushing the limits the Diaspora Group set for crew members, and she’d always joked that her feet were so far from her head that the two didn’t communicate.

Kicking up final sprays of sparkling ice crystals, she managed to stop. Her rank breath echoed in her helmet. She squinted at the display and blinked open the communications channels.

“
Veil
, come in please.
Veil
, this is Sharon Calvert on Charon. Come in.” Sharon on Charon. She’d heard the jokes about that and always pronounced Charon with a hard ‘k’ sound. Not that it helped.

I’ve got a bone for you, Sharon
, Boyd had said back when they were still on the
Veil
. Now he was busy giving it to everyone else back at the habitat.

Hilarious stuff.

It was all a joke to them. All those months on the
Veil
, watching the others pair off, break up, and pair off with other partners. It wasn’t like there was any privacy. Nancy Walters squealed like she had won a big prize whenever she came. She and McMurty were an item at first, but by the time the ship had reached Pluto-Charon, she must have gone through half the men on the ship.

Not Sharon. No one sought out her company after hours. She was tall and plain. Horse-faced, according to kids in school. None of that mattered when it came to getting the work done. Then she had their respect. She was always smart. She’d seen Terra Blackstone give a speech early on about the potential of the Diaspora Group and her bold vision of sending out missions to every world in the solar system. Why decide which world to colonize, to put all of humanity’s hopes into one basket, when there was so much to choose from? It had sounded impossible, but Blackstone lived to make the impossible a reality. Sharon had applied for a position immediately.

And she’d never looked back. She’d worked on every stage of the missions, working her way up, and made it onto the crew of the very first ship to launch, the
Veil
. All of the outer worlds launches were happening first because they had the farthest to go. Just the opposite of what others would have done, going for the nearby worlds first.

“
Veil
. This is Sharon Calvert. Come in.”

No response. The ship was right there, tracking across the sky. They should be picking up the transmission. What was going on up there that Angie Tran was off the ship? Soon the
Veil
would head back the other direction. It orbited the barycenter of the Pluto-Charon system, on a faster track than Pluto and Charon spinning around the same point in space. The position gave them ready access to either world.

“Sharon Calvert, calling
Veil
. Come in.”
Please
.

Silence. Sharon focused on the command menus and blinked her way to the diagnostics. Displays flitted across her view. All of the communications equipment reported functional.

“Calvert, calling
Veil
, come in.”