Hieroglyph (31 page)

I watched the next part from the lifter, though others swore it was better from Al Jazeera's LEO platform, framed against the earth, the day/night terminator arcing across the ocean below. But I liked the view from the lifter's nose, because you could see the moon growing larger, until it dominated the sky.

Decades before, the
Curiosity
crew had endured their legendary “seven minutes of terror” when its chute, rockets, and exterior casings had to be coordinated with split-second timing to land the spunky little bot on our nearest neighbor without smashing it to flinders. Landing the first Freelunch on the moon was a lot simpler, thankfully. We had a lot of things going for us: the moon was close enough for us to get telemetry and send new instructions right up to the last second, it exerted substantially less gravity than Mars, and we had the advantage of everything NASA had learned and published from its own landing missions. And let us not forget that Earth sports a sizable population of multigenerational lunar lander pilots who've trained on simulators since the text-based version first appeared on the PDP-8 in 1969.

Actually, the last part kind of sucked. A lot of people believed they were qualified to intervene in the plan, and most of them were not. The signal:noise ratio for the landing was among the worst in the whole project, but in the end the winning strategy was the one that had been bandied about since the ESA's scrapped lunar lander competition, minus the observational phase: a short series of elliptical orbits leading to a transfer orbit and a quick burn that set it falling toward the surface. The vision systems that evaluated the landing site were able to autonomously deploy air jets to nudge the descent into the clearest, smoothest patch available.

Celesc's lifter released the Freelunch right on time, burning a little to kick itself back down into a lower orbit to prepare for descent. As their vectors diverged, the Freelunch seemed to arc away, even though it was actually continuing on the exact curve that the lifter had boosted it to. It dwindled away from the lens of AJ's satellite, lost against the looming moon, winking in and out of existence as a black speck that the noise-correction algorithms kept erasing and then changing their mind about.

One by one, all the screens around me converged on the same feed: a split screen of shaky, high-magnification real-time video on one side, a radar-fed line-art version on the other. The Freelunch wound around and around the moon in four ever-tightening orbits, like a tetherball winding around a post. A tiny flare marked its shift to transfer orbit, and then it was sailing down in a spiral.

“Coming in for a landing,” Blight said, and I nodded, suddenly snapped back to the warm Brazilian night, the smell of food and the taste of beer in my mouth.

It spiraled closer and closer, and then it kicked violently away, and we all gasped. “Something on the surface,” Blight said.

“Yeah,” I said, squinting and pinch-zooming at the view from its lower cameras. We'd paid for satellite relay for the landing sequence, which meant we were getting pretty hi-res footage. But the moon's surface defies the human eye: tiny pebbles cast long, sharp shadows that look like deep cracks or possibly high shelves. I could see ten things on the landing site that could have been bad news for the Freelunch—or that could have been nothing.

No time. Freelunch was now in a wobbly, erratic orbit that made the view from its cameras swing around nauseously, a roil of Earth in the sky, mountains, craters, the ground, the black sky, the filtered gray/white mass of the sun. From around us came a low “Wooooah!” from eight thousand throats at once.

Maya switched us to the magnified AJ sat feed and the CGI radar view. Something was wrong—Freelunch was supposed to circle two or three times and land. Instead, it was tumbling a little, not quite flipping over on its head, but rolling more than the gyros could correct.

“Fuck no,” I whispered. “Please. Not now. Please.” No idea who I was talking to. Pug? Landing was the riskiest part of the whole mission. That's why we were all here, watching.

Down and down it fell, and we could all see that its stabilizers were badly out of phase. Instead of damping its tumble, the stabilizer on one side was actually accelerating it, while the other three worked against it.

“Tilt-a-whirl,” Maya said. We all glared at her. In a few of the sims that we'd run of the landing, the Freelunch had done just this, as the stabilizers got into a terminal argument about who was right. One faction—Iowa City–led, but with supporters around the world—had dubbed it the Tilt-a-whirl and had all kinds of math to show why it was more likely than we'd estimated. They wanted us to delay the whole mission while they refactored and retested the landing sequence. They'd been outvoted but had never stopped arguing for their position.

“Shut up,” Blight said, in a tight little voice. The tumble was getting worse, the ground looming.

“Fuck off,” Maya said absently. “It's the Tilt-a-whirl, and that means that we should see the counterfire any . . . second . . . now!”

If we hadn't been watching closely, we'd have missed it. The Freelunch had a set of emergency air puffers for blowing the solar collectors clear if the mechanical rotation mechanism jammed or lacked power. The Tilt-a-whirlers had successfully argued for an emergency command structure that would detect tumble and deploy the air jets in one hard blast in order to cancel out the malfing stabilizer. They emptied themselves in less than a second, a white, smudgy line at right angles to the swing of the Freelunch, and the roll smoothed out in three short and shortening oscillations. An instant later, the Freelunch was skidding into the lunar surface, kicking up a beautiful rooster-tail plume of regolith that floated above the surface like playa dust. We watched as the moondust sifted down in one-sixth gee, a TV tuned to a dead channel, shifting snow out of which slowly emerged the sharp angles of the Freelunch.

I registered every noise from the crowds on the roofs and in the stairways, every moan and whimper, all of them saying, essentially, “Please, please, please, please let it work.”

The Freelunch popped its protective covers. For an instant they stayed in place, visible only as a set of slightly off-kilter corners set inside the main boxy body of the lander. Then they slid away, dropping to the surface with that unmistakable moon-gee grace. The simultaneous intake of breath was like a city-sized white-noise generator.

“Power-on/self-test,” Maya said. I nodded. It was going through its boot-up routines, checking its subsystems, validating its checksums. The whole procedure took less than a minute.

Ten minutes later, nothing had happened.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Patience,” Blight said. Her voice had all the tension of a guitar string just before it snaps.

“Fuck patience,” I said.

“Patience,” Maya said.

We took one another's hands. We watched.

An hour later, we went inside.

THE FREELUNCH HAD NOTHING
to say to us. As Earth spun below the moon, our army of HAM operators, volunteers spread out across the equator, all tried valiantly to bounce their signals to it, to hear its distress messages. It maintained radio silence.

After forty-eight hours, most of us slunk away from Brazil. We caught a slow freighter up the Pacific Coast to the Port of Los Angeles, a journey of three weeks where we ate fish, squinted at our transflective displays in the sun, and argued.

Everyone had a theory about what had happened to the Freelunch. Some argued that a key component—a sensor, a power supply, a logic board—had been dislodged during the Tilt-a-whirl (or the takeoff, or the landing). The high-mag shots from the Al Jazeera sat were examined in minute detail, and things that were either noise or compression artifacts or ironclad evidence of critical damage were circled in red and magnified to individual pixels, debated and shooped and tweaked and enhanced.

A thousand telescopic photos of the Freelunch were posted, and the supposed damage was present, or wasn't, depending on the photo. It was sabotage. Human error. Substandard parts. Proof that space was too big a place for puny individual humans, only suited to huge, implacable nation-states.

THERE AIN'T NO SUCH THING AS A FREELUNCH, the /b/tards trumpeted, and took responsibility for all of it. An evangelical in Mexico claimed he'd killed it with the power of prayer, to punish us for our hubris.

I harbored a secret hope: that the Freelunch would wake up someday, having hit the magic combination of rebooting, reloading, and reformatting to make it all work. But as the Freelunch sat there, settled amid the dust of another world—well, moon—inert and idle, I confronted the reality that thousands of people had just spent years working together to litter another planet. Or moon.

Whatever.

THAT WASN'T A GOOD
year. I had another cancer scare because life sucks, and the doc wanted a bunch of out-of-policy tests that cost me pretty much everything left in my account.

I made a (very) little money doing some writing about the Freelunch project, postmortems and tit-for-tats for a few sites. But after two months of rehashing the same ground, and dealing with all the stress of the health stuff, I switched off from all Freelunch-related activity altogether. Blight had already done it.

A month later, Blight and I split up. That was scary. It wasn't over any specific thing, just a series of bickery little stupid fights that turned into blowouts and ended up with me packing a bag and heading for a motel. The first night, I woke up at 3
A
.
M
. to vomit up my whole dinner and then some.

Two weeks later, I moved back in. Blight and I didn't speak of that horrible time much afterward, but when we held hands or cuddled at night, there was a fierceness to it that hadn't been in our lives for years and years. So maybe we needed it.

Money, money, money. We just didn't have any. Sold the house. Moved into a rental place, where they wouldn't let us keep chickens or pigs. Grocery bills. Moved into another place, this one all the way out in Fresno, and got a new pig and half a dozen new chickens, but now we were a three hours' drive from Minus and our friends.

Blight got work at a seniors' home, which paid a little better than minimum wage. I couldn't find anything. Not even gardening work. I found myself sitting very still, as though I was worried that if I started moving, I'd consume some of the savings.

She was working at a place called Shadow Hills, part of a franchise of old folks' homes that catered to people who'd kept their nest eggs intact into their long senescences. It was like a stationary cruise ship—twenty-five stories of “staterooms” with a little living room and bedroom and kitchenette, three dining rooms with rotating menus, activities, weekly crafts bazaars, classes, gyms and a pool, a screening room. The major difference between Shadow Hills and a cruise ship—apart from Fresno being landlocked—was the hospital and palliative care ward that occupied the tenth and eleventh floors. That way, once your partner started to die, you could stay in the stateroom and visit her in the ward every day, rather than both of you being alone for those last days. It was humane and sensible, but it made me sad.

Blight was giving programming classes to septuagenarians whose high schools had offered between zero and one “computer science” classes in the early 1980s, oldies who had managed to make it down the long road of life without learning how to teach a computer how to do something new. They were enthusiastic and patient, and they called out to Blight every time she crossed the lobby to meet me and shouted impertinent commentary about my suitability as a spouse for their beloved maestra and guru.

She made a point of giving me a big kiss and a full-body hug before leading me out into the gardens for our picnic, and the catcalls rose to a crescendo.

“I wish you wouldn't do that,” I said.

“Prude,” she said, and ostentatiously slapped my ass. The oldies volubly took notice. “What's for lunch?”

“Coconut soup, eggplant curry, and grilled pumpkin.”

“Hang on, I'll go get my backup PB and J.”

I'd been working my way through an online cooking course one recipe at a time, treating it like a series of chemistry experiments. Mostly, they'd been successful, but Blight made a big show out of pretending that it was inedible and she demanded coaxing and pushing to get her to try my creations. So as she turned on her heel to head back into work, I squeezed her hand and dragged her out to the garden.

She helped me lay out the blanket and set out the individual sections of the insulated tiffin pail. I was satisfied to see that the food was still hot enough to steam. I'd been experimenting with slightly overheating food before decanting it for transport, trying to find exactly the right starting point for optimal temperature at the point of consumption. It was complicated by the fact that the cooldown process wasn't linear, and also depended on the volume and density of the food. The fact that this problem was consuming so many of my cycles was a pretty good indicator of my degraded mental state. Further evidence: I carefully noted the temperature of each tiffin before I let Blight tuck in, and associated the correct temperature with the appropriate record on my phone, which already listed the food weight and type details, entered before I left home.

Blight pulled out all the stops, making me scoop up spoonfuls of food and make airplane noises and feed her before she'd try it, but then she ate enthusiastically. It was one of my better experiments. At one point, I caught her sliding my sticky rice pudding with mango coulis across to her side of the blanket and I smacked her hand and took it back. She still managed to sneak a spoonful when I wasn't looking.

I liked our lunches together. They were practically the only thing I liked.

“How long do you figure it'll be before you lose your marbles altogether?” she asked, sipping some of the iced tea I'd poured into heavy-bottomed glasses I'd yard-saled and which I transported rolled in soft, thick dish towels.