Moon Girl Read online

  The pod had landed in the edge of a range of rugged desert mountains, in one of many canyons that opened out to a giant plain in front of her.

  Looking down and to one side she could see that the canyon she had clambered out of was full of huge boulders at the bottom. There were small trees here and there, and more clumps of low trees in adjacent canyons. She'd been expecting a denser forest, but perhaps this area was too dry to support one.

  There seemed to be only one highway across the plain. Where it disappeared among the hills on the horizon, a handful of lights twinkled dimly. If that was a town, it was the only one around for as far as she could see.

  Walking in the silent, chill air was exhilarating. Her shoes made a crunching sound in the gravel just off the pavement, but progress was easier, quieter, and faster on the hard, black surface. The cool, gentle breeze smelled wonderful.

  She became aware of a sound down the highway behind her. At first a faint sigh, it grew louder, and she had almost decided to jump down into the canyon when two lights appeared.

  It was an automobile, a vehicle used for transport.

  In no time at all it passed her, and then red lights brightened on the back end. It stopped, two white lights came on, and it slowly rolled back to where she stood. A glass panel slid down. She had almost decided to run for the canyon when a woman's head appeared in the opening and a voice said, "Hey, miss, you need a ride?"

  Anneyn forced herself to act calmly and stepped toward the automobile. The dark face in the window was smiling, and the voice had been kindly.

  Finally, she stammered "Oh, thank you, no. I'm just walking up to the observatory."

  "Oooh, that's a long walk on a cold morning," the woman said. "I work there. That's where I'm going. Get in. I'll give you a ride."

  She had seen enough movies to know that passengers rode next to the driver, so she walked to the other side, quickly studied the handle mechanism, opened the door, and got in. The car gathered speed up the mountain.

  Who should speak first?

  Fortunately, the woman spoke again.

  "Going all the way to the observatory! They don't open for visitors until nine o'clock! You’ll have to wait. You want to see the stars?"

  "Uh, no, ma’am. I want to talk to the director, to Dr. Harcroft."

  "I know him! My name is Mrs. Delbosque. I clean his office! That Dr. Harcroft, he's a very smart man. He knows everything about the stars. But he's very messy. You wouldn't believe the mess he makes in just one day.”

  “That would be wonderful, Mrs. Delbosque...” I need a name! My family name? I know there’s a similar name used on earth.

  “My name is, uh, Darcy.”

  “Well, Darcy, I can show you his office. Those people, they stay up all night looking through their telescopes, but they sleep late. You might not see him until lunch time. I hope you are patient."

  Smiling, she nodded at the driver—a bit of good fortune, perhaps. There's one thing less to worry about. If only the rest went as smoothly.

  Chapter 3

  "Craddick! Craddick, get in here!"

  Startled, three men in uniform gave each other a knowing look. Colonel Arthur's voice could be heard by the sentries all the way in the hall outside the two secure doors to the comm center.

  Colonel Jacob Arthur was the most dreaded watch officer on the staff of the Army Air Defense Center at Fort Bliss. Most of his staff assumed he was so short-tempered because their performance directly affected his prospects for promotion, but a few cynics maintained that it was also because he was short and ugly. No one liked to be chewed out, but Colonel Arthur’s tirades were in another league. His face turned cherry red, he shouted, and spittle flew onto anyone within five feet.

  The door to the adjacent radar room crashed open and a startled-looking young captain hurried in.

  "Yessir! Here, sir!"

  "You called me in the wee hours, Craddick. This better be good. I hope you haven't got another DEA blip on the loose, goddammit! Report!"

  "Uh, yessir. Well, at 0432 this morning we detected an anomaly passing through the atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean to a landing in the Davis Mountains, just east of here, sir."

  "Sounds like a meteorite, Craddick. You pulling me out of a sound sleep for a goddamn meteorite?"

  "I don't think so, sir. For one thing, the object's track indicated it had dropped out of earth orbit, sir. And it didn't burn up as it descended. It was going too slowly. For another thing," he paused briefly, "it changed course four times."

  "WHAT!?" the colonel gaped. “Changed course? Are you sure? What are you guys smoking back there, Craddick?"

  "Nothing, sir. I swear, the object slowed several times and adjusted course, once by six degrees and then by smaller amounts, and it slowed even more before dropping off the radar. It can't be a meteorite, sir. The station in the panhandle picked it up too. If the New Mexico base detected it, we can triangulate where it landed, maybe. That's why I called you."

  "Oh, crap! Sparks! Sparks, dammit, where are you?"

  A wide-eyed radioman half stood from beyond a nearby console.

  "Here, sir."

  "Notify Homeland Security! Flash priority! Have them check with NASA and their Euro buddies for screwed up satellites or orbiters or whatever the hell. Contact Special Ops at Fort Bliss and tell them to ready a team of SWAT guys and a couple of choppers. Craddick! Get that landing point triangulated to save your ass and send the posit to Special Ops. Don’t forget to copy NORAD. Also contact law enforcement on the ground in the area to ask the locals if they saw anything.

  “Whatever that is, we damn well better jump, and now! Move! Sparks! Craddick! Go!"

  Chapter 4

  The sun was barely halfway up the sky. Anneyn could think of nothing better to do than stand at the low wall outside the observatory and stare into the distance.

  This was not good. It was in fact, very, very bad.

  Ordinarily, new life forms fascinated her, but now not even the millions of little red ladybugs that carpeted the bases of the nearest trees attracted her interest. Some of the trees and plants had signs identifying them, but she just leaned on the wall and stared into the distance and thought about that discourteous Harcroft. What was the matter with him?

  A voice behind her startled her out of her gloom.

  "Hellooo, Darcy! Did you talk to Dr. Harcroft?"

  It was her recent rescuer, pushing a cart with several cans on it towards a large steel box.

  "Oh, hi, Mrs. Delbosque. Yes, I talked to him. But he didn't want to hear what I had to say. I think I have wasted my time."

  "Oooh, I'm sorry. That’s too bad! Pobrecita.” Poor thing. “You look so sad. What you going to do now?"

  "I don’t know."

  "Were you walking from the campsite? Were you with your family?"

  "No, ma'am. I am alone."

  "Well, where do you live?"

  "Uh, a long way from here." Thinking quickly, she added "I hitchhiked to get here, but I don't know where to go now. I must have been stupid to come so far."

  "Ay, pobre little 'cita! To think a little girl like you hitchhiking! Que molestia!” So dangerous! “And no place to go? Do you have any food?"

  "No, ma’am, I don't," she sighed.

  She hadn't planned that far ahead. She never dreamed it would be necessary. She had no money or clothes or anything. In retrospect, it was foolish to have expected needing more than an hour or two to convince an expert of the danger to the earth.

  I'm in serious trouble. I can't get off this planet, I can't convince that idiot astronomer of the threat to his world, and I have nowhere to go. I don't even know what to do in the next ten minutes. What was I thinking?

  "Well, maybe I can help you a little, anyway. Why don't I drive you to my house for lunch, and you can stay for supper and sleep on it? We have room for you, and tomorrow you can decide what you want to do. Why not?"

  The generosity of the proposal, unexpected as it was, startled her. br />
  "Oh, Mrs. Delbosque, that would be wonderful! Thank you so much! I'm so tired!"

  "Ay, mija,” daughter. “It will be my pleasure. Let me empty these cans and I'll get my keys and we'll vamonos prontito!" We’ll get going.

  Chapter 5

  "Flying time is 70 minutes, Hennessy. They send you that position yet?"

  Brooks had to shout into his mic over the maxed-out engines and the whirling rotor blades just above their heads.

  The four helicopters clattered east over the desert in the afternoon sun. Each aircraft was packed with a well-drilled intervention team: scouts, trackers, snipers, medical squad, technicians, forty soldiers all told.

  Their briefing had been hasty but they had trained for this for two years, only none of them was too sure what to expect in this particular case. Lt. Colonel Brooks hoped it would be at least something worthwhile, and not a false alarm.

  "Here it is, sir," hollered Hennessey, passing a clipboard over his shoulder.

  It showed a three-sided search area about a mile on each side, over some deep canyons a couple miles from the University of Texas McDonald Observatory, near Fort Davis.

  Brooks handed the clipboard up to his copilot.

  "Gonna be a bitch, Gomez," he hollered.

  "Sure is," the copilot nodded, squinting at the map. "Be lucky to find doodly-squat before dark."

  The choppers roared on, following Interstate 10 East.

  Chapter 6

  The Delbosque house was a rambling old structure located behind a ranch of some sort. As they drove in, Mrs. Delbosque pointed out several barns, corrals, and pens, and a large main house near the road.

  "You see those? This is a dude ranch. You know what's a dude ranch? People pay to come here and play like cowboys. Many people were here at spring break but now it’s almost deserted. Here's my house. You be safe here. I fix us lunch and you can have a nice siesta and you feel much better."

  The lunch was like nothing she’d ever eaten before. The various dishes filled the house with such savory aromas that she nearly fainted waiting for them to be served. It didn’t seem a good idea to ask what each was, but she wholeheartedly thanked Mrs. Delbosque for the meal. If ordinary working people ate food this good, what would wealthier people eat, she wondered?

  After Mrs. Delbosque went back to work, leaving Anneyn in the house alone, she was no longer sleepy. She felt defeated and frustrated and ashamed of herself. There was a lot to think about, too many questions and not enough answers. She could try to contact Hleo, but even if she was successful, he might not speak to her. He was such a stickler for regulations. How could he help anyway?

  Tiny whirring noises—insects, she hoped—came from the trees around the house. Much of what she had seen so far she recognized from pictures, movies, and books. The reality was much more vivid. If only she had the leisure to explore.

  Her profound isolation began to weigh on her. She'd been much too stubbornly single-minded when Hleo had told her about the meteoroids. It was one of her old problems, and part of the reason she had been sent on the mission in the first place.

  She had the necessary rank and intelligence, so how difficult could it be when her only companion would be a station manager built into the machinery? It should have been simple. Instead, she’d followed her old impulses and gotten herself into serious trouble—and not just herself, but the mission, and her people.

  Sitting on the Delbosque’s back porch looking at the silent trees in the canyon through the screen, her thoughts turned to her home, so very far away and long ago. Her father insisting she marry Herecyn, a man she couldn’t love. Her life would have been totally different then—maybe not better, given Herecyn’s coldness—but at least she wouldn’t be marooned in a world of strangers.

  Fed up with what he considered her selfishness (she preferred selectiveness), her father “promoted” her and had the Tribal Council send her off on the biggest mission her people had ever undertaken. Deep down, she felt she’d been banned, sent off on an expedition that had little hope of success. The thinking was, it might teach her to value her obligations to the tribe. When she returned—if she returned, perhaps with her tail between her legs—she might be more cooperative. But no. Instead, she had found a way to ruin a difficult mission that would delight the naysayers.

  To calm her nerves and explore a bit, she left the porch and walked through the nearby trees to some huge boulders at the bottom of the canyon. She leaned against a rock in the warm sun and stared at the ground.

  What else could I have done?

  Could she have waited until a shuttle to the International Space Station was in orbit and flown around it in the escape pod, maybe holding a sign to the window? That would have created a sensation, for sure. But a shuttle flight wasn’t scheduled as far as she knew, and time was running out on those meteoroids.

  Hleo could have sent a warning by internet, but the internet was full of hoaxers as it was. Or locate another expert like Dr. Harcroft and try again to make him or her understand?

  Well, no, that wasn’t any more likely to work than it had the first time. Being a young-looking female was apparently a disadvantage—Harcroft’s body language showed that he thought she was out of her mind. An older man, perhaps with a beard, might have been more credible to a self-important professional.

  That being taken seriously would be so difficult hadn’t occurred to her. It wasn't well thought through. And now she was in deep trouble. Idiot!

  The peaceful afternoon was interrupted only by the twittering of unseen birds until a black and white cat emerged from behind some boulders, making throaty rrroooowing sounds. People kept cats as pets, she knew, but some cats were wild, too. This one was a beautiful animal.

  The cat sat and looked at her, stuck a back leg out and licked it five or six times. Then it got up and walked directly to her. To her intense pleasure, it began purring loudly and rubbing back and forth against her pant legs.

  Just as she was about to bend down to touch it, there came a growing whapping sound, getting louder each second. Looking upwards she saw, and felt, a huge helicopter passing low overhead and thundering out of sight.

  The cat was gone. I’ll do the same, she thought, and hurried back to the house to sit on the porch and await Mrs. Delbosque's return.

  By the time Mrs. Delbosque came home from work, shadows had nearly filled the canyon. The air, still light and refreshing, had taken on a distinct chill.

  But two hours later, having experienced delicious frijoles, amazingly fragrant tortillas, and with her tongue burning from Mrs. Delbosque's salsa, her mind had been diverted from her problems by the lively family. The husband, a round, mustachioed man named Gustavo, left the house to take care of some chores in the barn, and the four children clustered around the new guest and peppered her with questions.

  They wanted to know her name. “Darcy” was in general use on earth, she knew. Her real name would have been too hard for them to pronounce. In all her reading on the moon she had never encountered another “Anneyn,” her given name.

  The oldest daughter, Luisa, a junior at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, asked where she was from.

  Quickly relying on her memory of earth’s geography to avoid further questions, she answered "Canada."

  The middle two girls, Clara and Maria, wanted to know if she spoke Spanish. She had to admit she could not.

  "But you can teach me," she offered, which started them giggling.

  The youngest child, eight-year-old Geraldo (though he corrected his mother that it was "Jerry"), was even bolder than his sisters.

  "Can I touch it?" he asked, of her long hair. She let him fool with it while she tried to copy the Spanish of Maria and Clara. Her clumsy attempts at the rolled "rr" in their nursery rhyme, Rapido corren los carros cargados de azúcar del ferrocarril, the sugar-loaded railroad cars run rapidly, made them shriek with laughter.

  Luisa was too sophisticated for such silliness, shushing some of Jerry's more dire
ct questions.

  "No seas tonto, Jerry," Don't be stupid. Silly or not, all the children called her "ma'am," or "miss."

  At about ten pm, Mrs. Delbosque put her hands on the table and said "Ay, mijos, es tiempo para acostarse.” It’s bedtime, kids.

  The children were getting sleepy, it was Friday, and they needed to get to sleep. She showed Darcy to a cot in a tiny room containing a sewing machine, several dressers, and piles of material, and after pointing out where the back washroom was, bid her good night.

  Darcy felt better than she had all day. She was tired but not hungry, and relieved that she could interact with people in a seemingly normal way. Most of the people in the movies, television, and books she had encountered on the internet depicted desperate people riddled with conflicts and problems.

  That did not seem to be the case here. The Delbosque family was a lovely family, the real thing—boisterous, but congenial.

  She washed up, then fell into the cot, and pulled the two quilts over herself. It took her five minutes to warm up, but by that time she was asleep.

  Chapter 7

  Matt Méndez was not having a good day.

  Whoever said career change was good for the soul should be drowned in a cow tank, he thought, driving his old pickup out of Fort Davis. As a boy growing up in Albuquerque, he'd always been regarded as someone with a great future, so where the hell was it? He was smart, not bad looking, and popular enough. He'd stayed in school like his parents expected, even getting a master's degree to their great pride. But where had it led?

  The best job he could find was teaching writing to college freshmen at El Paso Community College. The pay was barely adequate and the work was laborious. He could never get over the feeling that what he was doing wasn’t that different from trying to teach the deaf to sing. When the state of Texas began to cut back on money for schools, and especially for higher education, he realized reluctantly that there was even less future in that line of work than he had thought.