In the Moon's House

Book 0: Lady Astronaut

by Mary Robinette Kowal

Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Space Exploration

Synopsis

Dawn struggles to fit in with the rest of her team--the backup crew for the next lunar mission--but she and her colleagues may have more in common than anyone realizes...

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: July 17, 2024

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 32

Sample

ARTEMIS 17 CREW SETS STAGE FOR FUTURE LUNAR EXPLORATION
Special to the National Times
April 14, 1960, Kansas City, KS—In the desolate expanse of the lunar landscape, the Artemis 17 crew, led by astronauts Nicole Wargin and Estavan Terrazas, stands as a beacon of human ingenuity and determination. With Dr. Elma York at the ready in the command module above, the team diligently prepares for the transition as they await the incoming crew who will inherit the responsibilities of lunar-base construction upon their departure.

 

The ring on the back of Dawn’s space helmet dug into her neck as she stared at the controls over her head. Wilburt flipped a toggle. “Engine shutdown.”

Over the comms, the simulation supervisor said, “Good work today. Y’uns can come out now.”

Graeham stretched in his seat and popped his helmet open. “Bloody hell, I thought we were going to crash into the Moon.”

“God, I know. When we lost that thruster? Good work compensating.” Dawn pulled her gloves off before going for her helmet. Beer and fried chicken seemed entirely necessary. “Want to head to the Alibi?”

“Oh—sorry.” Wilburt unbuckled his harness and passed his helmet out of the simulator to the tech waiting for them. “I have . . . a thing I need to do tonight.”

“Copy that.” She undid her seat belt, waiting for the men to climb out the narrow hatch first. “Graeham?”

He had twisted to his side, helmet in hand, ready to climb out. “Negative. Sorry. Maybe next time.”

“Sure.” Dawn watched them go. With her other crews, they’d gone out after every sim. But these two made excuses every time. They were the backup crew for the next Moon mission and ought to have bonded by now, but she’d done something, at some point, to offend both men. In theory, being backups meant they’d be assigned a slot on a later mission as part of building the lunar base, but if neither man liked her, Dawn could find herself booted from the team.

She passed her helmet out of the simulator, rolling to her side to begin extracting herself from the small landing module mockup, and—

Dawn felt a familiar warm sticky shift in her MAG. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. Early. Ugh. The Maximum Absorbency Garment had not really been built with periods in mind. The engineers somehow thought that urine and menstrual blood had the same consistency when they most profoundly did not. But at least it was the end of the sim, so she ought have enough time to get to the locker room before she stained her spacesuit.

But now she really wanted that beer.

---

When Dawn walked into the women’s locker room, someone was singing quietly in German, voice echoing off the tile walls. She rounded the corner and Heidi was standing in front of one of the mirrors, braiding her long golden hair back into the haloed crown she habitually wore.

Half of it was still down and fell to the middle of her back like a waterfall at sunset. Dawn stopped, putting a hand on one of the lockers, and wanted her sketchbook so she could capture the glorious interplay of hair and the curve of Heidi’s back. The way her raised arms framed her long neck.

Her voice was breathy and so very different than when she was in a meeting, when she was as crisp and proper as Swiss clockwork. And so smart. She would be quiet until something needed to be said and she would just casually insert the answer with the precision of a rocket sliding into orbit.

Dawn wet her lips and pushed every thought of burying her hands in that golden hair away.

She walked forward, briskly, as if she hadn’t been lurking in the shadows. “I thought maybe—”

Heidi jumped, losing her grip on the braid. “Mein Gott— I thought I was the only one still here.”

Dawn held up her hands in apology. “I’m so sorry. We had a long sim today.”

“I know the feeling.” Heidi wrinkled her nose and regathered her hair. “I was in Chicago at the Adler Planetarium doing star charts. Had turbulence all the way back in the T-33. Couldn’t find a clean patch of air for love nor money.”

Dawn grimaced in sympathy. “Want to go out the Alibi and grab a beer to commiserate?”

Immediately, she second-guessed the invitation as being too obvious. She turned to her own locker to grab her shower kit, rifling through to make sure she had a pad. Yes, although it was only for light days, leftover from the tail end of her last period. Still, it would get her to the Alibi, where they had vending machines in the bathroom.

“Sorry.” In the mirror, Heidi wrinkled her nose in apology and even that was cute. “Sorry, but I already have plans.”

“Sure.” Dawn waved her toiletries kit and headed to the shower. Why did everyone have plans except for her? “Well, I’ll catch you later.”

---

Hair still damp from the shower, Dawn walked out to the parking lot, grimacing as she stepped into the wall of humid heat that was Kansas in May. She missed Vršac even while knowing that the city she missed was the one from before the Meteor.

She sighed, fishing in her purse for her keys as her shirt started to stick to her back. The Alibi had air-conditioning. Even if Heidi had plans, there was a fair chance some astronauts would be there and she could maybe join them.

Laughter floated across the parking lot. Under a pool of light, Graeham and Wilburt got into the same car. They’d acted like they had separate plans, but it looked like both were going to the same place.

Dawn stood on the sidewalk for a moment, feeling as though she were back at university and the only woman in the chemistry department. No one had wanted to be her lab partner and she’d had to work alone.

If she’d been willing to flirt with any of the men, it might have been different.

Head down, she walked to her own car, on loan from the IAC while she was back on Earth. This was all right. People were allowed to make their own plans. Those plans didn’t have to include her.

But lying to her about it? That made it feel like they were doing something she might want to do and that they just didn’t want her. The bulge of the pad in her underwear reminded her of the main difference between her and her crewmates. They had never been obvious assholes about the fact that she was a woman, but then the “gallant” ones never were. This was among the many reasons the company of women was so preferable.

She slid behind the wheel of her car. Following them would be childish.

She stuck the key in the ignition. There would be nothing she could do with that information.

She started the car. But she was going to follow them anyway.

---

Half a dozen times, Dawn told herself that she was being stupid and every time, the anger at being excluded washed right over her. Graeham and Wilburt stopped the car across the river in a part of Kansas City she’d never been to.

Dawn sat behind the wheel of the car, watching them walk into a building that was clearly a bar.

She had wanted to be wrong that they were excluding her. Gripping the wheel, she closed her eyes for a moment. What she should do was drive back to the Alibi and spend the evening with people who wanted her. Or at least who weren’t actively avoiding her.

Dawn opened the door.

These were her crewmates. She was tired of being shut out because she was a woman. They wanted a boy’s night out? Fine, she could be one of the boys.

Dawn straightened her shoulders and walked toward the bar. Working Late was painted on a window that was otherwise obscured with wavy glass. Pop rock thumped through the walls.

She opened the door, stepping into a haze of cigarette smoke. The music pulsed in her chest. The room was filled with men. The air-conditioning chilled the sweat coating her. She didn’t see Graeham and Wilburt anywhere, but the men at the table closest to her turned.

A freckled white man in a business suit looked her up and down. “In the right place, sweetheart?”

She was back in chemistry, walking into the classroom for the first time after having come up through an all-girls school where she had been one of many. Dawn took a step back. “No. Sorry.”

She turned and fled back into the humid night. The smart thing to do was to plan her approach and talk to Graeham and Wilburt at work. She shoved her hands in her pockets. Right. As if the problem of being a woman in aerospace was something that she could really work. Maybe Elma York could, but Dawn was just a face in the crowd.

Dawn walked back to the car and got behind the wheel. Maybe she could talk to Dr. York. During orientation, she’d said to come to her if there were any problems with “boys being boys.”

Gripping the steering wheel with one hand, Dawn cranked the engine. She turned on the lights and pulled away from the curb. Her headlights caught a glint of golden hair wrapped into a braid like a crown.

She slowed to let the pedestrian cross. Long legs tapered from a brown plaid mini-skirt to white go-go boots . It took a moment before she realized that the pedestrian was Heidi.

Heidi crossed the street and walked straight to the bar with no hesitation. She opened the door as if she went there every night.

Dawn drove away. Her shoulders seemed to round and pull her down into the seat. So it wasn’t that she was a woman. Graeham and Wilburt just didn’t like her. And apparently, neither did Heidi.

---

Dawn pushed the door to her apartment open. Halfway to the Alibi, she realized that she just couldn’t face the idea of walking into the bar and finding no other astronauts there or, worse, all of them there and tables too full for her.

Her roommate, Ljilja, looked up from the table where she was bent over a Portuguese language book. Dropping the book, the astronaut candidate grabbed a piece of paper from the table, and spoke in Serbian. “Direktor Clemons! Rekao je da ga pozoveš čim uđeš. Gde si bila? Ostavio je svoj kućni broj!”

For a moment, Dawn’s mind was too off-balance to understand her first language. Then she caught up and switched to Serbian. “Clemons left his home number?”

“Zora!” Ljilja used her real name, untranslated for the benefit of the anglophone International Aerospace Coalition. She thrust the paper at Dawn. “Zora, I think you’re getting an assignment.”

Dawn shook her head and stared at the paper, caught between languages. Serbian was usually a relief after a day spent bouncing between English, German, and Portuguese, but right now she felt so off-kilter. There were damn few reasons for the director of the International Aerospace Coalition to call her after hours, and none of them were good.

She answered in the language of the note, in English. “Have you heard anything about the prime crew?”

Ljilja shook her head. “Are you going to the Moon?”

“I don’t know.” She set her bag down on the table and walked to the phone. “Let’s find out.”

The phone rang three times before it rattled; in the background she could hear the clatter of dishes and conversation, “. . . about a puppy after you convince your mother.” Director Clemons’s distinctive posh British voice had a laugh in it that she’d never heard, which vanished into formality as he answered the phone. “Clemons residence.”

“Hello, Director Clemons. This is Dawn Sabados. I have a note to call you?” She gripped the phone cord in her right hand and tried not to see Llilja, who was pretending to be working on her Portuguese.

“Ah, Sabados. Wonderful. The prime crew has had a measles exposure. How would you like to go to the Moon?”

The world went white and gray around her. Fireflies seemed to dance across her body. So far, she’d only done runs to Lunetta or orbit and hadn’t gotten to land on the Moon. “I would like that very much, sir.”

“Splendid. Now we just need to find Schnöhaus and Stewman. We’ve much work to do over the next four days to get your team ready to fly.”

Her team. Her gut cramped and she tightened her hand on the warm Bakelite receiver. “I know where they are.”

---

Dawn parked the car down the street from Working Late. She had thought about telling Clemons where they were, and then she remembered university and how hard she’d had to fight to be here. She wanted Graeham and Wilburt to know that she knew that they’d left her out of their plans.

If she could do a chemistry lab by herself, she could walk into a bar.

Dawn got out of the car and walked to the bar. Shoulders back and chin up as if she was prepping for a test. She opened the door.

The businessman looked up again, taking his hand off the thigh of the man at the table with him. A bouncer in a leather vest walked over to her. “Looking for someone?”

“I’m meeting some friends.” She scanned the room, looking for Heidi’s golden hair, and realized that there was another room behind the wall of booths. It was filled with women laughing. One sat on another’s lap.

She looked at the men again. Shapes and laughter fell into place. This . . . this was a gay bar. Her brain split into two simultaneous reactions – the desire to flee before someone saw her and the relief at not having to hide who she was. Since joining the IAC, she had buried that part of herself in exchange for access to the stars.

She spotted Graeham and Wilburt across the room, heads close and relaxed as she’d never seen them before. Heidi leaned against the booth next to them, laughter brightening her eyes beneath her golden crown. The tension through her shoulders sublimated away.

She didn’t have to hide.

Dawn smiled at the bouncer, weight lifting as if she were sliding into orbit. “I see them. Thank you.”

Slipping through the crowd, she headed toward the small group. Graeham saw her first and straightened in familiar panic.

Dawn held up her hands, smiling to try to let them know, before she got to them, that it was okay. Wilburt turned, eyes widening. Then Heidi looked up and flinched.

She stopped just outside their circle and the music beat through her heart. “No, no. It’s okay. I’m . . .” She gestured at the bar, still not quite able to admit it out loud. “Also.”

Graeham tilted his head, grin starting to form. “Bloody hell. All four of us?”

“So it seems.” She felt Heidi’s gaze like a chemical reaction and kept her own fixed on Wilburt and Graeham. “I thought you did not like me.”

Wilburt’s brows went up. “No. No, I am so sorry. We only . . .” He looked at Graeham helplessly. “Being on the same crew gives us an excuse to spend time together.”

“I’m so sorry, my dear.” Graeham slid out of the booth. “Join us and let me buy a round, hm?”

“I can’t.” She took a deep breath, so grateful now that her pride and spite had sent her here. If she had unwittingly sent someone from the IAC to find them here, all three of them would have been quietly removed from the astronaut rosters. “Clemons called. Prime crew had a measles exposure. We’re going to the Moon.”

Graeham’s mouth dropped open. Wilburt let out a whoop that had the rest of the room turning to stare at them.

“Wunderbar! I’m so happy for you!” Heidi squealed and swept Dawn into a hug. The other woman smelled like strawberries and engine fuel. Dawn inhaled, burying her nose in the golden hair without meaning to.

And then she felt that uncomfortable sticky certainty that she’d bled through her pad.

“Damn it.” Dawn broke the embrace, reaching for her bag. She hadn’t changed pads when she got home. Even as she opened it, she knew it was pointless because she hadn’t restocked since her last period.

“Problem?” Wilburt asked, brows rising.

She grimaced, rooting past crumpled receipts and fractured mints. “I have an aunt from a red town.”

Maybe they had vending machines in the bathroom. Or she could ask—

“You . . . you’re worried they won’t let you go because your aunt is communist?” Graeham’s voice sounded very confused.

“What? No.” She stopped digging through her bag and looked up to see all three of them staring at her with some confusion. “Why do you think I have a communist aunt?”

“Red town?” Graeham shrugged and looked between them.

Then Heidi made an o that puckered her mouth into the shape of a perfect kiss. “Oh! Your aunt. Yes. My aunt visited me last week.”

“I wasn’t expecting her and . . .” Shit. What if they wouldn’t let her go because she was having her period?

“I know exactly what you mean.” Heidi grabbed Dawn’s hand. Her hand was warm and a little papery with dryness. “Come on.”

 Hand in hand, she followed Heidi through the men, across to the women’s side of the bar and then to the restroom. The music was too loud to have conversation while they were walking.

The volume dropped in the bathroom, where the lights were brighter and reflected off the mirrors. Dawn’s reflection was drab and unpolished beside Heidi’s brightness.

Heidi opened her own bag and pulled out a portable watercolor kit to make room to fish around. “How did you know where to find the boys?”

“I . . . um . . .” Dawn swallowed, twining her fingers together. “I followed them after work. How about you?”

Heidi pulled out a tampon and handed it to Dawn. “You mean, how did we find out that we were all gay?” She shrugged. “Bumped into each other here.”

Dawn turned the tampon over in her hands. “You don’t happen to have a pad?”

“Never worn one?” She looked toward the door back out into the main bar. “We could ask around, but from what I hear this is easiest to manage in space.”

Dawn looked up in astonishment. “I don’t remember that from training.”

Heidi laughed, voice shockingly loud in the small room. “Mein Gott, no. Can you imagine Stetson Parker even acknowledging that part existed for anything except fucking? No, no . . . this is from some of the other women. Officially, no one has had a period in space because that would mean having meetings that none of the male engineers can handle.”

“They are such delicate flowers.” She closed her fingers around the tampon. “Thanks. I’ll give it a try.”

“If it hurts, that just means your angle of insertion is wrong—just like on a sim, honestly.” Heidi smiled at her, warm and inviting. “There are more of us. I can introduce you, if you’d like.”

Dawn stopped before she went into the stall. “Why didn’t I know?”

Tilting her head to the side, so the lights around the mirror cast her braid into a halo, Heidi shrugged. “I think—I think maybe you have been so careful that you wound up guarding yourself too much. The walls have not left room to let anyone in.”

Tears pricked at the corners of Dawn’s eyes and she nodded. It was just the hormones, nothing more, but the evening felt bright and tender. Her orbit had widened and she felt as if she could see the whole planet spread below her, instead of a tiny patch of wall.

---

The ring on Dawn’s space helmet rested lightly on her shoulders as she stared at the controls over her head. The Eigene had landed.

Outside their tiny triangular windows, the lunar surface glowed in the brilliant light of an unfiltered sun. Stark shadows of lunar dawn stretched across the landing site. She wanted her pencils so she could try to catch the crisp contours and the way the spacecraft parked opposite them glinted in the sunlight.

The small mound of the lunar base rested just beyond it, little more than a tube with regolith scraped over it.

“This is . . . stellar,” Wilburt said.

Dawn laughed. “Do you have a joke for every occasion?”

“Naturally.” He flipped two pages forward in his checklist. “Though, I will note that my mother did not understand my obsession with looking at the moon every night. She thought it was just a phase.”

Dawn only half listened to Wilburt, trying to pay attention to her nether regions. She thought she was done with her period, but she’d also been in zero-g for three days. With gravity, even so mild as one-sixth of Earth’s, she was nervous that her period might still be present. “A reminder that I’m going to want a moment for hygiene before we—”

Their radio crackled and Nicole Wargin’s patrician voice greeted them, “Eigene, Artemis 17. Welcome to the Moon.”

“Artemis 17, Eigene.” Dawn’s face went bright red inside her helmet because she’d forgotten that they were on hot mics. “The crew of Artemis 18 is happy to be here.”

Through the window, Dawn could just see someone in the other tiny ship wave at them. She waved back.

“When you finish your shutdown, we’re standing by to help you unload supplies into the base. It’s cramped, but it’s home.”

“Our team appreciates that.” Graeham, as mission commander, responded with a grin. “And we brought some fresh fruit from Earth as a housewarming gift.”

“Then your team is very, very welcome.”

Dawn was never going to stop smiling. She turned to her checklist as Nav/Comp, working through her share of the landing procedures and noting stars for the report later. But really she was just giving Wilburt and Graeham the only privacy she could in the small quarters. Behind her, she heard the fricative hush of spacesuits brushing and a small, happy sigh.

She smiled at their happiness, staring out the window, then stopped as a brighter red star low on the horizon caught her gaze.

Mars. Maybe someday, this team could go there together. Maybe with Heidi. And maybe she could have the same joy of arriving on a new planet and being entirely herself.

Standing on the Moon, with the stars spread above them, brighter than diamonds, everything seemed possible for her team.

 

“In the Moon’s House” copyright © 2024 by Mary Robinette Kowal
Art copyright © 2024 by Avalon Nuovo