You keep crying after you’re back at campus. You cry until you run to the sink and vomit. You cry through that as well.
You wonder if you’re a bad daughter, a bad friend, a selfish asshole placing her own intellectual wankery above the living, breathing people who poured everything they could possibly give into her, and were rewarded with the sight of her walking away forever.
You never answer that question, and you never will.
You strap into your rocket ship anyway.
Somehow, you leave.
My heart pounded as I put on my suit. We wear suits, of course: TEVA suits for the ground – that’s Terrestrial Extra-Vehicular Activity – and the infinitely bulkier EVA suits – plain old Extra-Vehicular Activity – for spacewalks. TEVA suits are partially for our own protection, but mostly to protect the world from ourselves. This is another misconception people have about somaforming – the notion that our supplementations mean we can stroll around alien environments in brilliant nudity, passing through any biome with no more impact than a soft breeze. It’s a romantic image, but one that would be reckless in the extreme. Even after washing, human skin is laden with bacteria that are, to us, good and necessary, but would wreak havoc in a new ecosystem. We exhale bacteria, too, in the micro-droplets of moisture that travel through our airways. Symbiotic microbes aside, there’s no telling what human contaminants could do to an environment. Is our skin oil toxic to the life there? Do we shed allergens? Are we passively poisonous? There’s no way of knowing. Plus, we could get sick, too, and that’d be the end of the mission (and likely ourselves). Hence, suits.
This was not my first step off Earth. I’d spent a summative year and a half at the New Millennium Lunar Base. I felt transcendent the moment my first spacecraft touched down there, and had an echoing thrill every morning I woke up in my bunk and remembered oh my God, I’m on the Moon. But in some ways, the experience was not so removed from travelling on Earth. The Moon was not a mystery, but a place visited by many others before me. It’s difficult for me to explain this feeling, because I’m afraid of coming off as yep, went to the Moon, no big deal. The Moon is incredible, I assure you. I felt my daily share of reverence. But I felt a similar reverence, a related reverence, when I stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon for the first time, or stood breathless and shivering atop Mount Fuji. Places I had learned of and longed for, suddenly manifest around me. I felt the same on the Moon, in what I thought was the end-all-be-all. I thought I had reached the summit of wonder, that all natural spectacles would enchant me in much the same way.
Not so.
I descended the ramp. My thoughts were dizzy, dreamlike. I was so overwhelmed that I was afraid I wouldn’t remember the moment later. But I did. I do. I’ll never forget it.
Impossible quiet waited beyond the airlock, as if this moon were holding its breath with me. My boots clunked lightly on the ramp, each foot headed a little further down. The sound changed – not the clap of machine-made metal, but the soft crunch of ice. I could feel it give ever so slightly beneath my weight, then hold fast. Endless ice surrounded me, untouched and undisturbed. A flawless canvas. A smooth block of clay. And it looked more like clay or mud than the water I knew it to be comprised of. Thanks to the red-light spectrum bestowed by the sun above, the ice did not appear white or blue, but rather shiny black. It reminded me more of a lava field than anything.
I stood there, without thought or words. Despite the inviting bounce of low gravity, I remained stock-still. On Luna, I visited the Apollo sites, as all astronauts do. It’s our pilgrimage, our rite. I viewed Neil Armstrong’s footsteps, preserved behind their protective glass domes, and as I stood in that same lunar dust, I felt the way I had on Earth when I visited the Cave of Altamira and raised my palm so that it nearly touched the painted print left by someone thirty-six-thousand years prior: a tiny link in a mighty chain.
Aecor was different. My footprints would not stay there, I knew. I was standing on ice, not rock, and the same geysers that had polished the frozen ocean smooth would do so again, given time. But I was forging a new chain, and the immensity of that is a feeling I doubt can be matched.
Jack broke my reverie. ‘One small step, hey, Ari?’ he said, reading my mind. I turned and looked. All three of my crew were waiting in the airlock, and I suppose I’d been standing there for a while, because they were laughing at me. Well, not Elena. She let out a bit of a chuckle, but it came with a knowing smile. She’d been the first to stand on an asteroid, after all. She understood.
Like any good guests, we carefully checked our surroundings before setting up our temporary home. A probe can scout out a good spot for you to plant your spacecraft, but it’s only when you’re on the ground that you can tell if you’re about to unroll a habitat module into a puddle, or worse yet, onto something’s home. I sent everybody away from the lander, each in a different direction, walking counter-clockwise. We scrutinised the ground below us for anything better left alone. We do our best to leave no trace.
It’s difficult to know where to draw a line with that. If you overthink it – a classic human trait if ever there was one – you start to fall down a rabbit hole of potential disasters. What if the lander itself crushed something? What if the noise of landing scared something away and disrupted their breeding season? What if the exact place where your craft landed is where two bacteria of separate species met for the first time, and what if their meeting would have resulted in a symbiosis that would have led to the emergence of a new species, and you, you bastard, just wiped out that entire reality?
I used to stay awake at night stuck in these worries. But if you live by that logic, you can never take another step. The way I look at it, if the impact of one house-sized object is enough to disrupt an entire evolutionary thread, that thread didn’t have much of a shot to begin with. A spacecraft landing is no different than a boulder shifting, a meteor crashing, a tree falling. And unlike those objects, we do leave, and we do clean up after ourselves. We try to be mindful tenants and ethical observers, to have as minimal an impact as possible. As possible. At some point, you have to accept the fact that any movement creates waves, and the only other option is to lie still and learn nothing.
These moral quandaries nagged at me from afar as I examined the ground. I initially turned on my headlamps, but this made for a jarring juxtaposition. Unlike the weak sunlight straining from above, my lamps emit a full white-light spectrum, thus creating colours around me that hadn’t existed earlier (think like shining a blacklight in a dark room). Under my mobile pools of light, the black ice became white, stained with streaks of yellow and brown. It was disorientating, in that moment, so I found it easier to let my eyes adjust to Aecor in its native state.
‘Anybody else find any vents?’ Chikondi said over the comms. ‘I’ve got a little one here. Man, I wish I could smell it.’
Jack was less than enthused. ‘I’ll take you to a storm drain when we get back home,’ he said. ‘Throw some old eggs in it. It’ll be about the same.’
That’s the thing about these majestic icy moons. The surface ice is a lovely postcard, but the liquid water beneath stinks to high heaven. It’s an entire ocean of undisturbed brine, warm as a bathtub, brimming with bacteria, chock-full of the remnants of every birth and death that has ever occurred within it. It is, as evidenced by Chikondi bemoaning his clean canned oxygen, a smell only a biologist could love.