Where We Live

Mara Verhoeven’s first job on the surface of the Moon was to find a flat place to throw up.

The flat place didn’t exist. Everything inside the lander was angles and handholds and equipment lashed to bulkheads, and her stomach had been climbing her throat since the retro burn, and the helmet made vomiting a thing you didn’t survive. She breathed through it the way they trained her. In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth. The nausea was the landing, the body’s confusion at a gravity that was real but wrong, one sixth of what every cell in her had expected for thirty-four years.

“Status,” said Reyes, the commander, from the pilot’s couch.

“Green,” Mara said, which was a lie, but the kind of lie the mission ran on. “Green here.”

Six of them. Six people in a can on a gray plain, the first humans who wouldn’t be going home. That was the part the press releases said carefully, in the passive voice: a permanent presence. What it meant was that the return vehicle had been deleted from the manifest to make room for the habitat, and the math that put them here was the same math that kept them here. They’d food for four years and a promise of resupply and a plain of dead rock in every direction.

Reyes ran the shutdown. The lander stopped being a spacecraft and started being a building, which was a quiet transition, a series of switches, no ceremony to it. Then there was nothing left to do inside, and the six of them looked at the hatch.

“Verhoeven,” Reyes said. “You’re first out.”

She hadn’t expected that. The geologist didn’t go first. The commander went first, or the mission specialist, or anyone whose boots on the surface would mean something for the cameras.

“Why me?”

“Because you’re going to live the rest of your life here, and you’re going to study this rock until you die on it, and I think the first person to touch it should be the one who’s going to love it.” Reyes paused. “Also you’re closest to the hatch.”

Mara cycled the airlock. The pump ran down, the pressure bled away, the indicator went from amber to black, and the outer door unsealed with a sound she felt in her teeth and didn’t hear, because there was nothing out there to carry sound.

She went down the ladder backward, the way they trained her, one rung at a time. The suit was stiff. The gloves were clumsy. Her own breathing filled the helmet, too loud, and under it the small mechanical sounds of the life support that was now the only thing between her and a vacuum that didn’t care about her at all.

Her boot touched the surface.

She’d read every account of the first landing, the old one, the one with the famous line. She had a line prepared too. Everyone did. The mission psychologist had encouraged it, said the brain needed a marker for moments like this. Mara had written hers months ago and rehearsed it in the dark of her bunk during transit, and standing now on the gray dust with the Earth a blue marble over the crater rim, she opened her mouth to say it.

She didn’t say it.

What she said, into the open channel, to five people behind her and four hundred thousand kilometers of nothing and a whole planet listening on a delay, was the truth, which surprised her as it came out.

“It’s so quiet,” Mara said. “I didn’t think it would be this quiet.”

She knelt. The suit fought her the whole way down. She put her gloved hand flat against the surface of another world, and the dust held the shape of her hand when she lifted it away, because there was no wind here and never had been and the print would stay exactly as she left it for ten million years unless someone came and stepped on it.

That was the thing that got her. Not the distance. Not the no-return. The permanence of the print. She’d made a mark that would outlast every mark any human had ever made on Earth, every cave painting and every gravestone and every name carved in every tree, and she’d made it by accident, by kneeling, by being the one closest to the hatch.

“Verhoeven.” Reyes again, gentle now. “Talk to me. What do you see.”

Mara stood. She turned a slow circle. Gray plain. Black sky. The blue marble. The long shadows that the airless light threw hard and sharp, no softening, every rock edged like a blade. Behind her the lander, their home, already looking small against the size of the place.

“I see where we live,” she said.

The others came down the ladder one by one, and the six of them stood on the surface of the Moon, and there was no flag in the first hour because the flag was packed in a crate marked low priority, behind the water reclaimer and the seed stock and the thousand things that mattered more than a gesture when you were never going home. They’d plant it later. For now they stood in the print-holding dust and looked at the place that would have all of them in the end, and Mara, whose job was the rock, was already on her knees again, gathering the first sample.

Out past the crater rim, the Earth didn’t move. It hung where it would always hang, fixed in the black, a thing she could cover with her thumb and would never touch again.

She put her thumb up. She covered it. She uncovered it. Then she bagged her sample, labeled it in grease pencil with a hand that had finally stopped shaking, and got to work on the only world that was hers now.