She stopped on the edge of a long, winding rille. It looked like a riverbed just waiting for a rainstorm to fill it, but Trish knew it had never known water. Covering the bottom was only dust, dry as powdered bone. She slowly picked her way to the bottom, careful not to slip again and risk damage to her fragile life-support system. She looked up at the top. Karen was standing on the rim waving at her. “Come on! Quit dawdling, you slowpoke—you want to stay here forever?”
“What’s the hurry? We’re ahead of schedule. The sun is high up in the sky, and we’re halfway around the moon. We’ll make it, no sweat.”
Karen came down the slope, sliding like a skier in the powdery dust. She pressed her face up against Trish’s helmet and stared into her eyes, with a manic intensity that almost frightened her. “The hurry, my lazy little sister, is that you’re halfway around the moon, you’ve finished with the easy part and it’s all mountains and badlands from here on, you’ve got six thousand kilometers to walk in a broken spacesuit, and if you slow down and let the sun get ahead of you, and then run into one more teensy little problem, just one, you’ll be dead, dead, dead, just like me. You wouldn’t like it, trust me. Now get your pretty little lazy butt into gear and move!”
And, indeed, it was slow going. She couldn’t bound down slopes as she used to, or the broken strut would fail and she’d have to stop for painstaking repair. There were no more level plains; it all seemed to be either boulder fields, crater walls, or mountains. On the eighteenth day she came to a huge natural arch. It towered over her head, and she gazed up at it in awe, wondering how such a structure could have been formed on the moon.
“Not by wind, that’s for sure,” said Karen. “Lava, I’d figure. Melted through a ridge and flowed on, leaving the bole; then over the eons micrometeoroid bombardment ground off the rough edges. Pretty, though, isn’t it?”
“Magnificent.”
Not far past the arch she entered a forest of needle-thin crystals. At first they were small, breaking like glass under her feet, but then they soared above her, six-sided spires and minarets in fantastic colors. She picked her way in silence between them, bedazzled by the forest of light sparkling between the sapphire spires. The crystal jungle finally thinned out and was replaced by giant crystal boulders, glistening iridescent in the sun. Emeralds? Diamonds?
“I don’t know, kid. But they’re in our way. I’ll be glad when they’re behind us.”
And after a while the glistening boulders thinned out as well, until there were only a scattered few glints of color on the slopes of the hills beside her, and then at last the rocks were just rocks, craggy and pitted.
Crater Daedalus, the middle of the lunar farside. There was no celebration this time. The sun had long ago stopped its lazy rise, and was imperceptibly dropping toward the horizon ahead of them.
“It’s a race against the sun, kid, and the sun ain’t making any stops to rest. You’re losing ground.”
“I’m tired. Can’t you see I’m tired? I think I’m sick. I hurt all over. Get off my case. Let me rest. Just a few more minutes? Please?”
“You can rest when you’re dead.” Karen laughed in a strangled, high-pitched voice. Trish suddenly realized that she was on the edge of hysteria. Abruptly she stopped laughing. “Get a move on, kid. Move!”
The lunar surface passed under her, an irregular grey treadmill.
Hard work and good intentions couldn’t disguise the fact that the sun was gaining. Every day when she woke up the sun was a little lower down ahead of her, shining a little more directly in her eyes.
Ahead of her, in the glare of the sun she could see an oasis, a tiny island of grass and trees in the lifeless desert. She could already hear the croaking of frogs: braap, braap, BRAAP!
No. That was no oasis; that was the sound of a malfunction alarm. She stopped, disoriented. Overheating. The suit air conditioning had broken down. It took her half a day to find the clogged coolant valve and another three hours soaked in sweat to find a way to unclog it without letting the precious liquid vent to space. The sun sank another handspan toward the horizon.
The sun was directly in her face now. Shadows of the rocks stretched toward her like hungry tentacles, even the smallest looking hungry and mean. Karen was walking beside her again, but now she was silent, sullen.
‘“Why won’t you talk to me? Did I do something? Did I say something wrong? Tell me.”
“I’m not here, little sister, I’m dead. I think it’s about time you faced up to that.”
“Don’t say that. You can’t be dead.”
“You have an idealized picture of me in your mind. Let me go. Let me go!”
“I can’t. Don’t go. Hey—do you remember the time we saved up all our allowances for a year so we could buy a horse? And we found a stray kitten that was real sick, and we took the shoebox full of our allowance and the kitten to the vet, and he fixed the kitten but wouldn’t take any money?”
“Yeah, I remember. But somehow we still never managed to save enough for a horse.” Karen sighed. “Do you think it was easy growing up with a bratty little sister dogging my footsteps, trying to imitate everything I did?”
“I wasn’t either bratty.”
“You were too.”
“No, I wasn’t. I adored you.” Did she? “I worshipped you.”
“I know you did. Let me tell you, kid, that didn’t make it any easier. Do you think it was easy being worshipped? Having to be a paragon all the time? Christ, all through high school, when I wanted to get high, I had to sneak away and do it in private, or else I knew my damn kid sister would be doing it too.”
“You didn’t. You never.”
“Grow up, kid. Damn right I did. You were always right behind me. Everything I did, I knew you’d be right there doing it next. I had to struggle like hell to keep ahead of you, and you, damn you, followed effortlessly. You were smarter than me—you know that, don’t you?—and how do you think that made me feel?”
‘“Well, what about me? Do you think it was easy for me? Growing up with a dead sister—everything I did, it was ‘Too bad you can’t be more like Karen’ and ‘Karen wouldn’t have done it that way’ and ‘If only Karen had. . . .’ How do you think that made me feel, huh? You had it easy—I was the one who had to live up to the standards of a goddamn angel.”
“Tough breaks, kid. Better than being dead.”
“Damn it, Karen, I loved you. I love you. Why did you have to go away?”
“I know that, kid. I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry. I love you too, but I have to go. Can you let me go? Can you just be yourself now, and stop trying to be me?”
“I’ll . . . I’ll try.”
“Goodbye, little sister,”