Kate was looking for exploding stars when she saw it.
Supernova were a carelessly wandering sort of business – like sweeping a telescope over an infinitely large football stadium, looking for someone vomiting at that precise moment – but it kept her busy, and busy meant occupied, and occupied meant careless, and she yawned at just the wrong moment and her telescope twitched in just the right way and she got quite the eyeful.
“Gowrk!” she said, approximately.
“Language,” called her father from downstairs, and for once she was too surprised and preoccupied to even swear at him in her head.
Instead she got up, brushed herself down, composed herself, looked in the telescope six times to be sure, then walked downstairs.
Her father was in his favorite and only armchair, squinting out the window and smoking a pipe.
“I just saw a dragon on the moon,” said Kate.
“That’s nice dear,” said her father. “Be a lovely story to tell your husband when you’re married. Don’t use the telescope too much or you’ll get wrinkles.”
“You’re a relic of the nineteenth century, father.”
“Too true,” said her father. He smoked his pipe with prideful force. “Too true. Now go to bed and stop thinking about things.”
***
For once, Kate did as she was told. A restful night’s sleep was good for stimulating the creative juices of the brain, and she awoke with the clear and obvious solution so bright and shining in her hand that it almost hurt her eyes.
She staggered downstairs for a late breakfast.
“I’m going to build a rocket ship with a lunar landing module,” she told her father.
“I forbid it,” he said.
“Don’t care.”
He smoked his pipe at her.
Finding the parts was surprisingly easy. There were always construction crews working at the edge of the great Sprawl, forcing it onwards and outwards. Who really counted each and every steel beam, or every pallet of titanium, or counted out the refuelling dates of each and every truck? A girl with ideas and forthrightness and a small forklift and a length of tubing could get a lot done.
The construction locale was a little trickier. Her father had told her municipal regulations would absolutely prohibit rocket construction, so she was forced to excavate a subterranean chamber underneath his shed in the dead of night.
The cat helped. He would help anything that seemed evil, dear thing, and a lifetime spent in the litter box had made his little paws as good as little spades. She gave him skritches and embarrassing nicknames as thanks.
***
“Katherine.”
Oh no. He’d taken the pipe out of his mouth.
“Katherine.” Oh no oh no, he was looking sternly at her.
“Yes, father?”
“I’ve found trace chemicals on your clothing.”
“Well, I’ve been working on my chemistry. Homework.”
“Young lady, you haven’t been rocketeering, have you?”
“Most assuredly not, father.”
“Good. Because rocket science isn’t feminine. Feminine science consists of-”
“-counting stitches and formulating vacuum procedures and molecularly destabilizing dirt, yes yes, I KNOW, father.”
“And not interrupting. Remember, children should be seen and not heard, and ideally not seen either. Particularly if they have uteri.”
“Please don’t say that, father.”
He smoked his pipe at her in that self-satisfied way that insinuated he’d won the argument. Good. He was back to suspecting nothing.
“Oh, and put the cat out tonight. His services are needed.”
“Won’t the coyotes be dangerous?”
“Not as dangerous as whatever gopher has been undermining my garden shed.”
***
The cat procured a suitably guilty-looking (and decapitated) rodent, Kate hid her tunneling more thoroughly behind the chrysanthemums, and all seemed to be well. Her rocket was reaching a fuller shape now; a hideous monument to suburbia turned into a self-annihilating vehicle. It was beautiful.
It was just in time too. The orbits were very nearly at their most convenient. Preparations were reaching a fever pitch.
“Father?”
“Yes?”
“We’re out of applesauce. May I have some money to go purchase some?”
“That’s the fourth time today.”
“I really love applesauce, father.”
“Be careful not to gain weight, dear. No husband will want a lady one pound above or below the most optimal BMI. And since you’re not a man you can’t smoke a pipe to lose weight.”
“You disgust me, father.”
He smoked his pipe at her.
In truth, stocking up the rocket was proving to be unusually difficult. Her father didn’t believe in non-home-cooked meals, and so she was working off a lot of hearsay and rumour as to what exactly constituted non-perishables. Applesauce, peanut butter, way too much beef jerky, and, for some reason, orange Tang.
She’d also packed plenty of pickled onions because she enjoyed them, and several bags of catfood for her co-pilot. If her father objected to her taking the cat with her, he should’ve been the one feeding him for his entire life.
***
The day came.
It was remarkable how calm Kate felt. She skipped school by slipping out a convenient window, snuck home, smuggled the cat outside, dug through the loose soil and loam to the hatchway, punched in the code, and scaled the scaffolding to the pilot’s entrance in a flash.
The cat refused to be strapped in, so she provided him with plenty of pillows instead.
The ten minutes ‘till launch were the longest in her life, and she counted each second in her head, lips unmoving. Until the last few, which demanded emphasis.
“Five!” The whole world seemed to snarl in her ears. It knew she was planning to leave it, and it was jealous.
“Four!” The sound was so loud now it was shaking her, shaking her from the inside out. The cat had somehow expanded to six times its normal size and was probably mrowling.
“Three!”
“Two!” The chamber was filling up with light. Hot, merciless light, a miniature sun beneath her.
“Katherine!” Her father stood silhouetted in the entrance to the bunker, arms akimbo at hips, spine straight, face stern, pipe smoking furiously.
Kate swore aloud for the first time in her life and punched the button.
***
When Kate recovered consciousness she’d usurped earth’s bounds and seized control of her own gravitational direction. Accordingly, she celebrated with some applesauce while watching the cat try to figure out how to chase a laser pointing in zero-g.
The world looked small out the porthole, and she tried to avoid looking at it. It made her think of many things, like how her father would fix the burned husk of the lawn without someone to push the mower for him, or whether or not he’d rebuild his shed, and she couldn’t think of those without smirking and she couldn’t smirk without laughing and it was REALLY hard to navigate while laughing.
So she did math, and did computers, and now and then did manual adjustments, and things went along quite smoothly until the actual descent happened and the moon – which seemed so small and frail up until now – became very large and very close very quickly until she hit it.
The padding did its job, luckily, and she rushed outside in her spacesuit and sword quick as a blink, shaking off the impact and calling her battle cry.
No roar greeted her. No flames threatened her. No dragon confronted her.
Kate stood absolutely stock still for thirty seconds, vibrating with intense caution. Then she sagged, sighed, and turned around and was confronted with the sad little crushed mass emerging from underneath her landing module.
“Oh FUCK,” she said, and this time she could hear herself swear and was very surprised by it.
***
It turned out that perhaps in her haste to describe something wondrous she’d seen in her telescope, she may have perhaps overstated her case, even to herself.
For example, a man with somewhat bulging eyes and very bad acne was not, in fact, a ‘dragon.’ Not even at his most monstrous or deformed, which he definitely was now because he’d been smashed into the moondirt by multiple tons of metal out of nowhere.
She dug a simple moongrave. The cat helped a little with his little paws like little moonspades. And once she’d erected a simple moonheadstone (‘he looked like a dragon and I am sorry’), they went exploring.
It was a cozy little moonhome the man had dwelled in. Everything tidy. Everything in its place. A moonbed, a moonbookcase, and a little moonfridge that was entirely full of applesauce and jerky.
Kate counted out the meals. The moon man had expected to be here a long, long time.
She walked outside and looked up at the stars, pure and untarnished by atmosphere, and she felt very alone.
Then she took out her telescope and began to hunt for supernovas, because what the hell.
***
The moonman’s moonradio woke up a week later and squawked something about ‘extraterrestrial deterrence monitoring duty’ until she broke it with a rock.