A couple of short stories this time. One of them is an old favorite, first published in 1991: “A Walk in the Sun” by Geoffrey A. Landis. Luckily, Trish Mulligan is alive after a crash landing on the moon. Unluckily, a rescue is thirty days away. Luckily, her solar powered spacesuit is operational. If she’s going to survive, she’s got to keep her suit working, and to keep her suit working she’s got to keep those solar panels. Her solution is to keep walking, fast enough to avoid sunrise. The diameter of the moon = 6786 miles. The moon rotates once every 27 days. So to pull this off, Trish needs to average 10.47 miles per hour for 27 days.
I still like the Infinivox audio version of this story, read by Amy Bruce. It brought back Vox: SF for Your Ears.
The other short I read was “Boojum” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette from 2008. Here’s the opening:
The ship had no name of her own, so her human crew called her the Lavinia Whateley. As far as anyone could tell, she didn’t mind. At least, her long grasping vanes curled—affectionately?—when the chief engineers patted her bulkheads and called her “Vinnie,” and she ceremoniously tracked the footsteps of each crew member with her internal bioluminescence, giving them light to walk and work and live by.
The Lavinia Whateley was a Boojum, a deep-space swimmer, but her kind had evolved in the high tempestuous envelopes of gas giants, and their offspring still spent their infancies there, in cloud-nurseries over eternal storms. And so she was streamlined, something like a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her sides were lined with gasbags filled with hydrogen; her vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it; her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae.
Where there was light, she could make oxygen. Where there was oxygen, she could make water.
This was the first time I’ve read this one, and I liked it quite a bit. On this ship is a person who works in the engineering section named Black Alice. We follow her as she feels the Lavinia Whateley’s “shiver of anticipation” as it sense prey. The authors captured the feel of walking and working inside this creature, and of a person that felt connected to it. Very nice!
