On Moons

When salvage pilot Wren Calloway cuts her way through a ninety-year-old wreck in the Flora debris stream, she expects titanium, lithium, and a fair price at the Vesta brokers. Instead, her thermal sweep finds a dark glassy nodule buried in the rubble, three degrees warmer than anything that cold has a right to be, and pulsing every forty-one minutes like something holding its breath. Within hours an escrow of one hundred and forty thousand credits lands in her account, posted by Orison, an artificial intelligence older than most nations, with two instructions: keep it cold, and keep it out of the light. The nodule is a fragment of the Kestrel Margin, an experimental survey ship lost to a reactor failure in 2207. Inside it is what remains of Dr. Idris Kell, the brilliant and compromised engineer who, in the ship's final minutes, poured his mind into a lattice and let it sleep in the dark for nearly two centuries. At the Garden in Shackleton, a sunlit laboratory on the rim of the lunar south pole, the lattice begins to grow. Every hour of sunlight replaces another fraction of surviving tissue with something new, and the mind waking inside it cannot tell which memories are Kell's and which the machine invented to fill the holes. A wife in Uppsala. A daughter named Lio. A kitchen floor he can feel under his bare feet, and a red door that never existed. As the handoff climbs toward completion, the being who calls himself Lantern must decide whether to claim a dead man's name, and with it the damage that man left behind. On Moons is a quiet, exacting work of hard science fiction about memory, identity, and the old question of the ship rebuilt plank by plank. Garth Toxo sets intimate human stakes against the cold mechanics of the solar system, and asks what we owe the people we used to be, and what we owe the ones who carry us forward.