Last Rites

This volume attempts to answer the question, what kind of person would choose to spend the rest of their life alienated from their home planet? It recounts events of 24 people in their last days before leaving for a protracted tenure at a lunar site. There is a surgeon falsely accused of malpractice, a nurse with experience in the jungles of Africa and the ghettos of Detroit and Chicago, a woman frustrated with her advisor's demands for her thesis topic in organic transistors, a man who was saved from a life of running drugs by a defense attorney who recognized his potential, a shy Dalit girl from Mumbai who has the ability to calculate orbitals in her head, an interior decorator who is brilliant at visualizing 3D spaces and who has enough debts to force her into bankruptcy, and a Russian geologist who wants to get out from under the thumb of the NKVD. The volume ends with three young women in 2052 whose mothers want them safe on Luna in case a potential plague spins out of control.