Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  He had the feeling he could spend his life up here and not tire of this.

  But then, over North America, he saw a high, swirling stream of smoke. It seemed to flatten out at some high atmospheric layer, then plumed out towards the horizon. It was from the ruins of Washington State: steam and smoke and volcanic ash, disfiguring the face of Earth itself.

  Eventually Geena told him he was free to leave his seat and get out of his spacesuit.

  Helmet, gloves, zippers: he had to wriggle to get his arms and body out of the upper section, and then shove hard at the tight leggings to free himself. But as soon as he did, there he was floating in the air, dressed in his white T-shirt and longjohns, in a freedom he’d never imagined.

  The closed-over walls of the cabin seemed roomy. With a push of a fingertip he made himself float up to the control panels fixed to the roof, and with a gentle shove he could spin in the air, so he was looking down on the couch, and the spacesuit which lay there like a beached whale. He tried making himself twist further, but he found that if he moved his head too quickly nausea washed over him.

  Geena, moving with the slippery grace of a dolphin, opened up the hatch to the orbital module and beckoned him. Henry used his hands to pull himself after Geena through the tunnel, but — unlike Geena — he caught his knee on a control box, his foot on the lip of the hatchway. Two bruises already, and he hadn’t even gotten to Station yet. Anyhow, legs didn’t seem too much use up here, save as obstacles to movement; already his hands and arms, which would have to do most of the work in zero G, ached vaguely.

  In the upper orbital module, he felt disoriented. The little box-room, its walls lined with equipment, seemed much bigger than on the ground. Not only that: it looked different, its layout subtly altered, as if some unknown engineer had replaced the compartment he’d clambered through on the ground with this distorted twin.

  Geena was working the equipment. “Lunch time,” she said.

  Henry shrugged. “I’m not hungry. I’m not even thirsty.”

  “Bullshit,” Geena said precisely. “I’m dehydrated from the launch, and so are you. You have to learn to live up here.” She had pressurized the water tank, and now she pressed open the valve.

  A sphere of water emerged — a little thumb-sized liquid planet, shimmering and wobbling, complex waves crossing its surface, the cabin’s floodlights returning a mesh of highlights. It swam towards Henry; he watched, fascinated. There were bubbles of air, trapped inside the blob of water, like so many tiny jelly-fish, showing no desire to rise to the surface. When they touched they merged, little silvery meniscuses gleaming.

  He opened his lips and let the blob just sail in; the surface broke against his back teeth, and his mouth was flooded with crisp cool water. Half of it went down his air pipe, and he coughed, expelling a haze of tiny droplets.

  Geena laughed.

  Henry went back to the water valve and practised, until he could suck a ball of water into his lips without wasting a drop.

  Geena dug out a plastic bag of grain. She shook it before Henry. “Buckwheat porridge,” she said. She squirted hot water into it, kneaded it, then pulled it open. He dug his spoon into it, but when he pulled out a spoonful, the porridge sprayed out of the bag and began floating around the cabin.

  “Not enough water,” said Geena. “Time to feed the fish.”

  She began pushing herself around the cabin, gulping mouthfuls of the porridge out of the air. Henry followed suit. It was fun to chase down the little crumbs, but the porridge was very dry.

  After that, there was an awkward moment. How do you ask your ex-wife how to go to the bathroom?

  Geena was predictably brisk. She opened up a panel in the wall, revealing a small, conventional-looking privy. There was no partition, no place to get privacy.

  Henry said, “I’ll wait.”

  “Like hell,” Geena said. “You have to learn how to do this. Come here.” She turned a switch; a fan started up with a clatter.

  And so Henry found himself floating around with his dick in his hand, forcing himself to pee into a suction pump, while his ex-wife looked on, murmuring encouragement.

  A cute stream of golden globules swam into the bowl and were whisked away, like something out of a Disney cartoon.

  Geena said, “And later, the solid wastes—”

  “Much later, Geena. Much, much later.”

  For twelve hours the Soyuz, in a lower orbit, chased the Station around the curve of Earth. Geena worked through the rendezvous manoeuvres with care and skill. She was patient but tense, Henry saw; he sensed there wasn’t much time to spare.

  Two hundred and fifty miles out, Geena switched on a system she called Mera, a long-range scanner. The docking was to be pretty much automated, it seemed. At twenty miles another short-range system called Igla turned itself on, and the Station showed up as a blob in a little TV screen.

  The Station was the greatest construction ever assembled by humans off the planet. But it looked trivial, like a party favour, suspended over the blue curve of Earth.

  The Soyuz worked its way smoothly through its final series of burns. Each thrust was a smooth, sharp push in the back, a rumble of the big engine behind. The smaller attitude thrusters sounded like hollow punches, like someone hitting a barrel with a sledgehammer.

  And now the Soyuz turned again, and the Station swam back into Henry’s view, close enough now to make out detail.

  It was a rough L-shape. Its spine was a string of modules, blocky cylinders joined nose to nose. Out from the final module sprouted an open spar — Henry could see Earth clouds through its structure — and there were delicate, purplish solar panels fixed like wings to the spar, and to the other modules.

  It looked, Henry thought, more Soviet-era Russian than American.

  Geena leaned towards him. “The tourist guide,” she said. “That spine of modules is the heart of the Station. There’s the Service Module, and the FGB. Both Russian-built, similar to Mir core modules.” They looked like two fat Soyuz craft, joined nose to nose. “Next we have the Resource Node, which links the Russian and American halves of the Station, and then the US-built Laboratory Module…” The last was unmistakeable, with its giant “USA” and stars-and-stripes. A black-painted Soyuz was stuck nose-first to one port, like a suckling pig to a teat.

  Henry knew he was looking at the Station’s so-called Phase II configuration. The Station was still only partially built. It would have taken all of twenty-six more flights — by American, Japanese, European and Russian carriers — before the Station was complete, and able to host six people permanently. Even before the Moonseed, the Station was so far behind schedule, and so far over budget, that the first components were already starting to show their age.

  The Soyuz nudged closer, like a lion stalking a deer. They would dock at a port on the Service Module.

  Henry thought about the physics of docking, of joining two immense masses in Earth orbit. This wasn’t like bringing a boat home to harbour. For one thing, a boat was constrained to two dimensions, and the harbour didn’t move; here both Soyuz and Station could move in any of the three dimensions, and at different rates. Eight degrees of freedom, then. And on Earth there were damping forces: friction, air and water resistance, the restraining forces of rails and cables, all helping to kill the craft’s relative motion. In space, all the excess kinetic energy would have to be absorbed and damped out within the vehicles themselves…

  But the Americans and Russians had been docking craft in space for four decades already. He decided to stop worrying about it.

  The Soyuz swam closer to the Station, and the great structure slowly turned in space. It was like a toy, brightly lit, shining green, grey and white in the sun, and underlit by soft blue Earthlight. The modules were coated in powder-white insulation blankets, into which portholes had been cut. Henry could see now how the blankets were pocked by micrometeorite scars, big fist-sized craters. The blankets were a patchwork of colours, in fact, because some of them h
ad already been replaced during the Station’s life. The paintwork of the once-bright logos had faded. Around the nozzles of the attitude thrusters mounted on the FGB he could see scorched, blistered paint.

  He could see a face, sunlit in a porthole, peering out at him, human pink against the engineering dullness of the Station, the blue of Earth.

  As the Soyuz’s nose nuzzled into its docking port, struts and shadows and powder-grey blankets filled his window.

  He could feel the moment of docking: a slow grind of metal, a hard thump, a noisy rattle of latches. Then the Soyuz swung back and forth, gently, for long minutes; he heard metal creak around him.

  They swam up into the orbital module. When Geena opened the hatch, Henry could smell hot metal: the Soyuz hull, which had been exposed to vacuum.

  Jesus, he thought. This is real.

  And when he looked into the Station, at human faces grinning at him, Henry felt an unexpected gush of emotion. It really meant something, he found, to fly up through all that rocket energy and rattling metal, and arrive somewhere.

  Here was Arkady, waiting on the other side of the hatch. He was hanging with his head down, his body disappearing into the dimness beyond. He was wearing a Green Bay Packers T-shirt, cut-off jeans and thick socks.

  Geena reached out a hand to him. He pulled her up, and they embraced. But they broke when Henry came blundering up behind.

  “Pay the cab fare,” Henry said to Arkady. “I got no change.”

  Neither of them laughed. Henry looked from one to the other. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he felt like a gooseberry.

  “We do not have much time,” Arkady said gravely.

  Geena checked her watch, a big Moonwalker’s Rolex strapped to her arm. “TLI is minus fifty.”

  “What’s TLI?”

  “Trans-lunar injection. When we leave Earth orbit, for—”

  “The Moon. Minus fifty what? Hours?”

  She grinned. “Minutes.”

  He gaped at her. “You guys are crazy.”

  “The launch window is complicated, Henry. It will last about a day — after that the plane of our orbit will drift and we’ll have to wait a month — and we have pushbutton opportunities of a minute or so, once an orbit—”

  Arkady put a hand on his shoulder. “We will take care of it. If you need to defecate, I would recommend you do it here, in the departure lounge, so to speak. It will be rather more comfortable than later.”

  Henry shrugged him off. “What is it with you astronauts and my toilet functions? I’ll take my chances.”

  “As you wish.” Arkady floated off.

  Henry struggled after Geena, through the Station. He hadn’t got his sea legs yet, and he kept getting his elbows or his clumsy feet hung up.

  It was dark in here. The habitable compartments made up a kind of cramped corridor, strung out together, patchily lit by floods. There was a constant rattling of machinery, thumps and bangs and whirs. Oddly, he couldn’t smell anything at all, save a little sparky ozone. That made a certain sense. The air was recycled, with carbon dioxide absorbent and contaminant filters. It must be dry, clean, healthy. And it must be irradiated by the raw uv coming in the windows, ionized to ozone.

  The windows were small, well-separated portholes. They were grimy, coated with dusty fingermarks. Any dirt in the air up here was going to stay there, he supposed, until it stuck to some surface, or got sucked out by the filters.

  After all you couldn’t open a window to let out the fug.

  The walls were covered by thick insulation blankets. Every square inch of usable surface seemed to be crammed with equipment: boxes of electronic gear, pipes and air-ducts lashed together with silver tape, crudely lagged. Cables were strung about everywhere, floating like seaweed. It was like some old geezer’s home workshop, he thought, encrusted by years of make-do-and-mend, pieces of equipment crudely taped to the walls, instrument panels and air scrub cartridges and exercise gear sticking out at every angle, and towels hanging like flags from colour-coded holders on the walls.

  This wasn’t so much a science platform as a survival shelter, he thought. It was strange to think of humans struggling to survive in all this dimness and clutter, while the silence and beauty of space, of the Earthscape itself, hung beyond the scuffed walls.

  Right now there were five people up here, in a Station built for three: himself, Geena and Arkady plus two regular crew. Everybody was working but himself, it seemed, hauling equipment and supplies back and forth along the cramped modules. Less than an hour to TLI, Henry thought, and they were still loading. So much for checklists. He wondered what crucial item was being forgotten, what key mistake was being made, right this minute…

  He saw Arkady carrying his petrological microscope, ugly wooden box and all, and he felt obscurely reassured.

  Geena introduced the crew briefly. There was a tough, competent-looking woman of about fifty called Bonnie Jones, and a guy called Sixt Guth. Sixt had to be at least sixty, Henry thought: fit and lithe, his head totally free of hair, as if it had worn smooth. He was struggling with a pack of consumables, but he stopped to shake Henry’s hand. That left something on his palm, Henry realized, a kind of grey sheen.

  Sixt saw him looking. “Sorry. Metal dust,” he said. “From the Progress.”

  “The Progress?”

  “The supply ships the Russkies use. Like unmanned Soyuz. Pieces of shit. Half of them are looted for food by the ground crews in Kazakhstan.” Sixt winked at Henry. “So you’re going to the Moon. I envy you.”

  “Maybe I should be envying you.”

  “You know, the thing of it is, you get tired of watching the Earth, from orbit. After two or three months up here, you want to go some place.”

  “And now we are.”

  “You, anyhow. I just hope there’s somewhere for you to come back to.”

  Geena drifted past, beckoned Henry, and he followed.

  Bonnie pushed past them, hauling equipment. She barged into Henry’s back, knocking him aside.

  He took a moment to recover. “What’s eating her? Jealousy?”

  “No,” Geena said. “Well, maybe a little. Mostly she resents your being here. The interruption to her routine.”

  “Wow.”

  “You get a little cabin fever up here.”

  They came to another tunnel, set in the floor, with an open hatch.

  He said, “And what’s down this rabbit hole?”

  She said softly, “The Moon…” And she pushed him through the hatch.

  It was just another Soyuz capsule, another crude ball of earthy Russian metal. Geena pushed him through the orbital module to the descent module, pointed at the right-hand seat and told him to buckle up.

  For a few minutes longer the hatch above his head stayed open, and he could hear the crew frantically jamming last-minute cargo into the orbital module above him.

  The Soyuz was basically the same design as the one in which he’d ridden to orbit. But there were some differences in the instrumentation: a small laptop computer, duct-taped to a wall, English labels hand-printed and stuck over some of the Russian gear. He got the sense of improvisation, of beat-the-clock preparation, of this simple little craft being hastily upgraded to be capable of taking three humans to the Moon, and back again.

  The sense of hurry was not reassuring, right now.

  Geena came swimming down. She wriggled over to the left-hand seat and pulled a checklist from a plastic pouch stuck on the wall.

  Arkady followed, muscular limbs in a blue jumpsuit, crowding into the centre seat.

  So the crew was complete, thought Henry. Geena was trained to fly the lander; Arkady would handle the Soyuz; and he was Mister Moon. Given the circumstances they were a well-matched crew. Complementary.

  So why, then, was the atmosphere so stiff?

  “Fifteen minutes to TLI.”

  Radio voices responded to Geena, from the mission controls in Korolyov and Houston, English and Russian voices ticking through checklist items. Ge
ena responded in kind, her Russian tinged with California.

  “Shouldn’t we be wearing spacesuits?”

  She turned to him, distracted. “The launch window is kind of tight here.”

  “So, shut up, Henry.”

  “Shut up, Henry.”

  Arkady’s knees were jammed up against Henry’s. Try as he might, Henry just couldn’t get away from that gouging physical contact. The Soyuz seemed much more crowded with three than with two.

  And now Sixt’s Moon-like face loomed briefly in the open hatch, and he nodded gravely, before he slammed the hatch shut.

  Once more, Henry was sealed in.

  Henry heard a hiss as the short tunnel between Station and Soyuz was evacuated. Then the clamps that held the craft together were released, and a spring connector pushed the Soyuz away. The undocking was a small symphony of thumps, bangs and obscure jolts.

  Then the light in the porthole beside him started to change.

  He could see the great powder-grey structure of the Station once more, drifting away from him. The Station was lined up so its long axis pointed down towards the centre of the blue Earth, and its big solar panels trailed after it in its orbit. He wondered dimly if the Station’s position had something to do with stability: maybe the orientation was tweaked that way by the Earth’s faint tides, and the solar panels felt the soft breeze of the remnants of the atmosphere, even so high, so that the Station sailed like some immense ship through this silent ocean.

  Arkady saw him looking. “When Station is operational we will line it up with the long axis in the direction of flight. That eliminates tidal effects, from our zero-G manufacturing experiments—”

  “When it’s operational.”

  Arkady smiled sadly.

  The checks continued, in English and Russian. Henry could follow maybe half of what was spoken, pick up maybe ten per cent of the sense.

  …Roger, Geena, this is Houston. We’re all set here. We’re even ahead of schedule.

  “Rog.”

  Green lights here. Your attitudes look like they’re on the nose…