Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  The basic Russian systems seemed to have been augmented by American electronics, to handle the extra functions required of the ship on this Moon flight. Arkady mostly worked at the basic Soyuz controls, while Geena tapped on her laptop. They worked pretty smoothly, all things considered, but sometimes they stumbled, and they had to repeat what they were doing in English and Russian.

  The Soyuz turned in space, firing its attitude thrusters. Every clattering thruster pulse felt like a punch in the back. Henry could feel the shove of his couch and the hull wall, physically swinging him around.

  Now there was another clatter he recognized. “We docked with something.”

  “Very good,” said Geena drily. “We just picked up our booster stack, Henry.”

  They flew into Earth shadow. When Henry peered through his window he could see fans of crystals spewing out in geometrically perfect straight lines from the attitude thrusters: rocket exhaust, in Moonlight.

  Geena said, “The five-minute light is on. We should have the thirty-second light in — ah, five seconds — coming up — two, one, light:

  Very good. We got TM confirmation. Timing is perfect, you guys.

  “Roger that.”

  I’ll count you down to autosequence and you’ll call at five… Confirming, flight directors have been around the horn at Houston and over in Korolyov, and we confirm you are go for TLI. Geena, you are go for TLI.

  He asked, “What’s an autosequence?”

  “The program for firing the rockets,” Geena said.

  “The rockets that will take us to the Moon?”

  “You got it,” she murmured.

  “Yes.” Arkady’s voice was sombre. “But the ship is smart. It has aligned itself with the horizon and with the stars, and is ready to fire the new engines strapped to it. I am not concerned. The ship is much wiser than we are…”

  “Umm,” said Henry. “I just wish they’d had time to test this stuff.”

  “You can’t have everything,” murmured Geena. “Henry, this is going to be eyeballs-out.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Here we go. Countdown to autosequence. We’ve got — ah — ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five —

  Geena flipped a switch. “Arm.”

  Three, two, one, sequence.

  “Got it,” Geena said. “Right in the groove. Green on the attitude. She’s holding like we’re locked in cement.”

  “Copy that.”

  Here we go. Coming up to the five count.

  “Roger.”

  Coming up — now — five, four, three, two —

  Henry gripped the frame of his chair, and braced his back.

  — one —

  “Oh, shit.”

  Zero.

  He heard a low, deep rumble. Henry felt himself fall forward into his straps, as if he was falling into the nose of the cabin. The push was sharp, initially, then settled down to a steady thrust, a little more than Earth-normal gravity. “Eyeballs-out, hell,” he said.

  “Didn’t have time to design it out,” Geena shouted back. “Sorry.”

  Henry turned and looked out his window.

  He was flying over the Pacific night. He could see the light of the engine, a pale orange spot, reflected in the wrinkled Moonlit hide of ocean. Anybody down there, looking up, would be able to see the burn, see the first Moonship in a generation veering off into space.

  But already Earth was sliding past his window. He could feel the craft sliding sideways, pushing out of Earth orbit, heading for the Moon.

  You’re looking good here. Right down the old centre line.

  “Thirty thousand feet per second,” Geena said. “Thirty-three. Thirty-four. Thirty-five…”

  After a couple of minutes the thrust shut down, without warning. Henry watched the others, but they didn’t seem concerned. There was a series of metallic bangs.

  “Second stage,” Arkady said evenly. “Three, two, one—”

  Another jolt from the ship’s nose, eyeballs-out again, a thrust that lasted for two more minutes. Then that died — and the ship flipped over — and a final meaty push in the small of his back.

  The computer shut down the engine. The push died in an instant, and Henry felt himself pitch up out of his couch.

  So it was done, so quickly. He was moving at more than twenty-four thousand miles an hour, fast enough to coast all the way to the lip of Earth’s gravity well, and then downhill to a rocky Moon. But inside the little descent module, with its homely clatter of vents and fans and generators, there was no sense of speed.

  Arkady cut loose from the booster stack. Working the Soyuz’s attitude thrusters with two handheld joysticks, he turned the spacecraft so the windows were pointing back towards the Earth.

  The discarded booster stack looked immense, glowing in the unfiltered sunlight. Henry saw it was made up of three fat, squat cylinders, bound together in some kind of rough framework. Geena told him what he was seeing: the upper stages of three American-built boosters called IUSs, which had been docked to the Soyuz’s nose. The final push had come from a Russian engine called a Block-D, strapped to the back of the craft. The Block-D, incidentally, would deliver them to the Moon. The booster stack was dumping exhaust, spewing sheets of sparkling ice particles into space, sheets which spiralled out as the stage turned. It was like some immense lawn sprinkler, Henry thought.

  And beyond it, Henry could see the whole Earth, already small enough to fit into the frame of the little window. For the first time he could see the object of his life’s study, not as fragments of landscape, but as a planet, complete and entire, folded over on itself.

  From out here, Earth’s dominant colour was blue, the deep, mature blue of the oceans, with clouds laced over them dazzling ice white. Where the land showed, he could make out the bright oranges and browns of the desert, but the softer greens of the temperate zones were washed out to a bluish grey. A world of ocean and desert.

  But it was streaked with black. Even from here, the damage done by the Moonseed was visible.

  And beyond its edge, only utter darkness.

  As he watched the Earth got smaller.

  They were receding so fast — he hadn’t expected this — that the Earth visibly shrank, even as he watched, as if he was riding some cramped elevator car.

  Arkady pulsed the hand controllers once more. The booster stack receded, still rotating slowly, turning at last into a star-like point surrounded by a dim haze of vented propellant. And there came a time when Henry looked away, just for a moment, and when he turned back he’d lost the booster in the blackness.

  The light of Earth and sun was so bright out there he couldn’t see the stars. The little craft was alone in space, sliding unpowered through the dark; and all the universe was either inside this little metal bottle, within a few inches of his outstretched hand, or thousands of miles away.

  The three of them looked at each other, wondering what they had done, in such haste.

  A little later, they flew through the shadow of the Earth.

  The eclipse took more than an hour. They could see their home planet as a hole in the stars, ringed by a rainbow of sunlight refracted through the atmosphere. And in the centre of the planet, they could see a faint grey-blue glow: it was the light of the Moon, shining down on the belly of the Pacific. It was an eclipse of the sun by the Earth, a sight no human in all history could have seen before the Apollo adventure, and no human had seen since. A hell of a thing, Henry thought.

  24

  It was going to take them three days to get to the Moon, just as it had Armstrong and Aldrin.

  Three days. There was really no other way to do it, as long as you were constrained by chemical rocket engines: a hard push that burned up your fuel to launch you out of Earth orbit, a slowing climb up to the point where the Earth’s gravity balanced that of the Moon, and then a steady fall down to the Moon itself, where you would have to slow again to enter lunar orbit. Like climbing up one hill and down another, Henry t
hought.

  And as long as humans flew this way, it was going to take them those three days, just as it always had.

  Henry tried to sleep.

  Geena had hung up three light sleeping bags in the orbital compartment of the Soyuz, where there was just enough room to stretch out straight. Henry climbed into one, and Geena zipped him up, with a reasonable amount of tenderness, and so there he hung, suspended like a bat.

  He had supposed that sleeping in zero G would be like the most comfortable bed imaginable, but it didn’t seem to be working out that way. He missed the pressure of a pillow under his head, the security of a heavy duvet over him. Even field trips weren’t like this. He was missing Earth’s heavy gravity field, gluing him safely to that big ball of rock.

  And the damn bag was too big. If he’d been Arkady’s size it might have been okay, but he wasn’t. He was rattling around in here, and every time he moved the neck gaped open and cold air rushed in.

  Besides, whenever he felt himself drifting away, some deep part of his brain warned him that he was falling, and he clutched at his sleeping bag.

  He burrowed deeper into the bag, shutting out the light and noise.

  His heart, powerful enough to withstand a planet’s gravity field, was too strong up here. His pulse boomed in his head.

  And the cabin was full of noises — the clatter and whir of pumps and fans and extractors — and every so often some mechanical gadget would change its tone, startling him awake once more. It was like trying to sleep inside some huge refrigerator, with the added frisson of knowing that on these rattling Russian machines depended his life.

  He wasn’t aware of drifting off.

  …He came to when Geena reached into the bag, grabbed him under the chin and hauled his head out by main force. He found himself coughing, gulping at cool air.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.” His head felt stuffy, as if he had been standing on his hands. But he was the same way up as when he’d gone to sleep. He shook his head, and that was a mistake; the cabin started to move around him. “Oh, wow.”

  Geena stood before him, looking into his face. “Think about it. No convection, right? So if the carbon dioxide builds up in your sleeping bag you choke yourself.”

  “Much you care.”

  “A corpse in a Soyuz is about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit, as we say.” She was looking into his eyes. “How do you feel?”

  He took an inventory.

  The left side of his head hurt. For some reason, he found that if he pressed the back of his head it helped a little. His feet felt numb, as if there was no blood at all down there. His nose was stuffy.

  He reported all this to Geena. She laughed.

  “Your eyes are red as shit, too. It’s just the blood pooling in your head; your fluid balance hasn’t adapted yet.”

  Gingerly, he started to push himself out of the sleeping bag. Strangely, the experience of zero G seemed still more bizarre than it had yesterday.

  “Where are we?”

  “Eleven hours since TLI. Seventy thousand miles from home.”

  The light was shifting. He looked out the porthole.

  Earth and sun swung gently around the craft, as if the Soyuz was creating its own tiny sunrise and sunset. Geena had put the craft into barbecue mode, a slow hour-long roll in the sunlight to even up the heat load.

  Everything was rolling.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Suddenly he was retching.

  It was just a spasm, barely painful. But suddenly here was a greenish sphere, the size of a tennis ball, floating in space in front of him. It was oscillating slowly, thick and languid, pea-green and quite beautiful.

  Geena was scrabbling in a locker. “Christ, Henry.” She handed him a plastic bag, and he held it before his face, catching most of the rest.

  Under some complex combination of surface tension and air currents, the loose sphere of puke split in two. One half headed for the wall, the other for Geena.

  Henry ventured, “Kind of pretty, isn’t it? And look at the way they are moving. Equal and opposite. Conservation of momentum, I guess. And—”

  Geena was watching in horrified fascination. She didn’t seem able to move out of the way.

  The blob hit her square on her chest. The magic of zero G dissipated instantly, and the puke spread out over her white T-shirt, viscous, sticky and lumpy.

  She started dabbing at it with wet towels. “Henry, you asshole.”

  “I never said I was a spaceman.”

  The other lump of vomit reached a locker door now. Instead of sticking, it broke up into a dozen smaller globules, that rebounded and set off over the cabin.

  Arkady came floating up from the descent module. “I could smell — oh.” He laughed. “Time to hunt butterflies, I think.”

  He took a handful of wet wipes, and he and Geena started to chase over the cabin, snagging the vomit spheroids out of the air. Henry just hung there being still, trying not to worry about which way was up.

  Twenty-eight hours out; a hundred and forty thousand miles from home. A day after TLI, they were already more than halfway to the Moon.

  Wrapped in a blanket, Henry hung before a window, staring out.

  He could see the Earth every once in a while, as it slid past his window. He could tell it was a fat round world, floating in space, much more three-dimensional than the Moon; the huge highlight cast by the sun from the oceans ensured that, as if the Earth was a huge steel ball under a spotlight. Every time the planet came by, it dwindled. He couldn’t see the change if he watched, but if he turned away from it and looked back, it was a little smaller and more distant.

  Now, with the planet reduced to the size of a baseball, he found he’d lost his sense of what he was looking at. He was supposed to be a geologist, for Christ’s sake. But the real Earth was no map: it was swathed in cloud, and the countries weren’t colour-coded.

  Geena laughed at him when he told her this.

  “Start from the beginning,” she said. “What’s that big white patch at the edge? Ice or clouds?”

  Henry thought about it. “Looks like ice,” he said. “And if it’s summer in the northern hemisphere, and that patch is in sunlight—”

  “It has to be the Arctic.”

  “Okay. But how can that be right when it’s at the bottom?”

  Geena, reasonably gently, took hold of his longjohns at the hips, and swivelled him around, handling his mass as easily as if he was some inert piece of payload.

  When she’d turned him upside down, everything fell into place. There was Antarctica, and above it there was South America, Chile to Brazil, from forest to desert swathed in clouds. The whole of North America was drowned by grey, unseasonal cloud, although he could see Florida peeking out through a rift. There was a cyclone over the mid-Atlantic, like some immense pinwheel. In the Caribbean, he could see the Bahamas, the shallow ocean there shining green-blue as if lit from within.

  Monica Beus had e-mailed him with extracts from newscasts, some still uncensored.

  —French government have announced that their nuclear strike against a deliberately engineered Moonseed patch in the South Pacific has not been—

  —hard to believe that these hollow-eyed, malnourished children are English—

  —the Internet shutdown may indeed be purely from technical issues. But civil liberties groups are saying this is too convenient an excuse for a Government which is demonstrating increasingly illiberal instincts in this time of crisis—

  —relocation of crucial high-tech companies from the Washington coast has been complicated by the grounding of many aircraft by volcanic ash—

  —we should talk to it. It’s a living thing. This is first contact, for God’s sake. What does it want?—

  —so this thing chews rocks. Well, so does my ex-wife, and I lived with her for three years before—

  He deleted the mail before he got to the end. It was hard to reconcile the geometric calm and silence of space tr
avel with the clamour of voices on Earth, crying for help. He couldn’t help a guilty feeling that — despite the unknown dangers he faced ahead — he had already escaped.

  He wanted to be able to pick up the Earth and turn it around, view it from the other side, witness an African night. But he would have to wait for that; the Earth would turn in its own sweet time, as it always had, and by the time Africa was brought to face him, he would be too far away to be able to see.

  Arkady showed Henry the food store.

  The Russian-cuisine food was kept in boxes in the lockers of the orbital module. There seemed to be a lot of soup. Some of it was freeze-dried — kharcho, for instance, spicy lamb and rice — and some was natural liquid, such as borscht, which seemed to be cabbage and beet. There was cottage cheese, pork with potato, canned fish, coffee, tea, milk. There were eight different kinds of bread, cut up into little chunks, and then candied fruits, plums, chocolate, cookies. To drink there was fruit juice, in tubes, and coffee and tea. It was a regular snack bar up there.

  It took Henry a day to get his appetite back — he still didn’t feel too hungry even so — and he took to taking what he wanted, when he wanted, and stuffing his pockets with snacks for later.

  He got in trouble with Geena, for scattering crumbs around the capsule. The Soyuz, it seemed, didn’t have a decent air filter system, and he had to go around the cabin, scooping the drifting crumbs out of the air with a handheld vacuum cleaner.

  Geena showed him how to wash, Russian-style. You just had to wipe yourself down with wet napkins. You could even wash your hair that way: Geena wrapped a brush in another napkin, and scrubbed over his head for him. It was a soothing, relaxing feeling. Grooming rituals, he thought, a hundred and forty thousand miles from the nearest chimpanzee colony.

  Shaving was just an electric razor; he had a little vacuum cleaner standing by to collect his spare whiskers. He cleaned his teeth with a napkin wrapped around his finger. It was loaded with mint-flavoured toothpaste; it got rid, at last, of the taste of vomit from his mouth. Geena said it was actually good for him because it meant his gums got a massage too.