Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Besides, toothbrushes would be impractical up here. After all, where would you spit?

  Ultimately, he had to face it, he needed a dump.

  Once again he faced a 1960s Soviet-era privy, mounted on the wall. He stripped off his longjohns, switched on the fan, held himself in place and pushed.

  He had to strain harder than he’d expected; it seemed that Earth gravity even helped with this simple act.

  It wasn’t so bad. One little floater escaped the air flow, and he was able to chase it down with a wet wipe.

  At that, Geena told him, it wasn’t as bad a system as what the first Moon voyagers had to endure on Apollo, which was after all the same era as this Soyuz design. On Apollo, a crap involved stripping stark naked, and climbing into the storage bay under the three metal-frame couches. Then you took one of a collection of plastic bags, with adhesive coatings on the brim, and finger-shaped tubes built into the side. You had to dig into the bag with your, finger — nothing would fall, after all — and hook your turds down into the bag. And afterwards you had to break open a capsule of germicide, drop it into the bag, and knead it all together.

  Things, Henry realized as he chased down his turds, could be a lot worse.

  He drifted down into the descent module. Arkady was working through a checklist at the control panel. There were crackly voices singing in lusty Russian on the ground-to-air loop, and Arkady was singing along, his voice booming in the confined cabin, working as he sang.

  They finished up with a ripple of applause. Henry realized dimly that Arkady’s voice, time-delayed, would have been out of synch on the ground; they must have compensated for that somehow, a small act of interplanetary kindness.

  Arkady said to him, “Vam panravilas? You liked it?”

  “It sounded like an anthem. I kept expecting some shotputter to step up for her gold medal.”

  Arkady laughed. “It is a dashing Russian song we call From an Island into a Deep Stream.”

  “Oh, yeah. Lieber and Stoller, right?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Never mind.”

  Arkady studied Henry. “Your face is swollen like a balloon. You move stiffly. Your back is sore.”

  “Yeah. How could you tell?”

  “It is a hazard of spaceflight. Your spinal column is stretching. This will not become easier. Your back muscles will weaken, your discs will stretch. You must go back to the orbital compartment and brace your legs against the walls, and press your head against the opposite wall, and stretch. You will feel much better.”

  “An old cosmonaut trick?”

  “Born of long experience.” Arkady worked at his list. “I have been able to observe the differences in approach by Russians and Americans to this business of spaceflight. You Americans build fine machines, but pay little attention to the fragile bodies crammed inside. To us, however, spaceflight is an affair, not of machines, but of humans. We sing. We joke. We speak to our families.”

  “Smart guys.”

  “You like music?”

  Henry shrugged. “Not much. Geena played a lot of jazz.”

  Arkady snorted. “Jazz makes me tired and irritated. Jazz does not reflect any of the feelings of our everyday lives. Jazz is a music of idleness. It is for young people, flinging, hectic, impetuous. As they grow up they will come to appreciate art that brings relaxation and enjoyment.”

  Henry wondered if this guy was taking a rise out of him. “So what do you like? Songs about tractors?”

  Arkady didn’t rise to that. “Russian folk music. Tangos, foxtrots. Sentimental songs by Ruslanova, Shtokolov, Kobson. These songs evoke warm feelings in me, and banish disquieting thoughts.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  Arkady studied him. “Are you adjusting to weightlessness?”

  “I guess so. I’m not throwing up so often. I guess I missed the training—”

  Arkady snorted. “My training was begun by my grandmother.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. At night we would go to the swings in the park, to train me against motion sickness. She pushed the swings and checked my endurance with an alarm clock.”

  “My grandmother knitted me sweaters.”

  “She was a sweet woman and a hard worker.”

  “So you always wanted to be a cosmonaut? Did you follow the guys on Salyut and Mir?”

  “Not the cosmonauts. I grew up in the military town of the Kantemir division, in which my father was serving. I had a happy childhood. My dream was born when I was in school. I read books and watched films about the Patriotic War. I idolized the pilots I saw there.

  “But it has not been easy. I became a test pilot at the Moscow Institute for Aviation. I applied to serve as a cosmonaut. I was rejected three times. I remember the fourth time. I walked to the train station through a field of rye. I took off my boots and slung them over my shoulder. A golden field of ripening wheat was swaying around me; there were skylarks in the blue sky. I was overwhelmed by the thick aroma of Earth’s bounty. Thus, in my military uniform with the stripes of a sergeant, I walked barefoot to become a cosmonaut.”

  I don’t believe this guy, Henry thought. He’s a Russian Jimmy Stewart.

  “…I worked in the designers” office. I flew jets from Noviy Aidar. I flew helicopters in Viazniki. I trained; every morning I exercised, and jogged five kilometres. I became much stronger.

  “But I had to wait for my first flight. After glasnost the money which was made available for spaceflight in Russia was much reduced. There were few seats, hotly contested. It was the advent of our joint project with the Americans, first on Mir and then Station, which gave me my doorway to space… But I never doubted it would come.”

  He worked as he spoke, his blue eyes flicking over the checklists, his voice level. His eyes were the same colour as Geena’s, Henry noted absently.

  Behind Arkady, unnoticed, a baseball-sized Earth slid past the window.

  “And now here you are.”

  “Here I am, having travelled further than any cosmonaut before me, further even than Gagarin, flying between Earth and Moon.”

  “Lucky guy.”

  “No. Not luck. It is the faith of others.” He studied Henry. “I have found that many times in my life, friends and strangers alike have been prepared to help me because they believe in me. I am very happy because of this, and I am always careful not to betray their trust.”

  Henry thought Arkady was the most serious person he had ever met.

  Henry drifted back up to the orbital module, and tried Arkady’s back-compressing trick. It took a little practice to lodge his head and feet — he kept slipping and bouncing away, like a compressed spring — but after a time he got it and, he was not surprised, it seemed to help.

  Geena, too, took the time out to look back at the Earth. But the experience seemed unreal to her; she was unable to take in the reality of the immense distance she was traversing. She had spent a lot of time in space, but all of it, before TLI, in low Earth orbit. Always she had had the Earth, a huge, barely curving blue wall, outside her window, as if she was flying low over some huge map of the world. On orbit, the Earth was still the anchor of her sense of place, her sense of self.

  Out here, it was different.

  Out here, the features of Earth were so compressed they were hard to distinguish, and anyhow the planet itself was already so remote you could cover it over with the palm of your hand. When she looked out the window, when she thought about it too hard, she felt lost, a dust mote drifting around, a fly in a cathedral dome.

  She had to find a new frame of reference.

  Well, there was the Earth, a blue ball over there, the Moon a grey disc off thataway, and the sun, a glaring white torch: three beacons, enough to fix her in three-dimensional, interplanetary space.

  And beyond those references, visible when her eyes were shielded from the sunlight, she had the stars.

  Already she’d come an immense distance in any reasonable human terms, but the st
ars were so remote that they hadn’t shifted in perspective from when she’d lain out under desert skies, in California and Nevada, and tried to count them. The stars were still there, and they would guide her, as they had sailors on less strange oceans than this for millennia.

  The stars, and Venus, of course, an ugly grey smudge, like a stain on the pristine darkness.

  Distance: endlessly accumulating as they slowly climbed away from Earth.

  What made it all seem real, at last, was not the changing view, but the lengthening moments of silence that punctuated every exchange when she spoke to Houston. She had come so far, at last, that even light was taking its time to reach her.

  She felt her sense of space and time shifting and flowing, oddly. Here, in this timeless submarine of a capsule, without perspective beyond the windows, she lost her sense of how big they were — reduced to atoms, adrift in the cosmos, or inflated to the size of giants, able to reach out and enclose the Earth itself. Even time seemed to dissolve away from the steady clockwork of orbit, the ninety-minute dawns and sunsets. Sometimes it was as if her heart raced, other times as if it was pumping sluggish lava through her veins, as if she was losing her grounding in the frame of the universe.

  For the first time, she understood what the old guys like Jays had been telling her, all these years. Being an astronaut wasn’t supposed to be a career step. It was about going someplace. I really have come a long way from home, she thought.

  It was in this mood that she cornered Arkady, in the descent module, when Henry was asleep.

  They didn’t need words. They pulled off each other’s coveralls and underwear, until they were surrounded by a drifting cloud of clothing, like Jane Fonda in Barbarella. Then they found places to anchor themselves, with hands and feet, thrusting their mouths and bellies together.

  It wasn’t their first time in zero G. In the Space Station they had usually been driven to hide themselves away in some module or other — sometimes a Soyuz, in fact — to find privacy. Sex in space, they had found, was a matter of engineering ingenuity, of anchoring and leverage points, and of some athletic ability. Both partners had to work at it; it was no use relying on Earth’s sticky gravity to pull you down.

  Of course there was the usual problem of fluid imbalance. Arkady’s body fluids had pooled above his waist; he didn’t have the hydraulic surplus down below he was used to. But as usual, she discovered to her pleasure, testosterone overcame microgravity.

  And this time it was more delicious than ever for Geena: to float here inside the metal walls of this little egg in space, a hundred thousand miles of vacuum all around her, but with Arkady’s strong warmth inside her, his mouth pressed against hers, like two blobs of the primeval ocean come together here, defying the void—

  “Holy cow.”

  They broke, swearing. Geena grabbed coveralls out of the air — they turned out to be Arkady’s — and held them before her.

  It was Henry, of course; his head protruded out of the descent module’s hatch, upside down, his hair tousled with sleep.

  “Oh, God,” Geena said.

  Henry shook his head. “The fucking ship was shaking. I thought we had a leak.” He looked from one to the other, as they scrambled into their clothes. “So. The two of you. East meets west; astronaut athletics. Of course. How come I didn’t see it before?”

  “Henry, I’m sorry—”

  “Do what you want. I’ve no hold over you.” And he ducked back into the orbital module, slamming the hatch behind him.

  After that, the silences grew very long. Three people tucked into that confined place couldn’t have got further apart or communicated less, Geena thought; it was like the solution to some geometrical theorem.

  Two days and seven hours out, all of two hundred thousand miles from Earth, they went over the hill.

  They had climbed past the point of gravitational equilibrium, and entered the Moon’s sphere of influence. Up to now they had been slowing down, like a stone thrown up from the surface of the Earth; but from now on they would accelerate, all the way down to the Moon.

  Henry marked the moment, watched as the timer ticked past the nominated mark. Of course he felt nothing, no sense of speed or acceleration; he was inside the same old enclosed submarine, and there was no marker post here, or anywhere else.

  But they’d clambered all the way out of Earth’s gravity well. Somehow it didn’t seem right, that such a gigantic milestone should pass unmarked. But it did.

  The Soyuz carried a small telescope, of sorts. It was a monocular, designed to be used as part of a sextant, for interplanetary navigation by the stars. Now, Henry used it to study the Moon.

  He swept his gaze along the terminator, the line between night and day, and the long shadows there; he could see terraces in the collapsed walls of the bigger craters, as if they were cities designed by some intelligence, walls which curved over the close horizon. And littered over the walls and some of the crater floors, he could see boulders, pinpoints of brightness sending long, needle-fine shadows across the dusty ground.

  If the dinosaur killer comet had hit the Moon, it would have left a crater like Copernicus or Tycho, with ejecta rays stretching around a hemisphere.

  After a time, he abandoned the telescope, and just looked.

  In the window, the Moon was still small, no more than the size of a golf ball held at arm’s length. But he could see craters, with his naked eye: a sight denied to every human who ever lived, before Galileo raised his telescope.

  He stared into the Moon’s grey light until his eyes blurred with tears.

  They passed through one major crisis.

  Henry knew almost nothing of the systems that would take him down to the Moon’s surface, and keep him alive there. There hadn’t been time to explain it all, and Geena suspected he didn’t want to know anyhow, until he had to.

  But then he started asking how they were going to carry their nuclear weapon down to the surface.

  Geena drifted in front of him. “Henry, we can’t do it. We didn’t design the mission that way. We don’t have any spare carrying capacity. The mass estimates—”

  “Then we have to leave some mass behind.”

  “Like what? The air? The water? We can’t do it, Henry.”

  Arguing was difficult in microgravity. They tended to drift around the cabin, colliding with the walls and each other; it screwed up their body language.

  “Then,” he said, “how are we supposed to use the nuke anyhow?”

  Arkady said gravely, “The nuke has a small rocket pack which can drop it out of orbit, directly to its target. We can bomb Aristarchus, or any middle-latitude site, but—”

  “It’s my fault,” Henry said. “I should have been more open.”

  “Yes, you should,” Geena said. “The story of your life, Henry. What the hell do you want, anyhow?”

  He hesitated. “Suppose I told you I needed to drop the nuke on the South Pole. How could you do it?”

  “It’s impossible,” Geena said. “We don’t have the delta-vee for the orbit change. And if you’re talking about delivering it to the surface, rather than dropping it at orbital speeds—”

  “Yes. We might have to use the bunker-buster effect.”

  “Again, we don’t have the delta-vee,” Arkady said. And he drifted away, and began a conference, in Russian, with the ground controllers.

  “There is no way,” Geena said, irritated. “Henry, this is your fault. This is your damn plan, isn’t it? If you told us up front what was on your mind we could have prepared for it.”

  He laughed. “That’s impossible. They wouldn’t have let me out of Edinburgh if I had. I guess I thought there would be more — flexibility. More options.”

  “Well,” she said heavily, “you guessed wrong.”

  He backed off, troubled.

  When Geena tried to sleep, she wasn’t disturbed by the noises of the ship’s equipment, the sensations of zero G. She was used to all that. What got to her now were the flash
es inside her closed eyelids: loops and meteorite streaks and starbursts, some of them so bright she felt dazzled. The flashes were caused by cosmic rays, heavy particles which had emanated from some ancient supernova, and had crossed light years to pass through her head.

  Even in low Earth orbit you were protected from this shit by the Earth’s arching magnetic field. Not out here. And every time one of those ancient little wasps passed through her, it caused a little more damage to her body’s structure.

  Slowly but surely, space was killing her…

  “I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the priest / That christened me…”

  Henry was whispering, but even so it woke her up. She turned in her sleeping bag, and cold air pushed in at the neck.

  Henry was hovering by the wall, holding loosely to a stanchion. He was staring out the window, looking at the Moon.

  Arkady was curled into a ball, snoring softly.

  The Man in the Moon had changed. It looked as if he had turned a little to the right, bringing his left side forward, obscuring Imbrium, his big, dark right eye…

  She had come so far, already, that she was looking at a new part of the Moon.

  Its light flooded over Henry’s face, shadowless and stark.

  “I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the Moon, / God bless me.”

  “Henry, what are you doing?”

  “Something I learned in Scotland,” he said. “I’m protecting you.” He turned to the Moon; half his face entered shadow, so that there was a terminator down his profile, picking out the shape of his eye ridges, nose and lips.

  “What’s she like?”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever taught you the poem.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s called Jane. She has a kid. A boy.”

  Geena grunted. “Different from me.”

  He thought about that, studying her. “No. I don’t think so. Not fundamentally. She’s strong, like you. She’s no astronaut, though.”

  “Will you go back to her?”

  “If there’s somewhere back to go to. What about you and Leonid Brezhnev over there?”