Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

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 travel 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.

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.”