Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

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 stars 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.