Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“Ah. You always preferred Chinese.”

“Henry, for Christ’s sake.”

“Sorry.”

“The hot spigot is over there.”

“Right.”

He found how to inject the bags with water, and knead them up until they were mushy. Geena slit open the bags with a pocket knife, and dumped the contents into bowls. Then she dug again into the food locker and produced chopsticks.

“Wow,” Henry said. “You think of everything.”

“Just something I always wanted to try.”

In one-sixth G, the chopsticks worked better than on Earth; the food seemed to fly in a steady stream to Henry’s mouth, and with pretty good accuracy. But the portion lasted just minutes, and as for the flavour, he had the feeling he should have eaten the plastic packet.

The walls of the hab were vaguely translucent. It was, of course, still lunar morning outside. As he ate, Henry was aware of the gross features of the landscape: the sun a dazzling, blurred disc, black sky, bright ground.

Geena seemed to be trying to come up with something to say, to fill the silence. “You know, the Chinese have a Moon legend. They say a beautiful girl called Chango has been living up here for four thousand years. She was sent up here because she stole the pill of immortality from her husband. And she has a companion, a big Chinese rabbit which—”

“What if we get punctured by a meteorite?”

“You know that’s not likely.”

He punched the walls with his fist, making the fabric wobble around them. “Okay. But what about cosmic radiation?”

“Actually, the biggest risk on a six-day stay is a solar flare.”

“So where is the six-inch shell of lead plate to protect us?”

“You can’t design out all the risk, Henry. And the risk of dying because of some act of God up here is low compared to some of the other risks we have to take.”

“Such as?”

“Principally, launch from Earth. Reentry is no Disneyland ride, either.”

“So tell me how you handle this low risk.”

“Management waivers. A NASA speciality. You want some dried strawberries?”

After they’d cleaned up, they did some work on their suits. They turned away from each other, seeking a little privacy.

…The cabin was still full of Moon dust. Henry could actually see it in the air, hanging like a fine grey mist. If he breathed in deep it scratched at his throat and hurt his chest.

It was very clingy stuff. It got all over his hands. It stuck to everything: metal, fabric, painted surfaces, clothes and skin. The stuff had low conductivity and dielectric losses, and it had been pounded incessantly by ultraviolet from the sun, and so it had built up a charge. It stuck to him electrostatically, the way he had once, as a kid, made pieces of paper stick to his comb.

But knowing the process didn’t make it any less of a pest.

He worked on his suit. He tried a pocket-sized whisk broom to scrub the dust off of his suit. But it only seemed to work the dust deeper into the fabric.

The dust itself was very fine. It was basically ground-up lava bedrock, which made it abrasive as all hell. There were probably shards of pure iron, and perhaps glassy spheres and dumbbells in here, produced by major impacts, droplets which had been thrown into space and fallen back. And he could see the soil contained larger fragments: agglutinates, particles welded together by the glass produced by the much smaller impacts of micrometeorites.

Out on the surface, the regolith matured, subtly, the rain of micrometeorites welding it into such agglutinates, the solar wind implanting volatiles — hydrogen, for example — into the surface. Maybe recoverable, by future colonists.

He could feel the glass pricking at his fingers. And, as he rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, it was working his way into his skin, he saw. It seemed to be smoothing out his fingertips, taking away his individuality under a surface of lunar debris. He suspected it would take a long time, a lot of washing, before he could get himself clean of this stuff.

He started greasing his suit’s zippers and neck and wrist ring seals.

The toilet was waste tubes and plastic bags. Embarrassing intimacy.

When it was time to sleep, they slung fire-proof Beta-cloth hammocks across the shelter, one over the other. Henry elected for the bottom bunk.

Geena gave him a sleeping bag, and a length of hose.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Pump your bag full of water.”

“Are you crazy?… Oh. So this is NASA’s plan for protecting us from radiation.”

“You got it.” She dumped her own sleeping bag onto her bunk, and ran a tube from the water tank. When her bag lining was full she hung a blanket over the sun’s blurred image, darkening the hab, and clambered into her bunk.

Henry climbed inside his own bag and tried to lie down. It was like settling into a wraparound water bed. Every time Geena moved, she gurgled; and, he supposed, so did he.

Just above him, Geena barely made a dent in her own hammock, but he could see the curve of her hips, the way she’d tucked her legs up a little way towards her stomach, just like she always used to.

He tried to sleep.

The shelter was full of noise, the bangs and whirs of coolant pumps and ventilation machinery.

He’d read that the old Apollo guys had trained for sleeping on the Moon by camping out in Lunar Module simulators, with a tape of LM noises playing in the background. They should have just slept in a boiler room, he thought.

…There was a creak. He had a sense of falling.

His eyes snapped open.

“Geena,” he hissed. “Are you awake?”

Geena’s voice was hushed. “Hell, yes, I’m awake.”

“Did you hear that?”

“Hell, yes, I heard it.”

“Do you think we’re tipping?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t suppose this damn thing is going to roll over altogether?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“No. I can’t tell for sure which way is up. This low gravity—”

“Henry.”

“What?”

“Why are we whispering?”

Henry pushed his way out of his hammock. He collided softly with Geena, who came tumbling down from the top bunk; he held onto her upper arms, to keep them both from falling over.

For a moment they stood there like that, in the milky gloom of the shelter. Geena’s face was only a few inches from his, outlined by the subdued stand-by lighting. Her eyes were pools of darkness, her mouth a shadow. But her breath was warm on his face, the heat of her flesh in his hands tangible; for the first time he realized how deeply, utterly cold he had felt, how much he needed to be held by another human being.

They were, after all, alone on the Moon, the only living creatures on a planet.

She said, “You feel horny, don’t you?”

He grunted. “I haven’t felt so horny since my father’s funeral. But—”

“But it wouldn’t be wise,” she said.

“Damn right it wouldn’t,” he said; and when he looked into her eyes, he saw they both meant it.

They stepped apart. She began to cast around, in the piles of equipment loosely stacked on the floor.

“What are you looking for?”

“A weight.”

“What for?”

“A plumb line. If we can’t tell which way is up we need an attitude reference. We don’t have an eight-ball in here.”

She dug out one of Henry’s smaller geology hammers, and tied a piece of string to it. When she hung it up from a loop in the roof of the shelter, it hung straight down.

“So we aren’t tipping,” Henry said.

“No. That damn thing knows which way is up, even if we can’t tell.”

“Yeah.”

She reached up and, with an easy low-G bound, pulled herself up into her hammock once more. “Good night, Henry.”