Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

That done, the Honorary Concrete Worker continued with his duties, in lunar orbit.

When he passed over Aristarchus, he looked for Geena and Henry. If Arkady told the computer where to look, it was able to point the navigation sextant, with its low-power telescope, right at the rille; and when he looked in the eyepiece, just within the rim of the crater, there was the lander: a point of metallic light trailing a needlelike shadow.

He peered into the eyepiece, willing himself to pick out more details. Maybe he could make out the four landing legs of the old Apollo Lunar Module… Perhaps that fuzzy oblong was Geena’s inflatable shelter.

But the “scope wasn’t powerful enough for that, and he was starting to see what he wanted to see, not what was there; and so, he knew, he must put aside the telescope.

No Russian had ever visited the surface of the Moon. Perhaps no Russian ever would. It was an exercise in futility, therefore, to gaze on its surface like Moses at the Promised Land.

It might have been different, though.

Arkady would, he admitted to himself, relish the chance to be a hero, to be another Gagarin to inspire future generations, to help his country climb its long ladder to a better future.

But he would do nothing to jeopardize the mission.

He sailed once more into silence.

He liked this experience, sailing through lunar orbit, of being alone on the far side of the Moon. To a pilot it was the essence of flying: to be alone, in control of your craft. As he was now. It was, he thought, the purest form of freedom.

And there were lonelier places than the far side of the Moon. He had flown sorties over Afghanistan; he knew; he had been there.

When he came into view of Earth, the radio static turned to voices, and he was connected to humanity once more, strained voices which betrayed the grimness of the planet.

Houston woke them up with a burst of Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World.

Henry snapped awake, disconcerted. He’d woken up to news — bad news — every day for three months before the mission. But then it wasn’t NASA policy to pass on news, bad or otherwise, even when the world was coming to pieces around them.

For a while they lay in their bunks, staring at fabric walls illuminated by tan backlight from the Moon dust.

Good God, Henry thought. It’s real. I’m still on the Moon.

He’d slept well. He felt good.

Even the soreness in his arms had disappeared. The doctors on the ground had speculated that the cardiovascular system was so much more efficient, here in one-sixth G, that it cleansed the muscles of lactic acid and other waste products before they had a chance to do any damage. He hadn’t believed them; but now, he could feel the results.

How strange, he thought, that humans, four-limbed primates, should be so well-adapted to conditions on this sister planet. It looked as if those millions of years spent swinging around tree branches hadn’t been for nothing after all.

In the end, how easy it had been to come back to the Moon. They’d just decided they wanted to do it, and they’d done it. We wasted thirty years of exploration time, he thought.

But then Geena started to move, and it was time to begin the day.

A day in which, he realized, he was going to have to confront the Moonseed at last.

He struggled out of his sleeping bag.

When Henry peered out of the shelter’s little window, the Moon looked strange.

He knew from yesterday how far away the various instruments and craft of the Apollo astronauts were. He could even see the tracks of his own prints in the scuffed regolith. But when he looked out of the shelter’s window, it looked as if the instruments were right outside, as if they had come huddling closer to the shelter’s warmth.

None of it, the swimming perspective of the Moon, made any sense to him.

He turned to his suit and donned it, working steadily through its checklist.

When they were done they decompressed the shelter and climbed out, one by one, like fat grey-white grubs pushing out of a discarded shell.

He felt as if he was in some immense darkened room, where the light didn’t quite reach the walls, so that he was suspended in a patch of light in the middle of a darkened floor.

A morning that lasts a week. They’d first landed at something like 6:30 a.m., local time. The twelve hours they’d spent inside the shelter were equivalent to something like a half-hour in the lunar “day’: enough to shrink the shadows a little, but not by much.

Even so, all the pooled shadows were different, changing the feel of the landscape. Even the colours had changed, Henry saw, because the colours depended on the angle to the sunlight; the greys and browns, changing as he looked around, seemed to him a little more vivid.

He kept thinking he saw features, rocks and craters, he hadn’t noticed yesterday; but he soon realized they were the same rocks under different lighting, like a movie set that had been reassembled. The slopes of the crater walls and ejecta hills looked much less severe, almost gentle: not nearly the challenge they’d appeared yesterday. Maybe that was true. Maybe he was being fooled in the other direction.

The Moon was full of optical illusions, he thought. Given there was nothing here but bare rocks and flat sunlight, that was kind of surprising. It was a stage set put together by a master illusionist, a minimalist.

Maybe, he thought moodily, the Moon really is a magic world, a world of dream or nightmare, a world where distances and times can shift and swim, like a relativity student’s fever dream.

The Moon was, undoubtedly, a stranger and more interesting place than he expected.

He started to collect the equipment they would need for the day: tools and a couple of batteries for the Rover, his geological gear.

Reaching to lift a bag, he leaned too far, and fell.

When the fall began, his balance was lost quickly, especially when he tried to back up. The ground was uneven everywhere, and he kept treading on rocks and crater holes that made him stumble further. Besides, the heavy pack at his back gave him a centre of gravity aft of his midline, so he was always being pulled backwards.

But he fell with a dreamy slowness, like falling underwater. He had time to twist around, the stiff suit making him move as a unit, like a statue, and he could catch his footing before he fell. He just spun around, bent his knees and recovered, scuffing his feet to get them under him again.

Then he felt his ears pop.

He had to be losing pressure. He felt his heart pounding. Maybe he should call Geena.

He stood still. He leaned forward and checked the gauge on his chest. There was no change, and he didn’t feel any difference. Just that one pop.

Maybe he had bumped against the oxygen inflow port, or the outflow. If he obstructed the flow, that would cause a momentary transient; it might even have been a slight increase in pressure.

His monitors stayed stable. A glitch, then.

The incident was enough to brush him with fear.

Sobered, he went to work.

Side by side, carrying tools and equipment, they walked away from the Shoemaker, towards the Rover.

The Apollo Lunar Rover was a home-workshop beach buggy: about the size of a low-slung jeep, but with no body, or windshield, or engine.

“Oh, shit,” Henry said. “Have we really got to ride this thing?”

“Better than walking. You know what the Apollo guys called it?”

“Hit me.”

“Chitty Chitty Boeing Boeing.”

They bounced around the Rover, inspecting it.

The Rover was an aluminum frame, ten feet long, maybe six wide. It had four fat wheels — actually not quite wheels, but wire mesh tyres, with metal chevrons for tread. There were fenders, of orange fibreglass. There were two bucket seats with plastic webbing, and a minimal controller — just a gearshift-like hand controller between the seats, and a display console the size of a small TV. No steering wheel. At the back of the buggy there were bags for storage of equipment and samples.