Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

There was a series of clattering bangs on the outside of the hull.

Geena shouted, “There goes the escape rocket. And now—”

And now another jolt, much bigger, fundamental. Henry knew that must be the clustered first-stage boosters dropping away. Now only the centrally-mounted main engine was burning.

The thrust built higher, smoothly.

“Thirty miles high,” Geena said.

Another clatter from the cabin hull, and suddenly the faring was gone. No longer needed, Henry realized, because they were already above most of the air.

The windows were clear. There was a shaft of yellow sunlight, lying across his spacesuited lap.

He looked right, through his Captain Nemo window.

There was a loose snow, drifting past his window: ice, breaking off the hull of the capsule. They were so high now there was no air friction; only the ship’s steady acceleration carried him away from the ice fragments as they spun.

The second stage rocket died with a bang.

The acceleration vanished. Henry and Geena were thrown forward against their restraints, two puppets, helpless in this steel fist. A second of drifting. The ticking of the cabin instruments, the cooling creak of the hull.

Then came another bang as the final stage lit up, and they were slammed back into their seats. The acceleration soon built to the most ferocious of the launch.

There was nothing smooth about rocket flight, Henry realized, nothing gradual. It was all or nothing.

He glanced at the clock. Less than eight minutes ago he was still sitting on his back on the pad —

The third stage cut, in an instant. Henry was thrown forward against his restraints. He gasped. His chest was sore, probably bruised. His back hurt.

One instant the stage had been burning as hard as it ever had, the next it was dead.

But there was no more rocket fire, no more lurches of acceleration. It was, it seemed, over.

The light shifted across his lap.

Through his window he could see the Earth: the curving blue breast of an ocean that had to be the Pacific, laced with streamers of cloud, like a slice of day. And above a blurred horizon there was a jet-black sky, the sky of space.

The launch was over. This was Earthlight on his lap. He was in a spaceship, and it was rolling, and he was on orbit.

Holy shit, he thought.

For two and a half hours after launch, they had to stay strapped in their couches. Geena worked through more checklists, ensuring the comms, solar panels, computer, pressurization, propulsion and other systems had all survived the launch and were working correctly.

Henry could loosen his straps. He felt his body float a little way above the seat, so his layered suit wasn’t sandwiched under his back any more. The ventilation was working the way it was supposed to, and he started to feel pleasantly cool; the sweat that had gathered in the small of his back dried up quickly.

If he relaxed his muscles, he found his hands rose before him, as if raised by invisible threads, as the muscles of his arms reached a new equilibrium.

Floating: no pressure points on his body, the temperature neutral. If he closed his eyes it was as if he was suspended in some fluid, in a sensory deprivation tank maybe…

But by his right-hand side, through the stout little Nautilus porthole, he saw the Earth.

White clouds, curved blue sea: his first impression. The clouds” white was so brilliant it hurt his eyes to look at the thickest layers too long, as if a new sun was burning from beneath them, on the surface of the Earth. And the blue was of an extraordinary intensity, somehow hard to study and analyse.

It was easier to look at the land, where the colours were more subtle, greys and browns and faded greens. Cultivated areas seemed to be a dull sage green, while bare ground was a tan brown, deepening to brick red.

But Henry was struck by how much of the planet was empty: all of the ocean, save for the tiny, brave lights of ships, and great expanses of desert, jungle and mountain. To a first approximation, Earth was a world of blue ocean, baked-brown desert, and a few boundary areas.

And the Earth was immense. The Soyuz, for all the gigantic energy of its launch, was trivial, circling the planet like a fly buzzing an elephant, huddled close to its hide of air.

The sense of motion surprised him. No feeling of acceleration, of course; but still the Earth unrolled beneath him, new features washing steadily over the horizon, littered with clouds that were strikingly three-dimensional. Here came the Florida peninsula, for instance, like a raft of land suspended on the royal blue waters of the ocean, its coast fringed by a delicious electric blue, the shallower ocean floor of the continental shelf. A little way out to sea, over the Atlantic, a bank of cloud was gathered in great three-dimensional ripples, like scoops of ice cream layered over the pond-like air. On the land itself, he could make out the spit of land that marked Cape Canaveral. Straight inland from that, surrounded by the central lakes, he could see the Disney World complex, splashes of white and grey. On the other side of the peninsula he made out Tampa Bay, and Miami in the south. The cities were bubbly grey, their boundaries blurred. The whole thing looked like a map — but in three dimensions, with that visibly thick layer of air above it.

He was struck by the land’s flatness, the way it barely seemed to protrude above the ocean’s skin. In fact Florida was indeed a karst topography, a bed of limestone laid down in a shallow, ancient sea, and the lakes were just hollowed-out sinkholes in the limestone. Little separation between land and sea.

But his view was never stable. The spacecraft turned, slowly, so that its big, wing-like solar panels caught the sunlight. If Henry craned his head he could see the panels, jutting out like an airplane’s wings from the hull of the ship, the solar cells gleaming gold, as the Soyuz turned like a flower to the light.

They flew into darkness: what Geena called the shadow, the dark half of the orbit. Reflections from the cabin lights on the windows made it hard to see out at such moments, but still Henry could make out continents outlined by cities, chains of them like streetlights along the coasts, and penetrating the interiors along the great river valleys. The strings of human-made light, the orange and yellow-white spider-web challenging the night, were oddly inspiring.

Over the Pacific’s wrinkled hide he saw a dim glow: it was the light of the Moon.

And then they flew towards the sunlight once more. It was quite sudden: a blue arc, perfectly spherical, suddenly outlined the hidden Earth, and then the first sliver of sun poked above the horizon. The shadows of clouds fled across the ocean towards him, and then the clouds turned to the colour of molten copper. The lightening ocean was grey as steel, burnished and textured. The horizon brightened, through orange to white, and the colours of life leaked back into the world.

He had the feeling he could spend his life up here and not tire of this.

But then, over North America, he saw a high, swirling stream of smoke. It seemed to flatten out at some high atmospheric layer, then plumed out towards the horizon. It was from the ruins of Washington State: steam and smoke and volcanic ash, disfiguring the face of Earth itself.

Eventually Geena told him he was free to leave his seat and get out of his spacesuit.

Helmet, gloves, zippers: he had to wriggle to get his arms and body out of the upper section, and then shove hard at the tight leggings to free himself. But as soon as he did, there he was floating in the air, dressed in his white T-shirt and longjohns, in a freedom he’d never imagined.

The closed-over walls of the cabin seemed roomy. With a push of a fingertip he made himself float up to the control panels fixed to the roof, and with a gentle shove he could spin in the air, so he was looking down on the couch, and the spacesuit which lay there like a beached whale. He tried making himself twist further, but he found that if he moved his head too quickly nausea washed over him.