Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

Geena, moving with the slippery grace of a dolphin, opened up the hatch to the orbital module and beckoned him. Henry used his hands to pull himself after Geena through the tunnel, but — unlike Geena — he caught his knee on a control box, his foot on the lip of the hatchway. Two bruises already, and he hadn’t even gotten to Station yet. Anyhow, legs didn’t seem too much use up here, save as obstacles to movement; already his hands and arms, which would have to do most of the work in zero G, ached vaguely.

In the upper orbital module, he felt disoriented. The little box-room, its walls lined with equipment, seemed much bigger than on the ground. Not only that: it looked different, its layout subtly altered, as if some unknown engineer had replaced the compartment he’d clambered through on the ground with this distorted twin.

Geena was working the equipment. “Lunch time,” she said.

Henry shrugged. “I’m not hungry. I’m not even thirsty.”

“Bullshit,” Geena said precisely. “I’m dehydrated from the launch, and so are you. You have to learn to live up here.” She had pressurized the water tank, and now she pressed open the valve.

A sphere of water emerged — a little thumb-sized liquid planet, shimmering and wobbling, complex waves crossing its surface, the cabin’s floodlights returning a mesh of highlights. It swam towards Henry; he watched, fascinated. There were bubbles of air, trapped inside the blob of water, like so many tiny jelly-fish, showing no desire to rise to the surface. When they touched they merged, little silvery meniscuses gleaming.

He opened his lips and let the blob just sail in; the surface broke against his back teeth, and his mouth was flooded with crisp cool water. Half of it went down his air pipe, and he coughed, expelling a haze of tiny droplets.

Geena laughed.

Henry went back to the water valve and practised, until he could suck a ball of water into his lips without wasting a drop.

Geena dug out a plastic bag of grain. She shook it before Henry. “Buckwheat porridge,” she said. She squirted hot water into it, kneaded it, then pulled it open. He dug his spoon into it, but when he pulled out a spoonful, the porridge sprayed out of the bag and began floating around the cabin.

“Not enough water,” said Geena. “Time to feed the fish.”

She began pushing herself around the cabin, gulping mouthfuls of the porridge out of the air. Henry followed suit. It was fun to chase down the little crumbs, but the porridge was very dry.

After that, there was an awkward moment. How do you ask your ex-wife how to go to the bathroom?

Geena was predictably brisk. She opened up a panel in the wall, revealing a small, conventional-looking privy. There was no partition, no place to get privacy.

Henry said, “I’ll wait.”

“Like hell,” Geena said. “You have to learn how to do this. Come here.” She turned a switch; a fan started up with a clatter.

And so Henry found himself floating around with his dick in his hand, forcing himself to pee into a suction pump, while his ex-wife looked on, murmuring encouragement.

A cute stream of golden globules swam into the bowl and were whisked away, like something out of a Disney cartoon.

Geena said, “And later, the solid wastes—”

“Much later, Geena. Much, much later.”

For twelve hours the Soyuz, in a lower orbit, chased the Station around the curve of Earth. Geena worked through the rendezvous manoeuvres with care and skill. She was patient but tense, Henry saw; he sensed there wasn’t much time to spare.

Two hundred and fifty miles out, Geena switched on a system she called Mera, a long-range scanner. The docking was to be pretty much automated, it seemed. At twenty miles another short-range system called Igla turned itself on, and the Station showed up as a blob in a little TV screen.

The Station was the greatest construction ever assembled by humans off the planet. But it looked trivial, like a party favour, suspended over the blue curve of Earth.

The Soyuz worked its way smoothly through its final series of burns. Each thrust was a smooth, sharp push in the back, a rumble of the big engine behind. The smaller attitude thrusters sounded like hollow punches, like someone hitting a barrel with a sledgehammer.

And now the Soyuz turned again, and the Station swam back into Henry’s view, close enough now to make out detail.

It was a rough L-shape. Its spine was a string of modules, blocky cylinders joined nose to nose. Out from the final module sprouted an open spar — Henry could see Earth clouds through its structure — and there were delicate, purplish solar panels fixed like wings to the spar, and to the other modules.

It looked, Henry thought, more Soviet-era Russian than American.

Geena leaned towards him. “The tourist guide,” she said. “That spine of modules is the heart of the Station. There’s the Service Module, and the FGB. Both Russian-built, similar to Mir core modules.” They looked like two fat Soyuz craft, joined nose to nose. “Next we have the Resource Node, which links the Russian and American halves of the Station, and then the US-built Laboratory Module…” The last was unmistakeable, with its giant “USA” and stars-and-stripes. A black-painted Soyuz was stuck nose-first to one port, like a suckling pig to a teat.

Henry knew he was looking at the Station’s so-called Phase II configuration. The Station was still only partially built. It would have taken all of twenty-six more flights — by American, Japanese, European and Russian carriers — before the Station was complete, and able to host six people permanently. Even before the Moonseed, the Station was so far behind schedule, and so far over budget, that the first components were already starting to show their age.

The Soyuz nudged closer, like a lion stalking a deer. They would dock at a port on the Service Module.

Henry thought about the physics of docking, of joining two immense masses in Earth orbit. This wasn’t like bringing a boat home to harbour. For one thing, a boat was constrained to two dimensions, and the harbour didn’t move; here both Soyuz and Station could move in any of the three dimensions, and at different rates. Eight degrees of freedom, then. And on Earth there were damping forces: friction, air and water resistance, the restraining forces of rails and cables, all helping to kill the craft’s relative motion. In space, all the excess kinetic energy would have to be absorbed and damped out within the vehicles themselves…

But the Americans and Russians had been docking craft in space for four decades already. He decided to stop worrying about it.

The Soyuz swam closer to the Station, and the great structure slowly turned in space. It was like a toy, brightly lit, shining green, grey and white in the sun, and underlit by soft blue Earthlight. The modules were coated in powder-white insulation blankets, into which portholes had been cut. Henry could see now how the blankets were pocked by micrometeorite scars, big fist-sized craters. The blankets were a patchwork of colours, in fact, because some of them had already been replaced during the Station’s life. The paintwork of the once-bright logos had faded. Around the nozzles of the attitude thrusters mounted on the FGB he could see scorched, blistered paint.

He could see a face, sunlit in a porthole, peering out at him, human pink against the engineering dullness of the Station, the blue of Earth.

As the Soyuz’s nose nuzzled into its docking port, struts and shadows and powder-grey blankets filled his window.

He could feel the moment of docking: a slow grind of metal, a hard thump, a noisy rattle of latches. Then the Soyuz swung back and forth, gently, for long minutes; he heard metal creak around him.