Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  When Henry uncracked his helmet, he could smell the dust. It smelled like gunpowder.

  It made Henry sneeze.

  The dust in this shelter had never before been exposed to oxygen. So every grain was chemically active, like gunpowder just after it had been set off, and it was busily oxidizing, rusting away, not to mention reacting with his nasal passages.

  Geena took her helmet off. Her short hair was plastered to her forehead.

  They sat for a moment, breathing hard, facing each other, huge and clumsy in their pressure suits.

  It was—awkward. Eight years of marriage, and here they were on the damn Moon, and he couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  Looking into Geena’s ice blue eyes, he sensed she felt the same.

  They got on with their chores, and their conversation stuck to the equipment.

  They took off their gloves and helmets. Then, helping each other, each in turn stepped into a big stowage bag and pulled it up, and began to dismantle and shuck out of the suits. The stowage bag was needed to catch the rain of sooty Moon dust.

  The hab module seemed smaller than it had looked from the outside, and it was tipped up by the Shoemaker’s awkward landing. There was only just room for a suited human to stand upright. Every time Henry rolled against the fabric wall the whole thing shook like a kid’s inflatable bouncer; he just hated the thought that this was all that stood between him and the high-grade vacuum outside.

  They piled up their opened-out suits in a corner of the shelter. They would have to leave them to dry out before they would be usable again. The pressure suits, irradiated by the sun, smelled of ozone. And Henry found his faceplate was scarred, in several places. Tiny zap pits, from the invisible interplanetary sleet within which he’d been walking, micrometeorites laboring to wear away his protection. If he stayed out there long enough, he supposed, the hail of dust would wear him down, grind up his suit and flesh and bones, leaving nothing of him but a strange organic trace in the thick regolith layers, a part of the eroded-flat Moon.

  Out of his suit for the first time since leaving lunar orbit, he inspected his own damage. His face, armpits, chest and crotch were pooled with sweat. The sweat didn’t drip down, as it did on Earth, but clung in place; he could scrape it off with his fingers but it stuck there too, wobbling like a viscous jellyfish.

  His hands and forearms ached, and his fingers were sore—he even found blood underneath the nails of his right hand—and his wrists had been bruised where they bumped up against the seal rings on his suit.

  By comparison, his hips and knees felt stiff from underuse; it was a pleasure to do a little stretching, to touch his toes and squat down, bending his knees, to flex his body in ways his encasing pressure suit never allowed. There was no doubt, though, that Geena was right; the Moon was a world for the hands and arms and upper body.

  Geena opened a spigot on one of the boxes, and poured water into a shallow bowl. “Here. Wash. But go easy.”

  The water poured slowly, and curled gracefully against the side of the bowl, licking upward in a slow tide, as if trying to escape.

  Henry dipped his hands in. The meniscus bowed, reluctant to wet him. Geena had a little vial of liquid soap, and when he added that the water ran more easily over his hands. When he lifted his hands out of the water the liquid clung to his skin in a sheath maybe a half-inch thick. He held his hands over the bowl, and the water dripped back in fat globules.

  The languid motion of the water was surprisingly pleasing, easy on the eye muscles. As if, he thought, this was the pace our systems were supposed to work at all along.

  They pulled on blue Space Shuttle flight suits.

  Geena showed him the hab’s systems. The life support was open-loop. There was no attempt to recycle any of it. The hab could support the two of them, Geena said, for maybe six days. The atmosphere in here was low-pressure oxygen; there were filter beds to take out carbon dioxide, which they would have to reload.

  The power came from hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells, built into the Shoemaker, which would also supply more water. Their waste would go into bags or tanks, to be dumped over the side when it was time to leave. There were cold plates and radiators to control the temperature. There was a simple medical kit, germicidal wipes, some tools, equipment for the EVAs.

  Cramped, dusty, fabric walls, tipped-up, crowded with gear: the hab was, he thought, like a tent in the Antarctic. Except for the two huge space helmets stacked in the corner.

  Geena started to dig out food.

  “Station rations,” she said. “In fact just the rehydratable stuff. You can add hot water, but we don’t have an oven.”

  Henry looked at the rows of labeled plastic bags in dismay. “Fit for a king. Okay, what do you recommend?”

  She dug out two packets. “Chicken, cashew nuts, rice.”

  “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 flavor, 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 specialty. 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 gray 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 electro-statically, 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 its 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 fireproof 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 toward 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.”

  “Yeah.” He clambered back into his own hammock, and pulled his sleeping bag up around his neck.

  He tried to settle his mind.

  He listened to Geena’s soft, even breath. When he thought he was tipping, he looked up, and he could see the hammer dangling there, calm and rational, a link to a world where the laws of physics continued to work.

  He closed his eyes, determined to sleep.

  To his surprise, he succeeded.

  45

  Alone in lunar orbit, Arkady set his alarm to wake him during a period when he was on the far side of the Moon: invisible to all mankind, to remote blue Earth, even to the two humans scrambling through the Moon dirt near Aristarchus, here he could enjoy the ultimate privacy.

  He lay for a moment in his sleeping bag. He was surrounded by equipment, bags and containers and documents, fixed to every square centimeter of wall surface. It was like being in the middle of a busy railroad station, he mused, luggage scattered everywhere.

  The craft’s noise was a miniature orchestra: the whirring of different electrical devices, fans, regenerators, carbon dioxide absorbers and dust filters, gadgets which were never switched off. The noise rattled around him, echoing in this compact metal barrel. It was, he supposed, about as noisy as a busy apartment—with one difference: these were only mechanical sounds; there were no human voices here, save his own.

  Once, for an experiment, on the far side of the Moon, he’d turned everything off. Just for a moment. The silence was oppressive: in his ears there was only the susurrus of his own breath, his rushing blood, and beyond that a stillness that stretched a quarter-million miles. It gave him an unwelcome sense of perspective: noise seemed to make the universe more friendly.

  Loose objects—pens, paper, food wrappers—swam through the air past his head. They moved languidly in the gentle air currents from the fans, sometimes darting this way and that in the random flow of the air, like improbable fish.

  Here, everything floated: dust, pieces of trash, food crumbs, juice drops, coffee, tea. None of it would settle out, and all of it ended up suspended in the air. This enhanced Soyuz was fitted with a jury-rigged air circulation system, and a lot of stuff would end up collected on the intake grill of fan ducts, which he kept covered with cheese cloth. Once a day, he would wrap up the cheese cloth with its assorted trash and replace it with a fresh one.

  Most things, if he lost them, ended up on the grill. If he needed something in a hurry he had a little rubber balloon that he kept in his coverall pocket. If he blew this up and released it, it would drift with the prevailing air currents and he could just follow where it went.

  If he was thinking about chores, it was time to get up.

  He clambered out of his sleeping bag. He started his day with bread, salt and water.

  He spent some time cleaning up the Soyuz.

  He had some napkins soaked with katamine, a scouring detergent. He wiped down the wall panels, the handrails, the door hatches, the control panel surfaces, the crew couches. And, with a little hand-held vacuum, he cleaned all the tough places where dirt built up. He opened up wall panels so he could vacuum the bundles of pipes, cables, fan grills and hea
t-exchanger ducts there. When he did that he found a pen he’d lost right after the launch; he tucked it in his pocket, unreasonably pleased at this little triumph.

  He had grown used to life in microgravity.

  When he’d first arrived on Mir, he remembered, he could barely move a meter without catching his feet on side panels and banging his legs on anything fixed there: documents, cameras, lenses, control panels. Now he could fly through hatches and compartments, wriggling like some lanky fish, neatly avoiding the equipment and obstructions. If he had to cross some space without handholds, he had learned how hard he had to push. When he had to maintain a position at some work station, he had learned to find a post around which to wrap his legs, or else he would find somewhere to lodge his elbows, feet, knees or even his head, thus holding himself steady; sometimes he would use his legs as clamps, to hold maps or other documentation.

  He had come to depend heavily on the advice and experience of other cosmonauts who, for nearly thirty years now, had been learning to survive long-duration assignments in space.

  There had been that time, for instance, when the Progress resupply ship was late and he and his crewmates had been reduced to burning lithium perchlorate candles to sustain their oxygen. And then the recycling plant that connected to the toilet had failed, and the sewage tanks had filled up. The crew had been forced to open up the tanks and simply stir the sewage, to reduce the volume. That had worked, but the stench had been awful and did not seem to dissipate, as the days wore on; after all, they could not open a window up there to let in fresh air.

  Still, there had been some comedy as their American guest, brought up there in air-conditioned comfort on Shuttle, had tried to cope with all this; she had looked on with horror as the sewage tank was opened, antiseptic wipes over her face to protect her from week-old Russian shit—or, as she had comically put it, “human post-nutritive substance…”

  There were two E-mails for him today, transferred up via Houston to the IBM laptop fixed to one wall by Velcro patches. The first mail was relayed from Korolyov. It seemed his coefficient of errors was up to point three five, an unacceptably high level by historic standards.