Moonseed (62 page)

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: docu
ments, 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.

Arkady sighed and discarded the mail. It was a peculiarity of the Russian system—seen by Geena’s American eyes at least—that every error he made, on this or any other mission, was recorded by his controllers on the ground. Basically, after a mission, he was evaluated not by what he did or how much he accomplished, but by how many mistakes he made.

If he saved the world, he thought wryly, maybe they would overlook his unsatisfactory error ratio.

The second mail was more pleasing. It was from workers at the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station in Siberia. One summer, as a student of the Moscow Institute of Aviation, Arkady had worked at Krasnoyarsk on a dam construction project.

Arkady was moved. He was sorry Geena was not here to see this—though he was glad her American ex-husband Henry was not here to mock. Americans would never understand such a gesture as this, and would deride it.

But to Arkady, it was like an echo of the past. It seemed to Arkady that since the implosion of the Soviet Union—whatever the rights or wrongs of that “liberation”—the Russian people had had precious few heroes to celebrate. This message from the power workers wasn’t the first such he had received. It warmed him, here orbiting the cold wastes of the Moon, to think that his countrymen, even
in these dark times, were following his mission. Arkady had always believed that the true value of a hero was not to himself or herself, but to others, as an example of the heights to which humanity can aspire.

He drifted before the laptop keyboard, and composed a reply.

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 that betrayed the grimness of the planet.

46

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 gray-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
colors
had changed, Henry saw, because the colors depended on the angle to the sunlight; the grays 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 center of gravity aft of his midline, so he was always being pulled backward.

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,
toward 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 tires, with metal chevrons for tread. There were fenders, of orange fiberglass. There were two bucket seats with plastic webbing, and a minimal controller—just a gear-shiftlike hand controller between the seats, and a display con
sole the size of a small TV. No steering wheel. At the back of the buggy there were bags for storage of equipment and samples.

The front of the thing was cluttered up with cameras and comms equipment. The TV camera still pointed at the sky, where it had followed the final departure of the astronauts in their LM ascent stage. The camera was coated in insulation foil, which had split and cracked. The umbrella-shaped high-gain antenna still pointed at Earth, where the Apollo astronauts had left it, for the Earth had not moved in all the years since.

This Rover was a working vehicle. He could see how the straps on the backs of the frame chairs were stretched and displaced from use. There were still dusty footprints on the foot rests fitted to the ribbed frame, and the mark of a hand, imprinted in lunar dust, on the TV camera’s insulation. And one fender at the rear had cracked, and had been crudely patched with silver wire and what looked like a checklist cover, though the text and graphic had long since faded. The Rover looked as if it had been used just yesterday, as if its original drivers would come back in a couple hours for a fourth or fifth EVA.

Tracks, crisply ribbed, snaked off back over the ground, diminishing into the distance.

The Rovers had been built from scratch by Boeing in just two years. There had only ever been four of these babies, and all of them had been flown to the Moon, and all of them had been left up here, in the clean airless sunlight. Two million bucks apiece.

At that it was a better fate, he thought, than to finish up in a glass case in the Smithsonian or some NASA museum, slowly corroding in Earth’s thick, murky air while generations of successively more baffled tourists came to stand and gawk…

He said, “What makes you think this old dune buggy is going to work anyhow? It was built to last three days, not thirty years.”