During the last stages of the descent, a big blue and white parafoil, a steerable parachute a hundred and fifty feet wide, would blossom from the lander’s rear compartment. That would be quite a ride. The parafoil, the largest steerable “chute ever made, would be controlled by warping its wings, which was just the way the Wright brothers had steered their first ever manned flying machine. That seemed somehow appropriate. Anyhow, thus they would steer their way to a final descent, landing gently on skids.
In theory.
In fact they wouldn’t be steering the craft anywhere. The whole descent was automated. This was something against which Malenfant had fought hard. To give up control of the rudders and flaps to some virus-ridden computer program went against every instinct he’d built up in thirty years of flying. But it was much easier and simpler for the engineers to devise a lander that could fly itself all the way down than to figure out how to give a pilot control. Trust us, Malenfant. Trust the machine.
The facilities were not glamorous, even compared to the Station and the Shuttle. To wash Malenfant had to strip to the buff and give himself a sponge-bath. It took longer to chase down floating droplets of water and soap than to bathe in the first place.
The toilet arrangements were even more basic. There was no lavatory compartment, as in the Shuttle and Station, so they were thrown back to arrangements no more advanced than those used on Apollo, and earlier. There were receptacles for their urine, which wasn’t so bad as long as you avoided spillage, but for anything more serious you had to strip to the buff again and try to dump your load into plastic bags you clamped over your ass with your hands.
In this cramped environment they had, of course, absolutely no privacy from each other. But it never became a problem. Nemoto was twenty-five years old, with a fine, lithe figure; but Malenfant never found her distracting — and vice versa applied, so far as he could tell. Their relationship was prickly, but they were easy together, even intimate, but like siblings.
It was as if he had known this odd, quiet girl for a long time. In some other life, perhaps.
After eighteen hours awake, they prepared for sleep.
Malenfant had always had trouble sleeping on orbit. Every time his thoughts softened he seemed to drift up out of his couch, no matter how well he strapped himself down, and jerk himself to wakefulness, fearful of falling.
And on this trip it was even worse. He was acutely aware that he had travelled far from home this time — in particular, far beyond the invisible ceiling of Earth’s magnetic field, which sheltered the world’s inhabitants from the lethal radiation which permeated interplanetary space. When Malenfant closed his eyes he would see flashes and sparks — trails left in the fluid of his eyeballs by bits of flying cosmic debris that had come fizzing out of some supernova a hundred thousand years ago, perhaps — and he folded over on himself, imagining what that cold rain was doing to his vulnerable human body.
After a couple of hours he prescribed himself a sleeping pill.
On the couch next to his, Nemoto lay very still, and didn’t react when he moved; he couldn’t tell if she was asleep or awake.
When he woke up, the pure oxygen of the cabin’s atmosphere had made his nose irritable and runny, and his skin was starting to flake off, bits of it floating around him in the gentle breezes.
The nearest thing to navigation in space Malenfant had performed before had been the not-inconsiderable task of sliding a Shuttle orbiter into its correct low Earth orbit, and then nudging two giant spacecraft, Space Station and orbiter, into a hair’s-width precise docking and capture.
Flying to the Red Moon was a whole different ball game. The X-38 had left a planet whose surface was moving at around 1,000 miles per hour. The craft was aiming to encounter a Moon moving at some 2,300 miles per hour relative to the Earth, with an orbital plane that differed from the spacecraft’s. Furthermore the X-38 had to aim, not at where the Moon was at time of launch, but where it would be three days later. For the sake of the air-to-ground public-consumption transmissions they were forced to endure, Malenfant sought metaphors for what they were trying to achieve. “It’s like jumping from one moving train to another — and landing precisely in a top-price seat. No, more than that. Imagine jumping from a roller coaster car, and catching a bullet in your teeth as you fall…”
And the various computations had to be accurate to within one part in four million, or the X-38 would slam too steeply into the Red Moon’s atmosphere and burn up, or else go flying past the Moon and become lost, irretrievably, in interplanetary space. If they got the navigation wrong, they were both dead. It was as simple as that.
It didn’t console Malenfant at all to consider that this feat of translunar navigation had been achieved by manned missions before — nine times, in fact, if you included Apollo 13 — since here he was in an untried, utterly untested spacecraft, heading for an alien Moon, and everybody who had worked on those ancient missions was retired or dead.
So he laboured at his astronomical sightings, in-situ position recordings which backed up tracking from the ground. He had a navigational telescope and sextant, and he used these to peer through the grimy windows of the lander to take sightings of the Earth, the sun and the brighter stars. He kept checking the figures until he had “all balls’, nothing but zeroes in his discrepancy analysis.
Oddly, it was this work, when he was forced to concentrate on what lay beyond the cabin’s cosy walls, that gave him his deepest sense of the vastness he had entered. There was Earth, for example, the stage for (almost) all of human history, now reduced to a tiny blue marble in all that blackness. Sometimes it was simply impossible to believe that this wasn’t just another sim, that the darkness beyond wasn’t just blacked-out walls, a few feet away, close enough for him to touch if he reached out a hand.
But sometimes he got it, and the animal inside him quailed.
Fire:
It is morning. The rain has stopped. The sky is grey.
Fire’s eyes watch a branch drift down the river.
Blue wades into the water, waist-deep. He catches the branch. It is heavy. He sets his shoulders and pushes until the branch is resting against the bank.
Another branch comes. Blue grabs it, and hauls and pushes it against the first.
More people come, men and women. Some of them remember the river. Some of them don’t, and are startled to see it. They wade into the water. They catch branches and shove them against Blue’s crude, growing raft.
Children play, running up and down the bank, jabbering.
A crocodile sits in the deeper water. Fire sees the ridges on his back, his yellow eyes. The crocodile’s eyes watch the people. Its teeth want the children.
Fire walks back to the cave. The fire is still burning. People have brought more wood. The damp stuff makes billows of smoke that linger under the roof of the cave.
Maxie is standing before the fire. Maxie’s hands hold a fish. The fish is small and silver. A stick is jammed into the fish’s mouth. Maxie throws the fish on a rock at the centre of the fire. The rock is hot. The fish’s skin blisters. Its flesh spits and sizzles. There is a smell of fish and ash.
Sally helps Maxie get the fish out of the fire. “Careful, Maxie. It’s very hot.”
Stone is watching Sally, his eyes hard and unblinking. His member stiffens. His hand strokes it.
Maxie blows on the fish noisily. His white teeth bite into the belly of the fish.
Stone strides to Sally. She stumbles back, alarmed. Stone tucks his leg behind Sally’s. She falls on her back. He falls on top of her. She yells. His hand rips at her brown skin. It tears open. Fire sees her pink breast, a shadow of hair below her belly.