Bisesa stood and walked around the Eye, peering up at it. She continued to have an uneasy sense about it. Thats impossible. Pi is pi. The number is embedded in the structure of our universe.
Our universe, yes, Abdikadir said.
What do you mean?
Abdikadir shrugged. It seems that this spherethough it is evidently here is not quite of our universe. We seem to have stumbled into anomalies in time, Bisesa. Perhaps this is an anomaly in space.
If thats so, Casey rumbled, who or what caused it? And what are we supposed to do about it?
There was, of course, no answer.
Captain Grove came bustling up. Sorry to trouble you, Lieutenant, he said to Bisesa. Youll remember the scouting patrols Ive been sending outone of the sowars has reported something rather odd, to the north of here.
Odd, Casey said. God love your British understatement!
Grove was unperturbed. You might be able to make more of it than any of my chaps I wondered if you fancied a short excursion?
11. Stranded in Space
Hey, asshole, I need the john. That was Sable, of course, yelling up from the descent compartment, welcoming Kolya to another day.
He had been dreaming of home, of Nadia and the boys. Hanging in his sleeping bag like a bat from a fruit tree, with only the dim red glow of low-power emergency lights around him, it took him a few moments to realize where he was. Oh. I am still here. Still in this half-derelict spacecraft, endlessly circling an unresponsive Earth. For a moment he floated, clinging to the last remnants of sleep.
He was in the living compartment, along with their spacesuits and other unnecessary gear, and surrounded by the junk from the Station that they still carried with themthey could hardly open the hatch to throw it out. His sleeping up here gave them all a little more space, or, to put it another way, stopped three stir-crazy cosmonauts from killing each other. But it was scarcely comfortable. He could still smell the rotting discarded underwear, the Cossack jockstraps, as Sable had put it.
He groaned, squirmed and pulled himself out of his sleeping bag. He made his way to the little toilet, opened it out from the wall, and activated the pumps that would draw his waste out into the emptiness of space. When they had realized they were going to be stuck on orbit, they had had to dig out this lavatory from under the heaps of garbage; their journey home had been meant to last only a few hours, and toilet breaks hadnt been scheduled. This morning it took him a while to finish. He was dehydrated, and his urine was thick, almost painfully acidic, as if reluctant to leave his body.
Wearing only his longjohn underwear he found himself shivering. To maximize the Soyuz s endurance Musa had ordered that only essential systems should be run, at minimum power. So the ship had become progressively cold and damp. Black mildew was growing over the walls. The air, increasingly foul, was thick with dust, flaked-off skin, shaved-off bristle, and food debris, none of which, of course, settled out in the absence of gravity. Their eyes were gritty, and they all sneezed, all the time; yesterday Kolya had timed himself, and found he suffered twenty sneezes in a single hour.
The tenth day, he thought. Today they would complete another sixteen pointless orbits of the Earth, bringing their grand total, since the Station had winked out of existence, to perhaps a hundred and sixty.
He fixed his braslets to the tops of his legs. These elastic straps, a guard against fluid imbalances caused by microgravity, were adjusted to be tight enough to restrict the flow of fluids out of his legs, without being so tight that they stopped the flow in. Kolya pulled on his jumpsuitactually another discard he had found in the trash piles in the living compartment.
Then he clambered down through the open hatch and into the descent compartment. Neither Musa nor Sable met his eyes; they were sick of the sight of each other. He swiveled in the air and slid into his left-side couch with a practiced ease. As soon as he was out of the way Sable pushed herself up through the hatch, and Kolya heard her banging around.
Breakfast. Musa pushed a tray through the air toward Kolya. On it were taped tubes and cans of food, already opened, half-eaten. They had long since finished up the small stash of food aboard the Soyuz, and had broken into the emergency rations meant to sustain them after they landed: tins of meat and fish, squeeze tubes of creamed vegetables and cheese, even a few boiled sweets. But it was hardly filling. Kolya ran his finger over every empty tin, and sucked stray crumbs out of the air.
None of them were very hungry anyhow. The strange conditions of weightlessness ensured that. He did miss hot food, though, which he had not enjoyed since leaving the Station.
Musa had already begun his steady, determined working of the comms system. Stereo one, Stereo one Of course there was no reply, no matter how many hours he spent at the task. But what choice was there but to keep trying?
Sable meanwhile was bustling around upstairs in the living compartment. She had discovered the components of an old ham radio rig, which the Station astronauts had once used to contact amateurs across the planet, especially schoolchildren. Public interest in the Station had long waned, and the Stations aging gear had been disassembled, boxed up and packed into the Soyuz for destruction. Now Sable was trying to make it work. Perhaps they would pick up signals, or even be able to send broadcasts, on wavelengths the conventional gear couldnt handle. Musa, almost routinely, had grumbled when she wanted to hook the gear up to the spacecrafts power supply. Another blazing argument had ensued, but on this occasion Kolya had intervened. Its a long shot, but it might work. What harm can it do?
Kolya leaned forward and pressed the valve of the water tank. A globule a few centimeters across emerged and headed toward his face. Aware of Musa watching greedilythere would be a row if he wasted a single dropKolya opened his mouth wide. The water broke on his tongue, and he held it in his mouth, savoring its freshness, before swallowing it. Of all the rationing regimes Musa had imposed, the water was the hardest to bear. The Soyuz had none of the Stations recycling facilities; designed for short-duration hops from Earth to orbit and back, it was equipped only with a small water tank. But Sable had characteristically argued. Even when youre in a desert you dont ration your water. You drink it down when you need it. Theres no other way Right or wrong, the water was running out anyhow.
He dug out a tooth cleaner from a compartment on the wall. This was a bit of muslin impregnated with highly flavored toothpaste that you slipped over your finger and worked around your mouth. Kolya used this carefully, sucking every last bit of minty flavor out of the scrap of cloth; somehow the taste seemed to assuage his thirst a little.
And that was his day begun. He couldnt wash, for they had long since run out of the soft flannels that you usually used to wash your body and your hair. No doubt they all smelled as bad as the Cossack jockstraps upstairs. But at least they were all the same.
As Musa continued to call plaintively into the dark, Kolya turned to his own self-appointed program of work, which was a study of the Earth.
In his long hours in space, Kolya had always derived great pleasure from watching Earth. The Station, like Soyuz now, orbited only a few hundred kilometers above the surface, so to him the planet had none of the sense of isolation and fragility that the travelers to Mars reported, when they looked back at the blue island where they had been born. To Kolya Earth was hugeand all but empty.