Control, and then, at her third attempt, made it into the Astronaut Office. She’d paid her dues as an ascan, and finally been attached to a Shuttle flight – STS – 141, Atlantis – and come flying up here, to Station, for a six-month vigil.
It turned out to be a question of just surviving in this shack of a Service Module, boring a hole in the sky for month after month. Russian and American crews, brought up by Shuttle, had been rotating up here on six-month shifts, struggling to do some real research in these primitive conditions, their main purpose to keep this rump of the Station alive with basic maintenance and housekeeping.
Even so, at first she’d been thrilled just to be in space, all these years after those Illinois dreams. And as her relationship with Siobhan Libet had matured, the experience had come to seem magical.
Then, after a few weeks of circling the Earth, she’d got oddly frustrated. She got bored with the stodgy Russian food and with the daily regime of exercise and dull maintenance. The Station blocks were so small compared to the huge spaces out there; it seemed absurd to be so confined, to huddle up against the warm skin of Earth like this.
Damn it, she wanted to go somewhere. Such as Titan, where those hairies at JPL thought they’d found life signs … But nobody was offering a ride.
It wasn’t really the great tragic downfall in human destiny that was bothering her, she admitted. It was her own screwed-up career.
Mott was thirty-four years old, and she wasn’t given to morbid late-night thoughts like these. She started to feel cold, and, suddenly, terribly lonely. Staying up all night no longer seemed such a great idea.
She pulled herself back through to the Service Module.
The interior of Station was cramped and crowded. The walls were lined with instrument panels, wall mounts for air-scrubbing lithium chlorate canisters, other equipment. These two modules had been serving alone as the core of the Space Station for too many years now, and as parts had worn out replacements had been flown up and crudely bolted in place, and new experiments had been brought up here and fixed to whatever wall space was available. As a result the clutter was prodigious; cables and pipes and lagged ducts trailed everywhere, and there was a sour smell, the stink of people locked up in a small space for too long.
She pressurized the water tank, and fired the spigot. A globe of water came shimmering through the air towards her face, the lights of the module sharply reflected in its meniscus. She opened her mouth and let the water drift in; when she closed her mouth around the globule it was as if the water exploded over her palate, crisp and cold.
If she couldn’t get back into space, she’d never in her life be able to take a drink like that again, she thought. Returning to Earth was going to be like a little death.
Her sleeping compartment was a space like a broom cupboard, with its own window, cluttered with bits of gear and clothing. Her sleeping bag was fixed straight up and down against the wall of the module, and she had to crane her neck to see out of her window, at the slice of Earth which drifted past there. With the Earthlight, and the subdued floods of the compartment, the Service Module was pretty bright, and the pumps and ventilation fans kept up a continual rattle. It was like being in the guts of some huge machine.
She pulled herself deeper into her sleeping bag, which soon became warm enough for her to be able to forget the endless vacuum a few inches away from her face, beyond the module’s cladded hull.
After an unmeasured time, she felt a hand stroking her back. She turned in her bag. Siobhan, naked, her hair floating around her face in a big burst of colour, was silhouetted against the cabin lights.
Mott smiled and reached out. She brushed Libet’s hair back, revealing her fine, high brow. ‘You look like Barbarella,’ she said.
‘In your dreams. Are you going to let me in?’
The sleeping bags were too small for two people. But they’d found a way of zipping their two bags together. It was cold, the opening at the top liable to let in draughts, but their bodies would soon build up a layer of warm air around them.
‘Anyhow,’ Mott said, ‘I thought you wanted to sleep.’
‘I did. I do. But I guess I can spend the rest of my life asleep. Down there, at the bottom of the gravity well. This seems too good an opportunity to pass up. The last time anyone will be having sex in space, for a long, long time …’
Mott clung to Libet.
Libet stroked her back. ‘Who was the first, do you think? The first orgasm in space.’
Mott snorted. ‘Yuri Gagarin, probably. Or one of those Mercury assholes fulfilling a bet. Maybe even old Al Shepard managed it.’
‘Oh, come on. He only had fifteen minutes. Even Big Al couldn’t have done it in that time. Anyway, those Mercury suits were hard to open up.’
‘Fifteen minutes. Well, we haven’t got much longer.’
Libet’s hand, warm now, moved over Mott’s stomach. ‘From first to last.’
‘From first to last,’ Mott said, and she closed her eyes.
She was woken by a buzzer alarm, at 4 a.m. It felt as if she hadn’t slept at all.
They prepared a hasty meal: tinned fish and potatoes, tubes of soft cheese, and a vegetable puree that had to be reconstituted with hot water. The rations were Russian standard, and, as usual, tasted salty and heavy with butter and cream to Mott. She drank sweet coffee from a plastic bag with a roll-out spout. She tried not to drink too much; she was going to be in her pressure suit for a long time.
Libet went down to the Soyuz to run a final check, and Mott got herself dressed in her stiff Russian-design pressure suit.
Libet suited up in her turn, and they pressurized each other’s suits, making sure they were airtight. Then Mott tested her pressure-release valve, a large knob on the suit’s chest panel.
She pocketed some souvenirs: her Swiss army knife, photographs.
By six a.m. they were both ready to leave.
A TV camera was mounted in one corner of the Service Module, all but concealed amid the equipment lockers and cables there. The camera was mute, no red light showing. It looked as if nobody wanted to record these last acts of the American manned space program, two unhappy astronauts clambering into Russian pressure suits.
Mott led the way for the last time out of the Service Module and through the FGB towards Soyuz. Behind her, Libet killed the lights in the Service Module.
The waiting Soyuz was stuck on the side of the FGB, nose-first.
She could see through blister windows in the FGB that the body of the ship was a light blue-green, an oddly beautiful, Earthlike colour. The Soyuz looked something like a pepperpot, a bug-like shape nine feet across. Two matte-black solar panels jutted from its rounded flanks, like unfolded wings, and a parabolic antenna was held away from the ship, on a light gantry. Soyuz was basically a Gemini-era craft, still flying in this first decade of a new millennium. And today, Mott and Libet were going to have to ride Soyuz home.
The Soyuz was strictly an assured crew return vehicle, in the nomenclature of the Station
