The man she shared the lunar colony with had a name: Sergey. He slept in a bunk identical to Katherine’s at the far end of the habitat, as she’d come to think of it, because it was easy to feel like hamsters in this big glass dome with all its little gadgets and supplies arranged just so. The gadgets and supplies didn’t float around, and neither did Katherine and Sergey, because of some crackerjack Soviet invention that simulated gravity inside the prefab home.
Sergey didn’t say “crackerjack,” though; he said, “Brilliant technology, which Americans have been smashing their brains out trying to replicate. It is called a gravital capacitator.” He spoke fluent English, which was convenient. It made it possible, right away, for the two of them to argue.
“You cannot refer to a ‘day,’ ” he complained the first morning she woke up on the moon, “and expect me to know whether you mean a terrestrial day or a lunar day.”
“Well, what shall we call it, then?” she asked, slightly annoyed.
He opened his big hands and explained, as if he were teaching physics to a cat: “We speak in hours. If you mean Earth day, say twenty-four hours. If you mean lunar day, twenty-seven terrestrial days. Simple.”
Amused, she leaned back in her sitting module and attempted to cross her arms over her chest. The Soviets had provided her with a wardrobe of silver tunics with matching filmy trousers, plus an array of bullet brassieres. “Twenty-four hours is easier to say than ‘Earth day’?” Her voice felt tinny in the enclosed space. She had to speak above the light hiss of borrowed oxygen constantly filtering in from a giant tank outside. Every week—if it could be considered a week; Sergey would probably take issue with that, too—a robot-manned rocket came from Earth to replenish the oxygen tank.
“Not easier,” he corrected. “More accurate.”
“Aye, aye, comrade.”
She’d been told to call him comrade, which she did only on occasion and not without mockery. At first, the correspondence that came from Central Command was all in Russian. The typed letters curled down on ticker tape from a slot in one of the walls. She got to the first message that came after her arrival before he did. Morse code, she thought, simple, but when she began translating it, the letters made no sense.
She felt, more than heard, a rumbling laugh behind her left shoulder. “It’s the Russian Morse code. We use the Cyrillic alphabet,” he’d informed her, as though she didn’t know. “Here. Let me translate.”
Impatiently, she tapped her foot on the ground as he jotted down the message. He made a show of holding the paper out in front of him with straight arms as he read.
“Aha! It is for you.”
“So?” She waited. “What does it say?”
He grinned. “ ‘Welcome, American defector. The bonus payment you requested for your service has already been transferred to…’ ” He indicated the ever-blinking light of the visio-telespeaker. “You don’t want me to read the information for your bank account aloud, correct?”
She shook her head. “How do I know that thingamajig even works? Let alone has the capability to broadcast our lives all over the USSR?”
He looked back at the lens. “Don’t listen to her,” he said in a stage whisper. In English, thus for her benefit. “I’ll continue. ‘Miss Livingston, a reminder to begin each day promptly at seven hundred hours on the atomic clock. Day begins with salute of Soviet flag’—they do very much want to see you do this—‘and vigorous salute of Captain Kuznetsov.’ ” He shrugged and smiled, showing white teeth. “Those are the orders.”
She clucked her tongue. “I have to salute you? I think not.”
“Those are the orders,” he repeated. There was still a smile curling the corner of his lips. He had his sinewy arms crossed over his chest. For a moment, she felt distracted.
Finally, she shook her head. “How do I know what it really says? I have you translating for me.” She bent down in front of the camera, so all that would be visible was her mouth. “From now on,” she said loudly, “I shall receive separate correspondence. In English.”
In the end she got her way. Separate bulletins began arriving, written in mostly competent English. They reiterated their request for salutes, which she had no intention of fulfilling, and added more commands: “Your duty is to assist Captain Kuznetsov in his scouting tasks as discussed pre-mission: 1. Sustenance. 2. Cleanliness of lunar habitat. 3. Sterilization of equipment, especially uniform.”
“Meaning, I’m to do your cooking, cleaning, and laundry,” she said, brandishing the latest report. She let it fall to the floor, which it did, just as it would have done on Earth. The simulated gravity was remarkably realistic. Yet, whenever Sergey left the airtight antechamber, he bounced and bounced on the horizon, measuring craters, his boots seven feet in the air between steps. How she longed to be out there on a real lunar mission. “I’m no more than a housewife.”
Sergey shrugged. He was eating slices of dehydrated apple, his feet on the cushion of the sitting module that was supposed to be hers. “You want to go back to Earth, ask for a return of your shuttle.” At that point he winked at the lens—she was sure of it.
She stomped off to her bunk, making as much noise as she could in her capacitator-compliant slippers. For a while, she sulked by herself, watching him fiddle with a set of strange, S-shaped metal tools, his chest moving up and down as he guzzled the precious oxygen available in their cramped quarters.
How could he be so cruel to her, knowing as he must that she could not simply teleport back to her old life? A return to Earth would mean Russia. It was the only place that would take her now. The Soviets, or one of their territories. Both the Soviet and the American presses had made such a big deal of her defection; for a moment she’d been one of the most famous women on Earth. Now she was allegedly broadcast live on Programme One several times a day, although she had her doubts this was really true.
On Earth, she’d been a pilot. Well, a waitress. That was what she’d been when they found her. She’d learned to fly planes during the war, when any man who could handle a throttle and knew yaw from pitch had been sent to bomb Italy. A man had come into her school looking for farm girls, specifically a farm girl with steady hands and a solid temper, and her teacher had pointed Katherine out, saying she at least had the former. Within a week, she was dusting crops. She learned to love the wind blasting her face in the open cockpit, turning her lips dry and her throat parched. She loved the smell of oil and fuel, the feel of the engine buzzing her skeleton. Over time, she grew daring, allowing the nose to pitch upward so that she could imagine flying all the way up to where the sky turned dark. She’d been working on a barrel roll when the war ended.
After the boys came back, she had nothing else she could do. She had quit her little country school at sixteen to dust crops. Waitressing, then, was her best option. Men came into the dented aluminum diner and offered to marry her. She said no. She sent away an application to the new space program they’d been talking about on the news. No answer. More men came in and ordered coffee, steak and eggs, asked her to marry them. Then, one day, two men came in wearing rumpled suits. They smelled stale, as if they’d been traveling. She poured their coffee.
“That you?” one of the men asked, pointing at a framed newspaper clipping, yellowed now, on the wall. She was wearing her flight goggles in the photo and smiling ear to ear. A medal dangled from her neck. Now the same medal hung around her bedpost in her parents’ house.
“Oh,” she said. “Sure. That’s me, all right.” It was embarrassing now, looking at how proud she was in that photo. An all-women air show and flight contest. These days, people marveled at how quaint it was in wartime, when girls were allowed a crack at such things. Not anymore—the boys were back.
She went to fetch the men a cold pitcher of cream. “That was a long time ago,” she said.
“Would you want to fly again?” The man smiled slyly at her. Behind him, sunshine lit up the flat yellow fields. He wasn’t from around here, she thought. She couldn’t yet identify the accent.
She took a deep breath. “Of course I would,” she said all at once, then excused herself to grab a tray of malts and hamburgers.
The two foreign men paid and left. She watched them go outside, then stand by the road for a while and talk. When she finished her shift an hour and a half later, they were waiting for her behind the diner.