Sergey spent his days exploring the lunar surface, collecting soil samples. All Katherine could do was watch. All day he bounced and floated, bounced and floated, fumbled with the soil canisters between his big gloves, and ultimately would return with what seemed to Katherine like nothing. Was it so hard, what he did, or was he just terribly inefficient? In any case, it was her job to seal, label, and store the samples, which would be sent back to Earth in the unmanned spacecraft that delivered their oxygen.
“What’ll they do with the soil, once they get it?” she asked over their desiccated dinner.
“Test for water, gas, and minerals. See what kind of resources we have here, to set up the colony.” His hooded eyes turned back toward his plate. His lips were shiny with grease from the meat jerky they’d been consuming. “We inspect for other curiosities as well. Asteroid-borne fungus. Amoebic life.”
“Found anything interesting so far?”
He shrugged. “If they have, they do not tell me.”
She studied his sloping nose, dark soft hair, big shoulders. There wasn’t much scenery up here, but there was Sergey. Good grief, Katherine thought, I’m starting to find this bastard attractive. It was true what they said about people and their captors.
Not that Sergey was her captor—she had to remind herself she’d signed up for this—but she was beginning to feel resentful of him as she cleaned the same surfaces and garments and tubes and vials over and over again. They’d sent more detailed instructions after she settled in—no one was sure if viruses or bacteria could survive on the moon’s surface, pathogens that might be unknown to humans and thus result in a brutal end for herself and Sergey up here—and so she had to sterilize everything three times a day, including his protective suit, helmet, oxygen tank, and tether. Fortunately, the habitat was not large; unfortunately, it did not take long to become mundanely familiar. It was situated on what felt like a small bluff overlooking Earth when it was visible, a far-off blue marble swirled with white. Behind them, on the dark side, there must have been some sort of cliff, for all she could see were stars. So many stars, the sky was near white with them, hills of salt poured across a dark table.
“We should chart them,” she’d told Sergey. She had never seen so many stars, even in the remote farm town where she’d grown up. “We should look for constellations.” She only knew a few—Cassiopeia, the big W; the two bears, Ursas Major and Minor; Orion’s belt. “Maybe Central Command will send us star maps.”
“Pfft.” Sergey had scoffed at her. “This is not our job, tracking stars. Besides, there are too many to see. No way of picking out constellations or anything familiar to us. On Earth, we see a tiny fraction of these. Up here, it is just noise.”
He’d walked away from her then, to signal finality, but he couldn’t go far. Inside the habitat were their two small sleeping modules on either side of the common area, a pantry stocked with tanks of water and massive quantities of dried food, and dozens of empty soil canisters. They each had a small closet for their limited wardrobes, and in the back wall, on the dark side of the habitat, was a door that was always locked.
“What’s in there?” she’d asked Sergey on the third day.
“Always with the questions.”
She’d crossed her arms. “It’s strange, that’s all. We’re the only ones here.” She recalled a lake house she’d stayed in, in what felt like a different lifetime. The owners had a locked closet where, presumably, they hid the good china and bottles of liquor from renters. The presence of this closet in her surreal lunar home made her feel even more that she was merely a guest here, even an unwanted one, rather than a vital part of this mission. “Why would they lock a door to keep us out?”
Sergey’s face twitched. He didn’t seem to know what to say.
“You have the key, don’t you?”
He held up his hands. “Who, me?” His face broke into an uneven smile. “I say that in jest. I do not have the key. Just forget about it, okay, comrade?”
But there was very little to think about here, and she didn’t forget anything. At night, she couldn’t help thinking about the time she spent each day in the vestibule, helping him out of his Exo-Shell. She wore a respirator and impermeable gloves for the task, and he kept his helmet on until he came inside, but for a moment, while they were together, he would be undressed from the waist up. He had a scattering of little scars along the side of his ribs that looked to her untrained eye like shrapnel. Once, when she was feeling bold, she’d let a finger pass over one of these crags in his skin, which felt warm even through her gloves. He’d flinched and jerked away.
If she really were the sort of girl who asked too many questions, she’d ask about those scars.
She’d ask who Lizabeta was as well.
Neither Katherine nor Sergey slept well in the lunar habitat. There were nights—“rest periods,” they called them, since it was not always technically nighttime on the moon—when she felt sure that they were both awake, lying in silence on either side of the bubble, both staring at the myriad stars while unpleasant thoughts ran through their heads. She could tell when he couldn’t sleep, because then she could not hear him breathing.
Other times, he drew in breaths raggedly, tossing and turning inside the thin silver material of his hibernation sack. He murmured words she usually couldn’t understand, because they were either too garbled or in Russian, but once in a while a name rang out clearly:
“Lizabeta!”
Katherine hated hearing him call out for Lizabeta. She figured it might have something to do with the fact that they were all alone, she and Sergey, with no one to touch and no one else to keep them company. To witness him crying for someone else, someone he undoubtedly would rather be isolated with for this interminable period, made her feel terribly embarrassed.
“Lizabeta, Lizabeta,” he panted one rest period. “Izvini.”
That was one of the few Russian phrases he’d taught her: “I’m sorry.”
To wake him, she lobbed one of her slippers in his direction. The gravital capacitator did its work. The shoe connected, satisfactorily, with his head.