Katherine opened her eyes.
The blanket of tiny stars stared back at her, unchanged, above. Beside her, Sergey softly snored. How long had it been since they turned in for what they termed night? Her hair felt dry, her body still cool. They had probably been asleep for only an hour or so.
There it was again. She sat up, wincing. An invisible hand ran a searing-hot iron over her body from ribs to knees. It passed in a wave, cresting at such pain she nearly cried out, then subsiding, slowly, to nothing.
“Sergey.” She brushed a lock of hair away from his ear. At this point, she felt nothing but excitement. They would be fine, two pioneers out on this lunar prairie. Joseph and Mary alone in the manger. Now they were two. Soon they would be three. “It’s beginning.”
Sergey’s eyes, red from sleep, popped open. “Oh, darling, oh, oh, oh,” he said, sitting up, fumbling with her hands, attempting to be more awake than his current capabilities allowed. He rubbed his eyes, then felt her belly.
“Yes, your womb feels tense. You must sleep, my pet,” he said. “It says in the book.”
They’d sent a book, an obstetrics manual, which Sergey had been perusing. Katherine hadn’t seen it arrive; it had come one morning while she was still asleep, along with their tanks of oxygen, packaged dried food, and water. The book was in Russian, but Sergey refused to translate most of it for her. “Here is a quote,” he’d said. “ ‘The young mother must allow only the most harmonious images of birth to pass upon her impressionable mind.’ Let me be the one to prepare.”
She’d scoffed at this. “I am perfectly capable of reading the medical literature on this process I’m about to go through,” she’d told him. But, in truth, she felt she didn’t have to. Women had been giving birth for millennia. Animals lay behind trees and in caves and labored unassisted, and their calves and pups and hatchlings took their first steps within the hour. If her time on the moon had taught her anything, it was that people were capable of surviving with fewer luxuries than they had come to believe possible. With Sergey’s love filling the limited space that had become her entire sphere, she did not feel she needed anything else.
Now he stroked her hair. “The book says the first time for a woman may take a while, and it is best to go into it with as much rest as possible.” Shyly, he swallowed and looked down. “This is your first time, yes?”
“Yes,” she said instantly, reminded of how little they knew of each other, even after all this time. In the absence of other people, busybodies and tax collectors and work colleagues and intrusive aunts, there really was no reason to talk much about one’s history. “It’s yours, too?”
“Yes,” he said. “There is only you, and you”—he pointed at her stomach—“for me.”
Another wave hit her, stronger this time, so strong that she had to grab his shoulder and squeeze hard with her eyes closed. Sergey tried something—something he must have read about in the book—grabbing her hips and pushing them in toward each other. It felt wrong, and she tried to stop him, but she found she couldn’t speak. A strange cry came from within her, a raw, primeval sound, the first of its kind ever uttered on this celestial body. She screamed herself hoarse until the wave finally subsided, and when it did, she realized that the bulky cotton knickers she wore beneath her tunic were wet.
Slowly, she opened her eyes. Her vision had changed. It was crackling at the edges, it was all static; a blurry Sergey was visible only in outline, in the center of the picture. She couldn’t see his eyes. She felt as if she were looking into a television that needed to be tuned.
She was in between stations. She needed her antenna fixed.
“Katya. Katya!” His hands were back on her shoulders, and he was trying to get her to answer.
“That time…” She gasped. “That time it didn’t go away. The pain—it still hurts. It was only the second—why does it still hurt?”
Sergey gasped, and she realized he was looking down between her legs. Her legs felt wet and sticky. “Bozhe moy,” he muttered. “Bozhe moy, bozhe moy!”
“What does that mean?” At last, she looked down at her lap. She was sitting in a puddle of red.
Sergey lifted her into his arms and laid her on his bed. When he stood back up, his white sleeping shirt was stained. “Stay here,” he said, his voice shaking.
“Sergey!” Her body thrummed with pain, a low, dull ache. She had a horrible inkling that he’d leave, he’d put on his suit and disappear, as he’d done before. “Please, come back!”
When she heard his voice she realized he hadn’t gone far. He was shouting in Russian. “Pomogi! Pozhal’sta pomogi!” She squinted, then realized he was bent over the camera, crying into the lens. “Eto srochno, pomogi!”
Another contraction was beginning. She could feel it start to rise, a tingling in the toes, a tsunami still offshore. Quickly, it built. “Sergey, please!” She reached for him with outstretched fingers. “Don’t leave me—” The ability to speak disappeared. Her eyes rolled back, away from him, staring in pain at the forbidding white landscape and the black sea of sky beyond. There had never been a pain like this before.
Or perhaps there had. Perhaps it had been felt by a million women before her, and the animals, too, oh, those animals….
Perhaps this was the secret no one spoke of, the secret of life’s creation: that it was built on the annihilation of the female body.
Sergey was at her side. She could feel his warm fingers wrapped around hers and combing through the now damp mass of her hair. “Bohze moy,” he said again as he felt her belly and between her legs.
She felt him take a deep breath, his chest expanding against her upper arm. He let out a small sob, and then he screamed, in English this time:
“HELP!”
The last thing she remembered before everything went black was the locked door bursting open, and the men, so many men, rushing inside.