Russian Spring (51 page)

But now all that was over, and the great adventure was beginning!

Franja’s only disappointment was that she was being denied the glorious view and had to content herself with imagining it in her mind’s eye: the blue sky purpling to black and the Earth falling away as the Concordski’s main engines took over with a satisfying slap of the seatback against her body, the planet’s surface curving and the stars coming out as the plane rose faster and faster through the upper atmosphere, the judder, the hesitation, and the sudden change in the music of the vibrations as the Concordski’s engines went to internal oxidizer for the final kick to orbital velocity, and then—

The vibrations stopped and the plane glided along in perfect silence as Franja felt a sudden slightly queasy floating sensation. She loosened her seat belt and felt herself rising up off her seat against it. She wormed her hand between the seat and her butt and squealed in delight as it fitted loosely into the gap.

“Free fall! We’re weightless! We’re in
orbit!
”

“What?”

Her seatmate, a middle-aged man who had spent the whole time reading, finally looked up from his book at her.

“I said, we’re in orbit!”

“Since this is a flight to Sagdeev, that should hardly be surprising,” he said owlishly. “This is your first time?”

“Yes!” Franja declared excitedly.

“Well, don’t worry about it, you’ll get used to it. But if you
are
going to throw up, please remember to use the vomit bag. Globules of puke floating all over the cabin would definitely be considered nikulturni.”

And he reburied his nose in his book.

There was a series of little chuffs and judders as the Concordski fired its maneuvering jets, then a long silent glide, then more chuffs and judders as it matched orbits with the Cosmograd. Franja felt a little queasy, but she was not going to vomit, there was no question of giving the bookworm such satisfaction. There was a series of little
poings
against the hull as technicians attached the cable, and then just a hint of acceleration as the Cosmograd reeled the Concordski toward the air lock.

More clangs and poings and a rather unseemly bang as they mated the spaceway to the plane’s door lock. Then the door slid open, Franja’s ears popped as the pressure was equalized, and the passengers undid their seat belts and, pushing and bouncing off seats, floor, walls, and occasionally each other, swam awkwardly toward the exit.

Franja grabbed onto the first of a set of rings set into the top of the short tubular spaceway and pulled herself hand over hand through it and into the Cosmograd.

The first thing that she noticed was the smell, a faint rank odor of old sneakers, natural armpits, boiling cabbage, and a chemical tang vaguely reminiscent of toilet disinfectant.

She found herself floating near the center of a large round chamber about fifteen meters in diameter, its “walls” coated with peeling sky-blue paint. The mouths of five passageways led off into the rest of the Cosmograd, and a three-dimensional cross of ropes led from the center of the chamber to the lines of hand-rings that crisscrossed its surface. Franja managed to clutch onto one of the ropes as disembarking passengers brachiated along them, grabbed onto handholds, and pulled themselves into the passageways and out of the debarkation chamber like a cageful of gibbons, leaving her and her six fellow novices floating about in confusion, wondering what to do.

“Where are the new monkeys? Ah, there you are, how could I tell?”

A burly woman in a green sleeveless jumpsuit had pulled herself into the chamber from the passageway “below” Franja and hung upside down by one hand from a ring like an inverted ape.

“I’m Melnikov, your temporary keeper, and I’m supposed to show you to your cages, so stick close, try not to trip over your tails, and let’s go,” she said, and pulled herself back into the passageway.

After a certain amount of bumping, confusion, and cursing, Melnikov managed to assemble all of them in the passageway behind her, a dull green tube with the ubiquitous line of handholds down the center of an arbitrary ceiling and blue, green, red, black, and yellow lines painted down an arbitrary floor.

“Welcome to Cosmograd Sagdeev, such as it is,” she said. “We’re going to crew quarters now, that’s the yellow line in case you get lost, red goes to command and control, blue to the air locks and freight ports, which you’ll be seeing plenty of, green is science, of which there is not much, and black is equipment, repair, and construction, which will be your main bed of pain; save your questions for later, and follow me.”

Melnikov led them down the passageway toward another, smaller spherical module with more passageway branches, down another passageway, through another intersection module, following the yellow line as the others branched off, until, after more swerves and turns than Franja could hope to remember, they reached a spherical module where all the passageways were marked with only the yellow and big white numerals.

“From here all roads lead to the monkey cages,” she told them. “Remember the number of your dormitory module, there’re only five, you can count that high, can’t you?” She fished a little clipboard out of a jumpsuit pocket. “Lermitskovski, Bondarov, follow me, the rest of you stay here and wait your turn.”

She led two of the recruits off down passageway 1, returned a few minutes later, and read off two more names. “Khukhov, Reed . . .”

Franja found herself brachiating down passageway 2 close behind Melnikov, with Khukhov, a small dark-haired woman who looked a little green around the gills, trailing after. A series of round doors ran down two arbitrary sides of the passageway, each marked with a big white numeral.

“This one’s yours, Reed,” Melnikov said, hanging from a ring by a door marked “4.” “Orientation in half an hour, go down to the end of this passage and follow your nose toward the commissary. Borscht and Hungarian sausage—don’t worry, you can’t miss it. Well, come on, Khukhov, you can puke later, on your own time!”

Franja pushed open the unlocked door and hauled herself through into a cylindrical room painted pale yellow. A round gray plastic table was bolted to the arbitrary ceiling above her along with four matching chairs equipped with seat belts. A row of four clothes lockers lay along the arbitrary floor. There was a small canvas cubicle on the right-hand wall through the open flap of which a toilet bowl could be seen projecting out from the wall at a right angle. There was a bigger tent affair on the left-hand wall, this one rubberized, with
nozzles and some strange kind of drainpipe. There were hand-rings all over the place.

The far half of the cylinder was divided up into four equal slices by green canvas partitions. There were privacy flaps across the openings and one of them was snapped shut. Two of the cubicles were empty, and in them Franja could see rubber sleep nets fastened to the bulkhead and flexible gooseneck reading lamps.

In the fourth cubicle, a man in a green jumpsuit was snugly secured between two sheets of net webbing, reading a magazine with a naked lady on the cover.

“Hello . . . ?” Franja said uncertainly.

The man looked up, unsnapped his top sleep webbing, vaulted out of the cubicle, drifted over to her upside down, gave her a gentle shove toward the “ceiling.”

“You must be the new monkey,” he said. “Have a seat. I’m Sasha Gorokov.”

“Franja, uh, Gagarin,” Franja said, catching hold of one of the chairs, pulling herself up, or was it down, into it, and buckling the belt across her lap. With a series of seal-like motions, Gorokov seated himself and buckled in, and all at once they were seated across a table from each other on the floor like proper human beings, or so at least for the moment it seemed.

Gorokov looked her up and down quite frankly. “Not bad,” he said. “The last one was built like a bear, with armpit hair to match. You
do
shave your armpits don’t you?”

“
What?
” Franja exclaimed.

Gorokov laughed. He had an unkempt mop of thick black hair, lazy brown eyes, and a rather supercilious grin. “I really don’t like to fuck girls with hairy armpits,” he said. “I mean, they’ll do in a pinch, but—”

“If you think—”

Gorokov laughed again, harder this time. “Yes, yes, I know, I’m a vile crude muzhik, and you wouldn’t touch me with a fork, but don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. We’re all monkeys here, with sex lives to match. Wait till you try it hanging from the rings by your feet! I could show you now, if you’d like.”

“Certainly not!”

Gorokov shrugged. “No offense, there’ll be plenty of time later, believe me. Let’s have a drink.”

So saying, he unbuckled his belt, brachiated over to a locker, came back with a plastic squeeze-bottle with a built-in straw, sucked on it, smacked his lips, handed it to Franja. “Go on, try it, it’s been aged in plastic over a week!”

For want of anything better to do, Franja gingerly took a sip, and
spat it out in a fine spray of droplets that immediately began drifting around the room. It seemed to be about 150 proof and it tasted like kerosene.

“Don’t worry,” Gorokov said, “you’ll get used to it.”

“I have to go now,” Franja said frostily. “Would you at least tell me which cubicle is mine?”

“Why the one next to mine, of course!” Gorokov said.

“But they’re
all
next to each other!”

Gorokov gave her a lubricious wink. “You’re beginning to get the idea already!” he said. “Cozy, isn’t it?” And he broke up into raucous laughter.

In his way, Sasha Gorokov had been right. It was quite amazing what you could get used to when you had no choice.

Cosmograd Sagdeev was cobbled together out of five basic module types and various add-ons. The dormitory modules were reconfigurable to contain scientific workstations, control rooms, tool lockers, and workshops. The big spheres of the type that served as the so-called passenger debarkation lounge were also used to house the two commissaries, the library, the crew lounge, the main command center, the two gymnasiums, and the single observation deck, and served as bulk storage facilities as well. There were six working air-lock modules for spacewalks, and one outsize air lock which could be opened, clamshell-like, to swallow satellites for repair. There were docking facilities for lunar shuttles and Mars ships outside, as well as antenna complexes, solar panels, clusters of sensors, station-keeping thrusters.

All this had evolved rather randomly over the years, and it was all connected by passageway modules and crossroads spheres. From the outside, Sagdeev looked like something put together by a committee of schoolchildren playing with an antique Tinkertoy kit. On the inside, it was a crazy maze, navigable only via the color-coded lines, and by smell.

Sagdeev was not one of the glamorous Cosmograds devoted to science or Earth observation. It was basically a repair, maintenance, and occasional construction depot in Low Earth Orbit, servicing satellites, heavy-lifter upper stages,
GEO
sat sleds, lunar shuttles, freighters on their way to Spaceville, and the occasional Mars craft, which was to say a glorified repair and refitting garage in space.

What this meant for its complement of one hundred space monkeys was endless grunt labor, lightened only by the fact that some of it involved spacewalking, which was every bit the magnificent soul-stirring experience that Franja had imagined, when she had the time
to think about enjoying the view, which was seldom. Even
EVA
, which was certainly considered the best duty, was mostly a matter of tedious hand labor through clumsy suit-gloves or even more recalcitrant waldoes.

What it also meant was that Sagdeev’s living quarters were allocated according to a class structure as rigid as anything that had existed under the Czars or the Brezhnev bureaucracy. The Cosmograd commander, his immediate subordinates, and the occasional cosmonaut VIP had whole dormitory modules to themselves. Supervisors bunked two to a module with a bulkhead between them for privacy and their own toilets and showers.

Monkeys slept four to a module, sharing each other’s snores, toilet sounds, and farts, of which there were plenty, thanks to the food, which would surely have been relegated to the hog trough by the lowliest Bulgarian peasant. Rationed as they were to a three-minute shower every third day, they had plenty of intimacy with each other’s body odors too.

For reasons it took Franja several weeks to fully comprehend, the monkey cages were sexually integrated. Aside from Sasha Gorokov, she shared hers with Boris Waseletski, a muscular blond sexual athlete who seemed to have a different woman between his webs every twenty-four hours, and Tamara Ryamskolya, a rather homely and sloppily built woman for whom the “docking maneuvers,” as she called them, were an improbable dream come true.

Monkeys worked eight-hour shifts and then had sixteen hours off in order to maintain the terrestrial cycle, which meant that for sixteen hours of every “day” there was little to do but sleep, eat the vile food, do your mandatory workouts in the gym, read, watch TV in the crew lounge, swill the foul rotgut distilled on the sly from better-you-don’t-ask, and screw.

Things being what they were, and her fellow monkeys being what
they
were, drinking and screwing were the main leisure-time activities.

Everyone fucked everyone else like, well, like a cageful of bored monkeys. Privacy being virtually nonexistent, Franja grew accustomed to the sight of the bodies of her cage-mates quicker than she would have ever believed possible groundside. The sight of naked pricks became quite routine. So too did she become rapidly inured to the sounds of fucking on the other side of the canvas partitions.

Where privacy was impossible, nudity taboos would be ridiculous, and any futile attempts to honor them only a source of tension and frustration. Healthy men and women closely confined with plenty of time on their hands and not much else to do with it were going to have sex anyway, and since there was so little opportunity to do it
in private, it made sense to ignore what was going on in the nets next door.