He drifted down into the descent module. Arkady was working through a checklist at the control panel. There were crackly voices singing in lusty Russian on the ground-to-air loop, and Arkady was singing along, his voice booming in the confined cabin, working as he sang.

They finished up with a ripple of applause. Henry realized dimly that Arkady’s voice, time-delayed, would have been out of synch on the ground; they must have compensated for that somehow, a small act of interplanetary kindness.

Arkady said to him, “Vam panravilas? You liked it?”

“It sounded like an anthem. I kept expecting some shotputter to step up for her gold medal.”

Arkady laughed. “It is a dashing Russian song we call From an Island into a Deep Stream.”

“Oh, yeah. Lieber and Stoller, right?”

“Pardon?”

“Never mind.”

Arkady studied Henry. “Your face is swollen like a balloon. You move stiffly. Your back is sore.”

“Yeah. How could you tell?”

“It is a hazard of spaceflight. Your spinal column is stretching. This will not become easier. Your back muscles will weaken, your discs will stretch. You must go back to the orbital compartment and brace your legs against the walls, and press your head against the opposite wall, and stretch. You will feel much better.”

“An old cosmonaut trick?”

“Born of long experience.” Arkady worked at his list. “I have been able to observe the differences in approach by Russians and Americans to this business of spaceflight. You Americans build fine machines, but pay little attention to the fragile bodies crammed inside. To us, however, spaceflight is an affair, not of machines, but of humans. We sing. We joke. We speak to our families.”

“Smart guys.”

“You like music?”

Henry shrugged. “Not much. Geena played a lot of jazz.”

Arkady snorted. “Jazz makes me tired and irritated. Jazz does not reflect any of the feelings of our everyday lives. Jazz is a music of idleness. It is for young people, flinging, hectic, impetuous. As they grow up they will come to appreciate art that brings relaxation and enjoyment.”

Henry wondered if this guy was taking a rise out of him. “So what do you like? Songs about tractors?”

Arkady didn’t rise to that. “Russian folk music. Tangos, foxtrots. Sentimental songs by Ruslanova, Shtokolov, Kobson. These songs evoke warm feelings in me, and banish disquieting thoughts.”

“I’m happy for you.”

Arkady studied him. “Are you adjusting to weightlessness?”

“I guess so. I’m not throwing up so often. I guess I missed the training—”

Arkady snorted. “My training was begun by my grandmother.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. At night we would go to the swings in the park, to train me against motion sickness. She pushed the swings and checked my endurance with an alarm clock.”

“My grandmother knitted me sweaters.”

“She was a sweet woman and a hard worker.”

“So you always wanted to be a cosmonaut? Did you follow the guys on Salyut and Mir?”

“Not the cosmonauts. I grew up in the military town of the Kantemir division, in which my father was serving. I had a happy childhood. My dream was born when I was in school. I read books and watched films about the Patriotic War. I idolized the pilots I saw there.

“But it has not been easy. I became a test pilot at the Moscow Institute for Aviation. I applied to serve as a cosmonaut. I was rejected three times. I remember the fourth time. I walked to the train station through a field of rye. I took off my boots and slung them over my shoulder. A golden field of ripening wheat was swaying around me; there were skylarks in the blue sky. I was overwhelmed by the thick aroma of Earth’s bounty. Thus, in my military uniform with the stripes of a sergeant, I walked barefoot to become a cosmonaut.”

I don’t believe this guy, Henry thought. He’s a Russian Jimmy Stewart.

“…I worked in the designers” office. I flew jets from Noviy Aidar. I flew helicopters in Viazniki. I trained; every morning I exercised, and jogged five kilometres. I became much stronger.

“But I had to wait for my first flight. After glasnost the money which was made available for spaceflight in Russia was much reduced. There were few seats, hotly contested. It was the advent of our joint project with the Americans, first on Mir and then Station, which gave me my doorway to space… But I never doubted it would come.”

He worked as he spoke, his blue eyes flicking over the checklists, his voice level. His eyes were the same colour as Geena’s, Henry noted absently.

Behind Arkady, unnoticed, a baseball-sized Earth slid past the window.

“And now here you are.”

“Here I am, having travelled further than any cosmonaut before me, further even than Gagarin, flying between Earth and Moon.”

“Lucky guy.”

“No. Not luck. It is the faith of others.” He studied Henry. “I have found that many times in my life, friends and strangers alike have been prepared to help me because they believe in me. I am very happy because of this, and I am always careful not to betray their trust.”

Henry thought Arkady was the most serious person he had ever met.

Henry drifted back up to the orbital module, and tried Arkady’s back-compressing trick. It took a little practice to lodge his head and feet — he kept slipping and bouncing away, like a compressed spring — but after a time he got it and, he was not surprised, it seemed to help.

Geena, too, took the time out to look back at the Earth. But the experience seemed unreal to her; she was unable to take in the reality of the immense distance she was traversing. She had spent a lot of time in space, but all of it, before TLI, in low Earth orbit. Always she had had the Earth, a huge, barely curving blue wall, outside her window, as if she was flying low over some huge map of the world. On orbit, the Earth was still the anchor of her sense of place, her sense of self.

Out here, it was different.

Out here, the features of Earth were so compressed they were hard to distinguish, and anyhow the planet itself was already so remote you could cover it over with the palm of your hand. When she looked out the window, when she thought about it too hard, she felt lost, a dust mote drifting around, a fly in a cathedral dome.

She had to find a new frame of reference.

Well, there was the Earth, a blue ball over there, the Moon a grey disc off thataway, and the sun, a glaring white torch: three beacons, enough to fix her in three-dimensional, interplanetary space.

And beyond those references, visible when her eyes were shielded from the sunlight, she had the stars.

Already she’d come an immense distance in any reasonable human terms, but the stars were so remote that they hadn’t shifted in perspective from when she’d lain out under desert skies, in California and Nevada, and tried to count them. The stars were still there, and they would guide her, as they had sailors on less strange oceans than this for millennia.

The stars, and Venus, of course, an ugly grey smudge, like a stain on the pristine darkness.

Distance: endlessly accumulating as they slowly climbed away from Earth.

What made it all seem real, at last, was not the changing view, but the lengthening moments of silence that punctuated every exchange when she spoke to Houston. She had come so far, at last, that even light was taking its time to reach her.

She felt her sense of space and time shifting and flowing, oddly. Here, in this timeless submarine of a capsule, without perspective beyond the windows, she lost her sense of how big they were — reduced to atoms, adrift in the cosmos, or inflated to the size of giants, able to reach out and enclose the Earth itself. Even time seemed to dissolve away from the steady clockwork of orbit, the ninety-minute dawns and sunsets. Sometimes it was as if her heart raced, other times as if it was pumping sluggish lava through her veins, as if she was losing her grounding in the frame of the universe.