Stone joined her at the port. Stone, like York, was wearing thermal underwear, with his Cooling and Ventilation Garment over the top. The cooling garment was a corrugated layering of water coolant pipes. York had her catheter fitted, and Stone wore his own urine collection device, a huge, unlikely condom. The two of them looked bizarre, sexless, faintly ridiculous.

“Pretty view, huh,” Stone murmured. “You know, Ralph claims he can see the Moon with his naked eye.”

“Maybe he can. It’s possible.” The Moon ought to look like a faint silver-gray star, circling close to its master.

Stone had brought over York’s Lower Torso Assembly; this was the bottom half of her EVA suit, trousers with boots built on. “Come on, York; enough rubbernecking.”

She stared at the suit with a feeling of unreality. “That time already, huh.”

“That time already.”

She hooked the sleeves of the cooling garment over her thumbs; the hook would stop the sleeves from riding up later. She looked at her hands, her own familiar flesh, with the plastic webbing over the balls of her thumbs; it was the first step in the elaborate ceremonial of donning the suit, and the simple act had made her heart pump.

She stepped into the Lower Torso Assembly. The unit was heavy, the layered material awkward and stiff, and it seemed to wriggle away from her legs as Stone tried to pull it up for her. She found she was tiring rapidly, already.

Next she fitted a tube over her catheter attachment. It would connect with a bag large enough to store a couple of pints of urine. There was nothing to collect shit, though; she was wearing a kind of diaper — an absorbent undergarment — that would soak up “any bowel movement that cannot be deferred during EVA,” in the language of the training manuals.

York planned to defer.

Then it was time for the Hard Upper Torso. Her HUT was suspended from the wall of the airlock, like the top half of a suit of armor, with a built-in life support backpack.

She crouched down underneath the HUT and lifted her arms. She wriggled upward, squirming into the HUT. In the darkness of the shell there was a smell of plastic and metal and lint, of newness.

She got her arms into the sleeves and pushed her hands through; the cooling garment’s loops tugged at the soft flesh around her thumbs. Her shoulders bent backwards, painfully. Nothing about this process was easy. Still, these suits were a hell of a lot simpler than the old Moon suits; the Apollo crew members had had to assemble their suits on the lunar surface, connecting up the tubes which would carry water and oxygen from their backpacks.