STEPHEN BAXTER
British writer Stephen Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific new writers of the nineties, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well.
Like many of his colleagues in the late nineties, Baxter is busily engaged with revitalizing and reinventing the “hard-science” story for a new generation of readers —as demonstrated in the vivid and suspenseful novella that follows, a classic tale of humankind pitted against a hostile and unrelenting Nature in an engineering project of almost unimaginable scope and difficulty, but one which also ends up taking the stubborn, grimly determined, hard-headed entrepreneurs who drive the project into some unexplored, strange, and unexpected territory, with unforeseen results … .
Stephen Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche —a sequel to The Time Machine —The Time Ships, which won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His most recent books are the novels, Voyage, Titan, and Moonseed, and the collections Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence and Traces. Upcoming is a new novel, Manifold: Time. His stories have appeared in our Eleventh, Twelfth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Annual Collections.
There were only minutes until the comet hit the Moon.
“You got to beat the future! —or it will beat you. Believe me, I’ve been there … .”
Xenia knew that Frank J Paulis thought this the most significant day in the history of the inhabited Moon, let alone his own career. And here he was now, a
pile of softscreens on his lap, hectoring the bemused-looking Lunar Japanese in the seat alongside him, even as the pilot of this cramped, dusty evacuation shuttle went through her countdown.
“Look around you, pal. You guys have lasted three hundred years up here, in your greenhouses and your mole holes. A hell of an achievement. But the Moon can’t support you … .”
Xenia Makarova had a window seat, and she gazed out of the fat, round portholes. Below the shuttle’s hull she could see the landing pad, a plain of glass microwaved into lunar soil, here on the edge of the green domes of the Copernicus Triangle. And beyond that lay the native soil of the Moon: gray and brown, softly molded by a billion years of meteorite rain.
And bathed, for today, in comet light.
The count proceeded, in Japanese. Tanks pressurized. Guidance locked in. Coming up on one minute …
Frank was still talking. Xenia had listened to Frank talk before. She’d been listening to him, in fact, for five years, or three hundred, depending on what account you took of Albert Einstein.
“You know what the most common mineral is on the Moon? Feldspar. And you know what you can make out of that? Scouring powder. Big deal. Sure, you can bake oxygen out of the rock. You can even make rocket fuel and glass. But there’s no water, or nitrogen, or carbon —”
The Japanese, a business-type, said, “There are traces in the regolith.”
“Yeah, traces, put there by the Sun, and it’s being sold off anyhow, by Kawasaki Heavy Industries, to the Prion. Bleeding the Moon dry …”
A child was crying. Xenia glanced around. The shuttle was just a cylinder-shaped cargo scow, hastily adapted to support this temporary evacuation. The scow was crammed with people, last-minute refugees —men and women and tall, skinny children —in rows of canvas bucket seats like factory chickens, subdued and serious.
And all of them were Lunar Japanese, save for Frank and Xenia, who were American; for, while Frank and Xenia had taken a time-dilated three-hundred-year jaunt to the stars—and while America had been scraped off the face of the Earth by the ice —the Lunar Japanese had been quietly colonizing the Moon.
“No,” Frank said now, “you need volatiles. That’s the key to the future. But now that Earth has frozen over nobody is resupplying. You’re just pumping around the same old shit, literally in fact. I give you another hundred years, tops. Look around. You’ve already got rationing, strict birth control laws.”
“There is no argument with the fact of —”
“How much do you need? I’ll tell you. Enough to future-proof the Moon. Give it an atmosphere thick enough to breathe without a face mask. Oceans, without domes over them. Terraform.”
“And you believe the comets can supply the volatiles we need for this?”
“Believe? That’s what Project Prometheus is for. The random impact today is a piece of luck. It’s going to make my case for me, pal. And when we start harvesting the comets, those big fat babies out in the Oort Cloud —”
“Ah,” the Lunar Japanese was smiling, “and the person who has control of those comet volatiles —”
“—could buy the Moon.” Frank reached for a cigar, a 20th-century habit long frustrated. “But that’s incidental …”
Ten seconds. Five. Three, two, one.
Stillness, for a fraction of a second. Then, a clatter of pyrotechnics, a muffled bang.
Xenia was ascending, in utter silence, as if in some crowded elevator, pressed back in her bucket seat with maybe a full gee.
Beyond her window stray dust streaked away across the pad glass, heaping up against fuel trucks and pipelines.
Soon she could make out the curve of the Moon, a black sky above the bright, lumpy horizon. They were heading toward lunar night, and the shadows were lengthening, fleeing from the brilliant comet light.
Earth rose.
It was, of course, the new Earth, coated from poles to tropics by its featureless white shroud of ice, glaringly bright, ragged and showing green-blue only at the equator. Even from here, she could see Prion flowerships circling the Earth, the giant ramscoops of the alien craft visible as tiny discs.
The Lunar Japanese around her applauded the smooth launch.
Away from the Copernicus complex the Lunar surface was bare, streaked by long shadows. It looked like a bombing run, she thought, crater on crater, right down to the limit of visibility: not a square inch of it left untouched by the unending, mindless bombardment. The Moon could never be called beautiful —it was too damaged for that—but it had a compelling wildness.
But even here the Moon had been shaped by humans, the Lunar Japanese; the ancient, shattered land was scored by crawler tracks, overlaid by the glittering silver wires of mass driver rails.
… And now, as the shuttle tilted and settled into its two-hour orbit around the Moon, Xenia saw a sight she knew no human had ever seen before today:
Comet rise, over the Moon.
The coma, a diffuse mass of gas and fine particles, was a ball as big as the Earth, so close now it walled off half the sky, a glare of lacy, diffuse light. Massive clumps in the coma, backlit, cast shadows across the smoky gases, straight lines thousands of miles long radiating at her. She looked for the nucleus, a billion-ton ball of ice and rock. But it was too small and remote to see, even now, a few minutes from impact. And the tail was invisible from here, fleeing behind her, running ahead of the comet and stretching far beyond the Moon, reaching halfway to Mars, in fact.
The comet was coming out of the Sun, straight toward the Moon at 40 thousand miles an hour,
… and now there was light, all around the shuttle.
She craned her neck to see. The Moon and its human cargo, including this shuttle, were already inside the coma. It was like being inside a diffuse, luminous fog.
“Vileekee bokh.”
Frank said, “What?”
“We’re inside a comet … .”
Frank leaned across her, trying to see. He was a small, stocky man, with thick legs and big prizefighter muscles built for Earth’s gravity, so that he always looked like some restless, half-evolved ape alongside the tall, slim Lunar Japanese. He was 60 years old, physiological; he was bald as a coot and his nose was a misshapen mass of flesh.
“Eta prikrasna,” Xenia murmured.
“Beautiful. Yeah. Makes you think, though.”
“About what?”
“How easy it is to get off the Moon. Compared to the Earth anyhow. I mean, look at this old rust-bucket. We’re packed in here. It was the same for Neil and Buzz. In their dinky LM, they don’t have to wait for 50 thousand government employees to load millions of gallons of lox onto some giant Nazi rocket. They just stow the Moon rocks and put away the sandwiches and press the button; and a little diddly rocket the size of a car engine squirts them off into space. Now, if we’d evolved on the Moon instead of the Earth you could have made an orbit-capable rocket ship in your back yard. You wouldn’t need government support. An unreconstructed capitalist like me could have made it big … .”
“That’s all this means to you?”
He grinned. “Anyhow, today it looks like we’re the last off the Moon.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “There’s a handful of old nuts who won’t move, no matter what.”
“Even for a comet?”
“Takomi. He’s still there.”
“Who?”
“He’s notorious.”
“I don’t read the funny papers.”
“Takomi is the hermit who lives out in the ruins of Edo, on Farside.”
“No resupply?”
“Evidently he won’t even respond to radio calls.”
Frank frowned. “This is the Moon. How does he live? By sucking oxygen out of the rock?”
But Frank’s Lunar Japanese companion was tapping him on the shoulder. “I overheard. I apologize. You knew Neil? Armstrong?”
“Hell, yes,” said Frank, and he started to explain how, to the wide-eyed Lunar Japanese.
Xenia suppressed a smile and turned back to the window. Of course it wasn’t true. Frank had been born all of 75 years after Apollo 11. But the truth about America no longer mattered, she knew, because there was nobody to check up any more.
… The light changed.
There was a soft Fourth-of-july gasp from the people crammed into the shuttle.
A dome of blinding white light rose like a new Sun from the surface of the Moon: comet material turned to plasma by the shock wave, mixed with shattered
rock. Xenia thought she could see a wave passing through the Moon’s rocky hide, a sluggish ripple in rock turned molten, gathering and slowing, crater walls forming as she watched.
So the comet had struck the Moon.
At the center of the crater a new mountain was thrust up: a block of primordial rock dug out from 15 miles beneath the surface. The crater’s rim and walls, cooling and slowing, were already collapsing under their own weight, forming complex terraces. Some of the rock was still molten and flowed like lava across the gouged-out landscape; the melt-sheet cooled and hardened in place, like a fresh lava flow on Earth. Fountains of glowing rock bombs hailed over the surface beneath Xenia, covering the terrain for miles around the rim of the primary crater, which itself was now all of 50 miles across.
And now, spreading out over the Moon’s dusty gray surface, she saw a faint wash of light. It seemed to pool in the deeper maria and craters, flowing down the contours of the land like a morning mist on Earth.
It was air: gases from the shattered comet, an evanescent atmosphere pooling on the Moon.
And, in a deep, shadowed crater, at the ghostly touch of the air, she saw light flare.
It was only a hint, a momentary splinter at the corner of her eye. She craned to see. Perhaps there was a denser knot of smoke or gas, there on the floor of the crater; perhaps there was a streak, a kind of contrail, reaching out through the temporary comet atmosphere.
It must be some byproduct of the impact. But it had looked as if somebody had launched a rocket, from the surface of the Moon.
But already the contrail had dispersed in the thin, billowing comet air.
People were applauding again, with the beauty of the spectacle, relief at being alive.
It was only after they landed that it was announced that the comet nucleus had landed plumb on top of the dome in Fracastorius Crater.
Fracastorius, on the rim of the Sea of Nectar, was one of the largest settlements away from the primary Copernicus-Landsberg-Kepler triangle. The loss of life was small, but the economic and social damage huge. Perhaps unrecoverable.
The Lunar Japanese grieved.
But Frank Paulis got back to work, even before the shuttle landed. The very next day he called Xenia into his office.
When she arrived he had his feet up on his desk. He was reading, on a softscreen, some long, text-heavy academic paper about deep-implanted volatiles on the Earth. She tried to talk to him about Fracastorius, but he patently wasn’t interested. Nor was he progressing Prometheus, his main project.
“Frank, what are you doing? What about the comet?”
He blinked at her. “The comet is history, babe.”
“I thought it was going to supply us with volatiles. I thought it was going to be the demonstration we needed that Prometheus was a sound investment.”
“Yeah. But it didn’t work out.” Frank tapped the surface of his desk and a
softscreen embedded there lit up with numbers, graphics. “Look at the analysis. We got some volatiles. But most of the nucleus’s mass was just blasted back to space. Tough break.” He looked thoughtful, briefly. “One thing, though. Did you know the Moon is going to get an atmosphere out of this? It will last for a thousand years—”
“Iroonda.”
“No, it’s true. Thin, but an atmosphere, of comet mist. Carbon dioxide and water and stuff. How about that.” He shook his head. “Anyhow, it’s of no use to us.”
“But Prometheus —”
He shrugged. “I ran the math. The comet was inefficient. I figure you’d need around a thousand impactors like this one to future-proof the Moon fully. And we aren’t going to get a thousand impactors, not with the Chinese on Mars and the Australians at Neptune and the damn Prion everywhere.”
He didn’t seem concerned.
Puzzled, she said, “Frank, I’m sorry.”
“Huh? Why?”
“If comets are the only source of volatiles —”
“Yesterday I thought they were. But look at this.” He tapped his softscreen. He was talking fast, excited, enthusiastic, his mind evidently racing. “There’s an author here who thinks there are all the volatiles you could want, a hundred times over —right here on the Moon. Can you believe that?”
“That’s impossible. Everyone’s known the Moon is dry as a bone, since Apollo 11.”
He smiled. “That’s what everyone thinks. I want you to find this woman for me. The author of the paper.”
“Frank —”
“And find out about mining.”
“Mining?”
“The deeper the better.” His grin widened. “We went to the stars, and found nothing but shit. And then we wasted years chasing comets. But it’s all over now.”
“It is?”
“How would you like a journey to the center of the Moon, baby?”
The Sun’s gravitational field acts as a spherical lens, which magnifies the intensity of the light of a distant star along the line connecting the Sun to the star.
Every star has a different focus, in the Sun’s gravitational field. At the point of focus — called a Saddlepoint, out on the rim of the Solar System — the gain is measured in hundreds of millions.
A race called the Prion used gravitational lensing to send high-fidelity teleportation signals between the Saddlepoints of neighbouring stars. They came blundering into the Solar System that way.
But the Prion didn’t originate the technology. Some older species, who had been spreading out from the centre of the Galaxy along the Orion-Cygnus galactic arm, were the true pioneers.
Humans called them the Builders, but didn’t know much about them. The Prion wouldn’t say much.
Between humanity and the Prion, there existed a state of uneasy peace — or of low-grade warfare, depending on your point of view. The Prion weren’t expecting to find the system inhabited, and were a little pissed when humans asked them to take back the factory ships that had started chewing up the asteroid belt.
But they backed off.
Not that the Prion had stopped all industrial activity in the Solar System, according to some conspiracy theorists. They were just a little more discreet about it now, is all. Their long-term goals were probably unchanged — and still unknown.
There are other paranoid types, however, who would rather have had the Prion inhabiting the asteroid belt than the Red Chinese, who had moved into the space the Prion left.
As part of the truce that was worked out, the Prion took human observers on interstellar jaunts. Live cargo, on Prion flowerships, sailing through the Saddlepoint gateways.
Xenia and Frank had spent a year of their lives on a Prion flowership, submitted themselves to the unknown hazards of several Saddlepoint gateway teleport transitions, and got themselves relativistically stranded in an unanticipated future. And they had come back, to this: a crowded Moon, owned by other people.
And it was all for the sake of a visit to a dull, nondescript G-class star. No worlds to explore, no business angles for Frank.
They had felt cheated.
Not that they hadn’t prospered, here.
The Moon of the 24th century, as it turned out, had a lot in common with early 21st-century Earth. Deprived of its lifelines from the iced-up home world, the Moon was full: stagnant, a closed economy. But Frank had seen all this before, and he knew that economic truth was strange in such circumstances. For instance, as the scarcity of materials increased, industrial processes that had once been unprofitable suddenly became worthwhile; Frank had made a lot of money out of re-engineering an abandoned technology that made use of lunar sulphur and oxygen as a fuel source.
Within five years Frank J Paulis had become one of the hundred wealthiest individuals on the Moon, taking Xenia right along with him.
But it wasn’t enough. Frank found it impossible to break into the close-knit business alliances of the Japanese. And besides, Xenia suspected, he felt cooped up here, on the Moon.
There were no humans left on Earth — save, the rumors went, for a few gen-eng’ d post-human types in the equatorial belt, maybe elsewhere. America was gone, of course, except for a handful of galactic wanderers like Xenia and Frank, dispersed on Prion ships through the Saddlepoint gateways to star systems near and remote, over the years drifting back in ones and twos like relativistic snowflakes.
And they were all odd-balls.
Psychological screw-ups were common, out there between the stars. Knowing a
trip could take centuries, who else would go? The star travelers were, by definition, people with nothing to lose on Earth. Misfits. Dismally failed marriages, a hostile son, a posse of lawsuits, like Frank J. No family, a dead-end job, like Xenia — who had been drawn by Frank’s energy to his employ, then his bed, and at last to his side, en route to the stars.
Anyhow, that was why this comet had been so important for Frank. It would shake everything up, he said. Change the equation.
Project Prometheus — his study of shipping in terraforming volatiles from the comets — had got as far as designs for methane rockets, which could have pushed the Oort comets out of their long, slow, distant orbits and brought them in to the Moon. It had consumed all his energies for years, and cost a fortune. He needed investors, and had hoped the comet impact would bring them in.
But as soon as he realized Prometheus was impractical, and politically impossible besides, here was Frank launching himself, with equal enthusiasm, into other ventures. It was either admirable, she thought, or schizophrenic.
After all these years — during which time she had been his companion, lover, employee — Xenia still didn’t understand him; she freely admitted it.
He was an out-and-out capitalist, no doubt about it. But every ounce of his huge ambition was constantly turned on the most gigantic of projects: the future of a world! the destiny of mankind!
What Xenia couldn’t work out was whether Frank was a visionary who used capitalism to achieve his goals, or just a capitalist after all, sublimating his greed and ambition. But, swept along by his energy and ambition, she found it hard to focus on such questions.
She started work.
To launch his new project, Frank, feverish with enthusiasm, leased Landsberg’s Grand Auditorium itself.
The auditorium was at the heart of Landsberg. The dome itself, a blue ceiling above, was a thick double sheet of quasiglass, cable-stayed above and below by engineered spider web. The dome was filled with water, a sandwich of blue, through which fish swam, goldfish and carp. The water shielded Landsberg’s inhabitants from radiation, and served to scatter the raw sunlight.
Thus, in Landsberg, the sky was royal blue and full of fish. After five years, Xenia still couldn’t get used to it.
Bathed in watery light, pacing his stage, Frank J Paulis was a solid ball of terrestrial energy and aggression, out of place on the small, delicate Moon.
“You got to beat the future! — or it will beat you. Believe me, I’ve been there. I believed that before I went to the stars, and I believe it now. I’m here to tell you how … .”
Frank was standing before a huge three-dimensional facsimile, a Moon globe sliced open to reveal arid, uninteresting geological layers. Beside him sat Mariko Nishizaki, the young academic type whose paper had fired Frank off in this new direction. She looked slim and uncertain in the expensive new suit Frank had bought for her.
Xenia was sitting at the back of the audience, watching rows of cool faces: politicians, business types. They were impassive. Well, they were here, and they were listening, and that was all Frank would care about right now.
“ … We need volatiles,” Frank was saying, “not just to survive, but to get our work done. To expand. To grow, economically. Water. Hydrogen. Helium. Carbon dioxide. Nitrogen. Maybe nitrates and phosphates to supplement the biocycles.
“But the Moon doesn’t have volatiles. Everyone knows that. The Moon is just a ball of low-grade aluminum ore, created out of the Earth as the result of a giant primordial collision. Wherever we’ve looked, save for the occasional cold trap, we’ve found barely a trace of volatiles; and those that are present have been implanted by the solar wind in the top few feet of the regolith. So we have to bring in volatiles, from the Earth, the comets, the outer planet moons, wherever. Because everyone knows the Moon is a desert. Right?” He leaned forward. “Dead wrong.
“I’m here today to offer you a new paradigm. I’m here to tell you that the Moon itself is rich in volatiles, almost unimaginably so, enough to sustain us and our families, hell, for millennia. And, incidentally, to make us rich as Croesus in the process.”
Barely a flicker of interest in the audience, Xenia saw.
Three centuries and a planetary relocation hadn’t changed the Japanese much, and cultural barriers hadn’t dropped; they were still suspicious of the noisy gaijin who stood before them, breaking in from outside the subtle alliances and protocols that ruled their lives.
But now Frank stood back. “Tell ’em, Mariko.”
The slim Lunar Japanese scientist got up, evidently nervous, and bowed deeply to the audience. With the aid of a softscreen poster she began a long, rapid, and very technical presentation on the early history of the solar system.
Xenia’s attention wandered.
The Moon’s surface here was like a park. Grass covered the ground, much of it growing out of bare lunar regolith. Behind Frank there was a stand of mature palms, a hundred feet tall, and a scattering of cherries. People lived in the dome’s support powers, thick central cores with platforms of lunar concrete slung from them. The lower levels were given over to factories, workshops, schools, shops, and other public places.
Right now, far above Frank’s head, Xenia could see a little flock of schoolchildren in their white and black uniforms, flapping back and forth on Leonardo wings, squabbling like so many chickens. It was beautiful. But it served to remind her there were no birds here, outside pressurized cages. Birds tired too quickly, in the thin air; on the Moon, against institution, birds couldn’t fly.
The Japanese, inured to natural disaster over the centuries, had moved capitals before. In some ways Landsberg represented the continuity of Japan, uninterrupted by a little thing like the end of Earth. The Lunar Japanese called Landsberg nihon no furusati, the heart of Japan. And so it was. The Emperor lived here, still revered as a god, as his ancestors had been revered since the eighth century.
But, sitting here, she was surrounded by subtle noises: the bangs and whirs of
fans and pumps, the bubbling of aerators in the fountains and ponds. Landsberg, a giant machine, had to be constantly run, managed, maintained.
Thinking about that now, watching the children play in the warm air wafted by a great roof-top fan, Xenia had an intuition about the rightness of Frank’s vision, whatever his methods.
Landsberg, this high-tech, managed environment, was no long-term answer. The Moon had to become a world that could sustain itself without conscious human intervention. Just in case our children, she thought, are less smart, or less lucky, than we are.
And if Frank could make a little profit along the way, she wasn’t about to grudge him that.
She tried to focus on what Mariko was saying.
Earth, Moon, and the other planets — said Mariko — had condensed, almost five billion years ago, from a swirling cloud of dust and gases. That primordial cloud had been rich in volatiles — three percent of it was water, for instance. You could tell that was so from the composition of asteroids, which were left-over fragments of the cloud.
But there was an anomaly. If you added together all the water on Earth, for example, in the oceans and atmosphere and the ice sheets, it added up to less than a tenth of that three percent fraction.
Where did the rest of the water go?
Mariko believed it was still there.
She believed there was water and other volatiles trapped deep within the Earth, in the mantle. She presented old evidence compiled by Earth-bound geologists. They found helium, a light gas that should have escaped Earth long ago, leaking from the mantle plumes that built island chains like Hawaii. They found water in minerals dragged up from hundreds of miles down by kimberlites, iron-magnesium rocks that hauled up exotic high-pressure mineral specimens like diamonds. Seismic waves traveled slowly in some parts of the mantle, and such waves would, Mariko said, be slowed down by the presence of water.
The water wouldn’t be present as a series of immense buried oceans; rather it would be scattered as droplets, some as small as a single molecule, trapped inside crystal lattices of the minerals that formed under the intense pressure down there.
And what was true of Earth would be true of the Moon.
According to Mariko, the Moon was made mostly of material like Earth’s mantle. It was smaller than the Earth, cooler and more rigid, so that the center of the Moon was analogous to the Earth’s mantle layers a few hundred miles deep. And it was precisely at such depths on Earth, where such water-bearing minerals as majorite and wadsleyite were found … .
Frank watched his audience like a hawk.
Now he stepped forward, peremptorily interrupting Mariko. He waved a hand. His cartoon Moon globe suddenly lit up, overshadowing the dry charts and equations on Mariko’s screen. Now the onion-skin geological layers were supplemented by a vivid blue ocean, lapping in unlikely fashion at the Moon’s center. Xenia smiled. It was typical Frank. Inaccurate, but compelling.
“Listen up,” he said. “What if Mariko is right? What if even one percent of the
Moon’s mass by weight is water? That’s the same order as the water in all Earth’s oceans and ice sheets and atmosphere.
“And that’s not all. Where there is water there will be other volatiles: carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane. Maybe even hydrocarbons. And all we have to do is go down there and find it.” He grinned. “There’s a huge ocean down there, gentlemen, and it’s time to go skinny-dipping.”
There was a frozen silence, which Frank milked expertly. Then he snapped: “Questions.”
You say these volatiles date from the formation of the solar system. But as you noted, we know Earth-Moon was shaped by a giant impact with a Mars-sized planetesimal. Mantle material was driven from the Earth into an orbiting cloud. Which collapsed to form the Moon. The great heat of collapse would surely have baked out the volatiles … .
“Maybe,” Frank said. “But Mariko tells me it’s possible the volatiles, suspended in the cloud that condensed into the Moon, will have gotten trapped once more in its interior. Then again, maybe not. Nobody knows. Nobody cares much about the deep interior of the planets; for three hundred years we’ve been too busy scratching their surfaces. The seismic data, even now, even on the Moon, is patchy. It’s impossible to say. We’re going to have to go look-see.”
Look-see? Paulis-san, please tell us what you are proposing, specifically.
“Isn’t it obvious?” He waved a hand, and in his cartoon Moon a triumphant scarlet thread dug straight down from the surface, arrowing toward the core. “Gentlemen, I’m inviting you to join me in the mining business. Deep mining. We’re going to go down there and find out.”
Now there was head-shaking, murmuring, even a little laughter.
“It won’t be easy,” Frank said. “The record for a deep mine on Earth is only a few miles. And nobody has seriously mined the Moon, because we never expected to find anything down there. Right? We know there won’t be the huge hydrothermal ore deposits we were able to exploit on Earth. In fact, across the solar system as a whole, mining technology hasn’t advanced much beyond what they had in the 20th century.
“But the Moon is cooler, much more rigid, more stable than Earth. The temperature and pressure gradients as you go down are comparatively gentle. Believe me, our drill bits are going to sink down through those cold Moon rocks like a knife through butter … .”
You are proposing some sort of test bore?
“Hell, no,” he said, and he grinned under his fleshy nose. “Our bore-hole will be yards wide. A tunnel into the Moon. Why the hell not? That way we can send down Mariko and her double-domed buddies to do some serious seismology and whatever else they feel they need to do. We can go sideways, open up whatever seam we find. And, hell, that way we can go down there and see for ourselves.”
But the energy required for such an immense bore will drain our resources. At a time when we are striving to rebuild Fracastorius —
Frank shook his head. “Past a certain depth I’ll power myself. Thermal energy from the hot deep rocks. All I need is seedcorn resources.”
But still, Fracastorius should be the priority —
Frank stepped to the front of the little stage and glared around at them. “Gentlemen, I’m calling this new enterprise ‘Roughneck.’ If you want to know why, go look it up. I’m asking you to invest in me, in Roughneck. Sure it’s a risk. But if it works it’s a way past the resource bottleneck we’re facing, here on the Moon. And it will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.” He held the stare for one moment more.
Then he turned away. “If you want a piece of this, you know how to find me.”
The Moon globe popped like a balloon, showering pixels, and Frank J Paulis had left the stage.
Getting the seedcorn investment turned out to be the easy part.
There never had been a mining industry, here on the Moon.
So Frank and Xenia were forced to start from scratch, inventing afresh not just an industrial process but the human roles that went with it. They were going to need a petrophysicist and a geological engineer to figure out the most likely places they would find their imagined reservoirs of volatiles; they needed reservoir engineers and drilling engineers and production engineers for the brute work of the borehole itself; they needed construction engineers for the surface operations and support. And so on.
They had to work job descriptions, and recruit and train to fill them as best they could.
Then there were the practical problems, which they hit as soon as they started to trial heavy equipment in the ultrahard vacuum that coated the Moon. Friction was a killer, for instance: in an atmosphere there is a thin layer of adhered water vapor and oxides to reduce drag, but that didn’t apply here. They even suffered vacuum welds. Not only that, the ubiquitous dust — the glass-sharp remains of ancient, shattered rocks — stuck to everything it could, scouring and abrading. Stuff wore out fast, on the silent surface of the Moon.
But they persisted.
They learned to build in a modular fashion, with parts that could be replaced easily by a person in a spacesuit. And they learned to cover all their working joints with sleeves of a flexible plastic, to keep out the dust. After much experimentation they settled on a lubricant approach, coating their working surfaces with the substance the Lunar Japanese called “quasiglass,” hard and dense and very smooth; conventional lubricants just boiled or froze.
The work soon became all-absorbing. Even when Frank had enough investors to fund his start-up, the practical problems were just beginning, and Xenia found herself immersed.
But the Lunar Japanese, once committed to the project, learned fast, and were endlessly, patiently, inventive in resolving problems. It seemed to Xenia a remarkably short time from inception to the day Frank told her he had chosen his bore site.
“The widest, deepest impact crater in the solar system,” he said. “Hell, just by standing at the base of that thing we’d be halfway to the core already. And the
best of it is, we can buy it. Nobody has lived there since they cleaned out the last of the cold trap ice … .”
He was talking about the South Pole of the Moon.
Xenia pulled on the layers of her surface suit.
First came a bodyform, pressurized long-johns of engineered spider web. She tested the body waste pack and air conditioning. Next came a layer of body armor, a shield against micrometeorites and accidental collisions. Her life-support pack went on top of that; she could feel smart interfaces, feeder and waste pipes for air and water, nuzzling into sockets on her back, and immediately cool air started to flow under the bodyform. Her helmet was a bubble of quasiglass; the helmet was padded to fit her head, and moved when she did.
Finally she pulled on a disposable coverall and her radiation poncho, a light protective cape.
Thus, encased in spider web, Xenia stepped out of the hopper.
This was the Moon Pole. It was a place of shadows. There were stars above her. And the horn of crescent Earth poked above one horizon, gaunt and ice-pale.
Here, standing at the base of the crater called Amundsen, Xenia could actually see the Sun, a sliver of light poking through a gap in the enclosing rim mountains, casting long, stark shadows over the colorless, broken ground. She knew that if she stayed for a month the Moon’s glacial rotation would sweep that solar searchlight around the horizon. But the light was always flat and stark, like an endless dawn or sunset.
At the center of Amundsen, Frank’s complex sprawled in a splash of reflected light, ugly, busy, full of people.
Here came Frank in his spacesuit, Lunar Japanese spider web painted with a gaudy Stars & Stripes. “I wondered where you were,” he said.
“There was a lot of paperwork, last-minute permissions —”
“You might have missed the show.” He was edgy, nervous, restless; his gaze, inside his gold-tinted visor, swept over the crowd. “Whatever. Come see the rig.”
Together, they loped toward the center of the complex, past Frank’s perimeter of security guards.
New Dallas, Frank’s boomtown, was a crude cluster of buildings put together adobe-style from lunar concrete blocks. She could recognize shops, warehouses, dormitories, mess halls. There was a motor pool, hoppers and tractors and heavy machinery clustered around fuel tanks. And there was Frank’s geothermal plant, ready for operation, boxy buildings linked by fat, twisting conduits. The inhabited buildings had been covered over for radiation-proofing by a few feet of regolith.
This wasn’t Landsberg.
But it was actually bright here, the sunlight deflected into the crater by heliostats, giant mirrors perched on the rim mountains or on impossibly tall gantries. The stats worked like giant floodlights, giving the town, incongruously, the feel of an old American floodlit sports stadium. The primary power came from sunlight too, solar panels that Frank had had plastered over the peaks of the rim mountains.
The ground for miles around was flattened and scored by footprints and vehicle
tracks. It was hard to believe none of this had been here two months ago, that the only signs of human occupation then had been the shallow, abandoned strip mines in the cold traps.
And at the center of it all was the derrick itself, rising so far above the surface it caught the distant sunlight. Sheds and shops sprawled around its base, along with huge aluminum tanks and combustion engines. Mounds of rock, dug out in test bores, surrounded it like a row of pyramids.
Close to, the derrick seemed immense: It was hundreds of feet high, in fact, Frank said it was tall enough to stack up three or four joints of magnesium alloy pipe at a time. There was a pile of the pipe nearby, miles of it spun from native lunar ore, the cheapest component of the whole operation.
They reached the drilling floor. At its heart was the circular table through which the pipe would pass, and which would turn to force the drill into the ground. There were foundries and drums, to produce and pay out cables and pipes: power conduits, fiber-optic light pipes, hollow tubes for air and water and sample retrieval.
Xenia stood at the center of the drilling floor. She looked up into the structure of the derrick itself. It was tall and silent, like the gantry for a Saturn V. Stars showed through its open, sunlit frame. And suspended there at the end of the first pipe-lengths she could see the drill head itself, teeth of tungsten and diamond, gleaming in the lights of the heliostats.
Frank was describing technicalities that didn’t interest her. “You know, you can’t turn a drill string more than a few miles long. So we have to use a downhole turbine … .”
“Frank, eta ochin kraseeva. It is magnificent. Somehow, back in Landsberg, I never quite believed it was real.”
“Oh, it’s real,” Frank said.
“But think of it. That thing is going to dig hundreds of miles beneath our feet.”
“If it works. If it doesn’t melt … or break down … or …” He checked his chronometer, a softscreen patch sewn into the fabric of his suit. “It’s nearly time.”
They moved out into the public area.
Frank had made an event of the day. There must have been a hundred people here, she saw now, men, women, and children walking in their brightly colored surface suits and rad ponchos, or riding in little short-duration bubble rovers. Frank had set up a kind of miniature theme park, with toy derricks you could climb up, and a towering roller coaster based on an old-fashioned pithead rail — towering because height was needed, here on the Moon, to generate anything like a respectable gee-force.
The main attraction was Frank’s fish pond, she saw, a small crater he’d lined with ceramic and filled up with water. The water froze over and was steadily evaporating, of course, but water held a lot of heat, and the pond would take a long time to freeze to the bottom. In the meantime there were fish swimming back and forth in there, goldfish and handsome koi carp, living Earth creatures protected from the severe lunar climate by nothing more than a few feet of water.
Roughneck was the biggest public event on the Moon in a generation. Cameras
hovered everywhere. She saw Observers, adults and children in softscreen suits, every sensation being fed out to the rest of the Moon.
The openness scared Xenia to death. “Are you sure it’s wise to have so many people here?”
“The guards will keep out those Gray assholes.”
The Grays were a pressure group who had started to campaign against Frank. Arguing it was wrong to go digging holes to the heart of the Moon, to rip out the uchujin there, the cosmic dust. They were noisy but, as far as Xenia could see, ineffective.
“Not that. It’s so public. It’s like Disneyland.”
“Don’t you get it? This is essential. We’ll be lucky if we make hole at a mile a day. It will take 50 days just to get through the crust. We’re going to sink a hell of a lot of money into this hole in the ground before we see a red cent of profit. We need those investors on our side, for the long term. They have to be here, Xenia. They have to see this.”
“But if something goes wrong —”
“We’re screwed anyhow. What have we lost?”
Everything, she thought, if somebody gets killed, one of these cute Lunar Japanese five-year-olds climbing over the derrick models. But she knew Frank would have thought of that, and discounted it already, and no doubt figured out some fallback plan.
She admired such calculation, and feared it.
A warning tone was sounding on their headsets’ open loops now, and in silence the Lunar Japanese, adults and children alike, were lining up to watch the show.
Xenia could see the drill bit descend toward the regolith, the pipe sweeping silently downward inside the framework, like a muscle moving inside a sheath of flesh.
The bit sank into the Moon.
A gush of dust sprayed up immediately from the hole, ancient regolith layers undisturbed for a billion years, now thrown unceremoniously toward space. At the peak of the parabolic fountain, glassy fragments sparkled in the sunlight. But there was no air to suspend the debris, and it fell back immediately.
Within seconds the dust had coated the derrick, turning its bright paintwork gray, and was raining over the spectators like volcanic ash.
There was motion around her. People were applauding, she saw, joined in this moment. Maybe Frank was right to have them here, after all, right about the mythic potential of this huge challenge.
He was watching the drill intently. “Twenty or thirty yards,” he said.
“What?”
“The thickness of the regolith here. The dust. Then you have the megaregolith, rock crushed and shattered and dug out and mixed by the impacts. Probably a couple of miles of that. Easy to cut through. Maybe we’ll get to the anorthosite bedrock by the end of the first day, and then —”
She took his arm. Even through the layers of suit she could feel the tension in his muscles. “Hey. Take it easy.”
“I’m the nervous father, right?”
“Yeah.”
He took little steps back and forth, stocky, frustrated. “Well, there’s nothing we can do here. Come on. Let’s get out of this Buck Rogers shit and hit the bar.”
“All right.”
Xenia could hear the dust spattering over her helmet. And children were running, holding out their hands, in the gray Moon rain.
Her world was simple: The land below, light that flowed from the Dark above. Land, Light, Dark. That, and herself, alone.
Save for the Giver.
For her, all things came from the Giver. All life, in fact.
Her first memories were of the Giver, at the interface between the parched Land and the hot Dark above. He fed her, sank rich warm moist substance into the Land, and she ate greedily. She felt her roots dig into the dry depths of the Land, seeking the nourishment that was hidden there. And she drew the thin soil into herself, nursed it with hot Light, made it part of herself.
She knew the future. She knew what would become of herself and her children: that they would wait through the long hot-cold bleakness for the brief Rains. Then they would bud, and pepper this small hard world with life, in their glorious blossoming. And she would survive the long stillnesses to see the Merging itself, the wonder that lay at the end of time, she and her children.
But she was the first, and the Giver birthed her: None of it would have come to be without the Giver:
She wished she could express her love for him. She knew that was impossible.
She sensed, though, that he knew.
Overwhelmed by work as she was, Xenia couldn’t get the memory of the comet impact out of her head.
In the moment of that gigantic collision she had glimpsed a contrail; for all the world as if someone, something, had launched a rocket from the surface of the Moon.
But who, and why?
She had no time to consider the question as Roughneck gathered pace. At last, though she freed up two or three days from Frank, pleading exhaustion. She determined to use the time to resolve the puzzle.
Xenia was home for the first time after many days of sleeping at the Roughneck project office.
She took a long, hot bath to soak out the gritty lunar dust from the pores of her skin. In her small tub the water sloshed like mercury. Condensation gathered on the ceiling above her, and soon huge droplets hung there suspended, like watery chandeliers.
When she stood up the water clung to her skin, like a sheath; she had to scrape it loose with her fingers, depositing it carefully back in the tub. Then she took a small vacuum cleaner and captured all the loose droplets she could find, returning
every scrap to the drainage system, where it would be cleansed and fed back into Landsberg’s great dome reservoirs.
She made herself some coffee — fake, of course, and not as hot as she would have liked, given the relatively low pressure. She sat on a tatami mat made of rice straw matting, which was unreasonably comfortable in the low gravity, and sipped her drink.
Her apartment was a glass-walled cell in the great catacomb that was Landsberg. It had, in fact, served as a genkan, a hallway, for a greater establishment in easier, less crowded times; it was so small her living room doubled as a bedroom. The floor was covered with tatami, though she kept a zabuton cushion for Frank Paulis. Her technical equipment was contained within a tokonoma, an alcove carved into the rock, but she had also hung a scroll painting there, of a Samurai in an unlikely pose, and some dried flowers. The flowers were real, and had cost as much as the rest of her furnishings put together.
The miniature Japanese art around her filled the room with space and stillness.
She had been happy to accept the style of the inhabitants of this place, unlike Frank, who had turned his apartment into a shrine to Americana. It was remarkable, she thought, that the Japanese had turned out to be so well adapted to life on the Moon. It was as if their thousands of years on their small, cramped islands had readied them for this greater experience.
She tuned the walls to a favorite scene—a maple forest, carpeted with bright green moss — and padded, naked, to her tokonoma.
It took seconds to establish there was no indexed record of that surface rocket launch, as she had expected.
There was, however, a substantial database on the state of the whole Moon at the time of the impact; every sensor the Lunar Japanese could deploy had been turned on the Moon, that momentous morning.
And she found what she wanted, in a spectrometer record from a low-flying satellite.
The site, from this automated viewpoint, was low on the horizon—a bright splinter at the heart of the image, in fact, was an infrared trace of the nozzles of the evacuation shuttle she herself was riding at the time — but with enhancement and image manipulation she could recover a good view, much as she had seen it herself.
There was the contrail, bright and hot, arcing through splashed cometary debris. Spectrometer results told her she was looking at the product of aluminum burning in oxygen.
So it had been real.
She widened her search farther.
Yes, aluminum could serve as a rocket fuel. It had a specific impulse of nearly three hundred seconds, in fact, not as good as the best chemical propellant (that was hydrogen, which burned at four hundred), but serviceable. And aluminum-oxygen could even be manufactured from the lunar soil.
Yes, there were more traces of aluminum-oxygen rockets burning on the Moon that day, recorded by a variety of automated sensors. More contrails, snaking across the lunar surface, from all around the Moon. There were a dozen, all told, perhaps
more in parts of the Moon not recorded in sufficient detail. And each of them, she found, had been initiated when the gushing comet gases reached its location.
She pulled up a virtual globe of the Moon and mapped the launch sites. They were scattered over a variety of sites: highlands and maria alike, Nearside and Farside. No apparent pattern.
Then she plotted the contrails. The visible tracks had stretched just a few miles through the thin comet air. And so she extrapolated them, allowing them to curl around the rocky limbs of the Moon.
The tracks converged, on a single Farside site. Edo. The place the hermit, Takomi, lived.
It was the first Rain of all.
Suddenly there was air here, on this still world. At first there was the merest trace, a soft comet Rain that settled, tentatively, on her broad leaves, when they lay in shade. But she drank it in greedily, before it could evaporate in the returning Light, incorporating every molecule into her structure, without waste.
With gathering confidence she captured the Rain, and the Light, and continued the slow, patient work of building her seeds, and the fiery stuff that would birth them, drawn from the patient dust.
And then, so suddenly, it was time.
In a single orgasmic spasm the seeds burst from her structure. She was flooded with a deep joy, even as she subsided, exhausted.
The Giver was still here with her; enjoying the Rain with her; watching her blossom. She was glad of that.
And then, so soon after, there was a gusting wind, a rush of the air molecules over her damaged surfaces, as the comet drew back its substance and leaped from the Land, whole and intact, its job done. The noise of that great escape into the Dark above came to her as a great shout.
Soon after, the Giver was gone too.
But it did not matter: For, soon, she could hear the first tentative scratching of her children, carried to her like whispers through the still, hard rock, as they dug beneath the Land, seeking nourishment. There was no Giver for them, nobody to help; they were beyond her aid now. But it did not matter, for she knew they were strong, self-sufficient, resourceful.
Some would die, of course. But most would survive, digging in, waiting for the next comet Rain.
She settled back into herself, relishing the geologic pace of her thoughts. Waiting for Rain.
Xenia took an automated hopper, alone, to Farside. The journey was seamless, the landing imperceptible.
A small tractor, just a platform mounted by a bubble of tinted glass, rolled off the hopper’s base, bearing Xenia. The sky was black, but the ground was brightly lit, as if by footlights on the floor of some huge theater. Earth was invisible, of course, but she could see a satellite crawl across the black sky, remote, monitoring.
Beyond the curve of the tractor’s window, the Mare Ingenii — the Sea of Longing — stretched to the curved horizon, pebble-strewn. It was late in the lunar afternoon, and the sunlight was low, flat; the mare surface was like a gentle sea, a complex of overlapping, slowly undulating curves. The tractor’s wheels were large and open, and they absorbed the unevenness of the mare, so that it was as if she were floating.
But now she came to a place where the mare seemed unusually flat, free even of the shallow, dusty crater remnants.
Xenia stopped the tractor.
She saw two cones, tall and slender, side by side, geometrically perfect. They cast long shadows in the flat sunlight. She couldn’t tell how far away they were, or how big, so devoid was this landscape of visual cues. They simply stood there, stark and anomalous. She shivered.
She was still a mile short of Edo, but felt she had found Takomi.
She donned her spider-web suit, checked it, and stepped into the tractor’s small, extensible airlock. She waited for the hiss of escaping air, and — her heart oddly thumping — she collapsed the airlock around her and stepped onto the surface of the Moon. A little spray of dust, ancient pulverized rock, lifted up around her feet.
Nothing moved here, save herself and what she touched. There was utter silence. Xenia fought an impulse to turn around, to look to see who was creeping up behind her, in this horror-movie stillness.
The sky remained black … save, she saw, for the faintest wisp of white, glowing in the flat sunlight. Ice crystals, suspended in the thin residual atmosphere of the comet impact.
Cirrus clouds, on the Moon.
She turned away from the tractor, to face the cones, and walked forward, loping easily.
The regolith was flat, free of crater indentations, as if brushed or rolled. Her footsteps were sharp, the only breaches of this snowlike perfection. She felt an odd impulse to back up, retrace her steps, smooth them over.
She came to a place where the regolith had been raked.
She slowed, standing on bare, unworked soil.
The raking had made a series of parallel ridges, each maybe two or three inches tall, a few inches apart, a precise combing. When she looked to left or right, the raking went off to infinity, the lines sharp, their geometry perfect. And when she looked ahead, the lines receded to the horizon, as far as she could see undisturbed in their precision.
Those two cones stood, side by side, almost like termite hills. The shallow light fell on them gracefully. She saw that the lines on the ground curved to wash around the cones, like a stream diverting around islands of geometry. The curvature was smoothed out, subtly, so that after 20 or 30 of the lines the straightness was restored.
“Thank you for respecting the garden.”
Jumping at the sudden voice, she turned.
A figure was standing there — man or woman? A man, she decided, shorter and slimmer than she was, in a shabby, much-patched suit, the visor so scarred it looked as if it dated back to Apollo 11.
He bowed. “Sumimasen. I did not mean to startle you.”
“Takomi?”
“And you are Xenia Makarova.”
“You know that? How?”
A gentle shrug. “I am alone here, but not isolated. Only you sought and compiled information on the Moon flowers.”
“What flowers?”
He walked toward her. “This is my garden,” he said. “It is based on one that once graced the Daisen-In Temple, at Kyoto, Old Japan. Although this is somewhat larger, at 50 square miles —”
“A zen garden.”
“You understand that? Good. This is a kare sansui, a waterless stream garden.”
“Are you a monk?”
“I am a gardener.”
“I have thought several times that the Japanese character is suited to the stillness of the Moon. Calmness and continuity. Even before humans came here, the Moon was already like an immense zen garden, a garden of rock and soil.”
“Then you are wise.”
“Is that why you came here? Why you live alone like this?”
“Perhaps. I prefer the silence and solitude of the Moon to the bustle of the human world. You are Russian?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are alone here also. There are some of your people in the asteroid belt.”
“I know. They won’t respond to my signals.”
“No,” he said.
She pointed. “I understand the ridges represent flow. Are those mountains? Are they rising out of cloud, or sea? Or are they diminishing, shrinking back into …”
“Does it matter? The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. Perhaps time is an illusion, in fact.”
“Like the lines in the regolith.”
“You have traveled far to see me. I will give you food and drink.”
“Thank you.”
He turned and walked across the Moon. After a moment, she followed.
The abandoned lunar base, called Edo, was a cluster of concrete components: habitation modules, power plants, stores, manufacturing facilities, half-buried in the cratered plain. Comms masts sprouted like flowers. An old suborbital tug pad was a splash of scorched Moon dust concrete a couple of miles out. Around the station itself, the regolith was scarred by decades of tractor traffic. There were robots everywhere but they were standing silent, obviously inert. Their paintwork was yellowed, blistered. A faded hi-no-maru, a Japanese Sun flag, was fixed to a pole.
Edo looked ugly, cramped and confined, compared to the sunlit green bubbles of the Copernicus Triangle.
This had been the primary settlement established by the Japanese government
in the 21st century. But Kawasaki Heavy Industries had set up in Landsberg, using the crater originally as a strip-mine. Now, hollowed out, Landsberg was the capital of this new Japan, and Edo, cramped and primitive, was abandoned.
Landsberg represented the triumph of Kawasaki Heavy Industries. But that triumph had been built on Kawasaki’s partnership with the alien Prion, and nobody knew what the long-term price of that may be.
Still, Landsberg had meant the abandonment of Edo. But now a single lamp burned again at the center of the complex.
Takomi lived at the heart of old Edo, in what had once been, he said, a park, grown inside a cave dug in the ground. The buildings here were dark, gutted, abandoned. There was even, bizarrely, a McDonald’s, stripped out, its red and yellow plastic signs cracked and faded.
A single cherry tree grew, its leaves bright green, a single splash of color against the drab gray of the concrete, fused regolith, and Moon dust here.
He brought her green tea and rice cake. Out of his suit Takomi was a small, wizened man; he might have been 60, but such was the state of life-extending technology it was hard to tell. His face was round, a mass of wrinkles, and his eyes lost in leathery folds; he spoke with a wheeze, as if slightly asthmatic.
“You cherish the tree,” she said.
He smiled. “I need one friend. I regret you have missed the blossom. I am able to celebrate ichi-buzaki here. We Japanese like cherries; they represent the old Samurai view, that the blossom symbolizes our lives, here in our tents on the Moon, beautiful but fragile and all too brief.”
“I don’t understand how you can live here. You have no external support.”
“The Moon supports me,” he said.
“But —”
“It is a whole world,” he said gently.
Takomi used the lunar soil for simple radiation shielding. He baked it in crude microwave ovens to make ceramic and glass. He extracted oxygen from the lunar soil by magma electrolysis: melting the soil with focused sunlight, then passing an electric current through it to liberate the oh-two. The magma plant, lashed up from decades-old, salvaged components, was slow and power-intensive, but electrolysis was efficient in its use of soil; Takomi said he wasn’t short of sunlight, but the less haulage he had to do the better.
He took Xenia outside and showed her what he called a “grizzly,” an automated vehicle already a century old, so caked with dust it was the same colour as the Moon. The grizzly toiled patiently across the surface of the Moon, powered by sunlight, scraping up loose surface material and pumping out glass sheeting and solar cells, just a couple of square yards a day.
He took her to a rise to show her the extent of the solar farm the grizzly had built. It covered square miles, and produced megawatts.
“It is astonishing, Takomi.”
He cackled. “If one is modest in one’s request, the Moon is generous.”
“But even so, you lack essentials. It’s the eternal story of the Moon. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen —”
“Of course it is possible to derive many elements from the regolith. Solar wind
gases may be driven off simply by heating the dust.” He smiled at her. “However, I admit I cheat.”
“Cheat?”
“The concrete of this abandoned town is replete with water. A pleasing paradox: volatiles brought here, scooped from Earth’s atmosphere by people of a richer age, used to build, and then abandoned. And yet here they are, ready for my use.”
“You mine the concrete?”
“It is better than paying water tax.”
“I suppose it is. But even so —”
“And I have other friends here.”
“What friends?”
He would not answer.
Disoriented, walking beside this strange, dusty man through his gloomy caverns, she found her mind making unaccustomed intuitive leaps.
She asked him about the contrails she had seen, their convergence on this place. He evaded her questions, and began to talk about something else.
“I conduct research, you know, of a sort. There is a science station, not far from here, which was once equipped by Kawasaki Heavy Industries. Now abandoned, of course. It is — was — an infrared study station. It was there, some centuries ago, that a Japanese researcher called Nemoto first discovered evidence of Prion activity in the solar system, and so changed history.”
She grunted. “There should be a plaque,” she said dryly.
“The station was abandoned. But the equipment is operational, still.”
She wasn’t interested in Takomi’s hobby in some abandoned observatory. But there was something in his voice that made her keep listening.
“So you use the equipment,” she prompted.
“I watched, for instance, the approach of the comet. From here, some aspects of it were apparent that were not visible from Near-side stations. The geometry of the approach orbit, for example … and something else.”
“What?”
“I saw evidence of methane burning,” he said. “Close to the nucleus.”
“Methane?”
“A jet of combustion products.”
A rocket. She saw the implications immediately. Somebody had stuck a methane rocket on the side of the comet nucleus, burned the comet’s own chemicals, to divert its course.
Away from the Moon? Or — toward it?
And in either case, who? A friend of the Lunar Japanese, of everyone on the Moon, or an enemy?
“Why are you telling me this?”
But he would not reply, and a cold, hard lump of suspicion began to gather in her gut.
Takomi provided a bed for her, a thin mattress in an abandoned schoolhouse. Children’s paintings — of flowers and rocks and people floating in a black sky — adorned the walls, preserved under a layer of glass.
In the middle of the night, Frank called her.
She used her visor as a softscreen imager to see him. He was excited. The Roughneck bore had passed the crust’s lower layers, and was in the mantle.
The mantle of the Moon: a place unlike any other reached by humans before.
When the Moon formed, five billion years in the past, it was covered by an ocean of liquid rock. The lighter materials, such as plagioclase, floated up to make the crust, and the heavier stuff, olivine and pyroxene, drifted down to form the mantle. There had been some intrusion from below since then — magnesium-suite rockbergs pushing up into the crust — but the mantle, cloaking this small world, had become essentially static, the last convection currents freezing in place.
Conditions for the drilling engineers were gentle, comparatively.
There was a temperature rise of maybe 12 degrees per mile of depth, compared to four times that on Earth. The pressure scaled similarly; even now Frank’s equipment was subject only to a few kilobars, less than could be replicated in the laboratory. The Moon was much easier to deep-mine than the Earth … .
“It’s going better than we thought, better than we expected. The Moon really is still and old and static, and we’re just sinking in. Anyhow it’s great TV. Smartest thing I ever did was to insist we dump the magnesium alloy piping, make the walls transparent so you can see the rocks … .”
She tried to ask him technical questions, how they were planning to cope with the more extreme pressures and temperatures they would soon encounter.
“Xenia, it doesn’t matter. You know me. I can’t figure any machine more complicated than a screwdriver. And neither can our investors. But they know, and I know, that we don’t need to know. We just have to find the right technical-type guys, give them a challenge they can’t resist, and point them downward.”
“Paying them peanuts the while.”
He grinned. “That’s the beauty of those vocational types. Christ, we could even charge those guys admission. No, the technical stuff is piss-easy. The unreconstructed capitalist, if he wants to survive, takes primary account of the other factors. We have to make the project appeal to more than just the fat financiers and the big corporations.”
“More?”
“Sure. Xenia, you have to think big. This is the greatest lunar adventure since Neil and Buzz. That party when we first made hole was just the start. I want everybody involved, and everybody paying. Now we’re in the mantle we can market the TV rights —”
“Frank! They don’t have TV any more.”
“Whatever. I want the kids involved, all those little dark-eyed kids I see flapping around the palm trees the whole time with nothing to do. I want games. Educational stuff. Clubs to join, where you pay a couple of one-yen for a badge and get some kind of share certificate. I want little toy derricks in cereal packets … .”
“They don’t have cereal packets.”
He eyed her. “Work with me here, Xenia. And I want their parents paying too. Tours down the well, at least the upper levels.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sure I’m serious. Why do you think I’ve got the bore 10 feet wide with glass
walls? Xenia, for the first time the folks on this damn Moon are going to see some hint of an expansive future. A frontier, beneath their feet. They have to want it. Including the kids.” He nodded. “Especially the kids. I’m thinking long term, Xenia.”
“But the Grays —”
“Screw the Grays. We have the kids. They have rocks.”
“Maybe you should be focusing on the short term. You have investors, Frank.”
“The payoff will be immense. We just have to keep hammering that home. I want the best geologists on the Moon down that well, Xenia. I want seismic surveys, geochemistry, geophysics, the works. The sooner we find some lode to generate payback, the better … .”
And so on, on and on, his insect voice buzzing with plans, in the ancient stillness of Farside.
Takomi walked her back to her tractor, by the zen garden. She had been here 24 hours. The Sun had dipped closer to the horizon, and the shadows were long, the land starker, more inhospitable. Comet-ice clouds glimmered high above.
“I have something for you,” Takomi said. And he handed her what looked like a sheet of glass. It was oval-shaped, maybe a foot long. Its edges were blunt, as if melted; and it was covered with bristles.
Some kind of lunar geologic formation, she thought. A cute souvenir; Frank might like it for the office.
She said, “I have nothing to give you in return.”
“Oh, you have made your okurimono already.”
“I have?”
He cackled. “Your shit and your piss. Safely in my reclamation tanks. On the Moon, shit is more precious than gold — the most precious gift of all. Don’t you know that?”
He bowed, once, then turned to walk away, along the rim of his rock garden.
She was left looking at the oval of Moon glass in her hands.
It looked, she thought now, rather like a flower petal.
Back at Landsberg, she gave the petal-like object to the only scientist she knew, Mariko Nishizaki, for analysis. Mariko was exasperated; as Frank’s chief scientist she was under immense pressure, as Roughneck picked up momentum. But she agreed to pass on the puzzling fragment to a colleague, better qualified. Xenia agreed, provided she used only people in the employ of one of Frank’s companies.
Meanwhile, discreetly, from home, Xenia repeated Takomi’s work on the comet. She searched for evidence of the anomalous signature of methane burning.
It had been picked up, but not recognized, by many sensors.
Takomi was right.
Clearly, someone had planted a rocket on the side of the comet, and deflected it from its path. It was also clear that most of the burn had been on the far side of the Sun, where it would be undetected.
The burn had been long enough, she estimated, to have deflected the comet
to cause its lunar crash. Undeflected, it would surely have sailed by, spectacular but harmless.
She then did some checks of the tangled accounts of Frank’s companies.
She found places where funds had been diverted. Resources secreted. A surprisingly large amount, reasonably well concealed.
She’d been cradling a suspicion since Edo. Now it was confirmed, and she felt only disappointment at the shabbiness of the truth.
She knew that Takomi wouldn’t reveal the existence of the rocket on the comet. He simply wasn’t engaged enough in the human world to consider it. But she knew that, such was the continuing focus of attention on Fracastorius, Takomi wouldn’t be the only observer who would notice the trace of that diverting rocket, follow the evidence trail.
The truth would come out.
Without making a decision on how to act on this, she went back to work with Frank.
The pressure on Xenia, on both of them, was immense and unrelenting.
Frank seemed to be finding it hard to cope, and it brought him little joy.
After one gruelling 20-hour day, she slept with him.
She thought it would relieve the tension, for both of them. Well, it did, for a brief oceanic moment. But then, as they rolled apart, it all came down on them again.
Frank lay on his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling, jaw muscles working, restless, tense.
There was no prospect of sleep. All she could offer him was talk.
“Ya nye panimayoo,” she said. “I still don’t understand, Frank.”
“Huh?”
“You’re pushing Roughneck because you want to future-proof the Moon. Terraform it, if you have to. But you pitch it to your investors as a mining venture with short-term payoffs.”
“Sure. But I know my quarry, Xenia. Those people are politicians and business-types. That is, they’re a bunch of crooks, charlatans, and madmen. That side of human nature hasn’t changed since 1970. They’re like me.”
No, they’re not, she thought.
“What they care about is profit in the here and now. If I talk about terraforming I’ll scare them off.”
“But once you’ve dug your hole —”
“— Once I’ve dug my hole, and all those lovely volatiles are just gushing out onto the surface, the longer term implications are going to be obvious to everyone.” He looked thoughtful. “Of course just having the volatiles won’t solve all the problems. You’ll have the issue of the Moon’s long day-night cycle, for instance. Even an atmosphere as thick as Earth’s would freeze out every two weeks, on the dark side. And you’d have huge winds, forever sweeping around the terminator.”
“Mirrors,” she said. “Suspended over the dark side. Stop everything from freezing.”
He nodded, approving. “But mirrors are complicated; you’d need a space-going infrastructure to maintain them. No, the real solution is to spin up the Moon.”
She goggled. “Spin it up? How the hell —”
He grinned in the dim light. “How do I know? There’s more. We might want to move the Moon away from Earth altogether. What use is Earth now? It will only cause 60-feet tides, on a terraformed Moon, and slow up the spin again. To hell with that. Let’s pick an orbit of our own — maybe 60 degrees ahead of Earth. You don’t know how we’ll do that? Neither do I. When the time comes we’ll hire the technical types again, and pay them more peanuts.” He frowned. “Of course, it’s important we do this now. The next few decades, I mean.”
“Why? The leaky resource loops in the domes?”
“Not just that. Xenia, this is a low-gravity, low-pressure environment. There’s less oxygen per lungful than on Earth.”
“So what?”
“So, low gravity and low oxygen breeds big, slow, docile people. On the Moon, you don’t even have to be smart enough to react fast when you fall out of your tree.”
“You’re saying that living on the Moon is breeding dumb people? That’s just prejudice, Frank.”
He shrugged. “Take a look at the schools’ databases if you want to verify it. Look at the Grays. Anyhow there’s a perspective beyond that, even.”
“Frank, you’ve already terraformed the Moon, spun it up and moved it, and saved the inhabitants from losing their intelligence. How much further can you go?”
“Well, think about it,” he whispered. “Earth is an unusual planet. Maybe unique. Life has spent four billion years making it the way it is. The Moon, on the other hand, is mundane. There must be billions of little rocky worlds just like this, scattered through the galaxy. More Moons, not more Earths. So if we can learn to live on the Moon, we can live anywhere. The human race will be immortal.”
“Sometimes you scare me, Frank.”
“I know. I think big. That’s why you love me.”
No, she thought. That is why you fascinate me. You really would save the world by destroying it.
I will never comprehend you, she thought.
They fell silent, without sleeping.
A little later Mariko Nishzaki called Xenia. She had preliminary results about the glass object from Edo. Xenia took the call in her tokonoma, masking it from Frank.
“The object is constructed almost entirely of lunar surface material. Specifically, glass made of —”
“Almost?”
“There are also complex organics in there. We don’t know where they came from, or what they are for. There is water, too, sealed into cells within the glass. The structure itself acts as a series of lenses, which focus sunlight. Remarkably efficient. There seems to be a series of valves on the underside that draw in
particles of regolith. The grains are melted, evaporated, in the intense focused sunlight. It’s a pyrolysis process similar to —”
“What happens to the vaporized material?”
“There is a series of traps, leading off from each light-focusing cell. The traps are maintained at different temperatures by spicules — the fine needles protruding from the upper surface — which also, we suspect, act to deflect daytime sunlight, and conversely work as insulators during the long lunar night. In the traps, at different temperatures, various metal species condense out. The structure seems to be oriented toward collecting aluminum. There is also an oxygen trap farther back.”
Aluminum and oxygen. Rocket fuel, melting out of the lunar rock, inside the glass structure, by the light of the Sun.
Mariko was continuing with her analysis, and promised to keep Xenia informed.
Xenia returned to bed. Frank seemed to be asleep.
She thought over her relationship with him.
She had a choice to make. Not about the comet issue; others would unravel that, in time. About Frank, and herself.
He fascinated her, true. He was a man of her own time, with a crude vigor she didn’t find among the Japanese-descended colonists of the Moon. He was the only link she had with home. The only human on the Moon who didn’t speak Japanese to her.
Maybe he reminded her of her father. That, as far as she could tell, was all she felt.
In the meantime, she must consider her own morality.
Laying beside him, she made her decision.
She wouldn’t betray him. As long as he needed her, she would stand with him.
But she would not save him.
The next morning, Mariko called Xenia again. “The results are back. About the organics. You ought to come see this … .”
Mariko worked in what seemed like a typical geology lab, to Xenia: rocks and dust samples everywhere, in boxes and trays and on shelves, benches bearing anonymous analysis equipment. Some of the more pristine samples were being handled in sealed glove boxes. There was a persistent smell of wood smoke: the scent of fresh Moon dust, Xenia knew.
Mariko had set out the glass petal on a cleared bench. The petal had been partially dissected.
“I did not believe what my friend told me,” Mariko said. “Therefore I had him bring his subsample and his results here and repeat his analysis.”
“Is it so surprising?”
“To me, yes. But you must remember I am a geologist. My contact works with biochemists and biologists, and they are extremely excited.”
Biologists?
Xenia sat down. “You’d better tell me.”
Mariko consulted notes in a softscreen.
“Within this structure the organic chemicals serve many uses. A species of
photosynthesis, for instance. A complex chemical factory appears to be at work here. There is evidence of some kind of root system, which perhaps provides the organics in the first place, … but, there is no source we know of. This is the Moon.” She looked confused. “Xenia, this is essentially a vapor-phase reduction machine of staggering elegance of execution, mediated by organic chemistry. It must be an artifact. And yet it looks —”
“What?”
“As if it grew, out of the Moon ground. There are many further puzzles,” Mariko said, “for instance, the evidence of a neural network.”
“What?”
“Some of the organics —”
“Are you saying this has some kind of a nervous system?”
Mariko shrugged. “I am not a biologist. But still, if this is some simple lunar plant, why would it need a nervous system?” She blinked. “Even, perhaps, a rudimentary awareness.” She studied Xenia. “What is this thing?”
“I can’t tell you that.” She picked up the sample. “Not yet. Sorry.”
Mariko walked with her to the door. “There has been much speculation about the form life would take, here on the Moon. But volatile depletion seemed an unbeatable hurdle. Is it possible —”
“Mariko, I can’t tell you any more.”
Mariko pursued her. “How could life originate, here on the Moon? And, more fundamentally, where did it get its organic material? Was it from the root structure, from deep within the Moon? If so, you realize that this is confirmation of my hypotheses about the volatiles in —”
Xenia stopped. “Mariko. This isn’t to go further. News of this … discovery. Not yet. Tell your colleagues that too.”
Mariko looked shocked, as Xenia, with weary certainty, had expected. “You want to suppress this? But this could be …”
“The discovery of the age. Life on the Moon. I know.”
“More than that. Even our engineers could learn so much by studying the processes at work here.”
“But this isn’t science, Mariko. I don’t want anything perturbing the project.”
Mariko made to protest again.
“Read your contract,” Xenia snapped, and walked out, carrying the petal.
Life was long, slow, unchanging.
Even her thoughts were slow.
In the timeless intervals between the comets, her growth was chthonic, her patience matching that of the rocks themselves. Slowly, slowly, she rebuilt her strength: Light traps to start the long process of drawing out fire for the next seeds, leaves to catch the comet Rain that would come again.
She spoke to her children, their subtle scratching carrying to her through the still, cold rock.
Their conversations lasted a million years. It was important that she taught them: how to grow, of the comet Rains to come, of the Giver at the beginning of things, the Merging at the end.
The Rains were spectacular; but infrequent. But when they came, once or twice in every billion years, her pulse accelerated, her metabolism exploded, as she drank in the thin, temporary air, and dragged the fire she needed from the rock.
And, with each Rain, she birthed again, the seeds exploding from her body and scattering around the Land.
But, after that first time, she was never alone. She could feel, through the rock, the joyous pulsing of her children as they hurled their own seed through the gathering comet air.
Soon there were so many of them that it was as if all of the Land was alive with their birthing, its rocky heart echoing to their joyous shouts.
And still, in the distant future, the Merging awaited them.
As the comets leaped one by one back into the sky, sucking away the air with them, she held that thought to her exhausted body, cradling it.
Eighty days in and Frank was still making hole at his mile-a-day pace. But things had started to get a lot harder.
This was mantle, after all. The rock was like stretched wire, under so much pressure it exploded when it was exposed. It was a new regime. New techniques were needed.
Costs escalated.
The pressure on Frank to shut down was intense.
Many of his investors had already become extremely rich from the potential of the rich ore lodes discovered in the lower crust and upper mantle. There was talk of opening up new, shallow bores elsewhere on the Moon. Frank had proved his point. Why go farther, when the Roughneck was already a commercial success?
But that wasn’t Frank’s dream, of course. Metal ore wasn’t his goal, and he wasn’t about to stop now.
He lost some investors. For now at least he was able to sustain a sufficient coalition to maintain the project. Xenia was becoming worried at the funds he was ploughing back into the drilling himself, however.
… That was when the first death occurred, all of 70 miles below the surface of the Moon.
She found him in his office at New Dallas, pacing back and forth, an Earthman caged on the Moon, his muscles lifting him off the glass floor.
“Omelettes and eggs,” he said. “Omelettes and eggs.”
“That’s a cliché, Frank.”
“It was probably the Grays.”
“There’s no evidence of sabotage.”
He paced. “Look, we’re in the mantle of the Moon —”
“You don’t have to justify it to me,” she said, but he wasn’t listening.
“The mantle,” he said. “You know, I hate it. Four hundred miles of worthless shit we have to dig through just to get to the good stuff down below.”
“The primitive material?”
“Yeah. Primeval treasure, waiting for us since the birth of the solar system. But first we have to get through the mantle.”
“It was the change over to the subterrene that caused the disaster. Right?”
He ran a hand over his gleaming scalp. “If you were a prosecutor, and this was a court, I’d challenge you on ‘caused.’ The accident happened when we switched over to the subterrene, yes.”
They had already gone too deep for the simple alloy casing, or the cooled lunar glass Frank had replaced it with; to get through the mantle they would use a subterrene, a development of obsolete deep-mining technology, a probe that melted its way through the rock and built its own casing behind it, a tube of hard, high-melting-point quasiglass.
Frank started talking, rapidly, about quasiglass. “It’s the stuff the Lunar Japanese use for rocket nozzles. Very high melting point. It’s based on diamond, but it’s a quasicrystal, so the lab boys tell me, halfway between a crystal and a glass. They build it with some kind of nano technique, molecule by molecule … .”
“Like a Penrose tilling,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, looking surprised she understood. “Harder than ordinary crystal because there are no neat planes for cracks and defects to propagate. And it’s a good heat insulator similarly. If not for quasiglass this bore would be as ragged as any in a Texas oil field, just lengths of pipe packed in with cement … . Besides that we support the hole against collapse and shear stress. Rock bolts, fired through the casing and into the rock beyond. We do everything we can to ensure the integrity of our structure —”
This was, she realized, a first draft of the testimony he would have to give to the investigating commissions.
When the first subterrene started up it built a casing with a flaw, undetected for a hundred yards.
There had been an implosion. They lost the subterrene itself, a half mile of bore — and a single life, of a senior toolpusher.
“We’ve already restarted,” Frank said. “A couple of days and we’ll have recovered. The overall schedule loss —”
“Frank, this isn’t a question of schedule loss. It’s the wider impact. Public perception. Come on; you know how important this is. If we don’t handle this right we’ll be shut down.”
He seemed reluctant to absorb that. He was silent, for maybe half a minute.
Then his mood switched. He brightened. “Hell, you’re right. You know, we can leverage this to our advantage.”
“What do you mean?”
“We need to turn this guy we lost—what was his name? — into a hero.” He snapped his fingers. “Did he have any family? Find out. A 10-year-old son would be perfect, but we’ll work with whatever we have. Get his kids to drop cherry blossom down the hole. You know the deal. The message has to be right. The kids want the bore to be finished, as a memorial to the brave hero.”
“Frank, the dead engineer was a she.”
“And we ought to think about the Gray angle. Get one of them to call that toolpusher a criminal.”
“Frank —”
He faced her. “You think this is immoral. Right?”
“Well —”
“Bullshit,” he said. “It would be immoral to stop; otherwise, believe me, everyone on this Moon is going to die in the long run. Why do you think I asked you to set up the kids’ clubs and schemes?”
“For this?”
“Hell, yes. Already I’ve had some of those chicken-livered investors try to bail out. Now we use the kids, to put so much pressure on them it’s impossible for them to turn back. If that toolpusher had a kid in one of our clubs, in fact, that’s perfect.”
“Frank —”
He eyed her and pointed a stubby finger at her face. “This is the bottleneck. Every project goes through it. We need to get through it, is all. I need to know you’re with me on this, Xenia.”
She held his gaze for a couple of seconds, then sighed. “You know I am.”
He softened, and dropped his hands. “Yeah. I know.” But there was something in his voice, she thought, that didn’t match his words. An uncertainty that hadn’t been there before. “Omelettes and eggs,” he muttered. “Whatever.” He clapped his hands. “So. What’s next?”
This time, Xenia didn’t fly directly to Edo. Instead she programmed the hopper to make a series of slow orbits of the abandoned base.
It took her an hour to find the glimmer of glass, reflected sunlight sparkling from a broad expanse of it, at the center of an ancient, eroded crater.
She landed a half-mile away, eager to avoid disturbing the structure. She suited up quickly, clambered out of the hopper, and set off on foot.
Pocked regolith slid smoothly toward her feet, over the close horizon. She made ground quickly, in this battered, ancient landscape, restrained only by the Moon’s gentle gravity.
Soon the land ahead grew bright, glimmering like a pool. She slowed, approaching cautiously.
The flower was larger than she had expected. It must have covered an acre or more, delicate glass leaves resting easily against the regolith from which they had been constructed, spiky needles protruding. There was, too, another type of structure: short, stubby cylinders, pointing at the sky, projecting in all directions.
Miniature cannon muzzles. Launch gantries for aluminum-burning rockets, perhaps.
“ … I must startle you again.”
She turned. It was Takomi, of course: in his worn, patched suit, his hands folded behind his back. He was looking at the flower.
“Life on the Moon,” she said.
“Its life-cycle is simple,” said Takomi. “The flower is exposed to sunlight, through the long Moon day. Each of its leaves is a collector of sunlight. The flower focuses the light on regolith, and breaks the soil down to the components it needs to manufacture its own structure, its seeds, and the simple rocket fuel used to propel them across the surface.
“Then, during the night, the leaves act as cold traps. They absorb the comet frost that falls on them, water and methane and carbon dioxide, incorporating that, too, into the flowers’ substance.”
“And the roots?”
“The roots are miles long. I don’t know how long. They tap deep wells of nutrient, water and organic substances. Deep inside the Moon.”
So Frank, of course, was right about the volatiles, as she had known.
Takomi said now, “This is how the Moon feeds me. I have found a way to tap into those roots, extract the deep nutrients. My needs are modest. It does not damage the plant—although the plant is already withering.”
“What? … I suppose you despise Frank Paulis.”
He said mildly, “Why should I?”
“Because he is trying to dig out the sustenance for these plants. Rip it out of the heart of the Moon. Are you a Gray, Takomi?”
He shrugged. “We have different ways. My way is —” he stretched his hands “— this. To live off the land, off the Moon. I need little to sustain me, and that little the Moon provides. And I have all the stillness I need.”
“But how many humans could the Moon support this way?”
“Ah. Not many. But how many humans does the Moon need?” He studied her. “Your people have a word. Mechta.”
“Dream.” It was the first Russian word she had heard spoken in many months.
“It was the name your engineers wished to give to the first probe they sent to the Moon. Mechta. But it was not allowed, by those who decide such things.
“Well, I am living a dream, here on the Moon, a dream of rock and stillness, here with my Moon flower. That is how you should think of me.”
He smiled, and walked away.
The Land was rich with life now: her children, her descendants, drinking in air and Light. Their songs echoed through the core of the Land, strong and powerful.
But it would not last, for it was time for the Merging.
First there was a sudden explosion of Rains, too many to count, the comets leaping out of the ground, one after the other:
Then the Land itself became active. Great sheets of rock heated, becoming liquid, and withdrew into the interior of the Land.
Many died, of course. But those that remained bred frantically. It was a glorious time, a time of death and life.
Changes accelerated. She could feel huge masses rising and falling in the molten interior. The Land grew hot, dissolving into a deep ocean of liquid rock. She clung to the thin crust that contained the world.
And then the Land itself began to break up, great masses of it hurling themselves into the sky, so that soon the Land was surrounded by a glowing cloud of fragments.
More died.
But she was not afraid. It was glorious! — as if the Land itself was birthing comets, as if the Land were like herself, hurling its children far away.
The end came swiftly, more swiftly than she had expected, in an explosion of heat
and light that burst from the heart of the Land itself The last, thin crust was broken open, and suddenly there was no more Land, nowhere for her roots to grip.
It was the Merging, and it was glorious … .
Frank J Paulis and Xenia Makarova, wrapped in their spider-web spacesuits, stood on a narrow aluminum bridge. They were under the South Pole derrick, and suspended over the tunnel Frank had dug into the heart of the Moon.
The shaft below Xenia was a cylinder of sparkling lunar glass. Lights had been buried in the walls every few yards, so the shaft was brilliantly lit, like a shopping mall passageway, the multiple reflections glimmering from the glass walls. Refrigeration and other conduits snaked along the tunnel.
It was vertical, perfectly symmetrical, and there was no mist or dust, nothing to obscure her view. The tunnel receded to the center of the Moon, to infinity. Momentarily dizzy, she stepped back, anchored herself again on the surface of the Moon.
The area around the derrick had long lost its pristine theme-park look. There were piles of spill and waste and ore, dug out of the deepening hole in the ground. LHDs, automated load-haul-dump vehicles, crawled continually around the site. The LHDs were baroque aluminum beetles with broad fenders, and most of their working parts were six feet or more off the ground, where sprays of the abrasive lunar dust wouldn’t reach. They sported giant fins to radiate off their excess heat; no conduction or convection to transfer heat here. The LHDs, she realized, were machines made for the Moon … .
Frank, excited, oddly nervous, started telling her how even the subterrene technology hadn’t been resistant enough when they got through the mantle, four hundred miles deep, and the temperature climbed toward a thousand degrees. The drill could only penetrate farther by having high-velocity water flashed ahead of it so that the bore was constantly contained by a finger of chilled rock, bringing the temperature down to a bearable level —
The lights, here at the South Pole pit head, were bright, and Xenia couldn’t see Frank’s face within his visor.
He rubbed his hands. “It’s wonderful. Like the old days. Engineers overcoming obstacles, building things.”
“And,” she said, “thanks to all this stuff, we got through the mantle.”
“Hell, yes, we got through it. You’ve been away from the project too long, Xenia. We got through all that shit to the deep interior. The primitive material. And —”
“Yes?”
He took her hands. Squat in his suit, his face invisible, he was still, unmistakably, Frank J Paulis.
“And now, it’s our time.”
“What are we going to do?”
She could hear his smile. “Trust me.”
Without hesitation — he never hesitated — he stepped to the lip of the delicate metal bridge. She walked with him, a single step. A stitched safety harness, suspended from pulleys above, impeded her.
He said, “Will you follow me?”
She took a breath. “I’ve followed you so far.”
“Then come.”
Hand in hand, they jumped off the bridge.
Slow as a snowflake, tugged by gravity, Xenia fell toward the heart of the Moon.
The loose harness dragged gently at her shoulders and crotch, slowing her fall. She was guided by a couple of spider-web cables, tautly threaded down the axis of the shaft; through her suit’s fabric she could hear the hiss of the pulleys.
Xenia could hear her heart pound. She looked down. There was nothing beneath her feet save a diminishing tunnel of light.
Frank was laughing.
The depth markers on the wall were already rising past her, mapping her acceleration. But she was suspended here, in the vacuum, as if she were in orbit; she had no sense of speed, no vertigo from the hole beneath her.
Once she would have been terrified by such an experience. But she seemed to have lost her monkey instincts. There were rumors that Saddlepoint gateway transitions did that to you. Or perhaps this place, this monstrous Moon tunnel of Frank’s, was simply too strange to comprehend.
Their speed picked up quickly. In seconds, it seemed, they had already passed through the fine regolith layers, the Moon’s pulverized outer skin, and were sailing down through the megaregolith. Giant chunks of deeply shattered rock crowded against the glassy, transparent tunnel walls like the corpses of buried animals.
Frank was watching her. “Don’t touch that guide wire.”
“I won’t.”
“These Japanese suits are smart technology, but we’re already moving so fast the wire would take your arm off. But it isn’t so bad; even freefalling, our speed would only reach a mile a second by the time we hit the center of the Moon. Gravity falls off as you descend, you see … .” He looked down, at the convergent emptiness beneath their boots. “Anyhow the pulleys will slow us. A hell of a ride, isn’t it?”
“Yes … .”
The material beyond the walls had turned smooth and gray now. This was lunar bedrock, anorthosite, buried beyond even the probings and pulverizing of the great impactors. Unlike Earth, there would be no fossils here, she knew, no remnants of life in these deep levels; only a smooth gradation of minerals, processed only by the slow workings of geology.
Despite the gathering warmth of the tunnel, despite her own acceleration, she had a sense of cold, of age and stillness.
In some places there were levels, side shafts dug away from the main exploratory bore. They led to stopes, lodes of magnesium-rich rocks, plugs of deep material that had been extruded long ago from the Moon’s frozen interior, and were now
being mined out by Frank’s industry partners. She saw the workings as complex blurs, hurrying upward as she fell, gone like dream visions.
They dropped through a surprisingly sharp transition into a new realm, where the rock on the other side of the walls glowed, of its own internal light. It was a dull gray-red, like a cooling lava on Earth.
“The mantle of the Moon,” Frank whispered, gripping her hands. “Basalt. Up here it ain’t so bad. But farther down the rock is so soft it pulls like taffy when you try to drill it. Four hundred miles of mush, a pain in the ass … .”
As he talked they passed a place where the glass walls were marked with an engraving, stylized flowers with huge lunar petals. This was where a technician had lost her life, in an implosion. The little memorial shot upward and was lost in the light. Frank didn’t comment.
The rock was now glowing a bright cherry-pink, rushing upward past them.
Falling, falling. Like dropping through some immense glass tube full of fluorescing gas. Xenia sensed the heat, despite her suit’s insulation and the refrigeration of the tunnel.
Thick conduits surrounded them now, crowding the tunnel, flipping from bracket to bracket. The conduits carried water, bearing the Moon’s deep heat to the hydrothermal plants on the surface.
Now they passed through another transition, signaled by a wide wall marking, this one undetectable to eyes that were becoming dazzled by the pink-white glare of the rocks.
The harness tugged at her sharply, slowing her. Looking down along the forest of conduits, she could see that they were approaching a terminus, a platform of some dull, opaque ceramic that plugged the tunnel.
“End of the line,” Frank said. “Down below there’s only the downhole tools and the casing machine and other junk … . Do you know where you are? Xenia, we’re five hundred miles deep, halfway to the center of the Moon … .”
She glanced at her chronometer patch. It had taken 20 minutes.
The pulleys gripped harder and they slowed, drifting to a halt a couple of feet above the platform. With Frank’s help she loosened her harness and spilled easily to the platform itself, landing on her feet, as if after a sky-dive.
She caught her balance, and looked around.
The platform was crowded with science equipment, anonymous gray boxes linked by cables to softscreens and batteries. Sensors and probes, wrapped in water-cooling jackets, were plugged into ports in the walls. She could see data collected from the lunar material flickering over the softscreens, measurements of porosity and permeability, data from gas meters and pressure gauges and dynamometers and gravimeters. There was evidence of work here, small pressurisable shelters, spare backpacks, notepads — even, incongruously, a coffee cup. Human traces, here at the heart of the Moon.
They were alone here.
She walked to the walls. She was, she felt, almost floating.
There was primeval rock, pure and unmarked, all around her, beyond the window — like walls.
“The deep interior of the Moon,” Frank said, joining her. He ran his gloved hands over the glass. “What the rock hounds call primitive material. The same stuff the asteroids are made of, left over from the solar system’s formation. Never melted and differentiated like the mantle, never bombarded like the surface. Untouched since the Moon budded off of Earth itself, I guess.”
“I feel light as a feather,” she said. And so she did; she felt as if she was going to float back up the borehole like a soap bubble.
Frank glared up into the hundreds of miles of tunnel above them, and concentric light rings glimmered in his face plate. “All that rock up there doesn’t pull at us. Not when we’re down here. Just the stuff beneath our feet. It might as well be cloud, rocky cloud, hundreds of miles of it —”
“I suppose, at the core itself, you would be weightless.”
“I guess.”
On one low bench stood a glass beaker, covered with clear plastic film. She picked it up; she could barely feel it, dwarfed within her thick, inflexible gloves. It held a liquid that sloshed in the gentle gravity. The liquid was murky brown, not quite transparent.
She turned. Frank was grinning.
Immediately, she understood.
“I wish you could drink it,” he said. “I wish we could drink a toast. You know what that is? It’s water. Moon water, water from the lunar rocks.” He took the beaker and turned around, in a slow, ponderous dance. “It’s all around us. Just as Mariko predicted, a ocean of it. Wadsleyite and majorite with three percent water by weight … . Incredible. We did it, babe.”
“Frank. You were right. I had no idea.”
“I sat on the results. I wanted you to be the first to see this. To see my —”
“Affirmation,” she said gently. “This is your affirmation.”
“Yeah. I’m a hero.”
It was true, she knew.
It was going to work out just as Frank had projected, as they had mapped out in the wargaming they had done. As soon as the implications of the find became apparent — that there really were oceans down here, buried inside the Moon — the imaginations of the Lunar Japanese would be fast to follow Frank’s vision. This wasn’t a simple matter of plugging holes in the environment support system loops. There was enough resource here, just as Frank said, to future-proof the Moon. Not for the first time Xenia had recognized Frank’s brutal wisdom in his dealings with people: to bulldoze them as far as he had to, until they couldn’t help but agree with him.
Frank would become the most famous man on the Moon.
That wasn’t going to help him, though, she thought sadly.
“So,” she said. “You proved your point. You found what you wanted to find. Will you stop now?”
“Stop the borehole?” He sounded shocked. “Hell, no. We go on.”
“Frank, the investors are already pulling out.”
“Chicken-livered assholes. I’ll go on if I have to pay for it myself.” He put the beaker down. “Xenia, to hell with the water. Water isn’t enough; it’s just a first
step. We have to go on. We still have to find the other volatiles. Methane. Organics —”
“But even Mariko says the theoretical basis for their existence here is shaky compared to water.”
“Shaky, hell,” he said angrily. “If those cosmic processes, whatever the hell they were, worked to trap the water, they’ll trap the other stuff too.”
His faith, in the existence of those deep chemical treasures, was strong as ever. And — knowing she already had evidence that he was right — she felt stabs of guilt.
But she couldn’t help him now.
He was saying, “We go on. Damn it, Roughneck is my project.”
“No, it isn’t. We sold so much stock to get through the mantle that you don’t have a majority any more.”
“But we’re rich again.” He laughed. “We’ll buy it back.”
“Nobody’s selling. They certainly won’t after you publish this finding. You’re too successful. I’m sorry, Frank.”
“So the bad guys are closing in, huh. Well, the hell with it. I’ll find a way to beat them. I always do.” He grabbed her gloved hands. “Never mind that now. Listen, I’ll tell you why I brought you down here. I’m winning. I found water in the Moon, just where we predicted. And as soon as we hit volatile, I’m going to get everything I ever wanted. Except one thing.”
She was bewildered. “What?”
“I want us to get married. I want us to have kids. We came here together, from out of the past, and we should have a life of our own, on this Japanese Moon.” His voice was heavy, laden with emotion, almost cracking. In the glare of rock light, she couldn’t see his face.
She hadn’t expected this. She couldn’t think of a response.
“Hell,” he said, and now his voice was almost shrill. “What do you say? This is the biggest moment of my life, Xenia. Of our lives. I want to share it with you, now and forever. To hell with Kawasaki, the investors. We did this, together. The Moon is ours. Now, what do you say?”
“The comet,” she said softly.
He was silent for a moment, still gripping her hands.
“The methane rocket was detected.”
She could tell he was thinking of denying all knowledge of this. Then he said:
“Who found it?”
“Takomi.”
“The piss-drinking old bastard out at Edo?”
“Yes.”
“That still doesn’t prove—”
“I checked the accounts. I found where you diverted the funds, how you built the rocket, how you launched it, how you rendezvoused it with the comet.” She sighed. “You never were smart at that kind of stuff, Frank. You should have asked me to help.”
“Would you?”
“No.”
He released her hands. “I never meant it to hit where it did. On Fracastorius.”
“I know that. Nevertheless, that’s where it did land.”
He picked up the glass of lunar water. “But you know what, I’d have gone ahead even if I had known. I had to kickstart Prometheus; I needed that comet. It was the only way. You can’t stagnate. That way lies extinction.”
She closed her eyes. “I admire your ambition. But —”
“If I gave the Lunar Japanese a choice, they wouldn’t have allowed it. They’d be sucking piss water out of old concrete for the rest of time.”
“But it would be their choice.”
“And that’s more important?”
She shrugged. “It’s inevitable they’ll know soon,” she said. “Where I found the false accounting, the evidence of the deflection, the authorities will follow.”
He turned to her, and she sensed he was grinning again, irrepressible. “At least I finished my project. At least I got to be a hero … . Marry me,” he said again.
“No.”
“Why not? Because I’m going to be a con?”
“Not that.”
“Then why?”
“Because I wouldn’t last, in your heart. You move on, Frank.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. But there was no conviction in his voice. “So,” he said. “No wedding bells. No little Lunar Americans, to teach these Japanese how to play pro football.”
“I guess not.”
He walked away. “Makes you think, though,” he said, his back to her.
“What?”
He waved a hand at the glowing walls. “This technology isn’t so advanced. Neil and Buzz couldn’t have done it, but maybe we could have opened up some kind of deep mine on the Moon by the end of the 20th century, say. Started to dig out the water, live off the land. If only we’d known it was here, all this wealth, even NASA might have done it. And then you’d have an American Moon, and who knows how history might have turned out?”
“None of us can change things.”
He looked at her, his face masked by rock light. “However much we might want to.”
“No.”
“How long do you think I have?”
“Before —”
“Before they shut me down.”
“I don’t know. Weeks. No more.”
“Then I’ll have to make those weeks count.”
He showed her how to hook her suit harness to a fresh pulley set, and they began the long, slow ride to the surface of the Moon.
Abandoned on its bench top at the bottom of the shaft, she could see the covered beaker, the Moon water within.
After her descent into the moon, she returned to Edo, seeking stillness.
The world of the Moon, here on Farside, was simple: the regolith below, the
sunlight that flowed from the black sky above. Land, light, dark. That, and herself, alone. When she looked downsun, at her own shadow, the light bounced from the dust back toward her, making a halo around her head.
The Moon flower had, she saw, significantly diminished since her last visit; many of the outlying petals were broken off or shattered.
After a time, Takomi joined her.
He said: “Evidence of the flowers has been unturned before.”
“It has?”
“I have, discreetly, studied old records of the lunar surface. Another legacy of richer days past, when much of the Moon was studied in some detail.
“But those explorers, long dead now, did not know what they had found, of course. Some of the remains were buried under regolith layers. Some of them were billions of years old.” He sighed. “The evidence is fragmentary. Nevertheless I have been able to establish a pattern.”
“What kind of pattern?”
“It is true that the final seeding event drew the pods, with unerring accuracy, back to this site. As you observed. The pods were absorbed into the structure of the primary plant, here, which has since withered. The seeding was evidently triggered by the arrival of the comet, the enveloping of the Moon by its new, temporary atmosphere.
“But I have studied the patterns of earlier seedings —”
“Triggered by earlier comet impacts.”
“Yes. All of them long before human occupancy began here. Just one or two impacts, per aeon. Brief comet rains, spurts of air, before the long winter closed again. And each impact triggered a seeding event.”
“Ah. I understand. These are like desert flowers, which bloom in the brief rain. Poppies, rockroses, grasses, chenopods.”
“Exactly. They complete their life-cycles quickly, propagate as vigorously as possible, while the comet air lasts. And then their seeds lay dormant, for as long as necessary, waiting for the next chance event, perhaps as long as a billion years.”
“I imagine they spread out, trying to cover the Moon. Propagate as fast and as far as possible, like desert plants. Wherever there is suitable regolith —”
“No,” he said quietly.
“Then what?”
“At every comet event, the seedings converge.
“A billion years ago there were a thousand sites like this. In a great seeding, these diminished to a mere hundred: Those fortunate few were bombarded with seeds, while the originators withered. And later, another seeding reduced that hundred to 12 or so. And finally, the 12 are reduced to one.”
She tried to think that through; she pictured the little seed pods converging, diminishing in number. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Not for us, who are ambassadors from Earth,” he said. “Earth life spreads, colonizes, whenever and wherever it can. But this is lunar life, Xenia. And the Moon is an old, cooling, dying world. Its richest days were brief moments, far in the past. And so life has adjusted to the situation. Do you understand?”
“I think so. But now, this is truly the last of them? The end?”
“Yes. The flower is already diminishing, dying.”
“But why here? Why now?”
He shrugged. “Xenia, your colleague Frank Paulis is evidently determined to rebuild the Moon, inside and out. Even if he fails, others will follow where he showed the way. The stillness of the Moon is lost.” He sniffed. “My own garden might survive, but in a park, like your old Apollo landers, to be gawked at by tourists. It is a diminishing. And so with the flowers. There is nowhere for them to survive, on the Moon, in our future.”
“But how do they know they can’t survive — oh, that’s the wrong question. Of course the flowers don’t know anything.”
He paused, regarding her. “Are you sure?”
“What do you mean?”
“We are smart, and aggressive. We think smartness is derived from aggression. Perhaps that is true. But perhaps it takes a greater imagination to comprehend stillness than to react to the noise and clamor of our shallow human world.”
She frowned, remembering Mariko’s evidence about neural structures in the flowers. “You’re saying these things are conscious?”
“I believe so. It would be hard to prove. I have spent much time in contemplation here, however. And I have developed an intuition. A sympathy, perhaps.”
“But that seems —”
“What?”
“Bleak,” she said. “Unbelievably so. Cruel. What kind of god would plan such a thing? Think about it. You have a conscious creature, trapped on the surface of the Moon, in this desolate, barren environment. And its way of living, stretching back billions of years maybe, has had the sole purpose of diminishing itself, to prepare for this final extinction, this death, this smyert. What is the purpose of consciousness, confronted by such desolation?”
“But perhaps it is not so,” he said gently.
“What?”
“The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. The future of the Moon, in the direction we face, may be desolate. But not the past. So why not face that way?”
She remembered the kare sansui, the waterless stream. It was impossible to tell if the stream was flowing from past to future, or future to past; if the hills of heaped regolith were rising or sinking—
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Perhaps to the flowers — to this flower, the last, or perhaps the first — this may be a beginning, not an end. The beginning of a journey that will end in unity, and unimaginable glory.”
“Vileekee bokh. You are telling me that these plants are living backwards in time? Propagating — not into the future — but into the past?”
He touched her gloved hand. “The important thing is that you must not grieve for the flowers. They have their dream. Their mechta, of a better Moon, in the deep past, or deep future. The universe is not always cruel, Xenia Makarova. And you must not hate Frank, for what he has done.”
“I don’t hate him.”
“There is a point of view from which he is not taking from the heart of the Moon, but giving. You see? Now come. I have green tea, and rice cake, and we will sit under the cherry tree, and talk further.”
She nodded, dumbly, and let him take her by the hand.
Together they walked across the yielding antiquity of the Moon.
It was another celebration, here at the South Pole of the Moon. It was the day Project Roughneck promised to fulfill its potential by bringing the first commercially useful loads of water to the surface. Once again the crowds were out, investors with their guests, families with children, huge softscreens draped over drilling gear, Observers everywhere so everyone on the Moon could see, share immediately, everything that happened here today. Even the Grays were here, to celebrate the end, dancing in elaborate formations.
Icebound Earth hovered like a ghost on one horizon.
This time, Xenia didn’t find Frank strutting about the lunar surface in his Stars & Stripes spacesuit, giving out orders. Frank knew, he said, which way the wind blew, a blunt Earthbound metaphor no Lunar Japanese understood. So he had confined himself to a voluntary house arrest, in the new ryokan that had opened up on the summit of one of the tallest rim mountains here.
When she arrived, he waved her in and handed her a drink, a fine sake.
“This is one hell of a cage,” he said. “If you’ve got to be in a cage —”
“Don’t be frightened,” she said.
He laughed darkly. “Civilized, these Lunar Japanese. Well, we’ll see.”
It was true that so far, while the investigation was progressing, he had been left alone. Xenia liked to think the Lunar Japanese authorities were giving Frank time and space, letting him enjoy his huge triumph, before they acted.
But perhaps that was sentimental.
After centuries of survival on the unyielding Moon, she knew there was a hardness under the polite, civilized veneer of these Lunar Japanese. They did not suffer well those who wasted resources, or endangered the lives of others.
Not that Frank was suffering right now, at any rate. His suite was a penthouse, magnificent, decorated a mix of Western-style and traditional Japanese. One wall, facing the borehole, was just a single huge pane of tough, anhydrous lunar glass.
She saw a glass of murky water, covered over, on a table top. Moon water, his only trophy of Roughneck.
He walked her to the window.
She gazed out, goddess-like, surveying the activity. The drilling site was an array of blocky machinery, now stained deep gray by dust, all of it bathed in artificial light. The stars hung above the plain, stark and still, and people and their vehicles swarmed over the ancient, broken plain like so many spacesuited ants.
“You know, it’s a great day,” she said. “They’re making your dream come true.”
“My dream, hell.” He fetched himself another slug of sake, which he drank like beer. “They stole it from me. And they’re going inward. That’s what Kawasaki and the rest are considering now. I’ve seen their plans. Huge underground cities in the crust, big enough for thousands, even hundreds of thousands, all powered by thermal energy from the rocks. You don’t need the surface, any off-world
resources. In 50 years you could have multiples of the Moon’s present population, burrowing away busily. Hell, it would take a hundred generations to fill up the Moon that way, for there are oceans down there, my oceans, the oceans I found.” He glanced at his wristwatch, restless.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“But that wasn’t the idea,” he said heavily. “It wasn’t the point.”
“Then what was the point?”
“That,” he said, and he looked up at frozen Earth.
“We should take on the Prion?”
“If we have to, to get Earth back. It’s our planet, damn it.”
“Whose? Ours? Or the Lunar Japanese? Or —”
But he wasn’t listening. “If we dig ourselves into the ground, we won’t be able to see the Earth, or the stars. We’ll forget. Don’t you see that? …” He glared at her. “We had to flee Earth once before.”
“What?”
He said, “I know about the Moon flowers.”
Taken aback, she said nothing.
He laughed at her discomfiture. “Of course I know about the flowers. This is my organization, Xenia. Even now, that’s still true. You can’t keep anything from me.”
“I’m sorry if —”
“It would have been better if you’d told me. We could have worked together.” He picked up the water glass. “You know what I have here, in this beaker?”
“Tell me.”
“Life, Xenia. Or at least, lots of little corpses. Billions and billions of them, just in this beaker alone.”
She stared at the beaker of Moon water, as if she might see what he was talking about.
“Life, from deep inside the Moon,” he said. “The bio boys say there is a whole ecosystem down here. Well, there had to be. Did you think there would be just the flowers on the surface, just one species? The life is anaerobic; that is, it doesn’t use oxygen. It feeds on the water and organic shit down here, and it uses heat energy to drive its metabolism. Once we dig these little guys out, the reduction in pressure destroys them. So the techs are coming up with smarter probes that can study them in situ. Of course it isn’t native to the Moon … .”
All this was too fast for Xenia.
“Then where —”
“Xenia, the first forms of life on Earth were like this. They didn’t use free oxygen because there was none. Their metabolism was much less energetic than ours, and they pumped out a lot of undesirable by-products. But they survived nevertheless.
“When oxygen started to gather in Earth’s atmosphere — one of those by-products — they choked to death on it, literally. Some survived by adapting to the oxygen, and became us. Some just perished. And some escaped, retreating into ocean bottom ooze or volcanic vents — and some came here, all the way to the Moon.
“You’re saying this life, the bugs in the water, the flowers, came from Earth? How?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe they rode over in the big whack that made the Moon. Anyhow it’s just as I told you,” he said grimly.
“What?”
“This isn’t the first time life has had to escape, retreat from the Earth to the Moon … .”
But now there was activity around the drilling site. She stepped to the window, cupped her hands to exclude the room lights.
People running, away from the center of the site.
There was a tremor. The building shuddered under her, languidly. A quake, on the still and silent Moon?
Frank was checking his watch. “That was the kick.” He punched the air and strode to the window. “Right on time. Hot damn.”
“Frank, what have you done?”
There was another tremor, more violent; before the window, a small Buddha statue was dislodged from its pedestal, and fell gently to the carpeted floor. Xenia tried to keep her feet. It was like riding a rush-hour train.
“Simple enough,” Frank said. “Just shaped charges, embedded in the casing. They punched holes straight through the casing into the surrounding rock, to let the water and sticky stuff flow right into the pipe and up —”
“A blow-out. You planned a blow-out.”
“A small one. If I figured this right the interior of the whole Moon is going to come gushing out of that hole. Like puncturing a balloon.” He took her arms. “Listen to me. You don’t have to leave. We will be safe here. I figured it.”
“And the people down there, in the crater? Your managers and technicians? The children?”
“It’s just a blow-out.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s a day they’ll tell their grandchildren about.” He shrugged, grinning, his bald pate slick with sweat. “They’re going to lock me up anyhow. At least this way —”
But now there was an eruption from the center of the rig, a tower of liquid, rapidly freezing, that punched its way up through the rig itself, shattering the flimsy buildings covering the head. When the fountain reached high enough to catch the flat sunlight washing over the mountains, it seemed to burst into fire, crystals of ice shining in complex parabolic sheaves, before falling back to the ground.
Frank punched the air. “Hot damn. You know what that is? Kerogen. A tarry stuff you find in oil shales. It contains carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, potassium, chlorine, other elements, … I couldn’t believe it when the lab boys told me what they found down there. Mariko says kerogen is so useful we might as well have found chicken soup in the rocks.” He cackled. “Chicken soup, from the primordial cloud.” He eyed her. “I succeeded, Xenia. I did what I wanted.”
“I know you did, Frank.”
“I opened up a new frontier. With this blowout I stopped them from building Bedrock City. Jesus Christ, I even found life on the Moon. I’m famous.”
“What about the anaerobic life?”
His face was hard. “Who cares? I’m a human, Xenia. I’m interested in human destiny, not a bunch of worthless bugs we couldn’t even eat. And with this —” he waved a hand at the ice fountain “— I’m forcing a lot of hands.
“Look out there,” he said. “This is the way of things, Xenia. I beat the future. I’ve no regrets. I’m a great man. I achieve great things.”
The ground around the demolished drill head began to crack, venting gas and ice crystals; and the deep, ancient richness of the Moon rained down on the people.
“And what,” Frank Paulis whispered, “could be greater than this?”
She was in the Dark, flying, like one of her own seeds. She was surrounded by fragments of the shattered Land, and by her children.
But she could not speak to them, of course; unlike the Land, the Dark was empty of rock, and would not carry her thoughts.
It was a time of stabbing loneliness.
But it did not last long.
Already the cloud was being drawn together, collapsing into a new and greater Land that glowed beneath her, a glowing ocean of rock, a hundred times bigger than the small place she had come from.
And at the last, she saw the greatest comet of all tear itself from the heart of this Land, a ball of fire that lunged into the sky, receding rapidly into the unyielding Dark.
She fell toward that glowing ocean, her heart full of joy at the Merging of the Lands … .
In the last moment of her life, she recalled the Giver.
She was the first, and the Giver birthed her: None of it would have come to be without the Giver, who fed the Land.
She wished she could express her love for him. She knew that was impossible.
She sensed, though, that he knew anyhow.
Author’s note: This story is speculation. But the idea of volatiles trapped inside the planets is a serious one. It was raised in the 1960s by astronomer Thomas Gold, and more recently scientists have found evidence of volatiles deep within the Earth (see “Water in the Earth’s Upper Mantle,” Alan Bruce Thompson, Nature v 358, 23 July 1992).
The apparent lack of volates on the Moon is an obstacle to its colonization. But, if we look hard enough, we may find the Moon richer than we dream … .