Moon Rising

by Ian McDonald

  Pavel Vorontsov waits with his okrana in the low-ceilinged corridor for the inlock to open. Duncan Mackenzie stoops through the lock into the cramped space. His blades fall in behind him, shuffling awkwardly to find a suitably intimidating formation. Everyone’s familiar merges with the roof.

  ‘My grandfather apologises,’ Pavel Vorontsov says. ‘He would have been here to greet you, for the old affection between our families, but he couldn’t fit the corridors.’

  The entourages hunch and duck through the low passages. Familiars whisper warnings of obstructions and head hazards.

  ‘It’s designed for service crew only,’ Pavel Vorontsov says

  The control centre at the top of the smelter offers thrilling views across the Iron Sea all the way to the great industrial slough of St Olga. There is room enough only for executives. Okrana and blades huddle in the corridor trying to find comfort.

  ‘I’ve passed control to your familiar so you can take her out personally,’ Pavel says to Duncan Mackenzie. ‘We have to move it every other day anyway.’

  ‘The bogies freeze and bind,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. The old rituals of Crucible are not forgotten. His familiar Esperance opens the command windows in his lens. He lays in a route. The Vorontsovs will not hear the low hum as the grid feeds power to the traction motors, feel the subtle acceleration as a thousand tons of smelter starts to move. They are engineers, not rail-riders. They did not grow up on great Crucible, ever-circling the moon, one orbit every twenty-nine days, bathed in everlasting sunshine, in the protecting shadow of the mirrors.

  ‘Courageous choice of destination,’ Pavel Vorontsov says.

  ‘It feels like a debt unpaid,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. The smelter is at full speed now, ten kilometres per hour. Signal lights turn green on the cabin screen and on Duncan Mackenzie’s eyeball. His emotions are complex: nostalgic pleasure; the bleeding scab of barely healed hurt; the thrill of power, the sourness of regret that however many smelters VTO builds, it will never be Crucible again. Some cities only rise the once. The smelter takes the points on to the mainline without a shudder.

  ‘We’ve improved the design,’ Pavel Vorontsov says. ‘This is an old back-up smelter from the original Crucible model we’ve retrofitted with parts of the new system. The new units would be totally autonomous. Lighter, more efficient. Our engineering and production is much more sophisticated than our fathers’ days.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. He notes with pleasure the look of controlled consternation on Pavel Vorontsov’s face as he sees, through the window, a passenger express bear down on the smelter. Destruction is imminent, then the express vanishes underneath the smelter. It gets everyone the first time.

  ‘We can deliver five units per lune,’ Pavel says. ‘As the new designs are more efficient, you would need fewer of them to achieve full production. We could have you at the old Crucible’s output in six years. After that, it’s just a matter of adding cars.’

  ‘I’m impressed, Pavel Yevgenevitch,’ Duncan Mackenzie says.

  ‘Removing life-support and habitability features reduces the cost and ease of build. We’ve only pressurised this one for the demonstration. The updated models are designed to be maintained by our automated systems.’

  ‘They won’t be necessary,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. St Olga’s dome has dropped beneath the horizon. The smelter rolls across the flat-lands of eastern Procellarum.

  ‘I appreciate that historically Mackenzie Metals used its own maintenance teams …’

  ‘I won’t need any maintenance systems,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. Face to face, breath close in the confines of the control cab, the VTO executives try not to show their consternation.

  ‘Duncan, I don’t understand you,’ Pavel Vorontsov says.

  ‘I won’t be issuing a contract,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. Russian muttering, snatched glances. ‘Hadley will continue as Mackenzie Metals’ main smelter.’

  ‘Duncan, you’re already stretched to meet demand. You need continuous refining. You could switch from solar to electricity, but that means either buying into Taiyang’s sun-belt, or new fusion, and buying He3 from your brother, in the short term at least.’

  ‘Pavel, did you ever meet my father?’

  ‘At his centenary, in Queen of the South.’

  ‘In the chair, hooked into the environment suit. A dozen systems keeping him alive. Piss and shit and electricity. But his eyes; did you ever look in his eyes? You should have looked in his eyes. His eyes never got old. Same light I saw when I was a kid. Same light I saw when he turned the mirrors to the sun. He was fifty when he came to the moon. The launch will kill you, they said. It didn’t. The low gravity will kill you, they said. Bone loss. Muscle wasting. They didn’t. The only thing that could kill Robert Mackenzie was treachery. I’ll tell you this about the old man: if you offered him to choose this or that, he’d say, fuck you, I’ll take the third choice. There was always a third choice.

  ‘Mine it, melt it, move it. That been our way for fifty years now. But there’s another way. Fuck Earth. It’s always hungry, it’ll eat everything and then suck our bones. Earth’s a child. We don’t need it. There’s a system full of stuff we can use, just sitting out there. Enough for us to build any world we want. Not just the moon. You should see the ideas our kids are coming out with. Artificial worlds. Habitats like … necklaces in the sky. Dozens of them – hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Room enough for billions of people. Trillions. Enough metal and carbon out there to make every dream real. Ours for the taking.

  ‘You know why I’m cancelling the order? I don’t want you to build me smelters; I want you to build me asteroid miners. Ships. Mass-drivers. Thousands of mirrors. We have the materials skills. You have the space-lift experience. Mine it, melt it, move it, for us. We work together. We need to work together – all of us. All the Dragons. Or it’s our bones in the dust. Lucas Corta can’t control the terrestrials. My father believed in an independent moon. With all his heart. That’s not enough any more. We need to go higher, reach further, spread so wide Earth can never catch us all. We all live as long as Earth needs us. When they stop needing us …’

  Duncan Mackenzie smacks his fist into the window. Blood smears the glass. Esperance puts out medical alert to his blades. Duncan Mackenzie wills them away.

  ‘The old man believed in the moon. I believe in a thousand moons. A thousand societies.’

  Duncan Mackenzie feels a subtle deceleration. The smelter is braking.

  ‘What do you want, Duncan?’ Pavel Vorontsov asks.

  ‘Put me in front of your board. Let me tell them what I told you.’

  The smelter comes to an enormous halt, casting a mountain-shadow far across the grey flats of the Oceanus Procellarum. Duncan Mackenzie’s final destination would be hours distant at the smelter’s sun-following speed.

  ‘I’m taking the railcar the rest of the way to Crucible,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. ‘You can come with me or you can take this thing back to St Olga.’

  Men face off in the tiny, cramped cabin. Eye to eye, breath to breath.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Pavel Vorontsov says. In the corridor, clambering down to the railcar dock, he moves up as close to Duncan Mackenzie as the engineering will allow. ‘Duncan. I’ve spoken with the family. You have your meeting.’

  Irina wears the sasuit like paint on her skin. Custom highlights follow the curves and contours of her muscles and Alexia’s gaze follows them. This girl could no more stop entrancing than breathing. Charm is her heartbeat. She pulls on the helmet and goes from being Irina Efua Vorontsova-Asamoah to an object. She is, Alexia admits, as sexy as hell.

  But the shell-suit is sexier. Different, deeper, darker sexy. It stood open in the lock antechamber like an embrace, like an autopsy. Alexia gingerly backed into it, giggling as the haptic array took her measure and closed in to touch her body at a thousand po
ints, intimate and responsive as a lover’s muscles. The suit closed around her. Alexia fought panic as the helmet locked and sealed, then Maninho interfaced with the suit’s AI and the carapace vanished. She lifted her hands. They were bare, her arms, her feet and legs, everything she could see: naked.

  I have a wide-ranging wardrobe of suit skins, Maninho said. Alexia tired after the first fifty and went for body-hugging faux-neoprene. She looked like one of the rich-kid surfers who ran down to the beach at Barra with their boards and bodyguards.

  She dares a shuffling step in the shell-suit. It moves like her own body. Protected but limber. Enclosed, defended. Irina checks her. What does she see? Surfer gatinha or Iron Man? The suit interface has put Irina’s face over her helmet visor. Irina looks naked to vacuum. These tricks, these simulations and putting-at-eases, could trip a surface-suiter. And as everyone tells her, the moon wants to kill you, and knows a thousand ways to do it.

  ‘Keep behind me and don’t let it seduce you,’ Irina says. ‘Do you want a tether?’

  ‘I do not want a tether.’

  The inlock seals behind her.

  ‘How long does it take to get the air …’

  Her suit thrums, a rushing disturbance translated to her skin by the haptic mesh. And over.

  The lock is at surface pressure, Maninho says.

  So that’s what a lock depressurising feels like.

  The outlock slides upwards on a widening rectangle of brightness.

  ‘Come on then,’ Irina says. Her name floats in green above her shoulder. Green is good. Red is trouble. White is dead. Alexia shuffles up the ramp. Irina pats a rough icon of Lady Luna coloured in vacuum-marker on the outlock wall. The halved face is abraded almost to invisibility by thousands of gloves. Alexia brushes it with her glove tips. She is a duster now.

  Out into the sun. She stops dead at the top of the ramp.

  I’m walking on the moon, the moon!

  ‘Well come on, Moonbeam,’ Irina says. Alexia crosses the line from sinter to moondust. She kicks at the gritty grey. A cloud flies up higher than she had imagined, hangs long before settling to the surface.

  I’m walking on the freakin’ moon! Wait until I tell Caio!

  She sets her boot on the surface and sees that it intersects a previous bootprint. The windless oceans of the moon carry prints and tracks forever. On her last night before launch prep at Manaus, she had taken Caio and a telescope up to the top of Ocean Tower and he’d asked to see King Dong; the hundred-kilometre-tall phallus tracked into Mare Imbrium in the earliest days of industrialisation by bored dusters and their patient machines.

  Second foot on the regolith. She looks up. The freakin’ moon is a freakin’ mess. Obsolete technology, fallen comms towers, capsized dishes, ruptured tanks, junked rovers, cannibalised trains. Suit detritus, human garbage. Organics have been picked clean by the zabbaleen for reprocessing; the metal bones abandoned. Metal is cheap, dead. Carbon is precious life.

  Alexia looks up from the trash land. Earth steals her. Her homeworld stands locked halfway between horizon and zenith. Alexia has never seen a bluer thing. Once Norton bought her sapphire earrings. They sparkled and burned, but they were of the earth, not the Earth. Once in school she had struggled on Draw the Flag Day to remember the number and positions of the stars on the blue circle at the centre of the Auriverde, but that had been the blue of empty space, not of a living world. This is all the blue in the universe rolled up into one ball. So small. She raises her hand and obliterates every person she has ever known.

  What happens if you cry in a space helmet?

  ‘Come on, Mão.’

  ‘I’ve been staring, haven’t I?’

  ‘Respect, but Moonbeams always stare.’

  ‘How can you live with it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That. Up there. How can you stand it?’

  ‘Not my world, Mão.’

  Lithe skin-suit leads bulky space armour on a circuit of St Olga, from the junk-fields to the construction yards where bots climb and clamber trailing festivals of cables and wiring, cranes swing panels into position and Procellarum glitters with starfields of welding arcs. Into the shadow of the dome, Earth eclipsed, and the marshalling yards, where trains split and shunt and expresses pull out of service and the tracks merge into the great equatorial mainline. Alexia glimpses a massive object far down the tracks.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘The back-up smelter,’ Irina says. ‘The last of Crucible. They must be track-testing it. Mackenzie Metals has ordered a new refinery-train.’

  ‘Irina,’ Alexia Corta says. ‘Can you take me to Crucible?’

  ‘There’s nothing …’

  ‘I’d like to go.’

  A rover scurries from the end of the long line of parked vehicles, circles the two women and comes to a halt.

  ‘Where’s the door?’ Alexia asks. The rover is a rugged frame of construction bars, batteries and comms slung like a spider between massive wheels.

  ‘No doors on the VSV260,’ Irina says. ‘You get on, not in.’ She shows Alexia how to hook her suit up to the life-support. Alexia utters a small yip of surprise as the safety bars drop over her shoulders and lock.

  ‘I’d say hold on, but there really isn’t anything to hold on to,’ says Irina in the left-hand seat. Alexia grips the sides of her seat. The rover takes off like a fun park ride. Alexia has not known such a lift since the SSTO launch from Manaus. The regolith blurs; far far too close to her feet.

  ‘This is fucking immense!’ she shouts. ‘How fast are we going?’

  ‘One hundred and twenty,’ Irina says. ‘We can go faster if you want.’

  ‘I want.’

  Irina pushes the rover to one hundred and fifty. The terrain is rough, littered with rocks and billion-year-old ejecta, the wheels jolt and bounce but Alexia rides as smoothly as in a royal carriage. The suspension on this thing is incredible. It must be predictive. The rover hits a ridge, flies, flies the way only cars in action movies can fly.

  The moon, the moon, she is in a fast car racing on the moon.

  ‘Old Crucible is about an hour west,’ Irina says. ‘Your suit has a wide selection of entertainment offerings, so sit back and relax.’

  ‘I’d rather talk,’ Alexia says. She’s seen standard-package telenovelas.

  Irina is a garrulous talker. In a dozen kilometres Alexia learns about her Twé mother and St Olga father and her place in the complex amory designed to link Asamoahs, Vorontsovs, Suns and Mackenzies in a dynastic knot of relatives and potential hostages.

  ‘No Cortas,’ Alexia says.

  ‘You people were always weird,’ Irina says. ‘Those surrogate mothers. Brrr.’

  Irina nudges the speed up again and talks about her colloquium: Blue Lotus; a study group of biosphere designers based for the past twenty years in St Olga.

  ‘What I’m working on, ultimately, is terraforming the moon.’

  Alexia has heard of terraforming from some sci-fi show or other: turning another planet into an earth, bringing life to the lifeless.

  ‘The moon?’

  ‘Why not? Everyone thinks, oh, the moon: too small, not enough gravity, rotation locked, no magnetic field. We can fix all this. It’s just engineering. So, I’m guessing the Vorontsovs told you their big idea, space elevators and everything. Well, the Vorontsovs aren’t the only ones with the big idea. We Asamoahs have one too. We bring life. Wherever people go in the system, whatever worlds we settle or habitats we build. We bring life. And we can bring life to the moon. It’s easy. Forty big fat comets. Bang bang bang.’

  ‘You can’t hit the moon with forty comets, I mean …’

  ‘You break them up first. Of course.’

  ‘AKA is still rebuilding Maskelyne G.’ Alexia had been two weeks into launch training in Manaus when VTO took out the power plant in
a pin-point attack with a high-velocity ice impacter. And where, Irina Efua Asamoah, did you sit in the Vorontsov-Asamoah war? Or did you keep your head down and hide?

  ‘That just proves my point. See? If you can hit a target that small from two hundred kay, you can as easily hit empty space. We mightn’t even need to evacuate Meridian. But that’s the small stuff. The big stuff is that after the hard rain, we’ve got an atmosphere and a functioning climate. And we all go up on to the surface and wait for the soft rain.’

  Alexia remembers the rain on the moon, fat drops falling slow through Meridian’s chasms, spanning the canyons with rainbow bridges. Remembers Denny Mackenzie, soaked to the bone.

  ‘Do you know what’s exciting? What is really exciting? Regolith plus rain, equals?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alexia says.

  ‘Mud! Mud. Glorious mud! That’s my area of study. I am a lunar pedologist. A mud-ologist. I take mud, I turn it into soil. I make it come to life. The soft rain is about three years, the mud age is twenty years. But after that, after that, then we start greening. Mud is magic, sister. Never forget that.

  ‘Let me show you my moon. Where we are right now; you’ll be under twenty metres of water. We’ll have oceans, we’ll have seas and lakes. We have mountains and glaciers at the poles. We have a biosphere. There’ll be forests of trees a kilometre tall; there’s be savannahs filled with animals – such animals. Maybe we’ll bring back terrestrial animals, maybe we’ll design our own new species. Herbivore megafauna the size of that smelter. Birds with hundred-metre wingspans. It’ll be a garden. And we’ll live among it all in beautiful, organic cities that are like part of nature. We won’t need the surface to grow food. What we’re doing right now is much more efficient than terrain-based agriculture. And we’ll have a proper day and night. All those impacts, transfer of momentum, it’ll start the moon turning again. We reckon about a sixty-hour day. Imagine standing watching the Earth rise above the clouds. Just imagine it!

  ‘Okay, it’ll last maybe a hundred thousand years, but that’s long enough for us to come up with a more permanent solution. Maybe we’ll end up dismantling the moon and rebuilding it into something bigger. Other colloquiums are working on that. We could take the moon apart and spin it out to five times the total surface area of Earth. That’s before we get to the rest of the system. More life. That’s our big idea. What’s yours?’