Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  The shaft below Xenia was a cylinder of sparkling lunar glass. The tunnel receded to the center of the Moon, to infinity. Lights had been buried in the walls every few meters, so the shaft was brilliantly lit, like a passageway in a shopping mall, 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.

  Momentarily dizzy, she stepped back, anchored herself again on the surface of the Moon.

  Frank rubbed his hands. “It’s wonderful. Like the old days. Engineers overcoming obstacles, building things.” He seemed oddly nervous; he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “And,” she said, “thanks to all this problem solving, we got through the mantle.”

  “Hell, yes, we got through it. You’ve been away from the project too long, babe.” He took her hands. Squat in his suit, his face invisible, he was still, unmistakably, Frank J. Paulis. “And now, it’s our time.” 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.

  “Will you follow me?” he asked.

  She took a breath. “I’ve always followed you.”

  “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 spiderweb cables, tautly threaded down the axis of the shaft; through her suit’s fabric she could hear the hiss of the pulleys.

  There was nothing beneath her feet save a diminishing tunnel of light. Xenia could hear her heart pound. Frank was laughing.

  The depth markers on the wall were already rising up 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 depths beneath her.

  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 they 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.

  The material beyond the walls 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 by the slow workings of geology. In some places there were side shafts dug away from the main exploratory bore. They led to stopes, lodes of magnesium-rich rocks extruded from the Moon’s frozen interior, which 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.

  Despite the gathering warmth of the tunnel, despite her own acceleration, she had a sense of cold, of age and stillness.

  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 further down the rock is so soft it pulls like taffy when you try to drill it. A thousand kilometers of mush, a pain in the ass.”

  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 been killed 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. It was 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.

  Falling, falling.

  Thick conduits surrounded them now, crowding the tunnel, flipping from bracket to bracket. The conduits carried water, bearing the Moon’s deep heat to hydrothermal plants on the surface. She was 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 more than a thousand kilometers deep, two-thirds of the way to the center of the Moon.”

  The pulleys gripped harder and they slowed, drifting to a halt a meter 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 glanced at her chronometer patch. The fall had taken twenty minutes.

  She got her balance and looked around. They were alone here.

  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 inflatable shelters; spare backpacks; notepads; even, incongruously, a coffee cup. Human traces, here at the heart of the Moon.

  She walked to the walls. Her steps were light; she was almost floating. There was rock, pure and unmarked, all around her, beyond the windowlike walls, glowing pink.

  “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, 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 feel light as a feather,” she said. And so she did; she felt as if she were going to float back up the borehole like a soap bubble.

  Frank glared up into the tunnel above them, and concentric light rings glimmered in his faceplate. “All that rock up there doesn’t pull at us. It might as well be cloud, rocky cloud, hundreds of kilometers of it.”

  “I suppose, at the center itself, you would be weightless.”

  “I guess.”

  On one low bench stood a glass beaker, covered by 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.

  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 fucking 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…” He couldn’t find the word.

  “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 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, after all, wasn’t a simple matter of plugging holes in the environment-support system loops. There was surely enough resource here, just as Frank said, to future-proof the Moon. And perhaps this wo
uld be a pivot of human history, a moment when humanity’s long decline was halted and mankind found a place to live in a system that was no longer theirs.

  Not for the first time Xenia 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. Will you stop now?”

  “Stop the borehole?” He sounded shocked. “Hell, no. We go on, all the way to the core.”

  “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, the 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. 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 anymore.”

  “But we’re rich again.” He laughed. “We’ll buy it all 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’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, in this future.” 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.

  Now his voice was almost shrill. “You’ve gone quiet.”

  “The comet,” she said softly.

  He was silent for a moment, still gripping her hands.

  “The methane rocket,” she said. “On the comet. It was detected.”

  She could tell he was thinking of denying all knowledge. 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. Everything.” She sighed. “You never were smart at that kind of stuff, Frank. You should have asked me.”

  “Would you have helped?”

  “No.”

  He released her hands. “I never meant it to hit there, on Fracastorius.”

  “I know that. Nevertheless, that’s what happened.”

  He picked up the glass of lunar water. “But you know what, I’d have gone ahead even if I had known. I needed that fucking comet to kick start this. It was the only way. You can’t stagnate. That way lies extinction. If I gave the Lunar Japanese a choice, they’d be sucking water out of old concrete for the rest of time.”

  “But it would be their choice.”

  “And that’s more important than not dying?”

  She shrugged. “It’s inevitable they’ll know soon.”

  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 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 twentieth 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,” she said.

  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 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 ofthe 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.

  “Evidence of the flowers has been found before,” he said.

  “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. 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 billion years. 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 lie 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.”

  “No,” he said quietly.

  “Then what?”

  “At every comet event, the seedings converge. Just as they did here. These plants work backward, Xenia.

  “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 twelve or so. And finally, the twelve are reduced to one. This one.”

  She tried to think that through; she pictured the little seed pods converging, diminishing in number. “It doesn’t m
ake 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 dying.”

  “But why here? Why now?”

  He shrugged. “Xenia, your colleague Frank Paulis is 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 new 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 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. “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?”