Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  He tried to get a look at the Staff. Maybe it was the cause of that electric blue Saddle Point glow, the disappearance of the corpse. But the girl hid it away.

  A party set out along the cables once more, Valentina and Malenfant included. Malenfant kept to himself, ignoring the fantastic scenery, even ignoring the aches of his own rebuilt body.

  His head seemed to be starting to work again, if reluctantly. And slowly, step by step, he was figuring out the setup here.

  This arrangement with the Gaijin wasn’t all one-way. There was a reward for the Neandertals, it seemed, beyond the gift of this remote moon.

  He thought about the electric blue Saddle Point flash that came out of old Esau’s grave. Saddle Point teleport gateways worked by destroying a body so as to record its quantum-mechanical structure. Every passage into a gateway was like a miniature death anyhow. Maybe the Staff of Kintu, that little metal artifact, stored some kind of recorded pattern, from the dying old geezer.

  Maybe Esau — and perhaps all the Neandertals’ ancestors, stretching back centuries — were still, in a sense, alive, their Saddle Point signals stored in the Staff. No wonder the Neandertals took such care of the artifact. Maybe that was their reward, to live on in the Staff, until…

  Until what?

  Until, he thought, they had gathered enough energy, with the huge engines that encased Io. Until Kintu was ready to throw his Staff, all the way to his Navel. Just like in the songs.

  He grinned; he had it. That Staff, rattling around in some Neandertal backpack, was no totem. It was a fucking spaceship.

  And that was why they were gathering all this energy, from the natural dynamo that was Io.

  Malenfant, excited, grabbed Valentina’s arm. “Listen to me.”

  She lifted a hand to slap him.

  He backed off and tried to sign. Wait. Tell me, you tell me. Staff of Kintu, Navel. You go Navel, in Staff. Navel what Navel, what what what. “Oh, damn it. What are the Gaijin making here? Antimatter? What is the Navel? Is that where the Gaijin are heading?” She slapped him, knocking him back, but he kept going. Navel. “Kintu has belly, belly, Navel… I’m right, aren’t I?” Speak true know true. “I—”

  She prepared to slap him again.

  Beneath his feet the ground felt suddenly hot. It was like standing on a griddle. He backed away, instinctively, until he reached a place where the gritty dirt was cooler.

  Valentina hadn’t moved. She was looking down, as if baffled. The ground was starting to darken, its shade deepening down from the ubiquitous red. Blue gas erupted around Valentina’s feet, like a stage effect.

  It was a volcanic plume, opening up right under Valentina.

  When the ground started to crumble, he didn’t even think about it. He just lunged forward, fists outstretched. It seemed to take an age to arc through Io’s feeble gravity.

  He hit her on her shoulders as hard as he could. Despite her greater mass and low center of gravity, she toppled backward and fell away from the vent toward harder ground. She was safe.

  Malenfant, on the other hand, was helpless.

  He was falling in desperate low-gravity slow-motion, spread-eagled, right down into the center of the vent, which had opened up into a bubbling pit of dark molten sulphur. He could feel the skin of his chest and face blistering, bubbling like the sulphurous ground. Evidently his magic suit wasn’t going to protect him from this one.

  He laughed. So it ends here. At least he’d gotten to know the answer. Some of it, anyhow.

  There were worse deaths.

  The sulphur bubbled up over him, and the pain was overwhelming.

  But there was a strong hand at his neck—

  After that, only fragments:

  Lying flat. No feeling anywhere.

  Stars overhead. Vision bouncing. One eye still working? Being carried?

  Walls around him, lifting up, a circle of thick-browed faces.

  …Oh. A grave. He was the old geezer now. He tried to laugh, but nothing seemed to be working.

  A rain of blackness over him. Dirt. It spattered on his chest, his face. Pain stung where it hit exposed flesh. There were hands working above him, big powerful hands like spades, scooping up dirt to throw over him. Valentina’s hands, others.

  The dirt landed in his eyes, his mouth. It tasted of bleach.

  I’m alive. They’re burying me. I’m alive!

  He tried to cry out, but his throat was clogged by dirt. He tried to rise, but his limbs had no strength, as if he was swaddled up in bandages.

  The dirt rained on his face, a black sulphurous hail. He couldn’t even move.

  There was something in the corner of his vision. A metallic glint.

  A flash of electric blue light.

  Chapter 28

  People Came from Earth

  A little before Dawn, Xenia Makarova stepped out of her house into silvery light. The air from her nose frosted white, and the deep Moon chill cut through papery flesh to her spindly bones.

  The silver-gray light came from Earth and Mirror in the sky: twin spheres, the one milky cloud, the other a hard image of the Sun. But the light was still dim enough to allow her to see the changed, colonized stars, as well as the fainter stripes of the comets that hailed through the inner system, one after another, echoes of the titanic war being waged on the Solar System’s rim.

  And beyond the comets the new supernova — the destructive blossoming of the star the astronomers had once labeled Phi Cassiopeiae — was still brilliant, as bright as Venus perhaps, though dimming. When Xenia had been born such a spectacle, a supernova a mere nine thousand light-years away, would have been a source of great scientific and public interest. Not today, of course, not in the year A.D. 3480.

  But now the Sun itself was shouldering above the horizon, dimming even the supernova. Beads of light like trapped stars marked the summits of mountains rimming the shores of Tycho, and a deep bloody crimson was working its way high into the tall sky. Almost every scrap of the air in that sky had been drawn from the heart of the Moon by the great Paulis mines. But now the mines were shut down, the Moon’s core exhausted, and she imagined she could see the lid of the sky, the millennial leaking of the Moon’s air into space.

  She walked down the path that led to the circular sea. There was frost everywhere, of course, but the path’s lunar dirt, patiently raked in her youth, was friendly and gripped her sandals. The water at the sea’s rim was black and oily, lapping softly. She could see the gray sheen of pack ice farther out, though the close horizon hid the bulk of the sea from her. Fingers of sunlight stretched across the ice, and gray-gold smoke shimmered above open water.

  There was a constant tumult of groans and cracks as the ice rose and fell on the sea’s mighty shoulders. The water never froze at Tycho’s rim; conversely, it never thawed at the center, so that there was a fat torus of ice floating out there around the central mountains. It was as if the rim of this artificial ocean were striving to emulate the unfrozen seas of Earth that bore its makers.

  She thought she heard a barking, out on the pack ice. Perhaps it was a seal. And a bell clanked: an early fishing boat leaving port. It was a fat, comforting sound that carried easily through the still, dense air. She sought the boat’s lights, but her eyes, rheumy, stinging with cold, failed her.

  She paid attention to her creaking body: the aches in her too-thin, too-long, calcium-depleted bones, the obscure spurts of pain in her urethral system, the strange itches that afflicted her liver-spotted flesh. She was already growing too cold. Mirror returned enough heat to the Moon’s long Night to keep the seas from freezing, the air from snowing out. But she would have welcomed a little more comfort.

  She turned and began to labor back up her regolith path to her house.

  When she got there, Berge, her grandson, was waiting for her. She did not know then, of course, that he would not survive the new Day.

  He was eager to talk about Leonardo da Vinci.

  Berge had taken off his wings and sta
cked them up against the concrete wall of her house. She could see how the wings were thick with frost, so dense the paper feathers could surely have had little play. Even long minutes after landing he was still panting, and his smooth, fashionably shaven scalp, so bare it showed the great bubble profile of his lunar-born skull, was dotted with beads of grimy sweat.

  She scolded him even as she brought him into the warmth and prepared hot soup and tea for him in her pressure kettles. “You’re a fool as your father was,” she said. His father, of course, had been Xenia’s son. “I was with him when he fell from the sky, leaving you orphaned. You know how dangerous it is in the pre-Dawn turbulence.”

  “Ah, but the power of those great thermals, Xenia,” he said, as he accepted the soup. “I can fly kilometers high without the slightest effort…”

  Only Berge called her Xenia.

  She would have berated him further, which was the prerogative of old age. But she didn’t have the heart. He stood before her, eager, heartbreakingly thin. Berge always had been slender, even compared to other skinny lunar folk; but now he was clearly frail.

  And, most ominous of all, a waxy, golden sheen seemed to linger about his skin. She had no desire to comment on that — not here, not now, not until she was sure what it meant, that it wasn’t some trickery of her own age-yellowed eyes.

  So she kept her counsel.

  They made their ritual obeisance — murmurs about dedicating their bones and flesh to the salvation of the world — and finished up their soup.

  And then, with his youthful eagerness, Berge launched into the seminar he was evidently itching to deliver on Leonardo da Vinci, long-dead citizen of a long-dead planet. Brusquely displacing the empty soup bowls to the floor, he produced papers from his jacket and spread them out before her. The sheets, yellowed and stained with age, were covered in a crabby, indecipherable handwriting, broken with sketches of gadgets or flowing water or geometric figures.

  She picked out a luminously beautiful sketch of the crescent Earth…

  “No, Xenia,” Berge said patiently. “Not Earth. Think about it. It must have been the crescent Moon.” Of course he was right; she’d lived on the Moon too long. “You see, Leonardo understood the phenomenon he called the ashen Moon — like our ashen Earth, the old Earth visible in the arms of the new. He was a hundred years ahead of his time with that one.”

  This document had been called many things in its long history, but most familiarly the Codex Leicester. Berge’s copy had been printed off in haste during the Failing, those frantic hours when the Moon’s dying libraries had disgorged great snowfalls of paper, a last desperate download of their stored electronic wisdom before the power failed. It was a treatise centering on what Leonardo called the “body of the Earth,” but with diversions to consider such matters as water engineering, the geometry of Earth and Moon, and the origins of fossils.

  The issue of the fossils particularly excited Berge. Leonardo had been much agitated by the presence of the fossils of marine creatures — fish and oysters and corals — high in the mountains of Italy. Lacking any knowledge of tectonic processes, he had struggled to explain how the fossils might have been deposited by a series of great global floods.

  It made her remember how, when Berge was small, she had once had to explain to him what a fossil was. There were no fossils on the Moon: no bones in the ground, save those humans had put there. But now, of course, Berge was much more interested in the words of long-dead Leonardo than of grandmother.

  “You have to think about the world Leonardo inhabited,” he said. “The ancient paradigms still persisted: the stationary Earth, a sky laden with spheres, crude Aristotelian protophysics. But Leonardo’s instinct was to proceed from observation to theory, and he observed many things in the world that didn’t fit with the prevailing worldview—”

  “Like mountaintop fossils.”

  “Yes. Working alone, he struggled to come up with explanations. And some of his reasoning was, well, eerie.”

  “Eerie?”

  “Prescient.” Gold-flecked eyes gleamed. The boy flicked back and forth through the Codex, pointing out spidery pictures of Earth and Moon and Sun, neat circles connected by spidery light-ray traces. “Remember, the Moon was thought to be a crystal sphere. What intrigued Leonardo was why the Moon wasn’t much brighter in Earth’s sky. If the Moon was a crystal sphere, perfectly reflective, it should have been as bright as the Sun.”

  “Like Mirror.”

  “Yes. So Leonardo argued the Moon must be covered in oceans.” He found a diagram showing a Moon coated with great out-of-scale choppy waves and bathed in spidery sunlight rays. “Leonardo said waves on the Moon’s oceans must deflect much of the reflected sunlight away from Earth. He thought the darker patches visible on the surface must mark great standing waves, or even storms, on the Moon.”

  “He was wrong,” she said. “In Leonardo’s time, the Moon was a ball of rock. The dark areas were just lava sheets.”

  “Yes, of course. But now,” Berge said eagerly, “the Moon is mostly covered by water. You see? And there are great storms, wave crests hundreds of kilometers long, that are visible from Earth — or would be, if anybody was left to see…”

  They talked for hours.

  When he left, she went to the door to wave him good-bye.

  The Day was little advanced, the rake of sunlight still sparse on the ice, and Mirror still rode bright in the sky. Here was another strange forward echo of Leonardo’s, it struck her, though she preferred not to mention it to her already overexcited grandson: in these remote times, there were crystal spheres in orbit around the Earth. The difference was, people had put them there.

  As she closed the door she heard the honking of geese, a great flock of them fleeing the excessive brightness of full Daylight.

  Each Morning, as the Sun labored into the sky, there were storms. Thick fat clouds raced across the sky, and water gushed down, carving new rivulets and craters in the ancient soil and turning the ice at the rim of the Tycho pack into a thin, fragile layer of gray slush.

  The storms persisted as Noon approached on that last Day, and she traveled with Berge to the phytomine celebration to be held on the lower slopes of Maginus.

  They made their way past sprawling fields tilled by human and animal muscle, thin crops straining toward the sky, frost shelters laid open to the muggy heat. And as they traveled they joined streams of battered carts, all heading for Maginus. Xenia felt depressed by the people around her: the spindly adults, their hollow-eyed children — even the cattle and horses and mules were skinny and wheezing. The Moon soil was thin, and the people and animals were all, of course, slowly being poisoned besides.

  Most people chose to shelter from the rain. But to Xenia it was a pleasure. Raindrops here were fat glimmering spheres the size of her thumb. They floated from the sky, gently flattened by the resistance of the thick air, and they fell on her head and back with soft, almost caressing impacts, and water clung to her flesh in great sheets and globes she must scrape off with her fingers. So long and slow had been their fall from the high clouds that the drops were often warm, and the air thick and humid and muggy. She liked to think of herself standing in the band of storms that circled the whole of the slow-turning Moon.

  It reminded her of the day of Frank Paulis’s final triumph.

  She remembered that first hour when it was possible to step outside the domes — the first hour when unprotected people could survive on the Moon, swathed as it was by air drawn up by the great mines that bore Paulis’s name — an hour that had come to pass thanks to Frank’s ingenuity, courage, determination, and downright unscrupulous dishonesty. Frank, doggedly, had lived to see it, and on that day the authorities let him out of house arrest, just briefly. They wouldn’t permit him to be the first to walk out of a dome without a mask — they couldn’t bring themselves to be as generous as that. But he was among the first. And that was, perhaps, enough. She remembered how he had stalked in the fresh air, squat and def
iant, sniffing up great lungfuls of the air he had made, and how he had laughed as the rain trickled into his toothless mouth, fat lunar drops of it.

  And, soon after that, he had died.

  After that Xenia had left, with the Gaijin, for the stars.

  When she returned home she found that thirteen hundred years of history had worn away, leaving the Earth a cloud-covered ruin, the Solar System threatened by interstellar war, the last humans struggling to survive on Mercury and the Moon. Nobody remembered her, or much of the past: It was as if this attenuated, unstable present was all there ever had been, all that would ever be. So she had shed her old identity, settled into the community here.

  Thanks to her engineered biology, a gift of the futures she had visited, she had remained young, physically. Young enough to bear children, even. But now, despite the invisible engineering in her flesh, she was slowly dying, as was everybody, as was the Moon.

  How strange that the inhabited Moon’s life had been as brief as her own: that her birth and death would span this small world’s, that its rocky bones would soon emerge through its skin of air and ocean, just as hers would push through her decaying flesh.

  At last they approached Maginus.

  Maginus was an old, eroded crater complex to the southeast of Tycho. Its ancient walls glimmered with crescent lakes and glaciers. Sheltered from the winds of Morning and Evening, Maginus was a center of life, and long before they reached the foothills, as the fat rain cleared, she saw the tops of giant trees looming over the horizon. She thought she saw creatures leaping between the tree branches. They may have been lemurs, or even bats; or perhaps they were kites wielded by ambitious children.

  Berge showed delight as they crossed the many water courses, pointing out engineering features that had been anticipated by Leonardo: dams and bridges and canal diversions and so forth, some of them even constructed since the Failing. But Xenia took little comfort, oppressed as she was by the evidence of the fall of mankind. For example, they journeyed along a road made of lunar glass, flat as ice and utterly impervious to erosion, carved long ago into the regolith by vast space-borne engines. But they traveled this marvelously engineered highway in a cart that was wooden, and drawn by a spavined, thin-legged mule.