Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  Such contrasts were unendingly startling to a time-stranded traveler like Xenia. But, she thought with a grisly irony, all the technology around them would have been more than familiar to Berge’s hero, Leonardo. There were gadgets of levers and pulleys and gears, their wooden teeth constantly stripped; there were turnbuckles, devices to help erect cathedrals of Moon concrete; there had even been pathetic lunar wars fought with catapults and crossbows, “artillery” capable of throwing lumps of rock a few kilometers.

  But once people had dug mines that reached the heart of the Moon. The people today knew this was so, else they could not exist here. She knew it was true, for she remembered it.

  As they neared the phytomine, the streams of traffic converged to a great confluence of people and animals. There was a swarm of reunions of friends and family, and a rich human noise carried on the thick air.

  When the crowds grew too dense, Xenia and Berge abandoned their wagon and walked. Berge, with unconscious generosity, supported her with a hand clasped about her arm, guiding her through this human maelstrom.

  Children darted around her feet, so fast she found it impossible to believe she could ever have been so young, so rapid, so compact, and she felt a mask of old-woman irritability settle on her. But many of the children were, at age seven or eight or nine, already taller than she was, girls with languid eyes and the delicate posture of giraffes. The one constant of human evolution on the Moon was how the children stretched out, ever more languorous, in the gentle gravity. But in later life they paid a heavy price in brittle, calcium-starved bones.

  All Berge wanted to talk about was Leonardo da Vinci.

  “Leonardo was trying to figure out the cycles of the Earth. For instance, how water could be restored to the mountaintops. Listen to this.” He fumbled, one-handed, with his dog-eared manuscript. “ ‘We may say that the Earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil; its bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the mountains; its cartilage is the tufa stone; its blood the veins of its waters… And the vital heat of the world is fire which is spread throughout the Earth; and the dwelling place of the spirit of growth is in the fires, which in divers parts of the Earth are breathed out in baths and sulphur mines…’ You understand what he’s saying? He was trying to explain the Earth’s cycles by analogy with the systems of the human body.”

  “He was wrong.”

  “But he was more right than wrong, Grandmother! Don’t you see? This was centuries before geology was formalized, before matter and energy cycles would be understood. Leonardo had gotten the right idea, from somewhere. He just didn’t have the intellectual infrastructure to express it…”

  And so on. None of it was of much interest to Xenia. As they walked it seemed to her that his weight was the heavier, as if she, the foolish old woman, was constrained to support him, the young buck. It was evident his sickliness was advancing fast — and it seemed that others around them noticed it too, and separated around them, a sea of unwilling sympathy.

  At last they reached the plantation itself. They had to join queues, more or less orderly. There was noise, chatter, a sense of excitement. For many people, such visits were the peak of each slow lunar Day.

  Separated from the people by a row of wooden stakes and a few meters of bare soil was a sea of growing green. The vegetation was predominantly mustard plants. Chosen for their bulk and fast growth, all of these plants had grown from seed or shoots since the last lunar Dawn. The plants themselves grew thick, their feathery leaves bright. But many of the leaves were sickly, already yellowing.

  The fence was supervised by an unsmiling attendant, who wore — to show the people their sacrifice had a genuine goal — artifacts of unimaginable value: earrings and brooches and bracelets of pure copper and nickel and bronze.

  The attendant told them, in a sullen prepared speech, that the Maginus mine was the most famous and exotic of all the phytomines: for here gold itself was mined, still the most compelling of all metals. These mustard plants grew in soil in which gold, dissolved out of the base rock by ammonium thiocyanate, could be found at a concentration of four parts per million. But when the plants were harvested and burned, their ash contained four hundred parts per million of gold, drawn out of the soil by the plants during their brief lives.

  The phytomines, where metals were slowly concentrated by living things, were perhaps the Moon’s most important remaining industry.

  As Frank Paulis had understood centuries ago, lunar soil was sparse and ungenerous. And yet, now that Earth was wrecked, now that the spaceships no longer called, the Moon was all the people had.

  The people of the Moon had neither the means nor the will to rip up the top hundred meters of their world to find the precious metals they needed. Drained of strength and tools, they had to be more subtle.

  Hence the phytomines.

  The technology was old — older than the human Moon, older than spaceflight itself. The Vikings, marauders of Earth’s dark age, would mine their iron from “bog ore,” iron-rich stony nodules deposited near the surface of bogs by bacteria that had flourished there: miniature miners, not even visible to the Vikings, who burned their little corpses to make their nails and swords and pans and cauldrons.

  And so it went, across this battered, parched little planet, a hierarchy of bacteria and plants and insects and animals and birds collecting gold and silver and nickel and copper and bronze, their evanescent bodies comprising a slow, merging trickle of scattered molecules stored in leaves and flesh and bones, all for the benefit of that future generation who must someday save the Moon.

  Berge and Xenia, solemnly, took ritual scraps of mustard-plant leaf on their tongues, swallowed ceremonially. With her age-furred tongue she could barely taste the mustard’s sharpness. There were no drawn-back frost covers here because these poor mustard plants would not survive to the Sunset: They died within a lunar Day, from poisoning by the cyanide.

  Berge met friends and melted into the crowds.

  Xenia returned home alone, brooding.

  She found that her family of seals had lumbered out of the ocean and onto the shore. These were constant visitors. During the warmth of Noon they would bask for hours, males and females and children draped over each other in casual abandon, so long that the patch of regolith they inhabited became sodden and stinking with their droppings. The seals, uniquely among the creatures from Earth, had not adapted in any apparent way to the lunar conditions. In the flimsy gravity they could surely perform somersaults with those flippers of theirs. But they chose not to; instead they basked, as their ancestors had on far-remote Arctic beaches.

  Xenia didn’t know why this was so. Perhaps the seals were, simply, wiser than struggling, dreaming humans.

  The long Afternoon sank into its mellow warmth. The low sunlight diffused, yellow-red, to the very top of the tall sky.

  Earth was clearly visible, wrapped in yellow clouds — clouds of dust and bits of rock and vaporized ocean thrown up there by the great impact a hundred years back. The scientists used to say it would take centuries to disperse the clouds. Now, nobody so much as looked at Earth, as if, now that it could no longer succor its blue satellite, the planet had become unmentionable, its huge wounds somehow impolite. But Xenia could make out a dim cloud of green, swathing the Earth: It was an orbiting forest, Trees that had survived the collision, still drawing their sustenance from the curdled air with superconductor roots.

  The comet impact had been relatively minor, on the cosmic scale of such events. But it had been sufficient to silence Earth; nobody on the Moon knew who, or what, had survived on its surface. Xenia wondered if even those Trees could survive the greater and more frequent impacts that many had predicted were the inevitable outcome of the conflict in the Oort cloud, as the Crackers threatened to break through the Gaijin cordon, as warring ETs hurled giant rogue objects into the system’s crowded heart, century after century.

  Such musing failed to distract her from thoughts of Berge�
��s illness, which advanced without pity. She was touched when he chose to come stay with her, to “see it out,” as he put it.

  Her fondness for Berge was not hard to understand. Her daughter had died in childbirth. This was not uncommon, as pelvises evolved in heavy Earth gravity struggled to release the great fragile skulls of Moon-born children — and Xenia’s genes, of course, came direct from Earth, from the deep past.

  So she had rejoiced when Berge was born, sired by her son of a lunar native; at least her genes, she consoled herself, which had emanated from primeval oceans now lost in the sky, would travel on to the farthest future. But now, it seemed, she would lose even that consolation.

  But she was not important, nor the future, nor her complex past. All that mattered was Berge, here in the present, and on him she lavished all her strength, her love.

  Berge spent his dwindling energies in feverish activities. Still his obsession with Leonardo clung about him. He showed her pictures of impossible machines, far beyond the technology of Leonardo’s time: shafts and cogwheels for generating enormous heat, a diving apparatus, an “easy-moving wagon” capable of independent locomotion. The famous helicopter intrigued Berge particularly. He built many spiral-shaped models of bamboo and paper; they soared into the thick air, easily defying the Moon’s gravity, catching the reddening light.

  She wasn’t sure if he knew he was dying.

  In her gloomier hours — when she sat with her grandson as he struggled to sleep, or as she lay listening to the ominous, mysterious rumbles of her own failing body, cumulatively poisoned, racked by the strange distortions of lunar gravity — she wondered how much farther humans must descend.

  The heavy molecules of the thick atmosphere were too fast-moving to be contained by the Moon’s gravity. The air would be thinned in a few thousand years: a long time, but not beyond comprehension. Long before then people would have to reconquer this world they had built, or they would die.

  So they gathered metals, molecule by molecule.

  And, besides that, they would need knowledge.

  The Moon had become a world of patient monks, endlessly transcribing the great texts of the past, pounding the eroding wisdom of the millennia into the brains of the wretched young. It seemed essential to Xenia they did not lose their concentration as a people, their memory. But she feared it was impossible. Technologically they had already descended to the level of Neolithic farmers, and the young were broken by toil even as they learned.

  She had lived long enough to realize that they were, fragment by fragment, losing what they once knew.

  If she had one simple message to transmit to the future generations, one thing they should remember lest they descend into savagery, it would be this: People came from Earth. There: cosmology and the history of the species and the promise of the future, wrapped up in one baffling, enigmatic, heroic sentence. She repeated it to everyone she met. Perhaps those future thinkers would decode its meaning, and would understand what they must do.

  Berge’s decline quickened as the Sun slid down the sky, the clockwork of the universe mirroring his condition with a clumsy, if mindless, irony. In the last hours, she sat with him, quietly reading and talking, responding to his near-adolescent philosophizing with her customary brusqueness, which she was careful not to modify in this last hour.

  “But have you ever wondered why we are here and now?” He was whispering, the sickly gold of his face picked out by the dwindling Sun. “What are we, a few million, scattered in our towns and farms around the Moon? What do we compare to the billions who swarmed over Earth in the great years? Why do I find myself alive now rather than then? It is so unlikely…” He turned his great lunar head. “Do you ever feel you have been born out of your time, as if you are stranded in the wrong era, an unconscious time traveler?”

  She would have confessed she often did, but he whispered on.

  “Suppose a modern human — or someone of the great ages of Earth — was stranded in the sixteenth century, Leonardo’s time. Suppose he forgot everything of his culture, all its science and learning—”

  “Why? How?”

  “I don’t know… But if it were true — and if his unconscious mind retained the slightest trace of the learning he had discarded — wouldn’t he do exactly what Leonardo did? Study obsessively, try to fit awkward facts into the prevailing, unsatisfactory paradigms, grope for the deeper truths he had lost? Don’t you see? Leonardo behaved exactly as a stranded time traveler would.”

  “Ah.”

  She thought she understood; of course, she didn’t. And in her unthinking way she launched into a long and pompous discourse on feelings of dislocation: on how every adolescent felt stranded in a body, an adult culture, unprepared…

  Berge wasn’t listening. He turned away, to look again at the bloated Sun.

  “I think,” she said, “you should drink more soup.”

  But he had no more need of soup.

  It seemed too soon when the Day was done, and the cold started to settle on the land once more, with great pancakes of new ice clustering around the rim of the Tycho sea.

  Xenia summoned Berge’s friends, teachers, those who had loved him.

  She clung to the greater goal: that the atoms of gold and nickel and zinc that had coursed in Berge’s blood and bones, killing him like the mustard plants of Maginus — killing them all, in fact, at one rate or another — would now gather in even greater concentrations in the bodies of those who would follow. Perhaps the pathetic scrap of gold or nickel that had cost poor Berge his life would at last, mined, close the circuit that would lift the first ceramic-hulled ships beyond the thick, deadening atmosphere of the Moon.

  Perhaps. It was cold comfort.

  But still they ate the soup, of Berge’s dissolved bones and flesh, in solemn silence. They took his life’s sole gift, further concentrating the metal traces to the far future, shortening their own lives as he had.

  She had never been a skillful host. As soon as they could, the young people dispersed. She talked with Berge’s teachers, but they had little to say to each other; she was merely his grandmother, after all. She wasn’t sorry to be left alone.

  Before she slept again, even before the Sun’s bloated hull had slid below the toothed horizon, the winds had turned. The warmer air was treacherously fleeing after the sinking Sun. Soon the first flurries of snow came pattering on the black, swelling surface of the Tycho sea.

  Her seals slid back into the water, to seek out whatever riches or dangers awaited them under Moon core ice.

  Chapter 29

  Bad News from the Stars

  When Madeleine Meacher arrived back in the Solar System — just moments after passing through the pain of her last Saddle Point transition — she was stunned to find Nemoto materializing in the middle of her small hab module.

  “Nemoto. You. What…? How…?”

  Nemoto was small, hunched over, her face a mask of sourness. This was a virtual, of course, and a low-quality one; Nemoto floated in the air, not quite lined up with the floor.

  Nemoto glanced about, as if surprised to be here. “Meacher. So it’s you. What date is it?”

  Madeleine had to look it up: A.D. 3793.

  Nemoto laughed hollowly. “How absurd.”

  There was no perceptible time delay. That meant the originating transmitter must be close. But, of course, there had been no way Nemoto could have known which Saddle Point gateway Madeleine would arrive from. “Nemoto, what are you?”

  Nemoto grunted impatiently. “I am a limited-sentience projection. My function is to wait for the star travelers to return. I dusted the Saddle Point radius, all around the system. Dusted it with monitors, probes, transmitters. Technology has moved on, Meacher. Look it up. It scarcely matters… Listen to what I have to say.”

  “Nemoto—”

  “Listen, damn you. The Gaijin have been fighting the Crackers. Out on the rim of the system.”

  “I know that—”

  “The war has las
ted five centuries, perhaps more. The Oort cloud is deep, Meacher, a deep trench. But now the war is lost.”

  The simple, stunning brutality of the statement shocked Madeleine. “Are you sure?”

  Nemoto barked laughter. “The Gaijin are withdrawing from the Solar System. They don’t bother to hide this from us. Just as most people don’t bother to look up, into the sky, and see what is going on… Oh, many of the Gaijin remain: scouts, observers, transit craft like this one. But the bulk of the Gaijin fleet — mostly constructed from stolen Solar System resources, our asteroids — has begun to withdraw to the Saddle Points. The outer system war is over.”

  “And the Crackers…”

  “Are on the way into the inner system. They are already through the heliopause, the perimeter of the solar wind.” The virtual flickered, became blocky, all but transparent. “The endgame approaches.”

  “Nemoto, what must I do?”

  “Go to Mercury. Find me.” She looked down at herself, as if remembering. “That is, find Nemoto.”

  “And what of you? Nemoto, what is a limited-sentience projection?”

  Nemoto raised a hand that was crumbling into bits of light. She seemed puzzled, as if she was finding out for herself as she spoke. “I am autonomous, heuristic, sentient. I was born sixty seconds ago, to give you this message. But my function is fulfilled. I’m dying.” She looked at Madeleine, as if shocked by the realization, and reached out.

  Madeleine extended a hand, but her fingers passed through a cloud of light.

  With a thin wail, the Nemoto virtual broke up.

  Sailing in from the rim of the Solar System, Madeleine used Gaijin technology to study the strange new age into which she had been projected.