Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  Now he was flying over the far side of the Moon. And it didn’t look like the near side.

  There were no maria here: at first glance, anyhow. There were basins, just like on the near side, but you had to pick them out from their mountainous ring walls, for they hadn’t filled up with basalt lakes. Nobody knew why.

  It was like one giant stretch of highland, craters piled on craters, their overlapping rims like wave crests frozen on a rocky sea. There wasn’t even a sense of scale. It was an unsettling experience. He couldn’t tell where he was, or how high he was, or even what size he was anymore. It was as if his sense of space and time was softening, drawn out of him by the ambiguous Moon far side, this land human eyes hadn’t evolved to see.

  But here came giant Tsiolkovsky, the most distinctive crater on the whole damn far side of the Moon. Once, NASA had talked of putting an Apollo down, here in Tsiolkovsky, in the middle of the far side, with some kind of superannuated military relay satellite in orbit above it to keep the hapless astronauts in touch with home. Looking down now, he could see how dangerous that would have been, how treacherous Tsiolkovsky was.

  “Forty seconds,” Geena said.

  “Rog.”

  “Press the switch over there. To your right.”

  It was mounted on his back frame; he had to reach to get it. “What’s that?”

  “The movie camera for the landing. IMAX. Twenty seconds. Engine armed. Pressed to proceed.” She grabbed the handrail. “Two, one.”

  Ignition.

  Henry could feel the thrust of the engine, silent and invisible as it was; it was like some mysterious gravity field, pulling him down to the surface of the Shoemaker.

  The engine, he noted absently, had started up by itself.

  “Hey,” he said. “Who’s flying this thing?”

  “Autoland,” Geena said tightly.

  The engine roared to full thrust, and the Shoemaker platform shook with a soundless, high-frequency vibration. His feet came to rest hard against the Shoemaker’s deck, and after five days in microgravity he welcomed the feel of acceleration.

  “We’re burning, Arkady,” Geena said.

  “I can see the glow in the engine bell. Godspeed, my friends.”

  “Yeah. You too…”

  …The ground lurched under Blue Ishiguro.

  He’d been up here for hours. He had, he realized, been dozing.

  He heard the growl of cracking rock, and he was thrown onto his back. Suddenly there was smoke everywhere, and the air was burning hot. He could see the clouds venting from new fissures, the white of superheated steam, the blue of sulfuric acid and fluorine. The stink was foul, like, he thought darkly, a high-school chemistry lab.

  He straightened himself up, and surveyed the new situation.

  Fissures had appeared on the flanks of the Campsie Fells. Lava fountains there, curtains of red flame following the lines of the fissures, rock droplets hurled meters into the air. As he watched, the fissures were spreading and merging.

  A main vent, a broad crater, opened up in the hillside, facing Strathblane. More lava fountains, and now a major surge of sticky, viscous lava poured out. The heather on the hillside singed and burned in brief flashes. The cooling lava was already building up levees, and the molten material gushed down channels between the levees, heading toward the abandoned town.

  Another, broader vent opened, and vomited lava.

  Blue could smell sulfur and methane. Near the edge of the flow, loud cracks marked the explosion of methane gas. The fume clouds above the vents glowed orange against the blackening sky.

  Blue?

  “Sixt, I think it is starting. It was very sudden.”

  He checked his cameras and instruments were stable, and that his data was indeed reaching orbit.

  Then he pulled up his protective hood, and patiently described all he saw, as the Scottish ground—under intolerable strain—broke apart.

  As it receded after its separation, Arkady had kept the spindly lander in sight through the eyepiece of the twenty-eight-power sextant. With its bright colors, white and gold and black, hanging in the shadow of the Moon, it looked something like a tropical fish, angular and unlikely.

  But there were Geena and Henry in their snow white suits, perched on top of the Shoemaker platform. He could see them move as they worked their controls, or turn to each other and gesture: human beings, interacting as humans always had, here in lunar orbit.

  When Geena fired the descent engine to drop out of circular orbit, Arkady was looking into the Shoemaker’s engine bell. The craft seemed to become a glowing ball, like a jet plane on afterburner, and it moved away from him as steadily as if mounted on rails.

  The engine glow lasted a half-minute, then died, and he could no longer see them. Soyuz sailed on, through light, through darkness.

  The engine throttled down, and cut. Suddenly Henry was falling again, and once more he felt his lunch rise up his throat. He swallowed hard.

  Geena said, “Right on the nose.” She looked across, and he could see her face framed by her helmet. “We’re still breathing, Henry.”

  “Maybe you are…Oh, shit.”

  For now they were falling, tracking their ellipse, all the way down to the orbit’s low point at fifty thousand feet. And he could sense their diminishing altitude. The tightly curving edge of the Moon seemed to flatten, quickly. The features beneath him fled behind him, like shadows on an ocean.

  He felt as if he had fallen over the lip of some giant, invisible roller coaster.

  “And I always hated roller coasters,” he muttered.

  Geena looked across at him. “I know,” she said. “Hold onto your ass, kid.”

  “I’m holding.”

  Earth rose ahead of them, unnaturally quickly, its blue making a contrast with the tan and gray lunar plains that was almost painful to Henry’s eyes.

  …Shoemaker, Houston. We’re standing by.

  “Houston, Shoemaker, reading you loud and clear, do you read me?”

  Copy, Geena, good to have you back. That’s AOS, reading you five by. Coming up on twelve minutes to next ignition. We’re waiting for your burn report.

  “The burn was on time. Residuals are minus point one, minus point four, minus point one. Frank, everything went swimmingly, just beautiful.”

  The horizon closed in. Mountains hove over the edge of the world, chains of them, that curved inward until Henry could see they formed a crater rim, and then, as soon as the far side was visible, the rim fled beneath him. Sometimes they flew over fields of boulders, immense, round-shouldered, their shadows long and flat.

  “Look at that,” Geena said. “Some of those babies must be five stories high.”

  No, Henry thought. Probably ten times that…

  It was strange to remember how he’d griped about the restricted viewing from the Soyuz. Now he could see too much, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree span of Moonscape and sunlight and bare, clutching rock.

  Under the control of the computer the thrusters fired. There was no noise, but Henry could see little showers of exhaust crystals venting into space, feel the punch of the burns through his feet and hands. The Shoemaker rocked from side to side, fore and aft, sharply; it was a stomach-jolting feeling, like turbulence in an airliner…but there was no turbulence here.

  They reached the center of the Moon’s daylight face, and passed beneath the sun. Giant pumice gray lava plains fled beneath him. Briefly, at the subsolar point, the shadows disappeared, and the surface detail washed out.

  Coming up on five minutes to ignition.

  “Five minutes, copy.”

  You’re heading right for the guidance box at perilune.

  “Copy that.”

  Shoemaker, Houston, you’re go for powered descent. Your signal is breaking up. Recommend you yaw right ten degrees and reacquire.

  Geena pulsed her thrusters once more, and the Shoemaker swiveled, pointing its main antenna more squarely at the blue sliver of Earth.

  T
hree minutes to PDI. Two minutes forty seconds…

  “Forty-seven thousand feet. The laser altimeter has locked in. It agrees closely with the trajectory.”

  Good to hear it, Geena. You’re looking good at three minutes. You are still go to continue to powered descent.

  “Copy that…”

  Now they flew deeper yet, over a mare, a lava plain. It looked smooth as wet clay, pocked here and there by small round craters, fleeing beneath them. This was the Mare Imbrium, he thought with a thrill of understanding: he was flying over one of the Solar System’s greatest impact basins, the right eye of the Man in the Moon.

  Forty thousand feet high: back on Earth, even Concorde flew higher than this. No big deal.

  But this was no airplane ride.

  Tracking around the airless Moon, they were still following an orbit, and by dipping down from the peak of their ellipse they had actually picked up speed. They were moving at all of three thousand seven hundred miles per hour, more than a mile a second, five times the speed of sound. No pilot in history had flown so fast, so close: at orbital speed, hugging the ground.

  Henry felt as if he was bare-ass naked, strapped to his table. He shut his eyes, clung onto his restraints, and tried to forget where he was.

  “We’re drifting off.”

  He snapped open his eyes. “What?”

  “Something spooky. It’s as if the Shoemaker is trying to line itself up toward the radius vector.” Geena turned to him, her face mirrored. “It wants to point straight down.”

  “I can’t feel anything.”

  “It’s too subtle to see. The instruments know, though.”

  “The mascons,” he said. “Mass concentrations. The Moon is a lumpy old world. It’s plucking at us. Playing with us.”

  She grunted. “I wish it would leave us the hell alone. I sure wasn’t expecting turbulence out here.”

  “Turbulent gravity…Oh my,” he said, looking ahead. “Oh, my.”

  Aristarchus himself was shouldering over the horizon.

  The crater’s walls were a great rampart, visibly circular, which rose out of the Imbrium plain like the walls of some impossible city. And already Henry could see Jays Malone’s rille: Schröter’s Valley, a dry valley gouged into the sandy surface of the Moon by a brief, late spasm of lunar volcanism.

  The crater stunned him with its magnitude. The energies that had gouged out this monster—shattering the rock and melting the very floor—had been truly stupendous, far beyond human capability, as far ahead in the future as he cared to look. And yet, he knew, even this great impact had been a pinprick compared to the gigantic, primeval events which had gouged out the great basins, the final formative bombardment that had shaped the geology of the Moon.

  It was as much as humans could do, he thought, to send them this far, two tiny people, encased in air and water, descending cautiously on their candleflame. How could they hope to shape events here, on this cosmic battleground?

  The whole exercise, his grandiose, half-formed schemes, seemed futile before they even started.

  But now the Powered Descent burn began, this toy lander’s rocket engine jarring to life once more.

  Henry was tipped toward the vertical. He could feel how his center of mass was swung through space. Now, the Shoemaker would stand on a tail of rocket flame, all the way to the surface of the Moon.

  Twenty-one thousand feet. Velocity down to twelve hundred fps, Geena. Still looking very good.

  “Copy.”

  Seven minutes into the burn.

  “We’re only about ten miles from the landing site,” Geena said now. She looked down past her toes. “We ought to see the landing site soon.”

  Shoemaker, you’re looking great. Coming up on nine minutes.

  And then, at seven thousand feet, the Shoemaker’s engine throttled down.

  “High gate,” Geena said.

  “Wow!”

  Henry could feel the sharp reduction in thrust, as if the brakes had suddenly come off. It was momentarily exhilarating. He was, after all, riding a rocket ship to the Moon; there ought to be moments like this…

  The long brake was over now, and the Shoemaker pitched up for the final descent; now it would come down on its rocket tail.

  Henry settled gently against the platform. The lander was still supporting him, but the Moon’s gentle gravity was tugging at him now: he could feel the Moon, for the first time.

  And there was the Moon itself: a ghostly, black-and-white panorama, not much more than a mile under his feet, flying past at unreasonable speeds. But he was so close, now, that the glow of the engine bell was reflecting back up at him from the flanks of the taller peaks. Human fire, reflecting from the Moon.

  “Oh, shit,” said Geena.

  “Yeah. That maneuver—”

  “No, not that. Look at this place. Where the hell’s the Apollo?”

  The Moon was a thousand craters, a thousand pools of shadows. Henry felt an instant of panic. How could they map-read, how could they find their orientation in a landscape like this?

  …But suddenly he picked out the rille again, a scar in the Moon, sinuous and twisting, a trowel trench dug into wet clay. And there—a needle-point, glittering brightly, its morning shadow stretching behind it—was the old Apollo lander.

  He pointed. “We got it.”

  “I see it,” said Geena. “Holy cow. Right ahead of us. The computer is taking us straight in.”

  “I guess those geeks at NASA knew what they were doing after all.”

  “I guess.”

  It was essential to use the Apollo site as a beacon, because that was the site from which Jays Malone had traveled to pick up the fateful rock, 86047; and because that was where Houston had sent their supplies, on the second Shoemaker lander, unmanned. If they couldn’t find the second Shoemaker they wouldn’t even have the fuel to return to orbit.

  The Shoemaker turned, its thrusters banging, tipped up through about fifty degrees now. Henry’s viewpoint changed, and he realized the Shoemaker was flying beside a mountain. They were already so low that its rounded flanks shouldered all of five or six thousand feet above him, pale brown curves bright against the black sky.

  For a moment he lost the sense of powered flight, and it seemed to him he was drifting, weightless, among these huge shapes.

  Looking good, Shoemaker.

  “Five thousand feet high, a hundred feet per second,” Geena said. “Right on the nose.”

  Shoemaker, you are still go for the landing. Four thousand feet. Three thousand. Descending at seventy feet per second.

  A lot of Apollo astronauts had burned up their fuel by coming in along a stair-step pattern. Maybe they hadn’t trusted their landing radar data; maybe they hadn’t trusted the evidence of their own eyes. But the autoland, blindly confident in the thirty-year-old maps in its computer memory, was just going to bring them on down. And so it did, in a smooth steep nerveless glide that brought the ridges and craters and hummocks exploding into unwelcome relief.

  The Apollo site was still a long way ahead.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said.

  “No.” Geena was staring at the little bank of instruments before her, concentrating on the Shoemaker. She was looking internally, he realized, thinking about the machine they were riding, not externally, at the Moon.

  And the Moon was not behaving as it was supposed to.

  “Look up, Geena. We’re coming down short. Maybe you should take over and bring us in.”

  “No. I told you. We’re autoland all the way to the ground.”

  “Neil Armstrong did an override.”

  “Neil Armstrong hadn’t been here before. We have. We have maps, Henry. We have photographs. Now shut up and let this thing land itself.”

  A thousand feet above the Moon, and he was flying toward a bright field of craters, their shadows stretching away from him across the Moon. The Shoemaker was coming in at a low angle, unreasonably quickly, like an artillery shell lobbed across some
ancient battlefield; and Henry was riding the shell, feet first.

  Let Geena do her job, he told himself. Trust her.

  But they were still coming down hard, and now there wasn’t even a sign of Apollo.

  It seemed to Blue, now, that he was actually rising into the air, as if Dumfoyne was a raft which he was riding in a swelling lava sea.

  Perhaps he should have brought an altimeter.

  Lava from the main vent overwhelmed Strathblane, it seemed in moments. The neat buildings, the rich green fir trees, exploded and burned, as the lava, enclosed in a stretching sack of cooling rock, surged through the streets.

  There were faults everywhere now, fissures and lava fountains. Already most of the vegetation had burned off. As if the whole area was turning into one giant caldera.

  For now he was safe, here at the summit of Dumfoyne. The hill, and its nearby twin Dumgoyne, were little islands of stability, in a sea of fissures and vents and lava fountains.

  Dumfoyne was a raft he was riding to the sky.

  His voice transmission was still getting through, although his sky was covered, now, by an ugly, roiling cloud of steam and ash, through which lightning sparked continually. But the reception was too poor for his instruments’ telemetry to penetrate, and, regretfully, he folded up his instruments and collapsed his laptop.

  …incredible, Blue. We can’t believe these radar readings. There must be a magma volume production rate of millions of cubic meters a second…

  That compared to hundreds of cubic meters, Blue knew, in an eruption of the size of Mount St. Helens.

  …as if we’re seeing a million years of geology compressed. Mauna Loa, built in a day. Mauna Loa in Hawaii was Earth’s largest volcano, stretching seven miles above the ocean floor.

  “But this may be bigger than Mauna Loa,” Blue said, unsure if Sixt could hear him. “Bigger than anything on Earth.”

  There had been no volcanism on Earth on this scale for a hundred millennia. Twice as long as humans had existed.

  Perhaps this was Olympus Mons come to Earth, he thought. The giant Martian shield volcano, so huge its caldera poked out of the thin atmosphere. Mars, come to Earth.