Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  Arkady sighed and discarded the mail. It was a peculiarity of the Russian system—seen by Geena’s American eyes at least—that every error he made, on this or any other mission, was recorded by his controllers on the ground. Basically, after a mission, he was evaluated not by what he did or how much he accomplished, but by how many mistakes he made.

  If he saved the world, he thought wryly, maybe they would overlook his unsatisfactory error ratio.

  The second mail was more pleasing. It was from workers at the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station in Siberia. One summer, as a student of the Moscow Institute of Aviation, Arkady had worked at Krasnoyarsk on a dam construction project.

  >To celebrate the first Russian lunar flight, by the joint decision of the workers and the MIA student construction workers in Sayany, Arkady Berezovoy is nominated as an Honorary Concrete Worker in Dmitri Syroyezkho’s work team. His salary will be transferred to the Russian Peace Foundation. We wish you Siberian health, happiness, successful completion of your mission, and a safe return to Earth. We embrace you as a friend. Come and visit us in Sayany…

  Arkady was moved. He was sorry Geena was not here to see this—though he was glad her American ex-husband Henry was not here to mock. Americans would never understand such a gesture as this, and would deride it.

  But to Arkady, it was like an echo of the past. It seemed to Arkady that since the implosion of the Soviet Union—whatever the rights or wrongs of that “liberation”—the Russian people had had precious few heroes to celebrate. This message from the power workers wasn’t the first such he had received. It warmed him, here orbiting the cold wastes of the Moon, to think that his countrymen, even in these dark times, were following his mission. Arkady had always believed that the true value of a hero was not to himself or herself, but to others, as an example of the heights to which humanity can aspire.

  He drifted before the laptop keyboard, and composed a reply.

  >Dear friends, I thank you for your mail, and for the great honor you do me…I can assure you that by my hard work on the Soyuz I will represent the hydroconstruction workers with honor…

  That done, the Honorary Concrete Worker continued with his duties, in lunar orbit.

  When he passed over Aristarchus, he looked for Geena and Henry. If Arkady told the computer where to look, it was able to point the navigation sextant, with its low-power telescope, right at the rille; and when he looked in the eyepiece, just within the rim of the crater, there was the lander: a point of metallic light trailing a needlelike shadow.

  He peered into the eyepiece, willing himself to pick out more details. Maybe he could make out the four landing legs of the old Apollo Lunar Module…Perhaps that fuzzy oblong was Geena’s inflatable shelter.

  But the ’scope wasn’t powerful enough for that, and he was starting to see what he wanted to see, not what was there; and so, he knew, he must put aside the telescope.

  No Russian had ever visited the surface of the Moon. Perhaps no Russian ever would. It was an exercise in futility, therefore, to gaze on its surface like Moses at the Promised Land.

  It might have been different, though.

  Arkady would, he admitted to himself, relish the chance to be a hero, to be another Gagarin to inspire future generations, to help his country climb its long ladder to a better future.

  But he would do nothing to jeopardize the mission.

  He sailed once more into silence.

  He liked this experience, sailing through lunar orbit, of being alone on the far side of the Moon. To a pilot it was the essence of flying: to be alone, in control of your craft. As he was now. It was, he thought, the purest form of freedom.

  And there were lonelier places than the far side of the Moon. He had flown sorties over Afghanistan; he knew; he had been there.

  When he came into view of Earth, the radio static turned to voices, and he was connected to humanity once more, strained voices that betrayed the grimness of the planet.

  46

  Houston woke them up with a burst of Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World.

  Henry snapped awake, disconcerted. He’d woken up to news—bad news—every day for three months before the mission. But then it wasn’t NASA policy to pass on news, bad or otherwise, even when the world was coming to pieces around them.

  For a while they lay in their bunks, staring at fabric walls illuminated by tan backlight from the Moon dust.

  Good God, Henry thought. It’s real. I’m still on the Moon.

  He’d slept well. He felt good.

  Even the soreness in his arms had disappeared. The doctors on the ground had speculated that the cardiovascular system was so much more efficient, here in one-sixth G, that it cleansed the muscles of lactic acid and other waste products before they had a chance to do any damage. He hadn’t believed them; but now, he could feel the results.

  How strange, he thought, that humans, four-limbed primates, should be so well-adapted to conditions on this sister planet. It looked as if those millions of years spent swinging around tree branches hadn’t been for nothing after all.

  In the end, how easy it had been to come back to the Moon. They’d just decided they wanted to do it, and they’d done it. We wasted thirty years of exploration time, he thought.

  But then Geena started to move, and it was time to begin the day.

  A day in which, he realized, he was going to have to confront the Moonseed at last.

  He struggled out of his sleeping bag.

  When Henry peered out of the shelter’s little window, the Moon looked strange.

  He knew from yesterday how far away the various instruments and craft of the Apollo astronauts were. He could even see the tracks of his own prints in the scuffed regolith. But when he looked out of the shelter’s window, it looked as if the instruments were right outside, as if they had come huddling closer to the shelter’s warmth.

  None of it, the swimming perspective of the Moon, made any sense to him.

  He turned to his suit and donned it, working steadily through its checklist.

  When they were done they decompressed the shelter and climbed out, one by one, like fat gray-white grubs pushing out of a discarded shell.

  He felt as if he was in some immense darkened room, where the light didn’t quite reach the walls, so that he was suspended in a patch of light in the middle of a darkened floor.

  A morning that lasts a week. They’d first landed at something like 6:30 A.M., local time. The twelve hours they’d spent inside the shelter were equivalent to something like a half-hour in the lunar “day”: enough to shrink the shadows a little, but not by much.

  Even so, all the pooled shadows were different, changing the feel of the landscape. Even the colors had changed, Henry saw, because the colors depended on the angle to the sunlight; the grays and browns, changing as he looked around, seemed to him a little more vivid.

  He kept thinking he saw features, rocks and craters, he hadn’t noticed yesterday; but he soon realized they were the same rocks under different lighting, like a movie set that had been reassembled. The slopes of the crater walls and ejecta hills looked much less severe, almost gentle: not nearly the challenge they’d appeared yesterday. Maybe that was true. Maybe he was being fooled in the other direction.

  The Moon was full of optical illusions, he thought. Given there was nothing here but bare rocks and flat sunlight, that was kind of surprising. It was a stage set put together by a master illusionist, a minimalist.

  Maybe, he thought moodily, the Moon really is a magic world, a world of dream or nightmare, a world where distances and times can shift and swim, like a relativity student’s fever dream.

  The Moon was, undoubtedly, a stranger and more interesting place than he expected.

  He started to collect the equipment they would need for the day: tools and a couple of batteries for the Rover, his geological gear.

  Reaching to lift a bag, he leaned too far, and fell.

  When the fall began, his bal
ance was lost quickly, especially when he tried to back up. The ground was uneven everywhere, and he kept treading on rocks and crater holes that made him stumble further. Besides, the heavy pack at his back gave him a center of gravity aft of his midline, so he was always being pulled backward.

  But he fell with a dreamy slowness, like falling underwater. He had time to twist around, the stiff suit making him move as a unit, like a statue, and he could catch his footing before he fell. He just spun around, bent his knees and recovered, scuffing his feet to get them under him again.

  Then he felt his ears pop.

  He had to be losing pressure. He felt his heart pounding. Maybe he should call Geena.

  He stood still. He leaned forward and checked the gauge on his chest. There was no change, and he didn’t feel any difference. Just that one pop.

  Maybe he had bumped against the oxygen inflow port, or the outflow. If he obstructed the flow, that would cause a momentary transient; it might even have been a slight increase in pressure.

  His monitors stayed stable. A glitch, then.

  The incident was enough to brush him with fear.

  Sobered, he went to work.

  Side by side, carrying tools and equipment, they walked away from the Shoemaker, toward the Rover.

  The Apollo Lunar Rover was a home-workshop beach buggy: about the size of a low-slung jeep, but with no body, or windshield, or engine.

  “Oh, shit,” Henry said. “Have we really got to ride this thing?”

  “Better than walking. You know what the Apollo guys called it?”

  “Hit me.”

  “Chitty Chitty Boeing Boeing.”

  They bounced around the Rover, inspecting it.

  The Rover was an aluminum frame, ten feet long, maybe six wide. It had four fat wheels—actually not quite wheels, but wire mesh tires, with metal chevrons for tread. There were fenders, of orange fiberglass. There were two bucket seats with plastic webbing, and a minimal controller—just a gear-shiftlike hand controller between the seats, and a display console the size of a small TV. No steering wheel. At the back of the buggy there were bags for storage of equipment and samples.

  The front of the thing was cluttered up with cameras and comms equipment. The TV camera still pointed at the sky, where it had followed the final departure of the astronauts in their LM ascent stage. The camera was coated in insulation foil, which had split and cracked. The umbrella-shaped high-gain antenna still pointed at Earth, where the Apollo astronauts had left it, for the Earth had not moved in all the years since.

  This Rover was a working vehicle. He could see how the straps on the backs of the frame chairs were stretched and displaced from use. There were still dusty footprints on the foot rests fitted to the ribbed frame, and the mark of a hand, imprinted in lunar dust, on the TV camera’s insulation. And one fender at the rear had cracked, and had been crudely patched with silver wire and what looked like a checklist cover, though the text and graphic had long since faded. The Rover looked as if it had been used just yesterday, as if its original drivers would come back in a couple hours for a fourth or fifth EVA.

  Tracks, crisply ribbed, snaked off back over the ground, diminishing into the distance.

  The Rovers had been built from scratch by Boeing in just two years. There had only ever been four of these babies, and all of them had been flown to the Moon, and all of them had been left up here, in the clean airless sunlight. Two million bucks apiece.

  At that it was a better fate, he thought, than to finish up in a glass case in the Smithsonian or some NASA museum, slowly corroding in Earth’s thick, murky air while generations of successively more baffled tourists came to stand and gawk…

  He said, “What makes you think this old dune buggy is going to work anyhow? It was built to last three days, not thirty years.”

  She shrugged. “It was built to last three days, not thirty years.”

  She shrugged. “It was built for temperature extremes and vacuum. What is there to go wrong? Neighborhood kids stealing the tires? They built better than they had to, in those days. Look at those old space probes from the 1970s. Pioneer 10 lasted twenty-five years…Anyhow, you better hope. Otherwise, it will be a long walk.”

  Geena left the original batteries in place at the back of the vehicle, and set replacements on top of them. The new batteries were an advanced lithium-ion design. She started to hook them up with jump cables, and Henry loped around to help her. It was stiff, clumsy work; the Rover hadn’t been designed for this sort of maintenance, and Henry’s fingers were soon aching as he fought the stiffness of his gloves to manipulate leads and crocodile clips.

  They bolted a lightweight TV camera to the Rover’s big, clunky 1970s original, and a new miniaturized comms package. The old antenna still seemed to be serviceable, however. Then they loaded Henry’s gear into the panniers in back of the Rover.

  When Henry moved past the camera, a red light glared at him, steady and relentless. Back on Earth, they were already watching him.

  Let them. For what they were going to do today, there had been time to prepare no checklists, no simulations, no training. Maybe for the first time in the history of U.S. space exploration—the first since John Glenn anyhow—he and Geena were, truly, heading into the unknown. And there wasn’t a damn thing any of those anal retentive characters at Mission Control could do to help or hinder them, except keep quiet.

  Happily, they seemed to know it.

  Henry lowered his butt cautiously onto the right-hand of the two bucket seats, and swiveled his legs over the corrugated frame. The pressure in his suit made it starfish, and he had to use a little force to keep his arms by his side. He pulled restraints around his chest and waist.

  Half-sitting, half-lying, he tried to relax.

  The Rover was noticeably light; when Geena dropped into the left-hand driver’s seat, the whole vehicle bounced, and little sprays of dust scattered around the wheels.

  She flicked switches on the console, and dials lit up.

  “Left-hand drive,” Henry said.

  “What?”

  “If the first people on the Moon had been Scottish, you’d be sitting where I am.”

  She lifted her gold visor to stare at him.

  Then she dropped her visor, put her right hand on the joystick control, and jammed the control forward.

  The wheels, each spun by an independent electric motor, dragged at the dust. The Rover bucked like an aluminum bronco, bounding out of its thirty-year parking spot, throwing Henry against his straps.

  Following Apollo tracks as fresh as if they had been laid down yesterday, they headed east, toward the rille.

  It was an exciting ride.

  The turns were sharp. Every time Geena steered, all four wheels swiveled. The ground here was all bumps and hollows, an artillery field of craters, and every time they hit an obstacle one or two wheels would come looming off of the ground.

  Henry, strapped to his lawn chair on top of this thing, was thrown around, especially when Geena took a swerve to avoid a rock or a crater.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  “Don’t be a baby,” Geena said. “It’s only eight miles an hour. We’d be beaten by a San Francisco cable car.”

  “Yeah, but how many hummocks per hour are we hitting?”

  Geena pushed up the speed. The Rover bounced high off the ground, and threw up huge rooster tails of black dust behind them.

  “Let me explain something to you,” she said as she drove. “Our consumables are being used up all the time.”

  “Sure.”

  “So at no point are we going to drive farther than our walkback limit.”

  “Which is the distance we can walk back to the shelter, with the oxygen in our backpacks. In case the Rover breaks down. I know. That makes sense to me.”

  “Yes. But because our consumables go down steadily, that walkback limit gets tighter and tighter with time. And we are going to stay within that limit, all the time.”

  “Sure,�
�� Henry said.

  “If that means we have to leave the rille before you’re ready, we do it. If it means we have to miss out on interesting-looking detours, we do it.”

  “Geena—”

  “And I’m going to be conservative, because the navigation computer on this thing doesn’t work anymore. As far as walkback is concerned I’m the boss.”

  He shrugged, a clumsy gesture in his suit. “Sure. You’re the boss.”

  If she wanted to feel in control, if that was her way of avoiding the funk she suffered on the way in, it was fine by him.

  …There were, Henry realized afresh, craters everywhere.

  Some of the craters were subdued depressions, almost rimless, as if dug out of loose sand. They were easy to traverse; the Rover just rolled down a gentle slope. But others—mostly smaller—were sharper, with well-defined rims, the classic cup shapes of story books. The younger craters were full of rubble, like builders’ slag, concentrations of angular blocks, and they had littered rims. Geena had to drive around those babies.

  They couldn’t avoid a big crater, maybe two hundred yards wide. As they approached the rim Geena slowed down; they had to thread their way through an apron of ejecta a couple of hundred yards deep, sharp-edged, scattered blocks up to four or five yards in size, dug out of the Moon and thrown up here.

  From above, Henry knew, this blanket would form the crater’s ray system, the scattering of ejecta around the central wound, like a splash of blood around a bullet hole. It gave him a thrill to know that he was here, actually driving among the rays of a lunar crater. A hell of a thing.

  Here at last was the lip of the crater. They went over the rim into the basin. It was strewn with blocks ranging from a yard across to maybe fifteen yards, with a few yards separating the blocks, wide enough for them to drive through, as if passing through some miniature city block.

  Crossing the crater floor there was an ejecta ridge, a rough, loose structure made of highland dust and mare basalt fragments, churned up together. It must be part of the ray system that came radiating away from the impact that created the younger Aristarchus. He noticed a piece of rock that sparkled with glass beads. It was possible that after the impact, so many billions of years ago, this chunk had been thrown thousands of miles into space, smashed, molten, cooling, before falling back to the Moon, to land here, and, after waiting as long as it had taken for life to evolve on the Earth, here it was for him to see.