Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  “It’s the fucking San Andreas,” Sixt said. “Half of Los Angeles is on fire. A hell of a view…”

  “The San Andreas,” Jays said. “It took its own sweet time to join the party.”

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “And,” said Jays calmly, “go where, exactly?”

  “Jays—”

  “Can you still see the Moon?”

  “Yes. Yes, Jays, I see the Moon.”

  “Then tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me what’s happening up there.”

  At least, he thought, I got to see this. This and Aristarchus: maybe that’s enough, for one lifetime.

  But he wished he’d had a chance to say good-bye to Tracy and the boys.

  And so the old astronaut sat in the ruins of the observatory dome, trying to ignore the mounting pain from his smashed eye socket, listening as his friend described the waves of light traveling across the Moon, until the fires from the city filled the air with smoke, hiding the Moon, and began to close in on them for the last time, and the next shock hit them, even more violent than the last—

  They woke up Monica to see it.

  You’ve got to watch the Moon.

  Not live, of course; she couldn’t be moved. But they gave her a little TV, set up on a table over her bed, tipped so she could see it.

  Circles closing in.

  In the end it was the liver disease that was getting her. Nausea, loss of appetite, drastic weight loss; her skin had turned yellow and itched like all hell. She had turned into a giant, misshapen, irritable cantaloupe. But at that it was preferable to going crazy first, which had been another option.

  …There had come a day when she could not get herself out of her chair unaided, and a day when she knew she would never see another spring, and at last, maybe soon, there would be a day which would be the final day of all for her, a day without a sunset, or a night without a dawn. The circles would close in, walling her off from this world of books and music and mathematics and sunlight, everything she knew and cherished. And on the other side of the wall was nothing she could understand or anticipate, perhaps—probably—not even her identity. Even now her universe was reduced to this poky little hospital room, the last flowers Alfred Synge had sent her before he got himself killed in the Seattle event…Now, I won’t even get to see the outside air again.

  Watch the Moon…

  A disc, floating in the screen, obscured somewhat by the volcanic ash in the air: it was recognizably the Moon, still, the familiar layout of seas and highlands easy to make out. But now there was cloud pooling in the lowlands. What looked like auroras, lightning.

  Henry Meacher, she thought. So he did it. Hot damn.

  She felt a surge of satisfaction, banishing for a few minutes the coldness that seemed to cluster around her the whole day now. I knew I was right to back him. I knew he had something.

  She watched the clouds, swirling across the face of the Moon. Damn, damn, I wish I could see it for real. Just for a moment.

  But she knew that was impossible.

  …And now it came crowding over the horizon, as suddenly as that, a thick, crawling layer of fog, spreading toward him like, he thought irrelevantly, a dry ice layer at a 1980s rock concert. It spread right around the curving horizon, and stretched to a wispy thinness above.

  Incredible, he thought; he was still standing in vacuum, but he was looking at a layer of atmosphere, from the outside. He could see how turbulent it was: wherever it touched the ground, two hundred degrees hot, it was soaking up rock heat and boiling afresh.

  On the Moon’s dark side—in shadow—it would be different. There, the ground was two hundred below freezing; there, over the high cratered plains of farside, good God, it must already be snowing.

  The turbulent gas was picking up dust. That stuff could be a problem if it scoured at the seams of his suit.

  But it advanced toward him ferociously, turning into a towering tsunami of gas and steam and dust, coming at him at a thousand miles an hour—more than the speed of sound, back on Earth.

  He had time to look down, once more, at the ancient, complex surface of the regolith, his own boot print there, as sharp as Armstrong’s.

  Geena is going to kill me for not being in the shelter, he thought. But he couldn’t have missed this.

  The new air was white, and as tall as the sky.

  Then it was on him, a wall of vapor sweeping over him.

  It hit him harder than he’d expected, like a fire hose battering him from head to foot, a wall of rushing steam…Sound, on the Moon: he could hear the howling of this primordial wind across the plain, around his suit, the first sound in four billion years. The dust at his feet fled toward the vacuum, tiny dunes piling up over his blue Moon boots. There was a continual patter, almost like rain; it was probably pebble-sized fragments of regolith, trying to smash through his helmet. He tried to lift his arms, to protect his face, but he couldn’t.

  He fell backward.

  He bounced on Geena’s backpack and rolled sideways, and skidded a few feet over the surface. He tried to shield the control panel of his suit, protect the backpack itself; but he was just scrabbling in the dirt like an animal, helpless before this planetary violence. And it was hot, Jesus, but after all he was in a jet of live steam.

  He looked up. There was structure to the air already, he saw: the thick, ground-level fog, clearer air above, and, masking the vanishing remnants of black sky, some high, racing cirrus clouds: not billowing, just bannerlike streamers. Perhaps they were ice crystals.

  The air closed over him, like fog.

  There were waves in the still-tenuous gas encasing him—huge density waves pulsing past him—and his vision periodically cleared, affording him glimpses of the sky.

  The sun seemed shrunken and remote, reduced to a pale disc in a milky sky. There was the old Earth. The disc of shadowed world cradled within the arms of the crescent was clearly visible, illuminated more brightly by the Moonlight than he had seen it before. He thought, in fact, he could make out the shape of continents, Africa and west Asia and Europe, and the soft bowling-ball glow, where the Moonlight shone over the Indian Ocean.

  It wasn’t such a surprise; the Earth was entitled to be lit up like a Christmas bauble on a tree. For it had a brand new Moon, a Moon that had never been so bright before…

  But now clouds closed over the sky.

  Earth was gone. He was encased in a glowing fog, sealed under a lid of cloud.

  The wind was dying. He was still buffeted by gusts—he imagined the air scouring in great currents over this huge lava plain, the new lands it had conquered, seeking equilibrium—but it wasn’t as violent as before.

  And he was still breathing. He could hear, above the diminishing battering of the breeze, the steady hiss of his oxygen supply. Good NASA engineering, conservative to the last.

  He tried to stand up.

  Jane put down the toy telescope.

  The naked-eye Moon was bright: brighter than Jane had ever known it, as bright as if the sun had exploded. It cast a sharp shadow behind her, and the sky, masking the stars, was a deep, lustrous blue she’d never seen before: the new Moonlight, scattered by Earth’s ash-laden air. And the great lantern hanging in the sky shed enough light for her to pick out the details of the landscape, the coast, the sparkling waves. There were colors, she realized: colors by Moonlight.

  Actually, it was unearthly.

  The very light seemed unnatural: neither full daylight, nor night, nor Moonlight. And the Moon continued to evolve in the sky, a crawling, sparking thing. The Moon wasn’t supposed to change…

  But it was wonderful.

  Jack’s face, upturned, was shining in the new light. He was crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks, the moisture sparkling.

  She could hear sounds: dogs barking, birds, the rustle of insects.

  The animals think it’s daylight, she realized. It was the opposite of an eclipse. She wondered how long it would take them to adapt to the
new world in the sky, to throw off all that evolution.

  She shivered.

  She could hear people cheering. Clapping, from gardens and patios all over the neighborhood.

  Now there were flashes around the cloud-covered pole of the Moon: sparks, urgent flappings of yellow light, sparking, dying, reforming like trick candles. They were auroras. Lightning strikes. The first storms.

  Weather, on the Moon.

  She imagined faces all over the darkened hemisphere of the planet, in shattered homes and refugee camps, turned up to the new Moon, which hung in the sky bright as a sun: a symbol of hope, inchoate yet, but nevertheless real. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. For the first time in many days, her soul was lifted above her own concerns, her fears for Jack.

  She lifted the telescope again, but now her own vision was blurred with tears.

  His suit bent at the waist, comparatively easily. The suit was still pressurized, above ambient—but now there was air out there, not just vacuum; he wasn’t a starfish anymore.

  It was hard to see out of his gold sun visor, though. It had been scoured and starred comprehensively by that first wave of fragments. But when he raised it, his helmet remained clear.

  There was a soft sound, a gentle tap, on his helmet. Another on his shoulder. And his chest.

  The pattering came more steadily now. And when he looked around he could see new craters being dug into the battered regolith, little pits a couple of inches wide, all around him.

  He tipped back and raised his face to the hidden sky.

  Raindrops, falling toward his face.

  It wasn’t like rain on Earth. This was Moon rain.

  The biggest drops were blobs of liquid a half inch across. They came down surrounded by a mist of much smaller drops. The drops fell slowly, perhaps five or six feet in a second. The drops were big flattened Frisbees of liquid, flattened out by air resistance. They caught the murky light, shimmering.

  When the drops hit his visor, they impacted with a fat, liquid noise; their splash was slow and languid. The drops spread out rapidly, or else collapsed into many smaller, more compact droplets over the plexiglass.

  He stood up. He stood in Moon rain, the first for five billion years, wishing it could go on forever.

  He leaned forward, compensating for the mass of his pack, and looked down. As it hit the ground, each raindrop broke up into many smaller drops, which trickled rapidly into the regolith, turning it to mud.

  V

  BOTTLENECK

  50

  A day later…

  Well, after a day, the Moon hadn’t exploded, but outside the lava tube, the wind and rain kept on. The roof of the inflatable shelter sagged, because it couldn’t sustain its own weight over the pressure of the new air outside. It made getting around harder; Henry had to shove billows of fabric out of his face the whole time. It was irritating.

  They were both hot and miserable, and they bickered.

  But then the rain stopped, or at least tailed off a little. They could hear it, even inside the shelter.

  So Henry was going to get to go outside, to explore the new Moon. He felt like a kid, waking up on the morning after a snow fall.

  He put on his blue coveralls, regolith-stained gloves and Moon boots. He checked over his POS, his portable oxygen system. There were straps for him to fix the pack to his chest, and more to tie on his scuba diver mask. There was the smell of rubber, of stale sweat, inside the mask; and immediately he put it on it started to mist up.

  Geena watched him. Behind her, their lunar surface suits lay abandoned in a corner, grayed fabric sagging, like two fat men slumping side by side; Henry’s fishbowl helmet stared at him accusingly from where he had dumped it.

  She said, “You sure this is going to be enough?”

  “I’m sure. Believe me. Haven’t I been right so far?”

  “About the Moon, maybe.”

  He eyed her. They were going to be stranded together here for a while yet.

  “I think we need to get out of here before we kill each other,” he said.

  “Amen to that.”

  Geena ran one last check of the shelter’s systems, and then followed Henry out of the cramped airlock. They carried their comms unit between them.

  Henry looked up from the base of the rille. Before the nuke, he recalled, he’d been able to see stars up there.

  Now, things were different. Now, the narrow rille was roofed over by a slab of gray sky, fat with cumulus clouds that looked low enough to touch. The murky light diffused down over the walls of the rille, and his blue coverall.

  It was still raining, in fact, a slow drizzle of fat drops that hammered on his POS faceplate and rapidly soaked into his coverall.

  But he wasn’t cold. In fact the air was hot…. But it was thin, just a layer of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, water vapor and trace gases amounting to maybe a sixth of Earth’s atmospheric pressure. Like a mountaintop.

  You wouldn’t want it much thicker, in fact. The gravity was one-sixth G, so to get the same air pressure as Earth you’d need a column height six times that of Earth’s. And then you’d suffer from a lot of haze and a greenhouse effect, all that cee-oh-two trapping excessive heat.

  So, thin and dry was best, just the way it should be. It was as if they had been transported to the summit of a mountain two hundred and forty thousand miles tall, wrapped in comet air.

  When he took a step, he squelched in red-brown mud. It was soaked regolith. He could swear the rille was a little deeper than it had been before—well, perhaps it was; perhaps the deeper regolith layers had collapsed. After a couple of steps it was hard to lift his boots, low gravity or not, so caked were they in clinging lunar mud.

  He reached the walls of the rille. They were shallow, but now they were slick with mud, and their profile seemed to have changed. Farther down the rille he could see evidence of landslips, great swathes of mud which had come shearing off the rille walls.

  And, down the center of a valley cut a billion years before by a flow of lava, a rivulet of water was gathering. It was the start of a river which would gather, Henry knew, until it pooled with dozens of others in the great sea that must be forming in the Oceanus Procellarum.

  Geena shivered.

  He turned to her. “You okay?”

  “I think so.”

  Her voice sounded thin…and then he realized that he was hearing her, her voice faintly transmitted by the thin new air.

  “How about that. I can hear you.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. You shivered.”

  “It’s just being out here,” she said. “In the open.”

  “And not on Earth. I understand. We’re the first humans to walk around unsheltered like this, on another world, in all our history. We’ve had nothing to prepare us for this. If you weren’t scared—”

  “It would prove I’m even more unimaginative than you think already?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “You’re so patronizing, Henry.”

  She walked away from him, her feet leaving great glopping craters in the mud. After three paces she slipped, and landed on her butt with a slow motion splash; gobbets of mud sprayed up around her.

  Henry knew, absolutely, imperatively, he must not laugh.

  She growled. “Probably the low gravity. Reduced friction.”

  “Probably.”

  “Watch your step, Henry.”

  “Copy that.”

  They powered up the comms unit, and set up its low-gain antenna. They put headphones to their ears, and Geena started sending an automated telemetry feed; Henry could hear static, and the chatter of the telemetry.

  For long minutes, there was no reply.

  “Don’t give up,” Geena said doggedly.

  “Yeah. There’s a lot of electrical activity in this atmosphere. It must be hard to punch a signal through—”

  The static broke up. It was replaced by a chaotic noise.

  At first
Henry thought they were picking up the crackle of lightning from some remote storm—could an ionosphere have formed here so quickly? Then his mind resolved the sound.

  Cheering.

  It was human voices, raised in cheers and whoops, either at Korolyov, or Houston, or both; he couldn’t tell, and right now didn’t care.

  His eyes prickled. As if he was the one who had just found a planet full of people who were alive after all, and not the other way around. Damn it.

  They climbed the rille wall.

  It was a lot harder than it had been before. The thirsty regolith had soaked up the rainwater to a depth Henry hadn’t anticipated, and the wall had pretty much turned to a shallow slope of slippery mud. It was impossible to get a footing, or to grip with gloved hands, and they slipped back almost as much as they made headway. After a few minutes, Henry dumped his mud-caked gloves in frustration, despite Geena’s admonitions.

  Eventually Geena found a way of zigzagging up the slope, like a mountain path: it was longer, but her footing held in the low G long enough for her to take each step and climb a little farther.

  Henry sought a more direct route. One of the many landslips had exposed a gutter of lunar bedrock. Henry found he was able to run at this, scrambling at the rock to get purchase before his feet slid out from under him, until, by sheer momentum, he’d reached the top of the rille.

  Side by side, panting so hard their oxygen masks were steamed up, they stared out over the Moon’s new landscape.

  It was a drab, muddy plain.

  The sky was a steel gray lid, laden with water vapor clouds, clamped over this subtly curving sheet of red-brown mud. Here and there, Henry could still make out the overlapping craters which had populated this landscape—some of them had filled up with water, so the land was dotted with circular lakes, rippling sluggishly—but many of the crater walls had slumped. It was like standing in the flood plain of some unruly river.

  The landscape was all but unrecognizable from the way it had been just a couple of days earlier.