Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Some estimates said there should be as much as five times as much water buried within the Earth as in all its oceans and atmosphere and ice caps.

  And what was true of Earth might be true of the Moon.

  According to Mariko, the Moon was mostly made of material like Earth’s mantle. This was because the Moon was believed to have been budded off the Earth itself, ripped loose after a giant primordial collision, popularly called the ‘big whack’. The Moon was smaller than the Earth, cooler and more rigid, so that the centre of the Moon was analogous to the Earth’s mantle layers a few hundred kilometres deep. And it was precisely at such depths, on Earth, that you found such water-bearing minerals …

  Frank watched his audience like a hawk.

  His cartoon Moon globe suddenly lit up. The onion-skin geological layers were supplemented by a vivid blue ocean, lapping in unlikely fashion at the centre of the Moon. Xenia smiled. It was typical Frank: inaccurate, but compelling.

  ‘Listen up,’ he said. ‘What if Mariko is right? What if even one tenth of one per cent of the Moon’s mass by weight is water? That’s the same order as five per cent of Earth’s surface water. A hidden ocean indeed.

  ‘And that’s not all. Where there is water there will be other volatiles: carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, even hydrocarbons. All we have to do is go down there and find it.

  ‘And it’s ours. We don’t own the sky; with the Gaijin around, maybe humans never will. But we inhabitants of the Moon do own the rocks beneath our feet.

  ‘Folks, I’m calling this new enterprise Roughneck. If you want to know why, go look up the word. I’m asking you to invest in me. Sure it’s a risk. But if it works it’s a way past the resource bottleneck we’re facing, here on the Moon. And it will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.’ He grinned. ‘There’s a fucking ocean down there, folks, and it’s time to go skinny-dipping.’

  There was a frozen silence, which Frank milked expertly.

  After the session, Xenia took a walk.

  The Moon’s surface, beneath the dome, was like a park. Grass covered the ground, much of it growing out of bare lunar regolith. There was even a stand of mature palms, thirty metres tall, and a scattering of cherries. People lived in the dome’s support towers, thick central cores with platforms of lunar concrete slung from them. The lower levels were given over to factories, workshops, schools, shops and other public places.

  Far above her head, Xenia could see a little flock of schoolchildren in their white and black uniforms, flapping back and forth on Leonardo wings, squabbling like so many chickens. It was beautiful. But it served to remind her there were no birds here, outside pressurized cages. Birds tired too quickly in the thin air; on the Moon, against intuition, birds couldn’t fly.

  Water flowed in streams and fountains and pools, moistening the air.

  She passed Landsberg’s famous water-sculpture park. Water tumbled slowly from a tall fountain-head, in great shimmering spheres held together by surface tension. The spheres were caught by flickering mechanical fingers, to be teased out like taffy and turned and spun into rope and transformed, briefly, into transient, beautiful sculptures, no two ever alike. It was entrancing, she admitted, a one-sixth gravity art form that would have been impossible on the Earth, and it had immediately captivated her on her arrival here. As she watched, a gaggle of children – eight or ten years old, Moon legs as long as giraffes’ – ran across the surface of the pond in the park’s basin, Jesus-like, their slapping footsteps sufficient to keep them from sinking as long as they ran fast enough.

  Water was everywhere here; it did not feel dry, a shelter in a scorched desert. But overhead, huge fans turned continually, extracting every drop of moisture from the air to be cleansed, stored and reused. She was surrounded by subtle noises: the bangs and whirrs of fans and pumps, the bubbling of aerators. And, when the children had gone, she saw tiny shimmering robots whiz through the air, fielding scattered water droplets as if catching butterflies, not letting a drop go to waste.

  Landsberg, a giant machine, had to be constantly run, managed, maintained. Landsberg was no long-term solution. The various recycling processes were extraordinarily efficient – they had got to the levels of counting molecules – but there were always losses; the laws of thermodynamics saw to that. And there was no way to make good those losses.

  It didn’t feel like a dying world. In fact it was beginning to feel like home to her, this small, delicate slow-motion world. But the human Moon was, slowly but surely, running down. Already some of the smaller habitations had been abandoned; smaller ecospheres had been too expensive. There was rationing. Fewer children were being born than a generation ago, as humanity huddled in the remaining, shrivelling lunar bubbles.

  And there was nowhere else to go.

  Xenia had an intuition about the rightness of Frank’s vision, whatever his methods. At least he was fighting back: trying to find a way for humans to survive, here in the system that had birthed them. Somebody had to. It seemed clear that the aliens, the all-powerful Gaijin, weren’t here to help; they were standing by in their silent ships, witnessing as human history unfolded, and Earth fell apart.

  If humans couldn’t figure out how to save themselves soon, they might not have another chance.

  And if Frank could make a little profit along the way to achieving that goal, she wasn’t about to begrudge him.

  Well, Frank convinced enough people to get together his seedcorn investment; jubilantly, he went to work.

  But getting the money turned out to be the easy part.

  There never had been a true mining industry, here on the Moon. All anybody had ever done was strip-mine the regolith, the shattered and desiccated outer layers of the Moon, already pulverized by meteorites and so not requiring crushing and grinding. And nobody had attempted – save for occasional science surveys – to dig any deeper than a few tens of metres.

  So Frank and Xenia were forced to start from scratch, inventing afresh not just an industrial process but the human roles that went with it. They were going to need a petrophysicist and a geological engineer to figure out the most likely places they would find their imagined reservoirs of volatiles; they needed reservoir engineers and drilling engineers and production engineers for the brute work of the borehole itself; they needed construction engineers for the surface operations and support. And so on. They had to figure out job descriptions, and recruit and train to fill them as best they could.

  All the equipment had to be reinvented. There was no air to convect away heat, so their equipment needed huge radiator fins. Even beneficiation – concentrating ungraded material into higher-quality ore – was difficult, as they couldn’t use traditional methods like froth flotation and gravity concentration; they had to experiment with methods based on electrostatic forces. There was of course no water – a paradox, for it turned out that most mining techniques refined over centuries on Earth depended highly on the use of water, for cooling, lubrication, the movement and separation of materials and the solution and precipitation of metals. It was circular, a cruel trap.

  They hit more problems as soon as they started to trial heavy equipment in the ultra-hard vacuum that coated the Moon.

  Friction was a killer. In an atmosphere every surface accreted a thin layer of water vapour and oxides that reduced drag. But that didn’t apply here. They even suffered vacuum welds. Not only that, the ubiquitous dust – the glass-sharp remains of ancient, shattered rocks – stuck to everything it could, scouring and abrading. Stuff wore out fast, on the silent surface of the Moon.

  But they persisted, and solved the problems, or found old references of how it had been done in the past, when the Lunar Japanese had worked more freely beyond their domed cities. They learned to build in a modular fashion, with parts that could be replaced easily by a guy in a spacesuit. They learned to cover all their working joints with sleeves of a flexible plastic, to keep out the dust. After much experimentation they settled on a lubricant approach, coating
their working surfaces with a substance the Lunar Japanese engineers called quasiglass, hard and dense and very smooth; conventional lubricants just boiled or froze off.

  The work soon became all-absorbing, and Xenia found herself immersed.

  The Lunar Japanese, after generations, had become used to their domes. It was hard for them even to imagine a Moon without roofs. But once committed to the project, they learned fast, and were endlessly, patiently inventive in resolving problems. And it seemed to Xenia a remarkably short time from inception to the day Frank told her he had chosen his bore site.

  ‘The widest, deepest impact crater in the fucking solar system,’ he boasted. ‘Nine kilometres below the datum level, all of thirteen kilometres below the rim wall peaks. Hell, just by standing at the base of that thing we’d be half way to the core already. And the best of it is, we can buy it. Nobody has lived there since they cleaned out the last of the cold-trap ice …’

  He was talking about the South Pole of the Moon.

  Encased in a spider-web pressure suit, Xenia stepped out of the hopper.

  The Moon’s Pole was a place of shadows. The horn of crescent Earth poked above one horizon, gaunt and ice-pale. Standing at the base of the crater called Amundsen, Xenia could actually see the sun, a sliver of light poking through a gap in the enclosing rim mountains, casting long, stark, shadows over the colourless, broken ground. She knew that if she stayed here for a month the Moon’s glacial rotation would sweep that solar searchlight around the horizon. But the light was always flat and stark, like an endless dawn or sunset.

  And, at the centre of Amundsen, Frank’s complex sprawled in a splash of reflected light, ugly, busy, full of people.

  Xenia had never walked on the Moon’s surface before, not once. Very few people did. Nobody was importing tungsten, and it was too precious to use on suits for sight-seeing. The waste of water and air incurred in donning and doffing pressure suits was unacceptably high. And so on. On the Moon of 2190, people clung to their domed bubbles, riding sealed cars or crawling through tunnels, while the true Moon beyond their windows was as inaccessible as it had been before Apollo.

  That thought – the closeness of the limits – chilled Xenia, somehow even more than the collapse of Earth. It reinforced her determination to stick with Frank, whatever her doubts about his objectives and methods.

  Here came Frank in his spacesuit, Lunar Japanese spider-web painted with a gaudy Stars and Stripes. ‘I wondered where you were,’ he said.

  ‘There was a lot of paperwork, last-minute permissions –’

  ‘You might have missed the show.’ He was edgy, nervous, restless; his gaze, inside his gold-tinted visor, swept over the desolate landscape. ‘Come see the rig.’

  Together they loped towards the centre of the complex, past Frank’s perimeter of security guards.

  New Dallas, Frank’s roughneck boomtown, was a crude cluster of buildings put together adobe-style from lunar concrete blocks. It was actually bright here, the sunlight deflected into the crater by heliostats, giant mirrors perched on the rim mountains or on impossibly tall gantries. The ’stats worked like giant floodlights, giving the town, incongruously, the feel of a floodlit sports stadium. The primary power came from sunlight too, solar panels which Frank had had plastered over the peaks of the rim mountains.

  She could recognize shops, warehouses, dormitories, mess halls; there was a motor pool, with hoppers and tractors and heavy machinery clustered around fuel tanks. The inhabited buildings had been covered over for radiation-proofing by a few metres of regolith. And there was Frank’s geothermal plant, ready for operation, boxy buildings linked by fat, twisting conduits.

  The ground for kilometres around was flattened and scored by footprints and vehicle tracks. It was hard to believe none of this had been here two months ago, that the only signs of human occupation then had been the shallow, abandoned strip mines in the cold traps.

  And at the centre of it all was the derrick itself, rising so far above the surface it caught the low sunlight, high enough, in fact, to stack up three or four joints of magnesium alloy pipe at a time. There was a pile of the pipe nearby, kilometres of it spun out of native lunar ore, the cheapest component of the whole operation. Sheds and shops sprawled around the derrick’s base, along with huge aluminium tanks and combustion engines. Mounds of rock, dug out in test bores, surrounded the derrick like a row of pyramids.

  They reached the drilling floor. At its heart was the circular table through which the pipe would pass, and which would turn to force the drill into the ground. There were foundries and drums to produce and pay out cables and pipes: power conduits, fibre-optic light pipes, hollow tubes for air and water and sample retrieval.

  The derrick above her was tall and silent, like the gantry for a Saturn V. Stars showed through its open, sunlit frame. And suspended there at the end of the first pipe lengths she could see the drill head itself, teeth of tungsten and diamond, gleaming in the lights of the heliostats.

  Frank was describing technicalities that didn’t interest her. ‘You know, you can’t turn a drill string more than a few kilometres long. So we have to use a downhole turbine …’

  ‘Frank, eta ochin kraseeva. It is magnificent. Somehow, back in Landsberg, I never quite believed it was real.’

  ‘Oh, it’s real,’ Frank said tensely. ‘Just so long as it works.’ He checked his chronometer, a softscreen patch sewn into the fabric of his suit. ‘It’s nearly time.’

  They moved out into the public area.

  Roughneck was the biggest public event on the Moon in a generation. There must have been a hundred people here, men, women and children walking in their brightly coloured surface suits and radiation ponchos, or riding in little short-duration bubble rovers – the richest Lunar Japanese, who could still afford such luxuries. Cameras hovered everywhere. She saw Virtual Observers, adults and children in softscreen suits, their every sensation being fed out to the rest of the Moon.

  Frank had even set up a kind of miniature theme park, with toy derricks you could climb up, and a towering roller-coaster based on an old-fashioned pithead rail – towering because you needed height, here on the Moon, to generate anything like a respectable G-force. The main attraction was Frank’s Fish Pond, a small crater he’d lined with ceramic and filled up with water. The water froze over and was steadily evaporating, of course, but water held a lot of heat, and the Pond would take a long time to freeze to the bottom. In the meantime Frank had fish swimming back and forth in there, goldfish and handsome koi carp, living Earth creatures protected from the severe lunar climate by nothing more than a few metres of water, a neat symbol of his ambition.

  The openness scared Xenia to death. ‘Are you sure it’s wise to have so many people?’

  ‘The guards will keep out those Grey assholes.’

  The Greys were a pressure group who had started to campaign against Frank: arguing it was wrong to go digging holes to the heart of the Moon, to rip out the uchujin there, the cosmic dust. They were noisy but, as far as Xenia could see, ineffective.

  ‘Not that,’ she said. ‘It’s so public. It’s like Disneyland.’

  He grunted. ‘Xenia, all that’s left of Disneyland is a crater that glows in the dark. Don’t you get it? This PR stunt is essential. We’ll be lucky if we make hole at a couple of kilometres a day. It will take fifty days just to get through the crust. We’re going to sink a hell of a lot of money into this hole in the ground before we see a red cent of profit. We need those investors on our side, for the long term. They have to be here, Xenia. They have to see this.’

  ‘But if something goes wrong –’

  ‘Then we’re screwed anyhow. What have we lost?’

  Everything, she thought, if somebody gets killed, one of these cute Lunar Japanese five-year-olds climbing over the derrick models. But she knew Frank would have thought of that, and discounted it already, and no doubt figured out some fallback plan.

  She admired such calculation, and feared it
.

  Frank tipped back on his heels and peered up at the sky. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Looks like we have an audience.’

  A Gaijin flower-ship was sailing high overhead, wings spread and sparkling, like some gaudy moth.

  ‘This is ours,’ Frank murmured, glaring up. ‘You hear me, assholes? Ours. Eat your mechanical hearts out.’

  A warning tone was sounding on their headsets’ open loops now, and in silence the Lunar Japanese, adults and children alike, were lining up to watch the show. Xenia could see the drill bit descend towards the regolith, the pipe sweeping silently downwards inside the framework, like a muscle moving inside a sheath of flesh.

  The bit cut into the Moon.

  A gush of dust sprayed up immediately from the hole, ancient regolith layers undisturbed for a billion years, now thrown unceremoniously towards space. At the peak of the parabolic fountain, glassy fragments sparkled in the sunlight. But there was no air to suspend the debris, and it fell back immediately.

  Within seconds the dust had coated the derrick, turning its bright paintwork grey, and was raining over the spectators like volcanic ash.

  There was motion around her. People were applauding, she saw, in utter silence, joined in this moment. Maybe Frank was right to have them here, after all, right about the mythic potential of this huge challenge.

  Frank was watching the drill intently. ‘Twenty or thirty metres,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The thickness of the regolith here. The dust. Then you have the megaregolith, rock crushed and shattered and dug out and mixed by the impacts. Probably twenty, thirty kilometres of that. Easy to cut through. Below that the pressure’s so high it heals any cracks. We should get to that anorthosite bedrock by the end of the first day, and then –’