Space

by Stephen Baxter

  She took his arm. Even through the layers of suit she could feel the tension in his muscles. ‘Hey. Take it easy.’

  ‘I’m the expectant father, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He took little steps back and forth, stocky, frustrated. ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do here. Come on. Let’s get out of these Buck Rogers outfits and hit the bar.’

  ‘All right.’

  Xenia could hear the dust spattering over her helmet. And children were running, holding out their hands in the grey Moon rain, witnesses to this new marvel.

  Chapter 19

  DREAMS OF ROCK AND STILLNESS

  Her world was simple: the Land below, the Dark above, the Light that flowed from the Dark. Land, Light, Dark. That, and herself.

  Alone save for the Giver.

  For her, all things came from the Giver. All life, in fact.

  Her first memories were of the Giver, at the interface between parched Land and hot Dark. He fed her, sank rich warm moist substance into the Land, and she ate greedily. She felt her roots dig into the dry depths of the Land, seeking the nourishment that was hidden there. And she drew the thin soil into herself, nursed it with hot Light, made it part of herself.

  She knew the future. She knew what would become of herself and her children.

  They would wait through the long hot-cold bleakness for the brief Rains. Then they would bud, and pepper this small hard world with life, in their glorious blossoming. And she would survive the long stillness to see the Merging itself, the wonder that lay at the end of time, she and her children.

  … But she was the first, and the Giver birthed her. None of it would have come to be without the Giver.

  She wished she could express her love for him. She knew that was impossible.

  She sensed, though, that he knew anyhow.

  Overwhelmed by work as she was, Xenia couldn’t get the memory of the comet impact out of her head. For, in the moment of that gigantic collision she had glimpsed a contrail: for all the world as if someone, something, had launched a rocket from the surface of the Moon.

  But who, and why?

  She had no opportunity to consider the question as the Roughneck project gathered pace. At last, though, she freed up two or three days from Frank, pleading exhaustion. She determined to use the time to resolve the puzzle. She went home, for the first time after many nights of sleeping at the Roughneck project office.

  She took a long, hot bath, to soak out the gritty lunar dust from the pores of her skin. In her small tub the water sloshed like mercury. Condensation gathered on the ceiling above her, and soon huge droplets hung there suspended, like watery chandeliers. When she stood up the water clung to her skin, like a sheath; she had to scrape it loose with her fingers, depositing it carefully back in the tub. Then she took a small vacuum cleaner and captured all the loose droplets she could find, returning every scrap to the drainage system, where it would be cleansed and fed back into Landsberg’s great dome reservoirs.

  Her apartment was a glass-walled cell in the great catacomb that was Landsberg. It had, in fact, once served as a genkan, a hallway, for a greater establishment in easier, less cramped times, long before she had returned from the stars; it was so small her living room doubled as a bedroom. The floor was covered with rice straw matting, though she kept a zabuton cushion for Frank Paulis. Miniature Japanese art filled the room with space and stillness.

  She had been happy to accept the style of the inhabitants of this place – unlike Frank, who had turned his apartment into a shrine to Americana. It was remarkable, she thought, that the Japanese had turned out to be so well adapted to life on the Moon. It was as if thousands of years on their small, crowded islands had readied them for this greater experience, this increasing enclosure on the Moon.

  She made herself some coffee – fake, of course, and not as hot as she would have liked. She tuned the walls to a favourite scene – a maple forest, carpeted with bright green moss – and padded, naked, to her workstation. She sat on a tatami mat, which was unreasonably comfortable in the low gravity, and sipped her drink.

  There was no indexed record of that surface rocket launch, as she had expected. There was, however, a substantial database on the state of the whole Moon at the time of the impact; every sensor the Lunar Japanese could deploy had been turned on the Moon, the events of that momentous morning.

  And, after a few minutes’ search, in a spectrometer record from a low-flying satellite, she found what she wanted. There was the contrail, bright and hot, arcing through splashed cometary debris. Spectrometer results told her she was looking at the products of aluminium burning in oxygen.

  So it had been real.

  She widened her search further.

  Yes, she learned, aluminium could serve as a rocket fuel. It had a specific impulse of nearly three hundred seconds, in fact, not as good as the best chemical propellant – that was hydrogen, which burned at four hundred – but serviceable. And aluminium-oxygen could even be manufactured from the lunar soil.

  Yes, there were other traces of aluminium-oxygen rockets burning on the Moon that day, recorded by a variety of automated sensors. More contrails, snaking across the lunar surface, from all around the Moon. There were a dozen, all told, perhaps more in parts of the Moon not recorded in sufficient detail.

  And each of these rocket burns, she found, had been initiated when the gushing comet gases reached its location.

  She pulled up a virtual globe of the Moon, and mapped the launch sites. They were scattered over a variety of sites on the Moon: highlands and maria alike, Nearside and Farside. No apparent pattern.

  Then she plotted the contrails forward, allowing them to curl around the rocky limbs of the Moon.

  The tracks converged, on a single Farside site. Edo. The place the hermit, Takomi, lived.

  It was the first Rain of all.

  Suddenly there was air here, on this still world. At first there was the merest trace, a soft comet Rain which settled, tentatively, on her broad leaves, where they lay in shade. But she drank it in greedily, before it could evaporate in the returning Light, incorporating every molecule into her structure, without waste.

  With gathering confidence she captured the Rain, and the Light, and continued the slow, patient work of building her seeds, and the fiery stuff that would birth them, drawn from the patient dust.

  And then, suddenly, it was time.

  In a single orgasmic spasm the seeds burst from her structure. She was flooded with a deep joy, even as she subsided, exhausted.

  The Giver was still here with her, enjoying the Rain with her, watching her blossom. She was glad of that.

  And then, so soon after, there was a gusting wind, a rush of the air molecules over her damaged surfaces, as the comet drew back its substance and leapt from the Land, whole and intact, its job done. The noise of that great escape into the Dark above came to her as a great shout.

  Soon after, the Giver was gone too.

  But it did not matter. For, soon, she could hear the first tentative scratching of her children, carried to her like whispers through the still, hard rock, as they dug beneath the Land, seeking nourishment. There was no Giver for them, nobody to help; they were beyond her aid now. But it did not matter, for she knew they were strong, self-sufficient, resourceful.

  Some would die, of course. But most would survive, digging in, waiting for the next comet Rain.

  She settled back into herself, relishing the geologic pace of her thoughts. Waiting for Rain, for more comets to gather from the dirt and leap into the sky.

  Xenia took an automated hopper, alone, to the Sea of Longing, on Farside. The journey was seamless, the landing imperceptible.

  She donned her spider-web suit, checked it, and stepped into the hopper’s small, extensible airlock. She waited for the hiss of escaping air, and – her heart oddly thumping – she collapsed the airlock around her, and stepped onto the surface of the Moon.

  A little spray of dust, ancient
pulverized rock, lifted up around her feet. The sky was black – save, she saw, for the faintest wisp of white, glowing in the flat sunlight. They were ice crystals, suspended in the thin residual atmosphere of the comet impact. Cirrus clouds on the Moon: relics of the death of a comet. The mare surface was like a gentle sea, a complex of overlapping, slowly undulating curves.

  And here were two cones, tall and slender, side by side, geometrically perfect. They cast long shadows in the flat sunlight. She couldn’t tell how far away they were, or how big, so devoid was this landscape of visual cues. They simply stood there, stark and anomalous.

  She shivered. She walked forward, loping easily.

  She came to a place where the regolith had been raked. She stopped, standing on unworked soil.

  The raking had made a series of parallel ridges, each maybe six or eight centimetres tall, a few centimetres apart, a precise combing. When she looked to left or right, the raking went off to infinity, the lines sharp, their geometry perfect. And when she looked ahead, the lines receded to the horizon, as far as she could see undisturbed in their precision.

  Those two cones stood, side by side, almost like termite mounds. The shallow light fell on them gracefully. She saw that the lines on the ground curved to wash around the cones, like a stream diverting around islands of geometry.

  ‘Thank you for respecting the garden.’

  She jumped at the sudden voice. She turned.

  A figure was standing there – man or woman? a man, she decided, shorter and slimmer than she was – in a shabby, much-patched suit.

  He bowed. ‘Sumimasen. I did not mean to startle you.’

  ‘Takomi?’

  ‘And you are Xenia Makarova.’

  ‘You know that? How?’

  A gentle shrug. ‘I am alone here, but not isolated. Only you sought and compiled information on the Moon flowers.’

  ‘What flowers?’

  He walked towards her. ‘This is my garden,’ he said.

  ‘A zen garden.’

  ‘You understand that? Good. This is a kare sansui, a waterless stream garden.’

  ‘Are you a monk?’

  ‘I am a gardener.’

  She considered. ‘Even before humans came here, the Moon was already like an immense zen garden, a garden of rock and soil.’

  ‘You are wise.’

  ‘Is that why you came here? Why you live alone like this?’

  ‘Perhaps. I prefer the silence and solitude of the Moon to the bustle of the human world. You are Russian.’

  ‘My forebears were.’

  ‘Then you are alone here also. There are some of your people on Mars.’

  ‘So I’m told. They won’t respond to my signals.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘They won’t speak to anybody. In the face of the Gaijin onslaught, we humans have collapsed into scattered, sullen tribes.’

  Onslaught. It seemed a strange word to use, stronger than she had expected. Briefly, she was reminded of somebody else, another reclusive Japanese.

  She pointed. ‘I understand the ridges represent flow. Are those mountains? Are they rising out of cloud, or sea? Or are they diminishing?’

  ‘Does it matter? The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. Perhaps they are both falling and rising. You have travelled far to see me. I will give you food and drink.’

  He turned and walked across the Moon. After a moment, she followed.

  The abandoned lunar base, called Edo, was a cluster of concrete components – habitation modules, power plants, stores, manufacturing facilities – half-buried in the cratered plain. There were robots everywhere, but they were standing silent, obviously inert.

  But a single lamp burned again at the centre of the old complex. Takomi lived at the heart of Edo, in what had once been, he said, a park, grown inside a cave dug in the ground. The buildings here were dark, gutted, abandoned. There was even, bizarrely, an ancient McDonald’s, stripped out, its red and yellow plastic signs cracked and faded. A single cherry tree grew, its leaves bright green, a splash of colour against the drab grey of the fused regolith.

  This had been the primary settlement established by the Japanese government, back in the twenty-first century. But Nishizaki Heavy Industries had set up in Landsberg, using the crater originally as a strip mine. Now, hollowed out, Landsberg was the capital of the Moon, and Edo, cramped and primitive, had been abandoned.

  She clambered out of her suit. She had tracked in Moon dust. It clung to the oils of her hand and looked like pencil lead, shiny on her fingers, like graphite. It would be hard to wash out, she knew.

  He brought her green tea and rice cake.

  Out of his suit Takomi was a small, wizened man; he might have been sixty, but such was the state of life-extending technology it was hard to tell. His face was round, a mass of wrinkles, and his eyes lost in leathery folds; he spoke with a wheeze, as if slightly asthmatic.

  ‘You cherish the tree,’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘I need one friend. I regret you have missed the blossom. I am able to celebrate ichi-buzaki here. We Japanese like cherries; they represent the old Samurai view that the blossom symbolizes our lives. Beautiful, but fragile, and all too brief.’

  ‘I don’t understand how you can live here.’

  ‘The Moon is a whole world,’ he said gently. ‘It can support one man.’

  Takomi, she learned, used the lunar soil for simple radiation shielding. He baked it in crude microwave ovens to make ceramic and glass. He extracted oxygen from the lunar soil by magma electrolysis: melting the soil with focused sunlight, then passing an electric current through it to liberate the oh-two. The magma plant, lashed up from decades-old salvage, was slow and power-intensive, but the electrolysis process was efficient in its use of soil; Takomi said he wasn’t short of sunlight, but the less haulage he had to do the better.

  He operated what he called a grizzly, an automated vehicle already a century old, so caked with dust it was the same colour as the Moon. The grizzly toiled patiently across the surface of the Moon, powered by sunlight. It scraped up loose surface material and pumped out glass sheeting and solar cells, just a couple of square metres a day. Over time, the grizzly had built a solar farm covering square kilometres, and producing megawatts of electric power.

  ‘It is astonishing, Takomi.’

  He cackled. ‘If one is modest in one’s request, the Moon is generous.’

  ‘But even so, you lack essentials. It’s the eternal story of the Moon. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen –’

  He smiled at her. ‘I admit I cheat. The concrete of this abandoned town is replete with water.’

  ‘You mine concrete?’

  ‘It is better than paying water tax.’

  ‘But how many humans could the Moon support this way?’

  ‘Ah. Not many. But how many humans does the Moon need? Thus, I am entrenched.’

  It struck her as another strange choice of word. There was much about this hermit she did not understand, she realized.

  She asked him about the contrails she had seen, their convergence on this place. He evaded her questions, and began to talk about something else.

  ‘I conduct research, you know. Of a sort. There is a science station, not far from here, which was once equipped by Nishizaki Heavy Industries. Now abandoned, of course. It is – was – an infrared study station. It was there that a Japanese researcher called Nemoto first discovered evidence of Gaijin activity in the solar system, and so changed history.’

  She wasn’t interested in Takomi’s hobby work in some old observatory. But there was something in his voice that made her keep listening.

  ‘So you use the equipment,’ she prompted.

  ‘I watched the approach of the comet. From here, some aspects of it were apparent which were not visible from Nearside stations. The geometry of the approach orbit, for example. And something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw evidence of methane burning,’ he said. ‘Close to the nu
cleus.’

  ‘Methane?’

  ‘A jet of combustion products.’

  A rocket. She saw the implications immediately. Somebody had stuck a methane rocket on the side of the comet nucleus, burned the comet’s own chemicals, to divert its course.

  Away from the Moon? Or – towards it?

  And in either case, who?

  ‘… Why are you telling me this?’

  But he would not reply, and a cold, hard lump of suspicion began to gather in her gut.

  Takomi provided a bed for her, a thin mattress in an abandoned schoolhouse. Children’s paintings adorned the walls, preserved under a layer of glass. The pictures showed flowers and rocks and people, all floating in a black sky.

  In the middle of the night, Frank called her. He was excited.

  ‘It’s going better than we expected. We’re just sinking in. Anyhow the pictures are great. Smartest thing I ever did was to insist we dump the magnesium alloy piping, make the walls transparent so you can see the rocks. We have the best geologists on the Moon down that fucking well, Xenia. Seismic surveys, geochemistry, geophysics, the works. The sooner we find some ore lode to generate payback, the better …’

  The Roughneck bore had passed the crust’s lower layers, and was in the mantle. The mantle of the Moon: sixty kilometres deep, a place unlike any other reached by humans before.

  The Moon was turning out to be much easier to deep-mine than the Earth, for it was old and silent and still. There was a temperature rise of maybe ten degrees per kilometre of depth, compared to four times as much as on Earth. The pressure scaled similarly; even now Frank’s equipment was subject only to a few thousand atmospheres, less than could be replicated in the laboratory. Strangely, the density of the Moon hardly varied across its whole interior.

  But Xenia knew the project had barely begun. If Frank was to find the water and other volatiles he sought, if he was to reach the conditions of temperature and pressure that would allow the water-trapping minerals to form, it could only be at enormous depths – probably beneath the rigid mantle, a thousand kilometres deep, just a few hundred kilometres from the centre of the Moon itself.