Space

by Stephen Baxter

  She tried to ask him technical questions, about how they were planning to cope with the more extreme pressures and temperatures they would soon encounter. She knew that at first, in the impact-shattered upper regolith, he had been able to deploy comparatively primitive mechanical drilling techniques like percussion and rotary. But faced by the stubborn, hard, fine-grained rocks of the mantle, he had had to try out more advanced techniques – lasers, electric arcs, magnetic induction techniques. Stretching the bounds of possibility.

  But he wouldn’t discuss such issues.

  ‘Xenia, it doesn’t matter. You know me. I can’t figure any machine more complicated than a screwdriver. And neither can our investors. I don’t need to know. I just have to find the right technical guys, give them a challenge they can’t resist, and point them downwards.’

  ‘Paying them peanuts the while.’

  He grinned. ‘That’s the beauty of those vocational types. Christ, we could even get those guys to pay to work here. No, the technical stuff is piss-easy. It’s the other stuff that’s the challenge. We have to make the project appeal to more than just the fat financiers and the big corporations. Xenia, this is the greatest lunar adventure since Neil and Buzz. That party when we first made hole was just the start. I want everybody involved, and everybody paying. Now we’re in the mantle we can market the TV rights –’

  ‘Frank, they don’t have TV any more.’

  ‘Whatever. I want the kids involved, all those little dark-eyed kids I see flapping around the palm trees the whole time with nothing to do. I want games. Educational stuff. Clubs to join, where you pay a couple of l-yen for a badge and get some kind of share certificate. I want little toy derricks in cereal packets.’

  ‘They don’t have cereal packets any more.’

  He eyed her. ‘Work with me here, Xenia. And I want their parents paying too. Tours down the well, at least the upper levels. Xenia, for the first time the folks on this damn Moon are going to see some hint of an expansive future. A frontier, beneath their feet. They have to want it. Including the kids.’ He nodded. ‘Especially the kids.’

  ‘But the Greys –’

  ‘Screw the Greys. All they have is rocks. We have the kids.’

  And so on, on and on, his insect voice buzzing with plans, in the ancient stillness of Farside.

  The next day Takomi walked her back to her tractor, by the zen garden.

  She had been here twenty-four hours. The sun had dipped closer to the horizon, and the shadows were long, the land starker, more inhospitable. Comet-ice clouds glimmered high above.

  ‘I have something for you,’ Takomi said. And he handed her what looked like a sheet of glass. It was oval-shaped, maybe a half-metre long. Its edges were blunt, as if melted, and it was covered with bristles. Some kind of lunar geologic formation, she thought, a relic of some impact event. A cute souvenir; Frank might like it for the office.

  She said, ‘I have nothing to give you in return.’

  ‘Oh, you have made your okurimono already.’

  ‘I have?’

  He cackled. ‘Your shit and your piss. Safely in my reclamation tanks. On the Moon, shit is more precious than gold …’

  He bowed, once, then turned to walk away, along the rim of his rock garden.

  She was left looking at the oval of Moon glass in her hands. It looked, she thought now, rather like a flower petal.

  Back at Landsberg, she gave the petal-like object to the only scientist she knew, Mariko Kashiwazaki. Mariko was exasperated; as Frank’s chief scientist she was already under immense pressure, as Roughneck picked up momentum. But she agreed to pass on the puzzling fragment to a colleague, better qualified. Xenia agreed, provided she used only people in the employ of one of Frank’s companies.

  Meanwhile – discreetly, from home – Xenia repeated Takomi’s work on the comet. She searched for evidence of the anomalous signature of methane burning at the nucleus. It had been picked up, but not recognized, by many sensors.

  Takomi was right.

  Clearly, someone had planted a rocket on the side of the comet nucleus, and deflected it from its path. It was also clear that most of the burn had been on the far side of the sun, where it would be undetected. The burn had been long enough, she estimated, to have deflected the comet, to cause its lunar crash. Undeflected, the comet would surely have sailed by the Moon, spectacular but harmless.

  She then did some checks of the tangled accounts of Frank’s companies. She found places where funds had been diverted, resources secreted. A surprisingly large amount, reasonably well concealed.

  She’d been cradling a suspicion since Edo. Now it was confirmed, and she felt only disappointment at the shabbiness of the truth.

  She felt that Takomi wouldn’t reveal the existence of the rocket on the comet. He simply wasn’t engaged enough in the human world to consider it. But, such was the continuing focus of attention on Fracastorius, Takomi wouldn’t be the only observer who would notice the trace of that comet-pushing rocket, follow the evidence trail.

  The truth would come out.

  Without making a decision on how to act on this, she went back to work with Frank.

  The pressure on Xenia, on both of them, was immense and unrelenting.

  After one gruelling twenty-hour day, she slept with Frank. She thought it would relieve the tension, for both of them. Well, it did, for a brief oceanic moment. But then, as they rolled apart, it all came down on them again.

  Frank lay on his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling, jaw muscles working, restless, tense.

  Later Mariko Kashiwazaki called Xenia. Xenia took the call in her tokonoma, masking it from Frank.

  Mariko had preliminary results about the glass object from Edo. ‘The object is constructed almost entirely of lunar surface material.’

  ‘Almost?’

  ‘There are also complex organics in there. We don’t know where they came from, or what they are for. There is water, too, sealed into cells within the glass. The structure itself acts as a series of lenses, which focus sunlight. Remarkably efficient. There seems to be a series of valves on the underside which draw in particles of regolith. The grains are melted, evaporated, in intense focused sunlight. It’s a pyrolysis process similar to –’

  ‘What happens to the vaporized material?’

  ‘There is a series of traps, leading off from each light-focusing cell. The traps are maintained at different temperatures by spicules – the fine needles protruding from the upper surface – which also, we suspect, act to deflect daytime sunlight, and conversely work as insulators during the long lunar night. In the traps, at different temperatures, various metal species condense out. The structure seems to be oriented towards collecting aluminium. There is also an oxygen trap further back.’

  Aluminium and oxygen. Rocket fuel, trapped inside the glass structure, melted out of the lunar rock by the light of the sun.

  Mariko consulted notes in a softscreen. ‘Within this structure the organic chemicals serve many uses. A complex chemical factory appears to be at work here. There is a species of photosynthesis, for instance. There is evidence of some kind of root system, which perhaps provides the organics in the first place … But there is no source we know of. This is the Moon.’ She looked confused. ‘You must remember I am a geologist. My contact works with biochemists and biologists, and they are extremely excited.’

  Biologists? ‘You’d better tell me.’

  ‘Xenia, this is essentially a vapour-phase reduction machine of staggering elegance of execution, mediated by organic chemistry. It must be an artefact. And yet it looks –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘As if it grew, out of the Moon ground. There are many further puzzles,’ Mariko said. ‘For instance, the evidence of a neural network.’

  ‘Are you saying this has some kind of a nervous system?’

  Mariko shrugged. ‘Even if this is some simple lunar plant, why would it need a nervous system? Even, perhaps, a rudimentary awareness?’ She stu
died Xenia. ‘What is this thing?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘There has been much speculation about the form life would take, here on the Moon. It could be seeded by some meteorite-impact transfer from Earth. But volatile depletion seemed an unbeatable obstacle. Where does it get its organic material? Was it from the root structure, from deep within the Moon? If so, you realize that this is confirmation of my hypotheses about the volatiles in –’

  Xenia stopped her. ‘Mariko. This isn’t to go further. News of this – discovery. Not yet. Tell your colleagues that too.’

  Mariko looked shocked, as Xenia, with weary certainty, had expected. ‘You want to suppress this?’

  That caused Xenia to hesitate. She had never thought of herself as a person who would suppress anything. But she knew, as all the star travellers had learned, that the universe was full of life: that life emerged everywhere it could – though usually, sadly, with little hope of prospering. Was it really so strange that such a stable, ancient world as the Moon should be found to harbour its own, quiet, still form of life?

  Life was trivial, compared to the needs of the project.

  ‘This isn’t science, Mariko. I don’t want anything perturbing Roughneck.’

  Mariko made to protest again.

  ‘Read your contract,’ Xenia snapped. ‘You must do what I say.’ And she cut the connection.

  She returned to bed. Frank seemed to be asleep.

  She had a choice to make. Not about the comet deflection issue; others would unravel that, in time. About Frank, and herself.

  He fascinated her. He was a man of her own time, with a crude vigour she didn’t find among the Japanese-descended colonists of the Moon. He was the only link she had with home. The only human on the Moon who didn’t speak Japanese to her.

  That, as far as she could tell, was all she felt.

  In the meantime, she must consider her own morality.

  Lying beside him, she made her decision. She wouldn’t betray him. As long as he needed her, she would stand with him.

  But she would not save him.

  Life was long, slow, unchanging.

  Even her thoughts were slow.

  In the timeless intervals between the comets, her growth was chthonic, her patience matching that of the rocks themselves. Slowly, slowly, she rebuilt her strength: Light traps to start the long process of drawing out fire for the next seeds, leaves to catch the comet Rain that would come again.

  She spoke to her children, their subtle scratching carrying to her through the still, cold rock. It was important that she taught them: how to grow, of the comet Rains to come, of the Giver at the beginning of things, the Merging at the end.

  Their conversations lasted a million years.

  The Rains were spectacular, but infrequent. But when they came, once or twice in every billion years, her pulse accelerated, her metabolism exploding, as she drank in the thin, temporary air, and dragged the fire she needed from the rock.

  And, with each Rain, she birthed again, the seeds exploding from her body and scattering around the Land.

  But, after that first time, she was never alone. She could feel, through the rock, the joyous pulsing of her children as they hurled their own seed through the gathering comet air.

  Soon there were so many of them that it was as if all of the Land was alive with their birthing, its rocky heart echoing to their joyous shouts.

  And still, in the distant future, the Merging awaited them.

  As the comets leapt one by one back into the sky, sucking away the air with them, she held that thought to her exhausted body, cradling it.

  Eighty days in and Frank was still making hole at his couple-of-kilometres-a-day target pace. But things had started to get a lot harder.

  This was mantle, after all. They were suffering rock bursts. The rock was like stretched wire, under so much pressure it exploded when it was exposed. It was a new regime. New techniques were needed.

  Costs escalated. The pressure on Frank to shut down was intense.

  Many of the investors had already become extremely rich from the potential of the ore lodes discovered in the lower crust and upper mantle. There was talk of opening up new, shallow bores elsewhere on the Moon to seek out further lodes. Frank had proved his point. Why go further, when the Roughneck was already a commercial success?

  But metal ore wasn’t Frank’s goal, and he wasn’t about to stop now.

  … That was when the first death occurred, all of a hundred kilometres below the surface of the Moon.

  She found him in his office at New Dallas, pacing back and forth, an Earthman caged on the Moon, his muscles lifting him off the glass floor.

  ‘Omelettes and eggs,’ he said. ‘Omelettes and eggs.’

  ‘That’s a cliché, Frank.’

  ‘It was probably the fucking Greys.’

  ‘There’s no evidence of sabotage.’

  He paced. ‘Look, we’re in the mantle of the Moon –’

  ‘You don’t have to justify it to me,’ she said, but he wasn’t listening.

  ‘The mantle,’ he said. ‘You know, I hate it. A thousand kilometres of worthless shit.’

  ‘It was the changeover to the subterrene that caused the disaster. Right?’

  He ran a hand over his greasy hair. ‘If you were a prosecutor, and this was a court, I’d challenge you on “caused”. The accident happened when we switched over to the subterrene, yes.’

  They had already gone too deep for the simple alloy casing or the cooled lunar glass Frank had used in the upper levels. To get through the mantle they would use a subterrene, a development of obsolete deep-mining technology, a probe that melted its way through the rock and built its own casing behind it, a tube of hard, high-melting-point quasiglass.

  Frank started talking, rapidly, about quasiglass. ‘It’s the stuff the Lunar Japanese use for rocket nozzles. Very high melting point. It’s based on diamond, but it’s a quasicrystal, so the lab boys tell me, halfway between a crystal and a glass. Harder than ordinary crystal because there are no neat planes for cracks and defects to propagate. And it’s a good heat insulator similarly. Besides that we support the hole against collapse and shear stress. Rock bolts, fired through the casing and into the rock beyond. We do everything we can to ensure the integrity of our structure …’

  This was, she realized, a first draft of the testimony he would have to give to the investigating commissions.

  When the first subterrene started up, it built a casing with a flaw, undetected for a hundred metres. There had been an implosion. They lost the subterrene itself, a kilometre of bore, and a single life, of a senior toolpusher.

  ‘We’ve already restarted,’ Frank said. ‘A couple of days and we’ll have recovered.’

  ‘Frank, this isn’t a question of schedule loss,’ she said. ‘It’s the wider impact. Public perception. Come on; you know how important this is. If we don’t handle this right we’ll be shut down.’

  He seemed reluctant to absorb that. He was silent, for maybe half a minute.

  Then his mood switched. He started pacing. ‘You know, we can leverage this to our advantage.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We need to turn this guy we lost – what was his name? – into a hero.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Did he have any family? A ten-year-old daughter would be perfect, but we’ll work with whatever we have. Get his kids to drop cherry blossom down the hole. You know the deal. The message has to be right. The kids want the bore to be finished, as a memorial to the brave hero.’

  ‘Frank, the dead engineer was a she.’

  ‘And we ought to think about the Grey angle. Get one of them to call our hero toolpusher a criminal.’

  ‘Frank –’

  He faced her. ‘You think this is immoral. Bullshit. It would be immoral to stop; otherwise, believe me, everyone on this Moon is going to die in the long run. Why do you think I asked you to set up the kids’ clubs?’

  ‘For this?’<
br />
  ‘Hell, yes. Already I’ve had some of those chicken-livered investors try to bail out. Now we use the kids, to put so much fucking pressure on it’s impossible to turn back. If that toolpusher had a kid in one of our clubs, in fact, that’s perfect.’ He hesitated, then pointed a stubby finger at her face. ‘This is the bottleneck. Every project goes through it. I need to know you’re with me, Xenia.’

  She held his gaze for a couple of seconds, then sighed. ‘You know I am.’

  He softened, and dropped his hands. ‘Yeah. I know.’ But there was something in his voice, she thought, that didn’t match his words. An uncertainty that hadn’t been there before. ‘Omelettes and eggs,’ he muttered. ‘Whatever.’ He clapped his hands. ‘So. What’s next?’

  This time, Xenia didn’t fly directly to Edo. Instead she programmed the hopper to make a series of slow orbits of the abandoned base.

  It took her an hour to find the glimmer of glass, reflected sunlight sparkling from a broad expanse of it, at the centre of an ancient, eroded crater. She landed a kilometre away, to avoid disturbing the flower structures. She suited up quickly, clambered out of the hopper, and set off on foot.

  She made ground quickly, over this battered, ancient landscape, restrained only by the Moon’s gentle gravity. Soon the land ahead grew bright, glimmering like a pool. She slowed, approaching cautiously.

  The flower was larger than she had expected. It must have covered a quarter, even a third of a hectare, delicate glass leaves resting easily against the regolith from which they had been constructed, spiky needles protruding. There was, too, another type of structure: short, stubby cylinders, pointing at the sky, projecting in all directions.