Space

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘What kind of pattern?’

  ‘It is true that the final seeding event drew the pods, with unerring accuracy, back to this site. As you observed. The pods were absorbed into the structure of the primary plant, here, which has since withered. The seeding was evidently triggered by the arrival of the comet, the enveloping of the Moon by its new, temporary atmosphere. But I have studied the patterns of earlier seedings –’

  ‘Triggered by earlier comet impacts.’

  ‘Yes. All of them long before human occupancy began here. Just one or two impacts per billion years. Brief comet rains, spurts of air, before the long winter closed again. And each impact triggered a seeding event.’

  ‘… Ah. I understand. These are like desert flowers, which bloom in the brief rain. Poppies, rockroses, grasses, chenopods.’

  ‘Exactly. They complete their lifecycles quickly, propagate as vigorously as possible, while the comet air lasts. And then their seeds lie dormant, for as long as necessary, waiting for the next chance event, perhaps as long as a billion years.’

  ‘I imagine they spread out, trying to cover the Moon. Propagate as fast and as far as possible.’

  ‘No,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘At every comet event, the seedings converge. Just as they did here. These plants work backwards, Xenia.

  ‘A billion years ago there were a thousand sites like this. In a great seeding, these diminished to a mere hundred: those fortunate few were bombarded with seeds, while the originators withered. And later, another seeding reduced that hundred to twelve or so. And finally, the twelve are reduced to one. This one.’

  She tried to think that through; she pictured the little seed pods converging, diminishing in number. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Not for us, who are ambassadors from Earth,’ he said. ‘Earth life spreads, colonizes, whenever and wherever it can. But this is lunar life, Xenia. And the Moon is an old, cooling, dying world. Its richest days were brief moments, far in the past. And so life has adjusted to the situation. Do you understand?’

  ‘… I think so. But now, this is truly the last of them? The end?’

  ‘Yes. The flower is already dying.’

  ‘But why here? Why now?’

  He shrugged. ‘Xenia, your colleague Frank Paulis is determined to rebuild the Moon, inside and out. Even if he fails, others will follow where he showed the way. The stillness of the Moon is lost.’ He sniffed. ‘My own garden might survive, but in a park, like your old Apollo landers, to be gawked at by tourists. It is a – diminishing. And so with the flowers. There is nowhere for them to survive, on the new Moon, in our future.’

  ‘But how do they know they can’t survive? – oh, that’s the wrong question. Of course the flowers don’t know anything.’

  He paused, regarding her. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We are smart, and aggressive. We think smartness is derived from aggression. Perhaps that is true. But perhaps it takes a greater imagination to comprehend stillness than to react to the noise and clamour of our shallow human world.’

  She frowned, remembering Mariko’s evidence about neural structures in the flowers. ‘You’re saying these things are conscious?’

  ‘I believe so. It would be hard to prove. I have spent much time in contemplation here, however. And I have developed an intuition. A sympathy, perhaps.’

  ‘But that seems cruel. What kind of God would plan such a thing? Think about it. You have a conscious creature, trapped on the surface of the Moon, in this desolate, barren environment. And its way of living, stretching back billions of years maybe, has had the sole purpose of diminishing itself, to prepare for this final extinction, this death, this smyert. What is the purpose of consciousness, confronted by such desolation?’

  ‘But perhaps it is not so,’ he said gently. ‘The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. The future of the Moon, in the direction we face, may be desolate. But not the past. So why not face that way?’

  She barely followed him. But she remembered the kare sansui, the waterless stream traced in the regolith. It was impossible to tell if the stream was flowing from past to future, or future to past; if the hills of heaped regolith were rising or sinking.

  He said, ‘Perhaps to the flowers – to this flower, the last, or perhaps the first – this may be a beginning, not an end.’

  ‘Vileekee bokh. You are telling me that these plants are living backwards in time? Propagating – not into the future – but into the past?’

  ‘In the present there is but one of them. In the past there are many – billions, perhaps. In our future lies death for them; in our past lies glory. So why not look that way?’ He touched her gloved hand. ‘The important thing is that you must not grieve for the flowers. They have their dream, their mechta, of a better Moon, in the deep past, or deep future. The universe is not always cruel, Xenia Makarova. And you must not hate Frank, for what he has done.’

  ‘I don’t hate him.’

  ‘There is a point of view from which he is not taking nutrients from the heart of the Moon, but giving. He is pumping the core of the Moon full of water and volatiles, and when he is done he will even fill in the hole … You see?’

  ‘Takomi.’

  He was still.

  ‘That isn’t your real name, is it? This isn’t your identity.’

  He said nothing, face averted from hers.

  ‘I don’t think you are even a man. I think your name is Nemoto. And you are hiding here on the Moon, whiling away the centuries.’

  Takomi stood silently for long seconds. ‘My Moon plants recede into a better past. That, for me, isn’t an option. I must make my way into the unwelcome future. But at least, here, I am rarely disturbed. I hope you will respect that.

  ‘Now come,’ said Takomi, or Nemoto. ‘I have green tea, and rice cake, and we will sit under the cherry tree, and talk further.’

  Xenia nodded, dumbly, and let him – her? – take her by the hand. Together they walked across the yielding antiquity of the Moon.

  It was another celebration, here at the South Pole of the Moon. It was the day Project Roughneck promised to fulfil its potential, by bringing the first commercially useful loads of water to the surface.

  Once again the crowds were out: investors with their guests, families with children, huge softscreens draped over drilling gear, Virtual Observers everywhere so everyone on the Moon could share everything that happened here today. Even the Greys were here, to celebrate the project’s end, dancing in elaborate formations.

  Earth hovered like a ghost on one horizon, ignored, its sparking wars meaningless.

  This time, Xenia didn’t find Frank strutting about the lunar surface in his Stars and Stripes spacesuit, giving out orders. Frank said he knew which way the wind blew, a blunt Earthbound metaphor no Moon-born Japanese understood. So he had confined himself to a voluntary house arrest, in the new ryokan that had opened up on the summit of one of the tallest rim mountains here.

  When she arrived, he waved her in and handed her a drink, a fine sake. The suite was a penthouse, magnificent, decorated in a mix of western-style and traditional Japanese. One wall, facing the borehole, was just a single huge pane of tough, anhydrous lunar glass. She saw a tumbler of murky water, covered over, on a table top. Moon water, his only trophy of Roughneck.

  ‘This is one hell of a cage,’ he said. ‘If you’ve got to be in a cage.’ He laughed darkly. ‘Civilized, these Lunar Japanese. Well, we’ll see.’ He eyed her. ‘What about you? Will you go back to the stars?’

  She looked at the oily ripple of the drink in her glass. ‘I don’t think so. I – like it here. I think I’d enjoy building a world.’

  He grunted. ‘You’ll marry. Have kids. Grandkids.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  He glared at her. ‘When you do, remember me, who made it possible, and got his ass busted for his trouble. Remember this.’

  He walked
her to the window.

  She gazed out, goddess-like, surveying the activity. The drilling site was an array of blocky machinery, now stained deep grey by dust, all of it bathed in artificial light. The stars hung above the plain, stark and still, and people and their vehicles swarmed over the ancient, broken plain like so many spacesuited ants.

  ‘You know, it’s a great day,’ she said. ‘They’re making your dream come true.’

  ‘My dream, hell.’ He fetched himself another slug of sake, which he drank like beer. ‘They stole it from me. And they’re going inward. That’s what Nishizaki and the rest are considering now. I’ve seen their plans. Huge underground cities in the crust, big enough for thousands, even hundreds of thousands, all powered by thermal energy from the rocks. In fifty years you could have multiples of the Moon’s present population, burrowing away busily.’ He glanced at his wristwatch, restless.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘It wasn’t the fucking point.’ He glared up at Earth’s scarred face. ‘If we dig ourselves into the ground, we won’t be able to see that. We’ll forget. Don’t you get it? …’

  But now there was activity around the drilling site. She stepped to the window, cupped her hands to exclude the room lights.

  People were running, away from the centre of the site.

  There was a tremor. The building shuddered under her, languidly. A quake, on the still and silent Moon?

  Frank was checking his watch. He punched the air and strode to the window. ‘Right on time. Hot damn.’

  ‘Frank, what have you done?’

  There was another tremor, more violent. A small Buddha statue was dislodged from its pedestal, and fell gently to the carpeted floor. Xenia tried to keep her feet. It was like riding a rush hour train.

  ‘Simple enough,’ Frank said. ‘Just shaped charges, embedded in the casing. They punched holes straight through the bore wall into the surrounding rock, to let the water and sticky stuff flow right into the pipe and up –’

  ‘A blow-out. You arranged a blow-out.’

  ‘If I figured this right the interior of the whole fucking Moon is going to come gushing out of that hole. Like puncturing a balloon.’ He took her arms. ‘Listen to me. We will be safe here. I figured it.’

  ‘And the people down there, in the crater? Your managers and technicians? The children?’

  ‘It’s a day they’ll tell their grandchildren about.’ He shrugged, grinning, his forehead slick with sweat. ‘They’re going to lock me up anyhow. At least this way –’

  But now there was an eruption from the centre of the rig, a tower of liquid, rapidly freezing, that punched its way up through the rig itself, shattering the flimsy buildings covering the head. When the fountain reached high enough to catch the flat sunlight washing over the mountains, it seemed to burst into fire, crystals of ice shining in complex parabolic sheaves, before falling back to the ground.

  Frank punched the air. ‘You know what that is? Kerogen. A tarry stuff you find in oil shales. It contains carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, potassium, chlorine, other elements … I couldn’t believe it when the lab boys told me what they found down there. Mariko says kerogen is so useful we might as well have found chicken soup in the rocks.’ He cackled. ‘Chicken soup, from the primordial cloud. I won, Xenia. With this blow-out I stopped them from building Bedrock City. I’m famous.’

  ‘What about the Moon flowers?’

  His face was hard. ‘Who the fuck cares? I’m a human, Xenia. I’m interested in human destiny, not a bunch of worthless plants we couldn’t even eat.’ He waved a hand at the ice fountain. ‘Look out there, Xenia. I beat the future. I’ve no regrets. I’m a great man. I achieve great things.’

  The ground around the demolished drill head began to crack, venting gas and ice crystals; and the deep, ancient richness of the Moon rained down on the people.

  Frank Paulis whispered, ‘And what could be greater than this?’

  … She was in the Dark, flying, like one of her own seeds. She was surrounded by fragments of the shattered Land, and by her children.

  But she could not speak to them, of course; unlike the Land, the Dark was empty of rock, and would not carry her thoughts.

  It was a time of stabbing loneliness.

  But it did not last long.

  Already the cloud was being drawn together, collapsing into a new and greater Land that glowed beneath her, a glowing ocean of rock, a hundred times bigger than the small place she had come from.

  And at the last, she saw the greatest comet of all tear itself from the heart of this Land, a ball of fire that lunged into the sky, receding rapidly into the unyielding Dark.

  She fell towards that glowing ocean, her heart full of joy at the Merging of the Lands …

  In the last moment of her life, she recalled the Giver.

  She was the first, and the Giver birthed her. None of it would have come to be without the Giver, who fed the Land.

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

  She sensed, though, that he knew anyhow.

  Chapter 21

  HOMECOMING

  After their journey to the stars, Madeleine and Ben returned to a silent solar system.

  Over a century had elapsed. They themselves had aged less than a year. It was now, astonishingly, the year 2240, an unimaginable, futuristic date. Madeleine had been braced for more historic drift, more cultural isolation.

  Not for silence.

  As the long weeks of their flight inward from the Saddle Point radius wore away, and the puddle of crowded light that was the inner system grew brighter ahead, they both grew increasingly apprehensive. At length, they were close enough to resolve images of Earth in the Ancestor’s telescopes. They huddled together by their monitors.

  What they saw was an Earth that was brilliant white.

  Ice swept down from both poles, encroaching towards the equator. The shapes of the northern continents were barely visible under the huge frozen sheets. The colours of life, brown and green and blue, had been crowded into a narrow strip around the equator. Here and there, easily visible on the night side of the planet, Madeleine made out the spark of fires, of explosions. Gaijin ships orbited Earth, tracking from pole to pole, their ramscoops casting golden light that glimmered from the ice and the oceans, mapping and studying, still following their own immense, patient projects.

  Madeleine and Ben were both stunned by this. They studied Earth for hours, barely speaking, skipping meals and sleep periods.

  Ben, fearful for his wife, his people on Triton, grew silent, morbid, withdrawing from Madeleine. Madeleine found the loneliness hard to bear. When she slept her dreams were intense, populated by drifting alien artefacts.

  The Gaijin flower-ship dropped them into orbit around Earth’s Moon.

  Nemoto came to them, at last. She appeared as a third figure in the cramped, scuffed environment of Dreamtime Ancestor’s Service Module, a digital ghost coalescing from a cloud of cubical pixels.

  Her gaze lit on Madeleine. ‘Meacher. You’re back. You were expected. I have an assignment for you.’ She smiled.

  Madeleine said, ‘I don’t believe you’re still alive. You must be some kind of virtual simulation.’

  ‘I don’t care what you think. Anyhow, you’ll never know.’ Nemoto was small, shrunken, her face a leathery mask, as if with age she was devolving to some earlier proto-human form. She glanced around. ‘Where’s the FGB Module? … Oh.’ Evidently she had just downloaded a summary of their mission from the virtual counterpart who had travelled with them. She glared. ‘You have to meddle, don’t you, Meacher?’

  Madeleine passed a hand through Nemoto’s body; pixels clustered like butterflies. To Madeleine, ten more decades out of her time, the projection was impressive new technology. There was no sign of time-delay; Nemoto – or the projector – must be here, on the Moon or in lunar orbit, or else her responses would be delayed by seconds.

  Ben asked tightly,
‘What about Triton?’

  Nemoto’s face was empty. ‘Triton is silent. It’s wise to be silent. But your wife is still alive.’

  Madeleine sensed a shift in Ben’s posture, a softening.

  ‘But,’ Nemoto said now, ‘the colony is under threat. A fleet of Gaijin flower-ships and factories is moving out from the asteroids. They’re already in orbit around Jupiter, Saturn, even Uranus. They have projects out there, for instance on Jupiter’s moon Io, which we don’t understand.’ Her face worked, her anger visible, even after all this time, her territoriality powerful. ‘The Earth has collapsed, of course. And though the fools down there don’t know it, the Moon faces long-term resource crises, particularly in metals. And so on. The Gaijin are winning, Meacher. Triton is the only foothold we humans have in the outer system. The last trench. We can’t let the Gaijin take it.’

  And you have a plan, Madeleine realized, with a sinking heart. A plan that involves me. So she was immediately plunged back into Nemoto’s manipulation and scheming.

  Ben was frowning. He asked Nemoto some pointed questions about her presence, her influence, her resources. What was the political situation now? Who was backing her? What was her funding?

  She’d answer none of his questions. She wouldn’t even tell them where, physically, she was, before she disappeared, promising – or threatening – to be back.

  Madeleine spent long hours at the windows, watching the Moon.

  The Moon was controlled by a tight federal-government structure which seemed to blend seamlessly with a series of corporate alliances, which had grown mainly from the Japanese companies that had funded the first waves of lunar colonization. The lunar authorities had let the Ancestor settle into a wide two-hour orbit, but they wouldn’t let Madeleine and Ben land. It was clear to Madeleine that, to these busy lunar inhabitants, returned star travellers were an irrelevance.