Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  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-kilometers-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 rich 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 farther, 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 kilometers below the surface of the Moon.

  She found him in his office at New Dallas, pacing back and forth, an Earth man 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 Grays."

  "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 kilometers 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. It was 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 with 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 meters. There had been an implosion. They lost the subterrene itself, a kilometer of bore, and a single life, of a senior tool pusher.

  "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 Gray angle. Get one of them to call our hero tool pusher 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?"

  "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 tool pusher 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 center of an ancient, eroded crater. She landed a kilometer 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.

  Miniature cannon muzzles. Launch gantries for seed-carrying aluminum-burning rockets, perhaps.

  "I must startle you again."

  She turned. It was Takomi, of course, in his worn, patched suit, his hands folded behind his back. He was looking at the flower.

  "Life on the Moon," she said.

  "Its life cycle is simple, you know. It grows during periods of transient comet atmospheres – like the present – and lies dormant between such events. The flower is exposed to sunlight, through the long Moon day. Each of its leaves is a collector of sunlight. The flower focuses the light on regolith, and breaks down the soil for the components it needs to manufacture its own structure, its seeds, and the simple rocket fuel used to propel them across the surface.

  "Then, during the night, the leaves act as cold traps. They absorb the comet frost that falls on them, water and methane and carbon dioxide, incorporating that, too, into the flowers' substance."

  "And the roots?"

  "The roots are kilometers long. They tap deep wells of nutrient, water and organic substances. Deep inside the Moon."

  So Frank, of course, was right about the existence of the volatiles, as she had known he would be.

  "I suppose you despise Frank Paulis."

  "Why should I?" he said mildly.

  "Because he is trying to dig out the sustenance for these plants. Rip it out of the heart of the Moon. Are you a Gray, Takomi?"

  He shrugged. "We have different ways. Your ancestors have a word: mechta."

  "Dream." It was the first Russian word she had heard spoken in many months.

  "It was the name your engineers wished to give to the first probe they sent to the Moon: Mechta. But it was not allowed, by those who decide such t
hings. Well, I am living a dream, here on the Moon: a dream of rock and stillness, here with my Moon flower. That is how you should think of me."

  He smiled and walked away.

  The Land was rich with life now: her children, her descendants, drinking in air and Light. Their songs echoed through the core of the Land, strong and powerful.

  But it would not last, for it was time for the Merging.

  First there was a sudden explosion of Rains, too many of them to count, the comets leaping out of the ground, one after the other.

  Then the Land itself became active. Great sheets of rock heated, becoming liquid, and withdrawing into the interior of the Land.

  Many died, of course. But those that remained bred frantically. It was a glorious time, a time of death and life.

  Changes accelerated. She clung to the thin crust that contained the world. She could feel huge masses rising and falling far beneath her. The Land grew hot, dissolving into a deep ocean of liquid rock.

  And then the Land itself began to break up, great masses of it hurling themselves into the sky.

  More died.

  But she was not afraid. It was glorious! As if the Land itself was birthing comets, as if the Land was like herself, hurling its children far away.

  The end came swiftly, more swiftly than she had expected, in an explosion of heat and light that burst from the heart of the Land itself. The last, thin crust was broken open, and suddenly there was no more Land, nowhere for her roots to grip.

  It was the Merging, the end of all things, and it was glorious.

  Chapter 20

  The Tunnel in the Moon

  Frank and Xenia, wrapped in their spiderweb space suits, stood on a narrow aluminum bridge. They were under the South Pole derrick, suspended over the tunnel Frank had dug into the heart of the Moon.

  The area around the derrick had long lost its pristine theme-park look. There were piles of spill, and waste, and ore that had been dug out of the deepening hole in the ground. LHDs, automated load-haul-dump vehicles, crawled continually around the site. The LHDs, baroque aluminum beetles, sported giant fins to radiate off their excess heat – no conduction or convection here – and most of their working parts were two meters or more off the ground, where sprays of the abrasive lunar dust wouldn't reach. The LHDs, Xenia realized, were machines made for the Moon.

  The shaft below Xenia was a cylinder of sparkling lunar glass. The tunnel receded to the center of the Moon, to infinity. Lights had been buried in the walls every few meters, so the shaft was brilliantly lit, like a passageway in a shopping mall, the multiple reflections glimmering from the glass walls. Refrigeration and other conduits snaked along the tunnel. It was vertical, perfectly symmetrical, and there was no mist or dust, nothing to obscure her view.

  Momentarily dizzy, she stepped back, anchored herself again on the surface of the Moon.

  Frank rubbed his hands. "It's wonderful. Like the old days. Engineers overcoming obstacles, building things." He seemed oddly nervous; he wouldn't meet her eyes.

  "And," she said, "thanks to all this problem solving, we got through the mantle."

  "Hell, yes, we got through it. You've been away from the project too long, babe." He took her hands. Squat in his suit, his face invisible, he was still, unmistakably, Frank J. Paulis. "And now, it's our time." Without hesitation – he never hesitated – he stepped to the lip of the delicate metal bridge.

  She walked with him, a single step. A stitched safety harness, suspended from pulleys above, impeded her.

  "Will you follow me?" he asked.

  She took a breath. "I've always followed you."

  "Then come."

  Hand in hand, they jumped off the bridge.

  Slow as a snowflake, tugged by gravity, Xenia fell toward the heart of the Moon. The loose harness dragged gently at her shoulders and crotch, slowing her fall. She was guided by a couple of spiderweb cables, tautly threaded down the axis of the shaft; through her suit's fabric she could hear the hiss of the pulleys.

  There was nothing beneath her feet save a diminishing tunnel of light. Xenia could hear her heart pound. Frank was laughing.

  The depth markers on the wall were already rising up past her, mapping her acceleration. But she was suspended here, in the vacuum, as if she were in orbit; she had no sense of speed, no vertigo from the depths beneath her.

  Their speed picked up quickly. In seconds, it seemed, they had already passed through the fine regolith layers, the Moon's pulverized outer skin, and they were sailing down through the megaregolith. Giant chunks of deeply shattered rock crowded against the glassy, transparent tunnel walls like the corpses of buried animals.

  The material beyond the walls turned smooth and gray now. This was lunar bedrock, anorthosite, buried beyond even the probings and pulverizing of the great impactors. Unlike Earth, there would be no fossils here, she knew, no remnants of life in these deep levels; only a smooth gradation of minerals, processed by the slow workings of geology. In some places there were side shafts dug away from the main exploratory bore. They led to stopes, lodes of magnesium-rich rocks extruded from the Moon's frozen interior, which were now being mined out by Frank's industry partners. She saw the workings as complex blurs, hurrying upward as she fell, gone like dream visions.

  Despite the gathering warmth of the tunnel, despite her own acceleration, she had a sense of cold, of age and stillness.

  They dropped through a surprisingly sharp transition into a new realm, where the rock on the other side of the walls glowed of its own internal light. It was a dull gray-red, like a cooling lava on Earth.

  "The mantle of the Moon," Frank whispered, gripping her hands. "Basalt. Up here it ain't so bad. But further down the rock is so soft it pulls like taffy when you try to drill it. A thousand kilometers of mush, a pain in the ass."

  They passed a place where the glass walls were marked with an engraving; stylized flowers with huge lunar petals. This was where a technician had been killed in an implosion. The little memorial shot upward and was lost in the light. Frank didn't comment.

  The rock was now glowing a bright cherry-pink, rushing upward past them. It was like dropping through some immense glass tube full of fluorescing gas. Xenia sensed the heat, despite her suit's insulation and the refrigeration of the tunnel.

  Falling, falling.

  Thick conduits surrounded them now, crowding the tunnel, flipping from bracket to bracket. The conduits carried water, bearing the Moon's deep heat to hydrothermal plants on the surface. She was becoming dazzled by the pink-white glare of the rocks.

  The harness tugged at her sharply, slowing her. Looking down along the forest of conduits, she could see that they were approaching a terminus, a platform of some dull, opaque ceramic that plugged the tunnel.

  "End of the line," Frank said. "Down below there's only the downhole tools and the casing machine and other junk... Do you know where you are? Xenia, we're more than a thousand kilometers deep, two-thirds of the way to the center of the Moon."

  The pulleys gripped harder and they slowed, drifting to a halt a meter above the platform. With Frank's help she loosened her harness and spilled easily to the platform itself, landing on her feet, as if after a sky dive.

  She glanced at her chronometer patch. The fall had taken twenty minutes.

  She got her balance and looked around. They were alone here.

  The platform was crowded with science equipment: anonymous gray boxes linked by cables to softscreens and batteries. Sensors and probes, wrapped in water-cooling jackets, were plugged into ports in the walls. She could see data collected from the lunar material flickering over the softscreens, measurements of porosity and permeability, data from gas meters and pressure gauges and dynamometers and gravimeters. There was evidence of work here: small inflatable shelters; spare backpacks; notepads; even, incongruously, a coffee cup. Human traces, here at the heart of the Moon.

  She walked to the walls. Her steps were light; she was almost floating. There was rock, pur
e and unmarked, all around her, beyond the windowlike walls, glowing pink.

  "The deep interior of the Moon," Frank said, joining her. He ran his gloved hands over the glass. "What the rock hounds call primitive material, left over from the Solar System's formation. Never melted and differentiated like the mantle, never bombarded like the surface. Untouched since the Moon budded off of Earth itself."

  "I feel light as a feather," she said. And so she did; she felt as if she were going to float back up the borehole like a soap bubble.

  Frank glared up into the tunnel above them, and concentric light rings glimmered in his faceplate. "All that rock up there doesn't pull at us. It might as well be cloud, rocky cloud, hundreds of kilometers of it."

  "I suppose, at the center itself, you would be weightless."

  "I guess."

  On one low bench stood a glass beaker, covered by clear plastic film. She picked it up; she could barely feel it, dwarfed within her thick, inflexible gloves. It held a liquid that sloshed in the gentle gravity. The liquid was murky brown, not quite transparent.

  Frank was grinning. Immediately she understood.

  "I wish you could drink it," he said. "I wish we could drink a toast. You know what that is? It's water. Moon water, water from the lunar rocks." He took the beaker and turned around in a slow, ponderous dance. "It's all around us, just as Mariko predicted: a fucking ocean of it. Wadsleyite and majorite with three percent water by weight... Incredible. We did it, babe."

  "Frank. You were right. I had no idea."

  "I sat on the results. I wanted you to be the first to see this. To see my..." He couldn't find the word.

  "Affirmation," she said gently. "This is your affirmation."

  "Yeah. I'm a hero."

  It was true, she knew.

  It was going to work out just as Frank had projected. As soon as the implications of the find became apparent – that there really were oceans down here, buried inside the Moon – the imaginations of the Lunar Japanese would be fast to follow Frank's vision. This, after all, wasn't a simple matter of plugging holes in the environment-support system loops. There was surely enough resource here, just as Frank said, to future-proof the Moon. And perhaps this would be a pivot of human history, a moment when humanity's long decline was halted and mankind found a place to live in a system that was no longer theirs.