Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  He felt his heart thump. The rille layers were a record of the Moon’s volcanism, the strata left by ancient basalt floods, driven by an internal heat that had all but died almost as soon as the Moon formed.

  The only other volcanic remnants Apollo crews had found had been dug out by impacts, shattered and melted and reformed, scattered over the surface, heavily processed. In the rille walls, though, he was facing true lunar bedrock. What he had come for.

  Samples of basalt from the maria — the lunar seas, like Apollo 11’s Tranquillity — would take you back as far as the age of mare volcanism, when founts of lava had flooded the great impact basins. But if you wanted to look further you had to go find bedrock: dusty windows on even greater antiquity, all the way back to the birth of the Moon.

  Bedrock was the core of the mission, as far as Jays was concerned. And a big fat sample of bedrock, maybe from deep inside that old rille, would be his trophy fish.

  He felt his soul expanding.

  Nobody had ever seen this sight before, nobody. And, no matter who came after him, for whatever purpose, no matter how much smarter they were than him, they could never take that away. Schröter’s Valley would forever be a part of him.

  He went over a crest, and was now descending into the rille itself. But there was no sharp drop-off; like every other surface here the rille wall was eroded to smoothness, and the footing was secure, the regolith layer thin.

  For a moment he thought he glimpsed a stretch of the very bottom of the rille. Something shining there. But that was impossible, of course. It had to be a trick of the light. A scuff on his faceplate.

  …And then he saw it, sheltering beneath a hummock in the regolith. It was a dark basalt, a lava lump about the size and shape of a football. When he brushed away the regolith he could see it was protruding from a rock layer, like the ones he could see so clearly on the far side of the rille.

  Jays wanted to get this one right.

  He took careful photographs of the rock in its resting place. Then he tried to set up the gnomon beside it, the smart little tripod that would give him scale, local vertical and orientation compared to the angle of the sun.

  This was called documenting the sample. The idea was that back on Earth, if they knew exactly how the sample had been taken, the scientists would be able to reconstruct the geology of the area at leisure.

  But the documenting turned out to be a scramble. The slope was too steep for the gnomon, and he wasn’t sure the photographs would pick out the rock from its background. He did his best; but the guys in the geology back rooms didn’t always understand how tough their procedures were to follow once you were here… Still, surely the rock would be worth it.

  Of course the rock would be given a number of its own. A five-digit code: “eight” for Apollo 18, “six” because this was their sixth survey stop, and a number for the sample in the order they’d taken samples here, which had to be up in the forties or fifties already, he figured.

  He bent sideways, stiff in his inflated suit. He was able just to pick up the rock; it fit his hand as if it had been meant for him.

  He put his prize in a numbered Teflon bag. Then he photographed the place the rock had come from.

  Movement. The dust was stirring, where he’d lifted the rock. When he looked again, the movement wasn’t there.

  Never had been there. Been out here too long, Jays.

  Tom was calling. They had to complete a rake sample, a random representative selection of the rocks here, and then move on.

  He had just arrived, having come all this way, and it was already time to leave.

  Jays took a last glance down inside the rille. He tried to peer down as deep as he could, straining to see to the bottom. The slope looked easy; he wished he could go a little further, deeper into the rille. But he knew he mustn’t. He was a long way from Tom’s helping hands, if he ran into trouble. And anyhow, he was behind the timeline.

  He knew he wouldn’t mention what he’d seen to Tom.

  On impulse, he leaned over, scooped up another fragment of the bedrock sample, stuffed it inside a sample bag and crammed it into a pocket on his leg.

  Then, his bedrock under his arm, he snapped shut his sun visor and clambered back up the slope, towards Tom and the waiting Rover.

  After a four-billion-year wait, the visit with its burst of activity had lasted only three days, the final flurry of dust settling after only seconds.

  At Aristarchus Base, Rover tracks and footprints converged on the truncated base of the abandoned Lunar Module. The blast of the departed ascent stage’s engine had left a new ray system, streaks of dust which overlaid the footprints.

  Now the Moon was inert once more, the sculpted hills of the Aristarchus ejecta blanket rising above this puddle of pitted, frozen basalt, their slopes bathed in sunlight, shining like fresh snow.

  Waiting.

  In places, the disturbed dust stirred. Glowed softly silver.

  PART II

  ARD TOR

  1

  Geena Bourne woke up before dawn. She was, of course, alone in the apartment.

  She got up in the dark and walked around putting on lights.

  Henry had gone.

  Fled. But he’d taken nothing. No furniture, no carpets or curtains, no CDs or books, not even his own clothes. Nothing but his geology hammer, as far as she could see.

  Oh, and Rocky, their labrador, the Rock Hound.

  Shit.

  It was worse than if he’d taken everything, or trashed the place.

  Still, she knew where he’d be. She pulled a coat over her pyjamas, got in the car and drove out, through the night, to the USGS.

  It was cold. Always cold, here in the mountains.

  The Cascades Observatory of the United States Geological Survey was a squat, unimposing two-storey building, a slab of cinder-block. In the harsh, incomplete glow of its security lights it looked sinister, like some prison block transported from Soviet Russia.

  She had a little trouble with the guards. Lady, it’s 3 a.m. Do you know what time it is? 3 a.m… But her NASA pass and a little sweet-talking got her inside.

  And here was Henry, rucked up on top of a sleeping bag he’d spread out on the floor of his cramped office. The clutter of his work lay everywhere: geological maps and structure charts, trays of samples, microscope slides with slivers of rock, electronic parts, his precious polarizing microscope inside its grimy, worn-smooth wooden box. And Henry himself in the middle of it all, as sound asleep as if he were out on a field expedition in the Kalahari, his long, thin body folded over, his heavy black hair falling around his face.

  Rocky was here, lying on a blanket in a crate in the corner. The mutt came forward, licked her hand regretfully, and went back to the crate and fell asleep.

  She prodded Henry’s kidney with her toe, reasonably gently. “Hey. Crocodile Dundee. Wake up.”

  He came awake, with an ease she’d always envied.

  “It’s you.” He rolled over and sat up.

  “Of course it’s me.”

  “I left, Geena. It’s over.”

  “Do you have any coffee in here?”

  He ran his hand over his stubble and yawned. “No,” he said. “Go away and leave me alone.”

  “Believe me,” she snapped back, “there’s nothing I’d like better. But I can’t just walk away.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we have things to talk about.”

  “Geena, my lunar probes just got canned. My career is stiffed. What things?”

  “Our assets, Henry. Our property.”

  “All there is, is stuff. Burn it. I don’t care. Sell the apartment. It was no use anyhow, since we both spent the last two years working out of Houston.”

  She said heavily, “We’re taking apart our home.”

  He closed his eyes. “I know.”

  “Then you can’t just walk away. You have to go through the pain, Henry…”

  There was a light in the window.

>   Maybe it was the torch beam of some security guy, Geena thought, distracted. Rocky whined a little, and padded over to the window. Whatever the light was, it was high up; it cast Rocky’s shadow on the floor behind him.

  Not a torch beam, then.

  Even as she tried to deal with this situation with Henry, her damn problem-solving brain kept working. Something in the sky. A chopper beam, maybe a police patrol? But the beam would shift. And there’d be noise. The Moon, then? But the light was the wrong quality, vaguely yellow-white. And besides, the Moon was near new tonight.

  The dog was staring up at the light as if he’d seen a ghost.

  She said, “What about the dog?”

  “He comes with me. He’s my dog. He predates you.”

  “I suppose he does. But he’s used to staying with my mother—”

  Henry unfolded off the floor and stretched, tall and wiry, strong hands flexing. His face was dark in the uncertain light from the window, weather-beaten by all those days in the field. He looked towards the yellow glow at the window. “What the hell’s that?”

  “I thought it was a chopper. But it isn’t.”

  “No.”

  They walked towards the dog, still standing in his shaft of light, Henry’s bare feet padding on the tiled floor.

  “…Jesus,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  Henry was standing over the dog, staring up into the anomalous light. She came to stand beside him.

  The light, beaming in through the window, was so bright it was glaring, dazzling, like a spotlight in the face. But she could see it was a point source.

  It was fixed in the sky. There was no noise, no rotor clutter.

  The light was eerie. Not part of the natural order. This is bad news, she felt instinctively.

  “What do you think?” he said. “A planet?”

  “Too bright.”

  “A satellite?”

  “Not moving quickly enough.”

  “A star, then,” he said. “It would have to be a nova. Or a supernova.” He frowned. “I don’t like it.”

  “In case it’s a supernova?”

  “Even if not. It shouldn’t be there.” He glanced at her. “Don’t you feel it?”

  “Yes,” she said reluctantly. “I guess I do.” Bad news. “What would a supernova do to Earth?”

  He shrugged. “Depends how close. Supernovas are candidates for causing extinction events in the past. The radiation burst, the heavy particles… A massive star exploding within a hundred light years might give the planet a dose of five hundred roentgens.”

  “Enough to kill.”

  “Oh, yes. Even the trees. Did you know that? Trees are about as sensitive to radiation as humans. Also, all that ultraviolet hitting the atmosphere — disassociated nitrogen will oxidize to form nitrous oxide, which will react with the ozone and deplete it—”

  “Just as well we destroyed the ozone layer already, then,” she said drily. “But maybe it isn’t a supernova.”

  She couldn’t identify what part of the sky this lamp hung in. Her astronomy wasn’t so good, considering her career choice. But then it didn’t need to be, if you planned to spend your working life in low Earth orbit. “What else could it be?”

  He leaned forward, resting his hands on the window ledge, and looked around the sky. “I wish they’d clean these windows. Kind of a poor observing platform we have here… Oh.”

  “What?”

  “I think it’s Venus.”

  She frowned. “Venus, the planet?”

  He said heavily, “What other Venus? It’s right where Venus is supposed to be, tonight. And I don’t see any bright object nearby that could be Venus. So, it’s Venus.”

  “But how can it suddenly become so bright?” She remembered an old science fiction story. “Oh. Venus is closer to the sun than Earth. What if the sun has flared? Or even gone nova? And the reflected light—”

  “No.” He shook his head. “It’s near superior conjunction right now. Which means it’s on the far side of the sun, so showing us a full face. So if you think about it, by the time the increased sunlight reflected off Venus and crossed space to get here—”

  “The sunlight would have reached us direct, already.” A suppressed sigh of relief. “So Venus itself must have gotten brighter.”

  “Which is impossible.”

  “Is it? Maybe it’s some kind of volcanic thing.”

  “What kind of volcanic thing?

  She was used to his sarcasm. “You’re the geologist. Think of something.”

  He went to the back of the office, and came back with a scuffed pair of binoculars. He raised them and focused them briskly.

  He whistled.

  “What?”

  He passed her the binoculars, leaving the strap around his neck, so she had to lean towards him to use them. She scanned around the sky, seeking the glare.

  The binoculars resolved the distant, fixed stars to points. The glasses were too weak, she realized, to resolve Venus — on normal nights — to anything better than a minute disc, or crescent, at best.

  But this wasn’t a normal night.

  Where Venus ought to have been there was a bright, smudged disc, not quite symmetrical.

  “Holy God,” she said.

  “I think,” Henry said, “that Venus has exploded.”

  The call didn’t wake Monica Beus, for the simple reason that she hadn’t been asleep.

  “Yes?”

  Monica. It’s me. Alfred.

  Alfred Synge: astronomer, colleague, lover back when they and the world were young.

  “Where are you?”

  Kitts Peak. The observatory. Have you seen it yet?

  “What?”

  Take a look out the window.

  She lay for a minute in the stale warmth of her bed. The insomnia was the worst thing, for her, about the diagnosis.

  Breast cancer. What the hell kind of thing was that for her to contract? Her breasts had gotten her nothing but unwelcome attention when she was younger; she was of a generation that had been encouraged to use them as little as possible for what they were intended, which was to suckle children; and now some cosmic ray, a random piece of debris from some long-gone supernova explosion, had come whizzing across space in order to zap her just so…

  If any of it made sense, it might be acceptable. But it didn’t. If she had no stake in the world — if her son, Garry, and his family, didn’t exist — it might be reasonable. But she did have.

  She missed the ability to sleep, though. She longed for the ability to turn off her mind, the constant thinking, like a camera watching the world that never let up.

  But sleepless or not she was warm and comfortable here, her aches and pains fooled into silence for a while, and she felt reluctant to climb out into the harshness of the cold, vertical world. And for what?

  “What is it, Alfred? A lunar eclipse? A meteor shower?” Alfred did get a little carried away with his profession at times. It was enviable, a man whose job was his hobby, his passion. Also a little irritating.

  Uncharacteristically, he hesitated. I think you ought to see for yourself.

  “Why?”

  You might want to think about waking the President.

  Not a lunar eclipse, then.

  She got out of bed, and her body set up a chorus of aches. She pulled on a housecoat, picked up the phone handset, and walked to the window.

  She pulled back the heavy drapes and looked out over Aspen.

  Dawn was coming, she saw, and the leaves of the trademark aspen trees were already glowing with the pearl light, bone white; the quaint street lamps were starting to dim. Another hour or so and the first light of another early spring day would be touching the Rockies.

  Beautiful place. She had moved here to be close to her faculty, at the Center for Physics. She suspected she was going to have to move before long, though. She couldn’t see how she could stand to die here, to leave behind so much beauty. Everybody should die someplace
ugly, where it wouldn’t matter so much…

  On the other hand, maybe it was this beautiful place that was killing her. Up so high, poking out of Earth’s shielding blanket of air, Aspen received twice the sea-level dose of radiation.

  There was a new star in the morning sky, bright as a piece of the sun.

  It’s Venus, Alfred, on the telephone, was telling her. Venus.

  It was casting shadows, long raking shadows, from the aspen tree stands.

  The astrologers will be jumping up and down, she thought. We’re only a few years into the new millennium… and now this.

  “Venus? How can it be?”

  I’m afraid there’s no doubt. What you’re seeing is reflected light from the sun, with some intrinsic illumination from the planet itself.

  “Reflected light?”

  Monica, the atmosphere seems to have — blown off. The planet is surrounded by an expanding sphere of gases and other debris.

  “Debris? You mean rock?”

  Yes. Also fusion products. And the intrinsic illumination — Monica, something is happening on the surface, or maybe in deeper layers. Something very energetic.

  Alfred had first gotten the call from his night assistant, a graduate student. It was the student’s job to control the big telescope Alfred was working on at Kitts Peak. Alfred, sitting in an office, confirmed whatever target star he wanted, and observations were made with spectroscopes and charged-couple detectors.

  Nobody had been watching the planets, at Kitts Peak Observatory. It was just a casual glance out the window by the night assistant that had led to her noticing the change to Venus.

  That was the way with modern astronomy, Monica thought wryly. Nobody looked through the big telescopes any more.

  We were finishing up for the night. We were actually getting ready to park the telescope and —

  “Tell me what you did.”

  The first thing was to get on the IAU nets. The International Astronomy Union, the astronomers” jungle telegraph. There are ground-based observers working on this all over the planet already, Monica. Also the radio telescopes. I contacted NASA; they’re repositioning some of the satellites, for example the ultraviolet and X-ray and gamma ray observatories. We’re also speaking to the Europeans, Canadians and Japanese. The Space Station astronauts are doing some good work. NASA are sending up high-altitude experiments, by balloon and sounding rocket and aircraft. NASA are responding quickly, in fact.