Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  She had thought they were safe when they arrived here, at the house Henry had set up for them. Well, maybe they were. But there were power outages that lasted days. The TV had images of plucky Houstoners loading frozen hamburgers onto their summer barbecues… News Lite, the cynics called it.

  Anyhow she knew they would have to move soon, Henry’s protection notwithstanding. The Administration was preparing to remove ration privileges for aliens. But Jane knew where she would take Jack: north, into Canada, to the centre of the Shield. The most stable rocks in the continent…

  It was a clear night, with only a trace of sunset pink staining the horizon. And the Moon, in the tall Texan sky, was almost full, a dish of light mottled by grey, just as it had always been.

  She had brought a small telescope, a child’s toy. She lifted it now.

  Jane looked to the upper left corner of the Moon, where Henry had told her he would be, at Aristarchus. It was impossible to comprehend that the Moon was a globe-shaped planet in the sky, that Henry was standing there, perhaps looking back at her.

  She clutched Jack, hoping the sky stayed clear of clouds and ash.

  Henry was walking on the surface of the Moon.

  The Earth was low in the south, God’s blue eyeball in the sky, now lidded by darkness. Maybe Jane was up there, watching, thinking about him.

  When he stood in the shadow of the rille wall, he could see stars.

  He walked over the undulating ground, through quiet, in the soft rain of starlight.

  Geena kept calling the Moon a dead world. She was wrong. It wasn’t dead. It was a world of rocks, of rock flowers and rock forests and rock colours, a subtle, still, Zen-like beauty that would take a lifetime to explore.

  The Moon as a giant Zen rock garden. Blue Ishiguro would have enjoyed that thought.

  It was true that the Moon was a quiet world. There wasn’t even the brush of wind, the crash of a remote wave. It was a quiet that had persisted for billions of years, since the end of the heavy bombardment that had shaped the landscape. Even the light here was old, the light of the stars that had taken centuries or millennia to reach here.

  But there was change here. There was even weather.

  There was frost, on the Moon.

  The Moon had an atmosphere, of hydrogen, helium, neon and argon. It was so thin it was probably replenished by the solar wind. At night, the argon would freeze out. It sublimated quickly at dawn.

  Now, walking in shadows disturbed only by milky blue Earth-light, here and there, he convinced himself he could see a sparkle, a glint of lunar ice…

  He was encased in stars, surfing on rocky blue waves.

  He could feel the regolith crunch beneath his feet, his weight crushing the floury structure constructed by a billion years of micrometeorite gardening. All that information, lost as soon as he touched it.

  And now, there was no time left to decode it.

  If Henry had got his math right, soon this place — like every site on the Moon — would be overwhelmed by weather.

  Henry knew he should be anticipating the great events to come. If it worked — if — he would be giving humanity, perhaps, a whole new world.

  If the Moon was the only safe world in the Solar System, because of the Moonseed hive at its core, humans were going to have to come here to live. Henry’s plan would — might — make that possible.

  But Henry was a geologist. He might be creating a new Earth, but he was going to have to wreck the Moon to do it. For instance, the structure of the ice at the Pole, strata laid down over billions of years, was a record of the impact history of the inner Solar System — a unique record that was probably already lost, thanks to the nuke.

  He would destroy the Moon, to save humanity. Grandiose bullshit.

  Somehow, he had manoeuvred himself into a situation where the history of two worlds was resting on his shoulders. As if he was Jesus Christ himself.

  But he had no pretensions; this was no part of the deal as far as his life plan was concerned.

  Especially as Christ died for his mission, as he might have to now.

  He checked the watch clumsily strapped to his dust-grimed sleeve.

  Watch the Moon…

  Jays Malone climbed up Mount Wilson to do just that. He came with Sixt Guth, who was not much younger than him, now grounded from the Space Station. Everybody was grounded now, it seemed.

  The old observatory stood two thousand yards above Los Angeles. The city’s lights flowed in rectangular waves about the foot of the hill, washing out the horizon with a salmon-pink glow; but the sky above was crisp and cool and peppered with stars.

  The opened dome curved over Jays’s head, a shell of ribbing and panels that looked like the inside of an oil tank. The dome, with its brass fixtures and giant gears, smelled vaguely of old concrete. The telescope itself was an open frame, vaguely cylindrical, looming in the dark.

  Sixt had taken one of his several doctorates, in astronomy, at UCLA, and had put in some observational work on this “scope. Now, his old contacts had made the place available for Sixt and his buddy, on this night of all nights.

  Sixt was fussing around the telescope. “This is the Hooker telescope,” he said. “When it was built, in 1906, it was the largest telescope in the world… Kind of ironic.”

  Jays had a pair of Air Force binoculars around his neck, big and powerful. He lifted them to the Moon, squinting through the aperture in the dome.

  “What’s ironic?”

  “The use of that bunker-buster.”

  “The what? Oh, the bomb on the Moon.”

  “Those conventional earthquake bombs they used in the Gulf War were too good. So the pariah states started buying up deep excavation equipment, to escape the bombs, and bury their command posts and their nuclear and chemical and biological stockpiles…”

  Jays stared at the old Moon until the muscles at the edges of his eyes started to ache. He didn’t know what to expect, tonight. Would the changes on the Moon be visible at all, from a quarter-million miles? Would it be over in the blink of an eye?

  “…The B61-11 is like a nuclear dum-dum bullet,” Sixt was saying. “It directs most of its damage straight down into the ground, towards the bunker. It can do as much damage in that way as an H-bomb. So it’s a nuclear weapon with a role for which conventional weapons are useless. It blurs the line between conventional and nuclear war.” He laughed. “Saddam’s super-bunkers probably never existed anyhow. Do you remember Doctor Strangelove? We managed to get ourselves into a deep-mining arms race…”

  “What?” Jays looked at him vaguely, a little dazzled by Moonlight; he’d heard maybe one word in three. “What are you talking about?”

  And so, he missed the moment of detonation.

  …And Henry thought he felt the shock of the detonation: the gentlest of tremors transmitted through the layers of his suit, waves in the rock, passing through the silent heart of the Moon, from an explosion the planet’s width away.

  He should get back to the shelter in the lava tube. He turned and loped over the regolith, rock flour deposited by billions of years of meteorites, lunar ground never broken by a human footstep before.

  The shock wave from the bunker-buster punched down into the strata of ice and dust, crushing the ancient layers, and slammed into the bedrock crust beneath. A central ball was flashed to vapour, which strove to flee the explosion. Surrounding layers of dirty ice were smashed and crushed, and the cavity expanded, growing at last to a hundred yards across.

  When the stellar energy of the initial explosion faded, the weight of the layers above bore down on the cavity. It caved in, and layers of rubble collapsed down into it and over each other, forming a deep rubble chimney four hundred yards tall. It was surrounded by a fracture zone, cracks racing outwards, and its base was lined with radioactive glass, the remnants of the rock dust layers.

  When the chimney collapse reached the surface, volatiles — water and carbon dioxide steam — began to fount from the growing crater.
It was a volcano, of water and air…

  Jane had found too many symptoms to ignore, now. Changes in her bowel habits. Blood in her stools and urine; pain when she pissed. Sores in her mouth that wouldn’t heal; hoarseness and coughs and difficulty swallowing; bleeding between her normal periods. It was as if she had wished this illness on herself, and now it was coming true.

  She knew she would have to face it, go find a doctor. But that would confirm what she feared. It would be like picking up the revolver to play Russian Roulette—

  “I can see it,” Jack said. “I can see it. Wow.”

  Jane lifted the toy telescope. The Moon leapt into detail, the craters at the terminator finely detailed by shadow, her view obscured only by the trembling of her hands and by the false-colour spectral rings of the cheap lens.

  She’d almost missed the flash, the few seconds after ignition: the moment when fire touched the surface of the Moon, shining over the southern limb, brought there by human hands. Already that glow was fading. But she could see the consequences.

  There was a cloud, of yellow-white vapour, which fountained up — it must have been tens of miles high to be visible from here — erupting from the limb of the Moon into the darkness of space, in slow snakes, fingers of gas.

  Henry was right: there was ice at the Pole, and here was the proof of it.

  The soft white glow fell back, already much brighter than the Moon’s native glow, splashing against the Moon’s grey surface, and racing over that barren ground.

  For a moment she felt a stab of regret. What harm had the Moon ever done humanity? For billions of years it had patiently regulated the tides, drawing up the sap in oceans and plants and humans. It was inspiration for a million myths, maybe more bad love songs, and dreams of flight.

  And now, just a few decades after humans first reached it, we’ve visibly wounded it, she thought. Whatever the outcome of all this in human terms, it must be a tragedy for the Moon.

  But some of the vapour was dissipating, great wisps of it branching away from the Moon. Perhaps it was escaping from the Moon’s gravity well altogether.

  Maybe the new atmosphere wouldn’t stick.

  She watched anxiously as the flower of steam blossomed on the surface of the Moon.

  Now Sixt was using the Air Force glasses. “Oh, my God,” he kept saying. “Oh, my God.” Over and over.

  Jays sat down in a rickety old chair that had once, it seemed, belonged to Edwin P. Hubble, who had used this telescope to observe distant galaxies, and so figure out that the universe is expanding. Jays craned his head back, and pressed his eye to the cylindrical eyepiece.

  It took him a few moments to figure out how to see. He had to keep one eye closed, of course, and even then he had to align his head correctly, or his view would be occluded by the rim of the eyepiece.

  A gibbous disc floated into his view. It was a washed-out grey with a splash of white at one part of the edge.

  It was, of course, the Moon.

  And he could see the vapour fountaining from its invisible source on the Moon’s far side. Some of it was escaping the Moon’s gravity. But most of it was falling back to the surface, and creeping sluggishly over the face of the Moon.

  Right now, the vapour formed a loose cap, sitting over the South Pole region. It was growing, but with almost imperceptible slowness. It was like watching a mould spread across a smear of nutrient in a petri dish.

  But it wasn’t growing uniformly. It seemed to be pooling, in the deeper craters and valleys incised into the Moon, before flooding on. In fact, it seemed to be flowing generally north-east — into the mouth of the Man in the Moon — avoiding the brighter area in the south-west corner of the visible face.

  He knew the reason for that. The brighter area was the lunar highlands, older and higher than the grey areas, the lava-flooded maria. The volatiles Meacher had liberated were pouring over the Moon’s surface like fog, seeking out the low points, the crater pits and the valleys, the lava seas that flooded the great basins.

  In a deep mare to the south — that must be Mare Nubium, he thought — he could almost see the surge of the air as it flowed, a bowl of atmosphere sloshing against eroded rim mountains like dishwater; and at the leading edges of the flood there were waves, hundred-mile crests distinctly visible, reflecting back from the basin’s walls like ripples in a bathtub, moving with a slug-like slowness.

  It was, he thought, the first stirring of a new geography.

  The cap of steam was much brighter, area for area, than the native surface of the Moon, which was starting to look drab by comparison. Earth’s reflective clouds of water vapour made it one of the brightest objects in the Solar System. And already, with maybe twenty per cent of the Moon’s surface covered, the Moon was much brighter than before…

  He looked away from the eyepiece. He was slightly dazzled. When he looked down, the shadow of his liver-spotted hands against his shirt was much sharper than before.

  Sixt was staring up at the Moon, its new light shining on his bare scalp. “My God,” he said. “You guys going up there, hopping around for three days, that was something. But now we’re changing the face of the Solar System. My God.”

  Jays found he was trembling. Lights in the sky. He wanted to cower, hide like a dog under Edwin Hubble’s chair.

  Henry — restless, excited — walked until he came to a rise, which he climbed in a few loping paces, and looked south.

  The undulating lunar surface stretched away before him, its surface shaped by fractal crater layers into a frozen rocky sea. The sun was to his left — the east, for even after all that had happened it was still morning on the Moon — and he could feel the touch of its heat, through the thick layers of his suit. And the Earth was before him, a blue crescent: it was an old Earth, its phase locked in opposition to the new Moon’s. He imagined human faces all over that night side, turned up towards him, watching the Moon.

  The sky above was still black, unmarked by the great events which ought to be occurring on the other side of the planet.

  Ought to be.

  All those volatiles were going to spread around the curve of the Moon.

  How quickly?

  The leading edge, spreading into vacuum, would diffuse as rapidly as molecules moved at such temperatures — say, a thousand miles an hour. Enough to cloak the Moon in cloud, from pole to pole, in three or four hours.

  That was his theory, such as it was.

  He was looking south, away from the Aristarchus Complex, over the extent of the Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms. The way it would come.

  The released vapour, like heavy fog, would rush into the low-lying areas first. It would have to flow around the big bright block of the lunar highlands to the south, the Apennine and Altai Mountains, and then gush down into the lower-lying maria. Much of the left-hand side of the visible face of the Moon, as seen from Earth, was pocked with grey maria, including the place he was standing now, on the invisible line between Procellarum and the Mare Imbrium. The volatiles would just gush across these immense grey plains, as the thin basalt lava had once flowed, a billion years before. Maybe, he thought, the new weather was going to reach him sooner than he expected.

  It was indeed a judo trick.

  His single bomb, no matter how precisely delivered, could never have melted enough of the putative volatiles at the Poles to make a difference. There hadn’t been enough energy in the nuke to melt more than that initial hundred-yard spherical chamber in the dust. But his intention was to achieve more than that: much more.

  To melt all the volatiles he believed were locked at the South Pole would need something of the order of a billion times the energy released by his nuke. One hell of a feedback factor.

  But the energy he needed was there: superstring energy, locked up in the inert Moonseed, which permeated the aluminum-rich rock that was the crust of the Moon.

  Henry had modelled it over and over.

  Elsewhere on the Moon, there was no evidence of Moonseed
in the upper layers of the regolith. Presumably the action of sunlight had long ago activated whatever was there to activate; only shadowed rocks, like 86047, retained infection. And deeper in, the Witch in the Well had suppressed any chain reaction that might have led to the disassembly of the Moon.

  The gamma-ray flash from the nuke would, he figured, start a chain reaction in the deep-buried Moonseed. It would be activated in the upper layers of the crust, to a sufficient depth that there would be enough energy released to melt his volatiles — so he figured — before the chain-reaction reached the deeper crust layers and was suppressed by the Witch.

  So he figured. His lack of data, particularly on the suppression mechanism, was a little worrying.

  He looked at the black, inert horizon. Nothing might happen at all. Or, he might just have destroyed the Moon. I’ll settle for anything in between…

  It was a little spooky, in fact, the way the Moonseed had configured itself to offer him this mechanism. A lever, with which to move a planet.

  Terraforming the Moon would have been possible without this bizarre partnership with the Moonseed, and it had been Henry’s vision — what he had hoped to prove with Shoemaker — that the Moon had sufficient resources one day to become a true sister planet to Earth.

  They could have done it anyhow. But it would take a long time before humans could assemble the energy required. Centuries, even millennia.

  The Moonseed infestation seemed curiously designed. It was as if it was meant to be like this. The Alfred Synge cosmic conspiracy theory.

  Maybe he was being foolish, to be out in the open at a time like this. Or maybe he wasn’t. Who could tell? Nobody had sat through a terraforming before. Maybe nobody ever would get the chance again…