Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  So here he was, before it was too late.

  They stopped near a large koppie, and clambered stiffly out of the car. It was still morning, and the air was blessedly cool; Henry found himself surrounded by cactus and aloe and wild flowers.

  Henry and Jane didn’t speak; their routine, working together, was long enough established by now.

  Henry shucked off his antique Air Jordan trainers and pulled on his heavy field boots. He smeared sunblock on the exposed flesh of his arms, legs and face. He donned his broad-brimmed hat, pulled on his oxy-resp and dust and humidity filters — his spacesuit, as he thought of it — and he attached his digital Kodak to his chest bracket.

  He buckled on the old leather of his field gear and picked up his hammer and chisel, all of it worn smooth by hundreds of days of sun and rain.

  The familiar ritual, which for Henry long predated the coming of the Moonseed, was a great comfort to him. It was a prelude to the greatest pleasure of his working life, which was field work. The nature and objectives of the work had changed, but the pleasure he took in it hadn’t.

  Jane knew him well enough now to let him be, to relish this moment.

  So he walked into the desert, looking for fossils.

  The ground was full of so much detail it would be easy to miss the fossils; the trick was to train the eye and brain to filter out the noise and pick out the key signs. But right now, he didn’t know what those signs would be. Bones, of course, but would they be white or black? Crushed or whole? In the sandstone, river bed deposits, or the shale, silt and mud deposited by ancient floods, now metamorphosed to rock?

  It took a half-hour before he began to see them: fragments of bone, protruding from the rock. He recorded their location with the Kodak; the camera was tied into the GPS satellites so the location and context of the specimens were stamped on their images. He scooped up the fragments, unceremoniously, and stuffed them in a sample bag.

  As the day wore on, and his eye grew practised, he found more impressive samples. Bones of ancient amphibians, two hundred and fifty million years dead. The tiny skeletons of two burrowing proto-mammals, his earliest ancestors, white and delicate, embedded in a dark silty matrix. Here, peering ghoulishly out of a layer of flat sediment, was the skull of a dicynodont, a low-slung, pig-like animal a couple of feet long, covered with fur and sprouting impressive tusks.

  He tried to imagine what it must have been like here, a quarter of a billion years ago.

  But right now there was no time to study, classify, identify, deduce. For now, all Henry could do was to collect the raw data.

  Geology and palaeontology had always been a race against the predations of weathering and human expansion.

  As Earth’s upper layers wore away, ancient bones were exposed, removed from their quarter-billion-year storage, and, in a relative flash, eroded or frost-cracked to dust. Humans could only hope to collect a handful of these ancient treasures before they evaporated like dew.

  Now, of course, that time pressure had gotten a lot worse.

  He came at last to a new layer of rock, a coarse brown sandstone which overlay the black shales below.

  The upper bed was almost devoid of fossils.

  This layer marked the boundary between the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras, a boundary in time marked by the greatest extinction of life in Earth’s history. The ancient spasm of death, recorded in rock, had been obvious to the first modern geologists, the gentlemen-scientists from Edinburgh.

  Even now, nobody knew how it had happened. The more famous extinction pulse at the end of the Cretaceous, the one that had killed off the dinosaurs, had attracted a great deal more study, but that event had involved far fewer species. The best explanation was a slow deterioration of the climate, accompanied by a lowering of sea level, that had created conditions inimical to most life existing at the time.

  That was plausible. But nobody knew.

  The answer was surely embedded in these rocky layers somewhere, in the bones and skulls eroding out of the Karroo. But Henry could grab all the samples he liked; he was sure the answer would never, now, be found.

  Henry had grown up believing that the future was, more or less, infinite, and that there would be time — for generations to come, if not for him — to figure out answers to most of the great questions. Earth itself held the clues to the great puzzles of geology and palaeontology, and Earth would always be there…

  But the future wasn’t infinite any more, and Earth wasn’t going to last forever.

  There just wasn’t time for the slow processes of science to unpick the secrets of Earth’s past. When the evidence was gone, it would be gone forever, and they would never know.

  So, here was Henry clambering over the Karroo, grab-bagging bones out of the ground.

  Field work was now the only game in town, in all the sciences.

  Nobody was doing analytical science any more. The only people working in labs were directing the others, out in the field.

  Most of the effort, in fact, was in biology. In what was left of the rain forests, half-trained researchers were wrapping entire giant trees in plastic and drenching them with bug spray, hoovering up the stiff little bodies into nitrogen-cooled collection flasks, for eventual shipping to the great Arks that were flying to the Moon.

  The National Institutes of Health’s Natural Products Repository in Maryland — fifty thousand samples of plant, microbial and marine material from thirty tropical countries, stored in forty-one walk-in freezers — had been compactified, roughly catalogued and fired off to a cryogenic store in some deep-shadowed crater on the Moon. Some of the big bioprospecting drug companies, like Merck which had spent years trawling the flora and fauna of Costa Rica for resources for new products, had had similar repositories impounded and shipped off-Earth, though not without bloody battles over compensation.

  And so on.

  No time to classify, even to count the species, even those living; of Earth’s estimated thirty million species of plant and animal and insect, only a million had been identified and named by all the generations of biologists that had ever worked. Last chance to see.

  There were problems, of course.

  There was a lot of vertebrate bias, for instance, in the strategies for rescue. The big mammals and pretty birds were always top of the list, followed by other vertebrates, reptiles, amphibians, fish — even though many of the reptiles, for instance, were already literally drowning in the moisture-laden air that had followed the final melting of the ice caps, and the evaporation of so much ocean water.

  And nobody could agree on the corner cases. Biodiversity or not, was it right to preserve the last samples of anthrax, or the Ebola virus, or the last tsetse flies?

  And there were the bad guys. Like the cartel who had hunted down and wiped out the last elephants — before the geneticists managed to collect embryos for cryostorage — in order to get an all-time monopoly on ivory. Not to mention the reports, many substantiated, of crazies who were deliberately spreading the Moonseed, accelerating its propagation…

  There were lots of reasons to do this, to evacuate the biosphere.

  The new Moon needed to be colonized, of course, by the right creatures to coexist with mankind, to flesh out a new biosphere. And looking further ahead, a lot of people muttered vaguely about biodiversity. Nobody knew what benefits might be waiting to be discovered: new foods, better medicines, waiting to be derived from plants and animals yet to be catalogued.

  And then there was the potential of species, far beyond their economic value to humans. It would have been hard to extrapolate the rise of mankind from the tree-dwelling mammals that hid from the dinosaurs seventy-five million years ago. Who could say what great societies might arise from the beetles and reptiles and birds, if they were only given the chance?

  But for Henry there was a deeper sense of ethics involved.

  Homo sapiens was one of the newest species on Earth. Maybe it was homo sap’s fault that this calamity had been visited on the
planet; maybe it wasn’t. At any rate, wasn’t there an obligation on the species that commanded most of the planet’s primary production to save as many of the other, older species as it could?

  But in the end, maybe it was going to make little difference. For there just wasn’t enough time.

  Upcoming was the greatest extinction pulse of all, dwarfing even the end-Palaeozoic. This time there would be no recovery, no slow million-year clambering back to diversity, no reconquest of abandoned ecological niches. Now, evolution on Earth was at an end; now, whatever wasn’t sampled or collected was lost forever.

  Even the rocks were going to die, this time. So here were Henry and his wife, running through the desert and grabbing the rocks and bones, for all the world like the Apollo astronauts during their three brief, precious days on the Moon… Apollo.

  Suddenly, as seemed to happen too often these days, he was hit by a jolt of nostalgia. Apollo 11: Moonwalk parties, under clear starry skies, when Henry was eight or nine or ten. God, it seemed a million years ago, a world that was ten degrees cooler, or more, where there were still ice caps, and the new inland sea hadn’t covered over the state of Henry’s birth…

  Jane tired first. The cancers and their treatment had left her weakened. She returned to the cool of the car and turned on the radio. Henry could hear the voices of news announcers.

  The human world continued to turn. Less news than a decade ago, because less people. The volcanoes and the quakes and the floods and famine and war had killed off all but — the estimates went — around a billion people. Now, numbers were still declining, but more slowly. Almost gracefully.

  Less news. Nuclear war in the Balkans. Mutant riots in Asia. There was something about the war crimes trial of Dave Holland, the former British Prime Minister, who, he vaguely recalled, Henry had once met. The trial had finished with Holland being convicted of genocide during that desperate last-ditch British invasion of southern Ireland, mounted from Ulster, Prime Minister Bhide apologizing to the world, a death sentence ordered…

  But the murmur of words, emanating in digitized perfection from some satellite, meant little to Henry beside the dusty reality of these ancient rocks.

  Henry laboured on as the sun climbed higher in the sky. The sun was surrounded by a Bishop’s Ring, fat and oppressive, volcano ash.

  That night they ate their simple meal, and huddled together in zipped-up sleeping bags, and waited for the Moon to rise.

  Here it came, fat and full and cloudy, banishing the stars. And as they watched, a fine, white streak flashed across the Moon’s fat equator, a meteor scratch that wrapped itself half the way around the twin planet.

  Jane, her head cradled in Henry’s arm, stirred, half-asleep. “Do you think that was Jack?”

  “Perhaps.” Or someone else’s child, he thought, falling to the Moon in one of the Arks, the huge, heavy, clumsy mass transports, cushioned by the Moon’s new atmosphere behind a fat aeroshell.

  Henry’s outlandish scheme had worked.

  It was no less difficult to get out of Earth’s gravity well than it had ever been. But the presence of a braking atmosphere on the Moon had reduced the fuel load the big Arks had to carry by an order of magnitude, and made mass evacuation, of humans and the biosphere, possible. Not only that, he had given them somewhere worthwhile to go.

  And so the Shuttle-Zs launched almost daily, from Canaveral and Kourou and Baikonur, crude Saturn V-class boosters assembled from Space Shuttle technology, people crammed into sardine-can spaceships, fleeing to the Moon. He knew that Geena had emerged from her voluntary exile in the Russian heartland to work at Baikonur, trying to maintain some kind of standard of excellence among the fragmented, ill-trained and badly frightened work force there.

  Or maybe it was a Chinese ship, or one of the Indian fleet, based on old Soviet-era Energia technology, built with such haste and crammed even more full than the Shuttle-Zs, with even less precaution and safety checks than in the western sites. The Indian failure rate was a whopping forty per cent, and the toll in lost lives, on those crowded space trucks, was immense. Frank Turtle, the strange little guy from the bowels of NASA who had done so much to return humans to the Moon, had lost his life when one of those big old Energia clones had dropped back to the launch pad on Sri Lanka and blown apart, taking half the island with it.

  The rumours were that the failure statistics in China weren’t much better.

  It wasn’t going to stop the launches, though, nor the desperate press of people to get themselves or their children on those ramshackle ships. And Henry knew that any government that tried to scale down its launch program would suffer massive civil unrest. The launches were a safety valve, he supposed, the promise of one route, at least, out of the trap Earth had become.

  There was a lot of bitter conflict among the nations sending people to the Moon — the violation of international agreements on quotas and priorities went on daily — and it looked to Henry as if humanity was just going to transport all its old prejudices and inner conflicts intact to the new world, and presumably beyond. Depressing, but entirely predictable.

  The evacuation was gigantic, but it could never be complete.

  It would be possible to save only a fraction of the billions of people with which Earth had once teemed. Hence the Bottleneck laws. If the population was reduced to the minimum, by savage birth control measures, then, simply, there would be less people to be abandoned, to die, when the end came.

  Most people accepted that. About the only thing humans could control about this catastrophe was their own numbers: the human souls who would be spared a birth that would doom them only to the flame.

  Most people, it seemed to Henry, were doing their best, in this changing world. Behaving honourably, remarkably so in the circumstances. Surveys showed most populations around the planet were restricting their child birth rates voluntarily, accepting the Bottleneck laws.

  And, it was estimated, millions could be saved, before the final destruction.

  Remarkable, he thought. I bootstrapped a world. In the end, perhaps I really did save mankind. A fraction of it, anyhow.

  He’d saved Jack, at least: still just twenty-one years old, the boy was healthy as an ox and smart as a tack. Maybe that one achievement was enough, to justify Henry’s life.

  Now Jack was going to the Moon. But not us, Henry thought. There is nowhere for us, but here.

  Jane stirred again. He kissed the top of her head, the thinning hair there, and she settled deeper into sleep.

  As it turned out the Karroo was their last trip together, before Jane entered what the doctors delicately called her terminal stage: when their various treatments served no further purpose, and Henry, geologist turned amateur palaeontologist, became a nurse.

  Some of what they had to face was much as he anticipated. The painkillers and their side-effects. Her loss of appetite; he learned to cook Lebanese-style, masses of small, spiced dishes, to tempt her. After she was bed-ridden, there was the need to care for her skin: rubber rings, protective pads for her heels and elbows, and a bed cradle to keep the weight of the covers off her legs.

  And there were some things he didn’t anticipate. The constipation that doubled her in pain. The soreness in her mouth, which he treated with lip salves, mouth rinses and flavoured crushed ice for her to suck.

  He wanted to move her bed downstairs, in their home in Houston, but she wouldn’t accept that. It would be the mark of the end, she said.

  She would die upstairs.

  Strange thing. He’d been to the Moon, but he’d never seen anyone die close up.

  It wasn’t sudden. She slept more, sometimes drifting into unconsciousness, from which he couldn’t rouse her. Her breathing became noisy, like a rattle, but the doctors said it was just moisture on her chest.

  Sometimes, though, when she appeared unconscious she was aware, but unable to speak or see. But her hearing probably still worked — hearing was the last sense she lost — and so he spoke to her, reading her l
etters from Jack on the Moon, or news items, or, just, talking to her.

  Until there came a day when she seemed to fall ever more deeply into sleep, and she simply stopped breathing, and that was all.

  And Henry knew that he would be alone, for the rest of his life.

  4

  And ten years more…

  Ten years on, ten years older, and here was Henry putting on his spacesuit, fifty-five years old and utterly alone, letting the e-letter buzz in his earpiece for the fourth time, devouring this communication from the nearest thing to a son he ever had.

  Dear Dad…

  …I took little Nadezhda out to see the ecopoiesis farms in your old stamping ground of Aristarchus. They tell me they modelled the ecosystems here on the dry valleys of Antarctica, back when there used to be ice caps. Mats of green algae and cyanobacteria, lapping up the sunlight, resistant to the shortage of water and low partial pressure of oxygen, pumping out the oxygen. In some of the more clement areas there are even lichens and mosses, growing out in the open…

  The ground here was mud, baked utterly dry, cracked into hexagons the size of dinner plates. No water anywhere, of course. Mud, as far as Henry could see, ocean bottom mud, baked dry and hard as concrete; mud, and sand dunes, and salt flats, and gravel fans, covering this dried-up ocean bed.

  …We went to see the Apollo Museum there, at Aristarchus. They put it under a dome and reconstructed a lot of the original landing site, right down to the footprints they repaired from the rain damage they suffered. The day we were there they had Tracy Malone, the daughter of one of the astronauts, unveiling a plaque to her father, along with Geena, your ex-wife, who’s been working on lunar heritage projects now she’s retired. Quite symbolic: a representative of the first wave of lunar travellers, and the second, Geena, surrounded by the likes of us, the third. We introduced ourselves to Geena and she said to say hello. They showed Tracy Malone the place her father wrote her name in the dust with his fingertip. It’s under glass now. She cried a river, and it was a nice moment of closure, but I don’t think anyone had the heart to tell her they had to reconstruct it from the photos…