The sky was just a dome of mud-orange haze. But it wasn’t hard to see his way here, about as bright as an early evening in LA used to be. In fact there was more sunlight than appeared, still enough to sustain agriculture, to feed what was left of the Earth’s population, under the big domes in the old deserts.
Not that there was much left of the Earth’s population, all things considered. And if the stories were true about Siberia — it was said that because of the Venus radiation, and a lot of ancillary shit when the Chernobyl-era reactors out there started to go pop, a new homo species had emerged, viable, unable to interbreed with outsiders — the estimates of surviving human populations might be even further off.
…Nadezhda is going to spend her next break from school working at the Tycho carbon-sequestration pit.
I’ve got mixed feelings about her working there.
With all those burners and flues, Tycho is heavily industrial — something like Pittsburgh used to be, or the Ruhr cities. And with the same darker social side. They burn the biomass to recover volatiles, before burying the carbon-rich residue. It’s all part of the global scheme to maximize the production of free oxygen, which not many of us understand… But Tycho is one of the few places where the work we’re doing is simple enough for a five-year-old kid to contribute to.
I’ve taken Nadezhda around the place I work, the oxygen fountain at Landsberg. It sounds exotic — the ten-thousand-megaton thermonukes, the controlled energy cascades from Moonseed beds, all of it cracking the lunar regolith for oxygen — but there isn’t much, really, to see.
It can be a little bleak here.
For the foreseeable future, humans are going to be consuming eighty per cent of the lunar biosphere’s net primary production. And that’s a hell of a lot, maybe three times as high as humans ever reached on old Earth.
That means all the arable land surface we make, even most of the plankton in the crater lakes, is going to have to be turned over to crops. Other than humans, only those creatures that can survive in fields and orchards can be permitted. Any that need virgin forest or any kind of undisturbed habitat are going to have to stay in the zygote banks for now.
They tell me it’s going to take all of ten thousand years before we’re stable and self-regulating, before a human will be able to take off her resp mask and walk out of the domes… Still, we’re promised the first trees and grasses under the Copernicus dome before the decade is out. They are concentrating for now on developing the most useful crops: food, like potatoes, bananas, yams, sugar-cane, coconut; but also gourds and bamboo and plants we can use to make tapa cloth, dyes and oil.
It’s a grand vision, for all that. When the full terraforming gets started, the ecologists say it is going to be like the colonization of new volcanic islands, like Hawaii. The few species we release here to this native soil will explode into all the niches they find, over time, and diversify, new plants and animals to complete the colonization of the Moon. No doubt producing a new ecosystem the like of which Earth never saw.
But that will take a million years, they say. I wish I could fast-forward to see it. Morning on the Moon…
Henry checked his recording equipment, balky modern stuff which he didn’t know how to work, and thought about Earth.
It was the great tectonic events, of course, which had done the greatest damage. There had been the great lava flows off the east African coast, six thousand square miles of new basalt spilling in waves across the land, spewing out gases; everyone thought that was a stupendous catastrophe.
But the coup de grâce had been the giant magma plume that had burst, unexpectedly and explosively, through the crust beneath Yellowstone.
It was an explosion that had been ten thousand times as powerful as all mankind’s nuclear weapons, at their peak, ignited together. From a caldera the size of New Hampshire, blazing material had punched out of the atmosphere — some even entering low orbit — most of it falling back as giant fireballs which ignited what was left of the Earth’s vegetation.
And from the crater itself a huge fireball, followed by a dust plume, had swept up to the stratosphere, and added to the soot and dust from the burning forests to create a planet-covering pall of darkness.
Lights out, all over the Earth.
The atmospheric shock-heating was enough to cause oxygen and nitrogen to combine to nitrous oxide, which had combined with rain water to make acid; and enough acid rain had fallen on the planet to make the top three hundred feet of the oceans sufficiently acidic to dissolve calcareous shell material, so driving still more orders of life to final extinction. The food chains, already tenuous, had finally collapsed. Death soaked the planet, starting with the phytoplankton.
Ash falling, all over the Earth, like the thin layer that had been found in the rocks following the Cretaceous extinction, once puzzled over by scientists like Henry in bright, clean labs…
The magma plumes, giant wellings-up in the Earth’s molten substance that originated as deep as the core-mantle boundary, had been significant in Earth’s deep history. They had shattered continents, breaking up the Pangaea supercontinent, splitting Gondwanaland into two halves, splitting India, Madagascar and Antarctica from Africa. But all that had taken hundreds of millions of years. Now, the plumes” violence was manifested on timescales of mere decades, even years.
There was the mountain-building event in Antarctica, for instance, where the Indo-Australian plate had suddenly decided to set off south. More of the great magma plumes under Earth’s hotspots had come boiling through the crust, at the Canaries, under the tsunami-lashed wreckage of Hawaii, under Iceland. And the rift valleys all over the Earth had started to open up, in east Africa and Lake Baikal and the Red Sea, the continents just splitting apart. The river Rhine had disappeared into a crack in the ground, and then the graben through which it once flowed started to bubble with new ocean-floor plate.
What all the volcanism was mostly doing, in addition to killing people and boiling the seas, was pumping out a new atmosphere for the Earth: an unwelcome air of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide and hydrogen laced with arsenic and chlorine, that would, the estimates went, finish up ten times as thick as the old nitrogen-oxygen one. Immense greenhouse cycles had already started, and the oceans were evaporating and would soon start to boil…
And Henry’s beloved Earth was turning into what Venus used to be.
One large community of people had retreated to what was left of the oceans, sheltering from the heat there. But even the marine invertebrates were choking on ash. And the volcanism had polluted the water with exotic trace elements — like cadmium and mercury and iridium and osmium — and the oceans, the birthplaces of life on Earth, were, in their last days, becoming toxic.
But, in a way, it was geologist’s heaven. Processes that ought to take millions of years were occurring in mere years, even months. As if the Earth was trying to cram in her best special effects while she still had time. Geology, overwhelmed with unwelcome evidence, was at last becoming a mature science — just as, so he heard, fundamental physics had been galvanized by the study of the Moonseed processes, so that whole new areas of theory and technological achievement were being opened up.
None of it any use, though, in stitching poor Earth back together.
Dear Jane had called the sites of the great magma plumes Earth’s chakras. The energy centres, the wheel of light from which Earth’s energies were bleeding away. It was as good a description as any.
He stepped forward cautiously, keeping an eye on the compass set into his chest pack. The compass was inertial, a little spinning gyroscope system, like they used to use in aircraft and spaceships. It was the only type that was reliable nowadays; the electronic kind that communicated with the GPS satellites was too easily thrown out by the auroras and the big electrical storms that flapped around the planet, and you couldn’t use a magnetic compass, of course, since Earth’s magnetic field had gone to hell. The geophysicists said it was all to do with the melting of the
ice caps and the oceans” evaporation, all that mass redistribution making Earth wobble like a kid’s top after a hefty kick. The reversals in the magnetic field’s polarity were coming about once a year now, thus screwing up the magnetosphere and letting through the cosmic rays, just adding to the fun down here, and coincidentally fouling up Henry Meacher’s map-reading…
But he couldn’t make head or tail of this damn astronaut’s compass.
Well, maybe it was a little brighter to his left, to the east, where the sun must be rising. Maybe there were miles of cloud above him, the evaporated oceans lofted into the sky; maybe his green Earth had turned to a pearly white ball like Venus had been, where an American needed a space suit to walk out of the big underground shelters; but as far as he knew the world was still spinning the right way.
Anyhow, he might get lost, but wasn’t going to come to any harm, on this plain of mud.
He stepped forward, carefully.
…It still seems remarkable to me to see Nadezhda bounding around in the low gravity without an ounce of self-consciousness.
Of course she has no memory of the Moon before the modification. It seems perfectly natural to her to lope around the mare with nothing more than cold weather clothing, sunglasses and an oxygen pack! I’ve shown her recordings of the old Apollo Moonwalks, but she doesn’t say much.
I suspect among the young people born here there is already a conspiracy theory circulating: that the Moon has always been this way — that maybe the old airless Moon never existed — that maybe our “terraforming” is a clumsy attempt to rectify some eco screw-up on a previously pristine Moon. God, if only that was true!
I do know that the images the young ones see of Earth are affecting them in ways we didn’t anticipate.
For sure, the kids are evolving away from us, Henry. Already. Oh, Nadezhda doesn’t look much different from me at her age, when I was nagging mum to take me to the McDonald’s on Princes Street; it’s going to take generations even to work through the obvious physiological changes — the low G adaptations, for instance; Nadezhda will have to spend her life on courses of treatment against bone calcium loss and body fluid imbalances.
But her children will be a little taller, and a little more resistant; and her grandchildren a little more so… and so on.
Humans will survive here. I’m sure of that now. What I’m not convinced about is how much they will care about old Earth.
The young ones already have their own agenda. It’s hard for them to have any loyalty for the home planet when they see that now you need spacesuits just to survive down there…
There has already been some trouble at the drop points in Procellarum. Resistance to new immigrants, even to accepting more loads of rocks and frozen bugs from Earth.
I just hope it all holds together long enough to get the best of it away, before the end.
Well, maybe it’s inevitable. We’ve done all we can to equip the kids and educate them. Now, the future is theirs…
As the tectonic events accelerated, predictions were being revised, and it seemed they were approaching the Bottleneck itself, the great, final die-back from which nothing on the surface of Earth, nothing, was going to escape. The laws had gotten harsher. No more children to be born on Earth. Anybody who refused to comply would be refused boarding, for themselves or their children, to the Arks to the Moon.
It was harsh, and not universally accepted by the governments, and had caused revolution, and more than one war. In South America, where the Pope had mounted his last stand against the managed decline of the population, the fallout of thermonuclear destruction had added to Earth’s final woes.
And nevertheless — despite the logic and wisdom, despite the inevitability of the Bottleneck — there were still children being born on the Earth: the animal response of frightened humans to the threat of death, life trying to propagate in the face of hopelessness. But the helpless new kids were only more moths to the flames, Henry thought.
In a way, he was glad Jane wasn’t here to see this.
At least she had lived to see her grandchildren, growing straight and tall in the thin, clean air of the Moon.
But as for Henry, this was his home.
He had been in love with the Earth since the first time he opened a geology book, the first time he picked up a pebble from a beach and wondered how it got there. Now it was burning down around him, but he wasn’t about to abandon it.
He found himself walking on a layer of salt, white and bright in the smoggy twilight, that crunched under his feet.
This ocean had dried once before, though not in human history. And that had been significant. The ocean had ceased to buffer the local climate, feeding land areas with rainfall and reducing temperature swings. Forests had disappeared, to be replaced by dry grasslands, and the arboreal creatures had faced the choice of migrating, adapting, or dying.
One group of tree-dwelling primates was forced out of the branches that had hidden them from predators, and pushed onto the new grasslands of Africa, where they were going to need greater size and better locomotion and, above all, to get smarter.
They had never looked back.
Now, five million years later, a descendant of those frightened primates, dressed in a fragile spacesuit, stalked across the dried-up bed of the Mediterranean, looking for fossils and human artifacts, a few last treasures for the final Arks to the Moon.
5
And a final ten years…
Henry was standing on the Earth’s oldest rocks, and talking to his granddaughter, on the Moon.
…So here I am, Nadezhda, your honorary grandfather, sixty-five years old and no smarter than I ever was, waiting for the other shoe to fall.
I don’t suppose you know what that means. I can’t even remember how long it takes a shoe to fall on the Moon. Or if you wear shoes in those domes of yours.
Whatever.
I have instruments here, various sensors that show me what is happening inside the planet. I have a whole-Earth image here broadcast from one of your nearside observatories, I think at Kepler. I’m glad you can see the surface, from up there. The giant volcanoes blew off the crud, the Venusian atmosphere that was gathering, and who’d have thought that would be a blessing?…
He was in Isua, in west Greenland. He was standing on supracrustal rock bounded on both sides by granitoid gneisses: three point six billion years old. Babies for the Moon, but these rocks were the old men of Earth, the oldest, most stable place on the planet.
It seemed appropriate, to be here, now.
He was in a concrete, heat-insulated, pressurized bunker, which in turn was protected by what he would have called a force field when he was growing up, a piece of the smart stuff the kids on the Moon had been dreaming up. Technological evolution, force-fed by its environment, filling the niches.
He was here because it was one of the few solid, stable places left on the planet.
Earth, from space, looked like a jigsaw puzzle, or maybe like a pan coming to the boil, black continent pieces outlined by blood red.
It was astonishing how events had accelerated, towards the end. It had been faster than anyone had believed.
He wondered how long he’d last. How much of it he would see.
…Did you know I was alive when Apollo 8 flew by the Moon? The astronauts, Borman, Lovell and Anders, were the first humans to see the Earth whole. They thought it was blue, and fragile, like a Christmas tree ornament. Well, they were right. Fragile.
I know you think I’m crazy to stay.
You know, one of the most beautiful theories of the history of the Earth was published by a guy called the Reverend Thomas Burnet, in England in the seventeenth century. Burnet said the Earth originated from chaos, a fluid mass of particles of matter. The particles grew together to form a perfect sphere with a smooth surface, concentric shells of liquid and air around a solid core. But there was an oily fluid in with the water, and when dust mixed with it, it formed a firm and fertile envelope over the layer
of oily water.
But the sun’s heat made the fertile shell dry and crack. The waters below boiled, vaporized and exploded, and the Earth was flooded. When the agitation settled out, the waters drained back to the low places. Fragments of Paradise were left sticking up as continents and islands.
And that’s the world I was born on.
Eventually, though, flames would come to purify the Earth, and it would return to its paradisical state, and finally merge with God by becoming a star.
Well, it was a theory. That’s the way geology used to be, kid, a thing of dreams and fancies unsullied by brute fact. We only got into all that science stuff when the industrialists came along and started asking where they were going to find coal and iron ore and oil, and why the hell is the world so complicated anyhow?
We know the answers now, of course: all those aeons of mountain building and destruction, the rise and fall of the seas, the compaction, pressure, heating, cooling, sedimentation, erosion. The Earth is a rocky labyrinth.
Was, anyhow. It’s getting kind of simpler, even as I stand here.
Strange how Burnet seems to have been right all along, though, doesn’t it?
It had been a couple of years since the Moonseed made the mantle so hot that plate tectonics effectively stopped. The plates were too hot to behave in the rigid way they used to; and the rock of the mantle was just too runny to support big horizontal movements.
It had been thought that would reduce the volcanism for a time, but it didn’t turn out that way.
Still, the map of Earth was recognizable. Just.
The ocean plates were softening and melting back. The continents showed up in his images as black and dark islands in glowing oceans, the ancient granite cratons surrounded by crumpled greenstone. The cratons were the cores around which the continents had accreted in the first place, crust slabs which had formed in the centre of ancient mantle convection cells; now they were being uncovered once more.
Moonseed n-3 Page 62
