Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  And the corpse, of course, was all Fraser wanted to talk about.

  ‘ … It’s quite clear,’ Fraser said. ‘To beat Apollo, the Soviets sent up some poor sap in 1965 on a one-way flight.’

  ‘The Soviets denied they were ever going to the Moon,’ Michaela whispered.

  ‘Of course they did, when they lost. But that was a geopolitical lie. Both sides had a man-on-the-Moon programme. Both sides would do anything to win … Hence, the stiff. The idea was to keep him resupplied until the capability came along to retrieve him. We’d have done it if we had to. Remember Countdown.’

  ‘That was just a movie,’ Michaela whispered. ‘James Caan –’

  ‘Read the report. NASA SP-4002. Mercury technology. The Soviets covered their resupply flights as failed unmanned probes. Lunas 7, 8, 15, 18. And remember Lunokhod?’

  ‘The Lunokhods were science probes.’

  ‘The ones they reported did some science. The CIA knew about it, of course. But nobody had an interest in exposing this …’

  The party reached Building 7: something like a chemical plant, huge thickly-painted ducts and pipes everywhere. The Vice Prez was here to inspect the Integrated Life Support System Test Facility. This was a three-storey-high cylinder, built originally for some long-forgotten Cold War pressurization experiment. Now the top storey had been turned into a habitat. The guys in there used physico-chemical systems to recycle their air and urine, for sixty days at a time. The Vice Prez made a joke. What do you do at work, daddy?

  They met a woman who had worked in here on a previous trial. She was thrilled to meet real-life Moonwalkers. The team were goal-oriented, she said; they had their own astronaut-style crew patches.

  Michaela tried to imagine the cosmonaut on the Moon: six years, alone.

  Michaela was going to the Moon. She intended to work her way through NASA, make it up there in the second or third wave of colonists.

  Smart modern probes were already crawling all over the Moon: autonomous, packed with micromechanical systems and quantum logic chips, swarming and co-operating and discovering. Soon, humans would follow.

  There was ice in the regolith; they knew that for sure. There was ambitious talk of lassoing the Earth-approach asteroid, XF11, when it came past in October 2028, and applying its resource. And there were new, ingenious speculations that maybe the interior of the Moon was crammed with water and other volatiles, trapped there since the Moon’s savage formation. Riches which would, one day, turn the Moon green.

  There were even rumours that the probes had upturned evidence of some kind of sluggish biological activity, in the deep regolith.

  But Michaela knew that if it wasn’t for the corpse on the Moon they wouldn’t be going anywhere. It was a silent witness to a Cold War shame, the source of a new impulse to go back and do it nobly this time.

  Born long after Apollo, Michaela knew she could never be the first to walk on the Moon. Perhaps, though, she could have been the first human to die there. But the absurd, self-sacrificing bravery of that dead cosmonaut had robbed her of that ambition.

  The first child, then, she thought. The first mother on the Moon, the first to bring life there. Not a bad goal.

  … Unless, she thought, there is life there already.

  In Building 241, inside big stainless steel tanks, they were growing dwarf wheat. When Michaela looked through a little porthole she could see the wheat plants, pale and sturdy, straining up to the rows of fluorescents above them, warm little green things struggling for life in this clinical environment.

  Fraser was still talking about the dead cosmonaut. ‘We’re all guilty, Michaela,’ he said softly. ‘There is a little patch of the Mare Cognitum forever stained red with human blood …’

  And so I took humanity’s first step on another world. A little spray of dust, of ancient pulverized rock, lifted up around my feet and settled back.

  The ground glowed in the sunlight, but the sky was utterly black. There were craters of all dimensions, craters on craters. It was a land sculpted by impact.

  Nothing moved here. There was utter silence. This was disorienting. I fought an impulse to turn around, to see who was creeping up behind me.

  When I looked at my own shadow the sunlight around it came bouncing straight back at me. The shadow of my body was surrounded by an aura, Svetlana, a halo around my helmet.

  I felt filled with love for my country. I sang, ‘Oh Russia, my dear and wonderful country, / I am ready to give my life for you, / Just tell me when you need it, / And I will answer you only Yes.’

  I went to work.

  The crystal ship rose out of the tall, thin atmosphere. Samtha turned in her seat, uncomfortably aware of her heavy belly.

  The horizon curved sharply, blue and blurred. Sparks crawled busily: ships and surface cars and hovercraft, ferrying people to and fro across the Moon’s face. The highlands and Farside were peppered with circular crater lakes, glimmering, linked to the mare oceans by the great drainage canals.

  Samtha could see the gigantic feather-wake of the pleasure ships on the Tycho-Nubium.

  Soon the night hemisphere was turning towards her. But there was no true dark on the Moon, thanks to the solettas, the huge mirror farms which kept the air from snowing out. The solettas were already a thousand years old – nearly as old as the permanent occupation of the Moon itself – but they, or their successors, would have to keep working a lot longer, now that the Spin-Up had been abandoned.

  Wistfully she looked for the bone-white ice deserts of the lunar poles. The south pole had been Samtha’s home for a decade. She had worked there on the great deep-bore projects, seeking rich new sources of volatiles.

  Earth was rising. Blue Moon, brown Earth.

  Samtha stroked her belly, feeling the mass of the unborn child there. Today she was leaving, for the moons of Jupiter.

  Her project had been shut down. For there was life in the Moon.

  Samtha herself had found tracks dissolved into the rock by lunar micro-organisms, little scrapings just micrometres across. The bacteria fed off the Moon’s thin flow of internal heat, and mined carbon and hydrogen directly from compounds dissolved in igneous rocks.

  Time on the Moon ran slow. The deep bacteria, stunted, starved of energy and nutrients, reproduced just once every few centuries. But they had been found everywhere the temperature of the rocks was less than a hundred degrees or so. And they shared a common origin with Earth life: the first of them, it seemed, had been survivors of the great impact which had led to the budding-off of the Moon from young Earth. It was life which, though separated for five billion years, was nevertheless a remote cousin of her own cells.

  Now the Moon would become a museum and laboratory. And the Moon’s stillness, said the enthusiasts, made it an ideal test bed for certain new theories Samtha failed to understand – something to do with the spontaneous collapse of quantum-wave functions – perhaps, it was even said, there was a deeper life still to be found in the silent rocks of the Moon.

  The Moon, as a laboratory of life and consciousness.

  But humanity’s role in the future evolution of the Moon would be curtailed. People and their autonomous companions would be restricted to a thin surface layer, limited in the energy they could deploy and the changes they could make.

  Samtha had lived through the Die-Back. She accepted the logic; life had to be cherished. But she was a mining engineer and there was nothing for her to do here. So she was going to Jupiter, to mine turbulent, gravity-wrenched Io – where native life was, as far as anybody knew, utterly impossible.

  She had no regrets. She was happy that her child would grow up in the rich cosmopolitan society of the moons.

  But Samtha was sentimental. She knew that this turning away meant that the Moon could never be more than a shrunken twin of Earth, doomed only to decline.

  For the last time the ship soared over the limb of the Moon. Prompted by a murmur from the autonomous ship, Samtha looked out at a grey ellipse, like a mol
e disfiguring the blue-white face of the Moon. It was the open grave of Vladimir Alexeyevich Zotov, sealed in vacuum under its mile-wide dome. She wondered what that brave Russian would have made of this subtle abandonment of the world he had given his life to reach.

  The shuttle tipped up and leapt out of the Moon’s shallow gravity well. As the twin worlds receded, watery crescents side by side, Samtha bade a last farewell to the ancient cosmonaut.

  Goodbye, goodbye.

  My lander rests in a broad valley. There is a broad, meteorite-eroded crater wall nearby, which I call Rimma Crater, for my wife, your dear mother. If I climb this wall – passing through ancient rubble, boulders the size of houses – I can look back over the shining, undulating plain of Fra Mauro. The tracks from my wheeled cart stretch like snail paths down the hillside, to where my lander sits, sparkling like a toy. The ground around the lander is scuffed by my footprints.

  The mountains rise up like topped-off pyramids into the black sky. These are mountains which date back almost to the formation of the solar system itself, their contours eroded to smoothness. The constant micrometeorite hail is grinding the Moon to dust. There is a layer of shattered rock and dust, all over the Moon.

  I feel isolated, detached, suspended over the rubble of a billion years.

  Svetlana, here is how I live on the Moon.

  My lander is five metres tall. It consists of a boxy rocket stage standing on four legs, and a fat cabin on top. The cabin is a bulbous, misshapen ball, capped by a fat, wide disk, which is a docking device. Two dinner-plate-sized antennae are stuck out on extensible arms from the descent stage. The whole assemblage is swathed in a green blanket, for thermal insulation.

  My cabin is a cosy nest, lined with green fabric. My couch occupies much of the space. Behind my head there is a hatch. There are three small viewing ports recessed into the cabin walls. At my left hand is a console with radio equipment and instruments to regulate temperature and air humidity. On the wall opposite my face, TV and film cameras peer at me. My food is squeezed from tubes. Cupboards set in the walls of the cabin are crammed with such tubes.

  The cabin is, in fact, an orbital module adapted from Korolev’s new spacecraft design, called Soyuz. This lander is an early model, of course. Little more than an engineering prototype, lacking an engine to bring me home.

  Crude solar arrays are draped on frames across the surface of the Moon. In the lander are batteries, capturing the sun energy that keeps me alive during the long nights. But after so many years the lunar weather has taken its toll. The insulation blankets are discoloured. All the equipment is thoroughly irradiated, and remarkably dusty. The paint has turned to tan, but it is uneven, and where I look more closely I can see tiny micrometeorite pits, little craters dug into the paintwork.

  Each time I get back into my shelter, I find new scars in my faceplate: tiny pits from the invisible interplanetary sleet within which I walk. Soon I will be blinded.

  Moon dust gets in my lungs and causes chest pains. It eats away at joints and seals. Eventually, I suspect, it will overtake me, and everything mechanical will just stop working.

  One good thing is that in the lunar vacuum, the dust when disturbed will settle out ballistically. I have kept it clear of my solar panels simply by placing them a metre off the ground, too high for casually disturbed dust to reach.

  I have filed reports on many such observations, for I am enthusiastic about the future of the colonized Moon.

  cal342 let her viewpoint soar over the surface of the abandoned Moon.

  The evidence of the ancient terraforming effort lay everywhere: the gouged-out canals which the micrometeorite wind had yet to erode, the jewel-like cities still sparkling under a thickening layer of dust, the glimmer of frozen air in the shadowed cold traps of the poles.

  A million years of human history were wrapped around this small world. That was almost as long as Earth itself – for the first immigration to the Moon had occurred just a few dozen millennia after the emergence of the primal sapiens species itself – but now only shreds and shards of primitive technology remained here, as if ape-fingers had never disturbed this dusty ground.

  Now that ancient equilibrium was under threat.

  A perturbed Oort Cloud comet was approaching. It would be, it was said, the greatest impact event in the solar system since the formation of Earth-Moon itself. And cal342 was here to witness it.

  She found the two bodies nestling in an eroded crater at a dust sea’s edge.

  The first was the physical shell she had prepared for herself. She settled into it.

  … She found herself breathing. She was gazing at the sky from within a cage of bone: authentically primate, of course, but oddly restricting.

  The second body, lying beside her now, was much more ancient.

  Even now, with primate eyes, cal342 could see the intruder. It was the brightest object in the sky save the sun: a spark of glowering red in the plane of the ecliptic, a point light in a place it didn’t belong.

  It was a star, called Gliese 710.

  Gliese was making its closest approach to the sun: close enough that it had plunged into the Oort Cloud, the thick belt of comets that lay at the periphery of the solar system. For millennia already the rogue dwarf had been hurling giant ice worldlets into the system’s vulnerable heart. Many of cal342’s contemporaries had, in fact, bluntly refused to endure this difficult time, and had suspended consciousness until the star had receded.

  Not cal342, though.

  cal342 had lived a very long time, and she had achieved a certain contentment. She could think of no better way of terminating her existence than this.

  For humanity faced a crisis of purposelessness.

  Once humans, proudly conscious, had indulged in a certain arrogance. Quantum physics described the universe as filled with uncertainties and probability and ghostly multiple existences. The distinguishing property of consciousness was the ability to observe: for when an observation was made, the quantum functions would collapse, uncertainty would disappear, and the universe became – if only briefly and locally – definite.

  Humans had spread among the stars, and had found nobody like themselves. So, it had seemed, humans were unique in their consciousness. Perhaps by their observing, humans were actually calling the universe itself into existence. Perhaps humans had been created by the universe so that it could generate itself.

  But then, in laboratories on the still and silent Moon, spontaneous quantum collapse had been detected in inanimate objects.

  In humble rocks, in fact.

  An individual particle might take a hundred million years to achieve this – but in a large object, such as a Moon rock, there were so very many particles that one of them would almost immediately collapse its wave function – and then, in a cascade effect of entangled quantum functions, the rest would immediately follow. It was called, after the twentieth-century scientists who first proposed the phenomenon, the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber effect.

  The agonized debate had lasted a hundred thousand years.

  At the end of it, there was no doubt that the rocky Moon – scarred by impacts and the clumsy meddling of humans, bearing its own sullen biological lode – was itself alive, and, in some huge geologic sense, aware. And so were other small, stable worlds, and many other unpromising structures. The uniqueness of humans was lost.

  Now they knew how to look, humans found nothing but mind, infesting the giant structures of the universe. But it was mind that was patient, geologic, immortal. Nothing like their freakish selves.

  There was nobody, anywhere, to talk to; and certainly nobody to care.

  Science slowed. Art grew decadent. The various species of humanity fragmented and turned in on themselves. They were, it seemed, dancing in the face of oblivion, consuming the resources of worlds – even committing elaborate forms of suicide.

  Like cal342 herself.

  cal342 turned her head – it was like operating machinery – and looked at the body which
lay beside her.

  For almost a million years, since the collapse of its protective domes, the body had been exposed to the micrometeorite rain. The top of the body had imploded, leaving a gaping, empty chest cavity, a crumbling hollow shell around it. The head was exposed, and eroded pinnacles of bone hinted at the shape of a skull, eye sockets staring. This human corpse was of the Moon now, reduced to lunar dust, made the same colour as the dark regolith.

  Of the Moon, and of the life within it.

  Was it possible this ancient traveller, coupled to the chthonic mind of the Moon, was still, in some sense, aware? Was he dreaming, as he waited for the comet?

  And if so, what were his dreams?

  She looked up. The comet light was bright now.

  Her choice of viewpoint had been deliberate. Here she was, as humans had always been, her very size suspended between atoms and stars. She was a transient construct arising from baryonic matter, itself a small island in a sea of dark. Her consciousness was spindrift, soon to dissipate.

  She dug her hands into crumbling regolith. She wondered if the patient Moon understood what would become of it today.

  Fear stabbed.

  At the appointed hour I saw the cargo vessel descend.

  It was a glittering star in the sunlight, its rocket flame invisible. It came down over the prow of Rimma Crater, perhaps a mile from me. This marked success, Svetlana! Some past craft had failed to leave Earth orbit, or had missed the Moon, or had come down impracticably far away from me, or had crashed.

  Elated, I loaded up my cart and set off.

  Soon I approached the walls of Rimma Crater. The climb was tiring. My suit was stiff, as if I was inside an inflated tyre.

  At the crater rim there were rocks everywhere, poking through a mantle of dust. The crater walls plummeted steeply to a floor of smashed-up rock a hundred metres below.

  And there, planted in the crater’s centre, was the spacecraft.