But the landing had been faulty. The frame had collapsed, and the Lunokhod rover – an eight-wheeled bathtub shape – lay smashed open, glittering, amid the wreckage of the landing stage.
There was a light in the sky. I looked up. I had to tip back on my heels to do it.
I saw the Earth, a fat crescent, four times the size of a full Moon. And there, crossing the zenith, was a single, brilliant, unwinking star: it was the orbiting Command Module of an American Apollo spacecraft, waiting to take its astronauts home.
I think I knew at that moment that I would not return home.
I readied my cart and clambered down into Rimma Crater, preparing to salvage the Lunokhod.
The comet nucleus slammed into the Moon’s southern hemisphere.
A shock wave raced into the structure of the impactor and vaporized it immediately. A cloud of gas and molten silicate and iron billowed away from the Moon. And a second wave dug down into the ancient hide of the Moon, pulverizing and compressing. The lunar rocks rebounded with equal violence; they disintegrated utterly and exploded from the new cavity.
Then – seconds after the impact, even before the ejecta fell back – the excavated zone began to freeze. Waves of liquid rock froze like ripples on a sluggish pond. The new mountain walls began to collapse under their own weight, forming complex terraces.
But now the ejecta spray fell back from space, blanketing the new mountains in a vast sheet of molten rock.
It was over in minutes. Immediately the steady hail of micrometeorites began its millennial work, darkening and eroding the new deposits.
The cooling scar was the largest impact crater in the solar system.
The Moon, spinning, cooling, steadily receded from its parent Earth. For a time its axis of spin rocked, disturbed by Gliese and the impact. But at last even that residual motion died away, and once more the rigid face of the Moon was locked towards Earth.
But the impact, and Gliese’s ferocious gravity, had loosened Earth’s ancient grip on its battered offspring.
Month by month, the Moon’s orbit became wider, more chaotic.
At last the Moon wandered away, to begin an independent path around the sun.
Goodbye, goodbye.
It was Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov who informed me of the decision of the Presidium. One cosmonaut to another. I admired the way he spoke. I am not certain I could have achieved such dignity. The N-1 booster programme has been abandoned after continuing failure. No more cosmonauts will be flying to the Moon.
Our managers, it seemed, tried to strike a bargain with the Americans. If they would use a late Apollo flight to retrieve me, my flight would remain a secret – as would my triumph – and the Americans would take the public credit for reaching the Moon first. It is not a bargain I would have welcomed, even if it had saved my life!
But the last Apollos have been cancelled by the Americans; tens of millions of dollars are too high a price to pay, it seems, for my life.
My stranding here was always a possibility, of course. Even so I accepted the challenge gladly! My mission, should it succeed, could only reflect glory and honour on the Communist Party, and on Soviet science and technology.
… But there was something in Alexei’s tone which conveyed to me a deeper truth.
The Soviet Union cannot admit that at the heart of their space programme was the callous sacrifice of a cosmonaut. And NASA will never admit that their pilot was not the first to the Moon. Thus both sides are locked forever in a shameful compact of deception.
Stranded on the Moon, waiting to die, I am an object of shame, not of glory. I am a relic of a different age, to be hidden.
My cabin is full of noise. There are hundreds of electrical devices, fans, regenerators, carbon-dioxide absorbers and filters. It is like being inside a busy apartment. But in an apartment, a home, there are voices, the noises of life. Here there is only machinery.
I do not begrudge Colonel Armstrong his glory. He is a good pilot. If Korolev and Gagarin had lived, I believe it might have been different.
Humans had exploded from their planet, dug briefly into the Moon’s ancient hide, and disappeared.
After the separation of Earth and Moon, humans never returned.
The sun was gradually growing warmer. After a mere billion years, life on Earth was overwhelmed. Five billion years more, and the sun’s failing core caused it to swell up and destroy its inner planets.
Not the Moon, though.
The freed Moon circled patiently before the sun’s swollen, ferocious face, until the last fires died, and the sun collapsed.
A binary star system, long extinguished, veered past the sun; and the Moon, at last, was torn free.
It began a long journey into the darkness, out of the plane of the disintegrating solar system.
For a time new stars flared around the wandering Moon. And in the rings of rock which surrounded the developing stars, small rocky worlds were born. They glowed briefly in the light of their gaudy parents, and waited for the stillness that would inevitably come.
At last, though, the galaxy’s resources were depleted. After a hundred billion years no new stars could form. And after a hundred thousand billion years, the last of the stars were reaching the end of their lives.
The great darkness fell over the universe.
Slow cosmic expansion isolated the wreckage of the galaxy from its neighbours. And within that wreckage – a drifting mass of black holes, neutron stars, black dwarfs, stray planets – the soft leakage of gravitational waves caused a gentle, subtle collapse.
The remnant of a star cluster orbited the giant black hole that lurked, slowly evaporating, at the core of the galaxy.
The drifting Moon approached the cluster.
It is lunar night. I am walking across the face of a new Moon. My suit is protesting noisily.
I climb the wall of Rimma Crater.
The phases of the Earth and Moon are opposite. And so the Earth is full, fat above me, a shiny blue ball, laced about by cloud. Its light is blue and cold, and somehow it seems to suit the gentle curves of the Moon, these old, eroded hills.
Time is stretched out here, in the Moon’s soft gravity. A day lasts a month. And beneath that there is a still grander scale of time, of the slow evolution of the Moon itself. I look at the hills, the crater-sculpted plain beneath, and I know that I could have come here a billion years ago, or a billion years from now, to find the same scene.
The Moon cares nothing for time.
Perhaps Earth, with its complex geology and cargo of life, is unique. But the galaxy must be full of small, timeless worlds like this one. Explorers of the future will stand on a hundred, a thousand worlds like this, peering up at different patterns of stars. And will they remember this, the original Moon, the prototypical destination for mankind?
And as I frame these dreamlike thoughts, it is as if, for a brief moment, I have come further than the Moon itself: as if, in fact, I have spread myself across the stars, to the ends of space and time, like the godlike people of the farthest future.
They have stopped talking to me.
I refuse to be hidden upstairs, on this Moon, like an insane uncle.
Trillion-year meditations were enriched by the slow gathering of rocky worlds, torn loose of the evaporating galaxy.
Here was one such, approaching the great clustering of mind, as if with caution.
Curiosity was engaged, briefly.
Remnants of crude structures, long vanished, were observed on its surface – and even traces of an ancient carbon-hydrogen body, a spindrift remnant clinging to the rocky world, preserved by the deeper geologic soul.
But none of that was important.
If there had been awareness of humanity’s brief span, there would have been only pity.
Humans had been tragic, fluttering, fragile creatures: spindrift, with no future or past. And they had vanished without ever understanding why they were so alone.
The truth was, humans had emerged in a d
ull corner of the universe.
Amid the crashing energies of galaxy cores, by the light of clusters of a million swarming stars, in the giant molecular clouds that spanned whole systems: those were the deeps where the great minds had gathered, minds like gongs, minds beyond the reach – even the imagination – of mankind. No wonder humans had never understood.
The spark of chthonic consciousness – swimming out of the darkness, its mountains eroded almost to smoothness – was enfolded at last.
Welcome, welcome.
I lie in the soft, silent dust.
I can feel its cold, sucking at my warm body through the layers of my suit. I am in the crater’s shadow here; the sun will never reach my crumbling bones. I will record as long as I can, dear Svetlana.
The psychologists who prepared me said that, according to Freud, there is no time in the unconscious. And that, at certain intensely charged moments, there is no time in consciousness itself.
Can that be true?
And can it be that, at the moment of death, the most intense moment of all, the mind accelerates and the soul becomes eternal – an eternity crammed into that last exquisite instant?
If so, here on the timeless Moon, what will I dream?
Svetlana, the daughter I never held! I love you!
Tears flood my eyes, blurring the light of the full Earth.
TOUCHING CENTAURI
Fermi obsesses me (Malenfant wrote to his grandson). I know it does. Your grandmother – Emma, who died before you were born – must have spent half her life telling me as much.
But the more I think about it the more puzzling it gets.
The more I think there must be something wrong with the universe. That’s all there is to it.
Kate Manzoni was there the day Reid Malenfant poked a hole in the wall of reality.
When she arrived in the auditorium, Malenfant was speaking from a podium. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to JPL, and the climax of Project Michelangelo. This truly is a historic moment. For today, June 14 2025, we are anticipating the returned echo of the laser pulse we fired at the planet Alpha Centauri A-4, more than eight years ago …’
It was her first glimpse of Malenfant. He stood in a forest of microphones, a glare of TV lights. To either side of Malenfant, Kate recognized Cornelius Taine, the reclusive mathematician (and rumoured marginal autistic) who had come up with the idea for the project, and Vice President Maura Della, spry seventy-something, who had pushed the funding through Congress.
Kate was here for the human angle, and by far the most interesting human in this room was Malenfant himself. But right now he was still talking like a press release.
‘Four light years out, four light years back: it has been a long journey for our beam of light, and only a handful of plucky photons will make it home. But we’ll be here to greet them – and think what it means. Today, we will have proof that our monkey fingers have touched Centauri …’
Kate allowed her attention to drift.
JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had turned out to look like a small hospital, squashed into a cramped and smoggy Pasadena-suburb site dominated by the green shoulders of the San Gabriel Mountains. This was the von Karman auditorium, the scene of triumphant news conferences when JPL had sent probes to almost every planet in the solar system. Heady days – but long gone now, and JPL had been returned to the Army to do weapons research, its original purpose.
Well, today the big old auditorium was crowded again, with mission managers and scientists and politicians and journalists – like Kate herself – all crammed in among the softscreen terminals. Camera drones drifted like party balloons overhead, or darted like glittering insects through the air.
She walked past display stands, between scrolling softscreen images and bullshitting nerd-scientist types, all eager to lecture the gathered lay folk on the wonders of Project Michelangelo.
She could learn, for example, how the planets of the twin star system Alpha Centauri had first been detected back in 2010, by a European Space Agency planet-hunter probe called Eddington. Working with robotic patience in the silence of space, Eddington had detected minute oscillations in Alpha A’s brightness: the signature of a whole system of planets passing before the star’s face.
Of most interest was the fourth planet out, Alpha A-4. Not much bigger than Earth, A-4 orbited in the so-called Goldilocks zone: not too far from its sun for water to freeze, not so close to be too hot for life. Follow-up studies had shown that A-4’s atmosphere contained methane. What was significant about that was that it was chemically unstable: there had to be some mechanism to inject such a reactive gas into A-4’s unseen air.
Most likely candidate: life.
But still, despite these exciting hints, A-4 was little more than a dot of light, huddled blurrily close to its sun. There were plans underway to launch high-resolution space telescopes to image the continents and oceans of this second Earth, as everybody hoped it would turn out to be.
But now, ahead of all that, here was Reid Malenfant fronting up Project Michelangelo: an audacious attempt to bounce a laser beam off a planet of Alpha Centauri.
Malenfant had come down off his podium. Standing under an image of Michelangelo’s God and Adam – the famous fingertip touch that had become a clichéd icon for this kind of endeavour – he was mixing it with the journos and pols and various VIP types at the front of the auditorium. Everybody was talking at once, though not to each other, all of them yammering into com systems mounted on their wrists and lapels.
But even so, for this bitty, distracted audience, Malenfant was holding forth about life in space. ‘For me the whole course of my life has been dominated by a simple question: Where is everybody? Even as a kid I knew that the Earth was just a ball of rock, on the fringe of a nondescript galaxy. I just couldn’t believe that there was nobody out there looking back at me down here …’ In his sixties, Malenfant was tall, wiry slim, with a bald head shining like a piece of machinery. Close to, he looked what he was, a grounded astronaut, ridiculously fit, tanned deep. ‘I lapped up everything I could find on how space is a high frontier, a sky to be mined, a resource for humanity. All that stuff shaped my life. But is that all there is to it? Is the sky really nothing more than an empty stage for mankind? But if not, where are they? This is called the Fermi Paradox …’
He fell silent, gazing at Kate, who had managed to worm her way to the front of the loose pack. He glanced at her name-tag. ‘Ms Manzoni. From –?’
‘I’m freelancing today.’ She forced a smile. She could smell desert dust on him, hot and dry as a sauna.
‘And you think there’s a story in the Fermi Paradox?’
She shrugged, non-committal. ‘I’m more interested in you, Colonel Malenfant.’
He was immediately suspicious, even defensive. ‘Just Malenfant.’
‘Of all the projects you could have undertaken when you were grounded, why front a stunt like this?’
He shrugged. ‘Look, if you want to call this a stunt, fine. But we’re extending the envelope here. Today we’ll prove that we can touch other worlds. Maybe an astronaut is the right face to head up a groundbreaker project like this.’
‘Ex-astronaut.’
His grin faded.
Fishing for an angle, she said, ‘Is that why you’re here? You were born in 1960, weren’t you? So you remember Apollo. But by the time you grew up cheaper and smarter robots had taken over the exploring. Now NASA says that when the International Space Station finally reaches the end of its life, it plans no more manned spaceflight of any sort. Is this laser project a compensation for your wash-out, Malenfant?’
He barked a laugh. ‘You know, you aren’t as smart as you think you are, Ms Manzoni. It’s your brand of personality-oriented cod-psychology bullshit that has brought down –’
‘Are you lonely?’
That pulled him up. ‘What?’
‘The Fermi Paradox is all about loneliness, isn’t it? – the loneliness of mankind, orphaned in an e
mpty universe … Your wife, Emma, died a decade back. I know you have a son, but you never remarried –’
He glared at her. ‘You’re full of shit, lady.’
She returned his glare, satisfied she had hit the mark.
But as she prepared her next question, the auditorium crowd took up chanting along with a big softscreen clock: ‘ … Twenty! … Nineteen! … Eighteen! …’ She looked away, distracted, and Malenfant took the opportunity to move away from her.
She worked her way through the crowd until she could see the big softscreen display at the front of the auditorium. It was a tapestry of more-or-less incomprehensible graphic and digital updates.
She prepared her floating camera drones, and the various pieces of recording technology embedded in her flesh and clothing. The truth was, whatever data came back with those interstellar photons wouldn’t matter; today’s iconic image would be that pure instant of triumph when that faint echo returned from Alpha A-4, and those graphs and charts leapt into jagged animation. And that, and the accompanying swirl of emotions, would be what she must capture.
But in the midst of her routine she found room for a sliver of wonder. This was after all about reaching out to a second Earth, just as Malenfant had said – maybe it was a stunt, but what a stunt …
Everybody was growing quiet, all faces turned up to the big softscreen.
The ticking clock moved into the positive.
The shimmering graphs remained flatlined.
There was silence. Then, as nothing continued to happen, a mutter of conversation.
Kate was baffled. There had been no echo. How could that be? She knew this was an experiment that would have been accurate to a fraction of a second; there was no possibility of a time error. Either the receiving equipment had somehow failed to work – or else the laser pulse from Earth had gone sailing right through planet Alpha A-4 as if it was an image painted on glass …
Phase Space Page 43
