by Neil Clarke
“You will live free in the mind of the moon. Will you take up this charge?”
He sat up. His mouth was clear, filled only with the sharp electric after-taste of the blue. He saw the shapes around him: there were five of them, five people there. And suddenly he understood. Joy ballooned in him and he said, “I will. Oh, I will!”
A light appeared. Accustomed as he was either to no light or to intense blasts of it, Oliver at first didn’t comprehend. He thought his third eye was rapidly gaining power. As perhaps it was. But there was also a laser drill from one of the A robots, shot at low power through a cylindrical ceramic electronic element, in a way that made the cylinder glow yellow. Blind like a fish, open-mouthed, weak eyes gaping and watering floods, he saw around him Solly, Hester, Freeman, mute Elijah, Naomi. “Yes,” he said, and tried to embrace them all at once. “Oh, yes.”
They were in one of the long-abandoned caverns, a flat-bottomed bole with only three tendrils extending away from it. The chamber was filled with objects Oliver was more used to identifying by feel or sound or smell: pens of cows and hens, a stack of air cylinders and suits, three ore cars, two B robots, an A robot, a pile of tracks and miscellaneous gear. He walked through it all slowly, Hester at his side. She was gaunt as ever, her skin as dark as the shadows; it sucked up the weak light from the ceramic tube and gave it back only in little points and lines. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was the same for all of us. This is the way.”
“And Naomi?”
“The same for her too; but when she agreed to it, she found herself alone.”
Then it was Jakob, he thought suddenly. “Where’s Jakob?”
Rasped: “He’s coming, we think.”
Oliver nodded, thought about it. “Was it you, then, following me those times? Why didn’t you speak?”
“That wasn’t us,” Hester said when he explained what had happened. She cawed a laugh. “That was something else, still out there . . .”
Then Jakob stood before them, making them both jump. They shouted and the others all came running, pressed into a mass together. Jakob laughed. “All here now,” he said. “Turn that light off. We don’t need it.”
And they didn’t. Laser shut down, ceramic cooled, they could still see: they could see right into each other, red shapes in the black, radiating joy. Everything in the little chamber was quite distinct, quite visible.
“We are the mind of the moon.”
Without shifts to mark the passage of time Oliver found he could not judge it at all. They worked hard, and they were constantly on the move: always up, through level after level of the mine. “Like shells of the atom, and we’re that particle, busted loose and on its way out.” They ate when they were famished, slept when they had to. Most of the time they worked, either bringing down shafts behind them, or dismantling depots and stealing everything Jakob designated theirs. A few times they ambushed gangs of foremen, killing them with laser cutters and stripping them of valuables; but on Jakob’s orders they avoided contact with foremen when they could. He wanted only material. After a long time—twenty sleeps at least—they had six ore cars of it, all trailing an A robot up long-abandoned and empty shafts, where they had to lay the track ahead of them and pull it out behind, as fast as they could move. Among other items Jakob had an insatiable hunger for explosives; he couldn’t get enough of them.
It got harder to avoid the foremen, who were now heavily armed, and on their guard. Perhaps even searching for them, it was hard to tell. But they searched with their lighthouse beams on full power, to stay out of ambush: it was easy to see them at a distance, draw them off, lose them in dead ends, detonate mines under them. All the while the little band moved up, rising by infinitely long detours toward the front side of the moon. The rock around them cooled. The air circulated more strongly, until it was a constant wind. Through the seismometers they could hear from far below the rumbling of cars, heavy machinery, detonations. “Oh they’re after us all right,” Jakob said. “They’re running scared.”
He was happy with the booty they had accumulated, which included a great number of cylinders of compressed air and pure oxygen. Also vacuum suits for all of them, and a lot more explosives, including ten Boesmans, which were much too big for any ordinary mining. “We’re getting close,” Jakob said as they ate and drank, then tended the cows and hens. As they lay down to sleep by the cars he would talk to them about their work. Each of them had various jobs: mute Elijah was in charge of their supplies, Solly of the robot, Hester of the seismography. Naomi and Freeman were learning demolition, and were in some undefined sense Jakob’s lieutenants. Oliver kept working at his navigation. They had found charts of the tunnel systems in their area, and Oliver was memorizing them, so that he would know at each moment exactly where they were. He found he could do it remarkably well; each time they ventured on he knew where the forks would come, where they would lead. Always upward.
But the pursuit was getting hotter. It seemed there were foremen everywhere, patrolling the shafts in search of them. “Soon they’ll mine some passages and try to drive us into them,” Jakob said. “It’s about time we left.”
“Left?” Oliver repeated.
“Left the system. Struck out on our own.”
“Dig our own tunnel,” Naomi said happily.
“Yes.”
“To where?” Hester croaked.
Then they were rocked by an explosion that almost broke their eardrums, and the air rushed away. The rock around them trembled, creaked, groaned, cracked, and down the tunnel the ceiling collapsed, shoving dust toward them in a roaring whoosh! “A Boesman!” Solly cried.
Jakob laughed out loud. They were all scrambling into their vacuum suits as fast as they could. “Time to leave!” he cried, maneuvering their A robot against the side of the chamber. He put one of their Boesmans against the wall and set the timer. “Okay,” he said over the suit’s intercom. “Now we got to mine like we never mined before. To the surface!”
The first task was to get far enough away from the Boesman that they wouldn’t be killed when it went off. They were now drilling a narrow tunnel and moving the loosened rock behind them to fill up the hole as they passed through it; this loose fill would fly like bullets down a rifle barrel when the Boesman went off. So they made three abrupt turns at acute angles to stop the fill’s movement, and then drilled away from the area as fast as they could. Naomi and Jakob were confident that the explosion of the Boesman would shatter the surrounding rock to such an extent that it would never be possible for anyone to locate the starting point for their tunnel.
“Hopefully they’ll think we did ourselves in,” Naomi said, “either on purpose or by accident.” Oliver enjoyed hearing her light laugh, her clear voice that was so pure and musical compared to Hester’s croaking. He had never known Naomi well before, but now he admired her grace and power, her pulsing energy; she worked harder than Jakob, even. Harder than any of them.
A few shifts into their new life Naomi checked the detonator timer she kept on a cord around her neck. “It should be going off soon. Someone go try and keep the cows and chickens calmed down.” But Solly had just reached the cows’ pen when the Boesman went off. They were all sledgehammered by the blast, which was louder than a mere explosion, something more basic and fundamental: the violent smash of a whole world shutting the door on them. Deafened, bruised, they staggered up and checked each other for serious injuries, then pacified the cows, whose terrified moos they felt in their hands rather than actually heard. The structural integrity of their tunnel seemed okay; they were in an old flow of the mantle’s convection current, now cooled to stasis, and it was plastic enough to take such a blast without shattering. Perfect miners’ rock, protecting them like a mother. They lifted up the cows and set them upright on the bottom of the ore car that had been made into the barn. Freeman hurried back down the tunnel to see how the rear of it looked. When he came back their hearing was returning, and through the ringing that would pe
rsist for several shifts he shouted, “It’s walled off good! Fused!”
So they were in a little tunnel of their own. They fell together in a clump, hugging each other and shouting. “Free at last!” Jakob roared, booming out a laugh louder than anything Oliver had ever heard from him. Then they settled down to the task of turning on an air cylinder and recycler, and regulating their gas exchange.
They soon settled into a routine that moved their tunnel forward as quickly and quietly as possible. One of them operated the robot, digging as narrow a shaft as they could possibly work in. This person used only laser drills unless confronted with extremely hard rock, when it was judged worth the risk to set off small explosions, timed by seismometer to follow closely other detonations back in the mines; Jakob and Naomi hoped that the complex interior of the moon would prevent any listeners from noticing that their explosion was anything more than an echo of the mining blast.
Three of them dealt with the rock freed by the robot’s drilling, moving it from the front of the tunnel to its rear, and at intervals pulling up the cars’ tracks and bringing them forward. The placement of the loose rock was a serious matter, because if it displaced much more volume than it had at the front of the tunnel, they would eventually fill in all the open space they had; this was the classic problem of the “creeping worm” tunnel. It was necessary to pack the blocks into the space at the rear with an absolute minimum of gaps, in exactly the way they had been cut, like pieces of a puzzle; they all got very good at the craft of this, losing only a few inches of open space in every mile they dug. This work was the hardest both physically and mentally, and each shift of it left Oliver more tired than he had ever been while mining. Because the truth was all of them were working at full speed, and for the middle team it meant almost running, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth . . . Their little bit of open tunnel was only some sixty yards long, but after a while on the midshift it seemed like five hundred.
The three people not working on the rock tended the air and the livestock, ate, helped out with large blocks and the like, and snatched some sleep. They rotated one at a time through the three stations, and worked one shift (timed by detonator timer) at each post. It made for a routine so mesmerizing in its exhaustiveness that Oliver found it very hard to do his calculations of their position in his shift off. “You’ve got to keep at it,” Jakob told him as he ran back from the robot to help the calculating. “It’s not just anywhere we want to come up, but right under the domed city of Selene, next to the rocket rails. To do that we’ll need some good navigation. We get that and we’ll come up right in the middle of the masters who have gotten rich from selling the blue to Earth, and that will be a very gratifying thing I assure you.”
So Oliver would work on it until he slept. Actually it was relatively easy; he knew where they had been in the moon when they struck out on their own, and Jakob had given him the surface coordinates for Selene: so it was just a matter of dead reckoning.
It was even possible to calculate their average speed, and therefore when they could expect to reach the surface. That could be checked against the rate of depletion of their fixed resources—air, water lost in the recycler, and food for the livestock. It took a few shifts of consultation with mute Elijah to determine all the factors reliably, and after that it was a simple matter of arithmetic.
When Oliver and Elijah completed these calculations they called Jakob over and explained what they had done.
“Good work,” Jakob said. “I should have thought of that.”
“But look,” Oliver said, “we’ve got enough air and water, and the robot’s power pack is ten times what we’ll need—same with explosives—it’s only food is a problem. I don’t know if we’ve got enough hay for the cows.”
Jakob nodded as he looked over Oliver’s shoulder and examined their figures. “We’ll have to kill and eat the cows one by one. That’ll feed us and cut down on the amount of hay we need, at the same time.”
“Eat the cows?” Oliver was stunned.
“Sure! They’re meat! People on Earth eat them all the time!”
“Well . . .” Oliver was doubtful, but under the lash of Hester’s bitter laughter he didn’t say any more.
Still, Jakob and Freeman and Naomi decided it would be best if they stepped up the pace a little bit, to provide them with more of a margin for error. They shifted two people to the shaft face and supplemented the robot’s continuous drilling with hand drill work around the sides of the tunnel, and ate on the run while moving blocks to the back, and slept as little as they could. They were making miles on every shift.
The rock they wormed through began to change in character. The hard, dark, unbroken basalt gave way to lighter rock that was sometimes dangerously fractured. “Anorthosite,” Jakob said. “We’re reaching the crust.” After that every shift brought them through a new zone of rock. Once they tunneled through great layers of calcium feldspar striped with basalt intrusions, so that it looked like badly made brick. Another time they blasted their way through a wall of jasper as hard as steel. Only once did they pass through a vein of the blue; when they did it occurred to Oliver that his whole conception of the moon’s composition had been warped by their mining. He had thought the moon was bursting with promethium, but as they dug across the narrow vein he realized it was uncommon, a loose net of threads in the great lunar body.
As they left the vein behind, Solly picked up a piece of the ore and stared at it curiously, lower eyes shut, face contorted as he struggled to focus his third eye. Suddenly he dashed the chunk to the ground, turned and marched to the head of their tunnel, attacked it with a drill. “I’ve given my whole life to the blue,” he said, voice thick. “And what is it but a Goddamned rock.”
Jakob laughed shortly. They tunneled on, away from the precious metal that now represented to them only a softer material to dig through. “Pick up the pace!” Jakob cried, slapping Solly on the back and leaping over the blocks beside the robot. “This rock has melted and melted again, changing over eons to the stones we see. Metamorphosis,” he chanted, stretching the word out, lingering on the syllable mor until the word became a kind of song. “Metamorphosis. Meta-mor-pho-sis.” Naomi and Hester took up the chant, and mute Elijah tapped his drill against the robot in double time. Jakob chanted over it. “Soon we will come to the city of the masters, the domes of Xanadu with their glass and fruit and steaming pools, and their vases and sports and their fine aged wines. And then there will be a—”
“Metamorphosis.”
And they tunneled ever faster.
Sitting in the sleeping car, chewing on a cheese, Oliver regarded the bulk of Jakob lying beside him. Jakob breathed deeply, very tired, almost asleep. “How do you know about the domes?” Oliver asked him softly. “How do you know all the things that you know?”
“Don’t know,” Jakob muttered. “Everyone knows. Less they burn your brain. Put you in a hole to live out your life. I don’t know much, boy. Make most of it up. Love of a moon. Whatever we need . . .” And he slept.
They came up through a layer of marble—white marble all laced with quartz, so that it gleamed and sparkled in their lightless sight, and made them feel as though they dug through stone made of their cows’ good milk, mixed with water like diamonds. This went on for a long time, until it filled them up and they became intoxicated with its smooth muscly texture, with the sparks of light lazing out of it. “I remember once we went to see a jazz band,” Jakob said to all of them. Puffing as he ran the white rock along the cars to the rear, stacked it ever so carefully. “It was in Richmond among all the docks and refineries and giant oil tanks and we were so drunk we kept getting lost. But finally we found it—huh!—and it was just this broken-down trumpeter and a back line. He played sitting in a chair and you could just see in his face that his life had been a tough scuffle. His hat covered his whole household. And trumpet is a young man’s instrument, too, it tears your lip to tatters. So we sat down to drink not expecting a thing, and
they started up the last song of a set. ‘Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.’ Four bar blues, as simple as a song can get.”
“Metamorphosis,” rasped Hester.
“Yeah! Like that. And this trumpeter started to play it. And they went through it over and over and over. Huh! They must have done it a hundred times. Two hundred times. And sure enough this trumpeter was playing low and half the time in his hat, using all the tricks a broken-down trumpeter uses to save his lip, to hide the fact that it went west thirty years before. But after a while that didn’t matter, because he was playing. He was playing! Everything he had learned in all his life, all the music and all the sorry rest of it, all that was jammed into the poor old ‘Bucket’ and by God it was mind over matter time, because that old song began to roll. And still on the run he broke into it:
“Oh the buck-et’s got a hole in it
Yeah the buck-et’s got a hole in it
Say the buck-et’s got a hole in it.
Can’t buy no beer!”
And over again. Oliver, Solly, Freeman, Hester, Naomi—they couldn’t help laughing. What Jakob came up with out of his unburnt past! Mute Elijah banged a car wall happily, then squeezed the udder of a cow between one verse and the next— “Can’t buy no beer!—Moo!”
They all joined in, breathing or singing it. It fit the pace of their work perfectly: fast but not too fast, regular, repetitive, simple, endless. All the syllables got the same length, a bit syncopated, except “hole,” which was stretched out, and “can’t buy no beer,” which was high and all stretched out, stretched into a great shout of triumph, which was crazy since what it was saying was bad news, or should have been. But the song made it a cry of joy, and every time it rolled around they sang it louder, more stretched out. Jakob scatted up and down and around the tune, and Hester found all kinds of higher harmonics in a voice like a saw cutting steel, and the old tune rocked over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, in a great passacaglia, in the crucible where all poverty is wrenched to delight: the blues. Metamorphosis. They sang it continuously for two shifts running, until they were all completely hypnotized by it; and then frequently, for long spells, for the rest of their time together.
