Space m-2

by Stephen Baxter

  The shuttle climbed farther. The Lunar Japanese around her applauded the smooth launch.

  Now Earth rose. It looked as blue and beautiful as when she and Frank had left for the stars. But it had changed, of course. Even from here, she could see Gaijin flower-ships circling the planet, the giant ramscoops of the alien craft visible as tiny discs. She felt a stab of antique resentment at those powerful, silent visitors who had watched as humanity tore itself apart.

  And now, as the shuttle tilted and settled into its two-hour orbit around the Moon, Xenia saw a sight she knew no human had ever seen before today:

  Comet rise, over the Moon.

  The coma, a diffuse mass of gas and fine particles, was a ball as big as the Earth, so close now it walled off half the sky, a glare of lacy, diffuse light. Massive clumps in the coma, backlit, cast shadows across the smoky gases, straight lines thousands of kilometers long radiating at her. The comet was coming out of the Sun, straight toward the Moon at seventy thousand kilometers an hour. She looked for the nucleus, a billion-ton ball of ice and rock. But it was too small and remote, even now, a few minutes from impact. And the tail was invisible from here, fleeing behind her, running ahead of the comet and stretching far beyond the Moon, reaching halfway to Mars in fact.

  Suddenly there was light all around the shuttle. The little ship had plunged inside the coma. It was like being inside a diffuse, luminous fog.

  “Vileekee bokh.”

  Frank leaned across her, trying to see. He was seventy years old, physiological; his nose was a misshapen mass of flesh. He was a small, stocky man, with thick legs and big prizefighter muscles built for Earth’s gravity, so that he always looked like some restless, half-evolved ape alongside the tall, slim Lunar Japanese.

  “Eta prikrasna,” Xenia murmured.

  “Beautiful. Yeah. How about that: we’re the last off the Moon.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “There’s a handful of old nuts who won’t move, no matter what.”

  “Even for a comet?”

  “Takomi. He’s still there, for one,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “He’s notorious.”

  “I don’t read the funny papers,” Frank snapped.

  “Takomi is the hermit out in the ruins of Edo, on Farside. Evidently he lives off the land. He won’t even respond to radio calls.”

  Frank frowned. “This is the fucking Moon. How does he live off the land? By sucking oxygen out of the rock?…”

  The light changed. There was a soft Fourth-of-July gasp from the people crammed into the shuttle.

  The comet had struck the Moon.

  A dome of blinding white light rose like a new Sun from the surface of the Moon: comet material turned to plasma, mixed with shattered rock. Xenia thought she could see a wave passing through the Moon’s rocky hide: a sluggish ripple in rock turned to powder, gathering and slowing.

  Now, spreading out over the Moon’s dusty gray surface, she saw a faint wash of light. It seemed to pool in the deeper maria and craters, flowing down the contours of the land like a morning mist on Earth. It was air: gases from the shattered comet, an evanescent atmosphere pooling on the Moon.

  And, in a deep, shadowed crater, at the ghostly touch of the air, she saw light flare.

  It was only a hint, a momentary splinter at the corner of her eye. She craned to see. Perhaps there was a denser knot of smoke or gas, there on the floor of the crater; perhaps there was a streak, a kind of contrail, reaching out through the temporary comet atmosphere.

  It must be some by-product of the impact. But it looked as if somebody had launched a rocket from the surface of the Moon.

  Already the contrail had dispersed in the thin, billowing comet air.

  People were applauding again, at the beauty of the spectacle, with relief at being alive. Frank wasn’t even watching.

  It was only after they landed that it was announced that the comet nucleus had landed plumb on top of the Fracastorius Crater dome.

  Fracastorius, on the rim of the Sea of Nectar, was one of the largest settlements away from the primary Copernicus-Landsberg-Kepler triangle. The Lunar Japanese grieved. The loss of life was small, but the economic and social damage huge — perhaps unrecoverable, in these straitened times, as the Moon’s people tried to adapt to life without their centuries-old umbilical to Earth’s rich resources.

  Frank Paulis seemed unconcerned. He got back to work, even before the shuttle landed. And he expected Xenia to do the same.

  Xenia and Frank had spent a year of their lives on a Gaijin flower-ship, had submitted themselves to the unknown hazards of several Saddle Point gateway teleport transitions, and had gotten themselves relativistically stranded in an unanticipated future. On their way home from the Saddle Point radius, Frank and Xenia had grown concerned when nobody in the inner system answered their hails. At last they had tapped into some low-bit-rate news feeds.

  The news had seemed remarkably bad.

  Earth had fallen into a state of civil war. There were battles raging around the equatorial region, the Sahara and Brazil and the Far East. Frank and Xenia had listened, bemused, to reports laced with names they’d never heard of, of campaigns and battles, of generals and presidents and even emperors. Even the nations involved seemed to have changed, split and coalesced. It was hard even to figure out what they were fighting over — save the generic, the diminishing resources of a declining planet.

  One thing was for sure. All their money was gone, disappeared into electronic mist. They had landed on the Moon as paupers, figuratively naked.

  It turned out to be a crowded Moon, owned by other people. But they had nowhere else to go. And, even on the Moon, nobody was interested in star travelers and their tales.

  Frank had felt cheated. Going to the stars had been a big mistake for him. He’d gone looking for opportunity; he’d grown impatient with the slow collapse of Earth’s economy and social structure, even before the wars began, long before people started dying in large numbers.

  Not that he hadn’t prospered here.

  The Moon of the late twenty-second century, as it turned out, had a lot in common with early twenty-first century Earth. Deprived of its lifelines from the home world, the Moon was full: a stagnant, closed economy. But Frank had seen all this before, and he knew that economic truth was strange in such circumstances. For instance, Frank had quickly made a lot of money out of reengineering an old technology that made use of lunar sulphur and oxygen as a fuel source. As the scarcity of materials increased, industrial processes that had once been abandoned as unprofitable suddenly became worthwhile.

  Within five years Frank J. Paulis had become one of the hundred wealthiest individuals on the Moon, taking Xenia right along with him.

  But it wasn’t enough. Frank found it impossible to break into the long-lived, close-knit business alliances of the Lunar Japanese. And besides, Xenia suspected, he felt cooped up here on the Moon.

  Anyhow, that was why this comet had been so important for Frank. It would shake everything up, he said. Change the equation.

  It was either admirable, she thought, or schizophrenic.

  After all these years — during which time she had been his companion, lover, employee, amateur therapist — Xenia still didn’t understand Frank; she freely admitted it. He was an out-and-out capitalist, no doubt about that. But every gram of his huge ambition was constantly turned on the most gigantic of projects. The future of a world! The destiny of mankind! What Xenia couldn’t work out was whether Frank was a visionary who used capitalism to achieve his goals — or just a capitalist after all, sublimating his greed and ambition.

  But, swept along by his energy and ambition, she found it hard to focus on such questions.

  Bathed in blue-water light, pacing his stage, Frank J. Paulis was a solid ball of terrestrial energy and aggression, out of place on the small, delicate Moon. “You got to beat the future, or it will beat you! I believed that before I went to the stars, and I believe it now. I’m h
ere to tell you how…”

  To launch his new project, Frank, feverish with enthusiasm, had hired the Grand Auditorium, the heart of Landsberg. The crater’s dome was a blue ceiling above Xenia, a thick double sheet of quasiglass, cable-stayed by engineered spiderweb, filled with water. The water shielded Landsberg’s inhabitants from radiation and served to scatter the raw sunlight. During the long lunar day, here in Landsberg, the sky was royal blue and full of fish: goldfish and carp. After five years, Xenia still couldn’t get used to it.

  Frank was standing before a huge three-dimensional cartoon, a Moon globe sliced open to reveal arid, uninteresting geological layers. Beside him sat Mariko Kashiwazaki, the young academic type whose paper had fired Frank off in this new direction. She looked slim and uncertain in the expensive new suit Frank had bought for her.

  Xenia was sitting at the back of the audience, watching rows of cool faces: politicians, business types. They were impassive. Well, they were here, and they were listening, and that was all Frank cared about right now.

  “Here on the Moon, we need volatiles,” Frank was saying. “Not just to survive, but to expand. To grow, economically. Water. Hydrogen. Helium. Carbon dioxide. Nitrogen. Maybe nitrates and phosphates to supplement the bio cycles.

  “But the Moon is deficient in every essential of life. A molecule of water, out there on the surface, lasts a few hours before it’s broken up by the sunlight and lost forever. The Moon’s atmosphere is so thin some of the molecules are actually in orbit. Frankly, it’s no damn use.”

  It was true. All this had been well known from the moment the first Apollo astronaut had picked up the first lump of unprepossessing Moon rock and found it dry as a bone — drier, in fact.

  For a time there had been hope that deep, shadowed craters near the Moon’s poles might serve as stores for water ice, brought there by cometary impacts. But to the intense disappointment of some dreamers, no more than a trace of such ice had been found. As the Fracastorius impact had demonstrated, such impacts deposited little volatile material anyhow. And even if any ice was trapped it wouldn’t be there forever; the Moon’s axis turned out to be unstable, and the Moon tipped this way and that over a period of hundreds of millions of years — a long time, but short enough that no crater remained in shadow forever.

  Dry or not, Moon rock wasn’t useless. In fact, it was about 40 percent oxygen by weight. There were other useful elements: silicon, which could be used to make glass, fiberglass, polymers; aluminum, magnesium, and titanium for machinery, cables, coatings; chromium and magnesium for metal alloys.

  But Frank was essentially right. If a mine on Earth had turned up the highest-grade lunar ore, you’d throw it out as slag.

  And that was why Frank had initiated Project Prometheus, his scheme for importing volatiles and spinning up the Moon by hitting it with a series of comets or asteroids. But it hadn’t worked.

  “So where do we turn next?” He eyed his audience, as always in command, even before these wary, slightly bemused Lunar Japanese. “Believe me, we need to find something. The Moon, your Moon, is dying. We didn’t come to the Moon so our children could live in a box. We came to live as humans, with freedom and dignity.” He threw back his arms and breathed the recycled air. “Let me tell you my dream. One day, before I die, I want to throw open the damn doors and walk out of the dome. And I want to breathe the air of the Moon. The air we put there.” He began to pace back and forth, like a preacher — or a huckster. “I want to see a terraformed Moon. I want to see a Moon where breathable air blankets the planet, where there is so much water the deep maria will become the seas they were named for, where plants and trees grow out in the open, and every crater will glisten with a circular lake… It’s a dream. Maybe I won’t live to see it all. But I know it’s the only way forward for us. Only a world — stable, with deep biological reservoirs of water and carbon and air — is going to be big enough to sustain human life, here on the Moon, over the coming centuries, the millennia. Hell, we’re here for the long haul, people, and we got to learn to think that way. Because nobody is going to help us — not Earth, not the Gaijin. None of them care if we live or die. We’re stuck in this trench, in the middle of the battleground, and we have to help ourselves.

  “But to make the Moon a twin of Earth we’ll need volatiles, principally water. The Moon has no volatiles, and so we must import them. Correct?”

  Now he leaned forward, intimidating, a crude but effective trick, Xenia thought dryly.

  “Dead wrong. I’m here today to offer you a new paradigm. I’m here to tell you that the Moon itself is rich in volatiles, almost unimaginably so, enough to sustain us and our families, hell, for millennia. And, incidentally, to make us rich as Croesus in the process…”

  It was the climax, the punch line, Frank’s big shock. But there was barely a flicker of interest in the audience, Xenia saw. Three centuries and a planetary relocation hadn’t changed the Japanese much, and cultural barriers hadn’t dropped; they were still suspicious of the noisy foreigner who stood before them, breaking into the subtle alliances and protocols that ruled their lives.

  Frank stood back. “Tell ’em, Mariko.”

  The slim Lunar Japanese scientist got up, evidently nervous, and bowed deeply to the audience.

  Earth-Moon and the other planets, Mariko said, supported by smooth softscreen images, had condensed, almost five billion years ago, from a swirling cloud of dust and gases. That primordial cloud had been rich in volatiles: 3 percent of it was water, for instance. You could tell that was so from the composition of asteroids, which were leftover fragments of the cloud.

  But there was an anomaly. All the water on Earth, in the oceans and atmosphere and the ice sheets, added to less than a tenth of that 3-percent fraction. Where had the rest of the water gone?

  Conventional wisdom held that it had been baked out by the intense heat of Earth’s formation. But Mariko believed much of it was still there, that water and other volatiles were trapped deep within the Earth: perhaps four hundred kilometers down, deep in the mantle. The water wouldn’t be present as a series of immense buried oceans. Rather it would be scattered as droplets, some as small as a single molecule, trapped inside crystal lattices of the minerals with names like wadsleyite and hydrous-D. These special forms could trap water within their structure, essentially exploiting the high pressure to overcome the tendency of the rising temperature to bake the water out.

  Some estimates said there should be as much as five times as much water buried within the Earth as in all its oceans and atmosphere and ice caps.

  And what was true of Earth might be true of the Moon.

  According to Mariko, the Moon was mostly made of material like Earth’s mantle. This was because the Moon was believed to have been budded off the Earth itself, ripped loose after a giant primordial collision popularly called the “big whack.” The Moon was smaller than the Earth, cooler and more rigid, so that the center of the Moon was analogous to the Earth’s mantle layers a few hundred kilometers deep. And it was precisely at such depths, on Earth, that you found such water-bearing minerals…

  Frank watched his audience like a hawk.

  His cartoon Moon globe suddenly lit up. The onion-skin geological layers were supplemented by a vivid blue ocean, lapping in unlikely fashion at the center of the Moon. Xenia smiled. It was typical Frank: inaccurate, but compelling.

  “Listen up,” he said. “What if Mariko is right? What if even one tenth of one percent of the Moon’s mass by weight is water? That’s the same order as five percent of Earth’s surface water. A hidden ocean indeed.

  “And that’s not all. Where there is water there will be other volatiles: carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, even hydrocarbons. All we have to do is go down there and find it.

  “And it’s ours. We don’t own the sky; with the Gaijin around, maybe humans never will. But we inhabitants of the Moon do own the rocks beneath our feet.

  “Folks, I’m calling this new enterprise Roughneck. If
you want to know why, go look up the word. I’m asking you to invest in me. Sure it’s a risk. But if it works it’s a way past the resource bottleneck we’re facing, here on the Moon. And it will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.” He grinned. “There’s a fucking ocean down there, folks, and it’s time to go skinnydipping.”

  There was a frozen silence, which Frank milked expertly.

  After the session, Xenia took a walk.

  The Moon’s surface, beneath the dome, was like a park. Grass covered the ground, much of it growing out of bare lunar regolith. There was even a stand of mature palms, thirty meters tall, and a scattering of cherries. People lived in the dome’s support towers: thick central cores with platforms of lunar concrete slung from them. The lower levels were given over to factories, workshops, schools, shops, and other public places.

  Far above her head, Xenia could see a little flock of schoolchildren in their white-and-black uniforms, flapping back and forth on Leonardo wings, squabbling like so many chickens. It was beautiful. But it served to remind her there were no birds here, outside pressurized cages. Birds tired too quickly in the thin air; on the Moon, against intuition, birds couldn’t fly.

  Water flowed in streams and fountains and pools, moistening the air.

  She passed Landsberg’s famous water-sculpture park. Water tumbled slowly from a tall fountainhead in great shimmering spheres held together by surface tension. The spheres were caught by flickering mechanical fingers, to be teased out like taffy and turned and spun into rope and transformed, briefly, into transient, beautiful sculptures, no two ever alike. It was entrancing, she admitted, a one-sixth gravity art form that would have been impossible on the Earth, and it had immediately captivated her on her arrival here. As she watched, a gaggle of children — eight or ten years old, Moon legs as long as giraffes’ — ran across the surface of the pond in the park’s basin, Jesuslike, their slapping footsteps sufficient to keep them from sinking as long as they ran fast enough.