Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  But Henry was a geologist. He might be creating a new Earth, but he was going to have to wreck the Moon to do it. For instance, the structure of the ice at the Pole, strata laid down over billions of years, was a record of the impact history of the inner Solar System—a unique record that was probably already lost, thanks to the nuke.

  He would destroy the Moon, to save humanity. Grandiose bullshit.

  Somehow, he had maneuvered himself into a situation where the history of two worlds was resting on his shoulders. As if he was Jesus Christ himself.

  But he had no pretensions; this was no part of the deal as far as his life plan was concerned.

  Especially as Christ died for his mission, as he might have to now.

  He checked the watch clumsily strapped to his dust-grimed sleeve.

  Watch the Moon…

  Jays Malone climbed up Mount Wilson to do just that. He came with Sixt Guth, who was not much younger than him, now grounded from the Space Station. Everybody was grounded now, it seemed.

  The old observatory stood two thousand yards above Los Angeles. The city’s lights flowed in rectangular waves about the foot of the hill, washing out the horizon with a salmon-pink glow; but the sky above was crisp and cool and peppered with stars.

  The opened dome curved over Jays’s head, a shell of ribbing and panels that looked like the inside of an oil tank. The dome, with its brass fixtures and giant gears, smelled vaguely of old concrete. The telescope itself was an open frame, vaguely cylindrical, looming in the dark.

  Sixt had taken one of his several doctorates, in astronomy, at UCLA, and had put in some observational work on this ’scope. Now, his old contacts had made the place available for Sixt and his buddy, on this night of all nights.

  Sixt was fussing around the telescope. “This is the Hooker telescope,” he said. “When it was built, in 1906, it was the largest telescope in the world…Kind of ironic.”

  Jays had a pair of Air Force binoculars around his neck, big and powerful. He lifted them to the Moon, squinting through the aperture in the dome.

  “What’s ironic?”

  “The use of that bunker-buster.”

  “The what? Oh, the bomb on the Moon.”

  “Those conventional earthquake bombs they used in the Gulf War were too good. So the pariah states started buying up deep excavation equipment, to escape the bombs, and bury their command posts and their nuclear and chemical and biological stockpiles…”

  Jays stared at the old Moon until the muscles at the edges of his eyes started to ache. He didn’t know what to expect, tonight. Would the changes on the Moon be visible at all, from a quarter million miles? Would it be over in the blink of an eye?

  “…The B61–11 is like a nuclear dum-dum bullet,” Sixt was saying. “It directs most of its damage straight down into the ground, toward the bunker. It can do as much damage in that way as an H-bomb. So it’s a nuclear weapon with a role for which conventional weapons are useless. It blurs the line between conventional and nuclear war.” He laughed. “Saddam’s superbunkers probably never existed anyhow. Do you remember Doctor Strangelove? We managed to get ourselves into a deep-mining arms race…”

  “What?” Jays looked at him vaguely, a little dazzled by Moonlight; he’d heard maybe one word in three. “What are you talking about?”

  And so, he missed the moment of detonation.

  …And Henry thought he felt the shock of the detonation: the gentlest of tremors transmitted through the layers of his suit, waves in the rock, passing through the silent heart of the Moon, from an explosion the planet’s width away.

  He should get back to the shelter in the lava tube. He turned and loped over the regolith, rock flour deposited by billions of years of meteorites, lunar ground never broken by a human footstep before.

  The shock wave from the bunker-buster punched down into the strata of ice and dust, crushing the ancient layers, and slammed into the bedrock crust beneath. A central ball was flashed to vapor, which strove to flee the explosion. Surrounding layers of dirty ice were smashed and crushed, and the cavity expanded, growing at last to a hundred yards across.

  When the stellar energy of the initial explosion faded, the weight of the layers above bore down on the cavity. It caved in, and layers of rubble collapsed down into it and over each other, forming a deep rubble chimney four hundred yards tall. It was surrounded by a fracture zone, cracks racing outward, and its base was lined with radioactive glass, the remnants of the rock dust layers.

  When the chimney collapse reached the surface, volatiles—water and carbon dioxide steam—began to fount from the growing crater. It was a volcano, of water and air…

  Jane had found too many symptoms to ignore, now. Changes in her bowel habits. Blood in her stools and urine; pain when she pissed. Sores in her mouth that wouldn’t heal; hoarseness and coughs and difficulty swallowing; bleeding between her normal periods. It was as if she had wished this illness on herself, and now it was coming true.

  She knew she would have to face it, go find a doctor. But that would confirm what she feared. It would be like picking up the revolver to play Russian Roulette—

  “I can see it,” Jack said. “I can see it. Wow.”

  Jane lifted the toy telescope. The Moon leapt into detail, the craters at the terminator finely detailed by shadow, her view obscured only by the trembling of her hands and by the false-color spectral rings of the cheap lens.

  She’d almost missed the flash, the few seconds after ignition: the moment when fire touched the surface of the Moon, shining over the southern limb, brought there by human hands. Already that glow was fading. But she could see the consequences.

  There was a cloud, of yellow-white vapor, which fountained up—it must have been tens of miles high to be visible from here—erupting from the limb of the Moon into the darkness of space, in slow snakes, fingers of gas.

  Henry was right: there was ice at the Pole, and here was the proof of it.

  The soft white glow fell back, already much brighter than the Moon’s native glow, splashing against the Moon’s gray surface, and racing over that barren ground.

  For a moment she felt a stab of regret. What harm had the Moon ever done humanity? For billions of years it had patiently regulated the tides, drawing up the sap in oceans and plants and humans. It was inspiration for a million myths, maybe more bad love songs, and dreams of flight.

  And now, just a few decades after humans first reached it, we’ve visibly wounded it, she thought. Whatever the outcome of all this in human terms, it must be a tragedy for the Moon.

  But some of the vapor was dissipating, great wisps of it branching away from the Moon. Perhaps it was escaping from the Moon’s gravity well altogether.

  Maybe the new atmosphere wouldn’t stick.

  She watched anxiously as the flower of steam blossomed on the surface of the Moon.

  Now Sixt was using the Air Force glasses. “Oh, my God,” he kept saying. “Oh, my God.” Over and over.

  Jays sat down in a rickety old chair that had once, it seemed, belonged to Edwin P. Hubble, who had used this telescope to observe distant galaxies, and so figure out that the universe is expanding. Jays craned his head back, and pressed his eye to the cylindrical eyepiece.

  It took him a few moments to figure out how to see. He had to keep one eye closed, of course, and even then he had to align his head correctly, or his view would be occluded by the rim of the eyepiece.

  A gibbous disc floated into his view. It was a washed-out gray with a splash of white at one part of the edge.

  It was, of course, the Moon.

  And he could see the vapor fountaining from its invisible source on the Moon’s far side. Some of it was escaping the Moon’s gravity. But most of it was falling back to the surface, and creeping sluggishly over the face of the Moon.

  Right now, the vapor formed a loose cap, sitting over the South Pole region. It was growing, but with almost imperceptible slowness. It was like watching a mold spread across a
smear of nutrient in a petri dish.

  But it wasn’t growing uniformly. It seemed to be pooling, in the deeper craters and valleys incised into the Moon, before flooding on. In fact, it seemed to be flowing generally northeast—into the mouth of the Man in the Moon—avoiding the brighter area in the southwest corner of the visible face.

  He knew the reason for that. The brighter area was the lunar highlands, older and higher than the gray areas, the lava-flooded maria. The volatiles Meacher had liberated were pouring over the Moon’s surface like fog, seeking out the low points, the crater pits and the valleys, the lava seas that flooded the great basins.

  In a deep mare to the south—that must be Mare Nubium, he thought—he could almost see the surge of the air as it flowed, a bowl of atmosphere sloshing against eroded rim mountains like dishwater; and at the leading edges of the flood there were waves, hundred-mile crests distinctly visible, reflecting back from the basin’s walls like ripples in a bathtub, moving with a sluglike slowness.

  It was, he thought, the first stirring of a new geography.

  The cap of steam was much brighter, area for area, than the native surface of the Moon, which was starting to look drab by comparison. Earth’s reflective clouds of water vapor made it one of the brightest objects in the Solar System. And already, with maybe twenty percent of the Moon’s surface covered, the Moon was much brighter than before…

  He looked away from the eyepiece. He was slightly dazzled. When he looked down, the shadow of his liver-spotted hands against his shirt was much sharper than before.

  Sixt was staring up at the Moon, its new light shining on his bare scalp. “My God,” he said. “You guys going up there, hopping around for three days, that was something. But now we’re changing the face of the Solar System. My God.”

  Jays found he was trembling. Lights in the sky. He wanted to cower, hide like a dog under Edwin Hubble’s chair.

  Henry—restless, excited—walked until he came to a rise, which he climbed in a few loping paces, and looked south.

  The undulating lunar surface stretched away before him, its surface shaped by fractal crater layers into a frozen rocky sea. The sun was to his left—the east, for even after all that had happened it was still morning on the Moon—and he could feel the touch of its heat, through the thick layers of his suit. And the Earth was before him, a blue crescent: it was an old Earth, its phase locked in opposition to the new Moon’s. He imagined human faces all over that night side, turned up toward him, watching the Moon.

  The sky above was still black, unmarked by the great events which ought to be occurring on the other side of the planet.

  Ought to be.

  All those volatiles were going to spread around the curve of the Moon.

  How quickly?

  The leading edge, spreading into vacuum, would diffuse as rapidly as molecules moved at such temperatures—say, a thousand miles an hour. Enough to cloak the Moon in cloud, from pole to pole, in three or four hours.

  That was his theory, such as it was.

  He was looking south, away from the Aristarchus Complex, over the extent of the Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms. The way it would come.

  The released vapor, like heavy fog, would rush into the low-lying areas first. It would have to flow around the big bright block of the lunar highlands to the south, the Apennine and Altai Mountains, and then gush down into the lower-lying maria. Much of the left-hand side of the visible face of the Moon, as seen from Earth, was pocked with gray maria, including the place he was standing now, on the invisible line between Procellarum and the Mare Imbrium. The volatiles would just gush across these immense gray plains, as the thin basalt lava had once flowed, a billion years before. Maybe, he thought, the new weather was going to reach him sooner than he expected.

  It was indeed a judo trick.

  His single bomb, no matter how precisely delivered, could never have melted enough of the putative volatiles at the Poles to make a difference. There hadn’t been enough energy in the nuke to melt more than that initial hundred-yard spherical chamber in the dust. But his intention was to achieve more than that: much more.

  To melt all the volatiles he believed were locked at the South Pole would need something of the order of a billion times the energy released by his nuke. One hell of a feedback factor.

  But the energy he needed was there: superstring energy, locked up in the inert Moonseed, which permeated the aluminum-rich rock that was the crust of the Moon.

  Henry had modeled it over and over.

  Elsewhere on the Moon, there was no evidence of Moonseed in the upper layers of the regolith. Presumably the action of sunlight had long ago activated whatever was there to activate; only shadowed rocks, like 86047, retained infection. And deeper in, the Witch in the Well had suppressed any chain reaction that might have led to the disassembly of the Moon.

  The gamma-ray flash from the nuke would, he figured, start a chain reaction in the deep-buried Moonseed. It would be activated in the upper layers of the crust, to a sufficient depth that there would be enough energy released to melt his volatiles—so he figured—before the chain-reaction reached the deeper crust layers and was suppressed by the Witch.

  So he figured. His lack of data, particularly on the suppression mechanism, was a little worrying.

  He looked at the black, inert horizon. Nothing might happen at all. Or, he might just have destroyed the Moon. I’ll settle for anything in between…

  It was a little spooky, in fact, the way the Moonseed had configured itself to offer him this mechanism. A lever, with which to move a planet.

  Terraforming the Moon would have been possible without this bizarre partnership with the Moonseed, and it had been Henry’s vision—what he had hoped to prove with Shoemaker—that the Moon had sufficient resources one day to become a true sister planet to Earth.

  They could have done it anyhow. But it would take a long time before humans could assemble the energy required. Centuries, even millennia.

  The Moonseed infestation seemed curiously designed. It was as if it was meant to be like this. The Alfred Synge cosmic conspiracy theory.

  Maybe he was being foolish, to be out in the open at a time like this. Or maybe he wasn’t. Who could tell? Nobody had sat through a terraforming before. Maybe nobody ever would get the chance again…

  But now there was something in the sky.

  He raised his gold sun visor. The unwavering sun beamed in on him, shining in his eyes like a spotlight. But he masked his eyes with his gloved hands, holding them over his plexiglass visor, in a tunnel before his eyes. He stared out, letting his eyes dark-adapt once more.

  Gradually, the stars came out for him, over the Ocean of Storms.

  But those pinpoint lights were flickering, he saw: for the first time since the last of its internal atmosphere was lost to space, the stars in the Moon’s sky were twinkling.

  There was air up there.

  The old surface, where it was still exposed, was looking dingy gray by comparison with the glowing mask of cloud; and that diminishing cap was crowded, even as Jays watched, by the rippling ring of cloud that closed around it.

  It must almost have reached Meacher and Bourne, he thought. They would see it any time now.

  He envied them. Christ, to be there now…

  “I knew it from the moment I picked up that damn rock,” he said.

  “Knew what?” Sixt asked, sounding puzzled.

  “That there was something in that rock.” And he told Sixt about the dust pool he’d seen on the Moon, the way his purloined fragment of bedrock had glowed in the sun.

  Sixt said, “You knew? Christ, man, if you’d said something—”

  “We might have avoided all this?” Jays shrugged. “Maybe. But if I’d reported something as crazy as that, they wouldn’t have let me fly again. What would you have done?”

  Sixt mulled it over. “What you did. I guess you shouldn’t blame yourself. The damn thing is a planetary plague. It would have gott
en here anyhow.”

  “The irony is I never flew again anyhow. Maybe there is a just God. What do you think?”

  The Moon glowed in the sky, already as bright as a new sun; even the darkened crescent to its western limb was clearly visible. It was almost featureless, so bright was it now; but Jays thought he could make out a bright triangle in the southeast—the old highland area, poking above much of the new atmosphere—and perhaps dim shadows of the old maria. Here and there on the new, bland face of the Moon, he could see the crackle of lightning: gigantic storms which must have straddled hundreds of miles, with lightning leaping between clouds, illuminating them from beneath, as if the planet’s surface itself was cracking.

  Some vapor hung away from the Moon, in a thin cloud, trails of it hovering over the South Pole. The Moon floated within its wreath of air, like a huge lantern. And he thought he could see structure in that escaped cloud: shadows cast upward by the new, brighter Moonlight. Maybe those escaped volatiles would ultimately form some kind of ring—

  The ground lurched. The telescope seemed to come alive, and the eyepiece ground into his eye socket, and he fell.

  He was on his back, in the ruins of Hubble’s chair.

  He’d heard a cracking sound. Maybe it was the dome. Or maybe it was the bones of his skull.

  He couldn’t see too well. That eye, poked by the eyepiece, didn’t seem to be functioning at all. There was no pain, though.

  Here was Sixt, hovering over him, his face a blurry Moon shape.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Sixt said. “My God. Your eye.”

  Sixt tried to lift him to his feet. Jays had never felt so old.

  “Can you see?”

  “Not so well,” he said. But he didn’t think it would matter, very much longer.

  The ground quivered again, and he heard a metallic crash, as some piece of equipment or other came shearing off its mount.

  “What do you think?” he asked. “Richter seven? Eight?”