Miniature cannon muzzles. Launch gantries for seed-carrying aluminium-burning rockets, perhaps.
‘… I must startle you again.’
She turned. It was Takomi, of course: in his worn, patched suit, his hands folded behind his back. He was looking at the flower.
‘Life on the Moon,’ she said.
‘Its lifecycle is simple, you know. It grows during periods of transient comet atmospheres – like the present – and lies dormant between such events. The flower is exposed to sunlight, through the long Moon day. Each of its leaves is a collector of sunlight. The flower focuses the light on regolith, and breaks down the soil for the components it needs to manufacture its own structure, its seeds, and the simple rocket fuel used to propel them across the surface.
‘Then, during the night, the leaves act as cold traps. They absorb the comet frost which falls on them, water and methane and carbon dioxide, incorporating that, too, into the flowers’ substance.’
‘And the roots?’
‘The roots are kilometres long. They tap deep wells of nutrient, water and organic substances. Deep inside the Moon.’
So Frank, of course, was right about the existence of the volatiles, as she had known he would be.
‘I suppose you despise Frank Paulis.’
He said mildly, ‘Why should I?’
‘Because he is trying to dig out the sustenance for these plants. Rip it out of the heart of the Moon. Are you a Grey, Takomi?’
He shrugged. ‘We have different ways. Your ancestors have a word. Mechta.’
‘Dream.’ It was the first Russian word she had heard spoken in many months.
‘It was the name your engineers wished to give to the first probe they sent to the Moon. Mechta. But it was not allowed, by those who decide such things. Well, I am living a dream, here on the Moon, a dream of rock and stillness, here with my Moon flower. That is how you should think of me.’
He smiled, and walked away.
The Land was rich with life now: her children, her descendants, drinking in air and Light. Their songs echoed through the core of the Land, strong and powerful.
But it would not last, for it was time for the Merging.
First there was a sudden explosion of Rains, too many of them to count, the comets leaping out of the ground, one after the other.
Then the Land itself became active. Great sheets of rock heated, becoming liquid, and withdrawing into the interior of the Land.
Many died, of course. But those that remained bred frantically. It was a glorious time, a time of death and life.
Changes accelerated. She clung to the thin crust which contained the world. She could feel huge masses rising and falling far beneath her. The Land grew hot, dissolving into a deep ocean of liquid rock.
And then the Land itself began to break up, great masses of it hurling themselves into the sky.
More died.
But she was not afraid. It was glorious! – as if the Land itself was birthing comets, as if the Land was like herself, hurling its children far away.
The end came swiftly, more swiftly than she had expected, in an explosion of heat and light that burst from the heart of the Land itself. The last, thin crust was broken open, and suddenly there was no more Land, nowhere for her roots to grip.
It was the Merging, the end of all things, and it was glorious.
Chapter 20
THE TUNNEL IN THE MOON
Frank and Xenia, wrapped in their spider-web spacesuits, stood on a narrow aluminium bridge. They were under the South Pole derrick, suspended over the tunnel Frank had dug into the heart of the Moon.
The area around the derrick had long lost its pristine theme-park look. There were piles of spill and waste and ore, dug out of the deepening hole in the ground. LHDs, automated load-haul-dump vehicles, crawled continually around the site. The LHDs, baroque aluminium beetles, sported giant fins to radiate off their excess heat – no conduction or convection here – and most of their working parts were two metres or more off the ground, where sprays of the abrasive lunar dust wouldn’t reach. The LHDs, Xenia realized, were machines made for the Moon.
The shaft below Xenia was a cylinder of sparkling lunar glass. The tunnel receded to the centre of the Moon, to infinity. Lights had been buried in the walls every few metres, so the shaft was brilliantly lit, like a passageway in a shopping mall, the multiple reflections glimmering from the glass walls. Refrigeration and other conduits snaked along the tunnel. It was vertical, perfectly symmetrical, and there was no mist or dust, nothing to obscure her view.
Momentarily dizzy, she stepped back, anchored herself again on the surface of the Moon.
Frank rubbed his hands. ‘It’s wonderful. Like the old days. Engineers overcoming obstacles, building things.’ He seemed oddly nervous; he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
‘And,’ she said, ‘thanks to all this problem-solving, we got through the mantle.’
‘Hell, yes, we got through it. You’ve been away from the project too long, babe.’ He took her hands. Squat in his suit, his face invisible, he was still, unmistakably, Frank J Paulis. ‘And now, it’s our time.’ Without hesitation – he never hesitated – he stepped to the lip of the delicate metal bridge.
She walked with him, a single step. A stitched safety harness, suspended from pulleys above, impeded her.
He said, ‘Will you follow me?’
She took a breath. ‘I’ve always followed you.’
‘Then come.’
Hand in hand, they jumped off the bridge.
Slow as a snowflake, tugged by gravity, Xenia fell towards the heart of the Moon. The loose harness dragged gently at her shoulders and crotch, slowing her fall. She was guided by a couple of spider-web cables, tautly threaded down the axis of the shaft; through her suit’s fabric she could hear the hiss of the pulleys.
There was nothing beneath her feet save a diminishing tunnel of light. Xenia could hear her heart pound. Frank was laughing.
The depth markers on the wall were already rising up past her, mapping her acceleration. But she was suspended here, in the vacuum, as if she was in orbit; she had no sense of speed, no vertigo from the depths beneath her.
Their speed picked up quickly. In seconds, it seemed, they had already passed through the fine regolith layers, the Moon’s pulverized outer skin, and they were sailing down through the megaregolith. Giant chunks of deeply shattered rock crowded against the glassy, transparent tunnel walls like the corpses of buried animals.
The material beyond the walls turned smooth and grey now. This was lunar bedrock, anorthosite, buried beyond even the probings and pulverizing of the great impactors. Unlike Earth, there would be no fossils here, she knew, no remnants of life in these deep levels; only a smooth gradation of minerals, processed by the slow workings of geology. In some places there were side shafts dug away from the main exploratory bore. They led to stopes, lodes of magnesium-rich rocks extruded from the Moon’s frozen interior, which were now being mined out by Frank’s industry partners. She saw the workings as complex blurs, hurrying upwards as she fell, gone like dream visions.
Despite the gathering warmth of the tunnel, despite her own acceleration, she had a sense of cold, of age and stillness.
They dropped through a surprisingly sharp transition into a new realm, where the rock on the other side of the walls glowed of its own internal light. It was a dull grey-red, like a cooling lava on Earth.
‘The mantle of the Moon,’ Frank whispered, gripping her hands. ‘Basalt. Up here it ain’t so bad. But further down the rock is so soft it pulls like taffy when you try to drill it. A thousand kilometres of mush, a pain in the ass.’
They passed a place where the glass walls were marked with an engraving, stylized flowers with huge lunar petals. This was where a technician had been killed in an implosion. The little memorial shot upwards and was lost in the light. Frank didn’t comment.
The rock was now glowing a bright cherry-pink, rushing upwards past them. It was like dropping through s
ome immense glass tube full of fluorescing gas. Xenia sensed the heat, despite her suit’s insulation and the refrigeration of the tunnel.
Falling, falling.
Thick conduits surrounded them now, crowding the tunnel, flipping from bracket to bracket. The conduits carried water, bearing the Moon’s deep heat to hydrothermal plants on the surface. She was becoming dazzled by the pink-white glare of the rocks.
The harness tugged at her sharply, slowing her. Looking down along the forest of conduits, she could see that they were approaching a terminus, a platform of some dull, opaque ceramic that plugged the tunnel.
‘End of the line,’ Frank said. ‘Down below there’s only the downhole tools and the casing machine and other junk … Do you know where you are? Xenia, we’re more than a thousand kilometres deep, two-thirds of the way to the centre of the Moon.’
The pulleys gripped harder and they slowed, drifting to a halt a metre above the platform. With Frank’s help she loosened her harness and spilled easily to the platform itself, landing on her feet, as if after a sky-dive.
She glanced at her chronometer patch. The fall had taken twenty minutes.
She got her balance, and looked around. They were alone here.
The platform was crowded with science equipment, anonymous grey boxes linked by cables to softscreens and batteries. Sensors and probes, wrapped in water-cooling jackets, were plugged into ports in the walls. She could see data collected from the lunar material flickering over the softscreens, measurements of porosity and permeability, data from gas meters and pressure gauges and dynamometers and gravimeters. There was evidence of work here, small inflatable shelters, spare backpacks, notepads – even, incongruously, a coffee cup. Human traces, here at the heart of the Moon.
She walked to the walls. Her steps were light; she was almost floating. There was rock, pure and unmarked, all around her, beyond the window-like walls, glowing pink.
‘The deep interior of the Moon,’ Frank said, joining her. He ran his gloved hands over the glass. ‘What the rock hounds call primitive material, left over from the solar system’s formation. Never melted and differentiated like the mantle, never bombarded like the surface. Untouched since the Moon budded off of Earth itself.’
‘I feel light as a feather,’ she said. And so she did; she felt as if she was going to float back up the borehole like a soap bubble.
Frank glared up into the tunnel above them, and concentric light rings glimmered in his face plate. ‘All that rock up there doesn’t pull at us. It might as well be cloud, rocky cloud, hundreds of kilometres of it.’
‘I suppose, at the centre itself, you would be weightless.’
‘I guess.’
On one low bench stood a glass beaker, covered by clear plastic film. She picked it up; she could barely feel it, dwarfed within her thick, inflexible gloves. It held a liquid that sloshed in the gentle gravity. The liquid was murky brown, not quite transparent.
Frank was grinning. Immediately she understood.
‘I wish you could drink it,’ he said. ‘I wish we could drink a toast. You know what that is? It’s water. Moon water, water from the lunar rocks.’ He took the beaker and turned around, in a slow, ponderous dance. ‘It’s all around us. Just as Mariko predicted, a fucking ocean of it. Wadsleyite and majorite with three per cent water by weight … Incredible. We did it, babe.’
‘Frank. You were right. I had no idea.’
‘I sat on the results. I wanted you to be the first to see this. To see my –’ He couldn’t find the word.
‘Affirmation,’ she said gently. ‘This is your affirmation.’
‘Yeah. I’m a hero.’
It was true, she knew.
It was going to work out just as Frank had projected. As soon as the implications of the find became apparent – that there really were oceans down here, buried inside the Moon – the imaginations of the Lunar Japanese would be fast to follow Frank’s vision. This, after all, wasn’t a simple matter of plugging holes in the environment support system loops. There was surely enough resource here, just as Frank said, to future-proof the Moon. And, perhaps, this would be a pivot of human history, a moment when humanity’s long decline was halted, and mankind found a place to live in a system that was no longer theirs.
Not for the first time Xenia recognized Frank’s brutal wisdom in his dealings with people: to bulldoze them as far as he had to, until they couldn’t help but agree with him.
Frank would become the most famous man on the Moon.
That wasn’t going to help him, though, she thought sadly.
‘So,’ she said. ‘You proved your point. Will you stop now?’
‘Stop the borehole?’ He sounded shocked. ‘Hell, no. We go on, all the way to the core.’
‘Frank, the investors are already pulling out.’
‘Chicken-livered assholes. I’ll go on if I have to pay for it myself.’ He put the beaker down. ‘Xenia, the water isn’t enough; it’s just a first step. We have to go on. We still have to find the other volatiles. Methane. Organics. We go on. Damn it, Roughneck is my project.’
‘No, it isn’t. We sold so much stock to get through the mantle that you don’t have a majority any more.’
‘But we’re rich again.’ He laughed. ‘We’ll buy it all back.’
‘Nobody’s selling. They certainly won’t after you publish this finding. You’re too successful. I’m sorry, Frank.’
‘So the bad guys are closing in, huh. Well, the hell with it. I’ll find a way to beat them. I always do.’ He grabbed her gloved hands. ‘Never mind that now. Listen, I’ll tell you why I brought you down here. I’m winning. I’m going to get everything I ever wanted. Except one thing.’
She was bewildered. ‘What?’
‘I want us to get married. I want us to have kids. We came here together, from out of the past, and we should have a life of our own, on this Japanese Moon, in this future.’ His voice was heavy, laden with emotion, almost cracking. In the glare of rock light, she couldn’t see his face.
She hadn’t expected this. She couldn’t think of a response.
Now his voice was almost shrill. ‘You’ve gone quiet.’
‘The comet,’ she said softly.
He was silent for a moment, still gripping her hands.
‘The methane rocket,’ she said. ‘On the comet. It was detected.’
She could tell he was thinking of denying all knowledge. Then he said: ‘Who found it?’
‘Takomi.’
‘The piss-drinking old bastard out at Edo?’
‘Yes.’
‘That still doesn’t prove –’
‘I checked the accounts. I found where you diverted the funds, how you built the rocket, how you launched it, how you rendezvoused it with the comet. Everything.’ She sighed. ‘You never were smart at that kind of stuff, Frank. You should have asked me.’
‘Would you have helped?’
‘No.’
He released her hands. ‘I never meant it to hit there. On Fracastorius.’
‘I know that. Nevertheless, that’s what happened.’
He picked up the glass of lunar water. ‘But you know what, I’d have gone ahead even if I had known. I needed that fucking comet to kick-start this. It was the only way. You can’t stagnate. That way lies extinction. If I gave the Lunar Japanese a choice, they’d be sucking water out of old concrete for the rest of time.’
‘But it would be their choice.’
‘And that’s more important than not dying?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s inevitable they’ll know soon.’
He turned to her, and she sensed he was grinning again, irrepressible. ‘At least I finished my project. At least I got to be a hero … Marry me,’ he said again.
‘No.’
‘Why not? Because I’m going to be a con?’
‘Not that.’
‘Then why?’
‘Because I wouldn’t last, in your heart. You move on, Frank.’
‘Y
ou’re wrong,’ he said. But there was no conviction in his voice. ‘So,’ he said. ‘No wedding bells. No little Lunar Americans, to teach these Japanese how to play football.’
‘I guess not.’
He walked away. ‘Makes you think, though,’ he said, his back to her.
‘What?’
He waved a hand at the glowing walls. ‘This technology isn’t so advanced. Neil and Buzz couldn’t have done it, but maybe we could have opened up some kind of deep mine on the Moon by the end of the twentieth century, say. Started to dig out the water, live off the land. If only we’d known it was here, all this wealth, even NASA might have done it. And then you’d have an American Moon, and who knows how history might have turned out?’
‘None of us can change things,’ she said.
He looked at her, his face masked by rock light. ‘However much we might want to.’
‘No.’
‘How long do you think I have, before they shut me down?’
‘I don’t know. Weeks. No more.’
‘Then I’ll have to make those weeks count.’
He showed her how to hook her suit harness to a fresh pulley set, and they began the long, slow ride to the surface of the Moon.
Abandoned on its bench top at the bottom of the shaft, she could see the covered beaker, the Moon water within.
After her descent into the Moon, she returned to Edo, seeking stillness.
The world of the Moon, here on Farside, was simple: the regolith below, the sunlight that flowed from the black sky above. Land, light, dark. That, and herself, alone. When she looked downsun, at her own shadow, the light bounced from the dust back towards her, making a halo around her head.
The Moon flower had, she saw, significantly diminished since her last visit; many of the outlying petals were broken off or shattered.
After a time, Takomi joined her.
He said: ‘Evidence of the flowers has been found before.’
‘It has?’
‘I have, discreetly, studied old records of the lunar surface. Another legacy of richer days past, when much of the Moon was studied in some detail. But those explorers, long dead now, did not know what they had found, of course. The remains were buried under regolith layers. Some of them were billions of years old.’ He sighed. ‘The evidence is fragmentary. Nevertheless I have been able to establish a pattern.’
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