Space

by Stephen Baxter

  They talked for hours.

  When he left, she went to the door to wave him goodbye.

  The Day was little advanced, the rake of sunlight still sparse on the ice, and Mirror still rode bright in the sky. Here was another strange forward echo of Leonardo’s, it struck her, though she preferred not to mention it to her already over-excited grandson: in these remote times, there were crystal spheres in orbit around the Earth. The difference was, people had put them there.

  As she closed the door she heard the honking of geese, a great flock of them fleeing the excessive brightness of full Daylight.

  Each Morning, as the sun laboured into the sky, there were storms. Thick fat clouds raced across the sky, and water gushed down, carving new rivulets and craters in the ancient soil, and turning the ice at the rim of the Tycho pack into a thin, fragile layer of grey slush.

  The storms persisted as Noon approached on that last Day, and she travelled with Berge to the phytomine celebration to be held on the lower slopes of Maginus.

  They made their way past sprawling fields tilled by human and animal muscle, thin crops straining towards the sky, frost shelters laid open to the muggy heat. And as they travelled they joined streams of battered carts, all heading for Maginus. Xenia felt depressed by the people around her: the spindly adults, their hollow-eyed children – even the cattle and horses and mules were skinny and wheezing. The Moon soil was thin, and the people and animals were all, of course, slowly being poisoned besides.

  Most people chose to shelter from the rain. But to Xenia it was a pleasure. Raindrops here were fat glimmering spheres the size of her thumb. They floated from the sky, gently flattened by the resistance of the thick air, and they fell on her head and back with soft, almost caressing impacts, and water clung to her flesh in great sheets and globes she must scrape off with her fingers. So long and slow had been their fall from the high clouds that the drops were often warm, and the air thick and humid and muggy. She liked to think of herself standing in the band of storms that circled the whole of the slow-turning Moon.

  It reminded her of the day of Frank Paulis’s final triumph.

  She remembered that first hour it was possible to step outside the domes – the first hour when unprotected people could survive on the Moon, swathed as it was by air drawn up by the great mines that bore Paulis’s name – an hour that had come to pass thanks, of course, to Frank’s ingenuity, courage, determination and downright unscrupulous dishonesty. Frank, doggedly, had lived to see it, and on that day the authorities let him out of house arrest, just briefly. They wouldn’t permit him to be the first to walk out of a dome without a mask – they couldn’t bring themselves to be as generous as that. But he was among the first. And that was, perhaps, enough. She remembered how he stalked in the fresh air, squat and defiant, sniffing up great lungfuls of the air he had made, and he laughed as the rain trickled into his toothless mouth, fat lunar drops of it.

  And, soon after that, he died.

  After that Xenia had left, with the Gaijin, for the stars.

  When she returned home she found 1300 years of history had worn away, leaving the Earth a cloud-covered ruin, the solar system threatened by interstellar war, the last humans struggling to survive on Mercury and the Moon. Nobody remembered her, or much of the past: it was as if this attenuated, unstable present was all there ever had been, all that would ever be. So she had shed her old identity, settled into the community here.

  Thanks to her engineered biology, a gift of the futures she had visited, she had remained young, physically. Young enough to bear children, even. But now, despite the invisible engineering in her flesh, she was slowly dying, of course, as was everybody, as was the Moon.

  How strange that the inhabited Moon’s life had been as brief as her own: that her birth and death would span this small world’s, that its rocky bones would soon emerge through its skin of air and ocean, just as hers would push through her decaying flesh.

  At last they approached Maginus.

  Maginus was an old, eroded crater complex to the south-east of Tycho. Its ancient walls glimmered with crescent lakes and glaciers. Sheltered from the winds of Morning and Evening, Maginus was a centre of life, and long before they reached the foothills, as the fat rain cleared, she saw the tops of giant trees looming over the horizon. She thought she saw creatures leaping between the tree branches. They may have been lemurs, or even bats; or perhaps they were kites wielded by ambitious children.

  Berge showed delight as they crossed the many water courses, pointing out engineering features which had been anticipated by Leonardo, dams and bridges and canal diversions and so forth, some of them even constructed since the Failing. But Xenia took little comfort, oppressed as she was by the evidence of the fall of mankind. For example, they journeyed along a road made of lunar glass, flat as ice and utterly impervious to erosion, carved long ago into the regolith by vast spaceborne engines. But they travelled this marvellously engineered highway in a cart that was wooden, and drawn by a spavined, thin-legged mule.

  Such contrasts were unendingly startling, to a time-stranded traveller like Xenia. But, she thought with a grisly irony, all the technology around them would have been more than familiar to Berge’s hero, Leonardo. There were gadgets of levers and pulleys and gears, their wooden teeth constantly stripped; there were turnbuckles, devices to help erect cathedrals of Moon concrete; there had even been pathetic lunar wars fought with catapults and crossbows, ‘artillery’ capable of throwing lumps of rock a few kilometres.

  But once people had dug mines that reached the heart of the Moon. The people today knew this was so, else they could not exist here. She knew it was true, for she remembered it.

  As they neared the phytomine, the streams of traffic converged to a great confluence of people and animals. There was a swarm of reunions of friends and family, and a rich human noise carried on the thick air.

  When the crowds grew too dense Xenia and Berge abandoned their wagon and walked. Berge, with unconscious generosity, supported her with a hand clasped about her arm, guiding her through this human maelstrom.

  Children darted around her feet, so fast she found it impossible to believe she could ever have been so young, so rapid, so compact, and she felt a mask of old-woman irritability settle on her. But many of the children were, at age seven or eight or nine, already taller than she was, girls with languid eyes and the delicate posture of giraffes. The one constant of human evolution on the Moon was how the children stretched out, ever more languorous, in the gentle gravity. But in later life they paid a heavy price in brittle, calcium-starved bones.

  All Berge wanted to talk about was Leonardo da Vinci.

  ‘Leonardo was trying to figure out the cycles of the Earth. For instance, how water could be restored to the mountaintops. Listen to this.’ He fumbled, one-handed, with his dog-eared manuscript. ‘We may say that the Earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil; its bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the mountains; its cartilage is the tufa stone; its blood the veins of its waters … And the vital heat of the world is fire which is spread throughout the Earth; and the dwelling place of the spirit of growth is in the fires, which in divers parts of the Earth are breathed out in baths and sulphur mines … You understand what he’s saying? He was trying to explain the Earth’s cycles by analogy with the systems of the human body.’

  ‘He was wrong.’

  ‘But he was more right than wrong, grandmother! Don’t you see? This was centuries before geology was formalized, before matter and energy cycles would be understood. Leonardo had got the right idea, from somewhere. He just didn’t have the intellectual infrastructure to express it …’

  And so on. None of it was of much interest to Xenia. As they walked it seemed to her that his weight was the heavier, as if she, the foolish old woman, was constrained to support him, the young buck. It was evident his sickliness was advancing fast – and it seemed that others around them noticed it too, and separat
ed around them, a sea of unwilling sympathy.

  At last they reached the plantation itself. They had to join queues, more or less orderly. There was noise, chatter, a sense of excitement. For many people, such visits were the peak of each slow lunar Day.

  Separated from the people by a row of wooden stakes and a few metres of bare soil was a sea of growing green. The vegetation was predominantly mustard plants. Chosen for their bulk and fast growth, all of these plants had grown from seed or shoots since the last lunar Dawn. The plants themselves grew thick, their feathery leaves bright. But many of the leaves were sickly, already yellowing.

  The fence was supervised by an unsmiling attendant, who wore – to show the people their sacrifice had a genuine goal – artefacts of unimaginable value, ear rings and brooches and bracelets of pure copper and nickel and bronze.

  The attendant told them, in a sullen prepared speech, that the Maginus mine was the most famous and exotic of all the phytomines: for here gold itself was mined, still the most compelling of all metals. These mustard plants grew in soil in which gold, dissolved out of the base rock by ammonium thiocyanate, could be found at a concentration of four parts per million. But when the plants were harvested and burned, their ash contained four hundred parts per million of gold, drawn out of the soil by the plants during their brief lives.

  The phytomines, where metals were slowly concentrated by living things, were perhaps the Moon’s most important remaining industry.

  As Frank Paulis had understood centuries ago, lunar soil was sparse and ungenerous. And yet, now that Earth was wrecked, now that the spaceships no longer called, the Moon was all the people had.

  The people of the Moon had neither the means nor the will to rip up the top hundred metres of their world to find the precious metals they needed. Drained of strength and tools, they must be more subtle.

  Hence the phytomines.

  The technology was old – older than the human Moon, older than spaceflight itself. The Vikings, marauders of Earth’s dark age, would mine their iron from ‘bog ore’, iron-rich stony nodules deposited near the surface of bogs by bacteria which had flourished there: miniature miners, not even visible to the Vikings who burned their little corpses to make their nails and swords and pans and cauldrons.

  And so it went, across this battered, parched little planet, a hierarchy of bacteria and plants and insects and animals and birds, collecting gold and silver and nickel and copper and bronze, their evanescent bodies comprising a slow merging trickle of scattered molecules stored in leaves and flesh and bones, all for the benefit of that future generation who must some day save the Moon.

  Berge and Xenia, solemnly, took ritual scraps of mustard-plant leaf on their tongues, swallowed ceremonially. With her age-furred tongue she could barely taste the mustard’s sharpness. There were no drawn-back frost covers here because these poor mustard plants would not survive to the sunset: they died within a lunar Day, from poisoning by the cyanide.

  Berge met friends, and melted into the crowds.

  Xenia returned home alone, brooding.

  She found her family of seals had lumbered out of the ocean and onto the shore. These were constant visitors. During the warmth of Noon they would bask for hours, males and females and children draped over each other in casual abandon, so long that the patch of regolith they inhabited became sodden and stinking with their droppings. The seals, uniquely among the creatures from Earth, had not adapted in any apparent way to the lunar conditions. In the flimsy gravity they could surely perform somersaults with those flippers of theirs. But they chose not to; instead they basked, as their ancestors had on far-remote Arctic beaches.

  Xenia didn’t know why this was so. Perhaps the seals were, simply, wiser than struggling, dreaming humans.

  The long Afternoon sank into its mellow warmth. The low sunlight diffused, yellow-red, to the very top of the tall sky.

  Earth was clearly visible, wrapped in yellow clouds – they were clouds of dust and bits of rock and vaporized ocean, thrown up there by the great impact a hundred years back – clouds which, the scientists used to say, would take centuries to disperse. Now, nobody so much as looked at Earth, as if, now that it could no longer succour its blue satellite, the planet had become unmentionable, its huge wounds somehow impolite. But Xenia could make out a dim cloud of green, swathing the Earth: it was an orbiting forest, Trees that had survived the collision, still drawing their sustenance from the curdled air with superconductor roots.

  The comet impact had been relatively minor, on the cosmic scale of such events. But it had been sufficient to silence Earth; nobody on the Moon knew who, or what, had survived on its surface. Xenia wondered if even those Trees could survive the greater and more frequent impacts which many had predicted were the inevitable outcome of the conflict in the Oort cloud, as the Crackers threatened to break through the Gaijin cordon, as warring Eeties hurled giant rogue objects into the system’s crowded heart, century after century.

  Such musing failed to distract her from thoughts of Berge’s illness, which advanced without pity. She was touched when he chose to come stay with her, to ‘see it out’, as he put it.

  Her fondness for Berge was not hard to understand. Her daughter had died in childbirth. This was not uncommon, as pelvises evolved in heavy Earth gravity struggled to release the great fragile skulls of Moon-born children – and Xenia’s genes, of course, came direct from Earth, from the deep past.

  So she had rejoiced when Berge was born, sired by her son of a lunar native; at least her genes, she consoled herself, which had emanated from primeval oceans now lost in the sky, would travel on to the furthest future. But now, it seemed, she would lose even that consolation.

  But she was not important, nor the future, nor her complex past. All that mattered was Berge, here in the present, and on him she lavished all her strength, her love.

  Berge spent his dwindling energies in feverish activities. Still his obsession with Leonardo clung about him. He showed her pictures of impossible machines, far beyond the technology of Leonardo’s time: shafts and cogwheels for generating enormous heat, a diving apparatus, an ‘easy-moving wagon’ capable of independent locomotion. The famous helicopter intrigued Berge particularly. He built many spiral-shaped models of bamboo and paper; they soared into the thick air, easily defying the Moon’s gravity, catching the reddening light.

  She wasn’t sure if he knew he was dying.

  In her gloomier hours – when she sat with her grandson as he struggled to sleep, or as she lay listening to the ominous, mysterious rumbles of her own failing body, cumulatively poisoned, wracked by the strange distortions of lunar gravity – she wondered how much further humans must descend.

  The heavy molecules of the thick atmosphere were too fast-moving to be contained by the Moon’s gravity. The air would be thinned in a few thousand years: a long time, but not beyond comprehension. Long before then people would have to reconquer this world they had built, or they would die.

  So they gathered metals, molecule by molecule.

  And, besides that, they would need knowledge.

  The Moon had become a world of patient monks, endlessly transcribing the great texts of the past, pounding the eroding wisdom of the millennia into the brains of the wretched young. It seemed essential to Xenia they did not lose their concentration as a people, their memory. But she feared it was impossible. Technologically they had already descended to the level of Neolithic farmers, and the young were broken by toil even as they learned.

  She had lived long enough to realize that they were, fragment by fragment, losing what they once knew.

  If she had one simple message to transmit to the future generations, one thing they should remember lest they descend into savagery, it would be this: People came from Earth. There: cosmology and the history of the species and the promise of the future, wrapped up in one baffling, enigmatic, heroic sentence. She repeated it to everyone she met. Perhaps those future thinkers would decode its meaning, and
would understand what they must do.

  Berge’s decline quickened as the sun slid down the sky, the clockwork of the universe mirroring his condition with a clumsy, if mindless, irony. In the last hours she sat with him, quietly reading and talking, responding to his near-adolescent philosophizing with her customary brusqueness, which she was careful not to modify in this last hour.

  ‘… But have you ever wondered why we are here and now?’ He was whispering, the sickly gold of his face picked out by the dwindling sun. ‘What are we, a few million, scattered in our towns and farms around the Moon? What do we compare to the billions who swarmed over Earth in the great years? Why do I find myself alive now rather than then? It is so unlikely …’ He turned his great lunar head. ‘Do you ever feel you have been born out of your time, as if you are stranded in the wrong era, an unconscious time traveller?’

  She would have confessed she often did, but he whispered on.

  ‘Suppose a modern human – or someone of the great ages of Earth – was stranded in the sixteenth century, Leonardo’s time. Suppose he forgot everything of his culture, all its science and learning –’

  ‘Why? How?’

  ‘I don’t know … But if it were true – and if his unconscious mind retained the slightest trace of the learning he had discarded – wouldn’t he do exactly what Leonardo did? Study obsessively, try to fit awkward facts into the prevailing, unsatisfactory paradigms, grope for the deeper truths he had lost? Don’t you see? Leonardo behaved exactly as a stranded time traveller would.’

  ‘Ah.’

  She thought she understood; of course, she didn’t. And in her unthinking way she launched into a long and pompous discourse on feelings of dislocation: on how every adolescent felt stranded in a body, an adult culture, unprepared …

  Berge wasn’t listening. He turned away, to look again at the bloated sun.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘you should drink more soup.’