Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  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 here 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.

  Water was everywhere here; it did not feel dry, a shelter in a scorched desert. But overhead, huge fans turned continually, extracting every drop of moisture from the air to be cleansed, stored, and reused. She was surrounded by subtle noises: the bangs and whirrs of fans and pumps, the bubbling of aerators. And, when the children had gone, she saw tiny shimmering robots whiz through the air, fielding scattered water droplets as if catching butterflies, not letting a drop go to waste.

  Landsberg, a giant machine, had to be constantly run, managed, maintained. Landsberg was no long-term solution. The various recycling processes were extraordinarily efficient – they had gotten to the level of counting molecules – but there were always losses; the laws of thermodynamics saw to that. And there was no way to make good those losses.

  It didn't feel like a dying world. In fact it was beginning to feel like home to her, this small, delicate, slow-motion world. But the human Moon was, slowly but surely, running down. Already some of the smaller habitations had been abandoned; smaller ecospheres had been too expensive. There was rationing. Fewer children were being born than a generation ago, as humanity huddled in the remaining, shriveling lunar bubbles.

  And there was nowhere else to go.

  Xenia had an intuition about the rightness of Frank's vision, whatever his methods. At least he was fighting back: trying to find a way for humans to survive, here in the system that had birthed them. Somebody had to. It seemed clear that the aliens, the all-powerful Gaijin, weren't here to help; they were standing by in their silent ships, witnessing as human history unfolded and Earth fell apart.

  If humans couldn't figure out how to save themselves soon, they might not have another chance.

  And if Frank could make a little profit along the way to achieving that goal, she wasn't about to begrudge him.

  Well, Frank convinced enough people to get together his seedcorn investment; jubilantly, he went to work.

  But getting the money turned out to be the easy part.

  There never had been a true mining industry here on the Moon. All anybody had ever done was strip-mine the regolith, the shattered and desiccated outer layers of the Moon, already pulverized by meteorites and so not requiring crushing and grinding. And nobody had attempted – save for occasional science surveys – to dig any deeper than a few tens of meters.

  So Frank and Xenia were forced to start from scratch, inventing afresh not just an industrial process but the human roles that went with it. They were going to need a petrophysicist and a geological engineer to figure out the most likely places they would find their imagined reservoirs of volatiles; they needed reservoir engineers and drilling engineers and production engineers for the brute work of the borehole itself; they needed construction engineers for the surface operations and support. And so on. They had to figure out job descriptions, and recruit and train to fill them as best they could.

  All the equipment had to be reinvented. There was no air to convect away heat, so their equipment needed huge radiator fins. Even beneficiation – concentrating ungraded material into higher-quality ore – was difficult, as they couldn't use traditional methods like froth flotation and gravity concentration; they had to experiment with methods based on electrostatic forces. There was of course no water – a paradox, for it turned out that most mining techniques refined over centuries on Earth depended highly on the use of water, for cooling, lubrication, the movement and separation of materials, and the solution and precipitation of metals. It was circular, a cruel trap.

  They hit more problems as soon as they started to trial heavy equipment in the ultrahard vacuum that coated the Moon.

  Friction was a killer. In an atmosphere, every surface accreted a thin layer of water vapor and oxides that reduced drag. But that didn't apply here. They even suffered vacuum welds. Not only that, the ubiquitous dust – the glass-sharp remains of ancient, shattered rocks – stuck to everything it could, scouring and abrading. Stuff wore out fast on the silent surface of the Moon.

  But they persisted, solving the problems, finding old references to how it had been done in the past, when the Lunar Japanese had worked more freely beyond their domed cities. They learned to build in a modular fashion, with parts that could be replaced easily by someone in a space suit. They learned to cover all their working joints with sleeves of a flexible plastic, to keep out the dust. After much experimentation they settled on a lubricant approach, coating their working surfaces with a substance the Lunar Japanese engineers called quasiglass, hard and dense and very smooth; conventional lubricants just boiled or froze off.

  The work soon became all-absorbing, and Xenia found herself immersed.

  The Lunar Japanese, after generations, had become used to their domes. It was hard for them even to imagine a Mo
on without roofs. But once committed to the project, they learned fast and were endlessly, patiently inventive in resolving problems. And it seemed to Xenia a remarkably short time from inception to the day Frank told her he had chosen his bore site.

  "The widest, deepest impact crater in the fucking Solar System," he boasted. "Nine kilometers below the datum level, all of thirteen kilometers below the rim wall peaks. Hell, just by standing at the base of that thing we'd be halfway to the core already. And the best of it is, we can buy it. Nobody has lived there since they cleaned out the last of the cold-trap ice..."

  He was talking about the South Pole of the Moon.

  Encased in a spiderweb pressure suit, Xenia stepped out of the hopper.

  The Moon's pole was a place of shadows. The horn of crescent Earth poked above one horizon, gaunt and ice-pale. Standing at the base of the crater called Amundsen, Xenia could actually see the Sun, a sliver of light poking through a gap in the enclosing rim mountains, casting long, stark shadows over the colorless, broken ground. She knew that if she stayed here for a month the Moon's glacial rotation would sweep that solar searchlight around the horizon. But the light was always flat and stark, like an endless dawn or sunset.

  And at the center of Amundsen, Frank's complex – ugly, busy, full of people – sprawled in a splash of reflected light.

  Xenia had never walked on the Moon's surface before, not once. Very few people did. Nobody was importing tungsten, and it was too precious to use on suits for sightseeing. The waste of water and air incurred in donning and doffing pressure suits was unacceptably high, and so on. On the Moon of 2190, people clung to their domed bubbles, riding sealed cars or crawling through tunnels, while the true Moon beyond their windows was as inaccessible as it had been before Apollo.

  That thought – the closeness of the limits – chilled Xenia, somehow even more than the collapse of Earth. It reinforced her determination to stick with Frank, whatever her doubts about his objectives and methods.