Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Here came Frank in his space suit, Lunar Japanese spiderweb painted with a gaudy Stars and Stripes. "I wondered where you were," he said.

  "There was a lot of paperwork, last-minute permissions –"

  "You might have missed the show." He was edgy, nervous, restless; his gaze, inside his gold-tinted visor, swept over the desolate landscape. "Come see the rig."

  Together they loped toward the center of the complex, past Frank's perimeter of security guards.

  New Dallas, Frank's Roughneck boomtown, was a crude cluster of buildings put together adobe-style from lunar concrete blocks. It was actually bright here, the sunlight deflected into the crater by heliostats, giant mirrors perched on the rim mountains or on impossibly tall gantries. The 'stats worked like giant floodlights, giving the town, incongruously, the feel of a floodlit sports stadium. The primary power came from sunlight too, solar panels that Frank had had plastered over the peaks of the rim mountains.

  She could recognize shops, warehouses, dormitories, mess halls; there was a motor pool, with hoppers and tractors and heavy machinery clustered around fuel tanks. The inhabited buildings had been covered over for radiation-proofing by a few meters of regolith. And there was Frank's geothermal plant, ready for operation: boxy buildings linked by fat, twisting conduits.

  The ground for kilometers around was flattened and scored by footprints and vehicle tracks. It was hard to believe none of this had been here two months ago, that the only signs of human occupation then had been the shallow, abandoned strip mines in the cold traps.

  And at the center of it all was the derrick itself, rising so far above the surface it caught the low sunlight – high enough, in fact, to stack up three or four joints of magnesium alloy pipe at a time. There was a pile of the pipe nearby, kilometers of it spun out of native lunar ore, the cheapest component of the whole operation. Sheds and shops sprawled around the derrick's base, along with huge aluminum tanks and combustion engines. Mounds of rock, dug out in test bores, surrounded the derrick like a row of pyramids.

  They reached the drilling floor. At its heart was the circular table through which the pipe would pass, and which would turn to force the drill into the ground. There were foundries and drums to produce and pay out cables and pipes: power conduits, fiber-optic light pipes, hollow tubes for air and water and sample retrieval.

  The derrick above her was tall and silent, like the gantry for a Saturn V. Stars showed through its open, sunlit frame. And suspended there at the end of the first pipe lengths she could see the drill head itself, teeth of tungsten and diamond gleaming in the lights of the heliostats.

  Frank was describing technicalities that didn't interest her. "You know, you can't turn a drill string more than a few kilometers long. So we have to use a downhole turbine..."

  "Frank, eta ochin kraseeva. It is magnificent. Somehow, back in Landsberg, I never quite believed it was real."

  "Oh, it's real," Frank said tensely. "Just so long as it works." He checked his chronometer, a softscreen patch sewn into the fabric of his suit. "It's nearly time."

  They moved out into the public area.

  Roughneck was the biggest public event on the Moon in a generation. There must have been a hundred people here: men, women, and children walking in their brightly colored surface suits and radiation ponchos or riding in little short-duration bubble rovers. These were the richest Lunar Japanese, who could still afford such luxuries. Cameras hovered everywhere. She saw virtual observers, adults and children in softscreen suits, their every sensation being fed out to the rest of the Moon.

  Frank had even set up a kind of miniature theme park, with toy derricks you could climb up, and a towering roller-coaster based on an old-fashioned pithead rail – towering because you needed height, here on the Moon, to generate anything like a respectable g-force. The main attraction was Frank's Fish Pond, a small crater he'd lined with ceramic and filled up with water. The water froze over and was steadily evaporating, of course, but water held a lot of heat, and the pond would take a long time to freeze to the bottom. In the meantime Frank had fish swimming back and forth in there, goldfish and handsome koi carp, living Earth creatures protected from the severe lunar climate by nothing more than a few meters of water, a neat symbol of his ambition.

  The openness scared Xenia to death. "Are you sure it's wise to have so many people?"

  "The guards will keep out those Gray assholes."

  The Grays were a pressure group who had started to campaign against Frank, arguing it was wrong to go digging holes to the heart of the Moon, to rip out the uchujin there, the cosmic dust. They were noisy but, as far as Xenia could see, ineffective.

  "Not that," she said. "It's so public. It's like Disneyland."

  He grunted. "Xenia, all that's left of Disneyland is a crater that glows in the dark. Don't you get it? This PR stunt is essential. We'll be lucky if we make this hole at a couple of kilometers a day. It will take fifty days just to get through the crust. We're going to sink a hell of a lot of money into this hole in the ground before we see a red cent of profit. We need those investors on our side, for the long term. They have to be here, Xenia. They have to see this."

  "But if something goes wrong –"

  "Then we're screwed anyhow. What have we lost?"

  Everything, she thought, if somebody gets killed, one of these cute Lunar Japanese five-year-olds climbing over the derrick models. But she knew Frank would have thought of that, and discounted it already, and no doubt figured out some fallback plan.

  She admired such calculation, and feared it.

  Frank tipped back on his heels and peered up at the sky. "Well, well," he said. "Looks like we have an audience."

  A Gaijin flower-ship was sailing high overhead, wings spread and sparkling like some gaudy moth.

  "This is ours," Frank murmured, glaring up. "You hear me, assholes? Ours. Eat your mechanical hearts out."

  A warning tone was sounding on their headsets' open loops now, and in silence the Lunar Japanese, adults and children alike, were lining up to watch the show. Xenia could see the drill bit descend toward the regolith, the pipe sweeping silently downward inside the framework, like a muscle moving inside a sheath of flesh.

  The bit cut into the Moon.

  A gush of dust sprayed up immediately from the hole, ancient regolith layers undisturbed for a billion years now thrown unceremoniously toward space. At the peak of the parabolic fountain, glassy fragments sparkled in the sunlight. But there was no air to suspend the debris, and it fell back immediately.

  Within seconds the dust had coated the derrick, turning its bright paintwork gray, and was raining over the spectators like volcanic ash.

  There was motion around her. People were applauding, she saw, in utter silence, joined in this moment. Maybe Frank was right to have them here, after all, right about the mythic potential of this huge challenge.

  Frank was watching the drill intently. "Twenty or thirty meters," he said.

  "What?"

  "The thickness of the regolith here. The dust. Then you have the megaregolith: rock crushed and shattered and dug out and mixed by the impacts. Probably twenty, thirty kilometers of that. Easy to cut through. Below that the pressure's so high it heals any cracks. We should get to that anorthosite bedrock by the end of the first day, and then –"

  She took his arm. Even through the layers of suit she could feel the tension in his muscles. "Hey. Take it easy."

  "I'm the expectant father, right?"

  "Yeah."

  He took frustrated little steps back and forth. "Well, there's nothing we can do here. Come on. Let's get out of these Buck Rogers outfits and hit the bar."

  "All right."

  Xenia could hear the dust spattering over her helmet. And children were running, holding out their hands in the gray Moon rain, witnesses to this new marvel.

  Chapter 19

  Dreams of Rock and Stillness

  Her world was simple: the Land below, the Dark above, the Light t
hat flowed from the Dark. Land, Light, Dark. That, and herself.

  Alone save for the Giver.

  For her, all things came from the Giver. All life, in fact.

  Her first memories were of the Giver, at the interface between parched Land and hot Dark. He fed her, sank rich warm moist substance into the Land, and she ate greedily. She felt her roots dig into the dry depths of the Land, seeking the nourishment that was hidden there. And she drew the thin soil into herself, nursed it with hot Light, made it part of herself.

  She knew the future. She knew what would become of herself and her children.

  They would wait through the long hot-cold bleakness for the brief Rains. Then they would bud, and pepper this small hard world with life, in their glorious blossoming. And she would survive the long stillness to see the Merging itself, the wonder that lay at the end of time, she and her children.

  But she was the first, and the Giver had birthed her. None of it would have come to be without the Giver.

  She wished she could express her love for him. She knew that was impossible.

  She sensed, though, that he knew anyhow.

  Overwhelmed by work as she was, Xenia couldn't get the memory of the comet impact out of her head. For, in the moment of that gigantic collision she had glimpsed a contrail: for all the world as if someone, something, had launched a rocket from the surface of the Moon.

  But who, and why?

  She had no opportunity to consider the question as the Roughneck project gathered pace. At last, though, she freed up two or three days from Frank, pleading exhaustion. She determined to use the time to resolve the puzzle. She went home, for the first time after many nights of sleeping at the Roughneck project office.

  She took a long hot bath to soak out the gritty lunar dust from the pores of her skin. In her small tub the water sloshed like mercury. Condensation gathered on the ceiling above her, and soon huge droplets hung there suspended, like watery chandeliers. When she stood up the water clung to her skin, like a sheath; she had to scrape it loose with her fingers, depositing it carefully back in the tub. Then she took a small vacuum cleaner and captured all the loose droplets she could find, returning every scrap to the drainage system, where it would be cleansed and fed back into Landsberg's great dome reservoirs.

  Her apartment was a glass-walled cell in the great catacomb that was Landsberg. It had, in fact, once served as a genkan, a hallway, for a greater establishment in easier, less cramped times, long before she had returned from the stars; it was so small her living room doubled as a bedroom. The floor was covered with rice straw matting, though she kept a zabuton cushion for Frank Paulis. Miniature Japanese art filled the room with space and stillness.

  She had been happy to accept the style of the inhabitants of this place – unlike Frank, who had turned his apartment into a shrine to Americana. It was remarkable, she thought, that the Japanese had turned out to be so well adapted to life on the Moon. It was as if thousands of years on their small, crowded islands had readied them for this greater experience, this increasing enclosure on the Moon.

  She made herself some coffee – fake, of course, and not as hot as she would have liked. She tuned the walls to a favorite scene – a maple forest carpeted with bright green moss – and padded, naked, to her workstation. She sat on a tatami mat, which was unreasonably comfortable in the low gravity, and sipped her drink.

  There was no indexed record of that surface rocket launch, as she had expected. There was, however, a substantial database on the state of the whole Moon at the time of the impact; every sensor the Lunar Japanese could deploy had been turned on the Moon, the events of that momentous morning.

  And, after a few minutes' search, in a spectrometer record from a low-flying satellite, she found what she wanted. There was the contrail, bright and hot, arcing through splashed cometary debris. Spectrometer results told her she was looking at the products of aluminum burning in oxygen.

  So it had been real.

  She widened her search farther.

  Yes, she learned, aluminum could serve as a rocket fuel. It had a specific impulse of nearly three hundred seconds, in fact. Not as good as the best chemical propellant – that was hydrogen, which burned at four hundred – but serviceable. And aluminum-oxygen could even be manufactured from the lunar soil.

  Yes, there were other traces of aluminum-oxygen rockets burning on the Moon that day, recorded by a variety of automated sensors. More contrails, snaking across the lunar surface, from all around the Moon. There were a dozen, all told, perhaps more in parts of the Moon not recorded in sufficient detail.

  And each of these rocket burns, she found, had been initiated when the gushing comet gases reached its location.

  She pulled up a virtual globe of the Moon and mapped the launch sites. They were scattered over a variety of sites: highlands and maria alike, Nearside and Farside. No apparent pattern.

  Then she plotted the contrails forward, allowing them to curl around the rocky limbs of the Moon.

  The tracks converged on a single Farside site: Edo. The place the hermit, Takomi, lived.

  It was the first Rain of all.

  Suddenly there was air here, on this still world. At first there was the merest trace, a soft comet Rain that settled, tentatively, on her broad leaves, where they lay in shade. But she drank it in greedily, before it could evaporate in the returning Light, incorporating every molecule into her structure, without waste.

  With gathering confidence she captured the Rain, and the Light, and continued the slow, patient work of building her seeds and the fiery stuff that would birth them, drawn from the patient dust.

  And then, suddenly, it was time.

  In a single orgasmic spasm the seeds burst from her structure. She was flooded with a deep joy even as she subsided, exhausted.

  The Giver was still here with her, enjoying the Rain with her, watching her blossom. She was glad of that.

  And then, so soon after, there was a gusting wind, a rush of the air molecules over her damaged surfaces, as the comet drew back its substance and leapt from the Land, whole and intact, its job done. The noise of that great escape into the Dark above came to her as a great shout.

  Soon after, the Giver was gone too.

  But it did not matter. For, soon, she could hear the first tentative scratching of her children, carried to her like whispers through the still, hard rock, as they dug beneath the Land, seeking nourishment. There was no Giver for them, nobody to help; they were beyond her aid now. But it did not matter, for she knew they were strong, self-sufficient, resourceful.

  Some would die, of course. But most would survive, digging in, waiting for the next comet Rain.

  She settled back into herself, relishing the geologic pace of her thoughts. Waiting for Rain, for more comets to gather from the dirt and leap into the sky.

  Xenia took an automated hopper, alone, to the Sea of Longing, on Farside. The journey was seamless, the landing imperceptible.

  She donned her spiderweb suit, checked it, and stepped into the hopper's small, extensible air lock. She waited for the hiss of escaping air, and – her heart oddly thumping – she collapsed the air lock around her and stepped onto the surface of the Moon.

  A little spray of dust, ancient pulverized rock, lifted up around her feet. The sky was black – save, she saw, for the faintest wisp of white, glowing in the flat sunlight. They were ice crystals, suspended in the thin residual atmosphere of the comet impact. Cirrus clouds on the Moon: relics of the death of a comet. The mare surface was like a gentle sea, a complex of overlapping, slowly undulating curves.

  And here were two cones, tall and slender, side by side, geometrically perfect. They cast long shadows in the flat sunlight. She couldn't tell how far away they were, or how big, so devoid was this landscape of visual cues. They simply stood there, stark and anomalous.

  She shivered. She walked forward, loping easily.

  She came to a place where the regolith had been raked. She stopped, stand
ing on unworked soil.

  The raking had made a series of parallel ridges, each maybe six or eight centimeters tall, a few centimeters apart, a precise combing. When she looked to left or right, the raking went off to infinity, the lines sharp, their geometry perfect. And when she looked ahead, the lines receded to the horizon, as far as she could see undisturbed in their precision.

  Those two cones stood, side by side, almost like termite mounds. The shallow light fell on them gracefully. She saw that the lines on the ground curved to wash around the cones, like a stream diverting around islands of geometry.

  "Thank you for respecting the garden."

  She jumped at the sudden voice. She turned.

  A figure was standing there – man or woman? A man, she decided, shorter and slimmer than she was. He wore a shabby, much-patched suit.

  He bowed. "Sumimasen. I did not mean to startle you."

  "Takomi?"

  "And you are Xenia Makarova."

  "You know that? How?"

  A gentle shrug. "I am alone here, but not isolated. Only you sought and compiled information on the Moon flowers."

  "What flowers?"

  He walked toward her. "This is my garden," he said.

  "A Zen garden."

  "You understand that? Good. This is a kare sansui, a waterless stream garden."

  "Are you a monk?"

  "I am a gardener."

  She considered. "Even before humans came here, the Moon was already like an immense Zen garden: a garden of rock and soil."

  "You are wise."

  "Is that why you came here? Why you live alone like this?"

  "Perhaps. I prefer the silence and solitude of the Moon to the bustle of the human world. You are Russian."

  "My forebears were."

  "Then you are alone here also. There are some of your people on Mars."

  "So I'm told. They won't respond to my signals."

  "No," he said. "They won't speak to anybody. In the face of the Gaijin onslaught, we humans have collapsed into scattered, sullen tribes."