Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Onslaught. It seemed a strange word to use, stronger than she had expected. Briefly, she was reminded of somebody else, another reclusive Japanese.

  She pointed. "I understand the ridges represent flow. Are those mountains? Are they rising out of cloud, or sea? Or are they diminishing?"

  "Does it matter? The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. Perhaps they are both falling and rising. You have traveled far to see me. I will give you food and drink."

  He turned and walked across the Moon. After a moment, she followed.

  The abandoned lunar base, called Edo, was a cluster of concrete components – habitation modules, power plants, stores, manufacturing facilities – half buried in the cratered plain. There were robots everywhere, but they were standing silent, obviously inert.

  But a single lamp burned again at the center of the old complex. Takomi lived at the heart of Edo, in what had once been, he said, a park, grown inside a cave dug in the ground. The buildings here were dark, gutted, abandoned. There was even, bizarrely, an ancient McDonald's, stripped out, its red-and-yellow plastic signs cracked and faded. A single cherry tree grew, its leaves bright green, a splash of color against the drab gray of the fused regolith.

  This had been the primary settlement established by the Japanese government, back in the twenty-first century. But Nishizaki Heavy Industries had set up in Landsberg, using the crater originally as a strip mine. Now, hollowed out, Landsberg was the capital of the Moon, and Edo, cramped and primitive, had been abandoned.

  She clambered out of her suit. She had tracked in moondust. It clung to the oils of her hand and looked like pencil lead, shiny on her fingers, like graphite. It would be hard to wash out, she knew.

  He brought her green tea and rice cake.

  Out of his suit Takomi was a small, wizened man; he might have been sixty, but such was the state of life-extending technology it was hard to tell. His face was round, a mass of wrinkles, and his eyes were lost in leathery folds; he spoke with a wheeze, as if slightly asthmatic.

  "You cherish the tree," she said.

  He smiled. "I need one friend. I regret you have missed the blossom. I am able to celebrate ichi-buzaki here. We Japanese like cherries; they represent the old Samurai view that the blossom symbolizes our lives. Beautiful, but fragile, and all too brief."

  "I don't understand how you can live here."

  "The Moon is a whole world," he said gently. "It can support one man."

  Takomi, she learned, used the lunar soil for simple radiation shielding. He baked it in crude microwave ovens to make ceramic and glass. He extracted oxygen from the lunar soil by magma electrolysis: melting the soil with focused sunlight, then passing an electric current through it to liberate the oh-two. The magma plant, lashed up from decades-old salvage, was slow and power-intensive, but the electrolysis process was efficient in its use of soil; Takomi said he wasn't short of sunlight, but the less haulage he had to do the better.

  He operated what he called a grizzly, an automated vehicle already a century old, so caked with dust it was the same color as the Moon. The grizzly toiled patiently across the surface of the Moon, powered by sunlight. It scraped up loose surface material and pumped out glass sheeting and solar cells, just a couple of square meters a day. Over time, the grizzly had built a solar farm covering square kilometers and producing megawatts of electric power.

  "It is astonishing, Takomi."

  He cackled. "If one is modest in one's request, the Moon is generous."

  "But even so, you lack essentials. It's the eternal story of the Moon. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen –"

  He smiled at her. "I admit I cheat. The concrete of this abandoned town is replete with water."

  "You mine concrete?"

  "It is better than paying water tax."

  "But how many humans could the Moon support this way?"

  "Ah. Not many. But how many humans does the Moon need? Thus, I am entrenched."

  It struck her as another strange choice of word. There was much about this hermit she did not understand, she realized.

  She asked him about the contrails she had seen, their convergence on this place. He evaded her questions and began to talk about something else.

  "I conduct research, you know, of a sort. There is a science station, not far from here, which was once equipped by Nishizaki Heavy Industries. Now abandoned, of course. It is – was – an infrared study station. It was there that a Japanese researcher called Nemoto first discovered evidence of Gaijin activity in the Solar System, and so changed history."

  She wasn't interested in Takomi's hobby work in some old observatory. But there was something in his voice that made her keep listening.

  "So you use the equipment," she prompted.

  "I watched the approach of the comet. From here, some aspects of it were apparent that were not visible from Nearside stations. The geometry of the approach orbit, for example. And something else."

  "What?"

  "I saw evidence of methane burning," he said. "Close to the nucleus."

  "Methane?"

  "A jet of combustion products."

  A rocket. She saw the implications immediately. Somebody had stuck a methane rocket on the side of the comet nucleus, burned the comet's own chemicals, to divert its course.

  Away from the Moon? Or toward it?

  And in either case, who?

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  But he would not reply, and a cold, hard lump of suspicion began to gather in her gut.

  Takomi provided a bed for her: a thin mattress in an abandoned schoolhouse. Children's paintings adorned the walls, preserved under a layer of glass. The pictures showed flowers and rocks and people, all floating in a black sky.

  In the middle of the night, Frank called her. He was excited.

  "It's going better than we expected. We're just sinking in. Anyhow the pictures are great. Smartest thing I ever did was to insist we dump the magnesium alloy piping, make the walls transparent so you can see the rocks. We have the best geologists on the Moon down that fucking well, Xenia. Seismic surveys, geochemistry, geophysics, the works. The sooner we find some ore lode to generate payback, the better..."

  The Roughneck bore had passed the crust's lower layers and was in the mantle. The mantle of the Moon: sixty kilometers deep, a place unlike any other reached by humans before.

  The Moon was turning out to be much easier to deep-mine than the Earth, for it was old and silent and still. There was a temperature rise of maybe ten degrees per kilometer of depth, compared to four times as much on Earth. The pressure scaled similarly; even now Frank's equipment was subject to only a few thousand atmospheres, less than could be replicated in the laboratory. Strangely, the density of the Moon hardly varied across its whole interior.

  But Xenia knew the project had barely begun. If Frank was to find the water and other volatiles he sought, if he was to reach the conditions of temperature and pressure that would allow the water-trapping minerals to form, it could only be at enormous depths – probably beneath the rigid mantle, a thousand kilometers deep, just a few hundred kilometers from the center of the Moon itself.

  She tried to ask him technical questions, about how they were planning to cope with the more extreme pressures and temperatures they would soon encounter. She knew that at first, in the impact-shattered upper regolith, he had been able to deploy comparatively primitive mechanical drilling techniques like percussion and rotary. But faced by the stubborn, hard, fine-grained rocks of the mantle, he had had to try out more advanced techniques – lasers, electric arcs, magnetic-induction techniques. Stretching the bounds of possibility.

  But he wouldn't discuss such issues.

  "Xenia, it doesn't matter. You know me. I can't figure any machine more complicated than a screwdriver. And neither can our investors. I don't need to know. I just have to find the right technical guys, give them a challenge they can't resist, and point them downward."

  "Paying them peanuts the
while."

  He grinned. "That's the beauty of those vocational types. Christ, we could even get those guys to pay to work here. No, the technical stuff is piss-easy. It's the other stuff that's the challenge. We have to make the project appeal to more than just the fat financiers and the big corporations. Xenia, this is the greatest lunar adventure since Neil and Buzz. That party when we first made hole was just the start. I want everybody involved, and everybody paying. Now we're in the mantle we can market the TV rights –"

  "Frank, they don't have TV any more."

  "Whatever. I want the kids involved, all those little dark-eyed kids I see flapping around the palm trees the whole time with nothing to do. I want games. Educational stuff. Clubs to join, where you pay a couple of yen for a badge and get some kind of share certificate. I want little toy derricks in cereal packets."

  "They don't have cereal packets any more."

  He eyed her. "Work with me here, Xenia. And I want their parents paying too. Tours down the well, at least the upper levels. Xenia, for the first time the folks on this damn Moon are going to see some hint of an expansive future. A frontier, beneath their feet. They have to want it. Including the kids." He nodded. "Especially the kids."

  "But the Grays –"

  "Screw the Grays. All they have is rocks. We have the kids."

  And so on, on and on, his insect voice buzzing with plans, in the ancient stillness of Farside.

  The next day Takomi walked her back to her tractor, by the Zen garden.

  She had been here twenty-four hours. The Sun had dipped closer to the horizon, and the shadows were long, the land starker, more inhospitable. Comet-ice clouds glimmered high above.

  "I have something for you," Takomi said. And he handed her what looked like a sheet of glass. It was oval shaped, maybe half a meter long. Its edges were blunt, as if melted, and it was covered with bristles. Some kind of lunar geologic formation, she thought, a relic of some impact event. A cute souvenir; Frank might like it for the office.

  "I have nothing to give you in return," she said.

  "Oh, you have made your okurimono already."

  "I have?"

  He cackled. "Your shit and your piss. Safely in my reclamation tanks. On the Moon, shit is more precious than gold..."

  He bowed, once, then turned to walk away, along the rim of his rock garden.

  She was left looking at the oval of Moon glass in her hands. It looked, she thought now, rather like a flower petal.

  Back at Landsberg, she gave the petal-like object to the only scientist she knew, Mariko Kashiwazaki. Mariko was exasperated; as Frank's chief scientist she was already under immense pressure as Roughneck picked up momentum. But she agreed to pass on the puzzling fragment to a colleague, better qualified. Xenia agreed, provided she used only people in the employ of one of Frank's companies.

  Meanwhile – discreetly, from home – Xenia repeated Takomi's work on the comet. She searched for evidence of the anomalous signature of methane burning at the nucleus. It had been picked up, but not recognized, by many sensors.

  Takomi was right.

  Clearly, someone had planted a rocket on the side of the comet nucleus and deflected it from its path. It was also clear that most of the burn had been on the far side of the Sun, where it would be undetected. The burn had been long enough, she estimated, to have deflected the comet, to cause its lunar crash. Undeflected, the comet would surely have sailed by the Moon, spectacular but harmless.

  She then did some checks of the tangled accounts of Frank's companies. She found places where funds had been diverted, resources secreted. A surprisingly large amount, reasonably well concealed.

  She'd been cradling a suspicion since Edo. Now it was confirmed, and she felt only disappointment at the shabbiness of the truth.

  She felt that Takomi wouldn't reveal the existence of the rocket on the comet. He simply wasn't engaged enough in the human world to consider it. But such was the continuing focus of attention on Fracastorius that Takomi wouldn't be the only observer who would notice the trace of that comet-pushing rocket, follow the evidence trail.

  The truth would come out.

  Without making a decision on how to act on this, she went back to work with Frank.

  The pressure on Xenia, on both of them, was immense and unrelenting.

  After one grueling twenty-hour day, she slept with Frank. She thought it would relieve the tension, for both of them. Well, it did, for a brief oceanic moment. But then, as they rolled apart, it all came down on them again.

  Frank lay on his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling, jaw muscles working, restless, tense.

  Later Mariko Kashiwazaki called Xenia. Xenia took the call in her tokonoma, masking it from Frank.

  Mariko had preliminary results about the glass object from Edo. "The object is constructed almost entirely of lunar surface material."

  "Almost?"

  "There are also complex organics in there. We don't know where they came from, or what they are for. There is water, too, sealed into cells within the glass. The structure itself acts as a series of lenses, which focus sunlight. Remarkably efficient. There seem to be a series of valves on the underside that draw in particles of regolith. The grains are melted, evaporated, in intense focused sunlight. It's a pyrolysis process similar to –"

  "What happens to the vaporized material?"

  "There is a series of traps, leading off from each light-focusing cell. The traps are maintained at different temperatures by spicules – the fine needles protruding from the upper surface – which also, we suspect, act to deflect daytime sunlight, and conversely work as insulators during the long lunar night. In the traps, at different temperatures, various metal species condense out. The structure seems to be oriented toward collecting aluminum. There is also an oxygen trap further back."

  Aluminum and oxygen. Rocket fuel, trapped inside the glass structure, melted out of the lunar rock by the light of the Sun.

  Mariko consulted notes in a softscreen. "Within this structure the organic chemicals serve many uses. A complex chemical factory appears to be at work here. There is a species of photosynthesis, for instance. There is evidence of some kind of root system, which perhaps provides the organics in the first place... But there is no source we know of. This is the Moon." She looked confused. "You must remember I am a geologist. My contact works with biochemists and biologists, and they are extremely excited."

  Biologists? "You'd better tell me."

  "Xenia, this is essentially a vapor-phase reduction machine of staggering elegance of execution, mediated by organic chemistry. It must be an artifact. And yet it looks –"

  "What?"

  "As if it grew, out of the Moon ground. There are many further puzzles," Mariko said. "For instance, the evidence of a neural network."

  "Are you saying this has some kind of a nervous system?"

  Mariko shrugged. "Even if this is some simple lunar plant, why would it need a nervous system? Even, perhaps, a rudimentary awareness?" She studied Xenia. "What is this thing?"

  "I can't tell you that."

  "There has been much speculation about the form life would take, here on the Moon. It could be seeded by some meteorite-impact transfer from Earth. But volatile depletion seemed an unbeatable obstacle. Where does it get its organic material? Was it from the root structure, from deep within the Moon? If so, you realize that this is confirmation of my hypotheses about the volatiles in –"

  Xenia stopped. "Mariko. This isn't to go further. News of this... discovery. Not yet. Tell your colleagues that too."

  Mariko looked shocked, as Xenia, with weary certainty, had expected. "You want to suppress this?"

  That caused Xenia to hesitate. She had never thought of herself as a person who would suppress anything. But she knew, as all the star travelers had learned, that the universe was full of life: that life emerged everywhere it could – though usually, sadly, with little hope of prospering. Was it really so strange that such a stable, ancient world as the M
oon should be found to harbor its own, quiet, still form of life?

  Life was trivial, compared to the needs of the project.

  "This isn't science, Mariko. I don't want anything perturbing Roughneck."

  Mariko made to protest again.

  "Read your contract," Xenia snapped. "You must do what I say." And she cut the connection.

  She returned to bed. Frank seemed to be asleep.

  She had a choice to make. Not about the comet deflection issue; others would unravel that, in time. About Frank, and herself.

  He fascinated her. He was a man of her own time, with a crude vigor she didn't find among the Japanese-descended colonists of the Moon. He was the only link she had with home. The only human on the Moon who didn't speak Japanese to her.

  That, as far as she could tell, was all she felt.

  In the meantime, she must consider her own morality.

  Lying beside him, she made her decision. She wouldn't betray him. As long as he needed her, she would stand with him.

  But she would not save him.

  Life was long, slow, unchanging.

  Even her thoughts were slow.

  In the timeless intervals between the comets, her growth was chthonic, her patience matching that of the rocks themselves. Slowly, slowly, she rebuilt her strength: light traps to start the long process of drawing out fire for the next seeds, leaves to catch the comet Rain that would come again.

  She spoke to her children, their subtle scratching carrying to her through the still, cold rock. It was important that she taught them: how to grow, of the comet Rains to come, of the Giver at the beginning of things, the Merging at the end.

  Their conversations lasted a million years.

  The Rains were spectacular, but infrequent. But when they came, once or twice in every billion years, her pulse accelerated, her metabolism exploding, as she drank in the thin, temporary air and dragged the fire she needed from the rock.

  And with each Rain, she birthed again, the seeds exploding from her body and scattering around the Land.

  But, after that first time, she was never alone. She could feel, through the rock, the joyous pulsing of her children as they hurled their own seed through the gathering comet air.