Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  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 anymore."

  "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."

  "You'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 toward 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.

  "Evidence of the flowers has been found before," he said.

  "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."

  "What kind of pattern?"

  "It is true that the final seeding event drew the pods, with unerring accuracy, back to this site, as you observed. The pods were absorbed into the structure of the primary plant, here, which has since withered. The seeding was evidently triggered by the arrival of the comet, the enveloping of the Moon by its new, temporary atmosphere. But I have studied the patterns of earlier seedings –"

  "Triggered by earlier comet impacts."

  "Yes. All of them long before human occupancy began here – just one or two impacts per billion years. Brief comet rains, spurts of air, before the long winter closed again. And each impact triggered a seeding event."

  "Ah. I understand. These are like desert flowers, which bloom in the brief rain. Poppies, rockroses, grasses, chenopods."

  "Exactly. They complete their life cycles quickly, propagate as vigorously as possible, while the comet air lasts. And then their seeds lie dormant, for as long as necessary, waiting for the next chance event, perhaps as long as a billion years."

  "I imagine they spread out, trying to cover the Moon. Propagate as fast and as far as possible."

  "No," he said quietly.

  "Then what?"

  "At every comet event, the seedings converge. Just as they did here. These plants work backward, Xenia.

  "A billion years ago there were a thousand sites like this. In a great seeding, these diminished to a mere hundred; those fortunate few were bombarded with seeds, while the originators withered. And later, another seeding reduced that hundred to twelve or so. And finally, the twelve are reduced to one. This one."

  She tried to think that through; she pictured the little seed pods converging, diminishing in number. "It doesn't make sense."

  "Not for us, who are ambassadors from Earth," he said. "Earth life spreads, colonizes, whenever and wherever it can. But this is lunar life, Xenia. And the Moon is an old, cooling, dying world. Its richest days were brief moments, far in the past. And so life has adjusted to the situation. Do you understand?"

  "...I think so. But now, this is truly the last of them? The end?"

  "Yes. The flower is already dying."

  "Bu
t why here? Why now?"

  He shrugged. "Xenia, your colleague Frank Paulis is determined to rebuild the Moon, inside and out. Even if he fails, others will follow where he showed the way. The stillness of the Moon is lost." He sniffed. "My own garden might survive, but in a park, like your old Apollo landers, to be gawked at by tourists. It is a... diminishing. And so with the flowers. There is nowhere for them to survive, on the new Moon, in our future."

  "But how do they know they can't survive? Oh, that's the wrong question. Of course the flowers don't know anything."

  He paused, regarding her. "Are you sure?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "We are smart, and aggressive. We think smartness is derived from aggression. Perhaps that is true. But perhaps it takes a greater imagination to comprehend stillness than to react to the noise and clamor of our shallow human world."

  She frowned, remembering Mariko's evidence about neural structures in the flowers. "You're saying these things are conscious?"

  "I believe so. It would be hard to prove. I have spent much time in contemplation here, however. And I have developed an intuition. A sympathy, perhaps."

  "But that seems cruel. What kind of God would plan such a thing? Think about it. You have a conscious creature, trapped on the surface of the Moon, in this desolate, barren environment. And its way of living, stretching back billions of years maybe, has had the sole purpose of diminishing itself, to prepare for this final extinction, this death, this smyert. What is the purpose of consciousness, confronted by such desolation?"

  "But perhaps it is not so," he said gently. "The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. The future of the Moon, in the direction we face, may be desolate. But not the past. So why not face that way?"

  She barely followed him. But she remembered the kare sansui, the waterless stream traced in the regolith. It was impossible to tell if the stream was flowing from past to future, or future to past; if the hills of heaped regolith were rising or sinking.

  "Perhaps to the flowers," he said, "to this flower – the last, or perhaps the first – this may be a beginning, not an end."

  "Vileekee bokh. You are telling me that these plants are living backward in time? Propagating not into the future, but into the past?"

  "In the present there is but one of them. In the past there are many – billions, perhaps. In our future lies death for them; in our past lies glory. So why not look that way?" He touched her gloved hand. "The important thing is that you must not grieve for the flowers. They have their dream, their mechta, of a better Moon, in the deep past, or deep future. The universe is not always cruel, Xenia Makarova. And you must not hate Frank, for what he has done."

  "I don't hate him."

  "There is a point of view from which he is not taking nutrients from the heart of the Moon, but giving. He is pumping the core of the Moon full of water and volatiles, and when he is done he will even fill in the hole... You see?"

  "Takomi."

  He was still.

  "That isn't your real name, is it? This isn't your identity."

  He said nothing, face averted from hers.

  "I don't think you are even a man. I think your name is Nemoto. And you are hiding here on the Moon, whiling away the centuries."

  Takomi stood silently for long seconds. "My Moon plants recede into a better past. That, for me, isn't an option. I must make my way into the unwelcome future. But at least, here, I am rarely disturbed. I hope you will respect that.

  "Now come," Takomi, or Nemoto, said. "I have green tea, and rice cake, and we will sit under the cherry tree, and talk further."

  Xenia nodded, dumbly, and let him – her? – take her by the hand. Together they walked across the yielding antiquity of the Moon.

  It was another celebration, here at the South Pole of the Moon. It was the day Project Roughneck promised to fulfill its potential, by bringing the first commercially useful loads of water to the surface.

  Once again the crowds were out: investors with their guests, families with children, huge softscreens draped over drilling gear, virtual observers everywhere so everyone on the Moon could share everything that happened here today. Even the Grays were here, to celebrate the project's end, dancing in elaborate formations.

  Earth hovered like a ghost on one horizon, ignored, its sparking wars meaningless.

  This time, Xenia didn't find Frank strutting about the lunar surface in his Stars and Stripes space suit, giving out orders. Frank said he knew which way the wind blew, a blunt Earthbound metaphor no Moon-born Japanese understood. So he had confined himself to a voluntary house arrest, in the new ryokan that had opened up on the summit of one of the tallest rim mountains here.

  When she arrived, he waved her in and handed her a drink, a fine sake. The suite was a penthouse, magnificent, decorated in a mix of Western-style and traditional Japanese. One wall, facing the borehole, was just a single huge pane of tough, anhydrous lunar glass. She saw a tumbler of murky water, covered over, on a tabletop. Moon water, his only trophy of Roughneck.

  "This is one hell of a cage," he said. "If you've got to be in a cage." He laughed darkly. "Civilized, these Lunar Japanese. Well, we'll see." He eyed her. "What about you? Will you go back to the stars?"

  She looked at the oily ripple of the drink in her glass. "I don't think so. I... like it here. I think I'd enjoy building a world."

  He grunted. "You'll marry. Have kids. Grandkids."

  "Perhaps."

  He glared at her. "When you do, remember me, who made it possible, and got his ass busted for his trouble. Remember this."

  He walked her to the window.

  She gazed out, goddesslike, surveying the activity. The drilling site was an array of blocky machinery, now stained deep gray by dust, all of it bathed in artificial light. The stars hung above the plain, stark and still, and people and their vehicles swarmed over the ancient, broken plain like so many space-suited ants.

  "You know, it's a great day," she said. "They're making your dream come true."

  "My dream, hell." He fetched himself another slug of sake, which he drank like beer. "They stole it from me. And they're going inward. That's what Nishizaki and the rest are considering now. I've seen their plans. Huge underground cities in the crust, big enough for thousands, even hundreds of thousands, all powered by thermal energy from the rocks. In fifty years you could have multiples of the Moon's present population, burrowing away busily." He glanced at his wristwatch, restless.

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "It wasn't the fucking point." He glared up at Earth's scarred face. "If we dig ourselves into the ground, we won't be able to see that. We'll forget. Don't you get it?"

  But now there was activity around the drilling site. She stepped to the window, cupped her hands to exclude the room lights.

  People were running, away from the center of the site.

  There was a tremor. The building shuddered under her, languidly. A quake, on the still and silent Moon?

  Frank was checking his watch. He punched the air and strode to the window. "Right on time. Hot damn."

  "Frank, what have you done?"

  There was another tremor, more violent. A small Buddha statue was dislodged from its pedestal and fell gently to the carpeted floor. Xenia tried to keep her feet. It was like riding a rush hour train.

  "Simple enough," Frank said. "Just shaped charges, embedded in the casing. They punched holes straight through the bore wall into the surrounding rock, to let the water and sticky stuff flow right into the pipe and up – "

  "A blowout. You arranged a blowout."

  "If I figured this right the interior of the whole fucking Moon is going to come gushing out of that hole. Like puncturing a balloon." He took her arms. "Listen to me. We will be safe here. I figured it."

  "And the people down there, in the crater? Your managers and technicians? The children?"

  "It's a day they'll tell their grandchildren about." He shrugged, grinning, his forehead slick with s
weat. "They're going to lock me up anyhow. At least this way –"

  But now there was an eruption from the center of the rig, a tower of liquid, rapidly freezing, that punched its way up through the rig itself, shattering the flimsy buildings covering the head. When the fountain reached high enough to catch the flat sunlight washing over the mountains, it seemed to burst into fire, crystals of ice shining in complex parabolic sheaves, before falling back to the ground.

  Frank punched the air. "You know what that is? Kerogen. A tarry stuff you find in oil shales. It contains carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, potassium, chlorine, other elements... I couldn't believe it when the lab boys told me what they found down there. Mariko says kerogen is so useful we might as well have found chicken soup in the rocks." He cackled. "Chicken soup, from the primordial cloud. I won, Xenia. With this blowout I stopped them from building Bedrock City. I'm famous."

  "What about the Moon flowers?"

  His face was hard. "Who the fuck cares? I'm a human, Xenia. I'm interested in human destiny, not a bunch of worthless plants we couldn't even eat." He waved a hand at the ice fountain. "Look out there, Xenia. I beat the future. I've no regrets. I'm a great man. I achieve great things."

  The ground around the demolished drill head began to crack, venting gas and ice crystals; and the deep, ancient richness of the Moon rained down on the people.

  Frank Paulis whispered. "And what could be greater than this?"

  She was in the Dark, flying, like one of her own seeds. She was surrounded by fragments of the shattered Land, and by her children.

  But she could not speak to them, of course; unlike the Land, the Dark was empty of rock, and would not carry her thoughts.

  It was a time of stabbing loneliness.

  But it did not last long.

  Already the cloud was being drawn together, collapsing into a new and greater Land that glowed beneath her, a glowing ocean of rock, a hundred times bigger than the small place she had come from.