Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  The Apollo site was still a long way ahead.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said.

  “No.” Geena was staring at the little bank of instruments before her, concentrating on the Shoemaker. She was looking internally, he realized, thinking about the machine they were riding, not externally, at the Moon.

  And the Moon was not behaving as it was supposed to.

  “Look up, Geena. We’re coming down short. Maybe you should take over and bring us in.”

  “No. I told you. We’re autoland all the way to the ground.”

  “Neil Armstrong did an override.”

  “Neil Armstrong hadn’t been here before. We have. We have maps, Henry. We have photographs. Now shut up and let this thing land itself.”

  A thousand feet above the Moon, and he was flying towards a bright field of craters, their shadows stretching away from him across the Moon. The Shoemaker was coming in at a low angle, unreasonably quickly, like an artillery shell lobbed across some ancient battlefield; and Henry was riding the shell, feet first.

  Let Geena do her job, he told himself. Trust her.

  But they were still coming down hard, and now there wasn’t even a sign of Apollo.

  It seemed to Blue, now, that he was actually rising into the air, as if Dumfoyne was a raft which he was riding in a swelling lava sea.

  Perhaps he should have brought an altimeter.

  Lava from the main vent overwhelmed Strathblane, it seemed in moments. The neat buildings, the rich green fir trees, exploded and burned, as the lava, enclosed in a stretching sack of cooling rock, surged through the streets.

  There were faults everywhere now, fissures and lava fountains. Already most of the vegetation had burned off. As if the whole area was turning into one giant caldera.

  For now he was safe, here at the summit of Dumfoyne. The hill, and its nearby twin Dumgoyne, were little islands of stability, in a sea of fissures and vents and lava fountains.

  Dumfoyne was a raft he was riding to the sky.

  His voice transmission was still getting through, although his sky was covered, now, by an ugly, roiling cloud of steam and ash, through which lightning sparked continually. But the reception was too poor for his instruments” telemetry to penetrate, and, regretfully, he folded up his instruments and collapsed his laptop.

  …incredible, Blue. We can’t believe these radar readings. There must be a magma volume production rate of millions of cubic metres a second…

  That compared to hundreds of cubic metres, Blue knew, in an eruption of the size of Mount St Helens.

  …as if we’re seeing a million years of geology compressed. Mauna Loa, built in a day. Mauna Loa in Hawaii was Earth’s largest volcano, stretching seven miles above the ocean floor.

  “But this may be bigger than Mauna Loa,” Blue said, unsure if Sixt could hear him. “Bigger than anything on Earth.”

  There had been no volcanism on Earth on this scale for a hundred millennia. Twice as long as humans had existed.

  Perhaps this was Olympus Mons come to Earth, he thought. The giant Martian shield volcano, so huge its caldera poked out of the thin atmosphere. Mars, come to Earth.

  The ground lurched, swelling further.

  “Geena, we’re coming in short.”

  “The autoland is—”

  “Going to bring us down in the wrong damn place! Can’t you see that?”

  Now, he could see, she actually closed her eyes. “You don’t know that.”

  He thought furiously, trying to figure out how this could have gone wrong… “Mascons,” he said.

  “We know where the mascons are. We mapped them with Prospector. We allowed for them.”

  “We know where they were. Geena, if we’re right about the Moonseed—”

  “Oh. Maybe the mascons shifted.”

  “Right. Geena, if we land right but in the wrong place, we’ve failed. You know that.”

  “Henry, I can’t handle this—”

  That wasn’t Geena.

  Abruptly he realized she was descending, deep into some unexpected funk. He felt irritation rise; he felt like screaming at her, rerunning the breakup of their marriage.

  But right now, she was the only pilot he had.

  It’s the lack of training, he thought. They didn’t have time to desensitize her. She’s not used to being in a situation she can’t anticipate, control to the last degree.

  But that’s where we are now.

  He tried to concentrate on the altimeter, to read off their diminishing altitude. There could be minutes left, no more.

  “Tell me about piloting,” he said. “If you don’t like where you’re landing—”

  “You have four alternatives. You can go left, right, short, or go over. Going left or right is a hairy thing.”

  “Good. And landing short—”

  “You got to come down dead. You can’t see what you’re going into.”

  “Like a copter. So—”

  “You land long.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at him, and he could see a kind of desperation in her face.

  “That’s it, Geena. Land long. Go ahead.”

  She looked forward, as if seeing the fleeing surface of the Moon for the first time. She grasped a switch with her clumsy gloved hands, and flipped it to ALTITUDE HOLD.

  The Shoemaker pitched forward, sharp enough to jolt him. Now it was almost level, and it skimmed forward, over unfamiliar, empty terrain.

  “All right,” Henry whispered. “Five hundred and thirty feet,” he said. “Looking good.”

  “Kind of sluggish,” she muttered.

  “You’re doing fine…”

  But the Moon rushed up at him — it was like riding a glass-walled lift — and new terrain swept over the horizon. A young, fresh crater slid under the Shoemaker’s angular prow. Henry made out details inside the crater: a square, blocky shape, a few scattered pieces around it, all of it casting long angular shadows at the centre of a rough disc of discoloured land.

  The attitude thrusters pulsed, making the Shoemaker’s frame shake. When Henry looked down he could see his restraints rattling silently.

  The silence of the flight was eerie. Unnatural. No engine noise, no wind whistle. Not even a plume of smoke erupting from their engine. Just this platform, the two of them, and the sun and the Earth and the Moonscape wheeling past them, under a black sky.

  The craft responded sluggishly, but the 8-ball in front of Henry tipped sharply, and the cratered landscape tilted, before righting itself again. He tried to help Geena, to follow the readings on the little computer screen. “Three hundred fifty feet, down four feet per second. Horizontal velocity pegged… Three hundred thirty, down six and a half…” He was Buzz Aldrin, he realized suddenly, relaying information to her reluctant Armstrong; it was all just as it had been before.

  And suddenly the blocky lunar-floor shapes before him resolved, and there was the old Apollo site, right in front of him. He could see the boxy shape of the abandoned LM descent stage, little glittering packages around it.

  The Moon’s surface was discoloured, in a rough circle centred on the LM stage. At first he wondered if that was some kind of raying from the LM’s ascent and descent engines. Then he understood.

  The marking was footprints from American boots: after thirty years as fresh in the lunar regolith as if they’d been made yesterday.

  And he could see a shadow, fleeing across the textured ground: it was a platform bristling with antennae, set on four spindly legs, elongated by the low sunlight — and there were two skinny forms, side by side, his own shadow and Geena’s, sailing across the surface of the Moon itself. The Shoemaker shadow was surrounded by a kind of halo, sunlight reflected brightly straight back the way it had come. Henry smiled. “I do believe we have found what we came for.”

  And now there was a surge, upwards, that threw Blue onto his back; ash particles spattered his face. He could actually feel the acceleration this time, as if he was being carried aloft i
n a high-speed elevator.

  But it wasn’t like a quake; the motion didn’t have that sharp, characteristic suddenness. Basic Newtonian physics: nothing moved a mass of rock like this suddenly.

  Storm clouds gathered above him, turbulent, agitated. The air was being displaced, rammed upwards towards the tropopause.

  The end game must be close.

  The ground stabilized again, if briefly, and he got to his knees. He was starkly alone here, now, on this chunk of rock; his instruments had gone.

  The Earth below was deformed, bulging upward.

  He was riding a plug of rock, somehow held stable here, riding the flank of a new mountain that was pushing out of the ground, its sides still glowing hot from their new birth, lava rivers coursing, overwhelming levees even as they formed. Layers of steam and dust and smoke prevented Blue from seeing the original ground level, if that term had any meaning any longer.

  He wasn’t even close to the summit of this sudden bulge, he saw; the glowing flank continued upwards above him to a peak, a new caldera, lost in more layers of steam and mist.

  The noise reached a crescendo, then seemed to die away; he kept talking, but he could no longer hear his own voice, still less Sixt’s.

  His hearing was gone, then. He doubted it mattered.

  It looked as if all of Henry’s predictions were being fulfilled.

  The plug of rock he was riding was tilting. Soon, it would tip him off. Even if not, the streams of lava gushing down the wounded flank of the higher hillside would surely overwhelm him soon; it was only the absurd expansion of the mountain which had saved him from that fate so far.

  He wondered which peril would administer the final butt-whopping—

  Slam.

  It felt like a punch from a giant, deep in the base of his spine, and he was flying in the air, literally flying, among fragments of the rock which had, moments before, comprised the modest summit of Dumfoyne.

  He couldn’t feel or move his arms or legs. Perhaps his back was broken, or his neck. He couldn’t even tell if he was still breathing.

  The human body was, in the end, remarkably fragile.

  He seemed to be riding a new fire fountain; without the rock to shield him he was surely burning up, yet he felt nothing.

  Perhaps a god was smiling on him, even now, undeservedly sparing him the punishment dished out to others.

  And, remarkably, he was still rising, high into the ash clouds, picked up like a rag by some thermal current. Lightning flared above, and the clouds parted.

  And, for a brief moment, he saw the stars, so high had he risen.

  Just a few seconds more, he thought. Let me see the new mountain from above, the greatest geological formation in a hundred thousand years. Olympus come to Earth.

  But now even the gods, at last, failed him.

  “…Two hundred feet,” Henry read. “Coming down at three. We’re going to make it. One hundred. Levelling off. Woah. Look at that.”

  Suddenly they were kicking up dust, great bright streaks of it, rushing to the horizon over the ground. His view of the surface grew blurred, and he felt a tingle of new alarm. What if Geena couldn’t see the surface? How would she know where to set down the Shoemaker?

  “Ninety-six feet, coming down at six. Slowing the descent rate,” Geena said.

  He looked around, seeking the Apollo lander. A sheet of dust swept over the boxy LM. He hoped their kicked-up debris wouldn’t mess up the landing site.

  Now all Henry could see was a streaked layer of dust, with a few of the taller rocks sticking up here and there, like low mist.

  “Fifty feet,” Geena said. “Shit, we’re going backward… Henry, how much fuel do we have left?”

  The fuel indicator was a little ticking clock. “Sixty seconds flying time.”

  “More than Armstrong,” she muttered. “Thirty feet. Coming down at two. No lateral movement now.” Her voice was thin, but she seemed in control.

  A blue glow lit up on the instrument panel, startling Henry. “What’s that?”

  “Contact light!”

  Geena slapped the ENGINE STOP OVERRIDE button on the panel. The slight vibration of the engine died immediately.

  The Shoemaker fell the last few feet, into dust that was already settling.

  The four legs hit the ground with a firm thump, that transmitted up his legs to his spine, the Moon itself punching up at his animal bones for his audacity in being here.

  Geena went into a flurry of post-landing checks. “Descent engine command override is off. Engine arm off. Control stick out of detent…”

  And the dust settled, falling out of the airless spaces around him like so many tiny projectiles, and the stillness of a billion years returned to the Imbrium plain.

  Craters and rocks, just a few feet below him now; and under a thin layer of kicked-up dust, he could see footprints, a generation old. He was on the Moon.

  “Houston,” Geena said, “this is Aristarchus Base. We have come home.”

  PART IV

  MOON

  1

  The sky was dominated by the sun, a white spotlight too bright to look at. The Earth was there in the blackness, bigger than a full Moon but smaller than Geena had expected, just a thumbnail of blue light in the sky. The brightness of the sun made it impossible to make out the stars, and, away from sun and Earth, the sky was just a jet black, empty.

  Standing here on the lander platform, she could see all the way to the horizon, clearer than the finest day on Earth. The sculpted hills of the Aristarchus ejecta blanket rose above this puddle of pitted, frozen basalt, their slopes bathed in sunlight, shining like fresh snow.

  But there were no visual cues — no trees or cars or buildings or people, not even haze, to help her judge the distance. And beyond the brightly-lit hills at that horizon there was only blackness, like the space at the edge of a map.

  She could see the horizon was close, for it curved, gently but noticeably, the way the Earth looked to curve from fifty thousand feet or so. And in fact she could even see how the land before her curved away, dropping like the brow of a hill, out to the horizon. On this lander platform, she could tell she was standing on a ball of rock and dust, suspended in space; the roundness of this world was no intellectual exercise.

  She felt lost.

  It just didn’t look the same place as from orbit. Most of the shadows she’d used to guide the landing, particularly those pooled at the bottom of the craters, were invisible now. Not only that, she couldn’t see even the larger craters beyond a hundred feet or so, so flattened was the landscape by her perspective.

  Maybe there was just a hint of colour. Golds and tans. But it was washed out, as if poking out from under a layer of dust. Shades of concrete, she thought. It was a little like looking out over her driveway, back in Clear Lake, under the glare of the security night lights.

  She didn’t share these non-geological thoughts with Henry.

  She looked at the sunlight bathing her gloved hand. The fabric of her sleeve glowed with an intense brightness, as if it had just been manufactured. She thought she could feel, in fact, a ghostly trace of the sun’s warmth, seeping through the layers of cloth surrounding her.

  But she shivered, under the black sky. She could feel her heartbeat rise, and hoped it didn’t show up on the monitors on the ground.

  For it was wrong. How could so much light be falling on her, and not dispel the darkness above? Some ancient part of her brain, adapted for billions of years to life in the pond-like atmosphere of Earth, seemed to be rebelling against these new conditions.

  Going to take some getting used to, she thought. That’s all.

  She looked past her feet, the way she now had to climb down, in her role as mission commander, to step on the Moon. The Shoemaker’s footpads had settled barely an inch into the ground, and the little ladder, just two or three steps, was resting neatly against the dust.

  Geena released her restraints. They rolled themselves up silently into their holder
s.

  She took a step forward, to the edge of the platform. She was at the centre of a radial array of streaks and stripes, the disturbance they’d made in the ancient dust of the Moon as they descended.

  She felt giddy, vertiginous. Ridiculous. She’d ridden down from orbit on this contraption, and now here she was three feet above the dust, and she felt dizzy. But even so, she had to hold onto the control post before she got over it.

  She turned to Henry. He was still in his restraints, standing calmly, watching her. His oversuit glowed brilliant white in the unfiltered sunlight. He held out a gloved hand to her.

  She took it. Their gloves were so thick she could only feel the bulk of his suit, not his flesh and bone within.

  Holding on to Henry, she turned, got hold of the handrail, and bent forward. She put her foot on the top rung of the ladder, then the second.

  Her suit was stiff. In this Shuttle EMU it was hard to bend, to lower her feet from rung to rung. She found it was easier to push off and just drop down to the next rung, and the next.

  She let go of Henry’s hand.

  She pushed away one last time, and her hands slid along the rail… and her feet thumped into Moon dust.

  A little spray of dust — ancient pulverized rock, charcoal-black — lifted up around her feet, and settled back. Where it touched her clothing, it stuck.

  She said: “We’re back. My God, we did it. We’ve come back to the Moon.”

  She heard the sounds from Houston, whooping in her headset, some kind of broken-voiced response from Frank Turtle. But the words were remote and didn’t register.

  She moved her foot around over the surface. The dust was soft, queasy, but she wasn’t sinking in too far. She took a few steps. A little cloud of dust tracked around her feet, falling back with neat, liquid grace. The dust seemed to have an affinity for her suit, for it clung to her blue overshoes and the fabric of her leggings, as if she was a magnet attracting iron filings.