Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  She looked around.

  She was standing on a textured plain — like a piece of the high desert around Edwards, she thought — and the ground glowed in the sunlight. But the sky remained utterly, unnervingly black. Nothing moved here. There was utter silence. She fought an impulse to turn around, to look to see who was creeping up behind her, in this horror-movie stillness.

  She took a few more steps, experimentally.

  She couldn’t walk, exactly; her legs wouldn’t bend far enough to let her. This Shuttle suit, meant for zero-G EVAs, was even worse than the old Apollo suits for stiffness. She could move in a kind of jog, rocking from side to side, but the low gravity let her travel further than she wanted to go.

  And her balance was off. Her backpack pulled at her, and to compensate she leaned forward as she walked; she felt as if she might fall at any moment. She was somewhere between buoyant and heavy. Weight and mass had been redefined for her. It was more comfortable than either a full gravity or zero G: it had much of the buoyancy of microgravity but without that disconcerting lack of up and down. One-sixth G was weak, but enough to anchor her to the world.

  But, when she was still, it was hard for her to tell when she was standing upright. The land was full of gentle rises, and there were no verticals here, no telegraph poles or trees or buildings. Something to do with the gentle tug of the Moon’s gravity on her inner ear, maybe.

  The backpack’s pumps and fans whirred, and she could feel the soft rush of oxygen over her face. The pack was a reassuring mass on her back, replete with energy, supplies for heat and cooling, water, air; she was a little bubble of Earth life, she thought, bouncing around on the surface of the Moon.

  Maybe fifty yards from the Shoemaker, she turned to face the sun. The light glared through her gold-tinted faceplate. There stood the Shoemaker, Henry on it watching her, a little gold-coloured platform with a white snowman perched on the top. The lander looked strangely light, as if it might blow away. Its gaudy gold and black and silver looked ludicrous: overdesigned, for this gentle, subtle landscape.

  Behind the Shoemaker she looked across the width of a big crater, a bowl bigger than a football stadium, shadows stretching across the ground towards her from rocks and craters. She could see the old Apollo lander, nestled close to the crater’s shadowed far wall, a squat, boxy structure, unmistakeable.

  And there, only a hundred yards from the Apollo, stood the second Shoemaker, laden with the supplies that would keep them alive.

  “How about that,” she said. “Can’t be more than six hundred feet away.” She felt elated — the first lunar landing for more than thirty years, and it was pinpoint accurate. “Outstanding.”

  “You got the job,” Henry said drily. “Now, will you help me down from here?”

  So here was Henry, unbelievably, standing on the Moon, a geologist on the ultimate field trip. He turned, slowly, trying to understand where he was. The sun dominated seeing on the Moon, he realized immediately.

  The sun was like a giant, intensely bright searchlight, pure white, overwhelming everything, and the mental picture he built up of the landscape here depended completely on the angle to the sun.

  At zero phase angle — if he looked down-sun, with his own shadow stretching across the untrodden surface — it was difficult for him to make out shadows. Most objects were visible, but the contrasts were washed out. But he could see shadows if he looked cross-sun, so the trick was to look from left to right, to pick up the shadows, and shapes and sizes and glints, and he could orient himself that way. And if he walked up-sun, with the shadows stretching towards him, the sun was very bright, glaring in his visor.

  When he looked at his own shadow the sunlight around it came bouncing straight back at him. The shadow of his body was surrounded by a glow, a halo around his helmet.

  He inspected the mineral ground. Cinereous, he thought. The colour of ash…

  But there were colours here, he realized suddenly.

  He stopped and looked around more carefully.

  If he looked in the direction of the sun, the ground looked a pale, golden brown. It was the same if he looked away from the sun, beyond his own long shadow. But to left or right the colours got darker, to a richer deep brown. If he looked under his feet, or at a handful of soil in his hand, the colour was a deep charcoal grey, sometimes even a black.

  But anyhow the Moon colours looked pale and lifeless when he looked at the blue armbands on his suit, his blue lunar overshoes, the brilliant black and gold and silver of the Shoemaker, and especially the ice-blue of the Earth, when he looked up.

  He knew he would have to learn to take account of all this, learn to read the landscape on its own terms, in its own conditions of light and shadow.

  He did a little geologizing.

  He was standing on a dark plain, its surface evidently sculpted by craters, of all dimensions, craters on craters. There were rolling hills, almost like dunes, their form softened and fluid, their flanks littered with boulders thrown out of the larger craters. And close by he could make out smaller craters, almost rimless pits in the soil, and the centre of each one was marked by a spot of fused glass, a remnant of the punch which had dug out that particular pit.

  It was a landscape unlike any he had seen on Earth.

  The mountains — foothills of the Aristarchus crater rim walls — rose up like topped-off pyramids into the black sky, their sides dauntingly steep. There was no easy comparison with terrestrial features; the hills were neither as crag sharp as the granite of the Rockies, nor as smoothly rounded as the ice rivers of Norway.

  And besides, almost all of Earth’s features — certainly all of the mountains — were young, at any rate by comparison with what he would find on the Moon. Some of the mountains of the Moon were almost as old as the Solar System itself.

  But the shadows of the mountains were not the wells of darkness he had expected, for light, reflected from nearby slopes and plains, softened the shadows. The light, reflected from the rocky ground, was, of course, Moonlight: precisely that, the very light which illuminated Earth’s night sky.

  He’d ridden through Moonlight across a quarter of a million miles. And now, standing here, he and Geena were bathed in it.

  He shivered.

  He took a step forward, over dust and broken rock. The Moon gave him a firm footing, beneath a layer of looser dust that compressed like unpacked snow.

  The loose stuff varied from place to place, from maybe a few inches thick to perhaps a foot. He knew the reason for that: the regolith was created by a hail of micrometeorite bombardment, and it deepened and matured with time.

  So when he walked into a patch of softer dust, he was walking somewhere older.

  Anyhow, nowhere did it cause him a problem; the Moon, as a geological field site, would, it seemed, be an accommodating place to work.

  In fact, he felt an odd ache as he looked down at the dust billowing around his feet. He wanted to take off his gloves and run his bare fingers through the soil, connecting with the Moon. But that was, of course, impossible; he was the alien here, encased in his bubble of Earth murk, and he must stay that way.

  He walked further.

  He bent and, with both hands, pulled a big rock out of the ground. He had to push his fingers into the crackling surface, smashing up agglutinates, rock fragments glued together by solar wind particles, to get his hands around the rock.

  From above the rock looked smooth, almost flat against the ground, like a glacier deposit. But when he dug it out he found its underside, buried in the regolith, was sharp and angular, and maybe ten times as bulky as the portion that had shown above ground, like an iceberg. And the buried surfaces were sheer, lacking the sheen of zap pits and impact glass of the exposed section.

  This rock, casually dropped here after some ancient impact, had been eroded flat by an aeon of micrometeorite rain.

  He brushed off the dust and held the rock up to his faceplate.

  This was a breccia, a compound lump o
f rock whose fragments had been crushed, ground, melted, mixed and then bound together in a shock melt. When he turned it in the flat sunlight he could see the sparkle of glass, the recrystallized minerals that were holding this lump together.

  This rock, in fact, almost looked like a vesicular basalt — a pumice, riddled with bubbles left by gas. But the heat that formed it came not from volcanism but from the energy of the catastrophic fall of a giant impactor. And he thought he could see that this breccia was in fact itself made up of earlier breccias, breccias nested in breccias like biblical generations, remnants of still earlier impacts. In this one chunk there might be pieces of ancient anorthosite crust, mare lavas, even solidified dregs of the original magma ocean.

  He weighed the lump of breccia in his gloved hand. Its weight was barely discernible in the feeble gravity. And yet, just looking at it, he felt echoes of the almost inconceivable violence which had shaped the Moon’s early history, sensed the processes which had formed this rock since, processes unlike any on Earth.

  And now Geena was calling him, telling him to come with her to the Apollo site.

  He put the rock back where he had found it, back where it had lain for a billion years, and loped away through the morning sunlight.

  Side by side, Geena and Henry crossed the few hundred yards to the Apollo site. They kept quiet, concentrating on learning how to walk.

  Walking, in fact, took more of his attention than he expected, distracting him from the geology.

  His suit would have been too heavy for him even to lift on Earth. And, being pressurized, it was about as stiff as a rubber tyre. But because of the low gravity, his mobility wasn’t much reduced from what he could manage on Earth.

  He found that trying to walk heel-to-toe, as he did on Earth, was difficult and seemed to eat up energy. He kept tumbling away from the surface, as if he was walking across a trampoline; he didn’t feel as if he was stuck down properly to this light little world, and his overpowered Earth muscles kept throwing him off.

  The best way to move was something like a lope. He would push off with one foot, shift his weight, and land on the other foot. It seemed to him he was covering ten feet or more with every step. But that couldn’t be right; the Moon must be fooling him again.

  However far it was, however long he was up, every step kept him off the ground for several heartbeats, and he had to watch where he came down, on a rock or in an ankle-snapping crater. The trick was to anticipate each next step as he flew across the ground, shifting his weight and pushing off as soon as he landed, working rhythmically, like loping across a stream. It was demanding, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the ground for long. But he could relax in mid-step, unlike a runner on Earth, and it was amazing how that simple thing conserved his energy. It seemed to him he would take a long, long time to get tired.

  He could sense his inertia, though.

  It was hard to get moving; he had to thrust his body forward to get underway, as if he was walking into a wind. And to stop, he had to dig in his heels and lean back. He felt as if he was scuffing at this pulverized surface to which he was lightly bonded, trying to move his massive Earth bulk.

  It was the separation of mass and inertia; the gravity here was so weak the effects of his mass were reduced, and inertia dominated. Sir Isaac Newton, you should have been up here. You understood all this, without having to fly to the Moon.

  When he got tired, the stiffness of his suit actually helped. He could stop where he was and just slump inside his suit, and if he gave up the effort of trying to move the damn thing he could just rest against it.

  When he looked across to Geena, she was loping along in much the same way. With her body dipping, stiff-legged, at every stride, she looked like a giraffe running across some Godforsaken piece of veldt, dipping into the swelling crater pits. He stifled a laugh.

  …The surface was nothing but craters. Emphasize that: nothing but craters.

  The main craters ranged in size, mostly from a foot across to maybe twenty yards, and from a few inches to maybe ten yards deep. It was like the frozen surface of some ocean, shaped by wavelike swells of a characteristic length and spacing.

  But there were smaller pits as well, right down to zap pits on every rock he picked up, and he knew that if he took a glass to the fragments of regolith he’d find more craters right down to the limits of visibility, the rocks themselves like little Moons, as if this was a fractal landscape.

  After four billion years of incessant pounding, there wasn’t a square inch that hadn’t been pulverized and racked up into a saucer-shaped dip of one size or another, not a footfall but where he crunched on regolith, a flour of pulverized rock. The terrain was just saturated, like the desiccated remnant of some Civil War battlefield.

  He focused on the experience: the soapy feel of the fresh regolith, the gentle swell of the surface. As he loped across the land he might as well have been on the surface of some ocean, rolling quietly.

  …And at Aristarchus Base, Rover tracks and footprints converged on the truncated base of the abandoned Lunar Module. The LM formed the centre of a circle of scuffed regolith, littered with gear.

  Geena walked respectfully up to the old LM. It was a squat box on legs, a little taller than she was. There was a ladder fixed to the front leg; when she ran a gloved hand over it she found dust clinging to its rungs, left by departing feet, more than thirty years ago.

  The gold-coloured Kevlar insulation on the descent stage was discoloured, and in some places it had split open and peeled back. Geena tried to smooth it back with her gloved hand, but it just crumbled under her touch. The bird was evidently thoroughly irradiated. The paint had turned to tan, and where she looked more closely she could see tiny micrometeorite pits, little craters dug into the paintwork. Another million years of this erosion and there would be nothing left of the Apollo.

  She looked for Henry. He was studying the ALSEP science station that the astronauts had set up. She loped over to join him.

  The instruments were laid out in a star-shape over an inert patch of the Moon, and connected by gold-coloured cabling to a central telemetry transmitter and a power plant — a thermoelectric nuclear generator, now long inert. Henry pointed out the sights like a tourist guide. Here was the seismometer, like a paint can on top of a silver drop cloth. This irregular ball in a squat box on legs must be the solar wind spectrometer. Three booms, spread out like the petals of a flower, made up the lunar surface magnetometer. And so on. All the instruments were boxes covered by gold-coloured insulation and white paint, covered with dust from long-gone astronaut footsteps, now blistered by years of sunlight.

  There were packing brackets everywhere, dumped on the closely trodden ground.

  When she turned away, she tripped on an ALSEP cable.

  She didn’t even know it; Henry had to tell her. She couldn’t see her own feet as she walked, because of the chest-mounted control unit in her way, and she couldn’t even feel the cable through the inflated layers of her suit. The cable itself hadn’t unrolled properly. It seemed to have kept a kind of “memory” of being rolled, and once unrolled it wouldn’t lie flat, in one-sixth G.

  Near the LM was much evidence of departure. The surface was littered by exhausted lithium hydroxide canisters and LM armrests, two abandoned backpacks, urine bags and food packs: garbage thrown out of the LM, the detritus of three brief days of exploration.

  And the LM was surrounded by glittering fragments, for its foil insulation had been split and scattered by the blast of the departed ascent stage’s engine. There was a new ray system, streaks of dust which overlay the footprints.

  On a rise three hundred feet away sat the Lunar Rover, with its camera blindly pointing to a sky into which its masters had disappeared.

  Perhaps fifty yards from the LM, a US flag stood on its pole, held stiffly out on the windless Moon by a piece of wire. It had fluttered only once, as the brief blast of the LM’s ascent stage engine had rushed over it, and now it was tipped over, at
an angle of thirty or forty degrees to the vertical.

  Geena loped over to the flag.

  She got hold of the staff, raised it straight, and tried to push it into the regolith. The staff would go in four or five inches easily, but then she came up against stiff resistance. Still, she managed to balance it, almost upright.

  The relentless beating of sunlight had worn away at the fabric, and its colours — the red stripes, the blue star field — were no longer factory-bright. But the flag was the most colourful object on the Moon.

  When she turned away from the flag, she saw a pattern in the dust. In the low sunlight she couldn’t make out what it was, and she walked around it.

  A single line of footsteps led to this patch in the regolith, then turned back. And here was the object of that minor expedition: a name, written in the lunar dust, by a gloved finger. TRACY. A name written up here so it would last forever, on the unchanging lunar surface. He — Jays or Tom — had thought nobody would ever see this.

  She shivered. Maybe it was a feeling she was walking through a graveyard. Or maybe it was exultation. After all, she was here. We can still do it, by God. We got here, just like before.

  She turned, taking care not to spray dust over the scrawled name, and walked away.

  The second Shoemaker, with their supplies, had come down clumsily. One of its four legs had settled into a nasty pit of a crater, and the whole thing was tilted at maybe ten degrees to the horizontal. But when Geena hopped up to the platform to check its systems, it looked otherwise intact.

  The Shoemaker looked identical to their own, except that its upper surface was covered with a glittering Kevlar insulation blanket. Geena pulled that away; it fell oddly — low gravity, no air — it was stiff as moulded steel until it hit the ground, where it crumpled softly.

  There were no crew standing frames here, Henry saw. Instead there was a pair of big, clam-shaped discs, maybe two yards across, pressed up against each other, with some kind of fabric compressed between them. There were equipment boxes and fuel tanks crowded around, black and white and gold.