Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  She closed her eyes, and listened to the tapping of Henry’s fingers on the keypad of his laptop, his characteristic, soft, under-the-breath mutterings — frustration, surprise, satisfaction. Just like old times, she thought. As she drifted, the drizzle of key taps seemed to stretch out, as if Henry was some scientifically-minded robot, slowly running down.

  Maybe she slept.

  Henry tapped her on the shoulder. He was hollow-eyed, but he seemed healthy enough. He was chewing on a rice cake.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “But you’re wide awake.”

  “I am now.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You aren’t working.”

  He shrugged. “I think I’m done for now. Monica Beus sent me another e-mail. Smuggled it past the NASA smiley-face censors.”

  “And?”

  “And what? The world is coming to an end. Where do you want me to start?”

  The event in Scotland, its scale unprecedented in the lifetime of the human species, had shaken the world on every level — physical, political, economic. Governments were collapsing all over. Someone had taken out the UN building in New York with a backpack nuke. Britain had invaded the Republic of Ireland, seeking living space.

  The NASA satellite pictures were scary. White infra-red blurs that were whole populations, running. Black scars showed where thousands, millions, had died. People were fleeing in herds, seeking safety where none existed anywhere on Earth, all dignity gone.

  After the collapse of the international order, wars had flared all over, in every troublespot you could think of, nuclear, chemical, biological, conventional. But it hadn’t taken long for the collapse and general chaos to reach a point where large-scale warfare was impossible, and the conflicts descended into low-level, low-tech — but nonetheless bloody — local brushfire.

  “Good news,” Henry said humourlessly. “Famine is killing more people than war. Oh, and NASA centers have been coming under attack.”

  “Why, for Christ’s sake?”

  He shrugged. “You got to blame somebody.”

  He was talking too fast, his mood strange.

  She pushed her way out of her sleeping bag. “Show me what you have.”

  He brought over his laptop. The screen showed a sphere in false colours, yellow, orange and red, slowly rotating, semi-transparent so she could see to its core.

  He asked, “What does this look like?”

  Under a near-intact crust, the sphere was riddled with pockets and chambers. The core was picked out by a hard, dark blue knot. “A rotten apple.”

  “It’s the deep structure of the Moon.”

  “Right.”

  He explained how he’d produced this image.

  The Moon was a quiet planet.

  It wasn’t just the lack of air. The Moon had some seismic activity. In fact the heaviest quakes were imposed by the Earth, every month, “deep forming Moonquakes” caused by the dark tides Earth raised in the rocks of the waterless Moon. And there were occasional “shallow Moonquakes” — smaller, isolated events, of which nobody knew the cause. There were even occasional landslides, caused by impacts or quakes.

  But the Moon’s seismic violence was only a hundred-millionth part of the energy that racked the Earth.

  On the airless Moon there could be no sound, of course. But the Moon, paradoxically, transmitted sound well, through its solid structure. The Moon had “high Q’, Henry told her. That meant that when you hit the Moon, as he had done with his implanted charges, it would ring like a bell. And if you set a seismometer on the surface, it could pick up your footsteps as you lumbered away in your spacesuit.

  What all this meant was that Henry’s networks of seismometers were a powerful tool for unravelling the meaning of the rocky waves that passed through the Moon’s interior.

  “…I have a database and analysis program here called BOB II,” he said. He brought up lists of commands. “A neat piece of work. Command-drive, interactive. It’s adapted from the data analysis suite VDAP uses — the volcano disaster people — for the real-time analysis of time series data of seismic events in crisis situations. And—”

  “Henry, I don’t care about the software. Tell me what this means.”

  For answer he reduced the Moon’s image, and paired it with another. “This is what we called a puffball rock, from Edinburgh. Just a couple of feet or so across. Rotten with Moonseed, ready to blow.”

  It was an irregular elliptical shape, something like a potato. But it showed the same pattern of pockets through its structure as the Moon.

  “You’re telling me the Moon is a puffball rock.”

  “I’m telling you the Moonseed has infested it, as it did rocks on Earth.” There were differences of detail, but the patterns of the two infestations were the same. “You can see the relative scaling of these chambers — the way they cluster, like bubbles butting up against one another. We find the same in smaller rocks. Even dust fragments.”

  “…The Moonseed is all the way through the Moon,” she said. “That’s what this means.”

  “Yes.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I guess that isn’t so obvious, unless you study this stuff. Yes. The Moonseed is all the way through the Moon. I kind of knew it would be,” Henry said sadly. “The assumption of mediocrity. Jays Malone wasn’t looking for Moonseed, so from the point of view of the Moonseed he landed at random, but he found it anyway. If it was here, at Aristarchus, it was going to be everywhere…

  “Geena, the Moonseed works in a fractal way. The same structure regardless of scale. Whatever rock it settles in, it sets up the same kind of infestation pattern through the structure. And if you slice off a small piece of that rock, you’ll find the same structure repeated on the smaller scale, and if you slice off a piece of that, the same again… Right down to the microscopic.” He shook his head. “You have to admire the design. Cold, simple, logical. Yet with time, with the most minimal of resources, it allows the Moonseed to infest a world. The Moonseed is adapted to the universe. Perhaps the Moonseed, not we, is going to be the true master of the future…”

  “You know, I hate it when you talk like that. It’s a sign of your morbid personality.”

  He looked surprised. “Morbid?”

  “Sure. How often would you wake me at three a.m. full of angst about death and futility? Morbid, Henry, that’s you.”

  “Well, I guess I have a lot to be morbid about.”

  She studied the Moon image once more. “Here’s something not in your puffball rock.” She tapped the dark centre of the image.

  He rubbed his eyes. “It’s a mass anomaly at the centre of the Moon.”

  “A mascon?”

  “No. More dense, relatively, than that. More regular.”

  “Regular?”

  “It shows plane surfaces. Evidence of internal structure. It’s tens of miles across; it must be very dense. The data’s a little patchy…”

  “What is it?”

  He paused before replying. “Geena, I didn’t come to the Moon just to find if the Moonseed is spread right through it. I knew that must be true, if a galoot like Jays Malone could land at random and pick up a sample at his feet. All this is just confirmation.”

  “Then why?”

  “I had to find out why the Moon continues to exist at all. Why doesn’t the Moonseed destroy the Moon, as it did Venus? Something here has to be suppressing it. Making it inert. Oh, probably the stuff near the surface went off long ago, under the action of sunlight, but the reaction, the spread of the Moonseed, was stopped. Like everything else on the Moon, the Moonseed infestation here is old; the surface activity finished long ago.”

  “Are you saying that this thing, at the core of the Moon, is suppressing the Moonseed?”

  “I think so.” His eyes were fixed on nothing. “It’s the Witch in the Well, Geena. The demon at the heart of the Moon.”

  “But what is it? Some geological thing?”

&
nbsp; “No…”

  He told her his hypothesis.

  It came to Earth when the Solar System was young.

  One day, human scientists would call it the Impactor.

  It had about the mass of Mars, a tenth of Earth’s. Humans would later speculate that it was a young planet in its own right.

  But they were wrong. It was not a planet.

  Its heart was a dense block of matter, complex, its surface shifting, silvery. It was a hundred miles across, extraordinarily dense.

  This core came trailing a cloud of silvery motes. Where the motes touched, worldlets were transformed. Raw materials rained down on the surface of the core.

  It was heading for the sun. There, less than a solar radius from the young sun’s roiling surface, a great sail would be unfurled — or rather assembled, from the materials leached from the young Solar System. The sail would be almost perfectly reflective, so much so that it would have been cool, to a human touch. Humans would one day speculate about such objects, as designs for craft to cross the gulfs between the stars.

  But this was no craft. To a human eye, the sail would have looked organic, its surface as structured — and as beautiful — as a young leaf.

  The flood of raw sunlight would hurl the core, the sail and its attendant cloud out of the Solar System, and on to a new destination, another young system, pregnant with resources.

  Perhaps that was the plan. Or perhaps the intention was different. Or perhaps there was no conscious intention.

  From without, it was impossible to say.

  Whatever its purpose, the object barrelled through the dusty plane of the Solar System, heading for the sun.

  But there seemed to be something in the way.

  “Earth,” Geena said. “You’re saying the Moonseed hive — ship, whatever — was the Impactor which hit the Earth—”

  “And created the Moon. And it’s still here, deep inside the Moon.” He laughed. “Ironic, isn’t it? Without that impact — without the Moonseed — life on Earth wouldn’t even exist. But now it’s going to destroy us.”

  She studied him. “Let me summarize. A massive Moonseed hive crashes into the Earth. The impact forms the Moon. The hive becomes trapped at the core of the Moon. Its cloud of, umm, nano manufacturer insects, is trapped in the Moon’s fabric. They stop their destructive behaviour because of some kind of asimov inhibitor… It sounds like something your dippy girlfriend would come up with.”

  “Jane’s too sensible for this stuff. Look, it’s a consistent hypothesis. This mass concentration at the heart of the Moon, the wreckage, is actually a confirmation.”

  She said, “But what about Venus? All that stuff about a black hole rocket—”

  “I think that fits. If a hive gets trapped in a star’s gravity well, for whatever reason, it needs a more energetic propulsion system to escape than a solar sail.”

  “But in this case—”

  “In this case, the hive got itself more deeply trapped than that.” He stretched out on the floor; there were bruises on his neck, where his suit had caught him during the fall. “So I figured it out. I found what I came to find. The trouble is, it’s no use to us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what is suppressing the Moonseed is something inside the wreck of a five-billion-year-old hive at the core of the Moon. Kind of out of reach, don’t you think?”

  He bit into his rice cake, and chewed slowly, his expression neutral.

  “So what now?”

  “Now,” he said, “I do some thinking.”

  “Thinking? What the hell is there to think about?”

  But he wouldn’t reply. He turned back to his screen, and its light filled his eyes.

  His plan, she thought. He is figuring out his plan, the one he won’t tell anyone. Whatever the hell it is, it had better be good.

  She persuaded Henry he should sleep.

  She watched over him, listening to the whir of the fans and extractors.

  She looked out at the Moon’s moulded plains. Alone on the Moon, the only conscious mind in the world, she was driven in on herself.

  Time stretched out here, in the Moon’s shallow gravity, she thought.

  She touched her face, the lines there, the stiffness of her greying hair. She was, of course, ageing, as was every other member of the human race. Falling helplessly into a black future, hour by hour. And you don’t even, she thought, get a day off for good behaviour.

  She checked her watch. The Rolex ticked slowly, steadily. It was 3.00 a.m., Houston time. The morbid hour.

  Their human activities were regulated by the constant heartbeat ticks of their Rolexes and timers, the limits of their consumables, the working of their equipment. The chaotic clamour of Earth’s bad news. But that busy human ticking was irrelevant to the grand, slow timescales here, the time of the Moon. A day here lasted a month; she had worked for six or seven hours on the surface, and there had barely been a change even in the angle of the sunlight.

  And beneath that there was a still grander timescale, of the slow evolution of the Moon itself. She thought about all she had seen — the ejecta hills, the rille, the crater-sculpted plains — and she knew that she could have come here a billion years before, or a billion years from now, to find basically the same scene.

  The Moon cared nothing for time. And the longer she stayed, the more her own busy schedules came to seem irrelevant. She felt as if her sense of time was dissolving, stretching like melted candle-wax. Perhaps she could sink down into the Moon’s rhythms. Perhaps if she kept still, she could lie here long enough for the Moon to turn beneath her, and carry her into the night.

  Henry seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

  In a way, he had what he wanted. And there was the paradox of a scientist. On one level Henry was satisfied. What had driven him in his feverish efforts earlier — what had driven him all the way to the Moon — wasn’t so much fear for himself, a desire to save those he loved, as simple curiosity. Now, Henry had his answer.

  But that was too simple. Henry was no one-dimensional Brainiac. She suspected he understood the Moonseed on a level that defied her. And when he contemplated it — its simplicity of operation, its immense timescales, its tenacity, its capacity to destroy worlds — it seemed he felt genuine awe.

  She suspected he envied the Moonseed its lack of the complexity that bedevilled human life. Maybe Henry would like to be a half-machine, like the Moonseed.

  But even that wasn’t the bottom of the truth, she thought sadly. Because, plumb in the middle of Henry’s life, there you had dippy Jane, his relationship with her based on nothing but — she forced herself to admit it — love.

  Maybe she’d never really understood Henry, she thought. Or vice versa. Probably they’d never stood a chance.

  She probed at her own feelings. She felt — numb. Bewildered. Maybe she had gone through too much; maybe she was in shock. How were you supposed to feel, when your ex-husband says your species is doomed?

  Geena had grown up, in San Francisco, without religion. She’d never felt the need of what she thought of as its ersatz, manipulative comforts. So she had never had the expectancy of surviving her own death.

  More than that: she’d grown up with the message of science, which was that humanity had a finite tenure on the planet, come what may. If nuclear war didn’t get you, the eco-collapse would, or the dinosaur killer, or the return of the glaciers, or the extinction of the sun, or… The doom scenario depended only on which timescale you chose to think about.

  She was an advocate of space travel. Colonies off the planet would have boosted mankind’s chances of survival. If NASA’s more grandiose plans had come to pass and there were now, say, three or four hundred people living in some kind of Antarctic-type research station on Mars, right now, they wouldn’t have to worry so much about this Moonseed thing.

  The Earth might die. Even the Moon. Mankind wouldn’t have to.

  But it was too late for that.

  The fact was humans
just weren’t adapted to living anywhere away from Earth — the deep gravity well and thick, complex atmosphere they’d evolved in — and there was nowhere else in the Solar System for them to go.

  She was glad she didn’t have a kid…

  “What are you thinking about?”

  Henry’s voice made her jump. He was lying in his sleeping bag, eyes wide in the dark.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “I was thinking about the Moon.”

  He scratched his couple of days” growth of beard. He never could grow a beard, she thought; it came up comically patchy. He said, “Plutarch said the Moon was a way-station for our souls. Humans have to die twice. First on Earth, where the body is severed from the mind and soul, and returned to dust. And the mind and soul travel to the Moon. There, a second death occurs, with mind and soul separating. The mind flies off to the sun, where it’s absorbed and gives birth to a new soul. But your soul stays here, on the Moon, sinking into the Moon dust, clinging onto dreams and memories… Maybe all that stuff about rocket ships and Cape Canaveral and Baikonur was a fantasy. A false memory. Maybe we died, you and me. Maybe we’re just clumps of memories, sinking into the regolith.”

  She was shivering, despite the warmth of the hab.

  “Shut up, Henry.”

  “Sorry.” He rubbed his face; his patchy beard looked to have grown a little denser.

  She felt she couldn’t stand the stillness any longer.

  “Henry, for Christ’s sake.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me your plan.”

  He hesitated.

  “I haven’t shared this with anybody,” he said.

  “Not even dippy Jane?”

  “Not even Jane.”

  “I promise not to laugh at you. But I could use some good news right now.”

  “…I think there’s maybe a way out. It’s risky. The math is chancy; it depends on a lot of assumptions.”

  “Like what?”

  “How much ice there is at the South Pole. What happens when you drop a nuke on lunar Moonseed; what kind of energy amplification factor you can achieve here, in the presence of the hive remnant—”