Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  “I think so.”

  Her voice sounded thin… and then he realized that he was hearing her, her voice faintly transmitted by the thin new air.

  “How about that. I can hear you.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. You shivered.”

  “It’s just being out here,” she said. “In the open.”

  “And not on Earth. I understand. We’re the first humans to walk around unsheltered like this, on another world, in all our history. We’ve had nothing to prepare us for this. If you weren’t scared—”

  “It would prove I’m even more unimaginative than you think already?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “You’re so patronizing, Henry.”

  She walked away from him, her feet leaving great glopping craters in the mud. After three paces she slipped, and landed on her butt with a slow-motion splash; gobbets of mud sprayed up around her.

  Henry knew, absolutely, imperatively, he must not laugh.

  She growled. “Probably the low gravity. Reduced friction.”

  “Probably.”

  “Watch your step, Henry.”

  “Copy that.”

  They powered up the comms unit, and set up its low-gain antenna. They put headphones to their ears, and Geena started sending an automated telemetry feed; Henry could hear static, and the chatter of the telemetry.

  For long minutes, there was no reply.

  “Don’t give up,” Geena said doggedly.

  “Yeah. There’s a lot of electrical activity in this atmosphere. It must be hard to punch a signal through—”

  The static broke up. It was replaced by a chaotic noise.

  At first Henry thought they were picking up the crackle of lightning from some remote storm — could an ionosphere have formed here so quickly? Then his mind resolved the sound.

  Cheering.

  It was human voices, raised in cheers and whoops, either at Korolyov, or Houston, or both; he couldn’t tell, and right now didn’t care.

  His eyes prickled. As if he was the one who had just found a planet full of people who were alive after all, and not the other way around. Damn it.

  They climbed the rille wall.

  It was a lot harder than it had been before. The thirsty regolith had soaked up the rainwater to a depth Henry hadn’t anticipated, and the wall had pretty much turned to a shallow slope of slippery mud. It was impossible to get a footing, or to grip with gloved hands, and they slipped back almost as much as they made headway. After a few minutes, Henry dumped his mud-caked gloves in frustration, despite Geena’s admonitions.

  Eventually Geena found a way of zigzagging up the slope, like a mountain path: it was longer, but her footing held in the low G long enough for her to take each step and climb a little further.

  Henry sought a more direct route. One of the many landslips had exposed a gutter of lunar bedrock. Henry found he was able to run at this, scrambling at the rock to get purchase before his feet slid out from under him, until, by sheer momentum, he’d reached the top of the rille.

  Side by side, panting so hard their oxygen masks were steamed up, they stared out over the Moon’s new landscape.

  It was a drab, muddy plain.

  The sky was a steel-grey lid, laden with water-vapour clouds, clamped over this subtly curving sheet of red-brown mud. Here and there, Henry could still make out the overlapping craters which had populated this landscape — some of them had filled up with water, so the land was dotted with circular lakes, rippling sluggishly — but many of the crater walls had slumped. It was like standing in the flood plain of some unruly river.

  The landscape was all but unrecognizable from the way it had been just a couple of days earlier.

  A wind moaned, soft but guttural. And he thought he could hear thunder, somewhere around the curve of the world — maybe halfway round the planet, he thought; this was still a small world.

  Geena was working her way around the Lunar Rover. It was a sorry sight: half tipped up into a flooded crater, its aluminum surfaces streaked with mud, its wire-mesh wheels sunk deep into the soggy surface. The big umbrella-shaped S-band antenna had slumped to the dirt, under the weight of the water which had pounded into it.

  Geena got hold of the control column and tried to lift the Rover out of the mud.

  “It wouldn’t work now even if you dug it out,” Henry said. “Those wheels—”

  “I know.” She peaked a hand over her eyes and looked east, towards the old Apollo site. “We ought to go over there,” she said. “I bet the rain has made a hell of a mess.”

  “I bet.”

  “The flag, for instance—”

  He bent down and was pulling off his boots.

  She said, “And what the hell are you doing now?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No.” He placed one bare foot into the mud, then another. He wriggled his toes, and felt the mud ooze between his toes. “Feels like river bottom mud. When I used to go fishing with my brother as a kid—”

  “Spare me the cornball reminiscences.”

  He eyed her. “Back off, Geena. I’m in no danger. What do you think is going to happen to me? I’ll step on a stinging nettle? The Moon might be wet, but it’s still dead.”

  “Except for the Moonseed.”

  “Except for the Moonseed, and that doesn’t count right now…”

  The light changed, subtly; it became a little brighter, and for the first time Henry made out shadows, around the steeper of the muddy mounds.

  Geena was looking up at the sky. “Wow.”

  He turned and looked. The clouds had parted: through shreds of cumulus, Henry made out a lacing of higher, streaming cirrus, and there was the Earth, a thin crescent, huge and pale — and there, directly above, was a patch of blue sky.

  Blue sky, on the Moon.

  Well, of course it’s blue, he thought. The Moon gets the same strength sunlight as Earth. The light is scattered by the same sized particles as on Earth…

  “All we need is a rainbow,” Geena said.

  “Yeah.”

  On impulse, he lifted his facemask. His ears popped, as his oxygen rushed out; he took a single, deep sniff of the air.

  Geena rushed up to him. “Are you crazy?”

  He dropped his mask back into place. “Probably.” He took deep breaths. “But I’m okay.”

  “What did you do that for?”

  “I wanted to smell it. To smell the Moon.”

  “And?”

  He stared around, at the subsiding mud. “Wood smoke,” he said. “It smelled of wood smoke.”

  The regolith was oxidizing, even as comet water soaked into it. All around him, all over its surface, the Moon was slowly burning.

  They walked further, across the blank, muddy plain.

  Henry looked at the empty sky, which was closing over once more. “How long do you figure before they come to get us?”

  “It depends how long it takes to assemble another mission,” she said. “At least a month, I’d think; we used up both the prototype Shoemaker landers. They’d have to build more, and—”

  He shook his head. “You’re not thinking. Those landers won’t work any more. The air, remember? You don’t need to bring rocket fuel for the descent; you could just glide down. There are going to be strong winds for a while, though. And we’ll need a new design, a way to get back off the surface through this thick air…”

  She nodded. “Months, then.”

  “At least. Still, resupply will be easy. They can drop stuff by aerobrake and parachute. I don’t think they will let us starve.”

  “Or X-38s,” she said. “Space Station escape gliders.”

  “Yeah…”

  He looked at her sideways. It was hard to read her behind her mask. She still seemed brittle, to him.

  Fear and grief, he thought, the loss of Arkady, the pummelling of the terraforming. But it barely showed, at her surface.
r />   Maybe she was in shock. Or maybe it just showed how little he knew her, he thought gloomily.

  “We’ll get through this, you know,” he told her.

  “I know. But I’d rather be home.”

  “Umm.” He thought that over. “Where is home now, for you? Houston? Or—”

  “Russia,” she said firmly. “With Arkady’s family. They always made me welcome.”

  “Shows where we went wrong, huh.”

  “Frankly, yes.”

  “I’m sorry. About Arkady.”

  She nodded. “I know. But it was unavoidable.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think it was. But I can see you loved him.”

  After a time, she said, “What about you? Scotland?”

  He shrugged. “Hell, no. Scotland is Olympus Mons now. Nobody will be going back there… I need to find Jane, and her kid, and we’ll find some place that will last a little longer than Britain.”

  “I wish you well,” she said seriously. “I wish you happiness.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know you do,” he said. “What about Rocky?”

  “My mother still has him.” She added, “Much you care.” But he could tell it was a reflex jab.

  He looked around. “Maybe one day this will be home, for somebody. That’s the idea, anyhow.”

  “You think they’ll let us come back?”

  “No,” he said sadly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’ll be too old to breed,” he said bluntly. “Our time is gone, Geena. Gone with Earth. It’s up to the children now… Hats.”

  “What?”

  “Hats. When the sun breaks through, we’ll fry. No ozone layer up there, remember. And I don’t suppose you packed any sun-cream. Maybe we can take the S-band antenna off the Rover, use it as a parasol.”

  “You have a strange sense of priority, Henry.”

  “I have a strange mind.”

  “What else?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to find a source of water.” He dug a bare toe into the ground; the little pit he excavated slumped back immediately, like wet sand. “The rain is just going to soak away into this stuff. We ought to find the basin of a young crater. Maybe Aristarchus. The regolith is only a few inches thick there, and we should find liquid water pooling. Then we have to keep moving.”

  “Moving? Where?”

  “East, of course. We ought to go east.”

  “Why?”

  “Because night will come.” He looked at the sky, seeking the sun. “It isn’t lunar noon yet; we have some time. But the terminator, the line between night and day, moves across the landscape at around ten miles an hour. We can’t outrun it. We have to give ourselves as much time as we can, hope they get the resupply to us before night falls—”

  “And what happens then?”

  He looked at her, his eyes narrow over his mask. “Figure it out. No sunlight for fourteen days.”

  “Oh. The mud is going to freeze—”

  “Geena, depending on the atmospheric dynamics, the air is probably going to freeze. For two weeks the Moon will be like it used to be, and we’re going to have to find some way to live through it.” He shrugged. “Or maybe we should just hole up inside our lava tube. We’ll have to think about it. As long as it doesn’t collapse, or flood. I sure don’t want to be caught out in the open when the sun goes down. There will be a wind from hell, all that air sweeping around from the hot side to the cold—”

  “But the air will boil off after dawn.”

  “Most of it. Some of it is going to collect back where it came from, the cold traps at the Poles. And it will stay there. Nothing has changed the basic geometry of the Moon, Geena. Eventually all this lovely air will finish up back where it started, back at the Poles… Somebody is going to have to figure out a way to stop that, some day.

  “But that won’t be for a while. For now, the comet debris is still boiling off, powered by the Moonseed… I figure things won’t start to stabilize until all the ice has boiled off. Which will take a year, at least.” He squinted at the Earth. “Maybe they will send the first biogens. There’s no reason to delay. Photosynthetic plants, algae maybe, to start the job of turning all this sunlight and carbon dioxide to oxygen and food.”

  “Henry, how long is all this—” she waved a hand “—going to last?”

  “Well, even if we keep it from freezing at the Poles, long-term the atmosphere is going to leak away into space. But it’s a slow process. It’s like putting a bucket of water in the desert. Sure, the water evaporates, but it takes a long time because it can only get out through the comparatively small surface area of the top. In the same way the upper rim of the atmosphere will only allow the air to leak out slowly…”

  She pulled at her mask, adjusting it. “Always the scientist. You tell me everything except what I want to know. How long is long term, Henry?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe ten thousand years.”

  She said gently, “Time enough to think of something else, then.”

  “I guess so. Come on. Let’s go pack.”

  Side by side, arguing, planning, they walked back towards the lava tube.

  2

  A year later…

  She was in hospital when Henry returned from the Moon.

  She hadn’t wanted it this way, but the tests had become overwhelming: the best American technology, X-rays and scans and ultrasound and blood tests, and a whole set of -scopies which left her bewildered, sore and humiliated: sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopy, gastroscopy, bronchoscopy, cystoscopy.

  “I didn’t know I had so many orifices,” she told Henry.

  “Oh, Christ, Jane,” he said, and he sat on the edge of her bed.

  After a year on the Moon his gait and movements were clumsy, as if he expected everything around him to happen in slo-mo. She could see where the rigours of reentry to Earth’s atmosphere had left him bruised, around the neck and eyes.

  And every pore, every fold in his skin, was etched with deep-ingrained Moon dust.

  Still, it was Henry, more dear to her than she had anticipated — and more distressed than she had, somehow, imagined, when she had played through this scene in her head.

  “It isn’t so bad,” she said. “Leukaemia. I’m only here for tests; I’ll be out of here soon. I might live for years.”

  “But not forever,” he said.

  “No. Not forever.”

  “It ain’t fair.”

  He was trying to handle this, she realized, and she needed to give him time. She’d had more than a year to get used to the idea.

  He said, “You never even told me.”

  “The NASA psychologists wouldn’t let me. They were worried about your morale, up there on the Moon.”

  “Pointy-headed assholes,” he murmured. He took her hand. “But it ain’t fair, whether you told me or not. I did it for you.”

  “Did what?”

  He shrugged. “Blew up the Moon. Saved mankind. Whatever it was I did it for you, for us. To give us a future.”

  “Maybe the NASA shrinks were right, then.”

  They fell silent, and started to avoid each other’s eyes.

  After all, what were you supposed to say? How’s your cancer? How was life on the Moon?

  She dug out a letter from the stack on her bedside table. “I got this from someone called Garry Beus.”

  “Beus?”

  “Son of Monica Beus? The physicist lady you knew?”

  He nodded stiffly.

  She said, “She learned about me, through my connection to you, before she died, and told Garry.” She glanced over the letter. “So he wrote to me. Kind thought. He’s in the Air Force here. He’s applying for the astronaut corps, the new Earth-Moon ferry pilot positions they are opening up… He says Monica left a memory box for him. Actually for his children, her grandchildren. Do you think I should do that for Jack?”

  But he didn’t reply. When she looked up at him again he was
crying, the tears spilling down his cheeks, pooling Moon dust in the lines under his eyes.

  3

  Ten years later…

  Coming inland from the sea, driving north-east from Cape Town on the N1 highway, it took Henry and Jane two hours to drive through the coastal mountains to reach the Karroo itself.

  The ride, through mountain passes and the contorted passages through vales of rock, was spectacular. But then the landscape flattened to a desert, populated by what the old Afrikaners called fynbos, a mixed, complex flora of shrubs and bushes. It was spring, here in the southern hemisphere, and the desert — sheltered by its encircling mountains from the acid rain and climate shifts suffered by most of the world’s land masses — was putting on a show, red white and yellow flowers of every shape.

  At last, though, even the fynbos submitted to the logic of the climate, and only aloe and cacti relieved the panorama of rocks and sky.

  At a village called Touws River — abandoned now — they came upon the first Karroo rocks: squat black mudstones, sitting atop the younger Cape sands. Henry knew that the mudstones had been dumped from icebergs, floating on the surface of the polar ocean that had once covered this land, an ocean four hundred million years gone.

  Jane stared out the window, with that mix of patience and intelligent interest that had always characterized her, and the low, smoky sun picked out her old melanoma scars.

  Ten years. And still, every day they were granted seemed like a bonus to him, a new gift.

  Henry drove on, and the rock grew more complex.

  In a lifetime of geology Henry had never been here before, to this high-veldt plateau that covered two-thirds of South Africa. It was a large, empty place, devoid of human history, unpopulated save for a few scattered towns and farms — most of them abandoned now — crossed only by the immense road between Cape Town and Johannesburg. But to geologists and palaeontologists this land of sandstones and shales, piled up into the tablelands the Afrikaners called koppies, was one of the Earth’s greatest storehouses: a thousand-mile slab of sedimentary rock that was the best record on Earth of land-animal evolution.

  The Karroo had always been, for Henry, a place for the future, to visit before he got too old, or died. Now he was forty-five, though he felt a lot older, but the future was self-evidently running out.