It was as if, Henry thought, someone was winding back Earth’s evolution.
And there were giant mantle plumes breaking out all over the planet, flood lavas, volcanic domes, cones and even coronae — features never seen on Earth before, only on lost Venus, basaltic domes surrounded by annuli of ridges and grooves. Nowhere was left untouched in the catastrophic resurfacing of the planet.
Hardly anything of the works of humanity survived.
There was one consolation, though. For a time, Earth was the youngest place in the Solar System.
…I want to tell you how much I admire you people up there. My God, you guys think big. Your schemes to bring in comets to graze the Moon’s atmosphere and increase the volatile content. Rebuilding the crater walls and lunar mountains that are already getting eroded by the rain. No plate tectonics on the Moon, to maintain the carbon and oxygen cycles: so you’ll bake the silicate rocks into glass, drive out the carbon dioxide that’s weathered there, and reverse the erosion… Jesus.
I’m not sure if I agree with your projections that you can reduce the time to true terraforming to a thousand years, but I haven’t had the time to run the math. I don’t think you ought to concern yourself with the objections of the Siberians who have colonized farside. They aren’t even human; let them build their own damn world.
But you talk about using the extremal black holes from the Earth’s debris to tip the Moon, to give it seasons, then to spin it up. It’s a nice idea. A final gift from the Earth, to its daughter…
But, Nadezhda, I have to counsel caution. Are you guys sure you know what you’re doing? You’re going to have sixty-feet tides in those new lunar oceans of yours —
Shit.
Sorry. That was a surface wave, a big one. I think it will be over soon…
The continental cores, the ancient cratons, had resisted the magma plumes for billions of years, and, like knots in wood, were tough to crack. But they were not indestructible.
Even as he watched he could see the last of the African plate — cracking and dissolving like scum — there it went…
Africa had been the oldest continent, most of it formed more than two and a half billion years earlier, surviving for geological ages as the hard, protected core of Pangaea, the world continent. Now it was gone, just a puddle of magma.
Goodbye, Africa. Birth place of man. My God.
And now, where Africa used to be, another huge magma plume was starting. It looked like a solar flare. A fountain of rock blasting straight up, uncurling with perceptible speed…
No, not a fountain. More like a fist, punching out of a sack. A mass the size of a small moon, thrusting out of the Earth.
Henry couldn’t begin to compute the energy behind events like that.
The end must be close now.
Already there had to be significant mixing between the core and the mantle layers. The planet as a whole used to spin at a different speed from its core… Now the whole globe was coupled, structurally. It must be tearing itself apart, like an unregulated motor.
Another pressure wave swept beneath his bunker, cracking the floor. Maybe that was the aftershock of the Africa plume.
He kept to his feet, though.
Now another plate was gone, after five billion years just crumbling away like sugar in water. He thought that was Indo-Australia — the planet was such a mess now it was hard to be sure — and the other plates were starting to slide and crack.
…I know you think I’m crazy to have stayed. I know your new generation of Arks, skimming down from the Moon, had the capacity to take off almost everybody who was left. I know you think I’m like the crazy old fucker who wouldn’t get out of his house when they want to build the highway through it.
Sorry. I guess you don’t know what I’m talking about.
I just didn’t want to leave, is the top and bottom of it. This is my home: here, on the shitty side of the Bottleneck. On the other side is the future, all of the universe, waiting for you.
What would I do on the Moon, except bitch about the processed algae and yack about the old days?
This is my home.
Listen to me. Don’t tip the Moon. Harness the black hole wind. Use it for what it was meant for.
Get out of here, go to the stars.
Godspeed to all of you.
There was more bare magma ocean than continent left now. Giant plumes, everywhere, more of those fists punching out to space—
And here came another shock wave, slamming into the bunker.
An instant of confusion, pain, extreme noise.
He was on his back.
The force field had held. But the whole bunker was over on its side, the floor and walls cracked, shattered to powder.
It felt as if he had bust a leg, a couple of ribs. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t hear anything.
He didn’t suppose it mattered. He was lucky to have survived so long.
The force field was tough. Maybe it would come sailing out of the final destruction event with his old bones preserved inside, battered and crushed.
One monitor was still working, by some miracle. He could still see the Earth.
The planet was a ball of red-brown light, an ocean of magma, barely differentiated, just a few scraps of continent, patches of black slag. But now there were spreading pools of white light at the rims of the magmatic convection cells: plasma, presumably, from the high-energy stuff going on in the interior.
Just like Burnet said. This is the fire. And soon we will merge with God.
The planet looked lopsided. Here came the biggest plume yet, poking out of the equator, where the Pacific plate used to be.
The limb of the planet was… lumpy. Jets of rock vapour pushing out of the lumps, into space. Some of the lumps were falling back, creating craters hundreds of miles across, spectacular impact basins that weren’t going to last more than minutes. And now, a new upswelling—
Shit. You can’t call that a plume. The core must be splitting.
Oh. I’m rising. Like an elevator. The continent must have split. Jane, I think —
6
Earth was once more a ball of magma, everywhere molten, reduced to a primordial smoothness, as it had been when young.
But the planet was expanding.
The unified-force energy released in its core and mantle was overcoming the controlling pull of its gravity. But the expansion was uneven, and bolides, giant chunks of rock, burst out of the churning surface and traced long, glowing curves around the world.
New cracks appeared in the magma ocean, wide fissures filling up with rivers of plasma light, white and yellow and green. As if emerging from a rocky egg, the plasma ball broke open the last shells of Earth, the remnants of the mantle and asthenosphere, molten rock and iron, and hurled out giant globules of spinning, cooling fragments.
The Earth became briefly flattened, its rotation driving its fluid form outwards.
Then the cloud expanded, suddenly, an eruption of light and fire, the energy embedded in its own substance being exploited to destroy it in a silent concussion.
Thus it ended, in a moment of unimaginable violence.
The debris formed a cloud, through which the plasma glow, fading, cast thousand-mile shadows.
Shallow gravitational waves crossed the Solar System, subtly perturbing the orbits of the planets.
Then, placidly, the remaining children of the sun resumed their antique paths, barely affected by the loss of their sibling.
Earth’s closest companion was more disturbed.
At the loss of the tides from its lost parent, the Moon shuddered. Water sloshed in its crater lakes, in giant circular ripples. Ancient faults gaped, for the first time in a billion years, and dusty lava flowed, as if the satellite was aping its parent’s demise.
Some humans died.
But it didn’t last long. And the inhabitants were prepared.
Then the orphan Moon sailed on, alone, cradling its precious cargo of humanity.
&nb
sp; And, at the site of Earth, when the cloud of dust and volatiles and planetesimals dispersed, something new was revealed: a tear in space, a jewel of exotic particles, a wind of massless black holes fleeing at the speed of light.
Cautiously, tentatively, the ships from the Moon crept towards the ruin of Earth.
PART VI
NADEZHDA
…And, twenty years beyond the Bottleneck:
In the confines of Sagan’s airlock Nadezhda put on her gloves and snapped home the connecting rings. Then she lifted her helmet over her head.
The ritual of the suit assembly checklist was oddly comforting, a litany now decades old: in fact, almost unchanged from the routines endured by the original astronauts from Earth.
But the Sagan was no dinged-up low-Earth-orbit space truck, and right now Nadezhda was far from home.
She felt her heart hammer under her suit’s layers.
Jean Massie, on the hab module’s upper deck, was monitoring her. Nadezhda, you have a go for depress.
Nadezhda heard a distant hiss. “Let’s motor.”
She twisted the handle of the outer airlock hatch and pushed.
Nadezhda Pour-El Meacher Dundas gazed out into space.
She was looking along the length of the Sagan’s hab module. It was a tight cylinder, just ten yards long and seven wide, home to four crew for this six-month jaunt. The outer hull was crammed with equipment, the sensors and antennae clustered over powder-white and gold insulating blankets. The flags of the contributing lunar nations and agencies were here: NASA-L, the Russians, the Europeans, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the star-in-crescent flag of the Federal Republic of the Moon itself. At the back of the hab module she could see the bulging upper domes of the big cryogenic fuel tanks, and when she turned the other way there was the emergency return module, a capsule stuck sideways under the canopy of its big aerobrake.
The whole thing was just a collection of cylinders and boxes and canopies, thrown together as if at random. She knew every cubic inch of it.
She moved out through the airlock’s round hatchway.
There was a handrail, and two slide wires that ran the length of the curving hull, and Nadezhda tethered herself to the wires. It was a routine she’d practised a hundred times in the sims at Clavius and New Houston, and a dozen times in lunar orbit. There was no reason why now should be any different.
No reason, except that the Moon wasn’t where it should be.
In lunar orbit, the Moon had been a bright, curving carpet beneath her all the time. But out here, the Moon was all of five million miles away, reduced to a blue button three or four arms-lengths away. And Nadezhda was suspended in a huge three-hundred-sixty-degree planetarium just studded with stars, stars everywhere…
Everywhere, that is, except for one corner of the sky blocked by a vaguely elliptical shadow, sharp-edged, one rim picked out by the sun.
It was Icarus: a near-Moon asteroid, Nadezhda’s destination.
When she was selected for this mission, Nadezhda had studied the history of the Earthborn astronauts, right back to the beginning, Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard in their tin-can spaceships. She’d learned she had at least one thing in common with them.
She supported the objectives of the mission, of course. She had trained up on the science of Icarus, on near-Earth objects in general. She had trained up on the Moonseed, on the various coexistence and communications and exploitation schemes that had been proposed. She was interested in the science, the future of mankind, all of that stuff. Of course she was. She wouldn’t have come so far otherwise.
But what really motivated Nadezhda, here and now, five million miles from home, was not screwing up.
Every astronaut, right back to the beginning, had felt the same, she suspected. Don’t screw up. Finish the checklist, smile for the cameras. Because not screwing up was the only way to get on another flight.
Maybe that particularly applied to her, the first lunar-born deep-space astronaut, on this NASA-L mission. If she screwed up, the Earthborns would have a field day, and it would be a long time before she, or another Moonborn, would get another chance.
Of course, inevitably, their time would come.
All lunar citizens were astronauts anyway. The Earthborns just didn’t see that.
Under the big glass domes at Clavius and Tycho, human-powered flight was the most popular sport: thick air, low gravity…Nadezhda had grown up in a world where children flapped back and forth all the time like bony chickens, learning the rudiments of three-dimensional navigation and aerodynamics as soon as they were born.
And, on the Moon, everyone flew in space. You could reach orbit with a back yard rocket motor smaller than a car engine; even Armstrong and Aldrin had proved that. People went through sub-orbital lobs longer than Alan Shepard’s just to go shopping. Lunar inhabitants were nature’s astronauts.
But not to those Earthborn mission planners in New Houston, however.
She supposed it was pride.
Well, it would pass, with time. After all, when the present generation had retired, there would be no more Earthborn, ever.
So she put up with their prejudices, and waited for her own time to come, and listened to their stories — endless stories, five billion of them — tales of the time before the Bottleneck, of bravery and disaster and displacement — of unlikely acts of heroism linked with names in her own family lines — and of even earlier times, of an incomprehensible, vanished world, when everyone believed the Earth would forever be their home, as it always had…
But she didn’t want to wait for dead men’s shoes.
She pulled herself tentatively along the slide wire, and made her way to the PMU station, on the starboard side of the hab module. The Personal Manoeuvring Unit was a big backpack shaped like the back and arms of an armchair, with foldout head- and leg-rests on a tubular frame. Nadezhda ran a quick check of the PMU’s systems.
Then she turned around, and backed into the PMU.
“Sagan, Nadezhda,” she said. “Suit latches closed.”
Copy that.
She pulled the PMU’s arms out around her and closed her gloved hands around the hand-controllers on the end of the arms. She unlatched the folded-up body frame. She rested her neck against the big padded rest, and settled her feet against the narrow footpads at the bottom of the frame, so she was braced. Today’s EVA was just a test reconnaissance, but a full field expedition to Icarus could last all of eight hours; the frame would help her keep her muscle movements down, and so reduce resource wastage.
Nadezhda released her tethers. A little spring-loaded gadget gave her a shove in the back, gentle as a mother’s encouraging pat, and she floated away from the bulkhead.
…Suddenly she didn’t have hold of anything, and she was falling.
She had become an independent spacecraft. The spidery frame of the PMU occulted the dusting of stars around her.
She tested out her propulsion systems.
She grasped her right-hand controller, and pushed it left. There was a soft tone in her helmet as the thruster worked; she saw a faint sparkle of exhaust crystals, to her right. In response to the thrust, she tipped a little to the left.
When she started moving, she just kept on going, until she stopped herself with another blip of her thrusters.
She turned in space, and looked at the Moon. She pressed a stud on the side of her helmet, and the Moon’s image was magnified, so that its crescent filled her helmet. And the crescent’s edge was softly blurred by a band of light, which stretched part way around the darkened hemisphere.
Sparks crawled over the globe: ocean-going vessels, surface cars, low-orbit spacecraft. There were more lights, strung out in lines, on the darkened surface itself: towns and cities, outlining hidden continents. Buildings on the Moon were mostly made entirely of glass; lunar glass, manufactured from deep-lying dehydrated lunar ore, was incredibly strong. From space, all that glass made the cities bright.
But the sun-shadowed hemispher
e was not truly dark, for it basked in the light of the Noviy Svet — the Russian-designed solettas, the huge mirror farms built and launched by Boeing and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, artificial suns which cast enough daylight over the shadowed half of the Moon to keep its new air from snowing out in the weeks-long night. The solettas worked well, and anyhow the engineers said the Spin-Up should be completed before the solettas reached the end of their design life.
Not that anybody was confident of predicting when that would be, since the solettas, grown from lunar rock, were the first large-scale application of Moonseed-derived technology.
She could see the cold deserts of the lunar poles, bone-white.
On the Moon, the weather was simple. Sunlight lifted masses of moist warm air over the equator; the air quickly dumped its moisture, in sometimes violent rainstorms, and, displaced by colder, lower layers of air, the hot air drifted to the poles. There it cooled and sank, dry and cold, creating deserts, and joined the circulation back to the equator.
So there you had it. The prevailing winds were hot, dry air coming out of the poles, deflected a little by the Moon’s sluggish spin, shaped and moistened by the bodies of water it passed, the maria and the great crater lakes.
On the Moon, there were no weather forecasters.
She couldn’t remember much of Earth, before the Bottleneck. She found it hard to understand how big it had been, so big there had been room for more than one air circulation cell per hemisphere, so big there had been room for too much weather. Bizarre.
Anyhow, the Moon’s North Pole was the site of something much more interesting than weather, as far as Nadezhda was concerned. It was from the Pole that the great deep-core drilling project had been initiated by the Americans: a thousand-mile shaft designed to reach all the way to the Witch in the Well, the ancient, shattered hive at the heart of the Moon which, until now, had only been visible by seismic probes and neutrino light. And nobody knew what treasures that would bring.
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