Moonseed (11 page)

“The old folk call the mist the
haars,
” Jane said.

“It’s beautiful.”

“On a clear day you can see a long way. All the way across the Midland Valley graben from the Highlands, fifty
miles or so to the north, and down to the Southern Uplands, ten miles southeast of here, beyond the coalfield—”

“I’m impressed.”

“By the view?”

“By the fact that you know terms like
graben.
”

“You’re such a patronizing arsehole.” But this time her tone was so mild it almost sounded affectionate.

“Thank you,” he said. “So what about you? How did you get into, uh, rocks?”

“And all the other cookie-girl New Age stuff, you mean?”

“I didn’t say that.”

She pulled at a tuft of grass. “Actually, it was the Moon.”

“The Moon?”

“I read a science fiction story which shocked me. I was only ten or so—about Jack’s age, I guess.”

“What story?”

“I don’t remember the title. I think it was a Heinlein. The point was, he suggested the Moon is the way it is because of a nuclear war up there. It blasted off the atmosphere, and boiled the oceans, and killed everybody.”

He nodded. “And Tycho was just the biggest arms dump.”

“You know it. You don’t need to tell me it makes no sense.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“It scared me to death. As I got older I started to read about all the perils we faced—still do face. Before I left school I was organizing recycling drives. I read politics and economics at university. I got into real politics later, mainly with the Greens. Not that I ever got elected anywhere. But that doesn’t pay the bills—”

“Hence the rock shop.”

“Yeah.”

“So,” he said. “You’re what we’d call a survivalist? You think that when it all falls apart we should pack up and
head for the hills?”

“No.” Now she did sound offended. “Of course not. We’re human beings. We got where we are by cooperating, by helping each other. It’s just that the future is so dangerous.”

“Yep.”

“We’re going to have to be smart to survive, on any timescale you care to think about. My dad says he thinks I went a little crazy, back when I was a kid. But I think I went a little sane. It was like waking up. It seems to me that everyone else is a little crazy, not me.” She was looking out over the city, and the last of the sunlight picked out her profile, her strong nose and chin.

He said, “Maybe you’re too sane. Nobody should be burdened with too much future.”

“I’m not so tough. I’m a twentieth-century baby like everybody else. Spoiled rotten. As soon as anything serious happened, I’d run round in circles.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

The light was diminishing. The Moon grew brighter, as if to compensate, and she looked up at it.

“You know,” Henry said, “the project I was working on for NASA was about going back to the Moon. Looking for water ice there. I think it’s possible there is so much ice you could actually terraform the Moon.”

“Make it like the Earth.”

“Yes. Somewhere else for people to live. But my project got canned, and we may never know about the ice. Nobody’s going to the Moon any time soon. Least of all me.”

“Would you go if you had the chance?”

He grinned. “In those ropy World War Two rockets they fly? No, sir.”

“So you’re a childless man who wants to build a new world.”

“Oh. Sublimation, you think.”

“Could be.”

“And you’re a parlor psychoanalyst. Lucky me.”

She said, “You know, after I read that Heinlein story, I
colored in maps of the Moon, figuring out where the oceans and cities must once have been.”

He nodded. “How about that. So did I. We have something in common after all.”

“I was just a kid…”

He stared up at the Moon. “It would be a beautiful thing. A terraformed Moon. It would be much brighter. A twin of the Earth. And if you were on the Moon—well, with that low gravity, it would be like something out of H.G. Wells.
The First Men In The Moon.
”

“Umm.” She stood up, and brushed down her dress. “And people call me crazy.”

“I never did.”

“But you thought it. I know why. I run a shop where people come and pick up the rocks, trying to feel their vibrations—”

“Now
they’re
the crazy ones.”

“Are they?” she said mildly. “But there’s a rock in my digital watch; its vibrations keep the time. And they vibrate rocks to send laser beams, all the way to the Moon. We live in a strange world. Come on. We’d better go down before it’s too dark. Although you’ll like the Northern Lights displays we’ve been getting since Venus…”

He unfolded his legs and stood.

She led him down a different track, a path that would lead through a glacial cwm and then to a ruined chapel.

“So,” he said. “What about dinner?”

She frowned, but she didn’t immediately say no. “We just ate dinner.”

“Hell, you know what I mean. What about the weekend? I—
woah.
” He stopped in his tracks.

She slowed beside him. “What’s wrong?”

“What is
that
?” He pointed ahead.

It was a patch, on the exposed shoulder of the summit
agglomerate, roughly circular. It had been hidden from where they had sat. It was, Henry estimated, two yards across. Its surface was metallic silver, flat as steel. At first it looked like some liquid—there was even a fuzzy reflection of the Moon—but he could see it was too sluggish, even for the scummiest pond.

He approached its edge.

It was a pool of some kind of fine silvery dust, or maybe rock flour. He crouched down to see. The contact with the surrounding basalt was quite clean. The rock flour seemed to be stirring slightly, almost bubbling, sluggish currents moving through its substance.

He found a loose pebble. He dropped it into the edge of the puddle. It vanished without so much as a splash.

Jane was standing over him, leaning with her hands propped on her thighs. “What do you think it is?”

He scratched his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe it’s liquefaction. It could be some kind of magmatic event.”

“Magmatic?” She straightened up. “Come on. Arthur’s Seat has been dormant for three hundred million years.”

“I know.”

“It’s probably some kind of toxic waste,” she said.

“Maybe.”

He got up and walked off around the rim of the puddle, counting his footsteps.

Jane called, “What are you doing?”

“Measuring.”

“Why?”

“It’s an annoying thing geologists do. Can you smell anything?”

“Apart from bullshit, you mean.”

“Work with me here.”

She took a deep breath. “Nothing but the grass and the
haars.
”

“Nor can I.”

“Is that good?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it bad?”

“When was the last time you were up here?”

She shrugged. “A couple of weeks.”

“And it wasn’t here then?”

“No.”

He returned to her. “Listen, do you have a bottle? Maybe makeup. Perfume or somesuch.”

“I don’t wear perfume.”

“Anything, then.”

As it happened, she did have something. It was a sample of an aromatherapy oil she’d been given by a salesman at the shop. She’d tucked it in a pocket and forgotten about it.

He took the bottle, unstoppered it, and tipped out the oil. “Hey.”

“I’ll pay you.”

He shook the bottle dry, and then, carefully, he scraped the bottle along the top of the rock flour puddle.

When he was done, he stoppered the bottle and tucked it in a pocket of his jeans.

“What is that stuff?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’ll be able to find out.”

She looked around. “It really is getting dark now.”

“Yes.”

But he hesitated.

He walked to an outcrop of basalt near the pool, picked up a loose lump of rock, and hit the outcrop. He frowned at the result.

She said, “What’s wrong?”

“Did you hear that?”

“One rock hitting another? Flintstone chic—”

“The pitch was low. Basement rock will ring with a high pitch. This boulder is loose.” So something is breaking up the basement here.

Not good, he thought. Not good at all.

He walked carefully around the puddle. “I wouldn’t tread in that thing if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“You were saying about dinner…”

“No.
You
were saying about dinner.”

They worked their way down the hill, arguing. Henry stumbled occasionally in the deepening dark; each time he patted his jeans pocket to make sure his sample was safe.

Behind them, the puddle glowed softly in the wan Moonlight. Where it stirred, the rock flour rustled.

8

Toward the end of Geena’s eight-hour shift as capcom for Station, a problem came up with a seat liner for one of the Soyuz escape craft.

Because the seats in Soyuz were molded to fit an individual astronaut or cosmonaut, liners had to be stored for every crew member on Station at any moment. But one of the Russian crew who had just been carried to Station, on board Space Shuttle
Endeavor,
was complaining that when she tried to install her seat liner into the Soyuz it didn’t fit her. So the ground controllers, in Moscow and Houston, had gotten into a wrangle about what the cosmonaut’s home vehicle was, and Geena found herself on the voice loops to Station trying to explain—in English and Russian—the home vehicle rules.

She read, “‘The home vehicle for Shuttle-Station crew members is defined as follows. The home vehicle for Americans launched on the Shuttle is the Shuttle. The home vehicle for Americans on Station becomes the Shuttle immediately after the hatches are opened between Station and Shuttle. The home vehicle for cosmonauts launched on the Shuttle becomes the Soyuz, and becomes the Shuttle for cosmonauts on Station after—one—the seat liners are installed for the Station crew in the Soyuz, and—two—the
Station crew are briefed on emergency procedures…’”

Traditionally, the Americans tried to use Russian, while the Russians replied in English. It was slow and painfully clumsy, but it did seem as if less mistakes got made that way.

The Russian Interface Officer, a heavy-set woman from New York, was at her side, checking the agreed English-Russian translations of technical terms and acronyms.

The Mission Control Center here at JSC hummed around her, rows of sleek black touch-screen workstations like
Star Trek
props, littered with coffee cups and yellow stickies and laptops and binders of mission rules. Beside her desk there was a huge recycling bin for soda cans. At the back of the room was a row of potted plants, their tubs littered with more soda cans. At the front of the room, the big screens carried computer-graphic images of the Station’s position and orientation in orbit, a view of the Earth from an external camera, and a shot of a science lab where a European astronaut was freezing saliva scrapings taken from the crew.

It was a familiar working place for Geena, so homely that coming in here was like taking an adrenaline antidote.

Bored to tears, she tried to focus on seat liners.

She’d spent the morning attending a press conference on the plans the boys from JPL were putting up for a fast probe to Venus. It had been exciting, energetic; in fact NASA as a whole had been energized by the Venus event, Geena thought. Whatever the ominous implications, the amount of attention space issues had received since then had been gratifying, and NASA’s speed and flexibility of response invigorating.

But even so, when you got to the coal face of manned spaceflight, it was still a crushing bureaucracy to work in.

The seat liner controversy went on and on.

The hardest thing about managing the Station project was not the technology or the work on orbit. Geena knew from experience that once on orbit, isolated in that collec
tion of tin cans, people tended to drop their personal differences and work together. Integrating two forty-year-old management hierarchies on the ground had proven
much
more difficult.

Even the basic philosophy of operation of the two control centers differed. For instance, previous Russian space stations—Mir and the Salyuts—had been out of contact with their controllers for most of each day, because of a lack of ground stations around the globe. So the Russians had developed a shift system based on that fact, which differed from the American system. And they’d had to allow their cosmonauts more latitude in day-to-day operations and decision making than American astronauts, checklisted to death, were generally permitted.

American and Russian mission controllers had worked together for some years now, on the Station assembly project and before that on the Shuttle-Mir docking missions, and had thrashed out a set of common procedures. NASA had given all its astronauts and controllers accelerated Russian language training, and had provided joint training and simulations, and so on.

But it was never going to be
easy.

Day to day, they ticked along. But every time a real problem blew up, like this one, it seemed to go to the top of both hierarchies before resolution.

Gradually, the liner problem was eroded to bureaucratic smoothness. And, toward the end of the shift, she was able to snatch a little personal time on the loop with Arkady.

Of course, the whole of the MCC would listen in, as would TsUP, the Russian mission control at Korolyov; in fact a smart IBM computer somewhere would transcribe every word they spoke. But there was still room for a little intimacy. This was one area where the Americans had found they had had a lot to learn from the Russians; those guys seemed to have a better instinct for the internal needs of the people they thrust up there into orbit.

So, thanks to Russian mission rules, Geena and Arkady were allowed their air time.

She read him a poem Arkady’s mother said he had always liked, called
Poltav Battle.
And then they sang together, her own toneless grunts along with Arkady’s voice—more musical, but reduced to a scratch by the loop—an old Russian song called
On the Porch Together.
She got the odd stare from her fellow controllers, but she couldn’t care less about that.