Moonseed (57 page)

The descent orbit burn would put them into a lopsided ellipse of an orbit with a high point of sixty-nine miles, kissing Arkady’s circular orbit, and after skimming for three hundred miles around the Moon’s lighted face, they would reach a low point of nine miles: just fifty thousand feet high, close enough to touch the mountains of the Moon. And there they would burn their engine again, and fall all the way to the surface.

That was the plan.

There was no air on the Moon. Air would have made it easy, he thought. With air you wouldn’t need all this fuel. You could glide down, like the Space Shuttle returning to Earth, or even batter your way in with a heatshield and fall into the ocean under parachutes, the way the Apollo astronauts used to.

On the Moon, there was nothing to help you down. All you could do was bring along a rocket motor, and all the fuel you needed, and stand on it as it descended, all the way to the surface of the Moon. Like riding an ICBM back down into its silo, Henry thought bleakly, and about as stable. And expensive as all hell, considering the fuel load it took to bring an ounce of payload here…

Shoemaker,
on my mark you’ll have twelve minutes to DOI ignition.

“Roger, Frank.”

Shoemaker,
Houston, stand by for my mark. Mark. Twelve minutes.

“We copy.”

Shoemaker,
Soyuz, this is Houston, three minutes to LOS. You guys look good going over the hill.

Geena said, “
Shoemaker,
roger.”

Arkady chimed in, “Roger from Soyuz.”

Geena called, “Arkady, have a good time while we’re gone.”

“Yes,” said Arkady. “I won’t get lonesome.”

“And don’t accept any trans-Earth injection updates.”

“Don’t you worry,” said Arkady.

And so on.

It was, Henry knew, the kind of bull pilots always exchanged when hanging out their hides. But, he had to admit, right now he could see it had its purpose. After all, here he was strapped to this tabletop, on a craft that couldn’t take him back to Earth. If anything went wrong before the landing, Arkady was going to have to come down and get them, if he could. And after the landing, if the
Shoemaker
engine failed to restart, there was
no
way home.

At such a moment, what were they supposed to talk about?

The Moon was starting to reappear as his eyes opened wide: a tableau of craters, ridges and plains, worked in blue and soft gray. He could see
shadows,
cast by Earth itself.

As he sailed on, the shadows stretched out, and the Moon became a maze, a geometric essay in darkness and blue light. He thought he saw shapes in that unrecognizable surface: cities, artifacts, even gigantic human faces peering up at him, skulls with eye sockets made of dead lunar craters. It was an encounter with the Moon, he thought, but also with himself, with the deep reptilian core of his brain, which truly, really, could not understand where he had brought it.

There was a burst of static in his headset. Loss of signal.
Shoemaker
and Soyuz were sailing alone over the far side of the Moon.

It was
dark:
darker than Earth ever was, even over its night side, where you could see the sparkling cities at the rims of continents, and fires in the forest, and the lights of ships on the oceans—even, sometimes, the phosphorescent wakes of the ships, the evidence of tiny living creatures giving up their light to space. Out here, by comparison, there was nothing; and it hit him with a gut realization that there really was
nobody
out here, nobody to look up and see him crossing the night sky, nobody to help him should he fail.

After a half-hour of utter darkness, he could see fingers of light, gushing across space, obscuring the stars. It was the corona, streamers of gas from the outer atmosphere of the sun, which was itself still hidden by the Moon’s rocky curve.

Slowly the luminous coronal streamers thickened and brightened. They were three-dimensional, he saw, shafts and curtains of light, spread across space. And then he made out waves of light: thin bands of light, snaking around the rim of an invisible circle, suspended between the stars, and the pit of darkness that was the Moon. He was seeing the peaks of the mountains of the Moon, shining in the light of the rising sun.

The band thickened until the sunlight returned without warning, in a fingersnap, turning night to day. Long, spectacular shadows fled across the surface toward him.

Now he was flying over the far side of the Moon. And it didn’t look like the near side.

There were no maria here: at first glance, anyhow. There were basins, just like on the near side, but you had to pick them out from their mountainous ring walls, for they hadn’t filled up with basalt lakes. Nobody knew why.

It was like one giant stretch of highland, craters piled on craters, their overlapping rims like wave crests frozen on a rocky sea. There wasn’t even a sense of scale. It was an unsettling experience. He couldn’t tell where he was, or how high he was, or even what size he was anymore. It was as if his sense of space and time was softening, drawn out of
him by the ambiguous Moon far side, this land human eyes hadn’t evolved to see.

But here came giant Tsiolkovsky, the most distinctive crater on the whole damn far side of the Moon. Once, NASA had talked of putting an Apollo down, here in Tsiolkovsky, in the middle of the far side, with some kind of superannuated military relay satellite in orbit above it to keep the hapless astronauts in touch with home. Looking down now, he could see how dangerous that would have been, how treacherous Tsiolkovsky was.

“Forty seconds,” Geena said.

“Rog.”

“Press the switch over there. To your right.”

It was mounted on his back frame; he had to reach to get it. “What’s that?”

“The movie camera for the landing. IMAX. Twenty seconds. Engine armed. Pressed to proceed.” She grabbed the handrail. “Two, one.”

Ignition.

Henry could feel the thrust of the engine, silent and invisible as it was; it was like some mysterious gravity field, pulling him down to the surface of the
Shoemaker.

The engine, he noted absently, had started up by itself.

“Hey,” he said. “Who’s flying this thing?”

“Autoland,” Geena said tightly.

The engine roared to full thrust, and the
Shoemaker
platform shook with a soundless, high-frequency vibration. His feet came to rest hard against the
Shoemaker
’s deck, and after five days in microgravity he welcomed the feel of acceleration.

“We’re burning, Arkady,” Geena said.

“I can see the glow in the engine bell. Godspeed, my friends.”

“Yeah. You too…”

…The ground lurched under Blue Ishiguro.

He’d been up here for hours. He had, he realized, been dozing.

He heard the growl of cracking rock, and he was thrown onto his back. Suddenly there was smoke everywhere, and the air was burning hot. He could see the clouds venting from new fissures, the white of superheated steam, the blue of sulfuric acid and fluorine. The stink was foul, like, he thought darkly, a high-school chemistry lab.

He straightened himself up, and surveyed the new situation.

Fissures had appeared on the flanks of the Campsie Fells. Lava fountains there, curtains of red flame following the lines of the fissures, rock droplets hurled meters into the air. As he watched, the fissures were spreading and merging.

A main vent, a broad crater, opened up in the hillside, facing Strathblane. More lava fountains, and now a major surge of sticky, viscous lava poured out. The heather on the hillside singed and burned in brief flashes. The cooling lava was already building up levees, and the molten material gushed down channels between the levees, heading toward the abandoned town.

Another, broader vent opened, and vomited lava.

Blue could smell sulfur and methane. Near the edge of the flow, loud cracks marked the explosion of methane gas. The fume clouds above the vents glowed orange against the blackening sky.

Blue?

“Sixt, I think it is starting. It was very sudden.”

He checked his cameras and instruments were stable, and that his data was indeed reaching orbit.

Then he pulled up his protective hood, and patiently described all he saw, as the Scottish ground—under intolerable strain—broke apart.

As it receded after its separation, Arkady had kept the spindly lander in sight through the eyepiece of the twenty-eight-power sextant. With its bright colors, white and gold and black, hanging in the shadow of the Moon, it looked something like a tropical fish, angular and unlikely.

But there were Geena and Henry in their snow white suits, perched on top of the
Shoemaker
platform. He could see them move as they worked their controls, or turn to each other and gesture: human beings, interacting as humans always had, here in lunar orbit.

When Geena fired the descent engine to drop out of circular orbit, Arkady was looking into the
Shoemaker
’s engine bell. The craft seemed to become a glowing ball, like a jet plane on afterburner, and it moved away from him as steadily as if mounted on rails.

The engine glow lasted a half-minute, then died, and he could no longer see them. Soyuz sailed on, through light, through darkness.

The engine throttled down, and cut. Suddenly Henry was falling again, and once more he felt his lunch rise up his throat. He swallowed hard.

Geena said, “Right on the nose.” She looked across, and he could see her face framed by her helmet. “We’re still breathing, Henry.”

“Maybe you are…Oh,
shit.
”

For now they were falling, tracking their ellipse, all the way down to the orbit’s low point at fifty thousand feet. And he could
sense
their diminishing altitude. The tightly curving edge of the Moon seemed to flatten, quickly. The features beneath him fled behind him, like shadows on an ocean.

He felt as if he had fallen over the lip of some giant, invisible roller coaster.

“And I always hated roller coasters,” he muttered.

Geena looked across at him. “I know,” she said. “Hold onto your ass, kid.”

“I’m holding.”

Earth rose ahead of them, unnaturally quickly, its blue making a contrast with the tan and gray lunar plains that was almost painful to Henry’s eyes.

…Shoemaker,
Houston. We’re standing by.

“Houston, Shoemaker, reading you loud and clear, do you read me?”

Copy, Geena, good to have you back. That’s AOS, reading you five by. Coming up on twelve minutes to next ignition. We’re waiting for your burn report.

“The burn was on time. Residuals are minus point one, minus point four, minus point one. Frank, everything went swimmingly, just beautiful.”

The horizon closed in. Mountains hove over the edge of the world, chains of them, that curved inward until Henry could see they formed a crater rim, and then, as soon as the far side was visible, the rim fled beneath him. Sometimes they flew over fields of boulders, immense, round-shouldered, their shadows long and flat.

“Look at that,” Geena said. “Some of those babies must be five stories high.”

No, Henry thought. Probably ten times that…

It was strange to remember how he’d griped about the restricted viewing from the Soyuz. Now he could see too
much,
a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree span of Moonscape and sunlight and bare, clutching rock.

Under the control of the computer the thrusters fired. There was no noise, but Henry could see little showers of exhaust crystals venting into space, feel the punch of the burns through his feet and hands. The
Shoemaker
rocked from side to side, fore and aft, sharply; it was a stomach-jolting feeling, like turbulence in an airliner…but there was no turbulence here.

They reached the center of the Moon’s daylight face, and passed beneath the sun. Giant pumice gray lava plains fled beneath him. Briefly, at the subsolar point, the shadows disappeared, and the surface detail washed out.

Coming up on five minutes to ignition.

“Five minutes, copy.”

You’re heading right for the guidance box at perilune.

“Copy that.”

Shoemaker, Houston, you’re go for powered descent. Your signal is breaking up. Recommend you yaw right ten degrees and reacquire.

Geena pulsed her thrusters once more, and the
Shoemaker
swiveled, pointing its main antenna more squarely at the blue sliver of Earth.

Three minutes to PDI. Two minutes forty seconds…

“Forty-seven thousand feet. The laser altimeter has locked in. It agrees closely with the trajectory.”

Good to hear it, Geena. You’re looking good at three minutes. You are still go to continue to powered descent.

“Copy that…”

Now they flew deeper yet, over a mare, a lava plain. It looked smooth as wet clay, pocked here and there by small round craters, fleeing beneath them. This was the Mare Imbrium, he thought with a thrill of understanding: he was flying over one of the Solar System’s greatest impact basins, the right eye of the Man in the Moon.

Forty thousand feet high: back on Earth, even Concorde flew higher than this. No big deal.

But this was no airplane ride.

Tracking around the airless Moon, they were still following an orbit, and by dipping down from the peak of their ellipse they had actually picked up speed. They were moving at all of three thousand seven hundred miles per hour, more than a mile a second, five times the speed of sound. No pilot in history had flown so fast, so close: at orbital speed, hugging the ground.

Henry felt as if he was bare-ass naked, strapped to his table. He shut his eyes, clung onto his restraints, and tried to forget where he was.

“We’re drifting off.”

He snapped open his eyes. “What?”

“Something spooky. It’s as if the
Shoemaker
is trying to line itself up toward the radius vector.” Geena turned to him, her face mirrored. “It wants to point straight down.”