Moonseed (69 page)

Twenty seconds. Less than two thousand feet. The craters ahead were foreshortened to ellipses, pools of shadow in the sunlight, flattening.

He flew into shadow, and he could see no more.

And so, in darkness, Arkady—still moving at a mile a second, sitting up in his couch—hit the surface of the Moon.

Arkady’s life, the success of his mission, was utterly dependent on Henry’s theories.

At the moment of touchdown—the instant at which the rounded belly of the Soyuz impacted the lunar dirt—two things happened.

First, the attitude thrusters beneath Arkady’s feet fired on full strength, lifting Soyuz away from the regolith. The thrust was sufficient to hold eighty percent of the Soyuz’s weight up from the surface; the actual depth of contact ought to be no more than a few inches. Other thrusters fired intermittently, to keep the craft upright, stop it tumbling.

Second, the Star Wars laser fired from the craft’s nose.

If this South Pole crater was indeed a frozen lake of water, dusted over by regolith, then the laser should blast-melt a shallow furrow, a canal of glowing steam, utterly straight ahead of Arkady. The liquid water—persisting for a few seconds before boiling away—would lubricate the ferocious contact between the hull of the Soyuz and the ancient ice.

The Soyuz would shed its orbital speed in friction with the water, and—sliding home like a baseball player coming to a plate—would come to a gentle halt, with barely any fuel expended.

That, at any rate, was the theory.

A hundred seconds and it would be over, one way or another.

Arkady was thrust forward against his chest restraints. The impact was violent, spine-jarring, harder than he expected.

The Soyuz groaned like a tin can. The craft rattled and jumped, as if some giant were battering its hull, the vibration so violent he could no longer see the instruments. The deceleration should be less than one and a half G, but it was a long time since he had been on Earth, and it was in any case the vibration that was shaking him to pieces.

…But the craft held. The cabin lights flickered, but stayed bright.

The pressure, the noise and vibration, continued. He struggled to stay upright, to keep breathing. His ribs ached, and there was a graying around the rim of his vision.

He heard a series of jolts and bangs: that was the solar panel wings, the optical sighting system periscope, perhaps the rendezvous antenna on its stand, being ripped off the hull. His craft was being stripped down to its basics by this brutal passage.

In the first ten seconds, hardly any of his velocity gone, he covered ten miles, scouring across the Moon’s shadowed surface.

But the seconds wore on, his heart continued to beat, and the structure of the craft was still holding. He allowed himself a grin. This rattling Soyuz was a tank, plowing resolutely through the lunar ice; the Americans’ tin-foil Apollo would not have lasted a dozen yards!

He caught glimpses of the Moon, fleeing past his window: dune fields lit up by a red, spectral glow, obscured by sprays of steam. The glow was his own, he realized: it was the hull of his Soyuz and the dirt of the Moon, turned red hot by his spectacular arrival.

He must be a wonderful sight, raising parabolic plumes of glowing spray and steam to either side, as he cut his geometrically straight line across the surface of the Moon. If the Moon were tipped up a little more, in fact, on Earth they would even be able to
see,
with the naked eye, the gash he must cut in the surface.

Twenty seconds, seventeen miles covered; thirty seconds, twenty-four miles…

His velocity was dropping, then, almost as planned. Yet the ride grew no less violent, the shuddering dips and bangs of the craft no less pronounced. Sometimes the bangs were very severe, as the Soyuz hit some inhomogeneity in the ice.

Suddenly the deceleration increased, and he was thrown with fresh vigor against the restraint straps. But he had been expecting that; as his velocity reduced the Soyuz was sinking more deeply into the lunar ice, digging in, braking him more rapidly.

Now a full minute had elapsed since that first jarring touchdown, and, by God, he was still breathing. Just ten miles to go, and his speed must be no more than Mach Two, and falling…

He had of course broken all land-speed records in the process of this landing. And, whatever the outcome, he would become the first human to die on another planet, the first to create a myth on this world without history, without monuments. Let them engrave that on the statue they would build to him, on Leninski Prospect!

Seventy seconds, eighty; forty-five miles, forty-seven. The shuddering of the craft, the howling of the metal scraping on poorly-lubricated ice, all of it seemed to him to be smoothing out and reducing. The vibration now was much diminished, and he was even able to read his instruments.

Ninety seconds. Another lurch, a plummet downwards, another savage bite of deceleration.

Now the attitude thrusters had cut out, and he would complete his final glide unpowered, the Soyuz ploughing ever deeper into the ice of the Moon.

Ten more seconds. The Soyuz slowed in violent lurches, and Arkady was still pinned forward against his straps. But he felt exultant. It had worked, by God! His speed was now no more than a couple of hundred miles per hour, and he began to believe, cautiously, that he might actually live through this. He would be a Russian cosmonaut, alive on the Moon, even if for just a few minutes or hours…It would be glorious!

As its speed dwindled, the Soyuz dipped forward, and it started to slew sideways, as if skidding across an icy runway. The cloud of steam that had obscured the front rendezvous port cleared, and Arkady, for the first time, was able to see ahead.

And, he saw, there was something in his way.

It was a sheer cliff face; perhaps it was even the central mountain of the South Pole crater, or a foothill of it. So big, whatever it was, it filled half the universe.

Disappointment surged, overwhelming his fear.

He reached out to the laptop. He held his gloved finger over the destruct button he had configured.

He allowed himself a moment’s sweet regret at this misfortune, for it was a beautiful plan, and it had worked, all but this final detail.

He thought of Lusia, and Vitalik, and Geena.

Near enough.

He pushed the button, and he brought the light of the stars to the shadows of the Moon.

49

Watch the Moon.

It was as if the message ran around the battered planet.

Watch the Moon.
The satellite shone down on its parent, as it always had; but now the air of Earth was murky with ash and smoke, its night side glowing bright with fires and volcanism, the infernal light of Earth bright enough to banish the Moon glow…

Watch the Moon.

That was what Henry had told Jane to do, in the last message she got from him, via NASA.

It was 4:00
A.M
., nearly dawn, when she woke Jack. They dressed quickly, and went to stand in the middle of the lawn, at the rear of this rental house in Houston, that Henry had fixed up for them. Snow crunched under their feet: snow like Moon dust, snow in late Texas summer.

Jack walked silently, withdrawn. But that was okay. All he had seen in the last few weeks was going to take some silent time to take in, and she was determined he was going to get that time; even if she couldn’t give him anything else but that.

The weather was shot to pieces around the planet, but this August cold snap was unprecedented, it seemed. But the air was still laden with moisture, a damp ghost of summer humidity, so much clear ice had collected everywhere.

Ice whiskers had clustered together to make a carpet as thick as snow on the roads and structures. The drivers on the freeways were very cautious, and seemed to be baffled by such phenomena as ice on their windscreens. De-icer seemed unknown here; Jane felt a little contemptuous, like a Swede mocking British attempts to cope with a few measly inches of snow. The roads were gritted, but with what looked like beach sand. The bridges on the freeways were iced up, pretty deadly,
and the traffic was crawling and scared. It was easy to skid as you came off the freeway around those right-angle turns.

She had thought they were safe when they arrived here, at the house Henry had set up for them. Well, maybe they were. But there were power outages that lasted days. The TV had images of plucky Houstoners loading frozen hamburgers onto their summer barbecues…News Lite, the cynics called it.

Anyhow she knew they would have to move soon, Henry’s protection notwithstanding. The Administration was preparing to remove ration privileges for aliens. But Jane knew where she would take Jack: north, into Canada, to the center of the Shield. The most stable rocks in the continent…

It was a clear night, with only a trace of sunset pink staining the horizon. And the Moon, in the tall Texan sky, was almost full, a dish of light mottled by gray, just as it had always been.

She had brought a small telescope, a child’s toy. She lifted it now.

Jane looked to the upper left corner of the Moon, where Henry had told her he would be, at Aristarchus. It was impossible to comprehend that the Moon was a globe-shaped planet in the sky, that Henry was standing there, perhaps looking back at her.

She clutched Jack, hoping the sky stayed clear of clouds and ash.

Henry was walking on the surface of the Moon.

The Earth was low in the south, God’s blue eyeball in the sky, now lidded by darkness. Maybe Jane was up there, watching, thinking about him.

When he stood in the shadow of the rille wall, he could see stars.

He walked over the undulating ground, through quiet, in the soft rain of starlight.

Geena kept calling the Moon a dead world. She was wrong. It wasn’t dead. It was a world of rocks, of rock flowers and rock forests and rock colors, a subtle, still, Zenlike beauty that would take a lifetime to explore.

The Moon as a giant Zen rock garden. Blue Ishiguro would have enjoyed that thought.

It was true that the Moon was a quiet world. There wasn’t even the brush of wind, the crash of a remote wave. It was a quiet that had persisted for billions of years, since the end of the heavy bombardment that had shaped the landscape. Even the light here was old, the light of the stars that had taken centuries or millennia to reach here.

But there was change here. There was even weather.

There was frost, on the Moon.

The Moon had an atmosphere, of hydrogen, helium, neon and argon. It was so thin it was probably replenished by the solar wind. At night, the argon would freeze out. It sublimated quickly at dawn.

Now, walking in shadows disturbed only by milky blue Earthlight, here and there, he convinced himself he could see a sparkle, a glint of lunar ice…

He was encased in stars, surfing on rocky blue waves.

He could feel the regolith crunch beneath his feet, his weight crushing the floury structure constructed by a billion years of micrometeorite gardening. All that information, lost as soon as he touched it.

And now, there was no time left to decode it.

If Henry had got his math right, soon this place—like every site on the Moon—would be overwhelmed by
weather.

Henry knew he should be anticipating the great events to come. If it worked—
if
—he would be giving humanity, perhaps, a whole new world.

If the Moon was the only safe world in the Solar System, because of the Moonseed hive at its core, humans were going to have to come here to live. Henry’s plan would—
might
—make that possible.

But Henry was a geologist. He might be creating a new Earth, but he was going to have to wreck the Moon to do it. For instance, the structure of the ice at the Pole, strata laid down over billions of years, was a record of the impact history of the inner Solar System—a unique record that was probably already lost, thanks to the nuke.

He would destroy the Moon, to save humanity. Grandiose bullshit.

Somehow, he had maneuvered himself into a situation where the history of two worlds was resting on his shoulders. As if he was Jesus Christ himself.

But he had no pretensions; this was no part of the deal as far as his life plan was concerned.

Especially as Christ died for his mission, as he might have to now.

He checked the watch clumsily strapped to his dust-grimed sleeve.

Watch the Moon…

Jays Malone climbed up Mount Wilson to do just that. He came with Sixt Guth, who was not much younger than him, now grounded from the Space Station. Everybody was grounded now, it seemed.

The old observatory stood two thousand yards above Los Angeles. The city’s lights flowed in rectangular waves about the foot of the hill, washing out the horizon with a salmon-pink glow; but the sky above was crisp and cool and peppered with stars.

The opened dome curved over Jays’s head, a shell of ribbing and panels that looked like the inside of an oil tank. The dome, with its brass fixtures and giant gears, smelled vaguely of old concrete. The telescope itself was an open frame, vaguely cylindrical, looming in the dark.

Sixt had taken one of his several doctorates, in astronomy, at UCLA, and had put in some observational work on this ’scope. Now, his old contacts had made the place available for Sixt and his buddy, on this night of all nights.

Sixt was fussing around the telescope. “This is the Hooker telescope,” he said. “When it was built, in 1906, it was the largest telescope in the world…Kind of ironic.”

Jays had a pair of Air Force binoculars around his neck, big and powerful. He lifted them to the Moon, squinting through the aperture in the dome.

“What’s ironic?”

“The use of that bunker-buster.”

“The what? Oh, the bomb on the Moon.”

“Those conventional earthquake bombs they used in the Gulf War were too good. So the pariah states started buying up deep excavation equipment, to escape the bombs, and bury their command posts and their nuclear and chemical and biological stockpiles…”