Space (33 page)

Not that he hadn't prospered here.

The Moon of the late twenty-second century, as it turned out, had a lot in common with early twenty-first century Earth. Deprived of its lifelines from the home world, the Moon was full: a stagnant, closed economy. But Frank had seen all this before, and he knew that economic truth was strange in such circumstances. For instance, Frank had quickly made a lot of money out of reengineering an old technology that made use of lunar sulphur and oxygen as a fuel source. As the scarcity of materials increased, industrial processes that had once been abandoned as unprofitable suddenly became worthwhile.

Within five years Frank J. Paulis had become one of the hundred wealthiest individuals on the Moon, taking Xenia right along with him.

But it wasn't enough. Frank found it impossible to break into the long-lived, close-knit business alliances of the Lunar Japanese. And besides, Xenia suspected, he felt cooped up here on the Moon.

Anyhow, that was why this comet had been so important for Frank. It would shake everything up, he said. Change the equation.

It was either admirable, she thought, or schizophrenic.

After all these years -- during which time she had been his companion, lover, employee, amateur therapist -- Xenia still didn't understand Frank; she freely admitted it. He was an out-and-out capitalist, no doubt about that. But every gram of his huge ambition was constantly turned on the most gigantic of projects. The future of a world! The destiny of mankind! What Xenia couldn't work out was whether Frank was a visionary who used capitalism to achieve his goals -- or just a capitalist after all, sublimating his greed and ambition.

But, swept along by his energy and ambition, she found it hard to focus on such questions.

Bathed in blue-water light, pacing his stage, Frank J. Paulis was a solid ball of terrestrial energy and aggression, out of place on the small, delicate Moon. "You got to beat the future, or it will beat you! I believed that before I went to the stars, and I believe it now. I'm here to tell you how..."

To launch his new project, Frank, feverish with enthusiasm, had hired the Grand Auditorium, the heart of Landsberg. The crater's dome was a blue ceiling above Xenia, a thick double sheet of quasiglass, cable-stayed by engineered spiderweb, filled with water. The water shielded Landsberg's inhabitants from radiation and served to scatter the raw sunlight. During the long lunar day, here in Landsberg, the sky was royal blue and full of fish: goldfish and carp. After five years, Xenia still couldn't get used to it.

Frank was standing before a huge three-dimensional cartoon, a Moon globe sliced open to reveal arid, uninteresting geological layers. Beside him sat Mariko Kashiwazaki, the young academic type whose paper had fired Frank off in this new direction. She looked slim and uncertain in the expensive new suit Frank had bought for her.

Xenia was sitting at the back of the audience, watching rows of cool faces: politicians, business types. They were impassive. Well, they were here, and they were listening, and that was all Frank cared about right now.

"Here on the Moon, we need volatiles," Frank was saying. "Not just to survive, but to expand. To grow, economically. Water. Hydrogen. Helium. Carbon dioxide. Nitrogen. Maybe nitrates and phosphates to supplement the bio cycles.

"But the Moon is deficient in every essential of life. A molecule of water, out there on the surface, lasts a few hours before it's broken up by the sunlight and lost forever. The Moon's atmosphere is so thin some of the molecules are actually
in orbit.
Frankly, it's no damn use."

It was true. All this had been well known from the moment the first Apollo astronaut had picked up the first lump of unprepossessing Moon rock and found it dry as a bone -- drier, in fact.

For a time there had been hope that deep, shadowed craters near the Moon's poles might serve as stores for water ice, brought there by cometary impacts. But to the intense disappointment of some dreamers, no more than a trace of such ice had been found. As the Fracastorius impact had demonstrated, such impacts deposited little volatile material anyhow. And even if any ice was trapped it wouldn't be there forever; the Moon's axis turned out to be unstable, and the Moon tipped this way and that over a period of hundreds of millions of years -- a long time, but short enough that no crater remained in shadow forever.

Dry or not, Moon rock wasn't useless. In fact, it was about 40 percent oxygen by weight. There were other useful elements: silicon, which could be used to make glass, fiberglass, polymers; aluminum, magnesium, and titanium for machinery, cables, coatings; chromium and magnesium for metal alloys.

But Frank was essentially right. If a mine on Earth had turned up the highest-grade lunar ore, you'd throw it out as slag.

And that was why Frank had initiated Project Prometheus, his scheme for importing volatiles
and
spinning up the Moon by hitting it with a series of comets or asteroids. But it hadn't worked.

"So where do we turn next?" He eyed his audience, as always in command, even before these wary, slightly bemused Lunar Japanese. "Believe me, we need to find something. The Moon,
your
Moon, is dying. We didn't come to the Moon so our children could live in a box. We came to live as humans, with freedom and dignity." He threw back his arms and breathed the recycled air. "Let me tell you my dream. One day, before I die, I want to throw open the damn doors and walk out of the dome. And I want to breathe the air of the Moon. The air we put there." He began to pace back and forth, like a preacher -- or a huckster.
"I want to see a terraformed Moon.
I want to see a Moon where breathable air blankets the planet, where there is so much water the deep maria will become the seas they were named for, where plants and trees grow out in the open, and every crater will glisten with a circular lake... It's a dream. Maybe I won't live to see it all. But I know it's the only way forward for us. Only a
world
-- stable, with deep biological reservoirs of water and carbon and air -- is going to be big enough to sustain human life, here on the Moon, over the coming centuries, the millennia. Hell, we're here for the long haul, people, and we got to learn to think that way. Because nobody is going to help us -- not Earth, not the Gaijin. None of them care if we live or die. We're stuck in this trench, in the middle of the battleground, and we have to help ourselves.

"But to make the Moon a twin of Earth we'll need volatiles, principally water. The Moon has no volatiles, and so we must import them. Correct?"

Now he leaned forward, intimidating, a crude but effective trick, Xenia thought dryly.

"Dead wrong.
I'm here today to offer you a new paradigm. I'm here to tell you that the Moon
itself
is rich in volatiles, almost unimaginably so, enough to sustain us and our families, hell, for millennia. And, incidentally, to make us rich as Croesus in the process..."

It was the climax, the punch line, Frank's big shock. But there was barely a flicker of interest in the audience, Xenia saw. Three centuries and a planetary relocation hadn't changed the Japanese much, and cultural barriers hadn't dropped; they were still suspicious of the noisy foreigner who stood before them, breaking into the subtle alliances and protocols that ruled their lives.

Frank stood back. "Tell 'em, Mariko."

The slim Lunar Japanese scientist got up, evidently nervous, and bowed deeply to the audience.

Earth-Moon and the other planets, Mariko said, supported by smooth softscreen images, had condensed, almost five billion years ago, from a swirling cloud of dust and gases. That primordial cloud had been rich in volatiles: 3 percent of it was water, for instance. You could tell that was so from the composition of asteroids, which were leftover fragments of the cloud.

But there was an anomaly. All the water on Earth, in the oceans and atmosphere and the ice sheets, added to less than a
tenth
of that 3-percent fraction. Where had the rest of the water gone?

Conventional wisdom held that it had been baked out by the intense heat of Earth's formation. But Mariko believed much of it was still there, that water and other volatiles were trapped deep within the Earth: perhaps four hundred kilometers down, deep in the mantle. The water wouldn't be present as a series of immense buried oceans. Rather it would be scattered as droplets, some as small as a single molecule, trapped inside crystal lattices of the minerals with names like wadsleyite and hydrous-D. These special forms could trap water within their structure, essentially exploiting the high pressure to overcome the tendency of the rising temperature to bake the water out.

Some estimates said there should be as much as
five times
as much water buried within the Earth as in all its oceans and atmosphere and ice caps.

And what was true of Earth might be true of the Moon.

According to Mariko, the Moon was mostly made of material like Earth's mantle. This was because the Moon was believed to have been budded off the Earth itself, ripped loose after a giant primordial collision popularly called the "big whack." The Moon was smaller than the Earth, cooler and more rigid, so that the center of the Moon was analogous to the Earth's mantle layers a few hundred kilometers deep. And it was precisely at such depths, on Earth, that you found such water-bearing minerals...

Frank watched his audience like a hawk.

His cartoon Moon globe suddenly lit up. The onion-skin geological layers were supplemented by a vivid blue ocean, lapping in unlikely fashion at the center of the Moon. Xenia smiled. It was typical Frank: inaccurate, but compelling.

"Listen up," he said. "What if Mariko is right? What if even
one tenth of one percent
of the Moon's mass by weight is water? That's the same order as five percent of Earth's surface water. A hidden ocean indeed.

"And that's not all. Where there is water there will be other volatiles: carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, even hydrocarbons. All we have to do is go down there and find it.

"And it's
ours.
We don't own the sky; with the Gaijin around, maybe humans never will. But we inhabitants of the Moon do own the rocks beneath our feet.

"Folks, I'm calling this new enterprise Roughneck. If you want to know why, go look up the word. I'm asking you to invest in me. Sure it's a risk. But if it works it's a way past the resource bottleneck we're facing, here on the Moon.
And
it will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams." He grinned. "There's a fucking ocean down there, folks, and it's time to go skinnydipping."

There was a frozen silence, which Frank milked expertly.

After the session, Xenia took a walk.

The Moon's surface, beneath the dome, was like a park. Grass covered the ground, much of it growing out of bare lunar regolith. There was even a stand of mature palms, thirty meters tall, and a scattering of cherries. People lived in the dome's support towers: thick central cores with platforms of lunar concrete slung from them. The lower levels were given over to factories, workshops, schools, shops, and other public places.

Far above her head, Xenia could see a little flock of schoolchildren in their white-and-black uniforms, flapping back and forth on Leonardo wings, squabbling like so many chickens. It was beautiful. But it served to remind her there were no birds here, outside pressurized cages. Birds tired too quickly in the thin air; on the Moon, against intuition, birds couldn't fly.

Water flowed in streams and fountains and pools, moistening the air.

She passed Landsberg's famous water-sculpture park. Water tumbled slowly from a tall fountainhead in great shimmering spheres held together by surface tension. The spheres were caught by flickering mechanical fingers, to be teased out like taffy and turned and spun into rope and transformed, briefly, into transient, beautiful sculptures, no two ever alike. It was entrancing, she admitted, a one-sixth gravity art form that would have been impossible on the Earth, and it had immediately captivated her on her arrival here. As she watched, a gaggle of children -- eight or ten years old, Moon legs as long as giraffes' -- ran
across
the surface of the pond in the park's basin, Jesuslike, their slapping footsteps sufficient to keep them from sinking as long as they ran fast enough.

Water was everywhere here; it did not
feel
dry, a shelter in a scorched desert. But overhead, huge fans turned continually, extracting every drop of moisture from the air to be cleansed, stored, and reused. She was surrounded by subtle noises: the bangs and whirrs of fans and pumps, the bubbling of aerators. And, when the children had gone, she saw tiny shimmering robots whiz through the air, fielding scattered water droplets as if catching butterflies, not letting a drop go to waste.

Landsberg, a giant machine, had to be constantly run, managed, maintained. Landsberg was no long-term solution. The various recycling processes were extraordinarily efficient -- they had gotten to the level of counting molecules -- but there were always losses; the laws of thermodynamics saw to that. And there was no way to make good those losses.

It didn't
feel
like a dying world. In fact it was beginning to feel like home to her, this small, delicate, slow-motion world. But the human Moon was, slowly but surely, running down. Already some of the smaller habitations had been abandoned; smaller ecospheres had been too expensive. There was rationing. Fewer children were being born than a generation ago, as humanity huddled in the remaining, shriveling lunar bubbles.

And there was nowhere else to go.

Xenia had an intuition about the rightness of Frank's vision, whatever his methods. At least he was fighting back: trying to find a way for humans to survive, here in the system that had birthed them. Somebody had to. It seemed clear that the aliens, the all-powerful Gaijin, weren't here to help; they were standing by in their silent ships, witnessing as human history unfolded and Earth fell apart.