Space (35 page)

Authors: Stephen Baxter

Tags: #sf

BOOK: Space

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She knew the future. She knew what would become of herself and her children.

They would wait through the long hot-cold bleakness for the brief Rains. Then they would bud, and pepper this small hard world with life, in their glorious blossoming. And she would survive the long stillness to see the Merging itself, the wonder that lay at the end of time, she and her children.

But she was the first, and the Giver had birthed her. None of it would have come to be without the Giver.

She wished she could express her love for him. She knew that was impossible.

She sensed, though, that he knew anyhow.

Overwhelmed by work as she was, Xenia couldn't get the memory of the comet impact out of her head. For, in the moment of that gigantic collision she had glimpsed a contrail: for all the world as if someone, something, had launched a rocket from the surface of the Moon.

But who, and why?

She had no opportunity to consider the question as the Roughneck project gathered pace. At last, though, she freed up two or three days from Frank, pleading exhaustion. She determined to use the time to resolve the puzzle. She went home, for the first time after many nights of sleeping at the Roughneck project office.

She took a long hot bath to soak out the gritty lunar dust from the pores of her skin. In her small tub the water sloshed like mercury. Condensation gathered on the ceiling above her, and soon huge droplets hung there suspended, like watery chandeliers. When she stood up the water clung to her skin, like a sheath; she had to scrape it loose with her fingers, depositing it carefully back in the tub. Then she took a small vacuum cleaner and captured all the loose droplets she could find, returning every scrap to the drainage system, where it would be cleansed and fed back into Landsberg's great dome reservoirs.

Her apartment was a glass-walled cell in the great catacomb that was Landsberg. It had, in fact, once served as a
genkan,
a hallway, for a greater establishment in easier, less cramped times, long before she had returned from the stars; it was so small her living room doubled as a bedroom. The floor was covered with rice straw matting, though she kept a
zabuton
cushion for Frank Paulis. Miniature Japanese art filled the room with space and stillness.

She had been happy to accept the style of the inhabitants of this place -- unlike Frank, who had turned
his
apartment into a shrine to Americana. It was remarkable, she thought, that the Japanese had turned out to be so well adapted to life on the Moon. It was as if thousands of years on their small, crowded islands had readied them for this greater experience, this increasing enclosure on the Moon.

She made herself some coffee -- fake, of course, and not as hot as she would have liked. She tuned the walls to a favorite scene -- a maple forest carpeted with bright green moss -- and padded, naked, to her workstation. She sat on a
tatami
mat, which was unreasonably comfortable in the low gravity, and sipped her drink.

There was no indexed record of that surface rocket launch, as she had expected. There was, however, a substantial database on the state of the whole Moon at the time of the impact; every sensor the Lunar Japanese could deploy had been turned on the Moon, the events of that momentous morning.

And, after a few minutes' search, in a spectrometer record from a low-flying satellite, she found what she wanted. There was the contrail, bright and hot, arcing through splashed cometary debris. Spectrometer results told her she was looking at the products of aluminum burning in oxygen.

So it had been real.

She widened her search farther.

Yes, she learned, aluminum could serve as a rocket fuel. It had a specific impulse of nearly three hundred seconds, in fact. Not as good as the best chemical propellant -- that was hydrogen, which burned at four hundred -- but serviceable. And aluminum-oxygen could even be manufactured from the lunar soil.

Yes, there were other traces of aluminum-oxygen rockets burning on the Moon that day, recorded by a variety of automated sensors. More contrails, snaking across the lunar surface, from all around the Moon. There were a dozen, all told, perhaps more in parts of the Moon not recorded in sufficient detail.

And each of these rocket burns, she found, had been initiated when the gushing comet gases reached its location.

She pulled up a virtual globe of the Moon and mapped the launch sites. They were scattered over a variety of sites: highlands and maria alike, Nearside and Farside. No apparent pattern.

Then she plotted the contrails forward, allowing them to curl around the rocky limbs of the Moon.

The tracks converged on a single Farside site: Edo. The place the hermit, Takomi, lived.

It was the first Rain of all.

Suddenly there was air here, on this still world. At first there was the merest trace, a soft comet Rain that settled, tentatively, on her broad leaves, where they lay in shade. But she drank it in greedily, before it could evaporate in the returning Light, incorporating every molecule into her structure, without waste.

With gathering confidence she captured the Rain, and the Light, and continued the slow, patient work of building her seeds and the fiery stuff that would birth them, drawn from the patient dust.

And then, suddenly, it was time.

In a single orgasmic spasm the seeds burst from her structure. She was flooded with a deep joy even as she subsided, exhausted.

The Giver was still here with her, enjoying the Rain with her, watching her blossom. She was glad of that.

And then, so soon after, there was a gusting wind, a rush of the air molecules over her damaged surfaces, as the comet drew back its substance and leapt from the Land, whole and intact, its job done. The noise of that great escape into the Dark above came to her as a great shout.

Soon after, the Giver was gone too.

But it did not matter. For, soon, she could hear the first tentative scratching of her children, carried to her like whispers through the still, hard rock, as they dug beneath the Land, seeking nourishment. There was no Giver for them, nobody to help; they were beyond her aid now. But it did not matter, for she knew they were strong, self-sufficient, resourceful.

Some would die, of course. But most would survive, digging in, waiting for the next comet Rain.

She settled back into herself, relishing the geologic pace of her thoughts. Waiting for Rain, for more comets to gather from the dirt and leap into the sky.

Xenia took an automated hopper, alone, to the Sea of Longing, on Farside. The journey was seamless, the landing imperceptible.

She donned her spiderweb suit, checked it, and stepped into the hopper's small, extensible air lock. She waited for the hiss of escaping air, and -- her heart oddly thumping -- she collapsed the air lock around her and stepped onto the surface of the Moon.

A little spray of dust, ancient pulverized rock, lifted up around her feet. The sky was black -- save, she saw, for the faintest wisp of white, glowing in the flat sunlight. They were ice crystals, suspended in the thin residual atmosphere of the comet impact. Cirrus clouds on the Moon: relics of the death of a comet. The mare surface was like a gentle sea, a complex of overlapping, slowly undulating curves.

And here were two cones, tall and slender, side by side, geometrically perfect. They cast long shadows in the flat sunlight. She couldn't tell how far away they were, or how big, so devoid was this landscape of visual cues. They simply stood there, stark and anomalous.

She shivered. She walked forward, loping easily.

She came to a place where the regolith had been
raked.
She stopped, standing on unworked soil.

The raking had made a series of parallel ridges, each maybe six or eight centimeters tall, a few centimeters apart, a precise combing. When she looked to left or right, the raking went off to infinity, the lines sharp, their geometry perfect. And when she looked ahead, the lines receded to the horizon, as far as she could see undisturbed in their precision.

Those two cones stood, side by side, almost like termite mounds. The shallow light fell on them gracefully. She saw that the lines on the ground curved to wash around the cones, like a stream diverting around islands of geometry.

"Thank you for respecting the garden."

She jumped at the sudden voice. She turned.

A figure was standing there -- man or woman? A man, she decided, shorter and slimmer than she was. He wore a shabby, much-patched suit.

He bowed.
"Sumimasen.
I did not mean to startle you."

"Takomi?"

"And you are Xenia Makarova."

"You know that? How?"

A gentle shrug. "I am alone here, but not isolated. Only you sought and compiled information on the Moon flowers."

"What
flowers?"

He walked toward her. "This is my garden," he said.

"A Zen garden."

"You understand that? Good. This is a
kare sansui,
a waterless stream garden."

"Are you a monk?"

"I am a gardener."

She considered. "Even before humans came here, the Moon was already like an immense Zen garden: a garden of rock and soil."

"You are wise."

"Is that why you came here? Why you live alone like this?"

"Perhaps. I prefer the silence and solitude of the Moon to the bustle of the human world. You are Russian."

"My forebears were."

"Then you are alone here also. There are some of your people on Mars."

"So I'm told. They won't respond to my signals."

"No," he said. "They won't speak to anybody. In the face of the Gaijin onslaught, we humans have collapsed into scattered, sullen tribes."

Onslaught.
It seemed a strange word to use, stronger than she had expected. Briefly, she was reminded of somebody else, another reclusive Japanese.

She pointed. "I understand the ridges represent flow. Are those mountains? Are they rising out of cloud, or sea? Or are they diminishing?"

"Does it matter? The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. Perhaps they are both falling and rising. You have traveled far to see me. I will give you food and drink."

He turned and walked across the Moon. After a moment, she followed.

The abandoned lunar base, called Edo, was a cluster of concrete components -- habitation modules, power plants, stores, manufacturing facilities -- half buried in the cratered plain. There were robots everywhere, but they were standing silent, obviously inert.

But a single lamp burned again at the center of the old complex. Takomi lived at the heart of Edo, in what had once been, he said, a park, grown inside a cave dug in the ground. The buildings here were dark, gutted, abandoned. There was even, bizarrely, an ancient McDonald's, stripped out, its red-and-yellow plastic signs cracked and faded. A single cherry tree grew, its leaves bright green, a splash of color against the drab gray of the fused regolith.

This had been the primary settlement established by the Japanese government, back in the twenty-first century. But Nishizaki Heavy Industries had set up in Landsberg, using the crater originally as a strip mine. Now, hollowed out, Landsberg was the capital of the Moon, and Edo, cramped and primitive, had been abandoned.

She clambered out of her suit. She had tracked in moondust. It clung to the oils of her hand and looked like pencil lead, shiny on her fingers, like graphite. It would be hard to wash out, she knew.

He brought her green tea and rice cake.

Out of his suit Takomi was a small, wizened man; he might have been sixty, but such was the state of life-extending technology it was hard to tell. His face was round, a mass of wrinkles, and his eyes were lost in leathery folds; he spoke with a wheeze, as if slightly asthmatic.

"You cherish the tree," she said.

He smiled. "I need one friend. I regret you have missed the blossom. I am able to celebrate
ichi-buzaki
here. We Japanese like cherries; they represent the old Samurai view that the blossom symbolizes our lives. Beautiful, but fragile, and all too brief."

"I don't understand how you can live here."

"The Moon is a whole world," he said gently. "It can support one man."

Takomi, she learned, used the lunar soil for simple radiation shielding. He baked it in crude microwave ovens to make ceramic and glass. He extracted oxygen from the lunar soil by magma electrolysis: melting the soil with focused sunlight, then passing an electric current through it to liberate the oh-two. The magma plant, lashed up from decades-old salvage, was slow and power-intensive, but the electrolysis process was efficient in its use of soil; Takomi said he wasn't short of sunlight, but the less haulage he had to do the better.

He operated what he called a grizzly, an automated vehicle already a century old, so caked with dust it was the same color as the Moon. The grizzly toiled patiently across the surface of the Moon, powered by sunlight. It scraped up loose surface material and pumped out glass sheeting and solar cells, just a couple of square meters a day. Over time, the grizzly had built a solar farm covering square kilometers and producing megawatts of electric power.

"It is astonishing, Takomi."

He cackled. "If one is modest in one's request, the Moon is generous."

"But even so, you lack essentials. It's the eternal story of the Moon. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen--"

He smiled at her. "I admit I cheat. The concrete of this abandoned town is replete with water."

"You
mine concrete?"

"It is better than paying water tax."

"But how many humans could the Moon support this way?"