Space (37 page)

Eighty days in and Frank was still making hole at his couple-of-kilometers-a-day target pace. But things had started to get a lot harder.

This was
mantle,
after all. They were suffering rock bursts. The rock was like stretched wire, under so much pressure it exploded when it was exposed. It was a new regime. New techniques were needed.

Costs escalated. The pressure on Frank to shut down was intense.

Many of the investors had already become extremely rich from the potential of the rich ore lodes discovered in the lower crust and upper mantle. There was talk of opening up new, shallow bores elsewhere on the Moon to seek out further lodes. Frank had proved his point. Why go farther, when the Roughneck was already a commercial success?

But metal ore wasn't Frank's goal, and he wasn't about to stop now.

That was when the first death occurred, all of a hundred kilometers below the surface of the Moon.

She found him in his office at New Dallas, pacing back and forth, an Earth man caged on the Moon, his muscles lifting him off the glass floor.

"Omelettes and eggs," he said. "Omelettes and eggs."

"That's a cliche, Frank."

"It was probably the fucking Grays."

"There's no evidence of sabotage."

He paced. "Look, we're in the
mantle of the Moon
--"

"You don't have to justify it to me," she said, but he wasn't listening.

"The mantle," he said. "You know, I hate it. A thousand kilometers of worthless shit."

"It was the changeover to the subterrene that caused the disaster. Right?"

He ran a hand over his greasy hair. "If you were a prosecutor, and this was a court, I'd challenge you on 'caused.' The accident happened when we switched over to the subterrene, yes."

They had already gone too deep for the simple alloy casing or the cooled lunar glass Frank had used in the upper levels. To get through the mantle they would use a subterrene, a development of obsolete deep-mining technology. It was a probe that melted its way through the rock and built its own casing behind it: a tube of hard, high-melting-point quasiglass.

Frank started talking, rapidly, about quasiglass. "It's the stuff the Lunar Japanese use for rocket nozzles. Very high melting point. It's based on diamond, but it's a quasicrystal, so the lab boys tell me, halfway between a crystal and a glass. Harder than ordinary crystal because there are no neat planes for cracks and defects to propagate. And it's a good heat insulator similarly. Besides that, we support the hole against collapse and shear stress with rock bolts, fired through the casing and into the rock beyond. We do everything we can to ensure the integrity of our structure..."

This was, she realized, a first draft of the testimony he would have to give to the investigating commissions.

When the first subterrene started up, it built a casing with a flaw, undetected for a hundred meters. There had been an implosion. They lost the subterrene itself, a kilometer of bore, and a single life, of a senior tool pusher.

"We've already restarted," Frank said. "A couple of days and we'll have recovered."

"Frank, this isn't a question of schedule loss," she said. "It's the wider impact. Public perception. Come on; you know how important this is. If we don't handle this right we'll be shut down."

He seemed reluctant to absorb that. He was silent for maybe half a minute.

Then his mood switched. He started pacing. "You know, we can leverage this to our advantage."

"What do you mean?"

"We need to turn this guy we lost -- what was his name? -- into a hero." He snapped his fingers. "Did he have any family? A ten-year-old daughter would be perfect, but we'll work with whatever we have. Get his kids to drop cherry blossom down the hole. You know the deal. The message has to be right.
The kids want the bore to be finished, as a memorial to the brave hero.
"

"Frank, the dead engineer was a she."

"And we ought to think about the Gray angle. Get one of them to call our hero tool pusher a criminal."

"Frank--"

He faced her. "You think this is immoral. Bullshit. It would be immoral to stop; otherwise, believe me,
everyone
on this Moon is going to die in the long run. Why do you think I asked you to set up the kids' clubs?"

"For
this?"

"Hell, yes. Already I've had some of those chicken-livered investors try to bail out. Now we use the kids, to put so much fucking pressure on it's impossible to turn back. If that tool pusher had a kid in one of our clubs, in fact, that's perfect." He hesitated, then pointed a stubby finger at her face. "This is the bottleneck. Every project goes through it. I need to know you're with me, Xenia."

She held his gaze for a couple of seconds, then sighed. "You know I am."

He softened, and dropped his hands. "Yeah. I know." But there was something in his voice, she thought, that didn't match his words. An uncertainty that hadn't been there before. "Omelettes and eggs," he muttered. "Whatever." He clapped his hands. "So. What's next?"

This time, Xenia didn't fly directly to Edo. Instead she programmed the hopper to make a series of slow orbits of the abandoned base.

It took her an hour to find the glimmer of glass, reflected sunlight sparkling from a broad expanse of it, at the center of an ancient, eroded crater. She landed a kilometer away, to avoid disturbing the flower structures. She suited up quickly, clambered out of the hopper, and set off on foot.

She made ground quickly, over this battered, ancient landscape, restrained only by the Moon's gentle gravity. Soon the land ahead grew bright, glimmering like a pool. She slowed, approaching cautiously.

The flower was larger than she had expected. It must have covered a quarter, even a third of a hectare, delicate glass leaves resting easily against the regolith from which they had been constructed, spiky needles protruding. There was, too, another type of structure: short, stubby cylinders pointing at the sky, projecting in all directions.

Miniature cannon muzzles. Launch gantries for seed-carrying aluminum-burning rockets, perhaps.

"I must startle you again."

She turned. It was Takomi, of course, in his worn, patched suit, his hands folded behind his back. He was looking at the flower.

"Life on the Moon," she said.

"Its life cycle is simple, you know. It grows during periods of transient comet atmospheres -- like the present -- and lies dormant between such events. The flower is exposed to sunlight, through the long Moon day. Each of its leaves is a collector of sunlight. The flower focuses the light on regolith, and breaks down the soil for the components it needs to manufacture its own structure, its seeds, and the simple rocket fuel used to propel them across the surface.

"Then, during the night, the leaves act as cold traps. They absorb the comet frost that falls on them, water and methane and carbon dioxide, incorporating that, too, into the flowers' substance."

"And the roots?"

"The roots are kilometers long. They tap deep wells of nutrient, water and organic substances. Deep inside the Moon."

So Frank, of course, was right about the existence of the volatiles, as she had known he would be.

"I suppose you despise Frank Paulis."

"Why should I?" he said mildly.

"Because he is trying to dig out the sustenance for these plants. Rip it out of the heart of the Moon. Are you a Gray, Takomi?"

He shrugged. "We have different ways. Your ancestors have a word:
mechta.
"

"Dream." It was the first Russian word she had heard spoken in many months.

"It was the name your engineers wished to give to the first probe they sent to the Moon:
Mechta.
But it was not allowed, by those who decide such things. Well, I am living a dream, here on the Moon: a dream of rock and stillness, here with my Moon flower. That is how you should think of me."

He smiled and walked away.

Frank and Xenia, wrapped in their spiderweb space suits, stood on a narrow aluminum bridge. They were under the South Pole derrick, suspended over the tunnel Frank had dug into the heart of the Moon.

The area around the derrick had long lost its pristine theme-park look. There were piles of spill, and waste, and ore that had been dug out of the deepening hole in the ground. LHDs, automated load-haul-dump vehicles, crawled continually around the site. The LHDs, baroque aluminum beetles, sported giant fins to radiate off their excess heat -- no conduction or convection here -- and most of their working parts were two meters or more off the ground, where sprays of the abrasive lunar dust wouldn't reach. The LHDs, Xenia realized, were machines made for the Moon.

The shaft below Xenia was a cylinder of sparkling lunar glass. The tunnel receded to the center of the Moon, to infinity. Lights had been buried in the walls every few meters, so the shaft was brilliantly lit, like a passageway in a shopping mall, the multiple reflections glimmering from the glass walls. Refrigeration and other conduits snaked along the tunnel. It was vertical, perfectly symmetrical, and there was no mist or dust, nothing to obscure her view.

Momentarily dizzy, she stepped back, anchored herself again on the surface of the Moon.

Frank rubbed his hands. "It's wonderful. Like the old days. Engineers overcoming obstacles, building things." He seemed oddly nervous; he wouldn't meet her eyes.

"And," she said, "thanks to all this problem solving, we got through the mantle."

"Hell, yes, we got through it. You've been away from the project too long, babe." He took her hands. Squat in his suit, his face invisible, he was still, unmistakably, Frank J. Paulis. "And now, it's our time." Without hesitation -- he never hesitated -- he stepped to the lip of the delicate metal bridge.

She walked with him, a single step. A stitched safety harness, suspended from pulleys above, impeded her.

"Will you follow me?" he asked.

She took a breath. "I've always followed you."

"Then come."

Hand in hand, they jumped off the bridge.

Slow as a snowflake, tugged by gravity, Xenia fell toward the heart of the Moon. The loose harness dragged gently at her shoulders and crotch, slowing her fall. She was guided by a couple of spiderweb cables, tautly threaded down the axis of the shaft; through her suit's fabric she could hear the hiss of the pulleys.

There was nothing beneath her feet save a diminishing tunnel of light. Xenia could hear her heart pound. Frank was laughing.

The depth markers on the wall were already rising up past her, mapping her acceleration. But she was suspended here, in the vacuum, as if she were in orbit; she had no sense of speed, no vertigo from the depths beneath her.

Their speed picked up quickly. In seconds, it seemed, they had already passed through the fine regolith layers, the Moon's pulverized outer skin, and they were sailing down through the megaregolith. Giant chunks of deeply shattered rock crowded against the glassy, transparent tunnel walls like the corpses of buried animals.