Stephen Baxter - Space

But everywhere she could see the work of humans: the unmistakable tracks of tractors, smooth lines snaking over the regolith, and occasional orange tents that marked the position of emergency supply dumps, all of it overlaid by the glittering silver wires of mass driver rails.

The shuttle climbed farther. The Lunar Japanese around her applauded the smooth launch.

Now Earth rose. It looked as blue and beautiful as when she and Frank had left for the stars. But it had changed, of course. Even from here, she could see Gaijin flower-ships circling the planet, the giant ramscoops of the alien craft visible as tiny discs. She felt a stab of antique resentment at those powerful, silent visitors who had watched as humanity tore itself apart.

And now, as the shuttle tilted and settled into its two-hour orbit around the Moon, Xenia saw a sight she knew no human had ever seen before today:

Comet rise, over the Moon.

The coma, a diffuse mass of gas and fine particles, was a ball as big as the Earth, so close now it walled off half the sky, a glare of lacy, diffuse light. Massive clumps in the coma, backlit, cast shadows across the smoky gases, straight lines thousands of kilometers long radiating at her. The comet was coming out of the Sun, straight toward the Moon at seventy thousand kilometers an hour. She looked for the nucleus, a billion-ton ball of ice and rock. But it was too small and remote, even now, a few minutes from impact. And the tail was invisible from here, fleeing behind her, running ahead of the comet and stretching far beyond the Moon, reaching halfway to Mars in fact.

Suddenly there was light all around the shuttle. The little ship had plunged inside the coma. It was like being inside a diffuse, luminous fog.

“Vileekee bokh.”

Frank leaned across her, trying to see. He was seventy years old, physiological; his nose was a misshapen mass of flesh. He was a small, stocky man, with thick legs and big prizefighter muscles built for Earth’s gravity, so that he always looked like some restless, half-evolved ape alongside the tall, slim Lunar Japanese.

“Eta prikrasna,” Xenia murmured.

“Beautiful. Yeah. How about that: we’re the last off the Moon.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “There’s a handful of old nuts who won’t move, no matter what.”

“Even for a comet?”

“Takomi. He’s still there, for one,” she said.

“Who?”

“He’s notorious.”

“I don’t read the funny papers,” Frank snapped.

“Takomi is the hermit out in the ruins of Edo, on Farside. Evidently he lives off the land. He won’t even respond to radio calls.”

Frank frowned. “This is the fucking Moon. How does he live off the land? By sucking oxygen out of the rock?…”

The light changed. There was a soft Fourth-of-July gasp from the people crammed into the shuttle.

The comet had struck the Moon.

A dome of blinding white light rose like a new Sun from the surface of the Moon: comet material turned to plasma, mixed with shattered rock. Xenia thought she could see a wave passing through the Moon’s rocky hide: a sluggish ripple in rock turned to powder, gathering and slowing.

Now, spreading out over the Moon’s dusty gray surface, she saw a faint wash of light. It seemed to pool in the deeper maria and craters, flowing down the contours of the land like a morning mist on Earth. It was air: gases from the shattered comet, an evanescent atmosphere pooling on the Moon.

And, in a deep, shadowed crater, at the ghostly touch of the air, she saw light flare.

It was only a hint, a momentary splinter at the corner of her eye. She craned to see. Perhaps there was a denser knot of smoke or gas, there on the floor of the crater; perhaps there was a streak, a kind of contrail, reaching out through the temporary comet atmosphere.

It must be some by-product of the impact. But it looked as if somebody had launched a rocket from the surface of the Moon.

Already the contrail had dispersed in the thin, billowing comet air.

People were applauding again, at the beauty of the spectacle, with relief at being alive. Frank wasn’t even watching.

It was only after they landed that it was announced that the comet nucleus had landed plumb on top of the Fracastorius Crater dome.

Fracastorius, on the rim of the Sea of Nectar, was one of the largest settlements away from the primary Copernicus-Landsberg-Kepler triangle. The Lunar Japanese grieved. The loss of life was small, but the economic and social damage huge — perhaps unrecoverable, in these straitened times, as the Moon’s people tried to adapt to life without their centuries-old umbilical to Earth’s rich resources.

Frank Paulis seemed unconcerned. He got back to work, even before the shuttle landed. And he expected Xenia to do the same.

Xenia and Frank had spent a year of their lives on a Gaijin flower-ship, had submitted themselves to the unknown hazards of several Saddle Point gateway teleport transitions, and had gotten themselves relativistically stranded in an unanticipated future. On their way home from the Saddle Point radius, Frank and Xenia had grown concerned when nobody in the inner system answered their hails. At last they had tapped into some low-bit-rate news feeds.

The news had seemed remarkably bad.

Earth had fallen into a state of civil war. There were battles raging around the equatorial region, the Sahara and Brazil and the Far East. Frank and Xenia had listened, bemused, to reports laced with names they’d never heard of, of campaigns and battles, of generals and presidents and even emperors. Even the nations involved seemed to have changed, split and coalesced. It was hard even to figure out what they were fighting over — save the generic, the diminishing resources of a declining planet.

One thing was for sure. All their money was gone, disappeared into electronic mist. They had landed on the Moon as paupers, figuratively naked.

It turned out to be a crowded Moon, owned by other people. But they had nowhere else to go. And, even on the Moon, nobody was interested in star travelers and their tales.

Frank had felt cheated. Going to the stars had been a big mistake for him. He’d gone looking for opportunity; he’d grown impatient with the slow collapse of Earth’s economy and social structure, even before the wars began, long before people started dying in large numbers.

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.