Stephen Baxter - Space

The work soon became all-absorbing, and Xenia found herself immersed.

The Lunar Japanese, after generations, had become used to their domes. It was hard for them even to imagine a Moon without roofs. But once committed to the project, they learned fast and were endlessly, patiently inventive in resolving problems. And it seemed to Xenia a remarkably short time from inception to the day Frank told her he had chosen his bore site.

“The widest, deepest impact crater in the fucking Solar System,” he boasted. “Nine kilometers below the datum level, all of thirteen kilometers below the rim wall peaks. Hell, just by standing at the base of that thing we’d be halfway to the core already. And the best of it is, we can buy it. Nobody has lived there since they cleaned out the last of the cold-trap ice…”

He was talking about the South Pole of the Moon.

Encased in a spiderweb pressure suit, Xenia stepped out of the hopper.

The Moon’s pole was a place of shadows. The horn of crescent Earth poked above one horizon, gaunt and ice-pale. Standing at the base of the crater called Amundsen, Xenia could actually see the Sun, a sliver of light poking through a gap in the enclosing rim mountains, casting long, stark shadows over the colorless, broken ground. She knew that if she stayed here for a monththe Moon’s glacial rotation would sweep that solar searchlight around the horizon. But the light was always flat and stark, like an endless dawn or sunset.

And at the center of Amundsen, Frank’s complex — ugly, busy, full of people — sprawled in a splash of reflected light.

Xenia had never walked on the Moon’s surface before, not once. Very few people did. Nobody was importing tungsten, and it was too precious to use on suits for sightseeing. The waste of water and air incurred in donning and doffing pressure suits was unacceptably high, and so on. On the Moon of 2190, people clung to their domed bubbles, riding sealed cars or crawling through tunnels, while the true Moon beyond their windows was as inaccessible as it had been before Apollo.

That thought — the closeness of the limits — chilled Xenia, somehow even more than the collapse of Earth. It reinforced her determination to stick with Frank, whatever her doubts about his objectives and methods.

Here came Frank in his space suit, Lunar Japanese spiderweb painted with a gaudy Stars and Stripes. “I wondered where you were,” he said.

“There was a lot of paperwork, last-minute permissions—”

“You might have missed the show.” He was edgy, nervous, restless; his gaze, inside his gold-tinted visor, swept over the desolate landscape. “Come see the rig.”

Together they loped toward the center of the complex, past Frank’s perimeter of security guards.

New Dallas, Frank’s Roughneck boomtown, was a crude cluster of buildings put together adobe-style from lunar concrete blocks. It was actually bright here, the sunlight deflected into the crater by heliostats, giant mirrors perched on the rim mountains or on impossibly tall gantries. The ’stats worked like giant floodlights, giving the town, incongruously, the feel of a floodlit sports stadium. The primary power came from sunlight too, solar panels that Frank had had plastered over the peaks of the rim mountains.

She could recognize shops, warehouses, dormitories, mess halls; there was a motor pool, with hoppers and tractors and heavy machinery clustered around fuel tanks. The inhabited buildings had been covered over for radiation-proofing by a few meters of regolith. And there was Frank’s geothermal plant, ready for operation: boxy buildings linked by fat, twisting conduits.

The ground for kilometers around was flattened and scored by footprints and vehicle tracks. It was hard to believe none of this had been here two months ago, that the only signs of human occupation then had been the shallow, abandoned strip mines in the cold traps.

And at the center of it all was the derrick itself, rising so far above the surface it caught the low sunlight — high enough, in fact, to stack up three or four joints of magnesium alloy pipe at a time. There was a pile of the pipe nearby, kilometers of it spun out of native lunar ore, the cheapest component of the whole operation. Sheds and shops sprawled around the derrick’s base, along with huge aluminum tanks and combustion engines. Mounds of rock, dug out in test bores, surrounded the derrick like a row of pyramids.

They reached the drilling floor. At its heart was the circular table through which the pipe would pass, and which would turn to force the drill into the ground. There were foundries and drums to produce and pay out cables and pipes: power conduits, fiber-optic light pipes, hollow tubes for air and water and sample retrieval.

The derrick above her was tall and silent, like the gantry for a Saturn V. Stars showed through its open, sunlit frame. And suspended there at the end of the first pipe lengths she could see the drill head itself, teeth of tungsten and diamond gleaming in the lights of the heliostats.

Frank was describing technicalities that didn’t interest her. “You know, you can’t turn a drill string more than a few kilometers long. So we have to use a downhole turbine…”

“Frank, eta ochin kraseeva. It is magnificent. Somehow, back in Landsberg, I never quite believed it was real.”

“Oh, it’s real,” Frank said tensely. “Just so long as it works.” He checked his chronometer, a softscreen patch sewn into the fabric of his suit. “It’s nearly time.”

They moved out into the public area.

Roughneck was the biggest public event on the Moon in a generation. There must have been a hundred people here: men, women, and children walking in their brightly colored surface suits and radiation ponchos or riding in little short-duration bubble rovers. These were the richest Lunar Japanese, who could still afford such luxuries. Cameras hovered everywhere. She saw virtual observers, adults and children in softscreen suits, their every sensation being fed out to the rest of the Moon.

Frank had even set up a kind of miniature theme park, with toy derricks you could climb up, and a towering roller-coaster based on an old-fashioned pithead rail — towering because you needed height, here on the Moon, to generate anything like a respectable g-force. The main attraction was Frank’s Fish Pond, a small crater he’d lined with ceramic and filled up with water. The water froze over and was steadily evaporating, of course, but water held a lot of heat, and the pond would take a long time to freeze to the bottom. In the meantime Frank had fish swimming back and forth in there, goldfish and handsome koi carp, living Earth creatures protected from the severe lunar climate by nothing more than a few meters of water, a neat symbol of his ambition.

The openness scared Xenia to death. “Are you sure it’s wise to have so many people?”

“The guards will keep out those Gray assholes.”

The Grays were a pressure group who had started to campaign against Frank, arguing it was wrong to go digging holes to the heart of the Moon, to rip out the uchujin there, the cosmic dust. They were noisy but, as far as Xenia could see, ineffective.

“Not that,” she said. “It’s so public. It’s like Disneyland.”

He grunted. “Xenia, all that’s left of Disneyland is a crater that glows in the dark. Don’t you get it? This PR stunt is essential. We’ll be lucky if we make this hole at a couple of kilometers a day. It will take fifty days just to get through the crust. We’re going to sink a hell of a lot of money into this hole in the ground before we see a red cent of profit. We need those investors on our side, for the long term. They have to be here, Xenia. They have to see this.”