Stephen Baxter - Space

“But if something goes wrong—”

“Then we’re screwed anyhow. What have we lost?”

Everything, she thought, if somebody gets killed, one of these cute Lunar Japanese five-year-olds climbing over the derrick models. But she knew Frank would have thought of that, and discounted it already, and no doubt figured out some fallback plan.

She admired such calculation, and feared it.

Frank tipped back on his heels and peered up at the sky. “Well, well,” he said. “Looks like we have an audience.”

A Gaijin flower-ship was sailing high overhead, wings spread and sparkling like some gaudy moth.

“This is ours,” Frank murmured, glaring up. “You hear me, assholes? Ours. Eat your mechanical hearts out.”

A warning tone was sounding on their headsets’ open loops now, and in silence the Lunar Japanese, adults and children alike, were lining up to watch the show. Xenia could see the drill bit descend toward the regolith, the pipe sweeping silently downward inside the framework, like a muscle moving inside a sheath of flesh.

The bit cut into the Moon.

A gush of dust sprayed up immediately from the hole, ancient regolith layers undisturbed for a billion years now thrown unceremoniously toward space. At the peak of the parabolic fountain, glassy fragments sparkled in the sunlight. But there was no air to suspend the debris, and it fell back immediately.

Within seconds the dust had coated the derrick, turning its bright paintwork gray, and was raining over the spectators like volcanic ash.

There was motion around her. People were applauding, she saw, in utter silence, joined in this moment. Maybe Frank was right to have them here, after all, right about the mythic potential of this huge challenge.

Frank was watching the drill intently. “Twenty or thirty meters,” he said.

“What?”

“The thickness of the regolith here. The dust. Then you have the megaregolith: rock crushed and shattered and dug out and mixed by the impacts. Probably twenty, thirty kilometers of that. Easy to cut through. Below that the pressure’s so high it heals any cracks. We should get to that anorthosite bedrock by the end of the first day, and then—”

She took his arm. Even through the layers of suit she could feel the tension in his muscles. “Hey. Take it easy.”

“I’m the expectant father, right?”

“Yeah.”

He took frustrated little steps back and forth. “Well, there’s nothing we can do here. Come on. Let’s get out of these Buck Rogers outfits and hit the bar.”

“All right.”

Xenia could hear the dust spattering over her helmet. And children were running, holding out their hands in the gray Moon rain, witnesses to this new marvel.

Her world was simple: the Land below, the Dark above, the Light that flowed from the Dark. Land, Light, Dark. That, and herself.

Alone save for the Giver.

For her, all things came from the Giver. All life, in fact.

Her first memories were of the Giver, at the interface between parched Land and hot Dark. He fed her, sank rich warm moist substance into the Land, and she ate greedily. She felt her roots dig into the dry depths of the Land, seeking the nourishment that was hidden there. And she drew the thin soil into herself, nursed it with hot Light, made it part of herself.

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.