Stephen Baxter - Space

“I have nothing to give you in return,” she said.

“Oh, you have made your okurimono already.”

“I have?”

He cackled. “Your shit and your piss. Safely in my reclamation tanks. On the Moon, shit is more precious than gold…”

He bowed, once, then turned to walk away, along the rim of his rock garden.

She was left looking at the oval of Moon glass in her hands. It looked, she thought now, rather like a flower petal.

Back at Landsberg, she gave the petal-like object to the only scientist she knew, Mariko Kashiwazaki. Mariko was exasperated; as Frank’s chief scientist she was already under immense pressure as Roughneck picked up momentum. But she agreed to pass on the puzzling fragment to a colleague, better qualified. Xenia agreed, provided she used only people in the employ of one of Frank’s companies.

Meanwhile — discreetly, from home — Xenia repeated Takomi’s work on the comet. She searched for evidence of the anomalous signature of methane burning at the nucleus. It had been picked up, but not recognized, by many sensors.

Takomi was right.

Clearly, someone had planted a rocket on the side of the comet nucleus and deflected it from its path. It was also clear that most of the burn had been on the far side of the Sun, where it would be undetected. The burn had been long enough, she estimated, to have deflected the comet, to cause its lunar crash. Undeflected, the comet would surely have sailed by the Moon, spectacular but harmless.

She then did some checks of the tangled accounts of Frank’s companies. She found places where funds had been diverted, resources secreted. A surprisingly large amount, reasonably well concealed.

She’d been cradling a suspicion since Edo. Now it was confirmed, and she felt only disappointment at the shabbiness ofthe truth.

She felt that Takomi wouldn’t reveal the existence of the rocket on the comet. He simply wasn’t engaged enough in the human world to consider it. But such was the continuing focus of attention on Fracastorius that Takomi wouldn’t be the only observer who would notice the trace of that comet-pushing rocket, follow the evidence trail.

The truth would come out.

Without making a decision on how to act on this, she went back to work with Frank.

The pressure on Xenia, on both of them, was immense and unrelenting.

After one grueling twenty-hour day, she slept with Frank. She thought it would relieve the tension, for both of them. Well, it did, for a brief oceanic moment. But then, as they rolled apart, it all came down on them again.

Frank lay on his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling, jaw muscles working, restless, tense.

Later Mariko Kashiwazaki called Xenia. Xenia took the call in her tokonoma, masking it from Frank.

Mariko had preliminary results about the glass object from Edo. “The object is constructed almost entirely of lunar surface material.”

“Almost?”

“There are also complex organics in there. We don’t know where they came from, or what they are for. There is water, too, sealed into cells within the glass. The structure itself acts as a series of lenses, which focus sunlight. Remarkably efficient. There seem to be a series of valves on the underside that draw in particles of regolith. The grains are melted, evaporated, in intense focused sunlight. It’s a pyrolysis process similar to—”

“What happens to the vaporized material?”

“There is a series of traps, leading off from each light-focusing cell. The traps are maintained at different temperatures by spicules — the fine needles protruding from the upper surface — which also, we suspect, act to deflect daytime sunlight, and conversely work as insulators during the long lunar night. In the traps, at different temperatures, various metal species condense out. The structure seems to be oriented toward collecting aluminum. There is also an oxygen trap further back.”

Aluminum and oxygen. Rocket fuel, trapped inside the glass structure, melted out of the lunar rock by the light of the Sun.

Mariko consulted notes in a softscreen. “Within this structure the organic chemicals serve many uses. A complex chemical factory appears to be at work here. There is a species of photosynthesis, for instance. There is evidence of some kind of root system, which perhaps provides the organics in the first place… But there is no source we know of. This is the Moon.” She looked confused. “You must remember I am a geologist. My contact works with biochemists and biologists, and they are extremely excited.”

Biologists? “You’d better tell me.”

“Xenia, this is essentially a vapor-phase reduction machine of staggering elegance of execution, mediated by organic chemistry. It must be an artifact. And yet it looks—”

“What?”

“As if it grew, out of the Moon ground. There are many further puzzles,” Mariko said. “For instance, the evidence of a neural network.”

“Are you saying this has some kind of a nervous system?”

Mariko shrugged. “Even if this is some simple lunar plant, why would it need a nervous system? Even, perhaps, a rudimentary awareness?” She studied Xenia. “What is this thing?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“There has been much speculation about the form life would take, here on the Moon. It could be seeded by some meteorite-impact transfer from Earth. But volatile depletion seemed an unbeatable obstacle. Where does it get its organic material? Was it from the root structure, from deep within the Moon? If so, you realize that this is confirmation of my hypotheses about the volatiles in—”

Xenia stopped. “Mariko. This isn’t to go further. News of this… discovery. Not yet. Tell your colleagues that too.”

Mariko looked shocked, as Xenia, with weary certainty, had expected. “You want to suppress this?”

That caused Xenia to hesitate. She had never thought of herself as a person who would suppress anything. But she knew, as all the star travelers had learned, that the universe was full of life: that life emerged everywhere it could — though usually, sadly, with little hope of prospering. Was it really so strange that such a stable, ancient world as the Moon should be found to harbor its own, quiet, still form of life?

Life was trivial, compared to the needs of the project.

“This isn’t science, Mariko. I don’t want anything perturbing Roughneck.”

Mariko made to protest again.

“Read your contract,” Xenia snapped. “You must do what I say.” And she cut the connection.

She returned to bed. Frank seemed to be asleep.

She had a choice to make. Not about the comet deflection issue; others would unravel that, in time. About Frank, and herself.

He fascinated her. He was a man of her own time, with a crude vigor she didn’t find among the Japanese-descended colonists of the Moon. He was the only link she had with home. The only human on the Moon who didn’t speak Japanese to her.

That, as far as she could tell, was all she felt.

In the meantime, she must consider her own morality.

Lying beside him, she made her decision. She wouldn’t betray him. As long as he needed her, she would stand with him.

But she would not save him.

Life was long, slow, unchanging.

Even her thoughts were slow.

In the timeless intervals between the comets, her growth was chthonic, her patience matching that of the rocks themselves. Slowly, slowly, she rebuilt her strength: light traps to start the long process of drawing out fire for the next seeds, leaves to catch the comet Rain that would come again.

She spoke to her children, their subtle scratching carrying to her through the still, cold rock. It was important that she taught them: how to grow, of the comet Rains to come, of the Giver at the beginning of things, the Merging at the end.