Stephen Baxter - Space

“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.

The Land was rich with life now: her children, her descendants, drinking in air and Light. Their songs echoed through the core of the Land, strong and powerful.

But it would not last, for it was time for the Merging.

First there was a sudden explosion of Rains, too many of them to count, the comets leaping out of the ground, one after the other.

Then the Land itself became active. Great sheets of rock heated, becoming liquid, and withdrawing into the interior of the Land.

Many died, of course. But those that remained bred frantically. It was a glorious time, a time of death and life.

Changes accelerated. She clung to the thin crust that contained the world. She could feel huge masses rising and falling far beneath her. The Land grew hot, dissolving into a deep ocean of liquid rock.

And then the Land itself began to break up, great masses of it hurling themselves into the sky.

More died.

But she was not afraid. It was glorious! As if the Land itself was birthing comets, as if the Land was like herself, hurling its children far away.

The end came swiftly, more swiftly than she had expected, in an explosion of heat and light that burst from the heart of the Land itself. The last, thin crust was broken open, and suddenly there was no more Land, nowhere for her roots to grip.

It was the Merging, the end of all things, and it was glorious.

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.

The material beyond the walls turned smooth and gray now. This was lunar bedrock, anorthosite, buried beyond even the probings and pulverizing of the great impactors. Unlike Earth, there would be no fossils here, she knew, no remnants of life in these deep levels; only a smooth gradation of minerals, processed by the slow workings of geology. In some places there were side shafts dug away from the main exploratory bore. They led to stopes, lodes of magnesium-rich rocks extruded from the Moon’s frozen interior, which were now being mined out by Frank’s industry partners. She saw the workings as complex blurs, hurrying upward as she fell, gone like dream visions.

Despite the gathering warmth of the tunnel, despite her own acceleration, she had a sense of cold, of age and stillness.

They dropped through a surprisingly sharp transition into a new realm, where the rock on the other side of the walls glowed of its own internal light. It was a dull gray-red, like a cooling lava on Earth.

“The mantle of the Moon,” Frank whispered, gripping her hands. “Basalt. Up here it ain’t so bad. But further down the rock is so soft it pulls like taffy when you try to drill it. A thousand kilometers of mush, a pain in the ass.”

They passed a place where the glass walls were marked with an engraving; stylized flowers with huge lunar petals. This was where a technician had been killed in an implosion. The little memorial shot upward and was lost in the light. Frank didn’t comment.

The rock was now glowing a bright cherry-pink, rushing upward past them. It was like dropping through some immense glass tube full of fluorescing gas. Xenia sensed the heat, despite her suit’s insulation and the refrigeration of the tunnel.

Falling, falling.

Thick conduits surrounded them now, crowding the tunnel, flipping from bracket to bracket. The conduits carried water, bearing the Moon’s deep heat to hydrothermal plants on the surface. She was becoming dazzled by the pink-white glare of the rocks.