Stephen Baxter - Space

He walked away. “Makes you think, though,” he said, his back to her.

“What?”

He waved a hand at the glowing walls. “This technology isn’t so advanced. Neil and Buzz couldn’t have done it, but maybe we could have opened up some kind of deep mine on the Moon by the end of the twentieth century, say. Started to dig out the water, live off the land. If only we’d known it was here, all this wealth, even NASA might have done it. And then you’d have an American Moon, and who knows how history might have turned out?”

“None of us can change things,” she said.

He looked at her, his face masked by rock light. “However much we might want to.”

“No.”

“How long do you think I have, before they shut me down?”

“I don’t know. Weeks. No more.”

“Then I’ll have to make those weeks count.”

He showed her how to hook her suit harness to a fresh pulley set, and they began the long, slow ride to the surface ofthe Moon.

Abandoned on its bench top at the bottom of the shaft, she could see the covered beaker, the Moon water within.

After her descent into the Moon, she returned to Edo, seeking stillness.

The world of the Moon, here on Farside, was simple: the regolith below, the sunlight that flowed from the black sky above. Land, light, dark. That, and herself, alone. When she looked downsun, at her own shadow, the light bounced from the dust back toward her, making a halo around her head.

The Moon flower had, she saw, significantly diminished since her last visit; many of the outlying petals were broken off or shattered.

After a time, Takomi joined her.

“Evidence of the flowers has been found before,” he said.

“It has?”

“I have, discreetly, studied old records of the lunar surface. Another legacy of richer days past, when much of the Moon was studied in some detail. But those explorers, long dead now, did not know what they had found, of course. The remains were buried under regolith layers. Some of them were billions of years old.” He sighed. “The evidence is fragmentary. Nevertheless I have been able to establish a pattern.”

“What kind of pattern?”

“It is true that the final seeding event drew the pods, with unerring accuracy, back to this site, as you observed. The pods were absorbed into the structure of the primary plant, here, which has since withered. The seeding was evidently triggered by the arrival of the comet, the enveloping of the Moon by its new, temporary atmosphere. But I have studied the patterns of earlier seedings—”

“Triggered by earlier comet impacts.”

“Yes. All of them long before human occupancy began here — just one or two impacts per billion years. Brief comet rains, spurts of air, before the long winter closed again. And each impact triggered a seeding event.”

“Ah. I understand. These are like desert flowers, which bloom in the brief rain. Poppies, rockroses, grasses, chenopods.”

“Exactly. They complete their life cycles quickly, propagate as vigorously as possible, while the comet air lasts. And then their seeds lie dormant, for as long as necessary, waiting for the next chance event, perhaps as long as a billion years.”

“I imagine they spread out, trying to cover the Moon. Propagate as fast and as far as possible.”

“No,” he said quietly.

“Then what?”

“At every comet event, the seedings converge. Just as they did here. These plants work backward, Xenia.

“A billion years ago there were a thousand sites like this. In a great seeding, these diminished to a mere hundred; those fortunate few were bombarded with seeds, while the originators withered. And later, another seeding reduced that hundred to twelve or so. And finally, the twelve are reduced to one. This one.”

She tried to think that through; she pictured the little seed pods converging, diminishing in number. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Not for us, who are ambassadors from Earth,” he said. “Earth life spreads, colonizes, whenever and wherever it can. But this is lunar life, Xenia. And the Moon is an old, cooling, dying world. Its richest days were brief moments, far in the past. And so life has adjusted to the situation. Do you understand?”

“…I think so. But now, this is truly the last of them? The end?”

“Yes. The flower is already dying.”

“But why here? Why now?”

He shrugged. “Xenia, your colleague Frank Paulis is determined to rebuild the Moon, inside and out. Even if he fails, others will follow where he showed the way. The stillness of the Moon is lost.” He sniffed. “My own garden might survive, but in a park, like your old Apollo landers, to be gawked at by tourists. It is a… diminishing. And so with the flowers. There is nowhere for them to survive, on the new Moon, in our future.”

“But how do they know they can’t survive? Oh, that’s the wrong question. Of course the flowers don’t know anything.”

He paused, regarding her. “Are you sure?”

“What do you mean?”

“We are smart, and aggressive. We think smartness is derived from aggression. Perhaps that is true. But perhaps it takes a greater imagination to comprehend stillness than to react to the noise and clamor of our shallow human world.”

She frowned, remembering Mariko’s evidence about neural structures in the flowers. “You’re saying these things are conscious?”

“I believe so. It would be hard to prove. I have spent much time in contemplation here, however. And I have developed an intuition. A sympathy, perhaps.”

“But that seems cruel. What kind of God would plan such a thing? Think about it. You have a conscious creature, trapped on the surface of the Moon, in this desolate, barren environment. And its way of living, stretching back billions of years maybe, has had the sole purpose of diminishing itself, to prepare for this final extinction, this death, this smyert. What is the purpose of consciousness, confronted by such desolation?”

“But perhaps it is not so,” he said gently. “The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. The future of the Moon, in the direction we face, may be desolate. But not the past. So why not face that way?”

She barely followed him. But she remembered the kare sansui, the waterless stream traced in the regolith. It was impossible to tell if the stream was flowing from past to future, or future to past; if the hills of heaped regolith were rising or sinking.

“Perhaps to the flowers,” he said, “to this flower — the last, or perhaps the first — this may be a beginning, not an end.”

“Vileekee bokh. You are telling me that these plants are living backward in time? Propagating not into the future, but into the past?”

“In the present there is but one of them. In the past there are many — billions, perhaps. In our future lies death for them; in our past lies glory. So why not look that way?” He touched her gloved hand. “The important thing is that you must not grieve for the flowers. They have their dream, their mechta, of a better Moon, in the deep past, or deep future. The universe is not always cruel, Xenia Makarova. And you must not hate Frank, for what he has done.”

“I don’t hate him.”

“There is a point of view from which he is not taking nutrients from the heart of the Moon, but giving. He is pumping the core of the Moon full of water and volatiles, and when he is done he will even fill in the hole… You see?”

“Takomi.”

He was still.

“That isn’t your real name, is it? This isn’t your identity.”

He said nothing, face averted from hers.