Stephen Baxter - Space

“I don’t think you are even a man. I think your name is Nemoto. And you are hiding here on the Moon, whiling away the centuries.”

Takomi stood silently for long seconds. “My Moon plants recede into a better past. That, for me, isn’t an option. I must make my way into the unwelcome future. But at least, here, I am rarely disturbed. I hope you will respect that.

“Now come,” Takomi, or Nemoto, said. “I have green tea, and rice cake, and we will sit under the cherry tree, and talk further.”

Xenia nodded, dumbly, and let him — her? — take her by the hand. Together they walked across the yielding antiquity of the Moon.

It was another celebration, here at the South Pole of the Moon. It was the day Project Roughneck promised to fulfill its potential, by bringing the first commercially useful loads of water to the surface.

Once again the crowds were out: investors with their guests, families with children, huge softscreens draped over drilling gear, virtual observers everywhere so everyone on the Moon could share everything that happened here today. Even the Grays were here, to celebrate the project’s end, dancing in elaborate formations.

Earth hovered like a ghost on one horizon, ignored, its sparking wars meaningless.

This time, Xenia didn’t find Frank strutting about the lunar surface in his Stars and Stripes space suit, giving out orders. Frank said he knew which way the wind blew, a blunt Earthbound metaphor no Moon-born Japanese understood. So he had confined himself to a voluntary house arrest, in the new ryokan that had opened up on the summit of one of the tallest rim mountains here.

When she arrived, he waved her in and handed her a drink, a fine sake. The suite was a penthouse, magnificent, decorated in a mix of Western-style and traditional Japanese. One wall, facing the borehole, was just a single huge pane of tough, anhydrous lunar glass. She saw a tumbler of murky water, covered over, on a tabletop. Moon water, his only trophy of Roughneck.

“This is one hell of a cage,” he said. “If you’ve got to be in a cage.” He laughed darkly. “Civilized, these Lunar Japanese. Well, we’ll see.” He eyed her. “What about you? Will you go back to the stars?”

She looked at the oily ripple of the drink in her glass. “I don’t think so. I… like it here. I think I’d enjoy building a world.”

He grunted. “You’ll marry. Have kids. Grandkids.”

“Perhaps.”

He glared at her. “When you do, remember me, who made it possible, and got his ass busted for his trouble. Remember this.”

He walked her to the window.

She gazed out, goddesslike, surveying the activity. The drilling site was an array of blocky machinery, now stained deep gray by dust, all of it bathed in artificial light. The stars hung above the plain, stark and still, and people and their vehicles swarmed over the ancient, broken plain like so many space-suited ants.

“You know, it’s a great day,” she said. “They’re making your dream come true.”

“My dream, hell.” He fetched himself another slug of sake, which he drank like beer. “They stole it from me. And they’re going inward. That’s what Nishizaki and the rest are considering now. I’ve seen their plans. Huge underground cities in the crust, big enough for thousands, even hundreds of thousands, all powered by thermal energy from the rocks. In fifty years you could have multiples of the Moon’s present population, burrowing away busily.” He glanced at his wristwatch, restless.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It wasn’t the fucking point.” He glared up at Earth’s scarred face. “If we dig ourselves into the ground, we won’t be able to see that. We’ll forget. Don’t you get it?”

But now there was activity around the drilling site. She stepped to the window, cupped her hands to exclude the room lights.

People were running, away from the center of the site.

There was a tremor. The building shuddered under her, languidly. A quake, on the still and silent Moon?

Frank was checking his watch. He punched the air and strode to the window. “Right on time. Hot damn.”

“Frank, what have you done?”

There was another tremor, more violent. A small Buddha statue was dislodged from its pedestal and fell gently to the carpeted floor. Xenia tried to keep her feet. It was like riding a rush hour train.

“Simple enough,” Frank said. “Just shaped charges, embedded in the casing. They punched holes straight through the bore wall into the surrounding rock, to let the water and sticky stuff flow right into the pipe and up—”

“A blowout. You arranged a blowout.”

“If I figured this right the interior of the whole fucking Moon is going to come gushing out of that hole. Like puncturing a balloon.” He took her arms. “Listen to me. We will be safe here. I figured it.”

“And the people down there, in the crater? Your managers and technicians? The children?”

“It’s a day they’ll tell their grandchildren about.” He shrugged, grinning, his forehead slick with sweat. “They’re going to lock me up anyhow. At least this way—”

But now there was an eruption from the center of the rig, a tower of liquid, rapidly freezing, that punched its way up through the rig itself, shattering the flimsy buildings covering the head. When the fountain reached high enough to catch the flat sunlight washing over the mountains, it seemed to burst into fire, crystals of ice shining in complex parabolic sheaves, before falling back to the ground.

Frank punched the air. “You know what that is? Kerogen. A tarry stuff you find in oil shales. It contains carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, potassium, chlorine, other elements… I couldn’t believe it when the lab boys told me what they found down there. Mariko says kerogen is so useful we might as well have found chicken soup in the rocks.” He cackled. “Chicken soup, from the primordial cloud. I won, Xenia. With this blowout I stopped them from building Bedrock City. I’m famous.”

“What about the Moon flowers?”

His face was hard. “Who the fuck cares? I’m a human, Xenia. I’m interested in human destiny, not a bunch of worthless plants we couldn’t even eat.” He waved a hand at the ice fountain. “Look out there, Xenia. I beat the future. I’ve no regrets. I’m a great man. I achieve great things.”

The ground around the demolished drill head began to crack, venting gas and ice crystals; and the deep, ancient richness of the Moon rained down on the people.

Frank Paulis whispered. “And what could be greater than this?”

She was in the Dark, flying, like one of her own seeds. She was surrounded by fragments of the shattered Land, and by her children.

But she could not speak to them, of course; unlike the Land, the Dark was empty of rock, and would not carry her thoughts.

It was a time of stabbing loneliness.

But it did not last long.

Already the cloud was being drawn together, collapsing into a new and greater Land that glowed beneath her, a glowing ocean of rock, a hundred times bigger than the small place she had come from.

And at the last, she saw the greatest comet of all tear itself from the heart of this Land, a ball of fire that lunged into the sky, receding rapidly into the unyielding Dark.

She fell toward that glowing ocean, her heart full of joy at the Merging of the Lands.

In the last moment of her life, she recalled the Giver.

She was the first, and the Giver birthed her. None of it would have come to be without the Giver, who fed the Land.

She wished she could express her love for him. She knew that was impossible.