Stephen Baxter - Time

The only Blue who would regularly talk to those outside was Anna, five or six years older than any of the rest. And the specialist observers believed that — though Anna was the de facto leader of the children here — she was too old, her grammatical sense frozen too early, to have become fully immersed in the complex interchanges that dominated the lives of the rest of the children.

And besides, Anna was hardly a useful ambassador. Adults had damaged her too much.

A section of oak tree trunk seemed to split away, bending stiffly, and a thin, distorted face turned and peered up at Maura.

Maura nearly jumped out of her seat. “Oh, my good gosh.”

Anna laughed.

The giraffe stepped out of the shade of the tree. The yellow-and-black mottled markings on its body had made it almost invisible to Maura, startling for such a huge animal. The giraffe loped easily forward, fine-chiseled head dipping gently, the lunar gravity making no apparent difference to its stately progress. Now two more animals followed the first, another adult and a baby, its neck stubby by comparison.

Anna said, “There are little NASA robot dung beetles that come out at night and roll away their droppings. They’re really funny.”

“Why are they here?”

Anna shrugged. “We asked for them. Somebody saw one in a picture book once.”

Maura watched the giraffes recede, loping easily in the wash of sunlight and crater-wall shadow, their bodies and motion utterly strange, unlike the body plans of any creature she had seen. A real extreme of evolution, she thought.

Just like these damn kids.

Anna’s eyes, gray as moondust, were grave, serious. “Maura, why are you here?”

“You deserve the truth,” Maura said.

“Yes, we do.” Anna looked up at Earth, fat and full, its round-ness slightly distorted by the fabric of the dome. “We see the lights sometimes, on the night side.”

“What do you think they are?”

Anna shrugged. “Cities burning.”

Maura sighed. “Have you studied history, Anna?”

“Yes. The information is limited, the interpretations partial. But it is interesting.”

“Then you’ll know there have been times like this before. The religious wars during the Reformation, for instance. Protestants against Catholics. The Catholics believed that only their priests controlled access to the afterlife. So anybody who tried to deny their powers threatened not just life, but even the afterlife. And the Protestants believed the Catholic priests were false, and would therefore deny their followers access to the afterlife. If you look at it from the protagonists’ point of view, they were reasonable wars to fight, because they were over the afterlife itself.”

“Are the wars now religious?”

“In a sense. But they are about the future. There are different groups who believe they have the right to control the future of humankind — which, for the first time in our history, has come into our thinking as a tangible thing, an asset, something to be fought over. And that’s what they are fighting for.”

“What you mean is they are fighting over the children. Blue children, like me, and what they think we can offer.”

“Yes,” said Maura.

“They are wrong,” Anna said carefully. “All of them.”

“Here’s the bottom line,” Maura said. “I’m not sure how much longer, umm, wise heads are going to prevail. Even in the U.S.”

Anna listened, her eyes soft. “How long?”

“I don’t know,” Maura said honestly. “Months at the most, I would think. Then they will come for you.”

Anna said, “It will be enough.”

“For what? “

Anna wouldn’t reply.

Frustrated, Maura snapped, “You frighten people, Anna. Christ, you frighten me. Sitting here on the Moon with your plans and your incomprehensible science. We detected the artifact in the lunar mantle…”

It had been picked up by seismometry. A lump of highly compressed matter — possibly quark matter — the size of a mountain. It was right under this dome. Nobody had any idea how it got there, or what it was for.

Maura glared at Anna. “Are we right to be frightened?”

“Yes,” Anna said gently, and Maura was chilled.

“Why won’t you tell us what you’re doing?”

“We are trying. We are telling you what you can understand.”

“Are we going to be able to stop you?”

Anna reached out and grabbed Maura’s hand, squeezed it. The girl’s skin was soft, warm. “I’m sorry.”

Then, without warning, Anna tipped forward, falling out of the tree, and spread her wings. She soared away, sailing across the distorted face of Earth, and out of Maura’s view.

When Maura got back to the tractor, Bill was waiting for her. He affected a lack of interest. But as the bus crawled its painful way back to the NASA base, he hung on every word she had to tell him about conditions inside the dome, and about the children, and what she had glimpsed of Tom and little Billie.

The sun had set over the rim walls of Tycho, but the walls were lit by the eerie blue glow of Earthlight. The sun would linger for a whole day, just beneath the carved horizon, so languid was the Moon’s time cycle. There was no air, of course, so there were no sunset colors; but there was nevertheless a glow at the horizon, pale white fingers bright enough to dim the stars: she was seeing the light of the sun’s atmosphere, and the zodiacal light, the glimmer of dust and debris in the plane of the Solar System. It was calm, unchanging, unbearably still, austere, a glacier of light.

She found Bill Tybee weeping.

He let her hold him, like mother with child. It was remarkably comforting, this trace of human warmth against the giant still cold of the Moon.

Reid Malenfant:

His suit radio receiver was designed only for short distances.

Nevertheless he tuned around the frequency bands.

Nothing. But that meant little.

If he couldn’t hear anybody else, maybe they could hear him. The backpack had a powerful emergency beacon. He decided that was a good investment of their remaining power. He separated it from the pack, jammed it into Cruithne soil, and started it up.

Then he shook out the bubble shelter, zipped himself and Emma into it, and inflated it. Once more it was a welcome relief to huddle with Emma’s warmth.

He took a careful look at Emma’s damaged leg. Much of the flesh seemed to have been destroyed by its exposure to the vacuum. But at the fringe of the damaged area mere was discoloration, green and purple, and a stench of rot, of sickly flowers. He drenched the bad flesh in an antiseptic cream he found in the backpack until the place smelled like a hospital ward. But at least that stink of corruption was drowned.

And she didn’t seem to be in any pain. Maybe all this would be over, one way or the other, before they got to that point.

He sacrificed a little more of their power on warming up some water. He mixed up orange juice in it, and they savored the tepid drink. They ate more of the backpack’s stores, dried banana and what seemed to be yogurt. He used scraps of cloth torn from their micrometeorite garments to improvise washcloths, and then he opened up their suits and gently washed Emma’s armpits and crotch and neck. Malenfant took their filled urine bags and dumped their contents into the military backpack’s water recycler, and he filled up their suit reservoirs with fresh water. Almost routine, almost domestic.

He was, he realized, on some bizarre level, content.

And then the shit hit the fan.

“Malenfant.”

He turned. She was holding his personal med kit. With her gloved hands, she had pulled out a blister pack of fat red pills. And a silver lapel ribbon.