"Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

Chapter 18 Moon Rain

There were only minutes left before the comet hit the Moon.

“You got to beat the future, or it will beat you! Believe me, I’ve been there. Look around you, pal. You guys have lasted a hundred and fifty years up here, in your greenhouses and your mole holes. A hell of an achievement. But the Moon can’t support you…”

Xenia Makarova had a window seat, and she gazed out of the fat, round portholes. Below the shuttle’s hull she could see the landing pad, a plain of glass microwaved into lunar soil, here on the edge of the green domes of the Copernicus Triangle. And beyond that lay the native soil of the Moon, just subtle shades of gray, softly molded by a billion years of meteorite rain.

And bathed, for today, in comet light.

Xenia knew that Frank J. Paulis thought this day, this year 2190, was the most significant in the history of the inhabited Moon, let alone his own career. And here he was now, a pile of softscreens on his lap, hectoring the bemused-looking Lunar Japanese in the seat alongside him, even as the pilot of this cramped, dusty evacuation shuttle went through her countdown check.

Xenia had listened to Frank talk before. She’d been listening to him, in fact, for 15 years, or 150, depending on what account you took of Albert Einstein.

“…You know what the most common mineral is on the Moon? Feldspar. And you know what you can make out of that? Scouring powder. Big fucking deal. On the Moon, you have to bake the air out of the rock. Sure, you can make other stuff, rocket fuel and glass. But there’s no water, or nitrogen, or carbon—”

The Japanese, a businessman type, said, “There are traces in the regolith.”

“Yeah, traces, put there by the Sun, and it’s being sold off anyhow, by Nishizaki Heavy Industries, to the Gaijin. Bleeding the Moon even drier…”

A child was crying. The shuttle was just a cylinder-shaped cargo scow, hastily adapted to support this temporary evacuation. It was crammed with people, last-minute refugees, men and women and tall, skinny children, subdued and serious, in rows of canvas bucket seats like factory chickens.

And all of them were Lunar Japanese, save for Frank and Xenia, who were American; for, while Frank and Xenia had taken a time-dilated 150-year jaunt to the stars — and while America had disintegrated — the Lunar Japanese had been quietly colonizing the Moon.

“You need volatiles,” Frank said now. “That’s the key to the future. But now that Earth has fallen apart nobody is resupplying. You’re just pumping around the same old shit.” He laughed. “Literally, in fact. I give you another hundred years, tops. Look around. You’ve already got rationing, strict birth control laws.”

“There is no argument with the fact of—”

“How much do you need? I’ll tell you. Enough to future-proof the Moon.”

“And you believe the comets can supply the volatiles we need for this.”

“Believe? That’s what Project Prometheus is for. The random impact today, which alone will deliver a trillion tons of water, is a piece of luck. It’s going to make my case for me, pal. And when we start purposefully harvesting the comets, those big fat babies out in the Oort cloud—”

“Ah.” The Lunar Japanese was smiling. “And the person who has control of those comet volatiles—”

“That person could buy the Moon.” Frank reached for a cigar, a twentieth-century habit long frustrated. “But that’s incidental…”

But Xenia knew that Frank was lying about the comets, and their role in the Moon’s future. Even before this comet hit the Moon, Project Prometheus was already dead.

A month ago, Frank had called her into his office.

He’d had his feet up on his desk and was reading, on a softscreen, some long, text-heavy academic paper about deep-implanted volatiles on the Earth. She had tried to talk to him about work in progress, but he patently wasn’t interested. Nor was he progressing Prometheus, his main project.

He had gotten straight to the point. “The comet is history, babe.”

At first she hadn’t understood. “I thought it was going to supply us all with volatiles. I thought it was going to be the demonstration we needed that Prometheus was a sound investment.”

“Yeah. But it doesn’t pan out.” Frank had tapped the surface of his desk, which lit up with numbers, graphics. “Look at the analysis. We’ll get some volatiles, but most of the nucleus’s mass will be blasted back to space. Comets are spectacular fireworks, but they are inefficient cargo trucks. However you steer the damn things down, most of the incoming material is lost. I figure now you’d need around a thousand impactors to future-proof the Moon fully, to give it a stable atmosphere, thick enough to persist over significant periods before leaking away. And we aren’t going to get a thousand impactors, not with the fucking Gaijin everywhere.” He had looked thoughtful, briefly. “One thing, though. Did you know the Moon is going to get an atmosphere out of this? It will last a thousand years—”

“Iroonda.”

“No, it’s true. Thin, but an atmosphere, of comet mist. Happens every time a comet hits. Carbon dioxide and water and stuff. How about that.” He shook his head. “Anyhow it’s no use to us.”

“Frank, how come nobody figured this out before? How come nobody questioned your projections?”

“Well, they did.” He had grinned. “You know I’m never too sympathetic when people tell me something is impossible. I figured there would be time to fix it, to find a way.”

This was, on the face of it, a disaster, Xenia knew. Project Prometheus had gotten as far as designs for methane rockets, which could have pushed Oort comets out of their long, slow, distant orbits and brought them in to the Moon. The project had consumed all Frank’s energies for years, and cost a fortune. He needed investors, and had hoped this chance comet impact, a proof of concept, would bring them in.

And now, it appeared, it had all been for nothing.

“Frank, I’m sorry.”

He seemed puzzled. “Huh? Why?”

“If comets are the only source of volatiles—”

“Yesterday I thought they were. But look at this.” He had tapped his softscreen and was talking fast, excited, enthusiastic, his mind evidently racing. “There’s a woman here who thinks there are all the volatiles you could want, a hundred times over, right here on the Moon. Can you believe that?”

“That’s impossible. Everyone knows the Moon is dry as a bone.”

He had smiled. “That’s what everyone thinks. I want you to find this woman for me. The author of the paper.”

“Frank—”

“And find out about mining.”

“Mining?”

“The deeper the better.” His grin widened. “How would you like a journey to the center of the Moon, baby?”

And that was how she had first learned about Frank’s new project, his new obsession, his latest way to fix the future.

Ten seconds. Five. Three, two, one.

Stillness, for a fraction of a second. Then there was a clatter of explosive bolts, a muffled bang.

Xenia was ascending as if in some crowded elevator, pressed back in her bucket seat by maybe a full g. Beyond her window, stray dust streaked away across the pad glass, heaping up against fuel trucks and pipelines.

But then the shuttle swiveled sharply, twisting her around through a brisk ninety degrees. She heard people gasp, children laugh. The shuttle twisted again, and again, its attitude thrusters banging. This lunar shuttle was small, light, crude. Like the old Apollo landers, it had a single fixed rocket engine that was driving the ascent, and it was fitted with attitude control jets at every corner to turn it and control its trajectory. Just point, twist, squirt, as if she were a cartoon character carried into the air by hanging onto an out-of-control water hose.

Three hundred meters high the shuttle swiveled again, and she found she was pitched forward, looking down at the lunar surface, over which she skimmed. They were rising out of lunar night, and the shadowed land was dark, lit here and there by the lights of human installations, captured stars on dark rock. She felt as if she were falling, as if the ascent engine was going to drive her straight down into the unforgiving rocks. Sunrise. Wham.

It was not like Earth’s slow-fade dawn; the limb of the Sun just pushed above the Moon’s rocky horizon, instantly banishing the stars into the darkness of a black sky. Light spilled on the unfolding landscape below, fingers of light interspersed with inky black shadows hundreds of kilometers long, the deeper craters still pools of darkness. The Moon could never be called beautiful — it was too damaged for that — but it had a compelling wildness.

But everywhere she could see the work of humans: the unmistakable tracks of tractors, smooth lines snaking over the regolith, and occasional orange tents that marked the position of emergency supply dumps, all of it overlaid by the glittering silver wires of mass driver rails.

The shuttle climbed farther. The Lunar Japanese around her applauded the smooth launch.

Now Earth rose. It looked as blue and beautiful as when she and Frank had left for the stars. But it had changed, of course. Even from here, she could see Gaijin flower-ships circling the planet, the giant ramscoops of the alien craft visible as tiny discs. She felt a stab of antique resentment at those powerful, silent visitors who had watched as humanity tore itself apart.

And now, as the shuttle tilted and settled into its two-hour orbit around the Moon, Xenia saw a sight she knew no human had ever seen before today:

Comet rise, over the Moon.

The coma, a diffuse mass of gas and fine particles, was a ball as big as the Earth, so close now it walled off half the sky, a glare of lacy, diffuse light. Massive clumps in the coma, backlit, cast shadows across the smoky gases, straight lines thousands of kilometers long radiating at her. The comet was coming out of the Sun, straight toward the Moon at seventy thousand kilometers an hour. She looked for the nucleus, a billion-ton ball of ice and rock. But it was too small and remote, even now, a few minutes from impact. And the tail was invisible from here, fleeing behind her, running ahead of the comet and stretching far beyond the Moon, reaching halfway to Mars in fact.

Suddenly there was light all around the shuttle. The little ship had plunged inside the coma. It was like being inside a diffuse, luminous fog.

“Vileekee bokh.”

Frank leaned across her, trying to see. He was seventy years old, physiological; his nose was a misshapen mass of flesh. He was a small, stocky man, with thick legs and big prizefighter muscles built for Earth’s gravity, so that he always looked like some restless, half-evolved ape alongside the tall, slim Lunar Japanese.

“Eta prikrasna,” Xenia murmured.

“Beautiful. Yeah. How about that: we’re the last off the Moon.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “There’s a handful of old nuts who won’t move, no matter what.”

“Even for a comet?”

“Takomi. He’s still there, for one,” she said.

“Who?”

“He’s notorious.”

“I don’t read the funny papers,” Frank snapped.

“Takomi is the hermit out in the ruins of Edo, on Farside. Evidently he lives off the land. He won’t even respond to radio calls.”

Frank frowned. “This is the fucking Moon. How does he live off the land? By sucking oxygen out of the rock?…”

The light changed. There was a soft Fourth-of-July gasp from the people crammed into the shuttle.

The comet had struck the Moon.

A dome of blinding white light rose like a new Sun from the surface of the Moon: comet material turned to plasma, mixed with shattered rock. Xenia thought she could see a wave passing through the Moon’s rocky hide: a sluggish ripple in rock turned to powder, gathering and slowing.

Now, spreading out over the Moon’s dusty gray surface, she saw a faint wash of light. It seemed to pool in the deeper maria and craters, flowing down the contours of the land like a morning mist on Earth. It was air: gases from the shattered comet, an evanescent atmosphere pooling on the Moon.

And, in a deep, shadowed crater, at the ghostly touch of the air, she saw light flare.

It was only a hint, a momentary splinter at the corner of her eye. She craned to see. Perhaps there was a denser knot of smoke or gas, there on the floor of the crater; perhaps there was a streak, a kind of contrail, reaching out through the temporary comet atmosphere.

It must be some by-product of the impact. But it looked as if somebody had launched a rocket from the surface of the Moon.

Already the contrail had dispersed in the thin, billowing comet air.

People were applauding again, at the beauty of the spectacle, with relief at being alive. Frank wasn’t even watching.

It was only after they landed that it was announced that the comet nucleus had landed plumb on top of the Fracastorius Crater dome.

Fracastorius, on the rim of the Sea of Nectar, was one of the largest settlements away from the primary Copernicus-Landsberg-Kepler triangle. The Lunar Japanese grieved. The loss of life was small, but the economic and social damage huge — perhaps unrecoverable, in these straitened times, as the Moon’s people tried to adapt to life without their centuries-old umbilical to Earth’s rich resources.

Frank Paulis seemed unconcerned. He got back to work, even before the shuttle landed. And he expected Xenia to do the same.

Xenia and Frank had spent a year of their lives on a Gaijin flower-ship, had submitted themselves to the unknown hazards of several Saddle Point gateway teleport transitions, and had gotten themselves relativistically stranded in an unanticipated future. On their way home from the Saddle Point radius, Frank and Xenia had grown concerned when nobody in the inner system answered their hails. At last they had tapped into some low-bit-rate news feeds.

The news had seemed remarkably bad.

Earth had fallen into a state of civil war. There were battles raging around the equatorial region, the Sahara and Brazil and the Far East. Frank and Xenia had listened, bemused, to reports laced with names they’d never heard of, of campaigns and battles, of generals and presidents and even emperors. Even the nations involved seemed to have changed, split and coalesced. It was hard even to figure out what they were fighting over — save the generic, the diminishing resources of a declining planet.

One thing was for sure. All their money was gone, disappeared into electronic mist. They had landed on the Moon as paupers, figuratively naked.

It turned out to be a crowded Moon, owned by other people. But they had nowhere else to go. And, even on the Moon, nobody was interested in star travelers and their tales.

Frank had felt cheated. Going to the stars had been a big mistake for him. He’d gone looking for opportunity; he’d grown impatient with the slow collapse of Earth’s economy and social structure, even before the wars began, long before people started dying in large numbers.

Not that he hadn’t prospered here.

The Moon of the late twenty-second century, as it turned out, had a lot in common with early twenty-first century Earth. Deprived of its lifelines from the home world, the Moon was full: a stagnant, closed economy. But Frank had seen all this before, and he knew that economic truth was strange in such circumstances. For instance, Frank had quickly made a lot of money out of reengineering an old technology that made use of lunar sulphur and oxygen as a fuel source. As the scarcity of materials increased, industrial processes that had once been abandoned as unprofitable suddenly became worthwhile.

Within five years Frank J. Paulis had become one of the hundred wealthiest individuals on the Moon, taking Xenia right along with him.

But it wasn’t enough. Frank found it impossible to break into the long-lived, close-knit business alliances of the Lunar Japanese. And besides, Xenia suspected, he felt cooped up here on the Moon.

Anyhow, that was why this comet had been so important for Frank. It would shake everything up, he said. Change the equation.

It was either admirable, she thought, or schizophrenic.

After all these years — during which time she had been his companion, lover, employee, amateur therapist — Xenia still didn’t understand Frank; she freely admitted it. He was an out-and-out capitalist, no doubt about that. But every gram of his huge ambition was constantly turned on the most gigantic of projects. The future of a world! The destiny of mankind! What Xenia couldn’t work out was whether Frank was a visionary who used capitalism to achieve his goals — or just a capitalist after all, sublimating his greed and ambition.

But, swept along by his energy and ambition, she found it hard to focus on such questions.

Bathed in blue-water light, pacing his stage, Frank J. Paulis was a solid ball of terrestrial energy and aggression, out of place on the small, delicate Moon. “You got to beat the future, or it will beat you! I believed that before I went to the stars, and I believe it now. I’m here to tell you how…”

To launch his new project, Frank, feverish with enthusiasm, had hired the Grand Auditorium, the heart of Landsberg. The crater’s dome was a blue ceiling above Xenia, a thick double sheet of quasiglass, cable-stayed by engineered spiderweb, filled with water. The water shielded Landsberg’s inhabitants from radiation and served to scatter the raw sunlight. During the long lunar day, here in Landsberg, the sky was royal blue and full of fish: goldfish and carp. After five years, Xenia still couldn’t get used to it.

Frank was standing before a huge three-dimensional cartoon, a Moon globe sliced open to reveal arid, uninteresting geological layers. Beside him sat Mariko Kashiwazaki, the young academic type whose paper had fired Frank off in this new direction. She looked slim and uncertain in the expensive new suit Frank had bought for her.

Xenia was sitting at the back of the audience, watching rows of cool faces: politicians, business types. They were impassive. Well, they were here, and they were listening, and that was all Frank cared about right now.

“Here on the Moon, we need volatiles,” Frank was saying. “Not just to survive, but to expand. To grow, economically. Water. Hydrogen. Helium. Carbon dioxide. Nitrogen. Maybe nitrates and phosphates to supplement the bio cycles.

“But the Moon is deficient in every essential of life. A molecule of water, out there on the surface, lasts a few hours before it’s broken up by the sunlight and lost forever. The Moon’s atmosphere is so thin some of the molecules are actually in orbit. Frankly, it’s no damn use.”

It was true. All this had been well known from the moment the first Apollo astronaut had picked up the first lump of unprepossessing Moon rock and found it dry as a bone — drier, in fact.

For a time there had been hope that deep, shadowed craters near the Moon’s poles might serve as stores for water ice, brought there by cometary impacts. But to the intense disappointment of some dreamers, no more than a trace of such ice had been found. As the Fracastorius impact had demonstrated, such impacts deposited little volatile material anyhow. And even if any ice was trapped it wouldn’t be there forever; the Moon’s axis turned out to be unstable, and the Moon tipped this way and that over a period of hundreds of millions of years — a long time, but short enough that no crater remained in shadow forever.

Dry or not, Moon rock wasn’t useless. In fact, it was about 40 percent oxygen by weight. There were other useful elements: silicon, which could be used to make glass, fiberglass, polymers; aluminum, magnesium, and titanium for machinery, cables, coatings; chromium and magnesium for metal alloys.

But Frank was essentially right. If a mine on Earth had turned up the highest-grade lunar ore, you’d throw it out as slag.

And that was why Frank had initiated Project Prometheus, his scheme for importing volatiles and spinning up the Moon by hitting it with a series of comets or asteroids. But it hadn’t worked.

“So where do we turn next?” He eyed his audience, as always in command, even before these wary, slightly bemused Lunar Japanese. “Believe me, we need to find something. The Moon, your Moon, is dying. We didn’t come to the Moon so our children could live in a box. We came to live as humans, with freedom and dignity.” He threw back his arms and breathed the recycled air. “Let me tell you my dream. One day, before I die, I want to throw open the damn doors and walk out of the dome. And I want to breathe the air of the Moon. The air we put there.” He began to pace back and forth, like a preacher — or a huckster. “I want to see a terraformed Moon. I want to see a Moon where breathable air blankets the planet, where there is so much water the deep maria will become the seas they were named for, where plants and trees grow out in the open, and every crater will glisten with a circular lake… It’s a dream. Maybe I won’t live to see it all. But I know it’s the only way forward for us. Only a world — stable, with deep biological reservoirs of water and carbon and air — is going to be big enough to sustain human life, here on the Moon, over the coming centuries, the millennia. Hell, we’re here for the long haul, people, and we got to learn to think that way. Because nobody is going to help us — not Earth, not the Gaijin. None of them care if we live or die. We’re stuck in this trench, in the middle of the battleground, and we have to help ourselves.

“But to make the Moon a twin of Earth we’ll need volatiles, principally water. The Moon has no volatiles, and so we must import them. Correct?”

Now he leaned forward, intimidating, a crude but effective trick, Xenia thought dryly.

“Dead wrong. I’m here today to offer you a new paradigm. I’m here to tell you that the Moon itself is rich in volatiles, almost unimaginably so, enough to sustain us and our families, hell, for millennia. And, incidentally, to make us rich as Croesus in the process…”

It was the climax, the punch line, Frank’s big shock. But there was barely a flicker of interest in the audience, Xenia saw. Three centuries and a planetary relocation hadn’t changed the Japanese much, and cultural barriers hadn’t dropped; they were still suspicious of the noisy foreigner who stood before them, breaking into the subtle alliances and protocols that ruled their lives.

Frank stood back. “Tell ’em, Mariko.”

The slim Lunar Japanese scientist got up, evidently nervous, and bowed deeply to the audience.

Earth-Moon and the other planets, Mariko said, supported by smooth softscreen images, had condensed, almost five billion years ago, from a swirling cloud of dust and gases. That primordial cloud had been rich in volatiles: 3 percent of it was water, for instance. You could tell that was so from the composition of asteroids, which were leftover fragments of the cloud.

But there was an anomaly. All the water on Earth, in the oceans and atmosphere and the ice sheets, added to less than a tenth of that 3-percent fraction. Where had the rest of the water gone?

Conventional wisdom held that it had been baked out by the intense heat of Earth’s formation. But Mariko believed much of it was still there, that water and other volatiles were trapped deep within the Earth: perhaps four hundred kilometers down, deep in the mantle. The water wouldn’t be present as a series of immense buried oceans. Rather it would be scattered as droplets, some as small as a single molecule, trapped inside crystal lattices of the minerals with names like wadsleyite and hydrous-D. These special forms could trap water within their structure, essentially exploiting the high pressure to overcome the tendency of the rising temperature to bake the water out.

Some estimates said there should be as much as five times as much water buried within the Earth as in all its oceans and atmosphere and ice caps.

And what was true of Earth might be true of the Moon.

According to Mariko, the Moon was mostly made of material like Earth’s mantle. This was because the Moon was believed to have been budded off the Earth itself, ripped loose after a giant primordial collision popularly called the “big whack.” The Moon was smaller than the Earth, cooler and more rigid, so that the center of the Moon was analogous to the Earth’s mantle layers a few hundred kilometers deep. And it was precisely at such depths, on Earth, that you found such water-bearing minerals…

Frank watched his audience like a hawk.

His cartoon Moon globe suddenly lit up. The onion-skin geological layers were supplemented by a vivid blue ocean, lapping in unlikely fashion at the center of the Moon. Xenia smiled. It was typical Frank: inaccurate, but compelling.

“Listen up,” he said. “What if Mariko is right? What if even one tenth of one percent of the Moon’s mass by weight is water? That’s the same order as five percent of Earth’s surface water. A hidden ocean indeed.

“And that’s not all. Where there is water there will be other volatiles: carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, even hydrocarbons. All we have to do is go down there and find it.

“And it’s ours. We don’t own the sky; with the Gaijin around, maybe humans never will. But we inhabitants of the Moon do own the rocks beneath our feet.

“Folks, I’m calling this new enterprise Roughneck. If you want to know why, go look up the word. I’m asking you to invest in me. Sure it’s a risk. But if it works it’s a way past the resource bottleneck we’re facing, here on the Moon. And it will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.” He grinned. “There’s a fucking ocean down there, folks, and it’s time to go skinnydipping.”

There was a frozen silence, which Frank milked expertly.

After the session, Xenia took a walk.

The Moon’s surface, beneath the dome, was like a park. Grass covered the ground, much of it growing out of bare lunar regolith. There was even a stand of mature palms, thirty meters tall, and a scattering of cherries. People lived in the dome’s support towers: thick central cores with platforms of lunar concrete slung from them. The lower levels were given over to factories, workshops, schools, shops, and other public places.

Far above her head, Xenia could see a little flock of schoolchildren in their white-and-black uniforms, flapping back and forth on Leonardo wings, squabbling like so many chickens. It was beautiful. But it served to remind her there were no birds here, outside pressurized cages. Birds tired too quickly in the thin air; on the Moon, against intuition, birds couldn’t fly.

Water flowed in streams and fountains and pools, moistening the air.

She passed Landsberg’s famous water-sculpture park. Water tumbled slowly from a tall fountainhead in great shimmering spheres held together by surface tension. The spheres were caught by flickering mechanical fingers, to be teased out like taffy and turned and spun into rope and transformed, briefly, into transient, beautiful sculptures, no two ever alike. It was entrancing, she admitted, a one-sixth gravity art form that would have been impossible on the Earth, and it had immediately captivated her on her arrival here. As she watched, a gaggle of children — eight or ten years old, Moon legs as long as giraffes’ — ran across the surface of the pond in the park’s basin, Jesuslike, their slapping footsteps sufficient to keep them from sinking as long as they ran fast enough.

Water was everywhere here; it did not feel dry, a shelter in a scorched desert. But overhead, huge fans turned continually, extracting every drop of moisture from the air to be cleansed, stored, and reused. She was surrounded by subtle noises: the bangs and whirrs of fans and pumps, the bubbling of aerators. And, when the children had gone, she saw tiny shimmering robots whiz through the air, fielding scattered water droplets as if catching butterflies, not letting a drop go to waste.

Landsberg, a giant machine, had to be constantly run, managed, maintained. Landsberg was no long-term solution. The various recycling processes were extraordinarily efficient — they had gotten to the level of counting molecules — but there were always losses; the laws of thermodynamics saw to that. And there was no way to make good those losses.

It didn’t feel like a dying world. In fact it was beginning to feel like home to her, this small, delicate, slow-motion world. But the human Moon was, slowly but surely, running down. Already some of the smaller habitations had been abandoned; smaller ecospheres had been too expensive. There was rationing. Fewer children were being born than a generation ago, as humanity huddled in the remaining, shriveling lunar bubbles.

And there was nowhere else to go.

Xenia had an intuition about the rightness of Frank’s vision, whatever his methods. At least he was fighting back: trying to find a way for humans to survive, here in the system that had birthed them. Somebody had to. It seemed clear that the aliens, the all-powerful Gaijin, weren’t here to help; they were standing by in their silent ships, witnessing as human history unfolded and Earth fell apart.

If humans couldn’t figure out how to save themselves soon, they might not have another chance.

And if Frank could make a little profit along the way to achieving that goal, she wasn’t about to begrudge him.

Well, Frank convinced enough people to get together his seedcorn investment; jubilantly, he went to work.

But getting the money turned out to be the easy part.

There never had been a true mining industry here on the Moon. All anybody had ever done was strip-mine the regolith, the shattered and desiccated outer layers of the Moon, already pulverized by meteorites and so not requiring crushing and grinding. And nobody had attempted — save for occasional science surveys — to dig any deeper than a few tens of meters.

So Frank and Xenia were forced to start from scratch, inventing afresh not just an industrial process but the human roles that went with it. They were going to need a petrophysicist and a geological engineer to figure out the most likely places they would find their imagined reservoirs of volatiles; they needed reservoir engineers and drilling engineers and production engineers for the brute work of the borehole itself; they needed construction engineers for the surface operations and support. And so on. They had to figure out job descriptions, and recruit and train to fill them as best they could.

All the equipment had to be reinvented. There was no air to convect away heat, so their equipment needed huge radiator fins. Even beneficiation — concentrating ungraded material into higher-quality ore — was difficult, as they couldn’t use traditional methods like froth flotation and gravity concentration; they had to experiment with methods based on electrostatic forces. There was of course no water — a paradox, for it turned out that most mining techniques refined over centuries on Earth depended highly on the use of water, for cooling, lubrication, the movement and separation of materials, and the solution and precipitation of metals. It was circular, a cruel trap.

They hit more problems as soon as they started to trial heavy equipment in the ultrahard vacuum that coated the Moon.

Friction was a killer. In an atmosphere, every surface accreted a thin layer of water vapor and oxides that reduced drag. But that didn’t apply here. They even suffered vacuum welds. Not only that, the ubiquitous dust — the glass-sharp remains of ancient, shattered rocks — stuck to everything it could, scouring and abrading. Stuff wore out fast on the silent surface of the Moon.

But they persisted, solving the problems, finding old references to how it had been done in the past, when the Lunar Japanese had worked more freely beyond their domed cities. They learned to build in a modular fashion, with parts that could be replaced easily by someone in a space suit. They learned to cover all their working joints with sleeves of a flexible plastic, to keep out the dust. After much experimentation they settled on a lubricant approach, coating their working surfaces with a substance the Lunar Japanese engineers called quasiglass, hard and dense and very smooth; conventional lubricants just boiled or froze off.

The work soon became all-absorbing, and Xenia found herself immersed.

The Lunar Japanese, after generations, had become used to their domes. It was hard for them even to imagine a Moon without roofs. But once committed to the project, they learned fast and were endlessly, patiently inventive in resolving problems. And it seemed to Xenia a remarkably short time from inception to the day Frank told her he had chosen his bore site.

“The widest, deepest impact crater in the fucking Solar System,” he boasted. “Nine kilometers below the datum level, all of thirteen kilometers below the rim wall peaks. Hell, just by standing at the base of that thing we’d be halfway to the core already. And the best of it is, we can buy it. Nobody has lived there since they cleaned out the last of the cold-trap ice…”

He was talking about the South Pole of the Moon.

Encased in a spiderweb pressure suit, Xenia stepped out of the hopper.

The Moon’s pole was a place of shadows. The horn of crescent Earth poked above one horizon, gaunt and ice-pale. Standing at the base of the crater called Amundsen, Xenia could actually see the Sun, a sliver of light poking through a gap in the enclosing rim mountains, casting long, stark shadows over the colorless, broken ground. She knew that if she stayed here for a monththe Moon’s glacial rotation would sweep that solar searchlight around the horizon. But the light was always flat and stark, like an endless dawn or sunset.

And at the center of Amundsen, Frank’s complex — ugly, busy, full of people — sprawled in a splash of reflected light.

Xenia had never walked on the Moon’s surface before, not once. Very few people did. Nobody was importing tungsten, and it was too precious to use on suits for sightseeing. The waste of water and air incurred in donning and doffing pressure suits was unacceptably high, and so on. On the Moon of 2190, people clung to their domed bubbles, riding sealed cars or crawling through tunnels, while the true Moon beyond their windows was as inaccessible as it had been before Apollo.

That thought — the closeness of the limits — chilled Xenia, somehow even more than the collapse of Earth. It reinforced her determination to stick with Frank, whatever her doubts about his objectives and methods.

Here came Frank in his space suit, Lunar Japanese spiderweb painted with a gaudy Stars and Stripes. “I wondered where you were,” he said.

“There was a lot of paperwork, last-minute permissions—”

“You might have missed the show.” He was edgy, nervous, restless; his gaze, inside his gold-tinted visor, swept over the desolate landscape. “Come see the rig.”

Together they loped toward the center of the complex, past Frank’s perimeter of security guards.

New Dallas, Frank’s Roughneck boomtown, was a crude cluster of buildings put together adobe-style from lunar concrete blocks. It was actually bright here, the sunlight deflected into the crater by heliostats, giant mirrors perched on the rim mountains or on impossibly tall gantries. The ’stats worked like giant floodlights, giving the town, incongruously, the feel of a floodlit sports stadium. The primary power came from sunlight too, solar panels that Frank had had plastered over the peaks of the rim mountains.

She could recognize shops, warehouses, dormitories, mess halls; there was a motor pool, with hoppers and tractors and heavy machinery clustered around fuel tanks. The inhabited buildings had been covered over for radiation-proofing by a few meters of regolith. And there was Frank’s geothermal plant, ready for operation: boxy buildings linked by fat, twisting conduits.

The ground for kilometers around was flattened and scored by footprints and vehicle tracks. It was hard to believe none of this had been here two months ago, that the only signs of human occupation then had been the shallow, abandoned strip mines in the cold traps.

And at the center of it all was the derrick itself, rising so far above the surface it caught the low sunlight — high enough, in fact, to stack up three or four joints of magnesium alloy pipe at a time. There was a pile of the pipe nearby, kilometers of it spun out of native lunar ore, the cheapest component of the whole operation. Sheds and shops sprawled around the derrick’s base, along with huge aluminum tanks and combustion engines. Mounds of rock, dug out in test bores, surrounded the derrick like a row of pyramids.

They reached the drilling floor. At its heart was the circular table through which the pipe would pass, and which would turn to force the drill into the ground. There were foundries and drums to produce and pay out cables and pipes: power conduits, fiber-optic light pipes, hollow tubes for air and water and sample retrieval.

The derrick above her was tall and silent, like the gantry for a Saturn V. Stars showed through its open, sunlit frame. And suspended there at the end of the first pipe lengths she could see the drill head itself, teeth of tungsten and diamond gleaming in the lights of the heliostats.

Frank was describing technicalities that didn’t interest her. “You know, you can’t turn a drill string more than a few kilometers long. So we have to use a downhole turbine…”

“Frank, eta ochin kraseeva. It is magnificent. Somehow, back in Landsberg, I never quite believed it was real.”

“Oh, it’s real,” Frank said tensely. “Just so long as it works.” He checked his chronometer, a softscreen patch sewn into the fabric of his suit. “It’s nearly time.”

They moved out into the public area.

Roughneck was the biggest public event on the Moon in a generation. There must have been a hundred people here: men, women, and children walking in their brightly colored surface suits and radiation ponchos or riding in little short-duration bubble rovers. These were the richest Lunar Japanese, who could still afford such luxuries. Cameras hovered everywhere. She saw virtual observers, adults and children in softscreen suits, their every sensation being fed out to the rest of the Moon.

Frank had even set up a kind of miniature theme park, with toy derricks you could climb up, and a towering roller-coaster based on an old-fashioned pithead rail — towering because you needed height, here on the Moon, to generate anything like a respectable g-force. The main attraction was Frank’s Fish Pond, a small crater he’d lined with ceramic and filled up with water. The water froze over and was steadily evaporating, of course, but water held a lot of heat, and the pond would take a long time to freeze to the bottom. In the meantime Frank had fish swimming back and forth in there, goldfish and handsome koi carp, living Earth creatures protected from the severe lunar climate by nothing more than a few meters of water, a neat symbol of his ambition.

The openness scared Xenia to death. “Are you sure it’s wise to have so many people?”

“The guards will keep out those Gray assholes.”

The Grays were a pressure group who had started to campaign against Frank, arguing it was wrong to go digging holes to the heart of the Moon, to rip out the uchujin there, the cosmic dust. They were noisy but, as far as Xenia could see, ineffective.

“Not that,” she said. “It’s so public. It’s like Disneyland.”

He grunted. “Xenia, all that’s left of Disneyland is a crater that glows in the dark. Don’t you get it? This PR stunt is essential. We’ll be lucky if we make this hole at a couple of kilometers a day. It will take fifty days just to get through the crust. We’re going to sink a hell of a lot of money into this hole in the ground before we see a red cent of profit. We need those investors on our side, for the long term. They have to be here, Xenia. They have to see this.”

“But if something goes wrong—”

“Then we’re screwed anyhow. What have we lost?”

Everything, she thought, if somebody gets killed, one of these cute Lunar Japanese five-year-olds climbing over the derrick models. But she knew Frank would have thought of that, and discounted it already, and no doubt figured out some fallback plan.

She admired such calculation, and feared it.

Frank tipped back on his heels and peered up at the sky. “Well, well,” he said. “Looks like we have an audience.”

A Gaijin flower-ship was sailing high overhead, wings spread and sparkling like some gaudy moth.

“This is ours,” Frank murmured, glaring up. “You hear me, assholes? Ours. Eat your mechanical hearts out.”

A warning tone was sounding on their headsets’ open loops now, and in silence the Lunar Japanese, adults and children alike, were lining up to watch the show. Xenia could see the drill bit descend toward the regolith, the pipe sweeping silently downward inside the framework, like a muscle moving inside a sheath of flesh.

The bit cut into the Moon.

A gush of dust sprayed up immediately from the hole, ancient regolith layers undisturbed for a billion years now thrown unceremoniously toward space. At the peak of the parabolic fountain, glassy fragments sparkled in the sunlight. But there was no air to suspend the debris, and it fell back immediately.

Within seconds the dust had coated the derrick, turning its bright paintwork gray, and was raining over the spectators like volcanic ash.

There was motion around her. People were applauding, she saw, in utter silence, joined in this moment. Maybe Frank was right to have them here, after all, right about the mythic potential of this huge challenge.

Frank was watching the drill intently. “Twenty or thirty meters,” he said.

“What?”

“The thickness of the regolith here. The dust. Then you have the megaregolith: rock crushed and shattered and dug out and mixed by the impacts. Probably twenty, thirty kilometers of that. Easy to cut through. Below that the pressure’s so high it heals any cracks. We should get to that anorthosite bedrock by the end of the first day, and then—”

She took his arm. Even through the layers of suit she could feel the tension in his muscles. “Hey. Take it easy.”

“I’m the expectant father, right?”

“Yeah.”

He took frustrated little steps back and forth. “Well, there’s nothing we can do here. Come on. Let’s get out of these Buck Rogers outfits and hit the bar.”

“All right.”

Xenia could hear the dust spattering over her helmet. And children were running, holding out their hands in the gray Moon rain, witnesses to this new marvel.