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

Chapter 19 Dreams of Rock and Stillness

Her world was simple: the Land below, the Dark above, the Light that flowed from the Dark. Land, Light, Dark. That, and herself.

Alone save for the Giver.

For her, all things came from the Giver. All life, in fact.

Her first memories were of the Giver, at the interface between parched Land and hot Dark. He fed her, sank rich warm moist substance into the Land, and she ate greedily. She felt her roots dig into the dry depths of the Land, seeking the nourishment that was hidden there. And she drew the thin soil into herself, nursed it with hot Light, made it part of herself.

She knew the future. She knew what would become of herself and her children.

They would wait through the long hot-cold bleakness for the brief Rains. Then they would bud, and pepper this small hard world with life, in their glorious blossoming. And she would survive the long stillness to see the Merging itself, the wonder that lay at the end of time, she and her children.

But she was the first, and the Giver had birthed her. None of it would have come to be without the Giver.

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

She sensed, though, that he knew anyhow.

Overwhelmed by work as she was, Xenia couldn’t get the memory of the comet impact out of her head. For, in the moment of that gigantic collision she had glimpsed a contrail: for all the world as if someone, something, had launched a rocket from the surface of the Moon.

But who, and why?

She had no opportunity to consider the question as the Roughneck project gathered pace. At last, though, she freed up two or three days from Frank, pleading exhaustion. She determined to use the time to resolve the puzzle. She went home, for the first time after many nights of sleeping at the Roughneck project office.

She took a long hot bath to soak out the gritty lunar dust from the pores of her skin. In her small tub the water sloshed like mercury. Condensation gathered on the ceiling above her, and soon huge droplets hung there suspended, like watery chandeliers. When she stood up the water clung to her skin, like a sheath; she had to scrape it loose with her fingers, depositing it carefully back in the tub. Then she took a small vacuum cleaner and captured all the loose droplets she could find, returning every scrap to the drainage system, where it would be cleansed and fed back into Landsberg’s great dome reservoirs.

Her apartment was a glass-walled cell in the great catacomb that was Landsberg. It had, in fact, once served as a genkan, a hallway, for a greater establishment in easier, less cramped times, long before she had returned from the stars; it was so small her living room doubled as a bedroom. The floor was covered with rice straw matting, though she kept a zabuton cushion for Frank Paulis. Miniature Japanese art filled the room with space and stillness.

She had been happy to accept the style of the inhabitants of this place — unlike Frank, who had turned his apartment into a shrine to Americana. It was remarkable, she thought, that the Japanese had turned out to be so well adapted to life on the Moon. It was as if thousands of years on their small, crowded islands had readied them for this greater experience, this increasing enclosure on the Moon.

She made herself some coffee — fake, of course, and not as hot as she would have liked. She tuned the walls to a favorite scene — a maple forest carpeted with bright green moss — and padded, naked, to her workstation. She sat on a tatami mat, which was unreasonably comfortable in the low gravity, and sipped her drink.

There was no indexed record of that surface rocket launch, as she had expected. There was, however, a substantial database on the state of the whole Moon at the time of the impact; every sensor the Lunar Japanese could deploy had been turned on the Moon, the events of that momentous morning.

And, after a few minutes’ search, in a spectrometer record from a low-flying satellite, she found what she wanted. There was the contrail, bright and hot, arcing through splashed cometary debris. Spectrometer results told her she was looking at the products of aluminum burning in oxygen.

So it had been real.

She widened her search farther.

Yes, she learned, aluminum could serve as a rocket fuel. It had a specific impulse of nearly three hundred seconds, in fact. Not as good as the best chemical propellant — that was hydrogen, which burned at four hundred — but serviceable. And aluminum-oxygen could even be manufactured from the lunar soil.

Yes, there were other traces of aluminum-oxygen rockets burning on the Moon that day, recorded by a variety of automated sensors. More contrails, snaking across the lunar surface, from all around the Moon. There were a dozen, all told, perhaps more in parts of the Moon not recorded in sufficient detail.

And each of these rocket burns, she found, had been initiated when the gushing comet gases reached its location.

She pulled up a virtual globe of the Moon and mapped the launch sites. They were scattered over a variety of sites: highlands and maria alike, Nearside and Farside. No apparent pattern.

Then she plotted the contrails forward, allowing them to curl around the rocky limbs of the Moon.

The tracks converged on a single Farside site: Edo. The place the hermit, Takomi, lived.

It was the first Rain of all.

Suddenly there was air here, on this still world. At first there was the merest trace, a soft comet Rain that settled, tentatively, on her broad leaves, where they lay in shade. But she drank it in greedily, before it could evaporate in the returning Light, incorporating every molecule into her structure, without waste.

With gathering confidence she captured the Rain, and the Light, and continued the slow, patient work of building her seeds and the fiery stuff that would birth them, drawn from the patient dust.

And then, suddenly, it was time.

In a single orgasmic spasm the seeds burst from her structure. She was flooded with a deep joy even as she subsided, exhausted.

The Giver was still here with her, enjoying the Rain with her, watching her blossom. She was glad of that.

And then, so soon after, there was a gusting wind, a rush of the air molecules over her damaged surfaces, as the comet drew back its substance and leapt from the Land, whole and intact, its job done. The noise of that great escape into the Dark above came to her as a great shout.

Soon after, the Giver was gone too.

But it did not matter. For, soon, she could hear the first tentative scratching of her children, carried to her like whispers through the still, hard rock, as they dug beneath the Land, seeking nourishment. There was no Giver for them, nobody to help; they were beyond her aid now. But it did not matter, for she knew they were strong, self-sufficient, resourceful.

Some would die, of course. But most would survive, digging in, waiting for the next comet Rain.

She settled back into herself, relishing the geologic pace of her thoughts. Waiting for Rain, for more comets to gather from the dirt and leap into the sky.

Xenia took an automated hopper, alone, to the Sea of Longing, on Farside. The journey was seamless, the landing imperceptible.

She donned her spiderweb suit, checked it, and stepped into the hopper’s small, extensible air lock. She waited for the hiss of escaping air, and — her heart oddly thumping — she collapsed the air lock around her and stepped onto the surface of the Moon.

A little spray of dust, ancient pulverized rock, lifted up around her feet. The sky was black — save, she saw, for the faintest wisp of white, glowing in the flat sunlight. They were ice crystals, suspended in the thin residual atmosphere of the comet impact. Cirrus clouds on the Moon: relics of the death of a comet. The mare surface was like a gentle sea, a complex of overlapping, slowly undulating curves.

And here were two cones, tall and slender, side by side, geometrically perfect. They cast long shadows in the flat sunlight. She couldn’t tell how far away they were, or how big, so devoid was this landscape of visual cues. They simply stood there, stark and anomalous.

She shivered. She walked forward, loping easily.

She came to a place where the regolith had been raked. She stopped, standing on unworked soil.

The raking had made a series of parallel ridges, each maybe six or eight centimeters tall, a few centimeters apart, a precise combing. When she looked to left or right, the raking went off to infinity, the lines sharp, their geometry perfect. And when she looked ahead, the lines receded to the horizon, as far as she could see undisturbed in their precision.

Those two cones stood, side by side, almost like termite mounds. The shallow light fell on them gracefully. She saw that the lines on the ground curved to wash around the cones, like a stream diverting around islands of geometry.

“Thank you for respecting the garden.”

She jumped at the sudden voice. She turned.

A figure was standing there — man or woman? A man, she decided, shorter and slimmer than she was. He wore a shabby, much-patched suit.

He bowed. “Sumimasen. I did not mean to startle you.”

“Takomi?”

“And you are Xenia Makarova.”

“You know that? How?”

A gentle shrug. “I am alone here, but not isolated. Only you sought and compiled information on the Moon flowers.”

“What flowers?”

He walked toward her. “This is my garden,” he said.

“A Zen garden.”

“You understand that? Good. This is a kare sansui, a waterless stream garden.”

“Are you a monk?”

“I am a gardener.”

She considered. “Even before humans came here, the Moon was already like an immense Zen garden: a garden of rock and soil.”

“You are wise.”

“Is that why you came here? Why you live alone like this?”

“Perhaps. I prefer the silence and solitude of the Moon to the bustle of the human world. You are Russian.”

“My forebears were.”

“Then you are alone here also. There are some of your people on Mars.”

“So I’m told. They won’t respond to my signals.”

“No,” he said. “They won’t speak to anybody. In the face of the Gaijin onslaught, we humans have collapsed into scattered, sullen tribes.”

Onslaught. It seemed a strange word to use, stronger than she had expected. Briefly, she was reminded of somebody else, another reclusive Japanese.

She pointed. “I understand the ridges represent flow. Are those mountains? Are they rising out of cloud, or sea? Or are they diminishing?”

“Does it matter? The cosmologists tell us that there are many time streams. Perhaps they are both falling and rising. You have traveled far to see me. I will give you food and drink.”

He turned and walked across the Moon. After a moment, she followed.

The abandoned lunar base, called Edo, was a cluster of concrete components — habitation modules, power plants, stores, manufacturing facilities — half buried in the cratered plain. There were robots everywhere, but they were standing silent, obviously inert.

But a single lamp burned again at the center of the old complex. Takomi lived at the heart of Edo, in what had once been, he said, a park, grown inside a cave dug in the ground. The buildings here were dark, gutted, abandoned. There was even, bizarrely, an ancient McDonald’s, stripped out, its red-and-yellow plastic signs cracked and faded. A single cherry tree grew, its leaves bright green, a splash of color against the drab gray of the fused regolith.

This had been the primary settlement established by the Japanese government, back in the twenty-first century. But Nishizaki Heavy Industries had set up in Landsberg, using the crater originally as a strip mine. Now, hollowed out, Landsberg was the capital of the Moon, and Edo, cramped and primitive, had been abandoned.

She clambered out of her suit. She had tracked in moondust. It clung to the oils of her hand and looked like pencil lead, shiny on her fingers, like graphite. It would be hard to wash out, she knew.

He brought her green tea and rice cake.

Out of his suit Takomi was a small, wizened man; he might have been sixty, but such was the state of life-extending technology it was hard to tell. His face was round, a mass of wrinkles, and his eyes were lost in leathery folds; he spoke with a wheeze, as if slightly asthmatic.

“You cherish the tree,” she said.

He smiled. “I need one friend. I regret you have missed the blossom. I am able to celebrate ichi-buzaki here. We Japanese like cherries; they represent the old Samurai view that the blossom symbolizes our lives. Beautiful, but fragile, and all too brief.”

“I don’t understand how you can live here.”

“The Moon is a whole world,” he said gently. “It can support one man.”

Takomi, she learned, used the lunar soil for simple radiation shielding. He baked it in crude microwave ovens to make ceramic and glass. He extracted oxygen from the lunar soil by magma electrolysis: melting the soil with focused sunlight, then passing an electric current through it to liberate the oh-two. The magma plant, lashed up from decades-old salvage, was slow and power-intensive, but the electrolysis process was efficient in its use of soil; Takomi said he wasn’t short of sunlight, but the less haulage he had to do the better.

He operated what he called a grizzly, an automated vehicle already a century old, so caked with dust it was the same color as the Moon. The grizzly toiled patiently across the surface of the Moon, powered by sunlight. It scraped up loose surface material and pumped out glass sheeting and solar cells, just a couple of square meters a day. Over time, the grizzly had built a solar farm covering square kilometers and producing megawatts of electric power.

“It is astonishing, Takomi.”

He cackled. “If one is modest in one’s request, the Moon is generous.”

“But even so, you lack essentials. It’s the eternal story of the Moon. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen—”

He smiled at her. “I admit I cheat. The concrete of this abandoned town is replete with water.”

“You mine concrete?”

“It is better than paying water tax.”

“But how many humans could the Moon support this way?”

“Ah. Not many. But how many humans does the Moon need? Thus, I am entrenched.”

It struck her as another strange choice of word. There was much about this hermit she did not understand, she realized.

She asked him about the contrails she had seen, their convergence on this place. He evaded her questions and began to talk about something else.

“I conduct research, you know, of a sort. There is a science station, not far from here, which was once equipped by Nishizaki Heavy Industries. Now abandoned, of course. It is — was — an infrared study station. It was there that a Japanese researcher called Nemoto first discovered evidence of Gaijin activity in the Solar System, and so changed history.”

She wasn’t interested in Takomi’s hobby work in some old observatory. But there was something in his voice that made her keep listening.

“So you use the equipment,” she prompted.

“I watched the approach of the comet. From here, some aspects of it were apparent that were not visible from Nearside stations. The geometry of the approach orbit, for example. And something else.”

“What?”

“I saw evidence of methane burning,” he said. “Close to the nucleus.”

“Methane?”

“A jet of combustion products.”

A rocket. She saw the implications immediately. Somebody had stuck a methane rocket on the side of the comet nucleus, burned the comet’s own chemicals, to divert its course.

Away from the Moon? Or toward it?

And in either case, who?

“Why are you telling me this?”

But he would not reply, and a cold, hard lump of suspicion began to gather in her gut.

Takomi provided a bed for her: a thin mattress in an abandoned schoolhouse. Children’s paintings adorned the walls, preserved under a layer of glass. The pictures showed flowers and rocks and people, all floating in a black sky.

In the middle of the night, Frank called her. He was excited.

“It’s going better than we expected. We’re just sinking in. Anyhow the pictures are great. Smartest thing I ever did was to insist we dump the magnesium alloy piping, make the walls transparent so you can see the rocks. We have the best geologists on the Moon down that fucking well, Xenia. Seismic surveys, geochemistry, geophysics, the works. The sooner we find some ore lode to generate payback, the better…”

The Roughneck bore had passed the crust’s lower layers and was in the mantle. The mantle of the Moon: sixty kilometers deep, a place unlike any other reached by humans before.

The Moon was turning out to be much easier to deep-mine than the Earth, for it was old and silent and still. There was a temperature rise of maybe ten degrees per kilometer of depth, compared to four times as much on Earth. The pressure scaled similarly; even now Frank’s equipment was subject to only a few thousand atmospheres, less than could be replicated in the laboratory. Strangely, the density of the Moon hardly varied across its whole interior.

But Xenia knew the project had barely begun. If Frank was to find the water and other volatiles he sought, if he was to reach the conditions of temperature and pressure that would allow the water-trapping minerals to form, it could only be at enormous depths — probably beneath the rigid mantle, a thousand kilometers deep, just a few hundred kilometers from the center of the Moon itself.

She tried to ask him technical questions, about how they were planning to cope with the more extreme pressures and temperatures they would soon encounter. She knew that at first, in the impact-shattered upper regolith, he had been able to deploy comparatively primitive mechanical drilling techniques like percussion and rotary. But faced by the stubborn, hard, fine-grained rocks of the mantle, he had had to try out more advanced techniques — lasers, electric arcs, magnetic-induction techniques. Stretching the bounds of possibility.

But he wouldn’t discuss such issues.

“Xenia, it doesn’t matter. You know me. I can’t figure any machine more complicated than a screwdriver. And neither can our investors. I don’t need to know. I just have to find the right technical guys, give them a challenge they can’t resist, and point them downward.”

“Paying them peanuts the while.”

He grinned. “That’s the beauty of those vocational types. Christ, we could even get those guys to pay to work here. No, the technical stuff is piss-easy. It’s the other stuff that’s the challenge. We have to make the project appeal to more than just the fat financiers and the big corporations. Xenia, this is the greatest lunar adventure since Neil and Buzz. That party when we first made hole was just the start. I want everybody involved, and everybody paying. Now we’re in the mantle we can market the TV rights—”

“Frank, they don’t have TV any more.”

“Whatever. I want the kids involved, all those little dark-eyed kids I see flapping around the palm trees the whole time with nothing to do. I want games. Educational stuff. Clubs to join, where you pay a couple of yen for a badge and get some kind of share certificate. I want little toy derricks in cereal packets.”

“They don’t have cereal packets any more.”

He eyed her. “Work with me here, Xenia. And I want their parents paying too. Tours down the well, at least the upper levels. Xenia, for the first time the folks on this damn Moon are going to see some hint of an expansive future. A frontier, beneath their feet. They have to want it. Including the kids.” He nodded. “Especially the kids.”

“But the Grays—”

“Screw the Grays. All they have is rocks. We have the kids.”

And so on, on and on, his insect voice buzzing with plans, in the ancient stillness of Farside.

The next day Takomi walked her back to her tractor, by the Zen garden.

She had been here twenty-four hours. The Sun had dipped closer to the horizon, and the shadows were long, the land starker, more inhospitable. Comet-ice clouds glimmered high above.

“I have something for you,” Takomi said. And he handed her what looked like a sheet of glass. It was oval shaped, maybe half a meter long. Its edges were blunt, as if melted, and it was covered with bristles. Some kind of lunar geologic formation, she thought, a relic of some impact event. A cute souvenir; Frank might like it for the office.

“I have nothing to give you in return,” she said.

“Oh, you have made your okurimono already.”

“I have?”

He cackled. “Your shit and your piss. Safely in my reclamation tanks. On the Moon, shit is more precious than gold…”

He bowed, once, then turned to walk away, along the rim of his rock garden.

She was left looking at the oval of Moon glass in her hands. It looked, she thought now, rather like a flower petal.

Back at Landsberg, she gave the petal-like object to the only scientist she knew, Mariko Kashiwazaki. Mariko was exasperated; as Frank’s chief scientist she was already under immense pressure as Roughneck picked up momentum. But she agreed to pass on the puzzling fragment to a colleague, better qualified. Xenia agreed, provided she used only people in the employ of one of Frank’s companies.

Meanwhile — discreetly, from home — Xenia repeated Takomi’s work on the comet. She searched for evidence of the anomalous signature of methane burning at the nucleus. It had been picked up, but not recognized, by many sensors.

Takomi was right.

Clearly, someone had planted a rocket on the side of the comet nucleus and deflected it from its path. It was also clear that most of the burn had been on the far side of the Sun, where it would be undetected. The burn had been long enough, she estimated, to have deflected the comet, to cause its lunar crash. Undeflected, the comet would surely have sailed by the Moon, spectacular but harmless.

She then did some checks of the tangled accounts of Frank’s companies. She found places where funds had been diverted, resources secreted. A surprisingly large amount, reasonably well concealed.

She’d been cradling a suspicion since Edo. Now it was confirmed, and she felt only disappointment at the shabbiness ofthe truth.

She felt that Takomi wouldn’t reveal the existence of the rocket on the comet. He simply wasn’t engaged enough in the human world to consider it. But such was the continuing focus of attention on Fracastorius that Takomi wouldn’t be the only observer who would notice the trace of that comet-pushing rocket, follow the evidence trail.

The truth would come out.

Without making a decision on how to act on this, she went back to work with Frank.

The pressure on Xenia, on both of them, was immense and unrelenting.

After one grueling twenty-hour day, she slept with Frank. She thought it would relieve the tension, for both of them. Well, it did, for a brief oceanic moment. But then, as they rolled apart, it all came down on them again.

Frank lay on his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling, jaw muscles working, restless, tense.

Later Mariko Kashiwazaki called Xenia. Xenia took the call in her tokonoma, masking it from Frank.

Mariko had preliminary results about the glass object from Edo. “The object is constructed almost entirely of lunar surface material.”

“Almost?”

“There are also complex organics in there. We don’t know where they came from, or what they are for. There is water, too, sealed into cells within the glass. The structure itself acts as a series of lenses, which focus sunlight. Remarkably efficient. There seem to be a series of valves on the underside that draw in particles of regolith. The grains are melted, evaporated, in intense focused sunlight. It’s a pyrolysis process similar to—”

“What happens to the vaporized material?”

“There is a series of traps, leading off from each light-focusing cell. The traps are maintained at different temperatures by spicules — the fine needles protruding from the upper surface — which also, we suspect, act to deflect daytime sunlight, and conversely work as insulators during the long lunar night. In the traps, at different temperatures, various metal species condense out. The structure seems to be oriented toward collecting aluminum. There is also an oxygen trap further back.”

Aluminum and oxygen. Rocket fuel, trapped inside the glass structure, melted out of the lunar rock by the light of the Sun.

Mariko consulted notes in a softscreen. “Within this structure the organic chemicals serve many uses. A complex chemical factory appears to be at work here. There is a species of photosynthesis, for instance. There is evidence of some kind of root system, which perhaps provides the organics in the first place… But there is no source we know of. This is the Moon.” She looked confused. “You must remember I am a geologist. My contact works with biochemists and biologists, and they are extremely excited.”

Biologists? “You’d better tell me.”

“Xenia, this is essentially a vapor-phase reduction machine of staggering elegance of execution, mediated by organic chemistry. It must be an artifact. And yet it looks—”

“What?”

“As if it grew, out of the Moon ground. There are many further puzzles,” Mariko said. “For instance, the evidence of a neural network.”

“Are you saying this has some kind of a nervous system?”

Mariko shrugged. “Even if this is some simple lunar plant, why would it need a nervous system? Even, perhaps, a rudimentary awareness?” She studied Xenia. “What is this thing?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“There has been much speculation about the form life would take, here on the Moon. It could be seeded by some meteorite-impact transfer from Earth. But volatile depletion seemed an unbeatable obstacle. Where does it get its organic material? Was it from the root structure, from deep within the Moon? If so, you realize that this is confirmation of my hypotheses about the volatiles in—”

Xenia stopped. “Mariko. This isn’t to go further. News of this… discovery. Not yet. Tell your colleagues that too.”

Mariko looked shocked, as Xenia, with weary certainty, had expected. “You want to suppress this?”

That caused Xenia to hesitate. She had never thought of herself as a person who would suppress anything. But she knew, as all the star travelers had learned, that the universe was full of life: that life emerged everywhere it could — though usually, sadly, with little hope of prospering. Was it really so strange that such a stable, ancient world as the Moon should be found to harbor its own, quiet, still form of life?

Life was trivial, compared to the needs of the project.

“This isn’t science, Mariko. I don’t want anything perturbing Roughneck.”

Mariko made to protest again.

“Read your contract,” Xenia snapped. “You must do what I say.” And she cut the connection.

She returned to bed. Frank seemed to be asleep.

She had a choice to make. Not about the comet deflection issue; others would unravel that, in time. About Frank, and herself.

He fascinated her. He was a man of her own time, with a crude vigor she didn’t find among the Japanese-descended colonists of the Moon. He was the only link she had with home. The only human on the Moon who didn’t speak Japanese to her.

That, as far as she could tell, was all she felt.

In the meantime, she must consider her own morality.

Lying beside him, she made her decision. She wouldn’t betray him. As long as he needed her, she would stand with him.

But she would not save him.

Life was long, slow, unchanging.

Even her thoughts were slow.

In the timeless intervals between the comets, her growth was chthonic, her patience matching that of the rocks themselves. Slowly, slowly, she rebuilt her strength: light traps to start the long process of drawing out fire for the next seeds, leaves to catch the comet Rain that would come again.

She spoke to her children, their subtle scratching carrying to her through the still, cold rock. It was important that she taught them: how to grow, of the comet Rains to come, of the Giver at the beginning of things, the Merging at the end.

Their conversations lasted a million years.

The Rains were spectacular, but infrequent. But when they came, once or twice in every billion years, her pulse accelerated, her metabolism exploding, as she drank in the thin, temporary air and dragged the fire she needed from the rock.

And with each Rain, she birthed again, the seeds exploding from her body and scattering around the Land.

But, after that first time, she was never alone. She could feel, through the rock, the joyous pulsing of her children as they hurled their own seed through the gathering comet air.

Soon there were so many of them that it was as if all of the Land was alive with their birthing, its rocky heart echoing to their joyous shouts.

And still, in the distant future, the Merging awaited them.

As the comets leapt one by one back into the sky, sucking away the air with them, she held that thought to her exhausted body, cradling it.

Eighty days in and Frank was still making hole at his couple-of-kilometers-a-day target pace. But things had started to get a lot harder.

This was mantle, after all. They were suffering rock bursts. The rock was like stretched wire, under so much pressure it exploded when it was exposed. It was a new regime. New techniques were needed.

Costs escalated. The pressure on Frank to shut down was intense.

Many of the investors had already become extremely rich from the potential of the rich ore lodes discovered in the lower crust and upper mantle. There was talk of opening up new, shallow bores elsewhere on the Moon to seek out further lodes. Frank had proved his point. Why go farther, when the Roughneck was already a commercial success?

But metal ore wasn’t Frank’s goal, and he wasn’t about to stop now.

That was when the first death occurred, all of a hundred kilometers below the surface of the Moon.

She found him in his office at New Dallas, pacing back and forth, an Earth man caged on the Moon, his muscles lifting him off the glass floor.

“Omelettes and eggs,” he said. “Omelettes and eggs.”

“That’s a cliché, Frank.”

“It was probably the fucking Grays.”

“There’s no evidence of sabotage.”

He paced. “Look, we’re in the mantle of the Moon—”

“You don’t have to justify it to me,” she said, but he wasn’t listening.

“The mantle,” he said. “You know, I hate it. A thousand kilometers of worthless shit.”

“It was the changeover to the subterrene that caused the disaster. Right?”

He ran a hand over his greasy hair. “If you were a prosecutor, and this was a court, I’d challenge you on ‘caused.’ The accident happened when we switched over to the subterrene, yes.”

They had already gone too deep for the simple alloy casing or the cooled lunar glass Frank had used in the upper levels. To get through the mantle they would use a subterrene, a development of obsolete deep-mining technology. It was a probe that melted its way through the rock and built its own casing behind it: a tube of hard, high-melting-point quasiglass.

Frank started talking, rapidly, about quasiglass. “It’s the stuff the Lunar Japanese use for rocket nozzles. Very high melting point. It’s based on diamond, but it’s a quasicrystal, so the lab boys tell me, halfway between a crystal and a glass. Harder than ordinary crystal because there are no neat planes for cracks and defects to propagate. And it’s a good heat insulator similarly. Besides that, we support the hole against collapse and shear stress with rock bolts, fired through the casing and into the rock beyond. We do everything we can to ensure the integrity of our structure…”

This was, she realized, a first draft of the testimony he would have to give to the investigating commissions.

When the first subterrene started up, it built a casing with a flaw, undetected for a hundred meters. There had been an implosion. They lost the subterrene itself, a kilometer of bore, and a single life, of a senior tool pusher.

“We’ve already restarted,” Frank said. “A couple of days and we’ll have recovered.”

“Frank, this isn’t a question of schedule loss,” she said. “It’s the wider impact. Public perception. Come on; you know how important this is. If we don’t handle this right we’ll be shut down.”

He seemed reluctant to absorb that. He was silent for maybe half a minute.

Then his mood switched. He started pacing. “You know, we can leverage this to our advantage.”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to turn this guy we lost — what was his name? — into a hero.” He snapped his fingers. “Did he have any family? A ten-year-old daughter would be perfect, but we’ll work with whatever we have. Get his kids to drop cherry blossom down the hole. You know the deal. The message has to be right. The kids want the bore to be finished, as a memorial to the brave hero. ”

“Frank, the dead engineer was a she.”

“And we ought to think about the Gray angle. Get one of them to call our hero tool pusher a criminal.”

“Frank—”

He faced her. “You think this is immoral. Bullshit. It would be immoral to stop; otherwise, believe me, everyone on this Moon is going to die in the long run. Why do you think I asked you to set up the kids’ clubs?”

“For this?”

“Hell, yes. Already I’ve had some of those chicken-livered investors try to bail out. Now we use the kids, to put so much fucking pressure on it’s impossible to turn back. If that tool pusher had a kid in one of our clubs, in fact, that’s perfect.” He hesitated, then pointed a stubby finger at her face. “This is the bottleneck. Every project goes through it. I need to know you’re with me, Xenia.”

She held his gaze for a couple of seconds, then sighed. “You know I am.”

He softened, and dropped his hands. “Yeah. I know.” But there was something in his voice, she thought, that didn’t match his words. An uncertainty that hadn’t been there before. “Omelettes and eggs,” he muttered. “Whatever.” He clapped his hands. “So. What’s next?”

This time, Xenia didn’t fly directly to Edo. Instead she programmed the hopper to make a series of slow orbits of the abandoned base.

It took her an hour to find the glimmer of glass, reflected sunlight sparkling from a broad expanse of it, at the center of an ancient, eroded crater. She landed a kilometer away, to avoid disturbing the flower structures. She suited up quickly, clambered out of the hopper, and set off on foot.

She made ground quickly, over this battered, ancient landscape, restrained only by the Moon’s gentle gravity. Soon the land ahead grew bright, glimmering like a pool. She slowed, approaching cautiously.

The flower was larger than she had expected. It must have covered a quarter, even a third of a hectare, delicate glass leaves resting easily against the regolith from which they had been constructed, spiky needles protruding. There was, too, another type of structure: short, stubby cylinders pointing at the sky, projecting in all directions.

Miniature cannon muzzles. Launch gantries for seed-carrying aluminum-burning rockets, perhaps.

“I must startle you again.”

She turned. It was Takomi, of course, in his worn, patched suit, his hands folded behind his back. He was looking at the flower.

“Life on the Moon,” she said.

“Its life cycle is simple, you know. It grows during periods of transient comet atmospheres — like the present — and lies dormant between such events. The flower is exposed to sunlight, through the long Moon day. Each of its leaves is a collector of sunlight. The flower focuses the light on regolith, and breaks down the soil for the components it needs to manufacture its own structure, its seeds, and the simple rocket fuel used to propel them across the surface.

“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.