Moonseed (59 page)

The Earth below was deformed, bulging upward.

He was riding a plug of rock, somehow held stable here, riding the flank of a new mountain that was pushing out of the ground, its sides still glowing hot from their new birth, lava rivers coursing, overwhelming levees even as they formed. Layers of steam and dust and smoke prevented Blue from seeing the original ground level, if that term had any meaning any longer.

He wasn’t even close to the summit of this sudden bulge, he saw; the glowing flank continued upward above him to a peak, a new caldera, lost in more layers of steam and mist.

The noise reached a crescendo, then seemed to die away; he kept talking, but he could no longer hear his own voice, still less Sixt’s.

His hearing was gone, then. He doubted it mattered.

It looked as if all of Henry’s predictions were being fulfilled.

The plug of rock he was riding was tilting. Soon, it would tip him off. Even if not, the streams of lava gushing down the wounded flank of the higher hillside would surely overwhelm him soon; it was only the absurd expansion of the mountain which had saved him from that fate so far.

He wondered which peril would administer the final butt-whopping—

Slam.

It felt like a punch from a giant, deep in the base of his spine, and he was flying in the air, literally flying, among fragments of the rock which had, moments before, comprised the modest summit of Dumfoyne.

He couldn’t feel or move his arms or legs. Perhaps his back was broken, or his neck. He couldn’t even tell if he was still breathing.

The human body was, in the end, remarkably fragile.

He seemed to be riding a new fire fountain; without the rock to shield him he was surely burning up, yet he felt nothing.

Perhaps a god was smiling on him, even now, undeservedly sparing him the punishment dished out to others.

And, remarkably, he was
still
rising, high into the ash clouds, picked up like a rag by some thermal current. Lightning flared above, and the clouds parted.

And, for a brief moment, he saw the stars, so high had he risen.

Just a few seconds more, he thought. Let me see the new mountain from above, the greatest geological formation in a hundred thousand years. Olympus come to Earth.

But now even the gods, at last, failed him.

“…Two hundred feet,” Henry read. “Coming down at three. We’re going to make it. One hundred. Leveling off.
Woah.
Look at that.”

Suddenly they were kicking up dust, great bright streaks of it, rushing to the horizon over the ground. His view of the surface grew blurred, and he felt a tingle of new alarm. What if Geena couldn’t see the surface? How would she know where to set down the
Shoemaker?

“Ninety-six feet, coming down at six. Slowing the descent rate,” Geena said.

He looked around, seeking the Apollo lander. A sheet of dust swept over the boxy LM. He hoped their kicked-up debris wouldn’t mess up the landing site.

Now all Henry could see was a streaked layer of dust, with a few of the taller rocks sticking up here and there, like low mist.

“Fifty feet,” Geena said. “Shit, we’re going backward…Henry, how much fuel do we have left?”

The fuel indicator was a little ticking clock. “Sixty seconds flying time.”

“More than Armstrong,” she muttered. “Thirty feet.
Coming down at two. No lateral movement now.” Her voice was thin, but she seemed in control.

A blue glow lit up on the instrument panel, startling Henry. “What’s that?”

“Contact light!”

Geena slapped the
ENGINE STOP OVERRIDE
button on the panel. The slight vibration of the engine died immediately.

The
Shoemaker
fell the last few feet, into dust that was already settling.

The four legs hit the ground with a firm thump, that transmitted up his legs to his spine, the Moon itself punching up at his animal bones for his audacity in being here.

Geena went into a flurry of post-landing checks. “Descent engine command override is off. Engine arm off. Control stick out of detent…”

And the dust settled, falling out of the airless spaces around him like so many tiny projectiles, and the stillness of a billion years returned to the Imbrium plain.

Craters and rocks, just a few feet below him now; and under a thin layer of kicked-up dust, he could see footprints, a generation old. He was on the Moon.

“Houston,” Geena said, “this is Aristarchus Base. We have come home.”

The sky was dominated by the sun, a white spotlight too bright to look at. The Earth was there in the blackness, bigger than a full Moon but smaller than Geena had expected, just a thumbnail of blue light in the sky. The brightness of the sun made it impossible to make out the stars, and, away from sun and Earth, the sky was just a jet black, empty.

Standing here on the lander platform, she could see all the way to the horizon, clearer than the finest day on Earth. The sculpted hills of the Aristarchus ejecta blanket rose above this puddle of pitted, frozen basalt, their slopes bathed in sunlight, shining like fresh snow.

But there were no visual cues—no trees or cars or buildings or people, not even haze, to help her judge the distance. And beyond the brightly lit hills at that horizon there was only blackness, like the space at the edge of a map.

She could see the horizon was close, for it
curved,
gently but noticeably, the way the Earth looked to curve from fifty thousand feet or so. And in fact she could even see how the land before her curved away, dropping like the brow of a hill, out to the horizon. On this lander platform, she could tell she was standing on a ball of rock and dust, suspended in space; the roundness of this world was no intellectual exercise.

She felt lost.

It just didn’t look the same place as from orbit. Most of the shadows she’d used to guide the landing, particularly those pooled at the bottom of the craters, were invisible now. Not only that, she couldn’t see even the larger craters
beyond a hundred feet or so, so flattened was the landscape by her perspective.

Maybe there was just a hint of color. Golds and tans. But it was washed out, as if poking out from under a layer of dust. Shades of concrete, she thought. It was a little like looking out over her driveway, back in Clear Lake, under the glare of the security night lights.

She didn’t share these nongeological thoughts with Henry.

She looked at the sunlight bathing her gloved hand. The fabric of her sleeve glowed with an intense brightness, as if it had just been manufactured. She thought she could feel, in fact, a ghostly trace of the sun’s warmth, seeping through the layers of cloth surrounding her.

But she shivered, under the black sky. She could feel her heartbeat rise, and hoped it didn’t show up on the monitors on the ground.

For it was
wrong.
How could so much light be falling on her, and not dispel the darkness above? Some ancient part of her brain, adapted for billions of years to life in the pondlike atmosphere of Earth, seemed to be rebelling against these new conditions.

Going to take some getting used to, she thought. That’s all.

She looked past her feet, the way she now had to climb down, in her role as mission commander, to step on the Moon. The
Shoemaker
’s footpads had settled barely an inch into the ground, and the little ladder, just two or three steps, was resting neatly against the dust.

Geena released her restraints. They rolled themselves up silently into their holders.

She took a step forward, to the edge of the platform. She was at the center of a radial array of streaks and stripes, the disturbance they’d made in the ancient dust of the Moon as they descended.

She felt giddy, vertiginous. Ridiculous. She’d ridden down from orbit on this contraption, and now here she was
three feet above the dust, and she felt dizzy. But even so, she had to hold onto the control post before she got over it.

She turned to Henry. He was still in his restraints, standing calmly, watching her. His oversuit glowed brilliant white in the unfiltered sunlight. He held out a gloved hand to her.

She took it. Their gloves were so thick she could only feel the bulk of his suit, not his flesh and bone within.

Holding on to Henry, she turned, got hold of the handrail, and bent forward. She put her foot on the top rung of the ladder, then the second.

Her suit was stiff. In this Shuttle EMU it was hard to bend, to lower her feet from rung to rung. She found it was easier to push off and just drop down to the next rung, and the next.

She let go of Henry’s hand.

She pushed away one last time, and her hands slid along the rail…and her feet thumped into Moon dust.

A little spray of dust—ancient pulverized rock, charcoal-black—lifted up around her feet, and settled back. Where it touched her clothing, it stuck.

She said: “We’re back. My God, we did it. We’ve come back to the Moon.”

She heard the sounds from Houston, whooping in her headset, some kind of broken-voiced response from Frank Turtle. But the words were remote and didn’t register.

She moved her foot around over the surface. The dust was soft, queasy, but she wasn’t sinking in too far. She took a few steps. A little cloud of dust tracked around her feet, falling back with neat, liquid grace. The dust seemed to have an affinity for her suit, for it clung to her blue overshoes and the fabric of her leggings, as if she was a magnet attracting iron filings.

She looked around.

She was standing on a textured plain—like a piece of the high desert around Edwards, she thought—and the ground glowed in the sunlight. But the sky remained
utterly, unnervingly black. Nothing moved here. There was utter silence. She fought an impulse to turn around, to look to see who was creeping up behind her, in this horror-movie stillness.

She took a few more steps, experimentally.

She couldn’t walk, exactly; her legs wouldn’t bend far enough to let her. This Shuttle suit, meant for zero-G EVAs, was even worse than the old Apollo suits for stiffness. She could move in a kind of jog, rocking from side to side, but the low gravity let her travel farther than she wanted to go.

And her balance was off. Her backpack pulled at her, and to compensate she leaned forward as she walked; she felt as if she might fall at any moment. She was somewhere between buoyant and heavy. Weight and mass had been redefined for her. It was more comfortable than either a full gravity or zero G: it had much of the buoyancy of microgravity but without that disconcerting lack of up and down. One-sixth G was weak, but enough to anchor her to the world.

But, when she was still, it was hard for her to tell when she was standing upright. The land was full of gentle rises, and there were no verticals here, no telegraph poles or trees or buildings. Something to do with the gentle tug of the Moon’s gravity on her inner ear, maybe.

The backpack’s pumps and fans whirred, and she could feel the soft rush of oxygen over her face. The pack was a reassuring mass on her back, replete with energy, supplies for heat and cooling, water, air; she was a little bubble of Earth life, she thought, bouncing around on the surface of the Moon.

Maybe fifty yards from the
Shoemaker,
she turned to face the sun. The light glared through her gold-tinted faceplate. There stood the
Shoemaker,
Henry on it watching her, a little gold-colored platform with a white snowman perched on the top. The lander looked strangely light, as if it might blow away. Its gaudy gold and black and silver looked ludicrous: overdesigned, for this gentle, subtle landscape.

Behind the
Shoemaker
she looked across the width of a big crater, a bowl bigger than a football stadium, shadows stretching across the ground toward her from rocks and craters. She could see the old Apollo lander, nestled close to the crater’s shadowed far wall, a squat, boxy structure, unmistakable.

And there, only a hundred yards from the Apollo, stood the second
Shoemaker,
laden with the supplies that would keep them alive.

“How about that,” she said. “Can’t be more than six hundred feet away.” She felt elated—the first lunar landing for more than thirty years, and it was pinpoint accurate. “Outstanding.”

“You got the job,” Henry said dryly. “Now, will you help me down from here?”

So here was Henry, unbelievably, standing on the Moon, a geologist on the ultimate field trip. He turned, slowly, trying to understand where he was.

The sun dominated seeing on the Moon, he realized immediately.

The sun was like a giant, intensely bright searchlight, pure white, overwhelming everything, and the mental picture he built up of the landscape here depended completely on the angle to the sun.

At zero phase angle—if he looked down-sun, with his own shadow stretching across the untrodden surface—it was difficult for him to make out shadows. Most objects were visible, but the contrasts were washed out. But he could see shadows if he looked cross-sun, so the trick was to look from left to right, to pick up the shadows, and shapes and sizes and glints, and he could orient himself that way. And if he walked up-sun, with the shadows stretching toward him, the sun was very bright, glaring in his visor.

When he looked at his own shadow the sunlight around it came bouncing straight back at him. The shadow
of his body was surrounded by a glow, a halo around his helmet.

He inspected the mineral ground.
Cinereous,
he thought. The color of ash…

But there
were
colors here, he realized suddenly.

He stopped and looked around more carefully.

If he looked in the direction of the sun, the ground looked a pale, golden brown. It was the same if he looked away from the sun, beyond his own long shadow. But to left or right the colors got darker, to a richer deep brown. If he looked under his feet, or at a handful of soil in his hand, the color was a deep charcoal gray, sometimes even a black.

But anyhow the Moon colors looked pale and lifeless when he looked at the blue armbands on his suit, his blue lunar overshoes, the brilliant black and gold and silver of the
Shoemaker,
and especially the ice-blue of the Earth, when he looked up.

He knew he would have to learn to take account of all this, learn to read the landscape on its own terms, in its own conditions of light and shadow.

He did a little geologizing.

He was standing on a dark plain, its surface evidently sculpted by craters, of all dimensions, craters on craters. There were rolling hills, almost like dunes, their form softened and fluid, their flanks littered with boulders thrown out of the larger craters. And close by he could make out smaller craters, almost rimless pits in the soil, and the center of each one was marked by a spot of fused glass, a remnant of the punch which had dug out that particular pit.

It was a landscape unlike any he had seen on Earth.

The mountains—foothills of the Aristarchus crater rim walls—rose up like topped-off pyramids into the black sky, their sides dauntingly steep. There was no easy comparison with terrestrial features; the hills were neither as crag sharp as the granite of the Rockies, nor as smoothly rounded as the ice rivers of Norway.

And besides, almost all of Earth’s features—certainly
all of the mountains—were
young,
at any rate by comparison with what he would find on the Moon. Some of the mountains of the Moon were almost as old as the Solar System itself.

But the shadows of the mountains were not the wells of darkness he had expected, for light, reflected from nearby slopes and plains, softened the shadows. The light, reflected from the rocky ground, was, of course, Moonlight: precisely that, the very light which illuminated Earth’s night sky.

He’d ridden through Moonlight across a quarter of a million miles. And now, standing here, he and Geena were bathed in it.

He shivered.

He took a step forward, over dust and broken rock. The Moon gave him a firm footing, beneath a layer of looser dust that compressed like unpacked snow.

The loose stuff varied from place to place, from maybe a few inches thick to perhaps a foot. He knew the reason for that: the regolith was created by a hail of micrometeorite bombardment, and it deepened and matured with time.

So when he walked into a patch of softer dust, he was walking somewhere older.

Anyhow, nowhere did it cause him a problem; the Moon, as a geological field site, would, it seemed, be an accommodating place to work.

In fact, he felt an odd ache as he looked down at the dust billowing around his feet. He wanted to take off his gloves and run his bare fingers through the soil, connecting with the Moon. But that was, of course, impossible; he was the alien here, encased in his bubble of Earth murk, and he must stay that way.

He walked farther.

He bent and, with both hands, pulled a big rock out of the ground. He had to push his fingers into the crackling surface, smashing up agglutinates, rock fragments glued
together by solar wind particles, to get his hands around the rock.

From above the rock looked smooth, almost flat against the ground, like a glacier deposit. But when he dug it out he found its underside, buried in the regolith, was sharp and angular, and maybe ten times as bulky as the portion that had shown above ground, like an iceberg. And the buried surfaces were sheer, lacking the sheen of zap pits and impact glass of the exposed section.

This rock, casually dropped here after some ancient impact, had been eroded flat by an aeon of micrometeorite rain.

He brushed off the dust and held the rock up to his faceplate.

This was a breccia, a compound lump of rock whose fragments had been crushed, ground, melted, mixed and then bound together in a shock melt. When he turned it in the flat sunlight he could see the sparkle of glass, the recrystallized minerals that were holding this lump together.

This rock, in fact, almost looked like a vesicular basalt—a pumice, riddled with bubbles left by gas. But the heat that formed it came not from volcanism but from the energy of the catastrophic fall of a giant impactor. And he thought he could see that this breccia was in fact itself made up of earlier breccias, breccias nested in breccias like biblical generations, remnants of still earlier impacts. In this one chunk there might be pieces of ancient anorthosite crust, mare lavas, even solidified dregs of the original magma ocean.

He weighed the lump of breccia in his gloved hand. Its weight was barely discernible in the feeble gravity. And yet, just looking at it, he felt echoes of the almost inconceivable violence which had shaped the Moon’s early history, sensed the processes which had formed this rock since, processes unlike any on Earth.