Moonseed (72 page)

“Oh. The mud is going to freeze—”

“Geena, depending on the atmospheric dynamics, the
air
is probably going to freeze. For two weeks the Moon will be like it used to be, and we’re going to have to find some way to live through it.” He shrugged. “Or maybe we should just hole up inside our lava tube. We’ll have to think about it. As long as it doesn’t collapse, or flood. I sure don’t want to be caught out in the open when the sun goes down. There will be a wind from hell, all that air sweeping around from the hot side to the cold—”

“But the air will boil off after dawn.”

“Most of it. Some of it is going to collect back where it came from, the cold traps at the Poles. And it will stay there. Nothing has changed the basic geometry of the Moon, Geena. Eventually all this lovely air will finish up back where it started, back at the Poles…Somebody is going to have to figure out a way to stop that, some day.

“But that won’t be for a while. For now, the comet debris is still boiling off, powered by the Moonseed…I figure things won’t start to stabilize until all the ice has boiled off. Which will take a year, at least.” He squinted at the Earth. “Maybe they will send the first biogens. There’s no reason to delay. Photosynthetic plants, algae maybe, to start the job of turning all this sunlight and carbon dioxide to oxygen and food.”

“Henry, how long is all this—” she waved a hand “—going to last?”

“Well, even if we keep it from freezing at the Poles, long term the atmosphere is going to leak away into space. But it’s a slow process. It’s like putting a bucket of water in the desert. Sure, the water evaporates, but it takes a long time because it can only get out through the comparatively small surface area of the top. In the same way the upper rim of the atmosphere will only allow the air to leak out slowly…”

She pulled at her mask, adjusting it. “Always the scientist. You tell me everything except what I want to know. How long is
long term,
Henry?”

He shrugged. “Maybe ten thousand years.”

She said gently, “Time enough to think of something else, then.”

“I guess so. Come on. Let’s go pack.”

Side by side, arguing, planning, they walked back toward the lava tube.

51

A year later…

She was in hospital when Henry returned from the Moon.

She hadn’t wanted it this way, but the tests had become overwhelming: the best American technology, X rays and scans and ultrasound and blood tests, and a whole set of ’scopies that left her bewildered, sore and humiliated: sig
moidoscopy, colonoscopy, gastroscopy, bronchoscopy, cystoscopy.

“I didn’t know I had so many orifices,” she told Henry.

“Oh, Christ, Jane,” he said, and he sat on the edge of her bed.

After a year on the Moon his gait and movements were clumsy, as if he expected everything around him to happen in slo-mo. She could see where the rigors of reentry to Earth’s atmosphere had left him bruised, around the neck and eyes.

And every pore, every fold in his skin, was etched with deep-ingrained Moon dust.

Still, it was Henry, more dear to her than she had anticipated—and more distressed than she had, somehow, imagined, when she had played through this scene in her head.

“It isn’t so bad,” she said. “Leukemia. I’m only here for tests; I’ll be out of here soon. I might live for years.”

“But not forever,” he said.

“No. Not forever.”

“It ain’t fair.”

He was trying to handle this, she realized, and she needed to give him time. She’d had more than a year to get used to the idea.

He said, “You never even told me.”

“The NASA psychologists wouldn’t let me. They were worried about your morale, up there on the Moon.”

“Pointy-headed assholes,” he murmured. He took her hand. “But it ain’t fair, whether you told me or not. I did it for you.”

“Did what?”

He shrugged. “Blew up the Moon. Saved mankind. Whatever it was I did it for you, for us. To give us a future.”

“Maybe the NASA shrinks were right, then.”

They fell silent, and started to avoid each other’s eyes.

After all, what were you supposed to say?
How’s your cancer? How was life on the Moon?

She dug out a letter from the stack on her bedside table. “I got this from someone called Garry Beus.”

“Beus?”

“Son of Monica Beus? The physicist lady you knew?”

He nodded stiffly.

She said, “She learned about me, through my connection to you, before she died, and told Garry.” She glanced over the letter. “So he wrote to me. Kind thought. He’s in the Air Force here. He’s applying for the astronaut corps, the new Earth-Moon ferry pilot positions they are opening up…He says Monica left a memory box for him. Actually for his children, her grandchildren. Do you think I should do that for Jack?”

But he didn’t reply. When she looked up at him again he was crying, the tears spilling down his cheeks, pooling Moon dust in the lines under his eyes.

52

Ten years later…

Coming inland from the sea, driving northeast from Cape Town on the N1 highway, it took Henry and Jane two hours to drive through the coastal mountains to reach the Karroo itself.

The ride, through mountain passes and the contorted passages through vales of rock, was spectacular. But then the landscape flattened to a desert, populated by what the old Afrikaners called fynbos, a mixed, complex flora of shrubs and bushes. It was spring, here in the southern hemisphere, and the desert—sheltered by its encircling mountains from the acid rain and climate shifts suffered by most of the world’s land masses—was putting on a show, red white and yellow flowers of every shape.

At last, though, even the fynbos submitted to the logic of the climate, and only aloe and cacti relieved the panorama of rocks and sky.

At a village called Touws River—abandoned now—
they came upon the first Karroo rocks: squat black mudstones, sitting atop the younger Cape sands. Henry knew that the mudstones had been dumped from icebergs, floating on the surface of the polar ocean that had once covered this land, an ocean four hundred million years gone.

Jane stared out the window, with that mix of patience and intelligent interest that had always characterized her, and the low, smoky sun picked out her old melanoma scars.

Ten years.
And still, every day they were granted seemed like a bonus to him, a new gift.

Henry drove on, and the rock grew more complex.

In a lifetime of geology Henry had never been here before, to this high-veldt plateau that covered two thirds of South Africa. It was a large, empty place, devoid of human history, unpopulated save for a few scattered towns and farms—most of them abandoned now—crossed only by the immense road between Cape Town and Johannesburg. But to geologists and paleontologists this land of sandstones and shales, piled up into the tablelands the Afrikaners called koppies, was one of the Earth’s greatest storehouses: a thousand mile slab of sedimentary rock that was the best record on Earth of land-animal evolution.

The Karroo had always been, for Henry, a place for the future, to visit before he got too old, or died. Now he was forty-five, though he felt a lot older, but the future was self-evidently running out.

So here he was, before it was too late.

They stopped near a large koppie, and clambered stiffly out of the car. It was still morning, and the air was blessedly cool; Henry found himself surrounded by cactus and aloe and wild flowers.

Henry and Jane didn’t speak; their routine, working together, was long enough established by now.

Henry shucked off his antique Air Jordan trainers and pulled on his heavy field boots. He smeared sunblock on the exposed flesh of his arms, legs and face. He donned his broad-brimmed hat, pulled on his oxy-resp and dust and
humidity filters—his spacesuit, as he thought of it—and he attached his digital Kodak to his chest bracket.

He buckled on the old leather of his field gear and picked up his hammer and chisel, all of it worn smooth by hundreds of days of sun and rain.

The familiar ritual, which for Henry long predated the coming of the Moonseed, was a great comfort to him. It was a prelude to the greatest pleasure of his working life, which was field work. The nature and objectives of the work had changed, but the pleasure he took in it hadn’t.

Jane knew him well enough now to let him be, to relish this moment.

So he walked into the desert, looking for fossils.

The ground was full of so much detail it would be easy to miss the fossils; the trick was to train the eye and brain to filter out the noise and pick out the key signs. But right now, he didn’t know what those signs would be. Bones, of course, but would they be white or black? Crushed or whole? In the sandstone, river bed deposits, or the shale, silt and mud deposited by ancient floods, now metamorphosed to rock?

It took a half hour before he began to see them: fragments of bone, protruding from the rock. He recorded their location with the Kodak; the camera was tied into the GPS satellites so the location and context of the specimens were stamped on their images. He scooped up the fragments, unceremoniously, and stuffed them in a sample bag.

As the day wore on, and his eye grew practiced, he found more impressive samples. Bones of ancient amphibians, two hundred and fifty million years dead. The tiny skeletons of two burrowing protomammals, his earliest ancestors, white and delicate, embedded in a dark silty matrix. Here, peering ghoulishly out of a layer of flat sediment, was the skull of a dicynodont, a low slung, piglike animal a couple of feet long, covered with fur and sprouting impressive tusks.

He tried to imagine what it must have been like here, a quarter of a billion years ago.

But right now there was no time to study, classify, identify, deduce. For now, all Henry could do was to collect the raw data.

Geology and paleontology had always been a race against the predations of weathering and human expansion.

As Earth’s upper layers wore away, ancient bones were exposed, removed from their quarter-billion-year storage, and, in a relative flash, eroded or frost-cracked to dust. Humans could only hope to collect a handful of these ancient treasures before they evaporated like dew.

Now, of course, that time pressure had gotten a lot worse.

He came at last to a new layer of rock, a coarse brown sandstone which overlay the black shales below.

The upper bed was almost devoid of fossils.

This layer marked the boundary between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, a boundary in time marked by the greatest extinction of life in Earth’s history. The ancient spasm of death, recorded in rock, had been obvious to the first modern geologists, the gentlemen-scientists from Edinburgh.

Even now, nobody knew how it had happened. The more famous extinction pulse at the end of the Cretaceous, the one that had killed off the dinosaurs, had attracted a great deal more study, but that event had involved far fewer species. The best explanation was a slow deterioration of the climate, accompanied by a lowering of sea level, that had created conditions inimical to most life existing at the time.

That was plausible. But nobody
knew.

The answer was surely embedded in these rocky layers somewhere, in the bones and skulls eroding out of the Karroo. But Henry could grab all the samples he liked; he was sure the answer would never, now, be found.

Henry had grown up believing that the future was, more or less, infinite, and that there would be time—for
generations to come, if not for him—to figure out answers to most of the great questions. Earth itself held the clues to the great puzzles of geology and paleontology, and Earth would always be there…

But the future wasn’t infinite any more, and Earth wasn’t going to last forever.

There just wasn’t
time
for the slow processes of science to unpick the secrets of Earth’s past. When the evidence was gone, it would be gone
forever,
and they would
never know.

So, here was Henry clambering over the Karroo, grab-bagging bones out of the ground.

Field work was now the only game in town, in all the sciences.

Nobody was doing analytical science any more. The only people working in labs were directing the others, out in the field.

Most of the effort, in fact, was in biology. In what was left of the rain forests, half-trained researchers were wrapping entire giant trees in plastic and drenching them with bug spray, hoovering up the stiff little bodies into nitrogen cooled collection flasks, for eventual shipping to the great Arks that were flying to the Moon.

The National Institutes of Health’s Natural Products Repository in Maryland—fifty thousand samples of plant, microbial and marine material from thirty tropical countries, stored in forty-one walk-in freezers—had been compactified, roughly catalogued and fired off to a cryogenic store in some deep-shadowed crater on the Moon. Some of the big bioprospecting drug companies, like Merck which had spent years trawling the flora and fauna of Costa Rica for resources for new products, had had similar repositories impounded and shipped off-Earth, though not without bloody battles over compensation.

And so on.

No time to classify, even to count the species, even those living; of Earth’s estimated
thirty million
species of
plant and animal and insect, only a million had been identified and named by all the generations of biologists that had ever worked.
Last chance to see.

There were problems, of course.

There was a lot of vertebrate bias, for instance, in the strategies for rescue. The big mammals and pretty birds were always top of the list, followed by other vertebrates, reptiles, amphibians, fish—even though many of the reptiles, for instance, were already literally drowning in the moisture-laden air that had followed the final melting of the ice caps, and the evaporation of so much ocean water.

And nobody could agree on the corner cases. Biodiversity or not, was it
right
to preserve the last samples of anthrax, or the Ebola virus, or the last tsetse flies?