Moonseed

PART VI NADEZHDA

…And, twenty years beyond the Bottleneck:

In the confines of Sagan’s airlock Nadezhda put on her gloves and snapped home the connecting rings. Then she lifted her helmet over her head.

The ritual of the suit assembly checklist was oddly comforting, a litany now decades old: in fact, almost unchanged from the routines endured by the original astronauts from Earth.

But the Sagan was no dinged-up low-Earth-orbit space truck, and right now Nadezhda was far from home.

She felt her heart hammer under her suit’s layers.

Jean Massie, on the hab module’s upper deck, was monitoring her. Nadezhda, you have a go for depress.

Nadezhda heard a distant hiss. “Let’s motor.”

She twisted the handle of the outer airlock hatch and pushed.

Nadezhda Pour-El Meacher Dundas gazed out into space.

She was looking along the length of the Sagan’s hab module. It was a tight cylinder, just ten yards long and seven wide, home to four crew for this six-month jaunt. The outer hull was crammed with equipment, the sensors and antennae clustered over powder-white and gold insulating blankets. The flags of the contributing lunar nations and agencies were here: NASA-L, the Russians, the Europeans, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the star-in-crescent flag of the Federal Republic of the Moon itself. At the back of the hab module she could see the bulging upper domes of the big cryogenic fuel tanks, and when she turned the other way there was the emergency return module, a capsule stuck sideways under the canopy of its big aerobrake.

The whole thing was just a collection of cylinders and boxes and canopies, thrown together as if at random. She knew every cubic inch of it.

She moved out through the airlock’s round hatchway.

There was a handrail, and two slide wires that ran the length of the curving hull, and Nadezhda tethered herself to the wires. It was a routine she’d practised a hundred times in the sims at Clavius and New Houston, and a dozen times in lunar orbit. There was no reason why now should be any different.

No reason, except that the Moon wasn’t where it should be.

In lunar orbit, the Moon had been a bright, curving carpet beneath her all the time. But out here, the Moon was all of five million miles away, reduced to a blue button three or four arms-lengths away. And Nadezhda was suspended in a huge three-hundred-sixty-degree planetarium just studded with stars, stars everywhere…

Everywhere, that is, except for one corner of the sky blocked by a vaguely elliptical shadow, sharp-edged, one rim picked out by the sun.

It was Icarus: a near-Moon asteroid, Nadezhda’s destination.

When she was selected for this mission, Nadezhda had studied the history of the Earthborn astronauts, right back to the beginning, Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard in their tin-can spaceships. She’d learned she had at least one thing in common with them.

She supported the objectives of the mission, of course. She had trained up on the science of Icarus, on near-Earth objects in general. She had trained up on the Moonseed, on the various coexistence and communications and exploitation schemes that had been proposed. She was interested in the science, the future of mankind, all of that stuff. Of course she was. She wouldn’t have come so far otherwise.

But what really motivated Nadezhda, here and now, five million miles from home, was not screwing up.

Every astronaut, right back to the beginning, had felt the same, she suspected. Don’t screw up. Finish the checklist, smile for the cameras. Because not screwing up was the only way to get on another flight.

Maybe that particularly applied to her, the first lunar-born deep-space astronaut, on this NASA-L mission. If she screwed up, the Earthborns would have a field day, and it would be a long time before she, or another Moonborn, would get another chance.

Of course, inevitably, their time would come.

All lunar citizens were astronauts anyway. The Earthborns just didn’t see that.

Under the big glass domes at Clavius and Tycho, human-powered flight was the most popular sport: thick air, low gravity…Nadezhda had grown up in a world where children flapped back and forth all the time like bony chickens, learning the rudiments of three-dimensional navigation and aerodynamics as soon as they were born.

And, on the Moon, everyone flew in space. You could reach orbit with a back yard rocket motor smaller than a car engine; even Armstrong and Aldrin had proved that. People went through sub-orbital lobs longer than Alan Shepard’s just to go shopping. Lunar inhabitants were nature’s astronauts.

But not to those Earthborn mission planners in New Houston, however.

She supposed it was pride.

Well, it would pass, with time. After all, when the present generation had retired, there would be no more Earthborn, ever.

So she put up with their prejudices, and waited for her own time to come, and listened to their stories — endless stories, five billion of them — tales of the time before the Bottleneck, of bravery and disaster and displacement — of unlikely acts of heroism linked with names in her own family lines — and of even earlier times, of an incomprehensible, vanished world, when everyone believed the Earth would forever be their home, as it always had…

But she didn’t want to wait for dead men’s shoes.

She pulled herself tentatively along the slide wire, and made her way to the PMU station, on the starboard side of the hab module. The Personal Manoeuvring Unit was a big backpack shaped like the back and arms of an armchair, with foldout head- and leg-rests on a tubular frame. Nadezhda ran a quick check of the PMU’s systems.

Then she turned around, and backed into the PMU.

“Sagan, Nadezhda,” she said. “Suit latches closed.”

Copy that.

She pulled the PMU’s arms out around her and closed her gloved hands around the hand-controllers on the end of the arms. She unlatched the folded-up body frame. She rested her neck against the big padded rest, and settled her feet against the narrow footpads at the bottom of the frame, so she was braced. Today’s EVA was just a test reconnaissance, but a full field expedition to Icarus could last all of eight hours; the frame would help her keep her muscle movements down, and so reduce resource wastage.

Nadezhda released her tethers. A little spring-loaded gadget gave her a shove in the back, gentle as a mother’s encouraging pat, and she floated away from the bulkhead.

…Suddenly she didn’t have hold of anything, and she was falling.

She had become an independent spacecraft. The spidery frame of the PMU occulted the dusting of stars around her.

She tested out her propulsion systems.

She grasped her right-hand controller, and pushed it left. There was a soft tone in her helmet as the thruster worked; she saw a faint sparkle of exhaust crystals, to her right. In response to the thrust, she tipped a little to the left.

When she started moving, she just kept on going, until she stopped herself with another blip of her thrusters.

She turned in space, and looked at the Moon. She pressed a stud on the side of her helmet, and the Moon’s image was magnified, so that its crescent filled her helmet. And the crescent’s edge was softly blurred by a band of light, which stretched part way around the darkened hemisphere.

Sparks crawled over the globe: ocean-going vessels, surface cars, low-orbit spacecraft. There were more lights, strung out in lines, on the darkened surface itself: towns and cities, outlining hidden continents. Buildings on the Moon were mostly made entirely of glass; lunar glass, manufactured from deep-lying dehydrated lunar ore, was incredibly strong. From space, all that glass made the cities bright.

But the sun-shadowed hemisphere was not truly dark, for it basked in the light of the Noviy Svet — the Russian-designed solettas, the huge mirror farms built and launched by Boeing and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, artificial suns which cast enough daylight over the shadowed half of the Moon to keep its new air from snowing out in the weeks-long night. The solettas worked well, and anyhow the engineers said the Spin-Up should be completed before the solettas reached the end of their design life.

Not that anybody was confident of predicting when that would be, since the solettas, grown from lunar rock, were the first large-scale application of Moonseed-derived technology.

She could see the cold deserts of the lunar poles, bone-white.

On the Moon, the weather was simple. Sunlight lifted masses of moist warm air over the equator; the air quickly dumped its moisture, in sometimes violent rainstorms, and, displaced by colder, lower layers of air, the hot air drifted to the poles. There it cooled and sank, dry and cold, creating deserts, and joined the circulation back to the equator.

So there you had it. The prevailing winds were hot, dry air coming out of the poles, deflected a little by the Moon’s sluggish spin, shaped and moistened by the bodies of water it passed, the maria and the great crater lakes.

On the Moon, there were no weather forecasters.

She couldn’t remember much of Earth, before the Bottleneck. She found it hard to understand how big it had been, so big there had been room for more than one air circulation cell per hemisphere, so big there had been room for too much weather. Bizarre.

Anyhow, the Moon’s North Pole was the site of something much more interesting than weather, as far as Nadezhda was concerned. It was from the Pole that the great deep-core drilling project had been initiated by the Americans: a thousand-mile shaft designed to reach all the way to the Witch in the Well, the ancient, shattered hive at the heart of the Moon which, until now, had only been visible by seismic probes and neutrino light. And nobody knew what treasures that would bring.

The Moon’s highlands and Farside were visibly peppered with circular crater lakes, glimmering in soletta light. The first oceans, which had pooled in the basins of the old maria, still glittered blue where they had formed, all over the hemisphere which was still called Nearside; but they had been shrinking steadily since then. The problem was drainage. The oceans evaporated, the water returning as rain; but every time rain fell on the highlands it got trapped in the high craters. As the Moon had been born dry, there was no natural drainage to return the water to the oceans, as on Earth.

So great channels were being dug, canals to restore the water to the oceans. Nadezhda could see Tycho-Nubium, for instance, a straight-line thread of blue light.

Thus, on the Moon, by the side of the canals with their huge waves and feathery pleasure-boats, the crystal cities glistened in the sun.

As she looked at the Moon’s surface now, it was predominantly blue and white, ocean and cloud, or the powder-grey or baked red of desert. Much of the Moon was still not much more habitable than it had been for Meacher and Bourne themselves. It would take some time for the green of life to show on the Moon.

It would come.

But the Moon would never be a shrunken twin of vanished Earth. The engineers” dreams would see to that. They could do a lot better.

There was a scheme to go further than Spin-Up. Perhaps the black hole wind from ruined Earth could be used to move the Moon: to the orbit of Jupiter, perhaps, where there were whole worlds full of frozen volatiles, waiting to be tapped…

Or even further, to the stars themselves.

But that was the future. For today, Nadezhda had work to do.

Nadezhda tipped herself up so she was facing Icarus, with the Sagan behind her.

“Sagan, I’m preparing to go in.”

We copy, Nadezhda.

She fired her thruster. Computer graphics started to scroll across the inside of her face plate, updating burn parameters. She was actually changing orbit here, and she would have to go through a full rendezvous procedure to reach Icarus.

The angle of the sun was changing, and the slanting light changed Icarus from a flat silhouette to a potato-shaped rock in space, fat and solid. Icarus was crumpled, split by ravines, punctured by craters of all sizes, the beat-up surface a record of this little body’s dismal, violent history. There was one massive crater that must have been a half-mile across, its walls spreading around the cramped horizon.

The rock was more than three miles long, spinning on its axis once every twenty hours. It was as black as coal dust. Icarus was a stony asteroid, its substance baked dry of water and other volatiles by a billion years of passes around the sun, here in the hot heart of the Solar System.

Primordial rock. Ideal resource for the Moonseed.

It was a decade now since Icarus had been deliberately implanted with Moonseed, by an automated probe. The purpose was to test experimental asimov circuits, to see if the Moonseed could be inhibited.

Well, since the asteroid hadn’t blown up, the asimov circuits seemed to have worked. And now, Nadezhda was here to find out what the Moonseed had built, at the heart of the asteroid. We know you can make solar sails. We know you can turn planets into black hole guns. Now let’s see what the hell else you can do…

Even now, nobody understood the Moonseed. But there were those who believed the Moonseed was not malevolent.

Look at the evidence. This hive thing crashes into a primordial Earth, that was probably too big anyhow. It creates a Moon, just big enough to kick up the geological stuff that enabled life to start up in the first place. Then, just when we’ve had time to get smart enough to survive it all — in fact, don’t forget, our intelligence, bringing the Moonseed to Earth, was the trigger for this happening — it takes Earth apart, gives us a tool kit to rebuild other worlds, and gives us a way to the stars…

This is no threat. The Moonseed is no Berserker. It’s a life-giver.

There were other unanswered questions.

Why had the destruction of Venus taken such a different course from Earth’s?

Why was Mercury spared? And Mars, come to that — after all, craft from Earth had landed on Mars before they reached Venus.

Maybe it was just accident. Or maybe it was design.

Or maybe the Moonseed, for all its power, was like plankton — the bottom of some cosmic food chain whose upper reaches humans couldn’t even glimpse.

Maybe. Maybe not. Nobody knew for sure. But as Earth receded in memory, there were more who were prepared to give the Moonseed the benefit of the doubt.

At a computer prompt, she prepared for her final burn. “Ready for Terminal Initiation.”

Copy that, Nadezhda.

One last time the thrusters fired, fat and full.

Coming up to your hundred yard limit.

“Copy that.”

She came to a dead stop, a hundred yards from the surface of Icarus. The asteroid’s complex, battered surface was like a wall in front of her. She felt no tug of gravity — Icarus’s G was a thousandth of the Moon’s — it would take her more than two minutes to fall in to the surface from here, compared to a few seconds on the Moon.

She was comfortable. The suit was quiet, warm, safe.

She blipped her cold-gas thrusters, and drifted forward a little more quickly. This wasn’t like coming in for a landing; it was more like approaching a cliff face which bulged gently out at her, its coal-like blackness oppressive.

She made out more detail, craters overlaid on craters down to the limit of visibility. She tweaked her trajectory until she was heading for the centre of a big crater, away from any sharp-edged walls or boulder fields.

Then she just let herself drift in, at a yard a second. If she used the thrusters any more she risked raising dust clouds that wouldn’t settle.

There were four little landing legs at the corners of her PMU frame; they popped out now, little spear-shaped penetrators designed to dig into the surface and hold her there.

The close horizon receded, and the cliff face turned into a wall that cut off half the universe.

She collided softly with Icarus.

The landing legs, throwing up dust, dug into the regolith with a grind that carried through the PMU structure. The dust hung about her.

So Nadezhda was stuck here, clinging to the wall inside her PMU frame, like a mountaineer on a rock face in the Lunar Apennines.

She turned on her helmet lamp. Impact glass glimmered before her.

Unexpectedly, wonder pricked her. Here was the primordial skin of Icarus, as old as the Solar System, just inches before her face. She reached out and pushed her gloved hand into the surface, a monkey paw probing.

The surface was thick with regolith: a fine rock flour, littered with glassy agglutinates, asteroid rock shattered by aeons of bombardment. Her fingers went in easily enough for a few inches — she could feel the stuff crunching under her pressure, as if she was digging into compacted snow — but then she came up against much more densely packed material, tamped down by the endless impacts.

She closed her fist and pulled out her hand. A cloud of dust came with it, gushing into her face like a hail of meteorites. She looked at the material she’d dug out. There were a few bigger grains here, she saw: it was breccia, bits of rock smashed up in multiple impacts, welded back together by impact glass. There was no gravity to speak of; the smallest movement sent the fragments drifting out of her palm.

She had to get on with her work, think about her checklist. But she allowed herself a moment to savour this triumph.

She was, after all, the first human to touch the surface of a whole new world since Neil Armstrong.

And the Moonseed was here: hardened and eternal, riding the winds that blow between the stars. And now a human had come to meet it, on equal terms.

She grinned at the dust. “We need to talk,” she said.

Nadezhda? We don’t copy.

“Never mind.”

She pushed her hand back into the pit she’d dug, and went to work.