This document had been called many things in its long history, but most familiarly the Codex Leicester. Berge’s copy had been printed off in haste during the Failing, those frantic hours when the Moon’s dying libraries had disgorged great snowfalls of paper, a last desperate download of their stored electronic wisdom before the power failed. It was a treatise centering on what Leonardo called the “body of the Earth,” but with diversions to consider such matters as water engineering, the geometry of Earth and Moon, and the origins of fossils.
The issue of the fossils particularly excited Berge. Leonardo had been much agitated by the presence of the fossils of marine creatures — fish and oysters and corals — high in the mountains of Italy. Lacking any knowledge of tectonic processes, he had struggled to explain how the fossils might have been deposited by a series of great global floods.
It made her remember how, when Berge was small, she had once had to explain to him what a fossil was. There were no fossils on the Moon: no bones in the ground, save those humans had put there. But now, of course, Berge was much more interested in the words of long-dead Leonardo than of grandmother.
“You have to think about the world Leonardo inhabited,” he said. “The ancient paradigms still persisted: the stationary Earth, a sky laden with spheres, crude Aristotelian protophysics. But Leonardo’s instinct was to proceed from observation to theory, and he observed many things in the world that didn’t fit with the prevailing worldview—”
“Like mountaintop fossils.”
“Yes. Working alone, he struggled to come up with explanations. And some of his reasoning was, well, eerie.”
“Eerie?”
“Prescient.” Gold-flecked eyes gleamed. The boy flicked back and forth through the Codex, pointing out spidery pictures of Earth and Moon and Sun, neat circles connected by spidery light-ray traces. “Remember, the Moon was thought to be a crystal sphere. What intrigued Leonardo was why the Moon wasn’t much brighter in Earth’s sky. If the Moon was a crystal sphere, perfectly reflective, it should have been as bright as the Sun.”
“Like Mirror.”
“Yes. So Leonardo argued the Moon must be covered in oceans.” He found a diagram showing a Moon coated with great out-of-scale choppy waves and bathed in spidery sunlight rays. “Leonardo said waves on the Moon’s oceans must deflect much of the reflected sunlight away from Earth. He thought the darker patches visible on the surface must mark great standing waves, or even storms, on the Moon.”
“He was wrong,” she said. “In Leonardo’s time, the Moon was a ball of rock. The dark areas were just lava sheets.”
“Yes, of course. But now,” Berge said eagerly, “the Moon is mostly covered by water. You see? And there are great storms, wave crests hundreds of kilometers long, that are visible from Earth — or would be, if anybody was left to see…”
They talked for hours.
When he left, she went to the door to wave him good-bye.
The Day was little advanced, the rake of sunlight still sparse on the ice, and Mirror still rode bright in the sky. Here was another strange forward echo of Leonardo’s, it struck her, though she preferred not to mention it to her already overexcited grandson: in these remote times, there were crystal spheres in orbit around the Earth. The difference was, people had put them there.
As she closed the door she heard the honking of geese, a great flock of them fleeing the excessive brightness of full Daylight.
Each Morning, as the Sun labored into the sky, there were storms. Thick fat clouds raced across the sky, and water gushed down, carving new rivulets and craters in the ancient soil and turning the ice at the rim of the Tycho pack into a thin, fragile layer of gray slush.
The storms persisted as Noon approached on that last Day, and she traveled with Berge to the phytomine celebration to be held on the lower slopes of Maginus.
They made their way past sprawling fields tilled by human and animal muscle, thin crops straining toward the sky, frost shelters laid open to the muggy heat. And as they traveled they joined streams of battered carts, all heading for Maginus. Xenia felt depressed by the people around her: the spindly adults, their hollow-eyed children — even the cattle and horses and mules were skinny and wheezing. The Moon soil was thin, and the people and animals were all, of course, slowly being poisoned besides.
Most people chose to shelter from the rain. But to Xenia it was a pleasure. Raindrops here were fat glimmering spheres the size of her thumb. They floated from the sky, gently flattened by the resistance of the thick air, and they fell on her head and back with soft, almost caressing impacts, and water clung to her flesh in great sheets and globes she must scrape off with her fingers. So long and slow had been their fall from the high clouds that the drops were often warm, and the air thick and humid and muggy. She liked to think of herself standing in the band of storms that circled the whole of the slow-turning Moon.
It reminded her of the day of Frank Paulis’s final triumph.
She remembered that first hour when it was possible to step outside the domes — the first hour when unprotected people could survive on the Moon, swathed as it was by air drawn up by the great mines that bore Paulis’s name — an hour that had come to pass thanks to Frank’s ingenuity, courage, determination, and downright unscrupulous dishonesty. Frank, doggedly, had lived to see it, and on that day the authorities let him out of house arrest, just briefly. They wouldn’t permit him to be the first to walk out of a dome without a mask — they couldn’t bring themselves to be as generous as that. But he was among the first. And that was, perhaps, enough. She remembered how he had stalked in the fresh air, squat and defiant, sniffing up great lungfuls of the air he had made, and how he had laughed as the rain trickled into his toothless mouth, fat lunar drops of it.
And, soon after that, he had died.
After that Xenia had left, with the Gaijin, for the stars.
When she returned home she found that thirteen hundred years of history had worn away, leaving the Earth a cloud-covered ruin, the Solar System threatened by interstellar war, the last humans struggling to survive on Mercury and the Moon. Nobody remembered her, or much of the past: It was as if this attenuated, unstable present was all there ever had been, all that would ever be. So she had shed her old identity, settled into the community here.
Thanks to her engineered biology, a gift of the futures she had visited, she had remained young, physically. Young enough to bear children, even. But now, despite the invisible engineering in her flesh, she was slowly dying, as was everybody, as was the Moon.
How strange that the inhabited Moon’s life had been as brief as her own: that her birth and death would span this small world’s, that its rocky bones would soon emerge through its skin of air and ocean, just as hers would push through her decaying flesh.
At last they approached Maginus.
Maginus was an old, eroded crater complex to the southeast of Tycho. Its ancient walls glimmered with crescent lakes and glaciers. Sheltered from the winds of Morning and Evening, Maginus was a center of life, and long before they reached the foothills, as the fat rain cleared, she saw the tops of giant trees looming over the horizon. She thought she saw creatures leaping between the tree branches. They may have been lemurs, or even bats; or perhaps they were kites wielded by ambitious children.
Berge showed delight as they crossed the many water courses, pointing out engineering features that had been anticipated by Leonardo: dams and bridges and canal diversions and so forth, some of them even constructed since the Failing. But Xenia took little comfort, oppressed as she was by the evidence of the fall of mankind. For example, they journeyed along a road made of lunar glass, flat as ice and utterly impervious to erosion, carved long ago into the regolith by vast space-borne engines. But they traveled this marvelously engineered highway in a cart that was wooden, and drawn by a spavined, thin-legged mule.