Such contrasts were unendingly startling to a time-stranded traveler like Xenia. But, she thought with a grisly irony, all the technology around them would have been more than familiar to Berge’s hero, Leonardo. There were gadgets of levers and pulleys and gears, their wooden teeth constantly stripped; there were turnbuckles, devices to help erect cathedrals of Moon concrete; there had even been pathetic lunar wars fought with catapults and crossbows, “artillery” capable of throwing lumps of rock a few kilometers.
But once people had dug mines that reached the heart of the Moon. The people today knew this was so, else they could not exist here. She knew it was true, for she remembered it.
As they neared the phytomine, the streams of traffic converged to a great confluence of people and animals. There was a swarm of reunions of friends and family, and a rich human noise carried on the thick air.
When the crowds grew too dense, Xenia and Berge abandoned their wagon and walked. Berge, with unconscious generosity, supported her with a hand clasped about her arm, guiding her through this human maelstrom.
Children darted around her feet, so fast she found it impossible to believe she could ever have been so young, so rapid, so compact, and she felt a mask of old-woman irritability settle on her. But many of the children were, at age seven or eight or nine, already taller than she was, girls with languid eyes and the delicate posture of giraffes. The one constant of human evolution on the Moon was how the children stretched out, ever more languorous, in the gentle gravity. But in later life they paid a heavy price in brittle, calcium-starved bones.
All Berge wanted to talk about was Leonardo da Vinci.
“Leonardo was trying to figure out the cycles of the Earth. For instance, how water could be restored to the mountaintops. Listen to this.” He fumbled, one-handed, with his dog-eared manuscript. “ ‘We may say that the Earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil; its bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the mountains; its cartilage is the tufa stone; its blood the veins of its waters… And the vital heat of the world is fire which is spread throughout the Earth; and the dwelling place of the spirit of growth is in the fires, which in divers parts of the Earth are breathed out in baths and sulphur mines…’ You understand what he’s saying? He was trying to explain the Earth’s cycles by analogy with the systems of the human body.”
“He was wrong.”
“But he was more right than wrong, Grandmother! Don’t you see? This was centuries before geology was formalized, before matter and energy cycles would be understood. Leonardo had gotten the right idea, from somewhere. He just didn’t have the intellectual infrastructure to express it…”
And so on. None of it was of much interest to Xenia. As they walked it seemed to her that his weight was the heavier, as if she, the foolish old woman, was constrained to support him, the young buck. It was evident his sickliness was advancing fast — and it seemed that others around them noticed it too, and separated around them, a sea of unwilling sympathy.
At last they reached the plantation itself. They had to join queues, more or less orderly. There was noise, chatter, a sense of excitement. For many people, such visits were the peak of each slow lunar Day.
Separated from the people by a row of wooden stakes and a few meters of bare soil was a sea of growing green. The vegetation was predominantly mustard plants. Chosen for their bulk and fast growth, all of these plants had grown from seed or shoots since the last lunar Dawn. The plants themselves grew thick, their feathery leaves bright. But many of the leaves were sickly, already yellowing.
The fence was supervised by an unsmiling attendant, who wore — to show the people their sacrifice had a genuine goal — artifacts of unimaginable value: earrings and brooches and bracelets of pure copper and nickel and bronze.
The attendant told them, in a sullen prepared speech, that the Maginus mine was the most famous and exotic of all the phytomines: for here gold itself was mined, still the most compelling of all metals. These mustard plants grew in soil in which gold, dissolved out of the base rock by ammonium thiocyanate, could be found at a concentration of four parts per million. But when the plants were harvested and burned, their ash contained four hundred parts per million of gold, drawn out of the soil by the plants during their brief lives.
The phytomines, where metals were slowly concentrated by living things, were perhaps the Moon’s most important remaining industry.
As Frank Paulis had understood centuries ago, lunar soil was sparse and ungenerous. And yet, now that Earth was wrecked, now that the spaceships no longer called, the Moon was all the people had.
The people of the Moon had neither the means nor the will to rip up the top hundred meters of their world to find the precious metals they needed. Drained of strength and tools, they had to be more subtle.
Hence the phytomines.
The technology was old — older than the human Moon, older than spaceflight itself. The Vikings, marauders of Earth’s dark age, would mine their iron from “bog ore,” iron-rich stony nodules deposited near the surface of bogs by bacteria that had flourished there: miniature miners, not even visible to the Vikings, who burned their little corpses to make their nails and swords and pans and cauldrons.
And so it went, across this battered, parched little planet, a hierarchy of bacteria and plants and insects and animals and birds collecting gold and silver and nickel and copper and bronze, their evanescent bodies comprising a slow, merging trickle of scattered molecules stored in leaves and flesh and bones, all for the benefit of that future generation who must someday save the Moon.
Berge and Xenia, solemnly, took ritual scraps of mustard-plant leaf on their tongues, swallowed ceremonially. With her age-furred tongue she could barely taste the mustard’s sharpness. There were no drawn-back frost covers here because these poor mustard plants would not survive to the Sunset: They died within a lunar Day, from poisoning by the cyanide.
Berge met friends and melted into the crowds.
Xenia returned home alone, brooding.
She found that her family of seals had lumbered out of the ocean and onto the shore. These were constant visitors. During the warmth of Noon they would bask for hours, males and females and children draped over each other in casual abandon, so long that the patch of regolith they inhabited became sodden and stinking with their droppings. The seals, uniquely among the creatures from Earth, had not adapted in any apparent way to the lunar conditions. In the flimsy gravity they could surely perform somersaults with those flippers of theirs. But they chose not to; instead they basked, as their ancestors had on far-remote Arctic beaches.
Xenia didn’t know why this was so. Perhaps the seals were, simply, wiser than struggling, dreaming humans.
The long Afternoon sank into its mellow warmth. The low sunlight diffused, yellow-red, to the very top of the tall sky.
Earth was clearly visible, wrapped in yellow clouds — clouds of dust and bits of rock and vaporized ocean thrown up there by the great impact a hundred years back. The scientists used to say it would take centuries to disperse the clouds. Now, nobody so much as looked at Earth, as if, now that it could no longer succor its blue satellite, the planet had become unmentionable, its huge wounds somehow impolite. But Xenia could make out a dim cloud of green, swathing the Earth: It was an orbiting forest, Trees that had survived the collision, still drawing their sustenance from the curdled air with superconductor roots.