Landsberg, a giant machine, had to be constantly run, managed, maintained. Landsberg was no long-term solution. The various recycling processes were extraordinarily efficient — they had gotten to the level of counting molecules — but there were always losses; the laws of thermodynamics saw to that. And there was no way to make good those losses.
It didn’t feel like a dying world. In fact it was beginning to feel like home to her, this small, delicate, slow-motion world. But the human Moon was, slowly but surely, running down. Already some of the smaller habitations had been abandoned; smaller ecospheres had been too expensive. There was rationing. Fewer children were being born than a generation ago, as humanity huddled in the remaining, shriveling lunar bubbles.
And there was nowhere else to go.
Xenia had an intuition about the rightness of Frank’s vision, whatever his methods. At least he was fighting back: trying to find a way for humans to survive, here in the system that had birthed them. Somebody had to. It seemed clear that the aliens, the all-powerful Gaijin, weren’t here to help; they were standing by in their silent ships, witnessing as human history unfolded and Earth fell apart.
If humans couldn’t figure out how to save themselves soon, they might not have another chance.
And if Frank could make a little profit along the way to achieving that goal, she wasn’t about to begrudge him.
Well, Frank convinced enough people to get together his seedcorn investment; jubilantly, he went to work.
But getting the money turned out to be the easy part.
There never had been a true mining industry here on the Moon. All anybody had ever done was strip-mine the regolith, the shattered and desiccated outer layers of the Moon, already pulverized by meteorites and so not requiring crushing and grinding. And nobody had attempted — save for occasional science surveys — to dig any deeper than a few tens of meters.
So Frank and Xenia were forced to start from scratch, inventing afresh not just an industrial process but the human roles that went with it. They were going to need a petrophysicist and a geological engineer to figure out the most likely places they would find their imagined reservoirs of volatiles; they needed reservoir engineers and drilling engineers and production engineers for the brute work of the borehole itself; they needed construction engineers for the surface operations and support. And so on. They had to figure out job descriptions, and recruit and train to fill them as best they could.
All the equipment had to be reinvented. There was no air to convect away heat, so their equipment needed huge radiator fins. Even beneficiation — concentrating ungraded material into higher-quality ore — was difficult, as they couldn’t use traditional methods like froth flotation and gravity concentration; they had to experiment with methods based on electrostatic forces. There was of course no water — a paradox, for it turned out that most mining techniques refined over centuries on Earth depended highly on the use of water, for cooling, lubrication, the movement and separation of materials, and the solution and precipitation of metals. It was circular, a cruel trap.
They hit more problems as soon as they started to trial heavy equipment in the ultrahard vacuum that coated the Moon.
Friction was a killer. In an atmosphere, every surface accreted a thin layer of water vapor and oxides that reduced drag. But that didn’t apply here. They even suffered vacuum welds. Not only that, the ubiquitous dust — the glass-sharp remains of ancient, shattered rocks — stuck to everything it could, scouring and abrading. Stuff wore out fast on the silent surface of the Moon.
But they persisted, solving the problems, finding old references to how it had been done in the past, when the Lunar Japanese had worked more freely beyond their domed cities. They learned to build in a modular fashion, with parts that could be replaced easily by someone in a space suit. They learned to cover all their working joints with sleeves of a flexible plastic, to keep out the dust. After much experimentation they settled on a lubricant approach, coating their working surfaces with a substance the Lunar Japanese engineers called quasiglass, hard and dense and very smooth; conventional lubricants just boiled or froze off.
The work soon became all-absorbing, and Xenia found herself immersed.
The Lunar Japanese, after generations, had become used to their domes. It was hard for them even to imagine a Moon without roofs. But once committed to the project, they learned fast and were endlessly, patiently inventive in resolving problems. And it seemed to Xenia a remarkably short time from inception to the day Frank told her he had chosen his bore site.
“The widest, deepest impact crater in the fucking Solar System,” he boasted. “Nine kilometers below the datum level, all of thirteen kilometers below the rim wall peaks. Hell, just by standing at the base of that thing we’d be halfway to the core already. And the best of it is, we can buy it. Nobody has lived there since they cleaned out the last of the cold-trap ice…”
He was talking about the South Pole of the Moon.
Encased in a spiderweb pressure suit, Xenia stepped out of the hopper.
The Moon’s pole was a place of shadows. The horn of crescent Earth poked above one horizon, gaunt and ice-pale. Standing at the base of the crater called Amundsen, Xenia could actually see the Sun, a sliver of light poking through a gap in the enclosing rim mountains, casting long, stark shadows over the colorless, broken ground. She knew that if she stayed here for a monththe Moon’s glacial rotation would sweep that solar searchlight around the horizon. But the light was always flat and stark, like an endless dawn or sunset.
And at the center of Amundsen, Frank’s complex — ugly, busy, full of people — sprawled in a splash of reflected light.
Xenia had never walked on the Moon’s surface before, not once. Very few people did. Nobody was importing tungsten, and it was too precious to use on suits for sightseeing. The waste of water and air incurred in donning and doffing pressure suits was unacceptably high, and so on. On the Moon of 2190, people clung to their domed bubbles, riding sealed cars or crawling through tunnels, while the true Moon beyond their windows was as inaccessible as it had been before Apollo.
That thought — the closeness of the limits — chilled Xenia, somehow even more than the collapse of Earth. It reinforced her determination to stick with Frank, whatever her doubts about his objectives and methods.
Here came Frank in his space suit, Lunar Japanese spiderweb painted with a gaudy Stars and Stripes. “I wondered where you were,” he said.
“There was a lot of paperwork, last-minute permissions—”
“You might have missed the show.” He was edgy, nervous, restless; his gaze, inside his gold-tinted visor, swept over the desolate landscape. “Come see the rig.”
Together they loped toward the center of the complex, past Frank’s perimeter of security guards.
New Dallas, Frank’s Roughneck boomtown, was a crude cluster of buildings put together adobe-style from lunar concrete blocks. It was actually bright here, the sunlight deflected into the crater by heliostats, giant mirrors perched on the rim mountains or on impossibly tall gantries. The ’stats worked like giant floodlights, giving the town, incongruously, the feel of a floodlit sports stadium. The primary power came from sunlight too, solar panels that Frank had had plastered over the peaks of the rim mountains.
She could recognize shops, warehouses, dormitories, mess halls; there was a motor pool, with hoppers and tractors and heavy machinery clustered around fuel tanks. The inhabited buildings had been covered over for radiation-proofing by a few meters of regolith. And there was Frank’s geothermal plant, ready for operation: boxy buildings linked by fat, twisting conduits.