Frank rubbed his hands. “It’s wonderful. Like the old days. Engineers overcoming obstacles, building things.” He seemed oddly nervous; he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“And,” she said, “thanks to all this problem solving, we got through the mantle.”
“Hell, yes, we got through it. You’ve been away from the project too long, babe.” He took her hands. Squat in his suit, his face invisible, he was still, unmistakably, Frank J. Paulis. “And now, it’s our time.” Without hesitation — he never hesitated — he stepped to the lip of the delicate metal bridge.
She walked with him, a single step. A stitched safety harness, suspended from pulleys above, impeded her.
“Will you follow me?” he asked.
She took a breath. “I’ve always followed you.”
“Then come.”
Hand in hand, they jumped off the bridge.
Slow as a snowflake, tugged by gravity, Xenia fell toward the heart of the Moon. The loose harness dragged gently at her shoulders and crotch, slowing her fall. She was guided by a couple of spiderweb cables, tautly threaded down the axis of the shaft; through her suit’s fabric she could hear the hiss of the pulleys.
There was nothing beneath her feet save a diminishing tunnel of light. Xenia could hear her heart pound. Frank was laughing.
The depth markers on the wall were already rising up past her, mapping her acceleration. But she was suspended here, in the vacuum, as if she were in orbit; she had no sense of speed, no vertigo from the depths beneath her.
Their speed picked up quickly. In seconds, it seemed, they had already passed through the fine regolith layers, the Moon’s pulverized outer skin, and they were sailing down through the megaregolith. Giant chunks of deeply shattered rock crowded against the glassy, transparent tunnel walls like the corpses of buried animals.
The material beyond the walls turned smooth and gray now. This was lunar bedrock, anorthosite, buried beyond even the probings and pulverizing of the great impactors. Unlike Earth, there would be no fossils here, she knew, no remnants of life in these deep levels; only a smooth gradation of minerals, processed by the slow workings of geology. In some places there were side shafts dug away from the main exploratory bore. They led to stopes, lodes of magnesium-rich rocks extruded from the Moon’s frozen interior, which were now being mined out by Frank’s industry partners. She saw the workings as complex blurs, hurrying upward as she fell, gone like dream visions.
Despite the gathering warmth of the tunnel, despite her own acceleration, she had a sense of cold, of age and stillness.
They dropped through a surprisingly sharp transition into a new realm, where the rock on the other side of the walls glowed of its own internal light. It was a dull gray-red, like a cooling lava on Earth.
“The mantle of the Moon,” Frank whispered, gripping her hands. “Basalt. Up here it ain’t so bad. But further down the rock is so soft it pulls like taffy when you try to drill it. A thousand kilometers of mush, a pain in the ass.”
They passed a place where the glass walls were marked with an engraving; stylized flowers with huge lunar petals. This was where a technician had been killed in an implosion. The little memorial shot upward and was lost in the light. Frank didn’t comment.
The rock was now glowing a bright cherry-pink, rushing upward past them. It was like dropping through some immense glass tube full of fluorescing gas. Xenia sensed the heat, despite her suit’s insulation and the refrigeration of the tunnel.
Falling, falling.
Thick conduits surrounded them now, crowding the tunnel, flipping from bracket to bracket. The conduits carried water, bearing the Moon’s deep heat to hydrothermal plants on the surface. She was becoming dazzled by the pink-white glare of the rocks.
The harness tugged at her sharply, slowing her. Looking down along the forest of conduits, she could see that they were approaching a terminus, a platform of some dull, opaque ceramic that plugged the tunnel.
“End of the line,” Frank said. “Down below there’s only the downhole tools and the casing machine and other junk… Do you know where you are? Xenia, we’re more than a thousand kilometers deep, two-thirds of the way to the center of the Moon.”
The pulleys gripped harder and they slowed, drifting to a halt a meter above the platform. With Frank’s help she loosened her harness and spilled easily to the platform itself, landing on her feet, as if after a sky dive.
She glanced at her chronometer patch. The fall had taken twenty minutes.
She got her balance and looked around. They were alone here.
The platform was crowded with science equipment: anonymous gray boxes linked by cables to softscreens and batteries. Sensors and probes, wrapped in water-cooling jackets, were plugged into ports in the walls. She could see data collected from the lunar material flickering over the softscreens, measurements of porosity and permeability, data from gas meters and pressure gauges and dynamometers and gravimeters. There was evidence of work here: small inflatable shelters; spare backpacks; notepads; even, incongruously, a coffee cup. Human traces, here at the heart of the Moon.
She walked to the walls. Her steps were light; she was almost floating. There was rock, pure and unmarked, all around her, beyond the windowlike walls, glowing pink.
“The deep interior of the Moon,” Frank said, joining her. He ran his gloved hands over the glass. “What the rock hounds call primitive material, left over from the Solar System’s formation. Never melted and differentiated like the mantle, never bombarded like the surface. Untouched since the Moon budded off of Earth itself.”
“I feel light as a feather,” she said. And so she did; she felt as if she were going to float back up the borehole like a soap bubble.
Frank glared up into the tunnel above them, and concentric light rings glimmered in his faceplate. “All that rock up there doesn’t pull at us. It might as well be cloud, rocky cloud, hundreds of kilometers of it.”
“I suppose, at the center itself, you would be weightless.”
“I guess.”
On one low bench stood a glass beaker, covered by clear plastic film. She picked it up; she could barely feel it, dwarfed within her thick, inflexible gloves. It held a liquid that sloshed in the gentle gravity. The liquid was murky brown, not quite transparent.
Frank was grinning. Immediately she understood.
“I wish you could drink it,” he said. “I wish we could drink a toast. You know what that is? It’s water. Moon water, water from the lunar rocks.” He took the beaker and turned around in a slow, ponderous dance. “It’s all around us, just as Mariko predicted: a fucking ocean of it. Wadsleyite and majorite with three percent water by weight… Incredible. We did it, babe.”
“Frank. You were right. I had no idea.”
“I sat on the results. I wanted you to be the first to see this. To see my…” He couldn’t find the word.
“Affirmation,” she said gently. “This is your affirmation.”
“Yeah. I’m a hero.”
It was true, she knew.
It was going to work out just as Frank had projected. As soon as the implications of the find became apparent — that there really were oceans down here, buried inside the Moon — the imaginations of the Lunar Japanese would be fast to follow Frank’s vision. This, after all, wasn’t a simple matter of plugging holes in the environment-support system loops. There was surely enough resource here, just as Frank said, to future-proof the Moon. And perhaps this would be a pivot of human history, a moment when humanity’s long decline was halted and mankind found a place to live in a system that was no longer theirs.
Not for the first time Xenia recognized Frank’s brutal wisdom in his dealings with people: to bulldoze them as far as he had to until they couldn’t help but agree with him.