As its speed dwindled, the Soyuz dipped forward, and it started to slew sideways, as if skidding across an icy runway. The cloud of steam that had obscured the front rendezvous port cleared, and Arkady, for the first time, was able to see ahead.
And, he saw, there was something in his way.
It was a sheer cliff face; perhaps it was even the central mountain of the South Pole crater, or a foothill of it. So big, whatever it was, it filled half the universe.
Disappointment surged, overwhelming his fear.
He reached out to the laptop. He held his gloved finger over the destruct button he had configured.
He allowed himself a moment’s sweet regret at this misfortune, for it was a beautiful plan, and it had worked, all but this final detail.
He thought of Lusia, and Vitalik, and Geena.
Near enough.
He pushed the button, and he brought the light of the stars to the shadows of the Moon.
6
Watch the Moon.
It was as if the message ran around the battered planet.
Watch the Moon. The satellite shone down on its parent, as it always had; but now the air of Earth was murky with ash and smoke, its night side glowing bright with fires and volcanism, the infernal light of Earth bright enough to banish the Moon glow…
Watch the Moon.
That was what Henry had told Jane to do, in the last message she got from him, via NASA.
It was 4.00 a.m., nearly dawn, when she woke Jack. They dressed quickly, and went to stand in the middle of the lawn, at the rear of this rental house in Houston, that Henry had fixed up for them. Snow crunched under their feet: snow like Moon dust, snow in late Texas summer.
Jack walked silently, withdrawn. But that was okay. All he had seen in the last few weeks was going to take some silent time to take in, and she was determined he was going to get that time; even if she couldn’t give him anything else but that.
The weather was shot to pieces around the planet, but this August cold snap was unprecedented, it seemed. But the air was still laden with moisture, a damp ghost of summer humidity, so much clear ice had collected everywhere.
Ice whiskers had clustered together to make a carpet as thick as snow on the roads and structures. The drivers on the freeways were very cautious, and seemed to be baffled by such phenomena as ice on their windscreens. De-icer seemed unknown here; Jane felt a little contemptuous, like a Swede mocking British attempts to cope with a few measly inches of snow. The roads were gritted, but with what looked like beach sand. The bridges on the freeways were iced up, pretty deadly, and the traffic was crawling and scared. It was easy to skid as you came off the freeway around those right-angle turns.
She had thought they were safe when they arrived here, at the house Henry had set up for them. Well, maybe they were. But there were power outages that lasted days. The TV had images of plucky Houstoners loading frozen hamburgers onto their summer barbecues… News Lite, the cynics called it.
Anyhow she knew they would have to move soon, Henry’s protection notwithstanding. The Administration was preparing to remove ration privileges for aliens. But Jane knew where she would take Jack: north, into Canada, to the centre of the Shield. The most stable rocks in the continent…
It was a clear night, with only a trace of sunset pink staining the horizon. And the Moon, in the tall Texan sky, was almost full, a dish of light mottled by grey, just as it had always been.
She had brought a small telescope, a child’s toy. She lifted it now.
Jane looked to the upper left corner of the Moon, where Henry had told her he would be, at Aristarchus. It was impossible to comprehend that the Moon was a globe-shaped planet in the sky, that Henry was standing there, perhaps looking back at her.
She clutched Jack, hoping the sky stayed clear of clouds and ash.
Henry was walking on the surface of the Moon.
The Earth was low in the south, God’s blue eyeball in the sky, now lidded by darkness. Maybe Jane was up there, watching, thinking about him.
When he stood in the shadow of the rille wall, he could see stars.
He walked over the undulating ground, through quiet, in the soft rain of starlight.
Geena kept calling the Moon a dead world. She was wrong. It wasn’t dead. It was a world of rocks, of rock flowers and rock forests and rock colours, a subtle, still, Zen-like beauty that would take a lifetime to explore.
The Moon as a giant Zen rock garden. Blue Ishiguro would have enjoyed that thought.
It was true that the Moon was a quiet world. There wasn’t even the brush of wind, the crash of a remote wave. It was a quiet that had persisted for billions of years, since the end of the heavy bombardment that had shaped the landscape. Even the light here was old, the light of the stars that had taken centuries or millennia to reach here.
But there was change here. There was even weather.
There was frost, on the Moon.
The Moon had an atmosphere, of hydrogen, helium, neon and argon. It was so thin it was probably replenished by the solar wind. At night, the argon would freeze out. It sublimated quickly at dawn.
Now, walking in shadows disturbed only by milky blue Earth-light, here and there, he convinced himself he could see a sparkle, a glint of lunar ice…
He was encased in stars, surfing on rocky blue waves.
He could feel the regolith crunch beneath his feet, his weight crushing the floury structure constructed by a billion years of micrometeorite gardening. All that information, lost as soon as he touched it.
And now, there was no time left to decode it.
If Henry had got his math right, soon this place — like every site on the Moon — would be overwhelmed by weather.
Henry knew he should be anticipating the great events to come. If it worked — if — he would be giving humanity, perhaps, a whole new world.
If the Moon was the only safe world in the Solar System, because of the Moonseed hive at its core, humans were going to have to come here to live. Henry’s plan would — might — make that possible.
But Henry was a geologist. He might be creating a new Earth, but he was going to have to wreck the Moon to do it. For instance, the structure of the ice at the Pole, strata laid down over billions of years, was a record of the impact history of the inner Solar System — a unique record that was probably already lost, thanks to the nuke.
He would destroy the Moon, to save humanity. Grandiose bullshit.
Somehow, he had manoeuvred himself into a situation where the history of two worlds was resting on his shoulders. As if he was Jesus Christ himself.
But he had no pretensions; this was no part of the deal as far as his life plan was concerned.
Especially as Christ died for his mission, as he might have to now.
He checked the watch clumsily strapped to his dust-grimed sleeve.
Watch the Moon…
Jays Malone climbed up Mount Wilson to do just that. He came with Sixt Guth, who was not much younger than him, now grounded from the Space Station. Everybody was grounded now, it seemed.
The old observatory stood two thousand yards above Los Angeles. The city’s lights flowed in rectangular waves about the foot of the hill, washing out the horizon with a salmon-pink glow; but the sky above was crisp and cool and peppered with stars.
The opened dome curved over Jays’s head, a shell of ribbing and panels that looked like the inside of an oil tank. The dome, with its brass fixtures and giant gears, smelled vaguely of old concrete. The telescope itself was an open frame, vaguely cylindrical, looming in the dark.