Even now, nobody understood the Moonseed. But there were those who believed the Moonseed was not malevolent.

Look at the evidence. This hive thing crashes into a primordial Earth, that was probably too big anyhow. It creates a Moon, just big enough to kick up the geological stuff that enabled life to start up in the first place. Then, just when we’ve had time to get smart enough to survive it all — in fact, don’t forget, our intelligence, bringing the Moonseed to Earth, was the trigger for this happening — it takes Earth apart, gives us a tool kit to rebuild other worlds, and gives us a way to the stars…

This is no threat. The Moonseed is no Berserker. It’s a life-giver.

There were other unanswered questions.

Why had the destruction of Venus taken such a different course from Earth’s?

Why was Mercury spared? And Mars, come to that — after all, craft from Earth had landed on Mars before they reached Venus.

Maybe it was just accident. Or maybe it was design.

Or maybe the Moonseed, for all its power, was like plankton — the bottom of some cosmic food chain whose upper reaches humans couldn’t even glimpse.

Maybe. Maybe not. Nobody knew for sure. But as Earth receded in memory, there were more who were prepared to give the Moonseed the benefit of the doubt.

At a computer prompt, she prepared for her final burn. “Ready for Terminal Initiation.”

Copy that, Nadezhda.

One last time the thrusters fired, fat and full.

Coming up to your hundred yard limit.

“Copy that.”

She came to a dead stop, a hundred yards from the surface of Icarus. The asteroid’s complex, battered surface was like a wall in front of her. She felt no tug of gravity — Icarus’s G was a thousandth of the Moon’s — it would take her more than two minutes to fall in to the surface from here, compared to a few seconds on the Moon.

She was comfortable. The suit was quiet, warm, safe.

She blipped her cold-gas thrusters, and drifted forward a little more quickly. This wasn’t like coming in for a landing; it was more like approaching a cliff face which bulged gently out at her, its coal-like blackness oppressive.

She made out more detail, craters overlaid on craters down to the limit of visibility. She tweaked her trajectory until she was heading for the centre of a big crater, away from any sharp-edged walls or boulder fields.

Then she just let herself drift in, at a yard a second. If she used the thrusters any more she risked raising dust clouds that wouldn’t settle.

There were four little landing legs at the corners of her PMU frame; they popped out now, little spear-shaped penetrators designed to dig into the surface and hold her there.

The close horizon receded, and the cliff face turned into a wall that cut off half the universe.

She collided softly with Icarus.

The landing legs, throwing up dust, dug into the regolith with a grind that carried through the PMU structure. The dust hung about her.

So Nadezhda was stuck here, clinging to the wall inside her PMU frame, like a mountaineer on a rock face in the Lunar Apennines.

She turned on her helmet lamp. Impact glass glimmered before her.

Unexpectedly, wonder pricked her. Here was the primordial skin of Icarus, as old as the Solar System, just inches before her face. She reached out and pushed her gloved hand into the surface, a monkey paw probing.

The surface was thick with regolith: a fine rock flour, littered with glassy agglutinates, asteroid rock shattered by aeons of bombardment. Her fingers went in easily enough for a few inches — she could feel the stuff crunching under her pressure, as if she was digging into compacted snow — but then she came up against much more densely packed material, tamped down by the endless impacts.

She closed her fist and pulled out her hand. A cloud of dust came with it, gushing into her face like a hail of meteorites. She looked at the material she’d dug out. There were a few bigger grains here, she saw: it was breccia, bits of rock smashed up in multiple impacts, welded back together by impact glass. There was no gravity to speak of; the smallest movement sent the fragments drifting out of her palm.

She had to get on with her work, think about her checklist. But she allowed herself a moment to savour this triumph.

She was, after all, the first human to touch the surface of a whole new world since Neil Armstrong.

And the Moonseed was here: hardened and eternal, riding the winds that blow between the stars. And now a human had come to meet it, on equal terms.

She grinned at the dust. “We need to talk,” she said.

Nadezhda? We don’t copy.

“Never mind.”

She pushed her hand back into the pit she’d dug, and went to work.

AFTERWORD

Kent Joosten of the Solar System Exploration Division, NASA Johnson Space Center, was once again extremely generous in hosting my research at JSC and taking me through the modern mission studies which formed the basis of the lunar expedition featured here, and also reading drafts of the manuscript later; thanks also to Eric Brown for reading a draft. I’m indebted for assistance with the Edinburgh-based sections of this book to Dr Roger Scrutton, head of the Department of Geology and Geophysics, Edinburgh University; and to Peter Willdridge, Emergency Planning Officer, Buckinghamshire.

NASA’s Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, annotated transcripts of the Apollo missions, is available online and was an invaluable source on the astronauts” experience of the Moon. I learned about lunar geology and resources from Paul Spudis’s Once and Future Moon (1996), The Lunar Source Book ed. G.H. Heiken (1991), Lunar Bases and Space Activities in the 21st Century ed. W. Mendell (1986) and other references. The unlikely art of harenodynamics was suggested by Krafft Ehricke in a paper printed in Lunar Bases. Terraforming the Moon has been explored by Martyn Fogg in his masterly Terraforming (1995) and by earlier authors; I’m indebted to Martyn for his blunt review of an early draft of my terraforming scenario here.

Any errors are, of course, all mine.

It seems we really could get back to the Moon for under two billion dollars. The Moonseed may not be waiting for us — but a sister world is.

Stephen Baxter

Great Missenden

March 1998