And now, it appeared, it had all been for nothing.
“Frank, I’m sorry.”
He seemed puzzled. “Huh? Why?”
“If comets are the only source of volatiles—”
“Yesterday I thought they were. But look at this.” He had tapped his softscreen and was talking fast, excited, enthusiastic, his mind evidently racing. “There’s a woman here who thinks there are all the volatiles you could want, a hundred times over, right here on the Moon. Can you believe that?”
“That’s impossible. Everyone knows the Moon is dry as a bone.”
He had smiled. “That’s what everyone thinks. I want you to find this woman for me. The author of the paper.”
“Frank—”
“And find out about mining.”
“Mining?”
“The deeper the better.” His grin widened. “How would you like a journey to the center of the Moon, baby?”
And that was how she had first learned about Frank’s new project, his new obsession, his latest way to fix the future.
Ten seconds. Five. Three, two, one.
Stillness, for a fraction of a second. Then there was a clatter of explosive bolts, a muffled bang.
Xenia was ascending as if in some crowded elevator, pressed back in her bucket seat by maybe a full g. Beyond her window, stray dust streaked away across the pad glass, heaping up against fuel trucks and pipelines.
But then the shuttle swiveled sharply, twisting her around through a brisk ninety degrees. She heard people gasp, children laugh. The shuttle twisted again, and again, its attitude thrusters banging. This lunar shuttle was small, light, crude. Like the old Apollo landers, it had a single fixed rocket engine that was driving the ascent, and it was fitted with attitude control jets at every corner to turn it and control its trajectory. Just point, twist, squirt, as if she were a cartoon character carried into the air by hanging onto an out-of-control water hose.
Three hundred meters high the shuttle swiveled again, and she found she was pitched forward, looking down at the lunar surface, over which she skimmed. They were rising out of lunar night, and the shadowed land was dark, lit here and there by the lights of human installations, captured stars on dark rock. She felt as if she were falling, as if the ascent engine was going to drive her straight down into the unforgiving rocks. Sunrise. Wham.
It was not like Earth’s slow-fade dawn; the limb of the Sun just pushed above the Moon’s rocky horizon, instantly banishing the stars into the darkness of a black sky. Light spilled on the unfolding landscape below, fingers of light interspersed with inky black shadows hundreds of kilometers long, the deeper craters still pools of darkness. The Moon could never be called beautiful — it was too damaged for that — but it had a compelling wildness.
But everywhere she could see the work of humans: the unmistakable tracks of tractors, smooth lines snaking over the regolith, and occasional orange tents that marked the position of emergency supply dumps, all of it overlaid by the glittering silver wires of mass driver rails.
The shuttle climbed farther. The Lunar Japanese around her applauded the smooth launch.
Now Earth rose. It looked as blue and beautiful as when she and Frank had left for the stars. But it had changed, of course. Even from here, she could see Gaijin flower-ships circling the planet, the giant ramscoops of the alien craft visible as tiny discs. She felt a stab of antique resentment at those powerful, silent visitors who had watched as humanity tore itself apart.
And now, as the shuttle tilted and settled into its two-hour orbit around the Moon, Xenia saw a sight she knew no human had ever seen before today:
Comet rise, over the Moon.
The coma, a diffuse mass of gas and fine particles, was a ball as big as the Earth, so close now it walled off half the sky, a glare of lacy, diffuse light. Massive clumps in the coma, backlit, cast shadows across the smoky gases, straight lines thousands of kilometers long radiating at her. The comet was coming out of the Sun, straight toward the Moon at seventy thousand kilometers an hour. She looked for the nucleus, a billion-ton ball of ice and rock. But it was too small and remote, even now, a few minutes from impact. And the tail was invisible from here, fleeing behind her, running ahead of the comet and stretching far beyond the Moon, reaching halfway to Mars in fact.
Suddenly there was light all around the shuttle. The little ship had plunged inside the coma. It was like being inside a diffuse, luminous fog.
“Vileekee bokh.”
Frank leaned across her, trying to see. He was seventy years old, physiological; his nose was a misshapen mass of flesh. He was a small, stocky man, with thick legs and big prizefighter muscles built for Earth’s gravity, so that he always looked like some restless, half-evolved ape alongside the tall, slim Lunar Japanese.
“Eta prikrasna,” Xenia murmured.
“Beautiful. Yeah. How about that: we’re the last off the Moon.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “There’s a handful of old nuts who won’t move, no matter what.”
“Even for a comet?”
“Takomi. He’s still there, for one,” she said.
“Who?”
“He’s notorious.”
“I don’t read the funny papers,” Frank snapped.
“Takomi is the hermit out in the ruins of Edo, on Farside. Evidently he lives off the land. He won’t even respond to radio calls.”
Frank frowned. “This is the fucking Moon. How does he live off the land? By sucking oxygen out of the rock?…”
The light changed. There was a soft Fourth-of-July gasp from the people crammed into the shuttle.
The comet had struck the Moon.
A dome of blinding white light rose like a new Sun from the surface of the Moon: comet material turned to plasma, mixed with shattered rock. Xenia thought she could see a wave passing through the Moon’s rocky hide: a sluggish ripple in rock turned to powder, gathering and slowing.
Now, spreading out over the Moon’s dusty gray surface, she saw a faint wash of light. It seemed to pool in the deeper maria and craters, flowing down the contours of the land like a morning mist on Earth. It was air: gases from the shattered comet, an evanescent atmosphere pooling on the Moon.
And, in a deep, shadowed crater, at the ghostly touch of the air, she saw light flare.
It was only a hint, a momentary splinter at the corner of her eye. She craned to see. Perhaps there was a denser knot of smoke or gas, there on the floor of the crater; perhaps there was a streak, a kind of contrail, reaching out through the temporary comet atmosphere.
It must be some by-product of the impact. But it looked as if somebody had launched a rocket from the surface of the Moon.
Already the contrail had dispersed in the thin, billowing comet air.
People were applauding again, at the beauty of the spectacle, with relief at being alive. Frank wasn’t even watching.
It was only after they landed that it was announced that the comet nucleus had landed plumb on top of the Fracastorius Crater dome.
Fracastorius, on the rim of the Sea of Nectar, was one of the largest settlements away from the primary Copernicus-Landsberg-Kepler triangle. The Lunar Japanese grieved. The loss of life was small, but the economic and social damage huge — perhaps unrecoverable, in these straitened times, as the Moon’s people tried to adapt to life without their centuries-old umbilical to Earth’s rich resources.
Frank Paulis seemed unconcerned. He got back to work, even before the shuttle landed. And he expected Xenia to do the same.