“You know, it’s a great day,” she said. “They’re making your dream come true.”
“My dream, hell.” He fetched himself another slug of sake, which he drank like beer. “They stole it from me. And they’re going inward. That’s what Nishizaki and the rest are considering now. I’ve seen their plans. Huge underground cities in the crust, big enough for thousands, even hundreds of thousands, all powered by thermal energy from the rocks. In fifty years you could have multiples of the Moon’s present population, burrowing away busily.” He glanced at his wristwatch, restless.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It wasn’t the fucking point.” He glared up at Earth’s scarred face. “If we dig ourselves into the ground, we won’t be able to see that. We’ll forget. Don’t you get it?”
But now there was activity around the drilling site. She stepped to the window, cupped her hands to exclude the room lights.
People were running, away from the center of the site.
There was a tremor. The building shuddered under her, languidly. A quake, on the still and silent Moon?
Frank was checking his watch. He punched the air and strode to the window. “Right on time. Hot damn.”
“Frank, what have you done?”
There was another tremor, more violent. A small Buddha statue was dislodged from its pedestal and fell gently to the carpeted floor. Xenia tried to keep her feet. It was like riding a rush hour train.
“Simple enough,” Frank said. “Just shaped charges, embedded in the casing. They punched holes straight through the bore wall into the surrounding rock, to let the water and sticky stuff flow right into the pipe and up—”
“A blowout. You arranged a blowout.”
“If I figured this right the interior of the whole fucking Moon is going to come gushing out of that hole. Like puncturing a balloon.” He took her arms. “Listen to me. We will be safe here. I figured it.”
“And the people down there, in the crater? Your managers and technicians? The children?”
“It’s a day they’ll tell their grandchildren about.” He shrugged, grinning, his forehead slick with sweat. “They’re going to lock me up anyhow. At least this way—”
But now there was an eruption from the center of the rig, a tower of liquid, rapidly freezing, that punched its way up through the rig itself, shattering the flimsy buildings covering the head. When the fountain reached high enough to catch the flat sunlight washing over the mountains, it seemed to burst into fire, crystals of ice shining in complex parabolic sheaves, before falling back to the ground.
Frank punched the air. “You know what that is? Kerogen. A tarry stuff you find in oil shales. It contains carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, potassium, chlorine, other elements… I couldn’t believe it when the lab boys told me what they found down there. Mariko says kerogen is so useful we might as well have found chicken soup in the rocks.” He cackled. “Chicken soup, from the primordial cloud. I won, Xenia. With this blowout I stopped them from building Bedrock City. I’m famous.”
“What about the Moon flowers?”
His face was hard. “Who the fuck cares? I’m a human, Xenia. I’m interested in human destiny, not a bunch of worthless plants we couldn’t even eat.” He waved a hand at the ice fountain. “Look out there, Xenia. I beat the future. I’ve no regrets. I’m a great man. I achieve great things.”
The ground around the demolished drill head began to crack, venting gas and ice crystals; and the deep, ancient richness of the Moon rained down on the people.
Frank Paulis whispered. “And what could be greater than this?”
She was in the Dark, flying, like one of her own seeds. She was surrounded by fragments of the shattered Land, and by her children.
But she could not speak to them, of course; unlike the Land, the Dark was empty of rock, and would not carry her thoughts.
It was a time of stabbing loneliness.
But it did not last long.
Already the cloud was being drawn together, collapsing into a new and greater Land that glowed beneath her, a glowing ocean of rock, a hundred times bigger than the small place she had come from.
And at the last, she saw the greatest comet of all tear itself from the heart of this Land, a ball of fire that lunged into the sky, receding rapidly into the unyielding Dark.
She fell toward that glowing ocean, her heart full of joy at the Merging of the Lands.
In the last moment of her life, she recalled the Giver.
She was the first, and the Giver birthed her. None of it would have come to be without the Giver, who fed the Land.
She wished she could express her love for him. She knew that was impossible.
She sensed, though, that he knew anyhow.
Chapter 21
Homecoming
After their journey to the stars, Madeleine and Ben returned to a silent Solar System.
Over a century had elapsed. They themselves had aged less than a year. It was now, astonishingly, the year 2240, an unimaginable, futuristic date. Madeleine had been braced for more historic drift, more cultural isolation.
Not for silence.
As the long weeks of their flight inward from the Saddle Point radius wore away, and the puddle of crowded light that was the inner system grew brighter ahead, they both grew increasingly apprehensive. At length, they were close enough to resolve images of Earth in the Ancestor ’s telescopes. They huddled together by their monitors.
What they saw was an Earth that was brilliant white.
Ice swept down from both poles, encroaching toward the equator. The shapes of the northern continents were barely visible under the huge frozen sheets. The colors of life, brown and green and blue, had been crowded into a narrow strip around the equator. Here and there, easily visible on the night side of the planet, Madeleine made out the spark of fires, of explosions. Gaijin ships orbited Earth, tracking from pole to pole, their ramscoops casting golden light that glimmered from the ice and the oceans, mapping and studying, still following their own immense, patient projects.
Madeleine and Ben were both stunned by this. They studied Earth for hours, barely speaking, skipping meals and sleep periods.
Ben, fearful for his wife, his people on Triton, grew silent, morbid, withdrawing from Madeleine. Madeleine found the loneliness hard to bear. When she slept her dreams were intense, populated by drifting alien artifacts.
The Gaijin flower-ship dropped them into orbit around Earth’s Moon.
Nemoto came to them, at last. She appeared as a third figure in the cramped, scuffed environment of Dreamtime Ancestor ’s Service Module, a digital ghost coalescing from a cloud of cubical pixels.
Her gaze lit on Madeleine. “Meacher. You’re back. You were expected. I have an assignment for you.” She smiled.
“I don’t believe you’re still alive,” Madeleine said. “You must be some kind of virtual simulation.”
“I don’t care what you think. Anyhow, you’ll never know.” Nemoto was small, shrunken, her face a leathery mask, as if with age she was devolving to some earlier proto-human form. She glanced around. “Where’s the FGB module?… Oh. ” Evidently she had just downloaded a summary of their mission from the virtual counterpart who had traveled with them. She glared. “You have to meddle, don’t you, Meacher?”