“Feels like a mobile-home park,” she said.
“Yeah,” Dan said. He was puffing from the exertion of crawling through the tubes. “Except it will be an even worse place to stay. Remember, you’ll never be able to open a window. The power will come from solar cells. The engineers are looking at simple roll-up sheets you could spread across acres of the lunar surface or drape from a crater wall, whatever. It should be possible to move them around as the lunar day progresses. To survive the two-week nights they say they will need radioisotope thermonuclear generators.”
“More nukes, Dan?”
He shrugged. “In the short term there isn’t much choice. We’re constrained by where the kids came down — in Tycho, one of the roughest places on the Moon. The old NASA plans always showed astronauts colonizing a polar crater, somewhere you could catch the sun all lunar day, and where there would be ice to mine. As it is we’re going to have to haul up everything, every ounce of consumable. Initially, anyhow.”
He led her into the next hangarlike room. Here there was a single construction: a dome of some orange fabric, inflated, with fat tubes running around its exterior. It was maybe eight feet across, five high. Maura saw a small camera-laden robot working its way into the dome through what looked like an extendable airlock.
“This is stage two,” Dan said, “a Constructable Habitat Concept Design. You have your dome, inflated from the inside, with self-deploying columns for strength, and a spiral staircase down the center.”
“What’s the fabric?”
“Beta cloth. What they’ve been making spacesuits out of since Apollo 11. NASA is a somewhat conservative organization. This dome will contain a partially self-contained ecology based on algae. The medics here are looking at electrical muscle and bone stimulation to counteract the low-gravity effects. And regolith mining will get under way. The Moon isn’t as rich as Malenfant’s C-type asteroid, and it is mostly as dry as a bone. But you can make a reasonable concrete from the dust. And the rocks are forty percent oxygen by weight, and there is silicon to make glass, fiberglass, and polymers; aluminium, magnesium, and titanium for reflective coatings and machinery and cabling; chromium and manganese for alloys—”
“Living off the land, on the Moon.”
“That’s the idea. They are working to stay a long time, Maura.”
He led her to a coffee machine. The sludge-brown drink was free, but bad. The lack of fresh coffee was one of the consequences of the world trade minicollapse: something small but annoying, the removal of something she had always taken for granted, a sign of more bad news to come.
Maura asked him how come the NASA people were reacting so badly. “If anybody on the planet is trained to think about cosmic issues, to think out of the box of the here and now, it’s surely NASA.”
“Hell, Maura, it’s not as simple as that. NASA has lacked self-confidence for decades anyhow. Reid Malenfant drove them all crazy. Here was a guy who NASA wouldn’t even hire, for God’s sake, and he just went out there and did it ahead of them. Look at this.” He dug into a pocket and pulled out a cartoon printed off some online source: bubble-helmeted NASA astronauts in a giant, glittering spacecraft being beaten to the Moon by a bunch of raggedy-ass kids in a wooden cart. What s the big deal, guys?
Dan was grinning.
“You shouldn’t look like you enjoy it so much, Dan. Bad for relations.”
“Sorry.”
“So is that it? Hurt pride?”
“Maybe that’s a rational response,” Dan said. “The Blue kids, after all, have to operate within the laws of physics. So the solution they found to space travel must be out there somewhere. How come they got so smart, just sailing up to the Moon like that out of a nuclear explosion, for God’s sake, while we stayed dumb, still flying our Nazi-scientist rockets after decades and terabucks? And besides…”
“What?”
“Rocket scientists or not, the people here are only human, Maura. Some of them have Blue kids too… The good thing is that these NASA types have been dreaming of this, running experiments and pilot plans and paper studies, for decades now. When the call did come they were able to hit the ground running. And they are preparing to be up there a long time.” He eyed her. “That’s the plan, isn’t it, Maura?”
“It’s possible. Nobody knows. We don’t know what needs the children have. They may be genius prodigies at physics and math, but what do they know about keeping themselves alive on the Moon? Our best option may be to offer help.”
Dan looked skeptical. “So that’s our strategy? We imprison them, we nuke them, and now we offer them green vegetables?”
“We have to try to establish some kind of relationship. A dialogue. All we can do is wait it out.”
“As long as it takes?”
“As long as it takes.”
“Is it true they’re sending messages? The children, I mean.”
Maura kept stony-faced.
“Okay, okay,” Dan said, irritated, and he walked on, bulky, sweating.
They walked on to other test sites and seminar rooms and training stations — more elements of this slowly converging lunar outpost — inspecting, planning, questioning.
Reid Malenfant:
There was an instant of blue electric light, a moment of exquisite, nerve-rending pain. Malenfant kept his grip on Emma and Cornelius, focused on the hard physical reality of their suited flesh.
The blue faded.
And there was a burst of light, a wash that diminished from white to yellow to orange to dull red — a pause, as if recovering breath — and then a new glissando back up the spectrum to glaring hot yellow-white.
Then it happened again, a soundless pulse of white light that diminished to orange-red, then clambered back to brilliance once more.
And again, faster this time — and again and again, the flapping wings of light now battering at Malenfant so rapidly they merged into a strobe-effect blizzard.
The warning indicators on his suit HUD started to turn amber, then red. “Hold Emma.” He pulled Emma and Cornelius closer to him, gathered them in a circle so their faceplates were almost touching, their backs turned to the brutal waves of brilliance, the flickering light shimmering from their visors.
“Cornelius.” Malenfant found himself shouting, though the light storm was utterly silent. “Can you hear me?”
“Tell me what you see.”
Malenfant tried to describe the pulsating sky. As he did so the clatter of white-red-white pulses slowed, briefly, and the pumping of the sky became almost languid, each cycle lasting maybe three or four seconds. But then, without warning, the cycling accelerated again, and the dying skies blurred into a wash of fierce light.
“Cosmologies,” Cornelius whispered. “Phoenix universes, each one rebounding into another, which expands and collapses in turn. Each one destroyed so that the next one, its single progeny, can be born. And the laws of physics get shaken around every time we come out of a unified-force singularity.”
“A what?”
“A Big Bang. Or the singularity at the heart of a black hole. The two ways a universe can give birth to another… Black holes are the key, Malenfant. A universe that cannot make black holes can have only one daughter, produced by a Crunch. A universe that can make black holes, like ours, can have many daughters: baby universes connected to the mother by spacetime umbilicals through the singularities at the center of black holes. Like a miniature Big Crunch at the center of every hole. And that’s where cosmic evolution really takes off… We’re privileged, Malenfant.”