Nor were they afraid of the dark, here in the deep, deep bowels of the world. Which was fortunate, because dark it was, and dark it would remain. Thousands of kilometers long, the winding tunnel was wide enough to swallow any conventional flashlight beam, and this dig was too transient to bother installing the usual bright track lighting. So Conrad and Xmary, Bell and the others carried “rock burner” lamps—multispectral lasers which cast white spots whose apparent size and brightness was independent of range. Thirty-six degrees of arc—no more, no less. To accomplish this, the beam power could ratchet all the way up to fifty kilowatts—which at short range was enough to vaporize human flesh, to melt most ordinary metals, to discolor exposed stone. Rock burner, yes. The devices were smart and accidents were correspondingly rare, but the name served to remind its wielders what a powerful and dangerous piece of equipment it really was.
And by the light and shadows of these bright, bright lamps, playing over the stern of the kilometers-distant bore, they watched a neuble fall from the bore’s mechanical anus and settle—under the influence of straining gravity lasers—to the tunnel floor.
WHUMP. The ground rippled at the impact, and dimpled impressively despite the grasers’ carrying fully 99.999% of the weight.
And that was that. The last neuble. The thundering machine—the last of its kind still operating—rumbled to a halt.
The moon lay silent for the first time in two hundred years. In the one hundred and fifty-first decade of the Queendom of Sol, crushing operations on the world of Luna had just officially ended. Or would later today, when this tunnel was collapsed.
HUZZAH! said the scrolling marquee across Bell Daniel’s space suit.
“Well done, all,” Conrad replied, speaking aloud in words only his suit could hear. They appeared immediately on his own marquee.
Xmary offered her CONGRATULATIONS!!!!, and the four others exchanged the visual equivalent of small talk, complimenting one another on the excellence and timeliness of their work.
COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT YOU, BOSS, Bell offered, and Conrad wondered why he bothered kissing up like that, on his last day of work. From now on, Luna—or rather Lune—would belong to the seismology and hydrology and ecology teams. Aside from a few temporary structures on and near the planette’s surface, there would be no meaningful construction here for another twenty years.
THANKS, AND LIKEWISE, Conrad assured him. THE ERIDANI REFUGEES WILL BE GRATEFUL WHEN THEY ARRIVE. SHALL WE HAVE THE CHAMPAGNE?
ASSUREDLY, Bell agreed, and Lilly Frontera, his executive assistant, dutifully passed out the bottles, which were made from a frangible soda-silica-lime material—old-fashioned breakable glass that no fax machine would dispense without authorization. And Conrad’s crew dutifully smashed these against the tunnel floor, or hurled them—with more enthusiasm than hope—toward the bore and the distant walls of polished basalt.
Conrad and Xmary, for their part, clinked their own two bottles together and popped the corks, then raced to dump the liquid over each other’s suits before it boiled away in the vacuum. They were grinning, and Conrad was pretty sure he was chuckling as well, but there was a seriousness to it just the same, for change was upon them once again. These crush-the-moon days—harried and hopeful and deeply fulfilling—would be replaced by something new, and nothing would ever be the same.
And it was a funny thing, how sad such moments could be, for the alternative was to live forever with no change at all. And that was a kind of death—a lame and sorry one that anyone should be glad to avoid for a little while longer. But Conrad had never gotten used to change, and if he welcomed it, it was in the way that a man welcomes a familiar enemy.
Ah, well.
CALL SHIPPING TO PICK UP THE NEUBLE, he said unnecessarily. I WANT THAT LAST PLATE FILLED AND SEALED BY CLOSE OF BUSINESS.
SURE, BOSS, Bell said, with all the poignancy a two-word text message could convey.
That was the really private ceremony. The semiprivate one occurred four hours later, on the surface, where Conrad addressed a staff of thousands, including a few hundred retirees who’d wandered away from the project before its completion.
They were in the bowl of a shallow crater in Nubia Province, sucking dry, barely breathable air that stank of methane and sulfur. The sunset was gray.
“You’ve done excellent work here,” he told them all. “And God willing, we’ll see each other again someday, on a grander project still.”
“Crush Venus! Crush Venus!” the crowd chanted happily in reply. And then a woman off toward the rear called out “Crush Mars!” Then everyone was shouting: Melt Europa! Ignite Jupiter! Reconstitute the asteroid belt! And finally the noise dissolved into argumentative laughter.
None of these things were possible, of course; King Bruno wasn’t exactly out of money, but he wouldn’t be playing sugar daddy to the Queendom again for another few centuries. The workers were just letting off steam, kidding themselves that it could all keep going.
“We’ll do something,” he assured them, “and when we do, I’ll know exactly who to call. The best damned crew in the universe!”
They cheered at that, of course.
Was there anything else to say? He shook the hands that needed shaking, then wandered off into the barren hills to let his people—his former people—sort it out on their own. He wasn’t their boss anymore.
“You should be happy,” Xmary said, walking alongside him.
“I am,” he assured her. “Very.” And it was true. “I’m just… I don’t know, more tired than anything. My willpower’s browning out. Which is bad, because there’s a lot of work still to be done. And a lot of refugees streaming homeward, expecting a place to live.”
At that, she patted him on the rump and smiled wickedly. “I know what you need, Architect. Around that withered soul you’re still young and virile. A body like that requires attention.” And that was true, too.
Although the planet had shrunk beneath it, Luna’s actual crust hadn’t gotten any smaller. But it had only one-fourth the area to cover, so over the years of its settling it had folded and wrinkled and cracked, raising jagged mountain chains, broad steppes, and vast, broken plains. Even here in the relative flat of the former Mare Nubium, it wasn’t hard to find a little valley so secluded that it would be visible only from directly above.
“We start pouring the oceans tomorrow,” he told his wife. “Faxed ice from Callisto, mostly. And for the first year or two the water will simply sink into all these voids in the crust. The surface will be as dry as ever, but with the water to lubricate them, and explosives to jar them loose, the rock plates should settle together, smoothing out all these jags and spines.”
“All?”
“Well, a lot of them. We still want some contour, obviously, and with the highest mountains reaching twelve whole kilometers above the plains, we’ll definitely still have some. But the geo boys are having the time of their lives, figuring out where to plant all the bombs. We’ll go after the biggest voids with subnukes and aye-ma’am, and over time the water will be squeezed back out to the surface. Truthfully, with a fixed mass budget we’re not sure how deep the oceans will be when it’s all said and done. But there’ll be enough to stabilize the climate and the ecosystem. And there’ll be beaches.”