Moonseed (73 page)

And there were the bad guys. Like the cartel who had hunted down and wiped out the last elephants—before the geneticists managed to collect embryos for cryostorage—in order to get an all-time monopoly on ivory. Not to mention the reports, many substantiated, of crazies who were deliberately spreading the Moonseed, accelerating its propagation…

There were lots of reasons to do this, to evacuate the biosphere.

The new Moon needed to be colonized, of course, by the right creatures to coexist with mankind, to flesh out a new biosphere. And looking further ahead, a lot of people muttered vaguely about biodiversity. Nobody knew what benefits might be waiting to be discovered: new foods, better medicines, waiting to be derived from plants and animals yet to be catalogued.

And then there was the potential of species, far beyond their economic value to humans. It would have been hard to extrapolate the rise of mankind from the tree-dwelling mammals that hid from the dinosaurs seventy-five million years ago. Who could say what great societies might arise from the beetles and reptiles and birds, if they were only given the chance?

But for Henry there was a deeper sense of ethics involved.

Homo sapiens
was one of the newest species on Earth. Maybe it was
homo sap
’s fault that this calamity had been visited on the planet; maybe it wasn’t. At any rate, wasn’t there an obligation on the species that commanded most of the planet’s primary production to save as many of the other, older species as it could?

But in the end, maybe it was going to make little difference. For there just wasn’t enough
time.

Upcoming was the greatest extinction pulse of all, dwarfing even the end-Paleozoic. This time there would be no recovery, no slow million-year clambering back to diversity, no reconquest of abandoned ecological niches. Now, evolution on Earth was at an end; now, whatever wasn’t sampled or collected was lost forever.

Even the rocks were going to die, this time.

So here were Henry and his wife, running through the desert and grabbing the rocks and bones, for all the world like the Apollo astronauts during their three brief, precious days on the Moon.

…
Apollo.

Suddenly, as seemed to happen too often these days, he was hit by a jolt of nostalgia. Apollo 11: Moonwalk parties, under clear starry skies, when Henry was eight or nine or ten. God, it seemed a million years ago, a world that was ten degrees cooler, or more, where there were still ice caps, and the new inland sea hadn’t covered over the state of Henry’s birth…

Jane tired first. The cancers and their treatment had left her weakened. She returned to the cool of the car and turned on the radio. Henry could hear the voices of news announcers.

The human world continued to turn. Less news than a decade ago, because less people. The volcanoes and the quakes and the floods and famine and war had killed off all but—the estimates went—around a billion people. Now,
numbers were still declining, but more slowly. Almost gracefully.

Less news. Nuclear war in the Balkans. Mutant riots in Asia. There was something about the war crimes trial of Dave Holland, the former British Prime Minister, who, he vaguely recalled, Henry had once met. The trial had finished with Holland being convicted of genocide during that desperate last-ditch British invasion of southern Ireland, mounted from Ulster, Prime Minister Bhide apologizing to the world, a death sentence ordered…

But the murmur of words, emanating in digitized perfection from some satellite, meant little to Henry beside the dusty reality of these ancient rocks.

Henry labored on as the sun climbed higher in the sky. The sun was surrounded by a Bishop’s Ring, fat and oppressive, volcano ash.

That night they ate their simple meal, and huddled together in zipped-up sleeping bags, and waited for the Moon to rise.

Here it came, fat and full and cloudy, banishing the stars. And as they watched, a fine, white streak flashed across the Moon’s fat equator, a meteor scratch that wrapped itself half the way around the twin planet.

Jane, her head cradled in Henry’s arm, stirred, half asleep. “Do you think that was Jack?”

“Perhaps.” Or someone else’s child, he thought, falling to the Moon in one of the Arks, the huge, heavy, clumsy mass transports, cushioned by the Moon’s new atmosphere behind a fat aeroshell.

Henry’s outlandish scheme had worked.

It was no less difficult to get out of Earth’s gravity well than it had ever been. But the presence of a braking atmosphere on the Moon had reduced the fuel load the big Arks had to carry by an order of magnitude, and made mass evacuation, of humans and the biosphere, possible. Not only that, he had given them somewhere worthwhile to go.

And so the Shuttle-Zs launched almost daily, from Canaveral and Kourou and Baikonur, crude Saturn V-class boosters assembled from Space Shuttle technology, people crammed into sardine can spaceships, fleeing to the Moon. He knew that Geena had emerged from her voluntary exile in the Russian heartland to work at Baikonur, trying to maintain some kind of standard of excellence among the fragmented, ill trained and badly frightened work force there.

Or maybe it was a Chinese ship, or one of the Indian fleet, based on old Soviet era Energia technology, built with such haste and crammed even more full than the Shuttle-Zs, with even less precaution and safety checks than in the western sites. The Indian failure rate was a whopping forty percent, and the toll in lost lives, on those crowded space trucks, was immense. Frank Turtle, the strange little guy from the bowels of NASA who had done so much to return humans to the Moon, had lost his life when one of those big old Energia clones had dropped back to the launch pad on Sri Lanka and blown apart, taking half the island with it.

The rumors were that the failure statistics in China weren’t much better.

It wasn’t going to stop the launches, though, nor the desperate press of people to get themselves or their children on those ramshackle ships. And Henry knew that any government that tried to scale down its launch program would suffer massive civil unrest. The launches were a safety valve, he supposed, the promise of one route, at least, out of the trap Earth had become.

There was a lot of bitter conflict among the nations sending people to the Moon—the violation of international agreements on quotas and priorities went on daily—and it looked to Henry as if humanity was just going to transport all its old prejudices and inner conflicts intact to the new world, and presumably beyond. Depressing, but entirely predictable.

The evacuation was gigantic, but it could never be complete.

It would be possible to save only a fraction of the billions of people with which Earth had once teemed. Hence the Bottleneck laws. If the population was reduced to the minimum, by savage birth control measures, then, simply, there would be less people to be abandoned, to die, when the end came.

Most people accepted that. About the only thing humans could control about this catastrophe was their own numbers: the human souls who would be spared a birth that would doom them only to the flame.

Most people, it seemed to Henry, were doing their best, in this changing world. Behaving honorably, remarkably so in the circumstances. Surveys showed most populations around the planet were restricting their child birth rates voluntarily, accepting the Bottleneck laws.

And, it was estimated, millions could be saved, before the final destruction.

Remarkable, he thought. I bootstrapped a world. In the end, perhaps I really did save mankind. A fraction of it, anyhow.

He’d saved Jack, at least: still just twenty-one years old, the boy was healthy as an ox and smart as a tack. Maybe that one achievement was enough, to justify Henry’s life.

Now Jack was going to the Moon. But not us, Henry thought. There is nowhere for us, but here.

Jane stirred again. He kissed the top of her head, the thinning hair there, and she settled deeper into sleep.

As it turned out the Karroo was their last trip together, before Jane entered what the doctors delicately called her terminal stage: when their various treatments served no further purpose, and Henry, geologist turned amateur paleontologist, became a nurse.

Some of what they had to face was much as he anticipated. The painkillers and their side effects. Her loss of appetite; he learned to cook Lebanese-style, masses of small,
spiced dishes, to tempt her. After she was bedridden, there was the need to care for her skin: rubber rings, protective pads for her heels and elbows, and a bed cradle to keep the weight of the covers off her legs.

And there were some things he didn’t anticipate. The constipation that doubled her in pain. The soreness in her mouth, which he treated with lip salves, mouth rinses and flavored crushed ice for her to suck.

He wanted to move her bed downstairs, in their home in Houston, but she wouldn’t accept that. It would be the mark of the end, she said.

She would die upstairs.

Strange thing. He’d been to the Moon, but he’d never seen anyone die close up.

It wasn’t sudden. She slept more, sometimes drifting into unconsciousness, from which he couldn’t rouse her. Her breathing became noisy, like a rattle, but the doctors said it was just moisture on her chest.

Sometimes, though, when she appeared unconscious she was aware, but unable to speak or see. But her hearing probably still worked—hearing was the last sense she lost—and so he spoke to her, reading her letters from Jack on the Moon, or news items, or, just, talking to her.

Until there came a day when she seemed to fall ever more deeply into sleep, and she simply stopped breathing, and that was all.

And Henry knew that he would be alone, for the rest of his life.

53

And ten years more…

Ten years on, ten years older, and here was Henry putting on his spacesuit, fifty-five years old and utterly alone, letting the E-letter buzz in his earpiece for the fourth
time, devouring this communication from the nearest thing to a son he ever had.

Dear Dad……I took little Nadezhda out to see the ecopoiesis farms in your old stamping ground of Aristarchus. They tell me they modeled the ecosystems here on the dry valleys of Antarctica, back when there used to be ice caps. Mats of green algae and cyanobacteria, lapping up the sunlight, resistant to the shortage of water and low partial pressure of oxygen, pumping out the oxygen. In some of the more clement areas there are even lichens and mosses, growing out in the open…

The ground here was mud, baked utterly dry, cracked into hexagons the size of dinner plates. No water anywhere, of course. Mud, as far as Henry could see, ocean bottom mud, baked dry and hard as concrete; mud, and sand dunes, and salt flats, and gravel fans, covering this dried-up ocean bed.

…
We went to see the Apollo Museum there, at Aristarchus. They put it under a dome and reconstructed a lot of the original landing site, right down to the footprints they repaired from the rain damage they suffered. The day we were there they had Tracy Malone, the daughter of one of the astronauts, unveiling a plaque to her father, along with Geena, your ex-wife, who’s been working on lunar heritage projects now she’s retired. Quite symbolic: a representative of the first wave of lunar travelers, and the second, Geena, surrounded by the likes of us, the third. We introduced ourselves to Geena and she said to say hello. They showed Tracy Malone the place her father wrote her name in the dust with his fingertip. It’s under glass now. She cried a river, and it was a nice moment of closure, but I don’t think anyone had the heart to tell her they had to reconstruct it from the photos…

The sky was just a dome of mud-orange haze. But it wasn’t hard to see his way here, about as bright as an early evening in L.A. used to be. In fact there was more sunlight than appeared, still enough to sustain agriculture, to feed what was left of the Earth’s population, under the big domes in the old deserts.

Not that there
was
much left of the Earth’s population, all things considered. And if the stories were true about Siberia—it was said that because of the Venus radiation, and a lot of ancillary shit when the Chernobyl-era reactors out there started to go pop, a new
homo
species had emerged, viable, unable to interbreed with outsiders—the estimates of surviving
human
populations might be even further off.

…
Nadezhda is going to spend her next break from school working at the Tycho carbon-sequestration pit.

I’ve got mixed feelings about her working there.

With all those burners and flues, Tycho is heavily industrial—something like Pittsburgh used to be, or the Ruhr cities. And with the same darker social side. They burn the biomass to recover volatiles, before burying the carbon-rich residue. It’s all part of the global scheme to maximize the production of free oxygen, which not many of us understand…But Tycho is one of the few places where the work we’re doing is simple enough for a five-year-old kid to contribute to.

I’ve taken Nadezhda around the place I work, the oxygen fountain at Landsberg. It sounds exotic—the ten-thousand-megaton thermonukes, the controlled energy cascades from Moonseed beds, all of it cracking the lunar regolith for oxygen—but there isn’t much, really, to see.

It can be a little bleak here.

For the foreseeable future, humans are going to be consuming eighty percent of the lunar biosphere’s net primary production. And that’s a hell of a lot, maybe three times as high as humans ever reached on old Earth.

That means all the arable land surface we make, even most of the plankton in the crater lakes, is going to have to be turned over to crops. Other than humans, only those creatures that can survive in fields and orchards can be permitted. Any that need virgin forest or any kind of undisturbed habitat are going to have to stay in the zygote banks for now.

They tell me it’s going to take all of ten thousand years before we’re stable and self-regulating, before a human will be able to take off her resp mask and walk out of the domes…Still, we’re promised the first trees and grasses under the Copernicus dome before the decade is out. They are concentrating for now on developing the most useful crops: food, like potatoes, bananas, yams, sugarcane, coconut; but also gourds and bamboo and plants we can use to make tapa cloth, dyes and oil.