Space (3 page)

His probes were now spreading out along the Galaxy's spiral arms, along lanes rich with stars. His Japanese audience watched politely.

But as he delivered his polished words, he thought of Nemoto and her tantalizing hints of otherness -- of a mystery that might render all his scripted invective obsolete -- and he faltered.

Trying to focus, feeling impatient, he closed with his cosmic-destiny speech. "This may be a watershed in the history of the cosmos. Think about it.
We know how to do this.
If we make the right decisions now, life may spread beyond Earth and Moon, far beyond the Solar System, a wave of green transforming the Galaxy. We must not fail..." And so on.

Well, they applauded him kindly enough. But there were few questions.

He got out, feeling foolish.

The next day Nemoto said she would take him to the surface, to see her infrared spectroscopy results at first hand.

They walked through the base to a tractor air lock and suited up once more. The infrared station was an hour's ride from Edo.

A kilometer out from Edo itself, the tractor passed one of the largest structures Malenfant had yet seen. It was a cylinder perhaps 150 meters long, 10 wide. It looked like a half-buried nuclear submarine. The lunar surface here was scarred by huge gullies, evidently the result of strip-mining. Around the central cylinder there was a cluster of what looked like furnaces, enclosed by semitransparent domes.

"Our fusion plant," Nemoto said. "Edo is powered by the fusion of deuterium, the hydrogen isotope, with helium-3."

Malenfant stared out with morbid interest. Here, as in most technological arenas, the Japanese were way ahead of Americans. Twenty percent of U.S. power now came from the fusion of two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium. But hydrogen fusion processes, even with such relatively low-yield fuel, had turned out to be unstable and expensive: high-energy neutrons smashed through reactor walls, making them brittle and radioactive. The Japanese helium-3 fusion process, by contrast, produced charged protons, which could be kept away from reactor walls with magnetic fields.

However, the Earth had no natural supply of helium-3.

Nemoto waved a hand. "The Moon contains vast stores of helium-3, locked away in deposits of titanium minerals, in the top three meters of the regolith. The helium came from the Sun, borne on the solar wind; the titanium acted like a sponge, soaking up the helium particles. We plan to begin exporting the helium to Earth."

"I know." The export would make Edo self-sufficient.

She smiled brightly, young and confident in the future.

Out of sight of Edo, the tractor passed a cairn of piled-up maria rubble. On the top there was a
sake
bottle, a saucer bearing rice cakes, a porcelain figure. There were small paper flags around the figure, but the raw sunlight had faded them.

"It is a shrine," Nemoto explained. "To Inari-samma, the Fox God." She grinned at him. "If you close your eyes and clap your hands, perhaps the
kami
will come to you. The divinities."

"Shrines? At a lunar industrial complex?"

"We are an old people," she said. "We have changed much, but we remain the same.
Yamato damashi
-- our spirit -- persists."

At length the tractor drew up to a cluster of buildings set on the plain. This was the Nishizaki Heavy Industries infrared research station.

Nemoto checked Malenfant's suit, then popped the hatch.

Malenfant climbed stiffly down a short ladder. As he moved, clumsily, he heard the hiss of air, the soft whirr of exoskeletal multipliers. These robot muscles helped him overcome the suit's pressurization and the weight of his tungsten antiradiation armor.

His helmet was a big gold-tinted bubble. His backpack, like Nemoto's, was a semitransparent thing of tubes and sloshing water, six liters full of blue algae that fed off sunlight and his own waste products, producing enough oxygen to keep him going indefinitely -- in theory.

Actually Malenfant missed his old suit: his space shuttle EMU, extravehicular mobility unit, with its clunks and whirrs of fans and pumps. Maybe it was limited compared to this new technology. But he hated to wear a backpack that
sloshed,
for God's sake, its mass pulling him this way and that in the low gravity. And his robot muscles -- amplifying every impulse, dragging his limbs and tilting his back for him -- made him feel like a puppet.

He dropped down the last meter; his small impact sent up a little spray of dust, which fell back immediately.

And here he was, walking on the Moon.

He walked away from the tractor, suit whirring and lurching. He had to go perhaps a hundred meters to get away from tractor tracks and footsteps.

He reached unmarked soil. His boots left prints as crisp as if he had stepped out of
Apollo 11.

There were craters upon craters, a fractal clustering, right down to little pits he could barely have put his fingertip into, and smaller yet. But they didn't look like craters -- more like the stippling of raindrops, as if he stood in a recently plowed and harrowed field, a place where rain had pummeled the loose ground. But there had been no rain here, of course, not for four billion years.

The Sun cast brilliant, dazzling light. Otherwise the sky was empty, jet black. But he was a little surprised that he had no sense of openness, of immensity all around him, unlike a desert night sky at home. He felt as if he were on a darkened stage, under a brilliant spotlight, with the walls of the universe just a little way away, just out of view.

He looked back at the tractor, with the big red Sun of Japan painted on its side. He thought of a terraformed Moon, of twin blue worlds. He felt tears, hot and unwelcome, prickle his eyes. Damn it. We were here first. We had all this. And we let it go.

Nemoto waited for him, a small figure on the Moon's folded plain, her face hidden behind her gold-tinted bubble of glass.

She led him into the cluster of buildings. There was a small fission power plant, tanks of gases and liquids. A living shelter was half buried in the regolith.

The center of the site was a crude cylindrical hut, open to the sky, containing a battery of infrared sensors and computer equipment. The infrared detectors themselves were immersed in huge vessels of liquid helium. Robots crawled between the detectors, monitoring constantly, their complex arms stained by moondust.

Nemoto walked up to a processor control desk. A virtual image appeared, hovering over the compacted regolith at the center of the hut. The virtual was a ring of glistening crimson droplets, slowly orbiting.

"Here is a summary of my survey of the asteroid belt," Nemoto said. "Or 'belts,' I should say, for there are gaps between the sub-belts -- the Kirkwood gaps, swept clear by resonances with Jupiter's gravity field." The Kirkwood gaps were dark bands, empty of crimson drops. "Nishizaki Heavy Industries is very interested in asteroids. There is a mine in Sudbury, Ontario, which for a long time was a rich source of nickel. The nickel seam is disc-shaped. It is almost certainly the scar of an ancient asteroid collision with the Earth."

"Mineral extraction, then."

"There is a scheme to retrieve a fragment of the asteroid Geographos, which crosses Earth's orbit. We may cleave it with controlled explosions. Perhaps we can deliver fragments to orbit, using lunar gravity assists and grazes against the Earth's atmosphere. Or we may initiate a controlled impact with the Moon. This exercise alone would yield more than nine hundred billion dollars' worth of nickel, rhenium, osmium, iridium, platinum, gold -- so much, in fact, the planet's economy would be transformed, making estimates of wealth difficult."

Malenfant walked around the instrument hut. The novelty of his moonwalk was wearing off; his suit scratched, his helmet was hot, and his condom was itching. "Nemoto, it's time you got to the point."

"The
koan,"
she said. The virtual ring shone in her visor, making her face invisible. "Let us look at the stars."

She took his gloved hand in hers -- through the thick layers of glove he could barely feel the pressure of her fingers -- and she led him out of the building. The virtual asteroid ring, eerily, followed them out.

They stood in the deep shadow of the structure. With a motion, she indicated he should lift his visor.

He raised his head so he couldn't see the ground or the buildings, and he turned around and around, as he used to as a kid, on the darkest moonless nights back home.

The stars,
of course: thousands of them, peppering the sky all around him, crowding out the bright-star constellations seen from Earth. And now, at last, came that elusive feeling of immensity. From the Moon it was
much
easier to see that he was just a mote clinging to a round ball of rock, spinning endlessly in an infinite, three-dimensional starry sky.

"Look." Nemoto, pointing, swept out an arc of the sky, where dusty light shone.

Despite the crowding stars, Malenfant recognized one or two constellations -- Cygnus and Aquila, the swan and the eagle. And, where she pointed, a river of light ran through the constellations, a river of stars. It was the Milky Way: the Galaxy, the disc of stars in which Sol and all its planets were embedded, seen edge-on and turned into a band of light that wrapped around the sky. But, as it passed through Cygnus and Aquila, that band of light seemed to split into two, twin streams separated by a dark gap. In fact the rift was a shadow cast by dark clouds blocking the light from the star banks behind.

Nemoto pointed. "See how the darkness starts out narrow in Cygnus, then broadens in Aquila, sweeping wider through Serpens and Opiuchus. This is the effect of perspective. We are seeing a band of dust as it comes from the distance in Cygnus, passing closest to the Sun in Aquila and Opiuchus. Malenfant, we live in a spiral arm of this Galaxy -- a small fragment, in fact, called the Orion Arm. And spiral arms typically have lanes of dust on their inside edges."

"Like that one."

"Yes.
That
is the inner edge of our spiral arm, hanging in the sky for all to see." Her shadowed eyes glimmered, full of starlight. "It is possible to make out the Galaxy's structure, you see: to witness that we are embedded in a giant spiral of stars -- even with the naked eye.
This
is where we live."

"Why are you showing me this?"

"Look at the Galaxy, Malenfant. It appears to be a giant machine -- no, an ecology -- evolved to make stars. And there are hundreds of millions of galaxies beyond our own. Is it really conceivable, given all of that immensity, all that structure, that we are truly alone? That life emerged here, and nowhere else?"

Malenfant grunted. "The old Fermi paradox. Troubled me as a kid, even before I heard of Fermi."

"Me too." He could see her smile. "You see, Malenfant, we have much in common. And the logic behind the paradox troubles me still."

"Even though you think you have found aliens."

She let that hang, and he found he was holding his breath.

Cautiously, she said, "How would it make you feel, Malenfant, if I was right?"

"If you had proof that another intelligence exists? It would be wonderful. I guess."

"Would it?" She smiled again. "How sentimental you are. Listen to me: Humanity would be in extreme danger. Remember, by your own argument, the assumption on which a colonizing expedition operates is that it is appropriating an empty system. Such a probe could destroy our worlds without even noticing us."

He shivered; his spiderweb suit felt thin and fragile.

"Think it through further," she said. "Think like an engineer. If an alien replicator probe were to approach the Solar System, where would it seek to establish itself? What are its requirements?"

He thought about it. You'll need energy; plenty of it. So, stay close to the Sun. Next: raw materials. The surface of a rocky planet? But you wouldn't want to dip into a gravity well if you didn't have to... Besides, your probe is designed for deep space--

"The asteroid belt," he said, suddenly seeing where all this was leading. "Plenty of resources, freely floating, away from the big gravity wells... Even the main belts aren't too crowded, but you'd probably settle in a Kirkwood gap, to minimize the chance of collision. Your orbit would be perturbed by Jupiter, just like the asteroids', but it wouldn't require much station-keeping to compensate for that. And some kind of ship or colony out there, even a few kilometers across, would be hard for us to spot." He looked at her sharply. "Is that what this is about? Have you found something in the belt?"

"The plain facts are these. I have surveyed the Kirkwood gaps with the sensors here. And, in the gap which corresponds to the one-to-three resonance with Jupiter, I have found--" She pointed to her virtual model, to a broad, precise gap.

At the center of the gap, a string of rubies shone, enigmatic, brilliant in the shadows.

"These are sources of infrared," she said. "Sources I cannot explain."

Malenfant bent to study the little beads of light. "Could they be asteroids that have strayed into the gap after collisions?"

"No. The sources are too bright. In fact, they are each emitting more heat than they receive from the Sun. I am, of course, seeking firmer evidence: for example, structure in the infrared signature; or perhaps there will be radio leakage."

He stared at the ruby lights. My God. She's right. If these are
emitting
heat, this is unambiguous: It's evidence of industrial activity...

His heart thumped. Somehow he hadn't accepted what she had said to him, not in his gut, not up to now. But now he could see it, and his universe was transformed.

He made out her face in the dim light reflected from the regolith, the smooth sweep of human flesh here in this dusty wilderness. Though it must have been a big moment for her to show him this evidence -- a moment of triumph -- she seemed troubled. "Nemoto, why did you ask me here? Your work is a fine piece of science, as far as I can see. The interpretation is unambiguous. You should publish. Why do you need reassurance from me?"