Space. Stephen Baxter

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СКАЧАТЬ walked through the base to a tractor airlock, and suited up once more. The infrared station was an hour’s ride from Edo.

      A kilometre out from Edo itself, the tractor passed one of the largest structures Malenfant had yet seen. It was a cylinder perhaps a hundred and fifty metres long, ten 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 semi-transparent domes.

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

      Malenfant glared out with morbid interest. Here, as in most technological arenas, the Japanese were way out ahead of Americans. Twenty per cent of the US’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 metres 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 anti-radiation armour.

      His helmet was a big gold-tinted bubble. His backpack, like Nemoto’s, was a semi-transparent thing of tubes and sloshing water, six litres 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 metre; 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 metres 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 ploughed and harrowed field, a place where rain had pummelled 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 was 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 centre 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 Moon dust.

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

      Nemoto said, ‘Here is a summary of my survey of the asteroid belt. 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. ‘Of course 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 СКАЧАТЬ