Space

She was becoming dazzled by the pink-white glare of the rocks.

The harness tugged at her sharply, slowing her. Looking down along the forest of conduits, she could see that they were approaching a terminus, a platform of some dull, opaque ceramic that plugged the tunnel.

“End of the line,” Frank said. “Down below there’s only the downhole tools and the casing machine and other junk… Do you know where you are? Xenia, we’re more than a thousand kilometers deep, two-thirds of the way to the center of the Moon.”

The pulleys gripped harder and they slowed, drifting to a halt a meter above the platform. With Frank’s help she loosened her harness and spilled easily to the platform itself, landing on her feet, as if after a sky dive.

She glanced at her chronometer patch. The fall had taken twenty minutes.

She got her balance and looked around. They were alone here.

The platform was crowded with science equipment: anonymous gray boxes linked by cables to softscreens and batteries. Sensors and probes, wrapped in water-cooling jackets, were plugged into ports in the walls. She could see data collected from the lunar material flickering over the softscreens, measurements of porosity and permeability, data from gas meters and pressure gauges and dynamometers and gravimeters. There was evidence of work here: small inflatable shelters; spare backpacks; notepads; even, incongruously, a coffee cup. Human traces, here at the heart of the Moon.

She walked to the walls. Her steps were light; she was almost floating. There was rock, pure and unmarked, all around her, beyond the windowlike walls, glowing pink.

“The deep interior of the Moon,” Frank said, joining her. He ran his gloved hands over the glass. “What the rock hounds call primitive material, left over from the Solar System’s formation. Never melted and differentiated like the mantle, never bombarded like the surface. Untouched since the Moon budded off of Earth itself.”

“I feel light as a feather,” she said. And so she did; she felt as if she were going to float back up the borehole like a soap bubble.

Frank glared up into the tunnel above them, and concentric light rings glimmered in his faceplate. “All that rock up there doesn’t pull at us. It might as well be cloud, rocky cloud, hundreds of kilometers of it.”

“I suppose, at the center itself, you would be weightless.”

“I guess.”

On one low bench stood a glass beaker, covered by clear plastic film. She picked it up; she could barely feel it, dwarfed within her thick, inflexible gloves. It held a liquid that sloshed in the gentle gravity. The liquid was murky brown, not quite transparent.

Frank was grinning. Immediately she understood.

“I wish you could drink it,” he said. “I wish we could drink a toast. You know what that is? It’s water. Moon water, water from the lunar rocks.” He took the beaker and turned around in a slow, ponderous dance. “It’s all around us, just as Mariko predicted: a fucking ocean of it. Wadsleyite and majorite with three percent water by weight… Incredible. We did it, babe.”

“Frank. You were right. I had no idea.”

“I sat on the results. I wanted you to be the first to see this. To see my…” He couldn’t find the word.

“Affirmation,” she said gently. “This is your affirmation.”

“Yeah. I’m a hero.”

It was true, she knew.

It was going to work out just as Frank had projected. As soon as the implications of the find became apparent — that there really were oceans down here, buried inside the Moon — the imaginations of the Lunar Japanese would be fast to follow Frank’s vision. This, after all, wasn’t a simple matter of plugging holes in the environment-support system loops. There was surely enough resource here, just as Frank said, to future-proof the Moon. And perhaps this would be a pivot of human history, a moment when humanity’s long decline was halted and mankind found a place to live in a system that was no longer theirs.

Not for the first time Xenia recognized Frank’s brutal wisdom in his dealings with people: to bulldoze them as far as he had to until they couldn’t help but agree with him.

Frank would become the most famous man on the Moon.

That wasn’t going to help him, though, she thought sadly.

“So,” she said. “You proved your point. Will you stop now?”

“Stop the borehole?” He sounded shocked. “Hell, no. We go on, all the way to the core.”

“Frank, the investors are already pulling out.”

“Chicken-livered assholes. I’ll go on if I have to pay for it myself.” He put the beaker down. “Xenia, the water isn’t enough; it’s just a first step. We have to go on. We still have to find the other volatiles. Methane. Organics. We go on. Damn it, Roughneck is my project.”

“No, it isn’t. We sold so much stock to get through the mantle that you don’t have a majority anymore.”

“But we’re rich again.” He laughed. “We’ll buy it all back.”

“Nobody’s selling. They certainly won’t after you publish this finding. You’re too successful. I’m sorry, Frank.”

“So the bad guys are closing in, huh? Well, the hell with it. I’ll find a way to beat them. I always do.” He grabbed her gloved hands. “Never mind that now. Listen, I’ll tell you why I brought you down here. I’m winning. I’m going to get everything I ever wanted. Except one thing.”

She was bewildered. “What?”

“I want us to get married. I want us to have kids. We came here together, from out of the past, and we should have a life of our own, on this Japanese Moon, in this future.” His voice was heavy, laden with emotion, almost cracking. In the glare of rock light, she couldn’t see his face.

She hadn’t expected this. She couldn’t think of a response.

Now his voice was almost shrill. “You’ve gone quiet.”

“The comet,” she said softly.

He was silent for a moment, still gripping her hands.

“The methane rocket,” she said. “On the comet. It was detected.”

She could tell he was thinking of denying all knowledge. Then he said, “Who found it?”

“Takomi.”

“The piss-drinking old bastard out at Edo?”

“Yes.”

“That still doesn’t prove—”

“I checked the accounts. I found where you diverted the funds, how you built the rocket, how you launched it, how you rendezvoused it with the comet. Everything.” She sighed. “You never were smart at that kind of stuff, Frank. You should have asked me.”

“Would you have helped?”

“No.”

He released her hands. “I never meant it to hit there, on Fracastorius.”

“I know that. Nevertheless, that’s what happened.”

He picked up the glass of lunar water. “But you know what, I’d have gone ahead even if I had known. I needed that fucking comet to kick start this. It was the only way. You can’t stagnate. That way lies extinction. If I gave the Lunar Japanese a choice, they’d be sucking water out of old concrete for the rest of time.”

“But it would be their choice.”

“And that’s more important than not dying?”

She shrugged. “It’s inevitable they’ll know soon.”

He turned to her, and she sensed he was grinning again, irrepressible. “At least I finished my project. At least I got to be a hero… Marry me,” he said again.

“No.”

“Why not? Because I’m going to be a con?”

“Not that.”

“Then why?”

“Because I wouldn’t last, in your heart. You move on, Frank.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. But there was no conviction in his voice. “So,” he said. “No wedding bells. No little Lunar Americans, to teach these Japanese how to play football.”

“I guess not.”

He walked away. “Makes you think, though,” he said, his back to her.

“What?”

He waved a hand at the glowing walls. “This technology isn’t so advanced. Neil and Buzz couldn’t have done it, but maybe we could have opened up some kind of deep mine on the Moon by the end of the twentieth century, say. Started to dig out the water, live off the land. If only we’d known it was here, all this wealth, even NASA might have done it. And then you’d have an American Moon, and who knows how history might have turned out?”

“None of us can change things,” she said.

He looked at her, his face masked by rock light. “However much we might want to.”

“No.”

“How long do you think I have, before they shut me down?”

“I don’t know. Weeks. No more.”

“Then I’ll have to make those weeks count.”

He showed her how to hook her suit harness to a fresh pulley set, and they began the long, slow ride to the surface ofthe Moon.

Abandoned on its bench top at the bottom of the shaft, she could see the covered beaker, the Moon water within.

After her descent into the Moon, she returned to Edo, seeking stillness.

The world of the Moon, here on Farside, was simple: the regolith below, the sunlight that flowed from the black sky above. Land, light, dark. That, and herself, alone. When she looked downsun, at her own shadow, the light bounced from the dust back toward her, making a halo around her head.

The Moon flower had, she saw, significantly diminished since her last visit; many of the outlying petals were broken off or shattered.