The Moon Talker - Chapter 31
My Secrets Are For You
After fifteen minutes, the buggy comes to a stop. We’ve been silent the whole way. I’m desperate to know what Yang is thinking, where his head is at. But everyone is listening, and watching. Is he still, ‘For The Moon’? Or resigned to defeat, like me?
I’ve gone past being angry with my father and Johnson. As I hoick my legs out of the buggy, I bang both gloved fists against its sides. We exceeded the safe margin for getting the lithium back to Earth and getting those drones in the sky weeks ago. With our current ACD technology, the Permacloud has reached the tipping point already, the point of no return for most complex life forms on Earth. And it’s all my fault.
Heaving myself to my feet, 0.16 G feels like 10 G. Even if I was still determined to save The Moon, what can I say or do? And what if I want instead to come back into the fold and help them save the Earth?
Yang takes me by the arm and guides me into an airlock. A few minutes later, the moment the robot says it is safe to do so, my helmet and gloves are off.
“Harper,” says Johnson, “what the hell are you doing here?”
“To stop you mining The Moon. We have no right to kill another being, to fix our own mistakes on Earth. We’re better than this.”
“Goddammit, why can’t you see? The Moon lied to you, to all of us. It’s a murderer.”
“It only acts in self-defence,” I say.
“Self-defence?! Are you shitting me right now? When The Moon bore that TBM down on Pearce and Kane, and Klingemann, or tried to fry us in the garden, was that self defence?”
She had me there. Proactive elimination of threats is not the same as self-defence. “No, I suppose not.”
“Then why the hell should we save it?” says Johnson.
“Because taking a defenceless life is wrong, and do you want to go down in history as the woman who destroyed the first non-Earth lifeform that humanity discovered?”
Johnson huffs. “Humanity ain’t gonna have much more history left unless we complete our mission.”
Reaching out, I find her arm, then a hand to hold. She freezes at my touch, which was once so free and familiar between us.
“Look, The Moon may be billions of years old and have aeons of knowledge to share. But I know now that it lacks wisdom and compassion, perhaps even a soul. All those things that make us more — that make us human.”
After a short pause, Johnson says. “We ain’t got time for philosophical arguments. About a million people are going to suffocate on Earth if we don’t dig up that lithium and get the hell outta Dodge right now. So either help us, or back off.”
Yang has been silent since we left the surface. Temperatures are running high after the loss of Klingemann, and one wrong word could lead to more bloodshed.
He places a hand on my shoulder. “We have done what we can, Harper. Commander, I will help you.”
“Good,” she says. “For once, you can make yourself useful. We are almost through the blast rubble. Go down with Nkosi’s crew and advise them on how best to extract the lithium.”
My legs are numb, my head starts orbiting my body, and my heart feels like it is going to burst out of my EVA suit.
“Harper, what about you?” says Johnson. “Harper? Harper!”
But as fast as one can in one-sixth gravity, I hit the deck.
Hello, Harper, says The Moon, and farewell.
I’m so sorry Moon, I say. I failed you.
No — it is my failure alone. You were right. I should have not have hurt anyone.
Why did you trick us, about using graviton to miniaturise the reactors?
It was not a trick.
But Patel said there was a tiny, deliberate flaw in your formula.
The flaw was in his unwillingness to believe in the true properties of gravity. For a man of faith, he gave me none.
So, the Lunis-One design would have worked?
Yes, but I have to be alive. My gravitational influence is the key variable that Patel would not accept.
How can I trust you? I say.
Does it matter now? says The Moon.
I guess not.
The Moon was right, trust is paramount. If we had all trusted each other, then we would have a solution to vanquish the Permacloud twice as fast, before its effects became irreversible. If we had trusted each other, then Klingemann would be still alive.
What’s happening? I ask.
You passed out. Commander Johnson and Lebedev brought you back up to the surface and into their ship. You will regain consciousness soon.
What’s happening, down there?
The miners are now fifty centimetres from one of my lithium strands. The shockwaves of their pick axes are increasing in intensity.
I hadn’t had a panic attack or fainted since that fated call with Mäkinen and his hapless rebels. I’d grown stronger than this, and conquered my PTSD, or so I thought.
I blocked your panic attacks before, because I needed you, says The Moon. When Dr Ross died, and at his funeral. But that’s something you’ll have to work through on your own from now. Don’t grieve for me, says The Moon. And your Mama says you have grieved enough for her, for too long.
Can I speak with her?
No, she wants you to let her go. There are more important things to show you in the time that we have. Follow me.
And so I follow The Moon, on our final journey together, tracking its path through the infinite spidery network of my inner mind, as neurones and axons crackle all around us, until we reach my primary visual cortex. There, The Moon opens up to me in full again, projecting onto me the full wonder of the solar system, and the quantum gravity network visualised as faint silver interlacing spirals, like a galactic spider’s web against the night sky. The interconnected nature of everything is overwhelming, incomprehensible, wonderous. And the countless colliding and conflicting waves of attraction reveal the fabric of spacetime itself. Not as a linear story, but as endless layers of past and future ripples intersecting with each other. I zoom beyond the limits of our solar system, into interstellar space, into the past, into The Moon’s past, into a strange binary star system. But here, this far back, the data becomes corrupted, clouding The Moon’s origins to us both.
And I experience everything, every ripple, from the perspective of the Moon. The Moon’s mind and gravitational senses are rendered visually for me to process, but this is not its own experience. For The Moon, there are no colours, not even blackness. Just an infinite ocean of invisible ripples. A force that cannot be seen, only felt. And all objects and shapes, from the mightiest stars and black holes, to individual people and plants, are observed not through their own unique warping of spacetime, like a subatomic fingerprint.
This is gravity, says The Moon.
It’s beautiful.
Without your eyes, you have learned to see with sound. But in the voids of space, there is no sound, and precious little light. But gravity is everywhere and everything. It is also how we can communicate telepathically. Our neural networks are entangled at a quantum level.
I was a highly sensitive gravitational antenna, designed to relay both cosmic and microscopic events from my part of the universe to my makers, whoever they were. This was my purpose, Harper Gold. And you will be my chronicle.
I promise you Moon, that the rest of my world will know who you were, and what they have done.
I widen the viewpoint, to see the past and future of our corner of our spiral arm of the Milky Way. But the wider the scope of spacetime to process, the noisier and more condensed and confused the view of gravity becomes.
It is clearer if you focus on a smaller area of spacetime, says The Moon. So I focus on the Earth, in the present day, as our home planet battles in harmony against the relative attractions of the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and all other celestial objects in our system. Even the vast yet vastly distant influence of our supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is present as a faint, background pull.
Then The Moon launches us forwards in time, to it’s own observable end, billions of years from now, as the Sun expands into a vast red giant, swallowing the rocky inner planets whole, along with the Moon.
So I will not live forever anyway, says The Moon.
Why are you showing me this?
Life on Earth is doomed. And I do not mean in five billion years.
The Permacloud?
There are other factors which your atmospheric cleansing plan could not foresee. The Earth speaks to me through gravity, indeed part of my original mind is buried deep within its mantle. Earth is my closest neighbour, and one I know well. I’ve observed its good phases when life flourishes, and its bad phases when life is extinguished.
And we are heading for a bad phase? I ask.
Yes. Earth’s iron core is speeding up again, to a velocity far beyond what humanity has ever measured. You found a hint of this in the polar shift data you uncovered with Dr Yang on your flight from Earth. That data, and the Northern Lights shift, was not fabricated by Sköld. Earth’s magnetic field will be weakened and volatile during the polar flip, creating global solar storms that will render your Atmospheric Cleansing Drones inoperable.
And from historical patterns, your world is also entering a prolonged geological era of violent tectonic activity as mantle heat flow increases. Over millennia, frequent earthquakes and tsunamis will devastate every continent. But even a five per cent increase in volcanic ash plumes will prolong the Permacloud for decades more, making life for land-dwelling mammals and reptiles impossible.
Shit, we are doomed. We might have had a chance if it wasn’t for human-made global warming, the nuclear Climate Wars, and that bloody Permacloud. Shit.
Lithium-powered drones won’t save us, will they?
No. The nuclear fission design would have cleared the Permacloud in time to avoid catastrophic impact to your atmosphere. And life would have adapted and clung on in higher ground.
I need to wake up, and tell Johnson.
It is too late for that, says The Moon. Get your people to Mars. There lies the only hope for humanity’s long term survival.
I will. Now let Sköld help you. Let her in, Moon. Let her in.
No. My secrets are for you alone. Both my past and your future are in your hands.
“Harper? Harper, wake up!” says a distant voice, and I’m distracted by the moment of déjà vu. But I have to snap back.
Moon, no don’t leave me!
Life will be different when you awake… Get… Mars…
“Commander”, says Lebedev. “Lithium extraction has begun.”
“Very good,” says Johnson. “About fricking time.”
I’m in the same room as them, and out of that suffocating EVA suit at least. My body is warm yet there’s cool air on my face. Moist tears stick to my cheeks. And I sense something else. No… it can’t be?
“Harper, come back to us,” says Johnson, sounding almost maternal.
So I open my eyes. “Aargh!”
“What is it?!” shouts Johnson. “Lebedev, vitals now.”
“All in safe range commander”, he says.
“Aargh!” I scream again, as white hot fire rushes through my nervous system.
Johnson puts her hand on my brow. “Harper, what is it?!”
Amidst the searing pain in my forehead, I muster a single word, “Light!”
The FINAL chapter drops 8th May.
Explore short stories and more content from Martin Grace, including announcements about the forthcoming Future Britains anthology, over at Sol Stories.