“The mantle,” Nemoto whispered. “Basalt. Neither solid nor liquid, a state that you don’t find on the surface of a planet, rock so soft it pulls like taffy.”
Soon the rock brightened to a cherry-pink, rushing upwards past them. It was like dropping through some immense glass tube full of fluorescing gas. Gazing at that shining pink-hot rock just yards away, Emma felt heat, but that was surely an illusion.
The baby Nutcracker stirred, eyes closed, wiping her broad nose on Emma’s chest.
Falling, falling. Thick conduits surrounded them now, crowding the tunnel, flipping from bracket to bracket. She wondered what their purpose was; neither Nemoto nor Mane offered an opinion.
For the first time she felt a lurch, like an elevator slowing. Looking down along the forest of conduits, she could see that they were approaching a terminus, a platform of some dull, opaque material that plugged the tunnel.
She asked, “Where are we?”
Mane said, “Thousands of miles deep. Some two-thirds of the way to the centre of the Moon.”
They slowed, drifting to a crawl maybe a yard above the platform. Emma landed on her feet, still clutching the infant — an easy landing, even if it had reminded her of her involuntary sky-dive.
Now she glanced at the watch Nemoto had loaned her. The fall had taken twenty minutes.
The smooth surface was neither hot nor cold, a subdued white, stretching seamlessly from one side of the shaft to the other.
Emma put down the infant Nutcracker. With a happy grunt the infant urinated, a thin stream that pooled on the gleaming floor.
In this place of shining geometric perfection, all the hominids looked misshapen, out of place: Julia with her heavy-browed skull, the Daemon with her looming gorilla body, her fast, jerky motions and her eerily swivelling ears, and Nemoto and Emma, the proud ambassadors of Homo sapiens, huddled close together in their dusty, much-patched coveralls. We are barely evolved, Emma thought — even Mane — unformed compared to the chill, effortless perfection of this place.
“…Noise,” Julia said. She turned her great head, peering around. “Noise. Lights.”
Nemoto scowled, peering around, up into the tunnel that receded into infinity over their heads. “I cannot hear anything.”
“There is much information here,” Mane said gently. She had closed her eyes. “You must — let it in.”
“I don’t know how,” Nemoto said miserably.
Emma glanced down at the infant Nutcracker. She was crawling on legs and knuckles and peering into the floor, as if it were the surface of a pond. Emma, stiffly, got to her knees beside the child. She stared at the floor, looked where the infant looked.
There was a flash of blue light, an instant of searing pain.
The floor had turned to glass. With the Nutcracker, she was kneeling on nothingness. She gasped, pressed her hands against the hard surface. No, not glass: there was no reflection, nothing but the warm feel of the floor under her hands and knees.
And below her, a huge chamber loomed.
She felt Nemoto’s hand on her shoulder, gripping tight, as if for comfort.
Emma said, “Can you see it?”
“Yes, I see it.”
Emma glimpsed a far wall. It was covered with lights, like stars. But these stars marked out a regular pattern of equilateral triangles. Artificial, then. She looked from side to side, trying to make out the curve of that remote wall. But it was too far away for her to make out its shape, too far beyond her puny sense of scale.
“It’s a hole,” she said. “A chamber at the heart of the Moon.”
“It is whatever it seems to be.”
“The chamber looks flattened. Like a pancake.”
“No,” Nemoto murmured. “It is probably spherical. You have the eyes of a plains ape, Emma Stoney. Evolved for distances of a few hundred miles, no more. Even the sky looks like a flat lid to you. Humans aren’t evolved to comprehend spaces like this — a cave thousands of miles across, a cave big enough to store a world.”
“Those lights are regular. Like fake stars on a movie set.”
“Perhaps they are the mouths of tunnels, like this one.”
“Leading to more holes on the surface?”
“Or leading somewhere else.” Nemoto’s voice was quavering. “I don’t know, Emma. I understand none of this.”
But you understand more than me, Emma thought. Which is, perhaps, why you are more frightened.
There was motion in the heart of the chamber. Blueness. Vast wheels turning. A churning, regular, like a huge machine.
The Nutcracker child gurgled, her eyes shining. She seemed enchanted by the turning wheels, as if the whole display, surely a thousand miles across, was no more than a nursery mobile.
“Blue rings,” Nemoto breathed.
Emma squinted, wishing her eyes would dark-adapt faster. “Like the Wheel, the portal I fell through to come here.”
Nemoto said, “This technology has a unifying, if unimaginative, aesthetic.”
“It is the world engine,” Mane said simply.
Emma saw the turning wheels reflected in Mane’s broad, glistening eyes. “What is a world engine?”
“Can you not see? Look deeper.”
“…Ah,” Nemoto said.
At the heart of the turning rings, there was a world.
It was like Earth, but it was not Earth. Turning slowly in the light of an off stage sun, it was wrapped in a blanket of thick, ragged cloud. Emma glimpsed land that was riven by bright-glowing cracks and the pinpricks of volcanoes. Plumes of black smoke and dust streaked the air, and lightning cracked between fat purple clouds.
“Not a trace of ocean,” Nemoto murmured. “Too hot and dry for that.”
“Do you think it is Earth? — or any of the Earths?”
“If it is, it is a young Earth, an Earth still pouring out the heat of its formation…”
“The sky,” Mane said, her voice quavering, “is full of rock.”
Emma glanced up.
…And for an instant she saw what the Daemon saw: a different point of view, as if she were standing on that burnt, barren land, on bare rock so hot it glowed, close to a river of some sticky, coagulating lava. She looked up through rents in fat, scudding clouds — into a sky that was covered by a lid of rock, an inverted landscape of mountains and valleys and craters.
She gasped, and the vision faded.
Emma saw again the hot young world, and another beside it now, a Moon-like world, evidently cooler than Earth, but large, surely larger than Mars, say. The two planets sat side by side, like an orange and an apple in a still-life.
But they were approaching each other.
“I think we are watching the Big Whack,” Nemoto murmured. “The immense collision that devastated young Earth, but created the Earth-Moon system…”
The planets touched, almost gently, like kissing. But where they touched a ring of fire formed, shattering the surface of both worlds, a spreading splash of destruction into which the smaller body seemed to implode, like a fruit being drained of its flesh.
“The collision took about ten minutes,” Nemoto said softly. “The approach speed was tens of thousands of miles per hour. But a collision between such large bodies, even at such speeds, would look like slow motion.”
A vast fount of material, glowing liquid rock, gushed into space from the impact. Emma glimpsed the impacting planetesimal’s grey curve, a last fragment of geometric purity, lost in the storm of fire. A great circular wave of fire spread out around the Earth from the impact point.
A ring of glowing light began to coalesce in Earth orbit. As it cooled it solidified into a swarm of miniature bodies. And then spiral arms formed in the glowing moonlet cloud. It was a remarkable, beautiful sight.
“This is how the Moon was born,” Nemoto said. “The largest of those moonlets won out. The growing Moon swept up the remnant particles, and under the influence of tidal forces rapidly receded from Earth. Earth itself, meanwhile, was afflicted by huge rock tides, savage rains as the ocean vapour fell back from space. It took millions of years before the rocks had cooled enough for liquid water to gather once more.”