And, soon after that, he had died.
After that Xenia had left, with the Gaijin, for the stars.
When she returned home she found that thirteen hundred years of history had worn away, leaving the Earth a cloud-covered ruin, the Solar System threatened by interstellar war, the last humans struggling to survive on Mercury and the Moon. Nobody remembered her, or much of the past: It was as if this attenuated, unstable present was all there ever had been, all that would ever be. So she had shed her old identity, settled into the community here.
Thanks to her engineered biology, a gift of the futures she had visited, she had remained young, physically. Young enough to bear children, even. But now, despite the invisible engineering in her flesh, she was slowly dying, as was everybody, as was the Moon.
How strange that the inhabited Moon’s life had been as brief as her own: that her birth and death would span this small world’s, that its rocky bones would soon emerge through its skin of air and ocean, just as hers would push through her decaying flesh.
At last they approached Maginus.
Maginus was an old, eroded crater complex to the southeast of Tycho. Its ancient walls glimmered with crescent lakes and glaciers. Sheltered from the winds of Morning and Evening, Maginus was a center of life, and long before they reached the foothills, as the fat rain cleared, she saw the tops of giant trees looming over the horizon. She thought she saw creatures leaping between the tree branches. They may have been lemurs, or even bats; or perhaps they were kites wielded by ambitious children.
Berge showed delight as they crossed the many water courses, pointing out engineering features that had been anticipated by Leonardo: dams and bridges and canal diversions and so forth, some of them even constructed since the Failing. But Xenia took little comfort, oppressed as she was by the evidence of the fall of mankind. For example, they journeyed along a road made of lunar glass, flat as ice and utterly impervious to erosion, carved long ago into the regolith by vast space-borne engines. But they traveled this marvelously engineered highway in a cart that was wooden, and drawn by a spavined, thin-legged mule.
Such contrasts were unendingly startling to a time-stranded traveler like Xenia. But, she thought with a grisly irony, all the technology around them would have been more than familiar to Berge’s hero, Leonardo. There were gadgets of levers and pulleys and gears, their wooden teeth constantly stripped; there were turnbuckles, devices to help erect cathedrals of Moon concrete; there had even been pathetic lunar wars fought with catapults and crossbows, “artillery” capable of throwing lumps of rock a few kilometers.
But once people had dug mines that reached the heart of the Moon. The people today knew this was so, else they could not exist here. She knew it was true, for she remembered it.
As they neared the phytomine, the streams of traffic converged to a great confluence of people and animals. There was a swarm of reunions of friends and family, and a rich human noise carried on the thick air.
When the crowds grew too dense, Xenia and Berge abandoned their wagon and walked. Berge, with unconscious generosity, supported her with a hand clasped about her arm, guiding her through this human maelstrom.
Children darted around her feet, so fast she found it impossible to believe she could ever have been so young, so rapid, so compact, and she felt a mask of old-woman irritability settle on her. But many of the children were, at age seven or eight or nine, already taller than she was, girls with languid eyes and the delicate posture of giraffes. The one constant of human evolution on the Moon was how the children stretched out, ever more languorous, in the gentle gravity. But in later life they paid a heavy price in brittle, calcium-starved bones.
All Berge wanted to talk about was Leonardo da Vinci.
“Leonardo was trying to figure out the cycles of the Earth. For instance, how water could be restored to the mountaintops. Listen to this.” He fumbled, one-handed, with his dog-eared manuscript. “ ‘We may say that the Earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil; its bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the mountains; its cartilage is the tufa stone; its blood the veins of its waters… And the vital heat of the world is fire which is spread throughout the Earth; and the dwelling place of the spirit of growth is in the fires, which in divers parts of the Earth are breathed out in baths and sulphur mines…’ You understand what he’s saying? He was trying to explain the Earth’s cycles by analogy with the systems of the human body.”
“He was wrong.”
“But he was more right than wrong, Grandmother! Don’t you see? This was centuries before geology was formalized, before matter and energy cycles would be understood. Leonardo had gotten the right idea, from somewhere. He just didn’t have the intellectual infrastructure to express it…”
And so on. None of it was of much interest to Xenia. As they walked it seemed to her that his weight was the heavier, as if she, the foolish old woman, was constrained to support him, the young buck. It was evident his sickliness was advancing fast — and it seemed that others around them noticed it too, and separated around them, a sea of unwilling sympathy.
At last they reached the plantation itself. They had to join queues, more or less orderly. There was noise, chatter, a sense of excitement. For many people, such visits were the peak of each slow lunar Day.
Separated from the people by a row of wooden stakes and a few meters of bare soil was a sea of growing green. The vegetation was predominantly mustard plants. Chosen for their bulk and fast growth, all of these plants had grown from seed or shoots since the last lunar Dawn. The plants themselves grew thick, their feathery leaves bright. But many of the leaves were sickly, already yellowing.
The fence was supervised by an unsmiling attendant, who wore — to show the people their sacrifice had a genuine goal — artifacts of unimaginable value: earrings and brooches and bracelets of pure copper and nickel and bronze.
The attendant told them, in a sullen prepared speech, that the Maginus mine was the most famous and exotic of all the phytomines: for here gold itself was mined, still the most compelling of all metals. These mustard plants grew in soil in which gold, dissolved out of the base rock by ammonium thiocyanate, could be found at a concentration of four parts per million. But when the plants were harvested and burned, their ash contained four hundred parts per million of gold, drawn out of the soil by the plants during their brief lives.
The phytomines, where metals were slowly concentrated by living things, were perhaps the Moon’s most important remaining industry.
As Frank Paulis had understood centuries ago, lunar soil was sparse and ungenerous. And yet, now that Earth was wrecked, now that the spaceships no longer called, the Moon was all the people had.
The people of the Moon had neither the means nor the will to rip up the top hundred meters of their world to find the precious metals they needed. Drained of strength and tools, they had to be more subtle.