I hope I will.
They passed through a low, opaque-walled tunnel to the dome called Selene. This dome was much more open than Hecate, and most of its roof was transparent, so that sunlight streamed in. And here, in long beds, green things grew: Siobhan recognized cress, cabbages, carrots, peas, even potatoes. But these plants were growing in liquid. The beds were interconnected by tubing, and there was a steady hum of fans and pumps, a hiss of humidifiers. It was like a huge, low greenhouse, Siobhan thought, the illusion spoiled only by the blackness of the sky above, and the sheen of liquid where soil should have been. But many of the beds were empty, cleaned out.
So youre hydroponic farmers, she said.
Yeah. And were all vegetarians up here. It will be a long time before youll find a pig or cow or chicken on the Moon. Umm, I wouldnt dip my finger into the beds.
You wouldnt?
He pointed to tomato plants. Those are growing out of nearly pure urine. And those pea plants are floating in concentrated excrement. Pretty much all we do is scent it. Of course most of these crops are GMOs. Genetically modified organisms. The Russians have done a lot of work in this area, developing plants that can close the recycling loops as economically as possible. And the plants need to be adapted for the peculiar conditions here: the low gravity, pressure and temperature sensitivity, radiation levels. As he spoke of agricultural matters his voice took on a stronger accent; she thought it sounded like Iowa, the voice of a farm boy a long way from home.
She gazed at the innocent-looking plants. I imagine some people are squeamish.
You get over it, Bud said. If not, you ship out. And anyhow, its better than the early days when we grew nothing but algae. Even I had trouble chomping on a bright blue burger. Of course were vulnerable to solar events in here.
On June 9, partly thanks to Eugene Mangles warnings, the lunar colonists had been able to dive into their storm shelters and ride out the worst of it. Spacecraft and other systems had taken a battering, but not a single human life had been lost away from planet Earth. These empty hydroponic beds, however, showed that the living things that had accompanied humans on their first hesitant steps away from Earth had not been so lucky.
They walked on.
The third dome, Artemis, was given over to industry.
Bud, with parental pride, showed her a bank of transformers. Power from the sun, he said. Free, plentiful, and not a cloud in the sky.
I guess the downside is two weeks of darkness in every month.
Sure. Right now we depend on storage cells. But were looking to establish major power farms at the poles, where you get sunlight most of the month; then well only need a fraction of our current storage capacity.
He walked her around a plant of primitive, though lightweight-looking, chemical processing equipment. Resources from the Moon, he said. We take oxygen from ilmenite, a mineral you find in mare basalts. Just scoop it up, crush it, and heat it. Were learning to make glass from the same stuff. We can also extract aluminum from plagioclase, which is a kind of feldspar you find in the highlands.
He outlined future plans. The plant she saw here was actually pilot gear, meant to establish industrial techniques in lunar conditions. The operational plants would be huge robot factories out in the hard vacuum of the surface. Aluminum was the big dream: the Sling, the big electromagnetic launching rail to be powered by sunlight, was being constructed almost entirely of lunar aluminum.
Bud dreamed of the day when lunar resources, suitably processed, would be slingshot to construction projects in Earth orbit, or even the home world itself. I would hope to see the Moon start to punch its weight in trade, and become part of a unified and prosperous EarthMoon economic system. And all the time, of course, were beginning to learn how to live off the land away from Earth, lessons we can apply to Mars, the asteroidshell, anywhere else we choose to live.
But weve a long way to go. Conditions are different herethe vacuum, the dust, the radiation, the low gravity that plays hell with convection processes and such. Were having to reinvent centuries-old techniques from scratch. But Bud sounded as if he relished the challenge. Siobhan saw Moon dirt crusted under his fingernails; this was a man who got stuck in.
He walked her back to Hecate, the accommodation dome.
Bud said, Of the two-hundred-plus people on the Moon, about ten percent are support staff, including the likes of yours truly. The rest are technicians, technologists, biologists, with forty percent devoted to pure science, including your pals at the South Pole. Oh, and about a dozen kids, by the way. Were multidisciplinary, multinational, multiethnic, multi-you-name-it.
Of course the Moon has always been culturally complex, even before humans got here. Christopher Clavius was a contemporary of Galileo, but he was actually a Jesuit. He thought the Moon was a smooth sphere. Ironic that one of the Moons biggest craters was named for him! In my own tradition we are the guardians of the crescent Moon, as we say. Living on the Moon isnt a problem for meMecca is easy to findbut Ramadan is timed to the phases of the Moon, and thats a little more tricky
Siobhan did a double take. Wait. Your tradition?
He smiled, evidently used to the reaction. Islam has reached Iowa, you know.
In his thirties, as a serving soldier, Bud Tooke had been one of the first relief workers into what was left of the Dome of the Rock, after an extreme religious group called the One-Godders had lobbed a nuclear grenade into that site of unique significance. That experience exposed me to Islamand my body to a hard rain. Everything changed for me after that.
After the Dome, he told her, Bud had joined a movement called the Oikumens, a grassroots network of people who were trying, mostly under the radar, to find a way to bring the worlds great faiths to some kind of coexistence, mainly by appealing to their deep common roots. In that way, perhaps, the positive qualities of the faithstheir moral teachings, their various contemplations of humankinds place in the universemight be promoted. If humans could not be rid of religion, it was argued, then let them at least not be harmed by it.
So, Siobhan said, marveling, youre a career soldier, living on the Moon, who spends his spare time studying theology.
He laughed, a clipped sound like a rifle being cocked. I guess Im an authentic product of the twenty-first century, arent I? He glanced at her, suddenly almost shy. But Ive seen a lot. You know, it seems to me that over my lifetime weve been slowly groping our way out of the fog. Were killing each other off a bit less enthusiastically than a hundred years ago. Even though Earth itself has gone to hell in a handbasket while we werent looking, were starting to fix those problems, too. But now this, the business with the sun. Wont it be ironic that just as were growing up, the star that birthed us decides to cream us?
Ironic, yes, she thought uneasily. And an odd coincidence that just as we move off the Earth, just as were capable of all this, of living on the Moon, the sun reaches out to burn us Scientists were suspicious of coincidences; they usually meant you were missing some underlying cause.
Or youre just getting paranoid, Siobhan, she told herself.
Bud said, Ill fix you breakfast after I show you one more sightour museum. Weve even got Apollo Moon rocks in there! Did you know that three of the core drillings made by the Apollo 17 astronauts were never opened? People are already making quite an impact on the Moon. And so we went to the trouble of ferrying unopened Apollo rocks back to the Moon, so that the double domes can use those old samples as reference points, bits of a pristine Moon before we got our hands on it