Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  “Hell, no,” Henry said. He looked around, at the circle of officers around Romano, watching him. “Don’t you guys get it? It’s not going to stop here. You need to evacuate on a much bigger scale, or you’re facing major losses.”

  Romano rubbed the bridge of her nose; for an instant she looked immensely tired, but when she straightened up her command was returned. “Do you know what you’re asking? Do you know the difficulty and cost of mounting such an evacuation? We have to consider the elderly, the ill; we have to think about the needs of businesses. We have to think about where all those people will go. Sanitation. Shelter. Food.”

  “I know,” Henry said gently. “It’s just that I don’t think there’s a choice.” Talking rapidly, he summarized his researches.

  “Exponential growth starts slowly. One, two, four. But then it breaks out, eight, sixteen, thirty-two—”

  Romano laughed. “So Edinburgh is being destroyed by a rock-eating bug from the Moon. I’ve never heard such rubbish in all my puff. If we were to order an evacuation because of that, the public would laugh in our faces.”

  Henry shrugged. “Then tell them something else. That’s your problem. There really isn’t a choice.”

  Romano stared at him for long seconds. Then she turned to one of the civilians near her, a tall, upright, silver-haired man who looked as if he might have once been a soldier. “Archie…Dr. Meacher, this is Archie Ferguson, the Emergency Planning Officer.”

  Henry nodded.

  “I don’t have the authority to evacuate the city, do I?” Romano asked.

  “No,” Ferguson said. His accent was soft, almost anglicized. “That’s a lot bigger than us. We’d need to establish a REC.”

  “A what?”

  “A regional emergency committee. The old civil defense arrangements would come into play. Regional government, involving the military, police, health, transport, environment. And the utilities—electricity, telecoms, water. Whoever. We’d need the power to requisition and raise funding—”

  “Christ,” said Romano wearily. “You’re talking about the Emergency Powers Act.”

  “Yes. We’d have to get it through Parliament.”

  Romano shook her head. “Which Parliament? Westminster, or our talking shop here?”

  Ferguson looked unhappy. “It’s not clear since devolution. Both, probably. It would take two or three days anyhow.”

  Henry exploded. “Two or three days? What bullshit is this? Why the hell don’t you guys call in FEMA—the federal emergency guys—whatever your equivalent is here?”

  “We don’t have a FEMA,” Ferguson said coldly. “We don’t work that way. On the scale of the disasters Britain generally faces, it’s not necessary, or appropriate. We have a system of flexible response, where the most appropriate agency—”

  “Jesus.” Henry took a couple of paces in a tight circle, trying to stay cool. “So nobody’s in control.”

  Ferguson said, “This isn’t Hollywood, Dr. Meacher.”

  “It sure isn’t. Call in our FEMA.”

  More laughter, shaking heads, the crazy Yank. Romano said, “Dr. Meacher, I’m not sure if a parachute drop of Hershey’s bars is quite what we need right now.”

  “It’s not even clear how we’d handle a major evacuation,” Ferguson was saying ruefully. “We were geared up for major disturbances—particularly nuclear strikes—during the Cold War. But that’s all gone now. We sold off most of the regional bunkers. The military hospitals have closed. The Army is a lot smaller, a hundred thousand professionals, and most of them are tied up in Ireland or the peacekeeping zones.” He looked at Henry, almost apologetically. “We just weren’t expecting this.”

  “No,” said Henry, more restrained. Take it easy, Henry. These people are trying to do their jobs, as best they can, and they’re listening to you. “Nobody was expecting it.”

  “And we have to think about litigation,” Ferguson was saying unhappily.

  “What?”

  Ferguson said, “It’s happened in America. We have powers to act during an emergency, such as an evacuation. But does that imply a duty of care? We’re in a cleft stick. We’ll be liable if we don’t attempt to evacuate, but also liable if we do and we cause unnecessary suffering.”

  Henry shook his head. “Believe me. The lawyers are going to be the least of your worries.”

  Romano said, “Well, I can’t make the decision alone. I have to consult. The senior fire officer, who I bet will back an evacuation. The local authorities, who probably won’t.” She eyed Henry. “You know not everybody agrees with you. The geologists assigned by the Department of Environment, for instance. They’re putting out briefings. They say this is liquefaction. Just an earthquake. Localized. A couple of days it will all be over.”

  “Bullshit,” Henry said.

  “Maybe.” She eyed him. “But if you want me to act on what you say, I need you to press your case.”

  I’m winning, Henry thought. She’s going as far as she can.

  He said, “I’ll talk to your superiors, whoever. But that’s not enough. There’s no reason to think this incident is going to confine itself to Edinburgh. Even Scotland. I need to speak to your central government. The U.S. government also…”

  Romano arched an eyebrow. “Because you’re the only person who knows the truth. The man who can save the world.”

  He closed his eyes. I wish I had some smart way to say this. And I wish I’d tried to get the word out before the shit hit the fan. “That’s about the size of it.”

  “And you have to walk into my office.” She was silent a moment, visibly making her decision. “All right, Dr. Meacher, we’ll see what we can do for you.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “I’ll make arrangements to get you to London. I’ll talk to RAF Leuchars. Might take a day or two. Do you want to find somewhere to clean up, to rest?” Romano turned to one of her officers. “You’d better get me the Home Office. And I’d better speak to the silver and bronze level commanders again…” And now Romano was distracted by a junior officer who had some pressing message, and with a last nod to Henry, she walked off.

  Henry closed his eyes, rested for a second. But all he could see was Jane’s face.

  He was still covered in blood and grime, some of it his own. Maybe he ought to find a paramedic.

  Ted and Jack were directed to a Rest Center in Musselburgh.

  Musselburgh was a small coastal town a few miles east of the city center. Ted had only ever been out here for meetings at the race course, and to take the misty sea air, and to walk along the river gardens. The Honesty Town, was the local motto. On the lampposts there were flags to attract the tourists’ eyes, garish splashes of color, mussels and anchors and lengths of rope.

  Now, it seemed, the Honesty Town was going to have to soak up half of eastern Edinburgh. Already there was talk, he overheard, of setting up a tent city on the race course, soldiers laboring to install power lines and dig sewers and lay temporary roads on the turf.

  The Rest Center itself turned out to be set up in the Brunton Theater, maybe the biggest and most modern building here, a 1970s sprawl of concrete and glass that seemed out of place in this small, quiet, respectable old town.

  Ted and Jack were directed into the foyer of the theater. This was dominated by a huge, unlikely sea horse sculpture, around which people, weary and bewildered, were trying to find a place to rest, somewhere to go. The theater also, it turned out, doubled as the housing department offices. There were signs directing Ted where to go for Payment of Rents, Rates and Accounts, and there was a big notice board for house swaps. Now, the foyer was getting cluttered with blankets and chemical toilets and fold-up cots.

  Ted made a discreet choice. He pulled his jacket tighter to hide his bandaged chest, and he hoped there was no blood on his face or hands. He could pass himself off as a “survivor”—at worst a walking wounded who could look after himself for now—and take charge of Jack. It had to be for the best; Christ alone
knew what would happen if they got split up in this mess.

  They had to queue up, in a long, tangled line at the door, to register. Jack clung to his hand, as he hadn’t since he was a small child, wide-eyed but silent; Ted felt proud of him.

  He was surprised by the way the people around him endured this wait with stolid patience, even good humor—remarkable when he considered what had happened to them, the untimely ejection from their home, the catastrophe that was overwhelming the city barely six miles away.

  There were mobile phones scattered along the lines of people. He heard people trying to contact family members, offices and business contacts, trying to rearrange meetings, talk about being delayed for the next few days. People didn’t seem to be grasping what was going on. Was this what the trick cyclists called denial?

  After more than an hour he reached the front of the queue.

  “I’m looking for my daughter. Jane Dundas. Is she here?”

  He was speaking to a dumpy woman, no older than thirty, with a WRVS armband. Women’s Royal Voluntary Service. She was sitting in what usually served as the theater box office. She had a stack of forms, hand-drawn and evidently hastily photocopied, in front of her on a rickety foldaway desk. “I need to take your details. Is this your son?”

  “No, it’s my grandson,” Ted railed, “and today’s already been a very, very bad day, and now you have already kept me and the lad waiting an hour to go through this registration bureaucracy gash. Why can’t you just help me?”

  The woman looked weak, her face round and soft, and—Ted noticed—she might have been crying earlier. But now she was all cried out, and at Ted’s tirade, she just looked weary. “Right now the only way I can help you is by having you fill in this form.”

  Ted leaned forward, ready to attack once more.

  Jack touched his arm. The lad looked up at him, solemn, making him think again.

  She’s just a volunteer. Not very smart, not very capable, out of her depth. Just trying to do the job she’s given, in impossible circumstances.

  Besides, she’s right. Registering here, letting The System know where he was, was likely the only chance he would have of finding his daughter.

  He felt shamed. I should be helping here. Not making more trouble.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and he bent forward to fill out the form.

  The woman nodded, without real reaction. It looked as if she’d had her fill of apologies, too, today.

  When the form was done, the woman passed it on to a runner, a school-age girl, who took it over to a bank of pcs for entry at the back of the office. The woman started pointing out features of the theater, like an air hostess. “You’re in the Survivor Reception Center. On the first floor there is a Friends and Relatives Reception Center, in the theater bar.”

  “The bar.”

  “Yes. You might find your daughter there. We have a rest area for the emergency personnel, a transit area for people to be passed on to other centers…We’re very busy.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ted again. For being such an arse.

  But the woman had already moved on to the next in line, a heavily overweight man with a small, unhealthy-looking dog under his arm.

  Ted moved away. “That went well,” he said dismally.

  Jack squeezed his hand. “You’ll get used to it, Granddad.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What do we do now?” Jack asked.

  “We find a toilet,” said Ted firmly.

  Even that wasn’t so easy. The theater’s regular toilets were closed up—no running water, and the drains were blocked. There was a single chemical toilet in a Portaloo on the patio outside the entrance, with another immense but patient queue, which Ted joined; at the door there was a Red Cross official, a burly man.

  “How about this,” Ted said wearily. “A toilet with a bouncer. Never in all my puff.”

  The elderly man behind him grunted. “I hear they’ve got lads digging latrines on the beaches. Just like the bloody war.” And he stared with stolid, resigned patience at the yellow wall of the Portaloo.

  When they reached the front of the queue, Ted found the toilet flushing but it smelled clogged, and the floor was slick with drying, dribbled urine. There was a small sink with a faucet that supplied a small amount of very hot, very high pressure water. He used it to get the worst of the blood and dirt off himself, and off Jack: Ted’s own blood, in fact, sprayed over the clothing of his grandson.

  He felt newly shamed, that he hadn’t been able to protect the kid even from this.

  On impulse he found a clean T-shirt in their single suitcase and got Jack to put it on. He stuffed his bloodied shirt in a waste disposal slot, despite a pricking of conscience. You don’t know how long these clothes will have to last.

  The hell with it.

  The theater was getting steadily more crowded, with adults, kids, babies, some sullen teenagers. There were just so many kids, for now sticking close to their parents, but with plenty of potential for trouble later.

  All these people. And all of them would need feeding, and watering, and toilets. Young, old, thin, fat, good, evil, smart, dull. And yet it was the purpose of all human endeavor, as far as he could see, to preserve every last one of them, as if he or she was the last human on the planet.

  And they would all, he supposed, want dignity.

  Not only that, they had their pets with them: there were a lot of dogs, rather fewer cats, a handful of birds in cages and fish in bowls, even a few rabbits and gerbils and hamsters in cages or shoeboxes. The animals were already making a hell of a row, and much as he approved of the principle of keeping family units together—and pets were part of the family—he could see there was going to be trouble later; animals and humans, generally speaking, did not mix.

  All these people. And this was just one refugee station, of perhaps dozens, hundreds being set up, as the city became a leaking balloon, spilling its people across the countryside, the authorities trying desperately to mop up that sad flow in sink holes like this, trying to get some control again.

  When what they should really be doing, Ted told himself, was getting the hell out of the way.

  There were volunteers from all over, the British Red Cross and the St. John Ambulance Brigade and the Salvation Army and the WRVS and the RAF and the Army, even from the local Rotary Club. They were carrying blankets and sheets and camp mattresses and pillows, packets of food, plastic tubs of water, but they looked a little lost about where to put them.

  The RAF types had a job-lot of storm lanterns with them, and at that Ted glanced up at the light fittings. Not a flicker; no sound from any PA. No power, then; that was going to be fun later…though he wondered how those pcs were being made to work.

  Ted found the family reception point, as the woman on the desk had described it. It was crowded with lost-looking people, some of them injured. But there was no sign that this place had been set up to serve its new purpose. Not so much as a bulletin board with a box of tacks.

  He found a ballpoint pen in one pocket, and he scrawled his name and Jack’s on a painted wall. Jane Dundas. We’ll find you.

  An anxious-looking young woman begged the pen from him, to add her own message—Mum’s here—and then another after her.

  A queue started forming.

  Ted turned to Jack. “Nothing but queues,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t suppose I’ll see that pen again.”

  “No.”

  “So what do you think, lad? This place is a mess. How do you fancy a little work?”

  Jack nodded seriously. “I think they need our help.”

  “That they do.”

  Ted led the way downstairs again.

  Back toward the entrance there was even more of a crush to register than before. The lengthening, folded-back queues looked less patient than before, and there seemed to be a large number of wounded and their families being carried straight past and into the theater.

  Ted put down h
is case and leaned to talk to Jack. “Now then,” he said. “I know I complained at that lady.”

  “But you were wrong.”

  “Yes, I was wrong. Logging everybody in is one of the most important things that can happen here.”

  “Without that, mum can’t find us.”

  “That’s right. Are you any use with a computer?”

  “What model? What language? I know C++, markup—”

  “Never mind.” He pointed. “You see the wee girl over there.” It was the teenage runner he’d noticed before, carrying registration slips to a pc. The table where the pc was set up was piled high with unentered slips.

  Jack nodded uncertainly.

  “Say I sent you. Say you’ll help her with her forms. If she’ll let you type in the stuff, fine. If she just wants you to bring her the forms, well, that’s fine too.”

  “All right, Granddad.” The lad looked dubious. Probably he was more doubtful about the prospect of approaching a fourteen-year-old girl, Ted reflected, than getting involved in the greatest evacuation exercise in Britain since wartime. At that, Ted envied him.

  “But the first thing you can do is bring her a cup of tea. Or a Coke, or whatever. And the lady on the desk there too.”

  “Where will I get the tea?”

  “Do I look as if I know? You’ll find it, lad.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m going to see the manager.” He bent, painfully, and looked Jack in the face. “But you listen. I’ll be right here, in this theater. You’ll be able to find me any time you want me.”

  “And you can find me too, Granddad.”

  He nodded. “I’ll take you up on that. And your mother will be along soon. But for now, we’ve got work to do.”

  Ted ruffled the lad’s hair and, taking care not to look back, he turned and limped off to find the manager’s office.

  The door of the theater manager’s office was open; a small, harassed-looking woman was shouting into a phone about how she didn’t have the resources to handle this, not to mention a complete lack of training, and if something wasn’t done about it soon…First bad sign, Ted thought. Should be a line of people at this door, waiting for instructions. This woman isn’t running anything but a phone bill.