Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  She put her hand over her phone and scowled. “Who are you?”

  “Ted Dundas.” He flashed his old, now blood-stained warrant card.

  “Retired,” she said wearily.

  “But not deactivated.”

  “Mr. Dundas—”

  “Ted.”

  “I think I have all the help I can handle right now.”

  “You do?” Ted turned, as if to go. “That’s good. You’ll need it. Because I was wondering what percentage of the population of Edinburgh you were thinking of lodging in this establishment. And for how long.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got people streaming in. I don’t see too many streaming out.” He studied her. “You haven’t been trained for this, have you?”

  Her mouth turned to a thin line. She was near the edge, he realized. She was just the manager of a small provincial theater, a place that was a one-line backup on some local authority contingency plan that had never been expected to come to pass. And now, this. And everybody stretched thin, nobody around to help. Except an old arse like me.

  Tact, Ted. Never your strong suit.

  “Mr. Dundas, I’m in charge here.”

  “I know you are.” He held up his hands. “But I can see you don’t have what you need. No training. No emergency box. No call-out list. It’s all just been dumped on you.”

  She hesitated.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it has.”

  He nodded. “You don’t need to keep everybody here, to begin with. Billet them. Find volunteers here, with their cars, waiting to take people away, to put them up in their homes. It just takes a little organization. Maybe I could help with that.”

  “But the registration—”

  “You can register them going out as easy as coming in. Maybe there will be some who won’t have to pass through the center, physically, at all.”

  “We won’t have enough volunteers. Hosts.”

  “Get some more.” He pointed to her mobile phone. “Use that. Find a ham radio operator. Start tapping into the communication networks that already exist. Are there media people here?”

  “Media?”

  “The telly. They are going to be here, and in your face. Use them. Find somebody to be a media spokesman.”

  “Spokesperson.”

  “Whatever…If a local radio station is still operating—”

  The manager frowned, then scribbled a note.

  He ought to speak to whatever copper was in charge here, probably a bronze-level commander. The sooner they could be persuaded to let the mobile and self-reliant pass on and out of here under their own steam, the better.

  “What about resources?” Ted asked now.

  “We have the social services and the volunteer agencies—”

  “You never have enough blankets and warm clothing,” he said sharply. “Start an appeal. The local people. The ambulance service, the RAF…How about food?”

  “Well, we have a canteen in the theater. And I’ve been on to the school meals adviser for the town.”

  “Good. What about cutlery? Paper plates? What about special needs? Vegetarians. People with medical requirements. Ethnic diets. Whatever.”

  She said nothing.

  “You know you have some unattached kids here, don’t you?” he said. “They may be orphans, I suppose. Even they don’t know yet…”

  She was looking at him, her eyes wide.

  He said gently, “I think you ought to get your senior staff in here, don’t you?”

  17

  Sweating in his heat-resistant space suit in the late spring sunshine, laden with cameras and seismometers and thermocouples, Blue Ishiguro climbed the east flank of Arthur’s Seat.

  Here, the uneven spread of the Moonseed had not yet turned the rock to flour, and the ancient basalt plug persisted. But the grass and heather were dying back, he saw, poisoned by emissions of gas. The ground underfoot was distinctly warm, even through the thick soles of his boots. From small depressions in the ground, gas and steam seeped.

  Blue bent to collect samples in glass bottles, which he tucked into pockets in his suit. He steadily described what he saw into a throat mike; his words would be captured by a miniature tape recorder inside the suit and transmitted to his colleagues, safely removed from the area.

  Sweat pooled under his eyes, and he wished he could reach inside the suit. He was sandwiched, he thought, trapped between the hot May sun and this burning ground. And if I don’t get out soon, I will fry like a chunk of fish in a tempura grill.

  Of course, it might already be too late. There was no reason to suppose normal volcanological wisdom would apply here.

  But that wisdom was all any of them had to go on.

  And besides, the fact that this was a new phenomenon increased its attraction for Blue. The chance to study something new—to collect data from a genuinely new phenomenon, to push out the boundaries of understanding…

  To atone, he thought. Because I could not, in the end, do anything to save Kobe.

  Was that his motivation, as Henry Meacher believed? Perhaps. It scarcely mattered; for now the job was the thing, the only objective reality.

  Blue moved on, cautiously, taking his samples and readings, toward the heart of the disturbance, the primary Moonseed pool itself.

  He felt a tremor, a deep shifting in the ground. The catfish is stirring, he thought, deep in the mud.

  …Wish I was a Spaceman / The Fastest Guy Alive…

  Singing, coming from over the crest of the Seat. There were people, still here.

  He increased his pace.

  Over the summit and there they were: the cultists, the followers of the Scottish lunatic Bran, gathered on the agglomerate. None of them wore protective gear of any kind, not so much as a handkerchief over the nose, and Blue could see how they coughed and wiped their streaming eyes. There seemed to be fewer of them now—evidently the resolve of Bran’s followers had been tested to the limit—but still, many remained, perhaps a dozen, all of them in their ludicrous purple pajamas. They sat in a circle around Bran, oddly asexual, and they sang their absurd sci-fi songs to each other.

  And they were smiling.

  The Seat appeared to be otherwise deserted. Just this single ring of cultists before the unearthly steel-gray glimmer of the Moonseed puddle, the smoking ruin of the Edinburgh suburbs beyond. But a single policeman had stayed with the cultists, standing patiently with his hands behind his back, showing no sign of fear.

  Remarkable, thought Blue. He knew the British police had no powers to evacuate people forcibly. This young man must know his own life was forfeit, and yet he stayed to do his duty, giving himself up to defend a foolish law.

  Mike Dundas was here, among the cultists. His head was shaven, and he had somehow acquired the cultists’ oddly asexual look. Perhaps it was the pajamas.

  Blue walked up to the cultists. He waved to the policeman, miming that he would stay here only two minutes.

  He reached Mike. He took a deep breath, and pulled off his hood. It was difficult to grasp the dusty material with his heavily gloved hands.

  The air was heavy with sulfur, and his eyes stung immediately.

  Mike’s eyes, he saw, were glowing like jewels.

  Blue squatted beside him. “You must come with me.”

  “I’m staying here. I’m in no danger.”

  Blue shook his head. “The signs are unmistakable. You understand this. The Moonseed has been eating down into this basaltic plug. Working its way to the old magmatic chamber that powered this volcano in the first place. We’re expecting a major event. The deformation has increased, in some places, by two yards since yesterday. Kid, when you see a turtle on a fence post, you know it didn’t get there by accident.”

  Mike looked up at him, puzzled. “I understand what’s happening.”

  “Then you are a fool, Mike Dundas.”

  “No.” Mike’s expression was peaceful, despite his streaming ey
es. “I’ve made my choice.”

  And, Blue thought, maybe it was a rational choice after all. Mike would find peace, he supposed, whether his space aliens came to beam him up or not.

  “I do not know what has driven you here,” he said gently. “I do not know what you’re trying to escape.”

  “No,” said Mike. “You don’t. Anyhow, there is no escape. For any of us. But we don’t need it. We have to put aside our fear, and accept.” He smiled. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Blue looked at the landscape, the scar of metal-gray Moonseed that was pushing aside the green blanket of Scotland.

  “No,” he said. “I do not think it is beautiful at all. I will remember you to your family.”

  “Just tell them I love them. And I’m sorry.”

  Sorry? For what?

  Blue said, “I will tell them.”

  The ground shuddered again, a stirring beast.

  Blue pulled on his hood, and walked back the way he had come.

  Morag Decker walked steadily along George Street, knocking on doors.

  This was the heart of Edinburgh New Town, lined with banks and shops and churches. Today, the day after the first Moonseed surge, twelve hours after the evacuation was ordered, the street was empty save for a couple of abandoned cars, an old newspaper blowing down the center of the road. The emptiness was eerie in the middle of the day, the sun bright overhead, the light splashing from the buildings.

  The smoke clouds were still rising from Abbeyhill.

  There was no reply to her knocking. The evacuation of the city was all but complete, as far as anybody could tell; this was the final sweep.

  The evacuation, though fast, had been a mess. She’d been surprised how difficult it had turned out to be to get people to move.

  There had been broadcast warnings in the media—national and local TV and radio, even the Internet—with details of evacuation procedures, assembly points, Rest Centers. But the messages had been confusing, and mixed up with a lot of lurid misreporting. People were fragmented; there was no one channel that everybody listened to, no one time when everyone tuned in. And besides, nobody sensible believed what they heard on the radio anyhow.

  So the police had resorted to more old-fashioned methods. There was a mail-shot campaign, aimed at households and businesses affected, thousands of them. That had worked, even if it hadn’t made people move immediately; Morag had seen many people clutching the flyers, carrying the information with them.

  And at last, in the small hours, there had come the blunt approach: police cars with loudhailers patrolling the streets, one-way road blocks, coppers going from door to door telling you to get packed up and get out now. It had been that, it seemed, the sight of police on the doorstep giving direct commands, that finally forced compliance.

  That, and the sight of the fires on the eastern horizon, the mess around Arthur’s Seat that was visible from most of the city: this is real, and it’s coming this way.

  Morag’s briefing, from the local authority emergency planners, had been rudimentary, but effective.

  For instance, how to tackle looting. Looting was rare—bad guys flee too if the danger is real—but the fear of looting, whipped up by inaccurate reporting, was something you had to deal with. People wouldn’t have their houses marked as empty, for instance, for fear of making them targets. So you had to reassure. It was one reason she was still here now, a bobby on the beat in the empty heart of Edinburgh: to reassure the thousands who had gone.

  The most heart-rending moments had been dealing with people who couldn’t move themselves. The elderly. The disabled. A team of interpreters had combed the Asian communities, to make sure the message got home there. Once Morag had found a house occupied by a deaf couple; she’d had to call out a sign language interpreter.

  There were a lot of people on the margins. She’d never realized how many. Like the people dumped out of homes and hospitals under the Care in the Community program. It had reduced the nation’s welfare bill, and no doubt done some kind of good in many cases. But, by God, it had added to the strain in this situation.

  The gold police commander, the Chief Constable, had estimated that fifteen percent of the population had needed direct attention and assistance of some kind. Fifteen percent.

  Anyhow, now it was done; as far as she could tell, George Street was empty of human life—empty, at any rate, of anybody who wanted to move.

  She studied the eighteenth-century buildings that studded the street. There were two great churches, St. George’s and St. Andrew’s, the latter with its spire rising out of a Pantheon-like neoclassical building. The monumental banks and insurance houses were a blizzard of porticos, pediments and pilasters. But this was no museum, but the heart of a working city; many of the buildings had modern frontages of glass and plastic grafted on to them, sometimes with a brutal lack of grace.

  She reached the intersection of George Street with Frederick Street. She stood at the feet of the statue of Thomas Chalmers, founder of the Scottish Free Church, and looked north. Monuments everywhere to the great men of the past, who had looked for immortality in stone and bronze.

  Beyond a line of trees she saw blue sky, a hint of the waters of the Forth. The fresh light, still untainted in that direction by the smoke from Arthur’s Seat, drenched the prospect in loveliness.

  It was so beautiful, the world was so beautiful, and she had seen so little of it.

  Maybe she should go find her family, her mother and father. They had headed west out of the city; she knew where they should have got to by now.

  But she still had her duty.

  She turned away from the sunlit trees. She walked south, and turned into Princes Street, and continued to knock on doors.

  A helicopter flapped over her head; she stared up to see its rotors glittering in the sun.

  The Chinook set down in the center of Princes Street Gardens. It was a crude chunk of military hardware in the middle of this Georgian garden, its runners crushing ornate flower beds, the noise of its rotors clattering rudely from the elegant buildings.

  Henry, clutching his petrological microscope, lumbered up to the chopper, looking for somewhere to sit.

  The interior of the Army Air Corps Chinook was spartan, just a bare hull with plastic coating over the frame. There were no seats. There were soldiers here in field kit, a patrol on their way to some assignment of their own. The men were hot, sweating, sitting in the roar of the engines on a non-slip flooring littered with dirt. Their packs were strapped down to the floor, with cyalumes—lamps—around them. The men were rooting through the crew’s kit they found there, pinching chocolate bars and Coke with a practiced thoroughness.

  And I complained about British Airways, Henry thought. Well, there wasn’t a lot of choice. Maybe if he padded his jacket under his ass—

  A loadmaster tapped him on the shoulder. “Not here, sir. You can ride upfront, in the cockpit.”

  “Is that any more comfortable?”

  The loadie shrugged. “The company’s better.”

  So, with an effort, Henry climbed into the cockpit, and took a jump seat behind the pilot and copilot. The pilot was on the left—no, he was the guy on the right, damn it, these Brits took the wrong side of the highway even in the air. He nodded to Henry, a crisp “Sir.” The pilot seemed young, an NCO; Henry would have said he was working class if that hadn’t become, he’d learned, an outdated analysis of British society.

  The cockpit was a cave of switches and dials and screens; the pilot and copilot were working through their take-off routine.

  “Pedals in neutral.”

  “Pedals.”

  “Cyclic centered, collective lever down.”

  “Got it.”

  “Clear left and right.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Rotor brake off. Wind up rotors.”

  “I got it…”

  The noise of the rotors rose.

  The Chinook lifted with a surge that made Henry’s stomach sink
a little deeper inside his frame.

  Thanks for the warning, fellas.

  Edinburgh turned into a glowing map spread out beneath him, a folded blanket of green cut through by the blue of the Forth, the gray-black of the buildings, the lumpy outcrops of volcanic rock. The road network, clean and well maintained, was a black thread like a kid’s toy track, its markings clear and bright. Today the roads were empty, save for a few scattered and stationary vehicles.

  In the middle of the rectangular, oddly American grid that was the New Town, someone was standing, alone, looking up at him, face a bright white dot.

  “One hundred feet…eighty feet…” the copilot said.

  “Roger, eighty feet. Ninety knots.” The pilot turned, his eyes insectile behind big tinted goggles. “So you’re from NASA, sir?”

  “Yup.”

  “Always glad to give you Yanks a flying lesson. Staying at eighty feet, ninety knots.”

  The Chinook dipped sharply to the right. Henry looked for a sick bag; there was nothing that qualified.

  “This is a little slow for you, I suppose, sir.”

  “I’m a scientist, not an astronaut.”

  Now the Chinook was flying low over Arthur’s Seat.

  The plug looked extraordinarily ugly from the air, a crude knot of basalt protruding from the ground, old and stubborn, somehow magnificent. Its several ancient vents were easy to make out, the basalt outline clear beneath a thin coating of heather. The Seat had, thought Henry, already seen off three hundred million years of weather, the titanic scraping of the ice, the pinprick depredations of man. But it wasn’t going to be able to see off the Moonseed. And there, indeed, close to the summit, was the central pool, obscured a little by the smoke from the ruin of Abbeyhill, shining like a coin in the ashen light.

  And elsewhere, there were signs of magmatic activity: the blur of steam and smoke, perhaps a fissure near the crest of the Seat. He wished he had a cospec up here. A camera, even.