Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  “Yeah.” Even now it must be breeding down there, in the slushy layers beneath the continents. Building its fat little superstring bombs.

  Although we may contain the surface effects—

  “Hell, we can’t even do that.”

  It is difficult to see what can stop it.

  “I know,” Henry said.

  We can’t evacuate forever, Blue said. Eventually we will run out of planet.

  The light in his window was fading. The end of the day. Eventually we will run out of planet.

  Of course it wouldn’t come to that. They’d find some way to combat this thing, or else it would self-limit. But still, maybe somebody should be thinking about extreme contingencies.

  Now, what the hell was stirring at the back of his mind?

  “Blue, I’ll call you back.”

  Henry—

  He put the phone down.

  He lay on the bed, as the light deepened, and tried to let the thought coalesce, in the recesses of his head.

  An official car came to pick him up the next morning. A black Daimler, for Christ’s sake. He sank into soft leather in the back. His escort, one of the squaddies, followed him, looking even more uncomfortable.

  A police escort, two outriders, took them at a brisk pace through the London traffic.

  They turned off Whitehall into Downing Street, through heavy steel barriers. Henry got out of the car, in front of what was maybe the world’s most famous front door: in fact just a polished black door set in a mundane-looking terrace.

  There were press ranked up on the other side of the road, behind a cordon. There was an explosion of flash bulbs, a bank of TV lights that glared despite the brightness of the day.

  “Henry!” “Henry Meacher!” “What are you going to tell the Government, Dr. Meacher?” “Is Britain doomed?” “This way, Henry!”

  A policeman at the door saluted him. “Christ,” said Henry, unnerved. “How did they get my name? You’d think I was the Prez come to call.”

  The copper, a grizzled forty-year-old who looked as if he had seen it all, just nodded, face stern and blank.

  The door opened, as if automatically, and some kind of butler let him into a pretty impressive hallway. The butler was a big, balding, well-muscled guy. A plain clothes cop, no doubt.

  A young suited man shook Henry’s hand. “Dr. Meacher? My name’s Pearson. I’m the Prime Minister’s PPS—uh, political secretary.”

  “The Prime Minister?”

  “Didn’t you know you were seeing him? He’s waiting for you upstairs in his study. I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  The aide ran off up the narrow staircase. Henry was left standing with the Bruce Willis butler.

  It was just a smart old town house, on the surface. But Henry knew there was more to it than met the eye. For instance there were corridors that led to the other houses in the row, such as Number Eleven, the residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the finance minister. So, behind the facade, this was all one big house, like the Beatles’ shared home in Help!; he half-expected to see John Lennon playing a Wurlitzer come ascending from the floor.

  It was hard to believe you could run a modern country from such a place, but evidently the Brits managed.

  “So this is Number Ten,” he said to Bruce Willis.

  “How true, sir.”

  “It seems kind of—poky. What’s that big place down the corridor? The pool room?”

  “We call it the Cabinet Room, sir.”

  The political secretary returned, and escorted him up the stairs. The walls were lined with portraits of what looked like previous Prime Ministers. Henry recognized some: Churchill, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Portillo.

  The Prime Minister was standing in front of the window.

  Over the PM’s gray-suited shoulder was a hell of a view, of what looked like Horse Guards Parade. A couple of other people—a man and a woman, both sweating in heavy suits—were sitting in hard-backed chairs before the desk. The desk itself was a mess; its green leather top was covered by loose papers and scribbled notes and a big map of Britain. There were plates of abandoned sandwiches on the window sill, and a half-drunk bottle of red wine and three glasses leaving stains on the desk. It looked as if meetings had been going on here through the night.

  The Prime Minister turned and came forward. He looked tired, his face slack, his thick hair grayer than Henry remembered from TV. “I’m Bob Farnes,” he said. “Dr. Meacher, thank you for coming.”

  “It’s, umm, an honor.”

  Farnes introduced the others. The man, so fat his belly strained the buttons of his off-white shirt, was called Dave Holland, and he was the environment minister. The woman, a thin, intense Asian, was called Indira Bhide. Her title was Home Secretary, which meant, as Henry understood it, she was the most senior interior minister.

  Farnes said, “We have projections from our own science advisers. But Professor McDiarmid tells us you’re the best qualified to brief us on this phenomenon.”

  Henry wasn’t expecting that. Was McDiarmid uncharacteristically avoiding the credit for Henry’s work on the Moonseed—or, more likely, trying to avoid the heavy shit?

  “Tell us what we’re dealing with here, Dr. Meacher,” Farnes said.

  Henry spread his hands and summarized what he’d found out about the Moonseed. “It eats rock. It prefers igneous rocks—basalt, for instance. Volcanic rocks. It is spreading across surface rock, subsurface rock, and down into the mantle. Also, after the Arthur’s Seat incident, it is also spreading through the mantle itself, and through the stratosphere in the form of dust.”

  “I’m told it slowed down, after the Edinburgh eruption.”

  “Yes. I expected that.”

  “You did?”

  “It doesn’t just grow. It builds things. Structures in the rock. Now it’s into the deeper rock, we think it is busy building. But its spread will resume.”

  Holland pulled his lip. “So you say.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not everyone agrees with you.”

  He’d been expecting that. “They haven’t had time to study it the way I have.”

  They were staring at him, their faces grave—Christ, they’d already lost a city, they’d already presided over Britain’s biggest peacetime disaster—but, even so, not grave enough.

  He turned to the desk, and pulled the Britain map toward him. “Look. Here’s Edinburgh. Right now, we think the outbreak is around two months old, and it’s maybe four miles across. In another couple of months it will be out as far as here.” He stabbed at a point twenty miles to the east of Edinburgh. “What’s this? Some kind of nuclear plant?”

  “Torness,” said Bhide quietly.

  “Okay. A few weeks after that, it will reach here.” An urban sprawl at the western end of the Midland Valley. Glasgow. “And you won’t get the slow burn you had in Edinburgh. It will sweep over the city in a day.” He studied them. “Somewhere about then, it’s going to be moving faster than most people can walk. After that it will dig through the crust and—”

  “Dear God,” said Holland. “What about the rest of Britain? North England—even London—”

  Henry shrugged. “The projections are chancy. And we have to expect more incidents as it eats into old magmatic structures—dead volcanoes, weaknesses in the crust—and, given time, the Moonseed will attack the crust itself. The ocean floor is about five miles thick; the Moonseed will take a few weeks to get through that and down to the asthenosphere. The continental crust is more like fifty miles thick—”

  “What happens then?”

  Henry looked for the right expressions. “The scale of the eruptions is going to increase.”

  “Beyond anything we’ve yet seen?”

  “Beyond anything in recorded history.”

  Farnes withdrew to his window, and the sunlight streaming in there silhouetted him, masking even his posture.

  Holland said briskly, “So how can we stop this thing?”

  “W
e don’t know. We’re trying to find a way. It can be inhibited. The Moonseed has to form, umm, certain crystalline structures before it can spread effectively. If you disrupt those structures, we think it can be slowed down.”

  Holland looked confused. “What do you mean, disrupt?”

  “Mechanically. Break it up. Bomb it.”

  “Nuclear weapons? We couldn’t sanction—”

  “No,” said Henry firmly. “The radiation from a nuke would probably feed it more than inhibit it. Carpet-bomb the infection sites with conventional weapons. Water helps.”

  “Water?”

  “Under high pressure. Flood it wherever you can. The earlier you can catch a new infection site the better your chance of disrupting its growth, we think.”

  “You think?” snapped Holland. “Damn it, man, don’t you know?”

  “No, sir, I don’t. At Edinburgh we did some lab tests but we didn’t have time to test any of this in the field.”

  “But at least we can slow it down.”

  “I think so. You can buy some time.”

  Holland said, “What about further afield? Beyond the sea. Ireland, the continent—”

  “We think it will be inhibited by the ocean. The Moonseed likes dry rocks and sunlight. But it will migrate eventually, even if it has to go through the mantle.”

  “Evacuation,” Bhide said. “That’s what we’re looking at, if Dr. Meacher is right. First the Scottish Midland Valley towns. We can send people to the highlands and islands in the far north, to northern England, and out of Britain altogether. To Northern Ireland. Eire. France.”

  “We’ll have to think about the royals,” Farnes said abruptly. “Get them to Canada maybe. Christ. The bloody royals. The King will hate it; he despises the Canadians…”

  Holland stepped forward, angry. “Oh, this is all rot. Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?” he snapped at Bhide, and Henry saw old rivalries tense between them. “These are all short-term palliatives. If this gentleman is right, inside a few months, we would have to evacuate the country. It’s impossible. The capacity of the airports, the sea ports, the Channel Tunnel…Dr. Meacher, we’re talking about moving sixty million people.”

  “Of course it’s impossible,” Bhide said gently. “But we have to try. What else can we do?”

  “But where would we go?” the Prime Minister asked softly. “It would be a new diaspora. The British, without Britain.”

  Holland took a glass of wine and gulped it down. “Christ, here we go,” he muttered to Henry. “He went catatonic like this when the Euro collapsed.”

  Bhide said nothing.

  Farnes said, staring out the window, “I have to go on TV tonight. A message to the nation. If you were in my shoes, what would you say, Dr. Meacher?”

  Henry took a breath. “Sir, you have to look at the probability that the machinery of government in this country isn’t going to last for much longer.”

  Bhide nodded. “We still have regional government contingency plans from the Cold War days—”

  “You have to go beyond that,” Henry said. “You have to plan for a time when you will not be able to govern at all. People must understand that ultimately their lives, the lives of their families, will be their own responsibility.”

  “My last act,” Farnes said, “will be abdication.”

  “No, sir. Education.”

  “And,” Bhide said, “we have to keep trying. We must buy time, as Dr. Meacher says. And if the scientists can come up with some solution—” She looked to Henry.

  “As soon as I’m done here I’m going to America to keep working on just that, ma’am. But—”

  “Yes?”

  “Right now, we’re nowhere near a solution.”

  Farnes was silent, gazing through the window.

  Holland took another glass of wine; he dribbled spots of it down his shirt. “Catatonic,” he mumbled. “Bloody catatonic.”

  When they let Henry go, the butler character led him out through a back way, through the basement which led past the ruins of an old Tudor tennis court; he didn’t want to face the press again.

  20

  At the end of their first day in the Rest Center, Ted didn’t make it to bed until one in the morning.

  He had a little trouble finding Jack. But the lad had not only put himself to bed, he’d found a bed in the first place: in a remote corner of the theater’s main amphitheater, a couple of fold-up cots that looked as if they’d been supplied by the RAF, along with National Health Service blankets and International Red Cross sheets. The cot was a little sharp-edged but comfortable enough, even for an old codger like himself.

  Ted had even had some food, a bowl of thick soup served by a stern-looking woman from the Women’s Institute.

  If it wasn’t for the presence of dozens of other people in the room—and their pets, including one snoring Alsatian—he’d have been happy.

  Sleep came easily, and was disturbed only a couple of times by the dogs barking.

  And when he woke, in the light that marked another day, Jane’s face was before him.

  He sat up—his chest sent pain shooting through his frame—and he reached out and cupped her face. “You found us.”

  She was sitting on the edge of Jack’s bed. “It wasn’t so hard. Although I looked for you in the medical area. You old bugger.”

  He shrugged. “Too much to do. Michael—”

  She caught his eye, and shook her head, subtly.

  The day felt a little colder.

  “What about Henry?”

  Her face turned hard. “He’s not here. He has his own agenda.”

  Ted didn’t press the point.

  He glanced down at Jack. The boy was awake, and looking up at them with big, wet eyes.

  Jane frowned, and bent over him. “Jackie? What is it?”

  At first he shook his head, but she pressed him.

  “I wet the bed! I wet the bloody bed…”

  The Alsatian started barking, and pulling at its short lead.

  The days after that were both better and worse than the first.

  There were more volunteers now, in place to do more useful things. Registration was slick and smooth, with older schoolkids able to take details down straight onto their computers, which were linked in some way Ted utterly failed to understand, and the kids were able to retrieve immediately data on friends and relatives.

  For all that, there was no sign of Michael, on any system.

  The billeting process went well. Ted’s first thought had been to have the refugees meet the Musselburgh people, and see if they paired off. He was especially keen to find stable homes for the unattached children.

  But it didn’t work. The Musselburgh population seemed predominantly elderly, and they were goodhearted. But the human dynamics were all wrong. Cherry-picking; it was really quite obscene. The pretty girls and the youngest kids were always requested first. Nobody wanted the older boys. Even now—and Ted found himself to be utterly naive about such things—there was a lot of concern among the professionals here from the social services about the dangers to the kids of lodging them with strangers.

  The cherry-picking was repugnant anyhow, so Ted broke that up, and started to allocate the refugees on a more random basis, matching up on the basis of needs rather than individuals. The billeting was restricted to families with kids of their own, or people who were known foster parents. Only family groups, with an older male or two, went to volunteers unknown to the social services. If they’d take them, anyhow.

  It all helped to reduce the pressure on the Rest Center itself. But there weren’t enough hosts to go around. And there were some people who were just not suitable for billeting: large family groups, the elderly, people who had been undergoing “care in the community,” and the plain irascible who didn’t want to be billeted anyhow—under which category Ted would place the old guy with the yapping Alsatian, and himself and his diminished family. Ethnic-minority families attracted scarcely any help fr
om outside their own communities, a phenomenon which made Ted feel ill with frustration.

  Ted’s own informal estimate was that maybe ten percent of all those who arrived at the Rest Center couldn’t be billeted. And you had to add to that, he supposed, the population of the hospitals, the prisons, the remand centers for the young, the long-term care facilities, old people’s homes.

  On it went: a lot of people.

  Some things got worse, as time went on.

  Like hygiene. Dog shit seemed to be everywhere. He found himself spending much of his mornings organizing volunteers on clean-up squads, and issuing warnings about the danger of children getting eye infections from the stuff.

  More food arrived, canned stuff from the local supermarkets. Ted wondered how long that would last. But he heard of fleets of Army choppers bringing in supplies from Glasgow and north England, and when it arrived it came in boxes marked prominently with the name of the supplying store, big black letters to display for the TV cameras.

  There were cameras everywhere, in fact. He found one crew filming a grinning care worker handing a sack of used toys sent from Boise, Idaho to some kid who was supposed to act grateful, a Scottish kid with her own life and dignity, in order to please the hearts of some beer-sodden asshole on the other side of the planet, a kid who would forever be scarred by the experience. Ted had to be restrained, by Jane, from throwing the crew out.

  The theater manager—her name was Siobhan Reader—was soon wrestling with longer-term problems. Like finance. It seemed the theater would have to recover its costs from the local authority, who in turn would have to get it back from central government, all retrospectively, and all within the provisions of something called the Bellwin scheme which covered emergencies like this.

  And some of the residents here were actually asking for cash loans. With cash they could buy stuff from the local shops, which were still open, to tide them through the crisis. Many of them had left home with only electronic money, credit cards and Switch cards, which, when the telephone exchanges went down, had suddenly become useless.

  So Reader had obtained some money, twenty thousand pounds, as a loan from the theater’s own bankers in Musselburgh, and was now trying to figure a way of accounting for the small handouts she was making to the families.