Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  Monica Beus distrusted Henry Meacher from the moment he stood at the lectern in front of the OSTP.

  She knew he’d just come from giving testimony over in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, before the Senate committee on commerce, science and transport. And now here he was in Room 476 of the Executive Office Building to give a briefing to this subcommittee of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which reported to the President herself.

  Monica was at one end of a long conference table with Henry’s lectern at the far end, together with an overhead projector and a laptop computer, and three members of the President’s science team, boosted today by a suit from the Pentagon: Admiral Joan Bromwich, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Building was next door to the White House itself. In fact, when Monica looked past the small window-unit air conditioner and out the window she was looking along Pennsylvania Avenue.

  So it was a big day for Henry, maybe the biggest in his career, the clearest sign there could be that Washington was taking him and his dire warnings seriously. And yet here he was standing at the lectern in dirty jeans and a shirt that looked as if it had been slept in and his thick black hair like a mop: the picture of disrespect, or independence of thought, or unconventionality, or whatever the hell other Hollywood-scientist clichés he thought he was projecting. How were the suits sitting around the table supposed to respond to him?

  And how was she supposed to get through today, before she got back to her apartment, found the blessed oblivion of a few hours sleep?

  Just don’t embarrass me, she thought. She, and many others, hadn’t forgotten how Henry had shot his mouth off on TV and the Internet and in the newspapers to campaign, over the head of NASA management, for his doomed Shoemaker missions. It didn’t help his credibility, today. She’d had to put her own reputation on the line to bring this meeting together. She would be very damaged if Henry fouled up today. Just don’t embarrass me.

  She was surprised, in the circumstances, how much that still mattered.

  And she was glad Alfred was here. She’d even, on his advice, consented to wear a hat, so the attendees could concentrate on the matter at hand rather than her latest chemotherapy Bad Hair Day.

  She gathered her strength. “Let’s start.”

  A rumble of assent from around the room.

  “Dr. Meacher, have you prepared a formal briefing?”

  Henry tapped at his laptop, and images filled the projector screen. Maps of Earth, molecular structure charts and equations, energy expressions. He began without preamble. “We established conclusively that the Edinburgh outbreak flowed from the Moon rock, Apollo sample 86047.”

  “Fucking careless handling,” Bromwich growled.

  Henry wasn’t fazed. “We were doing geology. Not epidemiology.”

  Monica said, “I don’t think apportioning blame is helpful right now, Admiral.”

  Bromwich glowered.

  “Anyhow,” Henry said, “that was the primary source. We’ve been able to trace secondary outbreaks, in the U.S. and elsewhere, to the ash cloud that spread out from Edinburgh, through the stratosphere, around the planet.”

  An animated image of the Earth. Lurid red pimples appearing everywhere. First they came in a belt at about the latitude of Britain, spreading westward, across the U.S., Asia; and then more pimples and scars in most of the world’s geologically unstable regions: the Ring of Fire, the subduction volcanoes around the Pacific basin; the rift volcanoes in the middle of the Atlantic and other midocean ridges; the hot-spot volcanoes, like Hawaii. In other places, more usually stable, the Moonseed seemed to be making its own volcanism by just digging its way toward the asthenosphere through old flaws in the crust, such as at Edinburgh itself.

  Henry said, “The data here comes from worldwide sources, including our own USGS Earthquake Information Center in Colorado and the Large Aperture Seismic Array in Montana—”

  The Admiral said, “Dr. Meacher, tell me what’s going to happen to us from here on in.”

  He started to pull up charts. They showed the past records of cataclysmic geological events: volume of eruption, in cubic meters, plotted against repose time, in thousands of years…“Even for what’s likely to hit us in the short term, we have no precedent in historical times. The larger the magmatic event, the less frequently it occurs. But we have evidence that many eruptions in prehistoric times were larger—ten or a hundred times—than the huge eruptions we know about, like Thera and Tambora.”

  Thera destroyed a civilization. Tambora was the greatest ash eruption of the current geological period; it caused the Year Without a Summer, in 1816. Ten or a hundred times as large.

  “Are you saying,” Admiral Bromwich said, “that some of this stuff is—normal?”

  “Yes. We’ve lived, as a species, through a quiescent period in Earth’s geological history. The Moonseed is a lubricant. Enhancing the problem. But what’s hit us so far is the violence of Earth itself, Admiral. A lot of this stuff could have happened at any time.

  “Beyond this near-term stuff we’re predicting a timetable of escalation.”

  “A timetable?”

  “Depending on the thickness of the crust. In a month the Moonseed will penetrate oceanic crust—the sea bottom—where the plates are thin. Six weeks, a couple of months beyond that, we expect major events in plate boundary regions. Subduction zones, mountain-building areas, like the Pacific rim. And a month or so beyond that we’ll see the first breaches of the continental crust itself.”

  There was a brief, shocked silence.

  Henry delivered this with a chilling calm, Monica observed. He looked overworked, but calm. Hollow. He’s already accepted the logic of his argument. And its ultimate conclusion. That all this is just going to get worse and worse, until—

  I hope to God, she thought, he has a plan.

  Bromwich shook her head. “What do we tell the President?”

  “Aside from the direct damage, expect climate changes,” Henry said. “All that ash in the stratosphere, blocking out the sun. The injection of so much heat, greenhouse gases, destruction of ozone—we have to model this. Figure out what it means for crops, this year and next.”

  “Shit,” said the Admiral, and she scrawled notes on a pad in front of her. “Refugees. Crop failure. Starvation.”

  “We’ll be lucky to avoid war,” Alfred said.

  “The British are already dealing with this,” Monica put in. “We’re not the damn British,” Admiral Bromwich growled.

  Henry said, “The point is, we’re only seeing the start. This isn’t going to go away. We’re going to have to expect a movement of populations, from the more geologically unstable areas of the world, and from the areas most impacted by the Moonseed itself, like Scotland.”

  “A movement? Where to? Where is the safest place to be?”

  “Shelters,” Henry said. “Like greenhouses. Maybe subsurface. Maybe off planet.”

  “Off planet?” That surprised Monica. “How? To make a colony viable, you’d have to sustain a breeding population—say, several hundred—independently of Earth.” Even the Space Station, which in its present form could hold all of three people at a time, depended on almost continual resupply from Earth.

  The Admiral said, “Where the hell? Mars?”

  Henry shook his head. “Not Mars. Too far. Too difficult.”

  Monica said, “Mars or not, we don’t have the technology to sustain a colony off planet. If we had another century—”

  “But we may not have another century,” Henry said evenly.

  “Australia,” Alfred Synge said.

  “What?”

  “Australia. The oldest place in the world. All the mountains worn down to a nub. That’s where I’d go.”

  That didn’t help, Monica thought, watching Henry. He has some recommendation. Some case he’s building, carefully. He isn’t ready yet.

  I can’t read this guy. I wonder what the hell he wants.

  Henry pulled up
another chart. “That’s the short term. Further out, we have to expect something like an extinction event.”

  Bromwich frowned. “I thought it was some big rock from space that killed the dinosaurs. I seem to remember listening to one of you assholes pitching for a Star Wars system to blast the rocks out of the sky. Like the one that’s coming in 2028—”

  “The Cretaceous extinction was actually relatively minor,” Henry said. He pulled up more data from his laptop. “The Permian event was maybe the most significant Earth has suffered. Two hundred and fifty million years ago. A single giant continent, Pangaea, dominated the planet…Half the number of known marine families disappeared. Only two out of a hundred and thirty genera of brachiopods survived. All forty genera of the large fusulinid foraminifers were—”

  “Enough,” Monica said.

  “All told,” Henry said, “we lost eighty-three percent of marine invertebrate genera, three-quarters of the amphibian families, eighty percent of the reptilian.”

  “A fucking big rock,” Bromwich said.

  “Probably not a rock,” Henry said. “Violent volcanism is the best hypothesis.”

  “You say,” David Petit said. Petit was a Nobel Prize winning chemist, a thickset man with a Brooklyn accent. “Others don’t agree—”

  Bromwich snapped, “And is this where it will stop? With this—Permian shit?”

  “No,” Henry said. “Ultimately, the mantle infestation will be the most serious. When the Moonseed is spreading under the crust.”

  “Why?”

  Monica saw that Bromwich still didn’t understand.

  “Because,” she said, “it will blow the crust off the planet.”

  “Like Venus.”

  “Yes, Admiral. Like Venus.”

  Silence, briefly.

  Henry brought up molecular structure charts and scanning microscope images. “We think we have a handle on how the Moonseed works. If not why. It primarily attacks basaltic rocks, particularly those rich in olivine.”

  “Like the Earth’s mantle material.” That was Alfred. “And comet dust, and primordial debris.”

  The Admiral asked, “Primordial?”

  “Left over from the formation of the Solar System,” Alfred said. “Admiral, this thing feeds on the most basic rock suite in the universe. It is well adapted to conditions in this universe. More so than we are, in fact. We should have suspected the existence of this thing. Even logically deduced it.”

  Henry said, “It appears to reassemble the crystalline structure of a mass of rock in a recursive form which—”

  “In English, doctor,” Monica said.

  He brought up another image. A slice of rock, the crystal structure picked out with false color. A maze of dwindling tunnels, disappearing beyond the resolution of the ’scope into some invisible center, a heart of darkness.

  “It is changing the structure of the rocks it touches. Building something.” It was a kind of bootstrap process, Henry said. The manipulation of the outer layers of a crystal structure enabled the more detailed rebuilding of inner layers, which in turn enabled changes on a still smaller scale…and so on. Like waldos, Monica thought, each layer of miniaturization building the next level down, on to invisibility.

  “There is a certain logic in this,” Alfred mused. “Between planets, where resources are scarce, one might expect an evolutionary drive of this type. Toward the very small—the utilization and building-in of complexity into even the smallest grains of matter available.”

  David Petit, the chemist, locked his boxer’s hands behind his head. “Your qualifications are all in geology, Dr. Meacher. True?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not in chemistry or particle physics or biology.”

  “That’s true.” Henry was quite unfazed.

  Petit stopped there, satisfied he had made his point. For now.

  Alfred Synge said, “Of course maybe this isn’t some kind of geological thing, or even biological. Maybe this is nanotech. By which I mean the manufacture of materials and structures with dimension less than a billionth of a meter. Molecular machines—”

  That started an argument.

  “Nanotech is on our own horizon,” insisted Alfred. “We can manipulate atoms with microscope probe elements, we can use the amino acids to make new, non-natural proteins. We can posit self-replicating assemblers that can take inexpensive raw materials—any hydrocarbon feedstock would do—and produce anything from a rocket ship to a disease-fighting submarine that would roam your bloodstream—”

  David Petit slammed the table with the palm of his hand. “Nonsense,” he said. “Sure you can manipulate atoms. You can even get them to hold still for a while. But only by cooling your sample down to liquid helium temperatures. At room temperature, the atoms of your assemblers will start combining, with the ambient air, water, with each other, whatever medium your assemblers are floating in.

  “And what about the laws of thermodynamics? What about information flow? How do these assemblers get their information about which atom is where, in order to manipulate them? How do they know where they are themselves, to get from their tiny supply depots to wherever they are supposed to be working? How do they get their power for breaking up material, and navigating, and computing?” He turned to Bromwich. “Admiral, this is just more nonsense. Nanotechnology is cargo cult science. A plot generator for lazy sci-fi writers. Nobody has demonstrated any of this, outside computer simulations, where of course you can do anything you like.”

  Evidently, Monica thought, watching him, the good doctor has a beef against nanotech. She wondered which grant application of his had been turned down in favor of some sexy nano-proposal.

  Henry said mildly, “I’m not here to defend nanotech. The Moonseed, however, is doing one simple thing: building inward, and smaller. The structure, in fact, seems to be similar on all scales. You don’t need much stored information, or computation, or materials transfer to achieve that.”

  The Admiral frowned. “I wish you scientist types wouldn’t argue with each other. So the Moonseed is some kind of artificial phenomenon. We’re looking at tiny machines here. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Henry said, “Maybe they are artificial. Maybe they are alive. It may be that when a life-form is sufficiently advanced, there is no difference. It may not matter anyhow.”

  Bromwich shook her head, visibly angry, dissatisfied at the speculation and lack of clarity. “Continue with your analysis,” she told Henry. “What’s this thing for? What’s the point of rebuilding a rock?”

  “Concentration of energy,” Henry said.

  “What?”

  “There is enough chemical energy in a tank of gasoline to achieve unified-theory levels of energy density—if all the energy could be applied to a single proton. Which we can’t achieve. We build colliding accelerators miles long to try to emulate that, but we don’t even come close, not within orders of magnitude.”

  Bromwich pulled her lip. “You’re saying these little critters turn lumps of rock into—uh—miniature particle accelerators.”

  “That’s exactly it, Admiral.”

  Henry showed images from Edinburgh, exploding rocks around a volcanic plug called Arthur’s Seat, evidence from the lab where Apollo sample 86047 had exploded.

  “The contaminated rocks achieve densities, toward the center, at which fusion processes, at least, can occur. When the Moonseed destroys a chunk of rock, the outcome is dust, and a flood of high-energy radiation, and more Moonseed. It’s a way of propagating.”

  “Mini nukes?” asked the Admiral.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean, at least fusion?”

  This was Monica’s specialty. “He means the Moonseed constructs may reach greater levels of force unification than just fusion.”

  “We’ve also observed this astronomically, now we’ve started looking,” Alfred said. “In the Earth-Moon system. The same radiation signature as on the ground. There seems to be a concentration of Moonseed at t
he Lagrange points.” He looked around the table for understanding. “Lagrange points are gravitationally stable collection points in the Earth-Moon system. We always wondered why we couldn’t see anything at the Lagrange points: no minor bodies, asteroids, trapped there. Now we know. The Moonseed is there, destroying whatever drifts in.”

  “Just here? Where else?” Bromwich asked.

  “Venus,” said Alfred Synge bluntly.

  “Maybe space is their natural habitat,” Henry said. “Rather than planets. Our models show that they have difficulty reaching the surface of a planet, from space. They burn up in atmospheres, or are smashed by simple impact, on an airless body like the Moon.”

  Alfred said, “But if they do get to a planet—”

  “If they do,” Henry said, “then they transform it. Like Venus.”

  Petit said dryly, “Explain something else to me. You say the planets are shielded from the Moonseed, by atmosphere and gravity. We brought it here, from the Moon. But how did it get to Venus?”

  “We’ve developed a theory about that too,” said Henry.

  Petit said dryly, “I thought you might.”

  “We took it there,” Henry said.

  “What?”

  “You need a soft landing to deliver Moonseed to a planetary surface. The only objects which have soft-landed on the planets are our probes.”

  “You’re saying we did this?”

  Henry shrugged. “It’s a hypothesis. The probes collected the dust from the Lagrange clouds in near-Earth space. Specks in the paint work. And then delivered them to the planetary surfaces.”

  Petit pulled Henry’s laptop toward him. “Give me a minute…Ah. The first probe to soft-land on Venus was Soviet. Venera 7. Landed in 1970.” He looked up.

  “So,” Alfred said softly, “it takes a few decades to destroy a world the size of Venus.”

  The Admiral snapped, “How big is Venus?”

  “Similar to Earth,” Alfred said. “Eighty percent of the mass.”

  “Jesus H—So there’s our timescale.”

  “Oh, this is just bull,” Petit protested. “For God’s sake. There are holes in this you can drive a Chevy through. We’ve also been to Mars. Mars is only eleven percent of Earth’s mass. How come we didn’t destroy Mars too? And we know it’s on the Moon. How come the Moon hasn’t burst like a party balloon?”