Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  “That mirror thing the Moonseed is building. It’s a solar sail,” Bran said. He smiled. “It’s obvious.”

  Ted turned to Blue. “A what?”

  Blue was wheezing; maybe the concentrated dust here was getting to him. He said, “A sail, to catch the sunlight and so drive a spacecraft. Perhaps that’s the purpose of the large parabolic structure the Moonseed is struggling to assemble. Others have speculated like this. The Moonseed seems to be making spaceship parts. But it is stranded, here, at the bottom of this gravity well, under all this air.”

  Spaceship parts. For a few seconds, the strangeness of the thought threatened to overwhelm Ted.

  “Stuck at the bottom of a well.” Ted frowned at Blue. “You sound as if you feel sorry for it.”

  Blue looked up. “In a way. After all, it’s possible it means us no harm.”

  “I was right,” Bran said, as if crooning. “I knew I was right. But I went a little crazy. And then, as soon as the ground started to give way—”

  “You had your fun,” Ted said evenly. “Money. The girls. Didn’t you? And it cost my boy his life.”

  “Are you another witch burner, old man?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”

  That seemed to renew Bran’s fear. He looked in desperation at Blue. “Who the fuck are you? Can’t you stop him?”

  “I am a scientist,” Blue said. “I am here to study the Moonseed. That is all.”

  Bran searched Ted’s face, his eyes huge in the dark, his face thin and weak.

  “Story time’s over, laddie,” Ted said softly.

  There was noise outside: whistles, shouting.

  Blue looked out into the main body of the Cathedral. “I think the light is changing,” he said.

  Bran tried to wriggle from Ted’s grasp. “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” said Blue, “we should get out of here.”

  A sound like gunfire. Deep-throated coughs.

  “Now,” Blue said.

  Bran seemed dazzled by the daylight. Perhaps he hadn’t been outside for days, Ted thought. With his hand still clamped on Bran’s collar, he looked around.

  A party of soldiers was running, to the west, away from Arthur’s Seat, jumping over rubble. One of them looked hurt; his mates were helping him hobble along. When they saw Ted and Blue they waved. Come on.

  Smoke was rising from among the ruins atop Calton Hill. “It is the Moonseed,” said Blue. “It has started again. The secondary vents of the old magmatic complex—Calton Hill and Castle Rock, here—we are expecting them to give way in the next cycle.”

  Still grasping Bran, Ted climbed up onto a section of wall, and looked east, toward the Seat, the Moonseed pool.

  The pool was glowing. Light sparked from its rim, like flashbulbs popping under a blanket. He could see the ground cracking and dissolving, sinking into the Moonseed as he watched.

  “It’s spreading,” Blue said.

  “Jesus,” Bran said, and he squirmed harder.

  “It has been immobile for days, but now…We go,” Blue snapped. “We must get off this vent.”

  “Here,” said Ted. “Take your bottles.”

  For one second, two, Blue looked into Ted’s face, then Bran’s.

  Then Blue nodded, evidently understanding. He grabbed the sample bottles, and ran to the west, with surprising suppleness.

  Bran started shouting. “What are you doing? Shit, man, what are you doing?”

  Ted shook the lad, not hard, until he stopped squealing.

  When he’d turned in his results, Blue Ishiguro stripped off his Moon suit and walked back into the city. This time he walked to the east, the far side of the Seat, where the Moonseed had yet to spread.

  Here, in the suburbs of Duddingston and Bingham and Northfield and Restalrig, the work of clearing the corpses hadn’t advanced so far as in the west. So he joined a party of soldiers, with little protection but their improvised cloth facemasks, as they made their way along the ruin of a street. There was no way of telling what the housing stock had been like here, but there were a lot of cellars and underground rooms, some of them new additions—Venus shelters—where people had tried to ride out the explosion.

  Stiff pits, the soldiers were calling them.

  They dug into the rubble. It was loose, and so there were constant falls of dust and dirt, tiny avalanches. There was no machinery, because the scientists could not guarantee that the meringue surface would support the weight of any vehicle.

  So the soldiers had to use their muscles and hands. They removed layers of shattered masonry, plaster and roof beams and glass shards, all under a layer of ash and pumice, gingerly exposing an entrance. As soon as the new pit was opened, fetid air came billowing out, thick with insects. A stench, like rotting roses; after so many days, the bodies were liquefying, turning to mush down there.

  In the early days, the soldiers had had to drag out the corpses, bag them up, try to identify them, take them away for burial or burning. Now, though, the solution was simpler: a corporal stepped forward, with glass face mask, and a flamethrower to hurl down a tongue of fire, the ultimate flame which these poor souls had, Blue supposed, sought to escape.

  Blue Ishiguro had survived Kobe, a disastrous earthquake his science had failed to foretell. Many of his family had died there. And now, here he was, surviving again, hale and healthy, even well fed, where so many others had died.

  He was, he thought, cursed with life.

  So he labored with the soldiers for hour on hour, burying himself in the dirt and stench of it, pausing only when his body betrayed him, and dry heaves racked his stomach.

  29

  The Prime Minister, Dave Holland was told, was up on the roof garden.

  So Holland had to wheeze his way up the stairs past the Strangers’ Gallery, then through a fire door to the roof. His thick gut gurgled as he climbed, laden with a good dinner and a couple of beers, and he was wheezing and red-faced by the time he stood in the glow of the central skylights that illuminated the chamber of the House of Commons below.

  He took a minute to recover himself, and he dabbed at his sweating face with a huge, discolored handkerchief. The House was working, even so late, as the members forced through one package of emergency legislation after another.

  He could see Bob Farnes standing by the balustrade at the far end of the terrace, looking north. The Prime Minister was alone up here—save for the discreet presences, in the shadows of the garden, of his PPS, Pearson, and a couple of Special Branch men.

  Holland knew the roof garden well. The view was spectacular, even so late at night. To his right he could see the Thames, the crammed pleasure boats like bubbles of light on the black stream of the river. There were a lot of boats, in fact, reflecting the mood that seemed to be sweeping the country, like a rerun of the millennium.

  To his left he overlooked the tiled roof of Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the Palace of Westminster, mostly shadowed now. And before him was the tower of Big Ben, its carved sandstone fascias glowing golden in the light of the spots at its feet, and the big translucent clockface shining from within. The traffic of London sent a subdued, continuing roar into the air, a river in itself.

  He’d often used this spectacular place, high above the seat of British sovereignty, to host functions—the cocktail party for MPs he held when he was running for the Party leadership against Farnes, for instance—and for more private conjunctions, with two or three of the prettier research assistants who still flocked to the Commons, attracted like moths to the fat old drunks who worked here.

  But tonight, it wasn’t the same.

  The garden itself, the spectacular architecture beyond, were bloodied by the volcanic sky above, a dismal crimson glow that covered the stars all the way to the zenith. It was the curse of the Scots, he thought gloomily, entirely typical that their passing should be marked in such a melodramatic style, by the banishing of true midnight for everybody else.

  The Big Ben c
lock tower looked full of air and light, he mused, as if it were some immense Gothic spaceship, fueled and ready to go, ready to lift off from this sorry old world, and he wished it bloody well would, and take him with it.

  He coughed and walked forward.

  Farnes didn’t turn. “Hello, David. Do you think—”

  “What?”

  “Do you think there’s a glow up there? To the north?”

  Holland looked out over Whitehall, the Foreign Office and Treasury and Home Office: the great houses of the state, pompous as wedding cakes, and, as events had proved, just about as powerless.

  Farnes stared past it all, to the far north, looking for the glow.

  The light of Scotland burning, Holland thought bleakly.

  “No, I bloody well can’t see any such thing, Bob,” he said bluntly, “and even if I could it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.”

  “No,” Farnes said. “I suppose not.”

  Holland tried his best to project the bluff boyishness that—even if fake—had got him so far in life.

  “Now then, Bob. The preparations are going well. We’re gearing up to receive a flood of evacuees in the south, from the most threatened areas. All the emergency powers are in place now, and the police and the military are being briefed on various contingencies. We’ve got the Green Goddesses out.” A fleet of emergency fire engines, dating from the war. “Those bloody things. We only have a thousand or so left operational. And they are so old now you can’t get spares, and the rubber parts have perished…Well. There’ve been a few oddities. The police have had to assign men to patrol church services, would you believe. Riots, by people locked out. They say it’s like managing football matches used to be.”

  Farnes didn’t react.

  “Further out—well, the scientists are floundering, I think,” Holland said. “They don’t agree on what this Moonseed bugger is, or how fast it will spread, or whether it can be stopped. In the best case, perhaps we can contain it in Scotland. Perhaps it’s already contained, in fact. Somehow exhausted.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose the next few days or weeks will tell. But if it can’t be contained, if it’s going to spread further—”

  “Then what if it does? What do we do then?”

  “Then we continue to make plans.”

  “Plans?”

  “We’ve already got the airports geared up.” Heathrow and Gatwick and Stansted and Manchester and Birmingham and Luton, all of Britain’s great terminals. “The air traffic boys confirm we can handle up to a million passengers a day. A 747 in the air every three minutes, packed to the gills.

  “As to destinations, we can load as many as we like into Northern Ireland in the short term, of course. It’s going to be important to keep the ferry ports in Liverpool and Wales functioning as long as possible. The Scousers are organizing volunteer squads to break up any Moonseed infection, to keep the ports and roads open. Heroic. The bloody French are being no help at all, as you’d expect; they say we can take people out through the Chunnel, but they’ll be sent straight on somewhere else.

  “All of the ports are ready, of course. We’re going to ask you to front an appeal to small-boat owners to come to the aid of the party.”

  Farnes, in profile, smiled. “Dunkirk in reverse.”

  “That’s it. That’s exactly the note to strike. Spirit of the Blitz. I’m glad your instincts are still with us, Bob.”

  But the flattery did nothing to disturb the ominous calm within which Farnes seemed locked.

  Holland went on, “But we’ll never be able to get everybody out. The chronically ill, the very old, perhaps. The awkward squad who just won’t move anyhow. The emergency planning boys estimate perhaps fifteen percent could never be evacuated no matter how much time we have.”

  “Fifteen percent, of sixty million.”

  Holland blustered on, “We’ve already moved the bulk of the gold reserves to Belfast. The Arts Council have pulled together a committee on works of art to be exported. There are architects who want to set up an archive somewhere of plans and photographs of the finer buildings.” He coughed, and glanced around, for eavesdroppers. “On your instruction we’re working on the Ireland option.”

  “Ireland?”

  “The military option. Invasion. It’s feasible, though diplomatically it would be—”

  “Disastrous. We would be pariahs.”

  Perhaps, Holland thought. But needs must. He didn’t want to say any more, even here.

  “We’re setting up alternate seats of government, in Belfast and the Scillies. We have to think about moving ourselves, sooner rather than later…Bob, are you taking in all this?”

  “Oh, yes,” Farnes said. “Every word.” He stared into the north. “We’ve already lost so many lives. How many more?”

  Holland hesitated.

  “Just too big,” Farnes said. “Just too bloody big. Sixty million. We can’t conceive of such a number. In our hearts, we’re all still in some Stone Age village, where everybody knows everybody else. Sixty million. It’s beyond us.

  “And yet here they all are, Dave, all sixty million, crammed into this fragile little country of theirs, and all of them looking to me for guidance. Maybe there is no such thing as government.” He looked at his hands. “No such thing as power. Look at us. We couldn’t even manage the economy, if truth be told. And now, this plague from space, this natural disaster, has shown us up for what we are. Posturing puppets.”

  “But we carry on,” Holland said. In fact he understood how Farnes felt. He’d had to wrestle with this in his own demons, and he’d stiffened his resolve, and he’d come to believe every word he said now. “We do what we can. We keep on trying until the ground opens up under Whitehall.”

  “Like Churchill. At the gates of Buckingham Palace, facing off the Germans with his tommy gun.”

  “That’s the spirit. We save what we can. We govern. We let the country carry on in an orderly way, as long as we possibly can.”

  “But what’s the point, Dave? What’s the point if this—” He waved a thin hand into the darkness. “—if this bloody black meteor is heading straight for us?”

  Holland hesitated, considering a morale-boosting, upbeat answer. But Farnes was clearly beyond that.

  At last he said: “Dignity.”

  “What?”

  “Dignity. When you come down to it, what else is there, for any of us?”

  Farnes reflected on that for a long time.

  Holland found himself shivering. The traffic noise was dying to its minimum, as the small hours approached.

  Holland hated to be awake at such a time, the dead of night when the horrors arose, the fears of powerlessness and mortality which seemed to be overwhelming Farnes now, which could be banished during the day with its illusions of light and movement and control…

  Farnes said, “I’m planning to resign, Dave.”

  That startled him. “You can’t. Not now.”

  “I must. This is all too—” He waved his hands again. “—too big for me. I’m done for, Dave. You take it, if you want.”

  Despite himself, despite the circumstances, Holland felt a deep, atavistic thrill at the words.

  Power, real power, at last. He became intensely aware of where he was, poised above the chambers he could soon command, surrounded by the machinery of state, as if he was the huge, ugly Victorian mechanism which drove Big Ben itself.

  He tried to focus his mind on Farnes, the suffering man before him.

  “There will have to be an election,” he said.

  “You must do as you see fit.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Holland said. “How could it have been?”

  “But it was on my watch.”

  There was a sound like thunder, or distant guns, far to the north.

  Both men clung to the balustrade, staring toward Scotland, trying to pick out a change in the light.

  30

  To Ted’s
surprise, they survived the night, the two of them crouched in the ruins of St. Giles’. No food or water, but that scarcely mattered now.

  And with the dawn came the sound of thunder. Ted went outside, with Hamish’s collar grasped in his hand—Hamish-Bran seemed passive, beaten—and he climbed a ruined wall, looking for a vantage.

  The Moonseed was on the move. The Moonseed pool was spreading like a silvery stain across the ground. The remains of buildings, of homes, with whatever tokens and bodies and memories they held, were cracking and falling, subsiding into the glowing mass. Ash was rising in diffuse clouds. There was a stink of ozone.

  Inexorable. The word might have been coined for the stuff.

  Where Holyrood Road used to be, a man, a soldier, was running before the spreading, flaring pool, somehow separated from his mates. He was far enough away to be reduced to a stick figure, his face a white blur.

  He wasn’t running fast enough. The Moonseed was faster.

  Ted pointed. “Look.”

  “What? For God’s sake, what?”

  “Did you ever see anything like that? The fox that couldn’t outrun the hounds. The child caught by the tide. Jesus, Jesus.”

  In the last moment, that white point of a face turned to Ted, as if imploring.

  “Nothing I can do,” Ted murmured. “Not any of us. It’s a tide of death. Come all the way from the stars, to wreck our homes, and kill us…And there are always little bastards like you, out to make it worse for everybody else.”

  The Moonseed pool, hissing, overwhelmed the soldier. It was mercifully brief, from Ted’s point of view. One minute he was there, the next, in a flail of limbs, he was falling, and gone.

  And now Ted turned to face east.

  It was coming, crackling, bursts of light like a second dawn, the sound of rock breaking open like eggshell, washing up Castle Rock in a tide of light. Seconds left, no more.

  “What do you think?” Ted asked gently. “Still expecting a great beam-up to that party in the sky?”

  Bran was begging now. “Let me go. Oh Jesus, oh shit, let me go.”

  Ted tightened his grip on Bran’s collar. “Burning witches in the Highlands, eh. Good for them. Maybe the Highlands will survive. Maybe the Highlanders will come back down here, like William Wallace, and stuff the bloody Moonseed back where it came from. Eh?…”