Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  Past Berwick, the traffic stalled completely.

  A man—fortyish, thin, in a grimy business suit—clambered onto the road from rough ground beyond. He glanced up and down the row of cars, evidently selected Jane’s, and walked up to it.

  Before she could react, he had yanked open the driver’s side door. “Out of the car,” he said, and to make his point he grabbed her sweater at the shoulder and pulled her sideways. She wasn’t wearing her seat belt, and she spilled sideways onto the road, grazing her knees; the pain was startling.

  She got to her feet stiffly.

  In the middle of the road, traffic all around, the man confronted her. “I’m taking your car,” he said bluntly.

  But he was hesitating.

  Here was a man who was not used to this, to highway robbery. She tried to think, to size up the situation.

  In the scrub on the far side of the road, beyond the crawling traffic, was a fat woman with a couple of suitcases, and a kid, a sulky-looking teenage girl. Jane tried to figure what minor disaster had befallen this family. Maybe their car had broken down, or simply run out of petrol. Maybe they had been robbed themselves.

  She could offer to give them a ride.

  But now the man, with tongue protruding, grabbed her arm; he pushed his free hand inside her sweater, searching for her breast. He was doing this thing in front of his family, and hers. Just because he thought the rules were all gone; just because he thought he couldn’t be stopped.

  Jane stepped back, breaking his grip easily, and threw a punch at his nose. She put all her weight behind it. Blood spurted, bright crimson, and he fell backward.

  “Fuck off,” she said.

  She got back in the car and locked the doors from the inside. The car edged forward—given the traffic she could hardly get away—but she didn’t trouble to look back.

  Jack was clapping her slowly, a grin on his lips.

  Jane waved her hand in the air. “It bloody hurt. And don’t let me hear you use language like that.”

  The traffic crept forward.

  The air was strange. The sky was tinged orange. She could smell ozone and ash.

  By evening, they’d come no more than ten miles, and they had to sleep in the car.

  33

  It was now 3:00 A.M. in Chuzenji, an hour or more since one of the monks had woken him with the news of the Pacific volcano. Declan Hague sat in his cubicle, pondering events.

  Waves.

  In Declan’s mind, the future was simple: it was a question of waves, and wavelengths and speeds, the simple physics he remembered from school.

  On his small, hand-held TV there were the images of destruction, brought to him in a fraction of a second, bounced around the world by the satellites: the boiling ocean, the glowing, cracked sea floor, the new island-mountains thrusting into the air from the depths of the Pacific. It was the Moonseed, the scientists said. It hadn’t taken long to chew through the five-mile-thick crust under the oceans, to open up new vents to release the swarming fire of Earth’s interior. Some of the scientists seemed pleased with themselves. Right on schedule, they said.

  These electronic images came to him on the first wave, at the speed of light.

  Next would come the sound, the great shouts of the quakes and eruptions, carried through the perturbed and increasingly murky air of Earth at some six hundred miles an hour, directly to his ears. The second wave. He would need no technology for that, and that was pleasing.

  …And at last, one more wave, of more uncertain velocity, that would come rearing out of the perturbed ocean. And that, he thought with relief, would finish it all.

  There was a tsunami watch which sought to monitor and predict the great waves, like seismic weather stations, scattered across the Pacific, run by many countries. So the coming event was not unanticipated. On his TV the experts pronounced solemn warnings to prepare, exhortations to stay calm.

  Japan had been struck by at least fifteen great waves in the last three centuries. In 1896, a tsunami was reported to have killed twenty-seven thousand people. More than a thousand died in 1933. And so on.

  Tsunami.

  It was a word which meant “tidal wave,” but the waves were nothing to do with the tides, the pull of the Moon.

  Right now, in the open ocean, the wave caused by the ocean floor crack would not be so spectacular to look at. Perhaps three hundred miles long, but no more than a few feet high, with a hundred miles or more between crests, traveling at somewhere between three and six hundred miles per hour. Unimpressive—except in terms of the energy stored by such a vast formation, crossing the world ocean at such giant speeds.

  As it entered the shallower waters along the edge of a continent, the wave would reduce in speed and gather in height, to perhaps two hundred feet, three. And then when it reached the land, friction with the shallow bottom would reduce the speed to less than a hundred miles an hour—but the wave height would be magnified tremendously.

  No structure could withstand its force. As it uprooted trees and smashed buildings, it would become laden with debris, and its ability to scour the land bare would be magnified. Sizable ships might be carried miles inland.

  Then would come a rapid retreat back to the ocean, and then, every ten to twenty minutes, a fresh surge, until the energy was dissipated.

  Sometimes the first surge would deposit fish, swept inland and left to suffocate. Fools would hurry forward to take the fish. But the wily Japanese knew that more surges would come, and ignored the apparent bounty. That was the folk wisdom, the common experience. The Japanese were, after all, used to tsunamis.

  But he wondered if they really understood what today would bring.

  There would, of course, be no one to help. For, as the flickering TV images showed, the Moonseed was surging in many places, and the world was, evidently, starting to come apart.

  He had no desire to sleep again. He pulled on his habit, slipped out of the main hall, and walked through the soft quiet to the staircase cut into Mount Nantai.

  He took nothing but the clothes on his back, the sandals on his feet. Not even a light, a lantern or a torch, to guide his way on the rocky steps. The sky was so bright now, glowing a thin red like a sunset, all the way through the night—thanks to the volcanic dust being injected into the air, from Britain and Italy and the Philippines, and a hundred smaller eruptions—that he needed no light anyway.

  It would have been nice to see the stars, he thought. But then in an hour or so the baleful countenance of Venus was due to rise, and he had no desire to witness that ill omen again; let the dust blot it out for good.

  He reached the caldera rim, and was greeted by the stink of sulfur and ash and chlorine. There seemed to be new fissures in the ground here, and he suspected he could see the vent of steam.

  Here and there, the rock burst into subdued silvery light. It was the mark, he had learned, of Moonseed growth. His creation.

  He smiled.

  He found a place where he could sit in comfort, with his back to the subtle warmth of the reviving volcano. Here he could look out over the lake, to the south and east, toward the ocean, and Tokyo.

  There were twelve million people in Tokyo, an incredible number. One quarter of the population of the country lived within thirty miles of the Imperial Palace there.

  He wondered how many had already fled. But, as the light of a new dawn seeped into the sky, many more would even now be making their way into the city, by car and train and bus, for another day’s work, regardless of the warnings.

  The Japanese were used to tsunamis, after all.

  The sun was high, but it was a pinprick, a wan disc in an ugly gray sky. He was cold, despite the thickness of his robe.

  Unseasonal weather.

  Declan knew he would have to wait most of the day, until perhaps the early evening, before the wave arrived.

  By now, Hawaii must already have suffered.

  Hawaii, stranded in mid-Pacific, was surrounded by deep water, submarine trenche
s outside its harbors. The water shallowed rapidly near the land, and the waves, coming out of the western ocean, would pound down on the islands with virtually no warning. The sun was high; the destruction must already be over there. Scoured down to the bedrock, he thought.

  But even the tsunami would not be the end of it, no matter how destructive.

  A major earthquake was, said some of the experts, overdue for Japan. Statistical projections said it would be on the scale of the great 1923 quake which killed a hundred and forty thousand people. Hitting modern, crowded Japan, such a quake would destroy industrial production, and lead to a massive worldwide recession.

  That was the projection, the common understanding. Declan knew that the calamity that was coming would far exceed such measly predictions.

  Perhaps the approaching tsunami would trigger it. Or perhaps it would be the destruction of Nantai, fed by the Moonseed: perhaps it would be necessary for the Moonseed to work deep into the magma under Earth’s skin here, as it appeared to have done in Scotland. Perhaps, even now, other great calderas—even Fuji itself—were opening up, feeling the ghost touch of the Moonseed, the stirring of the magma in the deep chambers within.

  Eventually, though, it would all let rip.

  He imagined the near future, when the whole ring of fire went up: tracing down the western seaboards of North and South America, scrawled over the ocean past China and Japan and Australia, almost a perfect ring around the Pacific. What a sight it would be, from space! It would be as if the Pacific, the world ocean, was trying to pull itself free of the poisoned and battered Earth which spawned it, perhaps to sail free into space to join the Moon.

  He would like to live long enough to see that. But it wasn’t essential.

  Probably Declan hadn’t needed to do anything to speed the decline of Japan. It was all, really, inevitable; you only had to glance at the polluted sky to see that, the poison that had wrapped itself around the planet.

  But it pleased him to have played his part.

  He was destroying his home by his own actions. Just as he had destroyed one earlier home, lost his wife and baby daughter because of what he’d done, and the awful revelations he hadn’t been able to forestall or buy off.

  But this time, he would have nowhere to flee. Nowhere to shelter his sorry soul; nowhere to eke out the days, as he imprisoned himself.

  He smiled. Call it time off for good behavior.

  There was a wind from the ocean. A spattering of rain. It was salty and muddy.

  Declan Hague laughed, celebrating his freedom. He let the salty rain run into his open mouth.

  Scoured down to the bedrock.

  34

  Debbie Sturrock was actually coming off duty when it happened; that was the irony of it. And strictly speaking she wasn’t even a firefighter at all, since she hadn’t yet completed her training in the Scottish Fire Service Training School, down the road at Gullane.

  She just happened to be in the way.

  Torness, the modern nuclear power plant just outside Dunbar, meant little to Debbie. She drove past it every day on her way to her training assignment at the fire station in North Berwick. Torness was just an anonymous, slightly sinister collection of blue cylinders and boxes and piping, hiding behind a row of immature fir trees.

  But today, as she drove toward it on the crowded road, alarms were sounding, and people were fleeing out of the gates, and there was black smoke billowing from the big structure of steel and glass at the heart of the compound.

  She pulled over to look more closely.

  A pillar of flame. Sparks. Bits of concrete, metal structures, tumbling in the air.

  She drove up the broad main drive and got out of the car. She had her yellow hard hat and her jacket in the boot; she pulled them on, running to the gate.

  A security man was here, holding his position despite his obvious fear, directing others, office workers and engineers and managers. Debbie approached him.

  “I can help. Which way?”

  He looked her over, evidently recognized her as a firefighter, and pointed. She hurried into the compound.

  The big, boxlike building at the heart of the compound seemed to have exploded; the thin metal frame was ripped open at the roof, like a tin can. Above the damaged building there was a bluish glow, and pockets of fire on the surrounding buildings.

  She found herself walking across a neat lawn that was littered with glowing debris.

  Despite herself, her pace slowed. This was, after all, a nuke plant. Dear God. What have I walked into here?

  Well, she’d already been in a lot of fires, and she’d never hesitated before.

  Without thinking, she pushed herself forward, toward the blue glow.

  The heat was enormous, like a wind, crowding through the layers of her clothing.

  She came to a maintenance crew, trapped in a tool bunker maybe five hundred yards from the explosion’s core. The bunker wouldn’t last long; Debbie Sturrock could see a bloodred liquid seeping from the walls as they started to melt in the massive heat. The maintenance guys had no protective gear.

  A fire crew was pushing in toward the tool bunker with a fire hose. They were trying to keep the water playing on the door.

  Debbie joined them. The crew leader waved at her, miming at her to piss off out of here. She ignored him, and lent her strength to the efforts of the crew as they kept the hose directed at the door.

  When it was cool enough, the door was opened from the inside. The workers there threw out singed sandbags, which they’d evidently been using to seal the door, and made a run for it.

  By the time they were gone, Debbie was vomiting. But still she held onto the hose.

  The ground shuddered.

  Earth tremor?

  She wondered if that was what had triggered the explosion. She knew the two reactors here were cooled by pumped carbon dioxide gas. What would happen if a tremor knocked out the coolant pumps, or broke a feed line, or…?

  Really, she knew nothing about nuclear plants. Nothing, except that you shouldn’t go near one at the best of times. And this was not the best of times.

  When the maintenance guys were out, under the leader’s gestured command, the fire crew dropped the hose and ran toward the center of the blaze. Debbie followed.

  Her vomiting was over, but she was still dry-retching even as she ran.

  There were fires everywhere. It looked to Debbie as if the stuff raining down from the central explosion—the reactor?—had ignited whatever it could find, like the tar on the roofs. She had some breathing apparatus now, dropped by an injured firefighter, but as they worked to the center of the complex she found it progressively more difficult to battle through the intense heat, the acrid air, the molten tar that stuck to her boots, a black graphite dust which seemed to be everywhere.

  She felt hot, inside and outside, a feeling she’d never known before.

  They were met by a man in shirtsleeves and a Scottish Nuclear tie. He was the deputy station manager; he was wearing a badge that turned out to be a radiation dosimeter. His boss, the station manager, wasn’t here; she was crowning the Gala Queen in Dunbar five miles away. Local-friendly PR for the area’s biggest employer.

  Gradually, as the deputy manager and the fire chief argued about what to do, Debbie figured out what had happened here.

  “We’re protected from quakes here. The founds go down to bedrock. But we’re designed to withstand only up to a certain Richter. When the big tremor hit, the sea water conduits cracked…”

  “What does that mean?”

  The manager struggled to explain. “The reactors are cooled by carbon dioxide gas. The hot gas is passed through a boiler that turns water to steam, and the steam runs the turbine. The steam is in a closed loop. It passes through a condenser, where it’s cooled by sea water.”

  “What happens to the sea water?”

  “It’s dumped back in the ocean. The radiation levels are low, and we monitor—”

  “Never mind that
. So without the sea water flow there’s no way for heat to get out of the system?”

  “And on top of that we had a total loss of power. The cee-oh-two pumps failed—”

  “Shit, man, you must have backups.”

  “Oh, yeah. We draw power from the National Grid to keep the coolant pumps going. And failing that we have eight diesel generators on site. But the quake was too severe. We lost everything. Even so there are failsafes. When the power failed, the damper rods should have fallen into the reactor cores by gravity.”

  “Don’t tell me. They didn’t.”

  “The core was distorted. We couldn’t get the rods in. And we had carbon dioxide trapped in the core because the pumps had failed, and the gas got hotter and hotter, until there was an explosion that disrupted the pressure vessel—”

  “Hold it. What exploded?”

  “Reactor Number One.”

  “Oh, Jesus…”

  There was a small fire team here, Debbie learned, but only one of them had worked for the Fire Service.

  There were two nurses on site. Nobody knew where they were.

  The chief was still arguing what to do with the station manager when the one experienced firefighter tapped a couple of buddies on the shoulder, pointed, and ran toward the big central building, which was still burning.

  Debbie hesitated for one second, then followed.

  The leader took the crew up an appliance ladder to the roof of a building which, Debbie learned, was the turbine hall. Here, a couple of crews were already plying hoses onto the burning building below.

  It looked—to Debbie, in her ignorance—like the central reactor hall itself.

  The central building was just a shell of metal and glass, pretty much blown apart, a shell that had been wrapped around a massive concrete cube: the reactor block.

  She was looking down at the roof of the block, which was littered with equipment and protective clothing, hastily abandoned. There were three big discs of black tiles, set in the block roof. The centermost of these covered a store for spent fuel, and the two others were the two reactors themselves, in their forty-feet-high pressure vessels of concrete and steel, buried inside the block.