Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  As Henry had suspected. In fact he was counting on that, for his secret plan to save mankind, although when he put it like that he found himself staring in the mirror and wondering exactly how crazy he was.

  Anyhow he contacted Monica, asking for more specific measurements.

  He suspected it was the failure of the nukes that had triggered the Administration, finally, into acting. Henry had never expected a nuclear attack to succeed—quite the opposite—but he supposed it had to be tried. And its failure resonated like the failure of a god, like the death of Superman, confirming their worst fears.

  After the Nevada failure, in fact, there had been questions asked about the need to carry a nuke on the Moon trip. Henry had insisted; and everybody seemed too busy to argue with him.

  Still, though, the Administration’s step-by-step commitment to the project wasn’t complete; it wasn’t yet confirmed that they would actually be allowed to launch. As if, Henry thought bleakly, they still expected things to somehow get better.

  He managed to sleep through most of the bus journey out of Moscow to Star City.

  Star City, more formally known as the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, was the place the cosmonauts lived, along with the instructors, administrators and mission planners. It was a purpose-built town of four or five thousand people; its atmosphere, to Henry, was somewhere between a university campus and a military barracks.

  They were greeted with a lunch banquet in a building called the recreation center—and it was literally a banquet, Henry found to his amazement, with cognac and champagne; the Russians were treating their contribution to this mission as a cause for celebration. Henry joined in enthusiastically, despite frosty glares from Geena. He figured that if he got stoked enough there would be no more training today, at any rate.

  He was introduced to Arkady Berezovoy, a tall, dour, strong-looking cosmonaut who, it seemed, would be riding to orbit with them, and so would be joining in the training from now on. It turned out that Geena and Arkady knew each other already; they had worked on Station assignments.

  When Henry was introduced, Arkady grasped his hand firmly and looked into his face, searchingly. Henry was left puzzled.

  After lunch they were taken for a tour of Star City.

  Everything seemed built on an immense, heroic scale, a legacy of the Soviet days. He was shown a giant mock-up of the old Mir station, a spacesuit display, and a hydro pool where the Russians planned their spacewalks. There was a culture center, and a giant memorial to Gagarin. The first cosmonaut of them all stood heroically, one hand behind his back, looking up at the stars.

  There was even a planetarium, intended, Arkady told him seriously, for the cosmonauts to learn interplanetary navigation for the Soviet mission to Mars which had never come. In the planetarium foyer was a mock-up of the spacecraft which could have achieved the mission, perhaps in the early 1990s, assembled from hauntingly familiar components: Energia heavy-lift boosters, a Mir-based habitat module, a Mars lander built around Proton booster rocket stages.

  But those dreams were long gone.

  He was taken to gladhand the staff at TsUP, Russia’s mission control at the unremarkable little town of Korolyov, outside Moscow. The control room looked like a small cinema, with a big screen to show the Station’s trajectory curving over Earth’s surface, and four rows of consoles dating from the 1980s. Under the screens there were two big sponsors’ banners, one from a U.S. computer firm which had supplied the latest set of pcs that supplemented the older equipment, and one, bizarrely, from the Red October chocolate factory, with a slogan about celebrating “shared Russian traditions of quality.” The most useful piece of equipment looked to be a plastic model of the Space Station, which got more attention from the controllers than the screen images.

  The cosmonauts still earned a decent wage, but even that was mostly funded by American money funneled through the Station project, and many of the engineers and controllers, bringing home less than a couple of hundred bucks a month, worked as cab drivers and cleaners in Moscow to cover their bills.

  It seemed to Henry the disparity between space dream and reality was even harsher here than in the U.S.

  Most of the training forced on him here, it turned out, was in emergency procedures.

  Henry was heavily briefed on what to do if a Station module was slow-punctured by a micrometeorite, and what would happen if there were a failure of the booster in the early stages of launch (an escape rocket would haul the manned capsule clear—a lot of noise and shaking, high Gs, probable unconsciousness, a spell in hospital). It wasn’t that there was anything for him to do in such an eventuality, but it was thought better for him to know what would hit him.

  Henry, exhausted, disoriented, overtrained and bewildered, didn’t agree.

  He was trained for emergency landing. The Soyuz was designed to come down on land, somewhere in the Soviet Union, and there would be choppers to pick him up. In theory. But he was taken to the bush in Kazakhstan, a place the capsule might come down where helicopters wouldn’t be able to land, and he practiced getting into a recovery chair lowered from a helicopter.

  And he underwent what the American managers called water egress training. With Arkady and Geena, he was dropped in a mocked-up Soyuz entry module into the Black Sea. It was a July day and it was hot—around thirty Centigrade—and the three of them, stiffly noncommunicative, struggled in the hot, cramped capsule, bobbing in the sea, to change out of their spacesuits and into survival gear. It took three hours to get ready, and when Arkady finally opened the hatch, steam gushed out, and briny sea air replaced the stink of vomit that had come to dominate in the capsule.

  They had to float in the water, holding onto each other in a triangle. The rescue crews left them there for another hour before fishing them out, and barely a word passed between them.

  And in the middle of all this robust Russian training, they were visited by Frank Turtle and his team, red-eyed from jet lag and overwork, with bundles of charts and vu-graphs and laptops, who took Geena and Arkady through the procedures they were working out in such haste: procedures for the real mission, beyond the technicalities of Soyuz and Station—the flight to the Moon itself.

  But still, final approval for launch didn’t come.

  Then, one August morning, Henry was woken, to see the new images, of fire and ash and flood coming out of the west coast of America, and he knew there would be no more hesitation.

  37

  The editorial review was not going well. And, Joely Stern thought with dismay, it was only 9:00 A.M.

  Cecilia Stanley, her editor, read from the copy glowing on her screen “…And from there Earthquake and Thunder went south…They went south first and sank the ground…Every little while there would be an earthquake, then another earthquake, and another earthquake…And then the water would fill those places…‘That is what human beings will thrive on,’ said Earthquake… Shit, Joely. Earthquake and Thunder. What is this, Sesame Street?”

  Joely kept her temper. She’d already lost it once too often in this job.

  As an insurance, though, she had her ID in her pocket, in case she was fired on the spot.

  “It’s a Yurok myth,” she said evenly.

  Sitting behind her desk of expensive dressed stone, Cecilia was a severe, toothy woman of thirty-five. A classic corporate climber; a devourer of souls, thought Joely. “And just what,” Cecilia said in her cool way, “precisely is a Yurok?”

  “They’re the natives of this region. The Pacific coast. The legend seems to be a reference to a massive quake in this region in prehistoric times. 1700. A folk memory.”

  “If it’s prehistoric, how do you know it was 1700?”

  Smartass. “Because they cross-correlated it with a tsunami that washed up across the Pacific, in Honshu.”

  “Where?”

  “Japan. And that was recorded. And, look, the legend describes what should happen. When the fault gives way the edge of the North American plate slips forward
, and what used to be an upward fold in the plate catapults into a downward fold. The sea rushes in, and brings in sediment. And that enriches the land, like the man said. It’s happened several times. They’ve found layers of sea bottom mud and sand over ancient peat.”

  Cecilia rubbed her eyes. “Sea bottom mud. Native Americans nobody heard of. Look, Joely, this just isn’t what we’re looking for.” She glanced at Joely. “I’m expecting anger from you here.”

  Joely thought it over. She said carefully, “I think I used up my anger. I used it up on all the times you undermined my authority by sending out my copy to those shit-for-brain buddies of yours scattered around the corporation, and having them blind-side me with their E-mails.”

  “Joely—”

  “All this after you said I had autonomy. At least now you’re being straight with me.”

  “This isn’t personal,” Cecilia said. “It’s editorial. Don’t you get that? I don’t want nursery school songs about peat, for Christ’s sake. I want NASA and the USGS and FEMA. Now, if you could have gotten hold of that guy Meacher, the one who’s been shooting his mouth off about going to the Moon, we might have something—”

  There was a boom, like remote thunder.

  They stared at each other.

  Cecilia said, “What the hell was that?”

  Joely laughed. It can’t be. Not right on cue.

  They went to the window. Cecilia, as a permanent employee of Virtuelle, had a corner office, of course, up here on the third floor. The biggest window faced west, toward the Puget Sound.

  The day was clear, if oddly smoggy. They had a good view of the campus. On one of the neat squares of grass a cat was standing. It was facing north, standing oddly, with its legs apart…

  Far to the west, over the ocean, there was a giant electrical storm raging. It was a bank of thick black cloud, roiling, spread right along the horizon.

  There was sheet lightning, cracking in the gaps in the cloud, and what looked like fireballs, tossed into the air like popcorn. Ball lightning, maybe.

  “I think it’s a quake,” Joely said. “A big one.”

  “Oh, you’re an expert,” Cecilia said.

  “That black stuff could be dust, thrown up by the quake. The rock shears, the water vaporizes…You get a build-up of electricity…” She glanced around the campus. “These buildings—they conform to the California building code. Right?”

  “This isn’t California.” Cecilia looked confused. “How would I know?”

  “Well, they look like tilt-up construction to me.”

  “Is that bad?”

  The thunder was replaced by a low rumbling noise overlaid by a crackle, a series of short bangs that sounded like gravel on a tin roof.

  Joely listened intently to the low-frequency rumble, fascinated. She knew what that was. She was hearing the shortest-wavelength seismic waves, listening to the vibration of the Earth itself. The longest waves, with a period of an hour or so, corresponded to the whole Earth’s resonant frequency, and were much too low-frequency to hear.

  The planet was ringing like a bell.

  Now, above the storm, there was a strange cloud formation. Something like a smoke ring, Joely thought, a loose band of fluffy white. Maybe that was the acoustic pressure wave, rising up toward the stratosphere. The satellites would detect it later, a displacement of the atmosphere’s layers by a mile or more.

  Now Cecilia was starting to sound nervous. “What’s going on? Are we safe here?”

  “I don’t know. That storm front must be hundreds of miles long.”

  “But we’re safe, right?”

  Of course not. “…Yes. I guess so.”

  Cecilia was silent.

  On impulse, Joely reached out and took Cecilia’s hand.

  Joely thought of the cat. Animals knew how to brace themselves like that, standing with their legs apart, crossways to the shock.

  That cat is smarter than I am, she thought.

  Now there was movement.

  A couple of the pine trees at the edge of the campus tipped up, locking their branches together like clasping hands. When they sprang apart, their trunks cracked, and burst into showers of matchwood.

  Another line of trees, closer, popped out of the ground, roots and all, like wooden rockets.

  Incoming, Joely thought.

  “Holy shit,” said Cecilia…. And then it hit.

  It came in a second, without warning. The floor just disappeared from beneath her, and she was thrown into the air—like a kid in her father’s arms—her nose was inches from the ceiling…Then she fell, landing heavily on her back.

  An instant of stillness. Something falling to the floor with a soft explosion, maybe Cecilia’s pc monitor. Glass, she thought, and she closed her eyes.

  She’d had Cecilia’s hand wrenched out of her grasp in that first moment. She opened her mouth to call her.

  Slam, under her back.

  Again she was thrown into the air.

  She landed with a grunt, on her front this time, mercifully clear of furniture.

  And now the ground was pitching. She lay flat, spread-eagled, trying not to be turned over. It was like being on a violent sea, she thought—but not quite, for the motion was compound, shaking her up and down and side to side. More as if she was a flea on the back of a dog, shaking after a swim.

  She was surrounded by explosions. The window burst, creating a new hail of glass fragments over her neck and head. The wall cracked with a report like gunfire.

  Then the whole building fell, just like that, dropping through several feet, and she landed hard on her front again.

  There was a grind of metal, the soft crump of fresh explosions. That open car lot on the ground floor must have collapsed. The building was now a storey shorter than the architects had planned it.

  More booms. Smoke, curling into the window. That would be gas tanks going up, in the crushed automobiles beneath.

  Cecilia’s Toyota 4Runner. Her pride and joy, paid for by the company. Even now, lying here in her own blood in the middle of the greatest damn earthquake since Cecil B. de Mille, Joely found room in her head for a touch of spiteful joy at that.

  The floor was still shaking, but maybe not so violently. She got to her knees. She turned, looking for Cecilia.

  Cecilia’s pc lay smashed on the floor.

  It occurred to Joely that with the intranet destroyed, so was all the work she had done here; she had no hard copy, anywhere. Nothing to say why she had made her way here, today of all days. All those E-mails, lost like dreams, forever unanswered.

  If this is the end of us, she thought, we will leave less behind us than the citizens of Pompeii. So much of what humans had created in the last few decades had been, when you got to it, just electronic patterns, stored on some tape or chip or disc somewhere. And when the power failed…

  She saw a pair of legs, dimpled with cellulite, protruding from a too-short skirt. The edge of the stone desk top, still in one piece, had come down just above that skirt. Joely could see there was only a couple of inches clearance between the sharp rim of the desk and the floor.

  Just a couple of inches, into which a human torso had been crammed.

  There was blood seeping out under the desk, thicker and darker than Joely had imagined. Jesus. She felt bile rise at the back of her throat.

  She looked for the door. It was on the other side of the desk, and she wasn’t sure if she could make it that far. And even if she could it looked as if it had buckled in its frame. No way to get that down except with a fire ax.

  She made her way to the wall, and grabbed onto the window frame. A shard of glass stabbed her arm, but she ignored that. She stood, the floor still trembling beneath her feet. She looked out.

  The campus was demolished. Most of the buildings had simply fallen apart, she saw, like card houses, their prefabricated walls lying smashed on the neat patches of grass. One other building, still intact, had tipped over.

  She wondered if the ground had dip
ped already, the way the scientists’ models said it would. Was she below sea level yet?

  The horizon was just a blur of smoke and fires and electrical sparking, against a continual crackling noise. There was a kind of dome of a greenish luminosity, she saw, gathering in the air above the cloud.

  There were wide ravines, scratched at random across the ground. From a couple of them, fire was spurting. Gas mains, maybe. One of the fissures was closing again; and somehow that was more disturbing than anything else.

  She couldn’t even tell where the level was, so broken up was the ground.

  She could see nobody moving. There were a few splashes of color that might have been people, or might not. No sign of rescue, not so much as a TV news heli.

  And the quake wasn’t done; she could see a wave, maybe twenty feet high, passing through the ground itself, its crest sending chunks of shattered tarmac feet into the air.

  But the shuddering of the building seemed to be subsiding.

  My God, she thought. I might live through this yet. What a story I’ll have. Book deals, syndication, TV movies flashed through her imagination. She wondered if there was a webcam in the office.

  The dominant noise changed, to a whooshing like a wind blowing through trees.

  And now there was something emerging out of the smoke bank, to the east. Like a new cloud, wide and dark and rolling, laced with fire.

  Oh.

  It was water. A wave, surging out of the Sound, as if Puget was no more than a tipped-up bathtub. Burning oil had spilled over its surface, probably from the storage tanks at the docks. Earthquake cocktail, she thought.

  The wave had to be a hundred feet high.

  Waves like that could travel a hundred miles an hour; she could never outrun it. Not even in Cecilia’s Toyota.

  Blood dripped into her eye from a wound she hadn’t noticed. She was lucky as hell to have survived this far, she thought, and then she laughed at herself. Lucky? She was the girl from LA who had to move to Seattle in time for the Big One.