Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  …Soyuz, Houston. You’re go for LOI. You’re riding the best bird we can find. Godspeed, Soyuz…Soyuz, this is Korolyov. Do not rush to hell ahead of your fathers…

  LOI: lunar orbit insertion, the burn of two of their three remaining booster packs to put them into lunar orbit. Maybe the most crucial moment of the mission so far. The irony was, it would happen the first time they were out of contact with Earth, on the far side of the Moon.

  And since, with characteristic caution, Arkady had already turned the stack to the precise orientation for the burn—that is, ass-backward—none of them could see where they were heading.

  Henry said, “You know, we’ve come a quarter of a million miles across space, and we’re aiming at a world two thousand miles across, and we’re going to go into orbit sixty-nine miles above the surface. Not much room for error. And we can’t even see where we’re going.”

  Geena grimaced. “Every pilot hates not to be able to eyeball the target. That’s why LOS is so important.”

  “LOS?”

  “Loss of signal. When we go around the corner of the Moon, and into radio shadow.”

  Arkady found a place on his checklist. “They can calculate our trajectory to the second, in advance. And if LOS comes when the list says it should, at sixty-five hours, fifty-four minutes, five seconds, we’ll know we’re on course.” He grinned at Henry. “Trust me.”

  …And, as the craft turned in response to Arkady’s touches, the Moon came into Henry’s view: only eight thousand miles away now, less than four diameters, it was a gigantic crescent bathed in sunlight, pocked with craters, wrinkled by hills.

  And it was growing in his view, even as he watched.

  “My God,” murmured Geena. “It’s like a dive-bombing run.”

  But they were approaching the Moon’s dark side, and as the Moon neared that sunlit crescent narrowed, even as it spread across space.

  Henry leaned into the window and craned his neck to see the sweep of the Moon, from horn to narrowing horn.

  Jenny Calder packed her two kids off on the train with her sister. She watched as it pulled out of Glasgow Central Station, at the start of their long journey to their aunt’s home on the south coast of England.

  It broke her heart to do it.

  She hadn’t even felt able to tell her husband, William, who was on the Northern Channel exploratory rig. Not until he got home. But she’d wait here in Glasgow for him until he returned, just a few more days, and then they would go south together, and be a family once more.

  She patted the bulge of her stomach. Soon be a bigger family, in fact; another thing she hadn’t felt able to tell William while he was working so hard, desperately trying to get them a stash of money before the rig work finally disappeared.

  The rest of the day stretched before her, empty.

  She could go back to the flat. It was on the edge of the Gorbals, where she and William had both grown up, but their flat was one of the better conversions that had been done in the 1980s to attract the yuppies, and now a lot of their money was tied up in it, and of course they couldn’t sell it for love or money since the Edinburgh stuff started happening on the TV. Well, now it was going to stand empty. The police said it would be secure until they were able to return, when the Government got this volcano stuff under control.

  There was still some packing to do. But the flat would feel very empty without the kids.

  And there was something she had promised herself for a long time.

  She went out to the taxi rank. Soon she was in the back of a cab, whizzing along the motorway to the southwest, through Clydebank and Oban.

  She reached Pollok Park, and here was the Burrell Collection, airy rooms with a woodland backdrop, stuffed full of the art gathered by William Burrell, a dead ship owner.

  There were figures and statues and heads from Greece and Rome and Mesopotamia and Egypt. She especially liked the porcelain flower girls—the pieces which would fit best in her own flat, she thought, if she was allowed to take something away. And the place was full of surprises, for instance the old doorways and lintels and jambs that had been built into the fabric of the museum.

  There were notices saying there had been pressure from the Government to crate up the collection and ship it south, or abroad, until the emergency was over. But the city council had resisted. And Jenny was glad.

  She’d lived all her life in Glasgow without seeing this. William would never have been interested in coming here, bless him, and the kids were still too young. Well, it would always be here, in the future.

  Being here, it was as if all the volcano and earthquake stuff didn’t exist, as if life was just going on as it always had. But there was hardly anybody here, and on some of the surfaces there was a fine layer of pale gray grit, the same stuff that had come drifting out of the sky all over the city.

  When she was done, she spent a while wandering around the Park itself. Just three miles from the city center, it was like being in the country.

  But, though the light was sharp, there was a stink of ash, or smoke, in the air, and an odd orange tinge to the sky, like smog.

  After a few minutes, she went to find a taxi back to the city.

  The taxi carried her over the Kingston Bridge, the big motorway bridge that crossed the Clyde.

  The Clyde was low. Very low, surely lower, in fact, than just a couple of hours before. She could see watermarks in the banks, high above the rippling surface of the river itself.

  She thought she could see the water recede further, in the couple of minutes it took to cross the bridge. She’d never seen anything like it. Some kind of tide?

  She had the taxi drop her at George Square. From here she could walk up the hill along North Hanover Street to the Buchanan, the big mall at the end of Sauchiehall Street.

  …There was a sound like an explosion. The ground rippled.

  She was lifted up, thrown into the air, and landed flat, face down on the ground.

  The air was filled with shrieking sounds. Car alarms.

  Dazed and confused, Jenny tried to get up, cradling her bump. Her knees were grazed, bleeding, as if she was a ten-year-old kid.

  The buildings around the Square were swaying. Some of them had collapsed—the masonry and brickwork and glass just seemed to explode outward—and the air was brown with clouds of dust and smoke. A couple of buildings to the north were on fire, sending up pillars of black smoke.

  On the horizon were flashes. Electricity generators shorting out, perhaps.

  Now she could hear the wail of sirens, police cars and fire engines and ambulances. She could hear people screaming and shouting. They were emerging from what was left of the buildings, blinking in the sunlight, and then they began picking their way back into the ruins.

  Another shock, that jerked her onto her backside on the tarmac.

  There were pillars of black smoke all around the skyline now. An awful lot of fires.

  The speed of it struck her. Everything had just come apart, shaken to bits, in a few seconds.

  No traffic was moving. There wasn’t anything she could do to help. The Square was open, and she decided to stay where she was, far from the buildings; at least here she wouldn’t be crushed by falling bricks.

  One minute to LOS. You’re go all the way.

  “Copy that.”

  Soyuz, Houston, ten seconds.

  “See you round the corner…”

  Henry watched the clock, intently. At precisely 65:54:05—two days and seventeen hours from Earth—static filled his headset.

  “My God,” he said. “Right to the second.”

  Geena laughed. “Aw, they probably just turned off the radio to make us feel better.”

  Henry felt awed by the careless accuracy of the moment. To think that human beings could dig out this shell of metal and plastic, of Earth materials, wrap it around themselves and hurl it across space all the way to the Moon and arrive to the second.

  Arkady and Geena began the checklist for t
he burn, working carefully and slowly, swapping languages all the time. They seemed doubly careful not to make any mistakes now, out of sight of the Earth.

  The celestial geometry adjusted smoothly, the two great beacons of Earth and sun shifting steadily around the sky, illuminating the battered Moon. Through Henry’s window, the crescent of sunlit Moon ground grew, narrowing still, until it dwarfed the fleeing craft; and at last it narrowed to invisibility.

  …And, quite suddenly, the craft was enveloped in darkness, in the shadow of the Moon.

  It was the first time in three days Soyuz hadn’t been bathed in unfiltered sunlight. He craned toward his window. As his eyes dark-adapted, he could see stars, emerging from the gloom, each of them shining with a steady, gemlike brilliance. And, where the sun had been, the Moon was a giant, perfect hole in the star field—no, he saw now as his eyes adapted, not complete darkness: Earthlight played here, making the craters shine blue-black, like ghosts of themselves.

  But, ahead of him, maybe a third of the lunar disc was in true darkness. It was the double shadow, the place neither Earthlight nor sunlight reached, as dark as any place in the Solar System.

  Only the Apollo astronauts had known this experience before.

  The hair stood up on the back of his neck.

  “…Translation control power, on.”

  “On, Geena.”

  “Rotational hand controller number two, armed.”

  “Armed.”

  “Stand by for the primary TVC check.”

  “Three minutes to the burn. We are still go, Geena…”

  The ventilation hummed, the fans whirred, the machinery gleamed, mundane sights and sounds, as if he was in the guts of some immense pc; after three days they were enveloped in a persistent aroma of Russian cabbage and stale farts.

  But there was nothing mundane about where he was, a warm pink body, sailing through the shadow of the Moon.

  Come on, Henry, he thought. You aren’t supposed to feel like this.

  There was an explosion of light. Henry craned to see.

  Far ahead of the craft, the sun was rising over the Moon.

  It was a dawn of sorts, but it was bony and stark, with none of the richness and fleeing colors of an Earth-orbit sunrise. This was an airless world with no atmosphere to refract sunlight, to bend it up from below the horizon, and create a pre-dawn glow in the sky. So sunrise was instantaneous: one moment it was night, the next a line of fire had straddled the horizon, poking through the mountains and crater rims there.

  The light fled across the bare surface, casting shadows hundreds of miles long from mountains and broken crater walls. The smaller, younger craters were just wells of darkness in the flat light. For the first time, the Moon looked jagged and exotic, a craggy, romantic alien world; but he knew it was only an artifact of the light, giving the old, eroded Moon a rugged grandeur it didn’t merit—

  The engines lit.

  For a couple of weeks the rig workers had noticed strange happenings.

  The sea water here in the North Channel, not far from the mouth of the Clyde, was sometimes so warm it steamed. And there was that prevailing stink of rotten eggs. Hydrogen sulfide, the lab boys said.

  William Calder didn’t think much of it. Aged twenty-seven, with a wife, Jenny, and two kiddies in a tenement block in the Gorbals back in Glasgow, he’d always known the work on this exploratory oil rig was going to be hard and dirty and dangerous, even before Scotland started bloody blowing up. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off, weeks or months away from home; William just kept himself to himself and got through his work, like serving a sentence, which, if truth be known, William had done once or twice in his younger days.

  But now it was nearly the end of his tour of duty—nearly the end for everybody, as the rig was going to be evacuated in a few days because of the volcano stuff—and William would be going home with his bank account stuffed with money, more than enough to get his young family out of Glasgow for good, and into some safe bolt hole in England, as far south as they could bloody go without falling into the English Channel.

  So he was sitting with a six-pack in the cinema, watching Independence Day for the fourth time, when the first explosion came.

  The rig shuddered, and there was a wail like a scream.

  “Jesus Christ, that’s a gas leak,” said Jackie Brown, one of the blasting foremen.

  Everybody stood up.

  The film jammed, and burned through with shocking suddenness, a black circle just gushing outward across the screen.

  Then the plastic walls of the room started to melt, and the workers, men and women alike, started to run.

  In the corridor outside, William saw people grabbing at metal railings. There was a sound of sizzling, like bacon, and people screamed. The railings were too hot to touch.

  William tried to get to the heli-deck, but that was a waste of time. The stairwells were jammed with people, and the heat was already intense. So Jackie Brown turned and said, “Come on, boys,” and he started to push his way deeper into the rig.

  Eventually they got out through the drill deck, to a lower level which took them out to the foghorn platform. William blinked in the sudden light, breathed in fresh air. The sea was calm, the day bright. People were running everywhere.

  There was no sign of rescue, no choppers. There was a gigantic pall of black smoke, though, hanging over the eastern horizon.

  “Shite,” somebody said. “They must have nuked Glasgow.”

  William could see the gas flare, the system that burned off the inflammable gases produced by the thimblefuls of crude oil that was all they had managed to dredge up, here in the Channel between Britain and Ireland. The flare was burning furiously, much more intensely than usual.

  And then, as William watched, the flare exploded. The light was dazzling, brighter than the sun, and you could feel the energy pouring out of it.

  The bang was followed quickly by heavy, mortarlike crumps coming from the heart of the rig.

  Jackie Brown was standing beside him. “That’s the bloody diesel tanks,” Jackie hissed. He was nursing burned hands.

  …And now a fireball rose with a kind of majesty through the heart of the rig. It was the central gas jet. William could hear the tearing of metal, the cracking roar of explosion after explosion, as the rig tore itself to pieces.

  The deck beneath him tipped—the whole rig was coming apart—and now, oh God, some of the deck plates were buckling.

  The flames were towering over his head.

  Jackie Brown clapped William’s shoulder. Jackie, in his fifties, had seen it all before. “Fry and die, or jump and try,” he shouted, and he jumped without hesitation off the tipping side.

  There was oil burning on the surface of the water, which was all of a hundred feet below. The heat was already unbearable—

  William thought of Jenny, and wondered where she was now.

  He wondered if he should take off his boots first.

  He jumped.

  Henry was pressed back into his couch.

  The ignition was a sharp rattle, the engine noise a dull roar, transmitted through the fabric of the Soyuz. Suddenly Arkady’s knee, pressing against his, felt heavy, unbearably bony.

  He heard a clattering noise from above as some loose piece of gear fell through the orbital module. The pressure was heavy; he knew it was only a fraction of Earth-normal gravity, but, after three days of weightlessness, it felt like five G.

  Arkady and Geena scanned their controls. “Pressures coming up nicely,” said Geena.

  Time seemed to stretch, flowing like mercury. Henry knew that if the burn was too short, they would finish up on some weird, perhaps unrecoverable orbit. But if the burn was even a few seconds too long then instead of missing the Moon by that crucial sixty-nine miles or so, they would drive into its eternal surface, creating one more crater among billions.

  It was the longest four minutes of his life.

  “Burnout coming up,” Geena said. “Chamber pres
sures dropping to fifty psi…three, two, one.”

  The engine thrust died in a snap; the vibration and noise disappeared, and Henry was thrown forward against his straps.

  The fires around George Square seemed to be growing, not diminishing, and still the jolts and aftershocks came. Jenny sat squat on the ground, her hands spread out, not daring even to stand.

  In one place, in the west of the city, there was a kind of fountain, of steam and fire, that reached hundreds of feet into the air. Great glowing rocks shot out of it, and where they landed, like bombs, new fires started. A volcano, she guessed, right here in the middle of Glasgow.

  People were gathering in the Square, in ones and twos or small groups. Some were burned, or were nursing damaged limbs or heads, crudely bandaged, or were carrying other injured.

  Some of them had stories, and Jenny listened in horror.

  There was the woman who had come across the Glasgow Bridge, to flee the fires on the south bank. The bridge had collapsed, and the woman, with dozens of others, had ended up creeping across a single iron beam. But there had been a panic, a rush, crushing and suffocating, and fifty or sixty had been sent headlong into the waters of the Clyde. When she looked down, the woman saw maybe a hundred people in the water, some swimming or clinging to flotsam, some already dead. There were small boats trying to pick up survivors, but their task seemed hopeless.

  Here was a man who had seen Argyle Street crack right open, and fill up with a bizarre mix of rushing water and a wall of fire, from burst mains; the crowds had fled through streets that, even where intact, were jungles of downed power lines, bricks, rubble, shattered glass and felled lampposts and burning cars.

  Another woman barely escaped when the motorway bridge collapsed, steel reinforced concrete twisting like plasticine.

  An elderly woman had been asleep in her bed, when her high-rise block collapsed. Her first floor flat had become the ground floor; the lower level had telescoped down to eighteen inches. When she clambered out, dazed, she found people trying to mount a rescue operation, shimmying down fire hoses, people screaming and crawling over each other.