Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  There was the tale of a man who was buried up to his neck in the ruins of the City Chambers. When they dug him out, the whole of his lower body was crushed flat, like a tiger rug, and he had time to see it that way, before he died.

  Another woman had been trapped by her legs under a beam. Her son had tried to free her by, good God, amputating her legs. But he could only remove one before the flames beat him back.

  …And so on; everybody had a story to tell, it seemed.

  More and more people crushed into the Square. The fires were still growing, all around the skyline. New arrivals said the big fires on the south bank had leapt the Clyde. That big explosion was the fuel depot at the Central Station going up.

  And while all that marched up from the south, another great blaze was licking its way down from the wreckage of the Buchanan Center to the north.

  She waited. There was nowhere to run. She just had to hope it would die back before it reached her. She cradled the bump in her stomach, shielding it with her hands.

  While Geena and Arkady worked through their post-burn checklist, the craft left the land of shadows and sailed over brightening ground. The Moon filled his window now, a montage of pale tan and black, the edges and rims of the craters sharp and stark. Sometimes he lost his sense of perspective and the landscape seemed to flatten out, and the shadows looked like streaks of oil, sliding past his window.

  But those streaks of light and dark were the mountains of the Moon.

  Without air, compared to Earth from orbit, the view was remarkably clear. He flew over a landscape of craters: young, smooth, perfect bowls; random gouges; gentle hollows; tiny buckshot wounds; craters on top of craters. Here was a big old basin, with an eroded mountain at its center, and on the smooth floor—and on the flanks of its mountains, and its rambling walls—he could see the pockmarks of younger impacts.

  Craters on craters, everywhere: everything he saw, it seemed to him, was made of the rims or basins or central peaks of craters. It was like flying over some ghastly World War One battleground. It was a world of death, a world whose life had been smashed out of it.

  The clarity was incredible, though. When he peered down into the craters, especially when the shadows were long, he could see boulders, even broad scars in crater walls that had to be landslides. He could even see details by the milky blue of Earthlight; the landscape disappeared only when they flew through the double shadow of Earth and Moon. The view was so clear, in fact, that his vision kept playing tricks on him. The smoother craters seemed to reverse, popping up into domes or blisters, then sinking back to depressions. He couldn’t tell if he was sixty-nine miles up or six, and every so often, as some new mountain passed below, his heart would skip a beat, as if the Moon was clawing up into the sky.

  Now the jokes by those old Apollo guys didn’t seem so funny. Sixty-nine miles high? Watch out for the seventy-mile mountain on the Moon’s backside…

  He craned to see more. This module had been designed for survival, not as a viewing platform, and it was unbelievably frustrating to be so close and not to be able to see properly. Like driving through a national park, he thought, in a Sherman tank.

  As he skimmed around the rocky limb, passing from shadow to light, he learned that shadows—the angle of the sun—were the key to seeing, on the Moon. When the sun rose, other features would become more prominent, like the brighter ray systems. They looked, he thought, like the marks left where a pickax had dug into concrete.

  But when he was subsolar, with the sun behind him, the shadows were flattened, or disappeared altogether, as if he was looking down at the bleached floor of some dead ocean.

  In fact, when the sun was right behind him, the lunar landscape seemed to brighten suddenly. Heiligenschein, the lunar scientists called it. The saint’s halo: some obscure effect of the dust.

  But navigation using landmarks was going to be difficult, at high lunar noon. He conceded the wisdom of the old Apollo planners, who had sent all their guys in to land at lunar morning, when the low sun would send forward nice long crisp shadows for seeing…

  While he analyzed, Geena and Arkady were sightseeing. “It’s colorless,” Geena said. “Basically shades of gray. Like plaster of paris, or maybe a deep, grayish builder’s sand.”

  “Or pumice stone,” Arkady said. “Or a beach. Perhaps after a picnic. All churned up by a volleyball game, embers of the bonfire everywhere…”

  “Bullshit,” said Henry, angrily. “Arkady, you spent too long on Cocoa Beach. This is why they made a mistake sending you guys, you aviators, in the first place, on Apollo. You tourists can’t even describe what you’re seeing.”

  “What’s to describe?” Geena said grimly. “It’s just a ball of rock. Christ, it looks bleak. A huge expanse of nothing—”

  Henry, irritated, shook his head. “That’s because you don’t know how to look at it—”

  “Oh, my,” Arkady said now. “Will you look at that.”

  Henry and Geena crowded to see.

  Here she was, right on cue, as they completed their audacious orbit out of her sight for the first time in their lives: Mother Earth, right where she should be, rising above the surface of the Moon, a blue crescent hanging in the black sky.

  Even from here, you could see volcano smoke.

  “…Oh, man, that’s great,” Geena said. “Wow, is that pretty.”

  Arkady started taking pictures of Earth with his Has-selblad. “I hope these come out.”

  “You sure you’re getting it?”

  “I think so…”

  And so on. Henry sank back into his couch. It was Apollo 8 all over again, he thought, the astronauts ignoring the unexplored wastes below them, for the sake of a few tourist snaps of a place they’d spent their whole lives. It was such a cliché…

  But he found a lump in his throat.

  This is ridiculous, he thought. What am I, a salmon dreaming of the birthing river?

  He tried to focus his attention on the Moon. But some part of him, buried deep in his hind brain, made him look up at the rising Earth, again and again, as Geena and Arkady crowded to take their pictures.

  The sea was sharply cold, but when William’s head was out of the water he could feel it being cooked by the heat of the skeletal, smoldering wreck of the burning rig, so he had to duck under the surface as much as he could manage.

  There were no lifeboats, but there was buoyancy foam here from a smashed boat, and he and four others were clinging to it, including Jackie Brown. William couldn’t get to a foothold, and his arms were getting weaker, but he didn’t want to drag some other guy off and back into the water.

  There were people just floating in the water, screaming from the pain of their burns. There was nothing William or anybody else could do for them. There were bodies, too, strips of flesh peeling off them.

  The air stank here, that rotten-egg sulfide smell.

  And now there was a new explosion, behind him, from the ocean.

  He turned in the water, clinging to his scraps of foam.

  There were explosions coming toward him, in a line maybe five hundred yards long. Ash and steam plumed into the air, and fell back into the water. The steam was gathering into a cloud that soon drifted over the five of them, heavy droplets, hot and damp, that clung to their skin, and made it impossible to breathe without sucking in moisture.

  William screamed. Not from pain—from bewilderment. Wasn’t the rig explosion enough? How could there be more? Wasn’t that one thing enough?

  …But now there was something under his booted feet.

  Surprised, he looked down.

  Rock. Lumps of it clustered together, the size and shape of pillows, just four or five feet under the surface. And a little farther out he thought he could see more of these pillow rocks forming. It was some kind of lava. A sacklike skin would form over a lump of red-glowing, sticky rock. The skin would solidify, then burst, and the lava would squeeze out like toothpaste, and start to form another pillow.

  Volc
anic stuff, he supposed. The kind of thing that had knackered Edinburgh. It must be what had wrecked the rig, this crap bubbling up from the ocean bed.

  But now, maybe, he could use it.

  Cautiously, he rested his feet on a white pillow boulder. The rock was hot, but his heavy boots protected him. He was able to loosen his grip on the foam fragment, and his arms ached with release.

  He reached out to the others. Here came Jackie Brown. One of the younger men had given Jackie his life jacket, but even so, Jackie was exhausted, ashen-faced, barely awake.

  William stood on the new rock, clinging to Jackie, holding him up.

  The steam cloud cleared.

  On the rig, he could see men on the heli-deck. They were waving their arms amid the smoke and flame, pleading to be taken off, but there was nobody to respond. Even if choppers had been near, they couldn’t have approached through the heat and smoke.

  He saw men and women climbing down the legs into the water. Badly burned, terribly burned—some had their faces burned off—but still moving. The rig was tipped through thirty degrees, and looked as if it would fall over any minute.

  There were more explosions in the water behind him, as this weird volcanic stuff rebuilt the sea bed. But he was, incredibly, standing on stable ground here.

  He might live through this. Stand here, literally stand in the sea, until the choppers came, get himself saved by the volcano stuff that had destroyed the rig, costing probably a hundred lives.

  Incredible.

  William was alive, where so many had died, and he knew he would take a long, long time to come to terms with that.

  In the far distance, he saw the glint of helicopter blades, bright against the huge pillar of ash and steam that hung over Glasgow, and he thought of Jenny and the kids.

  The walls of fire broke through the line of ruined buildings to the north.

  People started to panic, to push to the south. Jenny struggled to her feet. But the heat from the south was also blistering.

  And now the fire gushed like a fluid, from the north, and swept across the ground.

  Ash and cinders rained down on Jenny, and she screamed, and tried to keep it out of her hair. Bags and parcels, dumped on the ground, burst into flame. People were running everywhere, but they were falling, popping into flame before they stopped moving. But she seemed to be alone, with nowhere to run.

  The fire rushed at her, a glowing fist. She was knocked onto her back by a red-hot wind.

  Oddly, she found herself relaxing.

  Her fear was gone.

  The kids were safe. William would look after them. And the one in her belly was with her; it would never know suffering.

  She was looking up into a cyclone; she could see a pillar of fire, laced with flame and debris, reaching high into the sky, dragging the flames together.

  She held her hand up before her face. It burst into flame, just like that, her fingers burning like the candles on little Billy’s cake.

  There was an instant of glowing pain.

  Henry, in lunar orbit, studied the summaries on his laptop.

  Something immense and restless was pushing out of the Earth, disturbing the thin blanket of rock and life that overlay the hot interior.

  The Moonseed had devoured a goodly portion of the asthenosphere, the mushy semi-solid layer that contained the hotter magma of the deeper mantle. A magma plume seemed to be starting up beneath the Midland Valley, a fountain of liquid rock like the ones which had built Hawaii, Iceland.

  But if that was true, it was a plume of a volume and extent and speed of efflux that nobody had modeled before. Already there had been disturbances all over the Valley: the cracking of extinct volcanic plugs, the slippage of faults that had been stable for millions of years.

  The destruction of the cities had caused human misery on a biblical scale.

  All of it, Henry knew, would be dwarfed by what was to come.

  Henry, sailing through black and white celestial geometry, felt like a detached god, unable to imagine the human suffering, souls as transient as sparks in a fire.

  He was glad, as they prepared for the landing, there was little time for reflection.

  43

  Blue Ishiguro—wheezing, asthmatic, lungs full of ash—made his camp at the top of Dumfoyne. With relief, he set down his seismometers and miniaturized cospec and pyrometers, tiltmeters and cameras, and connected them up via a laptop pc to a satellite transponder.

  Dumfoyne was a lumpy volcanic vent. The hilly country of the Midland Valley, stained green and purple with heather, rolled away around him. He could see the little town of Strathblane perhaps a couple of miles away, compact and green and nondescript, cupped by the hills.

  In his brief time here Blue had come to appreciate the Scottish landscape, even away from the more spectacular scenery of the Highlands. This land, shaped by the ice sheets and punctuated by stubborn igneous outcrops, was built on a scale that was almost human, a scale that reminded him of Japan, and it seemed to him that the character of the people had been shaped in the same way. Modest. Robust.

  But already the landscape was marred by the events of the last few weeks.

  That little town was deserted, for instance: no vehicles moved there, no smoke curled into the air, no children played. And the blue sky was overlaid by thick black clouds, ash-laden. The clouds gave the place the tinge of autumn, of decline.

  And that was surely appropriate, for winter was drawing close for Scotland now; little of this panorama would survive what was to come.

  …The ground shook, subtly.

  The catfish was stirring. Blue could smell sulfur, and it seemed to him that the ground under his buttocks was a little warm.

  Not long, then.

  He unfolded a small package containing smoked salmon sandwiches—his favorite Scottish delicacy—and a bottle of Tennent’s lager, the beer to which he’d taken an unreasonable liking.

  ISS, Ishiguro. You’re right at the epicenter, Blue, so far as we can tell.

  Blue adjusted his Madonna headset. “Thank you, Sixt. If ‘epicenter’ is the appropriate word.”

  We don’t really have the words, I guess, said Sixt Guth, in orbit on the International Space Station. The Moonseed is taking us into new territory.

  “I am atop the vent called Dumfoyne,” reported Blue. “I have a good view of the western Campsie Fells from here. I can see how the Clyde Plateau lavas, contemporaneous with this vent, form a steep scarp over Lower Carboniferous sediments, though this is partly obscured by a landslip—”

  Fuck the context. You should be getting your sorry ass out of there.

  “Watch me run, when it comes.”

  But the argument was ritual. Sixt knew Blue wasn’t going to move from this spot.

  Radar mounted on the Space Station had shown that the ground was uplifting, slowly but steadily, all across the Midland Valley of Scotland. False color images showed a bulls-eye shape, ragged circles of increasing altitude. And, as ancient cones belched fire, the deformation was increasing in scale and rate.

  And Blue was right at the center of things, right at the eye of that NASA false color storm of new contours.

  Like most geologists, Blue had often chafed at the absurd rapidity of human attention spans, even lifetimes, compared to the slow grandeur of the geological processes he studied. He’d been attracted to volcanism because at least it enabled him to see things happen.

  And today, something strange—even unprecedented—was going to happen. On such a day, with such an event impending, this was the only place to be.

  They made Henry put on a POS, a portable oxygen system, for all of twelve hours before he entered the all-oxygen atmosphere of the EVA suit. The POS was just a face mask, an oxygen bottle, a pressure regulator and a lith hydroxide cartridge to scrub out carbon dioxide. The idea was to flush the nitrogen out of his system, to save him from the bends. After the first couple of hours it was as uncomfortable as hell.

  They were, it seemed, going
to have to spacewalk to reach the lander.

  “Spacewalk?” Henry remembered movie images of Apollo astronauts, guys casually swimming through pressurized tunnels to their spacious and comfortable two-stage LM, with its big descent engine for landing, and smaller ascent stage to bring them home, and a cabin big enough to support two men for three days…“This isn’t Apollo, is it?”

  Arkady grinned. “It has been rather necessary to—improvise certain elements.”

  “How reassuring.”

  “But this is how we planned to reach the Moon: a space walk from a Soyuz derivative to a lightweight lander.” Arkady shrugged. “It is not impossible.”

  “But you never tested it out in practice.”

  “Since our launch rockets blew up on the pad, we never got the chance. To my eternal regret. Now. You must suit up.”

  Geena and Arkady began swimming briskly around the orbital compartment, pulling pieces of spacesuit from lockers. These suits were an American design and they looked bulkier and more rigid than the Russian design he’d worn to Earth orbit. There were inner coveralls of what looked like Spandex, and chunky outer suits that came in two halves, top and bottom. The halved suits swam fitfully around the cabin, as if half-alive.

  Arkady helped him prepare. “These are Space Shuttle EVA suits,” he said sternly. “They are called EMUs, for extravehicular mobility units—”

  “How did they know my size?”

  “They don’t,” Geena said stiffly. “One size fits all.”

  Arkady said, “The suit is like an independent spaceship. It will keep you alive for seven hours. Long enough to reach the surface of the Moon, all the way to the old Apollo site, if all goes well.”

  Henry had to strip to his underwear, and he switched from his oxygen mask to a scuba-diver mouthpiece. Arkady helped him climb into his Spandex mesh cooling garment. It was a one-piece affair, with water pipes woven into the fabric, and air ducts fixed to the limbs. It was a struggle to squeeze his legs down through the tight neck.