Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

Edinburgh turned into a glowing map spread out beneath him, a folded blanket of green cut through by the blue of the Forth, the grey-black of the buildings, the lumpy outcrops of volcanic rock. The road network, clean and well-maintained, was a black thread like a kid’s toy track, its markings clear and bright. Today the roads were empty, save for a few scattered and stationary vehicles.

  In the middle of the rectangular, oddly American grid that was the New Town, someone was standing, alone, looking up at him, face a bright white dot.

  “One hundred feet… eighty feet…” the copilot said.

  “Roger, eighty feet. Ninety knots.” The pilot turned, his eyes insectile behind big tinted goggles. “So you’re from NASA, sir?”

  “Yup.”

  “Always glad to give you Yanks a flying lesson. Staying at eighty feet, ninety knots.”

  The Chinook dipped sharply to the right. Henry looked for a sick bag; there was nothing that qualified.

  “This is a little slow for you, I suppose, sir.”

  “I’m a scientist, not an astronaut.”

  Now the Chinook was flying low over Arthur’s Seat.

  The plug looked extraordinarily ugly from the air, a crude knot of basalt protruding from the ground, old and stubborn, somehow magnificent. Its several ancient vents were easy to make out, the basalt outline clear beneath a thin coating of heather. The Seat had, thought Henry, already seen off three hundred million years of weather, the titanic scraping of the ice, the pinprick depredations of man. But it wasn’t going to be able to see off the Moonseed. And there, indeed, close to the summit, was the central pool, obscured a little by the smoke from the ruin of Abbeyhill, shining like a coin in the ashen light.

  And elsewhere, there were signs of magmatic activity: the blur of steam and smoke, perhaps a fissure near the crest of the Seat. He wished he had a cospec up here. A camera, even.

  Incredibly, there were people on the Seat: still, even now, with the whole damn city evacuated, right at the heart of the thing.

  Then, as the Chinook completed its second orbit of the Seat, Henry thought he spotted landsliding, on the south face, away from the ragged patches of Moonseed.

  It was beginning.

  He tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Could you circle a few times? I’d like to take a closer look.”

  “Surely, sir. Break my right now. That’s nice…”

  The Chinook dipped to the right and hurled itself into a dive.

  The copilot intoned, “Seventy feet, ninety knots. Sixty feet, one hundred knots.”

  Arthur’s Seat approached, like an obstacle in a Disneyland ride, and the Chinook soared, following the ground’s blunt contours.

  The pilot whooped. “Raw sex!”

  It came more abruptly than Mike Dundas had expected.

  There was an earthquake, a single jarring shift sideways, that sent them all sprawling, even Bran.

  Mike sat up. His arm was bruised, but nothing was broken.

  The ground shuddered. Aftershocks.

  But Bran was sitting up. He looked around the group, locking each of them in turn in eye contact. “Not long now,” he said, his voice thin and clear. “The EVA is almost terminated. All that remains is for the controllers to choreograph our reentry. We must accept, and be prepared.”

  Be prepared. Accept. Yes.

  A tall, older man broke out of the group with a kind of sob. “Christ, I don’t want to die. Not for a fucking junkie like you.” He ran, stumbling.

  Bran just watched him, his calm undisturbed.

  The ground cracked. There was a sound like thunder emanating deep from within the earth. Another jolt.

  A fissure opened up, stretching back towards the peak of the Seat; it was just a few inches wide, and the earth around crumbled into it. From a hole at one end of the fissure, smoke, steam and bursts of red hot cinders broke into the air.

  The policeman stepped forward. His blue trousers and yellow jacket were stained green where he’d been thrown into the grass. “Who else? It isn’t too late yet. I’ll do all I can to get you down from here in safety.”

  There was a stir among the cultists, and a stir in Mike’s heart. Not too late. Could that be true?

  People were getting up around him, brushing off scuffed and torn suits. Sheepishly joining the copper.

  But it is too late, Mike thought. It had been too late for them all, for the whole city maybe, from the moment he had brought those Moon dust grains to this place.

  He had let Henry down, betrayed a trust. He had killed the city, even his family, and he deserved to suffer.

  …Or maybe, as Bran expressed it, all he had done was to open the door, the hatch to the Airlock that was waiting for them all. And in that case, he deserved the peace and joy and endless light that would follow.

  So he ignored the people losing their faith, scurrying down the rock after that copper like frightened rabbits. Perhaps there was nobody left but himself and Bran, but that was okay too. There would be room for them all later. Room for a planet-ful of lost souls.

  He looked for Bran. But Bran had gone.

  That was puzzling. But even that didn’t seem to matter.

  “One hundred feet… eighty feet… eighty feet.”

  “Roger that, eighty feet.”

  “Power lines a quarter mile.”

  “Roger, power lines. Pulling up.”

  The surge upward caught Henry by surprise. His attention had been fixed on the evolution of the Seat; suddenly he was pushed down in his jump seat, his consciousness forced back into his fragile body, hurled around inside this clattering contraption.

  “One twenty… one fifty… one eighty… five hundred feet now.”

  “Five hundred feet. I have the lines visual. Over we go.”

  Henry saw the power lines pass seemingly feet below the Chinook.

  “Okay, going lower—”

  The Chinook orbited over the south face of the Seat once more.

  In the last few seconds, the landsliding had become intense. As Henry looked down, it was as if everything south of a line drawn east-west from the Salisbury Crags to the Dunsapie Loch was beginning to move. The nature of the movement was eerie — like nothing he had seen before — not truly a landslide, for there was no lateral movement; rather, the whole mass was rippling and churning up, basalt shattered and turned to a crude fluid by the immense forces stirring within.

  And now, at last, the whole south side of the Seat began to slide southwards along a deep-seated plane. Already outlying billows of dust and ash were reaching Duddingston Loch and Prestonfield, the suburb to the south of the Seat, mercifully evacuated—

  That was when the explosion came.

  Red-hot stones were hurled yards into the air. They came down hissing on the grass. Ash was hosing out, black outside, red-lit within; a cinder cone was already building up around the aperture.

  The ground shuddered. There were more deep-throated cracks and explosions: Mike was hearing the voice of the ground coming apart, new fissures and vents opening up.

  Mike repeated one of Bran’s favourite mantras. “Christmas Eve, 1968. In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth…”

  He heard people join in. “And the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” He was not alone, then. “And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters—”

  The ground shuddered, and he was thrown flat again, his face pressed into the grass. The first stones had become a fount of boulders, incandescent bombs hurled so far into the air they passed out of his sight, into the ash cloud that was gathering above him.

  Lightning sparked in the cloud. The sunlight was blocked out. He was enveloped in heat.

  Mike was sure there was nothing like this in the literature, this sudden and spectacular opening up. But then, there was nothing in fifty thousand years of human history, nothing in five billion years of Earth, like the Moonseed.

  The noise had merged into a roar now, continuous, the shudderi
ng unending. But still he could hear his own voice.

  “And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”

  The ground split again, gas and steam rushing all around him. He heard a scream, unearthly; he was scorched by the heat, but still, it seemed, uninjured. He could scarcely breathe, the air was so hot and thick with the ash.

  The ground subsided under him.

  In the darkness, he seemed to be falling. Perhaps he would fall all the way to the centre of the Earth, hollowed out by Moonseed.

  But now the ground returned, slamming up under him, and he fell on his back, the soil and grass and rock and heather and moss rubbing against his flesh.

  He was rising into the roiling ash cloud. It rose up above him, lightning sparking. Remarkably, he still felt no pain, no real discomfort.

  There could be only seconds left, though.

  Far above, a glint of metal against a square inch of blue sky. A helicopter?

  He tried to shout, but he had no voice.

  And God saw the light… That it was good…

  But now the ash descended on him — oh, Jesus, it was hot, it was burning — and there was no more light.

  The cloud of dust and steam billowed upwards, thrusting like a fist towards the Chinook.

  “Get us out of here,” Henry said. “Now.”

  The pilot didn’t need telling twice. He opened up his throttle and the Chinook dipped, its big rotors biting into the turbulent air.

  Henry looked back. The cloud, a black wall, hundreds of feet high, seemed to be catching them up.

  The Chinook lurched; the pilots fought for control.

  There was an explosion nearby: a crackle of acoustic shock waves, a blast of light, as if someone was shooting at the chopper.

  “What—”

  “Hold on!”

  The Chinook rocked violently.

  “Break left! Break right!”

  The Chinook banked; Henry grabbed the frame, but even so he was thrown from side to side.

  Thick and viscous magma, he thought. Undisturbed for three hundred million years. Heavy with dissolved gases. Suddenly the Moonseed takes the lid off. The magma tears itself into hot fragments, that jet upward or tear out of the new/old vent. Hurling volcanic bombs into the air, even high enough to threaten this Chinook.

  Understanding it, he found, was no reassurance right now.

  The rocking began to reduce.

  “Take it easy,” the pilot said.

  The Chinook levelled out.

  Henry looked back again. The cloud was still expanding faster than they could run, probably three hundred miles an hour or better, close enough now to turn the day dark.

  There was a patter of ash particles on the windscreen.

  “North,” he said. “Go north.”

  The pilots hurled the Chinook into a sickening wrench to the left.

  Henry looked back. The cloud was still expanding, but mostly southward; the north was shielded a little by the topography of the Seat, what was left of it.

  The cloud was separating into distinct mushroom-shaped clouds, thick and black, heavy and pregnant with ash. There were lighter cirrus clouds arrayed above. He could see the ashfall beginning already, a black ram; it would turn what was left of Edinburgh into a new Pompeii, he thought.

  The Salisbury Crags, at the western face of the Seat, had given way. He could see what looked like a pyroclastic flow, a heavier-than-air mix of gases and hot volcanic fragments. From here it looked like a smoke ring spreading down the battered western flank of the Seat. The flow would follow the contours of the ground, and pool in the lower areas: the heart of Edinburgh, the old loch that had been drained to build the New Town.

  Already the Seat itself, what was left of it, was scraped bare of life. And, through the clouds, he couldn’t see any sign of the Moonseed pools.

  Lightning bolts shot through the clouds, extending to tens of thousands of feet.

  For Morag, it started with a low rumble, like a tram deep underground. But there were no trains running today.

  Then a series of buffeting jolts. Jolts that grew stronger.

  She stood in the middle of Princes Street, in the roadway away from the buildings.

  Then she was down, her face slammed against the tarmac. It was as if a rug had been pulled away from beneath her feet.

  She tried to get to her knees. There was blood on the tarmac, a deep sting down the right side of her face, where the skin had been scraped away.

  The noise was suddenly enormous, the crashing and roaring of the buildings overlaid on the deeper rumble of the ground. There was a muddled stink, of gas, steam, ozone, soot.

  The street, still shaking, was turning into a battlefield. The facings of the buildings were coming away and crashing to the pavements, sheets of stone and bright plastic and metal and glass, smashing and splintering as they fell, as if the street was imploding. Billboards and neon light tubes turned themselves into deadly missiles, showering shrapnel over the pavements below. Some of the older buildings seemed to be collapsing already, the breaking of their beams like gunshot cracks.

  To the east, towards Arthur’s Seat, she could see red flames rolling and leaping, a growing pillar of black smoke. Sometimes the flames seemed to pause, to weaken, but then they would find new vigour and hurl themselves even higher than before. There was a constant muffled roar. It was like watching some immense oil refinery burning up.

  She sat down in the middle of the road, keeping her hands away from the glass fragments skidding there. The road surface was cracking open — to her left, a great section of it was tilting up — but she seemed to be in a stable place, here, and far enough from the cracking facades of the buildings to survive that, with a little luck.

  Hell, she thought. She might actually live through this. If she found somewhere to report in she would have a tale to tell…

  But now there was a new explosion. A sound like a thousand cannon.

  A wall of flame — taller than any of the buildings, laced with black smoke and steam — poured into the eastern end of Princes Street. It was almost beautiful, like a moving sculpture of smoke and fire and light. At the cloud’s touch buildings exploded like firecrackers, a blizzard of stone and metal and glass. Oh, shit.

  Time turned to glue; she seemed to be able to make out every detail.

  The flame hit the big old buildings at the end of the street. She saw the Register House’s portico and clock towers burst outwards, before fire erupted from within, white and hot, overwhelming the Wellington statue, the old Iron Duke on his horse, in the instant before the cloud enveloped them.

  Now a fountain of flame and smoke erupted from the entrances to the Waverley Market, the underground mall built around the Station, and the panels of its roof fluttered into the air like so many leaves. A brilliant light enveloped the Scott Monument, two hundred feet of carved Gothic foolishness, magnificent in the flames” underlighting for one last instant, before it too erupted into shards of stone.

  A wind buffeted her, blistering hot.

  The cloud poured along the street, more like a fluid than a gas. It must be full of ash, heavier than the air. Lightning cracked within it. It was carrying rocks, irregular, glowing boulders and sharp-edged fragments that probably came from buildings. Carrying all that stuff, she thought, was actually going to make it more efficient at scouring the city as it progressed.

  This thing was going to scrape Edinburgh down to the bedrock, she thought, and then the Moonseed was going to eat that. But maybe it would be beautiful, in its way.

  So much for reporting in.

  She stood tall, facing the heat. She had time for an instant of regret before the cloud reared before her, and—

  Soon, it seemed to Henry, the ash had reached a huge altitude, maybe fifty thousand feet. Ash, laden with Moonseed dust.

  It obscured the view of Edinburgh, and maybe that was a mercy; he glimpsed the fiery hell of Arthur’s Seat, the husks of burning buildings all around.
<
br />   The pilot said, “We couldn’t have outrun it, could we, sir?”

  “I don’t think so. No.”

  “We’ll have to go back to Leuchars. I don’t trust this bird after inhaling all that shit from the air.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “We’ll find another transport to get you to London.”

  Henry looked back at the high ash. It would inject itself all the way up to the tropopause, ten miles above the Earth, where the decreasing temperature of the thinning air was inverted, making the tropopause into an invisible lid on the lower atmosphere. But such was the violence of the eruption, the ash from the Seat would surely break through the tropopause into the stratosphere beyond. There was no rain up there, nothing to wash the debris back down again.

  The ash from the Seat would form a thin veil that would spread all the way around the planet, the heavier fragments slowly drifting back down to Earth. He thought he could see, as it reached towards the stratosphere, the steel glitter of Moonseed dust amid the ash.

  The genie was out of its bottle now.

  “Welcome to Mars, fellas,” he said.

  PART III

  EARTH

  1

  Monica Beus was exhausted by the time Scott Coplon, her USGS guide, had led her to Kanab Point, here on the north side of the Grand Canyon. And that after a (reasonably) gentle one-mile hike from the off-road vehicle that had brought them almost all the way from the North Rim entrance station.

  It was close to sunset — probably one of the best times of day to view the Canyon — and the light, coming in flat and low from a cloudless sky, filled the Canyon with dusty blue shadow. The layers in the rock shone yellow, orange, pink and red, the colours of fire.

  Scott was a kid of thirty or so, his face hidden by a bushy black beard and thick Buddy Holly glasses. He was dressed, as she was, in a bright red survival suit and woolly hat. He asked now, “Are you okay?”

  Now that, she thought, was a spectacularly dumb question, and she sat on a ledge of ancient, eroded sandstone and considered it. Not only was she being eaten up from the inside, not only had she become, without noticing it, a decaying old lady, but, according to the best of her information, some kind of dreadful global catastrophe was coming down. So: no, she was not okay, and never would be again.