Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  And anyhow just then Joely had bigger problems on her mind.

  Like negotiating her pay at Virtuelle, which still hadn’t been settled even when the company’s big eighteen-wheeler had turned up at her apartment block in LA, and the movers had loaded up everything, right down to her car, for God’s sake.

  She had gone in pitching at eighteen hundred bucks a week, but the executive who hired her, in the end, managed to lowball her to fourteen hundred. And on top of that she would lose twenty per cent to the employment agency Virtuelle were recruiting her through, which in turn meant that she was engaged not as a staff employee but as a perma-lancer, no health benefits or pension or stock options. And by the time Uncle Sam had taken his cut she was left with little more than eight hundred a week, which felt like a defeat, even if it was more than she had earned in her twenty-seven years…

  But she went to Seattle anyhow.

  She spent a day exploring, and she immediately fell in love with the place.

  She liked its topography, the way it was folded over the compact hillsides above its bay. She liked being able to drive from snowcapped mountains to a yacht-filled Sound in half a day. She liked the Elliott Bay Book Company, whose boast to stock every book in the world she was not able to invalidate with her standard three-title test set.

  Work was a little iffy, though.

  Virtuelle’s campus — all paid for by the unexpected profitability of the world’s first successful virtual reality e-zine — was a carpet of neat quadrangles of grass, separating three-storey office buildings like children’s blocks, gleaming blue glass, identical save for their red numbering. The bottom storey of each building was an open car lot, so that the buildings were fat, top-heavy boxes held up there by skinny little beams of reinforced concrete, all of it a little rickety in the eyes of a Californian.

  She spent most of her first day sitting in a cubicle before a blank screen, waiting for her magnetic photo-ID key and her e-mail address to be allocated her, without which, as far as she could tell, she didn’t really exist here, and she certainly couldn’t go anywhere or do anything.

  The cafeteria — where a kindly security guard bought her coffee and a sandwich for lunch pending the day her IDs arrived — seemed to be the centrepiece of the campus. It was a spectacular multi-level glass cylinder built around a chunk of bona fide Berlin Wall, laden with graffiti, and giant posters of happy customers, overlooking a sparsely populated food hall. There was, bizarrely, a stream running right through the middle of the hall, with little stone bridges spanning it.

  White security vehicles openly toured the campus. There seemed to be video surveillance in most office areas. She couldn’t receive faxes; these arrived at a central drop point and were distributed throughout the campus. A notice over her desk reminded her that even her e-mails could at any time be subpoenaed by the Justice Department.

  A slow start, then.

  On her third day, though, once her e-mail alias had been allocated, she arrived to a blizzard of mails, almost all of them utterly irrelevant.

  She met her boss once, a pushy New Man who insisted on bringing his three-year-old kid into work every day: fun, but it made serious progress impossible, although he didn’t seem to recognize that.

  Still, he gave her a first assignment: a major feature on the Rainier blow-out.

  There was no shortage of material, of course, a lot of it gripping and dramatic, much of it in IMAX or 3-D formats. Here were the first ash eruptions, small, but sufficient to shroud Rainier’s snow-capped peak with black streaks. Here were the geologists earnestly studying the bulge that had grown out of the hillside at a rate of yards a day, in a time-lapse sequence visible to the naked eye.

  Then came the sharp earthquake that dislodged the giant avalanche of ice and rock from the northern face of the mountain, releasing the pressure on the superheated groundwater and magma beneath the volcano.

  And the explosion. Half of the remaining peak was torn off, like a cork popping, hurling the fragments across five hundred square miles of forested ridges, the biggest seismic event in the Cascades since Mount St Helens.

  A whole set of last words, distorted and stark.

  Here was the geologist from the USGS who had been measuring the bulge, and when the explosion came, just had time to radio his headquarters: Vancouver — Vancouver — I think… Here was the old Navy guy who had been manning a Department of Emergency Services volunteer warning station a mile north of the avalanche, who had coolly described the avalanche, and how it overwhelmed his partner a half-mile away, and even how, in the end, it came to get him too.

  Great pictures, of course. Gas, billowing out of the exposed magma body for twelve hours, jetted ash high into the sky and sent ash flows down the shattered north flank. Rivers of mud flowed down the miniature valleys that drained the mountain. A little town called Orting was overwhelmed with ash, but not before heroic feats of evacuation led by the guys from VDAP, lots of human interest stuff.

  Volcanic ash even rained down on the Seattle-Tacoma area, in some places inches thick, covering cars and pedestrians and sidewalks, tyre marks like snow.

  Well, it was a hell of a thing, and even given the coverage it had already, would make a great virtual feature.

  And of course the most interesting aspect was how this was all connected to the Edinburgh explosion.

  She tapped into the buzz about the volcano plague that was spreading around the world. But she couldn’t get any responsible geologist to comment on that.

  Most of them said they weren’t too surprised by Rainier’s eruption. For hundreds of years Rainier had been subject to erosion from the weather outside, and from simmering magma inside. The magma had cooked the innards of the mountain to unstable clay. Rainier had, they told her, gone rotten, and the big bang had just been waiting to happen; it hadn’t taken much of a seismic jolt to kickstart the eruption.

  But why now?

  Of course the volcano plague was the world’s biggest story: a string of disasters, big and small, widespread and localized, following in the wake of Edinburgh. In addition to those directly affected — including the injured and the dead, already too many to count — everyone was feeling the knock-on effects.

  Air flights and shipping had been disrupted. The ash in the air worsened what Venus had already done, and disrupted crops worldwide. In the US, prices in the stores were sky-high on some items. Elsewhere, people were already starving. Or rioting. Or going to war.

  Right now things — the world — seemed to be holding together. National governments were handling their local emergencies — but the services were stretched. International co-operation was collapsing. Peacekeeping troops were being flown home. Trade was crumbling, and some nations were threatening protectionism.

  There were already politicians calling for a “Fortress USA” mentality.

  It was bad, and getting worse, steadily.

  But what interested Joely was Rainier. Was its eruption part of the plague? If it was, could they expect more of the same?

  Just coincidence, the geologists said. Probably.

  Some of them admitted to her they didn’t know enough about the plague to be sure.

  Of course there was always the nutty fringe, who held that the whole planet was doomed, like Venus.

  Still, when you thought about that, the assumed geological stability of the Washington region was kind of odd. After all you had Alaska up the coast and California to the south, both plagued by devastating quakes. Why should Washington be spared? The locals just assumed it was so, despite Rainier. Not here, not in Seattle…

  She spent some time digging a little deeper into the online libraries. And, slowly, she began to piece together an answer.

  Seattle-Tacoma was sitting on top of an area where one tectonic plate was diving under another.

  An ocean floor plate called the Juan de Fuca Plate was spreading out from a centre somewhere in the Pacific. When it hit the North American Plate, a little ways offshore, it dived b
eneath it, back towards the mantle. Subduction, this was called.

  So in the place where the plates were in contact, they rubbed over each other.

  But not smoothly.

  Part of the fault that separated the two plates remained locked. So the continental plate was bending, like a board bent over a table, folding under itself to follow the ocean plate.

  The continent could bend so far, as if it was made of rubber. But eventually it would snap back into place. And then—

  Well, the technical journals were a little light on detail on what would happen at this point.

  There were few severe earthquakes in the area’s historical record, she found. But then it was only two hundred years since the first Europeans, including Captain Cook, visited the region, and “history” began. And there were plenty of earlier disasters reported in the oral histories of the region’s original inhabitants. Such as the big quake that struck Pachena Bay, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, one winter night: in the morning the village at the head of the bay had gone…

  After a couple of days, the work even started to get to be fun, as her mix of 3-D video clips, sound and prose scraps started to assemble itself into something resembling content.

  But every time she called somebody, even internally, to discuss the project, she had to sign a non-disclosure form. After a week, Joely was seriously wondering how long she was going to survive here.

  Still, she found herself a nice apartment in Bellevue, with a fine, if distant, view of the Sound, and she had the eighteen-wheeler unload the rest of her stuff.

  After her first week, though, there was another quake, and a childhood memento — a snowscape of Disneyland that had survived three decades in LA — fell off a shelf and smashed, spilling plastic snowflakes all over the carpet.

  It was irritating. If the big quake hit before she filed her feature, she would lose her angle, and probably her job…

  She worked faster.

  8

  Henry called Jane.

  The truncated family were still in the semi-private little nest they’d carved out for themselves in a corner of the theatre — three cots and a cupboard — and they were settling down to sleep.

  Ted held his mobile phone out to Jane.

  Jane answered it, and then held it away from her ear, as if it was hot.

  “How did he get my number, Dad?”

  Ted just grinned, of course, a look that had infuriated her since long before her fourteenth birthday, when the old fool had first started to meddle in her love life. He turned away on his cot, and picked up the dog-eared copy of The Day of the Triffids that was doing the rounds of the Rest Centre’s informal lending library.

  Jack was already asleep.

  She didn’t have much choice.

  “What do you want?”

  And how are you? I’m amazed you’re still there.

  “Your pet the Moonseed hasn’t been doing too many of its tricks recently.”

  It’s working subsurface.

  “That’s it, look on the bright side.”

  You’ve only gone six miles in three weeks. You’re crazy.

  “But things have calmed down here, Henry. You ought to see it. The evacuation has become a lot more orderly. There are even classes for the kids. The Government seem to be thinking long term now.”

  Long term?

  “Where to locate the thousands — hundreds of thousands — who had to flee Edinburgh, how to feed and house them, how to find them new jobs. How to rebuild the businesses that were lost. We’ve been helping to run the Rest Centre.” She ruffled her sleeping son’s hair. “Even Jack.” Maybe especially Jack. “You learn things about yourself.” Like, I’ve learned I can stop a fist fight over a smuggled-in bottle of booze. “Ted doesn’t want to leave until he’s sure about Michael.”

  You should have gotten further away.

  She shifted, folding her legs on the bed and propping her chin on her knees. “You’re getting irritating, Henry.”

  At least you’re not paying for the call.

  Anyway, she hadn’t wanted to go further. She was comfortable here. If she was honest with herself, she knew that if she moved, she would have to face the bigger picture again, and she was reluctant to do that if she didn’t have to. Here, she was in control, at least of the small things in her life.

  The psychology of disaster: denial, anger, withdrawal, acceptance. It dismayed her to look into her own heart and find herself working her way through the textbook.

  “So where are you? The Moon?”

  Might as well be. I’m heading for Washington. Trying to get them to take me seriously.

  “Any success?”

  I’m getting tired of meetings with people in suits. Decisions. Directives. None of it is real, Jane, compared to what’s happening out there. The physical reality of the Moonseed, in the rock. You can’t executive-order all that out of existence.

  “I understand.”

  …And people always want to believe it’s going away.

  His voice was flat. Something had changed him.

  “Henry, what are you trying to tell me?”

  There was silence for long seconds, digitally perfect.

  I’ve been working on the science out here. Options to stop the Moonseed. Short and long term. Teams of us, across the planet. And I’ve become convinced.

  “What about?”

  That we can’t stop it.

  She tried to take that in. “There must be a way.”

  No. No happy ending, Jane. No neat solution. It doesn’t work like that, it seems. The Moonseed is implacable.

  “Is this why you called me?”

  No. Yes. I suppose so. It’s difficult. Jane — do you believe me?

  She massaged her forehead. “I don’t know.”

  The trouble is, we have no one to surrender to.

  “I’m not joking, Henry.”

  Neither am I. I’m sorry.

  “How long—”

  The math is uncertain. Earth is big. Decades, probably.

  “This wasn’t the future I expected when I was growing up.”

  You, the great prophet of environmental doom?

  “I think on some level I believed we would be able to do something. We were making a mess of the planet, fine, but it was within our capabilities to stop. All we needed was the will. And then there’s the movies. Science fiction. Disaster films. The world is ending, but the heroes can always do something.”

  Yeah. But in real life the future was always finite, Moonseed or not.

  “Not this finite. We used to talk about a billion years, Henry. Now you’re talking about decades…” Not even long enough for Jack to have kids of his own, and watch them grow, and grow old himself. Whatever years he does have, he’ll spend on the run. Fleeing from the bloody Moonseed.

  Henry said, All any of us can do is our best, by each other, by whatever duty we perceive.

  “Not much comfort.”

  I’m sorry, he said.

  “It’s not your fault. It’s not anybody’s.”

  No. Not even Mike’s.

  “Are they going to send people back to the Moon?”

  That’s what I’m campaigning for. I suppose it would be another one in the eye for astrology.

  She laughed, softly. “Tell me your birthday.”

  He told her.

  She thought for a while. “Well, there you are. Your sign is Sagittarius, the sign of exploration. The sign that’s linked with spaceflight. And your dominant planet is Pluto. Planet of transformation. So the omens are good.”

  Gee. How spooky.

  “Of course I don’t believe in astrology. But then I’m a Scorpio, and Scorpios are always sceptical.”

  A long pause, transatlantic crackles.

  For a while I’m not sure if I cared if it ended or not. But now I’ve met you. And —

  “What?”

  His voice was hesitant. Do you think we could have had a future together?

  “Hell,
I don’t know.” She laughed. “I suppose it’s possible.” She thought it through more carefully. “Yes. It’s possible. We would have had some incandescent arguments.”

  I’m sorry I walked out on you, the way I did.

  She took a breath. “I understand.”

  The truth of it was, she did understand. It was as he’d said. All any of us can do is our best, by each other, by whatever duty we perceive.

  It tore me apart.

  “But you can’t expect a mother to see it your way. Right then I’d have mobilized the resources of the planet to unite me with Jack if I could, for one more day, and to hell with the rest.”

  I understand. Anyhow, that’s the reason.

  “What?”

  The reason I care. It’s you, Jane. You, and Jack, and even Ted and Mike, damn it. It’s you. It took me a while to figure it out… The world can end, but not if it takes you.

  Henry’s voice, accent enhanced by the phone’s tiny speaker, was a dry whisper, from a million miles away. Dust blowing across the dry bottom of one of those lunar seas, she thought.

  “For Christ’s sake, Henry,” she said, “you’re the nearest thing to a hero I’ve got. If you feel like that come up with a better option.”

  I don’t feel like much of a hero.

  “Listen,” she whispered. “Here’s something to protect you. I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the priest / That christened me… / I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me, / God bless the Moon, / God bless me.”

  Pretty.

  “Yeah. Now you try it.”

  The words came drifting back to her. I see the Moon, / The Moon sees me…

  9

  As it turned out, Frank Turtle responded quickly, and, using some of the material from his failed return-to-the-Moon pitch, Geena and Frank worked up a convincing-looking presentation within a few days.

  They had Jays and others dry-run them, and then they presented to Harry Maddicott, JSC director. He sat, sleek and replete with lunch, as Geena and Frank worked through the spiel tag-team style. But Maddicott was more supportive than Geena had expected. He advised them to take it to at least one more center before going to the NASA Administrator, however.