Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  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 pressures 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.

  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 Centre 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 centre, 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 pickaxe 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 analysed, Geena and Arkady were sightseeing.

  “It’s colourless,” Geena said. “Basically shades of grey. Like plaster of paris, or maybe a deep, greyish 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 Hasselblad. “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, smouldering 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 sulphide 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 towards 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 further out he thought he could see more of these pillow rocks forming. It was some kind of lava. A sack-like 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.

  Volcanic 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 modelled 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.

  26

  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 sulphur, 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 favourite 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 epicentre, Blue, so far as we can tell.

  Blue adjusted his Madonna headset. “Thank you, Sixt. If ‘epicentre’ 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.