Moonseed (29 page)

“What happens then?”

Henry looked for the right expressions. “The scale of the eruptions is going to increase.”

“Beyond anything we’ve yet seen?”

“Beyond anything in recorded history.”

Farnes withdrew to his window, and the sunlight streaming in there silhouetted him, masking even his posture.

Holland said briskly, “So how can we stop this thing?”

“We don’t know. We’re trying to find a way. It can be inhibited. The Moonseed has to form, umm, certain crystalline structures before it can spread effectively. If you disrupt those structures, we think it can be slowed down.”

Holland looked confused. “What do you mean, disrupt?”

“Mechanically. Break it up. Bomb it.”

“Nuclear weapons? We couldn’t sanction—”

“No,” said Henry firmly. “The radiation from a nuke would probably feed it more than inhibit it. Carpet-bomb the infection sites with conventional weapons. Water helps.”

“Water?”

“Under high pressure. Flood it wherever you can. The earlier you can catch a new infection site the better your chance of disrupting its growth, we think.”

“You think?” snapped Holland. “Damn it, man, don’t you
know
?”

“No, sir, I don’t. At Edinburgh we did some lab tests but we didn’t have time to test any of this in the field.”

“But at least we can slow it down.”

“I think so. You can buy some time.”

Holland said, “What about further afield? Beyond the sea. Ireland, the continent—”

“We think it will be inhibited by the ocean. The Moonseed likes dry rocks and sunlight. But it will migrate even
tually, even if it has to go through the mantle.”

“Evacuation,” Bhide said. “That’s what we’re looking at, if Dr. Meacher is right. First the Scottish Midland Valley towns. We can send people to the highlands and islands in the far north, to northern England, and out of Britain altogether. To Northern Ireland. Eire. France.”

“We’ll have to think about the royals,” Farnes said abruptly. “Get them to Canada maybe. Christ. The bloody royals. The King will hate it; he despises the Canadians…”

Holland stepped forward, angry. “Oh, this is all rot. Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?” he snapped at Bhide, and Henry saw old rivalries tense between them. “These are all short-term palliatives. If this gentleman is right, inside a few months, we would have to evacuate the
country.
It’s impossible. The capacity of the airports, the sea ports, the Channel Tunnel…Dr. Meacher, we’re talking about moving
sixty million people.
”

“Of course it’s impossible,” Bhide said gently. “But we have to try. What else can we do?”

“But where would we go?” the Prime Minister asked softly. “It would be a new diaspora. The British, without Britain.”

Holland took a glass of wine and gulped it down. “Christ, here we go,” he muttered to Henry. “He went catatonic like this when the Euro collapsed.”

Bhide said nothing.

Farnes said, staring out the window, “I have to go on TV tonight. A message to the nation. If you were in my shoes, what would you say, Dr. Meacher?”

Henry took a breath. “Sir, you have to look at the probability that the machinery of government in this country isn’t going to last for much longer.”

Bhide nodded. “We still have regional government contingency plans from the Cold War days—”

“You have to go beyond that,” Henry said. “You have to plan for a time when you will not be able to govern
at all.
People must understand that ultimately their lives, the lives of their families, will be their own responsibility.”

“My last act,” Farnes said, “will be abdication.”

“No, sir. Education.”

“And,” Bhide said, “we have to keep trying. We must buy time, as Dr. Meacher says. And if the scientists can come up with some solution—” She looked to Henry.

“As soon as I’m done here I’m going to America to keep working on just that, ma’am. But—”

“Yes?”

“Right now, we’re nowhere near a solution.”

Farnes was silent, gazing through the window.

Holland took another glass of wine; he dribbled spots of it down his shirt. “Catatonic,” he mumbled. “Bloody catatonic.”

When they let Henry go, the butler character led him out through a back way, through the basement which led past the ruins of an old Tudor tennis court; he didn’t want to face the press again.

20

At the end of their first day in the Rest Center, Ted didn’t make it to bed until one in the morning.

He had a little trouble finding Jack. But the lad had not only put himself to bed, he’d
found
a bed in the first place: in a remote corner of the theater’s main amphitheater, a couple of fold-up cots that looked as if they’d been supplied by the RAF, along with National Health Service blankets and International Red Cross sheets. The cot was a little sharp-edged but comfortable enough, even for an old codger like himself.

Ted had even had some food, a bowl of thick soup served by a stern-looking woman from the Women’s Institute.

If it wasn’t for the presence of dozens of other people
in the room—and their pets, including one snoring Alsatian—he’d have been happy.

Sleep came easily, and was disturbed only a couple of times by the dogs barking.

And when he woke, in the light that marked another day, Jane’s face was before him.

He sat up—his chest sent pain shooting through his frame—and he reached out and cupped her face. “You found us.”

She was sitting on the edge of Jack’s bed. “It wasn’t so hard. Although I looked for you in the medical area. You old bugger.”

He shrugged. “Too much to do. Michael—”

She caught his eye, and shook her head, subtly.

The day felt a little colder.

“What about Henry?”

Her face turned hard. “He’s not here. He has his own agenda.”

Ted didn’t press the point.

He glanced down at Jack. The boy was awake, and looking up at them with big, wet eyes.

Jane frowned, and bent over him. “Jackie? What is it?”

At first he shook his head, but she pressed him.

“I wet the bed! I wet the bloody bed…”

The Alsatian started barking, and pulling at its short lead.

The days after that were both better and worse than the first.

There were more volunteers now, in place to do more useful things. Registration was slick and smooth, with older schoolkids able to take details down straight onto their computers, which were linked in some way Ted utterly failed to understand, and the kids were able to retrieve immediately data on friends and relatives.

For all that, there was no sign of Michael, on any system.

The billeting process went well. Ted’s first thought had been to have the refugees meet the Musselburgh people, and see if they paired off. He was especially keen to find stable homes for the unattached children.

But it didn’t work. The Musselburgh population seemed predominantly elderly, and they were goodhearted. But the human dynamics were all wrong.
Cherry-picking;
it was really quite obscene. The pretty girls and the youngest kids were always requested first. Nobody wanted the older boys. Even now—and Ted found himself to be utterly naive about such things—there was a lot of concern among the professionals here from the social services about the dangers to the kids of lodging them with strangers.

The cherry-picking was repugnant anyhow, so Ted broke that up, and started to allocate the refugees on a more random basis, matching up on the basis of needs rather than individuals. The billeting was restricted to families with kids of their own, or people who were known foster parents. Only family groups, with an older male or two, went to volunteers unknown to the social services. If they’d take them, anyhow.

It all helped to reduce the pressure on the Rest Center itself. But there weren’t enough hosts to go around. And there were some people who were just not suitable for billeting: large family groups, the elderly, people who had been undergoing “care in the community,” and the plain irascible who didn’t want to be billeted anyhow—under which category Ted would place the old guy with the yapping Alsatian, and himself and his diminished family. Ethnic-minority families attracted scarcely any help from outside their own communities, a phenomenon which made Ted feel ill with frustration.

Ted’s own informal estimate was that maybe ten percent of all those who arrived at the Rest Center couldn’t be billeted. And you had to add to that, he supposed, the pop
ulation of the hospitals, the prisons, the remand centers for the young, the long-term care facilities, old people’s homes.

On it went: a
lot
of people.

Some things got worse, as time went on.

Like hygiene. Dog shit seemed to be everywhere. He found himself spending much of his mornings organizing volunteers on clean-up squads, and issuing warnings about the danger of children getting eye infections from the stuff.

More food arrived, canned stuff from the local supermarkets. Ted wondered how long that would last. But he heard of fleets of Army choppers bringing in supplies from Glasgow and north England, and when it arrived it came in boxes marked prominently with the name of the supplying store, big black letters to display for the TV cameras.

There were cameras everywhere, in fact. He found one crew filming a grinning care worker handing a sack of used toys sent from Boise, Idaho to some kid who was supposed to act grateful, a Scottish kid with her own life and dignity, in order to please the hearts of some beer-sodden asshole on the other side of the planet, a kid who would forever be scarred by the experience. Ted had to be restrained, by Jane, from throwing the crew out.

The theater manager—her name was Siobhan Reader—was soon wrestling with longer-term problems. Like finance. It seemed the theater would have to recover its costs from the local authority, who in turn would have to get it back from central government, all retrospectively, and all within the provisions of something called the Bellwin scheme which covered emergencies like this.

And some of the residents here were actually asking for cash loans. With cash they could buy stuff from the local shops, which were still open, to tide them through the crisis. Many of them had left home with only electronic money, credit cards and Switch cards, which, when the telephone exchanges went down, had suddenly become useless.

So Reader had obtained some money, twenty thousand pounds, as a loan from the theater’s own bankers in
Musselburgh, and was now trying to figure a way of accounting for the small handouts she was making to the families.

But there were good things too. The
Edinburgh Evening News
was published every day, without a break, though Ted suspected it was being run up on a desktop publishing package on somebody’s home pc. It carried some news, mostly stale rehashes of the TV and radio bulletins, but it also ran long lists of personalized messages from the displaced people of the city.
To Mary McClair from Vicky Norman. If you need a place to stay, please call…
The mobile phones prevalent in the Center were being used less for personal messages, and more as part of an informal communications network, spreading low-level news about the fate of people and places, even pets. One of the volunteer groups brought in printed T-shirts.
NO WATER. NO FOOD. NO POWER. NO PROBLEM.
They became a fashion accessory among the volunteers.

They had a VIP visit. It was Dave Holland, a London politician, the environment secretary, a fat English bastard whose accent seemed to disappear down his throat. Trailed by two camera crews with glaring lights and gigantic boom mikes, he strode through the theater, shaking hands with photogenic kids and care workers and volunteers. Ted couldn’t believe how much time and resource was taken up by catering for Holland, the security and route planning and all the rest of it.

But it was good for morale, he was told.

Holland made one substantive announcement. “There’s a wave of sympathy around the world for what you’re going through,” he said. “Everyone’s eyes are on you. There will be a rock concert in Wembley Stadium to raise relief funds. And we’re flying out the Hibs and Hearts squads—” A ragged cheer; they were Edinburgh’s two principal soccer teams. “—to play an exhibition game.”

Rock music and soccer, Ted thought sourly.

He actually got to meet Holland. The man came along
a row of volunteers, introduced by Siobhan Reader, shaking hands and sweating heavily. When it was his turn, Ted asked, “When are you going to start evacuating Glasgow?”

Holland laughed nervously and moved on.

Later, Ted found himself in a huddle with Reader and Jack.

Jack said, “I’d have asked him if Willie MacLeish is playing.” MacLeish was Hibs’ star striker.

“You’re right,” Ted said seriously. “I would have got more sense.”

“And I’d have asked him,” Reader said stiffly, “if there’s any word of my husband.” The first time she’d mentioned him. And with that she turned and walked to her office, to start another sleepless night of work.

Ted stared after her. She was, he’d first thought, just an ineffectual worker, and he’d treated her with contempt. The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But she was, of course, a woman with a life of her own. A family maybe. And he’d never thought even to ask.

The evenings were long.

Just a day or two from near death, and boredom was becoming their biggest enemy.

On Ted’s advice, Reader had banned alcohol, but allowed in TV, powered by a portable generator. The reception of the terrestrial stations was poor—local transmitters knocked out, lousy conditions because of the volcano weather lingering over Edinburgh—but satellite dishes seemed to work reasonably well. Reader had intended to show a steady diet of game shows, pop and movies—she even wanted to run videos—but Ted suggested that, except for kids’ programming in the area set aside as a nursery, she simply run the news. People here wanted to
know,
after all.

The news, the images from Edinburgh, worked to keep people quiet. Ribald cheers whenever somebody in the Rest Center was shown.