Moonseed (36 page)

The Admiral considered. “I suppose the premium will be on compactness, lightness. A battlefield nuke, maybe. Lasers—”

“My God,” said Petit. “If you were a man, Admiral, I’d
say this was turning into a testosterone fest. Nukes to the Moon? We signed the Outer Space Treaty in 1967. If I remember my history, we undertook not to place in orbit, or emplace on the Moon or any other body or station in space, nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction. We pledged to limit the use of the Moon and other celestial bodies exclusively to peaceful purposes. We prohibited their use for establishing military bases or testing weapons—”

Monica said bluntly, “We signed that treaty primarily with the Soviet Union. A country which doesn’t exist any more. We shouldn’t let that stand in our way.”

“I’ll dissent from the recommendation,” Petit said.

“That’s your privilege, sir.”

“You space buffs make me sick. History can be torn up, just so you have your Buck Rogers dreams back again. The Russians—”

Bromwich smiled comfortably. “Who cares about the Russians? What can they do? Think about it. We’re now the only superpower on the planet. The Russians can’t stop us. So fuck them.”

Monica noticed that, as Henry let this dispute run on, he wasn’t volunteering what he wanted his weapons
for.

Alfred Synge was smiling at Henry. “To return to the Moon. You know, I envy you…”

The Admiral looked around the table. “Dissenting voices or not, I think we have our recommendation for the President. We back Dr. Meacher’s proposal for a Moon mission, if it can be mounted. But in parallel we set up programs to mitigate the effects of the Moonseed, here on Earth.”

Henry was nodding.

“And,” said the Admiral, “we should continue to study the basic science of the thing, see if we can come up with an antidote. Whatever.”

Nods around the table.

Monica was content to let the Admiral take over. She’d
expected it anyhow, and she didn’t disagree with any of her conclusions.

The Moon mission, though, was going to be the key, she sensed. That was what Henry Meacher had wanted when he walked in here, and it was what he was walking out with: a manned lunar flight, with a weapon.

Maybe he is smarter than he looks.

As the meeting relaxed into break-up informality, the Admiral drummed her fingers on the table. “Tell me this, gentlemen. Just what in hell are we dealing with here? Underneath all the science. Is the Moonseed here to destroy the world? Like some kind of Berserker?”

“I have a theory,” Henry said quietly. “Off the record.”

“Off the record,” said Bromwich.

“Think about a starship,” Henry said.

Petit laughed, sat back in his chair, and folded his arms.

Henry went on doggedly. “It’s a slow affair. Restricted to low velocities by relativity, by lightspeed and energy requirements. Maybe it’s driven by some kind of low-tech thing, like a solar sail. Whatever. It reaches a star system. Like the Solar System.” He closed his eyes. “It’s surrounded by a cloud, of something like the assemblers the nanotechnologists talk about.”

“The Moonseed,” said Bromwich.

“Yes. As it passes through the System, the assemblers hit on local resources. Principally small rocks, floating in space, asteroids and comets. There’s an awful lot of that stuff floating around out there; no need to go all the way down into a planet’s gravity well to retrieve it. It takes the rocks apart, and makes—”

“What?” Petit demanded.

“I don’t know.” Henry spread his hands. “Starship parts. I think, if we go back into the Moonseed pools, that’s what we’ll find.”

Petit just laughed.

“But if it does reach a planet,” Henry said, “the Moonseed goes further.”

Alfred spread his hands. “That’s true. Venus now seems to be some kind of black hole factory. Extremal black holes, which flee at the speed of light. I know it sounds implausible, but—”

“Good God,” Bromwich said. “I hate this sci-fi stuff.
Why
the hell?”

Alfred said, “Maybe it’s a starship drive. How about that?”

Henry smiled. “Even I never thought of that. A black hole rocket. Well, why not? The exhaust velocity would be lightspeed. The specific impulse—”

Admiral Bromwich was shaking her head. “So where is this fucking starship?”

Henry shrugged. “I don’t have all the answers. Maybe the starship has gone. Maybe it was destroyed. Perhaps the Moonseed have been here a long time. It could be the starship got here when the Solar System was forming—lots of debris just floating around, the planets not yet stabilized. The System would be a dangerous place back then—but better adapted for the Moonseed, no planets yet, just a thin cloud of rock flour. The kind of system such a ship would aim for. But dangerous. Maybe it suffered some kind of catastrophic accident.”

“And,” said Synge, “if the Moonseed has been around that long—”

“Maybe it has evolved, somehow. Or devolved. Maybe it forgot how to make anything except itself. Maybe it forgot how to make a starship drive properly.”

“So Venus is a screw-up,” said Alfred.

“If there was a ship,” Bromwich said doggedly, “where did it come from? Where was it going?”

“…Maybe there was no ship,” Monica Beus said. “Maybe the ‘ship’ was a hive. Then you don’t need to speculate about motive, or destination: nothing above survival, reproduction, propagation.”

And as she framed the thought, she shuddered. On some deep level, she felt she had stumbled on a truth, in this insight. My God. A hive. What are we dealing with here?

Or maybe her own morbidity was polluting her thinking. Projecting the cancer that was eating her up onto the whole damn universe.

They talked further, and the speculation, mostly led by Alfred, got wilder.

Perhaps, it was posited, in all this evolution, the imperatives of the Moonseed had got lost, or warped beyond recognition.

Perhaps the Moonseed was actually a
message,
of some kind. Perhaps it would rebuild the Solar System, if it was allowed, into some new information-bearing form. Perhaps the Moonseed was trying to reconstruct the world it came from, or the people who lived there. “Like a transporter beam,” said Alfred. A distorted beam, with the information it contained lost or transmuted, into which Earth had strayed. “I think this is just an accident,” Alfred said. “We are lucky—”

That was too much for Bromwich; she snorted. “
Lucky?
You scientists really are fuckers.” She picked up her papers. “I’ll tell you this, though. If this is what we meet the first time we put our foot out the farmhouse door, we’re going to find it a tough old universe out there.”

David Petit shook his head, disgusted.

The meeting broke up.

28

The day began badly, and got worse.

Ted even had trouble putting on the thick heat-resistant suit Blue Ishiguro lent him. When he bent to haul on the tight trousers and boots, and wriggled into the one-piece tunic, the stitched-up hole in his chest seemed to gape wide open. And when he pulled on his gloves and the hood with its big glass faceplate, the heat immediately began to gather.

Blue—already suited up, a heavy pack of equipment strapped to his back, cameras fixed to his hood and chest—was watching him skeptically.

“Kind of hot,” Ted said.

“Yeah. Here.” Blue handed him a heavy box, the size and shape of a cat box.

Ted tested the weight. “What’s this?”

“For samples. This is science, remember. How many can you carry?”

Soon Ted was laden with four of the boxes, suspended over his shoulder on leather straps; where the straps dug into him he could feel the heat build up further.

Blue was still watching him doubtfully. Questioning his strength, or commitment.

Ted glanced up at the sun, which was climbing the sky. “Are we going, or what?”

Blue hoisted his pack, picked up tools and sample boxes of his own, and set his face to the north, towards the center of Edinburgh, the city of ash.

As he toiled over the rubble-strewn ground, Ted kept rerunning his last encounter with his daughter. Their last argument.

“…What are you talking about, Dad?”

“They say there are still a few hundred people alive in there. Maybe more.”

“Dad.” It was hard for her to say it, he sensed, as if saying it might make it true. “Dad, Mike is dead. You know Mike is dead. You just want revenge. But revenge against what? The Moonseed?”

No, he had replied. Not the Moonseed. Something more specific than that.

Saying good-bye to her, and Jack, had been harder than he had imagined. But it had to be done. He had a job to do, and he had never shirked from duty before.

Anyway he was too damn old. They didn’t
need
him anymore. It was better this way.

Blue and Ted had been dropped off at the city bypass, a deserted motorway-class road, a couple of miles south-
east of Arthur’s Seat—or rather, of the hole in the ground where the Seat had been. They walked along the Gilmerton Road toward the city, through the residential areas of Gilmerton and Hyvot’s Bank and Inch.

At first there was little sign of damage. Here, the evacuation had been complete: the houses and shops were closed up, and the road was reasonably clear, save for a couple of burned-out wrecks. There was barely a sign, Ted thought, of the calamity that had befallen the city, save for a few inert lumps of rock—lava bombs, said Blue—and the pervasive layer of ash. The ash gave the mundane suburban streets a strange, unearthly tinge, Ted thought, as if the colors had been washed out, only the discarded outlines remaining. And the silence was eerie. No traffic noise. No bird song. No insects.

Only the sounds of the suit, his own noisy breathing, the scuff of the heavy fabric at his armpits and crotch, the soft crunching of his footfalls in volcanic ash.

Like walking on the Moon, he thought.

But the air was still and hot and smoggy, a yellow dome that obscured the sky. There were fires burning somewhere, threads of black smoke that snaked into the sky. And when a road junction gave them a clear view of the Braid Hills, the site of a golf course Ted had played a few times, he could see the steely glint of Moonseed dust.

Blue was dismissive. “That’s a new infection,” he said. “We want to get into the primary nest, where the Seat used to be. See what the hell the Moonseed becomes when it matures.” So he stomped on, setting a tough pace that Ted had trouble matching, even more trouble pretending it wasn’t causing him any distress.

They passed the Cameron Toll, and now, barely half a mile from the Seat itself, the signs of damage suddenly became apparent. Volcanic rubble lay everywhere, rocks and pumice and ash; the housing stock was mostly standing, but with shattered windows and roofs, crushed cars littering the silent streets.

And now, around Mayfield, they reached a place where the damage was much more severe. The buildings had been effectively razed, down to their foundations. The area looked something like a schematic street plan, in fact.

Blue grunted. “The pyroclastic flow came here. Hell on Earth, for a few minutes or hours.”

The ash was still warm underfoot.

In some places fires had caught, and some of the wreckage was scorched black. The fires had evidently burned themselves out without effective response.

But it was the surviving fragments of normality which were most heartrending.

Here was a scrap of carpet, lingering beneath a stub of wall, scorched at its fringe, thick with ash. The carpet was strewn with little glass beads. At first Ted vaguely thought this was some kind of volcanic effect, but the beads turned out to be marbles, with the pictures of soccer players embedded inside.
Collect all 265!
And here was the skeleton of a carefully designed garden, a layout of gravel and a square of scorched earth that had been a lawn. There was no sign of the flowers that might have flourished here, the trees—fruit perhaps—were no more than charred stumps.

Some of the ruins bore pathetic messages, scraps of paper already discolored by the sun and the billowing ash: notes pleading for Moira or Donald or Petey to meet Janet or Alec or William, at St. Giles’ or Waverley or the Meadow Park.

The clearing away of the housing here provided a new, uninterrupted view of Arthur’s Seat itself, off to the northeast. But it was no longer the blunt outcrop Ted had grown up with; now there was little left but a few spiky basaltic spires, cracked and scorched, with a final venting of ash and smoke still curling into the air from its heart.

And everywhere was the cold, unearthly glint of the Moonseed, like a poison that had infected the Scottish earth, emanating from this broken-open old basaltic scab.

Up to this point they had been surrounded by the
props of emergency rescue efforts: bulldozers, backhoes, tunnel borers, earth movers, some of them still working. But now they came to a place where no heavy machinery moved: where, amid the Moonseed’s silvery glow, only people picked their cautious way.

Blue had a map tucked into a plastic pouch at his waist. Now he pulled it out and showed it to Ted. It was a large-scale Ordnance Survey, marked by highlighters and pencil. “Listen up,” Blue said. “This is going to be no stroll in the country.”

“I know.”

“I bet you don’t. Here’s what we think. The Moonseed is everywhere: in the ash that coats everything, digging into every exposed chunk of bedrock, working through the subsurface layers. But there are still places we can walk. Places where the surface layers have held together. But they may be—” He was searching for the right word. “Fragile. You have meringues in this country?”

“Yes.”

“Like that. We’re going to be walking over a meringue, a thin crust of rock. Take a wrong step, and
poof.
” He snapped shut his fingers. “That’s why there’s no heavy equipment here. We’ll follow these routes.” He indicated the highlighted trails. Other areas, Ted saw, had been sectioned off by hand-drawn blue hatching. Moonseed outbreaks.

“So how do we know where is safe?”

Blue shrugged. “We can’t be sure. We do aerial surveys, every day. Debriefs from the soldiers and police and fire boys who work in here.” He eyed Ted. “We spend human lives, the lives of civilians or scientists or emergency workers doing their duty. That’s what this thing is. A map bought with human lives.” Blue faced him, his face a broad round mask behind his scuffed and dirty faceplate. “Now, you listen to me, old man,” he said.

“I’m not much older than you.”

“Bullshit. I’m taking you in as a favor to Henry, who likes you because he’s porking your daughter.”

“I wish you’d say what you think,” Ted said dryly.

“Only fools like me should risk going into such places. And for sure a dinged-up old fucker like you is just a liability.”

Blue’s mix of Japanese accent and cowboy phrasing was, Ted thought not for the first time, bizarre.

Blue leaned forward. “Now, I don’t give a rip what Henry says. Henry isn’t here. If you start coughing and spluttering and wheezing and doing other old-man stuff, you’re straight out of here. I want that clear right from the git-go. You got that?”

“I got it.”

“Okay. Then let’s get it over.”

Blue folded his map, and they walked on.

Ted wanted to get as close to the Seat as possible. That was, he reasoned, where he would find what he sought. But Blue skirted west, heading toward the New Town, and he had to follow.

In the rubble of the west of the city, there were more people than he had expected.

Many of them were civilians, poking through the ruins of their homes, business suits and summer skirts stained with ash. Some of them were filthy, their faces grimed by layers of mire; they looked as if they hadn’t washed or been properly fed for days. Evidently not everyone had made it to the comfort of a Rest Center.

But there were provisions for people, even here. They passed a Red Cross tent complex, beds and a simple field hospital, and what looked like a morgue. Human life and activity, slowly intruding, here on the surface of the Moon.

A squad of soldiers went by. They wore grimy fatigues, cloths bound over their mouths. They looked exhausted, but they were carrying spades and body bags, on their way to another clean-up. None of them spoke. They looked inordinately young to Ted: probably younger than both his children, not much older, in the greater scheme of things, than poor Jack.

The Army crews had been working here since the volcanism had died away. But there were still many bodies. Ted could see that, just walking here.

Some of them lay where they had been trapped in the rubble of their shattered houses, their limbs splayed, under roofing timbers or steel joists. The corpses were already bloated and discolored, faces swollen to a youthful smoothness, freed of the contortions of pain, the bloody reality masked by the thin painting of ash. In Newington there seemed to have been a more major fire—the buildings were uniformly razed—and in the main road that threaded through the suburb, they came across many bodies, apparently unburned, men, women and children alike, lying scattered across the road surface.

He saw a mother with a baby. The mother had been trying to hold her baby up, away from the road surface. And in that posture they had been petrified.

Evidently there had been some kind of miniature fire storm here. The road tarmac had melted. The people, fleeing the fires, had gotten stuck, like insects on fly paper, and, suffocating, had fallen. Now their corpses were glued in place, cemented to the road surface which had betrayed them.

How must it have been? Ted wondered, staring at the corpses. Not the fact of death itself, but those few seconds, knowing its inevitability: knowing that today was the day, now was the hour, death bursting out of the mundane background of these quiet suburbs; and suddenly there was nothing you could do to protect those you loved, not even the most innocent. How must it have been?

Edinburgh had become a city of tableaux, he thought, of tiny fragments of immense and undeserved suffering, such as this.

Ted and Blue inched around the bodies, trying not to get too close. Flies swarmed, and the stench was powerful enough to penetrate Ted’s protective suit.

They walked on into the heart of the city. The heat of the June day climbed.

At St. Leonard’s, Blue cut right, and headed through the few blocks of housing directly toward Arthur’s Seat. Ted followed gingerly.

The damage was so extensive here it was impossible to make out even the outlines of the streets. Everything had been smashed and burned and shattered by the ash flow, so that rubble lay everywhere in heaps that looked, from a distance, almost smooth. Easily negotiable. But close to, much of it was actually hot to the touch and unstable, eager to collapse to a more consolidated profile.

Ted found the going much more difficult, with jagged edges of wall eager to trip him, or rip his suit, or send a miniature landslide down on top of a foot or leg. In some places the rubble was smoothed over by layers of pumice and ash, making it still more treacherous, and even Blue was forced to slow right down, and move forward with much more caution.

From the air they must have looked like two silvery bugs, inching their way across the shattered, transformed landscape.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Here, Ted could
tell
he was close to the Moonseed.

The air was so still. And there was a tinge, a silvery glow, as if the sunlight was being scattered by a smog of iron filings.

At last, the world was reduced to its essentials. Moonscape below, silver-stained sky above, himself and Blue and this rubbly plain, his own breathing, the steady thump of his old heart, the tug of pain at his wounded chest. And as his faceplate grew opaque with the mist of his breath, the fine layer of ash dust he had to keep wiping away, his universe narrowed further, became simpler still.

It was almost peaceful.

He wondered what he would smell, if he raised his hood.

He thought about the Moonseed, and meringues, and the unknown pit of alien forms somewhere beneath his feet. It was as if the Moonseed had turned this place into an alien landscape, not Earth anymore.

Blue mounted a thick slab of wall, breathing hard, and looked back at Ted. “You are doing well.”

“Thanks.”

“For a geologist this is not so strange, this landscape.”

“What?”

Blue waved a gloved hand. “No life. Nothing but minerals. The world reduced to its essence, by the burning power of the alien among us. Come, my friend. Not much farther.” And he stepped forward and continued his progress.

After a time, the housing remains ran out. They had reached the western edge of Holyrood Park, the old garden which had contained the Seat, overlooked here by the Salisbury Crags.

The Crags had gone. The Moonseed pool had come spilling out from the Crags in great silvery tongues. But the turf survived, in narrow bridges pushing a few yards more into the Moonseed, evidently fragile. Ted could see the burned and fallen trunks of trees, gray and lifeless on the scorched, ash-strewn turf.