Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  He looked sideways at the girl.

  She was older than Mike, maybe as old as thirty, but she had the same Nordic coloring. Blonde hair tied back, revealing a composed, thoughtful face. Strong hands. Blue eyes you could swim in. One hell of a set of cheekbones, the essence of beauty. No body parts pierced that he could see, which was a good thing. She was eating something. A rice cake, maybe.

  She glanced up and caught him looking at her. She put down the rice cake.

  He was holding the tiger; he fumbled and nearly dropped it.

  “You pay for breakages,” she said. Her accent was the same as Mike’s—soft Scottish—but her tone was cold.

  “Sorry.” He put the tiger back. “I was just thinking.”

  “What?”

  “You ought to put a best-before date on that tiger. Ultimately it’s going to turn gray all over—”

  “I know. In sixty million years. It’s snowflake obsidian.”

  He nodded, surprised, approving. “You know about rocks.”

  “I know my job.” Her eyes narrowed as she studied him. “You’re an American. And you just arrived.”

  He faced her. “Is it that obvious?”

  She looked him up and down. “Look at the way you’re dressed. It’s only February, for God’s sake.”

  “You don’t like Americans?”

  “I don’t dislike them. I don’t know you well enough to dislike you. Yet.”

  He glanced around. “You like rocks. I know about rocks.”

  Those eyes narrowed again. “You’re a geologist.”

  Strike two, he thought. “Is that bad too?”

  “If you’re with one of the oil companies, yes.”

  He shrugged. “Edinburgh may not like me, but maybe I’ll like Edinburgh.”

  “Why?”

  “Volcanoes and a river sound. It reminds me of Seattle.”

  She snorted. “Seattle in three hundred million years, maybe, when the volcanoes have died.”

  He was impressed; that was about right.

  She said, “What have you seen?”

  “Just the walk from the hotel. The Balmoral.”

  She went back to her rocks. “This is the New Town. You need to go see the Old Town before you decide you like us.”

  “How new is the New Town?”

  “1760.”

  “Older than my whole damn country. I should have known.”

  “Most things in life are older than your country.” She studied him. “Look, are you going to buy anything, or—”

  He shook his head. How do I get myself into these situations? He turned to go. The girl didn’t acknowledge him.

  He stopped at the door and turned back. “Look—”

  “What?”

  He went back to the mineral racks and picked up the necklace of bottle-green beads. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Peridot,” she said.

  “Well, yes. The gem form of olivine. And that’s what the lithosphere and asthenosphere are made of. That is, the solid layers that hold in the liquid interior of the Earth. So olivine is important stuff.”

  She took it dubiously. “You want it wrapped?”

  “No,” he said. He dug his hands into his pockets, seeking money. “Take it. As a gift.”

  She pushed it back over the counter. “Stuff it up your jacksie.”

  “I mean it. No strings. I want to apologize. I’ve done nothing but make enemies since I landed…” He had no British money; he pulled out what he had, a crumpled roll of dollars. “Will you accept this?”

  “Christ. Dollars. You Americans.”

  Strike three, he thought. “Here. Fifty bucks. I’m sure that’s more than it’s worth. Please. On me.”

  “Stuff it,” she said again, but he thought he could see a smile in her face.

  He left the fifty, and got out while he could.

  When the door had closed and the shop was empty again, Jane Dundas picked up the fifty dollars, and the necklace, and ran the bottle-green beads through her hands.

  5

  Mike Dundas lived with his father, in the western shadow of Arthur’s Seat, to the east of the city center.

  It was a fine spring morning, the sky clear and deep blue, and the air off the Firth was fresh and cool, even this far inland. So, before getting the Rover out of the garage to drive into work, Mike put on his walking shoes and set off to the Seat.

  He walked east around Queen’s Drive, the road which skirted Holyrood, the park that contained the Seat. He reached the entrance opposite the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Edinburgh seat of the royals. Holyroodhouse was a twee picture palace, shut away behind railings; Mike had grown up in Edinburgh but had never been tempted to go visit it.

  He set off up the Volunteer’s Walk to the summit of the Seat itself.

  Everyone but the tourists knew the Seat had nothing to do with the English King Arthur, but was named from Gaelic: Ard Tor—the Height of Thor.

  The climb, he knew from a lifetime’s experience, looked a lot stiffer than it was. The grassy ground was dark, still in the shadow of the turning Earth, even though the sky was already bright; and the dew made it a little slippery underfoot. The path was heavily eroded—too many visitors—but the climb was one Mike had been completing since he was a kid, and it didn’t take long to reach the broad, flat summit.

  He stood on the red-brown, lumpy rock here. The rock was agglomerate, the exposed neck of the old volcano. There were two summit monuments up here, sparse concrete blocks.

  He was alone. The Seat attracted few tourists, compared to the Castle Rock anyhow; mostly you saw locals, dog walkers.

  He turned slowly around. From here you got a panoramic view of the city and its environs, nestling around the volcano plugs; Arthur’s Seat was the highest hill in Edinburgh.

  He could see the Pentland Hills to the south, the central lowland plain stretching off to the west, and the river to the north, the city splashed along its southern coast. He could make out the docks and the twin stacks of the Port Seton power station; the water beyond looked so flat and still it might have been molded from steel. And there was the rocky northern coast of the Forth; on a good day you could see the peaks of the Highland massif, all of seventy or eighty miles away.

  Venus was setting, but it was still bright enough to cast a reflection from the small waves on the Forth.

  The air, blowing off the Forth, was fresh and laced with salt; he breathed it deeply, swinging his arms, invigorated, exhilarated.

  All this out of his back door, and a Moon rock waiting for him back at the lab. Already he had more than a good feeling about how his relationship with this Henry Meacher was going to pan out. God, he thought, I love this job.

  But first, he had to see his sister. He patted his pocket, to make sure the little vial of dust he had secreted there was safe.

  Then he made his way down Arthur’s Seat, by a different track.

  He descended toward a sandstone ruin called St. Anthony’s Chapel.

  This was a gray heap of rubble not far below the summit of the Seat, in the lee of an exposed crag; time had left one wall intact, with a door and window gaping into nothing. The chapel was thought to date from the fifteenth century, but nobody actually knew; Edinburgh’s history had been chaotic.

  As he headed toward the Chapel, through a steep-walled old glacial cwm called the Dry Dam, Mike could hear a single voice—a man’s—floating into the morning air.

  “…I want to tell you the story of the original Bran. With twenty-seven companions, he was lured away to a place called the Land of Women, an island supported by four pillars of gold. There was a great tree full of sweet singing birds that was permanently in blossom, and the air was full of music…”

  Mike, descending into the Dry Dam, saw that the speaker was a kid—seventeen or eighteen, hair shaven, so skinny the bones showed in his face and skull. He was dressed in what looked like purple pajamas. He was sitting beneath the steep rear wall of the cwm, as if cupped by the g
eology; there were maybe thirty people sitting in the grass in a circle facing him. They were all clean-shaven, with close-cropped hair; they were slim, even gaunt-looking. Mike, in fact, had trouble telling the men from the women, even what age they were. They were all wearing the purple jim-jams, as far as Mike could tell, and they must be cold—he could see where the morning dew had seeped into the thin fabric of their uniforms—but they didn’t seem to be reacting to it. They looked relaxed, obviously fascinated by what the speaker was saying.

  Beyond the pajama party there was a thin, scattered circle of onlookers, dog walkers and ramblers, a few tourists. Among them he could see Jane, in a woolen hat and sheepskin jacket.

  The speaker’s voice echoed around the natural amphitheater.

  “…Bran landed. There was a bed—and a wife—for each man, and the food and drink were constantly replaced. Bran’s men stayed in this wonderful place for what they thought was a year—but when they returned home, they found a hundred years had passed. Nobody believed he was Bran, who they only knew as a distant legend. Bran was forced to sail away, into oblivion…Come.”

  Mike started; he hadn’t been hiding, but it wasn’t obvious how the speaker could have spotted him. But here he was, waving a skinny arm at Mike.

  “Come and join us. You’re very welcome. Everyone’s welcome to listen.”

  Mike would have backed off, but there was Jane, waving at him. So he nodded at the storyteller, and stepped cautiously through the pajama party circle, and crouched in the damp grass close to Jane. She was wearing a bottle-green necklace he hadn’t seen before.

  “I’ve got something for you,” he whispered.

  She raised a forefinger to her lips to shush him.

  “…Now you can see why I took the call-sign I did: Bran.” The kid looked around his flock; some were nodding, but others looked a little confused.

  “Think about it,” Bran said. “The pillars of gold, the birds singing—the sort of lurid detail you’d expect after three thousand years of retelling. But what about the replenished food and drink? What does that sound like, to you, but replicator technology?” He opened his hands, rested them on the back of his folded legs, and looked around the group, nodding persuasively. “Just like Star Trek. Right? And what about the women that just happened to be available for every man? Were they just hanging around, waiting for visitors? Isn’t it more likely that these were some kind of constructs—what we might call holograms, or even androids?

  “Which is why, of course, we find all that sci-fi stuff so easy to accept. Because it’s not part of our future—it’s part of our past.”

  Jane leaned to Mike and whispered, “Here comes Einstein.”

  “What?”

  “Wait and see.”

  “What is this?”

  “A staff meeting of Egress Hatch,” Jane hissed back. “Morning prayers.”

  “Egress Hatch? That new cult?” He’d heard pub talk about this; the cult had come out of nowhere to gather, apparently, a couple of thousand adherents in a month. But then, since Venus, it seemed as if the whole human race was splintering into cults and enclaves and pressure groups…He studied his sister. “What are you doing here?”

  She frowned. “I think I know him.” She pointed at Bran.

  “…And, of course, the clinching element in the whole story is the time lag. A century passing on Earth for a year of the travelers’ time! It’s just the twin paradox of relativity—the time dilation effect suffered by every interstellar traveler up to, but not including, Captain Kirk—foreshadowed in a story first told three thousand years before Einstein was born. Now, how can that be?…”

  “I told you,” Jane whispered.

  Bran’s sermon was a mish-mash. The underlying theology seemed to be Celtic, but it was mixed in with a bit of New Age, a bit of post-millennial anxiety, a lot of sci-fi stuff about UFOs.

  “…Our faith is rooted in that of the Celts. But this was the native religion of Britain and Western Europe, before it was suppressed by the conquering Romans, three thousand years ago, and then absorbed by Christianity, and so emasculated. Now, we’re reclaiming it…”

  Mike straightened up to speak; he could feel Jane plucking at his sleeve, but he ignored her.

  “So what’s that got to do with spacemen?”

  Bran smiled. “The old religion, long buried, is a memory of an even older human experience. It’s only now, in our modern age, we can make sense of it. Look—have you ever had the feeling that your conscious self is sitting somewhere inside you? Like an inner person in a vehicle, looking out on the world and controlling the actions of your body—”

  “Like the Wizard of Oz?”

  That got him a laugh from the outer fringe. Bran laughed along with them. “Something like that. Well, that’s a common feeling—”

  “A common illusion—”

  “Because it’s based in reality.” Bran patted his rib cage. “These are not our true bodies. This is not our native world. We believe that we are from somewhere else, and we’re destined to return.”

  Intrigued despite himself, Mike asked, “So what are we doing here?”

  “We are on an EVA, as the astronauts would say: an extravehicular activity. And these, our bodies, are like spacesuits we put on to preserve us here, on this alien world. We were an away team, so to speak. Or our remote ancestors were. But, long ago, we forgot what we were doing here. We forgot how to get back. Do you see?”

  “You’re speaking by analogy,” Mike said.

  Jane covered her mouth with her hand. “Mike, for God’s sake—”

  “You can prove anything by analogy.”

  “But,” Bran said mildly, “I don’t need to prove anything. It’s simply an expression of our common experience. The lost legend of the ship—the place we came from—transmuted into myth, even as we went native…Listen: our brains, the electrical impulses that flow through them, have nothing to do with us. Any more than the computer processors in an astronaut’s spacesuit are in any way part of her…”

  “Jesus,” Mike said. “He’s a crackpot.”

  “He’s Hamish Macrae,” Jane whispered.

  “Who?”

  She told him about the kid in the Cordley Road lift shaft, Jack’s friend.

  “And suddenly,” Jane said, “he’s Bran. I saw his picture in the paper. I just wanted to see what he was up to. He’s clever. I’ll give him that.”

  “He’s just working through what happened to his brother. He’s crazy.”

  She eyed him. “We’re all crazy, Mike. We always have been. At the end of the second millennium we were all just as crazy as at the start. We all believe something. And it’s all started up again thanks to Venus. Funny lights in the sky…My view is, if you’re going to spout craziness, it might as well be something harmless. At least Bran and his people don’t hassle anyone else. Unlike some I could mention.” She told him about the American who’d disrupted her lunch yesterday. “I think he was with the oil people. Arsehole.”

  Mike frowned. “What did he look like?”

  “Tall. Skinny. In a T-shirt, of course. Wild-eyed, hairy.”

  Henry. “You’re sure he was with the oil companies?”

  “No, I’m not sure. Why?”

  “No reason.”

  She fingered her bottle-green necklace. “The arrogant arsehole paid for this with dollars, in cash. As if we’re the fifty-first state already.”

  “But you’re wearing it. Did he give it to you?”

  She looked defensive. “Well, he had bought it. If I’d put the necklace back in the stock I’d never have reconciled the books—”

  “Of course not.”

  She studied him suspiciously. “Why are you so interested? Do you know this guy?”

  He shrugged. “How could I?”

  A shadow fell across them. Mike looked up.

  The leader of the pajama people, Bran, was standing over them. Looking beyond Bran, Mike saw the various groups had broken up; the pajama people w
ere standing in a knot, talking quietly.

  “You were persuasive,” Bran said to Mike with a rueful good humor.

  “Thanks.”

  “Come to our Belenus festival.”

  “When’s that?”

  “May Day. We’ll hold it here, on the Seat.”

  “Will there be replicator food and a woman for every man?”

  Bran laughed. “No, but there will be spectacle. And oatcakes. Mustn’t forget the oatcakes.”

  “Do I have to wear pajamas?”

  “Pajamas are optional. Will you come?”

  “I don’t know. All that stuff you were saying sounded—”

  “Cracked?” Bran smiled sadly. “But I have proof.”

  “Proof?”

  For answer, Bran turned and pointed to Venus.

  Mike and Jane strode back up the flank of the Seat, toward the summit. They found a place to sit on the agglomerate, looking north over the city.

  Mike, agitated, disturbed, said, “You know, that guy was in control from the moment he walked up to us. Even before. He used everything I said to make his case stronger.”

  She shrugged. “That’s what it takes to be a cult leader, I suppose.”

  “He ought to be a politician.”

  “Oh, I think he has his eye on higher goals than that…You said you wanted to see me.”

  “Yeah. I have something for you.”

  He glanced around to ensure they were alone. A couple of walkers, a hundred yards away; the steady susurrus of noise from the city.

  Pleasurably anticipating her reaction, he dug into his pocket, and pulled out his vial. It was just a small plastic test tube, stoppered with a rubber bung.

  He held it up in the morning light so she could see. There was a little puddle of dust in its base, a handful of grains. It was coal black, and when Mike shook the vial the dust clung to the sides.

  “It sparkles,” Jane said.

  “That’s the glass in it. Shards of it, from volcanic activity and meteorite impact—”