Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  “What?”

  “Don’t they teach you observation anymore? Look, girl.”

  She looked, and stepped forward a couple more paces.

  Under scattered fragments of broken orange-brown igneous rock, under green scraps of grass and heather and moss, there was a silvery pool. It clung to the outline of the crag, as if the rock had been painted.

  “Now,” said Ted, “this used to be solid rock. I wouldn’t step much further.”

  “Why not?”

  He bent and picked up a chunk of loose rock. With a reasonably lithe movement he threw it ahead of her, into the dust.

  It sank out of sight, immediately, as if falling into a pond.

  “Wow,” she said. “How far does this go?”

  “I don’t know. There seem to be other pools, up around the summit, and then the odd outbreak like this one. Like something coming through the rock, somehow.”

  “Has anybody been hurt up here?”

  “Sunk in the dust, you mean? Nothing’s been reported, so far as I know.”

  She thought. “No, it hasn’t.” She’d have heard. “So what’s caused it?”

  “Well, hell, I don’t know. I’m no scientist. I’m just an observant copper, like you. What else do you notice?”

  She looked around, trying to take in the scene as a whole. Her skirt flapped around her legs, irritating her.

  “I think the profile has changed. Of the Seat.”

  “Very good. On the slope we’re standing on, which is no more than six or eight percent, I’d say there has been a slip, overall, of ten or fifteen feet. And in the steeper slope at the back of the Dry Dam, for instance, it’s a lot more than that.”

  “You think so?”

  “You can hear it. Especially at night. Rock cracking. Little earthquakes, that shake the foundations of your house.”

  She stepped forward, cautiously; she had no desire to imitate the fate of Ted’s pebble. When she’d got to where she judged the edge of the dust pool to be—still standing on firm, unbroken basalt, maybe three feet from the lip of the dust—she crouched down.

  The dust was fine-grained, like hourglass sand. It seemed to be shifting, subtly, in patterns she couldn’t follow. It was more like watching boiling fluid than a solid.

  She thought she could smell something. Perhaps it was sulphur, or chlorine.

  Occasionally she thought she could see some kind of glow, coming from the dust where it was exposed. But it was sporadic and half-hidden. She’d once flown over a storm in a 747; looking out of the window, at lightning sparking purple beneath cotton-wool cloud layers, was something like this.

  “Come on,” Ted said. “I need to show you something else.” He headed down the slope, and started walking around the pool.

  She straightened up carefully, and went to follow Ted.

  She said, “You think this has something to do with the loss of the lines? The TV and gas and phone—”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said mildly. “Can’t say how far underground it spreads, how far it has got.”

  “But if there are land slips going on, some kind of subsidence—”

  “You could get line breaks. Yes. There have been scientists up here, poking and prodding away. There’s an American chap my son works with…But they’re just recording, measuring. I think someone should be doing something. Taking it a bit more seriously.”

  They climbed around the crag. They were paralleling the edge of the funny dust, Morag saw. It made for a rough circle, she supposed, patches of it draped across the breast of the land. But the edge of the circle was rough and irregular; in some places necks of the dust and broken ground came snaking down the hillside, perhaps carried there by some slip or a fault in the basalt, and they had to descend to avoid it.

  Now, Morag heard singing. I Wish I Was A Spaceman / The Fastest Guy Alive… It sounded like a TV theme tune.

  “Good Christ,” Ted said. “I haven’t heard that in thirty years.”

  “It sounds like kids’ TV.”

  “So it is, my dear. But long before your time.”

  They entered the Dry Dam and came on a line of people. They were dressed in some kind of purple uniform, and they were sitting in a loose circular arc that embraced the hillside, and they were singing.

  I’d Fly Around The Universe…

  They were mostly slim to the point of thinness. They didn’t seem cold, despite the paucity of their clothes, the keenness of the wind up here. They were singing with a happy-clappy gusto.

  There was a boy standing at the center of the loose arc, age eighteen or so, skinny as a rake. When he saw Ted and Morag approaching he got to his feet, a little stiffly, and approached.

  “Welcome,” he said. “My name is Bran.”

  “Now then, Hamish,” Ted said stiffly.

  Morag glanced at Ted. “You know this gentleman?”

  “Used to.”

  “Would you mind telling me what you’re doing up here, sir?”

  “Watching the Moonseed, of course,” Bran-Hamish said. “The Moonseed?”

  “All this started just after that Moon rock was brought to the university. And Venus, of course. Fantastic, isn’t it? Two thousand years of waiting—”

  Morag walked forward. The members of the group, still singing, looked up at her. Before each of them there was a small cairn, of broken fragments of basalt. When she looked farther up the slope, she saw broken ground, exposed silver dust, loose vegetation floating on the dust. Another pool. The smell of ozone was sharp.

  “Every morning we mark it with a cairn,” Bran said. “And every morning it has come further down the slope.”

  “You’re a fruitcake,” Ted said bluntly.

  “Maybe,” Bran said amiably. “But at least we’re here. Where are the scientists, the TV crews, the coppers—”

  Morag thought she could answer that. She imagined her own desk sergeant fending off nutcase reports from dog walkers, about an oddity no one could classify.

  Morag frowned, pointing up the slope. “Where are the other cairns? The ones from yesterday, and the day before.”

  “Gone,” Bran said simply. “Consumed, every morning. Like your fry-up breakfasts, Ted.”

  Morag straightened her cap. “Sir, I think you’d be advised to come away from here.”

  Bran spread his hands. “Why? Are we breaking the law?”

  “No. And I can’t compel you to move.”

  “Well, then.”

  She pointed to the dust. “But it’s obviously not safe.”

  “We’ve never been safer. Not since the Romans came have we been so—close.”

  Ted pulled a face at Morag. “I told you. Fruitcake.”

  Bran-Hamish just laughed, and resumed his seat with the others.

  Morag and Ted walked away.

  “Well,” Ted said. “Now you’ve seen it. What are you going to do?”

  Morag hesitated.

  She’d never faced anything like this before, in her brief police career.

  She’d had some emergency training, at police college and since joining the station, with the council’s emergency planning people. It had all been rather low-key, under-funded and routine. Britain was a small, stable island. Nothing much in the way of disasters ever happened.

  Morag had not been trained to handle the unexpected.

  “I can’t see this is any kind of criminal matter. And this isn’t yet an emergency.”

  “It isn’t? Are you sure? What if it keeps growing?” He eyed the horizon. “You know, cats are smart animals,” he said. “Sensitive. Sometimes they react before the rest of us when something is going wrong.” He hesitated. “I’ve not told Ruth, but I haven’t seen Willis for a couple of days either.”

  “Something going wrong? Like what?”

  There was a sound like subdued thunder.

  Morag and Ted exchanged a glance. Then they began to hurry back the way they had come, around the shoulder of the crag. The cultists came with them, running o
ver the basalt outcrops in their thin slippers.

  They came around the brow of the hill. They stopped perhaps a hundred yards from St. Anthony’s Chapel.

  The old ruin was sinking.

  The single large section of upright wall, two stories high, was tipping sideways, visibly, a ruined Pisa. But even as it did so its base was sinking into the softened ground. Its upper structure, never designed for such treatment, was crumbling; great blocks of sandstone were breaking free, and went clattering down the wall’s sloping face, making the dull thunderous noise she had heard. One of the lower wall remnants, she saw, had already all but disappeared, its upper edge sinking below the closing dust as she watched.

  It was like watching some immense stone ship, holed, sink beneath the stony waves of this plug of lava.

  Around them, the cultists were jumping up and down, whooping and shouting.

  Morag shook her head. “What does it mean, Ted?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Ted said grimly. “Ask these loonie buggers. I think it’s time you made a report, girlie.”

  “Yeah.”

  She lifted her lapel radio to her lips.

  10

  Jane showed up in the lab, a little before noon. Mike actually escorted her into the clean room area. The staff had got the clean room procedures beefed up a little by now, and so Jane was wearing the regulation white bunny suit and cloth trilby, blue plastic overshoes.

  “Hi.”

  Henry, with his hands inside a glove box, did a double take. “Oh. It’s you.” He fumbled the petrological slide he was handling, and tried to pull his hands out of the arm-length rubber gloves; he fumbled that too.

  Her face didn’t crack a smile. “Sorry. I’m disturbing you.”

  “No, no. That’s okay. I just didn’t recognize you.” He studied her. “You look—”

  “Different? Not so threatening in this male scientist disguise?” She wandered around the lab, passing between the stainless steel NASA glove boxes, the low fluorescent lights catching the wisps of hair that protruded from her hat. “I got Mike to sign me in for an hour. I wanted to see your world. I promise I won’t touch anything.”

  “If you do, you’ll be zapped by NASA laser beams.”

  “So these are Moon rocks.”

  “Yeah. Come see this.” He led her to the center of the room, where the largest single isolation tank stood, on four fat steel legs. She followed him, and they stood side by side, peering into the tank.

  Standing this close to Geena, he remembered, there had always been the faint smell of deodorants, shampoo, perfume. The chemicals industry of the late twentieth century. But with Jane there was only the autumn-ash scent of her hair. Like Moon dust, he thought absently.

  They’d been seeing each other, on and off, for a month now. Dinners. Walks, drives. A lot of gentle sparring as they picked at each other’s old wounds. Goodnight kisses like he used to get from his aunt.

  Maybe he could detect the stirring of some kind of attraction in her, on a subconscious level. The way volcano junkies could sometimes sense the stirring of magma pockets far underground, before the most sensitive of seismometers showed a trace.

  After all, she was here.

  Or maybe that was all self-deluding bull. He had been disastrously and persistently wrong about Geena. After a month he still wasn’t sure.

  The box contained a big, battered case made of aluminum. It was open. Inside the box was a series of dirty Teflon bags, some of them slit open.

  Jane said, “What’s this?”

  “An Apollo Sample Return Container, in NASA-ese. A rock box, to you and me. This is one of the boxes Jays Malone and his buddy filled up on the lunar surface, with Moon rocks they put in those numbered Teflon bags. And it was left unopened in twenty-five years.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “More than half the Moon rocks have never been touched. We had to sterilize the box, with ultraviolet light and acid, dried it with nitrogen, punctured it to let out whatever trace of lunar atmosphere was in there—”

  “Why? You can’t think there is any danger of contamination.”

  “Of us, by the rocks? Hell, no. But they planned for it back in the ’60s. They even sterilized the films the astronauts brought back from the Moon’s surface. No, now we’re more concerned with protecting the Moon rocks from us.”

  Jane leaned forward and inspected the Moon samples, where they nestled in the slit-open bags. “I’m not sure what I was expecting,” she said. “Something—primordial. More glamorous. This looks like—”

  “What?”

  “Like jacket potatoes that got left too long on the barbecue.”

  He laughed. “The Moon is a dark world, Jane; it only looks bright in the sky for lack of competition.”

  She pointed to an empty bag. It was numbered 86047. “What happened to that one?”

  “That’s the most important rock in this box. The focus of the study. It’s lunar bedrock. Possibly…”

  The work on the Moon rock was actually picking up quickly—although Henry hadn’t had much time for any real science yet, as so much of his time was being taken up with organizational stuff. He had to ensure the lab assigned the right facilities for the preliminary studies he wanted to run—emission spectrometry, X-ray crystallography, mass spectrometry, X-ray fluorescence and neutron activation. He wanted to push for a scanning tunneling microscope study, but there was no STM here, and Dan McDiarmid made it clear exactly where the boundary of his budget lay, as if every STM in the world had been transported to the Moon itself.

  It put Henry in his place, and he spent a lot of time fuming and fighting for turf.

  But the work itself had soon gotten going well enough.

  Mike Dundas was proving to be a good choice as his lab manager, confirming Henry’s hunch. Mike made sure procedures and operations ran smoothly, and didn’t get in the way of the researchers, including Marge Case, who were waiting to start their studies.

  He told Jane, “I’m interested in finding fragments of the Moon’s primordial crust, the first that formed after the Moon turned into a molten ball, after it accreted. Global melting: if it happened to the Moon, it must have happened to Earth, and other large bodies like Venus and Mars. But we have to know how it all happened. And the Moon is a natural place to study the process; the evidence is all buried deep on Earth, by the continuing geology of the planet.”

  “And is that what your bedrock fragment is? A piece of primordial crust?”

  “Unfortunately, no. We haven’t found a large crust fragment in any of the Apollo samples. But in bedrock like this we can expect to find fragments in the breccias, recycled repeatedly from earlier ejecta blankets…That is, smashed up and stuck back together again several times.” He eyed her. “Come see what I’m doing.”

  He led her to a bench, where he’d set up his petrological microscope. This was just a crude microscope, set up so you could look through a thin rock slice on a rotating stage, illuminated by a light source beneath. Jane squinted, trying to see.

  “Your brother is good at producing slides for this, over in the rock cutting lab,” he said. “You take a thin section of rock—say, five millimeters. You polish it with carborundum, take some thin chips, stick them to glass with optical glue, and then polish them in a grinder until they’re no more than fifty microns thick. Thin enough to see through. The art is the finishing by hand that comes after that; you need better than five microns tolerance, and to get that you have to overcome faults in the jib you use, even in the glass slides themselves…”

  She looked dubious. “I’m surprised they let you bring that thing in here.”

  He looked at the microscope, through her eyes. It was kind of battered, he admitted. He’d picked it up for twenty bucks as an honors student when his department had a clear-out, and it had been old even then. But the mechanism still ran sweet as a nut, and the Swiss optics were as bright and clear as the day they were ground, and the ’scope, worn smooth with use, had been all o
ver the world with him.

  Henry expected to be buried with his ’scope.

  Still, Mike had banned him from bringing its wooden box in here, which was even more disreputable.

  He stepped forward to check the alignment. The view through the eyepiece was a disc of multicolored light, irregular shapes of bright color. He twisted the analyzer disc to show up the colors.

  “Take a look,” he said. “Try to keep both your eyes open. After a while, you won’t see anything through your other eye.”

  She bent, and turned the analyzer as he showed her.

  “What do you see?”

  “It’s like a view down a kaleidoscope.” Jane straightened up. “Wow. I’m dizzy.”

  “That’s your other eye cutting in. Forget it. The point of the ’scope is that you can see what minerals are present there, just by letting the thin slice filter polarized light.”

  “Just like that? At a glance?”

  “At a glance. Neat, isn’t it?”

  “What am I looking at? Your bedrock?”

  “No. That’s a reference sample. A lunar basalt from another suite, closer to the norm of the Apollo samples. Tell me what you see.”

  She bent again. “Lots of small shapes, like a tiled floor. And, here and there, like pieces of stained glass window, rough discs and rectangles. Much larger shapes. Ships of glass, sailing among ice floes. As seen when on acid.”

  He laughed. “What you’re looking at is a felted matrix of small elongate crystals of feldspar—that’s the gray stuff—pyroxene, yellow—and olivine, all the bright colors you can see, scarlet and yellow and pink and blue. And stuck in the matrix you have those bigger crystals, phenocrysts of pyroxene and olivine.

  “Now.” He took out the slide, replaced it with another. “This is 86047. The bedrock. See if you can tell the difference.”

  She looked.

  “No olivine.”

  “To a first approximation, yes.”

  She straightened up, frowning. “So what?”

  He lifted his white hat and ran a hand through his hair. “So, that’s wrong. I can’t figure out what process has taken out the olivine here.