Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  “I don’t know,” Henry said, looking determined. “But I think that’s the key, Professor Petit. The Moon. The Moon is the key.”

  Monica asked, “The key? To what?”

  But Alfred was speculating again. “You know, you’re right, Dr. Meacher. The only way the Moonseed can get to a planetary surface is through the action of intelligence.”

  “Which means—”

  “Maybe that’s the purpose of intelligence. Maybe we were meant…”

  There was a moment of silence.

  Petit laughed. “Alien nano robots manipulating history, eh? Is that what you’re going to tell the President? Should she go on TV with that? Admiral Bromwich, I intend to disprove this absurd scaremongering hypothesis, point by point.”

  Henry nodded. “Do it. I’ll be there to applaud you.”

  “But in the meantime,” the Admiral said, “we have to consider how to advise the President. And Dr. Meacher, for all he’s a little swivel-eyed for my taste, is the only one coming up with any scenarios here.”

  “Thank you,” Henry said dryly.

  Bromwich said, “I think we have to work on a worst-case assumption.”

  Petit laughed. “The worst case being the end of the world. In an election year, too.”

  Admiral Bromwich turned to Henry. “You’ve told me how bad this is going to get. Now tell me what we should do about it.”

  “Three things,” Henry said. “We know we can slow the Moonseed down, if not stop it altogether, at least before it gets into the mantle.”

  “How?”

  “The structures it forms are fragile. They can be smashed, to put it bluntly.”

  “We’ll bomb the shit out of it,” the Admiral said.

  “And,” Petit said, “when you run out of bombs?”

  “Then I’ll be on the White House lawn ripping it apart with my teeth and bare hands,” the Admiral said. “Where will you be? What else, Dr. Meacher?”

  Henry said, “Maybe we can come up with some kind of nano counter-agent.”

  “I thought you said there was no hope of that.”

  “I might be wrong. We have to try. But, no, I don’t think there is any hope.”

  He let that hang in the air, for long seconds, maximizing its impact.

  Monica studied Henry anew. He was the first to understand this, she thought. There must have been a time, right at the beginning, when only he knew this. Only he, of all the billions on the planet, could see the future. The unfolding of Moonseed logic: Christ, the end of the world. How must that have felt?

  Probably, she thought, much like the moment when the doctor, an absurdly young man, had told her, in cool, compassionate terms, that she had such a short time left to live.

  If it had been me, would I have had the strength to act as Henry has done? To communicate, to risk mockery and ridicule?

  After all, she wouldn’t live to see the end, whatever happened.

  There is no hope. Yet we must act as if there is.

  Yet there was still something in Henry’s manner she didn’t understand. Something he didn’t want to tell them.

  Or something he wanted to achieve.

  She said, “Dr. Meacher, give us your third recommendation.”

  “We need to go back to the Moon. To Aristarchus, where Jays Malone picked up that rock.”

  The Admiral frowned. “Why?”

  Because the Moon is the key, thought Monica. That’s the center of his case.

  Henry said, “We have the question Professor Petit raised. We know the Moon is infected with Moonseed—but the Moon hasn’t been destroyed. Why not? We’ve learned all we can here. Something on the Moon must be inhibiting the Moonseed. We have to understand what.”

  Monica watched him. This is what he wants, she realized, on some deep intuitive level. The Moon mission. This is what he’s seeking from us, today.

  But, she sensed, there’s something he wants to achieve up there beyond what he’s telling us.

  But he fears ridicule, obstruction, if he tells us about it…

  “I agree,” she said immediately.

  Henry looked at her, surprised. He said, “We have to go quickly. While we still can. Before we’re overwhelmed. It may be in a few months we won’t be capable of mounting a Moon mission, whether we want to or not.”

  The Admiral nodded. “How the hell? I thought we smashed up all the Moon rockets, or put them in museums.”

  “We did,” Henry said. “But NASA has a way.”

  Monica said softly, “When can you leave?”

  He looked startled. “Me?”

  “Who else?”

  “Dr. Beus, I’m a rock hound, not an astronaut.”

  “Difficult times,” the Admiral said. “We all have to think out of the box, Dr. Meacher.”

  Henry subsided, looking confused, calculating. But he leaned forward again. “There’s something else.”

  “What?” the Admiral said.

  “Weapons. We need to take weapons.”

  Petit gasped. “You can’t be serious.”

  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 drive
n 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 Mayfiel
d, 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.