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 an
d fallen trunks of trees, gray and lifeless on the scorched, ash-strewn turf.
Farther to the east, toward the heart of the Seat, there was only the silver-gray glow of Moonseed light, all the geology and structure there—a billion years of Earth history—reduced to alien smoothness.
“Come on,” Blue whispered. “We can go a little farther.”
Blue stepped forward, onto a wider neck of ground. He tested every step, as if he was walking onto an ice floe. Ted followed a few yards behind, trying to stick to the footsteps Blue had left in the ash. Fixed to his hood Blue had a chest-mounted still camera and a small video camera—the kind they put in cricket stumps, Ted thought irrelevantly. Blue was working the still camera now, and talking patiently into a microphone inside his hood.
After maybe fifty paces Blue stopped.
Ted came to stand beside him. The neck of blackened turf went on some yards farther, but Ted could see how cracked and fragile it was becoming.
“Notice how it’s not advancing,” Blue said.
“What?”
“The Moonseed.”
“Why?”
“Who the hell knows? Come on. Open your bottles and let’s make like we know what we’re doing.”
Blue crouched and, leaning as if reaching out of a boat, began poking at the Moonseed debris with stuff from his equipment pack. He had probes of metal that he scanned over the pool surface or pushed into it, taking data through wires into his backpack, muttering to his tape the whole time.
Ted squatted down beside him, his knees and calf muscles protesting. He got hold of Blue’s belt at the back, near where he had tucked his heavy geologist’s hammer. It was like holding a child, leaning over a rail. Blue didn’t protest.
Ted looked around, back the way they had come. He was on a neck of land like a spit protruding into a silvery sea. At the “shore” he could see the rubble, the ruined Moonscape suburb through which he’d had to clamber. It seemed a long way away. The closest intact building was a ways away to the west, halfway up Castle Hill, a squat pile of sandstone that looked like it might once have been St. Giles’ Cathedral; the old church poked out of the landscape like a beached wreck.
He could see no other humans, in any direction.
In his gloved hand Blue had cupped a small sample he’d taken from the Moonseed surface. “Look at this now. Be careful. It is very delicate.”
Ted bent. He had to wipe the ash from his faceplate to see.
It was like a spiderweb; or an autumn leaf; or the skin stretched over the bones of a child’s hand. A fragment of structure, with the finest of membranes stretched between hair-thin spars.
He grunted. “Like something the Wright Brothers might have dreamed of.”
Blue laughed. His hand shook, just slightly, but it was enough to shake the fragment to pieces, to silvery Moonseed dust, which fell through his fingers and back to the pool. “It is all but impossible to retrieve such structures intact. They are like sculptures of dry sand.”
Ted straightened up painfully; it felt as if there was no blood at all in his lower legs. “Structures?”
“Yes.” Blue shifted his position, looking for more samples. “From the aerial shots and samples taken on the ground, it appears that the Moonseed is endeavoring to construct something here. A kind of dish, with a parabolic profile, half a mile across—”
“Covering most of Arthur’s Seat, then.”
“Yes.”
“This Moonseed is a rock-eating germ. How can it construct anything?”
“It does not eat rock,” Blue said, “and neither is it a bug. It moves atomic particles, sometimes molecules, to build structures from the subatomic level up. As far as we can tell, these structures are perfect. Without defect.”
“Not so perfect. That thing in your hands just fell apart.”
“It’s true we can disrupt the structures if we catch them early enough. But I don’t think whatever the Moonseed is building here is meant for this world.”
“What do you mean?”
But Blue wouldn’t answer.
He bent again, trying to collect more samples of the Moonseed structure, which he preserved in clear, fast-setting plastic.
When they were done, they walked gingerly back along the neck of land.
Ted pointed to the Cathedral on Castle Rock. “We go there.”
Blue looked at him curiously, face masked by the layers of dust and dirt on his faceplate. “Why?”
“Something I’m looking for.”
Blue shouldered his equipment. “Henry told me about your son.”
“In between porking my daughter.”
“I understand why you have come. I feel a certain—responsibility—for bringing you here.” He looked into Ted’s face. “So I feel I have to tell you this. Smell the coffee, Ted. Your son is dead. I saw him here, just before the great eruption. He is lost, here in the ruins of Edinburgh. At best you will only find his body. Probably not even that.”
“I know,” Ted said softly. “I’ve known that from the beginning.”
“Then what are you looking for?”
Ted said, “Are you coming with me, or do I go alone?”
Blue sighed. “If I abandon you, Henry will squeal like a pig stuck under a gate. Come.”
With Blue leading, they worked steadily over the shattered cityscape toward the building.
St. Giles’ was a great sandstone block, atypically low and squat for a Gothic cathedral, but that had evidently helped it survive; the pyroclastic flow, washing over Castle Rock, had heaped up against the eastern wall, but had not breached it. Still, the stained glass windows had shattered or, it looked like, melted; and the ornate crowned tower, the Scottish equivalent of a spire, was gone.
They paused for breath.
“St. Giles,” Ted said. “Patron saint of cripples, lepers and tramps.”
“Very appropriate,” Blue said. “I am impressed it has survived at all.”
Ted pointed. “Those pillars holding up the tower are nine hundred years old. Even survived the English burning the bloody place down. They’ll last a wee while yet. Come on.”
The big wooden doors of the Cathedral had been smashed in, the shards burned. Ted and Blue picked their way over the wreckage, the scorched wood crunching under their thick-soled boots.
The roof was destroyed—debris was scattered over the aisles and altar and the rows of pews—and silvery, alien daylight streamed into the dusty interior through the gaping roof and the empty window frames. Ted stood in the doorway for a few minutes, letting his gaze follow the soothing geometry of sunbeams. As if one part of the world still worked. The Cathedral was full of light, in fact, probably brighter than it had been since the day the roof was put on. The uniform gray and black was oddly pleasing, like a charcoal sketch.
He moved forward. He had to push through the ash layers, climb over the cold lava bombs which lay beneath it, like pushing through a shallow stream.
There were people in the pews, he saw.
Some were sitting, some had been kneeling, some seemed to have fallen. Their bodies were barely visible, all but drowned by the ash. Here was a woman—he couldn’t tell her age—her face tipped up to the ceiling, he supposed toward God, her mouth open and clogged with ash.
“The roof probably gave way immediately,” Blue said gently. “The ceiling rubble came down on them, and then pumice, hot ash, steam, gases. They must have died very quickly. Probably of suffocation.”
“I suppose they came here for shelter.”
“I suppose so. Perhaps we will find the priest at his altar. If they are undisturbed, perhaps this will form another Pompeii, for future archaeologists.”
Ted stopped beside another woman. “They are not undisturbed.”
Blue bent to see.
A necklace had been ripped from the woman’s neck. There were fingermarks, cut deep in the layers of ash.
“He’s here,” Ted said.
It didn’t take long to find him. There weren’t many p
laces left in the Cathedral intact enough to hide in.
He was in the Thistle Chapel, an ornate, heavily ornamented twentieth-century annex of the Cathedral. The windows had blown in, but its roof had survived, and so had most of the Chapel’s ornamentation: carved animals, angels playing musical instruments, including bagpipes.
He was hiding under a pew. He was thin, in rags, filthy, wide eyes staring out of a sketch of a face, patchy stubble over the spittle-splashed chin. Really no more than a boy, Ted realized. He had a little food—cans and packets and bottles of water, detritus around him—and a pathetic stack of valuables, jewelry and wallets and cash.
Ted pulled off his hood. There was a stench.
“You have fouled yourself,” he said softly. “Even an animal does not foul itself. Are you, then, less than an animal?”
Blue was frowning at him, but Ted kept his gaze on the boy. “I don’t know you.” The lad’s voice was thin, breaking, from fear and disuse.
“I know you,” Ted said. “You are Hamish Macrae. The one they called Bran.”
Bran said nothing. He shrank back beneath his pew, folding his legs against his chest.
Ted reached forward and collared him, as simple as that. From a renewed, sharp stink, it seemed as if Bran had fouled himself once more.
“Who are you?”
“Don’t you remember me, Hamish?”
“No…”
“A father, of one you led to the Seat. One of many. To his death.”
Bran was trembling, but he spoke up bravely enough. “So you found me. So what?”
Blue asked, “How did you know he would be here?”
“He stayed as close to the heart of it as he could. He was scared to run too far. There are others looking for him.”
“Too fucking right I’m holing up here,” Bran said. “Have you not heard the troopers? In the Highlands they’re already burning witches.” He looked at Ted, calculating. “I didn’t mean it. The Egress Hatch thing. I mean, I did. And I was right, wasn’t I?” He glared at Blue. “It did come from space.”
Blue rubbed his neck, through the thick fabric of his suit. “It is possible.”
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