Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  “Each grain has a structure. On the outside there’s a shell of silicate — a rock — although even that’s a mineral we haven’t seen before. Super-quartz, we’ve been calling it.”

  “And inside the shell—”

  “We don’t know. Whatever is there is beyond the level of resolution of our techniques. Certainly subatomic. Its structure changes with time. Its primary resource is olivine. Mantle rock. Whatever is inside the super-quartz shell is presumably the active agent, whatever starts the transformation of the rock the dust settles on.”

  “You make it sound like a machine.”

  “Maybe it is. Lots of tiny machines, eating olivine, using forces we can’t identify to tweak crystal structures.”

  “Machines, inside tiny eggs of rock.”

  “The Moon rock as a whole has a greater structure. Silicate again, at first, on the surface, but the density and complexity seems to increase, beyond what we can resolve, towards the centre… It’s a kind of funnel, I think. In three dimensions.”

  “A funnel?”

  “Building regions of successively greater density and pressure, towards the heart of the rock. I think it has a purpose.”

  “What?”

  “The compression of matter and energy. Jane, the way to make a new element, to turn matter from one element to another, is to go to high energy density. Atomic nuclei can fuse or fission—”

  “Like in a nuclear weapon.”

  “Or the heart of the sun. Right.”

  “And that’s what creates the miniature explosions,” she said. “When the quicksand spreads.”

  “Yes. But they mightn’t be mini fusion explosions. There are higher densities. You can go all the way up to a threshold called the Planck energy—”

  Planck energy. “Where all the forces of nature unify. And the strings begin to vibrate in higher modes—”

  “Yes.” He studied her. “Where did you hear about string theory?”

  She thought. “I heard a TV comment by an American scientist. A physicist called Monica Beus, I think.”

  “I know of her.”

  “She used string theory to explain the spectrum of the radiation from Venus.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  She tried to read his face. “Henry, what does this mean? How can there be Planck energy levels in a chunk of Moon rock?”

  He shrugged. “The energy itself isn’t so great. It’s about the same as the chemical energy in a tank of automobile gas. The difficulty is that to reach Planckian energy densities you have to focus all that energy on one proton or electron. That’s what we try to do in our supercolliders, but we don’t come anywhere near, not to within factors of hundreds of trillions. The Moon rock structure is a much smarter solution. I think the Moon rock is being turned, particle by particle, into a mini-collider. An energy lens. It’s elegant.”

  “How? Who by?”

  “I don’t think there’s a who. Unless you call a virus a who.”

  “A virus? Not a machine, then? You think this thing is alive? Like a plague?”

  “Jane, I’m just a rock jockey. I don’t know what alive means. I’m just speculating about what I’m observing.”

  “Henry, what does this mean? Is there a link between what’s happening here, and whatever happened to Venus?” She tried to make out his face, on the pillow beside her, in the dark. “Is the Earth under threat, like Venus?”

  He was silent for a while.

  Then he said, “You know, what we’re doing, in the lab, isn’t really science any more. We’re scarcely documenting.” He looked at her and grinned, sheepishly. “It’s kind of an emergency situation. I’m worried about the quicksand growth, which doesn’t seem to be self-limiting. We’re focusing on looking for ways to disrupt its growth. It’s fairly easy, if you catch it early. Just flood it; the reaction with water under pressure stops the formation of the crystal structure. And hide it from the light. Solar ultra-violet seems to trigger the process: kick-starts it, before the energy density gets high enough to self-sustain. We think some kind of supra-molecules are forming there, trapping photons to rebuild themselves: change molecular shape, separate charges… But they are fragile. Hell, if you catch it early enough, you can just kick it apart. But—”

  “What?”

  “Once it gets into the mantle, out of our reach, there will be no way of stopping it.”

  And it’s growing, she thought, every day spreading a little further down the flanks of Arthur’s Seat, and into its rocky heart. And then—

  Kaboom, she thought. Like Venus. That’s what Henry is thinking now.

  Breach of quarantine; infected rock.

  And she remembered a walk up Arthur’s Seat, a vial of dust, scattered on basalt.

  My God, she thought.

  Mike.

  Later, when Henry was asleep, she got up and looked into Jack’s room. The boy was sleeping, his hair spilled on his pillow. She felt torn. She wanted to hold him, as if he was a baby again. But she knew she mustn’t wake him.

  Already, she found her tentative acceptance of what Henry had said was slipping away.

  Denial, she thought. I’m in denial. Well, maybe. She just didn’t want to believe in this stuff. Not with Jack in the world.

  She went back to bed.

  14

  She was woken by thunder. Henry was already gone.

  She lay in her bed, still only half-awake, the flat morning sunlight already warming the outside of her drawn curtains.

  Thunder.

  She thought it over. Like giant footfalls in the distance. Like a door slamming deep underground.

  Thunder, on a morning that was obviously clear and calm?

  Was it more than that? Had something actually jolted her awake?

  She reached for her watch. Not long after 6.00 a.m.

  Jack stood at the door, in his Hibs soccer-strip pyjamas. “Mum?”

  “Go back to bed. It was only thunder.”

  “Granddad’s up. He says it was an explosion.”

  “Where’s Uncle Mike?”

  “I don’t know. Should we get dressed?”

  Now her father came to the door. He was already wearing his battered old donkey jacket, and he was pulling his trousers over his pyjama bottoms.

  “Dad, what was that noise?”

  “I’m not sure. It came from Abbeyhill.” The area just north of Arthur’s Seat, a half-mile away. “I’m going over there.” He glanced at Jack. “I think this wee fellow should have a day off school today.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’ll pack our bags.” He ruffled Jack’s mop of sleep-stiffened hair. “We’ll go for a holiday on the coast for a couple of days, will we?”

  “Dad, I can’t just take him out of school. Where’s Mike?”

  “Not here.” Ted glanced at her empty bed. “Neither is yer man, I take it,” he said.

  “No.”

  “I think you’d better find Mike,” Ted told her. “We should be together.”

  “But the shop—”

  Another thunderclap. Or explosion. Smaller, crisper this time.

  She heard the distant, Doppler-shifted wail of police sirens, the throaty flap of a helicopter somewhere overhead.

  “Dad, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll see you later.”

  Jack was left standing in the doorway, wide-eyed. “Shall I start packing? What can I take?”

  “First things first.” She swung her legs out of bed. “Go fix us some breakfast.”

  Still sleepy, eyes gritty after being disturbed, she used the bathroom. Mundane details, bright in the unreal daylight: yesterday’s Edinburgh Evening News left folded on the window ledge by her father, a final shred of paper left clinging to the toilet roll in its holder, Ted’s irritating little habit. The sunlight on the frosted glass of the window was midsummer bright.

  There was no bird song, she noticed absently. No morning chorus, save for the discordant wail of the emergen
cy vehicles.

  According to the News, the patch of “quicksand” on Arthur’s Seat had reached a thousand yards across by yesterday. The scientists were saying it was still growing, but it wasn’t a neat circle; in some places it was burrowing away underground, following the seams of basalt that underlay the city.

  It wasn’t a big story. It was too slow and obscure and impersonal. There was more space given over to speculation about the transfer of a soccer player from Hearts to an English club, Liverpool.

  Henry said it wasn’t quicksand. On the other hand, he didn’t know what it was, she reflected, and they had to call it something. Naming something is the first step to understanding it. Was that true? What if the underlying reality was so strange that it defied the neat labels, the metaphors and parallels, humans sought to justify it to themselves?

  The bathroom was warm and peaceful. She felt reluctant to step out of here, to handle Jack’s questions, to deal with the way her life was slowly tilting out of balance.

  But she must. She splashed cold water on her face and went out to the kitchen.

  Jack was eating a bowl of Coco Pops, the milk already stained a revolting diarrhoea brown, and he had turned on the small TV that sat on the serving bench.

  “Mum, look at this.”

  A train crash. Carriages tipped off their track, spilled and split over the ground. The picture, a little shaky, seemed to be coming from a helicopter suspended over the scene. The tipped-over carriages were long and sleek, shattered windows glistening as if moist. Fire was licking from a couple of the cars, bright despite the intensity of the early sun. She could see ambulances, police vehicles, emergency workers in fluorescent yellow jackets, bright in the sun, others in drabber everyday clothes. There were people lying over the broken ground, being covered by blankets, surrounded by buzzing helpers.

  A reporter was shouting over the whine of aircraft noise, something about subsidence under the line causing the derailment.

  Jack asked, “Will we see Granddad?”

  “What?”

  He pointed with his spoon at the TV. “On the telly. Will we see him?”

  She looked again at the screen, and something still half-asleep in her snapped awake. This was Edinburgh. Abbeyhill, in fact, not a half-mile from the house. The rail line came out of Waverley Station and headed east, tracking the coast, towards Dunbar. The derailment must have been the explosion she heard. Unlike herself, Ted had known immediately what it meant, what to do.

  The helicopter camera was taking wider-angle shots now. The bulk of Arthur’s Seat was visible, a crude, grass-clad knot, surrounded by an encrustation of streets and buildings. She could recognize Holyrood Palace. Probably this house was in the image somewhere, if she knew exactly where to look.

  On the Seat, the quicksand patches were clearly visible, rough circles shining a matt silver-grey in the morning light, like spilled paint. Millions of tiny eggs, she thought, waiting to hatch.

  She wished Ted had stayed. She wished Henry was here now.

  “Eat up and get dressed,” she said.

  “Have I got to go to school?”

  “Listen. Get packed. Not too much. Pack for me… and for Granddad and Mike too.”

  “Pack what?”

  “Clothes. Blankets.” She frowned, thinking. “Torches. The camp stove. The tent. The canned food from the larder. A tin-opener. Blankets.” She forced a smile. “As if we’re going camping. Candles. Matches. The bathroom stuff—”

  “By myself?”

  “You can do it. Remember we’ve all got to fit in one car.”

  “What about you?”

  “I have to go find Mike. I won’t be long.”

  The image on the TV had changed. Now there was a picture of a fire at a petrol station. Fountains of flame leaping up from the cracked concrete, the sagging yellow-green canopy of the station forecourt blistering. Another Edinburgh disaster: more subsidence, it seemed. The station’s thin underground tanks had cracked, and there had been a spark…

  She went to get dressed.

  Outside, the light was strange.

  The sky was a cloudless, mid-April deep blue; the last of the night’s chill was already dissipating. But Venus was clearly visible in the east, a bright spotlight: a third light in the Scottish sky, neither Moon nor sun.

  And there was something else, a silvery-grey texture to the air, as if everything was veiled by a fine smog, leaching out the colours. It was the reflected light from the quicksand, tinging the air grey: quicksand, rock chewed-up and transformed by something from the Moon, glowing silver-grey by the light of the wreck of Venus.

  This is a strange time, she thought uneasily.

  She got in the car and snapped on the radio, flicking it to a rock channel. She started the car and turned south, towards Henry’s lab.

  If Ted can face this, so can I.

  It was a little after seven. The early commuter traffic, heading towards the city centre, was already building up. Men in suits, fewer women, strictly one to a car. More than usual? Less? She couldn’t tell. But there were other vehicles: a lot of four-wheel-drives and people movers, Ford Galaxies and Renault Espaces, some laden with possessions and kids, moving in every direction, east, west, north — every direction away from the Seat, to the south. Early evacuees?

  Evidently Ted wasn’t alone in his intuition.

  Of, course there were some who would relish this.

  Perhaps there were survivalists, even here in respectable suburban Scotland, waiting for it all to fall apart — heading for the highlands with their cans of corned beef, ready to aim illicit shotguns at anyone who came begging. Or maybe they just wanted some place more challenging to take their 4WDs than the car park of Sainsbury’s. Riding out the cosy catastrophe, in Barbour jackets and Land Rovers.

  “Fuck them,” said Jane aloud. In a year such folk would be starving, chasing sheep around the highlands, and in two years they would be dead.

  There was a queue of cars forming already outside the hypermarket. There was even a line of pedestrian shoppers forming outside the Iceland supermarket.

  Frozen food. Smart. Not that she’d thought to exclude that from the list she’d given Jack. But the kid was brighter than she was, in many ways; he’d probably figure that out for himself.

  She ought to make sure he put in tampons, though.

  When she reached the Holyrood Road she found herself in a stationary queue of traffic. She got out of the car and walked a little way forward, until she could see to the head of the queue. There was a pair of police cars parked crudely across the carriageway, blocking the way, and a tape stretched more symbolically across the road. Some cars were already being turned around and were coming back; the drivers looked irritated, business types with meetings they needed to get to.

  The queue was moving, slowly; she realized that it was simply compressing, drivers inching forward in frustration, as if they could clear the obstacle by sheer psychic pressure.

  We’re fragile, she thought. Everything is full, run to capacity, pared to the bone in the name of efficiency. The slightest disruption and everything freezes up.

  The murky light of Venus was reflected from the roofs of the cars ahead of her, curved splashes of new light.

  The wind changed, and blew in from the east, from Abbeyhill. There was a smell of burned meat. She could hear sirens. A helicopter flapped over her. She looked up. It was in camouflage green, Army or Navy.

  Was this how it was starting? Was this the end of normality, of the routine of life? Would chaos and pain spread out from here, growing like the rock infection Henry had identified?

  Her father would be able to cope with such conditions. That silent strength had always been an irritation to her, as she’d moved through adolescence and upwards. What use was a father who was a kind of heroic pillar? What could he do but intimidate her, make her aware of her own weakness?

  But, she recognized, there were times when such strength was, simply, essential. Essential for sur
vival.

  The radio carried newsflashes. Incidents all over the eastern side of the city, fires and power outages and even collapsing buildings.

  She shivered.

  The receptionist at the lab didn’t know about Mike, and told her Henry hadn’t come in that morning. “But you might try the car park.”

  The car park?

  Jane suppressed her irritation, and went back outside.

  In the car park, in one corner, she found a Portakabin, a squat cuboid, uncompromising yellow. A plastic packing case was being used as a step before the open door. A fat bundle of cables — power and data feeds, she supposed — snaked into the Portakabin from an open window in the main lab building.

  She knocked on the frame of the open door. There was no reply. She stuck her head inside, shielding her eyes against the light. Henry was there, in the middle of clutter, with his back to her. He was sitting on a plastic chair, hunched over a workbench.

  “Henry?”

  He put down a soldering iron and turned around. “Hi.”

  She stepped inside. It was like an electronic hobbyist’s den; there were circuit boards and soldering irons and oscilloscopes and meters of all kinds, scattered over the benches and the floor. On the bench where Henry had been working there was a gigantic parts rack, row on row of little plastic drawers containing banana plugs, wires, leads, clips, resistors, capacitors, transistors. The glowing screen of a laptop sat at the centre of the bench. And beside the bench there was a bizarre cairn of gear, a stepped pyramid of what looked like a car tyre inner tube topped by plastic plates and Styrofoam sheets and lengths of hose, all topped by a clutter of electronic gear.

  There was a complex smell here, she thought: over-strong coffee, the ozone-rich stink of electronic equipment and burned solder. And Henry, of course, the warm scent she had so quickly gotten used to.

  She said, “Have you seen Mike?”

  “What?”

  “Mike.”

  “No. I—”

  “Do you think he’s in the lab?”

  “He hasn’t been around. What’s wrong?”

  “He didn’t come home. Ted is worried.” She told him about the train crash. “I’m worried too.”