Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Even if the quacks did say the bone disease she had contracted was a really “good” form of secondary cancer; even if the quacks still, absurdly, gave her a fifty-fifty chance of survival, despite the startling acceleration of her anatomy’s failure.

  But it didn’t make a piece of difference as to what she had to do, to be the eyes and ears and scientific brain of the President of the United States, just a little longer.

  Anyhow she let the kid off the hook. “I’m fine. Just let me catch my breath.”

  He took a couple of steps closer to the rim. “You can smell it, even up here.”

  “What?”

  “The sulphur. And the ash. If you’re asthmatic—”

  “I’m not asthmatic. Help me up.” She lifted her arm. “Give me a minute.”

  “For what?”

  She smiled. “To sight-see. I’ve never been out here before, to my shame.” And I sure as hell never will again.

  He grinned and backed off. “Sure. I understand. This is why I got into this game, you know.”

  “The scenery.”

  “Uh huh. I get paid to be up here. Take all the time you want.”

  She stepped forward, alone, her feet crunching on basalt fragments.

  Jesus Christ, this was the Grand Canyon.

  From here, on the northern rim, she could see the sweep of the land. She was in the middle of the Colorado Plateau, thousands of feet of rock laid down by the shallow seas and deltas that had once covered much of North America. On the horizon, to the south, she could see the smoothly swelling surface of the Plateau, flat and undulating, reminiscent of the sea which had given it birth. It was speckled with green, what looked like blades of grass spilling over the plateau walls. But each of those blades was a tree, a juniper or a canyon pine, each of them twenty or thirty feet tall.

  That was the Plateau, magnificent in itself. But the Colorado River had just cut through the whole thing, as clean as a knife gouge, dynamic and unstable. And the complex channels and incisions had exposed, in the outcrops and walls, the layers of sedimentary rocks laid down in that vanished ocean. Looking around the fragmented landscape, her gaze could complete the lines of distinct layers, invisibly spanning the Canyon’s channels. And she could see where the eroding river waters had met stiffer resistance, from the older, deeper rocks; scree piles flared against the base of surviving plugs.

  It was inhumanly vast. And yet she could see that this was a canyon, a channel cut into the softly swelling Earth. If this had been the Valles Marineris on Mars — compared to which the Canyon would have been just a tributary — it would have been so huge as to make its nature incomprehensible, and it wouldn’t have been nearly so striking. It was as if it had been placed here, this great wound in the land, with exactly the right dimensions to force a response from the human soul.

  As the sun set, the colours in the Canyon walls turned to gold. The sky up to the zenith was already stained pink. The sun was scattering light from haze layers fifteen or twenty miles above sea level. LIDAR measurements, pulsed laser beams scattered from the haze layers, had confirmed that the Edinburgh event had spread dust and aerosol particles throughout the stratosphere, all across the middle latitudes of Earth.

  The ozone layer was taking a beating from the chlorine injected up there. The meteorologists and climatologists and oceanographers were having fun predicting the impact on the atmosphere’s heat balance. A global cooling of maybe a half a degree. Acid rain, from all the sulphuric acid being created up there. Disruption to El Niño, in the equatorial Pacific, over the coming summer and fall.

  Droughts in Australia. Heavy rain and waves on the coast of California. And so on.

  And this, she thought, is evidently just the start.

  The first star was already out, low in the east. Maybe it was Jupiter.

  She knew if she dragged herself out of bed in the morning, she would see Venus, still bright enough to dazzle and cast shadows, surrounded by a halo from all the shit in the upper atmosphere.

  Beautiful. Deadly.

  Scott was pointing out some of the Canyon features to her. “…The peak over there is Mount Sinyala.” A crude cylindrical plug, with a flared skirt of smashed rock. “The channel that lies between Sinyala and these pinnacles in the foreground is the Colorado itself. The plateau you can see at the foot of Sinyala is called the Esplanade.” A cracked and shattered sheet. “It’s an erosional feature resting on one of the more resistant members of what we call the Supai Group of rocks. You can clearly see the contact between the Coconino Sandstone — that’s the lighter coloured stuff on top — and the Hermit Shale, the deeper red below.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the western end of the Canyon. We’re a goodly way away from where the tourists come to roost, at the resort areas on the South Rim some way to the east of here. The landscape here is different. Older.” He pointed. “You can see cinder cones over here. Lava cascades.” He looked at her. “You know, you can tell the nature of the rocks, just by looking, just from the way they have eroded. The shales form slopes. The thick beds of limestone and sandstone form steep, almost vertical cliffs. And the Inner Gorge, at the very base of the Canyon, is a V-shaped groove that reaches down maybe a thousand feet to the river itself. Those are ancient rocks, igneous and metamorphic…”

  She could see, now he described it, how the Canyon was a complex structure, channel cut within channel, Canyon within Canyon, each inner valley chiselled into harder, older rocks, all of it centred on the Inner Gorge, the narrowest valley cut into the oldest rock of all.

  “Enough of the tourist stuff.” Now it was Monica’s turn to point. “Tell me about that.”

  It was a plume of black smoke, rising from one of the incised channels.

  Scott grinned. “You can see for yourself. One of those old cinder cones has just cracked open and started belching ash. We think a more significant event is on the way. We’ve recorded more seismic activity in the Canyon area in the last few weeks than in the previous couple of years. It’s actually very exciting; there are a couple of dozen guys from the Survey working the area right now…”

  She let him run on. Right now the Administration was keen to keep enthusing scientists off the screens, but if this kid’s excitement was what motivated him to be up here and keep working and studying and gathering data, that was fine by her. The fact that what he was studying was liable to kill him, ultimately, was neither here nor there.

  For it was clear that the sudden, unexpected rash of minor volcanism in the Canyon, like that in a dozen other sites around the world, was directly related to the particle cloud that had spread around the planet from Edinburgh: what Henry Meacher called the Moonseed, the alien infection that — for weeks, it seemed — had been raining down out of the stratosphere and was eating into the very rock beneath her feet.

  The precedent of Edinburgh for what would follow was not encouraging. And what she needed to find out was what would happen when the Moonseed got into those deep old rocks.

  On the way here, she’d had another e-mail, from Alfred Synge.

  › Here’s what we think is happening in Venus. And I’m sure you can express it, not to mention understand it, far better than I can. › Take one of your rolled-up ten-dimensional string objects. Pinch it, like compressing a garden hose. As you approach zero width, you generate quantum-mechanical waves, membranes wrapped around the scrunched dimensions. The waves are extremal black holes…

  Actually Monica didn’t agree with the nomenclature here. These “black holes” were nothing like the collapsed stars of astrophysics. They were just solitons, clumps of string fields; the physicists preferred to call them black bubbles or black sheets.

  But arguments about nomenclature weren’t the most important thing right now, she reflected.

  › The black holes are massless, so they flee at the speed of light. But, like massless photons, they aren’t without momentum. So they exert a push. › Monica, we think that inside Venus there’s an organ
ization of mass and energy that is working as a generator of extremal black holes. Maybe that’s what the transformation of the planet is “for’, if you can think of such events as having anything like a single purpose. There is a fountain of black holes streaming from where Venus’s north pole used to be. And it is pushing what’s left of the planet out of its orbit, away from the plane of the ecliptic. It’s like a rocket, Monica, a black hole rocket…

  It was fanciful, abstract. The whole Venus event had become a kind of theoretical toy to be kicked around by the young and/or over-enthusiastic, including Alfred, and the hypotheses just got wilder. It was impossible to connect to the grubby reality of a cracked cinder cone, here in this great chasm.

  And yet, it seemed, connected they were.

  Alfred’s mail ended in rambling, a rant about NASA’s post-Edinburgh decision to destroy its remaining forty-billion-dollar Moonrock stock. The genie is out of the bottle! The horse has bolted! This is vandalism.

  No, she thought. You don’t understand. It’s a symbol. Appeasing the gods.

  “Tell me about the Inner Gorge rocks,” she said to Scott Coplon.

  “Yeah. They’re primarily schists and gneisses. The rocks were formed from pre-existing igneous and sedimentary rocks during mountain-building events in the deep past. A gneiss is what we call granitic rocks which have been exposed to later episodes of metamorphism, and—”

  “I know. Go on.”

  “Sorry. Well, we know that what’s exposed here is just the top of a much deeper layer. The rocks extend thousands of feet down from the surface and form the basement of the North American continent.”

  “The basement?”

  He nodded. “Rocks of that age and character underlie most of the continent. But it’s only where they have been exposed, like here, that we can study them…”

  Monica knew a little about plate tectonics. She knew that the continents rode like rafts of granite, on the plates that slid on currents in the viscous molten rock that lay beneath. The younger rocks of the ocean floors, gabbro and basalt, were in time subducted — dragged back into the interior of the Earth, to be melted and reborn. But the ancient rocks of the continents, riding above, survived.

  And now it looked as if, here and elsewhere, the Moonseed might reach those foundation rocks, the granite core of the continent itself, through this immense wound of rock and strata.

  This is not good, she thought. Not good at all.

  Well, then, we must do something about it. But what the hell she had no idea.

  Scott took her arm, and led her back towards the car.

  Scott started talking to her about the river ride she was going to have to take if she wanted to get any closer to those old Precambrian rocks. It meant a descent of five or six thousand feet, a rise in temperature of maybe twenty degrees. She calculated whether she would have the strength to undergo such a trip. And at the same time, she started to figure what she should tell the President, and how.

  A black hole rocket engine, firing wildly in the ruins of Venus. Now, what was the meaning of that?

  Strangeness. Too much of it, for one lifetime.

  The sunset crept on them. The colours deepened to rust, mile-long shadows flooding at perceptible speed across the land, and they walked back to the car.

  2

  Henry was flown, mostly at low altitude under the ash clouds, the length of Britain.

  Once, most of Britain was covered by a shallow ocean, which deposited gigantic chalk layers over the whole country. But then Britain tipped up. And the ice came, scraping most of the chalk off the top half of the island.

  Now, as he travelled south from Scotland, he traversed younger and younger landscapes: billion-year-old gabbros and granites and basalts in Scotland, belts of successively younger sedimentaries as he came down through England, until he reached the youngest of all, the marine Pleistocene clays and sands around London, less than sixty million years old.

  He could see the old buildings — churches, houses, pubs, even railway stations — which stood like geological markers, constructed of their area’s native rock. Britain was a small island, crammed with ten thousand years of history, a billion years of geology.

  The sheer size of London surprised Henry. He’d come to think of everything in Britain as being miniature scale. Even a place like Edinburgh was — had been — pretty small by the standards of many American cities.

  London, though, was different. He flew over mile after mile of grey suburbs, knots and twists of terraced houses and semis, spread like blankets over the gentle topography of the chalk landscape. His RAF pilot pointed out some of the logic, if you could call it that, that underlay the sprawl of outer London. It was really a collection of old villages — like Brentford and Harrow and Ealing and Richmond — that had been overwhelmed by the flood of building that had come after the war, but their identities were preserved in their names and the topology of the roads, which curled around the old village centres.

  The Thames coursed through the heart of the sprawl, a silver-blue thread, and as they flew over central London it was easy to use the river as a guide to pick out tourist highlights: the big ugly glass developments at Canary Wharf, where the old docks used to be, and ships from Britain’s global empire had once called; the tiny, jewel-like sandstone perfection of the Palace of Westminster, the seat of Parliament; the surprisingly elegant bridges that laced across the water; the spectacular cowl shapes of the Thames flood barrier.

  Traffic crowded the streets and highways, the metallic carapaces of cars and buses and lorries glimmering like so many beetles in the sun. Life was, obviously, going on here. It was as if the bad shit that had come down in Edinburgh, a bare four hundred miles away, had never happened.

  They landed at a floating heliport on the bank of the Thames, near a bridge the pilot said was called Blackfriars.

  Incredibly, he was taken to a hotel for the night; even more incredibly, he was going to have to wait until the next day — in fact, for twenty-four hours — before meeting members of the Government.

  So he arrived in an anonymous BMW in Soho, an area of tight, crowded roads, the cars cruising inches from the elbows of cappuccino-sipping customers of pavement cafes. Most of the population here looked young, sleek, dressed well if sometimes bizarrely; Venus protection had been subsumed into fashion, and the girls in their ponchos looked like butterflies.

  The car pulled into Frith Street, just off Soho Square. Henry got out with the holdall full of spare clothes and bathroom stuff that he’d requested on the way down from Edinburgh. His hotel was a neat little converted eighteenth-century house, another corner of Britain that was, no doubt, older than his entire country.

  His room turned out to be a box, a typical city centre room, no doubt ruinously expensive, but His Majesty’s Government could worry about that. His escort, a couple of bullshitting squaddies, were booked in the hotel, down the corridor.

  He threw his holdall down on the bed, shucked off his filthy clothes, and climbed straight into the shower, which was a modern fitting with a hot and powerful jet.

  Ash-grey shit soaked out of his skin, and made little whirlpools at the plug at his feet. Bits of burned Edinburgh, rock just a day old, the youngest rock on the planet.

  Drying off, he turned on the TV. All the regular programmes were suspended, save for one channel that was carrying children’s TV — he saw five seconds of it, weird little aliens that bounced around and spoke gibberish, Christ, bring back Sesame Street — and on all the other stations there was, of course, only one story.

  Images of Arthur’s Seat, before and after the explosion. Before: waving cultists in their purple pyjamas, upturned faces like daisies, maybe one of them Michael Dundas’s.

  And Arthur’s Seat after, a smouldering crater, still pumping out ash and steam.

  And all of the people, as volcanologists say, part of the sunset now.

  Here was the New Town after the pyroclastic flow, like an image of Hiroshima after the bombin
g: stumps of buildings, shorn off at little more than knee-level, surrounded by smashed and strewn rubble and covered by a ghostly powder-grey layer of ash, nothing left of the great Georgian design except the rectangular layout of the streets.

  There were people already picking through the rubble, some in volcanologists” protective suits, others, heroic, in nothing more than regular emergency gear. The scientists were recording what they could, pyrometers and thermocouples measuring the dwindling heat of the smashed ground. The rescue workers were using microphones and other gear to search, forlornly, for survivors, maybe people who had ridden out the ash storm in cellars. So far, the news guys said, not a one had been found.

  Henry could see how the heavy ash cloud, seeking the lowest points to pool like the sluggish liquid it was, had swept like a transient river around the other bony basalt outcrops, Calton Hill and the Castle; in fact most of the structures on those hilltops were still standing. But both plugs were marked, distinctly, by the cancerous grey scars of Moonseed pools. It would only be a matter of time before they went the way of the Seat, and added to the destruction of the area.

  And all the time the Moonseed was spreading, chewing up the Earth, disrupted briefly by the destruction it caused, but always returning, stronger and more widespread than ever.

  The cameras focused on the human misery, the scenes on the roads and assembly points and Rest Centres, improvised from schools and hospitals and leisure centres, most of them all but overwhelmed. People were crammed into whatever shelter could be found, bereft of their homes and belongings, lucky if they kept their families with them, stripped by the intrusive cameras of the last of their dignity.

  It was impossible to believe he was looking at a Western city, Henry thought uneasily.