Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  On it went: a lot of people.

  Some things got worse, as time went on.

  Like hygiene. Dog shit seemed to be everywhere. He found himself spending much of his mornings organizing volunteers on clean-up squads, and issuing warnings about the danger of children getting eye infections from the stuff.

  More food arrived, canned stuff from the local supermarkets. Ted wondered how long that would last. But he heard of fleets of Army choppers bringing in supplies from Glasgow and north England, and when it arrived it came in boxes marked prominently with the name of the supplying store, big black letters to display for the TV cameras.

  There were cameras everywhere, in fact. He found one crew filming a grinning care worker handing a sack of used toys sent from Boise, Idaho to some kid who was supposed to act grateful, a Scottish kid with her own life and dignity, in order to please the hearts of some beer-sodden arsehole on the other side of the planet, a kid who would forever be scarred by the experience. Ted had to be restrained, by Jane, from throwing the crew out.

  The theatre manager — her name was Siobhan Reader — was soon wrestling with longer-term problems. Like finance. It seemed the theatre would have to recover its costs from the local authority, who in turn would have to get it back from central government, all retrospectively, and all within the provisions of something called the Bellwin scheme which covered emergencies like this.

  And some of the residents here were actually asking for cash loans. With cash they could buy stuff from the local shops, which were still open, to tide them through the crisis. Many of them had left home with only electronic money, credit cards and Switch cards, which, when the telephone exchanges went down, had suddenly become useless.

  So Reader had obtained some money, twenty thousand pounds, as a loan from the theatre’s own bankers in Musselburgh, and was now trying to figure a way of accounting for the small hand-outs she was making to the families.

  But there were good things too. The Edinburgh Evening News was published every day, without a break, though Ted suspected it was being run up on a desktop publishing package on somebody’s home pc. It carried some news, mostly stale rehashes of the TV and radio bulletins, but it also ran long lists of personalized messages from the displaced people of the city. To Mary McClair from Vicky Norman. If you need a place to stay, please call… The mobile phones prevalent in the Centre were being used less for personal messages, and more as part of an informal communications network, spreading low-level news about the fate of people and places, even pets. One of the volunteer groups brought in printed T-shirts. NO WATER. NO FOOD. NO POWER. NO PROBLEM. They became a fashion accessory among the volunteers.

  They had a VIP visit. It was Dave Holland, a London politician, the environment secretary, a fat English bastard whose accent seemed to disappear down his throat. Trailed by two camera crews with glaring lights and gigantic boom mikes, he strode through the theatre, shaking hands with photogenic kids and care workers and volunteers. Ted couldn’t believe how much time and resource was taken up by catering for Holland, the security and route planning and all the rest of it.

  But it was good for morale, he was told.

  Holland made one substantive announcement. “There’s a wave of sympathy around the world for what you’re going through,” he said. “Everyone’s eyes are on you. There will be a rock concert in Wembley Stadium to raise relief funds. And we’re flying out the Hibs and Hearts squads—” A ragged cheer; they were Edinburgh’s two principal soccer teams. “—to play an exhibition game.”

  Rock music and soccer, Ted thought sourly.

  He actually got to meet Holland. The man came along a row of volunteers, introduced by Siobhan Reader, shaking hands and sweating heavily. When it was his turn, Ted asked, “When are you going to start evacuating Glasgow?”

  Holland laughed nervously and moved on.

  Later, Ted found himself in a huddle with Reader and Jack.

  Jack said, “I’d have asked him if Willie MacLeish is playing.” MacLeish was Hibs” star striker.

  “You’re right,” Ted said seriously. “I would have got more sense.”

  “And I’d have asked him,” Reader said stiffly, “if there’s any word of my husband.” The first time she’d mentioned him. And with that she turned and walked to her office, to start another sleepless night of work.

  Ted stared after her. She was, he’d first thought, just an ineffectual worker, and he’d treated her with contempt. The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  But she was, of course, a woman with a life of her own. A family maybe. And he’d never thought even to ask.

  The evenings were long.

  Just a day or two from near death, and boredom was becoming their biggest enemy.

  On Ted’s advice, Reader had banned alcohol, but allowed in TV, powered by a portable generator. The reception of the terrestrial stations was poor — local transmitters knocked out, lousy conditions because of the volcano weather lingering over Edinburgh — but satellite dishes seemed to work reasonably well. Reader had intended to show a steady diet of game shows, pop and movies — she even wanted to run videos — but Ted suggested that, except for kids” programming in the area set aside as a nursery, she simply run the news. People here wanted to know, after all.

  The news, the images from Edinburgh, worked to keep people quiet. Ribald cheers whenever somebody in the Rest Centre was shown.

  The Hibs-Hearts soccer match attracted the biggest crowds around the TVs. The game itself was played at Ibrox Stadium, the home of Glasgow Rangers, and the teams, depleted by the disaster, were reinforced by loan players from other clubs, in England and Scotland. There seemed a genuine warmth as the stranded people watched their teams battle it out, fans of the two clubs mingling without self-consciousness or conflict.

  When the game was done, the mood was subdued, it seemed to Ted: subdued, but somehow deepened. As if the televising of a soccer match, two scratch teams chasing a ball around a park, had moved people on a level the destruction of a city never could.

  Even the news of alcohol-fuelled rioting among Glasgow fans that followed the match didn’t seem to mar the mood.

  At the end of the fourth day, as the light was fading, Ted realized he hadn’t taken any air. So he walked out through the foyer, still crowded with new arrivals, and stepped into the comparatively fresh air of the patio outside.

  There was a pall of smoke to the west, over whatever was going on in Edinburgh. Helicopters flitted, their lights winking brightly. Some of them appeared to be dumping water or some kind of chemicals into the continuing inferno; others were dropping crates of supplies under blossoming parachute canopies to the pockets of survivors that remained. The small human activity, probing and challenging the work of the Moonseed, warmed Ted’s heart.

  Somehow, watching that, he found it easier to believe that Michael might yet have lived through all of that.

  He found a purpose, coalescing within him. He had to return. I’ll go in for Michael. And if I don’t find my son, maybe I’ll find the arsehole who lured him in there. Then we’ll see.

  He told Jane what he planned.

  “What? That’s ridiculous.”

  “But if it was Jack—”

  “I’d go. I’d go without hesitation.”

  And above their heads, the ash and smoke and steam merged into one hell of a sunset, a curtain of flame that reached to the police-blue zenith.

  The Rest Centre was actually quieter that night. Many people had found billets, or had been allowed to leave to find accommodation in hotels, or with relatives.

  Sleep again came easily to Ted. But he was woken at 3.00 a.m., by yelling voices.

  A middle-aged man — still dressed in the rumpled suit in which he’d arrived at the Rest Centre yesterday, straight from his job as lawyer or bank manager or accountant — had strangled that yapping Alsatian with his bare hands.

  4

  The journey into Tokyo was an ordeal for Declan Hague
.

  May was the season for the school children to be taken in parties to the nation’s show places. Venus and the volcano ash hadn’t put a stop to that, and they seemed to be everywhere: on the trains and the stations and the streets, with their mobile phones and their laughing faces and their fashionable rad-gear and their electronic toys. And everywhere he went, they seemed to home in on him.

  Well, he could understand why. He was a combination of two rarities for these kids: a gaijin — a foreigner — and a monk. Here they came in little groups of three or four, boys and girls alike in their ankle socks and navy or black uniforms and ties, grinning and giggling and holding up their disposable cameras.

  The kids pursued most of the few gaijin on Tokyo’s crowded streets. But he thought there was more to it than that. About him, they probably sensed weakness, on some subliminal level.

  Weakness. Fear.

  Or even a whiff of danger.

  After all, it was because of children younger than these teenagers that he had been forced to leave Ireland, leave the Church, and come all the way around the world to this place, to immerse himself in the placidity of another religion.

  But he got through the day somehow, smiling and nodding and waving away their requests for photographs. And besides, his determination to complete the mission he had set himself would carry him through.

  He walked the mile or so south from the Tokyo JR station to Ginza, the most famous entertainment and shopping district in Japan — so he had been told; he’d never been here before. What he found was an oddly American-flavoured district of glittering, high-rise buildings laid out on a rectangular street pattern, neon signs bright enough to dazzle even by day.

  Everywhere was crowded, of course, but without the sense of crush and bustle he’d grown up with in Dublin, even London; that, of course, was because of the Japanese habit of politeness and deference, all that smiling and bowing that had seemed so odd to him at first, but which now he understood as a vital social lubricant, the only way so many people could get along on this cramped little island chain.

  Politeness and deference — from everyone except the school kids, attracted endlessly by the gaijin mask he could never take off.

  And it was in Ginza — in a small (but expensive) shop near the Sony Building — that he found what he was looking for.

  In amongst the trashy Buddhist charms and plastic fans and pictures of twelve-year-old pop stars, there was row on row of vials of ash-grey dust: rock from Edinburgh. Each vial, he found, came with a certificate of authenticity from some geology institute he’d never heard of, and a list of the uses to which people were putting this stuff. Scattering it over their Zen gardens. Putting it in their Shinto shrines. Even mixing it with milk and drinking it.

  For this anonymous-looking volcanic ash had been — if the stories were true, if the ash were genuine — transformed by the ghostly touch of the Moon itself.

  Declan bought three vials. Then he turned and, without hesitation, made his way back to the JR station.

  Home for Declan, for the last decade, had been a small Shinto shrine called Futaarasan, which stood on the north bank of Lake Chuzenji, some hundred miles north of Tokyo. Now he retraced his journey to Futaarasan, taking the Shinkansen bullet train from the capital to Nikko, and the bus to Chuzenji.

  At last, cradling his vials, Declan made his patient way back along the lake’s north shore road towards the shrine.

  Chuzenji was once, probably, an attractive area, he thought. But the town had become a trashy resort, feeding off the cable-car that took visitors down the river gorge to see the Kegon Waterfall. Through the trees that lined the lake, he could see pleasure boats made absurdly in the shape of swans, Disney-style, plying back and forth.

  If they had done this to a site in Britain or Ireland, he thought, everybody would have said it was a typical desecration. But the Japanese were, maybe, a little more mellow. This was a culture where monks would quietly earn a living from charging for entry to their temples and shrines — even for services — as well as rake off hundreds of yen apiece for ridiculous little charms, like something out of the Middle Ages.

  With relief, he returned to the shrine itself.

  The shrine was modest. Its main buildings — vermilion-painted wood topped with blue tiles — were grouped around a central square. Facing the lake was the haidin, the hall of worship, and on either side were the honden, the main hall, and the homotsu-kan, the treasure house. Declan hurried through the square to the torii gate which stood at its rear, a plain affair of grey wood, two uprights topped by two cross-pieces. Beyond the torii stood a narrow vermilion archway, and behind this a steep flight of steps soared up the hillside.

  Declan paused a moment to gather his strength; he still felt exhausted from his unwelcome encounter with Tokyo. But he set his sandalled feet on the first of the steps, and began the familiar climb.

  Futaarasan Shrine nestled at the feet of Mount Nantai, a green-clad volcanic cone which rose above it, reaching all of a mile and a half above sea level. Futaara was actually an old name for the cone, and the true centre of the Shrine was set at the lip of the caldera at the summit. Each August pilgrims would come this way, through the old torn gate, leaving behind the absurd world of charms and plastic swans and tourists, and climb up here to the violent, quiescent heart of the volcano, just as Declan now climbed, alone.

  He knew he couldn’t wait until August; he knew he must do this now.

  The climb was long and arduous, and by the time it was completed he was sweating hard, his breath coming in gasps. But the view from the lip of the caldera was magnificent: the old volcano mouth itself, the numerous mountain lakes and volcanic cones, rounded and furred over by trees, and Lake Chuzenji, blue and sleek and beautiful from this distance, a vista too remote to be spoiled by the foolishness of its visitors.

  Japan was built on the junction between plates deep in the Earth, and was plagued by volcanism and earthquakes. And so everywhere you went, rounded volcanic hills stuck out of the landscape. It gave the landscape a sense of impermanence, he thought, and also a human scale.

  The Japanese had been shaped by their landscape. It seemed to him you just couldn’t build a giant Gothic cathedral in the middle of all this. Japan was about continuity and reflection and calm. The Japanese even had two religions, Buddhism and Shinto, working side by side without a hint of conflict, which was quite a contrast with Ireland.

  And that sense of calm had been what he’d sought when he’d come out here.

  He felt a sense of that old panic, of enclosure, as unwelcome memories of the past stirred in his hind brain. But he had done those things, hurt those children, and, even a decade later, he could never remove that scar from his soul — as they would, surely, never forgive or understand, and as those in authority would never hesitate to punish him, if they could identify and trap him.

  But then he was already trapped, by his own addled personality. For he knew he would do those things again, given the opportunity, the chance of secrecy. Even as he encountered the schoolchildren in Tokyo, he had felt his ageing loins stir, unable to dispel the endless calculations, the intricate maze of actions that might lead to a new release of his lust.

  So he must never give himself such opportunities again.

  He took out his little vials of Edinburgh dust, and smiled.

  He descended a little way into the caldera, past the trodden paths and platforms, until he was walking on bare volcanic rock. Then he opened his vials of Scottish dust — they smelled, he thought, of autumn bonfires — and he spilled them, carefully, on the ground. Delicately, with his fingertips, he rubbed the ash into the rock, as if applying some gentle unguent.

  The ghost touch of the Moon, brought to Mount Nantai.

  When it was done, he felt a great peace. He stayed for a while, as the evening gathered, and the spectacular volcanic sunset crept over the sky.

  Perhaps this offering would propitiate whatever gods resided here. Or perhaps it would
destroy them.

  Perhaps it would destroy him.

  And that would not be such a bad thing, if it reduced the number of future days he would have to face, the days he would have to wrestle down the monsters that lay inside him.

  In the caldera, where he had delivered the dust, the rock surface glowed softly.

  5

  In his London hotel room, waiting for transport to the US, Henry tried to nail down the thought that Blue’s remarks had sparked.

  Okay, address the worst case. The Moonseed was already spreading globally. What if it couldn’t be stopped? What then?

  Eventually we will run out of planet. But not, he thought, of planets.

  What was he thinking of? Evacuating the world, when they ran out of planet? Like When Worlds Collide?

  It was, of course, impossible. And even if you evacuated a handful of people, you needed somewhere to go, somewhere you could live off the land and not in a spacesuit.

  Ideally, somewhere immune to the Moonseed.

  …The thought coalesced, like crystals forming in supersaturated solution.

  Damn it, maybe there was such a place. But it was a hell of a long way away. And he might be wrong anyhow.

  The only way anyone would know would be by sending someone there…

  Suddenly, he realized he had to talk to Geena.

  From memory, he called the number of her new apartment in downtown Houston. He got an answering machine, saying she wouldn’t be back for days. Dumb, Geena. An open invitation to the bad guys.

  He tried JSC, but the receptionist there didn’t seem to believe who he was, and wouldn’t put him through.

  He tried the press office.

  He got nowhere trying to prove his identity. If he wanted to hear an astronaut, they said, he should log onto the World Wide Web in a couple of hours, to watch an online chat between a group of astronauts, in training for upcoming missions, and a bunch of schoolkids from Iowa. It sounded to him as if the NASA guys had been fielding a lot of shit all day, no doubt the usual end-of-the-world demands and queries and accusations of cover-up that NASA always got when something bad came down.