Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

Now the jokes by those old Apollo guys didn’t seem so funny. Sixty-nine miles high? Watch out for the seventy-mile mountain on the Moon’s backside…

He craned to see more. This module had been designed for survival, not as a viewing platform, and it was unbelievably frustrating to be so close and not to be able to see properly. Like driving through a national park, he thought, in a Sherman tank.

As he skimmed around the rocky limb, passing from shadow to light, he learned that shadows — the angle of the sun — were the key to seeing, on the Moon. When the sun rose, other features would become more prominent, like the brighter ray systems. They looked, he thought, like the marks left where a pickaxe had dug into concrete.

But when he was subsolar, with the sun behind him, the shadows were flattened, or disappeared altogether, as if he was looking down at the bleached floor of some dead ocean.

In fact, when the sun was right behind him, the lunar landscape seemed to brighten suddenly. Heiligenschein, the lunar scientists called it. The saint’s halo: some obscure effect of the dust.

But navigation using landmarks was going to be difficult, at high lunar noon. He conceded the wisdom of the old Apollo planners, who had sent all their guys in to land at lunar morning, when the low sun would send forward nice long crisp shadows for seeing…

While he analysed, Geena and Arkady were sightseeing.

“It’s colourless,” Geena said. “Basically shades of grey. Like plaster of paris, or maybe a deep, greyish builder’s sand.”

“Or pumice stone,” Arkady said. “Or a beach. Perhaps after a picnic. All churned up by a volleyball game, embers of the bonfire everywhere…”

“Bullshit,” said Henry, angrily. “Arkady, you spent too long on Cocoa Beach. This is why they made a mistake sending you guys, you aviators, in the first place, on Apollo. You tourists can’t even describe what you’re seeing.”

“What’s to describe?” Geena said grimly. “It’s just a ball of rock. Christ, it looks bleak. A huge expanse of nothing—”

Henry, irritated, shook his head. “That’s because you don’t know how to look at it—”

“Oh, my,” Arkady said now. “Will you look at that.”

Henry and Geena crowded to see.

Here she was, right on cue, as they completed their audacious orbit out of her sight for the first time in their lives: Mother Earth, right where she should be, rising above the surface of the Moon, a blue crescent hanging in the black sky.

Even from here, you could see volcano smoke.

“…Oh, man, that’s great,” Geena said. “Wow, is that pretty.”

Arkady started taking pictures of Earth with his Hasselblad. “I hope these come out.”

“You sure you’re getting it?”

“I think so…”

And so on. Henry sank back into his couch. It was Apollo 8 all over again, he thought, the astronauts ignoring the unexplored wastes below them, for the sake of a few tourist snaps of a place they’d spent their whole lives. It was such a cliché…

But he found a lump in his throat.

This is ridiculous, he thought. What am I, a salmon dreaming of the birthing river?

He tried to focus his attention on the Moon. But some part of him, buried deep in his hind brain, made him look up at the rising Earth, again and again, as Geena and Arkady crowded to take their pictures.

The sea was sharply cold, but when William’s head was out of the water he could feel it being cooked by the heat of the skeletal, smouldering wreck of the burning rig, so he had to duck under the surface as much as he could manage.

There were no lifeboats, but there was buoyancy foam here from a smashed boat, and he and four others were clinging to it, including Jackie Brown. William couldn’t get to a foothold, and his arms were getting weaker, but he didn’t want to drag some other guy off and back into the water.

There were people just floating in the water, screaming from the pain of their burns. There was nothing William or anybody else could do for them. There were bodies, too, strips of flesh peeling off them.

The air stank here, that rotten-egg sulphide smell.

And now there was a new explosion, behind him, from the ocean.

He turned in the water, clinging to his scraps of foam.

There were explosions coming towards him, in a line maybe five hundred yards long. Ash and steam plumed into the air, and fell back into the water. The steam was gathering into a cloud that soon drifted over the five of them, heavy droplets, hot and damp, that clung to their skin, and made it impossible to breathe without sucking in moisture.

William screamed. Not from pain — from bewilderment. Wasn’t the rig explosion enough? How could there be more? Wasn’t that one thing enough?

…But now there was something under his booted feet.

Surprised, he looked down.

Rock. Lumps of it clustered together, the size and shape of pillows, just four or five feet under the surface. And a little further out he thought he could see more of these pillow rocks forming. It was some kind of lava. A sack-like skin would form over a lump of red-glowing, sticky rock. The skin would solidify, then burst, and the lava would squeeze out like toothpaste, and start to form another pillow.

Volcanic stuff, he supposed. The kind of thing that had knackered Edinburgh. It must be what had wrecked the rig, this crap bubbling up from the ocean bed.

But now, maybe, he could use it.

Cautiously, he rested his feet on a white pillow boulder. The rock was hot, but his heavy boots protected him. He was able to loosen his grip on the foam fragment, and his arms ached with release.

He reached out to the others. Here came Jackie Brown. One of the younger men had given Jackie his life jacket, but even so, Jackie was exhausted, ashen-faced, barely awake.

William stood on the new rock, clinging to Jackie, holding him up.

The steam cloud cleared.

On the rig, he could see men on the heli-deck. They were waving their arms amid the smoke and flame, pleading to be taken off, but there was nobody to respond. Even if choppers had been near, they couldn’t have approached through the heat and smoke.

He saw men and women climbing down the legs into the water. Badly burned, terribly burned — some had their faces burned off — but still moving. The rig was tipped through thirty degrees, and looked as if it would fall over any minute.

There were more explosions in the water behind him, as this weird volcanic stuff rebuilt the sea bed. But he was, incredibly, standing on stable ground here.

He might live through this. Stand here, literally stand in the sea, until the choppers came, get himself saved by the volcano stuff that had destroyed the rig, costing probably a hundred lives.

Incredible.

William was alive, where so many had died, and he knew he would take a long, long time to come to terms with that.

In the far distance, he saw the glint of helicopter blades, bright against the huge pillar of ash and steam that hung over Glasgow, and he thought of Jenny and the kids.

The walls of fire broke through the line of ruined buildings to the north.

People started to panic, to push to the south. Jenny struggled to her feet. But the heat from the south was also blistering.

And now the fire gushed like a fluid, from the north, and swept across the ground.

Ash and cinders rained down on Jenny, and she screamed, and tried to keep it out of her hair. Bags and parcels, dumped on the ground, burst into flame. People were running everywhere, but they were falling, popping into flame before they stopped moving. But she seemed to be alone, with nowhere to run.

The fire rushed at her, a glowing fist. She was knocked onto her back by a red-hot wind.