Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

Oddly, she found herself relaxing.

Her fear was gone.

The kids were safe. William would look after them. And the one in her belly was with her; it would never know suffering.

She was looking up into a cyclone; she could see a pillar of fire, laced with flame and debris, reaching high into the sky, dragging the flames together.

She held her hand up before her face. It burst into flame, just like that, her fingers burning like the candles on little Billy’s cake.

There was an instant of glowing pain.

Henry, in lunar orbit, studied the summaries on his laptop.

Something immense and restless was pushing out of the Earth, disturbing the thin blanket of rock and life that overlay the hot interior.

The Moonseed had devoured a goodly portion of the asthenosphere, the mushy semi-solid layer that contained the hotter magma of the deeper mantle. A magma plume seemed to be starting up beneath the Midland Valley, a fountain of liquid rock like the ones which had built Hawaii, Iceland.

But if that was true, it was a plume of a volume and extent and speed of efflux that nobody had modelled before. Already there had been disturbances all over the Valley: the cracking of extinct volcanic plugs, the slippage of faults that had been stable for millions of years.

The destruction of the cities had caused human misery on a biblical scale.

All of it, Henry knew, would be dwarfed by what was to come.

Henry, sailing through black and white celestial geometry, felt like a detached god, unable to imagine the human suffering, souls as transient as sparks in a fire.

He was glad, as they prepared for the landing, there was little time for reflection.

Blue Ishiguro — wheezing, asthmatic, lungs full of ash — made his camp at the top of Dumfoyne. With relief, he set down his seismometers and miniaturized cospec and pyrometers, tiltmeters and cameras, and connected them up via a laptop pc to a satellite transponder.

Dumfoyne was a lumpy volcanic vent. The hilly country of the Midland Valley, stained green and purple with heather, rolled away around him. He could see the little town of Strathblane perhaps a couple of miles away, compact and green and nondescript, cupped by the hills.

In his brief time here Blue had come to appreciate the Scottish landscape, even away from the more spectacular scenery of the Highlands. This land, shaped by the ice sheets and punctuated by stubborn igneous outcrops, was built on a scale that was almost human, a scale that reminded him of Japan, and it seemed to him that the character of the people had been shaped in the same way. Modest. Robust.

But already the landscape was marred by the events of the last few weeks.

That little town was deserted, for instance: no vehicles moved there, no smoke curled into the air, no children played. And the blue sky was overlaid by thick black clouds, ash-laden. The clouds gave the place the tinge of autumn, of decline.

And that was surely appropriate, for winter was drawing close for Scotland now; little of this panorama would survive what was to come.

…The ground shook, subtly.

The catfish was stirring. Blue could smell sulphur, and it seemed to him that the ground under his buttocks was a little warm.

Not long, then.

He unfolded a small package containing smoked salmon sandwiches — his favourite Scottish delicacy — and a bottle of Tennent’s lager, the beer to which he’d taken an unreasonable liking.

ISS, Ishiguro. You’re right at the epicentre, Blue, so far as we can tell.

Blue adjusted his Madonna headset. “Thank you, Sixt. If ‘epicentre’ is the appropriate word.”

We don’t really have the words, I guess, said Sixt Guth, in orbit on the International Space Station. The Moonseed is taking us into new territory.

“I am atop the vent called Dumfoyne,” reported Blue. “I have a good view of the western Campsie Fells from here. I can see how the Clyde Plateau lavas, contemporaneous with this vent, form a steep scarp over Lower Carboniferous sediments, though this is partly obscured by a landslip—”

Fuck the context. You should be getting your sorry ass out of there.

“Watch me run, when it comes.”

But the argument was ritual. Sixt knew Blue wasn’t going to move from this spot.

Radar mounted on the Space Station had shown that the ground was uplifting, slowly but steadily, all across the Midland Valley of Scotland. False colour images showed a bulls-eye shape, ragged circles of increasing altitude. And, as ancient cones belched fire, the deformation was increasing in scale and rate.

And Blue was right at the centre of things, right at the eye of that NASA false colour storm of new contours.

Like most geologists, Blue had often chafed at the absurd rapidity of human attention spans, even lifetimes, compared to the slow grandeur of the geological processes he studied. He’d been attracted to volcanism because at least it enabled him to see things happen.

And today, something strange — even unprecedented — was going to happen. On such a day, with such an event impending, this was the only place to be.

They made Henry put on a POS, a portable oxygen system, for all of twelve hours before he entered the all-oxygen atmosphere of the EVA suit. The POS was just a face mask, an oxygen bottle, a pressure regulator and a lith hydroxide cartridge to scrub out carbon dioxide. The idea was to flush the nitrogen out of his system, to save him from the bends. After the first couple of hours it was as uncomfortable as hell.

They were, it seemed, going to have to spacewalk to reach the lander.

“Spacewalk?” Henry remembered movie images of Apollo astronauts, guys casually swimming through pressurized tunnels to their spacious and comfortable two-stage LM, with its big descent engine for landing, and smaller ascent stage to bring them home, and a cabin big enough to support two men for three days… “This isn’t Apollo, is it?”

Arkady grinned. “It has been rather necessary to — improvise certain elements.”

“How reassuring.”

“But this is how we planned to reach the Moon: a space walk from a Soyuz derivative to a lightweight lander.” Arkady shrugged. “It is not impossible.”

“But you never tested it out in practice.”

“Since our launch rockets blew up on the pad, we never got the chance. To my eternal regret. Now. You must suit up.”

Geena and Arkady began swimming briskly around the orbital compartment, pulling pieces of spacesuit from lockers. These suits were an American design and they looked bulkier and more rigid than the Russian design he’d worn to Earth orbit. There were inner coveralls of what looked like Spandex, and chunky outer suits that came in two halves, top and bottom. The halved suits swam fitfully around the cabin, as if half-alive.

Arkady helped him prepare. “These are Space Shuttle EVA suits,” he said sternly. “They are called EMUs, for extravehicular mobility units—”

“How did they know my size?”

“They don’t,” Geena said stiffly. “One size fits all.”

Arkady said, “The suit is like an independent spaceship. It will keep you alive for seven hours. Long enough to reach the surface of the Moon, all the way to the old Apollo site, if all goes well.”

Henry had to strip to his underwear, and he switched from his oxygen mask to a scuba-diver mouthpiece. Arkady helped him climb into his Spandex mesh cooling garment. It was a one-piece affair, with water pipes woven into the fabric, and air ducts fixed to the limbs. It was a struggle to squeeze his legs down through the tight neck.

When he was done, he had to hook a little rubber loop over each thumb, to stop the undergarment riding up his arms later.