Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“Even my phone’s been off since I got up. I had to walk down the road to the public phone box and you wouldn’t believe the filth…”

Morag got out as quickly as she could, reported into the station, and walked back up the road to Ted Dundas’s.

She sat in his kitchen — warm, smelling so thickly of bacon she could feel her arteries furring up just sitting here — and let him make her a mug of strong tea. He boiled up a pan on a battered camping stove, propped up on his gas hob.

“The gas is off,” Ted explained. “You saw the repair crew in the road. Bunch of bloody cowboys,” he said amiably. “I heard old Dougie at number fifteen complaining about it, and he said he’d heard someone else had called them in to look at a leak. Dougie heard that because they’d come to borrow his mobile phone; their phone was out.”

Mrs Clark’s phone had been cut too. “Ted, what about your phone line?”

“Snafu. But I have a mobile. But you can hang the bloody phone; what bothers me is the cable TV. I was watching the baseball from Japan. Got to the fourth innings before it cut out.”

“Um.” Cable and phone lines and gas lines, all out. Morag turned over the possibilities. Was it possible one of those cack-handed crews, doing some innocent repairs, had cut through the other service lines? It wouldn’t be the first time. Or what about deliberate vandalism?

“You own a cat, don’t you, Ted?”

“The cat owns me, more like.”

“I just can’t see what people like about the bloody creatures.”

“Aye, well, cats are unpleasant and unnecessarily cruel predators. And it’s soggy and sentimental to think anything else.”

“But you keep one anyhow.”

“I told you. I think Willis keeps me.” He poured her more tea. “We have a partnership of equals, me and that animal.”

“Where is he now?”

He eyed her. “Not here.”

The house shuddered gently.

Concentric ripples on the meniscus of her tea, like a tube tram passing far beneath the foundations. Except there was no metro in Edinburgh. Or maybe like a heavy lorry rolling by, shaking the ground.

But Viewcraig Street was a cul-de-sac.

She glanced up at Ted. He was watching her carefully.

“Funny weather,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Listen, do you have a couple of minutes? There’s something I’d like you to take a look at.”

They walked out to the back of Ted’s house, towards Arthur’s Seat. They headed up the slope towards St Anthony’s Chapel. Soon they were off the path and climbing over a rising rocky slope; the grass slithered under Morag’s polished shoes. Once they’d risen twenty yards or so above the level of the road, the Edinburgh wind started to cut into her.

“I’m not equipped for a hike,” she said.

“You’ll be fine.” Ted’s grizzled pillar of a head protruded from the neck of his thick all-weather rad-proof jacket. His legs worked steadily, hard and mechanical, and his breath was deep, calm and controlled.

It was quiet, she noticed absently. There was the moan of the wind through the grass, the distant wash of traffic noise from the city. But that was about all.

What was missing?

She stopped. “Bird song,” she said.

“What?”

“I can’t hear any bird song. Can you? That’s why it’s so quiet.”

He nodded, and walked steadily on.

A few dozen yards further, Ted halted. He pointed up the slope, towards the grey, brooding pile of the Chapel, where it sheltered under the crag, still a couple of hundred yards away. “There,” he said. “What do you make of that?”

“What?”

“Don’t they teach you observation any more? Look, girl.”

She looked, and stepped forward a couple more paces.

Under scattered fragments of broken orange-brown igneous rock, under green scraps of grass and heather and moss, there was a silvery pool. It clung to the outline of the crag, as if the rock had been painted.

“Now,” said Ted, “this used to be solid rock. I wouldn’t step much further.”

“Why not?”

He bent and picked up a chunk of loose rock. With a reasonably lithe movement he threw it ahead of her, into the dust.

It sank out of sight, immediately, as if falling into a pond.

“Wow,” she said. “How far does this go?”

“I don’t know. There seem to be other pools, up around the summit, and then the odd outbreak like this one. Like something coming through the rock, somehow.”

“Has anybody been hurt up here?”

“Sunk in the dust, you mean? Nothing’s been reported, so far as I know.”

She thought. “No, it hasn’t.” She’d have heard. “So what’s caused it?”

“Well, hell, I don’t know. I’m no scientist. I’m just an observant copper, like you. What else do you notice?”

She looked around, trying to take in the scene as a whole. Her skirt flapped around her legs, irritating her.

“I think the profile has changed. Of the Seat.”

“Very good. On the slope we’re standing on, which is no more than six or eight per cent, I’d say there has been a slip, overall, of ten or fifteen feet. And in the steeper slope at the back of the Dry Dam, for instance, it’s a lot more than that.”

“You think so?”

“You can hear it. Especially at night. Rock cracking. Little earthquakes, that shake the foundations of your house.”

She stepped forward, cautiously; she had no desire to imitate the fate of Ted’s pebble. When she’d got to where she judged the edge of the dust pool to be — still standing on firm, unbroken basalt, maybe three feet from the lip of the dust — she crouched down.

The dust was fine-grained, like hourglass sand. It seemed to be shifting, subtly, in patterns she couldn’t follow. It was more like watching boiling fluid than a solid.

She thought she could smell something. Perhaps it was sulphur, or chlorine.

Occasionally she thought she could see some kind of glow, coming from the dust where it was exposed. But it was sporadic and half-hidden. She’d once flown over a storm in a 747; looking out of the window, at lightning sparking purple beneath cotton-wool cloud layers, was something like this.

“Come on,” Ted said. “I need to show you something else.” He headed down the slope, and started walking around the pool.

She straightened up carefully, and went to follow Ted.

She said, “You think this has something to do with the loss of the lines? The TV and gas and phone—”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said mildly. “Can’t say how far underground it spreads, how far it has got.”

“But if there are land slips going on, some kind of subsidence—”

“You could get line breaks. Yes. There have been scientists up here, poking and prodding away. There’s an American chap my son works with… But they’re just recording, measuring. I think someone should be doing something. Taking it a bit more seriously.”

They climbed around the crag. They were paralleling the edge of the funny dust, Morag saw. It made for a rough circle, she supposed, patches of it draped across the breast of the land. But the edge of the circle was rough and irregular; in some places necks of the dust and broken ground came snaking down the hillside, perhaps carried there by some slip or a fault in the basalt, and they had to descend to avoid it.

Now, Morag heard singing. I Wish I Was A Spaceman / The Fastest Guy Alive… It sounded like a TV theme tune.

“Good Christ,” Ted said. “I haven’t heard that in thirty years.”

“It sounds like kids” TV.”

“So it is, my dear. But long before your time.”

They entered the Dry Dam and came on a line of people. They were dressed in some kind of purple uniform, and they were sitting in a loose circular arc that embraced the hillside, and they were singing.