Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

I’d Fly Around The Universe…

They were mostly slim to the point of thinness. They didn’t seem cold, despite the paucity of their clothes, the keenness of the wind up here. They were singing with a happy-clappy gusto.

There was a boy standing at the centre of the loose arc, age eighteen or so, skinny as a rake. When he saw Ted and Morag approaching he got to his feet, a little stiffly, and approached.

“Welcome,” he said. “My name is Bran.”

“Now then, Hamish,” Ted said stiffly.

Morag glanced at Ted. “You know this gentleman?”

“Used to.”

“Would you mind telling me what you’re doing up here, sir?”

“Watching the Moonseed, of course,” Bran-Hamish said.

“The Moonseed?”

“All this started just after that Moon rock was brought to the university. And Venus, of course. Fantastic, isn’t it? Two thousand years of waiting—”

Morag walked forward. The members of the group, still singing, looked up at her. Before each of them there was a small cairn, of broken fragments of basalt. When she looked further up the slope, she saw broken ground, exposed silver dust, loose vegetation floating on the dust. Another pool. The smell of ozone was sharp.

“Every morning we mark it with a cairn,” Bran said. “And every morning it has come further down the slope.”

“You’re a fruitcake,” Ted said bluntly.

“Maybe,” Bran said amiably. “But at least we’re here. Where are the scientists, the TV crews, the coppers—”

Morag thought she could answer that. She imagined her own desk sergeant fending off nutcase reports from dog-walkers, about an oddity no one could classify.

Morag frowned, pointing up the slope. “Where are the other cairns? The ones from yesterday, and the day before.”

“Gone,” Bran said simply. “Consumed, every morning. Like your fry-up breakfasts, Ted.”

Morag straightened her cap. “Sir, I think you’d be advised to come away from here.”

Bran spread his hands. “Why? Are we breaking the law?”

“No. And I can’t compel you to move.”

“Well, then.”

She pointed to the dust. “But it’s obviously not safe.”

“We’ve never been safer. Not since the Romans came have we been so — close.”

Ted pulled a face at Morag. “I told you. Fruitcake.”

Bran-Hamish just laughed, and resumed his seat with the others.

Morag and Ted walked away.

“Well,” Ted said. “Now you’ve seen it. What are you going to do?”

Morag hesitated.

She’d never faced anything like this before, in her brief police career.

She’d had some emergency training, at police college and since joining the station, with the council’s emergency planning people. It had all been rather low-key, underfunded and routine. Britain was a small, stable island. Nothing much in the way of disasters ever happened.

Morag had not been trained to handle the unexpected.

“I can’t see this is any kind of criminal matter. And this isn’t yet an emergency.”

“It isn’t? Are you sure? What if it keeps growing?” He eyed the horizon. “You know, cats are smart animals,” he said. “Sensitive. Sometimes they react before the rest of us when something is going wrong.” He hesitated. “I’ve not told Ruth, but I haven’t seen Willis for a couple of days either.”

“Something going wrong? Like what?” There was a sound like subdued thunder. Morag and Ted exchanged a glance. Then they began to hurry back the way they had come, around the shoulder of the crag. The cultists came with them, running over the basalt outcrops in their thin slippers.

They came around the brow of the hill. They stopped perhaps a hundred yards from St Anthony’s Chapel. The old ruin was sinking.

The single large section of upright wall, two storeys high, was tipping sideways, visibly, a ruined Pisa. But even as it did so its base was sinking into the softened ground Its upper structure, never designed for such treatment, was crumbling; great blocks of sandstone were breaking free, and went clattering down the wall’s sloping face, making the dull thunderous noise she had heard. One of the lower wall remnants, she saw, had already all but disappeared, its upper edge sinking below the closing dust as she watched.

It was like watching some immense stone ship, holed, sink beneath the stony waves of this plug of lava.

Around them, the cultists were jumping up and down, whooping and shouting.

Morag shook her head. “What does it mean, Ted?”

“I’ve no idea,” Ted said grimly. “Ask these loonie buggers. I think it’s time you made a report, girlie.”

“Yeah.”

She lifted her lapel radio to her lips.

Jane showed up in the lab, a little before noon. Mike actually escorted her into the clean room area. The staff had got the clean room procedures beefed up a little by now, and so Jane was wearing the regulation white bunny suit and cloth trilby, blue plastic overshoes.

“Hi.”

Henry, with his hands inside a glove box, did a double take. “Oh. It’s you.” He fumbled the petrological slide he was handling, and tried to pull his hands out of the arm-length rubber gloves; he fumbled that too.

Her face didn’t crack a smile. “Sorry. I’m disturbing you.”

“No, no. That’s okay. I just didn’t recognize you.” He studied her. “You look—”

“Different? Not so threatening in this male scientist disguise?” She wandered around the lab, passing between the stainless steel NASA glove boxes, the low fluorescent lights catching the wisps of hair that protruded from her hat. “I got Mike to sign me in for an hour. I wanted to see your world. I promise I won’t touch anything.”

“If you do, you’ll be zapped by NASA laser beams.”

“So these are Moon rocks.”

“Yeah. Come see this.” He led her to the centre of the room, where the largest single isolation tank stood, on four fat steel legs. She followed him, and they stood side by side, peering into the tank.

Standing this close to Geena, he remembered, there had always been the faint smell of deodorants, shampoo, perfume. The chemicals industry of the late twentieth century. But with Jane there was only the autumn-ash scent of her hair. Like Moon dust, he thought absently.

They’d been seeing each other, on and off, for a month now. Dinners. Walks, drives. A lot of gentle sparring as they picked at each other’s old wounds. Goodnight kisses like he used to get from his aunt.

Maybe he could detect the stirring of some kind of attraction in her, on a subconscious level. The way volcano junkies could sometimes sense the stirring of magma pockets far underground, before the most sensitive of seismometers showed a trace.

After all, she was here.

Or maybe that was all self-deluding bull. He had been disastrously and persistently wrong about Geena. After a month he still wasn’t sure.

The box contained a big, battered case made of aluminum. It was open. Inside the box was a series of dirty Teflon bags, some of them slit open.

Jane said, “What’s this?”

“An Apollo Sample Return Container, in NASA-ese. A rock box, to you and me. This is one of the boxes Jays Malone and his buddy filled up on the lunar surface, with Moon rocks they put in those numbered Teflon bags. And it was left unopened in twenty-five years.”

“You’re kidding.”

“More than half the Moon rocks have never been touched. We had to sterilize the box, with ultraviolet light and acid, dried it with nitrogen, punctured it to let out whatever trace of lunar atmosphere was in there—”

“Why? You can’t think there is any danger of contamination.”