Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“What?”

“Once it gets into the mantle, out of our reach, there will be no way of stopping it.”

And it’s growing, she thought, every day spreading a little further down the flanks of Arthur’s Seat, and into its rocky heart. And then —

Kaboom, she thought. Like Venus. That’s what Henry is thinking now.

Breach of quarantine; infected rock.

And she remembered a walk up Arthur’s Seat, a vial of dust, scattered on basalt.

My God, she thought.

Mike.

Later, when Henry was asleep, she got up and looked into Jack’s room. The boy was sleeping, his hair spilled on his pillow. She felt torn. She wanted to hold him, as if he was a baby again. But she knew she mustn’t wake him.

Already, she found her tentative acceptance of what Henry had said was slipping away.

Denial, she thought. I’m in denial. Well, maybe. She just didn’t want to believe in this stuff. Not with Jack in the world.

She went back to bed.

She was woken by thunder. Henry was already gone.

She lay in her bed, still only half-awake, the flat morning sunlight already warming the outside of her drawn curtains.

Thunder.

She thought it over. Like giant footfalls in the distance. Like a door slamming deep underground.

Thunder, on a morning that was obviously clear and calm?

Was it more than that? Had something actually jolted her awake?

She reached for her watch. Not long after 6.00 a.m.

Jack stood at the door, in his Hibs soccer-strip pyjamas. “Mum?”

“Go back to bed. It was only thunder.”

“Granddad’s up. He says it was an explosion.”

“Where’s Uncle Mike?”

“I don’t know. Should we get dressed?”

Now her father came to the door. He was already wearing his battered old donkey jacket, and he was pulling his trousers over his pyjama bottoms.

“Dad, what was that noise?”

“I’m not sure. It came from Abbeyhill.” The area just north of Arthur’s Seat, a half-mile away. “I’m going over there.” He glanced at Jack. “I think this wee fellow should have a day off school today.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll pack our bags.” He ruffled Jack’s mop of sleep-stiffened hair. “We’ll go for a holiday on the coast for a couple of days, will we?”

“Dad, I can’t just take him out of school. Where’s Mike?”

“Not here.” Ted glanced at her empty bed. “Neither is yer man, I take it,” he said.

“No.”

“I think you’d better find Mike,” Ted told her. “We should be together.”

“But the shop—”

Another thunderclap. Or explosion. Smaller, crisper this time.

She heard the distant, Doppler-shifted wail of police sirens, the throaty flap of a helicopter somewhere overhead.

“Dad, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I’ll see you later.”

Jack was left standing in the doorway, wide-eyed. “Shall I start packing? What can I take?”

“First things first.” She swung her legs out of bed. “Go fix us some breakfast.”

Still sleepy, eyes gritty after being disturbed, she used the bathroom. Mundane details, bright in the unreal daylight: yesterday’s Edinburgh Evening News left folded on the window ledge by her father, a final shred of paper left clinging to the toilet roll in its holder, Ted’s irritating little habit. The sunlight on the frosted glass of the window was midsummer bright.

There was no bird song, she noticed absently. No morning chorus, save for the discordant wail of the emergency vehicles.

According to the News, the patch of “quicksand” on Arthur’s Seat had reached a thousand yards across by yesterday. The scientists were saying it was still growing, but it wasn’t a neat circle; in some places it was burrowing away underground, following the seams of basalt that underlay the city.

It wasn’t a big story. It was too slow and obscure and impersonal. There was more space given over to speculation about the transfer of a soccer player from Hearts to an English club, Liverpool.

Henry said it wasn’t quicksand. On the other hand, he didn’t know what it was, she reflected, and they had to call it something. Naming something is the first step to understanding it. Was that true? What if the underlying reality was so strange that it defied the neat labels, the metaphors and parallels, humans sought to justify it to themselves?

The bathroom was warm and peaceful. She felt reluctant to step out of here, to handle Jack’s questions, to deal with the way her life was slowly tilting out of balance.

But she must. She splashed cold water on her face and went out to the kitchen.

Jack was eating a bowl of Coco Pops, the milk already stained a revolting diarrhoea brown, and he had turned on the small TV that sat on the serving bench.

“Mum, look at this.”

A train crash. Carriages tipped off their track, spilled and split over the ground. The picture, a little shaky, seemed to be coming from a helicopter suspended over the scene. The tipped-over carriages were long and sleek, shattered windows glistening as if moist. Fire was licking from a couple of the cars, bright despite the intensity of the early sun. She could see ambulances, police vehicles, emergency workers in fluorescent yellow jackets, bright in the sun, others in drabber everyday clothes. There were people lying over the broken ground, being covered by blankets, surrounded by buzzing helpers.

A reporter was shouting over the whine of aircraft noise, something about subsidence under the line causing the derailment.

Jack asked, “Will we see Granddad?”

“What?”

He pointed with his spoon at the TV. “On the telly. Will we see him?”

She looked again at the screen, and something still half-asleep in her snapped awake. This was Edinburgh. Abbeyhill, in fact, not a half-mile from the house. The rail line came out of Waverley Station and headed east, tracking the coast, towards Dunbar. The derailment must have been the explosion she heard. Unlike herself, Ted had known immediately what it meant, what to do.

The helicopter camera was taking wider-angle shots now. The bulk of Arthur’s Seat was visible, a crude, grass-clad knot, surrounded by an encrustation of streets and buildings. She could recognize Holyrood Palace. Probably this house was in the image somewhere, if she knew exactly where to look.

On the Seat, the quicksand patches were clearly visible, rough circles shining a matt silver-grey in the morning light, like spilled paint. Millions of tiny eggs, she thought, waiting to hatch.

She wished Ted had stayed. She wished Henry was here now.

“Eat up and get dressed,” she said.

“Have I got to go to school?”

“Listen. Get packed. Not too much. Pack for me… and for Granddad and Mike too.”

“Pack what?”

“Clothes. Blankets.” She frowned, thinking. “Torches. The camp stove. The tent. The canned food from the larder. A tin-opener. Blankets.” She forced a smile. “As if we’re going camping. Candles. Matches. The bathroom stuff—”

“By myself?”

“You can do it. Remember we’ve all got to fit in one car.”

“What about you?”

“I have to go find Mike. I won’t be long.”

The image on the TV had changed. Now there was a picture of a fire at a petrol station. Fountains of flame leaping up from the cracked concrete, the sagging yellow-green canopy of the station forecourt blistering. Another Edinburgh disaster: more subsidence, it seemed. The station’s thin underground tanks had cracked, and there had been a spark…

She went to get dressed.

Outside, the light was strange.

The sky was a cloudless, mid-April deep blue; the last of the night’s chill was already dissipating. But Venus was clearly visible in the east, a bright spotlight: a third light in the Scottish sky, neither Moon nor sun.