Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

It was so beautiful, the world was so beautiful, and she had seen so little of it.

Maybe she should go find her family, her mother and father. They had headed west out of the city; she knew where they should have got to by now.

But she still had her duty.

She turned away from the sunlit trees. She walked south, and turned into Princes Street, and continued to knock on doors.

A helicopter flapped over her head; she stared up to see its rotors glittering in the sun.

The Chinook set down in the centre of Princes Street Gardens. It was a crude chunk of military hardware in the middle of this Georgian garden, its runners crushing ornate flower-beds, the noise of its rotors clattering rudely from the elegant buildings.

Henry, clutching his petrological microscope, lumbered up to the chopper, looking for somewhere to sit.

The interior of the Army Air Corps Chinook was spartan, just a bare hull with plastic coating over the frame. There were no seats. There were soldiers here in field kit, a patrol on their way to some assignment of their own. The men were hot, sweating, sitting in the roar of the engines on a non-slip flooring littered with dirt. Their packs were strapped down to the floor, with cyalumes — lamps — around them. The men were rooting through the crew’s kit they found there, pinching chocolate bars and Coke with a practised thoroughness.

And I complained about British Airways, Henry thought. Well, there wasn’t a lot of choice. Maybe if he padded his jacket under his ass —

A loadmaster tapped him on the shoulder. “Not here, sir. You can ride upfront, in the cockpit.”

“Is that any more comfortable?”

The loadie shrugged. “The company’s better.”

So, with an effort, Henry climbed into the cockpit, and took a jump seat behind the pilot and copilot. The pilot was on the left — no, he was the guy on the right, damn it, these Brits took the wrong side of the highway even in the air. He nodded to Henry, a crisp “Sir’. The pilot seemed young, an NCO; Henry would have said he was working class if that hadn’t become, he’d learned, an outdated analysis of British society.

The cockpit was a cave of switches and dials and screens; the pilot and copilot were working through their take-off routine.

“Pedals in neutral.”

“Pedals.”

“Cyclic centred, collective lever down.”

“Got it.”

“Clear left and right.”

“Go for it.”

“Rotor brake off. Wind up rotors.”

“I got it…”

The noise of the rotors rose.

The Chinook lifted with a surge that made Henry’s stomach sink a little deeper inside his frame.

Thanks for the warning, fellas.

Edinburgh turned into a glowing map spread out beneath him, a folded blanket of green cut through by the blue of the Forth, the grey-black of the buildings, the lumpy outcrops of volcanic rock. The road network, clean and well-maintained, was a black thread like a kid’s toy track, its markings clear and bright. Today the roads were empty, save for a few scattered and stationary vehicles.

In the middle of the rectangular, oddly American grid that was the New Town, someone was standing, alone, looking up at him, face a bright white dot.

“One hundred feet… eighty feet…” the copilot said.

“Roger, eighty feet. Ninety knots.” The pilot turned, his eyes insectile behind big tinted goggles. “So you’re from NASA, sir?”

“Yup.”

“Always glad to give you Yanks a flying lesson. Staying at eighty feet, ninety knots.”

The Chinook dipped sharply to the right. Henry looked for a sick bag; there was nothing that qualified.

“This is a little slow for you, I suppose, sir.”

“I’m a scientist, not an astronaut.”

Now the Chinook was flying low over Arthur’s Seat.

The plug looked extraordinarily ugly from the air, a crude knot of basalt protruding from the ground, old and stubborn, somehow magnificent. Its several ancient vents were easy to make out, the basalt outline clear beneath a thin coating of heather. The Seat had, thought Henry, already seen off three hundred million years of weather, the titanic scraping of the ice, the pinprick depredations of man. But it wasn’t going to be able to see off the Moonseed. And there, indeed, close to the summit, was the central pool, obscured a little by the smoke from the ruin of Abbeyhill, shining like a coin in the ashen light.

And elsewhere, there were signs of magmatic activity: the blur of steam and smoke, perhaps a fissure near the crest of the Seat. He wished he had a cospec up here. A camera, even.

Incredibly, there were people on the Seat: still, even now, with the whole damn city evacuated, right at the heart of the thing.

Then, as the Chinook completed its second orbit of the Seat, Henry thought he spotted landsliding, on the south face, away from the ragged patches of Moonseed.

It was beginning.

He tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Could you circle a few times? I’d like to take a closer look.”

“Surely, sir. Break my right now. That’s nice…”

The Chinook dipped to the right and hurled itself into a dive.

The copilot intoned, “Seventy feet, ninety knots. Sixty feet, one hundred knots.”

Arthur’s Seat approached, like an obstacle in a Disneyland ride, and the Chinook soared, following the ground’s blunt contours.

The pilot whooped. “Raw sex!”

It came more abruptly than Mike Dundas had expected.

There was an earthquake, a single jarring shift sideways, that sent them all sprawling, even Bran.

Mike sat up. His arm was bruised, but nothing was broken.

The ground shuddered. Aftershocks.

But Bran was sitting up. He looked around the group, locking each of them in turn in eye contact. “Not long now,” he said, his voice thin and clear. “The EVA is almost terminated. All that remains is for the controllers to choreograph our reentry. We must accept, and be prepared.”

Be prepared. Accept. Yes.

A tall, older man broke out of the group with a kind of sob. “Christ, I don’t want to die. Not for a fucking junkie like you.” He ran, stumbling.

Bran just watched him, his calm undisturbed.

The ground cracked. There was a sound like thunder emanating deep from within the earth. Another jolt.

A fissure opened up, stretching back towards the peak of the Seat; it was just a few inches wide, and the earth around crumbled into it. From a hole at one end of the fissure, smoke, steam and bursts of red hot cinders broke into the air.

The policeman stepped forward. His blue trousers and yellow jacket were stained green where he’d been thrown into the grass. “Who else? It isn’t too late yet. I’ll do all I can to get you down from here in safety.”

There was a stir among the cultists, and a stir in Mike’s heart. Not too late. Could that be true?

People were getting up around him, brushing off scuffed and torn suits. Sheepishly joining the copper.

But it is too late, Mike thought. It had been too late for them all, for the whole city maybe, from the moment he had brought those Moon dust grains to this place.

He had let Henry down, betrayed a trust. He had killed the city, even his family, and he deserved to suffer.

…Or maybe, as Bran expressed it, all he had done was to open the door, the hatch to the Airlock that was waiting for them all. And in that case, he deserved the peace and joy and endless light that would follow.

So he ignored the people losing their faith, scurrying down the rock after that copper like frightened rabbits. Perhaps there was nobody left but himself and Bran, but that was okay too. There would be room for them all later. Room for a planet-ful of lost souls.

He looked for Bran. But Bran had gone.