Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

To the east, towards Arthur’s Seat, she could see red flames rolling and leaping, a growing pillar of black smoke. Sometimes the flames seemed to pause, to weaken, but then they would find new vigour and hurl themselves even higher than before. There was a constant muffled roar. It was like watching some immense oil refinery burning up.

She sat down in the middle of the road, keeping her hands away from the glass fragments skidding there. The road surface was cracking open — to her left, a great section of it was tilting up — but she seemed to be in a stable place, here, and far enough from the cracking facades of the buildings to survive that, with a little luck.

Hell, she thought. She might actually live through this. If she found somewhere to report in she would have a tale to tell…

But now there was a new explosion. A sound like a thousand cannon.

A wall of flame — taller than any of the buildings, laced with black smoke and steam — poured into the eastern end of Princes Street. It was almost beautiful, like a moving sculpture of smoke and fire and light. At the cloud’s touch buildings exploded like firecrackers, a blizzard of stone and metal and glass. Oh, shit.

Time turned to glue; she seemed to be able to make out every detail.

The flame hit the big old buildings at the end of the street. She saw the Register House’s portico and clock towers burst outwards, before fire erupted from within, white and hot, overwhelming the Wellington statue, the old Iron Duke on his horse, in the instant before the cloud enveloped them.

Now a fountain of flame and smoke erupted from the entrances to the Waverley Market, the underground mall built around the Station, and the panels of its roof fluttered into the air like so many leaves. A brilliant light enveloped the Scott Monument, two hundred feet of carved Gothic foolishness, magnificent in the flames” underlighting for one last instant, before it too erupted into shards of stone.

A wind buffeted her, blistering hot.

The cloud poured along the street, more like a fluid than a gas. It must be full of ash, heavier than the air. Lightning cracked within it. It was carrying rocks, irregular, glowing boulders and sharp-edged fragments that probably came from buildings. Carrying all that stuff, she thought, was actually going to make it more efficient at scouring the city as it progressed.

This thing was going to scrape Edinburgh down to the bedrock, she thought, and then the Moonseed was going to eat that. But maybe it would be beautiful, in its way.

So much for reporting in.

She stood tall, facing the heat. She had time for an instant of regret before the cloud reared before her, and —

Soon, it seemed to Henry, the ash had reached a huge altitude, maybe fifty thousand feet. Ash, laden with Moonseed dust.

It obscured the view of Edinburgh, and maybe that was a mercy; he glimpsed the fiery hell of Arthur’s Seat, the husks of burning buildings all around.

The pilot said, “We couldn’t have outrun it, could we, sir?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

“We’ll have to go back to Leuchars. I don’t trust this bird after inhaling all that shit from the air.”

“That’s fine.”

“We’ll find another transport to get you to London.”

Henry looked back at the high ash. It would inject itself all the way up to the tropopause, ten miles above the Earth, where the decreasing temperature of the thinning air was inverted, making the tropopause into an invisible lid on the lower atmosphere. But such was the violence of the eruption, the ash from the Seat would surely break through the tropopause into the stratosphere beyond. There was no rain up there, nothing to wash the debris back down again.

The ash from the Seat would form a thin veil that would spread all the way around the planet, the heavier fragments slowly drifting back down to Earth. He thought he could see, as it reached towards the stratosphere, the steel glitter of Moonseed dust amid the ash.

The genie was out of its bottle now.

“Welcome to Mars, fellas,” he said.

Monica Beus was exhausted by the time Scott Coplon, her USGS guide, had led her to Kanab Point, here on the north side of the Grand Canyon. And that after a (reasonably) gentle one-mile hike from the off-road vehicle that had brought them almost all the way from the North Rim entrance station.

It was close to sunset — probably one of the best times of day to view the Canyon — and the light, coming in flat and low from a cloudless sky, filled the Canyon with dusty blue shadow. The layers in the rock shone yellow, orange, pink and red, the colours of fire.

Scott was a kid of thirty or so, his face hidden by a bushy black beard and thick Buddy Holly glasses. He was dressed, as she was, in a bright red survival suit and woolly hat. He asked now, “Are you okay?”

Now that, she thought, was a spectacularly dumb question, and she sat on a ledge of ancient, eroded sandstone and considered it. Not only was she being eaten up from the inside, not only had she become, without noticing it, a decaying old lady, but, according to the best of her information, some kind of dreadful global catastrophe was coming down. So: no, she was not okay, and never would be again.

Even if the quacks did say the bone disease she had contracted was a really “good” form of secondary cancer; even if the quacks still, absurdly, gave her a fifty-fifty chance of survival, despite the startling acceleration of her anatomy’s failure.

But it didn’t make a piece of difference as to what she had to do, to be the eyes and ears and scientific brain of the President of the United States, just a little longer.

Anyhow she let the kid off the hook. “I’m fine. Just let me catch my breath.”

He took a couple of steps closer to the rim. “You can smell it, even up here.”

“What?”

“The sulphur. And the ash. If you’re asthmatic—”

“I’m not asthmatic. Help me up.” She lifted her arm. “Give me a minute.”

“For what?”

She smiled. “To sight-see. I’ve never been out here before, to my shame.” And I sure as hell never will again.

He grinned and backed off. “Sure. I understand. This is why I got into this game, you know.”

“The scenery.”

“Uh huh. I get paid to be up here. Take all the time you want.”

She stepped forward, alone, her feet crunching on basalt fragments.

Jesus Christ, this was the Grand Canyon.

From here, on the northern rim, she could see the sweep of the land. She was in the middle of the Colorado Plateau, thousands of feet of rock laid down by the shallow seas and deltas that had once covered much of North America. On the horizon, to the south, she could see the smoothly swelling surface of the Plateau, flat and undulating, reminiscent of the sea which had given it birth. It was speckled with green, what looked like blades of grass spilling over the plateau walls. But each of those blades was a tree, a juniper or a canyon pine, each of them twenty or thirty feet tall.

That was the Plateau, magnificent in itself. But the Colorado River had just cut through the whole thing, as clean as a knife gouge, dynamic and unstable. And the complex channels and incisions had exposed, in the outcrops and walls, the layers of sedimentary rocks laid down in that vanished ocean. Looking around the fragmented landscape, her gaze could complete the lines of distinct layers, invisibly spanning the Canyon’s channels. And she could see where the eroding river waters had met stiffer resistance, from the older, deeper rocks; scree piles flared against the base of surviving plugs.

It was inhumanly vast. And yet she could see that this was a canyon, a channel cut into the softly swelling Earth. If this had been the Valles Marineris on Mars — compared to which the Canyon would have been just a tributary — it would have been so huge as to make its nature incomprehensible, and it wouldn’t have been nearly so striking. It was as if it had been placed here, this great wound in the land, with exactly the right dimensions to force a response from the human soul.