Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

This is not good, she thought. Not good at all.

Well, then, we must do something about it. But what the hell she had no idea.

Scott took her arm, and led her back towards the car.

Scott started talking to her about the river ride she was going to have to take if she wanted to get any closer to those old Precambrian rocks. It meant a descent of five or six thousand feet, a rise in temperature of maybe twenty degrees. She calculated whether she would have the strength to undergo such a trip. And at the same time, she started to figure what she should tell the President, and how.

A black hole rocket engine, firing wildly in the ruins of Venus. Now, what was the meaning of that?

Strangeness. Too much of it, for one lifetime.

The sunset crept on them. The colours deepened to rust, mile-long shadows flooding at perceptible speed across the land, and they walked back to the car.

Henry was flown, mostly at low altitude under the ash clouds, the length of Britain.

Once, most of Britain was covered by a shallow ocean, which deposited gigantic chalk layers over the whole country. But then Britain tipped up. And the ice came, scraping most of the chalk off the top half of the island.

Now, as he travelled south from Scotland, he traversed younger and younger landscapes: billion-year-old gabbros and granites and basalts in Scotland, belts of successively younger sedimentaries as he came down through England, until he reached the youngest of all, the marine Pleistocene clays and sands around London, less than sixty million years old.

He could see the old buildings — churches, houses, pubs, even railway stations — which stood like geological markers, constructed of their area’s native rock. Britain was a small island, crammed with ten thousand years of history, a billion years of geology.

The sheer size of London surprised Henry. He’d come to think of everything in Britain as being miniature scale. Even a place like Edinburgh was — had been — pretty small by the standards of many American cities.

London, though, was different. He flew over mile after mile of grey suburbs, knots and twists of terraced houses and semis, spread like blankets over the gentle topography of the chalk landscape. His RAF pilot pointed out some of the logic, if you could call it that, that underlay the sprawl of outer London. It was really a collection of old villages — like Brentford and Harrow and Ealing and Richmond — that had been overwhelmed by the flood of building that had come after the war, but their identities were preserved in their names and the topology of the roads, which curled around the old village centres.

The Thames coursed through the heart of the sprawl, a silver-blue thread, and as they flew over central London it was easy to use the river as a guide to pick out tourist highlights: the big ugly glass developments at Canary Wharf, where the old docks used to be, and ships from Britain’s global empire had once called; the tiny, jewel-like sandstone perfection of the Palace of Westminster, the seat of Parliament; the surprisingly elegant bridges that laced across the water; the spectacular cowl shapes of the Thames flood barrier.

Traffic crowded the streets and highways, the metallic carapaces of cars and buses and lorries glimmering like so many beetles in the sun. Life was, obviously, going on here. It was as if the bad shit that had come down in Edinburgh, a bare four hundred miles away, had never happened.

They landed at a floating heliport on the bank of the Thames, near a bridge the pilot said was called Blackfriars.

Incredibly, he was taken to a hotel for the night; even more incredibly, he was going to have to wait until the next day — in fact, for twenty-four hours — before meeting members of the Government.

So he arrived in an anonymous BMW in Soho, an area of tight, crowded roads, the cars cruising inches from the elbows of cappuccino-sipping customers of pavement cafes. Most of the population here looked young, sleek, dressed well if sometimes bizarrely; Venus protection had been subsumed into fashion, and the girls in their ponchos looked like butterflies.

The car pulled into Frith Street, just off Soho Square. Henry got out with the holdall full of spare clothes and bathroom stuff that he’d requested on the way down from Edinburgh. His hotel was a neat little converted eighteenth-century house, another corner of Britain that was, no doubt, older than his entire country.

His room turned out to be a box, a typical city centre room, no doubt ruinously expensive, but His Majesty’s Government could worry about that. His escort, a couple of bullshitting squaddies, were booked in the hotel, down the corridor.

He threw his holdall down on the bed, shucked off his filthy clothes, and climbed straight into the shower, which was a modern fitting with a hot and powerful jet.

Ash-grey shit soaked out of his skin, and made little whirlpools at the plug at his feet. Bits of burned Edinburgh, rock just a day old, the youngest rock on the planet.

Drying off, he turned on the TV. All the regular programmes were suspended, save for one channel that was carrying children’s TV — he saw five seconds of it, weird little aliens that bounced around and spoke gibberish, Christ, bring back Sesame Street — and on all the other stations there was, of course, only one story.

Images of Arthur’s Seat, before and after the explosion. Before: waving cultists in their purple pyjamas, upturned faces like daisies, maybe one of them Michael Dundas’s.

And Arthur’s Seat after, a smouldering crater, still pumping out ash and steam.

And all of the people, as volcanologists say, part of the sunset now.

Here was the New Town after the pyroclastic flow, like an image of Hiroshima after the bombing: stumps of buildings, shorn off at little more than knee-level, surrounded by smashed and strewn rubble and covered by a ghostly powder-grey layer of ash, nothing left of the great Georgian design except the rectangular layout of the streets.

There were people already picking through the rubble, some in volcanologists” protective suits, others, heroic, in nothing more than regular emergency gear. The scientists were recording what they could, pyrometers and thermocouples measuring the dwindling heat of the smashed ground. The rescue workers were using microphones and other gear to search, forlornly, for survivors, maybe people who had ridden out the ash storm in cellars. So far, the news guys said, not a one had been found.

Henry could see how the heavy ash cloud, seeking the lowest points to pool like the sluggish liquid it was, had swept like a transient river around the other bony basalt outcrops, Calton Hill and the Castle; in fact most of the structures on those hilltops were still standing. But both plugs were marked, distinctly, by the cancerous grey scars of Moonseed pools. It would only be a matter of time before they went the way of the Seat, and added to the destruction of the area.

And all the time the Moonseed was spreading, chewing up the Earth, disrupted briefly by the destruction it caused, but always returning, stronger and more widespread than ever.

The cameras focused on the human misery, the scenes on the roads and assembly points and Rest Centres, improvised from schools and hospitals and leisure centres, most of them all but overwhelmed. People were crammed into whatever shelter could be found, bereft of their homes and belongings, lucky if they kept their families with them, stripped by the intrusive cameras of the last of their dignity.

It was impossible to believe he was looking at a Western city, Henry thought uneasily.

He needed to talk to Jane.

He used the hotel phone to try the contact number Chief Constable Romano had given him in Edinburgh, a direct line to the Police Casualty Bureau. It took a while to get through even so, and when he did there was no record, on the improvised database the young man on the other end was consulting, of Jane or her family.