Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

For all that, there was no sign of Michael, on any system.

The billeting process went well. Ted’s first thought had been to have the refugees meet the Musselburgh people, and see if they paired off. He was especially keen to find stable homes for the unattached children.

But it didn’t work. The Musselburgh population seemed predominantly elderly, and they were good-hearted. But the human dynamics were all wrong. Cherry-picking; it was really quite obscene. The pretty girls and the youngest kids were always requested first. Nobody wanted the older boys. Even now — and Ted found himself to be utterly naive about such things — there was a lot of concern among the professionals here from the social services about the dangers to the kids of lodging them with strangers.

The cherry-picking was repugnant anyhow, so Ted broke that up, and started to allocate the refugees on a more random basis, matching up on the basis of needs rather than individuals. The billeting was restricted to families with kids of their own, or people who were known foster parents. Only family groups, with an older male or two, went to volunteers unknown to the social services. If they’d take them, anyhow.

It all helped to reduce the pressure on the Rest Centre itself. But there weren’t enough hosts to go around. And there were some people who were just not suitable for billeting: large family groups, the elderly, people who had been undergoing “care in the community’, and the plain irascible who didn’t want to be billeted anyhow — under which category Ted would place the old guy with the yapping Alsatian, and himself and his diminished family. Ethnic-minority families attracted scarcely any help from outside their own communities, a phenomenon which made Ted feel ill with frustration.

Ted’s own informal estimate was that maybe ten per cent of all those who arrived at the Rest Centre couldn’t be billeted. And you had to add to that, he supposed, the population of the hospitals, the prisons, the remand centres for the young, the long-term care facilities, old people’s homes.

On it went: a lot of people.

Some things got worse, as time went on.

Like hygiene. Dog shit seemed to be everywhere. He found himself spending much of his mornings organizing volunteers on clean-up squads, and issuing warnings about the danger of children getting eye infections from the stuff.

More food arrived, canned stuff from the local supermarkets. Ted wondered how long that would last. But he heard of fleets of Army choppers bringing in supplies from Glasgow and north England, and when it arrived it came in boxes marked prominently with the name of the supplying store, big black letters to display for the TV cameras.

There were cameras everywhere, in fact. He found one crew filming a grinning care worker handing a sack of used toys sent from Boise, Idaho to some kid who was supposed to act grateful, a Scottish kid with her own life and dignity, in order to please the hearts of some beer-sodden arsehole on the other side of the planet, a kid who would forever be scarred by the experience. Ted had to be restrained, by Jane, from throwing the crew out.

The theatre manager — her name was Siobhan Reader — was soon wrestling with longer-term problems. Like finance. It seemed the theatre would have to recover its costs from the local authority, who in turn would have to get it back from central government, all retrospectively, and all within the provisions of something called the Bellwin scheme which covered emergencies like this.

And some of the residents here were actually asking for cash loans. With cash they could buy stuff from the local shops, which were still open, to tide them through the crisis. Many of them had left home with only electronic money, credit cards and Switch cards, which, when the telephone exchanges went down, had suddenly become useless.

So Reader had obtained some money, twenty thousand pounds, as a loan from the theatre’s own bankers in Musselburgh, and was now trying to figure a way of accounting for the small hand-outs she was making to the families.

But there were good things too. The Edinburgh Evening News was published every day, without a break, though Ted suspected it was being run up on a desktop publishing package on somebody’s home pc. It carried some news, mostly stale rehashes of the TV and radio bulletins, but it also ran long lists of personalized messages from the displaced people of the city. To Mary McClair from Vicky Norman. If you need a place to stay, please call… The mobile phones prevalent in the Centre were being used less for personal messages, and more as part of an informal communications network, spreading low-level news about the fate of people and places, even pets. One of the volunteer groups brought in printed T-shirts. NO WATER. NO FOOD. NO POWER. NO PROBLEM. They became a fashion accessory among the volunteers.

They had a VIP visit. It was Dave Holland, a London politician, the environment secretary, a fat English bastard whose accent seemed to disappear down his throat. Trailed by two camera crews with glaring lights and gigantic boom mikes, he strode through the theatre, shaking hands with photogenic kids and care workers and volunteers. Ted couldn’t believe how much time and resource was taken up by catering for Holland, the security and route planning and all the rest of it.

But it was good for morale, he was told.

Holland made one substantive announcement. “There’s a wave of sympathy around the world for what you’re going through,” he said. “Everyone’s eyes are on you. There will be a rock concert in Wembley Stadium to raise relief funds. And we’re flying out the Hibs and Hearts squads—” A ragged cheer; they were Edinburgh’s two principal soccer teams. “—to play an exhibition game.”

Rock music and soccer, Ted thought sourly.

He actually got to meet Holland. The man came along a row of volunteers, introduced by Siobhan Reader, shaking hands and sweating heavily. When it was his turn, Ted asked, “When are you going to start evacuating Glasgow?”

Holland laughed nervously and moved on.

Later, Ted found himself in a huddle with Reader and Jack.

Jack said, “I’d have asked him if Willie MacLeish is playing.” MacLeish was Hibs” star striker.

“You’re right,” Ted said seriously. “I would have got more sense.”

“And I’d have asked him,” Reader said stiffly, “if there’s any word of my husband.” The first time she’d mentioned him. And with that she turned and walked to her office, to start another sleepless night of work.

Ted stared after her. She was, he’d first thought, just an ineffectual worker, and he’d treated her with contempt. The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But she was, of course, a woman with a life of her own. A family maybe. And he’d never thought even to ask.

The evenings were long.

Just a day or two from near death, and boredom was becoming their biggest enemy.

On Ted’s advice, Reader had banned alcohol, but allowed in TV, powered by a portable generator. The reception of the terrestrial stations was poor — local transmitters knocked out, lousy conditions because of the volcano weather lingering over Edinburgh — but satellite dishes seemed to work reasonably well. Reader had intended to show a steady diet of game shows, pop and movies — she even wanted to run videos — but Ted suggested that, except for kids” programming in the area set aside as a nursery, she simply run the news. People here wanted to know, after all.

The news, the images from Edinburgh, worked to keep people quiet. Ribald cheers whenever somebody in the Rest Centre was shown.

The Hibs-Hearts soccer match attracted the biggest crowds around the TVs. The game itself was played at Ibrox Stadium, the home of Glasgow Rangers, and the teams, depleted by the disaster, were reinforced by loan players from other clubs, in England and Scotland. There seemed a genuine warmth as the stranded people watched their teams battle it out, fans of the two clubs mingling without self-consciousness or conflict.