Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

He knew he couldn’t wait until August; he knew he must do this now.

The climb was long and arduous, and by the time it was completed he was sweating hard, his breath coming in gasps. But the view from the lip of the caldera was magnificent: the old volcano mouth itself, the numerous mountain lakes and volcanic cones, rounded and furred over by trees, and Lake Chuzenji, blue and sleek and beautiful from this distance, a vista too remote to be spoiled by the foolishness of its visitors.

Japan was built on the junction between plates deep in the Earth, and was plagued by volcanism and earthquakes. And so everywhere you went, rounded volcanic hills stuck out of the landscape. It gave the landscape a sense of impermanence, he thought, and also a human scale.

The Japanese had been shaped by their landscape. It seemed to him you just couldn’t build a giant Gothic cathedral in the middle of all this. Japan was about continuity and reflection and calm. The Japanese even had two religions, Buddhism and Shinto, working side by side without a hint of conflict, which was quite a contrast with Ireland.

And that sense of calm had been what he’d sought when he’d come out here.

He felt a sense of that old panic, of enclosure, as unwelcome memories of the past stirred in his hind brain. But he had done those things, hurt those children, and, even a decade later, he could never remove that scar from his soul — as they would, surely, never forgive or understand, and as those in authority would never hesitate to punish him, if they could identify and trap him.

But then he was already trapped, by his own addled personality. For he knew he would do those things again, given the opportunity, the chance of secrecy. Even as he encountered the schoolchildren in Tokyo, he had felt his ageing loins stir, unable to dispel the endless calculations, the intricate maze of actions that might lead to a new release of his lust.

So he must never give himself such opportunities again.

He took out his little vials of Edinburgh dust, and smiled.

He descended a little way into the caldera, past the trodden paths and platforms, until he was walking on bare volcanic rock. Then he opened his vials of Scottish dust — they smelled, he thought, of autumn bonfires — and he spilled them, carefully, on the ground. Delicately, with his fingertips, he rubbed the ash into the rock, as if applying some gentle unguent.

The ghost touch of the Moon, brought to Mount Nantai.

When it was done, he felt a great peace. He stayed for a while, as the evening gathered, and the spectacular volcanic sunset crept over the sky.

Perhaps this offering would propitiate whatever gods resided here. Or perhaps it would destroy them.

Perhaps it would destroy him.

And that would not be such a bad thing, if it reduced the number of future days he would have to face, the days he would have to wrestle down the monsters that lay inside him.

In the caldera, where he had delivered the dust, the rock surface glowed softly.

In his London hotel room, waiting for transport to the US, Henry tried to nail down the thought that Blue’s remarks had sparked.

Okay, address the worst case. The Moonseed was already spreading globally. What if it couldn’t be stopped? What then?

Eventually we will run out of planet. But not, he thought, of planets.

What was he thinking of? Evacuating the world, when they ran out of planet? Like When Worlds Collide?

It was, of course, impossible. And even if you evacuated a handful of people, you needed somewhere to go, somewhere you could live off the land and not in a spacesuit.

Ideally, somewhere immune to the Moonseed.

…The thought coalesced, like crystals forming in supersaturated solution.

Damn it, maybe there was such a place. But it was a hell of a long way away. And he might be wrong anyhow.

The only way anyone would know would be by sending someone there…

Suddenly, he realized he had to talk to Geena.

From memory, he called the number of her new apartment in downtown Houston. He got an answering machine, saying she wouldn’t be back for days. Dumb, Geena. An open invitation to the bad guys.

He tried JSC, but the receptionist there didn’t seem to believe who he was, and wouldn’t put him through.

He tried the press office.

He got nowhere trying to prove his identity. If he wanted to hear an astronaut, they said, he should log onto the World Wide Web in a couple of hours, to watch an online chat between a group of astronauts, in training for upcoming missions, and a bunch of schoolkids from Iowa. It sounded to him as if the NASA guys had been fielding a lot of shit all day, no doubt the usual end-of-the-world demands and queries and accusations of cover-up that NASA always got when something bad came down.

He thought about that online chat. Maybe there was a way he could break into that.

But he’d left his laptop in Edinburgh. Part of the sunset now. Besides, this hotel room wasn’t exactly geared up for the information age. The telephone cord literally disappeared into the wall rather than terminating in a regular point.

Shit.

He found a telephone directory under the bed. Yellow Pages. It took a while to figure the classifications, but he found what he needed quickly.

He got dressed. He pulled on the jacket the Army guys had given him — a little tight but expensive, smart casual — and stumbled out of the room.

He was carrying his shoes, so he could get down the corridor without a sound, and give his military escort the slip. Apart from the creak of antique floorboards, he did pretty well.

In the hotel lobby, he pulled on his trainers. He pushed his way out of the hotel, into what was left of the daylight.

He called into a news store and bought a Central London map. He directed himself through side streets to Charing Cross Road, and then south, towards the river.

On foot, London seemed overwhelmingly strange. Red pillar boxes. Traffic that was snarled up everywhere you looked, but which still stopped for you at pedestrian crossings, one hundred per cent of the time. Churches and statues and blue plaques telling you who lived in this or that anonymous-looking old house, five centuries ago.

The sun was still up, visible above the clustering rooftops. It was surrounded by a fat opalescent corona, sprawling and misshapen. What volcanologists called a Bishop’s Ring.

Charing Cross Road was lined with bookstores, though they were mostly small and cramped compared to the big mall and out-of-town stores he used back in the States.

He reached Trafalgar Square: Nelson’s Column, the triumphalist stone lions growling at his feet, odd echoes of what the British thought of as their great days, the mock-classical front of the National Gallery looming over everything. The Square was crowded with tourists and hucksters — not an Anglo-Saxon face in sight — and fat, waddling pigeons for which you could buy feed from the hucksters, should you so choose.

There were shoppers and browsers and people hurrying to and from work, wrapped up in their own concerns, not even seeing Henry unless he all but collided with them. Homeless guys, curled up in the doorways in their sleeping bags, repeating their endless mantras, “Spare some change please…” More of that than he’d expected. He had to step over them sometimes, so crowded were the pavements. It seemed unreal.

Except for lurid headlines on the stands of the local paper, the Evening Standard, and the shimmering rad-ponchos everywhere, there was no sign of what was coming down in the north of the country. As if the Earth was flat and infinite, the stars just lights in the sky, the future endless and unthreatened. As if some kind of alien nano-bug wasn’t eating up the country.