Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

Volcanic ash even rained down on the Seattle-Tacoma area, in some places inches thick, covering cars and pedestrians and sidewalks, tyre marks like snow.

Well, it was a hell of a thing, and even given the coverage it had already, would make a great virtual feature.

And of course the most interesting aspect was how this was all connected to the Edinburgh explosion.

She tapped into the buzz about the volcano plague that was spreading around the world. But she couldn’t get any responsible geologist to comment on that.

Most of them said they weren’t too surprised by Rainier’s eruption. For hundreds of years Rainier had been subject to erosion from the weather outside, and from simmering magma inside. The magma had cooked the innards of the mountain to unstable clay. Rainier had, they told her, gone rotten, and the big bang had just been waiting to happen; it hadn’t taken much of a seismic jolt to kickstart the eruption.

But why now?

Of course the volcano plague was the world’s biggest story: a string of disasters, big and small, widespread and localized, following in the wake of Edinburgh. In addition to those directly affected — including the injured and the dead, already too many to count — everyone was feeling the knock-on effects.

Air flights and shipping had been disrupted. The ash in the air worsened what Venus had already done, and disrupted crops worldwide. In the US, prices in the stores were sky-high on some items. Elsewhere, people were already starving. Or rioting. Or going to war.

Right now things — the world — seemed to be holding together. National governments were handling their local emergencies — but the services were stretched. International co-operation was collapsing. Peacekeeping troops were being flown home. Trade was crumbling, and some nations were threatening protectionism.

There were already politicians calling for a “Fortress USA” mentality.

It was bad, and getting worse, steadily.

But what interested Joely was Rainier. Was its eruption part of the plague? If it was, could they expect more of the same?

Just coincidence, the geologists said. Probably.

Some of them admitted to her they didn’t know enough about the plague to be sure.

Of course there was always the nutty fringe, who held that the whole planet was doomed, like Venus.

Still, when you thought about that, the assumed geological stability of the Washington region was kind of odd. After all you had Alaska up the coast and California to the south, both plagued by devastating quakes. Why should Washington be spared? The locals just assumed it was so, despite Rainier. Not here, not in Seattle…

She spent some time digging a little deeper into the online libraries. And, slowly, she began to piece together an answer.

Seattle-Tacoma was sitting on top of an area where one tectonic plate was diving under another.

An ocean floor plate called the Juan de Fuca Plate was spreading out from a centre somewhere in the Pacific. When it hit the North American Plate, a little ways offshore, it dived beneath it, back towards the mantle. Subduction, this was called.

So in the place where the plates were in contact, they rubbed over each other.

But not smoothly.

Part of the fault that separated the two plates remained locked. So the continental plate was bending, like a board bent over a table, folding under itself to follow the ocean plate.

The continent could bend so far, as if it was made of rubber. But eventually it would snap back into place. And then —

Well, the technical journals were a little light on detail on what would happen at this point.

There were few severe earthquakes in the area’s historical record, she found. But then it was only two hundred years since the first Europeans, including Captain Cook, visited the region, and “history” began. And there were plenty of earlier disasters reported in the oral histories of the region’s original inhabitants. Such as the big quake that struck Pachena Bay, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, one winter night: in the morning the village at the head of the bay had gone…

After a couple of days, the work even started to get to be fun, as her mix of 3-D video clips, sound and prose scraps started to assemble itself into something resembling content.

But every time she called somebody, even internally, to discuss the project, she had to sign a non-disclosure form. After a week, Joely was seriously wondering how long she was going to survive here.

Still, she found herself a nice apartment in Bellevue, with a fine, if distant, view of the Sound, and she had the eighteen-wheeler unload the rest of her stuff.

After her first week, though, there was another quake, and a childhood memento — a snowscape of Disneyland that had survived three decades in LA — fell off a shelf and smashed, spilling plastic snowflakes all over the carpet.

It was irritating. If the big quake hit before she filed her feature, she would lose her angle, and probably her job…

She worked faster.

Henry called Jane.

The truncated family were still in the semi-private little nest they’d carved out for themselves in a corner of the theatre — three cots and a cupboard — and they were settling down to sleep.

Ted held his mobile phone out to Jane.

Jane answered it, and then held it away from her ear, as if it was hot.

“How did he get my number, Dad?”

Ted just grinned, of course, a look that had infuriated her since long before her fourteenth birthday, when the old fool had first started to meddle in her love life. He turned away on his cot, and picked up the dog-eared copy of The Day of the Triffids that was doing the rounds of the Rest Centre’s informal lending library.

Jack was already asleep.

She didn’t have much choice.

“What do you want?”

And how are you? I’m amazed you’re still there.

“Your pet the Moonseed hasn’t been doing too many of its tricks recently.”

It’s working subsurface.

“That’s it, look on the bright side.”

You’ve only gone six miles in three weeks. You’re crazy.

“But things have calmed down here, Henry. You ought to see it. The evacuation has become a lot more orderly. There are even classes for the kids. The Government seem to be thinking long term now.”

Long term?

“Where to locate the thousands — hundreds of thousands — who had to flee Edinburgh, how to feed and house them, how to find them new jobs. How to rebuild the businesses that were lost. We’ve been helping to run the Rest Centre.” She ruffled her sleeping son’s hair. “Even Jack.” Maybe especially Jack. “You learn things about yourself.” Like, I’ve learned I can stop a fist fight over a smuggled-in bottle of booze. “Ted doesn’t want to leave until he’s sure about Michael.”

You should have gotten further away.

She shifted, folding her legs on the bed and propping her chin on her knees. “You’re getting irritating, Henry.”

At least you’re not paying for the call.

Anyway, she hadn’t wanted to go further. She was comfortable here. If she was honest with herself, she knew that if she moved, she would have to face the bigger picture again, and she was reluctant to do that if she didn’t have to. Here, she was in control, at least of the small things in her life.

The psychology of disaster: denial, anger, withdrawal, acceptance. It dismayed her to look into her own heart and find herself working her way through the textbook.

“So where are you? The Moon?”

Might as well be. I’m heading for Washington. Trying to get them to take me seriously.