Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“Dad.” It was hard for her to say it, he sensed, as if saying it might make it true. “Dad, Mike is dead. You know Mike is dead. You just want revenge. But revenge against what? The Moonseed?”

No, he had replied. Not the Moonseed. Something more specific than that.

Saying goodbye to her, and Jack, had been harder than he had imagined. But it had to be done. He had a job to do, and he had never shirked from duty before.

Anyway he was too damn old. They didn’t need him any more. It was better this way.

Blue and Ted had been dropped off at the city by-pass, a deserted motorway-class road, a couple of miles south-east of Arthur’s Seat — or rather, of the hole in the ground where the Seat had been. They walked along the Gilmerton Road towards the city, through the residential areas of Gilmerton and Hyvot’s Bank and Inch.

At first there was little sign of damage. Here, the evacuation had been complete: the houses and shops were closed up, and the road was reasonably clear, save for a couple of burned-out wrecks. There was barely a sign, Ted thought, of the calamity that had befallen the city, save for a few inert lumps of rock — lava bombs, said Blue — and the pervasive layer of ash. The ash gave the mundane suburban streets a strange, unearthly tinge, Ted thought, as if the colours had been washed out, only the discarded outlines remaining. And the silence was eerie. No traffic noise. No bird song. No insects.

Only the sounds of the suit, his own noisy breathing, the scuff of the heavy fabric at his armpits and crotch, the soft crunching of his footfalls in volcanic ash.

Like walking on the Moon, he thought.

But the air was still and hot and smoggy, a yellow dome that obscured the sky. There were fires burning somewhere, threads of black smoke that snaked into the sky. And when a road junction gave them a clear view of the Braid Hills, the site of a golf course Ted had played a few times, he could see the steely glint of Moonseed dust.

Blue was dismissive. “That’s a new infection,” he said. “We want to get into the primary nest, where the Seat used to be. See what the hell the Moonseed becomes when it matures.” So he stomped on, setting a tough pace that Ted had trouble matching, even more trouble pretending it wasn’t causing him any distress.

They passed the Cameron Toll, and now, barely half a mile from the Seat itself, the signs of damage suddenly became apparent. Volcanic rubble lay everywhere, rocks and pumice and ash; the housing stock was mostly standing, but with shattered windows and roofs, stove-in cars littering the silent streets.

And now, around Mayfield, they reached a place where the damage was much more severe. The buildings had been effectively razed, down to their foundations. The area looked something like a schematic street plan, in fact.

Blue grunted. “The pyroclastic flow came here. Hell on Earth, for a few minutes or hours.”

The ash was still warm underfoot.

In some places fires had caught, and some of the wreckage was scorched black. The fires had evidently burned themselves out without effective response.

But it was the surviving fragments of normality which were most heart-rending.

Here was a scrap of carpet, lingering beneath a stub of wall, scorched at its fringe, thick with ash. The carpet was strewn with little glass beads. At first Ted vaguely thought this was some kind of volcanic effect, but the beads turned out to be marbles, with the pictures of soccer players embedded inside. Collect all 265! And here was the skeleton of a carefully designed garden, a layout of gravel and a square of scorched earth that had been a lawn. There was no sign of the flowers that might have flourished here, the trees — fruit perhaps — were no more than charred stumps.

Some of the ruins bore pathetic messages, scraps of paper already discoloured by the sun and the billowing ash: notes pleading for Moira or Donald or Petey to meet Janet or Alec or William, at St Giles” or Waverley or the Meadow Park.

The clearing-away of the housing here provided a new, uninterrupted view of Arthur’s Seat itself, off to the north-east. But it was no longer the blunt outcrop Ted had grown up with; now there was little left but a few spiky basaltic spires, cracked and scorched, with a final venting of ash and smoke still curling into the air from its heart.

And everywhere was the cold, unearthly glint of the Moonseed, like a poison that had infected the Scottish earth, emanating from this broken-open old basaltic scab.

Up to this point they had been surrounded by the props of emergency rescue efforts: bulldozers, backhoes, tunnel borers, earth movers, some of them still working. But now they came to a place where no heavy machinery moved: where, amid the Moonseed’s silvery glow, only people picked their cautious way.

Blue had a map tucked into a plastic pouch at his waist. Now he pulled it out and showed it to Ted. It was a large-scale Ordnance Survey, marked by highlighters and pencil. “Listen up,” Blue said. “This is going to be no stroll in the country.”

“I know.”

“I bet you don’t. Here’s what we think. The Moonseed is everywhere: in the ash that coats everything, digging into every exposed chunk of bedrock, working through the subsurface layers. But there are still places we can walk. Places where the surface layers have held together. But they may be—” He was searching for the right word. “Fragile. You have meringues in this country?”

“Yes.”

“Like that. We’re going to be walking over a meringue, a thin crust of rock. Take a wrong step, and poof.” He snapped shut his fingers. That’s why there’s no heavy equipment here. We’ll follow these routes.” He indicated the highlighted trails. Other areas, Ted saw, had been sectioned off by hand-drawn blue hatching. Moonseed outbreaks.

“So how do we know where is safe?”

Blue shrugged. “We can’t be sure. We do aerial surveys, every day. Debriefs from the soldiers and police and fire boys who work in here.” He eyed Ted. “We spend human lives, the lives of civilians or scientists or emergency workers doing their duty. That’s what this thing is. A map bought with human lives.” Blue faced him, his face a broad round mask behind his scuffed and dirty faceplate. “Now, you listen to me, old man,” he said.

“I’m not much older than you.”

“Bullshit. I’m taking you in as a favour to Henry, who likes you because he’s porking your daughter.”

“I wish you’d say what you think,” Ted said drily.

“Only fools like me should risk going into such places. And for sure a dinged-up old fucker like you is just a liability.”

Blue’s mix of Japanese accent and cowboy phrasing was, Ted thought not for the first time, bizarre.

Blue leaned forward. “Now, I don’t give a rip what Henry says. Henry isn’t here. If you start coughing and spluttering and wheezing and doing other old-man stuff, you’re straight out of here. I want that clear right from the git-go. You got that?”

“I got it.”

“Okay. Then let’s get it over.”

Blue folded his map, and they walked on.

Ted wanted to get as close to the Seat as possible. That was, he reasoned, where he would find what he sought. But Blue skirted west, heading towards the New Town, and he had to follow.

In the rubble of the west of the city, there were more people than he had expected.

Many of them were civilians, poking through the ruins of their homes, business suits and summer skirts stained with ash. Some of them were filthy, their faces grimed by layers of mire; they looked as if they hadn’t washed or been properly fed for days. Evidently not everyone had made it to the comfort of a Rest Centre.

But there were provisions for people, even here. They passed a Red Cross tent complex, beds and a simple field hospital, and what looked like a morgue. Human life and activity, slowly intruding, here on the surface of the Moon.