Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

A squad of soldiers went by. They wore grimy fatigues, cloths bound over their mouths. They looked exhausted, but they were carrying spades and body bags, on their way to another clean-up. None of them spoke. They looked inordinately young to Ted: probably younger than both his children, not much older, in the greater scheme of things, than poor Jack.

The Army crews had been working here since the volcanism had died away. But there were still many bodies. Ted could see that, just walking here.

Some of them lay where they had been trapped in the rubble of their shattered houses, their limbs splayed, under roofing timbers or steel joists. The corpses were already bloated and discoloured, faces swollen to a youthful smoothness, freed of the contortions of pain, the bloody reality masked by the thin painting of ash. In Newington there seemed to have been a more major fire — the buildings were uniformly razed — and in the main road that threaded through the suburb, they came across many bodies, apparently unburned, men, women and children alike, lying scattered across the road surface. He saw a mother with a baby. The mother had been trying to hold her baby up, away from the road surface. And in that posture they had been petrified.

Evidently there had been some kind of miniature fire storm here. The road tarmac had melted. The people, fleeing the fires, had gotten stuck, like insects on fly paper, and, suffocating, had fallen. Now their corpses were glued in place, cemented to the road surface which had betrayed them.

How must it have been? Ted wondered, staring at the corpses. Not the fact of death itself, but those few seconds, knowing its inevitability: knowing that today was the day, now was the hour, death bursting out of the mundane background of these quiet suburbs; and suddenly there was nothing you could do to protect those you loved, not even the most innocent. How must it have been?

Edinburgh had become a city of tableaux, he thought, of tiny fragments of immense and undeserved suffering, such as this.

Ted and Blue inched around the bodies, trying not to get too close. Flies swarmed, and the stench was powerful enough to penetrate Ted’s protective suit.

They walked on into the heart of the city. The heat of the June day climbed.

At St Leonard’s, Blue cut right, and headed through the few blocks of housing directly towards Arthur’s Seat. Ted followed gingerly.

The damage was so extensive here it was impossible to make out even the outlines of the streets. Everything had been smashed and burned and shattered by the ash flow, so that rubble lay everywhere in heaps that looked, from a distance, almost smooth. Easily negotiable. But close to, much of it was actually hot to the touch and unstable, eager to collapse to a more consolidated profile.

Ted found the going much more difficult, with jagged edges of wall eager to trip him, or rip his suit, or send a miniature landslide down on top of a foot or leg. In some places the rubble was smoothed over by layers of pumice and ash, making it still more treacherous, and even Blue was forced to slow right down, and move forward with much more caution.

From the air they must have looked like two silvery bugs, inching their way across the shattered, transformed landscape.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Here, Ted could tell he was close to the Moonseed.

The air was so still. And there was a tinge, a silvery glow, as if the sunlight was being scattered by a smog of iron filings.

At last, the world was reduced to its essentials. Moonscape below, silver-stained sky above, himself and Blue and this rubbly plain, his own breathing, the steady thump of his old heart, the tug of pain at his wounded chest. And as his faceplate grew opaque with the mist of his breath, the fine layer of ash dust he had to keep wiping away, his universe narrowed further, became simpler still.

It was almost peaceful.

He wondered what he would smell, if he raised his hood.

He thought about the Moonseed, and meringues, and the unknown pit of alien forms somewhere beneath his feet. It was as if the Moonseed had turned this place into an alien landscape, not Earth any more.

Blue mounted a thick slab of wall, breathing hard, and looked back at Ted. “You are doing well.”

“Thanks.”

“For a geologist this is not so strange, this landscape.”

“What?”

Blue waved a gloved hand. “No life. Nothing but minerals. The world reduced to its essence, by the burning power of the alien among us. Come, my friend. Not much further.” And he stepped forward and continued his progress.

After a time, the housing remains ran out. They had reached the western edge of Holyrood Park, the old garden which had contained the Seat, overlooked here by the Salisbury Crags.

The Crags had gone. The Moonseed pool had come spilling out from the Crags in great silvery tongues. But the turf survived, in narrow bridges pushing a few yards more into the Moonseed, evidently fragile. Ted could see the burned and fallen trunks of trees, grey and lifeless on the scorched, ash-strewn turf.

Further to the east, towards the heart of the Seat, there was only the silver-grey glow of Moonseed light, all the geology and structure there — a billion years of Earth history — reduced to alien smoothness.

“Come on,” Blue whispered. “We can go a little further.”

Blue stepped forward, onto a wider neck of ground. He tested every step, as if he was walking onto an ice floe. Ted followed a few yards behind, trying to stick to the footsteps Blue had left in the ash. Fixed to his hood Blue had a chest-mounted still camera and a small video camera — the kind they put in cricket stumps, Ted thought irrelevantly. Blue was working the still camera now, and talking patiently into a microphone inside his hood.

After maybe fifty paces Blue stopped.

Ted came to stand beside him. The neck of blackened turf went on some yards further, but Ted could see how cracked and fragile it was becoming.

“Notice how it’s not advancing,” Blue said.

“What?”

“The Moonseed.”

“Why?”

“Who the hell knows? Come on. Open your bottles and let’s make like we know what we’re doing.”

Blue crouched and, leaning as if reaching out of a boat, began poking at the Moonseed debris with stuff from his equipment pack. He had probes of metal that he scanned over the pool surface or pushed into it, taking data through wires into his backpack, muttering to his tape the whole time.

Ted squatted down beside him, his knees and calf muscles protesting. He got hold of Blue’s belt at the back, near where he had tucked his heavy geologist’s hammer. It was like holding a child, leaning over a rail. Blue didn’t protest.

Ted looked around, back the way they had come. He was on a neck of land like a spit protruding into a silvery sea. At the “shore” he could see the rubble, the ruined Moonscape suburb through which he’d had to clamber. It seemed a long way away. The closest intact building was a way away to the west, halfway up Castle Hill, a squat pile of sandstone that looked like it might once have been St Giles” Cathedral; the old church poked out of the landscape like a beached wreck.

He could see no other humans, in any direction.

In his gloved hand Blue had cupped a small sample he’d taken from the Moonseed surface. “Look at this now. Be careful. It is very delicate.”

Ted bent. He had to wipe the ash from his faceplate to see.

It was like a spider-web; or an autumn leaf; or the skin stretched over the bones of a child’s hand. A fragment of structure, with the finest of membranes stretched between hair-thin spars.

He grunted. “Like something the Wright Brothers might have dreamed of.”

Blue laughed. His hand shook, just slightly, but it was enough to shake the fragment to pieces, to silvery Moonseed dust, which fell through his fingers and back to the pool. “It is all but impossible to retrieve such structures intact. They are like sculptures of dry sand.”