Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“Stuck at the bottom of a well.” Ted frowned at Blue. “You sound as if you feel sorry for it.”

Blue looked up. “In a way. After all, it’s possible it means us no harm.”

“I was right,” Bran said, as if crooning. “I knew I was right. But I went a little crazy. And then, as soon as the ground started to give way—”

“You had your fun,” Ted said evenly. “Money. The girls. Didn’t you? And it cost my boy his life.”

“Are you another witch-burner, old man?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”

That seemed to renew Bran’s fear. He looked in desperation at Blue. “Who the fuck are you? Can’t you stop him?”

“I am a scientist,” Blue said. “I am here to study the Moonseed. That is all.”

Bran searched Ted’s face, his eyes huge in the dark, his face thin and weak.

“Story time’s over, laddie,” Ted said softly.

There was noise outside: whistles, shouting.

Blue looked out into the main body of the Cathedral. “I think the light is changing,” he said.

Bran tried to wriggle from Ted’s grasp. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” said Blue, “we should get out of here.”

A sound like gun-fire. Deep-throated coughs.

“Now,” Blue said.

Bran seemed dazzled by the daylight. Perhaps he hadn’t been outside for days, Ted thought. With his hand still clamped on Bran’s collar, he looked around.

A party of soldiers was running, to the west, away from Arthur’s Seat, jumping over rubble. One of them looked hurt; his mates were helping him hobble along. When they saw Ted and Blue they waved. Come on.

Smoke was rising from among the ruins atop Calton Hill.

“It is the Moonseed,” said Blue. “It has started again. The secondary vents of the old magmatic complex — Calton Hill and Castle Rock, here — we are expecting them to give way in the next cycle.”

Still grasping Bran, Ted climbed up onto a section of wall, and looked east, towards the Seat, the Moonseed pool.

The pool was glowing. Light sparked from its rim, like flashbulbs popping under a blanket. He could see the ground cracking and dissolving, sinking into the Moonseed as he watched.

“It’s spreading,” Blue said.

“Jesus,” Bran said, and he squirmed harder.

“It has been immobile for days, but now… We go,” Blue snapped. “We must get off this vent.”

“Here,” said Ted. “Take your bottles.”

For one second, two, Blue looked into Ted’s face, then Bran’s.

Then Blue nodded, evidently understanding. He grabbed the sample bottles, and ran to the west, with surprising suppleness.

Bran started shouting. “What are you doing? Shit, man, what are you doing?”

Ted shook the lad, not hard, until he stopped squealing.

When he’d turned in his results, Blue Ishiguro stripped off his Moon suit and walked back into the city. This time he walked to the east, the far side of the Seat, where the Moonseed had yet to spread.

Here, in the suburbs of Duddingston and Bingham and Northfield and Restalrig, the work of clearing the corpses hadn’t advanced so far as in the west. So he joined a party of soldiers, with little protection but their improvised cloth facemasks, as they made their way along the ruin of a street. There was no way of telling what the housing stock had been like here, but there were a lot of cellars and underground rooms, some of them new additions — Venus shelters — where people had tried to ride out the explosion.

Stiff pits, the soldiers were calling them.

They dug into the rubble. It was loose, and so there were constant falls of dust and dirt, tiny avalanches. There was no machinery, because the scientists could not guarantee that the meringue surface would support the weight of any vehicle.

So the soldiers had to use their muscles and hands. They removed layers of shattered masonry, plaster and roof beams and glass shards, all under a layer of ash and pumice, gingerly exposing an entrance. As soon as the new pit was opened, fetid air came billowing out, thick with insects. A stench, like rotting roses; after so many days, the bodies were liquefying, turning to mush down there.

In the early days, the soldiers had had to drag out the corpses, bag them up, try to identify them, take them away for burial or burning. Now, though, the solution was simpler: a corporal stepped forward, with glass facemask, and a flamethrower to hurl down a tongue of fire, the ultimate flame which these poor souls had, Blue supposed, sought to escape.

Blue Ishiguro had survived Kobe, a disastrous earthquake his science had failed to foretell. Many of his family had died there. And now, here he was, surviving again, hale and healthy, even well-fed, where so many others had died.

He was, he thought, cursed with life.

So he laboured with the soldiers for hour on hour, burying himself in the dirt and stench of it, pausing only when his body betrayed him, and dry heaves racked his stomach.

The Prime Minister, Dave Holland was told, was up on the roof garden.

So Holland had to wheeze his way up the stairs past the Strangers” Gallery, then through a fire door to the roof. His thick gut gurgled as he climbed, laden with a good dinner and a couple of beers, and he was wheezing and red-faced by the time he stood in the glow of the central skylights that illuminated the chamber of the House of Commons below.

He took a minute to recover himself, and he dabbed at his sweating face with a huge, discoloured handkerchief. The House was working, even so late, as the members forced through one package of emergency legislation after another.

He could see Bob Fames standing by the balustrade at the far end of the terrace, looking north. The Prime Minister was alone up here — save for the discreet presences, in the shadows of the garden, of his PPS, Pearson, and a couple of Special Branch men.

Holland knew the roof garden well. The view was spectacular, even so late at night. To his right he could see the Thames, the crammed pleasure boats like bubbles of light on the black stream of the river. There were a lot of boats, in fact, reflecting the mood that seemed to be sweeping the country, like a rerun of the millennium.

To his left he overlooked the tiled roof of Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the Palace of Westminster, mostly shadowed now. And before him was the tower of Big Ben, its carved sandstone fascias glowing golden in the light of the spots at its feet, and the big translucent clockface shining from within. The traffic of London sent a subdued, continuing roar into the air, a river in itself.

He’d often used this spectacular place, high above the seat of British sovereignty, to host functions — the cocktail party for MPs he held when he was running for the Party leadership against Fames, for instance — and for more private conjunctions, with two or three of the prettier research assistants who still flocked to the Commons, attracted like moths to the fat old drunks who worked here.

But tonight, it wasn’t the same.

The garden itself, the spectacular architecture beyond, were bloodied by the volcanic sky above, a dismal crimson glow that covered the stars all the way to the zenith. It was the curse of the Scots, he thought gloomily, entirely typical that their passing should be marked in such a melodramatic style, by the banishing of true midnight for everybody else.

The Big Ben clock tower looked full of air and light, he mused, as if it was some immense Gothic spaceship, fuelled and ready to go, ready to lift off from this sorry old world, and he wished it bloody well would, and take him with it.

He coughed and walked forward.

Fames didn’t turn. “Hello, David. Do you think—”