Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

She got to her feet stiffly.

In the middle of the road, traffic all around, the man confronted her. “I’m taking your car,” he said bluntly.

But he was hesitating.

Here was a man who was not used to this, to highway robbery. She tried to think, to size up the situation.

In the scrub on the far side of the road, beyond the crawling traffic, was a fat woman with a couple of suitcases, and a kid, a sulky-looking teenage girl. Jane tried to figure what minor disaster had befallen this family. Maybe their car had broken down, or simply run out of petrol. Maybe they had been robbed themselves.

She could offer to give them a ride.

But now the man, with tongue protruding, grabbed her arm; he pushed his free hand inside her sweater, searching for her breast. He was doing this thing in front of his family, and hers. Just because he thought the rules were all gone; just because he thought he couldn’t be stopped.

Jane stepped back, breaking his grip easily, and threw a punch at his nose. She put all her weight behind it. Blood spurted, bright crimson, and he fell backwards.

“Fuck off,” she said.

She got back in the car and locked the doors from the inside. The car edged forward — given the traffic she could hardly get away — but she didn’t trouble to look back.

Jack was clapping her slowly, a grin on his lips.

Jane waved her hand in the air. “It bloody hurt. And don’t let me hear you use language like that.”

The traffic crept forward.

The air was strange. The sky was tinged orange. She could smell ozone and ash.

By evening, they’d come no more than ten miles, and they had to sleep in the car.

It was now 3.00 a.m. in Chuzenji, an hour or more since one of the monks had woken him with the news of the Pacific volcano. Declan Hague sat in his cubicle, pondering events.

Waves.

In Declan’s mind, the future was simple: it was a question of waves, and wavelengths and speeds, the simple physics he remembered from school.

On his small, hand-held TV there were the images of destruction, brought to him in a fraction of a second, bounced around the world by the satellites: the boiling ocean, the glowing, cracked sea floor, the new island-mountains thrusting into the air from the depths of the Pacific. It was the Moonseed, the scientists said. It hadn’t taken long to chew through the five-mile-thick crust under the oceans, to open up new vents to release the swarming fire of Earth’s interior. Some of the scientists seemed pleased with themselves. Right on schedule, they said.

These electronic images came to him on the first wave, at the speed of light.

Next would come the sound, the great shouts of the quakes and eruptions, carried through the perturbed and increasingly murky air of Earth at some six hundred miles an hour, directly to his ears. The second wave. He would need no technology for that, and that was pleasing.

…And at last, one more wave, of more uncertain velocity, that would come rearing out of the perturbed ocean. And that, he thought with relief, would finish it all.

There was a tsunami watch which sought to monitor and predict the great waves, like seismic weather stations, scattered across the Pacific, run by many countries. So the coming event was not unanticipated. On his TV the experts pronounced solemn warnings to prepare, exhortations to stay calm.

Japan had been struck by at least fifteen great waves in the last three centuries. In 1896, a tsunami was reported to have killed twenty-seven thousand people. More than a thousand died in 1933. And so on.

Tsunami.

It was a word which meant “tidal wave’, but the waves were nothing to do with the tides, the pull of the Moon.

Right now, in the open ocean, the wave caused by the ocean floor crack would not be so spectacular to look at. Perhaps three hundred miles long, but no more than a few feet high, with a hundred miles or more between crests, travelling at somewhere between three and six hundred miles per hour. Unimpressive — except in terms of the energy stored by such a vast formation, crossing the world ocean at such giant speeds.

As it entered the shallower waters along the edge of a continent, the wave would reduce in speed and gather in height, to perhaps two hundred feet, three. And then when it reached the land, friction with the shallow bottom would reduce the speed to less than a hundred miles an hour — but the wave height would be magnified tremendously.

No structure could withstand its force. As it uprooted trees and smashed buildings, it would become laden with debris, and its ability to scour the land bare would be magnified. Sizable ships might be carried miles inland.

Then would come a rapid retreat back to the ocean, and then, every ten to twenty minutes, a fresh surge, until the energy was dissipated.

Sometimes the first surge would deposit fish, swept inland and left to suffocate. Fools would hurry forward to take the fish. But the wily Japanese knew that more surges would come, and ignored the apparent bounty. That was the folk wisdom, the common experience. The Japanese were, after all, used to tsunamis.

But he wondered if they really understood what today would bring.

There would, of course, be no-one to help. For, as the flickering TV images showed, the Moonseed was surging in many places, and the world was, evidently, starting to come apart.

He had no desire to sleep again. He pulled on his habit, slipped out of the main hall, and walked through the soft quiet to the staircase cut into Mount Nantai.

He took nothing but the clothes on his back, the sandals on his feet. Not even a light, a lantern or a torch, to guide his way on the rocky steps. The sky was so bright now, glowing a thin red like a sunset, all the way through the night — thanks to the volcanic dust being injected into the air, from Britain and Italy and the Philippines, and a hundred smaller eruptions — that he needed no light anyway.

It would have been nice to see the stars, he thought. But then in an hour or so the baleful countenance of Venus was due to rise, and he had no desire to witness that ill omen again; let the dust blot it out for good.

He reached the caldera rim, and was greeted by the stink of sulphur and ash and chlorine. There seemed to be new fissures in the ground here, and he suspected he could see the vent of steam.

Here and there, the rock burst into subdued silvery light. It was the mark, he had learned, of Moonseed growth. His creation.

He smiled.

He found a place where he could sit in comfort, with his back to the subtle warmth of the reviving volcano. Here he could look out over the lake, to the south and east, towards the ocean, and Tokyo.

There were twelve million people in Tokyo, an incredible number. One quarter of the population of the country lived within thirty miles of the Imperial Palace there.

He wondered how many had already fled. But, as the light of a new dawn seeped into the sky, many more would even now be making their way into the city, by car and train and bus, for another day’s work, regardless of the warnings.

The Japanese were used to tsunamis, after all.

The sun was high, but it was a pinprick, a wan disc in an ugly grey sky. He was cold, despite the thickness of his robe.

Unseasonal weather.

Declan knew he would have to wait most of the day, until perhaps the early evening, before the wave arrived.

By now, Hawaii must already have suffered.

Hawaii, stranded in mid-Pacific, was surrounded by deep water, submarine trenches outside its harbours. The water shallowed rapidly near the land, and the waves, coming out of the western ocean, would pound down on the islands with virtually no warning. The sun was high; the destruction must already be over there. Scoured down to the bedrock, he thought.