Stephen Baxter - Phase Space

At around five, they walk into the cathedral. A choir of schoolboys is practising, and their thin, delicate voices float on the air. There are tourists here, but they move around quietly, looking up. Jays is conscious of the loud click of the toecaps of his boots on the flags.

Alice reads from a guide pamphlet. ‘“The cathedral is mainly Norman.” Some of it is nine hundred years old, Jays. “Of special interest are the carved stalls, the fourteenth-century Mappa Mundi in the south transept, the chapels, the tombs and the library, with its chained and rare books.”’ She sniffs. ‘I’m becoming acclimatized to all this great age, I think.’

Jays runs a hand over a huge slab of sandstone embedded in a pillar. Somebody has carved a graffito here – ‘Dom. Gonsales’ – but even this desecration is self-evidently ancient.

‘Nice rock?’ Alice asks dryly.

Jays grins as they walk on. ‘Actually, yes. This is Devonian sandstone –’

‘Don’t tell me. When dinosaurs ruled the Earth.’

‘Hell, no. Much older than that. This stuff is about four hundred million years old, Alice. We’re on the coast of the Old Red Sandstone Continent. The rock here was laid down in lakes and deltas; most of southern England was covered by ocean. There were plants on land, but no animals yet …’

She nods as if listening, but she has found a small book stall, and is starting to browse.

Jays scratches the frosting of white that is all that is left of his hair. He is now seventy years old, fit and California-tanned. For twenty-five years, since his Apollo flight, his one and only spaceflight, he has been a bore about the Moon. And now his interest in geology is making him a bore about the Earth, too.

It is kind of heroic, he thinks, to be dull on two planets.

Alone, he wanders a little further. He tries to fix the church in his memory.

Most of the great English cathedrals stopped developing during the Reformation in the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII took his country away from the Church of Rome. Compared to the great churches in Catholic countries like Spain or Italy, swamped by centuries of ornamentation, English cathedrals have a certain austere class, he has decided.

He comes to a small, rather ugly side chapel. It isn’t roped off, but there are no tourists here. The walls are much darker than the rest of the church, and that, together with the filtering of the light by a couple of niggardly slit-windows, adds to a sense of gloom and age.

Jays, on impulse, steps inside. There are a couple of pews before a small, nondescript altar, and a stand of unlit candles. There is dust on the pews. A paper sign, stuck to the wall with putty, tells him this is Bishop Godwin’s Chapel, XVII Century. So this chapel is older than his nation. The windows are filled with panes of stained glass, which show what look, oddly, like Chinese scenes.

He runs his hand over the wall. Maybe the dark coloration is candle black, he thinks. But his fingers come away clean, save for a little dust.

He decides to apply a little geology. It looks more like an igneous or metamorphic rock than a sedimentary, like a sandstone. It is dark and isn’t coarse-grained, so that makes it a basalt. And there are fine gas bubbles embedded in the surface. A vesicular basalt, then, a lava that has cooled on the surface of the Earth.

He looks around. The chapel’s walls are all constructed of the dark basalt.

A lava, here in the heart of Britain?

He looks around, but there is no leaflet to explain the chapel’s history, nor anybody to ask about it.

Alice is still in the bookshop, leafing through a pamphlet.

‘Hell of a thing,’ he says.

She smiles abstractedly. ‘Look at this. It’s about you.’ She passes him the little book.

It is called The Man In The Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger.

The story is about how a man called Gonsales trains swans to carry him through the air. Twenty-five of them, each attached to a pulley, save him from a shipwreck. But the swans hibernate on the Moon, and carry Gonsales there …

And so on. It is a seventeenth-century tale, he sees, reprinted by some local enthusiast. The kind of stuff they now call proto-science fiction.

Domingo Gonsales. He tells her about the graffito he saw.

She takes the book back. ‘Maybe it was a fan. Or a literary critic. What did you want to tell me?’

He describes the lava walls to her. ‘It’s just it doesn’t make any sense, geologically.’

She pulls a face. ‘ Geology, ’ she says. She has a broad, high-cheekboned face, highlighted blond hair and intense blue eyes. At forty-five, she still turns heads. In a way he is glad she is getting a little older. It makes him less open to the accusation that he’s picked up a trophy wife, after Mary dumped him. And Alice has turned out to be one hell of a PA and agent, as his modest literary career has taken off.

‘Remember what I told you. You can tell the geology of an area just by looking at the old buildings there …’

Once, most of Britain was covered by a shallow ocean, which deposited gigantic chalk layers. But then Britain tipped up, and the ice came, scraping most of the chalk off the top half of the island. Now, as you travel south from Scotland, you traverse younger and younger landscapes: billion-year-old gabbros and granites and basalts in Scotland, belts of successively younger sedimentaries as you come down through England, until you reach the youngest of all, the marine Pleistocene clays and sands around London, less than sixty million years old.

His signing tour has taken in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Preston, Manchester, Birmingham, Peterborough, as well as London. He’s insisted on taking a train or a hired car everywhere, never flying, so he could see the old buildings – churches, houses, pubs, even railway stations – which stand like geological markers, constructed of the native rock.

‘Anyhow that’s why the basalt in that chapel is so odd,’ he says.

‘If it is basalt.’

‘Sure it is. Come on, Mary; I know basalts. All the damn Moon rocks we picked up were basalts. It’s just unusual for such an old building to feature such displaced materials. They didn’t have the haulage capability we have now …’

She shrugs. ‘They built Stonehenge from that rock from Wales, and that’s a lot older. It’s just a few tons of some Scottish stone.’

‘But what the hell’s it doing here, in the Godwin Chapel?’

‘Godwin?’ She frowns at that, and looks again at the book she is holding. According to the jacket The Man In The Moone was written by Francis Godwin, Bishop of Hereford, in the seventeenth century. ‘How about that,’ she says. ‘You suppose it is the same guy?’

He shrugs. ‘We could check.’

She reaches for her purse. ‘Anyhow this settles it. I thought nine pounds is a little steep for forty-three pages, but I guess this book has been waiting here for us to find it.’

She pays for the book, and he wants to go back to the chapel, but there is no time left before the signing.

So, Colonel Holland, why ‘Jays’ ?

It is a question he’s answered a hundred times before, but what the hell. ‘It was my sister. When she was a kid she couldn’t say “James” right. It came out “Jays”. It stuck as a nickname.’

Is it true you changed your name by deed poll to Jays ?

‘No. And it’s not true I trademarked it, either …’

Laughter.

The little lecture room in back of the book store is maybe half-full, rows of faces turned to him like miniature moons, filled with pleasant interest. He decides he is going to enjoy the event, even if he feels intimidated by the giant show cards his publisher has sent over from London – ‘ Rocky Worlds – A Vision of the Future by a Man Who’s Been There …’