Moonseed (26 page)

The most heart-rending moments had been dealing with people who couldn’t move themselves. The elderly. The disabled. A team of interpreters had combed the Asian
communities, to make sure the message got home there. Once Morag had found a house occupied by a deaf couple; she’d had to call out a sign language interpreter.

There were a
lot
of people on the margins. She’d never realized how many. Like the people dumped out of homes and hospitals under the Care in the Community program. It had reduced the nation’s welfare bill, and no doubt done some kind of good in many cases. But, by God, it had added to the strain in this situation.

The gold police commander, the Chief Constable, had estimated that fifteen percent of the population had needed direct attention and assistance of some kind. Fifteen percent.

Anyhow, now it was done; as far as she could tell, George Street was empty of human life—empty, at any rate, of anybody who wanted to move.

She studied the eighteenth-century buildings that studded the street. There were two great churches, St. George’s and St. Andrew’s, the latter with its spire rising out of a Pantheon-like neoclassical building. The monumental banks and insurance houses were a blizzard of porticos, pediments and pilasters. But this was no museum, but the heart of a working city; many of the buildings had modern frontages of glass and plastic grafted on to them, sometimes with a brutal lack of grace.

She reached the intersection of George Street with Frederick Street. She stood at the feet of the statue of Thomas Chalmers, founder of the Scottish Free Church, and looked north. Monuments everywhere to the great men of the past, who had looked for immortality in stone and bronze.

Beyond a line of trees she saw blue sky, a hint of the waters of the Forth. The fresh light, still untainted in that direction by the smoke from Arthur’s Seat, drenched the prospect in loveliness.

It was so beautiful, the world was so beautiful, and she had seen so little of it.

Maybe she should go find her family, her mother and father. They had headed west out of the city; she knew
where they should have got to by now.

But she still had her duty.

She turned away from the sunlit trees. She walked south, and turned into Princes Street, and continued to knock on doors.

A helicopter flapped over her head; she stared up to see its rotors glittering in the sun.

The Chinook set down in the center of Princes Street Gardens. It was a crude chunk of military hardware in the middle of this Georgian garden, its runners crushing ornate flower beds, the noise of its rotors clattering rudely from the elegant buildings.

Henry, clutching his petrological microscope, lumbered up to the chopper, looking for somewhere to sit.

The interior of the Army Air Corps Chinook was spartan, just a bare hull with plastic coating over the frame. There were no seats. There were soldiers here in field kit, a patrol on their way to some assignment of their own. The men were hot, sweating, sitting in the roar of the engines on a non-slip flooring littered with dirt. Their packs were strapped down to the floor, with cyalumes—lamps—around them. The men were rooting through the crew’s kit they found there, pinching chocolate bars and Coke with a practiced thoroughness.

And I complained about British Airways, Henry thought. Well, there wasn’t a lot of choice. Maybe if he padded his jacket under his ass—

A loadmaster tapped him on the shoulder. “Not here, sir. You can ride upfront, in the cockpit.”

“Is that any more comfortable?”

The loadie shrugged. “The company’s better.”

So, with an effort, Henry climbed into the cockpit, and took a jump seat behind the pilot and copilot. The pilot was on the left—no, he was the guy on the
right,
damn it, these Brits took the wrong side of the highway even in the air. He
nodded to Henry, a crisp “Sir.” The pilot seemed young, an NCO; Henry would have said he was working class if that hadn’t become, he’d learned, an outdated analysis of British society.

The cockpit was a cave of switches and dials and screens; the pilot and copilot were working through their take-off routine.

“Pedals in neutral.”

“Pedals.”

“Cyclic centered, collective lever down.”

“Got it.”

“Clear left and right.”

“Go for it.”

“Rotor brake off. Wind up rotors.”

“I got it…”

The noise of the rotors rose.

The Chinook lifted with a surge that made Henry’s stomach sink a little deeper inside his frame.

Thanks for the warning, fellas.

Edinburgh turned into a glowing map spread out beneath him, a folded blanket of green cut through by the blue of the Forth, the gray-black of the buildings, the lumpy outcrops of volcanic rock. The road network, clean and well maintained, was a black thread like a kid’s toy track, its markings clear and bright. Today the roads were empty, save for a few scattered and stationary vehicles.

In the middle of the rectangular, oddly American grid that was the New Town, someone was standing, alone, looking up at him, face a bright white dot.

“One hundred feet…eighty feet…” the copilot said.

“Roger, eighty feet. Ninety knots.” The pilot turned, his eyes insectile behind big tinted goggles. “So you’re from NASA, sir?”

“Yup.”

“Always glad to give you Yanks a flying lesson. Staying at eighty feet, ninety knots.”

The Chinook dipped sharply to the right. Henry
looked for a sick bag; there was nothing that qualified.

“This is a little slow for you, I suppose, sir.”

“I’m a scientist, not an astronaut.”

Now the Chinook was flying low over Arthur’s Seat.

The plug looked extraordinarily ugly from the air, a crude knot of basalt protruding from the ground, old and stubborn, somehow magnificent. Its several ancient vents were easy to make out, the basalt outline clear beneath a thin coating of heather. The Seat had, thought Henry, already seen off three hundred million years of weather, the titanic scraping of the ice, the pinprick depredations of man. But it wasn’t going to be able to see off the Moonseed. And there, indeed, close to the summit, was the central pool, obscured a little by the smoke from the ruin of Abbeyhill, shining like a coin in the ashen light.

And elsewhere, there were signs of magmatic activity: the blur of steam and smoke, perhaps a fissure near the crest of the Seat. He wished he had a cospec up here. A camera, even.

Incredibly, there were people on the Seat: still, even now, with the whole damn city evacuated, right at the heart of the thing.

Then, as the Chinook completed its second orbit of the Seat, Henry thought he spotted landsliding, on the south face, away from the ragged patches of Moonseed.

It was beginning.

He tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Could you circle a few times? I’d like to take a closer look.”

“Surely, sir. Break my right now. That’s nice…”

The Chinook dipped to the right and hurled itself into a dive.

The copilot intoned, “Seventy feet, ninety knots. Sixty feet, one hundred knots.”

Arthur’s Seat approached, like an obstacle in a Disneyland ride, and the Chinook soared, following the ground’s blunt contours.

The pilot whooped. “Raw sex!”

It came more abruptly than Mike Dundas had expected.

There was an earthquake, a single jarring shift sideways, that sent them all sprawling, even Bran.

Mike sat up. His arm was bruised, but nothing was broken.

The ground shuddered. Aftershocks.

But Bran was sitting up. He looked around the group, locking each of them in turn in eye contact. “Not long now,” he said, his voice thin and clear. “The EVA is almost terminated. All that remains is for the controllers to choreograph our reentry. We must accept, and be prepared.”

Be prepared. Accept. Yes.

A tall, older man broke out of the group with a kind of sob. “Christ, I don’t want to die. Not for a fucking junkie like you.” He ran, stumbling.

Bran just watched him, his calm undisturbed.

The ground cracked. There was a sound like thunder emanating deep from within the earth. Another jolt.

A fissure opened up, stretching back toward the peak of the Seat; it was just a few inches wide, and the earth around crumbled into it. From a hole at one end of the fissure, smoke, steam and bursts of red hot cinders broke into the air.

The policeman stepped forward. His blue trousers and yellow jacket were stained green where he’d been thrown into the grass. “Who else? It isn’t too late yet. I’ll do all I can to get you down from here in safety.”

There was a stir among the cultists, and a stir in Mike’s heart.
Not too late.
Could that be true?

People were getting up around him, brushing off scuffed and torn suits. Sheepishly joining the copper.

But it is too late, Mike thought. It had been too late for them all, for the whole city maybe, from the moment he had brought those Moon dust grains to this place.

He had let Henry down, betrayed a trust. He had killed the city, even his family, and he deserved to suffer.

…Or maybe, as Bran expressed it, all he had done was to open the door, the hatch to the Airlock that was waiting for them all. And in that case, he deserved the peace and joy and endless light that would follow.

So he ignored the people losing their faith, scurrying down the rock after that copper like frightened rabbits. Perhaps there was nobody left but himself and Bran, but that was okay too. There would be room for them all later. Room for a planetful of lost souls.

He looked for Bran. But Bran had gone.

That was puzzling. But even that didn’t seem to matter.

“One hundred feet…eighty feet…eighty feet.”

“Roger that, eighty feet.”

“Power lines a quarter mile.”

“Roger, power lines. Pulling up.”

The surge upward caught Henry by surprise. His attention had been fixed on the evolution of the Seat; suddenly he was pushed down in his jump seat, his consciousness forced back into his fragile body, hurled around inside this clattering contraption.

“One twenty…one fifty…one eighty…five hundred feet now.”

“Five hundred feet. I have the lines visual. Over we go.”

Henry saw the power lines pass seemingly feet below the Chinook.

“Okay, going lower—”

The Chinook orbited over the south face of the Seat once more.

In the last few seconds, the landsliding had become intense. As Henry looked down, it was as if everything south of a line drawn east-west from the Salisbury Crags to the Dunsapie Loch was beginning to move. The nature of the movement was eerie—like nothing he had seen before—not truly a landslide, for there was no lateral movement; rather, the whole mass was rippling and churning up, basalt shat
tered and turned to a crude fluid by the immense forces stirring within.

And now, at last, the whole south side of the Seat began to slide southward along a deep-seated plane. Already outlying billows of dust and ash were reaching Duddingston Loch and Prestonfield, the suburb to the south of the Seat, mercifully evacuated—

That was when the explosion came.

Red-hot stones were hurled yards into the air. They came down hissing on the grass. Ash was hosing out, black outside, red-lit within; a cinder cone was already building up around the aperture.

The ground shuddered. There were more deep-throated cracks and explosions: Mike was hearing the voice of the ground coming apart, new fissures and vents opening up.

Mike repeated one of Bran’s favorite mantras. “Christmas Eve, 1968.
In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth
…”

He heard people join in.
“And the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
He was not alone, then.
“And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters—”

The ground shuddered, and he was thrown flat again, his face pressed into the grass. The first stones had become a fount of boulders, incandescent bombs hurled so far into the air they passed out of his sight, into the ash cloud that was gathering above him.

Lightning sparked in the cloud. The sunlight was blocked out. He was enveloped in heat.

Mike was sure there was nothing like this in the literature, this sudden and spectacular opening up. But then, there was nothing in fifty thousand years of human history, nothing in five billion years of Earth, like the Moonseed.

The noise had merged into a roar now, continuous, the shuddering unending. But still he could hear his own voice.

“And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”

The ground split again, gas and steam rushing all around him. He heard a scream, unearthly; he was scorched by the heat, but still, it seemed, uninjured. He could scarcely breathe, the air was so hot and thick with the ash.

The ground subsided under him.

In the darkness, he seemed to be falling. Perhaps he would fall all the way to the center of the Earth, hollowed out by Moonseed.

But now the ground returned, slamming up under him, and he fell on his back, the soil and grass and rock and heather and moss rubbing against his flesh.

He was rising into the roiling ash cloud. It rose up above him, lightning sparking. Remarkably, he still felt no pain, no real discomfort.

There could be only seconds left, though.

Far above, a glint of metal against a square inch of blue sky. A helicopter?

He tried to shout, but he had no voice.

And God saw the light…That it was good…

But now the ash descended on him—oh, Jesus, it was hot, it was burning—and there was no more light.

The cloud of dust and steam billowed upward, thrusting like a fist toward the Chinook.

“Get us out of here,” Henry said.
“Now.”

The pilot didn’t need telling twice. He opened up his throttle and the Chinook dipped, its big rotors biting into the turbulent air.

Henry looked back. The cloud, a black wall, hundreds of feet high, seemed to be catching them up.