Moonseed (16 page)

He dialed the number, and tapped the card on his teeth. “Never leave home without it…Hey.” He checked his watch. “Sorry to disturb you so early. Could you put me through to Blue Ishiguro?”

11

Henry emerged from the lab’s fluorescent harshness into bright afternoon daylight. In his rental car he drove the short distance to Holyrood Park, and, pulling on his rad-proof poncho, walked up the Seat, leaving the traffic noises behind. He drank in the warm, fresh air of this mid-April day. He was coming to like Scotland, he thought; there was something refreshing about the air here, the very light. Something northern.

He had now got into the habit of doing this, walking out to monitor the disfigurement of the Seat, every day.

Today he found the biggest dust pools had been cordoned off by plastic police tape fixed to metal posts. Not far from the site where St. Anthony’s Chapel used to stand—now just an anonymous patch in the glass-smooth surface of a dust pit—a young policewoman was standing. She wasn’t like the cops back home. She wore a blue sweater and tie, and the heavy equipment that dangled from her
belt was just a radio. No gun. She didn’t look like she needed it.

Henry walked up to her, introduced himself, and told her he was here to study the site. He offered to show her some credentials, but she waved him away.

“Go ahead, Dr. Meacher.” Her accent was crisp and precise; she was cheery, dapper, competent, very Scottish. “I’ve seen you on the TV.” That was likely; he’d featured, to his chagrin, as a strange-but-true item on the local news, the eccentric Yank here to study the Moon rock. “Besides,” she said, “I can see the hammer on your belt. Just don’t fall in.”

“I won’t.”

“There are Government scientists coming up to study this. It’s caused quite a stir.”

“I’ll bet it has.”

She nodded. “We’re going to need more cordon tape, aren’t we?”

“That you are. Take care, officer—”

“Constable Decker.”

He left her at her post.

He set himself to walk around the perimeter of the primary pool at the summit—as close as he could get, given the police tape—counting his paces as he went.

The pool lay over the craggy agglomerate like a silvery blanket, dimly reflecting the afternoon sun, like a splash of mercury paint. In some places it had actually adjusted the shape of the Seat; bits of the old plug had subsided into the spreading silvery pool, as if dissolved in some powerful acid.

He approached his starting point once more.

There was Constable Decker, standing relaxed, and a little farther down the hillside there was the patient group of cultists. Just like every day, they seemed happy; he could hear guitars, folk songs, raucous laughter. A TV crew was making some kind of report, a girl reporter being filmed against the glimmering background of the Seat’s wound. The reporter was in a radiation-proofed smock, but most of
the other people here weren’t.

The whole incident was turning into a kind of low-grade circus, he thought, an item for the end of the TV news, a little scary but too strange to take seriously, like skateboarding dogs and skydiving wedding parties and Moonstruck Yank geologists.

Henry had a palm-top computer in his jacket pocket; he pulled it out. He entered the paces he’d counted, made an adjustment for the fact that he hadn’t been able to approach the rim of the pool as closely as before because of the tape, divided by pi on the assumption that the pool was circular…He entered the new data point onto a log-log graph he’d set up in the palm-top. The graph reduced the growth pattern to a straight line.

The new point was close to the line he’d established with his earlier data.

The growth he saw today was just what he’d found before. Steady. Relentless.

“I was right about the damn police tape,” he muttered.

He expanded the scale of his graph. He would be able to figure out how far out this shit would reach, given time…It wasn’t reassuring.

This was the easy part, of course. And he had already started to skew the work in the lab, focusing on this accelerating phenomenon, with studies of field samples, literature searches and phone calls to check on comparable cases (there were none). That was easy, too, all under his control, more or less.

The tough part was figuring out what the hell to do about this, how to tell people. From that, he found himself shying away. It wasn’t any part of his career plan to become a prophet of doom.

But if his numbers were right—if the phenomenon wasn’t self-limiting, if this inexorable growth continued—soon he wasn’t going to have a lot of choice.

Afterward, Henry walked up the glacial tail of Castle Rock, toward the Castle grounds themselves.

The crest of the tail was topped by a chain of streets known collectively as the Royal Mile. The buildings here, the heart of the Old Town, were antiques, and some were imposing, like the uncompromising block of St. Giles’ Cathedral; and it was startling to see, peering through steep alleys, a glimpse of the blue waters of the Firth. But to Henry the place was polluted by twee tourist shops selling junk, kilts and bagpipes and whisky marmalade and Scottish ancestry gizmos.

But some of the pubs were good. And he had to admit he had paid his dollar to go see the Camera Obscura, a Victorian sight-seeing gimmick that worked better than he had expected.

Castle Rock was another volcanic plug, smaller than Arthur’s Seat but of the same vintage, sprouting from the same underground magmatic complex. The Castle itself was a sandstone mound of buildings, walls and turrets and battlements, looking as if it had grown out of the basaltic crag on which it was built.

He walked around the grounds, inspecting the basalt that underpinned the Castle—in some cases, rocky outcrops had simply been incorporated into the walls—but to Henry’s relief there was no sign here of the contamination which had disfigured the Seat.

He climbed to the Upper Ward, and looked out from the cannon-platform terrace to the north. He could see the railway line and Princes Street, two great avenues stretching west to east, converging toward the odd structures on Calton Hill to the northeast. Between the rail line and Princes Street was the garden, that old drained loch. It was studded with trees, a little marred by a huge white marquee where—Henry had learned—a band played during the summer arts festival. Beyond that was the cluttered landscape of the New Town, with its sandstone monuments—the Scott Monument, his own Balmoral Hotel, the banks and insurance
companies on George Street—jutting out of the forest of roofs, and beyond that, serene and calm, was the blue surface of the Firth of Forth, and the rocky northern coast.

The lights were coming on, and in Princes Street the crowds were starting to bustle out of the shops and offices and making their way home, their radiation-proofed smocks and ponchos bright, bustling human activity at the heart of the ancient city.

He felt as if he was somehow opening up, as if walls in his head were crumbling. He wasn’t used to feeling so engaged with humanity as this.

Maybe it was something to do with Jane.

This was Lilliput, small and crowded: a thousand years old, and beautiful. It seemed impossible that it should be under threat—a threat only he perceived.

Venus. The Moon rock anomalies. The Arthur’s Seat dust.

The pieces of the puzzle seemed to be moving around in his head, colliding, trying to find ways to fit. But the essence of the future was clear to him; the inexorable growth of that stuff on Arthur’s Seat would see to that.

Bad news.

Unless he, and those who worked with him, found a way to stop it.

“We have to, is all,” he said to himself. “If not us, who else?”

For a while longer he gazed out over Edinburgh’s bustle.

Then he began the walk back to the town, to meet Blue.

Henry had a little trouble meeting up with Blue Ishiguro, in the subterranean clamor of Waverley Station. Blue wasn’t much over five five and was skinny as a rake, so it was hard to spot him among all these heavy-set, overfed
gaijin,
as Henry always thought of Westerners when he was around
Japanese.

But here Blue came at last, his pencil-thin frame all but overwhelmed by the giant, battered field rucksack he carried on his back, his button-small face split by a giant shit-eating grin.

Henry embraced Blue, and they went into a mock-boxing routine, what Blue, who had spent maybe too long in America, always called hoopin’ and hollerin’ mode.

Blue said, “It’s good to see you, man.”

“That’s the truth. Let’s get out of here.”

They emerged into the center of the city. Blue hitched his pack on his back and looked around curiously. They set off west down Princes Street, which ran straight as an arrow toward the spires of St. Mary’s Cathedral, to find the guest house Blue had booked for himself.

It was a little after eight in the evening, so the end-of-day crowd had subsided from its peak, and the light was starting to go. All the monuments of the city seemed to be bathed in yellow-gold floodlights: the Castle on its shapeless volcanic mound, the Balmoral Hotel, and the memorial for Walter Scott which looked, Henry thought, like a Saturn V launch gantry rendered in sandstone, turned black as coal by pollution, which the monument was too fragile to have washed off.

“So,” said Henry. “What do you think?”

Blue gazed around, his rheumy eyes analytical. “Skinny,” he said. “England has a lot of skinny buildings.”

“It may do. But this is Scotland.”

“Whatever. And it’s kind of grubby from the pollution.”

“True enough.”

“So where’s the volcano?”

Henry clapped him on the shoulder. “Tomorrow, old man. You need to sleep off your jet lag.”

Blue sighed. “I suppose you are right.”

They arrived in a small, straight side street in the west of the city, not far from the shadow of St. Mary’s. The guest
house was a rambling, much-extended building next to a cobbled courtyard, entered by a narrow archway. The ground floor was pretty much a pub, a long bar gleaming with glass and leather, circular brass tables crowded with drinkers cradling pints in straight glasses; cigarette smoke hung like a volcanic pall in the air.

Blue grinned at Henry. “I think I will like it here.”

He didn’t object when Henry picked up his rucksack to carry it up the two flights of stairs to his room (no elevator, of course). The room, when they got to it, was just a box, not much bigger than a bed and a shower stall.

Back in the bar, which was still more crowded than before, Blue insisted on buying the drinks. They sat at a table in the corner, sticky with stale beer, and Blue waited patiently, until Henry had to explain that in a British pub you had to go up to the bar and order your drinks and bring them back. On the other hand, in cafés and restaurants you were supposed to wait for service…and so forth. Blue accepted all this serenely, went to the bar, and came back with two glasses full to the brim with heavy Scottish bitter.

“Here’s to you,” Henry said.

“Kampai!”

The beer was heavy, flat and warm; Henry was working at getting used to the stuff, but he had a ways to go yet.

“Your room’s kind of small,” he said.

Blue laughed. “So small that if I cussed a cat I’d get hair in my mouth. It’s fine, my friend. I have my
tatami
mat and my happy coat and my portable family shrine, though I’m not sure where I will place it. The shower stall, perhaps. I think this place has a certain charm. Did you know it used to be a coaching inn? And you can see how old it is, so old it has had time to subside. Think about that, Henry. This place is probably older than all but two or three buildings on your whole continent.”

“But not Japan.”

“Not Japan, no.”

“Well, these old Brit places are better than they used to be, I guess. At least you get a shower in your room now. But—”

“But you can’t polish a turd.”

Henry grinned. “I’m glad to have you here, my friend.”

Blue eyed Henry. “I take it you don’t want to talk about work.”

“Not until tomorrow. I need you refreshed. I need your clear thinking.”

“There are no live volcanoes in Scotland,” Blue pointed out. “Not for three hundred million years.”

“I know. And I don’t think we have one now. What we have is—”

“What?”

“Something not right.”

“It scares you.”

“Yes, it does,” Henry said.

Blue grunted and raised his glass. “But that is for tomorrow. For tonight, we will do what old men like us always do, which is to talk about old times. Tell me, do you still hear from the Pinatubo team?”

Pinatubo was a volcano in the Philippines. Henry and Blue had been part of a joint team of USGS and Philippine volcanologists who had gone out to assess the danger of eruption. Because of the accuracy of their characterization of the hazards and their prediction of eruption, more than fifty thousand people had been evacuated to safety, days before Pinatubo’s devastating eruptions.

Henry, fresh from college, had done little more than carry the gear, but it had been his first exposure to real field work, and to a major geological event. And to what it could do to people.

So they gassed about that.

“Not that we were so smart about Pinatubo,” Henry said. “You remember Sister Assumpta?”

Blue laughed. “Of course.” This was the nun who had walked into the Philippine Institute of Volcanology to tell
the assembled scientists, peering at their instruments in the artificial light there, that, begging their pardon, the mountain had just exploded. And so it had, clearly visible from her village; but that nun’s soft-spoken message was the first warning anybody had.

So they talked about that for a while. Then Henry went up to buy some more drinks, and they talked about the time in Colombia when Blue had absentmindedly walked over terrain so hot that when he took off his boots his socks were smoking…and so on.

Blue kept up, but he looked thin and frail compared to the booming, bovine
gaijin
around him, and every now and again he would turn away and cough deeply into a huge handkerchief, the phlegm liquid in his throat. He had visibly crumbled in the few years since Henry had seen him last, and that was a true pisser.

Blue wasn’t admitting to any of it, but the word was he had asthma, and maybe heart trouble. Which was why VDAP hadn’t allowed him out of Vancouver and into the field for a couple of years, and—no doubt—why Blue had been so keen to come for a jaunt to Britain, on Henry’s obscure and ambiguous invitation.