Moonseed (27 page)

The Chinook lurched; the pilots fought for control.

There was an explosion nearby: a crackle of acoustic shock waves, a blast of light, as if someone was shooting at the chopper.

“What—”

“Hold on!”

The Chinook rocked violently.

“Break left! Break right!”

The Chinook banked; Henry grabbed the frame, but even so he was thrown from side to side.

Thick and viscous magma, he thought. Undisturbed for three hundred million years. Heavy with dissolved gases. Suddenly the Moonseed takes the lid off. The magma tears itself into hot fragments, that jet upward or tear out of the new/old vent. Hurling volcanic bombs into the air, even high enough to threaten this Chinook.

Understanding it, he found, was no reassurance right now.

The rocking began to reduce.

“Take it easy,” the pilot said.

The Chinook leveled out.

Henry looked back again. The cloud was still expanding faster than they could run, probably three hundred miles an hour or better, close enough now to turn the day dark.

There was a patter of ash particles on the windscreen.

“North,” he said. “Go north.”

The pilots hurled the Chinook into a sickening wrench to the left.

Henry looked back. The cloud was still expanding, but mostly southward; the north was shielded a little by the topography of the Seat, what was left of it.

The cloud was separating into distinct mushroom-shaped clouds, thick and black, heavy and pregnant with ash. There were lighter cirrus clouds arrayed above. He could see the ashfall beginning already, a black rain; it would turn what was left of Edinburgh into a new Pompeii, he thought.

The Salisbury Crags, at the western face of the Seat, had given way. He could see what looked like a pyroclastic flow, a heavier-than-air mix of gases and hot volcanic fragments. From here it looked like a smoke ring spreading
down the battered western flank of the Seat. The flow would follow the contours of the ground, and pool in the lower areas: the heart of Edinburgh, the old loch that had been drained to build the New Town.

Already the Seat itself, what was left of it, was scraped bare of life. And, through the clouds, he couldn’t see any sign of the Moonseed pools.

Lightning bolts shot through the clouds, extending to tens of thousands of feet.

For Morag, it started with a low rumble, like a train deep underground. But there were no trains running today.

Then a series of buffeting jolts. Jolts that grew stronger.

She stood in the middle of Princes Street, in the roadway away from the buildings.

Then she was down, her face slammed against the tarmac. It was as if a rug had been pulled away from beneath her feet.

She tried to get to her knees. There was blood on the tarmac, a deep sting down the right side of her face, where the skin had been scraped away.

The noise was suddenly enormous, the crashing and roaring of the buildings overlaid on the deeper rumble of the ground. There was a muddled stink, of gas, steam, ozone, soot.

The street, still shaking, was turning into a battlefield. The facings of the buildings were coming away and crashing to the pavements, sheets of stone and bright plastic and metal and glass, smashing and splintering as they fell, as if the street was imploding. Billboards and neon light tubes turned themselves into deadly missiles, showering shrapnel over the pavements below. Some of the older buildings seemed to be collapsing already, the breaking of their beams like gunshot cracks.

To the east, toward Arthur’s Seat, she could see red flames rolling and leaping, a growing pillar of black smoke.
Sometimes the flames seemed to pause, to weaken, but then they would find new vigor and hurl themselves even higher than before. There was a constant muffled roar. It was like watching some immense oil refinery burning up.

She sat down in the middle of the road, keeping her hands away from the glass fragments skidding there. The road surface was cracking open—to her left, a great section of it was tilting up—but she seemed to be in a stable place, here, and far enough from the cracking facades of the buildings to survive that, with a little luck.

Hell, she thought. She might actually live through this. If she found somewhere to report in she would have a tale to tell…

But now there was a new explosion. A sound like a thousand cannon.

A wall of flame—taller than any of the buildings, laced with black smoke and steam—poured into the eastern end of Princes Street. It was almost beautiful, like a moving sculpture of smoke and fire and light. At the cloud’s touch buildings exploded like firecrackers, a blizzard of stone and metal and glass.

Oh, shit.

Time turned to glue; she seemed to be able to make out every detail.

The flame hit the big old buildings at the end of the street. She saw the Register House’s portico and clock towers burst outward, before fire erupted from within, white and hot, overwhelming the Wellington statue, the old Iron Duke on his horse, in the instant before the cloud enveloped them.

Now a fountain of flame and smoke erupted from the entrances to the Waverley Market, the underground mall built around the Station, and the panels of its roof fluttered into the air like so many leaves. A brilliant light enveloped the Scott Monument, two hundred feet of carved Gothic foolishness, magnificent in the flames’ underlighting for one last instant, before it too erupted
into shards of stone.

A wind buffeted her, blistering hot.

The cloud poured along the street, more like a fluid than a gas. It must be full of ash, heavier than the air. Lightning cracked within it. It was carrying rocks, irregular, glowing boulders and sharp-edged fragments that probably came from buildings. Carrying all that stuff, she thought, was actually going to make it more efficient at scouring the city as it progressed.

This thing was going to scrape Edinburgh down to the bedrock, she thought, and then the Moonseed was going to eat
that.
But maybe it would be beautiful, in its way.

So much for reporting in.

She stood tall, facing the heat. She had time for an instant of regret before the cloud reared before her, and—

Soon, it seemed to Henry, the ash had reached a huge altitude, maybe fifty thousand feet. Ash, laden with Moonseed dust.

It obscured the view of Edinburgh, and maybe that was a mercy; he glimpsed the fiery hell of Arthur’s Seat, the husks of burning buildings all around.

The pilot said, “We couldn’t have outrun it, could we, sir?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

“We’ll have to go back to Leuchars. I don’t trust this bird after inhaling all that shit from the air.”

“That’s fine.”

“We’ll find another transport to get you to London.”

Henry looked back at the high ash. It would inject itself all the way up to the tropopause, ten miles above the Earth, where the decreasing temperature of the thinning air was inverted, making the tropopause into an invisible lid on the lower atmosphere. But such was the violence of the eruption, the ash from the Seat would surely break through the tropopause into the stratosphere beyond.
There was no rain up there, nothing to wash the debris back down again.

The ash from the Seat would form a thin veil that would spread all the way around the planet, the heavier fragments slowly drifting back down to Earth. He thought he could see, as it reached toward the stratosphere, the steel glitter of Moonseed dust amid the ash.

The genie was out of its bottle now.

“Welcome to Mars, fellas,” he said.

Monica Beus was exhausted by the time Scott Coplon, her USGS guide, had led her to Kanab Point, here on the north side of the Grand Canyon. And that after a (reasonably) gentle one-mile hike from the off-road vehicle that had brought them almost all the way from the North Rim entrance station.

It was close to sunset—probably one of the best times of day to view the Canyon—and the light, coming in flat and low from a cloudless sky, filled the Canyon with dusty blue shadow. The layers in the rock shone yellow, orange, pink and red, the colors of fire.

Scott was a kid of thirty or so, his face hidden by a bushy black beard and thick Buddy Holly glasses. He was dressed, as she was, in a bright red survival suit and woolly hat. He asked now, “Are you okay?”

Now that, she thought, was a spectacularly dumb question, and she sat on a ledge of ancient, eroded sandstone and considered it. Not only was she being eaten up from the inside, not only had she become, without noticing it, a decaying old lady, but, according to the best of her information, some kind of dreadful global catastrophe was coming down. So: no, she was not okay, and never would be again.

Even if the quacks did say the bone disease she had contracted was a really “good” form of secondary cancer; even if the quacks still, absurdly, gave her a fifty-fifty chance of survival, despite the startling acceleration of her anatomy’s failure.

But it didn’t make a piece of difference as to what she
had to do, to be the eyes and ears and scientific brain of the President of the United States, just a little longer.

Anyhow she let the kid off the hook. “I’m fine. Just let me catch my breath.”

He took a couple of steps closer to the rim. “You can smell it, even up here.”

“What?”

“The sulfur. And the ash. If you’re asthmatic—”

“I’m not asthmatic. Help me up.” She lifted her arm. “Give me a minute.”

“For what?”

She smiled. “To sight-see. I’ve never been out here before, to my shame.” And I sure as hell never will again.

He grinned and backed off. “Sure. I understand. This is why I got into this game, you know.”

“The scenery.”

“Uh huh. I get
paid
to be up here. Take all the time you want.”

She stepped forward, alone, her feet crunching on basalt fragments.

Jesus Christ, this was the
Grand Canyon.

From here, on the northern rim, she could see the sweep of the land. She was in the middle of the Colorado Plateau, thousands of feet of rock laid down by the shallow seas and deltas that had once covered much of North America. On the horizon, to the south, she could see the smoothly swelling surface of the Plateau, flat and undulating, reminiscent of the sea which had given it birth. It was speckled with green, what looked like blades of grass spilling over the plateau walls. But each of those blades was a tree, a juniper or a canyon pine, each of them twenty or thirty feet tall.

That was the Plateau, magnificent in itself. But the Colorado River had just cut through the whole thing, as clean as a knife gouge, dynamic and unstable. And the complex channels and incisions had exposed, in the outcrops and walls, the layers of sedimentary rocks laid down in that van
ished ocean. Looking around the fragmented landscape, her gaze could complete the lines of distinct layers, invisibly spanning the Canyon’s channels. And she could see where the eroding river waters had met stiffer resistance, from the older, deeper rocks; scree piles flared against the base of surviving plugs.

It was inhumanly vast. And yet she could
see
that this was a canyon, a channel cut into the softly swelling Earth. If this had been the Valles Marineris on Mars—compared to which the Canyon would have been just a tributary—it would have been so huge as to make its nature incomprehensible, and it wouldn’t have been nearly so striking. It was as if it had been placed here, this great wound in the land, with exactly the right dimensions to force a response from the human soul.

As the sun set, the colors in the Canyon walls turned to gold.

The sky up to the zenith was already stained pink. The sun was scattering light from haze layers fifteen or twenty miles above sea level. LIDAR measurements, pulsed laser beams scattered from the haze layers, had confirmed that the Edinburgh event had spread dust and aerosol particles throughout the stratosphere, all across the middle latitudes of Earth.

The ozone layer was taking a beating from the chlorine injected up there. The meteorologists and climatologists and oceanographers were having fun predicting the impact on the atmosphere’s heat balance. A global cooling of maybe a half a degree. Acid rain, from all the sulfuric acid being created up there. Disruption to El Niño, in the equatorial Pacific, over the coming summer and fall.

Droughts in Australia. Heavy rain and waves on the coast of California. And so on.

And this, she thought, is evidently just the start.

The first star was already out, low in the east. Maybe it was Jupiter.

She knew if she dragged herself out of bed in the
morning, she would see Venus, still bright enough to dazzle and cast shadows, surrounded by a halo from all the shit in the upper atmosphere.

Beautiful. Deadly.

Scott was pointing out some of the Canyon features to her. “…The peak over there is Mount Sinyala.” A crude cylindrical plug, with a flared skirt of smashed rock. “The channel that lies between Sinyala and these pinnacles in the foreground is the Colorado itself. The plateau you can see at the foot of Sinyala is called the Esplanade.” A cracked and shattered sheet. “It’s an erosional feature resting on one of the more resistant members of what we call the Supai Group of rocks. You can clearly see the contact between the Coconino Sandstone—that’s the lighter colored stuff on top—and the Hermit Shale, the deeper red below.”

“Yes.”

“This is the western end of the Canyon. We’re a goodly way away from where the tourists come to roost, at the resort areas on the South Rim some way to the east of here. The landscape here is different. Older.” He pointed. “You can see cinder cones over here. Lava cascades.” He looked at her. “You know, you can tell the nature of the rocks, just by looking, just from the way they have eroded. The shales form slopes. The thick beds of limestone and sandstone form steep, almost vertical cliffs. And the Inner Gorge, at the very base of the Canyon, is a V-shaped groove that reaches down maybe a thousand feet to the river itself. Those are ancient rocks, igneous and metamorphic…”

She could see, now he described it, how the Canyon was a complex structure, channel cut within channel, Canyon within Canyon, each inner valley chiseled into harder, older rocks, all of it centered on the Inner Gorge, the narrowest valley cut into the oldest rock of all.

“Enough of the tourist stuff.” Now it was Monica’s turn to point. “Tell me about
that.
”

It was a plume of black smoke, rising from one of the incised channels.

Scott grinned. “You can see for yourself. One of those old cinder cones has just cracked open and started belching ash. We think a more significant event is on the way. We’ve recorded more seismic activity in the Canyon area in the last few weeks than in the previous couple of years. It’s actually very exciting; there are a couple of dozen guys from the Survey working the area right now…”

She let him run on. Right now the Administration was keen to keep enthusing scientists off the screens, but if this kid’s excitement was what motivated him to be up here and keep working and studying and gathering data, that was fine by her. The fact that what he was studying was liable to kill him, ultimately, was neither here nor there.

For it was clear that the sudden, unexpected rash of minor volcanism in the Canyon, like that in a dozen other sites around the world, was directly related to the particle cloud that had spread around the planet from Edinburgh: what Henry Meacher called the Moonseed, the alien infection that—for weeks, it seemed—had been raining down out of the stratosphere and was eating into the very rock beneath her feet.

The precedent of Edinburgh for what would follow was not encouraging. And what she needed to find out was what would happen when the Moonseed got into those deep old rocks.

On the way here, she’d had another E-mail, from Alfred Synge.

Actually Monica didn’t agree with the nomenclature here. These “black holes” were nothing like the collapsed stars of astrophysics. They were just solitons, clumps of string fields; the physicists preferred to call them black bubbles or black sheets.

But arguments about nomenclature weren’t the most important thing right now, she reflected.

It was fanciful, abstract. The whole Venus event had become a kind of theoretical toy to be kicked around by the young and/or over-enthusiastic, including Alfred, and the hypotheses just got wilder. It was impossible to connect to the grubby reality of a cracked cinder cone, here in this great chasm.

And yet, it seemed, connected they were.

Alfred’s mail ended in rambling, a rant about NASA’s post-Edinburgh decision to destroy its remaining forty-billion-dollar Moonrock stock.
The genie is out of the bottle! The horse has bolted! This is vandalism.

No, she thought. You don’t understand. It’s a symbol. Appeasing the gods.
“Tell me about the Inner Gorge rocks,” she said to Scott Coplon.

“Yeah. They’re primarily schists and gneisses. The rocks were formed from pre-existing igneous and sedimentary rocks during mountain-building events in the deep past. A gneiss is what we call granitic rocks which have been exposed to later episodes of metamorphism, and—”

“I know. Go on.”

“Sorry. Well, we know that what’s exposed here is just the top of a much deeper layer. The rocks extend thousands of feet down from the surface and form the basement of the North American continent.”

“The basement?”

He nodded. “Rocks of that age and character underlie most of the continent. But it’s only where they have been exposed, like here, that we can study them…”

Monica knew a little about plate tectonics. She knew that the continents rode like rafts of granite, on the plates that slid on currents in the viscous molten rock that lay beneath. The younger rocks of the ocean floors, gabbro and basalt, were in time subducted—dragged back into the interior of the Earth, to be melted and reborn. But the ancient rocks of the continents, riding above, survived.

And now it looked as if, here and elsewhere, the Moonseed might reach those foundation rocks, the granite core of the continent itself, through this immense wound of rock and strata.

This is not good, she thought. Not good at all.

Well, then, we must do something about it. But what the hell she had no idea.

Scott took her arm, and led her back toward the car.

Scott started talking to her about the river ride she was going to have to take if she wanted to get any closer to those old Precambrian rocks. It meant a descent of five or six thousand feet, a rise in temperature of maybe twenty degrees. She calculated whether she would have the
strength to undergo such a trip. And at the same time, she started to figure what she should tell the President, and how.

A black hole rocket engine, firing wildly in the ruins of Venus.
Now, what was the meaning of that?

Strangeness. Too much of it, for one lifetime.

The sunset crept on them. The colors deepened to rust, mile-long shadows flooding at perceptible speed across the land, and they walked back to the car.

19

Henry was flown, mostly at low altitude under the ash clouds, the length of Britain.

Once, most of Britain was covered by a shallow ocean, which deposited gigantic chalk layers over the whole country. But then Britain tipped up. And the ice came, scraping most of the chalk off the top half of the island.

Now, as he traveled south from Scotland, he traversed younger and younger landscapes: billion-year-old gabbros and granites and basalts in Scotland, belts of successively younger sedimentaries as he came down through England, until he reached the youngest of all, the marine Pleistocene clays and sands around London, less than sixty million years old.

He could see the old buildings—churches, houses, pubs, even railway stations—which stood like geological markers, constructed of their area’s native rock. Britain was a small island, crammed with ten thousand years of history, a billion years of geology.

The sheer size of London surprised Henry. He’d come to think of everything in Britain as being miniature scale. Even a place like Edinburgh was—
had been
—pretty small by the standards of many American cities.

London, though, was different. He flew over mile after mile of gray suburbs, knots and twists of terraced houses
and semis, spread like blankets over the gentle topography of the chalk landscape. His RAF pilot pointed out some of the logic, if you could call it that, that underlay the sprawl of outer London. It was really a collection of old villages—like Brentford and Harrow and Ealing and Richmond—that had been overwhelmed by the flood of building that had come after the war, but their identities were preserved in their names and the topology of the roads, which curled around the old village centers.