Moonseed (37 page)

Farther to the east, toward the heart of the Seat, there was only the silver-gray glow of Moonseed light, all the geology and structure there—a billion years of Earth history—reduced to alien smoothness.

“Come on,” Blue whispered. “We can go a little farther.”

Blue stepped forward, onto a wider neck of ground. He tested every step, as if he was walking onto an ice floe. Ted followed a few yards behind, trying to stick to the footsteps Blue had left in the ash. Fixed to his hood Blue had a chest-mounted still camera and a small video camera—the kind they put in cricket stumps, Ted thought irrelevantly. Blue was working the still camera now, and talking patiently into a microphone inside his hood.

After maybe fifty paces Blue stopped.

Ted came to stand beside him. The neck of blackened turf went on some yards farther, but Ted could see how cracked and fragile it was becoming.

“Notice how it’s not advancing,” Blue said.

“What?”

“The Moonseed.”

“Why?”

“Who the hell knows? Come on. Open your bottles and let’s make like we know what we’re doing.”

Blue crouched and, leaning as if reaching out of a boat, began poking at the Moonseed debris with stuff from his equipment pack. He had probes of metal that he scanned over the pool surface or pushed into it, taking data through wires into his backpack, muttering to his tape the whole time.

Ted squatted down beside him, his knees and calf muscles protesting. He got hold of Blue’s belt at the back, near where he had tucked his heavy geologist’s hammer. It was like holding a child, leaning over a rail. Blue didn’t protest.

Ted looked around, back the way they had come. He was on a neck of land like a spit protruding into a silvery sea. At the “shore” he could see the rubble, the ruined Moonscape suburb through which he’d had to clamber. It seemed a long way away. The closest intact building was a ways away to the west, halfway up Castle Hill, a squat pile of sandstone that looked like it might once have been St. Giles’ Cathedral; the old church poked out of the landscape like a beached wreck.

He could see no other humans, in any direction.

In his gloved hand Blue had cupped a small sample he’d taken from the Moonseed surface. “Look at this now. Be careful. It is very delicate.”

Ted bent. He had to wipe the ash from his faceplate to see.

It was like a spiderweb; or an autumn leaf; or the skin stretched over the bones of a child’s hand. A fragment of
structure, with the finest of membranes stretched between hair-thin spars.

He grunted. “Like something the Wright Brothers might have dreamed of.”

Blue laughed. His hand shook, just slightly, but it was enough to shake the fragment to pieces, to silvery Moonseed dust, which fell through his fingers and back to the pool. “It is all but impossible to retrieve such structures intact. They are like sculptures of dry sand.”

Ted straightened up painfully; it felt as if there was no blood at all in his lower legs. “Structures?”

“Yes.” Blue shifted his position, looking for more samples. “From the aerial shots and samples taken on the ground, it appears that the Moonseed is endeavoring to
construct
something here. A kind of dish, with a parabolic profile, half a mile across—”

“Covering most of Arthur’s Seat, then.”

“Yes.”

“This Moonseed is a rock-eating germ. How can it construct anything?”

“It does not eat rock,” Blue said, “and neither is it a bug. It moves atomic particles, sometimes molecules, to build structures from the subatomic level up. As far as we can tell, these structures are perfect. Without defect.”

“Not so perfect. That thing in your hands just fell apart.”

“It’s true we can disrupt the structures if we catch them early enough. But I don’t think whatever the Moonseed is building
here
is meant for this world.”

“What do you mean?”

But Blue wouldn’t answer.

He bent again, trying to collect more samples of the Moonseed structure, which he preserved in clear, fast-setting plastic.

When they were done, they walked gingerly back along the neck of land.

Ted pointed to the Cathedral on Castle Rock. “We go there.”

Blue looked at him curiously, face masked by the layers of dust and dirt on his faceplate. “Why?”

“Something I’m looking for.”

Blue shouldered his equipment. “Henry told me about your son.”

“In between porking my daughter.”

“I understand why you have come. I feel a certain—responsibility—for bringing you here.” He looked into Ted’s face. “So I feel I have to tell you this.
Smell the coffee,
Ted. Your son is dead. I saw him here, just before the great eruption. He is lost, here in the ruins of Edinburgh. At best you will only find his body. Probably not even that.”

“I know,” Ted said softly. “I’ve known that from the beginning.”

“Then what are you looking for?”

Ted said, “Are you coming with me, or do I go alone?”

Blue sighed. “If I abandon you, Henry will squeal like a pig stuck under a gate. Come.”

With Blue leading, they worked steadily over the shattered cityscape toward the building.

St. Giles’ was a great sandstone block, atypically low and squat for a Gothic cathedral, but that had evidently helped it survive; the pyroclastic flow, washing over Castle Rock, had heaped up against the eastern wall, but had not breached it. Still, the stained glass windows had shattered or, it looked like, melted; and the ornate crowned tower, the Scottish equivalent of a spire, was gone.

They paused for breath.

“St. Giles,” Ted said. “Patron saint of cripples, lepers and tramps.”

“Very appropriate,” Blue said. “I am impressed it has survived at all.”

Ted pointed. “Those pillars holding up the tower are nine hundred years old. Even survived the English burning the bloody place down. They’ll last a wee while yet. Come on.”

The big wooden doors of the Cathedral had been smashed in, the shards burned. Ted and Blue picked their way over the wreckage, the scorched wood crunching under their thick-soled boots.

The roof was destroyed—debris was scattered over the aisles and altar and the rows of pews—and silvery, alien daylight streamed into the dusty interior through the gaping roof and the empty window frames. Ted stood in the doorway for a few minutes, letting his gaze follow the soothing geometry of sunbeams. As if one part of the world still worked. The Cathedral was full of light, in fact, probably brighter than it had been since the day the roof was put on. The uniform gray and black was oddly pleasing, like a charcoal sketch.

He moved forward. He had to push through the ash layers, climb over the cold lava bombs which lay beneath it, like pushing through a shallow stream.

There were
people
in the pews, he saw.

Some were sitting, some had been kneeling, some seemed to have fallen. Their bodies were barely visible, all but drowned by the ash. Here was a woman—he couldn’t tell her age—her face tipped up to the ceiling, he supposed toward God, her mouth open and clogged with ash.

“The roof probably gave way immediately,” Blue said gently. “The ceiling rubble came down on them, and then pumice, hot ash, steam, gases. They must have died very quickly. Probably of suffocation.”

“I suppose they came here for shelter.”

“I suppose so. Perhaps we will find the priest at his altar. If they are undisturbed, perhaps this will form another Pompeii, for future archaeologists.”

Ted stopped beside another woman. “They are not undisturbed.”

Blue bent to see.

A necklace had been ripped from the woman’s neck. There were fingermarks, cut deep in the layers of ash.

“He’s here,” Ted said.

It didn’t take long to find him. There weren’t many places left in the Cathedral intact enough to hide in.

He was in the Thistle Chapel, an ornate, heavily ornamented twentieth-century annex of the Cathedral. The windows had blown in, but its roof had survived, and so had most of the Chapel’s ornamentation: carved animals, angels playing musical instruments, including bagpipes.

He was hiding under a pew. He was thin, in rags, filthy, wide eyes staring out of a sketch of a face, patchy stubble over the spittle-splashed chin. Really no more than a boy, Ted realized. He had a little food—cans and packets and bottles of water, detritus around him—and a pathetic stack of valuables, jewelry and wallets and cash.

Ted pulled off his hood. There was a stench.

“You have fouled yourself,” he said softly. “Even an animal does not foul itself. Are you, then, less than an animal?”

Blue was frowning at him, but Ted kept his gaze on the boy. “I don’t know you.” The lad’s voice was thin, breaking, from fear and disuse.

“I know
you,
” Ted said. “You are Hamish Macrae. The one they called Bran.”

Bran said nothing. He shrank back beneath his pew, folding his legs against his chest.

Ted reached forward and collared him, as simple as that. From a renewed, sharp stink, it seemed as if Bran had fouled himself once more.

“Who are you?”

“Don’t you remember me, Hamish?”

“No…”

“A father, of one you led to the Seat. One of many. To his death.”

Bran was trembling, but he spoke up bravely enough. “So you found me. So what?”

Blue asked, “How did you know he would be here?”

“He stayed as close to the heart of it as he could. He was scared to run too far. There are others looking for him.”

“Too fucking right I’m holing up here,” Bran said. “Have you not heard the troopers? In the Highlands they’re already burning witches.” He looked at Ted, calculating. “I didn’t mean it. The Egress Hatch thing. I mean, I did. And I was right, wasn’t I?” He glared at Blue. “It did come from space.”

Blue rubbed his neck, through the thick fabric of his suit. “It is possible.”

“That mirror thing the Moonseed is building. It’s a solar sail,” Bran said. He smiled. “It’s obvious.”

Ted turned to Blue. “A
what
?”

Blue was wheezing; maybe the concentrated dust here was getting to him. He said, “A sail, to catch the sunlight and so drive a spacecraft. Perhaps that’s the purpose of the large parabolic structure the Moonseed is struggling to assemble. Others have speculated like this. The Moonseed seems to be making spaceship parts. But it is stranded, here, at the bottom of this gravity well, under all this air.”

Spaceship parts.
For a few seconds, the strangeness of the thought threatened to overwhelm Ted.

“Stuck at the bottom of a well.” Ted frowned at Blue. “You sound as if you feel sorry for it.”

Blue looked up. “In a way. After all, it’s possible it means us no harm.”

“I was right,” Bran said, as if crooning. “I knew I was right. But I went a little crazy. And then, as soon as the ground started to give way—”

“You had your fun,” Ted said evenly. “Money. The girls. Didn’t you? And it cost my boy his life.”

“Are you another witch burner, old man?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”

That seemed to renew Bran’s fear. He looked in desperation at Blue. “Who the fuck are
you
? Can’t you stop him?”

“I am a scientist,” Blue said. “I am here to study the Moonseed. That is all.”

Bran searched Ted’s face, his eyes huge in the dark, his face thin and weak.

“Story time’s over, laddie,” Ted said softly.

There was noise outside: whistles, shouting.

Blue looked out into the main body of the Cathedral. “I think the light is changing,” he said.

Bran tried to wriggle from Ted’s grasp. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” said Blue, “we should get out of here.”

A sound like gunfire. Deep-throated coughs.

“
Now,
” Blue said.

Bran seemed dazzled by the daylight. Perhaps he hadn’t been outside for days, Ted thought. With his hand still clamped on Bran’s collar, he looked around.

A party of soldiers was running, to the west, away from Arthur’s Seat, jumping over rubble. One of them looked hurt; his mates were helping him hobble along. When they saw Ted and Blue they waved.
Come on.

Smoke was rising from among the ruins atop Calton Hill. “It is the Moonseed,” said Blue. “It has started again. The secondary vents of the old magmatic complex—Calton Hill and Castle Rock, here—we are expecting them to give way in the next cycle.”

Still grasping Bran, Ted climbed up onto a section of wall, and looked east, toward the Seat, the Moonseed pool.

The pool was glowing. Light sparked from its rim, like flashbulbs popping under a blanket. He could see the ground cracking and dissolving, sinking into the Moonseed as he watched.

“It’s spreading,” Blue said.

“Jesus,” Bran said, and he squirmed harder.

“It has been immobile for days, but now…We go,” Blue snapped. “We must get off this vent.”

“Here,” said Ted. “Take your bottles.”

For one second, two, Blue looked into Ted’s face, then Bran’s.

Then Blue nodded, evidently understanding. He grabbed the sample bottles, and ran to the west, with surprising suppleness.

Bran started shouting. “What are you doing? Shit, man, what are you doing?”

Ted shook the lad, not hard, until he stopped squealing.

When he’d turned in his results, Blue Ishiguro stripped off his Moon suit and walked back into the city. This time he walked to the east, the far side of the Seat, where the Moonseed had yet to spread.

Here, in the suburbs of Duddingston and Bingham and Northfield and Restalrig, the work of clearing the corpses hadn’t advanced so far as in the west. So he joined a party of soldiers, with little protection but their improvised cloth facemasks, as they made their way along the ruin of a street. There was no way of telling what the housing stock had been like here, but there were a lot of cellars and underground rooms, some of them new additions—Venus shelters—where people had tried to ride out the explosion.

Stiff pits,
the soldiers were calling them.