Kitabı oxu: «Moonseed»

II ARD TOR
I

Geena Bourne woke up before dawn. She was, of course, alone in the apartment.

She got up in the dark and walked around putting on lights.

Henry had gone.

Fled. But he’d taken nothing. No furniture, no carpets or curtains, no CDs or books, not even his own clothes. Nothing but his geology hammer, as far as she could see.

Oh, and Rocky, their labrador, the Rock Hound.

Shit.

It was worse than if he’d taken everything, or trashed the place.

Still, she knew where he’d be. She pulled a coat over her pyjamas, got in the car and drove out, through the night, to the USGS.

It was cold. Always cold, here in the mountains.

The Cascades Observatory of the United States Geological Survey was a squat, unimposing two-storey building, a slab of cinder-block. In the harsh, incomplete glow of its security lights it looked sinister, like some prison block transported from Soviet Russia.

She had a little trouble with the guards. Lady, it’s 3 a.m. Do you know what time it is? 3 a.m. … But her NASA pass and a little sweet-talking got her inside.

And here was Henry, tucked up on top of a sleeping bag he’d spread out on the floor of his cramped office. The clutter of his work lay everywhere: geological maps and structure charts, trays of samples, microscope slides with slivers of rock, electronic parts, his precious polarizing microscope inside its grimy, worn-smooth wooden box. And Henry himself in the middle of it all, as sound asleep as if he were out on a field expedition in the Kalahari, his long, thin body folded over, his heavy black hair falling around his face.

Rocky was here, lying on a blanket in a crate in the corner. The mutt came forward, licked her hand regretfully, and went back to the crate and fell asleep.

She prodded Henry’s kidney with her toe, reasonably gently. ‘Hey. Crocodile Dundee. Wake up.’

He came awake, with an ease she’d always envied.

‘It’s you.’ He rolled over and sat up.

‘Of course it’s me.’

‘I left, Geena. It’s over.’

‘Do you have any coffee in here?’

He ran his hand over his stubble and yawned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Go away and leave me alone.’

‘Believe me,’ she snapped back, ‘there’s nothing I’d like better. But I can’t just walk away.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we have things to talk about.’

‘Geena, my lunar probes just got canned. My career is stiffed. What things?’

‘Our assets, Henry. Our property.’

‘All there is, is stuff. Burn it. I don’t care. Sell the apartment. It was no use anyhow, since we both spent the last two years working out of Houston.’

She said heavily, ‘We’re taking apart our home.’

He closed his eyes.

‘I know.’

‘Then you can’t just walk away. You have to go through the pain, Henry …’

There was a light in the window.

Maybe it was the torch beam of some security guy, Geena thought, distracted. Rocky whined a little, and padded over to the window. Whatever the light was, it was high up; it cast Rocky’s shadow on the floor behind him.

Not a torch beam, then.

Even as she tried to deal with this situation with Henry, her damn problem-solving brain kept working. Something in the sky. A chopper beam, maybe a police patrol? But the beam would shift. And there’d be noise. The Moon, then? But the light was the wrong quality, vaguely yellow-white. And besides, the Moon was near new tonight.

The dog was staring up at the light as if he’d seen a ghost.

She said, ‘What about the dog?’

‘He comes with me. He’s my dog. He predates you.’

‘I suppose he does. But he’s used to staying with my mother –’

Henry unfolded off the floor and stretched, tall and wiry, strong hands flexing. His face was dark in the uncertain light from the window, weather-beaten by all those days in the field. He looked towards the yellow glow at the window. ‘What the hell’s that?’

‘I thought it was a chopper. But it isn’t.’

‘No.’

They walked towards the dog, still standing in his shaft of light, Henry’s bare feet padding on the tiled floor.

‘… Jesus,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

Henry was standing over the dog, staring up into the anomalous light. She came to stand beside him.

The light, beaming in through the window, was so bright it was glaring, dazzling, like a spotlight in the face. But she could see it was a point source.

It was fixed in the sky. There was no noise, no rotor clutter.

The light was eerie. Not part of the natural order. This is bad news, she felt instinctively.

‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘A planet?’

‘Too bright.’

‘A satellite?’

‘Not moving quickly enough.’

‘A star, then,’ he said. ‘It would have to be a nova. Or a supernova.’ He frowned. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘In case it’s a supernova?’

‘Even if not. It shouldn’t be there.’ He glanced at her. ‘Don’t you feel it?’

‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I guess I do.’ Bad news. ‘What would a supernova do to Earth?’

He shrugged. ‘Depends how close. Supernovas are candidates for causing extinction events in the past. The radiation burst, the heavy particles … A massive star exploding within a hundred light years might give the planet a dose of five hundred roentgens.’

‘Enough to kill.’

‘Oh, yes. Even the trees. Did you know that? Trees are about as sensitive to radiation as humans. Also, all that ultraviolet hitting the atmosphere – disassociated nitrogen will oxidize to form nitrous oxide, which will react with the ozone and deplete it –’

‘Just as well we destroyed the ozone layer already, then,’ she said drily. ‘But maybe it isn’t a supernova.’

She couldn’t identify what part of the sky this lamp hung in. Her astronomy wasn’t so good, considering her career choice. But then it didn’t need to be, if you planned to spend your working life in low Earth orbit. ‘What else could it be?’

He leaned forward, resting his hands on the window ledge, and looked around the sky. ‘I wish they’d clean these windows. Kind of a poor observing platform we have here … Oh.’

‘What?’

‘I think it’s Venus.’

She frowned. ‘Venus, the planet?’

He said heavily, ‘What other Venus? It’s right where Venus is supposed to be, tonight. And I don’t see any bright object nearby that could be Venus. So, it’s Venus.’

‘But how can it suddenly become so bright?’ She remembered an old science fiction story. ‘Oh. Venus is closer to the sun than Earth. What if the sun has flared? Or even gone nova? And the reflected light –’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s near superior conjunction right now. Which means it’s on the far side of the sun, so showing us a full face. So if you think about it, by the time the increased sunlight reflected off Venus and crossed space to get here –’

‘The sunlight would have reached us direct, already.’ A suppressed sigh of relief. ‘So Venus itself must have gotten brighter.’

‘Which is impossible.’

‘Is it? Maybe it’s some kind of volcanic thing.’

‘What kind of volcanic thing?’

She was used to his sarcasm. ‘You’re the geologist. Think of something.’

He went to the back of the office, and came back with a scuffed pair of binoculars. He raised them and focused them briskly.

He whistled.

‘What?’

He passed her the binoculars, leaving the strap around his neck, so she had to lean towards him to use them. She scanned around the sky, seeking the glare.

The binoculars resolved the distant, fixed stars to points. The glasses were too weak, she realized, to resolve Venus – on normal nights – to anything better than a minute disc, or crescent, at best.

But this wasn’t a normal night.

Where Venus ought to have been there was a bright, smudged disc, not quite symmetrical.

‘Holy God,’ she said.

‘I think,’ Henry said, ‘that Venus has exploded.’

The call didn’t wake Monica Beus, for the simple reason that she hadn’t been asleep.

‘Yes?’

Monica. It’s me. Alfred.

Alfred Synge: astronomer, colleague, lover back when they and the world were young.

‘Where are you?’

Kitts Peak. The observatory. Have you seen it yet?

‘What?’

Take a look out the window.

She lay for a minute in the stale warmth of her bed. The insomnia was the worst thing, for her, about the diagnosis.

Breast cancer. What the hell kind of thing was that for her to contract? Her breasts had gotten her nothing but unwelcome attention when she was younger; she was of a generation that had been encouraged to use them as little as possible for what they were intended, which was to suckle children; and now some cosmic ray, a random piece of debris from some long-gone supernova explosion, had come whizzing across space in order to zap her just so …

If any of it made sense, it might be acceptable. But it didn’t. If she had no stake in the world – if her son, Garry, and his family, didn’t exist – it might be reasonable. But she did have.

She missed the ability to sleep, though. She longed for the ability to turn off her mind, the constant thinking, like a camera watching the world that never let up.

But sleepless or not she was warm and comfortable here, her aches and pains fooled into silence for a while, and she felt reluctant to climb out into the harshness of the cold, vertical world. And for what?

‘What is it, Alfred? A lunar eclipse? A meteor shower?’ Alfred did get a little carried away with his profession at times. It was enviable, a man whose job was his hobby, his passion. Also a little irritating.

Uncharacteristically, he hesitated. I think you ought to see for yourself.

‘Why?’

You might want to think about waking the President.

Not a lunar eclipse, then.

She got out of bed, and her body set up a chorus of aches. She pulled on a housecoat, picked up the phone handset, and walked to the window.

She pulled back the heavy drapes and looked out over Aspen.

Dawn was coming, she saw, and the leaves of the trademark aspen trees were already glowing with the pearl light, bone white; the quaint street lamps were starting to dim. Another hour or so and the first light of another early spring day would be touching the Rockies.

Beautiful place. She had moved here to be close to her faculty, at the Center for Physics. She suspected she was going to have to move before long, though. She couldn’t see how she could stand to die here, to leave behind so much beauty. Everybody should die someplace ugly, where it wouldn’t matter so much …

On the other hand, maybe it was this beautiful place that was killing her. Up so high, poking out of Earth’s shielding blanket of air, Aspen received twice the sea-level dose of radiation.

There was a new star in the morning sky, bright as a piece of the sun.

It’s Venus, Alfred, on the telephone, was telling her. Venus.

It was casting shadows, long raking shadows, from the aspen tree stands.

The astrologers will be jumping up and down, she thought. We’re only a few years into the new millennium … and now this.

‘Venus? How can it be?’

I’m afraid there’s no doubt. What you’re seeing is reflected light from the sun, with some intrinsic illumination from the planet itself.

‘Reflected light?’

Monica, the atmosphere seems to have – blown off. The planet is surrounded by an expanding sphere of gases and other debris.

‘Debris? You mean rock?’

Yes. Also fusion products. And the intrinsic illumination – Monica, something is happening on the surface, or maybe in deeper layers. Something very energetic.

Alfred had first gotten the call from his night assistant, a graduate student. It was the student’s job to control the big telescope Alfred was working on at Kitts Peak. Alfred, sitting in an office, confirmed whatever target star he wanted, and observations were made with spectroscopes and charged-couple detectors.

Nobody had been watching the planets, at Kitts Peak Observatory. It was just a casual glance out the window by the night assistant that had led to her noticing the change to Venus.

That was the way with modern astronomy, Monica thought wryly. Nobody looked through the big telescopes any more.

We were finishing up for the night. We were actually getting ready to park the telescope and –

‘Tell me what you did.’

The first thing was to get on the IAU nets. The International Astronomy Union, the astronomers’ jungle telegraph. There are ground-based observers working on this all over the planet already, Monica. Also the radio telescopes. I contacted NASA; they’re repositioning some of the satellites, for example the ultraviolet and X-ray and gamma ray observatories. We’re also speaking to the Europeans, Canadians and Japanese. The Space Station astronauts are doing some good work. NASA are sending up high-altitude experiments, by balloon and sounding rocket and aircraft. NASA are responding quickly, in fact.

‘Well, NASA would,’ she said drily. ‘They’re probably putting together a budget proposal for a new Venus probe as we speak.’

If they are you ought to back it, Alfred said. Monica, we don’t have the faintest understanding of what we’re seeing here. Right now Venus is on the far side of the sun. It took around fourteen minutes for the light curve to show up here. Photons, travelling at light speed. A minute later, a cosmic ray shower showed up.

‘Cosmic rays, from Venus?’

You heard right. Very high energy particles. And in about four hours we’re expecting a blast shell to impact the top of Earth’s atmosphere. The lower energy stuff, coming at thirty or forty million miles an hour. Monica, it’s as if a miniature supernova went off in our back yard. Hell, we’re even seeing a neutrino flux.

‘That’s impossible.’

Nevertheless. I’m not anticipating a lot of sleep in the next few days. Monica, that thing is going to be naked-eye visible, even at noon. It’s going to be unmissable.

So the public would wake up to it, to funny lights in the sky. Monica was one of the President’s senior science advisors. How was Monica going to brief her on this? ‘Tell me what to expect.’

The low-energy cosmic rays will be deflected by the Van Allen belts, which will fill up. We have to expect auroras. Spectacular stuff. Alfred sounded excited, as well he might, she mused; it sounded as if he might get priority on this discovery. The higher-energy stuff will make it through to the atmosphere. Crack the air molecules, create showers of secondary particles. We have to expect a significant increase in background radiation.

‘How much? For how long?’

We don’t know, Monica. We’ve never seen anything like this before. There is also the shower of X-ray and gamma rays. We don’t know how strong it will be at its peak. Maybe there will be some immediate deaths. More likely we will see a pulse of internal cancers, skin cancers, cataracts, in the coming months and years. We will have to monitor the food chain.

‘What should the President tell people?’

To take radiation precautions. Get underground if they can; rock and soil is a good shield. The military and politicos ought to get into their nuclear shelters. If they still have them.

‘They have them.’

If the shower persists we’ll have to think about lead-lining our surface buildings. Oh, air travel ought to be curtailed, at least monitored. And we ought to think about bringing the astronauts home from the Space Station.

‘Enough. All right, Alfred. Thanks. I ought to make some calls.’

Yes. Take care, Monica.

‘And you. Keep in touch.’

Oh, I will.

She put down the phone, and tried to think this through.

It was hard to focus on anything outside her own, failing body. As if she was a self-obsessed character in some daytime soap.

But, it seemed, she was still engaged with the world.

Outside, the light of day was gathering, but the ugly wound in the sky that was Venus was barely dimmed.

She put through a call to the White House.

Even after a week the light of new Venus, bright in the blue sky of a Scottish morning, made Jane Dundas shiver.

Anything so far out of the natural order made her shiver.

Or then again, maybe it was just this place. She looked up at the tower block. Its faceless windows reflected Venus a hundred times over, somehow without generating a shred of beauty. She clung a little harder to the hand of Jack, her ten-year-old son, and stepped forward.

Cordley Road was the site of some of Edinburgh’s more notorious blocks of council housing. Even here, at the entrance, the block was intimidating: evidently repainted and fitted with entry-phones, but a leaking overflow had stained the entrance with damp, graffiti was splashed over the hall, and the shrubbery outside, newly planted, was littered with lager cans and cigarette packets.

The irony was the location here should be prized. Cordley Road was less than fifty yards from the perimeter of Holyrood Park, which contained Arthur’s Seat – Ard Tor, the greatest of the extinct volcanoes on which Edinburgh had been built. She could see the Seat now, a lumpy shoulder of rock looming high to the east; just here she was in the shadow of the Salisbury Crags, a cliff-like extrusion of compounded ash from the old eruptions, glaring over the city like the guns of a battleship.

But what went on in the tower blocks here had nothing to do with anything so wonderful as extinct volcanoes.

Billy Macrae was here to let them in. Billy, ten years old, was one of Jack’s friends from school, and brother to Joe, eleven, who was the kid who had been killed in the lift shaft. Billy had a pixie face compressed under a mat of black hair, and he looked like a wee rascal, as her father might have said. But today he looked subdued. No trouble at all, in fact.

Billy led them to his family’s flat, which was, ironically, on the ground floor. The father let them in. Alan Macrae was a tired-looking man who was probably younger than Jane. No sign of a mother, Jane noted.

He waved them to the sofa. The place was sparsely furnished but clean enough, no more than the usual clutter kids created. Macrae offered them tea but Jane declined.

‘We don’t want to keep you.’

‘Aye. I’m sorry we couldn’t have wee Jack to the funeral. We tried to keep it small. Just family.’

‘I understand.’

Macrae made an effort to smile at Jack. ‘Joe used to talk about you.’

‘We played soccer,’ Jack said.

‘Aye. Not in the hall here, I hope.’

‘No.’

Jane nudged her son, and he produced his gift, a little parcel. Billy Macrae came forward and unwrapped it. It was an elephant, carved of black stone.

Jane smiled. ‘Jack chose it himself from my shop. The rock’s basalt. Lava. The youngest rock on the planet. So it’s appropriate.’

Macrae nodded, and put the knick-knack on the shelf over the gas fire. ‘We got a lot of flowers. People put them in the lift. But they get robbed, of course. The council say they will put steel plates on the lift doors to stop the kids breaking in, fat lot of good that is now.’ He eyed Jane. ‘You’re the one who runs that shop in Waverley Market. Rocks and stuff. Crystals.’

‘That’s right.’

He looked at the elephant. ‘I saw it, you know.’

‘What?’

‘I was on the seventh floor, talking to a mate up there. The windows in the lift shaft doors are broken there. So I saw him fall. Terrible crashing and screaming.’

Jane sat silently, and the boys looked at their feet miserably. It sounded as if Macrae was beyond grief, as if he’d told this story a hundred times over already, as if he couldn’t stop telling it; his voice and face were empty of expression.

‘Lift surfing, they call it,’ he said now. ‘Bloody stupid.’

Jane forced a smile. ‘I used to play chicken on the motorway. All kids are stupid, until they learn better.’

Macrae didn’t seem to have heard. ‘They jam open the shaft doors, see, and that stops the lift going down. Then they get on the roof, and they know how to set the engineer’s switch to “test”, so they can control the lift. Joe got his bloody hand caught, and for some reason the lift started going down, and he fell down behind it, in some kind of maintenance shaft. And that’s what I saw. Crashing and screaming. The thing of it was, at the bottom, he looked all right. Except for his mangled hand. Just asleep …’

And so on.

She stayed for a while longer, letting him talk out his grief a little more. Jack was restless, but she made him sit through it. Survival lesson, she thought. Listen and learn.

But it was hard. It seemed a long time before little Billy led them out.

In the yard, they all cast double shadows from sun and Venus, twin stars, and Jane shivered again.

‘It was our Hamish,’ Billy said unexpectedly.

‘What?’

Hamish turned out to be the elder brother of Billy and dead Joe. Eighteen years old. Jane realized, in retrospect, that there had been no sign of Hamish in his father’s flat.

Hamish, it turned out, had led on the others.

‘Hamish used to take stuff up there,’ Billy said.

‘Stuff?’

‘Lager. Ciggies and things. He even had a seat, so he could sit on top of the lift and ride up and down.’ Even now, even after all that had happened, Billy smiled faintly at the bravado and daring of his brother, and Jane realized anew how very, very difficult it was to restrain boys from following the pack, all the way into the jaws of death.

‘But it was Hamish’s fault,’ Billy said.

‘It was?’

‘He saw that planet thing.’ Billy pointed. ‘When it flared up, like. Hamish saw it through a window. That’s why he let go of the doors, and the lift started going, and Joe fell down.’

This boy will have to live with this. ‘Billy, Hamish is really just a kid too. Nobody’s to blame –’

‘Hamish says it’s not his fault. It’s the fault of that.’ And Billy’s small, grubby hand pointed straight at Venus.

… And elsewhere in Edinburgh, a young policewoman called Morag Decker was pulling on her uniform, about to start her tour of duty. She was on attachment to a community policing unit that night, and would be working with drug addicts. Not an assignment she was looking forward to, but a major problem in Edinburgh. When Venus had first flared up it had caused a problem, as the full-Moon types had crawled out from under their rocks to howl at the new light in the sky; and tomorrow the local Emergency Planning Officer was going to brief them on Scottish Office guidelines on radiation poisoning and other stuff … But all that seemed to be fading, like any other nine-day wonder. For tonight her head was full of apprehension, and she tried to comfort herself with thoughts about the video and takeaway Chinese meal and bottle of wine she’d treat herself to tomorrow night, and she scarcely noticed Venus any more …

… And to Debbie Sturrock, a trainee firefighter based along the coast in Dunbar, Venus was invisible, a light in the sky masked by the tower of flame she and her fellow students were trying to control, under the growling command of an unsympathetic station master. Fire in the sky meant nothing when you were confronted by fire on Earth …

… And in Glasgow, Scotland’s biggest city, Jenny Calder had tried to follow the news – she had been interested in astronomy and science and stuff as a kid, and the Venus incident was strange and somehow disturbing – but now the kids were fighting again, this flat in the Gorbals, renovated or not, was just too small for all of them, and William, her husband, was worrying that if his new employers found out about his record he’d be kicked off the oil rig again, and so she pushed her hair from her eyes and stumbled from crisis to crisis, never quite falling over, and Venus was just too far away and too strange to deserve her attention …

… And around the world, in the US, an Air Force pilot called Garry Beus test-flew an enhanced F-16 over the baked desert of California and looked up at Venus, smeared and distorted by his canopy in an eggshell sky, and thought with wistful sadness of his dying mother Monica, and how she must be fascinated by this … And in Los Angeles, a journalist called Joely Stern, dismayed by yet another rejected job application, stared up at a Venus made Mars-red by filthy LA smog, and she stared at it, wishing she was up there, up in space, anywhere but here …

… And in Japan, a geologist called Blue Ishiguro watched the evolving light in the sky, fascinated, and wondered if he should call his friend Henry Meacher at NASA who might know more about this – but then he’d heard Henry was leaving NASA, not to mention Geena, and it mightn’t be a good time … And, atop a Japanese mountain called Nantai, a Buddhist monk – originally from Ireland, called Declan Hague – stared at the strange light and wondered what it might mean for his self-imposed exile and the guilt that still racked him …

… All around the planet, as it turned in the wash of Venus light, human faces were lifted to the sky, shining in the strange light like coins in a well, amused or puzzled or wondering or indifferent …

… And in Houston, Tracy and Jays Malone spoke in hushed tones, so as not to wake the kids.

More than three decades after his Moonwalk, a few years into a whole new century, and here was Tracy with kids of her own, kids to whom Apollo was some sort of Cold War relic – not even that, something prehistoric and incomprehensible, something their grandfather had done. For somehow, as if mocking the old dreams, the space program had become a thing of the past, not the future.

But her name was undoubtedly, famously, written on the Moon – she’d seen photographs of it – and it would indeed be there for a million more years, less the few summers she had spent growing up since Jays came home.

So there had been only one place to come on this strange and cosmic night.

She stood with Jays on his verandah. It was just like all those years ago, except that now she cradled a pina colada in her hand instead of a soda.

And, in the dawn sky, there was a new light, which outshone even the battered old Moon.

‘Quite a night,’ said Jays, the light casting sharp point-source shadows on his face. ‘Quite a week, in fact.’

‘Yeah.’ So it had been, all of seven days after the Venus event first showed in the sky.

According to the TV there had been Venus-watching parties all over the US, a predictable run on telescopes and binoculars in the stores. The Hubble Web sites had crashed from the hit traffic, even though NASA hadn’t turned the Hubble that way yet.

She said, ‘Those guys on the TV, yammering about anti-matter comets and alien invaders. The most remarkable week since Neil Armstrong touched down on the Moon –’

‘Or since man came out of the caves. Makes you miss Cronkite,’ he said, ‘and I’ve been further out of the cave than most.’

The heatless light of dying Venus made her shiver. ‘So what do you think has happened up there, Dad?’

‘Danged if I know.’ His voice was light, but his face was a mask, expressionless. ‘I don’t think it’s a good omen, though.’

And that made her more queasy than all the fantastic speculations of the TV pundits.

He touched her arm. ‘Come on. I want to show you something.’ He led her indoors, towards the lounge. ‘Something I never showed anyone. Not even your mother.’

‘Why not?’

He grinned, and put his beer down on top of the piano. ‘Because it’s a federal offence.’ He started to rummage at the back of a dresser drawer.

She looked around the room. So familiar, nothing changed since she was a kid, it was like being transported back in time. It was an old guy’s trophy room, with Jays’s photographs of airplanes and spacecraft, a whole-globe view of Earth taken with a hand-held Kodak, a little framed patch of spacesuit, grey with Moon dust. But everything was old and faded. Even the spacesuit piece looked like it had come over on the Mayflower.

Jays approached her. He was carrying something in a fist-sized plastic envelope. The plastic had gone yellow and brittle with age. In the gathering dawn light, she could see it held a piece of rock, black as tar.

‘Oh, Dad. Is that what I think it is?’

‘It’s a piece of bedrock, sweet pea. It froze out of a lava flow, that bubbled out of the Moon more than three billion years ago …’

It was, of course, Moon rock.

‘Are you supposed to have that?’

He grinned, his teeth white in Venus light. ‘Hell, no. I told you. It’s a federal offence. I grabbed it when I was deep inside the rille, out of sight. They never missed it. Our documentation wasn’t worth jack shit anyhow. I wanted to leave it to you and the kids. So I will. I never even took it out and looked at it before, all these years. Come on.’ He stepped towards the porch.

The eastern sky, behind the house, was growing pink, but the Atlantic behind them was a mass of darkness still. Jays found a place to hold his rock so it cast two shadows in his hand, from sun and Venus.

‘It looks like coal,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘The Moon is dark. If it was bright as Earth, acre for acre, you could read by its light. But you’d never see the stars …’

There was a sharp smell. Like before a storm. Or like a beach.

‘Dad, what’s that?’

‘What? …’ But now his older senses registered it. ‘Ozone. Electrical fire.’

We’re not in a spacecraft now, dad, she thought. But still, maybe she should go get the kids –

Jays dropped the rock – it thumped dully on the wooden patio – and he tucked his hand under his arm. ‘Jesus, that’s hot.’

2

The day of Geena’s post-flight press conference was, it turned out, the last day Henry would spend in Houston. So Geena, with a sinking heart, realized she had no excuse to duck out of seeing him, one last time.

She drove the couple of miles to the Johnson Space Center from their abandoned Houston home, in the decaying 1960s suburb of Clear Lake. On NASA Road One, she found herself queuing in a bumper-to-fender jam. Once more, NASA Road One was being rebuilt; it was choked by huge, crudely-assembled contraflows, and the multiple surfaces made ramps that slammed into the suspension of her Chevy.

The short drive took her the best part of an hour, and she had no option but to sit there with her starched collar itching at her neck, the skirt of her suit riding up around her knees.

At length she crawled past the wire fence that separated JSC from the rest of the world. Through the chicken wire she could see the JSC buildings, black-and-white cubes scattered over the old cow pasture, looking small and cramped and closed-up, out of place in an era when every office building was a glass-walled rhomboid.

She tried the radio. Every station she found seemed to be playing country music, the modern stuff that sounded to her like soft rock. The DJs harangued her about a write-in campaign to have TNN – The Nashville Network, country music TV – retained by the local cable company. She flipped around to another station, 93.7FM, which seemed to play nothing but ‘fun oldies’. They had a policy of no repeats during a single day, and on Sunday mornings, she learned, she could enjoy breakfast with the Beatles. The music, every track of which she’d heard before, was depressing Boomer stuff, and sounded much worse than she remembered; it made her feel very old.

At last she found a news channel, and listened to an earnest debate about whether ebonics should be allowed in schools, and an ill-informed discussion about the latest news from Venus.

She had flown in space on four missions now: two Shuttle missions and two stays on Station. Her last Shuttle flight had finished a month ago, just before the Venus event. And every time she returned to this – from the black silence of space, the simplicity of her life and objectives up there – she felt depressed as all hell.

The traffic lurched forward in spasms.

She’d made Houston her home for ten years now, but she was San Francisco born and bred, and she’d never quite gotten used to Texas. Houston was hot and flat, water towers and shining green lawns and under-used malls that sprawled untidily around the downtown towers poking out of the city’s heart. Houston was new, its growth fuelled mostly by oil money, but it was half-empty and soulless.

Oh, Houston could give you its moments – driving around the Loop you would sometimes get a fine view of the Port of Houston, refineries draped in feathers of steam, lights on the stacks glowing yellow – but then she’d never had an ambition to live in a Blade Runner diorama.

And this area, Clear Lake/NASA, was really pretty seedy. It was a long way out of downtown Houston, off the Galveston Freeway, I-75. The Johnson Space Center was the home of the nation’s space program, but at heart it was just an old-fashioned government facility, fading 1960s buildings stranded in an area full of desolate mini-malls and little else.

But even so, she thought, maybe it wasn’t Houston’s fault she felt so sour about life here.

It would be better when Henry had gone: Henry, ex-husband of three days, the living, breathing embodiment of everything that had gone wrong with her life.

As she approached the JSC entrance, she realized she wasn’t up to facing the press, or Henry. Not just yet.

She pulled into a parking lot close to the Days Inn NASA, a chalet-style motel almost directly opposite the JSC entrance. She used to stay here when she was an impoverished ascan, an astronaut candidate, in happier days a hundred years ago. Near the Days Inn was the Puddruckers hamburger restaurant where she used to eat, and a Chinese restaurant. She bought a Houston Chronicle, 50c from a vending machine, and walked into the Chinese. It was full of old folks watching TV, and she bought herself soup and a sandwich for $2.95.

The Chronicle was stuffed full of ad sections and bewilderingly dull local news. But it had reasonable coverage of the space program, especially when a mission was in progress, with two or three features a day. A lot more informative than NASA TV, she thought.

Her soup arrived. When she looked up, past the middle-aged waitress, she could see spacecraft, the superannuated inhabitants of JSC’s rocket garden, poking above the trees like minarets from some ruined temple. And there was the white-and-black flank of the Saturn V, an operational Moon rocket, lying in the grass.

In the Chronicle there was a series of ads for stomach stapling, aimed at those more than a hundred pounds overweight. Americans always eat too much, Arkady often told her. Maybe she’d clip this out to show him.

She ate her soup, trying to make it last.

Through the JSC security gate she parked her car. It was a late February day, unusually cold. She walked to where Henry would be working, at the Lunar Curatorial Facility in Building 31N. This was the building where, for thirty years, they had stored the Moon rocks.

She had to climb two and a half storeys. The height was for protection against Class 5 hurricane floods; Mission Control was raised to this level for a similar reason. The weather was thought to be the most likely danger to the rocks, in these post-Cold War days. But just in case of a nuclear attack or similar catastrophe, a proportion of the irreplaceable samples were stored in Brooks Air Force Base at San Antonio, separation being the only defence in case of such a disaster.

To be destroyed in such an attack would have been a strange fate for the battered old rocks which had seen so much, she thought.

She found a friendly technician who would take her in. The woman had worked here for twenty years. The tech was pregnant. That struck Geena as odd: what a start to life, here in the Moon rock lab, halfway off the Earth.

She had to go through the clean room. In an outer changing room she put on a bunny suit: two layers of overshoes, and a button-up white coat and McDonald’s-server hat. The garments were labelled ‘Lockheed Martin’. There were no gloves, but she had to take off her wedding ring – gold evaporating from its surface could contaminate the samples – and when she slipped it into a pocket she realized, for the first time, she needn’t put it back again.

Then the two of them crowded into an airlock, a little two-doored glass-walled room little bigger than a phone booth. Air blowers blasted at them from the ceiling.

The tech opened an inner door, and there she was, in the same room as the most famous rocks in the world.

And Henry.

The lab was a place of rectangles, of big stainless steel glove boxes and staff in white clean-room coats and hats and overboots. The roof was crowded with fluorescent tubes which filled the room with a sickly grey light, a greyness emphasized by the polished steel of the glove boxes and the nondescript floor tiles. At the back of the room, a heavy door led to a vault where the bulk of the lunar samples were stored.

This lab didn’t do much original science, in fact. It was really just a service lab, providing sample processing for external researchers. The cleanness standard was tighter than an operating room, though not so tight as, for example, a microelectronics lab.

There was a tour going on, bigwigs garbed out in their white coats, having their photographs taken with the rocks, enduring a running commentary from some flack in a white coat and a trilby.

… Eight hundred pounds of Moon rock is stored here, as two and a half thousand samples, split into eighty thousand subsamples. Something like a thousand samples a year are taken, mostly less than one gramme. The subsamples are stored in nitrogen, in triple-shelled containers. Efforts are made to reuse the samples, even ones which have been driven to destruction in some way – it is possible that other unrelated tests could be performed even on the detritus. There is a computer database on all eighty thousand subsamples, and handwritten notes and photographs on each one are stored in a fire-proof vault. Even today, sixty per cent of the samples have remained unopened since they were locked up on the dusty surface of the Moon …

The receiving lab had been built at the height of the Cold War Apollo era, when funds flowed relatively freely, and everyone worried that there might be bugs in the Moon rocks, that would devastate the world. But the Moon rocks had turned out to be the deadest things ever seen.

She could see Henry at the far end of the room.

He was obviously busy, organizing the packaging of some precious rock or other. He was clustered around a stainless steel workbench with three or four techs, all of them in their white bunny suits, like a conference of surgeons.

She drifted to the front of the lab, and waited until Henry came free.

At the front of the room was a glass wall, beyond which was a viewing gallery, dimly lit.

And here there were three big rocks on display. Each of them was maybe the size of a grapefruit, sawn in half.

These were Moon rocks, she knew.

She’d been with Henry long enough to pick up, however reluctantly, a little geology. The rock on the left was obviously a basalt – a kind of lava – a dark grey structure shot through with vesicles. The rock on the right was a breccia, its structure compound like a granite, big shapeless blobs of different materials. Breccias were the result of violent events, which smashed up rocks and welded them back together again. On Earth they usually formed in river environments. But these lunar rocks had been shoved together by an ancient meteorite impact which pulverized some part of the Moon. Even that impact was more than three billion years ago, older than almost all rocks on Earth. And the centre rock, perhaps the most nondescript, was all of four and a half billion years old.

‘… Treat that with respect, Geena; it cost forty billion bucks.’

It was Henry, of course, his fleshy nose like a bird’s beak, his black hair an unruly tangle that wouldn’t stay put under his NASA-regulation trilby.

Geena said, ‘I thought I ought to –’

He talked fast. ‘What? Come say goodbye? Gee, thanks. You want to see 86047? That’s the rock I’m taking to Edinburgh. Or rather, it is taking me. The only piece of lunar bedrock you’re likely to see. What an honour. And the centrepiece of what’s left of my career.’ He eyed her. ‘Maybe you’d like to stomp it, like you stomped my balls.’

She stepped back, until her butt came up against the display case of Moon rocks. She hadn’t expected so much anger; it was like an explosion in her face.

‘Change the record, Henry. You aren’t good at bitterness.’

‘You think I’m giving you a hard time?’

‘I don’t deserve it.’

‘Like hell. You shafted the Shoemakers. We were going to the South Pole,’ Henry said. ‘A place your Man-in-Space heroes had never dared think about. Great science, and two probes for two hundred million bucks apiece. Christ, do you know how much we could have learned?’

‘I know, Henry.’

‘Do you? Listen to me – there’s water at the South Pole. Not just the bathtub full that Prospector found, but a whole frozen ocean of it, laid down by the comets, in great dusty layers, carbon dioxide too, maybe enough to flood the whole damn Moon –’

‘I know, Henry. And your fancy probes would have performed the deep core sampling that would have proved it. You told me a dozen, a hundred times. You told everybody else. Maybe –’

‘Maybe what?’

Maybe if you didn’t shoot your mouth off so much, to me and the NASA managers and on the TV chat shows and in the tabloid papers and in the goddamn JSC staff canteen, you’d exert a little more influence. Maybe this wouldn’t have happened to you.

Suddenly, she felt weary of all this. ‘You do blame me, don’t you?’

‘Hell, yes. If you hadn’t come out publicly and backed shutting down Shoemaker …’

‘It wouldn’t have made a difference. Don’t you get it? It’s all about money and politics and power and rivalry between the NASA centres, Henry. It’s a game, that you never figured out.’

He thought about that. ‘So what game were you playing? If it made no difference what you said, why say anything at all?’

‘I was trying to advance my career. What else?’

‘At my expense?’

‘Look, Henry, it could be worse. You got your lunar bedrock, haven’t you? The most important unanalysed Apollo sample left, so they tell me.’

‘86047? It’s a piece of shit.’

‘How can you say that? It’s bedrock.’

‘But that asshole Jays Malone didn’t do his documentation right. I don’t have the context.’

She knew enough geology to understand him. The geologists had been complaining about the astronauts’ performance on the Moon since 1969. Without its context – knowing exactly where a sample had come from, how it was positioned, all the rest – a rock’s value was hugely diminished, for a geologist. Maybe that was why they fobbed off Henry with it.

He was still talking.

‘… And I have to go to Edinburgh to work on it. The only place that would have me.’

‘Come on, Henry.’

‘Where the hell is Scotland anyhow?’ He waved an arm vaguely. ‘Some Scandinavian country, thataway somewhere.’

‘You need a change, Henry. A career break. Face it. All this bitterness –’

‘The thing of it is, we’ll never know. Don’t you get it yet, Geena? We’ll never know, about the South Pole ice. Not in my working lifetime. That’s what is killing me.’

She tried to focus, to stay sympathetic, but her attention drifted.

She’d heard this before, too.

Was this the definition of the end of a relationship? When you’ve heard everything the other person has to say – not once, but many times?

She started to think ahead to her appointments later in the day.

Henry had, she realized guiltily, stopped talking.

He turned, and walked back to his work.

The Shoemaker had been Henry’s project, the centrepiece of his career. It had actually got further than most. Two prototype landers had been built for real, by the Jet Propulsion laboratory out in Pasadena. Now, as far as she knew, they were being put in storage, or maybe cannibalised for other missions …

For the Shoemaker program had been canned. The manned program – delays to the Space Station, cancellations by the cash-strapped Russians – had taken too much out of NASA’s budget.

It had always been thus, Geena knew. A single Shuttle launch, of whatever value, cost as much as both Henry’s unmanned science missions put together.

The project on 86047 was no sop, though. The mother rock was being broken up and sent around the world to top geophysics labs for independent analysis. Edinburgh was just such a lab. They’d done the same, for instance, with the famous meteorite from Mars which had looked as if it held life traces; Edinburgh had got a piece of that too.

And Henry was being sent along with the rock. There was valuable work to be done here, genuine research. But …

But she’d been with him long enough to understand how he felt.

The cancellation of Shoemaker was like the cancellation of his whole career; it meant he wasn’t likely to meet the long-term objectives he had set himself, like all scientists, objectives which underlay his choice of particular projects.

Digging aimlessly into 86047 was, by comparison, no consolation.

The visitors were still here. A tech opened a cylindrical case inside a glove box, and pulled out a Moon rock: small, fist-sized, nondescript, sawn in half. Geena could see the vertical burns of the saw. The visitor had his picture taken with it, his grinning face outside the glass, the rock held by a black-gloved hand inside the glass, the camera angled so as to avoid the flash’s reflection from the glass.

And in the sterile light of the lab, the ancient rocks from the Moon – many of them older by a billion years than any rock that had survived on Earth – sat, wizened and lumpy and wilfully irregular, like resentful old men in a rest home.

3

Monica Beus was with Alfred Synge, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

She emerged from the dark crater into the blinding light of the sun. She pulled on her sunglasses and checked her floppy hat. She’d snapped Alfred’s head off when he showed up with this big hat for her. For the sun, he said. But he was right, of course; the chemotherapy had left her so bald her scalp would fry like an egg, and she was too damned stubborn, naturally, to wear a wig.

So be it. She wore the damn hat, and forgave Alfred for his residual love for her.

Breathing hard from the climb, she clambered on top of an old gun emplacement with a bunch of other tourists and studied the view.

She was at the highest part of Diamond Head crater, here on Oahu. She was surrounded on three sides by Pacific Ocean. The water was royal blue, laced with whitecaps, in its beauty showing no signs of the problems Venus had brought: the plankton die-backs, the collapse of the food chain in some parts of the oceans, depletion of stocks of fish and mammals. In the south she could see windsurfers skimming over the waves, radiation-proof skinsuits gleaming, their elegance and speed a balance between forces, aerodynamic and gravitational. In the west, the sun was already dropping towards the horizon. To the north the Miracle Mile along Waikiki Beach was a thin, golden strip of sand walled off from the interior by slab-like high-rise hotels. Sun, sand, sea, tourists.

And when she looked back she could see into the crater of a volcano two million years dead.

They found a seat. Alfred dug under his poncho and pulled out a laptop; without preamble, he started showing her images of Venus.

‘Before and after,’ he said drily. He retrieved a classic Venus-from-space image, the featureless pool ball. ‘Venus was our neighbour,’ he said. ‘At its closest, only a hundred times as far away as the Moon. And it wasn’t so different from Earth in size. But that’s as good as it gets. Otherwise, it was a hell-hole. Fifty miles of carbon dioxide, laced with a little sulphuric acid. So hot the rocks glowed, dull orange.’

He showed her surface images, craters and domes and valleys and mountains, constructed from a radar survey by the Magellan spacecraft. ‘Venus was covered by volcanism. There were flood lavas and volcanic cones and domes, and other features which don’t have any analogues on Earth. We didn’t see plate tectonics, like Earth; we think Venus was a one-plate planet dominated by hot-spot volcanism. My favourite hypothesis is that there was a catastrophic global resurfacing every half-billion years.’

‘A what?’

‘The crust melting, globally. There are problems with the heat flow from the interior otherwise … It would be like five hundred million years of geology crammed into a few centuries. Now,’ he said. ‘After. An image taken by the Hubble this morning.’

There was no evidence of a spherical shape. She made out a crudely-defined, blurred oval, with extensive tails, like a comet’s.

Alfred said, ‘You’re looking at a cloud of atmospheric gas, mostly frozen, and ground-up rock.’

‘The rock’s from the surface?’

‘Mostly the mantle, as far as we can tell. Most of the mass is still concentrated near the point where the centre of gravity of the planet used to be. We tried radar pulses from Arecibo, and … Well. Monica, we can’t find a solid object there any more. The substance of the planet is spreading out along the orbit. The ring probably won’t stay stable; the perturbation by Earth’s gravity will –’

‘Hold it. Alfred, I can’t follow you. You’re saying that Venus no longer exists.’

‘Not as a coherent solid, no.’

‘That’s impossible. How much energy would it take to destroy a planet?’

He considered. ‘Well, roughly speaking, you would have to lift every piece of rock to escape velocity, out of Venus’s own gravity well. There’s a quantity called the gravitational binding energy … For Venus, which had eighty per cent of Earth’s mass, it works out as ten to power thirty-two joules – umm, something like a thousand billion times our nuclear arsenal.’

‘Just for the record, we aren’t talking about your global volcanic resurfacing here, are we?’

He smiled. ‘Even that would be quite a spectacle, if it occurred in the lifetime of this astronomer. But no, it’s orders of magnitude beyond that.’ He rubbed his nose, smearing the gaudy sun block there. ‘Those are big numbers. But there’s another way of looking at it. If you consider the energy density required, averaged over the planet’s volume, it isn’t so high. Something like a tanker of gas per cubic yard or so, I guess.’

‘What are you telling me?’

‘We think we are looking at some funny physics over there, Monica. Which is why you and the rest of the particle physicists are going to have to work on this with us.’

‘Funny physics?’

‘Look at this.’ He pulled up results from a cosmic ray detector, tracks left in bubble chambers, accompanying analysis. ‘We’ve found some strange products from the Venus event. Some exotic beasties, escaping from that particular zoo. Have you seen this result?’

A spider-web of tracks, of splits and decay events and spirals and tiny explosions.

She whistled. ‘No. I’d remember.’

‘Well, the results haven’t made it onto the nets yet. The authors are still checking.’

‘I don’t blame them,’ she said. ‘If this is right –’

‘You’re looking at a particle with a charge a fraction of an electron’s. Which is something we’ve never seen before.’

‘And this mass –’ She looked at him. ‘Alfred, this is the signature of an elementary particle with a fractional charge, and the mass of a bacterium. Now, what processes do we know of which could produce such a thing?’

‘We don’t know of anything since the Big Bang.’ He studied her. ‘We’re measuring the symptoms here. Guessing at a cause isn’t so easy.’

‘A cause?’

‘A purpose, then. Something has taken Venus apart. It seems to have transformed the planet’s own mass-energy to use against it.’ He grinned, uneasily. ‘We’re speculating. Maybe there is something out there that doesn’t like planets, deep gravity wells. Something that prefers thin matter clouds. Like the primordial cloud from which the Solar System formed in the first place.’

‘Something? You make it sound as if this was somehow deliberate.’

He didn’t reply to that.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We’re on Hawaii. We should have ice cream. You want some ice cream?’

She shrugged, indifferent, and he went anyway.

After the Venus event Alfred had come here to the islands to work at the observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, fourteen thousand feet above sea level. Up there, the air was so rarefied it was as clear a sky as anywhere on Earth, but human lungs only received forty per cent of their normal intake of oxygen. Nobody slept at the summit; the astronomers came down four thousand feet every dawn to sleep over at Hale Pohaku.

Alfred had come down to meet her. Monica knew there was no way she would be able to tolerate the summit conditions.

Thus, death was already closing in on her, already cutting the options available to her, the circles closing in. She would never see another mountain top.

Bullshit, she thought.

She tried to focus on Hawaii.

This island, Oahu, was dying too, though a little more slowly than she was. It had bloomed out of the sea in a fiery birth, amid gouts of lava and steam. But every year erosion dragged it down towards the water, and there was nothing, no process, to restore it.

It had happened before. There was a flaw in Earth’s mantle here, a great plume of magma which had welled up steadily for a hundred million years. It had generated Oahu; right now the Big Island was over the plume, and was being pushed towards the sky by that lithic fountain. But the relentless sliding of the tectonic plates beneath the Pacific would eventually, in a few million years, take the Big Island away from the plume. The volcano at its heart would die, and the island would be abandoned to the forces of erosion.

Thus there was a chain of dying islands tailing off to the north-west, Oahu and Kauai and Niihau, and beyond that a trail of corpses, nameless undersea mountains, each of which had once been a paradise of forests and beaches, just like this one.

Somehow it seemed an appropriate place to come to talk about the death of Venus.

Alfred returned, bearing two immense cones of ice cream. He was wearing a broad, floppy hat, a garish shirt, and shorts that made his legs look as if he had spent ten years in space.

They found a seat, and ate up the ice cream companionably.

Small talk: How are Garry and your grandkids? Fine, Alfred, when I get to see them … he’s flying out of Edwards now … I don’t think Jenine is enjoying life as an Air Force wife …

She let her attention drift. A part of her mind was already composing the report she would have to pass up to the Administration.

She wondered about telling the President about the funny physics results. Was it appropriate to include something so exotic, something nobody yet understood, something it wasn’t even possible yet to check?

On the other hand, she thought bleakly, suppose Alfred’s wilder speculations have some bearing on reality. If there is something loose in the Solar System, something transforming, something powerful enough to destroy a planet like Venus – won’t it be seen immediately in terms of a threat to the Earth?

And if it was a threat, how could they possibly deal with it, even recognize it?

‘You know,’ Alfred was saying around his ice cream, ‘no matter what the other implications of this event, one thing’s for sure.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve lost Venus. Forever. Although I suppose the truth is we lost it a long time ago, when the first space probes got there. I’m old enough to remember –’

‘You’re younger than me, Alfred.’

‘– when Arrhenius’s theory was still the paradigm. He thought the clouds were water droplets. The land was choked by swamps. A hothouse, with amphibians and dinosaurs and cave men. Even later, when it became clear from the spectroscopic evidence there was no water in the cloud tops, we still thought there might be a loophole. Maybe a world-spanning ocean of Perrier water. Or seas of oil. Why the hell not?

‘But when the Mariners got there, what they found was a big disappointment.’ He shook his head. ‘But it needn’t have stayed that way. All those stupendous schemes to terraform Venus the fringe types cooked up. You’d have to block out the sun, and let all that carbon dioxide liquefy, strike it with comets to spin it up and bring in water –’

She laughed. ‘What bull.’

‘But just think what you’d finish up with. A planet much more like Earth than Mars could ever be: continents called Aphrodite and Ishtar, oceans called Guinevere and Niobe; even enough geological activity to sustain a biosphere for billions of years.’ He sighed. ‘It was always remote. But it was possible. Maybe that is why Venus was put in the Solar System in the first place.’

She eyed him. ‘As a place for us to colonize?’

‘Why not? But now, it’s gone. Taken from us …’

‘You sound as if you’re mourning. Mourning a planet.’

‘A whole world has died here, Monica. Everything we could have learned from it, all its future possibilities lost, for all time. A world. What more appropriate object of mourning is there? … Maybe we ought to hold a wake. A global wake.’

She shivered, despite the warmth of the day. She was aware of Alfred watching her with barely concealed concern, but she had no time for that.

She looked around the bright sky for Venus, but it was either below the horizon or lost in the glare.

4

Henry Meacher flew British Airways direct into Edinburgh.

His ticket was for what BA called World Traveller Class, which meant, essentially, steerage. Henry found himself in a middle seat in the central bank of four, a long way away from the 747’s tiny windows. The stewardesses, expertly encased in make-up, were all anorexic-slim English girls with what he thought of as cut-glass accents; they walked as if their orifices were all sewn up. The distant communal video screen showed a BBC news round-up preceded by a tourist’s-eye view of the alleged ancient beauties of Britain; a little menu card told Henry he would be eating a roast beef dinner – American beef – and, later, a traditional English breakfast.

Henry buried his face in the Journal of Geophysical Research and tried to ignore all this fake Englishness. It was like a chintz spread thrown over the battered American engineering of the aircraft. Who did they think they were kidding?

BA irritated him. The Venus scare had caused a huge curtailment in long-haul flights, so every airline was suffering – the rules about every passenger wearing a radiation exposure dosimeter badge had seen to that – but even so the length of queues BA maintained at check-in astounded him. But they pretty much seemed to have a monopoly on direct flights to Britain aside from into London, so BA it was.

The flight was late leaving Houston Intercontinental. An O-ring on one of the ageing 747’s engines had to be replaced, and the engineers, worryingly, seemed to have trouble finding the right inspection hatch.

The seat next to Henry was occupied by a USAF airman who was stationed at a base in Suffolk. He was returning with his two kids from leave in Texas, and he was homesick before the Boeing left the ground. ‘The bathrooms in Britain are just disgusting. Even the hotels. They just never heard of sanitary seals. The Germans aren’t so bad with the bathrooms. But the French, my God, one place we stayed there was just a hole in the ground you were supposed to squat over …’ Bathrooms on planes and on trains and in stations and in hotels, bathrooms in Britain and Italy and Greece and Sweden. It was, Henry realized with dismay, nothing so much as an asshole’s travelogue of Europe.

And after a couple of hours, the plane had metamorphosed, as ever, to a giant, stinking pig-pen in the sky, and every toilet Henry tried had a sticky floor and an overflowing trash can.

They flew out of bright morning light, from the west, towards Edinburgh. Henry peered out a window near the stewardess’ station, and took his first look at Scotland.

He was descending into the Midland Valley, a broad belt of lowland that stretched from Glasgow to Edinburgh. This was actually what geologists called a graben: a rift, a block of land that had dropped between two faults. He could see the roads from England, to the south, sweeping down out of the hills to the valley floor, which was settled and arable, coated with picture-book fields and towns, though he could see, in some places, the scars left by Venus: failing crops, fields left brown and bare, a portent of troubled times to come.

But what made this valley different were the extinct cores of old volcanoes that stuck out of the ground, remnants of a volcanism spasm three hundred million years gone. The cones were an uncompromising demonstration of the old geologist’s saw that the stuff that’s left sticking out of the ground is harder than whatever has been worn away.

And as he descended towards Edinburgh itself he caught a glimpse of Arthur’s Seat, a composite volcano that was the greatest of the volcanic plugs; the buildings of the old city lapped around its flanks.

He landed at 7.00 a.m. local, having missed an entire night out of his life. A bright early spring day stretched ahead of him, and he felt like a piece of shit.

‘The name’s Mike Dundas.’

The kid was waiting for Henry at the departure gate, when he finally got through queuing to have his passport checked.

Henry shook his hand. ‘We e-mailed. Good to meet you, Mike.’

Mike took Henry’s bag, a wheeled suitcase, and hauled it away through the terminal towards the car park. Mike was a technician in the University geology department here; he was in his early twenties, with – to Henry’s eye – brutally short-cut hair, a disconcertingly pierced nose, placid blue eyes. He wore the bright Day-Glo sunscreen popular with the young around the world, huge dabs of orange and yellow on his nose and cheeks. His accent was distinctly Scottish, but gentler than Henry had expected – lots of strong r’s, ‘ye’ for ‘you’, ‘tae’ for ‘to’, and so on. No big deal.

‘The rock’s already here,’ Mike said.

‘The rock?’

‘86047. The Moon rock. We’ve set up our sample lab. I don’t mind telling you we’re all excited about this, having the rock here.’

‘It’ll be glad to know it’s a celebrity.’

Mike looked cut by the mild sarcasm, and Henry instantly regretted it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mike said. ‘We’re glad to welcome you too, sir.’

‘I know what you meant, Mike. And for Christ’s sake call me Henry; you make me feel old enough as it is.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Stop apologizing, already.’

‘I’m –’ Mike laughed, and seemed to relax a little. ‘You’re the boss.’

Mike’s car, in the multi-level airport car park, turned out to be a small, battered Rover. Henry, unfamiliar with the Brit numberplate system, couldn’t tell its age, but he was willing to bet it hadn’t been radiation-proofed according to the new international code. There was room in the trunk – no, the boot – for Henry’s luggage, but Mike had to clear boxes and papers off the seats before Henry could sit down.

‘Sorry,’ Mike said. ‘I wanted to pick you up myself. But the car’s always full of shit.’

Henry shrugged as he buckled up his seat belt. ‘We’re geologists, remember. Geologists live in shit. It’s in the job description.’

‘Here.’ Mike handed Henry a cardboard carton of orange juice.

‘What’s this for?’

‘Jet lag. I know how it feels.’

Henry grinned, and held the carton to his mouth.

Mike queued his way out of the car park, and set off along the freeway – motorway – towards central Edinburgh, eight miles away. The sky was blue, fresh, marked by a few moist-looking cumuli; but, when Mike opened a window, it was cold.

He became aware that Mike hadn’t spoken since the airport. Mike seemed to have picked up Henry’s inner sourness; maybe the poor kid thought Henry’s mood was somehow his fault.

‘So,’ Henry said with an effort. ‘What’s the shit, specifically? The boxes in the car.’

‘Oh.’ Mike looked vaguely embarrassed. ‘They’re for my sister. I get her samples through my buddies at the University. She sells rocks.’

‘She’s an academic supplier?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Oh. Don’t tell me. Not rocks; crystals.’

Mike shrugged. ‘She knows more about geology and mineralogy and stuff than she admits. But she has to make a living.’

‘So, what about you? You have a pet rock at home?’

Mike laughed. ‘No. But I have a rock collection. I started when I was a kid. The first item was a piece of basalt from Arthur’s Seat. When I was a schoolkid I joined a local geology society. Field trips to the Pentland Hills, and stuff.’

‘Sounds fun.’

‘You know, Edinburgh is the home of geology –’

‘So they tell me.’

Mike looked embarrassed, and again Henry found himself absurdly regretting his sharpness.

‘Go on,’ Henry said. ‘So you wanted to be a geologist.’

‘I never got that far.’

‘As far as what?’

‘As taking A-levels. The exams that would have got me to University.’ He shrugged. ‘But I learned a lot about rocks. I was always good in the field, and I turned out to be good in the lab. I got a job as a technician in the geology department here.’

‘You could study. Do some kind of correspondence thing.’

Mike flashed a weak smile. ‘I’m happier with the rocks.’

‘Especially Moon rocks, huh.’

‘Oh, yes. Especially the Moon rocks.’

To Henry the British roads looked clean, wide, kind of crowded; this was indeed a small island, he thought. The exit ramp from the motorway was a baby-gentle curve, signposted miles in advance. They emerged onto a roundabout, a system of ordered chaos, with an unspoken etiquette about giving way Henry was going to have some trouble mastering. Not to mention the fact that Mike was sitting on the right, and the roundabout traffic turned clockwise, counter to the way God intended humans to travel …

Henry felt irritated by all this. He wasn’t interested in learning about the eccentricities of the British road system. The truth remained that he didn’t want to be here, and still wouldn’t even after he got past his jet lag. He let himself get annoyed at Edinburgh, Scotland and Britain, however unfair it was.

They entered the city itself. Henry’s immediate impression was bustle, colour, lovely old sandstone buildings, hills everywhere.

Mike, following the traffic along a broad, sunlit shopping street, turned towards the train station. ‘Your hotel’s the Balmoral. Kind of swank. We checked you in here until you find somewhere more permanent. NASA are paying …’

Henry peered gloomily at the hotel, a sandstone pile punctured with slit windows, topped by a huge, fairy-cake clock tower. Builders were working on the roof, adding what looked like a layer of radiation-proof lead shielding. Overall, the hotel looked like a prison.

He checked his watch: 9.00 a.m., British time.

‘How far are we from work, Mike?’

He shrugged. ‘A few minutes. Do you want to check in first, freshen up –’

Henry scratched the stubble on his cheeks. ‘Hell, no.’ He grinned. ‘First impressions are vital. Let’s go see that Moon rock.’

Mike pulled away from the kerb.

The Edinburgh University Department of Geology and Geophysics turned out to be part of a sub-campus called the King’s Buildings, a couple of miles south of the city centre. Most of the science and engineering departments lived out here, Henry learned, along with a couple of government research institutes. The department itself was housed in a building called the Grant Institute of Geology, a blocky 1930s frontage with rambling modern extensions to the rear.

The suburbs of Edinburgh ran away to the north. To the south there was an open area, trees and grassland, that turned out to be a golf course.

From Mike, Henry learned that Edinburgh was in fact pretty much ringed by golf courses.

When Henry and Mike walked up to the entrance a couple of undergraduates came out, carrying notebooks. They both seemed to have pierced tongues – my God – and, in their lurid war-paint sunscreen, to Henry they looked about twelve years old.

There was a security check at the door. Henry signed the book, alongside where Mike had already filled in his name for him. He’d spelled it wrong: HNERY.

Oh, Henry thought.

The entrance hall was 1930s grandiose, but its glory was faded. There were portraits of the department’s great men on the walls, and three granite slabs with lists of former professors. But the slabs weren’t up to date, and the hall was cluttered with a couple of fish tanks and a small seismology station. Mike shrugged. ‘We’ve been putting in stuff for the undergraduates. That’s a salt water aquarium over there, and this seismology station is live. Educational. But we have to scramble for the funding. And it costs a couple of hundred quid for every word you get carved on those big granite tombstones up there …’

Thus, thought Henry, times change, and not always for the worse.

Mike gave Henry a quick tour of the department.

The core of the Institute was the handsome old 1930s building, tall ceilings, oak panels, echoing; the modern extensions were cramped and rambling, with cheap ceiling tiles and linoleum floors. But, like every geology lab Henry had ever been in, the place was cluttered with samples. Even in the corridors there were big oak chests of drawers, all neatly numbered by hand-drawn labels. There were basement storage areas for the bigger samples – the foundations would have had trouble with the weight otherwise – and the rocks there were stored in open pallets or, sometimes, in cruder containers, like photocopier paper boxes. There was a cold room where ocean floor core samples were stacked up, in grimy metal tubes; Mike pointed out the department’s milk store here, ready to fuel the British need for a continual tea supply.

Rocks everywhere, all carefully labelled and tracked by a full-time curator. Grad students were encouraged to discard whatever they didn’t absolutely need for the future, but Henry knew that no geologist would willingly give up a single grain of sand.

To Henry it felt like coming home, after the crush and squalor of the plane, the jangling confusion of his first jet-lagged encounter with Edinburgh.

The clean lab, where the Moon rock would be processed, was a couple of storeys up. Henry was expecting a close cousin of the Lunar Curatorial Facility back home at JSC.

Well, there was a small, cramped airlock chamber here, a couple of wooden doors, like JSC. But there were no bunny suits or hats. It was just another lab, dusty, lined with grubby-looking wooden benches. There were fume cupboards on the walls, with safety notices, but their doors were ajar. Mike said the room had mostly been used, previously, by oceanographers looking for trace elements in sea water, like osmium or helium. At least there were steel-and-glass glove boxes sitting on the antique wooden benches, cheerfully bolted in place. And there were rocks, nondescript lumps, inside each of the boxes.

There was nobody working here right now. Too early in the morning, maybe.

‘… The samples here are mostly just dummies,’ Mike said. ‘A couple of meteorites and stuff. We really wanted to learn how to handle the samples. The containers are under positive pressure. I mean, the interiors contain air at a higher pressure than outside, so if there is any breach of containment the lunar material would be blown outwards, rather than have earthly contamination blow inwards. By comparison, if we were looking at radioactive material the pressure would be negative – air would be sucked inside a box in a breach, so that radioactivity would be contained. We store the samples in ultra-dry nitrogen …’

I know, Henry thought as Mike chattered nervously on. I know.

The positive pressure made the gloves, of black rubber, stick out from the boxes like questing arms, two or three feet long. As Henry walked past, the gloves seemed to bat at his chest, blindly.

‘This clean room,’ said Henry mildly, ‘doesn’t seem too clean to me. The lab at NASA is like Fort Knox.’

Mike looked defensive. ‘We’re trying to establish positive pressure in the room as a whole, but we’re having some trouble.’

‘Trouble?’

‘It’s kind of leaky. We don’t have the funding you guys have. And –’

Henry laughed. ‘My friend, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Moon rocks are just rocks. We’ll just roll up our sleeves and scrape off the shit. What do you say? Come on, show me one of these fancy boxes NASA has paid for.’

Mike grinned, still nervous. He led Henry to a glove box.

Henry knew from long experience that putting your hands into the gloves was a trick. You had to position your fingers over the fingers of the glove section, and then ram your arm into the aperture, pushing the glove right-side out by main force. It was easy to get your fingers in the wrong hole. And once inside the thick, somewhat stiff gloves, it was impossible to feel anything, and your hands got hot quickly. Learning to do delicate work in these things took time.

He noticed Mike had gotten his hands in there, ready to work, in seconds. Now he was picking up tools inside the box, confidently.

‘We’re working to the same standards as you do at Houston,’ he said. ‘The tools are Teflon, aluminum alloys and stainless steel. Stuff that won’t corrupt the rocks. The samples are sliced with lubricant-free handsaws and power saws, stainless steel blades edged with diamond.’

‘How do you find those things to work with?’

Mike shrugged. ‘Buggers. The lack of lubricant makes the saws heavy and difficult to work, and the blades wear out quickly. But you get the job done. You need strong arms, though.’

‘That you do.’

Mike pulled his arms briskly out of the gloves, and led Henry to the largest, best-lit case in the room, right at the centre. And there, on a small pedestal, sat sample 86047, an unprepossessing fist-sized lump of coal-black basalt, untidy and inert. Beside it rested a small plastic cube, labelled up-down and with the four points of the compass.

Mike bent to the case, and the fluorescent lighting underlit his face, making him look even younger.

‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘I can’t quite believe it’s here. That it’s – you know – real. That some guy picked it up on the Moon, and now it’s here.’

‘Believe it. You know about the documentation trail on these babies?’

‘Sure …’

In principle each Apollo sample had been photographed before it was picked up off the surface. The photo was the clue to the rock’s context. For instance, the pattern of shadows from the unremitting lunar sunlight gave the clue to its orientation. Since the scientists knew exactly when the rock was picked up, and where, and how high the sun would have been in the black lunar sky at that moment, they could position the rock in a strong light to recreate the shadows in the photograph, and so work out the rock’s precise orientation. Then they photographed the rock again alongside the small dice-like orientation cube. The cube stayed with the rock forever after. All this was important because, for instance, the underside of the rock would have been protected from the sun, and so processed differently.

‘… Great theory,’ said Henry sourly. ‘But it heads out the window when your astronaut fouls up. The orientation we have here is just a best guess. Shit. This rock sits there a billion years, waiting to be found, and we screw it up in the first second of contact …’

Two people bustled into the lab: a greying, portly older man, and a woman of about twenty-seven.

The man shook Henry’s hand. ‘Dr Meacher.’

‘Henry, please.’

‘Dan McDiarmid. I’m heading up the investigation here, from our side of the pond. Welcome to Edinburgh.’

‘Good to meet you, Danny.’

McDiarmid flinched but held his ground. ‘We weren’t expecting you quite so – informally.’ He was eyeing Henry’s stubble.

There wasn’t a trace of Scottish in his accent, as far as Henry could tell. He knew the type, he thought. His creative days long past, McDiarmid had used whatever reputation he had earned to win power and wealth, to turn himself into a Great Man.

Authority. The antithesis of science.

Now the woman pressed forward, thin and intense, sharp blue eyes. ‘Marge Case,’ she said. ‘I took my degree at Cambridge, and a doctorate in lunar feldspathic breccia crystallization history –’

‘I know about your work.’ Henry noticed both McDiarmid and Case had just ignored Mike; in fact Case had literally pushed past Mike to get to Henry.

Henry retrieved his hand from Case. ‘Hey. Mike. Stick around.’

Mike turned, confused. ‘You want me to get you a coffee?’

‘Hell, no, I don’t want a coffee. Well, yes I do, but not right now. Just hang loose, bubba.’

McDiarmid said with evident difficulty, ‘We want to offer you every hospitality and resource. Marge here will work as your lead technician, and –’

‘Sorry.’ Henry reached out to Mike, got hold of the shoulder of his jacket, and pulled him back. ‘Post’s taken.’

Case looked at Mike with precisely the reaction Henry had expected. ‘But I have a doctorate in –’

‘You said already. I’m sure Mike and I can find you something to do.’ Henry put his arms around their shoulders, and began to lead them to the door; McDiarmid followed, hands fluttering over his belly. ‘We’re going to be one big family,’ Henry said. ‘Just like the Waltons. Do you get the Waltons? Now, Mike. Where do we get that coffee?’

When he was done tormenting Case and McDiarmid, he relented and let Mike drive him back to the Balmoral.

Mike drove in silence, apparently confused. Henry wondered if he was being cruel to him, in some obscure way.

Am I just playing games with this guy? Or do I really think he will do a better job than Marge Case?

Well, sure he did.

But maybe he was being too smart at filling in Mike’s life story.

Henry suppressed a sigh. When the divorce from Geena was finalized – when he learned the Shoemaker was canned and he was going to have to leave Houston – it was as if his life was ending. He was glad when that crummy BA 747 left the tarmac at Houston Intercontinental, because it was like a little death.

But, unlike whatever lay beyond death, Edinburgh contained people, and choices, and already, just a few hours here, Henry had, on a whim, made two enemies and one dubious friend. And for what?

Anyhow, it was done.

Mike dropped him at the hotel, and Henry lugged his suitcase inside. Mike drove back to the King’s Buildings; he said he wanted to start work, preparing for the first samples from 86047.

Henry checked in.

The room rate was quite fantastically expensive. What was it with Brit hotels? Henry wasn’t paying, but he hated to waste money; the sooner he got out of here the better.

Still, his room wasn’t so bad. A big double bed – a duvet, not blankets – and a kettle and a whole stack of tea bags and a mini bar, and complimentary sunscreen in the bathroom. He was on the fifth floor, and he was looking east; he would get the sun in the morning.

He took off his shoes and his stinking socks, and padded to the window.

Looking north beyond the city’s roof tops he could see the Firth of Forth, a dreamy-blue arm of the sea. Calton Hill pushed out of the foreground. Calton was one of the ancient volcanic plugs that underpinned the city. It was coated with grass, and crowned by absurd-looking classical-style buildings, such as an open portico – some kind of unfinished temple, it seemed – and a telescope tower.

Mike had been right that Edinburgh was the home of geology. The old igneous structures here had been studied right from the beginning of the discipline. In fact James Hutton in the eighteenth century, based in Edinburgh, was the first to come up with modern theories of the processes that shaped Earth – the first man in history, perhaps, to understand the extent of the vast deserts of geological time that surrounded him.

Henry wondered, briefly, how that must have felt: to be the only human on the planet who knew …

I ought to sleep, he thought.

He tried the TV. There were five main channels and cable and satellite. The main channels were full of soaps and other daytime bullshit. He found a British news channel called Sky and watched that for a while, but the news meant little to him. There was a story about problems for the Government over integration into Europe, and some kind of IRA bomb threat that had caused gridlock in Birmingham, and, my God, a riot in some part of Scotland – what looked like a dire residential area called the Gorbals, in Glasgow – a spokesman who said in a thick accent, We never accepted the Union of the Parliaments, and that’s that. It turned out he wasn’t talking about the modern devolved assembly but the abolition of a Scottish Parliament in favour of a single British one, which had happened, for God’s sake, in 1707. And then commentators on the Irish stuff talked about some guy called William of Orange, who had his fifteen minutes of fame in 1688.

1707, 1688. Dates from prehistory for North America, dates as remote as 5000 BC.

There was no US news at all.

He tried to remember the last British news story he’d noticed back home. Some royal bullshit, probably.

Britain, he was coming to see, was built on a long and complex history. Shame they hadn’t got more of it right, he thought.

But then that was complacent. Britain was peaceful and prosperous and proud of itself and, hell, even pretty democratic. The US should last to be a thousand years old; then we’ll see what shape we’re in …

He flipped around until he found CNN. Lying on his bed, he studied baseball scores, one of his routines for conning himself to sleep.

But, though he was tired, he was not sleepy, and some part of him was reacting to the fact that it wasn’t even midday outside, and the day was a-wasting.

He’d done a lot of travelling in the course of his career. But he’d never yet got used to this planet-hopping.

He considered raiding the room’s mini-bar. Or maybe he should go back to the institute and rattle McDiarmid’s cage a little more. Or maybe he should just go find a USA Today.

Bored, sour, he got up, pulled on a fresh T-shirt, and walked out of the room.

He found himself on Princes Street, a broad, straight road that ran east to west. It seemed to be the spine of the shopping area, and it was crowded with traffic and shoppers. The pedestrians were all in big floppy hats and baggy white clothes with their faces smeared with cream.

The street’s north side was lined with plastic shop frontages, and on its south side there was a park called Princes Street Gardens: set in a valley, crammed with monuments and features. Pretty. But, Jesus, it was cold, a breeze gusting down the street like it was a wind tunnel. Henry, with just his T-shirt, wrapped his arms around his chest. Maybe he’d get more tolerant to this when he got over the loss of Houston’s muggy, comfortable warmth.

Anyhow, if he was lucky he’d be out of here before winter came.

He got his orientation quickly.

He could see the asymmetrical profiles of Calton Hill and Castle Rock from here, with the heart of the city stretching between them, and Arthur’s Seat on the outskirts of the city, a blocky, uncompromising mound. The glaciers had flowed east over this place, scraping off the younger sedimentary rocks and leaving these three igneous plugs exposed. All three plugs had been left with a sharp western face and a long, shallow eastern debris scarp. To Henry, musing, it looked as if some gigantic explosion had overwhelmed the area from the west, leaving these tails of debris, sheltered by the plugs.

He walked to the west along Princes Street. The shops were full of the new radiation-proofed clothing lines, heavily advertised. Here was a realtor – no, an estate agent – with a lot of properties price-hiked because they had cellars, or room for underground development.

He passed the train station entrance and the roof of an underground mall, decorated with obscure statues of what looked like abseilers. He came to a steep road called the Mound, which twisted up the glacial tail to the Castle, a brooding pile on top of its own basaltic plug. The Castle looked as out of place, viewed from this glitzy plastic shopping area, as a bubo in the armpit of a supermodel.

He thought about climbing up there, taking a look around.

Or, he could go back to that little mall by the station, get under cover, and have a coffee.

He went back to the mall.

It turned out to be a complex of staircases and escalators and glass-walled elevators. It was brightly lit and crowded, though muzak pumped out from too many places. There were fountains, with more of those bizarre stainless steel abseilers.

At least it was warmer here. But he couldn’t find anything that looked right. What he’d really like to find, he thought, was a big out-of-town-style Barnes and Noble, lined with books, with a fat Starbucks coffee shop on the end of it. You’re getting parochial, Henry.

He came to a shop called The World Store. It was just the kind of place you’d expect to find in a mall like this: full of bead necklaces, wooden carvings, bamboo curtains. At the back there were shelves full of rocks: sparse metal frames lit by spot lamps, the merchandise glowing.

There was a girl behind a counter at the back, blonde and slim, sorting through some kind of box of samples.

On impulse, Henry walked in. The girl looked up, took him in at a glance – so it seemed – and went back to her rocks.

On her desk, there was a card. THE WORLD STORE. S Kapur & J Dundas, props. Telephone, fax and e-mail.

Dundas. He remembered the rocks in the car, Mike’s crystal-gazing sister.

Henry drifted past the wooden elephants and pan pipes and other New Age crap, and made for the racks of minerals. It was mostly the usual eyecatching commercial stuff, sliced geodes and quartz crystals and pyrite clumps. Some of it looked native, but most of it was polished, even dyed and carved. Here was a necklace of bottle-green beads, for instance. And he found a tiger carved from a shining black rock, covered in pale grey blotches.

He looked sideways at the girl.

She was older than Mike, maybe as old as thirty, but she had the same Nordic colouring. Blonde hair tied back, revealing a composed, thoughtful face. Strong hands. Blue eyes you could swim in. One hell of a set of cheekbones, the essence of beauty. No body parts pierced that he could see, which was a good thing. She was eating something. A rice cake, maybe.

She glanced up and caught him looking at her. She put down the rice cake.

He was holding the tiger; he fumbled and nearly dropped it.

‘You pay for breakages,’ she said. Her accent was the same as Mike’s – soft Scottish – but her tone was cold.