Moonseed. Stephen Baxter

We didn’t need Station to go to the Moon. If we want to go to the Moon then we should go to the Moon. Learn to live off the land. You can’t do that in LEO.’ He eyed her. ‘Not that it would be easy. Some of the space buff types who come to see me seem to think it would be like the pioneer days, setting off into the western desert. It won’t be. We got to the Moon for three days apiece, two guys for just three days, and we had to bend the national economy backwards to do that. Up there, you have to haul along every drop of fuel you need to land, and the dust eats away at any equipment you have, and the volatiles in your seals boil away in the vacuum, and you have to bake the air you breathe out of the rock. Not impossible, but not easy.

      ‘And all we got to work with,’ he nodded a head to the west, ‘is NASA. A Cold War museum. You ever think about that? What we’d actually do if some kind of When Worlds Collide situation came along, the dinosaur killer maybe, and we had to set up a colony off-world, fast? Hell, we wouldn’t have a hope.’ He drained his beer. ‘People who say the Moon is easy are talking out of their asses. You can colonize a desert with Stone Age technology. On the Moon, you need to be smart …’

      Sure, Geena thought. Sure, let’s all dream about the Moon. That’s fine, if you don’t have to live and work in the space program as it exists, today, in the real world. Which means Station, like it or not.

      ‘Can we talk about your rock?’

      He was avoiding her eyes. He was reluctant – but also unwilling to show it.

      There was something he wasn’t telling her, she thought. Something he knew about that rock he wanted to keep to himself. She had no idea what that could be.

      He sighed. ‘Okay, lady. I don’t know what good it will do, but you got a deal. What do you want me to do?’

      She got out her tape recorder, and replayed the voice transcripts of those remote moments when he’d found the rock that became known as 86047.

       … Okay, Joe. It’s a block about a foot across. I’d say it’s an olivine basalt. It’s almost rectangular and the top surface is covered in vesicles, large vesicles. It almost looks like a contact here between a thin layer of vesicles and a rock unit that’s a little lighter in colour with fewer vesicles. And I think I can see laths of plage in it, randomly oriented, two or three millimetres across …

      So, in his living room, with a view of an ocean already tinted dark blue by the light of the setting sun, the old man listened to the words he’d once spoken on the Moon, and, as he descended in his mind once more into that lunar rille, he dredged up fragments of description and memory, which Geena noted down.

      

      When she was done, Geena left Jays to his solitary peace.

      On impulse, she drove on east and north through the darkening, faded grandeur of Seabrook, and it seemed as if maybe all the relics of the Space Age might one day end up here, washed along the coast by some intangible tide of time.

      But when she went just a little further north she entered industrial areas. The Dixie Chemical Company, the Graver Tank & Mfg Co. Inc., and so on. Further on still, on the Bay Area Boulevard, there were a lot of space-related industrial concerns: Lockheed Martin, Honeywell Space Systems, IBM, Hughes Aircraft, on roads called Moon Rock Drive and Saturn Road. Symbols that space wasn’t yet quite dead, a sepia-tinted memory, an impossible dream of the generation of Heinlein and von Braun.

      It was like coming back to the present, she thought, from a dismal descent into the dead past. She opened her window to let fresh air into the car, and turned the radio to a rock channel.

      9

      Constable Morag Decker swung her patrol car into Viewcraig Gardens and immediately ran into a jam.

      She counted three sets of roadworks, a scene of wooden separators and flashing yellow lamps and hard hats and jack-hammers. There were vans belonging to the gas company and British Telecom, and another from a private contractor that looked as if it was responsible for cable repairs, bumped up onto the kerb on both sides of the road. The traffic wasn’t too heavy, in the middle of this Monday morning, with the sun rising high above Arthur’s Seat. But the tailbacks already stretched hundreds of yards to either side.

      Maybe she should call the station.

      It was unusual for more than one crew to be vandalizing the road surface at any one time. For now, the traffic was moving okay, but she could see the signs of frustration in the way the drivers edged closer together and glared at the crews as they passed. One accident, even something trivial, and the road would be blocked.

      Today was April 1st. She wondered if this congestion was the result of some misbegotten joke.

      She frowned as she thought it over.

      At twenty-five, Morag had had her uniform for just a year. At her last appraisal her sergeant’s most cutting comment had been about the way she refused to take responsibility on the ground. She was always too willing to pass the buck up the line, so he said.

      She didn’t entirely agree. She thought reporting up the line was generally pretty responsible, in fact; information to support good decision-making had to be the key to any reasoned response. So she’d been trained, and so she believed.

      But her sergeant was of an older school, toughened in the English inner city riots of the early 1980s, when the police were essentially at war with a hostile public. I remember my community policing training. A video shot through the back of a riot shield in Toxteth. My God, the looks on the faces of those yobs …

      Her own presence, gliding through here in the marked police car, was having a visibly calming effect. Maybe a copper on the spot wouldn’t be a bad idea during the rush hour, later in the day.

      She deferred the decision.

      In the meantime she had a more immediate problem: nowhere to park.

      She was in luck. Ted Dundas was out in front of his house, prodding vigorously at a garden verge. When she pulled alongside she opened her window and leaned out.

      Ted straightened up, leaned on his hoe and nodded. ‘Morag. Come to see me?’

      ‘No such luck. But I need to get this beastie off the road. Can I –’

      ‘Use the drive?’ He dropped his hoe and, with an alacrity that belied his years and beer gut, he hopped over a low wall and opened the wrought-iron gate.

      That was Ted for you: helpful without pressure or hassle. He’d been one of the most helpful elements in the station when she’d joined last year; she genuinely regretted his retirement from the force.

      She briskly reversed the car into the drive. She climbed out, carrying her peaked cap.

      On impulse, she looked east, towards Arthur’s Seat. The air was – odd. She thought she could smell ozone, like at the coast, or maybe before a storm. But the clouds were high and thin. And the light above the Seat seemed strange. Yellowish.

      Morag reached out to lock her car. As her fingers approached the handle, a blue spark leapt from her fingertips to the metal; there was a tiny snap, and her fingertips burned sharply.

      She snatched her hand back, involuntarily. ‘Shit.’

      ‘Language, Constable,’ Ted said. ‘I’ve been doing that all morning.’

      ‘Storm weather, you think?’

      ‘Maybe. What are you up to here?’

      ‘A call from a Mrs Clark. Lost her cat. Insisted on a personal call.’

      Ted nodded. ‘Two doors down. Ruth’s a widow. Be kind to her, Morag.’

      ‘I will.’ He calls her Ruth. Interesting. Gossip for the station canteen later.

      She locked the car without any further static shocks, nodded to Ted, and walked down the road.