Moonseed

‘… I want to tell you the story of the original Bran. With twenty-seven companions, he was lured away to a place called the Land of Women, an island supported by four pillars of gold. There was a great tree full of sweet singing birds that was permanently in blossom, and the air was full of music …’

Mike, descending into the Dry Dam, saw that the speaker was a kid – seventeen or eighteen, hair shaven, so skinny the bones showed in his face and skull. He was dressed in what looked like purple pyjamas. He was sitting beneath the steep rear wall of the cwm, as if cupped by the geology; there were maybe thirty people sitting in the grass in a circle facing him. They were all clean-shaven, with close-cropped hair; they were slim, even gaunt-looking. Mike, in fact, had trouble telling the men from the women, even what age they were. They were all wearing the purple jim-jams, as far as Mike could tell, and they must be cold – he could see where the morning dew had seeped into the thin fabric of their uniforms – but they didn’t seem to be reacting to it. They looked relaxed, obviously fascinated by what the speaker was saying.

Beyond the pyjama party there was a thin, scattered circle of onlookers, dog-walkers and ramblers, a few tourists. Amongst them he could see Jane, in a woollen hat and sheepskin jacket.

The speaker’s voice echoed around the natural amphitheatre.

‘… Bran landed. There was a bed – and a wife – for each man, and the food and drink were constantly replaced. Bran’s men stayed in this wonderful place for what they thought was a year – but when they returned home, they found a hundred years had passed. Nobody believed he was Bran, who they only knew as a distant legend. Bran was forced to sail away, into oblivion … Come.’

Mike started; he hadn’t been hiding, but it wasn’t obvious how the speaker could have spotted him. But here he was, waving a skinny arm at Mike.

‘Come and join us. You’re very welcome. Everyone’s welcome to listen.’

Mike would have backed off, but there was Jane, waving at him. So he nodded at the story-teller, and stepped cautiously through the pyjama party circle, and crouched in the damp grass close to Jane. She was wearing a bottle-green necklace he hadn’t seen before.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he whispered.

She raised a forefinger to her lips to shush him.

‘… Now you can see why I took the call-sign I did: Bran.’ The kid looked around his flock; some were nodding, but others looked a little confused.

‘Think about it,’ Bran said. ‘The pillars of gold, the birds singing – the sort of lurid detail you’d expect after three thousand years of retelling. But what about the replenished food and drink? What does that sound like, to you, but replicator technology?’ He opened his hands, rested them on the back of his folded legs, and looked around the group, nodding persuasively. ‘Just like Star Trek. Right? And what about the women that just happened to be available for every man? Were they just hanging around, waiting for visitors? Isn’t it more likely that these were some kind of constructs – what we might call holograms, or even androids?

‘Which is why, of course, we find all that sci-fi stuff so easy to accept. Because it’s not part of our future – it’s part of our past.’

Jane leaned to Mike and whispered, ‘Here comes Einstein.’

‘What?’

‘Wait and see.’

‘What is this?’

‘A staff meeting of Egress Hatch,’ Jane hissed back. ‘Morning prayers.’

‘Egress Hatch? That new cult?’ He’d heard pub talk about this; the cult had come out of nowhere to gather, apparently, a couple of thousand adherents in a month. But then, since Venus, it seemed as if the whole human race was splintering into cults and enclaves and pressure groups … He studied his sister. ‘What are you doing here?’

She frowned. ‘I think I know him.’ She pointed at Bran.

‘… And, of course, the clinching element in the whole story is the time lag. A century passing on Earth for a year of the travellers’ time! It’s just the twin paradox of relativity – the time dilation effect suffered by every interstellar traveller up to, but not including, Captain Kirk – foreshadowed in a story first told three thousand years before Einstein was born. Now, how can that be? …’

‘I told you,’ Jane whispered.

Bran’s sermon was a mish-mash. The underlying theology seemed to be Celtic, but it was mixed in with a bit of New Age, a bit of post-millennial anxiety, a lot of sci-fi stuff about UFOs.

‘… Our faith is rooted in that of the Celts. But this was the native religion of Britain and Western Europe, before it was suppressed by the conquering Romans, three thousand years ago, and then absorbed by Christianity, and so emasculated. Now, we’re reclaiming it …’

Mike straightened up to speak; he could feel Jane plucking at his sleeve, but he ignored her.

‘So what’s that got to do with spacemen?’

Bran smiled. ‘The old religion, long buried, is a memory of an even older human experience. It’s only now, in our modern age, we can make sense of it. Look – have you ever had the feeling that your conscious self is sitting somewhere inside you? Like an inner person in a vehicle, looking out on the world and controlling the actions of your body –’

‘Like the Wizard of Oz?’

That got him a laugh from the outer fringe. Bran laughed along with them. ‘Something like that. Well, that’s a common feeling –’

‘A common illusion –’

‘Because it’s based in reality.’ Bran patted his rib cage. ‘These are not our true bodies. This is not our native world. We believe that we are from somewhere else, and we’re destined to return.’

Intrigued despite himself, Mike asked, ‘So what are we doing here?’

‘We are on an EVA, as the astronauts would say: an extravehicular activity. And these, our bodies, are like spacesuits we put on to preserve us here, on this alien world. We were an away team, so to speak. Or our remote ancestors were. But, long ago, we forgot what we were doing here. We forgot how to get back. Do you see?’

‘You’re speaking by analogy,’ Mike said.

Jane covered her mouth with her hand. ‘Mike, for God’s sake –’

‘You can prove anything by analogy.’

‘But,’ Bran said mildly, ‘I don’t need to prove anything. It’s simply an expression of our common experience. The lost legend of the ship – the place we came from – transmuted into myth, even as we went native … Listen: our brains, the electrical impulses that flow through them, have nothing to do with us. Any more than the computer processors in an astronaut’s spacesuit are in any way part of her …’

‘Jesus,’ Mike said. ‘He’s a crack-pot.’

‘He’s Hamish Macrae,’ Jane whispered.

‘Who?’

She told him about the kid in the Cordley Road lift shaft, Jack’s friend.

‘And suddenly,’ Jane said, ‘he’s Bran. I saw his picture in the paper. I just wanted to see what he was up to. He’s clever. I’ll give him that.’

‘He’s just working through what happened to his brother. He’s crazy.’

She eyed him. ‘We’re all crazy, Mike. We always have been. At the end of the second millennium we were all just as crazy as at the start. We all believe something. And it’s all started up again thanks to Venus. Funny lights in the sky … My view is, if you’re going to spout craziness, it might as well be something harmless. At least Bran and his people don’t hassle anyone else. Unlike some I could mention.’ She told him about the American who’d disrupted her lunch yesterday. ‘I think he was with the oil people. Arsehole.’

Mike frowned. ‘What did he look like?’

‘Tall. Skinny. In a T-shirt, of course. Wild-eyed, hairy.’

Henry. ‘You’re sure he was with the oil companies?’

‘No, I’m not sure. Why?’

‘No reason.’

She fingered her bottle-green necklace. ‘The arrogant arsehole paid for this with dollars, in cash. As if we’re the fifty-first state already.’

‘But you’re wearing it. Did he give it to you?’

She looked defensive. ‘Well, he had bought it. If I’d put the necklace back in the stock I’d never have reconciled the books –’

‘Of course not.’

She studied him suspiciously. ‘Why are you so interested? Do you know this guy?’

He shrugged. ‘How could I?’

A shadow fell across them. Mike looked up.

The leader of the pyjama people, Bran, was standing over them. Looking beyond Bran, Mike saw the various groups had broken up; the pyjama people were standing in a knot, talking quietly.

‘You were persuasive,’ Bran said to Mike with a rueful good humour.

‘Thanks.’

‘Come to our Belenus festival.’

‘When’s that?’

‘May Day. We’ll hold it here, on the Seat.’

‘Will there be replicator food and a woman for every man?’

Bran laughed. ‘No, but there will be spectacle. And oatcakes. Mustn’t forget the oatcakes.’

‘Do I have to wear pyjamas?’

‘Pyjamas are optional. Will you come?’

‘I don’t know. All that stuff you were saying sounded –’

‘Cracked?’ Bran smiled sadly. ‘But I have proof.’

‘Proof?’

For answer, Bran turned and pointed to Venus.

Mike and Jane strode back up the flank of the Seat, towards the summit. They found a place to sit on the agglomerate, looking north over the city.

Mike, agitated, disturbed, said, ‘You know, that guy was in control from the moment he walked up to us. Even before. He used everything I said to make his case stronger.’

She shrugged. ‘That’s what it takes to be a cult leader, I suppose.’

‘He ought to be a politician.’

‘Oh, I think he has his eye on higher goals than that … You said you wanted to see me.’

‘Yeah. I have something for you.’

He glanced around to ensure they were alone. A couple of walkers, a hundred yards away; the steady susurrus of noise from the city.

Pleasurably anticipating her reaction, he dug into his pocket, and pulled out his phial. It was just a small plastic test-tube, stoppered with a rubber bung.

He held it up in the morning light so she could see. There was a little puddle of dust in its base, a handful of grains. It was coal black, and when Mike shook the vial the dust clung to the sides.

‘It sparkles,’ Jane said.

‘That’s the glass in it. Shards of it, from volcanic activity and meteorite impact –’

‘Mike, what is this?’

He grinned. ‘Can’t you guess? Look, no one will ever know. Whenever you take a power-saw sample from a rock there’s always a little wastage. A few grammes. There has to be – the rock just crumbles. They expect it, when they reconcile the weights later. I was just careful to capture every loose grain. And here it is. I even pumped the vial full of ultra-dry nitrogen to keep it pure.’

‘Are you telling me this is Moon dust?’

She looked – not pleased, not awed, as he’d expected – but horrified.

‘Well, yes. That’s the point.’ He frowned, puzzled. ‘Don’t you want it?’

‘You’re giving it to me? Mike, what the hell am I supposed to do with it?’

‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘Give it to Jack. Put it in a locket. Sell it, to someone who will appreciate it.’

‘Mike, you’ve brought me a lot of stuff in the past – stuff I could never have gotten hold of otherwise – but this is different.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s against the law.’ She looked into his eyes, the way she used to when he was a kid. ‘You must have let someone down, to take this.’

‘What?’

‘Someone who trusted you. Someone who gave you responsibility.’

Shit, he thought. ‘… I suppose so.’

She pushed the vial back into his hand. ‘You’ll have to take it back.’

‘I can’t. What do I do, glue it back to the rock?’

‘You can’t keep it, Mike.’

‘It’s Moon dust.’

‘Even so.’

He hesitated.

‘You know I’m right,’ she said.

‘Oh, Christ. I hate it when you’re right.’

‘That’s what big sisters are for.’

He took hold of the rubber stopper. ‘You may as well look. You’ll never be so near a piece of the Moon again.’

She crowded close.

He pulled out the bung; it came loose with a soft pop.

She sniffed the vial. ‘I can smell wood smoke.’

‘That’s the Moon dust. It’s never been exposed to free oxygen before. It’s oxidizing. Burning. Here.’

He tipped up the vial, and tapped its base; the Moon dust poured into Jane’s palm. It was just a few grains; there really was hardly any of it.

Jane pushed at it with the tip of her little finger. ‘It’s sharp. Like little needles.’ She lifted her fingertip and inspected it. ‘It’s stuck to my skin. Oh, well …’

She tipped her hand, and let the grains scatter. They sparkled briefly before dispersing.

Talking, arguing, they made their way down the flank of Arthur’s Seat, towards the Dry Dam. Above them, the sky brightened.

… They were just grains of basalt, falling through the air.

A little piece of the Moon, come to Scotland. But, though different from any terrestrial samples, the grains themselves were unremarkable.

They fell now to a massive plug of agglomerate. They would not be found again, by the most determined petrological inspection.

… Except that where they fell, the bare rock glowed, softly silver, in spots a fraction of an inch wide.

6

The debriefing session for Geena’s mission was held in the Teague Auditorium in JSC Building 2, the Public Affairs Office. Geena had to sit behind a desk on a stage with the four others from her crew, bathed in the glare of TV lights. As clumsy young sound technicians tried to fix microphones to their lapels and ties, the astronauts chatted awkwardly, like newsreaders under the credits.

Geena had to shield her eyes to see the audience. She could see the platform on which the NASA TV cameras were mounted, and before it a thin scattering of journalists – mostly science correspondents, mostly men, mostly bearded, many of them familiar to her. This briefing wasn’t a formal press conference but had become a post-flight tradition; the idea was for the crew to come share their experience with colleagues and families. So there were engineers and controllers and mission managers from Mission Control and the science backrooms, here at Houston, and some pad technicians and managers from the Cape; but there were also grandmothers and little kids, relatives or friends of the crew.

There was nobody to see Geena.

That was her choice. Such events made her cringe, without her mother wanting to muscle in too.

It was a sparse crowd, and it looked as if today the audience was filled out with a tram-load or two of spectators from the Space Center, the flashy visitors’ centre on the edge of the JSC complex. The gaggle of tourist types sat together in their slacks and T-shirts, cameras dangling from their necks.

At last the proceedings began.

First there was a long ceremony of team awards, presented corporate-style by the director of JSC. Every astronaut who flew got a ‘Spaceflight Medal’ specific to the mission, pinned on her chest. When it was her turn, Geena got up to a ripple of polite applause, her palms sweating, suddenly as nervous as a grade school kid on show-and-tell day.

The Center director was a man called Harry Maddicott, somewhere in his sixties, hair slicked back, waistcoat stretched over an ample gut, fat and sleek and self-satisfied as a seal. He grinned at her as he pinned her medal to her suit jacket lapel, taking obvious care not to let his hands stray anywhere near her breast.

Next came the awards for the mission controllers, ‘outstanding performances’ by the Flight Dynamics Officer and the Guidance, Navigation and Control Officer and even the Public Affairs Officer. There were awards for the guys who planned the EVAs, the mission’s spacewalks – even though the EVAs, which Geena had been scheduled to take part in, had both got cancelled because of a loose screw that stuck the Shuttle orbiter’s hatch mechanism.

Then, to Geena’s embarrassment, she was called up again. She was given an EVA credit because – Maddicott said – she and her partner had got suited up and taken to vacuum, even though they never left the vehicle, and that counted for the record. Then the mission commander got up and gave the two of them a special award: the balky screw, smaller than her thumbnail, that had fouled up the hatch. It was wrapped up in a plastic bag, for them to saw in half and mount on wood, half each.

It was moments like this that made her realize what NASA was really all about: it was forty years old now, a well-entrenched piece of Government bureaucracy, where ceremonies like this were an essential part of motivation, the little plaques and medals and in-jokes a measure of the development of your career.

All the applauding NASA managers here seemed to be white males, it struck her, even though the astronauts, the showcase, were a reasonable mix of ethnicity, creed and sex. Many of the managers were of that sleek rotundity that comes to men of bulk and stature in such positions. Men of influence. She looked at Harry Maddicott, for instance. With his jowls grey and dragged down by gravity, it was difficult to remember that he had only been in his twenties during the era of flower power. How had he looked then? And yet now he had seamlessly become the kind of man who seemed to emerge from each generation to run the country, as long as Geena had been alive, and probably a lot longer before.

The inevitability of her own likely metamorphosis with age, into some female equivalent of Maddicott, depressed her. Well, Henry probably thinks I’m there already.

She tried to pay attention to the continuing presentations. There was a slide-and-video show of highlights of the mission. Images of the Mission Control Center here at JSC, guys sitting at their blue workstations with their jackets over the backs of their seats, scratching their bellies and working with mind-numbing slowness. The Shuttle’s docking with Station was more fun to watch, with intercuts between computer graphics of the converging spacecraft and the Station docking adapter making a slow geometric sense, the Shuttle flying up an invisible cone to its target, the black dots of the adapter’s Space Visioning System which helped the computers bring the huge spacecraft together. But this too proceeded with glacial slowness, the two huge machines converging at no more than an inch a second.

Now there were pictures from their stay in orbit on Station, usually of an astronaut – sometimes herself – struggling with some incomprehensible piece of equipment in a cluttered interior.

Here was Bonnie Jones, the other woman on the crew, floating around the Shuttle with her long greying hair loose and in a fan around her. As a crewmate, that had driven Geena quickly crazy. Of course the media outlets loved it; Henry told her there had been at least two daily occurrences of ‘bad hair day’ jokes. Later in the mission, Bonnie had tied her hair into a rope-like ponytail, which swung around behind her. The novelty of that wore off after the first crew member got a hairy slap in the face.

Geena was, of course, all for equal access to space. But she thought women like Bonnie ought to cut their damn Barbie-doll tresses to a crewcut for the duration; that wasn’t such a sacrifice.

The show limped on. The movement of objects in zero gravity, a milky-slow ballet, had some appeal. But the audience started getting restive, the kids and old people bored. The fact was, the novelty of watching nondescript people performing incomprehensible tasks soon palled, zero gravity or not.

There was a brief sequence of Arkady Berezovoy on board Station, using a Station power tool, floating upside down. He grinned out of the screen, it seemed directly at her. He spoke to camera in his thick, earthy, accented English: It was like a dream when Shuttle came floating up to Station. Last night I slept on the Shuttle for the first time. It was unusual. Station had become my whole universe. After 128 days in space, I couldn’t believe anything existed beyond its walls …

Arkady was still on orbit. Listening to his voice, Geena realized how much she missed him.

The most striking images, the ones that stunned the audience to silence, were those of the Earth: the visible evolution of the three-dimensional diorama of clouds and ocean and desert, filled with blue light, sliding past the orbiter’s dinged-up wing or tail. Here was a slide taken by Geena, the shimmering blues and greens of the coastline near the Bahamas.

And now here came images from the flight deck of the Shuttle’s reentry and landing. Geena’s favourite showed a view from the rear windows of the plasma trail stretching behind the orbiter, a pink road reaching all the way back to Mach 25 and orbit …

The time came for questions for the crew. Most of them came from the journalists, but given the nature of the event these were mostly harmless lobs.

Sixt, how do you feel about your career now? Do you want to fly again? Do you have any regrets?

Sixt Guth prepared his answer. He was an Apollo-era relic still flying at sixty-four, who seemed to be trying to defy age. It was incredible to think he was actually older than Harry Maddicott, she thought.

‘I was recruited, in the 1960s, as a scientist-astronaut,’ Sixt said. ‘You have to understand I was actually recruited to go to Mars, maybe in the 1980s. That was what I expected, and so did everyone else, and it was the ultimate purpose of my job. But it didn’t pan out that way. At least I got as far as LEO, low Earth orbit, and I enjoyed my time there …’

Sixt had actually completed seven flights already and was hoping for more. He was an obsessive learner, having taken at least five degrees in with his two-year stretches of Shuttle training. He was undeniably old: he was totally bald, his head and face seemingly polished smooth. He moved with an odd gait, as if awkward in Earth’s gravity, and – like others of his generation – he was, Geena thought, rather clumsy and too brief in his public pronouncements, not so articulate and media-friendly and practised as the rest of them, even Geena. She wondered briefly how they must all look to outsiders: like younger, slimmer, ethnically mixed versions of the Center director maybe, sleek and rich-looking and confident and articulate. The epitome of space travel as a career move.

It was for the sake of this corporate cosiness, she thought with uneasy regret, that Henry’s mission had been broken.

Sixt fumbled with his lapel microphone. ‘You ask me about regrets. We weren’t ready to go to Mars, I understand that now. Spaceflight is not easy. I don’t know personally how I would have fared, psychologically, if, in some other universe, I had ever gotten to do that hundred-million-mile trip to Mars. Months of isolation from my family and home, not just days …’

Sixt, do you still think we should go to Mars?

‘Well, I guess so. But it remains a heck of a long way to go. I’ve come to think we should put our hearts into a return to the Moon. Sure, the Moon’s not an ideal destination. It’s a desert compared to Mars. It would be better if Mars was in orbit around the Earth, just three days away, but it isn’t, and we ought to make the best of what we got. But even on the Moon it might be possible to live off the land, if we’re smart enough.’

And then came the questions for Geena. The first couple were about her last flight but two, the first by an all-woman crew in US space history. It seemed to have aroused as much interest and curiosity as if NASA had appointed a team of chimpanzees to make the flight. But Geena had gotten used to handling those questions now.