Ash and cinders rained down on Jenny, and she screamed, and tried to keep it out of her hair. Bags and parcels, dumped on the ground, burst into flame. People were running everywhere, but they were falling, popping into flame before they stopped moving. But she seemed to be alone, with nowhere to run.

The fire rushed at her, a glowing fist. She was knocked onto her back by a red-hot wind.

Oddly, she found herself relaxing.

Her fear was gone.

The kids were safe. William would look after them. And the one in her belly was with her; it would never know suffering.

She was looking up into a cyclone; she could see a pillar of fire, laced with flame and debris, reaching high into the sky, dragging the flames together.

She held her hand up before her face. It burst into flame, just like that, her fingers burning like the candles on little Billy’s cake.

There was an instant of glowing pain.

Henry, in lunar orbit, studied the summaries on his laptop.

Something immense and restless was pushing out of the Earth, disturbing the thin blanket of rock and life that overlay the hot interior.

The Moonseed had devoured a goodly portion of the asthenosphere, the mushy semi-solid layer that contained the hotter magma of the deeper mantle. A magma plume seemed to be starting up beneath the Midland Valley, a fountain of liquid rock like the ones which had built Hawaii, Iceland.

But if that was true, it was a plume of a volume and extent and speed of efflux that nobody had modelled before. Already there had been disturbances all over the Valley: the cracking of extinct volcanic plugs, the slippage of faults that had been stable for millions of years.

The destruction of the cities had caused human misery on a biblical scale.

All of it, Henry knew, would be dwarfed by what was to come.

Henry, sailing through black and white celestial geometry, felt like a detached god, unable to imagine the human suffering, souls as transient as sparks in a fire.

He was glad, as they prepared for the landing, there was little time for reflection.

26

Blue Ishiguro — wheezing, asthmatic, lungs full of ash — made his camp at the top of Dumfoyne. With relief, he set down his seismometers and miniaturized cospec and pyrometers, tiltmeters and cameras, and connected them up via a laptop pc to a satellite transponder.

Dumfoyne was a lumpy volcanic vent. The hilly country of the Midland Valley, stained green and purple with heather, rolled away around him. He could see the little town of Strathblane perhaps a couple of miles away, compact and green and nondescript, cupped by the hills.