Jack Williamson, page 4
“We had no proper breathing gear. He tried to improvise, with a plastic bag around his head and an oxygen bottle with a tube to his mouth. Pepe and I watched from the plane. Jagged black lava sloped down from a smoking cone north of us. No sunlight anywhere. A thunderstorm was towering in the west, alive with lightning.
“Cal carried a radio. I tried to copy what he said, but the plastic made him hard to hear. He tramped down to the water, stooping to pick up rocks and drop them in his sample bucket. ‘Nothing green,’ I heard him say. ‘Nothing moving.’ He looked at the volcano behind him and the blood-colored waves ahead. ‘Nothing anywhere.’
“Pepe was begging him to come back, but he muttered something I couldn’t make out and stumbled on over the frozen lava, down to a muddy little stream. Squatting there at the edge of it, he scraped up something for his bucket. We saw him double up with a coughing fit. He got back to his feet and waded on down the beach, into a surf that was foaming pink.
“‘Sir!’ Pepe called. ‘You’ve gone too far.’
“He waved a sample bottle and slogged on into the foam.
“‘Our best chance for a new evolution,’ he said. The plastic blurred his voice. ‘If anything is left in the sea.’
“‘Please!’ Pepe begged again. ‘While you can. We need you.’
“‘Not to cry.’ I heard his muffled laugh. ‘Don’t forget you’re all immortal.’
“His voice was strangled from a new wave breaking over him. He tried to get his breath, tried to say something else I didn’t get. He lost the radio and his bucket. He did turn back and stumble a few yards toward us before he tripped and fell. The oxygen bottle floated away. We saw him grabbing for it, but the next wave took it out of reach.”
“You left him there?” Dian’s voice rose sharply. “Left him to die?”
“He was already dead.” My father shrugged. “His own choice, I think. He knew the danger, but his spirit was dead. He was grieving for his wife. He let that last wave carry him under. We saw him later, far out in the surf. Just a glimpse before he went under again. Pepe wanted to look for his body, but that could have killed us both. We had no oxygen gear.”
“The air?” Arne asked. “What’s wrong with the air?”
“Volcanic fumes, and maybe cyanide. I caught the scent.”
“Cyanide?” Pepe frowned. “What put it there?”
“The impact object, I suppose. There’s cyanogen in cometary gases.”
“Poison air!” Arne turned pale. “And you want us to go back?”
“Not till you are grown, but that’s why you were born. To help nature heal the planet.” He looked down gravely at Arne. “Your father was the terraformer. He knew green plants could do our work. They use the energy of sunlight to generate free oxygen. If none of them are left, you must replant them.”
5
We are a younger generation. Born in the maternity lab, growing up in our narrow pits and tunnels under the station dome, we have listened to our parents and read the letters and notes and diaries they left for us. We have studied the books and disks in Dian’s library and the precious relics in her museum. The Robos have let us see the underground shops and hangars where they will build the spacecraft to take us home when the time for that has come. I think we have recovered some sense of our own identity and our noble mission.
How many years have passed since the great impactor fell? If the Robos and our holo parents know, they have never told us, but the clouds that veiled the Earth have cleared. An ice age has come and gone. The Robos, observing it through the instruments in the dome, have found it once more warm enough for human life.
The station is a lonely little prison, but our childhood has generally been happy enough. We know our parents only as images in the holo tank, but they always seemed alive and seemed to love us. My father’s character had two sides. The impact hurt him as terribly as it hurt the Earth. He never wanted to talk about that dreadful last day on Earth, but he grew more cheerful in mood when he spoke about our mission.
“It’s why we’re here,” he used to say. “Our kind of life on Earth had taken billions of years to evolve. The impact erased it, everything but us. We are all there is. You were born to build it back. The society. The culture. The civilization. The whole biocosm. A terrible responsibility. Maybe too big for you to understand till you know more about it.”
More than once he had us stand in line before the holotank, the Robos who served us in a silent line behind us. He made us raise our right hands and promise solemnly to obey the mother computer, to return to Earth when she commanded us, and to give our lives to our great task.
“It won’t be easy,” he told us, “but life is rare in the universe. For all we know, we may be here alone. Promise me that you’ll never let it die.”
We promised.
Our parents took turns in the tank, teaching us all they could. Our Robos, never in the tank, were with us all the time. My Robo taught me to spell, taught me science and geometry, counted time when I was working out in the centrifuge.
“Never mind the sweat,” he used to tell me. “Build the body you’re going to need. I may last forever, but you’re only human. You must work to stay alive.”
Pepe’s Robo father taught him the multiplication tables and rocket engineering and fighting skills that left him quick with his wits and quick on his feet.
“To make you fit,” he said, “to do what you must do.”
Pepe liked to compete. He was always begging to try his boxing skills on Arne and me. Better than I was, he kept beating me till I’d had enough. Arne was big and quick enough for punches that would send him sailing all the way to the wall in the Moon’s low gravity, but that didn’t matter. Not to Pepe. He always came back for more.
Tanya’s Robo cloned her a cat for a pet and taught her how to care for a baby-sized doll, taught her biology and the genetic science that might help her replant and repeople the Earth. Working in the maternity lab, she learned to clone frogs and dissect them, but she refused to dissect any kind of cat.
Arne’s Robo helped him learn to walk, tried to teach him the astronomy and geology he needed to understand what the asteroid had done to Earth and what we must do for its recovery. His first experimental project was a colony of cloned ants in a glass-walled ant farm.
“You’ll learn from it,” his holo father told him. “All life evolved as a single system, one great symbiotic biocosm. All its parts depend on the others, the way a human body does. Green plants free the oxygen we breathe. We exhale the carbon dioxide they need. The impact wiped nearly everything off the Earth. Our job is to carry back the seed and spores and cells and embryos that will bring it back to life.”
Arne shrugged and grunted.
“I’ve made my own biocosm for my ants.”
My own holo father, when he was my teacher, appeared as a slim man in a brown corduroy jacket, wearing a neat little beard. Counting push-ups when I worked out in the centrifuge, he looked younger and wore a red sweat suit and had no beard. He had a pipe but never smoked it, because his tobacco was gone and they had brought no seed. A good thing, he said, but still he missed the pipe.
Except for the gold plate on her flat chest, Tanya’s Robo looked like all the others, but her holo mother was tall and beautiful, not flat-chested all. She had bright gray-green eyes and thick black hair that fell to her waist when she left it free.
In the classroom holo tank, teaching us biology, she wore a white lab jacket. In the gym tank, teaching us to dance, she was lovely in a long black gown. Down at the pool on the bottom level, she appeared in a red swimsuit she used to wear into my dreams.
There was no real piano, but she sometimes played a virtual grand piano, singing her own songs of life and love on Earth. Tanya grew up as tall as her mother, with the same bright greenish eyes and sleek black hair. She learned to sing in the same rich voice. We all loved her, or all of us but Dian, who never seemed to care if anybody loved her.
Dian’s holo mother, Dr. Diana Lazard, was smaller than Tanya’s, with a chest as flat as the nameplate on her Robo. She wore dark glasses that made her eyes hard to see. Her hair was a red-gold color that might have been beautiful if she’d let it grow longer, but she kept it short and commonly hid it under a tight black tam.
Her Robo cared for Dian deftly enough, but it was her holo mother who taught us French and Russian and Chinese, and tried to share her love of literature and art.
“Knowledge. Art. Culture.” Her everyday voice was dry and flat, but it could ring with passion when she spoke of those treasures and her fear that they would be forever lost. “Guard them like your lives,” she urged us. “They matter more than anything.”
In her classes, we put on VR headsets that let her guide us over the world that had been. In a virtual airplane, we flew over the white-spired Himalayas and dived to skim the river that had cut the Grand Canyon and crossed the ice desert of Antarctica. We saw the pyramids and the Acropolis and the newer Sky Needle. She guided us through the Hermitage and the Louvre and the Prado.
She wanted us to love them, to love all the Earth had been. Dian surely did. Growing up in her mother’s image, she cut her hair just as short, kept it under the same black tam, wore the same dark glasses. Glasses she needed to shield her eyes from the glare of Earth, she said, though she was seldom in the dome to see Earth at all.
If she cared for anybody, it was Arne.
His holo father, Dr. Linder, had been a football quarterback whose athletic scholarships had set him on his way to degrees in physics and geology. Just as combative and just as smart, Arne ran every day on the treadmill in the centrifuge. He learned all that our parents taught and wore the VR gear to tour the lost world and played chess with Dian. Perhaps they made love; I never knew.
We had no children. They had never been in DeFort’s plan. The maternity lab, as Tanya’s mother explained, was only for us clones. The Robos gave us contraceptives when we needed them.
Tanya did. Our biologist, she understood sex and enjoyed it. So did Pepe. From their teens, they were always together, never hiding their affection. Yet Tanya was generous to me. Once, dancing with her in the gym, I was so overcome with her scent and her voice and her lithe body in my arms that I whispered what I felt. With Pepe glaring after us, she led me out of the room and up to the dome.
The Earth was new, a long curve of red fire slashed across the cold and soundless night, lighting the dead moonscape to a ghostly pink. In the dimness of the dome, she stripped to reveal her enchantment, and stripped me while I stood trembling with a dazed elation.
In the Moon’s mild gravity, we needed no bed. She laughed at my ignorance and proceeded to teach me. Expert at it, she seemed to relish the lesson as keenly as I did. We were a long time there, the dance over and only the Robos awake when we went back down. Kissing me a long good night that I never forgot, she whispered that practice might make me be better than Pepe. Sadly, however, she never invited me to practice.
She must have given Pepe consolation enough, because he held me no grudge. Afterward, in fact, he seemed more amiable than ever, perhaps because of our shared devotion. He got on less well with Arne, who played his endless chess with Dian and roamed the old Earth in his VR cap to study DeFort’s plan for restoring the planet. He wanted to be our leader.
The leader, of course, should have been DeFort’s clone, but he had never wanted to be cloned without his wife. The Robo with his name on the white plate stood dead in its corner of the stockroom, gray beneath millennia of moondust.
The year we were twenty-five, our Robo parents gathered us into the tank room. We found our holo parents already there, all in their most formal images and looking very serious.
“The time has come for your first flight to Earth.” My father spoke for them, or perhaps the master computer. “Your training is complete. Remote readings show the ice age ended. The Robos have fueled a two-place moon jumper and loaded it with seed pellets. Two of you will go down, taking off when you are ready.”
“I am.” Glancing at Tanya, Pepe raised his voice. “Today, if we can.”
“You are the pilot.” My father smiled and turned to Arne. “Linder, you will go to begin the reseeding.”
Flushing pink, Arne shook his head.
“Have you forgotten who you are?” My father grew severe. “Our chief terraformer. Sowing new life is the vital first step, to rekindle evolution and let nature do her work. Or ours.”
Arne’s jaw set hard, and he shook his head again.
6
Arne was still shaking his head, scowling at our parents in the holo tank. Dian stepped to his side and slid her arm around him.
“We have to go,” Pepe told him. “Have you forgotten why we’re here?”
“Damn DeFort!” Arne’s lip jutted stubbornly. “His crazy plan doesn’t fit the facts. Maybe he was smart as anybody, but still he got surprised. The asteroid was bigger than he ever imagined. It not only sterilized the planet, but shattered a lot of the crust. That left seismic instabilities that still cause quakes and volcanoes. It’s still recovering, the ice caps receding, but I think we ought to let it wait for another generation.”
“Arne!” Tanya shook her head in pained reproof. “Its albedo says it’s warm enough. Ready for us now.
“If you believe albedos.”
Our holo parents stood frozen in the tank, their eyes fixed on Arne as if the master computer had never been programmed for such a rebellion, but Tanya made a face at him.
“Arny Barny!” Mocking him, her voice turned shrill as it was when she was three. “Under all the bluff, you’ve always been a fraidy cat. Or are you just a yellow-bellied coward?”
“Please, Tanny.” Pepe touched her arm. “We’re all grown up.” He turned very soberly to Arne. “And we can’t forget why Dr. DeFort put us here.”
“DeFort’s dead.”
“Given time, we’ll all be dead.” Pepe shrugged. “But really, if you think what old DeFort meant us to be, we don’t really have to care. No matter when and how we die, we can always be replaced by another generation.”
“I’m not ready to be replaced.” Arne had flushed with emotion, but he shook his head at Tanya with a sort of forced deliberation. “You call me a coward. I’d rather say prudent. I know geology and the science of terraforming. I’ve spent thousand of hours surveying the Earth with telescopes and spectroscopes and radar, studying oceans and floodplains and lowlands.
“And I’ve found nowhere fit for life. The seas are still contaminated with heavy metals from the asteroid, the rivers still leaching more lethal stuff off the continents. We’d find the atmosphere unbreathable, oxygen depleted, carbon dioxide levels that would kill you, sulfur dioxide from constant new eruptions: climates too severe to let life take root anywhere.
“I see no place for any kind of life, at least for now. If we’ve got to make some crazy effort in spite of all the odds, at least let’s wait for another ten or twenty years—”
“Wait for what?” Tanya cut in more sharply. “If an ice age wasn’t long enough to cleanse the planet, what kind of miracle do you expect in just another ten or twenty years?”
“We can gather data.” Arne dropped his voice, appealing to reason. “We can update the plan to fit the Earth as we expect it to be in ten or twenty thousand years. We can train for our own mission, if we must finally undertake it.”
“We’ve trained.” Pepe waited for Tanya to nod. “We’ve studied. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be. We’re going. I say now.”
“Not me.” Arne hugged Dian to him, and she smiled into his face. “Not us.”
“We’ll miss you.” Pepe shrugged and turned to me. “How about it, Dunk?”
I gulped and caught my breath to say okay, but Tanya had already clutched his arm. “I’m the biologist. I understand the problems. I’ve found masks ready for us in the stockroom, if we do need oxygen masks. Just take me down. I know how to sow the seed.”
They took off together, Pepe flying the spaceplane, Tanya filing radio reports as they surveyed the Earth from low orbit. She described the shrunken ice caps, the high sea levels, the shifted shorelines that made familiar features hard to recognize.
“We need soil where seed can grow,” she said. “Hard to pinpoint from space if it does exist at all. Rocks do crumble into silt, but the rains are scouring most of that into the sea for lack of roots to hold it. We’ll try to seed from orbit, but I want to land for a closer look.”
Dian asked them to look for any relics of human civilization.
“We’re a little late for that.” Tanya sounded sardonic. “Ice and time have erased the great pyramids, the big dams, the great wall of China. Everything large enough to look for.”
“No surprise,” Arne muttered. “The impact has remade the Earth, but not for us. It may never be fit for human life.”
“That’s our job.” Pepe’s voice. “To make it fit.”
“A brand-new world!” Tanya’s irony was gone. “Waiting for the spark of life.”
On the mike, Arne had technical questions about spectrometer readings of solar radiation reflected from the surface and refracted though the atmosphere, questions about polar ice, about air and ocean circulation. It was all data, he said, that we ought to record for the next generation.
“We’re here to replant the planet.” Tanya grew impatient. “And now we’re too low over the equator to see all that much. So far there’s nothing useful we can say about atmosphere or ocean circulation patterns. At least we can see that the planet is pretty wet. Heavy clouds hide most of the surface. We’ll need the radar to search for a landing site.”
Arne never said he wished he had gone down with them, but he kept on with his questions till I thought he felt guilty.
