Jack Williamson, page 6
We voted for a leader. Dian raised her hand for Arne, Tanya for Pepe. When that left me to break the tie, I named Tanya. Arne sat scowling till she warmed him with a smile. Voting on the landing site, again we chose the coast of that same inland sea. Pepe picked the day. When it came, we gathered in space gear at the spaceport elevator. Only three of us at first, anxiously eager, impatiently waiting for Arne and Dian.
“She’s gone!” Arne came running down the passage. “I’ve looked everywhere. Her rooms, the museum, the gym, the shops, the common rooms. I can’t find her.”
8
The robots found her in her space suit a thousand feet down the crater’s inner wall. She had struck jagged ledges, bounced and rolled and struck again. Blood had sprayed the faceplate, and she was stiff as iron before they got her back inside. Arne found a note on her laptop.
“Farewell and good fortune, if any of you miss me. I’ve chosen not to go because I see no useful place for me at the Earth outpost, even if you get one set up. I lack the hardihood for pioneering, and even at the best, the colonists will have no time or need for libraries and museums before another crop of clones can grow.”
“Hardly true.” Gravely, Pepe shook his head. “She was caring for the seed of civilization. The mission means nothing without the heritage she was guarding.”
“She loved what she loved,” Tanya murmured. “She gave me a gift to carry with me back to Earth. A book of poems by Emily Dickinson. It meant a lot to her and I’ll never give it up.”
The Robos dug a new grave in the plot of rocks and dust outside the crater where our parents and our older siblings had lain so long, beside them the sad little mounds that covered my beagles. We buried her there, still rigid in her space gear. Arne spoke briefly, his voice hollow and somber in his helmet.
“I do miss her. It’s a terrible time for me, because I think I killed her. I’ve read the diaries of our older selves. We have been in love. I think she loved me again, though she never really told me, or said much to anybody. Perhaps I should have guessed, but I’m myself. Not any elder brother. Maybe I’ll do better if we’re ever born again.”
“I hope we’ll all do better.” Tanya tried to comfort him. “But we can’t help being what we are.”
We watched the robots fill the grave and delayed the launch again while he made a marker to set at the head of it, a metal plate that should stand forever here on the airless Moon, bearing only this legend:
DIAN
CLONE OF DIANA LAZARD
“Clone!” His voice in the helmet was a bitter rumble. “That’s all we are.”
“More than that,” Tanya protested. “We’re as human as anybody. More than human, if you think of our mission.”
“Not by choice,” he grumbled. “I wish old DeFort had left my father to die on Earth.”
Muttering and swallowing whatever else he wanted to say, he knelt at the foot of the grave. The rest of us waited silently, isolated from one another in our clumsy armor, yet thinking of Dian.
I felt that I myself had failed her. Shut up in her own tiny world of the lost past, she had seemed content with the precious artifacts she cared for. I had spent many an hour with her there, but never really got to know her.
Arne got back to his feet and Tanya led us from the cemetery to the loaded plane. Our five individual Robos had to be left on the Moon to care for another generation, but the sixth, the one DeFort had not lived to program, came with us. We called it Calvin.
From orbit, we studied those dark blots again.
“They’ve changed since we were children,” Arne said. “Moved and maybe grown. I can’t image what they are, but I don’t think the planet’s ready for us.”
“Ready or not—” Tanya grinned and leaned to slap his back. “Here we come.”
“I can’t imagine—” He muttered again, scowling at the ulcerated Earth, ominous and huge on the telescope monitor. “I can’t imagine what they are.”
“Bare lavas, maybe, where the rains have left no soil where anything could grow?”
“Do bare lavas move?”
“Maybe burns?” She waited for her turn to study the readouts. “The spectrometers show oxygen levels higher now than before the impact. More oxygen could mean hotter forest fires.”
“The air looks clear.” He scowled and shook his head. “No smoke from any fires.”
“So let’s go down.” She shrugged. “I want to find out.”
She had Pepe drop us into a landing orbit above the equator. The great African rift had widened again in the ages since our elder twins landed there. The sea had risen, covering the mudflat where they died.
“We’ll land there again,” she decided, “on our next pass.”
“Why?” Arne demanded. “Have you forgotten those red monsters?”
She shook her head. “I’d like to see how they’ve evolved.”
“Another danger.” He pointed at the monitor. “Don’t you see that black area just west of the rift?”
“I do. Something else we have to see.”
“So close? Can’t we pick a safer spot till we’ve had time to look around?”
“If it’s a challenge, I want to meet it and cope with it now.”
Arne had been watching the spot for years as it crept out of central Africa, erasing what he thought was dense rain forest. He begged Tanya to let him study it longer from low orbit, but she had Pepe set us down on the bank of a new river, just a few miles from that narrow, cliff-walled sea.
We rolled dice to be first out of the plane. I won with a seven and opened the air lock. The air was good, spiced with scents new to me. I stood a long time there, staring west across the grassy valley floor to the forested slope and sharp volcanic slopes that edged the rift, till Tanya nudged me to make room for her.
Pepe stayed on the plane, but the rest of us climbed down. Tanya picked blades from the grass at our feet and said they were almost the same Kentucky Blue she and Pepe had sowed so long ago. When we looked through binoculars, we saw nothing they had planted. Massive palmlike trees lifted feathery jade-green plumes and enormous trumpet-shaped purple blooms out of a dense tangle of thick crimson vines.
“A jungle of riddles,” Tanya whispered as she studied it. “The trees could be descended from some cactus species. But the undergrowth?” She stared a long time and whispered again, “A jungle of snakes!”
I saw them at last, when she passed the binoculars to me. Writhing like rooted snakes, they wrapped the black stalks of things that looked like gigantic toadstools and kept striking out as if to catch invisible insects.
“A new evolution!” Tanya took the glasses back. “Maybe evolved from the swimming things we saw on that beach a million years ago? The color may be due to a red mutant photosynthetic symbiote. I want a closer look.”
“Don’t forget,” Arne muttered. “Closer looks have killed you.”
We saw nothing else moving till Pepe’s radio voice came from the cockpit, high above us. “Look north! Along the edge of the jungle. Things hopping like kangaroos. Or maybe like oversize grasshoppers.”
We found a creature venturing warily over a ridge, standing tall to look at us, sinking out of sight, hopping on toward us to stand and stare again while it purred like a huge cat. A biped, it had a thick tail that balanced its forequarters and made a third leg when it stood. Others came slowly on behind it, jumping high but pausing as if to graze.
“Our retrojets must have scared them away,” Pepe called again. “But now! Farther up the slope. A couple of monsters that would dwarf the old elephants. And half a dozen smaller, maybe younger.”
“Do you think they’re a danger to us?” Arne called uneasily.
“Who knows? The big ones have stopped to look. And listen, too. They’ve spread ears as wide as they are. I hear the leader roaring at us. They do look able to smash us if they like.”
“Should we take off?”
“Not yet.”
Arne had reached for the binoculars, but Tanya kept them, sweeping the edge and the riverbank and the herd of hopping grazers while we waited.
“A wonderland!” She was elated. “And a puzzle box. We must have slept longer than I thought, for all this evolutionary change.”
Arne climbed back into the plane when the larger creatures came into view and came back down with a heavy rifle he mounted on a tripod. A weapon DeFort had hoped we would never need. He aimed it at them, squinting through the telescopic sight.
“Don’t shoot,” Tanya said, “unless I tell you to.”
“Okay, if you tell me in time.”
He held the rifle on the things till they stopped a few hundred yards from us. Armored with slick purple-black plates that shimmered under the tropic sun, they looked a little like elephants, but more like military tanks. The tallest came ahead, spread its winglike ears again, opened enormous bright-fanged jaws, bellowed like a foghorn.
Arne crouched behind his gun.
“Don’t,” Tanya warned him. “You couldn’t stop them.”
“I could try. No time to take off.”
He kept the gun level. We watched those great jaws yawning wider. A thunderous bellow scattered the hoppers. She caught his shoulder and pulled him away from his weapon. The monster stood there a long time, watching us through huge, black-slitted eyes as if waiting for an answer to its challenge, till finally it turned to lead its family on around us and down to the river. They splashed in and disappeared.
“Nothing I expected.” Tanya stood frowning after them. “No large land animal survived the impact, but perhaps sea creatures did. The whales were prehistoric land dwellers that migrated into the sea. Perhaps something like them has returned to the land. Maybe to breed, if they’re amphibian.”
The alarmed hoppers settled down. Tanya had us stand still in the shadow of the plane as they grazed in toward us, till Pepe shouted again.
“If you want a killer, here it comes!”
The hopper leader stood tall again, with a kind of purring scream. The grazers reared and scattered in panic. Something swift and tiger-striped pounced out of the grass and darted to overtake a baby before it could leap again. Arne’s rifle crashed, and the two tumbled down together.
“I told you,” Tanya scolded him. “Don’t do that.”
“Specimens,” he said. “You’ll want to take a look.”
He stayed with the gun while I went on with Tanya to study his kill. No larger than a dog, the infant hopper was hairless, covered with fine gray scales, its body torn open and entrails exposed. Tanya spread them on the grass for my video camera.
“It’s well shaped for its apparent ecological niche.” She shook her head in frustration. “But that’s about all I can say. We must have had fifty or a hundred million years of change.”
The killer was a compact mass of powerful muscle, clad in sleek striped fur. She opened its bloody jaws to show the fangs to my cameras, had me move the body to show the teats and claws.
“A mammal.” She spoke for the microphone. “Descended perhaps from rats or mice that somehow got through alive.”
Still aglow with elation when we got back to plane, she forgave Arne for the killing.
“A wonderland waiting for us!” she told him. “An open home for the new humanity, but as new and strange as Mars used to look.”
“And likely just as hostile,” he muttered. “A brand new biology where I’m afraid we’ll never belong.”
“We’ll see.” She shrugged and looked around again at the sea where the great amphibians lived, and at the jungle that had bred the killer. “We’re here to see.”
She set the Robo to scraping soil from the top of a rocky knob to level a site for our lab and living quarters. We unloaded supplies and set up a geodesic dome while the robot began cutting stone for a defensive wall. She took me on short expeditions along the shore and up the ridge to record her reports on the flora and fauna we found. Only a few weeks had passed before she was asking Pepe about fuel for the plane.
“We’re equipped to produce it here,” he told her, “from nearly any organic stuff.”
“The reserve still aboard?”
“It might get back to the Moon, with half a drop left in the tanks.”
“With only two aboard?”
“Probably safe enough.” He frowned at her. “But I like it here.”
“So do I.” She grinned at his puzzlement. “I think we’ve come home to stay. I want you to go back for what we need to replant our own biocosm. Seed, frozen ova and embryos, equipment for the lab.”
“You call this home?” Arne scowled at her. “With that black spot just over the ridge.”
She shrugged. “It’s a risk. We’ll always face risks. We must cope if we can. And leave our records for the next generation if we can’t.” She turned to me. “You’ll go back with Pepe. Holograph the data you have and what we can send you. Stay there to hold the fort for another generation.”
“And leave us?” Arne wasn’t ready for this. “Just the two of us?”
“Pepe will be back,” she told him. “You have work enough here. Testing soils for our first crops. Prospecting the area for oil and ores we’ll need.”
Pepe and I went back to the Moon. My beagle, Earthman, who had been left in the Robos’ care, was happy to have me back. The Robos loaded and refueled the plane. Pepe took off again and left me alone with Earthman.
I wasn’t used to solitude. The Robos were poor companions and the holos had nothing new to say, but Earthman was a comfort and the news from Earth kept me absorbed for a time.
Tanya reported that Pepe had inflated another geodome to house a hydroponic garden. Arne had surveyed land for a farm. When the rainy season ended, Robo built a diversion dam to draw irrigation water from the river.
“Arne enjoys shooting a yearling jumper when we need meat,” Tanya said. “A tasty change from the irradiated stuff we brought from the Moon. The hippo-whales come and go between the river and the grass. They stopped twice to stare and bellow, but they ignore us now. I think our tiny human island really is secure, though Arne still frets about the black spot. He’s gone now to climb the western cliffs for a look beyond the rim.”
Her next transmission came only hours later.
“Arne’s back.” Her voice was tight and quick. “Exhausted and in panic. Something chased him. A storm, he calls it, but nothing we can understand. A cloud so dark it hides the sun. A roar that isn’t wind. Something falling that isn’t rain. He says our days on Earth are done.”
9
The monitor went blank. All I heard was static. Outside the dome, Earth hung full in the lunar night. I saw Africa slide out of sight, watched the black-patched Americas crawl through an endless day, watched till Africa returned, and finally heard Tanya’s voice.
“We’re desperate.”
Her face was drawn haggard and streaked with something black. In the window beyond her head, I saw a dead black slope reaching up to the dark lava flows that edged the rift valley.
“The bugs have overwhelmed us.” Her voice was hoarse and hurried. “Bugs! They’re what made the blighted areas that always worried Arne. You must preserve the few facts we’ve learned, information that will surely be important when our clone siblings are born to try again.
“These marauding insects have evolved, I imagine, from mutations that enabled some locust or cicada to survive the impact. Evidently they enter migratory phases like some of our ancient locusts. A strange life cycle, as I understand it. I believe they’re periodic, like the seventeen-year cicada, though I think with a far longer period.
“I think they must spend decades or even centuries underground, feeding on plant roots or juices. Emergence is triggered, perhaps, when they begin to kill too many of their hosts. Emerging, they’re voracious, consuming everything organic they can reach and then migrating to fresh territory to leave their eggs and begin another cycle.
“Their onslaught on us was sudden and dreadful. They darkened the sky, swarming over us. Their roar became deafening. Falling like hail, they ate anything that had ever been alive. Trees, brush, grass, live wood and dead wood, live animals and corpses. They coupled in their excrement, buried their eggs in it, died. Their bodies made a carpet of dark rot. The odor was unendurable.
“We’re safe in the plane, at least for now, but total desolation surrounds us. The bugs ate the plastic geodomes and all our supplies inside. They ate the forest and the grass. They killed and ate the hoppers, bones and all.
“They shed and ate their wings. They died and ate the dead. They’re all gone now. Nothing alive but their eggs in the dust, waiting for wind and water to bring new seed from anywhere to let the land revive, while they hatch and multiply and wait to kill again.
“Dark dust rises when the wind blows now, bitter with the stink of death. The hippos came out of the river, wandered forlornly in search of anything to graze, and dived back in. Nothing alive is left in sight so far as we can see. Nothing but ourselves, in a silence as terrible as their bellowing.
“How long we can last, I don’t know. Arne wanted to give up and get back to the Moon, but there’s no fuel for it. We have no supplies for any long trek across this devastation, but Pepe has ripped metal off the plane and welded it into a makeshift boat. If the bugs didn’t get across the sea, perhaps we can make a new start beyond it.
“The plane must be abandoned, with our radio gear. This will be our last transmission. Keep your eye on the Earth and record what you can.
“And Dunk—” With a catch in her voice, she stopped to wipe at a tear. “I can’t wish you were with us, but I want you to know I miss you. Next time, whenever that comes, I hope to know you better. As Pepe likes to say, Hasta la vista!”
Till we meet again. The phrase was bitter irony, because she knew that would never happen. They may have a chance, if the bugs fail to follow them across that sea. They are resourceful. They will give it their best. I can beg the computer to have the Robos build another ship and take it down with fresh supplies, but it is unlikely to take orders from me.
