Collected Short Fiction, page 786
“It’s Dunk’s turn.” Tanya grinned at me.
“OK.” His voice smiled at her and Cleo before he turned more seriously to me. “I was a science news reporter. Cal had hired me to do publicity for the station. It cost a lot of money, and we had to sell it to the skeptics. I happened to be at White Sands when the asteroid fell, waiting to do a story on the new maternity lab. My own good luck.”
“And Spaceman?” I asked. “He was your dog?”
“Actually, no.” He almost laughed. “I never had time for a pet, but Cal liked dogs. Spaceman’s clone dad was a stray that happened to run across the field just before we took off. Cal called him. He jumped aboard, and here he is. A really lucky dog.”
“Lucky?” Arne stood scowling out across the blazing moonscape, where nothing had ever lived. “When he’s dead? Like our folks are dead, and all the Earth?” He looked at me and Spaceman, with something like a sneer. “Do you call us lucky to be clones?”
My father had no answer ready.
“We’re alive,” Tanya said. “Don’t you like to be alive?”
“Here?” I saw something like a shiver. “I don’t know.”
“I do.” Pepe caught my father’s plastic hand. “I want to know all about the impact and what we can do about it.”
“I hoped you would.” My father hugged him and spoke to all of us. “The asteroid was a chunk of heavy rock, potato-shaped and 10 miles long, probably a fragment from some larger collision. Cal had worked hard to have the station ready, but nobody could have been ready for anything so big.
“The warning got to White Sands about midnight on Christmas Eve. We might have had more time, but the duty man had come late from a party and gone to sleep at his post. We all might have died, but for a janitor who happened to see a red light flashing and called Cal. By then, we had only six hours.
“On holiday, people were away from home, impossible to reach. Although the supply plane was standing on the pad, we had a million things to do and no time for anything. Cal tried to keep the news off the air for fear of total chaos. A smart precaution, maybe, he couldn’t explain our haste to get off the pad. Fuel had been ordered but not delivered. We had to wait for Dr. Linder and Dr. Wu and more supplies. A hellish time.”
My robot-father’s voice had gone quick and trembly.
“But also a time of magnificent heroism. Cal finally had to tell our people there on the field—tell them they had only hours to live. You can imagine how desperately they must have wanted to be with their families, but most of them stayed at the job, working like demons.
“In spite of us, the news got out. Dozens of reporters and camera crews swarmed to the field. Cal had to confirm the story, but he begged them not to kill whatever chance we had. Kiss your wives goodbye,’ I heard him tell them, kneel in prayer, or just get drunk.’ I don’t know what they reported, but all the TV and radio stations soon went silent.
“We were still on the ground when the asteroid came down in the Bay of Bengal, south of Asia We had too little time to get into the air before the shockwaves got through the Earth to us at White Sands. The P waves first, just a few minutes ahead of the more destructive surface waves.
“Navarro and Linder got in from Iceland. Dr. Wu landed in a chartered jet. The work crews loaded what they could. We made it, but barely. We were hardly a thousand feet off the pad when buildings around the field began to crumble and yellow dust came up to hide everything.
“Earth died behind us.”
(2)
“BUT YOU GOT AWAY!” PEPE WAS ROUND-EYED WITH WONDER. “YOU were heroes!”
“We didn’t feel heroic.” My robot-father’s voice was solemnly slow and low, almost a whisper. “Think of all we’d lost. We felt very lonely.”
His naked plastic body quivered with something like a shudder and his eye lenses slowly swept us all.
“Christmas Day.” He went silent, remembering. “It should have been a happy time. My married sister lived in Las Cruces, a city near the base. She had two kids, just five years old. I’d bought trikes for them. She was making dinner, baked turkey and dressing, yams, cranberry sauce—”
His voice caught and he stopped for a second.
“Foods you’ve never had, but we liked them for Christmas. My father and mother were coming from Ohio. He had just retired. She was in a wheelchair from a car accident, but they were going on around the world. A trip they had planned all their lives. They never knew they were about to die. My sister called, but I couldn’t tell—” He stopped again, and his voice seemed strange. “Couldn’t even say goodbye.”
“What’s a trike?” Arne wanted to know.
My father just stood there, looking up at the iron-stained Earth, till Pepe nudged his plastic aim. “Tell us how you got away.”
“I hadn’t been on the survival team. Cal brought me in place of an anthropologist who was on a dig in Mexico. I guess we should have been glad to get away. But there on the plane, looking back at the terrible cloud already hiding half the Earth, none of us felt good about anything.”
He looked at Dian.
“Your mother opened her laptop and lay crying over it till Dr. Wu gave her something that put her to sleep.”
“She lost her nerve.” Arne made a face at Tanya. “My father was braver.”
“Maybe.” My father made something like a laugh. “Pepe’s father was our pilot, and cool enough. He took us all the way out to orbit before he gave the controls to Cal. He’d brought a liter of Mexican tequila. He drank most of it and sang sad Spanish songs and finally slept till we got to the Moon.”
“It’s dreadful to see.” Dian stood gazing up at the Earth, speaking almost to herself. “The rivers all running red, like blood pouring into the oceans.”
“Red mud,” my robot-father said. “Silt colored red by all the iron that came from the asteroid. Rain washes it off the land because there’s no grass or anything to hold it.”
“Sad.” When she looked at him I saw team in her eyes. “You had a sad time.”
“Tell us,” Tanya said. “Tell us how it really was.”
“Bad enough.” He nodded. “Climbing east from New Mexico, we met the surface wave coming around the Earth from the impact point. The solid planet was rippling like a liquid ocean. Buildings and fields and mountains were rising toward the sky and dissolving into dust.
“The impact blew an enormous cloud of steam and shattered rock and white-hot vapor up through the stratosphere. Night had already fallen on Asia. We passed far north, but we saw the cloud, already fading and flattening, but still glowing dull red inside.
“Clouds had covered all the Earth by the time we came around again. A rusty brown at first, but the color faded as the dust sett led out. Higher clouds condensed till the whole planet was bright and white as Venus. It was beautiful.” His voice fell. “Beautiful and terrible.”
“Everybody?” Whispering, Dian wiped at her tears. “Was everybody killed?”
“Except us.” His plastic head nodded very slowly. “The robots here at the station recorded the last broadcasts. The impact made a burst of radiation that burned communications out for thousands of miles. The surface wave spread silence all around the world.
“A few pilots in high-flying aircraft tried to report what they saw, but I don’t know who was left to hear. Radio and TV stations went off the air, but a few hardy souls kept on sending to the end. A cruise liner in the Indian Ocean had time to call for help. We picked up a reporter’s video of the shattering Taj Mahal, the way he saw it by moonlight.
“An American astronomer guessed the truth. We caught a White House spokesman trying to deny it. Just a sudden solar flare, he said, with no verified reports. His voice was cut off before he finished. Watching from a thousand miles up, we saw the great wave rolling up out of the Atlantic. It washed all the old cities off the coast. The last words we heard came from White Sands. A drunk signal technician wishing us a Merry Christmas.”
“You got here.” Pepe grinned cheerfully. “But what happened to Mr. DeFalco?”
“There’s a robot for him,” Tanya said. “I saw his frozen cells in the vault.”
“A tragedy.” My robot-father’s stiff face had no expression, but his voice was bleak. “Cal got with us to the Moon, but he died before he had the computer programmed to teach his clones, but he was the real hero. Earth had been hit so hard that our mission looked impossible, but he never gave it up.
“He tried to keep us too busy to fret about anything. We unloaded the plane and stored the seed and embryos and frozen life cells in the cryonic vault. We had to get used to lunar gravity, which meant a lot of sweating in the centrifuge to keep our bodies fit. We had to clean the hydroponic gardens and get them growing again.
“Still hoping somebody or something had survived, Cal spent most of the nights up here at the telescopes. Earth was then a huge white pearl, dazzling with sunlight but mottled with volcanic explosions. He never saw the surface.
“The second year, he decided to go back—”
“Back to that?” Arne was startled. “Was he crazy?”
“That’s what we told him. We’d seen no sign of life—nothing at all through those glaring clouds—but he kept imagining isolated survivors somehow hanging on. If anybody was there, he wanted to help.
“Three of us went down. Pepe at the controls. Cal with his search gear. I kept a video narrative. Flying low enough to look, all we saw was death. The impact had burned cities and forests and grasslands. The polar ice had thawed. Lowlands were flooded, coastlines changed. We found the land like you see it now, black and barren, pouring red mud into the oceans. No spark of green anywhere.
“Hoping for anything alive in the oceans. Cal had Pepe bring us down on the shore of a new sea that ran far into the Amazon valley.
I got a whiff of the air when we opened the lock. It had a burnt-sulfur stink and set us all to coughing. In spite of it, Cal was determined to get samples of mud and water to test for microscopic life.
“We had no proper gear but he tried to improvise, with a plastic bag around his head and an oxygen bottle with a tube to his mouth. We watched from the plane. A dismal view. Jagged slopes of dead black lava from a cone north of us. No sun anywhere. A towering storm rising in the west, alive with lightning.
“Cal had 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 smoking volcano behind him and the blood-colored sea 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 lit, but he got back to his feet and waded on down the beach, into a surf that was foaming pink.
“Pepe called again, warning him to come back. He waved a sample bottle. Our best chance.’ His voice was a strangled croak, but I got a few words. If anything survived in the sea. I hope—’
“Hope. Choking on that last word, he tried to get his breath and failed. He lost the radio and his bucket. He stumbled 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 his reach.”
“You left, him there?” Dian’s voice rose sharply. “Left him to die?”
“We left him dead. Pepe wanted to help him, but he’d gone too far. His oxygen gone, the air had killed him.”
“Air?”
“Bad air.” My robot-father’s helpless shrug was almost human. “Mixed in the volcanic gases in the whiff I caught, there was cyanide.”
“Cyanide?” Pepe frowned. “Who put it there?”
“It came from cometary cyanogen from the asteroid.”
“Poisoned air!” Arne turned pale. “And you want us to go back?”
“To help nature clean it.” His lenses swept the five of us. “If no green plants are left to restore the oxygen, you must replant them. Cal died with his work undone. It’s yours to finish.”
(3)
THE MISSION LEFT TO USE, US ALONE, WE DIED AND LET THE ROBOTS sleep while an ice age passed on Earth. The maternity lab delivered us again, and once more our dead parents brought us up.
My robot-father was always with me. He taught me to spell, taught me science and geometry, counted time when I was working out on the treadmill in the centrifuge.
“Keep yourself fit,” he used to tell me. “I can last forever, but you’re only human.”
He made me work till I was panting and dripping sweat.
“You have your clone father’s genes,” he reminded me again. “You’ll never be him, but I want you to promise you’ll never give up our noble mission.”
My hand on my heart, I promised.
Pepe’s robot-father taught him the multiplication tables and rocket engineering and trained him to box. The boxing was to make him quick with his wits and quick on his feet.
“You’ll need all that,” he said, “when you get to Earth.”
Pepe liked to compete. He was always wanting to work out with Arne and me. He beat me till I’d had enough. Arne was big enough to knock him across the centrifuge, but he kept coming back for more.
Tanya’s robot-mother taught her how to care for a baby-sized doll, taught her biology and the genetics she might need for terraforming 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 robot-father helped him learn to walk, taught him the geology terraforming science. His first experimental project was a colony of cloned ants in a glass-walled farm.
“We can’t exist alone,” his clone father told him. “We evolved as part of a biocosm. In the cryonic vault, we have seed and spores and cells and embryos to help you rebuild it.”
In the nursery and the playroom while we were small, later in the classroom and the gym, we learned to love the robots. They loved us as well as robots could. They were immortal. Sometimes I envied them.
I felt SAD FOR OUR PARENTS AND THEIR EARTH, DEAD a hundred thousand or perhaps a million years. The robots couldn’t say how long. They had been awakened only when the computer found Earth once more warm enough for life.
We saw them only in their images, speaking to us from the holo tanks. My own holo father, when he was my teacher, appeared as a tall slim man in a dark suit, wearing a narrow black mustache. Counting pushups when I worked out in the centrifuge, he looked younger and wore a red sweatsuit and no mustache. More relaxed at times when he talked of his wife and their home and their work together, he was in a purple dressing gown. Lecturing from the tank, he sometimes waved an empty pipe.
He tried to teach me the art of history.
“I was doing books and scripts about the project before the impact,” he said. “You’re to carry on the story I began. That will be important to whoever follows us.”
Except for the gold plate on her flat chest, Tanya’s robot-mother looked like all the other robots, but her holo mother was tall and beautiful, not flat-chested at all. She had bright gray-green eyes and thick black hair that fell to her waist when she left it free.
In the classroom 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 grand piano in the tank, singing songs she had written from her memories of life and love on Earth.
Tanya grew up as tall as she was, with the same bright greenish eyes and sleek black hair. She learned to sing the same songs 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 gray name-plate on her robot. 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 tarn. She taught Dian French and Russian and the histories of literature and ail, and showed the rest of us nearly all we ever knew about the old Earth.
“Knowledge. Art. Culture.” Her everyday voice was dry and flat, but it could ring when she spoke of those treasures and her fear they would be forever lost. “They matter more than anything.”
In her classroom, 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 down to the river that had carved out the Grand Canyon and crossed Antarctica to the ice desert at the pole. 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 all of us to love them, and all lost Earth.
Dian did. Growing up in her mother’s image, she cut her hair just as short and kept it under the same black tarn and wore the same dark glasses.
If she cared for anybody, it was Arne.
His clone father, Dr. Linder, had been a muscular giant whose athletic scholarships had paid his way to degrees in physics and geology. Just as big and just as small, Arne ran every day on the treadmill in the centrifuge. He learned everything our parents taught and wore the VR gear to tour the lost world with Dian and played chess with her. Perhaps they made love; I never knew.
We had no children. As much as most of us might have wanted them, they were not in DeFalco’s plan. The maternity lab, as Tanya’s mother explained, was only for clones. Tire robots 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. In spite of Pepe, however, Tanya was generous to me.
