Collected Short Fiction, page 788
Listening to the radio, watching holo stations, she learned of the communications blackout spreading over Asia. The baby sensed her tenor and began to cry. She nursed it and crooned to it and prayed for Arne to call or come home. When the holo phone rang, it was a friend in flight operations at White Sands, who thought she would be relieved to know her husband was safe. She had just seen him rushing aboard the escape plane.
She must have felt relief, my father thought, but also dreadful despair. She knew she and the baby were about to die. Trying not to feel that he had betrayed her, she prayed for him. With the wailing baby in her anus, she sang to it and prayed for its soul till the surface shock brought the building down upon them.
Hearing the emotion in my father’s voice, I shared something of his sorrow, a grief that always left me whenever we climbed into the dome to see the reborn Earth and talked of how to restore it. Our instruments revealed nothing of those anomalous creatures Wu and Navarro had seen crawling out into the Sun. The depleted oxygen had been replenished. Spinning its swift days and nights high in our black sky, Earth waxed and waned through our long months, inviting us home with green life splashed over the land.
Identical genes never made us entirely identical. We all had to struggle for some compromise between ourselves, our genes, and the demands of our mission. I was never my clone brother, whose dried and frozen body had lain in the Moon dust below the crater wall almost forever.
Reading his letters to me about his frustrated devotion to Tanya, I felt it hard to understand. Grown up again, she loved the mission the way her mother had. Avoiding any risk of discord, she favored all three of us equally, Pepe, Arne, and I. If Dian felt hurt, she gave no sign.
“Arrogance!” Arne’s clone brother had written in his diary. “Anthropocentric arrogance. “We’ve found a new biocosm already blooming. We have no right to harm it. A crime worse than genocide.”
The new ARNE SHRUGGED WHEN I ASKED what he thought of that passage.
“Another man waiting, too long ago. I get his point about the mission, but I’ll do what I must. Frankly, I don’t get what he said about Dian, if they really were in love. All she cares about now is her dusty books and her frozen art anti chess with her computer.”
DeFalco’s clone should have been our leader, but he had died without a clone. When the time had come for our return, Arne gathered us in the library reading room to plan it.
“First of all,” he asked, “why should we go back?”
“Of course we must.” Tanya spoke sharply, irked at him. “That’s the reason we exist.”
“An overblown dream.” His nose tilted up. “Old DeFalco’s impact was not the first. It won’t be the last. Maybe not the worst. But a new evolution has always replaced the old with something probably better. Nature working as it should. Why should we meddle?”
“Because we’re human,” Tanya said.
“Is that so great?” Be sniffed at her. “When you look at the old Earth, at all the wanton savagely and genocide, our record’s not so bright. Navarro and Wu found a new evolution already in progress. It could flower into something better than we are.”
“Those red monsters on the beach?” She shuddered. “I’ll go with our own kind.”
Arne looked around the table and saw us all against him.
“If we’re going back,” he said, “I’m the leader. I understand terraforming.”
“Maybe.” Tanya frowned. “But that’s not enough. We’ll have to get down into low orbit and make a new survey to select the landing site. Pepe is the space pilot.” She smiled at him. “If we make a safe landing, we’ll have things to build. Pepe is the engineer.”
We voted. Dian raised her hand for Arne, Tanya for Pepe. When that left me to break the tie, I nominated Tanya. Arne sat scowling till he surrendered to her 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 and the shops, the common rooms. I can’t find her.”
(6)
THE ROBOTS FOUND HER IN HER SPACESUIT A THOUSAND FEET down the craters 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 in her computer.
“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. Even at the best, the colonists will have no time or need for me before another crop of clones can grow.”
“Hardly time.” Gravely, Pepe shook his head. “The mission will take us all.”
The robots 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 row of smaller 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 ourselves in love. I think she loved me again, though she never told me, or said much to anybody. Perhaps I should have guessed, but I’m not my brother.”
“We’ll have another chance.” Tanya tried to comfort him. “But we can’t help 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 LAZARD
NUMBER THREE
“Three.” His voice in the helmet was a bitter rumble. “Numbers. That’s all we are.”
“More than that,” Tanya protested. “We’re human. More than human, if you remember why we’re here.”
“Not by choice,” he grumbled. “I wish old DeFalco had left my father back 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. Shut up in her own tiny world, Dian had seemed content with the precious artifacts she cared for. I felt sad that I had never really got to know her.
Arne rose from his knees and Tanya led us from the cemetery to the loaded plane. Our five individual robots had to be left on the station, but the sixth, the one DeFalco had not lived to program, came with us. We called it Calvin.
From orbit, we studied those dark blots again and found them changed.
“They’ve moved since we were children,” Arne said. “Moved and grown. I don’t like them. I don’t think the planet’s ready for us.”
“Ready or not,” Tanya grinned and leaned cheerfully to slap his back, “here we go.”
“I can’t imagine—” Muttering, he scowled at the ulcered Earth. “What could they be?”
“Bare lavas, maybe, where the rains have left no soil where anything could grow?”
“Do bare lavas move?”
“Maybe bums?” She waited for her turn to study the data. “The spectrometers show oxygen levels high. More oxygen could mean hotter forest fires.”
“No smoke.” He shook his head. “Fires don’t bum for years.”
“Let’s go on down.”
She had Pepe drop us into a landing orbit above the equator. Low over Africa, we found the Great Rift grown still wider. That inland sea had risen, flooding the ancient shore, yet she decided to land near it.
“Why?” Arne demanded. “Have you forgotten those monsters on the beach?”
“I want to see if they’ve evolved.”
“I don’t like that.” He nodded at the monitor. “That black area just west of the rift. I’ve watched it creeping across central Africa, erasing what I think was dense rain forest. Something ugly!”
“If it’s a challenge, I want to cope with it now.”
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 off the plane. Winning with a six, I opened the air lock and stood a long time there, staring west across the grassy valley floor to a wall of dark forest 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 found them the same Kentucky Blue she and Pepe had sowed so long ago. When we looked through binoculars, however, the forest was nothing they had planted. Massive palm-like trees lifted feathery green plumes and enormous trumpet-shaped purple blooms out of a dense tangle of thick crimson vines.
“A jungle of riddles,” Tanya whispered. “The trees could be descended from some cactus species. But the undergrowth?” She stared a long time and whispered again, “A jungle of snakes! Slick red snakes!”
I saw them at last, when she passed the binoculars to me. Heavy red coils, rooted in the ground, they wrapped the black stalks of things that looked like gigantic toadstools. Writhing like actual snakes, they kept striking as if at invisible insects.
“A new evolution!” Tanya took the glasses back. “Maybe from the swimmers we saw on that beach? Maybe red from mutant photosynthetic symbiotes? 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 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 stale again, rumbling with something like the purr of a gigantic 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 everything away,” Pepe called again. “But now! Farther up the slope. A couple of monsters that would dwarf the old elephants. Half a dozen smaller, maybe younger.”
“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. They do look able to smash us if they like.”
“Shouldn’t we take off?”
“Not yet.”
Arne had reached for the binoculars, but Tanya kept them, sweeping the forest edge and the riverbank and the herd of hopping grazers.
“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 and came down with a heavy rifle he mounted on a tripod. He squinted through the telescopic sight, waiting for the monsters.
“Don’t shoot,” Tanya said, “unless I tell you to.”
“OK, if you tell me in time.”
He held the rifle on them 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, more like military tanks. The tallest came ahead, spread its wing-like 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’ve got to 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 could have survived. Perhaps a few sea creatures did. The whales were prehistoric land dwellers that migrated into the sea. Maybe they’ve returned as amphibians.”
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 shrugged. “You ought to take a look.”
He stayed on guard with the gun while I went on with her to study his kills. No larger than a dog, the infant hopper was hairless, covered with fine gray scales, its belly tom open and entrails exposed. Tanya spread the mangled body on the grass for my camera.
“It’s well shaped for its apparent ecological niche, but that’s about all I can say.” She shook her head in frustration. “We must have had a hundred million years of change.”
The killer was a compact mass of powerful muscle, clad in sleek black fur. She opened its bloody jaws to show the fangs to my camera, 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 the elation of discovery, she forgave Arne for his kill. “A new world for a new race!” she exulted.
“Maybe,” Arne muttered. “But ours? More likely a brand new biology, where we’ll never belong.”
“We’ll see.” She shrugged and looked around again at the sea where the great amphibians lived and the jungle that had bred the killer. “We’re here to see.”
She set tire robot 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 the first geodesic dome. Tire robot began cutting stone for a defensive wall. She took me on short expeditions along the shore and up the ridge to record the flora and fauna we found. She was soon asking Pepe about fuel for the plane.
“The reserve still aboard might get us back to the Moon, with half a drop left in the tanks.”
“With only one aboard?”
“Safe enough.”
“Then I want you to go back for what we need to replant our own biocosm. Seed, frozen eggs and embryos, equipment for the lab.”
“To replant ourselves?” Arne scowled at her. “With that black biocosm just over tire ridge?”
She shrugged. “We face risks. We must cope when we can. Leave our records when we can’t.” She turned to me. “You’ll go back with Pepe. Holograph the data we can send you. Hold the fort.”
“And leave us marooned?” Arne went pale. “Just the two of us?”
“Pepe will be back,” she told him. “You have enough to do here. Testing soils. Prospecting for oil and ores we’ll need.”
Pepe and I went back to the Moon. My beagle was happy to have me home. The robots loaded and refueled the plane. Pepe took off and left me alone and very lonely. The robots were poor companions and the holos had nothing new to say, but Spaceman was a comfort until I got news from Earth.
Pepe had inflated another geodome for a hydroponic garden. Arne surveyed land for a farm. When the rainy season ended, the robotic Calvin built a diversion dam to draw irrigation water from the river.
“Arne enjoys shooting a yearling jumper when we need meat,” Tanya reported. “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.”
(7)
THE MONITOR WENT BLANK, ALL I HEARD WAS STATIC. OUTSIDE THE dome Earth hung full in the lunar night. I watched Africa slide out of sight, watched the black-patched Americas crawl through an endless day, watched Africa return, 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 those blighted areas that always worried Arne. You must preserve the few facts we’ve learned.
“These marauding insects have evolved, I imagine, from mutations that enabled some locust or cicada to survive the impact. Evidently they now enter migratory phases like the old locusts. A strange life cycle, as I understand it. I believe they’re periodic, like the 17-year cicada.
“They must spend decades or even centuries underground, feeding on plant roots or juices. Emergence may be triggered when they’ve killed too many of their hosts. Emerging, they’re voracious, consuming everything organic they reach and then migrating to fresh territory to leave their eggs and begin another cycle.
“Their onslaught on us was dreadful. They blackened the sky. 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 dead. 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 our plastic geodomes. 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.
