Collected Short Fiction, page 792
“God have mercy!” He shook his head, muttering almost to himself. “I can’t blame her. Whatever happened, I was a beast. An utter beast!”
Waiting again, I wondered if she had been the winner of our little game.
“Am I crazy?” He straightened to look at me. “Do I act crazy?”
“Disturbed,” I said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“If you can help.” Anxiously, he glanced toward the entrance. “I canceled a church meeting and spent most of yesterday with her. She wanted to know the history of the town and the county and the first people here. I drove her out to the dig and the early man museum. They were closed, but she came with me to the church. She asked what it was. I tried to tell her the Bible story. She knelt to pray with me, but then she asked if I thought the earth is flat.”
Trembling, he got the coffee to his lips, gulped it down, and signaled the waitress for another cup.
“I forgot myself.” He shivered. “I forgot my God. When we went past the Rio Rancho, she showed me a hundred-dollar bill and wanted to eat. I didn’t get what she said to the waiter, but he brought margaritas.”
He shivered again, watching the waitress with his coffee.
“I can’t blame her,” he went on when she was gone. “The devil got in me. I drank the margarita—my first alcohol since I came to the faith. She ordered another and wanted to dance. I don’t know how, but she tried to teach me. I never—”
He stopped to gulp the hot coffee, while I wondered if she had indeed been collecting her DNA.
“Whatever happened, it was the drinks and the devil in me.” He sat a long time staring at me, terror in his eyes. “It was midnight when we got back here. She was as drunk as I was, crooning something like a song in some other language. She put her arms around me and asked me into her room. God forgive me, I swear I never meant to take advantage!”
Shaking, he set down the empty cup.
“If He can—if He can forgive . . . Jesus resisted temptation, but I’m not Jesus. I forgot myself. Forgot my God. Gave in to my own Satanic lust. I damned my soul. And God has chastened me.”
He sat gritting his teeth while the waitress walked by.
“Have I dug my grave? Am I damned forever?” I reached to clap his shoulder and felt him shudder. “Afterward . . . afterward, we slept. When I woke—”
His fists clenched till I heard his knuckles crack.
“She was lying with me, naked in the bed. I reached to touch her and felt some things crawling off her body. Things that felt like ants. They crawled up my arm. That’s what I thought. Or was I still drunk?”
He stopped to gaze at me, his reddened eyes mutely appealing for an answer.
“I got out of bed and tried to wake her. She didn’t move. And those crawling things . . .” He sat shaking for a short time, lost in his own torment. “Swarming like ants, but bigger than ants and red as blood. What were they?”
He was in no mood to entertain any answer I knew how to give him.
“I thought they were eating her.” He was whispering hoarsely. “But now I don’t know. Her flesh seemed to be dissolving. Melting into them. It—it—”
He had bitten his lip; I saw a bit of blood in the corner of his mouth. He shuddered and went on. “Those red bugs! Swimming out of her blood, crawling up my arm. They clung when I tried to brush them away. Fell off when I held them toward the light. Or was I drunk and delirious?”
He dabbed his napkin at his lips.
“I just stood there and watched them consume her. Her organs. Her bare red bones. They drank her blood. Everything, till she was gone. Even her beautiful hair. The sheet was left clean.
“Or am I really crazy?” Miserably, he waited for a word of comfort I failed to find. “I turned on the lights to see if the bugs were real. They swarmed away from the light, into the closet. And left me alone in the room.”
Gray-faced and shaking, he peered toward the entrance, got half to his feet, then sagged back into his chair when he saw nobody.
“Was it a nightmare?” He whispered the question to me, hopelessly shaking his head. “I don’t know, but Miss Million was gone.” He groped for his empty cup and let it clatter on the table when he set it down again. “I was sick in the bathroom. I looked for her when I came out. She wasn’t there. I dressed and got away.
“Got home, I don’t know how. I was sick again. I prayed on my knees, prayed God to take mercy on my miserable soul. I was afraid to call the police. Afraid they would come knocking at my door.”
“But they didn’t,” I told him. “Here you are.”
“Here in my own black hell.” His haunted eyes searched my face. “Stricken mad. Or maybe drunk. I walked the floor. Dozed in my chair. Dreamed about those red bugs. When day came, I woke sober enough to call the hotel. They rang her room.”
Shuddering, he tried to smile.
“She answered. Alive. Laughed when I tried to say I was sorry.”
“If she’s okay, what’s the problem?”
“Look at this.”
He pushed something across the table. Her silver bracelet, with the tiny bangles.
“Lift it,” he begged me. “Tell me if it’s real. Or is it one more trick of Satan’s?”
The bangles jingled when I picked it up.
“Real enough,” I told him. “Heavy as solid silver.”
“If it’s real . . .” He stared at it as if it terrified him. “She wore it to bed. I remember the tinkle when she hugged me. I found it lying on the sheet after all the bugs were gone. Docs it prove . . .?” He shuddered. “I’m afraid to think—”
He gasped and looked across the room. I saw Miss Million gliding toward us. She was wrapped in something like a white silk sari, and her face was the same perfect oval, but she was somehow changed. Smaller, I thought, looking younger than I recalled her, almost a child. Tim rose to greet her and then staggered back, both hands lifted to his head.
“My God!” He moaned the words. “My dear God!”
Turning, I saw that she had indeed received her specimen DNA. Her identical twin had come in behind her, smiling an eager identical smile. Their childish voices chimed together: “Good morning, father!”
Engines of Creation
Readers picked “Terraforming Terra” as our best novelette of 1998. Now Jack Williamson returns to try to save planet Earth one more time.
1.
KIDS CAN BE CRUEL.
“Hey, Slit-Eyes!” Arne used to yell at Casey. “You’re nasty black all over. Go take a bath.”
We were creators, my father used to say, cloned to re-create the Earth. The fifth generation, growing up at Tycho Station on the Moon, we were training for our great mission: to terraform the planet, which had been swept clean of life by the killer impact.
Casey had a Chinese face, black as the sky. Arne liked to tease him for that, though the rest of us were just as different. Pepe was too brown to tan. Tanya had eyes as dark as his, and straight black hair. Arne and Dian were as pale as their holo parents. Casey took the kidding patiently till he heard about his natural father.
We were in the holo room. Speaking from the tank, my own holo father told us the story. The man who called himself K.C. Kell had been a security guard at the White Sands Moon Base in old New Mexico. The falling impactor caught him on duty at the launch site, defending the escape plane from the terrified mob fighting for space aboard. He abandoned that duty in the last frantic minutes and forced his own way aboard with his woman friend, who said her name was Mona Lisa Diamond.
“Casey had a gun.” My father said. “His own ticket to the Moon. Cal DeFort had no time or way to get to get them off the plane. Or off the Moon. He made room for them at the station and finally decided that they had displayed useful genes for survival. He stored their cells in the cryonic vault.” He nodded affectionately at Casey. “That’s why you’re here.”
We knew our natural parents from their robots and their images, but we had never seen Kell or Mona until my father booted their holos into the tank. Kell stood grinning at us, short and muscular like Casey, with the same black Chinese face. He was naked to the waist, the way my father said he came aboard. The tattooed flags of Mexico and China were crossed on his smooth black chest, the name El Chino red-lettered above them.
Mona stood close beside him, his arm around her. Wearing a yellow jumpsuit, she was half a head taller than he, her skin as white as Dian’s. Pale gold hair fell around her shoulders. She looked older than Kell, with tired lines around eyes as blue as the seas we could see on Earth. To me she was beautiful. Casey loved her from that first moment He asked why she hadn’t been cloned along with him.
“Ask the computer.” My father shrugged. “It makes the choices. But maybe—”
“Maybe what?” Casey asked when my father frowned and stopped.
“The original team members had all been scientists or experts, selected for their fitness for the mission.” He frowned at Mona and Kell. “They didn’t fit the pattern.”
“Why not?”
My father frowned again, hesitating. “Kell didn’t like to talk about himself, but he did admit that he had been a hit man for an international narcotics syndicate.”
“Hit man? What’s that?”
“A professional killer.” The old Earth was strange to us, and my father had to explain. “Lawmakers had forbidden traffic in certain narcotics, drugs that many people wanted to use. Trade in them became an illegal but profitable business that underworld syndicates fought to control. Kell admitted that he had been a gunman and a spy for one of the syndicates.
“As for Mona—”
He nodded at her. Standing together in the tank, she and Kell looked as live as we were. Unlike our parents, however, they had come aboard with no interface software installed in the computer. Their images lacked animation programs to make them interact with us, or even look entirely alive.
“She came from poor hill people on the east side of North America. The name on her passport was Fayreen Sutt. She had been a dancer, and her manager invented the Mona Lisa name to fit the da Vinci painting she had tattooed on her belly. She and Kell were in trouble with the law. They seem to have come to our New Mexico base with dreams of getting away to the Moon, even before the impactor gave them the opportunity.”
“He killed people?” Dian whispered, backing away from Kell’s dark and silent image in the tank, which was blind to her. “For money?”
“The old Earth was never peaceful.” My father sighed. “People used to fight for power or territory or just because they worshiped different gods.”
“Our new world will be better.” Casey grinned at my father. “We’ll make it better.”
“You?” Arne scoffed at him. “You sneaky clone of a black hit man. He’s what made the old world bad.
“Maybe he was a hit man.” Casey shrugged, trying to be reasonable. “But the men he hit were worse. Men selling bad drugs to innocent people.”
“Hah!” Arne snorted. “A hit man’s a bad man.”
“Maybe he had to be bad.” Casey shrugged again. “Because his world was bad. We can make a world where I’ll never have to kill anybody.”
“So you want to be a coward?” Arne laughed. “Black outside, yellow inside?”
Tanya and Dian were staring at them. Tanya whispered something. Dian tittered. Arne grinned at them and shook his fist at Casey. “If you’re afraid to be a hit man, I dare you to hit me.”
Casey stood a minute looking hard at Kell and Mona and my father in the tank. I saw his lips quiver as if he wanted to cry, but then his black face set hard.
“Thank you, sir,” he spoke very politely to my father. “I’m glad to know my father was El Chino, and proud to be his clone. If he had to be a hit man in that bad old world, I have to do what I have to do right here.”
He balled a dark fist and sent Arne toppling across the room, blood streaming from his nose.
NEVER REALLY FRIENDS, ARNE AND CASEY LEARNED TO get along, at least most of the time. We listened to our parents in the tank and read the records they had left for us, learning what we were and why we were here, learning science, learning to use the instruments in the dome. Arne studied terraforming and the geology of Earth with his holo father, who had written books about them.
Casey studied with us, but he wanted more. He ran the holos of Mona and his clone father, ran them again and again, listening to every word they had recorded. Only ghosts in the tank, they never answered questions, or even seemed to know he was listening, but he made up his own romantic stories about them. He made them heroic.
“I think the bolide came because the old world was so bad,” he told me. “People were starving when there was food, people were sick when there was medicine, people were fighting with no good cause. If El Chino and Mona were outlaws, that’s because the laws were bad. If they took money from the rich, they gave it to the poor. They were in love, and hunted by evil men trying to kill them. They fought and risked their lives to get on the escape plane. Your father saw how great they were and saved their genes because the mission needed them. Maybe El Chino was a hit man, but I’m glad to have his genes.”
Casey always longed for a way out of our narrow tunnels. He used to climb into the dome and stand gazing down at the hangars and the spaceplanes on the mooncrete flight strip down below the crater rim.
He pored over training manuals. When he had grown large enough, he trained in the flight simulator. He used to get into space gear and cycle out through the air lock.
“I like to climb into a cockpit and study everything,” he told me. “When it’s time for us to go back to Earth, I want to be the pilot.”
That, I thought, was how he meant to prove that he was born with El Chino’s survival genes.
The whole staff, all five clones of the fourth generation, had gone down to Earth a thousand years ago, leaving only robots to run the station. My clone brother’s last report had ended with the words, “lest disaster strike again.”
Something had struck. Earth hung huge and still in our dead-black sky, looking nearly close enough to touch when we saw it from the dome. Waxing and waning as we swung around it in our slow lunar orbit, it spun faster through its own days and nights. The face of it was frightening. Even with naked eyes, we saw that green life was gone from the continents. The seas were blue as ever, but the land was white as the blazing spirals of cloud.
“From ice and snow?” Pepe asked my robot father when he took us up to the telescopes to see the mystery for ourselves. “Another ice age?”
“Something stranger.”
“Like what?” Arne asked.
My robot father himself seemed strange enough to me. He was only a man-sized figure of stiff, gray plastic till the computer activated the interaction software installed before the impact, but that could make me forget that he was not as live as I was.
Now he stopped and stood frozen till the computer jerked him back to life.
“No data,” he muttered. “No revealing data.”
WE GATHERED THE DATA WE COULD. TANYA AND PEPE SEARCHED the computer records of the last thousand years, since our siblings of the fourth generation found a human civilization restored at the mouth of the Nile.
“Something hit it,” Pepe told us. “Hit it hard.”
They had called us into the dome, high on the north rim of Tycho, for their briefing. The full Earth shone huge and deathly white in the dark night sky, the dead craterscape below us a ghostly gray in its light. We were only in our middle teens by then, but he and Tanya were already very serious about the mission, with no time to waste.
Pepe was still boyish and slight, still shorter than Tanya, but intense and grave about the problem. Tanya was already a woman, fair-skinned and full-breasted, far more lovely than Dian. I was hopelessly in love with her, heartbroken because Pepe was the one she preferred.
We stood around the big telescope and the monitors with their images of Earth. Pepe reviewed the history of the last expedition. The whole team had gone down to Earth. They never returned. Although much of the planet had been infested with a deadly breed of mutant insects, their radio reports told of a thriving human colony at the mouth of the Nile, grown up around a towering Moon temple and colossal silver statues of the five of us.
“Things seem to have gone well for the next four’ hundred years.” Standing beside him at the monitor, Tanya showed us the Earth images the robot had taken. “The killer insects were finally beaten.”
Image by image, the black patches they infested shrank and finally disappeared. Green life spread over all the continents, and the colonists had followed. She magnified spots of East Asia and South America where Pepe pointed out what he said were roads and cities.
“It looked like our work was done,” she said, “till something went wrong. Terribly wrong. In just one year, all that green life was gone. The whole Earth turned to tire white you see now.”
“It’s dead?” Arne glanced up at the bone-white Earth and shrank back from it. “What killed it?”
“We have a clue.” She pulled up another image and let tire tiny red arrow of her laser pointer dance around it. “Look at that. Tell me what it is.”
The laser found a tiny bright dot on the white Earth. The image changed. She found the dot again, black now, on the white waste of tropical India. She twisted a knob to swell it from a dot to a tiny black globe.
“An asteroid?” Arne asked. “So close?”
Too close,” Tanya said. “But maybe no asteroid.”
Pepe had her run three more frames that caught the object in transit across the full Earth.
“That’s enough to bother us.” He frowned at the monitor. “Tire rapid apparent motion puts it in low orbit, down near Earth. We can estimate the diameter, something under one kilometer.”
“So?” Arne muttered. “If it’s no asteroid?”
“I don’t like the shape,” Tanya said. “A perfect sphere. Airy natural mass that small has too little gravity to shape it like that.”
