Collected Short Fiction, page 793
“Unless it’s water ice,” Pepe said. “Or formed from some other natural melt.”
“Something artificial?” Arne glowered at tire little black disk, now over the white spiral of a great typhoon on the blue Pacific. “An alien spacecraft? Space invaders that have devastated Earth?”
“We considered that.” Tanya shook her head. “But we know we’ve been alone in tire solar system. The stars are so far apart that space war is just too unlikely.”
“What else?”
“Riddles,” Pepe said. “Looking for answers, we’ve studied tire spectrum of Earth. Atmospheric oxygen content has fallen, carbon dioxide risen. Ice caps have shrunk. Global temperatures are higher. Climates have changed, deserts grown. Although air and ocean circulation patterns showed little change, we see great clouds of white dust that hide whole mountain ranges.
“Riddles.” He scowled and shook his head. “No solutions. We see nothing that should have killed the planet, but every sign says it’s dead.”
THE DAY WE TURNED 21, WE GATHERED AGAIN UNDER THE STATION dome. Ink-black shadow pooled the crater pit. The full Earth stood where it always did, high in the black north sky, blazing down on the cragged wall that curved east and west of our high perch. Africa was a wide, white patch on the sea-blue planet. Lake Victoria looked larger than the old maps showed it, a great blue jewel shining at its heart.
Searching again for any hint of humankind, we traced the Nile. Our maps showed the green streak of life it had drawn through the deserts to its delta and the sea. Now it was only a thin dark line. We found no dam, no city, no green of cultivated farms.
Tire Mediterranean was landlocked now, shrunk to a great salt lake since some geologic spasm had raised Gibraltar. A new bend had diverted the Nile into the Red Sea. The telescope showed a waste of long white dunes on the deserts west of the river, and a plume of white dust that reached far toward Asia. We scanned the site where our siblings had found a new city where Alexandria once stood and found no hint of anything alive.
My holo father called us down to the dining room to talk about the mission. Standing at the head of the long table, Arne squinted into his laptop and read his latest data on air temperature, ocean circulation, ice cap retreat, planetary albedo. Casey asked what it all came to.
“I don’t know.” Big and blond as his Viking ancestors, but perhaps not so bold, Arne bristled as if the question offended him. “I’m afraid to know. I hope we never know.”
“We had better know.”
“Maybe not,” Arne grew very grave. “Consider our responsibility. We’ve found no native life. The few of us here at the station are very likely the only life left in the solar system. So far as we know the only life in the universe. We must conserve it.”
“Our duty is to the mission.” Very quietly, Casey agreed. “Whatever hit the Earth, we must cope with it. If life has been wiped out, we must bring it back.”
“If we can.” Arne made a stubborn face. “Whatever killed the planet would likely kill us.”
“We’ve seen no proof of any invaders,” Pepe said.
“Whatever happened to Earth,” Casey said, “we’re here to restore it.”
“We’re here for the mission.” Arne’s face had a stubborn set. “We must protect ourselves for its sake. Our duty right now is to gather the data we safely can and record it for later generations—if there are any later generations. Our first priority is to care for ourselves.”
“We can do more.” Casey shook his head. “We can design landing probes to look for data and send it back. But when the time comes, we’ll have to go down to look for ourselves.”
“No!” Arne blinked and stiffened. “Think of the danger. Even a probe might expose us. The invaders would have wiped us out if they’d ever found us.”
“So?” Casey’s voice grew sharp. “What do you want us to do?”
“Keep under cover. Do nothing to give ourselves away. Hope future generations will know enough about the aliens to get a better break.”
“Hope’s not enough.” Casey gestured to wave it away. “We don’t know that anything alien hit the Earth. If we do nothing, we defeat the mission. If there’s a risk, we have to take it.”
“Do we?” Arne tried to argue. “Let’s not waste ourselves. Certainly not until we’ve learned all we can. Don’t forget that culture on the Nile. People as smart as we are, aimed with all our science and technology. They had their chance to save themselves. Till we know why they failed, we can’t pretend that the station is immune.”
“Suppose we die?” Casey shrugged. “We’ll be cloned again.”
He didn’t mention Mona, but he must have been dreaming of another life with her.
“Unless—” Glaring, Arne shook his head. “Unless the aliens find us.” He demanded a vote. Dian sided with him, but the rest of us stood against them. We agreed to send a light plane with a crew of two to survey the Earth and its vicinity from low orbit, send back reports of what they found, and finally land in north Africa. Casey was eager to pilot the craft. Arne dealt cards to pick the other crewman. The first blackjack fell to me.
2.
WE LIFTED OFF TOGETHER, CASEY AND I, THE CRATER BEHIND us yawned deep in the Moon’s gray face, the long, white scars of the impact that formed it spread out to the blazing dark of space. It shrank as we lifted, shrank till the Moon was a dwindling gray ball adrift in infinity. Earth looked smaller still. The Milky Way wrapped us in a diamond-dusted belt of remote and ruthless splendor.
Staring from the cockpit, I cringed from a sudden sick longing for the comfort of our snug little burrow. The void around us was too vast for me, too old and complex and strange. How could the fate of mankind matter in this infinite cosmos where blind chance was king, where another chance bolide might strike at any moment to end all life forever?
“Great!” Casey grinned and waved a lean, black hand across the waste of stars. He liked to copy El Chino’s accent. “Ain’t they great?” His elation was hard for me to share. Even before the takeoff, my own feelings for the expedition had been mixed. I had been no eager volunteer. With no special skills of any sort, I was only the mission historian, my job simply to see that good records were kept for the clone generations to come after us. Thinking of the dead Earth and the mystery of its death, I had little hope that we would ever get back to the Moon with any useful records at all.
I’d voted for the effort, however, because the mission required it. And, like Casey, I had little to lose. The others had sorted themselves into affectionate couples: Arne and Dian, Pepe and Tanya. I had no lover to leave behind. Casey had only his dreams of Mona, if the computer ever cloned them together. Although I sometimes felt that he was too conscious of his outlaw father and too anxious to prove the worth of his genes, we got on together.
His cheerful grin surprised me now.
“Adios to Arne Linder!” He gestured as if to sweep the diminished Moon and Arne’s blustery ego into oblivion. “Ain’t it a great break for us? Shut up all our lives under the dome like bugs in a bottle, but look at all that!” He stopped for half a minute, turning in his seat to survey the diamond field of stars. “Our own playground now.”
“Or battleground,” I said.
“If we find anybody to fight.” He shrugged. “Don’t forget my Dad. Anybody got in his way was just another job he got paid to do. I’m El Chino again and proud to be. Anybody don’t like us there, we’ll show ‘em what we are.”
I wasn’t quite so ready, but still glad to have him with me.
DOWN TO GEOSYNCHRONOUS ORBIT, WE FLOATED FOR weeks over the Americas, weeks over East Asia, weeks over Africa. The ice-white land was hard to distinguish from the polar snows. Searching with binoculars and telescopes and spectrometers, we found no signs of life, no alien monsters either. “Dead,” Casey muttered more than once, shaking his head at the bleached world beneath us. “Maybe dead forever.” Yet his heart for the adventure was never lost for long. He always looked for new clues and explored new plans. “You know, Dunk, I’ve got the feel of the mission now. It’s something great. Worth dying for. Dying a dozen times if that’s what it takes. Tell Arne he ought to be with us.”
Pepe had promised to track us and have somebody listening when we were in radio range of the Moon. We described what we saw, transmitted our instrumental data, asked for news from those we had left behind. Pepe answered whenever he got a message, but there was never a word from Arne.
We dropped to lower orbits, rounding the planet every three hours, then every 90 minutes, swinging north and south to let us see far toward the poles. Still we discovered nothing green. Crossing North Africa, crossing it again, we studied the site of that city our siblings had found on the Nile.
The buildings had crumbled into a glaring white snowscape of wind-driven dust, but the streets had left a grid of faint dark lines along the river’s edge. We found the radial runways at the airport and the road that led through the city. The gigantic silver statues of our clones still stood in line along the avenue that led to the temple of the Moon, though its tower had tumbled to rubble. My recollection of what my clone father had written about the landing gave me a strange feeling when I found his monumental figure towering out of the drifts.
“There’s Arne, when he used to be a god.” With a sardonic smirk, Casey pointed at an age-stained colossus that leaned into the dust. “Let’s let him know.”
The full Moon was out of range, above the dark side of Earth. We called the station when it came back overhead, waited for an answer that never came, waited and called again, heard only the rattle and crash of static.
“Tell the robots,” Casey said. “The computer will record it.”
I called again, with a code to wake the robots.
“That’s enough,” Pepe’s voice cackled out of the speaker. “Sony, Dunk, but Arne has taken charge. He doesn’t want you calling, doesn’t want us to answer.”
“Why not? We’ve met no aliens.”
Each reply took three long seconds to get back from the Moon. “No matter. He’s afraid they’re listening.”
“Still hunting us, after four hundred years?”
His hurried voice dropped lower. “If you thought you knew Arne, he’s gone paranoid. He found Casey’s gun. He’s ugly with it. Trusts nobody. Orders us all around. He’s taken Tanya as well as Dian. Treats me like a slave. Threatens to throw me out in the cold if I cross him. “I wish—” His voice caught. “I wish I’d gone with you and Casey.”
“Just hold out till we get back.”
“Don’t!” His voice came sharp. “Don’t try to come back. Arne’s afraid the aliens could follow you back. Even if you got here, he wouldn’t let you in.”
Startled, I asked him why.
“He’s the alpha male, since you and Casey are gone. He enjoys the job.”
“Can’t you compete?”
The three-second signal delay grew to half a minute.
“I tried.” His voice was hoarse and low when it finally came. “I stole the gun while he was asleep, but Tanya—” Emotion choked him. “She was with him in the bed. She woke and got between us. You know how we were, but now she—she loves him, Dunk. And I can’t do a thing.”
I tried to ask if he could get away to join us, but his husky voice cut me off before my words had time to reach him.
“It’s goodbye, Dunk. I’d like to think Arne’s really as crazy as he acts, but—well, you can’t really know. He could be right You say you haven’t encountered any aliens, but still you haven’t found what killed the planet. The station may really be in danger.”
“Or maybe not,” I tried to say. “We’ve heard nothing electronic. I doubt that anything here has the technology to listen.”
“. . . sorry, Dunk.” He hadn’t waited for my reply. “Arne wants us off the air. And finally, Dunk—” His voice fell to a whisper. “I hope to know you again in later generations, if no aliens hit us now.”
AIRBRAKING TO SAVE FUEL ON THE FINAL ORBIT, WE GLIDED OVER the Indian Ocean and down into Africa’s Great Rift valley to land at last on a wide, white beach between the ancient cliffs and a fresh-water sea. Waves danced on the water, but nothing else was moving.
We stayed aboard two days, gathering data we hoped to save for anybody who came to follow us. The spectroscope showed atmospheric oxygen a little low from lack of green life, carbon dioxide a little high, but nothing strange: no toxins, no microorganisms, nothing to alarm us.
On the third day, Casey ventured off the plane.
“Good luck, Dunk.” He took my hand before he suited up. “It’s been good fun. You’ll soon know if Arne’s right about his fatal agent. If I don’t get back, keep your records and get them to the robots. Whatever happens here, I want another chance for us. And my own chance—”
His voice caught.
“My chance to live again with Mona.”
I watched while he dug a long furrow in the loose white sand, dropped seed pellets coated with fertilizer, covered them carefully, and knelt a long time at the end of the row. Plodding down to the beach, he brought buckets of water to fill his furrow.
“Test number one.” He stood up to call on Iris helmet phone. “You’ll see the results in a week. If life can exist here again, the seed will sprout. You’ll see a show of green. If Arne’s right, if the world’s gone alien, you won’t Now, number two.”
“Don’t!” I saw him unsealing his helmet “Wait to watch the seed.”
He swept the helmet off and stood grinning up at me, breathing deep. I thought I saw him sway, but he was only bending to get at the seals on his boots. He stripped off the suit and the yellow liner under it Nude and black, he raised two fingers in the V-signal we had seen DeFort make on the holo of the escape from Earth, shouted something that I couldn’t hear, and ran down to the water.
Splashing out till it came to his waist, he dived, learned to stay afloat, paddled so far out I was frightened for him. Wading back at last, he waved at me and lay a long time basking under the sun before he gathered up his gear and climbed back into the air lock.
“A virgin Earth!” He bubbled with enthusiasm. “Swept clean of all the weeds and bugs and rival species our ancestors had to fight A fresh field waiting for us to plant our own new Eden.”
“And Arne’s aliens perhaps the new Satan, waiting to hand us the apple.”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “I hope not.”
NEXT DAY, I WENT OUT WITH HIM, OUR SPACE GEAR LEFT ABOARD.
Earth! This was a moment I had dreamed about all my life, waiting for it with a mix of eagerness and dread. The sun was high. Its dazzle on the sand and the surf hurt my eyes. I turned my face and felt the wind, the first I ever felt. It was hot, with a dry bite of dust, yet I caught something of Casey’s elation.
“Come along!” He darted ahead of me toward the sea. “Out of our little pit in the crater rim, into the universe!”
For all our work in the centrifuge, Earth gravity was still a heavy drag, but I trudged after him and helped carry water to fill the furrow again. I waded out with him when that was done, dived and strangled and waded out, lay resting on the sand till a tingle of sunburn drove me back aboard the plane.
In just a few days the rising sun gave the furrow a faint tinge of green. Green blades thrust up. Leaves unfolded. A bright green line ran through white sand toward the sea. Casey spent his days feeding the plants, raking the soil around them, improvising tiny tents to shelter any that seemed to wilt under too much sun. He made me call the station to let him rave about their swift growth and the sheer wonder of life. Nothing came back from the Moon.
We stayed there on the beach through a season of rain and another of sun. The white dust made fertile soil. Casey nursed the plants and rejoiced in the air and sea and sun. I got a tan and built strength to take the gravity. Our plants grew, hardy shrubs and grasses that bloomed and scattered seed. Fired with that promise, we took off again to spend our fuel reserve cruising the planet at stratospheric levels, sowing life-bombs loaded with seed over the continents and oceans.
That done, we came down again to wait out our current lives on the high plateau between the Rift and the Indian Ocean. A pleasant spot, though volcanic plumes sometimes tower over Kilimanjaro, far off in the south, and dust storms sometimes turn the sky to milk. Year by year, our small green island spreads wider across the barren plain.
We work together in the garden that feeds us. There’s no frost here, and we’ve brought no pests or weeds. Casey reads Shakespeare and enjoys declaiming great speeches in the style he learned from the holo dramas in the hall of treasures that Dian is hoarding for worlds to come. He is teaching me the martial skills he learned from a holo El Chino left him. Excellent exercise, though perhaps of little use for talk with any aliens that might appear.
We no longer expect trouble from them, but I suppose Arne does. We never get a response from test signals to the station, yet I continue keeping weather and seismic data, writing up the history of our work, beaming reports toward the Moon. Waiting Arne out, we trust that the robots Will still be there after he is gone, the computer recording our transmissions for whoever follows us. Casey has sent a message—a love letter, I believe, though he didn’t let me read it—intended to be waiting for some future Mona. We do expect to live again.
3.
WE ARE THE SIXTH GENERATION.
I have died and died again, leaving my bones in unmarked and forgotten places, yet as I read the narratives of our holo parents and our own earlier lives, I can feel that I have always been the same individual self. Always cloned from identical cells in the identical maternity lab, growing up with identical companions in the same lonely pit in the Tycho rim, trained for the same great mission by the same robots and the same holos, we were free from the thousand distractions that used to draw identical twins in the old world apart. I always know that each new life will find its own new direction. Yet, after so many incarnations, I sometimes feel that I am one single immortal.
Ages have passed since Casey and I reseeded the dead planet. My father says our rebirth was so long delayed because the last Arne had been terrified of aliens on Earth, afraid they would destroy the station and end our chances for the mission, perhaps even more concerned for his own precious skin.
“Something artificial?” Arne glowered at tire little black disk, now over the white spiral of a great typhoon on the blue Pacific. “An alien spacecraft? Space invaders that have devastated Earth?”
“We considered that.” Tanya shook her head. “But we know we’ve been alone in tire solar system. The stars are so far apart that space war is just too unlikely.”
“What else?”
“Riddles,” Pepe said. “Looking for answers, we’ve studied tire spectrum of Earth. Atmospheric oxygen content has fallen, carbon dioxide risen. Ice caps have shrunk. Global temperatures are higher. Climates have changed, deserts grown. Although air and ocean circulation patterns showed little change, we see great clouds of white dust that hide whole mountain ranges.
“Riddles.” He scowled and shook his head. “No solutions. We see nothing that should have killed the planet, but every sign says it’s dead.”
THE DAY WE TURNED 21, WE GATHERED AGAIN UNDER THE STATION dome. Ink-black shadow pooled the crater pit. The full Earth stood where it always did, high in the black north sky, blazing down on the cragged wall that curved east and west of our high perch. Africa was a wide, white patch on the sea-blue planet. Lake Victoria looked larger than the old maps showed it, a great blue jewel shining at its heart.
Searching again for any hint of humankind, we traced the Nile. Our maps showed the green streak of life it had drawn through the deserts to its delta and the sea. Now it was only a thin dark line. We found no dam, no city, no green of cultivated farms.
Tire Mediterranean was landlocked now, shrunk to a great salt lake since some geologic spasm had raised Gibraltar. A new bend had diverted the Nile into the Red Sea. The telescope showed a waste of long white dunes on the deserts west of the river, and a plume of white dust that reached far toward Asia. We scanned the site where our siblings had found a new city where Alexandria once stood and found no hint of anything alive.
My holo father called us down to the dining room to talk about the mission. Standing at the head of the long table, Arne squinted into his laptop and read his latest data on air temperature, ocean circulation, ice cap retreat, planetary albedo. Casey asked what it all came to.
“I don’t know.” Big and blond as his Viking ancestors, but perhaps not so bold, Arne bristled as if the question offended him. “I’m afraid to know. I hope we never know.”
“We had better know.”
“Maybe not,” Arne grew very grave. “Consider our responsibility. We’ve found no native life. The few of us here at the station are very likely the only life left in the solar system. So far as we know the only life in the universe. We must conserve it.”
“Our duty is to the mission.” Very quietly, Casey agreed. “Whatever hit the Earth, we must cope with it. If life has been wiped out, we must bring it back.”
“If we can.” Arne made a stubborn face. “Whatever killed the planet would likely kill us.”
“We’ve seen no proof of any invaders,” Pepe said.
“Whatever happened to Earth,” Casey said, “we’re here to restore it.”
“We’re here for the mission.” Arne’s face had a stubborn set. “We must protect ourselves for its sake. Our duty right now is to gather the data we safely can and record it for later generations—if there are any later generations. Our first priority is to care for ourselves.”
“We can do more.” Casey shook his head. “We can design landing probes to look for data and send it back. But when the time comes, we’ll have to go down to look for ourselves.”
“No!” Arne blinked and stiffened. “Think of the danger. Even a probe might expose us. The invaders would have wiped us out if they’d ever found us.”
“So?” Casey’s voice grew sharp. “What do you want us to do?”
“Keep under cover. Do nothing to give ourselves away. Hope future generations will know enough about the aliens to get a better break.”
“Hope’s not enough.” Casey gestured to wave it away. “We don’t know that anything alien hit the Earth. If we do nothing, we defeat the mission. If there’s a risk, we have to take it.”
“Do we?” Arne tried to argue. “Let’s not waste ourselves. Certainly not until we’ve learned all we can. Don’t forget that culture on the Nile. People as smart as we are, aimed with all our science and technology. They had their chance to save themselves. Till we know why they failed, we can’t pretend that the station is immune.”
“Suppose we die?” Casey shrugged. “We’ll be cloned again.”
He didn’t mention Mona, but he must have been dreaming of another life with her.
“Unless—” Glaring, Arne shook his head. “Unless the aliens find us.” He demanded a vote. Dian sided with him, but the rest of us stood against them. We agreed to send a light plane with a crew of two to survey the Earth and its vicinity from low orbit, send back reports of what they found, and finally land in north Africa. Casey was eager to pilot the craft. Arne dealt cards to pick the other crewman. The first blackjack fell to me.
2.
WE LIFTED OFF TOGETHER, CASEY AND I, THE CRATER BEHIND us yawned deep in the Moon’s gray face, the long, white scars of the impact that formed it spread out to the blazing dark of space. It shrank as we lifted, shrank till the Moon was a dwindling gray ball adrift in infinity. Earth looked smaller still. The Milky Way wrapped us in a diamond-dusted belt of remote and ruthless splendor.
Staring from the cockpit, I cringed from a sudden sick longing for the comfort of our snug little burrow. The void around us was too vast for me, too old and complex and strange. How could the fate of mankind matter in this infinite cosmos where blind chance was king, where another chance bolide might strike at any moment to end all life forever?
“Great!” Casey grinned and waved a lean, black hand across the waste of stars. He liked to copy El Chino’s accent. “Ain’t they great?” His elation was hard for me to share. Even before the takeoff, my own feelings for the expedition had been mixed. I had been no eager volunteer. With no special skills of any sort, I was only the mission historian, my job simply to see that good records were kept for the clone generations to come after us. Thinking of the dead Earth and the mystery of its death, I had little hope that we would ever get back to the Moon with any useful records at all.
I’d voted for the effort, however, because the mission required it. And, like Casey, I had little to lose. The others had sorted themselves into affectionate couples: Arne and Dian, Pepe and Tanya. I had no lover to leave behind. Casey had only his dreams of Mona, if the computer ever cloned them together. Although I sometimes felt that he was too conscious of his outlaw father and too anxious to prove the worth of his genes, we got on together.
His cheerful grin surprised me now.
“Adios to Arne Linder!” He gestured as if to sweep the diminished Moon and Arne’s blustery ego into oblivion. “Ain’t it a great break for us? Shut up all our lives under the dome like bugs in a bottle, but look at all that!” He stopped for half a minute, turning in his seat to survey the diamond field of stars. “Our own playground now.”
“Or battleground,” I said.
“If we find anybody to fight.” He shrugged. “Don’t forget my Dad. Anybody got in his way was just another job he got paid to do. I’m El Chino again and proud to be. Anybody don’t like us there, we’ll show ‘em what we are.”
I wasn’t quite so ready, but still glad to have him with me.
DOWN TO GEOSYNCHRONOUS ORBIT, WE FLOATED FOR weeks over the Americas, weeks over East Asia, weeks over Africa. The ice-white land was hard to distinguish from the polar snows. Searching with binoculars and telescopes and spectrometers, we found no signs of life, no alien monsters either. “Dead,” Casey muttered more than once, shaking his head at the bleached world beneath us. “Maybe dead forever.” Yet his heart for the adventure was never lost for long. He always looked for new clues and explored new plans. “You know, Dunk, I’ve got the feel of the mission now. It’s something great. Worth dying for. Dying a dozen times if that’s what it takes. Tell Arne he ought to be with us.”
Pepe had promised to track us and have somebody listening when we were in radio range of the Moon. We described what we saw, transmitted our instrumental data, asked for news from those we had left behind. Pepe answered whenever he got a message, but there was never a word from Arne.
We dropped to lower orbits, rounding the planet every three hours, then every 90 minutes, swinging north and south to let us see far toward the poles. Still we discovered nothing green. Crossing North Africa, crossing it again, we studied the site of that city our siblings had found on the Nile.
The buildings had crumbled into a glaring white snowscape of wind-driven dust, but the streets had left a grid of faint dark lines along the river’s edge. We found the radial runways at the airport and the road that led through the city. The gigantic silver statues of our clones still stood in line along the avenue that led to the temple of the Moon, though its tower had tumbled to rubble. My recollection of what my clone father had written about the landing gave me a strange feeling when I found his monumental figure towering out of the drifts.
“There’s Arne, when he used to be a god.” With a sardonic smirk, Casey pointed at an age-stained colossus that leaned into the dust. “Let’s let him know.”
The full Moon was out of range, above the dark side of Earth. We called the station when it came back overhead, waited for an answer that never came, waited and called again, heard only the rattle and crash of static.
“Tell the robots,” Casey said. “The computer will record it.”
I called again, with a code to wake the robots.
“That’s enough,” Pepe’s voice cackled out of the speaker. “Sony, Dunk, but Arne has taken charge. He doesn’t want you calling, doesn’t want us to answer.”
“Why not? We’ve met no aliens.”
Each reply took three long seconds to get back from the Moon. “No matter. He’s afraid they’re listening.”
“Still hunting us, after four hundred years?”
His hurried voice dropped lower. “If you thought you knew Arne, he’s gone paranoid. He found Casey’s gun. He’s ugly with it. Trusts nobody. Orders us all around. He’s taken Tanya as well as Dian. Treats me like a slave. Threatens to throw me out in the cold if I cross him. “I wish—” His voice caught. “I wish I’d gone with you and Casey.”
“Just hold out till we get back.”
“Don’t!” His voice came sharp. “Don’t try to come back. Arne’s afraid the aliens could follow you back. Even if you got here, he wouldn’t let you in.”
Startled, I asked him why.
“He’s the alpha male, since you and Casey are gone. He enjoys the job.”
“Can’t you compete?”
The three-second signal delay grew to half a minute.
“I tried.” His voice was hoarse and low when it finally came. “I stole the gun while he was asleep, but Tanya—” Emotion choked him. “She was with him in the bed. She woke and got between us. You know how we were, but now she—she loves him, Dunk. And I can’t do a thing.”
I tried to ask if he could get away to join us, but his husky voice cut me off before my words had time to reach him.
“It’s goodbye, Dunk. I’d like to think Arne’s really as crazy as he acts, but—well, you can’t really know. He could be right You say you haven’t encountered any aliens, but still you haven’t found what killed the planet. The station may really be in danger.”
“Or maybe not,” I tried to say. “We’ve heard nothing electronic. I doubt that anything here has the technology to listen.”
“. . . sorry, Dunk.” He hadn’t waited for my reply. “Arne wants us off the air. And finally, Dunk—” His voice fell to a whisper. “I hope to know you again in later generations, if no aliens hit us now.”
AIRBRAKING TO SAVE FUEL ON THE FINAL ORBIT, WE GLIDED OVER the Indian Ocean and down into Africa’s Great Rift valley to land at last on a wide, white beach between the ancient cliffs and a fresh-water sea. Waves danced on the water, but nothing else was moving.
We stayed aboard two days, gathering data we hoped to save for anybody who came to follow us. The spectroscope showed atmospheric oxygen a little low from lack of green life, carbon dioxide a little high, but nothing strange: no toxins, no microorganisms, nothing to alarm us.
On the third day, Casey ventured off the plane.
“Good luck, Dunk.” He took my hand before he suited up. “It’s been good fun. You’ll soon know if Arne’s right about his fatal agent. If I don’t get back, keep your records and get them to the robots. Whatever happens here, I want another chance for us. And my own chance—”
His voice caught.
“My chance to live again with Mona.”
I watched while he dug a long furrow in the loose white sand, dropped seed pellets coated with fertilizer, covered them carefully, and knelt a long time at the end of the row. Plodding down to the beach, he brought buckets of water to fill his furrow.
“Test number one.” He stood up to call on Iris helmet phone. “You’ll see the results in a week. If life can exist here again, the seed will sprout. You’ll see a show of green. If Arne’s right, if the world’s gone alien, you won’t Now, number two.”
“Don’t!” I saw him unsealing his helmet “Wait to watch the seed.”
He swept the helmet off and stood grinning up at me, breathing deep. I thought I saw him sway, but he was only bending to get at the seals on his boots. He stripped off the suit and the yellow liner under it Nude and black, he raised two fingers in the V-signal we had seen DeFort make on the holo of the escape from Earth, shouted something that I couldn’t hear, and ran down to the water.
Splashing out till it came to his waist, he dived, learned to stay afloat, paddled so far out I was frightened for him. Wading back at last, he waved at me and lay a long time basking under the sun before he gathered up his gear and climbed back into the air lock.
“A virgin Earth!” He bubbled with enthusiasm. “Swept clean of all the weeds and bugs and rival species our ancestors had to fight A fresh field waiting for us to plant our own new Eden.”
“And Arne’s aliens perhaps the new Satan, waiting to hand us the apple.”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “I hope not.”
NEXT DAY, I WENT OUT WITH HIM, OUR SPACE GEAR LEFT ABOARD.
Earth! This was a moment I had dreamed about all my life, waiting for it with a mix of eagerness and dread. The sun was high. Its dazzle on the sand and the surf hurt my eyes. I turned my face and felt the wind, the first I ever felt. It was hot, with a dry bite of dust, yet I caught something of Casey’s elation.
“Come along!” He darted ahead of me toward the sea. “Out of our little pit in the crater rim, into the universe!”
For all our work in the centrifuge, Earth gravity was still a heavy drag, but I trudged after him and helped carry water to fill the furrow again. I waded out with him when that was done, dived and strangled and waded out, lay resting on the sand till a tingle of sunburn drove me back aboard the plane.
In just a few days the rising sun gave the furrow a faint tinge of green. Green blades thrust up. Leaves unfolded. A bright green line ran through white sand toward the sea. Casey spent his days feeding the plants, raking the soil around them, improvising tiny tents to shelter any that seemed to wilt under too much sun. He made me call the station to let him rave about their swift growth and the sheer wonder of life. Nothing came back from the Moon.
We stayed there on the beach through a season of rain and another of sun. The white dust made fertile soil. Casey nursed the plants and rejoiced in the air and sea and sun. I got a tan and built strength to take the gravity. Our plants grew, hardy shrubs and grasses that bloomed and scattered seed. Fired with that promise, we took off again to spend our fuel reserve cruising the planet at stratospheric levels, sowing life-bombs loaded with seed over the continents and oceans.
That done, we came down again to wait out our current lives on the high plateau between the Rift and the Indian Ocean. A pleasant spot, though volcanic plumes sometimes tower over Kilimanjaro, far off in the south, and dust storms sometimes turn the sky to milk. Year by year, our small green island spreads wider across the barren plain.
We work together in the garden that feeds us. There’s no frost here, and we’ve brought no pests or weeds. Casey reads Shakespeare and enjoys declaiming great speeches in the style he learned from the holo dramas in the hall of treasures that Dian is hoarding for worlds to come. He is teaching me the martial skills he learned from a holo El Chino left him. Excellent exercise, though perhaps of little use for talk with any aliens that might appear.
We no longer expect trouble from them, but I suppose Arne does. We never get a response from test signals to the station, yet I continue keeping weather and seismic data, writing up the history of our work, beaming reports toward the Moon. Waiting Arne out, we trust that the robots Will still be there after he is gone, the computer recording our transmissions for whoever follows us. Casey has sent a message—a love letter, I believe, though he didn’t let me read it—intended to be waiting for some future Mona. We do expect to live again.
3.
WE ARE THE SIXTH GENERATION.
I have died and died again, leaving my bones in unmarked and forgotten places, yet as I read the narratives of our holo parents and our own earlier lives, I can feel that I have always been the same individual self. Always cloned from identical cells in the identical maternity lab, growing up with identical companions in the same lonely pit in the Tycho rim, trained for the same great mission by the same robots and the same holos, we were free from the thousand distractions that used to draw identical twins in the old world apart. I always know that each new life will find its own new direction. Yet, after so many incarnations, I sometimes feel that I am one single immortal.
Ages have passed since Casey and I reseeded the dead planet. My father says our rebirth was so long delayed because the last Arne had been terrified of aliens on Earth, afraid they would destroy the station and end our chances for the mission, perhaps even more concerned for his own precious skin.
