Collected Short Fiction, page 798
And that was the end of the dream.
A SHRILL SCREECH SHOCKED ME AWAKE. I WAS IN MY BED ON THE plane, the old metal creaking from expansion as the morning sun warmed it. Bright sunlight glittered on the instrument panels. Beyond the window, a single bright golden balloon drifted low above the long forest wall. A pool of brightness crept across the treetops beneath it, following like the shadow of a cloud, but the wonder of the dream was gone.
I sat there on the side of the bed, dazed with the pain of loss. Casey alive again, the human Mona here on Earth, the shining tree they called a son: all illusion. Cold reality hit me with my recollection of the three turf-eaten skeletons, Casey’s lance thrust through the alien skull, the brittle rib fragments around the root of the little tree. The forest lay silent and dark. The joy of the dream had vanished into utter loneliness. The bleak fact came back. I was here alone forever, the only man on the planet, maybe anywhere.
Yet the drive for life endures. With no appetite for breakfast, I plodded down for a cold plunge into the pool beneath my spring. A little revived by that, I spaded ground for another row of corn. I stopped for breath when that tired me, and searched the sky again for that balloon. It was gone. Had it brought another goldwinged fairy like Casey’s Mona? Another alien creature like the thing that killed him? I never knew.
TIME FLOWS ON. I WATCH THE FOREST NOW AND LISTEN to it, longing for the sense of comfort and companionship I enjoyed in the dream. It never speaks to me, not in any human tongue, yet I now feel sure that it does hold something more than toleration for me. Sometimes when I thought I heard another invitation in its song, I have ventured into it to search again for that small tree.
On the first occasions, I never got far. The towering trunks seemed too vast, the roof too high, the shadows too dark, its whole alien presence overwhelming. Dread of being lost, as Casey was lost in that African jungle, turned me back toward daylight. As time went on, however, that dread has dimmed.
Older now, changing slowly, I have begun to know and trust the forest. And I have learned how to live here. Now I know when and what to plant, how to save and ration what I harvest. I have learned to repair worn boots and clothing, learned to make do and improvise. Although I will always wonder whether Arne and Tanya and Dian are still alive on the Moon, that no longer matters greatly. We shall all be cloned again.
On hot summer afternoons when I feel exhausted from work in my little field, I have fallen into the habit of walking into the shade of the nearer trees to escape the high sun’s blaze on the open plain. I have come to like the stillness when the trees are silent and their voices when they sing. Sometimes I sleep and dream of the little tree called Leo. It speaks to me with dancing colors and wordless songs that have made it seem a friend. Feeling that it wanted to know me, I have told it the story of the great impact and the aftermath, the story of the station and our mission to restore the planet. I feel somehow that it understands and even seems to welcome the promise of our return to Earth.
It has guided me back to the clearing where it stands. I find it grown taller now, its straight bole sturdier, its broader leaves more vividly splashed with crimson and gold. The skeletons are gone. The ground where they lay is clean now, since I carried Casey’s lance and those other uneaten relics back to the plane.
I visit it often. Sometimes it sings very softly, just to me. Sometimes it is silent. Always it brings me a sense of quiet companionship. Near it, I no longer feel alone. Never using words, it has helped me begin to understand the exotic botany of the forest.
In their alien biology, I believe the trees bear those golden balloons as a means of dispersing their seed. The gold-winged being Casey loved was somewhat like a flower, more like a hatching egg. He was the first moving thing she saw after she emerged from the shell where she had grown. She bonded to him, as she would have bonded to the alien mate searching for her.
His own infatuation with her is harder to explain. I have come to believe that the trees are able to communicate with some means beyond their eerie music and the changing light and color of their leaves. Dian might call it telepathy, though I know no actual proof of that. Casey was still a sick man, sometimes hallucinating. Yet I think it was something in the forest itself that made him see her as El Chino’s Mona.
Whatever the cause, it was a desperate and impossible love, its ending told by what I found beneath the tree. In terms of what my father might have called exobiology, the male being must have carried something like pollen to fertilize the flower. The Leo tree must have sprung from something like a seed formed in her body by their union.
SO I SPECULATE, AND I HAVE TIME FOR SPECULATION. THE FOREST holds more mystery than I can ever hope to probe. Our parents on the Moon never made us pray, but they spoke often of the old world religions and philosophies. The trees and even the black vampires are proof of life evolving beyond our solar system. The forest has become a temple to me, where I go not to worship or adore but to share an awed and solemn sense of kinship with life throughout the cosmos.
For life is universal. The old astronomers found its basic molecules in the great clouds of interstellar dust and gas, the stuff of life created before the stars were formed. Life creates and re-creates itself in an infinity of shapes. In my own wordless communion with the trees, I have come to sense a vast web work of lives and minds existing all across the cosmos.
I catch a fleeting sense of beings often older and wiser and stranger than I can ever know, most of them good in the abstract sense that altruistic love is good, some of them evil, as I see the black vampires as evil in the sense that blind self-regard is evil. The evil entities are often at war with one another, the best of the good at war with death.
I have come to see the trees as engines of creation, created as we have been, not by any supernatural agency but by the processes of natural evolution with which life creates itself. Arne’s dread of alien conquest was justified, I believe. There must be an evil power elsewhere in the cosmos that erased our reseeded life from Earth to make space for the black vampires. The singing trees must have been put here as instruments of good, sent to counter them.
Or so I feel.
Does this make us hapless puppets in an age-long war waged by vast and unknown powers far out across the galaxies? We have no way to know, but so long as we continue our mission of creation, what could be a better use for us? I expect to live out my own life here alone, and finally die here. Yet, sustained by the company of the trees, I no longer feel entirely alone, nor do I expect to die entirely alone. Creation is eternal. We ourselves, we clones at the station, are engines of life. Our mission must endure.
That is the message I have been transmitting toward the Moon. Our heirs in the next generation must be informed and warned. I recall the Vale of Kashmir, that lovely little Eden far from the vampire race in Africa and secure behind its majestic mountain walls. I trust that we will all be cloned again, Mona and Casey with us, to land there and plant mankind on Earth again.
2000
Agents of the Moon
With the Earth destroyed, only the Moon children could bring it back to life.
1.
SEARCHING EARTH FROM HIGH ORBIT, WE found most of Africa still sullenly red with the alien stuff that had spread to M y ring the Mediterranean lakes and on M north to the ice. The Americas were mottled with something just as strange. Over m Asia, where our colony had been planted, the m retreating ice lay white from the pole to the I Himalayas. The south was green with the I life we had sowed, but we heard no radio, saw no city lights when the continent turned away from the Sun.
Arne Linder ordered us back to the Moon.
“Give it up and get back here. No lights and no radio means there’s no electricity. No high technology. No civilization. Something has killed the colony. Killed Mona and Casey. It can kill you. You may feel expendable, but Tycho Station isn’t. We’ve lost one plane. I don’t want you wasting another.”
In a sense, we were expendable. The station had been set up on the eve of the great impact that wiped most life off Earth, its mission to terraform and reclaim the devastated planet. Its brain was the master computer, its hands the robots that rebuilt themselves and maintained everything, its womb the maternity lab, where it had cloned us again and again from the frozen cells of the survival team.
No simple task. The impact left the shattered planet hostile to life of any sort. The first colonists endured a bitter struggle for survival long enough to build a new civilization at the mouth of the Nile. Alien invaders crumbled their world to malignant dust. The computer slept through a long ice age before it cloned a new generation to replant terran life on southern Asia and try again.
Tire fate of the second colony was our problem now. Dropping out of orbit to land in the Vale of Kashmir, their spaceplane had gone silent. Tire computer slept for centuries and cloned us again to look for them and plant a new colony if they had failed.
Casey and Mona volunteered to go. Casey’s clone father had been a guard at the Moon base in old New Mexico. A thick-set man with the flags of Mexico and Chino and the name “El Chino” tattooed on his black chest, he had forced his way aboard the escape plane just before the shockwave struck, Mona with him. She was a slim blonde with long pale hair and a dancer’s gliding grace. Now they were long ages dead, but DeFort had saved their cells for the gene pool. Although we knew them only from their images in the holo tank, Casey and Mona grew up full of a fierce pride in them and saw the expedition as their best chance to earn a rightful place on the mission.
Almost a year had gone since they took off. Calling back from high orbit before their descent to land in the Vale of Kashmir, they had seen no sign of the colony. Their radio went silent as they dropped into the stratosphere. When Pepe and I wanted to follow, Arne called us suicidal fools, but we got the computer to equip another space-plane for us. We had now been three weeks in orbit, still with nothing to report.
“Arne!” Pepe looked up at me from the pilot’s seat, a hard slant on his lean, brown jaw. “He wants to be the alpha male, but he’s afraid of everything. I say we go on down. If you’re with me, Dunk?”
I’m Duncan Yarrow. My clone father had been a friend of DeFort’s long before the impact, keeping his records while he built Tycho Station. Generation after generation, I have been the station historian. Pepe has always been my closest friend, and I think I cared for Casey and Mona as much as he did.
“OK,” I told him. “Let’s look.”
On our last low pass across Asia, he sat glued to his binoculars.
“Alive!” He shouted at me, suddenly elated. “They’re alive!”
He was busy with the controls. I had to wait for half-a-dozen anxious minutes before he spoke again.
“Lines!” His voice was quick and sharp. “I see a web of narrow lines spread over the Indian subcontinent and on east into China. Roads? Maybe railways? I think we’re finding civilization.”
“Civilization? With no electricity?”
He shrugged. “We used to make do without it, before Faraday and Edison.”
Seen from space, the Vale of Kashmir was a tiny green oasis nestled into that towering barrier of saw-toothed peaks that held back the Siberian ice. He raised the binoculars to study it again and turned to grin happily at me.
“The valley does look inhabited. The roads converge toward it. I make out rectangular patches that must be fields. And there! In tire middle of the vale!” Again I had to wait. “That has to be a city!”
Air-braking on the final pass, we sloped down to land. I needed no binoculars to find roads and green fields and scattered villages as the valley opened wider and wider beneath us. The city made an odd target pattern, the bull’s-eye a white spot at the center of a green oval space. Rings of red and green and gray around it became curving streets of red-roofed buildings.
We came down to that white spot on a cushion of roaring steam. Pepe killed tire jets and opened the door, which swung down to make a narrow platform. Outside, we stood lost in awe. Pepe’s hand was shaking when he gripped my arm. Our whole world had been the tiny nest of tunnels in tire crater ring and the dome above them that looked out across the bleak and colorless Moon to a dead-black sky. The vale was overwhelming.
“Que grandissimo!” Pepe liked to use Iris father’s Spanish. “Que marveloso!”
The wonder of it dazed me. A sky not black, but dazzling blue. A huge white mushroom suspended in it I shaded my eyes to look again.
“A cloud!” Pepe nodded at it. “That’s a cloud.”
The station had been a tiny dot of life on a world that had never lived. Here we stood outside in open air, gazing out across a sea of red rooftops toward a landscape vividly green. I felt cool wind and wanning Sun, inhaled sweet scents I had no words to name. A dark fleck soared overhead, trilling music. A songbird?
I breathed deeper and peered at everything. The open oval was a great arena, rimmed with seats. Buildings walled it, only three or four stories tall but solidly made of some white stone. Far beyond, the valley floor sloped up to dark-green forest. Farther still, bare cliffs climbed high to sunbright slopes of ice.
“Wouldn’t Arne be surprised!” Pepe grinned. “The aliens that frighten him never built this.”
He handed the glasses to me. Toward the south, I found a cluster of tall stacks, smoke trailing from them. Off in the distant east, I saw a dark line creeping across a high, green slope, a trail of smoke above its head.
“A train.” I gave the glasses back. “They do have steam.”
“Although they lost electricity?” He frowned and raised the glasses. “They must have had hard times. But they survived—” He froze. “Look at that! Casey’s plane, painted red!”
A hundred yards off, I saw another tall rocket craft. Red paint fading, bare metal gleaning on the nose, it stood on a second white landing pad. He looked through the glasses and shook his head.
“No such luck. That’s older. I see gaps eroded in the hull. It must be the plane the colonists came in, four hundred years ago.” He lowered the glasses to frown at me. “It means the colonists remember where they came from. With this pad ready, they could be expecting us.”
He pushed the glasses at me and moved to unfold the landing stairs.
“I’m going down to meet them. And ask whether Mona and Casey got here.”
“Not yet!” I beckoned him back. “We don’t know we’re welcome. Let’s leave the first move to them.”
I took the glasses and found people on rooftops around the arena Only a handful at first, but more already appearing. Men in jackets very much like my holo father’s. Men in brightly patterned shirts. Women in slacks, women in skirts, women with babies in their arms. Quiet children neatly uniformed in white and blue. I heard a rising hum of voices.
“They’re our colonists. Our kin.” Yet his voice sharpened uneasily. “Children of our clones?” Frowning, he reached for the glasses, shook his head, and grinned with relief. “None of them looks like you or me.”
A wide gate was opening in the side of the arena. An odd little vehicle came out. Pepe lifted the binoculars. I heard a Sharp catch of his breath, and he handed the glasses to me. What I saw was a rickshaw, with two high wheels and a man on the seat between them. What held my eye was the man who pulled it Naked to the waist, he was black as Casey. He had the same high cheeks and the same almond eyes, and a bright black bead on his forehead.
“Casey!” Pepe whispered, his face gone bleak.
“Or another clone of El Chino’s?” I said. “The colonists had hundreds of cell specimens from all the races, but perhaps they also cloned themselves.”
“Whatever they did—” Pepe made a bitter face. “I don’t think I like it.”
The passenger was a lean little man in silver and gray. He sat staring up at us while the rickshaw made a slow circle around us. Running hard, the black man kept staring straight ahead with never a glance at the plane or us. I studied the dark Chinese face again, and found a thin red stain around the small black bead on the forehead.
The rickshaw stopped below our platform. The passenger stepped off his seat, bowed toward us, dropped to one knee for a moment, and stood again, shading his eyes as if blinded by the Sun on our bright metal.
“Are you Agents—” His quavery shout caught, and he began again. “Are you Agents of the Moon?”
“We come from Tycho Station.”
“Welcome to the Kashmir Regency.” His knobby Adam’s apple rose and fell as he swallowed. He caught another nervous breath and went on. “I am Thomas Drake, secretary to Deputy Regency Agent Eric Frye. I greet for Regent Arne, Agent of the Moon. We beg you to remain on your craft until a proper reception can be arranged.”
I looked at Pepe.
“Why not?” He made a sad face and shrugged uneasily. “Let’s play their game.”
He turned silently to wait until Drake called again.
“The Deputy Agent will be honored to receive you. He regrets the inconvenience of this slight delay, but preparations for your reception must be completed.” He raised his wrist to consult a bulky timepiece. “I’ll be back within two hours with transportation for you.”
He looked up, waiting. Pepe said nothing.
“Please thank the Regent,” I called. “Tell him the honor is ours.”
“Honor!” Pepe muttered under his breath. “I don’t think so.”
Drake knelt to us again, ceremoniously, and got back on the rickshaw. The black man ran with it back through the gate. Pepe lowered the landing stairs and focused the glasses again as we waited.
“Look there!”
He gripped my arm and pointed. A young woman came riding a bicycle out of a narrow doorway on the opposite side of the empty arena. Her blonde head low, she pedaled rapidly toward us.
