Collected Short Fiction, page 812
“¡Osos!” Pepe whispered. “Bears.”
He had leaned to point at huge footprints in the muddy floor. In the dark ahead, I heard a hoarse animal grunt. A rank animal stink was suddenly overwhelming. My stomach roiling, I stumbled back into the open. We stood there, gasping for clean air, until abruptly Sandor turned and stared again into the sky.
I saw a thin bright line slice suddenly across a cotton puff of cumulus. It widened silently and became a mirror-bright slider pod, dropping to the grass beside us.
2.
The slider came down beside the fallen tree. The oval door stretched open and I saw Lo standing inside, her pale skin growing slowly golden as the light struck her. Nearly nude, she looked unchanged by whatever time had passed for her. Flat-breasted, almost boyish, with short red-brown hair falling around her pixie face, she was still somehow gracefully alluring. She stood for a moment gazing at Sandor and darted out into his arms. They hugged a long time and then pushed apart, looking at each other in silent adoration.
“Mona!” I heard Casey’s startled gasp. “Mona Lisa!”
Another woman stood in the slider door. Clad in some gauzy, half-transparent stuff, honey-hued hair falling to her shoulders, she looked more womanly than Lo, maybe more lovely. Casey had grown up in love with Mona’s image. She was identical and quite alive. Recognition lit her face.
“Mr. Kell! Mr. Navarro. Mr. Yare. Mother was afraid you’d never get here.” Casey stood open-mouthed and speechless, gaping at her.
“You do know us?” Pepe whispered. “You look like Mona. Mona Lisa Live, in our holo tank on the Moon.”
“I’m her clone.” Laughing at our astonishment, she nodded. “I met you when I was a child. Remember the little girl who was out in the bush with the elephants when she found you?”
“Tling?” Pepe shook his head. “You are Tling?”
“I never guessed!” Breathless, Casey stumbled toward her. “I can’t believe!” She stepped toward him out of the pod. His arms had spread as if to embrace her, but he checked himself and let them fall. She laughed again, and offered her hand. He stood paralyzed for a moment, grinned sheepishly, and seized it.
“I was cloned when you were.” Her grown-up voice had kept a hint of Tling’s. “Dr. Pen brought me with him back to Earth, to be an experimental guinea pig.” She turned with a teasing smile at Sandor. “He wanted to see if the nanorobs would thrive in prehistoric flesh.” She raised a bare arm to let us see its instant tan where the sun struck it. “Apparently they do.”
“Mona!” Casey murmured the name, still clinging to her hand. “Where have you been?”
“With Mother. She took me to her birth world. I grew up there. We’ve traveled since, timing the flights to meet my father here.”
“Do you remember the station? Your holo mother?” His eager eyes were still drinking her in. “You look just like her. I’ve always dreamed—”
His voice stopped when she shrugged.
“An identical twin.” His elation had faded when he saw she had failed to share it. “I don’t recall the Moon at all, though my father used to talk about his site there. I do remember when Mother took me to see the memorial and told me about Mona Lisa live and El Chino.”
“My father,” Casey whispered. “My holo father.”
“Mother told me.” She nodded. “Criminals, she said, in their violent prehistoric world. They had killed a man. They were escaping the law as well as the impact when they got off the Earth on the escape plane. That’s hard to imagine.” She stared hard at Casey. “I know we wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t got away, but now—”
She shrugged again, inspecting Casey as if he were a puzzling stranger.
Sandor and Lo had moved apart and turned to gaze across the memorial’s jungle-clotted ruin. She left Casey and ran to hug them. All three huddled together in soundless communion. We stood waiting until at last Mona came back to us, smiling at Casey now.
“The hero!” She threw her arms around him and kissed his startled lips. “Father has told me how you found his brother.”
He looked breathless when she let him go, shaking his head as if stunned with too much emotion.
“We heard a rumor on the last planet where we stopped,” she said. “A tale too wild to believe, about three prehistoric clones who landed on a dead world and came back with a cure for the pandemic that had killed.”
She paused to shake Pepe’s hand and mine, and slip her arm around Casey, who gave her another silly grin.
“We didn’t know you were the three. Or that it was Father’s lost twin brother you found there, along with this new nanorob that had kept him alive. Father says it wiped out the killer pathogen and saved all our lives. A wonderful surprise!
“But now—”
She shook her head, her fine skin grown pale again.
“We never expected this. We’ve seen the jungle and the ruined memorial. Something else has hit the Earth. It can’t be the same pathogen, because plants and animals are evidently immune, but we don’t see any people. We can’t hear any voices. Father’s afraid the whole Earth is dead.”
They huddled together again, Sandor’s arms around Lo and Mona. We waited uneasily till Mona turned back to us.
“We must search for the killer, whatever it is. Father says the odds are better if we separate. He and Mother are going out to look at a space station we passed on the way in. It’s still in geosynchronous orbit, but didn’t respond to our signals. We sensed no life aboard it, but Father hopes it can tell us something.”
“And you?” Casey peered at her, his dark faced tensed. “You?”
“I’m staying here on Earth. First of all, I want to look for Akyar.”
“Akyar?” Casey frowned.
“I’m sorry.” She gave him a smile of apology. “I forget to speak aloud.”
“I’m sorry.” Wryly, he grinned. “I can’t read your mind.”
“Akyar is—or was—a city in east Africa. Grown up around the Nexus building.”
“The Nexus?” He squinted as if groping for her thoughts. “The government?”
“Not quite.” She shook her head and went on soberly. “Planets hundreds of light-years apart could hardly be governed, but they did need contact. Trade was difficult, but they did need to exchange art and information, to unite their civilizations. If any shadow of coming disaster had been seen, the record of it should be there in Akyar.”
She smiled at the anxious questions still lingering on his face.
“It was located in east Africa, under the satellite station. A symbolic position, really. It was on the equator near the edge of the Great Rift Valley. Near where Father says our evolution began.”
“Please!” he begged her. “May I go with you?”
“I see no need.” She frowned. “We don’t know the killer. It’s likely still active.”
“Could be.” Casey shrugged. “But whatever happened was long ago. Centuries, maybe, if you look at the ruins.” His dark face set, he looked hard at her. “If you’re in danger, I want to be with you.”
She hesitated, frowning down across the ruins and turning at last to Sandor. Casey appealed to him, hands spread wide. I saw no sign from him, but after a moment she nodded to Casey.
“Father says you may be needed, as you were on the Sagittarian planet. Get your baggage.”
We had very little baggage, only our space suits and a few gifts from the grateful emigrants. Casey rushed to get his bag from Sandor’s pod and came back to wait by Mona’s. She was lost once more in silent talk with her parents. At last she hugged them again, wiped at her eyes with the loose end of her sash, and beckoned Casey into her slider.
He waited a moment to let Pepe and me shake his hand, and jumped aboard. It lifted soundlessly, floated briefly over our heads, and slid out of space-time. Lo and Sandor stood gazing somberly down across the valley. A magnificent lion lay on a hill, looking down across a little herd of impala grazing toward the waterhole. Pepe was shaking his head.
“I’m sorry for Casey,” he murmured to me. “He was always a dreamer, in love with an impossible dream. His only world is the cave in the Moon where we grew up. Mona may look like his vision, but she has lost her past. They’ll always be strangers, from worlds too far apart.” Moodily, he shrugged. “He’s crazy to think they can ever get together:”
He brightened when Sandor spoke to us.
“Do you want to come along to the satellite?”
“¡Seguro!” he whispered. “¡Seguro qué sí!”
He and I climbed into the pod to sit behind Sandor and Lo. The door flicked shut. The fallen log and the doorway in the cliff fell and vanished. With no motion I felt, we were again out in open space, the Sun so dazzling that we saw no stars.
Moving as the Earth turned, the station hung stationary over Akyar, which was too far for us to see. Suddenly only a mile or two ahead, it was a great silver wheel slowly rotating, blazing where the Sun struck it, vanishing into a shadow on the stars. Sandor and Lo sat frowning at it, listening, I suppose, for radio voices. I looked back at Earth, searching for Akyar.
“No visible damage.” Sandor turned at last to us. “No minds we can sense. No hint of any life surviving.” He paused to glance at Lo. “We’re going inside.”
The pod slid to a dome that covered the axis of the wheel. I felt a gentle impact, and we were motionless against it.
“We’re suiting out,” he told us. “The air inside may be harmless. It may be lethal.”
They helped us seal our suits, and we went with them. The rear end of the pod was a small airlock that let us through, one by one. I found myself in silent darkness, afloat in free fall. Reaching around me for Pepe or Sandor or anything at all, I found nothing I could touch.
Cut off from light or sound, from all sensation, I felt helpless as a bug on a pin. A wave of utter panic struck me. I wanted to call out, to hear a human voice, but my trembling fingers failed to find the button for the helmet radio. I was all alone, drowning in the silence and darkness and death of the station, calling myself a fool and a coward . . . till lights came on.
At first they were only dim and unfamiliar symbols, burning faintly through the blackness, but they let me breathe again. I found a shadow near me, Pepe’s shoulder when I reached to touch it. Stronger lights rose to fill a vast empty cylinder. Glowing cords ran from us to points about the walls. We hung there for a time, seeing no motion, hearing no sound.
“Nothing,” Sandor muttered. “No damage. No sign of accident or violence. Nothing to show what the killer was. Let’s get out to the rim.”
He caught a bright green cord that pulled him away. Lo and I followed. It brought us to a closed door in the cylinder’s side wall. It opened when Sandor glanced at a green symbol. I followed into a tiny chamber that tipped and lurched to give us weight as it dropped toward the rim. It stopped, and we stepped out into an endless corridor that curved up ahead of us and behind, a circular tunnel that ran all the way around the rim.
“¡La calle mayor!” Pepe’s spirits were higher than mine. “Main street.”
It was the single street of a little city in space. Signs along it began to flicker and flash with dancing characters in an alphabet I had never seen. Sandor and Lo led us on. Centrifugal gravity was an odd experience. Though the pavement always rose ahead, we never had to climb. The great wheel of the station seemed to roll as we walked, pavement always level underfoot.
Sandor and Lo ventured very warily forward, pausing and pausing again to study everything, saying nothing of whatever they concluded. Pepe and I followed nervously. I didn’t know what to expect. Battle debris? Dead bodies? Alien monsters?
We discovered no bodies, saw no life or motion. The pavement was bare and clean. We passed a dead machine that Sandor called a street sweeper. Dead, he said, because its power had failed. He stopped at a closed door. Symbols on it shone bright green when he looked at them.
“The captain’s office,” Lo told us. “The door says he is in.”
It slid open. We followed them into what might almost have been the reception room of an office on old Earth, furnished with seats along the walls and a wide desk facing us, all made of something that looked like painted metal or pale green plastic. The only color was a glitter of diamond beads on the rim of a long golden bowl on a little table. It must have held an ornamental plant. Dead earth filled it now, and dead leaves littered the table.
Lo and Sandor explored the room, shook their heads, opened an inside door. The room beyond held four empty chairs, behind four empty desks. I saw no books or papers I could recognize, no office machines or files, but a big black globe hung over each desk. One of them glowed when Lo looked into it. Peering past her, I looked into another office room, with another empty chair behind another empty desk.
Pepe reached to touch the globe, and his hand went through it.
“A holographic contact device,” Lo told us. “Still connected to an office down in Akyar. Nobody there.”
Sandor opened another door and stopped to stare. Pressing after him, we stopped and retreated. A dozen people had been seated around a long conference table, though not at any business meeting. The table was covered with dishes, empty cups and glasses, oddshaped forks and spoons, gem-bright bottles, bowls filled with dusty fragments of what must have been food.
“¡Una fiesta!” Pepe murmured. “I think they died muy contentos.”
“Whatever hit them,” Sandor said, “it must have been sudden.”
Men and women, they had belonged to his fine-boned and graceful race, but they were not handsome now. They had dried to mummies, the flesh brown and shriveled, black empty sockets in empty skulls staring blindly across the table at the other empty skulls. I felt grateful for my helmet. The odor must have been overwhelming.
“¡Los pobres!” Pepe crossed himself. “I hope they got to heaven.”
3.
Mona called from Earth.
“She and Casey have reached Akyar,” Sandor told us. “On the way, they flew north over the cities along the American coast and south again over Europe and the Mediterranean. Plants and animals seemed abundant, but the cities—” Lips set hard, he seemed to shrink into himself. “All tumbled into rubble and grown over with forest. They heard no radio, saw no open roads, no lights at night, nothing in motion.”
Silent for a moment, he shrugged and went on.
“They’ve landed in an open park near the Crown. That’s the Nexus building. There’s life there, Mona says, monkeys in the trees and birds overhead. Most of the city fell into ruin long ago, but she says the Crown building appears to be intact, with no damage visible. They are leaving the pod. She wants to get inside if she can. They are out of touch till they get back to the radio in the pod. We’ll wait here till she calls again.”
We waited forever.
With Earth seeming stationary under us, time seemed to stop. We had no days or nights. Sandor and Lo spent endless times aboard the satellite, searching for clues they never seemed to find. Once I went back aboard with them, but all their talk was silent and I made nothing of anything I saw. I felt shut in, depressed by the strangeness and darkness of the station, the presence of too much death.
I preferred the stars, the illusion that we were floating free in open space, and Pepe’s familiar company. Life in the pod was easy enough, so long as we could forget the dark riddles around us. There was food in the lockers, little brown cubes that water expanded into something I learned to eat. The seats reclined when we wanted to sleep.
Empty time on our hands, we watched the Moon’s deliberate creep around the Earth, the sun’s slow creep across the face. Though Tycho and the station were too far to see, I found myself grieving for Tanya and the others we had left there, alive and well when we left them but surely dead centuries ago. Or had they been all been cloned again, and us with them, when the computer saw that Earth was dead?
We watched the monsoon clear over Africa and waited for whatever Lo and Sandor might discover. Though they seldom slept, they came back to the pod now and then to eat and rest and try again to reach Mona. She never answered. Pepe urged Sandor to follow them to Akyar, to help if they were in trouble.
“They expected trouble.” Frowning, Sandor shook his head. “That’s why we separated. To double our chances. And we still have work to do here. We’re confirming a date for the disaster. Whatever happened, it was a bit over two hundred forty Earth years ago.
“It certainly was not the Sagittarian pathogen, which was carried by interstellar travel and killed all organic life. We’ve read the records in the operations section here. Interstellar craft and Earth shuttles were still arriving and departing in a very normal way till that last moment.”
His elfish face twisted as if with pain.
“We entered the room of an operations clerk who had just returned from a vacation on Earth. She had bought gifts for her friends. A neat little model of the prehistoric rocket craft from Tycho Station. A toy elephant still able to spread its ears, trumpet, and charge across a table top. Holo cubes of life in motion around the restored Taj Mahal and the Parthenon. All still wrapped and labeled with names, but never delivered.”
With no time of our own, we counted days by the sunlight that marched and marched again over motionless Africa beneath us. Thirteen had passed before Sandor got a call from Earth.
“They’re safe.” His thin-chinned face had lit. “Back in their own pod. Ready to tell us what kept them so long.”
Gliding down to Africa, we found Kilimanjaro grown taller since the great impact, a new caldera at the summit filled with snow. A chain of narrow lakes now filled the long valley of the Great Rift, stretched deeper as the continent was tom apart. Akyar stood east of the Rift, on the high plain that sloped toward the Indian Ocean. Seen from the air, the city made a target pattern, a bull’s eye surrounded by circular streets cut into blocks by wide radiant boulevards.
