Jack Williamson, page 20
“They were sentient,” Casey said. “Sentient and all of them kin. I think they were all a single conscious being. Even the ground cover somehow belonged to it. If you won’t call me crazy, I’d say it died of grief.”
Tramping on, we came through a stand of trees where leaves still hung, though yellowed and bleached. Farther, we climbed a rise and came out of that dead silence into a murmur of life. The ground was still covered with a soft, mosslike, blue-green carpet, the high canopy still bright with live and varied color. Though there was no wind, I heard a faint sighing in the treetops and then a note of song, high and faint and far away.
“They know us.” Casey stopped. “They remember Leo.”
We stood there a long time, listening. The song swelled louder till it filled the forest, a changing melody I had never heard, somehow touching me with emotions I had never felt. I saw rapture on Casey’s upturned face, as if it moved him deeply. Fading finally into silence, it left me with a painful ache of emptiness and loss.
He turned solemnly to me.
“They know Mona,” he whispered. “They are reaching to find her. If we wait, they will try to guide her.”
We waited. When I asked how long she would be on the way, he shrugged and said the trees had no language of words or numbers, no human sense of time. Later in the day they sang again, still with no meaning I could catch though sometimes I caught a sense of aching sorrow. We drained the canteen and finished our ration packs. When darkness began to thicken, we went back a little way to gather armfuls of the great dry leaves to make a bed. The voice of the trees had faded into a stillness that seemed hushed with expectation. I listened uneasily for anything, for Mona’s voice, the boom of the cannon on the flatcar, the thunder of the plane lifting off without us. I heard nothing at all.
All next day we waited. The trees sang again, sometimes with slow and solemn rhythms that pierced me with wordless pangs of loss and death and left my mind filled with sharpened images of the desolate desert of dead stumps and the fires that had charred the land. Yet toward the end they puzzled me with a thunderous chorus that seemed to echo a solemn triumph.
“They know about the asteroid,” Casey said. “Perhaps they sensed it. Perhaps Mona told them. They are grieving for themselves and their failure here, but not for us or the future of Earth. They have felt the evil of the black masters and sensed a sort of justice in their coming destruction. Happy with that, they will live on in the greater being that set them here. Though the loss is painful to them, they can accept death as the dark side of life. They expect the future of Earth to be better than its past.”
That second night was endless. I heard no wind, no voice from the trees, yet sometimes I thought I felt a ghostly presence in the faint moonlight that filtered though their branches, something so elusive that it vanished when I tried to grasp it. Listening in vain for any sound at all, I dozed and woke to a sad conviction that we were insane, trusting our lives to the imagined mind of a dying forest.
“It’s the last day,” I reminded Casey when he woke. “If Pepe and Laura still have the plane, they can’t afford to wait till the impact kills them. Shouldn’t we get back?”
He got to his feet, stretching the stiffness out of his bones.
“Mona’s on her way,” he insisted. “We have till midnight.”
That brought me small comfort, but I waited with him and felt a little relieved when I heard a soothing crooning from the trees and then the plop of something falling. He walked away and came back with two of the big juice-filled fruits that I recalled from our lives here. Their tangy sweetness eased my thirst and hunger, but the day seemed a century. Daylight was fading from the treetops when we heard a distant shout.
Casey answered, and a little band of ragged, wildly bearded men emerged from the thickening dusk. They carried crudely forged swords, rough lances, a few stolen military weapons. One had his arm in a blood-clotted sling, another was stumbling on a broken branch. Two or three were black clones, dirty headbands hiding the scars where their bugs had been. Cautious of us, they stopped under a tree some distance off.
“Casey?” A hoarse and anxious voice. A woman’s. “Is it you?”
“Mona!” Casey yelled. “Thank God! Or thank the trees.”
Her companions stared at us for a moment and melted back into the forest.
She limped on toward us. In tattered fragments of a jacket and jeans, she was drawn thin, dark with soot and dried blood, her filthy hair jaggedly clipped. Yet her white teeth flashed in the dusk with a smile as bright as it had been on the Moon.
She hugged me briefly before Casey took her in his arms. With no time for talk, we helped her back through the dying trees and the dead into open moonlight. The spaceplane stood where we had left it, a thin silver pillar on the stark waste of stumps. Before we reached the stair I heard a faint and far-off chant from the trees behind us and thought I caught a monody of fond farewell.
Laura opened the door to let us in. Grinning with relief, Pepe shook our hands, sealed the door, tumbled into the pilot’s seat. The jets bellowed. The ship shuddered. We lifted toward the Moon. When we were safely aloft, I asked Laura what had become of the regency force.
“The officer was after the plane,” she said. “He offered to let us go free if we surrendered it intact. He didn’t want to believe me when I tried to tell him why he didn’t need it. Pepe invited him aboard and let him call the Moon. The answer convinced him. He got back on his train and went back the way he had come.”
Pepe glanced at his watch and turned back from the instruments.
“We’re on our way.” He nodded at Laura, with a grim little grin. “Time enough left to get us well clear of the ejecta and give us a good view of the impact from high orbit.” He made a wry face at me. “A black chapter, Dunk, but we’ll be alive to try again.”
Casey and Mona sat close together on the narrow rear seat, holding hands. He murmured something to her and leaned against the window to look back down at the shrinking Earth. Night had drowned the wasted forest behind us, but over the Pacific white reefs of cloud were still bright with sun. He stared a long time before he sighed and turned again to Mona.
“Our colonists, once our last best hope.” Sadly, he shook his head. “Only hours left, if they knew. A dreadful end, too dreadful to imagine. But yet—” His lips set hard. “We couldn’t help. And there’s a terrible justice in it. They had gone too far wrong.”
PART FOUR
The Ultimate Earth
27
We loved Uncle Pen. We all called him that, though the name he gave us was something like Sandor Pen, spoken with an accent we never learned to imitate. Though the robots and our holo parents kept us busy with our lessons and our chores and our workouts in the big centrifuge, life was dull in our narrow quarters. His visits were our best excitement.
He never told us when he was coming. We used to watch for him, looking from the high dome on the Tycho rim, down across the field the digging machines had leveled. Standing huge on the edge of it, they were dark monsters out of space, casting long black shadows across the gray waste of rocks and dust and crater pits.
His visit on our seventh birthday was a wonderful surprise. Tanya saw him landing and called us up to the dome. His ship was a bright teardrop, shining in the black shadow of a gigantic metal insect. He jumped out of it in a sleek silvery suit that fit like his skin. We waited at the air lock to watch him peel it off. He was a small lean man, who looked graceful as a girl but still very strong. Even his body was exciting to see, though Dian ran and hid because he looked so strange.
Naked, he had a light golden tan that darkened in the sunlit dome and faded when he went below. His face was a narrow heart shape, his brown eyes enormous. He required no clothing, he had always told us, because his sex organs were internal.
He called Dian when he missed her, and she crept back to share the gifts he had brought from Earth. There were sweet fruits we had never tasted, strange toys, stranger games that he had to show us how to play. For Tanya and Dian there were dolls that sang strange songs in voices we couldn’t understand and played loud music on tiny instruments we had never heard.
The best part was just the visit with him in the dome. Pepe and Casey had eager questions about life on the new Earth. Were there cities? Wild animals? Alien creatures? Did people live in houses, or underground in tunnels like ours? What did he do for a living? Did he have a wife? Children like us?
He wouldn’t tell us much. Earth, he said, had changed since our parents knew it. It was now so different that he wouldn’t know where to begin. He let us take turns to see it through the big telescope. Later, he promised, if he could find space gear for us, he would take us up to orbit the Moon and loop toward it for a closer look. Now, however, he was working to learn all he could about the old Earth, the way it had been before the last great impacts.
He showed it to us in the holo tanks and the old paper books, back when it still had white ice caps over the poles and bare brown deserts on the continents. The new Earth had no deserts and no ice. Under the bright cloud spirals, the land was green where the sun struck it, all the way over the poles. It looked so wonderful that Casey and Pepe begged him to take us back with him to let us see it for ourselves.
“I’m sorry.” He shook his head, which was covered with short gold-brown fur. “Terribly sorry, but you can’t even think of a trip to Earth.”
We were looking from the dome. The mysterious Earth stood high in the black north, where it always stood. Low in the west, the slow sun blazed hot on the new mountains the machines had piled up around the field, and filled the craters with ink.
Dian had learned to trust Uncle Pen. She sat on his knee, gazing up in adoration at his face. Tanya stood behind him, playing a little game. She held her hand against his back to bleach the golden tan, and took it away to watch the sun erase the print.
Looking hurt, Casey asked why we couldn’t think of a trip to Earth.
“You aren’t like me.” That was very true. Casey has a wide black face with narrow Chinese eyes and straight black hair. “And you belong right here.”
“I don’t look like anybody.” Casey shrugged. “Or belong to anybody.”
“But you do belong here at the station.” Uncle Pen was gently patient. “You were cloned for your job here, to watch the sky for any danger to Earth and restore its life in case of any danger.”
“We’ve finished that.” Casey looked at me. “Tell him, Dunk.”
My holo father is Duncan Yare. The master computer that runs the station often speaks with his voice. He had told us how we had been cloned again and again from the cells our live parents had left in the cryostat.
“Sir, that’s true.” I felt a little afraid of Uncle Pen, but proud of all we had done. “My holo father says the big impacts killed Earth and killed it again. He says we have always brought it back to life.” My throat felt dry. I had to gulp, but I went on. “If Earth’s alive now, that’s because of us.”
“True. Very true.” He nodded, with an odd little smile. “But perhaps you don’t know that your little Moon has suffered a heavy impact of its own. If you are now alive, you owe your lives to us.”
We all stared at him.
“The digging machines?” Casey was nodding. “I’ve watched them and wondered why they were here. When did the impact happen?”
“Quién sabe?” He shrugged at Pepe, imitating the gesture and the voice Pepe had learned from his holo father. “It was long ago. Perhaps a hundred thousand years, perhaps a million. I haven’t found a clue.”
“Something hit the station?”
“A narrow miss.” Uncle Pen nodded at the great dark pit in the crater rim just west of us. “The ejecta smashed the dome and buried everything. The station was lost and almost forgotten. Only a myth till I happened on it.”
“The diggers?” Casey turned to stare down at the landing field where Uncle Pen had left his flyer in the shadows of those great machines and the mountains they had built. “How did you know where to dig?”
“The power plant was still running,” Uncle Pen said. “Keeping the computer alive. I was able to detect its metal shielding and then its radiation.”
“We thank you.” Pepe came gravely to shake his hand. “I’m glad to be alive.”
“So am I,” Casey said. “If I can get to Earth.” He saw Uncle Pen beginning to shake his head, and went on quickly, “Tell us what you know about the last impact and how we came down to terraform the Earth again that last time.”
“I don’t know what you did.”
“We’ve seen the difference,” Casey said. “The land is all green now, with no deserts or ice.”
“Certainly it has been transformed.” Nodding, Uncle Pen stopped to smile at Tanya while she left her game with the sun on his back and came to sit cross-legged at his feet. “Ages ago. But our historians are convinced that we’ve done much more ourselves.”
“You did?” Casey was disappointed and a little doubtful. “How?”
“They believe we removed undersea ledges and widened straits to change the ocean circulation. We diverted rivers to fill new lakes and water the deserts, changing atmospheric circulation. We engineered new life-forms to fit new climatic patterns.”
“If Earth was dead, we must have put you there.”
“Of course,” Uncle Pen said. “Excavating the station, I was looking for answers I never found, but authorities agree that the second impact was more severe than the first. It annihilated life and even destroyed most geologic records of it. The story I recovered here was cut short by the lunar impact, but it does confirm that you were replanting the planet and landing new colonists.”
Pepe had gone to stand at the edge of the dome, looking down at the monster machines and Uncle Pen’s little ship, which was strangely different from the rocket spaceplanes we had seen in the old video holos. “Can it go to the other planets?”
“It can.” He nodded. “It can reach the planets of other suns.”
“Other stars!” Tanya’s eyes went wide, and Pepe asked, “How does it fly in space with no rocket engines?”
“It doesn’t,” he said. “It’s called a slipship. It slides around space, not through it.”
“The stars?” Tanya whispered. “You’ve been to other stars?”
“To the planets of other stars.” He nodded gravely. “I may go again, though I still have work to finish here. And space flight plays tricks that might surprise you. I could fly to our closest interstellar colony in an instant of my own time and come back in another instant, but twenty years would pass here while I was away.”
“I didn’t know.” Her eyes went wider still. “Your friends would all be old.”
“We don’t get old.”
She shrank away as if suddenly afraid of him. Pepe opened his mouth to ask something, and shut it without a word.
“Or die.” He chuckled at our startlement. “We’ve engineered ourselves, you see, more than we’ve engineered the Earth.”
Casey turned to look out across the shadowed craters at the huge globe of Earth, the green Americas blazing on the sunlit face, Europe and Africa only a shadow against the dark. He stood there a long time and came slowly back to stand in front of Uncle Pen.
“I’m going down there when I grow up.” His face hardened stubbornly. “No matter what you say.”
“Are you growing wings?” Uncle Pen laughed and reached a golden arm to pat him on the head. “If you didn’t know, the impact smashed your old rocket craft to junk.”
He drew quickly back.
“Really, my boy, you do belong here.” Seeing his hurt, Uncle Pen spoke more gently. “You were cloned for your job here at the station, to watch for danger to Earth, and to repair any harm that occurs. It’s a job that ought to make you proud.”
Pepe swallowed hard, but he kept his voice even. “Maybe so. But where’s any danger now? Why do you need us here on the Moon?”
Uncle Pen had an odd look. He took a long moment to answer.
“We are not aware of any actual threat from another impacting bolide. All the asteroids that used to approach Earth’s orbit have been diverted, most of them steered into the sun.”
“So?” Casey’s dark chin had a defiant jut. “Why did you want to dig us up?”
“For history.” Uncle Pen looked away from us, up at the huge, far-off Earth. “The resurfaced Earth had lost nearly every trace of our beginning. People tried to prove we had evolved on some other planet and migrated here to colonize the solar system. Tycho Station is proof that Earth is the actual mother world. Its excavation has been the work of my life.”
He turned back to us with a smile of satisfaction.
“Others may quarrel, but I found our roots here under the rubble. The true story, that even the skeptics will have to accept.”
“If that is the true story,” Casey asked, “who needs the station now?”
“Nobody, really.” He shrugged, with an odd little twist of his golden lips, and I thought he felt sorry for Casey. “If another disaster did strike the mother planet, which isn’t likely at all, it could be repeopled by the colonies.”
“So you dug us up for nothing?”
“Please try to understand.” Uncle Pen leaned and reached as if to hug him, but he shrank farther away. “The station was almost obliterated. Restoration has been a long and difficult task. We’ve often had to invent and improvise. We had to test the tissue cells still preserved in the cryostat, and build new equipment in the maternity lab.” He smiled down into Tanya’s face, which was beaming with devotion. “The tests have turned out well.”
“Maybe for you,” Casey muttered bitterly. “Not so well for us. Do you expect us to sit here till we die, waiting for nothing at all?”
Looking uncomfortable, Uncle Pen had nothing to say. He just reached down to lift Tanya up in his arms.
“I want to live,” Casey told him. “Any way I can.”
“Please, my dear boy, you must try to understand.” Patiently, Uncle Pen shook his golden head. “The station is a precious historic monument, our sole surviving relic of the early Earth and early man. You are part of it. I’m sorry if you take that for a misfortune, but there is certainly no place for you on Earth.”
