Aftermath a-1

by Charles Sheffield

  Treatment ended. Mother was informed by LaRona that she wanted to do some shopping and would come home later. I was not mentioned. It was a dull day in February. As we drove away from the clinic it was already close to dusk.

  Earlier in the day I had set our destination in the car’s AVC system. Someone older and more sophisticated would have been suspicious of the place to which the vehicle took us, a parking lot for an entertainment center open only during the summer months. LaRona was too happy and excited to notice. She babbled on about what she had seen earlier in the day. While I had been busy providing Mother with final — and, I suspect, futile — instructions for monitoring her own condition, LaRona had seen a human clone enter the clinic.

  I listened with half an ear, and looked around carefully to make sure that the place was deserted. It was a popular venue for illicit sexual liaisons, but today no other car was present. I surreptitiously reached into the door compartment on my left-hand side, where the killing spray was ready and waiting.

  At that crucial moment she asked, “Why is it more difficult to clone an organism from an adult than a fetal cell?”

  Every rational brain cell told me to proceed, to use the spray, to perform the collection process. I needed only ten clear minutes and all evidence would be hidden away. But she was touching on twin passions of mine, clones and telomeres. I could not resist. With the spray can sitting in my left hand, I explained. A clone developed from adult cells would be born with its telomeres already shortened. It would have a reduced life expectancy. But telomeres are rebuilt in an organism’s germ cells. Thus fetal cell clones are provided with long telomeres and gain a “fresh start.”

  She asked me two questions, both intelligent and searching. As I concluded my second answer, a police car drew up beside us. An officer appeared. He was black, very young. He politely asked me what we were doing in a deserted parking lot. I gave an honest answer. I was Dr. Oliver Guest, and I and my passenger were discussing problems of genetics. He nodded, but he said to LaRona, “How old are you, miss?”

  “I’m fourteen.” She was wearing the skimpy top and short skirt favored in her district.

  “Thank you.”

  He moved back to his car. Even then, for the briefest moment, I thought they might leave. They were just cruising, and I was respectably dressed. But I heard his words to his woman partner: “Disgusting old fucker. Even if she is a hooker, she’s still only a kid. People like him oughta have their balls cut off.” And, returning to me, “I’m afraid that I must ask you to come with me.”

  “My car—”

  “Your vehicle will not be moved or damaged.” He glanced down, wary for possible weapons, and saw the spray. “What is that in your hand, sir?”

  Use it on him, LaRona, and his partner? Impossible. I would botch any attempt. Unplanned violent action is alien to my nature.

  It was over, then and there. I knew it, even though I had told the exact truth and nothing was farther from my mind than sex with LaRona. But policemen are creatures of habit. They would inspect my car, from sheer routine. They would find everything, my whole collection kit.

  It was a tragedy. LaRona would have been a star, one of the crown jewels of my collection. It was not to be.

  She is presumably still alive. Thinking about her now, I wonder if she has achieved her ambition. She is almost twenty. Has that keen mind and fiery desire for knowledge lifted her from awful family circumstances, into formal medical studies? I am curious, but only mildly so. As I say, she is now close to twenty. Much too old. Even were we to meet, she would no longer be of interest to me.

  10

  The snowfall had dwindled to a few random flakes. A cold night breeze blew from the north, and the curious odor that it carried made the waiting woman wrinkle her nose in disgust.

  Muffled in a long black coat and with a black woolen scarf covering her face, she was sitting on the lower level of the great memorial. At the sound of footsteps she rose to place her back against the stone wall. Her gloved right hand slipped into her pocket.

  The man approached confidently and quickly, saying when he was still ten steps away, “It’s all right, Sarah. Don’t put a bullet through me.”

  She relaxed as soon as she heard his voice, and removed her hand from her pocket to show a wicked ten-inch blade. “Knife, not gun.”

  “Very wise. Most of the guns don’t work anyway.” Nick Lopez made a careful survey of their surroundings. As the woman had done, he sniffed the air. “Pretty rank up here. This is the first time I’ve been outside the Federal Enclave in over a week. Now I can see why.”

  The air carried multiple odors, burning wood and paper and plastic mingled with the sweet reek of animal putrefaction and decay.

  “It’s coming in from the north. I gather it’s much worse up there.” Sarah Mander moved forward and turned to ascend the steps. “Apparently martial law isn’t working worth a damn outside the Beltway. Good thing there are no media outlets. They’d be having a field day with the bodies and the burning.”

  “Still plenty of media types around, itching to do what they’ve always done. That’s one reason I felt I had to see you in a place without eyes and ears.”

  “I wondered why you dragged me out here.” Sarah Mander paused in the shadow of the great seated figure and stood staring up at it. “What you have to say had better be good. I didn’t enjoy the walk over, and I don’t like the idea of walking back. And this place is freezing.”

  “Then I’d better get right down to business.” Lopez moved closer. With his tall pompadour hairstyle he towered over the woman by nearly two feet. “You must be getting the same briefings on the House side as I hear in the Senate. How’s it look?”

  It was a question rather than the information that she wanted, but after a moment she nodded and said, “Four days ago I’d have sworn that this country was down and out. Power grid dead, information network destroyed, data bases vanished, no working infrastructure. Looting and rioting along the eastern seaboard, thousands freezing to death in Chicago and Minneapolis. Nothing much of Florida south of Orlando after the second hurricane, and lots of California wiped out by mud slides. Horrible. For a while I worried about outside attack, because all our weapons had turned to junk. Then I said to myself, who could possibly want our problems?”

  “I can add to your list. I’ve heard of starvation and cannibalism in the Dakotas, there’s nothing civilized in Houston or Kansas City after the second round of fires and floods, and tornadoes took out most of Oklahoma City. We’ve had it easy by comparison. But you said that was the way you felt four days ago. How about now?”

  “Now?” Sarah Mander paused, her gloved hand at her chin. “You know, I really think we’ll make it. We had running water for an hour this morning — no way you’d drink it, of course — and my staff reported a flicker of power for a few minutes in the electric grid. I heard people laughing in the Rayburn Building for the first time in weeks, and one of my aides actually used the words ’next year’ in a report.”

  “It’s the same on the Senate side.” Lopez took a step closer to the statue. “So things are looking up. Which brings me to the main point. How do you see our chances with what we’ve talked about for the past year?”

  Her laugh was humorless, muffled by her scarf. “Are you kidding? The country may recover, but our plan doesn’t have a prayer now. It’s the old story: in a time of crisis the power always swings back to the presidency. Any ideas of tilting control more our way died on February 9. We just didn’t know it then. You’d better not have dragged me out in the cold and dark to argue that point.”

  Nick Lopez stood by the base of the great statue. With his height and coloring and dark cloak, he was like a carved icon himself. He nodded slowly. “I agree with you. The supernova changed the game. We don’t have a chance.”

  “So why are we standing out here?” “Every problem is also an opportunity.” “Nick, do you mind? Save the platitudes for the public appearances.”

&nbs
p; “Sorry. Only, this time the cliché happens to be true. I realized it yesterday, when I was listening to the acting chief from Navy describing loss of naval capability. Apparently the only branch that’s working right is the submarines.”

  “I knew that. The deep subs weren’t touched.” “But while old Rumfries was droning on I decided that although we may be in deep shit, every other country in the world is a lot worse off. This may not be the right time for a power struggle between branches of our own government, but it’s one hell of a good time to show the rest of the world who’s boss.”

  “Still smarting over last year’s put-down at the Korean reception?”

  She saw his teeth flash in the gloom. “Me? Worried by some half-assed ignorant wog who treated me like a teaboy? No more than you were, by your Indonesian visit and the words of the honorable Mr. Sutan concerning the place of women.” He waited, watching her face change in the gloom, and at last added, “That was four years ago. Elephants and Sarah Mander. But I’m telling you, this could be payback time.”

  She was silent for half a minute, staring toward the city. New fires had broken out to the north, pillars of orange topped by dense black smoke that was blowing toward them. Finally she shook her head. “And I’m telling you, the President is more powerful than he’s ever been. Are you proposing to take on Saul Steinmetz?”

  “Not today, thank you. I don’t much like him, but he’s a tough son of a bitch. We don’t do this without Saul Steinmetz, Sarah. We do it with him, with presidential consent and cooperation.”

  “You mean we try to talk him into it?”

  “I mean exactly that. We pitch the idea of a Pax Americana — naturally, for the good of the rest of the world.”

  “But this country would have total domination. Nick, he’ll never go along with it.”

  “Are you sure? Look at it from the point of view of Saul Steinmetz. You made it all the way to the presidency. Where can you go next? Nowhere but down, writing your memoirs and opening libraries and sinking into senility — unless someone can point out some new goal, something to make you unique even among Presidents.”

  “Suppose he did bite on it. What’s to stop him forgetting who suggested the idea in the first place?”

  “It could happen. That’s our risk. It would be our job to find friends and recruits in the White House, just as an insurance policy. We should be able to do that.”

  “And our reward, if we succeed?”

  “Pretty much what we ask for. It’s not Steinmetz’s habit to be stingy with his friends. I’m sure we could find positions of power and influence — abroad or at home. It’s a new world out there, Sarah. We could probably do anything that we really want to.”

  “Anything?”

  He did not answer, but followed her as she walked forward to the north boundary of the monument. Together they stared toward the restless, crippled city.

  “I think so,” she said at last. Her eyes reflected the smoky, ruddy glow of the distant fires. “You’re right, it’s a whole new world out there. If not this, then what? So. Who’s going to make the call to the White House, you or me?”

  11

  So near and yet so far. Celine stared at the mottled globe of Earth, hanging in front of her and seemingly close enough to reach out and touch.

  The old Greeks had a word for it, just as they had a word for most things. It was hubris, an arrogance that defies the gods and invites disaster. According to Reza Armani, expedition mystic, in its journey to Mars the Schiaparelli had moved into the abode of the gods, the space between the planets; now its crew was to pay the penalty.

  The added irony was that they had all discussed this possibility. Over and over, on the way to Mars and on the surface itself, they had agreed that the fatal Gotcha! had to be the one you never expected; otherwise, you built contingency plans to deal with it. A thousand things might go wrong on the way to Mars, landing on Mars, exploring Mars, rising from the surface of Mars, and returning from Mars. You had to prepare for all of them and make the tough decisions ahead of time. Only when you were finally in Earth orbit, in the hands of a reentry system and personnel honed to perfection by ten thousand tries, could you at last relax and feel safe.

  Celine couldn’t blame the others. She had gone along with the argument. Who could imagine that the reentry system, that whole gorgeous and intricate assembly of people and techniques and hardware and software, might vanish in one flash of free electrons and electric field surge? The Schiaparelli itself had never, even in its designers’ wildest imaginings, been seen as a ship able to endure reentry through Earth’s thick atmosphere. It would disintegrate fifty miles up.

  “We have to make a decision pretty soon.” Zoe Nash was seated next to Celine, studying her own displays. “It’s a onetime choice. I think it will be an easy one, but we have to be sure. Ludwig?”

  “No change.” He was wearing an earphone and working a miniaturized control pad. To Celine, he looked more like a willowy blond elf than ever. The prospect of disaster was driving them all to their extremes. Zoe was more impatient and demanding. Wilmer was remote and thoughtful. Reza was increasingly strange, oscillating between the manic clown and the aloof mystic. Celine was not sure, but earlier in the day she thought Reza had been weeping. A bad sign, in a group whose time of real stress still lay ahead.

  So what had Celine become? Indecisive, probably, to the point where she could see impossible problems in doing anything at all.

  “I’m picking up only a few dozen signal sources from Earth,” Ludwig said. “Normally I would expect hundreds of thousands. All the signals are weak, and so far as I can tell with our onboard equipment they are low frequency and omnidirectional. I’d say they’re amateur radio signals. If we wait—”

  “What about signals from space sources?” Zoe cut him off in midsentence. The Schiaparelli’s largest’ scopes were trained on the big international space stations, ISS-1 and ISS-2, and their images were showing on her displays.

  “The high orbits are broadcasting as usual — I’m receiving regular signals from all the automated geosynchronous birds. My question is whether anyone down below is picking them up.”

  “Still nothing from the manned stations?”

  “Not a peep. No output from the polar orbiters, either.”

  “We have to assume the worst.” Zoe swiveled in her seat. “Anything in low orbit had its electronics wiped out by the EMP. Alta, give me a second opinion.”

  Alta was watching in glum silence. She had been studying the same images as Zoe. She took her time before she answered, while Zoe sat and fidgeted impatiently.

  “The hatches are invisible on both stations,” Alta said at last. She sounded to Celine like a robot, without hope or feelings. “Even at highest magnification, I can’t tell if they are open or closed. I see no sign of interior lights, but of course they might be turned off to conserve power. I don’t think the high data rate antennae are working. They seem to be pointing in random directions. I see two small single-stage orbiters in docking position at ISS-2, and none at ISS-1. That’s unusual. Maybe there were orbiters at ISS-1, there surely should be. But if they were secured electronically and not mechanically, after the gamma pulse they would have been released. They could be floating quite close to the station; a general sky scan to find them would take quite a time.”

  “Time we don’t have.” Zoe turned back to face the screens. “Assuming that the life-support systems failed two weeks ago and no one is presently alive on either station, the general condition of all systems must be deteriorating. We have to pick one and get over to it as fast as we can. I say we head for ISS-2. Any discussion?”

  A thirty-second silence followed. Celine found that in itself depressing. The crew of the Schiaparelli had been picked because they were bright, innovative, and opinionated. When no one could think of a second option that was a very bad sign.

  “One point,” Alta said at last, and Celine found her hopes rising. “This is not exactly discussion, but it
is something that you need to be aware of. Neither of the single-stage orbiters docked at ISS-2 is class three or better. Each one can carry only three people, four at a real pinch.”

  The others, without a word, turned and looked at Wilmer Oldfield. He frowned back at them. He out-massed the others by at least fifty percent.

  Zoe gave a barking laugh. “Starvation rations for Wilmer, until we’re down on Earth. However we arrange the groupings, we’ll have to split up and ride home in two parties. Anything else? If not, we’ll get this show on the road. Jenny. Trajectory and rendezvous?”

  “Computed and stored.” Jenny was like a computer herself, steady and meticulous and unemotional. “I allowed an arbitrary start time up to four hours from now.”

  “That’s ample. Alta. Confirmed configuration?”

  “I recommend we fly just Section Three over to ISS-2. That gives us more fuel for final maneuvering — but not enough to reach ISS-1 if we don’t like what we find.”

  “Understood. Any final questions before we go ahead? Yes, Reza, what is it?”

  “My specimens.” He was in his most agitated phase. “The Mars life-forms. I realize we have a strict mass limit—”

  “Forget it. No Mars samples. Just our bodies, and our personal effects.”

  “I refuse to accept that. These are small, they are light, and they are so valuable—”

  Zoe cut him off. “I asked for questions, not arguments. They are valuable samples, and indeed we put great effort into collecting them. We will take them with us to ISS-2. If we can create a safe environment for ’ them there, we will leave them until someone can come up from Earth and retrieve them.”

  “Suppose we can’t create a safe environment for them?”

  “That will be unfortunate. But, Reza, I assume that if it comes to saving you or saving the samples, it is no contest.”

  Reza paused for a long time. Celine thought he was about to get into a shouting match with Zoe. Jenny put a hand on his arm. He looked at her, and then again at Zoe. He cupped his chin and cheek in his hand in a classic pose. At last he said, “I’m thinking.”