by Mike Ashley
Pepe's robot-father taught him the multiplication tables and rocket engineering and trained him to box. The boxing was to make him quick with his wits and quick on his feet.
"You'll need all that," he said, "when you get to Earth."
Pepe liked to compete. He was always wanting to work out with Arne and me. He beat me till I'd had enough. Arne was big enough to knock him across the centrifuge, but he kept coming back for more.
Tanya's robot-mother taught her how to care for a baby-sized doll, taught her biology and the genetics she might need for terra-forming Earth. Working in the maternity lab, she learned to clone frogs and dissect them, but she refused to dissect any kind of cat.
Arne's robot-father helped him to learn to walk, taught him the geology terraforming science. His first experimental project was a colony of cloned ants in a glass-walled farm.
"We can't exist alone," his clone father told him. "We evolved as part of a biocosm. In the cryonic vault, we have seed and spores and cells and embryos to help you rebuild it."
In the nursery and the playroom while we were small, later in the classroom and the gym, we learned to love the robots. They loved us as well as robots could. They were immortal. Sometimes I envied them.
I felt sad for our parents and their Earth, dead a hundred thousand or perhaps a million years. The robots couldn't say how long. They had been awakened only when the computer found Earth once more warm enough for life.
We saw them only in their images, speaking to us from the holo tanks. My own holo father, when he was my teacher, appeared as a tall slim man in a dark suit, wearing a narrow black mustache. Counting pushups when I worked out in the centrifuge, he looked younger and wore a red sweatsuit and no mustache. More relaxed at times when he talked of his wife and their home and their work together, he was in a purple dressing gown. Lecturing from the tank, he sometimes waved an empty pipe.
He tried to teach me the art of history.
"I was doing books and scripts about the project before the impact," he said. "You're to carry on the story I began. That will be important to whoever follows us."
Except for the gold plate on her flat chest, Tanya's robot-mother looked like all the other robots, but her holo mother was tall and beautiful, not flat-chested at all. She had bright grey-green eyes and thick black hair that fell to her waist when she left it free.
In the classroom tank, teaching us biology, she wore a white lab jacket. In the gym tank, teaching us to dance, she was lovely in a long black gown. Down at the pool on the bottom level, she appeared in a red swimsuit she used to wear into my dreams. There was no real piano, but she sometimes played a grand piano in the tank, singing songs she had written from her memories of life and love on Earth.
Tanya grew up as tall as she was, with the same bright greenish eyes and sleek black hair. She learned to sing the same songs in the same rich voice. We all loved her, or all of us but Dian, who never seemed to care if anybody loved her.
Dian's holo mother, Dr Diana Lazard, was smaller than Tanya's, with a chest as flat as the grey name-plate on her robot. She wore dark glasses that made her eyes hard to see. Her hair was a red-gold color that might have been beautiful if she'd let it grow longer, but she kept it short and commonly hid it under a tight black tam. She taught Dian French and Russian and the histories of literature and art, and showed the rest of us nearly all we ever knew about the old Earth.
"Knowledge. Art. Culture." Her everyday voice was dry and flat, but it could ring when she spoke of those treasures and her fear they would be forever lost. "They matter more than anything."
In her classroom, we put on VR headsets that let her guide us over the world that had been. In a virtual airplane, we flew over the white-spired Himalayas and dived down to the river that had carved out the Grand Canyon and crossed Antarctica to the ice desert at the pole. We saw the pyramids and the Acropolis and the newer Sky Needle. She guided us through the Hermitage and the Louvre and the Prado. She wanted all of us to love them, and all lost Earth.
Dian did. Growing up in her mother's image, she cut her hair just as short and kept it under the same black tam and wore the same dark glasses.
If she cared for anybody, it was Arne.
His clone father, Dr Linder, had been a muscular giant whose athletic scholarships had paid his way to degrees in physics and geology. Just as big and just as smart, Arne ran every day on the treadmill in the centrifuge. He learned everything our parents taught and wore the VR gear to tour the lost world with Dian and played chess with her. Perhaps they made love; I never knew.
We had no children. As much as most of us might have wanted them, they were not in DeFalco's plan. The maternity lab, as Tanya's mother explained, was only for clones. The robots gave us contraceptives when we needed them.
Tanya did. Our biologist, she understood sex and enjoyed it. So did Pepe. From their teens, they were always together, never hiding their affection. In spite of Pepe, however, Tanya was generous to me.
Once, dancing with her in the gym, I was so overcome with her scent and her voice and the feel of her lithe body in my arms that I whispered a confession. With Pepe glaring after us, she led me out of the room and up to the dome.
The Earth was new, a long curve of red fire slashed across the black and soundless night, lighting the dead moonscape to a ghostly pink. In the dimness of the dome, she stripped to reveal her enchantment, stripped me while I stood trembling with a dazed elation.
In the Moon's mild gravity, we needed no bed. She laughed at my ignorance and proceeded to teach me. Expert at it, she seemed to relish the lesson as keenly as I did. We were a long time there, the dance over and only the robots awake when we went back down. Kissing me a long goodnight that I shall never forget, she whispered that with practice I might be better than Pepe. Sadly for me, however, it never happened again.
She must have given Pepe some consolation, because he held me no grudge. Afterward, in fact, he seemed more amiable than ever, perhaps because of our shared devotion. He got on less well with Arne, who played his endless chess with Dian and roamed the old Earth in his VR cap to study DeFalco's plan for restoring the planet. He wanted to be our leader. That leader, of course, should have been DeFalco's clone, but the robot with his name on the white plate stood dead in its corner of the stock room, grey beneath millennia of Moon dust.
The year we were twenty-five, our robot parents gathered us into the gym. We found our gene parents already there in the big holo tank, all in their most formal images and looking very serious.
"The time has come for your own flight to Earth." My father spoke for them. "Your training is complete. Remote sensors show the ice age is over. The robots have fueled the two-place Moon jumper and loaded it with seed pellets. Two of you can go, taking off when you are ready."
"I am." Glancing at Tanya, Pepe lifted his voice. "Today, if we can."
"You will be the pilot." My father smiled and turned to Arne. "Linder, you're the trained terraformer. You will go to disperse the seed."
Flushing pink, Arne shook his head.
4
Arne stood shaking his head, scowling at our parents in the holo tank. Dian stepped to his side and slid her arm around him.
"Damn DeFalco!" His lip jutted defiantly. "Damn his crazy plan! It doesn't fit the facts. The asteroid was bigger than he ever imagined. It sterilized the planet and shattered a lot of the crust. It's still recovering, the ice caps receding, but there's still alarming seismic instability. I think we ought to let it wait for another generation."
"Arne!" Tanya shook her head in pained reproof. "Its albedo says it's warm enough. Ready for us now."
"If you believe albedos."
Our holo parents stood frozen in the tank, their eyes fixed on Arne as if the master computer had never been programmed for such a rebellion, but Tanya made a face at him.
"Arny Barny!" Mocking him, her voice turned shrill as it was when she was three. "Under all the bluff, you've always been a fraidy cat. Or are
you just a coward?"
"Please, Tammy." Pepe touched her arm. "We're all grown up." He turned very soberly to Arne. "And we can't forget why Dr DeFalco put us here."
"DeFalco's dead."
"Given time, we'll all be dead. And dead again." Pepe shrugged. "But really we don't have to care. We can always be replaced."
"Three cheers for Cal DeFalco!" Arne had flushed with emotion, but he shook his head at Tanya with a sort of forced deliberation. "You call me a coward. I'd say prudent. I know geology and the science of terraforming. I've spent thousands of hours surveying the Earth with telescopes and spectroscopes and radar, studying oceans and floodplains and lowlands.
"And I've found nowhere fit for life. The seas are still contaminated with heavy metals from the asteroid, the rivers still leaching more lethal stuff off the continents. We'd find the atmosphere unbreathable. Oxygen depleted.
Carbon dioxide enough to kill you. Sulfur dioxide from constant new eruptions. Climates too severe to let life take root anywhere. If we've got to make some crazy effort in spite of all the odds, at least let's wait for another ten or twenty years—"
"Wait for what?" Tanya cut in more sharply. "If an ice age wasn't long enough to cleanse the planet, what kind of miracle do you expect in ten or twenty years?"
"We can gather data." Arne dropped his voice, appealing to reason. "We can update the plan to fit the Earth as we expect it to be in ten or 20,000 years. We can train for our own mission, if we must finally undertake it."
"We've trained." Pepe waited for Tanya to nod. "We've studied. We're as ready as we'll ever be. We're going. I say now."
"Not me." Arne hugged Dian to him, and she smiled into his face. "Not us."
"We'll miss you." Pepe shrugged and turned to me. "How about it, Dunk?"
I gulped and caught my breath to say okay, but Tanya had already clutched his arm. "I'm the biologist. I understand the problems. I've found oxygen masks ready for us in the stock room. Just take me down. I know how to sow the seed."
They took off together, Pepe flying the space plane, Tanya filing radio reports as they surveyed the Earth from low orbit. She described the shrunken ice caps, the high sea levels, the shifted shorelines that made familiar features hard to recognize.
"We need soil where seed can grow," she said. "Hard to pinpoint from space if it does exist at all. Rocks do crumble into silt, but the rains are scouring most of that into the sea for lack of roots to hold it. We'll try to seed from orbit, but I want to land for a closer look."
Dian asked them to look for any relics of human civilization.
"Relics?" Tanya was sarcastic. "Ice and time have erased the great pyramids. The big dams. The Great Wall of China. Everything large enough to look for."
"No surprise," Arne muttered. "The impact has remade the Earth, but not for us."
"Our job." Pepe's voice. "To make it fit."
"A brand-new world!" Tanya's irony was gone. "Waiting for the spark of life."
On the mike, Arne had technical questions about spectrometer readings of solar radiation reflected from the surface and refracted through the atmosphere, questions about polar ice, about air and ocean circulation. Data, he said, that we ought to record for the next generation.
"We're here to replant the planet." Tanya grew impatient. "And too low over the equator to see atmosphere or ocean circulation patterns. Heavy clouds hide most of the surface. We'll need the radar to search for a landing site."
Arne never said he wished he had gone down with them, but he kept on with his questions till I thought he felt guilty.
Dropping into an orbit that grazed the atmosphere, they sowed the planet with life-bombs, heat-shielded cylinders loaded with seed pellets. Clearing weather over east Africa revealed a narrow sea in the Great Rift Valley, which had deepened and opened wider.
Tanya wanted to land there.
"The most likely spot we've seen. It should be warm and wet enough. The water looks blue, probably fresh, with no great pollution. Besides, it happens to be near where Homo sapiens evolved. A symbolic spot for a second creation, though Pepe says I'm crazy to think about it.
"He says our job is already done. We've scattered seed over every continent and dropped algae bombs into all the major oceans. He says nature can take care of the rest, but I'm the biologist. I want soil and air and water samples to save for the next generation.
"Arne ought to be here." She was serious, with no sarcasm. "He's the terraformer, more expert than we are. He's missing the thrill of his life."
Elation bubbled in her voice.
"We feel like gods. Descending to the dead world with the fire of life. Pepe says we ought to head back to the Moon while we can, but I won't - I can't - give up the actual landing."
Beginning the final descent on the other side of Earth, they were out of contact while I bit my nails for an hour.
"Down safe!" She was exuberant when we heard her again. "Pepe set us down on the west shore of this Kenyan sea. A splendid day with a high sun and a great view across a neck of the water to a wall of dark cliffs and the slopes of a new volcanic mountain almost as tall as Kilimanjaro. A tower of smoke is climbing out of the cone. The sky above us is blue as the sea, though maybe not for long. I see a storm cloud rising in the west."
She was silent for a moment.
"Another thing - a very odd thing.
Landing on its tail, the plane stands tall. From the cockpit we can see far out across the sea. Most of it calm, there's an odd little patch of whitecaps. Odd because they're moving toward us, with no sign of wind anywhere else. "I can make out—" Her voice broke off. I heard the quick catch of her breath and Pepe's muffled exclamation.
"Those whitecaps!" Her voice came back, lifted sharply. "Not whitecaps at all. They're something - something alive!"
She must have moved away from the microphone. Her voice faded, though I made out a few words of Pepe's.
"...impossible...nothing green, no photosynthesis, no energy for our kind of life...we've got to know..."
I caught no more till at last Tanya was back at the mike.
"Something swimming!" Her voice was quick and breathless. "Swimming at the surface. We can't see much except the splashing, but it must have descended from something that survived the impact. Pepe doubts that any large creature could live with so little oxygen, but anaerobic life did evolve on the old ocean floors. The black plumes, the giant tube worms, the bacteria that fed them—"
I heard Pepe's muted voice. The mike clicked, went dead, stayed dead while Dian and Arne came up to listen with me.
"Something has cut them off!" Dian shudderend. "An attack by those swimming things?"
"No way to know, but I did try to warn them." Arne must have repeated that a dozen times as the hours went by. "The planet simply isn't ready for us. It may never be."
In the hangars we had a dozen spare space planes that had ferried freight or workmen to the Moon. I suggested that we should think of a rescue flight.
"We'd be fools to go." Arne shook his head. "If they need help, they need it now, not next week. Our duty is to stay here, gather the data we can, record it for a generation that may have a better chance."
"I'm afraid," Dian whispered. "I wish—"
"Wish for what?" Arne snapped. "There's nothing we can do. Nothing but wait."
We waited forever, till the mike clicked at last and we heard Pepe.
"Navarro here, on board alone. Tanya's been off the plane for hours. In her breathing mask, collecting whatever she can. I've begged her to come back before her air runs out, but she's fascinated with those swimmers. We watched one crawling up out of the water. Something like a red octopus, though she says it looks no kin to any octopus that ever existed before the impact. A mass of thick, blood-red coils. It splayed itself on the beach and lay still in the sun.
"She wondered if it might have some kind of photosynthetic symbiote in its blood. Something red instead of green, that feeds it on solar energy. I don't see any way for he
r to tell, but she's still out there with her binoculars and her video and her sample bucket.
"I've begged her to get back with what she has, but she always needs a few more minutes. She keeps working towards the beach. The red things are amphibians, she says. A dozen of them out there now. An unexpected life form that she thinks could be a problem later. Leave that for later, I told her, but she keeps slogging on. The beach is mud, silt washed down off the hills in the west. She says the things are digging in it, maybe for something they eat. She wants to see. "But now—"
His voice lifted and stopped while he must have been watching. I heard no more till it came back, still begging her. She had gone too far. The mud was deeper than it looked. Her air had run low. She could watch the creatures from the cockpit till she knew them better. Faintly, I caught her answer.
"Just one more minute."
For a long-seeming time I heard nothing at all.
'"One more minute.' He echoed her words.
"It's close to night. That storm's rolling down on us. The wind's getting up. A few raindrops already - Stop, Tanny! Stop!" His voice went high. "Mind the mud."
"Give me just another minute." Her radio voice, so faint I hardly heard it. "These creatures - they're a new evolution. We've got to know what they are. Never mind the risk."
"I mind it," he called again to her. "Tanny, please—"
He stopped to hear something from her that I failed to catch. For a time he was silent again, except for the rush of his rapid breath.
"Navarro again." His voice was back, bitterly resigned. "She can't resist those red monsters. At first they sprawled flat, soaking up the sun, but now they're moving. One jumped at another. The other dodged and sprang to meet it. Now-"
He stopped to watch and shout another warning.
"The things are really quite a show. They look legless, maybe boneless, but amazingly active and quick. A riddle, if they need no oxygen. But I wish—" He yelled again, and waited. "They're a crazy tangle of long red tentacles roiling the mud. Fighting? Mating? She has to know. Binoculars now, then the camera. She's too close. Getting data, but I don't like this mud. Maybe bottomless, with no plant life to hold it. Her feet are sinking in it. She's stumbling, struggling—
