Alyce was grinning, a humorless grimace, like a skull’s. “That’s Rabaul going up. Great timing.”
Elisha had gotten hold of the girl’s wrists and pushed her arms over her head.
Joan said quickly, “Come on, Elisha. You aren’t here for this.”
“Aren’t I?”
Scott said grimly, “If all you want is something to fuck, take me.”
“Oh, but there would be no point,” Elisha said. “It’s not the act but the symbolism, you see. This is the first time since the extinction of the Neandertals that there have been two distinct human species in the world.” He stared down at the girl. “Is it rape, if the act occurs between different species?”
The doors blew in.
There was screaming, running, the crackle of gunfire. Small black pellets were hurled through the open doors and burst. White smoke began to fill the air.
Joan looked for the terrorists, trying to count. Two of them had fallen when the doors were charged. Another two, running and firing, fell as she watched, suddenly turned into tumbling puppets. Most of her delegates were on the floor or cowering under the furniture. Two, three, four looked as if they might be hurt: She saw inert shapes in the smoke, splashes of bloodred in the gray murk.
A new ripple of pain passed over Joan’s abdomen.
Elisha stood before her. He was smiling. He had hold of a length of black cord that extended from his waistband.
At least Bex had been released; the girl, in the arms of her mother, was backing away.
“Elisha. You don’t have to die.”
His smile broadened. “All over the planet, five hundred of us are poised to make the same statement.”
Alyce half reached for him. “Don’t do it, for God’s sake—”
“You won’t be harmed,” he said. He pulled his balaclava back over his head. “I die as I lived. Faceless.”
Joan screamed, “Elisha!”
He tugged on the cord, as if starting a gasoline engine. There was a flash around his waist, a belt of transient light. Then the upper half of his body tipped away from the lower. As the pieces of him fell, neatly bisected, there was a stink of blood, the acid stench of stomach contents.
Alyce clung to Joan. “Oh, God, oh, God.”
The smoke was thickening, blinding, and Joan was coughing like a lifelong smoker. Now the pain came again, washing through her abdomen and back. She held on to Alyce. “Has it ever struck you how maladaptive group suicide is?”
“For God’s sake, Joan—”
“I mean, individual suicide can sometimes be justified, from a biological point of view. Perhaps a suicide is removing a burden from her kin. But what biological rationale can group suicide ever have? The capacity to believe in cultural dictates has been adaptive. It must have been or we wouldn’t have it. But sometimes the mechanism goes wrong—”
“We’re crazy. Is that what you’re trying to say? We’re all crazy. I agree.”
“Ma’am, please come with me.” A shadow before her. It looked like a soldier in a space suit, reaching for her.
Pain rippled through her again, an extinction of purposeful thought. She crumpled against Alyce Sigurdardottir. She heard another explosion. She thought it was just another part of the military or police operation.
She was wrong, as it happened. That had been Rabaul.
Once the sea had penetrated the magma chamber, the explosion became inevitable.
Shreds of molten magma flew into the air faster than sound, reaching heights of fifty kilometers. They broke up into solidifying fragments, ranging from tiny ash particles to chunks a meter wide. Mixed in with all of this were chunks of the shattered mountain itself. These bits of rock had been hurled far above the weather, far above aircraft and balloons, above even the ozone layer, fragments of Rabaul mingling with the meteorites, burning brightly and briefly. It was a sky full of rock.
And on the ground, the shock wave moved out from the shattered caldera at twice the speed of sound. Silent until it hit, it leveled everything in its path, houses, temples, trees, bridges. Where it passed energy poured into the air, compressing it and raising it to enormous temperatures. Anything combustible burst into flames.
People could see the shock was coming, but they could not hear it and they certainly could not flee it. They just popped into flame and vanished, like pine needles on a bonfire. This was just the beginning.
Space suited soldiers bundled Joan out of the smoke-filled bar, out of the hotel, and into fresh air. She was put on to a stretcher that was hauled away at running speed. All around her was a blizzard of movement, people running, cars rushing, tarmac beneath, helicopters flapping through an orange sky.
Now they were bundling her into the back of a van. An ambulance? One, two, three, lift. The stretcher slid inside the vehicle, alongside a kind of narrow bunk bed. There was anonymous equipment on the walls, none of it bleeping or humming, nothing like the equipment in the medical soaps she had once been addicted to.
She waved her hand through the air. “Alyce.”
Alyce grabbed her hand. “I’m here, Joan.”
“I feel like an amphibian, Alyce. I swim in blood and piss, but I breathe the air of culture. Neither one thing nor the other—”
Alyce’s drawn face was above her, distracted, fearful. “What? What did you say?”
“What time is it?”
“Joan, save your breath. Believe me, I’ve been through this; you’re going to need it.”
“Is it day or night? I lost track. I couldn’t tell from the sky.”
“My watch is broken. Night, I think.”
Somebody was working on her legs — cutting away her clothes? The ambulance lurched into motion, and she heard the remote wail of a siren, like some animal lost in the fog. All she could see was the bare, gloomily painted roof of the vehicle, those meaningless bits of equipment, and Alyce’s thin face.
“Listen, Alyce.”
“I’m here.”
“I never told you my family’s true history.”
“Joan—”
She said sharply, “If I don’t make it out of this, tell my daughter where she came from.”
Alyce nodded soberly. “You came to America as slaves.”
“My great-grandfather worked out the story. We came from what is now Namibia, not far from Windhoek. We were San, what they called ‘bushmen.’ We nearly got wiped out by the Bantu, and in colonial days we were killed as vermin. But we kept some cultural identity.”
“Joan—”
“Alyce, gene frequency studies show that female-line DNA among San women is more diverse than anywhere else on Earth. The implication is that San genes have been around in southern Africa much longer than any genes anywhere else on Earth. People of San ancestry are about the closest we’ll ever get to the direct line of descent from our common grandmother, our mitochondrial Eve—”
Alyce nodded soberly. “I understand. So your child is one of the youngest people on the planet — and the oldest.” Alyce covered her hand. “I promise I’ll tell her.”
The pain came in waves now. She felt as if her mind were dissolving; she struggled to think. “You know, normal human births are statistically likely to happen at night. An ancient primate trait. It’s as well to bear your child in the safety of your treetop nest.”
“Joan—”
“Let me talk, damn it. Talking makes the pain go away.”
“Drugs make the pain go away.”
“Ow! That one felt different. Is there a midwife in this damn van?”
“They’re all trained paramedics. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”
“I think my daughter is keen to see the inside of this scruffy ambulance.”
“You’ve done your classes. Breathe. Push.”
She began to breathe in gasping snatches, Oof, oof, oof.
Alyce kept glancing down toward the business end. “You’re doing fine.”
“Even if I do have the pelvis of an australopithecine.”
>
“You really are full of shit, Joan Useb.”
“Not anymore, I fear.”
“She’s coming. She’s coming,” Alyce said.
The baby’s skull bones and their junctions were soft, able to mold under the pressure of being squeezed through the birth canal. And she was able to withstand oxygen deprivation up to the moment of birth.
These last moments were the most extreme physical transformation she would suffer up until the moment of death itself. But the baby’s body was flooded with natural opiates and analgesics. She was feeling no real pain, just a continuation of the long womb dream out of which her self, her identity, had gradually coalesced.
A space suited paramedic took Joan’s child, blew into its nose, and slapped its backside. A satisfying wail filled the ambulance. The soggy little scrap of flesh was hastily wrapped in a blanket and handed to Joan.
Joan, exhausted, wondering, touched her daughter’s cheek. The child turned her head, and her mouth worked, seeking something to suck.
Alyce was smiling down, sweating and exhausted herself, like any proud aunt. “By God, look at her. She’s already communicating with us, in her way. She’s already human.”
“I think she wants to suckle. But I don’t have any milk yet, do I?”
“Let her suckle anyhow,” Alyce advised. “It will stimulate your body to release more oxytocin.”
Now Joan remembered her classes. “Which will cause my uterus to contract, reduce the bleeding, help expel the placenta—”
“Don’t worry about that,” said a space suit. “We injected you already.”
Joan let the child lick her nipple. “Look at that. She’s making grasping motions. And it’s like she’s stepping. I can feel her feet.”
“If you had a hairy chest she could probably support her weight, and maybe crawl over you. And if you moved suddenly, she’d grab even harder.”
“In case I go bounding off through the trees. Look, she’s calming.”
“Give her twenty more minutes and she’ll be pulling her tongue at you.”
Joan felt as if she were floating, as if nothing was real but the fragile warm bundle in her arms. “I know it’s all innate. I know I’m being reprogrammed so I don’t shuck off this damp little parasite. And yet, and yet—”
Alyce laid her hand on Joan’s shoulder. “And yet it’s what your life has been all about, but you just never knew it before.”
“Yes.”
There was a bleep. Alyce pulled a mobile out of her pocket. Its face lit up with bright images, flickers of movement.
A space suit murmured to Joan. “We’re approaching the hospital. You’re not to be afraid. They have a secure, enclosed entrance.”
Joan cradled her baby. “So Lucy, having just passed through one long dark tunnel, is about to enter another.”
The space suit hesitated. “Lucy?”
“What better name for a primate gal?”
Alyce managed a smile. “Joan, you aren’t the only new parent.”
“Huh?”
“Ian Maughan’s robot worker on Mars has managed to build a fully working replica of itself. It has managed to reproduce. From the tone of this text, he is very happy.”
“He texted you about that?”
“You know guys like that. The rest of the world can go to hell as long as their latest gadget does what it’s supposed to. Oh. The Fourth Worlders killed Alison Scott’s pithecine chimera. I imagine they believed she was an abomination. I wonder what she believed.”
“I suppose she only wanted security, as we all do.”
Joan gazed down at her new baby. One world had begun, just heartbeats ago, while another was ending.
“We came close, didn’t we, Alyce? The conference, the manifesto. It could have worked, couldn’t it?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“We just ran out of time, is all.”
“Yes. That, and luck. But we must be hopeful, Joan.”
“Yes. We must always be that.”
The ambulance rattled to a halt. The doors banged open and cooler air gushed in. More space suits swarmed around, pushing Alyce out of the way, seeking to get Joan on a stretcher. They tried to take her baby off her, but she wouldn’t let them.
The geologists had long known that Earth had been overdue for a major volcanic incident.
Rabaul 2031 was not the worst eruption known — not even the worst in the historical record. Still, Rabaul had been far more severe than the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo in the Philippines, which had cooled the Earth by half a degree. It was worse than the explosion of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which had caused the “year without a summer” in America and Europe. Rabaul was the largest volcanic event since the sixth century after Christ, and one of the largest of the previous fifty thousand years. Rabaul was respectable.
Changes in climate were not always smooth and proportional to their causes. Earth was prone to sudden and drastic alterations in climate and ecology, flips from one stable state to another. The effects of even small perturbations could become magnified.
Rabaul was such a perturbation. But it was not going to be a small one.
It wasn’t really Rabaul’s fault. The volcano was just the final straw. Everything had been stretched to the breaking point anyhow by the humans’ extraordinary growth. It wasn’t even bad luck. If it hadn’t been Rabaul, it would have been another volcano or a quake or an asteroid, or some damn thing.
But as the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals embedded in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.
Meanwhile, on Mars, the little robots worked on. Patiently they turned the wan sunlight and the red dust and the carbon dioxide air into little factories, which in turn produced copies of the robots themselves, with jointed legs and solar cell carapaces and little silicon brains.
The robots transmitted news of their endeavors back to their makers on Earth. No reply came. But they kept working anyway.
Under the burnt orange sky of Mars, generations passed quickly.
Of course no replication, biological or mechanical, could ever be perfect. Some variants worked better than others. The robots were actually programmed to learn — to retain what worked, to eliminate what didn’t. The weaker ones died out. The stronger survived, and carried forward their design changes to the next metallic generation.
Thus variation and selection had begun to operate.
On and on the robots toiled, until the ancient seabeds and canyons glistened, covered by insectlike metal carapaces.
THREE
Descendants
CHAPTER 17
A Long Shadow
Place and time unknown.
I
Waking from a cold sleep wasn’t at all like a normal waking, in your own bed, with your wife beside you. It was more like surfacing from a deep dunking in a tank of some clinging, deadening fluid.
But now here was a break in the murk, a widening circle of light centered on a blurry face. The face belonged to Ahmed, the splot — the senior pilot — and not to the CO. That was Snowy’s first indication that something was wrong.
Ahmed was repeating, “OK? Are you OK?”
Before submitting to the injections Snowy had rehearsed how he was going to respond to his wake-up call. He smiled and raised the middle finger of his right hand. “Any landing you walk away from is a good one.” His voice was a rasp, and his mouth was desert dry.
“You aren’t walking yet, smart arse,” Ahmed said grimly.
“Where’s Barking?” Robert Madd, blessed with one of the Royal Navy’s less imaginative nicknames, was the unit’s CO.
“Later,” said Ahmed. He withdrew, letting Snowy see the metal walls of the Pit. He threw a ration pack on the bed. “Get out of there. Help me with the others.”
Snowy — Robert Wayne Snow, age 31 — was a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy, which had given him at least an inclination to follow the
odd order. So he struggled to sit up.
The Pit was just a cylinder of gunmetal gray, the walls unadorned save for instrument and sensor consoles. The light came from low-energy fluorescents that cast a sickly glow over everything. The instruments were all dead, just blank screens. It was like being inside an oil tank. And the Pit was full of bunk beds, twenty of them, stacked up. Plastic carapaces lay over the beds. Ahmed was working his way around the room, opening the carapaces one by one, and reclosing most of them.
Snowy was stark naked, but he wasn’t cold. He picked up his ration pack. It was a clear vacuum-packed bag containing dried banana, chocolate, and other goodies. He ripped into it with the only tool available to him, his teeth. The bag popped and air hissed. He dumped out the goodies on his bed and crammed some banana into his mouth. He felt like he’d been running a marathon. He’d been through cold sleep twice before, for training and evaluation purposes, just a week at a time. It was a peculiarity of the process that at no time did you feel cold, but you always woke up ravenous: something to do with your body slowly absorbing its stores to keep itself alive, according to the medicos.
But something was wrong with his bunk. He could see where he had been lying, his body had left a very clear imprint, like the gruesome dead-mother’s-bed scene in Psycho. He probed at the mattress. It was lumpy and hard. And the sheets on which he had been lying crumbled as he poked at them, like a mummy’s wrappings.
He felt a gathering sense of dread.
Ahmed was helping a girl from one of the upper bunks. Her name was June, so, naturally, she was known as Moon. She was a cutie, in or out of her clothes; but now, naked, she looked fragile, even ill, and Snowy felt nothing but an impulse to help her as she clambered awkwardly down from her bunk, flinching as her bare flesh brushed against the metal.
With Moon awake, Snowy started to feel self-conscious. He reached under his bunk, looking for his clothes.
But the floor seemed to be on a tilt. He straightened up, expecting his head to clear. But still the bare floor seemed askew, the vertical lines of the bunk frames leaning like drunks. Not good, Snowy thought. He could think of nothing reassuring that would tip up this hundred-ton emplacement.
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