The Last Science Fiction Writer

by Allen Steele

  The corridor was narrow and circular, winding its way around what appeared to be a central core. It was deserted, or at least so far as Phil could tell; all they could hear was a low hum from the ceiling air vents. The doors they passed were shut, but he noted that they were all coded with numbers that began with the digit 3. Moreau noticed his curiosity. “Sosigenes Center is a new facility,” he explained. “My company built it just a few years ago, and until now it’s been…well, not that well known.”

  Carson glanced at Mariano; the photographer gazed back at him, his eyes wide. As General Ballou had told them, the lab was secret. Yet if it was, Moreau was being unusually candid about its existence, particularly in the presence of two journalists. “So what sort of work have you been doing here?” Phil asked, wondering just how far he could take the line of query.

  Moreau didn’t say anything at first. He strolled ahead of them, slow enough for George to keep up with him. “At first it was principally agricultural,” he replied after a moment. “We were developing ways of genetically engineering new species of various crops…corn, wheat, soybeans, and so forth…for easier cultivation in a low-gravity environment.” He plucked at the sleeve of his sweater. “Our first success was with Cannabis sativa. We managed to develop a new strain that yields taller plants in lunar conditions. Your clothes, for instance, are made from lunar hemp.”

  “Superpot.” Phil nodded. “I heard of it. Raised a ruckus back on Earth.”

  “Back in America, you mean. Your country has such idiotic drug laws…”

  “So this place is owned by GenSyn.”

  Moreau turned to look back at him. “Yes. Sosigenes Center was built by GenSyn. I take it you’ve heard of us.”

  Too late, Phil realized that he’d tipped his hand. “I remember the net stories,” he replied. “Some people think you…your company, I mean…want to export drugs to Earth.”

  Moreau chuckled. “If that was our intent, then we would have made more money than we did from raising superpot. Please, Mr. Carson, put away your tabloid mentality. This isn’t some redneck meth lab.”

  Ballou thought it was; that was why he’d allowed them to accompany the advance team, to check out intelligence reports of a GenSyn facility near Sosigenes that was manufacturing illegal drugs for the Pax, which in turn was smuggling them to Earth in order to finance the revolution. Since GenSyn was based on Clarke County, then it was the sort of thing that the military wanted the media to show to the folks back home. Bad enough that the Pax was stopping the supply of He3 to fusion tokamaks on Earth; now they were also involved in drug trafficking.

  He only had Moreau’s word to go on, yet Phil had no reason to believe that he wasn’t telling the truth. Otherwise he wouldn’t have brought them here. “My apologies. I was only…”

  “Accepted.” Moreau continued walking down the corridor. “At any rate, Sosigenes was quite small then, but then we began to branch out into investigating certain aspects of the human genome, and so it became necessary to expand our facilities. This is the third-lowest of four subsurface levels, and it was completed just three years ago…ah, here we are.”

  He stopped at a door marked COMMISSARY. Pushing it open, he called for the lights; the ceiling illuminated, revealing a large room filled with tables and chairs. “I’m afraid the menu isn’t very good,” Moreau said as he led them to a dispensary along one wall. “Shipments of fresh food stopped a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve…I’ve had to make do with what’s already in stock.”

  Phil wasn’t about to complain. His last decent meal had been aboard Olympus; the only food he’d had since then had been cold-ration packs aboard the military lander. He inspected the glass doors of the dispensary until he found a vacuum-wrapped tomato and cheese sandwich and what looked like a slice of apple pie.

  “Looks like you’ve had company lately,” George said.

  At first he didn’t see what George was talking about, then Phil saw what he’d failed to notice before. Halfway across the room, a table was littered with discarded wrappers and empty juice cartons. The chairs had been pushed back, as if the people sitting there—six at least, perhaps more—had suddenly left, without bothering to clean up after themselves.

  “I thought you told me you were alone,” Phil said.

  Moreau quietly stood off to one side, either unable or unwilling to reply. Phil walked over to the table: fresh bread crumbs, and one of the juice cartons was half-empty and still cool to the touch. It looked like the sort of mess a bunch of kids might leave behind, as if expecting an adult to come along later and pick up for them.

  “I hope you’re not going to tell me this is all yours,” George said. “You don’t look like the sort of person who can’t keep the place clean.”

  “No,” Moreau said quietly, “I’m not.”

  “So who else is here?” George hobbled over to the nearest table; leaning his stick against a chair, he sat down and began unwrapping the sandwich he’d selected. “Don’t mean to be rude, but…”

  “All the same, I’m afraid you are.” Moreau folded his arms across his chest. “Gentlemen, there’s a limit to my hospitality. I think I’ve answered all the questions I care to, at least for now. Please eat, then I’ll escort you to your quarters.”

  Phil glared at George. For a little while there, it seemed as if Moreau was going to open up, tell him the truth. Then Mariano had come in with a hard line of questioning; caught in a lie, Moreau had retreated into silence.

  George refused to look at him; he realized his mistake. The two men ate in silence, while Moreau stood quietly nearby, not saying anything to either of them. Perhaps GenSyn wasn’t making drugs. Nonetheless, Moreau was hiding something.

  Down the corridor from the commissary were a row of dorm rooms. Small and tidy, nonetheless they appeared to have been recently vacated. Pieces of tape on the walls above the desk in Phil’s room showed where the last occupant had hung up photos, and in the drawer he found a few pens and some scrap paper. Although the closet was empty, the bed was still made, and there was toilet paper and a half-dissolved bar of soap in the adjacent bathroom.

  The desk held a comp terminal. Once Moreau left, bidding him a good night, Phil did his best to keep awake for a little while longer. His eyelids itched and his body craved sleep, yet there were too many questions that needed to be answered, so he sat down at the desk, pulled out the keypad, and began a line of inquiry.

  Moreau must have figured that he would do this, because every keyword he typed into the search engine drew unhelpful results. SOSIGENES gave him an orbital photo of the crater itself and nothing more, and GENSYN rendered standard P.R. material such as annual company reports and recent press releases, none of which mentioned a lunar research lab. He tried to access the net, only to find that he was completely locked out; UNAUTHORIZED USER appeared when he tried to patch into the LunaNet server. So there was no way he could send email, or even logon to a news site to find out what was going on.

  Finally, he typed in another word: MOREAU. The response was a link to a text within the library system: THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, by H.G. Wells. So Mariano was right; Moreau had borrowed the titular name of a character of a novel published in the late nineteenth-century. Yet perhaps might be a clue here; moving his chair a little closer, Phil began to read:

  I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the Lady Vain. As everyone knows, she collided with a derelict when ten days out from Callao…

  He tried to keep up with the story for as long as he could, yet it wasn’t long before his vision began to blur. He was more tired than he thought. Phil book-marked the text and shut down the terminal, then undressed and removed his anklets before crawling into bed. He was asleep as soon as he told the room to turn off the lights.

  How long he slept, he didn’t know; he might have remained asleep for many more hours if the door hadn’t creaked open, if a ray of light hadn’t passed across his face, if he hadn’t felt a small, warm h
and upon the side of his neck…

  He jerked awake, flopped over on his back to see a small form standing next to the bed, captured in silhouette by the light from the corridor.

  “Lights on!” he yelled.

  The figure squealed in terror, then Phil’s eyes were dazzled by the abrupt glare from the ceiling. In that half-instant, he saw what appeared to be a child—long-haired, almost naked, with strangely elongated arms and legs—dart from the room.

  Phil whipped aside the covers, lunged for the door. Too late, he remembered that he wasn’t wearing his weights; in one-sixth gravity, he sailed out the door into the corridor. He yelped as his left shoulder hit the wall; from somewhere just ahead he heard high-pitched laughter.

  Looking up, he caught a brief glimpse of the intruder: no more than a meter in height, wearing nothing more than a pair of briefs. A pair of large eyes peered at him from beneath a mane of hair, then the figure turned and fled, chortling as it dashed down the corridor. Just before it vanished around the bend, it performed a cartwheel, like a mischievous child showing off…

  “The hell?” Mariano appeared in the doorway of the next room, holding himself erect with his stick. He squinted against the light. “What are you…?”

  “C’mon!” Ignoring the fact that he was wearing only skivvies, Phil scrambled to his feet and rushed down the corridor.

  This time he was careful not to bound, but instead kept his momentum in a forward direction, taking advantage of lower gravity to turn his run into a head-long sprint. He reached the place where he’d last seen the child, just in time to see a door on the inner side of the corridor slam shut.

  Phil skidded to a halt. George came up behind him, hobbling on his stick. A sign on the door read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY—DO NOT ENTER, yet the knob turned freely when he tested it. He glanced back at Mariano, and the photographer shrugged. “Your call,” he whispered. “I’ll say we didn’t see it.”

  Phil nodded, then he opened the door and they stepped inside.

  A vast, well-like atrium, one so large that they could barely make out the far side. A volcanic bubble, Phil guessed, restructured to form the station’s core. Twenty meters above them, earthlight slanted down through thick panes of polarized glass, illuminating a miniature rain forest. Palmettos crowded each other for room, their fronds casting shadows across the ferns and tall grass that grew upon the atrium floor, their vines curled around the supports of upper-level walkways. From somewhere within the branches, they could hear the disturbed cries of songbirds.

  Phil’s eye caught something resting in the grass, a spherical object. Stepping closer, he kneeled down to examine it: a red-and-white rubber ball, the sort of thing one might find in a kindergarten playroom. And not far away, another toy: a stuffed koala bear, missing one of its eyes.

  He reached down to pick it up, and something struck the back of his head.

  “Hey!” he yelled, then looked around to see a stick lying next to him. From somewhere up in the trees, a muffled giggle, followed by another one from close by.

  A palm nut hit the ground near George. “Man, I don’t like this,” he murmured as he stepped back toward the door. “This place is giving me the…”

  “Hush.” Phil slowly stood up. “They’re just kids. All they want to do is play.” That gave him an idea. “Go over there,” he added, motioning toward a clearing a few meters away. “Don’t act frightened…just do it.”

  George gingerly walked in that direction, his eyes never leaving the dense foliage around them. Phil bent over, picked up the ball. Some murmurs from the tree-tops. “Okay, catch,” he said, then tossed it to George.

  Mariano caught it one-handed, still leaning heavily upon his stick, then glanced anxiously at the sound of muted laughter from just behind him. “All right,” Phil said, “now throw it back to me. And smile…we’re having fun.”

  George reluctantly returned the ball to him. Now there was more laughter, a little closer this time. Another palm nut landed on the ground, but this time it wasn’t close enough to be threatening. “That’s right,” Phil said aloud. “Just a couple of goofy ol’ guys, having a game of catch. Here y’go…”

  He threw the ball to George again, but this time he fumbled and the ball dropped to his feet. George started to lean down to pick it, then stopped. “Phil,” he said softly, nodding to his left, “behind you…”

  Phil slowly peered over his shoulder. A child was swinging upside-down from a tree branch. At first he thought it was the same one he’d seen in his room, but then he noticed that its hair was lighter in color, almost blond…

  No. It was definitely a she. About five or six, judging from her height. Yet other anatomical differences weren’t nearly so subtle. Her arms were almost as long as her legs, and her toes were nearly as long as her fingers; they were wrapped around the branch, allowing her to suspend herself upside-down. Although her rib-cage looked larger, her frame was so slender that Phil could have wrapped his hands around her stomach and been able to touch his thumbs and forefingers.

  Yet it was her eyes that surprised him the most. Twice normal size, with dark-blue irises nearly the size of quarters; when she blinked, he caught a glimpse of nictitating membranes, like a second pair of eyelids.

  Utterly alien…and yet, without question, a little girl, and a charming one at that. “Throw!” she demanded, and grinned as she extended her hands. “To me! Throw!”

  Phil looked back at George. “You heard the lady,” he said, stepping aside. “Throw her the ball.”

  At first, it seemed as if George hadn’t heard him. He was frozen in place, staring at the girl with eyes almost as large as her own. Behind him, another child appeared upon a low branches: nearly identical to the first, except this one was a boy, possibly the one who’d visited Phil’s room. George didn’t see him; he retrieved the ball and tossed it to the girl, but it was a clumsy pass and she shouldn’t have been able to catch it.

  Yet she did. Even before the ball was halfway to her, she swung herself off the branch, performing a somersault so graceful that it would have awed a gymnast, and touched down in plenty of time to catch it. She laughed with glee. “Thank you!” she cried, then she spun around to pitch the ball high into the air, in what seemed to be a random direction.

  Another child hurled himself from the top of a palm. He grabbed the ball, yet for a moment it seemed as if he was going to fall to his death. “Got it!” he yelled, then his left foot snagged a vine, and he whipped around to hurl the ball toward a second girl, who shrilled laughter as she deflected it with her right foot, straight into the hands of the boy who’d been lurking behind George.

  He dropped to the ground in front of the astonished photographer. “Again!” he yelled. “Harder! Too easy!”

  George was barely able to catch the ball. “I don’t…I don’t…” He stared at Phil. “What…I don’t…who the hell are…?”

  “They’re my children, Mr. Mariano.” Moreau’s voice echoed down from above the jungle, where he stood upon a walkway near the ceiling. “So to speak. If you wish, though, you may call them Superiors.”

  The fourth level of Sosigenes Center was inaccessible except by a single elevator, which could only be opened by keycard and retinal scan. Once they were dressed, Moreau led Carson and Mariano to the Advanced Genetic Engineering Facility; much to their surprise, he requested that Phil bring his pad and George his camera.

  “Why are you doing this?” Phil asked as Moreau escorted them down an empty corridor. “Why tell us now?”

  “No point in denying it, is there?” Moreau’s hands were clasped behind his back. “It wasn’t my intent to reveal this to you, or at least not when I brought you here. In fact, I’d hoped that, once Mr. Mariano…”

  “George.” Mariano was loading a fresh film disc in his camera. “Call me George, please.” He hesitated, then added, “And what should we call you, Dr. Moreau? And don’t tell us that’s your real name.”

  A smile brushed his lips. “Sorry. I shoul
d have known better.” He glanced at Phil, making sure that his pad was turned on. “Dr. Laurent Marquand,” he said, and spelled it for him. “Director, Project Tango Red.”

  “Uh-huh. And what is Project…?”

  “One question at a time, please.” Moreau—or rather, Marquand—held up a finger. “First, why am I doing this? As I was saying, I have no choice. I thought that once Mr. Mariano’s leg healed, I’d be able to have you out of here before you saw anything you shouldn’t. In fact, I’ve already summoned a rover from Descartes. It’s on its way now, and should be arriving within a few hours.”

  “That’s…very gracious of you.” Phil had no idea how they’d be treated by the Pax. Hopefully not as prisoners of war. “But if you didn’t want us finding out…”

  “But alas, you did.” Marquand let out his breath. “One of my children…figures it would be Vladimir, since he’s always been the most inquisitive…saw to that when he disobeyed me by paying you a visit. Twice, in fact.”

  “Guess he was curious.” Phil couldn’t help but grin. “Typical six-year-old.”

  “Six?” Marquand gave him a sidewise look. “Is that how old you think he is? What would you say if I told you that’s he’s little more than two years old?”

  Phil stopped walking. “That’s impossible. I was playing ball with him just a few minutes ago. He was…”

  “The size of a child three times his age, and with the reflexes of a teenager.” Marquand made an impatient gesture. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves again…I hoped you’d leave before you saw any of them, but you did anyway. That limits my options, doesn’t it? The only choice I have is to tell you everything, and hope that you’ll use that knowledge in the responsible manner.”

  By now they’d arrived at a door marked with an alphanumeric sequence: GHS-413. Marquand slipped his card into the slot, then bent a little closer to let the scanner examine his right eye. A double-beep, then the door slid open. “Gentlemen, if you will…”