The Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance (Mammoth Books)

by Trisha Telep

  “I brought you a change of clothes,” she told the noah. “They should fit. I used your own clothes as a measurement. Once that sedative wears off, eat your food and get dressed. I’ll be back in an hour to check on you.” She started for the door.

  The drugs in his system should have kept the noah too lethargic to move for at least another ten minutes. Instead, the moment her back was turned, the man erupted from the chair. One second he was slumped over in a chair in an apparent mild trance, the next he was pressed against her back, pinning her to the wall, one hand slapped against the glass on either side of her.

  “I was made to walk among your kind, but I am not of your kind,” he said. “My body does not process your drugs as your own does. Nor do I lie, as your kind has always done. Next time, when I say I am no threat, believe me.”

  Eve’s heart was in her throat. He was very tall, and very strong. And every inch of him was pressed against her back, hot and hard and intimidating. His mouth was pressed close to her ear. She swallowed heavily. “If this is your idea of nonthreatening, you are not as familiar with the nuances of my culture as you think.”

  The noah pulled one of his hands away from the wall and slid it down the side of her waist. The hand moved around the front of her belly and went slower still. Eve’s mouth went dry.

  “What are you doing?”

  He thrust his hand into the pocket of her lab coat and retrieved her disruptor. “I let you shoot me with this once. I will not do so again. It hurts.”

  He’d let her shoot him?

  “I have shown you how quickly I can move,” he murmured in her ear. “Yet you still doubt me? I had not counted you for a fool.”

  “I’m not. I’m sorry.” Oh, God. He had the disruptor. He had just proven how easily he could overpower her. If he got out of the quarantine space into Homebase . . . he could kill her easily. He could kill them all.

  The noah gave a frustrated sound and grabbed her hand. With a yank, he spun her around and pushed her towards the center of the room. “I will not kill you. I do not kill. I told you, I am a preserver of life, not a destroyer of it.” He cupped the disruptor in his hands and squeezed. Eve heard a crack and a sizzling pop, then he tossed the charred, smoking chunks of metal on the floor between them. “There, do you see? I no long have the disruptor, and you can no longer shoot me with it.” He rubbed the spot on his naked ribs. Her earlier blast had left an ugly bruise.

  “Do you read minds?” How else would he have known what she was thinking?

  “Thoughts are energy. I am skilled at manipulating energy. And just so you know, I only remained in this room to put you at ease. You cannot hold me here except by my choice.” He touched the lock on the door behind him, and with a snick and a pop, the seal depressurized, the lock turned and the door swung open. “There is no technology you possess that I cannot manipulate.” Instead of walking through the door, he stepped back, hands open, palms up in an unmistakable gesture of surrender. “But I will stay here, in this room, to prove that you have nothing to fear from me.”

  “Good, then I won’t have to shoot you myself.” Nonna stepped into the open doorway, a much larger disruptor in her hands. Dre stood at her back, also armed. Despite their gray hair, they both looked deadly.

  Eve watched the noah’s expression go blank. For the first time, the humans had managed to surprise him, it seemed. Those brilliant blue eyes of his darted from her face to Nonna’s, then Dre’s. “You are the same,” he said. “You are the same woman, but different ages of the same.”

  “The technical term is clones,” Eve said. She walked forward, putting herself between the noah and her family. “It’s all right, Nonna, Dre. He has proven that if he meant to harm us, he could easily have done so by now.” She waited for the two women who looked like older copies of herself – who, in fact, were exactly that – to lower their weapons.

  She turned back to the noah to find him watching them with a mix of surprise, curiosity and bemusement.

  “Remarkable,” he said. “It is a rare day that humans can still surprise me.”

  “Clearly, you’ve never met the daughters of Eve before,” Dre said.

  “Clearly.” The corner of his mouth tilted up in the very faintest of smiles.

  “Eat your food, and I will explain,” Eve said.

  “He can put some clothes on first,” Nonna commanded sharply. “Our baby’s almost done with her training vids, and she doesn’t need that particular anatomy lesson yet.” She nudged the tip of her disruptor towards the noah’s groin, indicating the penis that had been in a rather impressive state of semi-arousal since the moment the noah had pinned Eve’s body to the airlock door.

  “My sisters and I are all genetic copies of Dr Eve Cartwright, a scientist who lived and died before the End.”

  Eve and the noah were sitting at a table in the dining hall, the remains of his meal pushed off to one side. Shar, Dre, and Misha – who after a slightly heated discussion with Nonna had been allowed to join them – were there as well. Nonna had absented herself, saying she had too much work to do.

  The noah had donned the tunic and trousers Eve had brought earlier, and though she would never admit it out loud, she missed being able to covertly admire his lean, muscular beauty in its natural state. She didn’t think she’d successfully kept that thought to herself, though, because every few minutes he would shift in his chair and stretch in a way that drew her eyes to his chest or arms or elsewhere, and she would feel his eyes on her. It was very distracting.

  “Dr Eve Cartwright and her father saw what was happening between the Alliance and the Cartel, and they knew where the escalating tensions would lead,” Dre said, picking up where Eve had left off, as she had been doing every time Eve lost her train of thought. “They understood the destructive potential of the doomsday weapons the Cartel and the Alliance had amassed. So they bought an abandoned government bunker and refitted it to serve as a survival enclave and a laboratory, and among other things, they stored five thousand embryonic clones of Dr Cartwright so that her work would continue beyond her own human lifespan.”

  “And it has,” Eve added. “Every twenty-five years, two new embryos are gestated and raised by the others. Nonna and Dre are the seventy-fourth generation of Eve’s daughters. I am the seventy-fifth. Shar and Misha are the seventy-sixth.”

  “What work is it that all you generations of Eves are continuing?” The noah crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. Eve sighed and tried to smother images of running her hands across his chest.

  “The survival of our species and our world,” Dre said. “Come. Let us show you.”

  Misha held out a hand to the noah. She beamed a huge, beautiful smile up at him when he took it, and she skipped happily by his side as Eve escorted him through Homebase.

  “Homebase is a self-sustaining, geo-thermal-powered biosphere,” Eve informed him. “We cannot support a large colony of life, only about a half dozen adults at any given time. So that is why each generation of Eves gestates only two more sisters for the next generation. We live together, teach each other, keep Dr Cartwright’s work alive and going – and with her work, her hope for renewed life on this planet.”

  She escorted the noah through the laboratories and living spaces of Homebase. “Each of us record our discoveries, observations, thoughts into the Mind of Eve, the mainframe computer that operates all aspects of Homebase. And each successive generation of Eve’s daughters is imprinted through the neural trainers with the memories and life experiences of all the Eves that came before. In this way, each generation continues where the other left off. No discovery is ever lost. Our collective consciousness continues to expand and grow.”

  She opened a door into the large brightly lit conservatory that had been designed to look like a forest meadow, complete with a waterfall tumbling down rocks into a small stream. “We maintain four of these conservatories, as well as two gardens where we grow our own fruits and vegetables. The plants all came from seeds an
d seedlings that Dr Cartwright and her father collected before the End, with the intention of sustaining life in Homebase and ultimately re-seeding the world. Once the planet becomes habitable again, which should be in another few hundred years, we will begin gestating the other embryonic lifeforms the first Eve and her father collected.”

  “You have made yourselves into noahs,” he observed when the tour was done.

  “You sound surprised. Did you think we would not want to save our own species?”

  “No,” he answered honestly. “In my experience, your kind has been hopelessly bent on its own self-destruction.”

  “Then you have never experienced the love of a mother holding her newborn child,” Eve said. She ran a hand over Misha’s braided hair. “I assure you, she would do anything in her power to stop harm from befalling her child.”

  Misha gave a huge yawn. “I’m tired.”

  Shar stepped forward, bending down in order to pick up the child. “I’ll carry you to bed, Mimisha.”

  “No.” With a fractious scowl, Misha evaded her sister. “I want her – him – to carry me.” She pointed at the noah and held up her arms in clear invitation. Her pearly teeth beamed up at him in a beguiling smile.

  Eve leaned against the doorframe, watching as the noah succumbed to Misha’s charms and tucked the little girl into her bed for the night. He was so gentle with her. Tender and attentive. Even Nonna had to give her grudging approval.

  A pensive smile played about Eve’s lips. If ever she started to think there was no purpose to life, if ever she started to think the struggle was too hard, too pointless, she had only to look at Misha’s smiling face, hear her small, pert, girlish voice, and Eve’s heart filled with overwhelming love and determination. Hard, the struggle indeed might be, but for Misha, it was worth it. Anything was worth it. Because in Misha, the beauty of life glowed with its most enchanting promise.

  Since the moment Eve had first held the wriggling infant in her hands, she’d known such love as she never knew existed – never knew could exist. She’d spent so many nights wide awake, just lying beside the baby, staring at her absolute perfection, marveling at each incredibly tiny finger and toe, the plump perfection of her rosebud lips and tiny, curling black eyelashes. And Eve had known in those moments that life was worth any hardship, any sacrifice. Life was the greatest gift in the universe. The one never to be squandered. The gift that made everything else worthwhile.

  Through Misha, Eve had discovered what Nonna and Dre had learned before her. Unconditional love. Complete selfless-ness. Having Misha, holding Misha, caring for her every need, teaching her, loving her, watching her grow . . . those moments had given every other moment in Eve’s life meaning and purpose. She had looked upon Misha’s tiny, newborn face, held her tiny, newborn hand, and known she would fight for Misha to her last breath, suffer for her gladly, die for her without a qualm.

  She wondered, as she watched the noah brush a broad hand tenderly across Misha’s brow, if he had ever known such a love.

  “No,” he said half an hour later, as she and he wandered the trails in one of the conservatories. Shar, Dre and Nonna had also turned in for the night, but Eve was too charged from the day’s events to consider sleeping.

  “No what?”

  “No, I’ve never known the kind of love you feel for Misha.”

  She cast him a sideways glance. “You really should stop reading people’s minds. Thoughts should be private.”

  “I always find more truth in thoughts than words.”

  She didn’t doubt that for an instant. “How old did you say you are?”

  “Thirty thousand of this world’s years.”

  “Thirty thousand.” She shook her head. She could still hardly believe it. “And in all that time, you’ve never known love?”

  “No.”

  “You never even thought about it? What it would be like to have a wife, a child of your own?”

  “I am a noah, a watcher. My duty is to tend the worlds in my care, not to tend my own desires. Besides, I have seen what becomes of worlds, of love and families. Why would I want to subject a family of my own to such a fate?”

  She was starting to get an idea of what his existence had been like, and she wasn’t liking what she saw. He’d been alone. Utterly alone. Alone in a way she’d never known. She’d always had her sisters, Nonna, Dre, Beri until she’d died, then the little ones Shar and Misha. There might not be anyone else alive in the world, but they’d always had each other. The noah, he’d never had anyone. Ever. The mere thought made her want to cry. No one should ever be separated from the rest of the world for so long.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, laying a hand on his arm. His skin felt so smooth and warm.

  He stared at her hand, a strange expression on his beautiful face. “I do not understand. For what reason are you sorry?”

  “No one should ever have to be that alone.” Those perfect, drowning blue eyes captured her again. If there was a heaven – and she believed there was – its skies would be that particular shade of blue. A blue the oceans would envy. A blue a woman could happily drown in.

  He shrugged off her hand. “To be a noah is to be alone. I knew my purpose. I did my duty.”

  “I’m sure you did.” She could see the topic made him uncomfortable, so she took pity on him. “Tell me what this world was like thirty thousand years ago.”

  “Much greener.”

  She laughed, and was rewarded by that faint smile that lurked along the corner of his mouth. It softened him, made him look younger, more approachable, a little mischievous.

  “It was . . . peaceful . . . but also savage. Before men built their civilizations, before they made their machines, survival was their goal. Their lives were short, as you can imagine, with no medicine or technology. But there was a certain beauty to the simplicity of their lives. Of all the ages, that has always been my favorite. Because in those ages, the people . . . needed each other, much the same way you and your sisters need each other here. Of course, even then, they fought. For territory, for females, for food and resources.”

  “All creatures fight for survival. It’s instinct. A bit like the way you don’t like to be caged, I imagine.”

  Blue eyes glanced sideways. “I spent a lifetime – thousands of lifetimes – confined to my ship. When I am away from it, no, I do not like to be restrained.”

  “I can understand that.” They’d reached the waterfall. The terrarium lights had darkened, simulating night, and the softer silver lights reflected off the water in the stream. “And those more primitive humans from the ages you admired . . . did you . . . harvest . . . them the way you did the plants and animals?”

  “No. My duty is to preserve whatever life is in danger of extinction. They never were.”

  “And now? Did you come here to harvest us?”

  “I came here to die.”

  “What?” She stared at him in shock. “Why?”

  “I no longer see the point in my existence. Nothing ever changes. The patterns are fixed.”

  “But . . .”

  “There are no others on this planet besides you Eves. The men who engineered the End did their work very well. And when I saw it happening, I watched and I did nothing. I did not harvest human archetypes to carry on to the next world I had prepared for them, because I knew they would only destroy that world, too. And now, this world does not have much time left. What the final war did not destroy, an asteroid will in four months’ time. This world will be wiped clean. It is inevitable.”

  “Inevitable.” Eve had never believed anything was a done deal. She came by that honestly – an inherited family trait. If the original Eve had believed in inevitability, she wouldn’t have built this place. “My sisters and I may be scientists, but we deal in hope, not inevitability. Homebase is deep enough to survive an impact. And being geo-thermal-powered, even if the ejecta from impact were to remain in the atmosphere and lower global temperatures for a decade, we could survive it.”r />
  “To what end?” he challenged wearily. “I’ve seen your thoughts. I know why you and your sisters incubate only females. But you cannot sustain a population on the clones of Dr Eve Cartwright forever. And you cannot replicate yourselves indefinitely, either. Eventually, you will have no choice but to turn to your cache of stored embryos to create a self-sustaining population of males and females. The problem is, once you do that, you lose the control Eve Cartwright built into her system. Once your civilization grows beyond a small, tightly knit tribe, you will reach the beginning of the next End.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because I’ve seen it. Over and over and over again. Every human world ends the same, in violence and self-destruction. Again and again, I have watched civilizations grow, watched them turn on one another and rip each other apart, watched them create bigger, stronger, more powerful weapons until they destroy not only themselves but the very planets that sustain them. It is always the same. Not just on this world, but on the dozens of others I have watched as well. There’s no point in hoping for a different outcome. It is always the same. So it has ever been, so shall it ever be.”

  “You’re wrong. Things can change. Your very existence is proof of that.” She nodded at his look of disbelief. “Think about it. Why else would the creator send noahs to harvest the seeds of life from one dying planet and transport them to another? Don’t you see? You are humanity’s chance to try again, and to keep trying until we get it right. What else would you call that, if not hope?”

  The noah bowed his head, shoulders slumping forward in an expression of pure weariness. “Foolishness,” he whispered. “To try the same, failed experiment again and again, that is foolishness.”

  He looked so discouraged, so beaten down by the many disappointments of his long existence. He was such an ancient soul, but at this moment, he reminded her of Shar the time she’d fallen down a cliff during one of their expeditions and broken her leg. Hurt, wounded, in need of love and comfort. Eve’s hand reached out instinctively to brush back the fall of golden silk, as she’d been itching to do since she’d first uncovered his face.