by Robert Reed
“Do you know anything about the dragon, ma’am?” Marshall was hoping for clues. For advice.
“It’s not my department.” Lillith offered a thin, weak smile. I kept watching her red eyes and the way she chewed on her lip, and she sighed and said, “I’m in a different division.”
Jack said, “You aren’t going to catch it. Not ever.”
“I bet I do.”
“I bet it dies of old age first.”
“You two don’t get along?” asked Lillith.
“They feud,” Beth admitted. “That’s all, really.”
“Not today,” said Cody. “They have a truce. They shook on it.”
Lillith stopped listening. I could tell by looking at her eyes.
“Ma’am?” said Beth. “What do you do? If I might ask, ma’am.”
“What do I do?” She blinked and said, “Public relations. Coordinating departments. Those sorts of chores.”
Marshall asked, “Are you important?”
“I’d like to think so.”
“Myself,” Marshall announced, “I’m going to be a scientist. Maybe a tailor, I’m not sure.”
“Oh?” Lillith asked. “What about the rest of you?”
“Beth sings,” said Cody.
“A little.” Beth dropped her eyes, her mouth clamped shut.
Cody said, “Sports for me,” and grinned, imagining a baseball and throwing it out the window. “The men’s leagues.”
One of Lillith’s pretty hands curled into a fist, knuckles showing through the stretched skin. She gave a little sigh and said, “You sing?” to Beth. It was as if the words had finally percolated into her mind. “Maybe you could sing now. A little something?”
Beth said, “Now?”
“You can’t pay attention,” Cody explained, “or she clams up.”
So we stared out the windows, and Beth gradually broke into a song. It was slow and cold and matched the falling rain, and it was pretty in a fragile way. “That’s precious, dear,” said Lillith, and she smiled with sad eyes. “I’ve always liked that one.” She rubbed an eye with a finger, then she crossed her arms on her chest.
Beth said, “Thank you, ma’am.”
Lillith kept quiet. She was watching us.
Jack said, “I’m going to be a thief when I’m grown up.”
I looked at Jack, waiting.
“Pardon me?” said Lillith.
“Or a street-corner pharmacy,” Jack added. He smiled and touched his shirt pocket once lightly, teasing Lillith. “Everyone says I’m going to end up in jail, you know.”
“I see…”
“But you’re not,” Beth whined. “You don’t mean that.”
“Maybe yes,” said Jack, “and maybe no.”
Marshall said, “Let him do what he wants.”
Cody said, “Marshall.”
“What?”
“Leave him alone.”
“What did I do?” Marshall wondered. “Huh?”
Then Lillith nearly spoke. She leaned forward and opened her mouth, and I watched her and waited until she sat back again, her hands knotted together in her lap, her lips pressed into a seam, and her dark eyes damp enough to shine. She was watching us. She stared at each of us. I kept asking myself: “What is she thinking? What’s in her head?” Then her gaze came around to me, and we stared at one another for a moment. And she blinked and said, “Anyway,” and put her head back, shutting her eyes and not speaking again. Not until we were inside the mansion itself.
The surf room was a long beach against a long high wall, everything else saltwater and the illusion of sky. The waves rolled and collapsed onto the hard-packed sand, time after time, and somehow the lighting was brighter than outdoors, brighter even than a sunny summer day.
“We mimic the tropical sun,” Dr. Florida explained to me. “And the tropical heat, I’m afraid.” He was sitting beside me. He had a folding chair woven from liquid-filled tubes, and the liquid was chilled and keeping him from suffering too much. He wore light clothes and his usual hat. It wasn’t the same exact hat he had worn on the pasture, no. It had the same fabric and colors—smooth almost to shiny; tan with curling black lines—but there were differences in the wear and exact weave. I told him some of the differences, and he chuckled. “You’ve got exceptional eyes,” he told me. “Don’t you?” I felt glad to hear his praise, and he looked at me and said, “The truth is that I’ve got closets full of these things.” He ran his long spotted hands along the big brim. “They’re a symbol for me. Aren’t they?”
I nodded.
“People think in symbols, Ryder.” He shook his head and sighed, then he said, “Now consider yourself warned,” and grinned.
I said nothing. I saw Jack and Beth standing up to their knees in the water, waiting for the next wave. Jack’s swimsuit was too large, tied too high around his waist. He looked tough and silly, both things at once, and I could have laughed. Dr. Florida’s guards had found his garter snake in the shirt pocket, using their scanners, and Dr. Florida had promised that he would get it back when it was time to leave. Absolutely. The snake would be kept safe and sound.
“I like your friends, Ryder. You’re fortunate to have them.”
“I know I am, sir. Thank you.”
Beth turned her back to the next wave, her eyes squashed shut and the clear bluish water crashing over her head. She and Jack were pushed off their feet. She got up, laughing, and Jack looked mad. Beyond them, in the deepest water, I saw two heads bobbing and then diving, then coming up again. Marshall and Cody had donned goggles and snorkels and fins. I saw streams of salty vapor blown from the snorkels. A little camera moved over them, its fans blowing at the air. At least a dozen cameras were flitting about the surf room, scanning and listening and mostly keeping out of plain view. I couldn’t find any close to us now. I turned and turned and didn’t see one.
Dr. Florida touched me. “Ryder?”
I looked at his eyes and nothing else.
“How do you like this place?” he wondered.
“Just fine.” It was so bright and warm on a rainy day. The air couldn’t have tasted fresher. I sat and thought, then I told him, “It’s like the one on the moon, isn’t it?”
“There are several—”
“Tranquility City. The fake rocks, and everything…it’s the same.” The image had come to me. Dad had been turning through the channels and I had been sitting on the floor, my legs crossed and a coloring pad uncurled on my lap. Dad had lingered on one of those channels that showed views of exotic places. I’d seen the shoreline and the enormous slow waves, and people were thick on the beach and in the water, giggling and moving with the strange skipping motions of people on the moon. I watched them running on the sand, kicking up little lingering clouds, and Mom had said, “Kip? Kip? Could we find something a little more dull? Please?”
“The similarity,” said Dr. Florida, “is simply explained. My own engineering firm designed and manufactured both surf rooms.” He touched my shoulder and squeezed. I was lying on an ordinary blanket, the heat of the sand seeping into my bones. “It’s an indulgence for that parched land, but a wise indulgence.” He said, “It’s too bad I’m too old and frail to travel in space. The moon has grown so much since my last visit. So have all our farflung adventures. Isn’t that so?”
Just in my lifetime much had changed. I said, “Yes, sir. Quite.”
“The people who visit Tranquility City tell me that the surf room is easily, easily the most popular attraction. They have to employ a lottery system just to regulate who gets to feel the clean spray and the false sun.”
Dozens of glimpse-quick memories came to me. I saw glass domes and the vivid green farms beneath the domes, the brightly lit caverns and the long, razor-straight magnetic launchers. There were robots working the huge and bleak strip mines, plus people who seemed too tall and thin to be healthy. The earth hung full in the sky—a vast round blueness bordered with an honest surf of its own—and the moon’s moon passed overh
ead, moving fast, black like velvet and studded with tiny bright lights.
“Ryder? Ryder?”
I blinked and turned toward him again.
“You were a little lost, I think.” He patted my shoulder. “It’s fine. Don’t worry. I just wanted to ask a question.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Are you interested in space?” he wondered. “I was when I was your age. The wild worlds. The great unknowns. The adventure of the thing…does that sound familiar?”
“I read about space,” I admitted. “And watch TV—”
“I know you do.” He breathed once, then again, and said, “I had a dream when I was a boy. Do you want to hear it? I dreamed of becoming a great explorer and going on long, long voyages around the solar system, finding wonders.” He said, “Living wonders,” and stared at me. “I imagined fishes swimming in underground Martian seas. And bat-winged monsters soaring in the Venusian clouds. And forests of methane-sapped trees standing beside some Titan lake. Do you see what I’m saying? A solar system stuffed full of living creatures. Do you see?”
I had done the same things myself, in a fashion—
“None of those wonders are possible. Of course,” he said. “We know that now. No doubts about it. But when I was a boy I took them as fact. It wasn’t a game. It was possible. The image of alien creatures…well, it captivated me. It was addictive. And so beautiful.”
A flood of random facts jumbled in my head.
“Tell me,” said Dr. Florida, “are there any native life forms on any nearby worlds?” He leaned toward me and waited.
I said, “No, sir.”
“Exactly.” He nodded and sat back into his folding chair.
I grabbed a handful of sand, dry and coarse and warmer than blood.
“Venus had oceans when it was young,” he told me. “Did you know? It was the earth’s mirror twin for several hundred million years, which is quite a long time. Long enough to let life forms evolve into proficient, if somewhat simple, microbes.” He nodded and squinted at nothing, saying, “We’ve sent robots into that hell—my own robots included—and we’ve found the sketchy traces of life chemically bound with the rocks. Imagine an early Venus full of life—a durable, adaptable bacterial life—and the sun huge and scalding in the sky. The seas slowly evaporate. The water vapor lifts. Because of the strength of the sunlight and the extra heat, the clouds form at much higher elevations than on the earth. Light radiation from the sun shatters water molecules, bleeding off the precious hydrogen gas, and do you know the result? The seas shrivel and die. They are doomed from the start, and that’s the truth. That’s what happened, Ryder.”
The sand fell through my curling fingers, leaving my palm warm.
He said, “It’s a different story on Mars. Life was much more blessed on Mars. It reached a multicellular stage. There were jellyfish blobs, delicate and almost certainly lovely in life. There were worms in the muck and creatures on stalks, and so on. They left wonderful fossils. There are countless fossils on Mars, more than you could find on the earth and they are truly ancient, Ryder.” He paused, then said, “Nearly a billion years old. Do you know why my survey teams have uncovered so many fossils? It’s because there hasn’t been much volcanic activity on Mars. On the earth, in the last billion years, volcanoes and the drifting continents have crushed and melted and otherwise destroyed old rocks. But little Mars is too small and cold for that kind of drama. Which, in turn, is the reason it’s empty of life today.” He breathed and his expression became rigid, something sorry in his eyes. He told me, “The young Mars had volcanoes and the first rumblings of continents. There was plenty of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then. And that was good—”
“The greenhouse gases,” I blurted.
“Exactly.” He nodded and said, “On Mars, so far from the sun, that carbon dioxide was a saving grace. So long as it was liberated from old rocks, life evolved. Life could find new forms, more intricate and beautiful and precious forms, and it was very much like the youthful Earth. Only it didn’t last, Ryder. Mars went to sleep. The air thinned and its citizens retreated and froze and died of thirst. The changes didn’t come in one year, or in a million, and it wasn’t a steady slide either. There were sudden late summers. Teasing summers. But there was no doubting the end.” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “The last tough microbes died inside the permafrost. They’re locked there today, and researchers can find them and use them as reliable markers. An entire biosphere—an entire world—became extinct hundreds of millions of years ago, Ryder, and I think that is just so sad.”
“It is sad,” I agreed. My remark seemed small, even useless, when set beside such an enormous sadness. I stirred the sand beside my towel, using one finger. Why was Dr. Florida so serious today? I recalled him asking my friends, Cody and the rest, to leave us now, for a little while, because we had to talk. Just the two of us. I looked out at Cody and longed to be swimming. This wasn’t the same Dr. Florida I’d seen on the pasture, or the one who had given me ice cream. Like his hat, I thought. He looked very much the same. But he wasn’t.
He told me, “My entire life has been spent with life, Ryder.”
I blinked and watched him.
“I have this curious passion for things living. I do. There’s something fundamentally special about even the simplest organism. Life is the universe’s attempt to save itself from entropy. Do you know what I mean? Entropy? Heat death?” He paused, then he winked at me. “You don’t need to understand every word. Suffice to say that life is more precious than even I could have guessed when I was your age. Infinitely so.”
I nodded.
He nodded with me and watched the tumbling waves. “Think of the very largest planets. The gas giants.” He breathed and said, “Ryder,” and turned back to me. “They aren’t like Venus and Mars. Did you know? Each gas giant has zones where there’s plenty of water and energy in several flavors and temperatures that wouldn’t feel much different than this beach does now. I mean Jupiter, and the rest too. Isn’t that something to consider? When I was a boy, maybe a touch older than you, I imagined a Jupiter stuffed full of exotic, wondrous creatures. Before I made a living tinkering with earthly life, I spent hours and hours devising planktons and plankton-eating beasts that would live in the Jovian clouds. A game of childish pretend, yes. And futile too. Do you know what happens on Jupiter, and on every other gas giant? Do you know why they’re as sterile as the glassware in my cleanest lab?”
I shook my head. I had read things, but I couldn’t focus—
“Take Jupiter,” he said. “It has regions where sunlight and lightning bolts—enormous lightning bolts—work together on simple chemicals and airborne dusts. The dusts themselves come from meteorites, and they serve as catalysts. Chemicals cling to them and form RNA and DNA. Each year, without pause, Jupiter fabricates several billion tons of pure genetic material. Plus proteins too, and complex fats. And so on. The basics of life, yes. But the wind always blows. The atmosphere is torn by storms and unstable thermals. Those precious compounds—listen to me!—are eventually carried into the deepest regions of Jupiter’s atmosphere. The pressures and heat destroy them. They’re shattered into atoms again—wasted—and so life never has its chance to evolve on Jupiter. Or anywhere like Jupiter. Gas giants are doomed to remain sterile for all time.”
I watched him suck on his teeth, nodding. I watched him press his hands together. I felt tired and sorry for his sadness, and I was sad for the empty worlds. “It’s too bad,” I offered with my inadequate voice. “It would be nice…otherwise.”
He didn’t seem to hear me. He said, “Neptune and Uranus are cooler, true. And smaller. But the results are the same. Saturn too. This self-murdering goes on and on forever. Without pause.”
I said nothing.
“Only one world cradles life, Ryder.”
Earth. I had known that fact all of my life, but knowing is many things. Now I understood the fact. I saw it in the clearest of terms. Around us was a remarka
ble wealth, and we were blessed. Even the poorest weed rooted in the driest, poorest soil—
“Life is so precious,” he told me.
I understood. I said, “I know, yes,” and felt like crying.
“For a century,” he said, “we’ve listened to the skies, and watched the skies, and nothing resembling life has been heard. Not once. No one has any answers as to why it’s quiet, but if pressed I could make a few reasoned guesses.” He paused, then he asked, “Would you like to hear?”
I said, “Okay.”
“All sorts of nonsense can happen to a planet, Ryder.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Asteroids can slam into one. A swarm of comets can pepper it, leaving craters and devastated land. Or a passing star might explode and spread its poisons willy-nilly across the sky.” He was looking at me. “I don’t mean to sound black,” he told me, “and I don’t wish you to take this the wrong way. What I’m saying—what I want you to see—is that we, our world and all its sugary passengers, could have been swept away by any of a dozen cosmic events. That is the simple truth.”
I believed him. I dipped my head and said, “Okay.”
“The dinosaurs went extinct because of a rain of comets. We know it to be fact. But comets come in many sizes, and the largest comets exceed a hundred miles in diameter. A thousand times larger than the dinosaur killers. One giant comet impacting on our world, anywhere, would boil the oceans and sterilize the land. I’ve seen the simulations. Little would survive. Just some tiny bacteria accustomed to scalding heat, perhaps. And the forests and reefs and so on…well, I’m afraid nothing and no one would remain.”
I said nothing.
“Such a nasty truth, isn’t it?” He laughed without humor and shook his head. “As it turns out, Ryder, our chances of being hit by a giant comet are not small. We’ve probably had several near misses, in fact, and we remain a tempting target. Don’t think otherwise. Don’t.”
