Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32

by Judith Berman

  Josef frowned. “That was a long time ago, Dad.” He waved his hand at his apartment. “This is my home now, and I’d like to have a nice birthday for Pim.”

  “Is the frog pond still there, Grandpa?” Pim asked.

  “Yes! It’s been a struggle to keep the pond free of toxins, but the frogs still croak away on summer nights. Do you remember when you used to put them in boxes to scare the hell out of Grandma Shosh?”

  He giggled. “And Rach used make up silly names and marry them.”

  “They got so loud some nights,” Rachael said, smiling, “that my ears would ring the next morning.”

  I shook my head and stared down at the plate of cookies. “Those poor creatures don’t know that their ancient home will soon be destroyed.”

  “Not destroyed,” Josef said. “Dismantled. There’s a difference.”

  “Countless species will be killed. I don’t know what you call that.”

  “Some death will occur,” Rachael said. “But the Geoengineers are making heroic efforts to save every documented species.”

  “Heroic?” I said. “Rachael, the cradle of humanity is being left to rot.”

  “I love Earth too, Dad,” Josef said, “but the air is poison. The soil is toxic. You spent your whole gaise life trying to clean it, and for what? So we could watch Mom die slowly from the Tox?” He paused and took a deep breath. “I want a better life for my kids, and your Earth can’t give that.”

  I put down my cup. “Since when did it become my Earth? Once, it was ours.”

  Esther loudly sipped her coffee, a sign she was not amused by the conversation.

  “Grandpa,” Rachael said, “it’s not just the toxins, it’s the overpopulation. We used up all the matter in the asteroid and Kuiper belts to make New Earth. We need Old Earth’s mantle to build more colonies. And besides, it’s natural.”

  “Natural?” I said as my belly grew hot.

  “Yes.” Rachael sat up straight and looked at her mother, as if she had been preparing this for weeks. “In living creatures, new cells are born from old ones, then the old cells die. But life continues. Your body’s cells have replicated themselves dozens of times. Old Earth isn’t ending, Grandpa, it’s rejuvenating. The old cell is giving birth to a new one. And when the old cell dies, its contents are broken up and recycled. That’s the course of life. The body of Old Earth will be gone, but its essence lives on.”

  I stared at my family, all of them willing to throw away the priceless Earth as if it were an obsolete piece of technology, and disagreed.

  Three days after Lin’s visit, I set my car down in central Albany. In a foggy rain, I wander past empty skyscrapers, drifts of windblown debris, and vac-sealed buildings, kicking up clouds of gray dust. On Livingston Avenue I meet a holdout who introduces herself as Helen. A sickly looking kitten walks at her heel.

  “Not many kids left,” Helen says, her voice muffled by a scratched ox-mask, “Green hair, techplant on her cheek, neh? Yeah, that’s Lin Bar-Martin. Yeoung’s kid. Hangs out with a bunch of liumangs. If I recall, her father Yeoung worked in nanotesting.”

  “A scientist?” I ask.

  “Ha! No, they tested nano on him.”

  “Oh. Where do they live?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “What do you mean? She’s homeless?”

  “As if. No, plenty of places to live here. She’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “To Wal-Mart Toyota. An orbital.”

  “You mean, for good?”

  “Where’ve you been, baichi? No one comes back to Earth.”

  “What about her friends?” I hate myself that I can’t remember their names. “Are they still around?”

  “Haven’t seen a kid in days. The whole north side of the city shipped off to Wal-Mart Toyota. Heard the place is dreadful. They abandoned it mid-construction because they found better ways to build colonies using nano.”

  “But the kids were at my house three days ago!”

  “And they left two days ago. A fleet of ships took ’em away like it was a parade.”

  And then I know why the kids cycled all the way down to New Paltz over dangerous roads, and I know the look in Lin’s eyes when she was crying outside my door that night, the feeling that I’d missed something. That was Lin’s last day on Earth. The kids wanted to see a piece of ancient Earth before they left it forever.

  “Thank you,” I say to Helen.

  I pet the sick kitten, then I leave her empty city. By the time I arrive home, it’s getting dark. There’s a strange car in the driveway, and a young woman sits on my porch. For a moment, I think it’s Lin. But then I recognize my granddaughter’s dark hair.

  “Hi, Grandpa.”

  “Rach, what are you doing here?”

  “I came to say hi.”

  I hug her hello. “You came all the way here just to say ‘hi’? Why didn’t you call? I could have prepared dinner.”

  “It was kind of a last-minute thing.”

  “It’s great to see you! You look good, Rach.” The wicker chair creaks as I sit beside her. “How’s school?”

  “It’s tough, but otherwise xin.” We stare at the overgrown grass as a wind whispers through the trees. “The grounds look really healthy.”

  “I try.”

  “I remember when I used to sit on your lap and you’d tell me the silliest stories.”

  “I’d say come on over, but I think you’re too big for that now.”

  She smiles, but it quickly fades. “Grandpa, the NEU can spot a flea from orbit. There’s nowhere to hide.”

  “I don’t plan to hide. I plan to stay right here.”

  “They’ll force you out.”

  Beyond the trees, a troublesome spot on my stascreen wavers. “Maybe I won’t give them the chance.”

  “Grandpa …” She puts a warm hand on mine. “You and I disagree on a lot of things. Promise me that when the time comes, you won’t do anything stupid.”

  “Rachael …”

  “Promise me.”

  When I look at her I see the child she once was, the girl who married frogs and danced in fields of sunflowers. “I’m sorry,” I say, “but this isn’t your Earth. You don’t understand.”

  “Maybe I understand more than you.” She leaps to her feet. “Neh, I have to go.”

  “Already? You just got here.”

  “I have an exam in the morning.”

  She hugs me, squeezes a little too hard. “Goodbye, Grandpa. I love you.”

  And in seconds her lobber is flying up into the sky. I watch it recede until it’s just another star. Out back the frogs croak louder than I’ve ever heard them.

  I sit on the wet grass under the stars, hugging a bottle of rye. Yesterday, another hurricane blew through the area, a product of Earth’s new gravitational partner. A decade ago they would have burnt the storms away with their orbital lasers, but Earth just isn’t worth it anymore. They didn’t even bother to give the hurricane a name.

  The storm washed away the dust, and the moon and New Earth lay hidden below the horizon. And in the dark, how beautiful is the sky! The stars are so bright they cast shadows, their points are so clear I feel I could pluck them like apples from the sky. Jupiter rises slowly in the east, bright as an angel. And the Milky Way swaths gloriously across the heavens. If I could leap into the sky, I’d fall into it forever.

  “Ashey,” I say to my cranial, “Play ‘Grandkids Visit, Summer ’98.’”

  A holo projects over my eyes. Little Rach sits on my knee, giggling. Birds chirp in the summer sun. The smell of roses. A soft breeze on my cheeks, all under the warm comfort of a well-functioning stascreen. “Can we sit under the sunflowers again?” a five-year-old Rach asks a much younger me.

  Sunlight trickles through fans of yellow petals as I follow her into my field of sunflowers. She sits on the ground beneath their giant blooms and says, “I want to live in your house, with you, Grandpa. I never want to go home.”

  I watch her d
raw a house in the dirt with a stick. “Like this one,” she says.

  “Ashey, play ‘Shoshanna’s 60th Birthday.’”

  Years earlier, Shosh opens the ancient oak door of our house. Everyone yells, “Surprise!” As my wife throws her hands to her mouth and shrieks, she drops a glass bowl. It shatters, and everyone chuckles nervously. A tear of happiness rolls down her sallow cheek. Even this far back she’s already showing signs of the Tox.

  I excelled at removing the worst pollutants from environments, but with all my knowledge I still couldn’t protect my wife’s body from them.

  “You devil,” she whispers to me, embarrassed. “I thought you had forgotten.”

  “Never,” I say.

  “Damn. That bowl was expensive.”

  “I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  I lean in to kiss her, and I feel the press of her soft lips even after the recording ends.

  “Ashey, play ‘Josef’s first steps.’”

  Our same house, decades earlier. Shosh, younger, healthier, Tox unmanifest. Little Josef bravely climbs to his feet, takes two teetering strides, then falls. Shosh leaps to publish the holo on the net for all to admire. She struts pridefully over to me and smiles. “Kid learns fast. He’s already better at walking than you are.”

  My ancient self giggles.

  “Ashey, pause playback.”

  Google-Wang Colony spins into view far above. I’d recognize the corporate colors from a billion miles away. I take another quaff of rye, then lay back on the wet grass. Cold moisture soaks into my back. Bank of Zhong Guo Colony winks distantly across the sky, and even though it’s hundreds of miles up I think I can hear it tearing roughly across the Cosmos. I sit here, watching the stars, until New Earth rises, spoiling the glorious night.

  I approach my house, plasteel container in one hand, rye in the other. I pour the liquid in the plasteel container into the foyer, and the hydrocarbon smell burns my nostrils.

  With a small lighter I set flame to a soaked rag. I toss it into the house. For a moment, the rag burns like a candle, guttering in a bedroom. Shadows dance across my ancient walls like memories. A pang of dread hits me. Is this really what I want?

  But it’s too late. The foyer erupts in flame, and I leap back. In seconds the fire roars louder than the frogs ever have. The heat singes my face as the house burns.

  And just like that, I destroy the home that my fifteenth generation great-grandmother built four hundred and seventeen years ago.

  With the stascreen shut down, the fire corkscrews freely into the sky. A column of smoke arcs away for miles, lit by the light of New Earth. Once, this would have aroused a hundred suppressor-bots into action. Now, what is another fire when all will soon be ash?

  My ancient house burns to the ground. It takes a while. So I sit beside the pond. The frogs are quiet, perhaps watching the flames with me. I think of Rachael, and the promise I made to her. And I think of Lin.

  At dawn, when the police arrive, the only thing left of the house is a pile of cinders. The air is foul with soot as armed men read me the evac order. They bind me in plasticuffs and escort me off my property. They seat me inside a small craft, and the young man across from me, in bulky police regalia, offers me anti-nausea nano for the trip to space. I was hoping to glimpse my property one last time as we lift off, but there are no windows. This is a prison ship.

  I paid a hefty fine and was ordered to take “reintegration” classes, then I was set free. The process seemed rote, and I suspect I’m one of thousands. Josef rented me an apartment in his condo for an absurd price, and he and Esther have been inviting me over nightly for dinner as if nothing at all has happened. Rachael calls from time to time to see how I’m fitting in.

  When I’m not skipping the reintegration classes or finding excuses not to join Josef and Esther for dinner, I spend my time watching as the Earth gets sliced open like a piece of fruit, as geometric chunks are carved out of its pulpy flesh ten thousand kilometers at a time.

  This evening my telescope and datafeeds focus on the Earth’s northern hemisphere.

  “It’s time,” Ashey warns. By piggybacking illegally onto satellite proxies, I have real-time access to the Geoengineers’ datanet. On my holoscreen a green light flashes twice, the signal from the Foreman. In Pan Mandarin, translated on my screen, the Foreman says, “EDHL-22, begin the first longitudinal cut at your discretion.”

  A full minute’s pause. Then a blinding flash. A molten orange circle of light moves south along the seventieth longitude line for minutes, and even from this distance it’s so bright it leaves spots in my vision. The cutting pauses as the laser’s gyroscopes realign. Then it slices across the fortieth latitude line, just under an emptied New York City.

  The laser traces out a great rectangle over the course of an hour. Then the grav-beams tug the huge section out. Like ice cream, the molten core drips toward Earth’s center. By technology I don’t pretend to understand, the layered walls of Earth don’t collapse into the new space, but stay fixed. And the white-hot core, from what I’ve read, is being artificially cooled, eleven-point-five degrees per day.

  I wonder if any of the holdouts, like Cordelia or Marta or Dr. Wu or Helen and her kitten, escaped the mandatory evacs. As they slowly floated into the sky, would they think they were flying up to meet God?

  Over several hours, lasers break the chunk into hundreds of pieces.

  “That one,” Ashey says, highlighting a point in my vision.

  The land that was my home is shunted up to Trump-Dominguez Colony. It will be used, the datanet says, as a counter mass so the colony can maintain its highly sought-after earth-forward views. Four and a half billion years, of algae and antelope, of brontosauri and bison, of woolly mammoths and glaciers, of trees and earthworms and amphibious frogs just to become a paperweight so the rich can wake up to their plastic earth.

  That night, I dream of frogs screaming.

  Years pass. Old Earth is gone, every last piece used up.

  Today, I sit next to Josef, Esther, and Pim in an amphitheater of thousands. Rachael is graduating from GE Sinopec with a B.S. in Applied Biology. We sit through an endless procession of names. Pim and I converse a bit. His voice has deepened, and he looks more like a man these days. He’s polite, and humors me, but I sense universes between us. I know this world isn’t mine anymore.

  After the ceremony, we eat dinner at an expensive restaurant, and the low-g does horrors to my stomach. Rachael, in her graduation gown, has been staring at me the entire meal. “Grandpa,” she says, “will you come with me for a ride after dinner? I’d like to show you something.”

  Her mother smiles.

  “I’ve had too much to eat. I’m a little tired. Maybe next time?”

  Josef glares at me. “Dad,” he says like he’s scolding a child, because that’s what I’ve become to all of them.

  I sigh. “What did you want to show me?”

  We head outside to Rachel’s lobber, a frighteningly small vessel, and I climb into the passenger seat as eagerly as a man to the gallows. I was never good with zero-g. I try to hide my shakes as we leap off GE Sinopec and dive down to New Earth.

  “For my graduation thesis we had to recreate an Old Earth ecosystem,” she says, “as part of the bioprojects to save as much life as we can.” I examine her face in the reflected light of the planet. She is beautiful, my granddaughter. From under her rolled up sleeve I see the glint of a techplant, expressly forbidden by her father. I smile.

  “So I chose your backyard,” she says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Specifically, the lake behind your house, with all the frogs.”

  The lobber dips over a deciduous forest, and we descend tens of miles. My stomach feels like I left it back at the university.

  “I didn’t tell you,” she says, “because I knew how you were always going on about New Earth.” She holds her breath, and when I say nothing, she says, “and also because I really wasn’
t sure if it was going to work.”

  “What was going to work?” I say. We swoop over fields of swaying grass, muddy swamps and dense forests.

  “Let me show you.”

  We set down in a field beside a thick wood. There are deep depressions in the mud, a sign of many previous landings. The sun hangs low on the horizon, and its orange light spills through the trees. She leads me into the woods, down a winding path, pausing to make sure I’m still with her, to warn me of a treacherous branch or root. The air here smells of mulch and earth and abundant life. She smiles, and suddenly it’s like she’s a toddler again, leading me into a field of sunflowers.

  And then I hear them.

  Frogs. Thousands of them, croaking away with strange voices. We approach a small lake, not too different from the one that was once in my backyard.

  “I came by your house when I knew you were away.” She looks apologetically at me. “And I collected, um … specimens. They’re not the same frogs, of course,” she says. “They have genes better suited to this particular environment. But they’re direct genetic descendants. Essentially, these are your frogs’ great-grandchildren.”

  The sound of their croaking rekindles memories of a thousand summer nights.

  “I did it for school, of course,” she says, “but also I did it for you, Grandpa. I remember sitting beside your lake on summer evenings, listening to the frogs. Those times, when we were all together, are some of the happiest I remember. I wanted to bring a little of that here, to New Earth, for you. Now that I’ve got the population stabilized—and a passing grade.” She laughs. “I could finally show you.”

  I am flabbergasted. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say yes.” She waves her hand and a long document arrives in my vision.

  “What’s this?”

  “A deed,” she says. “I used a few connections at school, and I got a little financial help from Mom and Dad. Well, a lot of help. But I bought this land. And now I’ve transferred the deed to you. These fifteen hectares are yours, Grandpa. It’s my gift.”

  I’m stunned. “Rach, it’s beautiful.” I reach to hug her.

  She whispers in my ear as she squeezes me, like she used to on summer nights on my porch so long ago, “I thought perhaps you could build a house here.”