Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

“It was so beautiful,” Dian whispered. “All blue and white and green in the old pictures.”

“Before the impact,” my father said. “Your job is to make it beautiful again.”

Arne squinted at it and shook his head. “I don’t see how—” “Just listen,” Tanya said. “Please.” My robot-father’s face was not designed to smile, but his voice could reflect a tolerant amusement. “Let me tell you what you are.” “I know,” Arne said. “Clones—” “Shut up,” Tanya told him. “Clones,” my robot-father nodded. “Genetic copies of the humans who got here alive after the impact.”

“I know all that,” Arne said. “I saw it on my monitor. We were born down in the maternity lab, from the frozen cells our real parents left. And I know how the asteroid killed the Earth. I saw the simulation on my monitor.”

“I didn’t,” Tanya said. “I want to know.”

“Let’s begin with Calvin DeFalco.” Our robot-parents were all shaped just alike, but each with a breastplate of a different color. Mine was bright blue. He had cared for me as long as I remembered, and I loved him as much as my beagle. “Cal was the man who built the station and got us here. He died for your chance to go back—”

Stubbornly, Arne pushed out his fat lower lip. “I like it better here.”

“You’re a dummy,” Tanya told him. “Dummies don’t talk.”

He stuck his tongue out at her, but we all stood close around my robot-father, listening.

“Calvin DeFalco was born in an old city called Chicago. He was as young as you are when his aunt took him to a museum where he saw the skeletons of the great dinosaurs that used to rule the Earth. The bones were so big that they frightened him. He asked her if they could ever come back.

“She tried to tell him he was safe. They were truly dead, she said, killed by a giant asteroid that struck the coast of Mexico. That frightened him more. She told him not to worry. Big impacts came millions of years apart. But he did worry about how anybody could survive another impact.

“His first idea was a colony on Mars. He trained to be an astronaut and led the only expedition that ever got there.

It turned out to be unfriendly, unfit for any self-sustaining colony. Most of the crew was lost, but Cal returned so famous he was able to persuade the world governments to set up Tycho Station.

“Live men and women worked here to build it, but they went home when the humanform robots were perfected. They left the robots to run the observatory and relay observations. If they ever saw trouble coming they were to call a warning to Earth—”

“But the killer did hit!” Arne broke in. “Why didn’t they stop it?”

“Shhh!” Tanya scolded him. “Just listen.”

He rolled his eyes at her.

“Everything went dreadfully wrong.” My robot-father’s voice fell with my real father’s sadness. “The asteroid was mostly iron and bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs. It came fast, on an orbit close around the Sun that hid it from the telescopes. Nobody saw it till there was no time to steer it away. But still they had a little luck.”

“Luck?” Arne made a snarly face. “When the whole world was killed?”

“Luck for you,” my robot-father told him. “Your father wasn’t on what Cal called his survival squad. That was the little handful of people picked for essential skills and chosen to form a sturdy gene pool. He was Arne Linder, a geologist who had written a book about terraforming Mars — changing it to make it fit for people. Cal had wanted him on the Mars expedition, but he didn’t like risk. Without the odd stroke of luck that got him to the Moon, you wouldn’t exist.”

Arne gulped and blinked.

“Cal had been flying a supply plane out to the station every three months. The impact caught it on the ground in New Mexico, partly loaded for the next flight, but it was not yet fueled. The survival team was scattered everywhere. Linder was in Iceland, thousands of miles away. And your mother—”

His lenses turned and his voice warmed for Tanya. “She was Tanya Wu, the team biologist. Her job was installing the maternity lab. The warning caught her in Massachusetts, far across the continent, gathering frozen cells and embryos for the cryonics vault. She got here just in time to save herself and her cat. Your Cleopatra is its second clone.”

Cleo was purring in Tanya’s arms, her yellow eyes blinking sleepily at the blazing Earth.

“And you, Pepe—” The lenses swung to him. “Your father was Pepe Navarro, an airplane pilot. On that last day, he was in Iceland with Linder on a seismic survey. They just barely got back to White Sands.” The lenses gleamed at Arne. “That’s why you’re here.”

“Me!” Dian begged him. “What about me?”

“You?” My robot-father’s face showed no feelings, but his voice laughed at her eagerness in a kind but teasing way. “Your clone mother was Diana Lazard. She was the curator of the hall of humanities in a big museum till Cal picked her to help him select what they must plan to save. Our museum level is filled with her books and artefacts. Sealed now, but you’ll all study there when you are older.”

“It’s Dunk’s turn.” Tanya grinned at me.

“Okay.” His voice smiled at her and Cleo before he turned more seriously to me. “I was a science news reporter. Cal had hired me to do publicity for the station. It cost a lot of money, and we had to sell it to the sceptics. I happened to be at White Sands when the asteroid fell waiting to do a story on the new maternity lab. My own good luck.”

“And Spaceman?” I asked. “He was your dog?”

“Actually, no.” He almost laughed. “I never had time for a pet, but Cal liked dogs. Spaceman’s clone dad was a stray that happened to run across the field just before we took off. Cal called him. He jumped aboard, and here he is. A really lucky dog.”

“Lucky?” Arne stood scowling out across the blazing moonscape, where nothing had ever lived. “When he’s dead? Like our folks are dead, and all the Earth?” He looked at me and Spaceman, with something like a sneer. “Do you call us lucky to be clones?”

My father had no answer ready.

“We’re alive,” Tanya said. “Don’t you like to be alive?”

“Here?” I saw something like a shiver. “I don’t know.”

“I do.” Pepe caught my father’s plastic hand. “I want to know all about the impact and what we can do about it.”

“I hoped you would.” My father hugged him and spoke to all of us. “The asteroid was a chunk of heavy rock, potato-shaped and ten miles long, probably a fragment from some larger collision. Cal had worked hard to have the station ready, but nobody could have been ready for anything so big.

“The warning got to White Sands about midnight on Christmas Eve. We might have had more time, but the duty man had come late from a party and gone to sleep at his post. We all might have died, but for a janitor who happened to see a red light flashing and called Cal. By then, we had only six hours.

“On holiday, people were away from home, impossible to reach. Although the supply plane was standing on the pad, we had a million things to do and no time for anything. Cal tried to keep the news off the air for fear of total chaos. A smart precaution, maybe, he couldn’t explain our haste to get off the pad. Fuel had been ordered but not delivered. We had to wait for Dr Linder and Dr Wu and more supplies. A hellish time.”

My robot-father’s voice had gone quick and trembly.

“But also a time of magnificent heroism. Cal finally had to tell our people there on the field — tell them they had only hours to live. You can imagine how desperately they must have wanted to be with their families, but most of them stayed at the job, working like demons.