Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

Once, dancing with her in the gym, I was so overcome with her scent and her voice and the feel of her lithe body in my arms that I whispered a confession. With Pepe glaring after us, she led me out of the room and up to the dome.

The Earth was new, a long curve of red fire slashed across the black and soundless night, lighting the dead moonscape to a ghostly pink. In the dimness of the dome, she stripped to reveal her enchantment, stripped me while I stood trembling with a dazed elation.

In the Moon’s mild gravity, we needed no bed. She laughed at my ignorance and proceeded to teach me. Expert at it, she seemed to relish the lesson as keenly as I did. We were a long time there, the dance over and only the robots awake when we went back down. Kissing me a long goodnight that I shall never forget, she whispered that with practice I might be better than Pepe. Sadly for me, however, it never happened again.

She must have given Pepe some consolation, because he held me no grudge. Afterward, in fact, he seemed more amiable than ever, perhaps because of our shared devotion. He got on less well with Arne, who played his endless chess with Dian and roamed the old Earth in his VR cap to study DeFalco’s plan for restoring the planet. He wanted to be our leader. That leader, of course, should have been DeFalco’s clone, but the robot with his name on the white plate stood dead in its corner of the stock room, grey beneath millennia of Moon dust.

The year we were twenty-five, our robot parents gathered us into the gym. We found our gene parents already there in the big holo tank, all in their most formal images and looking very serious.

“The time has come for your own flight to Earth.” My father spoke for them. “Your training is complete. Remote sensors show the ice age is over. The robots have fueled the two-place Moon jumper and loaded it with seed pellets. Two of you can go, taking off when you are ready.”

“I am.” Glancing at Tanya, Pepe lifted his voice. “Today, if we can.”

“You will be the pilot.” My father smiled and turned to Arne. “Linder, you’re the trained terraformer. You will go to disperse the seed.”

Flushing pink, Arne shook his head.

Arne stood shaking his head, scowling at our parents in the holo tank. Dian stepped to his side and slid her arm around him.

“Damn DeFalco!” His lip jutted defiantly. “Damn his crazy plan! It doesn’t fit the facts. The asteroid was bigger than he ever imagined. It sterilized the planet and shattered a lot of the crust. It’s still recovering, the ice caps receding, but there’s still alarming seismic instability. I think we ought to let it wait for another generation.”

“Arne!” Tanya shook her head in pained reproof. “Its albedo says it’s warm enough. Ready for us now.”

“If you believe albedos.”

Our holo parents stood frozen in the tank, their eyes fixed on Arne as if the master computer had never been programmed for such a rebellion, but Tanya made a face at him.

“Arny Barny!” Mocking him, her voice turned shrill as it was when she was three. “Under all the bluff, you’ve always been a fraidy cat. Or are you just a coward?”

“Please, Tammy.” Pepe touched her arm. “We’re all grown up.” He turned very soberly to Arne. “And we can’t forget why Dr DeFalco put us here.”

“DeFalco’s dead.”

“Given time, we’ll all be dead. And dead again.” Pepe shrugged. “But really we don’t have to care. We can always be replaced.”

“Three cheers for Cal DeFalco!” Arne had flushed with emotion, but he shook his head at Tanya with a sort of forced deliberation. “You call me a coward. I’d say prudent. I know geology and the science of terraforming. I’ve spent thousands of hours surveying the Earth with telescopes and spectroscopes and radar, studying oceans and floodplains and lowlands.

“And I’ve found nowhere fit for life. The seas are still contaminated with heavy metals from the asteroid, the rivers still leaching more lethal stuff off the continents. We’d find the atmosphere unbreathable. Oxygen depleted.

Carbon dioxide enough to kill you. Sulfur dioxide from constant new eruptions. Climates too severe to let life take root anywhere. If we’ve got to make some crazy effort in spite of all the odds, at least let’s wait for another ten or twenty years—”

“Wait for what?” Tanya cut in more sharply. “If an ice age wasn’t long enough to cleanse the planet, what kind of miracle do you expect in ten or twenty years?”

“We can gather data.” Arne dropped his voice, appealing to reason. “We can update the plan to fit the Earth as we expect it to be in ten or 20,000 years. We can train for our own mission, if we must finally undertake it.”

“We’ve trained.” Pepe waited for Tanya to nod. “We’ve studied. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be. We’re going. I say now.”

“Not me.” Arne hugged Dian to him, and she smiled into his face. “Not us.”

“We’ll miss you.” Pepe shrugged and turned to me. “How about it, Dunk?”

I gulped and caught my breath to say okay, but Tanya had already clutched his arm. “I’m the biologist. I understand the problems. I’ve found oxygen masks ready for us in the stock room. Just take me down. I know how to sow the seed.”

They took off together, Pepe flying the space plane, Tanya filing radio reports as they surveyed the Earth from low orbit. She described the shrunken ice caps, the high sea levels, the shifted shorelines that made familiar features hard to recognize.

“We need soil where seed can grow,” she said. “Hard to pinpoint from space if it does exist at all. Rocks do crumble into silt, but the rains are scouring most of that into the sea for lack of roots to hold it. We’ll try to seed from orbit, but I want to land for a closer look.”

Dian asked them to look for any relics of human civilization.

“Relics?” Tanya was sarcastic. “Ice and time have erased the great pyramids. The big dams. The Great Wall of China. Everything large enough to look for.”

“No surprise,” Arne muttered. “The impact has remade the Earth, but not for us.”

“Our job.” Pepe’s voice. “To make it fit.”

“A brand-new world!” Tanya’s irony was gone. “Waiting for the spark of life.”

On the mike, Arne had technical questions about spectrometer readings of solar radiation reflected from the surface and refracted through the atmosphere, questions about polar ice, about air and ocean circulation. Data, he said, that we ought to record for the next generation.

“We’re here to replant the planet.” Tanya grew impatient. “And too low over the equator to see atmosphere or ocean circulation patterns. Heavy clouds hide most of the surface. We’ll need the radar to search for a landing site.”

Arne never said he wished he had gone down with them, but he kept on with his questions till I thought he felt guilty.

Dropping into an orbit that grazed the atmosphere, they sowed the planet with life-bombs, heat-shielded cylinders loaded with seed pellets. Clearing weather over east Africa revealed a narrow sea in the Great Rift Valley, which had deepened and opened wider.

Tanya wanted to land there.

“The most likely spot we’ve seen. It should be warm and wet enough. The water looks blue, probably fresh, with no great pollution. Besides, it happens to be near where Homo sapiens evolved. A symbolic spot for a second creation, though Pepe says I’m crazy to think about it.

“He says our job is already done. We’ve scattered seed over every continent and dropped algae bombs into all the major oceans. He says nature can take care of the rest, but I’m the biologist. I want soil and air and water samples to save for the next generation.