Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

Born in old Norway, he had married Sigrid Knutson, a tall blonde beauty he had known when they were children. We learned more about his life from Pepe Navarro’s journal. The warning caught them in Iceland. Flying back to the Moon base, he begged Navarro to drop him off in Washington, where his wife was a translator in the Norwegian Embassy.

He had left her pregnant, their first child due. He felt frantic to be with her, but Navarro said they had no time to stop anywhere. They fought in the cockpit. Navarro knocked him out and got them to the base in time to save their lives.

“Dreadful for him,” Dian said. “He never got over grieving for Sigrid, or feeling he had failed her.”

Our new Arne must have caught something of that bitterness. While the greener Earth had always beckoned the rest of us back to finish our mission, he had never learned to like it. Even as a child, he used to haunt the dome, scowling through the big telescope.

“Those black spots.” He used to mutter and shake his head. “I don’t know what they are. I don’t want to know.”

They were dark grey patches scattered here and there across all the continents. The instruments showed only naked rock and soil, bare of life.

“Only old lava flow, most likely,” Tanya said.

“Cancers.” He muttered and shook his head. “Cancers in the green.”

“A silly notion,” she scolded him. “We’ll find the truth when we land.”

“Land there?” He looked sick. “Not if I can help it!”

Our holo parents had been too long in the computers for such matters to concern them, but they were real enough to us. My father had been a journalist, reporting from all over the world. His videos of the monuments and history and culture of Russia and China and the old America held an eerie fascination, yet they always filled me with a black regret for all we could never recover.

He never spoke much about himself, but I found more about him from a long narrative, an odd mix of fact and fiction, that he had dictated to the computer. He called it The Last Day. Writing for a future he hoped might want to know about the past, he spoke about his family and everybody he had known, telling what they had meant to him. That much was the fact. The fiction was the way he imagined their last moments.

One chapter was about Linder’s wife. Best man at their wedding and dancing with her at the reception, he felt haunted by her tragedy. The baby had come, he imagined, while Linder was in Iceland. She was already at home from the hospital, trying to reach him with her news, when DeFalco called on that last morning.

Although he told her nothing about the falling asteroid, his haste and his tone of voice alarmed her. She tried and tried again to reach Linder at his hotel in Reykjavik. He was never there. Frantic, she tried to call friends at the White Sands Moon Base. The phone lines were jammed.

Listening to the radio, watching holo stations, she learned of the communications blackout spreading over Asia. The baby sensed her terror and began to cry. She nursed it and crooned to it and prayed for Arne to call or come home. When the holo phone rang, it was a friend in flight operations at White Sands, who thought she would be relieved to know her husband was safe. She had just seen him rushing aboard the escape plane.

She must have felt relief, my father thought, but also dreadful despair. She knew she and the baby were about to die. Trying not to feel that he had betrayed her, she prayed for him. With the wailing baby in her arms, she sang to it and prayed for its soul till the surface shock brought the building down upon them.

Hearing the emotion in my father’s voice, I shared something of his sorrow, a grief that always left me whenever we climbed into the dome to see the reborn Earth and talked of how to restore it. Our instruments revealed nothing of those anomalous creatures Wu and Navarro had seen crawling out into the Sun. The depleted oxygen had been replenished. Spinning its swift days and nights high in our black sky, Earth waxed and waned through our long months, inviting us home with green life splashed over the land.

Identical genes never made us entirely identical. We all had to struggle for some compromise between ourselves, our genes, and the demands of our mission. I was never my clone brother, whose dried and frozen body had lain in the Moon dust below the crater wall almost forever.

Reading his letters to me about his frustrated devotion to Tanya, I felt it hard to understand. Grown up again, she loved the mission the way her mother had. Avoiding any risk of discord, she favored all three of us equally, Pepe, Arne and I. If Dian felt hurt, she gave no sign.

“Arrogance!” Arne’s clone brother had written in his diary. “Anthropocen-trie arrogance. We’ve found a new biocosm already blooming. We have no right to harm it. A crime worse than genocide.”

The new Arne shrugged when I asked what he thought of the passage.

“Another man writing, too long ago. I get his point about the mission, but I’ll do what I must. Frankly, I don’t get what he said about Dian, if they really were in love. All she cares about now is her dusty books and her frozen art and chess with her computer.”

DeFalco’s clone should have been our leader, but he had died without a clone. When the time had come for our return, Arne gathered us in the library reading room to plan it.

“First of all,” he asked, “why should we go back?”

“Of course we must.” Tanya spoke sharply, irked at him. “That’s the reason we exist.”

“An overblown dream.” His nose tilted up. “Old DeFalco’s impact was not the first. It won’t be the last. Maybe not the worst. But a new evolution has always replaced the old with something probably better. Nature working as it should. Why should we meddle?”

“Because we’re human,” Tanya said.

“Is that so great?” He sniffed at her. “When you look at the old Earth, at all the wanton savagery and genocide, our record’s not so bright. Navarro and Wu found a new evolution already in progress. It could flower into something better than we are.”

“Those red monsters on the beach?” She shuddered. “I’ll go with our own kind.”

Arne looked around the table and saw us all against him.

“If we’re going back,” he said, “I’m the leader. I understand terraforming.”

“Maybe.” Tanya frowned. “But that’s not enough. We’ll have to get down into low orbit and make a new survey to select the landing site. Pepe is the space pilot.” She smiled at him. “If we make a safe landing, we’ll have things to build. Pepe is the engineer.”

We voted. Dian raised her hand for Arne, Tanya and Pepe. When that left me to break the tie, I nominated Tanya. Arne sat scowling till he surrendered to her smile. Voting on the landing site, again we chose the coast of that same inland sea. Pepe picked the day. When it came, we gathered in space gear at the spaceport elevator. Only three of us at first, anxiously eager, impatiently waiting for Arne and Dian.

“She’s gone!” Arne came running down the passage. “I’ve looked everywhere. Her rooms, the museum, the gym and the shops, the common rooms. I can’t find her.”

The robots found her in her spacesuit a thousand feet down the crater’s inner wall. She had struck jagged ledges, bounced and rolled and struck again. Blood had sprayed the faceplate, and she was stiff as iron before they got her back inside. Arne found a note in her computer.

“Farewell and good fortune, if any of you miss me. I’ve chosen not to go because I see no useful place for me at the Earth outpost, even if you get one set up. I lack the hardihood for pioneering. Even at the best, the colonists will have no time or need for me before another group of clones can grow.”