by Jerry
“I didn’t imagine it so big,” she whispered.
The dogs whined and ran back the way we’d come.
White smoke curled around the rocket’s base. From within it, a subterranean growl arose.
“What’s happening?” Rachael moved closer to me.
I looked at the grand ship in wonderment. “He’s started the engines, just like he did so many years ago. He must have seen us come through the fence.”
The growl deepened, became more like a roar. “That doesn’t sound like automobile engines,” Rachael said.
I took a step toward the ship. Something crackled beneath my shoe, a thin layer of glass. I held a piece to the moon. Black, smooth, razor edged.
Flame spurted from the rocket’s bottom.
I grabbed Rachael’s arm, and we ran from the noise growing so loud that at the end it knocked us down, even behind the sheltering metal barriers we’d put between ourselves and the screaming, howling avalanche illuminating every hubcap and transmission and broken metal sheet with acetylene clarity.
I rolled onto my back, my ears aching, and watched the flame climb into the sky. Climb, climb, climb until it was no more. Until the stars swallowed it and stared back at me. Rachael lay beside me, watching too.
“It’s impossible,” I said, barely able to hear myself. “He waited for me so I would see, and then he left. It’s impossible.”
“I never met him.”
That’s one way the story could go: Papa flying finally, riding a beam of flaming torchlight into the sky, the rocket shouting its long, triumphant song like a million shrieking angels.
I like that story.
Or it might have gone exactly the way I’ve told it here until the part where Rachael and I stepped into the hollow with its waiting spaceship.
No blast glass underfoot. Just packed dirt. Instead of exhaust escaping from the rocket, all was still. Rachael gasped a little, under her breath. “It’s real,” she said. “Your father has a spaceship.”
“Yes,” I said, seeing it with her eyes.
At night, it truly was wondrous. Moonlight transformed jumbled metal around it into alien landscapes where every broken windshield and bent chrome bumper caught reflections like diamonds.
Then, the hatch in the ship’s base opened, spilling out light. Papa stood there as a silhouette. “Come in,” he called, his voice frail with age but still himself, still my father. “It’s good to see you, son.”
When we got close, he said, “Who is this vision?”
“It’s Rachael, Papa. She’s my . . . I wanted to introduce you.”
“What do you think of space travel?” he asked. His face dissolved into a thousand wrinkles when he smiled.
“I hear you have stories,” Rachael said.
My father reached for her hand. “I can do better than that, young lady. I can take you.” He looked up. “If you’d care to go. I can take you both.”
We shut the door. Strapped ourselves in. Papa sat in the captain’s chair, and he made us count down, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 . . .
When I was ten, my papa took me to space. We saw the moon and asteroids and comets and Mars. He gave me Mars when I was ten so I would have it my entire life. I spent my life not thanking him, but I’ve thanked him now.
Rachael and I will be parents someday. I hope I can do as well for my own children as Papa did for me.
THE SOUNDS OF OLD EARTH
Matthew Kressel
Earth has grown quiet since everyone’s shipped off to the new one. I walk New Paltz’s empty streets with an ox-mask tight about my face. An acidic rain mists my body, and a thick fog obscures the vac-sealed storefronts. Last week they hauled the Pyramids of Giza to New Earth. The week before, Stonehenge. The week before that, Versailles and a good chunk of the Great Wall. But the minor landmarks are too expensive to move, the NEU says, and so New Paltz’s Huguenot Street, seven centuries old, will remain here, to be sliced to pieces in a few months when the planetary lasers begin to cut the Earth apart.
I pump nano into my bloodstream to alleviate my creeping osteoarthritis and nod to a few fellow holdouts. We take our strolls through these dusty streets at ten every morning, our little act of rebellion against the mandatory evacuation orders. I wave hello to Marta, ninety-six, in her stylishly pink ox-mask. I shake hands with Dr. Wu, who performed the op to insert my cranial when I was a boy. I smile at Cordelia, one hundred and thirty-three, as she trots by on her quad servo-legs. All of us have lived in New Paltz our entire lives and all of us plan to die here.
Someone laughs behind me, a sound I haven’t heard in a long time. A group of teenage boys and girls ride ancient turbocycles over the cracked pavement toward me. They skid to a halt and their eager, flushed faces take me in. None wear ox-masks, which is against the law. I like them already.
“Hey shinhun!” a boy says. “Do you know where the frogs are?”
Before I can answer, an attractive girl with a techplant on her cheek blows a dreadlock of green hair from her eyes and says, “We heard some wankuzidi has an old house where he keeps a gose-load of frogs.” A boy pops a wheelie and another takes a hit of braino from an orange inhaler. A third puffs a cigalectric and exhales fluorescent smoke.
“Behind my house I have a pond with a few frogs still alive,” I say.
“Xin!” she exclaims. “How ’bout you ride with us? I’m Lin.”
These kids are as high as orbitals, but it’s not as if I have much left to lose. “Abner,” I say.
And just like that I’m hanging on to her waist as we speed toward my house over broken roads no ground vehicle has used in decades. The wind in my face feels exhilarating.
“We’re from Albany,” Lin says, “We tried taking the old Interstate down, but after Juan got tossed when he hit a cheeda crack, we decided to go local. Took us yungyeh!”
The stascreen around my property makes my fifty acres of forest flicker like water in sunlight. It’s a matter of pride that I keep it functioning at high efficiency; after all, I designed the damn technology. When we pass through the screen’s charged threshold, I take off my ox-mask, and breathe deep. The kids smile when they smell the fertile earth, the decaying leaves.
“It don’t smell like this in Albany,” Lin says.
We park the cycles on the overgrown grass and I lead them into the woods behind my house. The kids stare up at the huge maples and birches and fall quiet.
“The frogs croak loudest at sunset and before it rains,” I say. “That’s when the males are trying to attract a mate.” The kids giggle as they leap over branches. “If you really want to hear them, you should stay until it gets dark.”
“You got anything to eat?” a boy says. “We haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
I search inside the house and return with some readimades, pretty much all you can buy on Earth these days, while the kids shudder and wobble as they inhale braino. The green-haired Lin wanders off to vomit in the trees.
“Is she going to be all right?” I ask a boy.
“Oh, Lin always pukes after her first hit. Want some?” He offers a red inhaler, but I decline.
We sit beside the pond, all of us squeezed on a log. Lin sits next to me, and I pop up the straw of the readimade for her. “You okay?” I say.
“Yeah, I always get all shunbeen when I deepen.”
“It’s probably none of my business,” I say, “but shouldn’t you kids be in school or something?”
“School closed four months ago,” she says. “Not enough teachers.”
“So what do you do all day?”
She wipes saliva from her cheek and shrugs. “I don’t know. This.”
Another boy goes off to puke in the woods.
“What about you?” she says. “You live here all by yourself?”
I nod.
“And what do you do all day? Hang out with the frogs?”
“Most of my time I just try to keep the stascreen working.”
“That your job or something?”
“Why? This place is xin!”
I smile wanly. “Because toxfiltering’s a dead business now. People are only interested in making new life, not preserving the old.”
She seems to take me in for the first time. “And how old is this place, Abner? These trees look cheeda ancient.”
“I know that when my ancestor built this house four hundred years ago, the frog pond was already here.”
She sighs. “Fucking NEU making you leave this place?”
“They’re making everyone leave.”
She throws a rock into the pond, and a dozen frogs squeak away in fright.
“Please,” I say, gently touching her arm. “You’ll scare them off.”
“How long?” she says, giving me a tender look, and I’m not sure if she means the frogs or my eviction.
“Soon.”
The kids grow hungry again. I had been saving some hard-to-find vegisteaks for my grandkids, but they haven’t visited in ages. As I grill them on the deck the smoke rises through the trees, and the dipping sun sends girders of light through the branches.
The kids inhale more braino, howl with laughter, and Lin pukes again. And when they tire, I glimpse something desperate in their bloodshot eyes, something I’ve seen in the expressions of Cordelia and Dr. Wu and Marta and the other holdouts. Regret doesn’t spare you just because you’re young.
“You cycled all the way from Albany for this?” I ask Lin.
“Nothing but dust and skyscrapers there,” she says. “No real trees. We heard this was xin. Do you have kids, Abner?”
The question catches me off-guard. “Yeah, a son and daughter. And two grandkids. You sort of remind me of my granddaughter, Rachael.”
She pauses to consider this. “They come here lots?”
“Not anymore.”
“Why not? I’d be here every day.”
“They’ve moved.” I point to the sky.
She frowns, and her body sags like an old tree. “We’re moving too.”
“New Earth?”
She harrumphs. “Nah, that’s only for rich kids. We’re going to Wal-Mart Toyota.”
“Haven’t heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t. It’s like cheeda ancient, one of the first orbitals. But you gotta go where they send you, or else, you know?”
“I know,” I say, staring at the upside-down trees reflected in the water.
Night creeps over the forest and the frogs begin their mating calls in earnest. The croaking rises to a din, and the kids pause and listen. The glorious stars emerge, and I’m not sure if it’s my imagination, but the frogs seem to plead to them, over and over again, “Save us, save us, save us!”
We listen for a while, until the frogs tire. “It’s late,” I say. “It’s a long way back to Albany. Why don’t you kids stay? There are plenty of beds.”
So we head inside. I set them up with fresh linen I haven’t used in years, and during the night I hear fucking and shuffling and laughing as I pour myself tumbler after tumbler of rye whiskey until I pass out. Late in the night, I hear someone whimpering outside my door, and I rise groggily from bed. Lin sits in the hallway, her eyes as red as cinders as she looks up at me.
“I’m sorry,” she says, wiping away tears. “I didn’t know that was your bedroom.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” she says as she climbs to her feet.
“You okay?”
“I was just thinking. You don’t know us, Abner, but you welcomed us into your home.”
I shrug. “This place was made for guests.”
She stares at the walls. “Must have been beautiful, when it was full of people.”
I nod. “It was.”
She stands there, and again she reminds me of my granddaughter who I never see. I want to hug her and tell her the future will be xin, that everything will work out, eventually. But I’m too drunk to lie. “It’s late, Lin. Go to bed.”
A tear rolls down her cheek. She nods and turns away. I close the door, feeling as if I’ve missed something important. It takes me forever to fall back asleep.
The next morning, the kids are gone. The house looks as if a tornado has blown through. But one bedroom has been tidied, and there’s a note on the nightstand.
“The frogs are beautiful. You are beautiful. Thank you for a perfect day.—Lin.”
I hold the note in my hand and stare out the window into the empty yard. I already miss their laughter.
Several months before I received the evac order, I visited New Earth for the first time. My son Josef played the guide and took me to the Ishibuto-Mori preserve, a dense rainforest on the northern hemisphere. Giant sequoias planted a few years ago had already grown hundreds of feet tall, carrion flowers had been gengineered to smell like cotton candy, and the rains came precisely at 2:00 p.m. every day.
Clear plexi walls kept us safe on a paved path that led us, like Dorothy to Oz, to John Muir Mall. It was a palatial marketplace where they seemed to have anticipated every human need. Food, clothing, jewelry, a pub, an immersion cinema, a spa. All was here, square in the middle of the rainforest. A holohost welcomed us to the mall’s courtyard and carefully explained, as if he were speaking to children, how Old Earth had become uninhabitable, how humanity’s first home was ruined forever because Those Before had no appreciation for the natural world. But the Ishibuto-Mori Corporation, along with dozens of other companies, were hard at work ensuring that New Earth avoided this fate.
As my son and I ate oversized burgers in the courtyard of Pfizer’s McDonald’s, I noticed that no one looked up when Earth rose above the forest canopy. Before the next scheduled rain we left for home.
Josef’s family lived in a spacious and many-windowed apartment on the ninety-seventh floor of a three-hundred-story tower. Luxury condos like these, Josef said, were popping up all over New Earth. My heart warmed when I saw my grandkids, Rachael and Pim. It had been several years since I’d seen them in person—they didn’t visit Earth anymore. Today was Pim’s twelfth birthday.
My grandson blew out his candles and we all shared papaya cake. On cues from my daughter-in-law, a shining mahogany andro poured coffee, brought out cookies, and cleared the dirty dishes. I felt like a princely CEO. On Earth natural grain was absurdly expensive and hard to come by, but on New Earth it seemed as plentiful as the scheduled rain.
“Pim’s not the only one celebrating today,” Josef said, in between sips of coffee. “Tell Grandpa the good news, Rach.”
My granddaughter beamed and said, “I got a full scholarship to GE Sinopec!”
“GE Sinopec?” I said.
“An orbital university!”
“Oh, wa!” I said. “A full scholarship? That’s xin!”
“As a reward,” Josef said, “Esther and I have decided to buy Rach a small lobber. You’d be surprised at how affordable they’ve become.”
“I can visit Mom and Dad on weekends,” Rachael said, “and fly back to school on Sundays. And Grandpa, there’s this low-fuel maneuver called a Hohmann Transfer that lets you fly over to Old Earth in a couple hours. Me and Leva are definitely headed there when they start dismantling it, to get a closer view.”
“Rachael,” Esther said with an admonishing tone. “Why don’t you see if Grandpa wants more coffee?”
“He’s got coffee. And isn’t that what you bought the andro for?”
“Rachael, don’t be rude!”
“But, Mom, his cup is full!”
“Rachael Kopperfeld!”
“Please!” I said. “Yes, yes, they’re dismantling Old Earth. It’s no gaise secret. Why does everyone avoid that subject around me?”
“Because every time we bring it up,” Josef said, “you go on a rant about how they’re tearing down your home.”
I stared at my son. �
��It was once your home too, if you remember.”
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.”