by Mike Ashley
"We have the frozen cells," Tanya said. "We can grow new people."
Nobody heard her. We were all looking out at the dead moonscape. The dome stood high between the rock-spattered desert and the ink-black shadow that filled the crater pit. Looking down, I felt giddy for an instant, and Arne backed away.
"Fraidy cat!" Tanya jeered him. "You're grey as a ghost."
Retreating farther, he flushed red and looked up at the Earth. It hung high and huge, capped white at the poles and swirled with great white storms. Beneath the clouds, the seas were streaked brown and yellow and red where rivers ran off the dark continents.
"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 de
mons.
"In spite of us, the news got out. Dozens of reporters and camera crews swarmed to the field. Cal had to confirm the story, but he begged them not to kill whatever chance we had. 'Kiss your wives goodbye,' I heard him tell them, 'kneel in prayer, or just get drunk.' I don't know what they reported, but all the TV and radio stations soon went silent.
"We were still on the ground when the asteroid came down in the Bay of Bengal, south of Asia. We had too little time to get into the air before the shockwaves got through the Earth to us at White Sands. The P waves first, just a few minutes ahead of the more destructive surface waves.
"Navarro and Linder got in from Iceland. Dr Wu landed in a chartered jet. The work crews loaded what they could. We made it, but barely. We were hardly a thousand feet off the pad when buildings around the field began to crumble and yellow dust came up to hide everything. "Earth died behind us."
2
"But you got away!" Pepe was round-eyed with wonder. "You were heroes!"
"We didn't feel heroic." My robot-father's voice was solemnly slow and low, almost a whisper. "Think of all we'd lost. We felt very lonely."
His naked plastic body quivered with something like a shudder and his eye lenses slowly swept us all.
"Christmas Day." He went silent, remembering. "It should have been a happy time. My married sister lived in Las Cruces, a city near the base. She had two kids, just five years old. I'd bought trikes for them. She was making dinner, baked turkey and dressing, yams, cranberry sauce—"
His voice caught and he stopped for a second.
"Foods you've never had, but we liked them for Christmas. My father and mother were coming from Ohio. He had just retired. She was in a wheelchair from a car accident, but they were going on around the world. A trip they had planned all their lives. They never knew they were about to die. My sister called, but I couldn't tell—" He stopped again, and his voice seemed strange. "Couldn't even say goodbye."
"What's a trike?" Arne wanted to know.
My father just stood there, looking up at the iron-stained Earth, till Pepe nudged his plastic arm. "Tell us how you got away."
"I hadn't been on the survival team. Cal brought me in place of an anthropologist who was on a dig in Mexico. I guess we should have been glad to get away. But there on the plane, looking back at the terrible cloud already hiding half the Earth, none of us felt good about anything."
He looked at Dian.
"Your mother opened her laptop and lay crying over it till Dr Wu gave her something that put her to sleep."
"She lost her nerve." Arne made a face at Tanya. "My father was braver."
"Maybe." My father made something like a laugh. "Pepe's father was our pilot, and cool enough. He took us all the way out to orbit before he gave the controls to Cal. He'd brought a liter of Mexican tequila. He drank most of it and sang sad Spanish songs and finally slept till we got to the Moon."
"It's dreadful to see." Dian stood gazing up at the Earth, speaking almost to herself. "The rivers all running red, like blood pouring into the oceans."
"Red mud," my robot-father said. "Silt colored red by all the iron that came from the asteroid. Rain washes it off the land because there's no grass or anything to hold it."
"Sad." When she looked at him I saw tears in her eyes. "You had a sad time."
"Tell us," Tanya said. "Tell us how it really was."
"Bad enough." He nodded. "Climbing east from New Mexico, we met the surface wave coming around the Earth from the impact point. The solid planet was rippling like a liquid ocean. Buildings and fields and mountains were rising toward the sky and dissolving into dust.
"The impact blew an enormous cloud of steam and shattered rock and white-hot vapour up through the stratosphere. Night had already fallen on Asia. We passed far north, but we saw the cloud, already facing and flattening, but still glowing dull red inside.
"Clouds had covered all the Earth by the time we came around again. A rusty brown at first, but the color faded as the dust settled out. Higher clouds condensed till the whole planet was bright and white as Venus. It was beautiful." His voice fell. "Beautiful and terrible."
"Everybody?" Whispering, Dian wiped at her tear. "Was everybody killed?"
"Except us." His plastic head nodded very slowly. "The robots here at the station recorded the last broadcasts. The impact made a burst of radiation that burned communications out for thousands of miles. The surface wave spread silence all around the world.
"A few pilots in high-flying aircraft tried to report what they saw, but I don't know who was left to hear. Radio and TV stations went off the air, but a few hardy souls kept on sending to the end. A cruise liner in the Indian Ocean had time to call for help. We picked up a reporter's video of the shattering Taj Mahal, the way he saw it by moonlight.
"An American astronomer guessed the truth. We caught a White House spokesman trying to deny it. Just a sudden solar flare, he said, with no verified reports. His voice was cut off before he finished. Watching from a thousand miles up, we saw the great wave rolling up out of the Atlantic. It washed all the old cities off the coast. The last words we heard came from White Sands. A drunk signal technician wishing us a Merry Christmas."
"You got here." Pepe grinned cheerfully. "But what happened to Mr Defalco?"
"There's a robot for him," Tanya said. "I saw his frozen cells in the vault."
"A tragedy." My robot-father's stiff face had no expression, but his voice was bleak. "Cal got with us to the Moon, but he died before he had the computer programmed to teach his clones, but he was the real hero. Earth had been hit so hard that our mission looked impossible, but he never gave up.
"He tried to keep us too busy to fret about anything. We unloaded the plane and stored the seed and embryos and frozen life cells in the cryonic vault. We had to get used to lunar gravity, which meant a lot of sweating in the centrifuge to keep our bodies fit. We had to clean the hydroponic gardens and get them growing again.
"Still hoping somebody or something had survived, Cal spent most of the nights up here at the telescopes. Earth was then a huge white pearl, dazzling with sunlight but mottled with volcanic explosions. He never saw the surface.
"The second year, he decided to go back-"
"Back to that?" Arne was startled. "Was he crazy?"
"That's what we told him. We'd seen no sign of life - nothing at all through those glaring clouds - but he kept imagining isolated survivors somehow hanging on. If anybody was there, he wanted to help.
"Three of us went down. Pepe at the controls. Cal with his search gear. I kept a video narrative. Flying low enough to look, all we saw was death. The impact had burned cities and forests and grasslands.
The polar ice had thawed. Lowlands were flooded, coastlines changed. We found the land like you see it now, black and barren pouring red mud into the oceans. No spark of green anywhere.
"Hoping for anything alive in the oceans, Cal had Pepe bring us down on the shore of a new sea that ran far into the Amazon valley. I got a whiff of the air when we opened the lock. It had a burnt-sulfur stink and set us all to coughing. In spite of it, Cal was determined to get samples of mud and water to test for microscopic life.
"We had no proper gear but he tried to improvise, with a plastic bag around his head and an oxygen bottle with a tube to his mouth. We watched from the plane. A dismal view. Jagged slopes of dead black lava from a cone north of us. No sun anywhere. A towering storm rising in the west, alive with lightning.
"Cal had a radio. I tried to copy what he said, but the plastic made him hard to hear. He tramped down to the water, stooping to pick up rocks and drop them in his sample bucket. 'Nothing green,' I heard him say. 'Nothing moving.' He looked at the smoking volcano behind him and the blood-colored sea ahead. 'Nothing anywhere.'
"Pepe was begging him to come back, but he muttered something I couldn't make out and stumbled on over the frozen lava, down to a muddy little stream. Squatting there at the edge of it, he scraped up something for h
is bucket. We saw him double up with a coughing fit, but he got back to his feet and waded on down the beach, into a surf that was foaming pink.
"Pepe called again, warning him to come back. He waved a sample bottle. 'Our best chance.' His voice was a strangled croak, but I got a few words. 'If anything survived in the sea. I hope-"
"Hope. Choking on that last word, he tried to get his breath and failed. He lost the radio and his bucket and stumbled a few yards toward us before he tripped and fell. The oxygen bottle floated away. We saw him grabbing for it, but the next wave took it out of his reach."
"You left him there?" Dian's voice rose sharply. "Left him to die?"
"We left him dead. Pepe wanted to help him, but he'd gone too far. His oxygen gone, the air had killed him."
"Air?"
"Bad air." My robot-father's helpless shrug was almost human.
"Mixed in the volcanic gases in the whiff I caught, there was cyanide." "Cyanide?" Pepe frowned. "Who put it there?" "It came from cometary cyanogen from the asteroid." "Poisoned air!" Arne turned pale. "And you want us to go back?" "To help nature clean it." His lenses swept the five of us. "If no green plants are left to restore the oxygen, you must replant them.
Cal died with his work undone. It's yours to finish."
3
The mission left to us, to us alone, we died and let the robots sleep while an ice age passed on Earth. The maternity lab delivered us again, and once more our dead parents brought us up.
My robot-father was always with me. He taught me to spell, taught me science and geometry, counted time when I was working out on the treadmill in the centrifuge.
"Keep yourself fit," he used to tell me. "I can last forever, but you're only human."
He made me work till I was panting and dripping sweat.
"You have your clone father's genes," he reminded me again. "You'll never be him, but I want you to promise you'll never give up our noble mission."
My hand on my heart, I promised.