Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  "My God!" He was screaming into the microphone. "Hold still! I'm coming."

  "Don't!" Her voice came thinly, desperate yet oddly calm. "Arne, please! Get back to the Moon. Report what you can. Don't mind me. There'll be another clone."

  I heard the whir and clang of the lock, and then nothing at all.

  5

  The three of us left at Tycho lived out our natural lives with no more news from Earth. The robots slept again, a million years perhaps; we had no clocks that ran so long. The computers woke them when the sensors found the Earth grown green enough. We grew up again, listening to the robots and the holos, struggling once more to learn the roles we must play.

  "Meat robots!" Arne was always the critic. "Created and programmed to play God for old DeFalco."

  "Hardly gods." Tanya was bright and beautiful and sure of nearly everything. "But at least alive."

  "Meat copies." Arne mocked her.

  "Copies of the holo ghosts in the tank."

  "More than copies, too," Tanya said. "Genes aren't everything. We're ourselves."

  "Maybe," Arne muttered. "But still slaves of old DeFalco and his idiot plan."

  "So what?" Tanya wore a thick sheaf of sleek black hair, and she tossed it scornfully back. "It's the reason we're here. I expect to do my bit."

  "Maybe you, but I've heard my father talk."

  We all knew his father's image in the tanks. A bronze-bearded giant, Dr Arne Linder had been a distinguished geologist back before the impact. We'd read his books in Dian's library.

  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 surre
ndered 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."

  6

  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."

  "Hardly true." Gravely, Pepe shook his head. "The mission will take us all."

  The robots dug a new grave in the plot of rocks and dusk outside the crater where our parents and our older siblings had lain so long; beside them the sad little row of smaller mounds that covered my beagles. We buried her there, still rigid in her space gear. Arne spoke briefly, his voice hollow and somber in his helmet.

  "I do miss her. It's a terrible time for me, because I think I killed her. I've read the diaries of ourselves in love. I think she loved me again, though she never told me, or said much to anybody. Perhaps I should have guessed, but I'm not my brother."

  "We'll have another chance." Tanya tried to comfort him. "But we can't help what we are."

  We watched the robots fill the grave and delayed the launch again while he made a marker to set at the head of it, a metal plate that should stand forever here on the airless Moon, bearing only this legend:

  DIANLAZARD NUMBER THREE

  "Three." His voice in the helmet was a bitter rumble. "Numbers. That's all we are."

  "More than that," Tanya protested. "We're human. More than human, if you remember why we're here."

  "Not by choice," he grumbled. "I wish old DeFalco had left my father back on Earth."

  Muttering and swallowing whatever else he wanted to say, he knelt at the foot of the grave. The rest of us waited silently, isolated from one another in our clumsy armor. Shut up in her own tiny world, Dian had seemed content with the precious artefacts she cared for. I felt sad that I had never really got to know her.

  Arne rose from his knees and Tanya led us from the cemetery to the loaded plane. Our five individual robots had to be left on the station, but the sixth, the one DeFalco had not lived to program, came with us. We called it Calvin.

  From orbit, we studied those dark blots again and found them changed.

  "They've moved since we were children," Arne said. "Moved and grown. I don't like them. I don't think the planet's ready for us."

  "Ready or not," Tanya grinned and leaned cheerfully to slap his back, "here we go."

  "I can't imagine—" Muttering, he scowled at the ulcered Earth. What could they be?"

  "Bare lavas, maybe, where the rains have left no soil where anything could grow?"

  "Maybe burns?" She waited for her turn to study the data. "The spectrometers show oxygen levels high. More oxygen could mean hotter forest fires."

  "No smoke." He shook his head. "Fires don't burn for years."

  "Let's go on down."

  She had Pepe drop us into a landing orbit above the equator. Low over Africa, we found the Great Rift grown still wider. That inland sea had risen, flooding the ancient shore, yet she decided to land near it.

  "Why?" Arne demanded. "Have you forgotten those monsters on the beach?"

  "I want to see if they've evolved."

  "I don't like that." He nodded at the monitor. "That black area just west of the rift. I've watched it creeping across central Africa, erasing what I think was dense rain forest. Something ugly!"

  "If it's a challenge, I want to cope with it now."

  She had Pepe set us down on the bank of a new river, just a few miles from that narrow, cliff-walled sea.

  We rolled dice to be first off the plane. Winning with a six, I opened the air lock and stood a long time there, staring west across the grassy valley floor to a wall of dark forest till Tanya nudged me to make room for her.

  Pepe stayed on the plane, but the rest of us climbed down. Tanya picked blades from the grass at our feet and found them the same Kentucky Blue she and Pepe had sowed so long ago. When we looked through binoculars, however, the forest was nothing they had planted.

  Massive palm-like trees lifted feathery green plumes and enormous trumpet-shaped purple blooms out of a dense tangle of thick crimson vines.

  "A jungle of riddles," Tanya whispered. "The trees could be descended from some cactus species. But the undergrowth?" She stared a long time and whispered again, "A jungle of snakes! Slick red snakes!"

  I saw them at last, when she passed the binoculars to me. Heavy red coils, rooted in the ground, they wrapped the black stalks of things that looked like gigantic toadstools. Writhing like actual snakes, they kept striking as if at invisible insects.

  "A new evolution!" Tanya took the glasses back. "Maybe from the swimmers we saw on that beach? Maybe red from mutant photosynthetic symbiotes? I want a closer look."

  "Don't forget," Arne muttered. "Closer looks have killed you."

  We saw nothing else moving till Pepe's radio voice came from the cockpit, high above us. "Look north! Along the edge of the jungle. Things hopping like kangaroos. Or maybe grasshoppers."

  We found a creature venturing warily over a ridge, standing tall to look at us, sinking out of sight, hopping on toward us to stand and stare again, rumbling with something like the purr of a gigantic cat. A biped, it had a thick tail that balanced its forequarters and made a third leg when it stood. Others came slowly on behind it, jumping high but pausing as if to graze.

  "Our retrojets must have scared everything away," Pepe called again. "But now! Farther up the slope. A couple of monsters that would dwarf the old elephants. Half a dozen smaller, maybe younger."

  "A danger to us?" Arne called uneasily.

  "Who knows? The big ones have stopped to look. And listen, too. They've spread ears as wide as they are. They do look able to smash us if they like."

  "Shouldn't we take off?"

  "Not yet."

  Arne had reached for the binoculars, but Tanya kept them, sweeping the forest edge and the riverbank and the herd of hopping grazers.

  "A wonderland!" She was elated. "And a puzzle box. We must have slept longer than I thought, for all this evolutionary change."

  Arne climbed back into the plane and came down with a heavy rifle he mounted on a tripod. He squinted through the telescopic sight, waiting for the monsters.

  "Don't shoot," Tanya said, "unless I tell you to."

  "Okay, if you tell me in time."

  He held the rifle on them till they stopped a few hundred yards from us. Armored with slick purple-black plates that shimmered under the tropic sun, they looked a little like elephants, more like military tanks. The tallest came ahead, spread its wing-like ears again, opened enormous bright-fanged jaws, bellowed like a foghorn.

  Arne crouched behind his gun.

  "Don't," Tanya warned him. "You couldn't stop them."

  "I've got to try. No time to take off."

  He kept the gun level. We watched those great jaws yawning wider. A thunderous bellow scattered the hoppers. She caught his shoulder and pulled him away from his weapon. The monster stood there a long time, watching us through huge, black-slitted eyes as if waiting for an answer to its challenge, till finally it turned to lead its family on around us and down to the river. They splashed in and disappeared.

  "Nothing I expected." Tanya stood frowning after them. "No large land animal could have survived. Perhaps a few sea creatures did. The whales were prehi
storic land dwellers that migrated into the sea. Maybe they've returned as amphibians."

  The alarmed hoppers settled down. Tanya had us stand still in the shadow of the plane as they grazed in toward us, till Pepe shouted again.

  "If you want a killer, here it comes!"

  The hopper leader stood tall again, with a kind of purring scream. The grazers reared and scattered in panic.

  Something swift and tiger-striped pounced out of the grass and darted to overtake a baby before it could leap again. Arne's rifle crashed, and the two tumbled down together.

  "I told you," Tanya scolded him. "Don't do that."

  "Specimens." He shrugged. "You ought to take a look."

  He stayed on guard with the gun while I went on with her to study his kills. No larger than a dog, the infant hopper was hairless, covered with fine grey scales, its belly torn open and entrails exposed. Tanya spread the mangled body on the grass for my camera.

  "It's well shaped for its apparent ecological niche, but that's about all I can say." She shook her head in frustration. "We must have had a hundred million years of change."

  The killer was a compact mass of powerful muscle, clad in sleek black fur. She opened its bloody jaws to show the fangs to my camera, had me move the body to show the teats and claws.

  "A mammal." She spoke for the microphone. "Descended perhaps from rats or mice that somehow got through alive."

  Still aglow with the elation of discovery, she forgave Arne for his kill.

  "A new world for a new race!" she exulted.

  "Maybe," Arne muttered. "But ours? More likely a brand new biology, where we'll never belong."

  "We'll see." She shrugged and looked around again at the sea where the great amphibians lived and the jungle that had bred the killer. "We're here to see."

  She set the robot to scraping soil from the top of a rocky knob to level a site for our lab and living quarters. We unloaded supplies and set up the first geodesic dome. The robot began cutting stone for a defensive wall. She took me on short expeditions along the shore and up the ridge to record the flora and fauna we found. She was soon asking Pepe about fuel for the plane.