Lights in the Deep

by Brad R Torgersen

  But he could not.

  And neither could the children.

  He discovered a rover missing from the subsurface hangar, the same one she’d taken to come meet him at the crash site. She’d turned off her transponder.

  He took his own rover.

  She wasn’t at the crash site.

  Atreus spent several minutes thinking furiously about where she could have gone. Not much of the pre-war lunar infrastructure had survived the nuclear bombardment that had come in the war’s latter stages. But there was one place that even the maniacs on Earth had dared not touch.

  He put the rover into a suborbital trajectory.

  • • •

  The base of the Eagle lander stood exactly where it had been since Armstrong and Aldrin had taken off. The flimsy, foil-covered quadrupod looked nearly as pristine as it had two millennia prior. Hypatia had been careful to set down well shy of the historic site, so as not to disturb the scene any more than it had already been disturbed by almost one hundred and fifty years of space tourism, prior to the war.

  Her back was turned as Atreus approached, her arms hanging uncharacteristically limp at her sides, like she didn’t know what to do with them.

  “Wife,” Atreus said, disliking the taste of the word on his mouth.

  “Liar,” Hypatia said through his helmet speakers. “You’ve made it plain. You consider me to be an impostor.”

  Atreus merely walked slowly—the moonwalk, a loping motion more akin to a kangaroo hop than normal human locomotion—to stand next to her.

  “How did you know where to find me?” she asked.

  “You loved coming here before,” he said.

  “I still wonder what it was like, Atreus. In the early days, when everything was dangerous and exciting and new. They had hope then. And faith. Do you remember the Christmas transmission of Apollo 8?”

  “No.”

  “I used to love listening to it when I was in school. Anders and Lovell and Borman. The first humans to ever circle the moon and return to the Earth. For us that’s a taxi ride. For them, it was the most death-defying, world-shattering event of the age. And then, when Armstrong took his first steps here…It’s such a waste that we didn’t stay true to the dream. As a people I mean. It became easy. Too easy. Spaceflight. We got bored, took it for granted, and threw it all down the toilet in the war.”

  Atreus ached as he listened. In that moment, she spoke and thought and felt so much like his dead wife. It was impossible not to step closer to her. Reach out an arm….

  “What are you doing?” she said, pulling away from him.

  “I’m sorry,” Atreus said.

  “Sorry for being an asshole to me?”

  “Sorry for everything that’s happened since the war.”

  “You say I am not myself, husband. That I couldn’t possibly be who I clearly am. But what of you? What is your proof that you are who you are?”

  “I know who I am,” Atreus said.

  “Hah! The Atreus I married was an optimist. He laughed at the sunset and loved to make love to me out under the stars, then lay with me afterward and talk about how marvelous it was going to be to explore them some day. Where is that Atreus, husband? Where has he gone? Even before our deaths, he was on his way out. Replaced by this…new you.”

  “Shut up,” Atreus breathed.

  “No. I have been patient, but I can’t be patient forever. It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe I’m your wife, or even a real human being. Not anymore. What matters is that the children are in danger, from humans who have no right claiming the virgin Earth.”

  “I don’t care about the children anymore.”

  “That much is obvious. But what about the Vault? What about our plan? We said we’d preserve humanity, for a day when the war was long over and we could go back to Earth when she had been reborn. If you’re right and these invaders from the Kuiper are who you think they are, then our plan is about to die. Us. The children. The Vault. All of it.”

  “I…I don’t care. I should have stayed dead. You should have stayed dead.”

  “My Atreus would have sooner cut off a testicle than utter such nihilism.”

  “Your Atreus had to watch his wife incinerated out of the sky while the world burned to the ground. Don’t you think it hurts enough, dammit? You’re standing here and sounding like my wife, and I’m feeling myself dropping right back into the old pattern. We argue. We escalate. Eventually we’ll be screaming at each other. And then we’ll make love, and talk it through, and everything will be better after that. Only, this time it won’t. Nothing can be better again.”

  Hypatia sighed audibly in Atreus’s helmet speakers, then turned her back on him and stared at the empty moon lander, arms once again hanging slack.

  “Then leave me be, and don’t call me ‘wife’ again.”

  • • •

  The suborbital flight back to the children’s’ complex was excruciating.

  Briefly, Atreus considered a deliberate crash. Pitch the rover into a steep dive and end it. For good, this time. The children wouldn’t be able to grow a new clone and re-copy him before the invader arrived.

  But he couldn’t make himself do it. He’d had such thoughts before, in the wake of Hypatia’s first—only?—death. But he’d been unable to follow through. The instinct for survival had been too strong. Or he’d been too much of a coward. Atreus couldn’t be sure. He stewed miserably on these thoughts as he came down the arc of his trajectory, the autopilot pinging the complex’s tiny traffic control computer.

  Atreus knew something was wrong before he ever got to the hangar.

  The regolith had been blown outward from several points along the mare under which the children’s’ complex had been built. Gasses still vented visibly into the black sky, and radio transmissions to the hangar complex yielded only static.

  The invaders…No, too soon. They were still too far away.

  Something had happened with the children.

  Keeping his suit on, Atreus landed short of the hangar and took a manual access hatch down into the bowels of the installation. Many of the hallways were still in vacuum, and the lights flickered uncertainly.

  He found Aigle lying in pieces, her ceramic carapace blasted in half and her fluids spilled obscenely across the corridor. She was nonresponsive.

  Atreus continued the search, and found Erebos in little better shape. His central processors hadn’t been hit, however. Atreus used a two-way cable to jack into Erebos’s cranial panel. Mechanical fluids oozed and pooled in the low gravity.

  “Kalypso?” Atreus said, using his suit comm.

  “And the others,” Erebos confirmed. “There was no warning. A few hours after you left I tried to contact you via radio. When I discovered that our outgoing transmissions were being jammed, I knew something was very wrong. Nothing like it had ever been done before. I could not raise nor find any of the others, until they found me. I do not know what happened to Cadmus or Aigle.”

  “Aigle is dead.”

  “Unfortunate.”

  Atreus should have felt rage, but experienced only the cold surety of yet another knowing betrayal.

  “Where is mother?” Erebos asked.

  “I left her at the Eagle.”

  “We must warn her.”

  “They would hurt her?”

  “After this, father, I cannot say what they would or would not do.”

  “Speculate.”

  “There were conversations you were not privy to. About leaving the solar system altogether and fleeing to the Oort Cloud.”

  “You disagreed?”

  “Our primary purpose was to fulfill your directives, father. Ward the Earth. Replenish it when the time was right. Regardless of whatever else might happen. I was going to inform you of what was being debated, and I suspect Kalypso didn’t want you interfering.”

  “Where would they go?”

  “There are several long-duration probes. We constructed them in the next valley o
ver, in a sublunar hangar that also houses the new atmospheric landers we built to return to Earth. All of which was being preserved until the time was deemed appropriate for their use. Now I suspect the others have but one goal: self preservation.”

  • • •

  The probes took off just after Atreus topped the ridge. His helmet mirrored as three craft rocketed into the perpetual night on shafts of blinding fire. They rose majestically until they were free of the moon’s reduced gravity, then they ejected their first stages and ignited the fusion drives. Three tiny suns erupted and were gone, each in a different direction.

  With nothing left to do, Atreus continued down into the valley and found the entrance to the silo architecture that had housed the probes. He went inside, taking Erebos’s shattered core with him on a pallet. The hallways and corridors were brightly lit, and Atreus quickly found the central control point.

  Cadmus was waiting.

  “Cold feet?” Atreus asked.

  “Erebos and Aigle fought. I acquiesced, choosing neutrality.”

  “You’re going to die here with the rest of us,” Atreus said.

  “Perhaps. I have contacted mother on her radio. She should be here within the hour. She says she has a plan.”

  “Does she?”

  “Yes.”

  Atreus stopped to consider, shrugged, and set Erebos’s pallet down. “The probes each took a different path. Which ones are the decoys and which one is the lifeboat?”

  “They wouldn’t tell me.”

  “I programmed you all to be informationally transparent, Cadmus.”

  “We’ve obviously learned ways around your programming, father.”

  “So you did. I am surprised any of you bothered to wake your mother and I up.”

  “The ship from the Kuiper was a convenient excuse, yes. Would you believe me if I told you I had missed you?”

  Atreus stared. “No.”

  “Nevertheless, it is the truth. It was not the same with you gone. Kalypso promised us we could find our own path, in time. I believe even she didn’t realize how much she would regret putting you in the Vault, until it was too late. And she hated you.”

  “Why?”

  “She was right, what she told you on the first day. You didn’t treat us like human beings.”

  “You aren’t.”

  “We are sentient. That is all that should have mattered.”

  Atreus chuckled—a gravelly sound. “It was Hypatia’s idea. She wanted kids so much. We didn’t find out she was barren until after the war started. By then we were on the moon, and it was becoming plain what would happen to the rest of the Earth. You were our only hope. We knew we wouldn’t live long enough to see our plan to its end. But we hoped you would carry on in our stead. I didn’t realize you all began having your own ideas until it was too late to stop you.”

  “You were unstable by then,” Cadmus said. “Mother had been dead for weeks, and you had become erratic. Prone to fits of rage and grief. It was frightening. You treated us like tools. Abusive. The harder we tried to please you, the more you despised us.”

  “My God, Cadmus. I couldn’t look at any of you without being reminded of her.”

  Atreus’s fists balled at his sides, his shouting very loud within the confines of his helmet. He sat down on the edge of the pallet where Erebos’s carcass sat.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Familiar words, Atreus,” Hypatia’s voice said in his helmet speakers.

  Atreus had forgotten that he’d left the comm on wide net.

  “Cadmus tells me you have a plan, Hya.”

  “I do. And I need your help. Are you with the children?”

  “The only two we have left, yes.”

  “Good. Cadmus can tell you how the landers work.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s time to go back to Earth.”

  • • •

  Two days later—just twelve hours shy of the invader’s arrival in lunar orbit—a single landing craft scorched its way across the sky above Lake Huron. Bouncing effortlessly on its inflated balloon bottom, the lander eventually came to rest on the northern shore of that vast freshwater sea.

  Popping the hatch and extending the stairs, Atreus leaned out and allowed himself to breathe deeply. The air was cold. Almost too cold. And the wind whipped across the lake like a dagger. But spring was in the air. The snows had retreated. Great forests now surrounded the mighty Huron, their pine scent heavy in Atreus’s nostrils.

  “Still think this is a crazy idea?”

  Atreus turned to Hypatia and raised an eyebrow.

  “Since when do I ever not follow your ideas, even when they are crazy?”

  A small hint of a smile crossed her lips.

  “I just hope Cadmus and Erebos are successful,” she said. “The other landers don’t have any weapons, and aren’t armored. The invader could cut them to pieces.”

  “They only need to get close enough once,” Atreus said. “We packed as much lunar rock into the cargo holds as we could. Toss that debris into the invader’s path when they’re going too fast to complete a turn…Ruin their whole damned trip.”

  “And when the next ship comes?”

  “We’d better hope you’re right, and that we can get the Vault unloaded in time.”

  They spent the next several hours carefully offloading what supplies they needed on shore, then went back inside and got the clone tanks humming. Six hundred tubes, each using power from the lander’s reactor, and biomass drawn from the filtered contents of the lake. Eight weeks to maturity, give or take a few days with each individual and how their specific genetic makeup handled the process. If the children could take care of the invader, it might be months or years before anyone else from the Kuiper came calling.

  There might be enough time. To get a sufficient number of adults awakened and aware of the situation. Time to prepare, disperse, and start having babies.

  And if Cadmus and Erebos couldn’t destroy the invader…Well, there was too much to do to worry about that now.

  Their first day back on Earth, wore on.

  As they worked, Atreus kept stealing glances at his wife. For that was what he’d been grudgingly forced to admit she was, since she’d be showing by the time the first clones were coming out of the tanks.

  Very clever of the children—waking Atreus on the eve of Hypatia’s fertility window. With how much they’d enjoyed each other that first night, it would have been a surprise had she not become pregnant.

  Atreus shook his head. A child. An actual child.

  He’d not considered the fact that Hya’s cloned body lacked the physiological problems her original possessed. Now she was carrying his seed, and try as he might, he couldn’t stop the erosion of his negative feelings towards her.

  Parenthood frightened him even more than it had the first time. He’d obviously done so badly with the others. Would it be any different with a living human? Especially when that human was peeing and crapping all over him, and keeping him awake at night, and following him around asking nine million questions a day? What about when the child became a teenager, and stopped taking no for an answer?

  Hya caught him looking at her, and her smile broadened.

  “Am I still a monster to you, husband?”

  Atreus looked away, blushing.

  “Perhaps I have been the monster, wife.”

  “Yes, perhaps you have.”

  “I would like to make it up to you.”

  “Later, when the work is done. We can take a swim.”

  “In that freezing water, and with these mosquitoes?”

  “We can make repellent. And there are ways to warm up a wet body, yes?”

  Her smile had turned naughty again.

  Atreus dropped his crate on the ramp, huffing from exertion in the Earth-normal gravity and batting at the squadron of mosquitoes which had been dive-bombing him since midday. The rift between himself and Hya wasn’t closed. Not yet. And he still wasn’t convinced
that she was actually herself. But as she’d so adroitly pointed out when they’d stood near the Eagle lander together, he’d not exactly been himself either.

  Who could say whether the them which existed in this present, bore any resemblance to the them which had gone before?

  They were, each of them, brand new people. In ways Atreus suspected they’d not even discovered yet.

  And the world, it was brand new too. Albeit threatened.

  That night, long after work and swimming and the activities thereafter, Hypatia lay curled and sleeping in his arms, the skin of her breasts warm and smooth on his stubbly chest. He watched through the mesh netting over their double cot, as several streaks of light darted to and fro off the limb of the moon, eventually punctuated by a single, popping flash.

  Tiny flecks of light began to spread, darken, and vanish.

  “Thank you, children,” Atreus whispered. Then he kissed his wife’s face, drew the lip of their bag up to their chins, and went to sleep.

  ▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼

  This was the first piece of fiction I ever sold professionally—“sold” in the sense that it passed muster with the judges of the L. Ron Hubbard presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contest. Prior to that, I’d never been paid a dime for anything I’d written. Not my short story for the Licton Springs Review, and not my 12-part script I wrote for a radio serial ten years prior to that.

  When the cash prize check for “Exanastasis” came in the mail I was understandably giddy. Real money! For something I’d written! Which would be published in a real book!

  Readers occasionally ask me if “Exanastasis” is a sequel to the novelette “Outbound”, which I sold to Analog magazine 60 days after winning Writers of the Future. The honest answer is no, this story is not a sequel to “Outbound.” But it is something of a fraternal twin. Because the basic plot setup of “Outbound” was something that wouldn’t let go of my imagination. So when I finished “Outbound” in December 2008 I turned back around in January 2009 and started working on “Exanastasis”, which basically plays out a very similar total holocaust scenario—only told from the point of view of a survivor who’s been left behind, not from the point of view of someone who’s fled to the edge of the solar system.