The Seeds of New Earth

by Mark R. Healy

  “Yeah, I’m beginning to understand that,” she bristled. “You really have no idea. I’m serious about this, all right? Stay away from my embryos from now on.”

  All I could do was shake my head helplessly. “Are we really going down this road? To a place where there’s you and me? I thought we were in this together.”

  “We were in this together, Brant. Until now. I just…” She seemed genuinely conflicted. “I can’t trust you with this. Not with something so important. There’s no room for error anymore. If the embryos are deteriorating as we suspect, we don’t have time for mistakes. We have to get it right first time.”

  “This is bullshit,” I muttered under my breath, but she ignored me. “All right,” I said, fed up. “If that’s what you want, that’s how we’ll play it. We’ll do things separately.”

  We didn’t speak much after that. She brooded over the heinous act she believed I’d perpetrated, this alleged act of incompetence, while I stood with my arms folded, indignant, certain that I had done nothing wrong. Where did she get off making an accusation like that, anyway? The numbers I’d used were there in black and white. If she was so concerned about the blend, she should have reviewed the parameters herself in the first place. Besides, there was no evidence yet that there was anything wrong with what I’d done.

  Looking across at her as she leaned over a touch panel, I could still see a scowl marring her countenance through the curls of her hair. I decided that I shouldn’t take her accusations so personally. We were both strung out by this ordeal, both struggling to come to grips with the pressures that we faced. It was only to be expected that, at some point, we’d lash out at each other. Every single move we made, every parameter we altered could have drastic and devastating effects further down the line. Looking back, it was amazing things hadn’t flared up before now. I just had to keep my cool and try to ensure that things didn’t get any worse.

  Hours passed, and communication was kept to a minimum between us. Eventually I gravitated out into the workshop to put some space between her and me. Arsha spent most of her time hovering over the a-wombs, so tense that she appeared as though she might snap at any moment. It was some time during the middle of the night that I heard her call out again, her voice shrill.

  “Brant!” came her slightly muted voice as she thumped vigorously on the window. “Quick! Get in here!”

  I was through the lab doors in an instant, pulling the cleanroom suit down from its hook and clambering into it as quickly as I could manage.

  “What is it?” I barked.

  “Come look!”

  A multitude of horrifying scenarios cascaded through my mind, one after the other: that the embryos had died; that the a-wombs had powered off or failed; or even that they were leaking. But then I saw her body language, the look on her face, and realised that it was excitement causing the change in her voice, not panic.

  I zipped up and shambled over to the a-wombs, where Arsha was pointing at the touch panel on number two. Leaning in close, I ran my eyes across the data.

  “The hCG is at seven mIU/ml,” she said.

  “Seven,” I repeated softly. Human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, was a hormone produced by a fertilised egg. It was the chemical that showed up on those home pregnancy tests that couples had obsessed over, back in the day. The fact that it was present was a good sign, but it didn’t mean there was a viable pregnancy yet. “That’s not high enough to be considered a positive, though,” I said.

  “Yeah, and it’s not low enough to be a negative, either.”

  “When it hits twenty-five, then you can pop the champagne.”

  Arsha laughed, and for the moment the animosity seemed to be forgotten. She wrung her hands in a kind of restrained jubilation and seemed to bounce a little more on the balls of her feet as she walked.

  “It’s a start. We’re on our way,” she said.

  I moved past her, checking my own a-wombs at the end of the row, but there was no hCG detected as of yet. The jubilation of the moment was tarnished somewhat, and I couldn’t help but feel deflated.

  Still plenty of time, I reassured myself.

  Over the next twenty-four hours Arsha’s other three embryos had all begun to register the hCG hormone, indicating that the blastocysts had most probably implanted in the uterine walls of the a-wombs. It was still very early days yet, and there was a long way to go before we could confirm that the embryos were developing properly, but as early signs went, this was as much as we could hope for.

  I didn’t dwell on the fact that my embryos were not faring so promisingly, instead preferring to get on with my work, both around the workshop and also back at the plantations. Arsha began leaving the lab less and less, lingering like an anxious parent who couldn’t bear to stray too far from her young. I couldn’t blame her. In all honesty, I was just as excited and nervous as she was. Right at this moment, it didn’t matter to me that it was only the engineered embryos that seemed to be thriving. I was happy that at least one of us was making progress. After all, our primary goal was to bring children into the world. I could quibble about the genetic traits of those newborns later if I was given that luxury.

  I spent a good day and a half away from the lab altogether, just to get away from it all and clear my head. It was good to immerse myself in the work: getting my hands dirty in soil, feeling the cool earth squeezing between my fingers and carting more pails of water than I cared to count. I clambered atop the roof at Somerset and wrestled with solar tiles, rearranging, adding and removing pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. In the garden, I continued to gather seeds from various fruit with utmost care. This last task was perhaps the most important of all. The seeds, like the embryos back in the lab, were precious treasures, more valuable than any gold. They were the beginnings of a new civilization – not just the seeds of fruits and vegetables, of people and animals, but the seeds of a new world. Our new Earth.

  It was almost therapeutic to immerse myself in the work. The labour was hard and dirty, but it somehow relaxed me and put me at ease. Maybe it was just the enjoyment of having the sun on my back and the appreciation of accomplishing something worthwhile.

  The time came when I knew I had to return to the lab. I cleaned up, making sure everything was in its right place, then collected my backpack and hit the road. When I arrived at M-Corp, Arsha had both good and bad news for me.

  “I’m seeing very good levels on three of my embryos,” she told me, “ranging from mid-twenties to high thirties. I think we can say these are positive now. Within the week they should be large enough for us to scan and get a closer look at.”

  “Well, that’s great,” I said, encouraged.

  “However, there’s still a problem.”

  That moment of optimism withered inside me. “What now?”

  She indicated to the first a-womb in the row. “The hCG on number one is dropping.”

  I checked the touch panel to see for myself. There was a graph showing the trend of the hormone over the past forty-eight hours, and it was dropping rapidly.

  “Okay, well, hCG can do that. It can fluctuate.”

  “No, not like this,” she said. “It’s down to six. It was triple that yesterday.” She cast an eye down the row. “And another thing. One of yours is showing hCG, too.”

  “What?” I exclaimed, moving quickly across the floor. “Really?”

  “Don’t get excited,” Arsha called after me, making no move to follow. “It never got very high, and now it’s started dropping as well.”

  I flicked through the touch panel screens and found the data on hCG levels.

  hCG: 2 mIU/ml.

  “Only two,” I murmured.

  “It only got as high as four before coming back down. It was never going to make it.”

  “There’s still time,” I said, but the conviction in my voice was thin, even to my own ears.

  “There’s not,” Arsha said adamantly. “And this should never have happened.”

  I glared back a
t her, understanding where this was going.

  “Go on then, Arsha. Say it.”

  She drew herself up. “This is your fault, Brant. You knew that your embryos weren’t going to be strong enough, so you over-compensated on the amniotic fluid. You made it thick as soup, and that’s what suffocated my embryo. It’s a miracle the others survived at all.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it, Arsha! Check the data. I carried out my part to the letter.”

  “You need to get it together Brant, do you hear me? We can’t afford any more of these mistakes.”

  “There were no mistakes, that’s what I’m trying to say! Tell me the reason why those embryos didn’t make it. Can you?” She said nothing. “You can’t even pinpoint that, can you? Blastocysts fail all the time through natural causes. There could be a hundred reasons why these didn’t make it.”

  Her eyes were hard as steel. “Mine don’t fail. This is on you.”

  I loosed a roar of frustration and indignation, storming from the lab without another word. I had to leave. I had to get out before things got really ugly, before I said something that would tear our relationship apart once and for all. Before things became irreparable.

  I kept away for the best part of a week, not only to stay out of Arsha’s way, but also to avoid the pointless vigil over the a-wombs. I could see the writing on the wall. Those two embryos I’d selected were not going to survive. I wasn’t really sure of the reason for that, but I knew that it had nothing to do with the amniotic fluid. I didn’t believe it was the genetics, either. Perhaps it was luck, just dumb, blind luck that had allowed three of Arsha’s embryos to implant where mine had failed.

  I occupied myself with the endless stream of work at the plantation, crossing paths with Arsha once or twice and exchanging words briefly as we went about our duties. I knew I had to return to the lab at some point. Like it or not, I had unfinished business there. I couldn’t put it off forever.

  When I did eventually return, I found that Arsha had already aborted a-womb number one, her own failed embryo, and it now sat drained of fluid, pale and empty. Beside it, the other successful a-wombs gave off a healthy red glow, their touch panels alive with flittering numbers as data readings came and went.

  Down the line I came to the final two active sacs, my embryos, and unsurprisingly the displays were inert, unchanging. There were no hCG hormone levels detected, and no other data to indicate that there was activity within. I scrolled through every screen maybe three or four times, each time becoming slower, pausing longer on every readout. It didn’t help. I couldn’t put off the inevitable. It was time to let them go.

  Keying in the commands on the touch panels, I initiated the abort procedure, heard the soft hiss of the slits opening in the sacs and then the splatter of fluid spewing into the drains below. As before, the sound brought with it a sense of disgust, and I could no longer bear to stand there and listen, to watch the fluid gushing from the sacs like crimson bile. The procedure was automated and the a-wombs would return themselves to their default configuration without my help. In a couple of hours they would be pale and sterile once again. There was no point hanging around.

  I wriggled out of the cleanroom suit like a snake trying desperately to shed its filthy skin, tossing it back on the hook and banging out through the doors. The sound of fluid sluicing out of the sacs seemed to follow me not only through the workshop, but also down the hallway and into the stairwell as I fled the building, chasing me like a malevolent spectre and sneering at my failure.

  8

  The stream wound its way through the gully, glinting like molten gold in the reflected glory of the late afternoon sky. From atop the incline the city sprawled out for clicks in every direction, resplendent and yet dormant in the deep orange sunlight, with not even the breath of wind to stir life into the stillness of buildings and streets that stretched as far as the eye could see. A column of smoke deep to the south hung frozen in the air and my eyes quickly passed over it. Fires brought with them some loathsome connotations: memories of the Winter, memories of the Displacer lab. Things that were best left buried. Dark times.

  I reached back and pulled the stainless steel buckets from the wheelbarrow, four in all, and started down into the gully, the buckets clanging together as I made rapid little steps to keep my balance. I wove between the withered boles of dead trees that still lined the embankment, skipping over cracked and rotted roots that jutted out from the dirt. Many had succumbed to gravity, breaking apart and sliding down to rest on the edges of the stream. One leaned precariously out over the water like a fishing pole that had been left to sit in the sand, the fisherman having long departed the scene. As I reached the water’s edge I dumped all but one of the buckets on the ground and stooped down to my haunches.

  I took a moment to dip my fingers into the stream. The water was cool and clear and it tugged at the silt and tiny pebbles below, dragging them unwittingly into a gently undulating dance. I reached further, to the bottom, where the flat edge of a stone poked through the sand. I noted with concern that the water barely came past my wrist. The levels were dropping. If we didn’t get more rain in the coming weeks we’d be forced to begin sourcing water from a new location.

  I pulled the stone free from its resting place and allowed the current to wipe away the mud that clung to its underside, brushing away the last morsels with my finger before lifting it clear of the water. Turning it in my fingers, I admired the smoothness of it, the perfection of the marbled ochre patterns that cut through the grey. It was almost a perfect oval shape, fitting snugly into the palm of my hand. Drying it on my shirt, I placed it into the pocket of my jeans. It would make a good skimmer.

  Dipping the bucket into the stream, I allowed it to fill almost to the brim before gripping the handle and pulling it away, dripping and sloshing onto the bank. I did the same with the second bucket, then got to my feet so that I could cart them back up the slope. Turning, I stopped abruptly, seeing Arsha standing at the top of the slope, her own buckets dangling in her hands.

  We just stood there for a few moments, staring. I hadn’t seen her in a week, let alone held a conversation, and the tension that had descended on the gully was palpable. I got the impression that she was weighing up whether she should stay and fill up her buckets or just turn around and leave without a word.

  “Hey,” I said finally.

  “Hey.”

  “Thirsty crops, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We need some rain, real soon.”

  “Yeah. Pretty dry,” she said.

  I started forward up the slope, trying my best to keep the water from spilling out onto the earth. Every drop was precious. Arsha watched me impassively, like observing an ant trying to crawl out of ditch, and waited until I’d reached the top before starting down herself.

  “Where’s your wheelbarrow?” I said, easing the buckets into the tray.

  “I don’t bring it anymore,” she called without looking back. “Too much junk between here and Cider.”

  “If you want, I could cart one of mine over for you.”

  Her voice drifted out of the gully. “That’s okay, I can manage.”

  I cantered back down the slope and joined her at the edge of the stream, where she’d already filled one of her buckets.

  “The embryos are doing well,” I commented. “Last I checked.”

  “Yeah, they’re doing fine.”

  She wasted no time, filling the second bucket with a minimum of fuss and hoisting them off the ground, preparing to leave.

  “Arsha,” I said awkwardly, “just wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “Just… put the buckets down for a second,” I implored.

  She did so impatiently, crossing her arms across her chest. “What is it?”

  “Can we…?” I struggled to find the right words. “Can we start this over?”

  “No, we can’t start this over,” she said bluntly.

  “Listen, you said wh
en I returned from the wasteland that you were glad. You said you needed me. Isn’t that true?”

  Grudgingly, she nodded. “Yeah, I said that.”

  “Well, I’m here. I’m trying my best. Isn’t that worth something?”

  “I’m not sure that’s enough.”

  “Why are you pushing me away, huh?”

  “Don’t try and make this sound personal, Brant,” she scowled. “I’m trying to do a job here, okay? I’m trying to complete the mission I was given. So far you’ve only hindering that. I’m just being pragmatic.”

  I threw up my hands, exasperated. “What is it you want from me, Arsha? Tell me what you want.”

  She sighed. “Okay. I can appreciate that you’re trying. What I want – what I need is someone I can rely upon. And I’m just not sure I can rely on you, Brant.”

  “You can rely on me, I promise you that. I’ll be more careful. I’ll uh… I’ll try harder.”

  “That’s fine, but I’m still not convinced.”

  “Arsha, we need to work together to get this done. I don’t know if either of us will make it on our own.”

  She glanced about, considering. “Here’s the deal, then. I will give you one more chance. One. After that, it’s over. We’re through. If I can’t depend on you to do the right thing, I’m better off going it alone, as hard as that may be. Understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  She held up an index finger. “One chance.”

  “Yeah, I got it. Thank you, Arsha.” Without another word, she gripped the buckets and began to walk off. “Give me a sec and I’ll help you with those up the road.”

  I filled my remaining buckets and carted them back out of the gully, loading them onto the wheelbarrow, and then motioned for Arsha to balance her buckets on the side.

  “It’s okay, Brant,” she said with a little flick of her head. “I can manage.” She trudged across through the knee-high grass that grew alongside the edge of the gully. Once she reached the arc of the road she turned to me and waited.

  Taking the unspoken invitation with both hands, I lifted the barrow with as much haste as I could manage and pushed it through the grass, carefully negotiating any ruts and bumps. I joined Arsha on Somerset Drive and pointed the load onto the cracked asphalt. From here the road curved away up the hill on a gentle gradient, so I leaned my weight forward as I began to push.