The Seeds of New Earth

by Mark R. Healy

  But more than that: he was perfect. Wholly and utterly perfect. From his dark eyelashes to his button nose, his smooth and unblemished skin, even the tranquil look on his face, every part of him was pure, as if lovingly crafted by the gods themselves.

  But he wasn’t moving.

  I lifted him onto the tray of towels, laying him out as straight and as gently as I could. I listened for a heartbeat, felt for a pulse. There might have been something there, but it was incredibly weak. He wasn’t breathing.

  Trying to calm myself, I recalled the procedure for resuscitation I had learned as a part of basic first aid. I recalled the steps, but now I began to doubt myself. I didn’t have the expertise, I realised horribly. I needed a professional here, someone who knew what they were doing, not someone as ill-equipped as me to handle the situation.

  But there was no one else here. I was the only one who could do it.

  I rapidly dried him off with the towels to keep him from getting cold, carefully avoiding knocking the placenta, then tried to assess what to do next. He was blue. He still wasn’t breathing.

  Remember the steps. Open the airway, goddammit.

  I laid him flat and adjusted his head position so that his eyes were facing the ceiling. I used my fingers to check the mouth to make sure the gunk had cleared away. Then I breathed into his mouth five times, stopping to check for a pulse. I started compressions on his chest, alternating back to inflation breaths and checking the pulse. Again. There was still no response. I looked around desperately for something that could help, something I might have missed.

  Arsha. Arsha could help. She’d save him.

  But Arsha wasn’t coming. No one was coming. And I was losing him.

  I went back to the routine: breaths, compressions, pulse. Again and again. I cursed the inadequacy of my synthetic lung, the small pouch in my chest that was used to mimic human breathing. It had not been built for a purpose such as this. I could blow out a candle, but not much more. If only it had been larger, I could shift greater quantities of air.

  Breathe. Use the tools you have at your disposal.

  I lost track of the repetitions I made, the minutes that slipped by as I worked on him. It all became a blur. I kept going even though it seemed I was getting nowhere, like I was just falling into an endless and futile pattern.

  “Come on!” I screamed at the boy. “You’re a fighter, you can do this!”

  More breaths, more compressions. How long had it been? Surely he should have come around by now. I couldn’t let myself stop. I would keep at this for hours if I had to. What else was there to do? This was the only thing I cared about, the only thing that mattered.

  Keep going.

  But I was sobbing. In truth, I knew it was all falling away, and that there was nothing I could do about it. His colour wasn’t improving and his chest was still. It was a losing battle.

  I slowed my frenetic pace, tried to push away the numbness. I clasped his little toes in my fingers, those tiny digits I’d seen him wiggle so many times in the sac, and kissed him gently on the forehead. I leant in again and gave him one last round of inflation breaths, but couldn’t bring myself to finish them. Suddenly, I was spent. My willpower had fled.

  I leaned back, sobbing uncontrollably. The tears were falling down my cheeks. There seemed to be a river of them, almost enough to make a pool at my feet. I felt like I could drown the world with these tears.

  After all the time spent waiting, the fighting with Arsha, the hope and the despair, it had all amounted to nothing. I was right back where I started from. I would have to begin once more.

  But how could I put myself through this again?

  Suddenly the boy’s toes jerked and he coughed, a wet gurgling sound, and I cried out in shock and amazement. His eyes fluttered and his chest heaved, and he clawed in a ragged breath. He expelled it again and took another, his hands lifting up by his side and shaking as he strained at the effort.

  “That’s it!” I cried, cradling his head. “You’re doing it!” I laughed in equal parts delight and disbelief. I lifted my free hand and his grasping fingers closed around it, wrapping about my thumb like a vice. “Keep going!”

  He took another breath, and then another, and as he sucked in oxygen he began to change before my eyes, his colour improving with each passing second, the blue giving way to pink, and as I watched, his lips trembled apart and he gave an almighty cry.

  “Wahhhhhhhh! Wahhhhhhh!”

  I laughed again, bundling him in the towels lifting him up into my arms, felt his tiny weight pressed against me. His form was so slight that it seemed I was cradling nothing but fabric. I had to slip my hand inside the swaddling and placed it against his warm skin to make certain he was still in there.

  We both cried, in our own way, for our own reasons.

  And suddenly I could see a future again.

  Part Two

  Reap

  17

  I sat and watched the open door as sunlight streamed in, the azure sky clear and bright, the breeze ruffling stalks of wheat and causing the long grass across the street to dip and sway gently. There was more than a touch of chill in that wind. The summer had been meek and short-lived, and now autumn seemed destined for the same fate, giving way to winter almost before it had run its course.

  Another harsh winter. Another season of struggle. It didn’t seem fair.

  I could hear them coming now, footsteps slapping against the asphalt as they ran toward the house. I tried to discern how many there were, how many sets of feet were headed my way. At least two. Maybe three? Idly, I wondered what they would have in store for me this time, these little people who barely gave me a moment’s rest.

  I roused myself and prepared to meet them.

  Getting to my feet, I couldn’t help but feel old, as though the coldness in the air was already seeping into my bones and stiffening my joints, tightening my limbs and making them creak. I clasped and unclasped my fingers, shook them out. Maybe it was just the sound of these exuberant youths that made me feel ancient in comparison.

  The boy trampled across the edge of the wheat patch and alighted in the doorway, breathless and wide-eyed, a mop of dark hair tumbling across his face as he slid to a halt. He was a whirlwind of great destructive force, this one.

  “Brant! Brant! I saw one!”

  He brushed the hair out of his eyes and waggled his finger back in the direction he’d come, hopping excitedly like he was standing on hot coals.

  “What did you see, Atlas?”

  He ducked his head back out the door and pointed again. “A real one! A real live one! Come see!”

  “A real live dinosaur?”

  He made an exaggerated scowl. “No, silly. Grasshopper!”

  Ellinan and Mish caught up, appearing behind him and sharing his excitement, albeit in a more restrained manner.

  “It’s true,” Ellinan said. “We saw it too.”

  “You better show me,” I said, and as soon as I began to move, Atlas turned and burst past the other two, promptly landing in a heap on the path, then picked himself up without bothering to check for damage.

  “Careful, Atlas,” I admonished, but he had already started along the street.

  “Is it really that exciting?” I said to Mish and Ellinan, amused.

  “It’s pretty cool,” Mish said.

  Out on Somerset Drive the street was lush with plants, grass, and small saplings. Although burgeoning, much of it was turning brown due to the cooler weather and a lack of rain. The past two winters had been harsh, and the crops hadn’t gone ahead at quite the rate I’d hoped, but there was still enough food to go around. Our grain stores were decent, and there was corn as well as wheat, enough to last another tough winter if needed.

  I hoped things would start getting easier soon.

  Atlas charged on ahead, barefoot and grubby, seemingly leaner and taller every time I looked at him. He wore an orange T-shirt with a cartoonish tyrannosaurus rex printed across the front, his fa
vourite, and his fair skin was beginning to brown on his arms and face, tiny freckles dotting his nose. I’d need to keep an eye on that. There was no such thing as sunscreen anymore and keeping him in longer garments was like trying to keep a shirt on a bagful of snakes.

  He’d had a number of close scrapes in his first year, more than I cared to count. Watching him now, running and jumping and skipping, those times when he had struggled seemed very distant. When he was first born he didn’t feed well, and he had wasted away to the point where his ribs were showing. At other times in those early days he had caused me great worry, times when his skin became pale and clammy and he seemed to struggle just to draw breath. The first month in particular was harrowing, and I had been sure that the bones of his frail body would not hold his spirit, that it would leak out like water through a sieve. As such, I learned to appreciate every moment of his life, knowing that it might not last. I often held him close, listening to his heartbeat and feeling his breath on my cheek, allowing him to wrap his tiny fingers around my thumb as I assured him that everything would be okay.

  Despite all that, he had proven himself to be every bit the fighter I had witnessed in the a-womb, overcoming adversity after his birth with as much fortitude as he had shown before it. He clung to his tenuous thread of life with all of his might, refusing to give in despite the odds stacked against him, and since his first year he had grown stronger seemingly with every breath he took.

  Now he’d come through it and seemed ready to take on every challenge that came his way, exhibiting all the zest one would expect from a child who was discovering that there was a whole world out there to explore, to embrace, and to learn about.

  As I strode along the street I saw him pointing again, urging me to hurry, and then he paused to wrestle with the blue jeans in which I’d dressed him. They were a bit too long, but I figured he’d grow into them soon enough. It wasn’t like I could take him to the nearest department store and have him measured up. For now we were just making do with whatever we could find left over in the suburbs.

  “He was here,” Atlas was saying. “Brant, over here.”

  He indicated to a patch of long grass that grew between two of the houses further along the street. I hadn’t seen any grasshoppers for a few months, and up until this point wasn’t even sure if they’d survived long enough to propagate out in the wilds of the city. Ants, on the contrary, were thriving, and I could see a stream of them winding across the cracked asphalt at our feet. They were also attacking the remains of an earthworm on the edge of the gutter. The worms, too, seemed to be doing well in this environment – at least when they avoided the ants.

  “Looks like he’s gone now, huh?” I said.

  Atlas stared at the grass, disappointed, then bounded forward with typical spontaneity, screaming “Rawrrr” at the top of his lungs and flapping his arms in the air. The other children giggled at his display, and the grasshopper was dislodged from its hiding place, flittering out of the grass and curving through the air to land on my shirt. I lifted my hand and gently cupped it between my fingers.

  “Okay, I got him,” I said, sinking to my haunches as the children gathered around. Atlas charged back at full tilt and I shied away to prevent him from squashing the insect in his eagerness. “Uh-uh! Take it easy around the animals. What do I always say?”

  Atlas reined himself in, thrusting his hands to his side melodramatically and standing straight and still.

  “Every life counts,” he said obediently.

  “That’s right, every life counts. So you need to be careful around this little guy. Don’t go grabbing at him and mashing his head in.”

  “Let me see him!”

  “Okay, but no squashing like you did with those ants last week, got it?”

  “Aww, but there’s lots of those. And they smell funny.”

  “So do you, but that doesn’t mean I should squash you, does it?”

  They laughed again, and I drew my hands forward, parting my fingers far enough to see in. The grasshopper was small, about half the length of my thumb, and bright green in the sunlight. A brown stripe ran down the centre of its back, and its eyes were large and black, matching the tips of its antennae. It looked up at us, edging around as if searching for an opening in my fingers through which it could escape.

  “Eww, yuck!” Atlas exclaimed, and he scampered around behind Ellinan, who was crouched beside me, peeking at the grasshopper from over his shoulder. “He’s yucky!”

  “What’s wrong with him?” I said.

  “He’s gonna bite me.”

  “No, he’s not.” I opened my palm flat and the grasshopper sat there unmoving, as if deciding whether or not to accept the invitation of freedom. Mish reached down gently to coax it into her hand, and that seemed to spur it into action. It leapt away and disappeared into the grass again.

  Emboldened by its retreat, Atlas charged over toward it, roaring in an attempt to scare it away, but when the grasshopper jumped back in his direction the tables were turned. Atlas wailed in fear and made an awkward about-face, running back and thrusting himself into Ellinan’s arms.

  “It’s okay,” Ellinan reassured him, lifting a hand and patting his arm. “Let’s leave him alone now.”

  “Good idea,” I agreed, but Atlas looked up at me with watery eyes, jittery from the scare. I leant down and grasped his shoulder. “Hey, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I think it’s time to go check the eggs.”

  His mouth made a big ‘O’ and his eyes widened. As I’d hoped, the scary grasshopper was instantly forgotten.

  “Race you!” he called and set off down the sloping roadway. Mish followed, jogging along beside him and reaching out with a steadying hand as he stumbled. Ellinan stood beside me and watched them go.

  “Not racing today, Ell?”

  “Not today,” he said. He gave me a little smile that didn’t touch his eyes.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Sure.” He began to pace down the street. I walked by his side, watching him closely. He was lean and wiry, like his sister, but he seemed to be carrying the weight of the world on those thin shoulders. I was becoming more concerned about him as time went by. No longer the carefree child I had first met years ago, Ellinan now seemed to struggle with doubt and turmoil in the same way that I once had. The incident with the Marauders had left him scarred, there was no doubt about that. He no longer saw the world with the innocence or exuberance that he once possessed.

  But there was more to it than that. Like me, he was a machine that had been crafted into the likeness of a human being, but in his case, he had been programmed to think and act as a ten-year-old child. The problem was that his worldly experiences were now at odds with that programming. The knowledge and understanding that he now possessed were straining against the confines of his underdeveloped intellect.

  Synthetic children, or Wards as they had been known, weren’t built to live in these tiny bodies for decades on end, as Ellinan and Mish had done. They were meant to be upgraded into larger bodies, programmed with the emotional faculties of older people to mimic the aging process.

  Ellinan, and to a lesser extent Mish, were now like adults who were suppressed within the minds and bodies of children. I’d begun to recognise that they were both tearing at the seams of this existence, each in their own way.

  Although he was still a lovely boy, I frequently found Ellinan to be moody, conflicted and depressed. I initially put it down to the onset of some kind of teenage angst, but now I knew there was more to it than that. I wasn’t exactly sure how to tackle the issue – whether I should confront him directly or merely wait to see if it was something he could sort out internally. In the end I’d decided to approach it more discreetly, ensuring that I talked to him often to provide him with an avenue in which to vent his frustrations. Up to this point it didn’t seem to be helping.

  A few doors down, Mish and Atlas zipped across a yard, disappearing into the house we’d nickna
med the ‘coop’, the place in which the fowls had taken up residence. It was a low-set house with blotchy, mushroom-coloured render that was crumbling away in large chunks. The excited chatter of the children echoed out into the street as they went on the hunt for goodies.

  “Did you have any success with that sunflower oil the other day?” I said, attempting to ease gently into a conversation with Ellinan as I’d done many times of late.

  “Kinda. I got something out of it, but it’s a bit gunky.”

  “It should be fine. We’ll use it tonight, okay?”

  “Over at Arsha’s place?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got a surprise in store for the kids.”

  “What is it?”

  “Surprise,” I winked.

  “Okay.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at his feet.

  There he goes, I thought, withdrawing from me again.

  “You doin’ okay, Ellinan? Is there anything you want to talk about?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You just seem like you’ve got some things on your mind today.”

  “No, not really.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t push it any further. I wasn’t going to get anywhere by poking and prodding him. It was just something he would have to bring to me when he was ready. All I could do was to be here and have my ear ready for when the words came.

  “Hey, y’know what?” I said. “If we ask real nice, I’m hoping Arsha will lend us her telescope tonight. I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to get a look at the moons of Jupiter if the clouds stay away.”

  “Really?”

  “For sure. As long as we can get someone to occupy Atlas for three minutes.”

  Ellinan returned my grin. “Maybe we should just tie him against a post somewhere for a few hours,” he joked.

  We reached the coop and stood at the front door. The floor was speckled with vegetable scraps, straw and wheat grain. One of the chickens, a scruffy little hen the kids had named Whitey, pecked idly at the detritus. The chickens had made their roosts all over the place: on the kitchen table, the sofa, on the shelves of cabinets and even in the bathtub. They had the run of the place. The windowsills were coated in clumpy olive-green-and-white excrement, and the furniture was streaked with it as well. These chickens had bred nicely, steadily increasing their numbers in the two years since I had taken the first embryos out of cryostorage. Some had even left here and wandered off beyond the neighbourhood, and I imagined them spreading throughout the city in years to come.