Smith's Monthly #11

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  Then she wiped her pack down and put it over her shoulder.

  “Time to go the final steps to home,” she said to Candice as she picked her up.

  The young girl was so light, it was scary. She carried Candice up the flight of stairs without a problem.

  It felt good to actually be rescuing someone from certain death. She knew that they had rescued everyone on the planet, but that had only been for a few hours.

  This rescue of Candice, Gina hoped, would last, and that Candice would help rebuild this new world. All over the planet a thousand Seeders were doing the same thing, trying to help one person at a time to survive.

  When she reached the next floor, Benny, the professor, and the two young men were there.

  Benny quickly took Candice from Gina and got the young girl into a bed in a private room off to one side of the main room.

  The professor had fixed some soup and had some crackers. The two boys just hovered close by, looking relieved and worried for their friend.

  After Benny got Candice tucked in, he came out. “Take turns sitting with her and get her food and water when she wakes up,” he said to the professor and the boys.

  Gina then introduced herself to the two boys and both of them thanked her for bringing Candice.

  After a short time, Benny said in front of everyone, “We have an apartment you might like that we just finished, if you are interested in staying with us for a while.”

  He smiled at her and she nodded. “I think I would like that. There are a lot of things I can do to help out.”

  “We’ll talk about that tonight over dinner,” Benny said, smiling at her.

  Damn that smile of his could melt an iceberg. And she was far, far from being an iceberg.

  She and Benny climbed up the flights of stairs so he could show her the apartment they had set up for her. They didn’t really talk. She wasn’t sure what exactly to say yet. It slightly annoyed her that she was acting like a school girl with a crush on a guy, but everything about Benny affected her and she had no idea why.

  But she liked the feeling of really being attracted to someone. It had been a long time since that had happened and never this strong on first sight that she could remember.

  She left her pack in her new bedroom. She was going to like staying here. The apartment, even being put together from what had clearly been an office area, was comfortable and the view was something to behold.

  The windows in her living room showed an amazing city stretching far beyond the limits of the water on either side of the island. What had happened to this planet was one of the great tragedies of the galaxy. Of that she had no doubt.

  She walked slowly around, looking at all the details Benny had set up for her as he quickly described it all. Granted, she had watched them set up this apartment, but actually being in it felt different.

  It felt right.

  “This is wonderful,” she said after Benny was done with the short tour. “It seems perfect.”

  She smiled at him and he just looked into her eyes for a long moment.

  “Thanks,” he said, finally. “Not as good as your place on the ship, I bet.”

  “In some ways,” she said, “I think it’s better.”

  She wanted to add that it was better because he was close by, but she didn’t. She was amazingly attracted to this man, but she really didn’t know him at all. They both had so much to learn about each other.

  She had to be careful, not move too fast, even though she wanted to.

  Actually, what she wanted more than anything was to just kiss him and pull him to that freshly made bed.

  But she managed to remain in control.

  And she had no idea how she was going to tell him about the Seeder part of things.

  “How about we go down and check on the professor and the boys and Candice,” Benny said after a moment of silence. “Grab a little lunch, then bring it back up here and talk.”

  “That sounds perfect,” she said.

  And it did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  BENNY CHECKED ON Candice, who still seemed to be sleeping comfortably. The professor and the boys were not going to be far from her. He hadn’t realized how much her disappearance had really bothered them until Candice showed up on the ship.

  Now it seemed her appearance had given them new life. They had set up a chair just inside her open bedroom door so someone would be there when she woke up.

  When he came out, the professor and David were sitting at the big oak meeting table they used to eat meals and Freddy was sitting just inside Candice’s door listening to their conversation.

  Gina was standing, leaning against a counter so she could face everyone. And it felt wonderful to have her here and part of this group.

  It actually felt natural, which was odd considering she had only been here an hour or so at most.

  He dug out of the fridge the fixings for sandwiches and started to put them together.

  “I think we need to be getting a few more floors ready for more guests,” he said as he worked. He was using some of the last thinly-sliced roast beef from the deli that they had kept in the freezer. He was going to miss deli roast beef more than he wanted to think about.

  And bread. He and the professor had talked at one point about trying to figure out how to make bread and grow vegetables and other things, but at the moment, with canned food and other things that didn’t spoil quickly, they had more than enough to make it for a year or so. It just wasn’t going to be a varied diet, but it would keep them alive.

  “How many people are you set up for now?” Gina asked.

  “We could hold fifty, maybe,” the professor said and Benny nodded his agreement. “We’re ready for that now.”

  But with fifty, Benny knew that would make it critical to go out regularly searching for more food.

  “That’s a pretty good number,” Gina said, nodding.

  From what Benny could tell, she was impressed.

  David and the professor then asked Gina some basic questions and she had told them she had been in the subway when everything happened, had holed up down there for a time, but decided she didn’t like that and it felt dangerous. Plus she said it smelled bad down there, with the moisture and all. So she came up to see if she could find anyone alive.

  Benny had just listened to her cover story, nodding. It was sound and had no places for any real questions.

  “Where you from originally?” the professor asked.

  “My family moved around a lot,” she said. “And I just kept on moving when I got older. So nowhere, really. But I sure love New York.”

  Benny smiled and nodded. Again a great cover story that didn’t pin her to any one place. There was absolutely nothing at all suspicious about her story and if he didn’t remember meeting her on a huge spaceship in orbit, he would have been completely buying the story as well.

  “You can see your lights from all over the city,” Gina said. “So as more discover they are not in a good place, they will try to get here, I’m sure. So I agree with Benny that setting up more living quarters would be a good idea. But fifty is a great start.”

  “You think we should track some of their lights as well and try to offer them a room here?” the professor asked.

  “I don’t think it would hurt,” Benny said, putting the sandwiches in front of everyone and handing Gina a plate. Then he took Freddy a plate with a sandwich on it and a small bag of potato chips.

  The professor nodded. “I agree. After Candice wakes up, I’ll start really looking at more spaces in the building we could convert easily.”

  Benny nodded. “Gina and I will be upstairs. I want her to fill me in on what she’s seen around the city. Let us know when Candice wakes.”

  “We will,” the professor said, nodding.

  When they got into the stairwell and started the climb, both carrying their plates of food, Gina looked over at Benny. “Those are some very good people you have there.”

  �
�I know,” he said. “And all three of them are as smart as a whip.”

  She laughed. “Never heard that expression before.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Benny said. “It’s an old one.”

  And he wasn’t surprised. No way anyone just studying the planet could learn all the language. So he figured that the walk up the stairs was as good a time as any to ask the first of what he figured would be a thousand or more questions.

  “How long did you have to study this planet, anyway?”

  “Basic preparations I did on the way here three weeks ago,” she said. “But almost all of what I studied was in the last ten days.”

  “Wow, you really didn’t have any time, did you?”

  She sighed beside him and he looked over at her pained face.

  “I think if the powers that be out there in the big universe had learned of this tragedy sooner,” she said, softly, “they would have saved a lot more people than just the two million from the last wave.”

  She was actually pained by what had happened here. This planet, this city, wasn’t just her job. These were real people to her and to those she worked for.

  That was very clear.

  And at that moment he realized just how important saving lives was to Gina and her people. And that eased about a thousand of his fears.

  There were still a few thousand more he could think of, but his feelings for her eased a lot of them as well.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  GINA COULDN’T REMEMBER when she enjoyed a lunch more than that first one with Benny. They sat at his table in his apartment near the windows looking out over the city. The air-conditioning was running softly in the background and she could faintly hear the generator on the balcony outside.

  The city spread out around them still looked fresh and almost alive. From where they were, they couldn’t see any of the streets and that was fine with her. She didn’t need a constant reminder of what was below them.

  They talked about everything as they ate, from Benny’s degrees in college, which didn’t really surprise her that he was that smart, to her home planet and how she had grown up and been recruited into the Seeders.

  And the sandwich had been amazing. She ended up devouring it and then telling him how much she liked it.

  “Don’t get used to it,” he said, looking sad. “Not a lot of that beef left and there won’t be more for a very long time.”

  She only nodded to that.

  He finished his sandwich and pushed his plate away, then leaned back. “Shall we get to some of the hard questions we’ve both been avoiding?”

  She laughed and he just smiled. Damn he was smart and she loved that about him.

  And that look in his eye told her that he loved when she laughed as well.

  “So ask away,” she said. “I promise I’ll tell you the truth no matter what.”

  He nodded. “The boys seemed to be stunned at how far away your home world is. How long did it take you to get here?”

  “I didn’t come from my home world directly here,” she said. “I was working on another planet in this area of this galaxy, so the trip didn’t take that long. A week or so to get into position. But if I was on a fast ship directly from my home world to here, it would take about a half year.”

  He nodded to that and seemed to file it away.

  “Explain to me how humans have spread so far in space? I remember a little of what you said on the ship, but my attention was elsewhere.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, taking a sip of a soda and then sitting back so she could look at him directly.

  “A very long time ago,” she said, “from a planet so distant from here that no one I know of even knows where it might be, the first humans evolved and jumped into space.”

  “How long ago?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Some say only hundreds of thousands of years ago, others say millions and millions of years ago. I tend to go to the millions of years ago number.”

  He nodded. “Can’t say I understand that kind of number, but go on.”

  “After the first humans spread out to the stars, they discovered that they were alone. There are no alien cultures out there that anyone knows about. None in this galaxy, my galaxy, or any galaxy close to here.”

  “So humans really are alone in the cosmos,” he said.

  “As far as anyone has found so far, yes,” she said. Then she went on. “Those early humans figured out a way to seed humanity on planets that could support life. They also seeded all plant and animal life from the original first human home, so every planet with humans on it has the same plants and animals around them.”

  “Wow, that’s a job,” Benny said, shaking his head.

  “It is,” she said. “The Seeders, as we are called, are very good at this now after all this time.”

  “So you help with this seeding?” Benny asked.

  “No,” she said. “The front line of the seeding ships has already left this galaxy. They are working in the Andromeda galaxy. My job as a Seeder is to help the cultures start to mature. I get involved in one fashion or another in the growing cultures to help them get past certain disaster points and grow. I embed in cultures, as I am doing now, to help with what I can help with.”

  “How often have you done that?” he asked.

  She took a deep breath. This was the first major problem point and from here on out she might lose this man. And that scared her to death.

  “I promised I would tell you the complete truth, remember?” she said.

  He nodded, looking very serious.

  “This is my tenth time embedding in a culture on ten different planets.”

  A frown crossed his face. “So tell me what you are worried about in how that is possible for you to do that and still look as good as you do.”

  She smiled at that and nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Just truth,” he said, smiling at her and her stomach twisted even harder. She was deathly afraid she was about to have Benny start hating her.

  “I like this feeling between us,” she said. “And I don’t want to lose that, so I’m afraid of telling you a lot of this.”

  “Trust me to deal with what you are saying,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Seeders are picked to be sort of the guiding hands of cultures for thousands of years as they grow and develop and jump into space. We do not get sick, nor do we age, and we have memories that can remember just about anything. We can also do this.”

  She teleported to a place thirty steps from him and he damn near went over backwards.

  She teleported back into her chair.

  She had to show him that she wasn’t a normal woman and that was one of the quickest ways she could think to do it.

  “That’s got to come in real handy,” he said, his voice only cracking once as he adjusted his chair.

  “So to answer your question truthfully and directly,” she said. “I was born just over 200 years ago. And there is no upper limit on how long I can live barring accidents. I have heard of some Seeders being thousands of years old. Maybe older for all I know.”

  He sat there staring at her for the longest time while her heart almost beat out of her chest with worry. Then he said, “You look damn good for an old broad.”

  For a moment she didn’t completely understand, then he smiled slightly and she laughed.

  “Well, thank you,” she said. “I guess.”

  He looked hard at her and then said, “Why do I get the sense you aren’t telling me something really important.”

  She leaned forward and reached her hand across the table, offering it to Benny.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he took it.

  She could feel the incredible attraction of the man pulling at her. His strong, work-worn hand rested in her hand and she kept her gaze locked on his dark, intense eyes.

  “The reason you remember the ship,” she said, “is because you have the Seeder gene as well. You could be a Seeder as well if yo
u wanted.”

  He actually jerked at that, but didn’t let go of her hand.

  She squeezed his hand and then sat back, pulling away from touching him so he could just think.

  “Besides living a long time,” he said after a moment, “what does being a Seeder really mean?”

  “It means that your life mission becomes to help all humans and humanity,” she said, “no matter what planet they are on.”

  “And how many planets is that?” he asked.

  “Do you have any idea how many people were in this city before the disaster?” she asked.

  “Millions and millions,” he said, “if you count all the boroughs across the rivers.”

  “There are more seeded human planets in just this galaxy than humans who used to be in this city.”

  “Oh,” was all he said.

  She let him sit in silence. At least he wasn’t storming off. She wasn’t sure what she would have been doing if the situations were reversed.

  “And how many Seeders are there?” he asked.

  “Not enough,” she said. “Never enough, which is why I hope you’ll join us.”

  “I’m not much of a joiner,” he said.

  “You don’t join Seeders like joining some lodge,” she said. “This is all a job and we all get paid for it.”

  “You get paid for helping people and living a long time?” he asked, looking directly at her.

  “I do,” she said, nodding. “And to be honest, I can’t imagine a better job.”

  He nodded to that and sat back.

  She just sat there, trying not to hold her breath in worry.

  Finally he spoke again. “And after all this time you aren’t married or have a boyfriend?”

  “Never married,” she said, “but I had some boyfriends along the way, but never one that was a Seeder, so I always had to leave them after a decade or so.”

  “Because you didn’t age,” he said.

  She nodded. “And my job moved me on. So no, I have no boyfriend now.”

  “And you are telling me the complete truth on everything?” he asked.

  “I am,” she said.