by Ben Bova
“Greedier,” Angelique murmured. “More grasping.”
“You have a poor opinion of your fellow human beings.”
“Don’t you?”
He almost smiled. “You look at the human race as a bunch of fallen angels. I see them as apes reaching for the stars.”
“With your help.”
“They would’ve gotten there on their own. It would just have taken longer.”
“So you’ve given them your gift from the stars.”
“And now the real work begins,” Stoner said. “Transforming the world. Sharing the knowledge and wealth fairly with all the Earth’s peoples.”
Angelique looked at Stoner with new hope in her eyes. “That’s an enormous task.”
Grinning back at her, he replied, “I never said it would be easy.”
“And you?” she asked. “What will you do?”
“I’ll be here. My family and I will remain nearby, to help wherever we’re needed.” Then he leveled a finger at her. “But it’s your job, not ours. We’ll help, but you’ve got to do the real work, the hard work.”
She nodded. “I see. I understand . . . I think.”
“Good. Maybe when things are moving in the right direction you can join some of the colonists who’ll want to settle one of the New Earths.”
Angelique gasped at the thought. Smiling brightly at her, Stoner got to his feet and disappeared.
CHAPTER 10
“Well,” Stoner said, “like it or not, we’ve set it in motion.”
He and Jo, Cathy and Rick stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Millions of years of Earth’s history were etched into the rocks that dropped away nearly two kilometers to the river running patiently below. Humankind’s ancestors had barely begun fashioning stone tools when that river started wearing away these rocks, Stoner knew. This canyon is a good gauge of how far we’ve come.
Behind them the sun was setting, throwing long shadows against the silent canyon walls. Birds of prey circled lazily against the molten gold of the sky.
Jo leaned her head against his shoulder. “Do you think it’s going to work? Can we save the human race?”
Stoner glanced down at her beautiful face. “Can they save themselves? That’s the question. We can help, but they’ve got to learn how to save themselves.”
Rick scuffed a boot against a pebble, sent it tumbling over the edge of the cliff. “That’s always been the question, hasn’t it?”
“They’ve got the tools, now,” said Stoner. “The knowledge. Thanks to you, the narcotics business won’t be hindering them.”
“Until they start mass-producing designer drugs.”
Stoner shrugged. “You’ve given them a start, a breathing space. Maybe they’ll use it wisely. We’ll see.”
“Their birthrate is going to drop,” Cathy said, a satisfied smile on her lips.
Stoner looked down at his daughter. “You’ve forced a major change on them.”
Cathy did not back away by so much as a millimeter. “It’s a needed change. Unless they lower their birthrate nothing else we can do will help them.”
“They’re going to be furious when they find out,” he said.
“Furious?” Jo countered. “At what? At not having to bear six or ten children? At having only two or three? The women of the world will be relieved, Keith, not furious.”
“Besides, Dad,” said Cathy, “it’ll be years before they realize what’s happened. Decades. By the time they figure it out, the world will already be getting better because of the lower birthrate.”
Her father shook his head. “I wouldn’t have done it that way.”
Jo stood beside her daughter. “Of course you wouldn’t have done it that way. It’s basically a woman’s problem; it took a woman to come up with the solution.”
Stoner looked from his wife to Cathy’s expectant face and back to Jo again. “We’ll see.”
Rick laughed. “They outmaneuvered you, Dad. Might as well admit it.”
Stoner’s only reply was a sound halfway between a sigh and a grunt.
Cathy’s expression turned serious, thoughtful. She looks so much like her mother, Stoner thought.
“There’s something else,” she said.
“What?”
With a smile slowly lighting up her face, Cathy replied, “Raoul Tavalera’s DNA sequence. We can recreate—”
“His DNA sequence?” Jo asked.
Shaking his head, Stoner said, “I thought of that. But his medical records don’t include that information. I checked. The authorities here consider it immoral.”
“But not the authorities on Goddard,” Cathy retorted, beaming. “I tapped into their records. They’ve got DNA sequencing, gene mapping, everything! The people out there don’t have religious taboos against it.”
Rick tousled his sister’s hair. “And no lawyers, either, I bet.”
Stoner’s grin almost equaled his daughter’s. “You’ve got it all down?”
“In the ship’s memory files.”
“We can replicate Tavalera’s cell structure,” Jo said. “We can make a fertilized ovum and let him grow back to life.”
Rick pointed out, “We’ll need a womb to gestate him.”
“We can build one,” Cathy said.
Stoner said, “Wait a bit. I’ve got to go out to Goddard first.”
“To the habitat?” Jo asked. “Why?”
“It’s out in Saturn orbit, isn’t it?” Rick asked.
Nodding, Stoner said, “I need to talk to Holly Lane. Tell her what’s happened to Raoul. Ask her if she’s willing to wait twenty years or more for him to grow up.”
Jo shook her head slightly. “No. Ask her if she’s willing to bear him as her son.”
Stoner gaped at her. “That . . . that’s asking a lot.”
“If she won’t,” Cathy said, “I will.”
Rick laughed. “That’s just what we need, a virgin birth. It’ll convince everybody down there that we’re gods.”
“We’re not gods,” Stoner said. “Far from it.”
“But we’ve taken on the same kind of responsibility,” said Jo. “We’ve taken on the job of guiding them, helping them.”
His expression sobering, Rick admitted, “It’s a helluva job.”
“It’s more than a job,” said Cathy. “It’s an endless burden.”
“Endless,” her brother agreed.
“We’ve got to do it,” Stoner said. “No one else can. It’s up to us.”
“It’s up to us,” Jo agreed.
Stoner broke into a tight smile. “We’ll get it done. We’ll help them to succeed, to survive.”
“That’s an awfully optimistic attitude,” Rick said.
“I know,” his father replied. “It’s a gift.”
EPILOGUE: MANY YEARS LATER
All the people of Earth watched as the first of the great silver ships lifted silently from their berths in the ancient desert of Mesopotamia, from the banks of the great rivers in China, from the verdant fields of Tuscany, from the sandy shores of Arkansas, from the red-rocked outback of Australia, from Africa and Brazil and the half-drowned island of Hawaii.
Silently they rose on invisible beams of energy, lifting slowly, majestically, into the clean blue sky of Earth.
The first colonists were leaving their home world, heading for a New Earth. The first of many.
All the Earth celebrated the day that the human race broke the bounds of the solar system and moved out to the stars.
Keith Stoner and his family watched, too, knowing that this was not the end of humankind’s struggle for survival but rather a new sort of beginning. The human race’s ancient enemies of poverty, disease, ignorance, and death had been almost conquered on Earth and in the human habitats spread through the solar system.
But those enemies waited among the stars. The ancient battle was not over. It never would be, for wherever humans went they brought those hidden enemies with them.
The choice that humankind f
aced was brutally simple: survive or die.
Stoner smiled as he watched the gleaming ships rise faster and faster until they winked out of sight.
They’re heading for the stars, he knew. Not to destroy or conquer, but to spread life, intelligence, beauty through the universe. Like seeds wafting on the wind, they’re bringing intelligent life back to the waiting worlds.
If I were a betting man, he told himself, I’d bet on our survival.
Nothing in life is to be feared.
It is only to be understood.
Marie Curie