The Heirs of Tomorrow

by Billy Roper

  Much of the Earth below was now depopulated. All of the great cities of the world were mined out for their metals and other reusable resources, and left as wastelands of bleached bone. Africa and Asia were giant game preserves where only conservationists lived to serve as guides for safari adventurers. Their family had taken one on vacation last year. The rhinos and elephants were back in abundance, limited only by their natural predators and the cycles of life and death. G.W. and T.J.’s wives had enjoyed it even more than the year before last, when they had all taken a shuttle to Cretaceous World to see the cloned reptiles which inhabited the swampy and humid planet.

  Just as with the human copies, slight changes made to the DNA of the dinosaurs, in their case to make them a bit more docile, helped ameliorate the threat of copy fade, the proclivity of cloning to increase cellular mutations in the same way that cancer does, by repetition.

  The Numircan Speaker might maintain offices in natural orbit, but it was the continent his grandfather had helped reclaim that he administered. The lunar location was more for the sake of his claim to impartiality when it came to adjudicating disputes between the Ozarkian, Appalachian, New Albion, Heartland, and Northwest member ethnostates of the confederation. His off-lunar responsibilities extended beyond the blue and green globe below, though.

  The cost of breaking out of the atmosphere made the trade wars between the Canadian wheat farmers of the northern Heartland provinces and the NovaVolgan pan-Slavists from Dugin hard to negotiate. He also had to keep the peace between his Numircan citizens offworld and other nationalities, wherever they went.

  His second wife had come with the treaty he’d negotiated between the Othodox and Identity populations sharing the terraforming effort on Mars. Most of the Identity colonists were citizens of Numirca, and his sheep to shepherd. She always liked to keep it too cold in the dome for his tastes, not to mention the preference of his first wife, who was the daughter of the founder of Ozarkia’s clone. The founder had never had biological children, but his DNA was used to create a son, who bore many children, both naturally and with the help of science. She was one of them, and preferred to set the thermostat at southern Numircan temperatures. The third and most recent matrimonial acquisition came from Europa, the aptly named moon of Jupiter, and still hadn’t adjusted to the lunar gravity which was twice what she was used to, not to mention the relative heat. As a full Organic, she never could make it on Earth without a biosuit or augmentation.

  T.J.’s two concubines, whose eggs had already been harvested for fertilization over the next few years, were more the result of personal than political interest. One of their parents owned the largest commercial water mining operation on Ceres, which had helped him corner the import market of aitch-two-oh to the moon and the orbital platforms, greatly enriching Numircan coffers. He had single-handedly financed the new venture on Titan, an experiment in creating a personal fiefdom for G.W. and his offspring, based on the profit from the deal she had made possible.

  The Numircan form of government was in practice Darreian feudalism, in all four ethnostates, with New Albion being more industrialized than the others. Hereditary rulership was the rule, rather than the exception, even in the more democratic Heartland republic. His vision for an entire moon of his family’s own was unusual only in regards to scope rather than intent.

  His most recent concubine, and his current favorite, was a genuine Organic Celt from Ireland. He had enough Celtic admixture, 21%, to not make breeding with her dysgenic. Besides, it was good to be Speaker. Noone would question his choice. T.J. had met her on a diplomatic mission negotiating Numircan fishing rights in the north Atlantic.

  It sometimes still amazed him how quickly science, technology, and human civilization was growing without nonWhites to hold the species back. In some fields the progress was exponential, such as the leapfrogging faster than light travel of warp drives, and the defeat of all inherited diseases and disabilities which had come with mastery of the genome.

  Now that his exact genetic heir was securely named as successor, G.W.’s half siblings could follow. By Numircan hereditary law, the firstborn must be senior of his sibs by a full decade in order to inherit absolute. G.W. would turn ten in a few months. There was no point in putting it off any longer, T.J. thought. After dinner he would tell his concubines that he would make an implantation appointment at the medclinic for next week. In following tradition, he would consummate the acts in the old fashioned sense as well, with each of them in turn. He’d better schedule that, as well.

  G.W. was a perfected version of his own DNA, without any inherited diseases or genetic markers for a shortened life span. T.J. had also lightened up his hair a lot and chosen blue eyes for his son, and a twenty point IQ boost. Otherwise, he was a carbon copy. His other kids would be even less manipulated, with only their inherited faults removed.

  Likewise, he would have his three wives’ contraception disengaged. That would certainly make life easier for him, since the first and third were hearing their biological clocks ticking as loud as an ice freighter docking without vacuum. After that, it would be a race between the three of them for the status of getting pregnant first. Some bragging rights still accrued along with natural conception, and in some families rank of marriage could even shift based on which wife produced the second oldest.

  However uncertain that might be, George Washington McNabb’s future was predestined by his duty of birth. After another ten years of education and training, he would be sent to Titan, which by then should be ready to receive colonists. There he would oversee the administration of the holding while he gathered wives and concubines of his own. In the meantime his father would continue to govern Numirca from his watchful perch above, and corner the property claim to the remainder of Titan, just to forestall any future competitors.

  Barring any accidents or assassination or death in war, G.W. should receive the first wave of his half-sibling colonists ten years later, and inherit the title of Speaker ten years after that. The diaspora from Earth should have progressed by that point that he could govern all Numircans everywhere from Titan just as easily as his father now did from Luna.

  Then, Thomas Jefferson McNabb could take his wives and concubines and whatever children they had given him who were still of age back home to Appalachia, where the trees were still green and the sun was still warm and the air was still sweet, without filters.

  Chapter Eight

  It could be that, even if we survive, and Balk, things might not go as foreseen in the previous story of the McNabbs. It might not be that easy.

  Eight of Four simultaneously watched Two of Ten images gleaned from One Two Eight-Three’s primitive satellites. They had originated the same number of its revolutions ago. The more relevant data streams showing wars and natural disasters were drowned out by seemingly meaningless bipedal interactions without end. For more than Ten of the target sphere’s revolutions, the One’s best hereditary xenopsychologists had been actively analyzing and interpreting the video and audio data. Eight of Four was continuing the service his Fourth Family had rendered for Two to the Fourth Power generations. His ongoing report wouldn’t be completed until after first contact, but he believed he had the foundation of a theory. It had to do with the species who called themselves humans’ stagnated group natural selection process. They were devolving towards extinction. It looked inevitable.

  The One had encountered this problem before. Some seemingly intelligent species never developed to their full potential due to too much hybridization and resultant equality between the subspecies. Legend told of one planetary system they had conquered with such a uniform climate that genetic subspecie never developed within the primary species there. The universe was an odd machine, with little logic to it. Only the One could bring order to the Cosmos.

  For the lifespans of his ancestors their mission had led them towards one goal. Just as other ships had, theirs was built and dedicated to a single purpose. For them, it was One Two Eight-Three. Aboard
this bioship they had been spawned and lived and died, dedicated to their in-flight duties, and to one another. When their bodily functions ceased their collective memories were filed and their biological organisms recycled. So it had been, so it would be, until contact.

  At least and at last the primates under their watch were becoming more clever technologically, making the first clumsy efforts off of their home world, like a clawful of the tasty klamath fledglings falling from their nest. The diversity which nature required in order to continue the progress of their species through the eternal honing process of competition was being mooted quickly, though. Without specialization and differentiation, the most recent and recessive, newest genetic adaptations were being subsumed back into the average mean of the dominant, lesser evolved genes. The race to spread their seed beyond their local system was being lost to the environmental poisoning of their planet. Even more deadly to their species, though, was the hybridization of ‘homo sapiens’. Even the term they used for themselves was from a language already long dead, from what Eight of Four could ascertain. He didn’t harbor much hope that the crazy monkeys would still be alive to study in person by the time they arrived. If no fresh genetic samples were available, the One would have to confiscate the life form templates previously taken by the other, grey bipedals. Those fellow watchers were next on the list.

  Sergei Emricks IV was on second watch this cycle, keeping a digital eye Earthwise to enforce the eternal quarantine. Three hundred and fifty years had passed since his ancestors had arrived in NewSanePees from the mythical Mercan exodus. Over the generations they had intermarried Stralyan and Rus until their cultures and languages overlapped along with their DNA. The Immorts had few problems enforcing order when the citizens were so homogeneous. The law worked. For the next six standard hours, Sergei would enforce it in this quadrant. It had been many years since the last craft had approached from the red planet whose spoken name was forbidden, and longer still since anything under power had broken Earth’s atmosphere. The fifty-three thousand citizens of the ringworld and its satellites lived and worked in peace and harmony. Most of the time.

  The Battle of Valles Marineris had ended in a stalemate, with the Martian habitats dominated by Russia absorbing the United Nations personnel from the other subterranean domes. Faced with the growing Eurasian might, Greater Israel had eventually abandoned their own orbital platform and mining colonies. Instead, they had focused on territorial acquisitions on Earth. The resources and equipment of the abandoned American and Chinese bases had been cannibalized, and over the last two centuries since the equatorial terraforming project had been completed, Martian Nationalism had grown into planetary isolationism. The other orbital platforms, such as New Muscovy and NewSanePees, had been left to fend for themselves. They’d done pretty well at it, considering.

  The rump state of Russia had remained the most powerful superpower on Earth for nearly a century before the degrading environment led them into an energetic effort to immigrate into the expanding Martian outlands, where they established migrant camps out in the open under the new, clean, oxygen rich atmosphere. These grew into scattered city states under the Russo-Martian Authority’s jurisdiction, but the central hub of the planetary government remained equatorial in orientation. There, the red soil was covered with topsoil and agricultural plantations, and aside from the far lower gravity that made the subsequent generations weaker physically, it was much like home. Martians took supplements for their bone demineralization and instituted religious exercise regimens as a part of the Orthodox faith, and developed mechanical exoskeleton-like simulacra to use when they traveled off their new home world.

  The absorption of the multi-national biospheres had made them more culturally and genetically diverse for the first two generations, but the Russo-Martians had integrated and assimilated the non-Russians more or less completely, giving them a different culture than that of the smaller colonies and habitats, as well. A theocracy emerged, to unite the disparate peoples, based on the Eastern Orthodox model. By the time Sergei was born, over five million homo sapiens lived off the Earth, four-fifths of them on the formerly red planet. Nearly sixty thousand humans in total lived in the Ceres sector, roughly 10,000 on each of the surviving Lunar colonies, both independent from one another and the rest but similar in their Mercan heritages. Half that many lived in the outer asteroid belt around New Muscovy. The rest existed in orbital platforms holding anything from a few dozen to a hundred souls each.

  As far as they could tell without any interplanetary communications to confirm it, most of the Earth had reverted to a medieval level of technology, or further, with a few exceptions. Throughout the largest land mass, most of the existing nations were vassal states of Greater Israel, trading their raw materials for finished products and luxury goods. Most worth noting for the NewSanePees historians, though, was that their home planet’s population had bottlenecked to less than a hundred million. The entire continent of Africa, for instance, seemed to have been completely depopulated. Some theorized that had been purposeful, but debate continued on that point in the halls of academia.

  The Russo-Martians, not trusting the Greater Israelis who dominated Earth, gave technical and engineering support to the Lunarians and facilitated trade between their two habitats and Mars, in exchange for a military base on the moon. From there, they kept an eye on the blue and white planet below. The new order blossomed.

  Sergei remembered his ancient history class lectures. During their retreat from space, the Izzies had launched several hundred payloads of highly radioactive material from their Terran conquests into extraorbital arcs. In the bravest move of his administration, Martian Secretary General Pietr Dunolovich ordered the experimental gravity drive prototypes being developed for efficient local travel through the near and far asteroid belts to be used to slingshot the containers back into Earth’s atmosphere. Most of them broke up upon reentry and were incinerated. A few skipped across the upper atmosphere and spread their contents in arcs of superheated fallout. The Australian expat citizens of NewSanePees then cheered as one of them fanned out across the South Pacific. They remembered what they had lost, so long ago.

  The next Izzie shuttle launch to resupply their Lunar base was hit by a rail gun volley from an unknown source. From then on, Earth had been under quarantine. Noone had landed there for three hundred years, and returned to tell about it.

  All of his life, the specialized training had molded him to be a Marine. “The Fewer, the Prouder”. As a guard, he was forbidden outside distractions like music and reading. They might pull him from his duty of monitoring readouts and waiting for alarms that never came. If they did, they might slow his reaction time in calling out the Guard. There were other threats out there, but this duty was his. It had been his, since he had finished the Academy. It would be his, for as long as he could maintain.

  A handful of the inner system habitats were truly independent, and relatively self-sufficient. Others were still under the yoke of Mars, but yearned to be free. The three habitats built to take advantage of the temperatures and atmospheric pressure levels in the cloud tops of Venus were in this confederation of rebels. Just a few struggled to survive and sought annexation and citizenship by Lichen City, the Martian capitol named during the early terraforming operations around the oldest human outposts. Whether they were accepted or rejected was based on what they could bring to the table. As above, so below, the struggle of life and death continued.

  The normal attention span of a Marine had been genetically modified and chemically enhanced. He could remain still and quiet and focused for his entire shift without a fluctuation in heart beat or pulse. Many times in the past some liberal Immort had argued that the Guard was no longer needed, and that the Marines should be disbanded. The resources should be used reaching out to other habitats, and helping them, they had argued. Each time an attack by a rogue Martian salvage craft or a Lunar pirate had happened, to refocus the citizens back on their task of staying alive. Some
times, the threats had been real. More often, they had been manufactured. Every time, they were for the greater good. Sergei cherished that. The ends justified the means, to a Marine.

  The day might come when the cries became too loud again, and he would be ordered to sacrifice himself to awaken them. If that day came, he had already thought about it, he would proudly fly a small craft into the side of an Agri pod or launch a harmless laser array at the surface, giving his life to slap the Immort consumers back to reality.