New Earth Page 19

  “No,” she answered. “I … I had a feeling you’d be coming.”

  “Woman’s intuition?” he taunted as he stepped next to her.

  Aditi looked slightly puzzled. “No … not intuition…”

  “Have you been tracking me?”

  She smiled at him. “Yes, of course. We track the emanations from your phone. Even when you’ve turned it off there’s enough residual radiation to be detected.”

  He did not smile back. “And you listen to our phone conversations.”

  “I don’t,” she said, totally serious now. “The communications technicians do.”

  “So we have no privacy.”

  “I’m afraid not. Adri says we need to know what you’re thinking, how you’re reacting to finding us.”

  “I see.” A part of Jordan’s mind was telling him that Adri’s eavesdropping was perfectly natural. We’d listen to his chatter if we could, he thought. Two intelligent races bumping into each other. There’s a lot to learn, a lot to find out, a lot to be afraid of.

  Aditi said, “You’re not angry, are you?”

  He looked into her bright brown eyes and saw that she was worried. Or acting, he couldn’t help thinking.

  “Are you?” she repeated.

  “Aditi, dear, we’re lovers. We shouldn’t have secrets between us.” Then he added, “Do you really love me?”

  “Oh, Jordan,” she gushed, and flung her arms around his neck. “Of course I love you! I never thought this would happen, but I do love you, truly I do.”

  “And I love you, Aditi my darling. But…”

  She pulled away from him slightly. “But you’re suspicious. I can’t say I blame you.”

  “It’s just that, the more we learn about you, the less it all adds up.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  Pointing to a stone bench a few meters from where they stood, Jordan said, “Why don’t we sit there and you can explain it all to me.”

  “I’ll explain as much as I can,” she said, sitting on the bench.

  Jordan sat down beside her. The stone was warm from the afternoon sunlight.

  “Contact between two intelligent races is a very delicate matter,” Aditi began. “Especially when one of the races is so much younger than the other.”

  “I understand,” he said. “But you—Adri, that is—he hasn’t been entirely truthful with us.”

  “Oh no!” she blurted. “He’s been completely honest with you. He’s never told you anything that’s not true.”

  “But he hasn’t told us the entire truth, has he?”

  Aditi fell silent for a moment, and Jordan recognized that she was using her implanted communicator to ask for instructions.

  Grasping her by the shoulders, he demanded, “Don’t ask Adri how to answer me. You tell me, yourself.”

  Strangely, she smiled at him. “Very well, that’s what I’ll do.”

  “Adri can hear us?”

  “Not now. I’ve turned off my communicator.”

  “Just like that.” Jordan snapped his fingers.

  So did Aditi. “Just like that. It’s controlled by the brain’s electrical fields.”

  “So we’re alone.”

  “Yes. Completely.” Looking almost impishly pleased with herself, Aditi asked, “So what do you want to know?”

  “Why has Adri been so … so deceptive with us?”

  “It’s not deception, Jordan. Not in the least. Adri and the others decided that we would answer all your questions completely truthfully, but only the questions that you actually ask. Nothing more. No additional information.”

  “Why would—”

  “You’re like schoolchildren, Jordan. We didn’t want to give you more information than you could handle. So we decided to answer your questions truthfully, but to go no further than your questions. As you learned more about us, learned to ask deeper questions, we would answer them.”

  “Like schoolchildren,” he murmured. “And you’re our teacher.”

  “One of them.”

  “That makes me teacher’s pet, I suppose,” he said, surprised at how bitter it sounded.

  Aditi didn’t seem to notice the sharpness of his tone. With a smile, she murmured, “Much more than a pet, dearest. Much more.”

  “You were … assigned by Adri to educate me?”

  Her eyes went wide with surprise. “As a teacher, I was asked to be part of the committee of welcome.” Lowering her eyes, she went on in a near-whisper, “I had no idea that I would fall in love.” She hesitated a heartbeat, then asked, “You did fall in love with me too, didn’t you, Jordan?”

  His heart melted. “Yes, I did, Aditi. Hopelessly, helplessly in love.”

  She beamed happily at him.

  So they sat on the stone bench in the warm afternoon light as the sun dipped lower and the shadows lengthened. Aditi explained Adri’s rationale for dealing with the visitors from Earth.

  “We didn’t want to swamp you with too much information about ourselves. We decided to let you find out about us and our world at your own pace.”

  “You’re a teacher, but I haven’t seen any children in your city. None at all. Do you have schoolchildren?”

  “I teach adults,” Aditi replied. “Children are rare among us.”

  “I see.”

  “We don’t have the same kind of family relationships that you do,” she said.

  “You told me that you do have marriages,” he recalled.

  “Rarely.”

  Suddenly he felt himself smiling. “So if I were to ask for your hand in marriage, would I have to get your parents’ consent?”

  “My parents?”

  “Your mother. Your father.”

  Aditi shook her head slightly. “I have no parents.”

  “You’re an orphan?”

  “No. You don’t understand. I wasn’t gestated in a woman’s womb. I wasn’t born, the way you were. None of us were.”

  Jordon felt his insides quake. “What do you mean?”

  “I was created from genetically engineered cell samples. All of us were.”

  “Created…” Jordan’s mind reeled. “You mean, in a biovat? Like meat?”

  “More sophisticated than your biovats,” she replied. “An artificial womb. All of us were produced in such devices.”

  “Even Adri?” Jordan heard his voice squeak.

  “Yes, even Adri. Every one of us has been generated in a laboratory facility.”

  MARS

  Far-called, our navies melt away,

  On dune and headland sinks the fire.

  RUDYARD KIPLING,

  “Recessional”

  TITHONIUM BASE

  Tithonium Chasma is a part of the great Martian rift valley, which stretches nearly four thousand kilometers across the frozen rust-red desert of Mars. The rugged multihued cliffs of its south face rise some two kilometers above the valley’s dusty floor. The cliffs of the north face are not visible from where Tithonium Base stands; the valley is so broad that they are beyond the short horizon.

  Wearing a transparent nanofabric pressure suit, Jamie Waterman stood before the flat inscribed stone that marked his wife’s grave. Not that Vijay’s remains were there. On Mars you couldn’t bury a person: her decaying remains would contaminate the Martian ecology. No, Vijay had been cremated, as she had wished, and her ashes carried into space and jettisoned there by one of the rockets returning to Earth. Her spirit became a cloud of ashes, drifting eternally in space.

  Looking back at Tithonium Base, Jamie saw that the structures looked timeworn, weary. Just as he felt. Old. Tired. The Navaho part of his soul felt that death was coming. Looking up into the clear, butterscotch sky of Mars, he felt that soon his spirit would be a cloud wafting up there, looking down upon a long, arduous lifetime’s work.

  Jamie had spent his life striving to keep human explorers working on Mars, uncovering the buried villages of the long-extinct Martians, translating their prayer tablets, helping the struggling Martian
lichen to survive the pitiless harsh environment.

  And working to keep the million-year experiment going.

  Now it was all in danger again. Funding from Earth was drying up, evaporating like a puddle of water in the thin Martian atmosphere.

  His son, Ravi, walked out to meet him, full of youthful energy. He was almost half a meter taller than his stocky father, his skin darker than Jamie’s copper hue. But he had his father’s easy smile, his father’s clear brown eyes, his father’s broad cheekbones and unbending perseverance.

  “Y’aa’tey,” Ravi said. The old Navaho greeting. It is good. “I figured you’d be here.”

  “Y’aa’tey,” Jamie replied, his voice reedy and rasping, like the thin Martian wind.

  “The L/AV lifts off in half an hour,” said Ravi.

  Jamie nodded. “I know. I’ll be there to see you off, don’t worry.”

  Ravi grinned at his father. “I got that shitload of messages you want me to deliver: Dex, Dr. Ionescu, all the others.”

  “In person. I’ve been talking to them from here, but you’ve got the chance to see them face-to-face.”

  “I don’t know about President Newton,” Ravi said slowly. “He might not want to see me.”

  “You’ve got to get to him.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I know you will, son.”

  Almost mischievously, Ravi said, “I’m surprised you didn’t put Chairman Chiang on the list.”

  Jamie shook his head inside the bubble helmet of his nanosuit. “Chiang’s an old hothead. We’ve got to work around him, get all the others to agree to continue our funding. Then he’ll come around. Not before.”

  An uncomfortable silence fell between them. Jamie turned his back on the stone marker and started walking slowly back toward the base and the rocket vehicle that would take his son to the ship waiting in orbit.

  At last Ravi asked, “Dad, what if I fail? What if they absolutely refuse to continue funding us?”

  Jamie didn’t hesitate an eyeblink. “Then we’ll go down to a shoestring operation. Most of the people will go back home, but a handful of us will remain. We’ll keep the work going.”

  “But—”

  “We’re just about self-sufficient. We’ll get along. We’ve been through lean periods before and survived.”

  Ravi didn’t say what he was thinking: Mom didn’t survive. She didn’t make it through the last time you had to live on a shoestring.

  “The important thing,” Jamie went on, leaning a hand on his son’s shoulder, “is to keep the experiment going.”

  Ravi knew what his father meant. The million-year experiment. They had excavated several pits deep enough to expose the Martian extremophiles that lived under the permafrost layer. They had domed over the excavations and kept them warm despite overnight temperatures that plummeted to a hundred degrees below zero or lower.

  The hardy bacteria were surviving, thriving, in fact. At one of the pits they had even begun to clump together in cooperative aggregations—the first step toward evolving true multicellular organisms.

  It was an experiment to see if Mars could be returned to life, its own indigenous Martian life, an experiment that would take millennia to complete. Biologists were stunned by its boldness. Religious fanatics worried that it might prove that evolution is more than a theory.

  Father and son walked side by side through the base’s scattered buildings and out to the concrete slab where the spindly, spraddle-legged landing/ascent rocket was being loaded.

  Ravi turned to his father and said, “I won’t let you down, Dad.”

  “I know you won’t.”

  “But if … if those flatlanders don’t come through with more funding, I’ll come back here anyway.”

  “Now wait,” Jamie said, suddenly alarmed. “Just because I’ll stay here doesn’t mean you have to. You’ve got to find your own path, Ravi.”

  “I know where my path leads, Dad: back to Mars.”

  Jamie tried to reply, but his throat was suddenly choked with tears.

  One of the crew loading the rocket called, “Hey Ravi, you coming or not?”

  Ravi waved to him, then said to his father, “I’ve got to go, Dad.”

  “Go with beauty, son.”

  “But I’ll be back. One way or the other. I’ll be back.”

  “Go with beauty,” Jamie repeated.

  REVELATIONS

  Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices.

  KNUTE ROCKNE

  THE BIOLAB

  Jordan stood dumbfounded, staring at Aditi, thinking, She wasn’t born naturally. She was created, built out of cell samples, gestated in an artificial womb, a machine. She’s not natural, not real …

  Yet she was sitting beside him on the stone bench, her beautiful face looking concerned, worried that his innate fears and prejudices would destroy their loving relationship.

  Jordan squeezed his eyes shut momentarily. She is real, he told himself. She’s as real as I am. She’s warm and loving and—alien.

  He opened his eyes and Aditi was still there, beside him, close enough to touch, close enough to catch the delicate floral scent she wore, close enough to see that her eyes were troubled.

  “Have I shocked you?” she asked, her voice low.

  He had to pull in a breath before he could answer, “It’s … a surprise. I never thought…”

  “Would you like to see the facility where we were created?”

  “I’m not so sure,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

  Aditi got to her feet and reached a hand out to Jordan. He rose, took her hand, and numbly followed her as together they walked into the city.

  People were strolling along the streets, together with the pony-sized animals they used as beasts of burden. Smaller pets scampered among them, unhampered by leashes. Many of the people smiled and said hello.

  He asked her, “All of these people were…?”

  “Created in the biolab, yes,” Aditi answered easily. “So were the ponies and all the other animals you have seen here in the city.”

  “And the animals in the forest?”

  She shook her head. “They procreate among themselves, of course.”

  “Of course,” he said weakly.

  As she walked purposefully along the street, Aditi said, “Jordan, it’s merely another way for a species to reproduce. We use our technology. We can control every aspect of gestation. It allows us to produce babies that are healthy, intelligent, and empathetic.”

  He said nothing, but his mind pictured hordes of identical clones being mass-produced like automobiles or robots. He knew it was nonsense, that Aditi was not a mindless zombie, that every one of Adri’s people was as individual as humans. Yet the picture remained in his mind. Things that looked like human beings being stamped out in a factory assembly line.

  Aditi sensed his inner turmoil. “Jordan, dearest, the end product of our way is the same as the end product of your way: a baby. A squalling, gurgling, dribbling baby. Just the same as your babies. Just as human.”

  They were at the entrance to a smallish building. Its door opened at Aditi’s touch and they went into the biolab.

  Jordan followed Aditi through rows of equipment, all silent and still. She pointed out the microscopes and specimen containers, the glassware for cell cultures, the reactors where egg and sperm cells were united.

  Like our biovats for meat, Jordan thought. Smaller, though. Much smaller.

  “And here are the gestation chambers,” Aditi said, gesturing to a line of small spheres that looked to Jordan like gourds made of plastic with half a dozen flexible pipes connected to them.

  “They enlarge as the fetus grows, of course,” Aditi said.

  “I see,” he murmured. Then he realized, “None of the equipment seems to be functioning.”

  “Not now. We don’t need any more people for the time being. When the need arises, we can gestate newborns.”
/>
  “And where do the eggs and sperm come from?” he asked.

  “From us,” she replied. “We donate ova and sperm cells when they are needed.”

  Rather cold-blooded, Jordan thought. But he said nothing.

  Going down the line of artificial wombs, Aditi stopped at one. “This is where I was gestated,” she said. “Number six.”

  The writing on the bench’s top was indecipherable to Jordan, but he looked from it to her face, smiling hopefully.

  “It did a good job,” he said, smiling back at her.

  Aditi broke into tears. Leaning her head against his chest, she sobbed, “You don’t think I’m a monster?”

  “I know you’re not.”

  “You can accept me, knowing how I was created? How different I am?”

  Folding his arms about her, Jordan said, “I love you, Aditi. I don’t care how you were created; that doesn’t matter.”

  He wasn’t being entirely truthful. Jordan felt a slight shiver of apprehension as he looked past her tousled head to the row of artificial wombs standing silently on the bench, waiting to be used again to create new aliens.

  RETURN TO CAMP

  “I’ve got to go back to the camp, tell the others about this,” Jordan said, as they walked back toward the entrance of the biolab.

  “I understand,” Aditi said.

  The door opened again at her touch and they stepped out into the sunshine and bustle of the late-afternoon street. The slanting rays of sunlight felt warm, soothing, on Jordan’s shoulders. Squinting against the brightness, he felt a cooling breeze that rustled the trees planted along the sidewalk.

  “Will you come back tonight?” she asked.

  As they walked along the street, back toward the city’s perimeter, Jordan shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so. This will be a lot for Meek and the others to digest. I’ll have to stay with them, I’m afraid.”

  “I understand,” she repeated. Reluctantly, Jordan thought.

  “Will you come with me?” he asked. “Spend the night in my cubicle?”

  Without hesitation, Aditi replied, “I’d like to, Jordan, but I don’t think it would be best. I don’t want them staring at me as if I’m a freak.”