The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [212]
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1
WE ARE CLONES, the last survivors of the great impact. The bodies of our parents have lain a hundred years in the cemetery on the rubble slope below the crater rim. I remember the day my robot-father brought the five of us up to see the Earth, a hazy red-spattered ball in the black Moon sky.
"It looks - looks sick." Looking sick herself, Dian raised her face to his. "Is it bleeding?"
"Bleeding red-hot lava all over the land," he told her. "The rivers all bleeding iron-red rain into the seas."
"Dead." Arne made a face. "It looks dead."
"The impact killed it." His plastic head nodded. "You were born to bring it back to life."
"Just us kids?"
"You'll grow up."
"Not me," Arne muttered. "Do I have to grow up?"
"So what do you want?" Tanya grinned at him. "To stay a snot-nosed kid forever?"
"Please." My robot-father shrugged in the stiff way robots have, and his lenses swept all five of us, standing around him in the dome. "Your mission is to replant life on Earth. The job may take a lot of time, but you'll be born and born again till you get it done."
We knew our natural parents from their letters to us and their images in the holo tanks and the robots they had programmed to bring us up. My father had been Duncan Yare, a lean man with kind grey eyes and a neat black beard when I saw him in the holo tanks. He had a voice I loved, even when he was the robot.
The dome was new to us, big and strange, full of strange machines, wonderfully exciting. The clear quartz wall let us see the stark earth-lit moonscape all around us. We had clone pets. Mine was Spaceman. He growled and bristled at a black-shadowed monster rock outside and crouched against my leg. Tanya's cat had followed us.
"Okay, Cleo," she called when it mewed. "Let's look outside." Cleo came flying into her arms. Jumping was easy, here in the Moon's light gravity. My robot-father had pointed a thin blue plastic arm at the cragged mountain wall that curved away on both sides of the dome.
"The station is dug into the rim of Tycho-"
"The crater," Arne interrupted him. "We know it from the globe."
"It's so big!" Tanya's voice was hushed. She was a spindly little girl with straight black hair that her mother made her keep cut short, and bangs that came down to her eyebrows. Cleo sagged in her arms, almost forgotten. "It - it's homongoolius!"
She stared out across the enormous black pit at the jagged peak towering into the blaze of Earth at the center. Dian had turned to look the other way, at the bright white rays that fanned out from the boulder slopes far below, spreading to the pads and gantries and hangars where the spacecraft had landed, and reaching on beyond, across the waste of black-pocked, grey-green rocks and dust to the black and starless sky.
"Homongoolius?" Dian mocked her. "I'd say fractabulous!"
"Homon-fractabu-what?" Pepe made fun of them both. He was short and quick, as skinny as Tanya was, and just as dark. He liked to play games, and never combed his hair. "Can't you speak English?"
"Better than you." Dian was a tall pale girl who never wanted a pet. The robots had made dark-rimmed glasses for her because she loved to read the old paper books in the library. "And I'm learning Latin."
"What good is Latin?" Cloned together, we were all the same age, but Arne was the biggest. He had pale blue eyes and pale blond hair, and he liked to ask questions. "It's dead as Earth."
"It's something we must save."