The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [217]
"Pepe called again, warning him to come back. He waved a sample bottle. 'Our best chance.' His voice was a strangled croak, but I got a few words. 'If anything survived in the sea. I hope-"
"Hope. Choking on that last word, he tried to get his breath and failed. He lost the radio and his bucket and stumbled a few yards toward us before he tripped and fell. The oxygen bottle floated away. We saw him grabbing for it, but the next wave took it out of his reach."
"You left him there?" Dian's voice rose sharply. "Left him to die?"
"We left him dead. Pepe wanted to help him, but he'd gone too far. His oxygen gone, the air had killed him."
"Air?"
"Bad air." My robot-father's helpless shrug was almost human.
"Mixed in the volcanic gases in the whiff I caught, there was cyanide." "Cyanide?" Pepe frowned. "Who put it there?" "It came from cometary cyanogen from the asteroid." "Poisoned air!" Arne turned pale. "And you want us to go back?" "To help nature clean it." His lenses swept the five of us. "If no green plants are left to restore the oxygen, you must replant them.
Cal died with his work undone. It's yours to finish."
3
The mission left to us, to us alone, we died and let the robots sleep while an ice age passed on Earth. The maternity lab delivered us again, and once more our dead parents brought us up.
My robot-father was always with me. He taught me to spell, taught me science and geometry, counted time when I was working out on the treadmill in the centrifuge.
"Keep yourself fit," he used to tell me. "I can last forever, but you're only human."
He made me work till I was panting and dripping sweat.
"You have your clone father's genes," he reminded me again. "You'll never be him, but I want you to promise you'll never give up our noble mission."
My hand on my heart, I promised.
Pepe's robot-father taught him the multiplication tables and rocket engineering and trained him to box. The boxing was to make him quick with his wits and quick on his feet.
"You'll need all that," he said, "when you get to Earth."
Pepe liked to compete. He was always wanting to work out with Arne and me. He beat me till I'd had enough. Arne was big enough to knock him across the centrifuge, but he kept coming back for more.
Tanya's robot-mother taught her how to care for a baby-sized doll, taught her biology and the genetics she might need for terra-forming Earth. Working in the maternity lab, she learned to clone frogs and dissect them, but she refused to dissect any kind of cat.
Arne's robot-father helped him to learn to walk, taught him the geology terraforming science. His first experimental project was a colony of cloned ants in a glass-walled farm.
"We can't exist alone," his clone father told him. "We evolved as part of a biocosm. In the cryonic vault, we have seed and spores and cells and embryos to help you rebuild it."
In the nursery and the playroom while we were small, later in the classroom and the gym, we learned to love the robots. They loved us as well as robots could. They were immortal. Sometimes I envied them.
I felt sad for our parents and their Earth, dead a hundred thousand or perhaps a million years. The robots couldn't say how long. They had been awakened only when the computer found Earth once more warm enough for life.
We saw them only in their images, speaking to us from the holo tanks. My own holo father, when he was my teacher, appeared as a tall slim man in a dark suit, wearing a narrow black mustache. Counting pushups when I worked out in the centrifuge, he looked younger and wore a red sweatsuit and no mustache. More relaxed at times when he talked of his wife and their home and their work together, he was in a purple dressing gown. Lecturing from the tank, he sometimes waved