The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [220]
They took off together, Pepe flying the space plane, Tanya filing radio reports as they surveyed the Earth from low orbit. She described the shrunken ice caps, the high sea levels, the shifted shorelines that made familiar features hard to recognize.
"We need soil where seed can grow," she said. "Hard to pinpoint from space if it does exist at all. Rocks do crumble into silt, but the rains are scouring most of that into the sea for lack of roots to hold it. We'll try to seed from orbit, but I want to land for a closer look."
Dian asked them to look for any relics of human civilization.
"Relics?" Tanya was sarcastic. "Ice and time have erased the great pyramids. The big dams. The Great Wall of China. Everything large enough to look for."
"No surprise," Arne muttered. "The impact has remade the Earth, but not for us."
"Our job." Pepe's voice. "To make it fit."
"A brand-new world!" Tanya's irony was gone. "Waiting for the spark of life."
On the mike, Arne had technical questions about spectrometer readings of solar radiation reflected from the surface and refracted through the atmosphere, questions about polar ice, about air and ocean circulation. Data, he said, that we ought to record for the next generation.
"We're here to replant the planet." Tanya grew impatient. "And too low over the equator to see atmosphere or ocean circulation patterns. Heavy clouds hide most of the surface. We'll need the radar to search for a landing site."
Arne never said he wished he had gone down with them, but he kept on with his questions till I thought he felt guilty.
Dropping into an orbit that grazed the atmosphere, they sowed the planet with life-bombs, heat-shielded cylinders loaded with seed pellets. Clearing weather over east Africa revealed a narrow sea in the Great Rift Valley, which had deepened and opened wider.
Tanya wanted to land there.
"The most likely spot we've seen. It should be warm and wet enough. The water looks blue, probably fresh, with no great pollution. Besides, it happens to be near where Homo sapiens evolved. A symbolic spot for a second creation, though Pepe says I'm crazy to think about it.
"He says our job is already done. We've scattered seed over every continent and dropped algae bombs into all the major oceans. He says nature can take care of the rest, but I'm the biologist. I want soil and air and water samples to save for the next generation.
"Arne ought to be here." She was serious, with no sarcasm. "He's the terraformer, more expert than we are. He's missing the thrill of his life."
Elation bubbled in her voice.
"We feel like gods. Descending to the dead world with the fire of life. Pepe says we ought to head back to the Moon while we can, but I won't - I can't - give up the actual landing."
Beginning the final descent on the other side of Earth, they were out of contact while I bit my nails for an hour.
"Down safe!" She was exuberant when we heard her again. "Pepe set us down on the west shore of this Kenyan sea. A splendid day with a high sun and a great view across a neck of the water to a wall of dark cliffs and the slopes of a new volcanic mountain almost as tall as Kilimanjaro. A tower of smoke is climbing out of the cone. The sky above us is blue as the sea, though maybe not for long. I see a storm cloud rising in the west."
She was silent for a moment.
"Another thing - a very odd thing.
Landing on its tail, the plane stands tall. From the cockpit we can see far out across the sea. Most of it calm, there's an odd little patch of whitecaps. Odd because they're moving toward us, with no sign of wind anywhere else. "I can make out—" Her voice broke off. I heard the quick catch of her breath and Pepe's muffled exclamation.
"Those whitecaps!" Her voice came back, lifted sharply. "Not whitecaps at all. They're something - something alive!"
She must have moved away from the