The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [222]
"My God!" He was screaming into the microphone. "Hold still! I'm coming."
"Don't!" Her voice came thinly, desperate yet oddly calm. "Arne, please! Get back to the Moon. Report what you can. Don't mind me. There'll be another clone."
I heard the whir and clang of the lock, and then nothing at all.
5
The three of us left at Tycho lived out our natural lives with no more news from Earth. The robots slept again, a million years perhaps; we had no clocks that ran so long. The computers woke them when the sensors found the Earth grown green enough. We grew up again, listening to the robots and the holos, struggling once more to learn the roles we must play.
"Meat robots!" Arne was always the critic. "Created and programmed to play God for old DeFalco."
"Hardly gods." Tanya was bright and beautiful and sure of nearly everything. "But at least alive."
"Meat copies." Arne mocked her.
"Copies of the holo ghosts in the tank."
"More than copies, too," Tanya said. "Genes aren't everything. We're ourselves."
"Maybe," Arne muttered. "But still slaves of old DeFalco and his idiot plan."
"So what?" Tanya wore a thick sheaf of sleek black hair, and she tossed it scornfully back. "It's the reason we're here. I expect to do my bit."
"Maybe you, but I've heard my father talk."
We all knew his father's image in the tanks. A bronze-bearded giant, Dr Arne Linder had been a distinguished geologist back before the impact. We'd read his books in Dian's library.
Born in old Norway, he had married Sigrid Knutson, a tall blonde beauty he had known when they were children. We learned more about his life from Pepe Navarro's journal. The warning caught them in Iceland. Flying back to the Moon base, he begged Navarro to drop him off in Washington, where his wife was a translator in the Norwegian Embassy.
He had left her pregnant, their first child due. He felt frantic to be with her, but Navarro said they had no time to stop anywhere. They fought in the cockpit. Navarro knocked him out and got them to the base in time to save their lives.
"Dreadful for him," Dian said. "He never got over grieving for Sigrid, or feeling he had failed her."
Our new Arne must have caught something of that bitterness. While the greener Earth had always beckoned the rest of us back to finish our mission, he had never learned to like it. Even as a child, he used to haunt the dome, scowling through the big telescope.
"Those black spots." He used to mutter and shake his head. "I don't know what they are. I don't want to know."
They were dark grey patches scattered here and there across all the continents. The instruments showed only naked rock and soil, bare of life.
"Only old lava flow, most likely," Tanya said.
"Cancers." He muttered and shook his head. "Cancers in the green."
"A silly notion," she scolded him. "We'll find the truth when we land."
"Land there?" He looked sick. "Not if I can help it!"
Our holo parents had been too long in the computers for such matters to concern them, but they were real enough to us. My father had been a journalist, reporting from all over the world. His videos of the monuments and history and culture of Russia and China and the old America held an eerie fascination, yet they always filled me with a black regret for all we could never recover.
He never spoke much about himself, but I found more about him from a long narrative, an odd mix of fact and fiction, that he had dictated to the computer. He called it The Last Day. Writing for a future he hoped might want to know about the past, he spoke about his family and everybody he had known, telling what they had meant to him. That much was the fact. The fiction was the way he imagined their last moments.