The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [223]
One chapter was about Linder's wife. Best man at their wedding and dancing with her at the reception, he felt haunted by her tragedy. The baby had come, he imagined, while Linder was in Iceland. She was already at home from the hospital, trying to reach him with her news, when DeFalco called on that last morning.
Although he told her nothing about the falling asteroid, his haste and his tone of voice alarmed her. She tried and tried again to reach Linder at his hotel in Reykjavik. He was never there. Frantic, she tried to call friends at the White Sands Moon Base. The phone lines were jammed.
Listening to the radio, watching holo stations, she learned of the communications blackout spreading over Asia. The baby sensed her terror and began to cry. She nursed it and crooned to it and prayed for Arne to call or come home. When the holo phone rang, it was a friend in flight operations at White Sands, who thought she would be relieved to know her husband was safe. She had just seen him rushing aboard the escape plane.
She must have felt relief, my father thought, but also dreadful despair. She knew she and the baby were about to die. Trying not to feel that he had betrayed her, she prayed for him. With the wailing baby in her arms, she sang to it and prayed for its soul till the surface shock brought the building down upon them.
Hearing the emotion in my father's voice, I shared something of his sorrow, a grief that always left me whenever we climbed into the dome to see the reborn Earth and talked of how to restore it. Our instruments revealed nothing of those anomalous creatures Wu and Navarro had seen crawling out into the Sun. The depleted oxygen had been replenished. Spinning its swift days and nights high in our black sky, Earth waxed and waned through our long months, inviting us home with green life splashed over the land.
Identical genes never made us entirely identical. We all had to struggle for some compromise between ourselves, our genes, and the demands of our mission. I was never my clone brother, whose dried and frozen body had lain in the Moon dust below the crater wall almost forever.
Reading his letters to me about his frustrated devotion to Tanya, I felt it hard to understand. Grown up again, she loved the mission the way her mother had. Avoiding any risk of discord, she favored all three of us equally, Pepe, Arne and I. If Dian felt hurt, she gave no sign.
"Arrogance!" Arne's clone brother had written in his diary. "Anthropocen-trie arrogance. We've found a new biocosm already blooming. We have no right to harm it. A crime worse than genocide."
The new Arne shrugged when I asked what he thought of the passage.
"Another man writing, too long ago. I get his point about the mission, but I'll do what I must. Frankly, I don't get what he said about Dian, if they really were in love. All she cares about now is her dusty books and her frozen art and chess with her computer."
DeFalco's clone should have been our leader, but he had died without a clone. When the time had come for our return, Arne gathered us in the library reading room to plan it.
"First of all," he asked, "why should we go back?"
"Of course we must." Tanya spoke sharply, irked at him. "That's the reason we exist."
"An overblown dream." His nose tilted up. "Old DeFalco's impact was not the first. It won't be the last. Maybe not the worst. But a new evolution has always replaced the old with something probably better. Nature working as it should. Why should we meddle?"
"Because we're human," Tanya said.
"Is that so great?" He sniffed at her. "When you look at the old Earth, at all the wanton savagery and genocide, our record's not so bright. Navarro and Wu found a new evolution already in progress. It could flower into something better than we are."
"Those red monsters on the beach?" She shuddered. "I'll go with our own kind."
Arne looked around the table and saw us all against him.
"If we're going back," he said, "I'm the leader. I understand terraforming."
"Maybe." Tanya frowned. "But that's not enough. We'll have to get down