The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [224]
We voted. Dian raised her hand for Arne, Tanya and Pepe. When that left me to break the tie, I nominated Tanya. Arne sat scowling till he surrendered to her smile. Voting on the landing site, again we chose the coast of that same inland sea. Pepe picked the day. When it came, we gathered in space gear at the spaceport elevator. Only three of us at first, anxiously eager, impatiently waiting for Arne and Dian.
"She's gone!" Arne came running down the passage. "I've looked everywhere. Her rooms, the museum, the gym and the shops, the common rooms. I can't find her."
6
The robots found her in her spacesuit a thousand feet down the crater's inner wall. She had struck jagged ledges, bounced and rolled and struck again. Blood had sprayed the faceplate, and she was stiff as iron before they got her back inside. Arne found a note in her computer.
"Farewell and good fortune, if any of you miss me. I've chosen not to go because I see no useful place for me at the Earth outpost, even if you get one set up. I lack the hardihood for pioneering. Even at the best, the colonists will have no time or need for me before another group of clones can grow."
"Hardly true." Gravely, Pepe shook his head. "The mission will take us all."
The robots dug a new grave in the plot of rocks and dusk outside the crater where our parents and our older siblings had lain so long; beside them the sad little row of smaller mounds that covered my beagles. We buried her there, still rigid in her space gear. Arne spoke briefly, his voice hollow and somber in his helmet.
"I do miss her. It's a terrible time for me, because I think I killed her. I've read the diaries of ourselves in love. I think she loved me again, though she never told me, or said much to anybody. Perhaps I should have guessed, but I'm not my brother."
"We'll have another chance." Tanya tried to comfort him. "But we can't help what we are."
We watched the robots fill the grave and delayed the launch again while he made a marker to set at the head of it, a metal plate that should stand forever here on the airless Moon, bearing only this legend:
DIANLAZARD NUMBER THREE
"Three." His voice in the helmet was a bitter rumble. "Numbers. That's all we are."
"More than that," Tanya protested. "We're human. More than human, if you remember why we're here."
"Not by choice," he grumbled. "I wish old DeFalco had left my father back on Earth."
Muttering and swallowing whatever else he wanted to say, he knelt at the foot of the grave. The rest of us waited silently, isolated from one another in our clumsy armor. Shut up in her own tiny world, Dian had seemed content with the precious artefacts she cared for. I felt sad that I had never really got to know her.
Arne rose from his knees and Tanya led us from the cemetery to the loaded plane. Our five individual robots had to be left on the station, but the sixth, the one DeFalco had not lived to program, came with us. We called it Calvin.
From orbit, we studied those dark blots again and found them changed.
"They've moved since we were children," Arne said. "Moved and grown. I don't like them. I don't think the planet's ready for us."
"Ready or not," Tanya grinned and leaned cheerfully to slap his back, "here we go."
"I can't imagine—" Muttering, he scowled at the ulcered Earth. What could they be?"
"Bare lavas, maybe, where the rains have left no soil where anything could grow?"
"Maybe burns?" She waited for her turn to study the data. "The spectrometers show oxygen levels high. More oxygen could mean hotter forest fires."
"No smoke." He shook his head. "Fires don't burn for years."
"Let's go on down."
She had Pepe drop us into a landing orbit above the equator. Low over Africa, we found the Great Rift grown still wider. That inland sea had risen, flooding the ancient shore, yet she decided to land near it.
"Why?" Arne demanded. "Have you forgotten