The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [230]
"A ceremonial," he whispered. "I think they worship the Moon."
I heard him counting under his breath as the bell pealed. "Twenty-nine," he murmured. "The lunar month."
The soundless pavement took us on till he started and jogged my arm again, pointing at the towering figure just ahead. More than magnificent, a blinding silver dazzle in the slanting morning sun, it must have been a hundred feet tall. Shading my eyes, I blinked and looked and blinked again.
It was my father. In the same jacket and necktie his holo image had worn when it spoke from the tank, flourishing the same tobacco pipe he had waved to punctuate his lectures. The pipe, I thought, could be only a magic symbol now; DeFalco had saved no tobacco seed.
Those nearest the statue dropped to their knees, kissing their lunar pendants. Eyes lifted, they breathed their prayers and rose again as we moved on toward the next monumental figure, even taller than my father's. It was Pepe himself, in the flight jacket and cap his clone father had worn to the Moon, one gigantic arm lifted as if to beckon us on toward the needle and the crescent. People pressed toward it, kneeling to kiss heir pendants and pray.
"He never dreamed." His own eyes lifted, Pepe shook his head in awe. "Never dreamed that he might become a god."
Tanya came next, taller still, splendid in the sunlit shimmer of her lab jacket, raising an enormous test tube toward the tower. Arne next, waving his rock-hunter's hammer. Finally Dian, the tallest, holding a silver book. I heard our actual Dian gasp when she read the title cut into the metal.
The Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Below the needle and the crescent, the pavement carried us into a vast open circle ringed with great silver columns. Slowing it crowded us together. At a single thunderous peal, people stood still, gazing up at a balcony high on the face of the spire.
A tiny-seeming man robed in bright silver appeared there, arms raised high. The bell pealed again, echoes rolling from the columns. His voice thundered, louder than the bell. The worshipers sang an answer, a slow and solemn chant. He spoke again, and Pepe gripped my arm.
"English!" he whispered. "A queer accent, but it's got to be English!"
The speaker stopped, arms still lifted toward the sky. The bell pealed, its deep reverberations dying slowly into silence. People around us fell to their knees, faces raised to the crescent. We knelt with them, all of us but Arne. He stalked on fonvard, bullhorn high.
"Hear this!" he bawled. "Now hear this!"
People around him hissed in protest, but he strode on toward the tower.
"We are your gods!" He paused to let his voice roll back from the columns. "We live on the Moon. We have returned—"
A tall woman in a silver robe came off her knees to shout at him, waving a silver baton. He stopped to gesture at Dian and the rest of us.
"Look!" he shouted. "You must know us-"
She waved the baton at him. His voice choked off. Gasping for breath, he dropped the bullhorn and crumpled to the pavement. The woman swung the baton toward us. Dian rose, waving her book and declaiming Dickinson: This is my letter to the world That never wrote to me— Dimly, I recall the desperate quaver in her voice, the hushed outrage on the woman's face. The baton swept us. A puff of mist chilled and stung my cheek. The pavement seemed to tilt, and I must have fallen.
For a long time I thought I was back at Tycho Station, confined to the bed in our tiny clinic. A robot stood over me, as patiently motionless as any robot. A fan hummed softly. The air was warm, with an odd fresh scent. I felt a sense of groggy comfort till a numb stiffness on my cheek brought recollection back: that avenue of gigantic silver figures, the stern-faced woman in her silver robe, the icy mist from her silver baton.
Shocked wide awake, I tried to get off the bed and found no strength. The robot tipped its lenses, bent to catch my wrist