Evolution (80 page)

“Joan—”

“Let me talk, damn it. Talking makes the pain go away.”

“
Drugs
make the pain go away.”

“
Ow!
That one felt different. Is there a midwife in this damn van?”

“They’re all trained paramedics. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”

“I think my daughter is keen to see the inside of this scruffy ambulance.”

“You’ve done your classes. Breathe. Push.”

She began to breathe in gasping snatches,
Oof, oof, oof.

Alyce kept glancing down toward the business end. “You’re doing fine.”

“Even if I do have the pelvis of an australopithecine.”

“You really are full of shit, Joan Useb.”

“Not anymore, I fear.”

“She’s coming. She’s
coming,
” Alyce said.

The baby’s skull bones and their junctions were soft, able to mold under the pressure of being squeezed through the birth canal. And she was able to withstand oxygen deprivation up to the moment of birth.

These last moments were the most extreme physical transformation she would suffer up until the moment of death itself. But the baby’s body was flooded with natural opiates and analgesics. She was feeling no real pain, just a continuation of the long womb dream out of which her self, her identity, had gradually coalesced.

A space suited paramedic took Joan’s child, blew into its nose, and slapped its backside. A satisfying wail filled the ambulance. The soggy little scrap of flesh was hastily wrapped in a blanket and handed to Joan.

Joan, exhausted, wondering, touched her daughter’s cheek. The child turned her head, and her mouth worked, seeking something to suck.

Alyce was smiling down, sweating and exhausted herself, like any proud aunt. “By God, look at her. She’s already communicating with us, in her way. She’s already human.”

“I think she wants to suckle. But I don’t have any milk yet, do I?”

“Let her suckle anyhow,” Alyce advised. “It will stimulate your body to release more oxytocin.”

Now Joan remembered her classes. “Which will cause my uterus to contract, reduce the bleeding, help expel the placenta—”

“Don’t worry about that,” said a space suit. “We injected you already.”

Joan let the child lick her nipple. “Look at that. She’s making grasping motions. And it’s like she’s stepping. I can feel her feet.”

“If you had a hairy chest she could probably support her weight, and maybe crawl over you. And if you moved suddenly, she’d grab even harder.”

“In case I go bounding off through the trees. Look, she’s calming.”

“Give her twenty more minutes and she’ll be pulling her tongue at you.”

Joan felt as if she were floating, as if nothing was real but the fragile warm bundle in her arms. “I know it’s all innate. I know I’m being reprogrammed so I don’t shuck off this damp little parasite. And yet, and yet—”

Alyce laid her hand on Joan’s shoulder. “And yet it’s what your life has been all about, but you just never knew it before.”

“Yes.”

There was a bleep. Alyce pulled a mobile out of her pocket. Its face lit up with bright images, flickers of movement.

A space suit murmured to Joan. “We’re approaching the hospital. You’re not to be afraid. They have a secure, enclosed entrance.”

Joan cradled her baby. “So Lucy, having just passed through one long dark tunnel, is about to enter another.”

The space suit hesitated. “Lucy?”

“What better name for a primate gal?”

Alyce managed a smile. “Joan, you aren’t the only new parent.”

“Huh?”

“Ian Maughan’s robot worker on Mars has managed to build a fully working replica of itself. It has managed to reproduce. From the tone of this text, he is very happy.”

“He texted you about
that
?”

“You know guys like that. The rest of the world can go to hell as long as their latest gadget does what it’s supposed to. Oh. The Fourth Worlders killed Alison Scott’s pithecine chimera. I imagine they believed she was an abomination. I wonder what
she
believed.”

“I suppose she only wanted security, as we all do.”

Joan gazed down at her new baby. One world had begun, just heartbeats ago, while another was ending.

“We came close, didn’t we, Alyce? The conference, the manifesto. It could have worked, couldn’t it?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“We just ran out of time, is all.”

“Yes. That, and luck. But we must be hopeful, Joan.”

“Yes. We must always be that.”

The ambulance rattled to a halt. The doors banged open and cooler air gushed in. More space suits swarmed around, pushing Alyce out of the way, seeking to get Joan on a stretcher. They tried to take her baby off her, but she wouldn’t let them.

The geologists had long known that Earth had been overdue for a major volcanic incident.

Rabaul 2031 was not the worst eruption known— not even the worst in the historical record. Still, Rabaul had been far more severe than the 1991 eruption of Pinatubo in the Philippines, which had cooled the Earth by half a degree. It was worse than the explosion of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which had caused the “year without a summer” in America and Europe. Rabaul was the largest volcanic event since the sixth century after Christ, and one of the largest of the previous fifty thousand years. Rabaul was respectable.

Changes in climate were not always smooth and proportional to their causes. Earth was prone to sudden and drastic alterations in climate and ecology, flips from one stable state to another. The effects of even small perturbations could become magnified.

Rabaul was such a perturbation. But it was not going to be a small one.

It wasn’t really Rabaul’s fault. The volcano was just the final straw. Everything had been stretched to the breaking point anyhow by the humans’ extraordinary growth. It wasn’t even bad luck. If it hadn’t been Rabaul, it would have been another volcano or a quake or an asteroid, or some damn thing.

But as the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals embedded in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.

Meanwhile, on Mars, the little robots worked on. Patiently they turned the wan sunlight and the red dust and the carbon dioxide air into little factories, which in turn produced copies of the robots themselves, with jointed legs and solar cell carapaces and little silicon brains.

The robots transmitted news of their endeavors back to their makers on Earth. No reply came. But they kept working anyway.

Under the burnt orange sky of Mars, generations passed quickly.

Of course no replication, biological or mechanical, could ever be perfect. Some variants worked better than others. The robots were actually programmed to learn— to retain what worked, to eliminate what didn’t. The weaker ones died out. The stronger survived, and carried forward their design changes to the next metallic generation.

Thus variation and selection had begun to operate.

On and on the robots toiled, until the ancient seabeds and canyons glistened, covered by insectlike metal carapaces.

Place and time unknown.

Waking from a cold sleep wasn’t at all like a normal waking, in your own bed, with your wife beside you. It was more like surfacing from a deep dunking in a tank of some clinging, deadening fluid.

But now here was a break in the murk, a widening circle of light centered on a blurry face. The face belonged to Ahmed, the splot— the senior pilot— and not to the CO. That was Snowy’s first indication that something was wrong.

Ahmed was repeating, “OK? Are you OK?”

Before submitting to the injections Snowy had rehearsed how he was going to respond to his wake-up call. He smiled and raised the middle finger of his right hand. “Any landing you walk away from is a good one.” His voice was a rasp, and his mouth was desert dry.

“You aren’t walking yet, smart arse,” Ahmed said grimly.

“Where’s Barking?” Robert Madd, blessed with one of the Royal Navy’s less imaginative nicknames, was the unit’s CO.

“Later,” said Ahmed. He withdrew, letting Snowy see the metal walls of the Pit. He threw a ration pack on the bed. “Get out of there. Help me with the others.”

Snowy— Robert Wayne Snow, age 31— was a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy, which had given him at least an inclination to follow the odd order. So he struggled to sit up.

The Pit was just a cylinder of gunmetal gray, the walls unadorned save for instrument and sensor consoles. The light came from low-energy fluorescents that cast a sickly glow over everything. The instruments were all dead, just blank screens. It was like being inside an oil tank. And the Pit was full of bunk beds, twenty of them, stacked up. Plastic carapaces lay over the beds. Ahmed was working his way around the room, opening the carapaces one by one, and reclosing most of them.

Snowy was stark naked, but he wasn’t cold. He picked up his ration pack. It was a clear vacuum-packed bag containing dried banana, chocolate, and other goodies. He ripped into it with the only tool available to him, his teeth. The bag popped and air hissed. He dumped out the goodies on his bed and crammed some banana into his mouth. He felt like he’d been running a marathon. He’d been through cold sleep twice before, for training and evaluation purposes, just a week at a time. It was a peculiarity of the process that at no time did you feel cold, but you always woke up ravenous: something to do with your body slowly absorbing its stores to keep itself alive, according to the medicos.

But something was wrong with his bunk. He could see where he had been lying, his body had left a very clear imprint, like the gruesome dead-mother’s-bed scene in
Psycho.
He probed at the mattress. It was lumpy and hard. And the sheets on which he had been lying crumbled as he poked at them, like a mummy’s wrappings.

He felt a gathering sense of dread.

Ahmed was helping a girl from one of the upper bunks. Her name was June, so, naturally, she was known as Moon. She was a cutie, in or out of her clothes; but now, naked, she looked fragile, even ill, and Snowy felt nothing but an impulse to help her as she clambered awkwardly down from her bunk, flinching as her bare flesh brushed against the metal.

With Moon awake, Snowy started to feel self-conscious. He reached under his bunk, looking for his clothes.

But the floor seemed to be on a tilt. He straightened up, expecting his head to clear. But still the bare floor seemed askew, the vertical lines of the bunk frames leaning like drunks. Not good, Snowy thought. He could think of nothing reassuring that would tip up this hundred-ton emplacement.

He reached under his bed again. The cardboard box that had contained his clothes was gone. His clothes were still there, in a heap. But when he grabbed them the cloth just crumbled, like the sheets on his bed.

“Forget it,” Ahmed called, watching him. “Get your flight suit. They seem to have lasted.”

“Lasted?”

“It’s the plastic, I think.”

Snowy complied. He found his boots were still intact too, made of some imperishable artificial material. But he had no surviving socks, none at all; that might be a problem.

Snowy helped get some food inside Moon, while Ahmed continued his patroling.

The woken gathered in a circle, sitting on the lowest tier of the bunks. But there were only five of them, five out of the twenty who had been stored here. The five were Snowy, Ahmed, Sidewise, the girl Moon, and a young pilot called Bonner.

For a time they were silent, as they tucked into banana and chocolate and drank vials of water. Snowy knew that was a good idea. If you were dropped into some new situation it always paid to give yourself time to just sit and listen and think, and adjust to the new situation.

Snowy had pressed Ahmed about the CO. Ahmed showed him. Barking Madd’s body was shriveled and shrunken, literally mummified, just hardened flesh over the bone. The rest, the other fourteen, were the same.

Sidewise, predictably, couldn’t keep his mouth closed. Sidewise was an air warfare officer. He was a thin, intense man, and he had earned his handle for his habit of making sideways crablike moves whenever he got on a dance floor. Now he glanced around at the little group. “Fucking hell,” he said to Snowy. “So much for the safety margins.”

“Shut it,” Ahmed snapped.

Bonner asked Ahmed, “So what was the tally?”

Tally,
for tally-ho, was the slang for a wake-up call. “There wasn’t one,” Ahmed said bluntly.

“So if not a tally, what woke us up?”

Ahmed shrugged. “Maybe the Pit has an automatic timer. Or maybe something just failed and it pitched us out.”

Bonner was a good-looking kid, though one of the gen-enged plagues had left him hairless from head to toe. Now he ran his hand over his bare scalp. His accent was faintly Welsh. “Maybe we just pushed it too hard. The Pit was supposed to be a cryostore for seeds and animal embryos and stuff. Insurance against the mass extinction. Not for humans—”