Cradle (32 page)

One of the plastic vehicles plunges through a misty blue cloudbank into an emerald
sea. The plastic is left on the surface, but the encased gold metallic object sinks
thirty feet to the floor of the ocean. For a day or two there is no discernible change
in its appearance. Then a protrusion begins to form in its north polar region, on
the top of the golden sphere as it sits on the ocean floor. The growth expands slowly,
until the spherical shape appears to have a large carbuncle on its top. A metamorphosis
now takes place. On the outside of the protrusion, the hard metal surface softens
and begins to resemble an organic membrane. Although the membrane is thick and dense,
it occasionally bulges, suggesting some motion on the other side of its golden barrier.

Eventually a thin black rod, a probe of some kind, thrusts through the surface into
the emerald ocean. A second probe becomes visible, then a third, both long black rods
like the first, but each equipped with strikingly different apparatus scattered along
the length of the rod. Something larger pushes against the membrane, once, twice,
then finally breaking through. What a strange contraption! It’s an aerodynamic shape
about three inches long, in two separate segments with a joint between them. The forebody
is a nosecone; the afterbody is long and slender and tapers to a point. In addition
to the three probes on the front of its forebody, it has four other furlable appendages
or arms, two connected to the side of each segment.

It swims over to a nearby underwater plant with its arms stored next to its smooth
body. There it unfurls the multifaceted appendages and begins to examine the plant.
An astonishing array of tiny instruments study the plant for a few moments and then
the entity moves away. The same procedure is repeated with each plant encountered.
Eventually the thing finds a plant that it ‘likes’ and its pincers remove a major
leaf. The leaf is neatly folded into a smaller volume and is then carried back to
the object with the golden membrane.

The strange forager is joined by a partner, a carbon copy of itself, and by two fat
fish with multiple arms and legs. The latter pair scuttle off to the side and begin
modifying the ocean floor. Days pass. The things with the probes work ceaselessly,
bringing more and more varieties of plant and animal life back to the home base. The
legged fish meanwhile have constructed, out of available sand, rocks, shells, and
living creatures, almost a thousand tiny, sealed rectangular homes on the ocean floor.
These fish entities also work without break. Their next task is to transport each
of the red spots, one at a time, from the golden cradle to their new houses.

If a microscope were available, it would show that some structure was already developing
inside the red spots, giving them definition and distinction, by the time of their
initial transport. But they are still very, very small. Once the red spots and their
gelatin protection are carefully implanted inside their tiny houses, the foragers
make routine stops on each trip to deposit a portion of their harvest. At the same
time, the fish with legs, the architects and builders of the rectangular houses, begin
working on transparent, igloolike homes for the embryos of another species.

A year later moonlight falls on the emerald lake. Several hundred eager, excited,
wriggling necks, some royal blue and some pale blue, struggle upward to find the moon.
Their heads pivot to face in all directions and perhaps two dozen separate indentations
and orifices can be seen in each face. The necks crane this way, then that way. The
silent serpents are searching for something.

From the direction of the moon a bizarre ship approaches on the water. It is large
compared to the young serpents, its twin towers standing about eight feet out of the
water and about six feet on average above a squarish platform fifteen feet on a side
that forms the bottom of the boat. The top surface of this platform is irregular,
undulating and cratered. The platform floats smoothly upon the water.

The ship comes into the middle of the serpents and stops. The serpents divide into
two groups according to the colour of their necks and then line up on either side
of the ship in very orderly rows and columns. A single musical note, a B-flat with
a flautish timbre, comes from the ship. Quickly the note is repeated up and down the
rows and columns by each of the serpents on the two sides of the boat. Then a second
note issues forth from the ship, also sounding like a flute, and the process repeats
itself. For hours the music lesson continues, covering a range of both notes and chords,
until some of the serpents on each side lose their voices. The exercise concludes
with an attempted ensemble performance by the royal bluenecked serpents, but the result
is a painful cacophony.

Inside the ship, every note, every movement, every response by the juvenile serpents
to the music lesson is carefully monitored and recorded. The ingenious engineering
design of the boat is based upon the key controlling elements of the original cradle.
However, although segments of gold metallic material (as well as the long black rods
and even portions of the fat fish with legs) appear in the computer that runs the
ship, the primary constituents of its mass are derived from great quantities of local
rock and organic matter taken from the floor of the emerald lake. The ship is the
quintessential music teacher, a virtually perfect synthesizer equipped with microprocessors
that not only store all the responses of the pupils, but also contain software which
will allow experimentation with a range of individualized methods of teaching.

But this sophisticated robot, engineered by the artificial intelligence packed around
the serpent zygotes and made almost entirely of chemical compounds extracted from
material found in the neighbourhood of the landing point, is itself being watched
and studied from afar by test engineers. The current test is in its earliest stages
and is progressing splendidly. This is the third different configuration tried for
the music teacher, the hardest part of the design of the cradle that will carry the
serpent zygotes back to Canthor. The first was an abysmal failure; the embryos developed
into adolescents satisfactorily, but the teacher was never able to instruct them well
enough that they could sing the mating song and reproduce. The second design was better;
it was able to teach the serpents to perform the courtship symphony and a new generation
of the species was produced. However, this next group of adult serpents was not able
subsequently to teach their progeny to sing.

The best of the bioengineering personnel in the Colony were brought in to study this
problem. After poring over quadrillions of bits of accumulated data associated with
the development of the serpents and other related species, they found a curious correlation
between the degree of nurturing provided by the parent and the resulting ability of
that infant, upon reaching maturity, to teach its own offspring. The artificial intelligence
package responsible for the first six months of serpent life was then redesigned to
include a surrogate mother whose only purpose was to hold and cuddle the fledgling
serpents at regular intervals. Sub-system tests proved successful; this slight alteration
of the early nurturing protocol produced adult serpents that were able to teach their
children to sing.

This demonstration test lasts for more than four millicycles. At the end of the period,
the test is declared an unqualified success. A strong, creative serpent population
nearing twenty-five thousand fills the artificial lake. Limitations to future growth
are only test related. Eventually the test survivors are transported to another locale
in the Zoo Complex and the Canthorean serpents are added to the list of species ready
for zygote repatriation.

The full moon rises over the placid ocean. Troy stares at the moonbeams, watching
them shimmer on the quiet water. Angie appears and stands in the water in front of
him. She is wearing a skintight white bathing suit, one piece, and is submerged from
the waist down.

She beckons to him and he walks across the damp sand toward the water. He is barefoot
and is also wearing a white bathing suit. The water is surprisingly warm. Angie begins
to sing. Her magnificent voice enfolds him as Troy draws nearer to her in the light
surf.

They touch and kiss. She pulls away and gives him a smile of encouragement. Troy feels
himself becoming aroused. Suddenly a siren pierces the air, destroying the calm of
the night. Instantly the sea becomes choppy, agitated, full of whitecaps. Troy turns
around, alarmed, and glances at the shore. He sees nothing special. He looks back
at the ocean. Angie has disappeared. Out in the distance, near the horizon, Troy thinks
he sees the beginning of a tidal wave. The siren shrieks again and Troy sees a large
shapeless mass riding a nearby wave in the moonlight.

He goes toward the object. The tidal wave is now defined in the distance, filling
half his dream screen. The bulky object nearby is a black body dressed in a red sleeveless
T-shirt and blue jeans. The siren grows louder. Troy rolls the body over and looks
at the face. It is his brother, Jamie.

Troy Jefferson bolted upright in bed, his heart pounding furiously, his mind making
the transition from the dream world to reality. Outside his duplex apartment a siren
raged. He could tell from the frequency change that the police car or ambulance had
just sped past his front door. He shook himself and crawled out of bed. The digital
clock on the end table read 3.03.

Troy walked to the kitchen. He went to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass
of grapefruit juice. He listened to the siren in the distance until it faded away
altogether. Then he started back to the small second bedroom where he slept. In the
hallway he was stopped by the sound of another siren, this one even louder, that seemed
to be coming toward him. For a few seconds he thought the siren was just outside his
front door and he recalled, vividly, another siren in the middle of another night.
His heart began to pound anew. ‘Jamie,’ Troy said to himself almost involuntarily,
‘Jamie. Why did you have to die?’

Troy could still see the events of that evening with perfect clarity. Nothing in the
first tableau had faded even a little. The beginning memory was the three of them,
Jamie, Troy, and their mother, sitting silently at the dinner table, eating fried
chicken and mashed potatoes. Jamie had just arrived home from Gainesville for spring
break that afternoon and had spent almost an hour, before they had sat down to eat,
regaling his fifteen-year-old brother with stories of football and university life.
Jamie had been Troy’s idol throughout his childhood. Handsome, intelligent, and articulate,
Jamie had also been blessed with remarkable physical gifts. As a result, he had been
the starting halfback for the Florida Gators in his sophomore year and was being touted
as a potential All-American for the following season. Troy had bitterly missed Jamie
when he had first gone away to the university, but in the intervening eighteen months
he had learned to accept his absence and to look forward to his brother’s holiday
visits.

‘So, bro,’ Jamie had said with a smile, when he finished his dinner and pushed his
plate away, ‘what about you? You’ve finished another quarter already. Did you make
the grades of a future astronaut?’

‘I did okay,’ Troy had replied, hiding his pride. ‘I made a B-plus in Social Studies
because my teacher thought I had taken an anti-American position in my paper on the
Panama Canal.’

‘I guess an occasional B-plus is acceptable,’ Jamie had laughed, his affection for
his younger brother clearly showing. ‘But I bet Burford didn’t make many Bs when he
was in the ninth grade.’

Whenever Troy recalled the fateful evening that his brother was killed, he always
remembered the mention of Guion Burford, the first American black astronaut. Most
of the time his memory, because it was so painful to proceed immediately to the terrible
recollection of his dying brother in his arms, would choose to digress to a happier
time, to a remembrance of his brother Jamie that was almost as vivid as the death
scene, but was happy and reinforcing instead of being gut-wrenching and depressing.

During the summer before his death, on a hot, humid day in late August, Jamie Jefferson
had arranged a third personal meeting with his football coach at Florida to request
permission to skip practice for two days. He wanted to take his little brother Troy
to see the launch of the space shuttle. In the first two meetings, the coach had vigorously
opposed Jamie’s taking the time away from the important workouts, but he had stopped
short of denying the request.

‘You still don’t understand, coach,’ Jamie had said firmly at the start of their third
and final meeting on the subject. ‘My little brother has no father. And he’s a genius
at math and science. He blows the top off those standardized aptitude tests. He needs
a role model. He needs to know that blacks can do something significant other than
sports.’ The coach had eventually relented and given Jamie permission, but only because
he had figured out that Jamie was going to go whatever he said.

Jamie had driven his battered Chevrolet nonstop across Florida, picked up his brother
in Miami, and continued northward without sleeping for another four hours to Cocoa
Beach. They had arrived in the middle of the night. Jamie, by now exhausted, parked
the car in a beach access zone next to a seven-storey condominium along the nicest
part of the beach. ‘All right, little brother,’ he had said, ‘now get some sleep.’

But Troy had not been able to sleep. He had been too excited thinking about the launch
scheduled the next evening, the eighth shuttle launch in all, the first one that had
ever occurred at night. He had been reading everything he could find about astronaut
Burford and the plans for the mission. He kept imagining that it was the future and
that he, Troy Jefferson, was an astronaut about to be launched into space. After all,
Burford was living proof that it could indeed be done, that a black American could
attain the upper echelons of society and become a popular hero on the basis of his
intelligence, personality, and hard work.