Cradle (55 page)

Nick picked up the trident and raced around the canopy to prepare the diving equipment.

It took Carol and Troy a few seconds to react to Nick’s abrupt departure. ‘That was
strange,’ Carol said finally. ‘What do you suppose he forgot?’

‘I have no idea,’ Troy shrugged. ‘But I hope he hurries back. I don’t think it’s very
long until launch. And I’m sure
they
will throw us out before then.’

Carol thought for a moment and then turned back to look at the cylinder. ‘You know,
Troy, those golden things are exactly like the trident on the outside. Did you say—’

‘I didn’t answer you before, angel,’ Troy interrupted. ‘But yes, you’re right. It
is the same material. I hadn’t realized until we came down here today that what we
picked up on that first dive was the seed package for Earth.
They
may have tried to tell me before; maybe I just didn’t understand them.’

Carol was fascinated. She walked over and put her face against the cylinder wall.
It felt more like glass than plastic. ‘So maybe I was right when I thought it was
heavier and thicker…’ she said, as much to herself as to Troy. ‘And inside that trident
are seeds for better plants and animals?’ Troy nodded his head in response.

There was now some motion inside the cylinder. The thin membranes separating the subvolumes
were growing what appeared to be guidewires that were wrapping themselves around the
individual golden objects. Carol reloaded her camera with a new disc and ran around
the outside of the cylinder, stopping in the best positions to photograph the process.
Troy looked down at his bracelet. ‘There’s no doubt about it, angel. These ETs are
definitely preparing to launch. Maybe we should go.’

‘We’ll wait as long as we can,’ Carol shouted from across the room. ‘These photographs
will be priceless.’ They both could now hear weird noises behind the walls. The noises
were not loud, but they were distracting because they were erratic and so totally
alien. Troy paced nervously as he listened to the gamut of sounds. Carol walked over
beside him. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘Nick asked us to wait for him.’

‘That’s great,’ Troy answered, ‘as long as
they
wait as well.’ He seemed uncharacteristically nervous. ‘I don’t want to be on board
when these guys leave the Earth.’

‘Hey there, Mr. Jefferson,’ Carol said, ‘you are supposed to be the calm one. Relax.
You just said yourself that you think they’ll throw us out before they leave.’ She
paused and looked searchingly at Troy. ‘What do you know that I don’t?’

Troy turned away from her and started walking toward the exit. Carol ran after him
and grabbed his arm. ‘What is it, Troy?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Look, angel,’ he replied, not looking directly at her, ‘I just figured it out myself
a minute ago. And I’m still not sure what it means. I hope I haven’t made a terrible—’

‘What are you talking about?’ she interrupted him. ‘You’re not making any sense.’

‘The Earth package,’ he blurted out. ‘It has human seeds in it too. Along with the
trees and insects and grasses and birds.’

Carol stood facing Troy, trying to understand what was bothering him so much. ‘When
they
came here a long long time ago,’ he said, his face wrinkled with concern, ‘they took
specimens of the different species and returned them to their home world. Where they
were improved by genetic engineering and prepared for their eventual return to the
Earth. Some of those specimens were human beings.’

Carol’s heart quickened as she realized what Troy was telling her.
So that’s it
, she said to herself.
There are super-humans inside that package we’ve found. Not just better flowers and
better bugs, but better people as well
. But unlike Troy, Carol’s immediate reaction was not fear. She was overwhelmed by
curiosity.

‘Can I see them?’ she asked excitedly. Troy didn’t understand. ‘The superhumans, or
whatever you want to call them…’ she continued, ‘can I see them?’

Troy shook his head. ‘They’re just tiny zygotes, angel. More than a billion would
fit in your hand. You wouldn’t be able to see anything.’

Carol was not dissuaded. ‘But these guys have such amazing technological ability.
Maybe they can…’ She stopped. ‘Wait a minute, Troy. Remember that carrot on the base?
It was a holographic projection and must have come somehow out of the information
base on this spacecraft.’

Carol walked away from Troy into the middle of the room. She raised her arms and looked
up at the ceiling thirty feet above her. ‘Okay, you guys, whoever you are,’ she invoked
in a loud voice. ‘Now there’s something that I want. We risked our ass to get what
you needed for your repairs. You can at least reciprocate. I want to see what we might
look like someday….’

To their left, not too far from one of the large blocky machines connected to the
cylinder, two of the wall partitions moved apart to form a hallway. They could see
light at the other end. ‘Come on,’ an exultant Carol called to Troy, who was again
smiling and admiring her assertiveness, ‘let’s go see what our superaliens have created
for us now.’

At the end of the short corridor, there was a softly lit square room about twenty
feet on a side. Against the opposite wall, illuminated by a blue light that gave the
entire tableau a surrealistic appearance, eight children were standing around a large,
glowing model of the Earth. As Carol and Troy approached, they recognized that what
they were seeing was not real, that it was simply a complex sequence of images projected
into the air in front of them. But the diaphanous picture contained such rich detail
that it was easy to forget it was just a projection.

The children were four or five years old. All were wearing only a thin white loincloth
that covered their genitals. There were four girls and four boys. Two of them were
black, two were Caucasian with blue eyes and blonde hair, two were Oriental, and the
final boy and girl, definitely twins, looked like a mixture of all humanity. What
Carol immediately noticed was their eyes. All eight children had large, piercing eyes
of brilliant intensity that were focused on the glowing Earth in front of them.

‘The continents of this planet,’ the little black boy was saying, ‘were once tied
together in a single gigantic land mass that stretched from pole to pole. This was
relatively recently, only about two hundred million years ago. Since that time the
motion of the plates on which the individual land masses rest has completely changed
the configuration of the surface. Here, for example, you can see the Indian subcontinent
tearing away from Antarctica a hundred million years ago and moving across the ocean
toward an eventual collision with Asia. It was this collision and the subsequent plate
interaction that lifted the Himalayas, the highest mountains on the planet, to their
current height.’

As the little boy was talking, the electronic model Earth in front of him demonstrated
the continental changes that he was describing. ‘But what is the mechanism that causes
these plates and land masses to move with respect to each other?’ the tiny blonde-haired
girl asked.

‘Psst,’ Carol whispered in Troy’s ear. ‘How come they are speaking English and know
all this Earth geography?’ Troy looked at her as if he were disappointed and made
a circular motion with his hands.
Of course
, Carol said to herself.
They’ve already processed the discs
.

‘… then this activity results in material being thrust upward from the mantle below
the Earth’s crust. Eventually the continents are pushed apart. Any other questions?’
The black boy was smiling. He pointed at the model in front of him. ‘Here’s what will
happen to the land masses in the next fifty million years or so. The Americas will
continue to move to the West, away from Africa and Europe, making the South Atlantic
a much larger ocean. The Persian Gulf will close altogether, Australia will drive
north toward the equator and press against Asia, and both Baja California and the
area around Los Angeles will split off from North America to drift northward in the
Pacific Ocean. By fifty million years from now Los Angeles will start sliding into
the Aleutian Islands.’

All of the children watched the changing globe with complete attention. When the continents
on the surface of the model stopped moving, the Oriental boy stepped slightly out
from the group. ‘We have seen this continental drift phenomenon that Brian has been
describing on half a dozen other planets, all of them bodies mostly covered by a liquid.
Tomorrow Sherry will lead a more detailed discussion about the forces inside a planet
that cause the sea floor to spread in the first place.’

A projected image of a warden entered the scene from the left and removed both the
Earth globe and several other unidentified props. The small boy waited patiently for
the warden to complete his task and then continued, ‘Darla and David now want to share
with us a project they have been working on for several days. They will play the music
while Miranda and Justin perform the dance they choreographed.’

The mixed twins turned eagerly to their classmates. The girl spoke out. ‘When we first
learned about adult love and the changes that we all can expect after we pass puberty,
David and I tried to envision what it would be like to find a new desire even stronger
than those we already know. Our joint vision became a short musical composition and
a dance. We call it “The Dance of Love”.’

The two children sat down away from the group, almost at the side of the image, and
began moving their fingers rapidly as if they were typing on the floor. A light synthesized
melody, pleasant and spirited, filled the room. The blond boy and the Oriental girl
began to dance in the centre of the group. At first in the dance, the two were totally
separate, unaware of each other, each child completely absorbed in his own activities.
The boy knelt down to pick a beautiful flower, its red and white colouring shimmering
in the holographic projection. The girl bounced a large bright blue ball as she danced.
After a while the little girl noticed the boy and approached him, somewhat tentatively,
offering to share the ball. The boy played ball with her but ignored everything except
the game.

This is magic
, thought Carol as she watched the children’s images moving with grace and deft precision
in front of her.
These children are wonderful. But they can’t be real. They are too orderly, too self-contained.
Where is the tension, the strife?
But despite her questions she was profoundly moved by the scene she was witnessing.
The children were acting in concert, as a group, flowing in harmony from activity
to activity. Their body language was open and unafraid. No neuroses were blocking
their learning process.

The dance continued. The music deepened as the boy began to pay attention to his partner
and she began arranging her hair with his favourite flowers for their brief encounters.
The body movements changed as well, the sprightly, exuberant bounces of the initial
stages giving way to subtly suggestive motions designed to awaken and then tease the
budding libido. The tiny dancers touched, moved away, and came back together in an
embrace.

Carol was entranced.
How would my life have been different
, she wondered,
if I had known all this at the age of five?
She remembered her rich friend at soccer camp, Jessica from Laguna Beach, whom she
had seen occasionally in the subsequent years.
Jessica was always ahead, always had to be first. She had had sex with boys before
I even started my period. And look what happened to her
. Three marriages, three divorces, just thirty years old.

Carol tried to stop her mind from drifting so that she could pay complete attention
to the dance. Suddenly she remembered her camera. She had just taken her first pictures
of the children when she heard a noise behind her. Nick was coming toward them through
the corridor. And he was carrying the trident in his hand.

Nick started to say something but Troy hushed him by putting his finger against his
own lips and pointing at the dance in progress. The tempo had now changed. The two
mixed children had somehow put the music on automatic (it seemed to be repeating some
of the early verses, but with additional instruments in a more complex pattern) and
joined the blond boy and the Oriental girl in the dance. Carol’s first impression
before Nick spoke out loud was that the dance was now exploring friendships between
the paired couple and other people.

‘What’s this all about?’ Nick said. The moment he spoke the entire projected tableau
vanished. All of the children, the dance, and the music disappeared in an instant.
Carol was surprised to find that she was disappointed and even a little angry. ‘Now
you’ve blown it,’ she said.

Nick looked at his companions’ stern faces. ‘Jesus,’ he said, holding up the cradle,
‘such a greeting. I bust my butt to go retrieve this damn thing and you guys are pissed
when I come back because I interrupt a movie of some kind.’

‘For your information, Mr. Williams,’ Carol replied, ‘what we were watching was no
ordinary movie. In fact, those kids in that dance are the same species as the ones
in your trident.’ Nick looked at her sceptically. ‘Tell him, Troy.’

‘She’s right, Professor,’ Troy said. ‘We just figured it out while you were gone.
That thing you’re carrying is the seed package for Earth. Some of the zygotes in there
are what Carol calls superhumans. Genetically engineered humans with more capability
than you or me. Like the kids we just saw.’

Nick lifted the cradle to eye level. ‘I had figured out myself that this thing was
a seed package. But what’s this shit about human seeds?’ He glanced at Troy. ‘You’re
serious, aren’t you?’ Troy nodded his head. Troy nodded. All three of them stared
intently at the object in front of them. Carol kept glancing back and forth from the
trident to where the image of the superchildren had been. ‘It still doesn’t seem possible,’
Nick added, ‘but then nothing else has for the last—’