IGMS Issue 22 (10 page)

The blonde's smile was fixed, like the Cheshire Cat's. She looked and felt almost as good as I remembered a real woman should.
Almost
. I wondered if I'd ever get the algorithms just right -- hers or mine.

A set of bare white feet suddenly appeared, just at the edge of my peripheral vision.

I froze -- so far as I knew, I was the only person on the planet. What the . . .?

I rolled onto all fours and looked up.

It was another woman. I knew her.
Wanda
. She stood four meters further up the beach. She smiled down at me, her brown hair cut short, just like I remembered it. She had on a pair of black short-shorts and a white tank top which hugged her athletic figure. Why hadn't I detected her coming into orbit? I smiled sheepishly at my old friend.

"Nice toy you built for yourself," Wanda said.

"How did you find me, Wanda? I didn't sense your ship coming in."

"One can never be too careful, Rordy. You should know that. Lucky for me I remembered you telling me once that you'd discovered a fantastic piece of beach circling a binary. You even gave me the rough coordinates. I gotta say, you were right -- this really is excellent real estate."

"Just wait until I've finished seeding the tidal regions with xenophytoplankton," I said. "That rust color in the sky will be blue within a thousand years. Then all this place will need are palm trees."

"Sounds perfect," Wanda said, surveying the carbon dioxide horizon.

"Interested in a swim?" I said. I looked down at the blonde I had built, then back up at Wanda. "Sorry I can't offer you equivalent companionship."

"Not a problem. I'm not here to relax. Something has happened, something important. I had to tell you."

"What?" I said.

"There are still people in this galaxy."

"Yeah," I said. "You, me, Ormond, Bana --"

"No, Rordy. I mean
real people
."

I forgot the blonde.

"That's not possible," I said, standing up.

"I've been to their planet. I've seen them for myself."

"Where?"

"About 3,500 light-years further out along the Sagittarius arm from here."

I walked slowly -- not caring about my nudity -- until I was face to face with Wanda. Like me, her body was a mechanical illusion, something she'd constructed to look like her former self, using the universal factories onboard her ship. Some of the others had taken great liberties when building their simulated bodies. Wanda and me -- we'd kept it real.

"I can't believe it," I said.

"I didn't want to either," she admitted, throwing her arms out in a gesture of resignation. "When Carlos found me slow-coasting through the Perseus arm, he had to argue hard to get me to take his claim seriously. But he and the others were right -- there are humans on Eden."

"Eden?" I said.

"That's what the others call it. It seemed like an appropriate name."

I stared, not sure I could let myself believe what I was hearing. The blonde had picked herself up and wandered to my side, glancing briefly at Wanda before looping her arm through mine. The three of us began walking.

"It's a wonder the Swarmers haven't jumped on this before now," I said.

"We can't really be sure what the Swarmers know," Wanda said. "But we're gathering -- everyone who can be found -- to make sure Eden has a proper defense. Because if we know anything about the Swarmers, it's that they'll find Eden eventually."

"What about these humans, aren't they armed?"

"The inhabitants of Eden are in no condition to fight."

"What do you mean?"

"Easier if you see for yourself," she said.

Almost four thousand light-years later Wanda and I stood on an altogether different beach, along with a few of the other two dozen who had answered the call. Our mechanical eyes gazed across the white-capped expanse of a kilometers-wide bay, to the tiny collection of bodies moving on the other side. If the natives of Eden could see us, they didn't show it. They were naked and mocha-colored with proud long faces like Native Americans and hair so light it was almost white. Even the children. The men had beards and the women were pregnant. They appeared to be collecting nets and baskets filled with some sort of sea life, all from the prows of dugout canoes.

"How many are there?" I asked.

"Taking a planetary census wasn't easy, but they appear to number several hundred thousand strong, scattered in tribes across every continent and most of the islands."

"Tribes," I said. "Is that your way of saying
all
of these people have reverted to a pre-technological state?"

"I don't know if reversion is the right word, Rordy. There is every indication from the archeological sites we've looked at that these humans have been on Eden for a very long time, and have never risen much beyond a stone-age level of sophistication."

"They're mystics," said Bana, whose artificial body mimicked a Hindu painting: blue skin and multiple arms, an androgynous face and no external genitalia. "They have no use for science."

"What about medicine?" I said.

"There isn't a single terrestrial virus or microbe on this planet," Ormond said. When biologically alive, he'd been a research physician -- a smallish white man condemned by age to a wheelchair. Now he possessed a towering three-meter frame and skin like brushed copper. "These people live at least a hundred or more of our years before even beginning to show signs of geriatric disability. Whatever force brought them here, it did them a favor in the process."

"So they are truly human?" I said.

"DNA shows a bit of cleaning up," Ormond said, "but yes, they're human. Enough so that if any of us were still biologically intact, we could breed with them."

"But how?" I asked, sweeping my arm towards the far side of the lagoon. "None of the colonies survived. Earth? Gone. Everywhere humans put down roots, the Swarmers located and destroyed them."

"Like I said," Wanda repeated, "evidence indicates that these people have been here for a very, very long time. Someone -- something -- brought them here."

I wondered who could have survived an era of interstellar flight long enough to avoid annihilation at the hands of the Swarmers, much less discovered humans and gone to the trouble of seeding us on a world so wonderfully and rarely like our own; before it too was destroyed.

The Swarmers hated all intelligent life that was not their own. I knew first-hand. I'd found the nebular remnants of the other systems the Swarmers had obliterated -- inspected the crude probes those vanished races had flung into the void, unaware that their end was near.

If your radio broadcasts didn't tattle on you, eventual discovery of the transluminal Link would. Earth and her colonies had discovered this the hard way.

"So what are we doing about early warning?" I asked.

"We're synthesizing a series of passive transluminal event detectors in this system's Kuiper region," Carlos said. He looked mostly like his original self, though he'd opted for skin black as midnight. "We also need to think about re-seeding some of these people to other worlds while we have the opportunity."

"Earth tried that," I said. "The Swarmers found all our Easter eggs, and smashed them."

"The colonies," Carlos replied, "were not aware of the Swarmers until it was too late."

"They also retained Earth-level technology," Wanda said, "including constant Link to Sol. They'd have survived longer if the Link hadn't pointed the Swarmers to every world."

"Which explains why Eden has survived unmolested for so long," I said. "If these people have remained at this basic level for the entirety of their existence, it's kept the Swarmers blissfully ignorant of their presence."

Wanda simply nodded.

I watched the Eden humans move their baskets up the beach, and into the trees. There was a village set back, away from the shoreline, and several tiny columns of smoke began to curl up into the breezy tropical air. Cooking fires? How long had it been since I'd eaten meat from a barbecue? The very thought gave me memory pangs of my last trip home to see my sister's family. Her husband had broiled New York strip steaks in the back yard, the glorious smell of beef wafting in through the open kitchen window.

Damn, it seemed just like yesterday.

Only now there were no more cows. Not even cow DNA from which to synthesize a new breed. The supernovas created by the Swarmers had taken care of that.

They'd do the same to Eden, given the chance.

I looked up into the sky, to where my ship orbited in concert with Wanda's, Ormond's, Carlos's, and a few others who were on the surface. Technically, our minds had never left space. Our bodies on the beach were Linked to the data cores in each ship. Short distance Link was harmless. The scanners the Swarmers used couldn't track over mere interplanetary distances. It was the interstellar stuff they watched for -- communications indicative of potential rivals.

Those of us who had survived this far, since the long-ago destruction of Sol and the Earth colonies, had learned to go about our business as quietly as possible.

"How can I help?" I asked, turning to face the small group.

"Do you know the location of anyone else?" Wanda asked. "Anyone who isn't already here?"

I shrugged. "I met Izuko about two hundred years ago. He said he was heading for one of the Magellanic Clouds. Haven't seen him since. Same for Venka, who said she was headed for the galactic core. Something about studying the event horizon at the core's perimeter. To be honest, I haven't made any effort to keep in touch."

"None of us have," Wanda said. "Wish we'd found Eden before all of us got bored and tired of each other, and started splitting up."

"No matter," Carlos said. "We'll have to make the most of what we've got. Rordy, you were always a bit of a sleuth. We need somebody to solve the puzzle of how these people came to Eden. Whoever made the transplant might have a way of effectively resisting the Swarmers. Some form of technology we haven't discovered on our own. Weapons, even."

"Sounds like a plan," I said.

"Meanwhile," Wanda said, "we need to know the locations of any clement worlds you might have run across. Places where we can put more humans. Not like the one where I found you, that will take too long to fully terraform. I mean planets that are capable and ready of supporting humans
now
."

I thought about it for a moment, then Linked the information to the group. I'd only ever found two planets which were acceptable: circling yellow dwarfs at the right distance, with the right gravity, and with photosynthetic life advanced enough to have put the atmospheric oxygen content close to acceptable for humans.

The information had already been Linked to Stephen and Pham, who diverted from their work on the detector network and began pulsing out of the system, destined for eventual transluminal hops towards the planets in question. They'd do a survey and report back. If all seemed well, we'd have to figure out how to successfully collect a viable pod of humans for transplant.

We shook hands and split up to begin our various tasks.

The system of Eden -- circling the yellow dwarf sun we'd named Edenstar -- proved remarkably pedestrian. Twelve major planetary bodies, most of them small and rocky, three of them big and gaseous, as well as two thin asteroid belts, and the previously mentioned -- and entirely predictable -- Kuiper and Oort cometary regions. I spent weeks pulsing across the system, doing detailed examinations of the moons of the big Jovian worlds, poking through the corrosive clouds of two of the smaller terrestrials, and generally growing both bored and discouraged. If the Transplanters -- as we'd come to call them -- had left any record or sign of their existence, it didn't show. No staging posts, no warning or sensory networks. Not even industrial trash.

Wanda caught up with me as I surveyed Eden from a distance of 100,000 kilometers, our mile-long ships locked in co-orbit. Her data core Linked with mine and she said, "Penny for your thoughts?"

"God is the only answer," I said across the Link.

"God?"

"Yes, because I can't find a damned thing which would tell us anything otherwise. These people, these Edenites, might have been formed from Adam's rib, for all the good my research has done."