Launch Pad (19 page)

“Remember, your aetheric vessel was coming anyway, whether or not you had seen it first. You did not cause this.” Goins paused a moment, searching Morgan’s face as if for some truth. “Science finds the path where the light of faith has shown the way.”

Morgan could not tell if the judge meant to be ironic or not. That did not matter.

He patted the other man’s shoulder. “Let us go, then. There is work to be done.”

Above them, the future rose ever higher, shedding six thousand years of mud and plants and tradition as it climbed to meet the oncoming stars.

***

The Caretaker

By Tiffany Trent

On the day the great tree spoke, Renza had been tending it for all her life. She was the thirtieth in a line of caretakers, descended from the first who had budded out of the tree at the appointed time.

She knew that she would die before she saw the ship reach its destination. She would never see the tree bear its fruit. She would never see the tree-born step onto the new world they had set out for before Renza was born.

Renza knew all this, but she still found herself yearning for what she was never meant to see—the fruit, the tree-born, the soil of the new planet, even perhaps the first saplings planted by the shores of a great lake or sea.

She would never see any of these things, but they were rich in her mind as she dug around the tree’s roots. Renza felt her fingers thickening, her skin becoming as gnarled as the tree’s. It was nearly her time.

It was quiet as it always was in the great oxygen chamber. The gravitational ring revolved every few minutes above her, keeping her steady with its slow spin.

You will soon return to me.

Having never heard any voice but her own, and that only seldom, Renza dropped her trowel. Its thud against the moss and roots seemed overly loud.

She looked around. No one was there. The catwalks that crisscrossed the great chamber were empty. The hammock where she slept was a drab rind slung across an alcove nearby.

You will soon return to me.

High in the branches, where billions of leaves shivered in the process of delivering precious air, the barest hints of buds were visible. And as always when she peered hard enough, Renza saw faces surface in the bark, the sleeping visages of those who would be born of the fruits when their time came. They were held there in suspension until the time of ripening came on the new planet’s surface. Then, they would burst forth and at last begin their new lives, adapting in whatever way was required to match the planet’s environment.

But those of Old Earth had calculated that KOI 1422 would be a relatively easy adaptation. In their last desperate attempt to free themselves of Old Earth’s failing Sun, they had filled the gene catalogs with whatever they thought their descendants would require.

Shame they’d never been able to test it out, Renza thought. A vague sense of dread settled in the pit of her stomach.

The tree must have sensed her discomfort. Soothing music from Old Earth came over the loudspeakers. “I Can’t Believe That You’re In Love With Me,” by Billie Holiday.

Renza couldn’t remember having heard this before herself, but she knew that her predecessors had. She also knew that when they had been told it was time to return to the tree and deepen, they had all done so without hesitation. They had believed in the tree’s words. They’d had to. It was part of their genetic programming.

She settled on the moss around the tree as she sometimes liked to do, far enough back from the roots and trunk that she could see it outlined against the vague abyss of space. The sunlights that fed the tree (and that the tree fed in turn with its photosynthetic energy) obscured the stars.

In addition to the tightly fisted blossoms, which no other caretaker had seen in their multitude of lives, she saw a fetal bulge in the trunk that filled her with nearly as much dread as the tree’s words had.

That dread was new. Nothing had been new in generations upon generations of caretakers. The tree’s leaves had changed with the seasons. And in the season of death and utter darkness, the caretaker went back to the tree so that a new one could be born and the tree could continue to flourish. That was the way of it. The caretaker’s blood and bone, memory and mind—all those things were the engine that made the system survive.

If she did not deepen, the tree would not survive. And all the last hopes of Old Earth would die with her.

Renza knew all this. It was encoded in the very fabric of her being. But for the first time in the long memory of the voyage and for no reason that she understood, the caretaker was afraid.

You must not fear.

That she could remember, Renza had never spoken aloud. She knew how. She knew that some caretakers had spoken to the tree as their only companion, especially the earliest ones who still remembered clearly what it was like to hear the speech of Old Earth. But they had all gradually fallen silent. The tree only spoke when it called the caretakers back to it.

The fact that it was expending the energy to reassure her was odd. Renza clasped her arms around her knees. Though her genetic catalog was vast, all the caretakers still took the basic form of the old human phenotype without too much deviance. Some, she knew, had had a sense of humor—a definite human trait—and over their long tenure sometimes reshaped themselves as they fancied. It took energy she wasn’t sure she should expend, though.

Especially not now.

The tree would need everything she had to give. Everything. Here at the very end of the journey, she alone would be responsible for seeing that all was in place for them to land safely, that the programming that had been laid down so long ago had no flaw, and that the tree and its precious cargo would survive the descent through KOI 1422’s atmosphere.

The genesis of her fear, she realized, was simple.

For the first time in generations of caretakers, she spoke it aloud. “I do not know if I’m enough.”

Her voice sounded odd, certainly not at all like it sounded in her head. The gravity of it shocked her. The words had a ponderous sound that seemed to fall on the moss and crumble there around her feet. She hadn’t experienced much in the way of true weight, and the fact that her own voice was so heavy, made her worry all the more.

At first, she thought the tree would remain silent. What was the purpose of it speaking again, in any case? What more could be said? She knew it was not the tree’s job to comfort her. This was the cycle of things. She came from the tree. She would go back to the tree. They depended on one another. They were, in truth, one being. She knew that she was only independent now as a failsafe. No matter how the genetic engineers had tried, they could not alter some basic facts of Earth life. Trees, no matter how sentient, could not move of their own volition. They needed something else to do it for them.

The best way to give a tree legs was to make part of it human.

And the best way to preserve humans was within a totipotent organism that could sustain itself and all the germlines it carried within its hollow heart.

You are enough, the tree said. That is why you are the last.

Renza didn’t say anything. She just put her chin on her knees and closed her eyes. She breathed in the smells of moss. She thought about the latent program in her genes that would tell her when the moment came.

What would she feel? Did it matter?

She was afraid, but she was also sad.

O O O

In the days that followed, Renza realized that her sorrow came from the unknown. She would never know what that final moment would be like, when the tree-born stepped forth and began the cycle of life all over again on KOI 1422. She would never know if it would go well or badly.

There would be no energy for another like her. She would be absorbed to feed the new children. There would be no reason for her to go on. She would be obsolete—little more than worn machinery. The fact that she would be no more than that soon bothered her. When she searched the memories laid down by her predecessors, she knew not a one had felt this way. They had all accepted their fates. Their joy, if it could be called that, had been in the knowledge that they were doing what they had been programmed to do. They had not had not had to worry about the perilousness of journey’s end.

Renza worried that her programming might not be functioning properly. She was, after all, a copy of a copy of a copy for many generations. Perhaps the genetic engineering had reached its limit and her DNA was degraded. Would she not measure up in the final moment?

You are enough, the tree had said.

It was some comfort, but ironically not quite enough.

She realized that she wanted to see them, the long-awaited children. The weight of all the Universe seemed to rest on them, these drifting seeds of lost Earth. And yet Renza knew the great hubris in such a thought. On all the Earth-like worlds in all the Sun-like systems, surely Old Earth had not been alone in developing life. Searches had been conducted, but nothing definitive had ever been proven. There had always been silence to every inquiry.

But that did not mean no one was listening.

Renza sighed. She was unaccustomed to so much emotion, so much turmoil. In the capsule space, with the sweeping vibration of the gravity rings and the continuing deceleration of the engines as they approached KOI 1422, the very monotony of it seemed calculated to drive her mad.

She went to the entertainment console. Her ancestors had realized that this at least was necessary; even if it marked her for the primate she truly was, still she found solace in the music and literature of bygone eras. She liked listening to and reading things from the Atomic Age. She found it strangely romantic that those early humans had been so concerned with love and splitting the atom all at once. She found the differences between men and women odd. Though she was one gender now, she could be both, or male, if she chose. She could switch back and forth like the fishes of Old Earth seas, but she’d decided to conserve precious energy and remain the female default.

It was hard to understand these people, even though she had come from them. All that they had fought and died for, all that they had nearly destroyed in their militaristic greed, and all that that same greed had aided them to discover—it made a strange frisson of certainty grow in her that even the tree’s words had not. Theirs were the first steps on the journey that was nearly at its end. They’d only vaguely dreamed of this day. They could have never realized that they were not the pinnacle of evolution, but its vehicle.

She was sure they’d never imagined it would take so long to finally leave Earth for good.

And yet, she was here. These were the final days. Soon, it would only be hours.

When she crawled into her hammock that night, she listened to an old song called “I Go to Sleep.” Never having had a partner, never needing one, she couldn’t fathom spending time imagining that someone was with her when they weren’t. She could hardly imagine lots of people all together in one place at the same time, even though her memories said it had happened quite often on Old Earth. It might happen again on KOI 1422 if she did what she was supposed to do.

Or it might not. She and the other caretakers encompassed the totality of human experience. Humans could never be as they once were, even if they made use of their own genetic roots to shape their fate. She doubted her ancestors would even recognize her as human with her mossy hair and twiggy fingers. She caused her hammock to gently swing with the motion of her body, listening to the deep, whirring hum of the gravity rings beneath the plaintive song. What if she didn’t do what she was supposed to do?

Every stage of landing depended on every other. If she didn’t initiate it, then she supposed the ship would either float endlessly through space, housing a withered tree and corpse.

Or it would crash spectacularly into KOI 1422.

Part of her, a selfish part that she realized was even older than her primate heritage, didn’t care. That part tried to tell her that if she had to die, then everything else on the ship should die, too. Who would remember the caretaker when she was gone? Who would remember that she and she alone had shepherded the precious tree and its cargo through space and time to this place?

Likely no one.

She didn’t have to do much to stop it. All she would have to do was nothing. She could lie in her hammock when the next call came. She could pretend to sleep. She could easily while away the hours reliving the memories of all who had gone before her, from the first caretaker to the last, and all of the lives that had gone into creating this single uninterrupted line.

“I don’t want to die,” she said aloud.

She rolled so she could look at the tree instead of the control panels above her. She waited for an answer, but she had a feeling the tree would not speak again until the time came. It had said what it needed to say.

O O O

She was awakened by a strange humming noise, a different humming than the vibrational spin of the gravity rings. She could barely see the boxes high above her on the dome. She was certain the noise came from them, but the aerial roots, buds, and leaves of the tree obscured them.

She walked out from her alcove, nearly to the mossy knees of the tree. The buzzing was louder and directly overhead.

Free them, the tree said. It is time.

Renza stood still. Every part of her body vibrated with the noise. Even her teeth buzzed. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to move. This was the beginning of the end.

After she accomplished this, there was no further use for her. She would deepen and die. The fetal bulge in the trunk would absorb her nutrients for the tree-born.

But none of that could happen unless she did what she was being asked to do now.

She crouched on the ground, inhaling the moss and blossom again. She shuddered with terror.

Every fiber of her being urged her to climb the tree and open the boxes. It was for this she had been programmed, for this she had been reborn century after century.

Her shuddering stilled. A thought, born of that same selfish lizard brain, occurred. She could still do this thing, and not deepen. If she could survive until they reached the planet’s surface, then she could escape. She could live. But if she didn’t do this now, the landing sequence wouldn’t start. She would most certainly die if they were forced to drift. The tree depended on her, and she depended on it. If it died here in space, she would, too. But if it didn’t, if they made it to the surface, there would at least be the chance that she might survive on her own.

Very well, then, she thought.

She curled her toes around the lowest knots in the twisted trunk and began climbing toward those distant boxes. Waves of gratitude radiated from the bark under her hands and feet. No one could ever fault the tree for being unfeeling. It just needed her to do the jobs it could not do for itself. For moments as she climbed hundreds of feet up through the limbs and the lime-cinnamon-anise of the opening blossoms, she was nothing more than a monkey in the forest. The last monkey on the last tree.