New Earth (3 page)

Her image disappeared, replaced by pictures of devastation: cities drowned, coastlines inundated, storms lashing fleeing refugees. Jordan stared in open-mouthed
horror.

“Because of these calamities,” Ionescu’s voice said over the views of disaster, “the World Council has been unable to authorize the backup missions that were in the IAA’s original program plan.”

The screen showed her face once more. She looked miserable. “I will work to my utmost to get the World Council to fund backup missions, eventually. But, for the present, you twelve members of
the
Gaia
mission are alone in your exploration of Sirius C. I wish you well.”

And her image winked off.

THE NEWS FROM EARTH

For long moments Jordan sat in the command chair, shocked beyond words. He could feel his heart thudding beneath his ribs, his stomach roiling.

Alone, he thought.

At last he pulled himself to his feet. Very well, then, he told himself. Alone. We have everything we need for a five-year stay at Sirius C. We’ll do the best we can with what we’ve got and then we’ll go home.

Yes, he thought. Now to break the cheery news to the rest of the team.

As resolutely as he could manage, Jordan marched back to the wardroom. Only one other person was there: Mitchell Thornberry, the roboticist, standing before the wall-screen display of New Earth.

“Hello, Mitchell.”

Thornberry turned to face Jordan, a wide smile breaking across his fleshy face. “Top o’ the morning to ya.”

He was a solidly built man from the University of Dublin, just about Jordan’s own height but thicker, heavier in the torso and limbs. His jowly face almost always displayed a quizzical little smile, as though the ways of his fellow humans amused him slightly. Or puzzled him.

Thornberry was wearing a loudly patterned open-necked shirt hanging over rumpled trousers. He looked as if he’d just come
in from an afternoon picnic.

“And a very pleasant good morning to you, sir,” said Jordan. And he thought, I’ll wait until they’re all here, the whole team together. No sense breaking the news eleven separate times.

“Well, we made it,” Thornberry said, jabbing a finger toward the wall screen.

“It’s uncanny, isn’t it?” Jordan said. “It could be Earth’s twin.”

Thornberry shrugged. “It is what
it is.” Heading toward the dispensing machines, he added, “I’ll let the scientists argue about how the planet could be so Earthlike. Me, all I’ve got to do is set up a working base down there on the surface and tend to me robots.”

Pecking at the food dispensers, Thornberry pulled out a thick sandwich of beef cultured from the biovats, and a tall glass of chilled fruit juice.

“They should have
packed some beer aboard for us,” he grumbled as he brought his tray to the table where Jordan was sitting.

“No alcoholic beverages,” Jordan reminded him. “The health and safety experts agreed on that.”

“Ahhh,” Thornberry growled. “A bunch of pissant academics with water in their veins.”

Jordan smiled at the Irishman. Then he remembered that he too was hungry. He went to the dispensers and selected
a salad from the ship’s hydroponics garden. Then he returned to his cooling tea and sat down beside Thornberry.

“Wasn’t your hair darker?” Thornberry asked, his thick brows knitting.

“It was,” said Jordan, unconsciously fingering his mustache.

“Do you feel all right?”

“Yes. Fairly normal,” Jordan replied as he sat down next to Thornberry. “A little shaky. I wonder how effective the memory
uploading really is.”

“Good enough,” Thornberry said. “I can remember what we had for dinner the night before we left. And the Guinness that went with it.” Then he sank his teeth into his sandwich.

“And you?” Jordan asked. “How do you feel?”

Thornberry swallowed before answering, “All right, more or less. Cold. Deep inside, I feel cold. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel warm again.”

“Psychosomatic,
I imagine.”

“Oh? And who made you a psychotechnician?”

That stung. Of the dozen men and women on the ship, Jordan alone was neither a scientist nor an engineer. He was merely the head of the mission.

As brightly as he could manage, Jordan changed the subject. “The artificial gravity system seems to be working fine, after all these years.”

Thornberry shrugged. “It’s just a big Ferris wheel.
Nothing exotic about it.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Here we are!”

Turning, Jordan saw his younger brother, Brandon, entering the wardroom, together with Elyse Rudaki, the Iranian astrophysicist.

Brandon looked like an improved edition of Jordan: younger, taller, handsomer. Brandon’s nose was thinner, nobler, his eyes a shade lighter. When he smiled he could light up a room. Like Jordan, he wore
a turtleneck shirt and comfortable denim jeans.

Elyse looked like royalty: tall, slim, elegant, her sculpted face unsmiling, utterly serious. Her complexion was light, almost pale, a stunning contrast to her thick, lustrous dark hair, which she had piled high on her head, making her look even taller, more regal. Although she was wearing a casual blouse of light blue atop darker slacks, Jordan
pictured her in a glittering red and gold sari.

But he thought she seemed somewhat uncertain of herself, as if slightly disoriented from drugs or drink. The upload, Jordan told himself. It’s not perfect. Then he thought, Perhaps she’s frightened. We’re a long way from home. Or perhaps you’re just projecting your own fears.

Getting to his feet again, Jordan smiled as he held out a chair for her.
“Welcome to Sirius C, Elyse.”

Before she could reply, Brandon gasped, “My god, Jordy, your hair’s turned totally white!”

Forcing a smile, Jordan replied, “I prefer to think of it as silver. Rather becoming, don’t you think?”

“I guess so,” Brandon said uncertainly. “Are you … do you feel okay?”

“I feel fine,” Jordan assured him.

Still looking doubtful, Brandon turned toward the wall display
and called to the voice-recognition system, “Display screen, show us news broadcasts from Earth.”

“No, wait…”

“Don’t get huffy with me, Jordy. We can look at the planet any time. I want to see what’s happening back home, don’t you?”

With a resigned nod, Jordan replied, “I suppose so.”

Elyse still stood beside him while Jordan held her chair. The wall screen broke into a dozen separate pictures.
The IAA is beaming news and entertainment vids to us, Jordan remembered. It’s all automatic, preprogrammed. And it’s all eight years old.

The screens showed cities that looked unfamiliar to Jordan, women dressed in strange styles, newscasters wearing what looked like uniforms, sports matches that looked superficially like football and cricket and even tennis, but not quite right. Distorted. Changed.

Where’s the flooding and disasters Ionescu showed me? Jordan wondered. Then he realized that newscasts and entertainment vids carefully avoided such unpleasantries.

“Palm trees in Boston?” Brandon marveled.

Elyse said, “The fashions are very revealing.”

“Must be summertime,” said Thornberry.

“Everywhere?”

“Eighty years have passed on Earth,” Jordan pointed out. “Everything is slightly different.
It’s not the same world that we left behind us.”

Thornberry wiped his mouth with his napkin and commented, “That’s the way things were back home some eight years ago. It’s taken eight and a half years for those signals to get from Earth to here.”

“Eight point six years,” Jordan murmured.

“Ah, who’s counting?” Thornberry wisecracked.

But Brandon did not smile. “Look at them. Going about their
lives perfectly normally.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any war,” said Elyse, her voice hushed, subdued. “No violence.”

“Or the news nets aren’t showing any,” said Brandon.

“Or mission control decided not to let us see any,” Jordan said.

“Saints alive!” Thornberry pointed at one of the scenes. “Look! There’s people scuba diving through a drowned city.”

They all stared at the underwater scene.

“It looks like Sydney,” Thornberry muttered. “Look! There’s the opera house, half underwater.”

“But not a word about us,” Brandon grumbled.

“That newscast is eight years old,” Thornberry pointed out.

Brandon insisted, “They knew we’d have arrived at our destination. But there’s nothing in the news about it.”

“I think I know why,” Jordan said.

OUTCASTS

Thornberry looked up at Jordan from beneath his shaggy brows. “Do you, now?”

“What is it?” Brandon demanded.

“Let’s wait until the others get here,” Jordan said. “I’ll explain it to all of you at once.”

Thornberry looked curious, Elyse worried. Brandon put on the irritated look that Jordan had seen all his brother’s life: half sulking, half impatience.

One by one the other members
of the team filtered into the wardroom: three more women, five men. They all looked uncertain, a bit shaky. Only to be expected after an eighty-year sleep, Jordan thought. You didn’t look too peppy yourself, those first few minutes.

How will they feel once they’ve heard the news I have to tell them? he asked himself.

The others helped themselves to food and drink, then slowly sat at the tables
and watched the screen displays from Earth.

Brandon sat himself beside Elyse and said, “All right, Jordy. We’re all here. What is it that you’ve got to tell us?”

Jordan stepped in front of the wall screen and looked at the eleven of them. Four women, seven men, their eyes focused on him.

“I’m afraid I have some disappointing news,” he began. “There isn’t going to be a backup mission.”

“What?”

“No backup? But the IAA—”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s been a second wave of greenhouse flooding,” Jordan tried to explain. “Even worse than the original floods, five generations ago. The World Council has reneged on the backup missions, they’ve got too much reconstruction and resettlement to do.”

“But we’ve seen nothing about such flooding on the news vids,” said Harmon Meek, springing to
his feet.

The team’s astrobiologist, Meek was a scarecrow of a man, tall and almost painfully thin, all bones and gangling limbs. He was dressed almost formally, in a starched white shirt and a dark brown ascot, no less, with neatly creased trousers of charcoal gray. His thick mop of sandy blond hair looked as if it hadn’t seen a brush in eighty years; his eyebrows were so pale they were almost
invisible, and the cold blue eyes beneath them looked terribly perplexed.

“I’m afraid the vids were edited by the IAA,” Jordan said.

“Nonsense!” Meek snapped. “I don’t believe you.”

Jordan smiled wanly at the astrobiologist, so full of righteous indignation. He commanded the communications system to show Ionescu’s message.

Meek sank back into his chair and the team watched the message from
Earth, with its scenes of devastation, in shocked silence.

“That’s Volgograd,” said Tanya Verishkova, in a choked whisper. “Flooded.”

“Look at the refugees.”

“Miles of ’em.”

“So that’s the situation,” Jordan said, once the images winked off. “It doesn’t change our circumstances, really. But it means that when we leave, there won’t be a backup team to take over from us, or on its way.”

Geoffrey
Hazzard, the astronautical engineer and nominal captain of their ship, muttered, “Just like Apollo.”

“What do you mean?” Elyse Rudaki asked.

Hazzard was an African-American from Pennsylvania, tall and rangy, his skin the color of mocha, his long-jawed face slightly horsy-looking, although his dark eyes were large and expressive.

“The first missions to the Moon,” he explained. “They put a dozen
men on the Moon inside of a few years, then stopped altogether. It was more than half a century before anybody went back.”

“Well,” Jordan said, trying to put up as good a face as possible, “we all knew we’d be pioneers in exploring New Earth. Now we’re even more so.”

From his seat beside Elyse, Brandon gave out a bitter laugh. “Pioneers, are we? We’re all outcasts, that’s what we are.”

“Outcasts,
is it?” Thornberry snapped.

Pointing to the wall-screen displays of the news vids from Earth, Brandon said, “Outcasts. Gone and forgotten. Twelve people, sent to explore a planet—a whole world! Just the twelve of us.”

Mildly, Jordan said to his brother, “Bran, we’re merely the
first
twelve to be sent here. There will be others, you know. In time.”

“You think so.”

“Sooner or later. There’s
got to be.”

Thornberry said, “We’ve got robots, remotely controlled roving vehicles, all sorts of sensors and satellites. There’s more than just the twelve of us.”

“Think about it,” Brandon replied, almost sneering. “Think about what we’re doing. We’ve spent eighty years getting here. Eighty years. We’re supposed to explore this planet for at least five years. Then we head back to Earth, another
eighty years.”

“But we haven’t aged,” Elyse said.

“What of it? When we get back home, damned near two hundred years will have passed. Two hundred years! We’ll be strangers in our own world. We’re already strangers. Outcasts.”

As mildly as he could manage, Jordan said, “No one forced you to join this mission, Bran. We’re all volunteers. We all knew the risks.”

“Oh, sure, volunteers,” Brandon
retorted. “I
volunteered
because my department head made it clear that if I didn’t I wouldn’t get tenure; I’d be an assistant professor for another ten years or more.”

“I volunteered willingly,” said Elyse. “I considered it an honor.”

“Very noble of you,” Brandon muttered.

“Come to think of it,” Thornberry said, rubbing his jaw, “the university’s president didn’t ask me if I wanted this mission.
He told me I was the only man on the faculty who could do the job.”

“Well, that’s quite an honor,” Jordan said.

“Maybe,” Thornberry replied, drawing out the word. “But I got the impression that what he meant was that I was the only man on the faculty that he could spare.”