Lights in the Deep (39 page)

There might be enough time. To get a sufficient number of adults awakened and aware of the situation. Time to prepare, disperse, and start having babies.

And if Cadmus and Erebos couldn’t destroy the invader…Well, there was too much to do to worry about that now.

Their first day back on Earth, wore on.

As they worked, Atreus kept stealing glances at his wife. For that was what he’d been grudgingly forced to admit she was, since she’d be showing by the time the first clones were coming out of the tanks.

Very clever of the children—waking Atreus on the eve of Hypatia’s fertility window. With how much they’d enjoyed each other that first night, it would have been a surprise had she
not
become pregnant.

Atreus shook his head. A child. An actual child.

He’d not considered the fact that Hya’s cloned body lacked the physiological problems her original possessed. Now she was carrying his seed, and try as he might, he couldn’t stop the erosion of his negative feelings towards her.

Parenthood frightened him even more than it had the first time. He’d obviously done so badly with the others. Would it be any different with a living human? Especially when that human was peeing and crapping all over him, and keeping him awake at night, and following him around asking nine million questions a day? What about when the child became a teenager, and stopped taking no for an answer?

Hya caught him looking at her, and her smile broadened.

“Am I still a monster to you, husband?”

Atreus looked away, blushing.

“Perhaps I have been the monster, wife.”

“Yes, perhaps you have.”

“I would like to make it up to you.”

“Later, when the work is done. We can take a swim.”

“In that freezing water, and with these mosquitoes?”

“We can make repellent. And there are ways to warm up a wet body, yes?”

Her smile had turned naughty again.

Atreus dropped his crate on the ramp, huffing from exertion in the Earth-normal gravity and batting at the squadron of mosquitoes which had been dive-bombing him since midday. The rift between himself and Hya wasn’t closed. Not yet. And he still wasn’t convinced that she was actually herself. But as she’d so adroitly pointed out when they’d stood near the
Eagle
lander together, he’d not exactly been himself either.

Who could say whether the
them
which existed in this present, bore any resemblance to the
them
which had gone before?

They were, each of them, brand new people. In ways Atreus suspected they’d not even discovered yet.

And the world, it was brand new too. Albeit threatened.

That night, long after work and swimming and the activities thereafter, Hypatia lay curled and sleeping in his arms, the skin of her breasts warm and smooth on his stubbly chest. He watched through the mesh netting over their double cot, as several streaks of light darted to and fro off the limb of the moon, eventually punctuated by a single, popping flash.

Tiny flecks of light began to spread, darken, and vanish.

“Thank you, children,” Atreus whispered. Then he kissed his wife’s face, drew the lip of their bag up to their chins, and went to sleep.

▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼

This was the first piece of fiction I ever sold professionally—“sold” in the sense that it passed muster with the judges of the L. Ron Hubbard presents Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contest. Prior to that, I’d never been paid a dime for anything I’d written. Not my short story for the
Licton Springs Review
, and not my 12-part script I wrote for a radio serial ten years prior to that.

When the cash prize check for “Exanastasis” came in the mail I was understandably giddy. Real money! For something I’d written! Which would be published in a real book!

Readers occasionally ask me if “Exanastasis” is a sequel to the novelette “Outbound”, which I sold to
Analog
magazine 60 days after winning Writers of the Future. The honest answer is no, this story is not a sequel to “Outbound.” But it is something of a fraternal twin. Because the basic plot setup of “Outbound” was something that wouldn’t let go of my imagination. So when I finished “Outbound” in December 2008 I turned back around in January 2009 and started working on “Exanastasis”, which basically plays out a very similar total holocaust scenario—only told from the point of view of a survivor who’s been left behind, not from the point of view of someone who’s fled to the edge of the solar system.

“Exanastasis” is more than just an alternate look at a plot concept, though. Its core conflict focuses on an estranged husband and wife, and how they must work out their relationship after time and calamity have all but destroyed their marriage. Having been married over 15 years at that point in time, I knew a thing or two about piecing a relationship back together in the face of adversity. My wife and I had done some remodeling on our marriage more than once. Thus the title has two meanings: the rebirth of the characters, yes, but the rebirth of their love and dedication to each other as well.

Did I say earlier that I don’t believe in the no-win scenario?

Well it’s true.

And I have been very happy with reader reaction to this story.

Oh, one other item. Larry Niven has talked about what a gas it was for him to attend his first cons and see costumed con attendees gallop up to him in the guise of his alien characters: Kzinti and Pierson’s Puppeteers, and so on. I’d always thought that anecdote to be a very neat story. And could not have guessed that the dance company performing during the warm-up for the Writers of the Future awards show in 2010 would spring a similar surprise on me.

Well, they did. Without my knowledge, the dance company directors read my story, and integrated the images of Atreus’s robotic children into the warm-up routine. Thus I got to see my characters live and in the flesh. To include being directly accosted by them during the book signing after the awards! I still have photos of my characters flanking me while I wrap my arms around them and grin like a happy fool.

Sometimes, the magic of being an author hits you when you least expect it.

Ray of Light

My crew boss Jake was waiting for me at the sealock door. I’d been eight hours outside, checking for microfractures in the metal hull. Tedious work, that. I’d turned my helmet communicator off so as not to be distracted. The look on Jake’s face spooked me.

“What’s happened?” I asked him, seawater dripping from the hair of my beard.

“Jenna,” was all I got in reply. Which was enough.

I closed my eyes and tried to remain calm, fists balled around the ends of a threadbare terrycloth towel wrapped around my neck.

For a brief instant the hum-and-clank activity of the sub garage went away, and there was only my mental picture of my daughter sitting in her mother’s lap. Two, maybe three years old. A delightful nest of unruly ringlets sprouting at odd angles from her scalp. She’d been a mischief-maker from day one—hell on wheels in a confined space like Deepwater 12.

Jenna was much older now, but that particular memory was burned into my brain because it was the last time I remember seeing my wife smile.

“Tell me,” I said to my boss.

Jake ran a hand over his own beard. All of us had given up shaving years ago, when the gel, cream, and disposable razors ran out.

“It seems she went for a joyride with another teenager.”

“How the hell did they get a sub without someone saying something?”

“The Evans boy, Bart, he’s old enough to drive. I’ve had him on rotation with the other men for a few weeks, to see if he’d take to it. We need all the help we can get.”

“Yeah, yeah, skip it, where are they now?”

Jake coughed and momentarily wouldn’t meet my gaze.

“We don’t know,” he said. “I tasked Bart with a trip to Deepwater 4, the usual swap-and-trade run. He’s now—they’re now—two hours overdue.”

“The acoustic transponder on the sub?” I said.

“It’s either broken, or they turned it off.”

“Good hell, even idiots know not to do that.”

Jake just looked at me.

I pivoted on a heel and headed back the way I’d come. With my wetsuit still on I didn’t have to change. I’d grab the first sub I could muscle out of its cradle. Over my shoulder I said, “Whoever is on the next sortie, tell ‘em I’m giving ‘em the day off.”

“Where are you going to look?” Jake said. “It’s thousands of miles of dark water in every direction.”

“I know a place,” I said. “Jenna told me about it once.”

• • •

My daughter was four when she first began asking the inevitable questions.

“How come we don’t live where it’s dry and sunny?”

All three of us were perched at the tiny family table in our little compartment. Lucille didn’t even look up from her plate. As if she hadn’t heard Jenna at all. Too much of that lately, for my taste. But I opted to not call my wife out on it. Lucille had become hot and cold—either she was screaming mad, or stone quiet. And I’d gotten tired of the screaming, so I settled for the quiet.

Folding my hands thoughtfully in front of me, I considered Jenna’s inquiry.

“There isn’t anywhere that’s dry and sunny. Not anymore.”

“But Chloe and Joey are always going to the park to play,” Jenna said. “I want to go to the park too.”

I grimaced.
Chloe and Joey
was a kids’ show from before…from before everything. Lucille had been loath to let Jenna watch it, but had caved when it became obvious that
Chloe and Joey
were the only two people—well, animated talking teddy bears actually—capable of getting our daughter to sit still and be silent for any length of time. We’d done what every parent swears they won’t do, and the LCD had become our babysitter. Now it was biting us in the butt.

My wife stabbed at the dark green leaves on her plate, the tines on her fork making pronounced
tack!
noises on the scarred plastic.

“There used to be parks,” I said. “But everything is covered in ice now. And it’s dark, not sunny. You can’t even see the sun anymore.”

“But why?” Jenna said, her utensils abandoned on the table.

The room lost focus and I briefly remembered my NASA days. Those had been happy times. Washington was pumping money back into the program because the Chinese were threatening to land on the moon.

I’d been on the International Space Station when the aliens abruptly came. It was a gas. I got to pretend I was a celebrity, being interviewed remotely by the news, along with my crewmates.

The mammoth alien ship parked next to us in orbit, for three whole days—a smoothed sphere of nickel-iron, miles and miles in circumference. No obvious drive systems nor apertures for egress. No sign nor sound from them which might have indicated their intentions.

Then the big ship promptly broke orbit and headed inward, towards Venus.

Six months later, the sun began to dim….

“It’s hard to explain,” I said to Jenna, noting that my wife’s fork hovered over her last bit of hydroponic cabbage. “Some people came from another place—another star far away. We thought they would be our friends, but they wouldn’t talk to us. They made the sunshine go away, and everything started getting cold really fast.”

“They turned off the sun?” Jenna said, incredulous.

“Nothing can turn off the sun,” I said. “But they did put something in the way—it blocks the sun’s light from reaching Earth, so the surface is too cold for us to live there anymore.”

I remembered being ordered down in July. We landed in Florida. It was snowing heavily. NASA had already converted over—by Presidential order—to devising emergency alternatives. The sun had become a shadow of itself, even at high noon. We cobbled together a launch: NASA’s final planetary probe, to follow the path of the gargantuan alien ship and find out what was going on.

The probe discovered a mammoth cloud orbiting just inside of Earth’s orbit: countless little mirrors, each impossibly thin and impossibly rigid. No alien ship in sight, but the cloud of mirrors was enormous, and growing every day. By themselves, they were nothing. But together they were screening out most of the sun’s light. A little bit more gone, every week.

“So now we have to live at the bottom of the ocean?” Jenna asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s the only place warm enough for anything to survive.”

Which may or may not have been true. In Iceland they’d put their money on surface habitats constructed near their volcanoes. Chancy gamble. Irregular eruptions made it dangerous, which is why the United States had abandoned the Big Island plan in Hawaii. Besides, assuming enough light was blocked, cryogenic precipitation would be a problem. First the oxygen would rain out, and then, eventually, the nitrogen too. Which is why the United States had also abandoned the Yellowstone plan.

People were dying all over the world when NASA and the Navy began deploying the Deepwater stations. The Russians and Chinese, the Indians, all began doing the same. There was heat at the boundaries between tectonic plates. Life had learned to live without the sun near hydrothermal vents. Humans would have to learn to live there too.

And we did, after a fashion.

I explained this as best as I could to my daughter.

She grew very sad. A tiny, perplexed frown on her face.

“I don’t want to watch Chloe and Joey anymore,” she said softly.

Lucille’s fork clattered onto the floor and she fled the compartment, sobbing.

• • •

Number 6’s electronics, air circulator, and propulsion motor blended into a single, complaining whine as I pushed the old sub through the eternal darkness along the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally I passed one of the black smokers—chimneys made of minerals deposited by the expulsion of superheated water from along the tectonic ridge. The water flowed like ink from the tops of the smokers. Tube worms, white crabs and other life shied away from my lights.

I was watching for the tell-tale smoker formation that Jenna had told me about. It was a gargantuan one, multiple chimneys sprouting into something the kids had dubbed the Gak’s Antlers. Dan McDermott had joined the search and was 200 yards behind me, his own lights arrayed in a wide pattern, looking.