But as the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals embedded in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.
Meanwhile, on Mars, the little robots worked on. Patiently they turned the wan sunlight and the red dust and the carbon dioxide air into little factories, which in turn produced copies of the robots themselves, with jointed legs and solar cell carapaces and little silicon brains.
The robots transmitted news of their endeavors back to their makers on Earth. No reply came. But they kept working anyway.
Under the burnt orange sky of Mars, generations passed quickly.
Of course no replication, biological or mechanical, could ever be perfect. Some variants worked better than others. The robots were actually programmed to learn — to retain what worked, to eliminate what didn’t. The weaker ones died out. The stronger survived, and carried forward their design changes to the next metallic generation.
Thus variation and selection had begun to operate.
On and on the robots toiled, until the ancient seabeds and canyons glistened, covered by insectlike metal carapaces.
THREE
Descendants
CHAPTER 17
A Long Shadow
Place and time unknown.
I
Waking from a cold sleep wasn’t at all like a normal waking, in your own bed, with your wife beside you. It was more like surfacing from a deep dunking in a tank of some clinging, deadening fluid.
But now here was a break in the murk, a widening circle of light centered on a blurry face. The face belonged to Ahmed, the splot — the senior pilot — and not to the CO. That was Snowy’s first indication that something was wrong.
Ahmed was repeating, “OK? Are you OK?”
Before submitting to the injections Snowy had rehearsed how he was going to respond to his wake-up call. He smiled and raised the middle finger of his right hand. “Any landing you walk away from is a good one.” His voice was a rasp, and his mouth was desert dry.
“You aren’t walking yet, smart arse,” Ahmed said grimly.
“Where’s Barking?” Robert Madd, blessed with one of the Royal Navy’s less imaginative nicknames, was the unit’s CO.
“Later,” said Ahmed. He withdrew, letting Snowy see the metal walls of the Pit. He threw a ration pack on the bed. “Get out of there. Help me with the others.”
Snowy — Robert Wayne Snow, age 31 — was a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy, which had given him at least an inclination to follow the odd order. So he struggled to sit up.
The Pit was just a cylinder of gunmetal gray, the walls unadorned save for instrument and sensor consoles. The light came from low-energy fluorescents that cast a sickly glow over everything. The instruments were all dead, just blank screens. It was like being inside an oil tank. And the Pit was full of bunk beds, twenty of them, stacked up. Plastic carapaces lay over the beds. Ahmed was working his way around the room, opening the carapaces one by one, and reclosing most of them.
Snowy was stark naked, but he wasn’t cold. He picked up his ration pack. It was a clear vacuum-packed bag containing dried banana, chocolate, and other goodies. He ripped into it with the only tool available to him, his teeth. The bag popped and air hissed. He dumped out the goodies on his bed and crammed some banana into his mouth. He felt like he’d been running a marathon. He’d been through cold sleep twice before, for training and evaluation purposes, just a week at a time. It was a peculiarity of the process that at no time did you feel cold, but you always woke up ravenous: something to do with your body slowly absorbing its stores to keep itself alive, according to the medicos.
But something was wrong with his bunk. He could see where he had been lying, his body had left a very clear imprint, like the gruesome dead-mother’s-bed scene in Psycho. He probed at the mattress. It was lumpy and hard. And the sheets on which he had been lying crumbled as he poked at them, like a mummy’s wrappings.
He felt a gathering sense of dread.
Ahmed was helping a girl from one of the upper bunks. Her name was June, so, naturally, she was known as Moon. She was a cutie, in or out of her clothes; but now, naked, she looked fragile, even ill, and Snowy felt nothing but an impulse to help her as she clambered awkwardly down from her bunk, flinching as her bare flesh brushed against the metal.
With Moon awake, Snowy started to feel self-conscious. He reached under his bunk, looking for his clothes.
But the floor seemed to be on a tilt. He straightened up, expecting his head to clear. But still the bare floor seemed askew, the vertical lines of the bunk frames leaning like drunks. Not good, Snowy thought. He could think of nothing reassuring that would tip up this hundred-ton emplacement.
He reached under his bed again. The cardboard box that had contained his clothes was gone. His clothes were still there, in a heap. But when he grabbed them the cloth just crumbled, like the sheets on his bed.
“Forget it,” Ahmed called, watching him. “Get your flight suit. They seem to have lasted.”
“Lasted?”
“It’s the plastic, I think.”
Snowy complied. He found his boots were still intact too, made of some imperishable artificial material. But he had no surviving socks, none at all; that might be a problem.
Snowy helped get some food inside Moon, while Ahmed continued his patroling.
The woken gathered in a circle, sitting on the lowest tier of the bunks. But there were only five of them, five out of the twenty who had been stored here. The five were Snowy, Ahmed, Sidewise, the girl Moon, and a young pilot called Bonner.
For a time they were silent, as they tucked into banana and chocolate and drank vials of water. Snowy knew that was a good idea. If you were dropped into some new situation it always paid to give yourself time to just sit and listen and think, and adjust to the new situation.
Snowy had pressed Ahmed about the CO. Ahmed showed him. Barking Madd’s body was shriveled and shrunken, literally mummified, just hardened flesh over the bone. The rest, the other fourteen, were the same.
Sidewise, predictably, couldn’t keep his mouth closed. Sidewise was an air warfare officer. He was a thin, intense man, and he had earned his handle for his habit of making sideways crablike moves whenever he got on a dance floor. Now he glanced around at the little group. “Fucking hell,” he said to Snowy. “So much for the safety margins.”
“Shut it,” Ahmed snapped.
Bonner asked Ahmed, “So what was the tally?”
Tally, for tally-ho, was the slang for a wake-up call. “There wasn’t one,” Ahmed said bluntly.
“So if not a tally, what woke us up?”
Ahmed shrugged. “Maybe the Pit has an automatic timer. Or maybe something just failed and it pitched us out.”
Bonner was a good-looking kid, though one of the gen-enged plagues had left him hairless from head to toe. Now he ran his hand over his bare scalp. His accent was faintly Welsh. “Maybe we just pushed it too hard. The Pit was supposed to be a cryostore for seeds and animal embryos and stuff. Insurance against the mass extinction. Not for humans—”
“Especially not humans like you, Bonner,” Snowy said. “Maybe your farts blew the gaskets.”
The bit of low humor seemed to relax the group, as Snowy had hoped.
Ahmed said, “This Pit might have been originally built for elephant embryos or whatever, but it was man rated. We all saw the lectures on the safety parameters, the reliability of the systems.”
“Sure,” Sidewise said. “But any system will fail, no matter how well it’s designed and built, if you give it enough time.” That silenced them. And Sidewise said, “Anybody noticed the clock?”