“Y’aa’tey,” Jamie replied, his voice reedy and rasping, like the thin Martian wind.
“The L/AV lifts off in half an hour,” said Ravi.
Jamie nodded. “I know. I’ll be there to see you off, don’t worry.”
Ravi grinned at his father. “I got that shitload of messages you want me to deliver: Dex, Dr. Ionescu, all the others.”
“In person. I’ve been talking to them from here, but you’ve got the chance to see them face-to-face.”
“I don’t know about President Newton,” Ravi said slowly. “He might not want to see me.”
“You’ve got to get to him.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I know you will, son.”
Almost mischievously, Ravi said, “I’m surprised you didn’t put Chairman Chiang on the list.”
Jamie shook his head inside the bubble helmet of his nanosuit. “Chiang’s an old hothead. We’ve got to work around him, get all the others to agree to continue our funding. Then he’ll come around. Not before.”
An uncomfortable silence fell between them. Jamie turned his back on the stone marker and started walking slowly back toward the base and the rocket vehicle that would take his son to the ship waiting in orbit.
At last Ravi asked, “Dad, what if I fail? What if they absolutely refuse to continue funding us?”
Jamie didn’t hesitate an eyeblink. “Then we’ll go down to a shoestring operation. Most of the people will go back home, but a handful of us will remain. We’ll keep the work going.”
“But—”
“We’re just about self-sufficient. We’ll get along. We’ve been through lean periods before and survived.”
Ravi didn’t say what he was thinking: Mom didn’t survive. She didn’t make it through the last time you had to live on a shoestring.
“The important thing,” Jamie went on, leaning a hand on his son’s shoulder, “is to keep the experiment going.”
Ravi knew what his father meant. The million-year experiment. They had excavated several pits deep enough to expose the Martian extremophiles that lived under the permafrost layer. They had domed over the excavations and kept them warm despite overnight temperatures that plummeted to a hundred degrees below zero or lower.
The hardy bacteria were surviving, thriving, in fact. At one of the pits they had even begun to clump together in cooperative aggregations—the first step toward evolving true multicellular organisms.
It was an experiment to see if Mars could be returned to life, its own indigenous Martian life, an experiment that would take millennia to complete. Biologists were stunned by its boldness. Religious fanatics worried that it might prove that evolution is more than a theory.
Father and son walked side by side through the base’s scattered buildings and out to the concrete slab where the spindly, spraddle-legged landing/ascent rocket was being loaded.
Ravi turned to his father and said, “I won’t let you down, Dad.”
“I know you won’t.”
“But if … if those flatlanders don’t come through with more funding, I’ll come back here anyway.”
“Now wait,” Jamie said, suddenly alarmed. “Just because I’ll stay here doesn’t mean you have to. You’ve got to find your own path, Ravi.”
“I know where my path leads, Dad: back to Mars.”
Jamie tried to reply, but his throat was suddenly choked with tears.
One of the crew loading the rocket called, “Hey Ravi, you coming or not?”
Ravi waved to him, then said to his father, “I’ve got to go, Dad.”
“Go with beauty, son.”
“But I’ll be back. One way or the other. I’ll be back.”
“Go with beauty,” Jamie repeated.
REVELATIONS
Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices.
The Biolab
Jordan stood dumbfounded, staring at Aditi, thinking, She wasn’t born naturally. She was created, built out of cell samples, gestated in an artificial womb, a machine. She’s not natural, not real …
Yet she was sitting beside him on the stone bench, her beautiful face looking concerned, worried that his innate fears and prejudices would destroy their loving relationship.
Jordan squeezed his eyes shut momentarily. She is real, he told himself. She’s as real as I am. She’s warm and loving and—alien.
He opened his eyes and Aditi was still there, beside him, close enough to touch, close enough to catch the delicate floral scent she wore, close enough to see that her eyes were troubled.
“Have I shocked you?” she asked, her voice low.
He had to pull in a breath before he could answer, “It’s … a surprise. I never thought…”
“Would you like to see the facility where we were created?”
“I’m not so sure,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”
Aditi got to her feet and reached a hand out to Jordan. He rose, took her hand, and numbly followed her as together they walked into the city.
People were strolling along the streets, together with the pony-sized animals they used as beasts of burden. Smaller pets scampered among them, unhampered by leashes. Many of the people smiled and said hello.
He asked her, “All of these people were…?”
“Created in the biolab, yes,” Aditi answered easily. “So were the ponies and all the other animals you have seen here in the city.”
“And the animals in the forest?”
She shook her head. “They procreate among themselves, of course.”
“Of course,” he said weakly.
As she walked purposefully along the street, Aditi said, “Jordan, it’s merely another way for a species to reproduce. We use our technology. We can control every aspect of gestation. It allows us to produce babies that are healthy, intelligent, and empathetic.”
He said nothing, but his mind pictured hordes of identical clones being mass-produced like automobiles or robots. He knew it was nonsense, that Aditi was not a mindless zombie, that every one of Adri’s people was as individual as humans. Yet the picture remained in his mind. Things that looked like human beings being stamped out in a factory assembly line.
Aditi sensed his inner turmoil. “Jordan, dearest, the end product of our way is the same as the end product of your way: a baby. A squalling, gurgling, dribbling baby. Just the same as your babies. Just as human.”
They were at the entrance to a smallish building. Its door opened at Aditi’s touch and they went into the biolab.
Jordan followed Aditi through rows of equipment, all silent and still. She pointed out the microscopes and specimen containers, the glassware for cell cultures, the reactors where egg and sperm cells were united.
Like our biovats for meat, Jordan thought. Smaller, though. Much smaller.
“And here are the gestation chambers,” Aditi said, gesturing to a line of small spheres that looked to Jordan like gourds made of plastic with half a dozen flexible pipes connected to them.
“They enlarge as the fetus grows, of course,” Aditi said.
“I see,” he murmured. Then he realized, “None of the equipment seems to be functioning.”
“Not now. We don’t need any more people for the time being. When the need arises, we can gestate newborns.”
“And where do the eggs and sperm come from?” he asked.
“From us,” she replied. “We donate ova and sperm cells when they are needed.”
Rather cold-blooded, Jordan thought. But he said nothing.
Going down the line of artificial wombs, Aditi stopped at one. “This is where I was gestated,” she said. “Number six.”