Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (16 page)

              In a broader vision, there were three goals: the first was self-sustainability of the biospheres on the planet; the second, the return to base zero—or rather, a generation as evolved as that of the founders—and that it be reached within five centuries, and, finally, departure for Venus, at that point terraformed by bacteria launched from Earth with the objective of digesting its acid atmosphere, cooling the planet and making it more similar to the blue one. On the poles of a terraformed Venus their descendants would walk in the open air as they had on Earth in another era.

              All knowledge capable of being copied had been deposited in the ship’s servers for all three mission groups’ spaceships. That knowledge included material in all languages, purged as much as possible of hateful propaganda. There were educational programs designed that considered each generation of Ganymedians up through the seventh, the point at which it was understood that Ganymedians would had quit following them.

              During the first generations, teaching maintenance of the equipment was vital, just as teaching the values and facts favorable to peace was essential. The seventh generation would have between fifty and one hundred thousand Ganymedians, or Venusians. At that point, Ganymede would still not be sufficiently covered by domes. Nevertheless, in that phase, the transformations carried out would be so evident that even those less evolved would be able to see for themselves that mankind could thrive on the planet. With reserves from Earth depleted, this would be an enormous stimulus for continuing a project that, at that point, would already be a legend.

              The mentors of the program to colonize Ganymede temporarily were convinced that the interplanetary transfer of Homo Sapiens Sapiens could be successful even with the small number of people sent.

              After reading the introduction to the mission, they spent the day learning how the ship’s principal systems necessary for daily life’s activities worked, namely food, habitability, and hygiene.

              They were in a contradictory position: for Earth and their loved ones to survive, Theia would have to crash into Jupiter and, in that case, they would die. Mariah asked Sofia if at any point she had discovered that scientists were developing bacteria to terraform Venus. Sofia had never heard anything like that. But the world was made of false facades constructed to hide other facades, also false. She now knew nothing.

              On the following day, the President of the United States would speak. He was a serious man.

Chapter 13

Emilio Cardoso, the Brief

August 22, exactly at noon, the eight settlers were seated in the meeting room, awaiting the presidential address. The previous day had been one of silence. Even Sofia and Mariah had exchange very few words. At 12:01, the screen came on. It played an inspiring instrumental song, which began softly and nostalgically, then crossed an epic period to finally reach hopeful serenity and plentitude. A hymn, it lasted less than three minutes.

              An image of Earth as seen from space appeared on the screen, with the moon visible. That image zoomed in on New England, then on Washington and the White House, ending in the Oval Office.

              The President of the United States, Emilio Cardoso, seemed like he was physically there. He was serious, perhaps tired, but serene and looking directly at them as if he were seeing them. “Esteemed founding settlers, President William.”

              “It was with renewed certainty of a duty fulfilled that I was informed the United States and its allies had succeeded in sending three groups of settlers to Ganymede, with Marines, scientists, doctors and engineers, two in equatorial positions and one at the South Pole. The Ganymede mission greatly benefitted from preparations the United States had previously made to colonized and mine Mars. We were indeed lucky to have progressed with that project.”

              “We nurture the hope of being able to send a very large fleet of empty spaceships that will let us transport your descendants from Ganymede to Venus in mass within five hundred years but that initiative’s size will depend on how the situation evolves. Venus has received an enormous bacteria mass and innumerous plant seeds and insect eggs were launched into space so that they land on Venus within four to five hundred years. You, both those chosen from volunteers and those sent in obedience to our species’ greater interests, have the noblest task ever undertaken by Adam’s grandchildren: that of continuing humanity’s voyage, spanning from when it first appeared thousands of years ago to the moment in which you were asked to abandon your earthly garden and begin building a new home for man on the planet Ganymede and, in the future, Venus, the new Earth undergoing preparation.

              “It is a survival mission for you and it is, for the rest of humanity, a mission that will let us die in peace, should this prove inevitable. But it is, above all else, the passing from us, as parents, to you, our children, the testimony of more than thirteen thousand years of civilization’s memory. Thirteen thousand years ago, at Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey, our ancestors, still nomads—before having discovered agriculture that would permit an economic and demographic revolution—constructed a temple, thus founding human civilization. They constructed a temple without having free time to do so, since they were still hunters and gatherers, with neither kings nor princes, lords or servants, in which each small group of families was a nation in and of itself. In constant movement, they trudged about every day so they would have food for themselves and their children, in incessant war with neighboring tribes. They built it without having resources for that enterprise, paying the price with hunger and cold.”

              “They erected it, be it because of a pre-Biblical revelation whose legend has dissolved with the passage of time, be it for motives that we do not yet understand, their world had changed intimately, ceasing to be just what they could see, touch, hear, or smell to become one including an orchestra of invisible things:

              The memory of ourselves that we want to last beyond us. The world of ideas that we know are true, of flowers that will bloom next spring and of landscapes that will exist elsewhere. Our grandchildren and our grandchildren’s grandchildren who we not only do not know, and who we will never know, but who we already love. The passion that shakes us and gives us happiness. The thirst for justice that we untiringly seek, the peace we only achieve in a just war, the losses we accept for a greater good and so many other things that make human beings humans.

              “Of all invisible things, there are two that prevail over all others: the first is our capacity to feel what others feel, making our neighbor’s life become part of our own before we can account for what we will win or lose with their presence. The second is, historically and today, the faith reborn in each generation that death is no more than a rite of passage for a life where we find the first cause, the immobile motor that moves nature without being moved by it. Both compete for the major discovery of all time. And it was neither the wheel, nor fire, neither agriculture, nor writing. The major discovery in the history of Man was the possibility of Peace, that oasis that we have broadened for thousands of years, stealing land from the desert that remains after war. That umbilical connection to other men and the pulse toward God, invisible but real, has led us, Americans and the those from other free nations, to join hands in the final effort, before our time is up, to spread humanity’s seeds on Ganymede today and on Venus tomorrow.

              “We have deposited in you, who are the seed, these others so that you may take care of them: freedom, because no one is born a slave; tolerance of mistakes, because no one knows everything; intolerance of injustice, because the future must be better than the past; respect for those who seek the truth, because the truth exists, even if not everyone can see it; equality upon departure, because we were all born naked, and the difference upon arrival, because we will not all tread the same paths. These values have been difficult for us on earth and will be difficult for you on that frozen but safe planet that we have been able to give you. Pass them on to your children and teach them to transmit it to their children. If you despair, look at the images we leave you of the Earth and believe that an equal garden will be born on Venus.

              “Dear Venusians, if the improbable happens and we do believe in miracles, the surviving earthly population we can place in orbit will be unable to help you for a long time as it will be our task to reconstruct Earth. If that occurs, your group will have the autonomy to proliferate and you should tell your grandchildren that between Jupiter and the Sun they have allies, preparing the reencounter of humanity’s two branches within a few centuries.

              “Good luck to all.”

              The image disappeared. Captions appeared announcing that Senator Tyrell Hendriks would speak in a few moments and that he would be their interlocutor until the disruptive event.

              Lucas felt that, during his speech, the President of the United States had situated man’s relationship to war in a very different manner than his biological father had it in the note written in the margins of an old book. Where his father had ended with war as man’s foundation, the President had ended with peace as the civilizing leap in a prehistory that had only known permanent conflict and, moreover, had maintained the expansion of the “oasis of peace” as a frontier that civilizations should broaden.

              “Isn’t Hendriks the name of that horrible guy working with fusion animals, in the Pentagon’s advanced biological engineering lab somewhere in Texas?” Mariah asked Sofia.

              “Yes,” Sofia answered her.

              “But he was proven to be psychotic, wasn’t he?”

              “I heard that he’d returned after a medical release and got involved in politics,” Sofia said.

Chapter 14

Tyrell Hendriks, the Rise of a Genius

Senator Hendriks was a squat man, sixty-one years of age, discolored as if bleached. He had dark hair white streaks lurking here and there, which did not diminish the contrast with his vitiligous skin and ice blue eyes. He wore thick glasses and presented himself in a black suit without a tie. “Esteemed Venusians of the polar group,”
began Hendriks.                           

              “I hope you enjoyed President Cardoso’s speech about the moving goodness of God and his party in the White House. Now we will talk about real thing. This program includes six units of volunteers and a compulsory one and they are grouped in three diferent locations. The volunteers are self-sufficient. We chose those of you in the polar group because you have favorable genes. It is also true that you have useful skills, very useful, for this mission to be successful. Given the very restricted number of people sent, the selection pool was limited to those who had certain abilities, but that was not the primum movens for your particular choice. The objective of your landing is the dissemination of your genes, which are advantageous, via reproduction. That is why I chose you personally. For reasons of genetic security, we surgically collected eggs and sperm for future use, should the platinum cause secondary effects. Those samples will be sent to Ganymede in later missions, but we hope they will not have to be used as that requires more experienced medical personnel than have been sent to that planet and we don’t fully trust the medical robot’s skills.

              “There is also the problem of the Russians and the Chinese. Their genetics are worthless because they considered none of this when choosing their people. They are outsiders to current genetics. They chose powerful people, soldiers and physical scientists. Their biological skills are residual. Our sampling team is trying to acquire as much information as possible and what we have received about their leadership is of the worst possible sort, in terms of recessive genes with the potential for future damage. As for independent players, Indians and Brazilians, you can forget them. It’s not going to happen. Ganymede is too far of a leap for simple people.”

              “I will explain this again: your mission is to stay alive and have babies. The second part does not seem difficult. The first part is a little more complicated. Because the European space agency’s amateurism, your twin ship landed near the vault’s outer limits, in a zone with irregular terrain. It contains the nuclear reactor, a palette of exoskeletons, two palettes of pluripotential robots of linear vital course, ten lupiform combat robots, tools and other logistical reserves. There is food, fabric, medicine and medical supplies, seed, chemical reagents, abrasives, spare parts and 3D printers—all vital to the mission. During the winter, until the artificial spring arrives, generated by the external nuclear reactor, you will not be able to travel to the other ship, but as soon as it warms a little, you will be merged with the other  survivors, if there are any. If there aren’t, we’ll consider transferring you to the equator to join the other groups. You will have to make the logistics ships operational, following instructions that were given to you. Since the food reserves on your small ship are not enough for the winter months, we will see when the temperature has improved a little from the warming of the dome. Then you can go look for food in the freezer. Ideally, you should wait until the temperature is above one hundred forty degrees below zero since the Rover may break down below that temperature. Take advantage of the next few weeks to study the dossiers in your laptops and respect the hierarchy you were given. We’ll speak again later.”

              The screen went black.

              “What do you know about this gentleman?” asked Vice President Andrew Kline, turning to Sofia and Mariah. That was the first time anyone had spoken in a normal tone. Up until then, it had been silence, broken by short formal and sometimes tense words.

              “I had an accident in a guided evolution greenhouse and went to do some exams in a hospital in Houston, the city where he works. At that time, Prof. Crane, Mariah’s friend, showed up with him, introducing him as a famous embryologist and geneticist. It seems that they had served together as volunteers in the Air Force despite Hendrik being older. He is a doctor by training and is very vain. He never did his clinical training, but treated the doctors at the hospital as colleagues, without being flustered when they did not return that recognition. He talked to me about his scientific work in an area he called xenopregnancy that involved inducing tolerance for using females of one species as surrogate mothers for embryos from other species. He joked that he wanted to spare women labor pains, implanting human embryos created in vitro into the uteruses of other animals. Afterward, he got serious and said that ethics, blessed ethics, did not permit such advances, but allowed abortion. Killing human embryos did not create problems. To give them a xenouterine chance, no, not that. He thought it would give mothers a unique experience: assisting with the birth of their own children, receiving them warm in their arms, cutting their umbilical cord, taking care of their babies, feeling themselves healthy and strong from the first moment since they would be spared from labor. He had made some progress with transplanting embryos between species, but he had not yet achieved a perfect model. That would come. Another of his interests was fusion animals. He bragged that he’d found a solution for the problem of species having different numbers of chromosomes. ‘Trés facile,’ he said. He showed me some photos of fusion animals. They were monsters, of no interest, except for the pride they caused their creator. One that I remember was a type of large bat with green wings, capable of photosynthesis. It did not survive and, if it had, it wouldn’t have been useful for anything. His latest mania was the old story of freezing and thawing out live animals, preserving their viability. He hated or envied the Germans, but told me that he had learned a lot from the Teutons and that he was five years from achieving success. I asked him if there was anything dealing with freezing moss or lichens, and he said he had no idea. Since he gave me his email, one day I asked him for some authors’ names, because I hadn’t found anything that thrilled me while researching the literature; he laughed and said the authors were from 1943-1946 and that if he dug anything up, he’d let me know, but that the Teutons had not researched that line because they were doctors.

              “Crane later told me he was a kind of deviant. He warned me to keep my distance from that type of people. I asked him who he was referring to and he only told me that people involved with accelerated animal evolution could not be trusted. They collaborated too much with the military, permanently lobbied politicians and churches because of the ethical impediments they were subjected to. It was rare for one of them to be any good. Later he told me that Hendriks had a psychotic breakdown but that, afterward, he’d been reintegrated. And that’s all I know,” Sofia finished.

              “Well, I’m glad that my genes have been praised, but I didn’t like the fact that it came from someone who reads about 1943 German medical experiments,” Andrew proffered. “We’re here to stay, which is why we’ve got to understand how every screw on this machine works. Nobody has any secrets. We’re all in this, and there are no tricks. We need to be very careful and find out if there’s any type of video or audio system on this ship transmitting data outside, be it to the equator or to Earth. Another thing I want to remind you is that we were all, without exception, taken from our lives by force. We owe no loyalty whatsoever to those people until they prove otherwise, nor can we easily believe one word they’ve told us.”

              “Those people include your president,” Pierre Tollmache recalled.

              Pierre spoke clearly. Despite not being conclusive, he refocused the problem and gave a more convincing solution, although it was presented as temporary.

              “An investment of this magnitude,” he continued, “must have a rational explanation. It’s not easily substituted and I don’t believe that life on Earth will go on with business as usual. Something’s happened and this Hendriks must want to guarantee his place in the thousands selected for orbit, if it’s like we were told. His success depends on our success. But I agree with keeping our eyes open,” he finished, speaking English with a marked French accent.

              “Crane is a good man,” Mariah murmured.

              “Something is intriguing me: how is it that Sofia and Mariah came here together. Two friends, both genetically alphas? Something’s not right,” Steven Boyd said.

              “That’s true. And if Crane and Hendriks are oil and water, why are both involved in this?” Pierre questioned.

              “And why I am seen as a candidate to become a professional breeder at the age of twenty-eight?” Larissa added. “Wouldn’t someone who could have begun this career earlier have been better?”

              “Well, Crane also commented on our genetic diversity,” Caroline said. “I’m certain that genetics was considered.”

              “You can be sure of that,” Sofia agreed. “Reconstructing an animal species with less than one hundred sixty specimens is almost impossible. We are very definitely under that number.”

              “Okay, let’s get to work,” said the vice president. We’re going to divide tasks and we’ll have a brainstorming session every day at five p.m.”

              It took them twelve weeks to discover how everything worked on the polar ship, all the while getting to know each other better. It was also evident that the vessel had originally been projected for Mars and not Ganymede, which was much colder and that meant spending more energy to keep the temperature stable. The idea that they had to reproduce was continuously on their minds, but they had made a decision: zero passion and zero sex until they had joined the other ship’s survivors. There were no contraceptives and, principally, the earlier those couplings occurred in such a small group would lead to worse divisions. They needed more information than what was on the computers that the crew of the other capsule, being volunteers, ought to know. How could they leave and reenter the vault if the Rover froze at temperatures below one hundred forty degrees, how would they meet up with the other humans imbedded near the equator, what were the engineering details of the domes, very superficially described in their computers, what purpose would so many lupiform combat robots serve?

              That the traditional model of courting and family was the most advantageous was not a given. They might have to separate reproduction from love. That was on the table and would mean a society totally different from what they knew on Earth. The community would educate their children, if they advanced to that stage. To avoid creating bonds, it was decided that, temporarily, they wouldn’t talk about their pasts. They would also avoid sharing their ambitions for the coming world. They spoke of only one thing with emotional significance: uniting with the people from the other group, the volunteers. The plan worked very well for a long time, with no personal contacts and without great effort by hardly anyone, with the exception of Sofia and Lucas for whom that aloofness required ever greater effort for both of them.

* * *

Lucas knew nothing about anything of interest to the group at that time.
What good am I, a fireman and a maid’s son, in this far corner of the solar system?
he wondered. They’d decided he would be the physical trainer for the other crew members to keep them healthy and in shape. In practice, Lucas only had to keep the team in good shape using the minuscule gym where the equipment, despite being attached to the floor, was very versatile. He avoided brusque movements to keep from internally pulverizing the platinum in his bone marrow. In the self-restricted quasi-martial environment they had adopted, Lucas was the only one with access to the others’ bodies. Only he touched the others, with the exception of the two friends, Sofia and Mariah, who were very close.

              He began asking himself what external physical elements could give him clues about those genetic characteristics Hendriks had chosen and for which he had apparently ordered the murders of someone unknown to him, an acquaintance and a friend in Lisbon. Hendriks had shown himself ready to kill whoever he needed to get him and his genes.             

              Lucas observed his colleagues’ bodies’ flexibility, coordination and the strength of their movements. One day, while training, Sofia caught him looking fixedly at her and said something unexpected. “You can’t see it, Lucas. You can look from every angle, but you’ll see nothing more than our genes’ external expression—the phenotype, if they’re dominant. You can’t see genes without the help of science and generations of observation. You’ll have to take a chance when it’s time to choose a partner.”

              Sofia’s naturally muscled body might not possess mysteries that go beyond normal genetics, but Lucas had seen a twinkle in her eye and looked away. Maybe it was because she sensed the agitation he felt and disguised when he was near her. Sofia was talkative, despite being economical with her words. She was clearly physical and, for both of them, taking care of others was secondary to discovering the truth. On the other hand, for example, Mariah and Andrew prioritized the others; Mariah spontaneously and Andrew on principle. But the differences between Lucas and Sofia were continental, far greater than what they had in common.