Ambrose clutched Charley’s ankle until Charley twisted and slashed his hand. Then Charley was climbing the creature’s legs, its back, raising the shears high over the back of its neck. And before Tom could stop him, the shears came down.
Pressurized blue blood arced across the room.
Tom was shouting. So was Ambrose.
The shears came down again. Then Tom had Charley by the shoulders. Charley twisted around and slashed Tom’s knee, and Tom staggered and landed on his rump.
Ambrose ran in circles around Charley, who kept him at bay with wild slashes of the bloody scissors. Again and again the scissors came down, until the creature’s head hung by a thread.
Then Charley flung the shears away and collapsed along with Ambrose, and the three of them lay there, breathing. The creature was dead.
Tom stood on the balcony of his top-floor office at the Institute, looking down on Celephais, Earth’s dreaming blue capital. Spanning his neck was the priestly green collar of the geneticist cleric.
Ambrose knocked on the glass behind him, and Tom motioned for him to come out. It was a lovely morning.
Ambrose leaned heavily on his cane, but he was smiling. They admired the sky. “Today we do it?” he said.
“Yes. Today.” Tom pulled a vial half-full of white fluid out of his jacket. “Beginning today, they’ll live again. Whoever they are.”
Ambrose’s eyes looked diamond-studded for a single instant. “To defy time. All time.”
“They did it first. They showed us the way. This is the least we can do.” He put the vial in Ambrose’s hand. The old doctor had his lab set up to begin germ-line therapy: his latest virus would infect the alien reproductive cells, and their independence from a host, their reincarnation, would be heritable. They would be complete, a people again. The toxin would be phased out; the beds of cloned human cells would provide the raw materials for them to construct their first generation, which would then reproduce on its own.
“I wonder,” said Ambrose, loudly smelling the freshness of the air, “if we’ll come to that. When the time comes, will we be ready? Will we be willing?”
“Encryption to avoid annihilation?”
“Yes, exactly.”
Tom took a second stoppered vial out of his coat pocket. “They showed us the way. By God, we’re ready now.”
“What have you got there?”
“Let the comets and ice ages come, just like they came before.” He’d first gotten the idea with Charley’s son standing over him against a backdrop of stars. “We’ll go on forever.” He smashed the vial on the balcony floor as a powerful breeze gusted up.
Ambrose smiled long and privately. “So we have joined the dance?”
“They’ll be on more than a dozen launches in the coming week.” He frowned. “What dance?”
“We’ve been doing a lot of sampling in the nearby systems.”
Tom studied his friend. “Now that you know what to look for.”
Ambrose bent down rather arthritically and swiped his fingertip along the floor where Tom had just scattered an essence of humanity. “It’s a jungle out there, that’s for sure. But it wasn’t ‘out there’ that interested me.” Ambrose stared straight ahead. “They’ve been here from the beginning, Tom.”
Tom suddenly felt tired. “The beginning of what, Larry?”
“You know damned well what. Abiogenesis. Four billion years, and who knows how much longer. Four billion years of memory and ambition.”
“That’s quite a theory.”
Ambrose chuckled dryly. “Safe enough bet. It’s from the horse’s mouth.”
Also by Digital Science Fiction
Science Fiction Anthologies
First Contact –Anthology 1
Therefore I Am –Anthology 2
Pressure Suite – Anthology 3
Heir Apparent – Anthology 4
Visions Imprint Science Fiction Short Stories
A Moment of Clarity
The Colors of Space
Table of Contents
Copyright Information
Preface
Coil Gun
50-Foot Woman over Redgunk, Mississippi
Beyond Valhalla
Brae na Ùrd
The Blanket Box
Pressure and the Argument Tree
Skirmish at Heklara
The Crossing
The Sun Dodgers
Son of Man
Also by Digital Science Fiction
Table of Contents
Copyright Information
Preface
Coil Gun
50-Foot Woman over Redgunk, Mississippi
Beyond Valhalla
Brae na Ùrd
The Blanket Box
Pressure and the Argument Tree
Skirmish at Heklara
The Crossing
The Sun Dodgers
Son of Man
Also by Digital Science Fiction