13.
Ridge realized he must have dozed a little. What startled him awake were the bright lights pouring down from the windows above. That would be WorkPod01. He rose, rubbing his eyes and yawning. His knees felt a little stiff from all his exertions and from the abuse he'd taken during his long day so far. He walked over to the control levers and moved them. The platform stopped making bicycle-chain noises and shuddered to a stop. Now the platform sat exactly as it had early in the day when the door had opened and Ridge and his crew had walked out. Now he was the only one left.
Rather than damage WorkPod01 by burning its doors, as he had planned, he decided to wait patiently. He was able to clamber up onto the hydroxide tank and look inside without having to tear his fingernails. The scene was exactly as before, but one difference. The empty hall had an array of sleep incubators. Now the incubators were not lying flat anymore but had propped themselves up. Since he saw nobody moving around, he had to assume it was all automated. He did see a number of flashing red and blue lights, so that was also different. Maybe something was about to happen.
The event he had hoped for occurred shortly thereafter. The sleep incubators opened up. Each incubator emitted its sigh of steam as its vapor lock unclenched and the gases inside mingled with the air outside to form a new and vital combination-78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and one percent trace gases. Each had a translucent glassy looking door, and those doors slid open. Inside each incubator was a fully formed human being wearing a clean new jumpsuit with collar markings of rank and function. There were four men and four women, none of whom looked like Ridge and his crew. So, Ridge thought, each shift consists of different personalities. They had name tags, and Ridge could make out a few of the names. The man with the single black bar, who was their leader as Ridge had been of his crew, was a strong-looking young man with dark hair, whose nametag read Ludovico. That meant Ludwig, Louis, what have you. Lucky Louie. He was about to be born and lead his crew on a charge against impossible odds. Right now, if Ridge read it right, the smile on Ludovico's face meant that he was joking with some of his team mates. They all half-stood, half-leaned in their newly propped up incubators. Each had his or her arms at their sides and their eyes closed, but their faces mirrored the laughter and pleasure of life in their artificial environment. Maybe Ludovico was carrying on a little subtle mating dance with some new version of Brenna. Maybe there was a red-haired body building gal in there pumping iron so sweat ran down over her freckles. Maybe there was a sour, cynical, but loyal Tomson there grumbling about the lack of proper music or proper toothpaste or who knew what. Maybe this, maybe that. Ridge stood on the tank outside and braced himself with his fingers against the window. As he had suspected, there was a significant difference between real time and dream time. Already, the team members stepped dreamily from their incubators. To them, it was still WorkPOd01 as Ridge had known it-a messy, cozy, steamy sort of warm place. There would be sweat on the exercise equipment. There would be cereal in the bowl, The Odyssey under the table, a Captain Venable speaking to them on a view screen as they waited in a loose formation. When all that was over, the doors slid open and they walked out onto the platform. Had they seen a wild-eyed man banging bloodied palms on the windows? Probably not. That would have been real-time and not in their dreams.
Before the door could open, Ridge spotted one or two baseball-heads stealthily moving up the slope below. They would be tracking the team members-probably riding under the platform the whole way. They would wait for the team to spend a little time in the work area, under the pretense that the old mission still worked as plotted by the engineers and thinkers. Maybe it was against the mudmen's ingrained instincts to attack and eat at the doors of WorkPod01. No matter. Ridge took his time. He aimed his rifle and picked them off, one by one, a good half dozen of them. Then he lifted the nozzle of his flame thrower and crept to the edge of the platform. He looked underneath and saw two stitch-heads standing close together there. Ghosts. He flamed them, and watched their blazing carcasses plummet through the air amid roiling black greasy smoke while their stitches came undone and sausage offal popped out from under their skin.
Smoke drifted across the platform as the doors whispered open. Ridge figured the ship's systems must have priorities that would include keeping WorkPod01 oiled and functioning in prime shape. With grim satisfaction, he determined figure out all of the ship's secrets in time. The ship had many powerful secrets, and he would figure them out if he had time. He stared anxiously at the faces of the team who emerged, coughing and waving their hands at the smoke that was just beginning to drift away. There was no Brenna among them. Of course not, he thought. Each of us is unique. There can never be another me or another you, even if we are slapped together from old dreams and bootleg lives and bits of this and chips of that. Of all the things he had learned here in this life, the one he treasured most was the dignity and truthfulness he'd seen in Brenna. From her, he had learned to be proud of his uniqueness and humanity.
The team members laughed and joked loudly. For a second, Ridge was mentally transported back to the world as he'd seen it a day ago, when the ship had been Neptune Express as far as he'd known, and as far as these poor candles understood it to be.
Ludovico stepped forth. "You from another workpod?"
"Yes," Ridge said.
Ludovico noted the black bar. "You're a team leader, eh? Where are your people?"
"They are where they are supposed to be."
Ludovico nodded as the others jostled light-heartedly around him. The men were strong and handsome, the women healthy and attractive. They were all young and filled with love for their families back on Earth, and that world made complete sense to them.
"Is everything all right with you?" Ludovico said. He looked genuinely concerned, if a bit puzzled and almost defensive about his own naiveté. His crisp black eyes crackled with intelligence and thoughtfulness.
"Everything is as it should be," Ridge said. He had meant to grab them, shake them, tell them the truth, enlist their aid. Now that he saw their innocence and faith, he couldn't bring themselves to shatter their illusions. He couldn't bring himself to fight against the strength of their innocent convictions.
"You look as though you've had a hard day," Ludovico said.
"It has been a long day," Ridge said. "Excuse me. I have to get my things."
"You can't go in there," Ludovico said, raising a hand in alarm. "Hey," someone else said, "we're sealing this door. Keep out." A third said: "Go to your own workpod, pops."
"I'm exactly where I should be," Ridge said, and nobody dared stop him because he wore the black bar; not even Ludovico, who saw that Ridge looked worn and experienced. Therefore, as a young man and woman drew the doors shut, and as Ludovico stood staring with a look of alarm on his face-he had his collar com going and was trying to raise the CP, and Ridge grinned good luck at him-the doors closed and Ridge was inside WorkPod01.
Ridge looked out the window and watched the platform drift away along its monorail track. When the darkness beyond the streaks of light had swallowed them up, Ridge turned to examine the inside of the workpod. He was startled at the contrast between this and what he remembered. There were no cubes, no moon doors, no showers. All of that had been a biomnemonically induced dream.
As he explored the sealed environment of WorkPod01, Ridge almost sobbed with relief. For the first time that day, he felt safe from the mudmen. For the first time, he felt secure enough to relax, except there was this great emptiness in his heart at having lost all of his companions and now even their home had proven to be an illusion. WorkPod01 was a clean, barren environment. The light was even and quiet, the floors polished, the air clean and smelling faintly of solvents without any unpleasant harshness nor undue sweetness.
The ship's systems made sure that each crew was birthed in surroundings free of contamination, or else the illusions would not work so seamlessly. There was little here, except a blank room with eight incubators in the middle. Ridge ran his hands over the walls, looking here and there. The walls were gray and blank, unless one looked more closely and saw the myriad patterns of darker gray that indicated embedded circuits. At regular intervals were fine lines that looked as if they had bacteriolumes built in. But what turned it all on? How could he communicate with the room, the ship, the CP here?
With a soft whirring sound, the incubators shuddered, startling Ridge as he examined the instrument-rich walls. The thick glassy lids of all incubators simultaneously swung closed. With a soft clatter of steel on glass, the lids locked shut with tight frosted-glass in frosted-glass seals. Yellowish oil soaked the seals, instantly creating an impermeable barrier between the inside of each incubator and the air around it. The noise of all this made Ridge jump. He flattened himself against the wall, then relaxed as he watched the incubators slowly lower from standing to horizontal positions flat on the polished floor. The large, coffin-like containers upon closer examination appeared to be shells of stainless steel and thick glass. The glass was inlaid with myriad electronic and bionic circuits, busses, chips, pipes, and the like. The base of each incubator was of the same marble-like material Ridge had noted in the lobby in the bow. The marble settled on the softer plastic floor with a sigh of air escaping, almost making a vacuum seal. Then hidden plumbing in the walls make banging sounds, and Ridge heard a rushing sound. The lids winked softly with tiny green and amber lights, in running sequences. A moment later, water rushed in to each incubator. Ridge was reminded of how one filled a small pool or hot tub. Under an aquamarine light, purified water gushed out from hidden nozzles. The water whirlpooled until its surface bubbles settled. Ridge watched in fascination as one incubator started going through a new birthing cycle. A tiny shadow appeared inside the incubator on the floor near the middle. The shadow was no larger than a dark-gray pinprick on the white ceramic floor. In minutes, the shadow darkened and grew larger. Ridge understood what it was: a zygote rapidly multiplying in its nutrient broth. Every ten minutes or so, the number of cells doubled. Pretty soon, it was a bluish ball of cells like a volley ball with many seams. The ball grew at a good clip until it was the size of a peanut, much faster than in utero. Ridge guessed that the nine-month gestation was probably telescoped into a fraction of its natural time in here. The next dramatic phase occurred as the cluster of cells appeared to elongate slightly. Ridge knew that if he stayed long enough, he would see another eight team members go through their embryonic and then fetal stages until the time for birth came. He did not have that kind of time, so he sought a clue about what Venable might have meant in saying there was a key here. What could he have meant? What was a key to the Command Post or CP? Anxious and frustrated, Ridge turned his attention from the miracle of growing embryos to the mystery of getting into the CP.
Try as he might, Ridge could not raise an image of Venable on the two or three surfaces that looked like view screens. He couldn't get anything-not even static. Those areas began to seem like simply light shadows on the wall, and Ridge thought he must have been mistaken in thinking they were viewing surfaces.
"If I were a clue," he said, "where would I hide?" He explored on. He ran his fingertips along the grooves and joins of the walls and ceiling. The metallic or plastic surfaces did not yield. Puzzled and frustrated, he sat down, crossed his legs, and tried to meditate about his quest. He said to the mythical clue that Venable had promised, which persisted in hiding its face from him: "Come out, come out, wherever you are." No clue appeared, and he broke off in frustration.
The place was a cipher. Ridge squatted in a cross-leg Yoga-like pose for what seemed like hours. The incubators were filled with water and the jets had shut off. The room reposed in a peaceful semidarkness. Machinery whispered softly in the walls, in he ceiling, in the floor, in the incubators themselves.
As he squatted, listening intently to the faintest nuances of the place, he began to detect a certain rhythm. He closed his eyes and sat with his hands palms-up on his knees. He tried to make himself part of the room itself so that he could understand its spirit. This was a place of birth. It was a place that gave life, while the rest of the ship appeared to take life. Pipes in the walls dropped ovum and sperm somewhere in a incubator, where the two conjoined and became a zygote. Twenty-three chromosomes joined with 23 more chromosomes to create a single-celled organism of 46 chromosomes. This then dropped into a incubator that acted like a womb to nurture the new human being into life. Ridge imagined there must be hormones and enzymes to speed up the process. In all of that, with its many nuances and complications, Ridge began to detect a faint interplay of rhythms. He counted, not using numbers but his own heartbeats, not by touching fingertips to his pulse, but by feeling the pulses as blood coursed through his brain in much the same way that fluids pumped through this room. He began to decipher the on-off of cooling pumps, the whirr of fans, the gurgle of tiny bubbles in relief valves. He even thought he could almost feel the slick motion of oil molecules around one another in hydraulic systems smaller than his thumb. As he did all this, he detected one simple set of rhythms that made him rise to his feet. His legs were stiff, and he bent to massage them, but he hobbled over to the nearest incubator and then the next and so on. What they all had in common was that, in the thick glass of their lids, amid the intricate miniaturized wiring, amid the cities of chips and buses there, were the softest imaginable little white lights. They were barely visible, and they pulsed in quick patterns, racing around corners, up one side, down the other. As he stepped back, he saw that the same pattern occurred on each lid. Already the person growing in each was the size of a walnut. Each sat on the floor of its tank, and when he looked closely he could see masses of tiny air bubbles around each, and microfine tendrils looping around each other. The only motion in the room was the coursing of those fine lights in each lid. As he looked from one incubator to another, Ridge noticed a commonality about the patterns. They started out the same-a quick motion in the upper left area, branching out into multitudes of unique configurations left to right and top to bottom before winking out to let the whole thing start over.
Ridge looked up and saw the same patterns racing along the ceiling. He guessed the ceiling had receptors in its surface to track the pattern. Somehow, perhaps this sent messages to the room, to the ship itself. Perhaps this was how the birth codes came down. Perhaps the ceiling sent the messages to the glass lids, and not the other way around. That didn't matter. That was beyond his understanding. What he did understand was the repetition. He began to figure out that maybe at one time inspectors had come around to check the growth of the fetuses. Judging by the condition of Nebula Express, the inspectors were long gone, dust amid interstellar dust. The automata functioned on, however, and functioned smoothly. He leaned his palms on the glass of one incubator and stared closely at the code of lights, so that he saw the glowing reflection of his own face in the glass. There was a lot of information in the code of lights, and most of it was binary or some other machine-readable code that he could not decipher. What he did decipher, however, were the letters W and P and then a number, 92. Could that mean WorkPod92? If so, it meant that all the workpods were coming out of one factory-this place. If there had been more, perhaps they had all succumbed to age and deterioration, and the ship now routed all the birth activity to this pod. It was a guess, anyway; and he had seen no evidence that other pods still existed. What pod had Caulfield said he was from? Ridge could still picture the old man mouthing the words: "WorkPod19."
Second in the code came what looked like the function and rank ciphers each person wore on their collar. The code appeared in a faint color scheme. Ridge compared the various patterns for members of WorkPod92 and found one that suggested a black bar. He rubbed his hands lightly along the polished glass and thought: Here is my equivalent. Maybe I was born in this incubator.
From there, the code diverged into myriad streams, loops, circles, rising and falling lines, that he could not decipher, but he had seen enough. He went back to his squatting position on the floor. After a while, he was attuned to the faint rocking of pumps and lights and could actually tell each time the pattern of lights repeated itself. Was there a clue in that?
It came to him after a while: Venable must have been born here. Maybe that was the clue. All the birthing in the ship went on here. Now what? Ridge racked his brain. Yes! Venable was older than some number of workpods. Maybe the ship assigned numbers randomly to the workpods, judging by the sequence. Whatever the intricacies of the process, this must be the clue at which Venable had hinted. Did that mean the CP was open somehow when a new captain replaced the old?
Ridge shook his head. Did he even know that Venable was not some ancient machine? Chances were that even in that case, the wetware, the bionics in the Captain, must be regularly replaced as they aged and died. If that were the case, then knowledge could be passed from one instance of a person to the next. He frowned and rubbed his aching brow with eyes pressed tightly shut as he tried to sort out the implications of that idea. It seemed intuitive that knowledge could be passed along through birth-else, how could he have memories of San Diego, Brenna memories of Buenos Aires, and better yet, any two team members memories in common, say of Tokyo or Perth? Even if these were random fragments from the lives of long-dead persons, it didn't matter for purposes of present analysis, Ridge thought. The key was that memory could be transmitted through some biochemical broth, some culinary tricks with RNA and DNA. The question then was, why did he have no memories of previous iterations of himself, since it appeared there were no more than 99 workpods, and so the groups had to repeat. Was each iteration slightly unique? Was each iteration therefore a totally unique human being whose thoughts and experiences were lost forever as it died? That wasn't the pressing issue so much, as the question-could he somehow reinvent himself as Venable and thus enter the CP? Was that the clue?
Still frustrated, Ridge walked back to the incubators and leaned over the nearest one. He stared at his own reflection again and shook his head, as if he were communicating with some other person. That was his moment of inspiration. Glancing up at the darting tiny lights in the ceiling, he waved his hand over the lid. His shadow briefly passed through the beam and nothing happened. Now he did something he had not yet done, and which probably had not occurred since the last inspector passed through here a generation or a century or several thousand years ago with a barcode reading wand of some type on a routing inspection: he placed both hands over the lights. He covered vital parts of the person's code with his hands. After a few seconds, the incubator began pulsing an amber warning light. Ridge leaned his whole body over the lid to cast darkness over the growing life inside.
Lights came on in the room. The walls flashed alight in panels of white fluorescent light. One by one, work panels lit up. The room spoke to him in a mechanical voice that was neither male nor female, but pleasantly and smoothly articulated: "Is there something wrong? We detect a malfunction."
"Yes," Ridge said. "This entire ship is a wreck."
"We do not grasp what inspector says. Can you identify your badge and pod number?"
"Ridge. WorkPod01. Lead engineer."
"That is not an authorized inspector I.D." Buzzers began to sound-faintly, nothing raucous, nothing to disturb the clinical peace in this reverse tomb where life sprang out of coffins.
"I want to enter the CP and talk with the Captain."
"What is the code?"
"The code is..." Ridge tried to remember. What had Venable said?"
"What is the code?" the voice repeated.
"Function Check Largo."
"Wait."
Ridge waited, while the panels winked out one by one. The incubators resumed their quiet patterns of moving lights. A hundred tiny pumps and circuits went back to normal whisper-function. The walls became blank again as the built-in circuits shut down. The fluoros shut down, leaving gray shadows. Ridge started to think he'd failed.
Then a panel in the wall slid aside. Instantly, Ridge grasped the meaning: the CP wasn't in the nose of the ship, but in here. Where he'd seen a solid wall was now a raised opening like an airlock. He had to raise his feet to step over the threshold, and the panel slid shut behind him. He was in an environment of shapes rather than furnishings; whispers rather than noises; ripples rather than liquids. The very walls seemed to move about as if they were impermanent. Sheets upon sheets of semitransparent circuit sets floated in the air. A constant process of sorting went on. Cool air whispered around Ridge's neck, sliding down his body to his feet. "We must keep you isolated from the cryovironment," said a voice he recognized as Venable's. "Come closer."
"Where are you?" Ridge said. He raised his arms and waved them as if fending off cobwebs. Some of the diaphanous sheets rippled in the wind caused by his arms, but returned into focus. Other sheets swirled as though they were made of liquid.
"Here," said the faint voice that came out of the walls somehow, not from any specific place but from the room as a whole.
Ridge stepped carefully, one foot before the other. He was afraid to hurt the delicate environment around him. He was equally afraid that he might be poisoned. He pictured atmospheres of nitrogen, ammonia, and other poison primordial gases. The floor shimmered as if drenched in excited phosphorants. "We are here," said the voice.
Ridge waved his arms as if brushing a curtain aside. This brought him through the hanging ciphers into a brighter area. It was a cluttered lab about the size of a typical living room at home. A number of sights assaulted Ridge's senses all at once. He cried out involuntarily and took a step back, holding one arm before his face, but he lowered the arm and looked at the secrets of the command post.
A bank of overhead biolume tubes cast a fog of harsh bluish light downward. Dust motes drifted like stars in the empty air. Motes of dust drifted like tiny organisms in some underwater world. The room was cluttered, dusty, and dirty. Old-fashioned wire racks full of dead gray circuit boxes were stacked ceiling-high on all sides. Masses of multi-colored cable snaked among them. The cables all had a uniform snow of gray dust on them, as did the primitive signal lights in the boxes. On the tables were bottles, test tubes, open digital manuals with now-blank pages, discarded ASCII styluses, and more. Rags, watches, socks, toy cars, dolls, pictures of New England houses, sheets of tango music written in ink on paper, towels, dirty glasses, the bric-a-brac was endless. It resembled a surreal sculpture.
The tile floor was white, the grout greasy looking, and swaths of cobwebs fluttered around his ankles as Ridge walked. He half expected cockroaches or rats to scurry by his shoes, but there was no life on that floor. There wasn't much room to walk, but he took a few steps.
"You see where the memories were made," the voice said.
"Where are you?" Ridge looked about. He expected to see a view screen on a wall, but there was almost no wall space devoid of clutter.
"Here," said the voice, and Ridge looked on the small lab bench before him. A bank of grayish steel camera lenses pointed down at a white enameled tray sitting askew on the black tile surface of a lab bench. Tubes and wires by the thousand snaked into the water there, and in the water lay a human face. Venable.
Ridge gasped.
Venable had that bright, hopeful look. "In all the melancholy and sadness of my existence here, I look forward to the resurrection of all our bodies and life everlasting on the New Earth."
Ridge understood what he had intuited earlier: the Captain had gone mad, as had the entire damaged ship carrying humanity on its last desperate journey. "Where is New Earth?" he said.
"We have not found it yet."
"We?"
"I am the last of the captains." Amid the ripples in his constantly refreshed water-and Ridge spied lobes of gray brain matter under the face, as well as misshapen bits of bone and gristle, maybe part of a nose that had not formed right, maybe a twin or a predecessor or a random growth-Venable smiled and moved his eyes rightward.
Ridge stepped a few feet closer to the hanging red and white checkered curtain and pushed it aside. He looked into a circular command room with high-backed chairs and banks of instruments. He thought it was like looking at a massive church organ with banks upon banks of keyboards and ranks upon ranks of pipes, only the music it made was not sound but sight. The plate view screens were black and spattered with light. It took Ridge a second or two to focus and understand that he was looking at the Milky Way galaxy from a high altitude, meaning light years, meaning they had been traveling for thousands of years to get here.
"Where are we heading?" Ridge asked.
"Counter the flow of stars and nebulas," Venable said. "We are moving against the rotation of the galaxy, which increases our velocity manifold. It makes our search for the New Earth more efficient."
"Then we do not know where we are headed," Ridge said.
"Life is most likely to exist in the mid-disk, where it had time to evolve rather than in the younger, more active center, so that is where we are looking. The ship searches constantly. All its energies are dedicated to that task, except the small effort to just stay alive and keep our cargo viable." Venable smiled very logically. "Without human life to reproduce on New Earth, there would be no reason to continue on. So you understand the purpose of our suffering. You and I are broken mirrors. We shine with borrowed light. We are living borrowed lives."
"You are wrong," Ridge said. "I am a man, and I have loved a woman."
The water rippled as Venable shook his face. "You still do not quite understand, Ridge."
"I understand only one thing," Ridge said heatedly. "I want to live. I want the woman back, Brenna. Where is she?"
"Largo. You might find her there."
"What is Largo?"
Venable smiled enigmatically, and Ridge angrily raised a fist as if to smash the thing in the water before him, which was little more than a photograph forever developing in a tray of chemicals, or biochemicals, given that its brain lay in there under its face. Invisible forces in the air grasped Ridge's arm. He felt himself being immobilized, and a cold numbness shot through him. He gasped for air.
"You cannot hurt me," Venable said calmly. "I almost wish you could. I might enjoy passing on into the limitless relief of eternal peace. Then again, like you, I dream of living. I dream of the old Earth. I know what it is to tango with a woman, or to ride a horse, or to sail a boat, or to sleep late and drink coffee on the patio before driving off to log in and check my e-mail. Do you get a lot of e-mail, Ridge? Nobody has contacted me in centuries, except now you are here and I am entertained. Please don't go."
"I am a leader," Ridge said. "I will not desert you."
"For that I thank you. Then we can be friends."
"Yes, Captain. We are friends."
Venable laughed. "We have little choice, do we?"
Ridge walked into the control room. He brushed aside cobwebs and coughed in the dusty atmosphere. There were at least ten or twelve high-backed chairs before the banked instrument panels, and in each chair reposed a mummified officer. Their uniforms were intact after centuries. Their collars were encrusted with rows of gold and black bars. Each had donned a jumpsuit open at the collar, with a wide ring where a helmet might fit. Perhaps they had suited up during the ship's great emergency and never made it. The ship had somehow put a mission together, using the cells and tissues of the last surviving officer-a man named Venable. "I understand the scenario," Ridge said quietly and tapped his hand on the back of a chair, as if saying goodbye to its occupant. Then he left the star-blazed control tomb, pulling the checkered curtain shut behind him. He addressed the face in the water: "We might be able to save the ship. What other choice do we have but to try?"
"None," the Captain said. "I might be able to help."
"I can't do it without you. If we can't do it, let's just blow the whole thing up and end this charade."
Venable looked dazed. "We could do that?"
"We could and we should." Ridge leaned close, and the ship did not stop him. "Think, man. How long should this living hell continue?"
"We must find New Earth," Venable said stubbornly. "Nothing else matters."
"Do we have any candidates?"
In the water beside Venable's chin appeared a blotch of shimmering black, a vision of space, and in it a faint shining object. "This is a star about five light-years of travel from here. We will make a pass by its heliosphere in another hundred years. If there is a habitable planet there, we will insert the ship into orbit around that planet, which will be called New Earth. Then the bones will come out dancing, and the music will start playing on the decks of Largo."
"This Largo," Ridge said.
"Two women are in there," Venable said. "You can go there if you wish."
"Are there Cleaners in there?"
Venable's eyes grew blank as he looked into distant data galaxies. "Cleaners inhabit every corner of the ship, keeping it sanitary and orderly."
"The cleaners have gone mad," Ridge said. "They have eaten all the colonists."
Venable shrugged, a mere ripple in the water. "No matter. The genetic material is safely stored and available."
"Where?"
"Largo."
"Then..." Ridge suddenly wrapped his head in his arms and felt like weeping with frustration. Talking with this poor demented creature was like consulting an oracle. For every second of truth one had to endure a minutes of smoke and tricks. "What should we do, Venable? Keep breeding temporary purpose-people, temps, throwaways, like you and me? Is that fair? Does that make sense?"
"We must reach New Earth. Go, Ridge. You have served your purpose. My purpose is not yet over but you deserve your rest now. Go to Largo. Find your woman. Sleep."
Invisible forces grasped Ridge so tightly he almost could not breathe, and moved him bodily out of the CP. It was all he could do to move his feet in small jerky motions and keep his face up to keep his windpipe free. He heard Venable say: "We will do as you say. We have tried a dozen worlds and failed, but the next one will be our last try. After that we'll do a swan dive into the sun. We'll tango off into the sunspots. We'll let the sun tear our atoms apart and make us into hydrogen. We'll return to the beginning of time and start over with a great big bang." Venable laughed. "Thank you, Ridge, and goodbye."
Ridge found himself thrown backwards, landing on his heels and butt and elbows, on the smooth floor in the workpod. The wall winked shut, and with it the CP closed him out.
"You can never come back in here," Venable said in a distant whisper that trailed among the quietly bubbling incubators. "Pity, because I so enjoyed talking with you."
Ridge rose to his feet and staggered to the nearest incubator. Inside was a human fetus, curled on its side and sucking its thumb. In its lap beat a huge bloody heart with trailing arteries and blood vessels. Its eyes were closed and it smiled in some distant dream of sunny castle ruins along the Moselle River in Luxembourg, or hordes of yellow taxis racing along Manhattan streets under a gray winter sky, or bare-chested Jivaros Indians hunting with blowguns in the Amazon basin while the white snow caps of the Andes loomed god-like in the distance.
"Hurry," Venable's voice whispered from the walls. "There is so little time."
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