Ev said, “She may have heard about today’s court decision. It’s headlining the news. If she sees the two of us she’ll either talk our ears off or call the campus police.”
But Anna wasn’t in. The door of her office hung ajar, giving Mark a glimpse of the usual clutter within, and her desk, for once, unaccountably, clean.
Knowing that Anna might be no farther away than the women’s restroom, Mark and Ev hurried by. A few minutes later, Mark reached into the freezer for small vials marked with his own neat handwriting.
In her valedictory lecture, Professor Berry had described starship stasis, the cold storage for plant seeds, germ cells, bacterial spores, and people. In a few months Mark would be in the freezer, and in a few hundred years, on the other side of the stars, being pulled out, insensate but alive—if he was lucky. His hand shook.
“Don’t make it too obvious,” Ev advised.
Mark selected Little Bluestem seeds—a keystone species in its native grasslands—then five more vials at random. On impulse, Mark also seized a vial that contained the fat seeds of Helianthus giganteus, the stalking wild sunflowers. He rearranged the vials to obliterate incriminating gaps. Ev leaned casually against the doorjamb to watch the hallway “Not a sight or sound of her yet. Let’s get out of here.”
When they were well away from the reference collection, Ev said, “I have to run next door and pick up something of mine that they’ve been keeping for me. And drop off a letter to Burch, my old advisor. Explaining everything. It’s OK—he’s out of the country and he won’t get back to open the letter until next month.”
Mark should have left a note for Anna. He owed her that much, at least. Too late now. They exited the biology building into the breezeway outside.
The day was gray and muggy, typical of this climate zone of greenhouse Earth. Some of the ancient bricks in the walls of the biology breezeway were molded with intaglio designs, biological ones—stylized scorpion, jellyfish, moth, protozoan, annelid. The intaglios had crumbled at the edges from decades of exposure to the acid air.
The breezeway led to the biosciences building, where some of the bricks were intaglioed with a double helix. “I’ll be back in a minute” Ev bounded through the main doors.
The Rice University campus was old, brick buildings dating from the mid to late twentieth century. Huge and slowly dying oaks lined the sidewalks. There seemed to be an unreal calm here today, like the Jurassic fern swamps on the eve of the great Cretaceous extinction. Mark wondered what obscure plants and animals would inherit the Earth this time.
Ev emerged from biosciences holding a small animal carrier labeled LIVE MICE HANDLE WITH CARE.
“Patented mice?” Mark asked. “You think the new world will need them?”
“You never know,” Ev said vaguely.
It was Ev’s ego showing, Mark thought. He couldn’t take his prized possessions to the stars, but he’d bring something he invented. They crossed the campus together in silence.
Waiting for the train at the South Main Rail Station, Mark started to say “Bluestem—” but he stopped himself. People milled around the station, university types whom he vaguely recognized, and others whom he did not know The Genesis Foundation definitely would not want its plans overheard, today of all days. Mark took his notebook computer out of his pocket. He urgently pecked out the words One grass won’t save the new world. After showing the statement on the little screen to Ev, he erased it.
Ev shrugged.
What if the models are wrong?
Ev took the computer to enter the words, we’ll make it work, I’ll make it work, are you coming or not?
It was hubris enough to attempt restoration ecology on Earth, to mend the gashes that humanity had torn in the planet’s living fabric. But to plan to terraform a whole, strange, undiscovered world—on the basis of hurried models based on familiarity with no living world besides Earth—this went past hubris into the realm of collective, suicidal insanity. On the train, Mark slumped in his seat.
Ev had the notepad. He handed it back to Mark, you still haven’t decided, have you, it accused.
The monorail took them toward the center of the city, first through the highrise residential district with frequent stops, among them the one that Ev would have taken to go to the place he shared with his girlfriend. Thoughts churning, Mark asked, “What about Miraly?”
Ev grimaced. “She understands everything all too well. But she still won’t come.”
Mark was startled. Ev had been so sure that Miraly would go with him to the stars in the end.
“I left everything with her. Including Ladies of the Lake.” Ev settled back in his seat, profoundly pensive.
Mark could not understand how Ev could leave Miraly. Mark loved the Earth. And he did not know whether, loving Earth as he did, he could bear to desert it.
Over the city loomed the shape of the Uptown arcology, a pyramid supported by three pillars—each pillar a skyscraper in its own right, but dwarfed by the pyramid. Mark blinked. Today everything seemed unfamiliar, in the dreadful light of leaving forever, unreal. Uptown reminded him of an ancient motion picture about an invasion of huge long-legged machines from Mars.
Entering the Wards, with no stops for the poor and crowded people who lived there, the train accelerated. Hurtling along its elevated rack, the train arrowed under the skirt of the pyramid, decelerating. When it halted, they exited onto a platform.
Another train would soon come to take them to the airport. Ev had bought tickets for both of them on a commercial flight to Star Field.
The platform stood high enough above the ground to activate Mark’s uneasy fascination with heights. He peered over the guardrail into the dirty and dismal neighborhood below the rail track. Neighborhoods like this stretched for miles in the innermost part of the city, the enormous area called the Wards, crammed with the underclass which was truly, physically under—relegated to the ground beneath the shining bulk of Uptown, in its shadow.
Garish words, both Spanglish and the semi-literate English called Manglish, were scrawled on every wall and sidewalk in sight. A rotten smell drifted up from the Wards, lofted by the heat of the day. It was not the reek of a living compost heap; it was truly foul.
“I see somebody I know,” Ev said. He nudged Mark’s shoulder, indicating a middle-aged man, face obscured by large dark Virtuality glasses, who disembarked from the train farther down the platform. “Pennington company man and very loyal. I do believe he was lurking around the South Main rail station, and now he’s getting out here. He may be following me. So let’s visit Uptown.”
Mark was appalled—less so than if Ev had suggested an excursion into the Wards, but not much less. “No!” he hissed. “I do not want to spend any of my last minutes on Earth in Uptown!”
“Pennington doesn’t like the police becoming involved in its affairs. The company might take rather forceful action on its own, without stopping to consult the police, if it should realize what I’ve done.” Ev pointedly did not indicate the mouse carrier under his arm, draped with his concealing suit jacket. “I don’t want my colleague over there to know where I’m going or guess why. We can lose him in Uptown. Come on.”
Mark followed with great reluctance. Even when he had occasion to go there briefly and in the best of moods, Uptown always made him feel like a gasping fish out of water.
Ev was an amphibian. And he led them to the Uptown escalator at a brisk stroll. Ev leaned against the escalator’s handrail as he turned to talk to Mark, on the next lower step. “This is a world-class Highcity, you know.”