“I sometimes wish there were. My hardest task is the controlling of the place of the children. There is no order. There are four mothers there now, though one will die soon. These are women who have been chosen because, well, they did not do satisfactory work in their studies and could not master their assignments. They became mothers.”
“And the fathers?”
“The Great Designer himself has ordered that. A frozen sperm bank. The technicians know how to use it. Great are His mysteries. Now, we must leave.”
Chimal knew that was all he would hear at this tune. He dropped the subject but did not forget it. They retraced the route they had taken when he had come here, after the observers had seen the alarm and gone to capture him. Through the great hall and down the golden corridor. The Master Observer pushed open one of the doors and showed him inside.
“It has been here since the beginning, waiting. You are the first. Simply sit in the chair before the screen and you will be shown.”
“You will stay with me?”
For the first time the old man’s down-tilting mouth curved reluctantly into a resigned smile. “Alas, that is not to be. This place is for arrivers only. It is my faith and my duty to tend it for them so it will always be ready.” He went out and the door closed behind him.
Chimal sat in the comfortable chair and looked for a switch to start the machine, but this was not necessary. His weight in the chair must have actuated the device because the screen lit up and a voice filled the room.
“Welcome,” the voice said. “You have come to Proxima Centauri.”
EROS, one of the many asteroids in the asteroid belt, an area of planetary debris between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, though there are violations to this rule. Eros is the most exceptional, with its orbit almost reaching that of Earth’s at one point. Eros, cigar shaped, twenty miles long, solid rock. Then the plan. The greatest plan executed by mankind in a history of great plans, originated by the man first called the Great Ruler now, truly, the Great Designer. Who else but He could have conceived of a project that would take sixty years to prepare — and five hundred years to complete?
Eros, swinging close to Earth to receive its new destiny. Tiny ships, tinier men, jump the gap of airless space to begin this mighty work. Deep inside the rock they drill to first prepare their quarters, for many will live out their lives here, then further in to hollow out the immense chamber that will house a dream…
FUEL TANKS, filling them alone takes sixteen years. What is the mass of a mountain twenty miles long? Mass, it will supply its own reaction mass, and the fuel will eject that mass and someday it will move, out and away from the sun that it has circled for billions of years, never to return…
THE AZTECS, chosen after due consideration of all the primitive tribes of Earth. Simple people, self sufficient people, rich in gods, poor in wealth. Still, to this day, there are lost villages in the mountains, accessible only by footpath, where they live as they did when the Spaniards first arrived hundreds and hundreds of years earlier. One crop, corn, consuming most of their time and supplying most of their food. Vegetarians for the most part, with a little meat and fish when it is available. Brewing a hallucinatory drink from the maguey, seeing a god or a spirit in everything. Water, trees, rocks, all have souls. A pantheon of gods and goddesses without equal; Tezcatlipoca lord of Heaven and Earth, Mixtec lord of death, Mictla-tecuhtli lord of the dead. Hard work, warm sun, all-pervading religion, the perfect and obedient culture. Taken, unchanged, and set down in this valley in a mountain in space. Unchanged in all details, for who can guarantee what gives a culture adhesion — or what, if taken away, will bring it down? Taken whole and planted here, for it must continue unchanged for five hundred years. Some small truths added, minor alterations it is hoped will not destroy it. Writing. Basic cosmology. These are needed when the Aztecs finally emerge from the valley and their children take up their destiny.
DNA CHAINS, complex intertwined helixes with infinite permutations. Builders of life, controllers of life, with every detail from the hair on the leg to the flea on the body of the twenty ton whale locked into their convolutions. Billions of years developing, unraveled in short centuries. Is this the code for red hair? Replace it with that and the child will have black hair. Gene surgery, gene selection, delicate operations with the smallest building blocks of life, rearranging, ordering, producing…
GENIUS, exceptional natural capacity for creative and original conceptions, high intelligence quotient. Natural capacity, that means in the genes, and DNA. In a world population there are a goodly number of geniuses in every generation, and their DNA can be collected. And combined to produce children of genius. Guaranteed. Every time. Unless this genius is masked. For every capacity and condition in the genes there is a dominant and a recessive. Father dog is black and black is dominant and white is recessive, and he has that too. Mother is all black too. So they are BW and BW and, as the good Mendell taught, these factors can be plotted on the square named after him. If there are four pups they will be BB, BW, BW and WW, or a white dog where none was before. But is it possible to take a dominant and make it artificially recessive? Yes, it is possible. Take genius, for instance. They did take genius. And they tied it down to stupidity. Dimness. Subnormality. Passivity. Prison it in slightly different ways in two different groups of people and keep them apart. Let them have children, generation after generation of obedient, accepting children. And each child will carry that tied-down dominant, untouched and waiting. Then, some day, the right day, let the two groups meet and mingle and marry. The bonds are then released. The tied-down dominant is no longer recessive, it is dominant. The children are — children of different parents than their parents? Yes, perhaps they are. They are genius children.
There was so much to be learned. At any point in the recorded lecture Chimal could press the question button and the pictures and voices would halt while the machine printed a list of references about the material then being covered. Some of these were recorded visual lectures that the viewer would play for him, others were specific volumes in the library. The library itself was a galaxy unexplored. Most of the books were photorecordings, though there were bound volumes of all the basic reference texts. When his head and his eyes ached from too much study and concentration, he would go through the library at random, picking up volumes and flicking through their pages. How complex the human body: the transparent pages of the anatomy text turned one by one to reveal the organs in vivid color. And the stars, they were giant burning spheres of gas after all, for here were charts with their temperatures and sizes. Page after page of photographs of nebulae, clusters, gas clouds. The universe was gigantic beyond comprehension — and he had once thought it was made of solid rock!
Leaving the astronomy book open on the table before him, Chimal leaned back and stretched, then rubbed at the soreness around his eyes. He had brought a thermos of tea with him and he poured a cup and sipped at it. The book had fallen open to a plate of the Great Nebula in Andromeda, a gigantic wheel of light against the star-pricked night. Stars. There was one star he should be interested in, the one he had been welcomed to when the process of education began. What was its name? — there were so many new things to remember — Proxima Centauri. It would still be far ahead, but he had a sudden desire to see the destination of his captive universe. There were detailed star charts of the sky, he had seen them, so it should not be too hard to pick out this individual star. And he could stretch his legs: his body ached from unaccustomed sitting for so many hours at a time.