She turned back to the noah to find him watching them with a mix of surprise, curiosity and bemusement.
“Remarkable,” he said. “It is a rare day that humans can still surprise me.”
“Clearly, you’ve never met the daughters of Eve before,” Dre said.
“Clearly.” The corner of his mouth tilted up in the very faintest of smiles.
“Eat your food, and I will explain,” Eve said.
“He can put some clothes on first,” Nonna commanded sharply. “Our baby’s almost done with her training vids, and she doesn’t need that particular anatomy lesson yet.” She nudged the tip of her disruptor towards the noah’s groin, indicating the penis that had been in a rather impressive state of semi-arousal since the moment the noah had pinned Eve’s body to the airlock door.
“My sisters and I are all genetic copies of Dr Eve Cartwright, a scientist who lived and died before the End.”
Eve and the noah were sitting at a table in the dining hall, the remains of his meal pushed off to one side. Shar, Dre, and Misha – who after a slightly heated discussion with Nonna had been allowed to join them – were there as well. Nonna had absented herself, saying she had too much work to do.
The noah had donned the tunic and trousers Eve had brought earlier, and though she would never admit it out loud, she missed being able to covertly admire his lean, muscular beauty in its natural state. She didn’t think she’d successfully kept that thought to herself, though, because every few minutes he would shift in his chair and stretch in a way that drew her eyes to his chest or arms or elsewhere, and she would feel his eyes on her. It was very distracting.
“Dr Eve Cartwright and her father saw what was happening between the Alliance and the Cartel, and they knew where the escalating tensions would lead,” Dre said, picking up where Eve had left off, as she had been doing every time Eve lost her train of thought. “They understood the destructive potential of the doomsday weapons the Cartel and the Alliance had amassed. So they bought an abandoned government bunker and refitted it to serve as a survival enclave and a laboratory, and among other things, they stored five thousand embryonic clones of Dr Cartwright so that her work would continue beyond her own human lifespan.”
“And it has,” Eve added. “Every twenty-five years, two new embryos are gestated and raised by the others. Nonna and Dre are the seventy-fourth generation of Eve’s daughters. I am the seventy-fifth. Shar and Misha are the seventy-sixth.”
“What work is it that all you generations of Eves are continuing?” The noah crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. Eve sighed and tried to smother images of running her hands across his chest.
“The survival of our species and our world,” Dre said. “Come. Let us show you.”
Misha held out a hand to the noah. She beamed a huge, beautiful smile up at him when he took it, and she skipped happily by his side as Eve escorted him through Homebase.
“Homebase is a self-sustaining, geo-thermal-powered biosphere,” Eve informed him. “We cannot support a large colony of life, only about a half dozen adults at any given time. So that is why each generation of Eves gestates only two more sisters for the next generation. We live together, teach each other, keep Dr Cartwright’s work alive and going – and with her work, her hope for renewed life on this planet.”
She escorted the noah through the laboratories and living spaces of Homebase. “Each of us record our discoveries, observations, thoughts into the Mind of Eve, the mainframe computer that operates all aspects of Homebase. And each successive generation of Eve’s daughters is imprinted through the neural trainers with the memories and life experiences of all the Eves that came before. In this way, each generation continues where the other left off. No discovery is ever lost. Our collective consciousness continues to expand and grow.”
She opened a door into the large brightly lit conservatory that had been designed to look like a forest meadow, complete with a waterfall tumbling down rocks into a small stream. “We maintain four of these conservatories, as well as two gardens where we grow our own fruits and vegetables. The plants all came from seeds and seedlings that Dr Cartwright and her father collected before the End, with the intention of sustaining life in Homebase and ultimately re-seeding the world. Once the planet becomes habitable again, which should be in another few hundred years, we will begin gestating the other embryonic lifeforms the first Eve and her father collected.”
“You have made yourselves into noahs,” he observed when the tour was done.
“You sound surprised. Did you think we would not want to save our own species?”
“No,” he answered honestly. “In my experience, your kind has been hopelessly bent on its own self-
destruction.”
“Then you have never experienced the love of a mother holding her newborn child,” Eve said. She ran a hand over Misha’s braided hair. “I assure you, she would do anything in her power to stop harm from befalling her child.”
Misha gave a huge yawn. “I’m tired.”
Shar stepped forward, bending down in order to pick up the child. “I’ll carry you to bed, Mimisha.”
“No.” With a fractious scowl, Misha evaded her sister. “I want her – him – to carry me.” She pointed at the noah and held up her arms in clear invitation. Her pearly teeth beamed up at him in a beguiling smile.
Eve leaned against the doorframe, watching as the noah succumbed to Misha’s charms and tucked the little girl into her bed for the night. He was so gentle with her. Tender and attentive. Even Nonna had to give her grudging approval.
A pensive smile played about Eve’s lips. If ever she started to think there was no purpose to life, if ever she started to think the struggle was too hard, too pointless, she had only to look at Misha’s smiling face, hear her small, pert, girlish voice, and Eve’s heart filled with overwhelming love and determination.
Hard, the struggle indeed might be, but for Misha, it was worth it. Anything was worth it. Because in Misha, the beauty of life glowed with its most enchanting promise.
Since the moment Eve had first held the wriggling infant in her hands, she’d known such love as she never knew existed – never knew could exist. She’d spent so many nights wide awake, just lying beside the baby, staring at her absolute perfection, marveling at each incredibly tiny finger and toe, the plump perfection of her rosebud lips and tiny, curling black eyelashes. And Eve had known in those moments that life was worth any hardship, any sacrifice. Life was the greatest gift in the universe. The one never to be squandered. The gift that made everything else worthwhile.
Through Misha, Eve had discovered what Nonna and Dre had learned before her. Unconditional love.
Complete selfless-ness. Having Misha, holding Misha, caring for her every need, teaching her, loving her, watching her grow . . . those moments had given every other moment in Eve’s life meaning and purpose.
She had looked upon Misha’s tiny, newborn face, held her tiny, newborn hand, and known she would fight for Misha to her last breath, suffer for her gladly, die for her without a qualm.
She wondered, as she watched the noah brush a broad hand tenderly across Misha’s brow, if he had ever known such a love.
“No,” he said half an hour later, as she and he wandered the trails in one of the conservatories. Shar, Dre and Nonna had also turned in for the night, but Eve was too charged from the day’s events to consider sleeping.
“No what?”