“No, I’ve never known the kind of love you feel for Misha.”
She cast him a sideways glance. “You really should stop reading people’s minds. Thoughts should be private.”
“I always find more truth in thoughts than words.”
She didn’t doubt that for an instant. “How old did you say you are?”
“Thirty thousand of this world’s years.”
“Thirty thousand.” She shook her head. She could still hardly believe it. “And in all that time, you’ve never known love?”
“No.”
“You never even thought about it? What it would be like to have a wife, a child of your own?”
“I am a noah, a watcher. My duty is to tend the worlds in my care, not to tend my own desires. Besides, I have seen what becomes of worlds, of love and families. Why would I want to subject a family of my own to such a fate?”
She was starting to get an idea of what his existence had been like, and she wasn’t liking what she saw.
He’d been alone. Utterly alone. Alone in a way she’d never known. She’d always had her sisters, Nonna, Dre, Beri until she’d died, then the little ones Shar and Misha. There might not be anyone else alive in the world, but they’d always had each other. The noah, he’d never had anyone. Ever. The mere thought made her want to cry. No one should ever be separated from the rest of the world for so long.
“I’m sorry,” she said, laying a hand on his arm. His skin felt so smooth and warm.
He stared at her hand, a strange expression on his beautiful face. “I do not understand. For what reason are you sorry?”
“No one should ever have to be that alone.” Those perfect, drowning blue eyes captured her again. If there was a heaven – and she believed there was – its skies would be that particular shade of blue. A blue the oceans would envy. A blue a woman could happily drown in.
He shrugged off her hand. “To be a noah is to be alone. I knew my purpose. I did my duty.”
“I’m sure you did.” She could see the topic made him uncomfortable, so she took pity on him. “Tell me what this world was like thirty thousand years ago.”
“Much greener.”
She laughed, and was rewarded by that faint smile that lurked along the corner of his mouth. It softened him, made him look younger, more approachable, a little mischievous.
“It was . . . peaceful . . . but also savage. Before men built their civilizations, before they made their machines, survival was their goal. Their lives were short, as you can imagine, with no medicine or technology. But there was a certain beauty to the simplicity of their lives. Of all the ages, that has always been my favorite. Because in those ages, the people . . . needed each other, much the same way you and your sisters need each other here. Of course, even then, they fought. For territory, for females, for food and resources.”
“All creatures fight for survival. It’s instinct. A bit like the way you don’t like to be caged, I imagine.”
Blue eyes glanced sideways. “I spent a lifetime – thousands of lifetimes – confined to my ship. When I am away from it, no, I do not like to be restrained.”
“I can understand that.” They’d reached the waterfall. The terrarium lights had darkened, simulating night, and the softer silver lights reflected off the water in the stream. “And those more primitive humans from the ages you admired . . . did you . . . harvest . . . them the way you did the plants and animals?”
“No. My duty is to preserve whatever life is in danger of extinction. They never were.”
“And now? Did you come here to harvest us?”
“I came here to die.”
“What?” She stared at him in shock. “Why?”
“I no longer see the point in my existence. Nothing ever changes. The patterns are fixed.”
“But . . .”
“There are no others on this planet besides you Eves. The men who engineered the End did their work very well. And when I saw it happening, I watched and I did nothing. I did not harvest human archetypes to carry on to the next world I had prepared for them, because I knew they would only destroy that world, too. And now, this world does not have much time left. What the final war did not destroy, an asteroid will in four months’ time. This world will be wiped clean. It is inevitable.”
“Inevitable.” Eve had never believed anything was a done deal. She came by that honestly – an inherited family trait. If the original Eve had believed in inevitability, she wouldn’t have built this place.
“My sisters and I may be scientists, but we deal in hope, not inevitability. Homebase is deep enough to survive an impact. And being geo-thermal-powered, even if the ejecta from impact were to remain in the atmosphere and lower global temperatures for a decade, we could survive it.”
“To what end?” he challenged wearily. “I’ve seen your thoughts. I know why you and your sisters incubate only females. But you cannot sustain a population on the clones of Dr Eve Cartwright forever.
And you cannot replicate yourselves indefinitely, either. Eventually, you will have no choice but to turn to your cache of stored embryos to create a self-sustaining population of males and females. The problem is, once you do that, you lose the control Eve Cartwright built into her system. Once your civilization grows beyond a small, tightly knit tribe, you will reach the beginning of the next End.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because I’ve seen it. Over and over and over again. Every human world ends the same, in violence and self-destruction. Again and again, I have watched civilizations grow, watched them turn on one another and rip each other apart, watched them create bigger, stronger, more powerful weapons until they destroy not only themselves but the very planets that sustain them. It is always the same. Not just on this world, but on the dozens of others I have watched as well. There’s no point in hoping for a different outcome. It is always the same. So it has ever been, so shall it ever be.”
“You’re wrong. Things can change. Your very existence is proof of that.” She nodded at his look of disbelief. “Think about it. Why else would the creator send noahs to harvest the seeds of life from one dying planet and transport them to another? Don’t you see? You are humanity’s chance to try again, and to keep trying until we get it right. What else would you call that, if not hope?”
The noah bowed his head, shoulders slumping forward in an expression of pure weariness.
“Foolishness,” he whispered. “To try the same, failed experiment again and again, that is foolishness.”
He looked so discouraged, so beaten down by the many disappointments of his long existence. He was such an ancient soul, but at this moment, he reminded her of Shar the time she’d fallen down a cliff during one of their expeditions and broken her leg. Hurt, wounded, in need of love and comfort. Eve’s hand reached out instinctively to brush back the fall of golden silk, as she’d been itching to do since she’d first uncovered his face.
He stiffened at her touch, spine going rigid, shoulders squaring.
“The experiment has too many variables to ever be the same,” she told him. “You and I have never met before, have we?”
“No.”
“There, you see. The experiment is already different.” She smiled. And then, because he was so beautiful, so sad, so alone, and because she knew that once he left, this chance would never come again, Eve did what she’d been wanting to do since she’d watched him tuck Misha into bed.
She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.
His mouth was silky soft and warm, his eyes wide open and locked intently with hers. She brushed her lips against his, nibbling a little, touching her tongue to his lower lip. Tendrils of heat curled in her belly.
Tingling sensations gathered in her breasts and groin. She drew back, smiling at the way his lips followed her, and knelt over his lap, straddling him so that they were face to face, chest to chest. Comfortable, feeling bolder, she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her body tight to his.