But this sophisticated robot, engineered by the artificial .intelligence packed around the serpent zygotes and made almost entirely of chemical compounds extracted from material found in the neighborhood of the landing point, is itself being watched and studied from afar by test engineers. The current test is in its earliest stages and is progressing splendidly. This is the third different configuration tried for the music teacher, the hardest part of the design of the cradle that will carry the serpent zygotes back to Canthor. The first was an abysmal failure; the embryos developed into adolescents all right, but the teacher was never able to instruct them well enough that they could sing the mating song and reproduce. The second design was better; it was able to teach the serpents to perform the courtship symphony and a new generation of the species was produced. However, this next group of adult serpents was not able subsequently to teach their progeny to sing.
The best of the bioengineering personnel in the Colony were brought in to study this problem. After pouring over quadrillions of bits of accumulated data associated with the development of the serpents and other related species, they found a curious correlation between the degree of nurturing provided by the parent and the resulting ability of that infant, upon reaching maturity, to teach its own offspring. The artificial intelligence package responsible for the first six months of serpent life was then redesigned to include a surrogate mother whose only purpose was to hold and cuddle the fledgling serpents at regular intervals. Subsystem tests proved successful; this slight alteration of the early nurturing protocol produced adult serpents that were able to teach their children to sing
This demonstration test lasts for more than four millcycles. At the end of the period, the test is declared an unqualified success. A strong, creative serpent population nearing twenty-five thousand fills the artificial lake. Limitations to future growth are only test related. Eventually the test survivors are transported to another locale in the Zoo Complex and the Canthorean serpents are added to the list of species ready for zygote repatriation.
SATURDAY
1
THE full moon rises over the placid ocean. Troy stares at the moonbeams, watching them shimmer on the quiet water. Angie appears and stands in the water in front of him. She is wearing a skintight white bathing suit, one piece, and is submerged from the waist down.
She beckons to him and he walks across the damp sand toward the water. He is barefoot and is also wearing a white bathing suit. The water is surprisingly warm. Angie begins to sing. Her magnificent voice enfolds him as Troy draws nearer to her in the light surf.
They touch and kiss. She pulls away and gives him a smile of encouragement. Troy feels himself becoming aroused. Suddenly a siren pierces the air, destroying the calm of the night. Instantly the sea becomes choppy, agitated, full of whitecaps. Troy turns around, alarmed, and glances at the shore. He sees nothing special. He looks back at the ocean. Angie has disappeared. Out in the distance, near the horizon, Troy thinks he sees the beginning of a tidal wave. The siren shrieks again and Troy sees a large shapeless mass riding a nearby wave in the moonlight.
He goes toward the object. The tidal wave is now defined in the distance, filling half his dream screen. The bulky object nearby is a black body dressed in a red muscle shirt and bluejeans. The siren grows louder. Troy rolls the body over and looks at the face. It is his brother, Jamie.
Troy Jefferson bolted upright in bed. his heart pounding furiously, his mind making the transition from the dream world to reality. Outside his duplex apartment a siren raged. He could tell from the frequency change that the police car or ambulance had just sped past his front door. He shook himself and crawled out of bed. The digital clock on the end table read 3:03.
Troy walked to the kitchen. He went to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of grapefruit juice. He listened to the siren in the distance until it faded away altogether. Then he started back to the small second bedroom where he slept. In the hallway he was stopped by the sound of another siren, this one even louder, that seemed to be coming toward him. For a few seconds he thought the siren was just outside his front door and he recalled, vividly, another siren in the middle of another night. His heart began to pound anew. “Jamie,” Troy said to himself almost involuntarily, “Jamie. Why did you have to die?”
Troy could still see the events of that evening with perfect clarity. Nothing in the first tableau had faded even a little. The beginning memory was the three of them, Jamie, Troy, and their mother, sitting silently at the dinner table, eating fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Jamie had just arrived home from Gainesville for spring break that afternoon and had spent almost an hour, before they had sat down to eat, regaling his fifteen-year-old brother with stories of football and university life. Jamie had been Troy’s idol throughout his childhood. Handsome, intelligent, and articulate, Jamie had also been blessed with incredible physical gifts. As a result, he had been the starting halfback for the Florida Gators in his sophomore year and was being touted as a potential All-American for the following season. Troy had bitterly missed Jamie when he had first gone away to the university, but in the intervening eighteen months he had learned to accept his absence and to look forward to his brother’s holiday visits.
“So, bro,” Jamie had said with a smile, when he finished his dinner and pushed his plate away, “what about you? You’ve finished another quarter already. Did you make the grades of a future astronaut?”
“I did okay,” Troy had replied, hiding his pride. “I made a B plus in Social Studies because my teacher thought I had taken an anti-American position in my paper on the Panama Canal.”
“I guess an occasional B plus is acceptable,” Jamie had laughed, his affection for his younger brother clearly showing. “But I bet Burford didn’t make many B’s when he was in the ninth grade.”
Whenever Troy recalled the fateful evening that his brother was killed, he always remembered the mention of Guion Burford, the first American black astronaut. Most of the time his memory, because it was so painful to proceed immediately to the terrible recollection of his dying brother in his arms, would choose to digress to a happier time, to a remembrance of his brother Jamie that was almost as vivid as the death scene, but was happy and reinforcing instead of being gut wrenching and depressing.
During the summer before his death, on a hot, humid day in late August, Jamie Jefferson had arranged a third personal meeting with his football coach at Florida to request permission to skip practice for two days. He wanted to take his little brother, Troy, to see the launch of the space shuttle. In the first two meetings, the coach had vigorously opposed Jamie’s taking the time away from the important workouts, but he had stopped short of denying the request.
“You still don’t understand, coach,” Jamie had said firmly at the start of their third and final meeting on the subject. “My little brother has no father. And he’s a genius at math and science. He blows the top off those standardized aptitude tests. He needs a role model. He needs to know that blacks can do something significant other than sports.” The coach had eventually relented and given Jamie permission, but only because he had figured out that Jamie was going to go under any circumstances.
Jamie had driven his battered Chevrolet nonstop across Florida, picked up his brother in Miami, and continued northward without sleeping for another four hours to Cocoa Beach. They had arrived in the middle of the night. Jamie, by now exhausted, parked the car in a beach access zone next to a seven-story condominium along the nicest part of the beach. “All right, little brother.” he had said, “now get some sleep.”
But Troy had not been able to sleep. He had been too excited thinking about the launch scheduled the next evening, the eighth shuttle launch in all, the first one that had ever occurred at night. He had been reading everything he could find about astronaut Burford and the plans for the mission. He kept imagining that it was the future and that he, Troy Jefferson, was an astronaut about to be launched into space. After all, Burford was living proof that it could indeed be done, that a black American could attain the upper echelons of society and become a popular hero on the basis of his intelligence, personality, and hard work.
At sunrise Troy had crawled out of the car and walked the few yards to the beach. It was very quiet. Troy’s company was limited to a few walkers and joggers plus a couple of those bizarre sand crabs, whose eyes wavered back and forth at the end of peculiar stalks as they raced sideways into their holes in the sand. To the north Troy could see some of the launch pads for the unmanned rockets at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base, but in his mind’s eye he saw them as the launching apparatus for the shuttle. He wondered what astronaut Burford was doing at that very moment. What was he eating for breakfast? Was he with his family or with the astronaut crew?