Troy turned away from her and started walking toward the exit. Carol ran after him and grabbed his arm. “What is it, Troy?” she said. ‘What’s wrong?”
“Look, angel,” he replied, not looking directly at her, “I just figured it out myself a minute ago. And I’m still not sure what it means. I hope I haven’t made a terrible — ”
“What are you talking about?” she interrupted him. “You’re not making any sense.”
“The Earth package,” he blurted out. “It has human seeds in it too. Along with the trees and insects and grasses and birds.”
Carol stood facing Troy, trying to understand what was bothering him so much. “When they came here a long long time ago,” he said, his face wrinkled with concern, “they took specimens of the different species and returned them to their home world. Where they were improved by genetic engineering and prepared for their eventual return to the Earth. Some of those specimens were human beings.”
Carol’s heart quickened as she realized what Troy was telling her. So that’s it, she said to herself. There are superhumans inside that package we’ve found. Not just better flowers and better bugs, but better people as well. But unlike Troy, Carol’s immediate reaction was not fear. She was overwhelmed by curiosity.
“Can I see them?” she asked excitedly. Troy didn’t understand. “The superhumans, or whatever you want to call them . . . ,” she continued, “can I see them?”
Troy shook his head. “They’re just tiny zygotes, angel. More than a billion would fit in your hand. You wouldn’t be able to see anything.”
Carol was not dissuaded. “ But these guys have such amazing technological ability. Maybe they can . . .” She stopped. “Wait a minute, Troy. Remember that carrot on the base? It was a holographic projection and must have come somehow out of the information base on this spacecraft.”
Carol walked away from Troy into the middle of the room. She raised her arms and looked up at the ceiling thirty feet above her. “Okay, you guys, whoever you are,” she invoked in a loud voice. “Now there’s something that I want. We risked our ass to get what you needed for your repairs. You can at least reciprocate. I want to see what we might look like someday . . .”
To their left, not too far from one of the large blocky machines connected to the cylinder, two of the wall partitions moved apart to form a hallway. They could see light at the other end. “Come on,” an exultant Carol called to Troy, who was again smiling and admiring her assertiveness, “let’s go see what our superaliens have created for us now.”
At the end of the short corridor, there was a softly lit square room about twenty feet on a side. Against the opposite wall, illuminated by a blue light that gave the entire tableau a surrealistic appearance, eight children were standing around a large, glowing model of the Earth. As Carol and Troy approached, they recognized that what they were seeing was not real, that it was simply a complex sequence of images projected into the air in front of them. But the diaphanous picture contained such rich detail that it was easy to forget it was just a projection.
The children were four or five years old. All were wearing only a thin white loincloth that covered their genitals. There were four girls and four boys. Two of them were black, two were Caucasian with blue eyes and blonde hair, two were Oriental, and the final boy and girl, definitely twins, looked like a mixture of all humanity What Carol immediately noticed was their eyes. All eight children had large, piercing eyes of brilliant intensity that were focused on the glowing Earth in front of them.
“The continents of this planet,” the little black boy was saying, “were once tied together in a single gigantic land mass that stretched from pole to pole. This was relatively recently, only about two hundred million years ago. Since that time the motion of the plates on which the individual land masses rest has completely changed the configuration of the surface. Here, for example, you can see the Indian sub continent tearing away from Antarctica a hundred million years ago and moving across the ocean toward an eventual collision with Asia. It was this collision and the subsequent plate interaction that lifted the Himalayas, the highest mountains on the planet, to their current height.”
As the little boy was talking, the electronic model Earth in front of him demonstrated the continental changes that he was describing. “But what is the mechanism that causes these plates and land masses to move with respect to each other?” the tiny blonde-haired girl asked.
“Psst,” Carol whispered in Troy’s ear. “How come they are speaking English and know all this Earth geography?” Troy looked at her as if he were disappointed and made a circular motion with his hands. Of course, Carol said to herself, they’ve already processed the discs.
“. . . then this activity results in material being thrust upward from the mantle below the Earth’s crust. Eventually the continents are pushed apart. Any other questions?” The black boy was smiling. He pointed at the model in front of him. “Here’s what will happen to the land masses in the next fifty million years or so. The Americas will continue to move to the West, away from Africa and Europe, making the South Atlantic a much larger ocean. The Persian Gulf will close altogether, Australia will drive north toward the equator and press against Asia, and both Baja California and the area around Los Angeles will split off from North America to drift northward in the Pacific Ocean. By fifty million years from now Los Angeles will start sliding into the Aleutian Islands.”
All of the children watched the changing globe with complete attention. When the continents on the surface of the model stopped moving, the Oriental boy stepped slightly out from the group. “We have seen this continental drift phenomenon that Brian has been describing on half a dozen other planets, all of them bodies mostly covered by a liquid. Tomorrow Sherry will lead a more detailed discussion about the forces inside a planet that cause the sea floor to spread in the first place.”
A projected image of a warden entered the scene from the left and removed both the Earth globe and several other unidentified props. The small boy waited patiently for the warden to complete his task and then continued, “Darla and David now want to share with us a project they have been working on for several days. They will play the music while Miranda and Justin perform the dance they choreographed.”
The mixed twins turned eagerly to their classmates. The girl spoke out. “When we first learned about adult love and the changes that we all can expect after we pass puberty, David and I tried to envision what it would be like to find a new desire even stronger than those we already know. Our joint vision became a short musical composition and a dance. We call it ‘The Dance of Love.’ ”
The two children sat down away from the group, almost at the side of the image, and began moving their fingers rapidly as if they were typing on the floor. A light synthesized melody, pleasant and spirited, filled the room. The blond boy and the Oriental girl began to dance in the center of the group. At first in the dance, the two were totally separate, unaware of each other, each child completely absorbed in his own activities. The boy knelt down to pick a beautiful flower, its red and white coloring shimmering in the holographic projection. The girl bounced a large bright blue ball as she danced. After a while the little girl noticed the boy and approached him, somewhat tentatively, offering to share the ball. The boy played ball with her but ignored everything except the game.
This is magic, thought Carol as she watched the children’s images moving with grace and deft precision in front of her. These children are wonderful. But they can’t be real. They are too orderly, too self-contained. Where is the tension, the strife? But despite her questions she was profoundly moved by the scene she was witnessing. The children were acting in concert, as a group, flowing in harmony from activity to activity. Their body language was open and unafraid. No neuroses were blocking their learning process.
The dance continued. The music deepened as the boy began to pay attention to his partner and she began arranging her hair with his favorite flowers for their brief encounters. The body movements changed as well, the sprightly, exuberant bounces of the initial stages giving way to subtly suggestive motions designed to awaken and then tease the budding libido. The tiny dancers touched, moved away, and came back together in an embrace.