“I’ll bring along a great-grandchild of mine to help you celebrate your hundredth birthday,” he said impulsively.
She laughed low. The light caught a glistening in her eyes. “You’re a darling, once you’ve had a smidgen of alcohol to dissolve that Swedish starch.” Her look sought her husband’s image. “Oh, ‘Mond,” she whispered, “I do wish you could’ve known him better.”
The picture was an animation. Because of thecomfort between them, Lars asked what would otherwise never have escaped him: “Do you activate that very often?”
“Not often any more,” she answered. “I know it so well, you see.”
“All these years,” he blurted. “Nobody else. You must have had offers.”
Sudden merriment rang forth. “Lots, though the last one was a fairish time ago. I was tempted occasionally, but never enough. ‘Mond kept right on being too much competition for ‘em.”
The smile waned. She looked elsewhere. “Although,” she said, “he’s become like a dream I had once long ago.”
“We live by our dreams, do we not?” he replied as softly.
It was a temperate-zone forest. Near Port Bowen, a tropical environment was under development, less far along because excavators did not have the fortune of starting but with hollows as big as were here. Talk went of making a prairie, or else a small sea, below Korolev Crater, but probably population and industry on Farside would remain too sparse for decades to support such an effort.
Eyraen guided his kin folk down a path along which elm and ash and the occasional oak arched leaves above underbrush where wild currants had begun to ripen. Deeper in the wood, birch gleamed white and light-spatters speckled shade. Butterflies fluttered brilliant in the air; the call of a cuckoo rippled its moist stillness. Where leaves from former years had blown onto the trail, they rustled underfoot. Smells were of summer. Yet this was no Terrestrial wild. Biotechnology had forced the growth; low gravity would let it go dizzyingly high.
A winged creature swept past and vanished again into the depths. It had been small, brightly furred, with a ruddering tail. A shrill cry died away in its wake. “What was that?” Rydberg asked. “A daybat,” Eyraen told him. “One of our genetic experiments. Besides being ornamental, we hope it will help keep the population of necessary insects stable.”
“It’ll be quite a spell, with quite a few mistakes along the way, before you have a real, self-maintaining ecology,” Beynac predicted.
“It is evolving more quickly than was forecast,” Eyrnen replied. “I will live to walk through a true wilderness.”
“Oh, scarcely that,” Rydberg demurred. At once he regretted it. Bad habit, correcting other people’s impressions.
Eyrnen glared at him and snapped, “How genuine is any of your so-called nature on Earth?”
“Down, boys,” Beynac said. She could bring it off. To Rydberg: “Don’t be persnickety, dear. What is nature, anyway? There’ll be life that can do without human or robot attention, as long as the energy comes in; and don’t forget, that’s solar energy, good for several billion years.”
Rydberg nodded. “True.” The optical conduits that led it from the surface wouldn’t likely give out. The molecular resonances that imposed a twenty-four-hour night-and-day cycle and the changing of the seasons might get deranged, but while some species would die off, others would adapt.
And, eventually, new breeds appear? As the sun grew hotter until runaway greenhouse effect seared and boiled Earth barren, could this forest endure, gone strange, in the deeps of the Moon?
He made his remark prosaic: “From what I have heard, a solidly viable ecology requires more space than this.”
“So the scientists declare,” Eyrnen conceded. “I think forms can be bred that would not need it. However, the point is moot, because the realms will in fact be vastly increased. At last, perhaps a century hence, all will be linked together.”
“Hm, what a monstrous job.”“In future we will not depend on machinery to carve out volumes where geology has not provided them. Bacteria already in $e laboratories can break down rock, multiplying as they do. It will take more energy than is available today, and of course they must be modified to fit into the ecology, but these a^e matters readily dealt with when the time comes.”