A billion earths, p.1
A Billion Earths, page 1
A BILLION EARTHS
A SEEDERS UNIVERSE COLLECTION
DEAN WESLEY SMITH
CONTENTS
Introduction
Remember Me to Your Children
Introduction
Remember Me to Your Children
A Matter for a Future Year
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
A Bad Patch of Humanity
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
A Deal at the End of Time
Introduction
A Deal at the End of Time
Dreaming Large
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Newsletter sign-up
Also by Dean Wesley Smith
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
I love writing space opera. I must, since I wrote under my name (and other names) 35 different Star Trek novels over a decade. And had fun with almost every one of them.
The Seeders came from a Star Trek: Next Gen episode, actually, where Picard was at an archeological site and it was mentioned that a race they called The Seeders had planted humanoids on all the different planets millions of years earlier, which was why all the alien races were humanoid in shape.
Years later I remembered that and thought I would tell some stories from the Seeders’ point of view. And what it would take for a race to do such a task.
And the idea just exploded for me from there.
Basically, the Seeders are long-lived humans who can teleport. Seeders’ mother ships hold millions and are larger than most cities.
And they think nothing of moving from galaxy to galaxy. That was the fun of figuring all this out.
For example, our Milky Way Galaxy is a smallish spiral galaxy with from 200 to 400 billion stars. Millions and millions of those stars would be far enough away from the galaxy core to sustain life and be yellow stars and have a planet in the same orbit as Earth.
So the Seeders terraformed each planet and seeded humans and all the plants and animal life identical to the original Earth (that was in another galaxy), and then stuck around to help the humans all mature and take the same basic path into space.
Creating billions and billions of almost identical Earths.
I have now written a lot of Seeders novels and numbers of short stories. Some of these stories have been used to start a novel, but I wanted to gather the short stories here for the first time.
I plan on writing a lot more Seeders novels over the years. And do more short stories. The Seeders’ ships flash past galaxies like they are fence posts, yet with the size of known space, the Seeders barely cover a tiny part of just our local cluster of galaxies.
And I have covered just a tiny part of the stories I want to tell.
Space is a very, very large place and the Seeders have somehow managed to spread the human race over billions of Earths in millions of galaxies, and they are still going.
And I am still writing their stories and having great fun. Hope you enjoy these stories as well.
* * *
Dean Wesley Smith
Las Vegas, NV
REMEMBER ME TO YOUR CHILDREN
INTRODUCTION
USA Today bestselling writer returns to the world of his latest novel, Dust and Kisses, the first of many books that span time and space in his Seeders’ Universe.
In this heartfelt story, Tammy works with her best friend and love, Hal, to help in the formal discovery and burial of the dead lost in the Big Death. The survivors call the task The Respect Project.
On a Portland, Oregon, suburban street, Tammy discovers from the tragedy of a family that the future can be a hopeful place.
REMEMBER ME TO YOUR CHILDREN
Tammy, can’t you just relax a little?”
Tammy glanced around at her best friend and lover, Hal Lemmon, as he tried to follow her up the center of the suburban street. The day was hot and Hal was sweating, staining his white tee shirt around the brown straps of the backpack he carried. His longish brown hair was damp where it stuck out from under his Yankee’s baseball cap.
His handsome face was flushed and he looked tired, even though they had only gone four blocks in distance.
She was hot as well, which was why she had been walking fast, trying to get them to their starting target before they stopped or the heat got them. It normally wasn’t this hot in Portland, Oregon, or at least that’s what some long-time residents of the area had told her earlier.
She was wearing jeans with tennis shoes, a sleeveless tank-top with a sports bra under it, and she had her short blonde hair under a Dodgers baseball cap. Sweat was running off her neck and down her chest and she desperately needed a drink of water.
She had her Smith and Wesson pistol in a holster on her hip and Hall had a small twenty-two saddle rifle tied to the side of his backpack. It had been years since they had gone anywhere without those guns, winter or summer. They both had admitted they would feel naked without them.
On both sides of the suburban street around them, the houses were like tombstones for the people who had been killed inside of them when the Big Death happened five years before. The once green grass lawns where children had played were brown and had long turned to tall, dry weeds. The house windows were dirty and almost every house had drapes pulled, at least on the lower floors.
Weeds and grass had started growing in patches of dirt along the street and up through cracks in the concrete. What had been perfect lines of lawns, driveways, sidewalks, and street were now blurred as Mother Nature slowly took back the neighborhood. Tammy had seen a projection on how in fifty years a neighborhood like this would be completely overgrown, in one hundred years it would be all plants and piles of rubble, and in five hundred years it would be almost impossible to tell what had been here.
Just as Mother Nature had killed most everyone on the planet one day with a burst of electromagnetic waves from space, she now was slowly reclaiming the planet.
The Big Death had hit at a little after eight in the morning here in Portland, so most people in this neighborhood were either at work or taking kids to school or some such thing. Tammy and Hal had been two of the million-plus lucky ones who had been either underground in subways, in vaults, or deep inside ships. She had been down in the vaults of her Boise newspaper, doing research through old papers not yet scanned, on a story that no longer mattered, other than being down there had saved her life.
Hal had been in a bank vault in downtown Boise getting something from his safe deposit box. She and Hal had stumbled upon each other on the second day of wandering around in the dead bodies. They hadn’t known each before, but they stayed together and helped each other survive those first few years until they joined up with other survivors working to rebuild a civilization.
Over that first really hard year, they had fallen in love.
Now they lived together in the new city of Portland, Oregon, worked together both on the local newspaper, and searching for the dead, and she couldn’t imagine being without Hal through any of it.
She looked around at all the empty houses. This neighborhood hadn’t been cleared yet, which was the process they were sent to start.
They were to inventory the bodies in every home along the street and mark from the outside which homes had bodies so the removal crews could come and take them to the new cemeteries.
And in each home they were to look for information as to who lived there and double-check it with their database, even those without bodies in them.
The ultimate goal of the Respect Project was to give everyone who died in the Big Death a proper resting place and a record of their existence for the future, including where they had lived and what they had done for work.
It was almost an impossible task, but everyone in the five now-growing new cities around the country, which included Portland, and the new national government, were committed to the task.
“We can start anywhere, you know?” Hal said. “How about we start here, work back to the truck along both sides, then cool down and bring the truck to here and go the other direction?”
Tammy stopped and glanced at an address still visible on the side of one of the homes. From what she could tell, they were about halfway along the long subdivision street. Hal’s idea was a good one. They had to get out of the sun. It was only ten in the morning and this day promised to be far too hot to stay out in the sun for very long.
She nodded. “Good plan.”
“Thank you,” Hal said, stopping and taking off his pack, letting it drop to the concert in the middle of the street.
They had been going out four mornings a week to catalog houses and bodies in the vast subdivisions that surrounded Portland. It had bothered her some at first, nosing into people’s personal homes, but then she had grown numb to it. After all, the people they were investigating were all dead.
The thing she could never look at were the children’s bodies, often in cribs. Every time they found a home with a child, Hal took that house on his own, even though they had clear orders to always stay together. Not that there was anything dangerous in these old subdivisions besides slowly rotting wood.
This subdivision had lots of signs that children lived in these homes, from swing sets visible in the back years, to small bikes and other toys left near the front doors.
She wanted a child someday, with Hal, but she felt the new world wasn’t stable enough yet to commit to that, even though hundreds of healthy children were being born every month in the new Portland. Hal wanted children, he was clear on that, but he was willing to wait until she was ready as well.
At the moment, she just wasn’t ready and when searching homes, she just couldn’t make herself deal with the dead children.
She took a long drink of semi-cold water that tasted wonderful and then handed the bottle to Hal, who took a drink and sighed. Around them a slight breeze kicked up filling the air with faint noises of houses creaking and dry brush rustling. The sounds did nothing to break the death silence of the subdivision.
“Let’s go get snoopy into people’s lives,” he said, handing her back the bottle of water.
“That one first,” she said, pointing to a light blue house on her right. “Let’s do two on that side, then two on the other side, as we work back to the truck.”
“Sounds perfect,” he said, smiling at her and picking up his pack.
She loved everything about him, his dark eyes, his solid build, and his strong arms. But mostly she just loved that smile.
Somehow, over all the years of living in the middle of death, that smile of his had kept her sane.
They headed up the front sidewalk of the two-story home that must have been very nice in its day. The drapes were pulled and more than likely the front door was locked. Both of them had been trained before they started this job to pick a lock. Hal was slightly faster at it than she was, but only by a second or so. They hadn’t found a lock so far that had stopped them.
The people in charge of the Respect Project wanted all the homes to be respected as well, if possible, even though eventually they would all just rot away. Tammy was fine with that as well.
Hal left his pack on the front step and took out his rifle, slinging it over his shoulder before bending down and picking the front door locks. Thirty seconds later he stood and pushed the door open.
The smell of mold and dust and something with a slight tang greeted them and they both stepped back out of the smell and pulled out their cloth masks and tied them over their mouths and noses. That smell with a bite meant there was a body in the building.
They always wore masks when a body was in the building.
The masks also helped them with the dust and they went through about a dozen of the masks a day, maybe more on a hot day like today.
Even though there was some light filtering through the drapes and from a back window in the kitchen beyond the living room, they both clicked on flashlights. When they first started out doing this job, they had both tripped over various things in homes that they just hadn’t seen in dim light. So they took no chances now.
Tammy panned her flashlight around the living room. More of a formal room that didn’t look much used. A layer of gray dust dulled down all colors in the room.
Moving slowly to not kick up too much dust from five years of no one moving around in here, they headed for the kitchen and the family room beyond.
Tammy was relieved to see no sign of children’s toys around the family room.
Hal slowly opened some drawers near the family dining area. Often families left personal information in drawers near a kitchen table.
While he was doing that, she turned and opened the back door leading into a two-car garage. There was one car there. And a spot for a second one. Tools were in their places on the walls.
Nothing else of interest.
“One car left,” she said as she went past Hal and toward the rooms to the right of the big living room. One looked like a guest bedroom and was as sterile as the living room. Whoever lived in this house believed in keeping everything in its place. Even after sitting abandoned for five years and layers of gray dust making everything pale, that feeling of “in its place” was clear in this home.
It made her wonder what the residents of this home had been like. Clearly different than she and Hal. Their large apartment in a building in the downtown area was always awash with clutter of various types, mostly books. They were both just comfortable in that.
She would not have been comfortable in this place. It felt sterile and even more dead than most homes she had been in, as if this home had been dead before the Big Death hit.
“Anything?” she asked.
Hal shook his head. “Nothing. Drawers in perfect order, but no bills, no letters, nothing. More than likely all that is in a study someplace from the looks of all this.”
With Hal leading, they headed upstairs.
The light was brighter upstairs as most of the back windows in the home had the blinds open. They all looked out over a lush backyard that had held a pool. Tammy had no doubt it had been beautiful in its day. And from the looks of the house, the lawn would have been mowed perfectly and the pool cleaned twice a week.
At the top of the stairs a hallway led the length of the house. It had a number of closed doors. Tammy had a hunch behind one of those doors would be the body they knew was in here from the faint musty smell. The smell had a slight tang to it after five years, but it wasn’t a smell that was easy to miss.
And now that they were upstairs, the smell was thick.
And even though it was still fairly early, this upper area of the house was already heating up. Any body they did find would be well mummified in this kind of heat.
A mummified body was a lot better as far as Tammy was concerned than a body torn up from animals. Not all animals had survived the electromagnetic pulse. Dogs and rats and mice had been killed, but cats had survived. And with a cat trapped in a home with a dead human, they ate the dead human when they got hungry enough.
There were no signs this home had cats, so the body would be mummified and look moderately human even after five years.
The first two doors were to small bedrooms with no occupants. They had been furnished with small single beds and just left. One room was painted pink, one blue.
Clearly the rooms had been meant for future children that had not arrived yet.
And now never would.
The third door was to an empty bathroom and the next door was to a master bedroom and bath, also empty. The bed was made perfectly.
There was nothing out of place in this entire house. Tammy found that amazing and very closed up and creepy.
The next door on the other side of the hall was to a study with a big desk.
“Got it,” Hal said, moving to the desk and file cabinet that would let them know who had lived here.
There was one more door at the end of the hall and that meant it had the body in it.
Tammy went to it and opened it slowly, making sure to not stir up any dust as she did so.
The blinds were open in the room and it was a fairly large family room that also did not look used in any way. This room had a large-screen television, a number of couches, a game table, and plush carpet.
It had been designed to be comfortable, but clearly not made comfortable.
Everything again was in perfect position. Nothing was used. It was as if the people living in this house had just existed in it and never really lived in it.
There was a door off the family room that was closed. More than likely that was where the body was. They had found many bodies, since they started this job, in various stages of bathroom routines.
Hal came in behind her. “This is the home of Ben and Cathy Freeman. He worked at a pharmacy downtown and she was an RN.”
Hal held up his digital pad. “We already recovered his body when they cleaned the downtown area.”
“This place sure looks like they were planning for kids,” Tammy said. ‘Clearly didn’t get the chance.”
Hal glanced around and nodded. Then he pointed to the door. “You want me to look and see who is in there?”
