Evolution

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As the plane descended toward Darwin it ran into a cloud of billowing black smoke. The windows suddenly darkened, blocking out the Australasian summer light, and the engines whined.

Joan had been talking quietly to Alyce Sigurdardottir. But now she shifted in her seat, the belt uncomfortably tight across her bulge. This was a roomy, civilized airplane, with even the economy seats set in blocks of four or six around little tables, quite unlike the cattle truck conditions Joan remembered from a childhood spent traveling around the world with her paleontologist mother. In the year 2031, a time of troubles, not so many people traveled, and those who did were granted a little more comfort.

Suddenly, as danger brushed by, she was aware of where she was, the people around her.

Joan watched the girl sitting opposite Alyce and herself. The girl, aged around fourteen at a guess, with a silvery gadget stuck in her ear, had been viewing tabletop images of the toiling Mars lander. Even here, ten thousand meters above the Timor Sea, she was connected to the electronic web that united half the planet’s population, immersed in noise and shining, dancing images. Her hair was pale blue — aquamarine, perhaps. And her eyes were bright orange red, the color of the Martian dust that filled up the smart tabletop. Doubtless she featured many other genetic “improvements” less visible, Joan thought sourly. Cocooned in her own expanded consciousness the girl had not even registered the presence of the two middle-aged women sitting opposite her — nothing save for a slight widening of the eyes at Joan’s figure when she had sat down, a reaction which Joan could read like a book: Somebody so old got pregnant? Yuck…

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