Read Online King of the Worlds by M. Thomas Gammarino - Free Book Online Page A

looked uncannily like Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors — so much so, in fact, that a certain fundamentalist contingent began watching that movie on repeat in search of eschatological clues. In general these spiritualists made no attempt at addressing the materialist claims of the Determinists and the Panspermists. They did not purport to know where or how many times life had originated, only that the mechanism behind whatever had happened was God, whom they had been calling “The Creator” for a pretty long time now after all.
    â€œYou must be the father?” the nurse said in flawless English.
    â€œI am.”
    â€œCongratulations! Erin did beautifully.”
    â€œWhat, you mean it’s done?”
    â€œCome meet your son.”
    â€œBut I was only gone twenty minutes.”
    â€œYour wife’s a pro at this. A real trooper.”
    â€œI guess so.”
    He walked over to Erin’s bedside.
    â€œIt’s really over already?”
    â€œIt really is.”
    She looked happy. She held up the bundle of swaddling clothes, and there it was, the bruised fruit of a human infant. They’d put a little blue snowcap on him.
    â€œI want to call him Dylan Jr.,” Erin said.
    â€œI thought you wanted to call him Earth?”
    â€œI did until I saw him. He looks just like you, don’t you think?”
    â€œLike me? I’d say he looks more like Gollum.”
    â€œHere, take him.”
    Dylan took the bundle in his arms. Feelings competed inside of him. He felt happy, of course. He’d begotten a son. A clean, pink, anatomically correct son.
    And yet he felt guilty too. Having grown up bombarded with cautionary tales and harrowing facts about Earth’s imminent overpopulation, 17 he couldn’t help but notice, knee-jerkily—or maybe just jerkily—that what he’d begotten was another son; and did you need two sons really? And then there were all the practical concerns. How many insipid papers would he have to grade to fund this kid’s education? Those little fingers, though: they were pretty sweet. Already Dylan Jr. was holding out one pinky like some tea-drinking aristocrat. Maybe this kid could be a better version of him someday? Dylan’s father had never given him much advice or dispensed much wisdom. He seemed to think words were just words and you had to learn through trials. The Buddha said something like that too, as Dylan recalled. Dylan, however, thought words could be pretty important—he taught literature after all—and he intended to give his children millions of the best ones he could come up with. His own life had not gone as he had hoped, but he would do everything in his power to ensure that theirs would.
    17 _____________
    Indeed, it was by and large the threat of food shortages, peak oil, and other depleted resources, coupled with the sense of wonder engendered in all but the most hard-hearted Americans by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series on PBS in 1980, that had led to the terraforming projects on Mars and Io that began in the early eighties — still very much works in progress — and, more successfully, to the search for habitable exoplanets, of which, at last count, some 4,696 had been identified, and, thanks to the refinement of QT in the mid-90s, 78 successfully settled. Overpopulation, it turned out, was not a major concern throughout the galaxy. Thousands of Super Earths had been probed and found to house at least some form of life. Most, like New Taiwan, were found to have given rise to life forms remarkably like Homo sapiens , but unlike humans, none had been subjected to so ruthless a process of natural selection that their reproductive instincts trumped their ecological ones. They had DNA, but for whatever reason — as yet undiscovered — it just didn’t seem to be as mean or shortsighted as the Terran variety. They were adept, in other words, at