Playing God

by Sarah Zettel

  And now … And now what comes next? Lynn wondered toward the windows. What if they all do go home? What am I going to do?

  She shook her head and laughed quietly. Nussbaumer, you selfish little so-and-so.

  As it turned out, it was three hours before the crowds in the street shifted enough for Lynn to get through to the monorail that would take her out of the crater and across the rust-and-green landscape to the Ares 12 Human colony. On the way, in her private cabin with its opaqued window, she shucked out of her clean-suit and helmet and stuffed them into her duffel bag. The suits were awkward, but absolutely necessary. Direct contact with Humans caused massive anaphylactic reactions among the Dedelphi. The touch of a Human hand could raise welts on Dedelphi skin. Human dander sent the Dedelphi respiratory system into massive shock. The first encounter between Dedelphi and Humans had lasted three days before five of the Dedelphi died of heart and respiratory failure. There had been confusion and bloodshed on all sides before it was understood what had happened.

  Lynn brushed down her shoulder-length auburn hair. Since she didn't actually live with the Dedelphi, she'd been spared the necessity of depilating herself to keep her dander to a minimum.

  Ares 12 was a residential community. Its homes and stores were built out of native brick and stood glittering a thousand shades of red in the late-afternoon sun. The city founders had worked hard to get thornless climbing roses to grow in the soil that remained sandy after three generations, but they'd been successful. Roses—pink, orange, red, white, and yellow—grew in riotous bundles everywhere and climbed up walls the way ivy climbed up walls in towns on Earth. Lynn breathed their perfume in as she walked from the monorail station to the house she shared with her partner, David Zelotes.

  Unlike the streets in Crater Town, the streets of Ares 12 were empty. If any of the Humans had gotten the news about the Dedelphi, they were discussing it over the info-web, if at all.

  The cream-and-burgundy front room of her home was also empty when Lynn walked in, but she heard David's voice coming out of his study. A strange voice followed it.

  Caller on the line, she thought, and went into her own comfortably untidy study. The antique furniture was covered with disks, films, slivers, actual books, maps, dirty dishes, and half-empty coffee cups. The cleaning jobber sat in a corner, turned off, as usual, with a china mug and half a stale sandwich balanced on it.

  “Claude,” she called for the room voice as she dropped the duffel into the corner and herself into her desk chair. “Any messages?”

  “One urgent message from Emile Brador, Vice President in charge of Resource and Schedule Coordination for Bioverse Incorporated Enclave.”

  “What?” Lynn shot up in her chair. Bioverse were the ones who just signed the deal with the Dedelphi.

  “One urgent message—”

  “Claude, stop. Claude, deliver message.”

  “Vice President Brador asks Lynn Nussbaumer to connect with him as soon as possible. He has an open thread waiting for her and has left his address with her home system.”

  What does Bioverse want with me? “Claude, thread me through to Mr. Brador.”

  “Threading.” Pause. “Connection complete.”

  Lynn swiveled her chair to face her wall screen.

  Emile Brador, Vice President in charge of Resource and Schedule Coordination for Bioverse Incorporated Enclave, appeared on the screen. He was a tidy man, slender, but not small. His round, pale eyes were set in a pinched brown face, making him look like a startled owl. His office, or at least its simulation, was a model of antique gentility with a lot of leather chairs and wooden paneling.

  “Good evening, Dr. Nussbaumer,” said Brador. “I want to thank you for taking the time to speak to me.”

  “You're welcome, Mr. Brador,” replied Lynn in her best formal voice. “I confess, I'm a bit uncertain what you wanted to speak to me about though. I'm assuming it's got something to do with the foliation program for Crater Town?” Bioverse was a biotech corp. They were always looking for new techniques, or new genomes.

  “Actually, we'd like to extend you an offer of citizenship.”

  Lynn blinked, startled. “That's very interesting, but I'd have to think about it.”

  Brador nodded. “I fully understand, Dr. Nussbaumer. You are a citizen of excellent standing and family in the Miami Environs and Greater Florida Enclave. When you're not on Mars, you're living on land your family re-created from bottom sand and ancient records. There, you have your pick of lifetime employment situations.” He spread his blunt-fingered hands. “And what am I offering? A chance for you to cut your ties to your family, surrender your allegiances, and leave home for fifty years or more.” He leaned forward. “But I'm also offering a chance for you to help save an entire world.”

  Nice opening, Vice President Brador. She looked back at tidy Veep Brador in his tidy office. She felt her back stiffen.

  “Mr. Brador, exactly what do you want me for?”

  She meant to shock him, but Brador's mouth just quirked up. A good sign, probably.

  “As of yesterday,” he said, “Bioverse Inc. has a contract with the Dedelphi—”

  “Yes, I untied the web knot,” Lynn cut him off. “Impressive. I thought getting all the Dedelphi Great Families to agree on something was impossible.”

  “That's what I thought.” Brador nodded, and, for the moment, the vice presidential mannerisms dropped. “The Getesaph and the Fil actually contacted us over a year ago, but what they want… It was decided we couldn't make a contract without a worldwide agreement.”

  “What exactly are they asking you to do?” Genuine curiosity prompted Lynn's question. There'd been so many rumors, and she'd barely skimmed the first thread of the knot in the office with Praeis.

  “For a start, we're going to contract a biomedical team and put a stop to the plague they've unleashed on themselves.” For a second, Brador's smile seeped into his eyes. “That is what my colleague is speaking with your partner, Dr. Zelotes, about.”

  “That's ‘for a start.’” She made quotation marks with her fingers. “What's after that?”

  “We are also being asked to perform full-scale bioremediation efforts to clean the planet up after two centuries of extremely dirty warfare.”

  Lynn sat back and rested her elbows on the chair's arms. She knew a fair amount about the world that Humans called Dedelph. There were places on that world that glowed in the dark. There were places you couldn't see from space because of the industrial haze. The Dedelphi never developed anything like the bio- and eco-tech that had allowed Humans to repair Earth and build themselves some brand-new homes on other worlds. To clean and repair a whole world after all those centuries of eco-disaster… Something warm surged through her.

  With a little difficulty, Lynn set that feeling aside and looked back at Brador again.

  “What are we going to do about the anaphylactic reactions?” she asked. “You can't drop thousands of Humans, and it is going to be thousands, right?” Brador nodded. “Thousands of Humans in the middle of a population they can kill by breathing on them.”

  The vice president overshadowed Brador again. “That is an exaggeration.”

  Lynn shook her head. “Not by much, it isn't.”

  Brador reached over to his main desk and touched its surface. The upper right-hand corner of the office scene cleared, replaced by a simulation of a ragged archipelago of space stations on a field of night and stars. “The center of our operations will be space-based until we can evacuate the population—”

  “Until we what?” Lynn gripped her chair's arms. A couple of implants beeped in protest.

  Brador folded his hands in front of him. “We're going to move the population onto city-ships and go to ground with nanotech and biosculpt.”

  For a second, Lynn remembered she was in the middle of a very high-powered job interview with a representative of a huge corporate enclave.

  In the next second, she decided she didn't care. “Are you o
ut of your corporate mind?” she demanded. “We're talking about a billion people!”

  “One point three billion, by the most recent estimate,” replied Brador. He touched his desk again. The space simulation was replaced by a population-distribution chart.

  Lynn stared at it without reading it. “One point three billion people who, despite what we saw today, have a long history of hating each other's genomes and going for blood when they can.” She threw up both hands. “You're going to move them onto city-ships—” She stopped and did a quick calculation. “There aren't that many city-ships in existence!” Lynn turned away for a moment, staring at her window. The evening sun turned the stone veranda a brilliant scarlet. She faced her interviewer again, somewhat more in control of herself. “Vice President Brador, you can't be thinking of jamming these people into a bunch of retooled freighters! This… project… is going to take at least fifty years!”

  “Probably more like seventy-five.” His pinched face and round eyes were absolutely sober and serious. “And no, we're not putting them in retooled freighters. We are going to place them in fully functional city-ships, many of which will be custom-built.” The graphic changed to a construction blueprint. “Our engineering teams are already at work in the Dedelph system asteroid belts. We expect an eighty percent need fulfillment within the year.”

  “How are you planning on scheduling an evacuation for a billion people? Do you have any idea of how many a billion is?”

  “Generally: It's a thousand million.” His expression did not waver.

  “And what” said Lynn, looking him directly in the eye, “are you going to do with the plague victims during this evacuation?”

  Brador remained unfazed. “Each city-ship will be equipped with a hospital quarter capable of holding ten thousand patients. Again, we hope your partner, Dr. Zelotes, will be helping with their relocation and care.”

  Lynn rubbed her forehead. “You're going to have to keep a billion Dedelphi, sick or well, housed and fed and comfortable during the evacuation. You're going to have to have a responsive grievance team, a clear, concise schedule, a comprehensive crisis scenario…” She broke off, running her hand through her hair. “If you're not careful, this cure is going to be a whole lot worse than the disease.”

  “Yes. That's why we need you.” Brador leaned forward. What Lynn had thought was poor lighting on his face turned into a full day's worth of five o'clock shadow. Whatever he'd been doing lately, it hadn't even left him time to depilate. “Are you aware of the reputation you possess, Dr. Nussbaumer? Not only for your ability to work with the Dedelphi, but for your massive success in coordinating and directing their colony's foliation and agricultural efforts.”

  “I had a lot of help,” said Lynn, refusing to let herself be flattered. “And you still haven't said exactly what it is you want me for.”

  Brador's eyes glittered. “I want you to organize and coordinate the relocation. For a start.”

  Lynn opened her mouth and shut it again. “And for my next trick?”

  “Coordinate and manage the southern-hemisphere microreconstraction teams.”

  Lynn just sat there for a moment. To give a whole race their lives back, give them their world back, alive and clean and new…

  “You're going to be allowing time for a complete life-web survey, right? Micro- and macroscopic?”

  Brador nodded. “We have some teams down there already, and we're shipping out more this week. The bases will be up and running by the time you're there to help coordinate activities and information.”

  Twenty years’ work right there, mapping the ecosystem of an entire planet so they could take it apart and put it back together again. “And we'll be customizing the bioremediation tools based on the local ecostructures, correct?”

  “We'll be designing them from the ground up, if we have to,” said Brador. “If you and your colleagues decide we have to,” he added. “We will go over the entire planet one inch at a time with every nano we can breed.”

  “Why not just drop a couple of asteroids on the place and start from the ground up?” she asked half-facetiously. “It'd be faster, and cheaper.”

  Brador's face remained impassive. “The Dedelphi are hoping we can do this without completely destroying their civilizations’ infrastructures. We've agreed to try. Several of our teams are going through what archives and libraries there are, trying to find out what exactly conditions were like two hundred years ago.”

  There probably wouldn't be much. None of the Great Families had much time or many resources for pure research. That was just one of the reasons why, despite the fact that they were at least as old as Humanity, their technology was at late-twentieth-century levels, at best.

  Brador wasn't admitting it, but a lot of the bioremediation was going to be guesswork. They could interview the oldest Dedelphi they could find and hear what their mother's mother's mother had said the world was like. Maybe they'd find a record or two about some extinct creatures, but, as far as determining exact ratios of, say, rain forest to grassland, or the proportions of bacteria in the soil of a specific area, or the original extent of a coral reef, the teams would have to work from simulations and educated speculation. They really would be building a whole new world….

  A thought struck her. “What are the Dedelphi giving Bioverse in exchange for these miracles?”

  Brador's smile slipped back into place. “Anything useful we find.”

  Lynn sucked in a breath. Except for a handful of isolationist enclaves, all the worlds in the Human Chain ran on nanotech. Nanotech ran on proteins and DNA. For all the talk there'd been once about microscopic fans and gears, the really useful technology turned out to be tightly controlled biochemistry.

  Bioverse had been offered a planetful of untapped biochemistry.

  “Think about it.” A light shone in Brador's round eyes. “They've fusion-bombed whole islands, and yet there're still living organisms on them. Bacteria that are radiation-hardened. We can turn those into assemblers that can't be interrupted by a fluctuating electromagnetic field. They've got huge pits filled with untreated inorganic debris, and there're living organisms in there. We could make those into disassemblers of incredible efficiency. They've got algae blooms big enough to turn a whole bay colors and tough enough that all that industrial pollution can't wipe them out. That's a whole new way to eat gaseous toxins next time we want to convert a gas giant.” He waved his hand. “We had all this on Earth once, but we bulldozed it to clean the place up.” He must have caught something sour in her expression, because he stopped himself. “I know, I know, to be fair, we didn't know what we had, or how to handle it. We had to bulldoze it.” The light returned to his eyes. “But now we have a second chance.

  “We've got four conglomerates and six enclaves planning their economies for the next century around this project, Dr. Nussbaumer. We're going to save a world. Want in?”

  A billion people. A billion people to transport and shelter and accommodate in all the billion ways each of them would need. Negotiations and treaties to begin and maintain. They'd have to cap wars that had smoldered for centuries. They'd have to clean out and rebuild an entire world.

  “I'll need to consider it,” she said with what she hoped was an appropriate blend of aloofness and cautious interest.

  Brador's smile was merely polite, but Lynn had the distinct feeling she hadn't fooled him for a second. “Of course. Your room has my direct address. You may contact me at any time.”

  They said polite farewells, and Lynn cut the connection. She sat dazed at the enormity of the project Brador had just offered her. Finally, she shook herself and returned to the living room.

  David was there, his long frame stretched out on the couch. Three of the windows were clear to let the end of the Martian day shine into the room. The fourth showed the treaty signing. The Queens-of-All were just receiving the treaty boards from the Sisters-Chosen-to-Lead.

  She crossed the thick, burgundy carpet to stand behind the
sofa and laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Look at that.” David's voice was soft as he gestured toward the view on the screen. “They actually did it.”

  “I know, I saw.” Lynn watched the scene replay itself. “You wouldn't believe the scene in Crater Town.” Lynn shook her head without taking her eyes off the screen. “I always knew they had it in them, but I never thought I'd live to see it.”

  Suddenly, a familiar shape caught her gaze, and she squinted at the shadows on the right of the stage.

  A recorder stood on its tripod legs, panning its double lenses slowly to take in the audience packed shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the stage. A Human held its leash. Lynn leaned forward. A man. Old memories rang in the back of her head.

  “Screen, zoom in on male Human figure on the stage.”

  David cocked a questioning brow at her, but Lynn said nothing. The image repositioned itself so the thin, tan, bald man in his clean-suit was the only person on the screen. Involuntarily, Lynn gripped David's shoulder.

  “Arron,” she whispered. Arron tracked his recorder's path with his own gaze. From this close, it looked like he was searching their living room for something.

  “Arron?” asked David. “Not Arron Hagopian?”

  Lynn nodded. On the screen, Arron thumbed the recorder's leash box. It turned its lenses back toward the delegates on the stage. His gaze followed the lenses. His face was tight, unhappy, and years older than it should have been.

  What's the matter, Arron? Arron had once filled her life. She had always thought that someday, when she had the time, she'd find him again, and they'd be friends. She'd introduce him to David, and they'd get along great. But the time had never materialized, and without even thinking about it, she'd lost track of him.

  David looked from Lynn to the screen and back again. “Do you want to talk, or do you want to keep watching?”

  Lynn felt a smile forming. “Jealous?” she asked, tousling David's neatly cropped hair.

  He raised his right hand. “I am not now, nor have I ever been jealous of Arron Hagopian,” he announced seriously. “Although I have occasionally wanted to beat him senseless for not appreciating you.” David lowered his hand to let it rest on top of hers.