“Is that …”
“A cow. It gets nearly all its water from hydrosquitoes, in the form of lampfruit juice from the insects’ stomachs. Getting eaten pays off for the hydrosquito, too: its egg sac is excreted intact, and gestates in the cow’s feces.”
The cow lifted its tail. Gates loped over to it and picked something up. He came back, showing off a baggie that contained several hard balls of manure, more like goat droppings than cowpats.
“We haven’t solved the temperature problem yet. Temperatures will be wide-ranging in situ, we expect, from 50°C through a low of about 15°C on the nightside, which is what we have here. But that’s not warm enough for hydrosquito eggs to hatch. So as of now we have to hatch them in incubators.” He pocketed the baggie.
Beyond the orchard, the curving inner wall of the intake shaft suddenly disclosed a village, lit by towering lamp trees. Prefab laboratories dominated a sprawl of igloo-like houses, the same dull black as the sand, with floppy-peaked domes. Several different stereos played several different genres of music. A printer spat out a haze of toxic dust and a volley of fabric diapers. People were cooking out in front of their igloos, savory aromas drifting from hot plates and Meal Wizards. Small children frolicked barefoot. Teenagers and young men loitered in the central square, outside the main R&D laboratory.
Elfrida counted heads and made a rough population estimate of five to six hundred. The personnel and dependent numbers she’d been given—by Vlajkovic—were obviously low
“Unreported births?” she said to Vlajkovic.
“Going back two generations. Plus a bunch of illegals from Luna and the NEOs. They come for the gravity. Who are you going to tell?”
“No one,” she said, with the force of a vow.
He lowered his voice. “We’ve got a drug problem. I’m being honest with you here. Also, some of the kids are into smuggling. The two things are related, of course. Also related: there aren’t enough jobs to go around. That would change if we could get permission to commercialize some of the concepts Richard and his team have developed … but no. Dog forbid the Project should make money, as well as spend it.”
Gates, ahead of them, stopped between two igloos. “What about here, Ms. Goto?” He was as cheerful as ever, not having heard their conversation.
“It’s Elfrida, and, um, what about here? It’s a nice gap between two igloos.”
“Perfect,” Gates said. He knelt and began to scoop up the sand with his hands, building a wall.
Elfrida stared for a moment and then caught on. The smart sand was self-organizing. That was why all the ‘igloos’ were the same color as the sand. They were made of it. They were sandcastles.
People stopped by to help. Shoulder to shoulder, working by the light of the groundfish that grew in the crevices of the neighboring sandcastles, they quickly built a knee-height wall enclosing a circle about four meters across. The sand could be moulded, like a cross between playdough and damp beach sand—a comparison that would, of course, make no sense to these people. None of them had ever seen the sea, much less played as children on Mediterranean beaches.
Soon, their helpers drifted away, but the sandcastle kept growing. The RNA of the nanoparticles in the sand automatically formed the walls into spiral ridges, just like a sea-shell. More sand crawled in from the bottom to bulk up the walls. It was like watching a flower open: you couldn’t quite see it moving, but it kept getting bigger and more beautiful.
At last, the newborn house knotted itself shut at the top. It was a starter version of all the others in the village.
Elfrida looked up at Vlajkovic. “Would this work on Venus? Higher gravity. Wouldn’t the roofs collapse under their own weight?”
“We could make the sand stickier. This is just a prototype. But what’s it matter? We’re on Mercury, and it works here. Go in and check it out.”
Elfrida ducked through the flared mouth of the structure. The floor inside was bare rock, frigid to the touch. All the sand from in here had gone into the walls. The ‘desert’ could only be 15-20 centimeters deep. She stood in darkness, stretched her arms up and touched the ceiling. Grains of sand fell on her face.
“Careful,” Vlajkovic shouted in. “We still have to give it a finishing coat of splart.”
His daughter, Bette, toddled in. She held a bunch of groundfish leaves in each chubby fist, lighting the way for Gates, who was dragging something heavy. “You’ll need this,” he smiled.
It was a large rose-pink carpet.
★
Vlajkovic and Gates took her back to their place for coffee. They lived in one of the largest sandcastles in the village, built around a two-storey plastisteel scaffolding that gave it a loft as well as a living/dining area. Richard made the coffee, and slid a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies onto the table. “I’m the domestic one.”
“He knows how to put nutriblocks into a Meal Wizard and press the buttons,” Vlajkovic stage-whispered.
Elfrida rested her elbows on the kitchen table. The living/dining room overflowed with handcrafted flatware, baby vids in wall frames, and oversized cushions. It was a real home, and it got her thinking about what she could do with her own sandcastle. All those hours of crafting with Louise 361AX might come in handy after all. She bit into a cookie. “Yum. Is this what you wanted the food coloring for?”
“Huh?” Gates said.
“For baking?”
“Oh! No. Did you bring it?”
“Yeah, I ordered it from Dronazon. They must have thought I was starting a catering business.”
“You. Are. Awesome,” Gates said. “Maybe I should explain. Modern food coloring is potent stuff. If you’ve ever got it on your hands, you know what I mean. So it makes great carpet dye.”
“It’s for the carpets?”
“We have to have some way of telling them apart. They’re not exactly alive, but they’re not not alive, either. We based them on sea anemones. They were supposed to keep the rats down …”
“How would that work? Rats are a lot faster than carpets.” Elfrida giggled, charmed by the absurdity of what she’d just said.
“Yes, but it’s cold in here, and the carpets are warm. Their tentacles are heating elements. We did that by programming their cnidocytes to crystallize sodium acetate when compressed, like those gloves that heat up when you rub your hands together. But the rats learned to avoid them …”
“So Richard, refusing to give up on his beloved carpets, introduced a new prey species that they could actually catch,” Vlajkovic said, chewing a cookie. “Guess what?”
“Um, no idea.”
“Slugs. Got them in a shipment of organic lettuces from an NEO,” Vlajkovic cackled. “Guess how the farm crew feels about that?”
“The carpets are popular with the entire workforce, thank you, Mike,” Richard said with dignity. “Anyway, I like to use different colors to keep track of the production runs. Food coloring is the cheapest solution, but it’s one of those things we just can’t get here. Thank you.”
Elfrida spread her hands. “Vegetarian mosquitoes, insectivorous cows, self-building sandcastles, living carpets … I’m almost frightened to ask what else you’ve got down here!”
There was an unexpected silence.
Elfrida cleared her throat. “Um, you’re not doing anything dangerous, are you?”
“What were you thinking of?” Vlajkovic said.
“Oh, I … dunno. A lot of times, isolated colonies develop odd beliefs … extremist views …”
“Are you talking about religion?” Elfrida flushed; she had been avoiding that incorrect word. Vlajkovic shook his head. “Did you see any churches out there, temples, mosques? Religion is the only problem we haven’t got.”
Elfrida felt disappointed, rather than relieved. She knew they were hiding something. She pushed, “Yeah, but all this gengineering. It’s kind of grey-zone, legally speaking. Isn’t it?”
Gates rearranged the cookies on the plate, his mouth set in an uncharact
eristic line. “Nope. We develop models for a post-terraforming ecology on Venus. That’s the mission, that’s what we do.”
“I just find the secrecy a bit odd.”
“As we discussed, people on Earth get nervous about geningeering. Which is why it has to be done out here.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t worry,” Vlajkovic said. “We’re not cloning human beings, or anything like that!”
Clattering footsteps interrupted the conversation. A swirl of Black Watch plaid parachuted down from the loft and grabbed two handfuls of cookies. Then it headed back to the ladder.
“Jake!” Richard yelled. “That’s antisocial! Say hello to our guest!”
“Hello, guest,” said a boy’s voice from inside the plaid cloak.
“Also, too many cookies before dinner!”
Elfrida laughed. “I forgot you had two children. Jake?”
“Our hearts’ delight,” Gates said glumly.
Elfrida was just as happy to take a break from the conversation. “Wink,” she said to the men, and climbed the ladder to the loft.
It was a teenager’s lair, electronics everywhere, smart posters blinking and flashing on the steeply pitched underside of the sandcastle’s roof. Jake sprawled in front of a surround screen. He had Vlajkovic’s skull-like face and would soon have Gates’s stocky build. His skin and hair was as pale as theirs.
“Hi there. What are you playing?”
“Nothing,” Jake said with his mouth full of cookie. He picked up a headset and fitted it over his blue-dyed hair.
The screen showed a twilit desert, machines zipping around. “I was just curious,” Elfrida said.
Jake suddenly smiled. He took off his headset and offered it to her. “Want to try?”
“Sure.”
“You’re an adult, so I guess you have retinal implants?”
“No, contacts.”
“That works. You won’t need the screen. Want the gloves?”
“No, I don’t want to mess up your game. I’ll just take a peek.” Elfrida took the headset and resized it to her skull. Her contacts flashed up a log-in screen. She entered her Space Corps ID and the local network password she’d been given on arrival.
And stubbed her toe on a stone, and went tumbling—slowly, in one-third Earth’s gravity—towards regolith as flat as a skillet covered with cooked-on dirt. Pebbles sprayed up around her in slow motion when she hit.
She rolled.
Leapt agilely to her feet.
She wasn’t doing it. Jake still had control of the game. She had the sensory feeds, was all.
A six-legged spider, standing on its hind pair of legs, pointed at her with a front leg and mimed hilarity, clutching its thorax.
The spider had a jackhammer attachment for a head, surmounted by improbable Bambi eyes.
Elfrida looked down (Jake doing it, not her). She, too, had six legs, the middle ones vestigial clamps.
She turned in a circle. She was standing in front of a crawler unit whose treads dwarfed her. And that was just one of the crawler units supporting a bucket-wheel excavator of monstrous size. Its spindly boom angled down to a point about a kilometer away in the stygian gloom. Linear spurts of dust rose from its head.
Smaller bots, ranging from the size of a house to the size of a car, scurried and rolled and trudged alongside the bucket-wheel excavator. They picked up the rocks that fell off the excavator’s conveyor belt, scanned the ground, dug scrapes, took samples. Dumptrucks loaded themselves and jolted off towards an even larger machine crawling on the horizon.
~Do you wish to proceed? said a bland, high voice in the earphones of the headset. Elfrida jumped.
~I get it. This isn’t a sim. It’s a feed, she subvocalized. ~And you’re ..?
~I am the mechanical intelligence of the phavatar you are currently operating as an observer. My designation is VC000632. But you may call me Gonzo. That is Jake’s nickname for me.
~VC000632, what am I observing here?
~This is UNVRP’s surface mining operation. It is presently located on the volcanic flood plain of Borealis Planitia, at 75.4° N, 101.2° W, at the edge of the territory claimed by Wrightstuff, Inc.
The whole cavalcade was moving west at a jogging pace. Left behind, Elfrida’s phavatar stood alone on the despoiled plain. The rocks were starting to get some color in them. Faded browns and greys.
Jake made her turn 180 degrees.
She stiffened.
The eastern horizon glowed like the door of a furnace. White-hot light limned the hills. Streamers of solar gas fingered the darkness.
“Run! For dog’s sake, Jake, run!”
Vlajkovic’s voice broke into her fascination. Without willing it, she turned and bounded over the rubble-strewn plain. She had forgotten the trick of running on four legs, but that was OK, because she wasn’t running, Jake was. In just a few minutes the rest of the mining crew had got a long way ahead. She had to sprint to catch up, and it broke her heart, because she was running away from the sun.
Hands snatched the headset off her skull, jammed it onto Jake’s. The kid was amazingly good at this. He had been running blind, without being able to feel his feet, just watching the screen. Now that he had positional feedback, he ran faster. The screen returned to its original murky state.
Vlajkovic shook a fist at his son. “Not. Funny.”
“Da-ad. I’m not stupid. I wasn’t going to stay there much longer. Anyway, Sam can operate in the sun.”
“You could have lost him.”
“No, I couldn’t. He’s viable up to 130 degrees. It’s only just above freezing where he’s at.” Jake glanced at Elfrida. “So, how did you like having six legs?”
“You’ll have to try harder than that to creep me out,” Elfrida smiled. “I’ve operated vinge-classes before.”
“Oh.”
“She’s Space Corps,” Vlajkovic said. “They do telepresence missions all the time.”
“Well, I haven’t done a lot of work with industrial phavatars like these,” Elfrida said modestly.
Jake scowled. “Good for you. Now please leave me alone. I have to work.”
Vlajkovic drew her down the ladder. Gates was recycling their coffee cups, shaking the dregs of liquid into the liquid collection bucket.
“Funny,” Elfrida said. “I almost forgot that this is officially a mining facility. Is he working on the trial run for the Phase Five ramp?”
She had forgotten Vlajkovic’s still-unexplained opposition to the Phase Five ramp. She remembered it now, but he just shrugged. “Are you gonna report us for letting a twelve-year-old operate a vinge-class?”
Twelve. She had overestimated his age because he was taller than her. Spaceborn. “I don’t think there’s actually any law against it. If he’s mature enough not to break it …”
“He won’t,” Gates said. “He knows how much they cost.”
“He’s been doing it for years,” Vlajkovic said. “No accidents yet.” He reached for his coat, signalling to her that it was time to go.
Elfrida sought to reassure them. “Well, it was great to get a feel for the mining operation.”
She’d expected to do that in a telepresence cubicle in Operations, not in the loft above Vlajkovic’s living-room.
“Sigh,” Vlajkovic said. “It’s pretty basic. Move around the planet, staying ahead of the dawn. Machinery is powered by microwave charging beams from solar arrays in orbit. Ore gets processed by our mobile vacuum smelter. Just like the big boys do it, at one-one-hundredth the scale.”
Gates said, “Terrestrial strip mines used to generate tons and tons of overburden: soil and soft rock that ultimately was discarded. But here, since the planet is more or less made of metal, we can just scrape the surface off and melt it down. We’re peeling Mercury like an orange, round and round.”
His tone was sad.
Elfrida said, “I’m just curious to know why Jake isn’t in school. It’s a legit question, OK?”
“And
the answer,” Vlajkovic said, “is that he’s good at this. Better for him to work, develop his skills, than waste another five years learning about the doggone history of dog-be-damned Earth … and end up unemployed, like the rest of the kids in this hab.”
Elfrida raised her hands, palms out. “It is not my fault.”
Vlajkovic glared. Then he forced a smile. “I know, I know, not everyone from Earth is an enemy. Just feels that way sometimes. Come on, Elfrida. Let’s get that coat of splart on your sandcastle, so you can move in tonight.”
vii.
“I am not living in a freaking mud hut,” Cydney said.
“It isn’t a mud hut. It’s a sandcastle.”
“Urrr. Mud, sand, whatever. I feel like I’m in a village back home.”
Cydney originally came from Xhosaland, where her father was a big deal.
“One of those places where Joburg buppies go to get in touch with their roots. By living in a freaking wattle and daub hut, and switching off their network connection.”
“Nobody’s asking you to switch off your network connection,” Elfrida said, nettled. Her new neighbors had helped her to fix up the sandcastle. There was an ergoform sofa jarked flat for a double bed, a splarted-sand desk for Cydney to work at, a rail for all the new clothes Cydney had bought on the Starliner, and of course the carpet, now contentedly digesting the fleas that had come out of the second-hand sofa. All right, so it was cramped by Earth standards, but by space hab standards, this was luxury.
Cydney was still ranting. “Are we going to get to eat umngqusho, too? And will there be drumming sessions? I know, let’s all sing hymns!”
“They don’t have any churches,” Elfrida said rather sadly.
“They don’t have any showers, either. I guess that’s why they smell so authentic.”
“Cyds?”
“What?”
“You do know you’re a raging snob?”
Elfrida’s tone was gentle. Cydney looked thunderous. Then she threw herself full-length on the sofa-bed. “My father’s a chieftain. I can’t help it.”
The Mercury Rebellion: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 3) Page 5
