“This?” Vlajkovic said. “Nothing. An exercise in box-ticking. Want to see luxe? I’ll show you VIP country.”
The top floor of the hotel, L1, was still a hotel—a residential hotel for the highest-ranking UNVRP officials. Several of these had been turfed out to make room for the celebrities who’d arrived on the Starliner. The L1 mezzanine teemed with entourages. Dr. Hasselblatter’s six-year-old son was pounding on the keyboard of a grand piano. Celebrity bodyguards were arguing about “survivability,” obviously skeeved out by the third-hand creakiness of the whole set-up.
“Plus,” Vlajkovic said softly, “the water they’ll be drinking while they’re here comes from comets! It’s been buried out there in the crater for billennia! It’s all gritty and yucky! How have we managed to survive here for almost a century?”
Elfrida laughed, suddenly liking him better.
“That’s my boss,” she said, pointing to Dr. Hasselblatter, who was hauling his son away from the piano.
“He looks like an asswipe.”
“He is,” Elfrida said, with a twinge of disloyalty.
“Who’s that?”
“Zazoë Heap.”
“No, the one talking to her.”
Elfrida sighed. It had not taken Cydney long to latch onto the most click-worthy person in the room. “My girlfriend.”
Vlajkovic raised his eyebrows.
A peacekeeper spotted Vlajkovic and shouted for him to come and allay the celebrity bodyguards’ fears.
“Busy!” Vlajkovic yelled. “Ask Life Support.” He dragged Elfrida away.
They ran all the way down the ramp that spiraled around the atrium. Elfrida fetched up against a tank of sweet potatoes, laughing. Nutrient-fortified water splashed onto her boots. Vlajkovic was pink in the face from running. She smiled at him.
The blue-bereted head of the same peacekeeper poked over the L1 balustrade. “Hey, Mike!”
“I’m busy! Showing my new gofer around!”
“I’m not your gofer,” Elfrida said quietly.
“Have they assigned you someplace to live?”
“I think you’re supposed to do that.”
“Well, you could have one of the staff rooms. Where the bellboys and maids used to live. But if you’re gonna be sharing with your girlfriend, you might be better off in the test hab. R&D country.”
“The test hab sounds great,” Elfrida said gamely.
★
Five corridors opened off the atrium on every level, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Vlajkovic explained that the hab had been constructed by a gigantic auger that bored out a spiral with a hollow core, wider at the bottom. The radial corridors were the spaces between prefab hab blocks. Walking across the farm, Vlajkovic pointed to each corridor in turn. “Parking lot—we came that way. Recycling plant. Vault ...”
“Vault?”
“We’re still storing some stuff for Wrightstuff, Inc. Over that way is the life support division. They’re snooty. And this is the way to the test hab.”
The walls of the corridor flaked, rusty where moisture had oxidized the iron-rich regocrete. Elfrida felt a gentle, warm breeze on her face. The corridor ended at a double door printed in cheap plastic, with gaps at the top and bottom, like a toilet stall. The gap at the bottom was partially filled by a teal and white striped carpet.
“Hey.” Vlajkovic bent and ruffled the shag pile. “Move it.”
The carpet’s front edge lifted and curled over. It rubbed itself against Vlajkovic’s knuckles, like a cat. Then it retreated through the gap.
“They’re always getting out,” Vlajkovic said. “Sometimes they have help. You saw all those people wrapped in carpets in Admin? Helps to keep the temps out.”
“Smart carpets?”
“Smart, and then some. But I’ll let Richard explain. They’re his babies.”
Vlajkovic threw open the doors.
Elfrida gaped, the carpets—and everything else—forgotten.
They seemed to have stepped outdoors. The warm breeze smelt of juniper. She had a sense that the darkness ahead was vast. Scattered clusters of lights could have been the lights of villages, klicks away.
She took a step forward. Her boots crunched on black sand, as fine as flour.
Pearly, glowing patches on the ground drew her. She squatted beside the closest one. It was a creeping plant, like ivy, with weird fractal leaves, and the leaves glowed.
“These are groundfish,” said Vlajkovic. “Part animal, part vegetable. Giant lichen with jellyfish DNA to make them glow.”
Elfrida walked towards one of the distant clusters of lights. It turned out not to be as distant as she’d imagined. She gaped up at a cactus the size of an oak. The lights were its fruit, hanging like Chinese lanterns from branch-thick spine. Their warm radiance bathed Vlajkovic’s upturned face, softening his features.
“A lamp tree. This is the oldest one. It was planted about ten years ago.”
“Only ten?”
“Trees grow tall, fast, in space. Like kids.”
Hordes of insects hovered around the lamp tree’s fruit. Elfrida stepped on a squishy fallen one.
Something fought loose and scuttled over her boot. She yelled.
“Rats,” Vlajkovic said. “They came here from Earth with us. Can’t get rid of them, short of depressurizing the whole hab.”
Elfrida craned up into the darkness. The light of the lamp fruit revealed the roof of the cavern, a good fifty meters up. “You could fly a pedal glider in here.” The words fell far short of expressing her sense of wonder.
“It’s something else, isn’t it? I always wonder how it must look to people from Earth.”
“It’s like I’ve stepped into a sim.”
“Interesting that you say that. Which sim? Does it remind you of anything?”
Suddenly, she realized it did. But she hesitated to say it. “Uh, Homestead Venus? The immersion game that UNVRP gives away as a freebie? Have you ever played it?”
“Have I ever played it? That sim is based on the work of our R&D division, Goto.”
“Oh, crap. Oh my God, of course.”
This test hab was not a mimicry of the UNVRP promotional sim. It was the other way round.
“I have a farm on the Ishtar coast,” Elfrida confessed. For a while, she’d been addicted to the Homestead Venus sim. A sugar pill for the blues while she was on furlough. “But I always play on the daylight setting, so that’s why I didn’t recognize it immediately.”
Even after terraforming, Venus was expected to have a day several months long.
Vlajkovic nodded. “Everyone prefers light. But when our terraforming goals are achieved, settlers on Venus will have to live with long nights, too. As will all the flora and fauna they bring with them. So in here, we’ve implemented a best-guess 180-day cycle. This is the second month of night. We’ll start bringing the lights up in another month.”
Elfrida leaned against the trunk of the lamp tree. It was vertically ridged, warm to the touch. The spines were far enough apart that she could have climbed the tree, using them as rungs. “There aren’t any giant cactuses in the sim,” she said.
“It’s out of date. Oh, we’ve also got moringas, prickly pears, figs, all the stuff you probably grow on your farm.”
Elfrida nodded. She suddenly felt like she might cry. She’d come to Mercury, not expecting much, and arrived on Venus.
She’d come home.
★
A man trudged out of the darkness, carrying a toddler on his hip. Vlajkovic lifted a hand as if he’d been expecting him. “Richie! This is Richard Gates. Mastermind of the gengineering department.”
“Hi,” Richard Gates said, putting the toddler down. He looked to be about forty, and radiated amiability. A thatch of fair hair framed a pug-nosed, bearded face. “All a bit overwhelming?”
“A bit,” Elfrida confessed. “But this is incredible. I had no idea you were doing this kind of stuff.”
“We don’t put it in our public profi
le. People on Earth get weirded out by gengineering. Even when it’s happening on a different planet.” Gates shrugged. “It’s a shame: I’d love to see the potential applications for our smart sand, just for example, in the Sahara, or ...”
“Um, the Sahara’s not a desert anymore,” Elfrida said. “We licked it about eighty years ago. It’s a jungle now. But the Gobi is still a desert, and so’s a lot of southern North America. But how is the sand smart?” She bent and took a handful. It didn’t feel as dry as it looked. When she squeezed it, it held the imprints of her fingers.
“Mixed with adhesive nanoparticles that self-organize, based on an RNA sequence we ripped off from seashells,” Gates said proudly. “Venus’s highlands, of course, will be mostly desert. A scattering of the nanoparticles will help to fix the sand in place, preventing potentially ferocious sandstorms. Smart sand is also useful in other ways, such as …”
“Papa!” squealed the toddler. They all looked down. The child was tearing fistfuls out of the decayed lampfruit that the rat had been at.
Calmly, Vlajkovic scooped the child up. “OK, Bette,” he said, kissing her cheek. “That’s enough of an immune system boost for one day.”
“Dada! I eat lots of fruit!”
Dada? Elfrida looked from Vlajkovic to Gates, and back again. “Are you guys, uh?”
“Fifteen years of wedded bliss,” Vlajkovic said. “Two kids, and the best years of our lives still ahead of us. Or not.” His smile faded. “Depends, doesn’t it?”
“On what?”
“Among other things, on you.”
vi.
They walked uphill, via a prickly-pear orchard and an olive grove. Richard Gates explained that the test hab occupied the intake shaft that spiraled around the hab. Clean air blew down from the atmospheric rebalancing unit at the top of the shaft, and dispersed naturally around the hab. Hence, the air in here was better than anywhere else—which was why people chose to live in here, even if it meant living in the dark half the time. Space-dwellers prized air quality; they could discuss it the way Earth-dwellers discussed food and wine.
Insects whirred around them in the dark. One landed on Elfrida’s arm. It looked exactly like a giant mosquito.
“A hydrosquito,” Gates smiled, as she swatted at it. “Not interested in your blood. They’re strictly vegetarian. They feed on the lamp fruits.”
“And what feeds on them?”
“There’s one over there.” Gates pointed to a shaggy animal, the size of a Shetland pony, wandering near the banks of UV lights that bathed the orchard (“a temporary fix, until we dark-adapt the trees”). The animal’s head darted. A long tongue flickered.
“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. That’s what we have here. But it’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. As they approached, Elfrida heard several different stereos playing several different genres of music. 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 UNVRP personnel and dependent numbers she’d been given—by Vlajkovic—were obviously way low.
“Unreported births?” she said to Vlajkovic.
“And 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.
Vlajkovic 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. God 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 came to help. 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. 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. She bit into a cookie. “Yum. Is this what you wanted the food coloring for?”
“Huh?” Gates said.
“For baking?”
“Oh! 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. The rats should have been attracted to them. But they 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.
The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy Page 65
