Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 102

by Naim Kabir

  “You’ve been modified, adapted.”

  “Well, yes. I couldn’t do this interview on Earth. I’m grav-adapted.”

  “Frankly, that’s why many feel that we need to put Earthside people on the ground on Luna as soon as possible. To represent our point of view.”

  “Look, Gray’s not just any world. Not just a gas giant, useful for raw gas and nothing else. Not a Mercury type; there are millions of those littered out among the stars. Gray is going to be fully Earthlike. The astronomers tell us there are only four semiterrestrials outside the home system that humans can ever live on, around other stars, and those are pretty terrible. I—”

  “You forget the Outer Colonies,” the interviewer broke in smoothly, smiling at the 3D.

  “Yeah—iceballs.” He could not hide his contempt. What he wanted to say, but knew it was terribly old fashioned, was: Damn it, Gray is happening now, we’ve got to plan for it. Photosynthesis is going on. I’ve seen it myself—hell, I caused it myself—carbon dioxide and water converting into organics and oxygen, gases fresh as a breeze. Currents carry the algae down through the cloud layers into the warm areas, where they work just fine. That gives off simple carbon compounds, raw carbon and water. This keeps the water content of the atmosphere constant, but converts carbon dioxide—we’ve got too much right now—into carbon and oxygen. It’s going well, the rate itself is exponentiating—

  Benjan shook his fist, just now realizing that he was saying all this out loud, after all. Probably not a smart move, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Look, there’s enough water in Gray’s deep rock to make an ocean a meter deep all the way around the planet. That’s enougn to resupply the atmosopheric loss, easy, even without breaking up the rocks. Our designer plants are doing their jobs.”

  “We have heard of these routine miracles—”

  “—and there can be belts of jungle—soon! We’ve got mountains for climbing, rivers that snake, polar caps, programmed animals coming up, beautiful sunsets, soft summer storms—anything the human race wants. That’s the vision we had when we started Gray. And I’m damned if I’m going to let the Majiken—”

  “But the Majiken can defend Gray,” the interviewer said mildly.

  Benjan paused. “Oh, you mean—”

  “Yes, the ever-hungry Outer Colonies. Surely if Gray proves as extraordinary as you think, the rebellious colonies will attempt to take it.” The man gave Benjan a broad, insincere smile. Dummy, it said. Don’t know the real-politic of this time, do you?

  He could see the logic. Earth had gotten soft, fed by a tougher empire that now stretched to the chilly preserve beyond Pluto. To keep their manicured lands clean and “original” Earthers had burrowed underground, built deep cities there, and sent most manufacturing off-world. The real economic muscle now lay in the hands of ther suppliers of fine rocks and volatiles, shipped on long orbits from the Outers and the Belt. These realities were hard to remember when your attention was focused on the details of making a fresh world. One forgot that appetites ruled, not reason.

  Benjan grimaced. “The Majiken fight well, they are the backbone of the Fleet, yes. Still, to give them a world—”

  “Surely in time there will be others,” the man said reasonably.

  “Oh? Why should there be? We can’t possibly make Venus work, and Mars will take thousands of years more—”

  “No, I meant built worlds—stations.”

  He snorted. “Live inside a can?”

  “That’s what you do,” the man shot back.

  “I’m . . . different.”

  “Ah yes.” The interviewer bore in, lips compressed to a white line, and the 3Ds followed him, snouts peering. Benjan felt hopelessly outmatched. “And just how so?”

  “I’m . . . a man chosen to represent . . . ”

  “The Shaping Station, correct?”

  “I’m of the breed who have always lived in and for the Station.”

  “Now, that’s what I’m sure our audience really wants to get into. After all, the moon won’t be ready for a long time. But you—an ancient artifact, practically—are more interesting.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.” Stony, frozen.

  “Why not.” Not really a question.

  “It’s personal.”

  “You’re here as a public figure!”

  “Only because you require it. Nobody wants to talk to the Station directly.”

  “We do not converse with such strange machines.”

  “It’s not just a machine.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “An . . . idea,” he finished lamely. “An . . . ancient one.” How to tell them? Suddenly, he longed to be back doing a solid, worthy job—flying a jet in Gray’s skies, pushing along the organic chemistry—

  The interviewer looked uneasy. “Well, since you won’t go there . . . Our time’s almost up and—”

  Again, I am falling over Gray.

  Misty auburn clouds, so thin they might be only illusion, spread below the ship. They caught red as dusk fell. The thick air refracted six times more than Earth’s, so sunsets had a slow-motion grandeur, the full pallet of pinks and crimsons and rouge-reds.

  I am in a ramjet—the throttled growl is unmistakable—lancing cleanly into the upper atmosphere. Straps tug and pinch me as the craft banks and sweeps, the smoothly wrenching way I like it, the stubby snout sipping precisely enough for the air’s growing oxygen fraction to keep the engine thrusting forward.

  I probably should not have come on this flight; it is an uncharacteristic self-indulgence. But I could not sit forever in the Station to plot and plan and calculate and check. I had to see my handiwork, get the feel of it. To use my body in the way it longed for.

  I make the ramjet arc toward Gray’s night side. The horizon curves away, clean hard blue-white, and—chungl—I take a jolt as the first canister blows off the underbelly below my feet. Through a rearview camera I watch it tumble away into ruddy oblivion. The canister carries more organic cutures, a new matrix I selected carefully back on Station, in my expanded mode. I watch the shiny morsel explode below, yellow flash. It showers intricate, tailored algae through the clouds.

  Gray is at a crucial stage. Since the centuries-ago slamming by the air-giving comets, the conspiracy of spin, water and heat (great gifts of astro-engineering) had done their deep work. Volcanoes now simmered, percolating more moisture from deep within, kindling, kindling. Some heat climbed to the high cloud decks and froze into thin crystals.

  There, I conjure fresh life—tinkering, endlessly.

  Life, yes. Carefully engineered cells, to breathe carbon dioxide and live off the traces of other gases this high from the surface. In time. Photosynthesis in the buoyant forms—gas-bag trees, spindly but graceful in the top layer of Gray’s dense air—conjure carbon dioxide into oxygen.

  I glance up, encased in the tight flight jacket, yet feeling utterly free, naked. Incoming meteors. Brown clouds of dust I had summoned to orbit about Gray were cutting off some sunlight.

  Added spice, these—ingredients sent from the asteroids to pepper the soil, prick the air, speed chemical matters along. The surface was cooling, the Gray greenhouse winding down. Losing the heat from the atmosphere’s birth took centuries. Patience, prudence.

  Now chemical concerts in the rocks slowed. I felt those, too, as a distant sampler hailed me with its accountant’s chattering details. Part of the song. Other chem chores, more subtle, would soon become energetically possible. Fluids could seep and run. In the clotted air below, crystals and cells would make their slow work. All in time . . .

  In time, the first puddle had become a lake. How I had rejoiced then!

  Centuries ago I wanted to go swimming in the clear blue seas of luna, I remember. Tropical waters at the equator, under Earthshine . . .

  What joy it had been, to fertilize those early, still waters with minutely programmed bacteria, stir and season their primordial soup—and wait.

  What sweet mother Earth d
id in a billion years I did to Gray in fifty. Joyfully! Singing the song of the molecules, in concert with them.

  My steps were many, the methods subtle. To shape the mountain ranges I needed further infalls from small asteroids, taking a century—ferrying rough-cut stone to polish a jewel.

  Memories . . . of a man and more. Fashioned from the tick of time, ironed out by the swift passage of mere puny years, of decades, of the ringing centuries. Worlds take time.

  My ramjet leaps into night, smelling of hot iron and —chung!—discharging its burden.

  I glance down at wisps of yellow-pearl. Sulphuric and carbolic acid streamers, drifting far below. There algae feed and prosper. Murky mists below pale, darken, vanish. Go!

  Yet I felt a sudden sadness as the jet took me up again. I had watched every small change in the atmosphere, played shepherd to newborn cloud banks, raised fresh chains of volcanoes with fusion triggers that burrowed like moles—and all this might come to naught, if it became another private preserve for some Earthside power games.

  I could not shake off the depression. Should I have that worry pruned away? It could hamper my work, and I could easily be rid of it for a while, when I returned to the sleeping vaults. Most in the Station spent about one month per year working;. Their other days passed in dreamless chilled sleep, waiting for the slow metabolism of Gray to quicken and change.

  Not I. I slept seldom, and did not want the stacks of years washed away.

  I run my tongue over fuzzy teeth. I am getting stale, worn. Even a ramjet ride did not revive my spirit.

  And the Station did not want slackers. Not only memories could be pruned.

  Ancient urges arise, needs . . .

  A warm shower and rest await me above, in orbit, inside the mother-skin. Time to go.

  I touch the controls, cutting in extra ballastic computer capacity and—

  —suddenly I am there again, with her.

  She is around me and beneath me, slick with ruby sweat.

  And the power of it soars up through me. I reach out and her breast blossoms in my eager hand, her soft cries unfurl in puffs of green steam. Aye!

  She is a splash of purple across the cool lunar stones, her breath ringing in me—

  as she licks my rasping ear with a tiny jagged fork of puckered laughter,

  most joyful and triumpant, yea verity.

  The Station knows you need this now.

  Yes, and the Station is right. I need to be consumed, digested, spat back out a new and fresh man, so that I may work well again.

  —so she coils and swirls like a fine tinkling gas around me, her mouth wraps me like a vortex. I slide my shaft into her gratefully

  as she sobs great wracking orange gaudiness through me,

  her, again, her,

  gift of the strumming vast blue Station that guides us all down centuries of dense, oily time.

  You need this, take, eat, this is the body and blood of the Station, eat, savor, take fully.

  I had known her once—redly, sweet and loud—and now I know her again,

  my senses all piling up and waiting to be eaten from her.

  I glide back and forth, moisture chimes between us, she is coiled tight, too.

  We all are, we creatures of the Station.

  It knows this, releases us when we must be gone.

  I slam myself into her because she is both that woman—known so long ago,

  delicious in her whirlwind passions, supple in colors of the mind, singing in rubs and heats

  I knew across the centuries. So the Station came to know her, too, and duly recorded her—

  so that I can now bury my coal-black, sweaty troubles in her, aye!

  and thus in the Shaping Station,

  as was and ever shall be, Grayworld without end, amen.

  Resting. Compiling himself again, letting the rivulets of self knit up into remembrance.

  Of course the Station had to be more vast and able than anything Humanity had yet known.

  At the time the Great Shaping began, it was colossal. By then, humanity had gone on to grander projects.

  Mars brimmed nicely with vapors and lichen, but would take millennia more before anyone could walk its surface with only a compressor to take and thicken oxygen from the swirling airs.

  Mammoth works now cruised at the outer rim of the solar system, vast ice castles inhabited by beings only dimly related to the humans of Earth.

  He did not know those constructions. But he had been there, in inherited memory, when the Station was born. For part of him and you and me and us had voyaged forth at the very beginning . . .

  The numbers were simple, their implications known to school children.

  (Let’s remember that the future belongs to the engineers.)

  Take an asteroid, say, and slice it sidewise, allowing four meters of head room for each level—about what a human takes to live in. This dwelling, then, has floor space that expands as the cube of the asteroid size. How big an asteroid could provide the living room equal to the entire surface of the Earth? Simple: about two hundred kilometers.

  Nothing, in other words. For Ceres, the largest asteroid in the inner belt, was 380 kilometers across, before humans began to work her.

  But room was not the essence of the Station. For after all, he had made the Station, yes? Information was her essence, the truth of that blossomed in him, the past as prologue—

  He ambled along a corridor a hundred meters below Gray’s slag and muds, gazing down on the frothy air-fountains in the foyer. Day’s work done.

  Even manifestations need a rest, and the interview with the smug Earther had put him off, sapping his resolve. Inhaling the crisp, cold air (a bit high on the oxy, he thought; have to check that) he let himself concentrate wholly on the clear scent of the splashing. The blue water was the very best, fresh from the growing poles, not the recycled stuff he endured on flights. He breathed in the tingling spray and a man grabbed him.

  “I present formal secure-lock,” the man growled, his third knuckle biting into Benjan’s elbow port.

  A cold, brittle thunk. His systems froze. Before he could move, whole command linkages went dead in her inboards. The Station’s hovering presence, always humming in the distance, telescoped away. It felt like a wrenching fall that never ends, head over heels—

  He got a grip. Focus. Regain your links. The loss!—It was like having fingers chopped away, whole pieces of himself amputated. Bloody neural stumps—

  He sent quick, darting questions down his lines, and met . . . dark. Silent. Dead.

  His entire aura of presence was gone. He sucked in the cold air, letting a fresh anger bubble up but keeping it tightly bound.

  His attacker was the sort who blended into the background. Perfect for this job. A nobody out of nowhere, complete surprise. Clipping on a hand-restraint, the mousy man stepped back. “They ordered me to do it fast.” A mousy voice, too.

  Benjan resisted the impulse to deck him. He looked Lunar, thin and pale. One of the Earther families who had come to deal with the Station a century ago? Maybe with more kilos than Benjan, but a fair match. And it would feel good.

  But that would just bring more of them, in the end. “Damn it, I have immunity from casual arrest. I—”

  “No matter now, they said.” The cop shrugged apologetically, but his jaw set. He was used to this.

  Benjan vaguely recognized him, from some bar near the Apex of the crater’s dome. There weren’t more than a thousand people on Gray, mostly like him, manifestations of the Station. But not all. More of the others all the time . . . “You’re Majiken.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “At least you people do your own work.”

  “We have plenty on the inside here. You don’t think Gray’s gonna be neglected, eh?”

  In his elbow he felt injected programs spread, clunk, consolidating their blocks. A seeping ache. Benjan fought it all through his neuro-musculars, but the disease was strong.

  Keep your voice l
evel, wait for a chance. Only one of them—my God, they’re sure of themselves! Okay, make yourself seem like a doormat.

  “I don’t suppose I can get a few things from my office?”

  “‘Fraid not.”

  “Mighty decent.”

  The man shrugged, letting the sarcasm pass. “They want you locked down good before they . . . ”

  “They what?”

  “Make their next move, I’d guess.”

  “I’m just a step, eh?”

  “Sure, chop off the hands and feet first.” A smirking thug with a gift for metaphor.

  Well, these hands and feet can still work. Benjan began walking toward his apartment. “I’ll stay in your lock-down, but at home.”

  “Hey, nobody said—”

  “But what’s the harm? I’m deadened now.” He kept walking.

  “Uh, uh—” The man paused, obviously consulting with his superiors on an in-link.

  He should have known it was coming. The Majikens were ferret-eyed, canny, unoriginal and always dangerous. He had forgotten that. In the rush to get ores sifted, grayscapes planed right to control the constant rains, a system of streams and rivers snaking through the fresh-cut valleys . . . a man could get distracted, yes. Forget how people were. Careless.

  Not completely, though. Agents like this Luny usually nailed their prey at home, not in a hallway. Benjan kept a stunner in the apartment, right beside the door, convenient.

  Distract him. “I want to file a protest.”

  “Take it to Kalespon.” Clipped, efficient, probably had a dozen other slices of bad news to deliver today. To other manifestations. Busy man.

  “No, with your boss.”

  “Mine?” His rock-steady jaw went slack.

  “For—” he sharply turned the corner to his apartment, using the time to reach for some mumbo-jumbo—“felonious interrogation of inboards.”

  “Hey, I didn’t touch your—”

  “I felt it. Slimy little gropes—yeccch!” Might as well ham it up a little, have some fun.

  The Majiken looked offended. “I never violate protocols. The integrity of your nexus is intact. You can ask for a scope-through when we take you in—”

  “I’ll get my overnight kit.” Only now did he hurry toward the apartment portal and popped it by an inboard command. As he stepped through he felt the cop, three steps behind.