Asimov's SF, July 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "This time, we'll build a conservatory,” one young atum declared. “That's how it should have been done in the first place. And again, Simon, I'm so very sorry for your tragedies."

  Naomi was a pretty youngster who used her beauty and a charming, obvious manner to win favors and fish for compliments. She liked to talk. She loved listening to her own smart, insistent voice. Rumor had it that her body was equipped with artificial openings and deployable prods, leaking intoxicating scents and wondrous doses of electricity. Simon was curious about her body, but he didn't have the rank or adequate desire to pursue his base urges. Watching one of Naomi's performances was as close as he wanted to be. Most of his colleagues felt threatened by her promise. But even when the girl spoke boldly about her incandescent future, Simon couldn't take offense. His second century had brought with it a tidy and quite useful epiphany: Everyone would eventually fail, and if their failures were long-built, then the subsequent collapses would be all the more dramatic.

  At this particular moment, the atums were chanting the usual praises about conservatories.

  "Oh, I'm not convinced,” said Simon quietly.

  Naomi laughed, and with a patronizing tone asked, “Oh my, why not?"

  "A roof wouldn't have helped. In the end, nothing would have changed."

  She couldn't let that statement go unchallenged. “But if we'd had a lid over the sky, we'd have controlled the weather more effectively. The sunlight, the upper atmosphere's chemistry. All the inflows would have belonged to us."

  "But not four and half billion years of geologic habit,” he countered.

  "Geologic habit,” she muttered, as if she couldn't quite understand the phrase.

  That's when the chief atum interjected her presence into the conversation. With a loud breezy voice, she summarized both positions. Then after putting her own opinion into jargon-laded terms, she added, “Too much of the Mars business depended on biological means. That's where they went wrong. Don't trust life; it doesn't care about you. The physical realm is what matters, and conservatories are wonderful tools. They're sure to be the last word in our business."

  Every face but one nodded, the matter settled.

  Yet despite all of this polished certainty, only one world-encompassing conservatory was close to being finished, and that was a special circumstance. Luna was the easiest world to enclose inside a semi-transparent bubble: The low gravity, the proximity of Earth, thriving local industries, and the absence of weather and political troubles. Its roof would hold any new atmosphere close. Double panes of diamond, transparent and strengthened with nanofibers, would keep space at bay. The engineering was straightforward, and construction should be relatively easy. But “should be” often proved illusionary. The Luna project was already 40 percent over-budget, the critical water from asteroids and comets was being chased by other terraforming projects, including Venus, and even the most favorable scenario warned that twenty more years would pass before the first soft winds of an oxygen-neon atmosphere began to blow across the dusty plains of Nearside.

  Simon's doubts could be misplaced. Indeed, he hoped he was wrong. But still, this one-time Martian was suffering a nagging yet familiar sense of standing at the brink of another precipice.

  The other atums had happily left Simon behind. The topic of the moment, and the passion of their professional lives, was Venus. Small projects were being discussed. Most of their work involved the atmosphere and heat dissipation, the obvious solutions offered and debated and then rejected, soon to be replaced with other equally satisfactory answers. When he bothered to listen, Simon could tell who was sleeping with Naomi and who was maneuvering to take their place. It would have been funny, if not for the grave consequences lashed to animal lust. He didn't believe in Great Deities, but if the gods were watching, they would surely laugh to see how tiny hormones and glands smaller than hands could manipulate the future of entire planets.

  Presiding over this working lunch was the chief atum for the Third District, High Atmosphere and Future Climate Department. She was ten years Simon's junior but much more successful, and when she spoke, the room fell silent. Though that didn't mean people were listening. This group wasn't large or diverse, but within its ranks were enough opinions and rampant ego that no authority could rule, much less orchestrate the thoughts of so many well-trained, singularly focused minds.

  Venus was the topic, but the planet existed only as numbers and one staggeringly complicated model. Except for the tug of gravity and the specifics in the numbers, this could have been any meeting of atums sitting inside any windowless room, on Luna or Callisto or Pallas, or any other portion of the Solar System being relentlessly and utterly transformed.

  When the official business was finished, at last, the chief looked longingly at Naomi. “Good job, and thank you,” she told everybody.

  Everybody wanted out of the room.

  But without warning, the chief said Simon's full name and caught his eyes, not quite smiling when she said, “You have a new assignment. For the time being, you're off the hydrological team."

  A colleague must have accused him of being difficult or incompetent, or perhaps both. It had happened before. He might be a 128-year-old man, but he always felt like a little boy when he was embarrassed or shamed.

  Except that nothing was wrong, at least on this occasion. The chief smiled, admitting, “It's because we have a visitor coming. A representative from . . .” She hesitated. “From the Zoo Project."

  "Another collection mission?” Simon inquired.

  "Oh, these darlings always have another mission,” the chief complained.

  Simon nodded, waiting.

  "I need you to help with her hunting and keep tabs on whatever she finds.” The chief stared at him, smiling suspiciously. “Do you know a woman named Lilly?"

  Too quickly, Simon said, “No."

  "That's odd,” the chief mentioned. “She requested you by name."

  * * * *

  There were myriad routes to achieving a long healthy lifespan. Simon preferred small measures left invisible to the naked, unmodified eye. But the woman beside him wasn't motivated by tradition. Native flesh would always be perishable, and the cosmetically proper synthetics were usually too fragile to last more than a few years. What proved most durable were colonies of engineered microbes, metabolically efficient and quick to repair themselves—a multitude of bacteria infusing the perpetually new skin with sensitive, highly adaptable neural connections. These were popular tools among the very young and the determined elderly. Yet Simon couldn't remember ever meeting anyone who had endowed herself with sucn a vibrant, elaborate exterior.

  "I'm sorry,” the very colorful woman began.

  Just why she was sorry, Simon didn't know. But he nodded politely, resisting the urge to ask.

  For the next few minutes, they sat in silence. The sky-driver continued on its programmed course, little to see and nothing to do for the present. Most of the world's air lay beneath them. The sun was low on their left, the only inhabitant of the nearly black sky, slowly descending toward its retrograde setting. The conservatory was a grayish-green plain far below them, absolutely smooth and comfortingly bland. Venus was not Luna, and this project was far more complicated than erecting a high roof above a compliant vacuum. Only limited sections had been completed—barely 9 percent of the eventual goal—and even that portion was little more than the scaffolding meant to support arrays of solar-power facilities and filters and spaceports and cities of robots that would do nothing but repair and improve this gigantic example of artless architecture. Was his guest full of questions? Most visitors wanted to hear about the nano-towers rooted in the rigid Venusian crust, holding these expensive gigatons far above the dense, dangerous atmosphere. People might know the facts, but it soothed them to learn about the marvelous engineering. Everyone was the center of his own important story. Everybody secretly feared that if some piece of the conservatory failed, it would happen beneath his own important, tragically mo
rtal feet.

  At last, the silence ended. Lilly touched Simon for the first time. Hot orange fingertips brushed against his forearm. “I am sorry,” she said again. “He was a good father, I know. I'm sure you miss him terribly."

  Simon's reaction surprised both of them. Turning toward the gaudy woman, he remarked sharply, “My mother was the good parent. Dad spent his life collecting lovers, and I didn't like his girls at all."

  The violet face was bright and hot, full of fluids more complicated than blood. Perhaps the woman was insulted. Maybe she wanted to turn the sky-driver back, ready to exchange this atum for one less difficult. But nothing about her seemed hurt or even surprised. She smiled for a few moments. Saying nothing, she let her glassy dark eyes absorb everything about the old man beside her. Then her hand gripped his wrist, a wave of heat threatening to burn his pale, dry skin.

  "Nonetheless, I'm sorry,” she said.

  Simon pulled his arm back.

  "I didn't treat either of you fairly. At the lake . . . when I was drilling . . . all I cared about was saving the natives, by whatever means. . . ."

  Here was the central problem, Simon realized. It wasn't that this woman and his father had an affair, or even that they might have loved one another. What rankled was that she had willfully used him as a tool.

  "How are the Martians?” he inquired.

  "Happily sleeping inside a thousand scattered laboratories."

  "That's sad,” he thought aloud.

  "Really? Why?"

  "Life should be busy,” Simon proposed. “Not hibernating inside common freezers."

  Now Lilly took offense. She said nothing, but her back stiffened and she maintained her silence until it was obvious that she didn't accept any complaints about her life's work. They were approaching their destination. As the sky-driver began its descent, Simon risked mentioning, “I'm probably mistaken. But I thought the Zoo already grabbed up every species of air-plankton."

  The native Venusians had had a robust ecosystem, but compared even to Martians, they were an uncomplicated lot.

  "We have every native in bottles,” she said stiffly, nursing her wounds.

  "And the native populations have crashed here,” he pointed out. “No light gets through, except for some infrared, and the sulfuric clouds are dispersed and too cold by a long measure."

  "True enough,” she agreed.

  Then she touched herself, her face growing brighter as it warmed with enthusiasm. “But new species are evolving every day, and isn't that exciting news?"

  * * * *

  It was boring news, but a truce had been declared. The old man and even older woman stopped mentioning their differences and histories. They were professionals, each quietly pursuing a quick and narrow mission. The sky-driver set down and linked up with a large dome filled with sleeping machines and assorted elevators. Donning lifesuits, they boarded a small elevator and descended ten kilometers. Simon watched Venus through the monitors. Lilly busied herself by readying a suitcase-sized apparatus that would inhale and filter the carbon-dioxide atmosphere, pulling every viable microbe from the mayhem of dust and industrial pollution. The nano-tower was more air than structure—hexagons of webs and sturdy legs, each side nearly a kilometer in length, its feet firmly planted on the slopes of Aphrodite Terra. Their final destination was a platform intended as a hive for robots waiting to repair what was rarely damaged. There was no visible light, but there was wind and a stubborn atmosphere still centuries away from collapsing into a newborn ocean of soda water. Obviously Lilly had done similar work on other towers. She moved with purpose. Her machine walked next to her, waiting patiently as she investigated one site and then another. Experience or perhaps intuition allowed her to decide where the best results would be found. Then she told the machine, “Deploy,” and it gladly grabbed the railing with three arms and flung its body over the edge, exploding into a purposeful tangle of ribbons and funnels and other twisting shapes.

  "How long?” Simon asked.

  "Do we wait?” She looked up at him, her features illuminated by the backscattered light from her helmet. “An hour, at least. Maybe longer."

  Venus lay before them, vast and bathed in darkness.

  "What kinds of creatures are out here?"

  "Chemoautotrophes, naturally.” Staring out into the same night, she explained, “The UV photosynthesizers are still here, of course. They like to find crevices in our towers, places where they can sleep, probably waiting for our roof to collapse."

  He let that anthropomorphism go unchallenged.

  "These natives are odd, adaptable species, all descended from plankton in the boiled-away seas. It's astonishing what they've kept inside their very peculiar DNA. Today, some of them are utilizing industrial solvents and lost nano products. Where there's heat, energy can be harvested.” She turned, showing her face again. “There's no reason to worry yet, and maybe never. But a few of these bugs have found ways to creep inside our robots, using them as shelters. If one of them ever learns how to steal an electrical current, everything changes. Probably in a matter of a month or two."

  "That quickly?"

  "Venusians are fertile and promiscuous. With these winds, a successful strain can be everywhere in days."

  Simon had never studied the beasts. Would it pay to invest an hour a week in digesting the existing literature?

  "But odds are, that won't happen,” his companion allowed. “I do love these little things. But life, even at its most spectacular, has limits."

  "It does have limits,” he said tactfully.

  Lilly's face was pretty and never more human—a consequence of the indirect light washing across their features, and their solitude, and Simon's nagging, seemingly eternal sense of loneliness in a universe filled with an increasingly strange humanity.

  "Does it ever bother you?” she asked.

  He waited for the rest of the question.

  "Terraforming is a horribly destructive act,” Lilly stated. “Obliterating one order for another. Or in the sad case of Mars, destroying a quiet and stable world to replace it with a doomed weakling . . . and then after all of that inflicted misery, not learning enough to give up the fight."

  "It isn't meant to be a fight,” he declared.

  But of course it was. Perhaps never so clearly, Simon realized that they were standing on the ramparts of a great fortress, an endless war waging around them. He listened to the wind and felt it push against him, and he took pleasure from his heart hammering away inside a chest that would never feel ancient. And then he was smiling, realizing that even a quiet disappointment of a soul—the sort of person that Simon was—could take a keen, unembarrassed pleasure from the battles that he had helped win, small and otherwise.

  * * * *

  Iapetus

  "I know you worry. I worry too, Simon. Neither of us is strong at politics, and even if I were a marvel at making alliances and handling cross-purposed personalities, this would be a difficult place. This Earth would be. But as knowing voices say, and with good reason, ‘There's only one Stanford.’ Perhaps the Farside Academy is its equal, at least when it comes to creating prominent astronomers. But Stanford still ranks first in my field, and it has for half a millennium, and my degree will get me noticed by wise entities and doubting coworkers at all ends of the Solar System. And since I'm not gifted at winning admirers through my simple charm, being in this university will help me quite a lot."

  Simon paused the transmission—this wasn't his first viewing—and spent the next several minutes studying the face that filled the screen. What had changed? The mouth, the bright yellow eyes. That artful crest of green feathers—a jaunty hat in appearance, and one of Jackie's last obvious links to the world of her ancestors. No, she looked exactly the same. To casual eyes, she might be some species of human, her genetics modified for the most normal of reasons. She wasn't much larger than when he had first met the parrot, which put her well inside the restrictions imposed on visiting students. The bio-taxing law
s were perfectly reasonable; Earth had always been too crowded. Even six hundred years ago, when Simon was a scrawny Martian with dust in his breath, the home world had suffered from too many bodies standing on too little land, farms working hard to make food for a population that wouldn't age, and in most cases, stubbornly refused to die. Immortality was the norm everywhere, and who didn't want children to share the bliss? That's why bodies and minds continued to grow smaller and smaller, cheating the restrictions of nature by shrewdly redefining the rules.

  In appearance, the Earth hadn't changed Jackie. Perhaps her voice was a little too formal, too staged, but cameras always made her self-conscious. He knew this creature well enough to know she wasn't holding anything back. One fib today, he feared, and that would be the end. They had barely begun their long separation, and here she was, making time to call home. Simon assured himself that no conspiracy of ambition or seduction would steal away the love that had taken him by surprise, one patient century at a time.

  Again, he let the message run. Jackie listed classes and spoke about the tiny quarters she shared with three other happy graduate students, and she mentioned that the stars came out on clear nights, but of course they were illusions. Earth's conservatory was finished two hundred years ago—a marvelous semi-permeable membrane that strictly controlled what fell from above and what slipped away into the cosmos. Today, the mother world was a rigorously controlled room where a trillion sentient entities lived on and inside the old continents and throughout the watery reaches. It was a beautiful world, still and all. But it was a decidedly alien realm, forever changing, and some corners of that room were famous for criminal mischief and random psychopathic rage.