Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

They were sure they were halfway to heaven.

  Picture that.

  The Deadland log told him as much as he really needed to know. But he read back through the old reports, also.

  Then he mixed himself a drink and stared out the third floor window.

  “ … Will die,” he said, then finished his drink, outfitted himself, and abandoned his post.

  It was three days before he found a camp.

  He landed the flier at a distance and approached on foot. He was far to the south of Deadland, where the air was warmer and caused him to feel constantly short of breath.

  They were wearing animal skins—skins which had been cut for a better fit and greater protection, skins which were tied about them. He counted sixteen lean-to arrangements and three campfires. He flinched as he regarded the fires, but he continued to advance.

  When they saw him, all their little noises stopped, a brief cry went up, and then there was silence.

  He entered the camp.

  The creatures stood unmoving about him. He heard some bustling within the large lean-to at the end of the clearing.

  He walked about the camp.

  A slab of dried meat hung from the center of a tripod of poles.

  Several long spears stood before each dwelling place. He advanced and studied one. A stone which had been flaked into a leaf-shaped spearhead was affixed to its end.

  There was the outline of a cat carved upon a block of wood … .

  He heard a footfall and turned.

  One of the Redforms moved slowly toward him. It appeared older than the others. Its shoulders sloped; as it opened its mouth to make a series of popping noises, he saw that some of its teeth were missing; its hair was grizzled and thin. It bore something in its hands, but Jarry’s attention was drawn to the hands themselves.

  Each hand bore an opposing digit.

  He looked about him quickly, studying the hands of the others. All of them seemed to have thumbs. He studied their appearance more closely.

  They now had foreheads.

  He returned his attention to the old Redform.

  It placed something at his feet, and then it backed away from him.

  He looked down.

  A chunk of dried meat and a piece of fruit lay upon a broad leaf.

  He picked up the meat, closed his eyes, bit off a piece, chewed and swallowed. He wrapped the rest in the leaf and placed it in the side pocket of his pack.

  He extended his hand and the Redform drew back.

  He lowered his hand, unrolled the blanket he had carried with him and spread it upon the ground. He seated himself, pointed to the Redform, then indicated a position across from him at the other end of the blanket.

  The creature hesitated, then advanced and seated itself.

  “We are going to learn to talk with one another,” he said slowly. Then he placed his hand upon his breast and said, “Jarry.”

  Jarry stood before the reawakened executives of December.

  “They are intelligent,” he told them. “It’s all in my report.”

  “So?” asked Yan Turl.

  “I don’t think they will be able to adapt. They have come very far, very rapidly. But I don’t think they can go much further. I don’t think they can make it all the way.”

  “Are you a biologist, an ecologist, a chemist?”

  “No.”

  “Then on what do you base your opinion?”

  “I observed them at close range for six weeks.”

  “Then it’s only a feeling you have … ?”

  “You know there are no experts on a thing like this. It’s never happened before.”

  “Granting their intelligence—granting even that what you have said concerning their adaptability is correct—what do you suggest we do about it?”

  “Slow down the change. Give them a better chance. If they can’t make it the rest of the way, then stop short of our goal. It’s already livable here. We can adapt the rest of the way.”

  “Slow it down? How much?”

  “Supposing we took another seven or eight thousand years?”

  “Impossible!”

  “Entirely!”

  “Too much!”

  “Why?”

  “Because everyone stands a three-month watch every two hundred fifty years. That’s one year of personal time for every thousand. You’re asking for too much of everyone’s time.”

  “But the life of an entire race may be at stake!”

  “You do not know for certain.”

  “No, I don’t. But do you feel it is something to take a chance with?”

  “Do you want to put it to an executive vote?”

  “No—I can see that I’ll lose. I want to put it before the entire membership.”

  “Impossible. They’re all asleep.”

  “Then wake them up.”

  “That would be quite a project.”

  “Don’t you think that the fate of a race is worth the effort? Especially since we’re the ones who forced intelligence upon them? We’re the ones who made them evolve, cursed them with intellect.”

  “Enough! They were right at the threshold. They might have become intelligent had we not come along—”

  “But you can’t say for certain! You don’t really know! And it doesn’t really matter how it happened. They’re here and we’re here, and they think we’re gods—maybe because we do nothing for them but make them miserable. We have some responsibility to an intelligent race, though. At least to the extent of not murdering it.”

  “Perhaps we could do a long-range study …”

  “They could be dead by then. I formally move, in my capacity as Treasurer, that we awaken the full membership and put the matter to a vote.”

  “I don’t hear any second to your motion.”

  “Selda?” he said.

  She looked away.

  “Tarebell? Clond? Bondici?”

  There was silence in the cavern that was high and wide about him.

  “All right. I can see when I’m beaten. We will be our own serpents when we come into our Eden. I’m going now, back to Deadland, to finish my tour of duty.”

  “You don’t have to. In fact, it might be better if you sleep the whole thing out …”

  “No. If it’s going to be this way, the guilt will be mine also. I want to watch, to share it fully.”

  “So be it,” said Turl.

  Two weeks later, when Installation Nineteen tried to raise the Deadland Station on the radio, there was no response.

  After a time, a flier was dispatched.

  The Deadland Station was a shapeless lump of melted metal.

  Jarry Dark was nowhere to be found.

  Later that afternoon, Installation Eight went dead.

  A flier was immediately dispatched.

  Installation Eight no longer existed. Its attendants were found several miles away, walking. They told how Jarry Dark had forced them from the station at gunpoint. Then he had burnt it to the ground, with the fire-cannons mounted upon his flier.

  At about the time they were telling this story, Installation Six became silent.

  The order went out: MAINTAIN CONTINUOUS RADIO CONTACT WITH TWO OTHER STATIONS AT ALL TIMES.

  The other order went out: GO ARMED AT ALL TIMES. TAKE ANY VISITOR PRISONER.

  Jarry waited. At the bottom of a chasm, parked beneath a shelf of rock, Jarry waited. An opened bottle stood upon the control board of his flier. Next to it was a small case of white metal.

  Jarry took a long, last drink from the bottle as he waited for the broadcast he knew would come.

  When it did, he stretched out on the seat and took a nap.

  When he awakened, the light of day was waning.

  The broadcast was still going on … .

  “ … Jarry. They will be awakened and a referendum will be held. Come back to the main cavern. This is Yan Turl. Please do not destroy any more installations. This action is not necessary. We agree with your proposal that a vote be held. Plea
se contact us immediately. We are waiting for your reply, Jarry … .”

  He tossed the empty bottle through the window and raised the flier out of the purple shadow into the air and up.

  When he descended upon the landing stage within the main cavern, of course they were waiting for him. A dozen rifles were trained upon him as he stepped down from the flier.

  “Remove your weapons, Jarry,” came the voice of Yan Turl.

  “I’m not wearing any weapons,” said Jarry. “Neither is my flier,” he added; and this was true, for the fire-cannons no longer rested within their mountings.

  Yan Turl approached, looked up at him.

  “Then you may step down.”

  “Thank you, but I like it right where I am.”

  “You are a prisoner.”

  “What do you intend to do with me?”

  “Put you back to sleep until the end of the Wait. Come down here!”

  “No. And don’t try shooting—or using a stun charge or gas, either. If you do, we’re all of us dead the second it hits.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Turl, gesturing gently to the riflemen.

  “My flier,” said Jarry, “is a bomb, and I’m holding the fuse in my right hand.” He raised the white metal box. “So long as I keep the lever on the side of this box depressed, we live. If my grip relaxes, even for an instant, the explosion which ensues will doubtless destroy this entire cavern.”

  “I think you’re bluffing.”

  “You know how you can find out for certain.”

  “You’ll die too, Jarry.”

  “At the moment, I don’t really care. Don’t try burning my hand off either, to destroy the fuse,” he cautioned, “because it doesn’t really matter. Even if you should succeed, it will cost you at least two installations.”

  “Why is that?”

  “What do you think I did with the fire-cannons? I taught the Redforms how to use them. At the moment, these weapons are manned by Redforms and aimed at two installations. If I do not personally visit my gunners by dawn, they will open fire. After destroying their objectives, they will move on and try for two more.”

  “You trusted those beasts with laser projectors?”

  “That is correct. Now, will you begin awakening the others for the voting?”

  Turl crouched, as if to spring at him, appeared to think better of it, relaxed.

  “Why did you do it, Jarry?” he asked. “What are they to you that you would make your own people suffer for them?”

  “Since you do not feel as I feel,” said Jarry, “my reasons would mean nothing to you. After all, they are only based upon my feelings, which are different than your own—or mine are based upon sorrow and loneliness. Try this one, though: I am their god. My form is to be found in their every camp. I am the Slayer of Bears from the Desert of the Dead. They have told my story for two and a half centuries, and I have been changed by it. I am powerful and wise and good, so far as they are concerned. In this capacity, I owe them some consideration. If I do not give them their lives, who will there be to honor me in snow and chant my story around the fires and cut for me the best portions of the woolly caterpillar? None, Turl. And these things are all that my life is worth now. Awaken the others. You have no choice.”

  “Very well,” said Turl. “And if their decision should go against you?”

  “Then I’ll retire, and you can be god,” said Jarry.

  Now every day when the sun goes down out of the purple sky, Jarry Dark watches it in its passing, for he shall sleep no more the sleep of ice and of stone, wherein there is no dreaming. He has elected to live out the span of his days in a tiny instant of the Wait, never to look upon the New Alyonal of his people. Every morning, at the new Deadland installation, he is awakened by sounds like the cracking of ice, the trembling of tin, the snapping of steel strands, before they come to him with their offerings, singing and making marks upon the snow. They praise him and he smiles upon them. Sometimes he coughs.

  Born of man and woman, in accordance with Catform Y7 requirements, Coldworld Class, Jarry Dark was not suited for existence anywhere in the universe which had guaranteed him a niche. This was either a blessing or a curse, depending on how you looked at it. So look at it however you would, that was the story. Thus does life repay those who would serve her fully.

  Retrograde Summer

  JOHN VARLEY

  John Varley appeared on the SF scene in 1974, and by the end of 1976—in what was a meteoric rise to prominence even for a field known for meteoric rises—he was already being recognized as one of the hottest new writers of the seventies. His first story, “Picnic on Nearside,” appeared in 1974 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and was followed by as concentrated an outpouring of first-rate stories as the genre has ever seen, stories such as “The Phantom of Kansas,” “In the Bowl,” “Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance,” “Equinoctial,” “The Black Hole Passes,” “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,” and many others—smart, bright, fresh, brash, audacious, effortlessly imaginative stories that seemed to suddenly shake the field out of its uneasy slumber like a wake-up call from a brand-new trumpet. It’s hard to think of a group of short stories that has had a greater, more concentrated impact on the field, with the exception of Robert Heinlein’s early work for John W. Campbell’s Astounding, or perhaps Roger Zelazny’s early stories in the mid-1960s.

  Varley was one of the first new writers to become interested in the solar system again, after several years in the late sixties and early seventies in which it had been largely abandoned as a setting for stories. In spite of the fact space probes had demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that there were no Earthlike planets anywhere in the solar system, prompting most authors to lose interest in setting stories there, Varley seemed to find the solar system exciting and romantic just as it was (and this was before the later Mariner probes to the Jupiter and Satum system had proved the solar system to be a lot more surprising than people thought it was)—an aesthetic shift in perception that went ringing on down through the eighties and nineties in the work of writers such as G. David Nordley, Stephen Baxter, Paul J. McAuley, and a dozen others.

  The ingenious and inventive little story that follows marked something of a watershed in science-fictional thinking about the settling of alien worlds, a third alternative to Blish’s Two Ways, not quite the same as either. Instead of terraforming a world to be more Earthlike, or adapting humans genetically so that their children will be able to survive under alien conditions, the people in Varley’s universe leave the planet fundamentally unchanged (in fact, they come to enjoy the alienness and difference of their new homes, even to use the most unEarthlike features for recreational purposes, as we shall see) and employ their technology to protect themselves from hostile environments, without needing to change the basic human form at all, or its genetic heritage. As we move into territory covered by the follow-up volume to this one, Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future, this third alternative will become more and more common, and you can see the influence of this story on much of the work of the eighties, nineties, and beyond into a new century.

  Varley somehow never had as great an impact with his novels as he did with his short fiction, with the possible exception of his first novel, Ophiuchi Hotline. His other novels include the somewhat disappointing Gaean trilogy, consisting of Titan, Wizard, and Demon, a novelization of one of his own short stories that was also made into a movie, Millennium, and the collections The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, Picnic on Nearside, and Blue Champagne.

  In the 1980s, Varley moved away from the print world to write a number of screenplays for Hollywood producers, most of which were never filmed. He wrote one last significant story, 1984’s “Press Enter,” which won him both the Hugo and the Nebula Award (he also won a Hugo in 1982 for his story “The Pusher,” and a Hugo and a Nebula in 1979 for his novella “The Persistence of Vision”). After “Press Enter,” little was heard from Varley in the genre. until the publication of
a major new novel, Steel Beach, in 1992, which was successful commercially but received a lukewarm reception from many critics. He was largely silent throughout most of the rest of the 1990s, but seems to be making something of a comeback of late, publishing a major new novel, The Golden Globe, in 1998, with another new novel, Irontown Blues, coming up soon. He has won two Nebulas and two Hugos for his short fiction.

  I was at the spaceport an hour early on the day my clone-sister was to arrive from Luna. Part of it was eagerness to see her. She was three E-years older than me, and we had never met. But I admit that I grab every chance I can get to go to the port and just watch the ships arrive and depart. I’ve never been off-planet. Someday I’ll go, but not as a paying passenger. I was about to enroll in pilot-training school.

  Keeping my mind on the arrival time of the shuttle from Luna was hard, because my real interest was in the liners departing for all the far-off places in the system. On that very day the Elizabeth Browning was lifting off on a direct, high-gee run for Pluto, with connections for the cometary zone. She was sitting on the field a few kilometers from me, boarding passengers and freight. Very little of the latter. The Browning was a luxury-class ship where you paid a premium fare to be sealed into a liquid-filled room, doped to the gills, and fed through a tube for the five-gee express run. Nine days later, at wintertime Pluto, they decanted you and put you through ten hours of physical rehabilitation. You could have made it in fourteen days at two gees and only have been mildly uncomfortable, but maybe it’s worth it to some people. I had noticed that the Browning was never crowded.

  I might not have noticed the arrival of the Lunar shuttle, but the tug was lowering it between me and the Browning. They were berthing it in Bay 9, a recessed area a few hundred meters from where I was standing. So I ducked into the tunnel that would take me there.

  I arrived in time to see the tug cut the line and shoot into space to meet the next incoming ship. The Lunar shuttle was a perfectly reflective sphere sitting in the middle of the landing bay. As I walked up to it, the force-field roof sprang into being over the bay, cutting off the summertime sunlight. The air started rushing in, and in a few minutes my suit turned off. I was suddenly sweating, cooking in the heat that hadn’t been dissipated as yet. My suit had cut off too soon again. I would have to have that checked. Meantime, I did a little dance to keep my bare feet away from the too-hot concrete.