Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  “Mom, you know I can’t insist. But don’t you have enough respect for me not to keep feeding me that story? There’s more behind it.”

  “Yes! Yes, there is more behind it. But I prefer to let it lie in the past. It’s a matter of personal privacy. Don’t you have enough respect for me to stop grilling me about it?” I had never seen her this upset. She got up and walked through the wall and down the hill. Halfway down, she started to run.

  I started after her, but came back after a few steps. I didn’t know what I’d say to her that hadn’t already been said.

  We made it to the grotto in easy stages. Jubilant was feeling much better after her rest, but still had trouble on some of the steep slopes.

  I hadn’t been to the grotto for four lightyears and hadn’t played in it for longer than that. But it was still a popular place with the kids. There were scores of them.

  We stood on a narrow ledge overlooking the quicksilver pool, and this time Jubilant was really impressed. The quicksilver pool is at the bottom of a narrow gorge that was blocked off a long time ago by a quake. One side of the gorge is permanently in shade, because it faces north and the sun never gets that high in our latitude. At the bottom of the gorge is the pool, twenty meters across, a hundred meters long, and about five meters deep. We think it’s that deep, but just try sounding a pool of mercury. A lead weight sinks through it like thick molasses, and just about everything else floats. The kids had a fair-sized boulder out in the middle and were using it for a boat.

  That’s all pretty enough, but this was retrograde summer, and the temperature was climbing toward the maximum. So the mercury was near the boiling point, and the whole area was thick with the vapor. When the streams of electrons from the sun passed through the vapor, it lit up, flickering and swirling in a ghostly indigo storm. The level was down, but it would never all boil away because it kept condensing on the dark cliffside and running back into the pool.

  “Where does it all come from?” Jubilant asked when she got her breath.

  “Some of it’s natural, but the majority comes from the factories in the port. It’s a by-product of some of the fusion processes that they can’t find any use for, and so they release it into the environment. It’s too heavy to drift away, and so during darkyear, it condenses in the valleys. This one is especially good for collecting it. I used to play here when I was younger.”

  She was impressed. There’s nothing like it on Luna. From what I hear, Luna is plain dull on the outside. Nothing moves for billions of years.

  “I never saw anything so pretty. What do you do in it, though? Surely it’s too dense to swim in?”

  “Truer words were never spoken. It’s all you can do to force your hand half a meter into the stuff. If you could balance, you could stand on it and sink in just about fifteen centimeters. But that doesn’t mean you can’t swim, you swim on it. Come on down, I’ll show you.”

  She was still gawking at the ionized cloud, but she followed me. That cloud can hypnotize you. At first you think it’s all purple; then you start seeing other colors out of the corners of your eyes. You can never see them plainly, they’re too faint. But they’re there. It’s caused by local impurities of other gases.

  I understand people used to make lamps using ionized gases: neon, argon, mercury, and so forth. Walking down into quicksilver gully is exactly like walking into the glow of one of those old lamps.

  Halfway down the slope, Jubilant’s knees gave way. Her suit field stiffened with the first impact when she landed on her behind and started to slide. She was a rigid statue by the time she plopped into the pool, frozen into an awkward posture trying to break her fall. She slid across the pool and came to rest on her back.

  I dived onto the surface of the pool and was easily carried all the way across to her. She was trying to stand up and finding it impossible. Presently she began to laugh, realizing that she must look pretty silly.

  “There’s no way you’re going to stand up out here. Look, here’s how you move.” I flipped over on my belly and started moving my arms in a swimming motion. You start with them in front of you, and bring them back to your sides in a long circular motion. The harder you dig into the mercury, the faster you go. And you keep going until you dig your toes in. The pool is frictionless.

  Soon she was swimming along beside me, having a great time. Well, so was I. Why is it that we stop doing so many fun things when we grow up? There’s nothing in the solar system like swimming on mercury. It was coming back to me now, the sheer pleasure of gliding along on the mirror-bright surface with your chin plowing up a wake before you. With your eyes just above the surface, the sensation of speed is tremendous.

  Some of the kids were playing hockey. I wanted to join them, but I could see from the way they eyed us that we were too big and they thought we shouldn’t be out here in the first place. Well, that was just tough. I was having too much fun swimming.

  After several hours, Jubilant said she wanted to rest. I showed her how it could be done without going to the side, forming a tripod by sitting with your feet spread wide apart. That’s about the only thing you can do except lie flat. Any other position causes your support to slip out from under you. Jubilant was content to lie flat.

  “I still can’t get over being able to look right at the sun,” she said. “I’m beginning to think you might have the better system here. With the internal suits, I mean.”

  “I thought about that,” I said. “You loo … Lunarians don’t spend enough time on the surface to make a force-suit necessary. It’d be too much trouble and expense, especially for children. You wouldn’t believe what it costs to keep a child in suits. Dorothy won’t have her debts paid off for twenty years.”

  “Yes, but it might be worth it. Oh, I can see you’re right that it would cost a lot, but I won’t be outgrowing them. How long do they last?”

  “They should be replaced every two or three years.” I scooped up a handful of mercury and let it dribble through my hands and onto her chest. I was trying to think of an indirect way to get the talk on to the subject of Dorothy and what Jubilant knew about her. After several false starts, I came right out and asked her what they had been trying not to say.

  She wouldn’t be drawn out.

  “What’s in that cave over there?” she asked, rolling over on her belly.

  “That’s the grotto.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “I’ll show you if you’ll talk.”

  She gave me a look. “Don’t be childish, Timothy. If your mother wants you to know about her life in Luna, she’ll tell you. It’s not my business.”

  “I won’t be childish if you’ll stop treating me like a child. We’re both adults. You can tell me whatever you want without asking my mother.”

  “Let’s drop the subject.”

  “That’s what everyone tells me. All right, go on up to the grotto by yourself.” And she did just that. I sat on the lake and glowered at everything. I don’t enjoy being kept in the dark, and I especially don’t like having my relatives talk around me.

  I was just a little bemused to find out how important it had become to find out the real story of Dorothy’s trip to Mercury. I had lived seventeen years without knowing, and it hadn’t harmed me. But now that I had thought about the things she told me as a child, I saw that they didn’t make sense. Jubilant arriving here had made me reexamine them. Why did she leave Jubilant in Luna? Why take a cloned infant instead?

  The grotto is a cave at the head of the gully, with a stream of quicksilver flowing from its mouth. That happens all lightyear, but the stream gets more substantial during the height of summer. It’s caused by the mercury vapor concentrating in the cave, where it condenses and drips off the walls. I found Jubilant sitting in the center of a pool, entranced. The ionization glow in the cave seems much brighter than outside, where it has to compete with sunlight. Add to that the thousands of trickling streams of mercury throwing back reflections, and you have a place that has to be ente
red to be believed.

  “Listen, I’m sorry I was pestering you. I—”

  “Shhh.” She waved her hands at me. She was watching the drops fall from the roof to splash without a ripple into the isolated pools on the floor of the cave. So I sat beside her and watched it, too.

  “I don’t think I’d mind living here,” she said, after what might have been an hour.

  “I guess I never really considered living anywhere else.”

  She faced me, but turned away again. She wanted to read my face, but all she could see was the distorted reflection of her own.

  “I thought you wanted to be a ship’s captain.”

  “Oh, sure. But I’d always come back here.” I was silent for another few minutes, thinking about something that had bothered me more and more lately.

  “Actually, I might get into another line of work.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I guess commanding a spaceship isn’t what it used to be. You know what I mean?”

  She looked at me again, this time tried even harder to see my face.

  “Maybe I do.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. Lots of kids want to be ship’s captains. They grow out of it. Maybe I have. I think I was born a century too late for what I want. You can hardly find a ship anymore where the captain is much more than a figurehead. The real master of the ship is a committee of computers. They handle all the work. The captain can’t even overrule them anymore.”

  “I wasn’t aware it had gotten that bad.”

  “Worse. All of the passenger lines are shifting over to totally automated ships. The high-gee runs are already like that, on the theory that after a dozen trips at five gees, the crew is pretty much used up.”

  I pondered a sad fact of our modern civilization: the age of romance was gone. The solar system was tamed. There was no place for adventure.

  “You could go to the cometary zone,” she suggested.

  “That’s the only thing that’s kept me going toward pilot training. You don’t need a computer out there hunting for black holes. I thought about getting a job and buying passage last darkyear, when I was feeling really low about it. But I’m going to try to get some pilot training before I go.”

  “That might be wise.”

  “I don’t know. They’re talking about ending the courses in astrogation. I may have to teach myself.”

  “You think we should get going? I’m getting hungry.”

  “No. Let’s stay here a while longer. I love this place.”

  I’m sure we had been there for five hours, saying very little. I had asked her about her interest in environmental engineering and gotten a surprisingly frank answer. This was what she had to say about her chosen profession: “I found after I divorced my mother that I was interested in making safe places to live. I didn’t feel very safe at that time.” She found other reasons later, but she admitted that it was a need for security that still drove her. I meditated on her strange childhood. She was the only person I ever knew who didn’t grow up with her natural mother.

  “I was thinking about heading outsystem myself,” she said after another long silence. “Pluto, for instance. Maybe we’ll meet out there someday.”

  “It’s possible.”

  There was a little quake; not much, but enough to start the pools of mercury quivering and make Jubilant ready to go. We were threading our way through the pools when there was a long, rolling shock, and the violet glow died away. We were knocked apart and fell in total darkness.

  “What was that?” There was the beginning of panic in her voice.

  “It looks like we’re blocked in. There must have been a slide over the entrance. Just sit tight and I’ll find you.”

  “Where are you? I can’t find you. Timothy!”

  “Just hold still and I’ll run into you in a minute. Stay calm, just stay calm, there’s nothing to worry about. They’ll have us out in a few hours.”

  “Timothy, I can’t find you, I can’t—” She smacked me across the face with one of her hands, then was swarming all over me. I held her close and soothed her. Earlier in the day I might have been contemptuous of her behavior, but I had come to understand her better. Besides, no one likes to be buried alive. Not even me. I held her until I felt her relax.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize, I felt the same way the first time. I’m glad you’re here. Being buried alone is much worse than just being buried alive. Now sit down and do what I tell you. Turn your intake valve all the way to the left. Got it? Now we’re using oxygen at the slowest possible rate. We have to keep as still as possible so we don’t heat up too much.”

  “All right. What next?”

  “Well, for starters, do you play chess?”

  “What? Is that all? Don’t we have to turn on a signal or something?”

  “I already did.”

  “What if you’re buried solid and your suit freezes to keep you from being crushed? How do you turn it on then?”

  “It turns on automatically if the suit stays rigid for more than one minute.”

  “Oh. All right. Pawn to king four.”

  We gave up on the game after the fifteenth move. I’m not that good at visualizing the board, and while she was excellent at it, she was too nervous to plan her game. And I was getting nervous. If the entrance was blocked with rubble, as I had thought, they should have had us out in under an hour. I had practiced estimating time in the dark and made it to be two hours since the quake. It must have been bigger than I thought. It could be a full day before they got around to us.

  “I was surprised when you hugged me that I could touch you. I mean your skin, not your suit.”

  “I thought I felt you jump. The suits merge. When you touch me, we’re wearing one suit instead of two. That comes in handy sometimes.”

  We were lying side by side in a pool of mercury, arms around each other. We found it soothing.

  “You mean … I see. You can make love with your suit on. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “You should try it in a pool of mercury. That’s the best way.”

  “We’re in a pool of mercury.”

  “And we don’t dare make love. It would overheat us. We might need our reserve.”

  She was quiet, but I felt her hands tighten behind my back.

  “Are we in trouble, Timothy?”

  “No, but we might be in for a long stay. You’ll get thirsty by and by. Can you hold out?”

  “It’s too bad we can’t make love. It would have kept my mind off it.”

  “Can you hold out?”

  “I can hold out.”

  “Timothy, I didn’t fill my tank before we left the house. Will that make a difference?”

  I don’t think I tensed, but she scared me badly. I thought about it, and didn’t see how it mattered. She had used an hour’s oxygen at most getting to the house, even at her stepped-up cooling rate. I suddenly remembered how cool her skin had been when she came into my arms.

  “Jubilant, was your suit set at maximum cooling when you left the house?”

  “No, but I set it up on the way. It was so hot. I was about to pass out from the exertion.”

  “And you didn’t turn it down until the quake?”

  “That’s right.”

  I did some rough estimates and didn’t like the results. By the most pessimistic assumptions, she might not have more than about five hours of air left. At the outside, she might have twelve hours. And she could do simple arithmetic as well as I; there was no point in trying to hide it from her.

  “Come closer to me,” I said. She was puzzled, because we were already about as close as we could get. But I wanted to get our intake valves together. I hooked them up and waited three seconds.

  “Now our tank pressures are equalized.”

  “Why did you do that? Oh, no, Timothy, you shouldn’t have. It was my own fault for not being careful.”

  “I did it for me, too. How could I live with myself if you died in
here and I could have saved you? Think about that.”

  “Timothy, I’ll answer any question you want to ask about your mother.”

  That was the first time she got me mad. I hadn’t been angry with her for not refilling the tank. Not even about the cooling. That was more my fault than hers. I had made it a game about the cooling rate, not really telling her how important it was to maintain a viable reserve. She hadn’t taken me seriously, and now we were paying for my little joke. I had made the mistake of assuming that because she was an expert at Lunar safety, she could take care of herself. How could she do that if she didn’t have a realistic estimate of the dangers?

  But this offer sounded like repayment for the oxygen, and you don’t do that on Mercury. In a tight spot, air is always shared freely. Thanks are rude.

  “Don’t think you owe me anything. It isn’t right.”

  “That’s not why I offered. If we’re going to die down here, it seems silly for me to be keeping secrets. Does that make sense?”

  “No. If we’re going to die, what’s the use in telling me? What good will it do me? And that doesn’t make sense, either. We’re not even near dying.”

  “It would at least be something to pass the time.”

  I sighed. At that time, it really wasn’t important to know what I had been trying to learn from her.

  “All right. Question one: Why did Dorothy leave you behind when she came here?” Once I had asked it, the question suddenly became important again.

  “Because she’s not our mother. I divorced our mother when I was ten.”

  I sat up, shocked silly.

  “Dorothy’s not … Then she’s … she’s my foster mother? All this time she said she was—”

  “No, she’s not your foster mother, not technically. She’s your father.”

  “What?”

  “She’s your father.”

  “Who the hell—father? What kind of crazy game is this? Who the hell ever knows who their father is?”