Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  Mirasol watched a group of striped gazelles struggle up the barren slopes of the talus in search of air. Their dark eyes, fresh from the laboratory, rolled in timeless animal fear. Their coats were scorched, their flanks heaved, their mouths dripped foam. One by one they collapsed in convulsions, kicking at the lifeless Martian rock as they slid and fell. It was a vile sight, the image of a blighted spring.

  An oblique flash of red downslope to her left attracted her attention. A large red animal was skulking among the rocks. She turned the crawler and picked her way toward it, wincing as a dark surf of poisoned smoke broke across the fretted glass.

  She spotted the animal as it broke from cover. It was a scorched and gasping creature like a great red ape. She dashed forward and seized it in the crawler’s arms. Held aloft, it clawed and kicked, hammering the crawler’s arms with a smoldering branch. In revulsion and pity, she crushed it. Its bodice of tight-sewn ibis feathers tore, revealing blood-slicked human flesh.

  Using the crawler’s grips, she tugged at a heavy tuft of feathers on its head. The tight-fitting mask ripped free, and the dead man’s head slumped forward. She rolled it back, revealing a face tattooed with stars.

  The ornithopter sculled above the burned-out garden, its long red wings beating with dreamlike fluidity. Mirasol watched the Sorienti’s painted face as her corporate ladyship stared into the shining viewscreen.

  The ornithopter’s powerful cameras cast image after image onto the tabletop screen, lighting the Regal’s face. The tabletop was littered with the Sorienti’s elegant knickknacks: an inhaler case, a half-empty jeweled squeezebulb, lorgnette binoculars, a stack of tape cassettes.

  “An unprecedented case,” her ladyship murmured. “It was not a total dieback after all but merely the extinction of everything with lungs. There must be strong survivorship among the lower orders: fish, insects, annelids. Now that the rain’s settled the ash, you can see the vegetation making a strong comeback. Your own section seems almost undamaged.”

  “Yes,” Mirasol said. “The natives were unable to reach it with torches before the fire storm had smothered itself.”

  The Sorienti leaned back into the tasseled arms of her couch. “I wish you wouldn’t mention them so loudly, even between ourselves.”

  “No one would believe me.”

  “The others never saw them,” the Regal said. “They were too busy fighting the flames.” She hesitated briefly. “You were wise to confide in me first.”

  Mirasol locked eyes with her new patroness, then looked away. “There was no one else to tell. They’d have said I built a pattern out of nothing but my own fears.”

  “You have your faction to think of,” the Sorienti said with an air of sympathy. “With such a bright future ahead of them, they don’t need a renewed reputation for paranoid fantasies.”

  She studied the screen. “The Patternists are winners by default. It certainly makes an interesting case study. If the new garden grows tiresome we can have the whole crater sterilized from orbit. Some other faction can start again with a clean slate.”

  “Don’t let them build too close to the edge,” Mirasol said.

  Her corporate ladyship watched her attentively, tilting her head.

  “I have no proof,” Mirasol said, “but I can see the pattern behind it all. The natives had to come from somewhere. The colony that stocked the crater must have been destroyed in that huge landslide. Was that your work? Did your people kill them?”

  The Sorienti smiled. “You’re very bright, my dear. You will do well, up the Ladder. And you can keep secrets. Your office as my secretary suits you very well.”

  “They were destroyed from orbit,” Mirasol said. “Why else would they hide from us? You tried to annihilate them.”

  “It was a long time ago,” the Regal said. “In the early days, when things were shakier. They were researching the secret of starflight, techniques only the Investors know. Rumor says they reached success at last, in their redemption camp. After that, there was no choice.”

  “Then they were killed for the Investors’ profit,” Mirasol said. She stood up quickly and walked around the cabin, her new jeweled skirt clattering around the knees. “So that the aliens could go on toying with us, hiding their secret, selling us trinkets.”

  The Regal folded her hands with a clicking of rings and bracelets. “Our Lobster King is wise,” she said. “If humanity’s efforts turned to the stars, what would become of terraforming? Why should we trade the power of creation itself to become like the Investors?”

  “But think of the people,” Mirasol said. “Think of them losing their technologies, degenerating into human beings. A handful of savages, eating bird meat. Think of the fear they felt for generations, the way they burned their own home and killed themselves when they saw us come to smash and destroy their world. Aren’t you filled with horror?”

  “For humans?” the Sorienti said. “No!”

  “But can’t you see? You’ve given this planet life as an art form, as an enormous game. You force us to play in it, and those people were killed for it! Can’t you see how that blights everything?”

  “Our game is reality,” the Regal said. She gestured at the viewscreen. “You can’t deny the savage beauty of destruction.”

  “You defend this catastrophe?”

  The Regal shrugged. “If life worked perfectly, how could things evolve? Aren’t we Posthuman? Things grow; things die. In time the cosmos kills us all. The cosmos has no meaning, and its emptiness is absolute. That’s pure terror, but it’s also pure freedom. Only our ambitions and our creations can fill it.”

  “And that justifies your actions?”

  “We act for life,” the Regal said. “Our ambitions have become this world’s natural laws. We blunder because life blunders. We go on because life must go on. When you’ve taken the long view, from orbit—when the power we wield is in your own hands—then you can judge us.” She smiled. “You will be judging yourself. You’ll be Regal.”

  “But what about your captive factions? Your agents, who do your will? Once we had our own ambitions. We failed, and now you isolate us, indoctrinate us, make us into rumors. We must have something of our own. Now we have nothing.”

  “That’s not so. You have what we’ve given you. You have the Ladder.”

  The vision stung Mirasol: power, light, the hint of justice, this world with its sins and sadness shrunk to a bright arena far below. “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, we do.”

  Out of Copyright

  CHARLES SHEFFIELD

  One of the best contemporary “hard science” writers, British-born Charles Sheffield is a theoretical physicist who has worked on the American space program, and is currently chief scientist of the Earth Satellite Corporation. Sheffield is also the only person who has ever served as president of both the American Astronautical Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America. He won the Hugo Award in 1994 for his story, “Georgia on My Mind.” His books include the best-selling nonfiction title Earthwatch, the novels Sight of Proteus, The Web Between the Worlds, Hidden Variables, My Brother’s Keeper, Between the Strokes of Night, The Nimrod Hunt, Trader’s World, Proteus Unbound, Summertide, Divergence, Transcendence, Cold as Ice, Brother to Dragons, The Mind Pool, Godspeed and The Ganymede Club, and the collections Erasmus Magister, The McAndrew Chronicles, Dancing with Myself, and Georgia on My Mind and Other Places. His most recent books are the novel Starfire, and a new collection, The Complete McAndrew. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife, SF writer Nancy Kress.

  Here he slyly suggests that even in a project as large as the terraforming of an entire world, finding the right tool for the right job is more than half the battle—particularly if you’re smart enough to know which jobs are really the important ones … and just what kind of tools you need to do them right.

  Troubleshooting. A splendid idea, and one that I agree with totally in principle. Bang! One bullet, and trouble bites the dust. But unfortunately, trouble doe
sn’t know the rules. Trouble won’t stay dead.

  I looked around the table. My top troubleshooting team was here. I was here. Unfortunately, they were supposed to be headed for Jupiter, and I ought to be down on Earth. In less than twenty-four hours, the draft pick would begin. That wouldn’t wait, and if I didn’t leave in the next thirty minutes, I would never make it in time. I needed to be in two places at once. I cursed the copyright laws and the single-copy restriction, and went to work.

  “You’ve read the new requirement,” I said. “You know the parameters. Ideas, anyone?”

  A dead silence. They were facing the problem in their own unique ways. Wolfgang Pauli looked half-asleep, Thomas Edison was drawing little doll-figures on the table’s surface, Enrico Fermi seemed to be counting on his fingers, and John von Neumann was staring impatiently at the other three. I was doing none of those things. I knew very well that wherever the solution would come from, it would not be from inside my head. My job was much more straightforward: I had to see that when we had a possible answer, it happened. And I had to see that we got one answer, not four.

  The silence in the room went on and on. My brain trust was saying nothing, while I watched the digits on my watch flicker by. I had to stay and find a solution; and I had to get to the draft picks. But most of all and hardest of all, I had to remain quiet, to let my team do some thinking.

  It was small consolation to know that similar meetings were being held within the offices of the other three combines. Everyone must be finding it equally hard going. I knew the players, and I could imagine the scenes, even though all the troubleshooting teams were different. NETSCO had a group that was intellectually the equal of ours at Romberg AG: Niels Bohr, Theodore von Karman, Norbert Weiner, and Marie Curie. MMG, the great Euro-Mexican combine of Magrit-Marcus Gesellschaft, had focused on engineering power rather than pure scientific understanding and creativity, and, in addition to the Soviet rocket designer Sergey Korolev and the American Nikola Tesla, they had reached farther back (and with more risk) to the great nineteenth-century English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He had been one of the outstanding successes of the program; I wished he were working with me, but MMG had always refused to look at a trade. MMG’s one bow to theory was a strange one, the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, but the unlikely quartet made one hell of a team.

  And finally there was BP Megation, whom I thought of as confused. At any rate, I didn’t understand their selection logic. They had used billions of dollars to acquire a strangely mixed team: Erwin Schrödinger, David Hilbert, Leo Szilard, and Henry Ford. They were all great talents, and all famous names in their fields, but I wondered how well they could work as a unit.

  All the troubleshooting teams were now pondering the same emergency. Our problem was created when the Pan-National Union suddenly announced a change to the Phase B demonstration program. They wanted to modify impact conditions, as their contracts with us permitted them to do. They didn’t have to tell us how to do it, either, which was just as well for them, since I was sure they didn’t know. How do you take a billion tons of mass, already launched to reach a specific target at a certain point of time, and redirect it to a different end point with a different arrival time?

  There was no point in asking them why they wanted to change rendezvous conditions. It was their option. Some of our management saw the action on PNU’s part as simple bloody-mindedness, but I couldn’t agree. The four multinational combines had each been given contracts to perform the biggest space engineering exercise in human history: small asteroids (only a kilometer or so across—but massing a billion tons each) had to be picked up from their natural orbits and redirected to the Jovian system, where they were to make precise rendezvous with assigned locations of the moon Io. Each combine had to select the asteroid and the method of moving it, but deliver within a tight transfer-energy budget and a tight time schedule.

  For that task the PNU would pay each group a total of $8 billion. That sounds like a fair amount of money, but I knew our accounting figures. To date, with the project still not finished (rendezvous would be in eight more days), Romberg AG had spent $14.5 billion. We are looking at a probable cost overrun by a factor of two. I was willing to bet that the other three groups were eating very similar losses.

  Why?

  Because this was only Phase B of a four-phase project. Phase A had been a system design study, which led to four Phase B awards for a demonstration project. The Phase B effort that the four combines were working on now was a proof-of-capability run for the full European Metamorphosis. The real money came in the future, in Phases C and D. Those would be awarded by the PNU to a single combine and the award would be based largely on Phase B performance. The next phases called for the delivery of fifty asteroids to impact points on Europa (Phase C), followed by thermal mixing operations on the moon’s surface (Phase D). The contract value of C and D would be somewhere up around $800 billion. That was the fish that all the combines were after, and it was the reason we all overspend lavishly on this phase.

  By the end of the whole program, Europa would have a forty-kilometer-deep water ocean over all its surface. And then the real fun would begin. Some contractor would begin the installation of the fusion plants, and the seeding of the sea-farms with the first prokaryotic bacterial forms.

  The stakes were high; and to keep everybody on their toes, PNU did the right thing. They kept throwing in these little zingers, to mimic the thousand and one things that would go wrong in the final project phases.

  While I was sitting and fidgeting, my team had gradually come to life. Fermi was pacing up and down the room—always a good sign; and Wolfgang Pauli was jabbing impatiently at the keys of a computer console. John von Neumann hadn’t moved, but since he did everything in his head anyway, that didn’t mean much.

  I looked again at my watch. I had to go. “Ideas?” I said again.

  Von Neumann made a swift chopping gesture of his hand. “We have to make a choice, Al. It can be done in four or five ways.”

  The others were nodding. “The problem is only one of efficiency and speed,” added Fermi. “I can give you an order-of-magnitude estimate of the effects on the overall program within half an hour.”

  “Within fifteen minutes.” Pauli raised the bidding.

  “No need to compete this one.” They were going to settle down to a real four-way fight on methods—they always did—but I didn’t have the time to sit here and referee. The important point was that they said it could be done. “You don’t have to rush it. Whatever you decide, it will have to wait until I get back.” I stood up. “Tom?”

  Edison shrugged. “How long will you be gone, Al?”

  “Two days, maximum. I’ll head back right after the draft picks.” (That wasn’t quite true; when the draft picks were over, I had some other business to attend to that did not include the troubleshooters, but two days should cover everything.)

  “Have fun.” Edison waved his hand casually. “By the time you get back, I’ll have the engineering drawings for you.”

  One thing about working with a team like mine—they may not always be right, but they sure are always cocky.

  “Make room there. Move over!” The guards were pushing ahead to create a narrow corridor through the wedged mass of people. The one in front of me was butting with his helmeted head, not even looking to see whom he was shoving aside. “Move!” he shouted. “Come on now, out of the way.”

  We were in a hurry. Things had been frantically busy Topside before I left, so I had cut it fine on connections to begin with, then been held up half an hour at reentry. We had broken the speed limits on the atmospheric segment, and there would be PNU fines for that, but still we hadn’t managed to make up all the time. Now the first draft pick was only seconds away, and I was supposed to be taking part in it.

  A thin woman in a green coat clutched at my arm as we bogged down for a moment in the crush of people. Her face was gray and grim, and she had a placard hanging round her
neck. “You could wait longer for the copyright!” She had to shout to make herself heard. “It would cost you nothing—and look at the misery you would prevent. What you’re doing is immoral! TEN MORE YEARS.”

  Her last words were a scream as she called out this year’s slogan TEN MORE YEARS! I shook my arm free as the guard in front of me made sudden headway, and dashed along in his wake. I had nothing to say to the woman; nothing that she would listen to. If it were immoral, what did ten more years have to do with it? Ten more years, if by some miracle they were granted ten more years on the copyrights, what then? I knew the answer. They would try to talk the Pan-National Union into fifteen more years, or perhaps twenty. When you pay somebody off, it only increases their demands. I know, only too well. They are never satisfied with what they get.

  Joe Delacorte and I scurried into the main chamber and shuffled sideways to our seats at the last possible moment. All the preliminary nonsense was finished, and the real business was beginning. The tension in the room was terrific. To be honest, a lot of it was being generated by the media. They were all poised to make maximum noise as they shot the selection information all over the System. If it were not for the media, I don’t think the PNU would hold live draft picks at all. We’d all hook in with video links and do our business the civilized way.

  The excitement now was bogus for other reasons, too. The professionals—I and a few others—would not become interested until the ten rounds were complete. Before that, the choices were just too limited. Only when they were all made, and the video teams were gone, would the four groups get together off-camera and begin the horse trading. “My ninth round plus my fifth for your second.” “Maybe, if you’ll throw in $10 million and a tenth-round draft pick for next year … .”

  Meanwhile, BP Megation had taken the microphone. “First selection,” said their representative. “Robert Oppenheimer.”