Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  Popular on toxic worlds, I recalled. Heavy metals and other terrors were shunted away from the human foods.

  “You see? I’m not a simple miser.”

  “It shouldn’t have happened,” I offered.

  Provo merely shrugged his broad shoulders, admitting, “I do love my daughter. And you’re correct about some things. But the situation here, like anywhere, is much more complicated than the casual observer can perceive.”

  I looked at the drab hyperfiber sky—the illusion of heavy clouds over a waxy low sun—and I gave a quick appreciative nod.

  “The area around us is littered with even less successful projects,” Provo warned me.

  I said, “Sad.”

  The old man agreed. “Yet I adore her. I want no ill to befall her, and I mean that as an unveiled warning. Ula has never existed with ordinary people. My hope is that I live long enough to see her mature, to become happy and normal, and perhaps gain some skills as a terraformer too. You are my best hope of the moment. Like it or not, that’s why I hired you.”

  I stared out at his little sea. A lone gull was circling, bleating out complaints about the changeless food.

  “My daughter will become infatuated with you,” I heard. “Which might be a good thing. Provided you can resist temptation, infatuation will keep her from being disillusioned. Never, never let her become disillusioned.”

  “No?”

  “Ula’s not her father. Too much honesty is a bad thing.”

  I felt a momentary, inadequate sense of fear.

  “Help her build one workable living place. Nothing fancy, and please, nothing too inspired.” He knelt and picked up a rounded stone. “She has an extensive lab and stocks of totipotent cells. You’ll need nothing. And I’ll pay you in full, for your time and your imaginary expertise.”

  I found myself cold for many reasons, staring skyward. “I’ve been to Beringa,” I told Provo. “It’s ridiculously cheery. Giant flowers and giant butterflies, mammoths and tame bears. And a clear blue sky.”

  “Exactly,” he replied, flinging the stone into the water. “And I would have kept my blue sky, but the color would have been dishonest.”

  A mosquito landed on my hand, tasting me and discovering that I wasn’t a caribou, flying off without drawing blood.

  “Bleak fits my mood, Mr. Locum.”

  I looked at him.

  And again he offered his nonsmile, making me feel, if only for an instant, sorry for him.

  Beauty, say some artists, is the delicious stew made from your subject’s flaws.

  Ula Lei was a beautiful young woman.

  She had a hundred hectare tent pitched beside her father’s home, the place filled with bio stocks and empty crystal wombs and computers capable of modeling any kind of terraforming project. She was standing beside a huge reader, waving and saying, “Come here,” with the voice people use on robots. Neither polite nor intimidating.

  I approached, thinking that she looked slight. Almost underfed. Where I had expected an ungraceful woman-child, I instead found a mannerly but almost distant professional. Was she embarrassed to need a tutor? Or was she unsure how to act with a stranger? Either way, the old man’s warning about my “toy” status seemed overstated. Taking a frail, pretty hand, feeling the polite and passionless single shake, I went from wariness to a mild funk, wondering if I had failed some standard. It wounded me when she stared right through me, asking with a calm dry voice, “What shall we do first?”

  Funk became a sense of relief, and I smiled, telling her, “Decide on our project, and its scale.”

  “Warm work, and huge.”

  I blinked. “Your father promised us a thousand-hectare tent, plus any of his robots—”

  “I want to use an old mine,” she informed me.

  “With a warm environment?”

  “It has a rock floor, and we can insulate the walls and ceiling with field charges, then refrigerate as a backup.” She knew the right words, at least in passing. “I’ve already selected which one. Here. I’ll show you everything.”

  She was direct like her father, and confident. But Ula wasn’t her father’s child. Either his genes had been suppressed from conception, or they weren’t included. Lean and graced with the fine features popular on tropical worlds, her body was the perfect antithesis of Provo’s buttery one. Very black, very curly hair. Coffee-colored skin. And vivid green eyes. Those eyes noticed that I was wearing a heavy work jersey; I had changed clothes after meeting with Provo, wanting this jersey’s self-heating capacity. Yet the temperature was twenty degrees warmer than the tundra, and her tropical face smiled when I pulled up my sleeves and pocketed my gloves. The humor was obvious only to her.

  Then she was talking again, telling me, “The main chamber is eight kilometers by fifty, and the ceiling is ten kilometers tall in the center. Pressurized ice. Very strong.” Schematics flowed past me. “The floor is the slope of a dead volcano. Father left when he found better ores.”

  A large operation, I noted. The rock floor would be porous and easily eroded, but rich in nutrients. Four hundred square kilometers? I had never worked on that scale, unless I counted computer simulations.

  A graceful hand called up a new file. “Here’s a summary of the world’s best-guess history. If you’re interested.”

  I was, but I had already guessed most of it for myself. Provo’s World was like thousands of other sunless bodies in the Realm. Born in an unknown solar system, it had been thrown free by a near-collision, drifting into interstellar space, its deep seas freezing solid and its internal heat failing. In other regions it would have been terraformed directly, but our local district was impoverished when it came to metals. Provo’s World had rich ores, its iron and magnesium, aluminum and the rest sucked up by industries and terraformers alike. A healthy green world requires an astonishing amount of iron, if only to keep it in hemoglobin. The iron from this old mine now circulated through dozens of worlds; and almost certainly some portion of that iron was inside me, brought home now within my own blood.

  “I’ve already sealed the cavern,” Ula informed me. “I was thinking of a river down the middle, recirculating, and a string of waterfalls—”

  “No,” I muttered.

  She showed me a smile. “No?”

  “I don’t like waterfalls,” I warned her.

  “Because you belong to the New Traditionalist movement. I know.” She shrugged her shoulders. “‘Waterfalls are clichés,’ you claim. ‘Life, done properly, is never pretty in simple ways.’”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yet,” Ula assured me, “this is my project.”

  I had come an enormous distance to wage a creative battle. Trying to measure my opponent, I asked, “What do you know about NTs?”

  “You want to regain the honesty of the original Earth. Hard winters. Droughts. Violent predation. Vibrant chaos.” Her expression became coy, then vaguely wicked. “But who’d want to terraform an entire world according to your values? And who would live on it, given the chance?”

  “The right people,” I replied, almost by reflex.

  “Not Father. He thinks terraforming should leave every place fat and green and pretty. And iron-hungry too.”

  “Like Beringa.”

  She nodded, the wickedness swelling. “Did you hear about my little mistake?”

  “About the hot-sap trees? I’m afraid so.”

  “I guess I do need help.” Yet Ula didn’t appear contrite. “I know about you, Mr. Locum. After my father hired you—I told him NTs work cheap—I ordered holos of every one of your works. You like working with jungles, don’t you?”

  Jungles were complex and intricate. And dense. And fun.

  “What about Yanci’s jungle?” she asked me. “It’s got a spectacular waterfall, if memory serves.”

  A socialite had paid me to build something bold, setting it inside a plastic cavern inside a pluto-class world. Low gravity; constant mist; an aggressive assemblage of wild animals and carnivo
rous plants. “Perfect,” Yanci had told me. Then she hired an old-school terraformer—little more than a plumber—to add one of those achingly slow rivers and falls, popular on every low-gravity world in the Realm.

  “Yes, Mr. Locum?” she teased. “What do you want to say?”

  “Call me Hann,” I growled.

  My student pulled her hair away from her jungle-colored eyes. “I’ve always been interested in New Traditionalists. Not that I believe what you preach … not entirely … but I’m glad Father hired one of you.”

  I was thinking about my ruined jungle. Fifty years in the past, and still it made my mouth go dry and my heart pound.

  “How will we move water without a river and falls?”

  “Underground,” I told her. “Through the porous rock. We can make a string of pools and lakes, and there won’t be erosion problems for centuries.”

  “Like this?” She called up a new schematic, and something very much like my idea appeared before us. “I did this in case you didn’t like my first idea.”

  A single waterfall was at the high end of the cavern.

  “A compromise,” she offered. Enlarging the image, she said, “Doesn’t it look natural?”

  For a cliché, I thought.

  “The reactor and pumps will be behind this cliff, and the water sounds can hide any noise—”

  “Fine,” I told her.

  “—and the entranceway too. You walk in through the falls.”

  Another cliché, but I said, “Fine.” Years of practice had taught me to compromise with the little points. Why fight details when there were bigger wars to wage?

  “Is it all right, Mr. Locum?” A wink. “I want both of us happy when this is done. Hann, I mean.”

  For an audience of how many? At least with shallow socialites, there were hundreds of friends and tagalongs and nobodys and lovers. And since they rarely had enough money to fuel their lifestyles, they would open their possessions to the curious and the public.

  But here I could do my best work, and who would know?

  “Shall we make a jungle, Hann?”

  I would know, I told myself.

  And with a forced wink, I said, “Let’s begin.”

  Terraforming is an ancient profession.

  Making your world more habitable began on the Earth itself, with the first dancing fire that warmed its builder’s cave; and everything since—every green world and asteroid and comet—is an enlargement on that first cozy cave. A hotter fusion fire brings heat and light, and benign organisms roam inside standardized biomes. For two hundred and ten centuries humans have expanded the Realm, mastering the tricks to bring life to a nearly dead universe. The frontier is an expanding sphere more than twenty light-years in radius—a great peaceful firestorm of life—and to date only one other living world has been discovered. Pitcairn. Alien and violent, and gorgeous. And the basic inspiration for the recent New Traditionalist movement. Pitcairn showed us how bland and domesticated our homes had become, riddled with clichés, every world essentially like every other world. Sad, sad, sad.

  Here I found myself with four hundred square kilometers of raw stone. How long would it take to build a mature jungle? Done simply, a matter of months. But novelty would take longer, much to Provo’s consternation. We would make fresh species, every ecological tie unique. I anticipated another year on top of the months, which was very good. We had the best computers, the best bio-stocks, and thousands of robots eager to work without pause or complaint. It was an ideal situation, I had to admit to myself. Very nearly heaven.

  We insulated the ice ceiling and walls by three different means. Field charges enclosed the heated air. If they were breached, durable refrigeration elements were sunk into the ice itself. And at my insistence we added a set of emergency ducts, cold compressed air waiting in side caverns in case of tragedies. Every organism could go into a sudden dormancy, and the heat would be sucked into the huge volumes of surrounding ice. Otherwise the ceiling might sag and collapse, and I didn’t want that to happen. Ula’s jungle was supposed to outlast all of us. Why else go to all this bother?

  We set the reactor inside the mine shaft, behind the eventual cliché. Then lights were strung, heating the cavern’s new air, and we manufactured rich soils with scrap rock and silt from Provo’s own little sea. The first inhabitants were bacteria and fungi set free to chew and multiply, giving the air its first living scent. Then robots began assembling tree-shaped molds, sinking hollow roots into the new earth and a sketchwork of branches meshing overhead, beginning the future canopy.

  We filled the molds with water, nutrients, and nourishing electrical currents, then inoculated them with totipotent cells. More like baking than gardening, this was how mature forest could be built from scratch. Living cells divided at an exponential rate, then assembled themselves into tissue-types—sapwood and heartwood, bark and vascular tubes. It’s a kind of superheated cultivation, and how else could artists like me exist? Left to Nature’s pace, anything larger than a terrarium would consume entire lives. Literally.

  Within five months—on schedule—we were watching the robots break up the molds, exposing the new trees to the air. And that’s a symbolic moment worth a break and a little celebration, which we held.

  Just Ula and me.

  I suggested inviting Provo, but she told me, “Not yet. It’s too soon to show him yet.”

  Perhaps. Or did she want her father kept at a distance?

  I didn’t ask. I didn’t care. We were dining on top of a rough little hill, at the midpoint of the cavern, whiteness above and the new forest below us, leafless, resembling thousands of stately old trees pruned back by giant shears. Stubby, enduring trees. I toasted our success, and Ula grinned, almost singing when she said, “I haven’t been the bother you expected, have I?”

  No, she hadn’t been.

  “And I know more about terraforming than you thought.”

  More than I would admit. I nodded and said, “You’re adept, considering you’re self-taught.”

  “No,” she sang, “you’re the disappointment.”

  “Am I?”

  “I expected … well, more energy. More inspiration.” She rose to her feet, gesturing at our half-born creation. “I really hoped an NT would come up with bizarre wonders—”

  “Like an eight-legged terror?”

  “Exactly.”

  It had been her odd idea, and I’d dismissed it twenty times before I realized it was a game with her. She wanted an organism wholly unique, and I kept telling her that radical tailoring took too much time and too frequently failed. And besides, I added, our little patch of jungle wasn’t large enough for the kind of predator she had in mind.

  “I wish we could have one or two of them,” she joked.

  I ignored her. I’d learned that was best.

  “But don’t you agree? Nothing we’ve planned is that new or spectacular.”

  Yet I was proud of everything. What did she want? Our top three carnivores were being tailored at that moment—a new species of fire-eagle; a variation on black nightcats; and an intelligent, vicious species of monkey. Computer models showed that only two of them would survive after the first century. Which two depended on subtle, hard-to-model factors. That was one of the more radical, unpopular NT principles. “The fit survive.” We build worlds with too much diversity, knowing that some of our creations are temporary. And unworthy. Then we stand aside, letting our worlds decide for themselves.

  “I wish we could have rainstorms,” she added. It was another game, and she waved her arms while saying, “Big winds. Lightning. I’ve always wanted to see lightning.”

  “There’s not enough energy to drive storms,” I responded. The rains were going to be mild events that came in the night. When we had nights, in a year. “I don’t want to risk—”

  “—damaging the ice. I know.” She sat again, closer now, smiling as she said, “No, I don’t care. It’s coming along perfectly.”

  I nodded, gazing up at
the brilliant white sky. The mining robots had left the ice gouged and sharp, and somehow that was appropriate. An old violence was set against a rich new order, violent in different ways. A steamy jungle cloaked in ice; an appealing, even poetic dichotomy. And while I looked into the distance, hearing the sounds of molds being torn apart and loaded onto mag-rails, my partner came even closer, touching one of my legs and asking, “How else have I surprised you?”

  She hadn’t touched me in months, even in passing.

  It took me a moment to gather myself, and I took her hand and set it out of the way, with a surety of motion.

  She said nothing, smiling and watching me.

  And once again, for the umpteenth time, I wondered what Ula was thinking. Because I didn’t know and couldn’t even guess. We had been together for months, our relationship professional and bloodless. Yet I always had the strong impression that she showed me what she wanted to show me, and I couldn’t even guess how much of that was genuine.

  “How else?” she asked again.

  “You’re an endless surprise,” I told her.

  But instead of appearing pleased, she dipped her head, the smile changing to a concentrated stare, hands drawing rounded shapes in the new soil, then erasing them with a few quick tiger swipes.

  I met Provo behind the waterfall, in the shaft, his sturdy shape emerging from the shadows; and he gave me a nod and glanced at the curtain of water, never pausing, stepping through and vanishing with a certain indifference. I followed, knowing where the flow was weakest—where I would be the least soaked—and stepped out onto a broad rock shelf, workboots gripping and my dampened jersey starting to dry itself.

  The old man was gazing into the forest.

  I asked, “Would you like a tour?” Then I added, “We could ride one of the mag-rails, or we could walk.”

  “No,” he replied. “Neither.”

  Why was he here? Provo had contacted me, no warning given. He had asked about his daughter’s whereabouts. “She’s in the lab,” I had said, “mutating beetles.” Leave her alone, he had told me. Provo wanted just the two of us for his first inspection.