Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  “I remember when Father showed me one of the old vents … the first one I ever saw … .”

  I doubly braced myself.

  “I was five or six, I suppose, and we were walking through a new mine, down a dead rift valley, two hundred kilometers under the frozen sea. He pointed to mounds of dirty ore, then he had one of his robots slice into one of them, showing me the striations … how layers of bacteria had grown, by the trillion … outnumbering the human race, he said … and I cried … .”

  “Did you?”

  “Because they had died.” She appeared close to tears again, but one hand casually scratched her breasts. Then the face brightened, almost smiling as she asked, “What’s your favorite world?”

  Changing subjects? I couldn’t be sure.

  “Your own world, or anyone’s. Do you have favorites?”

  Several of them, yes. I described the most famous world—a small spinning asteroid filled with wet forest—and I told her about the artists, all terraformers who had journeyed to the alien world of Pitcairn. They were the first New Traditionalists. I had never seen the work for myself, ten light-years between us and it, but I’d walked through the holos, maybe hundreds of times. The artists had been changed by Pitcairn. They never used alien life-forms—there are tough clear laws against the exporting of Pitcairn life—but they had twisted earthly species to capture something of the strangeness and strength of the place. And I couldn’t do it justice. I found myself blabbering about the quality of light and the intensity of certain golden birds … and at some point I quit speaking, realizing that Ula wasn’t paying attention to me.

  She heard silence and said, “It sounds intriguing.” Then with a slow, almost studied pose, she said, “Let me tell you about something even more fascinating.”

  I felt a moment of anger. How dare she ignore me! Then the emotion evaporated, betraying me, leaving me to wait while she seemed to gather herself, her face never more serious or composed. Or focused. Or complete.

  “It was the second world that I built,” I heard. “My first world was too large and very clumsy, and I destroyed it by accident. But no matter. What I did that second time was find a very small abandoned mine, maybe a hectare in size, and I reinforced the ice walls and filled the chamber with water, then sank a small reactor into the rock, opening up the ancient plumbing and inoculating the water with a mixture of bacteria—”

  “Did you?” I sputtered.

  “—and reestablishing one vent community. After three billion years of sleep. I fueled the reactor with a measured amount of deuterium, and I enriched the warming water with the proper metals.” A pause. “New striations formed. Superheated black goo was forced from the fossil tubes. And I dressed in a strong pressure suit and walked into that world, and I sat just like we’re sitting here, and waited.”

  I swallowed. “Waited?”

  “The reactor slowed, then stopped.” Ula took a breath and said, “I watched. With the lights on my suit down low, I watched the black goo stop rising, and the water cooled, and eventually new ice began to form against the walls. I moved to the center, sitting among the tubes … for days, for almost two weeks … the ice walls closing in on me—”

  “That’s crazy,” I blurted.

  And she shrugged as if to say, “I don’t care.” A smile emerged, then vanished, and she turned and touched me, saying, “I allowed myself to be frozen into that new ice, my limbs locked in place, my power packs running dry—”

  “But why?” I asked. “So you’d know how it felt?”

  And she didn’t seem to hear me, tilting her head, seemingly listening to some distant sound worthy of her complete attention. Eventually she said, “Father missed me.” A pause. “He came home from a tour of distant mines, and I was missing, and he sent robots out to find me, and they cut me free just before I would have begun to truly suffer.”

  The girl was insane. I knew it.

  She took a dramatic breath, then smiled. Her haunted expression vanished in an instant, without effort, and again she was a student, the youngster, and my lover. A single bead of perspiration was rolling along her sternum, then spreading across her taut brown belly; and I heard myself asking, “Why did you do that shit?”

  But the youngster couldn’t or wouldn’t explain herself, dipping her head and giggling into my ear.

  “You could have died,” I reminded her.

  She said, “Don’t be angry, darling. Please?”

  An unstable, insane woman-child, and suddenly I was aware of my own heartbeat.

  “Are you angry with sweet me?” She reached for me, for a useful part of me, asking, “How can I make you happy, darling?”

  “Be normal,” I whispered.

  “Haven’t you paid attention?” The possessed expression reemerged for an instant. “I’m not and never have been. Normal. My darling.”

  My excuse, after much thought and practice, was a conference with her father. “I want us to have a backup reactor. In case.”

  She dismissed the possibility out of hand. “He won’t give us one.”

  “And I want to walk on the surface. For a change of scenery.” I paused, then camouflaged my intentions by asking, “Care to walk with me?”

  “God, no. I’ve had enough of those walks, thank you.”

  Freed for the day, I began by visiting the closest caverns and one deflated tent, poking through dead groves and chiseling up samples of soil and frozen pond water. The cold was absolute. The sky was black and filled with stars, a few dim green worlds lost against the chill. Running quick tests, I tried to identify what had gone wrong and where. Sometimes the answer was obvious; sometimes I was left with guesses. But each of her worlds was undeniably dead, hundreds and thousands of new species extinct before they had any chance to prosper.

  Afterward I rode the mag-rail back to Provo’s house, finding where the hot-sap trees had been planted, the spot marked with a shallow lake created when the permafrost melted. I worked alone for twenty minutes, then the owner arrived. He seemed unhurried, yet something in his voice or his forward tilt implied a genuine concern. Or maybe not. I’d given up trying to decipher their damned family.

  Pocketing my field instruments, I told Provo, “She’s a good tailor. Too good.” No greetings. No preparatory warning. I just informed him, “I’ve watched her, and you can’t tell me that she’d introduce a toxic metabolite by accident. Not Ula.”

  The old man’s face grew a shade paler, his entire body softening; and he leaned against a boulder, telling me without the slightest concern, “That possibility has crossed my mind, yes.”

  I changed topics, Ula-fashion. “When we met you warned me not to get too close to her. And not to be too honest.”

  “I remember.”

  “How do you know? Who else has been here?”

  No answer.

  “She’s had another tutor, hasn’t she?”

  “Never.”

  “Then how can you know?”

  “Twice,” Provo told me, “my daughter has taken lovers. Two different crew members from separate freighters. Dullards, both of them. With each there was a period of bliss. They stayed behind and helped Ula with her work, then something would go wrong. I don’t know any details. I refuse to spy on my own daughter. But with the man, her first lover … he expressed an interest in leaving, I believe … in returning to his vocation … .”

  “What happened?”

  “Ula pierced the wall of the tent. A year’s work was destroyed in a few minutes.”

  The man sighed, betraying a huge fatigue. “She told me that it was an accident, that she intended just to scare him—”

  “She murdered him?” I managed.

  And Provo laughed with relief. “No, no. No, the dullard was able to climb into an emergency suit in time, saving himself.”

  “What about the other lover?”

  “The woman?” A strong shrug of the shoulders, then he said, “A fire. Another accident. I know less, but I surmise they had had a spa
t of some kind. A ridiculous, wasteful fit of anger. Although Ula claimed not to have started the blaze. She acted thoroughly innocent, and astonishingly unrepentant.”

  I swallowed, then whispered, “Your daughter is disturbed.”

  Provo said, “And didn’t I warn you? Did you not understand me?” The soft face was perspiring despite the chill air. A cloud of mosquitoes drifted between us, hunting suitable game. “How much forewarning did you require, Mr. Locum?”

  I said nothing.

  “And you’ve done so well, too. Better than I hoped possible, I should tell you.”

  I opened my mouth, and I said nothing.

  “She told me … yesterday, I think … how important you are to her education—”

  “The poison,” I interrupted.

  Provo quit speaking.

  “There’s a residue here. In the soil.” I showed him a molecule displayed on my portable reader. “It’s a synthetic alkaloid. Very messy, very tough. And very, very intentional, I think.” A moment’s pause, then I asked him, “Has it occurred to you that she was trying to murder you?”

  “Naturally,” he responded, in an instant.

  “And?”

  “And she didn’t try. No.”

  “How can you feel sure?”

  “You claim that my daughter is bright. Is talented. If she wanted to kill me, even if she was an idiot, don’t you think that right now I would be dead?”

  Probably true, I thought.

  “Two people alone on an empty world. Nothing would be simpler than the perfect murder, Mr. Locum.”

  “Then what did she want?” I gestured at the little lake. “What was this about?”

  Provo appeared disgusted, impatient.

  He told me, “I might have hoped that you could explain it to me.”

  I imagined Ula on the bottom of a freezing sea, risking death in some bid to understand … what? And three times she had endangered others … which left another dozen creations that she had killed … and was she alone in each of them when they died … ?

  “Discover her purpose, Mr. Locum, and perhaps I’ll give you a bonus. If that’s permissible.”

  I said nothing.

  “You have been following my suggestions, haven’t you? You aren’t becoming too entangled with her, are you?”

  I looked at Provo.

  And he read my face, shaking his head with heavy sadness, saying, “Oh, my, Mr. Locum. Oh, my.”

  A purpose.

  The possibility gnawed at me. I assumed some kind of madness lay over whatever her rationale, and I wished for a degree in psychiatry, or maybe some life experience with insanity. Anything would help. Riding the mag-rail back into our cavern, replaying the last few months in my mind, I heard part of me begging for me to flee, to turn now and take refuge where I could, then stow away on the first freighter to pass—

  —which was impossible, I realized in the same instant. Not to mention dangerous. Acting normal was important, I told myself. Then aloud, I said, “Just keep her happy.”

  I have never been more terrified of a human being.

  Yet Ula seemed oblivious. She greeted me with a kiss and demanded more, and I failed her, nervousness and sudden fatigue leaving me soft. But she explained it away as stress and unimportant, cuddling up next to me on the shady jungle floor. She said, “Let’s sleep,” and I managed to close my eyes and drift into a broken dreamy sleep, jerking awake to find myself alone.

  Where had the girl gone?

  I called her on our com-line, hearing her voice and my voice dry and clumsy, asking her, “Where are you?”

  “Mutating treefrogs, darling.”

  Which put her inside her home. Out of my way. I moved to the closest workstation, asking its reader to show me the original schematics and everything that we had done to date; and I opened up my jersey—I was still wearing my heavy, cold-weather jersey—drops of salty water splattering on the reader. I was hunting for anything odd or obviously dangerous. A flaw in the ice roof? None that I could find. A subtle poison in our young trees? None that showed in the genetic diagrams. But just to be sure, I tested myself. Nothing wrong in my blood, I learned. What else? There was one oddity, something that I might have noticed before but missed. The trees had quirks in their chemistry. Nothing deadly. Just curious. I was studying a series of sugars, wondering when Ula had slipped them into the tailoring process, and why; and just then, as if selecting the perfect moment, she said, “Darling,” with a clear close voice. Then, “What are you doing?”

  I straightened my back, and I turned.

  Ula was standing behind me, the smile bright and certain. And strange. She said, “Hello?” and then, “What are you doing, darling?”

  I blanked the reader.

  Then with the stiffest possible voice, I told her, “Nothing. Just checking details.”

  She approached, taking me around my waist.

  I hugged her, wondering what to do.

  Then she released me, pulling back her hair while asking, “What did you and my father decide?”

  Swallowing was impossible, my throat full of dust.

  “I forgot to ask before. Do we get a second reactor?”

  I managed to shake my head. No.

  “An unnecessary expense,” she said, perfectly mimicking her father’s voice. She couldn’t have acted more normal, walking around me while asking, “Has the nap helped?”

  I watched her undress as she moved.

  “Feel like fun?”

  Why was I afraid? There weren’t any flaws in our work, I knew, and as long as she was with me, nude and in my grasp, what could she do to me? Nothing, and I became a little confident. At least confident enough to accomplish the task at and, the event feeling robotic and false, and entirely safe.

  Afterward she said, “That was the best,” and I knew—knew without doubt—that Ula was lying. “The best ever,” she told me, kissing my nose and mouth and upturned throat. “We’ll never have a more perfect moment. Can I ask you something?”

  “What … ?”

  She said, “It’s something that I’ve considered. For a long while, I’ve been wondering—”

  “What?”

  “About the future.” She straddled me, pressure on my stomach. The grin was sly and expectant. “When Father dies, I inherit this world. All of it and his money too, and his robots. Everything.”

  A slight nod, and I said, “Yes?”

  “What will I do with it?”

  I had no idea.

  “What if I bought an artificial sun? Not fancy. And brought it here and put it in orbit. I’ve estimated how long it would take to melt this sea, if I hurried things along by seeding the ice with little reactors—”

  “Decades,” I interrupted.

  “Two or three, I think. And then I could terraform an entire world.” She paused, tilting her head and her eyes lifting. “Of course all of this would be destroyed. Which is sad.” She sighed, shrugging her shoulders. “How many people have my kind of wealth, Hann? In the entire Realm, how many?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And who already own a world too. How many?”

  “Very few.”

  “And who have an interest in terraforming, of course.” She giggled and said, “I could be one of a kind. It’s possible.”

  It was.

  “What I want to ask,” she said, “is this. Would you, Hann Locum, like to help me? To remake all of this ice and rock with me?”

  I opened my mouth, then hesitated.

  “Because I don’t deserve all the fun for myself,” she explained, climbing off me. “Wouldn’t that be something? You might be the first NT terraformer with your own world. Wouldn’t that make you the envy of your peers?”

  “Undoubtedly,” I whispered.

  Ula walked to her clothes, beginning to dress. “Are you interested?”

  I said, “Yes. Sure.” True or not, I wanted to make agreeable sounds. Then I made myself add, “But your father’s in good health. It co
uld be a long time before—”

  “Oh, yeah.” A glib shrug of her shoulders; a vague little-girl smile. “I hope it’s years and years away. I do.”

  I watched the girl’s face, unable to pierce it. I couldn’t guess what she was really thinking, not even when she removed the odd control from one of her deep pockets. A simple device, homemade and held in her right hand; and now she winked at me, saying, “I know.”

  Know?

  “What both of you talked about today. Of course I know.”

  The pressure on my chest grew a thousandfold.

  “The mosquitoes? Some aren’t. They’re electronic packages dressed up as mosquitoes, and I always hear what Father says—”

  Shit.

  “—and have for years. Always.”

  I sat upright, hands digging into the damp black soil.

  She laughed and warned me, “You’re not the first person to hear his confession. I am sorry. He has this guilt, and he salves it by telling people who can’t threaten him. I suppose he wanted you to feel sorry for him, and to admire him—”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Of my parents? Nothing.” She shook her head. “Everything.” A nod and the head titled, and she told me, “I do have one clear image. I don’t know if it’s memory or if it’s a dream, or what. But I’m a child inside a smelly freighter, huddled in a corner, watching Provo Lei strangle my real mother. He doesn’t know I’m there, of course.” A pause. “If he had known, do you suppose he would have strangled me too? To save himself, perhaps?”

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered.

  And she laughed, the sound shrill. Complex. “Why? He’s a very good father, considering. I love him, and I can’t blame him for anything.” A pause, then with a caring voice she told me, “I love him quite a lot more than I love you, Hann.”

  I moved, the ground under my butt creaking; and I had to say, “But you poisoned him anyway.”

  Ula waved her control with a flourish, telling me, “I poisoned everything. All I wanted was for Father to watch.” A shrug. “I tried to make him understand … to comprehend … but I don’t think he could ever appreciate what I was trying to tell him. Never.”

  I swallowed, then asked, “What were you telling him?”