Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  Her eyes grew huge, then a finger was wagged at me. “No. No, you don’t.” She took a small step backward, shaking her head. “I think it’s just a little too soon for that. Dear.”

  I waited.

  Then she waved the control again, saying, “Look up, Hann. Will you? Now?”

  “Up?” I whispered.

  “This direction.” She pointed at the canopy. “This is up.”

  My gaze lifted, the solid green ceiling of leaves glowing, branches like veins running through the green; and she must have activated the control, a distinct click followed by her calm voice saying, “I left out parts of the schematics, Hann. Intentionally. Before you were even hired, you should know.”

  There was a distant rumbling noise.

  The ground moved, tall trees swaying for an instant; then came a flash of light with instant thunder, a bolt of electricity leaping down the long cavern, the force of it swatting me down against the forest floor, heat against my face and chest, every hair on my body lifting for a terrible long instant.

  Then it was gone again.

  Everything was.

  The lights had failed, a perfect seamless night engulfing the world; and twice I heard a laugh, close and then distant.

  Then nothing.

  And I screamed, the loudest sound I could muster lost in the leaves and against the tree trunks, fading into echoes and vanishing, as if it had never existed at all.

  My jersey … where was my jersey … ?

  I made myself stand and think, perfectly alert, trying to remember where it had lain and counting steps in my mind … one step, and two, and three. Then I knelt and found nothing in reach, nothing but the rich new soil, and for a terrified instant I wondered if Ula had stolen my clothes, leaving me naked as well as blind.

  But another step and grope gave me my boots, then the jersey. I dressed and found my various equipment in the pockets and pouches. The portable reader had been cooked by the lightning, but the glowglobes were eager. I ignited one of them and released it; it hovered over me, moving with a faint dry hum as it emitted a yellowish light.

  I walked to the closest mag-rail.

  Inoperative.

  Nearby were a pair of robots standing like statues.

  Dead.

  I started to jog uphill, moving fast. Where was Ula? Had she gone somewhere, or was she nearby, watching me?

  It was fifteen kilometers to the waterfall, the exit. The trees seemed larger in the very weak light, the open jungle floor feeling rather like a place of worship. A cathedral. Then came a wall of vines and thorny brush—our earliest plantings—and I burrowed into them, pushing despite the stabs at my skin, breaking into an open unfinished glade and pausing. Something was wrong, I thought. Against my face was cold air, bitter and sudden. Of course the field generators were down. And the refrigeration elements. What remained was the passive emergency system, heat rising into high ducts while others released cubic kilometers of stored air from below.

  How long would the process take?

  I couldn’t remember, could scarcely think about anything. My jersey automatically warmed me, and I helped keep warm by running fast, pulling ahead of my glowglobe, my frantic shadow gigantic and ethereal.

  In my head, in simple terms, I handled the mathematics.

  Calories; volume; turbulence; time.

  Halfway to the waterfall, feeling the distance and the grade, I had a terrible sudden premonition.

  Slowing, I said, “Where are you?”

  Then I screamed, “Ula! Ula!”

  In the chill air my voice carried, and when it died there was a new sound, clear and strong and very distant. A howl; a wild inhuman moan. I took a weak step sideways and faltered. Somehow I felt as if I should know the source … and I remembered Ula’s eight-legged predator, swift and smart and possibly on the hunt now. She had made it … !

  There was a motion, a single swirling something coming out of the gloom at me. I grunted and twisted, falling down, and a leaf landed at my feet. Brown and cold. Partly cooked by the lightning, I realized. It crumbled when my hand closed around it. Then came the howl again, seemingly closer, and again I was running, sprinting uphill, into another band of prickly underbrush and starting to sob with the authority of a beaten child.

  The ambient temperature was plummeting.

  My breath showed in my glowglobe’s yellow light, lifting and thinning and mixing with more falling leaves. The forest was slipping into dormancy. A piece of me was thankful, confident that it at least would survive whatever happened; and most of me was furious with Ula—a simple, visceral fury—as I imagined my escape and the filing of criminal complaints. Attempted murder. Malicious endangerment. And straight murder charges on Provo, me as witness for the prosecution and their lives here finished. Extinguished. Lost.

  “I’m going to escape,” I muttered at the shadows. “Ula? Are you listening? Ula?”

  I pulled gloves from a pocket, covering my cold hands and then knitting into my sleeves. Then I unrolled my jersey’s simple hood, tying it flush against my head, enjoying the heat of the fabric. Leaves were falling in a steady brown blizzard. They covered the freezing earth, crunching with each footfall, and sometimes in the crunches I thought I heard someone or something else moving. Pausing, I would listen. Wait. The predator? Or Ula? But the next howl seemed distant and perhaps confused, and it had to be the girl whom I heard. Who wouldn’t be fooled with my stop-and-then-go-and-stop-again tricks.

  The cavern’s upper end was bitter cold. One of our emergency ducts had opened up beside the entranceway, robbing the heat from the water and ground and trees. Already the pond was freezing, the ice clear and hard, very nearly flawless. I ran on its shore, squinting into the gloom, believing that at least the cliché, the falls, would have stopped flowing when the power failed. Not in an instant, no. But its reservoir was relatively small—Ula had shown me her plans—and for a glorious instant I was absolutely convinced that my escape was imminent.

  What was that? From the gloom came an apparent wall of marble, white and thick and built where the cliché had been. Frozen … the waterfall had frozen clear through … !

  I moaned, screamed, and slowed.

  Beside the pond was one of the useless robots. I moved to it, my breath freezing against the ceramic skin, and with a few desperate tugs I managed to pry free one of its hands. The hand was meant for cutting, for chopping, and I held it like an axe, growling at my audience. “What did you think? That I’d just give up now?”

  No answer. The only sounds were the falling of leaves and the occasional creaking pop as sap froze inside the sleeping trees.

  I moved to the icy shelf at the base of the falls, shuffling to where I normally walked through, where the ice should be thinnest. Three times I swung, twice without force and the third blow hard and useless, the ice as tough as marble and more slippery. My axe slid sideways, twisting me. Then my boots moved, my balance lost, and I hit the icy shelf, slid, and fell again.

  The pond caught me. The ice beneath gave with the impact, a slight but deep cracking sound lasting for an age. But I didn’t fall through. And when I could breathe again, with pain, I stood and hobbled over to the shore, trying very hard not to give in.

  “Is this what you did to the others?” I asked.

  Silence.

  “Is this how you treat lovers, Ula?”

  A howl, almost close, sudden and very shrill.

  A primeval thought came to me. I made myself approach the black jungle, scooping up leaves by the armful and building a substantial pile of them where I had sat with Provo, against the downed log. And I lit them and the log on fire with a second glowglobe, putting it on overload and stepping back and the globe detonating with a wet sizzle, the dried leaves exploding into a smoky red fire.

  The odd sugars loved to burn, the flames hot and quick and delicious. They ignited the log within minutes, giving me a sense of security. The canopy didn’t reach overhead. I made doubly sure that the surrounding grou
nd had no leaves, no way for the fire to spread; then I set to work, armfuls of fresh leaves piled against the cliché, tamped them down with my boots until there was a small hill spilling onto the pond.

  Heat versus ice.

  Equations and estimates kept me focused, unafraid.

  Then I felt ready, using the axe to knock loose a long splinter of burning log. I carried the cold end, shouting, “See? See? I’m not some idiot. I’m not staying in your trap, Ula!” I touched the leaf pile in a dozen places, then retreated, keeping at what felt like a safe distance but feeling waves regardless, dry and solid heat playing over me, almost nourishing me for the moment.

  Those sugars were wonderfully potent. Almost explosive.

  Ula must have planned to burn me alive, I kept thinking. She would have lit the leaf litter when it was deep enough … only I’d beaten her timetable, hadn’t I?

  “I’ll file charges,” I promised the red-lit trees. “You should have done a better job, my dear.”

  A sharp howl began, then abruptly stopped. It was as if a recording had been turned off in its middle.

  Then came a crashing sound, and I turned to see a single chunk of softened ice breaking free of the cliché, crashing into my fire and throwing sparks in every direction. Watching the sparks, I felt worry and a sudden fatigue. What’s wrong? My eyes lifted, maybe out of instinct, and I noticed a single platter-sized leaf still rising, glowing red and obviously different from the other leaves. It was burning slowly, almost patiently. It practically soared overhead. Just like a fire eagle, it rode a thermal … and didn’t it resemble an eagle? A little bit? One species of tree among hundreds, and Ula must have designed it, and she must have seen that it was planted here—

  —such an elaborate, overly complicated plan. Contrived and plainly artificial, I was thinking. Part of me felt superior and critical. Even when I knew the seriousness of everything, watching that leaf vanish into great blackness overhead … out of the thermal now, gliding off in some preplanned direction, no doubt … even then I felt remarkably unafraid, knowing that that leaf would surely reach the canopy somewhere, igniting hundreds of leaves and the sappy young branches … and part of me wanted nothing more than to take my student aside, arm around her shoulders, while I said, “Now listen. This is all very clever, and I’m sure it’s cruel, but this is neither elegant nor artful and show me another way to do it. By tomorrow. That’s your assignment, Ula. Will you do it for me, please?”

  The forest caught fire.

  I heard the fire before I saw the ruddy glow of it. It sounded like a grinding wind, strong and coming nearer; then came the crashing of softened ice, blocks and slush dropping onto my fire and choking it out completely.

  I didn’t have time or the concentration to build another fire.

  Towering red flames were streaking through the cavern, first in the canopy and then lower, igniting whole trunks that would explode. I heard them, and I felt the detonations against my face and through my toes. The air itself began to change, tasting warm and sooty, ashes against my teeth and tongue. Transfixed, I stood in the clearing beside the pond, thick and twisting black columns of smoke rising, the ceiling lit red and the smoke pooling against it, forming an inverted lake full of swirling superheated gases.

  Over the rumble and roar of the fire, I heard someone speaking, close and harsh … and after a few moments of hard concentration I realized it was my voice, senseless angry sounds bubbling out of me … and I clamped a hand over my mouth, fingers into a cheek and tears mixed with the stinking ash … I was crying … I had been crying for a very long while …

  I would die here.

  Always crying, I struggled with prosaic calculations. Calories from combustion; oxygen consumed; the relative toughness of human flesh. But my numbers collapsed, too much stress and too little time remaining. Part of the firestorm was coming back at me now, trunks burning and splitting open as the fiery sap boiled; but I wouldn’t burn to death, I decided. Because what felt like a finger struck me on top of my head, in my hair, and I looked up just as a second gooey drop of water found me. It dripped between the fingers of my clamping hand, and I tasted it—smoke and ash mixed with a sharp, almost chemical aftertaste—

  —melted ice from the faraway roof—

  —unfrozen, ancient seawater.

  The black lake of churning smoke was its deepest straight above me, and those first drops became multitudes, fat and forceful. Like rain, then harder. They hammered me to the ground, my head dropping and my hands held above it, shielding very little, and squinting eyes able to see the oncoming fire begin to slow, to drown.

  I thought of the falls melting with this onslaught, but I couldn’t stand, much less move. The mud under me seemed to suck, holding me in place. I was squarely beneath an enormous waterfall—no cliché—and I would have laughed, given the breath.

  Funny, fun Ula.

  Perhaps the largest waterfall in the Realm, I was thinking. For this moment, at least. And my mind’s eye lent me a safe vantage point, flames and water struggling for the world. And destroying it too. And somewhere I realized that by now I had to be dead, that breathing had to be impossible, that I only believed I was breathing because death had to be a continuation of life, a set of habits maintained. What a lovely, even charming wonder. I felt quite calm, quite happy. Hearing the roar of water, aware of the soil and trees and rock itself being obliterated … my bones and pulverized meat mixed into the stew … and how sweet that I could retain my limbs, my face and mouth and heart, as a ghost, I thought. Touching myself in the noisy blackness, I found even my soaked jersey intact … no, not total blackness; there was a dim glow from above … and I began to sit upright, thinking like a ghost, wondering about my powers and wishing that my soul could lift now, lift and fly away.

  But instead, with unghostly force, my head struck a solid surface.

  Thunk.

  I staggered, groaned, and reached out with both hands, discovering a blister of transparent hyperglass above me. Enclosing me. Larger than a coffin, but not by much … it must have been deployed at the last possible instant, air pumped in from below, seals designed to withstand this abuse … a safety mechanism not shown on any schematic, obviously … and I was alive, slippery wet and numb but undeniably organic …

  … and unalone as well.

  Rising from the mud beside me, visible in that thin cool light, was a naked form—artist; torturer; Nature Herself—who calmly and with great dignity wiped the mud from her eyes and grinning mouth. And she bent, the mouth to my ear, asking me over the great roar, “So what have you learned today, student?”

  I couldn’t speak, could barely think.

  Opening my jersey, she kissed my bare chest. “The eight-legged howler was just noise. Just my little illusion.”

  Yet in my head it was real, even now.

  “I would never intentionally hurt,” she promised. “Not you, not anyone.”

  I wanted to believe her.

  “I always watched over you, Hann. I never blinked.”

  Thank you.

  “I’m not cruel.” A pause. “It’s just—”

  Yes?

  “—I wanted to show you—”

  What?

  “—what? What have I shown you, darling?”

  Squinting, I gazed up through the thick blister, the black water churning more slowly, cooling and calming itself. My mind became lucid, answers forming and my mouth opening and her anticipating the moment, her hand tasting of earth as it closed my mouth again.

  We lay quietly together, as if in a common grave.

  For two days we waited, the water refreezing around us and neither of us speaking, the creaking of new ice fading into a perfect silence. A contemplative, enlightening silence. I built worlds in my head—great and beautiful and true, full of the frailties and powers of life—then came the gnawing and pounding of robots. Half-burned trees were jerked free and tossed aside. The ice itself was peeled away from the blister. I saw motions, then stars.
Then a familiar stocky figure. Provo Lei peered in at us, the round face furious and elated in equal measures; and as he began to cut us free, in those last moments of solitude, I turned to Ula and finally spoke.

  “You never wanted to terraform worlds,” I blurted.

  “Worlds are tiny,” she said with contempt. Her liquid smile was lit by the cutting laser, and a green eye winked as she said, “Tell me, Hann. What do I care about?”

  Something larger than worlds, I knew—

  —and I understood, in an instant—

  —but as I touched my head, ready to tell, Provo burst through the hyperglass and stole my chance. Suddenly Ula had changed, becoming the pouting little girl, her lower lip stuck out and a plaintive voice crying, “Oh, Father. I’m such a clumsy goof, Father. I’m sorry, so sorry. Will you ever forgive me? Please, please?”

  Dawn Venus

  G. DAVID NORDLEY

  Like John Varley, Michael Swanwick, Stephen Baxter, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others, G. David Nordley is another writer who finds the solar system an exoticenough setting for adventures just as it is, as he’s demonstrated with stories of exploration and conflict on a grand scale, such as “Into the Miranda Rift,” “Out of the Quiet Years,” “Comet Gypsies,” “Alice’s Asteroid,” “The Day of Their Coming,” “Messengers of Chaos,” and others; many of these stories make effective use of the latest data from the Voyager space probes, data that shows just how bizarre, complex, surprising, and mysterious a place our solar system really is.

  After the successful terraforming of a planet takes place, what then? How do you populate your new world? The hair-raising thriller that follows takes us to a terraformed Venus for a frantic land rush unlike any seen before in human history … one with stakes so high that almost any risk is acceptable, even ones that seem almost certainly fatal—like jumping out of an orbiting space station.

  G. David Nordley is a retired Air Force officer and physicist who has become a frequent contributor to Analog in the last couple of years, winning that magazine’s Analytical Laboratory readers’ poll in 1992 for his story “Poles Apart”; he also won the same award for his story “Into the Miranda Rift.” He has also sold stories to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tomorrow, Mindsparks, and elsewhere. Although fairly prolific at short lengths, Nordley has yet to publish a novel, although he has several series in progress that could be worked up into novels without too much difficulty. Until then, you’ll just have to look for him in the SF magazines, where he appears with pleasing frequency. Nordley lives in Sunnyvale, California.