Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  Neither of us was born on Earth. Not many people were, in those days. It was a desert planet then, ravaged in the twelfth year of what they would call the Last War. When we met, that war had been going for over four hundred years, and had moved out of Sol Space altogether, or so we thought.

  Some cultures had other names for the conflict. My parent, who fought the century before I did, always called it the Extermination, and their name for the enemy was “roach,” or at least that’s as close as English allows. We called the enemy an approximation of their own word for themselves, Fwndyri, which was uglier to us. I still have no love for them, but have no reason to make the effort. It would be easier to love a roach. At least we have a common ancestor. And we accompanied one another into space.

  One mixed blessing we got from the war was a loose form of interstellar government, the Council of Worlds. There had been individual treaties before, but an overall organization had always seemed unlikely, since no two inhabited systems are less than three light-years apart, and several of them are over fifty. You can’t defeat Einstein; that makes more than a century between “How are you?” and “Fine.”

  The Council of Worlds was headquartered on Earth, an unlikely and unlovely place, if centrally located. There were fewer than ten thousand people living on the blighted planet then, an odd mix of politicians, religious extremists, and academics, mostly. Almost all of them under glass. Tourists flowed through the domed-over ruins, but not many stayed long. The planet was still very dangerous over all of its unprotected surface, since the Fwndyri had thoroughly seeded it with nanophages. Those were submicroscopic constructs that sought out concentrations of human DNA. Once under the skin, they would reproduce at a geometric rate, deconstructing the body, cell by cell, building new nanophages. A person might complain of a headache and lie down, and a few hours later there would be nothing but a dry skeleton, lying in dust. When the humans were all dead, they mutated and went after DNA in general, and sterilized the world.

  White Hill and I were “bred” for immunity to the nanophages. Our DNA winds backwards, as was the case with many people born or created after that stage of the war. So we could actually go through the elaborate airlocks and step out onto the blasted surface unprotected.

  I didn’t like her at first. We were competitors, and aliens to one another.

  When I worked through the final airlock cycle, for my first moment on the actual surface of Earth, she was waiting outside, sitting in meditation on a large flat rock that shimmered in the heat. One had to admit she was beautiful in a startling way, clad only in a glistening pattern of blue and green body paint. Everything else around was grey and black, including the hard-packed talcum that had once been a mighty jungle, Brazil. The dome behind me was a mirror of grey and black and cobalt sky.

  “Welcome home,” she said. “You’re Water Man.”

  She inflected it properly, which surprised me. “You’re from Petros?”

  “Of course not.” She spread her arms and looked down at her body. Our women always cover at least one of their breasts, let alone their genitals. “Galan, an island on Seldene. I’ve studied your cultures, a little language.”

  “You don’t dress like that on Seldene, either.” Not anywhere I’d been on the planet.

  “Only at the beach. It’s so warm here.”

  I had to agree. Before I came out, they’d told me it was the hottest autumn on record. I took off my robe and folded it and left it by the door, with the sealed food box they had given me. I joined her on the rock, which was tilted away from the sun and reasonably cool.

  She had a slight fragrance of lavender, perhaps from the body paint. We touched hands. “My name is White Hill. Zephyr-Meadow-Torrent.”

  “Where are the others?” I asked. Twenty-nine artists had been invited; one from each inhabited world. The people who had met me inside said I was the nineteenth to show up.

  “Most of them traveling. Going from dome to dome for inspiration.”

  “You’ve already been around?”

  “No.” She reached down with her toe and scraped a curved line on the hard-baked ground. “All the story’s here, anywhere. It isn’t really about history or culture.”

  Her open posture would have been shockingly sexual at home, but this was not home. “Did you visit my world when you were studying it?”

  “No, no money, at the time. I did get there a few years ago.” She smiled at me. “It was almost as beautiful as I’d imagined it.” She said three words in Petrosian. You couldn’t say it precisely in English, which doesn’t have a palindromic mood: Dreams feed art and art feeds dreams.

  “When you came to Seldene I was young, too young to study with you. I’ve learned a lot from your sculpture, though.”

  “How young can you be?” To earn this honor, I did not say.

  “In Earth years, about seventy awake. More than a hundred and forty-five in time-squeeze.”

  I struggled with the arithmetic. Petros and Seldene were twenty-two light-years apart; that’s about forty-five years’ squeeze. Earth is, what, a little less than forty light-years from her planet. That leaves enough gone time for someplace about twenty-five light-years from Petros, and back.

  She tapped me on the knee, and I flinched. “Don’t overheat your brain. I made a triangle; went to ThetaKent after your world.”

  “Really? When I was there?”

  “No, I missed you by less than a year. I was disappointed. You were why I went.” She made a palindrome in my language: Predator becomes prey becomes predator? “So here we are. Perhaps I can still learn from you.”

  I didn’t much care for her tone of voice, but I said the obvious: “I’m more likely to learn from you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” She smiled in a measured way. “You don’t have much to learn.”

  Or much I could, or would, learn. “Have you been down to the water?”

  “Once.” She slid off the rock and dusted herself, spanking. “It’s interesting. Doesn’t look real.” I picked up the food box and followed her down a sort of path that led us into low ruins. She drank some of my water, apologetic; hers was hot enough to brew tea.

  “First body?” I asked.

  “I’m not tired of it yet.” She gave me a sideways look, amused. “You must be on your fourth or fifth.”

  “I go through a dozen a year.” She laughed. “Actually, it’s still my second. I hung on to the first too long.”

  “I read about that, the accident. That must have been horrible.”

  “Comes with the medium. I should take up the flute.” I had been making a “controlled” fracture in a large boulder and set off the charges prematurely, by dropping the detonator. Part of the huge rock rolled over onto me, crushing my body from the hips down. It was a remote area, and by the time help arrived I had been dead for several minutes, from pain as much as anything else. “It affected all of my work, of course. I can’t even look at some of the things I did the first few years I had this body.”

  “They are hard to look at,” she said. “Not to say they aren’t well done, and beautiful, in their way.”

  “As what is not? In its way.” We came to the first building ruins and stopped. “Not all of this is weathering. Even in four hundred years.” If you studied the rubble you could reconstruct part of the design. Primitive but sturdy, concrete reinforced with composite rods. “Somebody came in here with heavy equipment or explosives. They never actually fought on Earth, I thought.”

  “They say not.” She picked up an irregular brick with a rod through it. “Rage, I suppose. Once people knew that no one was going to live.”

  “It’s hard to imagine.” The records are chaotic. Evidently the first people died two or three days after the nanophages were introduced, and no one on Earth was alive a week later. “Not hard to understand, though. The need to break something.” I remembered the inchoate anger I felt as I squirmed there helpless, dying from sculpture, of all things. Anger at the rock, the fates. Not at m
y own inattention and clumsiness.

  “They had a poem about that,” she said. “‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’”

  “Somebody actually wrote something during the nanoplague?”

  “Oh, no. A thousand years before. Twelve hundred.” She squatted suddenly and brushed at a fragment that had two letters on it. “I wonder if this was some sort of official building. Or a shrine or church.” She pointed along the curved row of shattered bricks that spilled into the street. “That looks like it was some kind of decoration, a gable over the entrance.” She tiptoed through the rubble toward the far end of the arc, studying what was written on the face-up pieces. The posture, standing on the balls of her feet, made her slim body even more attractive, as she must have known. My own body began to respond in a way inappropriate for a man more than three times her age. Foolish, even though that particular part is not so old. I willed it down before she could see.

  “It’s a language I don’t know,” she said. “Not Portuguese; looks like Latin. A Christian church, probably, Catholic.”

  “They used water in their religion,” I remembered. “Is that why it’s close to the sea?”

  “They were everywhere; sea, mountains, orbit. They got to Petros?”

  “We still have some. I’ve never met one, but they have a church in New Haven.”

  “As who doesn’t?” She pointed up a road. “Come on. The beach is just over the rise here.”

  I could smell it before I saw it. It wasn’t an ocean smell; it was dry, slightly choking.

  We turned a corner and I stood staring. “It’s a deep blue farther out,” she said, “and so clear you can see hundreds of metras down.” Here the water was thick and brown, the surf foaming heavily like a giant’s chocolate drink, mud piled in baked windrows along the beach. “This used to be soil?”

  She nodded. “There’s a huge river that cuts this continent in half, the Amazon. When the plants died, there was nothing to hold the soil in place.” She tugged me forward. “Do you swim? Come on.”

  “Swim in that? It’s filthy.”

  “No, it’s perfectly sterile. Besides, I have to pee.” Well, I couldn’t argue with that. I left the box on a high fragment of fallen wall and followed her. When we got to the beach, she broke into a run. I walked slowly and watched her gracile body, instead, and waded into the slippery heavy surf. When it was deep enough to swim, I plowed my way out to where she was bobbing. The water was too hot to be pleasant, and breathing was somewhat difficult. Carbon dioxide, I supposed, with a tang of halogen.

  We floated together for a while, comparing this soup to bodies of water on our planets and ThetaKent. It was tiring, more from the water’s heat and bad air than exertion, so we swam back in.

  We dried in the blistering sun for a few minutes and then took the food box and moved to the shade of a beachside ruin. Two walls had fallen in together, to make a sort of concrete tent.

  We could have been a couple of precivilization aboriginals, painted with dirt, our hair baked into stringy mats. She looked odd but still had a kind of formal beauty, the dusty mud residue turning her into a primitive sculpture, impossibly accurate and mobile. Dark rivulets of sweat drew painterly accent lines along her face and body. If only she were a model, rather than an artist. Hold that pose while I go back for my brushes.

  We shared the small bottles of cold wine and water and ate bread and cheese and fruit. I put a piece on the ground for the nanophages. We watched it in silence for some minutes, while nothing happened. “It probably takes hours or days,” she finally said.

  “I suppose we should hope so,” I said. “Let us digest the food before the creatures get to it.”

  “Oh, that’s not a problem. They just attack the bonds between amino acids that make up proteins. For you and me, they’re nothing more than an aid to digestion.”

  How reassuring. “But a source of some discomfort when we go back in, I was told.”

  She grimaced. “The purging. I did it once, and decided my next outing would be a long one. The treatment’s the same for a day or a year.”

  “So how long has it been this time?”

  “Just a day and a half. I came out to be your welcoming committee.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  She laughed. “It was their idea, actually. They wanted someone out here to ‘temper’ the experience for you. They weren’t sure how well traveled you were, how easily affected by … strangeness.” She shrugged. “Earthlings. I told them I knew of four planets you’d been to.”

  “They weren’t impressed?”

  “They said well, you know, he’s famous and wealthy. His experiences on these planets might have been very comfortable.” We could both laugh at that. “I told them how comfortable ThetaKent is.”

  “Well, it doesn’t have nanophages.”

  “Or anything else. That was a long year for me. You didn’t even stay a year.”

  “No. I suppose we would have met, if I had.”

  “Your agent said you were going to be there two years.”

  I poured us both some wine. “She should have told me you were coming. Maybe I could have endured it until the next ship out.”

  “How gallant.” She looked into the wine without drinking. “You famous and wealthy people don’t have to endure ThetaKent. I had to agree to one year’s indentureship to help pay for my triangle ticket.”

  “You were an actual slave”

  “More like a wife, actually. The head of a township, a widower, financed me in exchange for giving his children some culture. Language, art, music. Every now and then he asked me to his chambers. For his own kind of culture.”

  “My word. You had to . . . lie with him? That was in the contract?”

  “Oh, I didn’t have to, but it kept him friendly.” She held up a thumb and forefinger. “It was hardly noticeable.”

  I covered my smile with a hand, and probably blushed under the mud.

  “I’m not embarrassing you?” she said. “From your work, I’d think that was impossible.”

  I had to laugh. “That work is in reaction to my culture’s values. I can’t take a pill and stop being a Petrosian.”

  White Hill smiled, tolerantly. “A Petrosian woman wouldn’t put up with an arrangement like that?”

  “Our women are still women. Some actually would like it, secretly. Most would claim they’d rather die, or kill the man.”

  “But they wouldn’t actually do it. Trade their body for a ticket?” She sat down in a single smooth dancer’s motion, her legs open, facing me. The clay between her legs parted, sudden pink.

  “I wouldn’t put it so bluntly.” I swallowed, watching her watching me. “But no, they wouldn’t. Not if they were planning to return.”

  “Of course, no one from a civilized planet would want to stay on ThetaKent. Shocking place.”

  I had to move the conversation onto safer grounds. “Your arms don’t spend all day shoving big rocks around. What do you normally work in?”

  “Various mediums.” She switched to my language. “Sometimes I shove little rocks around.” That was a pun for testicles. “I like painting, but my reputation is mainly from light and sound sculpture. I wanted to do something with the water here, internal illumination of the surf, but they say that’s not possible. They can’t isolate part of the ocean. I can have a pool, but no waves, no tides.”

  “Understandable.” Earth’s scientists had found a way to rid the surface of the nanoplague. Before they reterraformed the Earth, though, they wanted to isolate an area, a “park of memory,” as a reminder of the Sterilization and these centuries of waste, and brought artists from every world to interpret, inside the park, what they had seen here.

  Every world except Earth. Art on Earth had been about little else for a long time.

  Setting up the contest had taken decades. A contest representative went to each of the settled worlds, according to a strict timetable. Announcement of the competition was delayed on the nearer world
s so that each artist would arrive on Earth at approximately the same time.

  The Earth representatives chose which artists would be asked, and no one refused. Even the ones who didn’t win the contest were guaranteed an honorarium equal to twice what they would have earned during that time at home, in their best year of record.

  The value of the prize itself was so large as to be meaningless to a normal person. I’m a wealthy man on a planet where wealth is not rare, and just the interest that the prize would earn would support me and a half-dozen more. If someone from ThetaKent or Laxor won the prize, they would probably have more real usable wealth than their governments. If they were smart, they wouldn’t return home.

  The artists had to agree on an area for the park, which was limited to a hundred square kaymetras. If they couldn’t agree, which seemed almost inevitable to me, the contest committee would listen to arguments and rule.

  Most of the chosen artists were people like me, accustomed to working on a monumental scale. The one from Luxor was a composer, though, and there were two conventional muralists, paint and mosaic. White Hill’s work was by its nature evanescent. She could always set something up that would be repeated, like a fountain cycle. She might have more imagination than that, though.

  “Maybe it’s just as well we didn’t meet in a master-student relationship,” I said. “I don’t know the first thing about the techniques of your medium.”

  “It’s not technique.” She looked thoughtful, remembering. “That’s not why I wanted to study with you, back then. I was willing to push rocks around, or anything, if it could give me an avenue, an insight into how you did what you did.” She folded her arms over her chest, and dust fell. “Ever since my parents took me to see Gaudí Mountain, when I was ten.”

  That was an early work, but I was still satisfied with it. The city council of Tresling, a prosperous coastal city, hired me to “do something with” an unusable steep island that stuck up in the middle of their harbor. I melted it judiciously, in homage to an Earthling artist.