Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

So I will take this final sheet down to the translator and then deliver the whole thing to the woman who is going to transfer it to permanent sheets of platinum, which will be put in a prominent place aboard the transport. They could last a million years, or ten million, or more. After the Sun is a cinder, and the ship is a frozen block enclosing a thousand bits of frozen flesh, she will live on in this small way.

  So now my work is done. I’m going outside, to the quiet.

  The Road to Reality

  PHILLIP C. JENNINGS

  One of the most prolific writers in the business at short lengths, Phillip C. Jennings has become one of the most frequent contributors to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine over the past two decades, and has also appeared in most of the field’s other major SF magazines and anthologies. His first novel, Tower to the Sky, was published in 1988. His most recent book was the fat and eccentric collection The Bug Life Chronicles, and he is long overdue for a second. Jennings lives in Golden Valley, Minnesota.

  Jennings has dealt with the terraforming process several times, in stories such as “The Fourth Intercometary” and “Blossoms.” The novella that follows, though, is his most complex and imaginative take on the concept, as he takes us across the galaxy on a mission to terraform a lifeless planet that is soon embroiled in an intricate and deadly web of politics, intrigue, clashing philosophies, hidden identity, deceit, warfare, and murder—a conflict that will stretch across thousands of years and affect the destiny of millions yet unborn …

  3111

  I dropped bombs carefully for four Blue World years, shaking the earthquake potential from this weak place in the planet’s crust, and sloshing the magma back and forth. My lake of lava coagulated at the crest of each bomb-tide, first along the interior rim, and then in the opposite direction, edging thirty kilometers of Region 62’s seashore.

  Two desolate ridges built higher with each swing of the bomb cycle. Chemical additives enhanced rapid hardening, and I achieved basaltic walls. Like the lip of a bowl, the south ridge tilted forward when seen from the ocean. It was very much a roof over the rough beach below.

  I readied my tour de force. I altered the lava mix, aiming for a light, glassy obsidian. Then I precision-bombed my work-basin. The incandescent stuff sheeted seaward over the lava roof, splashing and dripping in curtains that cooled to the integrity of warm tar, chilled by unseasonable winds.

  Some of my material froze before touching the water, hardening into a permanent cascade of stone. Regrettably, much did not, and slopped down to make a reef that steamed a few days into the poisonous air.

  This was the best I hoped to achieve with “natural” materials. Along my rugged thirty-kilometer shore, six kilometers boasted a wall on the sea side, arching from high above the waves. Obsidian and basalt formed opposite flanks, enclosing a transitional space floored by igneous shrapnel, sand and tidewater.

  I called it Yoshi Cathedral. It was finished, and I had been alone too long. I dusted off my social graces and enticed Lady Midori to come visit.

  “It’ll never last,” she warned me, stopping in the shallows short of the entry. “It’ll be centuries before people expand into Region 62. How can that be structurally sound?”

  She raised a salamandrine arm and pointed at a particularly thin stretch of obsidian wall, “The first big storm, and it’ll shatter.”

  “I think perhaps not,” I said.

  She seemed afraid to go inside. Perhaps I was daunting, standing ahead at twice the height of anything ever born human, in my battered, splattered carapace. She crouched into the water and let a big wave roll over her. Then she stood again. “Comrade Yoshi, have you been using chemical agents? Unnatural additives?”

  I said nothing at first. Finally, I answered: “What kind of body is that?”

  Midori smiled. “A one-day outdoor special. Oxygen from the electrical dissociation of water. When the batteries run out it’ll be dead.”

  “Pretty damned artificial,” I said.

  “It’ll leave bones. You’re the one who complains about fossils and such things.”

  I shook my robotic head. “Blue World will have no coherent fossil record. We can pretend to make it Earthlike, but not completely.”

  “Most of us think it’s a worthwhile pretense. You feel otherwise. We know this, and we pray it’s not—well, we pray—”

  “I’m not insane,” I said. “That label is flung too wildly. It’s a Suppressionist insult.” My voice softened. “Let’s not argue about this.”

  Lady Midori persisted. “Can you remember a time when we didn’t argue? Yoshi, you do grand things, as if this planet were just another virtual reality. That clouding of the line worries us. We survived a thousand-year trip from Earth by taking refuge in simulations, but so many of us got lost in fantasy. So many old friends! First you lose faith in existence, and then what’s the point of existing?”

  Midori ducked down to wet herself completely. Her present incarnation had a thrifty, cold-blooded metabolism, but even so her energies were running low. For the moment she was too fatigued to persist.

  I waited for her bald, turd-colored head to bob up again. She gazed lidlessly at the glossy black shoreline I’d created, and I began a rant of my own. “Why is death fearsome? We were dead before we left Earth. Forty thousand dead souls stored in a computer. Ha! You talk of ‘survival’! Our unearned second lives were a feast. The food was good, but most of us? Our appetites grew sated. It’s natural. They expected attrition back on Earth. That’s why they began with so many. They thought on a grand scale, you see.”

  I left the shore and waded closer, making it easier in case she needed to reduce her transmission strength. “We’ll plant people on this world three hundred years from now,” I continued. “People cooked out of the same vats that made the body you’re wearing now. My formations will attract their descendants’ attention. They’ll calculate how unlikely it is that lava could act this way. They’ll take samples and find chemical agents, and discover a clue to their origins. One can always hope.”

  She eyed me doubtfully. “Subversion. Perhaps it’s my duty to turn you in. I should complain against you.” Lady Midori’s radio voice was a whisper.

  “Come over to my side,” I said. “The others want our new humans to start clean, Adams and Eves in the Garden of Eden, begetting children and grandchildren. We’re supposed to hide among this naive humanity. We’re supposed to leave them ignorant and not play gods, because that would oppress them. It would give them a permanent inferiority complex.”

  “Yes! Let them develop themselves!” Lady Midori responded. “A new world! That’s the idea.”

  “They’ll invent gods. Why not offer ourselves in place of magic and superstition? It would be telling the truth. We’re terraforming this world. At least, those of us who survived the trip. We have a lot to teach.”

  “We’ll teach in our hidden identities,” Lady Midori said. “We’ll wear flesh, and risk mortality. It’s a way to suppress ourselves. To make ourselves less dangerous, because we aren’t so reliable, you know? Yes, certainly you know! All our friends who went insane—friends and lovers!—just because we few made it across the stars, can we say we’re stable? The numbers are against us. Nine hundred souls left! Nine hundred souls out of forty thousand!”

  I laugh rarely when talking politics. The stupidities that seemed funny ten years ago frighten me now. “This is a sane policy? To suppress the truth, and leak it out by hints and winks? There’s no Santa Claus. There’s no Santa Claus. All right, you’re old enough to know. There is a Santa Claus. Ah, now you don’t trust us!”

  “They shouldn’t trust us,” Lady Midori said heatedly.

  “Let’s not make ourselves worse than we are,” I answered. “Nor should we make them worse. Why raise generations of primitives? Why rerun ten thousand years of history? Can they do it? Can they move from bush life and campfires, and achieve a scientific world view on a world without a fossil record? No, let’s give them all our technology.�
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  “So they can die mad, like us?” Lady Midori objected. “So they can play sophisticated games, achieve sophisticated boredom, and commit sophisticated suicide?”

  “No! Again, no! Hell! But I say this. If some personality zeroes out after eight hundred years, it’s a private choice. Why should it terrify you into fake primitivism?”

  This was no abstraction. We were talking about mutual, lives-long friends. Over the long trip some had gone to zero. Others exiled themselves inside labyrinths of virtual fantasy, so deeply solipsistic they’d lost any hope of contact. In their absence we called them insane. Thinking of them was painful for both of us. Lady Midori dropped her gaze. “We’re talking in circles.”

  I was energized. I had a dozen points to make against the Suppressionist Party. As secret teachers it was their choice what truths and what lies to leak to our human charges, whereas my faction saw a better future: We saw ourselves living openly as terraforming intelligences from Old Earth, cycling through a choice of robotic incarnations, ready to deal with what our colonists requested on their own initiative. Empowering ourselves meant empowering them. But Midori had heard it all before. Why goad her?

  I changed the subject. “I have something else to show you. It’s in Region 19. A river that bridges over itself, loops around, and runs under. It was easier than this lava beach. Just a matter of digging a tunnel. On my new course it runs into a rain-shadow desert.”

  “More tricks!” Lady Midori sighed. “Give me a day to put together a Region 19 body. Are we done here? Already I feel unwell.”

  Our meeting had been a failure on both sides. Now it was over. “I’ll put your body out of misery,” I volunteered, from a reluctant sense of duty. I hated the way my political opponents used bodies of flesh, because—well, wouldn’t it be true? If their vatlings had longer to live, wouldn’t they develop souls of their own? And feelings? I’d never kill a frog, but now I had to sever the life from a thing compounded of frog and eel and human DNA. A thing with unrenewable batteries that would otherwise starve on a nearly lifeless world.

  “Thank you.” Lady Midori sank into a posture very like prayer. She radioed her soul back to Geosync Control. After a decent interval I pushed a hand through and snapped her spine just below the brain stem.

  I carried the corpse to shore, parked my old, worn body in a safe place and radioed up to space, and then down again, to another robot habitus in Region 19. I waited by my spiral river through a rainy afternoon, trudging a raw, iron-rich landscape, dark weathered reds relieved by the brighter sheltered pink of my undercut tunnel.

  The rain stopped. The skies took on the colors of sunset, lurid from Blue World’s poisonous excesses of carbon dioxide. Lady Midori failed to come. Instead I received a summons.

  “What do you mean, ‘job review?’” I answered. “That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been providing Lady Midori with views of the work I’ve done!”

  Returning one last time to Geosync, I learned that I was expected to testify at my own trial. The Suppressionists were dominant, and my “courtroom” was as stark as they could make it. We were all computer entities, at least during our times off-planet, but they were computer entities who hated computer effects. In my default body-of-choice (1930s heroic worker off a Diego Garcia mural) I stood immersed in white directionless light. I was confronted by floating faces so simplified into caricature they might as well be name tags with voices.

  It was all organized and procedural, even if nobody bothered to explain the procedure to me. Lord Hideyaki’s face zoomed close and began to speak. “We have heard people like Comrade Yoshi. They are a minority. They do not like the policies of the majority. Using the model of the parliaments of Old Earth, they talk themselves up as a loyal opposition. The rules of loyal opposition are clear. Do not subvert the policies that the majority have voted to carry out. If you can’t bring yourself to further those policies when it’s your job to do so, then resign.”

  “It’s my job to engineer the long-term liveability of Blue World,” I responded. “To reduce geological instabilities, and bring water to places that might otherwise be deserts. I have done that job. I have succeeded.”

  Another face spoke up, pale and oval, with black lines for eyes, nose, and mouth. “You have created unnatural wonders. The vat-colonists will seek them out. Perhaps you intend to expose nearby veins of ore. Our vatlings will dig and uncover gold plates with writing on them, or some such trick.”

  “There are no gold plates.” I refrained from saying thanks for the idea.

  The face pushed forward. “Lady Midori feels you have hidden intentions. You told her you favored a policy of planting clues.”

  “Did you mean to leave our colonists entirely clueless?” I responded. “What are they going to do without fossils? No, at some point this game of yours must have an end. These ‘vatlings’ are human beings. We’re talking about bringing forth real people, and not dolls or children or computer fictoids. They’ll be more real than us. That’s the truth of it. When you realize this, Suppressionism must fade.”

  I held up my computer-generated hands as if to ward off these drifting faces, though for all their anger they were as unreadable as masks. “Your party will wane,” I continued, “but now you think you can make me an example, and scare the opposition. Well, what’s my punishment? The sane among us work on Blue World’s surface. The insane pursue their dreams inside Geosync’s computer. Are you going to vote me insane, or let me get on with my job?”

  Lady Midori floated forward, while many faces retreated. “You may be insane, despite all your denials.”

  For a moment I was speechless. How dare she set such a precedent! Making this accusation once made it easier to do it again. The Suppressionists would soon feel free to purge everyone who disagreed with them. The days of toleration and open debate were over.

  I mustered myself. “Midori, you pushed the idea that on Blue World there should be no size disparity between men and women. Women as big as men could not be physically dominated. I rallied people from my faction to your side. We radioed Earth for genetic updates. This is how you reward me!”

  I’d have spared Midori nothing if I’d been allowed to continue. I’d have exposed her secret: Because the languages of Earth had evolved over a thousand years, they used scholars to interpret our requests. Perhaps they got things wrong. After ten-point-six years, plus processing time, plus another ten-point-six years in transition at the speed of light, Earth’s latest update package was too full, too elaborate. It pretended to be what we asked for, but could mere size have so many consequences?

  I’d have raised a dozen issues in my defense, but suddenly I couldn’t speak. While my sanity was put to a vote, I continued under restraint.

  The count was twenty-two to seven. Afterward, I went blank.

  3115

  I woke inside a cyberscape in Ready State Zero, flat green under cloudless blue. I was entirely alone. All the other nutcases had used the centuries to make themselves scarce.

  I was furious. Who wouldn’t be? I had a duty to be furious, a duty to myself and to my friends. The blank plasticity of my surroundings was like canvas to an artist, but though I was locked in, with nothing else to do but paint, I could create nothing until I quashed the emotions that burned too strongly inside me.

  All it took was lots of time, lots of green and blue, and a single question. What’s the point? What useful thing could I do here? What focus could draw me away from useless anger?

  I made a decision. The purpose of my life became to rescue souls from hell.

  Theologians say that hell is distance from God. A second hell is to be distanced so long from reality that you no longer believe it exists. Such distances are routine in virtuality. The sheer scale of my cybernetic environment was daunting. To find even one person among mad thousands, I’d have to explore complexities of size and game-logic beyond any metaphor. A ratmaze the size of Asia? Entirely new laws of physics?

  No, thank you. T
here had to be easier ways than subjecting myself to tortures like these.

  Why did I want to find my fellow inmates? Well, what else was there to do? Create my own fake universe? I’d done that a hundred times over on the long voyage between the stars. I’d done it, and kept sane—or maybe I was crazy. Maybe deep down I wanted to be here, and not out in reality. That’s why I couldn’t bring myself to kowtow to my political enemies.

  Home sweet home for a thousand years. I’d forced them to return me here. What is reality? Why had I run away from it?

  I have an answer to the first question, if not to the second. Reality organizes the world you’re in. The reality of the Geosync computer organized thousands of incompatible cyberworlds, and placed them all under one ultimate set of laws.

  For most people who believe in God, He’s the one who organizes the true universe. He’s the ultimate Computer—except the true universe is organized by the laws of physics, and that puts the old-fashioned God out of business.

  This is my confession: If I need God at all, I need a God of freedom, of a spontaneous grace that makes all organizing principles less oppressive and less confining. Perhaps the others trapped here were like me. They were oppressed because the computer worked flawlessly, giving them everything they wanted—except they wanted more.

  I hoped so. For those who were happy in their virtual play I could do nothing. For true solipsists who’d lost faith in organizing principles like the computer, it was freedom that oppressed them, not law. They might be miserable, but I could do nothing for them either.

  I hoped there was a reachable minority. I’d never find them by hiking out from Ready State Zero. Instead I generated a hundred cubes and zoomed them into rectilinear shapes. I stuck them together to make a longhouse, and defined some rooms inside. I nominated opposite directions for south and north, using hot and cold colors.

  I could have invoked directional light sources and theme music—something by Strauss or Demby—but I wanted the rules of electricity to apply, so now my job became complicated.