Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  “You tried to eat me.”

  “Sheer conquetry,” she said. “I controlled myself. I let you go, didn’t I? On Earth a thousand years ago there were civilized forms of every sexual persuasion, and then there were rapes. I know the difference. But yes, I want you inside me. If ever you tire of yourself, you’re welcome to become part of me.”

  What an offer! Moving to the tables was a polite way of increasing my distance. “Stereo earphones,” I said, picking them up. “A teddy bear. An address book. This is an odd collection.”

  “Souvenirs of eaten lives,” Kazumi suggested.

  The hangar door slid open. Bright sunlight sliced inside, outlining a small, shadowy figure. “Hello! We welcome you. My name is Joto.”

  “This is Comrade Kazumi. I’m Yoshi.” We exchanged bows and I continued. “Our interstellar mission reached Blue World orbit forty-four years ago. Out in reality, nine hundred souls are terraforming a world mostly covered by water. In three hundred years we’ll have enough oxygen to support a human colony.”

  “Ah! The old dream.” On closer approach Joto looked more and more like a Christmas elf. His small body was mostly arms and legs. He had big ears and a wizened face.

  “We can lead you there,” Kazumi said. “And then if the people in charge are satisfied, you can get bodies. Robot bodies, or bodies grown out of vats. I speak through you, of course, to the whole society that sent you to meet us.” She put these last words almost as a question.

  “Reality exists, and we may qualify?” Joto asked. “How do you know it’s not another simulation?”

  “When you’re real, you know,” I said. “When you’re awake, you know the difference between wakefulness and dreaming. We have returned from reality, and we carry that conviction. We haven’t been virtual long enough to doubt it.”

  Joto closed his eyes. He spent a moment in what seemed like prayer, and opened them again. “I shall ask three times; is this true? You have come to show us the way to reality? This is your serious purpose?”

  “Yes, it’s true,” Kazumi said.

  I amplified. “There will be a test of some sort, a test of sanity. A test of how open you are to the dominant policies of the terraformers, who call themselves Suppressionists.”

  Joto stepped back and quirked his head. “Are these policies repugnant?” Somehow he sensed my attitudes.

  “A kinder word is inadequate,” I said. “With time they must change. The Suppressionists want to plant Blue World with humans innocent of all Old Earth science and culture. They’ll hunt and fish and multiply, and it’ll be very pastoral and idyllic. But it won’t be, of course. Life isn’t like that, and they’ll feel obliged to take steps. The more steps, the better. That’s how I feel. Let’s teach our humans openly and honestly, and not disguise ourselves when we wander among them.”

  “You make the Suppressionists sound naive. If they were here, what would they say about you?”

  I shrugged. “That I’m cunning. That I’m trying to poison your mind against them. That I long for a future where souls like ours take hero bodies and stride about Blue World, demanding honors as if we were gods. My appeal for ‘openness’ is just a first step, you see. In their view it’s a ruse. We’ll ultimately create a privileged class, and that’s the object of all my scheming.”

  “We think this may be true, and what of it? The situation calls for the concentration of powers,” Joto said.

  “But also for the dissemination of knowledge,” I said.

  “Please. If you could move aside from those tables,” Joto asked, making a fluttery gesture. “We have decided to take advantage of all you offer, but first you need to meet us in a less packaged form.” He hurried past us and reached for the carpet shears.

  On touching them, the shears vanished in a blossom of pixels. Now Joto had a companion. Sumi bowed and introduced herself. The process repeated with the address book, the box of dried soup mix, the blue comb, the leather belt, the jar of putty, the candlestick, et cetera. The hangar grew crowded with people. “Master Joto had the life-force to keep going in the midst of despair,” Sumi explained. “He was the strongest. We surrendered our souls to his keeping, but each with a special key, so that if Joto ever discovered the way out to reality, we could become ourselves again.”

  “Otherwise, we might most of us be gone,” another soul agreed. “Ah, so many suicides!”

  “I’ll lead you to what we’ve made of Ready State Zero,” I said. “Then we’ll send a message. Do you remember everything from our conversation with Master Joto? Do you understand about Suppressionism? It’s those people I must get in touch with.”

  Joto strode forward. “We’re ready. Everyone’s accounted for.”

  I invoked Transit. It was like inviting a hundred strangers into my longhouse. Soon there was music. Spheres of Glass, Prokofiev, and Kitaro floating by like differently colored bubbles in the air. My flat green became a lawn. The urge to tamper is universal, especially in virtuality. To keep my guests busy while I shot messages to all the Suppressionist lords and ladies, I asked them to build me a fishpond.

  The pond grew into an elaborate water-garden, with canals and grottos, trellises and topiary. Master Joto kept to my side, and we inspected it together, while waiting for someone on the outside to answer.

  I told him stories about Lady Midori. “How does all this fit in?” Joto asked. “You’re a political leader in exile. How do we serve your political purposes?”

  “Finding you kept me from boredom and futility,” I told him. “But I think your people will serve my cause well. The Suppressionists hardly dare keep you all confined to virtuality. Not for long. If they did they’d make enemies among you, and some of their core support would falter.”

  “So you’re optimistic we’ll get bodies?”

  “As fast as they can grow them, or build new robots,” I said. “That serves me too. Out in reality you’ll all witness that I’m not insane. Many of you may side with my faction in future debates. The way my supporters are treated will seem unfair, set against your own status.”

  “Some of us may not be very sane,” Joto admitted. “We leaned on each other a special way. Think of a house of cards. Reality will heal us, or shock us further from health.”

  “I’d guess they’ll screen each of you, and make a fairly honest job of it,” I said.

  “Let’s speak frankly. You’re hoping your enemies will blunder. You’re describing how they should behave, but perhaps they—”

  Joto’s words were interrupted by a breach just ahead. Suppressionist face-masks floated out of the brightness in two even rows, like a military procession. Lord Hideyaki and Lady Midori were in the lead. They tilted politely in response to our bows.

  “You have succeeded. This is a great moment!” Lord Hideyaki said in his public speaking voice, as if he hadn’t hindered my success by wiping out my first computer six years ago. What a hypocrite! “We welcome everyone. We shall remember this day as a Blue World holiday. The return of lost souls!”

  Lady Midori took up the refrain. “Even now we’re growing new vat bodies in Regions 14, 18, 32, and 37. We will begin interviews as soon as possible. Let’s learn all we can about each other! Let’s share our centuries! Comrades Yoshi and Kazumi, we have a reward for you. Nothing must delay it. First my apologies for a very wrong analysis of your mental conditions, but how fruitful your time here was! Now we’ll show you how grateful we can be!”

  I found myself unable to reply. Really unable, as I’d been unable to speak at my trial twelve years ago. Perhaps the Suppressionists thought I’d say something embarrassing.

  It takes several minutes to radio a complete soul from Geosync down to the surface of Blue World, and those minutes must have passed. I never noticed. For me it was a sudden awakening. I rose and stepped away from Regional Depot 33, out into the morning sunshine. Tidewater crashed against the pylons below. After basking awhile I went back inside, checked out the facility, and found it functional. The Fusion Cell hum
med happily. ChemStores was so full that ChemOps was running its dig line at minimum speed. The vat was breeding nitrogen-fixing eukaryotes.

  Some time later, a second robot straightened away from the wall. “Comrade Kazumi?” I asked.

  “Depot 33,” she read from the sign on the door. “I know where Region 33 is. They’ve stuck us on a God-damned island. It’s just a new prison.”

  “A pretty big prison. Region 33 is the size of the whole Japanese archipelago, welded into one piece.” Despite these words it occurred to me that she might be right. I tried radioing a message to Comrade Haga, who was presumably breaking rocks into soil somewhere else on Blue World’s surface. The message should have gone up to Geosync and down again, to its proper destination, no matter that I didn’t know where he was.

  No answer. Comrade Atsuko failed to respond, as did Comrade Basho.

  Robots have no facial expressions, and very little body language. I was reduced to saying my feelings out loud: “Gloom. No, the hell with gloom. To hell with Lord Hideyaki and Lady Midori. Those two are starting to piss me off.”

  “They underestimated us. We’re underestimating them. Do you know what radio isolation means?” Kazumi asked. “They’re going to kill us. We’ll suffer a ‘regrettable accident.’”

  I started thinking out loud. “The fusion cell seems to be working properly. Would they explode a whole regional depot just to get rid of us? That’s wasteful.”

  “Do you doubt what I’m saying?” Kazumi asked.

  “No. I’m trying to figure out how they’ll do it. No explosions. No meteorites shot from space, because how do they know we’d stay in the target zone? Check your power supply. Batteries okay?”

  “Yoshi, I don’t know what to do,” my comrade told me. She waved inland. “Our deaths lie waiting to ambush us. Perhaps out there. Perhaps they’ve laid minefields.”

  “Let’s do different things. One of us should separate from this depot as if it were cursed, and try for distance. The other should stay put. Does this seem wise? We’ll stay in radio contact, or else it’s stupid. Perhaps it’s stupid anyway. I feel we’re being stampeded into action by our own fears.”

  “Be more flattering. Call it ‘being decisive,’” she said.

  “All right. I’ll go.” I spoke decisively. “I’ll transmit a message every five minutes. I’ll expect an answer. Silence at either end means disaster.”

  “Oh, Yoshi, if it gets you—Oh, I hate these bodies. There’s no meaning to metal touching metal. As hugs go, this is pathetic.”

  “Your embraces have gone farther than I would have believed,” I joked. “We’ve run the gamut of hugging.”

  “Except as human-to-human. It doesn’t seem likely that we’ll ever meet in the flesh. I regret that.”

  “Let’s not give up hope,” I said. “If I reach the opposite shore of this island, I’ll turn back. We’ll meet again and know that our Suppressionist enemies drew the line at murder. With time, we may all reconcile. Why not? The whole population of Blue World, adding in Joto’s people, is yet barely a thousand souls. As many as that lived in my Osaka towerblock on Old Earth, and we were perfectly civil to each other. Why shouldn’t a thousand souls live at peace in all these wide spaces?”

  She began to answer, and faltered. The life went out of her. Everything faded to black.

  3174

  I hadn’t felt such a sense of achievement in many years. Of course I let Comrade Kazumi hug me, and for that brief moment I even hugged her back. I woke from my great moment of happiness in what appeared to be an airplane hangar, crisscrossed overhead by metal beams on x, y, and z axes. It was empty, nothing on the tables by the walls except a big manila envelope. I opened it, and read the message:

  Dear Comrade Yoshi,

  Let me explain. When the Suppressionists began radioing you down to Blue World from your longhouse in Ready State Zero, I sidled over to Joto and whispered that I feared for your life and mine.

  He agreed to save us. I admitted I had a copy of your memories from when I hugged and swallowed you that one time—a stolen copy, because I’m that sort of thief, and that sort of pervert. That’s why I normally keep myself as a roadster, to discourage my own vices. But we had no time for pretense. I have software designed for my perverted uses, and I ran it in reverse to deliver your memories into Joto’s hands.

  Joto? Joto? Who the hell was Joto? I remembered Kazumi’s triumphant embrace—it was the last thing I remembered at all. So she’d stolen my memories! Now the woman knew everything about me. If she’d digested what she took, she knew all about my life on Old Earth; my frustrations, my jealousies, my disease, and how I’d been lied to by Dr. Kotobuko. How I came alive as an engrammed memory-set after my death. I made history by being the first disembodied soul to sue a medical practitioner. He’d given me placebos, damn it! I was dying of AIDS, and he’d put me into a control group to test how well his so-called miracle drug worked on others!

  The courts found in favor of Dr. Kotobuko. I was rebuked as a nuisance. The whole business wasn’t one of my proudest moments. Back on Earth, I’d not had many proud moments. I scratched my head. What was this business about the Suppressionists radioing us down to Blue World?

  I read on.

  Joto had his own special software, that allowed him to “package” and “unpackage” souls from his own conglomerate consciousness, by reattaching their memories to a plex processor. You won’t remember, but he did this in front of us, using all sorts of key objects that littered these now-empty tables. I asked him to use his skills to put you (and me) back together again, to resurrect us to virtual life, but only after a random number of years had passed, because it was possible I was being paranoid. Perhaps you and I were not destined to die down on Blue World. If not, I would act to prevent our duplicate souls from popping to life in virtuality.

  I said “random,” because anything unpredictable works against the Suppressionists, but I meant that you and I should awaken (if at all) at the same randomly chosen time, between eight and eighty years in the future. Joto didn’t understand this. Obviously we were in a hurry, and I didn’t make myself clear. So I came to life first, and it could be decades before you pop in. I’m in no hurry now, as I was during that minute with Joto, so I will explain all the events that have happened since you and I succeeding in finding that Zipped computer, and I gave you that big hug.

  Comrade Kazumi went on to describe one of my life’s prouder moments—a rescue of a hundred souls—a rescue I didn’t remember in the least. I tried to glory in a deed that had obviously led to my death down on Blue World. If you’re alive to read this, as I’m alive to write it, you know that they killed us, Comrade Kazumi wrote.

  I won’t forget that this has become that sort of battle. It’s not political anymore, not for me. I mean to start my campaign by gathering information against our enemies. If I’m successful, you’ll find much that you need to know in the other envelopes stacked on this table.

  There were no other envelopes. I didn’t know when Comrade Kazumi popped back to life. It could have been yesterday. If so, the lack of envelopes meant nothing. More likely she’d been killed twice over. The Suppressionists were now warned of the possibility that I might come back to haunt them.

  I checked the Geosync computer’s clock-date. It was 3174. My glorious rescue of Joto and his conglomerate souls took place forty-eight years ago.

  What now? Ready State Zero could easily be a trap. A Suppressionist trap, I thought at first, but then amended myself. It wasn’t likely that more than one or two leading Suppressionists were guilty of murder. The vast majority would disown evils of such magnitude. The majority thought that Comrade Kazumi and I were dead because of some unfortunate accident.

  Having seen us safely dead, Lord Hideyaki and Lady Midori would have turned us into saints, the better to accommodate former opponents. In her letter Kazumi spoke of a Blue World holiday, a once-a-year event at which we two were probably memorialized as Martyrs-to-a-Better Futu
re. Praising dead enemies is the traditional first step in co-opting them, as long as they don’t come back to life.

  But Kazumi had come to life, and alarmed them about me. To put it plainly, I had a handful of enemies very interested in keeping me from harvesting the garden they’d planted. I knew this about them. What else did I know?

  They’d be suspicious of any lost soul who turned up in Ready State Zero, hoping to get work down on Blue World’s surface. They’d think he was me in disguise. They might kill him—separate his memories from his plex processor, and zero them out. I could unzip Joto’s computer and contact all the crazy souls of cyberspace, hoping to create a flow of emigrants, but then I’d be as guilty of murder as my enemies.

  Maybe not. I could explain the situation. “The door out is a deadly one.” There’s such a thing as third-party suicide, people who want to die, but can’t do the deed themselves. Souls like that, worthless to themselves, were worth something to me. They might bring Lord Hideyaki or Lady Midori to a moral crisis.

  Could I use other people that way, in my own behalf? Was this decent behavior? The principles I championed against the Supressionists were those of full disclosure—tell the truth about human history, and let our vatling colonists choose freely what arts and sciences they wanted to learn.

  Let them choose. That was the point. I could send a backdoor message to all the lost souls of virtuality, being as thorough as possible—pages after pages with footnotes and appendices and exhibits, exploring all the pros and cons.

  Not to do this was a sort of Suppressionism, wasn’t it?

  That thought was decisive.

  I unzipped Joto’s computer, and took weeks to compose an opus. I shot it out several times over. Among the thousand souls at work on Blue World, some might be in transit via the Geosync computer, parked here temporarily while relocating between depots. They’d have an address indistinguishable from any other—one of forty thousand control-point locations. My long narrative would be carried down to reality when they finished their trips.