Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  As we talked, Leah’s face had slowly been reddening. Her eyes were pale circles; her nose and lips and chin, where the rebreather had covered them, a pale diamond. The rest of her face slowly turned a brilliant scarlet, deepening even as I watched. She raised a hand and brushed her hair away from her face. “Ouch.” She looked puzzled.

  Reflexively, I raised a hand to my temple. My own touch was like a whip, a brilliant stab of heat.

  Tally looked at the two of us, grinning. “Well, well, aren’t you two the sight. Look like you’re wearing warpaint. Painted up like two owls, you are.”

  Tally’s dark skin showed nothing, but Leah reached over and gently touched her face.

  “Yow! Hey, that hurts! Shit!”

  “Ultraviolet,” Leah said. “It’s the hard ultraviolet. CO-two is too difficult for UV to split; it doesn’t form an ozone layer. The climate is cloudy and cold, but the hard UVs still get right down to the surface. I’d say, we’ve been a bit stupid, going out unprotected. Good thing we weren’t out much longer.”

  “Shit,” said Tally. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

  “The hab has to have some kind of a med kit,” Leah said. “Maybe we’d better see if it has any sunburn ointment.”

  At night, in the cubby. I didn’t know what to expect.

  She wasn’t in the bunk. She was sitting in the cubby’s one small chair, staring into space. I got into the bunk, on one side, making a space for her.

  She didn’t move. Fifteen minutes. Half an hour.

  I’d done something wrong. But she hadn’t objected! I thought—

  Damn.

  The silence in the cubby was oppressive.

  At last I said, “Leah?”

  She said nothing.

  “Leah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to try to—”

  In the dark it was hard to tell where her eyes focused, but I could see the slight movement of her head and knew that she was looking at me.

  “David.” She paused for a moment, and just before I was about to speak again, to apologize to her, she continued. “I’ve seen bodies before.”

  It was not what I’d expected her to say. “Bodies?”

  “I thought I was used to it.” Her voice was tiny in the darkness. “I thought I could handle it. I can handle it.”

  It was odd. The bodies hadn’t bothered me. They had been so far decomposed that they were barely recognizable as having been human at all. And they hadn’t seemed to bother her, not in the daytime.

  “I’ve seen too many bodies.” And then she came into bed, turning to face away from me. I held her. Her body was rigid, but she turned her face and pressed her head into my side. “Too many, too many.” Her breath was warm against my shoulder. “It wasn’t even anybody I knew. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m going to stop crying now.”

  I touched her face. Her eyes were dry, but somewhere inside she seemed to be crying.

  “I don’t even know why I’m still alive,” she said. “Everybody else died.”

  I didn’t know what to say to her, so I stroked her hair and said, “I know, I know.”

  “Careful how you touch me, you idiot,” she said, and her tone was back to normal. “My whole face feels like it’s on fire.”

  I knew so little about her. She never talked about herself; she so deftly managed to always avoid the subject. She had always seemed so much in control. But suddenly she was asleep, and the time for asking questions had passed.

  I’ve heard that some people fall in love at first sight. It took me about three classes.

  The first one, I don’t think I even noticed her in particular, just another face among the many. I was teaching a class on troubleshooting. There are two techniques to troubleshooting equipment. The first is, you know the equipment so thoroughly that you have a sense of it, you know it as a friend, and when it’s down, you can feel what’s wrong by pure instinct. That method is rather hard to teach.

  The other way is to be simple, thorough and logical; to home in on the problem by pure mechanical elimination, a matter of dogged and willfully unimaginative technique. That was the technique I was teaching. It means teaching how to be methodical, how to structure a grid to let no combination of symptoms escape detection.

  The Institute has simple rules: everybody teaches, everybody learns. Every year, during the Earth’s northern-hemisphere summer, the Institute holds a monthlong convocation, and this year I was teaching. My class lasted only a week, and it was almost half over before I really noticed Leah.

  But, once I’d noticed her, I couldn’t get her out of my mind. The breeze rustled across pine needles, and I heard the sound of her voice, asking a question, precise, cogent, perfectly phrased. I’d see the way she cocked her head, listening. I became suddenly self-conscious, worried about how I presented the material, whether it was clear and precise.

  So when I finished, I sat in on her course, although it was somewhat out of my usual feeding range. Soliton-wave solutions of the Einstein field equations. I’m slow; my lips move when I solve field equations in four dimensions. She was a lot faster than the class, so smooth that it was obvious that she knew the material so well she didn’t even bother to review it before she started talking.

  I knew that once the convocation had ended, I would never see her again. The thought made me desperate, although I’d not spoken more than a half dozen words to her beyond what was required of a student. I knew absolutely nothing of her other than her name, Leah Hamakawa, and the obvious fact that she knew more about general relativity than I would be able to learn in a lifetime. I had to do something that would get her attention.

  I invited her to come with me to visit Old Los Angeles.

  The month after the convocation is traditionally a time for vacation and independent study, before we went back to our individual lives, hiring out as Institute-bonded technicians or consultants or troubleshooters. I had no idea whether she’d be interested in a trip to O.L.A.; it was a wild shot to try to impress her.

  But her eyes had suddenly flared with interest, and, for the first time, she looked at me and actually saw me. “Old L.A.? Interesting. Have you been there?”

  I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t, so I temporized. “I know a good guide.”

  O.L.A. was one of the most dangerous, and certainly the oddest, of the ecosystems on the Earth. Back at the end of the second Elizabethan age, the doomed city had been the home of a dozen or more gene-splicing laboratories, corporations that had made synthetic retroviruses to replace flawed DNA with custom-designed synthetic, right inside the chromosome of the target organism. Other cities had such labs, too, of course, and Los Angeles hadn’t even been the most prominent of them. Just the unluckiest.

  The virus that had gotten free was a generic gene-splicer. It would copy snippets of genes at random out of any host organism it happened to infect. As soon as it vectored to another host, it would make a billion copies of itself, and of its copied DNA, copy the genes back into a likely spot in the genome of the new host, and then start over again from the beginning by grabbing a snippet of DNA from the new host. As a parting gift to the new organism, it would then trigger the cell’s own enzyme promoters to express the DNA.

  The fact that retroviruses copy DNA from one organism to another is a natural process, of course; just a part of the mechanics of evolution. The rogue virus had the effect of a million years of evolution, set loose in a single day: chaos.

  Most of the additions to the genome were meaningless changes, genes which coded neither useful nor harmful proteins. Most of the changes that had effect were dysfunctional, and killed the hosts over the course of a few days or weeks, if they were lucky, or produced an explosion of cancers that killed the host over the course of months, if not so lucky. Over the course of the first year a great die-off occurred.

  The things that survived were—strange. The rogue virus had indiscriminately cut and pasted genes with no notion of species; what came out of the mingling were neither humans nor
animals nor plants, but weird mixtures: predatory plants, octopuses with hands, tiger-sized raccoons that knew how to use guns, social bacteria that drew recondite, hypnotic patterns across deserted beaches. The thrown-together quarantine barriers held, barely, and the hastily mobilized scientific effort to combat the virus devised a specific antiviral protein that knocked out the rogue virus’s ability to reproduce. The plague was stopped before it spread outside the boundaries of what had been Los Angeles.

  Inside the hundred-mile ring, surrounded by scorched sand and silent, instant death, what had once been Los Angeles was still evolving toward a new ecosystem. There was noplace more deadly, or more strange. The retrovirus itself was gone, but the creatures it had spawned remained. You could go there, if you signed a waiver indicating that you knew the danger and were aware that there was no guarantee that you would come back.

  The guide I had been told about was a mysterious survival specialist and weapons expert named Tally Okumba. Nobody, I was told, knew more about O.L.A., or about any of the odd, dangerous corners of the Earth, than Tally did; and nobody knew more about staying alive, on Earth or elsewhere.

  “Old L.A.,” Leah said. Her eyes were veiled, dreaming. “When do we leave?”

  In the light of the dawn, Tally was dancing, high kicks, spins, and backflips in the low gravity. Over her rebreather, her face was covered with a bone-white warpaint that, after a moment, I realized was an improvised sunblock. I watched her through the habitat’s window, and wondered how long she had been at it. Her flexibility was astonishing.

  Leah did not mention what she’d said the night before, and I didn’t bring it up.

  The task for the day was to gather up shards of the shattered habitat and as much of the wind-scattered contents as we could find. Leah and I worked mostly in silence, occasionally pointing out to each other pieces in the distance. Aerial photos taken as we had landed helped locate the more distant fragments, but didn’t substitute for plain, dogged walking.

  The job took a lot of walking. The camp was located on the Syrtisian isthmus. This was a broad saddle that separated the Hellenian Sea from Gulf of Isidis, a bay of the Boreal Ocean which covered nearly the entire northern hemisphere of Mars. To the northwest the land sloped gently upward toward the Syrtis caldera, an ancient shield volcano, dead now for well over a billion years. An endless series of lava-etched rilles corrugated the landscape from northwest to southeast, each with a tiny brown stream at the bottom. The wind that scattered the pieces of the habitat had, in accord with Murphy’s law, been crosswise to the rilles, meaning that we had to trek up and down innumerable gullies to collect the fragments.

  “It must have been some wind,” Leah said. “Blowing pretty constantly from the Hellenian Sea toward the Gulf, apparently.”

  The carbon-dioxide atmosphere was still now, with barely a trace of breeze.

  By local noon we had made a large collection of pieces. I took a break and sat on a rock by one of the streams. The brook foamed as it rippled over submerged rocks. Amber bubbles clumped together, then detached and floated downstream. The stream looked like an alcoholic’s vision of paradise: a river of ice-cold beer, flowing down into a lake of beer, emptying somewhere into a frigid ocean of beer—

  “Well, yes—what did you think that the rivers are?” Leah said, when I mentioned the thought to her. She was wearing a makeshift sunbonnet constructed from piloting charts; even with her face hidden by a rebreather and caked with burn ointment, she was stunningly beautiful. I wondered what it would be like to peel off her winter garments, to make love to her right there by the stream. “By any practical definition, it is a river of beer. Yeast is an anaerobic microorganism—the stuff that the ecopoesis team seeded this planet with will ferment just about everything. Naturally carbonated, too: five hundred millibars of carbon-dioxide atmosphere is going to dissolve a hell of a lot of carbonation into the water at this temperature. I’d bet that if you brought a glass of that stuff inside it would develop a pretty good head.”

  “You mean I could drink this stuff?”

  Leah looked at it critically. “Hmmm. You know, you just might be able to. Full of bacteria, I expect, but if our antibiologicals aren’t working, we’re already dead anyway, so I doubt it’s a problem. Tell you what.” She looked up at me. “You try it, and let me know.”

  I didn’t.

  By midafternoon, we had gathered as much of the debris as we could find. Everything that looked like it might have originally been part of the habitat pressure vessel, Leah set out in a array next to the site of the explosion. Each piece was numbered, and then Leah began fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  “There are some minor pieces missing, but I think we’ve pretty much got everything important,” she said at last.

  I walked up behind her and looked at the neatly indexed array of scrap. “What have you learned?”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t tell me a story, yet.” She picked up a piece and handed it to me. “Tell me what you think about this one.”

  It was a curved piece of aluminum, forty centimeters long, somewhat bent. “Exterior habitat pressure-vessel wall,” I said.

  “Right so far. What else?”

  The piece had broken at a seam at one edge. Shoddy workmanship? Probably not; the other end had ripped jagged right across; the weld had probably never been designed for the stress it must have taken. It was bent in the middle. The jagged end had a scrape of paint on the raw metal. “Blue paint chips on the end here,” I said.

  “Right,” she said. “And the bend?”

  It took me a moment, but suddenly I saw it. “Bent the wrong way,” I said. “It bowed in. The explosion should have blown it out.” I thought for a moment. “Could have been bent by the wind, later.”

  She nodded, thoughtful. “Possibility. There are other pieces bent the same way, though.”

  “How much overpressure would it take to bend it that way?”

  “Good question,” she said. “If we could figure the overpressure as a function of position, we can guess the locus of the blast. Turns out, though, that it doesn’t take much blast pressure to make the habitat structure fail this way. The pressure vessel was designed to hold an interior pressure; it’s not well designed against an external overpressure.”

  “So, what do you think?”

  “It might have failed in the rarefaction rebound following the overpressure of an explosion,” she said. “Microstructural examination might tell. Might not.”

  “Or the explosion was outside the habitat.” That would make sense. If somebody had wanted to kill the team, the easiest way to do it would have been to put a bomb next to the shelter.

  Leah shook her head and chose another piece to hand to me. “Carbon deposits,” she said.

  I looked at it and nodded. The burn marks were on the concave side, the interior. “Fire after the blast?” I suggested.

  She nodded, but slowly. “Could be, I suppose. But after the habitat breach, everything vents to the reducing atmosphere. Fire goes out pretty quick.”

  “If it was murder,” Leah said, “who might have done it?”

  We were sitting back in the little conference room. My whole face itched now, despite the ointments that Tally had devised for sunburn. My face felt like I was still wearing the rebreather.

  “Hard to say,” Tally said. “I suppose either one of ’em might have had enemies. If it wasn’t personal, I’ve got a few possibilities. First, before they went, turns out they got a couple of anonymous messages saying not to go. The point was, Mars was property of Freehold Toynbee, and it was reserved for the Martians, however long it took them to appear. Humans were expressly forbidden to land.”

  “Toynbee!” Leah said. “They were dissolved more than a century ago. Bankrupt and sold for scrap. Besides, lots of researchers have visited Mars.”

  Tally nodded, slowly. “A century ago, yes. I doubt anybody’s been here in the last hundred years, though, except our poor friends. Seems hard to
believe anyone would still care. A nut, I’d say. Still, a nut might be what we’re looking for.”

  “And the other possibilities?”

  “Turns out that there are still some people,” Tally said, “as think that ecopoesis is usurping the role of God. And some as think that ecopoesis is, or was, a crime against the ecosystem. And there’s been talk that if Mars could be triggered, then other planets, in other solar systems, could be. Some of these have life of their own, incompatible with terrestrial life. So, some radicals, they don’t want Mars studied. They’re scared that any studying of Mars is a step to triggering planets in other solar systems. There are those as would like to stop that. Stop it early, and stop it at any cost.

  “And, finally, there are those as worry about Mars, worry that this ecopoesis might just be another L.A. waiting to happen.” She shrugged. “Me, I rather like Old L.A. Got that kind of raw charm you don’t see much in other cities nowadays. But I know that not everybody thinks like me.”

  “I see,” said Leah. “And which of these would have set a bomb?”

  Tally shrugged. “Any of them. Or all of them, working together.”

  “Working together? Logically, the Toynbees and the ecoradicals are enemies.”

  Tally smiled. “Logically, we’re not precisely talking rational people here.”

  “So what do we have?”

  “See, are we even sure it was a bomb?” Tally said. “Tinkerman, you find any suspicious pieces of pyrotechnic?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing yet. But I don’t know much about bombs. I might have missed something.”

  “Me neither,” Tally said. “And I do know about bombs, I do. A bit.”

  Leah Hamakawa was completely opaque to me. I never had a clue what she was thinking, what she felt or thought about me. Sometimes her gaze would wander over me and stop, and she would look at me, not with a question, not with an invitation, just a look, calm and direct. I wished I knew what she was contemplating.