Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  “Heh,” he said, squeezing between a pair of strapped-down plastic crates. Beneath his suit he’d been wearing the bulky, padded folds of an undersuit garment, and it gave him a soft and clumsy look. “Sorry for the mess. Weren’t expectin’ t’be doin’ any entertainin’ today.”

  Took a moment to turn down some of the input … especially the odors. Norris didn’t seem to notice that throat-gagging cacophony of smells, and I wondered how he managed without being able to draw on internal life support. Maybe he’d just been living by himself too long. I turned down some of the visual input, too. Too much detail, too much focus, too much clarity in a cluttered-jumble like that could overload even advanced AI visual processors. Now I knew why OS-human eyes focused only a small area directly in the line of vision and let the periphery blur.

  “What,” I managed to say after a moment, “are you doing in here?”

  It wasn’t that Norris simply enjoyed living in clutter, though the clutter of Life only knows how many years living out in the desert played a part, certainly. Most of the hut’s interior was taken up by hardfoam packing containers and more sealed cryocases, and most had been anchored in place by straps bolted to the walls and floor. Fossil specimens, casts and impressions in red Martian sandstone, littered most of the remaining floor.

  “Movin’ day,” he said.

  I glanced at him, but couldn’t read the expression. In the center of the compartment, a relatively open and junk-free space was occupied by a seat that I recognized as having come from the dismantled lobber outside. The seat was affixed to a set of rotating gimbals, which would let it swing freely, remaining upright in any attitude. The engineering was remarkable, if less than precisionist neat.

  “May I ask the point of all of this?”

  “It’s liable to get a little bouncy,” he told me. Reaching up, he fondly patted one of the semicircular mounts within which the seat would freely swing to any attitude. “With this, I got half a chance of riding out your runaway.”

  “A chance?” I looked at him, disbelieving. “Paul, this is … is crazy. You will not survive.”

  He shrugged. “If I don’t, I don’t.” His voice sharpened. “But I am not

  evacuating.”

  “Paul, I’m not sure you understand how serious this is. You must leave. Or you will …” I hesitated, then said the word with an effort. “Die.”

  He gave me a sharp look. “I thought you amortal-types only worried about your own deaths.”

  “You needn’t be vulgar,” I replied, shocked. “We are concerned with all life.”

  “Yeah, right. Even humans, huh?”

  I turned, fixing him with a hard, scan-intense gaze. “Paul, do you hate or fear us, the amortals, I mean? Do you resent us or what we’re doing here? Is that why you … why you’re doing this?”

  He looked away. “Don’t rightly see how it’s any of your business what I do here,” he said. “I just want t’be left alone.”

  “Unfortunately, Paul, our … runaway, as you call it, has made that impossible. Even without it, you would have had to leave sooner or later. The Martian surface is not going to be stable—safe—for some centuries to come. CK-2023 merely hastened events. Sooner or later, you would have had to leave.”

  “Lady, I’m forty-seven years old.”

  I blinked. “Your records say you’re eighty-eight.”

  He made a face. “That’s standard. What you call a stadyer. I’m Martian, remember? Forty-seven. And what are you doing snooping around in my records?”

  “You came from Earth, originally.”

  “Ayuh. A long, long time ago.” He sighed. “The point is, I don’t have that much time left, do I? I was figurin’ on bein’ dead and gone by the time things changed enough that I would have to leave.”

  “No matter how well-laid plans may be, there is always room for error.”

  Stooping, I picked up one of the specimens Paul had left lying on the floor, partly wrapped in padding. He started forward, as though to take it from me, then stopped himself, making himself watch me finger the fragile, two-billion-year-old spine-studded crenelations of the spinotroch’s shell. “Careful with that,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Spine-wheel. Burrowed in the mud of the old sea bottoms.”

  I continued tracing the delicate outline, preserved perfectly in sandstone. “Interesting.” Gently setting the fossil down, I looked up at the stacks of hardfoam containers already sealed and secured to the walls. “And these others?”

  “Hell, I got thirty, mebbe forty different species collected here. Over seven hundred individual specimens. Centrophores. Placalophs. Camptohelians. Dihelians.” He raised his hand, lightly touching one of the containers. “There’s a lot of years of prospectin’ in these here packages.”

  “An impressive collection.”

  “Too many to ferry out by lobber. Too many even t‘pack out on a tractor back to Pittsburgh, assumin’ they had a tractor free right now. Seems like everybody’s busy haulin’ tail out of the lowlands, these days.” He snorted. “Hell, lady, why else do you think I’m going through all of this?”

  I wasn’t sure what to think. “Surely you understand,” I said, “that the fact that a tractor was not made available to you means that your collection did not have a high priority.”

  “Not for you, mebbe,” he said. “Or for the Arean Museum. But it has a damned high priority for me.”

  “The Arean Museum already has all the fossil specimens it needs. So does Earth. The Arean biota is well recorded, both with fossil specimens and with DNA records.”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “Why do you keep collecting them, then? Why are they so important to you?”

  Paul scowled. “Hell, lady, y’might ask y’self why a guy’s life is important to him! Me and Ann spent the better part of thirty-one years prospectin’ for fossils out here, one place an’ another. That’s … what? Almost sixty of yer damned stadyers. We spent twenty-one of ’em right here in the Valles Marineris. Hell, collectin’ fossils is all I know.”

  “If the areopaleontologists have already seen and described these species, there’s no need to collect more, surely.”

  “Says who? You can’t have too many specimens of a given life-form, not if you want as complete a picture as possible of the thing. How big did it grow? How long did it live? What structural variations were there, when evolution started reshaping the thing?” Carefully, he reached down and picked up the spinotroch, cradling it in his hand. “For me, though, it’s a matter of history, of … of being. Holding one of these, and knowing that it was alive and swimming, right here, when all Earth had to offer was blue-green algae.”

  He picked up a sheet of foam padding and began wrapping the fossil, using several layers before slipping the package inside one of the open hardfoam containers.

  “Besides,” he continued. “There’s always the chance of finding something new, something no one has ever seen before.”

  “A very small chance.”

  “Oh, you look long enough, you’ll find things … wonderful things.” He hesitated. “That specimen in the ice block I just hauled in. Found it by accident, when my digger was huntin’ fer ice fer my reserves. Found it just five hundred meters from here, and me and Ann working this part of the Valles for twenty-one years and we never knew it was there. I think it’s a new species, something never seen before. How much more must there be out there still, right under our noses like this thing was, and when you yank Mars out of its ice age it’s all going to be destroyed.”

  “We are less concerned with the past, Paul, than we are with the future.”

  “I’m not talking about the past. I’m talking about knowledge. About who we are and where we came from and what else there is in this universe besides us.”

  “No, you’re talking about your life as a fossil prospector,” I told him. “I understand that … and I respect it. There will still be fossils for you to hunt and sell, if th
at’s what you want.”

  “You don’t need to be condescending with me, damn it!” His fists were clenched, the veins standing out on the backs of his hands like blue marbling. He began ticking points off on long, bony fingers. “In the first place, you know well as I do that the new ocean you’re making is in the same spot as it used to be. Most fossils are gonna be lost … specially the ice fossils, which’ll disintegrate when the ice melts. Second, the way I heard it, you’re gonna be pulling everyone off Mars before too long, just because you figure it’ll be too dangerous here on the surface for the next couple hundred years. So what am I supposed to do, living the rest of my life in one of your big space colonies? Ain’t no fossils for me to hunt there, less you planted them there yourselves when you built the thing. Third, it’s a damned crime what you amorts are doin’ here. I’m not talkin’ about the runaway. I just mean your terraforming idea. Who needs it?”

  “Don’t you want your descendants to walk on a fair, green world? One with air they can breathe, blue skies, open—”

  “Aw, save it! It’s cheaper t’build O’Neill microworlds, and you can make your gravity t’order. Me, I like a place that’s got some bite to it!”

  “Your people,” I said slowly, “show an unusual tendency to attach themselves to a particular patch of land. Many of you have been … reluctant to move, despite the coming danger. We do not understand this.”

  He grinned. “I take it I’m not the only problem case, then.”

  I studied him a moment. I thought he was enjoying this. “No. No, you’re not. Most of the older sapiens prefer to stay where they are. Even when they know that survival is unlikely.”

  “Maybe we like it where we are.”

  “That doesn’t make sense! Surely, when life-threatening situations develop, it is best to leave, whatever the cost!”

  “Have you ever stopped to look at the sunrise over the Valles scarp? When black fades to purple, then maroon, then orange, then pink … and fast, like. Less than a minute. The air’s still too thin for lingering transition colors in the sky, you know.”

  “This is worth dying for?”

  He chuckled. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. But it makes us sad to see beauty like that passing.”

  “There will be beauty in the new world we create here. A new world, where men can walk and breathe without artifice.”

  “I’m sure. But that’s, what? Two, three Martian centuries off, yet, before the atmosphere’s thick enough to do away with pressure suits? And then another thousand years before your gene-tailored algae make the stuff breathable.”

  “We are terraforming Mars for you and your kind, Paul. We amortals can remake ourselves in any fashion we choose. But Homo sapiens need worlds like Mars, or the microworld colonies.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not gonna see it, am I? You take away my world now for the promise of paradise a thousand years from now. You amortals—well, there’s no tellin’ how long you folks have t’live. With downloadin’ to new bodies and all, I guess mebbe you have a fair chance at livin’ forever.”

  “Not forever, Paul. Nothing lasts forever.” I cocked my head to the side. “Why do you choose to live here, Paul? That is the central question, the reason I was sent here to talk with you, after all. We need to understand you, Paul, if we are to help your kind in the future.”

  “Mebbe we don’t want your help. I don’t.”

  “You said that at forty-seven you don’t have much time left, but you’re still throwing away an extra ten or fifteen Martian years! Good years. And who’s to say what advances might be made in nanomedtech and cyberimplants in that time? Paul, every human alive today has a chance to join us!”

  He looked at me for a long time, then slowly shook his head. “Lady, that assumes we want t’live forever. Some of us don’t.”

  “Paul, you can’t mean that. I mean, you are trying to survive, aren’t you?” I waved a hand at the seat and gimbals. “With all of this?”

  He managed a smile. “That’s the general idea.” The smile faded. “There was a time, there, when I just didn’t want to go on. But … well, it got better. Believe me, I don’t want to die.”

  “Then come with me! Now!”

  “To one of your resettlement microworlds?” He shook his head, a hard, jerky motion. “No thanks.”

  “You do resent us. What we’re trying to do here. For you.”

  He shrugged. “Well, I can’t deny I liked Mars the way it was. Mostly, though, I just wonder about the hurry. I always heard you folks were the ones t’take the long, patient view.”

  “Even in a plan spanning a thousand years,” I said, “there must be a beginning.”

  He fixed me with a disapproving stare. “Man’s been on this world for two hundred and thirty-one years, Cessair. That’s well over four centuries, standard. That’s not time to get to know something as big, as complicated as a world. There are wonders out there—”

  “There must be a beginning, Paul. There must be a time when we say, ‘Enough planning, enough research. We will begin now!’ After four centuries, we know all we need to know about Mars.”

  “We don’t know all there is to know about Earth yet, Cessair, and Man’s been there a damn sight longer than he’s been here!”

  “An opinion, Paul. One we do not share.” I hesitated, considering, looking for a different mental tack. “Paul, we—all of us concerned with the evacuation—we want to help. We don’t know why you are so stubbornly insisting on riding this out yourself, when there’s no need!”

  “Let’s just say I’d rather do this on my own.”

  “The resettlement will not be forever, a few years at most, until the end of the bombardment phase. Then you could return. Or you could elect to stay in the resettlement colony. Many of your people have chosen that option, you know. I believe your daughters have applied for long-term citizenship in Aldrin.”

  “They’re grown. They can do what they want with their lives.”

  “It’s a beautiful world, designed especially for you … Martians. You would be happy there.”

  “An inside-out world, with the other side of the place hanging over my head?” He chuckled, a dry, brittle sound. “No thanks! I prefer my sky wide-open and pink!”

  “I thought humans prided themselves on being adaptable.” It was a challenge.

  “Exactly. We are adaptable. I’ll adapt fine on my own. Right here.”

  “There is adaptable,” I said, “and there is stupid.” I spread my hands, imploring. How to get through to him? “Sooner or later, you will all have to leave, at least for a few centuries. The changes we’ve already introduced, well, things are going to be very risky here for a time. The runaway has only advanced the schedule a bit.”

  2

  I didn’t add that the Project Eos planners had embraced that advance. For fifty-one stadyers now, we’d been dropping cometary chunks onto the northern hemisphere of Mars, each piece precisely controlled, each no more than a few tens of meters across, designed to vaporize in the slowly thickening atmosphere without causing major impacts or environmental threats. At the same time, huge, orbital mirrors, each a hundred kilometers across, were bathing the northern hemisphere in sunlight, raising the surface temperature. And the changes were happening, had been happening for twenty years. Already, the Boreal Sea was forming anew, liquid water once again flowing where an ocean had rolled two billion years before.

  But the changes, even under tight control, were already wreaking havoc with a planetary surface essentially unchanged since the rising of the Tharsis Bulge a billion years back. Permafrost was melting across continent-sized regions, creating titanic sinkholes, Marsquakes, and mudslides of devastating proportions. The atmosphere had thickened twentyfold, further increasing temperatures, and accelerating the greenhouse effect. Open water was appearing in the lowest reaches of the northern basin, in Chryse and in Acidalia, as ancient subterranean ices melted. Within another century, we expected the ocean to be deep and warm enough that only the coa
stlines and north polar regions would freeze solid during north hemisphere winters. Then the real planetary engineering could begin.

  But conditions were increasingly dangerous for humans on the Martian surface, especially in the northern permafrost belt and in low-lying canyons like the Valles Marineris. For the past ten stadyers, we’d been supervising the evacuation of humans living in the threatened regions—primarily the northern lowlands—to orbital microworld colonies like Aldrin.

  But now—well, things had gotten out of hand. The next iceteroid in line had gone wrong.

  CK-2023 had started out as a resident of the Kuiper Belt, that band of cold, dark asteroids, comets, and Pluto-sized iceballs orbiting the fringes of Sol’s kingdom out beyond Neptune. Terraforming engineers—including an Al with the nomen of Ep-74 Far Thinking, who probably knew more about orbital mechanics and gravitational vectoring than any other sentient AI, CE, amortal, or oldie in existence—had set up the move, planting drivers that sent CK-2023 sunward on a long, patient curve that flicked close in around Jupiter 43 stadyers later. The calcs called for a tidal breakup as that chunk of ice swung past Jove, aided by some judiciously planted nuclear charges. The idea was to disperse the chunk into a pearlstring of impacters, none more than a few hundred mets across, all on a collision course with Mars well above the forty-degree-latitude line.

  So … what went wrong? We still don’t know, and it’s likely that the reason is lost somewhere beneath the blur of chaos and random event. CK-2023 fragmented, but not cleanly. One fragment was four hundred mets across and over two kilometers long, and as it swept past Jupiter and whipped around toward the Inner System, it picked up a hard-spinning tumble that made further landings impossible. Various schemes were calced and simmed, schemes employing missiles, lasers, particle beams, every weapon, in fact, that could be found in their dusty storage facilities on Earth and elsewhere. Since the amortals and AIs had assumed the responsibilities for what had passed as a government among sapiens, there’d been scant need for high-powered weaponry. An antimatter beam might have sufficed, but we could not generate that much antimatter in time. In fact, every sim we ran showed the same outcome. There was no way, with the hardware at our immediate disposal, to guarantee the fragment’s vaporization … and anything less than total vaporization risked hitting Mars with something very like the blast of an antique shotgun. Scan the thought, for a sec, of rubble impacting all across the target hemisphere, devastating, deadly, and utterly random. The largest Martian cities … Mariner, Denver-Olympus, Tharsisview, Pittsburgh, Hellas, Kasei City all would be seriously damaged, possibly destroyed. People would die … unthinkable tragedy on a scale as grand as the planet-gashing length of the Mariner Valles itself.