Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  Miriam, with reprimands and black marks now a part of her record, and a debt to the Project that would drain her accounts of credit, had been advised by a Counselor to resign from the Project, advice that was the equivalent of a command. Within days after the Project Council had approved The Dream of Venus in its final form, which had required a bit more editing, Miriam Lucea-Noyes was ready to leave for Earth.

  Hassan knew that it might be better not to say farewell to her in person. That would only evoke painful memories of their brief time together, and it could hardly help him to be seen with a woman who was in such disgrace. But he had dreamed of sharing his life with her once, and could not simply let her go with only a message from him to mark her departure. He owed her more than that.

  On the day Miriam was scheduled to leave, Hassan met her in front of the entrance to her building. She looked surprised to see him, even though his last message to her had said that he would be waiting for her there and would walk with her to the airship bay.

  “You didn’t have to come,” she said.

  “I wanted to see you once more.” He took her duffel from her and hoisted it to his shoulder.

  They walked along the white-tiled path that led away from the workers’ residence where they had passed so many hours together. There, at the side of one wing of the building, was the courtyard in which they had so often sat while talking of their work and their families and their hopes for a future together. They passed a small flower garden bordered by shrubs, the same garden where he had first tentatively hinted that he might seek a lasting commitment from her, and then they strolled by another courtyard, dotted with tables and chairs, where they had occasionally dined. Perhaps Miriam would suffer less by leaving the Island than he would by staying. Wherever she ended up, she would be able to go about her business without inevitably finding herself in a place that would evoke memories of him, while he would have constant reminders of her.

  “Have you any idea of what you’ll be doing?” he asked.

  “I’ve got passage to Vancouver,” she said. “The expense of sending me there will be added to what I owe the Project, and my new job won’t amount to much, but at least I’ll be near my family.”

  If her family were willing to welcome her back, they were showing more forbearance under the circumstances than his own clan would have done. As for her new work, he was not sure that he wanted to know much about it. Her training and education would not be allowed to go to waste, but a disgraced person with a large debt to pay off was not likely to be offered any truly desirable opportunities. If Miriam was lucky, she might have secured a post teaching geology at a second-rate college; if she was less fortunate, she might be going back to a position as a rock hound, one of those who trained apprentice miners bound for the few asteroids that had been brought into Earth orbit to be stripped of needed ores and minerals.

  “Don’t look so unhappy,” Miriam said then. “I’ll get by. I decided to accept a job with a team of assayers near Vancouver. It’s tedious, boring work, but I might look up a few of my old associates in the mind-tour trade and see if I can get any side jobs going for myself there. At least a couple of them won’t hold my black marks against me.”

  “Administrator Pavel was very pleased with the editing of The Dream of Venus,” Hassan said, suddenly wanting to justify himself.

  “So I heard.”

  “If you should ever care to view the new version—”

  “Never.” She halted and looked up at him. “I have to ask you this, Hassan. Did you preserve our original mind-tour in your personal records? Did you keep it for yourself?”

  “Did I keep it?” He shifted her duffel from his left shoulder to his right. “Of course not.”

  “You might have done that much. I thought that maybe you would.”

  “But there’s no point in keeping something like that. I mean, the revised version is the one that will be made available to viewers, so there’s no reason for me to keep an earlier version. Besides, if others were to find out that I had such an unauthorized mind-tour in my personal files, they might wonder. It might look as though I secretly disagreed with Pavel’s directive. That wouldn’t do me any good.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true,” Miriam said. “You certainly don’t want people thinking less of you now that you’ve won the Administrator’s respect.”

  Her sardonic tone wounded him just a little. “I don’t suppose that you kept a record of the original version,” he said.

  “I didn’t even try. I guessed that my Counselor might go rooting around in my files to see if they held anything questionable, and would advise me to delete anything inappropriate, and I don’t need any more trouble.” She smiled, and the smile seemed to come from deep inside her, as though she had accepted her hard lot and was content. “Let’s just say that the original may not have been completely lost. I have hopes that it will be safe, and appreciated. I don’t think you want to know any more than that.”

  “Miriam,” he said.

  “You know, I never could stand long dragged out farewells.” She reached for her duffel and wrested it from his grip. “You can leave me here. You don’t have to come to the airship bay with me. Good-bye, Hassan.”

  “Go with God, Miriam.”

  She walked away from him. He was about to follow her, then turned toward the path that would take him to his residence.

  During the years that followed, Hassan did not try to discover what had become of Miriam. Better, he thought, not to trouble himself with thoughts of his former love. His success with the altered mind-tour had cemented his friendship with Muhammad, increased the esteem his fellow geologists had for him, and had brought him more respect from his family on Earth.

  Within five years after the release of The Dream of Venus, Hassan was the head of a team of geologists, was sometimes assigned to the pleasant task of creating educational mind-tours for Island children, and had taken a bondmate, Zulaika Jehan. Zulaika came from a Mukhtar’s family, had been trained as an engineer, and had an exemplary record. If Hassan sometimes found himself looking into Zulaika’s brown eyes and remembering Miriam’s gray ones, he always reminded himself that his bondmate was exactly the sort of woman his family had wanted him to wed, that his father had always claimed that marrying for love was an outworn practice inherited from the decadent and exhausted West and best discarded, and that taking Miriam as a bondmate would only have brought him disaster.

  Occasionally, Hassan heard rumors of various mind-tours passed along through private channels from one Linker on the Islands to another, experiences that might be violent, frightening, pornographic, or simply subversive. He had always strongly suspected, even though no one would have admitted it openly, that his father and other privileged people in his clan had enjoyed such forbidden entertainments, most of which would find their way to the masses only in edited form. It would be a simple matter for any Linker to preserve such productions and to send them on to friends through private channels inaccessible to those who had no Links. Hassan did not dwell on such thoughts, which might lead to disturbing reflections on the ways in which the powerful maintained control of the net of cyberminds so as to shape even the thoughts and feelings of the powerless.

  One rumor in particular had elicited his attention a rumor of a mind-tour about the Venus Project that far surpassed any of the usual cliché-ridden productions, that was even superior to the much-admired The Dream of Venus. He had toyed with the notion that someone might have come upon an unedited copy of The Dream of Venus, that the mind-tour he and Miriam had created might still exist as she had hoped it would, a ghost traveling through the channels of the cyberminds, coming to life again and weaving its spell before vanishing once more.

  He did not glimpse the possible truth of the matter until he was invited to a reception Pavel Gvishiani was holding for a few specialists who had earned commendations for their work. Simply putting the commendations into the public record would have been enough, but Pavel had decided th
at a celebration was in order. Tea, cakes, small pastries, and meat dumplings were set out on tables in a courtyard near the Administrators’ ziggurat. Hassan, with his bondmate Zulaika Jehan at his side, drew himself up proudly as Administrator Pavel circulated among his guests in his formal white robe, his trusted aide Muhammad Sheridan at his side.

  At last Pavel approached Hassan and touched his forehead in greeting. “Salaam, Linker Pavel,” Hassan said.

  “Greetings, Hassan.” Pavel pressed his fingers against his forehead again. “Salaam, Zulaika,” he murmured to Hassan’s bondmate; Hassan wondered if Pavel had actually recalled her name or had only been prompted by his Link. “You must be quite proud of your bondmate,” Pavel went on. “I am certain, God willing, that this will be only the first of several commendations for his skill in managing his team.”

  “Thank you, Linker Pavel,” Zulaika said in her soft musical voice.

  Pavel turned to Hassan. “And I suspect that it won’t be long before you win another commendation for the credit you have brought to the Project.”

  “You are too kind,” Hassan said. “One commendation is more than enough, Linker Pavel. I am unworthy of another.”

  “I must beg to contradict you, Hassan. The Dream of Venus has been one of our most successful and popular entertainments.” A strange look came into Pavel’s dark eyes then; he stared at Hassan for a long time until his sharp gaze made Hassan uneasy. “You did what you had to do, of course, as did I,” he said, so softly that Hassan could barely hear him, “yet that first vision I saw was indeed a work of art, and worthy of preservation.” Then the Administrator was gone, moving away from Hassan to greet another of his guests.

  Perhaps the Administrator’s flattery had disoriented him, or possibly the wine Muhammad had surreptitiously slipped into his cup had unhinged him a little, but it was not until he was leaving the reception with Zulaika, walking along another path where he had so often walked with Miriam, that the truth finally came to him and he understood what Pavel had been telling him.

  Their original mind-tour might be where it would be safe and appreciated; Miriam had admitted that much to him. Now he imagined her, with nothing to lose, going to Pavel and begging him to preserve their unedited creation; the Administrator might have taken pity on her and given in to her pleas. Or perhaps it had not been that way at all; Pavel might have gone to her and shown his esteem for her as an artist by promising to keep her original work alive. It did not matter how it had happened, and he knew that he would never have the temerity to go to Pavel and ask him exactly what he had done. Hassan might have the Linker’s public praise, but Miriam, he knew now, had won the Linker’s respect by refusing to betray her vision.

  Shame filled him at the thought of what he had done to The Dream of Venus, and then it passed; the authentic dream, after all, was still alive. Dreams had clashed, he knew, and only one would prevail. But how would it win out? It would be the victory of one idea, as expressed in the final outcome of the Project, overlaid upon opposed realities that could not be wished away. To his surprise, these thoughts filled him with a calm, deep pleasure he had rarely felt in his life, and The Dream of Venus was alive again inside him for one brief moment of joy before he let it go.

  At Tide’s Turning

  LAURA J. MIXON

  A graduate of the 1981 Clarion writer’s workshop, Laura J. Mixon has worked as a chemical engineer in polymer research, a Peace Corps volunteer in East Africa, and a corporate VP for a New York-based financial and energy trading corporation. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Wild Cards, and elsewhere. Her books include the novels Glass Houses, Astropilots, Greenwar (in collaboration with Steven Gould), and, most recently, Proxies. Upcoming is a major new terraforming novel, related to her story in this anthology, called Burning the Ice. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband, author Steven Gould, two children, a dog, three guinea pigs, and assorted tropical fish.

  Here’s a powerful and eloquent study of technologists in a race with death, who must push on with terraforming an icy world at any price if they want to stay alive. In such life-and-death circumstances, under such extreme pressure, family relationships may come to seem unimportant, almost an unwelcome distraction. Until someone’s trapped and dying in the dark, that is … .

  “People can’t die along the coast except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born unless it’s pretty nigh in—not properly born till flood. He’s a-going out with the tide … . If he lives till it turns, he’ll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next tide.”

  —Mr. Peggoty to David Copperfield,

  from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

  After breakfast that morning, Manda CarliPablo headed to her work chamber to check her marine-waldos’ night’s work. The chamber was an ugly, rock-hewn room with fluorescent lighting and a thatch floor, with what looked like a hiker’s daypack hanging from a rod in the room’s center that rode across a wire web suspended just below the rough ceiling.

  Decked out in her livesuit and -hood, Manda hooked the livepack onto her yoke’s leads, slipped on the pack’s straps, and then buckled it around her chest. Her liveface appeared before her as she did so, rendered on her retinas by lasers built into the specs set in her livemask. Glamour filled the room, a glowing sphere that defined her projection pod, and a host of 3-D icons appeared: shiny, translucent satellites locked in Manda-static orbit.

  First Manda touched her communications-cube, and it expanded into a thicket of geometric shapes. She checked her mail and messages. LuisMichael hadn’t sent her his new seismic data yet. So she folded the commcube up and started calling up her marine-waldo data. It blossomed around her in glistening bouquets and thickets of numbers, charts, and graphic landscapes, and she began to sort it all. Her handcrafted fleet of eight marine-waldos, the Aculeus series, collected a lot of information, and she had a lot of data to get through since she had taken the evening off yesterday.

  But it wasn’t long before fingers of cold seeped in, disrupting her concentration. Beneath all the protective layers Manda had on—layers of plastic, organic, and metallic fibers, one after another till she could scarcely bend elbow or knee—she shivered, nicking virtual icons with cold-clumsy hands and elbows. Data strands fragmented and cascaded around her down the inner boundaries of the projection pod like ice crystals flung by a storm.

  “Shit.”

  With a sigh, suppressing both her frustration and the shivers, she recovered the data, reconstructed it, and started again—dancing her marine-waldo control dance, working her fingers, arms, legs, and torso to guide her fleet of machines across the dark, cold floor of the ocean, to read its secrets with their instruments.

  She was the colony’s best waldo pilot. The best. Amid the billions back on Earth, how could any single human presume to be the best at anything? For that, at least, she was glad to be one of the handful who lived on this freezing, barren world. She hadn’t lost a machine yet, in almost six seasons of piloting in some extremely dangerous environments.

  Manda’s siblings Arlene and Derek, the oldest set of twins of the CarliPablo nineclone, had suggested the ocean search project to Manda, while they and the rest of the clone geared up on Project IceFlame. Whatever secrets lay beneath Brimstone’s icy crust had stayed hidden ever since the colony’s inception eighteen seasons before. They knew little about this world they inhabited: Brimstone, the biggest moon of the gas giant Fire.

  When Derek and Arlene had suggested it, the assignment had seemed ideal. Manda hadn’t been especially interested in attempting a collaboration with the rest of her much more experienced, tightly-knit sibling group—even if it would have put her at the controls of the winged waldos that would shortly be strafing the methane-laced ice at the poles, putting carbon dioxide and methane into the air to start a cascade of global warming and make this moon more than marginally habitable.

  But was this really any better? All she was finding down in
the ocean depths was dark and cold, and she’d had her fill of those. At least her prior assignments—flying the jet-waldos up to the poles, and using land-explorer equipment to take ice and air samples there—had turned up interesting data to analyze. Even her first assignment, driving an archaic and clumsy tractorwaldo across the rotten tropical ice floes, struggling to avoid being thrown into the brine by Brimstone’s violent and chaotic tides while mapping the myriad island chains down there, beat this endless, oppressive nothingness.

  She was a woman of planetshine, of air currents and ice fog and indigo sky. Out in the harsh, rock-cold winds—in air so thin that a brief walk in corpus left her panting and so frigid it burned the sinuses even through her fur-lined parka hood and nasal filters—the cold didn’t bother her quite so much. In her aerial and terrestrial waldos she could outrun it … or so she pretended. Down here in the ocean there was nowhere to run. The chill pressed in all about. Thousands of tons of water and ice lay overhead. Even the sounds were oppressive, the gut-deep groans of shifting floes carried to Manda’s detectors across thousands of kilometers of gelid liquid: groans as deep and determined and agonized as those she’d heard some anonymous woman in labor make once, in a medical documentary. As if the world itself were trying to give birth.

  And the dark, too, oppressed. Her fleet of marine-waldos had computer-enhanced vision; their visuals swirled with falsecolor images. But it was all unreal, no different than the hallucinations that swarmed behind her eyelids while she lay alone in bed at night—shivering, sweating—knowing nobody gave a fuck about her and she was going to die.

  Her chest had grown constricted; through the pores of her livemask she gasped for air. With a pirouette that bordered on panic and a set of finger flicks on the translucent control icons that orbited her, Manda retreated from the waldo she rode—she wadded the whole thing up, shrinking its inputs till it was merely a shining ball of reduced data in her hands, and set it loose to float amid the other balls of compressed data at waist level. This took only a second to do. Then, with a word or two, she adjusted the livesuit settings, and bent over till the pressure eased.