Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  Its main disadvantage was that sonar was not an information-dense medium. Even a phased-array setup—and even with the signal-boosting buoys she had planted here and there—didn’t allow for a lot of information to be transmitted at once, since the frequencies she had to use were low ones. The link between Manda and her marine-waldos was a mere trickle of information across a very large expanse, and the inevitable errors in transmission and interruptions slowed things down even more. When she issued a command—to sample salinity, for instance, or descend or turn—her waldos might receive those commands several minutes—or even an hour or more—later. But her software compensated as best it could for this very long lag, and Manda’s doggedness and ability to anticipate her waldos had served her well.

  Manda called up some empty, transparent boxes, then grabbed the datashapes orbiting her-Septimus, and dropped them into the boxes. Three-dimensional brightly colored charts unfolded inside the boxes, positioning themselves around her.

  She massaged the data, quite literally, moving variables and recharting them and changing the axes around, and then stepped back and eyed the brightly colored datascape around her. She wandered through them, running her fingers over the results, and listened to the harmonics that fluctuated as she moved.

  Yes!

  Over the past half hour, the waldo had wandered in and out of currents a few hundredths of a degree Celsius warmer—and about a twentieth to a tenth of a knot faster—than ambient. Sonar soundings of the vicinity revealed nothing new, merely a rocky bottom with some silting, and a fairly featureless cliff face to the west—but the chemical screens showed slightly elevated concentrations of manganese and particulates in the warmer, fastermoving eddies.

  This was all very suggestive—still, she couldn’t bring it to the council until she had something more substantial to show them. They wouldn’t care about some little bumps that lined up. She needed more.

  Manda called up a map of the region she was currently exploring, and checked the approximate location of all her marine-waldos. They were spread out over almost five thousand kilometers, at varying depths but most within thirty meters of the ocean floor. Aculeus Septimus had been exploring a deep sea trench extending roughly north-to-south, several hundred kilometers to the east of the coast. Its precise location at the moment was—How interesting! She increased the map’s resolution. Yes, it’s just south of the equator. According to Jim, the equator was a highly likely location for geothermal activity, due to rotational and tidal stresses on Brimstone’s crust.

  She noted that the bottom of the trench had been increasing in depth as Septimus proceeded southward; in this vicinity it went down to about four kilometers below sea level. Septimus had been exploring along the lower eastern edge of the trench, cruising near the bottom of its design depth of four kilometers below sea level. The drop seemed to continue to the south, at about two degrees per kilometer.

  This posed a difficulty. If the source of the thermal activity lay much further south, and the trench continued to increase in depth, the heat source would be below the range of her marine-waldos’ detectors. Meaning she’d either have to risk losing the waldos to implosion, or give up the search.

  Give me time, she thought, rubbing at the livemesh over her upper lip; I’ll come up with something.

  When she overlaid her search grid onto the ocean-floor map she’d been building, she saw that Septimus had entered a large, virtually unmapped section of seafloor that extended south from the equator.

  She called the four closest waldos, Aculei Duo, Tres, Quatuor, and Octo, to assist Septimus. It would take a day for the nearest of them to arrive; in the meantime she needed to come up with a good search pattern. This was no time to get sloppy. And she should let someone know what was going on.

  She smiled fiercely into her livemask. Success was finally—if not yet hers—at least flirting with her for a moment or two.

  Manda put a call in to Jim LuisMichael, the geophysicist who had helped her develop her original seamap routines. He materialized beyond Manda’s livemask, grinning through his bushy, black, ice-encrusted beard. His eyebrows and nose hairs were also iced-over and his eyes made invisible behind a pair of small dark goggles. His microphone, a thick line, snaked across his cheek below the edge of his livemask, to perch beneath his lower lip; his radiation-alert badge was a blinking green LED at his collar. He must be using a wristband video transceiver, since his forearm, huge and near, faded into nothing at the periphery of her vision on the left, and the outsized tip of his mitten appeared at the periphery on her right.

  She felt like a mote standing on his arm. In the background she could see pipes, distillation columns, and a portion of a petroleum storage tank.

  “Manda!” he shouted over the wind. “What can I do for you?”

  “I got your seismic data—thanks.”

  “Sure! Was it a help?”

  “Oh, yes! In fact, I need your help refining my sea-mapping searches. Are you available to give me a hand?”

  “Not right away. I’m out at the refinery. Won’t be back for several days. We’re finishing up some repairs out here. Can it wait till I-we get back?”

  Manda gnawed her lip. She hated the idea of sitting idle for even just a few days, this close to her goal. But without his help developing a good search, based on the geology of the area, she’d be wasting her time. “Not if it can be avoided. Could you link in tonight, after sunset? Just for a little while?” She hesitated. “I think I’m on to something, Jim.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Oh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmm.” He nodded. “All right. I’ll try. Depends on how repairs go.”

  As he was talking a deep rumble came up through her soles and rattled her chest cavity. Her eardrums itched and popped. It went on longer than usual, and built in strength rather than fading, in a series of jerks that knocked her to her knees.

  “What is it?” Jim asked.

  “A quake,” she gasped, scrambling for purchase on the thatching. “Hang on.”

  The jerking seemed to last forever, though certainly it must have been less than a minute. As the quake began to finally subside, a muffled crack shook dust off the walls, followed by a loud whooomph.

  Shit. It’s big—and close. She yanked her livesuit connectors loose and struggled out of the livepack. Jim’s image depixilated to a lower resolution. He read her expression. “What now?”

  “Cave-in. Big one. I’ll call you back.” She cut the connection as she ran down the corridor, and called the colony’s support-systems syntellect. Its icon appeared before her.

  “Where is the cave-in?” she asked.

  “Specify cave-in.”

  “The cave-in that just happened, you dipshit!”

  After an unusually long pause, it gave her the coordinates. The collapse had happened in a bad place, logistically: in the main traffic corridor at the colony’s lowest level, which led to two of the colony’s three major agricultural caverns. The livestock themselves wouldn’t be affected by this, but the bamboo forest and Hydroponics might be. As well as the Fertility Labs and the nurseries and Child-Rearing.

  Abruptly everything went dark but her liveface, which flickered as it switched over to battery and to an even lower-rez mode. The livesuit was now running from its own processor, no longer hooked up by radiolink to the Amaterasu net. Power and communications were down.

  Someone collided with her, and swore. She pulled her flashlight from her belt. Other flashlights flicked on. The array of bouncing, caroming lights added more confusion, not less. Work-waldos now unpiloted milled about, crashing into the humans, or froze, blocking passage. She got pushed along a set of corridors and around turns till she wasn’t sure where she was.

  Manda stumbled along with the rest, bumping into stray people and equipment that fell across her path, until she caught a glimpse of a staircase ahead, and recognized her surroundings. She and others crowded down the nearest spiral staircase into the catecombs on the level
below. A crowd was gathering at the intersection ahead. She rounded the corner there. Several adults were herding children this way. People were shouting. Two lines were forming—rubble clearance brigades—while through the middle of the corridor other adults and teens were helping the survivors—most of them kids—out.

  The children looked confused; several were crying. A couple were injured—she couldn’t tell how badly; she could only catch glimpses in the poor lighting—and being carried out. She sneezed: dust and a solvent mist stung her nose. Steam, rubble, and poor lighting obscured her view, but it looked as if the collapse had occurred a few meters ahead, just beyond the child-care area. About ten meters beyond the children’s suites the corridor branched and opened up onto the caverns containing the Hydroponics gardens and the bamboo. The Fertility Center was in a set of caves off of the bamboo fields. If any of the three areas had been badly damaged, the colony was in trouble.

  She strapped her flashlight to her head with a strip of cloth torn from her shirt hem, and then joined the brigade. It was filthy, mindless work: take the boulders and dirt and buckets of rubble from the person ahead of her, hand them to the person behind. Some of the rocks started coming out stinking and slippery, and she realized it was blood. Or worse.

  Manda grew dizzy and her vision blurred—from the shock, from the effort, the smell, and the damp heat slowly building up in the corridor from the steam-line leak. But she kept going, doggedly, passing rock after bucket after rock. Her arm muscles shrieked their agony along her nerve endings. She hurled the fury that filled her into her brigade work, grab and pass, grab and pass, snarling at the others in the line—Hurry it up, you lazy shitheads. Move it. She knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help it. The rage was just there, boiling inside her like a hydrothermal cauldron. It had to go somewhere.

  A couple of mangled corpses came through the line, bundled in bloodstained sheets. Their faces were partially exposed and she knew them; everybody knew everybody—if not their given names, at least their clones. The first was a young JoeUrsula, who worked—had worked—in Child-Rearing. The second was Teresa.

  Numbly, Manda took her sister’s torso and looked at it, trying to make it be someone else. But the features of the dead woman in her arms refused to change.

  Manda could tell by the way her fingers sank in at the back of Teresa’s head, even through the bundling, that Teresa’s skull had been crushed. Bile rose in Manda’s throat. Teresa’s body was so terribly battered that Manda was grateful for the bundling.

  She hugged the body tight, spasmodically, trying to ignore the strange contortions and parts that weren’t where they should be beneath the sheet. Then she looked at the face again, stroked the corpse’s torn, bruised face. It was like looking in the mirror and seeing herself as a corpse—but at the same time it didn’t even look like Teresa, much less a carbon copy of Manda.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, remembering their argument this morning. She felt dizzy. The world receded to the end of a long tunnel. She looked around, confused, half forgetting where she was.

  The man directly behind her was looking at her with a pitying gaze.

  “Take it!” She forced Teresa’s body into his arms. Then she tried to rub the brown, sticky, drying blood off her palms, arms, and face before the next horrible load came down the line. She found it hard to breathe. But it wasn’t till several drops struck her hands that she realized a stream of tears was flowing down her face, which had contorted into a taut mask.

  Where’s Paul? Does he know? Oh, God. My siblings, my siblings! Where are you?

  She found herself sitting down, trembling like an ice-sprite. A woman was giving her oxygen from a portable unit. She’d been dragged out of the brigade. The woman was a young RoxannaTomas. Manda took several deep breaths into the mask, then signaled enough and struggled to her feet.

  “You gonna be okay?” the other shouted over the din. Manda couldn’t find the words to answer. She only returned to her place in line.

  Gradually, the rocks began to come out clean and hot and wet: steamblasted. Communications came back online. A kind of numbness settled over Manda. Her thoughts came more clearly.

  She remembered the extra waldos and spare parts sitting in the equipment hangar. She should check, see what kind of equipment she could throw together. The digging could go much faster. Lives could be saved.

  “Who is the cave-in rescue coordinator?” she asked those coming out, repeating the question until someone finally answered. It was Arlene. She spotted her up ahead, just this side of the cave-in.

  Manda left the brigade and pushed through the crowd till she reached Arlene. Her older sister was directing people who had crawled into the makeshift tunnel with beams and were stabilizing it. The steam leak had been fixed, or the line closed.

  They looked at each other, and Manda saw Teresa in Arlene’s face. As Arlene looked away, Manda lowered her own gaze, shoving down the horror and nausea that tried to muscle its way up again. Will any of us be able to bear to look at each other, after this?

  Other colonists had been lost over the years, too many of them, in too many different kinds of calamities. But never one of us. Never one of us.

  “I can bring some machines in,” she said.

  “What?” Arlene squinted at her, clearly distracted.

  “I can slap some big construction-waldos together to help with the digging.”

  Arlene frowned. “We’re too cramped already. Several small rooms and corridors need clearing-out and we need to go very carefully. Your waldos are too big for this work, until we get into the caverns.” She paused, thinking. “But you’re right that we’ll need the heavy equipment soon enough. Go see what you can come up with.”

  Manda turned to go, but someone up ahead, someone inside the hole, shouted, “We’re through! We’re into the caverns!”

  Word traveled back along the line; everything grew hushed. Manda strained to get a glimpse; it was impossible to see what was going on in there, with the dust and dancing lights and workers obscuring the view.

  The word came through: “The bamboo is intact!”

  A murmur of relief rippled around them.

  “What about the babies?” someone shouted, and someone else said, “What about Hydroponics?”

  Arlene put in a call. Twin GeorgJeans appeared in front of them, crouching, out of breath. They were broadcasting on a public channel: not only could Manda see their filthy, fatigue-lined faces, several other people also gathered around. Dust motes drifted around the GeorgJeans. The female spoke loudly to be heard over the digging and shouting going on around her. “The Fertility Center is cut off by rubble but we’re talking to them through the vents.” “There are no adult casualties yet,” the male said, and both finished, “We’re confident we can get them out.”

  “The fetuses?”

  Both shook their heads. “Their backup power unit was smashed up and a lot of the fetal-support equipment has been damaged as well.” “Most of the vats are intact, but they have no working life support, and it’s getting cold in there without the heaters.” “The workers are trying to save the ones closer to term but it looks like we’re going to lose a lot of them.”

  Arlene wiped a weary hand across her brow, leaving a smudge. Manda remembered her undecanted siblings, the new twins. A sharp pain lanced her through the midsection, piercing her armor of numbness.

  Please, she thought. Please.

  Arlene asked, “What about the gardens?”

  The GeorgJeans grimaced. “We’ve got a lot of damage in Hydroponics. But the power plant took a hit, too.” “We’ve got power out everywhere—” “—and we’re not in communication with any survivors.” “We won’t know exactly how much damage there is for a while.”

  Arlene sighed and exchanged a grim look with Manda.

  “Okay,” she told the GeorgJeans, “the Fertility Center becomes our top priority. Give me regular reports. Manda,” she said, as the GeorgJeans’ images dissolved, “once we
finish getting the Fertility Labs cleared out we’ll need your waldos for the Hydroponics cavern.”

  “On my way.” She started to go, then looked back. “Was it the terraforming drilling? Is that what triggered it?”

  Arlene stared at her. They both knew the answer.

  No way to be absolutely sure. But probably. Probably.

  Rage flooded Manda: rage at Arlene, at Derek—at all her clone. If not for your fucking IceFlame, Teresa would still be alive. Manda stood there staring at her eldest sister for several seconds, shaking with the need to scream at her. To accuse. To denounce. Only the anguish twisting Arlene’s face stopped her.

  Finally Manda turned, with a smothered cry, and hurled herself down the corridor toward the lifts to the equipment hangar, as fast as she could.

  The team managed to rescue all the Fertility personnel, and those of their fetal charges still hanging on to life, within a few hours. Manda didn’t ask about the baby CarliPablo twins right then. She couldn’t handle losing more siblings, just yet.

  Instead, she and the rest of the team got started clearing away rubble, building makeshift tunnels and valleys through the great mounds of debris that had dropped onto the gardens in the Hydroponics cavern. Power and the local network were brought back up after a while, which made things easier. Still it was tedious and gruesome work—there were too few living and too many dead—and the fact that she was only present in proxy, piloting a team of three construction-waldos, didn’t make it any less dreadful. Still, she pushed herself—and the others—very hard.

  As long as she stayed busy, she didn’t have to think. She didn’t have to remember.