Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  She and two other waldo pilots did the heaviest work with their six big, lumbering machines, aided by almost three dozen workers present in corpus. In the middle of that first night after the cave-in, the council appointed DaliaMarshall to replace Arlene as leader of the rescue effort. The fourclone spread out, each taking charge of part of the cleanup. Manda’s crew leader was Abraham DaliaMarshall, a large, bluff man two or three seasons older than Manda. Abraham been among her worst tormentors, growing up. A sneaky, vicious, backbiting bully. The rest of his clone was no better.

  But this was no time for old grudges. So she worked with him. And her focused intensity caused the other workers to turn to her for guidance and ideas at least as often as to DaliaMarshall. When they grew discouraged or talk of quitting, she harangued them, admonished them, reminded them that there could still be survivors—asked how they’d like to be trapped in the rubble, knowing their fate depended only on the perseverance of the rescue team? For once, no one argued with her or told her she was being rude.

  The LuisMichael threeclone soon returned from the refinery and pitched in, using sounding equipment and Jim’s seismology expertise to listen for sounds coming from any survivors. With LuisMichael’s help they located fourteen people trapped alive in various pockets of air under the rubble. But afterward, more than eighteen hours passed and several tons of rubble were cleared with no other survivors found, only scattered remains.

  Finally they uncovered a large cache of dismembered bodies. They shipped as many of the remains as they could to the genetics people, who were getting the Fertility Labs cleaned up, and they also did swabs everywhere they saw a speck of blood or other apparent animal matter. Genetics reported back early second-watch on day two that they’d identified four different DNA signatures. Since two of the DNA sets were for two different pairs of clonetwins on the missing-persons list, this meant that between four and six more people were accounted for. Probably six, since the twins were probably working together when the cave-in had struck.

  In which case, all were now accounted for except the UrsulaMeriwether threeclone: Helen, Jessica, and Rachel. The heart—and brain—of the Hydroponics effort.

  Looking across at the wreckage of the gardens, mottled by debrisfragmented beams of light from the searchers’ lamps—the broken, bone-colored remains of stalagmites and chunks of shale-like rock that lay like a stifling, multiton blanket over the shattered trays and tubes and wilted vegetable matter—Manda had to admit, if only to herself, that there were probably no more survivors. UrsulaMeriwether was dead.

  With a sigh, she wheeled Mole and Crane over to join Scaffold, whose rear right tire had gotten stuck in a hole. The workers building a permanent embankment there needed the scaffolding-waldo out of the way to finish their task, and her efforts to unstick it under its own power had failed. She-Crane lumbered up, latched on to her-Scaffold with her-its hook, and lifted her-Scaffold up and out of the way. The workers below waved weary thanks as she-Crane set her-Scaffold down. Meanwhile, she-Mole caught a glimpse of the hole she-Scaffold had been stuck in. It was a floor drain whose grating had buckled under the bulky waldo’s weight.

  A floor drain? A floor drain. Back in her projection pod, Manda frowned, and detached from her livepack leads for a moment. Her liveface diminished in scope to a simple 2-D display. She stretched with an enormous yawn and took a long drink of water from her bottle, then sat down on the floor and did some yoga stretches to invigorate herself.

  She was so tired it was hard to think, but there was something important about this. The drains.

  A floor drain, she realized suddenly, meant that there were conduits or trenches under the floor. Tunnels perhaps big enough for a human to crawl into and avoid being crushed, if that person were a quick thinker. Which UrsulaMeriwether was.

  DaliaMarshall—Abraham’s vat-twin Robert, to be precise—showed up in her work station as she was calling up schematics for the lines under the gardens. His eyes were sunken and dark with fatigue and his face was dirty, gaunt, and lined. Manda stood to face him, and stiffened when she read his expression. She knew why he was here.

  “Manda …” He sighed at the look on her face, and started again. “It’s time to give it up. We’ve done all we can.”

  “I have an idea,” she said. “I think I know where UrsulaMeriwether might be.”

  He groaned. “Not another one.”

  “Listen to me—there’s a drain—”

  DaliaMarshall talked over her. “We’ve chased down two of your possibilities already and hauled tons of junk for nothing. It’s been too long. They’re all dead. It’s time to quit.”

  She stared at him coldly. “You give up, then. There are still at least three unaccounted for. I’m not stopping till we find them—alive or dead.”

  “You are fucking impossible!” he exploded. “Abraham’s right about you.”

  “And you’re a coward,” she said. “Afraid to finish the job you-you started. Why the council would put your clone in charge, I have no idea.”

  He went pale and his lips thinned. “I-we am pulling the crew. You do whatever the hell you want. And the council will hear about this.”

  “Fine. Give them my love.”

  He gave her the fist of contempt and stalked out. Manda slumped against the wall and laid her forehead on her arm, feeling quivery and empty.

  What am I trying to prove? she thought. She was exhausted, too.

  This one last time, she thought. I’ll check this one last thing. The floor drains. She dragged herself back to her feet and jacked into her livepack, and the full-sensory interface bloomed around her. When she faced into Mole, DaliaMarshall, the other three members of it, was overseeing the equipment cleanup. Most of the workers were already leaving. The other three big machines were gone.

  A cold, hard pain squeezed her chest.

  “Go, then!” she yelled. “Give up when there may still be people alive in there! Cowards! Go ahead and go.”

  She split her liveface into three and faced into Scaffold and Crane as well as Mole. Turning her-waldos’ backs on the departing workers, she switched on her headlights and sent the three of them lumbering clumsily and faithfully back into the rubble mounds.

  To her surprise, one of the LuisMichaels followed her. It was Jim! It must be. His clone-sibs, Amy and Brian, hesitated only for an instant before following as well.

  Once they reached the end of the tunnel, Manda-Mole called them over. They crouched in a pool of light cast by Scaffold, amid clouds of dust and piles of loose debris, and she replaced her own image on Mole’s belly screen with a schematic of the Hydroponics cavern, pre-collapse. Then she superimposed a rough sketch of the rubble; it blanketed the schematic like a foul mirage. The mirage had red veins running through it, which she-Mole traced with her-its claw hand.

  “We’ve dug tunnels and set up listening equipment here, here, and here,” she-Mole said. “But this large section over here, near the offices where the worst of the collapse was, is unexplored. And it’s also most likely where UrsulaMeriwether and some of its top people were.”

  LuisMichael frowned at the schematic, and shook its heads. “But the offices abut the bamboo caverns right here, see?” Jim told her. “I’ve listened on the other side of the wall. I didn’t detect any sound, not even breathing.” “And our seismic tests of that area made it clear that there are no air pockets of any size in that vicinity,” Brian pointed out.

  “Not in the offices, no. But see this subterranean line right here? It’s a floor drain, and see?—there’s grating on the floor just outside the office. The quake lasted for several seconds before the cave-in occurred. It’s possible they had time to make it to the drain.”

  “In which case they’d have run out of air by now,” Amy said.

  “Not necessarily. Not if they belly-crawled through to here.” She pointed.

  “The runoff catchment sump?” Amy asked, dubiously. “That’s a good twenty-meter crawl, with two grated openings between the
office and the sump.” Brian went on, “The drain would be blocked by debris.”

  “I don’t think so,” Manda replied. “At least, there’s a reasonable possibility it wasn’t. A lot of the rubble has been larger than the grating gaps. And they could dig some, if they had to.”

  The three exchanged a glance.

  “And look,” she went on. She changed the overlay to a schematic of the level just beneath the floor. “All these utility pipes run on top of the sump. They’re undamaged and some are still operating. Adding up to lots of vibrations from fluid flow and transmission of engine noises. They would mask any sound the survivors might make.”

  Brian and Amy shook their heads, but Jim nodded, slowly, after a moment. “It’s worth a try. Where are we, in relation to the sump?”

  Manda-Mole pointed straight down between its tractor treads. “Almost directly above it, according to my calculations.”

  Brian jumped up. “I’ll get the utilities shut off—” “and we’ll bring plumbing equipment back with us,” Amy finished. They ran off, while Jim started setting up his sounding and seismic detectors.

  Let this work, Manda thought. If it doesn’t, I’m out of ideas.

  It didn’t take long for Manda-Mole to tear through the thatch floor and the dust and rock layers, to reveal the utility pipes that overlaid the drainage conduit about a meter-and-a-half below the floor.

  “There it is,” she-Mole said. In the dimness, numerous utility pipes ran on top of the concrete floor drain, both parallel and crosswise to the drain. She saw no indication that the floor drain discharged into a sump within the confines of the large hole they’d dug. “We’re not as close to the sump as I thought.”

  “That’s okay. If they’re anywhere in the vicinity, with the utilities turned off I should be able to hear them.” Jim scrambled down into the hole, aided by Brian, while Amy loaded the seismic and other sounding equipment onto a pallet. The triplets worked with a silent, intent efficiency that gave Manda a pang of envy.

  Back in her work station, Manda disconnected from her livepack and then made her way to the caverns. She could be more use in corpus for the finer-scale work, and if more heavy work was necessary, her lower-rez interface was adequate for controlling her waldos on-site.

  Besides, she wanted to be there, in person, when—if—when survivors were found.

  By the time she arrived, Jim had climbed down among the pipes and was brushing away soil. Amy and Brian were lowering his sonar equipment down to him on a rope.

  “I’ll need more light,” he said. Manda-Scaffold shuffled over to shine lights inside the hole. A rumbling started. Terror knotted in Manda’s throat, and she looked up at the cave ceiling, then around at the swinging lights, at the clouds of fine dust that rose. Small rocks pelted the ground here and there, with a sound like hail. The air choked them with fine dust and the smell of ruined vegetation. LuisMichael’s gazes met hers, its own eyes wide with fear.

  But it was just the usual small-scale tremors, and they died away in seconds. Amy and Brian continued lowering the equipment. Manda reconnected to Scaffold and adjusted the lighting at Jim’s direction. Then they three waited, while Jim placed leads among the pipes.

  “Turn on the detector,” he said finally. Amy squatted next to the sound detector and turned it on. Lines appeared on the screen. “I want everyone to be very still.” The lines on the screen peaked and bounced in response to his words. “No talking, no shuffling, and breathe as quietly as possible.”

  They fell quiet, and the squiggles died down to small, occasional wiggles. Manda resisted scratching a sudden, fierce itch on her leg. Her heart was beating harder than usual, a response to the tremors as well as the thought of finding UrsulaMeriwether. The noise was loud enough that Manda half expected the detector to pick it up.

  “Nothing unusual,” Amy said after a few moments. “You want to come check it out?”

  “No. You know what to screen for. I’m going to move the leads. Any idea which way the sump might lie from here?” he asked Manda. She checked her maps once more, and leaned over the edge of the hole to check the pipes. It was too hard to tell precisely where they were, in the midst of such ruin, but the sump should be almost directly below. Somehow, her calculations were off.

  She chewed her lip, then pointed. “Let’s try that way.”

  Again Jim set the leads, this time at the edge of the hole where she’d pointed, and again asked for silence. After a moment, Amy exclaimed, “I think we have something!”

  Jim climbed up out of the hole and hurried over. All four crowded around the readout screen.

  “See here?” Amy whispered, pointing at one set of squiggles. “And here.”

  “I see. Shh.” Jim studied the lines, wearing a deep frown. “Well, it’s something. Hard to say what. It could just be microtremors. Manda, do you think you could clear away that section of flooring there?”

  Things proceeded like this for some time, with Manda digging and scraping, and the other three moving the sound equipment and listening, with equivocal results. They couldn’t seem to locate the sump. They were all so exhausted that the mere act of lifting an arm or speaking a few words had become too great a chore. The hint of sound Jim had detected never panned out into anything. They were all growing discouraged. Manda suggested they take a short break, and volunteered to bring back food and water for everyone.

  The mess was full of people, but no one said much. She tossed two decachips onto the counter next to the cashier syntellect. The syntellect told her, “The colony is on emergency rations. No one may have more than six chips’ worth of dinner.”

  Manda wasn’t surprised; the destruction of the gardens was an extremely serious loss. The colony might not survive it. “I’m collecting for LuisMichael, also,” she said.

  “How many people total?”

  “Four.”

  After a brief pause, the syntellect approved the additional purchases. Manda looked at the food on the tray. Going to be a lot of hungry people around here. She took the water bottles, fruit, and crispy duck-and-bamboo shoot mana-rolls the robotic arms had assembled and headed back to the dig.

  Her companions took the food and ate greedily. It was all gone too quickly. After a few moments of silence, Brian took a slug of water and then said, “We’ve been talking it over, Manda. It’s almost fifty hours since the cave-in.” “We can’t locate the sump, and even if they made it there, they’ve probably run out of oxygen or died of exposure by now,” Amy said.

  All three LuisMichaels looked so tired. Her own limbs felt like they were made of jelly. It was all too much. Too much for such a small group to do alone. “The others should be here helping,” she said, and slumped over her knees. “It’s a big sump. There could still be some air left.”

  LuisMichael stood and brushed itselves off. Jim said, “Come on, Manda. Time to call it quits.”

  The pause lengthened as she looked up at them. The familiar anger came on, and abated.

  Manda, you know they’re right. She really had given it everything she had. With a sigh, finally, she opened her mouth to say so.

  Then closed it.

  Then shook her head.

  “I can’t quit. Not till I find the sump.”

  The others exchanged glances filled with depths she couldn’t read. When Manda next looked up, Jim was still there but the other two had gone.

  “Till we find the sump,” he said. “And that’s it.”

  “Thanks, Jim,” she said hoarsely, and blinked away tears.

  They did extensive sonar soundings along all sides of the trench they’d dug, and Jim finally reported that there might be a large air pocket not beneath this floor drain, but beneath the one on what would be two aisles over. “May,” he emphasized. “I could just be picking up empty piping or a crack that formed in the floor and didn’t get filled in.”

  This meant excavating several cubic meters of rubble before they even got to the floor. Manda eyed the mounds she must move—mounds of d
irt that were even higher than they had been before she’d started—and a feeling of futility rose in her chest. The fucking sump could be anywhere.

  But if it were one of her own siblings, she’d work till she collapsed. Would she do less for UrsulaMeriwether?

  “This will take awhile,” she told Jim. “Why don’t you get some rest, and I’ll call you when I reach the pipes under the floor.” He gladly took her up on the offer.

  She first made a very careful study of the maps. Then she started digging.

  Those next four hours she worked alone in the enormous cavern were the longest yet. She felt more tired than she ever remembered being—it took all she had to remain awake, huddled in the rubble surrounded by shattered Hydroponics equipment, in a dusty, fragmented pool of light, while Mole and Crane and Scaffold’s grinding, hammering, clanking chorus echoed against the dark upper reaches of the cavern, and returned to her in wobbly, staccato mimicry of itself.

  Yet she found a certain peaceful rhythm to the task. Several times she dozed off and reawakened to find her waldos standing lifeless nearby. She got up and paced as she worked, shaking her head, slapping her cheeks, swinging her arms—willing herself to stay awake as her three massive machines clanked and rumbled and bucked, first one, then two in concert, then the third, clearing away the rubble.

  And finally she reached the floor, one aisle over. She-Mole tore through the thatch and rock and dirt, and she-Crane lifted the chunks of debris away, and now she was down to the piping. She was tired enough that she misjudged the depth and marred the pipes, rather than just skimming dirt from them. Fuck it, she thought. It’s a small price to pay. The rubble she had moved to get there made a dark mountain beyond Scaffold’s stick legs. She called Jim.

  “I’m ready,” she said. He rubbed his eyes and sat up, blinking blearily, in his quarters.

  “Be right there.” His words were slurred by fatigue.

  Jim came, and so did Amy and Brian. As they were setting up, most of the other rescue workers who’d left earlier trickled in. And Derek and Arlene. Word had apparently gotten around.