“An accident,” he repeated.
I gave him a wary glance, asking. “Does she know what happened?”
Provo’s eyes opened wide, almost startled. “About the accident? Nothing! About her past life? She remembers, I’m sure … nothing. None of it.” Just the suggestion of memories caused him to nearly panic. “No, Mr. Locum … you see, once I had legal custody … even before then … I paid an expert from Beringa to come here and examine her, and treat her … with every modern technique—”
“What kind of expert?”
“In psychology, you idiot! What do you think I mean?” Then he gave a low moan, pulling loose a piece of fibrous bark. “To save her. To wipe away every bad memory and heal her, which he did quite well. A marvelous job of it. I paid him a bonus. He deserved it.” He threw the bark onto the pond. “I’ve asked Ula about her past, a thousand times … and she remembers none of it. The expert said she might, or that it might come out in peculiar ways … but she doesn’t and has no curiosity about those times … and maybe I shouldn’t have told you, I’m sorry…!”
I looked at the pond, deep and clear, some part of me wondering how soon we would inoculate it with algae and water weeds.
Then Provo stood again, telling me, “Of course I came to look around, should she ask. And tell her … tell her that I’m pleased.…”
I gave a quick compliant nod.
“It’s too warm for my taste.” He made a turn, gazing into the jungle and saying, “But shady. Sometimes I like a place with shade, and it’s pleasant enough, I suppose.” He swallowed and gave a low moan, then said, “And tell her for me, please … that I’m very much looking forward to the day it’s done.…”
* * *
Terraformers build their worlds at least twice.
The first time it is a model, a series of assumptions and hard numbers inside the best computers; and the second time it is wood and flesh, false sunlight and honest sound. And that second incarnation is never the same as the model. It’s an eternal lesson learned by every terraformer, and by every other person working with complexity.
Models fail.
Reality conspires.
There is always, always some overlooked or mismeasured factor, or a stew of factors. And it’s the same for people too. A father and a teacher speak about the daughter and the student, assuming certain special knowledge; and together they misunderstand the girl, their models having little to do with what is true.
Worlds are easy to observe.
Minds are secretive. And subtle. And molding them is never so easy and clear as the molding of mere worlds, I think.
* * *
Ula and I were working deep in the cavern, a few days after Provo’s visit, teaching our robots how and where to plant an assortment of newly tailored saplings. We were starting our understory, vines and shrubs and shade-tolerant trees to create a dense tangle. And the robots struggled, designed to wrestle metals from rocks, not to baby the first generations of new species. At one point I waded into the fray, trying to help, shouting and grabbing at a mechanical arm while taking a blind step, a finger-long spine plunging into my ankle.
Ula laughed, watching me hobble backward. Then she turned sympathetic, absolutely convincing when she said, “Poor darling.” She thought we should move to the closest water and clean out my wound. “It looks like it’s swelling, Hann.”
It was. I had designed this plant with an irritating protein, and I joked about the value of field testing, using a stick as my impromptu crutch. Thankfully we were close to one of the ponds, and the cool spring water felt wondrous, Ula removing my boot and the spine while I sprawled out on my back, eyes fixed on the white expanse of ice and lights, waiting for the pain to pass.
“If you were an ordinary terraformer,” she observed, “this wouldn’t have happened.”
“I’d be somewhere else, and rich,” I answered.
She moved from my soaking foot to my head, sitting beside me, knees pulled to her face and patches of perspiration darkening her lightweight work jersey. “‘Red of tooth and claw,’” she quoted.
A New Traditionalist motto. We were building a wilderness of spines and razored leaves; and later we’d add stinging wasps and noxious beetles, plus a savage biting midge that would attack in swarms. “Honest testing nature,” I muttered happily.
Ula grinned and nodded, one of her odd expressions growing. And she asked, “But why can’t we do more?”
More?
“Make the fire eagles attack us on sight, for instance. If we’re after bloody claws—”
“No,” I interrupted. “That has no ecological sense at all.” Fire eagles were huge, but they’d never prey on humans.
“Oh, sure. I forgot.”
She hadn’t, and both of us knew it. Ula was playing another game with me.
I looked across the water, trying to ignore her. The far shore was a narrow stretch of raw stone, and the air above it would waver, field charges setting up their barrier against the heat. Beyond, not twenty meters beyond, was a rigid and hard-frozen milky wall that lifted into the sky, becoming the sky, part of me imagining giant eagles flying overhead, hunting for careless children.
“What’s special about the original Earth?” I heard. “Tell me again, please, Hann.”
No, I wouldn’t. But even as I didn’t answer, I answered. In my mind I was thinking about three billion years of natural selection, amoral and frequently short-sighted … and wondrous in its beauty, power, and scope … and how we in the Realm had perfected a stupefying version of that wonder, a million worlds guaranteed to be safe and comfortable for the trillions of souls clinging to them.
“Here,” said Ula, “we should do everything like the original Earth.”
I let myself ask, “What do you mean?”
“Put in things that make ecological sense. Like diseases and poisonous snakes, for instance.”
“And we can be imprisoned for murder when the first visitor dies.”
“But we aren’t going to have visitors,” she warned me. “So why not? A viper with a nerve toxin in its fangs? Or maybe some kind of plague carried by those biting midges that you’re so proud of.”
She was joking, I thought. Then I felt a sudden odd doubt.
Ula’s entire face smiled, nothing about it simple. “What’s more dangerous? Spines or no spines?”
“More dangerous?”
“For us.” She touched my ankle, watching me.
“Spines,” I voted.
“Back on Earth,” she continued, “there were isolated islands. And the plants that colonized them would lose their spines and toxic chemicals, their old enemies left behind. And birds would lose their power of flight. And the tortoises grew huge, nothing to compete with them. Fat, easy living.”
“What’s your point, teacher?”
She laughed and said, “We arrived. We brought goats and rats and ourselves, and the native life would go extinct.”
“I know history,” I assured her.
“Not having spines is more dangerous than having them.”
I imagined that I understood her point, nodding now and saying, “See? That’s what NTs argue. Not quite in those terms—”
“Our worlds are like islands, soft and easy.”
“Exactly.” I grinned and nodded happily. “What I want to do here, and everywhere—”
“You’re not much better,” she interrupted.
No?
“Not much at all,” she grumbled, her expression suddenly black. Sober. “Nature is so much more cruel and honest than you’d ever be.”
Suddenly I was thinking about Provo’s story, that non-description of Ula’s forgotten childhood. It had been anything but soft and easy, and I felt pity; and I felt curiosity, wondering if she had nightmares and then, for an instant, wondering if I could help her in some important way.
Ula was watching me, reading my expression.
Without warning she bent close, kissing me before I could react and then sitting up again, laughing
like a silly young girl.
I asked, “Why did you do that?”
“Why did I stop, you mean?”
I swallowed, saying nothing.
Then she bent over again, kissing me again, pausing to whisper, “Why don’t we?”
I couldn’t find any reason to stop.
And suddenly she was removing her jersey, and mine, and I looked past her for an instant, blinding myself with the glare of lights and white ice, all at once full of reasons why we should stop and my tongue stolen out of my mouth.
* * *
I was Ula’s age when I graduated from the Academy. The oldest teacher on the staff invited me into her office, congratulated me for my good grades, then asked me in a matter-of-fact way, “Where do these worlds we build actually live, Mr. Locum? Can you point to where they are?”
She was cranky and ancient, her old black flesh turning white from simple age. I assumed that she was having troubles with her mind, the poor woman. A shrug; a gracious smile. Then I told her, “I don’t know, ma’am. I would think they live where they live.”
A smartass answer, if there ever was.
But she wasn’t startled or even particularly irritated by my non-reply, a long lumpy finger lifting into the air between us, then pointing at her own forehead. “In our minds, Mr. Locum. That’s the only place they can live for us, because where else can we live?”
“May I go?” I asked, unamused.
She said, “Yes.”
I began to rise to my feet.
And she told me, “You are a remarkably stupid man, I think, Mr. Locum. Untalented and vain and stupid in many fundamental ways, and you have a better chance of success than most of your classmates.”
“I’m leaving,” I warned her.
“No.” She shook her head. “You aren’t here even now.”
* * *
We were one week into our honeymoon—sex and sleep broken up with the occasional bout of work followed with a swim—and we were lying naked on the shore of the first pond. Ula looked at me, smiling and touching me, then saying, “You know, this world once was alive.”
Her voice was glancingly saddened, barely audible over the quiet clean splash of the cliché. I nodded, saying, “I realize that.” Then I waited for whatever would follow. I had learned about her lectures during the last seven days.
“It was an ocean world, just three billion years ago.” She drew a planet on my chest. “Imagine if it hadn’t been thrown away from its sun. If it had evolved complex life. If some kind of intelligent, tool-using fish had built spaceships—”
“Very unlikely,” I countered.
She shrugged and asked, “Have you seen our fossils?”
No, but I didn’t need to see them. Very standard types. The Realm was full of once-living worlds.
“This sea floor,” she continued, “was dotted with hot-water vents, and bacteria evolved and lived by consuming metal ions—”
“—which they laid down, making the ore that you mine,” I interrupted. With growing impatience, I asked, “Why tell me what I already know, Ula?”
“How do you think it would feel? Your world is thrown free of your sun, growing cold and freezing over … nothing you can do about it … and how would you feel…?”
The vents would have kept going until the planet’s tepid core grew cold, too little radioactivity to stave off the inevitable. “But we’re talking about bacteria,” I protested. “Nothing sentient. Unless you’ve found something bigger in the fossil record.”
“Hardly,” she said. Then she sat upright, small breasts catching the light and my gaze. “I was just thinking.”
I braced myself.
“I remember when Father showed me one of the old vents … the first one I ever saw.…”
I doubly braced myself.
“I was five or six, I suppose, and we were walking through a new mine, down a dead rift valley, two hundred kilometers under the frozen sea. He pointed to mounds of dirty ore, then he had one of his robots slice into one of them, showing me the striations … how layers of bacteria had grown, by the trillion … outnumbering the human race, he said … and I cried.…”
“Did you?”
“Because they had died.” She appeared close to tears again, but one hand casually scratched her breasts. Then the face brightened, almost smiling as she asked, “What’s your favorite world?”
Changing subjects? I couldn’t be sure.
“Your own world, or anyone’s. Do you have favorites?”
Several of them, yes. I described the most famous world—a small spinning asteroid filled with wet forest—and I told her about the artists, all terraformers who had journeyed to the alien world of Pitcairn. They were the first New Traditionalists. I had never seen the work for myself, ten light-years between us and it, but I’d walked through the holos, maybe hundreds of times. The artists had been changed by Pitcairn. They never used alien lifeforms—there are tough clear laws against the exporting of Pitcairn life—but they had twisted earthly species to capture something of the strangeness and strength of the place. And I couldn’t do it justice. I found myself blabbering about the quality of light and the intensity of certain golden birds … and at some point I quit speaking, realizing that Ula wasn’t paying attention to me.
She heard silence and said, “It sounds intriguing.” Then with a slow, almost studied pose, she said, “Let me tell you about something even more fascinating.”
I felt a moment of anger. How dare she ignore me! Then the emotion evaporated, betraying me, leaving me to wait while she seemed to gather herself, her face never more serious or composed. Or focused. Or complete.
“It was the second world that I built,” I heard. “My first world was too large and very clumsy, and I destroyed it by accident. But no matter. What I did that second time was find a very small abandoned mine, maybe a hectare in size, and I reinforced the ice walls and filled the chamber with water, then sank a small reactor into the rock, opening up the ancient plumbing and inoculating the water with a mixture of bacteria—”
“Did you?” I sputtered.
“—and reestablishing one vent community. After three billion years of sleep. I fueled the reactor with a measured amount of deuterium, and I enriched the warming water with the proper metals.” A pause. “New striations formed. Superheated black goo was forced from the fossil tubes. And I dressed in a strong pressure suit and walked into that world, and I sat just like we’re sitting here, and waited.”
I swallowed. “Waited?”
“The reactor slowed, then stopped.” Ula took a breath and said, “I watched. With the lights on my suit down low, I watched the black goo stop rising, and the water cooled, and eventually new ice began to form against the walls. I moved to the center, sitting among the tubes … for days, for almost two weeks … the ice walls closing in on me—”
“That’s crazy,” I blurted.
And she shrugged as if to say, “I don’t care.” A smile emerged, then vanished, and she turned and touched me, saying, “I allowed myself to be frozen into that new ice, my limbs locked in place, my power packs running dry—”
“But why?” I asked. “So you’d know how it felt?”
And she didn’t seem to hear me, tilting her head, seemingly listening to some distant sound worthy of her complete attention. Eventually she said, “Father missed me.” A pause. “He came home from a tour of distant mines, and I was missing, and he sent robots out to find me, and they cut me free just before I would have begun to truly suffer.”
The girl was insane. I knew it.
She took a dramatic breath, then smiled. Her haunted expression vanished in an instant, without effort, and again she was a student, the youngster, and my lover. A single bead of perspiration was rolling along her sternum, then spreading across her taut brown belly; and I heard myself asking, “Why did you do that shit?”
But the youngster couldn’t or wouldn’t explain herself, dipping her head and giggling into my ear.
&nb
sp; “You could have died,” I reminded her.
She said, “Don’t be angry, darling. Please?”
An unstable, insane woman-child, and suddenly I was aware of my own heartbeat.
“Are you angry with sweet me?” She reached for me, for a useful part of me, asking. “How can I make you happy, darling?”
“Be normal,” I whispered.
“Haven’t you paid attention?” The possessed expression reemerged for an instant. “I’m not and never have been. Normal. My darling.”
* * *
My excuse, after much thought and practice, was a conference with her father. “I want us to have a backup reactor. In case.”
She dismissed the possibility out of hand. “He won’t give us one.”
“And I want to walk on the surface. For a change of scenery.” I paused, then camouflaged my intentions by asking, “Care to walk with me?”
“God, no. I’ve had enough of those walks, thank you.”
Freed for the day, I began by visiting the closest caverns and one deflated tent, poking through dead groves and chiseling up samples of soil and frozen pond water. The cold was absolute. The sky was black and filled with stars, a few dim green worlds lost against the chill. Running quick tests, I tried to identify what had gone wrong and where. Sometimes the answer was obvious; sometimes I was left with guesses. But each of her worlds was undeniably dead, hundreds and thousands of new species extinct before they had any chance to prosper.
Afterward I rode the mag-rail back to Provo’s house, finding where the hot-sap trees had been planted, the spot marked with a shallow lake created when the permafrost melted. I worked alone for twenty minutes, then the owner arrived. He seemed unhurried, yet something in his voice or his forward tilt implied a genuine concern. Or maybe not. I’d given up trying to decipher their damned family.
Pocketing my field instruments, I told Provo, “She’s a good tailor. Too good.” No greetings. No preparatory warning. I just informed him, “I’ve watched her, and you can’t tell me that she’d introduce a toxic metabolite by accident. Not Ula.”
The old man’s face grew a shade paler, his entire body softening; and he leaned against a boulder, telling me without the slightest concern, “That possibility has crossed my mind, yes.”
The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Page 21
