Fallen Fragon

by Peter F. Hamilton

  In the centuries after the glacier formed, Amethi's dead, blackened plants stayed resolutely upright in the still air. Time alone aged them, for there were no elements anymore. Over a hundred thousand years, even petrified wood lost its strength. They corroded slowly, snowing ebony flakes onto the surrounding soil until enough had been shed to make the whole unstable. Then the entire brittle pillar would crack, tumbling over to shatter as if made from antique black glass. More often than not, in the denser forests, they would bring down a couple of their neighbors, initiating cascades of devastation. Where the forests once stood were now areas where the soil was blanketed with low black dunes of congealed grit.

  The children quietened at last as this new landscape unwound beyond the bus; here was where their future was birthing with pained deliberation. The first delicate effects of the HeatSmash were proudly visible. Crevices and tiny rills in the hard ground were host to tiny arctic plants. They were all heavily v-written for this world, to endure not only its coldness but also the long light-times and dark-times. Plants that grew above Earth's Arctic Circle through long wearisome days and equally oppressive nights had the closest environmental conditions to those on Amethi. This meant their genes needed the least amount of viral modification to withstand the hostility of this frigid wilderness.

  Several of them boasted flowers, tiny dainty coral trumpets or golden starbursts. The most significant accomplishment of the geneticists had been modifying the pollination cycle so that the spores were expelled by ripening anthers into the quiescent air. A haze light enough to drift on Amethi's minimalist breezes, little more than a draft of perfume, yet eradicating the necessity of insects. None of these perennials had needed nurturing in greenhouses and planting out; they were self-set. The first naked terrestrial colonists.

  While dark bottle-greens flourished in the earth's crannies, dry-rubber blotches of sulfur yellow and cinnamon brown encrusted exposed rock, from entire cliff faces down to pebbles scattered amid the carbon dunes of the old forests. The lichens that were first spread across Amethi's continents from high-flying robot aircraft in order to kick-start the new ecological cycle, expanded now as never before in the rush of warmth and rising humidity.

  Lawrence liked the color invasion stampeding across the bleak tundra. It signaled an astonishing level of achievement. Fundamentally reassuring, that human beings were capable of such visionary endeavor. He began to smile, letting his daydreams build out of the landscape where the impossible was happening. It was easy out here; the demands of his family and school restrictions were falling behind as the bus raced on into the realm of possibilities.

  His gaze drifted around and up. He squinted, suddenly alert. Hot urgent hands wiped the bus window where his breath was steaming it up, despite the insulative quality. There. In the sky, something very strange was moving. He knocked on the glass to try to show people where they should look. Then, realizing nobody would ever listen to him, he put his hand up above the window and found the red emergency handle. Without hesitating, he tugged it down hard.

  Antiskid brakes engaged as the AS driver program brought the bus to a halt as fast as its engineering parameters would allow. A signal was flashed to the Templeton traffic authority, putting emergency services on immediate recovery standby. Sensors inside and outside the vehicle were reviewed for any sign of abnormality. Nothing was found, but the human/manual intervention was not one the AS could ignore. The bus continued its abrupt deceleration, engine and gearbox whining sharply in mechanical alarm. Kids were hauled back hard into their seats as the safety webbing contracted. Yells and screams ran the length of the aisle. Mr. Kaufman lost hold of his coffee cup and biscuit as he cried: "Fatesbloody-sake..."

  A second later the bus was motionless and silent, a state almost as alarming as the sudden braking. Then the horn started a repetitive bleat, and amber hazard strobes on the front and back blazed away. Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Ridley gave each other a frantic uncomprehending look and slapped at their web release buttons. The red light above one of the emergency stop handles was flashing urgently. Mr. Kaufman never got a chance to ask whose seat it was before Lawrence was running past him to the front door, which had popped open automatically. The boy was zipping up the front of his baggy coat.

  "What...?" Ms. Ridley blurted.

  "It's outside!" Lawrence yelled. "In the air. It's in the air!"

  "Wait."

  She was yelling at nothing. He had already jumped down the steps onto the highway. The other kids wanted a piece of the action; they were laughing wildly, shock already fading as they dashed after Lawrence. They formed a big group standing on the sandy verge. Coats were hurriedly zipped up and hands stuffed into gloves as the bitter air nipped exposed skin. Lawrence stood a little way ahead of them, searching around for the bizarre shape he'd seen. There were several titters behind him as the wait grew.

  "There!" he shouted. His finger pointed westward. "There. Look."

  The rebuke Mr. Kaufman had been forming died away. A patch of tufty white cloud was floating serenely through the air, the only blemish in a perfect bright azure sky. Silence fell over the kids as they watched the implausible miracle.

  "Sir, why doesn't it fall?"

  Mr. Kaufman stirred himself. "Because the density is equal to the air at that altitude."

  "But it's solid."

  "No." He smiled. "It just looks like it is. Remember when we looked at Nizana through the telescope relay and you could see the clouds that made up the storm bands. They were flowing. This is the same, but a lot smaller."

  "Does that mean there are going to be storms here, sir?"

  "Eventually, yes. But don't worry, they'll be a lot smaller, too."

  "Where did it come from?"

  "Barclay's glacier, I suppose. You've all seen the pictures of the runoff. This is one of the results. You're going to be seeing a lot more as you grow up." He let them stare at the harbinger for a while longer, then shooed them back onto the bus.

  Lawrence was last up the steps, reluctant to abandon his remarkable discovery. And there was also the inevitable censure to face...

  The teachers were a lot more lenient than he expected. Ms. Ridley said she understood how strange the cloud was, but he must ask permission to ever do anything like that again. Mr. Kaufman gave a gruff nod, enforcing everything she said.

  Lawrence went and sat down as the bus moved forward again. The rest of the kids forgot their games to chatter in an animated fashion about what they'd just seen. Already, this was the best ecology field trip ever. Lawrence joined in occasionally with a few observations and speculations, his discovery giving him kudos previously not experienced. Mainly, though, he tried to keep tracking the cloud through the bus window.

  He couldn't stop thinking about the journey it had made. Traveling halfway around the world, with so much unknown territory laid out below it How ridiculous that a cloud had seen more of Amethi than he ever had. Lawrence wanted to be up there with it, soaring over the land and empty seabeds, swooping down to zoom along the crumbling edge of Barclay's glacier where he could see the runoff, a waterfall as long as a continental shoreline. How fabulous that would be. But here he was, stuck in a bus on his way to a poxy slowlife farm, learning about ecology when at some other school he could be learning how to fly. It just wasn't fair.

  The slowlife farm was, like all Amethi's industrial facilities, an uninspiring glass and aluminum box. It was situated all by itself on the side of a gentle valley, with an empty river course meandering away below it. The arctic plants were particularly prolific along the low slopes, clustering thickly on the silt bed itself.

  Several of the kids remarked on it when they scuttled from the bus to the warmth of the factory. Lawrence was still trying to see the cloud, which had disappeared off to the north some time ago. The lobby's big outer doors swung shut, and a gust of air washed over the group. They'd all been expecting that. The thermal trap lobby was standard across Amethi, a giant leaky airlock arrangement with thermal recycle
rs instead of vacuum pumps to prevent temperature drop in the domes. Here, there didn't seem much point. The factory was nothing like as warm as any of the city domes, barely a couple of degrees above freezing. They all kept their coats sealed up.

  The supervisor came out to meet them, dressed in padded purple coveralls with a tight-fitting hood. Mrs. Segan, who with her three coworkers ran the whole operation. She tried hard not to show how annoyed she was with another bunch of kids touring around and screwing up her timetable.

  "What you're going to see here today has no analogue in nature," she told them as they made their way into the building. This first zone seemed more factory than farm, with dark metal corridors lined with sealed glass windows that looked in on vats of some kind. "We grow fatworms here. I'd like to say breed, but the truth is, every one of these creatures is cloned." She stopped beside a window. The room beyond was filled with racks of trays, filled with a clotted jelly similar to frogspawn. "All slowlife is completely artificial; its DNA was designed for us by the Fell Institute in Oxford, back on Earth. As you know, the more complex an organism is, the more prone to illness and other problems it becomes. Therefore, fatworms are kept very simple indeed. The principal biological streamlining is their complete lack of reproductive ability. That's also very useful to us, as they are only needed for this stage of the terraforming process. They've got a lifetime of about ten years, so when we stop making them, they'll die out." She held up a jar of the jelly substance, handing it to the closest boy. "Pass that around, and please don't breathe on it. All slowlife is optimized to function at subzero temperature; your breath is like a flame to them."

  When it came to Lawrence all he could see was a mass of translucent eggs with a pinhead of darkness at the center of each. They didn't quiver or shake about as if they were about to burst open—which would have been something. Boring.

  Mrs. Segan took them through into the farm's main rearing arena, a long hall with rows of big rectangular plastic boxes separated by raised metal grid walkways. Pipes overhead sprayed gloopy fluid into each of the open boxes with short regular pulses. The air smelled of crushed grass and sugar.

  "Each of the fatworms is essentially a miniature bacteria reactor," Mrs. Segan said as she led them along one of the walkways. "We place them on a new section of tundra and they burrow their way through the ground chewing the dead vegetable matter in the soil. When it comes out, it's suffused with the bacteria that lives in their gut. This prepares the ground for terrestrial plants, which all need the bacteria in the soil to live on."

  The kids all leaned over the side of the box she indicated, their interest suddenly regained with the prospect of creatures that could poo out fungus and stuff. A glistening mass of oyster-gray fatworms covered the bottom of the box, squirming slowly: they were about fifteen centimeters long, a couple wide. Everyone oohed and yucked as they pulled rictus grimaces at the slimy minimonsters.

  "Is that why they're called slowlife?" someone asked. "Coz they don't move fast?"

  "Partly," Mrs. Segan said. "The temperature they encounter outside means they don't have a particularly fast metabolism, which makes their physical motion correspondingly slow. Their blood is based on glycerol so they can keep moving through the coldest ground without freezing solid."

  Lawrence sighed impatiently as she droned out long statistics, then started to explain about other slowlife forms. Some were like fish, swimming in the snow-slush runoff rivers round Barclay's glacier; others were distant relatives of caterpillars, munching their way across the huge dunes of carbon granules left behind by Amethi's original forests. He glanced down into the big box again. It was a bunch of worms wriggling around sluggishly. So what? Who in Fate cared what grubbed around under the soil? Why didn't they come up with birds or something interesting? Dinosaurs maybe.

  Mrs. Segan moved on, the group buzzing along behind her. Lawrence trailed at the rear. He craned his neck back, looking through the farm's grimy glass roof to see if the cloud had returned. The next thing he knew, he'd tripped on some ridge in the walkway, and went flailing onto his back. One scrabbling hand caught a shallow plastic bin, and when he landed painfully a whole bunch of fully grown fatworms were dropping on top of him.

  He rolled away from them quickly, disgust overriding the pain along his jarred spine. These adults were some forty centimeters long, seven or eight in diameter. Their tips waved about blindly. Lawrence clambered to his feet, automatically checking the position of the teachers. Nobody had actually seen him fall. He looked down at the fatworms, the only evidence. Gingerly, telling himself they weren't in the slightest bit dangerous, he groped down and tried to pick one up. It was revoltingly cold and slimy, with a texture like sodden carpet, but he managed to grip it tight. As he lifted it up, the slight wavering motion began to speed up. Instead of putting it back in the bin, he held on and watched. After a while the fatworm was almost thrashing. He dropped it back down onto the floor, and it slithered off along the walkway. There was a claret-colored patch around its midsection where his hand had been. "All right," he murmured. "Not so slow after all." Which was logical. They were slow in the cold; therefore they'd be fast in the warmth.

  He scuttled after the group. "Alan," he hissed. "Hey, Alan. Come and look at this."

  Alan Cramley stopped munching on his Toby bar, curious about the furtive tone. "What?"

  Lawrence took him back to the adult fatworms and showed him. They quickly turned the discovery into a challenge. Pick up the fatworms in tandem and hold them for thirty seconds, then drop them on the walkway and see which reaches the end of the grid first. In the end they were holding on to two each, turning it into a real race.

  "What exactly is going on here?" Mr. Kaufman demanded.

  Lawrence and Alan hadn't seen him approach from a walkway intersection. He was staring down at the four fat-worms twisting their way across the metal. Several of the other kids were behind him, and Mrs. Segan was scurrying up, anxious to see what the fuss was about.

  "I knocked a bin over, sir, and we were trying to pick them up," Lawrence said, holding out his icy hands as proof. Slime dripped from white, cold-crinkled fingertips. "I'm really sorry."

  Mr. Kaufman was frowning, not fully convinced.

  "Don't touch them," Mrs. Segan called urgently. She slipped past Mr. Kaufman, pulling on a pair of thick gauntlets. "Remember what I told you about them being adapted to the cold."

  Lawrence and Alan traded a look.

  Mrs. Segan picked up the first fatworm. Her eyes narrowed as she took in the big red mark around its middle. She took it over to the nearest bin. "What have you done?" she yelled. All the fatworms inside had the same red mark. None of them were moving. She hurried to the next bin, and gasped. In the third bin there were some fatworms left undulating slowly; Lawrence and Alan hadn't raced all of them yet. She whirled around. Lawrence took a step back, afraid she'd strike him. Her face was rigid with fury. "You burned them all, you little..." She turned to Mr. Kaufman. "Tour's over. Get these brats out of here."

  Lawrence had taken over the robot garage several years ago. The compact tracked machines that originally tended to the elaborate gardens of his family's domes had been replaced by newer, more efficient models when they upgraded their AS groundskeeper program. He'd found the old concrete ramp in the middle of a clump of copper-flowering bushes that had been allowed to expand and merge into a shaggy wall now the entrance was no longer needed. At the base of the ramp was a swing-up door with stiff old lever arms. It took a commendable amount of effort and persistence for a nine-year-old to prize it open, but Lawrence did it, to be rewarded with a musty concrete cave stretching out ahead of him for a good ten meters. Its roof was less than two meters from the ground, and it had strange metal tracks bolted to the floor, walls and ceiling where waldo arms had once run. But there was still power, and a data node.

  Since then it had become his den. He'd moved in life's essentials, cluttering it with a dilapidated magenta-colored leather settee, piles of cushion
s, a couple of tables, an old-model desktop pearl, a sound system with a decibel level that most hard-rock bands would envy, two active memory towers his father had salvaged from the office for him, an eclectic array of tools and boxes of toys he never played with. He'd tacked sheet screens over the walls and even part of the ceiling. A mosaic of images played as soon as the door was opened, some from the memory towers while others broadcast live camera feeds from the datapool.

  It was a grand refuge from his family and the rest of Amethi. Even his four younger siblings knew to stay out unless he explicitly invited them in.

  He'd gone there as soon as he got back after the ecology field trip. The sheet screens were showing several images of Templeton from cameras mounted on the apex of various domes. One of them showed Nizana's bright crescent, relayed from a near-side school's astronomy department telescope. Another was a telescope tracking Barric, the third-largest moon.