The Hormone Jungle

by Robert Reed

  His breakfast is meant to mimic a Garden meal. The juice tastes like whitesmear palm milk and the biscuits are dough around a soft boneless fish. AIs are the cooks. He has no trust in their work. What if the wrong roaches have gotten into the kitchen? What if there are diseases freshly tailored by some ill mind? It makes no sense to believe in the boxes of circuits. His fifty billion neighbors are fools. And he vents his frustrations by sipping on the juice, white and thick and warm, then pronouncing, “Too tart,” while punching the AUDIO ON button.

  The AIs hear him.

  Next time, sure as sure can be, he’ll say, “Not tart enough,” with the same conviction. Maybe that confuses the AIs. He likes to imagine them confused, sitting pretty in their Old Quarter homes, or wherever. He knows it’s unlikely, but he pictures them cursing whenever he makes his requests.

  It’s too hot again. He opens the glass door out to the balcony, feeling a hot, fresher burst of air curling through the gap. He sits and balances the plate and watches the yard while he eats, the Portuguese voice and ancient space scenes forgotten momentarily. The fish is mostly to his taste. Toby chews without haste, watching a big water rat come shuffling out from the bushes. It’s the one with the bobbed tail, fat and old and grizzled. He studies how it bends and the way it drinks with long lazy swallows, the body still capable of a kind of grace. A delicacy. It’s a ragged creature, ugly and absolutely wrong. It serves no function, no matter how obscure, and he wonders how the Terrans can let such things persist. It makes no sense to him. None.

  The swimming pool is deeper than it is wide, the soft-coral covering the deck and steep sides and the flat bottom. Like the wood of these buildings, the coral are fed by electrical currents. They serve to clean the water and seal the pool and produce food for the fish. He can see fish flicking about in the bright water. Once, he supposes, they were pretty enough…the sorts of fish you’d see beside an ocean reef. But now they’re junk species, carp and goldfish and tiny sharks and pulsating eels. The management doesn’t care. His neighbors are ignorant. Toby shudders and shuts his eyes and sees the clean perfection of Garden—the clear blue sky and sea, the wild white clouds oozing gentle rains, the artificial sun rising and setting every few hours, and those equally brief nights when Father Jove and its attendant moons were brilliant, shining down on the Souls of Eden.

  The Earth is a terraformed world, as is Garden.

  Sometimes Terrans think otherwise, buoyed up by their pride. It seems to Toby that they have a special smugness when they boast how their home is still the only sure haven for mankind. No other world can support them without trickery—machines and controlled climates and artificial suns—and that’s why they can claim a special status among all the worlds.

  What a tub of shit, thinks Toby.

  Absolutely!

  Fifty billion vulgar, ugly people are squeezed into this biosphere. The technologies making it possible are imported. Like rainboys shepherding the hyperdense clouds—that’s a Cradle skill. Or the way buildings are made from living woods—a Lunar trick used to snare carbon dioxide, minimizing greenhouse effects. Water and heat are the cruxes of managing the world. In the last couple millennia, or more, fossil fuels and changing ocean chemistries have caused a sharp warming of the climate. The Earth hasn’t been so tropical since the Coal Age. People and AIs and Ghosts, plus the Earth-based industries and power plants and such, all serve to produce more heat and to change weather patterns. Concentrating the people at the equator only adds to the problems. Effects have to be spread around the globe, and the result is a world oddly uniform seen from space. The Earth has darkened in recent centuries. The continents are a rich, rich alfalfacolored green from the mega-cities to the sparsely populated poles. Deserts are gone and icecaps are gone and even communities like Brulé are obscured by, and even include, the rampant vegetation. And the oceans, too, have been transformed. Once bright and blue—an inspiration to the Prophet—they now resemble a thick pea stew, kelp forests supported by foam-metal buoys and hyperfiber nets, and sucking up sunlight to fix more carbon dioxide and feed fish that feed people that lie to themselves, telling themselves that this enormous balancing act is eternal.

  He takes great pleasure from wishing the worst.

  Stop the rainboys, he thinks, and the deserts return. Clouds blossom and run wild and reflect sunlight away from starving plants. Heat begins to linger at the equator and the poles cool and the difference in airborne temperatures causes storms and chaos and hardship, too. If the fusion plants and geothermal plants were closed, the wood of the buildings would die and dry and become liable to burn. Toby imagines the cities in flames. All this rich land turns to ash and the ash stains the atmosphere and the seas experience massive die-offs, rotting kelp staining the water and fifty billion people facing extinction.

  Toby sees it clearly.

  He paints it in his head and paints himself safe on Garden, watching the show, and if he were in the mood for compassion he would feel a slight pang of regret for the pain and the waste. But when he’s upset and uncertain, like now, he loses all sense of proportion; his bright colorless mind takes a vicarious pleasure from the images, playing them over and over and never becoming bored.

  According to World-Net, there are one hundred and twenty-six distinct worlds named Garden or some derivative of Garden.

  Many are in the Belt. Most of the rest are miniscule comets and tiny worlds manufactured by various means. The largest, most important Garden is a moon of Jupiter. Two thousand years ago it and the entire Jovian system belonged briefly to the old Amazonian Empire. It was then known as Europa. The Empire had claimed it and its neighbors for military reasons as well as for the usual gray justifications set in the realm of prestige. The innermost major moon, Io, was and remains a dense body rich in ore. In those times it was bathed in hard radiation and its metal guts were stirred by tides. The Empire tried mining Io. It used adapted military robots and geothermal power, plus help from European and American partners, tapping the richest veins; for a couple of decades the Empire tried competing with the Belter mines and the Kross strip mines and the ocean-floor operations on the Earth.

  It took a beating.

  At one point the Europeans and Americans, possessing the clear eyes of all junior partners, pulled out of the venture. The Empire had to find new capital and fresh enthusiasm with other peoples. Toby’s documentary was made in those times. He looks at the images and hears the muted Portuguese voice running on and on with a well-coached verve. Io was a harsh landscape of sulfurous volcanoes and molten lakes. At some point, pressed into a desperate brilliance, the volcanoes themselves were adapted to serve as mass launchers. Jupiter’s extensive radiation belt and magnetic field were milked for their energy, the technologies new and crude. Toby blinks and studies the typical mining camp squatting on a flat ruddy plain. The voice has quit. Marching music has replaced it. Jupiter, banded and rather subdued, hovers permanently on the horizon. A lone robot passes near the camera, fat tires throwing up fountains of the sulfur dust. Toby sighs. Those were glorious times, he believes. In spite of all the things grating against his Gardener sensibilities, he feels a desire to live in times when people and their nations are in flux. Like when the Prophet was alive, he thinks. When an individual with vision and drive could rise above all the mediocrity…

  The documentary ends, credits rolling and the nearby robot giving a clumsy salute to the viewers.

  Toby touches a button, and the wall turns white.

  Several years later, he recalls, the Empire went bankrupt. Prestige has its limits. Its people had limits. Leaders in Old Brasilia faced a wicked set of choices—sell out to the Belters or the Luna City-States, or act tough with one of their competitors and hope no war resulted. The Empire was cowardly, thinks Toby. Instead of toughness, it took money. Cash. The Belters purchased the entire Jovian system just as they had done Mars, ensuring secure borders and deep buffers and resources to rely on in the remote future. But those same Belters, proud like all Bel
ters, boasted about their good sense and their good fortune and made certain that the Amazonians noted their pleasure.

  Part of the terms included existing facilities and the supporting deep-space shuttles.

  The Earth-based ships were prepared and launched under tight security, and their robot pilots sent them on a curious course. What’s this? asked the Belters. What’s going on? The fleet passed suspiciously close to Vesta, hub of the Belter Empire. What are you planning? they asked. Nothing! the Empire responded. And indeed, the shuttles went on to Io and braked into orbit just as the Belters had expected. But before their people could arrive and take possession, each shuttle fired its rockets one last time and fell onto the sulfurous moon. Nuclear weapons, archaic and potent, were secured in their holds. Flashes of brilliant dirty light signaled the destruction of mines and power facilities, and great clouds of poisoned dust were kicked loose and flung in every direction.

  The Belters screamed. They asked, How could you do such a thing? Where’s the sense? You yourselves spent billions on what you’ve ruined! Why? Why?

  Why not? responded the Amazonian Premier. Why not?

  They had the money, Toby knows. And they had something better too. Satisfaction. A great and lasting satisfaction stretching from the halls of government to the simplest peasant in the most obscure cornfield. No, he thinks. The Empire should have fought to keep what belonged to it. He has no doubts. But what happened was the next best thing. If he had been that Premier, he would have laughed and laughed while the Belters raged on about the waste and destruction. Let them make something of it now!

  The Belters were the first people not truly Terran. They were the first colonists to rename worlds to suit their own sensibilities. And they were the first to tailor their own genetics, bending themselves to fit the new environments—low gravity and as crowded as ants’ nests—yet never losing that imprecise, undeniable quality of being human.

  In the centuries after the Great Vengeance, the Belters increased their population a hundredfold.

  It was a time of expansion everywhere. Terraforming became relatively quick and marginally cheap. There was a steady pressure from the Earth and Luna for new worlds to absorb the excess populations. The Belters had no use for gravity and robust worlds. They still shun them whenever possible. Mars and the Jovian system were neither profitable nor habitable to them, so they made the prudent choice of picking their neighbors and selling each place according to the buyer’s purse.

  Harmless causes and toothless cults were preferred. Mars became Cradle and the Cradlers built a society dedicated to song and dance and similar pursuits. Io became Chu’s World—a harsh, half-tamed place famous for high-grade ceramics and its simple, long-lived people. The moon outside Europe, Ganymede, was renamed New Siberia. Terraforming gave it icy seas and wintery continents and tiny populations of ascetic Russians living like monks in the scattered villages. The final major moon, Callisto, was purchased by Terrans who were moved by charity. Its icy crust was melted and its deep, deep sea was colonized by the tailored descendants of whales and porpoises. Its name became Cetacea, appropriately. From space and the other moons it resembles a drop of green water lit from within by ten thousand tiny suns.

  Europa was renamed Garden.

  The name, like everything else in the world, was revealed to the Prophet Adam in a series of great visions. Toby knows the story better than any other. The Prophet founded the Souls of Eden long before terraforming was possible. Adam was a mystic and a thinker who had seen the future, and with perfect clarity he described the look and feel and smell and sound of His paradise. He told of the new creatures that would live on it and in it, and how the people themselves would look, and by what codes and principles each would live day by day. Few believed in the Prophet in those times. Not in your lifetime, thought his charitable skeptics. But there was money collected just the same, and supporters gathering in small numbers, and when the man died without seeing his vision come to fruition as he had reportedly promised it would, soon, soon, and he asked them to hold his body in waiting for the coming day.

  The Belters had practically handed the moon to the Souls, rightfully judging them harmless.

  It had seemed miraculous, and the Prophet had been proven a true Prophet, and suddenly there was no shortage of money or followers.

  Toby can’t count the times he has seen the mummified corpse of the Prophet and the first Souls—a few thousand of them in lifesuits, in rows, the icy landscape spreading around them. From every angle he has watched the Prophet dissolved into a scalding acid bath, then poured into the dark cold dead sea below them. And he has studied the history like every native Gardener, understanding the sacrifices made in the next years, the sea melted and the artificial sun built and the warming atmosphere wrapped inside its monomolecular sheath, then the tailored lifeforms added with care, and finally themselves: rebuilding themselves in the new perfect form described by the Prophet, His atoms flowing in all of their veins.

  Toby, like any Gardener, is a functional androgyne.

  He is tall and slender and thin by Terran standards, his face narrow and handsome and his eyes cool and lightless. He has a high forehead and a delicate sweet chin. All of his face and body is covered with an apricot fuzz that thickens on top of his head and around his groin. His skin is a soft dark color, darkest on his backside. A subcutaneous layer of fat serves to make him buoyant and keep him warm. His feet and hands are webbed, the flesh of the webbing pink and laced with delicate blue veins, and he sits in his chair and picks his nose and listens. Listens. He tips his head and listens very carefully, his breath held.

  Downstairs.

  He hears them moving now. There are small noises straight below, motions casual and someone talking—on World-Net?—and then the sliding glass door pulls open and words come to him. A conversation. A man and then a woman are speaking in the crisp, measured tones of unhappy people.

  “Well?” says Gabbro. “You hear anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I was working.” In the mines. He works all different hours, out of reach of night and day. “Did it come? Did you hear it?”

  “I must have missed it,” she says.

  “Did you listen?”

  “Hey!” she says. “I listened.”

  “I just asked.”

  She says nothing. Toby waits and listens, imagining their faces, and she says nothing. Sometimes they fight. He wouldn’t mind a fight now, thinking of the black bird.

  “What do you want to do?” he asks.

  Maybe she shrugs. He imagines a shrug.

  “Want to swim?”

  “No.”

  “Wash me off first? The grit?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  He says, “Sweetheart,” with a hook in his voice.

  She says, “What?”

  He stays quiet.

  “What do you want?” she asks.

  “Are you going to get mad?”

  “Don’t tempt me,” she warns. “I just might.”

  The door is slid shut again. Toby breathes and thinks about all the ugliness around him. He has lived in this poorhouse neighborhood for an entire year. Just like the bobtailed rat, he recognizes the people around him. There’s a family of Cradlers, for instance, with their singsong voices and their otterlike fur, muscular builds and nervous manners. And there’s a Lunarian next door, very tall and fragile and usually gone for weeks at a time. He doesn’t know where. Mostly it’s Terrans around here. It makes sense. Many of them are ancient people—two and a half centuries old, or more, with their collapsing faces and the glass eyes and the cheap synthetic organs sighing and wheezing beside their tired bones. On Garden, where the Ideal according to the Prophet is the only Ideal, people live shorter lives without the feeble years and the cursed synthetics. It’s a consequence of their genetics and their disdain for unnatural practices. Purity. It means everything to Toby. Purity of the Ideal. He came to the Earth fearing that he would be tempte
d, attacked and conquered, but it hasn’t happened. Not in any meaningful sense. He won’t let it happen, he thinks while he sits in his chair. Never. He feels strong and righteous as the sweet-smelling perspiration comes seeping out of his pretty face. Enemies around him, yet he perseveres.

  Arching his back, he looks across the yard and spies a neighbor standing at his own glass door, hands on his hips.

  The man is a tall, redheaded Terran. He is wearing only shorts, as usual, and his bare chest shows the gruesome scars, like claw marks, and the way all of his skin has been abused by wind and UV light from wild sunshine. The man lives alone. Toby has watched him more than he has any other neighbor. He has seen him watching World-Net or napping on his ragged couch or eating simple meals or doing nothing but sitting or standing by the glass door. He lives like a prisoner, thinks Toby. The two of them seem to share something, and more than once he has wondered how they might meet and talk. Just talk. The only time they were face-to-face was during a night that Toby doesn’t care to remember now. There wasn’t an opportunity for conversation. He shudders just thinking about the incident.

  He breathes once. Again.

  And he tilts his head and listens for anything in Gabbro’s apartment. As if on cue, the ultimate ugliness begins to move, setting the floor to vibrating. For some reason, Toby thinks of a dream he had this morning and then he loses it. Leaning back in his chair and staring at the white, white ceiling, he halfway falls asleep again. He imagines Garden. The sun rises—a nickel-iron asteroid on which the Souls have fixed an array of lasers, brilliant without cutting at the eyes—and the blue sea and the deep blue skies are warm, slow gentle waves beating against) a wide sandy shoreline. The islands were built from honeycombed stone reinforced with hyperfiber and coats of tailored coral, and their green forests are what the Prophet saw in his visions, the animals just as perfect, and Toby is asleep now, dreaming, his father having called him back from his exile and he is coming into a glade where a dozen people, all friends, are busily engaged in a Necklace of Paradise.