Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 102

by Naim Kabir

  “Officer Tozenji—”

  “I am no longer an officer. I resigned before you were born.”

  “By your leave, I meant it solely as an honorific. Surely you still have some loyalty to the Fleet.”

  Benjan laughed. The deep bass notes echoed from the office walls with a curious emptiness. “So it’s an appeal to the honor of the crest, is it? I see I spent too long on Gray. Back here you have forgotten what I am like,’” Benjan said. But where is “here”? I could not take Earth full gravity any more, so this must be an orbiting Fleet cylinder, spinning gravity.

  A frown. “I had hoped that working once more with Fleet officers would change you, even though you remained a civilian on Gray. A man isn’t—”

  “A man is what he is,” Benjan said.

  Katonji leaned back in his shiftchair and made a tent of his fingers. “You . . . played the Sabal Game during those years?” he asked slowly.

  Benjan’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, I did.” The Game was ancient, revered, simplicity itself. It taught that the greater gain lay in working with others, rather than in self-seeking. He had always enjoyed it, but only a fool believed that such moral lessons extended to the cut and thrust of Fleet matters.

  “It did not . . . bring you to community?”

  “I got on well enough with the members of my team,” Benjan said evenly.

  “I hoped such isolation with a small group would calm your . . . spirit. Fleet is a community of men and women seeking enlightenment in the missions, just as you do. You are an exceptional person, anchored as you are in the Station, using linkages we have not used—”

  “Permitted, you mean.”

  “Those old techniques were deemed . . . too risky.”

  Benjan felt his many links like a background hum, in concert and warm. What could this man know of such methods time-savored by those who lived them? “And not easy to direct from above.”

  The man fastidiously raise a finger and persisted: “We still sit at the Game, and while you are here would welcome your—

  “Can we leave my spiritual progress aside?”

  “Of course, if you desire.”

  “Fine. Now tell me who is getting my planet.”

  “Gray is not your planet.”

  “I speak for the Station and all the intelligences who link with it. We made Gray. Through many decades, we hammered the crust, released the gases, planted the spores, damped the winds.”

  “With help.”

  “Three hundred of us at the start, and eleven heavy spacecraft. A puny beginning that blossomed into millions.”

  “Helped by the entire staff of Earthside—”

  “ They were Fleet men. They take orders, I don’t. I work by contract.”

  “A contract spanning centuries?”

  “It is still valid, though those who wrote it are dust.”

  “Let us treat this in a gentlemanly fashion, sir. Any contract can be renegotiated.”

  “The paper I—we, but I am here to speak for all—signed for Gray said it was to be an open colony. That’s the only reason I worked on it,” he said sharply.

  “I would not advise you to pursue that point,” Katonji said. He turned and studied the viewscreen, his broad, southern Chinese nose flaring at the nostrils. But the rest of his face remained an impassive mask. For a long moment there was only the thin whine of air circulation in the room.

  “Sir,” the other man said abruptly, “I can only tell you what the Council has granted. Men of your talents are rare. We know that, had you undertaken the formation of Gray for a, uh, private interest, you would have demanded more payment.”

  “Wrong. I wouldn’t have done it at all.”

  “Nonetheless, the Council is willing to pay you a double fee. The Majiken Clan, who have been invested with Primacy Rights to Gray—”

  “What!”

  “—have seen fit to contribute the amount necessary to reimburse you—”

  “So that’s who—”

  “—and all others of the Station, to whom I have been authorized to release funds immediately.”

  Benjan stared blankly ahead for a short moment. “I believe I’ll do a bit of releasing myself,” he murmured, almost to himself.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing. Information?”

  “Infor—. Oh.”

  “The Clans have a stranglehold on the Council, but not the 3D. People might be interested to know how it came about that a new planet—a rich one, too—was handed over—”

  “Officer Tozenji—”

  Best to pause. Think. He shrugged, tried on a thin smile. “I was only jesting. Even idealists are not always stupid.”

  “Um. I am glad of that.”

  “Lodge the Majiken draft in my account. I want to wash my hands of this.”

  The other man said something, but Benjan was not listening. He made the ritual of leaving. They exchanged only perfunctory hand gestures. He turned to go, and wondered at the naked, flat room this man had chosen to work in: It carried no soft tones, no humanity, none of the feel of a room that is used, a place where men do work that interests them, so that they embody it with something of themselves. This office was empty in the most profound sense. It was a room for men who lived by taking orders. He hoped never to see such a place again.

  Benjan turned. Stepped—the slow slide of falling, then catching himself, stepped—

  You fall over Gray.

  Skating down the steep banks of young clouds, searching, driving.

  Luna you know as Gray, as all in Station know it, because pearly clouds deck high in its thick air. It had been gray long before, as well—the aged pewter of rock hard-hammered for billions of years by the relentless sun. Now its air was like soft slate, cloaking the greatest of human handiworks.

  You raise a hand, gaze at it. So much could come from so small an instrument. You marvel. A small tool, five-fingered slab, working over great stretches of centuries. Seen against the canopy of your craft, it seems an unlikely tool to heft worlds with—

  And the thought alone sends you plunging—

  Luna was born small, too small.

  So the sun had readily stripped it of its early shroud of gas. Luna came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch—how you wish you could have seen that!—spun a disk, and from that churn Luna condensed redly. The heat of that birth stripped away the moon’s water and gases, leaving it bare to the sun’s glower.

  So amend that:

  You steer a comet from the chilly freezer beyond Pluto, swing it around Jupiter, and smacked it into the bleak fields of Mare Chrisium. In bits.

  For a century, all hell breaks loose. You wait, patient in your Station. It is a craft of fractions: Luna is smaller, so needs less to build an atmosphere.

  There was always some scrap of gas on the moon—trapped from the solar wind, baked from its dust, perhaps even belched from the early, now long-dead volcanoes. When Apollo descended, bringing the first men, its tiny exhaust plume doubled the mass of the frail atmosphere.

  Still, such a wan world could hold gases for tens of thousands of years; physics said so. Its lesser gravity tugs at a mere sixth of Earth’s hefty grip. So, to begin, you sling inward a comet bearing a third the mass of all Earth’s ample air, a chunk of mountain-sized grimy ice.

  Sol’s heat had robbed this world, but mother-massive Earth herself had slowly stolen away its spin. It became a submissive partner in a rigid gavotte, forever tide-locked with one face always smiling at its partner.

  Here you use the iceteroid to double effect. By hooking the comet adroitly around Jupiter, in a reverse swingby, you loop it into an orbit opposite to the customary, docile way that worlds loop around the sun. Go opposite! Retro! Coming in on Luna, the iceball then has ten times the impact energy.

  Mere days before it strikes, you blow it apart with meticulous brutality. Smashed to shards, chunks come gliding in all around Luna’s equator, small enough that the
y cannot muster momentum enough to splatter free of gravity’s grip. Huge cannonballs slam into gray rock, but at angles that prevent them from getting away again.

  Earth admin was picky about this: no debris was to be flung free, to rain down as celestial buckshot on that favored world.

  Within hours, Luna had air—of a crude sort. You mixed and salted and worked your chemical magicks upon roiling clouds that sported forked lightning. Gravity’s grind provoked fevers, molecular riots.

  More: as the pellets pelted down, Luna spun up. Its crust echoed with myriad slams and bangs. The old world creaked as it yielded, spinning faster from the hammering. From its lazy cycle of twenty-eight days it sped up to sixty hours—close enough to Earth-like, as they say, for government work. A day still lazy enough.

  Even here, you orchestrated a nuanced performance, coaxed from dynamics. Luna’s axial tilt had been a dull zero. Dutifully it had spun at right angles to the orbital plane of the solar system, robbed it of summers and winters.

  But you wanted otherwise. Angled just so, the incoming ice nuggets tilted the poles. From such simple mechanics you conjured seasons. And as the gases cooled, icy caps crowned your work.

  You were democratic, at first: allowing both water and carbon dioxide, with smidgens of methane and ammonia. Here you called upon the appetites of bacteria, sprites you sowed as soon as the winds calmed after bombardment. They basked in sunlight, broke up the methane. The greenhouse blanket quickly warmed the old gray rocks, coveting the heat from the infalls, and soon algae covered them.

  You watched with pride as the first rain fell. For centuries the dark plains had carried humanity’s imposed, watery names: Tranquility, Serenity, Crises, Clouds, Storms. Now these lowlands of aged lava caught the rains and made muds and fattened into ponds, lakes, true seas. You made the ancient names come true.

  Through your servant machines, you marched across these suddenly murky lands, bristling with an earned arrogance. They—yourself!—plowed and dug, sampled and salted. Through their eyes and tongues and ears you sat in your high Station and heard the sad baby sigh of the first winds awakening.

  The Station was becoming more than a bristling canister of metal, by then. Its agents grew, as did you.

  You smiled down upon the gathering Gray with your quartz eyes and microwave antennas. For you knew what was coming. A mere sidewise glance at rich Earth told you what to expect.

  Like Earth’s tropics now, at Luna’s equator heat drove moist gases aloft. Cooler gas flowed from the poles to fill in. The high wet clouds skated poleward, cooled—and rained down riches.

  On Earth, such currents are robbed of their water about a third of the way to the poles, and so descend, their dry rasp making a world-wide belt of deserts. Not so on Luna.

  You had judged the streams of newborn air rightly. Thicker airs than Earth’s took longer to exhaust, and so did not fall until they reached the poles. Thus the new world had no chains of deserts, and one simple circulating air cell ground away in each hemisphere. Moisture worked its magicks.

  You smiled to see your labors come right. Though anchored in your mammoth Station, you felt the first pinpricks of awareness in the crawlers, flyers and diggers who probed the freshening moon.

  You tasted their flavors, the brimming possibilities. Northerly winds swept the upper half of the globe, bearing poleward, then swerving toward the west to make mild the occasional mild tornado. (Not all weather should be boring.)

  Clouds patroled the air, still fretting over their uneasy births. Day and night came in their slow rhythm, stirring the biological lab that worked below. You sometimes took a moment from running all this, just to watch.

  Lunascapes. Great Grayworld.

  Where day yielded to dark, valleys sank into smoldering blackness. Already a chain of snowy peaks shone where they caught the sun’s dimming rays, and lit the plains with slanting colors like live coals. Sharp mountains cleaved the cloud banks, leaving a wake like that of a huge ship. At the fat equator, straining still to adjust to the new spin, tropical thunderheads glowered, lit by orange lightning that seemed to be looking for a way to spark life among the drifting molecules.

  All that you did, in a mere decade. You had made “the lesser light that rules the night” now shine five times brighter, casting sharp shadows on Earth. Sunrays glinted by day from the young oceans, dazzling the eyes on Earth. And the mother world itself reflected in those muddy seas, so that when the alignment was right, people on Earth’s night side gazed up into their own mirrored selves. Viewed at just the right angle, Earth’s image was rimmed with ruddy sunlight, refracting through Earth’s air.

  You knew it could not last, but were pleased to find the new air stick around. It would bleed away in ten thousand years, but by that time other measures could come into play. You had plans for a monolayer membrane to cap your work, resting atop the whole atmosphere, the largest balloon ever conceived.

  Later? No, act in the moment—and so you did.

  You wove it with membrane skill, cast it wide, let it fall—to rest easy on the thick airs below. Great holes in it let ships glide through and fro, but the losses from those would be trivial.

  Not that all was perfect. Luna had no soil, only the damaged dust left from four billion years beneath the solar wind’s anvil.

  After a mere momentary decade (nothing, to you), fresh wonders bloomed.

  Making soil from gritty grime was work best left to the micro-beasts who loved such stuff. To do great works on a global scale took tiny assistants. You fashioned them in your own labs, which poked outward from the Station’s many-armed skin.

  Gray grew a crust. Earth is in essence a tissue of microbial organisms living off the sun’s fires. Gray would do the same, in fast-forward. You cooked up not mere primordial broths, but endless chains of regulatory messages, intricate feedback loops, organic gavottes.

  Earth hung above, an example of life ornamented by eleborate decorations, structures of forest and grass and skin and blood—living quarters, like seagrass and zebras and eucalyptus and primates.

  Do the same, you told yourself. Only better.

  These tasks you loved. Their conjuring consumed more decades, stacked end on end. You were sucked into the romance of tiny turf wars, chemical assaults, microbial murders and invasive incests. But you had to play upon the stellar stage, as well.

  You had not thought about the tides. Even you had not found a way around those outcomes of gravity’s gradient. Earth raised bulges in Gray’s seas a full twenty meters tall. That made for a dim future for coastal property, even once the air became breathable.

  Luckily, even such colossal tides were not a great bother to the lakes you shaped in crater beds. These you made as breeding farms for the bioengineered minions who ceaselessly tilled the dirts, massaged the gases, filtered the tinkling streams that cut swift ways through rock.

  Indeed, here and there you even found a use for the tides. There were more watts lurking there, in kinetic energy. You fashioned push-plates to tap some of it, to run your sub-stations. Thrifty gods do not have to suck up to (and from) Earthside.

  And so the sphere that, when you began, had been the realm of strip miners amd mass-driver camps, of rugged, suited loners . . . became a place where, someday, humans might walk and breathe free.

  That time is about to come. You yearn for it. For you, too, can then manifest yourself, your Station, as a mere mortal . . . and set foot upon a world that you would name Selene.

  You were both Station and more, by then. How much more few knew. But some sliver of you clung to the name of Benjan—

  —Benjan nodded slightly, ears ringing for some reason.

  The smooth, sure interviewer gave a short introduction. “Man . . . or manifestation? This we must all wonder as we greet an embodiment of humanity’s greatest—and now ancient—construction project. One you and I can see every evening in the sky—for those who are still surface dwellers.”

  3D cameras moved in smooth arcs through t
he studio darkness beyond. The two men sat in a pool of light. The interviewer spoke toward the directional mike as he gave the background on Benjan’s charges against the Council.

  Smiles galore. Platitudes aplenty. That done, came the attack.

  “But isn’t this a rather abstract, distant point to bring at this time?” the man said, turning to Benjan.

  Benjan blinked, uncertain, edgy. He was a private man, used to working alone. Now that he was moving against the Council he had to bear these public appearances, these . . . manifestations . . . of a dwindled self. “To, ah, the people of the next generation, Gray will not be an abstraction—”

  “You mean the moon?”

  “Uh, yes, Gray is my name for it. That’s the way it lookled when I—uh, we all—started work on it centuries ago.”

  “Yet you were there all along, in fact.”

  “Well, yes. But when I’m—we’re—done.” Benjan leaned forward, and his interviewer leaned back, as if not wanting to be too close. “it will be a real place, not just an idea—where you all can live and start a planned ecology. It will be a frontier.”

  “We understand that romantic tradition, but—”

  “No, you don’t. Gray isn’t just an idea, it’s something 1’ve—we’ve—worked on for everyone, whatever shape or genetype they might favor.”

  “Yes yes, and such ideas are touching in their, well, customary way, but—”

  “But the only ones who will ever enjoy it, if the Council gets away with this, is the Majiken Clan.”

  The interviewer pursed his lips. Or was this a he at all? In the current style, the bulging muscles and thick neck might just be fashion statements. “Well, the Majiken are a very large, important segment of the—”

  “No more important than the rest of humanity, in my estimation.”

  “But to cause this much stir over a world which will not even be habitable for at least decades more—”

  “We of the Station are there now.”