Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  Hollister noticed that his men had evolved an Asian ability just to sit, without thinking, hour after hour. Their conversation and humor also suggested Asia: acrid, often brutal, though maintaining a careful surface politeness most of the time. It was probably more characteristic of this particular job than of the whole planet, though, and maybe they sloughed it off again when their hitches on air detail had expired and they got more congenial assignments.

  As boss, he had the privilege of sharing his tank with only one man; he chose the wizened Johnny, whom he rather liked. Steering through a yelling sandstorm, he was now able to carry on a conversation—and it was about time, he reflected, that he got on with his real job.

  “Ever thought of going back to Earth?” he asked casually.

  “Back?” Johnny looked surprised. “I was born here.”

  “Well … going to Earth, then.”

  “What’d I use for passage money?”

  “Distress clause of the Space Navigation Act. They’d have to give you a berth if you applied. Not that you couldn’t repay your passage, with interest, in a while. With your experience here, you could get a fine post in one of the reclamation projects on Earth.”

  “Look,” said Johnny in a flustered voice, “I’m a good Venusian. I’m needed here and I know it.”

  “Forget the Guardians,” snapped Hollister, irritated. “I’m not going to report you. Why you people put up with a secret police anyway, is more than I can understand.”

  “You’ve got to keep people in line,” said Johnny. “We all got to work together to make a go of it.”

  “But haven’t you ever thought it’d be nice to decide your own future and not have somebody to tell you what to do next?”

  “It ain’t just ‘somebody.’ It’s the Board. They know how you and me fit in best. Sure, I suppose there are subversives, but I’m not one of them.”

  “Why don’t the malcontents just run away, if they don’t dare apply for passage to Earth? They could steal materials and make their own village. Venus is a big place.”

  “It ain’t that easy. And supposin’ they could and did, what’d they do then? Just sit and wait for the Big Rain? We don’t want any freeloaders on Venus, mister.”

  Hollister shrugged. There was something about the psychology that baffled him. “I’m not preaching revolution,” he said carefully. “I came here of my own free will, remember, I’m just trying to understand the setup.”

  Johnny’s faded eyes were shrewd on him. “You’ve always had it easy compared to us, I guess. It may look hard to you here. But remember, we ain’t never had it different, except that things are gettin’ better little by little. The food ration gets upped every so often, and we’re allowed a dress suit now as well as utility clothes, and before long there’s goin’ to be broadcast shows to the outposts—and someday the Big Rain is comin’. Then we can all afford to take it free and easy.” He paused. “That’s why we broke with Earth. Why should we slave our guts out to make a good life for our grandchildren, if a bunch of freeloaders are gonna come from Earth and fill up the planet then? It’s ours. It’s gonna be the richest planet men ever saw, and it belongs to us what developed it.”

  Official propaganda line, thought Hollister. It sounded plausible enough till you stopped to analyze. For one thing, each country still had the right to set its own immigration policies. Furthermore, at the rate Earth was progressing, with reclamation, population control, and new resources from the oceans, by the time Venus was ripe there wouldn’t be any motive to leave home—an emigration which would be too long and expensive anyway. For their own reasons, which he still had to discover, the rulers of Venus had not mentioned all the facts and had instead built up a paranoid attitude in their people.

  The new airmaker site was the top of a ridge thrusting from a boulder-strewn plain. An eerie coppercolored light seemed to tinge the horizon with blood. A pair of bulldozers had already gone ahead and scooped out a walled hollow in which seal-tents could be erected; Hollister’s gang swarmed from the tanks and got at that job. Then the real work began—blasting and carving a foundation, sinking piers, assembling the unit on top.

  On the fourth day the rock storm came. It had dawned with an angry glow like sulfur, and as it progressed the wind strengthened and a dirty rack of clouds whipped low overhead. On the third shift, the gale was strong enough to lean against, and the sheet steel which made the unit’s armor fought the men as if it lived.

  The blond man, Sam Robbins, who had never liked Hollister, made his way up to the chief. His voice came over the helmet radio, dim beneath static and the drumming wind: “I don’t like this. Better we take cover fast.”

  Hollister was not unwilling, but the delicate arc electrodes were being set up and he couldn’t take them down again; nor could he leave them unprotected to the scouring drift of sand. “As soon as we get the shielding up,” he said.

  “I tell you, there’s no time to shield ’em!”

  “Yes, there is.” Hollister turned his back. Robbins snarled something and returned to his labor.

  A black wall, rust-red on the edges, was lifting to the east, the heaviest sandstorm Hollister had yet seen. He hunched his shoulders and struggled through the sleetlike dust to the unit. Turning up his radio: “Everybody come help on this. The sooner it gets done, the sooner we can quit.”

  The helmeted figures swarmed around him, battling the thunderously flapping metal sheets, holding them down by main force while they were welded to the frame. Hollister saw lightning livid across the sky. Once a bolt flamed at the rod which protected the site. Thunder rolled and banged after it.

  The wind slapped at them, and a sheet tore loose and went sailing down the hill. It struck a crag and wrapped itself around. “Robbins, Lewis, go get that!” cried Hollister, and returned attention to the piece he was clutching. An end ripped loose from his hands and tried to slash his suit.

  The wind was so deafening that he couldn’t hear it rise still higher, and in the murk of sand whirling about him he was nearly blind. But he caught the first glimpse of gale-borne gravel whipping past, and heard the terror in his earphones: “Rock storm!”

  The voice shut up; orders were strict that the channel be kept clear. But the gasping men labored still more frantically, while struck metal rang and boomed.

  Hollister peered through the darkness. “That’s enough!” he decided. “Take cover!”

  Nobody dropped his tools, but they all turned fast and groped down toward the camp. The way led past the crag, where Robbins and Lewis had just quit wrestling with the stubborn plate.

  Hollister didn’t see Lewis killed, but he did see him die. Suddenly his airsuit was flayed open, and there was a spurt of blood, and he toppled. The wind took his body, rolling it out of sight in the dust. A piece of rock, thought Hollister wildly. It tore his suit, and he’s already embalmed—

  The storm hooted and squealed about him as he climbed the sand wall. Even the blown dust was audible, hissing against his helmet. He fumbled through utter blackness, fell over the top and into the comparative shelter of the camp ground. On hands and knees, he crawled toward the biggest of the self-sealing tents.

  There was no time for niceties. They sacrificed the atmosphere within, letting the air lock stand open while they pushed inside. Had everybody made it to some tent or other? Hollister wasn’t sure, but sand was coming in, filling the shelter. He went over and closed the lock. Somebody else started the pump, using bottled nitrogen to maintain air pressure and flush out the poisons. It seemed like a long time before the oxygen containers could be opened.

  Hollister took off his helmet and looked around. The tent was half filled by seven white-faced men standing in the dust. The single fluorotube threw a cold light on their sweating bodies and barred the place with shadows. Outside, the wind bellowed.

  “Might as well be comfortable,” said Johnny in a small voice, and began shucking his airsuit. “If the tent goes, we’re all done for anyhow.” He sat down on th
e ground and checked his equipment methodically. Then he took a curved stone and spat on it and began scouring his faceplate to remove the accumulated scratches in its hard plastic. One by one the others imitated him.

  “You there!”

  Hollister looked up from his own suit. Sam Robbins stood before him. The man’s eyes were red and his mouth worked.

  “You killed Jim Lewis.”

  There was murder here. Hollister raised himself till he looked down at the Venusian. “I’m sorry he’s dead,” he replied, trying for quietness. “He was a good man. But these things will happen.”

  Robbins shuddered. “You sent him down there where the gravel got him. I was there, too. Was it meant for me?”

  “Nobody could tell where that chunk was going to hit,” said Hollister mildly. “I could just as easily have been killed.”

  “I told you to quit half an hour before the things started.”

  “We couldn’t quit then without ruining all our work. Sit down, Robbins. You’re overtired and scared.”

  The men were very still sitting and watching in the thick damp heat of the tent. Thunder crashed outside.

  “You rotten Earthling—” Robbins’ fist lashed out. It caught Hollister on the cheekbone and he stumbled back, shaking a dazed head. Robbins advanced grinning.

  Hollister felt a cold viciousness of rage. It was his pseudopersonality he realized dimly but no time to think of that now. As Robbins closed in, he crouched and punched for the stomach.

  Hard muscle met him. Robbins clipped him on the jaw. Hollister tried an uppercut, but it was skillfully blocked. This man knew how to fight.

  Hollister gave him another fusillade in the belly. Robbins grunted and rabbit-punched. Hollister caught it on his shoulder, reached up, grabbed an arm, and whirled his enemy over his head. Robbins hit a bunkframe that buckled under him.

  He came back, dizzy but game. Hollister was well trained in combat. But it took him a good ten minutes to stretch his man bleeding on the ground.

  Panting, he looked about him. There was no expression on the faces that ringed him in. “Anybody else?” he asked hoarsely.

  “No, boss,” said Johnny. “You’re right, o’ course. I don’t think nobody else here wants twenty lashes back at base.”

  “Who said—” Hollister straightened, blinking. “Lashes?”

  “Why, sure. This was mutiny, you know. It’s gotta be punished.”

  Hollister shook his head. “Too barbaric. Correction—”

  “Look, boss,” said Johnny, “you’re a good engineer but you don’t seem to understand much about Venus yet. We ain’t got the time or the manpower or the materials to spend on them there corrective jails. A bull what don’t keep his nose clean gets the whip or the sweatbox, and then back to the job. The really hard cases go to the uranium mines at Lucifer.” He shivered, even in the dense heat.

  Hollister frowned. “Not a bad system,” he said, to stay in character. “But I think Robbins here has had enough. I’m not going to report him if he behaves himself from now on, and I’ll trust the rest of you to cooperate.”

  They mumbled assent. He wasn’t sure whether they respected him for it or not, but the boss was boss. Privately, he suspected that the Boards must frame a lot of men, or at least sentence them arbitrarily for minor crimes, to keep the mines going; there didn’t seem to be enough rebellion in the Venusian character to supply them otherwise.

  Chalk up another point for the government. The score to settle was getting rather big.

  IV

  Time was hard to estimate on Venus; it wasn’t only that they had their own calendar here, but one day was so much like another. Insensibly and despite himself, Hollister began sliding into the intellectual lethargy of the camp. He had read the few books—and with his trained memory, he could only read a book once—and he knew every man there inside out, and he had no family in one of the cities to write to and think about. The job itself presented a daily challenge, no two situations were ever quite the same and occasionally he came near death, but outside of it there was a tendency to stagnate.

  The other two engineers, Gebhardt and Yamashita, were pleasant company. The first was from Hörselberg, which had been a German settlement and still retained some character of its own, and he had interesting stories to tell of it; the second, though of old Venus-American stock, was mentally agile for a colonist, had read more than most and had a lively interest in the larger world of the Solar System. But even the stimulation they offered wore a little thin in six months or so.

  The region spun through a “winter” that was hardly different from summer except in having longer nights, and the sterile spring returned, and the work went on. Hollister’s time sense ticked off days with an accuracy falling within a few seconds, and he wondered how long he would be kept here and when he would get a chance to report to his home office. That would be in letters ostensibly to friends, which one of the spaceships would carry back; he knew censors would read them first, but his code was keyed to an obscure eighteenth-century book he was certain no one on Venus had ever heard of.

  Already he knew more about this planet than anyone on Earth. It had always been too expensive to send correspondents here, and the last couple of U.N. representatives hadn’t found much to tell. The secretiveness toward Earthmen might be an old habit, going back to the ultra-nationalistic days of the last century. Colony A and Colony B, of two countries which at home might not be on speaking terms, were not supposed to give aid and comfort to each other; but on Venus such artificial barriers had to go if anyone was to survive. Yamashita told with relish how prospectors from Little Moscow and Trollen had worked together and divided up their finds. But of course, you couldn’t let your nominal rulers know—

  Hollister was beginning to realize that the essential ethos of Venus was, indeed, different from anything which existed on Earth. It had to be, the landscape had made it so. Man was necessarily a more collective creature than at home. That helped explain the evolution of the peculiar governmental forms and the patience of the citizenry toward the most outrageous demands. Even the dullest laborer seemed to live in the future.

  Our children and grandchildren will build the temples, read the books, write the music. Ours is only to lay the foundation.

  And was that why they stuck here, instead of shipping back and turning the whole job over to automatic machinery and a few paid volunteers? They had been the lonely, the rejected, the dwellers in outer darkness, for a long time; now they could not let go of their fierce and angry pride, even when there was no more need for it. Hollister thought about Ireland. Man is not a logical animal.

  Still, there were features of Venusian society that struck him as unnecessary and menacing. Something would have to be done about them, though as yet he wasn’t sure what it would be.

  He worked, and he gathered impressions and filed them away, and he waited. And at last the orders came through. This camp had served its purpose, it was to be broken up and replanted elsewhere, but first its personnel were to report to New America and get a furlough. Hollister swung almost gaily into the work of dismantling everything portable and loading it in the wagons. Maybe he finally was going to get somewhere.

  He reported at the Air Control office with Gebhardt and Yamashita, to get his pay and quarters assignment. The official handed him a small card. “You’ve been raised to chief engineer’s rank,” he said. “You’ll probably get a camp of your own next time.”

  Gebhardt pounded him on the back. “Ach, sehr gut! I recommended you, boy, you did fine, but I am going to miss you.”

  “Oh … we’ll both be around for a while, won’t we?” asked Hollister uncomfortably.

  “Not I! I haff vife and kids, I hop the next rocket to Hörselberg.”

  Yamashita had his own family in town, and Hollister didn’t want to intrude too much on them. He wandered off, feeling rather lonesome.

  His new rating entitled him to private quarters, a tiny room with minimal furniture, though
he still had to wash and eat publicly like everyone else except the very top. He sat down in it and began composing the planned letters.

  There was a knock at the door. He fumbled briefly, being used to scanners at home and not used to doors on Venus, and finally said: “Come in.”

  A woman entered. She was young, quite good-looking, with a supple tread and spectacularly red hair. Cool green eyes swept up and down his height. “My name is Barbara Brandon,” she said. “Administrative assistant in Air Control.”

  “Oh … hello.” He offered her the chair. “You’re here on business?”

  Amusement tinged her impersonal voice. “In a way. I’m going to marry you.”

  Hollister’s jaw did not drop, but it tried. “Come again?” he asked weakly.

  She sat down. “It’s simple enough. I’m thirty-seven years old, which is almost the maximum permissible age of celibacy except in special cases.” With a brief, unexpectedly feminine touch: “That’s Venus years, of course! I’ve seen you around, and looked at your record; good heredity there, I think. Pops okayed it genetically—that’s Population Control—and the Guardians cleared it, too.”

  “Um-m-m … look here.” Hollister wished there were room to pace. He settled for sitting on the table and swinging his legs. “Don’t I get any say in the matter?”

  “You can file any objections, of course, and probably they’d be heeded; but you’ll have to have children by someone pretty soon. We need them. Frankly, I think a match between us would be ideal. You’ll be out in the field so much that we won’t get in each other’s hair, and we’d probably get along well enough while we are together.”

  Hollister scowled. It wasn’t the morality of it—much. He was a bachelor on Earth, secret service Un-men really had no business getting married; and in any case the law would wink at what he had done on Venus if he ever got home. But something about the whole approach annoyed him.