Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  When the air temperature reached the standard 24 degrees, the field around the shuttle cut off. What was left behind was an insubstantial latticework of decks and bulkheads, with people gawking out of the missing outer walls of their rooms.

  I joined the crowd of people clustered around the ramp. I had seen a picture of my sister, but it was an old one. I wondered if I’d recognize her.

  There was no trouble. I spotted her at the head of the ramp, dressed in a silly-looking loonie frock coat and carrying a pressurized suitcase. I was sure it was her because she looked just like me, more or less, except that she was a female and she was frowning. She might have been a few centimeters taller than me, but that was from growing up in a lower gravity field.

  I pushed my way over to her and took her case.

  “Welcome to Mercury,” I said in my friendliest manner. She looked me over. I don’t know why, but she took an instant dislike to me, or so it seemed. Actually, she had disliked me before we ever met.

  “You must be Timmy,” she said. I couldn’t let her get away with that. There are limits.

  “Timothy. And you’re my sister, Jew.”

  “Jubilant.”

  We were off to a great start.

  She looked around her at the bustle of people in the landing bay. Then she looked overhead at the flat black underside of the force-roof and seemed to shrink away from it.

  “Where can I rent a suit?” she asked. “I’d like to get one installed before you have a blowout here.”

  “It isn’t that bad,” I said. “We do have them more often here than you do in Luna, but it can’t be helped.” I started off in the direction of General Environments, and she fell in beside me. She was having difficulty walking. I’d hate to be a loonie; just about anywhere they go, they’re too heavy.

  “I was reading on the trip that you had a blowout here at the port only four lunations ago.”

  I don’t know why, but I felt defensive. I mean, sure we have blowouts here, but you can hardly blame us for them. Mercury has a lot of tidal stresses; that means a lot of quakes. Any system will break down if you shake it around enough.

  “All right,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “It happens I was here during that one. It was in the middle of the last dark year. We lost pressure in about ten percent of the passages, but it was restored in a few minutes. No lives were lost.”

  “A few minutes is more than enough to kill someone without a suit, isn’t it?” How could I answer that? She seemed to think she had won a point. “So I’ll feel a lot better when I get into one of your suits.”

  “Okay, let’s get a suit into you.” I was trying to think of something to restart the conversation and drawing a blank. Somehow she seemed to have a low opinion of our environmental engineers on Mercury and was willing to take her contempt out on me.

  “What are you training for?” I ventured. “You must be out of school. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to be an environmental engineer.”

  “Oh.”

  I was relieved when they finally had her lie on the table, made the connection from the computer into the socket at the back of her head, and turned off her motor control and sensorium. The remainder of the trip to GE had been a steady lecture about the shortcomings of the municipal pressure service in Mercury Port. My head was swimming with facts about quintuple-redundant fail-less pressure sensors, self-sealing locks, and blowout drills. I’m sure we have all those things, and just as good as the ones in Luna. But the best anyone can do with the quakes shaking everything up a hundred times a day is achieve a ninety-nine percent safety factor. Jubilant had sneered when I trotted out that figure. She quoted one to me with fifteen decimal places, all of them nines. That was the safety factor in Luna.

  I was looking at the main reason why we didn’t need that kind of safety, right in the surgeon’s hands. He had her chest opened up and the left lung removed, and he was placing the suit generator into the cavity. It looked pretty much like the lung he had removed except it was made of metal and had a mirror finish. He hooked it up to her trachea and the stump ends of the pulmonary arteries and did some adjustments. Then he closed her and applied somatic sealant to the incisions. In thirty minutes she would be ready to wake up, fully healed. The only sign of the operation would be the gold button of the intake valve under her left collarbone. And if the pressure were to drop by two millibars in the next instant, she would be surrounded by the force field that is a Mercury suit. She would be safer than she had ever been in her life, even in the oh-so-safe warrens in Luna.

  The surgeon made the adjustment in my suit’s brain while Jubilant was still out. Then he installed the secondary items in her; the pea-sized voder in her throat so she could talk without inhaling and exhaling, and the binaural radio receptors in her middle ears. Then he pulled the plug out of her brain, and she sat up. She seemed a little more friendly. An hour of sensory deprivation tends to make you more open and relaxed when you come out of it. She started to get back into her loonie coat.

  “That’ll just burn off when you go outside,” I pointed out.

  “Oh, of course. I guess I expected to go by tunnel. But you don’t have many tunnels here, do you?”

  You can’t keep them pressurized, can you?

  I really was beginning to feel defensive about our engineering.

  “The main trouble you’ll have is adjusting to not breathing.”

  We were at the west portal, looking through the force-curtain that separated us from the outside. There was a warm breeze drifting away from the curtain, as there always is in summertime. It was caused by the heating of the air next to the curtain by the wavelengths of light that are allowed to pass through so we can see what’s outside. It was the beginning of retrograde summer, when the sun backtracks at the zenith and gives us a triple helping of very intense light and radiation. Mercury Port is at one of the hotspots, where retrograde sun motion coincides with solar noon. So even though the force-curtain filtered out all but a tiny window of visible light, what got through was high-powered stuff.

  “Is there any special trick I should know?”

  I’ll give her credit; she wasn’t any kind of fool, she was just overcritical. When it came to the operation of her suit, she was completely willing to concede that I was the expert.

  “Not really. You’ll feel an overpowering urge to take a breath after a few minutes, but it’s all psychological. Your blood will be oxygenated. It’s just that your brain won’t feel right about it. But you’ll get over it. And don’t try to breathe when you talk. Just subvocalize, and the radio in your throat will pick it up.”

  I thought about it and decided to throw in something else, free of charge.

  “If you’re in the habit of talking to yourself, you’d better try to break yourself of it. Your voder will pick it up if you mutter, or sometimes if you just think too loud. Your throat moves sometimes when you do that, you know. It can get embarrassing.”

  She grinned at me, the first time she had done it. I found myself liking her. I had always wanted to, but this was the first chance she had given me.

  “Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind. Shall we go?”

  I stepped out first. You feel nothing at all when you step through a force-curtain. You can’t step through it at all unless you have a suit generator installed, but with it turned on, the field just forms around your body as you step through. I turned around and could see nothing but a perfectly flat, perfectly reflective mirror. It bulged out as I watched in the shape of a nude woman, and the bulge separated from the curtain. What was left was a silver-plated Jubilant.

  The suit generator causes the field to follow the outlines of your body, but from one to one-and-a-half millimeters from the skin. It oscillates between those limits, and the changing volume means a bellows action forces the carbon dioxide out through your intake valve. You expel waste gas and cool yourself in one operation. The field is perfectly reflective except for two pupil-sized discontinuitie
s that follow your eye movements and let in enough light to see by, but not enough to blind you.

  “What happens if I open my mouth?” she mumbled. It takes awhile to get the knack of subvocalizing clearly.

  “Nothing. The field extends over your mouth, like it does over your nostrils. It won’t go down your throat.”

  A few minutes later: “I sure would like to take a breath.” She would get over it. “Why is it so hot?”

  “Because at the most efficient setting your suit doesn’t release enough carbon dioxide to cool you down below about thirty degrees. So you’ll sweat a bit.”

  “It feels like thirty-five or forty.”

  “It must be your imagination. You can change the setting by turning the nozzle of your air valve, but that means your tank will be releasing some oxygen with the CO2 and you never know when you’ll need it.”

  “How much of a reserve is there?”

  “You’re carrying forty-eight hours’ worth. Since the suit releases oxygen directly into your blood, we can use about ninety-five percent of it, instead of throwing most of it away to cool you off, like your loonie suits do.” I couldn’t resist that one.

  “The term is Lunarian,” she said, icily. Oh, well. I hadn’t even known the term was derogatory.

  “I think I’ll sacrifice some margin for comfort now. I feel bad enough as it is in this gravity without stewing in my own sweat.”

  “Suit yourself. You’re the environment expert.”

  She looked at me, but I don’t think she was used to reading expressions on a reflective face. She turned the nozzle that stuck out above her left breast, and the flow of steam from it increased.

  “That should bring you down to about twenty degrees, and leave you with about thirty hours of oxygen. That’s under ideal conditions, of course, sitting down and keeping still. The more you exert yourself, the more oxygen the suit wastes keeping you cool.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Timothy, are you telling me that I shouldn’t cool off? I’ll do whatever you say.”

  “No, I think you’ll be all right. It’s a thirty-minute trip to my house. And what you say about the gravity has merit; you probably need the relief. But I’d turn it up to twenty-five as a reasonable compromise.”

  She silently readjusted the valve.

  Jubilant thought it was silly to have a traffic conveyor that operated in two-kilometer sections. She complained to me the first three or four times we got off the end of one and stepped onto another. She shut up about it when we came to a section knocked out by a quake. We had a short walk between sections of the temporary slideway, and she saw the crews working to bridge the twenty-meter gap that had opened beneath the old one.

  We only had one quake on the way home. It didn’t amount to anything, just enough motion that we had to do a little dance to keep our feet under us. Jubilant didn’t seem to like it much. I wouldn’t have noticed it at all, except Jubilant yelped when it hit.

  Our house at that time was situated at the top of a hill. We had carried it up there after the big quake seven darkyears before that had shaken down the cliffside where we used to live. I had been buried for ten hours in that one—the first time I ever needed digging out. Mercurians don’t like living in valleys. They have a tendency to fill up with debris during the big quakes. If you live at the top of a rise, you have a better chance of being near the top of the rubble when it slides down. Besides, my mother and I both liked the view.

  Jubilant liked it, too. She made her first comment on the scenery as we stood outside the house and looked out over the valley we had just crossed. Mercury Port was sitting atop the ridge, thirty kilometers away. At that distance you could just make out the hemispherical shape of the largest buildings.

  But Jubilant was more interested in the mountains behind us. She pointed to a glowing violet cloud that rose from behind one of the foothills and asked me what it was.

  “That’s quicksilver grotto. It always looks like that at the start of retrograde summer. I’ll take you over there later. I think you’ll like it.”

  Dorothy greeted us as we stepped through the wall.

  I couldn’t put my finger on what was bothering Mom. She seemed happy enough to see Jubilant after seventeen years. She kept saying inane things about how she had grown and how pretty she looked. She had us stand side by side and pointed out how much we looked like each other. It was true, of course, since we were genetically identical. She was five centimeters taller than me, but she could lose that in a few months in Mercury’s gravity.

  “She looks just like you did two years ago, before your last Change,” she told me. That was a slight misstatement; I hadn’t been quite as sexually mature the last time I was a female. But she was right in essence. Both Jubilant and I were genotypically male, but Mom had had my sex changed when I first came to Mercury, when I was a few months old. I had spent the first fifteen years of my life female. I was thinking of Changing back, but wasn’t in a hurry.

  “You’re looking well yourself, Glitter,” Jubilant said.

  Mom frowned for an instant. “It’s Dorothy now, honey. I changed my name when we moved here. We use Old Earth names on Mercury.”

  “I’m sorry, I forgot. My mother always used to call you Glitter when she spoke of you. Before she, I mean before I—”

  There was an awkward silence. I felt like something was being concealed from me, and my ears perked up. I had high hopes of learning some things from Jubilant, things that Dorothy had never told me no matter how hard I prodded her. At least I knew where to start in drawing Jubilant out.

  It was a frustrating fact at that time that I knew little of the mystery surrounding how I came to grow up on Mercury instead of in Luna, and why I had a clone-sister. Having a clone-twin is a rare enough thing that it was inevitable I’d try to find out how it came to pass. It wasn’t socially debilitating, like having a fraternal sibling or something scandalous like that. But I learned early not to mention it to my friends. They wanted to know how it happened, how my mom managed to get around the laws that forbid that kind of unfair preference. One Person, One Child: that’s the first moral lesson any child learns even before Thou Shalt Not Take a Life. Mom wasn’t in jail, so it must have been legal. But how? And why? She wouldn’t talk, but maybe Jubilant would.

  Dinner was eaten in a strained silence, interrupted by awkward attempts at conversation. Jubilant was suffering from culture shock and an attack of nerves. I could understand it, looking around me with her eyes. Loonies—pardon me, Lunarians—live all their lives in burrows down in the rock and come to need the presence of solid, substantial walls around them. They don’t go outside much. When they do, they are wrapped in a steel-and-plastic cocoon that they can feel around them, and they look out of it through a window. Jubilant was feeling terribly exposed and trying to be brave about it. When inside a force-bubble house, you might as well be sitting on a flat platform under the blazing sun. The bubble is invisible from the inside.

  When I realized what was bothering her, I turned up the polarization. Now the bubble looked like tinted glass.

  “Oh, you needn’t,” she said, gamely. “I have to get used to it. I just wish you had walls somewhere I could look at.”

  It was more apparent than ever that something was upsetting Dorothy. She hadn’t noticed Jubilant’s unease, and that’s not like her. She should have had some curtains rigged to give our guest a sense of enclosure.

  I did learn some things from the intermittent conversation at the table. Jubilant had divorced her mother when she was ten E-years old, an absolutely extraordinary age. The only grounds for divorce at that age are really incredible things like insanity or religious evangelism. I didn’t know much about Jubilant’s foster mother—not even her name—but I did know that she and Dorothy had been good friends back in Luna. Somehow, the question of how and why Dorothy had abandoned her child and taken me, a chip off the block, to Mercury, was tied up in that relationship.

  “We could never get clo
se, as far back as I can remember,” Jubilant was saying. “She told me crazy things, she didn’t seem to fit in. I can’t really explain it, but the court agreed with me. It helped that I had a good lawyer.”

  “Maybe part of it was the unusual relationship,” I said, helpfully. “You know what I mean. It isn’t all that common to grow up with a foster mother instead of your real mother.” That was greeted with such a dead silence that I wondered if I should just shut up for the rest of dinner. There were meaningful glances exchanged.

  “Yes, that might have been part of it. Anyway, within three years of your leaving for Mercury, I knew I couldn’t take it. I should have gone with you. I was only a child, but even then I wanted to come with you.” She looked appealingly at Dorothy, who was studying the table. Jubilant had stopped eating.

  “Maybe I’d better not talk about it.”

  To my surprise, Dorothy agreed. That cinched it for me. They wouldn’t talk about it because they were keeping something from me.

  Jubilant took a nap after dinner. She said she wanted to go to the grotto with me but had to rest from the gravity. While she slept I tried once more to get Dorothy to tell me the whole story of her life on the moon.

  “But why am I alive at all? You say you left Jubilant, your own child, three years old, with a friend who would take care of her in Luna. Didn’t you want to take her with you?”

  She looked at me tiredly. We’d been over this ground before.

  “Timmy, you’re an adult now, and have been for three years. I’ve told you that you’re free to leave me if you want. You will soon, anyway. But I’m not going into it any further.”