Then, for variety, we lost a sensor through sheer bad program design. In turning one of our imaging systems from star sensing to Io-Jupiter sensing, we tracked it right across the solar disk and burned out all the photocells. According to the engineers, that’s the sort of blunder you don’t make after kindergarten—but somebody did it.
Engineering errors are easy to correct. It was much trickier when one of the final-approach-coordination groups, a team of two men and one woman, chose the day before the Io rendezvous to have a violent sexual argument. They were millions of kilometers away from anyone, so there was not much we could do except talk to them. We did that, hoped they wouldn’t kill each other, and made plans to do without their inputs if we had to.
Finally, one day before impact, an unplanned and anomalous firing of a rocket on the asteroid’s forward surface caused a significant change of velocity of the whole body.
I ought to explain that I did little or nothing to solve any of these problems. I was too slow, too ignorant, and not creative enough. While I was still struggling to comprehend what the problem parameters were, my troubleshooters were swarming all over it. They threw proposals and counterproposals at each other so fast that I could hardly note them, still less contribute to them. For example, in the case of the anomalous rocket firing that I mentioned, compensation for the unwanted thrust called for an elaborate balancing act of lateral and radial engines, rolling and nudging the asteroid back into its correct approach path. The team had mapped out the methods in minutes, written the necessary optimization programs in less than half an hour, and implemented their solution before I understood the geometry of what was going on.
So what did I do while all this was happening? I continued to make my two columns: act of nature, or failure of man-made element. The list was growing steadily, and I was spending a lot of time looking at it.
We were coming down to the final few hours now, and all the combines were working flat out to solve their own problems. In an engineering project of this size, many thousands of things could go wrong. We were working in extreme physical conditions, hundreds of millions of kilometers away from Earth and our standard test environments. In the intense charged-particle field near Io, cables broke at loads well below their rated capacities, hardvacuum welds showed air-bleed effects, and lateral jets were fired and failed to produce the predicted attitude adjustments. And on top of all this, the pressure, isolation, and bizarre surroundings were too much for some of the workers. We had human failure to add to engineering failure. The test was tougher than anyone had realized—even PNU, who was supposed to make the demonstration project just this side of impossible.
I was watching the performance of the other three combines only a little less intently than I was watching our own. At five hours from contact time, NETSCO apparently suffered a communications loss with their asteroid-control system. Instead of heading for Io impact, the asteroid veered away, spiraling in toward the bulk of Jupiter itself.
BP Megation lost it at impact minus three hours, when a vast explosion on one of their asteroid forward boosters threw the kilometer-long body into a rapid tumble. Within an hour, by some miracle of improvisation, their engineering team had found a method of stabilizing the wobbling mass. But by then it was too late to return to nominal impact time and place. Their asteroid skimmed into the surface of Io an hour early, sending up a long, tear-shaped mass of ejecta from the moon’s turbulent surface.
That left just two of us, MMG and Romberg AG. We both had our hands full. The Jovian system is filled with electrical, magnetic, and gravitational energies bigger than anything in the Star System except the Sun itself. The two remaining combines were trying to steer their asteroid into a pinpoint landing through a great storm of interference that made every control command and every piece of incoming telemetry suspect. In the final hour I didn’t even follow the exchanges between my troubleshooters. Oh, I could hear them easily enough. What I couldn’t do was comprehend them, enough to know what was happening.
Pauli would toss a scrap of comment at von Neumann, and, while I was trying to understand that, von Neumann would have done an assessment, keyed in for a databank status report, gabbled a couple of questions to Fermi and an instruction to Edison, and at the same time be absorbing scribbled notes and diagrams from those two. I don’t know if what they were doing was potentially intelligible to me or not; all I know is they were going about fifty times too fast for me to follow. And it didn’t much matter what I understood—they were getting the job done. I was still trying to divide all problems into my Category One/Category Two columns, but it got harder and harder.
In the final hour I didn’t look or listen to what my own team was doing. We had one band of telemetry trained on the MMG project, and more and more that’s where my attention was focused. I assumed they were having the same kind of communications trouble as we were—that crackling discharge field around Io made everything difficult. But their team was handling it. They were swinging smoothly into impact.
And then, with only ten minutes to go, the final small adjustment was made. It should have been a tiny nudge from the radial jets; enough to fine-tune the impact position for a few hundred meters, and no more. Instead, there was a joyous roar of a radial jet at full, uncontrolled thrust. The MMG asteroid did nothing unusual for a few seconds (a billion tons is a lot of inertia), then began to drift lazily sideways, away from its nominal trajectory.
The jet was still firing. And that should have been impossible, because the first thing that the MMG team would do was send a POWER OFF signal to the engine.
The time for impact came when the MMG asteroid was still a clear fifty kilometers out of position, and accelerating away. I saw the final collision, and the payload scraped along the surface of Io in a long, jagged scar that looked nothing at all like the neat, punched hole that we were supposed to achieve.
And we did achieve it, a few seconds later. Our asteroid came in exactly where and when it was supposed to, driving in exactly vertical to the surface. The plume of ejecta had hardly begun to rise from Io’s red-and-yellow surface before von Neumann was pulling a bottle of bourbon from underneath the communications console.
I didn’t object—I only wished I were there physically to share it, instead of being stuck in my own pod, short of rendezvous with our main ship. I looked at my final list, still somewhat incomplete. Was there a pattern to it? Ten minutes of analysis didn’t show one. No one had tried anything—this time. Someday, and it might be tomorrow, somebody on another combine would have a bright idea; and then it would be a whole new ball game.
While I was still pondering my list, my control console began to buzz insistently. I switched it on expecting contact with my own troubleshooting team. Instead, I saw the despondent face of Brunel, MMG’s own team leader—the man above all others that I would have liked to work on my side.
He nodded at me when my picture appeared on the screen. He was smoking one of his powerful black cigars, stuck in the side of his mouth. The expression on his face was as impenetrable as ever. He never let his feelings show there. “I assume you saw it, didn’t you?” he said around the cigar. “We’re out of it. I just called to congratulate you—again.”
“Yeah, I saw it. Tough luck. At least you came second.”
“Which, as you know very well, is no better than coming last.” He sighed and shook his head. “We still have no idea what happened. Looks like either a programming error, or a valve sticking open. We probably won’t know for weeks. And I’m not sure I care.”
I maintained a sympathetic silence.
“I sometimes think we should just give up, Al,” he said. “I can beat those other turkeys, but I can’t compete with you. That’s six in a row that you’ve won. It’s wearing me out. You’ve no idea how much frustration there is in that.”
I had never known Brunel to reveal so much of his feelings before.
“I think I do understand your problems,” I said.
And I did.
I knew exactly how he felt—more than he would believe. To suffer through a whole, endless sequence of minor, niggling mishaps was heartbreaking. No single trouble was ever big enough for a troubleshooting team to stop, isolate it, and be able to say, There’s dirty work going on here. But their cumulative effect was another matter. One day it was a morass of shipments missing their correct flights, another time a couple of minus signs dropped into computer programs, or a key worker struck down from a few days by a random virus, permits misfiled, manifests mislaid, or licenses wrongly dated.
I knew all those mishaps personally. I should, because I invented most of them. I think of it as the death of a thousand cuts. No one can endure all that and still hope to win a Phase B study.
“How would you like to work on the Europan Metamorph?” I asked. “I think you’d love it.”
He looked very thoughtful, and for the first time, I believe I could actually read his expression. “Leave MMG, you mean?” he said. “Maybe. I don’t know what I want anymore. Let me think about it. I’d like to work with you, Al—you’re a genius.”
Brunel was wrong about that, of course. I’m certainly no genius. All I can do is what I’ve always done—handle people, take care of unpleasant details (quietly!), and make sure things get done that need doing. And of course, do what I do best: make sure that some things that need doing don’t get done.
There are geniuses in the world, real geniuses. Not me, though. The man who decided to clone me, secretly—there I’d suggest you have a genius.
“Say, don’t you remember, they called me Al … .”
Of course, I don’t remember. That song was written in the 1930s, and I didn’t die until 1947, but no clone remembers anything of the forefather life. The fact that we tend to be knowledgeable about our originals’ period is an expression of interest in those individuals, not memories from them. I know the Chicago of the Depression years intimately, as well as I know today; but it is all learned knowledge. I have no actual recollection of events. I don’t remember.
So even if you don’t remember, call me Al anyway. Everyone did.
A Place with shade
ROBERT REED
Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986, and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as selling many stories to Science Fiction Age, Universe, New Destinies, Tomorrow, Synergy, Starlight, and elsewhere.
Reed may be one of the most prolific of today’s young writers, particularly at short-fiction lengths, seriously rivaled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And—also like Baxter and Stableford—he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as “Sister Alice,” “Brother Perfect,” “Decency,” “Savior,” “The Remoras,” “Chrysalis,” “Whiptail,” “The Utility Man,” “Marrow,” “Birth Day,” “Blind,” “The Toad of Heaven,” “Stride,” “The Shape of Everything,” “Guest of Honor,” “Waging Good,” and “Killing the Morrow,” among at least half a dozen others equally as strong, count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the 1980s and 1990s. Nor is he nonprolific as a novelist, having turned out eight novels since the end of the eighties, including The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, and, most recently, Beneath the Gated Sky. His reputation can only grow as the years go by, and I suspect that he will become one of the Big Names of the first decade of the new century. Some of the best of his short work was collected in The Dragons of Springplace. His most recent book is Marrow, a novel-length version of his 1997 novella of the same name. Reed lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
The inventive, elegant, and exciting story that follows examines the old idea that Nature is “red in tooth and claw”—and concludes that sometimes Nature could do better at that if it had a little help … .
The old man was corpulent like a seal, muscle clothed in fat to guarantee warmth, his skin smooth and his general proportions—stocky limbs and a broad chest—implying a natural, almost unconscious power. He wore little despite the damp chill. The brown eyes seemed capable and shrewd. And humorless. We were standing on a graveled beach, staring at his tiny sea; and after a long silence, he informed me, “I don’t approve of what you do, Mr. Locum. It’s pretentious and wasteful, this business of building cruel places. You’re not an artist, and I think it’s healthy for both of us to know my objections to your presence here.”
I showed a grin, then said, “Fine. I’ll leave.” I had spent three months inside cramped quarters, but I told him, “Your shuttle can take me back to the freighter. I’ll ride out with the iron.”
“You misunderstand, Mr. Locum.” His name was Provo Lei, the wealthiest person for a light-month in any direction. “I have these objections, but you aren’t here for me. You’re a gift to my daughter. She and I have finally agreed that she needs a tutor, and you seem qualified. Shall we dispense with pretenses? You are a toy. This isn’t what you would call a lush commission, and you’d prefer to be near a civilized world, building some vicious forest for society people who want prestige and novelty. Yet you need my money, don’t you? You’re neither a tutor nor a toy, but your debts outweigh your current value as an artist. Or am I wrong?”
I attempted another grin, then shrugged. “I can work on a larger scale here.” I’m not someone who hesitates or feels insecure, but I did both just then. “I’ve had other offers—”
“None of substance,” Provo interrupted.
I straightened my back, looking over him. We were in the middle of his house—a sealed hyperfiber tent covering ten thousand hectares of tundra and ice water—and beyond the tent walls was an entire world, Earth-size but less massive. Not counting robots, the world’s population was two. Counting me, three. As we stood there enjoying impolite conversation, an army of robots was beneath the deep water-ice crust, gnawing at rock, harvesting metals to be sold at a profit throughout the district.
“What do you think of my little home, Mr. Locum? Speaking as a professional terraformer, of course.”
I blinked, hesitating again.
“Please. Be honest.”
“It belongs to a miser.” Provo didn’t have propriety over bluntness. “This is a cheap Arctic package. Low diversity, a rigorous durability, and almost no upkeep. I’m guessing, but it feels like the home of a man who prefers solitude. And since you’ve lived here for two hundred years, alone most of the time, I don’t think that’s too much of a guess.”
He surprised me, halfway nodding.
“Your daughter’s how old? Thirty?” I paused, then said, “Unless she’s exactly like you, I would think that she would have left by now. She’s not a child, and she must be curious about the rest of the Realm. Which makes me wonder if I’m an inducement of some kind. A bribe. Speaking as a person, not a terraformer, I think she must be frighteningly important to you. Am I correct?”
The brown eyes watched me, saying nothing.
I felt a brief remorse. “You asked for my opinion,” I reminded him.
“Don’t apologize. I want honesty.” He rubbed his rounded chin, offering what could have been confused for a smile. “And you’re right, I do bribe my daughter. In a sense. She’s my responsibility, and why shouldn’t I sacrifice for her happiness?”
“She wants to be a terraformer?”
“Of the artistic variety, yes.”
I moved my feet, cold gravel crunching under my boots.
“But this ‘cheap package,’ as you so graciously described it, is a recent condition. Before this I maintained a mature Arctic steppe, dwarf mammoths here and a coldwater reef offshore. At no small expense, Mr. Locum, and I’m not a natural miser.”
“It sounds like Beringa,” I muttered.
“My home world, yes.” Beringa was a giant snowball terraformed by commercial souls, carpeted
with plastics and rock and rich artificial soils, its interior still frozen while billions lived above in a kind of perpetual summer, twenty-hour days but limited heat. The natives were built like Provo, tailored genes keeping them comfortably fat and perpetually warm. In essence, Beringa was an inspired apartment complex, lovely in every superficial way.
The kind of work I hated most, I was thinking.
“This environment,” I heard, “is very much makeshift.”
I gestured at the tundra. “What happened?”
“Ula thought I would enjoy a grove of hot-sap trees.”
Grimacing, I said, “They wouldn’t work at all.” Ecologically speaking. Not to mention aesthetically.
“Regardless,” said Provo, “I purchased vats of totipotent cells, at no small cost, and she insisted on genetically tailoring them. Making them into a new species.”
“Easy enough,” I whispered.
“And yet.” He paused and sighed. “Yet some rather gruesome metabolites were produced. Released. Persistent and slow toxins that moved through the food web. My mammoths sickened and died, and since I rather enjoy mammoth meat, having been raised on little else—”
“You were poisoned,” I gasped.
“Somewhat, yes. But I have recovered nicely.” The nonsmile showed again, eyes pained. Bemused. “Of course she was scared for me and sorry. And of course I had to pay for an extensive cleanup, which brought on a total environmental failure. This tundra package was an easy replacement, and besides, it carries a warranty against similar troubles.”
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