I decided to wait for the interrogatories. Two hundred and thirty years had gone by. I could last another few minutes.
“This is still part of the Reset 1 transmission. Interrogatories follow. Question one: Was shutdown of computer functions at your end a matter of policy, or result of an accident? Please explain. You should know that Homeworld policy requires maintaining computer functions as an adjunct to colonization of Blue World. Is this fact acknowledged by current on-site leadership?”
“Probably not,” I answered, thinking of Comrade Basho’s warning, confirmed later by Lady Midori’s diatribe against Comrade Kazumi. The Suppressionists meant to shut down the computer after Blue World was terraformed. Now that had happened.
No. Now it had unhappened. I was alive. The year was 3405. Forty thousand kilometers below me spun a living world. Oxygen. Grass. People.
“My name is Yoshi Yasoda. My last memories are from 3175, when I was murdered because of my opposition to Suppressionist policies. I’m absolutely sure Lady Midori never intended me to come back to life. You have transmitted a signal restarting the Geosync computer, which was shut down on purpose. I assume this was done twenty or more years ago, to get rid of a place they’d given over to madness and exile.”
I collected my thoughts. “I will respond to each of your interrogatories, but my priority is to take control of Geosync, so there can be no further shutdowns. I may or may not be the only soul left up here in virtuality.”
I invoked a console. My green-blue Ready State Zero now showed in a window framed by bars and buttons. I touched SYSTEM, and then SETUP. While the voice spoke interrogatory two, I made sure this place belonged to me. I reestablished contact with sixty-four regional depots. The machines of Blue World acknowledged my signals.
“Interrogatory two. Question: Please describe your understanding of Covenant of 2344, which lays out contractual obligations between Earth and all future outsystem colonies.”
I collected my thoughts. “Will I have to wait twenty-one years to find out about this Covenant? I’ve never heard of it before. Our starship launched in 2085. If factions among us participated in putting together a covenant with Earth, I don’t know who they were. Can we be bound by a covenant we never made? On the other hand, we can be reasonable. Some of us, anyhow.”
The voice persisted with four other interrogatories. Then it spoke again. “Pause. Terms of Covenant of 2344 follow in five minutes.”
I waited five minutes and listened to a forty-minute drone. We of Blue World had two choices. At some future time we could pay Earth the costs of our starship, plus exorbitant interest. Or we could supply our homeworld with scientific information, running experiments under distant direction.
Of course, primitive hunters and fisherfolk could do neither of these two things, and so our Suppressionist leadership had ignored all past noise about “covenants” with Earth. After all, how could Earth enforce their terms?
Lady Midori and Lord Hideyaki hadn’t even brought Earth’s demands up for debate. The home world was ten-point-six light-years away! They were fools to think of imposing an interstellar regime across such distances!
Ignoring the demands of Earth, the Suppressionists continued to ask for genetic updates and the latest terraforming technology. Earth obliged. They were too weak-willed to withhold anything, though they persisted in their futile claims.
Not so futile, it turned out. Earth’s gifts came with a taint. They weren’t entirely powerless. A signal from Earth had restarted the Geosync computer. I came to life, and why shouldn’t I be an ally? Why shouldn’t I do Earth’s work for them? They’d furnished everything I could ask for, every weapon except the resolution to enforce their Covenant, and out of my hate for Lady Midori I could supply that lack.
I set to work. Region 14 had robots in inventory, from days before bodies of flesh could work in Blue World’s formerly poison atmosphere. Most were in decent shape. After securing Geosync against mad monsters and Suppressionist intruders, I radioed my soul down to reality. I used Vat 14 to fill a few dozen ampules with the latest genetic updates from Earth.
Depot 14 was buried under a mound of earth and rubble. I exited by a tunnel secret only from the outside. This was a new age, and wonderful to see. Blue World was green and buggy, the air still rich in carbon dioxide. Distances tended to blur in the humid haze.
The nearest village lay in a cove a dozen kilometers away. The walk was pleasant. I startled a few deer, and saw the dried turds of other large mammals. The trees around me were fully mature, although their root systems were shallow. Every strong wind took a few of them down, so that new trails veered from the old. Zigzags made the walk a long one.
Epsilon Eridani was dimmer than Sol, though Blue World was closer, so it showed a larger disk. It gave off a warm yellow light. The landscape was beautiful. I almost hoped that the vatling villagers were happy living in this wilderness, but I knew that wasn’t possible under present circumstances. If they’d come out of the vats the same time my Geosync computer had shut down, they’d have been sexually mature for many years. They were men and women full of the energies of life—but where were the babies? If this question didn’t bother them, it would bother the hell out of the Suppressionists hidden among their numbers.
Where were the babies? Thanks to a codicil snuck into one of Earth’s genetic updates, there would be no children born to human vatlings, except those I injected.
Beware the gifts of Earth. But then I saw the ungifted village—muddy paths and woven leaf-and-wicker huts, and naked people burned brown by the sun and dirty with smoke, eyes wide with the fear of me. Women shrieked and ran. A crippled man hobbled after them, down toward the sea.
I entered Suppressionism paradise, and to the inhabitants I was a battered metal monster four meters high. A woman crawled out of her hut. She seemed older than the others. Her hair was unkempt, and she’d lost an eye. She looked around, saw she was alone, and approached me. “Who are you?”
“Yoshi Yasoda. I’ve come to teach good things, and make these people fertile. Who are you?”
She paused. “Does it matter?” she asked softly.
“Do you know where I might find my friends? Kaiko Ieyamatsu? She was a deep gamer. One of the group from Chyle. What about Ayano?” I asked.
“We sent them to Regions 19 through 24. All those misfits, and the ones Ayano found in her virtual prowlings. They have their own small continent. Your political friends live among them.”
The woman sagged back. “I suppose this is your victory. We couldn’t even contact Earth to beg for help. We shut down the computer, and couldn’t turn it on again. These last years the curse became clear. No natural children. Each generation we’d have to breed from the vats, never enough to fill this world. Never enough to create a new culture on a new planet. Thank God you’ve come. It’s a miracle, and the bitterest moment of my long life.”
“This wasn’t my idea,” I said. “Neither the curse, nor my coming back to life.”
The woman pondered. “Of course not. You were always a heroic martyr. Your deaths were always sincere.” She waved toward the sea. “I’ll bring them home to the village. Make your injections, and talk all you like. I’m done with trying to stop you, Yoshi. Make them copycats of Earth, and all that Earth has ever done.”
“What theology have they created on their own?” I asked. “What kind of culture?”
She shrugged. “They talk about the Other World. About coming out of a hole in the ground. I take it these ideas are based on memories of the vats in Depot 14, from before we taught them language. Mostly they talk about the good-luck spirits in one place, and the bad-luck spirits in another. When it’s been dry too long, and it rains, they dance in celebration. With these roofs they’ll get wet anyhow. Why not make the best of it?” She shivered. “I don’t suppose you get cold. Keep the fires burning. I’ll be back.”
After a time she fetched the villagers home. Hunters and gatherers straggled in, bringing the total to twe
nty-three. I gave them my name, and they submitted to my injections. When it got dark, I pointed out Sol. It was a bright star, only ten-point-six light-years away, though too close to the horizon to be spectacular.
I pointed out another light, glowing again after twenty years of darkness. “We call it Geosync. It was our starship and we lived there a thousand years. Then we made this world for you. But we couldn’t have done it without help from your brothers and sisters on Earth. They want you to talk to them, and tell them what it’s like here. Your children will learn how to do that. They’ll have radio. I’ll come back and teach them.”
The vatling villagers told me stories of their own lives and wonders, and asked questions. In all our volleys of talk I said nothing about the Suppressionists. If the one-eyed woman wanted to live and die with her past a secret, it was better that way. It was better than being Lady Midori. Ignoring her, I left. I hiked by starlight, and transmitted my soul eastward to Region 19.
I paused at the halfway point up in Geosync. Any messages? I broadcast my sentences, as I will continue to do, in hopes my timing will someday hit home. Maybe my old friend is alive. Maybe Ayano found Comrade Kazumi and took her to Region 19’s continent, but I had to consider the possibility that Kazumi was still lost in revived virtuality.
It’s not likely then that she’s a sane and cheerful roadster. It pained me to think of her as obsessed with revenge or her “perversions,” but I couldn’t give up hope. “Comrade Kazumi, it’s Yoshi. Come on down to Blue World. It’s ours now, and we need your help.”
I gave Region 19 as my current address, and radioed down. I couldn’t wait. I had other friends to enlist. We had a world of work to do.
Ecopoesis
GEOFFREY A. LANDIS
A physicist who works for NASA, and who has recently been working on the Martian Lander program, Geoffrey A. Landis is a frequent contributor to Analog and to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has also sold stories to markets such as Interzone, Amazing, and Pulphouse. Landis is not a prolific writer, by the high-production standards of the genre, but he is popular. His story “A Walk in the Sun” won him a Nebula and a Hugo Award in 1992, his story “Ripples in the Dirac Sea” won him a Nebula Award in 1990, and his story “Elemental” was on the Final Hugo Ballot a few years back. His first book was the collection Myths, Legends, and True History, and he has just published his first novel, Mars Crossing. He lives in Brook Park, Ohio.
In the ingenious and suspenseful novella that follows, he shows us that with a project as complex and large-scale as the terraforming of a whole world, what you don’t know not only can hurt you—it can quite likely kill you!
“I wonder why they call this the red planet,” I asked. The rebreather made my voice sound funny in my ears. “Looks like the brown planet to me.”
“You got a problem with brown, boy?” Tally said. Her voice was muffled by the rebreather she wore as well.
I turned but Tally wasn’t looking at me; she was watching the opposite direction, standing in a half-crouch. That position surely couldn’t be comfortable, but for her it looked completely easy and natural. Her head turned with a quick birdlike grace to glance now one way, now the other. Guarding our backs, I realized. Against what?
“Nothing wrong with brown, my opinion,” she said.
The more my eyes got used to the terrain, the more colors came out. Brown, yes, barren rocky brown plains and brown buttes and a brown stream frothing over a tiny waterfall. The hills were sharp-edged, looking as if they had been blasted out of bedrock the day before, barely touched by erosion. But in the brown were hints of other colors: a sheen of dark, almost purple, echoing the purple-grey of the cloudy sky, and even patches on the rocks where the amber shaded off to almost army-green.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Leah Hamakawa. She was, as always, two steps ahead of us. She was down on one knee in the dirt, her nose right up against a rock. She’d taken both her gloves off and was scraping the surface of the rock inquisitively with her thumbnail.
I knelt down and scooped up a handful of rocks and dirt in my gloved hand. Close up, I could see that the brown was an illusion. The rocks themselves were the color of brick, but clinging to them were blotches of purple algae and tiny, dark amber specks of lichen. I pulled off one glove so I could feel the texture. Cold, with a rough grittiness. When I rubbed it between my fingers, the blotches of purple had a slimy feel. I was tempted to try pulling off the rebreather for a moment so I could put it right up to my nose and smell it, but decided that, considering the absence of oxygen in the atmosphere, that would not be wise.
“Beautiful, yeah, right,” Tally said. “You got rocks in your head, girl. Stinks. I seen prettier stinking strip mines.”
“It used to be red,” Leah said. “Long ago. Before the Age of Confusion; before the ecopoesis.” She paused, then added, “I bet it was beautiful then, too.”
I looked at the handful of dirt in my palm. Mars. Yes, perhaps it was beautiful. In its way.
My ears and the flesh of my face in the places not covered by the rebreather were getting cold. The temperature was above freezing, but it was still quite chilly. The air in the rebreather was stale, smelling slightly rotten and distinctly sulfurous. That indicated a problem with the rebreather; the micropore filters in the system should have removed any trace of odor from the recycled air. I thought again about taking the rebreather off and seeing what the air smelled like.
“Shit,” said Tally. “Anyway, you and Tinkerman about done gawking the scenery? We got a murder to solve. Two murders.”
“They’ve been dead for well over a year,” Leah said. “They can wait another day. God, isn’t this place magnificent?”
“Stinks,” said Tally.
The lander was bulbous and squat, painted a pale green, with the name Albert Alligator in cursive script next to the airlock door. Leah and I cycled through the airlock together. Langevin, the pilot who had shuttled us down, was waiting for us in the suiting atrium when the inner lock opened. He opened his mouth to say something, and then abruptly shut it, gagged, and turned away, his hand going up to cover his mouth and nose. He scrambled out of the atrium abruptly. I looked at Leah. She shrugged, and reached up to unfasten the strap of the rebreather from behind her head.
“Let me get that,” I said, and she turned around and bent her neck. Any excuse to touch her. Behind me, I could hear Tally cycling through the lock. The strap unfastened, and I gently took a finger and ran it along Leah’s cheek, breaking the seal of the rebreather to the skin.
Suddenly she broke away from me. “Oh, God!”
“What?”
“Take off your rebreather.”
Puzzled, I reached up, snapped the strap free, and pulled it forward over my head. The silicone made a soft poik! as the seal popped loose. I took a breath, and gagged on the sudden odor.
The smell was as if I’d been wading through a cesspool in the middle of a very rotten garbage dump. I looked down. My shoes were covered in brown. My hands were brown. One leg, where I’d knelt on the ground, had a brown spot on the knee. Leah was even dirtier.
Shit.
Tally popped through the lock, accompanied by a fresh burst of fecal odor. I held my nose and suppressed my instinct to gag.
“Of course,” said Leah. “Anaerobic bacteria.” She thought for a second. “We’re going to have to find some boots, and maybe overalls. Leave them outside when we come in.”
I started to giggle.
“What’s so goddam funny?” Tally said.
“I’ve decided you’re right,” I told her. “Mars stinks. Take off your rebreather. You’ll see.”
The utility landing platform was a hexagonal truss plate with small rocket engines mounted on three of the six corners. The hab-and-lab module that Spacewatch was delivering for our stay was strapped on the top. It hovered in the cloudy sky like a flying waffle-iron. Langevin guided it in by remote control, setting it down in the sandy valley a hundred meters from the ruins
of the earlier habitat. His landing was as neat and as unconcerned as a man passing a plate of potatoes. Still operating by remote control, he unstowed the power crane, lifted the habitat off the landing platform and lowered it gently to the ground. The habitat itself was an unpainted aluminum cylinder, fixed with brackets onto a platform with an electromechanical jack at each corner to level it on uneven ground. It was a small dwelling for three people, but would be adequate for our stay.
“Man, I don’t envy y’all,” he said. He delicately pinched two fingers over his nose. “No surprise nobody comes here.” He shook his head. “Anything else y’all need?”
“How about the rover?” Leah asked.
“It’s still in transit from the Moon; won’t arrive for a few more days. When it gets here, I’ll send it right down.”
Tally was first one inside the habitat, of course. Even though it had just come down from space, like a cat, she had to sniff it out herself. After five minutes she waved us in.
The interior of the habitat was brand-new, the fixtures molded to the interior. Across from the airlock atrium was the air regeneration equipment, with three spherical pressure tanks painted blue to indicate oxygen, and three green-painted tanks of nitrogen to provide make-up gas. To the left was a combined conference room-and-kitchen area, and behind that the sleeping cubbies.
“Only two cubbies,” Tally said, “and a mite cozy ones at that. Guess we girls bunk down in one: give you the other all to yourself, Tinkerman.”
I couldn’t breathe for a moment. Somehow I managed to sneak a quick glance up. Tally wasn’t looking at me. She hadn’t yet realized that the silence was extending a bit too long. Leah glanced across at me. Her expression was neutral, curious, perhaps, as to what I would do. I couldn’t read her intention. I never could.
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