Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  It seemed too soon when the cold started to settle on the land once more, with great pancakes of new ice clustering around the rim of the Tycho Sea.

  I summoned his friends, teachers, those who had loved him.

  I clung to the greater goal: that the atoms of gold and nickel and zinc which had coursed in Berge’s blood and bones, killing him like the mustard plants of Maginus—killing us all, in fact, at one rate or another—would now gather in even greater concentrations in the bodies of those who would follow us. Perhaps the pathetic scrap of gold or nickel which had cost poor Berge his life would at last, mined, close the circuit which would lift the first of our ceramic-hulled ships beyond the thick, deadening atmosphere of the Moon.

  Perhaps. But it was cold comfort.

  We ate the soup, of his dissolved bones and flesh, in solemn silence. We took his life’s sole gift, further concentrating the metal traces to the far future, shortening our lives as he had.

  I have never been a skillful host. As soon as they could, the young people dispersed. I talked with Berge’s teachers, but we had little to say to each other; I was merely his uncle, after all, a genetic tributary, not a parent. I wasn’t sorry to be left alone.

  Before I slept again, even before the sun’s bloated hull had slid below the toothed horizon, the winds had turned. The warm air that had cradled me was treacherously fleeing after the sinking sun. Soon the first flurries of snow came pattering on the black, swelling surface of the Tycho Sea. My seals slid back into the water, to seek out whatever riches or dangers awaited them under Callisto ice.

  Fossils

  WILLIAM H. KEITH, JR.

  Here’s a fast-paced and exciting study of different kinds of fossils that takes us to a tumultuous future Mars that’s in the midst of being terraformed whether all of its inhabitants want it to be or not … including some who are determined not to move no matter what.

  William H. Keith, Jr., is a science-fiction and technothriller writer who has published over fifty novels. His most recent novels include Semper Mars, as by “Ian Douglas,” and Diplomatic Act, in collaboration with Peter Jurasik. He lives in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

  1

  Norris, his nomen was, Paul Norris, which should link you the idea. Zet, firmative. A fuzzy scuzzy. An oldie, original-strain human, zero prosthetics and negative plants, not even so much as a companion. Oldie chronologically, too. The Net linked down with the dat—a nate date of 301.34. Eighty-eight stadyers? An eyeblink, sure, but going on pure biological, the geezie was old.

  Old bio, and old neural processing, which is worse. Wetware mud, link me? Norris had been nated on Earth, down among the teeming billions. Emigrated to Pittsburgh, Mars, in 325. Married Ann Whittaker … had to link the Net to find what that meant. He was old.

  He wasn’t at his domie when I downtouched my floater, and, for a blink or two, I thought the geezie’d given his firmative after all and lifted out. That would’ve been the pos-linked thing to do, of course, but one thing I’ve assimmed from the evacuation is the rampant illogic of OS-homies. Wetware mud runs thick and it runs deep. They claim they’re conscious, but by the day before Impact, I was beginning to have my doubts.

  Look, I’m no bigot! The Old-Strains made us, after all, and their genes formed the basis of those parts of amortal bodies that are still organic. They gave us form, gave us shape, gave us the stars, for Life’s sake … and I’m not going to static them just because they’re slow. But talking to one of them can be like talking to an ancient gigabit processor, pre-AI: slow, single-minded, and positively complacent in its determination that it’s right, and never mind what the rest of the universe has to say.

  Where was he, anyway? Ah. When I shifted to IR, there was a heat smear to the south, against the cliff wall. Couldn’t tell what he was doing, but it had to be him. Everyone else, amortal, AI, and human, had been evacuated from this part of the Valles days ago. Everyone but him.

  I took a sec, then, to scan the scenic. Oldies claim we don’t feel like they do. Zet. Untrue. If anything, we feel more … deeper, sharper, truer, keener, with more range and grasp and holosense than their brains can process, but it’s all in control and it kicks in when we decide. I’ve seen Saturn’s rings and I’ve skimmed the cloudtops of Jove, watched a double sunrise from the north rim of the Caloris Basin and looked back at a shrunken, void-lonely Sol from a tumbling ice mountain in the remotes of the Kuiper Belt. I’ve seen. I’ve recorded. I’ve felt.

  Paul Norris had planted his domie in scenic intensivity. Eos Chasma—the Chasm of the Dawn—gold-red cliffs like holos I’ve DLed of Earth’s Grand Canyon, but three times deeper. It was already dark down here at the bottom, but the upper third of those cliffs gleamed in the sunset like firestruck opal and red-banded gold. For twenty-one stadyers, he’d lived in this same spot, on the rock-scattered regolith floor of the Eos Chasma, a few hundred mets from the south wall. Side channel, observation: the canyon floor base level here registered at the minus three-kil line, and the surrounding clifftops soared almost vertical to plus two or three kils. Six kilometers is a long way down, deep enough that there were crevasses and deepfolds that never saw the sun even at local noon on the equinox, and I figured that old Paul had chosen the spot for a ready source of fossil ice. I was right, as it turned out, but not for the reason I thought.

  Anyway, it was the chasm’s depth that was the problem. My timesense told me we had another seven hours fourteen before a quite literal hell broke loose. I had to reach him, somehow, and I was just now realizing that I didn’t understand humans nearly as well as I’d thought when I volunteered for this.

  I gave his domie a light scan first. It hadn’t been much to begin with—a Type 12 Mars hut, a steel and durplast cylinder sliced in half down the long axis, twelve mets long and maybe four wide. Airlock on one end, a fusion pod and air bleeder on the other. External strap-on tanks for air reserves and water. State of the colonizing art fifty years ago, but no room for the amenities. Scarcely room for visitors, if it came to that.

  The geezie had been busy, though. He’d used a digger to excavate all around the hut, clear down to the slab, and then, Life alone knows how, he’d rigged monomol cables around the thing, constructed a block and tackle suspended from a homemade gantry, and somehow rolled the whole thing over on its back, round side down, slab side up. He had a ladder rigged from the side of the hole going down to his airlock entrance, so he could get in and out. Why? It made no sense.

  There were other strangenesses. An old lobber rested in the sand, stripped and partly dismantled. A crude sign had been erected on a post nearby, hand-painted on precious wood salvaged from a cargo pallet long ago: NORRIS ENTERPRISES. Directional markers were fixed to the pole beneath. One pointed west: PITTSBURG, MARS—3598 KM, it read. The other angled almost straight up: PITTSBURG, PA. 230,000,000 km (MEAN).

  That made no sense, either. Was it possible that Paul was suffering from dementia? Extreme biological age will do that to oldies who are isolated and not taking their insurance meds. We might be able to do something for him then, if that was the case.

  I would know more when I spoke with him. I opened channel 4, standard suit-to-suit, to give him a call.

  “Chriiiiiissst, what a beauty!” His voice, coming over the radio link, startled me. I hadn’t thought he’d noticed my arrival … but a few seconds later I realized that he was unaware of my presence. He was talking to … someone else.

  “You remember the first one of these we found, Ann?” he asked aloud. “That was … what? A couple of months after we came here. We were still working for the Arean Museum and living in that little co-op hab on the South Side of Pittsburgh. Remember? The first site we started prospecting, over in Ius Chasma. It was just a little one, the size of your little finger, but it was perfect. Perfect! Fetched a decent price up in Denver-Olympus, too, as I recall. Ayuh. Gave us the stake we needed t’get out of six-to-a-room and set up on our own.”

  His speech was slow … slow, like the rambling dr
awl of a voice-recording played at quarter speed. Wetware mud. As I walked toward him, I adjusted my processing cycles, slowing my thought … and my speech. I’d forgotten how slow OS brains could be. I would have to adjust my linguistic paradigms as well to embrace his oldie dialect and narrow my speech to a single channel, or he would never understand me.

  “Then there was that spirelliate the girls found,” he went on, “that spring in Tithonium. That was a find! Remember how they bounced in that afternoon, all excited about that ‘funny, twisty thing’ they’d spotted high up among the rocks … ?”

  “Citizen Norris?” I said, interrupting his monologue.

  “Who the hell’s that?” His voice sounded quicker now, with a bright snap of emotion that was probably surprise.

  I downshifted my cycles again, trying for a match. Ahead, the heat smear shifted and moved, and I switched to visual optics. Norris was a small man, clumsy in an ancient Model 15 Marsuit, with a blue helmet bright against the rust-red rock of the cliff wall. His digger, an even more ancient wheeled robexcavator, crouched at his side, illuminating whatever he’d been working on with a glare of light.

  “Excuse the interruption, Citizen Norris.” Zet, communication at this level was glacially slow! “I am … call me Cessair. I would like to speak with you, if I may.”

  “Well, I can’t say I care t’talk t’you!” he said. He waved a laser cutter, not in a hostile manner but with definite emotional agitation. “Got nothin’ t’ say to th’ likes of you or your kind!” I was close enough now to see his eyes narrow behind the visor of his helmet. “Huh. Ain’t you cold?”

  I glanced down at myself. I’d grown that body hours before for his benefit, but I suppose the context was anomalous enough to startle him. My skin appeared to be steaming as the moisture in it sublimed into the thin, cold air. I focused briefly, and my body grew a light skinsuit and bubble helmet, the latest fash in Marswear. “Better?”

  “You Homo-A types’ve tinkered with the climate here quite a bit already,” he drawled, “but the air pressure’s still less than a hundredth of a bar, and the temp right now is, what? Minus ten, minus fifteen Celsius? A bit frosty for you t’be sportin’ about in nothin’ but your skin. ’Course, you ain’t really human, are ya?”

  They’d warned me in Deimos that he might be an anti-amortal bigot. “I am human,” I told him, “within the parameters of humanity as detailed in the Sentients’ Declaration of 68.83. My genetic makeup is entirely human, derived from Original-Strain DNA. Both my genetic and electronic prostheses are—”

  “Aw, cut yer yappin’. I don’t care where you came from, s’long as you git back there. The sooner the better.”

  “I merely wished to establish that I am human, Mr. Norris,” I told him, dropping the words one at a time and wondering how these people could communicate this way. “Your descendant, as it were. I simply have more control over my metabolism and internal systems than you do … and a more intimate association with various AI enhancements, communications links, and cybernetic and computer implant control assets.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all that. Homo amortalis. The new and improved Man. Get the hell out of my way. Yer blockin’ my light.”

  He was attempting to lever something up out of a shallow hole in the ground at the base of the cliff. The way the light gleamed from the smooth and translucent surface, I thought it must be water ice.

  “Can I help you?” Without waiting for an answer, I reached down and grasped the block he was struggling with. Allowing my fingers to heat momentarily, I melted a grip for myself, then hauled the block free, rolling it clear of the trench he’d dug. More ice glittered beneath the digger’s worklights, a buried treasure lost for a billion years beneath the ocher sand.

  “Woof!” he said, and the condensation of his breath momentarily clouded the lower half of his visor. “Thanks! Even here a chunk like that must weigh fifty kilos! And I’m not as spry as I used t’be, not by a damned long shot!”

  I glanced at his find, then took a more deliberate look. There was something there, shadows motionlessly coiled within the ice.

  “What is it?” I asked, letting my fingers drag across the cold, slick surface. “Is that—”

  The ice was filled with … shapes. Familiar shapes. One lay just beneath the surface, a dark and twisting shadow under the worklights. It looked like a Helica species … but the thing was larger and more finely wrought then any specimen I’d seen before, a wonder of two intricate, flattened, left-handed spiraling tubes, weaving about one another in an odd and exquisitely delicate mimicry of DNA. Spines bristled about the soft part of the body which sprouted finger-length tentacles.

  “Helica species,” Norris said, grinning behind his visor despite his earlier bad humor. “But I ain’t never seen one this big before. Long as my forearm! Ain’t she a beauty, Ann? Ain’t she a beauty?”

  “Who is this Ann you keep talking to?” I asked. “Our records indicate that Ann Whittaker Norris died twelve stadyers ago.”

  With a strength I’d not thought he possessed in that skinny frame, Norris rolled, levered, and hoisted the ice block up and onto the cargo bed of the robexcavator, gentling it down onto a sheet of insulation that he carefully tucked over and around his find. Without another word, he gathered up his tools, stowed them on the digger, then stalked back across the sand toward his Mars hut, brushing roughly against me as he passed. The robexcavator trundled off in his footsteps, and I had to jump aside to avoid being bumped.

  I glanced inside the trench he’d dug and could just make out other shapes in the ice a meter beneath the surface. Fossils are common on Mars. Microfossils found in an Antarctic meteorite originally derived from Mars linked us the first clue to the existence of an ancient Arean biota, in fact, back in ’27 or so, and the first manned explorations of the planet had discovered more … an entire zoo of organisms ranging from microfossils to giant helicas, creatures that had swum and crawled in the Martian ocean perhaps two to three billion years ago. Most were impressions in stone … but a number of ice fossils had been found as well, organisms frozen intact, like the mammoths uncovered from time to time in Alaskan and Siberian glaciers. The Martian seas had been teeming when their last, evaporating remnants had frozen solid and the atmosphere had thinned away to near nonexistence.

  Affirm. There’d been quite an intense debate revolving around the existence of those fossils whenever we’d proposed terraforming Mars. When the Boreal Sea once again covered the northern lowlands after being lost for two billion years beneath the shifting sands, a lot of Martian fossils would be lost, submerged to depths of a kilometer or more.

  Well, such relatively minor downchecks were inevitable in the face of transforming a planet. In exchange, Humankind would get a new, green world, as fair and as habitable as Earth herself. No more domes, habs, or Mars huts. No more pressure suits and air bleeders. It was an old dream, a dream that the AIs and Amortals are morphing into reality. It was pure coincidence that we’d named the program Project Eos—Eos Chasma, the Canyon of the Dawn; Project Eos, the dawn of new life on long-dead Mars.

  You would think the current inhabitants of the planet would welcome the change, even if they would not live to see it completed, even if they had to accept some slight inconvenience. Zet. OS-human selfishness and shortsightedness were incomprehensible at times … most times, in fact.

  Turning, I started back toward Norris’s upended Mars hut, wondering how it was possible to even attempt reasoning with such a creature.

  I found another wooden marker along the way, not far from the hut. It was a cross, painted white, with Ann Norris’s name and the oldstyle dates 2273-2347 hand-printed on the crosspiece. Twelve years of sandblasting had smoothed the wood to a silky sheen, but the cross had obviously been lovingly repainted many times.

  Our information had been correct. Ann Norris had died in 377. Did he really imagine he was talking to her?

  He said nothing as he powered down the digger near his Mars hut, off
loaded the ice block and stored it in a cryocase. There were five other such cases, I noticed, lined up in a row awaiting storage. At the entrance to the upside-down Mars hut, he stopped and seemed to dither. “I ’spose you want t’come inside.”

  Mars was still frontier world enough that hospitality rituals prevailed. You always invite the traveler in for some refreshment, some conversation, and a PLSS recharge. I’d been counting on that. “I need to talk to you, Paul. I promise that I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, but I must talk to you.”

  Could it be that he actually welcomed the company, just then? I’d expected an argument, hospitality rituals or no, with a savage demand that I get off his landhold, but he seemed to sag a little inside his suit, and then nodded. “C’mon in, then, if y’must. Mind yer step on the ladder.”

  As I walked toward the ladder, I noticed an interesting touch he’d added to the inverted Mars hut. On the corner, just beneath the overhang of the foundation slab, were the words, in broad slaps of red paint, NORRIS’S ARK. I had the feeling there was some humorous wordplay there, but I did not understand the point.

  It took time to cycle through the airlock. It was an old model, of course, and he had to be meticulously careful not to let the powder-fine, red Martian dust clinging to his suit enter his domie. Lots of the ancient Martian regolith is charged with hyperperoxides, and some of the salts are downright toxic. I got through simply by negating the static charge on my skinsuit; I considered shedding it again but remembered his reaction earlier and decided to keep it, all but the helmet. Paul Norris was old enough that he might still have mindtwists like nudity taboos. I needed his cooperation and didn’t want to stress him.

  I stepped through the inner lock close behind him, and it was like stepping into another world.

  The stink was overpowering, a mind-numbing assault of odors associated primarily with Staphylococcus epidermidis and a variety of fungi and molds, but mingled with others ranging from decaying fruit to human excreta. As overpowering as the odor was the sheer confused jumble of the Mars hut’s interior, crammed almost to closure by crates and storage canisters and packing material, by partially dismantled equipment, by tom-down partitions and a forest of multicolored wires spilling from consoles, power packs, and antique control circuits. Wires! I hadn’t realized that such things still existed on Mars.