A PLACE WITH SHADE
ROBERT REED
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 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 cold-water 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 o 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."
Popular on toxic worlds, I recalled. Heavy metals and other terrors were shunted away from the human foods.
"You see? I'm not a simple miser."
"It shouldn't have happened," I offered.
Provo merely shrugged his broad shoulders, admitting "I do love my daughter. And you're correct about some things. But the situation here, like anywhere, is much more complicated than the casual observer can perceive."
I looked at the drab hyperfiber sky -- the illusion of heavy clouds over a waxy low sun -- and I gave a quick appreciative nod.
"The area around us is littered with even less successful projects," Provo warned me.
I said, "Sad."
The old man agreed. "Yet I adore her. I want no ill to befall her, and I mean that as an unveiled warning. Ula has never existed with ordinary people. My hope is that I live long enough to see her mature, to become happy and normal, and perhaps gain some skills as a terraformer too. You are my best hope of the moment. Like it or not, that's why I hired you."
I stared out at his little sea. A lone gull was circling bleating out complaints about the changeless food.
"My daughter will become infatuated with you," I heard. "Which might be a good thing. Provided you can resist temptation, infatuation will keep her from being disillusioned. Never, never let her become disillusioned."
"No?"
"Ula's not her father. Too much honesty is a bad thing."
I felt a momentary, inadequate sense of fear.
"Help her build one workable living place. Nothing fancy, and please, nothing too inspired." He knelt and picked up a rounded stone. "She has an extensive lab and stocks of totipotent cells. You'll need nothing. And I'll pay you in full, for your time and your imaginary expertise."
I found myself cold for many reasons, staring skyward. "I've been to Beringa," I told Provo. "It's ridiculously cheery. Giant flowers and giant butterflies, mammoths and tame bears. And a clear blue sky."
"Exactly," he replied, flinging the stone into the water. "And I would have kept my blue sky, but the color would have been dishonest."
A mosquito landed on my hand, tasting me and discovering that I wasn't a caribou, flying off without drawing blood.
"Bleak fits my mood, Mr. Locum."
I looked at him.
And again he offered his nonsmile, making me feel, if only for an instant, sorry for him.
Beaty, say some artists, is the delicious stew made from your subject's flaws.
Ula Lei was a beautiful young woman.
She had a hundred hectare tent pitched beside her father's home, the place filled with bio stocks and empty crystal wombs and computers capable of modeling any kind of terraforming project. She was standing beside a huge reader, waving and saying "Come here," with the voice people use on robots. Neither polite nor intimidating.
I approached, thinking that she looked slight. Almost underfed. Where I had expected an ungraceful woman-child, I instead found a mannerly but almost distant professional- was she embarrassed to need a tutor? Or was she unsure how to act with a stranger? Either way, the old man's warning about my "toy" status seemed overstated. Taking a frail, pretty hand, feeling the polite and passionless single shake, I went from wariness to a mild funk, wondering if I had failed some standard. It wounded me when she stared right through me, asking with a calm dry voice, "What shall we do first?"
Funk became a sense of relief, and I smiled, telling her, "Decide on our project, and its scale."
"Warm work, and huge."
I blinked. "Your father promised us a thousand hectare tent, plus any of his robots --"
"I want to use an old mine," she informed me.
"With a warm environment?"
"It has a rock floor, and we can insulate the walls and ceiling with field charges, then refrigerate as a backup." She knew the right words, at least in passing. "I've already selected which one. Here. I'll show you everything."
She was direct like her father, and confident. But Ula wasn't her father's child. Either his genes had been suppressed from conception, or they weren't included. Lean and graced with the fine features popular on tropical worlds, her body was the perfect antithesis of provo's buttery one. Very black, very curly hair. Coffee-colored skin. And vivid green eyes. Those eyes noticed that I was wearing a heavy work jersey; I had changed clothes after meeting with Provo, wanting this jersey's self-heating capacity. Yet the temperature was twenty degrees warmer than the tundra, and her tropical face smiled when I pulled up my sleeves and pocketed my gloves. The humor was obvious only to her.
Then she was talking again, telling me, "The main chamber is eight kilometers by fifty, and the ceiling is ten kilometers tall in the center. Pressurized ice. Very strong." Schematics flowed past me. "The floor is the slope of a dead volcano. Father left when he found better ores."
A large operation, I noted. The rock floor would be porous and easily eroded, but rich in nutrients. Four hundred square kilometers? I had never worked on that scale, unless I counted computer simulations.
A graceful hand called up a new file. "Here's a summary of the world's best-guess history. If you're interested."
I was, but I had already guessed most of it for myself. Provo's World was like thousands of other sunless bodies in the Realm. Born in an unknown solar system, it had been thrown free by a near-collision, drifting into interstellar space, its deep seas freezing solid and its internal heat failing. In other regions it would have been terraformed directly, but our local district was impoverished when it came to metals. Provo's World had rich ores, its iron and magnesium, aluminum and the rest sucked up by industries and terraformers alike. A healthy green world requires an astonishing amount of iron, if only to keep it in hemoglobin. The iron from this old mine now circulated through dozens of worlds; and almost certainly some portion of that iron was inside me, brought home now within my own blood.
"I've already sealed the cavern," Ula informed me. "I was thinking of a river down the middle, recirculating, and a string of waterfalls --"
"No," I muttered.
She showed me a smile. "No?"
"I don't like waterfalls," I warned her.
"Because you belong to the New Traditionalist movement. I know." She shrugged her shoulders. "'Waterfalls are cliches,' you claim. 'Life, done properly, is never pretty in simple ways."'
"Exactly."
"Yet," Ula assured me, "this is my project."
I had come an enormous distance to wage a creative battle. Trying to measure my opponent, I asked, "What do you know about NTs?"
"You want to regain the honesty of the original Earth. Hard winters. Droughts. Violent predation. Vibrant chaos." Her expression became coy, then vaguely wicked. "But who'd want to terraform an entire world according to your values? And who would live on it, given the chance?"
"The fight people," I replied, almost by reflex.
"Not Father. He thinks terraforming should leave every place fat and green and pretty. And iron-hungry too."
"Like Beringa."
She nodded, the wickedness swelling. "Did you hear about my little mistake?"
"About the hot-sap trees? I'm afraid so."
"I guess I do need help." Yet Ula didn't appear contrite. "I know about you, Mr. Locum. After my father hired you -- I told him NTs work cheap -- I ordered holos of every one of your works. You like working with jungles, don't you?"
Jungles were complex and intricate. And dense. And fun.
"What about Yanci's jungle?" she asked me. "It's got a spectacular waterfall, if memory serves."
A socialite had paid me to build something bold, setting it inside a plastic cavern inside a pluto-class world. Low gravity; constant mist; an aggressive assemblage of wild animals and carnivorous plants. "Perfect," Yanci had told me. Then she hired an old-school terraformer -- little more than a plumber -- to add one of those achingly slow rivers and falls, popular on every low-gravity world in the Realm.
"Yes, Mr. Locum?" she teased. "What do you want to say?"
"Call me Hann," I growled.
My student pulled her hair away from her jungle-colored eyes. "I've always been interested in New Traditionalists. Not that I believe what you preach . . . not entirely . . . but I'm glad Father hired one of you."
I was thinking about my ruined jungle. Fifty years in the past, and still it made my mouth go dry and my heart pound.
"How will we move water without a river and falls?"
"Underground," I told her. "Through the porous rock. We can make a string of pools and lakes, and there won't be erosion problems for centuries."
"Like this?" She called up a new schematic, and something very much like my idea appeared before us. "I did this in case you didn't like my first idea."
A single waterfall was at the high end of the cavern.
"A compromise," she offered. Enlarging the image, she said, "Doesn't it look natural?"
For a cliche, I thought.
"The reactor and pumps will be behind this cliff, and the water sounds can hide any noise --"
"Fine," I told her.
"-- and the entranceway too. You walk in through the falls."
Another cliche, but I said, "Fine." Years of practice had taught me to compromise with the little points. Why fight details when there were bigger wars to wage?
"Is it all right, Mr. Locum?" A wink. "I want both of us happy when this is done. Hann, I mean."
For an audience of how many? At least with shallow socialites, there were hundreds of friends and tagalongs and nobodys and lovers. And since they rarely had enough money to fuel their lifestyles, they would open their possessions to the curious and the public.
But here I could do my best work, and who would know?
"Shall we make a jungle, Hann?"
I would know, I told myself.
And with a forced wink, I said, "Let's begin."
Terraforming is an ancient profession.
Making your world more habitable began on the Earth itself, with the first dancing fire that warmed its builder's cave; and everything since -- every green world and asteroid and comet -- is an enlargement on that first cozy cave. A hotter fusion fire brings heat and light, and benign organisms roam inside standardized biomes. For two hundred and ten centuries humans have expanded the Realm, mastering the tricks to bring life to a nearly dead universe. The frontier is an expanding sphere more than twenty light-years in radius – a great peaceful firestorm of life -- and to date only one other living world has been discovered. Pitcairn. Alien and violent, and gorgeous. And the basic inspiration/or the recent New Traditionalist movement. Pitcairn showed us how bland and domesticated our homes had become, riddled with cliches, every world essentially like every other world. Sad, sad, sad.
Here I found myself with four hundred square kilometers of raw stone. How long would it take to build a mature jungle? Done simply, a matter of months. But novelty would take longer, much to Provo's consternation. We would make fresh species, every ecological tie unique. I anticipated another year on top of the months, which was very good. We had the best computers, the best bio-stocks, and thousands of robots eager to work without pause or complaint. It was an ideal situation, I had to admit to myself. Very nearly heaven.
We insulated the ice ceiling and walls by three different means. Field charges enclosed the heated air. If they were breached, durable refrigeration elements were sunk into the ice itself. And at my insistence we added a set of emergency ducts, cold compressed air waiting in side caverns in case of tragedies. Every organism could go into a sudden dormancy, and the heat would be sucked into the huge volumes of surrounding ice. Otherwise the ceiling might sag and collapse, and I didn't want that to happen. Ula's jungle was supposed to outlast all of us. Why else go to all of this bother?
We set the reactor inside the mine shaft, behind the eventual cliche. Then lights were strong, heating the cavern's new air, and we manufactured rich soils with scrap rock and silt from Provo's own little sea. The first inhabitants were bacteria and fungi set free to chew and multiply, giving the air its first living scent. Then robots began assembling tree-shaped molds, sinking hollow roots into the new earth and a sketchwork of branches meshing overhead, beginning the future canopy.
We filled the molds with water, nutrients, and nourishing electrical currents, then inoculated them with totipotent cells. More like baking than gardening, this was how mature forest could be built from scratch. Living cells divided at an exponential rate, then assembled themselves into tissue-types -- sapwood and heartwood, bark and vascular tubes. It's a kind of superheated cultivation, and how else could artists like me exist? Left to Nature's pace, anything larger than a terrarium would consume entire lives. Literally.
Within five months -- on schedule -- we were watching the robots break up the molds, exposing the new trees to the air. And that's a symbolic moment worth a break and a little celebration, which we held.
Just Ula and me.
I suggested inviting Provo, but she told me, "Not yet. It's too soon to show him yet."
Perhaps. Or did she want her father kept at a distance?
I didn't ask. I didn't care. We were dining on top of a rough little hill, at the midpoint of the cavern, whiteness above and the new forest below us, leafless, resembling thousands of stately old trees pruned back by giant shears. Stubby, enduring trees. I toasted our success, and Ula grinned, almost singing when she said, "I haven't been the bother you expected, have I?"
No, she hadn't been.
"And I know more about terraforming than you thought."
More than I would admit. I nodded and said, "You're adept, considering you're self-taught."
"No," she sang, "you're the disappointment."
"Am I?"
"I expected . . . well, more energy. More inspiration." She rose to her feet, gesturing at our half-born creation. "I really hoped an NT would come up with bizarre wonders --"
"Like an eight-legged terror?"
It had been her odd idea, and I'd dismissed it twenty times before I realized it was a game with her. She wanted an organism wholly unique, and I kept telling her that radical tailoring took too much time and too frequently failed. And besides, I added, our little patch of jungle wasn't large enough for the kind of predator she had in mind.
"I wish we could have one or two of them," she joked.
I ignored her. I'd learned that was best.
"But don't you agree? Nothing we've planned is that new or spectacular."
Yet I was proud of everything. What did she want? Our top three camivores were being tailored at that moment -- a new species of fire-eagle; a variation on black nightcats; and an intelligent, vicious species of monkey. Computer models showed that only two of them would survive after the first century. Which two depended on subtle, hard-to-model factors. That was one of the more radical, unpopular NT principles. "The fit survive." We build worlds with too much diversity, knowing that some of our creations are temporary. And unworthy. Then we stand aside, letting our worlds decide for themselves.
"I wish we could have rainstorms," she added. It was another game, and she waved her arms while saying "Big winds. Lightning. I've always wanted to see lightning."
"There's not enough energy to drive storms," I responded. The rains were going to be mild events that came in the night. When we had nights, in a year. "I don't want to risk -- "
"-- damaging the ice. I know." She sat again, closer now, smiling as she said, "No, I don't care. It's coming along perfectly."
I nodded, gazing up at the brilliant white sky. The mining robots had left the ice gouged and sharp, and somehow that was appropriate. An old violence was set against a rich new order, violent in different ways. A steamy jungle cloaked in ice; an appealing even poetic dichotomy. And while I looked into the distance, hearing the sounds of molds being tom apart and loaded onto mug-rails, my partner came even closer, touching one of my legs and asking, "How else have I surprised you?'
She hadn't touched me in months, even in passing.
It took me a moment to gather myself, and I took her hand and set it out of the way, with a surety of motion.
She said nothing, smiling and watching me.
And once again, for the umpteenth time, I wondered what Ula was thinking. Because I didn't know and couldn't even guess. We had been together for months, our relationship professional and bloodless. Yet I always had the strong impression that she showed me what she wanted to show me, and I couldn't even guess how much of that was genuine.
"How else?" she asked again.
"You're an endless surprise," I told her.
But instead of appearing pleased, she dipped her head, the smile changing to a concentrated stare, hands drawing rounded shapes in the new soil, then erasing them with a few quick tiger swipes.
I met Provo behind the waterfall, in the shaft, his sturdy shape emerging from the shadows; and he gave me a nod and glanced at the curtain of water, never pausing, stepping through and vanishing with a certain indifference. I followed, knowing where the flow was weakest --where I would be the least soaked – and stepped out onto a broad rock shelf, workboots gripping and my dampened jersey starting to dry itself.
The old man was gazing into the forest.
I asked, "Would you like a tour?" Then I added, "We could ride one of the mag-rails, or we could walk."
"No," he replied. "Neither."
Why was he here? Provo had contacted me, no warning given. He had asked about his daughter's whereabouts. "She's in the lab," I had said, "mutating beetles." Leave her alone, he had told me. Provo wanted just the two of us for his first inspection.
Yet now he acted indifferent to our accomplishments, dropping his head and walking off the rock shelf and stopping then looking back at me. And over the sound of tumbling water, he asked, "How is she?"
"Ula's fine."
"No troubles with her?" he inquired.
It was several weeks after our hilltop celebration, and I barely remembered the hand on my leg. "She's doing a credible job."
Provo appeared disappointed.
I asked him, "How should she be?”
He didn't answer. "She likes you, Mr. Locum. We've talked about you. She's told me, more than once . . . that you're perfect."
I felt a sudden warmth, and I smiled.
Disappointment faded. "How is she ? Speaking as her teacher, of course."
"Bright. Maybe more than bright." I didn't want to praise too much, lifting his expectations. "She has inspirations, as she calls them. Some are workable, and some are even lovely."
"Inspirations," he echoed.
I readied some examples. I thought Provo would want them, enjoying this chance to have a parent's pride. But instead he looked off into the trees again, the stubby branches sprouting smaller branches and fat green leaves. He seemed to be hunting for something specific, old red eyes squinting. Finally he said, "No." He said, "I shouldn't tell you."
"Tell me?"
"Because you don't need to know." He sighed and turned, suddenly older and almost frail. "If she's been on her best behavior, maybe I should keep my mouth shut."
I said nothing for a long moment.
Provo shuffled across the clearing, sitting on a downed log with a certain gravity. The log had been grown in the horizontal position, then killed. Sitting next to him, I asked, "What is it, Mr. Lei?"
"My daughter."
"Yes?"
"She isn't."
I nodded and said, "Adopted."
"Did she tell you?"
"I know genetics. And I didn't think you'd suppress your own genes."
He looked at the waterfall. It was extremely wide and not particularly tall, spilling onto the shelf and then into a large pond. A pair of mag-rails earned equipment in and out on the far shore. Otherwise little moved. I noticed a tiny tag-along mosquito who wouldn't bite either of us. It must have come from the tundra, and it meant nothing. It would die in a few hours, I thought; and Provo suddenly told me, "Adopted, yes. And I think it's fair to tell you the circumstances."
Why the tension?
"I'm quite good at living alone, Mr. Locum. That's one of the keys to my success." He paused, then said, "I came to this world alone. I charted it and filed my claims and defended it from the jealous mining corporations. Every moment of my life has gone into these mines, and I'm proud of my accomplishments. Life. My metals have brought life and prosperity to millions, and I make no apologies. Do you understand me?"
I said, "Yes."
"Few people come here. Like that freighter that brought you, most of the ships are unmanned." Another pause. "But there are people who make their livelihood tiding inside the freighters. Perhaps you've known a few of them."
I hadn't, no.
"They are people. They exist on a continuum. All qualities of human beings live inside those cramped quarters, some of them entirely decent. Honest. Capable of more compassion than I could hope to feel."
I nodded, no idea where we were going.
...
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