A History of Terraforming

ROBERT REED

The sprawling, vividly imaginative story that follows traces the protagonist, Simon, from his childhood on a newly settled Mars hundreds of years into an increasingly strange future. Simon is an “atum,” a terraformer, and each step in his career as he grows in knowledge and abilities showcases the strengths and weaknesses, the ethical as well as physical pros and cons, of terraforming, as the terraformers create new worlds—and sometimes destroy old ones as well.

Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986, and quickly established himself as one of the most prolific of today’s writers, particularly at short fiction lengths, and has managed 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 a half-dozen others equally as strong, count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the eighties and nineties; many of his best stories have been assembled in the collections The Dragons of Springplace and The Cuckoo’s Boys. He won the Hugo Award in 2007 for his novella “A Billion Eves.” Nor is he nonprolific as a novelist, having turned out eleven novels since the end of the eighties, including The Leeshore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, Sister Alice, and The Well of Stars, as well as two chapbook novellas, Mere and Flavors of My Genius. His most recent book is a new novel, Eater-of-Bone. Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.

MARS

Simon’s father started talking about nuts on walls, about how the seeds he was working with looked very much like wall nuts. Then he winked, handing over the wonder that he had been carrying in his big palm. “What do you think of this, Simon?” But before the boy could answer, his father cautioned him to use both hands and be especially careful. “Not because you might damage the seed,” the man said. “Or because it would ever hurt you. But certain objects are important, sometimes even sacred, and they deserve all the consideration and respect that we can possibly show for them.”

Considering how small it was, the seed was exceptionally heavy. It was black and hard as diamond but covered with small, sharp-edged pits. Against his bare palms, the object felt warm. Maybe the heat was leftover from where the seed was kept, or maybe it was warm in the same way that little boys were warm. Either answer might be true. He didn’t ask. He just held the object in his cupped hands and stared, wondering what would happen if the impossible occurred, if the seed decided to awaken now.

For one person, time passed.

Then his father asked again, “What do you think, Simon?”

The boy’s thoughts were shifting quickly, clinging to no single idea. He was telling himself that he wasn’t even three-years-old. But on the earth he would already be four, and every four-year-old that he knew enjoyed large, impressive opinions. But if he lived near Neptune, he wouldn’t be a month old and his father would never take him riding along on his working trips. And if this were Mercury, then Simon would be many years old, and because of certain pernicious misunderstandings about calendars and the passage of time, he believed that on Mercury he would be an adult. He was remembering how people said that he was going to grow up tall and handsome. It was as if adults had the power to peer into the future. They didn’t admit to children that they had this talent, but the truth often leaked out in careless words and unwanted glimpses. Simon liked the idea of peering into the future. Right now, he was trying to imagine himself living in some important, unborn century. The nearly three-year-old boy wanted to be a grown man entrusted with some very important job. But for the time being, riding with his father seemed important enough. That’s what he was thinking when he handed back that precious and very expensive seed, grinning as he said, “It’s delicious, Dad.” He had never been happier than he was just then.

“Do you know how it works?”

“Yes,” the boy claimed.

“No, you don’t,” his father warned. “It’s my job to find homes for these little buggers, and I barely understand them.”

That admission of ignorance made a deep impression. Quietly, Simon asked, “What do floor nuts look like?”

Puzzled, his father blinked and said nothing.

Simon pointed at the seed. “I’ve never seen a wall look like that.”

His father said, “Oh,” and then softly laughed. “It’s not two words. ‘Walnut’ is one word. It’s the seed made by a species of earth tree.”

“I know what trees are,” the boy boasted.

“You’ve seen the pictures, at least.” His father turned away, setting the heavy black wonder back into its important drawer. Then as he walked to the front of the rover, he added, “Here’s something else to think about: One of my seeds is quite a bit more complicated than any unborn tree. There’s more information packed inside that hull than normal DNA can hold. And considerably more power than roots and leaves would ever show on their own.”

Simon walked behind his father, looking through the wide windows. Mars was rocky and pale red, last night’s frost hiding in the coldest shade. The ground couldn’t have been rougher, yet the rover walked without rocking or lurching or jumping. High clouds and at least three mirrors looked down on them from the purple sky, and the skyhook known as Promise was straight ahead. Today the wind was blowing, moving hard enough to throw the smallest bits of dust. Dust was dangerous. The cold was dangerous. Mars liked to kill people, particularly careless children who didn’t listen to their fathers and other wise voices.

But the world wouldn’t be dangerous much longer, Simon thought.

For a long while, they rode toward Promise, but the slender tower didn’t come any closer. Then the AI driver took them around the flank of a low hill and over the lip of a worn-out crater, and suddenly they were looking into a wide basin filled with brilliant water ice.

“Is this the lake?” Simon asked.

His father was busy reading two different screens.

This must be their goal, the boy decided. But he thought it was best not to interrupt, his father busy with something that could only be important.

He sat on the nearest chair, watching everything.

The rover walked down to the shoreline. Out on the ice stood a little tower and another rover, and somebody was moving slowly in one direction, then another. The stranger was wearing a big lifesuit, the kind used by people planning to be outside for a long time. Someday Simon wouldn’t need a suit to walk in the open. Adults promised that in the future, he would be a tall, good-looking man and wear nothing but clothes and good shoes, and Mars would be the second earth, but even better.

Simon would live for hundreds of years. Everybody said so. And that was even if he counted his birthdays in Martian years.

“This isn’t right,” his father muttered.

The boy stood up and eased close to his father.

With a sigh, the man said, “They shouldn’t be here.”

“Who shouldn’t be?”

Father didn’t answer. Opening a channel, he identified his employer before asking, “What’s the hold up. You’re supposed to be gone.”

“Hey, John,” said a woman’s voice. “You’re talking to Lilly.”

Father’s name was John. “No,” he said quietly, but not softly. There was sharpness to that single tiny word. Then he sighed and reopened the channel, halfway smiling as he said, “I’m here with my son, Lilly.”

She said nothing.

Simon touched his father’s shoulder.

The man smiled at him and winked, and he was still smiling when he said, “I thought you went off on leave.”

“Came back early,” the woman said.

His father wasn’t looking at either screen or what was ahead. He was still smiling, but something had changed about his face.

“How old is little Simon now?” the woman asked.

“Four.” People born on the earth used their old calendar. That was one reason Simon had trouble understanding what time meant.

“Where’s his mother?”

“Waiting at home. It’s just him and me.”

There was a brief silence. Then the woman said, “Understood.”

Father sat back. “Lilly? I was told your rig was going to be gone by now.”

“I’ve had some lousy troubles, John.”

The man’s face looked patient but not happy. “Troubles?”

“Two bits went bad on me. I’ve had one bit get contaminated at the site before, but never two.”

Their rover was walking on its crab legs, quickly marching across the frozen face of the lake. Simon imagined liquid water hiding under the thick white surface ice, and he thought of the cold mud beneath the water. Then he remembered the guppies he left at home with his mother and baby sister. Someday he would take those fish and their babies and set them free. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? In his mind, he saw the ice turn to warm water and the sky was blue like on earth, and there were hundreds and millions of guppies swimming everywhere, all of their mouths begging for food.

“Are you close to finished?”

“Still drilling,” the woman reported.

“How deep are you?”

“Five kilometers, nearly,” she said.

His father mouthed one exceptionally bad word. Then with an angry tone, he said, “I’m sorry, Lilly.”

“You can’t wait one more day?”

“I’ve got my own schedule here.”

The woman didn’t respond.

After a minute, Father said, “I would, if I could. You know that. But they want me finishing this run in a week, and the kid has to get back.”

Still, the woman didn’t talk.

Father looked at Simon, preparing to tell him something.

But then Lilly’s voice returned. “I just put in a call to the Zoo.”

Father shook his head. Then softly and a little sadly, he said, “That won’t do any good, and you know it.”

“What are you talking about?” Simon asked.

Father closed the channel and said, “Shush,” and then opened it again. “All right, Lilly. The Zoo can get their lawyers working. We’re going to be official here. But why don’t you start pulling your bit? If you win your delay, I’ll let you put it back in and finish.”

“So your boy’s really there, is he?”

“Sure is.”

She asked, “Can he hear me?”

“Why?” Father asked, reaching for a button.

Then all of the sudden, she said, “Hello, Simon. Hi! I’m your dad’s very, very good friend, Lilly!”

*   *   *

There were rules about being alone. Alone inside a rover meant touching nothing except what belonged to him and what couldn’t be avoided. The AI driver watched Simon when his father was absent, and it watched his father when he worked outside. If something bad happened, the driver would find some way to help. But Mars was dangerous, and the worst things were always ready to happen. Before they left on this journey, Simon’s mother said exactly that to his father. “A seal fails, or you puncture your suit,” she said. Mom thought her boy was asleep, and even if he wasn’t, Simon couldn’t hear her talking at the far end of the tiny apartment. With a quiet urgent voice, she reminded her husband that one misstep might leave their son half-orphaned and two hundred kilometers from home. And what would happen then?

“The driver knows what to do,” his father had promised. “It sends out a distress call and starts walking toward the nearest settlement.”

“With Simon inside,” she said. “Terrified, and all by himself.”

“No need to mention I’m dead,” said his father. “Though that seems like the larger tragedy, if you ask me.”

“I don’t want the boy scarred,” she said.

Father didn’t respond.

“Scarred,” she repeated. And then again, she said, “Scarred.”

Simon didn’t want to be scarred, but he was definitely worried. His father walked slowly across the frozen landscape, wearing a lifesuit whiter than the ice beneath his boots. His clean-shaven head showed through the back of the helmet. His father’s friend stood beside her drill rig. Lilly was watching Simon at the window. A pair of small robots stood nearby, doing nothing. The drill was still digging, the clean bit clawing its way into the deep warm rock. Simon watched the cable twisting, and then he noticed his father waving a hand, and Lilly smiled at her friend and said words. Father turned, and Simon could see his mouth now. The adults were sharing a private channel, and both were talking at the same time. Then they quit talking. Several minutes passed where nothing was said. It felt like forever. Maybe they were waiting for something to happen. Maybe what would happen was something very bad. Simon remembered the story of a Zoo collector who cut into a cave filled with methane and water, and the foamy gas blew out of the hole and picked up one of his robots and flung it at him, killing him with the impact.

Just then, with chilling clarity, Simon understood that his father was about to die. Straightening his back, he made himself ready for the moment. Yet nothing happened. Nothing changed. The two adults resumed talking and then stopped talking, and Simon was desperately bored. So he dropped into the chair reserved for him, playing a game. He was the blue team; his enemies were purple. He started in one corner of the board, feeding and dividing and then spreading, and when he nudged against the purple blobs, he fought for position and the chance to make more blues.

When he stood again, his father was walking toward the rover. Simon had never seen anybody move that fast in a lifesuit. And Lilly had vanished. Where did she go? Then the airlock began to cycle, and Simon put down his game and sat again, staring at the little door at the back end of the cabin.

Even after a thorough cleaning, the woman’s suit smelled of peroxides and ancient dust. She stepped into the cabin smiling, helmet tucked under one arm. The woman was pretty. She was darker than most of the people that he’d seen before. In the cabin air, her voice sounded warm and kind and special, and the first words she said to him were, “You look a fine smart young man.”

He liked this woman.

“Simon is a wonderful name,” she said.

He nodded and smiled back at her.

“Your father’s told me quite a lot about you,” she offered. Then her face changed, and she said, “He’s being very unreasonable, you know.”

Once again, the airlock started through its cycle.

“Simon,” she began. “Has anyone told you about the Zoo project?”

The boy nodded before he considered the question. But luckily, yes, he knew about the bug people. “My mom explained them to me.”

Lilly said nothing.

“They’re good-hearted soft souls,” he continued.

Slowly, she said, “I guess we are,” and then she added, “I’d like to believe we’re doing something good. Saving what Martians we can save before their world is gone forever.”

“Mars isn’t leaving,” he said.

“But their habitats will vanish. Some soon, and then the rest.”

“But we’re Martians too,” he said, repeating what he heard from every other adult.

“Except the native microbes were first,” she mentioned.

Simon shrugged, unsure how that mattered.

“They’re under us right now,” she began.

The airlock was pressurized, jets and determined vacuums struggling to clean his father’s mostly clean suit.

“Beneath us is a wonderland, Simon. A paradise.” Lilly’s voice was quick and serious. “Heat and flowing water and nutrients, plus fractures in the bedrock that are prime growing surfaces for thousands of native species. Pseudoarchaea and nanobacteria, viral cysts and maybe the largest population of hunter-molds anywhere. What I’m sampling is the Martian equivalent of a tropical rainforest. It’s a fabulous treasure, unique in the universe, and do you know what’s going to happen to it?”

Some of her words made no sense. But one new word piqued his curiosity, which was why Simon asked, “What’s a rain-forest?”

Lilly hesitated. “What do you think it is?”

“Water falling on trees,” he offered.

“That’s it.”

“Never stopping.”

“It rains a lot, yes.”

“That sounds awful,” he offered.

Now the airlock stopped cleaning its contents, and the inner door popped open. Father entered the room quickly, his gloves unfastening his helmet, eyes big and his mouth clamped into a hard long line.

“We’re talking about rain-forests,” Simon reported. Then to his new friend, he asked, “How can trees grow under falling water?”

“It isn’t like that,” she sputtered. Then she turned. “Hey, John. Hear back from the attorneys?”

“Not yet.” Father stopped and with a slow voice asked his son, “What else have you talked about?”

“Nothing,” Lilly said.

“The Zoo,” corrected Simon.

“Yeah, the Zoo,” she allowed. “I was just asking this fine young man what he knew about my work, and he reports that his mother says I’m soft but that I have a good heart.”

Was that what he told her? Simon didn’t think so.

Father looked at their faces, one and then the other.

“That’s all,” Lilly said cheerfully.

Father’s suit was bright and clean. He looked hot, which made little sense. He even seemed tired, although they hadn’t done anything today.

Finally, with a quiet little voice, he said, “Don’t.”

Simon couldn’t tell which one of them he was talking to.

Or was he saying, “Don’t,” to himself?

But with a tight, almost angry voice, Lilly asked, “Why would I? Why would I even think that? I have this sterling good heart that doesn’t wish ill on anybody, bacterial or otherwise.”

Simon still liked Lilly, but adults could be very peculiar. Was Lilly one of those peculiar adults?

Neither adult wanted to talk, and they wouldn’t look at each other. The floor seemed to be the most interesting area in the room, and they stared at it for a time, their mouths small and their eyes empty and both of them breathing quickly.

To break the silence, Simon announced, “I got to hold one of the seeds today. Dad let me do that.”

Even then, nobody spoke.

“Seeds are machines,” the boy reported. “They explode like bombs, and they’re very powerful, and inside them? They’ve got these little sacks, and the sacks get flung out into the hole made by the bomb, and they’re full of good young bugs that can do all sorts of neat, important things. Like growing fast and building these little, little roots that carry power like wires do, and the roots make it possible to heat up the crust fast and change the rocks to make our kinds of life happy.”

Without warning, Lilly said one awful word.

Father set his hand on her suit, on the back of her shoulder.

“Don’t touch me, John.”

Then Father said, “Leave us alone, Lilly.”

Four words, and none were loud. But Simon had never heard the man angrier than he sounded then.

“Suit up and go,” he told the woman.

But Lilly just shook her head. Then putting on a big peculiar smile, she said, “Simon? Want to hear something funny about your father and me?”

The boy wanted any reason to laugh. “Sure.”

“No,” said Father, stepping between them. “Suit up and go do your work, Lilly. I’ll tell my bosses something’s wrong at my end, that I’m not ready to plant. Do what you need. Is that fair enough for you?”

She said, “No.”

“What?”

Lilly kept watching Simon, the wild smile building on her pretty dark face. “I want you to help me, John. With the drilling, with the sampling. All of it.”

Father didn’t speak.

Then Lilly said, “Hey, Simon. You want your father to have a good heart, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“So what should he do? Help me or hurt me?”

“Help her, Dad,” the boy begged. “You’ve got to, Dad. What else can you do?”

*   *   *

624 Hektor

A little bird warned Simon about the impending rebellion.

Jackie was part African gray, with a good deal of genetic retooling and enough bio-linked circuitry to lift the parrot’s IQ to vote-worthy levels. Her job functions included companionship and extra eyes with which to keep watch over the sprawling farm, and she was excellent at both duties. But every living thing possesses its unsuspected skills. Wasn’t that what Simon’s professors warned when they addressed each new class of would-be atums? No matter how simple the genetics, an organism’s mind or the culture in which it was immersed, every created entity contained its fair share of surprises, flaws as well as those few talents that would, if they were too spectacular, screw up anyone’s blooming career.

“Warning signs are marching,” Jackie reported. “Small warnings, I’ll grant you. But I can’t shake the premonition of disasters on the loose.”

“Is it our sun?” Simon asked. Which wasn’t an unreasonable question, what with their reactor running past the prescribed one hundred and five percent rating. “You think the light’s about to fail?”

In twenty years, there had been two prolonged blackouts. Neither was Simon’s fault, though both were major disasters for the farm—two incidents that left cancerous reprimands tucked inside his life-file.

But the parrot clucked at his concerns, saying, “No, it’s not our sun.”

“Meat troubles?” Viruses, he feared. A herpes strain hitching rides on the nervous systems of new immigrants, most likely.

“No, the ribs-and-hearts are growing well. And the bacon is ahead of schedule.”

Nonetheless, Simon studied the terrain before them: The ancient crater was capped with a diamond dome, and fixed to the dome’s apex was a blazing fire that winked out for only a few minutes each day. Otherwise the basin was flooded with a simple but brilliant light. Limiting the radiant frequencies allowed for the efficient consumption of energy. The black-green foliage stank of life, healthy and always growing. Tallest were the pond-pods—sprawling low-gravity trees endowed with countless trunks holding up bowl-shaped basins filled with clean water, each pond infested with shrimp and fish, each covered with thin living skins so that the jostling of wind and animals never spilling what lay inside. As a young man, Simon helped design the first pond-pods, and since his arrival on Hektor, he had overseen countless improvements that allowed them to thrive in the carbonaceous soil. No accomplishment made him prouder. By contrast, the rib-and-hearts and bacons were routine commercial species, ugly by any aesthetics he cared to invoke. There were long days when the master of this farm wished he could cull and enhance according to his own tastes, creating something more satisfying than an efficient but bland food factory.

Patiently but forcefully, he asked again, “What’s wrong, Jackie?”

“Two humans were passing through,” the bird reported. “They were keeping under the canopy but avoiding the main trails. I didn’t recognize their faces, but they wore miner uniforms.”

“What did the miners do? Steal food?”

“They did nothing,” she said. “Nothing wrong, at least. But they didn’t sound like miners.”

Simon waited.

“They talked about fire.”

“Tell me,” he coaxed.

Against every stereotype, Jackie was an awful mimic. But she knew her limitations and didn’t try to reproduce either stranger’s voice. Instead, she summarized. “One said something about being worried, and then the other said it was going to happen soon, in thirty-three hours. He told his companion that the dogs were sleeping and the fire was set, and even if the chiefs knew about the plan, at this point nobody could stop what couldn’t be stopped.”

“I don’t understand any of that,” Simon confessed.

“Why am I not surprised?” One of Jackie’s unanticipated talents was for sarcasm. “At first, I wasn’t bothered. But fire scares me and I thought that mentioning the chiefs was worrisome.”

Simon agreed. In principle, every aspect of the colony was under their control, and if something was unknown to them—

“That’s why I followed the miners,” the bird volunteered.

“You said they weren’t miners.”

“Because they were strong. Two exceedingly muscular human beings.”

Only soldiers and recent immigrants retained their muscle tone. Simon had a willow-boned shape that came from minimal gravity and limited calories. “What else did they say?”

“Except for one time, they didn’t speak again,” she said. “But just before leaving the farm, the man turned to the woman and told her to smile. He said that McKall knows what he’s doing, and she should please damn well stop wasting her energy by imagining the worst.”

Simon said nothing.

Then Jackie pointed out, “You know McKall, don’t you?”

“I do,” he admitted. “In fact, he’s the atum who gave me this post.”

*   *   *

Two dark reddish asteroids lay snug against each other, producing 624 Hektor. The little world orbited the sun 60 degrees ahead of Jupiter, in that sweet Lagrange zone where a multitude of Trojan asteroids had swum for billions of years. Hektor was an elongated body spinning once in less than seven hours, and Simon had always believed that it was an ugly world. It didn’t help his opinion that he was living on the fringe of settled space, serving the chiefs and various corporations as little more than a farmer. In school, his test scores were always ample; he graduated as a qualified, perhaps even gifted atum—the professional name borrowed from the Egyptian god whose task it was to finish the unfinished worlds. But good minds only took their bodies so far. More coveted posts were earned through useful friendships and powerful mentors, and Simon’s career to date proved that he had neither. Anywhere else in the solar system would have been a happier fate: Mars was a dream, and the sunward asteroids and the moons of Jupiter were busy, important realms. Plus there was Luna now, and preliminary teams were plotting the terraforming of Venus. In contrast, Hektor was an isolated mining station, and not even a complete station at that. Once its facilities were finished, it would supply water and pure carbon to the inner system. But it was never intended to become an important destination, much less a site of major colonization. Barely fifty thousand intelligent souls lived on and inside its gloomy body, and the humans were a minority, most of them deemed also-rans and lost souls.

The main settlement had an official name, but locals referred to it as Crashtown—a grimy dense chaotic young city resting on the impact zone where two D-class asteroids were joined together. Riding beside a load of freshly harvested bananas and boneless minnows, Simon rode down to Crashtown. But he wasn’t sure of his intentions, his mind changing again and again. Then the police robot suddenly asked for his destination.

“The home of Earnest McKall,” Simon heard himself reply.

But that wasn’t good enough. For no obvious reason, security protocols had been heightened. The robot haughtily demanded to know a purpose for this alleged visit.

“I found his lost dog,” the young atum declared.

No dog was present, but the answer seemed to satisfy. Simon continued kicking his way into an exclusive tunnel, past robust gardens basking under earth-bright lights, endless arrays of flowers and cultured animal flesh repaying their considerable energy by making rainbow colors and elaborate perfumes.

“What if McKall isn’t at home?” Simon asked himself.

But he was, and the much older atum seemed pleased to find this unexpected guest waiting at his front door. “Come in, my boy. I was just about to enjoy an evening drink.”

“I don’t want to bother you,” Simon lied.

“No bother at all. Come in here!” McKall had always been a bony person. Simon once found a ninety-year-old image of him—a lean, shaggy boy of eight, bright eyes staring at the camera while the mouth looked smug and a little too full, as if he had just eaten something that wasn’t proper food. The grown-up version of that boy retained his youthful air, but the hair was a second or third crop, and it had come in thin and amazingly black. Most of McKall’s life had been spent on tiny worlds, and the lack of gravity along with a Methuselan diet had maintained the scrawny elegance of that lost child.

“Wine?” McKall offered.

“Thank you, no,” Simon responded.

The chief atum on Hector stood beside an elaborate bar—a structure trimmed with rare metals, in the middle of a huge room designed for nothing but entertaining. Yet he hadn’t bothered reaching for empty bottles, much less filling them. What he was doing was staring at Simon, and smiling, and something about that look and the silence told the guest that his presence was not unanticipated.

“My dog, is it?” asked McKall.

Simon flinched.

The smile sharpened. The man kicked closer, his voice flat and smooth and decidedly unrushed. “What do you know, my boy?”

Simon was nearly fifty, his own boyhood beyond reach.

“Hear some news, did you?”

“About dogs,” he reported.

McKall shrugged. “And what else?”

“Something is going to happen.”

“Happenings are inevitable. Do you have specifics?”

“Twenty-eight hours from now—”

“Stop.” A small hand lifted, not quite touching Simon on the chest. “No, you know nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Your dogs are sleeping,” Simon continued.

His host refused to speak. Waiting.

“And there’s something about a fire, too.”

The smile shrank, but the voice was friendlier. Curious. Perhaps even amused. “What about fire?”

“I’ve studied your writings, sir.” Habit forced Simon to nod slightly, admitting his lower status. “You like to equate metabolic activity with fire.”

“I’m not the only voice to use that allusion.”

“But as a young atum, you spent a great deal of time and energy complaining about the limits to our work. Every atum is shackled by draconian laws, you claimed. You said that life as we made it was just a smoldering flame. Your hope was to unleash the powers of the organic. Novel biochemistries, unique genetics, and ultraefficient scavenging the dead and spent. You were one of the loudest advocates of suspending the outmoded Guidelines, and only then would our young profession be able to produce a firestorm of life that would run wild across the universe.”

“I see.” McKall laughed quietly. Then again, he said, “I see.”

“What can’t the chiefs stop?”

Instead of answering the question, the atum posed his own. “Why do you believe that a skilled researcher—a man with major accomplishments—willingly came to this very remote place? Why would Earnest McKall ignore every lucrative offer, traveling all the way out here to this little chunk of trash and ice water?”

Simon said nothing.

“There are dogs,” McKall admitted. “Soon to be awakened, in fact. Decades of research and a series of camouflaged laboratories have produced more than a few revolutions, both in terms of productivity and plasticity.”

“You did this?”

“Not alone.” The atum shook his head, the rich black hair waving in the air. “I have a dozen brilliant associates working beside me, plus collaborators on twenty other worlds. Yes, I have a fine confident mind, but I’m not crazy with pride.”

“I’m one of your associates,” Simon pointed out.

“You are not, no. I would have included you, young man. In fact, that’s why I steered several likely employers away from your class’s hatch. I believed I could use your talents out here with me.”

“But I haven’t done anything.”

“Nothing at all,” McKall agreed. “Which was a surprise for me, I’ll admit. After your arrival, I kept careful watch over your work, and in particular, how you responded to authority. Honestly, I wasn’t impressed. I need boldness, genius. Competency without inspiration is fine for the commercial world, but not for souls dreaming the big dream.”

If Simon had been slapped, his face wouldn’t have felt warmer. He breathed heavily and slowly, and then despite every reserve of self-control, he began to weep, tears scattering from his reddened checks.

“But I like you anyway,” McKall continued. “And since you have no specific knowledge about my plans, and there’s no way to stop what is soon to begin, I will give you a gift. Use this chance to slip away. A transport leaves Hektor in four hours. There will be empty berths, and I advise that you take one.”

Simon turned as if to leave, then hesitated.

“You plan to take control over Hektor?” he muttered.

McKall laughed. “Haven’t you been paying attention? My goals are far more ambitious than this two-headed rock!”

*   *   *

Expecting to be stopped—by restraining hands or murderous weapons—Simon nonetheless hurried to Crashtown’s civil house. The highest-ranking chief seemed to be waiting for his arrival. He shook both of Simon’s hands and ushered him into a tiny office, and before Simon could speak, the chief told him, “Don’t worry. And certainly don’t panic. We know all about their plans.”

“You do? For how long?”

“Days now.” The chief shrugged. Feigning confidence, he reported, “We have McKall in sight, plus all of his lieutenants. And our security teams are minutes away from taking out both of his private labs.”

“Good,” Simon offered.

And that was when the chief quit smiling. Turning grim, he said to the farmer, “But I am curious: Why did you go to the atum’s home before coming to us?”

“I didn’t know anything,” Simon said.

“You were fishing for information?”

With as much conviction as he could manage, he said, “Yes. If I was going to report a crime that hadn’t happened, I needed details. Some reason for you to believe me.”

“A good enough answer,” the chief replied. “At least for the moment.”

Simon felt cold and weak. What mattered to him now was returning to his farm, to Jackie, and provided this trouble vanished, he would again take up his pivotal role in feeding this very small world. He was practically shaking with worries. “May I leave?” he risked asking.

“Until we know for certain, you cannot.”

Simon swallowed. “Until you know what for certain?”

That brought a tiny laugh, and then the ominous words, “Everything, of course. Everything.”

*   *   *

The attacks on the laboratories were launched, each blundering into carefully laid traps. McKall’s mercenaries were ready, and the parallel attempt to capture the ringleaders ended up netting nothing but holo images and robotic mimics. Then the rebels took over the local com-system. Their own attack would proceed on schedule, and simple decency demanded fair warning to civilians and the opportunity to escape by any means available. But the chiefs banned all travel. They quickly gathered their remaining forces, generating new plans up until that moment when the rumored “dogs” appeared. Secret tunnels reached deep inside Hektor’s smaller half, and out of them came hot-blooded monsters moving as blurs, eating flesh and laser bolts as they ran wild through Crashtown.

The ensuing chaos allowed Simon to escape. At the farm, he discovered three civil robots quickly setting up a small fusion bomb. “We cannot leave this resource for the enemy,” one machine reported. Simon didn’t care anymore. He collected Jackie and a few possessions before racing to the auxiliary port, and while the ground beneath him shook and split open, thousands of panicked souls abandoned Hektor, riding whatever was marginally spaceworthy, accepting any risk to take the long fall back toward the sun.

For the next several weeks, Simon was interrogated by a string of distant voices—military minds and politicians who wanted any and all glimpses into McKall’s nature. Simon offered what insights he had, trying to steer clear of his own considerable embarrassment. Once Simon’s transport passed into Martian orbit, the refugees were herded into quarantine on New Phobos. Who knew what new diseases MaKall could have slipped into their blood? Between the tests and more interviews, his childhood world teased Simon with glimpses of its cold blue seas and dense, mostly artificial atmosphere. The harsh desert landscape had vanished, the world’s rapid transformation producing feelings of pride and sorrowful loss. But despite all of the brilliant plans and the trillions of invested euros, the terraforming process was far from perfect. From forty thousand kilometers high, Simon identified lakes where the acids still ruled and forests of withering trees, and there were rumors that the new ecosystem was proving far less stable than the public voices liked to proclaim.

Fifteen months later, Simon was free of quarantine, and he watched the updates as a fleet of powerful military vessels assaulted 624 Hektor. Robots and shock troops landed in the empty crater that had been Simon’s farm. The fearsome dogs were melted and frozen. Every battle was won; victory was in hand. But then the war took an abrupt, unexpected turn. A blue-white blast tore through the asteroid. Since the rebellion, the smaller portion of Hektor had been thoroughly transformed. A transport ship of unprecedented size was hiding inside the reddish crust, and the explosion flung away great chunks of its companion while slaughtering the invaders. Half of the asteroid dropped out of its ancient orbit, crude engines firing, maintaining a near-collision course with Jupiter. Momentum was stolen away from giant planet. Then uncontested, the ship pushed into the outer solar system, swinging close enough to Saturn to enjoy an even larger kick.

Five years later, an improved set of star engines came to life. By then, McKall’s plans were common knowledge. No one was planning to chase after him, much less continue the war. What would be the point? A forever-changing, increasingly strange body of organized carbon and silicon and fusion-heated water was streaking away from the sun, away from humanity, aiming this newborn revolution straight for the three Centauri sisters.

VENUS

Eventually Simon’s personal history became public knowledge. Strangers suddenly knew his name, and they would smile at him in that special sad way people used in uncomfortable circumstances. Acquaintances began to treat him as if he were important, laughing easily at his rare jokes, wishing him a good day or good evening or sweet, delightful dreams. His workmates, the fellow atums, embraced one of two inadequate strategies: Either they were quick to tell him how sorry they were and then ask if they could do anything, anything at all, or they seemed to take offense that Simon hadn’t confided with them before now. “Dear god, you lost most of your family,” one man exclaimed incorrectly, but with passion. “I wish I’d known. I look like the fool. I thought we were friends, at least…”

Simon did have a few scattered friends, and they knew better. When he didn’t mention the unfolding disaster on Mars, they patiently respected his privacy. As the situation worsened, he sought out mood-leveling drugs and other cheats that allowed him to manage, if only barely. He cried, but only when he was alone. During the worst days, he volunteered for solitary assignments, carefully avoiding professional chatter about past mistakes and the mounting casualties. He thought he was succeeding, taking a grim pride in his talent for enduring these personal trials, but afterwards, when the situation had finally stabilized, he crossed paths with an acquaintance from childhood. Ignorant as a bug, the fellow asked, “What about your family, Simon? They got out of that nightmare in time, didn’t they?”

His parents never tried to escape. They were two old people living at opposite ends of an unfinished, critically flawed world, and they hadn’t spoken to one another in nearly forty years. But as the blizzards struck and the air turned to poison, they left their homes, riding and then marching through the chaos and slaughter, finally reaching an isolated habitat overlooking Hellas where they lived together for their final eight days and nights.

As for Simon’s sister and various half-siblings, all but two escaped before the ecosystem collapsed. But where they would live tomorrow was an endless problem, for them and for the solar system at large. Millions of refugees were crammed onboard the ten New Moons and a fleet of rescue ships, plus various ad hoc habitats contrived out of inflated bladders and outmoded life support systems. It was a tough, dirty and problematic life, though far superior to being one of the fifty million bodies left behind on the anaerobic, peroxide-laced surface of Mars. Where would these souls live tomorrow? Faced with this conundrum, the atums had a ready solution: Terraform Mars all over again, and do it as quickly as possible, but use every trick in their rapidly evolving arsenal.

“This time, we’ll build a conservatory,” one young atum declared. “That’s how it should have been done in the first place. And again, Simon, I’m so very sorry for your tragedies.”

*   *   *

Naomi was a pretty youngster who used her beauty and a charming, obvious manner to win favors and fish for compliments. She liked to talk. She loved listening to her own smart, insistent voice. Rumor had it that her body was equipped with artificial openings and deployable prods, leaking intoxicating scents and wondrous doses of electricity. Simon was curious about her body, but he didn’t have the rank or adequate desire to pursue his base urges. Watching one of Naomi’s performances was as close as he wanted to be. Most of his colleagues felt threatened by her promise. But even when the girl spoke boldly about her incandescent future, Simon couldn’t take offense. His second century had brought with it a tidy and quite useful epiphany: Everyone would eventually fail, and if their failures were long-built, then the subsequent collapses would be all the more dramatic.

At this particular moment, the atums were chanting the usual praises about conservatories.

“Oh, I’m not convinced,” said Simon quietly.

Naomi laughed, and with a patronizing tone asked, “Oh my, why not?”

“A roof wouldn’t have helped. In the end, nothing would have changed.”

She couldn’t let that statement go unchallenged. “But if we’d had a lid over the sky, we’d have controlled the weather more effectively. The sunlight, the upper atmosphere’s chemistry. All the inflows would have belonged to us.”

“But not four and half billion years of geologic habit,” he countered.

“Geologic habit,” she muttered, as if she couldn’t quite understand the phrase.

That’s when the chief atum interjected her presence into the conversation. With a loud breezy voice, she summarized both positions. Then after putting her own opinion into jargon-laded terms, she added, “Too much of the Mars business depended on biological means. That’s where they went wrong. Don’t trust life; it doesn’t care about you. The physical realm is what matters, and conservatories are wonderful tools. They’re sure to be the last word in our business.”

Every face but one nodded, the matter settled.

Yet despite all of this polished certainty, only one world-encompassing conservatory was close to being finished, and that was a special circumstance. Luna was the easiest world to enclose inside a semi-transparent bubble: The low gravity; the proximity of earth; thriving local industries; and the absence of weather and political troubles. Its roof would hold any new atmosphere close. Double panes of diamond, transparent and strengthened with nanofibers, would keep space at bay. The engineering was straightforward, and construction should be relatively easy. But “should be” often proved illusionary. The Luna project was already forty percent over-budget, the critical water from asteroids and comets was being chased by other terraforming projects, including Venus, and even in the most favorable scenario warned that twenty more years would pass before the first soft winds of an oxygen-neon atmosphere began to blow across the dusty plains of Nearside.

Simon’s doubts could be misplaced. Indeed, he hoped he was wrong. But still, this one-time Martian was suffering a nagging yet familiar sense of standing at the brink of another precipice.

The other atums had happily left Simon behind. The topic of the moment, and the passion of their professional lives, was Venus. Small projects were being discussed. Most of their work involved the atmosphere and heat dissipation, the obvious solutions offered and debated and then rejected, soon to be replaced with other equally satisfactory answers. When he bothered to listen, Simon could tell who was sleeping with Naomi and who was maneuvering to take their place. It would have been funny, if not for the grave consequences lashed to animal lust. He didn’t believe in Great Deities, but if the gods were watching, they would surely laugh to see how tiny hormones and glands smaller than hands could manipulate the future of entire planets.

Presiding over this working lunch was the chief atum for the Third District, High Atmosphere and Future Climate Department. She was ten years Simon’s junior but much more successful, and when she spoke, the room fell silent. Though that didn’t mean people were listening. This group wasn’t large or diverse, but within its ranks were enough opinions and rampant ego that no authority could rule, much less orchestrate the thoughts of so many well-trained, singularly focused minds.

Venus was the topic, but the planet existed only as numbers and one staggeringly complicated model. Except for tug of gravity and the specifics in the numbers, this could have been any meeting of atums sitting inside any windowless room, on Luna or Callisto or Pallas, or any other portion of the solar system being relentlessly and utterly transformed.

When the official business was finished, at last, the chief looked longingly at Naomi. “Good job, and thank you,” she told everybody.

Everybody wanted out of the room.

But without warning, the chief said Simon’s full name and caught his eyes, not quite smiling when she said, “You have a new assignment. For the time being, you’re off the hydrological team.”

A colleague must have accused him of being difficult or incompetent, or perhaps both. It had happened before. He might be a 128 year-old man, but he always felt like a little boy when he was embarrassed or shamed.

Except that nothing was wrong, at least on this occasion. The chief smiled, admitting, “It’s because we have a visitor coming. A representative from…” She hesitated. “From the Zoo Project.”

“Another collection mission?” Simon inquired.

“Oh, these darlings always have another mission,” the chief complained.

Simon nodded, waiting.

“I need you to help with her hunting and keep tabs on whatever she finds.” The chief stared at him, smiling suspiciously. “Do you know a woman named Lilly?”

Too quickly, Simon said, “No.”

“That’s odd,” the chief mentioned. “She requested you by name.”

*   *   *

There were myriad routes to achieving a long healthy lifespan. Simon preferred small measures left invisible to the naked, unmodified eye. But the woman beside him wasn’t motivated by tradition. Native flesh would always be perishable, and the cosmetically proper synthetics were usually too fragile to last more than a few years. What proved most durable were colonies of engineered microbes, metabolically efficient and quick to repair themselves—a multitude of bacteria infusing the perpetually new skin with sensitive, high adaptable neural connections. There were popular tools among the very young and the determined elderly. Yet Simon couldn’t remember ever meeting anyone who had endowed herself with such a vibrant, elaborate exterior.

“I’m sorry,” the very colorful woman began.

Just why she was sorry, Simon didn’t know. But he nodded politely, resisting the urge to ask.

For the next few minutes, they sat in silence. The sky-driver continued on its programmed course, little to see and nothing to do for the present. Most of the world’s air lay beneath them. The sun was low on their left, the only inhabitant of the nearly black sky, slowly descending toward its retrograde setting. The conservatory was a grayish-green plain far below them, absolutely smooth and comfortingly bland. Venus was not Luna, and this project was far more complicated than erecting a high roof above a compliant vacuum. Only limited sections had been completed—barely nine percent of the eventual goal—and even that portion was little more than the scaffolding meant to support arrays of solar-power facilities and filters and spaceports and cities of robots that would do nothing but repair and improve this gigantic example of artless architecture. Was his guest full of questions? Most visitors wanted to hear about the nano-towers rooted in the rigid Venusian crust, holding these expensive gigatons far above the dense, dangerous atmosphere. People might know the facts, but it soothed them to learn about the marvelous engineering. Everyone was the center of his own important story. Everybody secretly feared that if some piece of the conservatory failed, it would happen beneath his own important, tragically mortal feet.

At last, the silence ended. Lilly touched Simon for the first time. Hot orange fingertips brushed against his forearm. “I am sorry,” she said again. “He was a good father, I know. I’m sure you miss him terribly.”

Simon’s reaction surprised both of them. Turning toward gaudy woman, he remarked sharply, “My mother was the good parent. Dad spent his life collecting lovers, and I didn’t like his girls at all.”

The violet face was bright and hot, full of fluids more complicated than blood. Perhaps the woman was insulted. Maybe she wanted to turn the sky-driver back, ready to exchange this atum for one less difficult. But nothing about her seemed hurt or even surprised. She smiled for a few moments. Saying nothing, she let her glassy dark eyes absorb everything about the old man beside her. Then her hand gripped his wrist, a wave of heat threatening to burn his pale, dry skin.

“Nonetheless, I’m sorry,” she said.

Simon pulled his arm back.

“I didn’t treat either of you fairly. At the lake … when I was drilling … all I cared about was saving the natives, by whatever means…”

Here was the central problem, Simon realized. It wasn’t that this woman and his father had an affair, or even that they might have loved one another. What rankled was that she had willfully used him as a tool.

“How are the Martians?” he inquired.

“Happily sleeping inside a thousand scattered laboratories.”

“That’s sad,” he thought aloud.

“Really? Why?”

“Life should be busy,” Simon proposed. “Not hibernating inside common freezers.”

Now Lilly took offense. She said nothing, but her back stiffened and she maintained her silence until it was obvious that she didn’t accept any complaints about her life’s work. They were approaching their destination. As the sky-driver began its descent, Simon risked mentioning, “I’m probably mistaken. But I thought the Zoo already grabbed up every species of air-plankton.”

The native Venusians had had a robust ecosystem, but compared even to Martians, they were an uncomplicated lot.

“We have every native in bottles,” she said stiffly, nursing her wounds.

“And the native populations have crashed here,” he pointed out. “No light gets through, except for some infrared, and the sulfuric clouds are dispersed and too cold by a long measure.”

“True enough,” she agreed.

Then she touched herself, her face growing brighter as it warmed with enthusiasm. “But new species are evolving every day, and isn’t that exciting news?”

*   *   *

It was boring news, but a truce had been declared. The old man and even older woman stopped mentioning their differences and histories. They were professionals, each quietly pursuing a quick and narrow mission. The sky-driver set down and linked up with a large dome filled with sleeping machines and assorted elevators. Donning lifesuits, they boarded a small elevator and descended ten kilometers. Simon watched Venus through the monitors. Lilly busied herself by readying a suitcase-sized apparatus that would inhale and filter the carbon-dioxide atmosphere, pulling every viable microbe from the mayhem of dust and industrial pollution. The nano-tower was more air than structure—hexagons of webs and sturdy legs, each side nearly a kilometer in length, its feet firmly planted on the slopes of Aphrodite Terra. Their final destination was a platform intended as a hive for robots waiting to repair what was rarely damaged. There was no visible light, but there was wind and a stubborn atmosphere still centuries away from collapsing into a newborn ocean of soda water. Obviously Lilly had done similar work on other towers. She moved with purpose. Her machine walked next to her, waiting patiently as she investigated one site and then another. Experience or perhaps intuition allowed her to decide where the best results would be found. Then she told the machine, “Deploy,” and it gladly grabbed the railing with three arms and flung its body over the edge, exploding into a purposeful tangle of ribbons and funnels and other twisting shapes.

“How long?” Simon asked.

“Do we wait?” She looked up at him, her features illuminated by the backscattered light from her helmet. “An hour, at least. Maybe longer.”

Venus lay before them, vast and bathed in darkness.

“What kinds of creatures are out here?”

“Chemoautotrophes, naturally.” Staring out into the same night, she explained, “The UV photosynthesizers are still here, of course. They like to find crevices in our towers, places where they can sleep, probably waiting for our roof to collapse.”

He let that anthropomorphism go unchallenged.

“These natives are odd, adaptable species, all descended from plankton in the boiled-away seas. It’s astonishing what they’ve kept inside their very peculiar DNA. Today, some of them are utilizing industrial solvents and lost nano products. Where there’s heat, energy can be harvested.” She turned, showing her face again. “There’s no reason to worry yet, and maybe never. But a few of these bugs have found ways to creep inside our robots, using them as shelters. If one of them ever learns how to steal an electrical current, everything changes. Probably in a matter of a month or two.”

“That quickly?”

“Venusians are fertile and promiscuous. With these winds, a successful strain can be everywhere in days.”

Simon had never studied the beasts. Would it pay to invest an hour a week in digesting the existing literature?

“But odds are, that won’t happen,” his companion allowed. “I do love these little things. But life, even at its most spectacular, has limits.”

“It does have limits,” he said tactfully.

Lilly’s face was pretty and never more human—a consequence of the indirect light washing across their features, and their solitude, and Simon’s nagging, seemingly eternal sense of loneliness in a universe filled with an increasingly strange humanity.

“Does it ever bother you?” she asked.

He waited for the rest of the question.

“Terraforming is a horribly destructive act,” Lilly stated. “Obliterating one order for another. Or in the sad case of Mars, destroying a quiet and stable world to replace it with a doomed weakling … and then after all of that inflicted misery, not learning enough to give up the fight.”

“It isn’t meant to be a fight,” he declared.

But of course it was. Perhaps never so clearly, Simon realized that they were standing on the ramparts of a great fortress, an endless war waging around them. Simon listened to the wind and felt it push against him, and he took pleasure from his heart hammering away inside a chest that would never feel ancient. And then he was smiling, realizing that even a quiet disappointment of a soul—the sort of person that Simon was—could take a keen, unembarrassed pleasure from the battles that he had helped win, small and otherwise.

IAPETUS

“I know you worry. I worry too, Simon. Neither of us is strong at politics, and even if I were a marvel at making alliances and handling cross-purposed personalities, this would be a difficult place. This earth would be. But as knowing voices say, and with good reason, ‘There’s only one Stanford.’ Perhaps the Farside Academy is its equal, at least when it comes to creating prominent astronomers. But Stanford still ranks first in my field, and it has for half a millennia, and my degree will get me noticed by wise entities and doubting coworkers at all ends of the solar system. And since I’m not gifted at winning admirers through my simple charm, being in this university will help me quite a lot.”

Simon paused the transmission—this wasn’t his first viewing—and spent the next several minutes studying the face that filled the screen. What had changed? The mouth, the bright yellow eyes. That artful crest of green feathers—a jaunty hat in appearance, and one of Jackie’s last obvious links to the world of her ancestors. No, she looked exactly the same. To casual eyes, she might be some species of human, her genetics modified for the most normal of reasons. She wasn’t much larger than when he had first met the parrot, which put her well inside the restrictions imposed on visiting students. The bio-taxing laws were perfectly reasonable; earth had always been too crowded. Even six hundred years ago, when Simon was a scrawny Martian with dust in his breath, the home world had suffered from too many bodies standing on too little land, farms working hard to make food for a population that wouldn’t age, and in most cases, stubbornly refused to die. Immortality was the norm everywhere, and who didn’t want children to share the bliss? That’s why bodies and minds continued to grow smaller and smaller, cheating the restrictions of nature by shrewdly redefining the rules.

In appearance, the earth hadn’t changed Jackie. Perhaps her voice was a little too formal, too staged, but cameras always made her self-conscious. He knew this creature well enough to know she wasn’t holding anything back. One fib today, he feared, and that would be the end. They had barely begun their long separation, and here she was, making time to call home. Simon assured himself that no conspiracy of ambition or seduction would steal away the love that had taken him by surprise, one patient century at a time.

Again, he let the message run. Jackie listed classes and spoke about the tiny quarters she shared with three other happy graduate students, and she mentioned that the stars came out on clear nights, but of course they were illusions. Earth’s conservatory was finished two hundred years ago—a marvelous semi-permeable membrane that strictly controlled what fell from above and what slipped away into the cosmos. Today, the mother world was a rigorously controlled room where a trillion sentient entities lived on and inside the old continents and throughout the watery reaches. It was a beautiful world, still and all. But it was a decidedly alien realm, forever changing, and some corners of that room were famous for criminal mischief and random psychopathic rage.

Yes, he was worried.

Absolutely, Simon wished Jackie had stayed with him after her sudden change of careers. Saturn’s major moons had quality universities, and even noble, haughty Stanford offered virtual classes to anyone with money. Why not accept a longer, safer path to her degree? Time wasn’t in short supply, Simon had argued. And by staying where they were, Jackie would have remained immune to the hazards of so many close-packed souls.

The transmission continued. “I’m sure you know this,” Jackie said. “I’ve probably told you this before. But did you realize there isn’t one working telescope on the entire campus? We have a facility forty kilometers above us, perched on the conservatory roof, but it’s filled with museum pieces and curious tourists.” She was thrilled, her flexible mouth giving each word an accent that was purely hers. “Stanford’s telescopes—my telescopes—are everywhere but on the bright busy earth. Luna and the Jovian Trojans, and there’s a beautiful new mirror that just came on line in Neptune’s Lagrange. And because I’m here, that’s my mirror. It’s my best eye. Think of the honor! If I was at home with you, I’d be little more than a technician pointing these machines at targets that only the true Stanford students would be allowed to see.”

Yes, she made the right decision. Simon had always known it, though these little mental exercises helped convince him again.

What a silly little ape he was.

“But I didn’t tell you this incredible news,” Jackie said in conclusion. “I just found this out. Long, long ago, Stanford had a mascot, and it was a bird! Can you imagine the odds?”

Simon froze the image and kissed the lips. Then he filed the transmission in places guaranteed to be safe for an eternity, and feeling weepy, he went on with his comfortably busy day.

*   *   *

Even orbiting Saturn, where space was cheap and food easy to come by, people were acquiring small modern bodies. Simon hadn’t been this tiny since he was one-year-old. These new metabolisms were efficient and reliable, and where the human mind would eventually decay, cortexes made of crystalline proteins were denser and far sturdier, thoughts washing through them quickly enough to double an atum’s natural talents and increase his memory twenty-fold.

But every atum underwent similar transformations, which meant that when it came to his professional life, remarkably little had changed. Simon and his colleagues had kept their old ranks and ratings, only with greater responsibilities and larger workloads. A significant medical investment had changed very little. “Treading water,” he dubbed his job—a weak play on words, since what he did was manage the nutrient flows in the newborn sea. But really, he had no compelling reason to complain, and in any given year, he didn’t waste more than a moment or two wondering what other course his life might have run, if only.

He was a quietly happy soul.

And despite few promotions or pay increases, his work had challenges as well as moments of total, child-like joy.

Pieces of Iapetus now belonged to Luna and Venus. But those decades of throwing water ice and hydrocarbons sunward were finished. The original mining camps had evolved into cities. Multitudes lived on Titan and Rhea and the other moons, and nobody was in the mood to share their wealth. Luna would remain a damp stony sponge, while Venus was a clean dry world, its ecology being redesigned to endure the boundless drought, its citizens more machine than meat. No matter how stupid or stubborn recent governments had been, the mathematics were brutally simple: From this point forward, it would be easier to terraform each world where it already danced, just as it was far cheaper to ship extra humans and other sentients out to these empty new homes.

Light washed through the new Iapetus, and the water was warm and salted, and the neutral-buoyant reefs were magnificent structures of calcium and silica wrapped around bubbles of hydrogen gas. The ancient moon had been melted, from its crust to the core, and great pumps were churning up that single round ocean, producing carefully designed currents meant to keep every liter oxygenated and illuminated by the submerged suns. Trillions of watts of power made the little world glow from within. Larger than the oceans of the original earth, but without the dark cold depths where life had to putter and save itself on hopes of a scrap of food, his home would eventually become jammed with coral forests and bubble cities and fish suitable for a garden, lovely and delicious to any tongue.

Nutrients were Simon’s boring, absolutely essential expertise. When he wasn’t dreaming of Jackie, he would dream about the day’s conversations with sensors and AI watchers, the home-mind and various colleagues scattered across other, more highbrow departments. Only a tiny fraction of moon was settled. A few floating cities on the surface, and there was an industrial complex digesting and dispersing the tiny core of stone and metal impurities. But what this atum needed to do, at least in his tiny realm, was create a cycle of nutrients that would ignore disruptions and random shifts in current, leaving all of the water as bright and clear as the finest tidal pool on some long-vanished earthly beach.

Because she was interested, Simon’s ended his days with updates to his lover. Every evening, as the nearest sun began to dim, he would craft a little message laid down on cool, bloodless data. But because he was nervous, he inevitably confessed that he was thinking of her constantly and that he loved her, his face and tone saying what he didn’t allow from his words: That he was scared to lose her to some student of promise, or worse, a professor of certified genius who would sweep his darling bird off to realms far more exotic than his beautiful but quite tiny pond.

*   *   *

The message began with news from earth. With a quick joyful voice, Jackie talked about classes and the lab that she was teaching solo—“I’m so terrified, and the students love it when I shake”—and she twice mentioned rumors about a mild plague tearing through some of the coastal algae farms. “There’s talk about shortfalls,” she admitted. “Since they run their ecosystem with minimal reserves, shortages are inevitable. Too many citizens, plus all those others who slipped in unnoticed.” Then guessing he would be frightened, she added, “Oh, it isn’t serious. Everybody’s just going to have to go a mouthful or two short at dinner. And Stanford has its own emergency supplies, so it’s nothing. Nothing at all.” Then she grinned with her lovely toothless mouth, and showing nothing but delight, she announced, “I have something to show you, darling. By the way.”

And with that, her face froze and her voice stopped long enough that Simon began troubleshooting his equipment.

But she moved again, speaking with a quiet, conspiratorial tone. “Nobody sees me, darling. ‘Nobody’ meaning everybody else. You didn’t know my little secret, but I seeded our home-mind with some elaborate security protocols. Not as good as some, but strong enough to keep away prying eyes.”

“Prying at what?” he muttered.

Jackie’s message was enormous, and it included interactive functions. The program heard him, and with Jackie’s voice it said, “Soon enough, darling. You’ll see. But let me show you a few other marvels first. All right?”

He nodded happily, a sense of adventure lending the moment its fresh, welcome edge.

Jackie continued. “You’ve seen these places. But I can’t remember when, and the new mirrors are so much more powerful. I’m including portraits of five hundred thousand worlds, each one supporting life.”

Except for their clarity, the pictures were familiar. Life was a relatively common trick performed by the galaxy. Sophisticated, earth-like biospheres did happen on occasion, but not often and not where they were expected to arise. By and large, the normal shape of life was tiny and bacterial. Mars and Venus, the European seas and the vivid clouds of Jupiter were typical examples. By contrast, multicellular life was an exceptionally frail experiment. Asteroid impacts and supernovae and the distant collisions of neutron stars happened with an appalling frequency, annihilating everything with a head and tail. Only the slow-living slime at the bottom of a deep sea would survive, or the patient cold bug ten kilometers beneath some poisoned landscape. At the end of the Permian, the earth itself barely escaped that fate. But even accounting for those grand disasters, the earth-equivalents proved a thousand times too scarce. Jackie’s once-young professors had a puzzle to play with, and their answer was as sobering as anything born from science.

Now and again, interstellar clouds and doomed suns would fall into the galaxy’s core. If the inflow were large enough, the massive black hole responded with a kind of blazing horror that effectively ended fancy life almost everywhere. Since the Cambrian, the galaxy had detonated at least three times, and the fortunate earth had survived only because it was swimming inside dense clouds of dust and gas—a worthy conservatory that was light-years deep, built by the gods of Whim and Caprice.

Simon wandered through the transmission, glancing at a few hundred random planets. Then he asked his home-mind to pull out the most exceptional. Within those broad parameters, he found several dozen images of cloudy spheres orbiting suns within a hundred light-years of his comfortable chair. When he came across the closest world, Jackie returned.

“Alpha Centauri B’s largest world,” she said in her most teacherly voice. “The planet that some mentally impoverished soul named New Earth, back when all we knew was that it had liquid water and a living atmosphere.”

Simon had never been so close to that alien body. The image was that clear, that astonishing. Simon felt as if he was floating in low orbit above a shallow black sea. Microbes accounted for the dark water—multitudes of tiny relentless organisms that ate sunlight and spat out just enough oxygen to be noticed by astronomers centuries ago. But the tectonics of New Earth were radically different than those back home, and for a host of reasons, the alien atmosphere could never support a flame, much less a vibrant ecosystem.

“To date,” Jackie continued, “our full survey has found nine million and forty thousand living worlds. That number and these images won’t be made public for another few months. We’re not done, and we expect several million more. But to date, Simon … as of this moment … only eighteen planets show unmistakable signs of multicellular life and intelligence. Of course we might be missing something small. But after this long, with these incredible tools and nothing closer to us than eight thousand light-years distance … well, darling, it makes a curious mind wonder if intelligence is a cosmic fluke, or worse, God’s best joke…”

“I hope not,” he muttered.

Jackie nodded in agreement. “Now for my fine surprise,” she went on. “One tiny portion of the sky is off-limits. Did you know that? The Powers-That-Be have rules. Nobody but them can look along one exceptionally narrow line. And we didn’t look, at least not intentionally. Except there was an accident last week, and supposedly nothing was seen and of course we recorded nothing. But I thought you’d appreciate a glimpse of what nothing looks like, provided you keep this in a very safe place.”

Against the stars, a tiny glow was visible—like a comet, but burning hotter than the surface of any sun.

“It’s Hektor,” Jackie reported. “Dr. McKall is still out there, still charging forward. Another ten thousand years, and your old colleague will finally get where he’s going.”

*   *   *

Simon was discussing salt contents with an irritable sensor on the far side of the moon, and then his home-mind interrupted. “There has been an incident,” it reported. “On earth, and specifically, on the campus—”

“Jackie?”

“I know nothing about her,” the voice admitted. “Stanford and the surrounding area are temporarily out of reach. A riot is in progress. There’s still a good deal of fighting. I can’t offer useful insights.”

“A riot?” he asked incredulously.

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“There was a story, only a rumor.” The mind was designed to show sorrow, but in tidy amounts. And no outrage, which was why it stated flatly, “According to the rumor, the Stanford community was holding back foodstuffs, and approximately one million citizens organized a flash-protest that mutated into violence, and the civil authorities reacted with perhaps too much force—”

“What about Jackie?”

“I have lists of the dead and injured, sir. The tallies are being constantly updated. Eighty-three are confirmed dead, with perhaps another hundred to be found. But I will tell you when I find her, wherever I find her.”

Simon refused to worry. The odds of disaster falling on one eager graduate student were remote. Tens of thousands attended that big old school, and no, letting his mind turn crazy was a waste of time. That was the conviction that he managed to hold on to for eight minutes of determined, rapidly forgotten work. Then he cut off the sensor in mid-sentence, and to his house he said, “Any word, contact me.”

“Of course, sir.”

His home—Jackie’s home, and his—was the only building on a tiny green island of buoyant coral floating on the moon’s surface. What seemed critical at that moment was to escape, separating himself from whatever reminded him of her. Alone, he jetted above the oil-restrained surface of the sea, scaring up birds and rainbow bats. Then he docked at a web-tower and boarded an elevator that quietly asked for a destination.

“Up,” he snapped. “Just up.”

The Iapetus roof was much more elaborate than those covering the inner worlds. It was blacker than any space, and it was dense and durable, and if civilization vanished today, it would likely survive intact until the sun was a cooling white ember. That durability was essential. Simon rode the elevator past the final ceiling, emerging on the moon’s night side but with dawn slowly approaching. He stopped the elevator before it reached the overhead port. Then he gazed at the sun’s emergence—a tiny fierce fleck of nuclear fire that was dwarfed by a thousand lasers pointed at this one modest moon of Saturn.

A coalition of ice-belt nations had joined forces. Mercury, long considered too expensive to terraform, had been purchased and partly destroyed, doctored rock and iron fashioned into a fleet of enormous orbiting solar collectors that collected energy that was pumped into beams of light that could have destroyed ships and cities and even whole worlds. Could but never would, what with their elaborate programming and too many safeguards to count. But it was the sun’s focused power that slammed into the tough black conservatory, and it was the conservatory that captured and channeled this resource into the artificial suns that made Iapetus glow to its core. This was a cheaper, sweeter solution than building and maintaining fleets of fusion reactors. Every photon was absorbed, and as a result, life had warm bright happy water—a place where he wanted to live forever.

Jackie had always enjoyed this part of the ascent; that’s why Simon stopped here now. Stopped and waited, knowing that she was alive and well, but wasn’t it the right thing to do, worrying as he did?

The situation on earth was always chaotic.

He understood that Jackie had friends and colleagues to help before she could send word his way, and she might not be able to do that for a long time, considering the riot and the normal censorship demanded by the Powers-That-Be.

No, he wasn’t sick with worry.

Then the home-mind called out, “Sir.”

Its voice was tinged with sorrow.

More than anything else, what surprised Simon was how quickly he severed all contact with the universe. Before another word was offered, his small sharp mind had made its decision and cut the channel to his home-mind, never bothering to tell him of its intentions.

If Simon knew nothing, then Jackie was alive; and that would remain true for as long as he could endure the cold boundless space about him and the sound of his breathing coming again and again in deep, useless gasps.

MAKEMAKE

“Sir, please. Please. What generosity may I offer you? I have marvelous teas, strong and sweet, or weak and sublime.”

“Something sublime.”

“And once again, sir, I apologize for any intrusion. For your time and sacrifices, I will be eternally grateful.”

Simon nodded and smiled blandly, asking nothing of his host. The Suricata were bright social entities famous for rituals and reflexive politeness. Answers would come soon enough, and knowing these people, he was certain that he wouldn’t much like what he was about to learn.

The tea was served cold in tiny ceremonial bowls.

“You continue to do marvelous work for us, sir.”

“And I hear praising words about you,” Simon replied. “Wiser minds than me say that our mob has never enjoyed a more efficient or responsible security chief.”

The narrow face seemed pleased. But the chief’s four hands gripped his bowl too firmly, long black nails scrapping against the white bone china.

Simon finished his drink and set it aside.

The chief did the same, and then with a portentous tone said, “Perhaps you heard about the refugee transport that arrived yesterday. Of course you have, who hasn’t? Eleven hundred and nine survivors, each one a victim of this monstrous war, and all now quarantined at the usual site.”

One hundred kilometers above their heads stood a roughly camouflaged, utterly filthy ice dome—the same jail-like dumping site where Simon had lived for his first three months after his arrival.

“My problem,” the chief began. Then the bright black eyes smiled, and he said, “Our problem,” as a less than subtle reminder of everyone’s civic responsibilities. “More than one thousand sentient entities wish to find shelter with us, but before that can happen, we must learn everything about these individuals. The political climate might be improving, but tempers and grudges remain in full force. Our neutrality is maintained at a great cost—”

“Who is our problem?”

Simon’s interruption pleased the chief. At least he sighed with what seemed like relief, watching a creature twice his size and older than anyone else on this world. “We have found a war criminal,” the chief admitted. “A much-sought individual, and I believe a colleague of yours from long ago. According to reliable accounts, she was complicit in the Martian genocide, a consultant in two slaughters on the earth, and her role in the Ganymede struggles has been rigorously documented.”

“We’re discussing Naomi?”

Embarrassed, the little face dipped until the rope-like body lay on the carpeted floor. “One of her names, yes. She attempted to hide her identity, but what was a clever and thorough disguise the day she left Titan has become old and obvious.” The Suricata were lovely creatures, their dense fur softer than sable, warming fats and fantastic metabolism keeping them comfortable inside their icy tunnels. The chief stood again, hands fidgeting with readers and switches while his tail made a quick gesture, alerting his guest to the importance of his next words. “We are quite certain. This is the infamous Naomi. We find ourselves holding perhaps the most notorious atums still at large.”

“From the Blue Camp,” Simon added.

Eight Camps exited at the war’s outset. Attrition and political necessities had shrunk the field to two Camps, and the Blue was officially extinct.

Politely but firmly, the chief cautioned, “As far as the Kuiper neutrals are concerned, there are no Camps. There is us, and there is the War. At no time have we taken sides in this ridiculous conflict, which means that we must remain immune to favoritism and even the most tentative alliances.”

In other words, to save their peace, they had to be ruthless.

Simon nodded. “Why here?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I understand why Naomi would want to escape. Of course she’d try to flee. But the woman I knew had a talent for guessing where the tunnel would turn next. Throwing everything into a long journey out to the edge of inhabited space … well, coming all of the way out to Makemake strikes me as desperate, at best. And at worst, suspicious.”

An unwelcome question had been asked. The chief responded by invoking his rank, stiffening his tail while the hands became fists. “Desperation is the perfectly normal response now. Sir. You don’t see the intelligence reports that I am forced to endure. You don’t study the elaborate simulations and their predictions for continuing troubles. At least ninety percent of the solar system’s population has been extinguished. At least. Worlds have been ruined, fortunes erased, but sitting inside this careful peace of ours, you cannot appreciate how miserable and frantic and sick these minds are … those tortured few who have managed to survive until this moment.”

Charitably, Simon said, “I agree. I don’t know how it would feel.”

The chief sighed. Regretting the present tone, he admitted, “I have nothing but respect for you, sir. Respect wrapped around thanks. What would we have done without your talents? What if you had found your way to another Kuiper world … to Varuna, perhaps? Today they would have a great atum working miracles with limited resources, and we would have to turn aside every soul for lack of room and food and precious air?”

Varuna had been a disaster—too many refugees overtaxing the barely-begun terraforming work. But Makemake, and Suricata society in particular, had endured this nightmare rather well. Simon knew this game. With feigned conviction, he said, “You would have done fine without me. You are a marvelous and endlessly inventive people.”

His host smiled too long.

“May I ask another question?”

“Yes, sir,” said the security chief.

“Why am I here? You’ve identified your prisoner. And since I haven’t seen her for at least eight hundred years—”

“Nine hundred and five Martian years,” the chief interjected.

“I don’t see any role for me to play.” Simon stroked the small gray beard that covered half of his thoroughly human face. “Unless of course you want my testimony at the trial.”

“No,” the chief blurted.

Simon waited, his patience fraying.

“The trial was concluded several hours ago. The judges’ have announced the sentence. Nothing remains now but the execution of the prisoner.”

“Ah.” Simon nodded. “You brought me here as a courtesy?”

The black eyes gazed at him, hoping to say nothing more.

But despite many decades of living among these souls, the atum couldn’t quite piece together the clues. What would have been obvious to any native citizen of this cold, isolated world was invisible to him. Finally, with honest confusion, Simon confessed, “I don’t know what you want.”

“It is what the prisoner wants.”

“Which is?”

“Naomi has memorized our laws,” the chief confessed. “And she somehow learned that you were living here.”

The atum began to feel ill.

“She has invoked a little-used code, naming her executioner.”

“I won’t,” said Simon.

But the Suricata was a deeply social species. Choice did not exist in their civil code. Duty to their city and their world was seamless. And no less could be expected from those who came to live in their cathedrals of ice and bright air.

“If you refuse this honor,” the chief said flatly, “then we will be forced to begin banishment procedures.”

Simon took a moment to let the possibilities eat at him.

“She wants me to kill her,” he muttered quietly.

“To my mind,” the chief replied stiffly, “the woman is already dead. With this gesture, you will be completing the act.”

*   *   *

In a multitude of places, including inside at least one atum’s mind, there were precise and effective plans for the transformation of this little world. Makemake was named for a Polynesian god of creation. Specifically, for a deity worshipped by the isolated citizens of Easter Island, which as landmasses went, was arguably the most remote portion of the earth colonized by the first human species. If the war hadn’t erupted during the last century, Makemake’s transformation would have begun. A dozen artificial suns were delivered while Mars was dying again. They were in orbit, patiently waiting orders to ignite. This early step could easily be taken: Turning methane snows into a thin atmosphere clinging to a body barely half the size of Pluto. But even that modest step brought danger. Why make yourself a prize to distant but vicious enemies? Eight decades of unmatched struggle had ravaged richer worlds, and if not for the thin traffic of refugees that still managed to limp their way out into this cold, lightless realm, there wouldn’t be any traffic whatsoever.

The ranking atum thought about these weighty matters, and he considered his own enormous luck—not just to survive the War, but to then discover a life that gave him authority and privilege beyond any that he’d ever known.

Simon usually took pleasure from his walks on the surface. There was majesty to this realm of cold and barren ice. The black sky was unmarred by clever lights and ship traffic, giving it an enduring appeal. The glimmers and flashes of great weapons weren’t visible any longer. Neither surviving Camp was able to marshal those kinds of monstrosities today. Which was why the determined mind could forget, looking at the ember that was the sun and seeing nothing else but the faint dot that was Jupiter, believing any story but the miserable one where almost every life was destroyed, and every world, including the earth, was at the best only barely, painfully habitable.

“What are you doing?” asked a sharp, impatient voice.

“As little as I can,” he admitted to his companion.

“Focus,” she implored.

“I should.”

“You haven’t changed at all, have you, Simon? You still can’t make yourself do the distasteful work.”

“That’s my finest flaw,” he replied.

The humor was ignored, such as it was. Her own focus was relentless, her shrewdness undiminished, and as always, Naomi had her sights locked on some self-important goal. Stopping abruptly, she told him, “I didn’t select you just because we were once friends and colleagues. No, Simon. I picked you because you are perhaps the most consistent creature that I’ve ever known.”

“What do you want, Naomi?”

“Not yet,” she teased. Then she began to walk again, marching vigorously toward the small, undistinguished crater where for years now prisoners like her had been executed.

Naomi and Simon were the same size, give or take a few grams. But in a calculated bid to ingratiate herself with her now-defeated Camp, she long ago surrendered every hint of her human form. The woman resembled a scorpion, complete with the jointed limbs and an elaborate, supremely graceful tail folded up beneath her lifesuit. Her carapace was designed to withstand a hard vacuum, but not the cold. Her suit was heated, and a simple recyke system kept her green blood fully oxygenated. Disable either, and she would die slowly and without fuss. The chief and various experts had advised Simon to cripple both systems and hasten the act. But ice crystals and suffocation were astonishingly violent acts, if only at the cellular level. Simon held his own opinions about how to commit murder, and much as he hated this wicked business, he would carry out the execution however he damn well pleased.

Seemingly without fear, the scorpion scuttled across the ice.

Ignorant eyes might imagine Simon as the doomed soul. And indeed, many eyes were watching their approach. Cameras supplied by both Camps had been unpacked and activated for this singular occasion. The machines were witnesses, hardened links and a multitude of security safeguards linking them to the solar system. In principle, nobody could be fooled by what happened next, unless what they wanted was to be fooled.

Simon took longer strides, catching the prisoner just short of the crater wall.

And Naomi slowed abruptly, her adrenalin or its equivalent suddenly failing her. Eerily human eyes glanced up at Simon, and on their private channel, she said, “I’ve always liked you.”

He was startled but careful not to show it.

“I know how that sounds, and I know you don’t believe me. But from the first time we met, I have held the greatest respect for your abilities.”

“Where was that?” he asked.

“The first time?”

“I’m old,” he admitted. “Remind me.”

She didn’t simply mention about Venus. With astonished detail, Naomi described a dry meeting between members of an air-plankton team—the kind of routine nonevent that Simon would forget in a week, at most. “You made skeptical comments about our work. Perceptive, illuminating comments, when you look back at the moment now.”

“That impressed you?”

“In a peculiar fashion, you seemed more secure than the rest of us. More honest, less willing to compromise yourself with the politics.”

He shrugged, saying nothing.

“I’m sure you took notice: I was a flirt and shameless when it came to working the rooms. And I don’t think that ten Simons would have held as much ambition as I carried around in those times.”

“Probably not,” he conceded.

“Did you ever want to sleep with me?”

“No,” he lied.

But she didn’t seem to care, eyes closing while the hard face nodded wistfully. “If I’d paid attention to you … if I had let myself learn from you … my life would have turned out quite a bit better, I think.”

It might have been a different life, or perhaps not. Simon realized long ago that no matter how creative or well informed the soul might be, there was no way to see the future that rose even from the wisest of decisions: Ignorance as epiphany, and with that, freedom from regret.

They reached the lip of the crater together—two tiny entities on the brink of a neat flat-bottomed bowl. Suddenly he was in the lead, his pseudo-adrenalin rising out of a gland that was among his youngest. With a dry, tight voice, he said, “You named me. You claim that there’s a reason. And if you don’t tell me why, I’ll be happy.”

“But I have to tell you,” Naomi replied.

“I can’t help you,” he warned. “Maybe you think that I’ve got power here, but I don’t. Or that I’m not strong enough to do this, and I’ll lose my will, and then the Suricata would give up trying to punish you—”

“I don’t expect your help or your weakness,” she interrupted. “You are a soft-hearted creature. But that isn’t why I selected you.”

“Soft-hearted,” he heard, and the image mysteriously gnawed at him.

Naomi continued, saying, “The two of us, Simon … we atums seen a great deal during our extraordinary careers.”

He took a long bounce, ending up on a flat stretch of rock-hard water ice. “I suppose we have, yes.”

“My career,” she began.

He forced himself to slow, glancing up at the cameras hovering against the eternal night sky.

“Being an atum is a blessing, and I feel blessed. I know how it looks now, the insanity that drove us into the Camps. Using our knowledge about building worlds to kill the worlds instead. But think of the history that these eyes have witnessed. The geniuses that I’ve known and our important work, and the foolish tragedies too … everything that comes with remolding and giving life to dozens and hundreds of worlds, little and great…”

“What is it, Naomi?”

“I kept a diary,” she muttered.

“Many do.”

“But my diary is far more complete than the others,” she maintained. “From the first entry, I’ve used only the best methods, the most thorough tricks. This isn’t just text and images, Simon. I underwent scans of my mind, uploaded memories, censoring nothing. Nothing. And then I employed a military-grade AI to act as an overseer and voice. This is my life, the splendid as well as the awful, and I don’t think any citizen in any venue has ever achieved the scale that I’ve managed.”

“And my role?”

“I’ll tell you where I hid it,” she admitted. “You’re good and decent, Simon, and you can appreciate the value of this kind of testimony. Ten thousand years from today, won’t the citizens be hungry to understand the people who shaped their history—those who first colonized the solar system?”

He glanced up at the sun and that feeble band of dust riding on the ecliptic, much of it created by explosions and obliterating impacts. “You’re certain there’s going to be an audience then?”

“We’ve made our mistakes,” she conceded. “But this war will end. And shouldn’t we give our descendants every lesson possible? ‘Don’t do as we did,’ we will tell them.”

“I did nothing too terrible,” he maintained.

Suddenly Naomi ran short of praise for her executioner. With her voice breaking, she pointed out, “No, you’re just as guilty as me, Simon.”

“Despite my good opinions,” he countered.

“A billion clever insights accomplish nothing, if the voice that mutters them isn’t compelling enough to change one action.”

They were near the crater’s center, the execution ground defined by a neat black circle as well as pits made by the blasts of weapons and warm bodies rapidly growing cold. Reach that line, and their private line would fail. Only an unsecured public line would allow them to speak to one another. Simon felt his face filling with blood—the blush marking just a portion of his deep, conflicted feelings. He tried to keep his voice under control, but each word came out hard and tense. “It’s time, Naomi. I’m going to stop your oxygen and heater now, and we can walk the rest of the way together.”

“My diary?”

He didn’t answer. “Your carapace is a fine insulator,” he said. “And if I’m right, we’ll have several minutes before you spend your last breaths.”

“But you will rescue my diary, won’t you? I tell you where it is, and you can use it however you want. As a historical record, if you want—”

“And only for that reason,” he muttered.

Emotions made her shiver, but she acted satisfied. One conspirator to another, she said, “I did genuinely like you, Simon.”

He touched the controls on her back, powering down both systems.

“And you’re a familiar presence,” she conceded. “If a person has to die this way, don’t you think she should be with a friend?”

“I’m not your friend, Naomi.”

She didn’t speak.

Oxygen had stopped entering her blood, and in the next moment, the bitter chill of Makemake began to creep inside her. “I don’t know if I can make it to the circle.”

“You can.”

“Just say that you’re my friend,” she begged. “Please. I don’t want it to end this way.”

From the satchel on his hip, Simon pulled out a small railgun, and he aimed and fired a slug of iron-clad stone into the scorpion’s brain. Naomi stiffened, and a moment later, collapsed. He grabbed a front leg and dragged her across the neat black line, then backed away to allow the cameras to descend and investigate the body with a full array of sophisticated tools. Breathing hard, he looked at the corpse, and with a steady voice he pointed out, “You helped murder hundreds of billions. And until today, you didn’t throw two nice words my way. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to help your beloved memories have any life beyond today.”

*   *   *

“Thank you,” the chief said.

He gave his thanks once and then again, and then twice more, with even greater feeling.

Then with an air of concern, the chief continued. “This must have been hard on you. Regardless what she was and how much she deserved her fate—”

“It was difficult,” Simon conceded.

The little creature seemed giddy with compassion. “This won’t happen again. I promise.”

“But I’m here if you need me,” Simon replied.

A dark, dark joke.

The chief nodded warily.

“She brought it with her. Didn’t she?”

The chief hesitated. “Brought what?”

“Her diary. The AI with its attached memories. Naomi came here with the hope of using it as a bribe, hoping to manage a better deal for herself.” Until Simon said the words, he didn’t believe it was true, but then they were drifting in the air and he believed nothing else.

The chief suddenly had no voice.

“And I’m guessing that one of you two brought me into this scheme. She would tell me that the fabled diary was somewhere else, somewhere hard to reach, throwing the scent far from Makemake. Naomi must have told others about her self-recording project, not to mention leaving an ether-trail from the hospitals and various specialists brought into the project. But if I thought I had this special knowledge, and if I acted according to my good noble instincts … well, I can see how this would have distracted a few players while you happily sat on the prize.”

“But why would I care?” the little man managed.

“Because Naomi had a wealth of experience, and that’s the part of her estate you wanted. Her expertise. Once this war is finished, Makemake will be able to reinvent itself, and prosperity is going to come easier when you enjoy the free and easy guidance of a highly accomplished atum.”

“Naomi’s dead,” the chief offered, in his own defense.

“She is. And she isn’t. No, in her peculiar mind, I think the creature held a different interpretation of events.” Simon shrugged, the last traces of anger washing out of him. “I saw a small useless death on the ice, while she saw life inside a new mechanical mind. When you’re as greedy as Naomi, it’s amazing what you can convince yourself of … and who knows, maybe that old lady has a point in all of this…?”

EARTH

The purpose of the visit was to meet the next generation of atums, in classes and privately, assessing the strengths as well as the inevitable weaknesses of these graduates before they were scattered across the Unified System. But several grateful university officials came to the chief atum, begging for a public event that would earn notice and praise, both for them and their ancient institution. Simon agreed reluctantly. He would give a speech, stipulating only that his audience was kept small—a diverse assortment of students and faculty assembled in some minor lecture hall. He understood that any public event by someone of his rank would attract attention. What he wanted to escape were situations where multitudes of eager, ill-prepared souls would cling to every word, unable to tell the off-hand remark from rigid matters of policy. But his request, harmless and rational to his mind, led first to strict quotas, and when the demand proved too enormous, a lottery system where tickets were awarded and sometimes sold for fantastic sums—all for the honor of cramming inside a long hot room with forty thousand equally enthralled bodies, every eye and a few secret cameras staring at a figure as old as terraforming, or nearly so.

In appearance, Simon had remained stubbornly, endearingly human. Pieces of him were still physically tied to the young Martian, though those archaic tissues consisted only of a few cells scattered through crystalline overlaps, metabolic engines, and bundles of smart-light and nulls and voids. His face and body remained tall, but only in contrast to the entities gathered about him. He began with a bright smile and a voice crafted to come across as warm and comforting to the average citizen, thanking everyone for surrendering a portion of his busy day to listen to an old fellow rattle on. Then he told a story from his childhood, describing in detail how his father once handed him a nano-bomb seed—one of the old marvels intended to transform Mars from a wasteland to a paradise. “I didn’t understand the significance of that crude tool,” he confessed. “But I held the miraculous seed in both hands, believing that in my brief life, this was the most important object that I had ever touched. Yet at the same moment, I was stubbornly ignoring my own soggy brain. And everyone else’s too. But minds are the only marvels worthy of our lasting respect, and I can only wish that each of us holds that truth close to us as we pass through our future days.”

Simon was smaller than his original hands had been, smaller than that early seed. But by the same token, he was larger than the rock and iron ball that was Mars. Like any modern mind, a good portion of his intelligence—facts and language, customs and a multitude of instincts—were held in the earth’s community mind. He remained a unique citizen, endowed with his own personality and ancient, often quaint notions. But as long as citizens wished to stretch toward infinity, room was going to come at a premium. Carrying your life experience inside one isolated skull meant large, inefficient bodies needing room to live. And if those bodies achieved even modest reproductive rates, any world would be swamped in a day, and shortly after that, ten thousand worlds more.

As Simon liked to do on these occasions, he reminded every ear that the duties of an atum, particularly one granted his terrifying station, was to help select a direction into the future, that determined line balanced between wild freedom and despotic rule. What kinds of biology would embrace each world; how many children would each of these rich lives be allowed; and under what terms and what punishments would the government hold each of its citizens accountable. Everyone understood the consequences of mistakes, but just to be certain, he mentioned the First War and the Purge that followed, then the subsequent Battle of the Kupiers and what was dubbed the Final Purge, as if that species of political madness had been wrung from civilization forever.

“Nothing is forever,” he warned, “no matter if it’s an individual life or the one hundred billion year life of the smallest, reddest sun.” Then his voice grew in depth and power, taking the sleepiest in the audience by surprise. “Change is inevitable,” he promised, “but little else about the coming forever is certain. I would imagine that everyone here holds that noble wish that intelligent life will prosper in the universe, spreading to other suns and eventually to all the ends of the Milky Way. But that remains far from certain. In our ongoing studies of the sky, we have observed what has to be considered a paucity of intelligence. Today, those civilizations nearest to humanity are just beginning to hear the earth’s original transmissions, radio and radar whispers barely hinting at everything that has happened since, and it is presumed that in another several thousand years, a slow rich conversation will commence. Or our neighbors will respond to our presence with the most perfect, telling silence. The fertile imagination easily conceives wonders as well as horrors coming from this unborn history. But this man before you, this atum, believes that the real gift of the Others will be to suggest to us the richest, most stable answers to the eternal questions of life and living well in a universe that holds minds such as ours in such very low esteem.”

*   *   *

Tradition dictated that the chief atum had to make his or her residence on the earth, but since Simon had no role in maintaining the biosphere, he was free to live where he wished. He earned a few grumbles when he requested a modest structure erected on top of the newest conservatory—little more than one dome and various substructures meant to house assistants and the usual secure machinery demanded by his office. Some complained that the new chief didn’t trust the good work being done by the local atums. Why else would he perched himself in the vacuum, his feet standing on top of one hundred trillion heads? But explanations did no good with those people. He spoke a few times about his love for space and the illusion of solitude, but after that, he gave up offering reasons. For as long as he held this post, enemies would find reasons to distrust him, and as long as his antagonists thought in small terms, he would be safe wherever he chose to live, right up until the day that this office was lost to him.

“I have an errand for you,” Simon told his favorite lieutenant. “A mission of some importance, and I wouldn’t trust anyone else with it.”

The creature turned vivid blue, and twenty limbs shook from the apparent compliment. Then a soft clear voice said, “Sir,” and then, “I am honored,” before asking, “What is my mission?”

With a thought, Simon delivered a set of encrypted files and the necessary keys, plus a few helpful suggestions. Then he waited while the files’ headings were studied. The assistant had a quick mind; it took only a moment for the limbs to stiffen, fear turning the body into a dark, despairing violet.

“Sir,” the voice began.

“What have you found there?” Simon kidded.

“I didn’t know about these matters.”

“You didn’t, did you?” The atum nodded agreeably. “That’s what you should mention when you act on your knowledge.”

“Sir?”

“You are going to act, aren’t you?”

The assistant turned black and cold, a begging voice complaining, “This is not fair, sir.”

“Little is,” Simon agreed.

“By law, I have to take what I know to the proper agency.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way, my friend.”

The creature muttered to itself.

“But please, will you do one small favor for me,” Simon continued. “Surrender this evidence to the Office of Exotic Biology. And yes, they have jurisdiction in these matters. They are perfectly acceptable authorities, and no one will fault you, even if you choose to someday mention these events to anyone else.”

Perplexed but obedient, the assistant left on his unexpected mission.

Alone, Simon slipped into a gossamer lifesuit and stepped out onto the hard surface of the newest conservatory. The sun was a faint glow just beginning to climb over the geometrically perfect horizon. Mercury was a dull dot almost invisible against the stars, its top fifty kilometers peeled away and refined into habitats ranging from mountain-sized to smaller than a small walnut. Venus was nearer and much duller, encased in half a dozen finished conservatories whose main purpose was to grab and sequester every photon falling from the sun, allowing the interior heat to build and build until the entire planet melted—a liquid world whose crust and then mantle could be siphoned off with relative ease, creating hundreds of trillions of living worlds that would eventually form a great ring around the sun.

Jupiter remained a wilderness of space and raw materials, accompanied by its liquid worlds, infested with life but still not full. Uranus and Neptune were brighter than ever, the terrraforming of the little giants just beginning in earnest. Once again, Mars was being made into an earth-like world, but this time the work involved improved conservatories stacked on top of one another, the crust laced with sprawling caverns and hidden seas. And largest to the eye was Luna. Nearly as large as earth, it was a vast balloon composed of vacuum-filled chambers and nonaqueous species. Again, its design was aimed at growth, machines and organisms busily digesting the rocky body. But like every world in the Unified System, the genius that designed this transformation always aimed for a special stability. Each planet functioned as a nest of deeply social insects. As long as all the pieces and players cooperated, life thrived. But if the calm failed, the queens of the nest would perish, and just as important, the lowly and the innocent would inherit what remained.

Simon had helped craft this ruthless and obvious system. Humanity might have the power to draw life in any form it wished, but there still existed the Darwinian god holding sway over the majestic mess, and for the next eon or two, the best would succeed a little more other than their peers.

Some days, it seemed that reaching this station was a miracle. But on this early morning being the chief atum felt entirely natural. Of course he was important. Who else was as old as him and as short of enemies? Who else could claim that they had been there at the beginning, or nearly so, yet never took part in any conspiracy or slaughter of note?

Without sound, Simon started to laugh, enjoying the irony. The absence of ambition was the ultimate ambition, it seemed.

Then his house-mind announced a visitor.

Simon didn’t ask for the name. He knew. And turning back toward his home, walking slowly and then not so slowly, he said to the house, “Tell Lilly to make herself comfortable. The criminal is on his way.”

*   *   *

“How did you manage this?” she blurted. Then in the next instant, she added, “This has to be a mistake. Somebody’s trying to frame you, and they didn’t even manage a believable job of it.”

Like Simon, Lilly had kept hold of her human features. She sat and watched as he settled before her, and when he didn’t act appropriately concerned, she added, “This is the worst kind of scandal. If I’d told anyone—”

“But you haven’t,” he interrupted.

“Because I thought I owed you at least the courtesy of looking into your face, seeing if there was any explanation for what you’ve done.”

He shrugged and said nothing.

“Starships are forbidden,” she snapped. “No vessel except sterile drones can legally pass beyond the Kuiper belt.”

“I am well aware of the laws—”

“And the kind of ship you’ve built,” she blurted. “Dammit, Simon. It shatters at least a thousand codes. If you were to ride this sort of magic seed out into the cosmos … you could go almost anywhere … and then you could infect and transform any body. Any world. The outlawed technologies and the government-only technologies that you’ve assembled here, using your station as chief atum—”

“Impressed, are you?”

Lilly remained a passionate creature, dark and lovely but always focused on the needs of her life’s mission. “I’m scared, Simon. Terrified. What were you planning to do with this monster seed?”

He laughed and nodded, and then he quietly confessed, “The seed has room for one small passenger.”

“For you?” she whimpered.

“Me? Hardly.” He sat motionless, carefully watching his guest. “I have a mission in mind. But by training and inclinations, I suspect that I wouldn’t make a worthy pilot for this kind of work.”

“What work?”

Simon leaned forward, one hand and then the other taking both of hers. It was pleasant, holding onto the woman like this, feeling her heat pass into him. He was thinking about Lilly and his father sleeping together on the red wastes of Mars. He recalled that moment on Venus, in the darkness, in the wind. Then he surprised both of them, lifting their hands and kissing the backs of hers even as he slid onto his knees, saying nothing, but tasting a faint delicious salt against his lips and the tip of his tongue.

A WORLD UNBURDENED BY NAMES

The object was noticed and instantly measured—a small glimmer approaching along the expected vector, closing rapidly on the decelerating starship—and McKall’s first reaction was an energetic laugh punctuated with several choice curses. “Long enough, it took them to chase us,” he declared to his hounds and fireworms and the other powerful, fearless members of his unabashedly loyal crew. “For now, watch our enemy. Study what it shows us, and do nothing. Then at ten thousand kilometers, obliterate it.”

Whatever the weapon was, their fifth blast managed to vaporize both its armor and the surprisingly simple meat inside.

Celebratory drinks were served.

For many centuries now, the starship’s captain had been worried. Onboard mirrors showed that the solar system behind them had suffered wars and subsequent rebirths. Who knew what kinds of marvels these new generations had devised? But obviously, his concerns had been misspent. Several moments were invested in careful study of the vanquished enemy. The remnant dust presented a minor puzzle, composed of common iron and little else. Why would anyone go to such trouble, sending what looked like a fancy cannonball after him? Too late, he wondered if perhaps the device had been a decoy, a ruse. He confessed his fears to his security chief, and the chief initiated a ship-wide search for tiny breeches and undetected invaders. Nothing was found. Every system was working properly. Twenty-three minutes after that cannonball was first seen, Earnest McKall retreated to his quarters—the only private rooms allowed inside the enormous starship—and he had halfway prepared a fresh cocktail when he noticed the tiny shape of a girl or woman clinging to the ceiling.

Softly, very softly, he asked, “How did you—?”

“Slip onboard? While you were fighting the bait, the hook approached from ahead of you. I used your engine’s fire as camouflage. And as for the rest of my trickery … well, explaining everything is not my consuming goal.”

In secret, McKall signaled for help.

Nothing changed.

An instant later his metabolism had reached full speed, dragging his thoughts along with it. “What is your—?”

“Lilly.”

He stopped talking.

“My name is Lilly, and thank you for asking.” She was at least as swift as the ship’s captain. “Do you have any other questions, Dr. McKall?”

“What is your goal?” he managed.

“What do you believe that I want?”

“To stop me, of course. We’re not five hundred years from New Earth, and this is some last-gasp attempt to destroy my ship and me.”

She was pretty and very small, no longer than a small finger, and it was difficult, even impossible, to take her seriously. Yet her voice had weight, rising from places besides her miniscule mouth. Amused, she explained, “But I don’t wish to stop you. And I certainly don’t want to destroy you. What I want—what I have halfway taken already, without you being aware—is complete control of this vessel and its crew. I am the new captain, and you are my dog.”

McKall was furious, and he was terrified. Which emotion fixed his legs to the floor? He couldn’t decide. But he discovered that moving any limb was impossible, and his voice was a breathless little gasp.

“You’ll conquer the New Earth for yourself,” he managed. “Is that your scheme?”

“Hardly.”

The untasted cocktail fell from his hand, spilling sticky and cold across his bare feet.

“I just want your ship and its possibilities,” she explained. Then she dropped off the ceiling and landed in his rich black hair, miniature hands gripping tightly, yanking hard. “My plan? We’ll drop into orbit, and I will mine the local system, beginning construction of rings first and then a conservatory far above the atmosphere. Elaborate defensive works will be built, plus shields against interstellar catastrophe, and then I will wait for anyone who is foolish enough to follow after you and after me.”

“But what will you do … with the world…?”

“Nothing,” she promised. Then thinking again, she added, “Except to watch its native life go about with its business. Which is what any of us do on any given day. Isn’t that right, Dr. McKall?”

*   *   *

The atum concluded his speech by answering the question that everyone would ask, given the chance. He posed it in his voice, wondering aloud, “And when, at long last, will we leave our solar system for other suns and the rich new worlds waiting their chance to be claimed?”

Then he paused, offering an archaic smile while nodding slightly.

Cryptically, he said, “We shall embark when we are ready.”

Then a little voice up front shouted, “And when will that be?”

Simon’s most loyal assistant was obeying explicit instructions. He glanced at the many-limbed creature, answering, “Once all of our local homes are filled and happy. I would hope. We will embark as soon as we can trust our nature and our institutions not to use this migration as an excuse for easy growth and return voyages of conquest. When we have a worthy plan and the courage and discipline to trust in it. When starships no longer consume fortunes in energy and precious matter. When we have become adults, finally mature and responsible in all occasions. But most important…”

He paused briefly, enjoying the anticipation that washed over him.

“Most important,” he concluded, “we will not leave this little realm of ours until we are children again. Wide-eyed, enthralled children who know what they have in their hands and hold it with all the care they possess.”