New Horizons

Geospermia-1

Geospermia

Published in Analog November 2013, this story started its life as a question: if someone exported a rare species to another country, continent or planet, and that species became a pest there, would it be all right to kill it?

"So," Pavlo said, "your brother lives down there?"

The truck slid down a hairpin bend, the rear end fishtailing. Pavlo's hands raced hand over hand over the wheel. Red mud splattered against the window. My fingers dug holes into my seat.

"Yup. He's had the farm for about five years now." Trying to sound relaxed. Not sure if I succeeded. All I could see was the narrow track wedged between the red cliff-face and the wall of green rising from the steep slopes of the canyon below. Right now, I was glad that I couldn't see the bottom. This section of Ophis Chasma was five kilometres deep, and every one of those kilometres was screaming its presence to me.

Silly space-adapted woman.

"What does he grow? I presume he's one of the farmers."

"Yes. He grows potatoes."

He raised an eyebrow at me. "Oh, old Mackenroy is your brother?"

I nodded, non-commitally, wondering since when forty-two was old and really not wanting to talk about Derek. I vastly preferred that Pavlo kept his eyes on the road instead.

And why didn't Pavlo know this anyway? It was not like the Mars settlers community was that big. Most of them lived in the towns and judging by the checkpoint we'd passed at the top of the valley, the Settlement Authority knew exactly who lived where.

Another hairpin bend, another sideways slide in crumbly Martian mud.

Sven in the back seat was fidgeting. He always did that when I was nervous.

"How much further?" I didn't think I could take much more of this; I was convinced he was doing this on purpose to scare the s**t out of me.

"We should be there soon," Pavlo said, steering around a deep pothole. "Does your brother know you're coming?"

"It's a surprise," I said.

Well, not quite, but that was none of his business. Rather, I hoped it would be a surprise, because when Derek had not even sent a virt to Annalise's wedding, and didn't reply to our subsequent messages, we'd all become worried. Long periods of silence were common with Derek, but ignoring an important event, that was not like Derek at all. So, yeah, that's why I was here, checking up on him, on Mars, all the way from Titan.

The truck turned into the farm driveway, and Pavlo gunned down the drive.

The familiar house was at the end of the rutted track, surrounded by walls of green. Derek had sent us photos of how the vegetation had grown, but it still filled me with awe to see it in reality. As terraforming engineer, I only ever got to see the dome-erections, the soil flushing operations, the plantings, and the building of the very first dwellings. My boss went back to old projects, but I was part of the machine that pushed ahead to the next project. We made models, we designed, we oversaw construction, we wrote the soil treatment manuals. We allowed people to start a closed ecosystem, but we rarely saw the results.

So this riot of greenery was new to me.

"Well, here you are," Pavlo said. He turned off the engine.

"Yeah," I said and hesitated. Damn, it was silent here. No recycling vents, no distant hum of engines.

The house looked the same it had on my last visit, years ago: a blocky structure made up out of a couple of shipping containers, white exterior stained orange, with a shed to the side. Functional, but ugly. An unkempt mat of grass had sprung up around the buildings. Mother, Annalise and I often wondered why Derek didn't pretty up the place a bit, but he would say that if people didn't like his mess, they were free to leave.

"Well—uhm…" I grabbed the door handle. Hesitated. I felt so naked. Rarely went outside without layers of protective clothing and pressure suits. Never without breathing apparatus.

Pavlo opened the door on his side. The air that streamed into the cabin was strangely humid and warm. It smelled of wet soil, a smell I knew well from the new Titan domes. What it lacked was the underlying tang of salt that came with the first wetting of soil in billions of years. The tinge of acid. The ammonia. This smelled like life. Earth life, on Mars.

I got out and stood on the red Martian soil. A soft breeze ruffled my hair. I'd seen the papers on predicted air circulation models. Because the canyon was very deep and at the equator, the shadows moved around a lot. This caused big temperature gradients and real breezes, real clouds and real rain, all within the volume of air capped by the dome. I knew that, but to feel it… damn, it was impressive. Here was Earth life infecting and slowly taking over a number of worlds. We found species that were suited to the harsh conditions, and they grew and thrived millions of miles from home. Geospermia in action.

There was a rustle behind me. Sven had come out of the back seat as silent and predator-like as he usually moved. The sunlight made his hair shine like platinum gold. His perfect face showed no emotion, but seeing as it was barely two years since his awakening, he had never seen real planetary life. I had allowed his datastreaming to stay on maximum just for this trip, and his eyes had that glazed look they took on when he was processing something. A slight frown crossed his face.

I went up the house's crude veranda, already sweating in the humidity. Sven followed close behind, his footsteps too silent for someone his size. I knocked on the door, but there was no sound inside the house.

I knocked on the windows. "Derek?"

Still no reply. I tried to peek through a gap between the blinds, but it was too dark inside.

Then I tried the front door. It was locked.

I rattled the doorknob, but Sven gently pushed me aside and opened the door with ease. If not for the bent aluminium, I would have thought I’d been crazy about it being locked. That was what aggregates could do, with their engineered muscles and stronger bones.

I went inside, ignoring the bent doorframe and torn seals. Most of these older container houses still had airtight doors and the remnants of air locks. Thus there was a second doorframe in the corridor, with a door mat over it, presumably so that no one would trip over the raised threshold. Typical Derek. Any sane person would have removed it ages ago.

My footsteps sounded hollow in the dark hall. "Derek?"

Dust crunched underfoot. The hall was lined with discarded shoes and socks, jackets, a raincoat. There was a cabinet at the end of the corridor. Empty, except for a couple of rifle-shaped clamps against the rear wall and a cardboard box that had held rounds of ammunition. That box was also empty.

In the kitchen I found a cup on the table, still with a drop of coffee in the bottom. I held it up to Sven. "He was here not that long ago. This morning probably."

And then he’d gone out, and taken his gun.

'Has he left any communication with anyone?'

Sven gazed into nothingness. He shook his head. "I can't access the mail. I'm not getting any communication channels, just the shuttle base info."

Hmmm—no reception in this valley? Surely it was a temporary outage.

We looked in all the rooms. The bed was disturbed, clothes on the floor around it. There was water in a laundry tub where a dark piece of clothing lay to soak. A light flashed in the darkness of the office. I peered in and noticed three surveillance camera screens, each showing part of the valley.

God. Paranoid anyone?

A thought: would he have hidden somewhere in the valley? Derek could be funny about strangers sometimes, and with all the surveillance equipment, he would have seen the truck coming for miles.

I checked the computer. Sven was right, the communication channel was down.

I left the house and walked into the field, through the cluggy Martian mud that stuck to my shoes and fell off in big clumps so that one moment I was walking on a platform, and the next, one of the platforms fell off and one leg was five centimetres shorter than the other. I made for the shed, Sven in tow, silent and dependable.

On closer inspection, the field had been churned but not ploughed. It looked like the soil had been dug up by wild pigs. And rained on, and churned up again. Something told me that it was a long time since these fields had seen any potato plants.

I pulled a green grass-like shoot, of which there were plenty. It lifted from the soil with a piece of thick woody rhizome attached.

Bamboo. Like the hillsides, like the whole f*****g jungle we’d just traversed to come here. Not a potato plant in sight.

Derek's truck was not in the shed. The back door was open, and tracks of crushed sprouts led across the field into the tall bamboo stand. Tracks which were fairly recent.

"I have a bad feeling about this, Sven. It's like he's fled after he saw us coming.' Because with the cameras, he would have seen us, and would not have known that I was inside the truck with the Department of Planetary Development logo on the sides. 'Like he’s had a disagreement with the department…" All of a sudden, my voice would no longer cooperate. I had expected Derek just to be sitting at home, being his stubborn self. But instead it looked like something was very, very wrong.

Sven put his arms around me. "We'll go and find him, yes?"

"Yes."

He spread his arms and I let myself be enfolded.

His voice rumbled in his chest. "You worry too much. Your brother was here this morning. He'll be around somewhere. Watching us, probably." He bent over and kissed me softly. Never mind that he was an aggregate, and had bones made of plastic and the capability to recycle nutrients internally, Sven was my rock, always there for me.

We made our way back to the truck, Sven still with his arm around me.

Pavlo saw us coming, and raised his eyebrows.

Sven said, softly, "I hazard a guess that he disapproves strongly of aggregates." He drew me close until my shoulder and back touched him.

"I heard that, Mister. Just for your information, it is not about aggregates," Pavlo said, sidestepping me and facing Sven. "It's about our right to interfere with nature, and I find it abhorrent how you planet-razers come and barge in with no respect to the natural cycles—"

"Natural cycles? On a dead world?"

"I would expect you to say that, as a half-human. But your boss, and the boss above that should know better—"

"If you threaten Wendy, you'll have to deal with me first—"

"Whoa, whoa!" I stepped between the two, looking from one to the other. "Do you care to explain what both of you are on about?"

Neither of them said anything. I met Sven's eyes and tried to look questioning, but he was again tapped into the shuttle base. I wished I could shut off the link, or at least vet it, because it seemed he had tapped into a political stream, but I needed his medi-couch, and damn it, at this age, he was meant to be stable.

"Derek’s not there," I said to Pavlo. "Do you know if there would be a reason for him not to want a visit from the department?"

Pavlo shrugged. "I don't know." A bit too careless for my liking. Oh hell, he knew.

"I’m going to find him," I said.

Pavlo snorted. "How? Last time I sent one of you spacers into the valley by themselves, I had to assemble a twenty-man strong team for a rescue mission."

"I'm a terraformer, not a spacer."

"You know nothing about this place. Let me tell you: if you go out there, you’ll need a truck. I'm coming."

"I didn't hire you for that." Derek would run even faster if he saw the department truck following him.

"I can't let you go by yourself."