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ROBERT REED
A PLACE WITH SHADE
The old man was corpulent like a seal, muscle clothed in fat to guarantee
warmth, his skin smooth and his general proportions -- stocky limbs and a
broad
chest -- implying a natural, almost unconscious power. He wore little despite
the damp chill. The brown eyes seemed capable and shrewd. And humorless. We
were
standing on a graveled beach, staring at his tiny sea; and after a long
silence,
he informed me, "I don't approve of what you do, Mr. Locum. It's pretentious
and
wasteful, this business of building cruel places. You're not an artist, and I
think it's healthy for both of us to know my objections to your presence
here."
I showed a grin, then said, "Fine. I'll leave." I had spent three months
inside
cramped quarters, but I told him, "Your shuttle can take me back to the
freighter. I'll ride out with the iron."
"You misunderstand, Mr. Locum." His ham e was Provo Lei, the wealthiest person
fora light-month in any direction. "I have these objections, but you aren't
here
for me. You're a gift to my daughter. She and I have finally agreed that she
needs a tutor, and you seem qualified. Shall we dispense with pretenses? You
are
a toy. This isn't what you would call a lush commission, and you'd prefer to
be
near a civilized world, building some vicious forest for society people who
want
prestige and novelty. Yet you need my money, don't you? You're neither a tutor
nor a toy, but your debts outweigh your current value as an artist. Or am I
wrong?"
I attempted another grin, then shrugged. "I can work on a larger scale here."
I'm not someone who hesitates or feels insecure, but I did both just then.
"I've
had other offers --"
"None of substance," Provo interrupted.
I straightened my back, looking over him. We were in the middle of his house
--
a sealed hyperfiber tent covering ten thousand hectares of tundra and ice
water
-- and beyond the tent walls was an entire world, earth-size but less massive.
Not counting robots, the world's population was two. Counting me, three. As we
stood there enjoying impolite conversation, an army of robots was beneath the
deep water-ice crust, gnawing at rock, harvesting metals to be sold at a
profit
throughout the district.
"What do you think of my little home, Mr. Locum? Speaking as a professional
terraformer, of course."
 I blinked, hesitating again.
"Please. Be honest."
"It belongs to a miser." Provo didn't have propriety over bluntness. "This is
cheap Arctic package. Low diversity, a rigorous durability, and almost no
upkeep. I'm guessing, but it feels like the home of a man who prefers
solitude.
And since you've lived here for two hundred years, alone most of the time, I
don't think that's too much of a guess."
He surprised me, halfway nodding.
"Your daughter's how old? Thirty?" I paused, then said, "Unless she's exactly
like you, I would think that she would have left by now. She's not a child,
and
she must be curious about the rest of the Realm. Which makes me wonder if I'm
an
inducement of some kind. A bribe. Speaking as a person, not a terraformer, I
think she must be frighteningly important to you. Am I correct?"
The brown eyes watched me, saying nothing.
I felt a brief remorse. "You asked for my opinion," I reminded him.
"Don't apologize. I want honesty." He rubbed his rounded chin, offering what
could have been confused for a smile. "And you're right, I do bribe my
daughter.
In a sense. She's my responsibility, and why shouldn't I sacrifice for her
happiness?"
"She wants to be a terraformer?"
"Of the artistic variety, yes."
I moved my feet, cold gravel crunching under my boots.
"But this 'cheap package,' as you so graciously described it, is a recent
condition. Before this I maintained a mature Arctic steppe, dwarf mammoths
here
and a cold-water reef offshore. At no small expense, Mr. Locum, and I'm not a
natural miser."
"It sounds like Beringa," I muttered.
"My home world, yes." Beringa was a giant snowball terraformed by commercial
souls, carpeted with plastics and rock and rich artificial soils, its interior
still frozen while billions lived above in a kind of perpetual summer,
twenty-hour days but limited heat. The natives were built like Provo, tailored
genes keeping them comfortably fat and perpetually warm. In essence, Beringa
was
an inspired apartment complex, lovely in every superficial way.
The kind of work I hated most, I was thinking.
"This environment," I heard, "is very much makeshift."
I gestured at the tundra. "What happened?"
"Ula thought I would enjoy a grove of hot-sap trees."
 Grimacing, I said, "They wouldn't work at all." Ecologically speaking. Not to
mention aesthetically.
"Regardless," said Provo, "I purchased vats of totipotent cells, at no small
cost, and she insisted on genetically tailoring them. Making them into a new
species."
"Easy enough," I whispered.
"And yet." He paused and sighed. "Yet some rather gruesome metabolites were
produced. Released. Persistent and slow toxins that moved through the food
web.
My mammoths sickened and died, and since I rather enjoy mammoth meat, having
been raised on little else --"
"You were poisoned," I gasped.
"Somewhat, yes. But I have recovered nicely." The nonsmile showed again, eyes
pained. Bemused. "Of course she was scared for me and sorry. And of course I
had
to pay for an extensive cleanup, which brought on a total environmental
failure.
This tundra package was an easy replacement, and besides, it carries a
warranty
against similar troubles."
Popular on toxic worlds, I recalled. Heavy metals and other terrors were
shunted
away from the human foods.
"You see? I'm not a simple miser."
"It shouldn't have happened," I offered.
Provo merely shrugged his broad shoulders, admitting "I do love my daughter.
And
you're correct about some things. But the situation here, like anywhere, is
much
more complicated than the casual observer can perceive."
I looked at the drab hyperfiber sky -- the illusion of heavy clouds over a
waxy
low sun -- and I gave a quick appreciative nod.
"The area around us is littered with even less successful projects," Provo
warned me.
I said, "Sad."
The old man agreed. "Yet I adore her. I want no ill to befall her, and I mean
that as an unveiled warning. Ula has never existed with ordinary people. My
hope
is that I live long enough to see her mature, to become happy and normal, and
perhaps gain some skills as a terraformer too. You are my best hope of the
moment. Like it or not, that's why I hired you."
I stared out at his little sea. A lone gull was circling bleating out
complaints
about the changeless food.
 "My daughter will become infatuated with you," I heard. "Which might be a good
thing. Provided you can resist temptation, infatuation will keep her from
being
disillusioned. Never, never let her become disillusioned."
"No?"
"Ula's not her father. Too much honesty is a bad thing."
I felt a momentary, inadequate sense of fear.
"Help her build one workable living place. Nothing fancy, and please, nothing
too inspired." He knelt and picked up a rounded stone. "She has an extensive
lab
and stocks of totipotent cells. You'll need nothing. And I'll pay you in full,
for your time and your imaginary expertise."
I found myself cold for many reasons, staring skyward. "I've been to Beringa,"
I
told Provo. "It's ridiculously cheery. Giant flowers and giant butterflies,
mammoths and tame bears. And a clear blue sky."
"Exactly," he replied, flinging the stone into the water. "And I would have
kept
my blue sky, but the color would have been dishonest."
A mosquito landed on my hand, tasting me and discovering that I wasn't a
caribou, flying off without drawing blood.
"Bleak fits my mood, Mr. Locum."
I looked at him.
And again he offered his nonsmile, making me feel, if only for an instant,
sorry
for him.
Beaty, say some artists, is the delicious stew made from your subject's flaws.
Ula Lei was a beautiful young woman.
She had a hundred hectare tent pitched beside her father's home, the place
filled with bio stocks and empty crystal wombs and computers capable of
modeling
any kind of terraforming project. She was standing beside a huge reader,
waving
and saying "Come here," with the voice people use on robots. Neither polite
nor
intimidating.
I approached, thinking that she looked slight. Almost underfed. Where I had
expected an ungraceful woman-child, I instead found a mannerly but almost
distant professional- was she embarrassed to need a tutor? Or was she unsure
how
to act with a stranger? Either way, the old man's warning about my "toy"
status
seemed overstated. Taking a frail, pretty hand, feeling the polite and
passionless single shake, I went from wariness to a mild funk, wondering if I
had failed some standard. It wounded me when she stared right through me,
 asking
with a calm dry voice, "What shall we do first?"
Funk became a sense of relief, and I smiled, telling her, "Decide on our
project, and its scale."
"Warm work, and huge."
I blinked. "Your father promised us a thousand hectare tent, plus any of his
robots --"
"I want to use an old mine," she informed me.
"With a warm environment?"
"It has a rock floor, and we can insulate the walls and ceiling with field
charges, then refrigerate as a backup." She knew the right words, at least in
passing. "I've already selected which one. Here. I'll show you everything."
She was direct like her father, and confident. But Ula wasn't her father's
child. Either his genes had been suppressed from conception, or they weren't
included. Lean and graced with the fine features popular on tropical worlds,
her
body was the perfect antithesis of provo's buttery one. Very black, very curly
hair. Coffee-colored skin. And vivid green eyes. Those eyes noticed that I was
wearing a heavy work jersey; I had changed clothes after meeting with Provo,
wanting this jersey's self-heating capacity. Yet the temperature was twenty
degrees warmer than the tundra, and her tropical face smiled when I pulled up
my
sleeves and pocketed my gloves. The humor was obvious only to her.
Then she was talking again, telling me, "The main chamber is eight kilometers
by
fifty, and the ceiling is ten kilometers tall in the center. Pressurized ice.
Very strong." Schematics flowed past me. "The floor is the slope of a dead
volcano. Father left when he found better ores."
A large operation, I noted. The rock floor would be porous and easily eroded,
but rich in nutrients. Four hundred square kilometers? I had never worked on
that scale, unless I counted computer simulations.
A graceful hand called up a new file. "Here's a summary of the world's
best-guess history. If you're interested."
I was, but I had already guessed most of it for myself. Provo's World was like
thousands of other sunless bodies in the Realm. Born in an unknown solar
system,
it had been thrown free by a near-collision, drifting into interstellar space,
its deep seas freezing solid and its internal heat failing. In other regions
it
would have been terraformed directly, but our local district was impoverished
when it came to metals. Provo's World had rich ores, its iron and magnesium,
aluminum and the rest sucked up by industries and terraformers alike. A
healthy
green world requires an astonishing amount of iron, if only to keep it in
hemoglobin. The iron from this old mine now circulated through dozens of
worlds;
and almost certainly some portion of that iron was inside me, brought home now
within my own blood.
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