Planetfall (10 page)

I GUIDE SUNG-SOO
through a rudimentary visengineering process to knock up a rough plan for the main structure of his new house. He chooses a dome structure with spokes, a lot like Mack's, but with a deeper floor like mine. Of course, only a portion of my house's layout is on the server: the sections that needed to be printed at the communal manufacturing center. The additions and changes I've made over the years are known only to me.

“I'll take you to the place where we print out the main struts for construction,” I say to him as I save the file in the right place on the cloud. “We can talk about the next bits on the way.”

“Next bits?”

“Yeah—how you want to create the energy your house will use. Each one has to be fully self-sufficient and have a zero-waste footprint.”

He frowns with concentration. “The houses tread lightly, like my father talked about.”

The door out of Mack's place opens and we wave good-bye to him. He seems relieved to be left at home.

“He used to say it was the best way to live,” Sung-Soo continued. “We shouldn't take more than we needed and stay longer than we had to. Then we could be sure the food would be there the next time we stayed in that place.”

It doesn't sound like Hak-Kun to me. But I knew him only as a pampered man, cosseted by technology in the way we all are here. I'm amazed he survived long enough to teach his son anything.

“We're keen to live lightly here, yes,” I reply. “But not in the same sense as you're used to. There are rules about energy production versus consumption, water collection and processing waste. Most of that is handled by the materials we make our walls from.”

“I want to be able to see the stars at night,” he says after a pause. “Can you make the walls so that I can see out but no one can see in?”

“I can, but not one hundred percent—you need special soils between the membranes to process the waste. But most of the ceiling could be made like that, if you're happy to collect sunlight from cells around the edge of the house instead of across the roof. That's how mine works, and why I can grow stuff on the outside.”

“But some of the plants on your house are dying.”

I shove my hands in my pockets. “Oh . . . well, that's because I test new strains and new soil compositions on my house before rolling them out to the colony.” I give him as confident a smile as I can. “Sometimes they just don't take. I'll replace them soon.”

We walk through the colony to the side farthest from God's city and there still isn't a soul on the streets. I'm glad; I wouldn't
want anyone else to come and stick their nose in and bombard him with options. “Can I have fish in my windows like Mack does?”

“Of course. You could get some energy from the algae too.”

“Did his fish come from Earth?”

“No. We didn't bring any of the animals down to the planet. We couldn't predict their impact on the ecosystem.”

He looks up. “Bring them down . . . Was the ship you came here on somewhere up there?” He points up at the sky, now a pale blue in the early morning.

“It's still up there. It's called Atlas.”

“Could we go back up to it?”

“Theoretically.” I look back to where we're heading. “We had to strip the shuttle for parts when the printer broke down, so that would have to be rebuilt.”

“Is that why you didn't come and look for my father and the others? Because the shuttle was broken?”

I almost miss a step. “We thought they were dead,” I say quietly. “We used Atlas to look for you, with satellites we'd sent out to scan the planet before we came down. But by the time we found the crash site, there were no signs of life.”

It's only partly true. Mack sabotaged the satellite data as it was received by Atlas. By the time anyone else in the colony had gotten themselves together enough after Planetfall to look for the missing pods, they were actually looking at old footage of the crash site. Mack updated the pictures only after he'd screened them first.

Sung-Soo is staring at me and I realize I've fallen silent. “At least you looked,” he says.

“We almost built something to go and search, but with nothing to go on, we couldn't risk critical people—” I shut my mouth.
After a moment I add, “I don't want you to think we didn't believe those we'd lost weren't critical too—they were—it's just that the early days were so hard. We needed every single person working at full capacity.”

Sung-Soo just nods. “If you'd known where we were, would you have come to get us?”

“Of course we would!” I clench my fists inside my pockets. Sadly, that isn't a lie. Once things had settled down and everyone else had given up on the search and a formal memorial service was held, Mack had another look at the site. There were no signs of life—they must have moved on by then. But I know that if they'd stayed in the place they crashed, Mack would have built a craft and gone to get them. To kill them.

Would I have let him do that too?

“Why did their pods crash?”

His question makes me fear I'll be sick, or at the very least give something away. “We don't know exactly.” Did my voice tremble? Can he hear the lie slathered on top? “There was always a risk; the pod technology was relatively untested.”

We walk in silence for the rest of the journey. It must be so hard for him and I can't think of anything to say that will make it better. There is nothing to say.

When we reach the communal printers, I'm grateful for the change in topic. He watches closely as I run a check on the largest printer and recalibrate it. “It's not used so often now,” I explain. He waits as I send the files to it and begin the printing, unable to see anything without a chip of his own. “We can start off the foundation preparations while that first batch is printing. It'll only take a few hours. The soil we take out will be put into the cavity between the wall membranes, after we've added in the correct biocultures and protocells to process
the waste. There's a few other bits and pieces that need to happen, to manage water and stuff, but I'll take care of all that. It'll only take a couple of days at the most.”

“Then I can live inside it?”

“Yep. And grow your furniture and stuff. Ready to pick a spot?”

WE PRINT. WE
dig. We design. We construct. It's a glorious day of finite tasks with optimum ways to execute them. Every single one of them is within my comfort zone and none causes guilt or panic.

When the rest of the colony wakes, our construction project turns into a bizarre party, with people bringing food and drink and blankets or chairs to sit on and chat with one another and Sung-Soo as we work. I end up giving impromptu lessons to the children who were born after most of the colony's construction was completed, or are too young to remember.

Gilmour, our resident cultural history expert, tells us about barn raising as we eat our lunch and for the first time in years I feel part of this place. I actually chat with people instead of scurrying away like a rat to my nest, and by the end of the first day the rudimentary structure is up and the excavated soil is almost ready to be put between the membranes.

So many people ask Sung-Soo to dinner he suggests a
communal meal in the Dome around a fire pit and half the colony goes to hear the tales he learned as a child around a fire. I nod off partway through, only to be awoken by Sung-Soo, who is laughing at me affectionately. I'm forgiven, and the assembled applaud me as I make my good-byes and leave. It isn't until I get outside that I realize Kay has followed me.

“You look shattered,” she says, slipping her arm around mine and squeezing it.

“It's been a busy day.”

“I've never seen you look so happy.”

I stop and look at her eyes, bright against the sky dusted with stars. “I like building things.”

Even now, that statement is tainted. I recall my mother saying the same to a friend when they thought I was in another room. “She never decorates them; she just says she likes building things.” She was waving a wineglass at the latest construction project taking up most of the living room. “I don't even know what they're supposed to be.”

“Have you asked her?” Her friend, a man who thought he might fit into the gap my father left, stooped to inspect it.

“She says all kinds of stupid things; one minute it's a city and the next it's a tree. She can't settle on anything. And they're so ugly.”

I saw something in the way he looked at her, something to suggest he might be an ally. “You don't see this as art?”

“Art?” She laughed and downed the rest of the wine. “I just wish she'd make something beautiful. Like the other little girls do. Or at least try.”

Kay kisses my cheek. “And you're bloody good at it. I won't keep you—I know you're off to bed—but I haven't had a chance to talk to you about Sung-Soo's”—she pats her stomach—“guest.”

“I assumed it wasn't anything bad, or else you would have told me or Mack.”

“Oh, it's nothing bad at all. In fact, it's really useful. It's unlocked a whole new line of research into digesting some of the proteins in the native plants here. I'm just going to leave it be. It's not harming him; in fact, it's kept him alive this long. I'll keep a close eye on him, see if our germs and viruses give him a hard time, but his immune system is pretty damn robust.”

“Have you talked to him about it?”

“Briefly. He's distracted, understandably.”

We pause outside his partially constructed house. “I think it's sweet that he wanted to live near to you,” she says.

I don't tell her that he wanted to live even closer, nor that I've planned his windows and doors to look out over all the directions except my house.

“He wanted to be near Mack's place at first,” I say. “But it would mean extending the formal boundary, and he couldn't bear to wait for that to be approved by the council.”

“At least there's room on this side.”

There's room because I put my house as close to the edge as possible. The front door opens out onto the boundary instead of the rest of the colony and I don't use the back door anymore. Only the grass and the animals see into my house when I go inside.

Of course, we have more room than we need here, and space aplenty outside the boundary. We just don't want to sprawl unnecessarily, like so many places did on Earth. We're all too aware we're at the foot of a holy place. It would be wrong to dominate the landscape here.

“Well, I'll see you tomorrow, probably,” I say and kiss her cheek.

“You are okay, aren't you, Ren?” She holds my hand, stopping me from leaving. “You've looked so stressed lately. Are you eating properly?”

“I'm fine.” I pull my hand free and wave with it, leaving her to watch a moment before going her own way.

For a moment I wonder if I should follow her. Initiate something. But I'm tired and need to rest rather than stir up something that's finally settled. In minutes I'm curled up, nestled in my own little nook. Not even the thought of that metal artifact and the mystery it brings with it can keep me awake.

•   •   •

AS
I'm walking to the communal printers early the next morning I realize I haven't been down to the Masher for a couple of days. The thought of what could have been lost already makes me clench my teeth with worry. I stop and consider turning back, but then I see Sung-Soo waving from inside the skeleton of his home and I know my only chance has passed.

“I've been looking at some more things on Mack's projector,” he says as I arrive.

“Good morning.”

He smiles. “Yes, sorry, good morning. And I wanted to ask you about the pipe that goes here. You said all my waste goes into the walls and gets filtered by the soil. So what's the pipe for?”

“The walls process human waste,” I reply. “The pipe will connect your house to the Masher.”

He listens, enraptured, like the perfect student. I answer his questions, surprised by how much detail he wants. Most people just want to know that their house will be functional, not how.

When the first lines of inquiry are exhausted, he comes with
me to the printer I've left working overnight. The membrane is ready and already rolled onto a bolt so we can carry it over.

When we go back outside, the first tendrils are starting to emerge from the pods on God's city, nothing more than nubbins at this time of day.

“People are getting excited about the seed ceremony,” Sung-Soo says. “Are you?”

Oh shit. What a question. I'm dreading it, but I can't tell him why, just as much as I can't pretend to be excited. He's too tuned in to people. “Sort of,” I say. “It makes me miss Suh more.” I look at him. “Messages only go so far, you know?”

“What is she like? My grandmother?”

Oh, he speaks of her in the present tense. We rarely talk about Suh in the colony, day to day, and not like this.

“She's the most amazing woman I know.”

“How did you meet her?”

“At university. We ended up viewing an apartment at the same time and decided to share.” I can't help but smile at the memory. “It was so hard finding somewhere to live in Paris then; the university had sold off its student accommodation and the only places most of us could afford were in dangerous parts of the city.”

“Paris?”

“The capital of France and the European Union.” Neither of which would mean anything to him. “Millions of people lived there. It wasn't a nice place, really.”

“Was that where the food was? Is that why you had to live there?”

It strikes me then, more than it ever has with the children of the colony, that Earth is an alien planet to him. We have no shared reference for what life was like there. How can I convey the sheer
number of people, the ancient infrastructure or the emphasis on money and prestige? He's a product of a life intimately connected with the environment, whereas the society I grew up in did everything it could to divorce us from that connection.

If he was chipped, it would be easier; there are exabytes of history archives on the cloud, a lot recorded with full immersion. I make a mental note to see what could be interpreted by the projector to remove this barrier between him and our technology.

“We were in Paris because it was the last independent university in Europe.” I pause. I need to stop referencing things that have no meaning or context for him. “It was the only place we could learn without more powerful people . . . using it as a chance to control us.”

He looks lost. I shrug. “It doesn't matter anymore. Suh changed everything. We live here now—that's the important thing.”

We reach the house skeleton and he helps me fix the first layer of the membrane. Every single thing I do is accompanied by a question. At the first chance he's given, he does the work himself.

The more time I spend with him, the less he reminds me of Suh. When I think back to the Suh I met that day at the apartment though, she's nothing like the woman I followed here.

We stood in the lobby with the awkwardness of two people sharing a space without knowing why the other was there. I assumed she was meeting someone else who lived there. In fact, she was waiting for another agent marketing the property. Both parties were unaware of the other and their brief argument when both turned up pushed Suh and me together into a shared social role of innocent but involved bystanders.

As phone calls were made and bosses consulted, she held out a hand to me. “I'm Lee Suh-Mi,” she said. “But call me Suh.”

“Renata Ghali,” I replied, but didn't invite her to call me Ren.

“Lee is my family name,” she said, dumping her bag on the floor and leaning against the wall. “Unfortunately, my parents didn't realize that my ‘very pretty' name sounds like an invitation for litigation in English.”

I think I laughed. I was fascinated by the fact that she spoke to me in English, rather than French. It was a bit of a faux pas, in France, with so many of the natives infuriated by the sheer number of immigrants squeezed into their capital. Whether economic or intellectual, it didn't matter. We didn't belong. Did I give something away in my interaction with the agent? My French was flawless—I'd been speaking it all my life as it was my father's first language. Perhaps my accent wasn't Parisian enough.

“Are you at the university?” she asked and I nodded. “I thought I recognized you. I've seen you on campus. I'm studying synthetic biology. You?”

“Engineering, architecture and mathematics.”

She looked impressed. “Which is your main subject?”

“Engineering, but the other two count as a full degree.”

“Are you some sort of genius, then?”

I shrugged. I'd learned by then to not advertise the fact that I was gifted. It was only my first year and I was still working out who to be and where I fit in.

Suh's agent got off the phone first. “I'm so sorry about this; it really shouldn't have happened,” he said in French. “We're just waiting to hear back from the landlord and our booking people to see who made the appointment to view first.”

“Pas de problème,” she replied, sounding Parisian as hell. “We'll share, right, Ren? If we like the apartment, that is?”

I realize now that I was always following her. Nothing but a little cork caught in her eddies and swirls, happy to bob along the river.

Soon after we moved in, I asked her why she offered to share with someone she'd just met.

“It made sense,” she said. “And it was fate, us being there at the same time like that. But I wouldn't have suggested it if you were a philosophy major. They're so miserable.”