Authors: William H. Keith
Operation Yunagi was, of itself, fairly straightforward. A number of DalRiss comels, budded from the comel that he’d used to talk to the Xeno World Mind on Alya B-V, had been prepared in laboratories on Earth. When Xenophobes were discovered on another human-colonized world, the comels would be shipped there.
Ideally, the attempt to communicate should have been tried before humans and Xenophobes clashed on the target world; according to Tsuru, it was too late for that on Eridu, and that aspect of the plan may have been unrealistic to begin with. It was hard to keep colonists from shooting at something that persisted in snacking on city domes, power plants, or warstriders. In fact—Dev’s arguments before the Imperial Staff had stressed the point—it might only be possible to approach Xenos on a world where active fighting had already broken out, simply because there was no way to get at the ones that were still kilometers underground.
Perhaps the biggest unanswered question was whether or not he could even get close to an acquisitive-stage Xeno without being killed.
That was a question which could not be answered until he tried.
Dev didn’t like looking at that aspect of Yunagi too closely, though he’d watched enough Xenos to be pretty sure he’d be able to at least approach the things, once he found some on the surface. He filed that for later, and tapped into
Hayai’s
ephemeris.
Linkcode accepted. Datafeed commence—
Stellar Data:
Chi Draconis
Type: F7 V, mass 1.25 Sol, luminosity 3.0 Sol, stellar radius 1.13 Sol.
Planetary system: six major bodies, including one Earthlike world (V) located within the star’s habitable zone.…
Planetary Data:
Chi Draconis V (Eridu)
Mean orbital radius: 1.78 a.u., eccentricity: .00513, period: 2.124
y
; natural satellites: two.
Diameter: 11,244 km, mass: 4.1 x 10
27
g, density: 5.501 g/cm
3
, surface gravity: .879 G; rotational period: 32
h
15
m
24.119
s
, axial tilt: 01° 13' 28"; magnetic field: .47 gauss.…
Albedo: .58; temperature range (equatorial): 40°C to 50°C; Atmospheric pressure (sea level): .81 bar; composition: N
2
87.1%, O
2
9.5%, Ar 1.2%, H
2
O (mean) 2.1%,
CO
2
845 ppm, SO
2
2.7 ppm, O
3
0.515 ppm.…
Note: Due to low partial pressures of atmospheric oxygen, plus somewhat elevated carbon dioxide and ozone levels, the atmosphere of Chi Draconis V is not breathable by humans without artificial assistance. Plans to modify the planetary atmosphere for human needs have met with surprisingly widespread local resistance.…
For hours, Dev walked the ViRsim surface of Eridu, getting a feel for the world and its terrain, his cephlink persona unaffected by the thin and oxygen-starved air.
Hot
and
wet
were the words best characterizing Eridu. Popular sims and travelogue feeds described the place as a jungle world, though such a simplistic characterization of any planetary ecology was patent nonsense. The air was humid, and at the equator where temperatures hovered around fifty degrees Celsius, steaming, brackish swamps and continent-wide tangles of exotic native flora reminiscent of Earth’s long-lost jungles were the rule.
The climate at Eridu’s iceless poles, however, was equivalent to that of northern BosWash, say, or the Pacific Northwest. An almost nonexistent axial tilt eliminated seasonal variations; climate was determined entirely by latitude and altitude, not by winter or summer. North and south of fifty degrees, the gently rolling hills were blanketed in open woodlands or steppelike grasslands. Winchester, near the-planet’s southern pole, was one of the largest of Eridu’s colonial settlements. Unlike on other colony worlds, where an equatorial towerdown had become the planet’s principal city, Eridu’s towerdown at Babel was little more than a stopover for freight and passengers going up- or down-tower. Transport to the more pleasant climes of the poles was accomplished by rail magflitter or by hydrofoil. Perhaps half of the world’s surface area was given over to small landlocked seas; more of Eridu’s original allotment of primordial water had escaped to space early in its history than had been the case on Earth, beneath a milder, gentler sun.
There’d been quite a lot of political controversy over Eridu, Dev noted. Universal Life was active there, as were several modern offshoots of the old Green Party political activists. In Winchester, he watched a demonstration by anti-Hegemonists, a chanting mob of dissidents advancing through the city’s main dome. A thin line of Authority Police blocked their way with stunners and light laser weapons.
“Troublemakers,” Tokuyama’s voice said, seemingly at his side. Dev opened a RAM code extending a silent invitation for
Hayai’s
Captain to join him. Tokuyama’s ViRpersona, Dev noticed, was identical to his real-world self, right down to the grease-stained and shabby green coveralls. “Hooligans and troublemakers.”
“What’s the argument all about?” Dev asked. “Whether or not it’s ethical to terraform?”
“Eridu’d be easy to T-form,” Tokuyama said. “Double the partial pressure of oxygen. Lower the CO
2
. You could manage that in fifteen years with a single atmosphere converter. That’d make the air breathable for humans and have the added benefit of reducing the greenhouse effect enough to make the equatorial regions bearable. A cinch compared to some hellhole like Moloch or Loki,
neh?”
“It would also exterminate the local flora and fauna,” Dev noted. With an effort of will, he shifted his vantage point from the city square to a point outside, where a forest of odd, mushroom-shaped things that might have been trees, stained in shades of red, gold, and brown, crowded close together above orange-tinted things that looked like dry-land sea anemones. Something fluttered through the air, all gauze and crimson streamers, but Dev couldn’t see it well enough to tell what it was. “Double the oxygen and you’d poison the natives. Their metabolisms are geared for nine percent oxygen and thinner air.”
“So? It’s our planet now. Hell, some people say we didn’t have the right to T-form prebiotics like Loki or Hephaestus, but we do. Better’n letting them go to waste, right?” He shook his head in disgust. “Some people are
baka.
Fools. They don’t know when they have it good.”
Dev didn’t answer, but Tokuyama’s curt dismissal bothered him. He was no enviro or greenie, certainly, but the Hegemony had taken a lot of public relations flak over the years for its rape-and-plunder colonial policies. There’d be less talk about rebellion on the Frontier, he thought, if some of those centuries-old policies could be softened.
Besides, according to the entry in
Hayai’s
ephemeris, Eridu’s ecology already provided several important trade products. A fungus from the humid equatorial forests, for example, provided a drug useful for biological memory enhancement, while a chemical extract taken from a freshwater weed called grennel was reputed to improve sexual performance.
“Any rebel activity on Eridu?” he asked Tokuyama.
“Oh, the usual who-was,” the Captain said.
Who-was,
an Inglic corruption of the Nihongo
uwasa,
was slang for “rumors” or “hearsay.” Tokuyama was as earthy and as colloquially direct as most Americans Dev knew.
“Like what?”
“Nothing official. The greenies keep threatening to start an armed rebellion if the Hegemony starts T-forming. Eridu was colonized by Americans, though. Americans and Europeans. That makes it a breeding ground for weird anti-Imperial notions,
neh?”
Dev wondered whether Tokuyama was trying to get a rise out of him, or if he’d genuinely forgotten that his passenger was an American. After a moment’s thought, he decided that his being an Imperial officer was all that counted for the old scout captain. He would relate to Dev as he would to any other Japanese official.
As for dissident activity at Eridu, well, it wouldn’t affect his mission there. The sudden emergence of Xenophobes suggested that even anti-Imperial rebels would be keeping their heads down for the time being. Travis Sinclair and his New Constitutionalists might hate the Hegemony and everything about it, but even they couldn’t prefer Xenos to their fellow humans. Humans you could talk to, negotiate with. Eventually you could reach an understanding with them. Xenophobes were so alien it was difficult to know what they were thinking… or even whether or not they were capable of thought at all.
As he continued experiencing the sims recorded on Eridu, however, Dev couldn’t help wondering about the factions that seemed poised for battle, ready to duel for control of Eridu’s destiny. He felt a certain sympathy for the people fighting to preserve the planet’s natural order, if for no other reason than that mass extinction within the planetary biosphere would ruin the livelihoods of tens of thousands of colonists. Until an Earth-based ecology could be established, there would be mass dislocation, poverty, even famine if the local government failed to address the colonists’ needs.
On the other hand, surely the Hegemony had the best interests of the people at heart. Worlds where men could walk without E-suits and breathe the air unaided, like New Earth or Elysia or Earth herself, were achingly rare. Terraforming created such worlds, given the proper raw materials and a few centuries in which to work.
Most T-formed worlds in the Shichiju had begun as prebiotic planets, worlds of water and ammonia and carbon dioxide that had the potential for evolving life but had never done so. One theory held that they would never do so; the Lunar Hypothesis suggested that only on worlds with large, close, natural satellites could prebiotic chemicals form the complex chains of amino acids, proteins, and ultimately DNA analogues. Tides, the proponents of the Lunar Hypothesis argued, tides such as those on Earth or Elysia, were necessary for the appearance of life. If humans didn’t terraform such worlds, they would forever remain lifeless, poison-shrouded wastes.
On Eridu, the situation was a bit more complicated, but different only in degree, not in principle. There, life had formed some hundreds of millions of years ago, but the most advanced phyla were insectlike pollinators of the plant life that girdled the planet from pole to pole. Most animal life remained in Eridu’s shallow seas, a recapitulation of Earth some three hundred fifty million years earlier. Intelligence, if it was to evolve at all, could not possibly arise on such worlds for many tens of millions of years yet to come.
The environmentalists, then, were interested in preserving primitive local life forms, creatures of particular interest to the exobiologists, of course, and to the locals who harvested grennel or trekked through the jungle searching for patches of
Dracomycetes mirabila.
But a world open to full habitation and exploitation would benefit everyone.
Surely, Dev thought, new careers could be found for out-of-work grennel harvesters, for example, and modern medical nanotechnology promised that any chemical compound could be perfectly and cheaply synthesized. It wasn’t as though Mankind was losing anything by terraforming such a world. He was gaining an entire planet, one with blue skies and breathable air, and the chance for launching new art, new achievements, a whole new expression of the diversity and the inventiveness of Man.
Besides, a scattering of local rebels and malcontents would be no match for the Hegemony Guard. They must see that their cause was hopeless.
Why then did they persist? Dev returned to the ship’s simulation of Eridu many times, walking invisibly with the protestors, listening to their shouted curses and slogans.
“Don’t poison our world!”
What was
that
supposed to mean?
“Leave us alone!”
and
“Down with the Imperial Hegemony!”
and
“Chiji no! Life yes!”
Didn’t the chanting, angry citizens know that they’d not survive on a hostile world like Eridu for six weeks without the Hegemony? They might grow food enough for themselves in the orbital hydroponics farms, but machine parts, tools, replacements, AI computers, weapons, all of those came from Earth or the other developed worlds of the Core.
To Dev, it seemed that the whole colony was on the verge of going mad.
Still, the disturbances appeared to be caused by a relative handful of extremists. Simwalking the demonstrations and riots, it was easy to forget that the vast majority of a world’s citizens were law-abiding, wanting nothing more than to be left alone. It was those people who would suffer most if civil war broke out… or if the Xeno threat wasn’t contained.
Dev refused to think about it anymore. The governor and his guard would have to look after the threat of rebellion. Dev’s concern was for the Xenos and how he was going to carry out his orders, especially if the fighting between Xenos and humans on Eridu had already begun. That situation was more than enough headache for any one man.
Any rebellion on Eridu could look after itself.
Chapter 4
Travis Ewell Sinclair—soldier, politician, author, statesman, philosopher… and principal author of that remarkable document called
The Declaration of Reason.
If the Confederation Rebellion doesn’t owe its existence to this man, it at least owes him much of its character.