Perhaps Cambodian, or even Indian.
Carlyle opened her helmet too. The man frowned.
‘Where you come?’ The translation was still going from Korean to American.
‘Through the wormhole gate on the beach.’
‘Ah!’ The man looked enlightened. He said something which came out as: ‘Space bend door on sand through?’
‘Yes.’
He was frowning, chinning something inside his helmet, rolling his eyes upward as if reading off a head-up. The two languages—the speech coming from her lips and what he was hearing through his own translation software—were evidently confusing him. ‘Ah!’ he said again. ‘Amehican!’
‘English,’ she replied. ‘I’m a Carlyle.’
‘Oh,’ said the man, this time in American, ‘beg pardon. No offence intended. I mistook you for one of our customers.’
‘Customers?’
‘Amehica Offline,’ he said, waving her to a low padded bench. ‘We terraform, then sell planet to farmers. Almost ready. Very profitable for collective.’
‘I’m sure.’ So that was what explained it. Carlyle took her helmet off.
The man stuck out his hand. ‘My name Eighty-Seven Production Brigade Ree. Please call me Ree, Miss Carlyle.’
‘Lucinda,’ she said, smiling. The man busied himself at a tiny brazier, making tea.
‘You know about the gate on the beach, then?’ Carlyle asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Ree said. ‘Some year ago, we poke telescope through. Planet already terraformed. We already have hands full, so we leave it for later.
We hope to keep knowledge of gate to ourselves, hence nature preserve.
But now I see Carlyles get everywhere.’ He sighed. ‘Always the way.’
‘Is there another gate on the planet?’
Ree shook his head, handed her a small handleless cup of green tea.
‘Not that I know.’ He grinned slyly. ‘Of course other production brigades may be doing what Eighty-Seven did.’
‘It’s amazing what people can get up to behind your backs,’ Carlyle said.
Ree grinned again, catching the statement’s double edge. He sat back on another part of the bench and sipped.
‘You are here to investigate?’ he asked.
‘Investigate what?’ Carlyle temporised.
‘Our sale.’
‘Oh no.’ Carlyle shook her head. ‘I came here by chance, while exploring the wormhole network.’
‘More Carlyles on the way?’
Again she decided to be honest. ‘Not as far as I know,’ she said. She jerked a thumb in what she thought was the direction of the beach. ‘To tell you the truth, the other side of that gate is occupied by the Knights of Enlightenment. They are in a local conflict with my family’s company.’
Ree looked worried. ‘Is it likely to spill through gate?’
‘It’s possible,’ Carlyle said. ‘Or worse, because they are also attempting to contain a population of war machines.’
‘War machines not a worry,’ said Ree. ‘Self-reliant people have powerful weapons. But we must fortify this area.’
Carlyle glanced around the glass aquaria and glittering instruments. ‘Does that mean the end of your nature reserve?’
‘No, no.’ Ree grinned fiercely. ‘We put weapons in heads of great Marxists.’ He mimed using a machine gun. ‘Must not let son of bitch Amehican farmers, I mean our customers, to know. Reduce property value. Perhaps we tell them this is sacred place to great Marx and dear Leader.’ He sniggered briefly, tapping his nose. ‘They think self-reliance idea is religion and great Marxists are our gods like their Jesus Koresh. They superstitious, but good customer, to you too, no?’
‘You could say that,’ said Carlyle. She was beginning to like the man. They spoke the same language.
Ree flew her over what turned out to be a small forested island, the ‘nature preserve,’ and over a few kilometres of open water to a much harsher mainland. Here too there were forests, but they were patches in a scrubby desert, which was being ploughed, mulched with kelp, irrigated, and otherwise cultivated to provide growth media for more forest. When the AO farmers came they would have a thriving ecosystem to burn down and turn into monocultures. It was the only way to produce stable mono-cultures, Ree told her. Great machines, far bigger than combine harvesters and obviously adapted from strip-mining equipment, crawled across the ragged land.
Ree’s extended family, Eighty-Seven Production Brigade, lived in a small town or large village in a patch of the prairie that had already been made horticultural. The children looked after the gardens, and from the town the adults went forth every day in lifters to the big machines, to farm forest and cultivate jungle. And every evening, as now, the sky filled with darting lifters as they came home for dinner. There was a production brigade, or family or clan or whatever, every few hundred kilometres on this continent. Together they made up the Transformation of Nature Collective, the group that would eventually—soon, Ree said again—sell the planet.
Soon?
About fifteen years.
The lifter landed in a paved park amid low, spreading, ornate wooden buildings. Hundreds of children dropped whatever productive-educational task was to hand and pelted over and crowded round. They wore blue dungarees and a profusion of different-coloured silk shirts and hair knots. It was hard to tell the small boys and girls apart, which was not the case with the adults or the adolescents. The young men wore natty asymetric variations of khaki and olive-green shirt and trousers, the young women similarly military styles and textiles but elaborated into chrysanthemum frills and fluted sleeves and parachute-silk blouses. The older men, fathers she guessed, wore blue overalls and the mothers wore big traditional Korean
After taking a shower she was invited to join the production brigade for dinner. Long hall, low tables. People sat around them on mats on the floor. Small children served, dipping into dishes as they did so, licking fingers. Carlyle was escorted to the top table; Ree came too, but she didn’t think he usually ate there, among the dozen or so matriarchs and patriarchs of the clan. They all spoke very good American and plied her with rice wine and something made mostly from peppers and pork.
‘This is a beautiful place,’ Carlyle said. ‘Surely you will miss it. Well, perhaps not you, but the younger folk who have grown up here.’
Jong, the oldest man here, an Earth veteran, shook his head. ‘Not at all.
Quite the opposite. We could adjust, we have come to like it. It’s like home.
But it is frustrating for the young ones. They have to travel long distance to other production brigades to find marriage partners.’ He circled a hand above his head. ‘In the habitats, many production brigades. Very close.
Thousands in every one.’
That led to a long family discussion, very explicit and naming names and lapsing often into Korean, that kept them all busy and Carlyle out of it until the end of the meal.
‘Now you must think about how you can pay,’ said Eighty-Seven Production Brigade San Ok, a great- grandmother whose face was as smooth and girlish as her great-granddaughters’.
Carlyle, thinking this must be a joke, gestured at empty bowls. ‘I can wash plates.’
San Ok laughed. ‘No, no. That is hospitality. But you wish transport to the spaceport. Many thousands of kilometres. Your starship fare is for the captain or the steward, not our problem, and as a Carlyle you will have
