“The trees are...humming!” Sushil exclaimed.
“I kind of like it,”one of the other councilors said.
“Might as welllike it,”Frank told him. “I don’t think you’vegot much choice.”
Mal trotted over to thegroup. “The area’s secure,” he announced. “Just don’t touchthose trees with the spikey vesicles on the trunks. Tox-scan shows itwon’t kill you but it will definitely put you down for a long nap.”
“Animals?” Sushilasked. “Any dens or burrows in the ground?”
“Just a few tunnelsfor what would compare pretty closely to your mice back home,” Maltold him. “Possibly a pest but no danger at all.”
Frank wandered over toone of the trees. Its trunk was roughly five feet in diameter and itlooked like it was covered in barnacles. Must be the one with allthe nap-sap. He looked out across the valley, wondering how longit would take to clear farmland.
He sighed, letting theinformation flow from memories he didn’t notice until now. Whilenanite work-gangs were mining, terraforming the hill and building thenew town, even more of them would flow across the valley, clearingthe trees and trimming them into usable timber.
It wouldn’t look likethis for long.
“So how does it feelto be home?” John asked, coming to stand next to his brother.
“It feels good,”Frank said after a while to think about it. “It also feels alittle… empty.” He looked at John. “No ghosts here.”
John raised an eyebrow.
Frank shook his head.“Not like that! I just mean… Humans have tens of thousands ofyears of history on Earth.” He looked back out at the valley as alight breeze hummed several intertwining notes in the trees.
“Back home, there’salways history all around us, even in Cali.” He smiled. “Rememberwhen you found that old mine-shaft?”
John nodded. “We usedto pretend we were grizzled old ’49ers, bush-whacking claims andall that nonsense.”
“Everywhere you look,back home, there’s stuff like that – evidence of a past Humanpresence.” Frank nodded down the valley. “Here, though, not ahint of history on the breeze at all.”
Everything was new.
Coming Soon…
Ragnarok, Town Site
Frank looked down atthe hilltop. Its irregular top had been smoothed out, leaving a smallpark area with roughly two hundred native trees near its center.
The materials from theterraforming had been deposited on a hard surface adjacent to thepark. Because it would be surrounded by a street and would wrappartially around a central public square, those surfaces had beenpaved with a very believable cobbled surface. That surface made anexcellent place for the automated equipment to deposit materials fromboth the terraforming and the mining operations.
Heshifted in his seat, if you could call the edge of the shuttle’sdecking a seat. His legs dangled freely overthe side. “I suppose you’reused to this kind of ride,” he said, glancing left at John.
“This is a littlemore unsettling,” John admitted.
“Because it’s analien world?” Sushil asked from Frank’s right side.
“Because thehelos we used in the Bolivar Restorationhad skids under our feet. Less likely to slide out if someone startsshooting at us and the pilot needs to change course.”
“Meh,” Frank said.“We’re tied off. If we fall out, we’ll just have a betterview.”
“Better make surethat harness is adjusted properly,” John said. “My sister-in-lawwon’t thank me if I bring you back to her a eunuch.”
The councilors on bothsides of the craft chuckled but then everyone shut up at the sametime. “The streets are starting!” someone behind Frank said,nearly shouting in his excitement.
“Now, that issomething that I find unsettling,” Sushil admitted, looking down asthe roads grew behind a froth of tumbling nanites.
Frank shuddered.“Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made.” He looked atSushil before his friend could ask. “Old saying back home. Nothingruins the taste of a good sausage like watching it being made in abig factory.”
“Especiallywhen you’re imagining the machinery turning youinto a sausage,” Sushil mused. “I plan to worry very much aboutthat horde of microscopic machinery running amok and turning us allinto sausage in our sleep.”
“I wasn’t going tosay anything,” John admitted, “but that kind of freaks me out aswell.” He grimaced, shaking his head. “I know they’ll move onto prep the fields and run the mines once they're done here.Honestly, you’re in no more danger than you would be at any randomlocation on the planet but…”
“But maybe theyremember they were here,” Frank said. “Maybe they’ll gethomesick or decide to put the hill back the way it used to be.”
“Gentlemen,”Mal said, coming to stand in the middle of the decking, “I cancertainly understand your concerns, given that you’re all new tothis way of life, but I can assure you that nobody has ever beenaccidentally killedby nanites.”
“Accidentally?” Acouncilor turned to frown up at Mal in the relative darkness of theshuttle.
“In the earlydays of the empire’s Brushfire Wars,we were short on munitions, so we programmed blocks of nanites totear apart enemy ships.”
“And how doesthis sound reassuring?” Frank asked him.
“It has to bedone on purpose,” Mal said,sounding surprised that the colonists were still unconvinced. “Theyhad to program a lump of nanites to expand in random directions whichdisrupted critical systems. They would have stopped before slicing acrewman in half because of restraints, hard coded into every singlenanite in existence.”
“Sounds to me,”Frank said, “like the nanites still killed the crew, even ifindirectly.”
Mal sighed. “Look, Icould say your house killed you, back on Irth, if I stabbed youthrough the neck with a chair-leg while you slept, right?”
“Hells no!” Frankretorted indignantly. “You killed me, the chair was just a weapon…”
“Ah!” Mal exclaimedin triumph. “You see? Anything is a weapon in the wrong hands.”
“But this is a weaponof mass destruction!”
Mal screwed up hisright cheek as he thought that over. “Given the right commands,yes. Some lunatic who wanted to kill you all would have to come upwith the right idea, though. If he just tried to make them eat thetown while you slept, the worst thing to happen might be that youfall into your basement when your bed disappears.”
“Or we wake to
