“Call the planet ‘Garden,’ since you want a name. Though who’ll ever use it but us, I have no idea.”
“The colonists will say ‘back on Earth’ and ‘here on Garden,’” said the expendable. “You may be interested to know that not one of the expendables or the ships’ computers predicted your choice of ‘Garden.’ The front-runner was ‘Ram,’ but some of us thought you were too modest for that.”
“It’s not a matter of modesty. I intend to live with these people-or at least one ship’s worth of them-and it would lead to ridicule and loss of face for me to try to make them call the world by my name.”
“That was my reasoning. But I now have the advantage of continued association with you, which the others lack.”
“I never imagined the expendables were given to wagering.”
“There are no stakes. It’s merely a matter of testing our predictive algorithms.”
“The divisions of the two larger continents look fine to me. I assume they all contain adequate resources.”
“Adequate for what?”
“For… human life.”
“Breathable air, potable water, arable soil, and survivable weather seemed to us to be all that was needed.”
“I was thinking of iron, coal…”
“This planet has no fossil fuels. Lacking a moon to create serious tides, Garden was much slower in developing life. Right now it is in the lush phase of plant growth, and its atmosphere has three times the carbon dioxide of Earth. In a few hundred million years, it would have had fossil fuels-except that of course we’ll put an end to that.”
“Why?”
“Because humans probably cannot digest the local flora and fauna. The chance of all the proteins being left- handed like those of Earth is probably fifty-fifty, and the chance of finding all the essential amino acids within the correct handedness is quite small. We need to establish Earth flora and fauna so that humans can flourish here.”
“Are you seriously proposing to wipe out all the existing flora and fauna on the two continents we’re using?”
“We intend to arrive on the planet in such a way as to wipe out all surface life, or as much of it as we can. That was the plan from the beginning, whether it was explained to you or not.”
“So the three small continents-”
“We will re-seed them with Garden’s native life forms after the extinction event. Here are the main steps of the plan: First, we visit the surface of Garden to make as complete a collection as possible of native life forms. Then we crash the ships into the planet at an angle and speed calculated to make the necessary changes, including mass extinction. Then we wait for the atmosphere to return to a breathable state, and re-seed the planet. Sometime before two hundred years are up, the human colonists, including you, will be wakened from stasis and brought out onto the surface of Garden to begin colonization.”
“Extinction event. Our coming is meant to be a disaster?”
“Those are the instructions we were given. It will be much easier to engineer the whole thing with nineteen ships to work with instead of one.”
“What are the other ‘necessary changes’?”
“As you can see, Garden has no moon. It must have captured a sizeable asteroid, but it was inside the Roche limit, which is why there is a ring. This provides noticeable and continuous illumination at night, so nocturnal fauna will thrive, but the only tides are solar.”
“We’re going to make a moon?”
“I thought you disliked being ridiculous.”
“Then what are you getting at?”
“Without a substantial moon to slow down Garden’s rate of rotation, days are only 17.335 hours long. This is below the tolerance limits of the human biological clock. The rotation of the planet must be slowed to allow days of no less than twenty hours, preferably 22 to 26. The original plan called for bombarding the planet with asteroids at the right speed and angle, but with nineteen ships, we can achieve the desired slowing of Garden’s rotation rate by bringing in all the ships at the same time, at the correct angle against the direction of spin, and at enough speed to compensate for the smaller mass.”
“You’re going to crash the ships into the surface.”
“The orbiting units, which contain duplicate computers and databases, will be evenly spaced in geosynchronous orbit. But the main body of each ship will impact the planet at an angle opposed to the direction of rotation, yes.”
“Pulverizing us and making lovely little craters.”
“The same fields that allow us to block collisions with interstellar objects will completely protect the ships. In fact, we will form the collision fields in exactly the right size and shape to pulverize just enough of Garden’s crust to block out all sunlight for several decades, while allowing a complete return to full sunlight within two hundred years.”
“We’re an ecological disaster.”
“Exactly,” said the expendable. “The goal was to establish human life on another world, orbiting another sun, so that the human race could not be destroyed by a single cataclysm.”
“So we’re doing to the native life of Garden exactly what we’re trying to keep from happening to us?”
“Garden has no detectable sentient life. If on our visit to the surface we find sentient life, then we will return to the ships and search for another world or worlds.”
“I had no idea we planned to be so ruthless.”
“It was not publicized or even discussed with the political arm of the colonization program. Ruthlessness was necessary but wins no votes.”
“But this is not our world, to treat however we want!”
“Visiting here as students of an alien evolutionary tradition would not be either cost-effective or, ultimately, successful. We would inevitably contaminate Garden or, worse yet, become contaminated and bring potentially deadly Gardenian life forms back to Earth. The three continental preserves will be sufficient to allow biologists to study alien life at some point in the future. And if you really thought we could colonize this world without making it ‘ours,’ you’d be far too naive to command this expedition.”
“I… didn’t realize…”
“You didn’t think about it at all,” said the expendable. “The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species’ most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.”
“And you aren’t morally blind?”
“We see the moral ironies very clearly. We simply don’t care.” • • • To Umbo, it seemed to take forever to fully enter Aressa Sessamo. There were no city walls. They walked along causeways in marshland of the delta. The causeways broadened and had occasional buildings on either side; many of these wide raised areas joined together and finally the land as far as they could see in every direction was raised to that level. More and more buildings arose; villages gave way to towns, and the towns came together to be a city.
“When will we get to Aressa Sessamo?” asked Umbo at last.
Loaf laughed at him. “We’ve been in it for hours.”
“But it’s nothing, it’s a jumble,” said Umbo. “Where did it start?”
“Where it’s water or marsh, that’s not the city; where it’s raised roads and buildings, that’s the city.”
“No great walls?”
“What good are walls in a city that might flood at any time? Winter storms pounding great waves against the city from the north. Spring floods drowning the city from the rivers in the south. They’d eat out the foundations of any stone wall. Look at the houses-they’re all built on stilts. Like herons’ legs.”
“But it’s the capital,” said Umbo.
“And the parts that should be protected, are,” said Loaf. “Though garrison duty in Aressa is just about the worst thing you can do to an army. Put them here for a year and they’re worthless in the field-you have to start their training almost from the beginning.”
