If she’d wanted to impress me with “Marjolin’s future in the making,” then this was probably not the best first impression to give. But if the director of Sharawaggi’s Marjolin field office wanted to dispel once and for all any notion I might have had that these wetlands could be saved, it was a brutally effective strategy. I was glad Otis wasn’t there. He would have cried.
But I had never had any illusions about the salvability of the patera. The Wags had put too much effort into getting this project past the point of no return. It couldn’t be reversed now, and it probably couldn’t have been stopped even if we-had acted sooner. By hook or by crook, this VR Entertainment Complex was going to be built. And in and of itself, that made no sense. I asked myself again, why would they go to so much trouble for a project which any marketing research team would have identified as a failure from the word go? The only explanation which made sense was the one Lulu had offered back in Ragougnasse á Gogo: “the VR Complex itself may be more than it pretends to be.”
That, and the Wags’ strategy of hiding things in plain sight, and then trying to keep me looking in the wrong direction, were the key ideas I needed to remember while I was here.
Cheri straightened and stretched, ostentatiously displaying her anatomy beneath the speckled gauze of her sari.
“Smells horrid, doesn’t it?”
“Marshlands aren’t usually beloved for their aroma,” I replied, “but I doubt the ’dozers have done much to improve it.”
“Not yet,” she agreed, and began rummaging about in a small compartment built into the back of the driver’s seat, “but give them time, and you’ll never know there ever was a filthy swamp here. Most of it will be terraced bougainvillea gardens. The complex itself will fill the center of the patera, over there to your left. The architects have designed it to be a fusion of ancient Mayan and Egyptian styles, you saw the renditions in the public records file, I trust?—Yes, of course you did—here.” And she handed me an aerosol container filled with clear liquid.
I shook my head, marvelling at how unselfconscious she was about revealing to me the fact that she was monitoring all my access to the habitat’s information net.
“I’m too attached to Earth mores to wear perfume,” I said.
“This isn’t perfume. It’s mosquito repellent. Trust me, the moment this vehicle stops moving, you are going to need it.”
I took the proffered bottle and began spraying my face and arms. The vehicle came to a stop beside a jumble of steel roofed equipment operator’s sheds. Outside, the operators themselves were taking an early afternoon siesta. They were mostly young men and women in their twenties, wearing shapeless sweat-stained work coveralls. All looked like recent ex-service types—more debutante civilians with hairless heads and honed interfacing skills so much in demand these days for terraforming jobs and other heavy work done primarily through sophisticated remotes. They were obviously not Marjolins. None had the languid grace which was so typical of dome inhabitants. I had noticed even Lulu walking with a trace of that languor, as I watched her cross the floor of the restaurant towards my table that morning. And I noticed one of the operators who looked heart-stoppingly like the young woman I had sent away so long ago—to seduce Otis into sticking with the Big Word when another firm was about to offer him an opportunity I’d known he’d jump at. She had the round face and girlish smile…
Then she turned to exchange words with another operator, breaking the spell.
“Well, here we are,” Cheri said as she stepped out of the open door, “at the birthplace of tomorrow’s Planet Marjolin.”
I followed her out, offering polite thanks to Mr. Izvoschik for playing doorman, and getting no response. The ground was squishy and wet. Mosquitoes buzzed annoyingly about my ears despite the repellent. I also soon discovered that I d forgotten to spray my feet, and the nasty bugs began feasting on my toes and ankles. Cheri watched me fruitlessly slap at my attackers several times before turning to ask the driver to wait by his groundcar, assuring him we wouldn’t be staying long.
“Now I know you won’t find all this equipment as fascinating as I do,” she was saying as she led me towards the main control office in the center of the village of squat little sheds, “but you must see how the pulse of activity just runs through this area now. Developing the Soyinka Patera swamp into such an exciting project will be the most important thing to happen on Marjolin since the Volcano itself was first domed over by the Enterprise more than two-hundred years ago.”
“Killing an important stabilizing force in your ecosystem in the name of an advertising slogan like, ‘Virtual Reality, not Virtual Reality,’ does not exactly strike me as such an epoch-making event,” I replied, stepping carefully to avoid the deeper puddles as I walked. Fortunately, once we left the road and were among the metal sheds, we were on ground which had already been drained and had large grey polystone flags laid across it to provide better footing. Sand had been spread about as well, and foot traffic had worked it into the irregular gaps between the flagstones. It was not an attractive bit of landscaping…
Well, I thought to myself, this part of the project is only temporary. Once it’s done they can rip up the flags and transform this wasteland into something living.
…In fact it rather reminded me of the barren basalt slabs and gritty regolith which covered the plains and valleys of the planet beyond the Volcano: the dead landscape Sharawaggi’s promotional literature insisted tired worklng-people on vacation would want to pay for the privilege of visiting by remote—
“That slogan was my idea, Shade! Honestly, why shouldn’t reality be more interesting than fantasy? People leave the Oort mines and the Starport and drop down our gravity well all the time to visit this claustrophobic little bit of heaven, just because they know it is real, not simulated. If fantasy could have satisfied them, they would have stayed out there and run VR simulations for every activity they can do here. Reality is a commodity for which there is a demand, Shade.”
But I wasn’t listening. I had turned and watched a ’dozer trundle by on the road. Somewhere, in one of the operator’s sheds, someone was not taking a siesta. Instead, plugged into their machine, skullcap snugged tight, seeing through the dozer’s “eyes,” feeling the texture of the ground beneath its wheels—someone was experiencing through Virtual Reality, the reality of the work underway in Soyinka Patera….
“Shade?” Cheri queried tentatively when she saw I had stopped following her lead, and begun looking at things on my own.
…And I remembered Lulu saying the Wags would be hiding the truth right in front of me. She probably hadn’t meant it this way, but my mouth twisted into a knowing grin as I saw shiny membranes stretched over each shed to reflect heat up and away from the structure beneath—and I thought about how on Earth, polar ice-caps reflect the Sun’s rays, preventing the arctic from warming, even during the six-month’s daylight of summer. Then I looked up at the crisscross skeleton of the dome and tried to feel the weight of the air it contained pressing down on me. Earth had once been as dead as Marjolin, until its oceans soaked up most of its carbon dioxide and cyanobacteria converted still more into limestone and stromatolites, releasing the oxygen which the rest of the living Universe needs, remaking a world.