Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 19

Petrolea 6d

He frowned up at her. “No going home or no comfort?”

“No harming mechanoids,” she said, watching the Dragonlets. Fed and satisfied, they had curled up on the other side of the hangar and gone to sleep. “Which you must continue to do until you are off Petrolea.”

Victor marched his slave-factors into the still. “Until we exploiters are off Petrolea?” He snorted. “And you will stay here, the Princess of the Robot Jungle? Breathing what, the fumes of good ecological karma?”

“I see you’re feeling better.” Feroza was rather impressed with how level she kept her voice. “I am beginning to think I should have ridden the Dragon back down the mountain.”

“I’m just trying to solve problems,” said Victor. “That’s all I’m ever doing. Solving problems. And people seem to hate me for it.”

The slave-factors emerged from the rattling still. Feroza stepped aside as they scuttled toward Victor, carrying little bits of metal and plastic.

“Sometimes people don’t want their problems solved,” she said.

“Nonsense. If you don’t want to solve a problem, then it isn’t a problem. That’s what the word ‘problem’ means.”

The factors swarmed over Victor’s suit, affixing patches with inhuman speed and precision.

“Sometimes the solution is worse.” Feroza gestured at the little slave-creatures. “I know you didn’t just invent these uses for Petrolean life at the drop of a hat. Al-Onazy was planning this. Xanadu was planning this. Not content with draining the petroleum blood from this biosphere, he wants to enslave it to his purposes.”

“Would you stop saying ‘enslave’? You can’t enslave a machine to do what it was designed for,” said Victor. “Why do you think those ancient aliens put the mechanoids here?”

“Why are any of us here? Not to be destroyed by someone more powerful, certainly.”

Victor laughed, which was probably better than the reaction she’d been aiming for.

Petrolea 6c

“We have to burn petroleum until I can grow a windmill-tree or patch into the Berg’s electrical system,” Toledo said, “but I don’t plan to stay that long.”

“No,” said Feroza, “I suppose you don’t.”

“I still don’t believe they’ll arrest you. Or that being arrested would be worse than staying out here. But,” Victor sighed, or maybe he was just gasping for fresh air. “We will need more feedstock, whatever you want to do.”

As if in sympathy, the mother Dragon burped and stopped regurgitating fuel into the still.

“Let her hunt again,” said Feroza.

“Will it be able to feed all her Dragonlets and the still as well?”

Feroza turned her palms up. “We left a rather large pile of corpses halfway down the Berg. If she gets back to them before the scavengers have dragged them all off–“

His suit clanked against hers. Victor had grasped her arm. “Don’t go with it this time. Stay here.”

“With you, you mean?”

Feroza tried hard to analyze her reactions. She disagreed with Victor on the most fundamental levels about the most important things. And yet, she found she liked the man. Wanted to spend more time with him. “I suppose the mother Dragon is well enough to hunt by herself. And you can work faster if you needn’t worry about being eaten.”

“Work,” said Victor, “yes.” He lifted himself up by the elbows. “I will fabricate patches for my suit, then walls, then more food, since we can’t actually eat if we can’t take off our suits.”

“So we will need that pleasure dome you planned, after all,” said Feroza.

He stared up at her from his prone position. “Pleasure dome?”

What must he think of her? Feroza’s cheeks flamed. “A slip of the tongue.” And that double-entendre only made her blush more.

“Heh. No problem.” Victor pulled himself upright and twiddled his fingers. The mother Dragon stiffened and a column of little black factors pushed their way out of her skin and plopped to the ground.

“Your slave factors,” said Feroza. “You’re freeing her?”

“I don’t have enough to work on me and it at once,” said Victor. “And if you are staying here, I won’t worry about that thing attacking you.”

“You shouldn’t worry anyway,” Feroza said, “I know how to handle her.”

“Oh. Uh.” Victor looked up at her again. “I guess you do. Of course. Well, we can trust it to hunt and return by itself, yes? Then I can use the slave-factors to work on my suit until it gets back. Then I can work on figuring out how to make the Dragon fly us back to Xanadu.”

Whatever warmth Feroza had just been feeling drained away. “No,” she said.

Petrolea 6b

One had to be careful, moving heavy things on Titan. A mistake, and she might fling him into the ceiling.

“Only do not drain the mother Dragon dry,” she said. “If you command her to go back to the feast I made for her, she can restock her supplies.”

“Enough to feed three Dragonlets? I was thinking we, you and I, could replace them. Free up resources. Also,” he held up his damaged glove, “there would be less danger.”

“So you would lower yourself to the position of brood parasite?”

“I am very cold,” he said. “I don’t want to argue.”

Feroza couldn’t help but share the sentiment. She peered through the fishbowl helmet at the man inside, and saw Victor’s eyes were red-rimmed and wide with fear. His large nose dripped. His skin was gray and slick. “I’m reasonably certain Dragons can’t count,” she assured him. “The mother will care for us and her real young if we help and guide her behavior.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. “If you mean hacking, we will need more metal and glass as well as plastic feedstock so I can replenish my colony of slave-factors.”

“I was referring to training, for which we do not need any more of your,” she couldn’t think of an uglier name than ‘slave factor,’ “…creatures.”

“But I need my factors.”

Pity flexed in Feroza’s breast. If he wasn’t in shock, Victor was certainly emotionally exhausted. “I know. But your factors need the other Dragon, and she needs her Dragonlets.”

“…symbiosis…” Toledo made a vague wave in the direction of the still, which clunked and dropped a pair of oxygen canisters onto the hangar floor.

The relief when Feroza saw her oxygen meter turn green was so intense it was almost nauseating. Whatever she might think, however she might moralize or rationalize, the meat of Feroza Merchant wanted to live.

“What about electricity?” she asked, fitting the other canister into Victor’s damaged suit.

“Cord,” Victor waved. “In the still.”

Grimacing, Feroza reached into the father Dragon’s corpse and unspooled what looked like an artery until her mind refocused and she plugged the electrical cord into Toledo’s battery pack.

The still vibrated and roared like a gasoline generator, which, Feroza realized, it was. As wrong as his philosophy was, she couldn’t blame the laboratory-bound Victor for thinking that these creatures were only machines. Machines they appeared.

Petrolea 6a

Chapter 6

Feroza and the mother Dragon arrived in the aerie to see Toledo huddled at the end of a gooey, yellowish trail. More food-paste covered his spacesuit, especially the left forearm, where it took on the red-and-black shimmer of frozen blood. He held the father Dragon’s head in his free hand, using it to shove at the Dragonlets that were trying to eat his boots.

As soon as its mother’s headlights fell on them, the Dragonlets turned away from their prey and raised their snouts, mouthparts gaping.

For a moment, Feroza saw not three hungry Dragonlets, but a trio of ravening monsters. If Victor hadn’t been so quick and resourceful, he would have died, and Feroza would have lost her–never mind that. It would be a tragedy for any sentient being to die in this hangar, and to assign Victor special status just because she preferred his company to that of a Dragon, such thoughts were the product of selfishness.

“Oh, thank God you’re here,” said Toledo. “I was getting so cold.”

Feroza slipped off her mount. “That is a bad sign. Your patch must be leaking.”

“My patch is porridge and blood,” he said. “Of course it’s leaking. And my batteries are running low. Low oxygen, too. And no food or water.” He coughed. “Thank God for your pet mechanoid.”

His fingers wiggled and the mother Dragon stiffened. The Dragonlets squalled and flapped, but their mother ignored them in favor of the still, which Feroza realized had a big funnel on one side.

Yes. She could not forget that even if Victor promised her baubles of companionship and hot baths, he had a moral standing no higher than one of these opportunistic predators nibbling on him, at least where animal rights were concerned.

“We two humans must be the monsters, if anybody is,” Feroza said. She and Victor were the out-of-control machines, grinding their way through resources to which they had no right.

But when Victor asked for help, Feroza bent to put her hands on him.

Petrolea 5g

The shocking crimson of his blood vanished in a cloud of white condensation and the Dragon reared away from the burst of heat. Its mouthparts worked at the scrap of Victor’s suit material. It brushed the disgusting human blood off the tasty plastic with finicky precision, then focused on his hands. Victor thought of all the metal and electronics in his handshake gauntlet.

“Toledo?” came the voice in his ear. “What happened? Are you all right?”

Victor threw the head across the room. This failed to distract the first Dragonlet, but the impact of the skull on the metal floor woke the other two, and they began to cry in hunger.

“Victor! Can you hear me? Answer immediately!”

“Suit is…” what was the word? “Ripped. Breached. Got to find patch. Got to protect the still…”

His eyes focused on the blood, steaming and freezing as it dripped down his fingers.

“Feroza, will warm organics repel the Dragon?”

“Yes.” Her voice was tight and high with emotion. “Victor, what are you doing?”

“Being eaten by a Dragon,” he said. “But maybe I deserve it. I eat its daddy, it eats me, huh?”

Victor smeared the blood across his glove and thrust it toward the Dragonlet’s nose. Condensation billowed in the frigid air.

“I’m coming, Victor,” she said. “It won’t eat you. You won’t die. I won’t have it.”

The baby pecked at his arm again, pulled back. The headlights brightened, focused on the steaming blood. The Dragon extended whisker-like probes from recesses along its nosecone and took a sample.

It drew back, repelled by the taste, and Victor nearly passed out from relief.

Petrolea 5f

When he turned, he saw one of the Dragonlets had crawled to within arm’s reach. Jaw’s reach. “Really,” Victor said. “Hurry. The Dragonlets are hungry and I’ve run out of food.”

“Well, get down on your knees,” ordered Dr. Merchant. “We can solve this problem behaviorally. There is no need for you to enslave the baby, Victor.”

As if he could enslave it. Victor didn’t have enough slave factors to hack the baby. The giant metal maggot could easily kill him, either by attacking him or just knocking over the still.

“Dr. Merchant,” he said as the creature advanced on him, “what should I do?”

There were no recriminations. Not even a scornful tone to her voice as she said, “Puppetry.”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you still have the father’s head?”

“Yes,” Victor hoisted it and dangling mandibles clacked.

“Use it to trick the baby. Make it think you’re its father.”

“Oh…kay?” Cameras tracked Victor as he held out the skull. “There, there,” he bounced the bulky machine up and down. “Nice little…larva.”

“Stroke it with the nose,” said Dr. Merchant, “nuzzle it.”

Victor flinched back from the humping round monster. “What does ‘nuzzle’ mean?”

“Like what fathers do with Dragonlets.”

“I don’t have any children. I’m not married.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

Victor concentrated on petting the Dragonlet, cheeks hot. “Um. Should I feed it? Is it hungry?”

“It’s an infant predator,” she said. “Of course it’s hungry.”

“I don’t have any raw petroleum left. I converted it all into food for us or damn bug repellant.”

The Dragonlet wasn’t looking at the puppet-head any more. Its cameras were focused on Victor’s arm. Its whiskers and antennae withdrew into their sockets.

“That might be a problem,” said Dr. Merchant.

The Dragon lunged. It couldn’t flame and Victor dodged before it pinned him, but he felt like his arm had been shot. Pain, a red smear, and cold.

“Oh,” said Victor, “oh, miércoles.“

Petrolea 5e

The Gob’s component factors wrapped around its central processor and re-assembled its little engines. The swarm assumed its streamlined flight-shape and zipped away from the still and circled the hangar until one of the Dragonlets woke up and snapped it out of the air.

But there were more Gobs buzzing around them or oozing along the walls. And what were those things that moved in the shadows of the hangar? Victor tried to calculate how much paste he would need to cover the whole still. “We will need to hunt more to replace this,” he said. “And now will I have to smear this stuff on myself, too?”

“Hopefully not,” said Dr. Merchant. “Your suit has a distasteful coating already, although that’s becoming less effective as time goes on. And I have never seen Gobs try to attack people. Do not worry.” She huffed as if lifting something heavy. “I have bagged enough game to repel bugs and feed ourselves.”

Victor sighed with relief. He’d half believed she would abandon him up here. “I’m glad you’ve decided life is worth living.”

“Yes,” she said. “Well. I suppose feeding two people is a rather different situation from strip-mining an entire planet.”

Was that a concession? A compromise? Victor tried to meet her halfway. “You know,” he said, “I would not want to be…the sort of person who would strip-mine a planet.”

A puffing of breath. “I am surprised and gratified to hear you say that.”

Surprised and gratified. God, it was like she’d dipped her hand in chocolate and slapped him. Like she was the strict headmistress of an expensive boarding school about to take off her glasses and administer discipline.

Victor licked his lips with a dry tongue. On the other side of the hangar, a Dragonlet called out in hunger.

A sultry huff of air in his earphones. “All right. I have denuded this patch of jungle enough. We are flying back.”

“Hurry home.”

The Dragonlet called again and Victor reached for the pile of bones he’d saved from its father’s corpse. There was nothing left but the head. Or skull or cockpit or whatever the preferred term was. The thing was the size of Victor’s torso, if not its mass, and even in the light gravity it took some awkward effort to lift the thing.

Petrolea 5d

Victor stopped the food extrusion and was fiddling with his gauntlet, trying to figure out how to print out walls to hold in an oxygen atmosphere, when something moved on the still.

“Oh, pucha. Another Gob.”

The little scavenger had spread itself out like a miniature city, with the cylindrical towers of its little processors pack up from the middle the mass of scurrying factors. Even as Victor watched, the little robots scuttled across the side of the still and into its inner workings. Without thinking, Victor reached out to brush them away.

Red lights in his visor. He swore for real this time and jerked back, the fingertips of his right glove scored with tiny notches. “That thing nearly chewed my glove off!”

“What?” said Dr. Merchant, “the Gob? You didn’t try to touch it, did you?”

“I…it tried to eat me!”

“Well of course it did,” she said. “Your suit is made of plastic and metal.”

“I thought they were treated in some way–ay! It’s going to break the whole still!” Error messages popped up in his visor and Victor nearly got his glove bitten off in his instinctive grab for his work.

“That still of yours is a whopping great corpse,” said Dr. Merchant. “Of course you should expect it to attract scavengers.”

How could she be so blasé about this? Victor poked impotently at the writhing mass of chewing factors. “How can I make it stop?”

“Piss on it,” said Feroza.

“What?”

“Urine. Wee. In the field, when the repellent coating wears off and we don’t have a tame Punisher to scare away scavengers, we empty our water reclamators into whatever we want safe. Factors don’t like the heat. And organic compounds, I imagine, taste bad to them.”

“But,” Victor flailed helplessly at the disgusting creature as it gnawed on their life-support engine, “I can’t afford to lose that water.”

“Do you have any other warm organics?”

Victor’s eyes went from the crawling, amorphous Gob to the bag of breakfast paste. “Pucha,” he said. “The food.”

The paste steamed when it hit the freezing Petrolean air, and the Gob recoiled and scuttled away from it. Wasting the stuff made Victor’s gut clench, but better lose a meal than his only means to make more meals.

Petrolea 5c

That made Victor laugh out loud. “You’re right,” he said while he worked in the Dragons’ lair. “It’s too bad we didn’t pave over this part of the solar system. Wouldn’t it be great if we already had electricity and air? I could take you out to eat at the Burger King down the Berg. Ooh, or maybe Bembos could open a branch on Titan. You’ve ever heard of Bembos?”

She sighed. “My point is that if we did live here, if we moved out of the artificial and unsustainable technological shells we’ve built around ourselves, we’d have more respect for the natural environment.”

He scrolled through options in his eye-tracking menu. “You think it would be better if we all lived in villages in the jungle?”

Doctor, I know people who used to live in the jungle, and they thought the slums around Lima were a big improvement.”

“So the slums keep growing. More and more people piled on top of each other until the whole global environment collapses underneath us.”

Victor snorted. “Nothing collapsed under me. I learned how to code and moved my family out.” He hoped the automatic bank transfers he’d set up were still beaming money back to his friends and family. He hoped the investment funded by space industry kept flowing, and Lima kept blooming. That way even if he died here in this den of monsters, his nephews and nieces might grow up in a better, more prosperous world.

“And once this job is over, you plan to move up again, do you?” She asked. “Dubai, maybe, or London? Along with every other upwardly-mobile young professional on Earth.”

“No, I’m going to stay in Lima, because it is a lovely city,” said Victor. “But if everyone else wanted to move in with me…why not? If the whole human race lived in my city, the rest of the planet would be free, hey?”

“A city of eight billion people? Are you joking? How could we possibly feed that many people? Can you imagine the amount of garbage they would produce?”

“We’re feeding and dealing with the garbage of the human race right now,” said Victor. “Packing those people together would make everything more efficient.”

She laughed for some reason. “Save us from social engineering by real engineers.”

That stung. But it was good to hear her laugh.

Petrolea 5b

Victor chewed his lower lip. “Don’t worry, we will not have to live on paste for long. Once both of us are fed, we can go back to Xanadu, right?”

“You can go back to Xanadu.”

Victor snorted. “And you will go where? To the jungle castle of the Princess of Petrolea? You will die out here.”

“I ‘ll be arrested if I go back there.”

Victor frowned. “No,” he said, “they wouldn’t do that. Well. They might. But if they blame you, they blame me too. Then we’re both in jail together,” he looked around at the rusty hangar, “and not much has changed, hey?”

She grunted and killed something down on the slopes of the mountain.

One of the Dragonlets twitched and broadcast a radio signal Victor had come to recognize meant “feed me.” He tossed one of its father’s vertebrae at it, and it quieted down.

He wanted to hear Dr. Merchant speak more. She had an attractive voice. “All right,” he said. “What would you do if you were in charge? What do you actually want from people?”

“Aside from there being fewer of them?”

“When people say we should reduce the human population, they never volunteer to be the part of the population that gets reduced.” Too late, Victor remembered he wanted her to like him. “Um, I mean we’re in space now. We have the resources to support a growing population.”

“Unfortunately. We’ll just be going faster when we hit the Malthusian wall.” And before he could ask her what the hell that meant. “And now we have a whole new biome to bring down with us.”

“You act like we’re all doomed.” Victor grinned as he worked. “If Mumbai is really so bad, you come live in Lima with me, he? Thanks to the space industry, it’s a cleaner and more beautiful place.”

“Only at the expense of a dirty and ugly Petrolea,” said Dr. Merchant. “You drove through the clear-cut area around Xanadu Base. Didn’t it sicken you?”

“No? What do I care about the Petrolean jungle? I don’t have to live there.”

Dr. Merchant paused for a moment, panting. “Clearly, you do.”