ASHES 

By 

Ian Stewart

Anton Brachvogel lay sleepless on the bunk and listened to the fungus moaning. Chorisande. The room was comfortably warm, but if he listened carefully, he could hear the distant dripping of meltwater from the evening frost. It was cold on Chorisande. When the sun warmed the ice fields, there was a slickness to the surface and free moisture in the air, but the only appreciable quantities of liquid water were those created by the artificial warmth of the installation. The average temperature was just below freezing and had been so for half a billion years.

He remembered skating with his father on the frozen oceans: silver blades slicing the soft, just-damp surface. Anton was a boy no longer, and Walter Brachvogel was dead. His legacy would not survive him by many more years: Tarkona-Chorisande Associates was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Anton blamed Chorisande. He knew it wasn't rational, but he blamed her just the same. You bloody-minded, beautiful, deadly bitch of a planet.

He went to the window and looked out. Tb the left, the ice field. To, the right, fifty-foot tree ferns, amber-edged in the moonlight. Night breezes rustled the brittle fronds, muting the moans of the fungus. The wind died, and the moan resumed.

Why does the wind stop the fungus singing? So much about Chorisande was unknown. Tarkona-Chorisande had explored only the ice. That held riches enough. The forests, which covered entire continents, were a mystery.

Within a mile of the Installation -and that was as far into them as he or anyone else had ventured there were the tree ferns; another plant with huge, fragile leaves, blue and skeletal; translucent, slow-moving insects; segmented, ice-sucking worms. A kind of dragonfly that could glide on rigid wings whether clicked into a flight configuration or folded flat beneath its body. Slugs the size of a cucumber that ate deep grooves in the fibrous trunks of the ferns, depositing clumps of crimson eggs, like cherries. And a creeping fungus that spread over the forest floor and out onto the ice and sang mournful songs when the wind died.

Chorisande, I would give my soul to know your deepest secrets.

A short way into the forest, in a band around the coastline, where the moisture balance was at some critical level of equilibrium, were huge, shapeless growths of ice, convoluted towers and parapets and cornices, and hanging drapery, built by centuries of frost, delicate and deadly until they collapsed under their accumulated weight.

An ice tower had fallen on Walter Brachvogel while he took a walk in the forest with his son. Young Anton was found some hours later, cowering under a bush, babbling incoherently. And they had taken him away from Chorisande, until the memories dimmed and he no longer knew what he had seen or thought he had seen. AD he could remember was that Chorisande had killed his father.

Anton had loved Chorisande. It was a difficult thing for a child to understand. He never quite succeeded.

And nobody had even understood why Walter, usually such a careful man, had risked going so close to an ice tower.

Chorisande. The irony struck him. Now she was his, and he was losing her. She's a planet, not a lover

She's both.

She's a murderess.

Tarkona-Chorisande Associates knew only the ice fields, the previous mineral-rich deposits laid down when there was rain enough on Chorisande to erode the mountains. To the company, the ice was no more than profit figures in a computer file. But to Anton, it was the ice that had killed his father and was now devouring Tarkona-Chorisande Associates, and Anton with it.

He returned to his bunk.

Eventually he slept.

The following morning, soon after daybreak, he took a company skitter and a pilot and began a brief inspection. The gray-blue ice, six hundred feet below, swirled inscrutable patterns like merged paint blobs on a much-used palette.

George Hazel, the pilot, turned his head for an instant. "Crawler B44 just coming up on the horizon," he said. "Shall I take her down, Mr. Brachvo
gel?"

Ahead and to one side, Anton could see the crawler: a yellow dot on a sea of gray, attached to a taut black thread. He nodded, and the skitter's nose dropped. Now more yellow dots and black threads came into view, the threads radiating from an oddly shaped, multicolored structure that, even from that distance, looked three-dimensional.

Process Plant B.

It deployed a total of seventy-four crawlers, each using laser knives and rotary cutters to gouge the ancient ice: a hundred thousand cubic yards every working shift. The wet slurry of smashed ice flowed along flexible pipelines to the plant, over a distance of up to two miles. TCA had fourteen plants operating on Chorisande; between them they processed three hundred fifty million cubic yards of ice per day. TCA's logo was a rectangular box transfixed by a wavy line. Its slogan: WE MINE THE OCEANS.

Intellectually Anton knew that these figures were puny by comparison with the bulk of Chorisande herself. The ice fields would last ten million years. It would take forty thousand years just to scrape off the top twenty feet. But numbers that big were meaningless.

Walter Brachvogel had commissioned the first plant when his son was one year old; the others had followed hard on its heels. Anton had visited Chorisande regularly, but to him the visits were just exciting vacations. After his father's death, he had avoided the place until, on reaching majority, he had joined TCA's board of directors. Not only did Patience Monteith and Gilles duFeu own two thirds of Tarkona-Chorisande Associates, but they had been running it between them for more than a decade. The newcomer had a hard time. But Anton had learned quickly and relatively easily. Chorisande was in his blood.

The skitter circled low, its motor whining stridently. George Hazel settled it delicately on the ice.

The crawler was close by, and the noise was almost deafening. Hazel produced two phase-cancellation helmets from a compartment in the skitter's side: combination ear muffs, hard hats, and commumcators. "Noisy animal, ain't she, Mr. Brachvogel?" Anton nodded.

The crawler was a simple box shape, resting on four enormous caterpillar tracks, and fully automated. Its creeping forward motion was barely perceptible. It dragged its tail, a twelve-foot pipeline, behind it, adding sections in a-spiral as it advanced. Brachvogel ran a gloved hand along its flank, and yellow paint flaked off beneath his fingers.

"Just normal corrosion, Mr. Brachvogel. The salts. Not like-"

"G19. I know, George," Brachvogel said irritably.

"Yes, sir. Sorry. But Chorisande sure is a tiresome lady. Listen to that ice screaming. She don't want to part with it."

Too true.

They made their way to the observation bubble. The interior of the crawler was a jumble of machinery, which Brachvogel's practiced eye resolved into some semblance of order. Computation. Modulated infrasound scanners. Maintenance robots. At the front, the business end, rotating banks of cutters wreathed in clouds of steam. At the back, the pipeline's blackmouth. The whole machine shuddered continually: If corrosion was the main engineering problem, vibration couldn't be far behind.

"This'n's fine," Hazel said unnecessarily. "Still on the top layer, of course. You wanna see G19 now?"

"I guess." It would complete the comparison.

Hazel and Brachvogel made a rapid exit. A few minutes later the skitter was in the air again.

From the crawlers, the ice slurry went to the nearest plant-a system of desiccators and purifiers, powered by a fusion reactor, which extricated the minerals locked within it. There were phosphates, chlorides, sulfates-enough to feed the chemical industries of entire planets. Sodium, potassium, magnesium, manganese, rare earths-even uranium and thorium. Chorisande's gelid seas were a chemical El Dorado, which TCA plundered. Until G19 hit a snag. It started to wear out.

The designers had allowed for wear, of course. The trouble was that they seemed not to have allowed enough.

G19 was the first crawler to strip away the entire surface layer within its allocated area. When it started on the next one down, its cutters, began to wear out faster than they could be economically replaced, and it didn't take long to discover why. Suspended in the ice, just below the surface, Brachvogel could see a thick layer of abrasive particles as fine as dust.

Now, looking despondently at the dismantled carcass of crawler G19, Brachvogel's mind went back to the disastrous day when they had realized that

this engineer's nightmare was more than just a local accident of topography.

You mean to say this junk covers the whole bloody planet?"

Ray Czerny, technical coordinator, nodded unhappily. "All the evidence points that way, Miss Monteith."

Patience Monteith was a tall, forceful woman in her late seventies, though she looked nearer forty, thanks to expensive medical treatment. Her close-, cropped black hair and her flashing eyes were entirely her own, however. So was her mouth, and everyone knew it. Czerny watched her face and waited for the explosion. It came.

"Then why wasn't it spotted years ago?"

In front of Czerny was a pile of yellow-bound reports. He pushed them to the center of the table. "It was, but its significance wasn't understood when the original survey's samples were analyzed, and nobody followed it up. I've been asking for -funds to do a new survey for three years now, but Finance vetoes the idea every time I-"

"Keep to the point," said Monteith.

"The main purpose of the original cores was to assess the mineral potential of Chorisande, for the benefit of the Asterope Bank's accountants. Chemically this stuff is harmless and unimportant. The abrasion problem just wasn't appreciated by the chemists who - "

"And the engineers?" Monteith interrupted menacingly.

"They needed more than the cores could tell them. Bulk samples, for stress strain analysis and so forth. So they dug themselves a nice, big deep pitat the edge of the ice field near the Installation-to keep transport costs down. And they managed to pick one of the few places on Chorisande where the particle layer wasn't. Some kind of shielding effect of the coastline."

Gilles duFeu was five years younger than Patience, but he looked twenty years older. He leaned forward in his chair with the tentative movements of a man whose joints were no longer supple. "What caused it?"

"Geology says it was planetwide vulcanism. That's why it's spread so evenly over the whole surface. Round about the time the oceans started to freeze, there was a lot of volcanic activity; The ocean surface froze and unfroze repeatedly in cycles, and the dust settled in bands below the ice. They think that a near-miss with an asteroid perturbed Chorisande's orbit and triggered the-"

"Damn Geology's theories," Patience said. "The question is, What in the hell can we do about it now?"

"Can we relocate the crawlers?" Brachvogel asked. "Skim a bigger area?"

"No. You can't extend those pipelines indefinitely. It shaves too much off the profit margins."

They all nodded. They also all knew that there was no way to relocate the Plants: Those were permanent. The economics of the project were predicated on ice miles deep, not twenty feet, and every proposal made in the next twenty minutes foundered on that discrepancy.

Brachvogel asked how much time was left.

"We've already got forty-eight crawlers outside their planned zones," said Czerny, "and another seventy on a slowed cutting schedule. Within six months we'll have half the crawlers laid up. That will reduce turnover severely. The Asterope Bank isn't going to be happy."

"To hell with the bank!" Patience exclaimed. "I'm not happy. I want an answer to this, and I want it fast. Develop abrasion-resistant cutters. Change to an all-laser system. Find new ways to strip the ice. Find something better than pipelines to carry the slurry."

"I assure you we're pursuing all of those ideas, Miss Monteith. But there isn't much room to maneuver. For example, an obvious approach is to liquefy the ice completely, filter out the abrasives, eliminate the cutters altogether. But there isn't the spare energy. The fusion generator doesn't have the capacity for that much energy."

"Bring in another one," Monteith said.

"Patience," duFeu said, "do you remember how long it took to commission the existing one? And we're still paying off the loan."

"It's a pity, though," said Anton. "With liquid water instead of slurry we could up production no end. Get rid of the crawlers, shorten the pipelines, cut channels for the melted ice to flow in. We could borrow pretty much anything we needed, on the strength of that kind of increase, and-"

ÒYes, and if pigs had wings-"

ÒOkay, Patience, keep your hair on. We're all as upset about it as you are."

"I'm not upset! I am merely trying to-"

"Patience, dear," said duFeu, "do try to live up to your name. We need cool heads."

"In that case," Patience replied, "you can stick them in a bucket of ice slurry."

About the only thing that came out of that meeting, apart from an ill concealed air of panic, was a decision to send Anton to make an on-site investigation. And now he returned from Chorisande to the Asterope Distributor with a report that held little encouragement. The meeting at which he was due to present it turned out to be even more traumatic than the previous one, but for different reasons.

They never even asked to hear his report.

Instead, they talked about the greenhouse effect.

"The idea's as old as the hills," said Czerny. "Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps radiation, and up goes the temperature. Chorisande is so finely balanced that just a couple of degrees would do it."

"Great," said Brachvogel. "So where does all that carbon dioxide come from?"

"We take advantage of Chorisande's extensive forest cover."

"I thought vegetation absorbed carbon dioxide, not produced it," said duFeu.

"Ordinarily it does."

"So how are we to persuade the forests to give instead of take?"

"Bum them," Czemy said.

!'What?"

"Burn them, Mr. duFeu. We calculate that-"

"Hold on," Brachvogel said. "Just how much of the forest do you propose to bum? That's a delicate ecology."

"Well, actually, the optimal-"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Czemy!" Patience reverted to character. "We bum the lot, Anton! What's the point of half-measures? The more carbon dioxide, the quicker we get Chorisande warmed up!"

Oh, Chorisande, what have we come to? Out of the corner of his eye, Brachvogel saw duFeu's face. DuFeu looked stunned. Brachvogel said, "And how long will this take to get results, Patience?"

"To fire the forests, three to four months. lb melt enough ice to get production going properly, five years!'

It was obviously ridiculous, and Brachvogel said so.

"Not with a loan from the AB," Patience reminded them. "Based on the production increase we'll get.Ó

"For God's sake, Patience!" duFeu protested. "You can't just go around setting fire to planets. It's unmoral. Those forests are unique. Beautiful. Unexplored. We haven't any idea what's in there. We-"

"We are heading straight for the Asterope Bankruptcy Court, Gilles! Chorisande's no use to us if we can't extract its minerals. Immoral? So is poverty! What are a few dragonflies and some screeching fungi compared to_ what a warmer Chorisande will give us?"

"They don't screech, Patience," Brachvogel said. "They moan. It's a wonderful, resonant sound, almost like a chant. I used to love listening to it when I was a child on Chorisande." Chant? A threnody. Anton was having trouble reconciling conflicting emotion. For Chorisande, or my father? Both? "Patience, how do we burn them, anyway? The conditions don't strike me as being suitable for forest fires."

"Particle beams. Bring in an orbital projector and sweep the continental mass in short bursts. The bank will pay."

"No!" duFeu shouted. "It's a world, not an entry in a ledger. I won't permit it."

"Fair enough," said Patience. "But Anton and I outvote you. Don't we, Anton?"

"You're trying to rush me," Brachvogel answered. "I need time to think it through."

"We haven't got any time! The bank will call in our current loans soon."

"But ... the government," Anton interposed. "We'd never get a license for action on this scale."

Patience shot him a i look of disgust. "Honestly, Anton, do you think the government will interfere with a nice little terraforming operation?"

"Terraforming?"

"Of course. Chorisande would make a beautiful terratype world if the climate were milder. Warm oceans and forested continents. We replant, of course. Conifers maybe."

"And the animals?" asked duFeu.

"Worms and insects! You call those animals? There's nothing worth speaking of on Chorisande except ice."

DuFeu clenched his fists in frustration. "We don't know that. We don't know anything."

Patience nodded. "Exactly. So there's nothing on central file to prevent our going ahead. If we move quickly, the project will be a fait accompli. The AB doesn't anticipate any trouble." She shot a glance at Anton. "Well? Are you capable of making a sensible commercial decision without getting sentimental?"

That was too much for duFeu. "Sentiment be damned! Anton, she's asking us to kill a planet."

It was a mistake. It reminded Brachvogel of what Chorisande had done to his father. Chorisande the murderess. How neatly symmetric to kill in returnI And while part of him was thinking, It's stupid to wreak -0engeance on a planet, another part reached a decision.

"Okay, Patience. We'll play it your way. Bring on the incendiaries. It's an evil answer to an evil problem, but I don't see any choice." You blackhearted bitch. And he wasn't sure whether he meant Patience or Chorisande.

'It was the directors' job to decide policy, nothing more. With the decision taken, its implementation was in other hands. One of the benefits of a hierarchical structure is its moral insulation.

Brachvogel took an extended vacation away from the Asterope region. He told himself that he deserved it, but the truth was that he couldn't face the prospect of actually watching Chorisande's forests burn.

From time to time he got digest reports of the projed's progress: financial arrangements, legal requirements, logistics, temporary evacuation of personnel and equipment. It was easy enough to begin with: The fine print on a bank loan seemed light-years away from the nasty fact of an orbital particle-beam projector. But the narrower that gap became, the greater the momentum of its closing. By the time Brachvogel's doubts had become painfully conscious, it was too late to stop.

When the report arrived saying that the bum-off had started, he tore it up, and he was in a black depression for a week. Patience was like a dog with two tails; duFeu seemed to have retreated within himself and hardly communicated at all. Anton's spirits rose and fell, depending on whom he talked to. After the bum-off had been completed, he tore up the next six reports unread. He was beginning to feel a little happier when duFeu contacted him with a person-to-person freewave call.

"Anton, I'd like you over here right away."

"Oh, hello, Gilles. I haven't seen you in ages. What's the rush? And where's here? How is Patience?"

"It's urgent. Extremely urgent. I'm on Chorisande. So is Patience, but I'd rather not talk about that. Get on the next cruiser and come as quickly as you can."

"But why? I thought everything was running smoothly. I'm not sure I - "

"For God's sake, Anton, get over here. Move."

Anton felt his depression coming over him again. "All right, Gilles, if you insist. I'm on my way. But why, damn it?"

Gilles looked anguished. "I can't say over the freewave, but Patience's fait accompli is looking a little sick," he said. And he cut the connection.

Anton stopped feeling depressed and began to feel scared.

From space, Chorisande had always been a sparkling jewel, dashed with green and brown. Now it was just a featureless gray blob, like a ball of mud.

It wasn't much better from the ground. Mostly it was obscured by swirling fog. The air smelled wrong: damp ash and wood-smoke. Even now, a month after the fires had died, even through a face mask. I never realized it would be like this. And there was another, indefinable smell-a smell of death.

DuFeu had met him when the shuttle landed and taken him to the Installation without saying a word. Something was horribly wrong.

"Where's Patience?"

"She's shut herself in her room and refuses to see anyone," duFeu said flatly.

"What? Patience? But she was so happy about this project."

"Yes. She's not the kind you'd expect to crack up, is she? But I'm afraid she can't take the way her fait accompli has turned out. Neither can I, Anton. But at least it was never my idea."

"Cracked up? Gilles, what the hell has been happening? Has someone found out what we're doing here? Is that it?" He struggled to control his emotions.

"No. But they will. And then . . ." He saw BrachVogel's puzzled face and shrugged. "I'll show you." He tossed a pile of holographs onto the table. "Take a look at these."

The first appeared to have been taken on the ice field near the coastline, probably in infrared to pierce the fog. It was hard to tell for sure; everything had changed so much. The ice was littered with strange, shapeless humps.

The next was a close-up of one of the humps. It was blackened and crumpled, like a dirty rug thrown carelessly into a heap. But if you looked closely, it was possible to make out the bone structure.

It was an animal. Something like a bear, except that only the lower half bore fur. There were more holos: One showed the face. It was sunken and deformed., There were no bacteria on Chorisande, but tissues still undergo chemical decomposition. There was something familiar about it.

"Dear God," said Brachvogel. I didn't know, I didn't know, I didnÕt know. "This is awful. What are they?"

"The clean-up team called them half-bears. Gallows humor, but it's appropriate. There must have been millions of them in the forests. Maybe more. We have no real idea; we ... The lucky ones near the edges made it to the ice. The rest-they burned, I guess. But the ones who escaped the flames didn't last long. Suffocation, lack of food, poisoned by gas-they were heaped up, in places. A dead continent bordered by corpses. I think I'm going mad, Anton. We did this to them. What do you think of the greenhouse effect now?"

Anton was feeling sick. He turned his eyes from the holo of the crumpled corpse. "Hell. They're only animals. We didn't mean to do it. But it's done now anyway, isn't it?"

"Yes. It's done."

"So nobody's going to worry about a bunch of animals."

"I do. Patience, too. So will you. I think you do now!Ó

"Yeah. But worrying won't bring the half-bears back, will it?"

"No.

"So what's a bunch of animals compared to Chorisande's minerals?" Revenge should be sweet. Why isn't it? Justice is-ugh! I can't speak the word. "She killed my father, Gilles. Why shouldn't we kill her?"

DuFeu wasn't really listening. "You tell me, Anton.Ó

"I don't know anymore, Gilles." He paused. "These-these half-bears -they're very familiar. I just can't quite place them . . ."

"We know so little about them," said duFeu. "Where they lived, how they lived. It's all gone forever. Were they solitary, or did they group into herds? What did they eat?"

"Fungus."

"Eh?"

Brachvogel said, almost dreamily. "We saw some eating the fungus. Daddy and me-we saw them. Just before he was killed. We were hurrying back to tell everyone."

He was almost in a trance. For a seco, I nd he seemed to shake it off. "That miust have been why he got careless and passed too near an ice tower.

"I'd forgotten all about it, but now it's all coming back. I was too young to appreciate it, but I remember how excited Daddy was. Oh, God, I remember everything!" He stared blankly into space.

DuFeu put one hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Anton. Did you watch them long?"

"Quite -quite a long time. They were, kind of - collecting the fungus."

"Grazing?"'

"No, more like harvesting, I suppose. They were putting it into huge baskets, woven from some sort of reed His voice trailed off, and his eyes stared.

"Anton," said duFeu in a stricken voice, "are you sure? Baskets?" his face was ashen.

No more than your dead fungus shall I sing again. 0 Chorisande. And I called you murderess. Brachvogel nodded once and held his head in his hands.

****