Greg Bear: The Forge of God

The hatch opened and he stepped out onto a patch of ubiquitous crisp lichen. The valley air at dusk was cold and still and the stars steady as crystal.

The sky glowed a lovely, subdued mauve, edging toward blue at zenith. To the southeast, the high valley walls caught the last sunlight of the day, a thin irregular horizontal ribbon of intense orange.

New Mars had recovered from its collision with the icy fragment of Europa in the 390 years they had been in cold sleep, dropping its mantle of cloud after two centuries of almost steady rain. Floods had scoured the red and ocher terrain, and the increased temperature had released the frozen carbon dioxide of the poles, thickening the atmosphere. At that time, a century past, New Mars had been ideal for primitive plants. Up and down the valley, the dust and rock had been carpeted by lichens and mosses, and the new small seas had been seeded with phytoplankton.

Oxygen soon returned in quantity to New Mars.

Farther north, the impacted remains of Phobos and Deimos, rich in organic materials, supported highland farms of new wheat strains, and the first experiments at Earthlike forests, chiefly conifers. In a few decades, New Mars would have territories virtually indistinguishable from Earth. She — New Mars had adopted Mother Earth’s gender — promised to be a planet of broad green prairies, high semiarid forests, and deep, almost tropical oxygen-rich valleys.

Eight thousand were settled here, two thirds of the human race. The remaining third still lived on the Central Ark, some learning the theory of planetary management, some — a select few — waiting for their chance to ride more starships and carry out the judgment of the Law.

With virtually unlimited power supplies, no weapons, and resources sufficient for a hundred times their number already, their life on New Mars held promise of being idyllic. As always, only their own cussedness could change that.

He marched between the milky glass-walled greenhouses and up a low hill to a point where he could look down Feinman Rift. Far below, breeders tended the first range animals born out of genetic storage. It was warmer down there, and it rained far more often, and some complained that in a truly free society, that would be prime real estate, but the area was strictly reserved for the breeders. To give in to the community’s baser instincts now might bring the Moms down on their backs again; it had happened once before, on the Central Ark, when human political authority had broken down into anarchy. Arthur did not wish to see it happen again.

Children do so hate to be disciplined.

Nobody knew who had sent these stern, dedicated robot guardians. Chances were they would never know. Arthur suspected that even benefactors had to be suspicious of their charges; it was best, for the time being, to simply stay hidden and quiet.

Arthur pinched his cheek and closed his faceplate against the cold. Then he looked to the east, above the pink haze of twilight, and saw the silvery point of Venus, still wrapped in a mantle of cloud.

Reuben Hordes was in command of the first exploratory and diagnostic mission to Venus. Twenty years ago, the now-moist Venerean clouds had parted briefly, and a decade-long rain had fallen, driving the planet’s surface acids into chemical battle with molten rock thrown up by three centuries of fresh vulcanism. The clouds had closed again, and the reconnaissance expedition had been launched from the Central Ark.

Arthur did not envy Reuben his task. Venus was a hard case; it might be centuries more before humans could live in significant numbers on its surface.

What he was actually seeking was a clear view of the Milky Way, so that he could look at Sagittarius. He missed Martin deeply. To be cut off from the past was to cherish the future all the more; Martin was much of Arthur’s future, though they would never see each other again, and hadn’t communicated for a year and a half, by Arthur’s time frame.

Martin had left on the seventh Ship of the Law, with fifty human crewmates, only eight years after Earth’s destruction, before most of the survivors had been put into cold sleep. The ships had been traveling for centuries now, accelerating and decelerating, searching, refueling from dead ice moons.

He found Sagittarius, the Archer, between Scorpius and Capricorn. He lifted his gloved hand and pointed: somewhere there . Within the arc subtended by his trembling finger lay the solar system of Earth’s killers.

How terrifying the sky was now. Arthur wished he could share Harry’s vision of united solar systems forming vast “galactisms.” Now, from what the Moms had told them, the galaxy was a vaguely explored frontier at best, a vicious jungle at the worst.

The galaxy, too, was young.

The planet-eaters had not come from such a great distance, after all. The first signs of their builders’ interstellar dissembling, their protective coloration, had become evident less than a hundred light-years from the sun.

Martin, a quiet, solemn man who had grown to resemble his father, floated among a crowd of younger student-pilots on the observation deck of the kilometer-long, needle-thin Ship, of the Law. All the Ships of the Law had been hewn from the material of the dead Earth itself. With the galaxy’s center in view, still inconceivably faraway, he thought back to the debates he had had with the ship’s Moms at the beginning of the journey.

” What if we find the civilization of the planet-eaters, and it’s matured? What if it’s beautiful and noble and rich with culture, and it regrets its past mistakes? Do we still destroy it?”

“Yes,” the Moms had replied.

“Why? What good would that do?”

“Because it is the Law.”

In fact, the builders of the planet-eaters had come very early on, thousands of years ago, to realize their mistake. They had laced the planetary systems around their parent star with dozens of false civilizations, misleading beacons, even genetically engineered biological decoys, complete in every detail but one — the ability to mislead a Ship of the Law.

Three ship-years before, Martin had walked the surface of one such decoy planet, marveling at the creativity, the sheer expenditure of energy.

The planet had revealed sophisticated defenses. They had barely escaped the trap.

Now they were closing…

If they failed, others would follow, more informed, more aware of the dangers and pitfalls of this neck of the galactic woods.

Despite his intellectual misgivings, Martin was committed. He thought often of the age-old Law, and of the hundreds of mature civilizations that had embraced it. In his heart, a cold, rational hatred and hunger for vengeance echoed the demands of justice.

He knew, however strange and out of proportion it might be, that one of his key subconscious motivations was to avenge the death of a single, uncomplicated friend: a dog. He vividly remembered those soul-branding hours in the ark’s observation cabin.

Many of the humans aboard the Ship of the Law had been born in the Central Ark and had never known their home world. They were all dedicated to the search, regardless.

Silently, each day before the brief sleep of deep space, Martin swore an oath he had made up himself:

To those who killed Earth: beware her children!

That is how the balance is kept.