The column of exhaust rose into the gray Petrolean sky. Like a harpoon thrown into a dark, upside-down sea, the gleaming needle at the white tip of that cloud broke through the pall of smoke over the badlands where Xanadu Base had once stood. Feroza stood atop the back of the Leviathan and watched the Rocket-seed pierce the heavens.
Interesting. There were no Bergs near the site of Xanadu Base, but perhaps human pollution had stretched farther than she assumed. Stressed, the factors had built themselves an escape capsule and blasted off, hoping to find better pastures. Feroza wished them luck.
Other mechanoid life was not so picky. Gazing out past the air paddles that fringed the Leviathan, Feroza could zoom in on the cracked ground around them. The clear-cut land was a broken jigsaw of grays and glossy blacks, pin-pricked with the red lights of scavengers signaling to each other. The humans had not allowed themselves to be destroyed without inflicting massive casualties upon the land, but already Petrolea was growing back.
Profits swung their stilt-like legs over the wreckage of the human's vehicles, stabbing down at hopping battalions of Gambols, fat with all the hydrocarbons they could pump out of the habitat's holding tanks. Flightless juvenile Leviathans, only the size of passenger trains, humped their way between the weedy furrows dug by earthmoving equipment. The gutted hollows and scraped flats had already developed a fuzz of self-assembler growth.
If Victor's theory was right, Feroza was observing at work the unseen hand of the original designers of the mechanoids' Van Neumann ancestors. Colonize empty land. Mine raw materials and convert them into tools you can use to mine more raw materials. Destroy what stands in your way.
From such a perspective, what difference was there between the creatures she had dedicated herself to protecting and her fellow humans? Ecosystem or economy, forest or factory, in the end everything came down to selfish self-replication. Eat and breed or be eaten so that others can breed.
And here was Feroza, connected to the net of life as she stood in her crudely camouflaged suit, a bonesteel spear in one hand and a string of butchered mechanoids in the other: the successful hunter taking food back to her mate.
Their hut was a dome sunk into the center of one of the Leviathan's broad carapace plates. The man-sized still steamed under the mast of the antenna Victor had caused to be grown there. Their quaint and rusty home.
"I'm home," Feroza broadcast to Victor.
A crackle from her earpieces. Then, "Good. Did you bring feedstock for the still?"
"I return victorious, yet again," said Feroza.
She fed her catch into the hopper, leaned her spear against the hut, and crawled through the airlock tube, feeling more medieval by the moment. How did the poem go?
"Longing for the emperor's arrow," she recited, "the game leapt and jumped so in the hunting ground/ That the wild animals, wishing they could run faster, envied the speed of the birds."
"I have no idea what you are talking about." Victor looked up from his housekeeping.
"I am talking about, or rather quoting, Abu Talib Kalim, poet laureate to the Mogul Shah Jahan."
"Uh. Oh?"
How good it was to see Victor out of his environment suit. Feroza had missed being able to see those dark, serious eyes. That large, rather hooked nose. The firm lips. Her gloves and helmet were such a chore to remove, but with them on, how could she run her fingers over the sharp, tiny hairs on his face and scalp? How could she kiss him?
After some time, Victor was able to open his eyes and frown at her. "You're in a good mood," he said.
"I'm alive, am I not?" She took a deep breath of the air her lover had oxygenated for her. "Cold," she said, "and it smells even worse than the hangar, but it is breathable. Your magic works again."
"It worked even better the second time," he said, nodding at the holes in the wall for air, food, and water, the LEDs embedded in the ceiling. "And no, it's not because I had extra time to tinker with the programs. The parasites are actively helping us build this place, even though we have to keep feeding them to the still."
"Our flying steed abounds with abundance, oh tender of my hearth," said Feroza. "By the grace of God and this giant airborne lobster, we shall never lack for sustenance or shelter."
"Whatever you say." Victor prodded the curving wall of their little shelter. The individual creatures that made up its bricks were now invisible under the layer of insulating foam they had secreted. "I'm still not entirely sure this place isn't going to fall in on us and eat us."
"Of course it won't," said Feroza. "And this shelter makes perfect sense if you think about it. You've made a bubble of hot, poisonous gas. The Leviathan does with oxygen what it does with any other irritant. It builds a cyst around it."
"I guess," he said. "But what about the improvements to the still? The…the architecture of this place seems wrong. I never told any of the mechanoids to build a door in this cyst."
Feroza had her theories, but decided to let them cook a while longer before feeding them to Victor. "Perhaps we must simply respect the Leviathan's hospitality," she said. "It encysts."
Victor squinted at her. "Was that a joke?"
It was a rather insulting just how shocked he sounded. Feroza sniffed. "A pun. And if it wasn't up to your standards, I apologize. I haven't had cause to make many jokes recently. Perhaps my skills have atrophied."
"Oh," said Victor. "So you should practice more…" he looked like he was doing calculus in his head, "so your puns might win…a trophy."
Feroza put a hand over her mouth. "I have created a monster."
"That's usually my job," he smiled and she kissed him again.
"Hm," she said after another while. "Could you fabricate a razor and shaving cream with this still?"
He shook his head. "I shouldn't need to. I'm done with the radio."
Ah, the radio. "Victor," she said, "have you considered what you want to say into the radio?"
"I already did. It wasn't complicated." He still had his handshake gauntlet on, whose fingers he fluttered. "'We're alive. Everything on Petrolea is programmed to kill humans. Please rescue us.' I'm waiting for a response."
Feroza settled herself against Victor, considering how to put this. Pragmatically, probably. "We have a new still. We have much better access to resources. We have everything we need."
He drew back from her, head shaking. "We've determined that the entire moon wants to kill us."
"Pah." She jerked her chin toward the suits with their macabre decoration of rusting corpses. "Once we find the tripwires, we can avoid them."
"And live as squatters in someone else's mining facility?" Victor shook his head. "And anyway I don't want to die on Petrolea. I want to go home."
Feroza sat back on her haunches. "We won't be going home, but to prison."
"Just how is that different from staying here?"
"Because there will be other people there."
Feroza didn't ask whether he'd prefer the company of a bunch of criminals and prospectors to her. That would be unfair. People needed the company of other people. Like any other social animal.
"What do you want, Feroza?" Victor asked. "To become a martyr for the anti-exploiters? To be eaten by the mechanical rainforest? To be one with nature? To stay out of prison? To save Petrolea? Or just prevent the deaths of the next idiots who come here?"
"Yes," said Feroza. "There's no reason I can't do all of those things. Just some of them…later than others. We will have some time to decide." She put her arms around him, rested her head against his chest. "It will be alright."
He shifted against her, hugging back. "What if I think we can do more good for Petrolea up there than down here?"
"How?"
"I don't know. Telling people what we know. Going on the media. Lobbying."
"What on Earth do you know about lobbying?"
"Well," said Victor. "We'll be in a position to save people's lives at least. Tell them about the tripwire program buried in the brains of every Petrolean creature."
"Now that they're sensitized to humans and human technology, extraction will become much more difficult," mused Feroza.
"So maybe there won't be any exploiters to lobby against at all," said Victor. "Maybe we'll have to find some other source of hydrocarbons in the outer system. Some other way to crack space open."
He sounded so disappointed at the prospect. Feroza imagined factories in space, sending energy and goods down to an unpolluted Earth. Dense cities separated by vast swaths of uninhabited wilderness. In a way, Victor's hyper-technological fantasy was a better, greener vision of the future than her own back-to-the-wilderness dream. But if her future could come about only after the deaths of nine tenths of the human population, Victor's was dependent on technology that didn't exist. To build an extraterrestrial industrial base, one would need...
"Factors!"
"What?" Victor mumbled, as if woken from a doze.
"All your wilderness survival!" crowed Feroza. "It wasn't wilderness at all! A cave-man learning how to steal food from a vending machine. Victor, that's what the mechanoids are for!"
"What are they for?"
"Think about it," said Feroza. "They make life-support facilities, food, radios. They build habitats. They carry people around. My goodness, they even collect metals and hydrocarbons together, pack them onto rockets, and blast them off into space! They couldn't be more perfect for space industry if they were specifically designed for it."
"Except for when they eat people."
"But don't you see?" Feroza propped herself up on his chest and turned around so she could look at him. "The tripwire program means that they are still obeying their original instructions. All of the instincts and behaviors they've evolved can be overridden."
Victor slowly nodded. "What if instead of killing the mechanoids, we domesticated them?"
It was actually rather sad. The animals became equipment far more completely and fundamentally than any battery farm hen or feedlot cow. Was Feroza a fool for devoting her life to these creatures, which were really nothing but the toys of departed masters? Or had she found the solution, the compromise, that would save her life's work?
"Just how could we go about doing that?" she asked.
"Well, the camouflage is a good start," said Victor. "But we don't want to hide from the old tripwires, we want to fool them. Spoof the mechanoids into thinking we're the old masters come back. Hit the right combination of cues, and the whole place might just open up to us. Dio, what could I do with user-friendly behavioral programming."
"What would those cues look like?" asked Feroza.
"Let's think about that."
They spun their castles in the air until the visor of Victor's helmet lit up red.
SOS. The message from the orbital station scrolled down the visor. SOS. SOS.