Petrolea ch4

The Dragons had carved their hangar into the chimney of a Factory Berg. Already, the window was lost in the ammonia clouds. As Feroza and the mother Dragon glided down the slope of the Berg, the tapering walls above were almost as vertiginous as its foundations below.

"I'm sorry," Feroza told the Dragon.

The bus-sized mechanoid made no response, but Feroza could feel the vibration in her chassis, see the factors of her flesh growing more sluggish in their reactions. I am tired, she seemed to say, when can I rest?

"Oh, it's nothing," said Toledo's voice in her earphones. "I am confident we can get oxygen indefinitely."

Feroza decided not to tell the engineer she hadn't been apologizing to him, but to the innocent animal whose mate they had slaughtered and whose children they now held hostage while they used her to collect food and fuel. Feroza wasn't happy to be in charge of that project, riding the Dragon down the mountain like the hallucination of some mercury-poisoned equestrian. At least she wasn't forced to stay in the hangar with Toledo, though, and his macabre "still."

"This machine is great." Toledo was back up at the top of Berg in the Dragons' hangar, chattering happily as he rendered their living-space habitable. "It's already cracked enough oxygen for both of us, and I'm confident about water and even digestible food."

Wilderness survival, as Toledo referred to it. A program cooked up by some bloated, greedy business-vampire in Dubai or London: hack the native life into growing life-support modules in the field. As if we weren't disturbing the ecosystem enough already with a single base at Xanadu, let's make it possible to grow a hundred bases overnight!

Toledo was still talking. "...but it'll need more oxygen to burn in its fabricators. And hydrocarbon feedstock."

Feroza looked down at her steed. The mother Dragon had spread her wings as far as she could, her engines shut off in her exhausted glide. This was her fourth trip down from her hangar in the past hour.

"You mean blood," Feroza said. "We will need the blood of Petrolean animals. More death, so we can live. So he could die."

"He?"

"The Dragon!" Feroza wanted to scream with frustration. How could Toledo be so damn dense? "You killed the father Dragon."

"So what? You favor your own first, then others. Humans are more important than animals."

"Humans are just one species of animal. And there are eight billion of us. How many Dragons are there?"

Toledo scoffed. "Because there are more people than Dragons, that makes a person's life less valuable? We're not selling people and Dragons on the international exchange, here. The only reason to keep Dragons around is because we like having them around."

"Why? What gives you the right to decide whether another creature dies?"

"I can figure out how to kill them," said Victor, "that's what."

"So intelligence is the sine qua non for personhood?" said Feroza. "Are you prepared to offer yourself up for slavery under the next genius you happen to meet?"

"It depends, mi señora," he said, voice suddenly dark and smoky. "What are your...orders?"

Feroza stopped with her mouth open, the Dragon rumbling under her. She thought they'd been arguing. Had Toledo thought they were flirting? Surely not. "I'm not talking about me," she said. "If your dividing line is the species, what happens when we meet aliens? How would you like it if a super-technological space-man reprogrammed your body to churn out food for him?"

"If the alien was as much smarter than me as I am smarter than a Dragon? I think my feelings don't matter so much, eh?"

What a bleak moral philosophy. The law of the jungle applied to human interactions. But wasn't that how most humans still governed themselves, or failed to?

The Dragon was already searching for a place to land. "I'm done arguing," said Feroza, watching ground slope up to meet them.

Once a water- and methane-spewing cryovolcano, the Berg had been covered over and converted by Petrolean life into an energy plant. The vast colonial organism of cooperating factors used the volcano to distill petrochemical fuel and oxygen to burn it, storing the energy that ultimately powered the entire local ecosystem.

Landing here on the forested slopes would not be easy, but the mother Dragon might not have the strength to make it all the way down to the plains. Now it was just a matter of letting go.

Feroza weighed only13% of what she would have on Earth, but her long-haul environment suit more than quadrupled her mass. She had a great deal of inertia, and could only very slightly control her descent. A fall that would have been instant death on her home world became a long, panicked dance of shoving hands and spinning, kicking legs.

Finally, Feroza stood on the steep incline of the lower Berg, leaning against the strut of a whirligig tree and trying not to vomit. No plumes of carbon dioxide snow rose from her suit; it was intact. She would live long enough to hunt down some food for the mother Dragon and thus more effectively enslave her.

Toledo must finally have realized that he'd upset her. "Look," he said, "I'm sorry I killed the Dragon, all right? But that funnel and valve idea you had — "

"If not that, then something else," she said. "We could have found some other solution."

"Maybe. But what's wrong with this solution?"

Did he honestly not understand? "You are perpetuating a cycle of death, Mr. Toledo. You killed the Dragon, which forces me to go down the Berg to kill more creatures, all so we can stay alive long enough to kill yet more."

Feroza watched the mother Dragon circle above her, jets angling down for vertical landing. "I will hunt for her. Fill her reserves and then persuade her to give us what she can."

"Then why do you need to be down there? We could have stayed here and waited for her to come back."

Feroza watched the mother Dragon settle onto her landing gear. A healthy animal would have immediately re-formed the factors of her body into their non-flying conformation. The exhausted mother Dragon simply slumped to the ground, factors sloughing from her superstructures like shed feathers. "She needs my help."

"Alright. Whatever makes you feel better."

"I am not sure you understand the extent of the..." suffering, Feroza thought, "...stress we have caused the mother Dragon. We have added ourselves to her responsibilities and removed her mate, who might otherwise have helped her hunt. If we do not do something to redress the balance, she might simply give up on this nest and fly away to mate again."

"So you have to give her enough food to convince her to stay here," but the confidence in Toledo's voice didn't last. "Um. Can you?"

"Yes." Feroza said with rather more confidence than she felt. She'd collected her share of specimens and could have bagged any number of small mechanoids for Toledo to feed to his blasphemous life support engine. She was less certain she could fuel the metabolism of an adult Dragon as well.

"It's only that this...what we're doing here is very important," said Toledo. "For our survival. Since we're stranded in the wilderness."

Stranded in someone else's home, he meant. Toledo just took what he wanted and demanded more.

"Okay," his voice intruded. "How about this? You ride that thing back up here, we'll process one of the juveniles into feedstock for her — "

"You want to force the mother Dragon to eat one of her Dragonlets?"

"Well, why not? They're both machines. If our shuttle broke, wouldn't we cannibalize the harvester for parts?"

Cannibalize? Feroza felt ill. "She is not flying anywhere."

That was a statement of fact. The mother Dragon sprawled across the uneven ground, wings shuddering, dead factors dropping off her body. Feroza's first priority must be to feed the poor creature.

Of course Toledo had different priorities. "Okay. How about this?" he said again. "I don't have many slave factors left, but if I use the ones I have to make one of the juveniles fly down to you — "

"No!"

"The big Dragon doesn't have to eat it." Victor cleared his throat. "You can place those slave factors on the adult."

"Never!"

"But I am offering to give you my last slave factors," he said.

"No," Feroza said again. "No more slavery."

"You just said," grated Toledo, "that it might just fly off and strand me at the top of a damn mountain with no way down. Plus you're lost in the jungle with no way back up."

Feroza watched the Dragon breathe, considering the merits of that idea. Why go back to Toledo, after all? Why extend his life and hers at the expense of so many other, equally deserving creatures? Why not fly out into the jungle and live there? Her life might be shorter than if she went back to Base, but it would be infinitely richer.

No. As peaceful as might be the image of her own death at the heart of the Petrolean food web, Feroza knew Toledo would die cursing her name. In the grand scheme of nature, one naked ape hating another might count for nothing, but Feroza could not be so amoral. Toledo had saved her life, after all, and Feroza had yet to return the favor.

Feroza turned away from the Dragon to look down the slope of the forest-mountain. Below were the superconducting spires assembled by the Berg itself, its flanks had been colonized by a dense underbrush of spinning windmill vanes and pinwheel leaves.

The alien race that designed and sent their mining robots on their long and lonely mission on Titan had probably envisioned something like what Toledo and his ilk wanted: a massive tower of industry, a petrochemical distillery the size of a planet.

But nature had intervened. Feroza theorized, and her learned colleagues agreed, that the factors had once been repair robots servicing the automated oil-rigs whose descendants had become the Bergs. But the factors' programming had mutated. Mistakes multiplied, directed by the blind wisdom of natural selection. Over the course of silent eons, the machines had evolved.

The Berg no longer accumulated petroleum and the oxygen to burn it for the benefit of some interstellar master. Instead, it served its own goal: reproduction. Feroza gave wide berth to the snout of an immature Rocket-seed, the blunt-tipped shaft thrusting up from the metallic ground, preparing to blast off and carry the Berg's genetic legacy to some distant part of Titan.

And to think people like Toledo would undo all of this natural innovation. Chop off the inflorescence of mechanoid biology and reduce Titan back to a mining colony of dumb robots. It made Feroza sick in her heart.

When she tried to articulate the feeling to the engineer, however, he refused to understand.

"Nonsense. Titan isn't alive. It's just covered by a bunch of self-replicating machinery."

"So then what is a cow or a goat, but self-replicating meat?" she countered.

"I guess that's what it is," he said.

Something moved between the twirling leaves and Feroza froze. But it was just a Gob: much too small for a Dragon's sustenance.

"And what about you, Mr. Toledo. What are you, but meat?"

"Thinking meat? Dreaming meat?" He had a smile in his voice, but Feroza couldn't guess why. She was getting too far from the Dragon, but there was no large prey for her to flush. What if she tried to attract some food, instead?

"Anyway," Toledo said, "so what? You make it sound like Petrolean life has more right to these resources than we do."

"Of course it does," she said. "Even if the mechanoids weren't already here when we arrived, every sentient creature deserves to live."

"Huh? There is no intelligent life on Titan."

"Yes," she said patiently. "'Sapient' means 'intelligent.' 'Sentient' means it has feelings. And you can't deny the mechanoids have feelings. You can't deny," she said, over his hemming and hawing, "that the father Dragon suffered as you ripped his body apart."

"All right," said Toledo, "so maybe it suffered. So what? A chicken suffers when one kills it."

"Even in the Middle Ages, Jains and Brahmins could live without killing," she said, "and this isn't the Middle Ages. We have no need to be cruel to animals to survive any more. We were just coming to realize that on Earth, and then," she said, mostly to herself, "we discovered Petrolea."

Feroza examined a clear spot of ground, but a few whacks with her field shovel confirmed that under the oily mud was the nose of another nascent Rocket-seed. It was an excellent source of concentrated fuel and oxidizer, of course, but impossible to break into. She moved on.

"Oh yes," said Toledo. "I forgot. You think meat is murder, but I bet you've never had to eat a chicken or starve."

Feroza turned her path into a circle with the Dragon in the center, looking for places where she could tap into an oil line. "But don't you see, Toledo? That is nothing but the wealthy and influential West not caring to give the poor an alternative to meat."

"Oh, 'the poor,' you say?" Toledo actually growled into his microphone. "You self-indulgent little princess. Do you know anything about 'the poor' or where we come from? There were times when I would have killed someone for a chicken to eat."

"But that's just it," said Feroza. "You didn't need to — "

"No. This is crazy. You're crazy. I'm crazy for having this stupid conversation with you. You took the oxygen from the dead Dragon and when I reprogram its fabricators, you will eat and drink the stuff they make because if you don't, you'll die."

"It is better to die than live at the expense of others?" Feroza's frayed patience finally gave way. "And why am I in this position, where I might die like the friends and colleagues you killed with your incompetence?"

"My incompetence," Toledo's English was deserting him. "...the Leviathan! The stupid…stupid...¡Estupidez ideológica de una ecochiquita privilegiada, desenfrenada y decadente!"

From the French and Latin cognates, Feroza assumed that was not complimentary. "If I regain my original beliefs and determination to uphold them, both of us will die. So consider carefully what you say to me."

The only response was the whistle of the carrier wave.

Fuming, Feroza tromped through the forest, flushing nothing but Gobs, stray factors, and families of Helicopter butterflies. Finally, she found a likely clear spot at the base of a superconductor spire where the Berg's oil-lines came close enough to the surface for her to breach one with her shovel.

Black hydrocarbon slurry bubbled in the light of her torch, spilling down the slope in a river of nutritious and tempting food. It wasn't long before something moved among the windmill leaves and hopped down to investigate. A laterally compressed body topped by a swiveling turret of sensors. Its powerful legs folded, its undercarriage a-bristle with piercing and cutting tubes, pipes, and sponges. The Gambol looked like a metal flea the size of a motorcycle.

"There you are, finally."

"What did you say?"

Feroza wasn't aware she'd spoken aloud.

"A Gambol," she said.

"Ah," Toledo sounded embarrassed. "That's good, yes? Why is that good?"

"I have prey for the Dragon."

"Are you sure you can handle it? I thought Gambols were dangerous parasites."

"Yes," said Feroza. "Just like the organization you work for."

He sighed. "You know we aren't just dumping the petroleum into the sun. We aren't wasting it. The fuel and plastics and hydrocarbon feedstock...they keep people alive in space stations and habitats all the way back to Luna. We need Petrolea."

The Gambol dragged its head back and forth, scooping up food. It was almost close enough. "We need Petrolea like a child needs his ice-lolly."

"So let him have his damn ice-lolly. Food can't complain."

A camera twitched in her direction and Feroza held her breath.

"Alright, maybe you disagree that mechanoids deserve basic rights, but what about people?" Toledo asked. "What about the people in the jungle when you brought the entire ecosystem down on our heads?"

"I didn't kill those people," Feroza watched the enormous parasite waddle closer to her, unaware of the danger it was in. Unaware of the meal that it would soon be. "I know you're not responsible, either, but you did bring the harvester into their territory. It was too tempting a target. You should have listened to us when we said that Petrolean life had become too aggressive to — "

"I tried!" he said. "And I was never supposed to be sent into the jungle to arrest you. I am a programmer, for God's sake!"

Feroza couldn't afford to let herself become as emotional Toledo. Forcing her breathing to slow, she bent her legs a precise 160 degrees and jumped, shrieking static across the AM bands.

The Gambol launched itself away with a kick from its piston-like hind legs. Feroza watched it arc through the air, flipping those legs around, turning them into springs with which to cushion its fall. A fall which brought it nearly on top of the mother Dragon.

The Gambol squealed over Feroza's radio and kicked its piston-legs, but they weren't oriented at the right angle to do any damage. Hooked mouthparts scrabbled and sparks flew as the buzz-saws in the Dragon's mouth bit into the carapace of the giant metal flea.

"Dr. Merchant?"

Feroza realized she'd been staring at the fighting monsters, breathing heavily, for far too long. How was her oxygen? Good. Fine. It was fine.

"Dr. Merchant? Feroza? What has happened?"

"The Gambol is down," she reported. "It's scattering."

Factors sloughed off the Gambol's steel skeleton. Some of the little robots managed to escape, but most fell prey to the dragon's overpowering radio voice and fell into line as members of its own swarm. They marched into their new master's body cavity, not even pausing to disassemble and transport the armature, organs, and other tools they had so painstakingly fabricated. Nor the fuel tanks they had just filled.

The Dragon tore into the skeleton, bright trails of light behind the hot tips of her cutting mouthparts.

Feroza edged forward and snatched up a steel bone from where it had fallen. Feeling rather like a cavewoman, she took the tool back to the gash she had made in the forest oil-pipeline. Petroleum streamed from the wound, already the center of a writhing clump of factors. Some of the little machines formed lines leading back to their nests in the undergrowth, stealing the resource. Others piled on top of each other within nets of spun plastic, self-assembling into impromptu walls, reservoirs, and claws to protect this breach in the Berg's body.

Feroza swung her bone-steel staff through them.

"What are you doing now? What's that noise?"

"Killing the Berg's repair-factors." She took a deep breath. "Keeping the blood flowing." Another breath. "Waiting for more parasites." She backed away from the honey pot. Hid herself again. "My plan is working, and so we might live out the day."

Toledo was silent for a while, digesting that. "Dr. Merchant," he said eventually, "I am sorry I argued with you. I want to thank you. Without you, I would have nothing to feed into my still. We keep each other alive, right?"

"We all keep each other alive, Mr. Toledo. That's what ecosystems do."

"Eh? Yes, I suppose."

Feroza didn't have long to wait before the next Gambol arrived. And the next, and the guardians the Berg summoned to protect its oil, and the larger things that would prey upon all three mechanoids.

"I feel like Mr. R.M. Renfield," said Feroza, "feeding flies to spiders and spiders to ants and ants to birds…"

"I don't know what that means," said Toledo.

"All for the glory of the great Count Dracula." Feroza raised her right arm and broadcast a specific radio signal. "Come to me."

The Dragon crashed through the undergrowth, mouthparts agape.

The first Gambol died before it even noticed the onrushing predator. It fell, sparked and dissolved into bones, organs, and squirming factors.

Feroza pointed and whistled again and the Dragon attacked another Gambol just as it compressed its spring legs. A leap to freedom became a sideways flop and a terminal shudder.

The forest guardian, a creature of plates and spikes like a car-sized metal hedgehog, died in a blast of fire, its plastic organs melting. The other predator sprang into the air, a jackal compared to the tiger Feroza had unleashed. It spread helicopter rotors, but the path of its unlucky leap took it past Feroza. She braced herself and swung her bone-steel staff like a featherball racket. The little predator crashed into the ground, where a jab with the staff and a stomp from her boot convinced the factors that made up its skin that they had better chances of survival elsewhere.

Feroza watched the creature disassemble, wondering if she was doing the right thing. Certainly, she could reduce her impact on Petrolea if she left. When they reached Xanadu Base, Al-Onazy would be only too happy to send her back to Earth on the next rocket, probably in chains. But then what? He or someone like him would go on merrily draining the moon of its resources until none were left. Who would stop him if Feroza was in jail on Earth or dead in the jungle?

The honey-pot she had made was now a-swarm with orphaned factors. Some tried to reclaim their abandoned armatures of bones and organs. Others tried to self-assemble without them. Most fled or died in the clutches of Gobs and other scavengers. Feroza tried to bag as many as possible for the still. If a person could survive indefinitely in the Petrolean jungle, what works might she accomplish? How might she act against the exploiters?

"You know what?" said Toledo as she worked. "I am thinking of what we can do with all this feedstock you're collecting. Why stop at food and water and oxygen, after all?"

Why indeed? But Feroza was too busy with the slaughter to answer him.

"I have programs that will make a plastic film to cover the entrance. The walls, floor, and ceiling will need to be covered as well, to prevent oxidation."

Feroza leaned on her staff, breathing hard, feeling her suit's cooling fans whir. "We won't have any leakage if you just keep fabricating spare oxygen canisters."

"Leakage? Oh no. I want to flood the chamber with breathable air. I want to be able to take off this damned suit."

Take off the environment suit. The sensual impact of that fantasy stopped Feroza in her tracks, imagining air on her skin. Sloughing away this plodding, restrictive armor. Feeling warmth over the invisible hairs on her body...

No. No, she couldn't allow herself to say what was on her mind. Couldn't allow herself to even think of the decadence of… "I suppose a bath would be out of the question?"

Silence. Feroza cringed. How had Toledo described her? As privileged? Self-indulgent? Not to mention hypocritical. Feroza was the woman who had prepared to walk into the jungle and make her environment suit into her tomb. Who had told Toledo he should regret every Petrolean life he feed into his still. And now she would use those precious resources to make soap and hot water?

"I apologize," Feroza said. "Please forget that I said…that I wanted…it was wrong of me."

"Oh, no. I don't think it's wrong, Dr. Merchant." Toledo's voice had gone husky. "I was only visualizing how...what resources we would need to requisition. Heating the water should be easy. Soap...I think I can fabricate. A bath...hm."

"A bath?" She said mortified. A princess of Petrolea, indeed! How could he think she would demand a bathtub? "No, no, I was thinking of a sponge bath," she assured him.

"Sponge..." he said "...bath. Oh. Oh. That would be...feasible, yes." He cleared his throat. "I will make a curtain, of course. For privacy."

And Feroza understood. 'I was just visualizing,' he had said. And then she had suggested a sponge bath. Of course. The point of life was reproduction.

Feroza's cheeks burned against the pads of her helmet. What must he think of her? And what was she thinking of him? Toledo would be out of his suit, as well. And would she perhaps enjoy giving him one?

Once Feroza allowed herself something so louche as a bath in a Dragon's nest, a bath with a man in a Dragon's nest hardly seemed worse. And whether they agreed about environmentalist philosophy or not, the two of them were going to be stuck together for some time. Adrift. Benighted. Bereft. With lots of free time...

"This is not the time. Nor — even remotely! — the place." Feroza picked up her bonesteel staff. "So we shall concentrate merely on staying alive." She swung, and clubbed the nearest mechanoid to death.