“Balak doesn’t know what tzee do any more than I know what nymphomaniac bikini models do. Besides, if they go for injured prey, it’ll be going for him, not me.”

  “Thanks. That really reassures me.”

  The clearing was only a hundred yards across, but it felt like walking the Sahara. Yuri was lying on his back, still clutching his knee. It wasn’t bleeding too badly. No major blood vessels seemed to have been severed. “I think the bastard took out my kneecap,” he said.

  “We’ll get you a shiny new one,” I said. “Gold titanium alloy. Incorrodable. Indestructible.”

  He appeared to smile, though he was probably gritting his teeth. “Don’t be stupid . . . where are you going to find titanium around here?”

  The undergrowth exploded again in a shower of leaves some distance away to my left. I’d read that it was very difficult to knock a leaf off a tree. Of course, that probably applied to Earth leaves and Earth trees. Had one of Balak’s men still been alive and injured, and was he alive no longer? “Keep still,” I said. “I have enough morphine in this one syringe to make a bull elephant see other, pinker bull elephants.”

  “It won’t make me able to walk.”

  “Agreed. You’re not going to walk. You’re not going to move.” I looked out into the now motionless undergrowth. “As soon as you start moving, moving broken, it’ll attack again. It’ll find you interesting. Keep still and you’re boring.”

  He exhaled so ecstatically as the syringe went in that I felt as if I were committing a homosexual act. “But it’ll eat me . . . oh, that feels gooood . . . ”

  Two more bushes detonated close by. Leaves drifted across our faces. “It evolved to eat life forms with biochemistries so full of heavy metals their meat tastes like licking cutlery,” I said. “If it takes a bite out of us it’ll probably die. It’s not like a rogue lion. It hasn’t suddenly discovered human beings taste good. It’s more like a rogue pussy cat. It’s suddenly discovered tormenting human beings is fun.”

  I backed away gingerly from Yuri.

  “Don’t leave,” he said.

  I picked up the LED pipe from where he’d let it fall and pressed it back into his hands. It was not as heavy as the harquebus, but not as accurate either. It might also be useless against a tzee. Human eyes and insect eyes had completely different visible spectra, after all, and they came from the same world. The chrysolope setting might not work on other Midas animals. I turned round slowly, searching the trees around me for stuff I didn’t know how to look for. Stuff that moved too fast to see.

  Too fast to see . . .

  “Yuri, turn the strobe effect up on the LED pipe. Way up. As high as it’ll go. And set it to maximum dispersal.”

  He fumbled with the settings. “Which one’s the strobe?”

  “Metal rheostat on the left hand side, big as your thumb. I didn’t have time to make it fancy.”

  “Check. Uh . . . what do you want me to do now?”

  “I’m going to walk away from you. I want you to sight up on me and shoot me.”

  “Why?”

  I inhaled through gritted teeth. “Because I’m where it’s going to be.”

  Before he could object, or ruin our friendship by not objecting, I started limping theatrically away from him, dragging one leg along behind me like a dead weight.

  I heard nothing. Hardly surprising, of course—I was making far too much noise myself, moving like this, to hear anything sneaking up. I felt faintly ridiculous. These woods, albeit these spine-leaved alien woods, had never before felt like anything sinister might lurk within them. Anything that didn’t walk around on two legs, that was.

  I only had time to flick my head sideways to see it; a clear line of collapsing vegetation streaking directly toward me. The LED pipe flared behind me like another sun. There was a sound like a crowbar jammed in an electric fan, and something blurred into existence, skidding out of control through the thicket. Then there was a sickening CRACK like wood breaking, and the blur became solid, wrapped right round a tree stump like a fox fur.

  I looked down at it. It was over twice the length of a man, and shaped like a sine wave, except where the tree had spoilt the effect. Occasionally, it broke into claws and teeth and, so help me, horns. Less like horns, in fact, than the bill on the front of a swordfish.

  “Don’t want to lose it at speed,” I said.

  Behind me, I could hear a regular wet THUMPing sound—I turned to see Yuri, his head striking rhythmically against a tree root, drool coming from the corner of his mouth.

  “YURI! Yuri! It got Yuri!” Brad rushed out of the woods, heedless of the possibility that there might be a hunting pack of tzee rather than just the one. For a divorced lady, she was certainly concerned for her ex-husband’s welfare.

  “No, it didn’t. The strobe was just turned up too high for safety. I figured tzee eyes had to re-render their environment far more times per second than ours do, or they wouldn’t be able to run through the woods that fast. Yuri must be susceptible to high frequency strobe. He’s just having an epileptic fit. The same thing that happened to the tzee. Only it was travelling at a hundred kilometres per hour when it had one.”

  “Just having an epileptic fit?”

  “Put something soft underneath his head, he’ll probably be fine.”

  As I turned back round to it, the tzee’s vibrated so rapidly that its flesh became as substantial as a hummingbird’s wing. This was also vibrating all the swords and claws, centimetres from my nose. I gave it a light squirt from the harquebus to pacify it, being not overly concerned about nonlethal force at this point. Blood blasted back out of it onto my trigger hand. The blood felt like salt in an open wound. I yelped and jumped backwards, felling a tree with the harquebus in panic.

  I was uncomfortably aware that Brad was already pointing a gun in my direction.

  “DON’T PANIC, I’m okay. But the blood . . . its blood burns.”

  Stupidly, Brad walked over, dabbed a finger in the blood on my hand, licked it, and said: “No it doesn’t.”

  Experimentally, I tried the same thing with my off hand. “You’re right. You’re right. Why are you right?”

  “Don’t look at me like me being right is a weird thing, chief.”

  “I don’t mean it like that. Anyhow, we need to get Yuri below ground now. We’ve got under an hour to build a shelter with a metre of earth cover. We haven’t got time to dig down, we’ll have to cut turf and make a lean-to. We’ll build it round him. Go get the Rover. He’ll be okay. He’s just fitting. He’ll stop fitting. Probably. Run.”

  She hesitated, searching for reasons to object, found none, and raced away.

  “I still don’t see why we have to tote this stinky piece of offal with us.”

  “That is a terrible way to talk about your ex-husband.”

  “Don’t say bad things about him while he’s too far gone to hear,” said Brad. Behind her, Yuri cooed and chortled softly in his opium dream.

  She had, of course, been talking about the tzee carcass. I’d trussed it up with wire and slung it in the back of the tractor. No-one had ever properly seen a tzee. I’d told Brad it would make us local celebrities in Croesus and Robinsonade. We might dine out on it. Certainly it would be slim pickings otherwise—we’d come home with no fatoid in our hoppers.

  The tractor, on autopilot, had taken us down out of Gulvellir woods into more populated country where people could see what people were doing to other people. There was little danger of anyone shooting anyone else in the back down here; I could stop checking how close my gun hand was to the harquebus every ten seconds. We were safe in Chrystopia Fields. These were not our fields, of course, and not active working fields either, but dead fields, fields where live weeds were running riot, strangling crops. The crops looked, to my non-Midasite eyes, more like giant weeds than the weeds did—huge, purple-flowered, pyramidal, surrounded by bird’s nests of coiling androecia, each sitting in its own appointed place on the terrace.

  Down here, it was so possible for people to see what was being done to other people that the memory might never be erased.

  Gulvellir Forest wasn’t a wild area. It was a hunting preserve. Every tree had been planted deliberately—artfully, even. The place showed signs of landscaping. Further down-plateau, Chrystopia Fields was what the rest of the world looked like.

  They had built irrigation channels down from reservoirs in the hills to water the fields, which also grew a crop with thick stilt roots that lifted itself clear of the water, like a mangrove. They had taken a plant that evidently habitually grew in the massive tidal shallows that took up half the planet and learned how to grow it a thousand kilometres inland. It had taken brains to do that.

  They were lining up in hundreds in the fields, sallow, grey-skinned, often injured, limping, leaning against each other for support. Three-legged like ’lope s, moving on two sturdy forelegs and one heavy rear. Heads like Great Cthulhu, both mandible and manipulatory appendage, faces only a mother could love. And they did have mothers, having two sexes like we did, and those mothers cradled their young in those horrible tentacles. The young looked tiny, scared, trembling. They lived underground, of course, to protect themselves against Hard Day. Had lived underground. Their dwellings were now either being dynamited or taken over by human pioneers. The pioneers had also built the new, humane structures lined up in the fields—the ones with the long lines, the ones that looked so popular at first glance.

  They felt no pain went they went into the devices. There was some sort of electric shock or chemical poison. I was unacquainted with the exact details. I had been assured by a drunken engineer, however, that no pain was involved—probly kint feel pain like we do anyhow. Then the innards of the device—my engineer’s pride and joy, described in over-vivid detail—went to work, reducing the of the creature, flesh, gristle and skeleton, to mush in under a minute and squirting it into the main cyanide vat, where the gold would be removed. Up to a hundred grammes of gold could be obtained per inhabitant.

  They had a system of writing based on dots placed above and below a line. They had a system of mathematical notation which allowed numbers to be expressed in multiple bases. They buried their dead.

  You’re saying to yourself, of course, if gold was all around, why didn’t they mine it out of the ground? Why didn’t they just build giant ore processors and tear the planet apart?

  People have known for years that planets have a carbon cycle—a period of constant replenishment, by volcanic outgassing, of carbon dioxide absorbed back into the planet. Once a planet’s carbon cycle finishes, complex life on that planet dies out. All the carbon gets swallowed up in the crust and never finds its way out again. What we hadn’t appreciated before arriving on Midas is that big heavy metal planets have a gold cycle too. Oh, sure, life on Midas had evolved to cope with massive quantities of gold, to the extent, in fact, that it now couldn’t live without it. And the gold cycle on Midas had stopped. Life had been dying out here long before we had even arrived. Now the gold was locked up deep within the planetary mantle, too deep for us to reach without a mohole. But one per cent of it was still walking around on the surface; and that one per cent was measured in megatonnes.

  And if life had already been dying out, why not help it along a little? Where was the harm in that? Squeeze a million years of decline into a thousand! They were going to die anyway! Where was the harm?

  It was an accepted fact, of course, that the good human settlers of Midas were not without consciences. For this reason, the men and women who, de facto, owned the fields had posted armed guards with sullen unforgiving eyes around the lines, in case one of the aforementioned conscientious settlers should attempt to sabotage operations. So far no-one had. If anything, the owners were guarding the fields against their own consciences.

  I kept my gaze straight ahead, as I always did driving through the lower fields. Li’l Truck Bomb was still riding with us, standing on the centreline of the tractor on the transaxle housing, his eyestalks agog at the wonders of civilization. The stately-carved galena dwellings the aboriginal Midasites had recently vacated were approaching. I could see one of the the more advanced life forms that had replaced them, trousers round its ankles, squatting in its new front doorway taking a shit and smoking. It grinned and waved at us as we passed by. A gold necklace heavy enough to bludgeon a man to death with hung from it. Men carried their wealth on them in Robinsonade. It was less easy to steal.

  “Where are we going to stay?” said Brad. “We don’t have money for the Wendy House or Soutpiel’s Kraal.” Robinsonade had only occupied the very centre of the Midasite city on our journey out. Now it seemed to be expanding out into the suburbs. It was evidently taking time to process the entire population.

  “We’re not going to stay anywhere,” I said. “We’re heading straight to Uncle Kwon’s Generie. We have some cloning to organize.”

  “Cloning,” said Brad.

  “The tzee’s blood,” I said, “burned.”

  “Which means what?” said Brad.

  “Which is why they don’t need a skeleton. Their innards are held up by their own blood pressure.” I reached over to the tzee carcass, pulled the wound I’d made in it wider with my thumb. “See how thick the insulation on the skin is? They’re living pressure vessels. They’re boiling inside.”

  Brad was puzzled. “Why would they want to be like that?”

  “They wouldn’t. It’s a side effect of their muscles transmitting that much power. The waste heat has to go somewhere.”

  “Skipper, tell me what this has to do with cloning or I’m going to shoot you myself.”

  “Everything on Midas uses gold compounds in its biochemistry. And one of the uses of gold is in superconductors. A lot of the sea life up near Midas’s poles uses superconducting magnets in place of conventional muscle fibre. Tracer squid, those really bright bullet-shaped things that skip out of the sea on wings and bioluminesce like crazy? The ones with the shoals we could see from orbit? They can only make their siphons expand and contract that quickly because their musculature superconducts. But this baby, this little ray of sunshine,” I slapped the wrinkled carcass, “superconducts at high temperature. Really high temperature.”

  She stiffened. She had understood. “The coolant. The helium problem.”

  “All we need,” I said, “is access to a biolab and decent cloning facilities. We don’t need coolant any more. We have high temperature superconductors right here on our doorstep. All our homegoing problems are over. All everyone’s homegoing problems are over. Of course”, I said, “we could insist everyone buy their superconductor compound from us. For gold, of course. At a reasonable price . . . ”

  She took a look back at the fields. “I don’t think so, Alasdair. I think we just equip our ship, get out of this place and leave them to their gold.”

  She’d persuaded me. “That’s right. That’s absolutely right. I was just testing you.”

  “Besides, what use will gold be to us? Unless you have a mountain of any metal nowadays, you’re nobody.”

  “But a high temperature superconductor, working above the boiling point of water,” I continued. “That’s worth what a mountain of gold would have been worth before spaceflight. Gold enough to make a leprechaun green with envy!”

  “Leprechauns,” burbled Yuri from the back seat with admirable lucidity for a man who could probably see them by now, “are already green.”

  The tractor shuddered to a halt outside Uncle Kwon’s, where I’d told it to. Far behind us, I watched a straight-backed, proud-statured Midasite walk into one of the field killers, holding a smaller Midasite in its tentacles. The door closed. The device hummed efficiently and did its work. The next Midasite in line stepped up.

  “Just before we leave,” I said, “I would like to put a home made grenade in one of those cyanide bowsers. POOF! Cyanide gas all over the settlement. You know it doesn’t kill Midasites? Maybe they’ll get the idea. The idea of how to fight back.”

  Brad shook her head. “The better type of Australian settler thought the same thing looking at the aborigines, Alasdair. Maybe if they figure out how to make guns somehow. Maybe if they work out they could throw flaming boomerangs into the powder magazine. It won’t happen. They’re a lame duck civilization. Their great crime is the same crime as the Africans’. To have been useful. They say the useless tree, the gnarled tree, the tree full of knots and twists, is always the oldest tree in the village. You know why that is?”

  I shrugged. “Because old trees get like that?”

  “Because no-one ever bothered to cut it down. Now stop philosophizing and help me get Yuri’s stretcher down off the wagon.”

  I stepped down from the rover. In the fields outside the settlement, the doors continued to open and close, open and close, open and close.

  THE QUALIA ENGINE

  DAMIEN BRODERICK

  1

  My sixteenth birthday was early spring, in effect, instead of late winter, that winter-spring when the bees continued to die and die.

  For a long time noknew why that was happening. I suppose specialists in the honey business were on it sooner than most, watching their apiaries emptying and shutting down, the poor bees stumbling about on the ground, forgetting how to get up in the air, dragging themselves round in confusion and then drying up dead. Soon enough the agribiz guys also grasped that their free pollinators were dropping like, well, flies.

  I know what it feels like to be one of those poor flightless bees.

  The stranded bees were one of the mysteries of science, of which I understood there were many, and even I couldn’t expect to ace all of them. You do have to try, though. I stood waiting for the bus at 8:15 in the morning, thinking about ants and other topics. This was the last day of my life that I’d be obliged by law to wait for this damned daily humiliation, but that didn’t mean I was off the hook.

  In our neighborhood, nine-tenths of those parents competent or fortunate enough to have kids in high school senior year insisted on the bus, even for those old enough to drive. Gas conservation was the cause of the month. Hey, fair enough, although it was obvious, if you thought about it, that peak oil was no more than a blip in the future energy curve, soon to be forgotten. Long before we ran out, hard-edged R&D would find a replacement, and simultaneously mend the greenhouse crisis. Some of my friends were working on it in their spare moments, of which they, like I, had plenty, time-sharing the appalling waste lands of the classroom.