Every room was cluttered, full of artifacts, memorabilia perhaps, or the objects of Nilis’s study. Some of this stuff was Virtual, complex three-dimensional sketches left half-finished, hovering in the air. But there were much older technologies, too. In one room Pirius even found a row of books — though he would learn that word only later — blocks of paper you held in your hand.
One room held a kind of display: certificates and plaques covered the walls, and in open cases medals and little statues shone. There was even a Virtual display, a double-helix representation that whirled and sparkled. Many of these items bore small plates marked with lettering. Pirius’s reading was poor — in his line of work, reading was just a backup data-access system — but he recognized Nilis’s name repeated over and over. It wasn’t hard to see that these artifacts were prizes, awards, certificates: tokens of achievement, of congratulation. Once again, this was horribly un-Doctrinal. You were supposed to do your duty for its own sake, not for recognition, not for pride. But the little tokens did not shout for attention; they were gathered here with a quiet, untidy pride, the marks of a life of achievement.
Indeed, the whole place was like a projection of Nilis’s personality: rich, cluttered, fusty, baffling.
At last Pirius came to a room where, between two vast windows, the wall was broken by an open door.
Pirius stood on the thick carpet, frozen, ingrained panic rising. But this was Earth, the only world in the Galaxy where you could walk out of a dome without so much as a skinsuit and expect to live. He remembered the little girl on the island, who had shown no fear.
In the open space beyond the door, Pirius glimpsed Nilis. Barefoot, his Commissary’s robe hitched up around his knees, he walked cheerfully through the bright light. He was carrying something green and complex, cradling it in his hands. Whistling, he passed on out of sight.
Pirius took a deep breath. After all, he must already be breathing the unprocessed air of Earth. It seemed fresh, a little cool, and there were strange scents: a sharp tang, like nothing he had smelled before, yet somehow familiar even so. A green scent: the thought came to him unbidden. He didn’t allow himself to hesitate further. He walked across the room, to the door, out onto the platform beyond.
The light blasted his face, hot, intense, coming from a sun so brilliant he couldn’t even bear to look toward it. But he made out something of the sky. It was blue, he saw, stunned. There were objects floating in that blue sky, fat, fluffy, irregular, shaded gray beneath. Surely the size of starships, they must be clouds, masses of water vapor.
Nilis was standing beside him. His hands, empty now, were grimy, black dirt trapped under his fingernails. He smiled. “You’re doing well, Ensign,” he said.
“Yes, sir.” Pirius glanced about. He was on a terrace, a broad rectangle of concrete. Much of the terrace was given over to a series of troughs, each of which contained heavy black earth. Things were growing in there: plants, Pirius supposed, with leaves of green, blood red, black. Small hand tools were scattered about. Though maintenance bots hovered hopefully, Nilis, barefoot, sweating, black-nailed, had evidently been tending this little garden himself.
Beyond the lip of the terrace the land fell away to the river, which swept by, its surface glistening like the hide of some immense animal. Pirius felt dwarfed, naked.
“So,” Nilis said. “What do you think?”
“The sky,” Pirius said.
“Yes?”
“It’s blue. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Nilis pondered that. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” He wiped his brow and lifted his face; the light of the sun seemed to smooth out the wrinkles etched in his brow. “You could know everything about the physics of light, Pirius, but you would never guess a sky might be blue. Earth, drained as she is, continues to remind us of our limits, our humility.”
“Drained?”
“Look again, Ensign. What else can you see, beyond the lid of sky?”
Pirius shielded his eyes from the sun. Everywhere he looked, sparks slid by. “Ships,” he said.
Nilis pointed to a drifting tetrahedral form, faintly visible, white against blue. “See that? It’s a Snowflake. Its builders, whom the Assimilators called ’Snowmen,’ lived far out in the halo of the Galaxy. A billion years ago they built their giant artifacts to record the slow cooling of the universe. We destroyed the Snowmen and confiscated their technology. Now Snowflakes orbit Earth in a great shell as deep as the Moon’s orbit: they are watch stations, I suppose, waiting for any threatening move from the Xeelee — and those huge eyes are turned on Earth, too, seeking out signs of insurgence from dissident human factions. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Ensign; in any age there are always plenty of rebels.
“Now — see those streams of ships? At night it’s easier to see their formations as they enter and leave orbit. You know, a surprising amount of the matйriel for this war comes from Earth itself. At the equator there are mines that tap the liquid iron of the planet’s core, for mass and energy. The home planet’s very lifeblood is poured into the throat of the war! Already, so it is said, the structure of the core has been so distorted by such mining that the planet’s natural magnetic field has been affected. But don’t worry. The Coalition lifts great stations into low orbit to protect us from any magnetic collapse…”
Pirius had learned that Nilis wanted him to speak openly. So he said boldly, “Commissary, I’m still not sure what you do all day.”
Nilis laughed. “Nor are my superiors.”
“But your achievements must be significant.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they earned you trophies. And this.”
“The apartment? Well, perhaps, though those jealous idiots on the Conurbation council always keep the best views for themselves!” He tapped his teeth. “You don’t know much about me, do you, Pirius? No reason you should. I suppose my enduring claim to fame is that I am the man who doubled the output of Earth’s farmland — and, of course, of every food production facility in the Galaxy.” He patted his generous belly. “It was long before you were born, of course. But every time you enjoy a hearty meal you should think of me, and offer up thanks.”
“How?…”
Ecology had long been deleted from the Earth. Outside of a few domed parks, the land was given over to nanotechnological machines, which, powered by sunlight, toiled to turn the raw materials of the air and the soil into the bland paste, nano-food, that was the staple diet of the whole of mankind.
“All I did was double the efficiency of those laboring little critters.” Nilis sighed. “The technology was simple enough. But still, it was a marvelous day for me when the speaker of the Coalition’s Grand Conclave herself brought a handful of nano-dust to a scraped-clean bit of ground — not far north of here, in fact — and released my food bots into the wild.”
Pirius didn’t know how to phrase his questions; he had never met a scientist before. “How did you figure out what to do?”
“By reading history, my boy. Who invented the nanobots that feed us, do you suppose?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come, come. What race?”
“I — human, of course.”
“Not so.” Nilis shook his head. “The Commission doesn’t lie — that would be very anti-Doctrinal. But it is happy to allow certain inconvenient truths to fade into forgetfulness. Pirius, it was the Qax, our occupiers, who first seeded Earth with nanobots. They did it to make us reliant on them, and later as a deliberate act of the Extirpation: by destroying our ecology they sought to cut our links to our past. And then, when the Qax fell and the Coalition took over, there were simply too many mouths to feed, too much ancient knowledge lost, to resist using the bots to feed the liberated swarms. Nobody knows that Qax machines are feeding them! But I knew, because I was curious, and I dug into various old libraries and found out. Then I checked to see if the Expansion had yet reached the Qax home World. Of course it had, long ago. So I applied for a study grant from my Office. I learned that the Assimilation officers had gathered a great deal of data on Qax nanomachinery, though their studies had been allowed to gather dust for centuries. With that, it was straightforward for me to revisit the basis of the food nanobots, and find ways to improve their operation. Straightforward — the work of ten years, but that is a mere detail.”