“People don’t die of brain fever,” Horis Antic murmured.
Gornon Vlimt looked up from his drink. “Oh, don’t they? Maybe not in the empire. But on Ktlina it’s been a major killer since the renaissance began, despite all our efforts to isolate the viroid at fault.”
“You think it’s produced by an infectious agent?” Maserd asked. “But by all accounts this syndrome was extant even in the dawn ages. We always assumed the cause was intrinsic. A price of having high intelligence.”
Vlimt barked a bitter laugh.
“Nonsense. It’s yet another tool for keeping most of the human race down. Ever notice how few of the gentry get it? But don’t worry, aristo. We’ll figure it out eventually, and defeat it, like all the other ploys and repressions invented by the ruling class.”
Hari did not like the direction things were going. So far, he had managed to steer their discussions and investigations away from robots, aided by the fact that artificial intelligence was another reflexively taboo subject. Now he must do the same thing with brain fever.
Thatisa topic I must sort out for myself, he thought. Somewhere in his subconscious, he felt an idea chum… transforming itself into mathematical terms…preparing to fill a waiting niche in the equations. That left his surface thoughts free for some practical diplomacy.
“Now that Jeni is gone, I’d like to hear what Horis came to tell us. Something about all the lovelydirt that our good farmers plant their seeds in, on millions of worlds. That richsoil came from somewhere, didn’t it, Horis? Most planets only had primitive sea life until just before human colonists came. So you’re implying that something was done to create all the beautifuldirt?”
Gornon Vlimt stood up so quickly that his chair toppled.
“You people are disgusting. When I think of the fine thoughts and great art we could discuss, and all you want to talk about is…” He could not bring himself to finish. More than a little tipsy, the eccentric from Ktlina stumbled off, leaving only Maserd, Hari, and Mors Planch to hear Antic’s theory. Even Planch seemed relieved to see Gornon depart.
“Yes!” The Grey Man answered Hari’s question enthusiastically. “Do you remember how I mentioned that over ninety percent of planets with seas and oxygen atmospheres only had primitive types of life on them? Some think it was because they had insufficient mutating radiation to ensure fast evolution. So their continents were mostly bare, except for mosses and ferns and stuff. Not enough complexity to develop the fantastic livingskin of soil that a world needs, in order to really thrive
“And yet, twenty-five million settled worldsdo have soils! Vast, rich blankets of pulverized stone, mixed with organic material to an average depth of about…” He shook his head. “That doesn’t matter. The point is that something must’ve happened tomake these soils. And quite recently!”
“How recently?” Mors Planch asked, his feet propped up on the edge of Biron Maserd’s fine oak table. If he was repulsed by the topic, the dark raider captain hid it well.
“It’s been hard to gather enough data,” Antic demurred. “And official resistance against this research is incredible. Mostly it’s been pursued as a side interest, passed on from one soil man to the next, for the last-”
Planch struck the table with his fist, rattling the glasses.
“How recently!”
Lord Maserd frowned at this kind of behavior in his home. But he nodded. “Please tell us, Horis. Your best estimate.”
The Grey Man took a deep breath.
“Roughly eighteen thousand years. A bit more in Sirius Sector. A bit less as you spread outward from there. The phenomenon swept across the galaxy like a prairie fire, reaching completion in a few dozen centuries, at most.”
“The planet that’s mentioned so often in the old archives,” Planch commented,“Earth, is in Sirius Sector. So this tilling phenomenon of yours matches the pace of human expansion from the original homeworld.”
“A little earlier,” Horis agreed. “Perhaps a few hundred years ahead of the colonizing wave. Among the few of us who thought about it, we wondered if some natural phenomenon might account for this massive effect occurring on millions of planets, virtually all at once. Maybe a galaxy-wide energy wave of unknown origin, perhaps emitted by the core black hole. We guessed that the colonizers were then drawn into the affected areas, by the sudden, accidental availability of all this newly fertile land. But now I see that we had cause and effect reversed!”
Maserd uttered a low oath.
“Now you think it was done on purpose, by those big machines out there.” He glanced toward one of the bulkheads separating them from the vacuum of space.“They did this… moving just in front of the human migration, sent ahead to the next unsuspecting virgin world, where they-”
The nobleman stopped, as if unable to speak the obvious conclusion. So Horis continued.
“Yes, they are the tillers. Those energy projectors they carry, that you all thought must be weapons? They were aimed at planets, all right, focusing energy gathered in huge solar collectors. But this was not for use in war. Rather, they had a much more benign aim of preparing the way for settlers, who were soon to follow.”
“Benign?” Maserd muttered into his drink. “Not if you were one of the unfortunatenatives, when such a monster appeared suddenly in your sky!”
Mors Planch chuckled.
“You’re pretty soft-hearted for funguses and ferns, aren’t you, nobleman?”
Maserd started to stand up. Hari raised a hand for peace, before the two could exchange blows.
“My lord Maserd comes from a planet near Rhodia, called Nephelos,” Hari explained. “Where complex, nonstandard animals preexisted, and survived the coming of Earthborn life. I believe right now he’s thinking there must have been many other anomaly worlds. Planets where the mutation rate was big enough to create higher life-forms, leaving the fossils Horis showed us earlier.”
“But those worlds weren’t as lucky as Nephelos,” Maserd growled. “Planets where all the native animals were blasted down tojust the right consistency for good dirt farming.”
Hari tried to divert the conversation a bit. “One question, Horis. Doesn’t good soil also need nitrates and organic material?”
“It does, indeed. Some was probably provided by maser-induced reactions in the atmosphere. It then arrived mixed in rain. I suspect subsurface carbon deposits were also tapped, and fed to special kinds of rock-loving plants and bacteria…but all of that would have been easy compared to crushing, tilling, and sifting stone to just the right texture and mineral content for vegetation to dig into.”
Mors Planch objected.
“I’m impressed with this fantastic notion, Antic. But the sheer scale of such an undertaking is just too staggering. Something so epic would be remembered. I don’t care what different causes people attribute our racial amnesia to. The descendants of these workers would sing of the accomplishment forever!”
“Perhaps they still do,” said Biron Maserd, who looked at Han. “Maybe this great deed is still remembered, all the way up to the present, by those who actually did it.”
Hari winced with a realization.
Maserd knows. He’s seen the tilling machines up close. Their lack of any habitats for organic crew. He linked this fact with the archives’ mention of robots. Having never had brain fever, he’s not averse to thinking about mechanical men.
You don’t need psychohistory to conclude that some group of non-organic beings set out from the vicinity of Earth and commenced an aggressive campaign to prepare worlds with just the right conditions for settlement by humans. When shiploads of people arrived at each preconditioned planet, they would find it already seeded with a basic Earthlike ecosystem…and possibly even fields of crops ready to harvest.