The Life-Blood of the Land

Illustration by George H. Krauter

Earth had been a greenhouse, wrapped in dirty air that made dawn long and rosy. Not so this planet. Here, in the early morning, the home dome’s skylight let Mark see a square piece of pale, cloudless, bluish-green sky.

The new day highlighted the wrinkles on Evrett Reynolds’s face and hands. Ev cleared his throat. “Mark, you and your people are doing a good greening job here. But about this wild water chase of yours. Isn’t it time to give up?”

“No. It’s there, just deeper than we thought.” Reckless, Mark added, “I dreamed about it last night.”

A pained expression crossed Ev’s aged features. “You always were a dreamer.”

“So were you!”

“Not anymore,” Ev said. “I’ve got the whole godforsaken ecosphere to think about.”

When they left Earth, they had been the same age. Not anymore. Ev had been revived forty years ago, while Mark remained in the cold zone of the Starship, undreaming, unknowing and, for most practical purposes, dead. Ev had thrown himself into the work of the new world and climbed as far up as the ladder went. Ev became the World Director of Ecogenesis. And old. And unfamiliar.

Mark fumbled for a reasonably clean mug, which he filled with water. He put the mug into the microwave oven, antique but sturdy technology that worked well for its intended purpose.

“Rainwater runs off too fast,” said Mark, facing the oven instead of the old man who had once been his best friend. “The soil needs to be conditioned so it can hold water. Drygrass and associated microorganisms accomplish that. Lusher vegetation, more organisms, would do it faster. If we can find groundwater, bring it up and fix it in biomass—”

“But you haven’t found any.”

Mark opened the oven. Hot water vapor emerged, carrying a chemical stench. Behind him, Ev demanded, “What the hell was cooked in there last?”

“Drilling mud. They’re trying to adjust the additives for downhole conditions such as heat.”

“Is the mud made with water from your cisterns? Convince me your stinking mud isn’t a waste of water.”

Mark placed the mug beside the jar of instant coffee on the table in front of Ev. “The geologist thinks water migrated deep into the rocks in ages past and got trapped there.”

Stirring the coffee, Ev’s spoon rattled in the mug. “She probably just wants to get her hands on a long core sample.” He was a tired and decisive old man. It still unsettled Mark that Ev’s hair, the little left of it, had turned yellowish white, the remains of what had once been a blond mane.

Mark turned away from Ev to take a fly out of the mesh box in the refrigerator. He lifted the lid of the terrarium on the kitchen counter and dropped in the chilled fly. The golden garden spider in the terrarium waved its forelegs attentively, hungrily. Mark selected another fly. Today, two flies, not just one, for the glorious and hungry spider.

Ev asked, “Pet?”

“Our mascot. What we’re trying to do is weave the web of life across the land, strand by strand.”

“How deep is your hole in the ground now?”

“A couple of miles. The water will be under pressure.” Vividly dreaming in the dim earliest hours of this morning, that was what Mark had seen. “The water will spurt up out of the ground like a geyser and fall on the ground like rain out of a clear sky.”

“I can’t sell dreams to the Creation Council,” Ev retorted. “There are more promising places to drill for water. And a limited supply of drilling equipment.”

Thawed out, the flies buzzed in the terrarium, about to blunder into the orb-woven design of their destiny. The sound irritated Mark’s already strung-out nerves. He said tersely, “We’ve hit hard rock. Impermeable enough to trap water underneath. Hard stuff.”

“Let me guess. You need another drill bit.”

“A bit with diamond teeth,” Mark said softly.

“What! Damn your monomania! Mister, I don’t play favorites. You have gotten what you asked for, so far, because you’ve been doing good work out here in the blasted interior. Don’t blow it on a pipe dream!”

A sleep-rumpled resident of the dome started to enter the kitchen. Finding the Director of Ecogenesis sitting in there and vehement, he backed out. Mark was sure that interested ears would now be stretched toward the kitchen from the safety of the hallway. Mark felt himself flushing, hot and probably brick red. “Listen. Your job is the toughest in this world. You have to cover land with grass and forests. But where water should be easy to find, it isn’t. Or you get too much water too fast, like that hurricane that went inland and ruined the manioc plantations. There’ve been stupid decisions—mostly not yours—on top of good bets going bad, and the greening isn’t going so good.”

“Says who?” Ev asked curtly.

“I’m an ecologist. I can read the handwriting on the wall.” Mark wasn’t going to spell it out aloud—not with one of his people listening in the hallway. But he knew the truth.

The ship had been incredibly lucky, finding a planet where life already existed. Evolution here had gone as far as marine microorganisms. The shallow seas were full of plankton that had changed a primeval atmosphere to breathable air comprised of oxygen and nitrogen. All that lacked was to green the land. But that alone was harder than the children of gentle Earth had anticipated. The human and biological resources that the ship had brought from Earth were finite and dwindling. The greening of this world was Ming.

“Try a bad bet for once.” Mark listened to himself with a strange sense of detachment, as if his words were more real than his body. “Give me a diamond drill bit.”

Ev’s face contorted. It darkly fascinated Mark, how anger looked so ugly on that aged face.

Slowly, incredibly, the anger resolved into a grin, weirdly familiar, the grin of the bright-eyed kid on the other side of the stars. Ev said, “Hell, Mark, maybe you’re right. Maybe I have been hedging my bets too much for too long. Let me think about this. I might just give you what you want.”

In the achingly cold gray hour before sunrise, Mark watched an acre of grass bum. Fire spread like a puddle, exploring combustion possibilities in the sparse dry vegetation. Mark held a shovel poised to beat back the edge of the fire if it started moving too fast. Ten others, greeners who worked in his outfit, formed an arc of vigilance downwind from the fire. The heat felt good at this chilly time of day.

Beside Mark, the biologist Chang beat out a forked tongue of flame. “Watch it, boss,” Chang said. “If it gets out of control, and we have to call down the fire squad from the Ship, there’ll be the devil to pay.”

Mark evaluated the extent of the burn. Summer’s drought would soon end in fierce storms with lightning falling thicker than rain. The lightning never found the tinder to start a real conflagration, only small fires that puddled ahead of the prevailing wind. The firebreak was now big enough to thwart one like that. If worse came to worse, there were concrete cisterns buried in the ground, water saved from the last time the creek ran wet with storm runoff, with which to damp a wildfire. “Let’s put it out.” With his shovel, he threw dirt onto the flames. The greeners followed suit. Having smothered the fire, they sifted the ground for embers, mashing those they found to harmless bits of ash.

Somebody shouted, “Zeppelin!”

Like a pink pearl in the dawn-lit sky, the supply zeppelin approached from the distance, floating down toward its pier.

A sweating and sooty Chang materialized at Mark’s shoulder. “When he visited us last week, were you able to persuade the director to give you soil polymer?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Chang frowned. “We need soil polymer in the Canyon.”

“No more than other outfits need it for their special places. There’s never enough to go around.”

Chang held his tongue, as usual. Mark thought, What we really need is an artesian well. Throwing his shovel on the pile with the others, to be cleaned and returned to the tool shed, Mark turned away from Chang and walked toward the zeppelin.

On the zeppelin pier lay a heap of goods fresh out of the cargo bay. Mark’s assistant and the zep pilot haggled over minor additions and subtractions to the supply list. But they had already dispatched a high-priority package to the drilling derrick.

Mark wanted to run, but made himself walk so as to appear more calm than he felt. His destination, the derrick, pointed toward a morning sky of ceramic blue. Grass covered the hills beyond it. But the green was fragile— a mere sketch on the pale ground, too easy to erase. He needed water to make the green deeper and more durable.

On the derrick’s platform, the drillers in gray coveralls and Tinaja, the tall blonde geologist, clustered around the new bit, which they had lifted from its bed of packing material. It looked like a sea serpent’s head. Tight plates of metal, edged with dark industrial diamonds, ringed a hollow maw.

Tinaja handed Mark a small piece of paper. Mark unfolded it to read a few words in Ev’s graceful but age-shivered handwriting. This is it. No more. Mark crumpled and stuffed the paper into his pocket. “Let’s use it today.”

The foreman attached the diamond bit to the drill pipe. Everyone waited, tense, until he announced that the connection was right and tight. Then the crew lowered the drill stem into the ground. Lengths of pipe, lifted from the stack and locked on one after another, followed the bit into the deep hole.

“It’ll take a while to get it down there, won’t it?” Mark asked Tinaja. “I need to do something in Creek Canyon.”

“Go right ahead. This’ll take most of the morning.”

Mark headed for the gulch between the hills. Out of sight from the rig, he stopped to pant. This world’s atmosphere was high-mountain thin here in the interior.

The gulch opened up onto a canyon, the floor of which was a wet-weather creek, a ribbon of rounded stones. Mesquite fringed the creek. The stringy little trees had long roots that reached deep in the ground, finding moisture from the last rains months ago. Tiny, tough green leaves fringed the mesquite’s twigs like tatted lace.

Mark crossed the stony creek bed. On a patch of soft sand under the canyon wall, the fanned footprint of sporadic rain runoff, he discovered the zigzag trail of a small snake—a wondrous trace of animal life in this once-desolate place. Creek Canyon was Chang’s territory. Chang did good work.

Mark had told Tinaja he needed to do something in the canyon. True in a way. He needed to think.

A planet wears life like a green skin, he thought, the patterned skin of a snake. Like a snake, the Earth had changed its skin many times in geological history at one catastrophe or another, most recently the environmental disaster constituted by Homo sapiens. It had never mattered much to planet Earth if, while its continents collided and split wide open above the simmering cauldron of its mantle, its green skin largely died and sloughed off every so often. The death of a snake’s, or a planet’s, skin only matters to the skin itself.

Humans had been part of a thin, fragile and impermanent skein of life on Earth. Even more so here. If the greening of the continents failed, this planet would endure, uncaring. But the human colony would be forced to live beside the shallow seas, in domes like surf bubbles that shimmer for a little while, then pop and vanish.

No. This raw land had to become a place for mesquite and snakes and people to exist under the wide blue sky.

With a groan, Mark stretched out on the sand in the shade of the canyon wall. Overhead, the zeppelin floated away with a mechanical purr that barely distorted the silence. In the canyon, a grasshopper trilled. One of the grasshoppers of the admirable Chang.

Mark woke up in full hot sunlight. In the distance, he heard the derrick with its signature clangs and bangs. He broke into a sweat, remembering Ev’s note. No more.

Mark returned to the derrick at high noon. Unbuffered sunlight blazed down. Near the derrick, the field of boxy solar energy collectors threw off dazzling reflections. Heat shimmered over the roof of the powerhouse from which electrical cables snaked away to the dome, the shop and the derrick.

They had stopped drilling. The crew languished on the platform, sitting or lying down under tarps hung up for shade. Only Tinaja seemed alert and unwilted as she picked rock chips out of the sieve.

Mark ran up to join her on the platform. “Can the diamond bit cut the caprock?” he asked.

“Does good,” she answered. “Want some lunch?”

Knees weak with relief, he sat down. “Yes, thanks.”

Tinaja handed him a metal plate. To his surprise, beside the pile of cooked prickly pear cactus on the plate lay several little chips of rock, clean and moist. Drill chips right out of the sieve. “Tinna, why are you serving me rocks?”

“That shiny bit broke through the caprock an hour ago,” said Tinaja. “Into soft old limestone.” She pointed at the rocks in his plate and grinned at him. “There was a sea down there once, and may just be some of it left! Will salty water be OK?”

Salt water would be wonderful, Mark muttered in his sleep that night. Salt water would be wonderful. Residual adrenaline smoldered in his nerves like embers in ash. Finally Mark snapped wide awake in a cold sweat. Pulling on his clothes, he left the dome.

The wind outside blew as cold now as it had been searing hot at midday. Overhead the sky was clear, strewn with scintillating stars.

Near zenith was a thin, ragged ring of pale nebulosity. The astronomers said the ring marked the death of a giant blue star so near that it would have washed out all of the other stars in the dark night sky. But it evolved rapidly and exploded, supernova, tens of thousands of years ago, a cosmic catastrophe in geological time, leaving a nebula around a neutron star.

Yellow light shone in the window of Tinaja’s lab in the shop shack. Mark had meant to start one of the nocturnal walks for which he was notorious; he changed his mind. At the door of Tinaja’s lab, he knocked before letting himself in.

Tinaja was engrossed in her work. She had a computer running, its screen split four ways, text disks and printouts strewn about the table, and cylinders of stone in front of her, plus rocks and sands in at least ten piles, and a microscope. Wisps of honey-colored hair had escaped from her ponytail.

“I took a core sample,” Tinaja announced. “This is the supernova layer. There are isotopes aplenty. This planet was cosmically irradiated, all right, but good.”

“That’s great! That you found geological evidence of that, I mean.”

Tinaja made a wry face. “Look in the microscope.”

The magnified shapes, though worn and fuzzy, were insistently reminiscent of regular geometry. Mark saw spirals, cones, fluted spars and tiny boxes. “Microscopic marine shells.”

Tinaja said flatly, “Right. This is, after all, limestone. But the variety of the shells is phenomenal, compared to the species that exist in the seas now.”

“From the Near Supernova layer?” Mark’s skin crawled. “There must have been a die-off. One that the world hasn’t recovered from.”

“Look.” She held out a curved, rough cone about an inch long. “Found this in the core sample. It was sheer accident that the whole thing was inside the core.”

“Worm shell?” Mark guessed.

Her face was intense. “I don’t think so. Granted, this is an alien world. Who knows how evolution goes here? But Mark, I think it’s a tooth. Look—see how it’s worn flat, here? Predators’ teeth get wear patterns like that. Worm shells don’t.”

Sheer shock made Mark feel cold and numb.

“Mark, what would have happened if this world had an extensive ecosystem?” she whispered. “What if it had been like Earth?”

Appalled, Mark forced himself to marshal his education in life sciences and answer her. “The atmosphere must have been partly stripped away and the oceans boiled off to shallow seas. Enough marine microorganisms survived to recolonize the seas. But on land, judging from what we found when we got here, there was nothing left. The continents must have been sterilized. It was as though the evolutionary clock were set back.” He swallowed with difficulty, his throat constricted. “Almost to zero.”

Three hours before dawn, the foreman flipped the main breaker at the powerhouse. The drilling rig’s lights came on. The crew checked their equipment. There was little of the usual banter and horseplay this morning. Two miles down, hole heating up and pipe supply dwindling, today looked like the last day, one way or another.

The foreman replaced the corer, a hollow sharp-rimmed cylinder, with the diamond drill bit. Then the crew lowered the bit into the ground. Joints of pipe followed it, each attached swiftly but securely. Time passed, metered by the clank of pipe being joined to pipe.

Mark felt nearly sick. He’d had too many broken nights and too much work, and now there was a fossil tooth—evidence of sudden death on a planetary scale. Visible through the thickness of the atmosphere near the western horizon, the shredded supernova ring shimmered like the winking of an eye, a vast lidless eye with a tiny, implacable pupil.

The plunging pipe changed its tune, decelerating. Tinaja called out in a clear voice, “We’re here.”

A small crowd of greeners had come out of the home dome to watch. Somebody slapped Mark on the back and blurted something about luck. Whether they believed in Mark’s dream or not—opinion was distinctly divided—the greeners wanted water.

Mark joined Tinaja on the platform. The drill bit met solid limestone far below their boots. The foreman sent the helper, a boy named Dusty, up the derrick to mind the moving parts at the top.

Two miles long in a hot, narrow hole, the pipe behaved like a wet noodle. It took several turns at the top to get any rotation at the bottom to cut the rock. The mud pumps ran at full throttle, forcing cool mud down the throat of the pipe. The mud came back up the hole outside of the pipe, carrying rock chips and heat with it. A fat hose took the mud back to the tank, dumped it in through the mechanized sieve called a shaker. The shaker rattled mindlessly. Thick and grayish-brown, the mud cooled in the open tank. An automatic stirrer made swishing sounds.

Tinaja paced between the rotary table and the shaker. She scraped chips of rock out of the shaker and examined them. She patted the pipe. “Down some more, baby, down some more.”

Machinery rattled and clanged, and the pipe turned tirelessly. Mark saw the knife edge of dawn, a thin rim of light on the eastern horizon. Directly overhead, a bright point of light traversed the dark sky. It was the Starship in polar orbit.

“Pay attention, skygazer!” Tinaja said sharply. “The mud’s changed!” She crouched beside her shaker, watching the mud stream through it, heedless of the spatters. “Frothy.”

“Watery?” Mark asked instantly.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Mark stared at the twisting snake of pipe. A scar on the metal revolved with it and slowly moved down.

Some mud bubbled up over the rotary table. The foreman watched it inundate his boots. Over his head the returning mud hose suddenly twitched. “Is the planet fartin’ at us?” asked the foreman.

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Tinaja replied in an uneven voice.

With a loud burp, mud spurted high out of the hole in the middle of the table. On his perch up in the derrick, Dusty ducked. “It’s throwing mud at us!” he sang out.

“You’re not safe up there,” the foreman decided. “Come down.”

A minute later, a brief gout of mud came out of the hole. Mud, with rocks in it, rained down on the platform. “I’ve drilled up a lot of water, but never seen the likes of this.” The foreman sounded uneasy.

Dusty scurried over to peer into the mud tank. “It’s making bubbles and the mud’s higher in the tank than it was!” he reported breathlessly from the edge of the platform by the tank.

“Mixed with water?” Mark demanded.

“No sir, it’s just really foamy.”

Another gout of mud, a hard one, shook the pipe.

In a sharp voice, Tinaja told the foreman, “We can’t have any sparks. If this is some kind of natural gas, then it could be flammable.”

The foreman nodded, then grimly started checking around for moving parts that might strike sparks, or loose electrical connections that could arc.

To Mark, Tinaja muttered, “Natural gas is not supposed to exist on this world—but neither are teeth. Maybe there is a kind of natural gas down there. It might or might not be associated with water.” She cursed briefly and vehemently. “I never studied this in ship school!”

The scar on the pipe turned around and around without going down. Mark approached it, leaning as close to the pipe as he could, heedless of the mud piling out onto on the table. He asked, “Why have you halted the downward motion of pipe?”

“I haven’t,” said the foreman.

“But it’s—”

The pipe slithered upward in front of Mark’s face.

Swearing in surprise, the foreman tried to clamp the pipe. The upward thrust of it tore the clamp apart. Accelerating, the pipe broke something high on the derrick. A piece of metal fell clanging down. Tinaja yelled, “Can’t you stop it?”

The foreman bellowed back, “No! There’s godawful pressure under it!”

The platform shook spasmodically. Dusty lost his balance. Letting out a terrified yell, he slipped into the mud tank with a thick splash.

Closer to the tank than the others, Mark shouted, “I’ll get him!” Holding a jittering railing, Mark reached for Dusty. The boy’s muddy hand slipped out of Mark’s.

The pipe thrusting itself up out of the ground muttered and moaned, noises that vibrated through the platform. Mark heard a shriek from strained metal at the top of the derrick. Tinaja screamed, “It’s breaking the rig apart! Run!”

With shouts and curses the drillers and Tinaja leaped off the platform and scattered. On his third frantic try Mark got a handful of Dusty’s shirt. Dusty scrabbled to get some leverage for himself on the slippery side of the tank.

The hole roared. The platform rocked. Mark almost fell into the mud tank himself. Then he hauled Dusty out while mud and rocks and metal parts rained on them. Dusty shrilled, “It’s shooting into the sky!!”

Dusty meant the pipe. Drill pipe arched high in the air over the derrick. It was being thrown up out of the hole—lofted by gas escaping from underground. The platform quaked. Glowing light bulbs swung wildly on their cords. Any moment now, one of them would smash into shards and sparks.

Mark threw Dusty off the platform and the boy hit the ground running like a jackrabbit. Mark jumped down and angled away from the platform as he raced toward the powerhouse. In the comer of his eye he saw hundreds of feet of noodle-soft pipe still shooting up into the air.

Gravity overtook the airborne pipe. A loop of it hit the ground in front of Mark. Thundering, it broke up, thirty-foot lengths bouncing wildly. Mark cowered. But he had to reach the powerhouse. He jumped over a steaming length of pipe to get there.

Tinaja reached the powerhouse just ahead of him. He nearly collided with her. She grabbed the derrick main breaker and threw her whole weight to turn it off. Then she looked past Mark and gasped. “Too late!”

Mark turned, his stomach knotted with dread.

Fire flared above the derrick. Heat from it struck Mark’s face.

The hole under the derrick threw up another gout of mud. Choked, the fire shrank dramatically.

“Now what?” Mark asked hoarsely. Tinaja just shook her head.

They stood closer to the derrick than anybody else. Spectators and drilling crew had fled to the nearest hill with the last of the pipe crashing to the ground at their heels. His eyes transfixed on the damaged derrick, Marie moved in front of Tinaja, for the little protection that he might give her.

The derrick coughed. Then it threw up thick globs of fire. Mark groaned in dismay. His dream had come true, the right image in terrible wrong colors, like a demonic photographic negative. What should have been pale and cool burned instead: a geyser, not of water but of fire. Black smoke coiled into the sky. The derrick howled and shook. Ropes of orange fire coiled up into the air and fell back to the ground, splashing flame. Tinaja let out a shrill cry of dismay. “It’s oil! Oil burning!”

Around the derrick, clumps of dry grass caught fire. The wind blew up a swirl of thin brown smoke, and the smoke pointed toward Chang’s Creek Canyon.

Mark shook off the mesmerization of the flames. He took Tinaja by the shoulders. “Run to the dome, raise the alarm and radio the Ship for help!” Without a word she sprinted away.

Mark charged uphill, toward the greeners and drillers, waving his hands. “Wildfire! Equipment to the Creek!” He panted. “Sand plan!”

Shovels and buckets were cached near the dry creek. Greeners and drillers broke out the tools and frantically shoveled sand over the cacti to protect the plants’ roots. Disturbed grasshoppers jumped and flew short distances.

The firebreak executed so carefully, just yesterday, to guard the canyon, utterly failed. Mark knew that it would. Spurred by the hellfire of burning oil spewing out of the ground, the grass fire rapidly sidled around the firebreak in the gulch.

The front edge of the fire penetrated Chang’s Creek Canyon. Burning bits of vegetation flew through the air.

“Fall back—across the creek bed!” Mark waved everyone across the stony bed of the dry creek that might halt the fire and help them save this, the shadier and greener side of the canyon.

Mark flung the lid off the nearest flood cistern. He plunged a bucket into the warm water. Drillers and greeners threw water on the vegetated ground and splashed the mesquite trees in desperate haste.

An isolated fire flared up in the bushes under the canyon wall. Side by side, Mark and Chang beat it out. Chang had no words of recrimination to spare for Mark. Not yet.

A sudden and startling mechanical noise reverberated in the canyon. Mark looked up, stricken by hope.

An airplane thundered overhead. It banked. On the second pass, the plane dumped a dense streamer of orange powder onto the fire in the gulch.

Coughing, Mark recognized the harsh chemical. Deus ex machina, the firefighting squadron had descended from the Starship in a shuttleplane loaded with fire-suppressing chemical. The plane circled back to release another load. Then it banked toward the column of black smoke in the sky beyond the gulch.

Mark told Chang, “Check around for hot spots and put ’em out.”

Chang nodded, expressionless.

Mark recrossed the stony creek bed. The mesquite trees on the bank, leaves singed off, bore orange powder like a dusting of weird snow.

The chemical had taken the fight out of grass fire. Only a few patches sullenly smoldered. Mark emerged from the bitter smoke in the gulch just in time to see the fire squad’s plane making a brave pass at the fiery fountain spewing out of the drilling rig. The plane tossed an orange plume of chemical at the rig.

The oil inferno barely flickered.

Mark felt detached, like a spectator at a grand and tragic show. He watched the derrick collapse, its metal girders melted, inside the flames.

Something new flew down out of the sky. Not another lumbering shuttleplane: this was a screaming splinter of a jet. The jet charged toward the towering fire. Then the jet pulled up, releasing a dull gray object to tumble down and explode in the midst of the fire.

The bomb’s shock wave flattened and extinguished the flames.

Mark cheered wildly.

Wreckage and dirt fell over the drill hole. But black oil still came out of the ground. Not ablaze anymore, the oil spurted like blood from a cut artery.

The jet arched and returned. This time it hurtled low over the singed landscape. It dropped a second bomb directly onto the hole in the ground. The cratering blast shattered the rock, stopped up the hole. Only a little more oil oozed out. The jet screamed away.

Mark’s ears rang from the two explosions. He did not know how long he had been standing here watching the attack on the fire. It seemed to be nearly noon now.

Mark gave the black, oily bomb crater a wide berth. Yet he found a blob of oil in his way, flung far by the bombing, sticky and smelly, the ancient dark blood of the planet.

The wildfire had run through the field of solar energy collectors next to the derrick. The structures drooped over the charred grass. In the distance, the green grass sketch on the hills had turned ugly, charcoal splotched with lurid orange.

The home dome seemed deserted. It was not flammable, so no one had stayed there to worry about it. Mark fed the spider her overdue breakfast. She was important. A symbol of the web of life. Of which the most vital strand, for the life of continents, was grass. Mark sat down at the kitchen table. Hard hot daylight beat down on him through the skylight, since no one had closed the shutters. Shaking, he folded his arms, buried his head in them, and cried.

Someone shook him by the shoulders. “Mark! Are you hurt?”

Mark flexed his hands. Under a crust of sooty dirt, his raw skin oozed blood and blister water. He shuddered. He looked up at Evrett Reynolds. “How come you’re here?”

“I was watching from orbit,” said Ev. Behind him stood Tinaja, disheveled, her face pale under streaks of soot.

Ev went on, “I watched the terminator sweep toward your part of the planet. Then I saw the flare. It was incredible—there shouldn’t have been that much fuel on the entire continent. My people analyzed the flare immediately. Then they did a data base search for how to fix an oil well blowout, which is what that kind of thing is called. I came down with the fire squadron.”

Tinaja pulled Mark over to the counter sink. She started cleaning his blistery burns with soap and water from the kitchen reservoir. Mark’s fingers and palms hurt fiercely. The pain seemed irrelevant. Through a scratchy, aching throat, he said, “I opened up the gates of hell. It burned up the grass.” Mark felt a quiver in his insides. Maybe he was going to be sick. Or sickeningly sad.

“Mark. Where does soil polymer come from?” Ev asked.

“Garbage. Our conversion rate is up to thirty-seven point six percent,” Mark said defensively. “It’s the best I could—”

“You’ve done fine recycling around here,” Ev soothed. “Polymer comes from garbage after you process it, more or less turning garbage into petroleum. We’ve been making all of our petrochemicals that way.”

Tinaja gasped. “Petrochems! I studied that in Ship school. We examined precious little samples—plastics, solvents, fertilizers.” She pulled a wrinkled tube of bum ointment out of her pocket. “Medicine.”

“Petroleum is the most useful stuff in creation,” said Ev. “We had no idea that it existed on this planet—that there’d ever been plant and animal life in such abundance as to turn into reserves of oil—except for one round of speculation years ago. Too farfetched to waste resources looking into, I thought.” Ev sighed deeply.

Tinaja smeared burn ointment on Mark’s hands. Mark leaned on the counter. He felt dizzied, as new ideas surged and glittered in his mind. Star-burned ecosystem. Petrochemicals. Soil polymer. Holding up his dripping hands, he blurted, “Now we can green the land!”

“What?” Tinaja asked. “How?”

“Let me demonstrate.” Ev produced a vial from his coat pocket and poured a small pile of substance on the counter. “Soil polymer.”

Ev sprinkled water onto the polymer. It absorbed the water like a sponge. He dripped more water onto the polymer, which kept sucking it up, swelling. The scant handful of plastic sand turned into a gelatinous mass.

Tinaja poked the swollen polymer. It quivered brightly.

Mark straightened. His back ached, but the weight of the world had just rolled off his shoulders.

Ev explained, “This material absorbs four hundred times its weight in water. Mixed in the soil, it does wonders for water retention. With enough of it, Mark’s outfit can turn this land green as grass. Not in my lifetime, but in yours.”

Tinaja let out a joyful cry and flung her arms around Mark. She exclaimed, “Surely the oil isn’t just here—there must be reserves all over the planet!”

Mark’s heart lurched at hearing another and even brighter hope than he’d expected, like the sun rising after the first flush of dawn. “Then we’ll use it to make the whole world green again.” He returned Tinaja’s embrace as Ev beamed at him over her shoulder. “Not in our lifetimes,” Mark added. “But someday.”

Editor’s Note: This story is a sequel to “A Pillar of Stars by Night,” which appeared in our January 1996 issue.