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Anthropy
"The principle task of civilization, its actual raison d'�tre, is to defend us against nature."
� Sigmund Freud
Chapter One
Kagome sat on the fence, staring lazily across a golden-green pool of lacegrass. The crop rose in a heady wave just in front of her, following the contour of the rise it clung to. Sunlight caught at the plants' delicate crystalline filaments, and when the wind blew a wave across the pool, a rhythmic dull clinking sound followed it as the strands knocked together.
Lacegrass was engineered to grow the spiderweb-thin semiconductor nets used in civilian computers. It was normally grown on asteroids, which overflowed with the elements essential to their production, unfortunately rare on most habitable planets. Gibson Planet, however, at some point in its history, had experienced a massive collision with some unthinkably large planetary body rich in all of those essential elements. On impact, a substantial portion of it had been thrust into the atmosphere, later raining down to the planet's crust, leaving one thin stratum of the lithosphere nearly as rich as the core of any asteroid. It was, of course buried far too deeply in the planet's crust to be easily accessible by ordinary means, but the violent press and grind of tectonic plates shoved sections of it to the topsoil with enough frequency that Gibson's surface now resembled, more than anything else, the mottled face of an oxidized coin. It was enough to make Gibson a planet on its way to becoming very wealthy as one of the few places where manned lacegrass farming was the norm. In asteroid farming, providing the resources needed to support a human workforce was an unnecessary expense when an automated system could do all the work without any need for atmosphere or sustenance. There was, however, an advantage to human farming. The special section of lacegrass DNA devoted to producing the nets had a mutation rate of roughly five percent. While most of the mutations were useless, causing the plants to bear clear globs of transparent mineral, or simply not produce anything at all, a few gave birth to strange new configurations of strands, able to route information in completely new ways. Automated systems tended to ignore these precious oddities, but the few human lacegrass farmers made it their business to scour their crop for every anomaly.
That was how Kagome had gotten there. She and her mother and grandfather and brother and Buyo the cat had come in the first wave of colonists, leaving old familiar rusty Mars far behind them to farm lacegrass on Gibson. After her father's death, it had been a silent agreement among them that a fresh start was needed. Living in the same house, going to the same places each day had kept the sores of his absence open and raw. The surroundings trapped memories like mosquitoes in netting, sparking a ceaseless chain of associations to follow them throughout the day. How on crossing this corner, he would always remark on the caf� that was always dark and had no customers but never went out of business, or how at dinner he would feed fat Buyo scraps under the table, or how sometimes when he couldn't sleep, he would check on his children in the middle of the night, though they were long past the age of needing it in their opinion. It had been impossible to think of anything else. Perhaps in time, his ghost would have faded and grown misty and occasional, but two out of the four remaining Higurashis were young yet and impatient, and none of them were likely to miss out on an opportunity. When a former colleague of his had brought them the news that a new planet was open for colonization, they had leapt at the chance.
So they had feverishly filled out application forms and read up on lacegrass farming and scrounged up the little information to be had on Gibson Planet, and finally, after nearly a month of anxious waiting, they had received the notification of acceptance from EGRESS � the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Growth, Relocation, Emigration, and Sourcing Supervision.
They were in.
Bags were packed with hasty thoroughness, keepsakes and bric-a-brac all sucked into the gaping black mouths of backpacks, duffel bags, suitcases, anything they could find. Finally, they had stowed all they could carry, and boarded the shuttle off-planet, their luggage making them look like a train of ants carrying outsize morsels of food back to the colony.
The shuttle ride was something Kagome would never forget. Their vehicle was ringed with a clear, narrow window, so that by standing in the middle and spinning in place, one's view was first overwhelmed by Mars' giant, ruddy disk, like that of a favorite, avuncular uncle, who always brings his face just a little too close when he speaks to you, then black space, flecked with burning, stationary stars, and finally, their ship, the Hermes.
Souta had loved the ship, had spent days reading ferociously about it with the maniacal attention for detail that only small children in the grip of either dino- or mechanophilia display. As Kagome's eyes had come to a rest on the vast thing, floating with such assurance it seemed glued into space, he had lit up and rattled off everything he knew about it in one very long sentence. The Hermes was Gibson's very own ship, assigned specifically to the planet, as the public space-routes did not yet reach it. It was one of the very biggest travel-ships ever built, and it was one of very few civilian crafts to carry its own Minkowski drive, letting it travel the underside of space-time, cutting beneath its wrinkled geometry. Kagome had listened with only half a mind, riveted by the sheer enormity of the vessel. She could not believe that something that big had been built by human beings.
As advertised, the Minkowski drive did its magic trick, and they made the voyage to Gibson in a period of time that was impossible to specify. At last they had resurfaced in normal space to find themselves orbiting their new home. It was strange to see a planet colored in the same blues and browns and greens of Earth. Kagome's eyes would seem to pick out a familiar coastline, seen over and over again in school texts and films, only to be confounded by an unexpected peninsula or a chain of mountains where she could not help but think there should be none. Still, Gibson was beautiful, and the thought of living on a planet with real oceans thrilled her. Mars, despite centuries of terraforming, had none.
Finally the day of exodus was upon them. They boarded the same shuttle they had left Mars in, and were smoothly lowered to Gibson's capital, still small, just a pithy collection of metallic architecture dwarfed by the vast wilderness around it. Theirs was the first wave of colonists to come to Gibson � aside from the survey team who had inspected and prepped the planet for human colonization, the very first human beings to live there. After the initial landing, time had flown by, the move to their farm a mere blur in her mind, the settling in and gradual adaptation to the quiet, steady rhythm of farming a flash.
In reality, the Higurashis had been on Gibson for a little over a month now. Kagome missed Mars sometimes. It could be lonely here. She had left all her school friends back home, and the nearest town was almost two hours away, so company was hard to find. But Gibson made up for it. Though people were scarce, it was almost a relief to be away from them. After her father's death, she had always felt squashed on Mars, as if she had suddenly grown a foot or four, and was now forced to shuffle hunched over through the halls. The utter lack of any sign of civilization and other people had been such a great relief that it had taken her three days to get over the shock and realize how much better she felt here.
Of course, Gibson has much more to recommend it than a sparse population, she mused, leaning back on the fence to catch a glimpse of sky, slightly violet due to a light concentration of atmospheric particles. Against the indigo tint, the tender green of the lacegrass shone, incandescently golden at the edges where the sun struck it. A breeze came up behind Kagome, tossing her hair towards the sky as it rushed up the rise in front of her, ruffling the lacegrass into a faintly discordant carillon. Kagome grinned and righted herself into proper position on the fence to brush the hair out of her eyes, catching a glimpse of white out of the corner of her eye as she did so. As soon as she turned her head, it was gone, but out of curiosity, she dismounted, and made her way through the rows of lacegrass to where she thought it had been. When she arrived, she found nothing but a set of indistinct footprints in the moist earth. Kagome blinked at them for a few moments before turning to make her way home.
Maybe it had been a youkai, one of Gibson's native inhabitants. No one knew much about them. They were sentient, and seemed fairly indifferent to the human colonization of their home. A couple of them had apparently met with the survey team to draw up an agreement about what could be done on their planet and what couldn't, and nobody had seen one since. No one was even really sure what they looked like.
�Maybe he � or she, or it, I guess � was curious about us,� thought Kagome. �Or maybe about the lacegrass? I guess it must be pretty strange if you've never seen it before. I wonder if he'll come back.�
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