NIF’S WORLD

NIF’S WORLD
Lawrence Watt-Evans

Nif watched, enraptured, as the colors poured out through the worldstalk, blue and green and white. Her fingers tightened around her companions’ hands in a final squeeze before they separated into their individual environment bubbles and soared apart, each bound for her own sprouting worldlet.

Nif did not take the first worldlet she saw, nor the second; she knew what she wanted, and in time she spotted it. Ahead, a little to one side, a worldlet was blooming outward, already a full sphere and approaching its final dimensions, with all the green-coated land on one side, the shining blue of the ocean on the other. That was what she needed, a world with only a single continent.

She flapped a wing and steered for it. Her wings were non-functional in the vacuum of space, of course, but the environment bubble registered the motion and fed the information to her propulsion unit.

She exulted at the sight of her chosen miniplanet. She had been planning this for pentads, dreaming and scheming for the day when she would at last sail into the pocket universe, the shaping power placed ready in her mind. She knew that her teachers doubted her talents, and she was determined to prove what she could do.

The purple mists of ylem were clearing as she swooped down toward the globe she had selected and prepared to nip it free of its nurturing tendrils.

Once she cut it free of the stalk there was no going back; that would commit her to shape this worldlet and no other. She did not hesitate, but sheared the stalk quickly and let the planet spin free.

It was all hers. She was on her own now. In her classroom assignments she had never been alone, not really; she had had her textmemories to refer to, and more importantly, she had had Qui and Skir to help out.

Now, though, her two best friends were off to their own worldlets, and she had nothing she could draw on but her own skills and talent and desire.

The desire was there, certainly. She wanted to be an artist, a world-shaper, more than anything else she could imagine. She had always wanted that. The talent, she was certain, was inside her somewhere, lurking within, buried still beneath the awkwardness of her youth, waiting an opportunity to blossom forth.

The skills, however, were lacking. She knew that. She simply was not very proficient with the shaping power. Her conceptions were not clear enough, not detailed enough, for the enabling mechanisms to follow them through quickly and easily. She had to go over every little thought and image over and over, correcting flaws, filling in gaps, and even reshaping concepts. Often, unfortunately, her concepts didn’t work.

It was an unfathomable wonder to her that Qui could bring forth her ornate creations in a single sweeping work, whole invented realities purring and ticking like fine machinery—though of course, until now, Qui had never had to fill an entire world. In her earlier projects, though, Qui had never been troubled by details, and Nif had no doubt that world-shaping would go as well for her. Qui’s creations always worked, and worked right the first time, without tinkering.

Skir was almost as good, creating her works not all at once, as Qui did, but in a smooth progression, like a flower opening.

Nif’s were more like a child’s card houses, rickety and uneven and likely to collapse under close inspection.

All the same, skills lacking or not, she had made it this far. She had reached the Competition. She had skirted the very edges of cheating to do it, of course, getting the most help that she could possibly be allowed from Qui and Skir and the household AIs. She had spent pentads plotting and planning, thinking what she could do that would impress the judges with her undeveloped raw talent, that would show she had the audacity to be a fine world-shaper even if she lacked the polish of her competitors.

She had known that any wholly original concept would not work. Under the intense pressure of the Competition, with the terrifyingly short time limit, she knew that she could only botch one of her own muddled ideas. She wouldn’t have the time to go back and patch it together after the initial shaping.

She had searched for something she could adapt, instead, a concept she could take, ready-made, to shape a world. She had dug back through history and myth for something clear and simple, so that she could handle it, but so stunningly appropriate and powerful that the judges would have no choice but to recognize its value.

And, at last, she had found what she wanted.

She approached her chosen worldlet and studied it.

Yes, it was just as it should be. Ready to drop from the stalk, it was roughly three kilometers in diameter—in the warped reality of the Competition’s artificially-opened pocket universe, that would support a fully-realized, miniature, Earthlike environment.

It had a molten metal core, a thick stone mantle, a fragile crust of tectonically-active plates that she could manipulate if she chose, and enough water to cover almost four-fifths of the surface with oceans, all in perfect miniature. The land surfaces, both dry and suboceanic, were coated with a thin layer of easily-modified, high-speed genetic material, ready for her to shape.

She reached out, in communion with the shaping power, and began to bring forth her dream. The gene-stuff grew and blossomed at her command, burgeoning wildly, until it had entirely covered her world’s single continent with a tame, peaceful, luxuriant garden. She needed no deserts, no mountains, no badlands for her creation, simply a single continent-sized garden.

When that was done she reached out again—thinking, as she did, that Qui was probably done already, with some magnificent, intricate work—and raised up fauna from the newly-formed, still-unstable flora. Beasts that crawled and walked and flew, that swam or burrowed, she brought forth as many as she could devise, all herbivorous, all calm, placid, peaceful. Her world was to be a paradise, not a battlefield.

When the beasts were finished, adequately if not well, she concentrated on the small open plain at the center of the single continent. There she put a single great tree, a tree bearing biocybernetic fruit. Each fruit carried a semi-sentient pseudo-organism, self-contained, which, if ingested by a humanoid would become a symbiote bonded to the human nervous system, feeding information and the accumulated moral knowledge of the human race into the eater’s mind.

She had worked on that aspect, all by itself, for more than a pentad, in planning her project. She had mentioned something to Qui about her preparations, and Qui had laughed.

“You can’t plan everything, Nif,” she had said. “You need to see what fits on the world you choose. The judges want to see us make the best use of the material we’re given, not just impose our own order upon it.”

That was all very well for Qui, Nif thought, but not everyone was as skillful as she.

Nif was ready for the centerpiece of her work now. She reached out to a pair of near-apes, one male and one female, that she had kept handy, and placed them beneath her biocybernetic tree. There she reshaped them, shifting and sorting their genes until they were virtually indistinguishable from true humans, save for their size, the speed at which they lived, and the peculiar nature of the other-universal matter that made up their bodies.

She herself, of course, was not exactly a true human, since her ancestors had been modifying their genes to suit their whims, or the whims of fashion, for millennia. Her wings were the most obvious manifestation of that. She was not interested in creating beings in her own image, however, and stuck closely to the genetic blueprint for humanity as it had originally evolved.

Adam and Eve, she called them when she was done, and the worldlet, of course, was Eden. It was perfect. She registered the name with the Competition’s administrators, then floated above her central tree, admiring her handiwork.

The little people hurried about their lives, gathering fruit from the Garden, playing with the animals, spending long seconds—hours, by their time-scale—just lying on the grass enjoying the world that Nif had given them.

She smiled down at them, delighted with her creation. They were so cute, so helpless! And the way they stayed close to each other, embraced, made love, walked about arm in arm—Nif could hardly stand it.

She had almost forgotten why she had made them in the first place when the three judges sailed into view, their environment bubbles gleaming golden in the warm light of the artificial sun.

Nif saw them approaching and waited expectantly. As she had been instructed she ascended, watching but well away from her work, so as to allow the judges their first look without interference. When they were ready she would swoop down and explain it all, tell them of the ancient myths, explain how her Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil worked, and then, modestly, she would await their assessment.

She was certain that she had created her masterpiece. Qui would probably outdo her, and Zik, and maybe Skir, but there were a dozen openings to be had this time around, and she would surely rate one of them.

The judges were taking their first good look at her world, and she found herself unable to resist. She had a trace of the shaping power left, and she used it, almost without meaning to, to tap into their private communications as they judged her Eden, her adorable little people.

The first judge spoke almost immediately after reaching the planet, before she could possibly have seen more than the most obvious features, and her words froze Nif’s heart.

“Oh, Creation!” she said. “Not Adam and Eve again!”

“That’s the third Garden of Eden this time around,” the second judge remarked, shaking his head.

“You’d think the kids would learn,” the third said. “But every time, it’s the same old things, Eden or dinosaurs.” He registered a rejection for Nif’s world; neither of his fellows countered it. Without speaking to Nif at all, they moved on toward the next worldlet.

Nif stared after them. She threw a glance down at her Adam and her Eve, happy in their garden; what would happen to them? She turned to the judges again.

“Wait,” she called. “Wait!”