Midnight in the Garden
by Floyd Largent
Terraforming wasn’t so difficult, Charlie Stalkinghorse mused, once you had the know-how and the resources. What was difficult was finding someplace to terraform that wasn’t already crawling with life. One of his latest finds was chewing on his left boot; he pushed it gently away. Miffed, the crab-sized creature revved up its underfeelers and corkscrewed into the regolith.
Lunar dust bunnies that pooped diamonds were fine, Charlie thought. They’d financed the push back into space 20 years ago. The Lagrangian lightbloomers that ate metal weren’t so fine, but humanity had survived those and their relatives in the Belt. By the time they found the quasisapient squeelies on Mars and the pancake-harvesters on Venus, no one was surprised.
The discovery of the great living dirigibles in the upper atmospheres of the gas giants was followed immediately by the identification of the sulphurines on Io and Mimas, oceans full of whale analogs on Europa and Enceladus, silicate striders on Callisto, whirliebirdies and their ilk in the smoggy atmosphere of Titan, silkies on Rhea, Dione, and Thethys, icybrats and chillblainies on the big Uranian moons, methane skaters on Triton... bam bam bam bam bam.
Turned out the whole damn Solar System was infested with life, and there weren’t many places left for humanity to claim as their own. Ganymede had looked all right for a while, until some egghead noticed that Gany had a fairly substantial atmosphere for part of its long year and looked close enough to find the rich subterranean ecology that produced the gases.
Studies were underway to determine whether they could tweak the Ganymedites’ biology to make them produce an oxy-nitro atmosphere that humans could breathe with minimal assistance, but preliminary results suggested that such an atmosphere would poison the Ganymedites, and they couldn’t have that.
They’d had great hopes for Mercury, probably the least useful of the terrestrial planets, but it had taken Charlie less than an hour to find life on the Farside surface, although it wasn’t life as Terrans knew it. Irritatingly, what humans thought of as typical life was indeed rare in the Solar System, but it was life, no doubt about it.
There were even plants of a sort: spindly, improbable silicon-ice composites with glassy, fractally branching limbs that terminated in fuzzy little pseudo-leaves. Not a speck of carbon in them, Charlie figured, and probably none in the digbugs either.
The silicon-ice plants reminded him of the ganytruffles and, like them, they’d last about a nanosecond in direct sunlight. So what were they doing on Mercury, of all worlds? If the planet had been tidelocked, he’d have understood; but it wasn’t. Oy vey, just another little mystery to add to the pile.
His mood sour, he smacked one of the plants with his collecting rod. It snapped with a satisfying tinkle that he could feel/hear through the fabric of his pressure suit. Wouldn’t do to waste a sample, Charlie thought. He took a nanoplas bag from a leg pocket and bent to collect a fragment.
Suddenly he was bathed in harsh, actinic sunlight. What the hell...? Eyes wide, he straightened slowly and looked up. The glare filters in his helmet’s faceplate — there to protect his eyes in case of an accidental exposure to the sun — kicked in. Oddly enough, he wasn’t hot at all, but the thin, reflective shield on his suit’s surface flickered to life. In case of emergency, it would protect him from the sun’s radiation. Only one thing could have made that happen, and it was weeks until sunrise.
Apparently, a little piece of the sun was floating a half-kilometer above him. Its tightly focused glare pinned him bug-like to the rocky, cratered regolith. Charlie guessed that the miniature sun measured perhaps a hundred meters across; it was generally spherical, edged with spiky yellow prominences. It eased gradually downward, jinking back and forth, cycling from yellow to bright white and back.
Charlie Stalkinghorse was fifty years old. He’d catalogued new lifeforms on dozens of planets, moons, and worldlets throughout the Solar System, and long experience suggested he’d just found a new type of specimen... But of what? One thing he did know: something about its attitude, about the way it was approaching rapidly, the way the prominences were reaching toward him, suggested supreme irritation.
Charlie noted all this before his consciousness whited out. When he came to, he was in his rover more than a kilometer from the... thing. At first, he thought that someone had put him there; then he noticed the trail of widely spaced bounce-prints leading off to the west. Apparently, he’d bounded back here like a frightened rabbit, reason entirely overcome by fear. He gritted his teeth. Oh well, at least he hadn’t wet himself.
The miniature sun was nowhere in sight. He glanced at the chronometer in the helmet’s display; as far as he could tell, he’d been out of it for at least an hour. He had maybe two hours until he was supposed to rendezvous with the others at the southern rim of Caloris Minor. And he didn’t have any samples or photos.
Cursing himself, Charlie made a terse notation in his voice log that made only a brief mention of the encounter and his response. He doubted he’d hallucinated it, though Lord knew the Sol System Biological Survey had had its share of space fugue cases.
Crazy or not, he had to shake it off; he needed those samples, so he popped out of the rover and headed back to the little stand of silicon-ice plants, maneuvering his way around the clusters of digbugs that tried to mob him. He’d learned right away that they tended to be gregarious. Probably wanted to steal his heat; it was barely 90 Kelvins here at midwinter on Farside. The balmy 700-degree summer was three weeks away.
His bounce prints were clear, as was his previous wandering trail out from the rover, so he followed them back to where he’d encountered the miniature sun thing or whatever it was. It had resembled a hot ball of plasma or magnetically bound gases, which would make it a miniature sun indeed. It seemed, however, to be alive; and what a surprise: ET life in the Solar System! Feh. One guess where a magnetically bound ball of living plasma had originated. He groaned aloud, “Not the sun, too!”
But then, every other body in the Solar System of appreciable size supported life, at least as far as they’d been checked. Why not the sun, too? But why the hell would solar creatures — Solarites? Minisuns? Helios? Solarbabies? — have anything to do with Mercury’s Farside, which was nearly as cold as Pluto or Eris? Charlie really wished he could call up one of the other team members and discuss this with them, but the solar flux made long-distance communications this close to the primary nearly impossible.
When he made it back to the trampled area where he’d broken the plant with his collection rod, where the rod and sampling kit were, indeed, waiting for him, he found the plant was upright and intact. He peered closely at it; there was no sign he’d ever harmed it.
An icy little chill crawled up his back. He took a deep breath, bent to pick up his sample bag and a pruner, and proceeded to cut a leafy bough off the same silicon-ice plant he’d shattered before.
He hadn’t even gotten it into the collection bag before he was pinned in a glare of white light. The solarbaby was back.
He looked up. Barely visible through the glare filters, the solarbaby dominated his universe. A huge, atavistic fear filled him, unreasonable and entirely stripped of anything like rational thought. Which was unusual; he’d never before been so scared of something that he couldn’t think. He frowned, took a deep breath, and the terror faded to something akin to normal unease. The solarbaby backed up a little; now Charlie felt overwhelming confusion.
Except it wasn’t his confusion. He was a bit bewildered, yes; puzzled, of course, but it wasn’t as if he’d never encountered an entirely new domain of life before. Suddenly, it struck him that he wasn’t the source of the fear and confusion: the solarbaby was. It was projecting the emotions on some mental band, maybe inadvertently, maybe in an attempt to keep him away from its plants.
The solarbaby drifted closer. A prominence stretched into a pseudopod that gently took the fractal bough from his hand and returned it to its place on the silicate plant. When the pseudopod withdrew, the plant was whole again.
The solarbaby pulled back a bit, then thrust all its prominences imperiously in the direction of Charlie’s rover. The biologist felt a wave of irritation wash through him. The message was clear: Go away. Leave my garden alone.
Charlie went. He drove back toward Caloris Base, his mind far away while the little rover made its slow way among the craters. Here and there, he spied a little patch of brightness, and realized he was likely seeing gardens that he hadn’t recognized before. Once he stopped and took a closer look, careful not to touch anything.
This garden was filled with fat glass spirals and chillblainies. He wanted desperately to take samples, to prove that the skittering little methane-eaters were structurally identical to the chillblainies he’d studied on Oberon... But he didn’t dare. He didn’t want to attract any further attention from the solarbabies, at least not yet. Anyway, these chillblainies were no doubt basically the same as the Oberonians, probably destined for the Pluto-Charon system, Eris, Sedna, and all the other large trans-Neptunian Kuiper bodies.
He’d bet anything that when humans finally got there, in the next decade or so, they’d either find precarious new ecologies or no life at all. If they hurried, maybe they could establish a beachhead before the solarbabies infected the entire outer system with life, just as they’d apparently infected the rest of the Solar System.
The others would think he was crazy, but his recommendation was going to be that humans just leave Mercury alone and bypass the inner system altogether. He had a feeling that the solarbabies might be irritated otherwise.
And humans weren’t ready just yet to challenge their creators.
Copyright © 2025 by Floyd Largent
