Forty Thousand in Gehenna by C. J. Cherryh

very flexible. We can just extend a road a bit and locate a loading dock around a critical area; and that’s what we’ll do. That’s why there’s a land bank being set up. When you own land, you’ll have title to a certain value of land, but not any specific land, and that lets the governor’s office and the bio department create a preserve where needed, and it protects you and your descendants against any financial damage. You can’t own caliban habitat. That has to be left. On the other hand, to prevent their encroachment on us, there will be barrier zones, usually residential, surrounding any contact point—like, for instance, the caliban mounds near the landing site. In the theory that lifeforms get along better with each other than lifeforms get along with roads and factories, there’ll be housing built along the line that turns only windows in that direction, not doors, not accesses. Once we determine the actual boundary of an area, that’s where the permanent building will go. And you’ll be up against a protected zone, so your actual maintenance on that side will be handled through the bio department. City core will be industrial. All city growth will be handled through the creation of similar enclaves along roadways. This is the way it is in the charter. I think you understand it. I just want to explain how the bio section relates to the construction agency and to the governor’s office and why we’ll have some functions linked in with security and law enforcement. We have a constituency, which is the ecosystem we’re entering. We also represent the human ecosystem. We work out accommodations and bring those before other departments, who have to adjust to the facts as we present them. We don’t really have authority. Nature has that. We just find out the facts as they exist; the decision’s already made—that the two systems have to exist in balance. A world where humans come in at the top of the food chain is easily thrown out of balance. Those of you who are stationborn will appreciate that quite readily. It’s like a station, like Pell, for instance, where two biosystems exist in complement. Very tricky lifesupport setup, one looping into the other, and each benefitting the other. But when you start from the beginning you can do that, and make them balance. We look to have station manufacture for the really heavy and polluting industries. All the departments will be doing these seminars and we’ll go on doing them after we land, making tapes for the azi and for future generations. All of this is going to be priceless stuff. And mostly history’s going to make liars out of us, but, we sincerely hope, not in our hopes for the place.
    “I’ll be going over the ecosystem from the microorganisms up in the more detailed session tomorrow; and I’ll be doing it again for my own staff in a morning session day after tomorrow. Check your schedules, and if you find you want to sit in on that lecture you’re quite welcome. It’s going to be pretty detailed, but after the other session it might make fair sense. Session to begin tomorrow morning is Zell Parham on security and law, this room, 0700 mainday…
    “Game in R12.”
viii
    T20 days MAT
    “…The world is to be loved,” the taped voice whispered, and Jin accepted it deeply, wholly. “The things you will find there are beautiful. All the things that really belong to the world are to be protected; but you will build there. Born-men will tell you where you will build and if life is taken in the building, that is as it must be. If you can spare a living thing you will do so, if it is your choice alone. You will observe certain cautions in touching wild things. You will report all such contacts to your supervisors, just as born-men have to report them.
    “You will work in the fields; and it may be you will take lives. That will be an accident and there is no guilt.
    “You will catch fish and eat them, and this is the order of nature. There is no