Quarus

by S J MacDonald

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Alex agreed at once, though he was surprised by that in several ways, not least why she wanted him to go and deal with that. ‘Mr Delaney’s monkeys, I take it?’

  Silvie nodded. There was an interruption, then, as they arrived at Mit’s – he wasn’t there himself at the time, but there were several shoreleavers there and exchanging greetings with them, making their own choice and finding a booth left the subject of monkeys in abeyance for a few minutes. Only when they were seated did Silvie pick it up again.

  ‘Uncle Andrei,’ she explained, ‘brought monkeys… why do you crack up at that?’ She shook her head at him as Alex gave a merry little snurge. ‘It’s not a joke, he had people do a lot of research about it and a biolab did the cloning and engineering to adapt a species just for here. He knows we don’t have mammals on Quarus and that it would be something amazing for my people to meet them here. It’s actually a really thoughtful, generous thing to do. He brought a breeding colony, and he brought them properly, not bagged up in stasis but in a proper habitat with people looking after them. They’re lovely, too; a species of spider monkey with the softest red-gold fur, sweet and playful like kittens. I love them and my people will too, no question of that. His people want to do the phased release thing – you know, acclimatisation in an enclosure, then into a managed zone, and finally into the wild. But the terraforming lot wouldn’t have it, said it’s not part of their plan.’ She spoke scathingly. Her opinion of the terraforming unit was also familiar to Alex. Quarians generally did not approve of the way that humans treated animals. Some attempts at taking interesting species over to Quarus to show them had not gone well.

  ‘You could just tell them to do it, now,’ Alex pointed out, still wondering why she wanted him to go and deal with this in person.

  ‘I want your opinion,’ Silvie explained. ‘I know this is a sticky, and I may be reacting too emotionally to be fair about it. So I want to see what you make of it all – tell them that we want the monkeys and then tell me if you think that they’re right to say no. Is that okay?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Alex said. ‘Tomorrow morning all right?’

  Silvie assured him that it was. So the next day Alex made his way to the university complex.

  He had told them that he would be visiting that morning. Or at least, had handed that over to Cadet Officer Tomaas as a minor administrative task appropriate for a cadet on placement. Nyge Tomaas was, in fact, accompanying him, carrying a clipboard with an air of self-conscious importance.

  Arranging the visit had not been as straightforward as it should have been. Nyge had been shocked to be told that the Terraforming Unit didn’t normally allow visitors and even when he’d insisted that Captain von Strada was making an official visit at the request of the quarian ambassador they had still dragged their feet, trying to put it off till later in the week and grumbling that it really wasn’t convenient.

  Now, they made their way through the complex to the building which housed the terraforming department, officially the Experimental Environmental Development Unit.

  The first thing that Alex noticed was that there was a sign. The campus, too, had been asked to remove all their signage, which had been varied and generally tatty. As Silvie had observed, it shouldn’t take even the dimmest human very long to find their way about a place as small as this, and if they did want to know what different bits of building were for, they could look on a campus map and get directions if required. Nor was it necessary to have the place splatted with Authorised Personnel Only signs when people should know anyway where they were allowed to go and where they weren’t, and the fact that a door wouldn’t open for you ought to be sufficient if you didn’t know that.

  The campus, generally, had embraced these and other changes, even if mostly because they’d come along with generous funding for other things they did want. There were around three hundred people working at the campus here – not a university in fact, of course, just a research facility funded by several universities which then haggled it out amongst themselves as to what projects would be carried out.

  The EEDU had been one of the very first units established here, and had been going in some form or another for nearly nine hundred years. As far as they were concerned, this was their planet. And the first declaration of that was the fact that they had printed out their own sign, EEDU – Authorised Personnel Only, and fixed it to the main entrance.

  The door did not open, and though they were on time as arranged, there was nobody there to meet them.

  ‘Allow me, sir,’ said Nyge, feeling illogically responsible for this since he had made the arrangements, and indignant, too, that his captain was being treated with such disrespect. He put his hand firmly on the comm panel next to the door and spoke into it. ‘Captain von Strada,’ he announced, with clear rebuke for their lack of manners, ‘is at the main entrance.’

  It was a calculated two minutes before anyone appeared to let them in. When they did, it was a hairy man wearing a lab coat. He looked so much like the popular conception of a scientist that for a moment Alex wondered if he was in fancy dress. Nobody in the real world, so far as he knew, wore that kind of white lab coat. If lab clothing was required, they wore scrubs or clean-room suits.

  They wore lab coats in the EEDU, though – not for safety, but for tradition. They were clearly very proud of their history, here. The corridors were lined with pictures of Unit Directors going right back to the very first. All of them were wearing white lab coats and the style had changed very little over the centuries. It was academic garb, Alex recognised, similar to the gowns still worn by graduating students.

  They were given a tour, and introduced to a great many people Alex didn’t particularly want to meet and who certainly didn’t want to meet him. All of them were wearing lab coats.

  The labs themselves were not at all what Alex had expected. Every agency on Serenity had been given instructions and funding to have both external and internal refurbishment. There had been something of a rush in some areas to get things finished before the Heron arrived; the paint had still been drying in the last sections even while the frigate was coming through deceleration. Here, too, the corridors had that gleaming freshly painted look. But the labs themselves were very far from the crisp, high tech environment Alex had anticipated. This particular building was only a hundred and fifty years old but by the look of it they hadn’t got rid of any old equipment in all of that time, even when installing new. Bulky old disused tech was either gathering dust or had been repurposed for storage, and there were cupboards and shelving everywhere, jammed up with what Alex could only think of as junk. On one shelf, he saw a jumble of microscopes of the type he remembered from high school. Another, metal doored cupboard had its door bulging open slightly at the top, so lord knew what would come tumbling out if you opened it. And everywhere, piled on the work benches, was a clutter of specimen slides, pots, trays and jars.

  ‘Eeeeeuw!’ Nyge exclaimed in horror as he discovered that the objects piled on the bench beside him were small birds in plastic bags. ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ he said, as both Alex and the Unit Director turned to look at him. The hairy man had turned out to be the current Director, giving them the tour in person and making very sure that they knew how much of a nuisance that was. Seeing what it was the cadet had reacted to, the Director looked annoyed.

  ‘Stasis bags,’ he said.

  Nyge did not feel that that helped very much. The bags were opaque on one side but clear-view on the other, with technical labelling printed across. The birds inside were mostly of the sparrow-sized, blue and yellow plumaged variety, with long tails. They looked dead, their bodies limp and their eyes fixed. It was like a pile of little bird corpses, and knowing they could be revived did not make them look any better.

  Alex looked at the way they were piled up on the bench. It wasn’t harming them, of course, the stasis bags were keeping them safe and it was recommended ethical practice, too, to keep living specimens in stasis so th
at they weren’t stressed by a laboratory environment. He was sure that the team adhered to ethical practice, too, in all their work. But that casual dumping of the birds into a heap, as if someone had emptied a box of them onto the lab bench, spoke volumes as to the lack of respect these people had for those animals.

  ‘They are specimens,’ the Director said testily. ‘Not pets.’

  He spoke with pointed scorn, clearly referring to the fact that the Heron maintained an expensive habitat aboard for the sole purpose of housing their pet gecko.

  Alex made no comment, though later, when it became apparent that the Director was intending to finish the tour entirely within that building, he asked to see the pre-release centre.

  ‘Tsk!’ the Director clicked his tongue with evident impatience, and sighed, but gave in. ‘I thought you wanted to see the labs,’ he grumbled, and warned, ‘We’ll have to go outside,’ as if ‘outside’ was a raging storm of toxic chemicals. And he did, indeed, seem quite uncomfortable even making the short walk between the lab building and the centre which was about eighty metres away. He huddled into his coat and moaned at the breeze, scuttling along at twice the speed he’d managed indoors. ‘It’s going to rain later,’ he said accusingly, as if Alex was personally responsible for that.

  Once inside the centre, though, he resumed his lecturing mode. The centre, Alex felt, was quite interesting. It was in four sections – a large cultivation greenhouse with all manner of plants in various stages of growth, an insect house with rows upon rows of stacked tanks, an aquarium with very similar tanks of jellyfish, corals and other primitive sea life, and the aviary. This was where cloned and bioengineered birds were revived and monitored before being released into what the Director referred to as the target environment. The aviaries were spacious, clean, with food and water and the appropriate perching and nesting provision, but there had been no attempt to create a natural habitat. They were stark siliplas and metal boxes. Since it was dark at the time the aviaries were in UV light so the birds could settle to the planet’s diurnal cycle while still being observed by the scientists, and the corridors outside them were harsh in the glare of strip lights. Alex could well understand now why Silvie’s reaction to this place, during her first visit, had been to open all the cages and let the birds out. He felt quite tempted to do that himself.

  ‘None of the specimens spend more than a month here before being released into the target environment,’ the Director said. He was evidently accustomed to the way that people reacted when they were shown around this place, and defensive about it. ‘We operate strictly within bio-laboratory regulation on animal welfare.’

  Again, Alex made no comment. He knew that it was perfectly possible to create a high-welfare natural habitat even in the extremely unnatural environment of a starship. He knew how much it cost to do that, too, both in terms of funding and in the time and effort required. Funding was not an issue here, they could certainly have funding for that if they wanted it. But developing high-welfare habitats in the release centre would cost a good deal of time and effort which they were clearly not willing to give.

  ‘So, is that all?’ the Director asked, obviously wanting to be rid of them.

  ‘Thank you,’ Alex said, and just as the Director was starting to look relieved, ‘Perhaps we might talk in your office.’

  The Director looked as if he was about to protest that they’d taken up far too much of his valuable time already, but then remembered the ‘little chats’ he’d had from both the Embassy and the campus authority, stressing Captain von Strada’s importance and the expectation that EEDU would give their full cooperation.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ he said, gracious as ever, and led them off at a stumping walk, griping about feeling a touch of drizzle in the air as they made their way back to the main building. Soon enough they were in his office where, a grudging offer of refreshment having been declined, they sat down.

  Nyge, perching himself in the seat beside the captain, looked around and began making rapid notes. On the way down in the shuttle the captain had assigned him another task – to profile this office. It was, thrillingly, an Intel exercise. Okay, not exactly a swinging-on-chandeliers undercover operation, but still, an actual real life Intel challenge. Profiling the office of the person in charge, the skipper had said, should be able to tell you everything you needed to know about that person and about the organisation itself.

  Alex himself carried out that profiling with nothing so obvious even as glancing around. Yula Cavell had taught him this, and this at least had been an aspect of Intelligence work which he’d been very good at. His attempts at undercover roles had had Yula and her team in fits of laughter, but environmental profiling had got him top marks.

  Office located in the best-view corner of the top floor, Nyge wrote busily on his noteboard, and drew a quick sketch, too, indicating the layout and noting that the desk was placed diagonally so as to be framed on either side by picture windows and with a backdrop of corner walls. Desk and other furniture, he noted, new and of matching design, evidently recently installed. Décor… he sought for one word to encapsulate the feel of it and wrote crowded. There was hardly a bare patch on any of the walls. Behind the desk, the walls which visitors would be looking at, was an impressive array of academic certificates and honours, and they were actual certificates, too, not holos, but printed out in hard copy on thin plastic and framed. On the other walls, the ones which the Director himself would be looking at from behind the desk, were pictures of insects. Lots and lots of pictures of lots of different insects, sometimes even just a tiny part of an insect like an eye or a leg. These were in holoframes, indicating that they were of lesser importance than the academic honours in hard-copy. On the desk… he cast an eye over it, remembering as he did so a game they had played way back in nursery school – a tray of items which you had to look at and then try to remember. There was so much on this desk that he divided it up mentally into functional, like the in-tray stacked with data discs, scientific, like the piles of slides and sample pots, and decorative, like the model of a dragonfly on a plinth. The model was in pride of place directly ahead of the Director and between him and the visitors’ places. It had, Nyge saw, a little engraved plaque on the base, though it was too small and at the wrong angle for him to be able to read it. A significant item, though, clearly, and since it had an engraved plaque, probably given by somebody else.

  The fact that the cadet had been looking around and then writing things down had not escaped the Director’s attention. He had been telling Alex how difficult it had been for them to recover from the damage done when The Ambassador had vandalised the release centre, but broke off when he saw Nyge paying such close attention to the contents of his desk. ‘Something of interest, young man?’ he asked, in just the tone he might have used to an impertinent student.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said Nyge. ‘But yes…’ he indicated the model dragonfly, his manner deeply respectful. ‘Is that a species you created, sir?’

  The Director relaxed. ‘It is,’ he confirmed, and the glance he gave the model made it clear that it was his pride and joy. He picked up the model, too, handling it in a way which was evidently a familiar, almost caressing gesture.

  ‘Oh.’ Nyge looked impressed, and glanced longingly at the model. ‘May I, sir..?’

  The Director handed it over with a smile and a brief lecture on the subject of how he had designed and engineered it as an apex predator.

  ‘It is,’ he said, ‘the leopard of the insect world.’ This was clearly something he had said many times, and he looked at Alex, too, as if he expected congratulations, even perhaps some applause.

  ‘If you’ve finished, Mr Tomaas,’ said Alex, with a reproving glance for the cadet. Nyge handed the model back quickly, though with care, resuming his seat, and his note-making, with an abashed look and an inevitable, ‘Beg pardon, sir.’ The dragonfly, he was noting, had been named after the Director.

  ‘Vandalism, did you say?’ Alex returned
to his own conversation with the Director, picking up where the Director had left off.

  ‘I don’t know what else you could call it,’ the Director returned. ‘It was…’ he struggled for words, or at least, words which he wouldn’t get into trouble for using. ‘It was…’ he gestured helplessly and settled for description of the event, instead. ‘The Ambassador was dressed as a goddess when she arrived and instructed us to call her Oceanica,’ he said. ‘But when being shown the release centre she took her clothes off and said that she was a child of nature, Eco-Girl, and with that, she opened up all the cages, overrode all our security systems and let all the birds out.’

  Alex’s expression remained absolutely deadpan.

  ‘Disconcerting,’ he observed.

  ‘To put it mildly,’ the Director agreed. ‘It was like that all the time, of course, everywhere she went, but it was a great blow to us, completely ruined several experiments and threw our release programme into chaos. It took weeks to capture all the birds and put them back in their assigned target environments.’

  ‘Hmmn,’ Alex said, noncommittally. ‘You are aware, of course, that this planet is now under quarian sovereignty?’

  A tide of blood rushed up the Director’s neck and suffused his face.

  ‘Yes,’ he said tersely. ‘I am aware.’

  ‘And not happy about it,’ Alex surmised.

  The already ruddy countenance deepened with wrath and even seemed to swell as the Director’s jaw thrust forward and his cheeks puffed up.

  ‘We have,’ he said, with taut control, ‘been terraforming this planet for a thousand years. We are its creators, and its custodians. I myself have held that honour, and that responsibility, as Director of this Unit for seventeen years, and was head of the insect division for nine years before that. We are not come-and-go people like the other agencies, we are in this for the long haul, building a stable, self-sustaining eco-system which is at the forefront of terraforming research. I have no choice but to accept the decisions of our political masters, of course, but I cannot pretend that I am happy to see everything we’ve worked for being handed over to a people who may, frankly, ruin it. And Acko, too…’ his manner was suddenly much more openly aggrieved, as he felt that it was far more acceptable to criticise the corporation than the more sensitive matter of objecting to quarians. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with that,’ he said. ‘They’ve sent people to refurbish and upgrade the base, fair enough, but they actually seem to think that they can interfere with the environmental development too, bringing in new species of fish and birds, and even monkeys! Monkeys!’ He shook his head incredulously. ‘It’s insane,’ he stated. ‘We’ve told them no, of course, absolutely not.’