Beyond Flesh

by Gardner Dozois

  All this futzed the telepresence link between operators and their proxies. One moment Margaret was experiencing the three-hundred-twenty-degree panorama of the little proxy’s microwave radar, the perpetual tug of vacuum on its mantle, the tang of extreme cold, a mere thirty degrees above absolute zero, the complex taste of the vacuum smog (burnt sugar, hot rubber, tar), the minute squirts of hydrogen from the folds of the proxy’s puckered nozzle as it maintained its orientation relative to the cliff face during its descent, with its tentacles retracted in a tight ball around the relay piton. The next, she was back in her cradled body in warm blackness, phosphenes floating in her vision and white noise in her ears while the transmitter searched for a viable waveband, locked on and—pow—she was back, falling past rippled pink pavement.

  The alarm went off, flashing an array of white stars over the panorama. Her number two, Srin Kerenyi, said in her ear, “You’re wanted, boss.”

  Margaret killed the alarm and the audio feed. She was already a kilometer below the previous benchmark and she wanted to get as deep as possible before she implanted the telemetry relay. She swiveled the proxy on its long axis, increased the amplitude of the microwave radar. Far below were intimations of swells and bumps jutting from the plane of the cliff face, textured mounds like brain coral, randomly orientated chimneys. And something else, clouds of organic matter perhaps—

  The alarm again. Srin had overridden the cut-out.

  Margaret swore and dove at the cliff, unfurling the proxy’s tentacles and jamming the piton into pinkness rough with black papillae, like a giant’s tongue quick frozen against the ice. The piton’s spikes fired automatically. Recoil sent the little proxy tumbling over its long axis until it reflexively stabilized itself with judicious squirts of gas. The link rastered, came back, cut out completely. Margaret hit the switch that turned the tank into a chair; the mask lifted away from her face.

  Srin Kerenyi was standing in front of her. “Dzu Sho wants to talk with you, boss. Right now.”

  ###

  The job had been offered as a sealed contract. Science crews had been informed of the precise nature of their tasks only when the habitat was under way. But it was good basic pay with the promise of fat bonuses on completion: When she had won the survey contract Margaret Henderson Wu had brought with her most of the crew from her previous job, and had nursed a small hope that this would be a change in her family’s luck.

  The Ganapati was a new habitat founded by an alliance of two of the Commonwealth’s oldest patrician families. It was of standard construction, a basaltic asteroid cored by a gigawatt X-ray laser and spun up by vented rock vapor to give 0.2 gee on the inner surface of its hollowed interior, factories and big reaction motors dug into the stern. With its AIs rented out for information crunching and its refineries synthesizing exotic plastics from cane sugar biomass and gengeneered oilseed rape precursors, the new habitat had enough income to maintain the interest on its construction loan from the Commonwealth Bourse, but not enough to attract new citizens and workers. It was still not completely fitted out, had less than a third of its optimal population.

  Its Star Chamber, young and cocky and eager to win independence from their families, had taken a big gamble. They were chasing a legend.

  Eighty years ago, an experiment in accelerated evolution of chemoautotrophic vacuum organisms had been set up on a planetoid in the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt. The experiment had been run by a shell company registered on Ganymede but covertly owned by the Democratic Union of China. In those days, companies and governments of Earth had not been allowed to operate in the Kuiper Belt, which had been claimed and ferociously defended by outer system cartels. That hegemony had ended in the Quiet War, but the Quiet War had also destroyed all records of the experiment; even the Democratic Union of China had disappeared, absorbed into the Pacific Community.

  There were over fifty thousand objects with diameters greater than a hundred kilometers in the Kuiper Belt, and a billion more much smaller, the plane of their orbits stretching beyond those of Neptune and Pluto. The experimental planetoid, Enki, named for one of the Babylonian gods of creation, had been lost among them. It had become a legend, like the Children’s Habitat, or the ghost comet, or the pirate ship crewed by the reanimated dead, or the worker’s paradise of Fiddler’s Green.

  And then, forty-five years after the end of the Quiet War, a data miner recovered enough information to reconstruct Enki’s eccentric orbit. She sold it to the Ganapati. The habitat bought time on the Uranus deep space telescopic array and confirmed that the planetoid was where it was supposed to be, currently more than seven thousand million kilometers from the Sun.

  Nothing more was known. The experiment might have failed almost as soon as it begun, but potentially it might win the Ganapati platinum-rated credit on the Bourse. Margaret and the rest of the science crews would, of course, receive only their fees and bonuses, less deductions for air and food and water taxes, and anything they bought with scrip in the habitat’s stores; the indentured workers would not even get that. Like every habitat in the Commonwealth, the Ganapati was structured like an ancient Greek Republic, ruled by share-holding citizens who lived in the landscaped parklands of the inner surface, and run by indentured and contract workers who were housed in the undercroft of malls and barracks tunneled into the Ganapati’s rocky skin.

  On the long voyage out, the science crews had been on minimal pay, far lower than that of the unskilled techs who worked the farms and refineries, and the servants who maintained the citizens’ households. There were food shortages because so much biomass was being used to make exportable biochemicals; any foodstuffs other than basic rations were expensive, and prices were carefully manipulated by the habitat’s Star Chamber. When the Ganapati reached Enki and the contracts of the science crews were activated, food prices had increased accordingly. Techs and household servants suddenly found themselves unable to afford anything other than dole yeast. Resentment bubbled over into skirmishes and knife-fights, and a small riot the White Mice, the undercroft’s police, subdued with gas. Margaret had to take time off to bail out several of her crew, had given them an angry lecture about threatening everyone’s bonuses.

  “We got to defend our honor,” one of the men said.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Margaret told him. “The citizens play workers against science crews to keep both sides in their places, and still turn a good profit from increases in food prices. Just be glad you can afford the good stuff now, and keep out of trouble.”

  “They were calling you names, boss,” the man said. “On account you’re—”

  Margaret stared him down. She was standing on a chair, but even so she was a good head shorter than the gangling outers. She said, “I’ll fight my own fights. I always have. Just think of your bonuses and keep quiet. It will be worth it. I promise you.”

  And it was worth it, because of the discovery of the reef.

  At some time in the deep past, Enki had suffered an impact that had remelted it and split it into two big pieces and thousands of fragments. One lone fragment still orbited Enki, a tiny moonlet where the AI that had controlled the experiment had been installed; the others had been drawn together again by their feeble gravity fields, but had cooled before coalescence had been completed, leaving a vast deep chasm, Tigris Rift, at the lumpy equator.

  Margaret’s crew had discovered that the vacuum organisms had proliferated wildly in the deepest part of the Rift, deriving energy by oxidation of elemental sulfur and ferrous iron, converting, carbonaceous material into useful organic chemicals. There were crusts and sheets, things like thin scarves folded into fragile vases and chimneys, organ pipe clusters, whips, delicate fretted laces. Some fed on others, one crust slowly overgrowing and devouring another. Others appeared to be parasites, sending complex veins ramifying through the thalli of their victims. Water-mining organisms recruited sulfur oxidizers, trading precious water for energy and forming warty outgrowths like stromatolites. Some were more th
an a hundred meters across, surely the largest prokaryotic colonies in the known Solar System.

  All this variety, and after only eighty years of accelerated evolution! Wild beauty won from the cold and the dark. The potential to feed billions. The science crews would get their bonuses, all right; the citizens would become billionaires.

  Margaret spent all her spare time investigating the reef by proxy, pushed her crew hard to overcome the problems of penetrating the depths of the Rift. Although she would not admit it even to herself, she had fallen in love with the reef. She would gladly have explored it in person, but as in most habitats, the Ganapati’s citizens did not like their workers going where they themselves would not.

  Clearly, the experiment had far exceeded its parameters, but no one knew why. The AI that had overseen the experiment had shut down thirty years ago. There was still heat in its crude proton beam fission pile, but it had been overgrown by the very organisms it had manipulated.

  Its task had been simple. Colonies of a dozen species of slow-growing chemo-autotrophs had been introduced into a part of the Rift rich with sulfur and ferrous iron. Thousands of random mutations had been induced. Most colonies had died, and those few which had thrived had been sampled, mutated, and reintroduced in a cycle repeated every hundred days.

  But the AI had selected only for fast growth, not for adaptive radiation, and the science crews held heated seminars about the possible cause of the unexpected richness of the reef’s biota. Very few believed that it was simply a result of accelerated evolution. Many terrestrial bacteria divided every twenty minutes in favorable conditions, and certain species were known to have evolved from being resistant to an antibiotic to becoming obligately dependent upon it as a food source in less than five days, or only three hundred and sixty generations, but that was merely a biochemical adaptation. The fastest division rate of the vacuum organisms in the Rift was less than once a day, and while that still meant more than thirty thousand generations had passed since the reef had been seeded, half a million years in human terms, the evolutionary radiation in the reef was the equivalent of Neanderthal Man evolving to fill every mammalian niche from bats to whales.

  Margaret’s survey crew had explored and sampled the reef for more than thirty days. Cluster analysis suggested that they had identified less than ten percent of the species that had formed from the original seed population. And now deep radar suggested that there were changes in the unexplored regions in the deepest part of Tigris Rift, which the proxies had not yet been able to reach.

  Margaret had pointed this out at the last seminar. “We’re making hypotheses on incomplete information. We don’t know everything that’s out there. Sampling suggests that complexity increases away from the surface. There could be thousands more species in the deep part of the Rift.”

  At the back of the room, Opie Kindred, the head of the genetics crew, said languidly, “We don’t need to know everything. That’s not what we’re paid for. We’ve already found several species that perform better than present commercial cultures. The Ganapati can make money from them and we’ll get full bonuses. Who cares how they got there?”

  Arn Nivedta, the chief of the biochemist crew, said, “We’re all scientists here. We prove our worth by finding out how things work. Are your mysterious experiments no more than growth tests, Opie? If so, I’m disappointed.”

  The genetics crew had set up an experimental station on the surface of the Ganapati, off limits to everyone else.

  Opie smiled. “I’m not answerable to you.”

  This was greeted with shouts and jeers. The science crews were tired and on edge, and the room was hot and poorly ventilated.

  “Information should be free,” Margaret said. “We all work toward the same end. Or are you hoping for extra bonuses, Opie?”

  There was a murmur in the room. It was a tradition that all bonuses were pooled and shared out between the various science crews at the end of a mission.

  Opie Kindred was a clever, successful man, yet somehow soured, as if the world was a continual disappointment. He rode his team hard, was quick to find failure in others. Margaret was a natural target for his scorn, a squat muscle-bound unedited dwarf from Earth who had to take drugs to survive in micro-gravity, who grew hair in all sorts of unlikely places. He stared at her with disdain and said, “I’m surprised at the tone of this briefing, Dr. Wu. Wild speculations built on nothing at all. I have sat here for an hour and heard nothing useful. We are paid to get results, not generate hypotheses. All we hear from your crew is excuses when what we want are samples. It seems simple enough to me. If something is upsetting your proxies, then you should use robots. Or send people in and hand-pick samples. I’ve worked my way through almost all you’ve obtained. I heed more material, especially in light of my latest findings.”

  “Robots need transmission relays, too,” Srin Kerenyi pointed out.

  Orly Higgins said, “If you ride them, to be sure. But I don’t see the need for human control. It is a simple enough task to program them to go down, pick up samples, return.” She was the leader of the crew that had unpicked the AI’s corrupted code, and was an acolyte of Opie Kindred.

  “The proxies failed whether or not they were remotely controlled,” Margaret said, “and on their own they are as smart as any robot. I’d love to go down there myself, but the Star Chamber has forbidden it for the usual reasons. They’re scared we’ll get up to something if we go where they can’t watch us.”

  “Careful, boss,” Srin Kerenyi whispered. “The White Mice are bound to be monitoring this.”

  “I don’t care,” Margaret said. “I’m through with trying polite requests. We need to get down there, Srin.”

  “Sure, boss. But getting arrested for sedition isn’t the way.”

  “There’s some interesting stuff in the upper levels,” Arn Nivedta said. “Stuff with huge commercial potential, as you pointed out, Opie.”

  Murmurs of agreement throughout the crowded room. The reef could make the Ganapati the richest habitat in the Outer System, where expansion was limited by the availability of fixed carbon. Even a modest-sized comet nucleus, ten kilometers in diameter, say, and salted with only one hundredth of one percent carbonaceous material, contained fifty million tons of carbon, mostly as methane and carbon monoxide ice, with a surface dusting of tarry long-chain hydrocarbons. The problem was that most vacuum organisms converted simple carbon compounds into organic matter using the energy of sunlight captured by a variety of photosynthetic pigments, and so could only grow on the surfaces of planetoids. No one had yet developed vacuum organisms that, using other sources of energy, could efficiently mine planetoids interiors, but that was what accelerated evolution appeared to have produced in the reef. It could enable exploitation of the entire volume of objects in the Kuiper Belt, and beyond, in the distant Oort Cloud. It was a discovery of incalculable worth.

  Arn Nivedta waited for silence, and added, “Of course, we can’t know what the commercial potential is until the reef species have been fully tested. What about it, Opie?”

  “We have our own ideas about commercial potential,” Opie Kindred said. “I think you’ll find that we hold the key to success here.”

  Boos and catcalls at this from both the biochemists and the survey crew. The room was polarizing. Margaret saw one of her crew unsheathe a sharpened screwdriver, and she caught the man’s hand and squeezed it until he cried out. “Let it ride,” she told him. “Remember that we’re scientists.”

  “We hear of indications of more diversity in the depths, but we can’t seem to get there. One might suspect,” Opie said, his thin upper lip lifting in a supercilious curl, “sabotage.”

  “The proxies are working well in the upper part of the Rift,” Margaret said, “and we are doing all we can to get them operative farther down.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Opie Kindred said. He stood, and around him his crew stood, too. “I’m going back to work, and so should all of you. Especially you, Dr. Wu. Perhaps
you should be attending to your proxies instead of planning useless expeditions.”

  And so the seminar broke up in uproar, with nothing productive coming from it and lines of enmity drawn through the community of scientists.

  “Opie is scheming to come out of this on top,” Arn Nivedta said to Margaret afterward. He was a friendly, enthusiastic man, tall even for an outer, and as skinny as a rail. He stopped in Margaret’s presence, trying to reduce the extraordinary difference between their heights. He said, “He wants desperately to become a citizen, and so he thinks like one.”

  “Well, my God, we all want to be citizens,” Margaret said. “Who wants to live like this?”

  She gestured, meaning the crowded bar, its rock walls and low ceiling, harsh lights and the stink of spilled beer and too many people in close proximity. Her parents had been citizens, once upon a time. Before their run of bad luck. It was not that she wanted those palmy days back—she could scarcely remember them—but she wanted more than this.

  She said, “The citizens sleep between silk sheets and eat real meat and play their stupid games, and we have to do their work on restricted budgets. The reef is the discovery of the century, Arn but God forbid that the citizens should begin to exert themselves. We do the work, they fuck in rose petals and get the glory.”

  Arn laughed at this.

  “Well, it’s true!”

  “It’s true we have not been as successful as we might like,” Arn said mournfully.

  Margaret said reflectively, “Opie’s a bastard, but he’s smart, too. He picked just the right moment to point the finger at me.”

  Loss of proxies was soaring exponentially, and the proxy farms of the Ganapati were reaching a critical point. Once losses exceeded reproduction, the scale of exploration would have to be drastically curtailed, or the seed stock would have to be pressed into service, a gamble the Ganapati could not afford to take.