Beyond Flesh

by Gardner Dozois

  “Perhaps it isn’t a random change,” Margaret said. “Perhaps the reef has a use for the proxies.”

  “Teleology,” Arn said. “Don’t let Opie hear that thought. He’d use it against you. This is evolution. It isn’t directed by anything other than natural selection. There is no designer, no watchmaker. Not after the AI crashed, anyway, and it only pushed the ecosystem toward more efficient sulfur oxidation. There’s more, Margaret. I’ve been doing some experiments on the side. Exposing aluminum foil sheets in orbit around Enki. There are exfoliations everywhere.”

  “Then Opie is right.”

  “No, no. All the exfoliations I found were nonviable. I did more experiments. The exfoliations are metabolically active when released, unlike bacterial spores. And they have no protective wall. No reason for them to have one, yah? They live only for a few minutes. Either they land on a new host or they don’t. Solar radiation easily tears them apart. You can kill them with a picowatt ultraviolet laser. Contamination isn’t a problem.”

  “And it can’t infect us,” Margaret said. “Vacuum organisms and proxies have the same DNA code as us, the same as everything from Earth, for that matter, but it’s written in artificial nucleotide bases. The reef isn’t dangerous at all, Arn.”

  “Yah, but in theory it could infect every vacuum organism ever designed. The only way around it would be to change the base structure of vacuum organism DNA—how much would that cost?”

  “I know about contamination, Arn. The mold that wrecked the biome designed by my parents came in with someone or something. Maybe on clothing, or skin, or in the gut, or in some trade goods. It grew on anything with a cellulose cell wall. Every plant was infected. The fields were covered by huge sheets of gray mold; the air was full of spores. It didn’t infect people, but more than a hundred died from massive allergic reactions and respiratory failure. They had to vent the atmosphere in the end. And my parents couldn’t find work after that.”

  Arn said gently, “That is the way. We live by our reputations. It’s hard when something goes wrong.”

  Margaret ignored this. She said, “The reef is a resource, not a danger. You’re looking at it the wrong way, like Opie Kindred. We need diversity. Our biospheres have to be complicated because simple systems are prone to invasion and disruption, but they aren’t one-hundredth as complicated as those on Earth. If my parents’ biome had been more diverse, the mold couldn’t have found a foothold.”

  “There are some things I could do without.” Arn scratched his left ankle with the toes of his right foot. “Like those ants.”

  “Well, we don’t know if we need the ants specifically, but we need variety, and they contribute to it. They help aerate the soil, to begin with, which encourages stratification and diversity of soil organisms. There are a million different kinds of microbe in a gram of soil from a forest on Earth; we have to make do with less than a thousand. We don’t have one-tenth that number of useful vacuum organisms and most are grown in monoculture, which is the most vulnerable ecosystem of all. That was the cause of the crash of the green revolution on Earth in the twenty-first century. But there are hundreds of different species in the reef. Wild species, Arn. You could seed a planetoid with them and go harvest it a year later. The citizens don’t go outside because they have their parklands, their palaces, their virtualities. They’ve forgotten that the outer system isn’t just the habitats. There are millions of small planetoids in the Kuiper Belt. Anyone with a dome and the reef vacuum organisms could homestead one.”

  She had been thinking about this while working out in the fields. The Star Chamber had given her plenty of time to think.

  Arn shook his head. “They all have the parasite lurking in them. Any species from the reef can turn into it. Perhaps even the proxies.”

  “We don’t know enough,” Margaret said. “I saw things in the bottom of the Rift, before I lost contact with the proxy. Big structures. And there’s the anomalous temperature gradients, too. The seat of change must be down there, Arn. The parasite could be useful, if we can master it. The viruses that caused the immunodeficiency plagues are used for gene therapy now. Opie Kindred has been down there. He’s suppressing what he has found.”

  “Yah, well, it does not much matter. They have completed synthesis of the metabolic inhibitor. I’m friendly with the organics chief. They diverted most of the refinery to it.” Arn took out his slate. “He showed me how they have set it up. That is what they have been doing down in the Rift. Not exploring.”

  “Then we have to do something now.”

  “It is too late, Margaret.”

  “I want to call a meeting, Arn. I have a proposal.”

  ###

  Most of the science crews came. Opie Kindred’s crew was a notable exception; Arn said that it gave him a bad feeling.

  “They could be setting us up,” he told Margaret.

  “I know they’re listening. That’s good. I want it in the open. If you’re worried about getting hurt, you can always leave.”

  “I came because I wanted to. Like everyone else here. We’re all scientists. We all want the truth known.” Arn looked at her. He smiled. “You want more than that, I think.”

  “I fight my own fights.” All around people were watching. Margaret added, “Let’s get this thing started.”

  Arn called the meeting to order and gave a brief presentation about his research into survival of the exfoliations before throwing the matter open to the meeting. Nearly everyone had an opinion. Microphones hovered in the room, and at times three or four people were shouting at one another. Margaret let them work off their frustration. Some simply wanted to register a protest; a small but significant minority were worried about losing their bonuses or even all of their pay.

  “Better that than our credibility,” one of Orly Higgins’s techs said. “That’s what we live by. None of us will work again if we allow the Ganapati to become a plague ship.”

  Yells of approval, whistles.

  Margaret waited until the noise had died down, then got to her feet. She was in the center of the horseshoe of seats, and everyone turned to watch, more than a hundred people. Their gaze fell upon her like sunlight; it strengthened her. A microphone floated down in front of her face.

  “Arn has shown that contamination isn’t an issue,” Margaret said. “The issue is that the Star Chamber wants to destroy the reef because they want to exploit what they’ve found and stop anyone else using it. I’m against that, all the way. I’m not gengeneered. Microgravity is not my natural habitat. I have to take a dozen different drugs to prevent reabsorption of calcium from my bone, collapse of my circulatory system, fluid retention, all the bad stuff micro-gravity does to unedited Earth stock. I’m not allowed to have children here, because they would be as crippled as me. Despite that, my home is here. Like all of you, I would like to have the benefits of being a citizen, to live in the parklands and eat real food. But there aren’t enough parklands for everyone because the citizens who own the habitats control production of fixed carbon. The vacuum organisms we have found could change that. The reef may be a source of plague, or it may be a source of unlimited organics. We don’t know. What we do know is that the reef is unique and we haven’t finished exploring it. If Star Chamber destroys it, we may never know what’s out there.”

  Cheers at this. Several people rose to make points, but Margaret wouldn’t give way. She wanted to finish.

  “Opie Kindred has been running missions to the bottom of the Rift, but he hasn’t been sharing what he’s found there. Perhaps he no longer thinks that he’s one of us. He’ll trade his scientific reputation for citizenship,” Margaret said, “but that isn’t our way, is it?”

  “NO!” the crowd roared.

  And the White Mice invaded the room.

  Sharp cracks, white smoke, screams. The White Mice had long flexible sticks weighted at one end. They went at the crowd like farmers threshing corn. Margaret was separated from Arn by a wedge of panicking people. Two techs go
t hold of her and steered her out of the room, down a corridor filling with smoke. Arn loomed out of it, clutching his slate to his chest.

  “They’re getting ready to set off the poison,” he said as they ran in long loping strides.

  “Then I’m going now,” Margaret said.

  Down a drop pole onto a corridor lined with shops. People were smashing windows. No one looked at them as they ran through the riot. They turned a comer, the sounds of shouts and breaking glass fading. Margaret was breathing hard. Her eyes were smarting, her nose running.

  “They might kill you,” Arn said. He grasped her arm. “I can’t let you go, Margaret.”

  She shook herself free. Arn tried to grab her again. He was taller, but she was stronger. She stepped inside his reach and jumped up and popped him on the nose with the flat of her hand.

  He sat down, blowing bubbles of blood from his nostrils, blinking up at her with surprised, tear-filled eyes.

  She snatched up his slate. “I’m sorry, Arn,” she said. “This is my only chance. I might not find anything, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try.”

  ###

  Margaret was five hundred kilometers out from the habitat when the radio beeped. “Ignore it,” she told her pressure suit. She was sure that she knew who was trying to contact her, and she had nothing to say to him.

  This far out, the Sun was merely the brightest star in the sky. Behind and above Margaret, the dim elongated crescent of the Ganapati hung before the sweep of the Milky Way. Ahead, below the little transit platform’s motor, Enki was growing against a glittering starscape, a lumpy potato with a big notch at its widest point.

  The little moonlet was rising over the notch, a swiftly moving fleck of light. For a moment, Margaret had the irrational fear that she would collide with it, but the transit platform’s navigational display showed her that she would fall above and behind it. Falling past a moon! She couldn’t help smiling at the thought.

  “Priority override,” her pressure suit said. Its voice was a reassuring contralto Margaret knew as well as her mother’s.

  “Ignore it,” Margaret said again.

  “Sorry, Maggie. You know I can’t do that.”

  “Quite correct,” another voice said.

  Margaret identified him a moment before the suit helpfully printed his name across the helmet’s visor. Dzu Sho.

  “Turn back right now,” Sho said. “We can take you out with the spectrographic laser if we have to.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” she said.

  “I do not believe anyone would mourn you,” Sho said unctuously. “Leaving the Ganapati was an act of sedition, and we’re entitled to defend ourselves.”

  Margaret laughed. It was just the kind of silly, sententious, self-important nonsense that Sho was fond of spouting.

  “I am entirely serious,” Sho said.”

  Enki had rotated to show that the notch was the beginning of a groove. The groove elongated as the worldlet rotated further. Tigris Rift. Its edges ramified in complex fractal branchings.

  “I’m going where the proxies fell,” Margaret said. “I’m still working for you.”

  “You sabotaged the proxies. That’s why they couldn’t fully penetrate the Rift.”

  “That’s why I’m going—”

  “Excuse me,” the suit said, “but I register a small energy flux.”

  “Just a tickle from the ranging sight,” Sho said. “Turn back now, Dr. Wu.”

  “I intend to come back.”

  It was a struggle to stay calm. Margaret thought that Sho’s threat was no more than empty air. The laser’s AI would not allow it to be used against human targets, and she was certain that Sho couldn’t override it. And even if he could, he wouldn’t dare kill her in full view of the science crews. Sho was bluffing. He had to be.

  The radio silence stretched. Then Sho said, “You’re planning to commit a final act of sabotage. Don’t think you can get away with it. I’m sending someone after you.”

  Margaret was dizzy with relief. Anyone chasing her would be using the same kind of transit platform. She had at least thirty minutes’ head start.

  Another voice said, “Don’t think this will make you a hero.”

  Opie Kindred. Of course. The man never could delegate. He was on the same trajectory, several hundred kilometers behind but gaining slowly.

  ‘Tell me what you found,” she said. “Then we can finish this race before it begins.”

  Opie Kindred switched off his radio.

  “If you had not brought along all this gear,” her suit grumbled, “we could out-distance him.”

  “I think we’ll need it soon. We’ll just have to be smarter than him.”

  Margaret studied the schematics of the poison spraying mechanism—it was beautifully simple, but vulnerable—while Tigris Rift swelled beneath her, a jumble of knife-edge chevron ridges. Enki was so small and the Rift so wide that the walls had fallen beneath the horizon. She was steering toward the Rift’s center when the suit apologized and said that there was another priority override.

  It was the Ganapati’s lawyer. She warned Margaret that this was being entered into sealed court records, and then formally revoked her contract and read a complaint about her seditious conduct.

  “You’re a contracted worker just like me,” Margaret said. “We take orders, but we both have codes of professional ethics, too. For the record, that’s why I’m here. The reef is a unique organism. I cannot allow it to be destroyed.”

  Dzu Sho came onto the channel and said, “Off the record, don’t think about being picked up.”

  The lawyer switched channels. “He does not mean it,” she said. “He would be in violation of the distress statutes.” Pause. “Good luck, Dr. Wu.”

  Then there was only the carrier wave.

  Margaret wished that this made her feel better. Plenty of contract workers who went against the direct orders of their employers had disappeared, or been killed in industrial accidents. The fire of the mass meeting had evaporated long before the suit had assembled itself around her, and now she felt colder and lonelier than ever.

  She fell, the platform shuddering now and then as it adjusted its trim. Opie Kindred’s platform was a bright spark moving sideways across the drifts of stars above. Directly below was a vast flow of nitrogen ice with a black river winding through it. The center of the Rift, a cleft two kilometers long and fifty kilometers deep. The reef.

  She fell toward it.

  She had left the radio channel open. Suddenly, Opie Kindred said, “Stop now and it will be over.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  No answer.

  She said, “You don’t have to follow me, Opie. This is my risk. I don’t ask you to share it.”

  “You won’t take this away from me.”

  “Is citizenship really worth this, Opie?”

  No reply.

  The suit’s proximity alarms began to ping and beep. She turned them off one by one, and told the suit to be quiet when it complained.

  “I am only trying to help,” it said. “You should reduce your velocity. The target is very narrow.”

  “I’ve been here before,” Margaret said.

  But only by proxy. The ice field rushed up at her. Its smooth flows humped over one another, pitted everywhere with tiny craters. She glimpsed black splashes where vacuum organisms had colonized a stress ridge. Then an edge flashed past; walls unraveled on either side.

  She was in the reef.

  The vacuum organisms were everywhere: flat plates jutting from the walls; vases and delicate fans and fretworks; huge blotches smooth as ice or dissected by cracks. In the light cast by the platform’s lamps, they did not possess the vibrant primary colors of the proxy link, but were every shade of gray and black, streaked here and there with muddy reds. Complex fans ramified far back inside the milky nitrogen ice, following veins of carbonaceous compounds.

  Far above, stars were framed by the edges of the cleft. One st
ar was falling toward her: Opie Kindred. Margaret switched on the suit’s radar, and immediately it began to ping. The suit shouted a warning, but before Margaret could look around, the pings Dopplered together.

  Proxies.

  They shot up toward her, tentacles writhing from the black, streamlined helmets of their mantles. Most of them missed, jagging erratically as they squirted bursts of hydrogen to kill their velocity. Two collided in a slow flurry of tentacles.

  Margaret laughed. None of her crew would fight against her, and Sho was relying upon inexperienced operators.

  The biggest proxy, three meters long, swooped past. The crystalline gleam of its sensor array reflected the lights of the platform. It decelerated, spun on its axis, and dove back toward her.

  Margaret barely had time to pull out the weapon she had brought with her. It was a welding pistol, rigged on a long rod with a yoked wire around the trigger. She thrust it up like the torch of the Statue of Liberty just before the proxy struck her.

  The suit’s gauntlet, elbow joint, and shoulder piece stiffened under the heavy impact, saving Margaret from broken bones, but the collision knocked the transit platform sideways. It plunged through reef growths. Like glass, they had tremendous rigidity but very little lateral strength. Fans and lattices broke away, peppering Margaret and the proxy with shards. It was like falling through a series of chandeliers. Margaret couldn’t close her fingers in the stiffened gauntlet. She stood tethered to the platform with her arm and the rod raised straight up and the black proxy wrapped around them. The proxy’s tentacles lashed her visor with slow, purposeful slaps.

  Margaret knew that it would take only a few moments before the tentacles’ carbon-fiber proteins could unlink; then it would be able to reach the life support pack on her back.