by Jeff Carlson
Joanna rushed into her armor as their implants spoke again: "We've got five hurt on top and two buried. It looks tight. Let's put our triage by the shed."
"I'm up," Joanna said the instant she was dressed, adding a signature pulse. She moved toward the door. But she'd done a bad job of placing the feed for her left quadriceps. The leg of her suit dragged, and she strained to compensate.
"Joanna, Hel." That was Louise, their line-senior. "Work your way around on the west rim, there's a chance it might be easier to dig through from that side."
They bounded away from camp. Joanna stumbled once and Hel came back to help her stand, patting at Joanna's arm in her fussy way as if it mattered that Joanna's armor was dirty.
"What's wrong?" Hel asked.
"My left quad's only eighty percent. I'm okay."
They cleared a ravine and two sink holes, but Hel grabbed Joanna before a larger jump. "Wait. Can you hop that far?"
"I'm okay."
Neither of them had approached from the west before. In many places, this rim fell away into the brutal surf. The new perspective heightened Joanna's mute, urgent dread.
It was such a strange land, packed into flat steppes, an artificial mountain that had mostly kept its shape even after centuries of quakes and storms. Only brown weeds grew from the brown dirt — a sterile contrast to the greenery and lush flowers of home. This shore had its own allure but it was a terrible beauty, so much like her Diamond, a dead surface concealing wealth beneath.
Quickly, wordlessly, Joanna and Hel coordinated with the others by grid position and their extensive database of radar scans. The two girls buried in the cave-in had been working Trench Fifteen, which was among the deepest. Recovery efforts would be difficult no matter what angle they tried.
"There's an open rift twenty meters down on my side," Joanna said. "We might save time going through there."
"Let's anchor and get a probe in." Hel knelt in a wide, three-point stance, locking her armor as Joanna crouched beside her, aware of an ache in the ligaments of her hip socket. She grabbed Hel's free arm to better stabilize herself before pushing a wire drill through the surface.
Even away from the cliffs, this place could be treacherous. Professor Michaud often compared the site to an insect mound, a methodical if crude structure, each layer carefully separated from the next but, inexplicably, containing the same hodgepodge of materials. Some had decayed, leaving hollows. Gas vents and fires further disrupted the sediment.
The site was a massive garbage dump, vast enough to swallow Joanna's home colony and six others like it, and her people had discovered ten thousand of these landfills all across Europe, Asia, and North America when they emerged from the ice and tundra above the Arctic Circle six hundred years ago. Expeditions further south revealed more of the same, a world-wide scarring.
This dump, like so many along the fallen edge of California, leached poisons into the ocean. Other landfills had been found near freshwater drainages, which was idiotic yet appeared typical of the breeder civilization.
No one wondered why they were extinct.
Louise made contact again in a quiet, calming voice. "How's that rift look?" she asked.
"Not good, it's top heavy," Joanna said, concentrating on guiding the drill. She uplinked her radar to Louise. "Do you want us to come over?"
"Stay there. Keep searching. I've already got twelve people standing back until there's more room to work."
Joanna frowned at the number. Twelve? A quick grid check showed that her line-mates had been joined by the remainder of the site crew, the third shift, who'd been asleep.
There were three lines cooperating at this dig in what had been equal numbers of ten before a chemical burn killed three Löw and then a viral infection decimated the Suhoza. Replacements, including Hel and Joanna, had brought the total crew back to twenty-six. The line culture could be superstitious about odd numbers, but the Suhoza were still under-strength and it was the Löw and the Michaud who alternated the main work details, so it had been a good bet that one of them would be the next to suffer.
"If I send over two robots," Louise said, "do you think you can dig into that rift?"
"Yes," Joanna said. She felt Hel tense. Her own reaction, excitement, made her strong with adrenaline even though it was followed by guilt. Saving the Michaud girls was no contest. Whoever got to them first wasn’t better than anyone else.
"Be careful, cubs," Louise said. "Understood? I just want a second option available if this side doesn't pan out."
#
The excavation robots were towering, ten-legged spiders, capable of squeezing through narrow holes or extending several legs over a thirty-meter circumference in order to hoist ton-loads of debris. Unlike the ferrets, the spiders weren't cyborgs. They contained no living flesh whatsoever and rarely earned nicknames or affection.
Joanna worked her machine relentlessly, blunting its claws, losing four eyes when she pulled upward too fast and a load disintegrated into shrapnel. Hel was more studious, fishing after the smaller junk that Joanna ignored.
Louise continued to deny them an open link to anyone except herself, shielding them from the Michaud's grief, but Louise could not completely prevent this misery from ebbing through to Joanna and Hel each time she checked in with either or both of them to monitor their progress.
The two girls trapped below hadn't transmitted since the cave-in. Possibly this silence was due to the interference of metals. More likely they were dead.
At first Joanna paid little attention to the garbage as she angled toward the rift. The loose debris was only a frustration. But as ten minutes became fifteen, then twenty-five, her emotions found new focus. Anger.
Her home colony wasted nothing, recycling even their urine to maintain the nitrogen levels in their box farms. The line culture was not only genetically poor. For generations they had overcome energy shortages and cold and isolation. The wealth discarded here was staggering. This same crew of twenty-six could have extracted a city's worth of iron each work week if transportation costs weren't so great. They had too few spiders, too little fuel, and there were a thousand kilometers between here and home, which meant the colonies struggled while this wealth decayed.
It was wrong. It was hateful.
Their line-mother had taught them to view this immense, upside down grave as a powerful lesson, but over time Joanna had felt that wisdom slowly die in her. To confront such waste day after day was irreconcilable with proper thinking. It was as though an entirely new interior landscape had opened inside her.
They had all changed. But Joanna was afraid for herself and so much of what she was experiencing.
She envied the makers of this dump.
"Careful!" Hel swatted Joanna's shoulder, overreacting to a slide. They both drew their spiders out. Hel's machine was pinned for an instant, three legs grinding.
Joanna shook her head. "Okay, we need to start setting the larger pieces as containment walls."
"We need to move further back!" Hel's anxiety cut deeper than her voice, a cold contrast to Joanna's determination.
Joanna resisted when Hel nudged at her again. "No," she said. "This spot is as solid as we've got." She almost didn't ask... "Are you okay?"
Louise interrupted on their implants before Hel could answer. "I'm sending over help," Louise said.
We're doing fine, Joanna thought, but she kept silent, trying to hide her possessiveness.
"This dig is no good," Hel said. "The upper sediment is manufactured items and the next layer down must have been mostly biodegradable. It's sinking."
"It's our best bet right now," Louise said. "We ran into a corrosive spill over here and getting around it will cost us too much time. We'll start digging from the south, too, but right now you're the farthest ones in."
#
Joanna and Hel were alone for another six minutes. Their work grew inefficient, uncoordinated, a truth as unsettling to Joanna as the question still turning like a knife in her heart.
Are you okay?
Hel's loss of composure was a weakness and a danger, but eight crew approached before Joanna found the courage to speak, because this was not a physical hurt — because she was afraid Hel might ask her the same.
It was normal to feel shock, fear, impatience. Joanna was experiencing worse. She felt resentment and mistrust.
Night came almost in a blink, so unlike the long dusks at the pole. Floodlights preceded the mix of human and spider figures who joined them. The Professor herself led the two groups of Michaud and Suhoza. She had been among those injured in the cave-in, suffering chest bruises and a fractured cheekbone, yet she'd foregone medical attention to join the rescue effort.
Watching her, the pride Joanna felt was soothing. The Michaud were well-made and worthy partners.
"Your entry reinforcements are uneven," the Professor said, rebuking her, and Joanna only nodded when she might have looked at Hel as if to pass the blame. The Professor said, "Why don't you two rest for—"
"No."
"What? Rest for a minute."
"Uh, no, we know this substrata best."
"We have your scans." Professor Michaud walked her machine toward the dig, shrugging four of its legs as well as her own hands in a gesture of dismissal. "Rest."
Joanna turned away, glancing up for the stars but finding only cloud cover. What was happening to her? She'd been right to be concerned. These emotions went against the teachings of the line. To be selfish, to be disobedient, were the hallmarks of breeder thinking, especially in the face of trauma, when a line was meant to close into a circle.
Louise would know what she was feeling through her implant. At the moment, Joanna's turmoil might be mistaken as stress. But Louise would know.
Joanna limped away from the Michaud and was pleased when Hel hurried after her, no matter how she'd been feeling toward her sister. Joanna put one hand on Hel's arm and was rewarded with a small, brittle smile.
"I'm not tired, are you?" Joanna asked.
Hel shook her head.
Joanna smiled back at her. "Let's run a wider sweep in case they need more options," Joanna said.
"Stay with me," Hel pleaded.
"Yes."
They leaned close for comfort as they marched their spiders outward in a semi-autonomous stop-and-scan, their visors flickering with radar and thermal displays. Twice Joanna leaned past Hel to watch the Michaud complete the dig, then drop four spiders into the rift.
"Oh!" Hel flinched and said, "Line-senior?" Her tone was almost embarrassed. "Look at my radar! I've located a huge vein of organics."
Jealousy pushed through Joanna's already crowded head, and she hesitated before joining the link to Hel's spider.
"Excellent work," Louise said. "That's industrial."
"It's, um, I'm estimating two thousand plus," Hel said, which Joanna thought was conservative. Based on the size of the twisting cubic area highlighted in the scan, Joanna's own guess exceeded four thousand. Even if the smaller number was accurate, this find would be among their best.
"What are you doing so far from your dig?" Louise asked, both stern and pleased.
My idea, Joanna thought. This sweep was my idea.
"Joanna wanted to make sure we weren't missing a better recovery route," Hel said. She was eager to share the bonus, and Joanna clenched her teeth in self-reproach.
#
Everyone gathered above the rift as the Professor's team unearthed their missing girls, but in the night, in the rarely moving cross of floodlights, it was easy to find a shadow. Joanna stood in semi-darkness.
The casualties wore only respirators and shoulder mecha, which hadn't been enough to protect them. Joanna's emotions were too deep to catalogue when the Michaud brought up two torn, bloody corpses, even though these women were lighter in coloring and slimmer than the black-haired Löw. Death had become uncommon in the line culture as they mastered their genetic codes, and violence was unknown, and Joanna could not have been less prepared for gore and bone.
In some odd way she felt honored, even calm.
Hel trembled beside her. Hel was gripped by a more primal reaction, and yet the Michaud and the Suhoza seemed to share Joanna's mood, carrying the bodies with slow grace.
Standing in the shadows was no protection, of course. Louise and Katarine found Joanna by homing on the signal generated by her implant.
As the two seniors approached, Hel left Joanna's side before anyone spoke, desperate for whatever physical contact could be had despite their armor. "Line," Hel murmured. Louise and Katarine both repeated the greeting, embracing her.
Joanna joined them a moment too late and worried again at this visible mistake.
"Walk with us to your find," Louise said.
"I—" Hel was still shaking. When she moved her head from side to side, no, it looked like a larger spasm.
The slightest of glances passed between Louise and Katarine. Then Katarine brought Hel closer to herself, both calming her and turning her away from Joanna.
"I'll show you," Joanna said quietly. She didn't want to leave the group, but judgment was inevitable.
Their foursome split. Hel and Katarine stayed near the Michaud as Louise and Joanna walked away. Underbellies split open with lights, two spiders paced ahead of them, slaved to their movements. One dazzling array of floodlights loped forward smoothly but the other jerked and then swayed as Joanna looked back at the group of human silhouettes gathered in bent, heavy postures of mourning.
#
More spiders hunched above Hel's find, mapping the chaotic sediment layers but not digging. The lines did not, could not, trust machines so completely.
A culture that had survived only by tinkering with its very biology was also one intensely sensitive to change. They could be as hostile towards it as their own hyper-immune systems were towards infection. With a total population of six thousand, her line allowed no room for difference — or freedom.
Joanna walked after Louise cautiously, not trying to protect her strained hip but so steeped in thought that each step was a great process. She recounted each of her failings today, her head swarming with memory and regret.
Their line-mother had celebrated Joanna's childhood skills as a gardener, encouraging her to experiment with otherwise useless blossoms because doing so increased her knowledge of selection and breeding. That had been the start of Joanna's ambition, but always the lesson was one of care and control.
Always the line sought to preempt risk to itself.
Joanna's reverie broke as Louise led her into the midst of the spiders. The robots' long, multi-jointed shapes had never seemed menacing before. Joanna shivered and glanced away but still there were no stars, only the cloud cover. Her apprehension quieted again into something more rueful.
Violence was unknown to the line, yet nonviable members were recycled, whether in fetal screenings or much later, because breeder-like traits persisted among them and must be pruned away.
If earning this job had also been a winnowing of those with anti-social tendencies — if leaving the creche was a test that Joanna had failed by succeeding — she didn't want anything other than her fate. Yes, it would be cruel to kill her now. It was also right. And yet she'd cost the line so much training! Couldn't she still be useful somehow?
Louise stopped beside the nexus spider and said, "I'm going to allocate your find to the Michaud."
Joanna hesitated, caught between hope and terror.
"It's the proper action," Louise said. "It's because of them that we found this batch." Louise watched her closely, aware of her tension. "You haven't patched in."
The deeper link would be her truth. Joanna took the hand that Louise extended, a symbolic joining only, metal glove in glove. Then she tapped her implant—
The nexus spider collated information from all the others much like a line-senior directing her mates. Compilation imaging showed three thousand, three hundred and eighteen Sealies in the main body of this vein, balled up and bag
ged together by the dozens. Another ninety-one had been scattered as far as ten meters by the tidal grinding of the earth.
It was a superior find, no doubt from a hospital or nursery, and easily worth Joanna's life. On an average day they were glad to recover just five or six diapers from household garbage, most of which were badly degraded and worthless.
Fortunately, Sealies had been a dominant brand throughout the twenty-first century. The synthetics used were almost ideal. Old media advertised Sealies as ultra leak-proof, fluid and odor absorbent, each one stamped with the distinctive logo of a blue, grinning seal.
The breeder civilization had discarded the feces and urine of their infants in such packets by the trillions. The population had been impossibly bloated until the pandemics — and here was their pre-contagion genetic treasure, sheathed in white plastic and polycotton filaments grayed with age and mold. Only one in thousands had been mummified by the heat of the rotting landfill, fused with the plastic or otherwise preserved in ways that the line could extract viable DNA, but the poor yield had never deterred them from their hunt. Pre-plague samples were necessary both to reestablish diversity and to further develop superior immunities, intelligence, and life spans.
There were safer places to dig than alongside the California sea, but before the pandemics, this region had been host to an unusual blend of ethnic groups from across the globe. The landfills here were richer because of it.
Joanna's pride was what Louise singled out among her tangle of emotions. "You were excellent today," Louise said, continuing to hold her hand.
Surprised, Joanna flexed, muscle memory betraying the secret of her Diamond. "But the things I've felt..."
"You were better than Hel, tougher and more alert."
"Those are the hallmarks of breeder thinking," Joanna insisted, giddy with relief and love and, still, a razor of guilt.
Louise smiled. "You've been telling yourself too many ghost stories," she said. "It's okay. You're okay. It happens to all of us here, especially because of the implants. Most of what you were feeling was ours."