by Audrey Faye
“We specialize in symbiosis, in engineering species for cooperation and co-dependence.” John Bastur leaned forward, as if suddenly realizing his job as tour guide risked being usurped. “We seek to build terraforming species that can work well together with native life forms.”
Planetary colonization—with respect. I very much supported their goals, even if it didn’t appear to be something they put into practice in their own lives. This cafeteria could have done with a good injection of communal ethos.
Not what I’d come here to fix, but it grated all the same. Human beings are wired to connect, to love, to be a part of something greater. I looked at Glenn and Toli, heads close together in quiet, animated conversation. The ingredients for community lived here, and whatever my stated mission was, I’d be giving those ingredients a push. It was more than how I worked—it was who I was.
I took a bite of my food and tried to keep an open mind. I’d barely begun to explore Xirtaxis Minor—now was the time to be collecting first impressions, not coming to conclusions. And probably not the time to be ignoring the two people in charge, either. I swallowed hastily and turned my attention back to John Bastur. “Tell me about the problems you’ve been having.”
“I believe it was all in our report,” he said smoothly. His wife stiffened beside him.
The report had been a wealth of bland sentences with very little meaning. “I read your briefing, but I always prefer to hear directly from the people who have their finger on the pulse of things.”
I didn’t miss Toli’s discreet eye roll—or John’s chest quietly puffing up. The quintessential bureaucrat, happy to be seen as important. He glanced at Mary Louise. “It was Glenn who first brought the pattern to our attention.”
Gordie was back to scowling. “I’m not convinced anything is going on. Just some people who are weak in the head.”
By believing so, he was weakening his own community and their ability to solve this. His voice was loud enough that I could see the surrounding tables reacting—and there were a lot of uncomfortable shuffles. Not everyone agreed with the folks at the head table.
Which meant that if I wanted to get a read on what was really going on, I needed to head underground.
I looked across the table at Toli. “Mind if I drop by the labs in the morning?”
She looked a little surprised, but nodded. “Sure thing. I’m there by skybreak. Ask anyone, they’ll know where to find me.”
It would give me a place to start, even if I was already betting that the labs weren’t where this would end. I’d place the rest of my bets after I did some thinking.
And took another pass through Glenn’s files.
10
Strange, dark, black. And not.
Couldn’t see, could never see.
Wind on my cheeks, too cool, too hot. Stirrings. Needs. Yearnings.
Feet that refused to move. Stuck in cool darkness, potent dim. Offers of nourishment.
I didn’t want food.
Fingertips yearning for the sky, the color, the bright. Hot edges. Too long in the sky, not enough cool.
Needing different. Desiring new.
Skin too tight, a world too small. Breath that is never quite enough.
Seen, but not seen.
No one understands.
I could feel myself waking up. Cranky, groggy, shuddering as the experience of other slithered off into the dark night air.
The details evaporated even as I tried to chase them.
Skin too tight. Breath not enough.
All that remained was feeling. Far too much of it, and not mine. Fractious, hot resonances.
No one understands.
My scientist brain knew that I had just gotten a front-row seat to the little problem happening here on Xirtaxis Minor.
The rest of me, aching with the residues of interrupted sleep and the energies that had crashed into it, wasn’t ready to analyze anything yet.
I stumbled to my feet in the dark, knowing exactly what I did need, and cursing the travel lag that was doubling the gravitational pull of my bed. I managed to make it out of my quarters without walking into a wall—barely.
Scrubbing my eyes with my fists, I lurched into the dimly lit hall and tried to pull up a map in my head. I would sleep again, and soon—but first I needed to shed skin that felt too tight.
-o0o-
There were two places I went when I woke up hard, and since a warm pair of arms wasn’t something I knew how to find here yet, I’d gone for the other option.
I sighed in gratitude as the first set of doors to experimental dome Alpha slid silently open when I approached. Apparently Mary Louise Bastur hadn’t revoked the access she’d very grudgingly given me after dinner. I’d known I would need to wander freely—I just hadn’t realized I’d be doing it in the middle of the night.
I stood patiently as the air intakes did a basic job of giving me a vacuuming.
My chakras felt jostled, disconnected. Kind of like how I generally felt while in a tin can on an interstellar journey. Not how I’d expected to feel in a biome with plenty of very nice dirt.
The doors on the other end of the small decon area opened, and I stepped out, tugged by air that finally smelled right.
The first visuals were stunning.
The dome, on a different diurnal cycle than the main habitat, was just shifting to skydusk, shading the light in the grays and pinks and pearls of the inside of an oyster shell. Gorgeous, understated backdrop to an organic, architectural wonderland. A garden exquisitely planned—and so delightfully random that it teased you to believe it might have been born that way.
I took two careful steps off the pathway into a bed of orange and yellow. Some kind of California poppy hybrid, cheerful and clearly better behaved than its wildly spreading Earth ancestor.
This wasn’t remotely what I’d expected. From Gordie’s description, I’d expected to find dirt and plants subsumed to scientific progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was order here, and beauty, and a sense of timeless presence. Plants were likely rotated in and out of this garden on a very regular basis, but the overall resonance was one of harmony, permanence, and productive peace.
It told me more about the man who had created it than meeting him ever had. Which was important, because I’d spent some time before I’d gone to sleep digging into the personnel and incident files again, and I’d placed my bets squarely on Dr. Salmera and his experimental domes.
Now I was going to have to go revise those bets.
I could see here what I hadn’t seen in the cafeteria. A beautiful, interdependent community. It told me two things. First, whatever was wrong on Xirtaxis Minor, I couldn’t believe it came from here. The dreams and behaviors were damaging, hurting a tribe that was already pretty darn dysfunctional. No plant that grew in a garden like this would be causing that.
And whatever I might have felt from Jerome Salmera over dinner, a man who could create this was good people.
I didn’t know yet why he wore so many masks, but my gut, drinking in the tranquil beauty around me, said that I needed to look somewhere else for the roots of the problem. An unhappy underling, maybe, or a project gone wrong.
In the morning, I’d find Toli and tour the labs. Until then, I needed to catch some sleep—the kind without any dream invaders.
Fortunately, I had just the potion for that—and now I had enough peace of mind to use it.
I thanked the dirt I hadn’t even touched, and turned to go. I would be back.
11
I yawned as I exited the lab decontamination chamber and pulled on the universal white lab coat over my skinsuit. I’d worn a bright purple one this morning, hoping it would help keep my eyelids from falling accidentally shut. Nocturnal walks in the garden were a pretty normal part of my repertoire—staying up for two hours afterward meditating and reinforcing a set of energy barriers in my room wasn’t, however. I was pretty sure my dreams would be uninterrupted moving forward, but it had c
ost me a lot of REM cycles.
However, missions didn’t go on hold just because Fixers were tired—and I was also very curious. I’d encountered a lot of intriguing resonances yesterday, and my scientist brain was ready to get to work. Carefully. Without spooking the locals.
I ambled slowly along the corridor that seemed to connect most of the labs. Some had the walls and seals of facilities that did delicate or environmentally sensitive work. Others were open to the corridor and burbled with the sleepy sounds of scientists and their experiments slowly waking up.
I noted a lab shelf sitting oddly empty—site of one of the most recent antisocial incidents, and one of the few that had taken place in the lab. Beakers tended to have a pretty short life, but they didn’t usually die in a fit of someone’s temper.
I imagined Toli would have the shelves filled again shortly. She didn’t seem the type to leave unattended wounds on her turf, even minor ones.
The rest of the shelves were interesting too, but for a different reason. Unlike the relatively low-tech gardens, the labs bristled with state-of-the art gadgetry. I could identify some of the obvious gizmos for gene splicing or chemical analysis. Others were the basic scopes and beakers and burners of labs everywhere. But a fair amount of it was mystifying, and I considered myself a pretty decent gadgetry geek.
I turned a neat ninety-degree corner and felt the smoldering lab tech before I saw him. He exuded an energy that was hard to miss—especially when he noticed me ambling into his territory. Clearly I was his type.
I kept walking. A Grower with her Talent turned on was anybody’s type. We know that attraction has everything to do with energy, and not nearly as much to do with externals as most people think. Or rather, the right energy can make any externals zing.
This lab tech would hardly be the first person in my career who had wanted to check out the mythos of Growers for themselves, but the level of intensity behind it had me thoughtful again. In healthy tribes, sexual energies got routed in useful and satisfying ways—not left smoldering behind lab benches.
Whatever else was going on here, Xirtaxis Minor had a pretty defective community. I wasn’t sure yet whether that was the cause of the troubles I’d been sent to investigate or just part of the reason why they hadn’t solved it themselves, but either way, it was something I intended to lean on before I left.
Lightbodies work the soil, always.
I turned corner number two in my transit of the lab’s square and found myself in the greenest section of research I’d encountered so far. Lots of growing things, although many of them were clearly in various stages of careful plotting, measurement, and dissection.
I stopped to peer at a shallow, wide planter bed that looked like a battlefield. Splotches of a tiny plant with sharp red spikes were clearly invading the short, stumpy grass that covered most of the planter. I thought back to the dinner conversation of the previous night and looked over at the tech who had just approached me. “Testing for invasive species?”
She nodded cheerfully and turned on a switch that cast a square grid of light beams over the planter bed. “Yup. This little spiky guy’s a right bastard—takes over every damn thing. But if we can get him modified a stitch, he’s super good at terraforming. Doesn’t take shit from anybody’s soil micro-organisms. We just need him to do it without beating up on all the native greenery.”
I grinned—she clearly loved both her work and the feisty bully of a plant she worked with. “Have you tried selenium in the soil enrichments?”
She raised a surprised eyebrow. “We did. Helps quite a bit for about half a rotation, and then the little bugger adapts.” Her eyes twinkled. “And you really don’t want to see what he does when he’s mad.”
I could only imagine. I reached a careful finger toward one of the spiky clumps. “Is it okay to touch?”
“Sure.” She leaned over, watching my finger. “You’re the Grower, right?”
I assumed scuttlebutt would have gotten that word around already—there likely weren’t all that many strangers wandering into the labs at the crack of dawn. “I am. You can call me Tee if you like.” I touched the spikes, which were just as prickly as they looked, and could feel the fearless spread-out-or-die mantra in every cell of the plant. “You’ve got your work cut out trying to modify this guy.”
“Tell me about it.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m Veronica, by the way. Everyone calls me Nikki. I’m the lowly beaker washer, and the one who gets to run counts by hand when Toli gets her knickers in a twist.”
More points for Toli. “The machine counts won’t see what your eyes will.”
Nikki grinned. “That’s what Toli says.”
I opened my mouth to offer to help count, and saw Nikki’s face shift. Gone was the friendly, talkative tech—and in her place, a low-level lab rat with a neutral expression, downcast eyes, and two hands on her tablet.
She reminded me oddly of a chameleon I’d seen once.
I turned around to see what surroundings she’d just shifted to match—and saw Jerome Salmera crossing the floor with a pleasant smile on his face.
That was interesting, and too good an opportunity to miss. I reached out a hand and briefly touched Nikki’s forearm. “Thank you for the explanation of your work.”
“Veronica is one of our best techs.” The complicated, charismatic scientist had arrived at my shoulder, and spoke quickly enough that I caught a flash of Nikki’s reaction before I lifted my hand away.
Adulation, almost. And a touch of fear.
That didn’t fit the man who had built the garden I visited last night, but it did fit the one standing in front of me now. King of his domain, and Nikki was just one of his peons.
“Good morning, Dr. Salmera.” I held out a hand in greeting, curious if he would take it. I wanted another reading.
He turned smoothly, as if he hadn’t seen my gesture. “Call me Jerome, please. Why don’t you come this way and I’ll take you in to some of our most experimental work. I think you’ll find it interesting.”
Nikki raised a surprised eyebrow.
Apparently I hadn’t been relegated to peon status. He wasn’t the person I’d come to find, but I could be flexible. I winked and waved goodbye to Nikki and her prickly marauder, and then shifted to join Jerome in a walk down the hallway, turning up the radar on my Talent as I did so. I wouldn’t pick up nearly as much as Kish without physical contact, but it added a layer to what my eyes could see.
He started up a monologue as we walked—the fairly meaningless babble of a tour guide, and not a particularly engaged one.
Curious glances flicked our way as we passed by, and then people went quietly and efficiently back to work. Which was just plain weird—back home, the labs were a riot of half-yelled conversations and teasing and the oddball camaraderie that happened when you stared into a scope or babysat beakers for way too many hours a day.
Work happened—but life happened too.
Not here, or at least not while the great Dr. Salmera was walking by. A similar vibe to the cafeteria last night, but with adulation glossed on top. Jerome was a star here. And however little attention he appeared to be paying to the peons, I was quite sure he was soaking it all in.
Which didn’t fit at all with the man who had designed last night’s gardens, and that was an inconsistency my Talent didn’t like. I still didn’t know what lived in this man’s cells, and my gut was back to thinking he was a key player in what was happening here on Xirtaxis Minor.
Time to get underneath his many masks. “So, why did you choose to work with experimental species?”
He looked surprised that I’d formed actual words. “I had a talent for it. I did my graduate studies in genetic engineering, but I appreciate the opportunity here to be hands-on.”
I wasn’t paying a lot of attention as he finished his answer. We’d turned yet another corner, and there were green, growing things as far as my eyes could see. I smiled, hearing the message they delivered loud and clear. The heart
of the man beside me lived here too. These were growing beds, and very carefully tended ones. “These will all transfer to your gardens?”
“I hope so.”
I hid my smile. Under all the masks, this man was a gardener—and I knew how to work with that. I laid a hand on the nearest leafy head of soft green, letting my fingers hear. “This one is fragile, scared of having neighbors.” I reached for the variegated purple leaves interspersed in the same planting bed. “Ah, you’ve found it a nursemaid.” A subtle and wise pairing.
His eyebrows went up. “You’re very skilled.”
I was, but most people in the wild wouldn’t know that from so few words. Dr. Salmera knew more about Growers than he was letting on. I gestured toward another planter, this one with five or six different species intermixed. “May I?”
He hesitated a moment. “That one is in the very early experimental stages. There’s a lot of work to do yet.”
My fingers itched to feel. I held out my hands wordlessly, letting him see my interest. My compassion. One gardener, revealing herself to another.
He finally nodded.
I moved very gently this time. Brushing heads. Reading the whole before I swam down into the parts.
It wasn’t as clunky as I’d expected. Seven different species signatures, and three of them were already playing quite nicely together. Two of the others had cells that were still confused by very new DNA. I sank in a little deeper there, and smiled. Gene splicing was tricky business, especially when it tried to shift thousands of years of history. This had been done by someone with a skilled and compassionate hand. I turned my head, seeking eye contact with the man those hands belonged to. “The splicing is lovely. This is a tricky mix, but you’ve given them some clever new tools to work with.”
Something in his face softened and opened. “They can’t pick up and move like we can, so they have to adapt. Learn to live well with their neighbors.”
That was a pretty decent strategy for mobile species too, but I kept my mouth shut. The door into understanding Jerome Salmera had just cracked open, and I wanted in.