by MadMaxAU
Carl finished, puffing, his breath spurting cotton clouds in the cold air. Saul regarded him silently, his face lined and more than middle aged in the harsh phosphorescent glare. A long silence passed between them and Carl calmed down, began to regret .... But it was too late.
Saul poked at the caked sealant. “This wasn’t why you called me out here. You asked me to volunteer for the Newburn rescue. Very well. I volunteer. I don’t have to eat any of this chazerei”
He cast off awkwardly, heading back toward Central. As he coasted, still looking back at Carl, hip words game in the chilled quiet: “It’s really Virginia, isn’t it?”
And Carl knew that it was.
He came into the Rec and Lounge cylinder with a sour, tired weight pulling him down. The grav wheel had been one of the last items transferred from the Edmund. It was always depressing coming in from near zero G into a centrifugal G field, for several reasons. Even in a big wheel, there were Coriolis forces that set your reflexes off, induced a mild veering nausea. After a day in near-zero, where the slightest tug was important, you couldn’t walk without feeling the misaligned forces. Halley’s spin always pushed you slightly to the left.
But the worst of it was the simplest: you had been an eagle, and were now a groundhog.
So Carl was not in a warm mood when he met the Ortho. The man’s name, Linbarger, was stenciled on his crew over alls.
“Don’t sit there,” he said as Carl eased into a recliner.
“Huh? Why not?”
“Got a friend coming.”
“Plenty of room.”
“Not for some there isn’t.”
Carl put down his drink. “You’re just out of the slots, so I’ll take that as a sign of the drugs not wearing off yet.”
Linbarger had all the slot symptoms. He was a thin stub end of a man, all skin and bones and no meat. The slots gradually used up your stored fat because the body was still running, only at an exponentially reduced level. But Linbarger must have been thin to start with. His head was long and narrow, set on a chicken neck with a knotty Adam’s apple. His face was all nose and cheekbones. His watery gray eyes were set deep in the skull, the jaw round and hard.
“My friend, he’s just been unslotted, too. And I’d just as soon neither of us sat next to a Percell.”
“Oh, really?” Carl said with mock concern.
“So clear off.”
Linbarger wasn’t awakened for the rendezvous, so he’s not mentally adjusted from Earthside ideas, Carl thought. Okay, I’ll allow for that. Some. “Look, things are tough enough around here without you being a jackass.”
Linbarger rose and knotted his fists. “Don t breathe on me, Percell, or I’ll—“
“Oh, it’s my bad breath? Sorry, I didn’t bring any mouthwash from Earthside.”
“You know what I mean. It’s the damned germs you’re carrying.”
Carl snorted derisively. “The microbes are in the ice, not in us. “
Linbarger’s face took on a sour, cynical cast. “I’ve been out of the slots three days, reviewing what’s happened—and you can’t fool me. Normal people have died twice as often as you Percells.”
“So?” Carl had heard something about that from Virginia, but in the confusion and long hours of these last two weeks it had meant nothing. Just another piece of data.
“You Percells are using this to take over the expedition.” Linbarger announced it as a known fact. Heads turned at other tables. Carl noticed Lani Nguyen get up, concern knitting her face, and start toward them, but another Ortho put a restraining hand on her shoulder.
“That’s what you think?”
“We all do—those of us normal people who have come out of the slots. We know it. You can’t pull the wool—“
“Spare me.” Carl said, lifting his hands. There was no such plot—who the hell had time to think about such things? —but how could he convince Linbarger of that?
Across the curve of the cylinder he saw Lieutenant Colonel Ould-Harrad. He called, “Sully!”
The black man approached, compensating for the Coriolis twist with an easy stride, a drink in his hand.
“I was hoping you could straighten this guy out,” Carl said. “He’s going around saying that it’s us, the Percells, who’re— “
“I know,” Ould Harrad said abruptly.
Carl nodded, relieved. Ould Harrad hadn’t been out of the slots for long. He had been called up for service when Major Lopez had sickened in hours and been slotted. Ould Harrad wasn’t working in the tunnels all day; he would have time to keep on top of this political crap. Carl could turn all this over to him.
But then Ould Harrad looked uncomfortable, his broad face converging on an unwelcome topic by lowering the thick eyebrows and pulling the wide mouth up into an expression of sorrowful, vexed concern. “I believe you people should pay attention to what Linbarger says. He points out difficult facts.”
“But he’s warping them, making— “
“The source hardly matters. Consider the implications.”
Carl was stunned. “What . . . what implications?”
“We need more protection against the diseases.”
Carl said, “Well, of course we do, but—“
“No. You do not understand. We do—we normal people. Especially.”
“Oh . . . So it’s going to be that way?”
Ould Harrad looked at Carl grimly, ignoring Linbarger’s eager nodding. “Heaven forfend, it already is that way. Unless normal people feel they are protected against these diseases by isolation, by more care—then they can see only one outcome.”
“What?”
“You Percells will come to run the entire expedition. There will not be enough other people alive to oppose you.” The African spoke with a calm earnestness, free of aggression and all the more striking because of his powerful frame. He had the impressive calm of those whose strong religious convictions inform their every word.
“That…we don’t intend that,” Carl finished lamely.
“No matter.” The brown eyes held sadness. “Many believe that is what will happen.”
“Look, I called you over to quiet down this guy, this Linbarger. I—“
“It’s not for the likes of you to shut me up,” Linbarger said hotly. “If you think you can, I’d be glad to—“
“No, no,” Ould Harrad said sternly, raising a hand toward Linbarger. “Please be quiet now.”
“But he—“
“Please.” Ould Harrad silenced Linbarger with his ministerial presence.
Carl thought hotly, It might be fun to bash Linbarger around a little. Bad for him, but good therapy for me. Better than all this talk, anyway.
He said, “I certainly didn’t think you’d back up Linbarger! These guys are using hypochondria to get back into the slots. And all this Ortho nonsense— “
“You see?” Ould Harrad said. “You have your own name for us.”
“So? You call us Percells.”
“We need no special name. We are the normal people—the human race.”
“And we’re not?”
“I . . . I did not say that.”
“You intended it! You probably think we don’t have souls.”
The black man shook his head mournfully. “That issue is in the hands of the omnipotent. The point remains that we are different.”
“Yeah, and you’ve got renegade Arcists and worn out Zionists and Salawites— “ Carl noticed Ould Harrad wince. “But you all stick up for each other around us, huh?”
Ould Harrad said mildly, “We must struggle to balance the viewpoints of all.”
Carl had never been good with words, did not have the easy, oily skills of an administrator, and he had no magic way to get through to Linbarger, or to Ould Harrad. All this endless talk! He gritted his teeth in irritation, stood, and left without another word.
SAUL
Not paying attention, Saul thought. That was our basic mistake, these last few centuries. Nature flowering an
d bursting with life all around us, and we never paid enough respectful attention.
He was waiting for the others to arrive in sleep slot 1, trying to rest in these few free moments. Avoiding thinking about the daily slot meeting, about to start.
You’d think we’d have caught on with the limestone business. He smiled wanly. Only blue green Earth burgeoned with life. And Earth had proved to be the only planet with an oxygen atmosphere, thick, yet transparent enough to let excess heat escape. It had taken generations to realize that the latter fact did not cause the former. No, it was the other way around. Life . . .trillions of tiny cells in the early days of Earth, had pulled the carbon out of the primordial atmosphere and stored it in their bodies, which silted to the ocean floor and became limestone beds . . . changing the air itself in the process.
Science was still fumbling with the notion that life might be driver in the evolution of worlds, rather than a simple passive passenger, shoved about by the rude winds of astronomical fate. After the bleak vistas of Venus and Mars, scientists still assumed that minute changes in planetary mass or distance from the sun made life impossible. Like all the others, he had ignored the possibility that life had spawned in comets. It had tailored this ice mote, too, carving caverns and spreading seeds.
A tiny Gaea . . . a self regulating ecosphere scaled in ice, revived when the sun’s licking warmth came to briefly banish the long night . . . and perhaps trillions of others, too, swooping in from the far dark . . . He would have to mull that one over, if he ever got a spare second . . . .
“My, how serene.” Virginia’s lilting, affectionate sarcasm cut through his musing.
“Um? No, just my ritual worrying.” He sat up, feeling dull aches rearrange themselves in his legs and back, even in the faint gravity.
Virginia sat beside him on the narrow bench that was the only furniture in sleep slot 1’s observing room. In the pale enameled light he studied her with wonder. She was trim and sure, her milky green pullover covering but not concealing a flat stomach, breasts hard and high, a muscular calm. The septic certainty of the room numbed his senses, but she redeemed that with a soft warming presence, calling up memories of humid, spice laden Hawaiian air. Yet she likens herself to her machines, cool and cyborg certain. How wrong!
The quiet comfort of being with her reminded him of other days, of cramped apartments, gas flames licking the dark as friends talked far into the night, meals of peppery meats and crisp onions, an enfolding sense of an enduring natural order—
He cut off the thought. Nostalgia clutched him sweetly with hollow, fuzzy fingers whenever he let it, and this was most certainly not the time.
Virginia said lightly, “You look like something the cat dragged in.” She scratched the back of his neck.
“You can’t turn my head with mere compliments.” He rubbed his eyes. “Besides, we have no cat.”
“Lucky we didn’t thaw the pets right away. Or would they be susceptible?”
“Of course. These viroids love lung tissue—I suspect some spread through the air.”
“So Spot and Fluffy would buy the farm, too.”
“Definitely.”
He did not mention that he and Matsudo had thawed some rabbits and monkeys already—had to, for tests of new treatments. Of course the poor creatures had to be sacrificed. He had never been able to do that without a twinge of guilt. Yet you chose to be a biologist.
She looked out through the transparent wall, to where several suited figures labored over pale, waxy bodies. “If we could just stop the stuff from spreading! Particularly that green gunk climbing the walls—it gives me the shivers.”
“I suspect the algoids and lichenoids aren’t the true danger.”
“They’re spreading so fast!”
“There are so many variants, it’s difficult to control them even with the microwaves. But we’re making progress.”
She wrinkled her nose. “The stuff smells.”
An introspective, distant smile creased his leathery skin. “Aesthetics come later. If ever.”
Virginia frowned. “Do you think you’re learning . . . well . . . fast enough?”
“My father always said that life was like giving a violin concert while you are learning the instrument.”
She grinned. “And while everyone you care bout is watching.”
“Quite so.” He was aware that Virginia was trying to cheer him up, but a more sunny smile would not do it. He was familiar with his own moods, the fitful depressions that had come more regularly these last few years.
Not that he did not have ample cause now, of course. With more self-knowledge than he would have liked, he understood his own brooding as another evasion. Ever since the fall of Jerusalem, he had found it far easier to meditate, to pontificate, than to throw himself fully into the raw world, to feel all its stings and scrapes. He still needed the security of his emotional calluses.
Virginia had seen his mood. She put her hand in his and said softly, “I know. . . “ He squeezed her hand. “If there’s anything—“
“Get this straightened out,” a thin man said loudly as he came into the room with Suleiman Ould Harrad. “Damned if I’ll let them play the angles while we sit on our asses.”
Linbarger nodded toward them, his lean face self involved. “I figure it’s obvious—we’ve got to keep normal people on top, where they can see everything’s run right. We can’t let the Percells move up! If the casualty rate keeps on this way, they’ll outnumber us, maybe even two to one. Unless we hold the commanding positions, they’ll make every decision, run right over our interests.”
Ould Harrad looked embarrassed. “I will have to confer— “
“No conferring to it! This is an executive decision, you have to do it. Start taking a vote and we’ll be goners.”
Saul grimaced. “Is this what it sounds like?”
Linbarger turned, hands on hips. “I’m trying to make sure our people don’t lose control of the situation “
“Our people?”
“Right. You heard? Oakes has that sky high fever, the one that fries the brain in a couple hours. She’s going into a slot right away.”
Saul said, “Oh damn,” and sat down. Maybe I should’ve spent more time in sick bay. I might’ve made a difference. . .
“Someone has to do the research,” Virginia whispered, as if reading his thoughts.
Bethany Oakes had been barely adequate in these last few days, but at least she had been the obvious successor to Miguel Cruz. Continuity was important.
After Major Lopez was slotted, skin half-gnawed away by some slimy fungus, Ould-Harrad had been pulled…and now dropped into a command position no one could envy. The tall, rangy black man had never been more than the nominally senior of the five section heads. He carried no cachet of command. Certainly the dour African had not been selected for his skill at balancing political forces and quieting clever loudmouths.
Linbarger nodded, licking his lips. “Pretty fine mess, huh? It’s either the fever or the chills with the blue spots all over you, or else that shaking thing—all of ‘em fatal.”
“I believe I’ve isolated the agent that causes the chilling disease,” Saul said quietly. “A vaccine should take only a few days. The skin infections show signs of vulnerability to microwave— “
“But there’re eight or ten diseases already!” Linbarger shouted. “And that’s just the ones we know of. That we can spot easily.”
Saul looked into the man’s pinched, anxious face and read there something that felt like a cold draft let into the room.
“There are some promising measures for the rest. That’s all I can tell you right now.” He glanced at Ould Harrad. Take the wind out of this fellow’s sails, Saul thought, as if to will the African into action. But Ould Harrad remained impassive, eyes distant, his arms folded across his broad chest.
Linbarger seemed to feel he was gaining momentum, winning an argument. He looked at the two men, ignoring Virginia. “With Lominatze out there
getting iced” —he pointed at the transparent wall— “and Byrnes and Matsudo headed there before long, that means Percells are going to be running both Power Systems and Tunnels and Gases.”
Saul said formally to Ould Harrad, “May I ask why Dr. Linbarger is at this meeting?”
The tall black man’s face took on a wary, diplomatic cast. “I felt each, ah, faction in the crew should be represented in making slotting decisions.”
“Yeah,” Linbarger said. “That’s why she’s here.”
Saul looked at Virginia. “Oh? You came at Ould Harrad’s request?”
She nodded. “I was free. Most Percells are either asleep or working in the tunnels. Or sick,” she added pointedly.
“I’m taking a risk just being in the same room with her,” Linbarger muttered.
“No one’s assigned vectors for most of the diseases,” Saul said carefully, restraining his rising irritation. “There’s no reason to believe the genetically augmented people carry anything.”
“Just because they’re immune doesn’t mean they can’t be carriers,” Linbarger said. “I know that much.”
“There is no correlation—“Saul began, and then realized no scientific discussion was going to reach the man. “Look. We need to learn more, and that means cooperating with every— “
“Pretty soon they’ll be giving us orders! If—“
“Shut,” Saul said precisely. “Up.”
Linbarger frowned, puzzled, plainly feeling betrayed. “You’re a biologist, you know three of us get these diseases for every one of them.”
“Then thaw out more Orthos,” Virginia said cuttingly. “Swell your ranks.”
“And see most of them die?” Linbarger whirled toward her, fists clenched. “You know a man fresh out of the slots is more vulnerable to these bugs!” Linbarger glared at her, but was obviously playing to Ould-Harrad.