by MadMaxAU
“No, you won’t. The subsystems will shut down those lines as soon as we start up. It’s automatic—says so right in the blueprints.”
Damn. “That’s not the way it’ll work.” Bluff.
“Don’t try that crap on me.”
Linbarger was smarter than Carl had thought. But he wasn’t going to win.
“You’ll never get back Earthside. You’re low on tritium as it is. I’ll blow enough of it to make sure you have a long voyage. You’ll never pick up the delta V for a Jupiter carom. Even with the sleep slots, you’ll starve.”
“We’ve got the hydroponics.”
“Sure. And no extra water to run it.”
“There’s Halley ice right outside.”
“Try stepping outside.” Carl played a hunch “Hey—Jeffers! What happened to that Arcist I blew out the lock?”
—What Arcist? All I see is bits ‘n pieces. —
Silence.
This tit for tat couldn’t go on much longer. Linbarger’s voice was getting thin, hollow sounding. The man’s words came too fast, spurting out under pressure.
Carl bunched his jaw muscles, wondering if he believed his own words. If Linbarger acted, it would be a matter of seconds. Carl would have to choose whether to launch himself for the aft hatch and try to get away, or to use the wrenches. No time for dithering . . .
“You’re lying.” Linbarger didn’t sound so certain now.
“Fuck you.”
“You wouldn’t
“I’m starting tritium release now.”
“No!” Ould Harrad said. “I won’t have it come to this. We had a deal worked out— “
“And you double crossed us! Percell lover!” Linbarger barked.
Ould Harrad said, “I couldn’t let that hydroponics equipment go, you refused to understand that.”
Carl said caustically, “Don’t apologize to that scum.”
“Carl,” Ould Harrad said, “I must ask you to stop— “
“The party’s over,” Carl said. “Surrender, Linbarger!”
“I think I’ll give you a little pulse of the hot stuff, Osborn. It might improve your manners.”
“The second I hear a gurgle through these pipes, you Arcist prick, I’ll— “
“Stop it! Both of you! We have to work this out.” The African’s voice was frantic.
A long silence. Carl tried to imagine what was going through Linbarger’s mind. The man had apparently concealed from the Psych Board his fanatical hatred of Percells. Or maybe he’d just snapped. Could he think around that now, be halfway rational?
They’ve lost, dammit. Could Linbarger see that? Or would he prefer his moment of revenge?
And Carl would know of it by a whispering in the pipes…
“Okay.” Linbarger’s voice was grating, sour.
Ould Harrad answered, “What? You agree?”
“We’ll trade the hydro for the tritium and slots.”
“No!” Carl cried. “We have them!”
“Quiet, Osborn!” Ould Harrad shouted.
“The alternative,” Linbarger said slowly, “is that I blow up the Edmund Halley. Better . . . all of us here agree . . . better a quick end . . . than . . .”
Carl felt a cold chill at the croaking, slurred, mad voice. It was utterly convincing. He really means it. “Sweet Jesus,” Carl muttered.
First his captain, dead. Now the Edmund.
Ould Harrad spoke at last. “We . . . we will make the exchange.”
What is a spacer without a spaceship? Carl wondered numbly. What will we be, when the Edmund is gone? It was too awful to even think of.
“You can offload the hydro stuff,” Linbarger said. “Get Osborn out of there and I’ll set the mechs to doing it.”
“No. I stay here until it’s done.”
Another silence. “Well . . .” More whispered arguing. Finally, “Okay. You can use those mechs to detach the main greenhouse module as a unit. Make it fast—or we’ll fry that piece of Percell shit.”
Carl let out a long, slow breath. The thought he had suppressed all these long minutes, that kept jabbing him, finally came swarming up: Why are you doing this? You could die, fool.
Now that he let it surface, he had no answer.
“Hurry up,” he said irritably.
SAUL
April 2062
Wriggling, fluttering in a saline solution, the tiny bests flicked here and there, hunting, always hunting.
Certain substances, flavors, drew them to the equivalent of sweetness. Others repelled. The choice was always as easy as that, a logic of trophic chemistry. On the level of the cell, there were no subtleties, no future to worry about. No past to haunt one’s dreams.
Saul was pensive as he watched the tiny creatures pulse under the fiber microscope. They were the last and most potent of the new developments cooked up during the two months since the mutiny. Biological smart bombs for an unwanted war against Comet Halley.
So many of the rules he had lived by—codes of slow caution when experimenting with the stuff of life—had been pushed aside in order to get here. He envied the little microbes, in a way. For they would do as they were programmed, but he, their “creator,” was left with his load of doubt and mystery.
No. Of course you don’t worry, little ones. Guilt is a teamwork thing—a trait of eucaryotic metazoans—vast collections of conspiring cells gathered to form men and women, societies . . . gods.
Look at me, tampering with what I barely understand, on the questionable excuse that all our human lives depend on it.
The cyanutes had fully as much history behind them as he did. Their tiny ancestors had spent well over three billion years evolving
in Earth’s waters. Then, some few millions of years ago, they adapted to take up a different way of life in another salty soup—the bodily fluids of complex creatures with great, nucleated cells.
How many thousands of my own ancestors did they kill in order to establish that first beachhead? How many trillions of them, in turn, were fought off by my forebears’ immune systems—latched onto by antibodies and transported to destruction, or engulfed and digested by white cells? How long did it take for a truce to be called at last . . . for evolution to work out a negotiated peace, a symbiosis ?
It was an unanswerable question. But at some point in the past some human being and some ancestral cyanute struck an accidental bargain. In exchange for a minor cleansing function in the lung cavity, the creatures were granted safe conduct from the body’s immune system. They settled down to an innocuous existence, so innocuous, in fact, that they weren’t even discovered until the waning days of the last century.
In our wisdom, we meddled with them, turning them into “cyanutes.” And, Heaven forgive me, I’m not ashamed at all. A hundred skilled, devoted men and women spent half a decade altering the fruits of four gigayears’ evolution. Given special permission, we used the tools of Simon Percell—and forged a useful thing of beauty.
But this!
The creatures on the screen had been changed even more, given jagged new protein coats, snipped and edited with tailored chain molecules, analyzed and reanalyzed by “reader enzymes” . . . warped by the drives of an emergency nobody had expected.
The job had taken only eight weeks since the mutiny. And, except for Virginia and her biocybernetic familiar, and a few tentative suggestions from brave colleagues on Earth, he had had no help at all.
By all the laws of biology I should not have succeeded. Not without a research team and thousands of hours of careful simulation. Millions of tests. Heaps of luck.
I knew better!
It ‘s a wonder that I even tried.
Saul’s eyes flicked over the unrolling data display, seeing nothing but success. The uniformity of it made him more nervous than any flaw. It was too perfect.
I took both the sample cyanutes and the reader units from my own blood. The data on that line goes back more than five years.
There are elements of Halley Life in the new form .
. . I had to include them.
Saul shook his head. He couldn’t see how that would explain this convenient success.
To the left, one of JonVon’s unbiquitous color simulations turned a complex, jagged chain over and over
The involute compound sugar was unknown in the literature. Last night, while holding Virginia close, he had told her that the Academy on Earth wanted to name it after him.
“That’s quite an honor, isn’t it?” she had asked sleepily. The cable snaking out from her neural tap looked like a braid of hair, and hardly got in the way.
He had smiled and stroked her glossy bangs. “Sure. They’ve reinstated my membership, too. But naming a chemical after me...”
“You don’t want them to?” she had asked.
“Hell, no!” He’d laughed. “Think of poor Thomas Fruck, with his name tied forever to fructose!”
She was too logy and languid from their lovemaking to do more than reach if back and pinch him for the affront of a joke.
SERIOUSLY, I SHOULD SUGGEST A NAME, he subvocalised. By now JonVon knew their surface networks well enough to deliver clear words most of the time. Saul felt her understanding echo back, amplified, the way her sexual fury and climax had confirmed themselves in his own mind a while ago, like explosions trying to lift the surface of his skull.
“Hnmimm,” she mumbled. He could sense her drifting off into slumber.
…COMET OSE . . . came her suggestion.
He had been so offended by the horrible pun that it didn’t even occur to him until later that she must have already been asleep when he heard it.
Whatever its name, the sugar compound was the key . . . the sweetness he had used to forge a gingerbread cannon.
The missing madman, Ingersoll—by now a legend of the lower caverns—had given him the idea. Not long after he had glimpsed the man grazing on Halley lifeforms in the outer hallways, he had done something admittedly foolish; he had tasted some of the wall growth himself.
The stuff had been sweet, tangy, like lemon drops.
Saul played a hunch. Began some experiments. And here they were, the new cyanutes. They were still good at their old jobs, but
now they were also voracious for anything with the special sugar complex . . . for any invader wearing clothes saying “Halley.”
On the screen the tiny creatures clustered where cometary-viroid coat factors flowed from the tip of a needle. Instruments showed them gobbling contentedly and multiplying with abandon.
We were due for some good news.
Oh, the Halleyforms would adapt, evolve. This was not the end by a long shot. But it was starting to look as if the acute panic period might be over at last.
What have I missed? Saul wondered anxiously, perplexed. How was it possible to do it at all?
A chime sounded. Everything checked out. Saul pulled out the tube of fully tested cyanutes. From his lab it was a short glide to sick bay, where two lines of people waited along opposite walls to be served by the two med techs on duty.
One of the queues was shorter than the other, but Saul did not see any Orthos moving over to stand in the Percell line. Ould Harrad should never have let this system of segregation develop.
People did not stand any closer together than they had to. No one was sure how the cometary diseases were transmitted. Fights had broken out over a cough…or over one man using another’s space helmet without permission.
And every sick call turned up several who were faking symptoms, trying to escape the backbreaking work and drop dead sicknesses by fleeing into the slots.
Well, at least the lines are shorter than they were a few months back. First, anger over the mutiny took their minds off things for a while. And Carl Osborn’s heroics had suppressed the Ortho-Percell squabbling. The “norms” all knew they owed their lives to a Percell.
Now, if only these new cyanutes work as well as the first tests indicate . . .
A booth at the back of sick bay opened, and out stepped a woman who smiled and waved at Saul. Marguerite von Zoon looked almost like a different person. Gone were the ravages that were tearing her skin apart two months ago. She had resumed her medical duties, releasing Saul for research.
Saul’s smile dropped when he saw Marguerite’s patient—a younger woman in a gray ship’s suit—who edged past the Walloon physician and hurried away toward the exit holding a cloth to one side of her face. Even turning her head away, she could not completely hide a shimmering, pink rash.
“Lani!” Saul whispered in dismay.
He had hoped that Marguerite’s diagnosis might turn out to be wrong, but there was no mistaking the symptoms of Zipper Pox.
“Lani?” he said, but she hurried by without looking up. These in both lines edged away as she passed.
Oh, Lani.
It was one of those diseases that seemed impervious, so far, to any of the tricks to come out of the lab. Even with his recent string of incredible luck.
It was ironic. While others were fighting to get back into the slots, Lani had begged to stay awake. But the decision was made. Her cooling had already been scheduled for day after tomorrow.
Carl has been a real rat to her, Saul thought. If he isn’t there for Lani’s slotting, I’m going to punch him in the nose.
“Dr. Lintz!”
Keoki Anuenue, the med tech handling the shorter Percell line, stood up as Saul crossed the waiting room. The Hawaiian momentarily left the side of a dull eyed man whose ears were packed with cotton, who slapped the side of his head every few minutes as in vain effort to stop the sound of bells.
Anuenue was exceptional even for a Hawaiian—one of the rare Orthos who seemed completely oblivious to both sickness and despair. He seemed never to sleep. Whenever Saul came in, Keoki was already on duty.
He grinned broadly, gesturing down at the vial in Saul’s hand, anticipation in his voice as he asked, “Is that the latest cyanute varietal, Dr. Lintz?”
He thinks I can do anything. So does Virginia. Saul shrugged. And after the luck I’ve been having, who am I to disagree? It was a sardonic thought. He knew something mysterious was going on, and it had little to do with skill.
He held out the vial.
“Here you are, Keoki. Find volunteers the usual way. Only desperate cases, at first. These ought to be useful against the Node Lodes, as well as Sinus Whinus and the Red Clap.”
Anuenue eagerly took the flask. He started to speak, then somebody in the line along the left wall cut loose in a loud, sudden sneeze.
All around the room, people looked up accusingly. It wasn’t me, this time, Saul felt like disclaiming.
As if it were a trigger, more sneezes erupted from the Ortho side of the chamber. The line lengthened as people put more room between themselves and the miscreants.
Saul glanced at the genetically enhanced group. Percells hardly ever sneezed.
They caught the same diseases as everyone else. Saul had tried to explain this over and over to resentful Orthos. If a viroid or other comet microbe was going to kill outfight, it didn’t matter much which group you belonged to.
But Percells’ bodies did not overreact. Their lymph nodes and membranes might swell while the body’s immune system waged war on invaders, but the process was self limiting. They didn’t balloon up and die of their own overeager defenses.
Simon, he thought. This was the gift of which you were proudest, even though it mystified you, too . . . that every child you worked on somehow benefited from the same augmentation, whatever genetic disease you had started out working on.
It had surprised everyone, back in Berkeley. They had used DNA strip readers and molecular surgery to edit harmful genes from sperm and ova of couples desperate to have children. But few had expected the babies who came forth out of those microrepaired cells to emerge so enhanced.
It’s a gift we gave them. A gift with the terrible price of making them different.
“Saul!”
A voice from across sick bay—he looked up and saw Akio Ma
tsudo waving at him from his office door.
Saul glanced at Keoki Anuenue, who grinned. “Go on, Doctor. I’ll find those volunteers, and I’ll let you know before the tests begin.”
Saul nodded, concealing deep within the dread of what he knew had to come, sooner or later. Eventually, his bizarre string of luck would run out. One of his tailor made symbionts would kill, rather than save its host. And then, no matter how much good he had done before, they would turn on him. All of them.
As they had turned on Simon Percell.
As the mob had burned a university on a mountaintop, so long ago and so very far away.
“Mai kii aku i kauka hupo,” he told Keoki.
Don’t get an ignorant doctor.
The big Hawaiian blinked in surprise, then rocked back laughing. The sound was so rich, so infectious, that several of those standing in line smiled without quite knowing why.
“Coming, ‘Kio,” he called to Matsudo. “I’ll be right there.”
The snow covered slopes of Mount Asahi were as symmetrical as the green pines blanketing its lower flanks. Clouds, like rice-paper boats, floated past on an invisible layer of either air or magic, setting forth toward a setting sun and a dark blue western sea.
Saul was content to watch Akio Matsudo’s weather wall, perhaps the finest in all the colony. Indeed. until Virginia came off shift in two hours, this was just about the best thing he could think of to do with his time.
It beats working, he thought tiredly. For once his mind was not awhirl with ideas, the next experiment to try, the next clue to trace. He sat, zazen fashion, thinking as little as possible.
Something we Westerners have learned from the East . . . that beauty can be found in the smallest things.
The earthy brown clay tea set had been brought all the way from the shores of the Inland Sea. Its rough surfaces reflected the mute colors of the late afternoon light in a way that could not be described, only admired. The shaping marks on the cup in front of Saul seemed to have been formed on the same wheel as that which turned Creation. It was contemporary with the planets, with the sun.
Entranced, Saul glanced up when Akio Matsudo spoke.
“The wait will be worth it, Saul. Be patient.”