By Syndicate standards, Bella’s diffidence verged on social deviance. Arkady had wondered how a construct with such a personality fault had made it through the MotaiSyndicate’s famously stringent culls…until he saw her at work in the orbsilk garden. At that point the mystery of why she’d been spared culling gave way to the mystery of why such a supremely gifted silk thrower had been exiled to the social backwater of a long-term survey mission. No matter. Whatever the reason, at least on this trip they wouldn’t have to worry about defective solar sails or hab ring seal blowouts.
Bella’s pairmate, on the other hand, could have used a healthy dose of shyness. Bossy Bella was that rare thing in Syndicate society, and space settlements generally: a truly rude person. Watching her in action, Arkady could only conclude that socialization in MotaiSyndicate crèches involved a lot fewer lectures about consideration, politeness, and Lotka-Wilsonist ideals, and a lot more of the aggressive jockeying for social dominance that was supposed to have vanished with the abolition of class oppression and private genetic property. He got the distinct impression that Bossy Bella was used to reigning over her fellow Motai B’s from the top of some primitive pecking order and was now working out just how far she could push her bullying in a group of science-tracked A’s who weren’t used to taking orders or deferring to anyone.
So far Bella’s pushing had worked pretty well. By-the-Book Ahmed liked her. Laid-back Ahmed tolerated her. The Rostov and Banerjee A’s were either blissfully blind to social nuance or too busy to notice.
But now Bella had let her social jockeying bleed into Aurelia’s DVI. And Aurelia, being an Aurelia, was out for blood.
Technically, what modern Syndicate ecophysicists did wasn’t terra-forming at all. Certainly it had little to do with the sledgehammer-style “planetary engineering” that early human terraformers had attempted when they hurled the first unmanned seed probes out of their solar system.
Most Evacuation-era terraforming starts had gone belly-up, leaving nothing behind but impact-scarred wreckage interesting only to historians. But where luck and skill had been with the original terraformers, their remote seeders had created impact craters in which the precious free volatiles collected and life could eventually thrive. The original terraformers had called these chains of isolated island ecosystems “oases.” Syndicate terraformers, none of whom had ever seen Earth’s oases, just called them “potholes.”
The pothole worlds (Gilead had been one when the first generation ship fell into orbit around it) were not terraformed but merely potentially terraformable. Each pothole evolved as its own separate planet, separated from its neighbors by sterile highlands lashed by lethal dust storms and solar radiation. Most of them flared into brief unstable life, then crashed. As Arkady’s first biogeography teacher had pointed out, knowing that isolated population fluctuations took the form of undamped oscillations around a stable equilibrium was small consolation if a downward oscillation dropped the population of a critical organism below zero. But some potholes survived. And a few, a very few of them were still there when the first-generation ships arrived: the scattered seeds of viable planet-spanning biospheres.
All but a handful of human colonies failed anyway, even where they were lucky enough to land on pothole worlds. The number of ways colonists had found to choke, drown, starve, or poison themselves was awe-inspiring. In most cases, however, the ultimate cause of death was startlingly basic: failure to adapt.
Dead colonies—including the genetically nonviable colonies of walking ghosts that the Treaty euphemistically called “bare branches”—died for one of two reasons. Either they refused to retool Earth-born customs and expectations to fit the unforgiving fragility of synthetic biospheres, or they refused to accept the invasive genetic engineering humans needed in order to survive anywhere but on their native planet. Colonies that survived only did so by facing up to the cold equations of life after Earth’s ecological collapse. They gave up the dream of building a second Earth. Or they gave up the dream of staying human. Or they died.
The Syndicates had given up on both those dreams. And in doing so, they had earned the privilege of working miracles. Which meant that the new worlds, the worlds out in the Deep beyond the treaty lines, were theirs for the taking.
Novalis was a typical Syndicate terraforming mission. It unfolded in four phases, only the last of which involved launching a manned driveship toward the target planet. Or rather, the presumed planet. For when the first remote probe launched, its target wasn’t a planet at all but merely a suggestive infrared excess in the spectrometry of a distant star.
The first probe swooped around Novalis on its subluminal flyby and found planets, two of them in orbits that were at least theoretically compatible with the presence of liquid water.
A second probe arrived eight months later, its launch window carefully scheduled to give the RostovSyndicate ecophysicists time to chew on the first round of raw data. In a maneuver that was always touch-and-go in terms of fuel conservation, it fired its onboard thrusters in order to translate into the plane of the most promising satellite: a more or less Earth-sized planet, blessed with a more or less Moon-sized moon that had the geophysicists whispering hopeful little phrases like “satellite stabilization” and “mild Milankovitch cycles.”
Translation was successful. The flyby happened—a spectacular display of interstellar sharpshooting at a mere seventy thousand kilometers above the target planet’s cloud-shrouded surface. The probe dropped seven automated landers before it hooked around Novalis’s yellow sun and shot off on its final voyage into the unsounded Deep.
Four of the landers vanished without transmitting any data at all.
The fifth lander made it most of the way down before succumbing to a damaged heat shield segment, and it sent back infrared and microwave soundings of an ocean (an ocean!), whose scatterometry produced a marine wind field map that Banerjee’s chief oceanographer pronounced promisingly reminiscent of Earth’s southern oscillation.
The sixth lander reached the surface and sent back a wealth of intriguing and frustratingly inconclusive readings before it drove over a cliff, to the spluttering humiliation of its design team, and shattered its solar collector.
The seventh lander caught an ant.
An ant whose DNA, when crushed and sequenced and crosschecked and cataloged, proved her to be the many thousandth great-granddaughter of a cloned ponerine queen boosted into space in 2031 on one of the European Space Authority’s venerable Ariane rockets and still covered by a perpetual, though obviously unenforceable, patent originally held by a Delaware corporation with the unlikely name of Monsanto.
With the discovery of one humble ant, all hell broke loose in the skies over Gilead. Scientific teams zipped back and forth from Syndicate to Syndicate. Aziz and Banerjee planners hammered out launch windows and crew and cargo manifests. The infamous “annoyance questionnaires” began to circulate among potential payload and mission specialists, a sure sign that not only was a long-range mission being planned, but that it would be a sprint mission: a desperate direct throw of the bare minimum of personnel and equipment needed to stake a claim to the target planet. Good luck, happy sailing…and we’ll deliver logistical support if you survive long enough to need it.
A third unmanned probe was dispatched, this one sleek, heavy, expensive, and freighted with a weight of scientific equipment worth the gross annual product of some of the smaller Syndicates. Two years behind the third probe—these things take time, after all—RostovSyndicate launched the ship whose arboretum they had just flown through at a speed that precisely measured the technical advances in interstellar propulsion made in the six years that separated the two ships’ launch dates.
And now, in a matter of days, the survey team would swing into orbit around Novalis…and begin the real work for which each of them had been training ever since they’d opted for the sciences track at sixteen and tested into geophysics, genetics, engineering, astrophysics, oceanography, zoology, genetics,
molecular biology complex systems study, chaotic systems control, and all the other manifold specializations that the science-cum-art of terraforming demanded.
Arkady was at once awed and inspired by the sheer weight of history that lay behind each step of a preterraforming survey. Every reading, every sounding, every measurement they would use to establish the baseline condition of Novalis’s biosphere represented the life’s work of generations of engineers and scientists before them. Even so simple a task as taking the temperature of the ocean’s surface from orbit embodied a trajectory of technological evolution that began with the first primitive infrared sounding devices NASA engineers invented back in the twentieth century to explain the subtle color shifts that entranced the first astronauts to see Earth’s oceans from space.
Each member of the survey team—Arkady with his ants, Aurelia with her exacting measurements of the planet’s geophysical processes, Arkasha with his DNA samples—was part of an endless cycle of trial and error and recalibration that spanned two sentient species, several dozen planets, and a millennium of scientific investigation. And at the end of all their work lay the same thing their forebears had faced, a term coined by the first geophysicists on Earth but still a fertile part of the terraformer’s working vocabulary all these centuries later:
Ground truth.
Ground truth was the final judge from whose verdict there was no appeal. Ground truth was what you found when you finished your measurements and plans and preparations and took your heart in your hands and landed on your target planet. Ground truth was what you found when you sampled the soil, when you physically dropped a sounder into the ocean, when you walked through the forest or grassland or tundra you had surveyed from orbit and dissected and sequenced the specimens you collected there.
And this was the second source of Arkady’s endless fascination with his chosen field. In a very real sense every expedition to a new planet retraveled in miniature the long evolution of the discipline that humans called terraforming and Syndicate scientists called ecophysics. Syndicate survey teams might be armed with technical and theoretical tools that would have appeared near-magical to pre-Evacuation humans; but each new planet, even if every living thing on it was earthly in origin, presented an entirely new set of experimental parameters. Those parameters inevitably produced results that confirmed prior theory…and results that pointed out the limitations of trying to generalize about the largest complex nonlinear dynamic system anyone had yet encountered based on a sample size of one. Every unsurveyed planet was, quite literally, a new world. And nothing in all the wide universe said that the next planet wouldn’t blow the lid off every prior theory.
Which was exactly—though it was hard for Arkady to bring himself to believe such a thing could be happening—what Bella’s DVI numbers would do.
If they were real.
“You want her to learn on the job?” Aurelia was asking incredulously when Arkady walked into the hastily called formal consult over what the Ahmeds were calling the DVI situation. “She was supposed to know her job before we launched. People who can’t do a simple job right belong on a euth ward, not on a deep-space survey mission!”
“I did do the job right the first time!” Bossy Bella protested. Bella had been assigned, after much covert maneuvering and insistence that she was too busy (she wasn’t, and wouldn’t be until it was time to establish the food cycle systems in the dirtside habitat module), to help Aurelia with data collection for the all-important DVI. The two of them had already developed a cordial dislike for each other…and when something went wrong, the inevitable happened.
“So now you know my job better than I do?” Aurelia asked coldly.
“My numbers are right,” Bella insisted.
Her sib stirred beside her. “Perhaps…”
“Perhaps nothing! If you’d been helping me instead of wasting time staring into space, we wouldn’t be in this mess!”
Shy Bella bowed her head submissively, but judging from the dark shadows under her eyes Arkady seriously doubted she’d been slacking. In fact, she’d lost several kilos since they came out of cryo, and she and her sib were now worrisomely easy to tell apart even before they opened their pretty mouths.
Someone jogged his elbow: the other Aurelia. She was worried about her sib, and her usually confident face showed it. “What does Arkasha think about the numbers?” she asked Arkady in a nervous whisper.
He cast a furtive glance at Arkasha, who was sitting at the other end of the consult table, his shoulders turned away just enough to isolate himself from the rest of the group, flicking through a sheaf of densely inked printouts.
“How should I know?” he said bitterly. “I haven’t exchanged twenty words with him since we woke up. I couldn’t have seen less of him if he’d been ducking out of airlocks to avoid me.”
“I’ve been around a while,” Bossy Bella was saying when Arkady turned back to the general conversation. She’d been detanked two years before her pairmate and three years before the Ahmeds, Arkadys, and Aurelias. In her place, Arkady would have been embarrassed about being dropped behind his age group, but Bella predictably treated the age difference as a reason to pull rank on the rest of the crew. “I was on the Kuretz-12 survey while you all were still waiting for your year nineteen cull. And no one has ever found any problems with the work I do—”
“I, I, I, I, I!” Aurelia burst out, exasperated. “If you thought a little less about your precious self and a little more about our job out here—”
“How dare you accuse me of—”
“No one’s accusing you of anything,” Laid-back Ahmed said soothingly.
But Aurelia wasn’t willing to let it slide. And if you put half the energy into working that you put into slinging malicious gossip—”
“I refuse to allow this consult to degenerate into personal attacks,” By-the-Book Ahmed said, predictably rising to Bella’s defense. “If you don’t have the leadership skills to manage the people under you—”
“That’s humanist crap!” Aurelia burst out. “I don’t need leadership skills! I’m not a goddamn sheepdog! And it’s not my Part in life to chase down people who won’t put in an honest day’s work unless they’re nagged and nattered at!”
“Listen,” Arkady began, knowing from late-night drinking sessions that once Aurelia started in on her ideological objections to caste-based genelines things could only go downhill. Not that he disagreed with Aurelia on either count. Ever since that first night she’d let her sib do her dishes, Bossy Bella had shown a formidable talent for being nowhere in sight whenever there was work to do. And as to the caste nonsense…well, just look at the current situation.
His interruption did no good, though; Aurelia had gotten the bit firmly between her teeth.
“And speaking of nagging and nattering,” she went on, “I’ve about goddamn well had it with the so-called shipboard duty schedule. Are we grown-ups or crèchelings?”
“Collective job lists are inefficient,” By-the-Book Ahmed said in his usual categorical tones.
“Not as inefficient as pissing people off by treating them like galley slaves instead of pre-citizens!”
“Shipboard duty rosters work,” Ahmed insisted. “It’s proven.”
“By AzizSyndicate studies!” Aurelia said contemptuously. “Studies done on B’s and C’s. Well, we’re not B’s and C’s, in case you hadn’t noticed. And if your so-called leadership skills are limited to bossing around worker drones sociogenetically programmed to swallow your counterrevolutionary humanist bullshit—”
“Look,” Laid-back Ahmed said in his usual levelheaded tone. “Let’s just focus on the problem at hand. We can’t solve everything today. And none of the rest matters worth a lick if we can’t get to the bottom of the DVI situation.”
“Why not just redo the DVI readings and make a fresh start on the problem?” Arkasha said. It was the first time he’d opened his mouth since the consult started.
There was a momentary silence whi
le everyone considered his proposal. Arkasha had acquired an unofficial and nebulous authority over the past week as his crewmates—one by one, and without ever admitting they’d done it—downloaded his public dossier. The long string of publications, citations, and discoveries attached to the dossier had subtly shifted not only their views on Arkasha but their assumptions about the entire mission. Arkasha was the closest thing the anti-individualist culture of the Syndicates had to an academic superstar: one of the best theoretical geneticists of his generation in a society where genetics was the undisputed top of the scientific food chain. Naturally his articles were published under his geneline name. But you only had to see that all-important first footnote to understand how many articles he’d written, and how influential his work had been on other geneticists. Arkasha’s presence on the mission signaled the magnitude of what the joint steering committee expected them to find on Novalis. And without doing or saying anything to demand the position—in fact he barely even talked to anyone except poor little Shy Bella, who was the farthest thing imaginable from a social power broker—Arkasha had become the de facto lead scientist on the survey.
Bossy Bella, however, was conspicuously uninterested in Arkasha’s academic qualifications. She and Arkasha stared at each other, locked in a private battle of wills. “If you’ve got something to say,” she told him, “why don’t you have the guts to say it? Or would you rather come creeping around my quarters again making your nasty insinuations?”
“There’s no need to jump down his throat!” Aurelia snapped, interrupting whatever had been going on between Arkasha and Bella and foreclosing any chance at finding out what Arkasha’s “nasty insinuations” had been. Arkady smothered a sigh. He dearly loved Aurelias in general, and these Aurelias in particular…but their “help” in a consult was a burden he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy.
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