Spin Control ss-2

by Chris Moriarty

  “Don’t browbeat me!” Bella cried, her attention momentarily deflected from Arkasha.

  “Browbeat her?” Aurelia’s sib muttered for Arkady’s ears only. “I wish we could horsewhip her.”

  “Come on, people.” Laid-back Ahmed again. “Let’s focus on solutions, not fault finding.”

  Arkady took a deep breath and plunged in. “Maybe the best solution really is just to check the numbers again. I’ll redo the DVI if Bella doesn’t have time. It’s no problem. Honestly.”

  Laid-back Ahmed gave him an eloquently grateful look. The idea that doing a little extra work yourself was better than letting the social gears get squeaky was one of the many things Arkady and the big Aziz A had already discovered they saw eye to eye on.

  “I don’t need you looking over my shoulder for mistakes,” Bella snapped at Arkady. She cast a venomous look toward Arkasha’s end of the table. “And don’t think I don’t know who put you up to this!”

  “No one put me up to anything,” Arkady said, wondering what Arkasha could possibly have said to provoke such animosity. “I just meant that I have a little extra time and if you’re too busy to be able to go over the numbers again, I could…uh, help you.” Arkady did his best to make the offer sound supportive and unthreatening. Inside, however, he was having counterrevolutionary thoughts about whether some of those bad old repressive human political systems had found a way to make sure the decent hardworking people didn’t get the short end of the stick…and the bullies, prima donnas, and manipulators didn’t rise to the top like scum on milk.

  Bella’s sib leaned over to whisper something in her ear. Whatever it was Bella didn’t like it much.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” she cried. “Why are you turning against me?”

  “I’m not. I just—”

  “It’s not fair! Why isn’t anyone asking if it’s Aurelia’s analysis and not my readings that are wrong? Why are you all so ready to believe her and turn against me? Because she’s an A and I’m a B, that’s why!”

  “Because she knows her job and you don’t, you moron,” Aurelia’s sib muttered—thankfully too softly for anyone but Arkady to hear.

  “She has a point,” By-the-Book Ahmed said. “Why aren’t we considering the possibility that the numbers are good and the, uh…what did you call it just now, Arkady?…the ground truth is different than what we thought it would be?”

  “Because…” Aurelia said, and trailed off helplessly.

  Arkady and every other science track A sitting around the table knew what that “because” stood for. Because the numbers Bella had come up with were flat-out impossible. Because we didn’t come all the way out here to run a basic ecophysics course. Because we all have too much work to do to waste our collective time explaining to Bella why if she knew her ass from her elbow she’d know her numbers were wrong.

  But of course the Ahmeds knew even less about terraforming than Bella did. All they knew was that they had a bunch of temperamental techs and scientists at each other’s throats. And in the absence of technical knowledge, they could only fall back on their knowledge of their fellow crewmates. By-the-Book Ahmed sided with Bella because she flattered and deferred to him and was the only crewmember who didn’t display “lack of motivation” by bridling under his beloved shipboard duty roster. Laid-back Ahmed followed his basic philosophy—fair in most disputes but disastrous in this case—of trying to get the combatants to split the difference and compromise.

  “I agree,” Laid-back Ahmed said. “I mean there’s no reason not to consider every possibility, is there?”

  The science track A’s greeted this with stunned silence. One of the Aurelias coughed. Arkasha fidgeted.

  “The thing is,” one of the Banerjees said cautiously, “that if these numbers were right, it would mean we were looking at a planet that already had large contiguous regions of its surface in a state of biogeological climax.”

  Both Ahmeds looked blank. Could they really have so little insight into what the survey and terraforming team was supposed to be doing once they hit planet surface? If so, they were going to be deadweight as soon as the team made planetfall. Worse than deadweight if they began meddling in survey decisions they didn’t understand. Something had gone very wrong in the mission preplanning, Arkady realized. And he felt a bitter little seed of resentment over the planning failures lodge somewhere close to his heart.

  “So what you’re saying is that Bella’s numbers are better than we thought they’d be,” By-the-Book Ahmed said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s not a question of better or worse,” the other Banerjee began.

  “Then what is it a question of? Why can’t we get straightforward answers out of you people?”

  “Because we don’t have them. This isn’t calculating a launch window or the bearing strength of an I-beam. There’s no simple answer.”

  “Then how do you know Bella’s wrong?”

  “Because…”

  “I don’t think you’re hearing us,” Aurelia said. “This planet shouldn’t be here.”

  “Then where should it be?” Laid-back Ahmed asked blandly.

  “I meant—” Aurelia began. And then she saw the joke. “Oh for God’s sake, Ahmed, be serious!”

  “I am serious. I just think we’re getting a little overheated. No one’s trying to put you on the hot seat. Just give us the general picture in laymen’s terms.”

  But of course Rostov A’s were not used to dealing with people who needed to be given the general picture in laymen’s terms…and for the first time in his life Arkady was beginning to see that in the wrong circumstances the very strength of the Rostov genelines might be a liability.

  “For instance,” Laid-back Ahmed said, “how do these numbers compare to Gilead?”

  “Basically,” Arkady said, “they don’t.”

  “So it’s further along than Gilead? Is that impossible?”

  “No…um…Gilead’s not a useful comparison.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…well…Gilead gives you large contiguous areas of ‘terraformed’ surface. But they’re all being artificially held away from ecological climax in order to keep boosting the volatiles. That gives you a very recognizable volatiles profile, especially in the free nitrogen. Gilead is a textbook-perfect best-scenario case of terraforming on the numbers. But the numbers Bella’s getting for Novalis aren’t that at all. They’re…well, they’re nonsense. There are no comps for those numbers.”

  Something moved in Arkady’s peripheral vision.

  Arkasha.

  He was sliding his thick stack of printouts across the table toward the Ahmeds.

  “Yes, there are,” he said. “Right here.”

  By-the-Book Ahmed grabbed the printouts and squinted at them.

  “Is this another one of your practical jokes?” he asked accusingly. He and Arkasha had already come dangerously close to locking horns twice—both times over what By-the-Book Ahmed referred to as Arkasha’s “too smart to follow the rules” attitude.

  Arkasha’s only answer to Ahmed’s question was a dismissive shrug.

  Arkady craned his neck to read the heading on the printed page across the table. When he finally managed to decipher it, he decided that Ahmed was right. It must be a joke. It said:

  EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY WHITE PAPER Results of DISTRIBUTED VOLATILES INVENTORY performed for the Climate Change Baseline Project, authorized pursuant to Sec. 17 of the Beijing Addendum to the Kyoto Accords, May 15—April 3, 2017

  “All Bella’s numbers are fluctuating within two points of this DVI,” Arkasha said flatly.

  “Could, uh, this be a coincidence?” Laid-back Ahmed asked in a hollow tone that made Arkady quite sure he had understood what Arkasha was leaving unsaid.

  “Not unless Novalis actually is Earth, complete with a two-hundred-year-old planet-spanning fossil-fuels economy and some serious CFC contamination.”

  “I don’t have to take this!” Bella exclaimed
, standing up.

  “Sit down !” Laid-back Ahmed said in a tone that knocked Bella’s knees out from under her.

  Don’t say it, Arkady pleaded with his sib. Just let the Ahmeds handle it. She’s not the kind of person you want to make into your enemy.

  But Arkasha wasn’t going to let it go. He was going to try to be nice. And he was going to do it in a way that only deepened Bella’s humiliation.

  “I don’t want to cast blame,” he said, keeping his dark eyes carefully fixed on the table. “This is a failure at the steering committee level, not the individual level. A great deal of early training in the sciences involves learning not to panic when your numbers look wrong. And the numbers often look wrong in complex systems work. Throwing someone with a purely technical background into this kind of situation without real supervision more or less guarantees panic. And someone without a really solid grasp of ecophysics might well look at the relatively advanced flora and fauna the landers picked up on Novalis and make the mistaken assumption that a planet so far along in the ecopoietic curve might look the same on the numbers as Earth did when it was on its way down.”

  Arkasha had spoken deliberately, so that everyone around the table had time to understand what he was accusing Bella of: cribbing the numbers from the Earth DVI when her own readings didn’t look right.

  Twelve pairs of eyes shifted furtively toward Bella, who sat staring at her hands and breathing hard.

  Arkasha’s eyes flicked once toward Bella, then dropped away. “There’s no shame in not being perfect. As long as you’re honest. A lot of people’s lives could depend on our honesty. Starting with our own. We need to redo the DVI. We can do it with no questions asked. I think that’s the way we should do it. But it would be extremely helpful to have your notes of the original readings.”

  No one spoke for a long moment. The two Banerjees both stared resolutely out the nearest viewport. By-the-Book Ahmed was fuming, while his sib had no readable expression at all on his handsome features. Arkady looked sideways just in time to see Aurelia glance back and forth significantly between him and Arkasha and raise an eyebrow at her own sib.

  “Bella?” Laid-back Ahmed said. “Can we have your notes? Please?”

  “I gave them to you!” she snapped. And pointed to the neat printout of her final measurements she had circulated at the beginning of the consult.

  But those weren’t notes. Even the Aziz A’s knew enough to understand that.

  Ahmed and Arkasha looked at each other, obviously reaching some kind of understanding.

  “Okay,” Ahmed said, “I see the problem. If there was a problem, which I’m not saying there was. And I propose that we just, uh, decide how to handle the DVI on a forward-going basis.” Ahmed looked around the table but no one contested his analysis. “Any thoughts? Anyone?”

  Everyone in the room knew what was supposed to happen next. They’d spent half their lives sitting around tables or in childhood crèche circles, mastering the slow, courtly, circular procedures of consensus decisionmaking. They all knew that the script called for a series of tentative summings up; carefully structured and only vaguely purposeful statements that would begin with self-effacing phrases like “If I understand what’s been said so far,” or “I’m hearing from Bella that…” or “We might consider investigating the possibility of…” and would allow the group to arrive at a decision without actually forcing any single person openly to declare his or her positions and allegiances.

  But once again Arkasha wasn’t willing to follow the script.

  “I say we land,” he announced, tossing the naked proposal out like a duelist flinging his glove at an opponent’s feet. “Enough probes and flybys and extrapolations. We need a good dose of ground truth. And trust me, if the question is whether or not Bella’s DVI numbers are right, we’ll know that the minute we open the airlock.”

  “Unacceptable,” By-the-Book Ahmed snapped. Why did he always have to sound as if he were lecturing children when he was talking to the mission specialists? “Too much risk involved.”

  “Too much risk to the mission?” Arkasha retorted, “or too much risk that you can’t cover your ass if things go wrong?”

  “I’m responsible for the safety of this ship and crew,” Ahmed said sententiously. “I’m not willing to put us down on a planet you can’t even give me reliable numbers on.”

  Arkasha opened his mouth and shut it again. He and the other Rostovs had all bridled under Ahmed’s heavy-handed assertions of authority ever since the mission started. But what could they do, really? The Ahmeds were the ship’s pilots. There might be arguments once they were all planetside about relative authority, but as long as they were in space they were essentially captives.

  “I see Arkasha’s point though,” Laid-back Ahmed said, tactfully directing his comment as much to his sib as to Arkasha. “Perhaps we can find a middle ground? What if we agree to spend a predetermined amount of time check—uh, redoing the DVI, and then meet again and make a firm decision on how to proceed? That’ll give us a deadline for one thing, so the DVI doesn’t turn into too much of a time sink.”

  Arkasha shrugged—but this time the movement had none of the dismissive quality with which he’d mocked By-the-Book Ahmed before.

  “It’s just a question of minimizing the uncertainties, really. Does that make sense to everyone?”

  Nods all around the table.

  “Would a week be enough time to minimize the uncertainties? What do you all think? I know it’s a tight schedule for some of you, but does a week work for everyone?”

  It seemed a week did work for everyone.

  “Arkady, would you work with Arkasha and Aurelia to put together a plan of attack?”

  “Absolutely.” Arkady accepted for all three of them before Arkasha or Aurelia could stir up any more trouble.

  “Is tomorrow evening too soon for us to look over your plan together? No? Good. I’ll look to go over it with you tomorrow evening. And then I’ll go around and get feedback from the individual teams before we finalize the schedule.”

  It was neatly done, Arkady realized, with a newfound admiration for the big Aziz A. A potential conflict had been avoided. Everyone’s opinion had been solicited, but in a way that gave no one the chance to complain about his or her colleagues or foment bad feeling. The main dissenter had been co-opted by being put in charge of administering the very decision that had been taken over his head. Arkady had been inserted into the vendetta between Arkasha and Bella so that there was no reason for the two of them to have to deal with each other until they cooled off a bit. And all potential for conflict had been siphoned off into “individual consultations” in which Ahmed’s considerable charm could be deployed to head off any potential acrimony.

  But underneath the neat managerial tricks, Arkady had the sense that he’d just watched a tectonic realignment of continents. Bella, who had been jockeying with the equally assertive Aurelias for social dominance, had been publicly shamed. By-the-Book Ahmed had broken fast out of the gate, then fallen behind in the backstretch. Laid-back Ahmed, despite his easygoing affability, had emerged as the real leader of the expedition. And though he clearly neither wanted nor sought the role, Arkasha had replaced By-the-Book Ahmed as the unacknowledged second-in-command.

  As the rest of the team stretched and shuffled their papers and began getting back to the real business of the day, Arkady glanced at Bella. She was still in her chair, sitting up quite straight, with her hands resting in her lap and her beautiful face set into a mask of nobly wounded dignity. But her violet eyes were fixed on Arkasha as if he were the only other person in the room. And one look at their expression left no doubt in Arkady’s mind that his sib had just earned an implacable enemy.

  Night cycle.

  No moon lit the sky. Novalis loomed overhead, visible only as a darker blackness in the surrounding void.

  A brush fire raged across the invisible curve of the northern continent’s central grasslands. On the ground the kil
ling fields must cover thousands of kilometers, but from here the fire was just a pinprick in the surrounding blackness: a reminder that life itself was fire, and that all life devoured other life just as surely as the flames licking across Novalis’s gravid belly.

  Arkady’s feelings toward the planet had changed subtly over the last few days. His impatient excitement had given way to an apprehension bordering on fear. Eve of battle nerves, he told himself, brought to an uncomfortably high pitch by that distasteful nonsense over the DVI numbers. But a voice inside him whispered that he could die down there, and if he died Novalis would eat his flesh and mulch his bones, and not one molecule of the water or volatiles or trace metals he was made of would ever go home to RostovSyndicate. He stared up at the planet, desperately homesick, and asked himself if he was strong enough to face that ground truth. The only answer was the swirl and flicker of the flames.

  He shuddered and turned back into the bright cocoon of the ship. The bridge seemed safe and familiar, a last glimpse of home before the long fall into the gravity well. Status chimes rang soothingly. In the kitchen alcove off the navigator’s station the hum of the refrigerator competed with the splutter of the coffeemaker.

  Arkady floated over to the table, feeling liquefied with exhaustion and privately cursing whoever had drunk all the coffee and left the machine empty. He watched the drops of coffee seep into the spherical carafe and wander around until they finally bumped into the container’s viruglass shell and stuck there like caffeinated amoebas. Which he supposed made him what? A decaffeinated amoeba? That sounded about right.

  The main bridge door cycled open.

  “Oh, good,” the newcomer said. “Coffee’s on.”

  Bella. But which Bella? He squinted at her and decided with a distinct lowering of spirits that it was Bossy Bella.