Terraforming on Novalis had succeeded so spectacularly that it threw into doubt every former assumption about what was possible or impossible in terraforming. That the planet had been actively terraformed was now established beyond question. The survey team had already found the burnt-out remains of two atmospheric entry craft and a half dozen scattered Quonset huts flanked by an overgrown cemetery. And in a nearby valley bottom they had stumbled on the ruins of a vast laboratory complex, its dormitories standing empty, its locked cages housing only the dry skeletons of abandoned mice and monkeys, its crumbling walls filled with a vast metastasizing supercolony of predatory ants that Arkady had to comb through every reference book in the ship’s library to identify as the supposedly long-extinct Strumigenys louisianae.
Novalis had been settled twice—or at least that was the conclusion Arkady, Arkasha, and the Aurelias had drawn when they tried to derive family trees for three of the standard seed species and came up with seeding dates strung out across three centuries.
The fact that both settlements had failed worried no one. There was no reason to assume that either failure had anything to do with Novalis. Most colonists arrived on their chosen worlds as walking ghosts: biologically alive but already doomed by the cold equations of evolution in a shifting fitness landscape. Either new blood arrived—usually in the form of custom-engineered posthuman colonists stuffed into UN-dispatched jumpships—or the original colony vanished, leaving its partially terraformed world behind for the next wave of settlers…or for the Syndicates.
And Novalis had everything the Syndicate surveyors had been looking for. No bare branch colonists to stir up trouble and open the door to the lawyers and diplomats. No fatal diseases or allergens, so far anyway. And above all, a rich, diverse, and to all appearances stable biosphere.
In short, Novalis was perfect. So what was the source of Arkady’s growing unease? Nothing, he told himself. Nothing at all. There wasn’t a thing wrong with the planet. And the glitches in his data? Glitches, nothing more. He wouldn’t have given a second thought to them if other things had been going well.
Other things meaning Arkasha.
Their relationship—or rather their complete lack of anything any reasonable person could call a relationship—had tinged all Arkady’s feelings about the mission. It would have been different if they’d disliked each other. Or if Arkasha had been selfish or lazy or a petty bully or any one of the thousand things that you always hoped the other member of a new workpair wouldn’t be. But he wasn’t. And Arkady did like him. He liked him more after every one of their rare and all-too-brief encounters.
Arkasha had a wry, subtle sense of humor; once he’d established by cautious probing that Arkady had the stomach for subversive jokes, he’d developed the habit of alighting next to Arkady at mealtimes, murmuring some outrageous thing in his ear, then evaporating back to the lab while Arkady was still trying to smother his laughter. And he was smart. More than smart. There was something liberating about talking to him. He was always short-circuiting Arkady’s accumulated social defenses so that he would suddenly find himself quite comfortably saying things that he hadn’t imagined he’d ever say to anyone.
Arkasha even liked ants, for God’s sake. He asked intelligent questions about Arkady’s theories and experiments…and actually managed to stay awake and apparently interested for the answers to the questions.
But every time it seemed they were starting to move toward something more than cool collegiality, Arkasha would retreat into his work, leaving Arkady confused, disappointed, and, as the weeks drifted by, desperately lonely.
It took less than a week on-planet for the survey team’s carefully engineered and supposedly foolproof quarantine procedures to fail. And when they failed, the damage hit the worst thing possible: the orbsilk gardens.
The orbsilk gardens were a fairy-tale realm in which the brutal economies of spacefaring life were transformed into abundant, blooming, luxurious life. It was this section of the ship—of any Syndicate ship—that was most heavily retrofitted, and therefore felt most like home to Syndicate senses. Here the hard cold virusteel of the UN-built driveship had been transformed by the collective labors of botanists, zoologists, and entomologists into a living architecture of silk and leaves and spun orbglass. Where the rest of the ship turned away from space and hunkered down behind its virusteel double hull, the ark section unfolded into the void like an intricate flower. When the ship was in orbit the vast spans of spun silkglass opened onto the sea of stars beyond the solar collectors, seeking the starlight that the orbsilkworms—and therefore the ship—lived upon. And at the moment they looked out over the green sea of the Big Wood from which the new invaders had come.
This was Bella’s kingdom, and she tended it with a fervent attention to detail that its denizens required. The orbsilkworms lived on dwarf mulberry trees, which were rooted in hanging hydroponic trays suspended from the airy ceiling. The elevation of the trays was either to protect them from the appetites of other shipboard insects or to avoid some kind of rampant fungal infection, Arkady could never remember which. But the result was a veritable hanging garden of fragrant, weeping, cocoon-festooned mulberry trees. They ate and slept and woke and spun their gauzy silk cocoons in much the same way that ten millennia of their forebears had done. But they were chimeras, ingeniously spliced genetic constructs, just like the Syndicate engineers who designed them. And the rich gold-brown shimmer of their cocoons revealed the nature of the chimera: a precisely engineered recombination of silkworm DNA with genetic material drawn from the spinners of the strongest natural fiber ever discovered: the silk of the golden orb spider.
When the silkworms were feeding, the sound of their collective jaws was loud enough to be audible: a constant slippery hum like the whisper of a sleeper turning beneath silken bedsheets. At other times, the garden was a place of gauzy shimmering silence in which Bella flitted from tree to tree or bent over her copper throwing bowls or labored at her airy glass-and-virusteel hand loom like some posthuman Lady of Shalott.
Out of this insubstantial aerie would come every article of clothing, every piece of rope, and every parachute, collecting net, and specimen sack that the survey team would use over the course of their mission. More important, a large array of materials that would be used to repair or replace broken elements of the ship itself would be produced here, or by subtle molecular manipulations of the raw silk in the zero-g labs down in the core engineering levels. And it would all come from the worms, teased into existence by Bella’s careful, deliberate, disciplined fingers.
Their management was more art than science. They died off with horrifying regularity, and for bizarrely trivial reasons: an inauspicious change of temperature or humidity; a bad smell; a sudden noise; a change in the habitation arc’s rotational gravity that might be so subtle as to be imperceptible even to the refined instrument of the human inner ear. At times they required air and light, and the workers would open up the ventilation louvers and pull back the blinds over the great skylights to let in the carefully filtered starlight. At other times they must be covered with damp sterile cloths and kept in the most perfect darkness and silence, lest they become startled and turn their heads so that their razor-sharp teeth severed the precious threads in midstream.
But now the orbsilkworms were more than startled.
They were starving. They were being outcompeted in their own carefully engineered ecological niche by an obscure species of caterpillar with a voracious appetite for mulberry leaves.
Bella did her best to help. She brought Arkady endless samples of everything that looked to her even remotely like one of the life stages of the pest. She even learned how to collect and preserve samples with the spare field kit Arkady dug out of storage for her. Unfortunately, the samples told Arkady a lot about the mysterious worm but not much about how to kill it.
What finally broke the problem open was a tiny seed of memory prompted by the sight of Bella’s throwing hooks glittering in the ruddy g
leam of Novalis’s sunset…a seed of memory that germinated into the barest, tender green shoot of an idea.
“Listen to this,” Arkady told Bella excitedly when he finally tracked down the long-ago-read and nearly forgotten passage. “It’s from Wheeler’s Ants, the book that kicked off the great twentieth-century flowering of social insect studies. I must have read it when I was eight. I can’t believe it was still rattling around in my brain somewhere:
According to Magowan, [Wheeler wrote] quoted by McCook, “In many parts of the province of Canton, where, says a Chinese writer, cereals cannot be profitably cultivated, the land is devoted to the cultivation of orange-trees, which being subject to devastation from worms, require to be protected in a peculiar manner, that is, by importing ants from the neighboring hills for the destruction of the dreaded parasite. The orangeries themselves supply ants which prey upon the enemy of the orange, but not in sufficient numbers; and resort is had to hill people, who, throughout the summer and winter, find the nests suspended from branches of bamboo and various trees. There are two varieties of ant, red and yellow, whose nests resemble cotton bags. The orange-ant feeders are provided with pig or goat bladders, which are baited inside with lard. The orifices they apply to the entrances of the nests, whence the ants enter the bag and become a marketable commodity at the orangeries. Orange-trees are colonized by depositing the ants on their upper branches, and to enable them to pass from tree to tree, all the trees of the orchard are connected by a bamboo rod.”
“Okay,” Arkady said. “So that’s Magowan according to Cook according to Wheeler. And then Wheeler follows up the bit about the Cantonese red and yellow ants with what has to be one of the earliest written accounts of importing ants into the contintental United States for pest control. That’s what actually stuck in my mind. That and putting the bamboo rod between the trees for the ants to walk across. Though I don’t know what we’re going to use for bamboo here, come to think of it…”
He looked up expectantly only to find Bella staring rather blankly at him.
“Don’t you see?” he said. “Novalis’s analog to the orange tree worms has found your orbsilk garden. Now we’ve got to find Novalis’s version of Magowan’s red and yellow ants. Or, rather, we’ve got to find the ecological niche they belong in…and hope to God it’s got something in it we can use.”
Arkady had to shake down every tree within a morning’s walk of base camp. But he did it, with Bella’s surprisingly able help. And eventually he struck gold: a tiny golden ant that lived in the genetically engineered fruit trees that was the only visible legacy of the long-vanished bare branch colony.
They weren’t Monsanto ants either, which pleased Arkady because it suggested that they had been developed during the original colonists’ long interstellar journey. He was reinventing an already tried and tested pest control method. And the great thing about reinventing the wheel was that the wheel that worked for someone else usually worked for you too.
“Can you check my work before I do a release?” he asked Arkasha when he had mapped out what he hoped would be a suitable geneset. “Just in case?”
“Your work is always good, Arkady. I don’t have to check it.”
“But I’d feel more comfortable if you did.”
Arkasha shrugged, pronounced himself flattered, and checked it.
“I like it,” he said eventually. “Your queens function normally once they’ve mated, but they don’t have the genes that express themselves in the nuptial flight, so they don’t mate except in the lab. You get a perfectly normal colony, with the life cycle to support the large-scale predation you want from them, but you can cut the thread at the end of each generation and start fresh without worrying about wild strains developing. Classic example of de facto sterilization through genetic modification.” He made one of his wry faces. “Too bad they can’t do that for us. It’d save a lot of sweat and bother.”
Arkady cleared his throat and forced his mind away from the image that the words sweat and bother raised…an image that was never far below the surface when Arkasha was in the same room with him.
“Well?” Arkasha asked. “What are you standing there for? Go save Bella’s worms. She promised to make me another sweater, and I seem to be missing one.”
Amazingly, it worked. And the long, undulating willow wands that they’d used in place of bamboo sticks made the whole orbsilk garden look like one of the intricate diagrams of climatic succession cycles that Arkady had admired so much in his childhood textbooks. He’d only adapted an ancient solution to a new environment, rather than inventing it from whole cloth, but he felt a real sense of accomplishment nonetheless.
“Thank you so much,” Bella said in her quiet, awkward voice…an awkwardness Arkady had begun to suspect was not simple shyness but the hesitation of a thoughtful, sensitive person long accustomed to being misunderstood by her peers. “That was so clever of you. Can you imagine, if you hadn’t read that little paragraph and remembered it and…”
“Yeah, it’s kind of neat when useless knowledge turns out not to be so useless after all.”
“Exactly!” Bella breathed. “I mean what could be a better proof that education can’t all be practical application…that you have to have research and study and…and knowledge for its own sake?”
Arkady looked down into the shining eyes that were gazing up at him with such admiration and felt an unaccustomed flush of pleasure. It was amazing, really, how tiny and childlike Bella was. She even engendered the same protective feelings in him that children inspired. He supposed this was what human males must have felt back when…but no, his mind shied away from the thought.
“I’d like to help you with your collecting,” she was saying now. “If you need the help. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble to have me tagging along. I…I don’t mind taking on the extra work. And I wouldn’t be in the way, really I wouldn’t. It’s so interesting.”
Arkady hesitated.
“And I need to get away from…I feel so…so trapped sometimes…please, Arkady, I won’t be any trouble to you!”
“Of course you can help,” he said. “It never hurts to have an extra pair of helping hands. And I’ll be glad to teach you.”
Ironically it was also Shy Bella who brought about what Arkady later came to think of as his and Arkasha’s first Real Conversation.
She came into dinner late one night—a night when Arkasha had put in one of his rare appearances—and she walked straight across the room, served herself from the stovetop, and sat down between the two Ahmeds without so much as glancing at her sib farther down the table.
A sib who gave her a hard, narrow-eyed stare, then stood up and swept out of the room without uttering a word of excuse or farewell to anyone.
“Trouble in paradise?” Arkasha murmured ironically when the normal buzz of conversation had revived enough to cover his words.
“You think that’s paradise?” Arkady glanced around instinctively to make sure no one was listening. “It looks more like purgatory to me.”
“Now that might be just about the most interesting thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Arkady turned to find his sib’s dark eyes fixed intently on him. They were sitting very close, having slid down the bench together to make room for Bella, and he could feel the warm pressure of Arkasha’s thigh against his.
“You don’t give me much of a chance to say anything to you, interesting or otherwise.”
“Is that how it comes across to you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” Arkasha seemed uncharacteristically taken aback. “Uh…doing anything tonight?”
“Should I be?”
“Well, I have some work I need to get done later, but walk down to the lab with me. I’ve got something to show you.”
Back in the lab, Arkady marveled as always at the neat dovetailing of individual and society, so pervasive in the Syndicates that it was for all intents and purposes invisible. Arkady’s side of the lab was a chaotic day
-after-the-battle debris field of fly tape, sample containers, taxonomy treatises, work gloves, and trenching tools. His field gear—the most obvious vector of external contamination—had been disinfected daily since they made planetfall, but nothing could disguise the tears and stains that were badges of former expeditions. Even the newish lab coat dangling off the backrest of his stool bore the telltale spots and smears of yesterday’s sample preparations.
Arkasha’s side of the lab looked all but unused in comparison. Virgin expanses of countertop gleamed under the shipboard lights. Racked trays of slides glittered like ice in the zero-g shelving units beside neatly labeled notebooks and thick reference volumes whose spines had none of the cracks and dog-eared edges that Arkady’s books seemed magically to acquire. The only signs of a fallible posthuman presence—and even those were lined up along the backsplash of the lab bench like little soldiers—were Arkasha’s ubiquitous chewed pencil stubs.
It would have been more efficient of course to divide the labs by area of specialization rather than geneline. But in Syndicates as well as in anthills, efficiency rarely trumped psychological comfort. The first joint missions had tried to organize their limited work space by task category. Pure sciences with pure sciences. Field work with field work. Sample preparation segregated from processing and analysis.
It hadn’t worked. There had been fights and frustrations. People had worked less—and been more stressed out about what little work they did accomplish—than they were in their home Syndicates. They wanted to be with their sibs, not with strangers. And in the end, the steering committees had relented, surrendering to the very biological constraints they and their predecessors had engineered into their lateral descendants.
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