Spin Control ss-2

by Chris Moriarty

  But that was the theory. And the one sure thing about theory in complex adaptive systems was that, while it could tell you a great deal about the characteristic dynamics of a given system, it could never deliver reliable predictions of what the system would do in practice.

  Try to put the theory into practice on a real planet, and the neat schemata spun off into chaos. A biosphere was an emergent phenomenon, just like an AI or an ant swarm. You couldn’t “build” one the way you built a ship or an orbital station. You could only put the necessary conditions in place and hope it would find a way to build itself. Sometimes it did. And sometimes, for reasons that could never be established completely, the system never self-organized into anything recognizable as a functional biosphere. Or it organized into a form that was impossibly unfriendly to humans and their descendants. Or some complex positive feedback loop developed that crashed the biosphere so badly that all you could do was scrap it for parts.

  In such cases, terraformers were left with the uncomfortable, time-consuming, and often futile task of biopsying a failing biosphere and trying to figure out how to tweak it back onto a sustainable trajectory. More often the biopsy was an autopsy: The niggling little problem that you’d set aside to work on when you had time turned out to be the beginning of a catastrophic crash that could only have been stopped by specific actions at a precise moment…usually a moment that slipped by while you were still getting around to worrying about that odd little anomaly you’d noticed in your last set of field data.

  This nebulous and frustrating exercise in chaotic systems control was what terraformers called trapping crows. And Arkady had started to log datapoints that were making him wonder if trapping crows wasn’t about to become a full-time job in his very near future.

  “What’s this bunch for, again?” Arkady asked as Aurelia pulled the next vial of blood. It was the sixth, if he’d counted right; well in excess of the amounts required for the normal monitoring he’d been accustomed to all his life.

  “Immunodominance assay.”

  “Because of the sneezies?” That was what they’d started calling the coldlike symptoms that were making the rounds since they’d landed, turning embarrassment into humor.

  “Yes.” Aurelia frowned, concentrating intently on the task at hand despite its apparent simplicity. Arkady had already decided that the Aurelias’ (to his mind) excessively methodical nature was a central personality trait of their geneline. It was probably a highly adaptive trait for surgeons, but it made for somewhat lackluster conversation.

  “Surely it’s just a reactivated virus? The long trip out? Cryo? Stress?”

  “Well, obviously,” Aurelia snapped. It had been known since the earliest days of space travel that astronauts on long-duration missions passed around reactivated viruses, sometimes succumbing to childhood diseases to which they’d apparently already established immunity. “But we should have seen a matured immune response by now. I want to see if someone’s matured an unadaptive response and is passing it around to the rest of us.”

  Looking at Aurelia’s fierce expression, Arkady had a sudden twinge of pity for whoever the unfortunate culprit turned out to be.

  “Let’s just hope that’s all it is,” she said, half-speaking to herself.

  “What else would it be?”

  “I don’t know. Not much of a track record on long-range multisyndicate expeditions. And I was never for having Motais on the mission. I don’t like their new immune system splice. And I don’t trust designers who offer glib promises about what untested splices will or won’t do in the real world.”

  “You’re sure it’s something we brought?” Arkady asked, speaking before he really thought the question through. “You haven’t run into anything…I don’t know…odd?”

  Aurelia had her steth on, checking his vitals while she had him on the table in the name of thoroughness. Now she pulled the steth off and looked sharply at him. “Odd how? Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “Okay, you’re done. Off the table. You’re healthy as an ox, whatever an ox is. You and Arkasha both. Pretty as anything Motai ever turned out and a lot tougher than the Ahmeds as soon as you look past the muscles. They did some fine work when they spliced you boys. Classic. No gimmicks. I approve.”

  Arkady stood, rolling down his shirtsleeve. “What about your sib? Her work going okay?”

  “You’d have to ask her. I’ve been too busy virus hunting to do anything but work, sleep, and piss. Plus, she’s just getting over this piece of shit virus. Hundred and four fever. Unbelievable.”

  “Does that mean she’s immune now?”

  “It means jack for all I know. I’m over my head. And unlike some people around here I’m not too chicken-shit to admit it. I’m going to ask Arkasha to take a look at it as soon as he’s done putting out his own fires.”

  “His fires? He’s run into trouble too?”

  “You’re his sib. What the hell are you asking me for? Listen, Arkady, no offense but I hope you’re not going to call another formal consult over this. Life’s too short for me ever to spend another hour in the same room with that idiot Ahmed.”

  “Hey, cowlick,” Arkasha said when Arkady walked into the lab.

  “I hate that nickname.”

  “Why else do you think I keep using it?”

  Since their late-night talk, he had taken to speaking to Arkady in a cool, bantering tone and gently mocking him about everything from his cowlicks to his bad housekeeping habits. It was better than being ignored…sort of. But it was part and parcel of the same frustrating pattern that had characterized their relationship from that first meeting. One step forward and a step and a half back. And somehow it was always Arkady taking the step forward and Arkasha retreating.

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “Who says anything’s bothering me?”

  “You do.” Arkasha rubbed at his own cowlick-free forehead in a mocking through-the-looking-glass gesture. “Talk about futility. Nothing you can do now to make your hair lie down and grow the right way. That kind of defect’s almost impossible to fix, even in utero. A real throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater problem.”

  “Well, in MotaiSyndicate they would throw the baby out with the bathwater, wouldn’t they?”

  Arkasha shrugged, apparently not all that interested in Motai-Syndicate’s cowlick policy. “The interesting thing to me is when you do it. At first I thought it was just social self-consciousness. A first meeting. An awkward conversation. A contentious consult. But then I noticed that you do it when you’re alone too.”

  “If you’re there to see me do it, then I’m not alone, am I?”

  “Very cute. You do it when you’re working is what I mean. And I think you do it when you’re thinking non-norm-conforming thoughts. Going after the outward physical deviation because it’s easier to smooth out than the one that really scares you.”

  “And when exactly did you decide to become a renorming counselor?”

  “Oh, so nothing’s bothering you? I’m glad to hear it.” Arkasha folded his arms and smiled.

  “Okay,” Arkady admitted. “It’s the survey.”

  He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly awkward, and crouched down to pull his field notebook from his rucksack. He set it on the table, still not meeting his pairmate’s eyes. “I’m just…not a hundred percent comfortable with the results I’m getting in the field.” The understatement of the millennium. “Normally I’d talk to the DVI team about it but…well…the DVI situation being what it is…”

  Arkasha grasped the essence of the problem with such astounding speed that Arkady caught himself thinking yet again that he was far too fine a tool for the scientific hackwork of a routine survey mission. “Have you worked up your climatic succession equations yet?” he asked.

  “I tried. I came up with nonsense.”

  “Can I see your work?”

  “I checked it. And double-checked it. It’s not a calculating error.”

 
“I’m not saying it is,” Arkasha replied with unaccustomed mildness. “I just want to understand what you’ve done so I don’t waste time repeating it.”

  He waited while Arkady leafed through the pages, written and scratched out and overwritten, on which he’d tried and failed to make sense of the facts on the ground.

  “What’s dh? Disturbance history?”

  “Yes. And C is percentage of the sample in climax stage. And P is…”

  “Patch areas. Yes. Great. Perfect.”

  Arkasha flipped back to the first page of calculations, walked around to the other side of the lab bench, grabbed a piece of scrap paper and a chewed pencil stub, dragged his stool back around to Arkady’s side of the table, and sat down—all without taking his eyes off the equations. “Go boil some coffee, would you? It’s going to take me a while to get through this. And Arkady?”

  Arkady turned, his hand on the doorjamb.

  “We’re not telling anyone about this until we’re sure, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Good boy.”

  Arkady was so distracted that he boiled the water twice, and by the time he got back Arkasha’s scratch paper was thickly covered with his illegible pencil scratchings.

  “Well,” Arkasha announced. “Your math’s fine.”

  “I know my math’s fine. What I don’t know is where the problem is.”

  “In the data, obviously.”

  “What are you—?”

  “Oh, get your hackles down. There’s nothing wrong with your data collection methods, or your samples or your recording or anything else you’ve done. There’s something wrong out there.” He gestured toward the skin of the hab ring and the vast black forest beyond. “There’s something wrong—or right—with the planet itself.”

  Arkady stared wide-eyed at Arkasha. “What do you mean ‘wrong or right’?”

  Arkasha rubbed at his head, his face screwed up into a mask of indecision. Then ran his fingers down the neatly aligned spines of his own intimidatingly orderly notebooks and plucked one out off the rack to spread before Arkady. “Have a look at this.”

  Arkady couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was neatly written out in Arkasha’s minute, mathematically precise hand, and it betrayed none of the adjustments, revisions, recalculations, and smudged erasures that marred Arkady’s own efforts.

  He leaned over the page, straining to decipher the tiny print. He was so close to Arkasha that he could see the pulse flicker in the soft hollow between his collarbones. Suddenly he desperately wanted not to be worrying about mutation rates or DVI numbers or anything else but Arkasha. You only love me because you don’t know me. What kind of crazy thing was that to say? And it was wrong, anyway. Dead wrong. He cleared his throat and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Uh…is r rate of mutation?”

  Arkasha nodded.

  “In mitochondrial DNA?”

  Another nod.

  “I’m sorry,” Arkady said after a long moment. “It looks fine to me. I guess I know enough to know what I’m looking at, but not to spot the problem.”

  “Look at the answer I came up with.”

  Arkady looked, assessing the number as a real-world fact for the first time, rather than as the abstract product of a series of mathematical operations. “Um…isn’t that kind of high?”

  “It’s worse than high. It’s impossible. But it’s what’s out there.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I stayed up three nights in a row centrifuging fresh samples to make sure of it. It’s right. It’s all right. Except it’s all wrong.” Arkasha grabbed a second notebook and set it in front of Arkady. “Remember those hairy beetle things you were so excited about last week?”

  “The ant lions?”

  “Ant lions. Right. Well, thanks to your fascination with them, they’re the most thorough sampling we’ve got of a sexually reproducing species. So when my other models started going south, I figured I’d look at them.”

  “And you came up with that ?”

  “Exactly. According to my calculations, your beloved ant lions shouldn’t exist. Just like every other living thing on this planet. In fact, Novalis should be a sterile hellhole. And every species on it—every bug, every bird, every tree, every blade of grass—should be walking ghosts.”

  The two men stood looking at the page before them for another long moment.

  “You’re sure?” Arkady asked finally.

  “That’s what the numbers say.”

  “But it’s not what the world outside the airlock says.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “We punt,” Arkasha announced, as if it were the only logical solution. “We push the whole problem onto Ahmed’s desk and let him worry about it.”

  No need to say which Ahmed; both men had long ago written off By-the-Book Ahmed as useless.

  “But if we’re wrong…,” Arkady began.

  “We’re not wrong.”

  “Still,” Arkady said. “I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I knew whether or not the new DVI numbers were adding up.”

  Arkasha made a disparaging noise. “What are you going to do? Walk down the hallway and ask Bella if her numbers add up, and if they don’t, then was she planning to cook the books again and would she mind terribly telling us which planet’s DVI she’s going to borrow this time so I don’t have to waste another day tracking the numbers down in the data banks? You can count me out of that conversation!”

  “Well, we could be a little more tactful than that.”

  Arkasha folded his arms across his chest and stared meaningfully at Arkady.

  “Or, uh…we could always just punt and let Ahmed worry about it.”

  In the end the Ahmeds called a general consult to discuss what they diplomatically described as “concerns” about the preliminary survey results.

  “So where do we go from here?” one of the Aurelias asked when Arkady and Arkasha had taken turns laying out the problems in their work.

  Arkasha shifted in his chair. “I say we shift base, see if we get better results in the other hemisphere. After all, the same arguments still apply. More biomass, higher species counts, better baselines…We need to rule out the possibility that we’re looking at some local—”

  “Do you have the faintest idea how totally impractical that suggestion is?” By-the-Book Ahmed interrupted.

  “It wouldn’t be if you’d followed my advice and picked a scientifically defensible landing site in the first place.”

  “I refuse to let this consult become an excuse for revisiting closed issues. And even if—”

  “And who the hell says that’s your decision?”

  “—and even if we were going to reopen the question of base camp sites, I certainly wouldn’t do it on the advice of two alleged experts who can’t even figure out how to conduct routine survey work!”

  “Why don’t you go around the room, Ahmed, and see how many other people are willing to say their data looks right. Really. I want to hear it.”

  “Our work is solid!” Lazy Bella protested.

  “No it’s not,” her sib countered. She really was getting more assertive, Arkady thought. “Well, I mean…at least mine isn’t. I’ve been staying up nights trying to figure out where I went wrong.” Shy Bella sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand, flushing in embarrassment. “Sorry.”

  “What about you?” Arkasha asked Aurelia the geophysicist.

  Embarrassed silence.

  “Well,” she admitted finally, “most of my stuff’s fine. I mean, the issue here isn’t rocks. But I do feel like…well, the planet just doesn’t look good enough to me. Compared to what everyone else is seeing. Whenever I talk to any of the life-sciences people I keep getting the creepy feeling that Novalis is putting two and two together and getting five. Or five hundred million, more like.”

  “We can’t make a decision of the magnitude of moving the base camp on our own anyway,” By-the-Book
Ahmed broke in. “I say we launch a courier. Send samples back to Gilead for processing.”

  “And do what exactly in the intervening four months?” one of the Banerjees snarked. “Drink ourselves into a stupor?”

  “Go back into cold sleep. Set the shipboard comp to wake us up when it gets the return transmission.”

  If this had been a single Syndicate mission, Ahmed’s decision would have been accepted without question; what could be more obvious, after all, than calling home for instructions?

  As it was, however, the non-Aziz A’s bridled. Even the relatively docile Arkady could feel the urge toward rebellion. A learned response? A genetic reflex? A difference in the negotiation styles and customary behaviors that each of the team members had learned in his or her home Syndicate? Did it even matter? And was it any accident that all their rebellious feelings found a voice in Arkasha?

  “I refuse to waste four months waiting for the same joint steering committee that got us into this mess!” the other Banerjee announced. “Life is too short. I have a job to do.” A pointed glare at By-the-Book Ahmed. “Even if some people don’t.”

  Laid-back Ahmed opened his mouth to say something reassuring—and that was when all hell broke loose.

  By-the-Book Ahmed accused Arkasha of being an egotistical humanist elitist.

  The Aurelias came to Arkasha’s defense, and Bella accused them of siding with a fellow Rostov even when they knew he was a deviant who’d been skating on the edge of renorming for decades.

  The other Aurelia leapt to her sib’s defense by calling Bella a lazy, self-centered, manipulative bitch.

  “It’s not my fault we’re on the wrong side of this stupid planet!” Bella protested. “It wasn’t my idea to land here!”

  “Like hell it wasn’t!” Oh no. Please, Arkasha, just keep your mouth shut for once. “You sat right here three weeks ago and sided with the Ahmeds on the landing site decision for no reason at all but sheer petty-minded spite. And now you have the hypocritical nerve to—”