by Kathy Tyers
“It is rather disconcerting about your predecessor, isn’t it?” GurEshel murmured, digging for an elusive shard.
“Dr. Mahera?” Graysha asked dreamily. “Sandstorm. Yes.”
Yael GurEshel set down her probe and leaned close. “Dr. Brady-Phillips, try to concentrate. MaiJidda told you nothing more?”
“Sandstorm,” Graysha insisted, fighting the sedative in an attempt to focus. The unblinking stare of Yael GurEshel’s dark brown eyes probably would have unnerved her another time. “Frontier pay?” she asked.
“It will wait.” The physician’s face blurred as her voice faded out. “But before you check out of the Health Maintenance Facility, someone needs to speak with you.”
―――
“This is Vice-Chair MaiJidda,” said the deep voice on Dr. Yael GurEshel’s audi line. “We can only hold that shuttle lander twenty minutes longer or we’ll miss the launch window. Dr. Brady-Phillips is sick enough to warrant sending her away, isn’t she?”
Yael GurEshel frowned at her bare yellow-tan office wall. “Too sick,” she answered. “She won’t be able to travel for at least a month. You had no business holding back food—”
“A month?” The vice-chair’s voice rose. “Cancel that, doctor. Do you realize whose daughter she is?”
Yael GurEshel rocked her chair away from the desktop console. “I might not realize?”
“Listen,” MaiJidda said softly. “I had only two hours to find out what would bring on that attack. The idiot lander captain insisted on sending her to you instead of putting her back on board. Scared of his legal liability. If there’s no food in her stomach, we could still put her back on that shuttle. Or . . . Yes—we’ll put her back on board, regardless. Acceleration sickness is messy, but it isn’t dangerous.”
Irritated, Yael drummed her fingers. “You aren’t listening, Ari. In her condition, the stress of takeoff and acceleration could be fatal. The Hippocratic oath does not permit me to deliberately endanger her life, to say nothing of what we would stir up if Novia Brady-Phillips’s daughter died through our malpractice. She must remain here for at least a month.”
After several seconds, MaiJidda sighed heavily onto her own pickup, making Yael’s desk speaker roar. “All right. I’ll release the lander.”
The line went dead. Yael GurEshel gripped her desk’s edge with both hands, wishing this long Goddarday had never dawned. She would not knowingly endanger her newly arrived patient, but neither would she become emotionally involved.
Ari MaiJidda was absolutely correct: Novia Brady-Phillips’s daughter must not remain on Goddard.
Varberg
An hour later, Graysha rested with both hands bandaged and a fresh drip-pak taped to one arm. Emmer slept next to her shoulder, a warm spot alongside her neck. The clinic still smelled of phenol and ethanol: sharp, clean, sterile. Natural daylight shone through a window that attendants had adjusted to minimal polarization at her request.
Outside, a yellowish plain blotched with vegetative browns and greens stretched out under the red-orange sun. She recognized two metal hulks, slowly chomping their way toward the crater wall, as mechanical crop tenders. What grew out there, unsheltered in the cold? About fifteen kilometers in the distance, a highway switchbacked up a sheer stony wall to escape her range of vision. Goddard’s towns were all built deep below the highland surface, inside impact craters, where air collected thickest and the winds didn’t blow so hard.
Graysha took a leisurely sip of water from her bedside glass, gagged, and set the glass back down. It tasted like dead algae and processing chemicals, just like the outside air. Concrete walls, grim and dismal, closed her in.
What was she doing here? She was a teacher with financial difficulties, not a soils specialist. It had been luck beyond her fervent prayers when Gaea accepted her application—or maybe not. Maybe Dr. Bell was right after all. Goddard was no place for a person in imperfect health.
She needed the money, though, and according to her Gaea contract, this position would be mostly lab work, not physically demanding. With what she intended to save over three terrannums at frontier triple wages, she might pay for . . . Well, first she needed to settle debts created by a messy lawsuit-entangled divorce, but she had additional plans for the money.
She’d heard rumors about Goddard—stories that flew in the face of everything her mother preached, rumors that they practiced gene-healing. If she could find a geneticist willing to try to help her despite her mother’s notoriety, then someday she might have normal noncarrier children. In Flaherty’s syndrome—a mutation that first appeared at Newton Habitat—a protein-production function did not shut down at the end of capillary growth. Fifteen to twenty Earth-referent terrannums from now, nutrients and oxygen would no longer pass out of her bloodstream through micropores in the thickened capillary walls. No matter how much she ate, she would starve to death at the cellular level. There was no cure, no real hope for herself . . . but at twenty-four, married only once and still childless, she could at least live productively and well—and hope to give her next husband children who might outlive them both.
She had to find medical help, legal or illegal. Now. Her mother, a high-ranking investigator for the United Sovereignties and Space Colonies’ Eugenics Board, was starting to drop pointed hints about surgical sterilization—and she had the legal authority to see it done.
Graysha reached up to stroke Emmer, whose smooth black pelt parted under her fingertips. A fuzzy-haired stowaway caught on board the ExPress shuttle had been ferried down with her. Did he, too, come seeking the mysterious people they called Lwuites?
Openly, Goddard’s colonists—a medico-religious sect claiming fifteen thousand adherents—had started fetal work back when they lived in Einstein Habitat, trying to decrease violently aggressive tendencies in the human race. Hearsay was far more interesting. It hinted that the Lwuites fled Einstein—the second largest hab in the Alpha Centauri complex—hoping to find a place where they might repair the genetic mutations that plagued space dwellers.
If Goddard’s colonists were illegal homogenegineers, they would almost certainly question her intentions, especially since her mother and the Eugenics Board would pose them a genuine threat.
Graysha’s door swung open, and another stranger appeared. A huge man, without the defined look of muscle, he held his left hand behind his back. Brown hair grayed at his temples and around the back of his head. “Dr. Brady-Phillips?” he asked, drawing out her name in almost-a-drawl. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”
“No,” she said warily. Who was this? “Hello.”
“Will Varberg.” He thrust forward his right hand to clasp hers, saw the bandages, and drew back. “You really took a nasty spill, didn’t you? I’m head of the Micro floor, your new supervisor. Welcome to Goddard. I hope things go better for you from here on out.” He swung forward his left hand to present a nosegay of yellow and orange flowers. His thumb ring, which looked like a three-carat synthetic emerald, sparkled under brilliant room lights.
She smiled. “Thank you. Here, stick them in my water. It isn’t fit to drink.” She waved a stiff hand toward the bedside stand.
He reached for the tumbler. “It tastes vile, all right. I’ve learned not to notice.”
“I’m looking forward to that.”
“When do you get the mummy wrappings off?”
That sounded rude, but she played along, displaying her bandaged palms. “My fingers are free, so I could use a computer already. What is that smell in the air and water? Is it ether?”
“By-products of first generation bacteria, mostly. I assure you, within a day you’ll barely notice it.”
Graysha doubted his assurance. She’d made a hobby of scents. She’d even brought her perfuming kit to Goddard. “What’s your specialty, Dr. Varberg?”
He tipped back his head and looked down at her. “Microbial genetics. Say,” he said a little too casually, “are you related to the
Brady-Phillips who—”
“Yes,” she said, “the eugenics commissioner is my mother.” Novia’s daughter, she thought bitterly. All my life, I’ll be Novia’s daughter. Novia Brady-Phillips’s Eugenics Board was responsible for enforcing the ban on human gene tampering, and geneticists tended not to like her. The Eugenics Board watched and regulated and harassed them constantly.
Varberg tossed off a shrug. “I’ve had a report on your condition. They think they found the problem.”
“Oh?” Graysha smoothed a thin scratchy blanket over her flimsy gown.
“Repeated fasting from all the shuttle transfers,” he explained, “plus weeks at low shuttle-gravity. Then you tried to run before your fast-breaking meal.”
Obviously. But until she knew Will Varberg better, she wouldn’t voice her suspicion of the colonial officer. One group or the other—terraformers or colonists—might help her.
Varberg continued, “Very little research has been done on Flaherty’s sufferers, but it looks as if you’ve provided new data.”
“I’m ecstatic.” Graysha laughed quietly. “I just hope they’ll give me researcher’s pay and won’t feed me gribby chow.” Trying to speak through the cotton mouth of muscle relaxants was tricky. “I’m pumped so full of blood sugar I’m a vampire’s holiday dessert.”
Dr. Varberg wheeled the room’s single chair toward Graysha’s bedside. “How are you feeling?” He sat down and scooted the chair even closer, leaning one beefy arm on her bedside table and the other against the railing of her bed.
Intimidated by his proximity, Graysha pushed away from him, toward the wall and the other railing. “I’m only tired. And ve-ry relaxed. My legs think they ran a 10K race. Have you . . .” She hesitated, embarrassed again. She hated thinking of herself as an invalid. “Have you asked the doctors when I’ll be well enough to go to work?”
“They want you to spend one night under observation. I’ve had your things sent to Gaea employee housing.” From an inside pocket, he pulled a magnetic key strip. “Someone will escort you to your apartment when you’re ready.”
Graysha glanced at the laminated strip. “Dr. Varberg, I’m sorry about this. If I’d guessed—”
Varberg laid the key on the concrete bedside table and waved away Graysha’s objection. “Don’t skip any meals and they say you’ll be fine.” He scooted the bouquet closer to her, deftly plucking a petal out of one yellow bloom. “They don’t smell good, but they look nice, don’t they?” he asked in that deep, oddly lazy voice.
The powdery odor was a pleasant change from ethanol, phenol, and medicines. “I can’t believe picking flowers is allowed.”
“I grow them myself. Do save the wilted heads for me, if you would.” He lounged in her bedside chair. “So you’ve put in a bit of soils work, besides your university credits?”
Of course he would wonder why Gaea had recruited a high-school teacher. She did, too. Once, briefly, she even suspected her mother had something to do with it.
But that couldn’t be. Novia always kept her close, watchable, shielded from risks. It felt good to have so much distance between them. “Here and there,” she answered. “One can’t actively pursue all one’s interests.”
“True. I particularly liked your thesis work with nitrifying bacteria. We’ve set up a terrarium series in the main lab, hoping you’ll want to continue that course of study.”
Distracted, she stared at his broad hand. He pulled out a second petal and dropped it beside the other one. Did he even realize he was doing it?
She had another thought. If Will Varberg specialized in genetics, what would it take to convince him to repair her damaged twelfth chromosomes—how much money, how much reassurance that she wouldn’t report him back to Novia?
No. That was layman’s thinking. A microbial geneticist wouldn’t be equipped to deal with human problems.
Another petal dropped on the bedside table as Varberg talked on about his own educational history. She wouldn’t risk asking him, she decided. The Eugenics Board’s policy was to defrock a convicted homogenegineer all the way down to the BS level. As for the genegineered subjects, they were punished with sterilization—no reversible tubal lig, but a whole-body irradiation that rendered every cell unusable for cloning, sentencing the victim to slow death by all kinds of cancers. The 2030 Troubles—a dark time in human history—anathematized human genetic tampering forever. Except for a few patients legally cured of specific diseases, genetically altered individuals no longer had human rights. By USSC definition, they weren’t even human.
There went another petal. Varberg looked her way, then pulled back his hand.
“I’d be pleased to work with nitrifiers again,” she said, pushing one thumb against her palm. The pain medication had to be wearing off, because it hurt.
“We do need you primarily on soils. No problem with that?”
“I get along well with soils. So long as I don’t fall in them.”
He smacked his hands together. “Perfect. It will be good to have Jon Mahera’s lab filled again and to get back to full efficiency.” He gave Graysha an exaggerated wink. “You might as well go back to sleep. If they let you out tomorrow, I’ll see you then.”
She glanced back down at the table. Beside her bouquet lay five ruffled yellow and orange petals. They cast peculiar shadows on the dull gray, metal-topped concrete. “The flowers are wonderful, Dr. Varberg.”
Her physician, Yael GurEshel, visited again before dinner time. After examining her hands, she replaced the dressings with small bandages. “You’re healing more rapidly than we anticipated, given your condition,” she said, folding her hands across her broad waist.
“Really, Doctor, I’m not an invalid.”
“Mmm. Well, you may report to work at the Gaea station tomorrow. You should be fine, so long as you don’t fast again.”
Graysha flexed her hands. “This attack doesn’t bar me from space travel, does it?”
GurEshel raised an eyebrow. “You should remain on Goddard for at least a month, though of course I cannot force you to stay. I doubt ExPress would even board you. Another three-day fast before your metabolism stabilizes would likely bring on a repeat attack. When you leave Goddard, I recommend that you remain a month at Copernicus Hab before traveling on and at every transfer point thereafter.”
“A month at each transfer point?”
“Exactly.” The stout physician nodded. “We would also like you to keep careful symptomatic records. For research, you understand.”
Reminded again that she was not just a Ph.D. but a lab subject, too, she sympathized with Emmer and all her furry kin. People who considered her an invalid—slowly dying instead of rising in her field—would not respect her as a professional or as a woman.
But keeping her own research records sounded reasonable. They might help someone else some day. “I’ll do that, of course.”
“Now,” said GurEshel, “about Jon Mahera.”
Graysha shifted under the scratchy blanket. “What about him, Doctor?”
GurEshel’s round eyes had a direct, honest intensity. “You ought to know we’re in the middle of a murder investigation.”
Stunned, Graysha crossed her arms across her chest. “Murder? I thought he’d gone out in a . . .”
“Sandstorm. Yes. After he was expressly told the weather would be safe for a trip upside.”
False information was potentially as deadly as hard radiation. She struggled to put down her fears and retain professional poise. “Don’t they know who told him so?”
Yael GurEshel shook her head. “Vice-Chair MaiJidda says current leads point to one of his colleagues. Professional jealousy can be a frightening thing.”
“Oh,” Graysha said quietly, seeing Will Varberg’s nervous petal pulling in an ominous new light. Perhaps her new boss was a murderer, or maybe he feared he might be targeted next.
Or maybe Jon Mahera discovered something the new soils specialist also might learn, something
the Lwuite people didn’t want him to know, and they killed him for it. If members of this sect were mercy criminals, some of them might silence anyone they considered a threat.
In that case, Graysha could be their next victim. A final thought knocked the wind out of her: Just like Ari MaiJidda, Dr. GurEshel was trying to scare her away—and was just about succeeding.
Graysha had a sudden urge to ask GurEshel to send her back to Einstein Hab via the next supply shuttle, regardless of medical risk.
Atop the crater wall, something flashed a slow rhythm. A navigational beacon for robot crop tenders, maybe, or for colonial air travel. The slow, steady pulse reminded Graysha that as time slipped away, her capillary walls thickened.
She needed the Lwuites’ help. She had to stay on.
Smiling weakly up at GurEshel, she said, “Thank you for the information.”
GurEshel stepped toward the open door. “Be careful, Dr. Brady-
Phillips.”
“I will,” she answered, stroking Emmer’s warm fur. God help me, I will.
Stowaway
TreVarre Chase-Frisson LZalle had hoped to make a break for it as soon as the ten-passenger lander touched down. Instead, ExPress Shuttle crewmen held him until the legitimate passengers had disembarked and then handed him over to three hooded characters, who forced him into a waiting track-truck. Alone in the back, he hunched down on the uncomfortable seat, clenching both hands beneath his arms to keep them warm as the truck bounced across the crater bottom. Looks like you’ve got yourself another planet, Trev. And another trip without a view.
Oh, shut up. He’d been told that talking to himself—worse, answering back—was a sign of instability, but he didn’t care anymore. This frigid planet smelled worse than his father’s crimping fluid.
One more place where he can take out his temper . . .
Hating the thought, Trev exhaled through his mouth and made frosty dragon breath. By the time his father finished with this place, a dragon might as well have passed through. The last time Trev ran away . . .