by Kathy Tyers
“Even a small whiff is pretty awful.” He offered a beautiful smile.
Realizing she was about to ask if he’d ever found sand on his computer station, she raised her guard again. She mustn’t confide in him. In her experience, unbelievably handsome men—and women—weren’t particularly trustworthy. “It’s no worse than I expected. Dr. Varberg says I’ll be sampling compost, too, and topsoil aging beds.” She closed the kit.
Stretching out one hand, he touched a wisp of her hair that had escaped its tie. “Plenty of good smells. If you find anything missing from the biologic inventory, come back in two days with necessary cultures and inoculate. Somehow I always found something missing.”
“I’ll bet,” she murmured, smiling.
He smiled back. “The inoculating is particularly good on Bdays and Cdays, when the sun shines.” He looked down at her lab coat in a way that warmed her cheeks again. “It’s a good place to sunbathe, and very private.”
Following standard procedure for corporate employees, Paul brought her back from Wastewater right at morning breaktime. Graysha left Jon Mahera’s sampling bag in her office and joined the rest of the micro floor in the break room.
Actually a long lab, its accoutrements suggested it served as coffee bar (ceramic water heater on an end table), confessional (deep chair and several stools), first aid station (crimson kit mounted on the near wall), and experimental-animal quarters (shelves full of opaque cages with metal grate tops). Graysha wrinkled her nose at the combined scent of coffee, alfalfa tea, and rodent droppings.
The floor’s Lwuite techs—Graysha had met another young woman before leaving the floor with Paul—shared their break separately, in the hall. Detached sibilant s’s were all Graysha could hear of their conversation.
She swung her legs beneath her stool and sipped a cup of slightly bitter alfalfa tea, brewed from plants “pharmed” with a caffeine-producing gene from tea camellias. Grown as green manure throughout the crater, a smaller dwarfalfa cultivar survived on minimal water, fed the livestock, and furnished several local delicacies, or so Dr. Varberg claimed.
She mentioned Mahera to Will Varberg.
“Couldn’t remember his place,” Varberg drawled, stirring coffee crystals into his cup, “both literally and figuratively. Never knew where he was. Had a hard time remembering he wasn’t in charge, too.”
Paul Ilizarov swiveled in a seat two meters to her right. “Clumsy fellow. We wash these floors daily, and every day Jon slipped.”
“A wonder we didn’t lose him earlier.” Jirina swung through the door and bent to dose her own cup from the decaf jar. “You know how it is when you’re thinking hard.”
“Exactly,” said Varberg from the depths of a stuffed chair. “Didn’t know where he was. Couldn’t keep his place.”
And so it was easy to claim he’d wandered off? How would death come in a sandstorm? she wondered. Had he suffocated, or was the flesh slowly scoured from his bones?
And if the Lwuites didn’t do it, whom did they suspect? “I suppose the colonists are pretty amateurish when it comes to conducting an investigation,” she said, watching the others for reactions.
“What else would you expect?” Jirina asked, rolling her dark eyes. Ilizarov nodded. Varberg merely sipped his coffee. “They hauled us in one by one,” Jirina explained, “everyone in the building clear up to Dr. Lee, but they’ve got no police equipment. They’re a joke.”
Thanks to her mother’s investigative work, Graysha knew more about police equipment than she liked. “Did Mahera have children?” she asked the gathering in general.
“No, thank goodness.” Paul leaned against a counter. “Most of us are single and enjoying the hunt, an odd group by hab standards.” He blinked slowly, catlike.
She found his presence electrifying. “Did he have trouble with this Chairman DalLierx?” she asked, crossing her ankles on a rung of the stool and willing herself not to scratch her legs. “Was there any suspicion of foul play committed by the colonists?”
“DalLierx suspects us,” Ilizarov commented. “Maybe we should suspect him.”
Clasping long fingers like a bracelet around her upper arm, Jirina grinned across at Graysha. “DalLierx has one thing on his mind, that’s all. He’s the great leader. He is determined to breed his Lwuites, seed them around Goddard, and keep them doctrinally pure. Like the way he called you in already.”
“What do I have to do with—”
“Wanted to check you out, make sure you’re no threat,” Jirina said. “Maybe see if you could be bullied into leaving. I don’t think he’s capable of murder. The rest of them? Who knows?”
Digging noises erupted from an opaque cage. “How could I threaten the Lwuites?” She knew, of course, but she wondered if it had occurred to her co-workers. “Surely they’re not so short on food that they can’t support one more specialist.”
“All very mysterious.” Ilizarov winked, smiling blandly. “They’re hiding something. They take their babies early. Did you know that?”
Graysha nodded. “But only the males.”
“No, all of them. They do a second treatment at puberty,” Jirina added. “Some kind of hormonal soup, injected right through the forehead. Supposed to encourage little axons to connect speech centers with spatial centers or something. Very secret.”
“Very weird.” Varberg slid his cup toward the sink and let his head loll to one side. “Come to Goddard, join the Lwuites. Lobotomies are our specialty!”
Graysha discreetly pushed her stool backward, wanting to get more distance from Varberg. Up until this moment, he hadn’t actually been offensive. This callous disdain for others’ beliefs was worse than petal pulling.
Paul and Jirina added their cups to Varberg’s in the sink. Out of habit, Graysha reached for the washing sponge. Her fingers almost touched Paul’s, about to clasp the same sponge.
“Yours. This time,” Paul said. “Perhaps dinner some night soon?”
His attention was balm to her spirit. “Definitely,” she said, glad to turn her back on Varberg. “Thank you.”
He strolled back out into the hall.
“Hey.”
At the sound of Jirina’s stage whisper, Graysha glanced up.
Jirina stood near Graysha’s shoulder. “Send those pants through the laundry about ten times and they’ll lose their bite,” Jirina said. “Sorry I forgot to tell you yesterday. And be sure your shots are current before getting too close to Paul.”
“What?”
“Social diseases.” Jirina’s long body swayed as she walked out of the break room.
“Oh,” Graysha said as Jirina’s back receded. The diseases Jirina implied would have been eliminated before immigrants arrived on this world, but her meaning was clear. Perhaps she ought not to be quite so friendly with Paul if—as Jirina hinted—he simply wanted to score with the new woman on the team.
Graysha carried her refilled tea mug back to her office and depolarized her small window. Orion hung overhead, strangely positioned but reassuringly familiar. Galactically speaking, Eps Eri wasn’t all that far from the Alpha triple system she had always called home. Not that she’d spent much time stargazing. Stars meant vacuum, the ever-present danger she had dreaded ever since she was old enough to understand that depressurization was the potential apocalypse stalking all habitants.
The winking light of a communication relay passed slowly overhead. She thought of the necklace of geosynchronous mirrors that also lay in a high orbit. Small beacons, they focused patches of sunlight onto seas and over poles, onto black-sand areas and the continental snowpack—slowly warming the world, helping drive Goddard’s weather. Other satellites focused light onto solar generators, providing electrical power as inexpensively as in a hab.
Graysha now had an inkling of why Gaea’s task would take generations to accomplish here and why the importation of raw materials was so vital. For one thing, the planet was open to the sky, with heat lost to space every night.
; Knowing her ancestors spent all their lives shackled to planetary surfaces like this had been one thing. It seemed distant, romantic, long ago and far away. It was all too close now, and she couldn’t forget that she lived out here by choice. For the moment.
She dimmed the window and raised the office light’s intensity. Nights masquerading as working days would not lower her productivity if she could help it. Sinking into her office chair, she touched on the computer. On her duty roster she found an apparently endless list of undone tasks created by Jon Mahera’s death. She must familiarize herself with bacterial, algal, and fungal populations. She touched up a map, then sipped her cooling tea.
Evidently Mahera kept excellent records of Axis’s microbes. Her first task, then, was to take a complete biological inventory from agricultural sites. Changes might have occurred while her position was vacant. She would need plates and tubes of growth media for the nodulators and their group, the sulfur-cycle group, soil streps . . .
Footsteps approached in the hallway. She heard a soft voice, then a rap at her outer door.
“Come,” she called.
A woman she guessed at close to her own age, with chestnut pigtails pinned up over the top of her head, shuffled into the office. “Good morning, Dr. Brady-Phillips. My name is Liberty JenChee. I have an undergraduate degree in General Sci and two G-years experience at Port Arbor Clinic. When I asked about employment this morning, Dr. Lee sent me to you. Will you be needing technical help?”
“Certainly.” Graysha pushed a wisp of hair off her forehead. “Just a minute, Miss JenChee. Sit down, if you’d like.”
She typed a query to Melantha Lee’s secretary. Gaea did pay technical staff. She was, in fact, allotted two techs.
A good thing, since she’d offered DalLierx—
Yes. She might be able to employ the stowaway. That would give her one educated assistant and a “grunt,” like most field researchers. It was likely that Liberty JenChee had been sent by the Chairman of Colonial Affairs to keep an eye on her.
Fair enough.
She swiveled her chair. The woman had stepped out into the lab. “Miss JenChee?” Graysha called.
When Liberty returned to the office doorway, Graysha took a moment to look her over. Ethnically mixed and long-waisted, she wore browncloth softened with wear. She seemed unable to look long at Graysha’s face, darting her glances aside and then trying again to maintain eye contact.
“I’d be happy to offer you employment,” Graysha plunged on, “but at the moment I’m still settling in myself. What I’d like to do is have you come in, say, about every third day until I know where I’ll need you. If that will be all right, I’ll see you tomorrow morning—no, come the next day, at about eight.” Graysha stood up and offered Liberty a handshake.
After the young Lwuite woman left, Graysha spent the better part of an hour selecting abstracts at the basic level, then filing them in a new index for Liberty to read. It occurred to her to wonder what happened to Jon Mahera’s assistants. Had they left the work force, departed Axis Plantation for other settlements, or found better employment during the job’s brief vacancy?
Abruptly she realized that a low-pitched rumble had started somewhere off to her right, like an army of approaching track-trucks. That couldn’t be. Those solar vehicles would be shut away in garages during today’s darkness. The floor didn’t move, so this was no microseism.
Sandstorm?
She sprang to the small office window, depolarized its dimmer, and peered out. Stars winked on and off with those queer atmospheric disturbances. That looked right—until before her very eyes they faded and vanished. Barn lights disappeared next. The rumbling developed a whistle.
She spun toward the hall door. Jirina intercepted her there. “It’s snowing,” Jirina exclaimed, “and, sister, I’ve seen it snow sideways here. It’s blowing due south. Catch that wind?”
Graysha nodded. Her window, she’d learned, faced south by southeast. “It scared the pants off me. We’re supposed to have stars this time of day.”
“Right. Come around to the other side of the building. We’ve got a few outdoor lights close enough for you to see what’s happening.”
Standing in the break room, Graysha watched a flood of white pellets wash past. A few tiny eddies around the window’s frame slowed the onslaught, letting it swirl. She hoped the window glass was good and thick.
“Our third snow this G-year,” Jirina said, standing at Graysha’s shoulder. “It means we’re getting enough water into the ecosystem to saturate the atmosphere—what air there is, and at this temp . . .” She touched a keyboard. “Twenty below freezing, and it’s dropping.”
Graysha stared. What a violent atmosphere. What a waste of water and energy. “The poor animals,” she murmured.
Jirina picked up a spare cup from under the water heater, and Graysha noticed the black woman wore no more jewelry than she did. Evidently Jirina preferred not to flaunt hab wealth when living close to colonists. “Meteorology’s on top of things,” Jirina said. “The AnProd people will have had warning, and all the babes will be warm in their barns. But aren’t you glad we’re going home by tunnel?”
“What about the colonists in their new little houses?” Graysha tried to imagine how isolated they must feel, waiting out the storm, unable to go anywhere.
Filling her cup with double-distilled hot water, Jirina stirred in a spoonful of decaf. “Those that live upside are stuck at work, or school, or wherever. But that’s okay, too. They have to learn to watch the forecasts. It’s part of their new life.”
Graysha shook her head, thinking of Jon Mahera, sent outdoors into a sandstorm as powerful and deadly as this blizzard. Maybe worse. “There goes the collecting trip I planned for next Bday,” she mused.
“Maybe not.” Jirina shrugged. “Read the forecast. This will probably break by planetary morning. When we finally get really long storms, that’ll mean Goddard is coming alive.”
Graysha rubbed the chilly window, marveling at the clear trail her finger left in a fog of condensation. Sooner or later, she’d have to go out under that untamed sky again. “Is it safe outdoors right after a storm?”
“If you dress for it. People do it all the time.”
Like the ancients, they consistently wore extra clothing to control their warmth. “Incredible.” Graysha stared, steadying her legs against vertigo as unending whiteness whipped past in the dark. Her triannum would be six swings through the local seasons, including six uncontrolled winters. If solar batteries flickered out or hydroelectric lines broke during this kind of blast, only wind-generated power would keep the chill outdoors.
“Jirina,” she mused, “on days like this I’m going to miss living in a hab.”
Messier’s Shadow
The storm howled over Axis Plantation all twenty-four hours of Aday, ending sometime during the late planetary night. By Bday light, right after lunch, Graysha layered culture-growing dishes and a case of enriched soy-broth swab tubes into Jon Mahera’s collecting case.
Will Varberg stepped into her lab as she set the case beside her sink and washed her hands. “Your trip day,” he observed.
“Yes, finally.” She reached for a yellowed homespun towel. “It’s about time, don’t you think? I’ve been here four circadays.”
“I’ll go with you—show you around.”
Warning bells clanged in her mind as she turned to hang up the towel. If Varberg was the murderer, she might put herself in danger if she let him come along. Was she already asking too many questions?
But he was her supervisor and likely the wrong suspect, and she could think of no good reason to beg off. “I’m about ready to head out,” she said. “How soon can you conveniently leave?”
“Give me ten.”
“Thank you.” She swung around and managed a smile. “I’m still not too secure about that sky up there.”
He took longer than ten minutes, and when at last he rapped on her door, he offered no
explanation. Supervisory privilege, she guessed. She maintained silence while they boarded the elevator.
It opened across from Dr. Lee’s office. “Just a moment, Graysha. I think I should let Administration know where we’re going.”
“That’s fine.” She followed Varberg’s massive silhouette through glass doors and past the jittery secretary, who flicked one hand at him in greeting. Vivid yellow and orange marigolds crammed a waist-high planter along one wall, and the outer office smelled faintly of jasmine over sandalwood, as if Melantha Lee occasionally burned incense. Beige and gray floor tiles formed a random patchwork underfoot.
Inside Lee’s private office, Graysha stared at the side wall. On a smoothed concrete slab, someone had painted a glossy life-sized mural of tall reeds root-drowned in water. Two stately white cranes framed the reeds, cocking their heads, watching for fish with bright black eyes.
Sitting behind her desk, Dr. Lee tracked Graysha’s stare back over her shoulder. “With so little paper to spare, I’ve taken to ornamenting walls. I see you like it.”
“You painted it?” Graysha exclaimed. “Dr. Lee, it’s almost alive.”
“The adjustment to living underground is difficult for many,” Lee said, “even for some habitants. This is one reason the newer constructs are no longer dug underground—and it’s easier to build upside.”
“I hope you’re teaching some of their children to paint.” Graysha spotted a small brown fish hiding in painted ripples.
“We’re going sampling this afternoon,” Varberg said. “Tour of the plantation.”
Dr. Lee swiveled her chair. “An excellent idea, Dr. Brady-Phillips. Small changes occur every day, particularly after a storm.”
“It’s curiosity as much as anything,” said Graysha. “I’d like to see how your greenhouses compare to those at Newton or Einstein, or even Halley.”
“Our under-glass crops come along as quickly as in any habitat.” Dr. Lee stared over Graysha’s shoulder as she spoke. “The colonists’ chief goals are to pay for our service and make the colony self-supporting. As soils expert, you are a particularly valuable person to them.”