Shivering World

by Kathy Tyers

  Except for one small problem—my mother. She would have said it out loud, but Varberg was speaking. “Gaea’s goal, on the other hand, is to make the planet live. Neither is going to be easy.”

  Lee’s audi line buzzed. “Excuse me one moment.” The supervisor turned aside.

  As Dr. Lee spoke toward the pickup on her desk, Graysha murmured, “It sounds like you and Dr. Lee have a long-­standing friendly disagreement.”

  “We’ve heard rumbles,” Varberg answered softly, “of reorganization from Gaea’s Copernicus office. The home office back on Earth isn’t impressed with regional management. It has nothing to do with long-­term Goddard policy, though. Shouldn’t affect us.”

  Graysha distrusted shouldn’t on principle, whenever she heard it. “What kind of reorganization?” she asked. Could corporate greed offer another clue to Jon Mahera’s murder?

  “The same kind of stories I’ve been hearing since I was hired twenty years ago.” Casually, Varberg reached down to the glass of marigolds on Melantha Lee’s desk. Graysha watched, fascinated. He plucked a petal, then another. “Consortium money about to run out, maybe,” he said, “or too many projects too far separated to manage them all efficiently. Surely you’ve heard them.”

  She had. If Gaea pulled out of Goddard, her triple pay—and her best and perhaps final chance at finding a homogenegineer—would vanish like Mars’s polar ice caps. She tried not to stare at his hand. “Well, yes,” she said, “I’ve heard lots of stories.” Switching her web-­handled carry case from one side to the other, she stepped away from Dr. Lee’s desk. On a low table near a window, a large woody seed hung suspended by thin wooden picks over a drinking glass. A broad-­leafed sapling, half a meter high, sprouted from its rounded top. Someday, if Goddard warmed enough to support tropical flora, one avocado tree would be ready for transplant.

  Lee turned aside from her soft conversation. “Oh, excuse me. I didn’t mean to delay you. Have a pleasant afternoon.”

  Graysha strolled beside Varberg toward the plantation’s central hub. She sniffed the indoor air, catching a faint tang of curing concrete. Most of the heavy machinery she’d seen parked along this corry was gone today. Axis Plantation must have mammoth elevators.

  Headed due north, they passed a stairwell marked Textiles. She worked up the courage to ask, “Tell me more about your genetics work, Dr. Varberg. What’s your specialty?”

  He smiled faintly. “Whatever’s needed. Agriculture says, ‘Let there be acid-­tolerant cyanobacteria,’ and I provide. Our gene bank is one of the best, and it’s rare when I don’t have the right organisms to start with.”

  “That’s excellent.”

  He squinted across at her. “You’re not opposed to gene-­jockeying on principle?” he asked. One eye narrowed as one side of his mouth smiled.

  “Should I be?”

  “Just thinking of your mother.”

  Mother, mother, mother. Stop following me! She adjusted the parka she’d slung over one arm. “My mother and I,” she said, “don’t see eye to eye on some things.”

  He laughed. “Such a nice normal family.”

  Not exactly, but she didn’t care to explain any further.

  Beyond the textile mill, another broad stair bore the label Farm Complex IV. “That’s closest,” he said. “We’ll take it.” He paused to pull on his coat. Graysha copied him, feeling fettered head to waist by the bulky parka. She left her goggles atop her head, wanting a first look at the upside farms with unfiltered vision.

  At the top of the stairs hung a thermometer that read twelve below freezing. Graysha cringed and walked out into the wind—not the mild breeze of an air-­conditioning unit but a gale that tugged hairs loose from her band and whipped them into her face. It blew steady and cold, slanting out of the north. She fastened the jacket snugly and raised its hood.

  As wild as it seemed, this site wasn’t truly exposed. A transparent shelter tent flapped overhead, dimming her view of the blue, blue sky. She still felt awed—buffeted physically and emotionally—by Goddard’s untamed atmosphere. Human determination and human helplessness had to go hand in hand in a frontier environment like this, even when the frontier was being shaped by human intelligence.

  She hugged her chest for warmth. Wilted stubs of harvested plants drooped over plowed soil, making rows of long brown humps. Several meters west down the nearest row, men worked in a line, pushing some kind of wheeled machines. Out of the windward distance came chomping sounds from a heavy cultivator.

  Varberg bumped her shoulder. “It’s heating over the equator,” he shouted, “so we get northers most of Bday.”

  Graysha faced windward and tried to let her shoulders hang loose. If she tried, she still could smell dust, algae, and odd gases. “How far to the crater wall?” she asked. By early-­angle light, the wall looked more rugged and jagged than ever, spattered with snowcapped boulders that had to be huge.

  “Twelve K north is the closest point.”

  Mentally upgrading those huge boulders to gigantic, she eyed the row of broken plant stubs. “I want a soil sample from each field.”

  “Fortunately, it’s not frozen too hard to sample. Too little water in it.”

  Frozen crop soil . . . She balked at the notion and then finally, fully comprehended. There was no way to protect it from freezing in this environment. “Ah,” she said.

  “I’ll dig. You inoculate.” Varberg flipped up his coring shovel, took a two-­handed grip, and stomped on its foot peg as naturally as if he’d been born holding one of the implements.

  “What about that rumor,” she asked, crouching downwind of him and clenching her hands for warmth, “that the Lwuites were running from something back on Einstein?”

  He grunted as a small cylinder of dirt dropped out of his shovel’s blade. “Oh, you’ve heard that one, too. Where, from your mother?”

  “I don’t remember.” Graysha scooped part of his core with a spatula. The wind blew the soil away. Turning against the gale to shelter the next sample, she trickled soil into a tube, then placed it in the case. Varberg still hadn’t answered her question. “Did you get your start in soils?” she asked, brushing the dirt from her browncloth pants.

  “Potatoes, check. The next field up has sugar beets.” He stood and said shortly, “Six terrannums on Messier.”

  “Oh, no.” Instantly, she felt that she understood him better. “I’m sorry,” she added. Messier, a stony world orbiting Barnard’s Star, was the first planet terraformed outside the home solar system. Tragically, a two-­degree rise in atmospheric temp, compounded by the loss of jet stream stability, melted a tenth of the world’s newly introduced water onto one continental plain—the plain where all its colonists lived.

  As Varberg followed Graysha up the crushed-­rock path, he added, “Messier was my first and last attempt at settling a planet for good. Goddard gets three terrannums of my life and no more, and then Edie and I are gone. Gone,” he repeated. “Take my advice, Graysha. We’re all here for the money. Just leave as soon as you can. Planets are good for mining, field studies, and killing settlers.”

  “I think . . . I understand how you must feel.” Maybe this explained his nervous petal pulling. He’d doubtless gone confidently into the field only to have naive academic ideals stripped away, but he had been unable to make a career change.

  “You couldn’t understand,” he said through gritted teeth. “Gaea employees who were heads of families drew lots for places on the last shuttle away. I won a place, but if it weren’t for Edie, I’d wish I hadn’t. I knew every man, woman, and child at the Gaea installation. Every one.” He kicked at a clod on the path. It vaporized into a small, dusty cloud. “I should have seen it coming, done something. Seventeen terrannums later, I still have nightmares. Edie has to take pills to sleep at all.”

  Chilled by the images, she stepped backward against the wind. “By all rights, it never should have happened.”

  “Bimonthly supply flights might have allowed more staff
to evacuate, but they couldn’t land during that season,” he said. “It was tragic.”

  By all established theories, the Messier disaster shouldn’t have happened. Projections for runaway flood conditions weren’t even in the right ballpark. Too much energy was supposed to be required, too long a time period, or too small a world.

  But try explaining that to the old folks whose colonizing sons and daughters died there.

  And don’t remind Dr. Varberg again, she decided, not if it gave him nightmares. She looked north across a stretch of blinding white toward the crater wall. Its jagged silhouette clawed the blue sky. She, too, would be glad to return to a habitat, where the horizon curved the right direction and the weather was servant instead of deadly enemy. With a mental sigh of sympathy, she dismissed Varberg from her list of murder suspects.

  He trudged west toward the last field. Heaps of stone and sand lay here and there. A huge orange vehicle with some kind of scoop attached to its front bumper sat on the road’s edge. Knobby ice stems connected its wheel wells with the ground.

  At that point, the shelter tent ended. She plodded behind Varberg up a ramp onto the half-­buried pipeline. Her pulse beat faster. Rounded white hillocks extended toward the crater wall, forming an eerie pattern of rippled C-­shaped drifts in a wild symmetry, like ocean waves. Sparkling wisps of white crystal blew off the near drifts. She pulled her UV goggles down, covering forehead and eyes, then stomped both feet to reconfirm that this world’s gravity would hold her and she wouldn’t blow away like newly fallen snow.

  “Storm’s buried everything out there. Grain, dwarfalfa.” Clenching fists on his hips, Varberg stamped out a circle in drifted snow atop the long, snakelike rise. Footprint by footprint, he flattened a standing space along its summit. “And I think that’s flax over there on the right—”

  “Flax. That’s what they weave the browncloth from?” Under the parka, her shirt still itched.

  “That, and wool from their halfers and goats. Snow won’t reduce production for any of those critters. Out beyond the crater, we’ve got experimental fields. Cold-­kudzu, increasingly modified dwarfalfa strains.”

  “They actually survive out there.” The notion awed her.

  “Yep. There’ll be trees soon, hardy softwoods. Talk to someone up at Hort if you want to know species. Plants don’t exactly thrive under UV, but if we plant enough of them, we’re bound to get some adaptive-­favorable mutations. Eventually.”

  A spray of snow seeped off the nearest mound, glittering like spun sugar on a huge icy cake. She raised her eyes to the craggy rim. “If it’s blowing like this down here, what’s it like up top, outside the crater?”

  “Pretty wild at true dawn. I wouldn’t want to be there.”

  “I’ll bet,” she murmured.

  “Late Bday, early Cday, closest to planetary noon, is our tropical calm. Tropical being a relative term, of course.”

  She tried again to imagine this world warming enough for someone to plant Dr. Lee’s small avocado tree.

  “Cday evenings,” he continued, “if the clouds are heavy enough, that’s when it rains. The wind shifts around from Storm Sea, and in she comes.”

  She couldn’t fault them for naming Goddard’s ocean Storm Sea. “And if wet weather blows in on Dday, it snows,” she murmured. “Fascinating.”

  “But deadly.”

  “Right.” She stared southwest again, past the colonial buildings. A cylindrical concrete stack rose behind the hub’s low dome. Chlorofluorocarbon production, she guessed. Thousands of tons of freons, formerly used in refrigerating units, were splattered on Goddard’s frigid surface during the cometary impact decades. This plant spewed more. Carbon came from crushed regolith, as did the fluorine, and chloride was extracted from Storm Sea.

  Graysha stamped her feet and realized that her body felt good, standing there with her leg muscles warm and tingly tight. “They have genegineered animals, I take it.”

  “Halfers. Lots of halfers.”

  The standard post-­bovine strain of meat and wool producers. “All the EB’s work aside, it certainly would be simpler to gene-­tailor us, too, for a particular planet. Don’t you think?” She held her breath, waiting for his answer. If only—

  “Hmm.”

  Exasperated, she clenched her sampling bag’s strap. If she really wanted answers, she might try changing her name. She faced him on the path. “Just for my curiosity’s sake, Dr. Varberg, do the colonists practice homogenegineering?”

  “Blast, you’re persistent.” He scowled. “Like a fly. I don’t know. Don’t ask me again.”

  “It’s me asking, Dr. Varberg. Not my mother.”

  He shook his head.

  Mother! Where have you ever been when I actually needed you? If legalistic Novia Brady-­Phillips had had the courage to locate her own homogenegineer, Graysha wouldn’t be wondering where to find one now.

  “Had enough?” he asked tersely. “It’s almost quitting time.”

  “I’m fine. The parka is very warm.”

  “I don’t want to lose another soils person, Graysha. Dr. Mahera was sampling a duricrust Streptomyces seeding up on the wild when he . . .” Varberg fell silent. Graysha looked back over her shoulder. Three hooded figures had turned aside from the main road and were trudging toward them. The wind whistled, flapping a torn edge of the shelter tent.

  Varberg walked down the ramp to meet them. Once the parka-­swathed colonists were within hailing distance, one stopped while the other two marched forward. “Dr. Varberg?” asked one of the approaching pair. “Colonial police. Please come with us. You have the legal right not to speak, but I must arrest you on suspicion of causing the death of Dr. Jon Mahera.”

  Graysha backed several steps into soft, deep snow. The next instant froze in her memory: Will Varberg dropping his sampling gear to reach for the nearby policewoman; the second colonist poised to fight or flee; the colonist who hung back leveling a medical trank gun at Will Varberg’s midsection.

  Evidently Varberg spotted the trank gun, too, because he let his hands fall limp without touching either officer. “This is a mistake,” he drawled, “and you are legally bound to let me prove it.”

  “Yes, Dr. Varberg,” said the taller man. “Walk ahead of us, please.”

  Graysha stood with legs buried to her shins in snow, scarcely able to believe she was watching an arrest. Her emotions seemed even number than her chilly toes. Will Varberg led the taller guard and the gun wielder toward the nearest blockhouse, and then the other officer—the woman—approached. “You’re Dr. Brady-­Phillips?”

  “Yes,” she said warily. “I am.”

  Raising one hand to display a recorder button nestled in her palm, the officer asked, “Has Dr. Varberg said anything in your presence that might give you cause to wonder if there were ill feelings between him and the late Dr. Mahera?”

  Graysha groaned softly. She’d heard so much new information during the past four days. How could she hope to remember anything that specific?

  And if the colonists were responsible for Mahera’s death, Will Varberg might be their choice of scapegoat.

  “No,” she admitted, staring down at the path. “That is, I don’t remember hearing him say anything like that.”

  “Did he express ill will toward anyone, Dr. Brady-­Phillips?”

  Another wind gust flapped the shelter tent. “He did give me the impression that he doesn’t like or trust colonial government.”

  The colonist shot her a glance that could have frozen exposed flesh.

  ―――

  Ari MaiJidda frowned, disappointed, as Yael GurEshel injected an antidote into Will Varberg’s beefy arm. Using a law enforcement drug that made a subject relaxed, talkative, and almost unable to lie, Ari had confronted Varberg with evidence: The fateful message that the sandstorm was over originated at a terminal he frequently used. With bright eyes and softly slurred speech, he admitted sending it. She exulted.

  Then he maintained it was accidental,
not intentional. He’d decided not to come forward “to spare Edie the embarrassment.”

  DalLierx stood over the Gaea employee’s chair, finishing follow-­up questions that would determine the degree of Varberg’s actual crime. Manslaughter, probably. “Recommendation?” she asked DalLierx when he finished.

  DalLierx hooked both thumbs into his pockets, looking natural in a boyish stance. “Half a G-­year’s recompense work on behalf of Mahera’s parents. On planet.”

  Varberg glared up at him, rocking back and forth on his chair. His resentment showed so plainly that Ari guessed it’d be a while before he regained full control. She had time to ask one or two more questions. “Was there any other reason, besides sparing your wife embarrassment, that you didn’t come forward?”

  DalLierx frowned, but she wasn’t about to retract the question. Law enforcement fell under her jurisdiction.

  “After Messier,” Varberg said, sounding thick-­tongued, “do you think either one of us wanted to try another planetary assignment? You people make me laugh. You’re all going to die on Goddard.”

  “Sooner or later,” Ari murmured, spearing DalLierx with another glare.

  He turned away.

  She focused on Varberg. The weirdly bright gleam in his eyes faded out. Yes, it was safe to ask this question . . . now. “What about those notorious sandpiles, Dr. Varberg? What was the point in leaving those on so many of your co-­workers’ desks?”

  Sitting perfectly straight in the office chair, he glowered at DalLierx’s back. “Find another suspect, Madam Vice-­Chair. I’m not guilty of that one.”

  DalLierx spun back around.

  “Hmm,” she observed, catching Lindon’s eye. “Too late.”

  “I didn’t do it,” Varberg repeated.

  “You may go, Dr. Varberg,” she said. The escorts took him back to the stairs, and she gave Lindon another somber look as she closed down her file.