Quiet Invasion

by Sarah Zettel

  How many of them had waived their right to kids in favor of long-life? How many of them wanted to have both the kids and as much immortality as money could buy and had already reserved a slot in some resort on the Moon or Mars where they could retreat once they reached age 120? That was the deal. You got long life, or kids, or you left Mother Earth behind.

  And for the hundred-millionth time Quai told himself his activism was not about his father’s decision to take the waiver and leave him.

  Mari came back with a minipad. She slotted it into the bar, hit a couple of command keys, and handed him the stylus. “It’s all encrypted under some of my best stuff, so don’t send anything they’ll want to trace. The yewners will think it’s me.”

  “Never.” Quai took the stylus and considered the blank screen for a moment.

  Finally, he wrote: Old friends operating under alias in targeted area. Working toward mutual goal. With their efforts, we might get there sooner rather than later if we just sit back and let it happen. But maybe keep one eye on the Moon.

  He addressed the message to an alias and sent it out. The contact code he sent the scrambled package to was a group box. Buyers and sellers of all kinds went in there to keep up on gossip, to give leads to friends, that kind of thing. All of it was scrupulously legal, of course, or, at least, all of it was so far unaudited.

  Quai sat back and fingered the holotattoo on his neck. He could barely believe things were really happening. Ever since he’d thrown in with the separatists, he’d gotten used to the idea that it was going to be a long, hard slog. Ted Fuller rotted in an isolation cell. Mars was discovering easy economic benefits in lining up to serve the mines, the heavy industries, and the long-life resorts.

  But now, now, he could see the end. He could almost touch it. Okay, not the end, but the beginning. The new beginning.

  He’d never really believed he’d have this kind of help, or that the people they needed so badly would come around.

  But he did and they had, and now it was a whole new game.

  “Well, well,” murmured Alinda, pushing her heavy braid of hair back over her shoulder. “Don’t push the Send key yet, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Grace looked up from her desk. “What are you mumbling about, Al?”

  Alinda’s dark eyes sparkled and Grace groaned inwardly. There was nothing Alinda Noon loved more than a good rumor.

  That is the biggest problem with v-babies, thought Grace. They all believe gossip is a social grace.

  The three of them sat along the curving wall of Chemistry Lab Nine, their desks a small island on a sea of cluttered workbenches and metal-sided analyzers.

  “Looks like reports of aliens on Venus were a bit premature,” Alinda went on.

  Grace froze. “What?” she demanded.

  “I win the pool.” Al called over her shoulder to Marty, who’d frozen his own simulation to listen. “I said the yewners would be crying fraud within a week of getting here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Grace heaved herself to her feet.

  Alinda blinked, startled. “Nothing catastrophic, Grace, really. The yewners are calling for an audit of base books and time logs. Only one reason for it. They think we’ve been playing games with time and money.”

  Each word thudded hard against Grace’s mind. “But they don’t know?”

  “Know we’ve been playing games?” Alinda’s brow creased.

  “That the Discovery’s is a fake!”

  “Of course not. Why? Should they?”

  Alinda’s blank look, Marty’s stupid, stunned stare were suddenly more than Grace could stand. “Pay attention, little girl!” she roared. “That Discovery is saving your job and your precious base! If it gets taken away, this whole place is going into cold storage! There is nothing funny here!”

  Grace wanted to shake her. She wanted to smack him. Instead, she strode into her private office and slammed the door. She knew outside a whole cloud of whispers was now rising, most of them containing her name. She had just given the entire lab something to chew over for weeks. She gripped the back of her chair and squeezed.

  Get it together, get it together. Nothing’s happened yet. It’s just an audit. Of course there had to be an audit.

  But it wasn’t just an audit; it was another round of questions and inspections and sideways glances and gossip and more questions and nobody believing what she’d found.

  For just a minute there, it had been going so well. The outside world was actually listening to her. For once, the great Helen Failia hadn’t been able to divert her funding or try to monopolize her research assistant’s time.

  On the wall of her office, Grace kept a still shot of an absorber chain. It had been taken by a stasis microscope and looked like someone had taken forty gray-and-white tennis balls and stuck them together in a ring that twisted in on itself. Not in the neat double helix, but more like a bedspring wound far too tightly and then folded over in the middle and fed back into itself.

  This small tangle had been her life for ten years. She and her team had isolated this as Venus’s mysterious ultraviolet absorber. Snarls of this little molecule created the dark bands that showed up in the cloud banks. There had been praise and papers and money, and even Helen had been happy.

  Which had all been fine, but then Grace had discovered that the compound was alive.

  “Now, I’m not saying it’s a yeast or an alga,” she tried to tell them. “But it must be considered on a level with a virus or at the very least an autocatalytic RNA molecule. It absorbs energy; it exudes waste chemicals.” Ozone and water molecules were more concentrated in the absorption bands than outside them. This had been independently measured. “It has an identifiable internal barrier to increase electrochemical potential. And”—she’d stab at the table, or the chart, or the nearest person with her index finger as she got to this part—“it reproduces itself.”

  There was the snag. The molecules were highly active, always combining and combining. But Grace couldn’t get anyone else to say that this process was definitely reproduction, and she hadn’t yet been able to duplicate its peculiar gyrations in the lab. The consensus of the rest of the worlds was that the intense ultraviolet light hitting the top of the cloud layer broke apart the molecules, which re-formed once they’d dropped far enough down in the clouds to be out of reach of the worst of the UV.

  But she hadn’t stopped. She had years’ worth of observations. She scrabbled for independent confirmation of her results. She fought to bring biologists and chemists to Venera to look at the absorbers, just on the chance that someone else would finally see what she saw.

  For the first time in her long life, Grace was certain about what she was doing, and that certainty had almost ruined her.

  Grace brushed her bangs from her forehead and stared at the absorber on her wall. She hadn’t planned on becoming a long-lifer. She’d planned on taking her 120 allotted years, getting a decent life, getting married, having a kid and passing on, leaving the Md, or the work, or both, behind to say Here Lived Grace Meyer.

  But it hadn’t worked out that way. She’d gone into chemistry because it could be applied in so many different fields, not because it interested her for its own sake. She’d wandered from job to job. In each one, she found she was a solid middle-of-the-road performer. She was good enough but not brilliant, never brilliant. Always the third or fourth name on the few papers that her work groups published, never quite making the patent disclosures.

  Her first marriage had bombed, the second had petered out, the third…the third had barely existed. After the third, she realized she’d been wandering from husband to husband the way she’d been wandering from job to job, so she swore off marriage.

  It was after that that she’d headed for “the planets,” hoping in her vague, wandering way that her life waited for her outside Mother Earth’s sheltering arms.

  And then you found it, and nobody listened to you. Grace laughed and shook her head. Too perfect.

&nb
sp; But I made them listen. She smiled at the picture of her little, personal discovery. Even if just for a little while, I made them listen.

  And if the yewners discovered how she’d managed that particular feat, then it really was over. Everything. Here Lived Grace Meyer, Fraud.

  No, she dug her fingers into the chair’s fabric until her nails bent against the frame. She’d wiped the trail clean. She’d reviewed all the records and put them back the way they were supposed to be. There was no linkage. Nothing.

  Nothing you can think of anyway.

  Grace closed her eyes. Now it wasn’t just routine logs sitting in the endless streams of screenwork that Venera generated. Now it was individual files being scrutinized by Michael Lum, who’d apprenticed under Gregory Schoma, the man who designed Venera’s security. Now it was two yewner cops helping him.

  All that skill and brilliance trained against the work of Grace Meyer, who’d never been able to get anyone to believe she might actually be more than just competent.

  So what do you do about it? Grace opened her eyes and focused on the image of the absorber, the real discovery, the true evidence of life on Venus. You go back over everything. You make sure there’s nothing you’ve missed. Come on, Grace, it’s basic research. You’ve been doing this for seventy years. Go in there and see if you can find yourself.

  Grace pulled the chair away from her private desk and sat down, waking the command board with her touch. As she started shuffling her icons, she realized she’d have to do something about Alinda. She and Marty would spread news of Grace’s outburst across half the base, with embellishments, if Grace didn’t give them something else to think about. She did not need for her name coming to the yewners’ attention. Not like this, anyway.

  Grace fixed a smile onto her face and walked back out into the main lab and up to Alinda’s desk.

  I’m sorry, Al,” she said, meaning it. “That was completely uncalled for. I’ve been sitting on the edge just a little too long.”

  Alinda, as quick to forgive as she was quick to talk, waved Grace’s words away. “It’s okay, Grace. We all want this to be real, and our department’s got more reason than most.”

  Grace nodded. “Just one more attack on the data. Only to be expected.” She shrugged. “What would you say to a show of unity? The microbrewery’s got a new batch coming out today. We could close up shop early and go try a sample. My treat?”

  Al’s face lit up. “Sounds great. You in, Marty?” She turned to her fellow researcher.

  “The boss’s buying beer?” Marty’s thin grin split his face. “You bet I’m in.”

  Grace smiled down on them. Kids. Easily distracted. Michael and the yewners would not be so easy. With them, she’d have to be careful; she’d have to be thorough.

  For the first time in her life, she really would have to be brilliant.

  Chapter Nine

  T’SHA FOUND TR’ES IN the life research chamber. She hovered silently in the doorway and watched the child work. No, not child. Stop thinking like that. Tr’es was small, it was true, almost as small as a male, and her crest shone blue as sapphires, undimmed by age. But she was an adult, picked out by Br’sei shortly after her Declaration. She followed his promises and left Ca’aed’s care for Ke’taiat’s, to become one of Br’sei’s best engineers, or so T’sha understood.

  Even so, there was something furtive about Tr’es, or at least there was when she was around other people. Here, though, alone with her maze of microcosms, caretakers, and simulators, she was intent and confident. Reverse engineering, that was Tr’es’s specialty. Find something that existed and track it back through all its previous stages. Take it apart until you understood it and put it back together again.

  Rather like what I’m trying to do here. T’sha poked her muzzle into the room. The gesture did not catch Tr’es’s attention. The engineer just hovered in front of her simulator, talking nonstop in a specialized command language and watching patterns that might have been wind currents on the nightside, or neurochemical diffusion, flow across its surface.

  T’sha flew all the way into the room, careful not to touch any of the microcosms or their connecting tubules.

  The shadow of her movement crossed the simulator’s surface, and Tr’es whirled around, startled.

  “Oh, ah, good luck, Ambassador T’sha.” She raised her forehands. “I didn’t…I—”

  “You were absorbed in your work.” T’sha glided carefully between the tools, both living and nonliving. “I know how it feels.”

  Reassured, Tr’es inflated slightly. “Is there something I can share with you, Ambassador?”

  “I hope so.” T’sha finally spotted a pair of rods that she was fairly sure were perches and settled onto them. “I understand it was you who did the initial work on the raw materials D’seun took from the New People.” She had listened to the caretaker of the reports for an entire dodec-hour and had practically had to be carried into the refresher, she was so exhausted. Fear had kept her listening. Fear and suspicion, because of what she could not find.

  Tr’es dipped her muzzle. “He wanted me to map neural branching and chemical diffusion patterns to see if we could link that and the gross physiology to the transmissions we were receiving and make a start on the language translation.”

  She seemed about to go on, but T’sha interrupted. “And you have made great progress, I see.”

  Tr’es shriveled a little, embarrassed. “We have done our best. The New People are complex. They have at least as many command languages as we do, and those patterns are all bound up with their person-to-person speech. Teasing them apart has not been easy.”

  T’sha whistled her appreciation. “No, it would be extremely difficult. Your good work will make your birth city proud.”

  At that, Tr’es puffed up fully. “How does Ca’aed?”

  “Very well.” T’sha whistled more approval at the warmth with which Tr’es spoke of her blood home. “You have been here a long time, haven’t you? Perhaps a trip back to Ca’aed is indicated.”

  Tr’es cocked her head first to one side, then the other. “I’d like that, Ambassador T’sha, if Ambassador D’seun would agree….”

  T’sha decided to spare her from having to go on. “We can leave the discussion for later if you think that would be better.” This was a rough wind. T’sha had some authority over Tr’es, as ambassador from her birth home, but if Tr’es’s loyalties weren’t all promised to D’seun, she was the only one on the team, except possibly for Br’sei. Br’sei, however, was older, much more complicated, and much better at hiding what he really knew, so T’sha had decided to tackle Tr’es first.

  Tr’es had swelled even further. She was almost her normal size now. “Yes, that might be best.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do.” T’sha stretched her wings. The child…Tr’es was as relaxed as she was going to get. Now was the time to ask the real question. “Tr’es, how did the New People’s raw material come into our possession?”

  “I was not there,” said Tr’es, just a little too quickly. “Ambassador D’seun said there was an accident and all that remained of the New People who suffered was raw material, which he collected for study.” She shifted her size uneasily. “For me to study,” she added like an admission.

  T’sha dipped her muzzle. “That study sounds as though it was arduous,” she said, carefully keeping the touch of judgment from her words. “How did you deal with the extreme cold?”

  “Carefully,” said Tr’es, with a flash of engineer’s humor. T’sha clacked her teeth. “At first we used only nonliving tools. Then, working from the New People’s material, we were able to grow some specialized microcosms that were able to keep their liquid transfer media intact and yet perform useful work.”

  Again, T’sha whistled, this time genuinely impressed. Tr’es was no child when it came to skill. To not only propagate an alien life but to make a useful tool of it with only a few years of study, that was a feat indeed.

 
Unfortunately, it did not change the reason T’sha had come. “They are delicate things, the New People,” she said. “Ambassador D’seun must have moved very quickly.”

  Tr’es hesitated, but then dipped her muzzle. “That is my understanding,” she said softly.

  T’sha thrust her muzzle closer. “Did no new people arrive to claim the raw materials of their own?”

  “They may have, later, but”—Tr’es rattled her wings uneasily—“raw materials are raw materials. They belong to whoever claims them first.”

  “True.” T’sha dipped her muzzle. “We are fortunate Ambassador D’seun was so alert. The translations would be going much more slowly if you had not had anything to work with.”

  Tr’es’s relaxation vanished. She pulled herself inward, minutely, just a couple of bones at a time, as if she were hoping T’sha wouldn’t notice. “I believe he was waiting for such an occurrence.”

  “Waiting?” T’sha pushed closer.

  Tr’es’s skin trembled as she deflated. “I have work to do, Ambassador. Is there anything else I can share with you?”

  T’sha let go of her perches and glided forward until the tip of her muzzle just brushed Tr’es’s bright-blue crest. “How quickly did D’seun move to obtain the raw materials, Tr’es?”

  Tr’es jerked away and turned to face her simulator again. She spoke a few words in a command language T’sha didn’t know, and the diaphanous patterns were replaced by a more familiar wind grid.

  “Tr’es,” said T’sha, although the engineer was no longer looking at her. “What has D’seun made you do?”

  “He made me do nothing,” said Tr’es without taking her gaze off the simulator. “I have made promises.”

  T’sha moved up next to her until they hovered wingtip to wingtip. T’sha did not overfly her, not yet. Tr’es still might talk without overt intimidation. “This is not about promises. I was sent here by the High Law Meet, just like you were. We’re here to do what’s right for the People.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do,” Tr’es said miserably, huddling in on herself.