Miles, Mutants, and Microbes

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "Wrap, wrap how? What do you mean, wrap?"

  "That bitch Apmad's most favored scenario. I'll bet she was purring when she cut these orders—the quaddies gave her nervous palpitations, y'know. They're to be sterilized and stashed downside. Any pregnancies in progress to be aborted—shit, and we just started fifteen of 'em! What a fiasco. A year of my career down the tubes."

  "My God, Bruce, you're not going to carry out those orders, are you?"

  "Oh no? Just watch me." Van Atta stared at him, chewing his lip. Leo could feel himself tensing, pale with his suppressed fury. Van Atta sniffed. "What d'you want, Leo? Apmad could have ordered them exterminated. They're getting off lightly. It could have been worse."

  "And if it had been—if she had ordered the quaddies killed—would you have carried it out?" inquired Leo, deceptively calm.

  "She didn't. C'mon, Leo. I'm not inhuman. Sure, I'm sorry for the little suckers. I was doing my damndest to make 'em profitable. But there's no way I can fight this. All I can do is make the wrap as quick and clean and painless as possible, and cut the losses as much as I can. Maybe somebody in the company hierarchy will appreciate it."

  "Painless to whom?"

  "To everybody." Van Atta grew more intent, and leaned toward Leo with a scowl. "That means I don't need a lot of panic and wild rumors floating around, you hear? I want business as usual right up to the last minute. You and all the other instructors will go on teaching your classes just as if the quaddies really were going out on a work project, until the downside facility is ready and we can start shuttling 'em. Maybe take the little ones first—the salvageable parts of the Habitat are supposed to be moved around the orbit to the transfer station, we might cut some costs by using quaddies for that last job."

  "To imprison them downside—"

  "Oh, come off the dramatics. They're being placed in a perfectly ordinary drilling workers' dormitory, only abandoned six months ago when the field ran dry." Van Atta brightened slightly in self-congratulation. "I found it myself, looking over the possible sites to place 'em. It'll cost next to nothing to refurbish it, compared to building new."

  Leo could just picture it. He shuddered. "And what happens in fourteen years, when and if Orient IV expropriates Rodeo?"

  Van Atta ruffled his hair with both hands in exasperation. "How the hell should I know? At that point, it becomes Orient IV's problem. There's only so much one human being can do, Leo."

  Leo smiled slowly, in grim numbness. "I'm not sure . . . what one human being can do. I've never pushed myself to the limit. I thought I had, but I realize now I hadn't. My self-tests were always carefully non-destructive."

  This test was a higher order of magnitude altogether. This Tester, perhaps, scorned the merely humanly possible. Leo tried to remember how long it had been since he'd prayed, or even believed. Never, he decided, like this. He'd never needed like this before. . . .

  Van Atta frowned suspiciously at him. "You're weird, Leo." He straightened his spine, as if seeking a posture of command. "Just in case you missed my message, let me repeat it loud and clear. You are to mention this artificial gravity business to no one, that means especially no quaddies. Likewise, keep their downside destination secret. I'll let Yei figure out how to make them swallow it without kicking, it's time she earned her over-inflated salary. No rumors, no panics, no goddamn workers' riots—and if there are, I'll know just whose hide to nail to the wall. Got it?"

  Leo's smile was canine, concealing—everything. "Got it." He withdrew without turning his back, or speaking another word.

  Dr. Yei was not usually easy to track down, it being her habit to circulate often among the quaddies, observing behavior, taking notes, making suggestions. But this time Leo found her at once, in her office, with plastic flimsies stuck to every available surface and her desk console lit like a Christmas tree. Did they have Christmas at the Cay Habitat? Leo wondered. Somehow, he thought not.

  "Did you hear—"

  Her glum slouch answered his question, even as his white face and rapid breathing finished asking it.

  "Yes, I've heard," she said wearily, glancing up at him. "Bruce just dumped the whole Habitat's personnel evacuation logistics on my desk to organize. He, he tells me, being an engineer, will be doing facility dismantling and equipment salvage flow charts. Just as soon as I get the bodies out of his way. Excuse me, the damned bodies."

  Leo shook his head helplessly. "Are you going to do it?"

  She shrugged, her lips compressed. "How can I not do it? Quit in high dudgeon? It wouldn't change a thing. This affair would not be rendered one iota less brutal for my walking out, and it could get a lot worse."

  "I don't see how," Leo ground out.

  "You don't?" She frowned. "No, I don't suppose you do. You never appreciated what a dangerous legal edge the quaddies are balanced on here. But I did. One wrong move and—oh, damn it all. I knew Apmad needed careful handling. Everything got away from me. Although I suppose this artificial gravity thing would have killed the project whoever was in charge, we are very, very lucky that she didn't order the quaddies exterminated. You have to understand, she had something like four or five pregnancies terminated for genetic defects, back on her home world when she was a young woman. It was the law. She eventually gave up, got divorced, took an off-planet job with GalacTech—came up through the ranks. She has a deep emotional vested interest in her prejudices against genetic tampering, and I knew it. And blew it . . . She still could order the quaddies killed—do you understand that? Any report of trouble, unrest, magnified by her genetic paranoias, and . . ." She squeezed her eyes shut, massaged her forehead with her fingertips.

  "She could order it—who says you've got to carry it out? You said you cared about the quaddies. We've got to do something!" said Leo.

  "What?" Yei's hands clenched, spread wide. "What, what, what? One or two—even if I could adopt one or two, take them away with me—smuggle them out somehow, who knows?—what then? To live on a planet with me, socially isolated as cripples, freaks, mutants—and sooner or later they would grow to adulthood, and then what? And what about the others? A thousand, Leo!"

  "And if Apmad did order them exterminated, what excuse would you find then for doing nothing?"

  "Oh, go away," she groaned. "You have no appreciation for the complexities of the situation, none. What do you think one person can do? I used to have a life of my own, once, before this job swallowed it. I've given six years—which is five and three-quarters more than you have—I've given all I can. I'm burned out. When I get away from this hole, I never want to hear of quaddies again. They're not my children. I haven't had time to have children."

  She rubbed her eyes angrily, and sniffed, inhaling—tears?—or just bile. Leo didn't know. Leo didn't care.

  "They're not anybody's children," Leo growled. "That's the trouble. They're some kind of . . . genetic orphans or something."

  "If you're not going to say anything useful, please go away," she repeated. A wave of her hand encompassed the mass of flimsies. "I have work to do."

  Leo had not struck a female since he was five years old. He removed himself, shaking.

  He drifted slowly through the corridors, back toward his own quarters, cooling. And whatever had he hoped to get from Yei anyway? Relief from responsibility? Was he to dump his conscience on her desk, a la Bruce, and say, "Take care of it . . ."

  And yet, and yet, and yet . . . there was a solution in here somewhere. He could feel it, a palpable dim shape, like a tightness in the gut, a mounting, screaming frustration. The problem that refused to fall into the right pieces, the elusive solution—he'd solved engineering problems that presented themselves at first as such solid, unscalable walls. He did not know where the leaps beyond logic that ultimately topped them came from, except that it was not a conscious process, however elegantly he might diagram it post facto. He could not solve it and he could not leave it alone, but picked uselessly at it, counterproductive like picking a scab, in a rising compulsive fr
enzy. The wheels spun, imparting no motion.

  "It's in here," he whispered, touching his head. "I can feel it. I just . . . can't . . . see it . . ."

  They had to get out of Rodeo local space somehow, that much was certain. All the quaddies. There was no future here. It was the damn peculiar legal set-up. What was he to do—hijack a jumpship? But the personnel jumpships carried no more than three hundred passengers. He could, just barely, picture himself holding a—a what? what weapon? he had no gun, his pocket knife featured mainly screwdrivers—right, hold a screwdriver to the pilot's head and cry, "Jump us to Orient IV!"—where he would promptly be arrested and jailed for the next twenty years for piracy, leaving the quaddies to do . . . what? In any case, he could not possibly hijack three ships at the same time, and that was the minimum number needed.

  Leo shook his head. "Chance favors," he muttered, "chance favors, chance favors . . ."

  Orient IV would not want the quaddies. Nobody was going to want the quaddies. What, indeed, could their future be even if freed from GalacTech? Gypsy orphans, alternately ignored, exploited, or abused, in their dependency on the narrow environment of humanity's chain of space facilities. Talk about technology traps. He pictured Silver—he had little doubt just what sort of exploitation would be her lot, with that elegant face and body of hers. No place for her out there . . .

  No! Leo denied silently. The universe was so damned big. There had to be a place. A place of their own, far, far from the trappings and traps of human so-called civilization. The histories of previous utopian social experiments in isolation were not encouraging, but the quaddies were exceptional in every way.

  Between one breath and the next, the vision took him. It came not as a chain of reason, more words words words, but as a blinding image, all complete in its first moment, inherent, holistic, gestalt, inspired. Every hour of his life from now on would be but the linear exploration of its fullness.

  A stellar system with an M or G or K star, gentle, steady, pouring out power for the catching. Circling it, a Jovian gas giant with a methane and water-ice ring, for water, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen. Most important of all, an asteroid belt.

  And some equally important absences: no Earth-like planet orbiting there also to attract competition; not on a wormhole jump route of strategic importance to any potential conquistadors. Humanity had passed over hundreds of such systems, in its obsessive quest for new Earths. The charts were glutted with them.

  A quaddie culture spreading out along the belt from their initial base, a society of the quaddies, by the quaddies, for the quaddies. Burrowing into the rocks for protection against radiation, and to seal in their precious air, expanding, leapfrogging from rock to rock, to drill and build new homes. Minerals all around, more than they could ever use. Whole hydroponics farms for Silver. A new world to build. A space world to make Morita Station look like a toy.

  "Why"—Leo's eyes widened with delight—"it's an engineering problem after all!"

  He hung limply in air, entranced; fortunately, the corridor was empty of passers-by at the moment, or they would surely have thought him mad or drugged.

  The solution had been lying around him in pieces all this time, invisible until he'd changed. He grinned dementedly, possessed. He yielded himself up to it without reservation. All. All. There was no limit to what one man might do, if he gave all, and held back nothing.

  Didn't hold back, didn't look back—for there would be no going back. Literally, medically, that was the heart of it. Men adapted to free fall, it was the going back that crippled them.

  "I am a quaddie," Leo whispered in wonder. He regarded his hands, clenched and spread his fingers. "Just a quaddie with legs." He wasn't going back.

  As for that initial base—he was floating in it right now. It merely required relocating. His cascading thought clicked over the connections too rapidly to analyze. He didn't need to hijack a spaceship; he was in one. All it needed was a bit of power.

  And the power lay ready-to-hand in Rodeo orbit, being gratuitously wasted even at this moment to shove mere bulk petrochemicals out of orbit. What might a petrochemical pod-bundle mass, compared to a chunk of the Cay Habitat? Leo didn't know, but he knew he could find out. The numbers would be on his side, anyway, whatever their precise magnitudes.

  The cargo thrusters could handle the Habitat, if it were properly reconfigured, and anything the thrusters could handle, one of the monster cargo superjumpers could manage too. It was all there, all—for the taking.

  For the taking . . .

  Chapter 8

  It took an hour of stalking before Leo was able to catch Silver alone, in a monitor blind spot in a corridor leading from the free fall gym.

  "Is there someplace we can talk in private?" he asked her. "I mean really private."

  Her wary glance around confirmed that she understood him perfectly. Still she hesitated. "Is it important?"

  "Vital. Life or death for every quaddie. That important."

  "Well . . . wait a minute or two, then follow me."

  He trailed her slowly and casually through the Habitat, a flash of shimmering hair and blue jersey at this or that cross-branching. Then, down one corridor, he suddenly lost her. "Silver . . . ?"

  "Sh!" she hissed at his ear. A wall panel hinged silently inward, and one of her strong lower hands reached out to yank him in like a fish on a line.

  It was dark and narrow behind the wall for only a moment, then airseal doors parted with a whisper to reveal an odd-shaped chamber perhaps three meters across. They slipped within.

  "What's this?" asked Leo, stunned.

  "The Clubhouse. Anyway, we call it that. We built it in this little blind pocket. You wouldn't notice it from Outside unless you were looking for it at just the right angle. Tony and Pramod did the outside walls. Siggy ran the ductwork in, others did the wiring . . . the airseals we built from spare parts."

  "Weren't they missed?"

  Her smile was not in the least innocent. "Quaddies do the computer records entry, too. The parts just sort of ceased to exist in inventory. A bunch of us worked together on it—we just finished it about two months ago. I was sure Dr. Yei and Mr. Van Atta would find out about it, when they were questioning me"—her smile faded to a frown in memory—"but they never asked just the right question. Now the only vids we have left are the ones that happened to be stored in here, and Darla doesn't have the vid system up yet."

  Leo followed her glance to a dead holovid set, obviously in process of repair, fixed to the wall. There were other comforts: lighting, handy straps, a wall cabinet that proved to be stuffed with little bags of dried snacks abstracted from Nutrition, raisins, peanuts and the like. Leo orbited the room slowly, nervously examining the workmanship. It was tight. "Was this place your idea?"

  "Sort of. I couldn't have done it alone, though. You understand, it's strictly against our rules for me to bring you in here," Silver added somewhat truculently. "So this better be good, Leo."

  "Silver," said Leo, "it's your uniquely pragmatic approach to rules that makes you the most valuable quaddie in the Habitat right now. I need you—your daring, and all the other qualities that Dr. Yei would doubtless call anti-social. I've got a job to do that I can't do alone either." He took a deep breath. "How would you quaddies like to have your own asteroid belt?"

  "What?" Her eyes widened.

  "Brucie-baby is trying to keep it under wraps, but the Cay Project has just been scheduled for termination—and I mean that in the most sinister sense of the word."

  He detailed the anti-gravity rumor to her, all that he had yet heard, and Van Atta's secret plans for the quaddies' disposal. With rising passion, he described his vision of escape. He didn't have to explain anything twice.

  "How much time do we have left?" she asked whitely, when he had finished.

  "Not much. A few weeks at most. I have only six days until I'm forced downside by my gravity leave. I've got to figure out some way to duck that; I'm afraid I might not be able to get back
here. We—you quaddies—have to choose now. And I can't do it for you. I can only help with some of the parts. If you cannot rescue yourselves, you will be lost, guaranteed."

  She blew out her breath in a silent whistle, looking troubled indeed. "I thought—watching Tony and Claire—they were doing it the wrong way. Tony talked about finding work, but do you know, he didn't think to take a work suit with him? I didn't want to make the same mistakes. We aren't made to travel alone, Leo. Maybe it's something that was built into us."

  "But can you bring in the others?" Leo asked anxiously. "In secret? Let me tell you, the quickest end-scenario for this little revolution I can imagine would be for some quaddie to panic and tell, trying to be good. This is a real conspiracy, all rules off. I sacrifice my job, risk legal prosecution, but you risk much more."