The Flowers of Vashnoi

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “The first sample I took, last week, did show a good harvest of those. But also traces of several surprises, including platinum.”

  “Platinum!” said Miles. “How are the butterbugs—excuse me, radbugs—finding platinum, here?”

  “Atom by atom, evidently. Enzymes, you know.” Enrique got a familiar, faraway look in his eye. “Which gives me an idea for addressing gold mine tailings. You know, those dumps from old, inefficient mining operations. I’m sure whatever you people had back in your Time of Isolation was horribly inefficient. They’re known to be laced with the metal, but there has been no way to safely and economically extract it. If I could design burrowing bugs… worms…? something, they might…. hm.”

  “Talk to Martya,” Miles advised. “Or Mark. Sounds like their department. I just want…” Miles trailed off, looking around through the lengthening afternoon shadows in the scrubby woods.

  To redeem his family’s liege-dead? To prove his worth to his late grandfather, again?—this was a pursuit that seemed, in Ekaterin’s observation so far, to have no end for him. In any case, she joined him as he strolled the perimeter of the plot, chewing his lip under his mask and staring out into the lovely, lethal landscape.

  “Good heavens!” said Enrique, which drew them both back to the Escobaran’s shoulder in a hurry. He had picked up a stick and was prodding at a radbug easily twice the length of the one they’d seen under that henbloat. The bug hunkered down with a surly little hiss.

  “That’s not a queen, is it?” said Miles uneasily.

  “No, no. All the radbugs here are sterile workers. Though they do molt and grow throughout their lives. They are supposed to go back and die on the waste piles, when they reach the end of their life cycles. One of the things this plot is supposed to tell us is how long the average worker can survive in the field. I was expecting to have lost a few already, though of course some insects are extremely radiation-resistant…” His eyes narrowed, picturing something. Or the absence of something. He went to the nearest waste pile and poked it with his stick. No purple body parts shimmered among the lead-colored pellets.

  Looking abstracted, he went off to locate the several other little piles scattered around the plot. Looking chary, Miles followed along.

  Enrique glanced up from the last of these and smiled a bit thinly. “I wonder if you three could help me out, here. Space yourselves evenly across the plot and count all the radbugs you see. Be sure to look under things, logs and what-not.”

  Obediently, Miles, Ekaterin, and Vadim did so; Enrique took the far end of the sweep. Miles did good work with his cane, startling several bugs out of hiding from rotting timber and leaf litter; they waddled off in purple-and-gold-gleaming flashes.

  “Twenty-nine,” Miles reported.

  “Seventeen,” said Vadim.

  “Twenty-three,” said Ekaterin, and looked to Enrique, whose lips were still moving.

  “Twenty-six,” he said at length.

  “Ninety-five total,” said Miles, who was quick at that sort of thing. “Is that good or bad?”

  “Well, it’s, er… puzzling. Because I released an even two hundred here, last week.”

  Miles drew a long, long breath through his filter mask. “Enrique…” He took visible control of his temper, always a bit edgy around the bugs. History. “Could they have flown out over the barrier?”

  “No! They don’t have wings!” Enrique picked up a not-too-glowing bug in his gloved fingers and folded up its carapaces to demonstrate the un-functional wing-nubs beneath. Miles recoiled only slightly.

  “If they don’t fly,” said Ekaterin, “could they climb?”

  Four people bent their heads back to stare upward into the scrubby trees, like gawkers studying a Winterfair light display. But no gold twinkles winked up there.

  Miles wheeled and frowned at the corner boxes. “Could the barrier have, I don’t know, shorted out in the night and shorted back on?”

  “Seems unlikely,” said Enrique.

  “Why don’t we all take a quick look around outside the field,” suggested Ekaterin. “If we find, well, any radbugs outside, it’ll at least prove the possibility.” The possibility of what, she wasn’t quite sure, but it served to separate Miles from Enrique.

  “Mm,” grunted Miles, but joined the others in a squinty-eyed patrol through the woods nears the plot. The bugs, after all, didn’t hide well, having their own built-in signal lights.

  Ekaterin was just wondering how fast radbugs could travel overland, and doing futile calculations in her head, when Miles’s voice drew her gaze up from the ground: “What the hell is that?”

  He stood several meters off, staring out into the shadowy scrub. His chin thrust forward, then he followed its line, limping. He nearly stumbled over a root, and Ekaterin hurried to his side.

  “What did you see?”

  “Pale shape. It flickered back into the brush.”

  “Feral animal?” Feral dogs, cats, pigs, goats, chickens, red deer, ponies, black-and-white rats, and other escapees from human settlements were known to roam the Barrayaran wilderness, if only in areas where Earth-descended plants had first made a dent; almost no Barrayaran vegetation was edible to Earth-descended animals of any kind, humans included. So the feral populations tended to be sparse and starving. The notion of hungry feral chickens—which could fly, certainly over a half-meter-high force screen—gave Ekaterin a new and alarming idea of what might have happened to the disappearing radbugs. Loaded radbugs in the food chain were a horrifying notion. But people in the Vorkosigan’s District were careful about wild-caught food, at least in these days when rad scanners were cheap and abundant enough to be shared around freely.

  “Too tall. Too quiet.” Miles squeezed his eyes open and shut a few times. “I did not see—”

  “Did not see what?” Ekaterin prodded as he stalled out.

  “I did not just see a wood-elf,” Miles said, very firmly. If in an undertone. He either underscored or undercut this certainty with a few jabs of his cane into the leaf litter. He raised his voice. “Vadim!”

  The tall ranger arrived, striding up out of a dell. “My lord?”

  “I saw something strange moving over thataway.” Miles pointed with his cane.

  Vadim’s head turned. “Nothing’s there, my lord.”

  “Still. Take a reconnaissance, see if you notice anything.”

  The ranger cast him a dutiful salute and moved off into the growing shadows. The radbugs should be even easier to spot in the dimness, Ekaterin thought, gleaming in the gloaming, but she glimpsed none.

  It was several minutes before Vadim returned to report, “I didn’t find anything, my lord.”

  Miles scowled.

  “Could it have been a little hallucination? They say dusk is the trickiest light of the day,” offered Enrique.

  “I’ve had hallucinations,” said Miles shortly. “I know what they look like. Not… that.”

  “Medication allergy,” Ekaterin explained to the ranger’s startled stare. And Miles was not, to her certain knowledge, on any of those medications now.

  Enrique turned slowly around, squinting into the gathering gloom. “This won’t do. I need more data.”

  “But not tonight, sir,” said the ranger firmly. “It’s time we were leaving.” He tapped his dosimeter significantly.

  With reluctance, the party allowed themselves to be escorted off to the lift van.

  * * *

  Ekaterin accompanied Enrique back to the plot the next morning to help get his more-data. They didn’t need to add to the zone ranger’s lifetime rad-dosage sum for this, and Miles was tied up in meetings in Hassadar, so she and the Escobaran spent the next hour tacking live-feed vidcams up on the trees by themselves.

  “I should have thought of this earlier,” Enrique grumbled, as she handed him up the last of the cams—cheap commercial models, bought in a bulk bundle in town last night. Miles had offered to scrounge some of Imperial Security’s finest equipment, but there wa
s such a thing as overkill, Ekaterin had pointed out frugally. Miles tended not to think frugally on any scale smaller than a district budget.

  “How were you to know?” Ekaterin consoled the scientist. “Anyway, the purpose of the first test plot is to find problems; it’s certainly working for that.”

  Enrique spoke into his wristcom to his partner back in the hundred-kilometers-safely-distant Hassadar lab: “Do you have the signal, Martya?”

  “Yes, locked in,” Martya’s voice returned cheerfully. “You’ve pretty much got the whole plot cross-covered now. I’m getting very fine detail on the close-up zooms—I can count the legs. And compare the brightness.”

  Enrique nodded satisfaction and stepped down off the ladder with a grunt. Ekaterin went to set it in the little shelter with the growing collection of to-be-left-in-the-zone tools.

  “If our bug thieves turn out to be feral chickens or rats,” she said, returning, “is there some way you could make the next batch of bugs especially bad-tasting to them?”

  “I shouldn’t think they were very yummy to start with,” said Enrique, “but yes. It would be a trivial modification, though I expect we’d best buy a few actual chickens for the lab to test the options. That’s another thing I should have thought of, I suppose. But I was focused on tuning the microbe suite.”

  “As well you should have been,” said Ekaterin. “Miles was really pleased with the concentration you obtained.”

  Enrique brightened. “Yes. It may be time to bring the robotic collection scheme forward.”

  “We certainly can’t be sending out squads of proles with shovels,” said Ekaterin. “That would have been too Time-of-Isolation even for the Time of Isolation.” She hesitated. “Though operating the remote collectors might be a reasonable employment for district people, if it would get the system up sooner.”

  Enrique nodded. “I expect we’ll be training the bugs to stockpile it in removable grids in some kind of hutches, like the original butterbugs. Let’s do another head-count.”

  They split the plot to make a more detailed survey than last night’s rough estimate. It came out only three more; no hundred-bug hoards, or hordes, were found under anything.

  Enrique pressed his lips together in frustration. “I think the next batch of bugs should be individually numbered. Maybe with some sort of little tracer built into the tags.”

  Applying tiny tags to the bugs was going to be a tedious task for some lab tech, but Ekaterin could only nod agreement. “So—have you done a plant survey?”

  “Ah,” said Enrique, after a slight hesitation. “Good thinking.”

  Ekaterin, who’d been about to ask for a look at it, gave him a mildly reproachful glance. “After eighty years, all the contamination that could wash away easily, mostly has. The rest is locked up in the biota or down in the subsoil. It would be good to know which plants were drawing up the most rads from the subsoil. And which ones the bugs have a preference for, if any. If there turns out to be some optimum combination, seeding the zone might be a way to help speed things along.”

  “I’d need more people…”

  “Or you might be able to get some help from Hassadar District College,” Ekaterin suggested. “Botany, Agronomy, any of those departments might welcome the project.” Come to think, there had to have been some such botanical surveys done already, sometime, by somebody. She knew the rangers kept up-to-date radiation plots, but then, those could be mapped from the air. Next stop, Hassadar College.

  “We’d been keeping the radbugs, if not exactly secret, very closely held,” said Enrique. “So as not to raise false hopes, your husband said.”

  Or false fears. “I think most of the hopes were his, but yes. We might disclose them soon. Maybe,” she modified this prudently. “Everything in the district competes for resources. The best solution is to make more resources, Miles claims.”

  She fell in beside Enrique as he walked one last circuit of the perimeter, staring around for bugs, or anything forgotten, or maybe just ideas.

  “What does Miles plan to use this land for, anyway?” he asked, as they made the far turn and started back. “Not that the radbug project hasn’t been intrinsically interesting, as both pure and applied science. But it’s not as if your district is overpopulated even yet—Martya claims you’ve been losing people to the capital for decades, and, now, all that emigration to Sergyar. Why not just let it all sit there and look pretty?”

  “From a distance?” said Ekaterin dryly. “Forever?”

  Enrique shrugged. “It’s far from the only unpeopled and un-people-able wasteland on the planet. Agriculture? Seems archaic. Industrial food- and fiber-making are more efficient. And your cities are growing.”

  “Not everyone wants to live in a plascrete box.” Ekaterin certainly didn’t. “And even the industrial bio-processes need organic feedstocks.”

  “Yes, but you’ll have a hard sell from here. There’s likely still going to be a rad residue, even after cleanup. Food seems, so to speak, off the table. Fiber… eh…” He frowned in doubt.

  Ekaterin said, a little shyly, “This used to be one of the most fruitful agricultural areas on the continent. I thought the first recovery application might be commercial flower farming.” She could see it in her mind’s eye even now, acres of glorious blooms, rivers of color. And more district employment, too.

  “Oh.” Enrique blinked. “Yes, that might do very well.”

  “Even if it only becomes a park, it might be a park people could walk in without protection, maybe camp in without dosimeters. We need our open spaces. Our green-and-red-brown spaces.”

  “A garden, then,” said Enrique. “Two hundred kilometers around?”

  Ekaterin smiled. “Maybe.”

  “Ambitious.”

  “Miles,” she said primly, “has strong views on not limiting one’s scope.”

  “I’ve heard some of his, er…”

  “Rants?” Ekaterin supplied.

  He gave her a grateful You said it, I didn’t nod. “I suppose that’s why we’re all here.”

  “Oh, you have no idea.”

  * * *

  Enrique’s call came earlier than Ekaterin expected, the next morning as she was struggling to get breakfast into two toddlers. Miles was helping, sort of—both twins seemed more interested in using their food to bomb the Hassadar Count’s Residence cats, swirling under their high chairs, a more entertaining and quasi-military exercise to which Miles had allowed himself to be diverted.

  “Bracket him, bracket him, that’s right, Helen—!”

  Giggles and shrieks, not much chewing and swallowing. Except by the three overweight cats, who greeted this manna with ecstatic growls. A one-to-one ratio of parents to children ought to be an even match, but Ekaterin was sometimes not sure whose side Lord Vorkosigan was on. Grimacing in mixed amusement and exasperation. Ekaterin stepped away from the war zone and raised her wristcom to her lips. “Yes, Enrique?”

  “Ekaterin, you’ve got to come out to the lab right away!”

  “Is it an emergency?”

  “Yes!”

  Martya’s voice interrupted: “Not by now, surely. This was last night. Even if you flew out there right away, you’d be too late to do anything about it.”

  “Martya”—Ekaterin, experienced, addressed the practical partner—“what’s going on?”

  “Our vidcams picked up our bug thief last night.”

  “Aha! Was it chickens?”

  “No…”

  “Well, what was it?”

  “It’s a little hard to say. You should see this.”

  Miles, ears pricking, looked up and waved her on. “If Martya sounds that taken aback, it probably is urgent. You’d better go. I have things under control here. I’m not due in that damned committee for another hour, and it’s only a five-minute walk across Hassadar Square.”

  Aurie Pym, their summer nanny while she was on college break, strolled in just then, sipping coffee. “Need some help, Lady Ekaterin?” />
  “Yes,” said Ekaterin gratefully. “For the love of heaven, get some protein into those two.” She jerked her head toward the playtime in progress. “Or he won’t be the one who’s sorry later.”

  Aurie grinned. “Understood.”

  The chortles of laughter, punctuated by an occasional lying meow protesting imminent starvation, and fatherly praise of “Good shot, Sasha!” that followed Ekaterin out relieved her maternal guilt, somewhat.

  * * *

  It was a short hop by lightflyer from downtown Hassadar out to the lab, installed on an old hardscrabble farmstead abandoned when its prior occupant had emigrated to what Ekaterin hoped were more fertile fields on Sergyar. In any case, the farmstead seemed more lucratively suited to its new purpose. MPVK Enterprises, Laboratory One, read the formal public sign by the gate, though Martya’s sister Kareen had dubbed it The Butterbug Ranch, a name which had stuck in private.

  Ekaterin bypassed the new pole barn housing the experimental bug hutches and headed for the current main building, the converted farmhouse. Some more impressive HQ was planned for Someday, when we’re not so busy. She found Enrique and Martya back in the old parlor that served as auxiliary office and communications center.

  She waved at Martya Koudelka-Borgos, a tall, blond, efficient woman in her late twenties. “Hi, Martya. So, what’s the big mystery?”

  “More mystery, it seems. Come look.”

  Enrique was seated at the comconsole, scowling at an array of vid images that Ekaterin recognized as the cross-angles of their plot. “Here, I’ll back it up to the beginning. Just after dusk, last night.” He enhanced the images to defeat the low light level, at some cost in true color and resolution.

  She leaned over his shoulder and stared.

  A strange, slight figure stepped carefully over the force barrier and wandered into focus. It was dressed in trousers a couple of sizes too large for it, cinched up around the narrow waist by a rope belt, and an old black T-shirt. Skinny arms shone a luminous white by contrast—skin not just pale ivory, or lacking a tan, but near-paper-white. When the figure glanced upward, the vid caught a clear view of a bony face, equally white, and wispy white hair that looked as though someone had trimmed around the head using a bowl for a guideline.