by Paul McAuley
This was at the four thousand metre level, where the nitrogen ice walls of the Rift were sparsely patched with yellow and pink marblings that followed veins of sulphur and organic contaminants. The taste of the vacuum smog here was strong, like burnt rubber coating Margaret's lips and tongue.
As she looked around, a proxy jetted towards her. It overshot and rebounded from a gable of frozen nitrogen, its nozzle swinging back and forth as it tried to stabilise its position.
"Fuck," its operator, Kim Nieye, said in Margaret's ear. "Sorry, boss. I've been through five of these, and now I'm losing this one."
On the other side of the cleft, a hundred metres away, two specks tumbled end for end, descending at a fair clip towards the depths. Margaret's vision colour-reversed, went black, came back to normal. She said, "How many?"
"Just about all of them. We're using proxies that were up in the tablelands, but as soon as we bring them down they start going screwy too."
"Herd some up and get them to the sample pickup point. We'll need to do dissections."
"No problem, boss. Are you okay?"
Margaret's proxy had suddenly upended. She couldn't get its trim back. "I don't think so," she said, and then the proxy's nozzle flared and with a pulse of gas it shot away into the depths.
It was a wild ride. The proxy expelled all its gas reserves, accelerating as straight as an arrow. Coralline formations blurred past, and then long stretches of sulphur-eating pavement. The proxy caromed off the narrowing walls and began to tumble madly.
Margaret had no control. She was a helpless but exhilarated passenger. She passed the place where she had set the relay and continued to fall. The link started to break up. She lost all sense of proprioception, although given the tumbling fall of the proxy that was a blessing. Then the microwave radar started to go, with swathes of raster washing across the false colour view. Somehow the proxy managed to stabilise itself, so it was falling headfirst towards the unknown regions at the bottom of the Rift. Margaret glimpsed structures swelling from the walls. And then everything went away and she was back, sweating and nauseous in the couch.
It was bad. More than ninety-five percent of the proxies had been lost. Most, like Margaret's had been lost in the depths. A few, badly damaged by collision, had been stranded amongst the reef colonies, but proxies sent to retrieve them went out of control too. It was clear that some kind of infective process had affected them. Margaret had several dead proxies collected by a maintenance robot and ordered that the survivors should be regrouped and kept above the deep part of the Rift where the vacuum organisms proliferated. And then she went to her suite in the undercroft and waited for the Star Chamber to call her before them.
The Star Chamber took away Margaret's contract, citing failure to perform and possible sedition (that remark in the seminar had been recorded). She was moved from her suite to a utility room in the lower level of the undercroft and put to work in the farms.
She thought of her parents.
She had been here before.
She thought of the reef.
She couldn't let it go.
She would save it if she could.
Srin Kerenyi kept her up to date. The survey crew and its proxies were restricted to the upper level of the reef. Manned teams under Opie Kindred's control were exploring the depths – he was trusted where Margaret was not – but if they discovered anything it wasn't communicated to the other science crews.
Margaret was working in the melon fields when Arn Nivedta found her. The plants sprawled from hydroponic tubes laid across gravel beds, beneath blazing lamps hung in the axis of the farmlands. It was very hot, and there was a stink of dilute sewage. Little yellow ants swarmed everywhere. Margaret had tucked the ends of her pants into the rolled tops of her shoesocks, and wore a green eyeshade. She was using a fine paintbrush to transfer pollen to the stigma of the melon flowers.
Arn came bouncing along between the long rows of plants like a pale scarecrow intent on escape. He wore only tight black shorts and a web belt hung with pens, little silvery tools and a notepad.
He said, "They must hate you, putting you in a shithole like this."
"I have to work, Arn. Work or starve. I don't mind it. I grew up working the fields."
Not strictly true: her parents had been ecosystem designers. But it was how it had ended.
Arn said cheerfully, "I'm here to rescue you. I can prove it wasn't your fault."
Margaret straightened, one hand on the small of her back where a permanent ache had lodged itself. She said, "Of course it wasn't my fault. Are you all right?"
Arn had started to hop about, brushing at one bare long-toed foot and then the other. The ants had found him. His toes curled like fingers. The big toes were opposed. Monkey feet.
"Ants are having something of a population explosion," she said. "We're in the stage between introduction and stabilisation here. The cycles will smooth out as the ecosystem matures."
Arn brushed at his legs again. His prehensile big toe flicked an ant from the sole of his foot. "They want to incorporate me into the cycle, I think."
"We're all in the cycle, Arn. The plants grow in sewage; we eat the plants." Margaret saw her supervisor coming towards them through the next field. She said, "We can't talk here. Meet me in my room after work."
Margaret's new room was barely big enough for a hammock, a locker, and a tiny shower with a toilet pedestal. Its rock walls were unevenly coated with dull green fibre spray. There was a constant noise of pedestrians beyond the oval hatch; the air conditioning allowed in a smell of frying oil and ketones despite the filter trap Margaret had set up. She had stuck an aerial photograph of New York, where she had been born, above the head stay of her hammock, and dozens of glossy printouts of the reef scaled the walls. Apart from the pictures, a few clothes in the closet and the spider plant under the purple grolite, the room was quite anonymous.
She had spent most of her life in rooms like this. She could pack in five minutes, ready to move on to the next job.
"This place is probably bugged," Arn said. He sat with his back to the door, sipping schnapps from a silvery flask and looking at the overlapping panoramas of the reef.
Margaret sat on the edge of her hammock. She was nervous and excited. She said, "Everywhere is bugged. I want them to hear that I'm not guilty. Tell me what you know."
Arn looked at her. "I examined the proxies you sent back. I wasn't quite sure what I was looking for, but it was surprisingly easy to spot."
"An infection," Margaret said.
"Yah, a very specific infection. We concentrated on the nervous system, given the etiology. In the brain we found lesions, always in the same area."
Margaret examined the three-dimensional colour-enhanced tomographic scan Arn had brought. The lesions were little black bubbles in the underside of the unfolded cerebellum, just in front of the optic node.
"The same in all of them," Arn said. "We took samples, extracted DNA, and sequenced it." A grid of thousands of coloured dots, then another superimposed over it. All the dots lined up.
"A match to Opie's parasite," Margaret guessed.
Arn grinned. He had a nice smile. It made him look like an enthusiastic boy. "We tried that first of course. Got a match, then went through the library of reef organisms, and got partial matches. Opie's parasite has its fingerprints in the DNA of everything in the reef, but this," he said, jabbing a long finger through the projection, "is the pure quill. Just an unlucky accident that it lodges in the brain at this particular place and produces the behaviour you saw."
"Perhaps it isn't a random change," Margaret said. "Perhaps the reef has a use for the proxies."
"Teleology," Arn said. "Don't let Opie hear that thought. He'd use it against you. This is evolution. It isn't directed by anything other than natural selection. There is no designer, no watchmaker. Not after the AI crashed, anyway, and it only pushed the ecosystem towards more efficient sulphur oxidation. There's more, Margaret. I've been doing so
me experiments on the side. Exposing aluminium foil sheets in orbit around Enki. There are exfoliations everywhere."
"Then Opie is right."
"No, no. All the exfoliations I found were non-viable. I did more experiments. The exfoliations are metabolically active when released, unlike bacterial spores. And they have no protective wall. No reason for them to have one, yah? They live only for a few minutes. Either they land on a new host or they don't. Solar radiation easily tears them apart. You can kill them with a picowatt ultraviolet laser. Contamination isn't a problem."
"And it can't infect us," Margaret said. "Vacuum organisms and proxies have the same DNA code as us, the same as everything from Earth, for that matter, but it's written in artificial nucleotide bases. The reef isn't dangerous at all, Arn."
"Yah, but in theory it could infect every vacuum organism ever designed. The only way around it would be to change the base structure of vacuum organism DNA – how much would that cost?"
"I know about contamination, Arn. The mold that wrecked the biome designed by my parents came in with someone or something. Maybe on clothing, or skin, or in the gut, or in some trade goods. It grew on anything with a cellulose cell wall. Every plant was infected. The fields were covered by huge sheets of grey mold; the air was full of spores. It didn't infect people, but more than a hundred died from massive allergic reactions and respiratory failure. They had to vent the atmosphere in the end. And my parents couldn't find work after that."
Arn said gently, "That is the way. We live by our reputations. It's hard when something goes wrong."
Margaret ignored this. She said, "The reef is a resource, not a danger. You're looking at it the wrong way, like Opie Kindred. We need diversity. Our biospheres have to be complicated because simple systems are prone to invasion and disruption, but they aren't one hundredth as complicated as those on Earth. If my parents' biome had been more diverse, the mold couldn't have found a foothold."
"There are some things I could do without." Arn scratched his left ankle with the toes of his right foot. "Like those ants."
"Well, we don't know if we need the ants specifically, but we need variety, and they contribute to it. They help aerate the soil, to begin with, which encourages stratification and diversity of soil organisms. There are a million different kinds of microbe in a gram of soil from a forest on Earth; we have to make do with less than a thousand. We don't have one tenth that number of useful vacuum organisms and most are grown in monoculture, which is the most vulnerable ecosystem of all. That was the cause of the crash of the green revolution on Earth in the twenty-first century. But there are hundreds of different species in the reef. Wild species, Arn. You could seed a planetoid with them and go harvest it a year later. The citizens don't go outside because they have their parklands, their palaces, their virtualities. They've forgotten that the outer system isn't just the habitats. There are millions of small planetoids in the Kuiper Belt. Anyone with a dome and the reef vacuum organisms could homestead one."
She had been thinking about this while working out in the fields. The Star Chamber had given her plenty of time to think.
Arn shook his head. "They all have the parasite lurking in them. Any species from the reef can turn into it. Perhaps even the proxies."
"We don't know enough," Margaret said. "I saw things in the bottom of the Rift, before I lost contact with the proxy. Big structures. And there's the anomalous temperature gradients, too. The seat of change must be down there, Arn. The parasite could be useful, if we can master it. The viruses that caused the immunodeficiency plagues are used for gene therapy now. Opie Kindred has been down there. He's suppressing what he has found."
"Yah, well, it does not much matter. They have completed synthesis of the metabolic inhibitor. I'm friendly with the organics chief. They diverted most of the refinery to it." Arn took out his slate. "He showed me how they have set it up. That is what they have been doing down in the Rift. Not exploring."
"Then we have to do something now."
"It is too late, Margaret."
"I want to call a meeting, Arn. I have a proposal."
Most of the science crews came. Opie Kindred's crew was a notable exception; Arn said that it gave him a bad feeling.
"They could be setting us up," he told Margaret.
"I know they're listening. That's good. I want it in the open. If you're worried about getting hurt you can always leave."
"I came because I wanted to. Like everyone else here. We're all scientists. We all want the truth known." Arn looked at her. He smiled. "You want more than that, I think."
"I fight my own fights." All around people were watching. Margaret added, "Let's get this thing started."
Arn called the meeting to order and gave a brief presentation about his research into survival of the exfoliations before throwing the matter open to the meeting. Nearly everyone had an opinion. Microphones hovered in the room, and at times three or four people were shouting at each other. Margaret let them work off their frustration. Some simply wanted to register a protest; a small but significant minority were worried about losing their bonuses or even all of their pay.
"Better that than our credibility," one of Orly Higgins's techs said. "That's what we live by. None of us will work again if we allow the Ganapati to become a plague ship."
Yells of approval, whistles.
Margaret waited until the noise had died down, then got to her feet. She was in the centre of the horseshoe of seats, and everyone turned to watch, more than a hundred people. Their gaze fell upon her like sunlight; it strengthened her. A microphone floated down in front of her face.
"Arn has shown that contamination isn't an issue," Margaret said. "The issue is that the Star Chamber want to destroy the reef because they want to exploit what they've found and stop anyone else using it. I'm against that, all the way. I'm not gengeneered. Micro-gravity is not my natural habitat. I have to take a dozen different drugs to prevent reabsorption of calcium from my bone, collapse of my circulatory system, fluid retention, all the bad stuff micro-gravity does to unedited Earth stock. I'm not allowed to have children here, because they would be as crippled as me. Despite that, my home is here. Like all of you, I would like to have the benefits of being a citizen, to live in the parklands and eat real food. But there aren't enough parklands for everyone because the citizens who own the habitats control production of fixed carbon. The vacuum organisms we have found could change that. The reef may be a source of plague, or it may be a source of unlimited organics. We don't know. What we do know is that the reef is unique and we haven't finished exploring it. If the Star Chamber destroys it, we may never know what's out there."
Cheers at this. Several people rose to make points, but Margaret wouldn't give way. She wanted to finish.
"Opie Kindred has been running missions to the bottom of the Rift, but he hasn't been sharing what he's found there. Perhaps he no longer thinks that he's one of us. He'll trade his scientific reputation for citizenship," Margaret said, "but that isn't our way, isn't it?"
"NO!" the crowd roared.
And the White Mice invaded the room.
Sharp cracks, white smoke, screams. The White Mice had long flexible sticks weighted at one end. They went at the crowd like farmers threshing corn. Margaret was separated from Arn by a wedge of panicking people. Two techs got hold of her and steered her out of the room, down a corridor filling with smoke. Arn loomed out of it, clutching his slate to his chest.
"They're getting ready to set off the poison," he said as they ran in long loping strides.
"Then I'm going now," Margaret said.
Down a drop pole onto a corridor lined with shops. People were smashing windows. No one looked at them as they ran through the riot. They turned a corner, the sounds of shouts and breaking glass fading. Margaret was breathing hard. Her eyes were smarting, her nose running.
"They might kill you," Arn said. He grasped her arm. "I can't let you go, Margaret."
She shook herself fre
e. Arn tried to grab her again. He was taller, but she was stronger. She stepped inside his reach and jumped up and popped him on the nose with the flat of her hand.
He sat down, blowing bubbles of blood from his nostrils, blinking up at her with surprised, tear-filled eyes.
She snatched up his slate. "I'm sorry, Arn," she said. "This is my only chance. I might not find anything, but I couldn't live with myself if I didn't try."
Margaret was five hundred kilometres out from the habitat when the radio beeped. "Ignore it," she told her pressure suit. She was sure that she knew who was trying to contact her, and she had nothing to say to him.
This far out, the Sun was merely the brightest star in the sky. Behind and above Margaret, the dim elongated crescent of the Ganapati hung before the sweep of the Milky Way. Ahead, below the little transit platform's motor, Enki was growing against a glittering starscape, a lumpy potato with a big notch at its widest point.
The little moonlet was rising over the notch, a swiftly moving fleck of light. For a moment, Margaret had the irrational fear that she would collide with it, but the transit platform's navigational display showed her that she would fall above and behind it. Falling past a moon! She couldn't help smiling at the thought.
"Priority override," her pressure suit said. Its voice was a reassuring contralto Margaret knew as well as her mother's.
"Ignore it," Margaret said again.
"Sorry, Maggie. You know I can't do that."
"Quite correct," another voice said.
Margaret identified him a moment before the suit helpfully printed his name across the helmet's visor. Dzu Sho.
"Turn back right now," Sho said. "We can take you out with the spectrographic laser if we have to."
"You wouldn't dare," she said.
"I do not believe anyone would mourn you," Sho said unctuously. "Leaving the Ganapati was an act of sedition, and we're entitled to defend ourselves."
Margaret laughed. It was just the kind of silly, sententious, self-important nonsense that Sho was fond of spouting.
