by David Drake
It wouldn't be the first time a human tool broke in the course of duties for which it had not been tempered.
“But,” Pretorius continued, “despite its undesired side effects, the test proves that a very great level of specificity is possible. Not certain: the principals will not promise that a different virus tailored to radically different genetic bundles will act with the same... razor-edged, one might say, care.''
He waved his right hand in the gesture of a man throwing away a bit of trash. “Even if they promised, it would be the act of a fool to believe them, and you would not support me if I were a fool.
“But the precision is now possible, sirs and mesdames,” Pretorius concluded, leaning forward in his chair. “Probable, even, as it was not before. The test that tells us that cannot be considered wholly an unsuccess.”
“We'll take your opinion under advisement,” said the fat Club member, the last syllable as much a wheeze as part of a word. “I think” - the pause was for noisy breathing, not thought or rhetoric - “that you should leave now.”
The big head shimmered in slow movement. From the end of the table the Oriental said, “You'll be summoned when we next wish to see you.”
Pretorius accepted the brusque dismissal as he always did, neutrally: unpleasant, but a factor that had to be expected - like the flies that had bitten him the times he lay in ambush with heat waves shimmering from the receiver of his machine gun. He got up with the deliberation of age, levering himself out of the deep chair with his hands and the back of his calves instead of trusting solely to the muscles of his thighs and lower back.
“Wait,” called a Club member harshly.
“Sir?” Pretorius responded to the shadowy blur that had been a Saudi prince when the member's anger had been a touch fiercer.
“You've seen to it that there won't be any slip-ups afterward?' ' the Oxford accent demanded. “When the laboratory will have become a liability.”
“The one who has been entrusted with that duty is a long-time associate of mine,” said the old Afrikaner. He almost seated himself again within the battery of monitors, but instruments could tell these faceless creatures nothing that was not clear in his quietly assured voice. “He will not fail in this duty.”
The dignity of Pretorius' response took the Saudi aback. He grunted to clear his throat, a disconcerting sound when the electronic screen had finished fragmenting and reassembling it.
“You had better be right,” said the Club member, choosing to take the last word, though he knew he had already been bested in the exchange. “The test would not have been allowed to proceed had we not been guaranteed it would be limited. A false guarantee.”
The Afrikaner bowed without speaking and began to walk toward the armored doors which would roll when he reached them.
He wondered whether the strain of virus tested on the Moon were really extinct. If a further sample could be procured; if it could be spread on his cuff, perhaps, just before he entered the building for his next interview with the Club . . .
There would be a risk, of course.
But not, he suspected, as much personal risk for Karel Pretorius as there was in letting the Plan come to fruition while the Saudi was still alive.
Chapter 8 - THE CLUB
The meeting room dimmed when the doors closed behind Karel Pretorius because the hologram screening shut off also and its diffracted light no longer played over the features of the Club members. Al-Fahd first mumbled in his own language, then began to talk of retribution in English; but there was far more important business at hand.
“Obviously we cannot expect the technicians' assessment of the new strain to be any more accurate than their predictions for the test variety,” said Sakai, whose artificial left eye was so nearly perfect that it could be noticed only by the fact its pupil did not expand under the present conditions. “It may have the designed limitations, it may not. The risk is unacceptable.”
“We knew there were risks,” growled Heidigger, one of the generals in the room. “The Dutchman's right, you know: it didn't do exactly what they said it would, but it did better.” He nodded crisply to the Saudi beside him and added, “Sure, I'm sorry about the collateral damage, but the - hell, the couple thousand pneumonia cases we expected weren't going to be a picnic either.”
“There's a level of truth to that,” said Pleyal as she rubbed her nose in obvious distaste at agreeing with any opinion of Heidigger's. “After all, we didn't expect any geographical limitation on the main release.”
“Wouldn't want one,'' said Lee, whose accent was American though his features were not. “There'll be disruption, certainly, but the long-term benefits outweigh them.”
A smile quirked his expression into that of a moon-faced pixie. “The short-term benefits as well, for those of us who are prepared to take advantage of them.”
Blake, who had been laboriously sucking in a breath while Lee spoke, now said, “What we expected didn't include a kill ratio of a hundred percent either.”
All eyes in the room turned to the grotesquely fat man in the center of the table. He glared around him like a bear baited by dogs while his lungs struggled to fill themselves for another statement.
“Ah, surely,” said Mahavishtu in the oily voice that made even flat truth sound like a lie when it came from his lips, “there was nothing undesirable about a more complete success than we expected?”
“Not if it's limited to coloreds, like we plan,” said Blake with a harshness that was as much venom at life as it was a result of the battle that speech always cost him. “Like they promise this time.”
In the frozen silence that followed Blake's concluding wheeze, Sakai remarked, “To return to Madame Pleyal's observation” - he nodded toward the angular woman - “I think in fact we can count on geographical limitations when we direct the main release.”
Heidigger gave a loud snort that began as an even more disdainful obscenity. “A tiny sample ran through UN Headquarters in a coupla hours. Do you really think that multiple releases in Africa are going to stop at the Mediterranean? Or even the Atlantic.”
“I think they'll stop at the atmosphere,” responded the Japanese industrialist sharply enough to cut through the sudden babble of voices.
There was silence, then another confusion of words and even languages.
“A moment, please,” demanded Mahavishtu with the surprising volume he could summon at need. “What our colleague has suggested is very interesting. But will it not cause comment if we, many of whom have never left Earth, should do so at the same time . . . and at a time which will later be the subject of much scrutiny, scrutiny that even we will not be able to control?”
“Not,” said Sakai, “if we are attending the celebrations at United Nations Headquarters. Are there any of us here who would seem out of place at the Twentieth Anniversary Commemoration?''
He looked blandly at his fellows, neither eye blinking. The slight disparity in pupil size give him a subliminal psychic advantage over those who met his gaze but were not consciously aware of its details.
Heidigger guffawed. No one else spoke for a moment.
“You can arrange invitations, Mistress Undersecretary?” Sakai prompted, focusing - and not - on the woman to his immediate left.
“There'll be a delay, of course?” al-Fahd protested, drawn back into the deliberations when they intersected his own preoccupation. “Cancellation, even, because of the . . . disaster?”
“Could they cancel a war?” argued Lee coolly, turning his head in challenge to the Saudi. “Could they cancel a rainstorm?”
“Yes, that is correct,” said Perilla, planning while her lips pursed in the direction of her ring, a cameo much older than Portugal - let alone Brazil. “The celebration is to go ahead . . . There will be individuals who choose not to attend at the last minute. That will make changes more easy - “
She looked up, sweeping her fellow Club members with her hazel eyes. “That would not have been difficult in any case.
Not too difficult.”
“Then,” said Pleyal with a crispness hinting that she liked the other female in the Club as little as she did General Heidigger, “we will proceed on that basis with our individual arrangements - and with the timing of the main release.”
“It is no more than a slum there, you realize,” added Perilla, speaking sadly in the direction of her cameo. “Twenty years ago they broke ground, and by today they have accomplished a slum to which no one is transferred who can avoid it.”
She glanced around imperiously, her eyes flashing like the jewel-encrusted combs in her hair, the emeralds and topazes that she could not wear as a public functionary but wore here. “I would never have gone there, you realize.
But now, for a few days, it will be” - she flicked her fingers - “acceptable to me.”
“I wonder,'' said Mahavishtu in a musing tone,'' whether we should not see to it that a large Sub-Saharan contingent attends the ceremonies?”
“Why the hell?” demanded Heidigger, while other faces around the table blanked or frowned.
“Why, for breeding stock,” the Indian explained. “We can house them, do you not think, next to the okapis and the tigers?”
Someone swore under his breath. There was general motion as Club members slid their chairs back and rose from the table.
Mahavishtu remained seated. “Another species becomes extinct,” he said. “So sad.”
He was still giggling as he left the room.
Chapter 9 - IMPROVISING
The only rich color bathed by the light reflected into the room was the spray of huge roses grown here on Sky Devon. The antiseptic array of blacks and whites that otherwise furnished the office of Director Sutcliffe-Bowles was in contrast to the pungency of pig manure which permeated the atmosphere of the entire orbital habitat. The odor did not seem to bother Sutcliffe-Bowles, but Dr. Kathleen Spenser was willing to kill to avoid it.
She had already murdered 517 people at UN Headquarters in order to free herself from Sky Devon on terms that she found acceptable.
The tall, spare woman cleared her throat as she waited for her superior, tilted back in a chair that looked complex enough to be remotely pilotable, to acknowledge her presence in response to his summons. Sutcliffe-Bowles raised a hand to silence her. Though he did not open his eyes, his pinkish face wrinkled up in displeasure at the hint of interruption.
Spenser held herself almost motionless, smoothing the edge of her white lab smock while her mind drew in considerable detail a picture of the director with his limbs blackening and sloughing off as gangrene attacked his tissues. The trouble was, she and Sutcliffe-Bowles were almost identical in ethnic background.
She had double-checked to be, regretfully, sure.
There was a swelling climax to the music that filled the director's office as thoroughly and offensively as did the reek of hog feces. The director's eyes opened and his chair tilted him upright as if the three events had been programmed together.
“Magnificent,” said Sutcliffe-Bowles with proprietary certainty. “The Immolation of the Gods and Valhalla, of course. We live in the best of ages, my dear: we have now achieved technical perfection in the creation and recording of sound - and we have the genius of Wagner from the past. Mere mechanical skill would be of small benefit without the work of genius to infuse it.”
“So I understand,” said Dr. Spenser, uttering a collection of syllables past experience had taught her to mouth in response to the director's absurdities. It was incredible that anyone could visit Sky Devon, much less run it, and believe that humanity had reached the summit of progress in any technical art.
And as for Wagner, she would prefer pig shit if that were the only choice.
The director opened a flat dispenser of varicolored euphoric tablets, chose one for himself, and offered the remainder to this subordinate. “For you?”
“No thank you, Director,” Spenser said distantly. “I'm working. You called me from my laboratory to see you at once.”
“Yes, yes, I did,” agreed Sutcliffe-Bowles with neither embarrassment nor anger at the implied rebuke. “We had a request, what was it. . . ?”
More sharply and with a frown toward the sheet of uncluttered black boro-cadmium monomer that formed his desktop, the director said, “The note for Kathie.”
A sheet of hard copy fed soundlessly from a slot in the desktop which had been invisible until it disgorged its printed burden. “There,” said the director, gesturing toward the brief document which Spenser had to lean across the broad desk to reach. “He's from your lab, isn't he?”
The microbiologist felt her knees waver a moment before she lost all sense of the body that nevertheless continued to support her. The sheet she had just skimmed expanded into duplicates of itself, then shrank back down to a single document whose letters burned her mind.
Around Spenser's neck was a silver chain. Her left hand now touched the lump of the pendant hidden beneath her clothing. It was a spherical drop of crystal the size of her thumb at the first joint, wrapped in wire that only a metallurgist might have guessed was tungsten rather than one of the rare metals more common in jewelry.
“Yes, Director,” she heard herself say. “Or rather, he used to be. Technician Beaton died a week ago in an accident while he was on vacation.”
“Well,'' said Sutcliffe-Bowles with a flutter of his hands, “that's why they want information, then. Take care of it, will you, like a good girl.”
“You may have misinterpreted the request, Director,” said Spenser, her eyes on the flimsy and her mind filled with shifting images - some of them news holograms fed from the bloody corridors of Headquarters Colony. “This appears to be part of a university study of off-Earth cultural patterns rather than something connected with the accident. An on-going study.”
“Well, take care of it, won't you, Kathie?” ordered Sutcliffe-Bowles, frowning and making a little fluttering motion with his hands as his chair rocked him into a semi-recline again. “The Prelude to Tahnhauser, I think,'' he called to his desk.
“Always nice to chat with you, m'gel,” the director added, opening his eyes when he did not feel the movement of his subordinate leaving the room, “but I've a great deal of planning to do today, what with the shareholders' meeting looming on the horizon.”
“I was just wondering, sir,” said the microbiologist, “if we'd even gotten a request like this before. I'm sure other members of the staff have visited UN Headquarters.”
She had done so herself, as part of the run-up to the test release.
“Well, how would I know?” demanded Sutcliffe-Bowles, his face darkening. The music swelling to fill the office had an emotional content as pervasive as the miasma surrounding a bushel of rotting peaches.
You would ask your desk's artificial intelligence, thought Spenser, the only intelligence that regularly occupies this office, and it would give us the answer in a matter in seconds.
Aloud she said, “I'm sorry, Director. I'll go take care of this at once.”
One way or another she would take care of it.
“Always glad to see my staff,” said Sutcliffe-Bowles with his eyes closed and his face to the ceiling. Spenser was not sure that he heard her words, but when the multisheeted door panels closed behind her, their motion threw patterns of light like the wings of morpho butterflies across his face.
She was terrified as she stepped toward the transit station, though she didn't suppose her stiffness would strike as unusual anyone who knew her. All her life there'd been laughter, jokes. She'd lost track of the times she'd heard around a corner or behind a not-quite-sheltering hand, “Walks like she's got a poker up her arse.”
Perhaps no burden came without a corresponding benefit. If her normal demeanor during her post-pubescent years permitted her to conceal her agitation at this time, then the four decades of snickers might have been worthwhile.
Almost worthwhile.
An anticlockwise car glided up to the platform, braking smoothly as th
e drive magnet reversed polarity over the center rail while the suspension magnets in the outriggers continued to poise the vehicle a millimeter above the friction of any solid surface.
Other passengers entered the car with her, but Spenser ignored them except to wait for a chance to key her stop, seventeen, into the destination pad. The transit vehicles sensed and stopped for people waiting on station platforms, but they could not read minds.
Kathleen Spenser was not herself sure of what was going on in her mind.
She was still clutching the data request she had brought from the director's office. The car was enclosed against the wind of its own velocity, but the crinkling of the document as Spenser sat down recalled it to her attention. She touched the latch of her briefcase, the only way that the case could be opened without force since the combination lock that usually supplemented the thumbprint had been disconnected.
When the flimsy was safely inside, she snapped the lid of leather-covered titanium firmly over it.
If only it were possible to close off the implications of the request as completely.
The car slowed to a stop with perfect smoothness, but Spenser and the other passengers swayed as they transferred their inertia to the vehicle through their seats and the arms that braced them in the direction of motion. Two men got off when the doors opened; a woman got on; and the squeals from the feeding pens only underscored what the methane-pungent atmosphere made obvious.
If the odor of hog excrement penetrated every part of the habitat, here at Section Eighteen it roiled. Farming the animals in Sky Devon had been a mistake obvious from the start, but one of the project's major backers was the largest breeder of Poland Chinas in Europe.
The animals were clean, so long as they did not have to wallow in mud to protect their tender skin from insect pests, but the odor of their feces was inescapable in a closed atmosphere, no matter what stages of filtration took place in the recirculating blowers. That omnipresent discomfort for habitat residents would not have kept hog breeding from economic success here - and anyway, Director Sutcliffe-Bowles' acceptance was more typical of the way arrivals at Sky Devon adapted than was Dr. Spenser's continued revulsion.
