by Scott Mackay
“So they’ve put some of themselves into the shroud,” said Sidower. “Big deal. How does it affect our odds of defeating the goddamn thing?”
He glanced at the secretary of defense, who was cantankerous for obvious good reason.
“Eventually we will defeat it.” He meant it to be a bold Neil Thorndike proclamation, but it came out sounding weak. “It’s just that I think it will take a little more time than I originally thought. And that’s because the shroud—and, by the way, I prefer to call it the phytosphere now, because that’s what it is, a sphere made out of plant material.” He felt his forehead moistening. “Anyway, the phytosphere seems to adapt to whatever we throw at it, most probably because of this subset of transmutational genes. Also,
we’re finding it hard to penetrate the individual planktons themselves because the Tarsalans have spliced resistant traits of the Martian paleo-organism, Aresphyta, into the mix, and this has created a kind of impenetrable shell around each individual organism. To give you a bit of history—”
“We get the picture, Neil,” said Sidower. “This shell more or less acts as armor.”
“Yes.”
“And there’s no way we can penetrate this armor with conventional herbicides?” asked the president.
“No. I’ve got one team working on finding a herbicide that will effectively destroy the phytoplankton component, another working on destroying the shell, or carapace if you will, and a third studying the Tarsalan genetic component. The main thrust right now is the carapace. We’ve got to find a way to break the carapace. Once we’ve done that, we can concentrate on the organism itself.”
“Do you have any ideas about the carapace?” asked the president.
Neil squared his shoulders, forcing his confidence. “We’ve tried acids and other corrosive agents, but so far nothing has worked. We have to devise something that can compete against the carapace, in the Darwinian sense, and come up the winner every time. We need something that’s adaptable and can shift strategies, depending on the situation. I believe the best answer is to develop some kind of omniphage, an organism that can eat through the carapace, and won’t stop eating. If we develop an omniphage capable of penetrating the carapace, we can then use the same macrogen as a delivery module to carry a lethal dose of whatever toxic agent we finally develop to kill the xenophyta—that’s what I’m calling the individual organisms.”
“And is it possible to develop such a… hell, what do you call it? An omniphage?” asked the secretary.
“I have a team of geneticists working on the problem right now.”
“So when you say it should be designed to carry a lethal dose…” The president trailed off, trying to figure it all out.
“It would essentially be a workhorse macrogen engineered to penetrate the carapace and administer the necessary fatal agent. As for the fatal agent itself, my team is working on a hydrogen sulfide compound that’s going to fool the xenophyta into thinking it’s getting its usual supply of carbon dioxide when in actual fact—”
“But first we have to get this…this omniphage going, right?” said Sidower.
“Yes.”
“And do we have all the best experts on board to help us build this omniphage?”
“In the case of the Aresphyta, all the best experts would be Martian.”
“Wonderful. Let’s send a drop to Mars right away.”
Neil nodded, even as his confidence once again ebbed. “I’ve been having some of my people track these experts down. And they tell me that the top expert of all, Dr. Luke Langstrom, is currently on the Moon. As a matter of fact, he’s part of my brother’s team.”
Neil couldn’t help being galled by this. After advising strongly against his brother’s involvement, and getting Gerry’s flat refusal in a recent drop, his brother now held a trump. He glanced around at the other three, and knew they understood the implications. He had alienated all those working on the Moon effort, and now it was going to play against them. Neil couldn’t help feeling like an idiot. And he didn’t like feeling like an idiot. Especially in front of the president.
The president turned to the national security advisor. “Send a priority drop to the Moon. Do whatever it takes, but get this Luke Langstrom on board.”
9
Gerry left the Nectaris Buena Vista after supper and strolled down Sagittarius Way, still trying to come to grips with all the wild and conflicting information the Smallmouth had brought back from the shroud.
He looked at the vaulting underground dome of Nectaris, ten miles across and two miles high, most of it laminated rock, but with huge polycarbonate windows here and there. He headed downtown.
At this time of the day, the lighting technicians, probably zonked out on premium-grade bud, were having fun with their spots, floods, and lasers, choosing, for the most part, a mood indigo. The sky was a preternatural violet, intense in its dark luminosity, the epitome of dusk, peppered here and there with red stars. Food vendors were conspicuously absent, and as he reached Pisces Road, he realized that even the prostitutes weren’t around, that all the curtains to the brothels were closed, and that despite the carnival indigo of the evening sky, there weren’t many people about at all, as if the somber situation on Earth had cast its pall over the gay old Moon.
Yet a few cafés were open, and he saw couples sitting at tables drinking espresso and eating pastries.
He remembered the old days, when he and Glenda had lived in the center of Raleigh, before the kids had been born; how they would go to cafés, just like these young people, and believe for a while that life had all the magic of an indigo sky with red stars.
He strolled down Pisces Road toward Möbius Lake. Would he ever make sense of all the bizarre information from the Smallmouth?
Have a tough problem to solve? Go to the ocean and look at it for an hour. But all he had now was this artificial lake, which was really the town’s main water recycler and Ossimax dispenser. He hoped Neil was making progress on Earth. He hoped that tomorrow he would wake up and look at Earth, and that the shroud would be gone. In the meantime, he had a lot to think about. He took a deep breath and focused his concentration.
He was just reaching Möbius Lake when Ian Hamilton came out of the nearby Nickel and Dime Cannabis Bar and Roti Shop; he could never go far in this city without running into Ian, it seemed.
“We were just talking about you,” said his old friend.
“Who?”
“Me and the girls. And Malcolm. And Luke.”
“I’m just out for a walk.”
“Why don’t you come inside?”
“As long as you know I don’t smoke anymore. I never really did.”
“Then have a coffee. It’s on me.”
He followed Ian into the Nickel and Dime.
Looking around, he saw that it was a cozy little place, all the furniture made of artificial wood, the Velcro trails decorated with designs of colorful thread, a lot of thick macramé tapestries on the walls, and aquariums filled with genetically enhanced Siamese fighting fish with fins and tails so long and so colorful he could easily understand why they were the chief objets d’art in this stoner bar. The fish bioluminesced, turning on and off like Christmas lights.
He and Ian went to a table at the back, really more a low platform surrounded by cushions, and there he found the mayor and Dr. Luke Langstrom, their eyes glazed, their mood placid, their bent philosophical.
The air was sweet with the smell of hashish, and he had a hard time getting used to it because it was still illegal in North Carolina. The girls. He had forgotten their names. Only that Ian had been dragging them around for a while. Twins? He wasn’t sure. They looked much alike. Pretty. Small. Fine-boned.
Showgirls, but showgirls of the Moon variety, born here, raised here, like elfin queens in their delicacy, as tranquil and as still as a day in the Mare Serenitatis.
“You remember Gwen and Stephanie?” asked Ian.
He waved. “Hi.”
“Her
e’s the man of the hour,” said the mayor. “Have a seat.”
He maneuvered awkwardly—still wasn’t used to Moon gravity—and sat on one of the large, embroidered pillows. He glanced at Luke Langstrom, who was grinning with ruby red eyes over a bowl of Moroccan. Ian took a seat beside him. The mayor had half his mind on some kind of 3-D game involving holographic leopards and parrots. So. Here it was. The perfect cross-section of the lunar effort to destroy the shroud. His committee on all things serious. Yes, why not? Neil had the president and the president’s closest advisors. It made perfect sense that he should have potheads and showgirls.
“So you’re him?” asked Stephanie.
And they would all speak cryptically, and answer cryptically, and no one would understand anybody else, but somehow, through a series of non sequiturs and red herrings, they would get the job done.
“Who?”
“The man who’s going to save the world.”
“I’m going to try, sweetie,” he said, the sweetie coming reflexively because he always called Hanna sweetie.
“We don’t talk to many Earthmen,” said Gwen. “You move funny.”
“I know.”
“I could teach you to walk right,” said Stephanie.
He looked at Stephanie closely. She had pink hair, and a makeup atomizer had misted her face blue.
She had plucked eyebrows, now lined with twinkling blue sequins. She had painted her lips a shade of plum.
Before he could accept Stephanie’s offer, Dr. Langstrom said, “I got the attachment you sent. The microscopic photographs were spectacular.” Langstrom glanced at Stephanie with marked disapproval, then turned back to Gerry. “They brought to mind some of the Martian fossils I’ve researched. I would like to look at the samples firsthand, if you don’t mind.”
Gerry studied Langstrom. “Be my guest. What do you make of the photographs?”
“Rather a stark comparison between the ones taken in the lab and the ones taken in the shroud itself, isn’t there? Microscopic section photographs right inside the foul thing. How did you arrive at such a technique?”
Gerry shrugged. “You’ve got to study things in their natural habitat, Luke. Studying it in the lab is only going to lead to a lot of miscues.”
Langstrom’s amused intolerance softened. He looked as if he had been given a fascinating new toy.
“Interesting organism.”
“You got my e-mail about the carapace?”
Langstrom’s eyes narrowed. “Reminds me of the carapace of Aresphyta C-4721. If only Nectaris had a DNA sequencer.” The Martian turned to the mayor, as if he were to blame.
“Anything like that is always done on Earth,” said the mayor.
“Because it would be interesting to see if the Tarsalans used Aresphyta genetic strands to construct this organism. C-4721 is of course a prehistoric organism, and I’ve only ever seen fossil specimens. But it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the Tarsalans could have recovered a live specimen. They’ve been coring the Martian ice cap for the last several years, and C-4721 mimics certain present-day Martian organisms, especially in the growth of its carapace. Grows like a tooth, you know. Impervious to ultraviolet radiation. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the Tarsalans spliced C-4721 into their phytoplankton base.”
The mayor spoke up. “Gerry, no pressure, my man, but any ideas on how we might… like… do a pest-control number on the phytosphere?”
“Phytosphere? Where’d you come up with a name like that?”
“Just what the Earth guys are calling it.”
Gerry’s confusion, ambivalence, and puzzlement over the shroud—phytosphere—came back. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” Phytosphere. That would be a Neil name. “Every time I think I have an answer, I run into a roadblock.” Everything was Greek to Neil. “I’m thinking herbicide—get AviOrbit to design and build some applicator satellites—but I’m not sure it would work because many kinds of phytoplankton can absorb huge amounts of herbicide with little, if any, detrimental effect.” He wondered if Neil was thinking herbicides. “Going the herbicide route might be counterproductive.”
“It would be more than counterproductive,” said Hulke. “It would be impossible.”
“Why?” said Gerry.
“Because we have no herbicide or large-scale chemical production facilities here on the Moon. We don’t even use herbicides here. We’re a… a hermetically sealed community. Everything that comes to our customs depot is meticulously screened. We don’t have any weeds in any of our gardens…or hydroponic acreages, because the seeds for such plants have never gotten past our teams in the first place.”
So even if they wanted to go the herbicide route, it was out of the question anyway? “What’s the latest drop from Earth say? Phytosphere. Who thought that name up?”
The mayor glanced away, as if he were embarrassed. “That would be your brother. He’s in the news, Gerry.” Hulke focused on him and folded his hands. “He’s made a number of announcements to the media.”
Gerry nodded stoically. “And what’s he got to say for himself? I mean, over and above calling the shroud the phytosphere.”
Langstrom piped in with an odd kind of glee. “He’s calling the individual organisms xenophyta.”
Gerry regarded the Martian evenly, then turned back to the mayor. “Anything else?”
Hulke’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing specific about their plans to destroy the… the phytosphere.” As if the mayor were reluctantly giving in to Neil’s nomenclaturural template. “Only that they’ve definitively confirmed that it is in fact derived from ocean plankton, just as we have, and a few other components that they wouldn’t disclose.” An expression of patient aggravation came to the mayor’s face. “They’ve devised a… how did they phrase it… a three-pronged approach to dismantling the phytosphere. These drops from Earth… God, they’re funny.” Yet the mayor looked peeved. Was he wondering why Gerry hadn’t devised his own three-pronged approach? “I asked them for a full scientific report but they… they more or less flipped me the finger. If that’s the way they’re going to play it—by the way, what about… like, a report from you, Ger?”
Gerry shook his head, momentarily distressed by how baffling he found all the Smallmouth’s information. “I haven’t got any reports, Malcolm. All I’ve got are a lot of questions. I guess in their drop they didn’t say anything about the way the xenophyta behaved in the lab as opposed to the way they behaved in the actual phytosphere.”
The mayor paused, and he could see it in the mayor’s eyes: Hulke thought that maybe—just maybe—Dr. Gerald Thorndike, formerly of the NCSU, might have something. “Why? Is there a big difference?”
“A huge difference. The xenophyta… they embrace each other when they’re in the phytosphere. They have these two little flagella on each organism—tiny whiplike appendages, like the flagella on certain phytoplankton. When they’re in the phytosphere, these flagella twine around each other to form long chains, and these long chains then go on to form huge mats, which then go on to the bloom phase. Then the blooms join to form the entire phytosphere. These flagella are extremely active in the phytosphere.
But you take the xenophyta out of the phytosphere and put them in the lab and the flagella grow limp.
The xenophyta still congregate in colonies, but they don’t bind with their flagella. So far I’ve yet to discover any electrical or chemical stimuli inside the xenophyta that can account for the flagella becoming paralyzed like that. They seem to need the entire phytosphere to bind, and I can’t figure it out.”
Outside, the sky turned purple and now had orange stars. A waiter came by with a tray of smokables but everybody had had enough.
Gerry looked around at the group. In Stephanie’s eyes he saw a burgeoning idolatry. In Malcolm Hulke he saw apprehension, as if the mayor were blaming him for coming up with yet more obstacles. Ian Hamilton wasn’t even paying attention anymore, and was instead focusing on Stephanie, gazing at her as if
she were the most beautiful creature on the Moon.
Luke Langstrom was the only one who looked fascinated by the problem. “So do you have any theories about it?”
Gerry’s brow rose. “Only that there’s got to be some trigger that’s turning these flagella on and off, depending on where they are.”
Later, as they strolled around Lake Möbius, Stephanie took his arm.
“Maybe I can sit in at some of your sessions,” she said.
“If you’d like.”
“Because I’ve been thinking about the shroud. The phytosphere. Whatever you want to call it.”
“You have?”
“An outside opinion might help. Are there any showgirls on your committee?”
“No.”
“Then don’t you think you should have one?”
He gave her a smile. “I think maybe we should.” To make things perfectly clear, he added, “I’ve got my wife down there. And the more people working on the problem, the better.”
She paused. “I don’t know many scientists.”
“Perhaps you should count yourself lucky.”
“You don’t seem like a scientist.”
He looked away. “No. And sometimes I don’t feel like one, either.”
“Except I can tell you’re the most brilliant man on the Moon right now.”
“And how can you tell that?”
She tightened her grip on his arm. “It’s just something I can tell. This way I have. Ask Ian. He knows. I can tell you have a different way of looking at things than other people.”
“And is that a curse or a blessing?”
She stopped and peered at him more closely. “In your case, I think it’s a blessing.”
