“Security,” said Hrecker.
“Of course.”
“This morning,” said a voice. “In Vatroom 3.”
The screen displayed a single man, so skinny that his bones showed at every joint, maneuvering a complex glass construction. With one hand he fended off walls and other obstacles. The other clutched a glass pipe from which rose half a dozen curving, curling, tapered shapes that subdivided in a nearly fractal way.
“That’s Ozzie Gilpin,” said Tamiko.
“He must have blown that himself.”
Gilpin was Belt Center 83’s chief mechanic. He repaired what broke. He built shelving and cabinets and tools. He machined metal into shapes called for by physicists and engineers. He blew molten glass into flasks and coils and stills for the chemists.
The vatroom’s ceiling was a broad arch of metal interrupted by narrow viewports through which light could stream. Beneath each glass stripe stood a green wall a handsbreadth thick, a tank full of algae soup. Between the tanks were mounted fluorescent lights to supplement the distant sun. Buglike robots clustered atop the tanks and ran up and down their sides.
Dark flecks, threads of ungreen fluid, and streams of bubbles swirled in the narrow tanks. The veedo carried the throbbing sound of the pumps that kept the algae well mixed with the Center’s sewage and stale air.
Gilpin’s eyes were intent on the nearest tank. He did not seem to notice as a trio of Security guards swam into view. They were armed with short metal clubs whose grips were wrapped with black plastic tape. Elsewhere in the lab, the guards also carried sidearms.
“What have you got there?” asked one of the guards.
“You’ll see,” said Gilpin. His free hand brought him to a gentle stop beside the tank’s topmost harvest tap, nearest the window and the light. He immediately connected the tap to the pipe at the base of his intricate glassware construction.
“It’s a sculpture,” said Hrecker.
The guards made no move to stop Gilpin.
When he opened the tap, rich green fluid flowed into the sculpture and filled its every ramifying corner. “A fern,” he said, and as it caught the light it was. A cluster of sparkling, glass-sheathed fronds that shone as brightly as any in an Earthly forest.
“Oh!” said Tamiko. “It’s beautiful.”
Hrecker nodded. His hand covered hers and squeezed.
The three guards reacted in no such appreciative way.
As one, they unfastened their clubs from their belts and began to swing.
The glass shattered.
Gilpin screamed and bled and died.
The algae soup continued to flow from the tap.
Hrecker thought it should cover the wreckage with green, but red blood made it muddy and low gravity let it drift and twist and bubble in the air.
“Oh, no,” said Tamiko. Her voice was low, as if she could feel Gilpin’s pain.
The screen went dark.
The voice that had introduced the veedo tape had said nothing more after “In Vatroom 3.”
The point had needed no discussion, no lecture, no sermon. No one needed to be told that Engineer officialdom thought it heresy to value living things, or that Security was always watching for hints of treason.
“He’s not the first.” They both nodded. Ten days before, Hrecker had been on his way to work when Security agents had made him stop and cling to the travel grid overhead. In the distance, he had been able to see other agents pulling a struggling woman from a workspace.
Later, he had told Tamiko and said, “I wonder who she was. I wonder what she did.” He had not said how aware he was that the same thing might once have happened to him, might yet happen if Security ever learned about the African violet.
Tamiko hadn’t known the answers then, but by the next day she had been able to tell him: The woman had fastened a photo of her mother to the plastic wall of her workspace. Unfortunately, her mother worked in a lunar greenhouse tunnel, and she had been photographed against that background, all green leaves, red and purple fruit, even a few flowers.
The next time Hrecker traveled down that tunnel he looked for the woman, her workspace, the photo. But there was only an empty space, a desk, a computer screen and keyboard, a veedo set, flimsy walls with no sign that anyone had ever attached a thing to them. Two days later, a man was sitting at the desk and there was a photo of the Explorer on the wall.
The woman had vanished.
“I never did learn what happened to her,” said Tamiko now.
“They forget we’re animals,” said Hrecker. “We need food and oxygen, so we need the plants.”
“Need is one thing. They recognize that.” Her hand indicated the veedo set and the algae tanks they had just seen. “But we shouldn’t love them. We shouldn’t see beauty in them.”
Not even if that beauty was shaped from glass, from hardness born of furnace melt, not seed or spore. Not when it gained color and significance from lowly algae. Not when it glorified the living world.
He opened his mouth as if to say as much. But then he glanced at the ceiling and remained quiet except for, “Or we might be tempted.”
“Yes,” said Tamiko. Their hands were still entwined. When she squeezed, he thought the message clear. There was no telling who might pass or who might be hovering just out of sight, listening for any disloyal word. And whatever they might now say could be dangerous for them both.
The Engineers thought of themselves as allied to machinery, to mechanisms designed and built by human hands. Their traditional enemies, the Gypsies, had based their technology on living things, on genetic engineering. And the closer the Engineers came to confronting their foes once more, as they had not in a century, the more they purified their stance.
Nor would it be safe to suggest out loud that the Engineers’ ideology could be less absolute and rigid and unchanging, more flexible and lifelike, than one of their holy machines.
But of course it was. Ideology was a people thing, and people were not machines. Of course it stiffened when opposed and relaxed when it was not.
Hrecker took a deep breath. It would be much safer to question action instead of belief. “Why do we have to go back to Tau Ceti?”
Tamiko was shaking her head even before he finished. “We’ve exhausted Earth.”
“But we have everything we need out here. Don’t even mention the Moon or Mars. We have habitats and the Belt. Enough room and energy and minerals for centuries. And no gravity wells to fight. No interstellar distances to make shipping expensive. Why can’t we just let these creatures go on with their lives?”
“You’re right,” she said. “Of course you are. We don’t need mines or farms or colonies.”
“But we’re going anyway.”
“Idiot. You’ve forgotten the Gypsies.”
“The Gypsy stain.” He could not help the doubting tone of his voice.
She frowned at him. “First we have to be sure it’s there. But once we’re sure—”
“We’ll get out the scrub brushes.”
“We’ll clean the place up. Get it polished and purified and ready for colonists later on.”
He knew how much of what he said he believed. But she? Her tone was definite, decisive, confident, as if she could see beauty in green plants and glass ferns filled with algae but still believe the Gypsies evil.
How much of that, he wondered, was pretense for the sake of those who might be listening?
* * * *
On Mars, a large part of the lab’s work had been directed toward focusing probability shifters on smaller and smaller volumes. Now that focus was turned outward as it had been when the shifter was first invented.
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker had seen old records that claimed the Engineers had invented the shifter and the Orbitals
and Gypsies had stolen it. He thought more recent historians made more sense when they said the Orbitals had been the first to learn how to warp probability and stimulate the vacuum to fountain forth the energy needed to power a spaceship. The resulting Q-drive had made it possible for the genetic engineers to escape the cleansing of Earth. Later the refugees had learned how to use the shifter to boost the infinitesimal probability that large objects such as spaceships would tunnel across gaps in space. The distances the ships could leap in this way had been microscopic at first, but when the leaps were repeated millions of times per second, the ship’s effective velocity rapidly grew impressive.
In time, the Engineers had duplicated the discovery. They had even increased the size of the tunneling leaps to meters and achieved faster-than-light travel. But the Explorer’s voyages each took many months. Longer leaps and shorter travel times were essential for a military expeditionary force.
“We got it!” said Renard Saucier. His ebullient tone and the wine bottle held aloft in his hand suggested a crucial announcement.
“Not us,” said Hrecker. “We weren’t even working on that.” His tone was flatter. The news had been on the veedo the evening before. Each leap was now ten meters, and it took three nanoseconds. That was about twenty times light-speed, already a good deal better than the best the Explorer had ever been able to do.
“Hah!” Saucier laughed and squeezed wine into translucent drinking bulbs. The wine was not champagne. “So it was the Farside team.”
“Gypping thieves,” said Eric Silber in his abrasive voice. “I had to help them on the math, and do you think they mentioned that?”
“The point is, we got it,” said Miriam Panek quietly. Smooth, yellow-brown skin and an almost hairless scalp made her age impossible to estimate. Her specialty was the macroscopic quantum. “The trip will only take five weeks, maybe six.”
“Once we have the ships,” said Silber.
“They’re almost ready,” said Saucier. “But they’re bigger than the probability fields we can generate. That’s our job.”
“I’ve been working on that math too,” said Silber. Silence answered him, but it was not an attentive silence and no one looked his way. “I …” He shrugged and stopped.
“We’re getting there,” said Hrecker. “It won’t be long.”
Saucier lifted his drinking bulb in a toast. When the others had matched the gesture, he said, “It had better not be.”
* * * *
Except for Security and Administration, Belt Center 83’s personnel lived in much the same sort of quarters as they worked: open-topped, flimsy-sided, doorless cubicles. Sleeping sacs were velcroed to solid floors and walls to keep the sleepers’ movements from propelling them into traffic or neighboring cubicles.
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker unfastened the elastic cord that held his makeshift ceiling of wall material in place. It did not cover the entire cubicle, but it did serve to block vision and provide an illusion of privacy. Tamiko let go of the travel grid and slipped through the opening. A moment later, he had joined her.
She touched the plastic overhead. “You’re supposed to leave more space around the edges. You shouldn’t have to unfasten it to get in.”
“You’ve said that before.” He kicked a robot aside as he drew her toward the sleepsac on the floor. “The last time you were here.”
Their words were not loud, not much above a whisper. People in nearby cubicles were just as careful not to stand out above the background murmur of soft talk, shifting bodies, and quiet music, though a laugh echoed from further down the tunnel. Some evenings there were fights. Sometimes there were parties, though with those the neighbors joined in rather than protest. Sometimes they even took down their walls to make a larger space.
For a moment they said nothing more at all. But then he drew back from her just enough to see her face in the light that filtered through the plastic. “Lots of people do it,” he said.
“Security doesn’t like it. They think people don’t want them watching.”
“They don’t. We don’t. You don’t. Do you?”
She giggled. He murmured. She giggled again.
Later, he said, “You’re going, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am. I work for the General, after all.” There was a pause. “And I want to go. Here, the only place you can live outdoors is Earth. Everywhere else …” She pointed at the poster he had taped to one flimsy wall. It seemed an abstract landscape until one recognized the many-sulfured hues of Io. “The Moon, Mars, the habitats. Here. You have to stay in a box. I want to see another living world. And the aliens sound fascinating.”
“Even if you have to destroy them?”
“If we have to.” He hoped the reluctance in her voice was genuine. “If they aren’t natural. If the Gypsies made them. If they’re monsters. Your work will help.”
Hrecker grunted. The Engineers had defeated the Orbitals a century before largely because they alone had seen that the torrent of energy the probability shifters coaxed from the vacuum could become a particle beam weapon. And among his other tasks at Belt Center 83, he had worked on improving particle flux, beam collimation, and range.
“You’re going back to Mars.” It was not a question.
“Back to the university. Back to the routine. It’s probably just as well.”
“What about us?”
Her mass was not enough to keep him from shrugging. “I’m not a gypsymp. But …” He pointed at the flimsy ceiling, and she nodded. He could not, should not, say any more. There was no telling who was listening.
But they both knew what he wished he could say aloud: He was no Gypsy sympathizer, but he was not nearly as convinced as she that it was right to purge every trace of gengineering from the universe.
“We won the war a long time ago,” he said instead. He meant that the old conflict between mechanical and biological technology was over. “In fact, they couldn’t have fled without adopting our kind of technology. Spaceships and Q-drives.”
“Potsters,” she whispered in his ear. And yes, he thought, the Engineers had had to accept some biological technology in turn. Here they ate processed algae, but on Mars and elsewhere, much of the food came from gengineered plants.
“They’re good,” she added. “But I wouldn’t eat them if I had any choice. Lobsters and potatoes are just as good and more moral. Purer, you know?”
“Natural.” That was the party line. Did she really believe it?
She nodded against his shoulder. “That’s it. We should get rid of them. Udder trees, too. And oil trees, hanky bushes, snackbushes …” She continued the list.
“People like them too much. They’re too tasty, or too useful.”
“Tough.”
“Why can’t we combine the two?” he asked quietly. “The way we’re already doing, really. The best of both?”
She shook her head. “We’re too different.”
The lights above the travel grid never dimmed, and the thin plastic of the cubicle’s walls and partial ceiling did nothing to exclude the brightness. But people had long since learned to sleep without dark. Tamiko was snoring gently, prettily, seconds after closing her eyes.
He remained awake, thinking: He had never accepted the ideology of his world as unquestioningly as she. As unquestioningly as almost everyone, when no one alive today had ever seen a Gypsy.
When he had first heard of the Explorer’s discovery, he had said he hoped the government had argued over what to do. That was not a thought suitable for someone who thought the Gypsies and all their works were automatically, innately evil.
Somewhere along the line, sometime in his life, even before he met Tamiko, he had become a moderate.
Yet he kept silent about it. Or nearly so, though he thought Tamiko might think he was only playing devil’s a
dvocate when he opposed her.
He sighed. If he opposed her less gently, if he said what he really thought, he would surely lose her. He might also lose his job, his liberty, even his life.
Meanwhile, he continued to work on the probability shifters that would permit the ships of the Engineers’ expeditionary force to stutter their ways through space. The problem remained that the fields generated by the probability shifter, the regions of warped probability that alone made macroscopic quantum tunneling possible, were still too small. They were more than large enough for the Explorer, but the new ships were larger still.
He did not doubt that they would lick the problem, just as other teams would eventually reduce the time needed for a single leap to a single nanosecond.
It was only a matter of time.
Chapter Four
Dotson Barbtail let the crowd sweep him through the high doors into the Great Hall of Worldtree Center. The female beside him was nearly as tall as he, and everything around them glowed with all the warmth a springtime sun could carry. Even the armor and weaponry and ancient gadgetry displayed along the walls gleamed as if freshly polished, despite the film of dust and the occasional cobweb the light revealed.
“There’s a new shop out by the Field,” she was saying in his ear. “Basket lunches. Beer. The berries are ripe. And it’s a beautiful day.”
“Ah, Sunglow.” He struggled to keep his voice a relaxed snarl, not the high melody of tension and anger he suddenly felt. He patted the soft, golden fur of her hip. “You know I have work to do at home.”
Her grip on his elbow tightened, and her voice smoothed with irritation. “You always do.”
The female to their left was staring at them, nudging her mate with an elbow, saying, “Look at them! What’s he thinking of? She’s one of them!”
Others heard and joined her glare. The tip of a lashing tail brushed Dotson’s ankles. He knew it could not be Sunglow’s, for “one of them” meant one of the tailless Racs.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 127
