Paper flowers wouldn’t have been appropriate—this was an adult, uncertain peacemaking—but the quarrel was over. Kir looked up, Bill turned to face her: they smiled sadly, accepting what they had. “You know what?” said Bill. “I sincerely, truly wish after this would never come.”
* * *
Kir went searching for Dan Orsted. She needed a perspective on the Great Popularizer—possibly in revenge for what Bill had said about Margrethe. She tracked him down to a meeting of the “10ppm Club” in the mall; he was giving them a master class. 10ppm, her watch told her, stood for “10 parts per million atmospheric carbon dioxide,” the lower limit for photosynthesis, and the most extreme absolute limit for a habitable exoplanet. Kir hadn’t used any of the LDM facilities, except playtime. She slipped into the strolling mall feeling like a spy in enemy territory. An air-tag popped up: “10ppm Club Meeting. All Insanely Dedicated Survivalists Welcome!” and she followed it, glancing uneasily at the eye-hurting dioramas that lined the winding walls. The group clustered around Dan, on floor cushions, looked to be the entire crew complement: she couldn’t see any officers. She sat down quietly. She’d never been so close to Dan Orsted before. At the canteen parties he’d always been surrounded by his own people. Like Margrethe, and unlike Neh and Vati, he showed no sign of his great age. His light skin was tanned like leather but still looked supple. His eyes were bright, his hair a vigorous white brush. He looked as if he could run a mile, or knock one of his muscular starship troopers down with ease. There was no tech, just Dan, talking; and the lecture wasn’t about how to exploit a world that barely supports microbes.
The crewbie next to her whispered, “Hi, kid-genius. Good to see you here. This one’s about actual sex, did you realize?”
“I don’t mind,” Kir whispered back. “I’m just interested.”
“You have to take on board that the major STDs may still be lurking in your biome,” Dan was saying. “Discharge menstruation and early puberty could drift back into expression. You won’t have out-of-body embryo development, you won’t have reversible sterilization, and you won’t have playtime. All these things must pass away. . . .”
Kir was thinking that Dan “schmoozed with the MegaCorps” all the time. He hustled the One Percent into paying ridiculous sums for ludicrous starship tickets, to finance his obsession! So why shouldn’t Margrethe make friends with the superrich? Because science is supposed to be pure and never needs money? Bill was dreaming. Dreaming and making up dirty lies. What if Kir said Dan favored Extreme Population Control?
But she would never say that, because Dan and Margrethe were allies, temporarily.
“You have to get the dangers of actual sex, the fear of misplaced conception and hideous disease, embedded in your culture at once: before the population gets traumatized. In fact I wish more of you would take up barrier methods now. We have the inventory! But we don’t talk about the voyage in 10ppm, do we? We talk about the new world. So do what I tell you: carve it in stone. No ifs, no buts. God will punish. Ramp up the threats. It’s your only chance. Once your little girls have started dying, with the babies their bodies weren’t ready to bear, you’ll be locking up your daughters, making menstruation a crime, and your new society will go straight to hell. Once you’ve seen the flower of a generation of young men, and young women too, lost to the hopeless agony of full-blown AIDS, you’ll be rewriting Leviticus. . . .”
“What’s Leviticus?” whispered a woman near Kir.
“A bunch of weird rules,” her neighbor whispered back. “It’s in the Bible, I think. Or the Koran. Sssh!”
Kir’s nerves prickled. She was small, and mostly hidden, but she felt that Dan had noticed her. She looked up, and she was right. The Great Popularizer gave Kir a bright-eyed, secret little nod, smiling as if they were old friends—
A crewbie stood up. “But Dan, these carved-in-stone threats, wouldn’t they tend to create the society that scares you?”
Kir eased herself out of the group and left the mall, unwillingly impressed. Dan was a passionate speaker, and maybe Kir had found the real LDMs. Maybe the officers were just for show. . . . She took the less frequented route back to Needler territory, via the waste plant and the cold-sleep dorms—feeling uneasy about that nod, and strangely guilty, as if she’d better stop hugging Karim (something she did often), better give up holding Liwang’s meaty paw, if they happened to be walking together. The dorms were sealed, of course. The officers would change shift (or “rote”) after six months; crew after four. She wondered what the “off rote” experienced as they lay stacked in their medically induced comas, like criminals in prison. Were they getting nasty scary cognitive training, like Dan’s lecture?
The things people would put up with, for a miserable-sounding “Great Escape” that was never going to happen—
She looked in on the Historians, in passing. Laksmi and Malik were alone: Malik bent over his needlepoint, Laksmi apparently engrossed in a repro soccer video game. Lakki took one hand off her controller, fingers raised and spread. Give us five.
“Okay.”
The History lab could be a forbidding place, if only Malik and Laksmi were on shift—and not just because Needle data often came here to die, after brutal interrogation. Sadness was their signature mood. Long ago they’d wanted to have a baby together. They’d spent years trying: secretly falling deeper and deeper into debt, in attempts to improve their lottery chances. The cruelest thing was that in the end they’d won a permit but had to sell it, or face utter ruin. And now they were both overage. It happened to a lot of people. Baby permits got monetized almost as often as Land Grants, but Laksmi and Malik had taken it very hard.
They’d never considered an unlicensed pregnancy. They weren’t the type.
“Hi, Kir,” said Laksmi, in an unusually cheerful tone, setting her DC cap and her game aside. “What’s up?”
“Nothing. I’m just restless. I was getting on people’s nerves in IS.”
Malik smiled. “You’re always welcome here, Li’l Bit.”
“Thanks. What’s going on with you guys, anything interesting?”
“We can’t talk about your Giewont data yet,” said Laksmi. “Bosses’ say-so. Sorry.”
“My hopes are dashed,” sighed Kir. “I was longing for gossip. Hey, where are your bosses?”
“Vati’s working on her own,” said Malik with a shrug. “The old chair-smasher’s taking it easy, I think. Those parties were too much.”
“Don’t worry, Li’l Bit, we haven’t been abandoned,” Laksmi assured her. “Margrethe keeps us in the loop.”
“It was strange that both your head honchos came down. Were they planning to start a righteous LDM revolution?”
“Kir,” said Malik, narrow-eyed and teasing. “Stop sniffing. Go away and play, little girl.”
“Okay, okay. I was just making conversation—”
* * *
Needler rumor said Neh was sulking because Vati and Margrethe had given him a telling-off after the chair-smashing incident—but he hadn’t been seen for days, and other people besides Kir were getting puzzled. At last a formal message went around, signed by Margrethe, Vati, Laksmi, and Malik. Neh was spending time in the clinic, in need of rest and monitoring. No visitors, please. This sounded serious, and so it proved. There was no further news for a day and a night, and then everyone, LDMs included, was summoned to the canteen. Margrethe, Dan, Laksmi, and Malik took the stage; Margrethe made the statement.
Big Neh had been living with a well-managed heart condition for many years. His recent minor illness had caused an unforeseen deterioration. The prognosis had not been good, and Neh had opted “not to delay his departure.” “Neh was a very old man,” Margrethe continued, as Needlers and LDMs sat in dumbfounded silence. “And a very big man, a giant in IS studies, with a huge, exuberant appetite for life. I’m sorry he decided to go, but we can all respect his choice. Our Neh was not cut out to linger on a deathbed! He left no funeral address for us, but he has named Laksmi as
his successor, and she will now say a few words.”
“This is a very sad day for me,” said Laksmi, solemnly. “But Neh’s death is not a tragedy or a mystery. Everything that could have been done upside was done down here. Malik and I were with him, when he slipped into a coma and died peacefully last night. You should know there will be no funeral visitors. Neh had no family living and had made his wishes clear, in case of this sad eventuality. A public memorial service will be held upside, after the mission. Meanwhile we’re preparing an informal tribute, and anyone who wants to may visit the clinic to pay their last respects, before he’s moved to his temporary resting place. And now, let us have a minute’s silence. For Neh . . .”
The minute passed. The Historians and the codirectors left the stage, still in silence, and filed out of the room: Margrethe and Dan calm, Laksmi and Malik distinctly self-conscious. Nobody moved, nobody spoke; and then the murmurs broke out.
“Eight months and thirteen days to go,” muttered Bill to Kir. “I wonder how many more we’ll lose.”
Kir just shook her head.
“Where’s Vati?” she whispered to Lilija as they left the canteen together. “Why wasn’t she up there?”
“Maybe she’s at the clinic; with Neh, you know. They’d known each other such a long, long time—”
“Listen, Lilija, I was in the History lab just before that ‘Neh situation serious’ message went around. Vati wasn’t there either. Laksmi and Malik said she was ‘working on her own,’ but I got an odd vibe off them. When did you last actually see her?”
“I’m certain there’s nothing wrong. Karim and I were talking to Vati only yesterday; she was fine—”
“Me too. I’ve talked to her, messaged her, but I haven’t seen her. She put me off. When? In the flesh?”
“I’m not sure,” said Lilija slowly. “I’m not sure. . . .”
* * *
Vati’s “sudden collapse and death” followed Neh’s prepared departure after just ten days. Margrethe made the announcement this time, supported only by Dan. After listing Vati’s honors, and praising both of her colleagues and long, longtime friends, she finally explained, with an air of dignified relief, what had been going on. “Sergey Pillement’s passing was unforeseen,” she said. “Except perhaps by Sergey himself. Kang-De ‘Neh’ Gok had seen the signs that his time was up before we embarked on this experiment; Vati also had concerns. I won’t speak of medical advice; prolonging life for its own sake means nothing at such great age. I will say that Neh and Vati wanted to be with us, cost what it may; and that Sergey and I, and Dan, felt that they deserved no less than our discretion and our full support. You can rest assured they both had the best of medical assistance at all times. And I hope it goes without saying that our ‘voyage’ must continue, and end as a proud success!”
She paused, and spoke again in a new tone, full and firm. “It’s a sad irony that before Neh fell ill, our internal verification team, otherwise known as the Historians—Kang-De Gok, Vati Murungrajian, Laksmi Kling, and Malik Trespichore—were about to announce that a very positive development has withstood their rigorous examination. To my Needlers I’ll say ‘Proof of Concept’ is as confirmed as it can be until we return upside! For Dan’s team, I shall translate: we can confidently predict that the Needle’s first live test will be an unqualified success!”
Margrethe waited. After a delay, as if they were thousands of miles away from their director, the Needlers realized they were supposed to burst out cheering, so they did. The LDMs, officers and crew, obediently joined the chorus. . . . But the cheers were a little ragged.
Dan bounced forward. “This is HUGE, Needle Voyagers! We have liftoff! Our scientists have opened the way, and the Great Escape has its cornerstone!” He spread his arms, as if about to roar another countdown, but then let them fall and assumed a grave expression. “Enough about triumph. Let us now mourn and celebrate the passing of two mighty minds, from mortality into immemorial renown!”
Margrethe invited Kir for the usual evening chat the day after the Vati announcement. She talked about their wander-years, when Altair was working on contract. The beautiful apartment in Geneva. That wonderful treetop retreat, on the private orangutan reservation. The not-too-evil MegaCorps’s “Fortress of Solitude” in Antarctica. She didn’t mention her loss, but to Kir the fond memories seemed drenched in her mentor’s heartbreak. Margrethe’s whole core team, the three people who’d helped to build Altair, the Needle experiment founders, all gone in a matter of weeks. You can’t prepare yourself for a grief like that. No matter how old you were, or how long you’d known they were dying.
“At least you’ve still got Dan—”
Kir was appalled at herself as soon as the words were out, but Margrethe smiled. “I can’t keep much from you, can I?”
Kir blushed. “Are you secretly really friends, or really just friendly enemies? I don’t know if I get it.”
“I don’t know if I ‘get it’ myself,” said Margrethe, with a shadow of her sharp grin. “We’ve known each other a long time, that’s all.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll stop asking stupid questions.”
The tributes, one for Neh and one for Vati (in official order of disappearance, as Karim put it) were thinly attended. The live events were held in the strolling mall. Recorded versions played on a loop on the canteen screen for a day, and then Neh and Vati were gone. The whole Frame was struck by a collective, echoing silence: a strange kind of silence in which the LDMs, thoroughly rattled, reverted to noisy clowning, and Needlers snapped at one another inexcusably. They were shipwrecked sailors on a drifting hulk. They would all die, one by one. The Needle Voyager had passed beyond the heliopause, that last border of the solar system: helpless and directionless, out of all contact.
* * *
Lilija pulled things together and called an unofficial meeting. It was held in the IS lab, where Margrethe—who was taking a time-out from lab work, to mourn her friends—was unlikely to turn up. Laksmi and Malik were not invited. Nobody wanted any upsets, but there were things that needed to be said. Questions that needed to be aired.
“I’m not blaming anyone,” said Liwang. “I understand why they were willing to risk never getting out again alive. I’m guessing they must have known Proof of Concept was in the bag, and that’s a big deal, for more than one reason—”
“Hey,” Lilija interrupted. “Did you guys know, in Volume? Before the ceremonial posthumous announcement?”
“Sort of, er, yeah,” said Firefly, the youngest Needler (apart from Kir). She glanced at Liwang, and backpedaled. “I mean, no, we knew something, possibly, but not really knew—”
“We knew about the result,” said Xanthe defensively. “We knew it looked very good. Or seemed to . . . But we’re juniors, except Liwang, and it’s not really his field, and we’re always told never never gossip. Being over the line in a test-box might not mean anything, and if it was real it couldn’t be confirmed until after this LDM thing. So what could we say?”
Liwang scowled. “Excuse my colleagues’ technobabble. We didn’t know for sure, and we had no right to tell you. Okay?”
“Nobody’s accusing you of anything,” said Karim. “I suppose Margrethe decided to rush the good news because we needed cheering up.”
“Cheering up? Sometimes your humor defeats me, Karim—”
The angry speakers fell silent; the onlookers looked away. Everyone took a breathing space.
Liwang held up his hands. “Forget Margrethe’s announcement: I can understand why she did that. What I can’t understand is that Neh and Vati were dying, and I wasn’t allowed to know! It’s inhuman.”
“If they thought we’d be indiscreet, they only had to wait till the Abyss was sealed,” added Firefly. “Who were we going to call?”
Terry and Jo sat shoulder to shoulder, fists clenched on their thighs. They were the same chunky build; they dressed alike and had the same skin tone. In uncertainty and grief they looked like twins. “Who�
��s they?” asked Terry uneasily.
“Margrethe and Dan,” said Lilija, staring broodingly at the floor. “But it’s the way super-post-lifespans think. They do whatever comes into their heads and they just don’t care. They have no consideration, no boundaries.”
“What if Margrethe was telling the truth?” suggested Kir. “Neh and Vati were desperate to come with us. She decided to take the risk, discreetly, and it coincidentally happened the two of them did die, and in quick succession? What’s so wrong with that?”
Nobody took any notice, except by exchanging dismissive glances.
“I bet Dan insisted on secrecy,” said Karim. “He’s been calling the shots. He didn’t want his LDMs to know they were shipping with two or three potential corpses. Bad for morale.”
“What about us?” demanded Jo. “We had to ship with thirty potential corpses. And not people we loved, either. Nobody asked us whether we liked it.” They unclenched a fist and made the fingers-down-throat gesture. “Murderers and rioters get put in cold sleep. How are we to know?”
The meeting relapsed into silence again, then Lilija spoke. “Liwang said it: nobody’s blaming anyone. But the way things have happened, it feels as if something’s being kept from us. To save us anxiety, maybe. But if we aren’t going to abort, then I want to know what’s going on. Any ideas on how we find out?”
“Try asking Laksmi and Malik,” growled Karim. “They seemed well informed, up there with the directors.”
“Apart from them,” said Lilija. “I wasn’t thinking of them.”
“Um,” said Kir. “I’m not sure, but . . . maybe someone’s been trying to tell me something, but I didn’t want to listen—”
Immediately she was the center of attention, her teammates staring as if they’d just realized she was in the room. “Is that so?” said Lilija in a not very friendly tone. “Then why don’t you go and ask your LDM correspondent, Kir?”
“Why not right now?” suggested Karim. “See what you can find out, kid. And report back.”
Proof of Concept Page 6
