by Kathy Tyers
Trev leaned against the window, fingering stubble. He was trying to grow a mustache. “Huh,” he said. “I almost wish I hadn’t come here.”
“Why?” Libby demanded.
“Well,” he said, eyeing Graysha, “this is turning out to be an interesting place. And I’m going to be trouble for you.”
Graysha shook her head. “Well, you’re . . . no, you’re no trouble. Not really. Teaching you makes me prove to myself I really understand this. Anything I can’t explain in simple terms I probably don’t know.”
“I mean Blase.” He pursed his lips. “He’s going to be beyond fury when he finds out where I am. He’s got enough backing to make really deep soup.”
“Now, Trev—”
“Yanking me home is only where he’d start. You don’t know what kind of trouble he could make for Gaea. There are ways to devalue a stock. If he managed to decapitalize your priceless consortium, Goddard could end up abandoned. We all know Gaea isn’t much of a money-making proposition.”
“Not in the short term,” Graysha admitted. Libby glowered.
Graysha balled a fist and rested her chin on it. “Trev, you must have a terrible self-concept if you think your father is such a scoundrel. But you’re smart, and you’re cagey. You’re a survivor, and when you find your niche, you’re going to excel.”
“My mother was the survivor.” He huffed out the words. “And she’s gone.”
“Gone?” Graysha asked, alarmed. Surely Trev’s father hadn’t done away with her. No, he couldn’t have. That fear of his father sometimes made Trev ugly. “She disappeared?” Graysha guessed.
He grimaced. “She and Blase had a falling-out terrannums ago. She was of age, so Blase couldn’t have her psych-conditioned.”
Graysha winced, understanding that Trev feared precisely that kind of conditioning.
“She made time for exactly one of me, then vaporized—for Galileo, I think. Yeah, for Galileo. Huh.” He stared at the floor. “I wonder if she made it, if she’s still there. I haven’t thought about her in ages.” He brought his head back up. “Anyway, I didn’t have the option to go, and she was under contract to leave me with him. I’ll give Blase credit for one thing—he didn’t track her down.”
“I’m sorry, Trev.” Graysha folded her hands together. “I truly am. I hope it’s a long time before he finds you. At the least, you’ll have a few months. Time in transport and all.”
“Great.” He struck the desktop hard with his finger. The glass tube split off, and he jerked back his hand. Both halves fell to the concrete floor and shattered.
“I’ll get a minvac,” he muttered, then ducked out of the lab.
Libby, who had been staring out into space, came back all in an instant. “Excuse me, Dr. Brady-Phillips?” She pointed at the wall to show Graysha the time.
It was town meeting day, Graysha recalled. She nodded. Libby hurried out.
Graysha looked back down into the cage. The young gribien lay limp, slowly uncurling from its feverish ball shape. Groaning, Graysha lifted the lid and prodded its midsection.
It didn’t respond.
Town Meeting
“What’s a town meeting?” Trev asked in a sullen voice, vacuuming glass shards as Graysha quietly set aside the dead gribien’s cage. Libby would see to recycling its body. Nothing could be wasted.
Paul, she recalled, had kept Trev working over the last meeting day. “On Aday,” she explained, “it’s too cold to do much outdoors, so people with petitions can take them before the Colonial Affairs Committee. The whole colony’s entitled to watch, even Gaea people. I’m still trying to figure out the Lwuites, so I plan to watch the meeting when I can.” So far, she’d caught it both times.
Working his jaw in anger and frustration over the little gribien’s demise, Trev stalked beside her up the hall to the break room. Libby and the building’s other Lwuite employees would be watching together in a lounge on the second floor.
Jirina sat near the big monitor on the south wall, swinging one leg and sipping at a cup that smelled of decaf. Greeting her, Graysha took the next stool. Trev sank into the deep cushioned chair. “Better not, Trevish,” said Jirina.
“Trevish,” he repeated scornfully. He didn’t get up. Graysha shrugged. She would tell Jirina about the gribien later.
Jirina wrinkled her nose. “Find any critters to adjust on your wastewater check?” she asked. “Paul claimed Mahera had let it go desert.”
“Mm-hmm.” The facility was in perfect balance, but she intended to take warm green sanctuary, too. She might even find Paul there. “Bit of an overgrowth problem in tank four, possibly.” It was possible . . .
Will Varberg appeared at the doorway. “My chair.” He gave Trev a jerky eviction gesture with the thumb wearing the emerald ring.
“I don’t see why,” Trev growled.
“My chair,” Varberg repeated.
“I think you could afford another one.” Trev took his time about rising. “Look, you just lost one of your animals. A young one, with its whole life ahead—for what that was worth, locked in a box. But if you’d taken decent care of the cages, it might not have happened.”
“We’ve given work to a tech, Mr. Trevarre.” Varberg made the noun into a sneer. “If you don’t like the way things are done in laboratories, find yourself another job.” Varberg sank down with his eyes flaring and his mouth narrow. The wall monitor lit up.
The colonists’ town meeting room, across Axis in the CA building, had a monitored “live” audi zone flanked by two tables, all in pickup range. To the committee’s left, several young men and women sat at operator stations to accept observers’ reactions and comments or double-check electronic votes if called for. Other colonists walked back and forth, taking positions.
Ignoring Varberg and Trev to scan those tables, Graysha recognized Chairman DalLierx and Ari MaiJidda. Beside MaiJidda sat a thin, white-haired man whose name she’d picked up four days ago—Taidje FreeLand.
She saw as many men as woman. The shift to femalism might be peaking out here in the colonies, where male muscle and fortitude were useful attributes. A few radical researchers like Henri Lwu, forbidden by (mostly female) lawmakers to tamper with human chromosomes, were working in other ways to swing the pendulum back toward equality. Graysha believed able men deserved equal opportunity. Certainly her father deserved it. Lenard Phillips was widely recognized in his field of pharmaceutical botany.
However, the basic plan of the mammalian organism was female. Graysha knew enough embryology to understand that a fertilized egg stayed female unless told to be otherwise by modifying hormones. Females had dominated hab-based society for almost a century, after millennia of male rulership and a twentieth-century golden age of near equality. It seemed almost inevitable that society would skew-flip once more.
She frowned, half seeing her mother on that screen. “God knew what He was doing,” she’d heard at least a hundred times, “and we have no right to alter creation.” Whispered voices argued, “If He’d meant us to fly, we’d have wings,” and, “If you had enough faith, you’d never get sick.”
She did believe that the human mind was God’s finest creation.
Maybe, by trying to make male and female brains more similar, the Lwuites weren’t so much tampering with the organism as restoring part of it to its original embryonic status.
That, she realized, was a notion most non-scientists would dislike. Embryos were probably better left to take their natural course of development, no matter what marvels medical science achieved.
What, then, about fixing mutations? She fidgeted. She’d been ordered to report any such transgressions. EB reward money might pay off her divorce loan and make her a free woman. Her mother would like it, too.
It was useless to consider, though. She wanted other things worse than financial freedom: children of her own. Normal children, with a normal lifespan.
To an extent, she could fulfill that hope simply by marrying a ma
n whose ancestors never spent time at Newton Hab. She’d have normal-looking children. Still, every one would carry her recessive, mutated gene. And if one of them married another Flaherty’s carrier, her grandchildren might face a bleak future she knew too well.
Marrying a non-carrier, she’d decided long ago, simply wasn’t good enough.
She glanced at Varberg’s chair. Only his arm was visible, relaxed on one armrest. He had killed Jon Mahera indirectly, and certainly by accident. Still, she wanted to inch her stool farther away. Maybe Trev was right and he neglected his animals, too. He destroyed homegrown flowers without thinking.
Chairman DalLierx called the meeting to order, and Graysha paid full attention to the monitor. The colonists’ first argument concerned a petition to Gaea’s Botany Division, to switch a tree planting near Axis Crater from alpine-hardy lodgepole pines to modified cold-tolerant apple trees. Melantha Lee had tentatively vetoed it. It wasn’t Graysha’s department, but Trev attended closely from his perch atop a counter. Maybe he liked trees, or apples. The proposal would eventually reappear on some Gaea supervisor’s terminal.
Slender, black-haired Vice-Chair MaiJidda glided into the “live” zone. Her controlled grace reminded Graysha sharply of her older sister, Asta, a full professor of Doppler physics at Einstein U. Not as graceful as MaiJidda, Asta probably was twice as intelligent. Graysha had been her family’s “slow” child, working hard for grades while the rest of the family stayed up late discussing unified field theory—when her father was home, anyway. She missed him.
After formal introductory remarks, which Graysha ignored, MaiJidda cleared her throat. “Preliminary documentation has been finished on the conversion of Axis’s rudimentary police force to a defense group, and the CA Committee has allocated funding. We may now begin training and implementation.”
Jirina raised both eyebrows and ducked her chin, looking mystified.
Ari MaiJidda faced more fully into the vidi pickup. “Positions are now offered. Training will be voluntary, unless we don’t get enough volunteers. D-group service will be part time and will be paid in additional fractional colony shares.”
On Ari MaiJidda’s left, Taidje FreeLand pulled a small folding knife from his breast pocket and tapped it against the palm of one hand. Graysha had seen Melantha Lee do that.
“Those with experience in any kind of defense position will be commissioned as officers.” MaiJidda gestured toward the operators. “We are available to take your calls, and a ten-minute break in new business will ensue.”
“What’s this about?” Trev asked loudly, voicing Graysha’s unspoken question.
Varberg uncrossed his knees and made the heavy chair creak. “This MaiJidda policewoman has had it under her bonnet for a couple dozen Goddardays that Goddard might become so desirably terraformed that someone, someday, might want to take it away.”
“It’s an army they’re talking about?” Graysha asked, swiveling her stool. “I thought these people had treatments for non-aggression. Can’t they use USSC Marines if they need help?”
“Maybe they think the Marines would take too long to get here,” Varberg answered, “and evidently Gaea’s not going to stop them. I suppose we’re convinced they’re non-aggressive enough not to be a threat.”
“There could be aliens out there,” Trev said in a stage-spook voice.
Jirina hooted. “Nothing lives in the Eps Eri system but Earth humans and a pack of gene-tailored biologicals.”
But it was a frontier world, and it made a kind of sense to maintain readiness. Out here, even imaginary dangers might prove concrete. “They aren’t threatening us, are they?”
“Doubt it,” said Jirina. “They’re our employers. As long as they want to live here, they need us.”
Graysha kicked at her stool with one heel. Here was a chance to meet the Lwuites in their own quarters and maybe figure out the best way to approach them. It was also a chance to lay herself at their mercy, which might win their trust . . . or leave her as dead as Jon Mahera.
Gathering courage, she said, “They didn’t ask for Lwuites only, did they? What if I volunteered? I enjoy picking up training in odd fields.”
“And if they won’t take you, then Gaea can start worrying.” Jirina cocked an eyebrow. “Not bad, Blondie.”
Youthful on-screen operators started fielding calls. A committee member Graysha didn’t know left the table and fetched a water glass.
Graysha crossed the lab to an audi line pickup.
“Wait a minute.” Varberg swung his chair. “Graysha, you’d better let Paul. Or Jirina. Jirina, you do it.”
Graysha narrowed her eyes and stared lasers at the side of his head. I am not an invalid, she thought at him. Now she was determined to try it. “Any idea what number I punch?” she called across the room.
“Operator should know,” answered Jirina. “Just switch on the line.”
Graysha touched the button.
“Assistance,” said a businesslike female voice.
“I’d like to be patched through to the town meeting, please.”
“One moment.”
The line went dead except for static. Varberg and Jirina watched the screen, but Trev focused on Graysha. She wondered what was passing through her student’s mind, whether he wanted to join her or disliked her idea based on his dealings with parental bodyguards. In the nearest yabut cage, two chubby littermates pushed noisily at alfalfa-smelling chow piled atop their unit, gnawing fragments off the rolling pellets. If only human life were that simple. Food overhead, water handy . . .
Yes, life without freedom would be very simple. There’d been little real freedom on Earth as recently as the nineteenth century. Then uncontrolled industrial development started making hot-and-sour soup of the planet’s atmosphere. Soon, maybe, there would be even less freedom there. Gaea’s Earth-based sister corporation, Terra Two, now lay under USSC jurisdiction, in an effort to control global processes. It would take desperate, possibly repressive measures to make Terra beautiful again.
Voices came on in her ear. The loudest said, “Meeting.”
“Yes,” Graysha answered. Jirina and Varberg turned to watch her. “You’re accepting volunteers for the defense group?”
“We are,” said the young voice. Graysha touched another control and put the Lwuite operator on a room speaker as the voice continued. “Have you any military or guard experience?”
Varberg smirked.
“None,” Graysha said, “but I’m experienced with a number of computer types.”
“Laser-radar is in need of volunteers.”
“Very good. I volunteer.”
“Name, please.”
Graysha gave it. Knowing that her name set off alarms every time the Lwuites heard it, she watched the screen. One pigtailed girl glanced up from the audi bank and around the studio. “One moment,” came over the speaker.
Graysha muted the pickup. “Look,” she whispered loudly, and her co-workers swiveled. The girl hurried up to Vice-Chair MaiJidda, who sat at one end of the committee table. They conversed for maybe thirty seconds, during which the pigtailed girl positioned herself between MaiJidda and the monitor.
If they wouldn’t take her, Graysha decided, that almost certainly meant they were hiding things.
For a fleeting moment she pictured herself gene-healed, working Goddard’s thin soil alongside a Lwuite husband, discussing the health and quirks of their children.
According to Novia, healing mutations would open the door for further tampering with the human organism. Who had the right to judge where the line should be drawn?
They’d take her, all right. They didn’t dare refuse her.
“Here she comes,” Trev announced superfluously. The pigtailed operator walked back to her station.
“Thank you for holding,” came the young voice. “We are pleased to welcome you for training. Please report to the D-group building when your relief week begins. When will that be?”
Graysha looked at Varberg.
“Dday,” he mouthed.
“Next Dday,” she echoed into the pickup.
“Very good, Dr. Brady-Phillips. We will expect you two days after tomorrow, on Dropoff. Thank you for concerning yourself with Goddard’s future.” The line went dead again, broadcasting static over the lab speaker. Graysha switched it off.
Jirina touched her forehead, chin, and chest in homage. “Welcome to God’s little army.”
“Dropoff?” Graysha asked.
“Well, after two terrannums you don’t expect the colonists to go on calling days of their week by letter designations. Not all the time. Just when dealing with us oh-fishial types.”
“Aday is Freezeout,” said Varberg’s voice from the deep chair, “Bday is Sunday, Cday is Windsday—it shifts around from Storm Sea, remember?—and Dropoff. All together, one Goddarday, or G-week. They haven’t decided which one of those they’re going to use consistently.”
A minute later, the older man—Taidje FreeLand—rose and said something about the colonial covenant, one planetary month, and challenge elections.
“What?” Varberg barked.
Startled out of a daydream of what D-group training might entail and what precautions she ought to take, Graysha attended again.
“Declared candidates thus far,” said FreeLand, “are sitting Chairman Lindon DalLierx and Defense Group Coordinator Ari MaiJidda. No other committee member has declared candidacy, but applicants feeling themselves qualified may register in person at the CA office this Sunday or Windsday.”
Jirina whooped. “Election? DalLierx is being challenged, Graysha. Maybe you’ll outlast him after all!”
Trev said, “Maybe this woman called the election to make sure Graysha stayed. I notice they aren’t calling her vice for police anymore.”
“She wouldn’t have done this for my sake,” Graysha told him. No one else knew Ari MaiJidda had tried to expel her from day one, and she wasn’t about to spread it around.
