by Kathy Tyers
“I’ll get to it as soon as I do this. I need to finish my research, Dr. Lee.”
“You will do the soils titration first,” Lee ordered, “now. Or I will dismiss you from employment and send you away with the Varbergs.”
Plainly, Lee meant to delay this experiment until it was too late to influence Dr. Hauwk’s verdict.
Not this time, she wouldn’t. Even Jirina had offered to help.
Now, if ever, it was time to do a little judicious fudging. “Very well,” Graysha said submissively.
Lee folded her hands, appearing to relax. “I had another transmission from Dr. Hauwk.”
Sobered, Graysha sterilized her pipette and dropped it into its sheath. She swiveled on her stool. “Oh?”
“Trev,” Lee said, “this concerns you, as well.”
“Oh.” He kept working, bless him. Tomorrow morning, all these broth tubes would be grown and usable for cross-inoculation.
“That shuttle launched to take away the Varbergs will reach parking orbit tomorrow. Gaea’s Council of Supervisors sent two representatives with full authority to decide to continue or discontinue the Goddard experiment.” Lee stepped farther in through the door. “Flora Hauwk is coming, of course. I’m surprised she stayed away this long. She will evaluate the situation from a scientific point of view.
“The other supervisor is apparently a member of Gaea Consortium’s Board of Shareholders. A new major shareholder, I’m told.”
Trev halted with one hand in the air. “Oh, please. Tell me it isn’t my father.”
“I won’t,” Lee said stiffly. “I can’t. And I think it’s time we concluded this planetary project.”
Graysha let one hand go limp, releasing a soy-broth flask to shatter on the floor. It was safer than expressing her panic verbally. Glass shards settled in a puddle of fragrant broth that ran toward the floor drain. Seizing a browncloth towel, she slid off her stool.
Melantha Lee pursed her lips. “Graysha, Dr. Hauwk will wish to hear about the current situation from you publicly. Please prepare a statement.”
Lee strode around Graysha to the counter’s inner end. “And Mr. LZalle Senior will discuss with me—and with Colonial Affairs subcommittee members—the financial feasibility of trying to maintain Goddard.” She bore down on Trev like a predator. “Finish what you’re doing, if it’s genuine Gaea business, and then come to my office for the soils titration tubes.”
―――
Trev stayed late at work, helping Gray and Jirina finish Lee’s titration and the CFC tubes. That gave him plenty of chances to keep trying to contact Kevan DalLierx. At midnight, after Jirina promised to stay close to Graysha, he made one last desperate call to the dugout. Maybe by now they’d arrived back home. He stared out the polarized lab window at Eps Eri’s face, rising in slow majesty over the crater’s rim. It took a long, long time. Bday was dawning. His forty-fifth day on Goddard.
Blase was coming.
He needed front money now, not after extraction was complete—for the colony’s sake, as well as his own. He had to know how deep that ore vein ran, even if it meant tying Thaddeus Urbansky to a track-truck and driving him there. At least Nick and Kevan had finally recorded the claim. He’d checked the record yesterday. True to their word, they’d registered his name, too . . . and Blase’s.
So there really was hope. But he needed a back door, some way to escape if Blase wouldn’t dance to this tune . . . Did he really dare stay and face the old man, to try talking him into taking a new kind of business risk?
Balling a fist, he pushed it against the window panel. If he made an offer and Blase wouldn’t dance, Trev wouldn’t have a chance to get away. He’d have to run—now—and let Kevan and Graysha and DalLierx fight their own battle.
His visit yesterday to Urbansky’s office made it all the more urgent to contact Kevan or Nick. The bearlike little man confirmed Kevan’s analysis. “What we’re seeing come in on the trucks is as rich as anything I’ve ever seen. Better than any of Earth’s important ores,” he added, handing back a chunk of black rock. “Gaea’s cut will bring the company a nice profit.”
“I’ll be getting a little myself,” he’d explained to the geologist. He didn’t tell Urbansky everything but explained there might be an offworld backer.
“Oh,” Urbansky said. “Ah. Well,” he added, drawing briefly at a straight-stemmed pipe, “if it’s a good strike and it goes deeper still, remember me in your will.”
“What about the calcite?” Trev asked casually. Graysha had infected him, too, with the urge to see Goddard’s CFCs restored. “I thought I saw one truck dump crystals.”
“You did.” Another pull on the pipe. “But our estimates of the cavern size don’t jibe with Kevan’s. There isn’t enough there to manufacture sufficient CFCs to replace what’s been lost.”
Maybe. And maybe Lee and her cronies fudged the new calculations. Surely nobody had mapped the whole cavern, not yet.
“What was your Varberg thinking of?” Urbansky had asked as a parting shot, “playing with CFCs up there?”
That had sent Trev sulking toward the door. “Don’t talk to me about Varberg, and he’s not my anything. If the colonists lynch him, it’s what he deserves.”
―――
“This had better be important.” Ari MaiJidda folded her hands beside her keyboard. “D-group has to be ready when that shuttle lands.”
Lindon glanced aside at Taidje FreeLand. The white-haired elder stood in front of a dark tapestry Ari had hung in the CA office. Taidje said nothing. He’d agreed to escort Lindon here and stay with him just long enough to witness a brief statement. “It’s important,” Lindon said softly. “If Graysha Brady-Phillips were to die here, not only would you bring a USSC investigation down on our heads, but you would have committed an act of murder.”
Ari pulled up straight in the tall chair, eyes wide, mouth open as if in shock. “I beg your pardon. Precisely what are you accusing me of?”
He kept his voice soft. “Of abusing your position with the colonial police. Of deliberately creating three situations calculated to aggravate Brady-Phillips’s illness. Of—”
“If we don’t get her sent away, there will be—”
“Listen to me.” He all but shouted it. Ari closed her mouth and glared. Taidje looked at the brightening window, then back down to Ari.
“Did your officers enter the HMF lab after Dr. Brady-Phillips was taken upstairs?”
“They did,” she clipped firmly.
He watched her eyes. “Did they remove all traces of a broken syringe, including fluid that leaked from it?”
Ari tossed her head. “I would hope they cleaned up.”
“Did they run tests on that fluid?”
She looked up, eyes narrowing. “They did not.”
“Why not?” Lindon leaned both hands on her desk. “Did you order them not to?”
Ari folded her arms, pulling away from him. “It was an ordinary, generic, plainly labeled glucodermic. Should we have analyzed her culture dishes, as well? The air in the room, the dust on her countertop? The woman is sick. Of course she carries a glucodermic.”
“Perhaps other things were removed from that laboratory, too.” Lindon looked at Taidje. The older man’s head turned slightly, and he eyed Ari with a trace of skepticism.
“I would like to speak with the officer who cleaned up the scene,” Lindon said quietly.
Finally she appeared to hesitate. Her eyes went to Taidje and then re-focused on Lindon. “He left this morning for Port Arbor as part of our defensive posture.”
Taidje raised one eyebrow, a good sign. Maybe he, too, doubted her innocence.
“Ari,” Lindon said, “I will consider one more assault on Graysha Brady-Phillips, one more ‘accident,’ one more ‘attack’ of Flaherty’s symptoms, as confirmation of your guilt—and I will ask for a recall election. Taidje, I call you as witness.”
Ari sprang to her feet, looking as if she wanted to jump
over the desk at him. “Get out, DalLierx.”
―――
Graysha woke early from dreams that were dogged with urgency. The faint scent of sandalwood pervaded Jirina’s bedroom. She dressed quietly, trying not to wake her friend.
Jirina’s window looked out on the covered crop fields. Strengthening light reflected off the shimmering shelter cloth. So much had been accomplished out there, under the shelter and elsewhere. Despite the volcanoes, nearly ten percent of the wild had been seeded for mineral liberation. That was only half what would eventually be needed, but it’d taken only eighty terrannums. Closer to the settled craters, thousands of hectares sprouted clover, dwarfalfa, and cold-kudzu; more grew experimental grains and other new crosses—fifty terrannums, overlapping the mineral-lib phase, all in preparation for colonization. Even in the short time since she arrived, the crop fields inside Axis Crater had been plowed farther out, inching toward the crater walls.
If her research failed, all this might vanish under an ice sheet that would last until Eps Eri began to burn out.
She slipped into shoes, then brushed her hair. She’d been told, but never really understood, the incredible amount of time and work involved in terraforming. One person, a thousand people, might spend their lives laboring and scarcely make a difference. It took unbelievable sums of money, all the knowledge and know-how humankind possessed, and time. Decades, if not centuries.
And people willing to spend their whole lives laboring, guiding, shaping—
For what? To have someone take it all away?
Silently, she formed words in her mind. God, if you care about Lindon—and you do know he cares about you—don’t let that happen. They say you raised dead people. That you own everything that exists. Would this be so hard for you?
Like a voice in her ear or an echo from some philosophy professor, she heard what sounded like an answer—to some other question. Your greatest fear is rarely your greatest real danger.
Was that a quote? She couldn’t place it. Feeling strangely haunted, she looked back at the bed, where Jirina’s long blanket-covered body lay still.
Did Jirina want to leave Goddard? Was she afraid?
Graysha shook her head. No, Jirina wasn’t frightened—but she would follow orders. So Graysha had to convince Flora Hauwk and Blase LZalle not to evacuate.
―――
Novia Brady-Phillips lounged in her deceleration hammock, which hung from a bulkhead alongside Flora Hauwk’s. Blase LZalle hadn’t shown his face since turnaround signaled deceleration and the landing fast began. Jambling flitted in occasionally with position reports. Novia found these sleeping hammocks slightly more comfortable than the deceleration seats, and she wasn’t heading down there until she had no choice.
“Copernicus simply doesn’t have enough large ships to evacuate them instantly,” Hauwk said. “We’ll need assistance from Halley, or perhaps Einstein, where more shipping is conducted.”
“That’s all right,” Novia answered, this time squelching her flicker of hope. She’d accomplished nothing for Graysha, and Goddard was rapidly becoming dangerous. The atmospheric imbalance made evacuation imperative. From this point, Gaea—and the EB—would do everything by the tutorial. “This shuttle will hold thirty, restrained, if we convert the cargo holds to steerage. We’ll take their leadership this time.”
“If they prove guilty.” Hauwk sniffed. “You seem convinced, and you haven’t done a single chrome scan.”
“I have enough evidence,” Novia answered. “Those people must leave sooner or later. It gives my board a better show of force to take the top percent into custody from the first, though of course, the suggestion can be made that we merely need their presence to renegotiate their labor contract.”
“Let’s stick with the truth, if we can,” Hauwk said wryly.
Everyone seemed determined to protect these criminals! “For the present, the most vital operation from my standpoint is to confirm that Port Arbor is the site of illegal activity.”
Flora Hauwk’s hammock swung gently. “I’m almost sorry to have to evacuate,” she said. “Goddard had so much potential. I suppose we must announce the failure publicly, in person. Perhaps we’ll be glad to have your armed escort along.” She grinned, indicating a joke had been made.
To Novia, it was no joke. The Lwuites had formed a defense group, after all. She’d seen no reports as to its strength or readiness. “They certainly seem to have gone after Dr. Varberg. Strangely, it seems he has done Gaea more good than harm.”
“You people don’t object to the alteration of a planet from its created state?” Dr. Hauwk’s bright eyes narrowed. “Or genegineered animals? It’s just humans, isn’t it?”
Novia was ready for a change of topic. “Terraforming is borderline permissible if no native life is displaced. But the human organism is sacred.”
Hauwk stared up at the dull gray bulkhead. “Is it our chromosomes that make us human, after all? I thought you church people thought it was something a little more nebulous. Our so-called souls.”
“If genegineered creatures have souls,” Novia said stiffly, “God will be able to tell.”
“After you send them into his . . . dimension.”
“They are dangerous here. Incredibly dangerous.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that.” Flora Hauwk adjusted her hammock cover. “In other words, we have recreated God, and he is us.”
“That’s reasonably close.” Novia didn’t feel like arguing theology any further. Hauwk plainly had no interest in converting to the CUF. Novia wanted to think.
―――
“What’s that?” Trev tapped a large new object, square metal with primitively welded seams, that lay beside Graysha’s laboratory sink where the water baths used to be. He seemed nervous today, pacing and fidgeting.
Graysha raised one finger to her lips, then pulled a pair of small cloudy flasks from her lab-coat pocket. “Your friend Kevan DalLierx was here when I got to work,” she whispered. “Lindon brought him by. It’s a lock-down mechanism he put together to protect two water baths.”
Trev’s back straightened. “He was here at the plantation and you didn’t call me? I’ve got to get ahold of him!”
Graysha wondered why it mattered so much. “He was driving a track-truck, and he stayed only a few minutes. I tried to get him to call you, but they’re making hay—so to speak—while the sun shines, so they can get speed out of solar engines. You’ve got to help me cross-inoculate these samples with Dr. Varberg’s streptomycete inventory.”
“No, I’ve got to call Kevan. Now.”
“Trev,” she said patiently, “I need about 500 tubes inoculated. I want duplicate tubes for backups, plus controls. This is too important to do carelessly. This is it, Trev. Our last chance to save a world.”
He groaned, then ducked into her office. “Let me just try calling his dugout again. I’ll leave him a message to contact me here at work.”
“Go ahead,” she said, sighing. “But please hurry.”
She jogged up the hall and ordered the media she’d need. Bateson’s broth would yield the fastest results, if S. gaeaii could utilize its carbon source. A normally blue medium, Bateson’s faded to pale green in the presence of even a minuscule amount of free chlorine. If her samples grew out in Bateson’s, she’d be able to monitor an infinitesimal color change within the few hours she had left. If any other strep species inhibited S. gaeaii, that tube would still be pure blue tomorrow morning. Surely Gaea would let her wait that long. Spectrophotometric examination would confirm whether gaeaii organisms were still present—and later, she could make sure any organisms that passed this test also let soil streps grow. Running 192 samples through Jirina’s spectrophotometer would take . . . at two minutes apiece . . . over six hours, but she could at least start growing the cultures now.
Much to her relief, the media tech agreed that mixing Bateson’s with small amounts of CFC wouldn’t interfere with testing.
S
he needed a day and a half. So little time.
Surely, Dr. Flora Hauwk would give her that long—and delay her verdict.
Rite of
Passage
To Graysha’s relief, Dr. GurEshel didn’t send for her that morning. She let Trev leave at ten, as soon as he finished the cross-inoculations. Shortly thereafter, Melantha Lee called all Gaea employees down to the stone-floored lobby. Graysha arrived last, feeling shaky and hoping the others’ presence would divert Lee’s attention.
It didn’t. The site supervisor stood on a stool near the glass walls that separated her office from the lobby, and only seconds after Graysha walked off the elevator, she called out, “Graysha, if you need to try your sampling again, there is a hovercopter available.”
Thirty heads swung in her direction. “Thank you, Dr. Lee,” she called back, feeling conspicuous. Maybe they hadn’t discovered the lock-down incubator. Whether or not they had, she couldn’t leave the plantation now. She needed to hear what Flora Hauwk and Blase LZalle intended. Lee’s offer of the plane might also be a final act of sabotage.
Dr. Lee cleared her throat and spoke to the gathering. “There will be a public meeting in the Gaea cafeteria at twelve-thirty. It’s our largest contained room, better equipped for mass communication than the hub. We’ll bring in as many colonists as will fit. I suggest you all head home, shower, and have an early lunch.”
Had Hauwk secretly ordered evacuation? Graysha shuddered, hoping her guess was wrong, but this could be a final good meal before imposing a takeoff fast.
“I have one more suggestion.” Lee added, “for what it’s worth.”
From Graysha’s position at the back of the crowd, she saw heads turn toward one another. A few people jostled closer to Lee’s stool.
“There are a number of rumors doing colonial rounds,” Lee called. “Unkind ones. It might be safest to sit together at the meeting. Please avoid antagonizing them.”
Yes, Graysha thought, Varberg has already stirred them up against us.
