by Neil Clarke
Most of them had emigrated because they couldn’t make a living in the countries they had been born in. That seemed to be clear. So why shouldn’t he “pull up stakes” (whatever that meant) and head for the booming economy in the sky? Didn’t that show you were made of something special?
George’s major brush with history had been four sets of viewer-responsive videos he had studied as a child, to meet the requirements listed on his permanent educational transcript. His parents had chosen most of his non-technical educational materials and they had opted for a series that emphasized human achievements in the arts and sciences. The immigrants he was familiar with had overcome poverty and bigotry (there was always some mention of bigotry) and become prize-winning physicists and world famous writers and musicians. There had been no mention of immigrants who wandered the corridors of strange cities feeling like they were stumbling through a fog. There had been no indication any immigrant had ever realized he had traded utter hopelessness for permanent lifelong poverty.
There had been a time, as George understood it, when the music in restaurants had been produced by electronic sound systems and unskilled laborers had carried food to the tables. Now unskilled labor provided the music and carts took orders and transported the food. Had any of his ancestors been invisible functionaries who toted plates of food to customers who were engrossed in intense conversations about the kind of real work people did in real work spaces like laboratories and offices? He had never heard his parents mention it.
Battery good twenty minutes. No more. Moth not come back twenty minutes—not come back ever.
He almost missed the light the moth flicked on just before it settled into the grass. He would have missed it, in fact, if they hadn’t told him he should watch for it. It was only a blip, and it was really a glow, not a flash. He crept toward it in an awkward hunch, with both cases in his hands and his eyes fixed on the ground in front of his boots.
The small square case contained his laboratory. The collection tube attached to the moth’s body fit into a plug on the side of the case and he huddled over the display screen while the unit ran its tests. If everything was on the up and up, the yellow lines on the screen would be the same length as the red lines. If the “Director” was being given false information, they wouldn’t.
It was a job that could have been handled by eighty percent—at least—of the nineteen million people currently living on the Moon. In his lab on Earth, there had been carts that did things like that. A four wheeled vehicle a little bigger than the lab case could have carried the two moths and automatically plugged the collection tube into the analyzer. He was lurching around in the dark merely because a cart would have required a wireless communications link that might have been detectable.
The first yellow line appeared on the screen. It was a few pixels longer than the red line—enough to be noticeable, not enough to be significant.
The second yellow line took its place beside the second red line like a soldier coming to attention beside a partner who had been chosen because they were precisely the same height. The third line fell in beside its red line, there was a pause that lasted about five hard beats of George’s pulse, and the last two yellow lines finished up the formation.
The moth had hovered above the hawk’s back and jabbed a long, threadlike tube into its neck. The big changes in the bird’s chemistry would take place in its brain, but some of the residue from the changes would seep into its bloodstream and produce detectable alterations in the percentages of five enzymes. The yellow lines were the same length as the red lines: ergo, the hawks were carrying a package exactly like the package they were supposed to be carrying.
Which was good news for the Director. Or George presumed it was, anyway. And bad news for him.
If the result had been positive—if he had collected proof there was something wrong with the hawks—he could have radioed the information in an encrypted one-second blip and headed straight for the nearest exit. His three bodyguards would have helped him through the portal—they’d said they would anyway—and he would have been home free. Instead, he had to pick up his equipment, close all his cases, and go creeping through the dark to the other hawk nest in the system. He was supposed to follow the small stream until it crossed a dirt utility road, the big guy had said. Then he was supposed to follow the road for about four kilometers, until it intersected another stream. And work his way through another two kilometers of tangled, streamside vegetation.
The habitat reproduced three hundred square kilometers of temperate zone forest and river land. It actually supported more plant, animal, and insect species than any stretch of “natural” terrain you could visit on the real 21st Century Earth. Samples of Earth’s soil had been carried to the Moon with all their microorganisms intact. Creepers and crawlers and flying nuisances had been imported by the hundreds of thousands.
You couldn’t understand every relationship in a system, the logic ran. People might not like gnats and snakes but that didn’t mean the system could operate without them. The relationship you didn’t think about might be the very relationship you would disrupt if you created a wonderful, super-attractive new species and introduced it into a real habitat on Earth. A change in relationship X might lead to an unexpected change in relationship Y. Which would create a disruption in relationship C . . . .
And so on.
It was supposed to be one of the basic insights of modern biological science and George Sparr was himself one of the fully credentialed, fully trained professionals who turned that science into products people would voluntarily purchase in the free market. The fact was, however, that he hated insects and snakes. He could have lived his whole life without one second of contact with the smallest, least innocuous member of either evolutionary line. What he liked was riding along in a fully enclosed, air conditioned or heated (depending on the season) automobile, with half a dozen of his friends chattering away on the communications screen, while a first class, state-of-the-art control system guided him along a first class, state-of-the-art highway to a building where he would work in air conditioned or heated ease and continue to be totally indifferent to temperature, humidity, illumination, or precipitation.
Which was what he had had. Along with pizzas, steaks, tacos, turkey club sandwiches, and a thousand other items that had flavor and texture and the great virtue that they were not powdered rice flavored with powdered flavor.
There had been women whose hair tossed across their necks as they gave him little glances across their music stands while they played quartets with him. (He had made the right decision, he had soon realized, when he had chosen the viola. The world was full of violinists and cellists looking for playing partners who could fill in the middle harmonies.) There had even been the pleasure of expressing your undiluted contempt for the human robots who were hustling like mad in China, Thailand, India, and all the other countries where people had discovered they, too, could enjoy the satisfactions of electronic entertainment, hundred year lifespans, and lifelong struggles against obesity and high cholesterol levels.
George Sparr was definitely not a robot. Robots lived to work. Humans worked to live. Work was a means, not an end. Pleasure was an end. Art was an end. Love and friendship were ends.
George had worked for four different commercial organizations in the eleven years since had received his Ph.D. He had left every one of them with a glowing recommendation. Every manager who had ever given him an evaluation had agreed he was a wonderful person to have on your payroll on the days when he was actually physically present. And actually concentrating on the job you were paying him to do.
The dogs weren’t robots, either. They were real muscle-and-tooth living organisms, and they had him boxed in—right and left, front and back, with one prowling in reserve—before he heard the first warning growl. The light mounted on the dog in the front position overwhelmed his goggles before the control system could react. An amplified female voice blared at him from somewhere beyond the gla
re.
“Stand absolutely still. There is no possibility the dogs can be outrun. You will not be harmed if you stand absolutely still.”
She was speaking complete sentences of formal Techno-Mandarin but the learning program she had used hadn’t eliminated her accent—whatever the accent was. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have to understand every word. He knew the dogs were there. He knew the dogs had teeth. He knew the teeth could cut through his suit.
“I’m afraid you may have a serious problem, patriot. As far as I can see, there’s only one candidate for the identity of this director they told you about—assuming they’re telling you the truth, of course.”
The ecosystem was surrounded by tunnels that contained work spaces and living quarters. They had put him in a room that looked like it was supposed to be some kind of art gallery. Half the space on the walls was covered with watercolors, prints, and freehand crayon work. Shelves held rock sculptures. He was still wearing his suit and his goggles, but the goggles had adjusted to the illumination and he could see the lighting and framing had obviously been directed by professional-level programs.
They had left him alone twice, but there had been no danger he would damage anything. The dog sitting two steps from his armchair took care of that.
The man sitting in the other armchair was an American and he was doing his best to make this a one-immigrant-to-another conversation. He happened to be the kind of big bellied, white faced, fast-food glutton George particularly disliked, but he hadn’t picked up the contempt radiating from George’s psyche. He probably wouldn’t, either, given the fact that he had to observe his surroundings through the fat molecules that puffed up his eyelids and floated in his brain.
George could understand people who choked their arteries eating steaks and lobster. But when they did it stuffing down food that had less flavor than the containers it came in . . . .
“Do you understand who Ms. Chao is?” big-belly said.
George shrugged. “You can’t do much biodesign without learning something about Ms. Chao.”
The puffy head nodded once. They hadn’t asked George about his vocational history but he was assuming they had looked at the information he had posted in the databanks. The woman had asked him for his name right after she had taken him into custody and he had given it to her without a fuss.
“Your brag screen looked very promising, patriot. It looks like you might have made it to the big leagues under the right circumstances.”
“I worked for four of the largest R&D companies in the United States.”
“But you never made it to the big leagues, right?”
George focused his attention on his arms and legs and consciously made himself relax. He pasted a smile on his face, and tried to make it big enough Mr. Styrofoam could see it through his eye slits.
“The closest I ever got to the other side of the Pacific was a weekend conference on La Jolla Beach.”
“That’s closer than I ever got. I was supposed to be a hardwired program genius—a Prince of the Nerds himself—right up to the moment I got my transcript certified. I thought if I came here I could show them what somebody with my brain circuits could do. And make it to Shanghai the long way round.”
George nodded: the same sympathetic nod and the same sympathetic expression—he hoped it was sympathetic anyway—that he offered all the people who told him the same kind of story when they sat beside him on the transportation carts. Half of them usually threw in a few remarks to the effect that “doughfaces” didn’t stand a chance anymore. He would usually nod in sympathy when they said that, too, but he wasn’t sure that would be a good idea in this situation. His interrogator was putting on a good act, but the guy could be Ms. Chao’s own son, for all George knew. George had never seen an Asian who looked that gross, but Styrofoam’s mother could have decided anybody cursed with American genes had to possess a special, uniquely American variation on the human digestive tract.
“The database says you’re a musician.”
“I’ve been working in a restaurant. I bought a performance system when I was on Earth—one of the best.”
“And now you’re serenading the sages and samurai while they dine.”
“That’s why I’m here. They told me I’d be thrown out of my job if I turned them down.”
“Ms. Chao had a husband. Mr. Tan. Do you know him?”
“I’ve heard about the Tan family. They’re big in Copernicus, right?”
“They’re one of the families that control the Copernicus industrial complex. And make it such a wonderful place to work and raise children. This Mr. Tan—It’s clear he’s connected. But nobody knows how much. Ms. Chao married him. They went through a divorce. Somehow he’s still sitting on the Board. With lots of shares.”
“And he thinks his ex-wife is trying to put something over on him? Is that what this is all about?”
Chubby hands dug into the arms of the other chair. Arm muscles struggled against the low lunar gravity as they raised the bloated body to an upright position. The Prince of the Nerds turned toward the door and let George admire the width of his waistline as he made his exit.
“You’re the one who’s supposed to be coming up with answers, patriot. We’re supposed to be the people with the questions.”
There was a timestrip built into the base of George’s right glove. It now read 3:12. When they had brought him into the working and living area, it had read 3:46.
George’s suit was totally self-contained. He could breathe and rebreathe the same air over and over again. But nothing comes free. Bacteria recycled the air as it passed through the filtering system. Other bacteria generated the chemicals in the organic battery that powered the circulation system. Both sets of bacteria drew their energy from a sugar syrup. In three hours and twelve minutes, the syrup would be exhausted. And George could choose between two options. He could open the suit. Or he could smother to death.
The second interrogator was a bony, stoop shouldered woman. She spoke English with a British accent but her hand gestures and her general air of weary cynicism looked European to George’s eye. She glanced at the timestrip—it now read 2:58—and sat down without making any comments.
The woman waved her hand as if she was chasing smoke away from her face. “You were hired by three people. They coerced you. They claimed you would lose your job if you didn’t work for them.”
“I didn’t have any choice. I could come here or I could find a good space to beg. Believe me—this is the last place I want to be.”
“You’d rather play little tunes in a restaurant than work in a major ecosystem? Even though your screens say you’re a trained, experienced biodesigner?”
George offered her one of his more sincere smiles. “Actually, we play almost everything we want to most of the time. Mozart quintets. Faure. Krzywicki. Nobody listens anyway.”
“The three men who hired you told you they were hired by Mr. Tan. Is that correct?”
So far George had simply told them the truth—whatever they wanted to know. Now he knew he had to think. Was she telling him they wanted him to testify against Mr. Tan? Was Ms. Chao trying to get something on her ex-husband?
Was it possible they had something else in mind? Could they be testing him in some way?
“They’re very tough people,” George said. “They made a lot of threats.”
“They told you all the things Mr. Tan could do if you talked? They described his connections?”
“They made some very big threats. Terminating my job was only part of it. That’s all I can tell you. They made some very big threats.”
The woman stood up. She bent over his timestrip. She raised her head and ran her eyes over his suit.
George didn’t have to tell the canaries he didn’t want to join them. Nobody wanted to be a canary. In theory, canaries didn’t have it bad. They didn’t pay rent. The meals they ate were provided free, so their diets could be monitored. They got all the medical care they needed and some
they could have done without. They could save their wages. They could work their way out of their cage.
Somehow, it didn’t work that way. There was always something extra you couldn’t do without—videos, games, a better violin to help you pass the time. The artificial ecosystems were a little over thirty years old. So far, approximately fifteen people had actually left them while they still had the ability to eat and drink and do anything of consequence with women whose hair tossed around their neck while they played Smetana’s first quartet.
And what would you really have, when you added it up? George had done the arithmetic. After twenty-five years in an ecosystem—If you did everything right—you could live in the same kind of room he was living in now, in the same kind of “neighborhood.” With the same kind of people.
The other possibility would be to buy yourself a return trip to Earth. You’d even have some money left over when you stepped off the shuttle.
The timestrip read 2:14 when the woman came back. This time she put a glass bottle on a shelf near the door. George couldn’t read the label but he could see the green and blue logo. The thick brown syrup in the bottle would keep the bacteria in his life support system functioning for at least ten hours.
He was perfectly willing to lie. He had no trouble with that. If they wanted him to claim his three buddies had told him they were working for Mr. Tan, then he would stand up in front of the cameras, and place his hand on the American flag, or a leather bound copy of the last printed edition of The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, or some similar object of reverence, and swear that he had clearly heard one of his abductors say they were employees of the said Mr. Tan. That wasn’t the problem. Should he lie before the canaries let him out? And hope they would let him out? Or should he insist they let him out first? Before he perjured himself?
And what if that wasn’t what they wanted? What if there was something else going on here? Something he didn’t really understand?
