Stranded

by James Alan Gardner

  Obviously, there had been a mistake. Somehow the computer had misread my request. Bees weren’t some exotic species. They were bees. They went buzz, they helped pollinate plants as they gathered pollen for food, they made honey. And I had checked the amount of available genetic material just two days ago to make sure there would be enough, since I figured every Restorer team would want to disperse bees.

  When I finally got to view the honeycomb chambers that held the genetic material for bees, I just stared at the screen. A shiver went through me—a shiver that grew and grew until I began to shake.

  The honeycomb chambers had a color code. Green chambers held genetic material. White meant the chamber had been emptied; the material had been completely used. Pink meant the computer was picking up a problem within that cell that could damage the material. Red was a major alert that the genetic material was in danger. Black meant the material within that cell had died.

  The area designated for bees was spotted with black and red cells. As I watched, two red cells turned black, and several pink cells changed to red.

  With my heart pounding, I keyed in a Priority Urgent message warning every Restorer team that there was a problem with the honeycomb chambers. I also sent the message to the techs’ consoles at the generation tanks. At that point, I didn’t care who knew I had a Restorer code or that I was handling the island. The teams had to be warned.

  As soon as I sent that message, I sent a Priority Urgent to Stev, who had gone down to the generation tanks to oversee the transfer of genetic material to start the field mice we would add to the meadows. I told him to put a hold on the mice and draw all the genetic material available for bees and get it into a generation tank.

  A minute later, as I watched more green cells change to pink, I got back the query: ??

  DON’T ARGUE. JUST DO IT!!! I sent that message twice.

  Stev didn’t respond.

  “Hurry, Stev,” I whispered, clenching my hands so hard they began to cramp. “Please hurry.”

  More pink cells turned red. Some red cells turned black.

  Then, finally, one by one, the red cells turned white. The pink cells turned white. Last, the green cells turned white.

  I finally managed to take a deep breath—and realized I was crying.

  There was a strong possibility that the material in the red cells wouldn’t be able to create healthy bees anymore. Stev, being Stev, would have put that material in another tank so that it wouldn’t contaminate the rest if it was no longer viable.

  Whatever bees we managed to grow would have to be shared among the Restorer teams that needed them. There wouldn’t be enough. We would need another pollinator.

  I got a cup of tea from the food slot. Thought it over carefully—and followed my intuition.

  When I did a little checking, I discovered that someone had taken Stev’s little “oddity” and had been carefully growing more specimens from it. There were several dozen cells filled with its genetic material.

  I waited until Stev sent a message that he was returning to the auxiliary room.

  Then I sent another Priority message to the techs overseeing the generation tanks.

  I was the Restorer for the island. I was the only one who chose what was given to that land, and I was the only one who would be held responsible for that choice.

  Before Stev arrived, I got back confirmation from one of the techs.

  When the next generation tank became available, it would be growing Stev’s bumbler bees.

  —————

  When I got home, Mother was crying her heart out and holding on to Father as if he were her entire world.

  “There was nothing we could have done, Rista,” Father said quietly as he rubbed her back, trying to soothe her. “Even if we had known about the problem before today, there was nothing we could have done. Those species aren’t right for this world. They would have always been out of Balance.”

  “I know. I know. But . . . Jeromi . . . Extinct.”

  “We don’t know that. There might be another ship—”

  Father saw me at that moment and didn’t continue. It had been a long time since we had heard from another city-ship. There was no certainty that there were any others out there anymore.

  I don’t know what he saw in my eyes, but I saw the conflict in his. He wanted to take care of the two people he loved, but he wasn’t sure which one of us needed him the most at that moment.

  I smiled at him and went to my room—not because I didn’t need the comfort or the hug, but because Mother needed him more and deserved to have him all to herself for a little while.

  Because Mother was from one of those other city-ships. She’d given up everything she had known out of love for another person.

  I took my hologram down from its shelf and turned it on, watched it for a while.

  An overloaded circuit was the reason that the warning about the cells never reached the techs’ consoles. There had been a few erratic warnings a week ago, but the diagnostics showed no problem with the system, and the techs concluded that the warnings were a computer error.

  Nobody understood why my accessing the information at that moment triggered the warning circuit, but my sounding the alarm produced an awful scramble in the tank rooms. In fact, my request for bumbler bees was the last confirmed request for the rest of the day.

  While the techs were checking out the system, they discovered how much genetic material had already been destroyed. Fortunately, none of the now-extinct species were vital to this world, and some couldn’t even have lived on the planet under any condition, but that didn’t make the loss any better.

  “Extinct” was the most terrible word we knew.

  And if we were the last surviving city-ship, it was a word that would apply to us very soon.

  Chapter 7

  A couple of days later, while Stev and I were eating the midday meal in the Restorers’ food court, Whit showed up. He got a plate of food and then just sat and stared at it for several minutes.

  “Thanie resigned from the program,” he said abruptly. “So did I.”

  “What?” I put my glass down before I dropped it.

  “What happened?” Stev asked sharply.

  “The . . . The songbirds were being destroyed from every direction. They were starving, and there were so many predators after them, the ones who weren’t actually killed as prey were dying from fright and exhaustion. She just couldn’t stand watching it anymore. So this morning, she sent in a request to have all the remaining songbirds transferred out of the area. The approval came in about an hour before the midday break. When the rest of the team realized what she’d done, you should have heard the way they shrieked about it. Dermi and Fallah were still yelling at her when she keyed in her resignation from the program, shut down her console, and left.”

  “What about you, Whit?” I asked.

  His eyes were bright with tears. “What’s the point of putting up with bug-brains like Zerx and Dermi and Fallah—or even Benj, for that matter? The ship is dying. Everyone knows it even if no one will admit it. There’s no reason to do this since it’s not going to make any difference.”

  His voice had risen to the point where several people around us had turned to look at us with not-too-pleased expressions on their faces.

  “Not the Restorer teams,” he said, his voice dropping back to normal. “I don’t mean them. They’re doing real work and they are making a difference to this world. But there’s no reason for me to keep gritting my teeth and trying to work with the rest of those people in order to earn my qualification. There’s no future in it.” He tried to smile at a joke that was, in its honesty, obscene.

  None of us finished our meals. Stev took Whit off to talk for a while. I went over to Thanie’s and ended up saying useless things while she cried.

>   —————

  It was a couple of hours before I got back to the auxiliary room. Out of habit, I called up the screen that listed the species that were now in the area we were restoring. Several names popped up on the screen with the “new species” symbol next to them.

  I stared at the screen. Birds? Birds? I hadn’t requested birds yet. There weren’t supposed to be any birds yet.

  I keyed in the command for the computer to locate and provide a planet-side view of one of these birds.

  There it was, a little sparrow that was barely able to hold on to the branch of a sapling oak tree.

  “What’s going on here? The Restorer screen is supposed to prevent things like this from happening,” I muttered as I started to key in a demand to remove those birds. Granted, in a few more days, I intended to request birds from the generation tanks, but . . .

  That’s when it occurred to me to check my messages before I sent that demand to the tank techs.

  There was a directive accepting a transfer of songbirds. The directive had a Restorer code that wasn’t mine. It also had very specific instructions about the placement of the birds. They had been scattered over the several thousand acres of land that Stev and I were restoring. Despite being added prematurely, the birds really wouldn’t be consuming more food than the land could provide.

  Which wasn’t the point, I assured myself as I muttered my way through the directive. Those birds shouldn’t be there until I decided they should be there.

  And then I got to the end of the directive. The Restorer code was repeated. Under it was simply—Britt.

  I sat back, no longer sure what to think.

  I checked my other messages—which I hadn’t bothered to do since I hadn’t expected any to come through on this console—and found the transfer request. It had been an open request. That meant it had been sent to every Restorer code the computer recognized, and anyone who wanted any of those birds could request them to be sent to the area that person was restoring.

  Britt, for whatever reason, had initiated the transfer of the birds to the island.

  No. Not “for whatever reason.” They were living creatures. The person who had requested the transfer had done so in order to save them. In a few more days, I would have requested the same species. And I still would in order to bring the numbers up to a viable population.

  But I think Britt, who sometimes understood too well, knew exactly what my decision would have been if I’d read the transfer request when it first came in.

  Just as she understood exactly how Thanie would feel if she knew her beloved songbirds were safe with me.

  Chapter 8

  “Willow? Where are you going?”

  Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Thanie hurrying to catch up with me.

  “I have some . . . stuff . . . to do,” I said lamely as I continued walking toward the auxiliary room.

  “Can I help?” Thanie said. “It’s just . . . Well, I thought since you didn’t have class either . . .”

  The entire walk was filled with her unfinished sentences, but I understood the gist of it. Thanie didn’t want to sit home doing nothing while there was an entire world aching to be restored. She had no idea how I had been filling my days since I’d been dismissed from the class project and probably figured that two people doing nothing might create more of the illusion of doing something.

  I was still trying to figure out what kind of excuse to give her when we reached the auxiliary room. As it turned out, I didn’t need an excuse. As I approached the auxiliary room from one direction with Thanie, Stev approached it from the other direction with Whit, who had the same lost look that Thanie had.

  I looked at Stev. Stev looked at me.

  “Well,” I said. “Four can do more than two.” I put my code into the keypad. The door opened. “Let’s get to work.”

  “Willow . . . ,” Thanie said as she followed me into the room. “Students aren’t supposed to be in auxiliary rooms.”

  “We’re not students anymore, remember?” I replied as Stev and I started opening our consoles. “Thanie, why don’t you take that console.” I indicated the one immediately on my left. “Whit, you take the one next to Stev.”

  Whit looked around the small room. “You got permission to do a special project?” he asked, looking hopeful. “Could I—” He glanced at Thanie. “Could we help? Not for credit or anything.”

  That made me pause. I looked at Thanie.

  This wasn’t about getting credit. This wasn’t about getting points on a score—or even getting formally qualified. They just wanted to do the work.

  Stev was the one who broke the silence. “If you’re going to be here,” he said dryly, “we didn’t expect you to just sit there and play with your fingers.”

  “So . . . what’s the project?” Whit asked.

  Stev and I braced ourselves to catch them as I called up the screen that showed the entire project. We didn’t want to start the day with a trip to sick bay because someone hit the floor.

  Whit and Thanie just stared at the screen, their mouths hanging open.

  “Blessed All,” Whit finally said. “You’ve done that much by yourselves?”

  Pain and fury flashed in his eyes for a moment before he regained control. He was seeing the difference between what a real team, even if it consisted of only two people, could accomplish compared to what was done by one that was a team in name only.

  “We’ve done that much,” I said, feeling the pleasure of our accomplishment warm me. “And we’ve got a lot more to do. Thanie, you’ve got the birds.”

  “Willow . . .”

  Since I was already at my console, transferring the data to her console, she took her seat. When she looked at the number of birds, tears filled her eyes. She knew where they had come from.

  She sniffed a couple of times and then firmed up. “You don’t have any hawks or falcons.”

  “They’ll have to be added . . . along with the other bird species that are designated as being appropriate for this ecosystem.”

  I watched her take that in. She would be handling all the birds—and that included the birds that would eat the songbirds.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and nodded.

  In a land that had Balance, Thanie would be able to accept the give and take of life.

  While Thanie and Whit spent the next couple of hours acquainting themselves with the project, Stev continued to work through the lists of species we would need, and I went through the messages that had been sent to this console.

  Most of them were from the Restorers, basically offering understated praise for saving the bees. They also carefully indicated that they would like some of the bees if any were available.

  Since I had initiated the order to grow the bees, I was entitled to keep as many as I wanted or needed. If I kept all of them, I would have a full population of bees for the island, but everyone else would have to scramble to find something else to take the bees’ place in the ecosystems they were restoring. So we would share them.

  Besides, I had the bumblers, which no one but the tank techs knew about yet.

  The next message was from a tank tech informing me that all the genetic material for the bumblers had been placed in a generation tank and was being grown at the same slow acceleration rate that Stev had ordered for the other bees.

  The message after that was from another tank tech informing me that the bees would be ready for dispersal in twenty hours. That message was copied to Stev.

  The last message from was Zashi, who warmly praised my quick action concerning the bees and then gently offered his assistance. If I were willing to release the equivalent of two small hives—queens, drones, and workers—he would personally oversee using them as the genetic base to create more bees.

 
That was a tough decision to make. The generation tanks didn’t require large amounts of material to start growing another specimen, but it seemed unfair to create something and then turn around and use it to create more of its kind without ever giving it a chance to live. But I was also aware that two queen bees would provide enough material to create close to fifty more queen bees. And fifty hives, that could then produce more bees on their own, would go a lot further toward giving every Restorer team starter hives.

  I keyed in a message to Zashi taking him up on his offer. I copied the message to Stev, with an additional note that listed the Restorer teams who had requested bees. He would see that each team got an equal number of bees—or as close to it as possible.

  By the time we were ready for a midday break, Thanie was bubbling over with enthusiasm. “Just wait until—”

  “No.” I blocked the door. “This project is need-to-know only, Thanie. It doesn’t get discussed with anyone who isn’t working on it.”

  I knew she wanted to rub Dermi’s and Fallah’s nose in the fact that we were working on a major project, but there was still a chance that we could be shut down if this came to too many people’s attention.

  I saw her struggle with the disappointment. That was my real reservation about having Thanie work on this project. When pushed, she tended to blurt out confidential information in order to regain some emotional ground.

  “What about my parents?” Thanie finally asked. “Can I tell—”

  “They aren’t need-to-know when it comes to this project,” Stev said firmly.

  Whit shifted uneasily. “You do have approval for this, don’t you? I mean, you didn’t . . . lift . . . the Restorer code or anything?”

  “I have approval,” I replied. “And there is a primary Restorer who is . . . aware . . . of the work.”

  That was enough for Whit and, apparently, Thanie.

  Stev just gave me a searching look. After getting a message from Zashi, it wasn’t hard for him to figure out who the Restorer was who was aware of our work. But I wasn’t prepared to tell even Stev just how aware Britt was of our work.