And I wasn’t going to start wondering why she was so interested in what I would do with the land.
Chapter 9
A couple of days later, while the four of us were eating what the food slots in the Restorers’ food court had decided to offer for a midday meal, Zashi stopped by our table.
“The new bees are growing very nicely,” he said, smiling at me. “They’ll be distributed tomorrow.” Then he gave me a speculative look. “I just came from the tank rooms. Since I was assisting you with the bees, one of the techs didn’t see any harm in mentioning that your other specimens were nicely grown and ready for dispersal. I believe you’ll find a message to that effect when you get back to work. I gather you want to give them a chance to prove themselves before offering them to anyone else?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling my smile become brittle. “That’s it exactly.”
“I don’t think you’ll find that to be an issue—at least, not with any Restorer.” He lifted his hand in farewell and went to join friends at another table.
“What other specimens?” Stev asked.
“I’ll explain later,” I muttered, not daring to look at him.
There had been a blend of amusement and sympathy in Zashi’s eyes before he left us that clearly told me he knew as well as I did who was going to make an issue out of this.
—————
When we got back to the auxiliary room, Stev read the message waiting for us and threw a fit.
“How could you?” he shouted. “How could you? I have spent years trying to put that behind me.”
“They’re pollinators. They’re viable. They work in this ecosystem. We need them,” I shouted back.
“They aren’t viable. They don’t fit! The Scholars and Instructors made that very clear when they reviewed the project.”
“I’m the Restorer for this team, and I say they fit!” If there wasn’t so much hurt under the anger, I could have punched him for being so stubborn. “They’re bees, Stev, and we need bees.”
He turned away from me.
Whit quietly cleared his throat. “Uh . . . Thanie and I have some . . . stuff . . . to do. We’ll be back in a little while.” Taking a firm grip on Thanie’s arm, he dragged her out of the room.
I barely noticed them leave.
“They’ll chew on you for this, Willow,” Stev said bitterly.
“Let them try.” I waited until he turned to face me. “I’ll put our work up against any Restorer team. I don’t know why the Scholars and Instructors made such a fuss over the bumblers. I don’t care why they did. They were wrong, Stev.” I was so angry at that point, I started to cry. “They were wrong.”
“Willow . . .” Stev put his arms around me. “Don’t cry, Willow. Please don’t cry.”
I did my best to stop, not because I was ready to, but mostly because seeing me cry made Stev feel helpless.
Stev sighed. “I guess no one will really notice a handful of bumblers.”
Obviously, he had only gotten far enough into the message to read “bumbler bees” and hadn’t actually taken in the quantity of specimens that were ready for dispersal. Once he had, hopefully he, too, would start wondering why someone had taken the time and trouble to produce that much genetic material for an oddity that had no value.
Now there was just the little problem of dispersing the bumblers. As much as I cared about Stev and would trust him without question at any other time, I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t dump the bumblers under six inches of water somewhere if he was the one handling the dispersal. Since I’d ordered all the genetic material for the bumblers to be drawn from the honeycomb chambers, if Stev did something rash out of some misguided idea of saving the rest of the project, there wouldn’t be any way of starting over and producing bumblers again.
Wiping my eyes with my sleeve, I checked my own console for messages while Stev slumped in his chair.
There was one message—from Zashi. All it said was, Bumblers??
Thank the Blessed All for Zashi. That message was an offer to handle the dispersal. Stev would have had another fit if I had asked Whit to take care of the bumblers, but there wasn’t much he could say when a primary Restorer’s Right Hand offered to handle it.
Yes, please, I answered.
A few minutes after Thanie and Whit returned, a message came in from Zashi, copied to Stev, thanking me for allowing him to participate a little and make use of his skills.
I busily avoided Stev’s stare until he settled back to work.
And I smiled when, much later that evening after Stev had already gone home, I watched a bumbler land on a flower.
Chapter 10
We worked as long as we could and as hard as we could. It still wasn’t enough.
Every day there was a circuit failure in yet another system. The engineers would just get one repaired and two more would go down. The tank techs were sending messages every morning, warning the Restorer teams about continued failures in the honeycomb chambers and which species were threatened. And every Restorer team was using the generation tanks at full acceleration now, even though there was more risk that a fully accelerated specimen might have less reproductive capability.
We just wanted to get as much life down on the planet as possible before a vital system in the ship failed—like life support or the ability to maintain orbit.
I was alone in the auxiliary room. I’d sent Whit and Thanie home because there was nothing else that could be done at the moment, and Stev had gone to check out something in the tank rooms before getting some sleep.
I was tired enough that I had slipped into that state of waking dreams. I stared at the screen in front of me, not really seeing it anymore.
Every link in the chain of survival had to be built in the right order and at the right time. That’s what we’d been taught in every Restorer class. That idea was fine when there was more than enough time, but it wasn’t going to work now. If I waited until I reached a particular link in the chain at this point, the genetic material might not still exist when I needed it. But if I didn’t follow procedure, I risked the Balance the island now had.
As I stared at the screen, I felt a surge of energy flow through my body. I sat up. I really looked at the planet-side picture that was on the screen.
For several minutes, I watched a spider build a web and saw all my lists and plans in a new way.
Not a chain of survival—a web of life. A link was only connected to the links on either side of it. But a web . . . Each strand affected every strand in the overall scheme of the web, but in the end, there was Balance.
With the image of a web kept firmly in my mind, I looked over my lists again.
With the city-ship breaking down a little more every day, I might not be able to send enough of each animal and plant down to the planet in time to assure that each species would be able to sustain itself in the future. But now I knew how to fully restore a part of that island so that, for a shining moment, there would be Balance.
Chapter 11
The next morning, Whit and Thanie looked very confused as they reviewed the list of species I had requested from the generation tanks. Stev looked very concerned.
I knew what he was thinking: that I’d been working too hard and something inside me had snapped.
There was no way I could explain to him, but something inside me hadn’t snapped, it was now wide open. Balance flowed through me in a way it never had before. I was no longer following the rules that had been laid down for us in class. I was the Restorer—and I finally understood what that really meant.
“Willow . . .” Stev said. Before he could go on, the door opened. Britt and Zashi stepped inside.
Britt’s eyes met mine and held.
She had been waiting for this moment, had been wondering if it would come.
&nbs
p; “Would you like some help?” she asked.
I just smiled.
Britt, Zashi, and I slipped into working together as if we’d always done so. After a couple of hours, Stev was almost in stride with us. Whit and Thanie were bewildered by the change in the project’s direction and a little dazed at suddenly working in such close quarters with the most respected Restorer and Restorer’s Right Hand on the ship.
At midday, Britt and Zashi excused themselves, saying they had other commitments during the afternoon. I thanked them both—and was greatly relieved when they assured me they would be back the next morning.
As they were about to leave, I overheard Zashi say to Stev, “Give yourself some time. You’ll get used to working with someone like her.”
Chapter 12
Later that evening, when I had finally gone home to get some sleep, I opened a file that had been sent to my personal computer pad. It was a picture of an old document followed by a plain copy of the text. I didn’t need to be told that the document had come from the Scholars’ secret files. I also didn’t need to be told that the sender had taken great care to make sure access to that file couldn’t be traced to me.
The document was a long list. A terrible list. At the top was the heading, Lab Specimens Are The Only Specimens Now Available.
Wolf, crow, hawk, falcon. Salmon, dolphin, fox, panda. Bison, zebra, elk, tiger. Nightingale, otter, cobra, seal. The list went on and on, naming plants and insects as well as animals. If I compared it to the list of species that were suitable for this world and were stored as genetic material in the honeycomb chambers, they would match. I was certain of it.
The next part of the list was much, much longer. Its heading simply said, Extinct.
Near the bottom of that list, I found the reason why the Scholars had been so upset with Stev—and why they had suspected him of accessing their secret files. The entry said Bumblebee.
Stev had re-created a creature that had become extinct before its time in the world was done. If the Scholars hadn’t slapped him down to the point that he would never be willing to try again, who knows what other creatures he might have given back to the world?
The last part of the list said, Myths. The very last entry was the unicorn.
I looked at that entry for a long time. Then I deleted the file. I understood why Britt had sent it to me, and I understood that the list, and the underlying message, wasn’t meant to be seen by anyone but me.
Chapter 13
We worked for another month while the ship failed around us. Whit had continued to disperse grass seed and wildflowers over the rest of the island whenever we could get them. Thanie dispersed seeds to build young woodlands while I planted the saplings that would give those woodlands an anchor. Britt added the deer. She had insisted on using the genetic material that was still available instead of transferring animals from another location. I was grateful to her for understanding that I could never have felt impartial about the deer if they had originally been Dermi’s.
We had six breeds of horses. There were cows and sheep, hawks and falcons, foxes and hares, mice and owls. We had salmon and trout in the streams, and frogs lived among the cattails and water lilies in the ponds. We had woodlands and shrubs and meadows. We planted fields of oats and barley as well plots of every other vegetable the land would support. Parsley and thyme were among the herbs that had taken root. There was a small population of every kind of creature that belonged to this land. And we had the plant life to support it all.
In that one portion of the island, we had Balance.
We hugged each other. We cheered. We laughed until we cried.
We had Balance.
Over time, the plants and animals would spread out over the rest of the island and grow in number.
We wouldn’t see it. But that didn’t matter.
And then, the next evening, Stev told me something that changed everything.
—————
Stev waited until the others had left for the day. Then he put his hands on my shoulders.
“Willow . . .” It took him a moment to try again. “Willow, I was talking to one of the tank techs today. In order to try to save the specimens that are needed to restore this world, they’re going to start cutting the power to the rest of the honeycomb chambers. All the genetic material in those cells will die.”
I felt a deep sorrow, but I understood the necessity. We wouldn’t be traveling to any other worlds. We had to do what we could for this one.
“That includes the student projects,” Stev said softly.
It took me a moment to understand.
“The unicorns,” I whispered.
“I’m so sorry, Willow.”
I closed my eyes and tried to wait out the pain.
“They can’t die,” I said. Not again.
I don’t know why that thought filled my head, but once it was there, there was nothing else.
Turning away from Stev, I worked my way through the commands that would show me the honeycomb chamber that held the genetic material for my unicorns. When I found it, I couldn’t say anything.
There was just enough material to create a small but viable population of unicorns. But if even one cell was lost . . .
Then I remembered something else. It took a few minutes more before I found the cells I needed.
Half of the cells containing the genetic material had turned black.
“If we made them all weaned foals, there would be just enough material for a small population. And my adult unicorns would look after them along with the other foals.”
“We can’t do it, Willow,” he said, his voice thick with regret. “We can’t put a species on this world that doesn’t belong here.”
I knew what he was thinking. I had saved his bumbler bees, and he had to be the one to tell me that I couldn’t save something I had loved ever since I’d seen that one specimen that had been grown in the generation tanks.
He cared—and I loved him for it.
He was also wrong.
“They don’t belong here, Willow.”
I thought about the list of Myths I had seen. I thought about how, in the simulations, there was Balance where a unicorn lived. I smiled sadly. “Yes, they do. This is where they came from, Stev. This is their home.”
His eyes widened. He stared at me as if he’d never seen me before. Then he looked at the screen and frowned. “Why did they put your genetic material into two different honeycomb chambers?”
“They didn’t. Those are Britt’s unicorns.”
He seemed to have trouble breathing for a minute. “Blessed All,” he whispered.
I waited.
He took a deep breath. Blew it out. “I’d better get down to the tanks and do this myself. You stay here and send me the cell numbers. That way I won’t have to go through any of the tech consoles where this might get traced.”
When he reached the door, he paused and looked back at me. “Zashi was right. It will take a bit of time to get used to working with you.”
Chapter 14
Since they were the only ones available at the time, Stev used the two generation tanks that were working at half capacity. He set them at full growth acceleration so that they would be available again as fast as possible.
When a fully operational tank became available, he insisted on placing some of my unicorns in it.
I couldn’t argue with him. The speed at which the cells were changing from green to pink to red to black was terrifying.
The techs weren’t interested in what he was doing. They were scrambling to take care of what they could for the Restorer teams, and were happy that he was willing to do his own work.
Whenever he could, he jumped in and filled another generation tank before the techs could put other material into it. As soon as a
tank finished the growth process, I issued the command code to send the unicorns down to the island.
I don’t think either of us really slept for days.
Finally, the moment came when Stev placed the last surviving material into the generation tanks.
A couple of days after that, we sent the last of the unicorns down to the island.
The day after that, an angry group of Scholars and Instructors showed up at the auxiliary room door.
Chapter 15
Thanie was wracked with guilt and kept apologizing in between bouts of tears.
We’d warned her, again and again. But a couple of verbal jabs from Dermi and Fallah were all it had taken for her to lash out and tell them about the special project.
Of course, Dermi and Fallah immediately went to the Head Instructor and told him everything—including the fact that there were bumbler bees on the island. Which is what brought in the Scholars.
Stev and I were still groggy from lack of sleep. We were just sitting at our consoles, drinking tea and trying to wake up enough to function, when Whit and Thanie were herded into the room, followed by the primary Scholars and the Head Instructor. Behind them came Britt and Zashi.
Stev jumped to his feet. A younger person was supposed to rise whenever a Scholar or Instructor came into the room.
I remained seated. I sipped my tea and stared them down.
That made them furious. And, for some reason, nervous.
Accusations filled the room. I had deceived my Instructor by falsifying the information when I made the request for the special project. A student would never have been given a restoration project the size of the island. I had deceived the tank techs into believing I was a qualified Restorer and entitled to the special considerations I was given. I had lied to them in order to remove unsuitable genetic material.
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