Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Thirteen: Prax

The thing that surprised him the most when it all changed was how little it all changed. At least in the beginning. Between the trailing end of the reconstruction and the rising tide of research projects, Prax sometimes went days or weeks without looking at newsfeeds. Anything interesting in the greater sphere of humanity, he heard about in the conversations of others. When he’d heard that the governing board was putting out a declaration of neutrality, he’d thought it was about gas sequestration and exchange. He hadn’t even known there was a war until Karvonides told him.

Ganymede knew too much about being a battlefield already. The collapse was too recent in their collective memory, the scars still fresh and raw. There were ice-flooded corridors still unexcavated after the last outbreak of violence, back before the ring gate, back before the opening of the thirteen hundred worlds. No one wanted that again. And so Ganymede said it didn’t care who ran things, just so long as they could continue their research, care for the people in their hospitals, and go about their lives. A massive We’re busy, you figure it out to the universe in general.

And then … nothing. No one claimed them or threatened them. No one fired nukes at them, or if they had, the weapons hadn’t landed and the event hadn’t made the news. So much of Ganymede’s food was locally sourced, no one worried about going hungry. Prax had some concerns about research funding, but after the first few times he brought it up and had the issue swept aside, he’d stopped trying. They were in a holding pattern. They were keeping their heads down, doing the things they’d always done, hoping no one took notice.

And so Prax’s daily trip between his hole and Mei’s school and his offices had been weirdly unchanged. The food carts in the station served the same fried corn mash and bitter tea. The project-management meetings continued on Mondays before lunch. The generations of plant and fungus and yeast and bacteria lived and died and were analyzed just the way they would have been if no one had crippled Earth. Or killed it.

When Belters in Free Navy uniforms started appearing on the corners, no one said anything. When the Free Navy ships had started demanding resupply, their scrip had been added to the approved list of currencies and their contracts drawn up. When loyalists who’d filled their boards and feeds with support for Earth and demands that the governing board take a stand went silent, no one talked about it. It was just understood. Ganymede’s neutrality was permitted so long as the Free Navy could enforce it. Marco Inaros—who Prax had never heard of before the rocks fell—might not control the base, but he was quite willing to prune away the people who did until the organizational chart had been bonsai’d into the shape that pleased him. Pay tribute to the Free Navy, and govern yourself. Rebel, and be killed.

So nothing much changed and also everything did. The tension was there every day. In every interaction, however mundane. And it came out at strange times. Like reviewing trial-report data.

“Fuck the animal trials,” Karvonides said, her face tight and angry. “Forget them. This is ready to go into production.”

Khana crossed his arms, scowling at her. Prax, confused, had only the data to turn to, so he turned to it. Harvester yeast strain 18, sequence 10 was doing very well. The production numbers—sugars and protein both—were slightly above expected. Lipids were inside the error bars. It had been a good run. But …

His office was spare and close. The same room he’d taken when he’d brought Mei back from Luna. The first office of his tenure on the Reconstruction Committee. The others on the committee had moved on to larger places with bamboo paneling and augmented-spectrum lights, but Prax liked being where he already was. The familiar had always offered a powerful comfort. If Khana and Karvonides had worked in any other section, there would have been a couch or at least soft chairs for them to sit on. The lab stools in Prax’s office were also the same ones he’d had his first day back.

“I …” Prax said, then coughed, looked down. “I don’t see why we’d break protocol. That seems … um …”

“Completely irresponsible?” Khana said. “I think the phrase is completely irresponsible.”

“What’s irresponsible is sitting on this,” Karvonides said. “Two additions to the genome, fifty generations of growth—so less than three days—and we have a species that can beat chloroplasts for making sugars out of light and extends out almost into gamma. Plus the proteins and micronutrients. Use this for reactor shielding and you can shut down the recycler.”

“That’s hyperbole,” Khana said. “And this is protomolecule technology. If you think—”

“It is not! There is literally nothing in Hy1810 that comes from an alien sample. We looked at the protomolecule, said It can’t do that; can we? and figured out how to make something of our own. Native proteins. Native DNA. Native catalysts. Nothing that traces back to Phoebe or the ring or anything that came off Ilus or Rho or New London ever touched this.”

“That … um,” Prax said. “That doesn’t mean it’s safe, though. The animal protocol—”

“Safe?” Karvonides said, wheeling on him. “There are people starving to death all over the Earth right now. How safe are they?”

Oh, Prax thought. This isn’t anger. It’s grief. Prax understood grief.

Khana leaned forward, his hands in fists, but before he could speak, Prax put up his palm. He was in charge here, after all. It didn’t hurt to actually exercise his power now and then.

“We’ll continue with the animal protocol,” he said. “It’s better science.”

“We could save lives,” Karvonides said. Her voice was softer now. “One message. I have a friend at Guandong complex. She’d be able to replicate it.”

“I’m not going to be part of this conversation,” Khana said. The door slammed closed behind him so hard that the latch didn’t hold. The door ghosted open again, like someone invisible was coming in to take his place.

Karvonides sat, her hands on Prax’s desk. “Dr. Meng, before you say no, I want you to come with me. There’s a meeting tonight. Just a few people. Hear us out. Then, if you really don’t want to help, I won’t bring it up to you again. I swear.”

Her eyes were dark enough it was hard to tell iris from pupil. He looked back down at the data. She was probably right, in her way. Hy1810 wasn’t the first yeast that had been modified with radioplasts, and Hy1808 and most of the Hy17 runs had been in animal trials for months without any statistically significant ill effects. With things on Earth as bad as they were, the risk of Hy1810 having adverse effects was almost certainly lower than the dangers of starvation. His stomach felt tight and anxious. He wanted to leave.

“It’s proprietary,” he said, hearing the whine in his voice as he said it. “Even if we could ethically release it, the legal consequences, not just for us but for the labs in general, would be—”

“Just come hear us out,” Karvonides said. “You won’t have to say anything. You won’t even have to talk.”

Prax grunted. A little chuffing sound that centered behind his nose. Like an angry rat.

“I have a daughter,” he said.

The silence between them went on for the space of a breath. Then another. Then, “Of course, sir. I understand.”

She stood up. Her stool scraped against the flooring. It sounded cheap. The urge to say something fluttered in his chest, but he didn’t know what it would be, and before he found it, she was gone. She closed the door more gently than Khana had, but with a greater finality. Prax sat, scratching at his arm though it didn’t itch, then he closed the report.

The rest of the day was filled with his own work in the hydroponics labs. His new project was a modified fern built for water and air purification. They stood in long rows, fronds bobbing in the constant and well-regulated breeze. The leaves—so green they were almost black—smelled familiar and welcoming. The embedded sensors had been gathering data since the day before, and he looked it over like sitting with an old friend. Plants were so much easier than people.

When that was done, he stopped back by his office, returned half a dozen messages, and reviewed the meetings scheduled for the next morning. It was all routine. All the same things he’d done before the rocks hit Earth. It was like a ritual.

Today, though, he took the extra step of adding an administrative lock on the Hy1810 data. He tried not to think too much about why he’d done it. Something vague fluttered in the back of his mind about being able to show he’d done all he could do. He wasn’t sure who he imagined he’d be defending himself before, but he didn’t really want to think about that.

He felt nervous during his walk to the tube station. The pale tile walls, the arching ceiling above the platform. All of it was just as it had been ever since the rebuild. It only seemed ominous because of all the things in his own head. While he waited for his tube, he bought a wax-paper cone of fried bean curd with olive oil and salt. The vendor was an Earther, and Prax noted the way the man had kept his hair and beard long, letting them grow out from his skull to mimic the slightly larger heads of true Belters. The man’s skin was dark, so the OPA tattoos on his hands and neck didn’t stand out as much as they could have. Cryptic coloration, Prax thought as the chime announced the tube’s arrival. Probably a good idea. It was interesting to see how humanity adopted the strategies you saw anywhere in nature. They were part of nature, after all. Red in tooth and claw.

Mei was already home when he got there. Her voice gabbling with and over the slightly higher tones of Natalia’s came in from the playroom like music. Prax relocked the door behind him and went to the kitchen. Djuna, making salad for their dinner and reading something off her hand terminal at the same time, paused both activities to smile her greeting. He kissed her shoulder before going to the little refrigerator and plucking out a beer.

“Isn’t it my turn to make dinner?” he said.

“You agreed to take tomorrow because of my late meeting—” Djuna started, then stopped when she saw the beer in his hand. “One of those days?”

“It was fine,” he said, but he didn’t even convince himself. Part of him thought he should tell her, but that was selfish. Djuna had her own burdens and her own work. She wouldn’t be able to do anything about Karvonides or Hy1810. If she couldn’t fix it, there was no call to burden her. Besides which, then if anyone asked, she’d be telling the truth when she said she didn’t know anything.

Over dinner, they talked about the safer parts of work. His plants, her biofilms. Mei and Natalia were having one of their good days when they seemed more like best friends than stepsisters, and they took turns talking about all the things that had happened at school. David Gutmansdottir had gotten sick from the new lunches and had to go to the nurse, and the math test was late, and they’d gotten exactly the same score, but it was all right because they’d missed different questions, so Mr. Seth knew it wasn’t that they cheated, and anyway tomorrow was Dress-in-Red Day, and they both had to make sure to put out the right clothes before bed and …

Prax listened to them running together, leaping subject over verb over object like they were running downhill. Natalia had Djuna’s brownness, high cheekbones, and thick nose. Beside her, Mei looked as pale and round as old pictures of Luna. After dinner, it was Mei’s turn to clean up, and Prax helped her a little. The truth was, she didn’t need it. But he enjoyed her company, and it wouldn’t be long before she was old enough to start differentiating from the family unit. Then it was homework hour for all of them, and then baths and then beds. Mei and Natalia stayed up talking across their bedrooms to each other until Djuna shut the connecting door. Even then, the two girls talked, like they had to burn through their buffers before sleep could finally come.

Prax lay beside Djuna, his arm as a pillow, and wondered where Karvonides was. If her meeting had gone well. If he hoped it had or not. Maybe he should have accepted her invitation. Even if it was only so that he could know what was going on …

He didn’t notice that he was falling asleep until the door chime woke him. Prax sat up, disoriented. Djuna was looking at him, her eyes wide and round and frightened. The chime came again, and his first nearly coherent thought was that he should answer before they woke the girls.

“Don’t go,” Djuna said, but he was already lurching across the bedroom. He grabbed his robe, knotting the belt as he stumbled into the dimness of the rooms. The system readout said it was just after midnight. The chime came again, and then a deep, soft knocking, like a massive fist using only a fraction of its power. He heard Mei cry out, and knew from long experience that the sound meant she was still asleep, but wouldn’t be for long. The skin on Prax’s flank puckered into goose bumps that only had a little to do with the temperature of the air.

“Who’s there?” Prax said through the closed door.

“Dr. Praxidike Meng?” a man’s muffled voice asked.

“Yes,” Prax said. “Who is it?”

“Security,” the voice said. “Please open the door.”

Which security? Prax wanted to ask. Ganymede Station security or Free Navy? But it was too late now. If it was Station, it made sense to open the door. If it was Free Navy, it wouldn’t stop them if he didn’t. What he was going to do next was the same either way.

“Of course,” he said, then swallowed.

The uniforms of the two men in the hall were gray and blue. Station security. The relief that flooded his bloodstream was evidence of how frightened he’d been. How frightened he always was these days.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

The morgue smelled like a lab. The chemical reek of the phenol soap bit at his sinuses. The throbbing hum of the high-use air filters. The clinical lights. It reminded him of his years at upper university. He’d taken a cadaver lab then too. The body he’d dissected had been suffused in preservative fluids, though. Not as fresh. And it had been in better condition.

“The identification’s solid,” one of the security people said. “Metrics and markers sync up. ID matches. But you know how it is. No relatives on the station, and the union has rules.”

“Does it?” Prax asked. He meant the question honestly, but when he said it out loud, the words took on nuances he hadn’t intended. Can a union still matter when there’s barely a government any longer? Are there still rules? The security man grimaced.

“It’s the way we’ve always done it,” he said, and Prax heard the defensiveness in the man’s voice. The hint of anger. As if Prax was responsible for all the changes they were suffering.

Karvonides lay on the table, her modesty maintained by a black rubber sheet. Her expression was calm. The wounds on her neck and the side of her head were complicated and ugly, but the lack of fresh blood gave the illusion that they weren’t serious. They’d shot her four times. He wondered if the others from her meeting were in other rooms, on other tables, waiting for other witnesses.

“I’ll attest,” he said.

“Thank you,” the other security man said, and held out a hand terminal. Prax took it, pressed his palm to the plate. It chirped when it was done recording him, a weirdly cheerful sound, given the circumstances. Prax handed it back. He looked at the dead woman’s face, waiting to understand what he felt about her. He had the sense that he should cry, but he didn’t feel like it. In his mind, she’d become evidence not of a crime but of what the world had become. Her death wasn’t the beginning of an investigation, but the conclusion of one. The data was unambiguous. What happens when you stand up? You’re cut down.

“Can we ask you a few questions about the deceased, Dr. Meng?”

“Of course.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Two and a half years.”

“In what capacity?”

“She was a researcher in my labs. Hmm. I’ll have to make sure her datasets get collected. Can I make a note of that? Or do I need to wait until the interrogation’s done?”

“This isn’t an interrogation, sir. You go right ahead.”

“Thank you.” Prax pulled up his hand terminal and put an entry on his list for the morning. He thought at first there was something wrong with the display, but it was only his hand trembling. He shoved the terminal back in his pocket. “Thank you,” he said again.

“Do you have any idea who might have done this to her? Or why?”

The Free Navy did this to her, Prax thought. They did it because she was trying to stand against them. She was doing that because people are suffering and starving and dying that might not have to, and she had it in her power to make a difference. They found out, and they killed her. The way they’d kill me if I made things uncomfortable for them.

He looked into the security man’s inquiring eyes. The way they’d kill you too, he thought.

“Anything you can offer on the question, sir? Even something small might help.”

“No,” Prax said. “I don’t have any idea.”