Spin Control

NOVALIS Trapping Crows

It began quietly, a faint thrumming under the everyday whistle and chatter of the awakening forest.

Birds sang, but they were far off, hunting and nesting in the sunlit heights of the canopy. Only gradually did a louder, more urgent song alert Arkady that the great predator was on the hunt. A thrush appeared—no, an entire flock of thrushes, flying and dipping and warbling. A moment later Arkady caught sight of a pair of ocellated antbirds: no mere opportunistic swarm followers but professionals who would have flown their appointed rounds before sunrise, peering into the hidden bivouacs of the swarm raiders to determine which army was most likely to be on the march today. Arkady had seen spinfeed of ocellated antbirds literally knocking each other off tree branches in order to stake out the best positions from which to swoop down on the moveable feast that was about to come their way. The pair weren’t quite at that level of feeding frenzy, but they were obviously expecting action.

A moment later a chaotic flurry of ant butterflies—Arkady thought they were ithomiines but he couldn’t be sure—erupted into the clearing, a sure sign that the raiders were approaching. But by then Arkady could already hear the murmur and hiss of a vast insect throng, running, hopping, slithering, and flying in a desperate attempt to escape the raid front.

The raiders surged into the clearing like a glittering, granular, red tsunami. The raid front was fifteen meters wide: tens of thousands of reddish-black ants flowing through and around and under the debris of the forest floor, covering the ground with a deadly carpet of razor-sharp mandibles. Arkady and Bella retreated cautiously, skirting around to the side of the glittering tide until they could track its progress without being overrun themselves.

The swarm’s method of operation was deceptively simple: the front rank of the raiders simply seized every living thing in their path, grappling and stinging until by the simple expedient of piling ant upon ant upon ant, they could subdue spiders, scorpions, beetles, cockroaches, grasshoppers, entire ant colonies, small rodents, and even, according to the ancient rumors of Earth’s jungles, unwatched human infants. In the space of five minutes Arkady and Bella watched this raid front seize a spider, a cluster of caterpillars, and half a dozen foraging ponerines unlucky enough to be caught in the raiders’ path. A bright blue beetle was caught by the tide, succeeded in staying afloat for a few precarious moments, and then capsized and was sucked into the whirl of glistening bodies. As the swarm caught each new prey item, major workers grasped and immobilized it while their comrades dismembered it for easier transport back down the supply lines. And gradually, at more or less the pace of a walking human, the raid front flowed through the clearing and into the forest beyond, leaving a thinned-out but still-impressive braid of foraging paths behind it: forward-moving columns carrying reinforcements up to the raid front, while backward-flowing ones transported prey items back to the bivouac to feed the ravenous larvae.

Arkady leaned cautiously over the swarm, poised his soft-nosed tweezers above one of the foraging routes, and plucked out one of the powerful soldiers guarding the columns to hold up for Bella’s inspection.

“She’s beautiful,” she said.

“She’s also one of the most successful organisms Earth ever created. Without these ants there would be no humans. And I don’t mean only biologically. Army ants evolved in the same environments early humans did, and the words for them—siafu, soldier, soldado, and so forth—go back as far as any words in human speech. There’s even a theory that organized human hunting and warfare developed from prehistoric man’s observations of the African Driver Ant’s raiding fronts.

He turned the soldier to give Bella a better view of the armored head, with its massive jaw muscles and barbed mandibles. “In pre-Evacuation Africa people even used to use them as surgical staples. You hold the soldier up to the wound, like so.” He demonstrated, keeping a careful distance between the furiously grasping mandibles and his own arm. “You squeeze her body to make her bite down on the edges of the wound, and then you twist off the body, and the head stays locked in place until you’re ready to take it out. And of course then the ant’s own immune defenses make the method as sterile as anything short of viral surgery. Neat, huh?”

“And what are we hunting the hunters for?” Bella asked. Arkasha had been right; she did have a sense of humor under the shyness.

“Well, officially because they’re the planet’s top predator and Arkasha and I want to get as much data on them as we can. But honestly…I’ve always kind of wanted an army-ant swarm to play with. Wait till I show you Schnierla’s circular milling experiment.”

All fun stuff…but not quite fun enough to take Arkady’s mind off the unnerving suspicion that something wasn’t quite right about Novalis.

Things still looked good on the surface. Better than good. Miraculous.

But the pieces that all looked so good in isolation became slippery and intractable every time Arkady tried to piece them into some larger pattern. And with every sedimentary layer of data that accumulated in his logbooks, Arkady was becoming more and more convinced that it wasn’t ants he should be trapping, but (metaphorically speaking) crows.

Trapping crows had always been emblematic, among working field biologists, of the kind of thankless, impossible, frustrating fieldwork that could take years off your life without adding measurably to your store of reliable data. Arkady wasn’t quite sure when the term trapping crows had first been applied to terraforming…but it certainly fit.

In theory terraforming was simple. You did your DVI. You figured out whether your volatiles were within an acceptable range. If they weren’t, you moved on and found another planet. If they were, you went to work on the one you had. First, you initiated runaway greenhouse syndrome by seeding the atmosphere with CFCs. Once atmospheric CO₂ content hit the tipping point, the greenhouse effect would start cascading, and you could just monitor its progress via remote probe, until things reached the point where you could effectively create an ozone layer by photodissociation. Or if you had enough colonists willing to live in hell, you could just let surface dust storms block UV radiation in the place of an ozone layer. And even during these initial stages you could start seeding; classic terraforming practice dictated the seeding of the target planet with UV-resistant cryptoendolithic lichens, most of them artificially tweaked descendants of the few precious remaining samples of lichens from the Ross Desert of Antarctica. And once the lichens had done their work, you started in with a well-known succession of plant and insect life that built up toward…well, ideally toward just what they’d found on Novalis.

But that was the theory. And the one sure thing about theory in complex adaptive systems was that, while it could tell you a great deal about the characteristic dynamics of a given system, it could never deliver reliable predictions of what the system would do in practice.

Try to put the theory into practice on a real planet, and the neat schemata spun off into chaos. A biosphere was an emergent phenomenon, just like an AI or an ant swarm. You couldn’t “build” one the way you built a ship or an orbital station. You could only put the necessary conditions in place and hope it would find a way to build itself. Sometimes it did. And sometimes, for reasons that could never be established completely, the system never self-organized into anything recognizable as a functional biosphere. Or it organized into a form that was impossibly unfriendly to humans and their descendants. Or some complex positive feedback loop developed that crashed the biosphere so badly that all you could do was scrap it for parts.

In such cases, terraformers were left with the uncomfortable, time-consuming, and often futile task of biopsying a failing biosphere and trying to figure out how to tweak it back onto a sustainable trajectory. More often the biopsy was an autopsy: The niggling little problem that you’d set aside to work on when you had time turned out to be the beginning of a catastrophic crash that could only have been stopped by specific actions at a precise moment…usually a moment that slipped by while you were still getting around to worrying about that odd little anomaly you’d noticed in your last set of field data.

This nebulous and frustrating exercise in chaotic systems control was what terraformers called trapping crows. And Arkady had started to log datapoints that were making him wonder if trapping crows wasn’t about to become a full-time job in his very near future.

“What’s this bunch for, again?” Arkady asked as Aurelia pulled the next vial of blood. It was the sixth, if he’d counted right; well in excess of the amounts required for the normal monitoring he’d been accustomed to all his life.

“Immunodominance assay.”

“Because of the sneezies?” That was what they’d started calling the coldlike symptoms that were making the rounds since they’d landed, turning embarrassment into humor.

“Yes.” Aurelia frowned, concentrating intently on the task at hand despite its apparent simplicity. Arkady had already decided that the Aurelias’ (to his mind) excessively methodical nature was a central personality trait of their geneline. It was probably a highly adaptive trait for surgeons, but it made for somewhat lackluster conversation.

“Surely it’s just a reactivated virus? The long trip out? Cryo? Stress?”

“Well, obviously,” Aurelia snapped. It had been known since the earliest days of space travel that astronauts on long-duration missions passed around reactivated viruses, sometimes succumbing to childhood diseases to which they’d apparently already established immunity. “But we should have seen a matured immune response by now. I want to see if someone’s matured an unadaptive response and is passing it around to the rest of us.”

Looking at Aurelia’s fierce expression, Arkady had a sudden twinge of pity for whoever the unfortunate culprit turned out to be.

“Let’s just hope that’s all it is,” she said, half-speaking to herself.

“What else would it be?”

“I don’t know. Not much of a track record on long-range multisyndicate expeditions. And I was never for having Motais on the mission. I don’t like their new immune system splice. And I don’t trust designers who offer glib promises about what untested splices will or won’t do in the real world.”

“You’re sure it’s something we brought?” Arkady asked, speaking before he really thought the question through. “You haven’t run into anything…I don’t know…odd?”

Aurelia had her steth on, checking his vitals while she had him on the table in the name of thoroughness. Now she pulled the steth off and looked sharply at him. “Odd how? Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

“Okay, you’re done. Off the table. You’re healthy as an ox, whatever an ox is. You and Arkasha both. Pretty as anything Motai ever turned out and a lot tougher than the Ahmeds as soon as you look past the muscles. They did some fine work when they spliced you boys. Classic. No gimmicks. I approve.”

Arkady stood, rolling down his shirtsleeve. “What about your sib? Her work going okay?”

“You’d have to ask her. I’ve been too busy virus hunting to do anything but work, sleep, and piss. Plus, she’s just getting over this piece of shit virus. Hundred and four fever. Unbelievable.”

“Does that mean she’s immune now?”

“It means jack for all I know. I’m over my head. And unlike some people around here I’m not too chicken-shit to admit it. I’m going to ask Arkasha to take a look at it as soon as he’s done putting out his own fires.”

“His fires? He’s run into trouble too?”

“You’re his sib. What the hell are you asking me for? Listen, Arkady, no offense but I hope you’re not going to call another formal consult over this. Life’s too short for me ever to spend another hour in the same room with that idiot Ahmed.”

“Hey, cowlick,” Arkasha said when Arkady walked into the lab.

“I hate that nickname.”

“Why else do you think I keep using it?”

Since their late-night talk, he had taken to speaking to Arkady in a cool, bantering tone and gently mocking him about everything from his cowlicks to his bad housekeeping habits. It was better than being ignored…sort of. But it was part and parcel of the same frustrating pattern that had characterized their relationship from that first meeting. One step forward and a step and a half back. And somehow it was always Arkady taking the step forward and Arkasha retreating.

“What’s bothering you?”

“Who says anything’s bothering me?”

“You do.” Arkasha rubbed at his own cowlick-free forehead in a mocking through-the-looking-glass gesture. “Talk about futility. Nothing you can do now to make your hair lie down and grow the right way. That kind of defect’s almost impossible to fix, even in utero. A real throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater problem.”

“Well, in MotaiSyndicate they would throw the baby out with the bathwater, wouldn’t they?”

Arkasha shrugged, apparently not all that interested in Motai-Syndicate’s cowlick policy. “The interesting thing to me is when you do it. At first I thought it was just social self-consciousness. A first meeting. An awkward conversation. A contentious consult. But then I noticed that you do it when you’re alone too.”

“If you’re there to see me do it, then I’m not alone, am I?”

“Very cute. You do it when you’re working is what I mean. And I think you do it when you’re thinking non-norm-conforming thoughts. Going after the outward physical deviation because it’s easier to smooth out than the one that really scares you.”

“And when exactly did you decide to become a renorming counselor?”

“Oh, so nothing’s bothering you? I’m glad to hear it.” Arkasha folded his arms and smiled.

“Okay,” Arkady admitted. “It’s the survey.”

He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly awkward, and crouched down to pull his field notebook from his rucksack. He set it on the table, still not meeting his pairmate’s eyes. “I’m just…not a hundred percent comfortable with the results I’m getting in the field.” The understatement of the millennium. “Normally I’d talk to the DVI team about it but…well…the DVI situation being what it is…”

Arkasha grasped the essence of the problem with such astounding speed that Arkady caught himself thinking yet again that he was far too fine a tool for the scientific hackwork of a routine survey mission. “Have you worked up your climatic succession equations yet?” he asked.

“I tried. I came up with nonsense.”

“Can I see your work?”

“I checked it. And double-checked it. It’s not a calculating error.”

“I’m not saying it is,” Arkasha replied with unaccustomed mildness. “I just want to understand what you’ve done so I don’t waste time repeating it.”

He waited while Arkady leafed through the pages, written and scratched out and overwritten, on which he’d tried and failed to make sense of the facts on the ground.

“What’s dh? Disturbance history?”

“Yes. And C is percentage of the sample in climax stage. And P is…”

“Patch areas. Yes. Great. Perfect.”

Arkasha flipped back to the first page of calculations, walked around to the other side of the lab bench, grabbed a piece of scrap paper and a chewed pencil stub, dragged his stool back around to Arkady’s side of the table, and sat down—all without taking his eyes off the equations. “Go boil some coffee, would you? It’s going to take me a while to get through this. And Arkady?”

Arkady turned, his hand on the doorjamb.

“We’re not telling anyone about this until we’re sure, right?”

“Right.”

“Good boy.”

Arkady was so distracted that he boiled the water twice, and by the time he got back Arkasha’s scratch paper was thickly covered with his illegible pencil scratchings.

“Well,” Arkasha announced. “Your math’s fine.”

“I know my math’s fine. What I don’t know is where the problem is.”

“In the data, obviously.”

“What are you—?”

“Oh, get your hackles down. There’s nothing wrong with your data collection methods, or your samples or your recording or anything else you’ve done. There’s something wrong out there.” He gestured toward the skin of the hab ring and the vast black forest beyond. “There’s something wrong—or right—with the planet itself.”

Arkady stared wide-eyed at Arkasha. “What do you mean ‘wrong or right’?”

Arkasha rubbed at his head, his face screwed up into a mask of indecision. Then ran his fingers down the neatly aligned spines of his own intimidatingly orderly notebooks and plucked one out off the rack to spread before Arkady. “Have a look at this.”

Arkady couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was neatly written out in Arkasha’s minute, mathematically precise hand, and it betrayed none of the adjustments, revisions, recalculations, and smudged erasures that marred Arkady’s own efforts.

He leaned over the page, straining to decipher the tiny print. He was so close to Arkasha that he could see the pulse flicker in the soft hollow between his collarbones. Suddenly he desperately wanted not to be worrying about mutation rates or DVI numbers or anything else but Arkasha. You only love me because you don’t know me. What kind of crazy thing was that to say? And it was wrong, anyway. Dead wrong. He cleared his throat and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Uh…is r rate of mutation?”

Arkasha nodded.

“In mitochondrial DNA?”

Another nod.

“I’m sorry,” Arkady said after a long moment. “It looks fine to me. I guess I know enough to know what I’m looking at, but not to spot the problem.”

“Look at the answer I came up with.”

Arkady looked, assessing the number as a real-world fact for the first time, rather than as the abstract product of a series of mathematical operations. “Um…isn’t that kind of high?”

“It’s worse than high. It’s impossible. But it’s what’s out there.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I stayed up three nights in a row centrifuging fresh samples to make sure of it. It’s right. It’s all right. Except it’s all wrong.” Arkasha grabbed a second notebook and set it in front of Arkady. “Remember those hairy beetle things you were so excited about last week?”

“The ant lions?”

“Ant lions. Right. Well, thanks to your fascination with them, they’re the most thorough sampling we’ve got of a sexually reproducing species. So when my other models started going south, I figured I’d look at them.”

“And you came up with that ?”

“Exactly. According to my calculations, your beloved ant lions shouldn’t exist. Just like every other living thing on this planet. In fact, Novalis should be a sterile hellhole. And every species on it—every bug, every bird, every tree, every blade of grass—should be walking ghosts.”

The two men stood looking at the page before them for another long moment.

“You’re sure?” Arkady asked finally.

“That’s what the numbers say.”

“But it’s not what the world outside the airlock says.”

“Isn’t it?”

“So what do we do now?”

“We punt,” Arkasha announced, as if it were the only logical solution. “We push the whole problem onto Ahmed’s desk and let him worry about it.”

No need to say which Ahmed; both men had long ago written off By-the-Book Ahmed as useless.

“But if we’re wrong…,” Arkady began.

“We’re not wrong.”

“Still,” Arkady said. “I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I knew whether or not the new DVI numbers were adding up.”

Arkasha made a disparaging noise. “What are you going to do? Walk down the hallway and ask Bella if her numbers add up, and if they don’t, then was she planning to cook the books again and would she mind terribly telling us which planet’s DVI she’s going to borrow this time so I don’t have to waste another day tracking the numbers down in the data banks? You can count me out of that conversation!”

“Well, we could be a little more tactful than that.”

Arkasha folded his arms across his chest and stared meaningfully at Arkady.

“Or, uh…we could always just punt and let Ahmed worry about it.”

In the end the Ahmeds called a general consult to discuss what they diplomatically described as “concerns” about the preliminary survey results.

“So where do we go from here?” one of the Aurelias asked when Arkady and Arkasha had taken turns laying out the problems in their work.

Arkasha shifted in his chair. “I say we shift base, see if we get better results in the other hemisphere. After all, the same arguments still apply. More biomass, higher species counts, better baselines…We need to rule out the possibility that we’re looking at some local—”

“Do you have the faintest idea how totally impractical that suggestion is?” By-the-Book Ahmed interrupted.

“It wouldn’t be if you’d followed my advice and picked a scientifically defensible landing site in the first place.”

“I refuse to let this consult become an excuse for revisiting closed issues. And even if—”

“And who the hell says that’s your decision?”

“—and even if we were going to reopen the question of base camp sites, I certainly wouldn’t do it on the advice of two alleged experts who can’t even figure out how to conduct routine survey work!”

“Why don’t you go around the room, Ahmed, and see how many other people are willing to say their data looks right. Really. I want to hear it.”

“Our work is solid!” Lazy Bella protested.

“No it’s not,” her sib countered. She really was getting more assertive, Arkady thought. “Well, I mean…at least mine isn’t. I’ve been staying up nights trying to figure out where I went wrong.” Shy Bella sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand, flushing in embarrassment. “Sorry.”

“What about you?” Arkasha asked Aurelia the geophysicist.

Embarrassed silence.

“Well,” she admitted finally, “most of my stuff’s fine. I mean, the issue here isn’t rocks. But I do feel like…well, the planet just doesn’t look good enough to me. Compared to what everyone else is seeing. Whenever I talk to any of the life-sciences people I keep getting the creepy feeling that Novalis is putting two and two together and getting five. Or five hundred million, more like.”

“We can’t make a decision of the magnitude of moving the base camp on our own anyway,” By-the-Book Ahmed broke in. “I say we launch a courier. Send samples back to Gilead for processing.”

“And do what exactly in the intervening four months?” one of the Banerjees snarked. “Drink ourselves into a stupor?”

“Go back into cold sleep. Set the shipboard comp to wake us up when it gets the return transmission.”

If this had been a single Syndicate mission, Ahmed’s decision would have been accepted without question; what could be more obvious, after all, than calling home for instructions?

As it was, however, the non-Aziz A’s bridled. Even the relatively docile Arkady could feel the urge toward rebellion. A learned response? A genetic reflex? A difference in the negotiation styles and customary behaviors that each of the team members had learned in his or her home Syndicate? Did it even matter? And was it any accident that all their rebellious feelings found a voice in Arkasha?

“I refuse to waste four months waiting for the same joint steering committee that got us into this mess!” the other Banerjee announced. “Life is too short. I have a job to do.” A pointed glare at By-the-Book Ahmed. “Even if some people don’t.”

Laid-back Ahmed opened his mouth to say something reassuring—and that was when all hell broke loose.

By-the-Book Ahmed accused Arkasha of being an egotistical humanist elitist.

The Aurelias came to Arkasha’s defense, and Bella accused them of siding with a fellow Rostov even when they knew he was a deviant who’d been skating on the edge of renorming for decades.

The other Aurelia leapt to her sib’s defense by calling Bella a lazy, self-centered, manipulative bitch.

“It’s not my fault we’re on the wrong side of this stupid planet!” Bella protested. “It wasn’t my idea to land here!”

“Like hell it wasn’t!” Oh no. Please, Arkasha, just keep your mouth shut for once. “You sat right here three weeks ago and sided with the Ahmeds on the landing site decision for no reason at all but sheer petty-minded spite. And now you have the hypocritical nerve to—”

“I did not side with the Ahmeds!”

“Well, you sure as hell didn’t side with me!”

“That’s not the same thing,” Bella said primly. “I have a right to express my opinion.”

“Anyone as stupid, lazy, ignorant, and selfish as you are doesn’t have a right to have an opinion!”

“Look,” Arkady pleaded. “Let’s just try to calm down and—”

But all he succeeded in doing was throwing himself into the middle of the flames.

“Stop apologizing for him!” Bella said.

“She’s right,” one of the Banerjees agreed. He pointed at Arkasha and began speaking of him in the third person and in that special tone that made every nerve in Arkady’s body cringe at the remembered misery of collective critiques gone by. “He’s the real problem. He can’t bother to be friendly, or even polite. He picks fights. He disagrees with everything. He goes around jerking people’s chains until they’re so pissed off that even when he’s right they won’t agree with him. Which is why we’re in this hemisphere instead of the one he wanted to land in. Which if he’d bothered to build a consensus and work with people we probably would have agreed to instead of having the Ahmeds, who—excuse me, Ahmed, but honestly—don’t know shit, make the decision by default—”

“You people really are pathetic,” Arkasha said in a detached, almost conversational tone of voice.

“See? See?”

“Are we done ripping each other apart yet?” Laid-back Ahmed asked in a very small and quiet voice. “Does anyone have any ideas about what we should do now, as opposed to whose fault it is?”

“Sedatives might be a good place to start,” Arkasha muttered.

“Oh shut up, Arkasha.” One of the Aurelias sighed, sounding fed up to the point of no return.

Arkady cleared his throat.

“What?” By-the-Book Ahmed said, turning on him savagely.

“Nothing!”

“Gee,” Shrinivas said acidly. “Arkady has nothing to say for himself. That’s a big fucking change.”

Eventually things petered out into an exhausted and hostile silence.

Ahmed sighed. “Look, people. We’re all under a lot of stress. Obviously things aren’t going too well. I think it’s important to remind ourselves that we have to make decisions on the basis of the information we have at any given time. Sometimes later information proves a particular decision not to have been perhaps the best possible one we could have made. That’s no one’s fault. It’s just the way things break. We move forward, and we adjust. Obviously feelings are running high at the moment. But we really don’t have time to cool off and come back later. We need to reach some consensus about where to go from here.”

More silence.

“We could always take a vote,” one of the Aurelias said finally.

The idea was shocking. The fact that someone would even suggest such a crude and, well…human tactic showed how frayed around the edges the consensus-building process had become.

A long dance ensued, during which no one would exactly admit that they liked the idea of taking a vote, but no one would condemn it either. And, of course, in the end they voted…though only with the proviso that if the vote broke purely along lines of Syndicate loyalty, they would throw out two of the Rostov votes to even things up.

The vote didn’t break along Syndicate lines, however.

By-the-Book Ahmed and Bossy Bella were for going back into orbit and calling for instructions. Arkady and Arkasha were for pulling up stakes and moving to the other hemisphere, but the Banerjees and the Aurelias split, with one pairmate opting for cryo and a call for instructions and the other opting for staying put at least temporarily. And that left only Shy Bella and Laid-back Ahmed.

All eyes turned to Bella…who, predictably, either couldn’t make up her mind or was too shy to speak it so bluntly.

Later, in their quarters, Arkasha would tell Arkady that humans had had several mechanisms to deal with this sort of situation, including a thing called abstention, which Arkady thought sounded like a vaguely gruesome first-aid procedure. Probably it was better for everyone, including Arkasha, that he hadn’t admitted to knowing such a thing in public.

“I don’t know. I think I—” Bella broke off abruptly and sneezed into her cupped hands. “I’m sorry,” she said in the humiliated and embarrassed voice of a Syndicate construct admitting to physical weakness. “I must have caught Aurelia’s bug somehow—” She broke off, wracked by another fit of sneezing.

“I certainly didn’t give it to you!” Bossy Bella announced as if her sib’s confession were a covert attack on her moral rectitude and ideological purity.

Laid-back Ahmed stared at her for a moment, his normally good-natured face twisted into a disdainful expression that Arkady wouldn’t have thought he was capable of. Then he got up, walked out of the room, and returned with a tissue.

Bella blew her nose—an operation from which they all politely averted their eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered, looking up at Ahmed with a glitter in her eyes that made Arkady wonder if she was running a fever. “I should have thought of it myself. It’s just…I’m so tired…”

Ahmed shook his handsome head, gave Bossy Bella another baleful look, and sat down.

“Why are we even sitting here?” By-the-Book Ahmed asked his sib. “If she can’t make up her mind, then we’ve got four votes for going forward and four for stopping. And even if she sides with Arkasha your vote will cancel hers out.”

“I care what Bella thinks, and so should you,” Laid-back Ahmed said patiently. “And anyway I don’t want to break a tie. I think this is a decision for the life-sciences specialists.”

“She’s not a specialist!” his sib protested. “She’s a B, for God’s sake!”

“Bella?” Laid-back Ahmed asked, ignoring his pairmate.

By-the-Book Ahmed pressed his lips together in a thin disapproving line, folded his arms across his chest, and pushed his chair back from the table. But he didn’t get up. Like everyone else his attention was now riveted on Bella.

“I agree with Arkasha,” she said finally. “Mostly.” She cast an apologetic, slightly defiant look in his direction. “We do need to move base camp, and there’s too much at stake for us to waste four months of field time going back into cryo while we wait for orders. But I’d like a little more time here first. I think we all ought to try to make sense of the data we’ve got before we move. No trying to make our home Syndicates look good or covering up mistakes in our work. We’ve all got enough expertise—even the Ahmeds—to check each other’s work. And then at least the time here won’t be a total waste.”

Everyone looked at each other, waiting for someone to take the initiative.

“I’ll go along with that,” Arkady hazarded.

“Me too,” one of the Aurelias said in a subdued voice.

“What about the rest of you?” Laid-back Ahmed asked. “Is everyone on board with this?”

Everyone seemed to be.

“What about you?” he asked his own pairmate.

Ahmed shrugged. The two Aziz A’s locked eyes for a moment. “Okay,” By-the-Book Ahmed said grudgingly. “It sounds sensible. But I want it noted in the ship’s log that I was overruled on this.”

A feeling of shaky relief permeated the room. Disaster narrowly averted once again. Consensus achieved…sort of. Bella had bucked the caste system in a way that was both astonishing and (to the Rostovs and Banerjees at least) highly gratifying. And thank God for Ahmed, Arkady told himself. What the mission would have turned into without his keeping the peace between warring factions didn’t bear thinking.

Arkasha, on the other hand, turned out to have a rather different view of the consult.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said when Arkady finally cornered him in the lab late that night.

“You aren’t still upset about what the Banerjees said? Look, tempers were running high. People won’t remember it in a few days.”

“I’m glad you’re so sure.”

“You’re getting hung up on trivialities, Arkasha. It’s not that big a deal…”

“Is that why you followed the other sheep instead of defending me?” Arkasha said in a voice so low Arkady barely heard the words.

“What are you talking about? I agreed with you. I voted with you! What the hell do you want from me?”

Arkasha gave him a bruised, angry look. “Nothing.”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

“You’re right. I’m being ridiculous.”

“You can’t really think—”

“Well, if I can’t think it, then what’s the point of talking about it?”

“Why do you always have to—”

“You’re right. I’m wrong. I admit it. There’s nothing left to talk about. Now will you go away please?”

Back in their cabin, Arkasha’s neatly made bunk tormented him. It was impossible to sit still here, let alone sleep. He needed to think. A trip around the powered-down arc of the in-flight hab section would clear his head, even if it didn’t bring sleep any closer.

Only when he was almost there did he realize that in his distress he’d unconsciously turned toward the closest thing on the refitted UN ship to home: the airy hanging forest of Bella’s orbsilk gardens.

In day cycle the silk garden was a gauzy maze of sunlit mulberry limbs, gently swaying seed trays, and silver-edged cocoons. Now it was a whispering, rustling, shivering fairy-tale landscape of silvery starlight. Arkady had penetrated deep into the forest of hanging trays before he realized that he wasn’t the only one who had decided on a midnight walk.

He would wish later that he’d turned around and retreated into the darkness. Or spoken. Or done anything other than what he did do. But in that moment something pulled him on. And the something that pulled him forward was the same thing that kept him silent.

He heard the catch of breath in an unseen throat. He saw a single creature, one half lean brown muscle, the other half soft whiteness, both halves frozen in the act of some atavistically significant movement. Only in the next frozen moment did he realize that the strong, clean line picked out by moonlight that pierced the mulberry branches was the curve of Ahmed’s spine.

The two lovers disentangled themselves from each other. Bella turned into the darkness as if she were trying to bury her face in the wall.

“Go on,” Ahmed told her in a voice that had nothing to do with the voice he used to talk to the rest of the world. “I’ll deal with this.”

She turned toward Arkady as if she were about to explain or apologize, then heaved a shuddering sigh and fled down the long swaying tunnel of weeping branches.

When Arkady turned back to Ahmed, the big Aziz A was watching him, his face drained of all expression, his hands opening and closing at his side in a way that made Arkady acutely aware he’d just been touching a woman with them.

“Nothing happened,” Ahmed said. He was standing on the balls of his feet, Arkady noticed, like a wild animal readying itself to fight or flee. “She was just curious. Nothing happened.”

“Okay,” Arkady said.

“You don’t believe me.”

“No. I believe you. Really.”

“I don’t care for myself.” Ahmed shifted restlessly, moving closer to Arkady as if he thought mere physical proximity would make his words believable. “But don’t put Bella through it. You don’t know what they do in the euth wards, Arkady. They don’t just let you die. They try to fix you. They try until you’re ready to beg them to kill you.”

Arkady looked at the other man. He felt that he was actually seeing him as a physical being for the first time. The brown skin and blue-black hair and dominating manner that had been, until now, merely shorthand for AzizSyndicate were suddenly a body: Ahmed’s body.

He tried to imagine that body with Bella, with any woman, and found the idea…not repulsive exactly, but incomprehensible. How would it work exactly? And how would either of them, knowing nothing of their lover’s body and needs and desires, ever be able to satisfy the other?

“It’s not her fault,” Ahmed repeated when Arkady failed to speak. His voice dropped to a husky, pleading whisper. “She just felt sorry for me. How can she deserve to be punished for that?”

Arkady looked away; there was something in Ahmed’s eyes suddenly that he couldn’t stand to look at. “I didn’t see anything,” he said. “Really, I didn’t.”

“You mean that?”

He nodded. He still couldn’t bring himself to look at the other man.

“You’re a good person, Arkady.”

The images that flooded Arkady’s brain were startling, vivid, unpleasantly stranded between the erotic and the disgusting. And somehow, horribly mingled with the brief glimpse of Ahmed and Bella, was his own obsessive and consuming desire for Arkasha.

“I’m not good,” he whispered. “I’m a long way from good.”