Spin Control

NOVALIS The Six Percent Rule

The Big Wood: 6:00 A.M., third day postlandfall.

Sunbeams sliced through the forest canopy a hundred meters overhead and slanted toward Arkady through the green haze of quivering leaf edges and fluttering insect wings. There was still a predawn, underwater cast to the forest light, but the night’s deep-sea shadows were fast giving way to the midmorning glow of shallow surf under sunlight.

Arkady had found a dacetine, one of the Beautiful Ants, and she was on the hunt.

She’d spied a springtail grazing on the waterlogged edge of a fallen leaf. Arkady watched her stalk her prey, her finely sculpted legs lifting and arcing with the graceful precision of the huntress she was. He knew what would happen, but, no matter how many times he watched it, the hunt retained its otherworldly magic.

The dacetine would approach the springtail, her movements growing slower and more deliberate with every step, until she stood so close that it was grazing literally between the razor-toothed prongs of her widespread mandibles. She would let the fine hairs between her mandibles, so delicate that they were invisible except under a microscope, brush across the oblivious springtail’s thorax. And then, twenty times faster than the blink of an eye, her mandibles would snap closed with enough force to cut the poor springtail in two.

Arkady shivered, wondering what it would be like to have the last thing you felt in life be the fine tickling of those intramandibular hairs on your neck. He had a sudden disturbing vision of the survey team as springtails, innocently sampling and measuring and mapping Novalis’s bewildering diversity while the razor-sharp mandibles closed in on them.

And yet…and yet there was nothing concrete, no real problem that he could point to to justify the feeling. The initial disputes among the crew had died down, quelled by the insane pace at which they’d all been working since planetfall. Meanwhile the survey progressed so spectacularly that so far it had largely consoled him for the mission’s more personal disappointments.

By the end of the first week afield, Arkady had documented five major nest complexes. Dozens upon dozens of the massive, man-high, aboveground nests constructed by the European wood ant, dotted in military formation across the woodland clearings, with their southern slopes precisely canted to maximize winter solar gain. A vast underground complex of leaf-cutter ants, which he suspected and would later confirm, had been artificially adapted to the temperate climate of the main continent. And in the warm open pastures, the exotic pyramids of the Cataglyphis, Herodotus’s legendary gold-digging ants, its surface dotted with precisely distributed specks of glittering gray schist.

But his most spectacular discoveries were all made under the deep green shadows of the forest they had begun to call the Big Wood. It wasn’t really a wood at all, but a temperate rain forest, and it hosted a diversity of ant life almost unimaginable by the normal standards of terraformed worlds. Some of the species were ones Arkady knew from RostovSyndicate’s genetic archives but had never expected to see in the wild. Others were so rare that he had to scurry back to the ship and consult his reference books to identify them.

He found the legendary hanging gardens of the Crematogaster longispina, some of them containing forgotten species of bromeliads that Arkady thought had died with Earth’s Amazon Basin. He found a plethora of ant birds and ant butterflies who followed the monstrous swarm and column raids of the army ants, though the army ants themselves had so far eluded him. He found ponerines and dacetines in all their stupendous variety. And most significant from an ecological standpoint, he found a number of leaf-cutter ants, Atta sexdens as well as Atta cephalotes, whose vast vaulted underground colonies could contain as many as 150 million minor workers, all toiling over their subterranean fields of tame fungi. They were Novalis’s single greatest herbivores and dirt movers, filling to overflowing the ecological niches of terrestrial species as various as cattle, aphids, and earthworms.

Terraforming on Novalis had succeeded so spectacularly that it threw into doubt every former assumption about what was possible or impossible in terraforming. That the planet had been actively terraformed was now established beyond question. The survey team had already found the burnt-out remains of two atmospheric entry craft and a half dozen scattered Quonset huts flanked by an overgrown cemetery. And in a nearby valley bottom they had stumbled on the ruins of a vast laboratory complex, its dormitories standing empty, its locked cages housing only the dry skeletons of abandoned mice and monkeys, its crumbling walls filled with a vast metastasizing supercolony of predatory ants that Arkady had to comb through every reference book in the ship’s library to identify as the supposedly long-extinct Strumigenys louisianae.

Novalis had been settled twice—or at least that was the conclusion Arkady, Arkasha, and the Aurelias had drawn when they tried to derive family trees for three of the standard seed species and came up with seeding dates strung out across three centuries.

The fact that both settlements had failed worried no one. There was no reason to assume that either failure had anything to do with Novalis. Most colonists arrived on their chosen worlds as walking ghosts: biologically alive but already doomed by the cold equations of evolution in a shifting fitness landscape. Either new blood arrived—usually in the form of custom-engineered posthuman colonists stuffed into UN-dispatched jumpships—or the original colony vanished, leaving its partially terraformed world behind for the next wave of settlers…or for the Syndicates.

And Novalis had everything the Syndicate surveyors had been looking for. No bare branch colonists to stir up trouble and open the door to the lawyers and diplomats. No fatal diseases or allergens, so far anyway. And above all, a rich, diverse, and to all appearances stable biosphere.

In short, Novalis was perfect. So what was the source of Arkady’s growing unease? Nothing, he told himself. Nothing at all. There wasn’t a thing wrong with the planet. And the glitches in his data? Glitches, nothing more. He wouldn’t have given a second thought to them if other things had been going well.

Other things meaning Arkasha.

Their relationship—or rather their complete lack of anything any reasonable person could call a relationship—had tinged all Arkady’s feelings about the mission. It would have been different if they’d disliked each other. Or if Arkasha had been selfish or lazy or a petty bully or any one of the thousand things that you always hoped the other member of a new workpair wouldn’t be. But he wasn’t. And Arkady did like him. He liked him more after every one of their rare and all-too-brief encounters.

Arkasha had a wry, subtle sense of humor; once he’d established by cautious probing that Arkady had the stomach for subversive jokes, he’d developed the habit of alighting next to Arkady at mealtimes, murmuring some outrageous thing in his ear, then evaporating back to the lab while Arkady was still trying to smother his laughter. And he was smart. More than smart. There was something liberating about talking to him. He was always short-circuiting Arkady’s accumulated social defenses so that he would suddenly find himself quite comfortably saying things that he hadn’t imagined he’d ever say to anyone.

Arkasha even liked ants, for God’s sake. He asked intelligent questions about Arkady’s theories and experiments…and actually managed to stay awake and apparently interested for the answers to the questions.

But every time it seemed they were starting to move toward something more than cool collegiality, Arkasha would retreat into his work, leaving Arkady confused, disappointed, and, as the weeks drifted by, desperately lonely.

It took less than a week on-planet for the survey team’s carefully engineered and supposedly foolproof quarantine procedures to fail. And when they failed, the damage hit the worst thing possible: the orbsilk gardens.

The orbsilk gardens were a fairy-tale realm in which the brutal economies of spacefaring life were transformed into abundant, blooming, luxurious life. It was this section of the ship—of any Syndicate ship—that was most heavily retrofitted, and therefore felt most like home to Syndicate senses. Here the hard cold virusteel of the UN-built driveship had been transformed by the collective labors of botanists, zoologists, and entomologists into a living architecture of silk and leaves and spun orbglass. Where the rest of the ship turned away from space and hunkered down behind its virusteel double hull, the ark section unfolded into the void like an intricate flower. When the ship was in orbit the vast spans of spun silkglass opened onto the sea of stars beyond the solar collectors, seeking the starlight that the orbsilkworms—and therefore the ship—lived upon. And at the moment they looked out over the green sea of the Big Wood from which the new invaders had come.

This was Bella’s kingdom, and she tended it with a fervent attention to detail that its denizens required. The orbsilkworms lived on dwarf mulberry trees, which were rooted in hanging hydroponic trays suspended from the airy ceiling. The elevation of the trays was either to protect them from the appetites of other shipboard insects or to avoid some kind of rampant fungal infection, Arkady could never remember which. But the result was a veritable hanging garden of fragrant, weeping, cocoon-festooned mulberry trees. They ate and slept and woke and spun their gauzy silk cocoons in much the same way that ten millennia of their forebears had done. But they were chimeras, ingeniously spliced genetic constructs, just like the Syndicate engineers who designed them. And the rich gold-brown shimmer of their cocoons revealed the nature of the chimera: a precisely engineered recombination of silkworm DNA with genetic material drawn from the spinners of the strongest natural fiber ever discovered: the silk of the golden orb spider.

When the silkworms were feeding, the sound of their collective jaws was loud enough to be audible: a constant slippery hum like the whisper of a sleeper turning beneath silken bedsheets. At other times, the garden was a place of gauzy shimmering silence in which Bella flitted from tree to tree or bent over her copper throwing bowls or labored at her airy glass-and-virusteel hand loom like some posthuman Lady of Shalott.

Out of this insubstantial aerie would come every article of clothing, every piece of rope, and every parachute, collecting net, and specimen sack that the survey team would use over the course of their mission. More important, a large array of materials that would be used to repair or replace broken elements of the ship itself would be produced here, or by subtle molecular manipulations of the raw silk in the zero-g labs down in the core engineering levels. And it would all come from the worms, teased into existence by Bella’s careful, deliberate, disciplined fingers.

Their management was more art than science. They died off with horrifying regularity, and for bizarrely trivial reasons: an inauspicious change of temperature or humidity; a bad smell; a sudden noise; a change in the habitation arc’s rotational gravity that might be so subtle as to be imperceptible even to the refined instrument of the human inner ear. At times they required air and light, and the workers would open up the ventilation louvers and pull back the blinds over the great skylights to let in the carefully filtered starlight. At other times they must be covered with damp sterile cloths and kept in the most perfect darkness and silence, lest they become startled and turn their heads so that their razor-sharp teeth severed the precious threads in midstream.

But now the orbsilkworms were more than startled.

They were starving. They were being outcompeted in their own carefully engineered ecological niche by an obscure species of caterpillar with a voracious appetite for mulberry leaves.

Bella did her best to help. She brought Arkady endless samples of everything that looked to her even remotely like one of the life stages of the pest. She even learned how to collect and preserve samples with the spare field kit Arkady dug out of storage for her. Unfortunately, the samples told Arkady a lot about the mysterious worm but not much about how to kill it.

What finally broke the problem open was a tiny seed of memory prompted by the sight of Bella’s throwing hooks glittering in the ruddy gleam of Novalis’s sunset…a seed of memory that germinated into the barest, tender green shoot of an idea.

“Listen to this,” Arkady told Bella excitedly when he finally tracked down the long-ago-read and nearly forgotten passage. “It’s from Wheeler’s Ants, the book that kicked off the great twentieth-century flowering of social insect studies. I must have read it when I was eight. I can’t believe it was still rattling around in my brain somewhere:

According to Magowan, [Wheeler wrote] quoted by McCook, “In many parts of the province of Canton, where, says a Chinese writer, cereals cannot be profitably cultivated, the land is devoted to the cultivation of orange-trees, which being subject to devastation from worms, require to be protected in a peculiar manner, that is, by importing ants from the neighboring hills for the destruction of the dreaded parasite. The orangeries themselves supply ants which prey upon the enemy of the orange, but not in sufficient numbers; and resort is had to hill people, who, throughout the summer and winter, find the nests suspended from branches of bamboo and various trees. There are two varieties of ant, red and yellow, whose nests resemble cotton bags. The orange-ant feeders are provided with pig or goat bladders, which are baited inside with lard. The orifices they apply to the entrances of the nests, whence the ants enter the bag and become a marketable commodity at the orangeries. Orange-trees are colonized by depositing the ants on their upper branches, and to enable them to pass from tree to tree, all the trees of the orchard are connected by a bamboo rod.”

“Okay,” Arkady said. “So that’s Magowan according to Cook according to Wheeler. And then Wheeler follows up the bit about the Cantonese red and yellow ants with what has to be one of the earliest written accounts of importing ants into the contintental United States for pest control. That’s what actually stuck in my mind. That and putting the bamboo rod between the trees for the ants to walk across. Though I don’t know what we’re going to use for bamboo here, come to think of it…”

He looked up expectantly only to find Bella staring rather blankly at him.

“Don’t you see?” he said. “Novalis’s analog to the orange tree worms has found your orbsilk garden. Now we’ve got to find Novalis’s version of Magowan’s red and yellow ants. Or, rather, we’ve got to find the ecological niche they belong in…and hope to God it’s got something in it we can use.”

Arkady had to shake down every tree within a morning’s walk of base camp. But he did it, with Bella’s surprisingly able help. And eventually he struck gold: a tiny golden ant that lived in the genetically engineered fruit trees that was the only visible legacy of the long-vanished bare branch colony.

They weren’t Monsanto ants either, which pleased Arkady because it suggested that they had been developed during the original colonists’ long interstellar journey. He was reinventing an already tried and tested pest control method. And the great thing about reinventing the wheel was that the wheel that worked for someone else usually worked for you too.

“Can you check my work before I do a release?” he asked Arkasha when he had mapped out what he hoped would be a suitable geneset. “Just in case?”

“Your work is always good, Arkady. I don’t have to check it.”

“But I’d feel more comfortable if you did.”

Arkasha shrugged, pronounced himself flattered, and checked it.

“I like it,” he said eventually. “Your queens function normally once they’ve mated, but they don’t have the genes that express themselves in the nuptial flight, so they don’t mate except in the lab. You get a perfectly normal colony, with the life cycle to support the large-scale predation you want from them, but you can cut the thread at the end of each generation and start fresh without worrying about wild strains developing. Classic example of de facto sterilization through genetic modification.” He made one of his wry faces. “Too bad they can’t do that for us. It’d save a lot of sweat and bother.”

Arkady cleared his throat and forced his mind away from the image that the words sweat and bother raised…an image that was never far below the surface when Arkasha was in the same room with him.

“Well?” Arkasha asked. “What are you standing there for? Go save Bella’s worms. She promised to make me another sweater, and I seem to be missing one.”

Amazingly, it worked. And the long, undulating willow wands that they’d used in place of bamboo sticks made the whole orbsilk garden look like one of the intricate diagrams of climatic succession cycles that Arkady had admired so much in his childhood textbooks. He’d only adapted an ancient solution to a new environment, rather than inventing it from whole cloth, but he felt a real sense of accomplishment nonetheless.

“Thank you so much,” Bella said in her quiet, awkward voice…an awkwardness Arkady had begun to suspect was not simple shyness but the hesitation of a thoughtful, sensitive person long accustomed to being misunderstood by her peers. “That was so clever of you. Can you imagine, if you hadn’t read that little paragraph and remembered it and…”

“Yeah, it’s kind of neat when useless knowledge turns out not to be so useless after all.”

“Exactly!” Bella breathed. “I mean what could be a better proof that education can’t all be practical application…that you have to have research and study and…and knowledge for its own sake?”

Arkady looked down into the shining eyes that were gazing up at him with such admiration and felt an unaccustomed flush of pleasure. It was amazing, really, how tiny and childlike Bella was. She even engendered the same protective feelings in him that children inspired. He supposed this was what human males must have felt back when…but no, his mind shied away from the thought.

“I’d like to help you with your collecting,” she was saying now. “If you need the help. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble to have me tagging along. I…I don’t mind taking on the extra work. And I wouldn’t be in the way, really I wouldn’t. It’s so interesting.”

Arkady hesitated.

“And I need to get away from…I feel so…so trapped sometimes…please, Arkady, I won’t be any trouble to you!”

“Of course you can help,” he said. “It never hurts to have an extra pair of helping hands. And I’ll be glad to teach you.”

Ironically it was also Shy Bella who brought about what Arkady later came to think of as his and Arkasha’s first Real Conversation.

She came into dinner late one night—a night when Arkasha had put in one of his rare appearances—and she walked straight across the room, served herself from the stovetop, and sat down between the two Ahmeds without so much as glancing at her sib farther down the table.

A sib who gave her a hard, narrow-eyed stare, then stood up and swept out of the room without uttering a word of excuse or farewell to anyone.

“Trouble in paradise?” Arkasha murmured ironically when the normal buzz of conversation had revived enough to cover his words.

“You think that’s paradise?” Arkady glanced around instinctively to make sure no one was listening. “It looks more like purgatory to me.”

“Now that might be just about the most interesting thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Arkady turned to find his sib’s dark eyes fixed intently on him. They were sitting very close, having slid down the bench together to make room for Bella, and he could feel the warm pressure of Arkasha’s thigh against his.

“You don’t give me much of a chance to say anything to you, interesting or otherwise.”

“Is that how it comes across to you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Arkasha seemed uncharacteristically taken aback. “Uh…doing anything tonight?”

“Should I be?”

“Well, I have some work I need to get done later, but walk down to the lab with me. I’ve got something to show you.”

Back in the lab, Arkady marveled as always at the neat dovetailing of individual and society, so pervasive in the Syndicates that it was for all intents and purposes invisible. Arkady’s side of the lab was a chaotic day-after-the-battle debris field of fly tape, sample containers, taxonomy treatises, work gloves, and trenching tools. His field gear—the most obvious vector of external contamination—had been disinfected daily since they made planetfall, but nothing could disguise the tears and stains that were badges of former expeditions. Even the newish lab coat dangling off the backrest of his stool bore the telltale spots and smears of yesterday’s sample preparations.

Arkasha’s side of the lab looked all but unused in comparison. Virgin expanses of countertop gleamed under the shipboard lights. Racked trays of slides glittered like ice in the zero-g shelving units beside neatly labeled notebooks and thick reference volumes whose spines had none of the cracks and dog-eared edges that Arkady’s books seemed magically to acquire. The only signs of a fallible posthuman presence—and even those were lined up along the backsplash of the lab bench like little soldiers—were Arkasha’s ubiquitous chewed pencil stubs.

It would have been more efficient of course to divide the labs by area of specialization rather than geneline. But in Syndicates as well as in anthills, efficiency rarely trumped psychological comfort. The first joint missions had tried to organize their limited work space by task category. Pure sciences with pure sciences. Field work with field work. Sample preparation segregated from processing and analysis.

It hadn’t worked. There had been fights and frustrations. People had worked less—and been more stressed out about what little work they did accomplish—than they were in their home Syndicates. They wanted to be with their sibs, not with strangers. And in the end, the steering committees had relented, surrendering to the very biological constraints they and their predecessors had engineered into their lateral descendants.

Tonight, however, Arkasha wasn’t even remotely interested in workplace efficiency. On entering the lab, he went straight to the refrigerator, pulled a large beaker out from behind the sample racks, and set it carefully on the countertop. “I had to barter my virtue to the Aurelias to get this,” he announced, “so you’d damn well better appreciate it.”

“What is it?”

“It seemed better not to ask.” Arkasha extracted two smaller beakers from the autoclave, poured out double shots of the clear liquid with practiced ease, and handed one to Arkady. “Tastes like beetle dung, but it gets the job done.”

“I’m not sure this is a good idea, Arkasha.”

“Drink faster, then. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your doubts slip away.”

Arkady took a sip and found, to his relief, that it tasted more or less like vodka. “I’m not going to go blind from this, am I?”

“Not unless you play with yourself while you’re drinking it.”

Arkady choked and spit a mouthful of the stuff on the floor and sat wheezing on his lab stool while Arkasha thumped at his back.

When Arkady was more or less breathing again, Arkasha climbed onto the counter, crossed his arms and legs, and peered down at him, looking for all the world like one of the sleek sharp-eyed crows that infested Gilead’s farmland districts. “So,” he began as if he were embarking on the weightiest of philosophical debates. “Tell me why, out of all the things in the world you could have turned your brain to, you chose ants.”

Why ants? Where to begin?

Even the mere names were things of beauty to him. Pogonomyrmex barbatus, for example: the red harvester ant, whose name always brought to his mind the earliest known description of the species, from some ancient Aztec codex: “It sweeps, makes itself heaps of sand, makes wide roads, makes a home.” Or the beautiful dacetines; or the primitive, solitary ponerines; or all the varied species of industrious leaf cutters.

The names and lore of ants reminded Arkady of the coded flicker of navigational beacons. They traced a tenuous path through the galaxy—always at the edge of extinction, always running just ahead of the death from which there could be no returning—plotting the tenuous evolutionary trail that linked all of posthumanity, UN and Syndicate alike, to Earth.

Take the ants on Novalis, for example. From a meager, hopelessly narrow stream of imported specimens they had flowed across the planet, filling every ecological niche he had so far investigated. Harvesters, earth movers, foragers, swarm raiders…and several variants of ants that Arkady had encountered in none of his long studies and that he suspected might be entirely new species adapted to the peculiar needs of life on Novalis.

“And what about you?” he asked Arkasha, embarrassed that he’d gone on so long. “Why genetics?”

“That’s less interesting. I was always top of my class, and all the top students are pushed into genetics more or less automatically.”

Arkady must have looked as incredulous about the idea of Arkasha being pushed into anything as he felt.

“And I liked it for my own reasons too, I suppose.”

Arkady waited.

“There’s a kind of poetry to genetics,” Arkasha said at last. He looked defensive, as if he thought Arkady might laugh at the idea. “I mean look at a person. Any person. You. The Aurelias. Look at this whole amazing planet we’re sitting on. And then just imagine what Earth must have been with all her countless species coevolving on an evolutionary landscape that they themselves were changing at every moment. Have you read Lotka? Not the parts they quote in political philosophy. The science. At the end of Principles of Mathematical Biology, he writes about the evolution of planets, what he calls the great world engine. I wanted to find out what makes the world engine run.”

“And have you?”

“I bare my soul to you and all you can do is make fun of me?”

“I’m not making fun of you! Really, I mean it. Have you found out?”

“No. But I will.” He gestured toward the door, and his voice dropped to a near whisper. “The answer’s right outside the airlock. All the answers. We just have to find eyes new enough to see Novalis with.”

“I know!” Arkady cried. “I feel the same way! I was thinking just this morning that Novalis is a kind of second chance. And not just for the Syndicates either. For earth sciences generally. Every time we’ve ever looked at data from pre-Evacuation Earth and wished we could go back, knowing what we know now, with the tools we have now… There’s a lifetime of work here. More than a lifetime.”

Arkasha poured himself another glass, threw back a quick swallow, then topped off Arkady’s glass. “So are you going to stick around to do it?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that.”

“You mean stay here? Permanently?”

“Someone’ll have to.”

“But don’t you want to go home to Rostov?”

Arkasha shrugged.

“It’s home. Doesn’t that matter to you?”

Another shrug.

“But…weren’t you happy there?”

“No,” Arkasha said baldly.

“Why not?”

“Has it ever occurred to you, Arkady, that we might be getting a little too conformist in the Syndicates? We go to great lengths to maintain sufficient genetic diversity, of course. But what about diversity here?” He tapped his forehead. “Or here.” He tapped his chest, not quite in the anatomically correct position, but close enough so that they both knew what organ he was talking about.

“I don’t think—”

“Look at you, for example. Look at the misery you caught over your dissent paper.”

“That’s putting it strongly.”

“Is it? Didn’t you catch just enough grief over it that you stopped writing along those lines?”

“No! I just…backed off a little.”

Arkasha shrugged and began to turn away.

“I want to talk about it,” Arkady protested. “I just don’t necessarily agree with you.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Arkasha sloshed the liquor around in his glass and took an experimental sip. “It’s gotten too warm, hasn’t it?” He got up without waiting for Arkady’s answer and deposited the beaker back in the lab’s sample refrigerator. It was a little alarming to think of what else was in there with it. But if it had come out of the Aurelias’ fridge, then Arkady supposed it had seen worse.

“Tell me,” Arkasha said when he returned to his perch. “Have you ever read the Bible?”

Arkady’s surprise and dismay must have shown in his face, because Arkasha laughed and quickly said, “Oh no. I’m not one of them. I was just thinking of the verses in Leviticus about the scapegoat.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not familiar with goats. What’s the Latin species name?”

Arkasha laughed. “It’s a metaphor, not a species. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the ancient Israelites used to put all the sins of the people on the head of a goat and cast it out into the desert. ‘And the goat shall bear away all their iniquities to an uninhabited land.’”

“I’m afraid I don’t see your point,” Arkady said, all too aware of how pompous he sounded.

“Don’t you? Instead of the desert we have euth wards. And instead of Yom Kippur we have culling and critique sessions.”

“That’s ridiculous, Arkasha! Renorming centers are for rehabilitation, not punishment. And even the people who can’t be reintegrated into their home crèches can lead happy, productive lives from the wards.”

“Oh, yeah? Name one person who’s done it.”

“Rumi.”

“Rumi, indeed. I was wondering when we were going to get to him. Brilliant, isn’t it? Let one dead dissident become a famous poet and you can wave his poems in the face of all the live dissidents to prove that they’re imagining things. Of course Rumi had to kill himself before he could be rehabilitated. But we only want to remember the feel-good part of the story. ‘I’m the echo of your echo, the shadow of your shadow’s shadow,’” Arkasha quoted, twisting Rumi’s famous lines to extract a disconcerting new meaning from them. “‘And let’s face it, brother, a man needs a shadow.’”

The poet’s words hung in the air between them, a ghostly reminder of the great man’s unrequited and ultimately fatal passion.

“It’s a love poem,” Arkady protested weakly, “not a political tract.”

“Is there a difference?”

Arkady felt hot and restless. He stood up, his back protesting its long stint on the hard lab stool; but there was nowhere else to go in the suddenly cramped space of the lab, so he sat back down again.

“If you want to talk about love,” Arkasha said, “let’s talk about the six percent rule. Or don’t you know what it is?”

Of course Arkady knew. Everyone knew. The six percent rule had dogged Syndicate genetic designers since the moment the first cohort reached sexual maturity. It turned out, after all the millennia of debate and argument and condemnation, that you could sociogenetically engineer humans for either heterosexuality or homosexuality. It was child’s play. An idiot could do it. Except that neither the most brilliant genetic engineering nor the most repressive social systems could do it to everybody. No matter how careful or ruthless you were, about six percent of the population broke the other way out of the starting gate. And the percentage was the same regardless of whether you were trying to promote God-given heterosexuality or laboratory-manufactured homosexuality.

“Well, what if the six percent rule is like your ants?” Arkasha went on. “What was it you said in your dissent paper? That following behaviors are only adaptive as long as Russell’s prerequisite for inductive reasoning applies: as long as future futures continue to resemble past futures. But dissent is the swarm’s way of keeping alternative solutions on hand: hedging its bets just in case future futures break the rules learned from past futures.”

“Okay,” Arkady admitted. “I guess I said that.”

“So generalize. What if there’s a dissent instinct in all social animals, humans as well as ants? What if dissent—deviance, abnormality, protest, whatever you want to call it when some people in a society refuse to follow the crowd—is really the species trying to maintain enough diversity, mental as well as physical, to deal with unexpected bumps in the road? Has it ever occurred to you that we might be normalizing ourselves onto a fitness peak we’re not going to be able to climb back down from if our future futures turn out to be too different from our past futures?”

“First of all,” Arkady said after a stunned pause, “my dissent paper didn’t even remotely say that. And, second, how can you possibly compare political dissent, which, yes, I admit there might be a place for, with…well, deviance?”

Arkasha jumped up off his lab bench and started straightening already obsessively straight papers. “I have to get back to work, Arkady. It’s been nice talking to you. Let’s do it again next week.”

“Arkasha!”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just…” He floundered, unable to bring himself to speak the unspeakable. “I want…”

Arkasha sighed. “What do you want from me, Arkady?”

“I want…I like you, dammit! As a person. We should be friends, but every time it seems like we’re about to be, you…Oh for God’s sake, will you put your stupid notes away and sit down ?”

Arkasha sat down, drawing his feet onto the bottom rung of his lab stool and crossing his arms over his chest like a child who’d just been yelled at for fidgeting.

“I mean if I bore you or something, let me know,” Arkady went on.

“I can live with it.”

“You don’t bore me,” Arkasha whispered.

“And I don’t care about the sex either.” There, he’d said it. It couldn’t get worse than that, could it? He plunged on. “I mean, of course I care. But I don’t care if you’re—I don’t care what you are. And I’m not going to report you, or anything like that. Maybe that’s wrong, but…I’m just not, okay? So if that’s why you’re avoiding me, you can stop worrying about it.”

Arkasha blinked. “Are you trying to tell me that it’s okay with you if I’m a sexual deviant?”

“Yes.”

“Failure to report is a crime, Arkady. You could land yourself in a renorming center that way.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should care. You could get yourself into a lot of trouble if you talk like that to just anybody.”

“I’m not talking to just anybody. I’m talking to you.”

“Arkady—”

“I mean it. I don’t care. And you don’t have to explain yourself to me. It’s over. We never have to talk about it again.”

“Arkady!”

“What?”

“I’m not.”

Arkady frowned at him for a moment, not understanding.

“I’m not.”

“Oh.”

One corner of Arkasha’s mouth quirked upward. “You sound disappointed.”

“I, uh…feel really stupid.”

“You don’t look so clever either. No, no! I’m joking! Seriously, Arkady, why should you feel stupid? There’s nothing to feel stupid about.”

“Well, I mean, I just assumed. And I’m not one of those guys who thinks he’s so devastatingly attractive that anyone who doesn’t fall into bed with him has to be a pervert.”

“I didn’t think you were one of those guys. Though you are pretty devastatingly attractive.”

The room suddenly felt hot and very small. He looked up to find Arkasha watching him intently.

“But this is a really long assignment, Arkady. A long time to live in each other’s back pockets if things go badly.”

“I wouldn’t be…difficult.”

“I know you wouldn’t. You’re much too nice for that.”

“I love you.”

Arkasha shrank back into himself again. When he finally answered his voice was muffled and he wouldn’t meet Arkady’s eyes. “You only say that because you don’t know me,” he said. “When you know me better, you won’t say it anymore.”

“Am I interrupting something?” Bella asked coolly from the door.

Arkady jumped, dropping his glass, which shattered deafeningly. Razor-sharp splinters of glass scattered to the room’s four corners. The place reeked of guilt and alcohol.

“Have you seen my sib?” Bella asked, casting a suspicious eye around the lab as if the two of them might have secreted her missing crèchemate in a file drawer.

“Should we have?” Arkasha asked.

Bella ignored him. “Well?” she said, looking at Arkady as if he were the only person in the room.

“Uh…no. Sorry.”

“She said she was coming down here to have you run a sample from the seed bank.” Typically, she managed to make the statement sound like an accusation. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her these days. Her mind is on everything except her job.”

Which probably meant that her mind was on everything except her crèchemate, Arkady thought uncharitably.

Meanwhile, Bella was still ostentatiously ignoring Arkasha. Embarrassed, Arkady stood up and ushered her out into the corridor so that Arkasha could get back to work if he wanted to.

But apparently he didn’t want to. He padded across the lab to take in the conversation over Arkady’s shoulder. Bella muttered something huffy about people sticking their noses in where they didn’t have any business to be.

“Am I interrupting something?” Arkasha inquired sweetly.

Bella glared at him.

“Have you tried paging her?” Arkady asked.

“Of course I have!” Now, for the first time, and quite inexplicably, she seemed embarrassed herself. “She doesn’t answer.”

“Have you talked to the Ahmeds about it?”

“I’m not disloyal!”

Right. Not disloyal enough to lodge a formal complaint against her crèchemate. Just disloyal enough to talk her down with every other construct on board.

“Well, if she shows up, I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”

And after a few more complaints and accusations, Bella finally took herself off.

“I loathe that woman,” Arkasha murmured, tracking her progress down the hab ring.

“You shouldn’t provoke her,” Arkady said. “She already hates you. And she’s the type who gets people put on euth wards.”

Arkasha stared down the corridor. He looked wounded and brittle and terribly in need of protection. “You think I don’t know that?”

“I wish…”

“You wish what?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

“Listen, Arkady. I really do have work I need to get done tonight. Is it going to hurt your feelings if I go do it?”

“Of course not,” Arkady lied.

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“Thanks, Arkady. And don’t leave the light on, okay? I don’t want to keep you up.”

“I’ll leave the light on.”

“You don’t have to leave the light on.”

“I want to.”

“You shouldn’t.”

Arkady forced a grin that didn’t come out nearly as shaky as he’d thought it would. “Are you going to argue with me about this all night, or are you going to go do your work?”