Shivering World Page 4

  Will Varberg tipped his head back and smiled. “As Lee said, Gaea believes in taking care of its employees.”

  Graysha touched one key. The screen lit briefly, then blanked. She shook her head. Even on triple-­pay frontier duty, MF computers cost two terrannums’ wages.

  Wait. Varberg hadn’t been in the lab when Dr. Lee said that about the Consortium. He must have eavesdropped from the hall. She eyed him with distaste.

  “You’ll need a five-­character password to access the Gaea net.” He pulled out her chair and typed +BLOND+. “How’s that?”

  She didn’t like the password, and she especially didn’t like his knowing what access word she’d use, but this didn’t seem like the time to object. “Fine,” she said, making a mental note to change it later.

  He touched a few more pads, and the word vanished. “That will get you onto Gaea net and the colony’s general system. The Lwuites have their own net, but ours works like any university system within USSC jurisdiction.”

  Just like home. “Who monitors?”

  “No one, supposedly.”

  She didn’t believe that for a moment.

  “It’s automated,” he continued. “But be careful around those colonists, Graysha. Particularly Chairman DalLierx. I have suspicions about him.” He glanced at Mahera’s nameplate on the door, reinforcing the hint. “I’ll leave you and your computer to get acquainted.” Stepping back toward the doorway, the big man paused. “Suleiman and Ilizarov are both working today, so introduce yourself when you get a chance. Oh, and cover up if you go outside. The high last night was fifteen below, and it’s dropping fast.”

  “What?” she asked. “Wait a minute. The high—last night?”

  “While we were asleep,” he said in a faintly condescending tone, “the sun passed overhead. The maximum temp, Celsius, for the four-­workday period generally falls just before we get up on Cday.”

  “Okay. Okay,” she said, concentrating. “I did study this. We get four working days out of a planetary rotation, right? Aday through Dday equals one so-­called Goddard day?”

  “One word. Goddarday. Our short little workweek.” He blocked her view out into the lab when he passed through the door.

  She moved to the window, glad he was gone. Now she could take a look around. From up here, on the fifth floor, she stared out over a cluster of tiny row houses to an arc of larger constructs that looked like barns or equipment sheds, ringed by open fields. The fields reminded her of farmland in winter fallow. Her grad course in soils development had included day trips into Newton’s production area.

  She never dreamed she’d end up working this specialty.

  Outside, the distant fields were predominantly brown—ash brown, russet, or yellow-­tan. That reminded her to push up her sleeve. The t-­o button on her forearm was green. If she wanted to stay at her peak, she ought to pick up a roll of mints or dried berries, or whatever was available here, and keep them in a pocket.

  Later. Working quickly, she signed in on the Gaea database to learn what she could about these Lwuites before she met their chairman. He could be a critical contact, in several ways.

  She’d heard a little about them back at the school where she taught in Einstein Hab. A researcher in the subtle sexual dimorphism of the human brain—in other words, how men’s cerebral structure differed from women’s—Dr. Henri Lwu had hypothesized that most of human warfare resulted from overaggressiveness in both sexes, but primarily in the male. He chose the corpus callosum, the brain structure connecting the two hemispheres, for his specialized field of study, and he found something interesting. Between the eighth month of pregnancy and the second month after birth, male infants developed a differently shaped corpus callosum. After a massive brain-­cell die-­off, fewer neurons crossed the cerebral midline.

  That, he speculated, left male children less gifted at wholistic thinking, which used both hemispheres at the same time. Lwu found ways to alter the corpus callosum’s shape and thickness without using illegal gene manipulation. In test after test, the change made a quantifiable difference in his male patients’ aggressive tendencies. Those infants grew up to carry on normal lives, including fathering children, but rarely—if ever—exhibited belligerent behavior.

  So the literature claimed.

  United Sovereignties and Space Colonies policy blamed violent aggressiveness for much of humankind’s misery. Consequently, for nearly a hundred years, women had dominated human leadership. Henri Lwu found no shortage of Einsteinians willing to take part in his experiment for the sake of humanity’s future.

  This information was common knowledge. Now Graysha hoped to learn more, but here, as at Einstein, specific medical data was lock-­coded, sheltered by a label that cited the Religious Liberties Act of 2085. Many sects kept their ceremonial and doctrinal practices private. The RL Act, passed to protect the masses from obnoxious proselytizers, worked both ways.

  The only new information she now found concerned Lwuite surnames and explained MaiJidda’s pride in her capital J. The first Lwuites chose to be called by the first syllable or so of their mother’s surname, then a significant syllable or two from their father’s name (or husband’s, after marriage). Graysha nodded understanding. She’d inherited her mother’s hyphenated surname, which proved more of a handicap than a help in her life.

  Emmer clicked and grunted. Graysha scratched her, took a few of her remaining minutes to look over microbial inventories, then shut off her computer and hurried to the elevator. Down on the first floor, Dr. Lee’s harried-­looking secretary issued directions to the Lwuites’ Colonial Affairs office.

  Graysha eyed passing colonists on her way across the cool hub and up a long northbound tunnel. They walked purposefully, most women wearing their hair long and plaited like the physician’s, while the men’s was cut short. All wore shirts and pants of heavy, coarse brown cloth.

  DalLierx: Mother, then, was Dal-­something. Father, something-­Lierx. If she could win this man’s approval, it might be a start toward seeking out a gene healer from among the Lwuites . . . still assuming they were capable of doing such a thing. Her name, pointing back like a signpost toward her infamous mother, would work against her.

  Colonial Affairs was painted in black on concrete over a stairwell arch. Graysha started up. On the fourth-­floor landing, she hesitated a moment, catching her breath—mentally and physically—then strode in. Off the stairwell, desks were scattered toward all points of the compass. Along opposite walls, pairs of black doors watched her like the pupils of disapproving eyes.

  It took her a moment to realize there was hardly a scrap of paper anywhere. Desktops, waste cans, and shelves were bare of paper products. Composite film she saw in abundance, and a few framed sheets of what looked like linen parchment hung from the walls.

  Tree shortage, she guessed. Maybe they relied on composite film and taught their children to memorize.

  A pigtailed woman at the closest desk directed her to the last door on the left. Graysha rapped on it, then walked in.

  The man standing beside the desk, not much taller than her and looking her in the eye, had to be Lindon DalLierx. Wavy black hair cut short and small ears framed his boyish face. He had narrow black eyebrows that drooped toward the bridge of his straight nose, giving him a Peter Pan never-­grew-­up look. His serious stare hinted at disapproval, and she assumed yesterday’s sudden sickness did little to advance her chance at squirming into this man’s good graces.

  A pity. Irrelevant as it was, she liked his looks. She stuck out a hand. “Good morning, Chairman.”

  His long-­sleeved shirt was muslin, his hand as rough as a field mechanic’s. “Sit down,” he said. “I have a reconnaissance vidi cued up. I would like you to see our world.”

  Graysha took the seat beside DalLierx’s desk. Though his desk had a concrete frame, the desktop and chairs wore smooth brown leather covers. On the desktop, several childish clay figures surrounded a treasure: three leather-­covered antique books. “Th
ank you, Chairman. This long sun cycle is intriguing.” She spoke casually, wanting to sound nonthreatening. “When will the sun set?”

  He sat down on a high-­backed chair that curled forward around his shoulders. “At about midnight of this working-­day cycle. Officially, this is Cday, the third circadian period of four in a Goddarday. The schedule requires some mental adjustment.” His delicate features made him appear no older than twenty. He pressed palms together under his straight chin. “I am surprised to find someone so closely allied with USSC’s Eugenics Board at Goddard, Dr. Brady-­Phillips.”

  She gave him full credit for directness. “My EB stint was a long time ago. I’ve been with Gaea Consortium for three months. Before that, I taught at a public high school at Einstein.”

  “Yes, but you did promotional work for the Eugenics Board until recently.”

  Plainly, he knew more of her history than she expected. “That was only part time, while I was teaching.” She’d been an idiot to try working for her mother. Ellard’s unsubtle pressure to leave the EB for good was the single honest debt she still owed her ex-­husband. “I quit in ’31.”

  “I know.”

  Was she digging this hole wider with every attempt to climb out? “There are thousands of us—genefective people—living under USSC jurisdiction. I could no longer act as an EB spokesperson.”

  Instead of asking what triggered her decision, he rocked forward and eyed her silently. She stared back, wondering what combination of genes produced such a delicate though unmistakably masculine face . . . and what other effects Henri Lwu’s treatments wreaked on his brain, body, and psyche.

  “Are you feeling better?” he asked, leaning back.

  Oh, she was sick of this! “Thank you, I’m not an invalid. Flaherty’s syndrome is a microvascular capillary disease.”

  “Yes—”

  “I must stay a month,” she interrupted, then explained the Lwuite physician’s directive. She added, “I was relieved to have stayed calm under open sky.” Maybe she might draw him out with what had to be a shared experience. “I couldn’t escape the sensation that . . . that the wind up there meant a meteor puncture.”

  He clenched one hand, and for an instant, his eyes widened. “You’ll have to get over it. I did,” he said, hollow-­voiced. Before she could ask what terrible memory haunted him, he spoke again. “This vidi was made by a hovercopter pilot taking off here at Axis Plantation.” He reached for a keyboard and dimmed the room.

  Emmer tensed, curling closer to Graysha’s throat. She stroked the flat-­bodied gribien. Soft, warm fur gave way under her touch, a welcome relief from this prickly conversation.

  DalLierx had only a small screen mounted on his desktop, but its resolution was excellent. Closest to Axis—filmed in summer, she guessed—were wedges and patches of soft-­looking green crop fields. Dull, sandy flats beyond the croplands led to distant haze. Dusty gray-­blue sky hung close and intimidating. The only clouds in camera range were thin and extremely high. As the copter flew low out of the crater, Graysha found herself fascinated instead of frightened to see how the haze vanished around the outside of the planetary sphere.

  DalLierx leaned up to his keyboard and did something to interrupt the vidi. Two more keystrokes brought up a map. He pointed to a dot near the irregular continent’s center. “You’re here, at Axis Plantation.” Surrounding the continent, a blue-­gray sea held unknowable threats of its own. His finger slid northwest. “Hannes.” Then eastward, almost to the coast. “Port Arbor, and . . . Center.” The fourth settlement lay due west of Axis.

  She wondered if all the settlements smelled bad and if all that water came in as cometary ice. “What’s the scale?”

  “We’re about 500K from Center.” He restarted the vidi, which panned a counterclockwise circle. Beyond the crater, a moving cloud of black dust came into view.

  “What’s that?”

  “Ore truck. At Hannes, we’re refining metals. Track-­trucks in this area mostly bring in crushed stone for carbonate processing. We’re always short of the carbon necessary to manufacture CFCs, and all our organic waste that isn’t recycled as crop nutrient goes into CFC production. Here at Axis, we specialize in agriculture and atmospheric alteration.”

  She nodded. CFCs—chlorofluorocarbons—were greenhouse gases that slowly warmed the planet.

  “And we have the Gaea station here, of course,” he added without enthusiasm, “monitoring all planetary sciences.”

  Hostile but well mannered, she observed. She wished she’d had time to find out more about his interests, his history, anything that might serve as conversational currency and put him at ease.

  Between camera eye and high mountains, northerly gray-­black lava flows lightened to pale rose. Black sand drifted over coarse pink gravel, blown southwest from its parent material. She found the effect stunningly beautiful until she recalled that Goddard’s sandstorms had killed Jon Mahera.

  Will Varberg’s warning filtered back up through her memory. Was Chairman DalLierx party to a murder?

  He leaned away from the vidi when she did and brought the lights back up, then raised one dark eyebrow. “What do you think?”

  She reminded herself that he’d dedicated the rest of his life to developing this world. “It’s actually rather pretty, in an eerie, savage sort of way.”

  “I agree.” At last, a smile.

  “Thank you for the . . . tour.”

  He rested one hand on the leather desktop. “Why did you decide to pursue terraforming when you left your teaching position?”

  Back in the habs, the second part of that question was generally, “Otherwise, you seem like a sensible person.” Many habitants saw no justification for the time and resources necessary for planetary-­scale development. Space colonies, built outside the gravity wells that surrounded planets, made trade and travel so much easier. Graysha steepled her fingers. “I went into Ecosystems Development more as a field of study than out of any practical on-­site intention. I’m a teacher, both by training and preference.”

  “Ah. So you hope to go back and teach terraforming with the added qualification of three terrannums’ experience?”

  “Yes, and I believe that within the next few generations, we’ll solve the problems of transport down into gravity wells.”

  “I heartily hope so.”

  One more empathy point scored. She hoped. “When that time comes, people might choose to resettle planetside. They’ll need habitable worlds to live on.”

  “And frontier wages did nothing to dissuade you.” His darkly serious expression reminded her of a dear old friend. During the happy years, pre-­Ellard.

  Thinking of Ellard irked her. She rubbed a bandage on her tender right palm. “That’s true,” she said flatly. “I can use the money.”

  “You’re not averse to working with Lwuites?”

  She laughed, hoping to convey an image of friendly professionalism. “I have no prejudices, Chairman DalLierx.”

  She expected him to ask if she had religious beliefs and whether she followed all the Church of the Universal Father’s teachings. What he said instead was, “Prejudices aren’t necessarily bad. There are people I’d rather not work with. There is a time for cooperation and a time for separation.”

  Startled, she did not answer. The silence stretched over several uncomfortable seconds, until she changed the subject. “What happened to that . . . Was he a stowaway?” The youth caught on board her shuttle was so homely she had pitied him, like a runt puppy.

  “We have him in disciplinary confinement. I’ll assign him to the Gaea station to work off his shuttle fare home.”

  An opening! She dove in. “I used to teach his age group. If it would help, I’ll take him under my wing.”

  DalLierx stroked his chin, then said, “That might work. Thank you.”

  She acknowledged his thanks with a nod.

  “Other questions, Dr. Brady-­Phillips?”

  It sounded like he was starting to wind down t
he conversation, but she still needed to know if her hopes were completely futile. “Tell me, Chairman. Why didn’t you simply have me watch this vidi from the Gaea building?”

  He frowned, but smile lines gathered under his eyes. “I wanted to see for myself if you were adjusting to the notion of an open-­air planet.”

  “I seem to be.” She rubbed her left thumbnail, a nervous habit her ex despised. “The colony must depend heavily on transgenic mammals,” she said, cautiously pressing on. “Are they gene-­tailored or cloned here as conditions change?”

  “Neither,” he answered without hesitating. “For the present, we’re working with standard crosses. At least that’s my understanding. Your Dr. Lee provides breeding stock. She’d know better than I.”

  Had she seen a flicker of guilt? “All right,” she said, “I’ll ask Dr. Lee. One more question, though. I caught a rumor that Goddard may be recooling.” Also, her computer inventory showed odd gaps in cold-­tolerant microbial populations. “Any truth to it?”

  DalLierx uncrossed his legs and sat up straight. “There could be. Where did you hear that?”

  Finally, a reaction. “Back on Einstein.”

  He shook his head. “I was hoping you might’ve heard it confirmed here. I’ve spent hours trying to convince Dr. Lee that this cooling trend is serious. She keeps telling me, ‘Field data are ambiguous.’ Evidently you’re not yet infected by local Consortium policy.”

  “Policy?” Graysha repeated, wondering what sort of compost she was stirring. “Surely the Consortium works as closely with your people as humanly possible.”

  “That is why the Consortium decided the late Dr. Mahera had to be replaced, though meeting your salary meant doing without a secondary fusion generator we could’ve bought used from Copernicus Hab.”

  It was an opening she couldn’t resist. “Dr. Mahera’s death. What has the investigation brought to light?”

  “We’ve known for some time that a message was left in his personal mail on the morning of his death, assurance the approaching sandstorm had dissipated. The difficulty has been in tracing that message through the system. Gaea’s first reaction was to cast aspersions on possible Lwuite malcontents. That’s ridiculous. I’ll grant you some of us forget the Gaea people are our protectors. But I’ve seen men and women crack under the strain of field labor. These people held office positions before they came to Goddard. You must understand the changes they’ve been through.”