what he may or may not have read in my official reports. He is also becoming quite testy about my failure to respond in a satisfactory way (though I have responded fully to all his legitimate inquiries and requests). I suspect that if he is in control when he arrives, removing me from office will be his first priority. Fortunately, demographics suggest that I will be dead before he gets here so that issue will be moot.
Thirteen you may be, but at least you understand that you cannot lead strangers, you can only coerce or bribe them.
— Vitaly
Sel Menach's back and neck ached from his hours staring at alien molds through a microscope. If I keep this up, I'll be bent over like an old hag before I'm thirty-five.
But it would be the same out in the fields, hoeing, trying to keep the vines from growing up the maize and blocking out the sun. His back would bend there, too, and his skin turn brown. You could hardly tell one race from another in this savage sunlight. It was like a vision of the future: Personnel chosen from all the races of earth to be surgeons and geologists and xenobiologists and climatologists — and also combat pilots, so they could kill the enemy who once owned this world — and now that the war was over, they'd interbreed so thoroughly that in three generations, maybe two, there would be no concept of race or national origin here.
And yet each colony world would get its own look, its own accent of I.F. Common, which was merely English with a few spelling changes. As colonists began to go from world to world, new divisions would arise. Meanwhile, Earth itself would keep all the old races and nationalities and many of the languages, so that the distinction between colonist and Earthborn would become more and more clear and important.
Not my problem, thought Sel. I can see the future, anyone can; but there'll be no future here on the planet now called Shakespeare unless I can find a way to kill this mold that infests the grain crops from Earth. How could there be a mold that is already specific to grasses, when the grasses of Earth, including the grains, have no genetic analogue on this world?
Afraima came in with more samples from the test garden in the greenhouse. It was so ironic — all the high- tech agricultural equipment that had been carried along with the fighters in the belly of the transport starship, and yet when it failed there would be no parts, no replacements for fifty years. Maybe forty, if the new stardrive actually brought the colony ship sooner. By the time it gets here, we might be living in the woods, digging for roots and utterly without any working technology.
Or I might succeed in adjusting and adapting our crops so that they thrive in this place, and we have huge food surpluses, enough to buy us leisure time for the development of a technological infrastructure.
We arrive at an extremely high level of technology — but with nothing under it to hold it up. If we crash, we crash all the way down.
'Look at this,' said Afraima.
Dutifully, Sel stood up from his microscope and walked over to hers. 'Yes, what am I looking at here?'
'What do you see?' she asked.
'Don't play games with me.'
'I'm asking for independent verification. I can't tell you anything.'
So this was something that mattered. He looked closely. 'This is a section of maize leaf. From the sterile section, so it's completely clean.'
'But it's not,' she said. 'It's from D-4.'
Sel was so relieved he almost wept; yet at the same moment, he was angry. Anger won, in the moment. 'No it's not,' he said sharply. 'You've mixed up the samples.'
'That's what I thought,' she said. 'So I went back and got a new selection from D-4. And then again. You're looking at my triple check.'
'And D-4 is easy to make out of local materials. Afraima, we did it!'
'I haven't even checked to see if it works on the amaranth.'
'That would be too lucky.'
'Or blessed. Did you ever think God might want us to succeed here?'
'He could have killed this mold before we got here,' said Sel.
'That's right, sound impatient with his gift and piss God off.'
It was banter, but there was truth behind it. Afraima was a serious Jew — she had renamed herself in Hebrew to a word meaning «fertile» when they held the vote on mating, in hopes that it would somehow induce God to let her have a Jewish husband. Instead, the governor simply assigned her to work for the only orthodox Jew among the colonists. Governor Kolmogorov had respect for religion. So did Sel.
He just wasn't sure that God knew this place. What if the Bible was exactly right about the creation of that particular sun, moon, and earth — only that was the whole of God's creation, and worlds like this one were the creation of alien gods with six limbs, or trilateral symmetry or something, like some of the life forms here — the ones that seemed to Sel to be the native species.
Soon they were back in the lab, with the amaranth samples that had been treated the same way. 'So that's it — good enough for starters, anyway.'
'But it takes so long to make it,' said Afraima.
'Not our problem. The chems can figure out how to make it faster and in larger quantities, now that we know which one works. It doesn't seem to have damaged either plant, does it?'
'You are a genius, Dr. Menach.'
'No Ph.D.'
'I define the word 'doctor' as 'person who knows enough to make species-saving discoveries.»
'I'll put it on my resume.'
'No,' she said.
'No?'
Her hand touched his arm. 'I'm just coming into my fertile period, doctor. I want your seed in this field.'
He tried to make a joke of it. 'Next thing you'll be quoting from the Song of Solomon.'
'I'm not proposing romance, Dr. Menach. We have to work together, after all. And I'm married to Evenezer. He won't have to know the baby isn't his.'
This sounded like she had really thought things through. Now he was genuinely embarrassed. And chagrined. 'We have to work together, Afraima.'
'I want the best possible genes for my baby.'
'All right,' he said. 'You stay here and head up the adaptation studies. I'll go work in the fields.'
'What do you mean? There are plenty of people who can do that.'
'It's either fire you or fire me. We're not working together anymore after this.'
'But no one had to know!'
'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' said Sel. 'You're supposed to be the believer.'
'But the daughters of Midian —»
'Slept with their own father because it was more important to have babies than to practice exogamy.' Sel sighed. 'It's also important to respect the rules of monogamy absolutely, so we don't see the colony torn up with conflict over women.'
'All right, forget I said anything,' said Afraima.
'I can't forget it,' said Sel.
'Then why don't you —»
'I lost the lottery, Afraima. It's now illegal for me to have offspring. Especially by poaching another man's mate. But I also can't take the libido suppressants because I need to be sharp and energetic in order to conduct my study of the life forms on this world. I can't have you in here, now that you've offered yourself to me.'
'It was just an idea,' she said. 'You need me to work with you.'
'I need someone,' said Sel. 'Doesn't have to be you.'
'But people will wonder why you fired me. Evenezer will guess that there was something between us.'
'That's your problem.'
'What if I tell them that you got me pregnant?'
'You're definitely fired. Right now. Irrevocably.'
'I was kidding!'
'Get your brain back inside your head. There'll be a paternity test. DNA. Meanwhile, your husband will be
