on Ganymede but covertly owned by the Democratic Union of China. In those days, companies and governments of Earth had not been allowed to operate in the Kuiper Belt, which had been claimed and ferociously defended by outer system cartels. That hegemony had ended in the Quiet War, but the Quiet War had also destroyed all records of the experiment; even the Democratic Union of China had disappeared, absorbed into the Pacific Community.
There were over fifty thousand objects with diameters greater than a hundred kilometers in the Kuiper Belt, and a billion more much smaller, the plane of their orbits stretching beyond those of Neptune and Pluto. The experimental planetoid, Enki, named for one of the Babylonian gods of creation, had been lost among them. It had become a legend, like the Children’s Habitat, or the ghost comet, or the pirate ship crewed by the reanimated dead, or the worker’s paradise of Fiddler’s Green.
And then, forty-five years after the end of the Quiet War, a data miner recovered enough information to reconstruct Enki’s eccentric orbit. She sold it to theGanapati. The habitat bought time on the Uranus deep space telescopic array and confirmed that the planetoid was where it was supposed to be, currently more than seven thousand million kilometers from the Sun.
Nothing more was known. The experiment might have failed almost as soon as it begun, but potentially it might win theGanapati platinum-rated credit on the Bourse. Margaret and the rest of the science crews would, of course, receive only their fees and bonuses, less deductions for air and food and water taxes, and anything they bought with scrip in the habitat’s stores; the indentured workers would not even get that. Like every habitat in the Commonwealth, theGanapati was structured like an ancient Greek Republic, ruled by share-holding citizens who lived in the landscaped parklands of the inner surface, and run by indentured and contract workers who were housed in the undercroft of malls and barracks tunnelled into theGanapati ’s rocky skin.
On the long voyage out, the science crews had been on minimal pay, far lower than that of the unskilled techs who worked the farms and refineries, and the servants who maintained the citizens’ households.
There were food shortages because so much biomass was being used to make exportable biochemicals; any foodstuffs other than basic rations were expensive, and prices were carefully manipulated by the habitat’s Star Chamber. When theGanapati reached Enki and the contracts of the science crews were activated, food prices had increased accordingly. Techs and household servants suddenly found themselves unable to afford anything other than dole yeast. Resentment bubbled over into skirmishes and knife-fights, and a small riot the White Mice, the undercroft’s police, subdued with gas. Margaret had to take time off to bail out several of her crew, had given them an angry lecture about threatening everyone’s bonuses.
“We got to defend our honor,” one of the men said.
“Don’t be a fool,” Margaret told him. “The citizens play workers against science crews to keep both sides in their places, and still turn a good profit from increases in food prices. Just be glad you can afford the good stuff now, and keep out of trouble.”
“They were calling you names, boss,” the man said. “On account you’re-”
Margaret stared him down. She was standing on a chair, but even so she was a good head shorter than the gangling outers. She said, “I’ll fight my own fights. I always have. Just think of your bonuses and keep quiet. It will be worth it. I promise you.”
And it was worth it, because of the discovery of the reef.
At some time in the deep past, Enki had suffered an impact that had remelted it and split it into two big pieces and thousands of fragments. One lone fragment still orbited Enki, a tiny moonlet where the AI that had controlled the experiment had been installed; the others had been drawn together again by their feeble gravity fields, but had cooled before coalescence had been completed, leaving a vast deep chasm, Tigris Rift, at the lumpy equator.
Margaret’s crew had discovered that the vacuum organisms had proliferated wildly in the deepest part of the Rift, deriving energy by oxidation of elemental sulfur and ferrous iron, converting carbonaceous material into useful organic chemicals. There were crusts and sheets, things like thin scarves folded into fragile vases and chimneys, organ pipe clusters, whips, delicate fretted laces. Some fed on others, one crust slowly overgrowing and devouring another. Others appeared to be parasites, sending complex veins ramifying through the thalli of their victims. Water-mining organisms recruited sulfur oxidizers, trading precious water for energy and forming warty outgrowths like stromatolites. Some were more than a hundred meters across, surely the largest prokaryotic colonies in the known Solar System.
All this variety, and after only eighty years of accelerated evolution! Wild beauty won from the cold and the dark. The potential to feed billions. The science crews would get their bonuses, all right; the citizens would become billionaires.
Margaret spent all her spare time investigating the reef by proxy, pushed her crew hard to overcome the problems of penetrating the depths of the Rift. Although she would not admit it even to herself, she had fallen in love with the reef. She would gladly have explored it in person, but as in most habitats theGanapati ’s citizens did not like their workers going where they themselves would not.
Clearly, the experiment had far exceeded its parameters, but no one knew why. The AI that had overseen the experiment had shut down thirty years ago. There was still heat in its crude proton beam fission pile, but it had been overgrown by the very organisms it had manipulated.
Its task had been simple. Colonies of a dozen species of slow growing chemoautotrophs had been introduced into a part of the Rift rich with sulfur and ferrous iron. Thousands of random mutations had been induced. Most colonies had died, and those few which had thrived had been sampled, mutated, and reintroduced in a cycle repeated every hundred days.
But the AI had selected only for fast growth, not for adaptive radiation, and the science crews held heated seminars about the possible cause of the unexpected richness of the reef’s biota. Very few believed that it was simply a result of accelerated evolution. Many terrestrial bacteria divided every twenty minutes in favorable conditions, and certain species were known to have evolved from being resistant to an antibiotic to becoming obligately dependent upon it as a food source in less than five days, or only three hundred and sixty generations, but that was merely a biochemical adaptation. The fastest division rate of the vacuum organisms in the Rift was less than once a day, and while that still meant more than thirty thousand generations had passed since the reef had been seeded, half a million years in human terms, the evolutionary radiation in the reef was the equivalent of Neanderthal Man evolving to fill every mammalian niche from bats to whales.
Margaret’s survey crew had explored and sampled the reef for more than thirty days. Cluster analysis suggested that they had identified less than ten percent of the species that had formed from the original seed population. And now deep radar suggested that there were changes in the unexplored regions in the deepest part of Tigris Rift, which the proxies had not yet been able to reach.
Margaret had pointed this out at the last seminar. “We’re making hypotheses on incomplete information.
We don’t know everything that’s out there. Sampling suggests that complexity increases away from the surface. There could be thousands more species in the deep part of the Rift.”
At the back of the room, Opie Kindred, the head of the genetics crew, said languidly, “We don’t need to know everything. That’s not what we’re paid for. We’ve already found several species that perform better than present commercial cultures. TheGanapati can make money from them and we’ll get full bonuses. Who cares how they got there?”
Arn Nivedta, the chief of the biochemist crew, said, “We’re all scientists here. We prove our worth by finding out how things work. Are your mysterious experiments no more than growth tests, Opie? If so, I’m disappointed.”
The genetics crew had set up an experimental station on the surface of theGanapati, off limits to everyone else.
Opie smiled. “I’m not answerable to you.”
This was greeted with shouts and jeers. The science crews were tired and on edge, and the room was hot and poorly ventilated.
“Information should be free,” Margaret said. “We all work toward the same end. Or are you hoping for extra bonuses, Opie?”
There was a murmur in the room. It was a tradition that all bonuses were pooled and shared out between the various science crews at the end of a mission.
Opie Kindred was a clever, successful man, yet somehow soured, as if the world was a continual disappointment. He rode his team hard, was quick to find failure in others. Margaret was a natural target for his scorn, a squat muscle-bound unedited dwarf from Earth who had to take drugs to survive in micro-gravity, who
