been more diverse, the mold couldn’t have found a foothold.”
“There are some things I could do without.” Arn scratched his left ankle with the toes of his right foot.
“Like those ants.”
“Well, we don’t know if we need the ants specifically, but we need variety, and they contribute to it.
They help aerate the soil, to begin with, which encourages stratification and diversity of soil organisms.
There are a million different kinds of microbe in a gram of soil from a forest on Earth; we have to make do with less than a thousand. We don’t have one tenth that number of useful vacuum organisms and most are grown in monoculture, which is the most vulnerable ecosystem of all. That was the cause of the crash of the green revolution on Earth in the twenty-first century. But there are hundreds of different species in the reef. Wild species, Arn. You could seed a planetoid with them and go harvest it a year later. The citizens don’t go outside because they have their parklands, their palaces, their virtualities. They’ve forgotten that the outer system isn’t just the habitats. There are millions of small planetoids in the Kuiper Belt. Anyone with a dome and the reef vacuum organisms could homestead one.”
She had been thinking about this while working out in the fields. The Star Chamber had given her plenty of time to think.
Arn shook his head. “They all have the parasite lurking in them. Any species from the reef can turn into it.
Perhaps even the proxies.”
“We don’t know enough,” Margaret said. “I saw things in the bottom of the Rift, before I lost contact with the proxy. Big structures. And there’s the anomalous temperature gradients, too. The seat of change must be down there, Arn. The parasite could be useful, if we can master it. The viruses that caused the immuno deficiency plagues are used for gene therapy now. Opie Kindred has been down there. He’s suppressing what he has found.”
“Yah, well, it does not much matter. They have completed synthesis of the metabolic inhibitor. I’m friendly with the organics chief. They diverted most of the refinery to it.” Arn took out his slate. “He showed me how they have set it up. That is what they have been doing down in the Rift. Not exploring.”
“Then we have to do something now.”
“It is too late, Margaret.”
“I want to call a meeting, Arn. I have a proposal.”
Most of the science crews came. Opie Kindred’s crew was a notable exception; Arn said that it gave him a bad feeling.
“They could be setting us up,” he told Margaret.
“I know they’re listening. That’s good. I want it in the open. If you’re worried about getting hurt you can always leave.”
“I came because I wanted to. Like everyone else here. We’re all scientists. We all want the truth known.” Arn looked at her. He smiled. “You want more than that, I think.”
“I fight my own fights.” All around people were watching. Margaret added, “Let’s get this thing started.”
Arn called the meeting to order and gave a brief presentation about his research into survival of the exfoliations before throwing the matter open to the meeting. Nearly everyone had an opinion.
Microphones hovered in the room, and at times three or four people were shouting at each other.
Margaret let them work off their frustration. Some simply wanted to register a protest; a small but significant minority were worried about losing their bonuses or even all of their pay.
“Better that than our credibility,” one of Orly Higgins’s techs said. “That’s what we live by. None of us will work again if we allow theGanapati to become a plague ship.”
Yells of approval, whistles.
Margaret waited until the noise had died down, then got to her feet. She was in the center of the horseshoe of seats, and everyone turned to watch, more than a hundred people. Their gaze fell upon her like sunlight; it strengthened her. A microphone floated down in front of her face.
“Arn has shown that contamination isn’t an issue,” Margaret said. “The issue is that the Star Chamber wants to destroy the reef because they want to exploit what they’ve found and stop anyone else using it.
I’m against that, all the way. I’m not gengeneered. Micro-gravity is not my natural habitat. I have to take a dozen different drugs to prevent reabsorption of calcium from my bone, collapse of my circulatory system, fluid retention, all the bad stuff micro-gravity does to unedited Earth stock. I’m not allowed to have children here, because they would be as crippled as me. Despite that, my home is here. Like all of you, I would like to have the benefits of being a citizen, to live in the parklands and eat real food. But there aren’t enough parklands for everyone because the citizens who own the habitats control production of fixed carbon. The vacuum organisms we have found could change that. The reef may be a source of plague, or it may be a source of unlimited organics. We don’t know. What we do know is that the reef is unique and we haven’t finished exploring it. If the Star Chamber destroys it, we may never know what’s out there.”
Cheers at this. Several people rose to make points, but Margaret wouldn’t give way. She wanted to finish.
“Opie Kindred has been running missions to the bottom of the Rift, but he hasn’t been sharing what he’s found there. Perhaps he no longer thinks that he’s one of us. He’ll trade his scientific reputation for citizenship,” Margaret said, “but that isn’t our way, is it?”
“NO!”the crowd roared.
And the White Mice invaded the room.
Sharp cracks, white smoke, screams. The White Mice had long flexible sticks weighted at one end. They went at the crowd like farmers threshing corn. Margaret was separated from Arn by a wedge of panicking people. Two techs got hold of her and steered her out of the room, down a corridor filling with smoke. Arn loomed out of it, clutching his slate to his chest.
“They’re getting ready to set off the poison,” he said as they ran in long loping strides.
“Then I’m going now,” Margaret said.
Down a drop pole onto a corridor lined with shops. People were smashing windows. No one looked at them as they ran through the riot. They turned a corner, the sounds of shouts and breaking glass fading.
Margaret was breathing hard. Her eyes were smarting, her nose running.
“They might kill you,” Arn said. He grasped her arm. “I can’t let you go, Margaret.”
She shook herself free. Arn tried to grab her again. He was taller, but she was stronger. She stepped inside his reach and jumped up and popped him on the nose with the flat of her hand.
He sat down, blowing bubbles of blood from his nostrils, blinking up at her with surprised, tear-filled eyes.
She snatched up his slate. “I’m sorry, Arn,” she said. “This is my only chance. I might not find anything, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try.”
Margaret was five hundred kilometers out from the habitat when the radio beeped. “Ignore it,” she told her pressure suit. She was sure that she knew who was trying to contact her, and she had nothing to say to him.
This far out, the Sun was merely the brightest star in the sky. Behind and above Margaret, the dim elongated crescent of theGanapati hung before the sweep of the Milky Way. Ahead, below the little transit platform’s motor, Enki was growing against a glittering starscape, a lumpy potato with a big notch at its widest point.
The little moonlet was rising over the notch, a swiftly moving fleck of light. For a moment, Margaret had the irrational fear that she would collide with it, but the transit platform’s navigational display showed her that she would fall above and behind it. Falling past a moon! She couldn’t help smiling at the thought.
“Priority override,” her pressure suit said. Its voice was a reassuring contralto Margaret knew as well as her mother’s.
“Ignore it,” Margaret said again.
“Sorry, Maggie. You know I can’t do that.”
“Quite correct,” another voice said.
Margaret identified him a moment before the suit helpfully printed his name across the helmet’s visor. Dzu Sho.
“Turn backright now,” Sho said. “We can take you out with the spectrographic laser if we have to.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” she said.
“I do not believe anyone would mourn you,” Sho said unctuously. “Leaving theGanapati was an act of sedition, and we’re entitled to defend ourselves.”
Margaret laughed. It was just the kind of silly, sententious, self-important nonsense that Sho was fond of
