'Sir, why doesn't it fall?'
Mr. Kaufman stirred himself. 'Because the density is equal to the air at that altitude.'
'But it's solid.'
'No.' He smiled. 'It just looks like it is. Remember when we looked at Nizana through the telescope relay and you could see the clouds that made up the storm bands. They were flowing. This is the same, but a lot smaller.'
'Does that mean there are going to be storms here, sir?'
'Eventually, yes. But don't worry, they'll be a lot smaller, too.'
'Where did it come from?'
'Barclay's glacier, I suppose. You've all seen the pictures of the runoff. This is one of the results. You're going to be seeing a lot more as you grow up.' He let them stare at the harbinger for a while longer, then shooed them back onto the bus.
Lawrence was last up the steps, reluctant to abandon his remarkable discovery. And there was also the inevitable censure to face...
The teachers were a lot more lenient than he expected. Ms. Ridley said she understood how strange the cloud was, but he must ask permission to ever do anything like that again. Mr. Kaufman gave a gruff nod, enforcing everything she said.
Lawrence went and sat down as the bus moved forward again. The rest of the kids forgot their games to chatter in an animated fashion about what they'd just seen. Already, this was the best ecology field trip ever. Lawrence joined in occasionally with a few observations and speculations, his discovery giving him kudos previously not experienced. Mainly, though, he tried to keep tracking the cloud through the bus window.
He couldn't stop thinking about the journey it had made. Traveling halfway around the world, with so much unknown territory laid out below it How ridiculous that a cloud had seen more of Amethi than he ever had. Lawrence wanted to be up there with it, soaring over the land and empty seabeds, swooping down to zoom along the crumbling edge of Barclay's glacier where he could see the runoff, a waterfall as long as a continental shoreline. How fabulous that would be. But here he was, stuck in a bus on his way to a poxy slowlife farm, learning about ecology when at some other school he could be learning how to fly. It just wasn't fair.
The slowlife farm was, like all Amethi's industrial facilities, an uninspiring glass and aluminum box. It was situated all by itself on the side of a gentle valley, with an empty river course meandering away below it. The arctic plants were particularly prolific along the low slopes, clustering thickly on the silt bed itself.
Several of the kids remarked on it when they scuttled from the bus to the warmth of the factory. Lawrence was still trying to see the cloud, which had disappeared off to the north some time ago. The lobby's big outer doors swung shut, and a gust of air washed over the group. They'd all been expecting that. The thermal trap lobby was standard across Amethi, a giant leaky airlock arrangement with thermal recyclers instead of vacuum pumps to prevent temperature drop in the domes. Here, there didn't seem much point. The factory was nothing like as warm as any of the city domes, barely a couple of degrees above freezing. They all kept their coats sealed up.
The supervisor came out to meet them, dressed in padded purple coveralls with a tight-fitting hood. Mrs. Segan, who with her three coworkers ran the whole operation. She tried hard not to show how annoyed she was with another bunch of kids touring around and screwing up her timetable.
'What you're going to see here today has no analogue in nature,' she told them as they made their way into the building. This first zone seemed more factory than farm, with dark metal corridors lined with sealed glass windows that looked in on vats of some kind. 'We grow fatworms here. I'd like to say breed, but the truth is, every one of these creatures is cloned.' She stopped beside a window. The room beyond was filled with racks of trays, filled with a clotted jelly similar to frogspawn. 'All slowlife is completely artificial; its DNA was designed for us by the Fell Institute in Oxford, back on Earth. As you know, the more complex an organism is, the more prone to illness and other problems it becomes. Therefore, fatworms are kept very simple indeed. The principal biological streamlining is their complete lack of reproductive ability. That's also very useful to us, as they are only needed for this stage of the terraforming process. They've got a lifetime of about ten years, so when we stop making them, they'll die out.' She held up a jar of the jelly substance, handing it to the closest boy. 'Pass that around, and please don't breathe on it. All slowlife is optimized to function at subzero temperature; your breath is like a flame to them.'
When it came to Lawrence all he could see was a mass of translucent eggs with a pinhead of darkness at the center of each. They didn't quiver or shake about as if they were about to burst open—which would have been something. Boring.
Mrs. Segan took them through into the farm's main rearing arena, a long hall with rows of big rectangular plastic boxes separated by raised metal grid walkways. Pipes overhead sprayed gloopy fluid into each of the open boxes with short regular pulses. The air smelled of crushed grass and sugar.
'Each of the fatworms is essentially a miniature bacteria reactor,' Mrs. Segan said as she led them along one of the walkways. 'We place them on a new section of tundra and they burrow their way through the ground chewing the dead vegetable matter in the soil. When it comes out, it's suffused with the bacteria that lives in their gut. This prepares the ground for terrestrial plants, which all need the bacteria in the soil to live on.'
The kids all leaned over the side of the box she indicated, their interest suddenly regained with the prospect of creatures that could poo out fungus and stuff. A glistening mass of oyster-gray fatworms covered the bottom of the box, squirming slowly: they were about fifteen centimeters long, a couple wide. Everyone oohed and yucked as they pulled rictus grimaces at the slimy minimonsters.
'Is that why they're called slowlife?' someone asked. 'Coz they don't move fast?'
'Partly,' Mrs. Segan said. 'The temperature they encounter outside means they don't have a particularly fast metabolism, which makes their physical motion correspondingly slow. Their blood is based on glycerol so they can keep moving through the coldest ground without freezing solid.'
Lawrence sighed impatiently as she droned out long statistics, then started to explain about other slowlife forms. Some were like fish, swimming in the snow- slush runoff rivers round Barclay's glacier; others were distant relatives of caterpillars, munching their way across the huge dunes of carbon granules left behind by Amethi's original forests. He glanced down into the big box again. It was a bunch of worms wriggling around sluggishly. So what? Who in Fate cared what grubbed around under the soil? Why didn't they come up with birds or something interesting? Dinosaurs maybe.
Mrs. Segan moved on, the group buzzing along behind her. Lawrence trailed at the rear. He craned his neck back, looking through the farm's grimy glass roof to see if the cloud had returned. The next thing he knew, he'd tripped on some ridge in the walkway, and went flailing onto his back. One scrabbling hand caught a shallow plastic bin, and when he landed painfully a whole bunch of fully grown fatworms were dropping on top of him.
He rolled away from them quickly, disgust overriding the pain along his jarred spine. These adults were some forty centimeters long, seven or eight in diameter. Their tips waved about blindly. Lawrence clambered to his feet, automatically checking the position of the teachers. Nobody had actually seen him fall. He looked down at the fatworms, the only evidence. Gingerly, telling himself they weren't in the slightest bit dangerous, he groped down and tried to pick one up. It was revoltingly cold and slimy, with a texture like sodden carpet, but he managed to grip it tight. As he lifted it up, the slight wavering motion began to speed up. Instead of putting it back in the bin, he held on and watched. After a while the fatworm was almost thrashing. He dropped it back down onto the floor, and it slithered off along the walkway. There was a claret-colored patch around its midsection where his hand had been. 'All right,' he murmured. 'Not so slow after all.' Which was logical. They were slow in the cold; therefore they'd be fast in the warmth.
He scuttled after the group. 'Alan,' he hissed. 'Hey, Alan. Come and look at this.'
Alan Cramley stopped munching on his Toby bar, curious about the furtive tone. 'What?'
Lawrence took him back to the adult fatworms and showed him. They quickly turned the discovery into a challenge. Pick up the fatworms in tandem and hold them for thirty seconds, then drop them on the walkway and see which reaches the end of the grid first. In the end they were holding on to two each, turning it into a real race.
'What exactly is going on here?' Mr. Kaufman demanded.
