Macabie Feya was dying, and there was nothing Hayes could do about it.
THREE
On top of everything else, there was the question of how to spin this unfortunate death. The problem preoccupied Kenyon Degrandpre as he reported for his monthly medical evaluation. He was eager to speak to the doctor. Not that he was ill. But the senior medical manager—Corbus Nefford, a Boston-born physician with a long career in the Trusts—was also the closest thing to a friend Degrandpre had found aboard the IOS. Nefford, unlike the cold-world barbarians who dominated the scientific crew, understood the rules of civil discourse. He was friendly but mindful of the subtleties of rank, deferential but seldom distastefully toadying. Nefford possessed a chubby, aristocratic face that must have served him well in the professional sweepstakes back home; he looked like a Family cousin even in his modest physician’s smock.
Degrandpre stepped into the small medical station and stripped unselfconsciously. Like his uniform, his body was an expression of rank and class. He was nearly hairless, his excess body fat chelated away, his musculature defined but not boastful. He wore a Works Trust tattoo on his left shoulder. His slender penis dangled over the faint scar of his orchidectomy, another badge of rank. He stepped quickly into the diagnostic nook.
Nefford sat attentively at his monitor, never so gauche as to speak before he was addressed.
Machinery hummed behind Degrandpre’s back, a whisper of hummingbird wings. He said, “Of course you’ve heard about the death.”
The physician nodded. “A suit breach, I gather. Tragic for the Yambuku staff. I suppose they’ll have to replace the armor.” “Not to mention the engineer.”
“Macabie Feya. Arrived thirty months ago. Healthy as a horse, but they all are, at least when they first set foot on the IOS. He caused the accident himself, I hear.”
“He was in open air in poorly prepped protective gear. In that sense, yes, he brought it on himself. But fault has a way of rising up the ranks.”
“Surely no one could blame you, Manager.”
“Thank you for the unconvincing show of support. Of course we both know better.”
“It’s not an ideal world.”
“We’ve lost two assets that will be expensive to replace. There’s no way to finesse that. However, Yambuku is far from crippled. They can still make vehicular excursions, most of their tractibles are in decent shape, and they have at least one suit of bioarmor that can be brought up to specification fairly quickly. Basic research won’t be interrupted.”
“And,” Nefford said, “they have the new gear that Fisher woman brought with her.”
“Is that common knowledge?”
“For better or worse. The IOS is a village. People talk.”
“Too much and too often.” But Degrandpre expected a certain amount of gossip from Corbus Nefford. Because he was a physician and a section manager, Nefford’s rice bowl was virtually ensured.
He could risk saying things others might keep to themselves. “What Zoe Fisher brought with her is an unproven technology foisted on us by a rogue branch of the Trusts. The Fisher woman comes with a vade mecum from Personnel and Devices, and she’s putting herself directly in harm’s way. That worries me. One death is attrition; two would look like incompetence—on someone’s part.”
The doctor nodded absently, whispering into his scroll. “The diagnostic’s finished. Step down, please.”
Degrandpre dressed himself, still thinking aloud. “Personnel and Devices act like they can shuffle our priorities at will. I doubt the Works commissioners will put up with this kind of arrogance much longer. In the meantime, I’d like Zoe Fisher to survive at least until I’m safely back in Beijing. It’s not my battle, frankly.” Had he overstepped? “This is privileged, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Not galley gossip, in other words.”
“You know you can trust me, Kenyon.” He used the given name not as an impertinence but with downcast eyes, to ingratiate.
“Thank you, Corbus.” A gentle rebuke. “So? Am I healthy?”
Nefford turned with visible relief to his desktop. “Your bone calcium is excellent, your musculature is stable, and your accumulated radiation exposure is well within tolerance. But next time, I want a blood sample.”
“Next time, you may have one.”
Once every calendar month, Degrandpre walked the circumference of the orbital station, from docking bays to sun garden, his left hand on the holster of his quirt.
He thought of the walkthrough as a way of staying in touch with the IOS. Keeping the maintenance crew on their toes, citing Works staff for uniform violations—in general, making his presence felt. (In the case of dress-code infringements, he had long ago given up on the Kuiper and Martian scientists; he considered himself lucky if they remembered to dress at all.) Problems that seemed distant from his chambers loomed larger from the deckplates. And he liked the exercise.
Invariably, he started his inspection at the dimly lit cargo-storage spaces of Ten Module and finished back at Nine, the garden. He liked to linger in the garden. If he had been asked, he might have said he enjoyed the filtered sunlight, pumped from fixed collectors in the IOS’s hub, or the moist air, or the earthy smell of the aeroponic suspensions. And all that was true. But not all of the truth.
To Kenyon Degrandpre, the garden was a kind of pocket paradise.
He had loved gardens even as a child. For the first twelve years of his life he had lived with his father, a senior manager at the Cultivar Collection in southern France. The Collection’s greenhouses ranged over thousands of acres of rolling pastureland, foundations tilted to the southern sky, a city of damp glass walls and hissing aerators.
“Paradise” was his father’s name for it. In biblical mythology, paradise was a garden called Eden; the Edenic world was cultivated, perfect. When humankind fell from grace, the garden succumbed to anarchy.
On the IOS the garden was even more central, as delicate and vital as a transplanted heart. It supplied most of the station’s nutritional needs; it recycled wastes; it cleansed the air. Because the garden was both indispensable and fragile, it was, at least in Degrandpre’s eyes, the paradise of the Old Testament restored: orderly, calculated, organic, and precise.
The gardeners, in their buff fatigues, acknowledged his presence by staying out of his way. He walked the garden tiers slowly, pausing in a glade of tall tomato plants to savor the smell and the leaf-green light.
He had. entered the Works with much of his father’s idealism still intact. Humanity had endured a wild Earth for too long. The price had been uncontrolled population growth, climatic devolution, disease.
Kuiper radicals accused Earth of wallowing in stasis. Nonsense, Degrandpre thought. How long would a Kuiper habitat or a Martian airfarm last if it failed to regulate its ice and oxygen mining? How long could the IOS, for instance, sustain itself in a state of anarchy? But there was nothing special about the surface of Earth; the issues were the same, only broader, more diffuse. Consider Isis itself: a garden never cultivated. Beautiful, as freshly arrived Kuiper enthusiasts never failed to point out. And fundamentally hostile to human life.
He passed through the vegetable gardens and climbed a flight of stairs to a terrace where delicately engineered fruit vines thrived near the light. Gardeners and slim white tractibles moved like angels among the lush foliage, and he savored the patient sound of dripping water. Home, Degrandpre found himself thinking: five years now since he’d seen it, and God knows what had gone on during his absence. The disastrous North African Aquifer Initiative had nearly cost him his career; he had called in every outstanding favor just to save his Works card. He had accepted the Isis rotation to demonstrate his adaptability. It was the only post of any responsibility he had been offered.