The harvesting and fermenting of tea is a delicate process that combines farming practices unchanged for thousands of years with technology that was no older than Cater’s own five decades. The best plants were reserved for the fine plucking. Harvesters searched for plants with silvery-white fuzz and painstakingly picked only those buds, gathering the tiny blossoms in the early morning to ensure the most delicate flavors for which MacNeil was famous. A healthy bush might produce three thousand buds, enough for just one pound of tea.
When the fine plucking reached the factory it was dried. It must be the baking equipment, Cater thought. If the equipment were overheating, the entire spring flush could be lost. And Cater, who never failed to watch the scenery with delight, closed his eyes. He leaned his head against the window and drifted in and out of an uneasy sleep as the train glided east.
Cater felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up, confused. The conductor had roused him. He handed his ticket to the attendant, a man with whom Cater had shared this journey for several years.
The conductor looked at his friend with amusement. “Oh, there must be something going on for you, sir. You will be staying in Badulla? Maybe you have a woman there, eh?”
“What are you talking about? I haven’t been with a woman since my wife, bless her soul, passed away two years ago.”
The conductor pointed to the ticket, “One way.”
Cater stared at the ticket. “Saints preserve me. I’ve been so tired I cannot think straight. I’ll buy another one way for the return.”
The conductor peered at his passenger and his voice softened. “Tell you the truth, you don’t look so good today. Your face is puffy. Are you all right, old friend?”
Cater heaved a sigh. “Not so good today. I haven’t felt this tired since I got the filter to clean my blood.”
A thumb-sized packet replaced cumbersome dialysis sessions that required him to sit connected to a machine for several hours each week. Researchers had tried for decades to develop an implantable filter. The problem was that the better the filter worked, the faster it became clogged.
Absolute efficiency in a self-contained module eluded nephrologists until an NMech scientist took a whale-watching boat from Boston to Nantucket and marveled at the giant beasts’ feeding habits. The whale’s baleen caught his attention. The feeding filters that sieve plankton and small animals from seawater to provide food for the beast reminded him of something. He invoked a heads-up display and studied the anatomy of the baleen. Its elongated pores resembled nephrons, the kidney’s filtering cells.
The solution to an implantable kidney filter was slit-shaped pores, modeled on the whale’s baleen. The NMech approach permitted a self-contained unit to process variable-sized nutrients and wastes in the blood. Dr. Marta Cruz had been able to insist that NMech provide 10% of its filters to poorer countries as part of NMech’s commitment to public health.
Jagen Cater had been one of the first recipients of the NMech IDD—Internal Dialysis Device. It had been a lifesaver for Cater and for thousands of others who suffered from chronic kidney disease. A signal from an NMech medical equipment datapiller kept the IDD operating properly, or else it would quickly become a clogged roll of inert plastic the approximate size and shape of a cigar. The NMech maintenance signal and redundant safeguards were monitored continuously to ensure Cater’s survival.
They were also monitored by Eva Rozen’s Cerberus program.
Five thousand, five hundred twenty-three miles east of Staff Sergeant Mike Imfeld’s United Nations EcoForce recon squad, and 9,889 miles east of Jagen Cater’s tea estate, Nancy Kiley gritted her teeth and left her smartbed’s comfort. Kiley was a good boss. She shared the hardships of her charges, and so she had been taking night shifts, working alongside her subordinates. Just as she fell asleep after a difficult evening, an alarm rang. Cursing, she donned a sun-proof and insect-repellant work suit. Kiley exited her small cabin at El Cerro Rojo—“The Red Hill”—a desalinization plant on Venezuela’s Paraguanà Peninsula.
The private cabin was one of the project manager’s few perquisites at the desal complex. Scant compensation, she thought, for the time she spent in a landscape slightly less hospitable than the living conditions she imagined a planetologist would find on Mars. Would safety protocols on the Red Planet include thrice-daily examinations of clothing, linens, and shoes for biting creatures? Scorpions, Kaboura flies, and poison dart frogs were among the nasty critters that preferred the cool, dark comfort of Nancy’s clothing and shoes. One learned to check, to stay alert.
Mother Nature’s a bitch, Kiley thought, not for the first time, scratching at one of the many patches of dry skin that flaked and cracked in the peninsula’s arid climate.
Her imprecations were out of character for the cheerful and charismatic woman who inspired loyalty among her staff. She relied on kind words and praise and sprinkled them like the gentle rains that once fell on South American’s coastline. But the rains had dried up and her mood had soured. A torrent of maledictions had replaced her upbeat patter. She damned the sun that beat mercilessly on her head, cursed the sand and pebbles that ground under her boots and made walking a chore, and swore at each tormenting species of insects with which she was forced to share the desiccated habitat.
Kiley’s compact body cast a short shadow in the midmorning sun. She clenched her square jaw in frustration at what was becoming a hopeless assignment. She squinted despite vision enhancements that included a photosensitive nictating membrane, a third eyelid—biological sunglasses for her ice-blue eyes.
Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink. Coleridge’s couplet was Kiley’s mantra. She repeated it while hurrying to the desal plant’s command center. What’s today’s screw-up? she wondered as she subvocalized a heads-up display. I’ll be dipped in turtle dung before I have another surprise like yesterday.
Twenty-four hours earlier, her staff panicked when the nano-controlled biocide levels at the plant dipped unexpectedly. The biocides killed off bacterial contaminants in Cerro Rojo’s water. Then, as now, Kiley scrambled out of her slumber to attend to the malfunction. As she watched, the ’cides returned to their normal levels for reasons that were inexplicable. An hour later, when her heart had stopped racing and she was drifting back into sleep, a second emergency summoned her from Morpheus’ arms. The desal filters had quit. Electric currents that animated the ion transfer mechanism still flowed, but it was as if the system had stopped listening to its programming. The temporary halt in production scared the bejeezus out of Kiley and her staff. Had it lasted much longer, the 30 million people in the arid cities and hills of northern Venezuela and the island nations of the Caribbean would get thirsty. And thirsty people become angry people—desperate and prone to violence.
Kiley cursed the woman who coaxed her to this hellhole from the security of a government job with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I don’t know who’s the bigger bitch, Kiley thought, Mother-freakin’-Nature, or Eva-freakin’-Rozen.