There are so very few of us, he whispered to the gods of the void, if there were any. I can stand dying. But not for nothing. Let Novalis be the home we need so badly. Who knows how many more chances we’ll have?
Arkady had spent only four hours on the ship before going into cryo, so the smell of the curry led him more surely than his vague memories of the hab module’s configuration. The ship seemed smaller and harder-used than he remembered it. A trick of perception; in point of fact, it had barely been used at all during the two years they’d spent in cold sleep. And it was just the right size for the ten members of the survey team, most of whom were already in the dayroom, nursing their cryo hangovers and watching Novalis slowly stealing real estate from the black void on the wall monitor.
They’d put the dayroom in one of the old UN-designed zero-g lab modules on the theory that if you were going to relax, you might as well be comfortable. But it still had the oddly cramped look that so many UN-built ships did; as if the humans who designed them had never quite grasped that there were no ceilings in free fall. And the survey team were all sitting at the table on the “floor” side of the room rather than lounging comfortably around its various corners the way they would naturally have done in a Syndicate-designed room.
Arkady scanned the faces around the table, but he didn’t see the one familiar face he most wanted to see. His pairmate had arrived, hadn’t he? Surely they wouldn’t have launched without the mission’s head geneticist?
“Hair of the dog?” someone asked, proffering a squeezeball of beer.
The entire ten-person survey team had agreed, in a deal brokered by the two Banerjees, to use half their personal weight allowances for brewing supplies. Arkady had taken the agreement as a good omen for the people who would be his only companions for the duration of the mission.
He took a sip and blinked in surprise. “Hey, that’s actually good!”
One of the Banerjee A’s grinned. “Pride of the Banerjees,” he said in the noble but slightly pompous tones that crèchelines learned young to associate with the Heroes of the Breakaway.
“Plates, food, forks,” one of the Ahmeds said, pointing.
Arkady crossed the room, aware of half a dozen pairs of eyes weighing and measuring him. He bent over the simmering pot. “Fantastic,” he said in his best fitting-in voice. “Three cheers for AzizSyndicate.”
“Actually, we didn’t cook it,” the other Ahmed admitted. “You can thank your sib for the feast.”
“That would make him the first Arkady I’ve ever met that could cook worth a damn.” Arkady looked at the curry with renewed suspicion, tasted it, and had to admit it was good. “And where is this marvel of culinary talent?”
He turned around just in time to see the two Ahmeds exchange a cryptic glance.
“Working?” one of them hazarded. And already there was that little something in his voice that should have been a warning.
Someone ruffled Arkady’s hair, and he turned around to the welcome sight of another Rostov face. “Aurelia, right?”
“Right.”
“And where were you when I woke up?”
“Hey, don’t look at me. I’m the rock doctor, not the people doctor.”
“I see.” Arkady took a closer look at her; as the team’s single geophysicist she might well be working closely with him, depending on what they found on Novalis. “I’ll make sure to bring you any sick rocks I stumble over.”
“I’m the people doctor,” said the other Aurelia from down at the far end of the table. “You met me an hour ago. You just don’t remember it. I’ve been sitting up with you since they popped your top, but I thought I’d let you do your last little bit of waking up in private.”
Functioning within Syndicate society required a good dose of what Keats had once famously called negative capability: the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. On the one hand you had to learn to recognize individual constructs for the purposes of work and social interaction; the human brain, however profoundly reengineered, couldn’t be entirely freed from the individual consciousness that had powered the first four hundred millennia of its evolution. On the other hand, the structures and customs of Syndicate society were all geared toward eliminating distinctions between individuals in the same geneline. A Syndicate was a family, with the same consanguinity between its various genelines that welded together human families. But your sibs, the fellow members of your own geneline, were more than family. They were you. And the individual body you inhabited—the lone physical organism inside its prison of skin and skull—was no more a whole person than an ant was a whole swarm. Geneline names reflected this. Each individual construct had a dossier, compiled over the course of his or her life by docents, professors, crèchemates, steering committee representatives; but the dossier filing number was as unreal as paperwork. On a day-to-day basis, from the moment he or she was detanked, every one of the thousands of Arkadys was simply Arkady, every Bella, Bella; every Ahmed, Ahmed; every Aurelia, Aurelia.
If you wanted to single out one of your sibs in normal conversation, you were reduced to ad hoc nicknames or to complicated formulations like “the year seven who led the mission to Karal-20,” or “the year five who spent last year planetside working on the arctic core survey,” or “the one who told that awful joke about the dog,” or “the one who wrote the paper on cryogenesis in amphibians.”
Or, in the grammatical construction that had fueled more grief, joy, strife, and passion than any other in all of Syndicate history: “the one I love.”
Arkady instinctively thought of his new crewmates as geneline members first and individuals second. First—the phrase pari inter pares came somewhat sarcastically to mind—came the two AzizSyndicate Ahmeds. Their Syndicate name reflected its founder’s North Indian heritage, as did their tall soldierly frames and square-jawed faces. Arkady had met both Ahmeds briefly before launch, and had privately dubbed them “Laid-back Ahmed” and “By-the-Book Ahmed.” Laid-back Ahmed was a full centimeter taller than Aziz-8135 gene-norm, and had adopted a habitual slouch to disguise the deviation. Something about the combination of the slouch and his levelheaded self-deprecating manner promised to Arkady that he might be that rare treasure: a pilot who was tough enough to command a ship in the Deep, but modest enough to back off after planetfall and let the scientists do their jobs. By-the-Book Ahmed, on the other hand, was a cold fish and a bit of a martinet…the last kind of personality Arkady would have assigned to command a crew full of science track Rostovs and Banerjees.
But perhaps he was just stereotyping. One of the Ahmeds’ older cogenetics was a wildly popular spin star. His sex- and violence-laden adventures were one of the great guilty pleasures in a society that had been increasingly cold and austere and rationed since the UN invasion. No one could look at any Ahmed’s muscular frame and commanding features without thinking of their famous sib, and the manly virtues that AzizSyndicate embodied in the Syndicate collective consciousness. Or that it was supposed to embody, anyway. Arkady certainly hoped that this particular pair of A-8s would bring the strengths of their phenotype to the mission at hand, rather than its failings. Because if either of them acted with the kind of impetuous arrogance their spin star sib displayed on-screen, then the whole survey team was headed for heavy weather.