The science track A’s greeted this with stunned silence. One of the Aurelias coughed. Arkasha fidgeted.
“The thing is,” one of the Banerjees said cautiously, “that if these numbers were right, it would mean we were looking at a planet that already had large contiguous regions of its surface in a state of biogeological climax.”
Both Ahmeds looked blank. Could they really have so little insight into what the survey and terraforming team was supposed to be doing once they hit planet surface? If so, they were going to be deadweight as soon as the team made planetfall. Worse than deadweight if they began meddling in survey decisions they didn’t understand. Something had gone very wrong in the mission preplanning, Arkady realized. And he felt a bitter little seed of resentment over the planning failures lodge somewhere close to his heart.
“So what you’re saying is that Bella’s numbers are better than we thought they’d be,” By-the-Book Ahmed said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s not a question of better or worse,” the other Banerjee began.
“Then what isit a question of? Why can’t we get straightforward answers out of you people?”
“Because we don’t have them. This isn’t calculating a launch window or the bearing strength of an I-beam. There’s no simple answer.”
“Then how do you know Bella’s wrong?”
“Because…”
“I don’t think you’re hearing us,” Aurelia said. “This planet shouldn’t be here.”
“Then where should it be?” Laid-back Ahmed asked blandly.
“I meant—” Aurelia began. And then she saw the joke. “Oh for God’s sake, Ahmed, be serious!”
“I am serious. I just think we’re getting a little overheated. No one’s trying to put you on the hot seat. Just give us the general picture in laymen’s terms.”
But of course Rostov A’s were not used to dealing with people who needed to be given the general picture in laymen’s terms…and for the first time in his life Arkady was beginning to see that in the wrong circumstances the very strength of the Rostov genelines might be a liability.
“For instance,” Laid-back Ahmed said, “how do these numbers compare to Gilead?”
“Basically,” Arkady said, “they don’t.”
“So it’s further along than Gilead? Is thatimpossible?”
“No…um…Gilead’s not a useful comparison.”
“Why not?”
“Because…well…Gilead gives you large contiguous areas of ‘terraformed’ surface. But they’re all being artificially held away from ecological climax in order to keep boosting the volatiles. That gives you a very recognizable volatiles profile, especially in the free nitrogen. Gilead is a textbook-perfect best-scenario case of terraforming on the numbers. But the numbers Bella’s getting for Novalis aren’t that at all. They’re…well, they’re nonsense. There areno comps for those numbers.”
Something moved in Arkady’s peripheral vision.
Arkasha.
He was sliding his thick stack of printouts across the table toward the Ahmeds.
“Yes, there are,” he said. “Right here.”
By-the-Book Ahmed grabbed the printouts and squinted at them.
“Is this another one of your practical jokes?” he asked accusingly. He and Arkasha had already come dangerously close to locking horns twice—both times over what By-the-Book Ahmed referred to as Arkasha’s “too smart to follow the rules” attitude.
Arkasha’s only answer to Ahmed’s question was a dismissive shrug.
Arkady craned his neck to read the heading on the printed page across the table. When he finally managed to decipher it, he decided that Ahmed was right. It mustbe a joke. It said:
EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY WHITE PAPER Results of DISTRIBUTED VOLATILES INVENTORY performed for the Climate Change Baseline Project, authorized pursuant to Sec. 17 of the Beijing Addendum to the Kyoto Accords, May 15—April 3, 2017
“All Bella’s numbers are fluctuating within two points of this DVI,” Arkasha said flatly.
“Could, uh, this be a coincidence?” Laid-back Ahmed asked in a hollow tone that made Arkady quite sure he had understood what Arkasha was leaving unsaid.
“Not unless Novalis actually isEarth, complete with a two-hundred-year-old planet-spanning fossil-fuels economy and some serious CFC contamination.”
“I don’t have to take this!” Bella exclaimed, standing up.
“Sit down!” Laid-back Ahmed said in a tone that knocked Bella’s knees out from under her.
Don’t say it,Arkady pleaded with his sib. Just let the Ahmeds handle it. She’s not the kind of person you want to make into your enemy.
But Arkasha wasn’t going to let it go. He was going to try to be nice. And he was going to do it in a way that only deepened Bella’s humiliation.
“I don’t want to cast blame,” he said, keeping his dark eyes carefully fixed on the table. “This is a failure at the steering committee level, not the individual level. A great deal of early training in the sciences involves learning not to panic when your numbers look wrong. And the numbers often look wrong in complex systems work. Throwing someone with a purely technical background into this kind of situation without real supervision more or less guarantees panic. And someone without a really solid grasp of ecophysics might well look at the relatively advanced flora and fauna the landers picked up on Novalis and make the mistaken assumption that a planet so far along in the ecopoietic curve might look the same on the numbers as Earth did when it was on its way down.”
Arkasha had spoken deliberately, so that everyone around the table had time to understand what he was accusing Bella of: cribbing the numbers from the Earth DVI when her own readings didn’t look right.
Twelve pairs of eyes shifted furtively toward Bella, who sat staring at her hands and breathing hard.
Arkasha’s eyes flicked once toward Bella, then dropped away. “There’s no shame in not being perfect. As long as you’re honest. A lot of people’s lives could depend on our honesty. Starting with our own. We need to redo the DVI. We can do it with no questions asked. I think that’s the way we should do it. But it would be extremely helpful to have your notes of the original readings.”
No one spoke for a long moment. The two Banerjees both stared resolutely out the nearest viewport. By-the-Book Ahmed was fuming, while his sib had no readable expression at all on his handsome features. Arkady looked sideways just in time to see Aurelia glance back and forth significantly between him and Arkasha and raise an eyebrow at her own sib.
“Bella?” Laid-back Ahmed said. “Can we have your notes? Please?”
“I gave them to you!” she snapped. And pointed to the neat printout of her final measurements she had circulated at the beginning of the consult.
But those weren’t notes. Even the Aziz A’s knew enough to understand that.
Ahmed and Arkasha looked at each other, obviously reaching some kind of understanding.
“Okay,” Ahmed said, “I see the problem. If there was a problem, which I’m not saying there was. And I propose that we just, uh, decide how to handle the DVI on a forward-going basis.” Ahmed looked around the table but no one contested his analysis. “Any thoughts? Anyone?”
Everyone in the room knew what was supposed to happen next. They’d spent half their lives sitting around tables or in childhood crèche circles, mastering the slow, courtly, circular procedures of consensus decisionmaking. They all knew that the script called for a series of tentative summings up; carefully structured and only vaguely purposeful statements that would begin with self-effacing phrases like “If I understand what’s been said so far,” or “I’m hearing from Bella that…” or “We might consider investigating the possibility of…” and would allow the group to arrive at a decision without actually forcing any single person openly to declare his or her positions and allegiances.