There were perhaps three hundred of them. They emerged from the narrow crack between wall and deckplating, wound across the floor in the classic branching and puddling fractals of a colonizing swarm, and disappeared into a facing crevice just as lightless and impenetrable as the first. They were a river, a living stream of thoraxes that glittered like spilled oil under the sickly gleam of the shipboard lighting. They shouldn’t have been here. They were pests. No one had ever meant to bring them into space. And yet here they were, welling from the ship’s intestines like blood from an open wound: poor ravaged Earth wreaking her revenge through these, her smallest foot soldiers.
Arkady dipped a finger into the flood and let the tiny minor workers swarm onto his hand so he could get a closer look at them. He felt a mild sting as one of them took an experimental bite out of him. He blew the ants off his hand—brushing them off might have crushed delicate legs and antennae, and he’d never been able to bear hurting ants avoidably. He rubbed at the bite pensively and forced his mind back to the same question that had obsessed him since that first meeting with Andrej Korchow.
Why Arkady? What made him different from all the thousands of other Arkadys on the half dozen Syndicate orbital stations and surface settlements? Why had Korchow extended his miraculous offer of clemency to Arkady and Arkasha? Arkady had spent his whole life studying ecosystems and biospheres: mapping the complex web of interlocking energy cycles that drove the metabolism of a living planet. It was only natural for him to apply these skills to his current situation. But all his attempts to construct a coherent picture of Novalis and its aftermath had failed miserably. Whatever confidence he’d had in his ability to grasp the underlying structures of his own life, it had vanished into Novalis’s impenetrable jungle.
He shuffled back to the sink, poured a fresh glass of water, and entertained himself by sprinkling it in the swarm’s path. A few solitary foragers responded, dipping into the spilled water and marching back to their companions with miniscule droplets glittering between their raised pincers like diamonds set in amber. But the main body of the swarm flowed on, too firmly in the grip of the swarm-colonize pheromone to turn aside even for life’s ultimate necessity.
Arkady kept up the attempt for a while, wishing he had his collecting gear. He searched for the telltale elongated thorax of an ambulatory queen, trying to recall whether colonizing Pharaoh ants took their supernumerary queens with them or sequestered and assassinated them.
Then he just sat, numb with exhaustion, and watched the ants hurtle from one darkness to another in search of a moveable idea called home.
Arkady woke with a start, knowing, though he couldn’t have said why, that he wasn’t alone.
He rolled over and saw Moshe sitting in the chair beside his bed, bathed in the secondhand starlight refracted off the tanker’s solar collectors.
“We need to talk,” Moshe said.
Arkady sat up, pulling the rough blanket around his nakedness.
“What time is it?”
“Early. Or late, depending on how you want to look at it. But then I guess people who grow up in space don’t get station lag. You want to get dressed, go ahead.”
He got up and put his clothes on. Moshe’s eyes tracked him across the room.
“Can I use the toilet?”
“No one’s stopping you.”
He went into the bathroom, shut the door behind him, blew his nose, and went back out again.
Moshe was still in the chair, but now the lights were on. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing Arkady back to the bed.
The bed that had seemed so hard when he was trying to fall asleep now felt too soft. He couldn’t sit up straight in it. And there was some-thing ignominious about slumping in the ruins of his crumpled sheets while Moshe sat on his chair as neat and straight as a toy soldier.
“It seems my superiors have gotten cold feet, Arkady. They’ve decided to make me decide whether we should run you through the Embargo or just dump you back into the pond to be snapped up by the next fish that happens by. In other words they’ve figured out how to put my ass on the line for decisions they’re getting paid to make. Do they promote self-serving incompetents in the Syndicates too? Or have you people evolved beyond that sort of thing?”
“Uh…not quite yet.”
“Well, I guess that should make me feel better.” He cocked his head as if he were taking the measure of his feelings. “It doesn’t. By the way, Arkady, we’re on spin. Is that a problem for you?”
“Would it make any difference if I said it was?”
“No. But I thought I’d ask. My mother raised me to be polite. You doknow what a mother is, don’t you?”
“I’ve seen dogs have puppies,” Arkady said doubtfully.
Moshe gave him a hard unfriendly look. “Novalis,” he said after a moment. “Start from the beginning. Tell me everything. Tell me about the survey mission. Tell me about this genius, Arkasha, and his brilliant discovery. That’s what you’re selling, isn’t it? Some genetic weapon this Arkasha person discovered?”
“Not a weapon. An antidote.”
Moshe snorted. “If you think there’s a difference between the two, then you’ve grossly misunderstood the last five hundred years of human history.”
Arkady blinked and cleared his throat. This line of conversation felt dangerous; technical knowledge was one thing, but Moshe could read him far too well when they strayed into broad-brush ideological debates. “Arkasha didn’t discover it. I told you. The UN spliced it and tried to use it against us in violation of the Treaty provisions. Arkasha just isolated a sample. I’m willing to trade it to you.”
“In exchange for what? And don’t give me some candyass speech about genetic diversity.”
“For Arkasha’s safety.”
“Keep talking.” Moshe’s face remained impassive. “I’m listening.”
Arkady collected himself and tried to pull the story together in his mind the way Korchow had told him to tell it. But it was like giving a shape to water. And Korchow wasn’t the one who was going to have to face Moshe’s fists and feet if he was caught out in a lie.
“Novalis wasn’t just a survey mission,” he began tentatively. “It was more of a survey and a terraforming mission all in one. Novalis was selected based on unmanned probe telemetry. We’re looking for the same thing everyone’s looking for: abandoned Evacuation-era terraforming starts. Bare branch colonies are the best, of course, but synthetic biospheres are tricky. If something killed off the original colonists, there’s always the chance it could still be around to kill you.”
“What do you mean, killed off?” Moshe interrupted. “Like…predators?”
“Uh…no.” Was that a joke? “More like mold. Anyway…what we do isn’t really all that different from what UN terraformers do. We just do it with a smaller team.”
And a smaller safety margin. But there was no reason to tell Moshe about that. God knew what he’d make of it. Probably file a report about how the Syndicates were so desperate they were throwing terraformers away like soldier ants.
“But you guys are a hell of a lot better at terraforming than humans are,” Moshe prompted.
“Well, half the planets on the Periphery were terraformed by corporate-owned constructs. And some of them came over in the Breakaway. We have a lot of expertise. And we don’t have the evolutionary baggage humans have. We don’t try to treat synthetic biospheres as if they were Earth before the ecological collapse. We’ve shaped our entire social organism to respond to the ecophysical realities of postterrestrial…”
Moshe shifted restlessly. “Okay. Let’s start with the team members. How many of you were there?”
“Ten.”
“Home Syndicates?”
“Two from Aziz. Two B’s from Motai. Then the two Banerjees and us four from Rostov.”
“Why four team members from Rostov? Was Rostov commanding the mission?”