NOVALIS

The Time of Cruel Miracles

From the moment the rest of the survey team began to wrap their brains around the idea of Bella’s pregnancy, something happened that surprised Arkady as much as it frightened him.

It became an assumption, held with a certainty bordering on religious faith, that the ultimate cause of Bella’s pregnancy was not terraforming fallout but a genetic weapon specifically targeted at Syndicate bodies, Syndicate ideology, the Syndicate Way of Life.

Novalis’s prior settlers, until now objects of pity and admiration, were suddenly assumed to be the advance troops of an unseen enemy. And the identity of that enemy was another article of quasi-religious faith, uncontested by any loyal Syndicate construct: the United Nations.

“But why would they assume it’s a genetic weapon?” Arkady asked Arkasha, who also secretly doubted. “I mean it’s not like it’s killing us…the opposite, you might even say.”

“You can’t mean that seriously.”

They were lying on Arkady’s bunk, snatching a rare moment of rest amidst the chaos. “Well, actually,”

Arkady said, “I do mean it.”

“Then I’d say that for once By-the-Book Ahmed is actually showing more brains than you.”

“But what threat to us is it if—”

“Not us, Arkady. We believe in the system. We have too much at stake not to believe. And RostovSyndicate may not be perfect, but at least it would be recognizable to the Zhangs and Parks and Banerjees who started the Breakaway. But Aziz and Motai Syndicates have started down the road of specialized series. B’s. C’s. Motai’s even introduced Ds, though they only use them for UN-based contract work. So far. The Motais and Aziz A’s don’t want the kind of world we all grew up believing in. They want a class system without money, a police state without prisons. Do you really think their C’s and D’s are going to go along with that when there’s a chance of getting immortality the old-fashioned way?”

“Maybe it’s a gift in disguise, then. Maybe it’ll make us live up to our ideals and get out of the specialized series business.”

“There’ll be civil war before that happens, Arkady. Or revolution. And a society can’t survive two revolutions in one generation.”

“I have to believe people are more reasonable than that—”

“If there’s one thing people can be depended on not to be in a crisis, it’s reasonable!”

“—take someone like Laid-back Ahmed, for instance. He’s certainly not prejudiced.”

“As you once pointed out to me, love and politics are two very different things.”

“You knew about Bella and Ahmed?”

“Of course. It’s obvious. Just look at the way they look at each other.”

“If it’s so obvious to you, then how come their home Syndicates didn’t figure out what they are?”

“What makes you think they haven’t?”

“But how could they be crazy enough to put the whole mission, or half of it anyway, in the hands of a man who’s been through renorming ? What’s wrong, Arkasha? Why are you looking at me like that? Oh Arkasha. No. Not you. How could they have?”

Arkasha had rolled onto his stomach. Arkady couldn’t see his face, only the dark hair feathering the pillow. He rubbed at the back of Arkasha’s neck, the way he would have done to soothe a frightened puppy.

“When did it happen?”

“Five…no, six years ago.”

“Tell me about it?”

Nothing.

“Please?”

“The worst thing,” Arkasha began, his voice muffled less by the pillow than by the same wrenching humiliation Arkady had heard in Ahmed’s voice, “the worst thing is how horribly nice everyone is about it. It’s not the Bellas of the world who work in the renorming centers. They’re dedicated, well-intentioned, idealistic professionals. They want to help you. They want to make you better.” He spat the last word out as if it tasted bad.

“And did they?”

“They made me learn to keep my stupid mouth shut. Is that better?”

Arkady leaned down to kiss his hair.

“There’s nothing like a stint on the euth ward to make you realize that you’re expendable,” Arkasha went on. “And the thing is, I didn’t really think I was expendable. I was the best, after all. At everything. Didn’t that mean I set the norm? Didn’t it mean I was the new norm? And I’m not egotistical or selfish. If I complained, it was because I wanted things to be better for everyone, not just for me.”

“So what happened in the end?”

“Nothing. I shut my mouth and worked my ass off and published my first paper out of the renorming center. And that was the end of that. They called me in for an evaluation, and I pretended to be cured, and they pretended to believe I was cured, and I packed my bag and went home and got back to work. Because it turned out that even if I was expendable, my work wasn’t.”

“But it must have changed you.”

“It made me work a hell of a lot harder, I can tell you that.”

“Be serious, Arkasha!”

Arkasha rolled over on his back and finally met Arkady’s eyes. His expression was intent, searching. “Would you believe me if I told you that you were the first person I’d slept with since then?”

He pulled Arkady down to him and kissed his eyes, his forehead, the bridge of his nose, the corner of his mouth. Arkady wanted to return the kisses, but there was still a last question he had to ask. “Why did they send you?”

“That’s the craziest thing of all. No one ever told me. I still don’t know. I don’t have the faintest clue.” He held Arkady tight and buried his face in his hair so that his last words were muffled to near inaudibility. “All I know is if I ever get sent back again, I’ll kill myself.”

“Wake up the tacticals?” Arkasha burst out, not two minutes into the consult that followed on the news of what they’d all started calling Bella’s situation. “Are you insane?”

“You’ve been saying yourself since before we even landed that Novalis is all wrong,” By-the-Book Ahmed countered. “Now we know why. And we know what to do about it too!”

“But you can’t turn the tacticals loose on Novalis!” Arkasha was pale with anger and frustration, knowing that he wasn’t carrying the room with him but unable to give up and acquiesce to the emerging consensus. If you could call it a consensus, Arkady thought bitterly, when half the team had plainly made up their minds before they ever sat down at the table. “This planet is irreplaceable, unprecedented! Priceless genetic material!”

“Priceless genetic material for you to exploit for your own egotistical and selfish reasons.”

“That’s unfair!”

“Is it? Really? Who are you really thinking about, Arkasha?”

“Look,” Laid-back Ahmed said, still faithfully trying to keep the peace. “Let’s at least hear what Aurelia and Arkasha have to say before we start shouting at each other. The least we can do is make up our minds based on facts, not opinions.”

“Basically,” Aurelia said, “the virus has hitched a ride on our collective immune system.”

She tore a sheet of paper from her notebook and began sketching bold lines and circles to illustrate her point. One circle was labeled susceptible individuals, another immune individuals, another asymptomatic carriers. Under her hands, the lines and circles quickly mustered into the standard flowchart that illustrated the way diseases and immunities spread through human and Syndicate populations.

“The collective immune system—of which the Motai version is the most aggressive—operates along the same lines as horizontal DNA transfer between virus variants within an infected host. It’s an intelligent adaptation to life in space. The human immune system evolved on Earth, where you had large, genetically diverse, low-density populations living in the open air or in primitive, well-ventilated dwellings. Disease spread slowly, and even major epidemics were no real threat in evolutionary terms since the overall population was always large enough to buffer against excess mortality. In that environment there’s actually a major evolutionary advantage to letting diseases spread widely enough to elicit a diversity of immune responses and avoid immunodominance problems.

“But in the Syndicates, we have tiny populations with minimal genetic diversity living on space stations where pathogens spread like wildfire. A severe epidemic can literally wipe out an entire geneline; it happened several times before we developed the current immunological splices. So our immune systems are designed with one goal in mind: killing new pathogens before they have a chance to get a foothold…even if that means giving up on the Earth-evolved mechanisms that ensure a diverse and balanced immune response in the longer, evolutionary timescale. We’ve used two tools to do it: horizontal DNA transfer that confers ‘inherited’ immunity without the time lag of waiting for genes to be passed on to the next generation; and a hard-hitting, fast-maturing immune response profile.

“Both splices are double-edged swords. And Novalis has turned them both against us. I can’t tell you if the virus is designed to infect us or not,” she finished darkly, “but I can tell you that the fit couldn’t be more perfect.”

As if by some tacit agreement, all eyes turned to Arkasha.

“Bottom line?” Arkasha said, speaking directly to By-the-Book Ahmed. “It’s not a weapon. It’s a terraforming tool. The most brilliant terraforming tool anyone could imagine. A viral search engine that expands its population—and therefore its parallel processing capacity—by jumping into every new species it encounters. And then expands it some more by pushing infected individuals into evolutionary overdrive. It’s a diversity machine. And it’s created a global red queen regime where every organism on this planet is running and running just to make the world stand still.”

“If it’s a terraforming tool,” By-the-Book Ahmed inquired icily, “then who put it here?”

“The original colonists. The UN. Little green men. I don’t care. All I know is it works. It works so well that there’s a real chance that other ship you’re so worried about wasn’t Peacekeepers but colonists.”

“Colonists with cutting-edge UN military technology?” Ahmed asked. Obviously the question was rhetorical.

“Maybe we need to go back to Aurelia’s first point,” Arkasha said. To Arkady’s surprise he was holding his temper in the face of Ahmed’s attacks. Perhaps it was a sign of the importance he placed on the outcome of this consult. “The immunological splices have always been the weak link in Syndicate physiology. It was the right trade-off to make, but we knew it might come back to haunt us someday. This thing hit us so hard because our immune systems happen to be an ideal vector for it, not necessarily because it was intentionally targeted at us.”

“If you step on one of Arkady’s ants,” By-the-Book Ahmed asked trenchantly, “does it matter to the ant whether you killed it on purpose or by accident?”

“Still,” Arkasha insisted, “we don’t know it’s the Peacekeepers. That’s a big jump.”

“Then explain why we didn’t see them come in-system?” By-the-Book Ahmed asked. “They have to have kept the planet between us and them for every kilometer of their in-system flight or our navcomp would have picked them up. Do I need to draw you a map? Do you have any idea how minute an area of space the solutions for that trajectory occupy? Talk about putting a camel through the eye of a needle!”

“I still don’t see why we can’t get more information before we—”

“What do you want us to do, fly around to the other hemisphere and politely ask them if they’re here to kill us? If they are, then I guarantee you the only reason we’re still alive is that they haven’t figured out where we are yet. We’re running on UN commercial technology that was already obsolete when we left Gilead three years ago. Fact of life. If we go out looking for them, they’ll find us a hell of a long time before we find them!”

They argued the question back and forth for a while, getting nowhere. Arkady had seen this dynamic in other consults: people talking around a problem not because they were still making up their minds, but because they needed to put mileage between themselves and their doubts. And in this consult Arkady sensed an emotional undertow that he suspected would be ominously familiar to anyone who’d lived through the bloody and bewildering weeks that followed the UN invasion.

His crewmates were frightened. They were terrified. And in their terror they turned to the tacticals.

The only real and effective support for Arkasha’s position came from a quarter that was as unexpected as it was welcome: Laid-back Ahmed.

“I think we’re losing sight of the real priorities here,” he said finally with the calm confidence that had made him the more or less undisputed mission leader ever since they woke up. Arkady could see team members glancing covertly at each other, taking stock, reexamining their previous assumptions in light of Ahmed’s calm rationality. “It’s not our personal safety that matters, it’s our long-term ability to settle this planet. Thawing out the tacticals and retreating into orbit may make us feel safer, but it won’t do a thing to solve the real problems facing us. The only way to do that is to stick to our guns and let the scientists keep working.”

“But what does that matter if their work is lost because we get—”

“It doesn’t need to be lost,” Arkasha jumped in. “We can just start shooting message drogues to the out-system relay daily instead of weekly. That way nothing’s being lost. Our data and questions and theories will all get to Gilead.”

“But not soon enough to save us if—”

“Since when did this become about saving us? If we go home without having gotten our job done, then we might as well have let whoever’s out there kill us.” Arkasha looked around the table incredulously. “What’s happening to you people? Where’s your altruism? You’re acting like humans, for God’s sake!”

And then Bella said the awful words that changed everything:

“You weren’t so worried about acting human when you got my cr`echemate pregnant.”

A chill settled over the room. Arkasha froze. The others shrank away from him, looking in every other possible direction.

In retrospect it seemed incomprehensible, but until Bella made her accusation everyone had been so overwhelmed by the fact of Bella’s being pregnant that it had never occurred to them to wonder who’d helped her get that way. And of course they would all suspect Arkasha long before their thoughts turned to Ahmed. Arkasha the contrarian. Arkasha the intellectual. It was only a short step from there to Arkasha the deviant.

Arkady sought Laid-back Ahmed’s eyes across the table, but the big Aziz A was looking at Arkasha. The two of them stared at each other for what would have been a breath’s length if anyone in the room had been breathing. Ahmed looked stunned. Arkasha looked as if he were wavering on the brink of a choice he didn’t want to have to make.

Laid-back Ahmed cleared his throat and began to speak.

“Don’t bother,” Arkasha said, cutting him off brutally. “They don’t care about the truth. They only want to find a scapegoat. They’ll turn on you too if you try to stick up for me. I’ve seen it before.”

Arkasha stood up and began collecting his papers. No one spoke to him. No one met his eyes or even looked in his direction. As he left the room Arkady saw Bossy Bella and By-the-Book Ahmed exchange a glance of quiet satisfaction.

In the end Arkasha’s sacrifice didn’t make much difference. Laid-back Ahmed did his best to hold the line, but the final consensus was still for waking up the tacticals and sending the civilians back into orbit. The tacticals made contact just after local dawn the next day and hit their LZ by midafternoon. The first lander brought down only a single squad, running point for their fellows, but from the moment they arrived the base camp stopped being a research station and took on the unmistakable atmosphere of a military outpost.

To Arkady’s trembling relief, the tacticals paid no real attention to the survey team. They took it for granted that the Rostov A’s, no matter how adamantly they’d opposed the decision to wake them up, would now fall into line and do as they were told. And they were right, Arkady thought bitterly…though not bitterly enough to do anything about it.

He wasn’t sure when he began to realize that Arkasha was going to do something.

There was no sudden, blinding revelation. Just a gradual surfacing of the idea that Arkasha was acting oddly…and that when you put all the little oddities together they made a disturbing pattern. By the afternoon of the tacticals’ second day on-planet, suspicion had given way to certainty and Arkady was secretly convinced that Arkasha had no intention whatsoever of leaving Novalis.

He went looking for him. He checked the orbsilk garden, thinking Arkasha might have gone there to check on poor Bella, but it was empty. He went to the bridge and found only By-the-Book Ahmed, busy and excited now that he had a war to run.

“Have you seen Arkasha?” he asked.

“Why? Is he off sulking somewhere? He’d better get over it in time to finish packing. We don’t have time for tantrums.”

“Do you know where your sib is?”

“No.”

“What about Be—”

“What?”

“Uh…nothing. Never mind. I’ll, uh, tell Arkasha to hurry up with the packing when I see him.”

He stepped off the bridge, waited until the door had fully closed behind him, and then let out the trembling breath he’d been holding.

Three people were missing, not one. Laid-back Ahmed and Shy Bella, who could be damn sure of landing on the euth ward if they ever made it home and the truth came out. And Arkasha, who had said he would die before he went through renorming again…and then taken the bullet for Ahmed in a quixotic attempt to keep the mission from falling apart.

Arkady hurried back to the lab, forcing himself to walk instead of run, freezing his face into an expression that he hoped didn’t reflect the rising panic inside him.

Arkasha’s work space was as gleamingly immaculate as ever. Not a notebook or a pencil or a slide plate out of place. Except for an all-but-imperceptible sag in the precisely arranged bookshelf that betrayed the hurried removal of several notebooks. Back in their quarters, a complete set of Arkasha’s clothes was missing as near as Arkady could make out…but there was no note there either. He wished he could check Ahmed’s and Bella’s personal things, but of course that was impossible.

There had to be a note, he told himself. They wouldn’t have left without giving him a chance to follow. Unless they hadn’t thought they could trust him. Or unless Arkasha had insisted on keeping him out of it. And of course Arkasha had insisted. Arkasha the reserved. Arkasha the cautious. Arkasha who would never risk dragging Arkady into danger—and who would never understand that Arkady would gladly have risked a stint on the euth ward for a last note from him.

He went back to the lab, forcing himself not to run down the corridor by an act of sheer will. But it was true. There really was no note. They were gone. And he would never know what decision he would have made, because he’d never have the chance to make it.

Then he looked over to his side of the lab and saw something that drove everything else from his mind.

He had forgotten to pack the arena where he’d been running his milling experiment. Worse, he’d forgotten to stop the experiment. It was still running, though the word running could only be applied to it with grisly irony. The pinwheel shape of the circular column remained. But the fleet-legged swarm of yesterday was now only a trail of crumpled corpses.

Arkady would never be able to explain what happened next, even to himself. He looked at the carnage in the arena. He looked at his field kit, lying forlornly in an open packing crate. He opened the rucksack and rummaged through it until he was sure that the first-aid gear and emergency rations were in their usual place. He told himself he was just going to stroll over to the airlock to see if he could see anything from there. No need to make his mind up about anything. And who cared if someone saw him? He had nothing to hide. But he noticed with a kind of bemused detachment that he rolled the kit up inside a clean lab coat before stepping into the corridor.

He could see nothing from the airlock, of course, only the impenetrable wall of the Big Wood. The air was heavy with some coming storm, and the cicadas were shrieking so wildly that he could hear them even through the lander’s sealed hull.

He wavered like a diver hanging over icy water. Then he hit the airlock, put his head down against the rising wind, and forged across the beaten ring of grass that separated the grounded ship from the forest. Ten strides took him under the shadow of the trees. Ten more strides and the wind had faded to the faint roar of surf on a distant reef.

He found Ahmed’s tracks first; Bella’s and Arkasha’s were fainter but still visible when you knew what you were looking for. When he was sure he had read them right he followed, erasing his own tracks as he went along and hoping against all reasonable hope that what little he knew of woodcraft was more than the tacticals knew.