He Without Sin (18 page)

“Yes, it goes on. I know. But Jason, it’s a real life and something I want to do. And don’t say it’s a waste. There’s a lot I could teach during my time. I’d like that.”

“Teach…? Dyl, let’s say you mean it but listen, you’re making a mistake. You are not of this planet. Yes, the chemicals and code of life are the same, you can digest the food, and there is no basic incompatibility but…”

“But what?”

“But look, the native populations, and I mean all the populations on the planet—animal, plant, microscopic, all—have lived and evolved right here, together, for eons. They are used to each other, for lack of a better term. And they are in a more-or-less stable equilibrium. We are not from here. Sure, we are protected by the med treatments and preventatives, the skin spray coating…”

“Not me. I quit using it.”

This stops me in my tracks. “Are you kidding me? When?”

“Don’t worry. It’s been a while. You do know that lab has been testing and culturing as much of the native biota as they can. I’ve talked to Jacob about it…”

“Jacob? Doc? You mean, he’s said it’s ok?” I ask in surprise.

“No, he didn’t know at first. In fact he didn’t know until my last checkup. He agrees with you, that it’s a bad idea not to use the spray. But I still don’t think so. Anyway, there it is.”

“But back to the main point. It remains a strong possibility that something out there is going to get you. I can’t believe you haven’t caught something already. You are simply not fine-tuned for this environment.” It’s then I realize I don’t know anything about his background. “Family?”

“None to speak of. There’ll be no one left when we get back. If I go back I mean.” After a brief silence, Dylan adds, “Jason. Ok. I hear you. I will think about it. At least you know now, and you are the only one who knows.”

I am fairly beat by the time we complete our circuit, ending up once again near the natural entry for this small valley. To my great surprise, we hear a loud voice, an amplified voice, booming out as we approach our starting point.

“What the… Is that…?”

“Yep, that is the voice of your pal Lester,” answers Dylan.

“What is he up to now?” I wonder, still surprised. “I didn’t catch what he was saying.” We approach the main pathway and just catch a glimpse of several natives. They have seen us first and begin to move quickly but quietly away. I notice that one recognizes Dylan and gives a quick look and wave to him before disappearing. The bright visual warning lights come on and we step into the clearing close to where the natives were congregated.

“Shipley, you reek!” says the booming voice.

That Dylan’s a good kid. I mentioned to him that
the administrator passwords for the Resource
team’s private channels had been changed, hoping
he could help me get back in. But he kept anything
he might have known about access to himself.

I ran into David not long ago, when I was thinking
about Dylan’s report of monitoring and further
treatments for the A&B line. I was in a mood and
just asked him straight out if it’s true. No
fireworks—he just said ‘yes’ and that was it.

The more I think about it, the more I don’t like the
way the work Craig and Aileen did with A&B was
being undermined. Dylan couldn’t say exactly what
they were being told, of course, but he was
confident it was not helpful. And it was being done
not so much as part of a grand plan, but more for amusement. According to my well-tested theory of
personality constancy, I have to wonder what other
mischief is afoot.

Local Attraction

“So Dylan. What do you think? I mean about his idea to stay.”

“If you must know,” says Carol, looking at me carefully, “I’ve thought about the same thing. Hasn’t it occurred to you?”

“Carol, what are you talking about? We can’t stay here. Wait, you are talking about us both?” She gives me a look. “Yes, of course. And there is nothing more I’d like to do than spend my life with you, but here?”

“Really?”

“Really what?”

“Spend our lives together?”

“Well, yes, of course. I thought you knew.”

“I left my mind-reading helmet up on the Hobbe, so no, I didn’t know. You may want to make a note to speak out loud when you have a thought like that,” she says with a decidedly unamused look on her face.

I am a little embarrassed by my lack of skill in dealing with relationship issues and am thankful she is trying to help me out. “But here? As I told him, it’s not gonna happen.”

“You’ve traveled around this planet more than I have and you’ve seen how beautiful it is. Can’t you just imagine? Stop being practical just a moment.”

“Ok sure, I like the idea of us spending our lives in an exotic location, back to nature; our rugged defiance of adversity, reliance on ourselves and all that. But at some point, a very early point I might add, you bump up against reality: infection; broken limb; childbirth…” I take a quick look at Carol and see no response. “All these things become life threatening instead of routine. It’s asking a lot to sacrifice the advantages we have.”

“Way to ruin it.”

“I’m just sayin’ I wouldn’t mind ordering out for food sometime and having it delivered instead of trapping and killing wild animals. I mean, when is the last time anyone’s done that? Who’s had unprocessed food in our lifetimes?” She’s not responding so I add, “You’re gonna get tired of pounding grain and sewing our clothes together out of skins and sinew.” At last, I detect her little smile. “On the other hand, if we could someday afford a nice place back in the civilized world, I say let’s do it. It’s going to be a while though.”

“Ok, let’s.”

“Back home, you mean?” She nods. “Think about some places, and we’ll do the math and see how to make it happen. We could opt out of any more missions and out of the Academy work altogether. I imagine we’ll each have opportunities in civilian positions if we want. Just a thought.”

“Alright, let’s take the practical approach after all,” Carol says and now she is not gently chiding me but instead seems content with our discussion. “Let’s do make a point while we are here to get away again every now and then for a few days. We’ll never have a whole planet practically to ourselves again.”

“It’s a deal. If you can make me some shoes out of tree bark, I promise to kill something and figure out how to cook it on a fire.”

“No, you don’t have to. It is an intriguing idea though, you have to admit. Cave man and cave woman against the world.” Carol is silent for a moment and then speaks again saying, “But I do know someone who could give you pointers on cooking raw meat.”

“Raw meat? Really?”

“Yes, you asked who has ever done that recently and, well, you might want to talk to Wesley about it.”

“You must be joking. Has he gone native? I can’t imagine for one second him getting his hands dirty. Why do you think this?”

“Look, I haven’t seen it myself and shouldn’t be talking out of turn. But I do talk to one or two of his people sometimes and the word is that Wes is not only doing it but that he’s hooked on it. You talked about raw meat on a fire—well he’s done it, or having it done.”

This reminds me of the scene that Dylan and I stumbled on during my last visit to the old bio area. The natives had run off from the gate area, but they left behind some intriguing things; including meat—charred. “I wonder…” Carol knows some of what happened that time and I fill her in on the rest. “You don’t think he’s badgering the natives to do it for him? Is he using them for something like that?”

“It could be; he’s a snake. I told you I don’t trust him. Way back when we were still at the Academy, he would deliberately pester me…”

“Pester? What exactly? Pester how?” My hackles are raised; here is yet another reason to dislike this man.

“It’s not important now, but I let him have it verbally and threatened to go straight to Dean Carson or higher if he kept it up. That straightened him out and since then when we meet he pretends innocence and ignorance.”

“Look, if he’s…”

“Settle down, tiger, I told you it’s not a problem now. I am doing some work for him but only through his delegates.”

“Go on. What work? If I may ask,” I ask, still upset.

“It’s all legit. He is asking me to work the Hobbe’s imaging systems to search landmasses globally for surface outcroppings of specific materials. Or, for outcroppings where we may deduce the materials may be embedded if we don’t find them directly. It’s all standard stuff.”

“Standard stuff? I don’t like it. If anything comes up where he tries to get you alone…”

“Hey, I’m a big girl, ok? I can handle him.”

I take some breaths to cool down. I’ll trust her to handle Brachus.

There’s been a lot to absorb lately: Dylan running around without basic protection on his bare skin; now Brachus eating unprocessed meat, if the story I true. What other safety measures is that group ignoring? The actual idea of using animals from here, roasted or whatever, turns my stomach a little. It’s possible Carol has it wrong. Her contacts may be feeding her a line. He seems to have a pretty loyal core group, whatever else they might be, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he, and maybe they as a group, were to enjoy an ego boost by spreading a rumor like this.

______

“Look, it’s the best system ever developed,” says Mark in one of his expansive moods in his work area at base camp. “It’s really the best there is and nothing beats it.”

“But what about the latest version we saw back at training?”

“What, that? Don’t be silly. I played with it. It’s beta. Loaded with bugs. Here, take this. Here’s to ya.”

Mark takes an exploratory sip of his latest batch followed by another and a grin. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

“I have to give it to you, it’s just a bad as the real thing back home,” says I after my own sip. I am not a fan of his favorite after-hours brew. “What possesses you to drink this stuff?”

“I deserve it,” he says. “After all the crap I put up with… You talk to Porter? Well, he’s got the right idea. His priority system is the best. Just give me one job at a time if you are going to micromanage me. Or better yet, get the hell out of my way and I’ll take care of my end of things just fine.”

“So you are not actually brewing or distilling this stuff are you? How is it actually done?”

“Yes, I’m brewing it. What do you think?” Mark answers hastily. He gives his thinning red hair a sweep. “Well, brewing… I am inputting the ingredients in the form of organic compounds, the output formula I modify by hand; the impurities, the aging flavors, are a little tricky. Try something like that on your beta unit.”

“But brewing, or fermenting, in the original sense…”

“It’s the impurities that make the difference between good, better, and best. What you have here, son, is gold, pure gold,” he says, ignoring my original question. He follows this with another sip. “This unit will spit out, no pun intended, just about anything you want. The trick is having the right formula. All the standards are built in for food and drink. Non-standards require someone who knows what they are doing.”

“Can it make me a cup o’ ‘burnin’ fire’?” I suggest, tongue-in-cheek.

“Nope. Can’t do that yet. Too complex. Need to completely break it down and analyze. Not gonna do it here, at least not unless time frees up. And not even then. Not interested. Something’s happening during the processing of those beans anyway; the drying, crushing, and heating makes for a very complex liquid by the time you drink it. You drink it?”

“I have. Not a major fan.”

“Are you a major fan of anything? Besides Carol, I mean,” Mark adds with his own brand of chortling.

“Inorganics. What about them? Same unit?”

“No. Yes, same idea. Different handling. Ores have to go through preprocessing. They are all different. You have to change setups quite often, believe me I know,” he answers and I catch a little grimace on his face.

“What is keeping you so busy? Is everything going all right? Your crew behaving?”

“Crew? Naw, we’re basically all runners now, I don’t have a crew. We all work for Big Brachus and just don’t know it. No, my operation is smooth. It’s the damn government jobs that’ll kill ya. But never mind that. Take a look at this,” he says conspiratorially. Mark pulls a little sphere out of his pocket and drops it into my free hand. I set my drink down and look at the object.

“Is this…?” It’s heavy for its size, like a ball bearing, which it clearly is not.

“Yes, it is. It certainly is.”

I knew it right away. I look at Mark, look at the glittering object in my hand, and then hold it up in front of my eye. You think you can look through it but you cannot. If you hold it up to a light source it gets brighter but it’s not translucent in the normal sense; you can see nothing through it. It is a work of art—an immensely detailed and beautiful object. It’s as if ordinary light goes in, bounces around a while and then exits as every color of the rainbow. The surface is an ever-changing assemblage of soft points of every color. I say ‘surface’ but I can’t really focus on the surface at all. You can feel it—it’s hard—but the sphere looks more like a cloud, with depth.

“You made this,” I say at last, not as a question. I see that Mark is studying me, enjoying my reaction no doubt.

“I figured out the secret. Something I’ve been playing with on the side. I’ve got to have some fun in all this too, you know. It’s a solution, technically, not a solid—the sphere. A structure built up of just three building blocks, one after the other, atom by atom. It doesn’t happen naturally.” He looks at me, his eyes gleaming. “I should say molecule-by-molecule.” Oh, he’s in his element now, as it were. Mark continues, “You’ve heard about this stuff—ever held one before?”

“Piramon? Never saw it in person before, but…”

“Yeah, yeah—keep it down, will ya? Not many people run into the two main components of this material. One’s a metal, the other is not, both are pretty rare. What do you think is the third component? Do you know?”