Lifeline (6 page)

Chapter 7

AGUINALDO—Day 8

Pliant green strands, gelatinous and damp.…

Luis Sandovaal ran his fingers through the fresh wall-kelp, allowing himself a broad grin since no one else was around. The solarium alcove looked like a lush, primeval forest. Thick fronds dripped from the walls and window plates.

A month ago, ten days ago, his kelp had been nothing more than animal feed. Now the
Aguinaldo
’
s
survival depended on it. President Magsaysay had told him to find a way to get wall-kelp to
Orbitech 1
and to
Clavius Base
as well, perhaps even to the Soviet
Kibalchich
station at L-5. It was just like Magsaysay to worry about other people in trouble before he got himself out of the same mess.

The odor of sewage filled the air. Hidden vats circulated the
Aguinaldo’s
untreated wastes for absorption by the kelp nexus. Harsh light from the viewing ports glared into the chamber, washing over the wall-kelp appendages.

Under these ideal conditions, with all the nutrients and sunlight it could handle, the genetically enhanced kelp grew fast enough to be harvested daily. It was food—unappealing to the colonists, perhaps, but it would see them through. They could treat it, remove all taste, then add their own cayenne and soy and other chemical seasonings. If you were starving, who cared about seasonings anyway?

The other colonies were in much worse shape than the
Aguinaldo,
which the Filipinos had always intended to make into a viable home. The international
Clavius Base
, the American
Orbitech 1,
and the Soviet
Kibalchich
—they had been caught with their pants down. They had no contingency plans for disasters. Oh, certainly they had backup launch systems on Earth, agreements with other countries, reciprocal treaties with non-spacefaring nations, and even scores of shuttles—but none of that mattered now that Earth’s industrial capability had been removed. Even if some industry still functioned, the survivors would use it to rebuild things they desperately needed—not to send supplies to stranded space colonies.

American and Soviet technologies far outstripped what the Filipinos had available to them. With all that skill and knowledge at hand, the superpowers had more than enough ability to survive—but, Sandovaal thought, they seemed to have the wrong mind-set.

The superpowers relied too heavily on high technology—machines—when the key was biotechnology, genetic engineering. Living organisms were more sophisticated and adaptable than anything humans would ever build. The success of Sandovaal’s wall-kelp would put the Filipinos in the forefront of all future genetic research. He knew it. Especially now.

But how to get kelp nodules to the other colonies? The
Aguinaldo
didn’t have the capability for powered spaceflight, or a facility, or resources to create fuel. All of the stations were effectively stranded on desert islands—like living on the Philippine Islands before the age of boats. Sandovaal was the
Aguinaldo’s
chief scientist. He was supposed to come up with ideas.

He flared his nostrils, wondering how much responsibility one person could shoulder. It seemed the more he did, the more they expected of him.

But then he thought of the others the Council could turn to. Dobo Daeng? Sandovaal snorted. Dobo was a good assistant, a crackerjack technician, but he had no initiative to head up a research team. Dobo followed orders and did things right, but he had no imagination. Tough times demanded a special type of person—someone who could do what needed to be done. Someone like Luis Sandovaal.

He stood in the alcove for some minutes, lovingly rolling the meter-long strands of wall-kelp with his fingertips. He thought he could sense the wall-kelp growing, hear it moving like bamboo, but a thousand times faster.

Sandovaal brought the strand close to his lips and took a nibble. This substance would etch his name in Filipino history forever, right alongside General Aguinaldo, General MacArthur, and the first President Magsaysay.

Sandovaal winced at the taste.

He dropped the strand and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Conceptually, he realized the raw kelp material was edible, but his mouth rebelled at the acrid, unprocessed taste.

Even he admitted that things would have to be very grim before people worshiped
that
as manna from heaven.

Trial and error.

For months their research had followed a dogged routine. Sandovaal’s team, including Ramis’s parents, Agpalo and Panay Barrera, and Dobo Daeng, clustered in the laboratory units. Using chlorella algae as a genetic base material, combined with two different species of kelp, Sandovaal tried to enhance the salient features of a good food substitute—that it be fast growing, high in protein, and tailored for the
Aguinaldo’s
environment. Sandovaal insisted that the plant be self-sufficient, not tied to the soil by any root system.

After running a series of converging molecular-dynamic calculations, and dozens of trials, the transgenetic algae/kelp survived and increased its mass. Dobo, in a rush of accidental inspiration, suggested they could grow the plant over the
Aguinaldo’s
walls. The idea excited Sandovaal. He grabbed the other man’s round face and patted him like a puppy.

The wall-kelp proved to be amazingly versatile—to Sandovaal’s surprise as much as anyone else’s. It could cling to any freestanding object; a few unsupported spherical nodules drifted in the zero-G core. The fronds of wall-kelp advanced like a green wave over barren sections of the internal hull, producing oxygen and a digestible bio-mass.

Sandovaal decided he had discovered the panacea that would give the
Aguinaldo
independence from the Americans and their supply shuttles.

Decades before, his grandmother had worked in the rice paddies on the Philippines, tilling the soil and carrying “honey buckets” of human waste to spread as fertilizer. She splashed through the brown water, sweating in the humidity, her hands raw from the rice shoots. Sandovaal remembered seeing a tractor rusting at one end of the rice paddy, but otherwise he might have been imagining a scene from two hundred years ago.

By way of support for the new Filipino government established after World War II, the Americans had shipped in thousands of tons of farm equipment: tractors, harvesters, silos—equipment that should have elevated the Philippines to a true second-world country. The Islands had all the resources; the Filipinos had only to learn to use the new equipment.

But once the tractors ran out of gas or oil, or ground to a halt because of mechanical failures, the Filipinos found it easier just to let them stand in the fields and rust than to fix them.

Sandovaal had heard their excuse: it was Western equipment, built and designed to be run by Western hands.

Sandovaal snorted at the blindness of his own people, their stupidity. Survival was more important than misplaced pride. They should use the tools, the techniques, the discoveries already available. He himself had not felt the need to reproduce all the pioneering genetics experiments Gregor Mendel had performed in his monastery garden. That would be foolish, and Sandovaal had no patience with fools.

The same ingrown resistance to change made the
Aguinaldo
colonists reluctant to accept his wall-kelp as food. They turned up their noses at its taste, though the kelp was nutritionally sound. Sandovaal considered it a direct insult from his own people. But at least they used it as animal feed.

One day, after he had been on the
Aguinaldo
for two years, Sandovaal looked up as daylight streamed into the laboratory from the open door. President Magsaysay stood outside, silhouetted. His bare feet contrasted with the formal barong he wore, but fit his image well.

Sandovaal motioned him inside and indicated the small culture tanks of new wall-kelp strains. The laboratory room carried a spoiled smell from the raw nutrients. He began to jabber about his progress, knowing how important it would be for the Council to learn, but Magsaysay seemed uninterested in the conversation. It occurred to Sandovaal that the
dato’s
eyes were misty and troubled.

Magsaysay stared at his long fingernails, looking very tired. He rubbed his temples, avoiding Sandovaal’s gaze. “Luis, that is not the reason I am here.”

“I suspected as much.”

Magsaysay held out his hands, but said nothing. Sandovaal watched him, growing impatient. “Well, what is it?”

“Agpalo and Panay Barrera were your assistants, correct?” His voice trailed off.

Sandovaal frowned. “Yes. I hired them out of the Baguio barrio, back on the Islands. They were always trying to get ahead. Moonlighting, in fact—running a Sari-Sari store when I found them. They were much too bright for that. Are they giving you trouble?”

Magsaysay set his mouth. “They were killed this morning.”

“What?” Sandovaal sat and slumped back in his chair. His face fell slack. “But they were here not more than a few hours ago—”

“They were almost home when—”

“When what? What do you mean?”

“Some youngsters brought a fiberglass plate to the core. They tried to go skimming around the Sibuyan Sea, ride against the rotation. They lost control of the plate—”

Sandovaal sat up straight. “Idiots! If they flew into the rim—” he thought for a moment, calculating. “Why, they could impact at fifty kilometers an hour.”

“We found out,” Magsaysay said. “The children were unharmed. But the fiberglass plate flew into one of the walkways. The Barreras … I have already talked to their son, Ramis—the one who is here on
Aguinaldo.”

Sandovaal looked up at him, feeling oddly quiet inside. “Why have you not done anything before this?”

“Luis, how are we going to stop children from sneaking out and playing in the core?”

“Toss them out the airlock if they get caught. That would stop the little terrors.”

“We do not have that kind of government, Luis.”

Sandovaal hit his hand with his fist. “It should never have happened. Panay and Agpalo did good work.” He stopped. “What will you do with their boy, uh—”

“Ramis. This is his home. He will stay with me.” Sandovaal lifted an eyebrow at the
dato. President Magsaysay?
he thought.
With a boy to take care of?
But establishing their colony as more than an experimental outpost was very dear to Magsaysay’s heart.

“I have not lived with anyone since Nada died. But I have plenty of room—and plenty of time, for that matter. In a country as small as the
Aguinaldo,
even the president is not kept too busy. Ramis has a brother back on Earth, but he may be better off staying here.” Magsaysay shrugged. “Besides, I feel responsible for what happened.”

Sandovaal still grumbled to himself. “Those idiots should have known better. Humans are supposed to be an intelligent species, remember?”

Magsaysay looked at the floor. “Luis, you cannot convince children what is good for them. You must have precautions and enough safety features to stop accidents. Perhaps we will have to set up a strict patrol, like policemen. No, like lifeguards.”

Sandovaal paced back to his desk, pondering. “They are children. They need sheepdogs, not lifeguards.” The laboratory seemed silent to him; the vat of maturing wall-kelp emitted a putrid smell.

Magsaysay stood up, brushing the palms of his hands over his barong. “I just needed someone to talk to, Luis. But I should be alone now. Or maybe I should be with Ramis. I will let you get back to your work.”

Sandovaal nodded distractedly and walked the
dato
to the door. But long after Magsaysay’s electric cart had trundled uphill along the curving rim, Sandovaal remained lost in thought, staring out at the enclosed world around him.

It was, after all, time to begin the new phase of trans-genetic research to follow up on his brilliant success of the wall-kelp. Take it one step farther. Like that sail-creature debacle he had pushed.

Sheepdogs.…

***

Chapter 8

ORBITECH 1—Day 8

The fountain jets in the Japanese garden looked like spurting diamonds. Karen Langelier watched with wonder as each droplet of water rose to its apex, hung there for a prolonged instant, then began its glide back down to the pool. She listened as the drops hit the surface, like a slow-motion rain shower. Her eyes glinted, and she smiled at the beauty that low gravity gave to the downpour.

Karen closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, smelling the air, the moisture, the plants.
Relax, unwind. Then you can get back to work on the new weavewire process.
She moved around the fountain to look at a burst of magenta, button-shaped blooms. The gardener, Hiro Kaitanabe, kept a variety of flowers in bloom, mixing the scents like a master tea blender.

She was glad Kaitanabe refused to label the plants with their scientific names. Karen was a polymer chemist, not a botanist, and had little grasp of Latin names for living species. Scientists loved to name and categorize things, but sometimes it became a little oppressive. She wanted this place to feel like a park, not a plant museum.

She had come to the garden to empty her mind, to get away from thinking. To forget about the War, her work … her estranged husband back on Earth. To distract herself, Karen spent too many hours in the lab, surrounded by chemicals, analytical instruments, and polymer spinnerets, using the clumsy techniques of working without gravity.

She could work out her problems, somehow. She was strong enough for that.

Karen wandered along the manicured aisles of bushes, listening to the fountains, the recorded bird song from tiny speakers hidden in the branches. Kaitanabe knew just how much sound and how much silence to add to his garden. Warm illumination glowed from the walls and ceiling, simulating sunlight. Brighter lamps shone out of artificial Japanese lanterns for those plants that required more light.

Karen wore comfortable clothes—stretch jeans and a sweater—under her lab coat, which she rarely removed because she always needed the pockets for her personal paraphernalia, computer, calendar-beeper, black licorice candy. Anything she had to carry consciously, such as a backpack or a purse, always seemed too much bother.

Part of her wanted to hurry back to the lab, to bury herself in work again. She thought she had just made a major breakthrough, found a much faster way to draw out the monomolecular weavewire she had pioneered years before.…

No, she would stay here and just let some of the calmness soak in for a while, seek that quiet place in her center where all the ideas originated. She had been consciously teaching herself how to relax, but it was very difficult.

She glanced down at the meandering stream pumped by slow turbines under the floor. She looked a little haggard, but she’d had ghosts of gray in her red hair and laugh lines around her eyes long before the War. Leaving Ray had done that to her—the trial separation to see if they would fare better together or by themselves. A year at L-5 doing her work, giving her time to think … and at the end of her assignment, then they could decide what to do.

But the War had decided for them, and she and Ray would never have the chance to find out. Even if he had not been killed in the exchange, they were separated by circumstances more final than any divorce.

Karen did not close her eyes against the pain, but her vision became focused on a faraway place.
Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to.
It sounded corny and simplistic, but she believed it.

As she rounded a corner of hedges, Karen came upon Hiro Kaitanabe, bent over a flower bed of cream-colored lilies. She was about to greet the gardener, but stopped as she noticed the tension in his back.

Kaitanabe ripped the lilies out by the roots, crushing the bulbs in his hands. He yanked the leaves off silently and tore the delicate flowers.

Karen took a step forward. “What—?”

The gardener froze, then slowly placed the lilies down on the ground, as if embarrassed. He stood up, brushing his dirt-covered hands together. It took him a moment to place an indifferent mask on his face.

“This entire garden … none of it is food.” He indicated the plants with a nod of his head. “All this time I could have been growing food.”

He padded away, leaving the ruined flower bed and clods of dirt on the path.

Karen stared at him until he disappeared into the foliage. She couldn’t even hear him moving. Deep in one of the branches of a sculpted tree, a burst of cheerful bird song echoed in the garden.

The Bifrost Lounge held a dozen people. The chairs, tables, and small holoscreens had been arranged in a haphazard but calculated way. Karen was sure Orbitechnologies had spent a lot of effort on psychological studies to give it just that “homey” touch. Everything was done in earth tones with splashes of green here and there, artificial flowers, real plants.

Three women sat at a table playing a game with a well-worn deck of paper playing cards. Clustered together in the high-throughput ventilation area, four people shared a cigarette. Karen smiled to herself. One of
Orbitech 1’s
developments had been an alveoli-scrubber drug—a timed-release capsule that cleaned deposits from the lungs. This made tobacco smoking safe again, but since it cost so much to import tobacco from Earth, few of the Orbitech colonists could smoke anyway.

The lab work waited, but Karen avoided it for now. She needed to be with other people, even if she did nothing more than sit and observe. She was getting tired of hiding with nothing but her problems for company. That was no way to make things better for herself.

She entered the lounge quietly so no one would notice her. A man in a red sweat suit hurried up to her. “The shuttles are going down! Either this orbit or the next one.” He looked as if she should be interested, but he went off to tell the others before she could respond.

The shuttle
Miranda
had crashed on the Moon days before. Most of the people on
Orbitech 1
were still furious with Mr. McLaris and the pilot who had stolen the shuttle. Mutineers, some people called them. Some claimed that it was just like upper management to steal the goods and screw the other employees; others chuckled bitterly that McLaris had screwed even the other managers.

But the other two shuttles were a different story. The
Ariel
and the
Oberon
had been trapped in low Earth orbit, arriving at the end of their runs just after the War. At least they hadn’t been blasted in the space-based weapons exchange like the Earth-orbiting stations, but now the two pilots had limited supplies and no fuel to go anyplace else.

Every ninety minutes the two shuttles dipped lower in their orbits as the vanishingly thin atmosphere slowed them like quicksand. They had about another day and a half before the craft would hit the ionosphere—not like a stone skipping across the water, but streaking across the sky in a dazzling fireball.

The Colony Communications—ConComm—network between the
Aguinaldo, Clavius Base
, and
Orbitech 1
kept communications open twenty-four hours a day. Occasionally it picked up low-wattage broadcasts from Earth or amateur radio operators, or intercepted transmissions between groups of War survivors, but very few of the transmissions were directed out into space. The colonies were on their own as far as Earth was concerned.

But ConComm also broadcast regular updates of the situation with the
Ariel
and the
Oberon.
What else did the people have to do but watch and listen to the pilots’ gamble for survival?
Heroes
—
we could use some about now,
Karen thought.

Clavius Base
had suggested to the pilots that they maneuver their shuttles together, transfer all remaining fuel from the
Ariel
into the larger
Oberon,
which had been built for landing on the Moon, and kick themselves into a higher, stable orbit. But even if that succeeded, they had only food enough for another week.

The pilots had been more enthusiastic about another suggestion made by someone on
Orbitech 1.
The
Ariel
contained a shipment of tungsten-alloy wire that had been intended for transfer to the
Orbitech 2
construction site at L-4. If the pilots maneuvered close enough, they could lash the two shuttles to each other, strapping one in front to act as a heat shield.

Karen sat down in a chair and thought about dozing, lying back and letting the tension ripple out the base of her neck. Ray used to be so good at giving back rubs.…

She must have dozed, because the shuttle pilots broke over the intercom again, ending their forty-five-minute silence. They had successfully attached the two craft together. They were going to toboggan through the atmosphere with the
Oberon
in front as a shield. Karen looked around the lounge and saw that the card game had ended. Several other people had arrived and were listening to the transmissions.

“They’re going down!” said the man in the red sweat suit.

Karen closed her eyes, traveling back into her mind and imagining a dull-red glow of plasma forming at the shuttle’s ablative front, seeing what it would be like if she were floating along with the craft. The spot of roasting metal grew quickly, heating up until the craft was immersed in a blue-bright bath of light. How long before the bottom shuttle started to melt and crumble?

“Plasma interfer-# # #-communica-# # #.” The static in the
transmission made it impossible to tell which of the pilots had spoken. “We prom-###-say hello-###-every-###.”

All the people in the lounge seemed to be holding their breath. Karen realized that she had unconsciously crossed her fingers. Smiling at her childishness, she straightened her hands and looked around the room.

The Earth kept its radio silence.

The people waited in the lounge, and kept waiting. After the silence grew too thick, mumbled conversation began to rise and fall in the air.

ConComm remained quiet. After half an hour, the first people started to leave. Karen walked out of the lounge, heading back to her lab.

The shuttles never re-established contact.

***