Playing God (2 page)

Cheers, waving ears, raised hands. Lynn shook her head. Trust Praeis to know what not to say. Don’t bring up the fact that many of the sisters out there fled from the continuous warfare as much as from the plagues that the warfare let loose. Let everyone who wanted to hope that the deal around that table meant an end to both.

Lynn watched Praeis step off the fountain’s edge into the arms of her Dedelphi sisters, and the Others. Mother Praeis Shin the Townbuilder, said those who liked her. Praeis the Cold-Blooded, said those who couldn’t understand why she didn’t get furious at the drop of the hat in the normal Dedelphi fashion. Praeis, who, unlike the other inhabitants of Crater Town, was not a refugee. She was an exile. The ones who knew that had worse names for her, and some of them might have gone for blood. But—Lynn glanced again at the Human security guards on the roofs and highest balconies—Praeis’s planning had made sure that Crater Town had law enforcement that was beyond the influence of the Dedelphi’s fractious anger, as much for her family’s sake as for the good of the colony.

Lynn went back to the worktable. Obviously, no more work was getting done today. The crowd in the streets would be cheering and debating for hours, and Praeis would be in the thick of it. Lynn touched the keys on the table’s edge to save the city map they’d been working with. She subvocalized the record command to her camera implant and stored an additional working copy, in case she had any brilliant ideas on the way home.

Three waves of the plague had hit Crater Town. The sickness had been brought in by refugee ships, and despite steadily tightened quarantine controls, transmitted through families. Now, between thirty and forty percent of the colony’s housing stood empty. The Building Committee had decided to raze the empty buildings as potential health hazards. Lynn and Praeis had met that morning to try to come up with plans for how to use the empty spaces the demolition would create.

Thirty percent. Lynn closed her eyes against the memories of the mass funerals, the dead and dying in their isolation beds, the wailing of the sisters left behind. Hundreds of Human doctors, armed with the best defenses years of research and biotech could devise, had volunteered themselves to help the fight, but they’d only made a small dent in the death tolls. Praeis had lost two sisters and four daughters, and Lynn had been there to watch.

Lynn’s fingers hurt. She opened her eyes and looked down. Her gloved hands clenched the edge of the worktable like they were trying to break it off. Feeling moderately foolish, she let go and finished storing the maps.

Praeis liked to try to give Lynn credit for the success of the Crater Town colony, but Lynn would just shake her head. “I just helped out with the gardening,” she said. “You’re the one who got people to actually live here.”

When the original Dedelphi refugees had shown up, they weren’t fleeing plague, they were fleeing war. They arrived in the ships of Human mercenary pilots. They stood torn between fear and pride at the customs stations of enclaves, space stations, colonies, and city-ships—anybody who’d let them land and would agree to give them a berth of some variety in return for work or good publicity.

Then came Praeis and her sisters, Jos and Shorie. They saw the scattered, meek Dedelphi population in the Solar system, and they got to work. They found a crater that the Martian enclaves hadn’t bothered to foliate. They convinced twelve separate boards and committees that it would be an incredible act of public charity to give it to the Dedelphi so the Dedelphi could have a home where they could be safe from the Human poison that was a constant danger to themselves, their sisters, their daughters.

Praeis and her sisters tramped all over the system gathering donations, equipment, and skilled help. The refugee Dedelphi responded tentatively at first, but then with growing enthusiasm, especially since many of them had daughters who had never been out of their clean-suits.

Lynn’s family, famous for their re-creation of Earth’s Florida peninsula, were recruited to foliate the crater in a style that would be comfortable for the Dedelphi. It was the work of a number of years. Lynn, her portable screen still warm from receiving her doctorate, had fallen in love with the job, and fallen into friendship with Praeis Shin. When the rest of her family left, Lynn stayed behind. The foliation wasn’t complete, she said at the time. There wasn’t nearly enough variety in the fields and gardens. They didn’t have a trained maintenance force yet.

Her family had nodded sagely at each other, hugged her, and let her stay. Everybody knew what was going on, and approved. Back in Florida, Lynn would be tweaking work that had been completed fifty or seventy-five years ago. Here, she had her own projects, and they were worthwhile ones. Not one relative said one word to protest her basing herself on an entirely different planet.

Her decision had won her the gratitude of the Dedelphi, a number of awards from assorted enclaves, and a handful of really bad nightmares from the plagues. But it was real, and important, and she loved it.

And now…And now what comes next?
Lynn wondered toward the windows.
What if they all do go home? What am I going to do?

She shook her head and laughed quietly.
Nussbaumer, you selfish little so-and-so.

As it turned out, it was three hours before the crowds in the street shifted enough for Lynn to get through to the monorail that would take her out of the crater and across the rust-and-green landscape to the Ares 12 Human colony. On the way, in her private cabin with its opaqued window, she shucked out of her clean-suit and helmet and stuffed them into her duffel bag. The suits were awkward, but absolutely necessary. Direct contact with Humans caused massive anaphylactic reactions among the Dedelphi. The touch of a Human hand could raise welts on Dedelphi skin. Human dander sent the Dedelphi respiratory system into massive shock. The first encounter between Dedelphi and Humans had lasted three days before five of the Dedelphi died of heart and respiratory failure. There had been confusion and bloodshed on all sides before it was understood what had happened.

Lynn brushed down her shoulder-length auburn hair. Since she didn’t actually live with the Dedelphi, she’d been spared the necessity of depilating herself to keep her dander to a minimum.

Ares 12 was a residential community. Its homes and stores were built out of native brick and stood glittering a thousand shades of red in the late-afternoon sun. The city founders had worked hard to get thornless climbing roses to grow in the soil that remained sandy after three generations, but they’d been successful. Roses—pink, orange, red, white, and yellow—grew in riotous bundles everywhere and climbed up walls the way ivy climbed up walls in towns on Earth. Lynn breathed their perfume in as she walked from the monorail station to the house she shared with her partner, David Zelotes.

Unlike the streets in Crater Town, the streets of Ares 12 were empty. If any of the Humans had gotten the news about the Dedelphi, they were discussing it over the info-web, if at all.

The cream-and-burgundy front room of her home was also empty when Lynn walked in, but she heard David’s voice coming out of his study. A strange voice followed it.

Caller on the line,
she thought, and went into her own comfortably untidy study. The antique furniture was covered with disks, films, slivers, actual books, maps, dirty dishes, and half-empty coffee cups. The cleaning jobber sat in a corner, turned off, as usual, with a china mug and half a stale sandwich balanced on it.

“Claude,” she called for the room voice as she dropped the duffel into the corner and herself into her desk chair. “Any messages?”

“One urgent message from Emile Brador, Vice President in charge of Resource and Schedule Coordination for Bioverse Incorporated Enclave.”

“What?” Lynn shot up in her chair. Bioverse were the ones who just signed the deal with the Dedelphi.

“One urgent message—”

“Claude, stop. Claude, deliver message.”

“Vice President Brador asks Lynn Nussbaumer to connect with him as soon as possible. He has an open thread waiting for her and has left his address with her home system.”

What does Bioverse want with me?
“Claude, thread me through to Mr. Brador.”

“Threading.” Pause. “Connection complete.”

Lynn swiveled her chair to face her wall screen.

Emile Brador, Vice President in charge of Resource and Schedule Coordination for Bioverse Incorporated Enclave, appeared on the screen. He was a tidy man, slender, but not small. His round, pale eyes were set in a pinched brown face, making him look like a startled owl. His office, or at least its simulation, was a model of antique gentility with a lot of leather chairs and wooden paneling.

“Good evening, Dr. Nussbaumer,” said Brador. “I want to thank you for taking the time to speak to me.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Brador,” replied Lynn in her best formal voice. “I confess, I’m a bit uncertain what you wanted to speak to me about though. I’m assuming it’s got something to do with the foliation program for Crater Town?” Bioverse was a biotech corp. They were always looking for new techniques, or new genomes.

“Actually, we’d like to extend you an offer of citizenship.”

Lynn blinked, startled. “That’s very interesting, but I’d have to think about it.”

Brador nodded. “I fully understand, Dr. Nussbaumer. You are a citizen of excellent standing and family in the Miami Environs and Greater Florida Enclave. When you’re not on Mars, you’re living on land your family re-created from bottom sand and ancient records. There, you have your pick of lifetime employment situations.” He spread his blunt-fingered hands. “And what am I offering? A chance for you to cut your ties to your family, surrender your allegiances, and leave home for fifty years or more.” He leaned forward. “But I’m also offering a chance for you to help save an entire world.”

Nice opening, Vice President Brador.
She looked back at tidy Veep Brador in his tidy office. She felt her back stiffen.

“Mr. Brador, exactly what do you want me for?”

She meant to shock him, but Brador’s mouth just quirked up. A good sign, probably.

“As of yesterday,” he said, “Bioverse Inc. has a contract with the Dedelphi—”

“Yes, I untied the web knot,” Lynn cut him off. “Impressive. I thought getting all the Dedelphi Great Families to agree on something was impossible.”

“That’s what I thought.” Brador nodded, and, for the moment, the vice presidential mannerisms dropped. “The Getesaph and the Fil actually contacted us over a year ago, but what they want…It was decided we couldn’t make a contract without a worldwide agreement.”

“What exactly are they asking you to do?” Genuine curiosity prompted Lynn’s question. There’d been so many rumors, and she’d barely skimmed the first thread of the knot in the office with Praeis.

“For a start, we’re going to contract a biomedical team and put a stop to the plague they’ve unleashed on themselves.” For a second, Brador’s smile seeped into his eyes. “That is what my colleague is speaking with your partner, Dr. Zelotes, about.”

“That’s ‘for a start.’” She made quotation marks with her fingers. “What’s after that?”

“We are also being asked to perform full-scale bioremediation efforts to clean the planet up after two centuries of extremely dirty warfare.”

Lynn sat back and rested her elbows on the chair’s arms. She knew a fair amount about the world that Humans called Dedelph. There were places on that world that glowed in the dark. There were places you couldn’t see from space because of the industrial haze. The Dedelphi never developed anything like the bio- and eco-tech that had allowed Humans to repair Earth and build themselves some brand-new homes on other worlds. To clean and repair a whole world after all those centuries of eco-disaster…Something warm surged through her.

With a little difficulty, Lynn set that feeling aside and looked back at Brador again.

“What are we going to do about the anaphylactic reactions?” she asked. “You can’t drop thousands of Humans, and it is going to be thousands, right?” Brador nodded. “Thousands of Humans in the middle of a population they can kill by breathing on them.”

The vice president overshadowed Brador again. “That is an exaggeration.”

Lynn shook her head. “Not by much, it isn’t.”

Brador reached over to his main desk and touched its surface. The upper right-hand corner of the office scene cleared, replaced by a simulation of a ragged archipelago of space stations on a field of night and stars. “The center of our operations will be space-based until we can evacuate the population—”

“Until we
what
?” Lynn gripped her chair’s arms. A couple of implants beeped in protest.

Brador folded his hands in front of him. “We’re going to move the population onto city-ships and go to ground with nanotech and biosculpt.”

For a second, Lynn remembered she was in the middle of a very high-powered job interview with a representative of a huge corporate enclave.

In the next second, she decided she didn’t care. “Are you out of your corporate mind?” she demanded. “We’re talking about a billion people!”

“One point three billion, by the most recent estimate,” replied Brador. He touched his desk again. The space simulation was replaced by a population-distribution chart.

Lynn stared at it without reading it. “One point three billion people who, despite what we saw today, have a long history of hating each other’s genomes and going for blood when they can.” She threw up both hands. “You’re going to move them onto city-ships—” She stopped and did a quick calculation. “There aren’t that many city-ships in existence!” Lynn turned away for a moment, staring at her window. The evening sun turned the stone veranda a brilliant scarlet. She faced her interviewer again, somewhat more in control of herself. “Vice President Brador, you can’t be thinking of jamming these people into a bunch of retooled freighters! This…project…is going to take at
least
fifty years!”

“Probably more like seventy-five.” His pinched face and round eyes were absolutely sober and serious. “And no, we’re not putting them in retooled freighters. We are going to place them in fully functional city-ships, many of which will be custom-built.” The graphic changed to a construction blueprint. “Our engineering teams are already at work in the Dedelph system asteroid belts. We expect an eighty percent need fulfillment within the year.”