Year's Best Scifi 3 Part 23

Their Director, the trio claimed, was worried about the ethics of the other directors. The reports from the research and development team indicated the project was months behind schedule.

"Our man afraid he victim big cheat," the big one said, in slow Techno-Mandarin pidgin. With lots of emphatic, insistent hand gestures.

It had been the big one, oddly enough, who had done most of the talking. In his case, apparently, you couldn't a.s.sume there was an inverse relationship between muscle power and brain power. He was one of those guys who was so ma.s.sive he made you feel nervous every time he got within three steps of the zone you thoughtof as your personal s.p.a.ce.

The artificial ecosystems had become one of the foundations of the lunar economy. One of the Moon's greatest resources, it had turned out, was its lifelessness. Nothing could live on the surface of the Moon-not a bacterium, not a fungus, not the tiniest dot of a nematode, nothing.

Temperatures that were 50 percent higher than the temperature of boiling water sterilized the surface during the lunar day. Cold that was grimmer than anything found at the Antarctic sterilized it during the night. Radiation and vacuum killed anything that might have survived the temperature changes.

And what happened if some organism somehow managed to survive all of the Moon's hazards and cross the terrain that separated an ecosystem from qne of the lunar cities? It still had to cross four hundred thousand kilometers of vacuum and radiation before it reached the real ecosystems that flowered on the blue sphere that had once been George's home.

The Moon, obviously, was the place to develop new life forms. The designers themselves could sit in Shanghai and Bangkok and ponder the three-dimensional models of DNA molecules that twisted across their screens. The hands-on work took place on the Moon. The organisms that sprouted from the molecules were inserted in artificial ecosystems on the Moon and given their chance to do their worst.

Every new organism was treated with suspicion. Anything-even the most trivial modification of a minor insect-could produce unexpected side effects when it was inserted into a terrestrial ecosystem. Once a new organism had been designed, it had to be maintained in a sealed lunar ecosystem for at least three years. Viruses and certain kinds of plants and insects had to be kept imprisoned for periods that were even longer.

According to the big guy, Ms. Chao claimed she was still developing the new hawk control interface. The Director, for some reason, was afraid she had already finished working on it. She could have turned it over to another company, the big guy claimed. And the new company could lock it in another ecosystem. And get it ready for market while the Director thought it was still under development inside the old com-'pany's ecosystem.

"Other directors transfer research other company," the big guy said. "Show him false data. Other company make money. Other directors make money. His stock-down."

"Stock no worth chips stock recorded on," the guy with the white scar on the back of his fingers said.

"You not commit crime," the big one said, with his hands pushing at the air as if he were trying to shove his complicated ideas into George's dumb immigrant's brain. "You not burglar. You work for Director. Stockholder. Director have right to know."

Like everything else on the Moon, the ecosystem was buried under the surface.George crawled into the back of the truck knowing he had seen all of the real Topside landscape he was going to see from now until he left the system. The guy with the scarred hand kept a camera on while he stood in the sterilizing unit and they talked him through the "donning procedure." The suit had already been sterilized.

The donning procedure was supposed to reduce the contamination it picked up as he put it on. The sterilizing unit flooded him with UV light and other, less obvious forms of radiation while he wiggled and contorted. The big guy got some bobs and smiles from the third member of the trio when he made a couple of "jokes" about the future of George's chromosomes. Then the big guy tapped a b.u.t.ton on the side of the unit and George stood there for five minutes, completely encased in the suit, while the unit supposedly killed off anything the suit had attracted while he had been amusing them with his reverse strip tease. The recording they were making was for his benefit, the big guy a.s.sured him. If he ran into any legal problems, they had proof they had administered all the standard safety precautions before he had entered the ecosystem.

The thing that really made George sweat was the struggle to emerge from the container. It was a cylinder with a big external pressure seal and they had deliberately picked one of the smaller sizes. We make so small, n.o.body see think person, the big guy had explained.

The trick release on the inside of the cylinder worked fine, but after that he had to maneuver his way through the neck without ripping his suit. Any tear-any puncture, any pinhole-would activate the laws that governed the quarantine.

The best you could hope for, under die rules, was fourteen months of isolation.

You could only hope for that, of course, if you had entered the ecosystem legitimately, for a very good reason. If you had entered it illegally, for a reason that would make you the instant enemy of most of the people who owned the place, you would be lucky if they let you stay inside it, in one piece, for the rest of whatever life you might be willing to endure before you decided you were better off dead.

The people on the "long term research and maintenance team" did some useful work. An American with his training would be a valuable a.s.set-a high level a.s.sistant to the people on the other side of the wall who really directed the research. But everybody knew why they were really there. There wasn't a person on the Moon who didn't know that coal miners had once taken canaries into their tunnels, so they would know they were breathing poisoned air as soon as the canaries keeled over.

The humans locked in the ecosystem were the living proof the microorganisms in the system hadn't evolved into something dangerous.

The contact had placed the container, as promised, in the tall gra.s.ses that grew along a small stream. The ecosystem was supposed to mimic a "natural" day-night cycle on Earth and it was darker than any place George had ever visited on the real planet. He had put on a set of night vision goggles before he had closed the hood of the suit but he had to stand still for a moment and let his eyes adjust anyway.

His equipment pack contained two cases. The large flat case looked like it had been designed for displaying jewelry. The two moths fitted into its recesses wouldhave drawn approving nods from people who were connoisseurs of bioelectronic craftsmanship.

The hawks he was interested in were living creatures with modified brains. The cameras and computers plugged into their bodies were powered by the energy generated by their own metabolism. The two moths occupied a different part of the great borderland between the world of the living and the world of the machine. Their bodies had been formed in coc.o.o.ns but their organic brains had been replaced by electronic control systems. They drew all their energy from the batteries he fitted into the slots just behind each control system. Their wings were a little wider than his hand but the big guy had a.s.sured him they wouldn't trigger any alarms when a surveillance camera picked them up.

Insect like this in system. Not many. But enough.

The first moth flitted away from George's hand as soon as he pressed on the battery with his thumb. It fluttered aimlessly, just above the tops of the river gra.s.ses, then turned to the right and headed toward a group of trees about a hundred meters from its launch site.

At night the hawks were roosters, not flyers. They perched in trees, dozing and digesting, while the cameras mounted in their skulls continued to relay data to the security system.

George had never paid much attention when his parents had discussed their family histories. He knew he had ancestors who came from Romania, Italy, Austria, and the less prominent regions of the British Isles. Most of them had emigrated in the nineteenth century, as far as he could tell. One of his grandmothers had left some country in Europe when it fell apart near the end of the twentieth.century.

Most of them had emigrated because they couldn't make a living in the countries they had been born in. That seemed to be clear. So why shouldn't he "pull up stakes" (whatever that meant) and head for the booming economy in the sky? Didn't that show you were made of something special?

George's major brush with history had been four sets of viewer-responsive videos he had studied as a child, to meet the requirements listed on his permanent educational transcript. His parents had chosen most of his non-technical educational materials and they had opted for a series that emphasized human achievements in the arts and sciences. The immigrants he was familiar with had overcome poverty and bigotry (there was always some mention of bigotry) and become prize-winning physicists and world famous writers and musicians. There had been no mention of immigrants who wandered the corridors of strange cities feeling like they were stumbling through a fog. There had been no indication any immigrant had ever realized he had traded utter hopelessness for perma-nent, lifelong poverty.

There had been a time, as George understood it, when the music in restaurants had been produced by electronic sound systems and unskilled laborers had carried food to the tables. Now unskilled labor provided the music and carts took orders and transported the food. Had any of his ancestors been invisible functionaries whototed plates of food to customers who were engrossed in intense conversations about the kind of real work people did in real work s.p.a.ces like laboratories and offices? He had never heard his parents mention it.

Battery good twenty minutes. No more. Moth not come back twenty minutes- not come back ever.

He almost missed the light the moth flicked on just before it settled into the gra.s.s.

He would have missed it, in fact, if they hadn't told him he should watch for it. It was only a blip, and it was really a glow, not a flash. He crept toward it in an awkward hunch, with both cases in his hands and his eyes fixed on the ground in front of his boots.

The small square case contained his laboratory. The collection tube attached to the moth's body fitted into a plug on the side of the case and he huddled over the display screen while the unit ran its tests. If everything was on the up and up, the yellow lines on the screen would be the same length as the red lines. If the "Director"

was being given false information, they wouldn't.

It was a job that could have been handled by 80 percent-at least-of the nineteen million people currently living on the Moon. In his lab on Earth, there had been carts that did things like that. A four-wheeled vehicle a little bigger than the lab case could have carried the two moths and automatically plugged the collection tube into the a.n.a.lyzer. He was lurching around in the dark merely because a cart would have required a wireless communications link that might have been detectable.

The first yellow line appeared on the screen. It was a few pixels longer than the red line-enough to be noticeable, not enough to be significant.

The second yellow line took its place beside the second red line like a soldier coming to attention beside a partner who had been chosen because they were precisely the same height. The third line fell in beside its red line, there was a pause that lasted about five hard beats of George's pulse, and die last two yellow lines finished up the formation.

The moth had hovered above the hawk's back and jabbed a long, threadlike tube into its neck. The big changes in the bird's chemistry would take place in its brain, but some of the residue from the changes would seep into its bloodstream and produce detectable alterations in the percentages of five enzymes. The yellow lines were the same length as the red lines: ergo, the hawks were carrying a package exactly like the package they were supposed to be carrying.

Which was good news for the Director. Or George presumed it was, anyway.

And bad news for him.

If the result had been positive-if he had collected proof there was something wrong with the hawks-he could have radioed the information in an encrypted one-second blip and headed straight for the nearest exit. His three bodyguards would have helped him through the portal-they'd said they would, anyway-and he would have been home free. Instead, he had to pick up his equipment, close all his cases, and go creeping through the dark to the other hawk nest in the system. Hewas supposed to follow the small stream until it crossed a dirt utility road, the big guy had said. Then he was supposed to follow the road for about four kilometers, until it intersected another stream. And work his way through another two kilometers of tangled, streamside vegetation.

The habitat reproduced three hundred square kilometers of temperate zone forest and river land. It actually supported more plant, animal, and insect species than any stretch of "natural" terrain you could visit on the real twenty-first century Earth.

Samples of Earth soil had been carried to the Moon with all their microorganisms intact. Creepers and crawlers and flying nuisances had been imported by the hundreds of thousands.

You couldn't understand every relationship in a system, the logic ran. People might not like gnats and snakes but that didn't mean the system could operate without them. The relationship you didn't think about might be the very relationship you would disrupt if you created a wonderful, super-attractive new species and introduced it into a real habitat on Earth. A change in relationship X might lead to an unexpected change in relationship Y. Which would create a disruption in relationship C....

And so on.

It was supposed to be one of the basic insights of modern biological science and George Sparr was himself one of the fully credentialed, fully trained professionals who turned that science into products people would voluntarily purchase in the free market. The fact was, however, that he hated insects and snakes. He could have lived his whole life without one second of contact with the smallest, most innocuous member of either evolutionary line. What he liked was riding along in a fully enclosed, air conditioned or heated (depending on the season) automobile, with half a dozen of his friends chattering away on the communications screen, while a first cla.s.s, state-of-the-art control system guided him along a first cla.s.s, state-of-the-art highway to a building where he would work in air-conditioned or heated ease and continue to be totally indifferent to temper-ature, humidity, illumination, or precipitation.

Which was what he had had. Along with pizzas, steak, tacos, turkey club sandwiches, and a thousand other items that had flavor and texture and the great virtue that they were not powdered rice flavored with powdered flavor.

There had been women whose hair tossed across their necks as they gave him little glances across their music stands while they played quartets with him. (He had made the right decision, he had soon realized, when he had chosen the viola. The world was full of violinists and cellists looking for playing partners who could fill in the middle harmonies.) There had even been the pleasure of expressing your undiluted contempt for the human robots who were hustling like mad in China, Thailand, India, and all the other countries where people had discovered they, too, could enjoy the satisfactions of electronic entertainment, hundred year lifespans, and lifelong struggles against obesity and high cholesterol levels.

George Sparr was definitely not a robot. Robots lived to work. Humans workedto live. Work was a means, not an end. Pleasure was an end. Art was an end. Love and friendship were ends.

George had worked for four different commercial organizations in the eleven years since he had received his Ph.D. He had left every one of them with a glowing recommendation. Every manager who had ever given him an evaluation had agreed he was a wonderful person to have on your payroll on the days when he was actually physically present. And actually concentrating on the job you were paying him to do.

The dogs weren't robots, either. They were real muscle-and-tooth living organisms, and they had him boxed in-right and left, front and back, with one prowling in reserve-before he heard the first warning growl. The light mounted on the dog in the front position overwhelmed his goggles before the control system could react. An amplified female voice blared at him from somewhere beyond the glare.

"Stand absolutely still. There is no possibility the dogs can be outrun. You will not be harmed if you stand absolutely still."

She was speaking complete sentences of formal Techno-Mandarin but the learning program she had used hadn't eliminated her accent-whatever the accent was. It didn't matter. He didn't have to understand every word. He knew the dogs were there. He knew the dogs had teeth. He knew the teeth could cut through his suit.

"I'm afraid you may have a serious problem, patriot. As far as I can see, there's only one candidate for the ident.i.ty of this director they told you about-a.s.suming they were telling you the truth, of course."

The ecosystem was surrounded by tunnels that contained work s.p.a.ces and living quarters. They had put him in a room that looked like it was supposed to be some kind of art gallery. Half the s.p.a.ce on the walls was covered with water-colors, prints, and freehand crayon work. Shelves held rock sculptures. He was still wearing his suit and his goggles, but the goggles had adjusted to the illumination and he could see the lighting and framing had obviously been directed by professional-level programs.

They had left him alone twice, but there had been no dan-ger he would damage anything. The dog sitting two steps from his armchair took care of that.

The man sitting in the other armchair was an American and he was doing his best to make this a one-immigrant-to-another conversation. He happened to be the kind of big-bellied, white-faced, fast-food glutton George particularly disliked, but he hadn't picked up the contempt radiating from George's psyche. He probably wouldn't, either, given the fact that he had to observe his surroundings through the fat molecules that puffed up his eyelids and floated in his brain.

George could understand people who choked their arteries eating steaks and lobster. But when they did it stuffing down food that had less flavor than the containers it came in..."Do you understand who Ms. Chao is?" big-belly said.

George shrugged. "You can't do much biodesign without learning something about Ms. Chao."

The puffy head nodded once. They hadn't asked George about his vocational history but he was a.s.suming they had looked at the information he had posted in the databanks. The woman had asked him for his name right after she had taken him into custody and he had given it to her without a fuss.

"Your brag screen looked very promising, patriot. It looks like you might have made it to the big leagues under the right circ.u.mstances."

"I worked for four of the largest R&D companies in the United States."

"But you never made it to the big leagues, right?"

George focused his attention on his arms and legs and consciously made himself relax. He pasted a smile on his face, and tried to make it big enough so that Mr.

Styrofoam could see it through his eye slits.

"The closest I ever got to the other side of the Pacific was a weekend conference on La Jolla Beach."

"That's closer than I ever got. I was supposed to be a hardwired program genius-a Prince of the Nerds himself- right up to the moment I got my transcript certified. I thought if I came here I could show them what somebody with my brain circuits could do. And make it to Shanghai the long way round."

George nodded: the same sympathetic nod and the same sympathetic expression-he hoped it was sympathetic anyway-that he offered all the people who told him the same kind of story when they sat beside him on the transportation carts. Half of them usually threw in a few remarks to the effect that "doughfaces"

didn't stand a chance anymore. He would usually nod in sympathy when they said that, too, but he wasn't sure that would be a good idea in this situation. His interrogator was putting on a good act, but the guy could be Ms. Chao's own son, for all George knew. George had never seen an Asian who looked that gross, but Styrofoam's mother could have decided anybody cursed with American genes had to possess a special, uniquely American variation on the human digestive tract.

"The database says you're a musician."

"I've been working in a restaurant. I bought a performance system when I was on Earth-one of the best."

"And now you're serenading the sages and samurai while they dine."

"That's why I'm here. They told me I'd be thrown out of my job if I turned them down."

"Ms. Chao had a husband. Mr. Tan. Do you know him?"

"I've heard about the Tan family. They're big in Copernicus, right?"

"They're one of the families that control the Copernicus industrial complex. Andmake it such a wonderful place to work and raise children. This Mr. Tan-it's clear he's connected, but n.o.body knows how much. Ms. Chao married him. They went through a divorce. Somehow he's still sitting on the Board. With lots of shares."

"And he thinks his ex-wife is trying to put something over on him? Is that what this is all about?"

Chubby hands dug into the arms of the other chair. Arm muscles struggled against the low lunar gravity as they raised the bloated body to an upright position.

The Prince of the Nerds turned toward the door and let George admire the width of his waistline as he made his exit.

"You're the one who's supposed to be coming up with answers, patriot. We're supposed to be the people with the questions."

There was a timestrip built into the base of George's right glove. It now read 3:12.

When they had brought him into the working and living area, it had read 3:46.

George's suit was totally self-contained. He could breathe and rebreathe the same air over and over again. But nothing comes free. Bacteria recycled the air as it pa.s.sed through the filtering system. Other bacteria generated the chemicals in the organic battery that powered the circulation system. Both sets of bacteria drew their energy from a sugar syrup. In three hours and twelve minutes, the syrup would be exhausted. And George could choose between two options. He could open the suit.

Or he could smother to death.

The second interrogator was a bony, stoop shouldered woman. She spoke English with a British accent but her hand gestures and her general air of weary cynicism looked European to George's eye. She glanced at the timestrip-it now read 2:58-and sat down without making any comments.

The woman waved her hand as if she was chasing smoke away from her face.

"You were hired by three people. They coerced you. They claimed you would lose your job if you didn't work for them."

"I didn't have any choice. I could come here or I could find a good s.p.a.ce to beg.

Believe me-this is the last place I want to be."

"You'd rather play little tunes in a restaurant than work in a major ecosystem?

Even though your screens say you're a trained, experienced biodesigner?"

George offered her one of his more sincere smiles. "Actually, we play almost everything we want to most of the time. Mozart quintets. Faure. Kryzwicki. n.o.body listens anyway."

"The three men who hired you told you they were hired by Mr. Tan. Is that correct?"

So far George had simply told them the truth-whatever they wanted to know.

Now he knew he had to think. Was she telling him they wanted him to testify against Mr. Tan? Was Ms. Chao trying to get something on her ex-husband?

Was it possible they had something else in mind? Could they be testing him insome way?

"They're very tough people," George said. "They made a lot of threats."

"They told you all the things Mr. Tan could do if you talked? They described his connections?"