The Mimicking of Known Successes, page 11
Then again, the way she had captured—captured!—Bolien, a colleague of mine no less, even if one that I thoroughly disliked, it was disturbing, such actions and such license … My thoughts were confused, and I rested my eyes on our surroundings. A cricket chirped from somewhere in the briars. Mossa laid her head on my shoulder with a soft sigh. A small goshawk hit the ground a scant meter away, scrabbled in the dirt, cast a lightning glare at us, and lofted again, disappearing quickly into the murk. I followed its leap, fascinated; on Valdegeld we did not have goshawks, only pigeons.
On platforms where goshawks had been brought, pigeons never lasted, torn to bits before they could propagate. On one place, I heard, they reanimated a hundred pigeons at once—I don’t know why anyone would be so set on having pigeons, of all things, some romantic Earth notion—but the goshawks were too well established already (goshawks having been another romantic Earth notion, one particularly widespread at the time when animals were being introduced on Giant), and wrecked the pigeons in no time.
It was a common problem; it had happened on Earth multiple times, with invasive species unbalancing ecosystems; it had happened during humanity’s brief sojourn on Mars, and had contributed to making that planet, already ravaged by mining and extraction, as uninhabitable as Earth. It was, in fact, the reason for my work, the reason we were so careful …
“Mossa!” I was gasping already, my body hollowed by the certainty, the inevitability of it, an insight as sudden as the goshawk’s stoop. She looked up, startled. “Mossa,” I couldn’t seem to get any other words out. “The list!” Not enough, not even for her. “The list of stolen cells. From the Preservation Institute! Do you have it?”
She rummaged in her bag. She had her bag; I had my satchel, with the timetable: we could leave at once. I started walking almost before she handed me the list and she followed. “What is it?”
I scanned it, then handed it back to her. “I’ll explain on the railcar. We have to go now. The nearest station?”
“Do we need to bring Bolien?”
“No. He wasn’t going to tell us anything anyway; I can’t imagine he’ll be helpful now.” In truth, I couldn’t bear to spend a long ride with him tied up and smirking at us, or worse still, in stasis. “Um … is there any way you can…” Dislike him I might, but I couldn’t countenance leaving him alone and constrained on Mossa’s floor.
“I’ll send a telegram from the station,” Mossa said with a nod, and then took the lead, walking even faster than I had, because she trusted me before I explained.
When we reached the station I studied the departure board and the timetable while she ran to the telegraph office. By the time she returned I had selected an andén and was tapping foot and fingertips with impatience. Mossa glanced up at the list of stations on the route but said nothing, bless her. “All sorted?” I asked.
“Yes. I sent to the station, asked a colleague who has my key to collect him.” I had nothing to say to that, which somehow caused her to keep talking. “She—we—were in a relationship. Before. That’s why she has my key. Not any more.”
I smiled involuntarily: Mossa, nervous. About—could it be? Yes, it seemed the only interpretation—me.
“That seems reasonable,” I said. “I take it it didn’t cause problems for your working relationship?”
“No.” Mossa sounded relieved. “Not at all. It was a very…” The pause stretched an improbably long time. “That is, rather…” She trailed off a second time, with even more relief, as the railcar appeared along the distant reach of ring.
Chapter 22
It was, unfortunately, about an hour after dawn, and a number of people who commuted across the Sembla-Arkenist-Pyl corridor were traveling as their days began, so our compartment was crowded. At Arkenist Mossa, with admirable foresight or perhaps uncontrollable hunger, sprang out to buy a pair of food packets from a station vendor. When she handed me the odorous packet I discovered that I, too, needed to eat, and consumed it, shoulders hunched beside the other passengers. It was not until we had left the bustling station of Pyl that we were finally alone in our compartment.
Mossa waited until we had been out of the station long enough to be fairly certain no latecomers would stumble into our isolation. “Do we have some time?”
“Some hours yet,” I said, suddenly wearied by the massive secret I was carrying. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell Mossa: indeed, passing it into her competent hands might be the only thing that would offer some relief. And yet, the idea of saying it out loud conjured a deep reluctance.
Her eyes went distant, and I knew she was reviewing the list of stations on this line, then connections, trying to understand where we were going. But there was no flicker of insight, and I roused myself. “It’s—” Still difficult to say. I pulled out the list she had given me in the garden. “Look. The biomaterials are in no kind of order here—or perhaps it’s an order that makes sense to the mauzooleum workers, based on where the habitats are located or something of the sort. But if we think instead of the relationships between the animal and plant species…” I waited, hoping she would see it. It was a long list, though, and her eyes darted up and down it for some moments before I saw them widen.
“You think—this could be an ecosystem?”
“An attempt at one, in any case.” I swallowed against the dryness of my throat. “Bolien—you were right about him, this was more than just attacking the Preservation Institute. That’s why he laughed so hard, he realized we didn’t know. His theories, about altitude—he would be able to put a list together, for a specific location on Earth.”
This time, her whole expression changed with the shock of it. “You think they’re going to send these to Earth?”
I nodded, my arms curled around my stomach. “They’ll send them, and—and, if they’re a little bit lucky, and hit the right place and have planned the rocket kit correctly, it could happen. They’ll restart life on Earth with this set of animals and—and all our work—every scholar, every hour of study, all the planning, all our care—” I doubled over in the seat, and a hesitant few seconds later Mossa’s hand was rubbing my shoulders.
“Surely,” she started, and then thought better of it. “Even if they start this in one area, that can’t obviate the plans for the whole planet?”
“It could. It—there are so many factors, Mossa. That’s why we’re being so careful, studying the exact proportions that worked, back before we managed to fuck it up. Starting from zero like that is one thing. But trying to integrate with an existing ecosystem, even one that’s limited to one area … I don’t know.” Telling her had helped: I was already starting to feel a whisper of hope. “Maybe. I’ll talk to the rest of the scholars, the research directors, the dean of the Classics faculty…”
“That’s if we don’t stop them,” Mossa said. “I take it we’re going to Uliram?” It was the only spaceport with facilities, rarely enough used for anything but probes, for extra-orbital travel.
“They’ve probably left already,” I said glumly.
“Perhaps not,” Mossa replied. She tugged gently at my head and I rested it on her shoulder. “There. The suspended railcars are somewhat slower, and perhaps they had some other preparations to make. We shall see what we find. And if they have, we will face that too.” She continued rubbing my shoulder for a long time, until well after my tears had stopped, and even then she simply adjusted my position to her chest so she could lean back more comfortably, and we stayed that way, her arm around me. The comfort of it was sweeter than her kisses had been, and that was very sweet indeed.
Chapter 23
As we approached Uliram, my mood became more optimistic. “Surely the officials at the spaceport will have stopped them from departing? It’s not so easy to just walk in and commandeer a rocket.”
“Hmm.” Mossa’s countenance was not sanguine, and at the next stop her skepticism was, if not borne out, given support. While we paused at the station—it was Jarbin, a large enough platform for the railcar to pause several minutes before departing—an attendant dashed on board, glancing from compartment to compartment until he could thrust the telegram flimsy into Mossa’s waiting hands and then dive back onto the andén even as the railcar gave its premonitory shudder.
Mossa looked the message over and then handed it to me. “My colleague,” she said, with only a slight hesitation. Her impervious carapace was closing over her again. “When I sent the telegram from Sembla station I asked her to follow up on certain things and send anything relevant to me along this ring.”
The message read:
Notable absence from Valdegeld on dates specified only Rector Spandal
“Someone of that stature,” Mossa remarked as I stared at it, “would stand a good chance of suborning or simply blustering over any opposition.”
I looked up, appalled. “Surely not!”
“Is the rector a strong supporter of the Classics faculty?”
I started to answer, and had to stop. I was, in truth, too many rungs below the rector to have direct interaction with him in the subtle spheres of university politics. But Mossa’s question brought to mind a multitude of offhand comments, a subtle antagonism, a number of suggestions, carefully couched in the academic discourse, that the grand project of the Classical department might be taking too long.
“But even so … this … unethical … utterly … beyond…” I realized I was spluttering, and took a breath. When I had sorted my outrage, what came out of my mouth was: “This is a man with so much power in the academic world. Why would he need to do something so appallingly underhanded?”
Mossa responded simply with a Classical quotation: “‘Why are men?’”
“Granted, but even so. This man could have hindered or hurried our work in any number of ways…” I stopped again, this time to consider whether he had, subtly enough that we hadn’t even noticed, and then leaving that aside went on. “How could he excuse stealing biological samples, undermining the collective decision process of all of Giant, not to mention murdering poor Rechaure?”
“With any luck, you’ll have the chance to ask him.” Mossa pointed out the window and there, looming out of the fog ahead of us, I saw the massive spire of a rocket signaling our approach to the spaceport.
Chapter 24
Uliram platform was exclusively dedicated to the spaceport: there were no living quarters and only the most minimal of administration, both of those being consigned to other platforms nearby (but not too nearby) so as to reduce any casualties from accidental explosions, or even from the entirely intentional consequences of a rocket launch powered by a focused explosion that channeled fuel from the planet into combustion within the platform, rather than in the rocket itself as in spaceflight from Earth.
But while it wasn’t entirely unusual that there was no one on the station’s solitary andén, no one at all, it was still unsettling. And when the gate into the spaceport was also unguarded, I began to worry that Mossa had been correct. “Mossa…”
“Hurry,” she urged me over her shoulder.
“But Mossa,” I said, panting slightly as we charged along the narrow labyrinth of blast walls that would eventually lead us to the launching pad, “if we arrive at the moment of launch…”
“We will hear—and probably feel—the machinery for the focusing and calibration of the explosion long before ignition,” Mossa assured me, still half-running several paces ahead; apparently rocket science was yet another area in which she had acquired some expertise. “Ah! You feel that vibration?”
In all honesty, I did not, but as that was probably due to my pounding heartbeat and both our footsteps echoing in the narrow corridors I took her word for it. “How … long … does that … leave us?”
“At least twenty minutes. There’s a wide range of force and directionality that need to be precisely—ah!”
We had emerged into the first of the broad open launch pads. This one, however, was empty. “Could he have launched it already?”
Mossa did not bother to answer, sprinting instead towards the far wall.
I trailed her across three unoccupied launch areas, each roofless but for the atmoshield and open onto the wheeling moons, I followed her through the doubling, layered corridors between them, as the vibration of the launch mechanism augmented around us until even I could hear the reverberations rumbling the walls and floor.
On the fourth launch pad we found a rocket.
It was smaller than I had expected, but menacingly armored all the same. From the many theoretical diagrams I had seen, I recognized the nose cone specially designed to disintegrate and distribute frozen cells in reanimation packets. “He’s really doing it,” I panted.
Mossa, who had finally stopped running (and, to my gratification, was at least breathing heavily) nudged my arm and jerked her chin towards the console near the base of the spaceship and the figure poring over it.
I forgot my exhaustion and for once outpaced Mossa in my fury. Fortunately the roar of the launch mechanism had grown distractingly loud, and Rector Spandal—for indeed it was he—was not aware of me until I grabbed his stooped and august shoulder and yanked him away from the panel.
His brows cranked together in fury, but otherwise his face was blank: he didn’t recognize me. And why should he? I was only an unimportant myrmidon among thousands, pouring my time and effort and imagination into a project that he had decided he disagreed with, or couldn’t wait for. I was so choked by this, and he so surprised by my gall in appearing much less accosting him, that neither of us had managed to say anything before Mossa’s cry rang out: “Sembla Investigators Bureau, holding you to account for the murder of the person known as Rechaure—”
“What!” the rector bellowed: not even a question, just outrage.
“And conspiracy in the theft of biological materials from the—”
“Theft? I’ll have you know—”
“—misuse in unsanctioned rocket launch—”
“I have perfect authority—”
“How dare you?” I screamed across them both. I was jabbing my finger at the rocket. “You are going to overturn years, decades of planning for Earth reanimation, delay the time when we can finally go back—”
“Delay?” Rector Spandal turned fully to me, swaying with the force of his anger or self-justification. “Delay? You Classics fools would never have decided! You would never be ready to start! Believe me, I have been waiting, expecting that resettlement might happen in my lifetime or in my son’s lifetime, but you—”
“And you will push it off for decades if not centuries more!” I yelled at him. “With this precipitate, irresponsible, selfish action, you will distort the evolution of—”
“It’s never going to be Earth!” It was almost a screech. “Not the Earth that you Classicists deify! It’s never going to be exactly like it was before, and that means you’re never going to be willing to let us get back there.” He leaned forward, grabbing my shirt and pulling. “So happy here, studying your ancient texts and cozy in those ridiculous quarters we give you, no wonder you don’t feel any urgency! Well, young lady, I don’t care what you think should happen. I am going to the planet I am supposed to be living on!”
“You’re going?” The absolute lack of hinges in his plan blotted over all his insults: I simply couldn’t believe it. “You’re physically going to…”
“Earth.” The rector straightened his back, then his clothing. “You’re welcome to keep dreaming about a meta-ecosystem that is gone forever while I breathe air and swim in water and—”
“It’s not ready,” I said, suddenly desperate to save this stupid, overbearing man’s life. “You’re going to be breathing poison, swimming in poison—”
“So they tell us,” he said. “I’m going to find out.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” Mossa had a whip-lasso out, the Investigator’s non-lethal tool. “I’m going to ask you once to stop that rocket of your own—”
“Mossa!” I screamed, as Professor Porbal charged out of the dimness behind her, his arms pulled back in the wind-up for a swing with what I saw, as it came around, was a metal object. A pipe, maybe, or a wrench. I should have yelled duck. For months after I would wake up sweating and wishing I had, but perhaps I wasn’t sure enough of his angle of attack in time and perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered.
Mossa was at least fast enough in turning towards him that the club caught her across the face instead of on the back of her skull. Blood sprayed horribly and I dove for Porbal—that, too, how had it not occurred to me that this person we knew to be part of the conspiracy might be there, that the mad rector was not entirely alone?—and drove him to the ground. I looked up in time to see Rector Spandal shove a key into the control panel, turn it, and then pull it out. He glanced in our direction once, his face garish in the glow of the indicators, twisted with scornful laughter, the hand with the key clasped in a hard fist. Then he took off running towards the rocket ship.
I was still struggling with Porbal. He had landed under me, but he was gripping the pipe, and he nearly got a bash in with it before I caught his wrist with both my hands. I worked my knee in under his ribs while we struggled, he pushed at me with his free hand and tried to get it at my face, but despite my inability to keep up with Mossa during our sprint earlier, I do bolster my academic lifestyle with some exercise; if nothing else, the stairs to my room had tempered my quads. I was able to push his weapon hand to the platform and bring my foot up to step on it until he let go; I got in a few additional kicks as I stood, and left him stunned enough that I had time to grab for Mossa’s whip-lasso and lash it around him. (I had never before realized how pleasurable those weapons are to handle: the flick of the wrist, the satisfying contraction of the cords around the target. I had to admire Mossa’s restraint in not using it more.)
