Playing God (3 page)

“How are you planning on scheduling an evacuation for a billion people? Do you have any idea of how many a billion is?”

“Generally: It's a thousand million.” His expression did not waver.

“And what” said Lynn, looking him directly in the eye, “are you going to do with the plague victims during this evacuation?”

Brador remained unfazed. “Each city-ship will be equipped with a hospital quarter capable of holding ten thousand patients. Again, we hope your partner, Dr. Zelotes, will be helping with their relocation and care.”

Lynn rubbed her forehead. “You're going to have to keep a billion Dedelphi, sick or well, housed and fed and comfortable during the evacuation. You're going to have to have a responsive grievance team, a clear, concise schedule, a comprehensive crisis scenario…” She broke off, running her hand through her hair. “If you're not careful, this cure is going to be a whole lot worse than the disease.”

“Yes. That's why we need you.” Brador leaned forward. What Lynn had thought was poor lighting on his face turned into a full day's worth of five o'clock shadow. Whatever he'd been doing lately, it hadn't even left him time to depilate. “Are you aware of the reputation you possess, Dr. Nussbaumer? Not only for your ability to work with the Dedelphi, but for your massive success in coordinating and directing their colony's foliation and agricultural efforts.”

“I had a lot of help,” said Lynn, refusing to let herself be flattered. “And you still haven't said exactly what it is you want me for.”

Brador's eyes glittered. “I want you to organize and coordinate the relocation. For a start.”

Lynn opened her mouth and shut it again. “And for my next trick?”

“Coordinate and manage the southern-hemisphere microreconstraction teams.”

Lynn just sat there for a moment. To give a whole race their lives back, give them their world back, alive and clean and new…

“You're going to be allowing time for a complete life-web survey, right? Micro- and macroscopic?”

Brador nodded. “We have some teams down there already, and we're shipping out more this week. The bases will be up and running by the time you're there to help coordinate activities and information.”

Twenty years’ work right there, mapping the ecosystem of an entire planet so they could take it apart and put it back together again. “And we'll be customizing the bioremediation tools based on the local ecostructures, correct?”

“We'll be designing them from the ground up, if we have to,” said Brador. “If you and your colleagues decide we have to,” he added. “We will go over the entire planet one inch at a time with every nano we can breed.”

“Why not just drop a couple of asteroids on the place and start from the ground up?” she asked half-facetiously. “It'd be faster, and cheaper.”

Brador's face remained impassive. “The Dedelphi are hoping we can do this without completely destroying their civilizations’ infrastructures. We've agreed to try. Several of our teams are going through what archives and libraries there are, trying to find out what exactly conditions were like two hundred years ago.”

There probably wouldn't be much. None of the Great Families had much time or many resources for pure research. That was just one of the reasons why, despite the fact that they were at least as old as Humanity, their technology was at late-twentieth-century levels, at best.

Brador wasn't admitting it, but a lot of the bioremediation was going to be guesswork. They could interview the oldest Dedelphi they could find and hear what their mother's mother's mother had said the world was like. Maybe they'd find a record or two about some extinct creatures, but, as far as determining exact ratios of, say, rain forest to grassland, or the proportions of bacteria in the soil of a specific area, or the original extent of a coral reef, the teams would have to work from simulations and educated speculation. They really would be building a whole new world….

A thought struck her. “What are the Dedelphi giving Bioverse in exchange for these miracles?”

Brador's smile slipped back into place. “Anything useful we find.”

Lynn sucked in a breath. Except for a handful of isolationist enclaves, all the worlds in the Human Chain ran on nanotech. Nanotech ran on proteins and DNA. For all the talk there'd been once about microscopic fans and gears, the really useful technology turned out to be tightly controlled biochemistry.

Bioverse had been offered a planetful of untapped biochemistry.

“Think about it.” A light shone in Brador's round eyes. “They've fusion-bombed whole islands, and yet there're still living organisms on them. Bacteria that are radiation-hardened. We can turn those into assemblers that can't be interrupted by a fluctuating electromagnetic field. They've got huge pits filled with untreated inorganic debris, and there're living organisms in there. We could make those into disassemblers of incredible efficiency. They've got algae blooms big enough to turn a whole bay colors and tough enough that all that industrial pollution can't wipe them out. That's a whole new way to eat gaseous toxins next time we want to convert a gas giant.” He waved his hand. “We had all this on Earth once, but we bulldozed it to clean the place up.” He must have caught something sour in her expression, because he stopped himself. “I know, I know, to be fair, we didn't know what we had, or how to handle it. We had to bulldoze it.” The light returned to his eyes. “But now we have a second chance.

“We've got four conglomerates and six enclaves planning their economies for the next century around this project, Dr. Nussbaumer. We're going to save a world. Want in?”

A billion people. A billion people to transport and shelter and accommodate in all the billion ways each of them would need. Negotiations and treaties to begin and maintain. They'd have to cap wars that had smoldered for centuries. They'd have to clean out and rebuild an entire world.

“I'll need to consider it,” she said with what she hoped was an appropriate blend of aloofness and cautious interest.

Brador's smile was merely polite, but Lynn had the distinct feeling she hadn't fooled him for a second. “Of course. Your room has my direct address. You may contact me at any time.”

They said polite farewells, and Lynn cut the connection. She sat dazed at the enormity of the project Brador had just offered her. Finally, she shook herself and returned to the living room.

David was there, his long frame stretched out on the couch. Three of the windows were clear to let the end of the Martian day shine into the room. The fourth showed the treaty signing. The Queens-of-All were just receiving the treaty boards from the Sisters-Chosen-to-Lead.

She crossed the thick, burgundy carpet to stand behind the sofa and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Look at that.” David's voice was soft as he gestured toward the view on the screen. “They actually did it.”

“I know, I saw.” Lynn watched the scene replay itself. “You wouldn't believe the scene in Crater Town.” Lynn shook her head without taking her eyes off the screen. “I always knew they had it in them, but I never thought I'd live to see it.”

Suddenly, a familiar shape caught her gaze, and she squinted at the shadows on the right of the stage.

A recorder stood on its tripod legs, panning its double lenses slowly to take in the audience packed shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the stage. A Human held its leash. Lynn leaned forward. A man. Old memories rang in the back of her head.

“Screen, zoom in on male Human figure on the stage.”

David cocked a questioning brow at her, but Lynn said nothing. The image repositioned itself so the thin, tan, bald man in his clean-suit was the only person on the screen. Involuntarily, Lynn gripped David's shoulder.

“Arron,” she whispered. Arron tracked his recorder's path with his own gaze. From this close, it looked like he was searching their living room for something.

“Arron?” asked David. “Not Arron Hagopian?”

Lynn nodded. On the screen, Arron thumbed the recorder's leash box. It turned its lenses back toward the delegates on the stage. His gaze followed the lenses. His face was tight, unhappy, and years older than it should have been.

What's the matter, Arron?
Arron had once filled her life. She had always thought that someday, when she had the time, she'd find him again, and they'd be friends. She'd introduce him to David, and they'd get along great. But the time had never materialized, and without even thinking about it, she'd lost track of him.

David looked from Lynn to the screen and back again. “Do you want to talk, or do you want to keep watching?”

Lynn felt a smile forming. “Jealous?” she asked, tousling David's neatly cropped hair.

He raised his right hand. “I am not now, nor have I ever been jealous of Arron Hagopian,” he announced seriously. “Although I have occasionally wanted to beat him senseless for not appreciating you.” David lowered his hand to let it rest on top of hers.

She squeezed his fingers gratefully. “Screen off,” she said, and Arron winked out of sight, replaced by blackness.

“Well,” said David, wriggling around so he could see her better. “What'd you hear?”

Lynn opened her mouth and closed it again.
What did I hear? Not a word about salary, or staff, or citizenship conditions. I just heard about helping to save a whole world, and I didn't think to ask about anything else.

David watched her face, listened to her silence, and nodded. “Yeah, that's about what I heard.” His eyes shone with a cold light. Lynn ran her knuckles along his chin and nodded.

David was an epidemiologist. He'd come to Crater Town shortly after the first wave of the plague did, when it was realized there wasn't one-tenth the number of doctors among the Dedelphi needed to deal with the crisis. Since then, he'd watched thousands of patients die, sometimes literally under his own hands. If Lynn had a handful of nightmares from the plague waves, David had a lifetime's worth.

Bioverse had offered Lynn a chance to rebuild a whole world, but they had offered him the chance to save lives.

“Okay.” Lynn squeezed his hand one more time. “We're going.”

David brought her hand to his lips and kissed it gently. “We're going.”

Chapter II

L
ynn stared at her freshly depilated self in the mirror. She ran her fingers across her bare, pale, still-tingling scalp. Her hair had been the functional, unenhanced auburn she'd been born with. The sink and the carpeting had absorbed it as it fell. Her fingers drifted across the ridges where her eyebrows had been five minutes before. She traced the visible stiffness on her temple indicating the memory works for her camera eye beneath her skin. She thought about David, still asleep in the other room, and how he would be seeing this sight as soon as he woke up. Her heart rose into her throat, and she seriously considered grabbing her clothes and hiding in the closet.

“Vanity, thy name is Nussbaumer.” She tossed the microshaver onto the counter next to the vacuum sink and dissolution cream.

“Hi.”

Lynn spun. David stood in the bathroom doorway, as naked as she was, but considerably hairier. During the three-week flight to the Dedelphi system from Mars, he had let his beard grow into a golden brown fuzz and allowed his brash cut to start looking more like a hedge.

He'd be shaving again after his shower. For three weeks they had been on their way to work. Today they would finally get down there, a year and five months after they'd both accepted Bioverse's citizenship offer.

David blinked sleepily at her and lounged against the threshold. He smiled and met her eyes. He was very carefully not looking at her scalp, or anywhere else she had just shaved. The only hair she had left on her body was her eyelashes, which were not considered to carry any dander worth worrying about.

Good bedside manner, Doctor,
she thought with twinges of both love and exasperation.
Put them at ease, whoever they are.

“Hi.” She plucked her robe off the towel bar and shrugged into it. The silk felt too slick and cool against her completely bare skin. David caught her hand as she tied the sash and pulled her gently toward him.

She looked up at his soft, brown eyes. “David, if you say this suits me, I will beat you, hard. In anatomically sensitive places.”

David smoothed her hand between both of his. “I wasn't going to say that.”

She ran the knuckles of her free hand along his chin, savoring the familiar line of his jaw, even under all the bristles. She knew what he was thinking. David had been assigned to one of the t'Therian hospitals. Lynn, on the other hand, would be island-hopping, when she wasn't in her headquarters a full continent away. They hadn't split up for this long since they'd gotten married.

David did not lift his gaze from her fingernails. “I've just been thinking about … What do they call their world again?”

Lynn's mouth twisted into a half smile. He spoke and read three Dedelphi languages. She spoke five and read four. She'd trotted the fact out once at a meeting, and he'd never let her forget it.

“The t'Theria call it All-Cradle. The Getesaph call it Ground, or Earth, if you like, although that gets confusing,” she added. “The Shi Ia call it Our Pouch, the Fil call it Everywhere, and the Chosa Ty Poroth call it …” She hesitated. The amber words
THE PARENT
flashed in front of her right eye. “The Parent.”

“I'll defer to our landing point.” David cleared his throat. “I've just been thinking about All-Cradle and”—he raised his gaze to her face—“how very much I'm going to miss you.”

“It's only for a few months,” she reminded him. “Until the evacuation's complete. Then we even get our own house again.”

“I know.” He reached around her waist under her robe and pulled her close to him. “But hold me for a while anyway, Lynn,” he whispered, as her cheek brushed his. “It's still going to be too long.”

The dining room of Dedelphi Base I was huge. It had a full-service cafeteria and garden attached to a honeycomb of dining cubicles. A view screen threaded to the outside cameras dominated the longest wall. This morning, it showed the
Ur,
one of the two city-ships already in-system and awaiting the evacuation of the first of a billion Dedelphi. Each city-ship was two pairs of glittering domes set on opposite sides of a silver plate. The engineering and command centers were encased in two smaller domes, one over each nozzle cluster. Against the vacuum, it looked as if a city had been built on a black lake and now sat on its own reflection. The projection had zoomed in just far enough that they could see the gleaming buildings and green trees on both sides.