Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (22 page)

“She hates me.”

“You trust her.”

“I do.” Valens shook his head, and Dexter squawked her disapproval of the sudden movement. “Hush, birdy-bird. I'll use her any way I have to, Georges. Especially if it comes down to her or Patty. But I think she turned out okay. She's a patriot, in one of the better senses of the word.” He might have said more, but he didn't think he needed to.

“It's that bad?”

“Well.” The bird nibbled his finger, clucking. “Go to Papa Georges, birdy-bird.”

She clucked again, as if to her eggs, or a mate, and regarded him out of eyes like black gemstones set in fragile lids with the texture of crumpled rice paper. “Pretty!” she said—her all-purpose term of approval—and bit his nose.

He shook his hand gently. “Papa Georges.”

The bird clucked in annoyance and took wing again, landing on her towel on the sofa.

“Well?”

“Latest reports indicate that there are massive algae
die-offs in the Atlantic, spreading to the Indian Ocean. Nobody knows why, but there's some theorization that it's linked to the failure of the Gulf Stream and deep-ocean water turnover. An El Niño event is under way in the Pacific, and coral reef survivability is down to 35 percent. We're looking at an ecosystem collapse in 150 years, tops. That's all proprietary Unitek information, of course. Holmes hasn't informed Riel yet, although we presume her own scientific adviser, Paul Perry, must be aware of the issues. Charlie tells me that Paul has been in touch.”

“It sounds like a doomsday scenario. Hysteria.”

Valens rolled his head back and looked up at the ceiling. Suddenly, he decided he wanted that drink after all. “It does, doesn't it? It doesn't mean the planet will be uninhabitable, of course. Just that it will take greater and greater interventions to sustain human life. We're looking at a lot of hunger, misery, and sickness. A lot of poverty.”

“A lot more war.”

“A whole hell of a lot more war.”

1830 Hours
Thursday 7 December, 2062
Clarke Orbital Platform

Charlie had intended to meet Paul Perry when he disembarked from the beanstalk on Clarke, but somehow one thing led to another, and Charlie was still hunched over one of his microenvironments when his contact flashed a message. He blinked for a time display and cursed under his breath, standing up from his stool the same instant a knock sounded on the hatch. “Paul, I'm sorry—”

Perry stood framed in the doorway a moment: a small-boned man, slightly built and of average height, dark hair still tousled from his trip in the space elevator. “It's nothing,” he said, his quick sideways glance an unassuming request to come in out of the corridor. Charlie stepped back and let him. “I assume something good kept you?”

Charlie shrugged, and tapped the door-panel shut behind Paul. “Something interesting,” he said. “I'm up to my neck in nanites—”

“Literally?” Pale eyes flashed slyly. Charlie made a little show of dusting off his shirt front, and then led Paul over to the benches while the science adviser kept talking. “You know I'm not here as a colleague, Charles—”

“You're here as Riel's investigator. I know she's not pleased with Unitek, but—”

“Yes? What are these, Charlie? Terrariums?”

“Microenvironments. But we've discovered some remarkable secondary abilities in our nanotech that I wanted to share with you anyway.”

“These all look extremely healthy. Are they closed systems?”

Charlie nodded, picking up one of the sealed glass spheres and handing it to Paul. Paul took it, cupped it in both his narrow hands. “Completely. Water, shrimp, snails, some algae—one of the classic model ecosystems.”

Paul coughed. It was a laugh hidden behind a hand, and Charlie grinned. “Which, as an ecologist, you were no doubt aware.”

“Indubitably. Nothing remarkable there, then?”

Charlie shook his head. “On the contrary. They're all quite remarkable. The one you're holding is a control. There are five natural controls, five controls that are infected with a nanotech population—”

“Not sure I like that word
infected
.” Paul turned toward the light, and held the sphere carefully up to it. His motions disturbed the crystalline water, and a pale smear of sediment rose from the base of the globe, describing a spiral.

“Got a better one?”

Paul answered him only with silence. Charlie propped one hip on a steel lab bench and waited until Paul finally caved and jerked his chin at the racks of labeled spheres under grow-lights. “And the others?”

“Contaminated.”

“With nanites? What, various”—he sought a word and failed—“cultivars?”

“Ooo,” Charlie answered. “Cultivars. Consider that terminology stolen, Paul. No, all one—cultivar. Differing concentrations of industrial chemicals, heavy metals, bleach—”

“Bleach?”
Paul set the sphere in his hands down carefully on its rack, affixed the clips, and strode to the wall to look at the others. He bobbed up and down a little when he walked, his hands fisted and shoved into his jacket pockets. “They all look very healthy. That's . . .
very
exciting.”

“That,” Charlie answered, “is the remarkable thing—” and grinned when Paul turned back over his own shoulder and made a wry mouth. “We're on the same side of this fight, Paul.”

“The prime minister isn't so sure about that, Charlie.”

“I am.” Charlie shrugged. “Fred Valens is. Holmes, she's a different matter. But that's not what I need to talk to you about. How much do you know—really
know
—about what's going on planet-side?”

“Politically?” Paul turned to face Charlie, his back to the racks of microenvironments.

“Climatologically.”

Paul laughed bitterly and drew his hands out of his pockets. Charlie was surprised to find himself twisting his own fingers together and forced himself to stand up straight and stop. “Do you need a more definite answer than,
we're fucked
?” He said it mildly, calm as a request for coffee. “I know. Riel knows. I'm postulating that we're on the verge of a snowball Earth scenario, actually.”

“Snowball—” Charlie felt himself blink. It was a vivid mental picture, and certainly it couldn't be what it sounded like. But Paul's slow, considered nod twisted a chilly knot in his gut nonetheless.

“Snowball Earth,” Paul said. “A complication of a global warming scenario. The short form is that a big glup of cold water—like a caving ice shelf, say—hits the ocean, and the water temperature plummets, precipitating a glaciation. Except if the glaciation gets severe enough, the planet's albedo rises to extreme levels—”

“Reflecting solar energy into space. Charming.” Charlie realized he'd wrapped his arms tight around himself, but didn't drop them. “Snowball Earth.”

“Quite the vivid poetic image, isn't it?”

“Quite.” Paul didn't say anything else as Charlie turned around and began fussing with instrument calibrations. Charlie knew going in he was going to lose his nerve first, and didn't bother putting up much of a fight, truth to tell. “Do you think it's likely?”

“I think we can fight it if it starts to happen. Carbon dust on the ice pack, anything to increase heat absorption. But it's one hell of an ugly long shot. If anything happened to spike atmospheric dust, say a volcano or two, we'd be in really rough shape.”

“What would it take, Paul?” Charlie's nails were bitten, but his hands were expert as he made his adjustments, and they didn't shake. “To trigger that?”

Paul came up beside him, leaning his elbows on the bench. “It's already triggered, in my opinion. We're also due—overdue—for a magnetic polar swap and a normal, everyday sort of a glaciation and a bunch of other ecological trauma. The short form is that things are going to get very, very ugly. Possibly in our lifetimes. Definitely within our grandchildren's. People are going to be hungry and they're going to be cold.” He sighed.

“And yet Riel wants to shut down the space program.”

“The prime minister thinks we're better off spending the money at home. Different priorities. And I have to say I agree with her.”

Charlie nodded. “You know what amazes me, Paul?”

“Human stupidity?” Dry tone, but a guess hazarded with a smile. The two men shared a long, tangled look, and Charlie blew air across his face and shrugged.

“No,” he said. “Our damned human conviction that there's going to be a way to weasel out of this one, too.”

0315 Hours
Friday 8 December, 2062
Bloor Street
Toronto, Ontario

I wake early, and for a moment—before Gabe's darkened apartment swims into focus—I can't remember where I am. The clock reads a little after 0300. I trained myself to go without sleep—besides catnaps—for so long that now that I
can
sleep through the night, I don't need it anymore. Boris came to dinner in the cat carrier; he purrs on my chest. The damn cat drools, and the quilt is wet. Gabe still snores quietly beside me, but I can tell I'm done sleeping.

Some light filters in from the street below, so I annoy the cat by turning on my side. I stretch out and lie there for a little while watching Gabe's breath flow slowly in and out.
Richard?

“Up late, Jenny.”

News?

“Min-xue is developing a taste for Dylan Thomas and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I'm teaching him English. Poetry is a good motivator. He loves it.”

It's hard to think of the Chinese as enemies when Richard gives me regular progress reports on his new project, a seventeen-year-old half-Taiwanese pilot who composes traditional poetry on the stars. I wonder how they feel about that in St. Petersburg, now.
Corrupting the innocents, son?

“Who you calling sonny, Grandma?” Richard chuckles. “How's everything going down there?”

Scared. Trying to keep body and soul together. The usual. Elspeth sends her love and wants a nanite load of her own so she can talk to you.

“I'm working on that. The problem is the damned control chips—”

What if we reprogrammed the nanites to act independently?

“There are horror movies about that. We still don't know what these things are
for,
Jenny.”

Have you hacked their O/S yet?

“It'd help to have Castaign for that.”

Oh, come on. You're saying Gabe can do things you can't?

“I'm smart, Jen, not omnipotent. And the command system that Charlie and Ramirez welded on over the nanites' original programs is sheer . . . well, it's strictly A-life stuff. Not so much a command program, per se, as training protocols. Although some of Ramirez's work is pretty bleeding edge.”

I don't understand a word you're saying, Dick.

“That's okay. By the way, your cocoa-tosser is Indigo Xu, and your guess was right. She's Bernard Xu's niece by his deceased brother. Age twenty-nine, college dropout. No steady employment or place of residence for two years. No outstanding debt.”

Oh.

“Yeah, she's probably following in Uncle Bernie's shoes, and I haven't traced her financing yet. Watch yourself, Jenny. She may have a grudge.”

May?
I laugh silently so I won't wake Gabe.
I already moved out of the hotel. And I won't stay here after tonight—too much risk to the girls.
Gabe can take care of himself. Even if he looks soft and fluffy these days. I narrow my eyes, squinting into darkness green-lit by my prosthetic's night sight and scented warmly with the heavy aroma of sleeping bodies.
Have you managed to figure out where the generation ships are yet?

“Less than a light-year out. It will be hundreds of years before they get there. And I don't think our friends the Chinese have any plans to go looking for them in the meantime.”

That's—

“Inhumane? You checked on that kid on the ventilator at NDMC recently?”

Ow.

“Jenny, he's conscious.”

I gag. I literally put my hand to my throat, and gag.
Merci à Dieu
. Trapped in a body like a pile of meat . . . no, I don't have any issues about that.
Isn't there anything they can do for him? What went wrong?

“I'm talking to him whenever he's awake. I don't know what happened, but somehow the signals from his nervous system are not getting to his brain, and vice versa—or when they do, they're garbled. It may be a programming issue with the nanites. It may be something else.” I feel him shrug. “I'm making some progress with the programming, but I'd really like to talk to your boyfriend, there.”

If only he could catch a nanite load.

“Don't get stuck on the obvious solution.”

I know. I just keep thinking what these little guys could do for Genie.

Richard chuckled. “So keep her alive for three more years and get her into the pilot program.”

Shit.

It could work.

Richard, you're brilliant.

“That's long been established. Talk to you later, Jenny. Get some rest.”

Blow me.
He winks as he leaves, and I'm alone in the dark, with my warm pillow and my warmer lover, but my feet itch too much for me to stay in bed. After checking on the girls—both asleep, Genie snoring—I curl idly on the sofa and pick up my hip, intending to read myself back to sleepiness or kill a few hours till morning.

The message light blinks when I thumb it on.
Dr. Simon Mobarak. Well, I'll be damned
.

If it's oh-dark-thirty in the morning in Toronto, it's even earlier for a hardworking single neurologist with an on-line virtual-reality game addiction. Hell, Simon might still be camped out in his bar in the Avatar Gamespace. If he isn't, he's curled up in bed, just hitting the first sweet, refreshing flickers of REM sleep. I really shouldn't call him. I still haven't forgiven him for giving Valens the information that he needed to find me.

I have Simon's home number.

He owes me.

I call.

No visual, but a sleepy voice mumbles amid a rustle of sheets. “Jenny? It's 3 a.m.”