Читать книгу Alien Earth - Megan Lindholm - Страница 6

IN COMPARISON TO the quiet of Evangeline’s gondola, the corridors of Delta Station swirled with life and its accompanying cacophony of noise. John felt all the symptoms of sensory overload syndrome: the headache, the vague nausea, the lassitude of permanent gravity. None of them were enough to completely distract his mind from his most gnawing discomfort: Norwich had expressed polite disinterest in renegotiating their contract. John clenched his teeth and resolutely jerked his mind away from considering it. He had business to conduct, and he’d better be alert about it. He nodded agreement to whatever pleasantry the garrulous little representative from Earth Affirmed was mouthing as John followed him through Delta’s corridors. It irked John that no one else had expressed any interest in hiring them.

Time was when he and Evangeline would have had a dozen offers before he’d even docked. But they’d worked steady runs for Norwich so long now that no one even considered them anymore. He’d posted Evangeline’s availability on the listings screen, but didn’t hope for much from that. Every captain knew that the only decent jobs were the ones that came looking for a specific ship and captain, and they’d been off the open market too long. He’d already had a couple of calls from other captains, wanting to know how he and Norwich had fallen out. Well, he was damned if he knew, he reflected bitterly. The only other call had been from Earth Affirmed, reiterating their interest and setting up this meeting.

“… disorientation and sensory overload when you first come back into a station?”

“Usually,” John replied shortly, guessing at the man’s question. “It’s a hazard of the profession. One learns to live with it.”

Deckenson insisted on talking to him as they walked. John wished he wouldn’t. He was only hearing about one third of what Earth Affirmed’s man was saying, and couldn’t keep his mind on that much. The sights and sounds of Human activity in the station corridors were overwhelming after the years aboard Evangeline. That those years had passed as a matter of months for John didn’t diminish the effect, but intensified it. How could so much have changed so greatly in what felt like such a short time to him?

The wide white corridors of Delta Station swarmed with people of all ages, dressed in every imaginable garment. The brightness diffusing from the high-domed ceilings made it eternally a summer morning. A light wind stirred the plantings and people’s garments, carrying with it a scent of flowers and only a trace of machine oil from the fans that generated it. The utilitarian corridors he remembered had blossomed into something more reminiscent of a botanical garden. Even the people looked cultivated for their diversity. Riotous colors and swirling fabrics of every sort had replaced the sedate white togas and brown leggings that had been in favor when he left. Even stranger was the population change. A Rabby had been a rare sight when last he’d been here. Now they made up about one quarter of the population, and at almost every corner there were discreet jets where they could recharge their breathing tanks. The Arthroplana had recently and somewhat grudgingly granted Humans the privilege of having unsupervised contact with selected Rabby individuals on a face-to-face basis. The grant had been accompanied by many dour warnings that Humans were as yet still too disharmonious in nature to be granted general access to the Rabby race as a whole. From the few Rabby John had ever communicated with, he wondered why anyone would want to talk to any of them, unsupervised and face-to-face or any other way. They were boring as hell. Yet the fact that the Arthroplana had the power to restrict Humanity’s access to the other sentient species still galled him. It all came back to the Arthroplana’s monopoly on interplanetary travel. Didn’t everything? he reminded himself sourly.

The population diversity wasn’t the only change in the corridors. Decorative art seemed to be enjoying a renaissance. The austerity of slag sculptures had given way to living embellishments. John could remember when the export of live plants to any of the dirty-tech stations, for other than edible use, had been a grave offense. He could still remember his very first trip to one of the tank rooms, his small hands secured in front of him lest he yield to any disruptive unadjusted impulses. He’d hated the plants then, because he’d believed they could never be his, could never be touched by him. So often they’d told him he could never be allowed around any living thing except another Human.

Now vinery draped doorways and blossoms dangled from sculptures. Fountains spattered and danced in enfoliated basins at every intersection. Music was playing, at an audio level that was so low he was barely sure he could hear it, yet it was annoyingly pervasive. Last time he’d been in port, public music had been illegal in the corridors. Noise pollution, they’d called it. All music had been confined to private residences and offices, so that those who didn’t enjoy it didn’t have to be annoyed by it. John turned to ask Deckenson about it, only to realize the man was a dozen steps ahead of him, still blithely chattering. Spotting him and catching up to him were not problems; John was taller than anyone he’d seen in the satellite corridors.

“Oh, there you are!” Deckenson exclaimed with asperity as John loomed up beside him. He reached up and took a firm grip on the right cuff of John’s orange flight suit. “Don’t wander off again. I’m trying to explain our position to you, and why this must be handled so delicately.”

The small man’s grip on his cuff annoyed John, but he didn’t shake it off. Part of why Mariner was his first option was because he could adapt to new customs, even within his own species. And this casual physical familiarity seemed to be the current custom. Everywhere, people clung to one another as they hurried down the corridors. Trios and quartets, all gripping hands or clothing as they bustled along, were not uncommon. Huddles of people cuddled on benches as they talked. So he tolerated Deckenson’s grip and tried not to put any emotional tags on it. Male/male bonding had also been unpopular last time he was here, but that, too, seemed to have changed. Or perhaps it was only that every time John docked somewhere, it seemed that the prepubes looked more asexual. He knew Deckenson was a male only because his secretary had referred to him as “him” when John had been waiting to see him.

He looked down on his escort as Deckenson hustled him along. At least the smaller man was trotting; John’s longer legs matched his stride effortlessly. Deckenson’s hair was long and pale and flounced with every step he took. Looking down on it made John feel like a giant in contrast to Deckenson’s fine-boned stature. He lifted a hand to his own scalp and ruffled up the scant growth of dark hair on it. Shaving the scalp and treating the follicles with inhibitor was a standard procedure before entering Waitsleep. His hair was as long as it ever got, and would soon be stripped back to bare scalp again; that is, if his negotiations with Deckenson went well, and he contracted a mission for the Evangeline.

For the hundredth time, he wished Norwich had renewed their shipping contract. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what had gone wrong. “Sorry. Our company no longer has any need for your services. We’ll be happy to supply you with an excellent reference.” John hadn’t even got past their outer offices. And that was it. No explanations. The only thing he could come up with was that someone had undercut his price. But no other Beastship in port had the vast cargo capacity that Evangeline had. She was practically the only “lifeboat” left unmodified since evacuation days. He couldn’t figure it out, and it was keeping him from concentrating on his dealings with Earth Affirmed.

Not that he especially wanted to concentrate on them. Earth Affirmed had a reputation among Beastship captains, and it wasn’t good. In a word, they were crackpots. Always stepping on the Conservancy’s toes, always pushing to the limits of the law. Fines, warnings, and cargo seizures seemed to follow in the wake of any deals with them. Earth Affirmed itself had too much funding to feel much of the Conservancy’s displeasure. So when their high-handed ways needled the Conservancy badly enough, the Conservancy’s wrath usually fell on Earth Affirmed’s minions. Like their ship captains. Years ago, Chester on the Beastship N’raltha had taken the scorching for bringing Rabby imports into Beta Station. The Conservancy had ruled them environmentally dangerous, and the captain, ultimately responsible for his ship’s conduct, had undergone complete Readjustment and two years of intensive environmental respect classes. Nowadays, the same raw materials routinely came into the dirty-tech stations for processing, under the supervision and taxation of the Conservancy. John idly wondered what Chester was doing now; whatever it was, it wouldn’t have anything to do with marinering.

John tried to sigh away the uneasiness the thought gave him. He wished he could just get a contract and be out of here. Too many rules in the stations, and if John was going to bend any of them, he was going to do it for his own benefit, not for some big corporation that would leave him to take the heat if things went bad. He didn’t need that kind of complications in his life. He didn’t need any complications in his life.

In fact, the older he got, the less time he liked to spend in port. The light and bustle of the corridor was already making him think longingly of the privacy of the Waitsleep womb and the quiet of Evangeline’s crew quarters. He still had his pickup of Ginger’s wares and his rendezvous with Andrew to look forward to. Even those errands carried some nerve-wracking risks of their own. About the only thing he was actually looking forward to was a visit to a semiscrupulous dealer for a rather esoteric poetry recording that he intended especially for Tug’s edification. He grinned at the thought, and found Deckenson was smiling back up at him, in mistaken interpretation of John’s expression.

“So, do you approve of the changes in living conditions here? We’ve been instrumental in lobbying against the Conservancy’s ridiculous ban against all but sentient life-forms in station corridors. Quite a switch from when you were a boy, I imagine. The plants make quite a difference, don’t they?”

“Yes. They do,” John replied awkwardly. He hoped Deckenson hadn’t been talking about anything more important than interior decoration. He realized he hadn’t been listening to him. How could he, while wandering through this chaos? He wished the man would settle down somewhere and talk. But no, first it had been a meeting at his office, which accomplished little more than actually making contact with this representative of Earth Affirmed, and being endlessly introduced to office staff. He’d expected to have to sit through some kind of negotiating meeting there, but abruptly Deckenson had insisted that he and John had to go out to lunch. They’d been walking now for twenty minutes but Deckenson showed no signs of stopping.

“You’re impatient with us, aren’t you?” Deckenson suddenly asked, as if he had read John’s mind. He didn’t wait for John’s cautious nod. “That’s in our files about you; that you have an impatient nature. It’s a fault, John, one you should work on. At least, for our business, it is. Think on this …”

And he was off again, looking all around and talking as they walked, so John could barely follow his words. Earth Affirmed seemed to have an affinity for garrulous, busy little men. Their last representative had been just like this; he could have been Deckenson’s clone. John began to believe he’d have turned down their last two offers even if he hadn’t had Norwich’s contract.

“Earth Affirmed has had to be patient. Even to gain these small concessions from the Conservancy has taken lifetimes. Patience, John. It’s one of our virtues, and the chief reason why we still exist, so many years after Earth’s Evacuation. We’ve been here since the very first Humans came to Castor and Pollux; we’re a contemporary of the Conservancy itself, if you would credit it. Very few other Human institutions have managed to exist as long as we have, and most of them were religious organizations that merged into the Conservancy’s philosophy; scarcely separate entities at all anymore. But Earth Affirmed has stood firm. All we’ve had was our dream and our patience to sustain us. It’s our sense of mission that’s kept us going. A mission that’s needed a certain kind of man to reach fulfillment. And now, we think, we may have our man.”

He looked up at John suddenly as he said this, and there was such fervent hope in the man’s face that John drew back from him. Looks like that always meant the same thing. Someone was about to put grapplers on you and hold on, to depend and ask favors and demand promises. It was a look no Mariner could fairly accept or return. To see it on this businessman’s face was doubly unsettling.

If Deckenson noticed John’s withdrawal, he didn’t comment on it. “The restaurant’s here,” he declared suddenly. “Let’s go in.” Without waiting for John’s response, he ducked into a doorway nearly obscured by a vine trellised over it. John followed, ducking more deeply than Deckenson had.

Deckenson was already following the host to a table. John fell in behind him. Damn. The whole place was scaled down to the size the Human race had become. The walkways between the tables were narrower, the tables lower, the chairs more spindly than any John had ever seen. All the furniture and screens were of woven tika vine, hardened with tika syrup into a glossy finish. He’d never seen it used for chairs and tables before, and wondered if it would take his weight. He felt disoriented, like the time he had wandered into an older part of Evangeline’s gondola and encountered the formidable couches and work surfaces his ancestors had used. Only this was like being invited into a creche’s playroom. Eyes turned to him as he passed. He hadn’t felt stared at in the corridors, but here the attention was impossible to ignore. His close-cropped hair and traditional orange flight suit were enough to mark him as a Mariner; his hulking size advertised his great age as well. He wasn’t sure which trait was drawing all the attention.

The host was very smooth about bringing a larger chair for John, but couldn’t do much about how low the table was. John waved off his apologies and accepted a small menu. He was studying its ornate print when he realized Deckenson was looking at him. John met his gaze.

“Feels odd, doesn’t it? To be so big in a world of tiny people. Like you’re an outmoded piece of equipment. Obsolete. Archaic.”

“So?” John asked coolly.

“So I brought you here on purpose. To emphasize it. To get you thinking. What will you find next time you come back from space, John? People that look even more like children? Will you be able to walk among us, to sit in our chairs, to drink from our tiny cups? Look at me, John, and see what we’re doing to ourselves.” Deckenson held out his hands, spread-fingered, as if to emphasize the slenderness of his fingers, the delicacy of his pink nails, the fragility of his white wrist with the pale blue vein pulsing in it.

John shrugged. “I’m a Mariner, Deckenson. It was my first option, and I’ve been with it for twenty-three years, my wake time. Yeah, every time I come back, things have changed more. But I’m adaptable to it. That’s why Mariner came out number one on my options.”

“There are also the factors that you don’t form bonds easily, and don’t seem to regret not having any close personal relationships. Are not those also prime personality traits for a Mariner?”

John took a sip of water from a narrow glass. “Of course. You say it like I should apologize for it.”

“No. I merely think it odd, in a man whose second option was Poet. One would think a man with a predilection for poetry would be closely enmeshed with humanity. I always thought of Poets as speakers for their species.”

It irritated John that they had somehow dug out this odd bit about him. Rubbed him worse that Deckenson placed importance on it. He wondered what else they knew about him. How intrusive were these people? His irritation came through in his reply. “Skill with words isn’t chained to love of one’s fellow man.”

“Poetry is more than skill with words. The option tests for Poet are quite exhausting mentally, and very demanding emotionally. I ought to know. It’s my first option.”

John should have known. “Really? Well, perhaps times have changed in that, also. When I took the tests, I came away feeling I had been the victim of a scam. All the questions seemed to ask one sort of thing while digging information of a very different sort out of you.”

“Exactly.” Deckenson took a quick breath as if he were about to go on, then paused abruptly. He let the breath out slowly, then breathed in twice, slower still, through his nostrils. John recognized the calming exercise. Deckenson looked up at him across the table and smiled suddenly, disarmingly. “Look, John. This isn’t going at all the way I’d planned, and I’m not going to let myself get sidetracked. Poet might be my first option, but Executive was my next, and that’s what I have to be right now. For the sake of poetry later. I have so much to convey to you, and such a limited time. And I desperately need to have your commitment.”

This sounded familiar. It would go like the last two meetings he’d had with Earth Affirmed people. There would be the same old song of their idealistic concept of a Human-centered civilization, usually followed by a monologue about how they had John’s best interests at heart and that was why he should give them cut-rates. It irked him that this time he might have to strike some kind of deal with them.

He thought about the previous times he’d been approached by Earth Affirmed. The first two times, way back when, he’d taken on consignments from them. Sticky ones. Never again. The last two times they’d approached him had been, oh, about sixty-five of their years ago, and again about thirty-seven years before that. They’d used the same pussyfooting techniques, long talks that hinted at a very profitable and exciting mission, but somehow never came around to making a direct statement of what that mission was. Each time, after protracted talks, John had gotten impatient and taken his option offer from Norwich and gone on his way. He wished it was that easy this time. He was starting to wonder why he even bothered with Earth Affirmed overtures. He hated to think it could be something as prosaic as curiosity.

The waiter came and hovered. Deckenson looked almost annoyed. “My regular meal. And John will have the same, but double portions. And more water, please. John, anything to drink besides water?”

“Stim.”

Deckenson turned to the waiter apologetically. “Do you have stim here?”

The waiter frowned consideringly. “Not in the old style, no. But I think our chef can come up with something that is both stimulating and refreshing. Will you trust us?”

“Certainly,” Deckenson replied without consulting John, and the waiter hustled away.

“So stim isn’t commonly drunk anymore, either?”

“I’m afraid it’s regarded as a bad habit. The better restaurants don’t encourage it.”

“I see. Last time I was in port, it was ‘purity of experience.’ Restaurants discouraged patrons from ordering more than one kind of food or drink at a meal. Background music was regarded as distracting one from the immediate experience. Wearing a perfume that could intrude on another’s olfactory experience was regarded as the height of rudeness. All of that seems to have been replaced.”

“So you see all this as merely another brief change of consciousness, a swing of the pendulum,” Deckenson indicated the whole room with a wave of his diminutive hand.

“For me, that describes it perfectly. For you, it’s your life.” The words came out more bluntly than John had intended.

“Exactly. But some things change in one direction, John, and keep changing. You’ve seen it, though you don’t seem to have attached any importance to it. The Conservancy’s ‘guided evolution’ has not swayed an iota from its headlong drive to keep Humans from having any effect on Castor’s and Pollux’s ecologies. They blindly refuse any of Earth Affirmed’s suggestions to integrate us into the ecologies, preferring instead to force us to live as outsiders, as parasites who try to sustain themselves on the natural flows of life here, without either contributing or detracting from that flow.” Deckenson’s voice was beginning to quiver with fervor. John braced himself against the current of fanaticism.

“Look what their breeding controls have done to us. People keep getting smaller, in an effort to make even less impact on the planet’s ecologies. Puberty keeps getting pushed back, a side effect of the growth inhibitors. We’re supposed to believe that’s good. The Conservancy talks about an extended juvenile period undistracted by internal hormonal riots, as if sexual maturity were a form of insanity. Our bodies have become little more than mobile containers for our brains.”

John tried a shrug. It only seemed to electrify Deckenson more.

“What was puberty when you were generated, John?” he demanded, almost angrily. “Onset at about fifty-two, fifty-five? I see you haven’t made it yet, so that has to be about right. Now it’s sixty-five to seventy, and climbing. Of course, the inhibitors have also pushed our life spans up beyond two hundred years, so that shouldn’t sound so bad. In fact, all the time a Human has before his hormones become obsessed with reproduction is supposed to be why we’ve advanced so far intellectually. We’ve successfully moved a bit farther away from our animal natures. Supposedly.” Deckenson drew breath, and sipped his water.

“Supposedly?” John was resigned now. The man was a typical poet: he communicated to use words, rather than the other way around. John would just have to ride out the chatter until Deckenson got down to business.

“Yes, supposedly. Look at me, John. On a scale of twenty, with twenty being the perfect achievement of the Conservancy’s ‘guided evolution,’ I score a seventeen point six-three. We’re not supposed to be able to get casual access to that data, but one can, if one is determined enough. And the interesting thing is that most of us who attain those high scores are determined enough. Perhaps because we, trapped inside these ‘improved’ bodies, sense, more than anyone else, that something is going wrong. Very wrong.”

“Looks fine to me.” John gave an offhand wave at the restaurant around them. “Things are going better than ever; or at least that’s what the update reports on the Wakeup line told me as we were coming in. Dirty technology is getting cleaner. Use of plastics is almost down to zero, what with the new cell-meld techniques and bacterial information storage system. Waste from harvested asteroids is down to less than six percent, and the on-rock mining techniques do even better than that. The interpopulation of the space stations by the Rabby is obviously a successful venture. The populations on both Castor and Pollux are stabilized at a constant that is ten percent under what was considered the population safety mean for human habitation thirty years ago, and …”

“Stop there,” Deckenson suggested quietly. “And think about what you just said for a minute.”

John had more than a minute, as the food arrived just then. John recognized none of it, but it didn’t bother him. Styles in serving food changed just as styles of wearing clothes. There were twenty-two native plants on Castor and seventeen on Pollux that Humans could safely eat. Thirty-nine plants that met all nutritional needs of a Human when eaten in a judicious mix. John had eaten them all, and expected to continue eating them all for his entire life. They could make them look different, and they could vary the flavor somewhat, but what it came down to was that tapa lily was tapa lily, and it was the basis of your diet, whether your gourmet chef prepared it or you ate standard rations from the ship’s dispenser.

There was a brown rectangle in a brown sauce, a salad, small orange cubes of something, and a tangle of white noodles with pinkish flakes of something in it. The waiter refilled Deckenson’s water glass, and set a small steaming mug in front of John, then departed. John picked up the mug immediately and sipped at it. Stim. Sort of. A little too bitter. He sweetened it with taro syrup from the dispenser on the table and tried it again. Better. But already almost gone. He was beginning to see Deckenson’s point about a world scaled down to smaller people. He set the mug down, but Deckenson had already noticed his wry expression.

“I’ll order more. For both of us. I think I’d like to try it.”

“What did you mean, think about what I had just said?” John asked. He found he was hungry, and tried to fork loose some of the brown rectangle, but it clung together stubbornly. Fibrous. Probably tubers from Pollux barber cane, then. He found a small knife by his plate and used it to free a chunk while Deckenson signaled the waiter for more stim.

“Mostly your population statistic. While the information people are crowing about our population being stable yet self-supporting even if under mean size, others of us are seeing it as a very real danger signal.” Deckenson had been staring past John’s ear as he spoke, his eyes unfocused. Now he suddenly seemed to come back to himself with a start. “Pardon me if I review things you already know,” he said vaguely. “It helps me organize my thoughts.”

John nodded as the stim arrived. The waiter left a carafe of it this time. John kept sawing at the brown rectangle of food with the small knife as Deckenson talked.

“Consider this. Human reproduction used to be a simple matter of two people mating. A child was born from the female ten lunar months later. It was easy, it was efficient. No planning was necessary or artificial assistance of any kind. Unplanned reproduction was what the race worried about back then. Well, now it’s the opposite. By the time a female is ready to release a mature egg cell, the cell is actually too old to be viable. The average woman has no possibility of conceiving. So oogonial cells are harvested from females of twenty years or so and carefully pushed into oogenesis. The resulting ovum is fertilized with sperm that has likewise been harvested from young males and pushed into maturity. The zygote is transferred to an artificial womb and nurtured there for six weeks, before it is then implanted in a Mother. The Mother carries it in her Human womb for perhaps another six months. At least, if the embryo is lucky, its mother can carry it that long. At that point, the developing child is usually too large for our ‘improved design’ women to carry or to bear. Our reduced size comes from growth inhibitors, not a true evolution. So our embryos are disproportionately large to the Mother. So the embryo is again surgically harvested and placed in an artificial womb where it is tended until its caretakers decide the baby is mature enough to be born. It is then removed from the artificial womb and introduced to independent life by being placed in a creche with other infants of its generation. There has always been talk of finding a way to produce a child totally outside of a Human womb, but our research in that area is, as they put it, ‘economically unfeasible for the paltry success rate.’”

John had a piece of the brown rectangle in his mouth and was chewing it slowly as his mind worked through what Deckenson was saying. He swallowed it; slightly bitter flavor, and he still couldn’t identify what it was. But it was good. He started sawing off another piece. “You’re saying women can’t bear living children anymore. That the Human race can no longer reproduce without artificial aids.”

Deckenson closed his eyes dramatically and sighed. He opened them again. “Exactly. I am saying that the sexual act has become recreational only, totally unrelated to reproduction. I am saying that pregnancy is no longer related to mothering. That may be an even more serious breakdown than the separation of sex from reproduction. There are studies, quite ancient; I am almost afraid to ask if you know of them. The information dates back to Earth life, and was gathered when scientists still had access to other primates. Do you know what is meant by the phrase ‘together-together monkeys’?”

John shrugged. “Some subspecies of primate, I suppose. What am I eating?”

“Pseudo-meat. A reconstruction based on chemical analysis. We assemble the vegetable nutrients to resemble the original components, and add fiber to simulate the texture of flesh. Those orange cubes approximate an Earth vegetable called carrots. The noodles are a simulated wheat pasta with artificial sea-life meat, and the salad is a salad. But, to get back to the monkeys, they were deprived of their natural mother, and offered only the companionship of other infants. They developed an unnatural pattern of clinging to one another in groups. Adults from those experiments were incapable of the behavior necessary to successful mating. When they did reproduce, say by artificial insemination, they either neglected or abused their children—I mean offspring, of course.”

“Of course.” John had managed to swallow what had been in his mouth. He looked at what was left on his plate in distaste. He could eat it. Intellectually, he knew it was only vegetable protein, no matter how they had prepared it. His training in following local customs was good. He could eat it. But. “Isn’t this sort of thing illegal?” He waved his fork at his plate.

“Not anymore. First, when I was very young, there was a legal decision that one would have to prove intent to stimulate carnivorous interest rather than mere culinary experimentation. And, more recently, there was a legal decision that substance was more important than appearance. As we’re the only animals on Castor or Pollux, any attempt at becoming a true carnivore would have to involve cannibalism of some sort. There are separate and totally adequate laws to prevent that sort of thing. No one’s trying to encourage cannibalism; this is just satisfying a historical curiosity for most of us.”

“Still.” John poked at the pseudo-meat with his fork, then took a bite of the salad instead. Even it tasted strange. He sampled the noodles, trying to miss the pink flakes of pseudo-meat. It was good, very good. He looked up to find Deckenson pouring himself some stim. John cleared his throat. “There’s a point to all this, I take it. I mean, making me feel like an outmoded, brutish sort, and then feeding me pseudo-meat and telling me that the Human race has improved itself to the brink of extinction.”

“Of course. I just don’t know that you’re ready to hear it yet.”

“That sounds familiar. In fact, the last time I dealt with anyone from Earth Affirmed, I recall our negotiations ending in just this way.” John made a show of pushing his chair back.

“I know,” Deckenson said quietly. “My father kept very complete records of the meeting. As he did of everything he did.”

“Then you won’t be surprised when I walk out of here.”

“You think I used that word as an honorific. I was referring to a biological fact. The last contact you had with Earth Affirmed was through my biological father.”

John resettled slowly into his chair and stared at Deckenson. He supposed it was possible. The light hair was the same, but he couldn’t recall what color Jarred’s eyes had been. But what Deckenson was suggesting was high treason against the race. From the very earliest settlement of Castor and Pollux, personal children had been forbidden. Individual families led to ambitions that favored personal survival and comfort over the survival of the total ecology. One could lose the sense of oneness with one’s species if one cultivated a personal family. To deliberately seek out the knowledge of which child you had genetically contributed to implied that you would put that child ahead of other children. As Jarred obviously had; how else the immense coincidence of Deckenson holding the same company position his male parent had held?

“I’ve shocked you, haven’t I?” Deckenson asked softly.

John didn’t have to nod. His wordlessness was answer enough.

“It’s going to get worse.” Deckenson attempted a wry smile; it looked like a death grin. “It’s been going on for hundreds of years; since the evacuation, in fact. And it’s not just keeping track of our offspring, and passing on our beliefs.”

John watched Deckenson take a brief sip of stim. He pursed his mouth at the bitterness. He glanced up at John and their eyes met. Deckenson’s were hesitant, almost pleading. John kept his eyes empty. He’d hear him out, then decide what to do: Turn him in and feel virtuous, or take what had to be one hell of a bribe for whatever it was Earth Affirmed wanted done. Deckenson wouldn’t be putting himself this much at risk if he didn’t have the cash to buy John’s silence.

The cash, or the force. John’s whole body suddenly felt very quiet and cold to him.

Deckenson set his stim down. “Earth Affirmed hasn’t been idle these past years. We’re not just beliefs and talk. Six years ago we applied for a colony permit. It was denied, of course. We were naively open about our purposes, and the Conservancy ruled us counterproductive. So we attempted a renegade colony in one of Castor’s wastelands; you needn’t know which. Nothing’s left of it, anyway. We were trying to see if, freed of the growth inhibitors we’ve all be ingesting since we were zygotes, Humans could recover enough to reach puberty, mate, and give live birth. It failed. We did managed three pregnancies, but two spontaneously aborted and the third ended in both mother and unborn child dying. But we believe natural fertilization could be accomplished, if we had more time, if we had access to younger children, fresh from the creches, and chose not to feed them the growth inhibitors and …”

“I don’t want to hear any more.” John felt chilled at the enormity of what Deckenson was telling him. It wasn’t so much what they had done; he didn’t particularly care what risks fanatics took or what deviations they performed upon their own bodies. No, it was the size of the crime he was confessing to John. Just listening to what Deckenson was saying and failing to report it would be construed as a crime meriting Readjustment. Forget Earth Affirmed. There had to be other work he could find for Evangeline. He stood.

“Of course not.” Deckenson stood with him, gesturing at a plant draping a window and nodded as he spoke, as if commenting only on it. “For you needn’t listen to me at all. Others will. I could start with something minor, say, by going to the Conservancy and reporting all those contraband entertainments you favor. It’s a shame you’d put your passion for collecting obsolete information over the good of the ecology. Didn’t you know that information hoarding directly leads to excessive possessions, and thus unfrugal consumerism? Both charges carry mandatory Adjustment sentences. And it’s been going on so long.”

John sank down into his chair slowly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course not.” Deckenson seated himself and picked up his fork. “You’re a straightforward man, John. You think it’s luck when you happen to acquire some, uh, collector’s item of literature. Such good luck you have! Or such bad luck, as when Norwich suddenly drops your contract. It’s dawning on you now, isn’t it? We’ve had a ‘finger in your pie,’ to use an old idiom, for a long time. We’d hoped to draw you in gradually. But, those two little errands you did for us, way back when, must have spooked you. We’ve tried to take our time to regain your trust. But now we’ve come down to necessities. We know things about you; we’ve made it possible for you to do things you wanted to do, things the Conservancy frowns on. We’ve helped create who you are, John. And now we intend to use what we’ve created.”

John suddenly felt gravity sick. Everything was too heavy; he could scarcely keep his head up, and the food was a gelid mass in his novice stomach. He tried to keep his face expressionless, to speak calmly. “Deckenson. None of this is rational. It sounds like you’re threatening me, but I have no idea what you’re implying I’ve done.”

Deckenson lifted his small glass of stim again, sipped from it delicately. This time he appeared to enjoy it. “Interesting flavor. Originally an imitation of an old Earth drink; did you know that?” He raised his eyes to meet John’s. Deckenson’s eyes were pale and curiously unanimated, but he smiled slightly at John’s tense expression. “I told them you’d have to have it spelled out, one word at a time. It’s simply this. We’re dying. All of us. They can terminate me tomorrow, or I can die two hundred years from now. It makes little difference to me. But whether or not you listen to me will make a big difference. Basically, we’re offering you the chance to save our species. And yourself.”

John forced himself to sit quietly, to unclench his fists under the table. How much could they know for certain about him? How careless had he ever been? Not very careless. Not ever. Earth Affirmed might suspect but they’d never be able to prove much. So what was the worst the Conservancy would do to him? They wouldn’t terminate him. No. At most, they’d adjust him. Adjustment wasn’t so bad. People went through Adjustment all the time. John tried to think of someone he knew who’d gone through Adjustment. Unfortunately, he knew very few people. They tended to die or get very old while he was gone. Of the other Mariners he knew, he couldn’t recall any who had gone through Adjustment.

Except Chester. And he wasn’t marinering anymore.

But that didn’t mean anything; people who had been adjusted almost always took a career change afterward. He could be adjusted, and survive it, and go on to do something else. Something else that meant no more Waitsleep. Not that tough. Just wake up every single morning, and live every single day, one at a time, knowing that death crept closer with every passing hour, every passing minute. He was sweating. He wanted, more than anything, to be back inside Evangeline, safe in a womb, outbound to anywhere. Deckenson’s insistent voice sounded strangely gentle.

“John, you’ve been brought up to believe in the Stewardship of the Conservancy; to think that those in charge of our destiny had the essential sweep of vision necessary to plan wisely. Now, I have to tell you, in a few short hours, that you’ve been misled. That the Conservancy has placed the ecology of Castor and Pollux above the survival of Humanity. Wait, no, that’s not quite fair. It’s placed a premium on Humanity making no impact on that ecology. To that end, they’ve altered us. Altered us possibly past the point of no return. In their efforts to make us the perfect guests on these planets, they’ve made us totally temporary. None of the structures, on Castor or Pollux are regarded as permanent. Take away the Humans, and they biodegrade back to nothing in just a few years.”

He paused, and looked at John measuringly. “As you well know, not even information is stored permanently. It has been constantly recopied onto biologically harmonious material. They can say that nothing ‘essential’ has been lost or changed, but only a fool would believe them. And look at how much knowledge has been declared obsolete and deliberately destroyed. We have only a smattering of the Greek and Roman classics in public repository. The last information purge declared excess most of the fictional writing prior to the nineteenth century. The battle to keep the records of the flora and fauna on Earth is gradually being lost. With strict limits on the use of plastics, and ‘hoarding of superfluous information,’ an offense that carries horrendous fines and Readjustment sentences, the old records are being crowded out of repositories. There are supposed to be permanent master copies somewhere, but access to them is strictly limited. So when the present public records of it begin to biodegrade, it won’t be recopied. Earth Affirmed has managed to surreptitiously copy some of it; it’s labeled as mining transactions. But we can’t hope to save it all, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Deckenson’s voice trailed off and he stared past John, brow wrinkled as if staring after a departing dream. John was silent for a long time. He could hear his own heart beating, one thud after another, counting out the moments of his existence. His throat was dry, and his voice came out raspy. “No.”

Deckenson looked startled. “No what?”

“I’m not going to be coerced this way. I don’t think you’ve got the arm twist on me that you think you do. I haven’t done anything wrong, and I’m not going to be blackmailed into whatever you’re trying to get me to do. I don’t need you. I can get a legitimate contract with someone sane.”

Before he had even finished speaking, Deckenson had lifted an inquiring finger. John watched the waiter react to it, darting forward with a credit slate for Deckenson to authorize. He left it discreetly on the corner of the table and retreated to seat some new arrivals. Without a word, Deckenson lifted it and glanced at it. He frowned, then presented it to John.

“Dostoyevski?” he commented inquiringly. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

John took it numbly, glanced at the display. It wasn’t the restaurant bill. It was, instead, a complete listing of his last three transactions with Ginger, including his most recent order. Dates, times, and even the exchange rendezvous points were listed. Deckenson reached across the table to take the slate from John’s lax grip. He tapped a few keys, then turned the slate to display for John their itemized restaurant bill. John made no comment as Deckenson turned the slate back toward himself.

“I would have expected you to choose Shaw over Dostoyevski,” Deckenson observed coyly as he keyed in an agreement of credit transfer.

“Perhaps you don’t know me as well as you think you do.” John had intended to sound defiant. But the words caught in his throat and he finished his attempt at bravado with a cough.

“We know you well enough,” Deckenson assured him quietly. To make the threat less subtle, he offered, “Would you like to see a copy of your pre-Academy transcripts?”

John’s mouth went dry. “What is it?” he demanded, his voice cracking on the question.

“What do we want?” Deckenson’s eyes were back on him, suddenly hard in their triumph.

“Yeah.” John begrudged everything he gave this man, every word, every second of his life.

Deckenson leaned forward, and spoke with soft fervor. “Earth. We want the Earth back. We want to live there, as Humans were meant to do, as a part of the ecology, filling the niche we evolved to fill.” Fanaticism reddened his pale cheeks.

“Earth is dead.” John spoke as if Deckenson were an unadjusted child, uninformed of the basic facts of ecology.

Deckenson shook his head. “No. She’s not. And even if she were, we could revive her. With all we’ve learned from our exile, we could do it. Imagine it, John. We re-create the Earth, and Humans could have a real home again, instead of existing as we do, as very precarious guests of Castor and Pollux. Children could run through fields of plants instead of following pathways, pick fruit from trees without counting each piece, interact with lower life-forms without being accused of interference or damaging the planet. Or can you imagine it, John? You, who’ve never even been allowed on the open surface of a planet.”

John closed his eyes for half a moment, pushed down total panic. How the hell much did they know about him, and how had they found it out? “That’s none of your business, where I’ve been or haven’t been,” he said flatly.

“Perhaps not,” Deckenson said in a suddenly mild voice. “But nonetheless, we do know. Instead of being terrified of our betraying you, think what we’re offering you: the chance to finally stand on the surface of a planet and look up at the sky. And that planet is our own homeworld, Earth.”

“Not my home.” John said it flatly.

“John,” Deckenson chided. “It is. Yours and mine, and we could live there again. Earth Affirmed knows it’s true, despite all the official reports. All we need to do to prove it is sidestep the Conservancy. For years, they’ve given lip service to our requests for updates on Earth’s condition. We finance a Beastship there, we put up the money for the satellite surveillance and send in the probes. But the results always come back the same. Toxic. Poisoned. Dead and deadly. You know why? Because all our raw data becomes the property of the Conservancy, goes directly into sealed files. We aren’t even allowed to see the readings we get. All we’re allowed is the Conservancy’s interpretation of what the raw data meant. It’s been very frustrating and very expensive. But the solution is obvious. Get permission for another reconnaissance. But this time there’s a man on the ship who’s ours, one who can step in and pirate the data before they can steal it from us and ‘interpret’ it to their own liking. We’ve set up ways for it to be done.” Deckenson paused, and John wondered what worse thing he was about to introduce.

“And there’s one other possibility, even more exciting. We have reason to believe there exists a time capsule that was left for us, created by those who stayed behind when we evacuated, in the faith that someday we’d come back for it. Firsthand data about Earth’s ecology. We believe it’s there, waiting for us. You can retrieve it. Or try. That’s all we ask.”

All they asked. The words seemed to echo in John’s ears. He couldn’t imagine anything worse they could ask of him.

“Deckenson,” he said pleadingly. “It’s completely crazy. Earth’s dead. Any ‘time capsule’ that was left there is destroyed, centuries ago. And it’s treason. If I do it, I’ll return to condemnation. There won’t even be a pretense of adjusting me. They’ll simply eliminate me like a contagious disease. And my crew.”

Deckenson didn’t smile. The very flatness of his mouth was somehow more intimidating. “No. Because you won’t fail. And when the information you gather is released, eliminating you will be impossible. You’ll be a hero. We’ll see to that. Refuse us, and we’ll see you’re condemned. So focus on this. If you serve us, you’ll return to wealth and acclaim. We promise.”

“There isn’t really a choice for me, is there?” John said slowly.

“Not really,” Deckenson agreed. His flat eyes smiled at John over the rim of his stim mug as he drained it off.