‘So you won’t be ahead of schedule for long?’
Senkovi decided he could throw his past self under the bus for the benefit of his future self. ‘Sure. I was optimistic. However, I’ve got a solution. Paul can help.’
Baltiel raised an eyebrow, a reaction sent over minutes between planets, but Senkovi felt it was worth waiting for.
‘Do you know the work Califi and Rus were doing for Doctor Kern?’
Baltiel’s eyebrow ratcheted up further, because right now everyone knew about that work – certainly everyone back on Earth had an opinion about it thirty-one years ago, and the most recently received opinions were extremely vocal. It had been a cause celebre for the reactionaries, a justification for terrorism, bombed out labs and brutalized monkeys. ‘The viral work,’ he said flatly.
‘It wasn’t finished when we set out, not quite, but I have a lot of their research. I was even co-author for one of the papers.’ Senkovi was not looking Baltiel in the eye now, his attention shifting to Paul instead. ‘I mean, I’m not talking actual uplift, not like they did it, but a little tweaking, a little acceleration’ – not to mention improving lifespan and post-egg laying survival but I’m not saying that because you’d want to know why – ‘so that when the sea is sufficiently habitable we could have a workforce to help us . . .?’
Baltiel said nothing for a long time, enough that Senkovi checked twice to ensure the link was still open. What’s he going to do? He’s on a different planet. He has his own obsessions. Is he calling Han to tell her to replace me? So I bred a better octopus. Is that so wrong?’
‘Submit a proper plan, at least, before you start meddling with them.’ The words jolted Senkovi into eye contact again and for a moment the two of them just stared at each other across the thousands of kilometres. We are both off our briefs, Senkovi realized. We’re rebel angels, and by the time God – meaning Avrana Kern – realizes what we’re up to, it’ll be too late.
‘I will,’ he promised, blithely sidestepping the fact that he’d already started. From his tank, Paul watched him with one slit-pupiled eye, tentacles curling in elaborate arabesques.
4.
Terraforming gave them all time to think. Yes, they were hurrying the planet’s changes along at a ludicrous rate, compared to geological time: from iceball to ocean within a small slice of a human lifetime. Still, humans had evolved to live with days and months and seasons. The waiting was hard. Nobody wanted to just fall back into cold sleep the moment the opportunity arose, telling the Aegean to wake them in a decade. They wanted to see the world below them start to germinate before they closed their eyes. And so they practised art, music, read the ship’s stored library front to back, played procedurally generated strategy games advertised never to repeat themselves. And almost everyone became obsessive, now and then. The Earth link was what got most of them. Poullister, Han, Maylem, they had all spent time trying to discuss what was happening back home. People were fighting. There were localized war zones – mostly the traditional sort where the big players’ soldiers got to go play in the back yards of their neighbours, to minimize the property damage of friendly allies. Proxy wars, and keeping it clean so far, but everyone knew that there were stocks of chemical and biological agents just sitting around waiting for someone to lose patience with polite and limited wars. And the news was old, of course, over three decades. They were out here on the edge of humanity’s sphere of influence, their ability to communicate with home crippled by the insuperable laws of relativity.
Senkovi had heard Poullister and Maylem in full-blown argument – one of those pointless rows where both of them were effectively arguing the same case, where the argument itself was the point, not the winning of it. He hadn’t realized, before then, just how riled up everyone was about Earth and the growing conflict they were hearing about, a generation late. And probably it was all settled now, peace and harmony, but that old demon relativity brought an end to any difference in acceleration between good news and bad, truth and rumour. None of it could get to them faster than the light of their home world’s distant sun, leaving them to endlessly speculate about how bad things might have got.
Senkovi himself kept out of the discussion and kept out of their way. He was already obsessive, a trait he had proudly smuggled onto the Aegean long before it had become de rigueur, and he was using the waiting time to indulge in his own personal schemes.
When Han came to see him – this was months after his brittle détente with Baltiel over Paul – her first comment was, ‘You’re supposed to be in the freezer by now.’
‘Don’t wanna,’ Senkovi told her, sticking out his bottom lip because he’d learned that with some people a veneer of feigned childishness could transform his peculiarities from obnoxiously antisocial to charming. ‘Busy.’
‘Busy keeping us out of here,’ she noted. ‘This was Payload Bay Seven, wasn’t it? Only none of this looks like payload, Disra.’
‘It is payload. Of a sort.’ He was already being defensive, and he’d hoped to keep that in reserve when charmingly childish wore thin. ‘I filed a plan with Baltiel. He’s all over this like a rash, believe me.’
‘Disra, I saw the plan you filed. It was . . . thin. And you must have pushed past its parameters an age ago. Preliminary testing, it said.’
‘And it went very well, so I made an executive decision. Baltiel will back me.’
Han was a tall, slender woman who looked as though she should be an aesthete, all impromptu haiku and abstract paintings. In fact her paintings were all of robots, fantastical, impractical metal humanoids lit by industrial fires or explosions, as though she had a window onto a world where cybernetics had gone in very different directions. On top of that, perhaps despite that, she was the best engineer on the terraforming team, a genius mathematician and a pilot. And all of that, Senkovi had thought, should have been enough to keep her busy and not send her snooping around here. He felt like a boy caught doing something untoward after lights out, sitting on the floor of Bay Seven with a half-gutted virtual console, lit by the azure radiance of the big tank he’d had constructed.
Han put a hand to the transparent plastic, seeing the occupants detach from the fake coral and rocks he’d given them, drifting towards her fingers to see if they would give any entertainment value. ‘I’m guessing you’re not sending them planetside any time soon,’ she noted. ‘Unless you’ve engineered the fuck out of them to not need oxygen or Earth-style temperatures or pH.’
‘As it happens they aren’t ready for deployment, no,’ Senkovi told her shortly, wishing she’d just go away and, if possible, forget everything she was currently looking at. ‘I’m still very much in the R&D phase of the project, as you must know if you’ve read—’
‘Why squid?’
‘Not squid. Octopi. Octopuses if you want to be a slave to the dictionary. And why not? What’s wrong with them?’
Han glanced down at him. ‘You’ve got a genetic library that’s a good slice of Earth biodiversity, Disra. You’ve got the kit here to hatch out anything, un-extinct it. Poullister was talking about making a dog.’
Disra, not much of a dog person, shrugged. ‘Why not? I mean, what would you do? Let me guess, you had a cat, back home? Fish?’ He decided Han probably had owned a cat, or had wanted to own a cat but hadn’t lived somewhere she could get a pet permit. Maybe she’d had a robot cat, one of those good little machines that purred and sat on your lap and then its ears fell off the moment its warranty expired.