“And what are we hunting the hunters for?” Bella asked. Arkasha had been right; she did have a sense of humor under the shyness.
“Well, officially because they’re the planet’s top predator and Arkasha and I want to get as much data on them as we can. But honestly…I’ve always kind of wanted an army-ant swarm to play with. Wait till I show you Schnierla’s circular milling experiment.”
All fun stuff…but not quite fun enough to take Arkady’s mind off the unnerving suspicion that something wasn’t quite right about Novalis.
Things still looked good on the surface. Better than good. Miraculous.
But the pieces that all looked so good in isolation became slippery and intractable every time Arkady tried to piece them into some larger pattern. And with every sedimentary layer of data that accumulated in his logbooks, Arkady was becoming more and more convinced that it wasn’t ants he should be trapping, but (metaphorically speaking) crows.
Trapping crows had always been emblematic, among working field biologists, of the kind of thankless, impossible, frustrating fieldwork that could take years off your life without adding measurably to your store of reliable data. Arkady wasn’t quite sure when the term trapping crows had first been applied to terraforming…but it certainly fit.
In theory terraforming was simple. You did your DVI. You figured out whether your volatiles were within an acceptable range. If they weren’t, you moved on and found another planet. If they were, you went to work on the one you had. First, you initiated runaway greenhouse syndrome by seeding the atmosphere with CFCs. Once atmospheric CO2 content hit the tipping point, the greenhouse effect would start cascading, and you could just monitor its progress via remote probe, until things reached the point where you could effectively create an ozone layer by photodissociation. Or if you had enough colonists willing to live in hell, you could just let surface dust storms block UV radiation in the place of an ozone layer. And even during these initial stages you could start seeding; classic terraforming practice dictated the seeding of the target planet with UV-resistant cryptoendolithic lichens, most of them artificially tweaked descendants of the few precious remaining samples of lichens from the Ross Desert of Antarctica. And once the lichens had done their work, you started in with a well-known succession of plant and insect life that built up toward…well, ideally toward just what they’d found on Novalis.
But that was the theory. And the one sure thing about theory in complex adaptive systems was that, while it could tell you a great deal about the characteristic dynamics of a given system, it could never deliver reliable predictions of what the system would do in practice.
Try to put the theory into practice on a real planet, and the neat schemata spun off into chaos. A biosphere was an emergent phenomenon, just like an AI or an ant swarm. You couldn’t “build” one the way you built a ship or an orbital station. You could only put the necessary conditions in place and hope it would find a way to build itself. Sometimes it did. And sometimes, for reasons that could never be established completely, the system never self-organized into anything recognizable as a functional biosphere. Or it organized into a form that was impossibly unfriendly to humans and their descendants. Or some complex positive feedback loop developed that crashed the biosphere so badly that all you could do was scrap it for parts.
In such cases, terraformers were left with the uncomfortable, time-consuming, and often futile task of biopsying a failing biosphere and trying to figure out how to tweak it back onto a sustainable trajectory. More often the biopsy was an autopsy: The niggling little problem that you’d set aside to work on when you had time turned out to be the beginning of a catastrophic crash that could only have been stopped by specific actions at a precise moment…usually a moment that slipped by while you were still getting around to worrying about that odd little anomaly you’d noticed in your last set of field data.
This nebulous and frustrating exercise in chaotic systems control was what terraformers called trapping crows. And Arkady had started to log datapoints that were making him wonder if trapping crows wasn’t about to become a full-time job in his very near future.
“What’s this bunch for, again?” Arkady asked as Aurelia pulled the next vial of blood. It was the sixth, if he’d counted right; well in excess of the amounts required for the normal monitoring he’d been accustomed to all his life.
“Immunodominance assay.”
“Because of the sneezies?” That was what they’d started calling the coldlike symptoms that were making the rounds since they’d landed, turning embarrassment into humor.
“Yes.” Aurelia frowned, concentrating intently on the task at hand despite its apparent simplicity. Arkady had already decided that the Aurelias’ (to his mind) excessively methodical nature was a central personality trait of their geneline. It was probably a highly adaptive trait for surgeons, but it made for somewhat lackluster conversation.
“Surely it’s just a reactivated virus? The long trip out? Cryo? Stress?”
“Well, obviously,” Aurelia snapped. It had been known since the earliest days of space travel that astronauts on long-duration missions passed around reactivated viruses, sometimes succumbing to childhood diseases to which they’d apparently already established immunity. “But we should have seen a matured immune response by now. I want to see if someone’s matured an unadaptive response and is passing it around to the rest of us.”
Looking at Aurelia’s fierce expression, Arkady had a sudden twinge of pity for whoever the unfortunate culprit turned out to be.
“Let’s just hope that’s all it is,” she said, half-speaking to herself.
“What else would it be?”
“I don’t know. Not much of a track record on long-range multisyndicate expeditions. And I was never for having Motais on the mission. I don’t like their new immune system splice. And I don’t trust designers who offer glib promises about what untested splices will or won’t do in the real world.”
“You’re sure it’s something we brought?” Arkady asked, speaking before he really thought the question through. “You haven’t run into anything…I don’t know…odd?”
Aurelia had her steth on, checking his vitals while she had him on the table in the name of thoroughness. Now she pulled the steth off and looked sharply at him. “Odd how? Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
“Okay, you’re done. Off the table. You’re healthy as an ox, whatever an ox is. You and Arkasha both. Pretty as anything Motai ever turned out and a lot tougher than the Ahmeds as soon as you look past the muscles. They did some fine work when they spliced you boys. Classic. No gimmicks. I approve.”
Arkady stood, rolling down his shirtsleeve. “What about your sib? Her work going okay?”
“You’d have to ask her. I’ve been too busy virus hunting to do anything but work, sleep, and piss. Plus, she’s just getting over this piece of shit virus. Hundred and four fever. Unbelievable.”
“Does that mean she’s immune now?”
“It means jack for all I know. I’m over my head. And unlike some people around here I’m not too chicken-shit to admit it. I’m going to ask Arkasha to take a look at it as soon as he’s done putting out his own fires.”
“His fires? He’s run into trouble too?”
“You’re his sib. What the hell are you asking me for? Listen, Arkady, no offense but I hope you’re not going to call another formal consult over this. Life’s too short for me ever to spend another hour in the same room with that idiot Ahmed.”