“Hey, cowlick,” Arkasha said when Arkady walked into the lab.
“I hate that nickname.”
“Why else do you think I keep using it?”
Since their late-night talk, he had taken to speaking to Arkady in a cool, bantering tone and gently mocking him about everything from his cowlicks to his bad housekeeping habits. It was better than being ignored…sort of. But it was part and parcel of the same frustrating pattern that had characterized their relationship from that first meeting. One step forward and a step and a half back. And somehow it was always Arkady taking the step forward and Arkasha retreating.
“What’s bothering you?”
“Who says anything’s bothering me?”
“You do.” Arkasha rubbed at his own cowlick-free forehead in a mocking through-the-looking-glass gesture. “Talk about futility. Nothing you can do now to make your hair lie down and grow the right way. That kind of defect’s almost impossible to fix, even in utero. A real throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater problem.”
“Well, in MotaiSyndicate they would throw the baby out with the bathwater, wouldn’t they?”
Arkasha shrugged, apparently not all that interested in Motai-Syndicate’s cowlick policy. “The interesting thing to me is when you do it. At first I thought it was just social self-consciousness. A first meeting. An awkward conversation. A contentious consult. But then I noticed that you do it when you’re alone too.”
“If you’re there to see me do it, then I’m not alone, am I?”
“Very cute. You do it when you’re working is what I mean. And I think you do it when you’re thinking non-norm-conforming thoughts. Going after the outward physical deviation because it’s easier to smooth out than the one that really scares you.”
“And when exactly did you decide to become a renorming counselor?”
“Oh, so nothing’s bothering you? I’m glad to hear it.” Arkasha folded his arms and smiled.
“Okay,” Arkady admitted. “It’s the survey.”
He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly awkward, and crouched down to pull his field notebook from his rucksack. He set it on the table, still not meeting his pairmate’s eyes. “I’m just…not a hundred percent comfortable with the results I’m getting in the field.” The understatement of the millennium. “Normally I’d talk to the DVI team about it but…well…the DVI situation being what it is…”
Arkasha grasped the essence of the problem with such astounding speed that Arkady caught himself thinking yet again that he was far too fine a tool for the scientific hackwork of a routine survey mission. “Have you worked up your climatic succession equations yet?” he asked.
“I tried. I came up with nonsense.”
“Can I see your work?”
“I checked it. And double-checked it. It’s not a calculating error.”
“I’m not saying it is,” Arkasha replied with unaccustomed mildness. “I just want to understand what you’ve done so I don’t waste time repeating it.”
He waited while Arkady leafed through the pages, written and scratched out and overwritten, on which he’d tried and failed to make sense of the facts on the ground.
“What’s dh? Disturbance history?”
“Yes. And C is percentage of the sample in climax stage. And P is…”
“Patch areas. Yes. Great. Perfect.”
Arkasha flipped back to the first page of calculations, walked around to the other side of the lab bench, grabbed a piece of scrap paper and a chewed pencil stub, dragged his stool back around to Arkady’s side of the table, and sat down—all without taking his eyes off the equations. “Go boil some coffee, would you? It’s going to take me a while to get through this. And Arkady?”
Arkady turned, his hand on the doorjamb.
“We’re not telling anyone about this until we’re sure, right?”
“Right.”
“Good boy.”
Arkady was so distracted that he boiled the water twice, and by the time he got back Arkasha’s scratch paper was thickly covered with his illegible pencil scratchings.
“Well,” Arkasha announced. “Your math’s fine.”
“I know my math’s fine. What I don’t know is where the problem is.”
“In the data, obviously.”
“What are you—?”
“Oh, get your hackles down. There’s nothing wrong with your data collection methods, or your samples or your recording or anything else you’ve done. There’s something wrong out there.” He gestured toward the skin of the hab ring and the vast black forest beyond. “There’s something wrong—or right—with the planet itself.”
Arkady stared wide-eyed at Arkasha. “What do you mean ‘wrong or right’?”
Arkasha rubbed at his head, his face screwed up into a mask of indecision. Then ran his fingers down the neatly aligned spines of his own intimidatingly orderly notebooks and plucked one out off the rack to spread before Arkady. “Have a look at this.”
Arkady couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was neatly written out in Arkasha’s minute, mathematically precise hand, and it betrayed none of the adjustments, revisions, recalculations, and smudged erasures that marred Arkady’s own efforts.
He leaned over the page, straining to decipher the tiny print. He was so close to Arkasha that he could see the pulse flicker in the soft hollow between his collarbones. Suddenly he desperately wanted not to be worrying about mutation rates or DVI numbers or anything else but Arkasha. You only love me because you don’t know me. What kind of crazy thing was that to say? And it was wrong, anyway. Dead wrong. He cleared his throat and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Uh…is r rate of mutation?”
Arkasha nodded.
“In mitochondrial DNA?”
Another nod.
“I’m sorry,” Arkady said after a long moment. “It looks fine to me. I guess I know enough to know what I’m looking at, but not to spot the problem.”
“Look at the answer I came up with.”
Arkady looked, assessing the number as a real-world fact for the first time, rather than as the abstract product of a series of mathematical operations. “Um…isn’t that kind of high?”
“It’s worse than high. It’s impossible. But it’s what’s out there.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I stayed up three nights in a row centrifuging fresh samples to make sure of it. It’s right. It’s all right. Except it’s all wrong.” Arkasha grabbed a second notebook and set it in front of Arkady. “Remember those hairy beetle things you were so excited about last week?”
“The ant lions?”
“Ant lions. Right. Well, thanks to your fascination with them, they’re the most thorough sampling we’ve got of a sexually reproducing species. So when my other models started going south, I figured I’d look at them.”
“And you came up with that ?”
“Exactly. According to my calculations, your beloved ant lions shouldn’t exist. Just like every other living thing on this planet. In fact, Novalis should be a sterile hellhole. And every species on it—every bug, every bird, every tree, every blade of grass—should be walking ghosts.”
The two men stood looking at the page before them for another long moment.
“You’re sure?” Arkady asked finally.
“That’s what the numbers say.”
“But it’s not what the world outside the airlock says.”
“Isn’t it?”
“So what do we do now?”
“We punt,” Arkasha announced, as if it were the only logical solution. “We push the whole problem onto Ahmed’s desk and let him worry about it.”