No need to say which Ahmed; both men had long ago written off By-the-Book Ahmed as useless.
“But if we’re wrong…,” Arkady began.
“We’re not wrong.”
“Still,” Arkady said. “I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I knew whether or not the new DVI numbers were adding up.”
Arkasha made a disparaging noise. “What are you going to do? Walk down the hallway and ask Bella if her numbers add up, and if they don’t, then was she planning to cook the books again and would she mind terribly telling us which planet’s DVI she’s going to borrow this time so I don’t have to waste another day tracking the numbers down in the data banks? You can count me out of that conversation!”
“Well, we could be a little more tactful than that.”
Arkasha folded his arms across his chest and stared meaningfully at Arkady.
“Or, uh…we could always just punt and let Ahmed worry about it.”
In the end the Ahmeds called a general consult to discuss what they diplomatically described as “concerns” about the preliminary survey results.
“So where do we go from here?” one of the Aurelias asked when Arkady and Arkasha had taken turns laying out the problems in their work.
Arkasha shifted in his chair. “I say we shift base, see if we get better results in the other hemisphere. After all, the same arguments still apply. More biomass, higher species counts, better baselines…We need to rule out the possibility that we’re looking at some local—”
“Do you have the faintest idea how totally impractical that suggestion is?” By-the-Book Ahmed interrupted.
“It wouldn’t be if you’d followed my advice and picked a scientifically defensible landing site in the first place.”
“I refuse to let this consult become an excuse for revisiting closed issues. And even if—”
“And who the hell says that’s your decision?”
“—and even if we were going to reopen the question of base camp sites, I certainly wouldn’t do it on the advice of two alleged experts who can’t even figure out how to conduct routine survey work!”
“Why don’t you go around the room, Ahmed, and see how many other people are willing to say their data looks right. Really. I want to hear it.”
“Our work is solid!” Lazy Bella protested.
“No it’s not,” her sib countered. She really was getting more assertive, Arkady thought. “Well, I mean…at least mine isn’t. I’ve been staying up nights trying to figure out where I went wrong.” Shy Bella sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand, flushing in embarrassment. “Sorry.”
“What about you?” Arkasha asked Aurelia the geophysicist.
Embarrassed silence.
“Well,” she admitted finally, “most of my stuff’s fine. I mean, the issue here isn’t rocks. But I do feel like…well, the planet just doesn’t look good enough to me. Compared to what everyone else is seeing. Whenever I talk to any of the life-sciences people I keep getting the creepy feeling that Novalis is putting two and two together and getting five. Or five hundred million, more like.”
“We can’t make a decision of the magnitude of moving the base camp on our own anyway,” By-the-Book Ahmed broke in. “I say we launch a courier. Send samples back to Gilead for processing.”
“And do what exactly in the intervening four months?” one of the Banerjees snarked. “Drink ourselves into a stupor?”
“Go back into cold sleep. Set the shipboard comp to wake us up when it gets the return transmission.”
If this had been a single Syndicate mission, Ahmed’s decision would have been accepted without question; what could be more obvious, after all, than calling home for instructions?
As it was, however, the non-Aziz A’s bridled. Even the relatively docile Arkady could feel the urge toward rebellion. A learned response? A genetic reflex? A difference in the negotiation styles and customary behaviors that each of the team members had learned in his or her home Syndicate? Did it even matter? And was it any accident that all their rebellious feelings found a voice in Arkasha?
“I refuse to waste four months waiting for the same joint steering committee that got us into this mess!” the other Banerjee announced. “Life is too short. I have a job to do.” A pointed glare at By-the-Book Ahmed. “Even if some people don’t.”
Laid-back Ahmed opened his mouth to say something reassuring—and that was when all hell broke loose.
By-the-Book Ahmed accused Arkasha of being an egotistical humanist elitist.
The Aurelias came to Arkasha’s defense, and Bella accused them of siding with a fellow Rostov even when they knew he was a deviant who’d been skating on the edge of renorming for decades.
The other Aurelia leapt to her sib’s defense by calling Bella a lazy, self-centered, manipulative bitch.
“It’s not my fault we’re on the wrong side of this stupid planet!” Bella protested. “It wasn’t my idea to land here!”
“Like hell it wasn’t!” Oh no. Please, Arkasha, just keep your mouth shut for once. “You sat right here three weeks ago and sided with the Ahmeds on the landing site decision for no reason at all but sheer petty-minded spite. And now you have the hypocritical nerve to—”
“I did not side with the Ahmeds!”
“Well, you sure as hell didn’t side with me!”
“That’s not the same thing,” Bella said primly. “I have a right to express my opinion.”
“Anyone as stupid, lazy, ignorant, and selfish as you are doesn’t have a right to have an opinion!”
“Look,” Arkady pleaded. “Let’s just try to calm down and—”
But all he succeeded in doing was throwing himself into the middle of the flames.
“Stop apologizing for him!” Bella said.
“She’s right,” one of the Banerjees agreed. He pointed at Arkasha and began speaking of him in the third person and in that special tone that made every nerve in Arkady’s body cringe at the remembered misery of collective critiques gone by. “He’s the real problem. He can’t bother to be friendly, or even polite. He picks fights. He disagrees with everything. He goes around jerking people’s chains until they’re so pissed off that even when he’s right they won’t agree with him. Which is why we’re in this hemisphere instead of the one he wanted to land in. Which if he’d bothered to build a consensus and work with people we probably would have agreed to instead of having the Ahmeds, who—excuse me, Ahmed, but honestly—don’t know shit, make the decision by default—”
“You people really are pathetic,” Arkasha said in a detached, almost conversational tone of voice.
“See? See?”
“Are we done ripping each other apart yet?” Laid-back Ahmed asked in a very small and quiet voice. “Does anyone have any ideas about what we should do now, as opposed to whose fault it is?”
“Sedatives might be a good place to start,” Arkasha muttered.
“Oh shut up, Arkasha.” One of the Aurelias sighed, sounding fed up to the point of no return.
Arkady cleared his throat.
“What?” By-the-Book Ahmed said, turning on him savagely.
“Nothing!”
“Gee,” Shrinivas said acidly. “Arkady has nothing to say for himself. That’s a big fucking change.”
Eventually things petered out into an exhausted and hostile silence.
Ahmed sighed. “Look, people. We’re all under a lot of stress. Obviously things aren’t going too well. I think it’s important to remind ourselves that we have to make decisions on the basis of the information we have at any given time. Sometimes later information proves a particular decision not to have been perhaps the best possible one we could have made. That’s no one’s fault. It’s just the way things break. We move forward, and we adjust. Obviously feelings are running high at the moment. But we really don’t have time to cool off and come back later. We need to reach some consensus about where to go from here.”