More silence.
“We could always take a vote,” one of the Aurelias said finally.
The idea was shocking. The fact that someone would even suggest such a crude and, well…human tactic showed how frayed around the edges the consensus-building process had become.
A long dance ensued, during which no one would exactly admit that they liked the idea of taking a vote, but no one would condemn it either. And, of course, in the end they voted…though only with the proviso that if the vote broke purely along lines of Syndicate loyalty, they would throw out two of the Rostov votes to even things up.
The vote didn’t break along Syndicate lines, however.
By-the-Book Ahmed and Bossy Bella were for going back into orbit and calling for instructions. Arkady and Arkasha were for pulling up stakes and moving to the other hemisphere, but the Banerjees and the Aurelias split, with one pairmate opting for cryo and a call for instructions and the other opting for staying put at least temporarily. And that left only Shy Bella and Laid-back Ahmed.
All eyes turned to Bella…who, predictably, either couldn’t make up her mind or was too shy to speak it so bluntly.
Later, in their quarters, Arkasha would tell Arkady that humans had had several mechanisms to deal with this sort of situation, including a thing called abstention, which Arkady thought sounded like a vaguely gruesome first-aid procedure. Probably it was better for everyone, including Arkasha, that he hadn’t admitted to knowing such a thing in public.
“I don’t know. I think I—” Bella broke off abruptly and sneezed into her cupped hands. “I’m sorry,” she said in the humiliated and embarrassed voice of a Syndicate construct admitting to physical weakness. “I must have caught Aurelia’s bug somehow—” She broke off, wracked by another fit of sneezing.
“I certainly didn’t give it to you!” Bossy Bella announced as if her sib’s confession were a covert attack on her moral rectitude and ideological purity.
Laid-back Ahmed stared at her for a moment, his normally good-natured face twisted into a disdainful expression that Arkady wouldn’t have thought he was capable of. Then he got up, walked out of the room, and returned with a tissue.
Bella blew her nose—an operation from which they all politely averted their eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered, looking up at Ahmed with a glitter in her eyes that made Arkady wonder if she was running a fever. “I should have thought of it myself. It’s just…I’m so tired…”
Ahmed shook his handsome head, gave Bossy Bella another baleful look, and sat down.
“Why are we even sitting here?” By-the-Book Ahmed asked his sib. “If she can’t make up her mind, then we’ve got four votes for going forward and four for stopping. And even if she sides with Arkasha your vote will cancel hers out.”
“I care what Bella thinks, and so should you,” Laid-back Ahmed said patiently. “And anyway I don’t want to break a tie. I think this is a decision for the life-sciences specialists.”
“She’s not a specialist!” his sib protested. “She’s a B, for God’s sake!”
“Bella?” Laid-back Ahmed asked, ignoring his pairmate.
By-the-Book Ahmed pressed his lips together in a thin disapproving line, folded his arms across his chest, and pushed his chair back from the table. But he didn’t get up. Like everyone else his attention was now riveted on Bella.
“I agree with Arkasha,” she said finally. “Mostly.” She cast an apologetic, slightly defiant look in his direction. “We do need to move base camp, and there’s too much at stake for us to waste four months of field time going back into cryo while we wait for orders. But I’d like a little more time here first. I think we all ought to try to make sense of the data we’ve got before we move. No trying to make our home Syndicates look good or covering up mistakes in our work. We’ve all got enough expertise—even the Ahmeds—to check each other’s work. And then at least the time here won’t be a total waste.”
Everyone looked at each other, waiting for someone to take the initiative.
“I’ll go along with that,” Arkady hazarded.
“Me too,” one of the Aurelias said in a subdued voice.
“What about the rest of you?” Laid-back Ahmed asked. “Is everyone on board with this?”
Everyone seemed to be.
“What about you?” he asked his own pairmate.
Ahmed shrugged. The two Aziz A’s locked eyes for a moment. “Okay,” By-the-Book Ahmed said grudgingly. “It sounds sensible. But I want it noted in the ship’s log that I was overruled on this.”
A feeling of shaky relief permeated the room. Disaster narrowly averted once again. Consensus achieved…sort of. Bella had bucked the caste system in a way that was both astonishing and (to the Rostovs and Banerjees at least) highly gratifying. And thank God for Ahmed, Arkady told himself. What the mission would have turned into without his keeping the peace between warring factions didn’t bear thinking.
Arkasha, on the other hand, turned out to have a rather different view of the consult.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said when Arkady finally cornered him in the lab late that night.
“You aren’t still upset about what the Banerjees said? Look, tempers were running high. People won’t remember it in a few days.”
“I’m glad you’re so sure.”
“You’re getting hung up on trivialities, Arkasha. It’s not that big a deal…”
“Is that why you followed the other sheep instead of defending me?” Arkasha said in a voice so low Arkady barely heard the words.
“What are you talking about? I agreed with you. I voted with you! What the hell do you want from me?”
Arkasha gave him a bruised, angry look. “Nothing.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“You’re right. I’m being ridiculous.”
“You can’t really think—”
“Well, if I can’t think it, then what’s the point of talking about it?”
“Why do you always have to—”
“You’re right. I’m wrong. I admit it. There’s nothing left to talk about. Now will you go away please?”
Back in their cabin, Arkasha’s neatly made bunk tormented him. It was impossible to sit still here, let alone sleep. He needed to think. A trip around the powered-down arc of the in-flight hab section would clear his head, even if it didn’t bring sleep any closer.
Only when he was almost there did he realize that in his distress he’d unconsciously turned toward the closest thing on the refitted UN ship to home: the airy hanging forest of Bella’s orbsilk gardens.
In day cycle the silk garden was a gauzy maze of sunlit mulberry limbs, gently swaying seed trays, and silver-edged cocoons. Now it was a whispering, rustling, shivering fairy-tale landscape of silvery starlight. Arkady had penetrated deep into the forest of hanging trays before he realized that he wasn’t the only one who had decided on a midnight walk.
He would wish later that he’d turned around and retreated into the darkness. Or spoken. Or done anything other than what he did do. But in that moment something pulled him on. And the something that pulled him forward was the same thing that kept him silent.
He heard the catch of breath in an unseen throat. He saw a single creature, one half lean brown muscle, the other half soft whiteness, both halves frozen in the act of some atavistically significant movement. Only in the next frozen moment did he realize that the strong, clean line picked out by moonlight that pierced the mulberry branches was the curve of Ahmed’s spine.