It meandered quietly, carrying its load of contaminants out of the Vorkosigans’ District and undrinkably through the eastern neighboring district, to empty out at last into an abandoned estuary and the sea that swallowed, if not all, much. Maybe not forever-abandoned, now. Let us see what this generation of Vorkosigans can do. She sat up and looked forward eagerly as they banked again and tracked up the ridge that, along with the prevailing winds, had once saved the lands just to the west from the worst of it.
“What the hell…?” Miles stretched his neck and frowned. “Vadim, what is that crap down there?”
The ranger turned his head. “Rubbish tip, my lord.”
Ekaterin followed their gazes; the lift van swooped lower.
“I’m not sure I approve of that. Maybe we do need that fence… though I don’t suppose it would stop a flyer.”
“I don’t think anyone lands, my lord. They just shovel it out the back of their lift van or lightflyer while they hover.”
“That would explain the scatter, yes.” Miles’s scowl deepened. “I expect it does no harm. Seems wrong, though.”
“Lese-majeste?” Ekaterin inquired, amused by his bristle.
“Mm, or defacing a graveyard.”
She let her eyelids droop in a conceding nod.
In a few more moments, the lift van slid down to thump to a landing at the edge of a patch of woods and meadow otherwise indistinguishable from its surroundings. The occupants of the van busied themselves arranging their protective gear. Miles and Ekaterin wore disposable jumpsuits over their ordinary clothes; Enrique and Vadim, more permanent garb. Flexible galoshes went on over shoes, lab gloves over hands. Miles watched anxiously as Ekaterin pulled on her hood and sealed her face mask, a simple half-cylinder of clear plastic with a filter arrangement. She watched back, a little more sardonically, as he sheepishly adjusted his own. At the last moment, about to jump down from his seat, he bethought himself of his cane and slipped a double layer of lab glove over the ferrule, self-tying it with the floppy fingers. Everyone checked their dosimeters, then finally piled out.
Ekaterin nodded to the dosimeter hanging at Vadim’s waist. “Does the lifetime limit on exposure curtail your career as a ranger?”
He shrugged. “It’s less important the older you get. And the treatments keep getting better. I hope to stay just behind that moving line for as long as I can.”
“Technically,” Miles put in, “I passed my lifetime limit halfway through my space career. You can’t take that stuff too seriously, or you’ll be paralyzed. Anyway, there’s gene cleaning now.”
Vadim gave a heartened nod at this elastic view of safety protocols, and followed his little liege lord as he stumped toward the experimental plot.
Ekaterin fell in beside Miles. “Does that radio-insouciance go for me, too?”
“Of course not.” He gave her a wary glance. “Though the limits are conservative.” And, in a lower mutter, “Besides, they only matter if you’re going to live to grow old.”
Ekaterin wondered whether to take up the ongoing argument about Miles’s personal conviction that he would not survive to some ripe old age, and had to live fast, cramming in experience, to make up for it. And was so much a part of what made Miles, Miles. Not now, perhaps. There would be time later; she was determined on it. She contented herself with a, “You’d better. Or I’ll have your scalp,” which made his sharp gray eyes crinkle behind his filter mask.
A faint humming marked the edge of the test plot, a twenty-meter-wide square laid out at the edge of the woods encompassing both scrub and a slice of meadow. At each corner, a force screen generator supported a barrier, half a meter high and a meter deep below ground, to contain the area and its important, if small, experimental inhabitants. Ekaterin and Vadim stepped over it; with a faint yelp, Enrique stumbled through it; Miles, about to hop, planted his cane and stepped over more carefully. It had been quite some time since his knees had last buckled unexpectedly, but this was not a good place to go rolling in the dirt. Ekaterin looked around eagerly for her first view of what she couldn’t help thinking of as her radbugs at work, though really, her design contribution had been small compared to Enrique’s. The exterior was the part everyone saw first, though, and first impressions were psychologically important.
“There’s one!” Miles pointed with the condomized tip of his cane toward a red-brown Barrayaran weed—henbloat, the botanist-and-gardener part of Ekaterin’s mind noted automatically—and used it to push back the stalk and reveal the insectoid shape contentedly chewing a leaf in the shade beneath.
The bioengineered creature was six or seven centimeters long, six-legged, beetle-like in form with its glossy wing carapaces. The carapaces, head, and legs were a deep, shimmering purple. Upon its back a clear trefoil shape glowed a butter-yellow. Really glowed; the tiny light was bright enough to reflect off its shadowy surroundings. The general effect was quite enchanting, Ekaterin thought.
Even before the design modifications, it had been entirely unjust of Miles to dub the earlier, original version ‘the vomit bugs’, or, during the unfortunate time they’d escaped inside Vorkosigan House, ‘those damned pullulating cockroaches’. Butterbugs had been the official name of that parent generation, brought by Dr. Enrique Borgos from his Escobaran laboratory, unfairly lost to—well, be frank—to financial mismanagement. His new lab at Hassadar on Barrayar was being much more shrewdly managed, if not by Enrique. Enrique had better things to do with his brain.
The butterbugs themselves were just mobile, self-maintaining packaging for the real secret, a suite of bioengineered microbes in their guts that processed any Earth-organic matter the bugs could munch. The butterbugs ate vegetation people could not; regurgitated an extremely nutritious tofu-like substance edible to humans; and excreted one of the best fertilizers Ekaterin-the-gardener had ever tested. Really, there was no downside.
Except for the bugs’ original appearance, which some people—Ekaterin glanced under her lashes at her husband, still peering under the plant—who had less excuse than most to judge others by their surfaces, had found repulsively off-putting. So, at the other shareholders’ requests, Ekaterin had taken on the packaging problem; the new food-producing butterbugs, renamed glorious bugs, were quite attractive and a hit. Miles… had come around slowly.
Miles had come around a lot faster, though, when Enrique had floated the tentative notion of a bug that might eat radioactively contaminated matter, chelate the heavy metals to a claylike substance to be regurgitated at collection points, and excrete what was to all intents and purposes clean, fertile soil. The lab had suddenly found itself generously funded for the new project from Lord Vorkosigan’s personal purse. And Dr. Borgos, who was not a slow learner despite his youth—the man was not yet thirty even now—had this time come to Lady Vorkosigan for design tips first.