Julia Ecklar - Tide of Stars

“I know enough,” Keim said firmly, not looking up from her notes, “to know that stellar jellyfish do not come from coral.”

Rahel growled and tugged at her forelock while Paval stated in a slow, loud voice, “Nobody said they did come from coral.”

“Stellar jellyfish make eggs.” Rahel bent forward to lean her elbows on her knees, ticking off elements of the life-cycle within a few centimeters of Keim’s humorless scowl. “The eggs hatch into larvae, which swim around until they find some nice rock to latch onto. Once they attach, they grow into polyps—”

Keim flipped her notebook and stabbed at an entry. “Which is a type of coral!”

“Which is like coral!” Paval corrected, and Rahel grumped over him, “Sort of!” before Keim could take that as some kind of justification for whatever she’d written. “After the polyps have been around for a while, they start shedding single-celled ephyrae, which eventually grow into adult jellyfish. This is such an effective system that it’s existed essentially unchanged for about 600 million years both here and on Earth. It’s partly because we’ve never had a chance to study such perfect parallel evolution in such a high-level organism that the Ark was interested in taking this job.” Keim flicked a look at her over the top of the notebook. “Jellyfish are a high-level organism?”

Rahel shrugged. “Compared to slime molds, they are.”

“So does Mr. Sadena know that Noah’s Ark has ulterior motives for being on Uriel?”

Rahel fought down a prickle of annoyance even as she saw Paval jerk his head up sharply in the seat behind Keim. “Not ulterior. Just more complex, maybe.”

“So you acknowledge that the wellbeing of the stellar jellyfish population may not be Mr. Sadena’s primary interest in engaging Noah’s Ark.”

This time it was clearly a statement. Rahel clenched her hands together into a fist.

“I can only tell you why I’m here, Ms. Keim,” Rahel answered stiffly. “If you want to know what Mr. Sadena is thinking, you’d be better off taking it up with him.” Nils would have been so proud.

“Oh, come on. ” Keim dropped her notebook against her knees with a clack! “Are you actually going to look me in the face and tell me you don’t care why he really brought you in?”

What a stupid question. As if Rahel’s caring could change one damn thing the man had done to this planet. As if Sadena’s dissembling could change how much she cared even so. “I don’t care,” she told Keim simply. It wasn’t exactly the first time she’d lied to the press.

Keim made some mark in her notebook, face calm but cheeks faintly red. “Don’t care that Feles Sadena is using Noah’s Ark to whitewash his poor management of this ecology?” she asked in studied sincerity. “Or don’t care that even GreeNet doesn’t believe you’ll be allowed to tell the truth in your report, much less accomplish anything with it?”

Something about the way Keim waited with her stylus poised above the screen as though expecting some sort of straight answer made Rahel smile. “Let me tell you something,” she said, pushing up from her knees to lean back in her seat again. “No amount of money can change the facts of a scientific investigation. Whatever Sadena thinks he’s paying for, Noah’s Ark is here to find out the truth about what’s going on with this environment. Paval and I—” She waved at her apprentice over Keim’s shoulder, but the reporter showed no inclination to glance at him, “—are the first phase in what will probably end up being a very lengthy planetary study. But for right now, we’ll check out the immediate complaint, produce a report based on what we find here, and suggest a course of action to both Mr. Sadena and the Ark. If Sadena decides he doesn’t want to do any of the things we present to him, it’s not like we can force him.” She smiled thinly. “Any more than he can force us to lie about our findings.”

“Is it Noah’s Ark’s position that a human arbitrarily granted with enough money to own a planet automatically has the right to destroy it, if they choose?”

Rahel snorted and tossed a look toward the sky. “Where do you get this crap?”

“I only ask what my readers would, if they were posing the questions.”

Rahel nodded, unimpressed. “Then your readers are idiots.”

“Her readers are here.”

She and Keim twisted about together at Paval’s growled remark. “What?”

Scowling off to his left, Paval threw the pack he’d been rummaging through to the floor of the boat. “There are laws against them congregating on private property, aren’t there? Doesn’t a privately owned planet count?”

Rahel rotated to follow the irritated wave of his arm, and glimpsed an uneven clot of green undulating with the waves where the sea met the sky. “Apparently not.” She even flipped off her visor to make sure all the hoods and jackets really were in emerald, and not just distorted by the colored lenses. “Shit.”

The demonstration group was the usual motley collection of shouting and mismatched green. It was apparently traditional that members of a Green rally pull together whatever emerald, kelly, olive, or lime clothing they had lying around, swarming the point in question like leaves blown from a hundred different trees. They were the only officially organized group that managed to make the Ark’s khaki brown bush suits look like a fascist uniform. Rahel supposed that impression was intentional, which only served to irritate her more.

“Did you tell them to show up here?” she asked, turning back to Keim. “Something to make the interview a little more lively?”

“Are you kidding?” Keim didn’t seem able to take her eyes off the renegade flotilla as she folded her notebook and slipped it into a pocket of her blouse. “The kind of Greens who come all this way just to cause trouble are fruitcakes.”

Rahel snorted, and Keim shot a frown at her as though anticipating what she was planning to say. “That doesn’t invalidate what they stand for,” she insisted before Rahel could even consider a remark. “It just means not everyone in the Green is a good judge of how to best accomplish those goals.”

Considering that hard-core Greens didn’t believe humans should be allowed to set foot anywhere except their native Earth—and perhaps not even there—it was a small wonder they didn’t know how to react to the rest of their species’ antagonism. “But they’re here because of your uploads, yes?”

Keim pursed her lips and nodded, not taking her eyes from the rapidly growing green blot. “Probably.”

“My God! Don’t you even wait for facts before you—”

Rahel leaned across Keim to push Paval back into his seat before he could upset the skate’s delicate balance. “Not now!” She dropped back into her own seat, facing Keim. “Any chance they’ll listen if you tell them to back off?”

Keim looked at her as though surprised she’d even made the suggestion, then shrugged. “Most likely they’ll think I’m only taking your side because we’re in the same boat.”

“And are you?” Rahel asked.

“Am I what?”

“Taking our side.”

Keim made a face and turned back toward the Greens. “I haven’t even said I’ll talk to them yet.”

The only difference between lawyers and reporters was their graduate degree. Rahel lifted her chin to call up toward the mechanical pilot, “I suppose it’s too much to ask that they’re nowhere near where we need to be.”

The pilot extended a small remote mike in her direction from a panel low on its subjective back. “Query error.” Its voice was finely tuned and masculine, but oddly devoid of character. Rahel wondered what it had been before it was Newborn. “Syntax not sufficient for specific data retrieval.”