Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

And this was the second source of Arkady’s endless fascination with his chosen field. In a very real sense every expedition to a new planet retraveled in miniature the long evolution of the discipline that humans called terraforming and Syndicate scientists called ecophysics. Syndicate survey teams might be armed with technical and theoretical tools that would have appeared near-magical to pre-Evacuation humans; but each new planet, even if every living thing on it was earthly in origin, presented an entirely new set of experimental parameters. Those parameters inevitably produced results that confirmed prior theory…and results that pointed out the limitations of trying to generalize about the largest complex nonlinear dynamic system anyone had yet encountered based on a sample size of one. Every unsurveyed planet was, quite literally, a new world. And nothing in all the wide universe said that the next planet wouldn’t blow the lid off every prior theory.

Which was exactly—though it was hard for Arkady to bring himself to believe such a thing could be happening—what Bella’s DVI numbers would do.

If they were real.

“You want her to learn on the job ?” Aurelia was asking incredulously when Arkady walked into the hastily called formal consult over what the Ahmeds were calling the DVI situation. “She was supposed to know her job before we launched. People who can’t do a simple job right belong on a euth ward, not on a deep-space survey mission!”

“I did do the job right the first time!” Bossy Bella protested. Bella had been assigned, after much covert maneuvering and insistence that she was too busy (she wasn’t, and wouldn’t be until it was time to establish the food cycle systems in the dirtside habitat module), to help Aurelia with data collection for the all-important DVI. The two of them had already developed a cordial dislike for each other…and when something went wrong, the inevitable happened.

“So now you know my job better than I do?” Aurelia asked coldly.

“My numbers are right,” Bella insisted.

Her sib stirred beside her. “Perhaps…”

“Perhaps nothing! If you’d been helping me instead of wasting time staring into space, we wouldn’t be in this mess!”

Shy Bella bowed her head submissively, but judging from the dark shadows under her eyes Arkady seriously doubted she’d been slacking. In fact, she’d lost several kilos since they came out of cryo, and she and her sib were now worrisomely easy to tell apart even before they opened their pretty mouths.

Someone jogged his elbow: the other Aurelia. She was worried about her sib, and her usually confident face showed it. “What does Arkasha think about the numbers?” she asked Arkady in a nervous whisper.

He cast a furtive glance at Arkasha, who was sitting at the other end of the consult table, his shoulders turned away just enough to isolate himself from the rest of the group, flicking through a sheaf of densely inked printouts.

“How should I know?” he said bitterly. “I haven’t exchanged twenty words with him since we woke up. I couldn’t have seen less of him if he’d been ducking out of airlocks to avoid me.”

“I’ve been around a while,” Bossy Bella was saying when Arkady turned back to the general conversation. She’d been detanked two years before her pairmate and three years before the Ahmeds, Arkadys, and Aurelias. In her place, Arkady would have been embarrassed about being dropped behind his age group, but Bella predictably treated the age difference as a reason to pull rank on the rest of the crew. “I was on the Kuretz-12 survey while you all were still waiting for your year nineteen cull. And no one has ever found any problems with the work I do—”

“I, I, I, I, I!” Aurelia burst out, exasperated. “If you thought a little less about your precious self and a little more about our job out here—”

“How dare you accuse me of—”

“No one’s accusing you of anything,” Laid-back Ahmed said soothingly.

But Aurelia wasn’t willing to let it slide. And if you put half the energy into working that you put into slinging malicious gossip—”

“I refuse to allow this consult to degenerate into personal attacks,” By-the-Book Ahmed said, predictably rising to Bella’s defense. “If you don’t have the leadership skills to manage the people under you—”

“That’s humanist crap!” Aurelia burst out. “I don’t need leadership skills! I’m not a goddamn sheepdog! And it’s not my Part in life to chase down people who won’t put in an honest day’s work unless they’re nagged and nattered at!”

“Listen,” Arkady began, knowing from late-night drinking sessions that once Aurelia started in on her ideological objections to caste-based genelines things could only go downhill. Not that he disagreed with Aurelia on either count. Ever since that first night she’d let her sib do her dishes, Bossy Bella had shown a formidable talent for being nowhere in sight whenever there was work to do. And as to the caste nonsense…well, just look at the current situation.

His interruption did no good, though; Aurelia had gotten the bit firmly between her teeth.

“And speaking of nagging and nattering,” she went on, “I’ve about goddamn well had it with the so-called shipboard duty schedule. Are we grown-ups or crèchelings?”

“Collective job lists are inefficient,” By-the-Book Ahmed said in his usual categorical tones.

“Not as inefficient as pissing people off by treating them like galley slaves instead of pre-citizens!”

“Shipboard duty rosters work ,” Ahmed insisted. “It’s proven.”

“By AzizSyndicate studies!” Aurelia said contemptuously. “Studies done on B’s and C’s. Well, we’re not B’s and C’s, in case you hadn’t noticed. And if your so-called leadership skills are limited to bossing around worker drones sociogenetically programmed to swallow your counterrevolutionary humanist bullshit—”

“Look,” Laid-back Ahmed said in his usual levelheaded tone. “Let’s just focus on the problem at hand. We can’t solve everything today. And none of the rest matters worth a lick if we can’t get to the bottom of the DVI situation.”

“Why not just redo the DVI readings and make a fresh start on the problem?” Arkasha said. It was the first time he’d opened his mouth since the consult started.

There was a momentary silence while everyone considered his proposal. Arkasha had acquired an unofficial and nebulous authority over the past week as his crewmates—one by one, and without ever admitting they’d done it—downloaded his public dossier. The long string of publications, citations, and discoveries attached to the dossier had subtly shifted not only their views on Arkasha but their assumptions about the entire mission. Arkasha was the closest thing the anti-individualist culture of the Syndicates had to an academic superstar: one of the best theoretical geneticists of his generation in a society where genetics was the undisputed top of the scientific food chain. Naturally his articles were published under his geneline name. But you only had to see that all-important first footnote to understand how many articles he’d written, and how influential his work had been on other geneticists. Arkasha’s presence on the mission signaled the magnitude of what the joint steering committee expected them to find on Novalis. And without doing or saying anything to demand the position—in fact he barely even talked to anyone except poor little Shy Bella, who was the farthest thing imaginable from a social power broker—Arkasha had become the de facto lead scientist on the survey.

Bossy Bella, however, was conspicuously uninterested in Arkasha’s academic qualifications. She and Arkasha stared at each other, locked in a private battle of wills. “If you’ve got something to say,” she told him, “why don’t you have the guts to say it? Or would you rather come creeping around my quarters again making your nasty insinuations?”