Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

As the rest of the team stretched and shuffled their papers and began getting back to the real business of the day, Arkady glanced at Bella. She was still in her chair, sitting up quite straight, with her hands resting in her lap and her beautiful face set into a mask of nobly wounded dignity. But her violet eyes were fixed on Arkasha as if he were the only other person in the room. And one look at their expression left no doubt in Arkady’s mind that his sib had just earned an implacable enemy.

Night cycle.

No moon lit the sky. Novalis loomed overhead, visible only as a darker blackness in the surrounding void.

A brush fire raged across the invisible curve of the northern continent’s central grasslands. On the ground the killing fields must cover thousands of kilometers, but from here the fire was just a pinprick in the surrounding blackness: a reminder that life itself was fire, and that all life devoured other life just as surely as the flames licking across Novalis’s gravid belly.

Arkady’s feelings toward the planet had changed subtly over the last few days. His impatient excitement had given way to an apprehension bordering on fear. Eve of battle nerves, he told himself, brought to an uncomfortably high pitch by that distasteful nonsense over the DVI numbers. But a voice inside him whispered that he could die down there, and if he died Novalis would eat his flesh and mulch his bones, and not one molecule of the water or volatiles or trace metals he was made of would ever go home to RostovSyndicate. He stared up at the planet, desperately homesick, and asked himself if he was strong enough to face that ground truth. The only answer was the swirl and flicker of the flames.

He shuddered and turned back into the bright cocoon of the ship. The bridge seemed safe and familiar, a last glimpse of home before the long fall into the gravity well. Status chimes rang soothingly. In the kitchen alcove off the navigator’s station the hum of the refrigerator competed with the splutter of the coffeemaker.

Arkady floated over to the table, feeling liquefied with exhaustion and privately cursing whoever had drunk all the coffee and left the machine empty. He watched the drops of coffee seep into the spherical carafe and wander around until they finally bumped into the container’s viruglass shell and stuck there like caffeinated amoebas. Which he supposed made him what? A decaffeinated amoeba? That sounded about right.

The main bridge door cycled open.

“Oh, good,” the newcomer said. “Coffee’s on.”

Bella. But which Bella? He squinted at her and decided with a distinct lowering of spirits that it was Bossy Bella.

“What a week!” She sighed, settling next to Arkady in a flowing rustle of orbsilk. Arkady repressed the urge to move away from her. When the coffee finally spluttered to the end of its cycle he pushed off with alacrity. “Can I get you some?”

“Thanks,” she said. She made no effort to track down milk or sugar.

“Just look at that sink,” she said. “What a mess! But of course everyone’s too busy and important to do the dishes around here.”

This was pretty rich considering that Bella was undoubtedly the least busy person on board. Which gave her plenty of time to poke her sharp little nose into other people’s private lives, Arkady thought, and then repressed the thought as petty.

“Don’t you agree with me?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said, settling cravenly for the path of least resistance.

“I blame the Ahmeds,” she continued. “We would never have allowed things to go this far in my home crèche. They’re too soft, too inexperienced—”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“ I do. I may not be an A, but I do know enough to see when things need to be put back on track. A little constructive criticism—”

“I hardly think it’s worth calling a group critique session over a few dirty dishes, Bella.”

“Well…no…of course not. But it’s the idea, you understand.”

Arkady gave the Motai B a sideways glance, wondering once more what it would do to a person to grow up under MotaiSyndicate’s harsh normalization regimes. He tried to count up the crèchemates from his own year—very few of them, it had to be said in Rostov’s defense—who had mysteriously vanished after fifth- and eighth-year norm testing. It wasn’t easy. The docents firmly discouraged any discussion of culled crèchemates. And as always when you tried to separate the individual from the geneline, names became cumbersome. But he remembered his feelings about culled crèchemates with painful clarity. Fear. Insecurity. Gratitude to the docents who had approved and promoted and protected him. The panicky need to believe that the vanished children were deviants, and that he could avoid their fate if he just worked a little harder at being normal and well-adjusted. And, worst of all, the first dark suspicion that while most people soon learned to hate the suffering that came with culls and critique sessions, others learned that enforcing “normality” could be a source of pleasure and power.

He thought he knew which kind of person he was. And he was starting to get a pretty good idea which kind Bella was.

Meanwhile she was watching him, her beautiful features alert and hungry-looking. “I’ve noticed that your sib and my sib seem to be pretty friendly with each other,” she said.

Arkady had noticed too. He hadn’t thought much of it. After all, he spent nearly all his free time with the two Aurelias. There was nothing strange about it. The opposite sex was refreshingly…well, opposite. And you could be friendly to them without worrying about the awkward misunderstandings or sexual tensions that complicated relationships between crèchemates.

“So how are you and Arkasha getting along?” Bella asked.

“I have nothing to complain about,” Arkady said evasively.

“That’s not exactly ringing praise.”

“Well what do you want me to say? He’s smart…hardworking…uh, clean…”

They stared at each other. Arkady could feel a furious blush spreading across his face.

“Are you sleeping together yet?”

“I…uh…”

“I thought not.”

“Not everyone jumps into bed with his pairmate the first week of an assignment,” Arkady protested—and then could have kicked himself for the implicit admission. “He’s not deviant, if that’s what you’re implying.”

Bella smiled like a cat who’d just made a kill. Why hadn’t Arkady noticed that sleek, predatory complacency before?

“Deviant!” she said in a voice that was patently insincere yet somehow impossible to challenge. “I only meant that his behavior seems a bit selfish. But you’re his pairmate after all. If you’ve started wondering…and now that you mention it, he did make that odd joke the first night. And, really, the way he looks at my sib sometimes…don’t tell me you haven’t seen it?”

Arkady hadn’t seen it. Arkady didn’t want to see it. Though of course now that Bella had put it into his head, he would see it. That was the problem with this kind of talk. Once someone had put the revolting idea in your mind, nothing could get it out. And you could never look at the person again without that little niggling blister of doubt rubbing at you.

In fact, Arkady did manage to put Bella’s insinuations aside for a few days, not so much through force of will but because the mission itself hit a long-overdue patch of smooth running.

The new DVI numbers were low enough to make sense but still high enough to reassure the Ahmeds. And from the moment the landing was greenlighted, the mission seemed to be running on rails. Site selection and GPS seeding went as smoothly as the most elementary training sim. Even the choice of a landing site went off with only nominal conflict. Arkasha argued for the southern tip of the larger continent, which jutted conveniently toward the equator. The Ahmeds, on the other hand, wanted to land in the temperate zone along the eastern flank of the continent. Arkasha stated his case: higher rates of evapotranspiration would translate into higher species richness, making their field time more efficient; they had a far better baseline for tropical ecosystems than for temperate ones, and so forth. But as Arkady had predicted, Arkasha had resolutely avoided doing anything since the last consult either to patch things up with Bella and By-the-Book Ahmed or cement his alliances with the other science track A’s. So while Arkady and (to everyone’s surprise) Shy Bella supported Arkasha’s preferred site, the rest of the team rapidly reached a consensus for the Ahmeds’ chosen site. To Arkady’s surprise, Arkasha backed down without a confrontation—and they settled on a likely-looking base camp site in the coastal flatlands of the main continent.