Lois Bujold: The Flowers of Vashnoi

“Aha!” cried Enrique.

Ekaterin and Miles came quickly across to where he was crouching over a tiny mound of dull gray pellets. He unhooked his rad scanner from his belt and passed it over the pile. Its discontented-sounding twitter rose abruptly in pitch and volume to a wail.

“Wow!” said Enrique, making a hasty record of the readout. “This stuff is hot!”

Miles took a look past his shoulder at the reading, which Enrique obligingly tilted his way; his eyebrows shot up. “By damn.”

Enrique straightened. “It looks like we may have to address that disposal problem earlier than we thought. Really, this reverses the usual method of cleanup, which is to dilute and dilute till your matrix is no worse—or little worse—than whatever you suffer for the normal background. This un-dilutes. Concentrates.” He went off to fetch a trowel, kneeling again to scoop up the sample into a lead-lined jar to take back to the lab for further analysis. He handed it off to Vadim, who carted it gingerly away to stash in the lift van.

“I admit,” said Miles, watching all this closely, “that my desire to make a permanent end to this crap by taking it up to orbit and firing it into the sun is mitigated by visions of some horrible transport accident. Binning it up and sinking it in the most active subduction zone on the planet might be safer as well as cheaper. At least humans don’t pull food from the Barrayaran seas.”

“Yet,” said Ekaterin. “There are projects in the works, I understand.”

“Well, if we do nothing, which is what we have been doing for the past eight decades, it ends up in the sea all the same. Just getting it away from the coast has got to be an improvement.”

“May I suggest final decisions should wait on further testing, Miles,” said Enrique. “Depending on how the profile of other heavy metals works out, there might be commercial applications for this waste. It might even turn out to be a product. It’s already far more concentrated than any natural ore.”

“What other heavy metals? I thought we were going after the residual strontium, cesium, and samarium, mainly. And that bloody plutonium.” With which the Cetagandans had salted the bomb on purpose , to the outrage of more people than just the Barrayarans.

“The first sample I took, last week, did show a good harvest of those. But also traces of several surprises, including platinum.”

“Platinum!” said Miles. “How are the butterbugs—excuse me, radbugs—finding platinum, here?”

“Atom by atom, evidently. Enzymes, you know.” Enrique got a familiar, faraway look in his eye. “Which gives me an idea for addressing gold mine tailings. You know, those dumps from old, inefficient mining operations. I’m sure whatever you people had back in your Time of Isolation was horribly inefficient. They’re known to be laced with the metal, but there has been no way to safely and economically extract it. If I could design burrowing bugs… worms…? something, they might…. hm.”

“Talk to Martya,” Miles advised. “Or Mark. Sounds like their department. I just want…” Miles trailed off, looking around through the lengthening afternoon shadows in the scrubby woods.

To redeem his family’s liege-dead? To prove his worth to his late grandfather, again?—this was a pursuit that seemed, in Ekaterin’s observation so far, to have no end for him. In any case, she joined him as he strolled the perimeter of the plot, chewing his lip under his mask and staring out into the lovely, lethal landscape.

“Good heavens!” said Enrique, which drew them both back to the Escobaran’s shoulder in a hurry. He had picked up a stick and was prodding at a radbug easily twice the length of the one they’d seen under that henbloat. The bug hunkered down with a surly little hiss.

“That’s not a queen , is it?” said Miles uneasily.

“No, no. All the radbugs here are sterile workers. Though they do molt and grow throughout their lives. They are supposed to go back and die on the waste piles, when they reach the end of their life cycles. One of the things this plot is supposed to tell us is how long the average worker can survive in the field. I was expecting to have lost a few already, though of course some insects are extremely radiation-resistant…” His eyes narrowed, picturing something. Or the absence of something. He went to the nearest waste pile and poked it with his stick. No purple body parts shimmered among the lead-colored pellets.

Looking abstracted, he went off to locate the several other little piles scattered around the plot. Looking chary, Miles followed along.

Enrique glanced up from the last of these and smiled a bit thinly. “I wonder if you three could help me out, here. Space yourselves evenly across the plot and count all the radbugs you see. Be sure to look under things, logs and what-not.”

Obediently, Miles, Ekaterin, and Vadim did so; Enrique took the far end of the sweep. Miles did good work with his cane, startling several bugs out of hiding from rotting timber and leaf litter; they waddled off in purple-and-gold-gleaming flashes.

“Twenty-nine,” Miles reported.

“Seventeen,” said Vadim.

“Twenty-three,” said Ekaterin, and looked to Enrique, whose lips were still moving.

“Twenty-six,” he said at length.

“Ninety-five total,” said Miles, who was quick at that sort of thing. “Is that good or bad?”

“Well, it’s, er… puzzling. Because I released an even two hundred here, last week.”

Miles drew a long, long breath through his filter mask. “ Enrique …” He took visible control of his temper, always a bit edgy around the bugs. History. “Could they have flown out over the barrier?”

“No! They don’t have wings!” Enrique picked up a not-too-glowing bug in his gloved fingers and folded up its carapaces to demonstrate the un-functional wing-nubs beneath. Miles recoiled only slightly.

“If they don’t fly,” said Ekaterin, “could they climb?”

Four people bent their heads back to stare upward into the scrubby trees, like gawkers studying a Winterfair light display. But no gold twinkles winked up there.

Miles wheeled and frowned at the corner boxes. “Could the barrier have, I don’t know, shorted out in the night and shorted back on?”

“Seems unlikely,” said Enrique.

“Why don’t we all take a quick look around outside the field,” suggested Ekaterin. “If we find, well, any radbugs outside, it’ll at least prove the possibility.” The possibility of what, she wasn’t quite sure, but it served to separate Miles from Enrique.

“Mm,” grunted Miles, but joined the others in a squinty-eyed patrol through the woods nears the plot. The bugs, after all, didn’t hide well, having their own built-in signal lights.

Ekaterin was just wondering how fast radbugs could travel overland, and doing futile calculations in her head, when Miles’s voice drew her gaze up from the ground: “What the hell is that ?”

He stood several meters off, staring out into the shadowy scrub. His chin thrust forward, then he followed its line, limping. He nearly stumbled over a root, and Ekaterin hurried to his side.

“What did you see?”

“Pale shape. It flickered back into the brush.”

“Feral animal?” Feral dogs, cats, pigs, goats, chickens, red deer, ponies, black-and-white rats, and other escapees from human settlements were known to roam the Barrayaran wilderness, if only in areas where Earth-descended plants had first made a dent; almost no Barrayaran vegetation was edible to Earth-descended animals of any kind, humans included. So the feral populations tended to be sparse and starving. The notion of hungry feral chickens—which could fly, certainly over a half-meter-high force screen—gave Ekaterin a new and alarming idea of what might have happened to the disappearing radbugs. Loaded radbugs in the food chain were a horrifying notion. But people in the Vorkosigan’s District were careful about wild-caught food, at least in these days when rad scanners were cheap and abundant enough to be shared around freely.