Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

Nita shot Ronan a bemused look. “What?”

“He seems to have a calming effect on gates. I was looking at his intervention logs this morning.”

“Now wait a minute,” Kit said, “isn’t that stuff supposed to be privacy-locked?”

“Not when we’re all on the same intervention,” Ronan said, “and when gates’ behaviors tend to get interlinked. I take it you got the lecture from Rhiow on portal contagion.”

Kit nodded, getting busy with what remained of the croissant. Nita rolled her eyes. “Well, we should be grateful almost all the rest of the gating’s done,” she said, “the heavy-duty stuff—”

“Oh bollocks,” Ronan said. “As if moving however many million people doesn’t count as heavy-duty.”

Nita laughed at him. “Compared with moving the biosphere? Half the planet’s been scraped bare over the last month, right down through the lithosphere. Huge populations and communities of animals, plants… whole big chunks of the ecology already transplanted to the refuge worlds. You want to look at the logs for that—they’re something else.” Nita shook her head. “But you know what’s really interesting? The further down the biological hierarchy you go, the more eager life is to get out of here. The plants, especially, aren’t arguing the point. They can feel the change in the local gravity, the magnetic fields. They know what’s coming. So do most of the animals.” She frowned. “What’s weird is the way the ones closer to the Tevaralti, the domesticated ones and the animals in their food chain… they’re a lot less eager. There’s more conflict about going, and when you ask them what’s going on, they can’t tell you.”

“Something to do with this symbiotic thing the Tevaralti have going on, I guess,” Ronan said. “But they will go if you tell them to?”

“Yeah. The Planetary’s had words with the less volitional parts of the biosphere; that pretty much settles it. If they can be gotten out, they’ll cooperate.”

Kit finished his croissant, crumpled up the cellophane and stuck it in his pocket. “You could really wish the Planetary could do the same for the people,” he said, looking at the little crowd of encamped Tevaralti across the plaza and thinking of the huge crowd of them back at his own gates.

“Wouldn’t be just you,” Nita said. “I don’t get how they know what’s going to happen and they just want to sit here and let it happen. There are moments when…” She trailed off, as if she wasn’t entirely happy with what she was about to say. “‘In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake…’” She shook her head. “Supposedly that’s what it’s all about. Life. Saving it. How are we supposed to stand around and let it just throw itself away?”

Kit had no answers. For the moment his mindscape was rebelling against getting to grips with the huge numbers of Tevaralti who might not survive. Instead in his mind’s eye he suddenly saw the tentacled shape he’d been feeding saltines last night. “You said they were half done with the biosphere,” he said. “What about my part of the continent? There are still a lot of animals running around.”

Ronan stretched himself against the glass wall. His mouth had gone tight. “If the research I’ve been doing on rafting is right,” he said, “only two hundred and twelve rafting projects in all the Interconnect Project’s history have ever achieved one hundred percent clearance of a planet. In all those projects they had decades to work in, not months or days. And even so, that number only works when they leave bacteria and viruses and the smallest in-soil or in-water organisms out of the count.”

He looked away. “Rafting’s about preservation… not total rescue. At least that’s what the docs say. You pull the best case you can out of a worst-case scenario—try to get enough life forms out of a planetary-extinction scenario for them to reproduce themselves, continue as a species… reconstruct their cultures, if they have cultures, somewhere else. Saving every single one of them, it’s a goal all right, something to shoot for. But then so’s perfection.” And Ronan too looked toward the edge of the plaza in the direction where Thesba would be rising. “With a half-busted moon hanging over our heads and getting more fragile every orbit, there may just not be enough time…”

That hopelessness that Kit had been trying to deal with earlier came back for him, in spades. Yet he wasn’t going to give in to it: not yet. We’re just getting started here. “I guess,” he said aloud, “all we can do is do our jobs and try to make sure what we’re doing goes as well as it can.”

“There you go,” Nita said. “We’re on the same page.” She stretched too, bumped her hip against his again. “So what was that you were going to tell me last night?”

Ronan glanced over at them. “I’ll go pretend to do something else so as not to have to stand here and listen to you two embarrassing each other, shall I?”

“No, you don’t have to go anywhere, it’s not embarrassing! Have you seen the local octopuses?”

Nita looked at Kit in bemusement. “Okay,” Ronan said, “I admit that’s not how I imagined your next sentence coming out.”

“And what do you mean ‘octopuses’?” Nita said. “I thought you were somewhere landlocked.”

“We are. They’re kind of field octopuses. They can climb, too: I think maybe some of them live in trees.”

Ronan rubbed his face. “If I wasn’t grateful to be in a city on this planet before,” Ronan said, “I am bloody grateful now. Having octopus things drop on me out of trees is not something I’d be excited about.”

“They wouldn’t hurt you!” Kit said. “You saw the one yesterday. They’re pretty friendly.”

“Tell me about it. If he’d have climbed up me any further, that lad would’ve got friendly with bits of me I really prefer to reserve for humans. And now we’re talking octopus-things that’ll drop out of trees on me and get friendly?” Ronan shook his head incredulously. “Janey mack, there’s something I really don’t need when the fecking moon’s already trying to drop out of the sky on my head.”

Nita gave Ronan’s histrionics an amused look. “But what’re they doing around your gates?”

“There are wild ones running around out in the grasslands,” Kit said, “but sometimes pet ones wander over from the people who’re not using the gates.” He gestured with his head at the gathering across the plaza. “Aren’t you seeing them here?”

“I wasn’t looking for them,” Ronan said, “because it never occurred to me I needed to be looking for octopuses.”

“Sibik,” Kit said. “They’re called sibik.”

“You know,” Nita said, “there’ve been Tevaralti going through my gates with little boxes, and now that I think of it they do look kind of like those dog carriers people at home have to use for their dogs when they’re flying them somewhere.” She stood up a bit and stretched as if her back was bothering her. “So what about them?”

“Well, nothing specific,” Kit said. “Except they seem to have their own version of the symbiosis thing going on, which is interesting. I fed one of them a saltine yesterday, and last night a completely different one came along and asked me for crackers.”

“Asked you?” Ronan said.

“Well, more like demanded. And he knew the language I’d used with the first guy. It’s kind of weird.”

“Think they’ll come back later?” Nita said. “I might come see them if I can get the scheduling to work.”

“I don’t know. I can message you if one shows up. My shiftmates say that sometimes a lot of them turn up, looking for food mostly.”

“Speaking of shiftmates,” Nita muttered, looking over to the short-jump transport pad, “I need to get moving.”