Lois Bujold: Falling Free

Van Atta was no more than five years younger than Leo. Leo suppressed profound irritation—he wasn’t this paper-shuffler’s ninety-year-old retired Sunday school teacher, damn it. He was a working engineer, hands-on, and not afraid to get them dirty, either. His technical work was as close to perfection as his relentless conscientiousness could push it, his safety record spoke for itself… He let his anger go with a sigh. Wasn’t it always so? He’d seen dozens of subordinates forge ahead, often men he’d trained himself. Yeah, and trust Van Atta to make it seem a weakness and not a point of pride.

Van Atta spun the data disks across the room at him. “There’s your roster and your syllabus. Come on, and I’ll show you some of the equipment you’ll be working with. GalacTech’s got two projects in the wind they’re thinking of finally turning these Cay Project quaddies loose on.”

“Quaddies?”

“The official nickname.”

“It’s not, um… pejorative?”

Van Atta stared, then snorted. “No. What you do not call them out loud, however, is ‘mutants,’ genetic paranoia being what it is after that Nuovo Brasilian military cloning fiasco. This whole project could have been carried out much more conveniently in Earth orbit, but for the assorted legal hysterias about human gene manipulation. Anyway, the projects. One to assemble Jump ships in orbit around Orient IV, and another building a deep space transfer facility at some nexus away the hell-and-gone beyond Tau Ceti called Kline Station—cold work, no habitable planets in the system and its sun is a cinder, but the local space harbors no less than six wormhole exits. Potentially very profitable. Lots of welding under the most difficult free-fall conditions—” Leo’s brief angst was swallowed in interest. It had always been the work itself, not the pay and perks, that held him in thrall. Screw executive privilege—didn’t it mostly mean being stuck downside? He followed Van Atta out of the office back into the corridor where Tony still waited patiently with his luggage.

“I suppose it was the development of the uterine replicators that made it all possible,” Van Atta opined while Leo stowed his gear in his new quarters. More than a mere sleep cubicle, the chamber included private sanitary facilities and a comconsole as well as comfortable-looking sleep restraints—no morning back-ache on this job, Leo thought with minor satisfaction. Headache was another problem.

“I’d heard something about those things,” said Leo. “Another invention from Beta Colony, wasn’t it? ” Van Atta nodded. The outer worlds are getting too damn clever these days. Earth’s going to lose its edge if it doesn’t shape up.”

Too true, Leo thought. Yet the history of innovation suggested this was an inevitable pattern. Management who had made huge capital investments in one system were naturally loathe to scrap it, and so the latecomers forged ahead—to the frustration of loyal engineers… “I’d thought the use of uterine replicators was limited to obstetrical emergencies.”

“Actually, the only limitation on their use is the feet that they’re hideously expensive,” said Van Atta. “It’s probably only a matter of time before rich women everywhere start ducking their biological duties and cooking up their kids in ‘em. But for GalacTech, it meant that human bioengineering experiments could at last be carried out without involving a lot of flaky foster-mothers to carry the implanted embryos. A neat, clean, controlled engineering approach. Better still, these quaddies are total constructs—that is, their genes are taken from so many sources, it’s impossible to identify their genetic parents either. Saves quantities of legal grief.” “I’ll bet,” said Leo faintly.

“This whole thing was Dr. Cay’s obsession, I gather. I never met him, but he must have been one of those, you know, charismatic types, to push through a project with this enormous lead time before any possible pay-off. The first batch is just turning twenty. The extra arms are the wildest part—”

“I’ve often wished I had four hands, in free fall,” Leo murmured, trying not to sound too dubious out loud.

“—but most of the changes were this bunch of metabolic stuff. They never get motion-sick—something about re-wiring the vestibular system—and their muscles maintain tone with an exercise regimen of barely fifteen minutes a day, max—nothing like the hours you and I would have to put in during a long stint in null-gee. Their bones don’t deteriorate at all. They’re even more radiation-resistant than us. Bone marrow and gonads can take four and five times the rems we can absorb before GalacTech grounds us—although the medical types are pushing for them to do their reproducing early in life, while all those expensive genes are still pristine. After that, it’s all gravy for us; workers who never require downside leave; so healthy they’ll go on and on, cutting high-cost turnover; they’re even,” Van Atta snickered, “self-replicating.”

Leo secured the last of his scanty personal possessions. “Where… will they go when they, uh, retire?” he asked slowly.

Van Atta shrugged. “I suppose the company will have to work something out, when the time comes. Not my problem, fortunately; I’ll be retired before then.”

“What happens if they—quit, go elsewhere? Suppose somebody offers them higher pay? GalacTech will be out-of-pocket for all the R&D.”

“Ah. I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the beauty of this set-up. They don’t quit. They aren’t employees. They’re capital equipment. They aren’t paid in money—though I wish my salary was equal to what GalacTech is spending yearly to maintain ‘em. But that will get better as the last replicator cohort gets older and more self-sufficient. They stopped producing new ones about five years ago, see, in anticipation of turning that job over to the quaddies themselves.” Van Atta licked his lips and raised his eyebrows, as if in enjoyment of a salacious joke. Leo could not regret missing its point.

Leo turned, curling in air and crossing his arms. “Spacer’s Union is going to call it slave labor, you know,” he said at last.

“The Union’s going to call it worse names than that. Their productivity is going to look sick,” growled Van Atta. “Loaded language bullshit. These little chimps have cradle to grave security. GalacTech couldn’t be treating them better if they were made of solid platinum. You and I should have so good a deal, Leo.”

“Ah,” said Leo, and no more.

The observation bubble on the side of the Cay Habitat had a televiewer, Leo discovered to his delight, and furthermore it was unoccupied at the moment. His own quarters lacked a viewport. He slipped within. His schedule allowed this one free day, to recover from trip fatigue and Jump lag before his course was to begin. A good night’s sleep in free fall had already improved his tone of mind vastly over yesterday, after Van Atta’s—Leo could only dub it “disorientation tour.”

The curve of Rodeo’s horizon bisected the view from the bubble, and beyond it the vast sweep of stars. Just now one of Rodeo’s little mice moons crept across the panorama. A glint above the horizon caught Leo’s eye.

He adjusted the televiewer for a close-up. A GalacTech shuttle was bringing up one of the giant cargo pods, refined petrochemicals or bulk plastics bound for petroleum-depleted Earth perhaps. A collection of similar pods floated in orbit. Leo counted. One, two, three… six, and the one arriving made seven. Two or three little manned pushers were already starting to bundle the pods, to be locked together and attached to one of the big orbit-breaking thruster units.