The Quiet War
7.
Macy immersed herself in her work, staying in her lab as much as possible so that she wouldn't run into either Ursula Freye or Speller Twain, and tried to forget about what had happened. Tried to forget that Speller Twain could come back at any time and do whatever he wanted to her. Ursula Freye was protected by her consanguinity, but the security chief had demonstrated that Macy was just a grunt whose life and career were at the mercy of the whims of her superiors.
One piece of good news: Cristine Quarrick discovered that the Skeletonema cells weren't producing enough copies of the transport protein that bound phosphate ions externally and then pumped them across the cell membrane, which seriously reduced the diatom's ability to take up the nutrient at ambient levels in the melt water and was almost certainly the explanation for the low growth rates. Cristine used a transcriber to manufacture loops of DNA containing the genes that coded for transport protein production and added them to a small sample of Skeletonema cells via an off-the-shelf retrovirus, and this treatment ramped up doubling time and photosynthetic efficiency close to optimal levels. Producing enough retrovirus to infect the mass cultures of the diatom would cause a slight delay in production, but it wasn't serious. A matter of days, not weeks. They could easily get it done before the opening ceremony was scheduled to take place, and that was all that mattered.
When Macy asked Cristine if she had gotten around to doing a complete genomic analysis of the diatom, Cristine said, 'The genes for phosphate transport proteins are there, if that's what you mean. They just aren't expressing properly for some reason.'
'I was wondering if it was something that could be fixed more easily than adding extra copies of the genes.'
'The problem is fixed,' Cristine said, a sharp edge entering her voice. She was a brisk, brittle woman who didn't take kindly to any hint of criticism. 'And I have plenty of work to do without making more work.'
So Macy could put that problem to one side, and get on with growing up her own cultures of microorganisms. She discussed tweaks and snags in the quickening of the marsh ecosystem with Tito Puntarenas and Delmy March. She supervised the draining of a bioreactor where blood-warm temperature and the activity of more than three hundred species of bacteria and microalgae and protists had quickened a slurry of smectite clay fines and carbonaceous chondrite material into rich black living mud. Argyll and his father, a languid, nut-brown centenarian, one of the Outer System's best soil chemists, had helped Macy modify methods routinely used on Earth for the base materials available on Callisto, mostly minerals derived from palagonitised basalts mined from impact craters. Macy had learned a lot, and had been very impressed by the tour that Argyll's father, Jael Laudrisen Hall, had given her of the facility where topsoil was manufactured. It was far more difficult than making mud. Soil was not a random mixture of inorganic, organic and living material; it was highly structured at every level, fractally so. Stratified and textured and dynamic, it supported a myriad complex chemical reactions that were still not completely understood, mediated by soil water and air moving through pore spaces that occupied up to fifty per cent of soil by volume. Soil water also transported material through processes such as leaching, eluviation, illuviation and capillary action, and supported a rich and highly diverse biota -- hundreds of varieties of soil bacteria of course, and cyanobacteria, microalgae, fungi, and protists, as well as nematodes and worms, and insects and other small arthropods -- that recycled macro- and micro-nutrients, decomposed organic material, and mixed and transported and aerated mineral and organic components. In natural conditions on Earth, it took about four hundred years to produce a centimetre of topsoil; a thousand years to produce enough to support agriculture. A significant proportion of the work of the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps had been concerned with replacement of topsoil lost by erosion caused by overfarming, or poisoned by industry during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or stripped away by floods and hyperstorms during the Overturn. So Macy was fascinated by the huge reactors, vats, tanks, and table pedons where topsoil similar to the rich black chernozens of temperate grasslands of Earth was manufactured. AIs monitored and micromanaged every stage of the process, but really it was more like alchemy than chemistry, and a major expenditure of energy and effort.
'We don't need soil for the hydroponic farms, of course,' Jael Laudrisen Hall told Macy. 'And we could use humus and sand ground from basaltic glass as a substrate for the plantings in our parks and gardens, grow them like so many pot plants. But most plants grow better in soil, and it serves as a valuable buffer that helps to stabilise our enclosed ecosystems. And besides all that, it feels better between the toes.'
Making mud was somewhat easier than making soil, but as far as Macy was concerned it was an equally honourable profession. As important as anything the construction crew did and maybe more so, for mud was at the base of most flows of nutrients and organic material in the biome's enclosed aquatic ecosystem. And there was an immense satisfaction in using carefully calibrated cultures of microorganisms to transform material left over from the creation of the Solar System into living mud, a self-organising bioreactor that structured itself into microdomains within upper aerobic layers and lower anoxic layers and could consume just about every kind of organic material and reprocess inorganic nutrients and return it all to the cycle of life. To the amusement of her two assistants, Macy drew off a small measure as it was pumped out of the bioreactor, tasted the gritty gruel and pronounced it good, nice and lively. Just right for the hectares of reed beds that the gardening team were growing in one of the farm tunnels under the city, ready to be transplanted onto shallow banks along the eastern edge of the lake once it was filled to the brim.
Macy's work was important, and there was so much to do. Five days after she had delivered the copy of the work logs to Ursula Freye, she and her assistants went out to check the reef in the channel to the west of the little archipelago that was being built beyond the main island. It was a broad table several hundred metres long, dissected by a maze of ridges and channels designed to maximise mixing of water driven through them by wave machines at the southern end of the lake. When the lake reached its final level, the ridges would be just a metre below the surface, and Tito Puntarenas and Delmy March would seed them with sponges, soft corals, and species of red algae and kelp tweaked to grow in fresh water, providing a habitat for fish and crabs and shrimp. In the channels between the ridges, sandy sediments rich in microorganisms and stabilised by a matrix of blue-green algae and the mucus-lined burrows of several species of tube worm and shrimp would filter huge volumes of water and provide a major contribution to recycling suspended organic material and essential nutrients.
The lake had begun to flood the reef a couple of days ago. The water listlessly sucking to and fro at the bottom of most of the channels was a lifeless yellow-brown soup thick with fines, but Macy and her assistants had sealed off a couple of dozen of the channels and laid down various mixes of quickened sediment and filled them with filtered melt water. Now, before the rising level of the lake overtopped the little dams that stoppered the channels, they motored out to the reef in a skiff and took samples. On-the-spot DNA sampling suggested that most species of bacteria and microalgae in most of the mixes had flourished, and Macy was in a good mood as Loris steered the skiff past the flank of the coffer dam that encircled the construction site of the new archipelago, heading back to the lab.
The tops of islands rose like small hills above the dam's low black wall. One was crowned with a grove of cypresses and the white pillars of a shrine in the style of ancient Greece; others were turfed with flawless green grass or planted with clumps of palms; the last and largest island was still being constructed by a balletic flock of robots perched on a pile of elaborately cross-braced scaffolding that looked like a truncated version of the Eiffel Tower. Their triangular heads, equipped with hundreds of tiny spinnerets that extruded fullerene composite strands as strong as diamond, bobbed and gyred as they patiently lengthened the spars and struts of the island's skeleton. One stood with its swollen abdomen pointing into the air and its head bowed while a technician raked clogged spinnerets with a wand spraying needle jets of water.
Argyll, who'd been watching the robots too, said, 'It's going to look wonderful when it's finished.'
'As long as no one decides to put some other last-minute change to the vote,' Macy said.
'You have to shake off your linear thinking,' Argyll said. 'This isn't a top-down hierarchical society like Greater Brazil. This is the Outer System. We do things differently here.'
'I know,' Macy said. 'Everything is provisional, and everyone has the right to an opinion on anything, even if they don't know the first thing about it. I'm amazed you get anything done.'
'Well, we're not afraid of hard work,' Argyll said.
'Nor are we. But it makes things a lot easier if you know what you are going to do before you start to do it.'
'Easier doesn't mean better.'
'Easier, and less wasteful,' Macy said. 'I don't know why anyone ever thought democracy was a good idea.'
'The city has a surplus of robot labour,' Argyll said. 'And the islands really aren't much of an expense compared to the total cost of the biome. The only raw materials are graphite slurry to make the framework, a few boulders, and a couple of hundred tonnes of topsoil. And it really is going to look beautiful when it is finished. A shoal of little green islands with sailboats and waterskis threading through them, people picnicking on them . . .'
'One thing we can agree on,' Macy said. 'We've taken your crazy ideas and made something good from them.'
As they rounded the southern end of the coffer dam, another skiff scudded out across the lake, heading straight towards them. Macy had a bad feeling when she saw that Ursula Freye was at the tiller, but told Loris to slow down. If Ursula wanted something from her there would be no escape -- she might as well get it over with now, in front of witnesses.
Ursula slowed too, drew alongside. Her blonde hair was tangled about her face and her gaze was bright and eager as she leaned forward and shouted to Macy across the narrow gap of water. 'I found something! Something important! Meet me tonight! Eight o'clock! The place where we talked before!'
Before Macy could reply, Ursula gunned her skiff's reaction motor and the little boat raised its nose and drew a wide curve of white wake as it turned through one hundred and eighty degrees and skimmed past Macy's skiff again. 'Eight o'clock! It will change everything!' Ursula shouted as she went past, and then her skiff heeled hard and shot away.
Loris said, 'Do you want me to go after her?'
'Hell no,' Macy said. She was badly shaken by the encounter, by the wild look Ursula had given her, her wild words. The woman was obviously convinced that she had uncovered something that proved or supported her crazy idea that Emmanuel Vargo had been murdered, and although Macy definitely didn't want to have anything more to do with this fantasy she had a bad feeling, as physical as seasickness, that she was going to be dragged back into it anyway.
'You Brazilians sure like your alcohol. I bet someone's going to have a hangover tomorrow,' Argyll said, with a grin that reminded Macy that although he was twice her age, he was in many ways naive and oddly childlike.
They returned to the facility at the foot of the hollow strut and were eating supper and working up a full analysis of the reef sediment samples when Speller Twain walked in and told Argyll and Loris to get lost. Loris asked Macy if everything was all right; Speller Twain aimed his blank gaze at her and said that if it was all right with her he wanted to have a private conversation with Miz Minnot.
'Everything's fine,' Macy said. 'I'll see you tomorrow.'
After the two assistants had left, Loris giving Macy a troubled backward glance, Speller Twain said, 'You know what this about.'
The big man was leaning against the corner of a bench, flicking a magnifying screen on and off, on and off.
Macy said, 'I know you could ask Ursula what she's so excited about.'
'I could. But she is what she is, and you are what you are.'
'It must make you mad, not being able to touch her because she's consanguineous.'
'She thinks you're her friend,' Speller Twain said, moving his hand back and forth across the lighted screen, making shadows flutter across the struts high above. 'She'll tell you things she won't ever tell me. And you know that if you don't help me, I can have you pulled off the job right now and put in a hibernation coffin. And when they wake you back on Earth, that's where your real trouble will begin. But if you choose to help me find out where this leads, your exemplary work on behalf of the crew and the project won't go unrecognised.'
'If it leads anywhere.'
'That's for you to find out,' Speller Twain said. 'Eight o'clock, wasn't it? And at the usual place. Unless you two have been having meetings I don't know about, that's the bar down in the free zone. If you're going to do this, I think you'd better get a move on. You don't want to be late, do you?'
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