Arkady shivered, wondering what it would be like to have the last thing you felt in life be the fine tickling of those intramandibular hairs on your neck. He had a sudden disturbing vision of the survey team as springtails, innocently sampling and measuring and mapping Novalis’s bewildering diversity while the razor-sharp mandibles closed in on them.
And yet…and yet there was nothing concrete, no real problem that he could point to to justify the feeling. The initial disputes among the crew had died down, quelled by the insane pace at which they’d all been working since planetfall. Meanwhile the survey progressed so spectacularly that so far it had largely consoled him for the mission’s more personal disappointments.
By the end of the first week afield, Arkady had documented five major nest complexes. Dozens upon dozens of the massive, man-high, aboveground nests constructed by the European wood ant, dotted in military formation across the woodland clearings, with their southern slopes precisely canted to maximize winter solar gain. A vast underground complex of leaf-cutter ants, which he suspected and would later confirm, had been artificially adapted to the temperate climate of the main continent. And in the warm open pastures, the exotic pyramids of the Cataglyphis, Herodotus’s legendary gold-digging ants, its surface dotted with precisely distributed specks of glittering gray schist.
But his most spectacular discoveries were all made under the deep green shadows of the forest they had begun to call the Big Wood. It wasn’t really a wood at all, but a temperate rain forest, and it hosted a diversity of ant life almost unimaginable by the normal standards of terraformed worlds. Some of the species were ones Arkady knew from RostovSyndicate’s genetic archives but had never expected to see in the wild. Others were so rare that he had to scurry back to the ship and consult his reference books to identify them.
He found the legendary hanging gardens of the Crematogaster longispina,some of them containing forgotten species of bromeliads that Arkady thought had died with Earth’s Amazon Basin. He found a plethora of ant birds and ant butterflies who followed the monstrous swarm and column raids of the army ants, though the army ants themselves had so far eluded him. He found ponerines and dacetines in all their stupendous variety. And most significant from an ecological standpoint, he found a number of leaf-cutter ants, Atta sexdensas well as Atta cephalotes,whose vast vaulted underground colonies could contain as many as 150 million minor workers, all toiling over their subterranean fields of tame fungi. They were Novalis’s single greatest herbivores and dirt movers, filling to overflowing the ecological niches of terrestrial species as various as cattle, aphids, and earthworms.
Terraforming on Novalis had succeeded so spectacularly that it threw into doubt every former assumption about what was possible or impossible in terraforming. That the planet hadbeen actively terraformed was now established beyond question. The survey team had already found the burnt-out remains of two atmospheric entry craft and a half dozen scattered Quonset huts flanked by an overgrown cemetery. And in a nearby valley bottom they had stumbled on the ruins of a vast laboratory complex, its dormitories standing empty, its locked cages housing only the dry skeletons of abandoned mice and monkeys, its crumbling walls filled with a vast metastasizing supercolony of predatory ants that Arkady had to comb through every reference book in the ship’s library to identify as the supposedly long-extinct Strumigenys louisianae.
Novalis had been settled twice—or at least that was the conclusion Arkady, Arkasha, and the Aurelias had drawn when they tried to derive family trees for three of the standard seed species and came up with seeding dates strung out across three centuries.
The fact that both settlements had failed worried no one. There was no reason to assume that either failure had anything to do with Novalis. Most colonists arrived on their chosen worlds as walking ghosts: biologically alive but already doomed by the cold equations of evolution in a shifting fitness landscape. Either new blood arrived—usually in the form of custom-engineered posthuman colonists stuffed into UN-dispatched jumpships—or the original colony vanished, leaving its partially terraformed world behind for the next wave of settlers…or for the Syndicates.
And Novalis had everything the Syndicate surveyors had been looking for. No bare branch colonists to stir up trouble and open the door to the lawyers and diplomats. No fatal diseases or allergens, so far anyway. And above all, a rich, diverse, and to all appearances stable biosphere.
In short, Novalis was perfect. So what was the source of Arkady’s growing unease? Nothing, he told himself. Nothing at all. There wasn’t a thing wrong with the planet. And the glitches in his data? Glitches, nothing more. He wouldn’t have given a second thought to them if other things had been going well.
Other things meaning Arkasha.
Their relationship—or rather their complete lack of anything any reasonable person could call a relationship—had tinged all Arkady’s feelings about the mission. It would have been different if they’d disliked each other. Or if Arkasha had been selfish or lazy or a petty bully or any one of the thousand things that you always hoped the other member of a new workpair wouldn’t be. But he wasn’t. And Arkady did like him. He liked him more after every one of their rare and all-too-brief encounters.
Arkasha had a wry, subtle sense of humor; once he’d established by cautious probing that Arkady had the stomach for subversive jokes, he’d developed the habit of alighting next to Arkady at mealtimes, murmuring some outrageous thing in his ear, then evaporating back to the lab while Arkady was still trying to smother his laughter. And he was smart. More than smart. There was something liberating about talking to him. He was always short-circuiting Arkady’s accumulated social defenses so that he would suddenly find himself quite comfortably saying things that he hadn’t imagined he’d ever say to anyone.
Arkasha even liked ants,for God’s sake. He asked intelligent questions about Arkady’s theories and experiments…and actually managed to stay awake and apparently interested for the answers to the questions.
But every time it seemed they were starting to move toward something more than cool collegiality, Arkasha would retreat into his work, leaving Arkady confused, disappointed, and, as the weeks drifted by, desperately lonely.
It took less than a week on-planet for the survey team’s carefully engineered and supposedly foolproof quarantine procedures to fail. And when they failed, the damage hit the worst thing possible: the orbsilk gardens.
The orbsilk gardens were a fairy-tale realm in which the brutal economies of spacefaring life were transformed into abundant, blooming, luxurious life. It was this section of the ship—of any Syndicate ship—that was most heavily retrofitted, and therefore felt most like home to Syndicate senses. Here the hard cold virusteel of the UN-built driveship had been transformed by the collective labors of botanists, zoologists, and entomologists into a living architecture of silk and leaves and spun orbglass. Where the rest of the ship turned away from space and hunkered down behind its virusteel double hull, the ark section unfolded into the void like an intricate flower. When the ship was in orbit the vast spans of spun silkglass opened onto the sea of stars beyond the solar collectors, seeking the starlight that the orbsilkworms—and therefore the ship—lived upon. And at the moment they looked out over the green sea of the Big Wood from which the new invaders had come.