This was Bella’s kingdom, and she tended it with a fervent attention to detail that its denizens required. The orbsilkworms lived on dwarf mulberry trees, which were rooted in hanging hydroponic trays suspended from the airy ceiling. The elevation of the trays was either to protect them from the appetites of other shipboard insects or to avoid some kind of rampant fungal infection, Arkady could never remember which. But the result was a veritable hanging garden of fragrant, weeping, cocoon-festooned mulberry trees. They ate and slept and woke and spun their gauzy silk cocoons in much the same way that ten millennia of their forebears had done. But they were chimeras, ingeniously spliced genetic constructs, just like the Syndicate engineers who designed them. And the rich gold-brown shimmer of their cocoons revealed the nature of the chimera: a precisely engineered recombination of silkworm DNA with genetic material drawn from the spinners of the strongest natural fiber ever discovered: the silk of the golden orb spider.
When the silkworms were feeding, the sound of their collective jaws was loud enough to be audible: a constant slippery hum like the whisper of a sleeper turning beneath silken bedsheets. At other times, the garden was a place of gauzy shimmering silence in which Bella flitted from tree to tree or bent over her copper throwing bowls or labored at her airy glass-and-virusteel hand loom like some posthuman Lady of Shalott.
Out of this insubstantial aerie would come every article of clothing, every piece of rope, and every parachute, collecting net, and specimen sack that the survey team would use over the course of their mission. More important, a large array of materials that would be used to repair or replace broken elements of the ship itself would be produced here, or by subtle molecular manipulations of the raw silk in the zero-g labs down in the core engineering levels. And it would all come from the worms, teased into existence by Bella’s careful, deliberate, disciplined fingers.
Their management was more art than science. They died off with horrifying regularity, and for bizarrely trivial reasons: an inauspicious change of temperature or humidity; a bad smell; a sudden noise; a change in the habitation arc’s rotational gravity that might be so subtle as to be imperceptible even to the refined instrument of the human inner ear. At times they required air and light, and the workers would open up the ventilation louvers and pull back the blinds over the great skylights to let in the carefully filtered starlight. At other times they must be covered with damp sterile cloths and kept in the most perfect darkness and silence, lest they become startled and turn their heads so that their razor-sharp teeth severed the precious threads in midstream.
But now the orbsilkworms were more than startled.
They were starving. They were being outcompeted in their own carefully engineered ecological niche by an obscure species of caterpillar with a voracious appetite for mulberry leaves.
Bella did her best to help. She brought Arkady endless samples of everything that looked to her even remotely like one of the life stages of the pest. She even learned how to collect and preserve samples with the spare field kit Arkady dug out of storage for her. Unfortunately, the samples told Arkady a lot about the mysterious worm but not much about how to kill it.
What finally broke the problem open was a tiny seed of memory prompted by the sight of Bella’s throwing hooks glittering in the ruddy gleam of Novalis’s sunset…a seed of memory that germinated into the barest, tender green shoot of an idea.
“Listen to this,” Arkady told Bella excitedly when he finally tracked down the long-ago-read and nearly forgotten passage. “It’s from Wheeler’s Ants,the book that kicked off the great twentieth-century flowering of social insect studies. I must have read it when I was eight. I can’t believe it was still rattling around in my brain somewhere:
According to Magowan, [Wheeler wrote] quoted by McCook, “In many parts of the province of Canton, where, says a Chinese writer, cereals cannot be profitably cultivated, the land is devoted to the cultivation of orange-trees, which being subject to devastation from worms, require to be protected in a peculiar manner, that is, by importing ants from the neighboring hills for the destruction of the dreaded parasite. The orangeries themselves supply ants which prey upon the enemy of the orange, but not in sufficient numbers; and resort is had to hill people, who, throughout the summer and winter, find the nests suspended from branches of bamboo and various trees. There are two varieties of ant, red and yellow, whose nests resemble cotton bags. The orange-ant feeders are provided with pig or goat bladders, which are baited inside with lard. The orifices they apply to the entrances of the nests, whence the ants enter the bag and become a marketable commodity at the orangeries. Orange-trees are colonized by depositing the ants on their upper branches, and to enable them to pass from tree to tree, all the trees of the orchard are connected by a bamboo rod.”
“Okay,” Arkady said. “So that’s Magowan according to Cook according to Wheeler. And then Wheeler follows up the bit about the Cantonese red and yellow ants with what has to be one of the earliest written accounts of importing ants into the contintental United States for pest control. That’s what actually stuck in my mind. That and putting the bamboo rod between the trees for the ants to walk across. Though I don’t know what we’re going to use for bamboo here, come to think of it…”
He looked up expectantly only to find Bella staring rather blankly at him.
“Don’t you see?” he said. “Novalis’s analog to the orange tree worms has found your orbsilk garden. Now we’ve got to find Novalis’s version of Magowan’s red and yellow ants. Or, rather, we’ve got to find the ecological niche they belong in…and hope to God it’s got something in it we can use.”
Arkady had to shake down every tree within a morning’s walk of base camp. But he did it, with Bella’s surprisingly able help. And eventually he struck gold: a tiny golden ant that lived in the genetically engineered fruit trees that was the only visible legacy of the long-vanished bare branch colony.
They weren’t Monsanto ants either, which pleased Arkady because it suggested that they had been developed during the original colonists’ long interstellar journey. He was reinventing an already tried and tested pest control method. And the great thing about reinventing the wheel was that the wheel that worked for someone else usually worked for you too.
“Can you check my work before I do a release?” he asked Arkasha when he had mapped out what he hoped would be a suitable geneset. “Just in case?”
“Your work is always good, Arkady. I don’t have to check it.”
“But I’d feel more comfortable if you did.”
Arkasha shrugged, pronounced himself flattered, and checked it.
“I like it,” he said eventually. “Your queens function normally once they’ve mated, but they don’t have the genes that express themselves in the nuptial flight, so they don’t mate except in the lab. You get a perfectly normal colony, with the life cycle to support the large-scale predation you want from them, but you can cut the thread at the end of each generation and start fresh without worrying about wild strains developing. Classic example of de facto sterilization through genetic modification.” He made one of his wry faces. “Too bad they can’t do that for us. It’d save a lot of sweat and bother.”
Arkady cleared his throat and forced his mind away from the image that the words sweatand botherraised…an image that was never far below the surface when Arkasha was in the same room with him.
“Well?” Arkasha asked. “What are you standing there for? Go save Bella’s worms. She promised to make me another sweater, and I seem to be missing one.”