Amazingly, it worked. And the long, undulating willow wands that they’d used in place of bamboo sticks made the whole orbsilk garden look like one of the intricate diagrams of climatic succession cycles that Arkady had admired so much in his childhood textbooks. He’d only adapted an ancient solution to a new environment, rather than inventing it from whole cloth, but he felt a real sense of accomplishment nonetheless.
“Thank you so much,” Bella said in her quiet, awkward voice…an awkwardness Arkady had begun to suspect was not simple shyness but the hesitation of a thoughtful, sensitive person long accustomed to being misunderstood by her peers. “That was so clever of you. Can you imagine, if you hadn’t read that little paragraph and remembered it and…”
“Yeah, it’s kind of neat when useless knowledge turns out not to be so useless after all.”
“Exactly!” Bella breathed. “I mean what could be a better proof that education can’t all be practical application…that you have to have research and study and…and knowledge for its own sake?”
Arkady looked down into the shining eyes that were gazing up at him with such admiration and felt an unaccustomed flush of pleasure. It was amazing, really, how tiny and childlike Bella was. She even engendered the same protective feelings in him that children inspired. He supposed this was what human males must have felt back when…but no, his mind shied away from the thought.
“I’d like to help you with your collecting,” she was saying now. “If you need the help. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble to have me tagging along. I…I don’t mind taking on the extra work. And I wouldn’t be in the way, really I wouldn’t. It’s so interesting.”
Arkady hesitated.
“And I need to get away from…I feel so…so trapped sometimes… please, Arkady, I won’t be any trouble to you!”
“Of course you can help,” he said. “It never hurts to have an extra pair of helping hands. And I’ll be glad to teach you.”
Ironically it was also Shy Bella who brought about what Arkady later came to think of as his and Arkasha’s first Real Conversation.
She came into dinner late one night—a night when Arkasha had put in one of his rare appearances—and she walked straight across the room, served herself from the stovetop, and sat down between the two Ahmeds without so much as glancing at her sib farther down the table.
A sib who gave her a hard, narrow-eyed stare, then stood up and swept out of the room without uttering a word of excuse or farewell to anyone.
“Trouble in paradise?” Arkasha murmured ironically when the normal buzz of conversation had revived enough to cover his words.
“You think that’s paradise?” Arkady glanced around instinctively to make sure no one was listening. “It looks more like purgatory to me.”
“Now that might be just about the most interesting thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Arkady turned to find his sib’s dark eyes fixed intently on him. They were sitting very close, having slid down the bench together to make room for Bella, and he could feel the warm pressure of Arkasha’s thigh against his.
“You don’t give me much of a chance to say anything to you, interesting or otherwise.”
“Is that how it comes across to you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” Arkasha seemed uncharacteristically taken aback. “Uh…doing anything tonight?”
“Should I be?”
“Well, I have some work I need to get done later, but walk down to the lab with me. I’ve got something to show you.”
Back in the lab, Arkady marveled as always at the neat dovetailing of individual and society, so pervasive in the Syndicates that it was for all intents and purposes invisible. Arkady’s side of the lab was a chaotic day-after-the-battle debris field of fly tape, sample containers, taxonomy treatises, work gloves, and trenching tools. His field gear—the most obvious vector of external contamination—had been disinfected daily since they made planetfall, but nothing could disguise the tears and stains that were badges of former expeditions. Even the newish lab coat dangling off the backrest of his stool bore the telltale spots and smears of yesterday’s sample preparations.
Arkasha’s side of the lab looked all but unused in comparison. Virgin expanses of countertop gleamed under the shipboard lights. Racked trays of slides glittered like ice in the zero-g shelving units beside neatly labeled notebooks and thick reference volumes whose spines had none of the cracks and dog-eared edges that Arkady’s books seemed magically to acquire. The only signs of a fallible posthuman presence—and even those were lined up along the backsplash of the lab bench like little soldiers—were Arkasha’s ubiquitous chewed pencil stubs.
It would have been more efficient of course to divide the labs by area of specialization rather than geneline. But in Syndicates as well as in anthills, efficiency rarely trumped psychological comfort. The first joint missions had tried to organize their limited work space by task category. Pure sciences with pure sciences. Field work with field work. Sample preparation segregated from processing and analysis.
It hadn’t worked. There had been fights and frustrations. People had worked less—and been more stressed out about what little work they did accomplish—than they were in their home Syndicates. They wanted to be with their sibs, not with strangers. And in the end, the steering committees had relented, surrendering to the very biological constraints they and their predecessors had engineered into their lateral descendants.
Tonight, however, Arkasha wasn’t even remotely interested in workplace efficiency. On entering the lab, he went straight to the refrigerator, pulled a large beaker out from behind the sample racks, and set it carefully on the countertop. “I had to barter my virtue to the Aurelias to get this,” he announced, “so you’d damn well better appreciate it.”
“What isit?”
“It seemed better not to ask.” Arkasha extracted two smaller beakers from the autoclave, poured out double shots of the clear liquid with practiced ease, and handed one to Arkady. “Tastes like beetle dung, but it gets the job done.”
“I’m not sure this is a good idea, Arkasha.”
“Drink faster, then. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your doubts slip away.”
Arkady took a sip and found, to his relief, that it tasted more or less like vodka. “I’m not going to go blind from this, am I?”
“Not unless you play with yourself while you’re drinking it.”
Arkady choked and spit a mouthful of the stuff on the floor and sat wheezing on his lab stool while Arkasha thumped at his back.
When Arkady was more or less breathing again, Arkasha climbed onto the counter, crossed his arms and legs, and peered down at him, looking for all the world like one of the sleek sharp-eyed crows that infested Gilead’s farmland districts. “So,” he began as if he were embarking on the weightiest of philosophical debates. “Tell me why, out of all the things in the world you could have turned your brain to, you chose ants.”
Whyants? Where to begin?
Even the mere names were things of beauty to him. Pogonomyrmex barbatus,for example: the red harvester ant, whose name always brought to his mind the earliest known description of the species, from some ancient Aztec codex: “It sweeps, makes itself heaps of sand, makes wide roads, makes a home.” Or the beautiful dacetines; or the primitive, solitary ponerines; or all the varied species of industrious leaf cutters.
The names and lore of ants reminded Arkady of the coded flicker of navigational beacons. They traced a tenuous path through the galaxy—always at the edge of extinction, always running just ahead of the death from which there could be no returning—plotting the tenuous evolutionary trail that linked all of posthumanity, UN and Syndicate alike, to Earth.