Arkady stared wide-eyed at Arkasha. “What do you mean ‘wrong or right’?”
Arkasha rubbed at his head, his face screwed up into a mask of indecision. Then ran his fingers down the neatly aligned spines of his own intimidatingly orderly notebooks and plucked one out off the rack to spread before Arkady. “Have a look at this.”
Arkady couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was neatly written out in Arkasha’s minute, mathematically precise hand, and it betrayed none of the adjustments, revisions, recalculations, and smudged erasures that marred Arkady’s own efforts.
He leaned over the page, straining to decipher the tiny print. He was so close to Arkasha that he could see the pulse flicker in the soft hollow between his collarbones. Suddenly he desperately wanted not to be worrying about mutation rates or DVI numbers or anything else but Arkasha. You only love me because you don’t know me.What kind of crazy thing was that to say? And it was wrong, anyway. Dead wrong. He cleared his throat and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Uh…is rrate of mutation?”
Arkasha nodded.
“In mitochondrial DNA?”
Another nod.
“I’m sorry,” Arkady said after a long moment. “It looks fine to me. I guess I know enough to know what I’m looking at, but not to spot the problem.”
“Look at the answer I came up with.”
Arkady looked, assessing the number as a real-world fact for the first time, rather than as the abstract product of a series of mathematical operations. “Um…isn’t that kind of high?”
“It’s worse than high. It’s impossible. But it’s what’s out there.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I stayed up three nights in a row centrifuging fresh samples to make sure of it. It’s right. It’s all right. Except it’s all wrong.” Arkasha grabbed a second notebook and set it in front of Arkady. “Remember those hairy beetle things you were so excited about last week?”
“The ant lions?”
“Ant lions. Right. Well, thanks to your fascination with them, they’re the most thorough sampling we’ve got of a sexually reproducing species. So when my other models started going south, I figured I’d look at them.”
“And you came up with that?”
“Exactly. According to my calculations, your beloved ant lions shouldn’t exist. Just like every other living thing on this planet. In fact, Novalis should be a sterile hellhole. And every species on it—every bug, every bird, every tree, every blade of grass—should be walking ghosts.”
The two men stood looking at the page before them for another long moment.
“You’re sure?” Arkady asked finally.
“That’s what the numbers say.”
“But it’s not what the world outside the airlock says.”
“Isn’t it?”
“So what do we do now?”
“We punt,” Arkasha announced, as if it were the only logical solution. “We push the whole problem onto Ahmed’s desk and let him worry about it.”
No need to say which Ahmed; both men had long ago written off By-the-Book Ahmed as useless.
“But if we’re wrong…,” Arkady began.
“We’re not wrong.”
“Still,” Arkady said. “I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I knew whether or not the new DVI numbers were adding up.”
Arkasha made a disparaging noise. “What are you going to do? Walk down the hallway and ask Bella if her numbers add up, and if they don’t, then was she planning to cook the books again and would she mind terribly telling us which planet’s DVI she’s going to borrow this time so I don’t have to waste another day tracking the numbers down in the data banks? You can count me out of that conversation!”
“Well, we could be a little more tactful than that.”
Arkasha folded his arms across his chest and stared meaningfully at Arkady.
“Or, uh…we could always just punt and let Ahmed worry about it.”
In the end the Ahmeds called a general consult to discuss what they diplomatically described as “concerns” about the preliminary survey results.
“So where do we go from here?” one of the Aurelias asked when Arkady and Arkasha had taken turns laying out the problems in their work.
Arkasha shifted in his chair. “I say we shift base, see if we get better results in the other hemisphere. After all, the same arguments still apply. More biomass, higher species counts, better baselines…We need to rule out the possibility that we’re looking at some local—”
“Do you have the faintest idea how totally impractical that suggestion is?” By-the-Book Ahmed interrupted.
“It wouldn’t be if you’d followed my advice and picked a scientifically defensible landing site in the first place.”
“I refuse to let this consult become an excuse for revisiting closed issues. And even if—”
“And who the hell says that’s your decision?”
“—and even if we were going to reopen the question of base camp sites, I certainly wouldn’t do it on the advice of two alleged experts who can’t even figure out how to conduct routine survey work!”
“Why don’t you go around the room, Ahmed, and see how many other people are willing to say their data looks right. Really. I want to hear it.”
“Our work is solid!” Lazy Bella protested.
“No it’s not,” her sib countered. She really was getting more assertive, Arkady thought. “Well, I mean…at least mine isn’t. I’ve been staying up nights trying to figure out where I went wrong.” Shy Bella sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand, flushing in embarrassment. “Sorry.”
“What about you?” Arkasha asked Aurelia the geophysicist.
Embarrassed silence.
“Well,” she admitted finally, “most of my stuff’s fine. I mean, the issue here isn’t rocks. But I do feel like…well, the planet just doesn’t look goodenough to me. Compared to what everyone else is seeing. Whenever I talk to any of the life-sciences people I keep getting the creepy feeling that Novalis is putting two and two together and getting five. Or five hundred million, more like.”
“We can’t make a decision of the magnitude of moving the base camp on our own anyway,” By-the-Book Ahmed broke in. “I say we launch a courier. Send samples back to Gilead for processing.”
“And do what exactly in the intervening four months?” one of the Banerjees snarked. “Drink ourselves into a stupor?”
“Go back into cold sleep. Set the shipboard comp to wake us up when it gets the return transmission.”
If this had been a single Syndicate mission, Ahmed’s decision would have been accepted without question; what could be more obvious, after all, than calling home for instructions?
As it was, however, the non-Aziz A’s bridled. Even the relatively docile Arkady could feel the urge toward rebellion. A learned response? A genetic reflex? A difference in the negotiation styles and customary behaviors that each of the team members had learned in his or her home Syndicate? Did it even matter? And was it any accident that all their rebellious feelings found a voice in Arkasha?
“I refuse to waste four months waiting for the same joint steering committee that got us into this mess!” the other Banerjee announced. “Life is too short. I have a job to do.” A pointed glare at By-the-Book Ahmed. “Even if some people don’t.”
Laid-back Ahmed opened his mouth to say something reassuring—and that was when all hell broke loose.
By-the-Book Ahmed accused Arkasha of being an egotistical humanist elitist.
The Aurelias came to Arkasha’s defense, and Bella accused them of siding with a fellow Rostov even when they knew he was a deviant who’d been skating on the edge of renorming for decades.
The other Aurelia leapt to her sib’s defense by calling Bella a lazy, self-centered, manipulative bitch.
“It’s not my fault we’re on the wrong side of this stupid planet!” Bella protested. “It wasn’t myidea to land here!”
“Like hell it wasn’t!” Oh no. Please, Arkasha, just keep your mouth shut for once.“You sat right here three weeks ago and sided with the Ahmeds on the landing site decision for no reason at all but sheer petty-minded spite. And now you have the hypocritical nerve to—”