“So how does Turing Soup fit into that?” Arkady asked.

“Well, I’m running into the limits of my understanding of Algorithmic Chemistry here, but Fontana envisioned neutral networks as search spaces and mutation as a search algorithm just like the search algorithms you’d use to find information in a database. The bigger the database, the more data there is to mine, and the more data you can get. That’s the expanding neutral networks side of the equation. But there’s another limiting factor as well: How good is your algorithm at searchingthe database? The better the search algorithm, the faster it sifts the kernels of relevant data from the chaff. So Fontana looked at mutations accumulating inside neutral networks as a mechanism through which organisms ‘search’ the entire space of the current phenotype for possible improvements or responses to environmental alterations. Now I get a little bit itchy at the idea that organisms ‘search’ their genotype in any meaningful way. I just don’t think evolution works that way. But on the other hand, genetic engineers spend a lot of time improving their neutral network search algorithms. And if you could engineer organisms to search their neutral networks more efficiently, you could turn walking ghosts into viable populations…which is exactly what I think someone’s done on Novalis.”

Arkady sank onto his own stool, floored by the magnitude of what Arkasha was describing. “I’m not even going to touch the developmental biology problems with that idea—”

“I know, I know.”

“—but how would you even begin to prove someone had done it on Novalis?”

“I can’t. Not in any time frame that’s going to make a difference to this mission. But I can say that Bella’s virus looks a hell of a lot more like a terraforming tool than a bioweapon.”

Arkady bit his lip.

“What?”

“Well…I was just thinking about that old saying about a weed being a perfectly good plant in the wrong place. Isn’t a bioweapon just a perfectly good terraforming tool in the wrong place?”

“So you are saying you agree with Ahmed.”

“No! I’m just pointing out that you’d better have an answer to that question, because there’s no way he won’t ask it.”

“I’ll have an answer,” Arkasha said. “One way or another I’ll have an answer.”

“Well, don’t push yourself too hard…okay?”

“I promise I’ll be sensible. And thanks for…well, taking care of me.”

“Anyone would have done the same.”

“That’s the kind of thing you always say. It doesn’t make it true.”

Arkasha’s eyes glittered. He really did look feverish, Arkady told himself for the second time in as many minutes.

He pressed his lips to Arkasha’s forehead in a kiss so sweet and chaste that they might have been two brother monks on one of the Russian icons their geneline’s features were said to be modeled on.

Of course he hadn’t meant it to be a kiss at all; he’d been checking Arkasha’s temperature, just as he’d done countless times over the course of the sickness. But somehow it hadn’t ended up that way.

He stood there, one hand still on Arkasha’s shoulder, feeling like an army that had outrun its supply lines. Arkasha was utterly still under his hand, his eyes wide and dark, his face oddly expressionless. But Arkady could feel the heat of his skin through the thin shirt, and the bones of his shoulder beneath their too-thin veil of muscle and tendon.

“I just—” Arkady began. And then he stopped, because Arkasha had begun to speak in the same instant.

“What?” they both said—and then laughed nervously.

Arkasha raised a hand, then let it fall without completing the gesture. “I should get back to work,” he said.

“Why?” Arkady asked. He slid his hand up to the nape of Arkasha’s neck, certain that Arkasha would shy away from the touch but unable to stop himself. “Why won’t you just let yourself be happy?”

Arkasha blinked like a man stepping out of a shuttered room into bright sunlight. “I’ve made a lot of trouble for myself,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t be doing yourself any favors.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should care,” Arkasha said. But he let himself be drawn closer.

“I don’t care,” Arkady repeated.

Then, still half-convinced he would be pushed away, he took Arkasha in his arms and kissed him again…this time not at all chastely.

“I love your cowlicks,” Arkasha said. “I’m endlessly, abjectly grateful to whatever poor slob is responsible for them. If he hadn’t fallen asleep on the job, you might be a completely different person. You might never have fallen in love with your silly little ants. And I might never have met you, let alone fallen in love with you.”

They were in their cabin, sprawled across the lower bunk, drinking more of the Aurelias’ vile vodka, stealing a few moments away from the insanity that was rapidly consuming the rest of the crew.

“Has Aurelia showed you any results on those assays yet?”

“Don’t change the subject on me. I’ve never seen hair that out of control. No wonder you’re obsessed with the adaptive value of dissent!”

Arkady brushed ineffectually at the offending locks. “They’re ugly.”

“They’re extraordinary.”

“They’re a deviation.”

“They’re an oversight. Some poor designer was too busy thinking about next week’s production quotas, or his digestive troubles, or his unrequited love for whatever norm-conforming certifiably A-equivalent piece of tail he happened to be chasing at the moment. His mind strayed”—Arkasha’s free hand slid down Arkady’s chest and across his belly—“unforgivably from the all-important work at hand. An error crept into the D1746 gene at site forty-two of chromosome eighteen. That’s the frizzy D site to you and the rest of the hoi polloi. Our poor designer failed to notice the error. It began to replicate. The control team, perhaps similarly distracted by work, lust, or digestion, also failed to notice the error. Which continued to replicate. Which resulted in your spectacular cowlicks. Which resulted in my falling in love with you. Which is about to result in…here, hold this.”

“You’re drunk.” Arkady took the beaker Arkasha handed him and realized belatedly that there was nowhere on the narrow bunk to put it down—and that that was exactly what Arkasha had intended.

“True, too true,” Arkasha admitted, busy with the drawstring of Arkady’s pants. “I’m also a shirker, and a malingerer, and an unregenerate deviant. None of which detracts from the blinding moral import of the revelation I’m about to bestow upon you.”

“Which is?”

“That I love you—have I mentioned, by the way, that you entirely fail to appreciate my brilliance and originality?—that Ilove youbecause of their mistake.”

Arkady made a rude noise. “At least my cowlick is outside my skull, not inside it.”

“Yep,” Arkasha announced at about the same moment as he finally succeeded in making Arkady spill his drink all over the floor. “That’s me. A Cowlick on the Brain of a Perfect Society.”

The arena was perhaps a meter across. At the moment its perfectly white and featureless surface contained perhaps five hundred army ants, racing around in a swirling, slightly irregular circle that resembled nothing so much as a satellite’s eye view of a hurricane. It also resembled, to Arkady’s naturalist’s eye, a dozen or so other examples of self-organized criticality in action: the delicate spiral structures that so many leafy plants evolved to maximize sun exposure and minimize self-shading; the intricate whorls in the pelts of fur-bearing mammals, of which the single whorl on the crown of each human and posthuman head was a vestigial remnant; the complex interlocking networks formed by communities of people, ants, or songbirds.

But there was one difference of course: all those other patterns were adaptive, whereas the milling, panicked circle of ants was suicidally dysfunctional.