Lifeline

She already felt weak from low rations. She could picture herself, gaunt and sunken-eyed, haunted by hunger. Would she pause a moment to think of the beauty in the garden before she tore flowers off the shrubs?

First Ombalal and then Brahms had cut back their food. Hunger was a dull ache now: nothing intolerable, but knowing that it was only the beginning made it much more difficult. The nightmare would spiral deeper and deeper into darkness, and people would begin to do irrational things.

She stared at the splashing fountain with such an intensity that her eyes dried out, though she felt like crying. Her vision grew blurry as she tried to focus on the droplets of water hanging in the air and drifting slowly to the pool.

She ran her fingers along the tips of the leaves.

What if Brahms did another RIF? She could not hide anywhere on Orbitech 1—not even here in the garden.

To her disappointment, the garden looked … run down. Leaves floated in the fountain pools. The path had not been swept. The flowers themselves looked un-trimmed and in disarray, with dead blooms unsnipped.

The place was empty—nature holding sway without the presence of man. Would the garden continue to grow, she wondered, even after all the inhabitants had died?

Irregular bird song burst cheerfully from hidden microphones in the foliage. The muted skylights, the precision of the rows and sculpted shrubbery, showed the deft but obvious hand of the gardener.

Karen did not see Kaitanabe; in fact, she had not seen him the last two times she’d been in the garden. She thought that with Brahms’s plea for everyone to work twice as hard for survival, Kaitanabe would have turned the garden over, tried to cultivate some fast-growing edible plant. She didn’t know anything about the station’s biological stores, but she assumed they must have some sort of seed stock.

Karen wandered along the pathways looking for him. “Hello?” she called, not wanting to speak too loudly. The silence of the place made it seem like a cemetery.

Then she remembered the storage and maintenance cubicle set into the wall, hidden behind a row of hedges. Karen doubted anyone else cared whether they saw the cubicle door or not, but the precision of Kaitanabe’s garden would not have allowed such an anachronism to be seen.

She broke through hedges of magenta oleanders and found the door. She called out again but heard no response. The cubicle door was ajar, and she wondered if he might be sleeping. A heavy, acrid odor of chemicals hung in the air.

Several of the random speakers rang out at once, making the garden sound as if it were filled with raucous birds.

Karen pulled open the door to a gagging stench. Containers of fertilizer and plant nutrients, growth hormones, and caustic treatment chemicals had been spilled on the floor.

The blotched and bloated corpse of Hiro Kaitanabe lay sprawled out in a frozen spasm on his thin cot. His lips were cracked and stained, and dribbles of colored chemicals had dried on his chin. Somehow, he had managed to keep his hands primly folded across his chest, even though his spine was twisted upward in mid-convulsion.

She looked at the spilled containers on the floor and stared at him in horror, but she could not look back. It had taken him a very long time to die.

Karen took several steps away from the cubicle, leaving the door open. She bumped into the hedge and it seemed to reach out and grab her. The rustle of the branches dislodged one of the hidden speakers. She swallowed a scream.

Would the others mourn, or would they consider it one less mouth to feed without worrying about who would be chosen for the next RIF? Karen shuddered.

What are we becoming?

Out in the garden, the cheerful bird song continued.

Chapter 19

AGUINALDO—Day 14

Ramis floated in the core, alone. Sail-creature nymphs dodged among the children playing floater-tag. None of the other nymphs bore the splotchy “Z” marking of the creature that had saved Ramis’s life three years before.

Sarat would never be there to play with him again.

Ramis closed his eyes as he drifted. The core seemed empty without Sarat.…

The bioengineers had made three attempts with the oldest sail-creature nymphs. Dobo stood by Sandovaal as they attached a coupling harness to the first of the disoriented creatures.

They had anesthetized the nymph before ejecting it from the airlock; Dobo argued that was the humane way to conduct such experiments. But the anesthetized nymph had exploded from its own internal pressure, unable to compensate fast enough. Dobo had refused to come to work for a full day afterward.

On the second attempt, with Sandovaal looking smug, they did not drug the nymph. Exposed to the vacuum, it grew and expanded, spreading itself in a wide blanket to absorb sunlight. But its metamorphosis was too fast, too violent for the restraining hooks connecting it to the Aguinaldo. The newborn sail-creature tore free and drifted away into space.