The Cause of Death (8 page)

"Full marks--except for one assumption you made, on account of your not thinking like a member of one of the Elder Races, and a fiddly cultural detail you don't know about the Reqwar Pavlat."

"Okay. I'll bite. What did I miss?"

"Elder Races species take the long view. They rig that 'reset' button to be pushed every ten thousand or hundred thousand years, not just every century. And the Reqwar Pavlat won't or can't do genetic engineering themselves."

"So they hired someone else to do it? Another species?"

"Right. Some species called the Kreflar, if I have that right."

"Never heard of them."

Hannah grinned evilly. "No reason why you should have. They managed to go extinct themselves, about the same time the Neanderthals checked out. But the punch line is that they didn't just do the genetic mods for Reqwar before they died out. They encrypted their work."

Jamie sat bolt upright. "
What?
Encrypted DNA? Is that even possible?"

"I have no idea. But this isn't DNA--it's whatever genetic code life from the Pavlat home world uses. And encryption must be possible with that genetic material because the Kreflar did it. In effect, you have to know the password before you can reset the clocks on all the kill-genes."

"And the people who know the passwords are all dead."

"And the kill-genes are starting to activate," Hannah said. "Unless or until Georg and his friends manage to decrypt the code and reset the timers, Reqwar's entire terrestrial ecology is going to collapse and die out within one or two human lifetimes.

"In other words," Hannah went on, "the stakes on this case are a lot higher than where one man serves out a prison sentence. The question is whether much of anyone on Reqwar will be alive by the time he
finishes
serving it."

SIX
MIRACLES

Marta Hertzmann stared at the display screen as she slowly and carefully shifted the scan-scope's field of view to the next encoding site. She spotted the telltale encrypt-start sequence and used the marker controls to lock in on it. She glanced down at her status boards. The learning sequencer was following right along with her, recording all her actions. She highlighted the encrypt-start sequence and flagged it, then moved down the gene to the encyprt-stop marker, and repeated the process. That was the last one on that gene--and, praise be, the last encrypt site for that species.

She let out a sigh of relief, saved her work, and lifted her hands away from the controls, being careful not to joggle anything. Delicate work. Delicate, intricate work. Soon, very soon, she hoped, the learning systems would have enough parameters to automate the process.

Marta had custom-designed the scan-scope's gene manipulation system herself, and built most of it by hand. She knew the limitations of the system as well as anyone. It was an excellent machine, but if the project had to rely on manual tagging--let alone manual decryption--they'd never get done. Even with Georg working alongside her, there was infinitely more work than two operators could do. And, of course, Georg was not working alongside her. She glanced at the other scan-scope, and the vacant operator's chair in front of it. It was hard to imagine any circumstances under which he would be there again.

From behind her came the sound of a crash and a thud and a sort of rattling gallop. "Mommy? School session's over! Aren't you finished
yet
?"

Marta turned around to see her eight-year-old daughter in the corridor, standing in the doorway of the lab, breathless from running. Marta smiled. "Just closing down now, Moira," she said. "Give me just a minute. Did you remember to shut down the tutoring system properly?"

"
Yes
, Mommy," Moira said in a tone of exaggerated impatience. She fidgeted in the doorway for a moment, looked down at the floor for a moment, then asked, "Are we going back to Thelm's Keep soon?"

Marta shut her eyes for a moment to master her frustration. The child asked the same question every day. "I told you, Moira. Not for a while. I don't know how long."

Georg and Marta had shuttled back and forth between the science labs on Lesser Western Continent and Thelm's Keep on Largest Continent for the last few months, towing Moira along with them. But after the Thelm's three eldest sons died, and Georg tried to escape, and things got distinctly ugly between the Thelm and the High Thelek, Marta had found lots of good reasons to stay on Lesser Western. There had even been rumors--reliable rumors--that the High Thelek was going to challenge the Thelm himself to a duel. It seemed safer to be far away from the political storms. "I know it's not as exciting here as at Thelm's Keep," Marta said.

"It's lonely. There aren't even
Pavlat
kids to play with here--and Pavlat kids aren't all that much fun, anyway. Will there be humans moving in here soon, now that the barracks are nearly done?"

"That's the plan," Marta said. But would the plan ever happen? In theory, they were just about at the point in the work where they would be ready to shift over from pilot programs and testing to full-scale operations. Hundreds of genetic technicians and cryptographers and other specialists had already been recruited, and were literally waiting for the call--but with Georg under arrest, Marta didn't see how that call could go out.

But
Moira
wasn't bothered by any of
that
. There was a plan. It would work. More humans would come. They would bring their kids. She wouldn't be lonely anymore. Short, simple, straightforward. And Marta didn't see how to explain about the complicated parts. Starting with how Daddy had been arrested and convicted and might never see them again. "It'll all work out, I'm sure," Marta said, feeling not the least bit sure of anything.

"Good," said Moira. "I hope they hurry up."

"For right now, I have just a couple of more things to do, so you go and play for just a bit, all right?"

"Okay. I'll go over to the high-bay and say hello to Allabex and Cinnabex. Meet you there!"

"I'm not sure they'll want to be disturbed just now--" But Moira had already vanished from sight. Another slightly quieter crash signaled that Moira had already bounced through the main door to the outside, and the nearby high-bay lab.

Well, that was her daughter. Marta looked at the empty chair next to her again.
Their
daughter. Very much
his
daughter, for it was easy to see a lot of Georg in Moira.

Georg. Georg, captured while trying to escape. Georg, moldering away in the Thelm's Keep, in the city of Thelm's Keep. Georg, on the other side of this weary planet of Reqwar, determined that his death should do some good if his life no longer could.

Marta accepted those choices, even, as a staunch member of Pax Humana herself, agreed with them, and believed she would have made them herself. But even so, it was hard for her not to feel a jolt of resentment. She even indulged in a moment's sinful fantasy of all that could have been theirs--could have been
hers
--if Georg had been willing to submit, to obey the custom.

But no. Best not to think on that. Marta reached up to the chain around her neck and the Pax Humana pendant that hung from it, the outstretched hand of Peace, Help, and Hope. All three were in short supply on Reqwar. And the Devil himself knew how harshly they had all been punished for trying to bring in fresh supplies of them.

* * *

Three or four Reqwar workers were putting the finishing touches on a barracks building as Marta came outside into the cool pearly-grey light of an overcast afternoon. Reclamation Genetics, Inc. had set up its main labs in the central plains of the Lesser Western Continent, half a world away from Thelm's Keep and Thelmhome and Thelm's This and Thelm's That on Largest Continent. But they were in roughly the same latitude, and the climates were broadly similar. The weather in one place was just as dismal as in the other.

Reclamation Genetics had taken over the site of an abandoned manor home. None of the original structures had been in good enough condition to use, and all of them had been demolished. The trees surrounding the grounds of the old manor were still there, though they looked wan, sickly, and faded--as did nearly all the vines and creeper and trees and grasses within eyeshot. The dying plants added a gloomy air to the appearance of the lab compound--quite appropriate, given the situation.

The work-ending bell chimed, and the Reqwar Pavlat workers instantly started putting away their tools. One of them was assembling a wall section, and not only stopped halfway through getting the fastener in, but literally stopped his power-hammer in midstroke.

Marta tried to keep her annoyance from boiling over. They were, after all, lucky to get that much work out of the Reqwar Pavs. Not only were Pavlat's Medical Restriction Laws strict enough to forbid any Pavlat from working on the actual genetic decryption work--it had taken a special dispensation from the Thelm himself to allow local Pavlats merely to do construction work on buildings related to genetic engineering. It was bad enough that all the edicts and restrictions were irrational and close on suicidal. But it was far worse to see that the workers they had fought so hard to get were mainly concerned with doing the absolute minimum labor possible under the terms of their contracts.
Whose planet are we trying to save, anyway?
Marta stalked away from the building site.

The scene that greeted her in the high-bay lab building did little to improve her temper. The high-bay lab had been built in part to house large and outsized items that needed to be sheltered from the elements--but mainly it was there to house the Stannlar themselves--for the two of them, Allabex and Cinnabex, definitely qualified as outsized.

A Stannlar Consortium consisted of thousands of smaller creatures that lived together inside the tough, translucent exomuscular skin that gave a Consortium's main body its distinctive, if ever-changing, appearance. At present both Stannlar were in their more or less default shape: a streamlined teardrop two meters tall, three meters across, and five meters long from the tip of the bulging forward sense cluster to the guard talon on the base of the pointed tail. Allabex was currently an attractive translucent green, while her split-clone twin was an intense opaque blue.

The exoskin was itself a living being, and did more than just hold all of a Consortium's local biological, electronic, and bioelectronic components together. It provided protection from the outside environment, supported various embedded sensing and communications organs and components, and managed locomotion, among other things.

A Stannlar could swap various living sensory organs and electromechanical sensors in and out of its sensing cluster, but both Cinnabex and Allabex were wearing a fairly conventional array at the moment: two pair of black button eyes, a pair of trumpet-shaped ears that could swivel, widen, and contract as needed, olfactory bulbs nestled under the ear-stalks, and a bright red oval sound-making membrane--in effect a living loudspeaker--set into where the forehead would have been, if the forward sense cluster had actually been a head.

A conventionally configured Stannlar Consortium resembles a giant slug, but that was an extremely misleading comparison. One annoyed Consortium heard the slug comparison one time too many and observed that the average human came a lot closer than a Consortium ever did to leaving a trail of slimy debris in its wake.

Stannlar reproduced only rarely, and generally did so by a split-clone process--though other procedures were possible. But there was something else about Stannlar that most humans found more disconcerting then how they reproduced. They were far more put off by the Stannlars' semi-independent subcomponents, the ones capable of exiting and reentering the main body of the creature. They came in all sorts of shapes and appearances, but tended toward bright colors and rounded forms. Some walked, some slithered, some hopped, and some even rolled. Some were biological, some robotic, and some combined the two. They resembled nothing so much as so many bath toys come to life.

Stannlar subcomponents were absolutely central to the whole plan to decrypt and reset the genetic kill switches in the various life-forms on Reqwar. Once their various researches had collected enough data both about the decrypt algorithms and the proper methods for counteracting and resetting the genetic kill switches, Cinnabex and Allabex would, in effect, turn themselves into living factories, manufacturing subcomponents capable of independent existence, and capable of duplicating themselves through split-cloning, and bearing in their bodies organs that would produce the kill-switch reset organisms appropriate to a given environment.

The subcomponents would be shipped all over the planet, into every ecological zone. They would multiply, and deliver the resets where they were needed--in part by being bred to tempt the palate of carefully selected species that would serve to spread the reset organisms further. The independent components and the reset organisms would have their own kill switches, of course. The sixteenth generation of the components would be incapable of split-cloning, and would simply die out--or be gobbled up--after a time. Similar processes would be built into the reset organisms.