Kingdom of Cages(2)

“It is bad enough that we will be enabling the colonists to continue to destroy the natural and native life of their worlds. We will not turn our own hands to that destruction, any more than we would begin to destroy Pandora.”

Which meant only one thing. If the worlds could not be changed, the humans would have to be.

“I had hoped to get to bed early.” Basante stepped forward. “But this is urgent.”

Without waiting to be invited, he pressed his palm over the back of Tam’s hand. Tam glared at him. He also, however, looked at the back of his hand to see what data had been transferred to the display.

The miniature screen shone with the colored lines that made up a gene scan. Tam’s practiced eye read it as clearly as if it had been the alphabet, and he felt his eyebrows rise.

Tam looked up from the scan. “Is this one of ours?”

“Not yet,” said Basante. He had a grin on his face, as if he had produced the gene alleles by himself from a dish in his lab. “She’s being processed for immigration right now.”

Tam felt his mouth tighten into a frown. Basante’s enthusiasms were reason for caution. As of this afternoon, his project, the Eden Project, had suddenly become the chosen means of curing the Diversity Crisis. However, Basante, like the other experimenters, was too apt to see the subjects of his experiments as spare parts and forget that they were as human as the family. “Have we asked her to volunteer for the project yet?”

“Do you want to take the chance she’ll say no?” Basante actually looked surprised.

Tam’s frown deepened and his gaze turned sour. Recognizing that a negative answer was on the way, Basante held up his hand. “Normally I’d agree with you.” Basante had sat with Tam in history lessons. He knew that even villagers could be pushed too far, and this woman was a stationer. “But this one is too important,” Basante barreled on, gesturing to the gene scan. “She’s within three or four points of perfection. We’ve been having the Authority sweep the Called for this configuration, and here she is, practically delivered to us.”

Tam ran a thumb over the back of his hand, wiping the scan from his display. “We will ask her to enter voluntarily. We can make a good offer. But we will let her immigrate no matter what she says.”

“And if she does say no?” Basante folded his hands behind his back.

“Then at least she’s down here with us, and about to have all the usual problems station people have in the villages. We will make our offer again.” Tam turned away, then he turned back again. “If I find out you or anyone else has forced her into the project, I’ll have you standing up to explain yourself before the family, including Senior Committee.”

Tam walked away from the windows and through the connector hallway, with its aquarium walls. Sunfish and koi looked briefly out at him between green clouds of algae and then went about their own business.

He hoped he had been clear enough. With Basante, one never knew.

Outside, I wouldn’t have to worry about any of this, he thought, before he could stop himself. The guilt rose, and must have tasted familiar to his implant. He’d been giving it a lot of practice lately.

Earth, his Conscience said. I want you to think about what happened to Earth.

Then it seemed to Tam he smelled ozone and sulfur, and everything he had ever learned about Earth came flooding back to him. Earth, the birthplace of humanity, with its endless sprawl of buildings tied together with roads and tubes and rails, its red tides, and rivers that ran slick and hot with waste from the power generators and factories. He remembered studying the diagrams of the water processors and the earth processors and the people in their protected habitats, and all the vast machinery that was needed to ensure the continuance of human life on a world where the only green left was the miles and miles of corn and soybean fields that fed all those people.

He remembered the video composites of the people in their boxlike homes, taking their medicines and monitoring their blood chemistry and receiving news reports about the latest longevity discoveries and treatments and the progress that was being made in reseeding the oceans with fresh kelp to help create more oxygen for them to breathe during their long, propped-up lives, which had destroyed the world they did not understand. Around them, that same world struggled not to die, while its oblivious children lived on in shells of stone, bacteria, and artificial gardens.

“But is it true?” murmured Tam to the memories and his Conscience as he took a deep, steadying breath. It was hard to ask the question, but he had to. Without it, he would just accept, which was the one thing he could not do. If he did, it would mean everything his parents had tried to do for him and for Pandora was over. It would make him worse than his birth sister Dionte, with her scheming and her excesses. “Or is it just what you and I are supposed to believe?”