Playing God(6)

“How are you planning on scheduling an evacuation for a billion people? Do you have any idea of how many a billion is?”

“Generally: It's a thousand million.” His expression did not waver.

“And what” said Lynn, looking him directly in the eye, “are you going to do with the plague victims during this evacuation?”

Brador remained unfazed. “Each city-ship will be equipped with a hospital quarter capable of holding ten thousand patients. Again, we hope your partner, Dr. Zelotes, will be helping with their relocation and care.”

Lynn rubbed her forehead. “You're going to have to keep a billion Dedelphi, sick or well, housed and fed and comfortable during the evacuation. You're going to have to have a responsive grievance team, a clear, concise schedule, a comprehensive crisis scenario…” She broke off, running her hand through her hair. “If you're not careful, this cure is going to be a whole lot worse than the disease.”

“Yes. That's why we need you.” Brador leaned forward. What Lynn had thought was poor lighting on his face turned into a full day's worth of five o'clock shadow. Whatever he'd been doing lately, it hadn't even left him time to depilate. “Are you aware of the reputation you possess, Dr. Nussbaumer? Not only for your ability to work with the Dedelphi, but for your massive success in coordinating and directing their colony's foliation and agricultural efforts.”

“I had a lot of help,” said Lynn, refusing to let herself be flattered. “And you still haven't said exactly what it is you want me for.”

Brador's eyes glittered. “I want you to organize and coordinate the relocation. For a start.”

Lynn opened her mouth and shut it again. “And for my next trick?”

“Coordinate and manage the southern-hemisphere microreconstraction teams.”

Lynn just sat there for a moment. To give a whole race their lives back, give them their world back, alive and clean and new…

“You're going to be allowing time for a complete life-web survey, right? Micro- and macroscopic?”

Brador nodded. “We have some teams down there already, and we're shipping out more this week. The bases will be up and running by the time you're there to help coordinate activities and information.”

Twenty years’ work right there, mapping the ecosystem of an entire planet so they could take it apart and put it back together again. “And we'll be customizing the bioremediation tools based on the local ecostructures, correct?”

“We'll be designing them from the ground up, if we have to,” said Brador. “If you and your colleagues decide we have to,” he added. “We will go over the entire planet one inch at a time with every nano we can breed.”

“Why not just drop a couple of asteroids on the place and start from the ground up?” she asked half-facetiously. “It'd be faster, and cheaper.”

Brador's face remained impassive. “The Dedelphi are hoping we can do this without completely destroying their civilizations’ infrastructures. We've agreed to try. Several of our teams are going through what archives and libraries there are, trying to find out what exactly conditions were like two hundred years ago.”

There probably wouldn't be much. None of the Great Families had much time or many resources for pure research. That was just one of the reasons why, despite the fact that they were at least as old as Humanity, their technology was at late-twentieth-century levels, at best.

Brador wasn't admitting it, but a lot of the bioremediation was going to be guesswork. They could interview the oldest Dedelphi they could find and hear what their mother's mother's mother had said the world was like. Maybe they'd find a record or two about some extinct creatures, but, as far as determining exact ratios of, say, rain forest to grassland, or the proportions of bacteria in the soil of a specific area, or the original extent of a coral reef, the teams would have to work from simulations and educated speculation. They really would be building a whole new world….

A thought struck her. “What are the Dedelphi giving Bioverse in exchange for these miracles?”

Brador's smile slipped back into place. “Anything useful we find.”

Lynn sucked in a breath. Except for a handful of isolationist enclaves, all the worlds in the Human Chain ran on nanotech. Nanotech ran on proteins and DNA. For all the talk there'd been once about microscopic fans and gears, the really useful technology turned out to be tightly controlled biochemistry.

Bioverse had been offered a planetful of untapped biochemistry.

“Think about it.” A light shone in Brador's round eyes. “They've fusion-bombed whole islands, and yet there're still living organisms on them. Bacteria that are radiation-hardened. We can turn those into assemblers that can't be interrupted by a fluctuating electromagnetic field. They've got huge pits filled with untreated inorganic debris, and there're living organisms in there. We could make those into disassemblers of incredible efficiency. They've got algae blooms big enough to turn a whole bay colors and tough enough that all that industrial pollution can't wipe them out. That's a whole new way to eat gaseous toxins next time we want to convert a gas giant.” He waved his hand. “We had all this on Earth once, but we bulldozed it to clean the place up.” He must have caught something sour in her expression, because he stopped himself. “I know, I know, to be fair, we didn't know what we had, or how to handle it. We had to bulldoze it.” The light returned to his eyes. “But now we have a second chance.