Quiet Invasion(153)

What if it were Ben? Without Ben’s urging, she might give up this whole revolutionary idea. Maybe she was just grasping at the straws he held out. Without him, Michael could talk her out of this.

But he’d have to do it quickly. He’d have to have the evidence in hand when Helen got off the shuttle. He couldn’t give anybody time to think.

Which meant he’d have to open Schoma’s com files.

Well, maybe he’d nursed this particular secret long enough. He was expecting everybody else to take responsibility for their actions in this farce; he had to be ready to take on his.

Once he’d shown Helen what a mess they were really in, they could call Yan Su in on their side and hash out a compromise with the U.N. Then he could find out who had taken Derek and Kevin’s lives, and everything could get back to the way it was supposed to be. Well, mostly. They’d still have the aliens to deal with, but at least the human order would be restored.

Right then, alone, in the silence and the darkness, the human order was all Michael cared about.

D’seun had never seen an experiment house as crowded as Tr’es had managed to make hers. Yards of encapsulated holding racks made a stiff net strung wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

The net left no room even for one person to stretch his or her wings. Tr’es climbed clumsily from rack to rack with her recorder bobbing through the air behind her. The racks were full of specimen spheres and microcosms that held the raw materials from both the New People they had acquired. Most of them, D’seun saw, were solutions of various colors—red, blue, yellow, gray, even a deep greenish purple. There was a skull, recognizable mainly by its eye sockets. Tr’es’s tools had separated it neatly into plates, exposing the wrinkled gray matter underneath. It was remarkably compact. Tr’es had told him it was the major nervous center. The New People, it seemed, thought with only part of their bodies.

“Good luck, Ambassador,” said Tr’es, climbing over the nearest rack, carefully not touching the spheres encasing the raw materials, D’seun noticed. “How can I help you?”

D’seun held onto the threshold with one hand to keep himself in place. “Good luck, Tr’es. Your work is going well?”

Pride swelled the engineer up until D’seun thought she would burst. “There is such a wealth of material here, Ambassador. We lost next to nothing this time, because we had appropriate stasis containers and microcosms ready to hold the materials.” She spread her crest out. The individual tendrils brushed the racks surrounding her. “It is a vision of an entirely different way of arranging and spreading life. But”—she went on excitedly before he could speak—“there are some shocking familiarities on the molecular level. This may be confirmation that life is patterned, not random. That the life we see is as it is because this is the working template….”

D’seun clacked his teeth at her enthusiasm. “Engineer, while I sympathize with your eagerness to reshape our notions of the nature of the universe”—she shrank in on herself, abashed—“are you aware of the nature of the debate happening in the Law Meet?”

Her crest ruffled. “I had heard, Ambassador.”

D’seun dropped himself directly into her line of sight. “It is becoming increasingly likely that the distant family of the New People will be declared insane. We need to know if you have found anything in terms of a molecular solution, should we need to separate out their raw materials.”

Tr’es stilled and shrank. “Insane?”

D’seun dipped his muzzle. “One family of them may be.”

“A deep shame that they let this happen to themselves.” Her words barely reached him. “They are so elegant, so complex.”

“Perhaps because of their complexity, they were unable to prevent this tragedy,” suggested D’seun. The words felt good as he said them. After all, how much damage had the People themselves done because they didn’t understand the true complexity of Home? But New Home was a simple world. They would be able to control what they did here. No more cities would die under their hands.

Tr’es’s gaze drifted from specimen to specimen. “There are several possibilities,” she said slowly. “Like us, they actually live in symbiosis with all manner of monocellulars. There is a particular one….” She clambered through the racks, climbing over and under them without regard to orientation.

We have to get this child more room, thought D’seun idly. Surely we are not that pressed for resources.

She stopped by a specimen microcosm full of a hazy gray solution. “I found it in some of the orifice membranes. It seemed to be doing no harm, but when I cultured it in some tissue and bone samples, it seemed willing to feed on whatever it found, very like a wild yeast I think it maintains a balance in the New Person’s body. But that balance can be tipped, by, say, increasing its concentration in the body or possibly a chemical trigger that would turn the benign strain virulent.” She paused again, studying her brew. “It uses the chemicals trigger method naturally, so that might be the course to follow.”