All Fall Down (40 page)

           
By the time the others came in, the blood had long since soaked into the protein mixture. They asked if she was OK, and she said it was just a cut. A stupid mistake, a sneeze that had thrown her off.

           
Through the lab door she saw Sophie floating in space.

“I said maybe it's not the best place for us.”

           
“But we're free here.”

           
“Only in the lab.”

           
“I don't get it. Where else is there?”

           
“Here.”

           
“In here? In our quarters? What have I done?”

           
“You don't understand.”
    

           
“I'm trying to. You're not making sense.”

           
“Don't tell me what I am or am not. You have no idea.”

           
“Give me an idea, then!”

           
“Don't shout.”

           
“Help me. I'm obviously missing something. I thought we were happy. Us.”

           
“I do love you.”

           
“What is it then?”

           
“Here. Fall. I feel, I don't know. Trapped. Suffocated. Unclean.”

           
“Unclean? Are … Are you having an affair?”

           
“How can you say that? How dare you! I love you.”

           
“I'm sorry, it's just … What do you mean, 'unclean'? Trapped by what?”

           
“I want to leave this place. Fall isn't right for us.”

           
“It's a two year re-integration process. You know that. We'll have to leave everything behind. Our research.”

           
“Two years.”

           
“Huriko, what's wrong?”

In Huriko's dream were monsters. Dark shapes around corners. Moody presences at her back. Threatening clouds. They reached into her heart and wrenched it black. Fear volted her.

           
Gripping the sheets, she woke in the night, holding her breath. A pale triangle stretched across the ceiling, the living room light leaking in. Her chest was going to explode. Her stomach turned. She slid out of bed, cold, sweating.

           
In the bathroom, door quickly and quietly closed, she vomited. In the mirror under the light Huriko looked back, drool hanging from her lower lip, eyes drugged with sleep.

           
She spat.

           
A cramp gripped her abdomen, soured her pubis.

           
More vomit.

           
Water swirled around the sink, spiralling, spiralling down into a bottomless black hole.

Djembe was flicking through his datapad for the wording of the Organic Edict. He was starting to think that Huriko was not pregnant with her husband's baby, but something different. Something implanted. He glanced back at the cell and watched the night scene fade into a green and brown light.

A worm's head blindly writhed from side to side. The black soil held onto a collapsed cast. Between her fingers, soil smeared and fell back to itself. This patch of soil in the experimental farm pod could transform the planet. If her protein worked, the soil could be seeded, transformed into a hard chitin under the harsh sunlight. The protein structures could be grafted into crops, which would grow suits of bio-armour while harvesting the lethal radiation. Fall would be terraformed. Other planets would follow. Sterile environments brought to life by humanity, an invading alien life form.

           
Brown deformed leaves crinkled the space around her. Spastic crops frozen in spasms of failure. Huriko tried to imagine what Fall would look like if her research was successful. She was suddenly unsure if she was doing the right thing. There were no food shortages. Humanity had settled enough worlds. Fall may be sterile, but was that so bad? Maybe humanity needed barren worlds, harsh conditions, where life had to hide to survive. Where the struggle confirmed its existence. Who was she to decide what life could come into this world, this universe? Around her were the corrupted growths of such thoughts. The plants looked like they were caught in screams, agonies. If an entire ecosystem had to be bio-engineered to deploy armour all the time, wouldn't it become monstrous, hideous? What sort of defences would the lowliest worm need in such an environment, to aerate a punished soil and keep itself from burning?

           
Huriko walked to a banana tree, touched a leaf, watched it shatter, shard in blackness to the ground.

           
Perhaps it was wrong to bring life to such places.

The people in white curled over her body. She was strapped into an examination chair. Immobile. Feet in stirrups. Black darts, a nova of dark needles pinned her vision to her sleeping mind. Their faces were obscured, but she felt their voices, distorted with metallic static, terrifying.

           
“She's fighting it.”

           
“Is she aware?”

           
“It's the compound. It creates resistance to anaesthetic.”

           
“Give her five mil more.”

           
“Be careful, will you?”

           
“Can she hear us?”

           
“She won't remember.”

           
The bright lights striated into metallic white lines. A platinum waterfall.

Huriko looked up the Colony's central air shaft. Metres below huge fans whumped the air. Their siblings reciprocated in the gloom hundreds of metres above. The balconies were set back a little on each floor up, so that she could see all of the darkness capping the Colony's heart. Gantries criss-crossed the space. She had the impression that as she looked up someone was on the uppermost balcony looking down. Down at her so small. In the depths. The gloom, the grey yellow sludge light that sickened the dark cavity blurred all details above the sixth floor.

           
Down here was immaculate. Alone.

           
She just wanted to be alone.

           
Biology was holding less and less interest. The human body, plant physiology, soil ecology. Pre-Edict knowledge. Armoured worlds growing in spite of nature. Fall. The rumour. The myth. The broken ties. The child that grew inside her. The sickness in the pits of her body. The growth. The growths. Forbidden knowledge. Plants with insect skin. Soil that grew with hair. Fall's thirst. Its hunger. The Colony pressing down. Memories of operations. Screaming.

           
She slid down the balcony's barrier, slumped to the floor. Breathed through her nose. Her legs splayed.

           
The darkness above was empty. Silent.

           
The way she wanted it.

“Got everything you need, Doctor Maki?”

           
“I think so. Thank you, Kiran.”

           
“There's no return time booked. When should I bring the aircar back for you?”

           
“I'll call you. I have a few experiments to check at different points in the outer circle.”

           
“You know what time the storm front is due, right? Make sure you're back well before second sun rise.”

           
“Don't worry.”

           
“I'll be waiting for you.”

           
She smiled and patted the young man's arm.

That was the end of the direct evidence. Djembe spoke to a holicon, allowed the only remaining evidence, indirect, from another source, flow in.

           
In the cell Jonah swam in an ocean of dark sensor readings, camera recordings and audio logs. It washed itself free of Huriko Maki, immersed itself in Colony Pilot Kiran ha'Doek. In bar tales, mumblings and flight logs. A shallower sea.

“Well here we are Doctor Maki. I'll help you unload.”

           
They stood to the rear of the aircar, unloading equipment.

           
“What are these things, anyway?”

           
“Test plates of bio-engineered proteins. Extracts from human and insect DNA. We're trying to find a protective protein sequence so we can grow things on the surface.”

           
“Like what?”

           
“Crops. Trees. Forests maybe.”

           
Silence. An anti-grav loader moved from the aircar, unloaded, back again.

           
“So we could live on the surface? Like on other planets?”

           
“Maybe not that far. But maybe have woodland where we could be protected during single sun.”

           
“Is there a vote on that?”

           
“What do you mean?” Huriko altered the polarisation of her goggles so she could better see Kiran's wrapped face, his protected eyes.

           
“Well, no offence, but you're not from here. This is my home. I was born here. Me and the others, might be nice to ask us if we want our home changed like that. That's all.”

           
Around them, solar harvesters silently gathered energy for the experimental equipment. Covered plates were stacked, waiting for installation. Older plates rested on skeletal frames, bleached bone white. Flakes curled from their surfaces, where they weren't blistered or cracked or wizened into twisted fibres. “Is this what the future looks like, then?”

           
Huriko glanced over her shoulder, “This is what failure looks like.”

           
“So what would success look like? What will my planet become?”

           
She adjusted a scarf, tucked it further into the neck of her environment suit, “You know the farming pods? Imagine if we built more of them, implanted, underground. And seeded them with crops that could cope with the twin suns. And opened the pods' shields, so the crops could burst out, and start growing across the surface.”

           
Kiran packed empty boxes and loading equipment into the aircar. “What about water? What will they live on? And what about the storm?”

           
Huriko closed the aircar doors, and stepped toward the experiment. She turned back, “Life will find a way. Goodbye.” She darkened her goggles and turned back to her experiment.