Spin Control

NOVALIS Six Species of Chaos

“Outside!” Aurelia panted. “Now! Hurry!”

Arkady and Arkasha stared, bewildered. But by the time Arkady thought to ask what was happening she was already several doors down, repeating the message. And already someone else was pounding on the hab module’s metal walls, hammering out the panicked signal that means only two things to a spacer: decompression or fire.

Arkady left the lab at a dead run with Arkasha close behind him. The last thing he remembered hearing as he left was the brittle crack of Arkasha’s dropped pencil shattering on the floor.

Aurelia dashed through the airlock ahead of them without pausing to let it cycle. So much for the last shreds of the theoretical quarantine.

The rest of the team was clustered on the open slope below the hab module, staring skyward, hands shielding their eyes or held over mouths dropped open in slack-jawed amazement.

“There,” Aurelia urged. “Look!”

It took Arkady a long, stunned moment to understand what he was looking at. Then he realized that the trailing mare’s tail of high cumulus streaming across the sky from horizon to horizon was no cloud at all.

It was a contrail.

“That’s not—” Arkasha began.

“No,” Laid-back Ahmed said. “It’s not ours. The sound’s all wrong. It must be one of the new drives UNSec hasn’t cleared for civilian use.”

“Shouldn’t we have seen them coming in-system?”

“Yes.” There was an edge to Ahmed’s voice that Arkady had never heard there before.

“Unless they were hiding behind the planet,” By-the-Book Ahmed pointed out ominously.

“But wouldn’t they have to know where we were to do that?” Aurelia asked.

“Yes. And where all our mapping satellites are as well.”

“Then…”

Aurelia’s voice trailed off into the general silence just as Arkady came to the realization that however frightening it had been to be alone on Novalis with help four months away, it was many times more frightening to be sharing the planet with a contingent of Peacekeepers.

Arkady remembered the next ten days of the mission as one long continuous slow-motion avalanche of panic.

Bella’s sickness spread through the crew with the ponderous inevitability of an avalanche gathering breadth and power as it flows down a mountainside. First the Ahmeds fell sick. Then both Banerjees and both the Aurelias went down in a single miserable day. Aurelia was unable, even after the most frantic efforts, to isolate the pathogen responsible for the sickness. And meanwhile, a new fight was splintering the crew into ever more violently opposed factions: the fight over whether the undiagnosable sickness and the inexplicable contrail were caused by a single common enemy.

“Come for a walk with me?” Aurelia the surgeon asked Arkady sometime in the middle of the panic.

“Are you up to a walk?” he asked doubtfully. She’d just dragged herself out of bed and back to work that morning.

“Not really. But I want the privacy.”

She was silent all the way to the airlock, and while they cycled through it, and for a good minute after they got outside. Even ravaged by fever, she struck out across the clearing with her usual assertive stride. Just under the shadow of the first rank of trees, she veered sideways and began making a slow circuit of the pasture.

“I’m worried,” she said at last. “And I want to talk to you first because I don’t want to turn this into a fight between Ahmed and Arkasha. It’s too important.”

“What’s too important?”

“Ahmed has been after me to tell him that this sickness is some kind of bioweapon. He wants to thaw out the tacticals.”

“Oh God.”

“That’s about what I said when he sprang it on me.”

“Well,” Arkady said, beginning to think through the implications of Ahmed’s idea. “Is it?”

Aurelia opened her mouth, then closed it without answering. “Arkasha doesn’t think so. As far as I can make out, he thinks we’ve just walked into the terraforming cross fire. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time. First survey mission I crewed on was cleanup for a team that lost all but two members to some kind of hypermutating fungus before they could even figure out what hit them. And Arkasha is the one looking at the viral payload. I’m just trying to sort out the vector of infection. Which, if you ask me, amounts to MotaiSyndicate running an outrageously unethical immunological experiment on the rest of us poor slobs.” She kicked at the grass in frustration. “God, I wish this was a Rostov mission!”

They walked along in silence, Arkady matching Aurelia’s longlegged stride without thought or effort. She had a point, he reflected. “You still haven’t said what you think about Ahmed’s bioweapon idea.”

“It’s possible, of course. Anything’s possible.” She plucked one of the many-petaled blue flowers that had carpeted the pasture during the recent weeks of sun and began tearing the petals off it in an absentmindedly savage game of she-loves-me-not.

“Then you think it evolved here naturally?”

“No. And no, I can’t tell you why.” She looked down at the flower’s dismembered corpse, frowning as if she’d only just realized the havoc her fingers were wreaking. “It just…it just feels wrong.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” She turned to face him, looking young and scared and nothing like her usual confident self. Behind her the long pasture ran away toward the hidden river, and the silver grass rippled like the fur of some sleeping beast. “It’s like…it’s like a real frog in an imaginary garden.”

And no matter what he did, Arkady couldn’t get her to say what she meant by those words…or even whether she knew that there was no such thing as a real frog anymore.

Arkasha went down with the virus the next day, and by nightfall he was running a dangerously high fever. The sickness was quirky that way; one person’s symptoms might be merely annoying, while the next person might run a fever that had Aurelia talking darkly about the low survival rates for prophylactic cryo. Arkady and Arkasha were a case in point. Arkady’s brush with the disease had been so mild that he still wasn’t sure if he had escaped it altogether or simply failed to notice it amid the general exhaustion and panic. But Arkasha went down hard.

Arkady nursed his pairmate through seventy-two hours of violent chills and fevers, scrupulously following all Aurelia’s instructions. On the evening of the third day he came back from his first hot meal in days to find Arkasha’s bed empty.

He finally tracked his sib down in the first place he should have looked for him: the lab. Arkasha was still haggard with exhaustion and dehydration. But he was clean and shaved and neatly dressed…and doggedly determined to get back to work.

“Are you sure you’re strong enough to be out of bed already?” Arkady asked worriedly.

“No. But I needed to check on something. I had an idea while I was sick. Something about this virus was ringing a bell somewhere, and I finally remembered what it was. Ever heard of Turing Soup?”

Arkady blinked in surprise. “As in Alan Turing?”

“Yep. I think that’s what we’ve caught. I can’t explain how it got here or who spliced it but at least I think I know what they were trying to accomplish.”

“Aurelia said you weren’t sure it was designed.”

“I wasn’t when I talked to her.” He cocked a sharp eye at Arkady. “Why was she talking to you about that? Did she ask you to stop me from insulting Captain Bligh’s breadfruit?”

Arkady laughed in spite of himself. “Is that his new nickname?”

“Well, it’s what I call him. I can’t repeat what Aurelia calls him within range of your delicate ears.”

“Don’t be mad at her for talking to me. She likes you. She just doesn’t want to watch you make trouble for yourself.”

“I know. And I appreciate it. And I’m sorry about what I said after the last consult. I overreacted. It just…brought back bad memories.”

Arkasha rubbed a hand across his forehead and sat down a bit limply. He still looked feverish to Arkady, and not just with the fever of excitement.

“So anyway. The virus. This is still just in the region of wild surmise. But I think it’s an evolutionary search algorithm. Fontana, the human who thought up the Turing Soup idea, spent his whole life working on the relationship between genetic robustness and evolvability. In other words, if species need to change rapidly to respond to changes in their environment, then why are most evolutionarily successful organisms so genetically resistant to change? What’s the adaptive value of all the epistatic effects and redundancy that UN-based commercial splicers are always deleting from their genomes and we’re always trying to preserve? Fontana’s big idea was something he called neutral networks. I remember neutral networks from first-year genetic engineering. It’s central to understanding how genotype space maps onto phenotype space: how DNA turns the biological equivalent of a computer program into an actual living organism. It’s also why designers always run into those ‘you can’t get there from here’ design problems. You know: the changes that look like minor tweaks but turn out to involve so many splices that all have so many unintended side effects that you can’t make the ‘tweak’ without stripping the whole geneset down to its bolts and starting over again.”

Arkady nodded. This was a familiar problem for Syndicate design teams, and a major reason for the slow, cautious, incremental changes within genelines. The pre-Breakaway corporate genetic engineers had been far bolder; but they’d assumed cull rates for their company-owned constructs that even MotaiSyndicate would have found ethically indefensible.

“So that’s one of the first lessons in genetic engineering: Just because two organisms ‘look’ the same doesn’t mean their genesets look the same. It just means that their DNA inhabits the same neutral network. And one of the basic truisms of evolutionary genetics is that the most successful species usually have the largest neutral networks. Fontana theorized that this was because neutral networks were nature’s way of minimizing the chances of a you-can’t-get-there-from-here problem. He explained how neutral networks do that by talking about maps of old Europe on Earth. Which makes sense, I guess, since neutral networks are all about the importance of boundaries and territory. Imagine you’re walking around some country. France, let’s say. But you want to get to Germany. Well, if you’re walking around somewhere in the middle of France, it’s going to take a lot of steps to get to Germany…steps that, in the mutational context, are all fraught with an overwhelming risk of producing nonviable phenotypes. But if you happen to be exactly on the border between the two countries, all you need to do is take one easy step and presto, you’re in Germany. And the bigger your country is, the longer your borders are, and the more places you can get to in just one step. Fontana called those border crossings—single mutations that shift an organism into a new phenotype—gateway mutations. The bigger the neutral network, the more gateway mutations. The more gateway mutations, the less risk of a you-can’t-get-there-from-here problem…known in the real world as an extinction event.”

“So how does Turing Soup fit into that?” Arkady asked.

“Well, I’m running into the limits of my understanding of Algorithmic Chemistry here, but Fontana envisioned neutral networks as search spaces and mutation as a search algorithm just like the search algorithms you’d use to find information in a database. The bigger the database, the more data there is to mine, and the more data you can get. That’s the expanding neutral networks side of the equation. But there’s another limiting factor as well: How good is your algorithm at searching the database? The better the search algorithm, the faster it sifts the kernels of relevant data from the chaff. So Fontana looked at mutations accumulating inside neutral networks as a mechanism through which organisms ‘search’ the entire space of the current phenotype for possible improvements or responses to environmental alterations. Now I get a little bit itchy at the idea that organisms ‘search’ their genotype in any meaningful way. I just don’t think evolution works that way. But on the other hand, genetic engineers spend a lot of time improving their neutral network search algorithms. And if you could engineer organisms to search their neutral networks more efficiently, you could turn walking ghosts into viable populations…which is exactly what I think someone’s done on Novalis.”

Arkady sank onto his own stool, floored by the magnitude of what Arkasha was describing. “I’m not even going to touch the developmental biology problems with that idea—”

“I know, I know.”

“—but how would you even begin to prove someone had done it on Novalis?”

“I can’t. Not in any time frame that’s going to make a difference to this mission. But I can say that Bella’s virus looks a hell of a lot more like a terraforming tool than a bioweapon.”

Arkady bit his lip.

“What?”

“Well…I was just thinking about that old saying about a weed being a perfectly good plant in the wrong place. Isn’t a bioweapon just a perfectly good terraforming tool in the wrong place?”

“So you are saying you agree with Ahmed.”

“No! I’m just pointing out that you’d better have an answer to that question, because there’s no way he won’t ask it.”

“I’ll have an answer,” Arkasha said. “One way or another I’ll have an answer.”

“Well, don’t push yourself too hard…okay?”

“I promise I’ll be sensible. And thanks for…well, taking care of me.”

“Anyone would have done the same.”

“That’s the kind of thing you always say. It doesn’t make it true.”

Arkasha’s eyes glittered. He really did look feverish, Arkady told himself for the second time in as many minutes.

He pressed his lips to Arkasha’s forehead in a kiss so sweet and chaste that they might have been two brother monks on one of the Russian icons their geneline’s features were said to be modeled on.

Of course he hadn’t meant it to be a kiss at all; he’d been checking Arkasha’s temperature, just as he’d done countless times over the course of the sickness. But somehow it hadn’t ended up that way.

He stood there, one hand still on Arkasha’s shoulder, feeling like an army that had outrun its supply lines. Arkasha was utterly still under his hand, his eyes wide and dark, his face oddly expressionless. But Arkady could feel the heat of his skin through the thin shirt, and the bones of his shoulder beneath their too-thin veil of muscle and tendon.

“I just—” Arkady began. And then he stopped, because Arkasha had begun to speak in the same instant.

“What?” they both said—and then laughed nervously.

Arkasha raised a hand, then let it fall without completing the gesture. “I should get back to work,” he said.

“Why?” Arkady asked. He slid his hand up to the nape of Arkasha’s neck, certain that Arkasha would shy away from the touch but unable to stop himself. “Why won’t you just let yourself be happy?”

Arkasha blinked like a man stepping out of a shuttered room into bright sunlight. “I’ve made a lot of trouble for myself,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t be doing yourself any favors.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should care,” Arkasha said. But he let himself be drawn closer.

“I don’t care,” Arkady repeated.

Then, still half-convinced he would be pushed away, he took Arkasha in his arms and kissed him again…this time not at all chastely.

“I love your cowlicks,” Arkasha said. “I’m endlessly, abjectly grateful to whatever poor slob is responsible for them. If he hadn’t fallen asleep on the job, you might be a completely different person. You might never have fallen in love with your silly little ants. And I might never have met you, let alone fallen in love with you.”

They were in their cabin, sprawled across the lower bunk, drinking more of the Aurelias’ vile vodka, stealing a few moments away from the insanity that was rapidly consuming the rest of the crew.

“Has Aurelia showed you any results on those assays yet?”

“Don’t change the subject on me. I’ve never seen hair that out of control. No wonder you’re obsessed with the adaptive value of dissent!”

Arkady brushed ineffectually at the offending locks. “They’re ugly.”

“They’re extraordinary.”

“They’re a deviation.”

“They’re an oversight. Some poor designer was too busy thinking about next week’s production quotas, or his digestive troubles, or his unrequited love for whatever norm-conforming certifiably A-equivalent piece of tail he happened to be chasing at the moment. His mind strayed”—Arkasha’s free hand slid down Arkady’s chest and across his belly—“unforgivably from the all-important work at hand. An error crept into the D1746 gene at site forty-two of chromosome eighteen. That’s the frizzy D site to you and the rest of the hoi polloi. Our poor designer failed to notice the error. It began to replicate. The control team, perhaps similarly distracted by work, lust, or digestion, also failed to notice the error. Which continued to replicate. Which resulted in your spectacular cowlicks. Which resulted in my falling in love with you. Which is about to result in…here, hold this.”

“You’re drunk.” Arkady took the beaker Arkasha handed him and realized belatedly that there was nowhere on the narrow bunk to put it down—and that that was exactly what Arkasha had intended.

“True, too true,” Arkasha admitted, busy with the drawstring of Arkady’s pants. “I’m also a shirker, and a malingerer, and an unregenerate deviant. None of which detracts from the blinding moral import of the revelation I’m about to bestow upon you.”

“Which is?”

“That I love you—have I mentioned, by the way, that you entirely fail to appreciate my brilliance and originality?—that I love you because of their mistake.”

Arkady made a rude noise. “At least my cowlick is outside my skull, not inside it.”

“Yep,” Arkasha announced at about the same moment as he finally succeeded in making Arkady spill his drink all over the floor. “That’s me. A Cowlick on the Brain of a Perfect Society.”

The arena was perhaps a meter across. At the moment its perfectly white and featureless surface contained perhaps five hundred army ants, racing around in a swirling, slightly irregular circle that resembled nothing so much as a satellite’s eye view of a hurricane. It also resembled, to Arkady’s naturalist’s eye, a dozen or so other examples of self-organized criticality in action: the delicate spiral structures that so many leafy plants evolved to maximize sun exposure and minimize self-shading; the intricate whorls in the pelts of fur-bearing mammals, of which the single whorl on the crown of each human and posthuman head was a vestigial remnant; the complex interlocking networks formed by communities of people, ants, or songbirds.

But there was one difference of course: all those other patterns were adaptive, whereas the milling, panicked circle of ants was suicidally dysfunctional.

“Under unique circumstances in nature (and rather ordinary ones in the laboratory), army ants can be induced to form a tight circular column, a myrmecological merry-go-round, in which they ‘march themselves to death.’” Gotwald, of course, quoting Piels and Schnierla.

And the great Schnierla had established that the diameter of the circular column represented “the sum of the vector of the individual ant’s centrifugal impulse to resume the march and the centripetal force of trophallaxis which binds it to its group”…an equation that never failed to cross Arkady’s mind when he saw large groups of people all making the same stupid mistake at the same moment.

Trophallaxis—the following instinct—was so strong that if you dropped ants from two different swarms into the arena together, they would actually follow each other perfectly peacefully for ten or twenty minutes before they came to their senses and locked mandibles in a last mortal battle.

“You’d think that sometime, somewhere, some of them would just snap out of it and turn the other way,” Arkasha said beside him.

“You have to remember that the following instinct is perfectly adaptive in the environment it evolved in.” As usual Arkady felt an obscure need to defend his ants. “If these ants were on the forest floor instead of in the lab, they would circle around until they found their swarm’s scent and just follow it back to the main column. Or even if the scent trail was gone, washed away in a flood for example, they’d run into sticks and stones and leaves and be deflected little by little until they eventually worked their way back to the rest of the swarm. It’s just here, where there’s no external noise to counterbalance the circling instinct, that it becomes maladaptive. The ants and their environment are an integrated system, just like the brain and its environment. Change the environment and you’re left with half a system. You might as well rip half the wires out of a computer, then blame it for not working.”

“It’s really kind of awful when you put it that way,” Arkasha said. “Actually…why are you doing this to the poor ants?”

“I’m not going to follow through with it,” Arkady confessed. “I just wanted to see a circular mill in action. I’m going to aspirate them back into their nest before they get too tired. To tell you the truth, I never could do any really nasty experiments on ants. I can’t stand the sight of their little faces when they’re frightened.”

“Their little faces?” Arkasha sounded amused. “Do ants even have faces?”

“Sure. Well, mandibles. And they have this panic-stricken way of antennating that’s just heartbreakin—”

Ranjipur poked his head into the lab, looking thoroughly panic-stricken himself despite his lamentable absence of antennae. “Have you two seen Aurelia?” he asked. “Oh. Arkasha. Thank God. We need you. Bella’s had some kind of relapse.”

Bella was in the bathroom slumped over the toilet when they reached her. Her dark hair was plastered against her skull, and Arkady could see the pale skin of her scalp showing between the damp locks.

“How long has this been going on?” Arkasha asked.

It turned out that it had been going on for a week, and that Bella had somehow managed to hide it from everyone. Shocking. But not as shocking as the look on Aurelia’s face when she finally arrived and got a handle on the situation.

“Come down to the lab and help me run this?” she asked Arkasha after she’d pulled blood from the Motai B.

Arkady tagged along, following Aurelia’s glance at him rather than an explicit invitation.

“What the hell is going on down here?” Arkasha said as soon as the door closed behind them.

Aurelia still had that stunned, bloodless look on her face. “I don’t know. I have no data, no physiological baselines, no standard procedures to follow. I mean, for the ship cat, sure. But this…”

Arkasha flopped weakly onto the stool next to Arkady. He and Aurelia seemed to have reached some basic unspoken agreement about the nature of Bella’s changeling sickness that eluded Arkady.

“Is Bella in danger?” he asked hesitantly. “Can you cure her?”

“She’s in a lot of danger,” Aurelia said shortly. “And I can’t cure her because there’s nothing to cure. She’s not sick, Arkady. She’s pregnant.”