Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Forty: Prax

The more time passed, the clearer it became how little Ganymede’s official neutrality meant. The ships in the docks and orbiting the moon were more and more Free Navy ships, fewer and fewer anything else. The soldiers in Free Navy uniform appeared more often at the tube stations, in the markets, in the public halls and corridors, first with the apparent casualness of citizens, then in larger groups with more aggressive demeanors. Then with armored emplacements that would allow them to shoot in safety whoever happened by.

Djuna had stopped letting him watch the local newsfeeds at breakfast on the weekends. Too many stories about bodies being found in unfortunate conditions. Too many missing people, too many espionage claims, too many reminders from the still-official security apparatus that Pinkwater was an unaffiliated corporate entity with no political litmus tests and only the safety and well-being of the citizens of Ganymede at heart. The sorts of things people said because they weren’t true.

For Prax, the official news and the gun-wielding soldiers weren’t the most disturbing things. There were smaller things that he noticed. The way that the girls didn’t fight against being home by curfew anymore. The wistful conversations Djuna would start about taking positions somewhere else, emigrating off Ganymede entirely, and then end without ever drawing a conclusion. The small things carried more weight. Yes, a dissident circle was killed. Yes, people disappeared. But—apart from Karvonides—they weren’t people he knew. And the change in the station was also changing his family. It was also changing him.

Prax went about his work because there was nothing else to do. It wasn’t as if things would be made better by hiding in his bed. And the appearance of normalcy was sometimes almost as good as the real thing. So he went to the meetings in the mornings, worked with his plants in the afternoons. Some of the runs had to be scaled back. Research and development weren’t a priority as much as generating food to resupply the warships. Prax thought that was shortsighted. If anything, disruptions like this were an argument for more research, especially with the radioplast work that Khana and Brice had under proposal. He tried bringing the point up now and again. He’d even gone so far as to ask whether there was a contact with the Free Navy that the labs could talk to about it. No one was enthusiastic about it, though. So that was something else the occupation had taken away.

Under it all, the fear of what he’d done in sending the data to Earth hung over him. It was almost a relief when the security forces finally came.

He was in the overflow hydroponics lab at midafternoon. Rows of black-leaved plants rose up from the tanks toward the light banks. The roots that pushed through the underlying aqueous gel were pale as snow. Prax was moving from plant to plant, his hands in light-blue NBR gloves. He checked each leaf gently, looking for sprays of yellow and orange where the radioplasts were dying. Until the man called his name, his afternoon had been going pretty well.

“Dr. Meng?”

There were four people, all of them men. Two wore simple uniforms with the Pinkwater logo on the breast and shoulder. The other two were Free Navy. Prax felt his heart thud against his chest as the adrenaline hit, but he tried not to look more than a little uncomfortable. Anyone would be a little anxious when the Free Navy came asking for them. Even the innocent. He thought that was right.

“Can I help you?”

“We need you to come with us now,” the taller of the two Free Navy men said.

“I can’t,” Prax said, gesturing toward the plants he hadn’t checked. As if that were explanation enough.

They stepped closer, moving around him. They all had sidearms. Handcuffs. Canisters of restraint spray.

“You have to come with us now,” the tall man said again.

“Do … do I need my union representative?” he asked, but he wasn’t surprised when the shorter of the Free Navy men pushed him in the small of the back. I could run, he thought. It wouldn’t help, but I could do it.

They marched him out through the front office. When they passed Brice in the hall, she looked away, pretending not to notice. The front desk was abandoned, everyone suddenly called to the restroom or a coffee break at the same moment. None of the people he worked with would actually see him leave. That’s how quickly the right kinds of power could make someone disappear. Walking out the front door for what he had to assume was the last time, it felt like an epiphany. He’d wondered, watching the newsfeeds, how so many could go missing in a station with people and cameras everywhere. He understood now.

All they had to do was make it too dangerous for others to watch.

They loaded him into a cart, drove off down the main corridor, down the southern exchange ramp, and into a well-lit concrete hallway. He had the sudden, visceral memory of waiting here back after the mirrors fell, when the survival of Ganymede Station had been an open question. He’d waited in line right there, trying to find Mei. It would be her turn now to wonder what had happened to him. Symmetry.

At the Pinkwater office, they took him to a small, cold room. Green walls. Green floor. Everything stank of industrial cleaner. The kind they used to clean up blood and spit. Biohazard stuff. A chair bolted in place in front of a cheap, plastic desk. Black dots along the wall shifted toward him like the eyes of a spider. Not cameras, but the same multifrequency image arrays he used in the labs. They were sensitive enough to pick up his heart rate from changes in his skin and track the heat in every part of his body. He’d used them extensively on last year’s soybean experiments, and seeing them here felt almost like betrayal.

The taller Free Navy man came in. A dark-skinned woman in a Pinkwater uniform with him. Prax looked up. He’d imagined this moment so many times in the middle of dread-soaked nights that now that it was happening he was almost curious to see how well it met his expectations. Would they beat him? Threaten him with violence? Would they threaten Mei and Djuna and Natalia? He’d heard that sometimes they would addict prisoners to drugs and then threaten to withhold their supply and let withdrawals do the work.

“Dr. Meng,” the tall man said, sitting across from him. Did they take focus drugs? Prax had heard of focus drugs, but he didn’t know how they worked. “You were supervisor for Quiana Karvonides? You’re on record as identifying her body.”

“I am,” Prax said. Was there a way to pretend his way out of this? Would they believe him if he denied everything he could deny? Or would he give himself away? All the black, mechanical eyes on him, and the tall man’s pale-brown ones too. Only the Pinkwater woman was looking at her hand terminal. “I did. Karvonides didn’t have family on the station, I think. I’m not sure about that, though. Is something wrong?”

“She was working on proprietary yeast? Is that right?”

“That’s one of the projects we do,” Prax said, nodding. He was being too anxious. They’d know.

“She was working on it particularly?”

Prax’s mouth was dry, and the cold of the room seemed to creep up his legs and into the base of his spine. What had he done? Why hadn’t he kept his head down? But no, that wasn’t right. He had reasons for taking every action he took. And he’d known there were risks. Being here in this room was one, even if he hadn’t known which room in particular. He wondered whether there were other people watching him, or if the spider eyes fed into some sort of software that analyzed him and fed them the answers.

“Dr. Meng?”

“Yes, sorry. Yes, she worked on the harvester yeast. It’s an organism, um, that harvests a very broad range of electromagnetic radiation, the way that a plant uses light. It’s reverse-engineered from the protomolecule data. It lets the yeast generate its own sugars from the radioplasts, and then, um, its native systems can convert that into higher-complexity nutrients.”

The two shared a look. He couldn’t tell what its significance was. How would Mei do without him? She was older now. Nearly adolescent. She was going to start pulling away from the family unit soon anyway. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad time to lose him. Would they put his body back in the recycler? He couldn’t think like that. Not now.

“What can you tell us about Hy1810?” the woman asked, and Prax felt like she was looking through him. Seeing his bones and the shape of his blood vessels. He’d never felt more naked. He tried to lean back in his chair, to rock it a little back and forth, but the bolts only grated a little. There were notches and scrapes on the wall he hadn’t noticed until now. Painted over, yes, but there. He didn’t want to think about what had made them.

“It’s the tenth variation using protocol eighteen,” he said. “It’s proprietary. I’m not supposed to talk about that. I’m sorry.”

“Why did you move the Hy1810 data out of Karvonides’ partition?”

And there it was. They knew. He took a breath, and he could hear it shaking in his throat. They wouldn’t need focus drugs or psych computers. He was readable as plain text. It had been a dream that he might avoid the worst. All that was left was watching it play out. He felt a vestigial, unreasoning hope. There had to be a way. He had to get back home, or else who would make pancakes for the girls?

“I moved it on the request of some of the other project engineers. With Karvonides’ passing, they needed to have access to the run data. Otherwise there was no way to move forward. So, yes, I put it in a partition where they could reach it.”

“Did you review the permissions on that partition?”

“The information was proprietary,” Prax said, clinging to the idea like it was the last, water-logged fragment of the ship that had sunk beneath him. It sounded weak, even to him.

The man leaned forward. “That data was sent to Earth. We’ve isolated the tracking data on it, and it came from the partition you put it in.”

Lies and denials bubbled in his mind. Anyone could have accessed that data. I was sloppy. Careless with security, maybe. That’s all. I didn’t do anything wrong.

In his mind’s eye, he saw Karvonides again. The wounds on her neck and head. Yes, he could deny her again, but it wouldn’t make any difference. They already knew, or near enough. They’d push him, torture him, and he would break. It didn’t matter what he said now. He was dead. No more pancakes. No more evenings coaxing the girls into doing their homework or Sunday mornings waking up late with Djuna. Someone else would have to take over his research. Everything he’d loved, everything he’d lived for, was gone.

To his surprise, it felt less like fear than a sort of terrible freedom. He could say anything he wanted now. Including the truth.

“The thing you need to understand,” he said, an irrational, intoxicating courage blooming in his heart. “Biological equilibria? They’re not straightforward. Never.”

“Equilibria,” the man repeated.

“Yes. Exactly. Everyone thinks that it’s simple. New, invasive species comes in and it has an advantage and it outcompetes, right? That’s the story, but there’s another part to that. Always, always, the local environment resists. Yes, yes, maybe badly. Maybe without a clear idea of coping with novelty. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I am saying it’s there. Even when an invasive species takes over, even when it wins, there is a counterbalancing process it has to overcome to do that. And—” The tall man was scowling, and his discomfort made Prax want to speak faster. To say everything he had in his heart before the hammer fell. “And that counterprocess is so deep in the fabric of living systems, it can never be absent. However well the new species is designed, however overwhelming its advantages seem to be, the pushback will always be there. If one native impulse is overcome, there will be another. You understand? Conspecifics are outcompeted? Fine, the bacterial and viral microecologies will push back. Adapt to those, and it’ll be micronutrient levels and salinity and light. And the thing is, the thing is, even when the novel species does win? Even when it takes over every niche there is, that struggle alone changes what it is. Even when you wipe out or co-opt the local environment completely, you’re changed by the pushback. Even when the previous organisms are driven to extinction, they leave markers behind. What they are can never, never be completely erased.”

Prax sat back in his chair, chin high, breath deep and fast, nostrils flared. You can kill me. You can wipe me from the rolls of history. But you can never change the mark I’ve made. I stood against you, and even when you’ve killed me, it won’t undo the things I’ve done.

The man’s scowl deepened. “Are we still talking about the yeast?”

“Yes,” Prax said. “Of course we’re talking about the yeast.”

“All right,” the man said. “That’s great, but what we need to know is who had access to that partition.”

“What?”

“The partition you put the data in,” said the Pinkwater woman. “Who could have linked to it from there?”

“Anyone with access to the workstations in the research group could have,” Prax said. “What does that have to do with it?”

The man’s hand terminal chimed, and he pulled it out from his pocket. The red backsplash on an alert made him look almost like he was blushing, but when he put the hand terminal away, his face had gone pale.

“I have to step back,” the Free Navy man said. “You finish this, yeah?” His voice was tight. Prax thought he was shaking. The woman nodded and checked her own hand terminal. Prax watched him go, confused. Wanting, almost, to call him back and insist that they finish. This was important. This was his martyrdom in the cause of freedom and science. The interrogator couldn’t just walk away in the middle of it. When the door closed, he turned to the woman, but she was still looking at her terminal. A newsfeed with something about the war.

She whistled softly, her eyes going wide. When she looked up at him, it was like she was surprised to see him.

“The yeast data,” he said, reminding her.

“Dr. Meng, you have to be more careful. You can’t do that anymore.”

“Do what?”

The woman’s impatient smile didn’t reach her eyes. “You can’t put data that might help the enemy into an open partition. I know it’s proprietary, but someone leaked it, and we have an active investigation now into who that might have been.”

“But—No, you don’t understand.”

“Dr. Meng,” she snapped. “I know you don’t like us coming in and telling you how to run your lab, but these are delicate times. I’m asking you to take a long, careful look at your lab’s security hygiene so that we don’t have a less pleasant conversation next time. You understand that?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“All right, then,” the woman said with the air of having won an argument. “You can go now.”

Prax didn’t know what to do. He sat quietly for a moment, waiting for clarification he didn’t know how to ask for. The woman checked her hand terminal, looked back at him, annoyance in her expression.

“Dr. Meng? We’re done for now. If we have any further questions, we’ll find you.”

“I should leave?”

“Yes,” she said.

And so he did. Walking through the halls and up to the public carts felt like moving through a dream. His stomach felt empty. He wasn’t hungry, there was just a massive bubble in his gut where something—pain, despair, hope, fear—was supposed to be. He rented a cart, took it to the tube station. The whole incident had been so brief, his shift wasn’t even done. It would be, though, by the time he got back to the lab. So he went home instead.

The newsfeeds on the tube were alive with whatever military action had been on the security woman’s hand terminal. He tried to make sense of it all, but the words seemed to lose their meaning somewhere between the screen and his senses. He caught himself staring emptily at a young man sitting across from him and had to make a conscious effort to look away. All he could think was the dark-skinned woman saying You can go now.

Djuna was home when he got there, sitting on the couch with her head in her hands, her eyes bloodshot and her cheeks blotchy from crying. When he stopped in the entryway from the kitchen and lifted his hand in greeting, she stared at him for a moment, stunned, and then leaped up, ran to him, and wrapped him in her arms. After a long moment, he hugged her back, and they stood in their rooms, the way he never thought they would again.

“Leslie sent me a message,” Djuna said, her voice still thick with tears. “She said they came for you at the office. That the security people took you away. I was trying to find a lawyer who would talk to me. I sent the girls to Dorian’s. I didn’t know what to tell them.”

“All right,” Prax said. “It’s all right.”

Djuna leaned back, searching his eyes like there was something written in them. “What happened?”

“I confessed,” Prax said. “I told them … I told them everything. And then they let me go.”

“They did what?”

“They said I shouldn’t do it again, and that I should leave,” he said. “It wasn’t at all the reaction I expected.”