Estevez had come Down with him, God help Julio and his sneezes. Estevez and he just didn’t talk about Upstairs, didn’t talk about the doubts… they’d gone through Studies together, been in training together—known each other all their lives… how not, in the limited world of the station? He and Julio had hashed over doubts aplenty before they’d made the cut, but not dwelled on them once they knew they were on the team, and most of all hadn’t rehashed them once they were down here. Here everything was fine and they weren’t scared, and Estevez wouldn’t worry if he was late for dinner, no, of course not. Julio would just be standing by the window by now, wondering if he’d gotten sick on the way or gotten bitten by some flying creature they hadn’t catalogued yet.
Ian shoved his hands into his pockets and began to walk back to the barracks—Estevez probably had supper in the microwave, timed to the last of sunset—they had no general mealtime, with all of them on lab schedules, and supper, such as it was, fell whenever the work was done. No amenities, no variety in the menu, no reliance on freezers or fancy equipment: every priority was for lab equipment, everything was freeze-dried, dried, or add-water-and-boil, and damned disgusting as a lifelong prospect. Probably the Guild looked for the cuisine to bring them to their knees… to have them begging the Guild for rescue and a good stationside dinner.
Meanwhile he had discovered a sudden, unusual preference for sweets, which, with the coppery taste he had almost constantly, was the only thing that tasted good. And mostly those came out of the labs he’d worked in, so he named them what they were, in all their chemical parts.
There was, in their reliance on food from orbit, a most pressing reason to identify grasses, and dissect seeds, and figure out their processes and their chemistry, where it was like Earth’s and where it was different: ecologically different, the Guild had said, probably full of toxins, not to meddle with.
But the Guild was going to be wrong on that one, if the results held—God, the tests were looking good, down to the chemical level where it really counted: there were starches and sugars they recognized, no toxins in the seeds that, the Phoenix histories informed them, could be processed and cooked in ways human beings had done for a staple food for thousands of years.
That again, for the Guild’s insistence they needed no understanding about natural systems—the Guild said they had no use precisely because in the Guild’s opinion planets had no use, and, the unspoken part, stations and station-dwellers had no use except for the services they provided. The Guild talked about ecological disasters—about native rights, about all manner of rights including the local fauna that had more rights than the workers on the station… the Guild, that adamantly refused understanding of any natural system.
But contrary to predictions, the microbes they collected and the ones that necessarily attended human beings showed no dispensation to run amok with each other or with them or the planet—that had been their greatest fear, viruses getting a hold in human bodies or human-vectored bacteria wreaking havoc faster than the genetics people could patch the problems. They’d prepared for it, they’d taken precautions—but it hadn’t happened catastrophi-cally; they weren’t seeing the problems they’d prepared for, even in lab cultures. The very fact they were finding biological correspondences was a hazard, of course, but so far and with fingers crossed, the immunologists were beginning to argue that the mere fact there were correspondences might mean some effective defenses. Talk around the lab began to speculate on microbial-level evolution more intimately related to geology and planetary formation than theory had previously held to be the case, wild stuff, the geneticists and the geologists and the botanists putting their heads together on one spectacular drunk the night they’d gotten the supply drop with the unscheduled Gift from Upstairs—
God, the irreverent insanity down here, after a lifetime of the solemn Cause, and the politics, and the Movement. But discoveries were pouring in on them after a century and a half of stagnant study of taxonomies. They were drunk with invention. They were understanding the natural systems they were seeing. They’d formed a comparative framework with its essential questions foremost, worked out on Lenoir’s principles, for a hundred fifty years of information trickling up through optics and hands-off observation of the planet; they’d held on to planetary science—and they’d done it in the face of the Guild’s ridicule and the Guild’s absorption of resources, and the Guild’s ship-building, and every Guild-blessed project that drank up station time and materials.