Lifeline

Plodding along and optimizing its own parameters, Sandovaal’s computer model had found a way to send his wall-kelp to the other colonies, using only the magic of gravity. His kelp would save the lives of thousands. President Magsaysay would like that. But Sandovaal had to understand the orbital principles enough so that he’d seem knowledgeable when he made the proposal to the Council. The next meeting would be within the hour.

Orbits, ellipses, perturbations, a slow-moving tug-of-war with gravity … he had difficulty conceptualizing the rules. He wondered if this was how other people felt about biology and genetics. But then, everybody had genetics inside them. Sandovaal’s distinctive pale hair and blue eyes set in a round Filipino face had caused his own fascination with the subject.

The son of a Danish diplomat and a Filipino woman, Luis Sandovaal had grown up in the expansive diplomatic household of his grandfather. They had found a special exemption to get Luis into the embassy schools, where he studied voraciously—especially the natural sciences. Later, the old Danish ambassador had arranged for his grandson to study at Cambridge.

Luis’s mother had pulled him aside the day before he had boarded the Philippine Airways flight from Manila to London, begging him not to desert the Islands forever, to come back with what he had learned.

Sandovaal logged off the computer and made his way out of the lab complex, onto the Aguinaldo’s main floor level. Sandovaal pressed a taxicall by the stairs and waited for one of the electric carts to find him. His thumbprint would trigger a priority call and ensure a speedy dispatch.

Above him, children played in the zero-G core, squirting compressed air out of cans to maneuver themselves. A sail-creature nymph and an older boy played a game of crack-the-whip. Sandovaal squinted, then snorted to himself. The Barrera boy—Ramis, he thought. Always up to something dangerous. Ramis flew past the nymph until the rope grew taut, then snapped them both about. With the colony’s crisis, President Magsaysay had been far too busy to keep a close watch on his foster son.

The taxi’s arrival startled Sandovaal from his thoughts. He climbed in, directed it to the main Council chambers, then craned his neck to look out the taxi’s wire-mesh window. Ramis and the sail-creature nymph still frolicked in the core. An old woman slowly made her way along the axis on a pedal-kite. Other nymphs guarded the children playing in the core, as they had been conditioned to do.

Like sheepdogs.…

Years ago the colony animals had accepted the wall-kelp as a substitute feed, once it had been dried and processed. Sandovaal and Dobo Daeng, along with the technicians who had replaced Agpalo and Panay Barrera, worked on the next step in their experiments. Sandovaal had been stifled on Earth, unable to get permission to do some of his research because it was too unorthodox, and therefore considered “risky.” Here on the Aguinaldo, the Filipinos trusted his judgment.

Sandovaal expanded on the technique of gene grafting he had developed for the wall-kelp. At times he felt like a Filipino Frankenstein; at other times he conceived of himself as a chromosomal gourmet chef.

Most of the time the recipe failed. The failures usually died immediately, but some survived into the embryonic stage. Only rarely did a hideously distorted patchwork “thing” manage to grow to maturity.

Then they succeeded in creating the first proto-creature—robust and strong, featureless. The creature had both mitochondria and chloroplasts within its cell walls—it was plant and animal. Somehow, everything had worked exactly right—everything fit together, everything functioned as it should.

Sandovaal would never admit that it had been an accident.

Dobo kept staring at the proto-creature with wide eyes, astonished. The other assistants crowded around.

“It is still a plant, so it functions as a plant. It needs nutrients, sunlight, water.” Sandovaal felt smug. “We grew its lungs and digestive system, but they were superfluous. Like our appendix: everyone has one, but it serves no purpose. A baby can be perfectly happy in the womb, unaware of its lungs, until we take it away from the mother and force it to breathe the open air.”

“Mother Marie, it is a miracle, I think,” Dobo whispered.

Sandovaal made a rude sound. “Since when does a thousand trials, breaking your back for months and months, qualify as a miracle? We did not create life, Dobo, we just rearranged it.”

Sandovaal thought of what Magsaysay had said a year before, and smiled to himself.

Sheepdogs!

The twenty senators were settling into their seats in the Council chamber when Sandovaal strode in. He knew they did not expect him, which would heighten the effect. The senator from Leyte—a thin woman who needed the simplest things explained to her several times—scowled at his intrusion.