Radiant

Considering Cohen’s feelings for Tut, that might have meant leaving Tut’s body on the bare floor of the shuttle bay and letting him wake up on his own.

Pistachio pulled out of orbit and headed sunward to recharge the ship’s energy envelope. The envelope was commonly called a Sperm-field: a milky sheath that formed a pocket universe around the ship and let us move at faster-than-light speeds through the universe outside. Charging the field in a star’s chromosphere was a new procedure — until recently, the navy had believed Sperm-fields would be torn apart if a ship got too much solar radiation. Then between my junior and senior year at the Academy, all the textbooks suddenly changed to say that a solar bath made Sperm-fields stronger… and every ship in the navy abruptly became ten times faster.

Science marches on.

Anyway, the voyage to Muta would once have taken two weeks; now, we’d get there in a day and a half. We had precious little time for preparations.

The instant we left Cashleen, Festina called a meeting in Pistachio’s small conference room. Only Captain Cohen and I were invited… but Li and Ubatu showed up too and Festina let them stay. (She whispered to me, "They’ll just cause trouble if I kick them out. They’ll be nuisances here too, but at least I can keep an eye on them.")

When everyone was seated at the conference table, Festina convened the meeting. "All right. We have thirty-six hours to develop a plan for the landing. First step: reviewing available information about Muta. There’s quite a lot — Starbase Trillium has forwarded files obtained from the Unity. Every bit of data they have on their settlements there."

Li gave a derisive snort. "Every bit of data? I doubt it. Those bastards hate sharing anything with the Technocracy."

"Admittedly, they seldom talk to us," Festina said. "In this case, however, they have no choice. Withholding information from a rescue mission would endanger our lives and the people we’re trying to save. The Unity has to tell us everything they know, or they’ll get in trouble with the League."

Ambassador Li looked dubious. Perhaps he had unhappy past dealings with the Unity. No surprise: the Unity and the Technocracy had been at odds for centuries, with plenty of resentment built up on both sides. This state of tension wasn’t a war — not even a cold war. More like the huffiness between a divorced couple who want to conduct themselves with decorum but simply can’t stop bickering.

The Unity had divorced itself from the Technocracy three hundred years ago: a mere century after our ancestors left Old Earth. The cause of the breakup was irreconcilable differences over the raising of children. Children like me. Bioengineered.

As I’ve said, gene-tinkering is illegal in the Technocracy (except to cure serious medical conditions and in a few other strictly regulated situations). Most artificial enhancements are also ba

The Unity, on the other hand, don’t accept a priori limitations. Their ancestors questioned the ethics of remaining merely human. Why, for example, would you force people to make do with "natural" babies when science could produce children who were healthier, happier, and smarter? Wasn’t it cruel to create inferior offspring when superior children were possible? How could you justify the continued production of weaklings and cripples when it was entirely u

Similarly, why balk at modifying humans after birth? If, for example, people opted to live in a deep-sea colony, why not give them gills? It was a simple surgical procedure that solved a host of problems. Without it, one needed bulky and expensive machinery to survive (scuba tanks, air-pumping systems), and even then, there was always the risk of accidental failure. The Technocracy claimed that tampering with human essence was "immoral"… but how could it be immoral to protect people from drowning?

Those were the kinds of questions that started the schism. A group of humans who disagreed with the Technocracy’s ban on augmentation quietly vanished from the neighborhood of New Earth. Fifty years later, the same people and their children resurfaced as the Unity: industrious, placid, and a

Technocracy doomsayers might have expected the Unity to become hellish cyborgs: brain-linked mutants with robot arms, and wheels instead of feet. But our Unified cousins remained human in appearance… mostly. Those in specialized jobs modified themselves as needed and changed back when they were finished. If they had any qualms about getting fingers amputated and replaced with welding torches, they kept it to themselves. Probably, they took such changes in stride and wondered what the fuss was about — members of the Unity were irritatingly well adjusted. (They looked like they never screamed at their mothers.)

In a way, the Technocracy and the Unity acted like two halves of a broken family in a broadcast comedy. Our half was made up of ne’er-do-wells: the ones who fought and hollered, whose government was pere

But like a divorced couple, we weren’t utterly blind to each other’s strengths. Members of the Unity sometimes admitted they might be a little too obsessed with control; they pla

On the other hand, I didn’t like lone wolves myself. Explorers survived through teamwork and forethought, rather than going their own impetuous ways. No plan could anticipate every contingency, but thinking ahead was far better than leaving things to chance. One should never depend on luck.

So, unlike Li, I admired the Unity. In particular, I admired their survey teams — the only people in the galaxy who might equal our own Explorer Corps. Their equipment and training were just as good, their advance pla

Contrast that with Explorers. I wondered if the Technocracy had staffed our corps with pariahs just to be different from the Unity. It wouldn’t be the first time our government had been that petty.

But in the Unity, surveyors were the best of the best… and Muta had been settled by survey teams. Every last colonist was a trained surveyor: elite, bioengineered for genius, and augmented to the n th degree. If the entire populace had still been wiped out with only time for a single Mayday…