Spin Control

Translation was successful. The flyby happened—a spectacular display of interstellar sharpshooting at a mere seventy thousand kilometers above the target planet’s cloud-shrouded surface. The probe dropped seven automated landers before it hooked around Novalis’s yellow sun and shot off on its final voyage into the unsounded Deep.

Four of the landers vanished without transmitting any data at all.

The fifth lander made it most of the way down before succumbing to a damaged heat shield segment, and it sent back infrared and microwave soundings of an ocean (an ocean!), whose scatterometry produced a marine wind field map that Banerjee’s chief oceanographer pronounced promisingly reminiscent of Earth’s southern oscillation.

The sixth lander reached the surface and sent back a wealth of intriguing and frustratingly inconclusive readings before it drove over a cliff, to the spluttering humiliation of its design team, and shattered its solar collector.

The seventh lander caught an ant.

An ant whose DNA, when crushed and sequenced and crosschecked and cataloged, proved her to be the many thousandth great-granddaughter of a cloned ponerine queen boosted into space in 2031 on one of the European Space Authority’s venerable Arianerockets and still covered by a perpetual, though obviously unenforceable, patent originally held by a Delaware corporation with the unlikely name of Monsanto.

With the discovery of one humble ant, all hell broke loose in the skies over Gilead. Scientific teams zipped back and forth from Syndicate to Syndicate. Aziz and Banerjee pla

A third unma

And now, in a matter of days, the survey team would swing into orbit around Novalis…and begin the real work for which each of them had been training ever since they’d opted for the sciences track at sixteen and tested into geophysics, genetics, engineering, astrophysics, oceanography, zoology, genetics, molecular biology complex systems study, chaotic systems control, and all the other manifold specializations that the science-cum-art of terraforming demanded.

Arkady was at once awed and inspired by the sheer weight of history that lay behind each step of a preterraforming survey. Every reading, every sounding, every measurement they would use to establish the baseline condition of Novalis’s biosphere represented the life’s work of generations of engineers and scientists before them. Even so simple a task as taking the temperature of the ocean’s surface from orbit embodied a trajectory of technological evolution that began with the first primitive infrared sounding devices NASA engineers invented back in the twentieth century to explain the subtle color shifts that entranced the first astronauts to see Earth’s oceans from space.

Each member of the survey team—Arkady with his ants, Aurelia with her exacting measurements of the planet’s geophysical processes, Arkasha with his DNA samples—was part of an endless cycle of trial and error and recalibration that spa

Ground truth.

Ground truth was the final judge from whose verdict there was no appeal. Ground truth was what you found when you finished your measurements and plans and preparations and took your heart in your hands and landed on your target planet. Ground truth was what you found when you sampled the soil, when you physically dropped a sounder into the ocean, when you walked through the forest or grassland or tundra you had surveyed from orbit and dissected and sequenced the specimens you collected there.

And this was the second source of Arkady’s endless fascination with his chosen field. In a very real sense every expedition to a new planet retraveled in miniature the long evolution of the discipline that humans called terraforming and Syndicate scientists called ecophysics. Syndicate survey teams might be armed with technical and theoretical tools that would have appeared near-magical to pre-Evacuation humans; but each new planet, even if every living thing on it was earthly in origin, presented an entirely new set of experimental parameters. Those parameters inevitably produced results that confirmed prior theory…and results that pointed out the limitations of trying to generalize about the largest complex nonlinear dynamic system anyone had yet encountered based on a sample size of one. Every unsurveyed planet was, quite literally, a new world. And nothing in all the wide universe said that the next planet wouldn’t blow the lid off every prior theory.

Which was exactly—though it was hard for Arkady to bring himself to believe such a thing could be happening—what Bella’s DVI numbers would do.

If they were real.

“You want her to learn on the job?” Aurelia was asking incredulously when Arkady walked into the hastily called formal consult over what the Ahmeds were calling the DVI situation. “She was supposed to know her job before we launched. People who can’t do a simple job right belong on a euth ward, not on a deep-space survey mission!”

“I diddo the job right the first time!” Bossy Bella protested. Bella had been assigned, after much covert maneuvering and insistence that she was too busy (she wasn’t, and wouldn’t be until it was time to establish the food cycle systems in the dirtside habitat module), to help Aurelia with data collection for the all-important DVI. The two of them had already developed a cordial dislike for each other…and when something went wrong, the inevitable happened.

“So now you know my job better than I do?” Aurelia asked coldly.

“My numbers are right,” Bella insisted.

Her sib stirred beside her. “Perhaps…”

“Perhaps nothing! If you’d been helping me instead of wasting time staring into space, we wouldn’t bein this mess!”

Shy Bella bowed her head submissively, but judging from the dark shadows under her eyes Arkady seriously doubted she’d been slacking. In fact, she’d lost several kilos since they came out of cryo, and she and her sib were now worrisomely easy to tell apart even before they opened their pretty mouths.

Someone jogged his elbow: the other Aurelia. She was worried about her sib, and her usually confident face showed it. “What does Arkasha think about the numbers?” she asked Arkady in a nervous whisper.

He cast a furtive glance at Arkasha, who was sitting at the other end of the consult table, his shoulders turned away just enough to isolate himself from the rest of the group, flicking through a sheaf of densely inked printouts.

“How should I know?” he said bitterly. “I haven’t exchanged twenty words with him since we woke up. I couldn’t have seen less of him if he’d been ducking out of airlocks to avoid me.”