Five #2
“Tonner and Jellit need the resources to focus on their projects,” Dafyd said. “How well they perform is going to be the thing that keeps us in the Carryx’s good graces. Everything else needs people who know how to organize what needs to be organized.”
“The physical plant,” Korham said. “Food supply. Housing. Hygiene necessities. Light sources.”
“All that,” Dafyd said, then turned to Andermus. “And security. We’re people. There are going to be disagreements. Fights. Some folks who get bad ideas that could put the rest of us at risk. We need a way to police that.”
He’s already planning for the next Ostencour , Tonner thought. Only this time, his hands will be clean . Andermus nodded, but there was a gleam in her eyes.
“And the hard part,” Dafyd continued, “is organization. Education. Finding the people who are right for the jobs we need and getting them together. Helping everyone understand why we need to do the things we need to do.”
“So,” Uuya Tomos said. “Minister of propaganda?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Dafyd said with a game, unconvincing smile. “But we need to move quickly. We have some mandates from the librarian that are going to be challenging. For the Carryx to see us as useful, we have to be self-sustaining. As a population.”
“As a population?” Andermus echoed.
Uuya Tomos spoke, and her voice was simultaneously amused and serrated as a knife. “Children. He’s talking about children.”
“I am,” Dafyd said.
“Uh,” Korham said, “not a lot of us are in our childbearing years. What percentage of our population is even fertile?”
“I’m aware of that issue, and—” Dafyd started.
“How exactly do you expect that to work?” Tomos said. “Are we going to require everyone under forty to be perpetually pregnant? Am I supposed to pick who pairs up with who? Is this one”—she gestured to Andermus—“supposed to hold them down if they disagree?”
“No!” Dafyd barked. He seemed surprised at the anger in his own voice. Tonner suppressed a smile at watching his up-jumped former lab assistant squirm at Tomos’s questions.
“No,” Dafyd repeated, gentler this time. “I’m not talking about forcing anyone to do anything with their bodies. I’m talking about lamb sacks. Like back at the medrey. Artificial placentation. Industrial gestation. The way we did for research animals. We could do that, right?”
All the eyes turned to Tonner. He shrugged. “I mean, we could. It’s another project on top of everything else. And I’m pretty sure it would be both criminal and grotesquely unethical. There were rules against doing exactly this kind of thing for good reasons.”
“We are making new rules here,” Dafyd said.
Tomos coughed out a laugh. “We? Or you?”
Dafyd flinched. “The Carryx made it clear that we need to be a living population. We can’t do that without new generations coming up. Replacement at least. Growing is better.”
“And you’ve decided we’re drawing the ethical line at forced impregnation,” Tomos said. “Nice to know you have a line.”
“The plan,” Dafyd said, ignoring her barb, “is to start with maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty embryos. We already have tissue samples from everyone the Carryx took. We can revert those back down to stem cells, make gametes out of them, implant them in artificial wombs. While they get ready to decant, we build a nursery.”
“And who takes care of this nursery?” Andermus asked.
“Everyone will take a shift caring for the kids. It’ll be mandatory,” Dafyd replied, visibly grateful that someone had asked the question.
“People are going to fall in love with the babies,” Tomos said. “They won’t be able to help themselves. It’s biology. But that’s your scheme, isn’t it?”
Dafyd nodded. He began talking faster and faster now, running down the road of his own ideas like he was trying to get the taste out of his mouth. It was astonishing to watch.
“If people want them, they can take them,” he said.
“We’ll up their calorie allowance when they do.
Even past what the kid needs, so it’s a reward.
An incentive. Then after the first new generation, maybe another hundred or two.
Space them out wide enough that we have a seed population.
When they get old enough they’ll start making babies the normal way, but as you pointed out, the population we have is too old, and there’s too much we need to do to have people taking time out for pregnancy—”
“And you think creating the babies in test tubes will make this whole thing palatable,” Tomos finished dryly.
“Don’t fool yourself. Birthing new slaves for the Carryx is an atrocity any way you slice it.
Because it’s not just kids, is it? Give people children that they love, and you put handles on their backs.
What are we going to do when the bugs can threaten to kill our babies if we refuse? ”
“I don’t like it either,” Dafyd said. “But it’s not my decision. We live or we die depending on what the Carryx pick. If there is anything we want to do, we have to do these things first. We aren’t free to go another way.”
“He’s right,” Jellit said. “We don’t have a choice.”
“I do,” Uuya Tomos said. When she stood up, Tonner expected her to go on, but she only turned and walked out of the room with a rolling gait like her hip ached. Probably it was the most eloquent way she could have put it. He found himself liking her.
“If the rest of you want to go,” Dafyd said, “you can. I can find other people.”
For a moment, they were silent. Then Andermus chuckled. “All right. So let’s assume we want to live.”
Korham cleared his throat and turned to Tonner. “These lamb sacks. What would they need, construction-wise, to work best?”
The test sacks hung along one wall, each one fixed to the metal by three hooks.
They were square, about the length of his arm.
The white of the backing was yellowed by what would act as amniotic fluid if he could keep the dialysis tubes running to and from each sack from cooling the mix down.
Solve the temperature stasis issues, and there would be little wisps of tissue in the soup in as little as a month, all of them on their way to growing up and paying taxes or whatever the Carryx equivalent was.
Tonner paced the wall, thinking about how to make that happen.
As a technical challenge, it was interesting, and he appreciated that.
The lab around him was busier than it had been since he’d come.
New voices layered over each other, almost drowning out the burble of the hydroponics.
New faces passed him as he went through his rounds.
All of them knew who he was. He had expected to resent Korham’s new team, but in practice, they were a godsend.
Korham staged himself as a facilities manager and nothing more.
When Tonner said he needed a better water supply or someone to string wire from the power conduits, Korham and his team did as they were told.
Even the ones who had been experts in some other field seemed to take on Korham’s persona of puzzle solving and service to the community.
His religious background seemed to help, which was interesting.
Tonner had never had much use for imaginary cosmologies.
“Um, Tonner?” Brun said. “We have a little problem.”
The tall man was looming behind him. Tonner wasn’t sure how long he’d been there. “That’s new. We haven’t had problems before. I wonder what changed.” Brun’s confused look was disappointing. Before his assistant could say anything, Tonner went on. “What is it? What’s the problem?”
“One of the new workers is… He’s not…”
“Show me.”
The man was at one of the new Carryx-designed machines that seemed as much animal as lab equipment. He was half a head shorter than Tonner with close-cropped gray hair and a mustache that had been groomed to within an inch of its life. His arms were crossed, and his chest puffed up like a bantam’s.
“You’re the one in charge?” the man said, each word seeming to end on a higher note than the one before.
The man was playing out his protest like he had an audience.
“I want to make it very clear that I’m not going to do this.
I am Ver Cannedan. I have spent my life dedicated to the art and philosophy of dance.
I am not a man who washes lab equipment. Do you understand me?”
“I do,” Tonner said, then turned to Brun. “This is not my problem. Alkhor wants him here, Alkhor can deal with him.”
He headed back to the lamb sacks. If the tubes were bound together so that the fluid coming in was warmed by the fluid coming out, it might be enough to keep the system stable.
Adding a dedicated heating element was possible, but overheating would be just as bad.
And the more complicated a system got, the more parts there were to fail. He’d talk to Korham about that.
“So, ah, should I send for Alkhor?” Brun asked.
“Sure,” Tonner said. “Or his new security woman. What’s her name? Andermus? See if they want to come deal with whatshisname the dancer.”
Brun nodded and darted off. Tonner watched him go.
“This should be entertaining,” he said to no one.