Meru, page 4
“I can’t believe that worked! Is that your usual technique?”
“Not at all, but after moving your body, it felt like the right way to pull out of the fall.”
“Your intuition beats mine by light-years. Now I have to try to do that on my own tomor—svah, during the test.”
“You won’t just try, you human knockoff—you will do it!”
Vaha converged with Kaliyu’s trajectory and squeezed zir hand.
Vaha pulled zirself into a pressurized cleaning station and watched as heat-damaged scales sloughed away. Mindless automated constructs swarmed over zir body. Zie sealed a tube over zir mouth to let some fly in. The tiny machines inspected Vaha inside and out, doing routine surface maintenance as well as a medical check.
Silver patches spotted zir blue-black skin—mild burns from zir botched Venusian exits. They would scale over in a few hours, but they’d take several days to heal fully. Zie accepted some topical pain blockers in the meantime. That had the added benefit of helping the sore muscles at the base of zir tail. Zie was overdue for cellular repairs to treat oxidative and radiation damage.
Zir body could handle some of that on its own, but everyone needed periodic maintenance that went beyond their natural systems. Vaha had pushed hard for the past half Venusian-year without enough breaks. After tomorrow, zie promised zirself, I’ll spend enough rotations attached to my womb to get myself to full health. Nishadas had a womb, but unlike the others, Vaha had one of zir own, a legacy from zir maker that marked zir potential and zir failures. Zie wished zie could rest first, but if zie missed the testing window, there wouldn’t be another for a full Venusian-year.
Why can’t I be as good as Kaliyu?
Vaha’s design was supposed to have been an improvement over zir friend’s more standard hybrid-flight genomes, allowing Vaha to transport passengers and material from the ground, through atmosphere, across microgravity, and transit the very fabric of reality itself. Kaliyu’s body could only skim a planet’s atmosphere. Zie would never be able to land and launch the way Vaha could—in theory.
Small consolation if I can’t navigate a gravity well, Vaha thought. What good are innovative genes if the person who possesses them is too incompetent to take advantage of them? At least zie excelled at reality transits. Zie had a knack for entering the mind state needed to use quantum probability senses, something Kaliyu struggled with.
The microconstructs tickled the inside of Vaha’s water-filled lungs. After they finished cleaning zir out, Vaha grabbed a rehydration tube and drank. The pure taste of melted comet-ice filled zir mouth and settled into zir stomach. Running out of water during the test would ensure failure. Zie swapped it for a bhojya tube and drank a basic nutrient solution of protein, carbohydrates, fat, silicon, metals, and minerals. The microconstructs had restocked the protective bacteria that coated zir skin and mouth and repaired any damaged solar cells on zir wings. Bhojya and biology would take care of the rest.
Vaha emerged from the cleaning station, pulsing zirself past other pilots’ bodies and into zir assigned berth. Kaliyu drifted in the adjacent spot, zir phores chased with the pastel rainbow hues of dreams. Vaha plugged zir backup engine into a charging port, then settled into zir berth. Zie replayed the maneuver that Kaliyu had shown zir earlier and hoped that rest would instill the muscle memory . . . assuming zie could fall asleep. Zie practiced the first stage of mind-clearing. Close the eyes. Bring the body to rest. Let your cartilage soften. Relax each muscle, from tip to crown.
AKSHA—PIVOT
Jayanthi sat next to Mina on their bed and watched as three other SHWAs appeared on the wallscreen. Ekene and Jean looked to be calling from home, but Li Feng’s backdrop was a domed observatory.
“I finally got some telescope time,” Li Feng said by way of greeting. “Had to show it off. How’s everyone else?”
“Still happy taking crop samples,” Ekene said. “I’m keeping my thesis adviser satisfied, too.”
“I think I found a sponsor for my movie,” Jean said. “An alloy who’s a fan of my short films contacted me. They’re in stasis, and they said they’d be happy to start a petition to get me resources.”
“That’s great, Jean,” Jayanthi said. “I’m happy for you.”
A few years earlier, Jean had wanted to travel to Antarctica and do research there, but the Committee for Intercontinental Travel had denied his request. They said he had too little tolerance for the climate conditions. The disappointment had nearly crushed him, and he’d opted for gene therapy to help him let go of the dream. On one level, she felt bad for him, but on another, she was glad to see her friend out of pain. He wasn’t much of a SHWA anymore, but he was still a friend.
Mina waved their hand as if sweeping aside a pile of debris. “I’m glad we’re all doing well, but can we talk about the only thing that really matters right now? How do we muster enough votes to pass Hamsa’s amendment so humans can live on Meru?”
The others burst into laughter.
“You’re the one studying law,” Ekene said.
“Not the same as politics,” Mina rejoined.
“We need a good counterargument to everyone saying that we’d have to modify the planet’s atmosphere,” Li Feng said. He had always followed policy matters closely, though his passion was radio astronomy. “Pushkara’s taking that angle hard. Apparently one of his human ancestors was a lead geoengineer on Mars. He’s spouting his usual lines about having witnessed the drafting of the compact and how flawless it is.”
“So he has familial guilt to assuage,” Mina mused. “And the current legal framework is on his side. This will pose a challenge.”
“He also has a long record of conservative voting,” Li Feng said, “especially when it comes to protecting the integrity of nonliving conscious bodies, including planets. The respect for his work runs deep and wide. If he says that we shouldn’t consider having humans on Meru, people will listen. We have a year and a half to convince the majority that he’s wrong.”
“I saw a poll that said eighty percent of humans don’t think we need to leave the Earth,” Ekene said. “The alloys poll slightly better, at sixty-eight in Pushkara’s favor. They have no incentive to let us leave Earth. Not only would it require them to provide safe transport for us, it would mean fewer alloys working on the surface and less Earth resources for them to take. That’s two things the alloys don’t want. The ones who’ve curbed their AAD might vote in our favor, but the rest won’t.” She made an apologetic face. “I know Hamsa’s your friend, Jaya, but none of his proposals for human space travel have gone well. He has a lot of goodwill from his tarawan days, but he’s fighting a losing battle. Humanity has spent generations weeding out its desire to explore. If we don’t care, how do we make them care?”
“I don’t know,” Jayanthi said. “But we have to try. If we can start fresh with a whole new planet, we’ll need a populace that’s more adventurous. We can let some of those characteristics come back into the gene pool.”
“How’s your genetics project going?” Jean asked. “Did Hamsa like it?”
Jayanthi made a sour face and filled them in on the previous day’s events.
“I bet someone could design a human with the right physiology for Meru,” Ekene said. She studied genetic engineering as well, though her work was on plants. “It shouldn’t require too many changes.”
The newly discovered planet had parameters remarkably similar to Earth’s. After alloys had established civilization in Sol-space, they’d sent probes, constructs, and alloys to other systems, searching purely for the sake of science. They’d discovered plenty of exoplanets, but very few came close to Earth’s mass, temperature, and geophysics. Many harbored rudimentary forms of life, which made them off-limits to anything but orbital observation. Some had developed protein structures that even alloys would find toxic. Meru was the first to have similar gravity, a human-breathable atmosphere, and minimally evolved life-forms that aligned with Earth’s biochemistry. The trouble with Meru was the amount of oxygen. At nearly 45 percent of the atmosphere, it would cause lung and vision disorders, along with general oxidative damage at the cellular level.
As the others delved further into political wrangling, Jayanthi slow-blinked to activate her emchannel and searched through the known methods for preventing hyperoxia. People could handle pure oxygen for short durations, and most negative effects would reverse after they resumed breathing Earth-normal air. No one knew what a lifelong overexposure to oxygen would cause, but they had discovered that some genetic variants could help mitigate the damage caused to lung tissue.
Jayanthi skimmed the list. Her gaze stumbled over a familiar term, HMOX-1. The new medication for her sickle cell disorder affected the expression of that gene, cranking it up so that it destroyed the free heme her sickled cells released into her blood. She’d incorporated it as a permanent change in the design she’d shown Hamsa. According to the information in front of her, the same enzyme would keep the alveoli in human lungs from corroding under continuous exposure to excess oxygen.
An idea began to coalesce in her mind like the first cells in an embryo. With sickling, the problem for the body was that the distorted cells didn’t bind well to oxygen. In an atmosphere like Meru’s, that would be an advantage, and a tweak to the genes regulating HMOX-1 would then prevent the associated lung damage. Someone with that combination ought to live a long and healthy life on Meru.
“I . . . might already see a genetic solution,” Jayanthi said, interrupting a heated discussion between Mina and Li Feng.
They stopped talking, and Mina turned to her. As Jayanthi explained her idea, Mina began to frown.
“An entire population with a condition like yours?” they asked.
“In Meru’s atmosphere, they wouldn’t get sick as often as I do.”
“Didn’t they eradicate sickle cell anemia from the human genome centuries ago?” Ekene said. “I thought you only exist because you have alloy parents and Hamsa went for a random combination from the Nivid’s historical records?”
Jayanthi nodded. “There must be plenty more like me in the database. If we could get tarawans to help with embryo design on Meru and implant those into the first wave of human settlers—”
Everyone interrupted her at once. Then they got into a new argument about Bantri and natural human reproduction versus the alloy method. Jayanthi said little. Politics had never interested her much, and she couldn’t shake loose the thought that her design for Hamsa had exactly the genes a person would need on Meru. If she stripped out the extra bits from the Z chromosome, she could make it a purely human genome. She had to tell Hamsa. If he could demonstrate the design’s viability, he’d have the classic counterargument to Pushkara’s objection: The evolved life-form adapts the environment to itself; the highly evolved life-form adapts itself to the environment.
That evening over dinner, Jayanthi mentioned her idea to Hamsa and her parents. They sat around a table sliced from a four-hundred-year-old kapok tree. She had traced its irregular contours over and over as a child, and the oils from her fingers had left a streak around the wood. A creamy-brown rabbit slept peacefully at her feet.
She began, “I might have a human DNA design that’s well adapted to the conditions on Meru.” She smiled at the pale glow of surprise from her parents’ phores. “We’d start with the genome I already made for Hamsa and strip out all the alloy genes. With the additional oxygen on Meru, my sickle cell plus some of the modifications I made could balance out to a healthy metabolic rate.”
Before Hamsa could respond, her mother said, “You’re saying that sickling would help on Meru?”
“In a way, yes. It means that the right amount of oxygen would get delivered to the body’s tissues. The problem is the lung exposure—the higher O2 level in Meru’s atmosphere would corrode the tissue over time. It turns out that the treatment I’m taking also protects the lungs from excess oxygen. The effects aren’t harmful here on Earth and would be useful on Meru.” She met Hamsa’s gaze. “In my hybrid design, I’d already modified the genes that my treatment affects. If we replaced the mother’s Z chromosome with a human X, we’d have a person who can thrive on Meru without changing the planet.”
“It’s a good idea, Jaya,” Hamsa said, “but a design alone won’t convince people. We’d need to demonstrate planetary fitness with an actual person, and then we’d have to prove that the modified genes would be expressed across successive generations. If humans were on Meru and looking to procreate, we could test your idea, but we can’t ethically make a human for the sole purpose of verifying your theory. That kind of experimentation is only allowed with people who can be remade.”
In other words, alloys.
“Could an alloy raise this experimental human on Meru?” Jayanthi looked pointedly at her parents. They’d talked about asking for another human baby, but they’d decided to wait until after her own childbearing years in case she wanted one of her own.
“We had so much trouble getting approval for you,” Kundhina said. “I doubt that TESC would agree to such an arrangement on a strange new planet.” She smiled and patted Jayanthi’s hand. “Besides, if we left, who would take care of you?”
“Can’t you do a simulation of Meru’s atmosphere interacting with this gene-set?” Vidhar asked.
“Too many variables,” Hamsa said. “We’d run into the problem of asymptotic complexity. We can verify the oxygen-hemoglobin pathway, but we have other factors to contend with on Meru. By the time we build an accurate simulation of all the planetary conditions and their interactions with Jaya’s design, we’re approaching reality itself.”
Kundhina turned to face Hamsa and Vidhar. “If we can’t make a child to test Jaya’s design, what about using an existing person?” She inclined her head at Jayanthi and raised her hairless brows.
Jayanthi blinked at her mother. Of course! She had all the requisite genes, and her new treatment mimicked a permanent up-regulation of HMOX-1. They already knew it worked with her physiology.
“You’d send me to Meru?” She’d never gone farther on her own than Mina’s house. Her head spun at the implications. She turned to Hamsa. “Would my parents come? Would they allow us to go there before the vote?”
“I wonder,” her mentor said, drawing out the word. “I could ask for a delay to the vote and call your expedition a preliminary investigation, something that the Meru Exploration Committee could approve without violating any laws. You’d be part of an alloy endeavor, not a human one. I don’t think I could justify sending Kundhina or Vidhar, though. They have no skills applicable to a situation like Meru. We’d have to find someone else to look after you, someone with an exploratory background and, ideally, with human medical knowledge in case you have trouble with your health.”
All three of their phores glowed with thoughtfulness.
After Jayanthi’s first sickle cell crisis at age four, Vidhar had requested the presence of a construct to accompany her everywhere. Keerthi had lived with them until Jayanthi turned eighteen. They’d traveled together as far as Southeast Asia once, to visit a girl—a former SHWA member—because she and Jayanthi had fallen in love. Or thought they had. They’d been seventeen at the time. The construct had kept Jayanthi safe and comfortable during the journey.
“What about Keerthi?”
“I’m not sure if Keerthi can handle space travel,” her father said.
“We’d need a pilot to take Jaya there,” Kundhina said. “Maybe they could accompany her planet-side with an incarn? With their extended memory capacity, they could store information about Jaya’s medical needs.”
“That’s a good idea,” Hamsa said. “If Jayanthi can stay healthy on Meru with no impact to its environment, then we weaken Pushkara’s position. He can’t argue that humans would inevitably demand a radical geoengineering of the planet. We’d need a second stage of research to demonstrate that children can be raised on the planet and then a third stage to show that those children could reproduce and pass on the necessary genes. The first generation would have to be made, like Jayanthi was.” He nodded, his head gaining speed until the feathers trembled, and he pressed his hands together. “Yes, this could work nicely. I’ll start drafting a research proposal for the committee right away.”
“Just a minute,” Vidhar said. He turned to Jayanthi. “What do you think? Do you want to go?”
All three of them looked at her. Jayanthi froze. When she’d spoken to Mina about it, she’d enthused about visiting Meru. She’d always wished she could travel through space like alloys did. So why did the thought of actually going paralyze her?
“I think we should all take some time to consider this,” Vidhar said. “Sending Jaya off by herself, hundreds of light-years from home, with her poor health—it scares me.”
“Of course,” Hamsa said. “I’ll be on Earth for three more weeks. I’ll start work on the proposal in case Jaya says yes, but don’t feel any pressure, my dear.”
She laughed. If it all worked, if she went to Meru and proved her fitness there, if that swayed the majority of alloy voters to alter the compact, she’d make history. No pressure, though.
Her parents discussed Meru more often than Jayanthi did. They spoke about it so much that she eventually forbade Mina from the topic during their daily visits. Her father’s phores often glowed lime green with concern. Her mother insisted that Jaya was an adult now and could make her way alone in the world. Ekene and Li Feng thought the answer was obvious. Jean expressed indifference, and Mina wasn’t sure. Of the SHWAs, only Mina had witnessed Jayanthi’s pain crises in person. They had taken time to understand her disorder and understood the risks.
At night, Jayanthi lay outside, gazed into the night sky, and replayed all the arguments in her head. The stars beckoned as they always had, but for the first time, reaching them didn’t seem like an impossibility. If the Meru Exploration Committee approved the project, she’d get to leave Earth. Not just that, she’d get to experience long-distance travel to an extrasolar system. Thamity gradients. Reality transits. Concepts that she’d spent her whole life reading about, dreaming about. Can I really do this? Her parents thought so. Hamsa, too. What would the alloys think, especially the one assigned to look after her? Most wanted nothing to do with humans and lived on Earth only because they were forced to. Would anyone want to take care of her on Meru? If she died, it would ruin their reputation. Who would take that kind of risk?
