The Darwin Elevator

Chapter Three

Platz Space-Ag Station 12

13.JAN.2283

Tania Sharma watched with keen interest as a swarm of tiny black ants carried away the remnants of a fallen avocado. The fruit, dark and rotten, lay discarded on the white tile floor.

Above her, the huge tree that had dropped it grew in a chaotic sprawl, gray branches flush with green leaves. It extended out in all directions from a central tube filled with a nutrient-rich synthetic soil. A gentle breeze stirred the leaves into a sporadic dance, taken up in sequence by the entire orchard. The gusts came every three minutes, exactly on schedule. Each time the wind blew Tania inhaled deeply, trying to identify all the smells carried by it—a fun exercise, hopeless as it may be.

The “sky” above dimmed, then brightened, as the station adjusted to keep sunlight pouring in. Articulated mirrors directed the beams in through expansive borosilicate windows. Tania had memorized the layout and programming of the farms as a child, fascinated. She’d studied the crops grown, their genetic modifications, and their ideal soil composition. Everything she could find, her young mind insatiable. Even now, at twenty-six, the orbiting farms gripped her imagination.

“Missed one, did we?”

She turned at the familiar voice.

Neil Platz bounded toward her in the low artificial gravity, a childlike movement that belied his mane of silver-gray hair. For her own part, Tania preferred full Earth gravity, which most stations maintained, but she knew the agriculture platforms were configured for optimal plant growth, not human comfort. Each ring of the station rotated at a different speed, depending on the crops grown. Apples grew best in a fraction of Earth norm, while potatoes hit their optimal yield in a pull slightly more than Mother Nature’s. That always struck Tania as particularly curious.

The grin on Neil’s face told of his joy at being here, light on his feet. Despite his age, he exhibited more zest for life than anyone she knew. He’d dressed casually today, black slacks and a simple white sweater. A fresh pair of running shoes adorned his feet.

She smiled at the sight of him. “Missed one what?”

Neil landed in a graceful stance in front of her, dropping to a knee to study the avocado. “This little bugger. The ants don’t seem to mind.”

“The ants just follow their genes.”

“Cheapest cleanup crew I ever hired,” he said. “Marvelous efficiency.”

Tania smoothed her plain blue jumpsuit and folded her hands across her lap. “You wanted to see me?”

“Indeed,” he said. “Thanks for coming all this way.”

“I love it here, the air is so … it’s delicious, really.”

He drew in a deep breath, and nodded. “I’ve missed you, dear girl. You look radiant, the very image of your mother.”

“I like the beard,” she said. “It suits you.”

He scratched at the gray stubble covering his chin. “Ran out of bloody shaving cream. I hope the scavengers will find more.” He spoke with an Australian accent, as strong as ever, despite his time living in orbit. Tania found it charming.

“Did Zane come with you? I haven’t seen him in so long.”

“My brother is on Gateway, keeping the council at bay.”

“Four months is a long time between visits,” she said, enunciating the words so that Neil would catch her chastising.

He broke away from the insect parade and moved to sit next to her on the bench. “I’ve been preoccupied. But now, this climber blockade …”

Tania knew then why he’d called, why he wanted a personal meeting in a tranquil place. A shift in priorities, an end to pet projects. Four months had passed since she’d made her request, four months of silence, and now he’d kill it officially.

She bit her tongue, allowing her disappointment to fade. “The power fluctuation on the cord. It’s that serious, is it?”

“Hah!” he barked. “Some sure want it to be. The self-styled king in Nightcliff has grasped the opportunity with both hands and shut everything down. Just the excuse he needed.”

“Shut down until when?”

Neil looked up as another waft of air stirred the branches. “Until he gets a satisfactory explanation.”

“Well,” she said carefully, “it is unprecedented. We should have a team look into it.”

He waved off her remark. “Relax, dear. I’m assigning Greg and Marcus to study that. You’ve got a more important project to work on.”

A rush of excitement coursed through her, a feeling quickly dashed by anxiety. Neil swore her to secrecy every time the theory came up. She glanced over her shoulder toward the entrance.

“We’re alone, dear. I gave the staff a few hours off. Except the ants, that is.”

She took a long breath of the fragrant air, willing herself to be calm. “I thought perhaps you’d forgotten about it.”

“Just the opposite. I can’t get the idea out of my head.”

“I’d nearly given up on the theory, Neil,” she said, conscious of how meek her voice sounded. “You could have told me. Why wait so long?”

He grimaced.

Tania studied him closely, looking for any subtext in his expression, and as usual found little. She knew his face better than her own dad’s. Sometimes when she dreamt of her father, rest his soul, he wore Neil’s face.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I had preparations to make.”

“Preparations?”

He leaned back on the bench, tilting his face to the reflected sunlight, and closed his eyes. “Tania, you’re a brilliant scientist. The best I’ve got. But there’s politics to consider. If your theory is correct, the world is going to change. Again.”

“Maybe. Until I’ve been able to analyze—”

“I need to be ready for what happens if you’re right,” he said. His voice took on a full, sonorous tone, one Tania knew only from his speeches to the Orbitals, or the citizens of Darwin in times past. He’d never spoken that way to her before, not when they were alone.

Since she first voiced the theory three years ago they’d discussed it often. Sometimes over hot tea in his opulent office on Platz Station, sometimes over terse interstation messages. Neil gave her the original spark, an offhand comment that the Builders “probably weren’t done,” though he maintained he’d said no such thing. Tania took the idea and ran with it, theorizing that they might be on a specific schedule. The disease had come almost twelve years after the Elevator, 11.7 to be precise, and it made sense to her that if they were to return it would be after a similar time period.

“Maybe they’ll get lazy, take longer,” Neil had said in a message four months ago.

Tania’s tunnel vision fell away with that remark. Or … what if they come sooner? What if they’re here and we missed it? She’d called Neil in a mild panic, asking him to find the data she needed right away. He’d said he would look into it, and avoided the topic since.

“It’s just …” She paused. “Granted, we might have years, if they’re even coming back at all. But we could just as easily be too late already. Without data, it’s impossible to know.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

“Plus, the analysis may take ages. If my assistant, Natalie, could help … She’s brilliant—”

“Forget it,” Neil said. “Secrecy is paramount. You must do this alone.”

The breeze picked up again, rustling the leaves along the line of trees.

“It reminds me of the ocean, that sound,” Neil said. His voice now fatherly, again. “Waves on the shore of Nightcliff, before the disease came.”

“I barely remember it,” Tania said. “Bits and pieces. My home has always been up here.”

He smiled. “I used to walk with your parents along the rocks, discussing their research of the Elevator. Your father and I took turns carrying you. You hated to get your feet wet.”

The mirth drained from his face then. Tania knew this expression well—an inevitable outcome when her parents became the topic of conversation. He’d be thinking now of how they died, and she hoped he wouldn’t talk about it.

She was twenty-one at the time, in the first days of the disease. Her mother, a doctor, had rushed back to India, hoping to find a way to stop SUBS. A fool’s errand, in hindsight. Tania never heard from her again.

At the same time, Neil had sent her father to one of the older space stations the company ran, one far from the Elevator. But a freak accident destroyed the place. Her father had been the only person aboard.

Neil felt responsible for them, despite Tania’s assurances otherwise. They were gone, along with almost everyone else. She found it hard to mourn her parents with so many dead.

She changed the subject. “You were saying, about preparations?”

“Yes,” he replied. “You know we’ve spent years trying to complete another habitat station. Hab-Eight.” When she nodded, he continued. “Well, it’s much closer to completion than the council realizes. It’s better if you don’t know more. Point is, I’ve been stocking it like a bomb shelter, just in case.”

“In case … what?”

“What, exactly,” Neil said. “The unknown, one of my least favorite things. Which is where you come in.”

“There may be nothing to it. It’s only a theory.”

“A brilliant theory,” he said, a hint of annoyance in his voice. “There’s something to it, Tania. I know it. Call it a gut feeling, I don’t care.”

She nodded, slowly, despite her disagreement. She couldn’t make that kind of mental leap, not without evidence. “Without the data—”

“That’s why I wanted to see you today. The data.”

Excitement rippled through her again, and she couldn’t suppress it now. The anticipation of discovery was too strong. “You have it!”

“Not yet,” he said, then noted her disappointment. “Soon, I hope. It’s a difficult thing you’re asking. Any venture beyond Aura’s Edge is risky as hell, and your data is quite far from Darwin. It’s going to cost me a small fortune.”

She said nothing. Neil’s concern about spending a fortune, however small, depressed her.

He’d become the richest man in the world when the space elevator connected to Earth on land he owned, some seventeen years ago. Platz Industries dominated the ensuing renaissance in space activity. Neil ran the company with ruthless efficiency, Tania’s father always nearby as his chief scientist.

She caught glimpses of that Neil, the business tycoon, too often. From her perspective none of that mattered anymore. Wealth should no longer have a place in society, and yet it remained—ingrained in the psyche.

Neil went on. “They’ll have to take their own air and water. Put their lives in the hands of environment suits made decades ago. One little puncture, Tania, and that’s it.”

Tania knew all this. She’d studied SUBS, as much as one could. Little had been learned before the bulk of the human brain trust perished. It bore some similarity to Alzheimer’s, a disease cured almost a century earlier. Only one detail mattered: Outside Aura’s Edge, the disease killed most people in less than four agonizing hours. Around 10 percent survived only to be left in an animalistic state, “devolved,” their primal urges and emotions amplified beyond what the sane mind could handle. Entering Darwin would not help them. The Aura did not cure SUBS; it only put the virus in stasis. Leave its relative safety, and once the inactive cells contacted active ones, they’d wake and grow again.

A microscopically small percentage was totally unaffected.

“Point being,” Neil said, “I’ve set things in motion. Today, in fact.”

“Then we’ll have it soon?”

“Patience, dear. Even if the data is out there, they have to find it, bring it to Darwin, and get it up here. All difficult tasks.”

Her mind raced. She knew of the scavenger crews in Darwin; their adventures beyond the Aura were often talked about. The romance of danger and adventure in forbidden places. Tania assumed the stories to be greatly exaggerated by the time she heard them. “Who did you hire? Someone trustworthy, I hope?”

“I have no idea.” He patted her arm. “Nothing to tie me to it, should things go awry.”