1
MEETINGS AND MISSION
“MY MONEY’S on the plant.”
The antique clay pot on the windowsill ignored Mac’s comment, preoccupied with containing the immense aloe that folded its lower thick leaves over the pot’s rim like grasping fingers and burst roots from beneath so the combination tilted in its saucer. There weren’t cracks . . . yet. But the plant would win. Time, toughness, and a single-minded refusal to accept barriers to its growth. Mac approved.
Not that she had time on her side.
Her “pot” was this waiting room, her discomfort in it undoubtedly a pleasure to the man whose offices filled the remaining two-thirds of this floor. Mac was convinced those who ran the Wilderness Trusts shared a disdain for those who required roofs and meetings, begrudging any budget toward such things—even for their own staff. This building was shabby, the neighborhood matched, and the floor space was probably donated. The waiting room? Bland, square, and furnished to test the resolve of anyone waiting. The carpet gave off a stifling aroma, a combination of stale body and damp fiber. The only window had been frosted for no imaginable reason except to prevent gazing at anything but the imprisoned aloe on its sill. The reader on the side table? Never worked. There was a framed piece of art on the wall not occupied by window or closed, forbidding door. As this was an aerial view of a dense forest, with the words: “Leave Me Alone!” blazoned in threatening yellow across the center, Mac’s eyes automatically avoided it.
Dr. Mackenzie Connor, just “Mac” to anyone she cared about, avoided the mainland’s cities, including this one, just as automatically. Her preferred environment was at the ocean’s edge, where the tallest structures were snow-covered peaks. It wasn’t hard to confine her excursions to the halls and labs of academia, with the occasional foray into shopping or visits with her dad. At one time, she’d even been able to avoid entanglement in the many layers of bureaucracy and politics that governed Earth and her solar system. During elections, Mac would ask Kammie, who was as political as they came, which representatives were most likely to keep or raise funding levels for their work and would vote accordingly. It kept her life simple.
Until Mac encountered the politics of the Trusts. One Trust in particular. The one whose Oversight Committee consisted solely of the man sitting on the other side of that door.
Mac glared at it, well aware that Charles Mudge III knew to the second how long he could make her wait before she’d throw something.
There was an Oversight Committee for each of the Wilderness Trusts beading the western coast of the Pacific, from the Bering Strait to Tierra del Fuego. Their mandate, like such Trusts elsewhere on Earth, was identical and straightforward: keep the Anthropogenic Perturbation Free Zones, Classes One through Fifteen, exactly that: off-limits to Humans or Human activity.
As an evolutionary biologist, Mac approved. To become a Trust, these fortunate patches of nature had to have been undisturbed for a minimum of two hundred years—some perhaps for the extent of Human history. They were standards against which to compare restoration and preservation efforts elsewhere, not to mention a source of biodiversity for the rest of the planet. Earth had come a long way since relieving her Human population pressure by moving much of it, and her heavy industry, offworld. She had a long way left to go, and the rules protecting the Trusts were part of that journey.
Unfortunately, as senior coadministrator of Norcoast Salmon Research Facility, located just offshore of the Wilderness Trust that encompassed the shoreline and forested hills surrounding Castle Inlet, Mac found herself in the unexpected position of asking for those rules to be, if not broken, then seriously bent.
Mac sighed and went back to the room’s only chair, the seat’s padding warm from the last time she’d sat on it. She liked rules. They helped people behave in a reasonable manner, most of the time. Unfortunately, other living things tended to run rampant over rules, blurring boundaries and refusing to conveniently exist in isolation. Case in point: Castle Inlet. Norcoast’s mandate—her mandate—from Earthgov was to conduct ongoing studies of the metapopulations of local salmonide species, a valued Human food source as well as a crucial portion of the energy and nutrient web of the area. Fine, but that meant more than counting fish in the ocean and waterways. Salmon were essential to the surrounding forest and its life, their bodies carrying nutrients from the ocean depths to land. The forest organisms, in turn, were essential to the vigor and health of the waterways the salmon needed in order to reproduce. Researchers at Norcoast thus required access to the land as well as water. Earthgov, through the Office of Biological Affairs, had readily granted Norcoast’s scientists that access.
Legally, that should have been it. However, a clause in the Wilderness Trust charter granted each Oversight Committee the power to ban any specific encroachment it deemed detrimental to the life therein. Which put Mac in this same chair, watching the aloe fight its pot, twice each year. Once to deliver, in person, the details of all research proposals for the coming field season, complete with Norcoast’s planned precautions to avoid any anthropogenic interference with the Trust lands.
Once a year, in other words, to beg permission to continue their life’s work from Charles Mudge III.
As if that wasn’t demeaning enough, Mac was also required to report, in person, any and all slips in those precautions, no matter how minor, that may have occurred during the course of the field season, these to be included in the Oversight Committee’s annual catalog of outside, undue influence.
Once a year, in other words, to grovel and confess their sins to Charles Mudge III.
Today’s meeting would be one of the former: begging. Mac winced. Regardless of having plenty of practice, she wasn’t good at it. Arm wrestling, verbal or otherwise, was more her style.
It had only been an hour and thirteen minutes since she’d arrived. Too soon to be pacing and scowling, though Mac admitted to temptation. To keep still, she pulled out her imp—a tougher-than-standard version of the ubiquitous Interactive Mobile Platform carried by almost everyone on or off Earth—from the ridiculous little sack she’d been forced to carry. No pockets. She laid the stubby black wand on her left palm and tapped her code against its side with a finger of the other hand. In answer, a miniature version of her office workscreen appeared in midair, hovering at the exact distance from her eyes that she preferred.
Just as Mac was about to review the access request she knew by heart, she glanced at the black, unblinking vidbot hovering at the ceiling. Pursing her lips, she disengaged the ’screen and put the imp away.
Privacy wasn’t an option on the mainland.
Not that she’d anything to hide, Mac assured herself. It was the principle of the thing.
Time. Time. Time. She folded her hands to resist the urge to fiddle with her hair. It was, unusually, tucked up and tidy. As was she, dressed in her mainland business suit and borrowed shoes. There’d been the expected startled looks from those at Base when she’d left this morning. Dr. Connor, professor and friend to an ever-changing group of grad students every summer—when not investigating the evolutionary impact of diversity within migratory populations—typically went about her business in clothing with useful pockets, her hip-length hair in a braid knotted into a loose pseudo-pretzel, and her feet bare or in waterproof boots with decent tread.
A fashion statement she wasn’t, even now. Mac had reluctantly taken her father’s advice after graduating, investing in The Suit for those all-important tenure interviews. Ironically, she’d landed her first choice without it: Norcoast, where she’d been a student herself.
Which made The Suit a decade and a half out-of-date. If she waited long enough, Mac thought pragmatically, its short jacket and pleated pants would come back in style. The dark blue weave was, in her estimation, timeless, if a trifle warm for this time of year.
The dress shoes were Kammie’s, Mac’s not having survived being worn through waves and sand one memorable night. Dr. Kammie Noyo was the other coadministrator at Norcoast and loaned her favorite shoes with the clear expectation that Mac wouldn’t mess up the applications of Kammie’s own lab and students. Mac squinted down her legs and flexed one ankle, wondering who in their right mind would design footwear to topple the wearer down the first set of stairs she might encounter.
But it would be worth the shoes and Suit. Worth the wait. Worth whatever it took. It had better be, Mac amended, time crawling over her skin. This meeting was unusual and an alteration in routine never sat well with Mudge. She’d been here, as always, midwinter to confirm his permission—however grudging—for this field season’s projects. However, thanks to Emily’s—Dr. Emily Mamani’s—recent accomplishments in the Sargasso Sea, Mac had seen an opportunity to move her own work up by three years, maybe more. With that motivation, she’d chanced Mudge’s temper and scrambled to get the changed request to him by spring, hoping for permission before the early fall salmon runs—her target—approached the continental shelf. But with the damnable timing of bureaucracy in general, suspicious timing from an organization and individual that surely understood that much of the natural world it was supposed to protect from Human interference, she was in this waiting room when she should have been calibrating sensors at Field Station Six.
The salmon were coming.
And Emily was late. Emily, who could charm a clearance from Earth customs, let alone a curmudgeon who called himself a committee.
Mac scowled at the empty room. Emily, her co-researcher and friend, was never late for the start of their field season. The first time would have to be this one, when so much was at stake.
The plant caught her attention and Mac transferred her scowl to its pot, willing the aloe to grow faster and shatter the damn thing. She contemplated helping it along by tossing pot and plant at the door. Satisfying, if hardly beneficial to her own cause.
With impeccable timing, the door in question abruptly opened wide enough to let a slice of face and one pale eye peer into the room. “Dr. Connor,” said a voice with clear disapproval. “You’re still here.”
“Yes, I am,” Mac confirmed. “You’d think I had nothing else to do but wait, wouldn’t you?”
“The office is about to close for the day. I suggest you come back tomorrow.”
The thin smile stretching Mac’s lips was the one which gave inadequately prepared students nightmares, but all she said was: “You’re new here, aren’t you?”
The opening remained a slit, as though the person on the other side, older and female by the voice, preferred a barrier between herself and imagined hordes in the waiting room. “I’ve been here since last fall, Dr. Connor,” complete with sniff. “You really should go—”
Mac felt a twinge of remorse. Not at forgetting the woman—she tended to focus on Mudge, not the receptionists who appeared and vanished like shoe styles—but last fall had been the Incident. The Oversight Committee, namely Mudge, had been outraged by the report of a near-attack by a grizzly, an episode he treated, with intolerable smugness, as incited by the grad student in question. He’d claimed the student had grossly interfered with the animal’s normal movements through the forest—a serious charge, possibly enough to cancel Norcoast’s access.
Upon hearing this, Mac had forced her way past the futile protests of a pimpled young man into Mudge’s office, there dumping a bucket of distinctly ripe salmon on his desk. The so-called incitement had been no more than a similarly fragrant sample on its way back to the lab. The bear, needless to say, had willingly followed the scent and student. The Wilderness Trust didn’t control the air.
She’d made her point, but Mac hadn’t wished to cost someone their job. Still. Mudge seemed to have a limitless supply of new staff. She leaned back comfortably and gazed at the eyeball in the door slit. “You can go home, if you like.”
The door closed. Mac sighed and raised an eyebrow at the vidbot’s lens. “The game’s getting old,” she told it, in case anyone was watching.
“Norcoast.”
“Oversight.”
“Counting this—this change of yours, Norcoast, there are three more applications from your facility than last year.”
No apologies, no pleasantries. Not even names, as though to Mudge their roles mattered more than their own existence. Mac couldn’t disagree.
She ran a finger along the edge of the bare, gleaming white table separating them, gathering her patience around her.
The man with authority to grant or refuse the land-based portion of Norcoast’s research was florid in face and manner, with a body determined to stress the midline of his clothing. How many underestimated him? Mac wondered. Their mistake, not hers. Charles Mudge III’s lineage could be traced back to the earliest wave of loggers to settle the Pacific coast and, beyond any doubt, he was obsessed with its forests. Castle Inlet’s forests in particular, since it was partly his great grand-mother’s doing that so many of its slopes had remained pristine enough to qualify for Trust status. Mudge vehemently opposed any Human presence in the Trust.
Mac was here, as she had been each of the past fourteen years—in The Suit—to arrange just that. “I turned down twenty from my staff,” she replied calmly. “We understand the restrictions, Oversight. We follow them.”
Mudge looked rumpled and aggrieved, not that Mac could recall seeing him otherwise. Now he scowled at her, his round face creased with wear and sun. His cheeks and chin sported the beginnings of a beard, mottled in gray, red, and black despite the brown hue of what hair struggled to cap his shiny head. “You’d better. Castle Inlet gains Class Two rating in fifty-one years, three months, and two days. If it survives your scientists. And you know what that means. No exemptions, none. I plan to be there on that day, Norcoast, to see your people ousted permanently.”
Mac hid her dismay. The active lifespan of a Human was lengthening with each generation—on Earth, anyway—so it was entirely possible she and Mudge would continue these meetings into the next century. Sit in that waiting room another hundred times? For a moment, she seriously considered delegating the job, something she’d never done—even to Emily the charming. Then Mac looked into Mudge’s small and anxious eyes, read the determined defensiveness of his hunched shoulders and lowered head, and gave a slow, respectful nod.
“I’ll be there,” she promised. “Norcoast will be overjoyed to see the Castle Inlet Wilderness Trust reach its four hundredth birthday unspoiled. We aren’t at odds on that, Oversight, by any measure. Now, about my application?”
She knew better than to hope for a curt “yes” and an end to waiting. Sure enough, Mudge tugged his own imp from a chest pocket and set an enlarged workscreen between them, one that reached to the ends of the table and almost touched the ceiling. Proposals and precautions formed chains of text in the air, most glowing red and trailing comments like drops of gore. She’d been afraid of this. He’d complain about everything possible all over again, a knight defending the virtue of his forest against the pillages of field research.
Elbows on the table, Mac propped her chin in her hands and plastered an attentive look on her face.
Good odds the aloe plant would escape before she did.
The hired skim deposited Mac on the deserted pier, in time to watch the second-last northbound transport lev rise and bank out over the harbor. The driver was apologetic and willing to take her somewhere else; Mac paid him and sent him away.
She didn’t mind this kind of waiting, the kind where the city lights played firefly over the dark waters of the bay, skims darting from building to building in such silence the lapping of waves against the pylons rang in her ears. She took her time walking to the pier’s end and discovered a small series of crates there, a couple stacked atop one another. Taking off Kammie’s dress shoes with a groan of relief, Mac placed them carefully on a lower crate. She climbed the stack, sat on the topmost, and dangled her bare feet over its edge, admiring the view. She had time, all right. The final t-lev of the night would be late; its driver lingering at each stop so as not to strand anyone.
Meanwhile, the cool sea air held pulses of city heat, scented with late summer flowers. Mac half closed her eyes to puzzle at the scents, letting the tension of her meeting with Mudge escape with every exhalation, feeling her bones melt. Castle Inlet was too far north for plants that couldn’t take a little bluster and gale with their winter. Bluster. She smiled to herself. Mudge had certainly done enough of that, but even he’d found nothing in her changed request that would impact his precious Trust. Not for want of trying. In his own way, he was as tough as the aloe.
Mac’s hands strayed to her hair, tugging free the mem-ribbons making it behave. Loose, the stuff drifted down her back and arms until Mac swept it forward over her right shoulder and began to braid, fingers moving in the soothing, familiar pattern.
The meeting hadn’t been a disaster. Chalk one up for diplomacy, Mac decided proudly. It sounded better than saying she’d managed to keep her temper. They’d had their share of confrontations in the past; times when she and Mudge had shouted at one another until both were hoarse. Once, he’d walked out in a fury. Only once, since Mac had proved herself willing and able to camp in his office for as long as it took. Today? He’d agreed to her request, confirmed all but one of the existing permissions, insisted on onerous but doable increases in their precautions, and been, all in all, reasonable. For Mudge.
Now one of Kammie’s grad students would have to travel up the coast to find a new study site. Mac could live with that, being finished with Kammie’s shoes for six months. Flexibility was worth learning, she grinned to herself. Mac always included one or more projects she knew Mudge wouldn’t allow. It let them both get some satisfaction out of the day. She’d been surprised he’d passed it in the first place.
Leaning back on her hands, Mac smiled peacefully at the city outlining itself against the night. Not a bad meeting at all.
The voice startled her out of an almost doze, an hour later. “I can’t believe you wore that thing again!”
Mac turned awkwardly and too quickly, almost falling off the crate into the bay. “Emily? What the—” Smiling so broadly it hurt her cheeks, she clambered down, her bare feet landing in a puddle of cold seawater. It didn’t dim her joy one iota. “About time—”
The glows lining the pier’s edge were sufficient to put color to the tall slim woman standing in front of her, touching a gold shimmer from a dress that was most likely the latest rage in Paris, sliding warm tan over the skin, and lifting red along the scarf supporting Emily’s left forearm. A sling?
“What have you done to yourself?” Mac demanded, drawing back from the relieved hug she’d planned to offer.
“This?” Emily raised her left arm. The scarf fell back to show a flash of white. “Little collision between the edge of a stage, a dance floor, and yours truly.”
Mac took Emily’s left hand and pulled it gently into the light. “A cast?” she said worriedly, looking up. “A bit archaic, isn’t it?”
“I had a reaction to the bone-knitting serum. Just have to heal up the old-fashioned way. Don’t worry.” The fingers in Mac’s hold wriggled themselves free. “Won’t slow me down.”
“You’re late, you know.”
“Glad to see you, too, Mac.”
Mac grinned. Looking beyond Emily, she could see a trio of skims parked near the entrance to the pier, figures unloading boxes. “That your gear? Is it—is it ready?”
“You find me your salmon run, and I’ll tell you who’s in it. Name, rank, and DNA sequence.”
A shiver of anticipation ran down Mac’s spine. “I’ve such a go
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