Chapter 3
AGUINALDO—Day 1
As he approached the open-air hall, Ramis realized he had attended only one other Council meeting in his life. Political discussions and tedious plodding through red-tape mazes of motions and counter-motions and rebuttals and addenda bored him.
But now it seemed that most of the Aguinaldo colonists were trying to push their way into the hall. Their future hung on what the Council of Twenty would decide in the next session.
He had attended that other Council meeting when he had been twelve years old, four years before. Dr. Sandovaal was testifying about the course of agriculture and food production on the colony—about some of the work Ramis’s parents had helped him begin before their accident.
Sandovaal had at first seemed a mysterious and frightening man, spiteful for no particular reason, and Ramis’s parents were in awe of him. But that Council session—where Sandovaal debated, and defeated, the Aguinaldo’s agricultural specialists—had elevated the stature of the unorthodox Filipino bioengineer on self-imposed exile from Earth.
Ramis could still see Sandovaal’s ruddy face shaking in rage. “In order to produce a viable food source in space, we cannot just attempt to grow the same old feed crops!”
Sandovaal put an expression of supreme distaste on his face, glaring at the other agricultural specialists and speaking in a mocking voice. “Listen to you—rice and wheat! Corn and abaca! Are you idiots? Do you have tumors for brains? Those crops adapted to Earth’s planetary environment—it took them millennia to perfect themselves in that particular ecosystem. Here on a Lagrange colony, plants grow under completely different rules.
“Do you begin to see? Have you opened your eyes? We are not on Earth anymore. It requires us to take a radically new look at how plants and animals are put together. We must first acquire a new feed crop for our animals—a crop high in protein, but without a high overhead to produce. After that, we shall be free to develop new crops for ourselves.”
After Sandovaal had stirred their anger, he then smugly presented his first samplings of wall-kelp. Ramis knew that was the way Sandovaal always did things—he made his opponents angry to get their attention, then slapped them in the face with what they should have seen all along.
Sandovaal’s preliminary wall-kelp data astounded the Council. The genetically modified kelp, combined with some traits of chlorella algae, had an unheard-of growth rate, incredible efficiency for waste conversion, and—most important of all—a digestible mass of protein. Since the wall-kelp was photosynthetic, it produced oxygen as it grew. It was a starting place, a beginning success for Sandovaal’s team. And Ramis’s parents had worked with him on it.
Back then, when the Council members and the audience gave Sandovaal a standing ovation for his work, the old scientist sniffed, as if he had expected nothing less. . . .
Ramis smiled to himself at the memory. He came back to the present as Yoli Magsaysay rapped the podium for order. The hall overflowed with people: many squatted on the steps and in the aisles. The noise nearly overwhelmed the PA system. Magsaysay rapped once more. “Quiet, please. Let us begin.”
The dato cleared his throat. At first, his voice could not be heard, but the president continued in the same low tone. Like his famous namesake in Philippine politics several generations before, Yoli Magsaysay knew how to handle people. The room grew still.
“... reminded that the Council hall has a tradition for holding open meetings—especially in this instance, where everything will affect us all so profoundly. However, if we are unable to hear each other speak, I will be forced to clear the hall.”
Magsaysay scanned the room. Only the rustle of people trying to get a better view disturbed the silence. The air-conditioning hummed, turned to high. Overhead, several sail-creature nymphs drifted near the core. Ramis glanced up, looking for Sarat.
The dato spoke again. “Who started the War? Who won? Who survived? All contact has been severed, so we do not know and we may never know. But that is not our problem.
“We may be forced to survive on the Aguinaldo without help from Earth. No supplies—only the resources we have here now.”
He ticked off the points on his fingers. “That means no food. No clothing. No appliances. We have the Sibuyan Sea, but water is still going to be a problem. We have only leftover Moon rubble for raw materials. Even though the construction site of our neighbor, Orbitech 2, is barely a hundred kilometers away, we have no means to get there. We must assume that the Aguinaldo has to be totally self-sufficient from now on.”
Magsaysay placed his hands on the podium. His big eyes looked very sad.
“I have purposely presented the situation in the bleakest terms. The Council must consider this situation when we make our decisions. If we are too optimistic now, we could doom our entire colony.”
Magsaysay raised his gray eyebrows. “Dr. Sandovaal, would you and your staff please brief the Council of Twenty on your projections?
“Most certainly—you must have named me chief scientist for a reason.”
A nervous titter brushed across the hall as Sandovaal led his entourage of assistants on the stage. Dobo Daeng shuffled over to the large-display holotank. Sandovaal cleared his throat and tapped the microphone pad. The speakers squealed as he breathed into the pickup, making him jerk back. He glared at the microphone.
“Mr. President, members of the Council, for the past four years my associates and I have been tracking the progress of my wall-kelp. You will recall that the Council wisely voted to adapt the kelp as the Aguinaldo’s main source of feed for our livestock. In addition, the actual crop space the wall-kelp has replaced is minimal.”
Ramis wrinkled his nose. The stagnant smell of the wall-kelp had been the basis for numerous insults and expletives invented by the Aguinaldo colonists.
“Luis, we all appreciate your work,” Magsaysay said from his seat to the left of the stage, “but at the moment, we need to know your projections of our ability to survive using our current supply of foodstuff.”
Sandovaal’s expression grew stormy. Ramis drew in a breath, expecting an outburst from the scientist.
“President Magsaysay, since you ask the question so bluntly, I will answer it bluntly: What are our chances of survival using our current supply of foodstuffs? The answer is none. Zero. No chance whatsoever. It is a simple calculation—anybody can see it.”
He stopped and stared around at the faces stunned into silence. His blue eyes looked very cold. Magsaysay struggled to his feet and opened his mouth to speak, but Sandovaal waved him into silence.
“Dobo, display the data. Show them.”
Dobo touched the controls. A set of graphs appeared in the giant holotank. The curves rotated, then the window zoomed in on a chart labeled ASSETS—CURRENT CROP PRODUCTION.
Dr. Sandovaal spoke over a growing murmur in the crowd.
“The blue line is our current population. The red curve is our crop surplus, decreasing as we consume more than we produce.” He waited a beat, then continued. “As you can see, these two curves intersect at a point not three months in the future. That is when we start getting hungry. Shortly after that, I expect fighting and widespread killing. From that point, we cannot calculate accurately how long the survivors can last—it depends on how many there are after the riots.”
A shout rang out from the back. The hall’s sergeant at arms scuffled with the person and ejected him. Ramis felt a surge of despair ripple through the gathered people. After watching the War on Earth, this was too much in one day. Ramis no longer felt proud to think of the part his parents had had in Sandovaal’s work. Dobo looked up, frowning at Sandovaal’s attitude.
Magsaysay looked beaten. He held up his hands. His low voice barely projected over the rising din. “Quiet! Please allow Dr. Sandovaal to continue.” When the sounds ceased, the dato turned to his chief scientist. “Luis, are your numbers correct?”
“The calculations are simple—you will find no errors. But I was talking about something much more important when you interrupted me. Several years ago we succeeded in producing a highly efficient feed substitute.
“When you tasked me this morning with projecting the Aguinaldo’s food supply, you placed ridiculous restrictions on what we are capable of doing. You said ‘using our current supply of foodstuff and allowed for nothing else. That is nonsense. The answer is staring you in the face. Maybe a few hunger pangs will improve your intellect.” He cracked his knuckles in front of the microphone pad, making a sound like muffled gunshots.
“Now, this second set of charts is also correct.” Dobo quickly changed graphs in the holotank.
Sandovaal allowed the people to study the new curves in silence. He seemed to be forcing down a smug smile. The red and blue lines in the holotank held an uneasy balance, but never intersected. The supply of food remained above the consumption level.
Magsaysay stared and frowned. “What does this show?”
“What do you think? It is certainly not a new idea. A few minutes ago I tried to explain our only way to survive, but you were not interested. You wanted only the bottom line, so I gave it to you. By continuing our present course, wasting too much time and too many resources on inefficient crops, we will starve in a few months.
“We must act immediately if we are going to save the Aguinaldo. As you can see from the curves, we have little margin for hesitation or error. If we decide quickly, we can survive—we can all survive.”
“What is it we have to do?” Magsaysay asked. “Make it plain for those of us who are stupid.”
Sandovaal turned to stare at him. He didn’t seem to notice the slight sarcasm in the dato’s tone. “Just look at the data! What do the curves tell you?
“We must grow wall-kelp on a massive scale. Use all our available space. Cover the viewport end, the athletic fields, the grazing lands.”
The senator from Cebu interrupted. Her accent was heavily Americanized, since she had grown up near the bases. “But wall-kelp tastes like water buffalo manure. And it damn well looks like it, too.”
Ramis thought Dr. Sandovaal was going to jump over the table and strangle her. “I presume you have tasted both?” he asked.
Over the snickers, the chief scientist shook his fist at the statistics displayed in the holotank. “We have the means to survive—for all people on the Aguinaldo. But we must act now. So what if the wall-kelp’s original purpose was animal feed? Will that make you lose sleep at night when you are starving? So what if it tastes worse than tofu or taro? It is protein, and we can produce it fast enough to meet our needs.”
The chamber erupted into scattered shouting. Ramis found himself realizing with a half-smile that Dr. Sandovaal had done it again: shocked his audience, then rubbed their noses in the only possible answer.