And now, dear reader, I must part the curtain for a moment and take my first part in this drama. While I am your humble narrator and chronicler, it is also true that I had a hand in the events that I describe. For, you see, it was I who brought the bioplague to Nereid.
I came like a sneak thief in the form of a cloud of asteroids, and sent down to Colonel Sherman a message with the recipe for the bioplague encoded in it. I thence took up residence dispersed among the rings of Neptune until such time as I might be of further assistance. There had been pacts to wipe certain forms of grist from the knowledge of humanity, and it was true that this particular variant was stricken from the merci. But those who depend upon the merci for all their information are fools indeed, especially if they want to be thorough and historical about it. Things are lost from electronic and quantum storage devices that still survive in those old chemical bondage machines, the books. I have plenty of books, let me tell you. Great rooms full of them, and, yes, I have read them all. You can do a great deal of reading in one thousand years. Where was I?
My point was that along about the time when nanotechnology was first coming into its own, before the time of the Met, even, there was an effort to use nano to improve farming methods on Earth. In this case, the effort consisted of substituting certain animal genes for DNA in plants on a cell-by-cell basis. This was mostly done with mammals and beans, and was an attempt to make those bean plants “warm-blooded” to an extent. I shan’t go into the technical details, although I can point you in the right direction should you want to look them up (one might start, for example, with Psyche Toomsuba’s comprehensive Artificial Speciation and the Genesis of Mammaliform Brachiation in the Legume Family. Or take up Peter Ober’s Mouseflowers, which is intended for a more general audience (already I digress and there can be no end to it if I do not arbitrarily close the parenthesis)). Someone suggested that human DNA might just as well be used as that of any mammal, and a paradigm was suggested, but the suggestion was laughed out of the journals—only to be taken up by the military.
The stuff—with human DNA in the mix—was eventually made and tested in Guatemala. A group of volunteer soldiers quickly became part of the jungle as a result, literally. The stuff was infectious, it seemed, and did not obey the usual grist “harm not human life” overrides, since it was designed to reengineer exactly the human genome. The tests were discovered five years later by a Russian journalist, who published a full account in the Russian tabloids of the time. This caused a furor, but was not believed until the story was independently confirmed by E.U. military whistleblowers (the original experiment had been a joint German-French venture called Project Alsace-Lorraine). There was a big sensation, and the then E.U. Parliament voted on the information ban. This was, incidentally, one of the “containment principles” that later led to the Information Consortiums of the 2400s, to the genesis of the ECHO Alliance, and which had repercussions until recently, being the precedent for the reproduction and expiration constraints put on free converts in the Met.
So, as a result of the E.U. decision, the mammaliform-legume grist specifications were deleted from all known databases. But, of course, someone had written them down, and, of course, I happen to have run across a copy of that notebook at a yard sale in Fountain Valley, California, put on by the surviving children of a Caltech professor to get rid of their dad’s old nonnegotiable leavings. I haunt such affairs, let me assure you. (The professor’s name was Elton Rigor, by the way, and I was, at one time, tempted to name the bioplague grist the Rigor Mortise, but settled, instead, upon PAL, for Project Alsace-Lorraine.)
But “proto-PAL,” as it were, was created before the advent of grist as we now know it, and modern grist, with its quantum-computing and information-storage properties, allows for the creation of a PAL strain that is reversible and nonlethal. This was the information and sample that I sent down to Sherman on Triton. But the reason that I was fairly certain that this biogrist might be effective where a more advanced and lethal form might not be, is its archaic lineage. Modern military grist had been developed from very different directions. The effect, I reasoned, was somewhat like throwing smallpox-ridden blankets upon a population from which the disease had been wiped out and for which no one received inoculations anymore.
So the humans on Nereid were not dead—except for the few unfortunates who had managed to be caught outside by the PAL infection—but were put into a stasis. Each new “plant” cell had an additional set of DNA held in a protein capsule. The individual’s brain had not been compromised by the grist, but was sustained by a fluid delivered by the plant growth. It was all run, I later learned, by photosynthetic energy conversion using the moon’s muon-exchange fusion power plant. This would have to be eventually supplemented by energy from the Mill, or some other source, or dieback, and actual human death on a large scale, would begin. The real problem was not the threat of mass death, which was slight, but the fact that the people were not unconscious. They were merely fixed in place and cut off from all sensation—other than certain vegetable ones. There are actually several survivor accounts, and at their best, they make for interesting reading if one ever wanted to develop an idea of how a plant feels. Most of the survivors went on to be excellent gardeners, further enhancing Triton’s reputations in that regard. But I am getting ahead of my own story.
As you perhaps have guessed already, my name is Tacitus, and, as I told you earlier, I am one of the cloudships of the outer system. There is more to tell in that regard, but suffice it to say at the moment that my brothers and sisters had not, at this time, seen quite the threat to themselves in Amés, and the impending war, as had I. They are, perhaps, not to be blamed too severely. I am, after all, a professional historian and ought, if anyone can, to be the first to apply the lessons of the past to the present. Of course, we historians often fall short in this regard and substitute our own preferences and failings for an actual analysis. I have certainly done this myself on more than one occasion. But I like to think that I was right this one time and that, by timely action, I may have had a hand in saving the day. But the vanity of an old geezer such as myself is enormous, and it may be that Roger Sherman would have figured a way out of his initial predicament even without my aid. So be it. Allow an old ship to be, at least, a legend in his own mind.
With the withdrawal of the Montserrat from the immediate area of Neptune, Sherman had gained a bit of breathing room. After Nereid was rescued, army forces entered into the Jihad and “cut out” the nearly twenty thousand plantlike soldiers of the DIED. It was impossible to reverse the PAL grist, except all at once, and while many of these soldiers died, some were able to “reroot” in the pressurized park into which they were thrown. Most of these soldiers were unconscious at the time of their transformation, and most remained so during the PAL ordeal. I anticipate that this entire operation will be looked upon as a war crime by some. All I can say in its defense was that the times were dire and steps were taken to save a great many lives that might just as well have been sacrificed to make things easier. I have to admit, though, that the incident troubles me to this day, and my relationship with green and growing things has never been the same since. I see the eyes of the dead in green life, and sometimes a simple houseplant can leave me feeling accused and convicted of atrocity.
The Jihad became the first ship in the outer-system navy. It was rechristened as the Boomerang and had quite a history over the next few years, eventually acquiring a personality and volume until she (she was female) served as the point ship in . . . well, now I am really getting ahead of my story. The Boomerang did good service more than once, I assure you.
Where was I? Yes, I did not risk a merci communication with the ground forces on Triton when I arrived at Neptune, but depended, instead, on my meteor drop. It was sheer luck that my bit of rock did not kill anyone, for I had to shoot the thing directly down upon New Miranda, avoiding mines in orbit (not so hard for a one-meter-wide rock as for a ten-kilometer-long ship) and generally dropping the capsulated message directly upon everyone’s heads. Fortunately, it was picked up, tracked down, and it landed in one of the stretches wiped clean by the passage of the rip tether two and a half e-days before, where it was quickly retrieved by an Army team. I had inscribed the exterior: “Urgent: For Ground Commander” in several languages, so it was pretty obvious that this was not your ordinary meteorite.
It was detected and the message delivered. I had included several bits of seemingly forgotten lore; the PAL grist was only one of this number. All were subsequently tried at various times during the conflict, some with success. I repeat for all prospective despots, kings, saviors, democratic freedom fighters, and the like: Frequent rummage sales. You never know but you might pick up the secret of universal domination at one, and at a sweet price.
But I will leave off here and retreat into the backstage shadows for the nonce. Only I leave you with this warning: You may have guessed at the outcome of the war even now, or may know it from other sources, but I would have you consider that neither side really wins in a war. It is not a coin toss when everybody is dying. So before you thrust this account aside as beside the point, consider that, for every man and woman who fights in a war, if they live, they win. And if they die the way they wanted, they sometimes win. And everyone loses, because it had better not have been. And the dead are truly dead. The drama is in each human’s soul, where everything is always at stake, and the house enjoys killing odds.