The Winter Over(92)
“It was you?” Cass swallowed. “You really killed everyone?”
“Of course not. Not directly. I inserted a catalyst here, removed a social barrier there. Not so very different than what happens in any true crisis, isn’t that so?”
“Why would you do that? What could be worth all those lives?”
“Oh, Cassie.” Biddi sighed in disappointment. “Think of every drought, every natural disaster, every man-made catastrophe you’ve ever heard about. What happens? Social constructs we’ve built up over thousands of years disappear in a flash. People kill one another for a crust of bread or a gallon of gas.”
“What’s that got to do with any of this?”
She lifted an arm, gesturing upward to include all of Shackleton. “The crises I fabricated here are nothing compared to what we’re going to face in the future. If we want to continue as a species, it’s not enough to know who can face up to a crisis and survive , we need to know who’s going to transform . And, more importantly, how.”
“You’re telling me this year’s winter-over was a dry run for the apocalypse?”
Her face was obscured, but Biddi’s smile came through her voice. “A wee bit melodramatic, perhaps, but yes. And you needn’t be so negative, dearie. We’re on the cusp of colonizing other planets, creating habitations in the Sahara and at the bottom of the sea, aren’t we? Extraordinary achievements that might be accomplished by exceptional individuals . . . but what happens when ordinary people are asked to do the same?”
“Did you learn what you needed to? Was it worth it?”
“On the whole, no. Our tests are already sophisticated enough to weed out the weak and the infirm. My models predicted nearly everything that happened—from Jun’s suicide to the final riot—on the basis of the psych surveys all of you took a year ago. But TransAnt’s little team of pinheads decided there was nothing like a field test to confirm the theory.”
“And did it?”
“Yes. The prognosis is not good. We started with forty adventurous, intelligent, resourceful subjects. Two of you seemed to show signs of crisis growth. You and Ayres had faced enormous personal, professional, and emotional setbacks only to come out stronger and better than when you went in. Both of you thought of yourselves as failures. Psychological messes. Dangerously fragile. But the truth is, you’re just the kind of people the world needs if we’re going to survive.”
“But you killed Ayres. And all the people he was trying to save.”
“He allowed too many people into the Lifeboat—ten might’ve survived over the long term, but not thirty. He knew that and brought them in anyway. Our future can’t be left in the hands of someone so sentimental.”
“So you locked them in and shut off the heat.”
“Yes. And to the station as a whole, of course. That was a nice feature installed on the power plant last summer.” She shrugged. “The TransAnt folks will be mortified, but they’ll come around when they see that I took the experiment to its logical conclusion. Haven’t we always benefited from pushing science through its moral hedgerow and finding out what lies on the other side? It takes someone with true courage to keep the greater good in mind.”
“But why kill everyone? You had your . . . results.”
“Forty-odd legal inquiries would taint the value of my conclusions, I’m afraid. Better to purge the subject pool and deal with the fallout later, don’t you think? Dead men tell no tales, as those rascals the buccaneers used to say.”
“Biddi,” Cass said, grasping for words. “You’re insane.”
“It’s just big-picture thinking, my girl. You’re disappointing me, by the way. I was ready to rank you as the highest performer. But now I’m not so sure.”
“Does that mean I’m to be purged, too?”
“Cass, the ugly reality is that, in any experiment, even the rat who finds the cheese is killed at the end.”
Biddi’s ice axe was an overhand blur, the spiked head aiming for the top of Cass’s skull. But at the first sound of the change in Biddi’s voice, Cass had begun leaning away, and as Biddi moved toward her, swinging the axe like a lumberjack, Cass threw herself backwards, backpedaling and scrambling to get away.
Hampered by the awkward cold weather gear, Biddi’s swings were clumsy and poorly placed, throwing her off balance. Cass turned and ran down the darkened tunnel. She’d thought briefly about standing to fight, but couldn’t imagine trading blows with the person she’d called her friend, no matter what madness she’d just confessed to.
Her breath came in gasps and spasms as she shrugged off the rucksack as she ran, trying to shed weight. The ice axe, she kept.
Behind her, Biddi crooned her name, calling for her to stop. Cass pelted down the tunnel, the light from her headlamp bobbing in time with her panicky strides. She struggled to pull in clean, steady breaths; she felt the bite of that axe in her spine, and the fear caused her breathing to stagger and choke in her mouth.
Calm down. Breathe. In through your nose, out through your mouth .
She raced for the oldest ice tunnels of the original station, the area where she’d first discovered the sewage leak. The only sound was the scrabbling sound of her boots and her heaving gasps, broken only by Biddi’s occasional yell for her to stop.