Living Hell Read Online Free

sessions were called Hobnobs. They were part of our Brotherhood program. I always looked forward to my Hobnobs with Sloan.
    My Hobnobs with Dygall, on the other hand, weren’t so much fun.
    ‘See if Sloan’s found out anything from Firminus,’ my mother urged, as I headed for the door. ‘About this anomaly, I mean. Your father was very vague.’
    ‘All right.’
    ‘Back by twenty-three hundred, Cheney.’
    ‘Yup. I know.’
    ‘And tell Sloan to give his mother a call, will you? I’m sick of having Sadira moan on about how she never sees him.’
    Sadira was Sloan’s mother: a Medic, like my own mum. Firminus was Sloan’s father. I don’t know why Sadira and Firminus partnered up, because they were very different, but it was an inspired genetic splice. Sloan was the result, and he combined all the best features of each parent. Though tall and slim and well-organised, like his dad, he wasn’t as stiff or as finicky. Though he had his mother’s heavy, lustrous hair and rich colouring, he never complained about anything. (Life wasn’t ever quite good enough for Sadira.) Sloan had his father’s high cheekbones, but his mother’s large eyes; his father’s incisive brain, but his mother’s smooth voice. It made you wonder if someone had broken the genetic manipulation laws. How could someone so perfectly conceived have been produced by sheer chance? That’s what I thought at the time, anyway.
    As far as I was concerned, Sloan’s only fault lay in the fact that he didn’t think much of Caromy. Though I never heard him say a bad word about anyone, his tone, when he spoke of Caromy, was slightly dismissive. I got the feeling that he considered her a little less bright than most people on board.
    Had it been anyone but Sloan, I might have wondered if jealousy played a part in this attitude. After all, Caromy was First Born, while Sloan had come in second. But resentment like that would have been illogical, and Sloan was always logical. Always.
    It was what I admired about him.
    ‘Where are you, Sloan?’ I inquired, as I headed for the port tube. (I had called him up to pinpoint his location.)
    ‘Are you working?’
    ‘ I’m always working, Cheney. You know that .’
    ‘In BioLab?’
    ‘ In my cabin .’
    ‘We missed our Hobnob today. Because of the party.’
    ‘ Yes, of course. You must tell me about the party. In great detail .’
    ‘Now, you mean?’
    ‘ Whenever you like .’
    So I went to visit Sloan in his cabin. Here I found him poring over some kind of slowly unfolding calculation on the Interface Array, surrounded by various oddly shaped, transparent vessels full of soupy jellies. I peered at these vessels, one by one.
    ‘How are the little guys?’ I queried.
    ‘Oh, thriving. No complaints.’
    ‘This one’s new.’ I pointed.
    ‘Not really. It’s garden-variety sulfolobus acidocaldarius , from the purification tanks.’
    ‘No mutations, or anything?’
    ‘Not of any interest.’
    ‘You ought to teach them a few tricks.’
    Sloan smiled.
    ‘Oh, they can put on quite a show, when the opportunity presents itself,’ he said placidly.
    I knew what he was talking about. Plexus was practically run by micro-organisms. Rotifers in the filtration ducts consumed other microbes that were harmful or toxic. Bacteria helped to repair the hull by excreting certain metals. Algae and azotobacter fixed nitrogen for the photosynthesis machines. Almost the entire Plexus cleaning system was based on microscopic organisms that quietly ate up grime and mould and bits of skin, scrubbed the air clean, processed sewage, and helped to purify water.
    Sloan was one of the people who took care of all these microbes. After two years of Rotation Assignments, he had found his niche in Sustainable Services among other ‘Sussers’ who monitored the health of our microscopic populations.
    He called the populations his ‘little guys’.
    ‘Some of our halobacterium salinarum are getting a bit frisky,’ Sloan said.