Lifeline by Kevin J. Anderson Page A

staring out at the enclosed world around him.
    It was, after all, time to begin the new phase of trans-genetic research to follow up on his brilliant success of the wall-kelp. Take it one step farther. Like that sail-creature debacle he had pushed.
    Sheepdogs.…
    ***

Chapter 8
    ORBITECH 1—Day 8
    The fountain jets in the Japanese garden looked like spurting diamonds. Karen Langelier watched with wonder as each droplet of water rose to its apex, hung there for a prolonged instant, then began its glide back down to the pool. She listened as the drops hit the surface, like a slow-motion rain shower. Her eyes glinted, and she smiled at the beauty that low gravity gave to the downpour.
    Karen closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, smelling the air, the moisture, the plants. Relax, unwind. Then you can get back to work on the new weavewire process. She moved around the fountain to look at a burst of magenta, button-shaped blooms. The gardener, Hiro Kaitanabe, kept a variety of flowers in bloom, mixing the scents like a master tea blender.
    She was glad Kaitanabe refused to label the plants with their scientific names. Karen was a polymer chemist, not a botanist, and had little grasp of Latin names for living species. Scientists loved to name and categorize things, but sometimes it became a little oppressive. She wanted this place to feel like a park, not a plant museum.
    She had come to the garden to empty her mind, to get away from thinking. To forget about the War, her work … her estranged husband back on Earth. To distract herself, Karen spent too many hours in the lab, surrounded by chemicals, analytical instruments, and polymer spinnerets, using the clumsy techniques of working without gravity.
    She could work out her problems, somehow. She was strong enough for that.
    Karen wandered along the manicured aisles of bushes, listening to the fountains, the recorded bird song from tiny speakers hidden in the branches. Kaitanabe knew just how much sound and how much silence to add to his garden. Warm illumination glowed from the walls and ceiling, simulating sunlight. Brighter lamps shone out of artificial Japanese lanterns for those plants that required more light.
    Karen wore comfortable clothes—stretch jeans and a sweater—under her lab coat, which she rarely removed because she always needed the pockets for her personal paraphernalia, computer, calendar-beeper, black licorice candy. Anything she had to carry consciously, such as a backpack or a purse, always seemed too much bother.
    Part of her wanted to hurry back to the lab, to bury herself in work again. She thought she had just made a major breakthrough, found a much faster way to draw out the monomolecular weavewire she had pioneered years before.…
    No, she would stay here and just let some of the calmness soak in for a while, seek that quiet place in her center where all the ideas originated. She had been consciously teaching herself how to relax, but it was very difficult.
    She glanced down at the meandering stream pumped by slow turbines under the floor. She looked a little haggard, but she’d had ghosts of gray in her red hair and laugh lines around her eyes long before the War. Leaving Ray had done that to her—the trial separation to see if they would fare better together or by themselves. A year at L-5 doing her work, giving her time to think … and at the end of her assignment, then they could decide what to do.
    But the War had decided for them, and she and Ray would never have the chance to find out. Even if he had not been killed in the exchange, they were separated by circumstances more final than any divorce.
    Karen did not close her eyes against the pain, but her vision became focused on a faraway place. Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to. It sounded corny and simplistic, but she believed it.
    As she rounded a corner of hedges, Karen came upon Hiro Kaitanabe, bent over a flower bed of cream-colored lilies. She was about to greet