Cibola Burn

“What if you knew it was going to be like this? What if you could look into some crystal ball and see us here, the way it’s all happened?”

“If we could do that, we’d never explore anything,” she said.

It was very strange to think that they were all going to die. She knew it, but it still seemed unreal. In the back of her mind, a small, insistent voice kept saying that a ship would arrive to help them. That another group on the planet would show up with extra food or water or shelter. She’d catch herself wondering if they shouldn’t be signaling for help, and have to make the effort to recall that there were no other bases. No other ships. In the whole solar system, there were just the crews and passengers of three ships. And fewer now than there had been before. Even with all of them packed into the ruins together like refugees so close they could hear each other snore, it made the universe seem very empty. And frightening.

“We should find Holden,” she said. “The water’s coming slow. I wonder… Maybe he has a really good immune system? The fact that we’re all getting discharge means we’ve got some immune response to it. Like a splinter, maybe. It just grows faster than we can knock it out. Maybe Holden has some exposure that gives him antibodies to it.”

“Did the blood scans find anything?”

“No,” she said. “His white cell count is lower than ours too.”

“Maybe his eyeball juice tastes bad,” Fayez said. “What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No, but you made that little I’ve-got-an-idea grunt. I’ve heard that grunt. It means something.”

“I was just thinking that it can’t be his immune system,” she said. “I mean, we’re all traveling in hard vacuum all the time. The radiation just on the way out here probably left all of us a little immunocompromised. And especially after Eros Station, he’s had more… more radiation damage…”

Elvi closed her eyes, shutting out the green. A beautiful cascade of logic and implication opened before her like stepping into a garden. She caught her breath, and grinned. The joy of insight lifted her up.

“What?” Fayez said. “He’s overcooked? The eye thing only likes us rare, and he’s well done?”

“Oh,” Elvi said. “It’s his oncocidals. After the Eros incident, he had to go on a permanent course of them. And that means… oh! That’s so pretty.”

“Oh good. What are you talking about? Why would his anti-cancer meds work on something from a different biosphere?”

“It means there’s a Dawkinsian good move down around cell division somewhere.”

“That’s one of those xenobiology things, isn’t it? Because I’ve got no idea what you’re on about.”

Elvi patted her hands in the air. The pleasure running through her blood felt like being carried by light.

“I told you about this,” she said, “that there are good moves – maybe even forced moves – in design space because we see things that show up again and again all through different branches of the tree of life.”

“Right,” Fayez said. “Which is why we can come to New Terra and find things that have eyes and stuff.”

“Because bounced light has a lot of information in it, and organisms with that information do better.”

“Preaching to the choir, Elvi.”

“But that’s not the good part. Holden’s on medications that selectively address fast-dividing tissues. Skippy’s a fast-dividing tissue.”

“Who’s Skippy?”

“The organism. Focus here. That the onococidals work against it means there’s something like flight or sense organs near the mouth that’s going on at the level of cell division. Even though the proteins are totally different, the solutions they’re coming up with are analogous. That’s the biggest thing since we came here. This is huge. Where’s my hand terminal? I have to tell the team on Luna. They’re going to lose their minds.”

She moved forward too quickly, stumbling into Fayez. He pressed the terminal into her hands. She sat beside him.

“Are you bouncing up and down?” he asked. “Because you sound like you’re bouncing.”

“This is the most important thing that’s happened to me in my life,” she said. “I’m floating.”

“So this means we can treat the eye thing, right?”

“What? Oh. Yeah, probably. It’s not like oncocidals are hard to synthesize. Just most of us don’t need a constant course the way Holden does.”

“You are the only woman I have ever known who would figure out how to keep a bunch of starving refugees including herself from going blind and be excited because it means something about microbiology.”

“You should get out more. Meet people,” Elvi said, but she felt a little pull of guilt. She probably should try to get people treated before she started talking to the team on Luna. It was still just a hypothesis anyway. She didn’t have any data yet. “Connection request Murtry.”

Her hand terminal chimed that it was working. A gust of wind made the plastic window flutter. It sounded a little different than usual, and the constantly falling rain sounded louder. She wondered if the sheeting might be coming unsealed. There could be death-slugs creeping around the room and she wouldn’t have known. Wouldn’t have seen them. Something else she’d have to ask Holden to check. The double-tone of connection refused made her grunt.

“Who’s working on the drops?” she asked.

“Upstairs? Um. Havelock, I think.”

“Connection request Havelock.”

The hand terminal made a single chime and then stopped. She wasn’t sure if it had gone through or failed.

“Mister Havelock? Are you there?” she asked.

“I’m afraid it’s not a good time, Doctor.”

“You’re coordinating the drops? I need to see if we can get —”

“Is this something where people are going to die if I don’t fix it in the next five minutes?”

“Five minutes?” she said. “No.”

“Then it’s going to have to wait.” The hand terminal made the falling tone of a dropped connection.

“Well, that was fucking rude,” Fayez said.

“He probably has something else going on,” she said.

“We’re all under a little stress here. Doesn’t mean he has to be a dick about it.”