Cibola Burn

Chapter Twenty: Elvi

Sitting outside her hut, her hand terminal resting on her knees, the now-familiar sunlight warming her neck and back, Elvi waited for the reports from Luna to buffer. The comm laser on the Edward Israel was the only conduit back to the worlds she’d known, and it was swamped with technical data flowing out from the workgroups on the planetary surface and the sensor data from the Israel. It was sobering to realize that for all the tragedies and fear and death that wracked New Terra, most of the raw data going back home was still technical. And her slow connection was more than the townspeople of First Landing had. The Barbapiccola didn’t even support a feed for them. Their hand terminals were strictly ad hoc, local, line-of-sight networks if they functioned at all.

A breeze lifted a whirl of sand, then set it gently down again. High above, the green clouds scattered apart and rejoined, lacing the blue sky like algae floating on the surface of a pond. The air smelled of heat and dust and the distant presentiment of rain. The reports finished loading and Elvi pulled them up and spent a long hour reading them, listening to the debates, putting together her perspective. It was harder than she liked. Her mind kept jumping around without her.

Everything was changing on the planet so quickly, everything was so different than she’d expected it to be, that just maintaining focus was hard. The voyage into the desert, seeing a two-billion-year-old mechanism actually still functioning, if only barely, had been revelatory. Then the exposure and destruction of the terrorists among the squatters, which should have been a relief, had left her oddly unsettled. And, though she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone and never would, she’d been suffering recurring and intrusive dreams about James Holden.

On the screen, the research coordinator’s report ended, and Elvi realized she hadn’t heard any of it. She sighed, restarted it, and stopped it again before the woman back at the RCE labs on Earth could say anything. Elvi looked up at the sky, wondering where the Rocinante and the Barbapiccola and the Edward Israel were, hidden by the atmosphere-scatter of blue. One of the plant analogs beside the path leading back to the town let out a volley of rising clicks. It was something she’d wanted to investigate, but she hadn’t had the time. Not yet. “Doctor Okoye,” the research coordinator said from sixty AU away, or half a galaxy depending on how you looked at it, “I’ve just come from a meeting with the stats team, and I wanted to bring you up to speed on the plan for how we’d like to proceed with the data collection in the next weeks. The Luna group especially was hoping to request additional sampling on several of your initial subjects so that we can narrow our error bars…”

Elvi listened, focused, pushed away all her other thoughts and feelings. This time, she ended the report with a list of action items, a clear sense of how her work was changing the resources and plans of the labs back at home, and a half dozen questions about mineral sequestration that she wanted to ask Fayez. Protocol said she should record a reply and send it out right away. The hours it would take to reach home meant it would arrive before the morning meetings. But instead, she switched to her organizer and began listing her obligations. Water samples and soil samples. Samples of three different plant analog species. A report on the alien artifact…

She’d been thinking about possible triggers to the artifact’s sudden activity, and since Holden had been there and was, after all, the mediator who was ultimately responsible for making the situation on New Terra better—sensible, sane—she thought maybe, if she could give a solid reason that the artifact in the desert wasn’t moving in reaction to their presence, it would take something off his plate. Just as a kindness, and to help support him in making peace.

Certainly it wasn’t just that she was generating excuses to see him again.

She went down the list of things to do, then paused. At the end, she wrote, Letter of recommendation for Felcia Merton. She sat for a long moment, looking at the words, trying to decide how she felt about them. She erased the line, waited, and then entered it in again.

Walking into the town was like entering another world, and a harder one. The dirt streets weren’t empty, but the people who walked them stayed closer to the walls than they had before. The smiles and nods, the eye contact and simple greetings were all gone. The townspeople walked quickly, with their heads down. Elvi had the urge to stand in their way, block them with her body until they acknowledged that she was there.

The building where it had happened stood near the edge of town. The fire had melted what it hadn’t burned. The bones of the structure still stood, charred and tilted in the afternoon sun. She paused before them. They reminded her of something, but she couldn’t quite remember what. Something dead. Something about fire.

Oh. Of course. The artifact, burning in the desert.

Two of the RCE security force walked down the street in front of her, striding in the middle of the road. She couldn’t make out their words, but the tone of the conversation was bright, loose, and celebratory. One of them laughed. Elvi turned, walking toward them. As they passed, one of them lifted a hand in greeting and Elvi returned it automatically. Across the street, one of the Belter women—Eirinn her name was—stepped out from a door, saw the security forces, and hesitated before she came out into the light. Elvi watched the woman walk, her head a little too high, her shoulders pulled a little too far back. Nothing proved fear like the effort of rejecting it. First Landing had belonged to that woman once.

Elvi stepped into the commissary, hoping to find Holden at his traditional table. The room was dim, and it took her eyes a moment to adjust. The other one, Amos Burton, was there instead, eating a bowl of brown noodles that smelled of fake peanuts and curry. In the back, Lucia Merton sat in a booth with someone. Elvi looked away before the doctor met her gaze.

Amos looked up at her as she came close.

“I was wondering if Captain Holden… I wanted to talk with him. About the artifacts? In the desert?”

“Something happen with it?”

“I had some theories about it that I thought might be… useful.”

Oh good God, she thought. I’m stuttering like a schoolgirl. Thankfully, Amos didn’t notice, or if he did he pretended not to.

“Captain’s off getting ready to transfer the prisoner,” Amos said. “Should be back around sundown.”

“All right,” Elvi said. “That’s fine. If you’d tell him I was looking for him? I’ll likely be in my hut by the time he’s back. He can find me there.”

“I’ll let ’im know.”

“Thank you.”

She turned away, fists pushed into her pockets. She felt humiliated without being entirely certain why she should. She was just going to offer some perspective on the artifacts and the local ecosystem. There was nothing about it that was at all inappropriate or—

“Elvi!”

She felt her belly drop. She turned toward the back, toward the booth where Lucia Merton sat. Fayez had swiveled around in the chair and was waving at her. She looked at the door to the street, wishing there was some graceful way to get through it.

“Elvi! Come sit. Have a drink with us.”

“Of course,” she said, and walked toward the back of the commissary, regretting every step as she took it.

Doctor Merton looked pale except for the bags under her eyes. Elvi wondered if the woman was ill, or if it was just distress and grief.

“Lucia,” Elvi said.

“Elvi.”

“Sit, sit, sit,” Fayez said. “You’re standing there, I feel short. I hate feeling short.”

Elvi smoothed the fabric of her pants and slid in next to Fayez. His smile was beery and amused. Lucia’s glance at her was almost an apology. You could have sat next to me, she seemed to say.

“We were just talking about Felcia,” Fayez said, then turned to Lucia. “Elvi is the smartest person on the team. Seriously, do you know that she’s the one who wrote the first real paper on cytoplasmic computation? That’s her. Right there.”

“Felcia’s told me about you,” Lucia said. “Thank you for being a friend to my daughter.”

Your family tried to kill me, Elvi thought. You shared your bed every night with a man who wanted me dead.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “She’s a very talented girl.”

“She is,” Lucia said. “And God knows I tried to talk her out of being a doctor.”

“You were hoping she’d stay?” Elvi asked, and her voice was more brittle than she’d intended.

“Not that, no,” Lucia said, laughing. “That she’s leaving this planet is the only good thing that’s happened since we came. It’s only that I’m afraid she’s doing it because it’s what I do. Better that she find her own way.”

“It’s a long way to Luna,” Fayez said. “I mean, I had five major courses of study before I fell in love with geohydraulics. I was going to be a brewer. Can you imagine that?”

Elvi and Lucia said Yes at precisely the same time. Elvi smiled despite herself. Lucia stood.

“I should go get Jacek,” she said.

“Is he all right?” Elvi asked. It was a reflex. A habit of etiquette. She wished she could take the question back even as the words left her mouth. The doctor’s smile was wistful.

“As well as can be expected,” she said. “His father is leaving today.”

Taken prisoner on the Rocinante, Elvi thought, but said nothing.

“Your money’s no good here,” Fayez said. “It’s on me.”

“Thank you, Doctor Sarkis.”

“Fayez. Call me Fayez. Everyone else does.”

Lucia nodded and walked away. Fayez shook his head and stretched, his arm reaching behind Elvi’s shoulders. She shifted to the opposite side of the table.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

“What am I doing? You think that’s the question?”

“You know that her husband—”

“I don’t know a damned thing, Elvi. Neither do you. I’m rich in interpretation and poor in datasets, just the same as you.”

“You think… you think it’s not…”

“I think that building was filled with terrorists, and that Murtry killed them and saved us. That’s what I think, though. I also think that the more the locals know and love me, the less likely it is that I’ll be scalped in the next uprising. And… and what is civilization if it isn’t people talking to each other over a goddamned beer?” Fayez said, then lolled his head back over his shoulder. “Am I right?”

“Fuckin’ A,” Amos called back. “That sure is whatever you were talking about.”

“That’s right,” Fayez said.

“You’re drunk.”

“I’ve been doing this for a while,” Fayez said. “I’ve probably had drinks with a third of the people in this shithole. What I want to know is where the rest of you are while I’m making peace.”

For a moment, she could see his fear too. It was in the angle of his jaw and the way his half-closed eyes cut to the left, avoiding hers. Fayez who could laugh at anything, however tragic, was scared out of his wits. And why wouldn’t he be? They were billions of klicks from home, on a planet they didn’t understand, and in the middle of a war that had now killed people on both sides. And how odd and obvious that it would be a victory for their side—the nameless, faceless killers identified and killed or imprisoned—that would call up the panic.

Fayez was waiting. Waiting for the next escalation. The other shoe to drop. He was reaching out for whatever control he could find or hope for or pretend into being. Elvi understood, because she felt just the same, only she hadn’t known it until she saw it in someone else.

He scowled down at the table, then, slowly, his gaze floated up to meet hers. “What are you doing here?”

“Sitting with you, apparently,” she said.

Waiting for the other shoe.