Cibola Burn

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Elvi

Elvi sat on the crest of the hill, looking west. The morning light behind her caught the wings of thousands of butterfly-like animals. She hadn’t seen them before, but today they filled the air from the ground to twenty meters high. A vast school of tiny animals. Or insects. Or whatever other name humanity eventually assigned to this foreign kingdom of life. For her, right now, they were butterflies.

They moved together like a school of fish, independent and coherent. Bursts of color—blue and silver and crimson and green—flashed through them, seeming almost to come in patterns for a moment and then dissolving into chaos. The column of them rose, narrowing, then broadened and flattened. They moved past her in a rush, and for a few seconds she was inside the cluster, palm-sized wings fluttering gently against her with a sound like sheets of paper falling and a clean, astringent smell like mint without being mint. She smiled and raised her arms up into the cloud of them, taking joy in the beauty and the moment, and then they passed, and she turned to watch them flow through the air, tumbling to the south as if they were going somewhere in particular.

She stood and stretched, adjusting her collection satchel against her hip. The sunlight pressed against her shoulders and the nape of her neck as she walked forward into the dusty, stone-paved field. The ruins rose to the north, with First Landing not even a smudge next to them, all human artifacts hidden by the curve of the planet and the shape of the hills. All except her.

Here and there, a few butterflies remained, possibly dead. Possibly quiescent. She squatted beside one, looking into the vibrant blue of its wings, the coppery complication of flesh where its body—what she thought of as its body—folded together, interarticulated like a hinge. She put on her gloves and lifted the tiny body. It didn’t so much as flutter. Even though it meant getting less physiological data, she hoped it was already dead.

“Sorry, little one,” she said, just in case. “It’s in the name of science.”

She folded it into the black lattice, sealed it, and triggered the collection sequence. The array of sampling needles clicked and muttered to themselves. Elvi squinted up into the white-blue arch of the sky. The red dot floated about fifteen degrees above the horizon, bright enough to show through the thin, greenish clouds.

The satchel coughed, throwing out an error code Elvi hadn’t seen before. She took out her hand terminal, connecting it to the satchel’s output channel. The preliminary dataset was a mess. Elvi felt a deep, cold stab of fear. If the satchel was broken, it could take days before the one functioning shuttle could bring her a spare from the Israel. She wasn’t even positive they had a spare in the toolkit or if they’d all been lost in the wreck of the heavy shuttle. The prospect of years going by collecting data by hand and spending her nights doing dissections like she was back in lower university reared up like a ghost. She took the butterfly out. Its corpse looked almost the same as when she’d put it in. She sat cross-legged beside it and ran the satchel’s system diagnostics, chewing her lips as she waited for a fresh error code.

The readout came up clean. She looked from the satchel to the butterfly, then back again. A second hypothesis formed, as chilling as the first. Maybe worse. She picked up the dead butterfly and marched back toward the huts. Fayez’s was a small green geodesic design he’d constructed halfway down a thin hill, high enough that any storm runoff would pass it by, but not at the crest where the wind would catch it. He was sitting on a stool, leaning back against the hut. He was wearing a pair of polyfiber work pants, a T-shirt, and an open bathrobe. He hadn’t shaved in days, and the stubble on his cheeks made him look older.

“This isn’t an animal,” she said, holding out the butterfly.

He let the stool come down, its legs tapping the ground. “Good to see you too,” he said.

“This isn’t two biomes coming together. It’s three. This… whatever it is? It doesn’t have any of the chemical or structural commonalities that you’d expect to see.”

“Lucia Merton was up looking for you. Did you run across her?”

“What? No. Look, this is another machine. It’s another thing like”—she pointed at the low red moon—“like that.”

“All right.”

“What if they’re really not coming awake just because we’re here? What if they’re consistent? It complicates everything.”

Fayez scratched his scalp just above his left ear. “You seem to want something here, Elvi, but I don’t know what it is.”

“How am I supposed to make any sense of this place when it keeps changing all the rules?” she said, and her voice sounded shrill even to her. She threw the butterfly down angrily, then immediately wished she hadn’t. Not that it cared, just that the gesture seemed cruel. Fayez smiled his sharp little smile.

“You’re preaching to the choir. You know what I’ve been doing all morning?”

“Drinking?”

“I wish. I’ve been going over surface data from the Israel. There’s a chain of islands on the far side of the planet with what looks like a metric ass-ton of volcanic activity. Only so far as I can tell, this planet doesn’t have, you know, tectonic plates. So what the hell is mimicking vulcanism? Do you know what Michaela’s working on?”

“No.”

“There’s a pattern in the ultraviolet light that reaches the ground here, like it’s some kind of carrier signal. Doesn’t exist before the sunlight hits the exosphere, and by the time it comes here, complex, consistent patterning. She’s got no idea where it’s coming from. Sudyam’s workgroup has what they think might be complex molecules that incorporate stable transuranics.”

“How does that work?”

“I know, right?” Fayez said.

Elvi hung her hand on her shoulder, letting her elbow hang loose. Sweat trickled down her spine.

“I have to—”

“—tell Holden,” Fayez said. “I know.”

“I was going to say ‘review my data.’ See if maybe there’s a common structure between that”—she nodded at the butterfly—“and the big thing in the desert. Maybe I can make sense of it.”

“If you can’t, no one can,” Fayez said.

Something in his voice caught her attention, and she looked at him more closely. His fox-sharp face looked softer around the eyes and jowls. The flesh around his eyes was puffier than usual. “Are you all right?”

He laughed and spread his arms toward the horizon, gesturing at the whole planet—the whole universe—at once. “I’m great. Just spiffy. Thanks for asking.”

“I’m sorry. I just—”

“Don’t, Elvi,” he said. “Don’t be sorry. Just go on dealing with all of this the way that you do. Pile on another few layers of not thinking about it, and sail on, my dear, sail on. Whatever keeps you sane and functioning in a place like this, I will carry a flag for it. I’ll even pray with Simon on Sunday mornings. That’s how bad I’ve got it. Whatever works for you has my blessings.”

“Thank you?”

“Afwan,” he said, waving his hand. “Only before you bury your head back in your datasets again? Go see Doctor Merton. She looked worried.”

The boy sitting on the clinic table was six years old. His skin was the same deep brown as Elvi’s own, but with an ashy color to it. Not dryness, but something deeper. His eyes were bloodshot like he’d been weeping. Maybe he had been. His mother stood in the corner, her arms crossed and a vicious scowl on her lips. Lucia’s voice was crisp and calm, but her shoulders rode high up beside her ears.

“So I’m seeing this here,” she said, as her finger pulled down on the boy’s cheek, opening a thin gap between the lower lid and the roughened surface of the eyeball. The discoloration was almost invisible in the redness, but it was there. The faintest hint of green.

“I see,” Elvi said. She smiled at the boy. He didn’t smile back. “So, Jacob—”

“Jason.”

“Sorry. Jason. How long have you had trouble seeing things?”

The boy shrugged. “Right after my eyes started hurting again.”

“And everything looks… green?”

He nodded. Lucia touched Elvi’s arm. Silently, the doctor shone a light into the boy’s eye. The iris barely reacted, and Elvi caught a glimpse of something in the fluid behind the boy’s cornea, like a badly maintained aquarium. She nodded.

Lucia stood up, smiling at the woman. “If you’ll wait with him here, Amanda. I’ll be right back.”

Amanda nodded once, sharply. Elvi let Lucia draw her through the examining room door and down a short hallway. Outside, a stiff breeze had picked up, rattling the clinic’s doors and windows.

“He’s the only one I’ve seen like this,” Lucia said. “There’s nothing in the literature.”

“His mother doesn’t seem to like me very much,” Elvi said, trying to make it a joke.

“Her wife was shot and killed by RCE security,” Lucia said.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

The testing array was good, but it was old. Ten years, maybe fifteen. A long scar ran across the bottom of its screen where something had gouged at it. Elvi could believe it had made the long trek from war-torn Ganymede to come here. She was surprised it still worked, but when Lucia thumbed in her access code, the screen came to life. The sample was beautiful in its way. A branching of elegant green like a pictogram meaning tree.

“It began in the extracellular matrix,” Lucia said. “Low-level inflammation, but nothing worse than that. I hoped it would clear up on its own.”

“Only now it’s in the vitreous humor,” Elvi said.

“I was wondering…” Lucia began, but Elvi had already taken out her hand terminal and started syncing it to the array. It only took a few seconds to find a match. Elvi tapped through the data.

“All right,” she said. “The closest match is some of the rainwater organisms.” Lucia shook her head, and Elvi pointed up. “You know how the clouds are greenish? There’s a whole biome of organisms up there that have found ways to exploit the moisture and high ultraviolet exposure.”

“Like plants? Fungi?”

“Like them,” Elvi said. “It’s not where we’ve been burning most of our cycles. But it looks like a pretty crowded niche. A lot of species fighting for resources. I’m guessing this little fella was in a raindrop that dropped into Jason’s eye and found a way to live there.”

“He’s had several eye infections, but they all came from familiar organisms. This thing. Is it contagious, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t guess so,” Elvi said. “We’re just as new to it as it is to us. It evolved to spread in open air through a water cycle. It’s salt tolerant if it’s living in us, and that’s interesting. If his eyes were already compromised, he may have been vulnerable to it, but unless he starts throwing his tears at people, wouldn’t think it would go too far.”

“What about his eyesight?”

Elvi straightened up. Lucia looked at her seriously, almost angrily. Elvi knew it wasn’t directed at her, but at the terrible ignorance they were both struggling under. “I don’t know. We knew something like this was bound to happen sooner or later, but I don’t know what we can do about it. Except tell people not to go out when it’s raining.”

“That isn’t going to help him,” Lucia said. “Can you ask the labs back home for help?”

A hundred objections filled Elvi’s mind. I don’t control the RCE research teams and All the data analysis is planned out and running months ahead of where we are now and I just got another sample of a third biome this morning. She tapped at her hand terminal, saving a copy of the array’s data, then translating it into RCE’s favored formats and sending it winging through the air back to the Israel, and then the Ring, and then Earth.

“I’ll try,” she said. “In the meantime, though, we need to let people know it’s a problem. Has Carol Chiwewe heard about this?”

“She knows I’m suspicious and that I wanted to bring you in on it,” Lucia said.

Elvi nodded, already trying to think what the best way would be to bring the issue to Murtry’s attention. “Well, you let your side know, and I’ll tell mine.”

“All right,” Lucia said. And then a moment later, “I hate that it breaks down that way. Your side and mine. One of my teachers back in school always used to say that contagion was the one absolute proof of community. People could pretend there weren’t drug users and prostitutes and unvaccinated children all they wanted, but when the plague came through, all that mattered was who was actually breathing your air.”

“I’m not sure if that’s reassuring or awful.”

“There’s room for both,” Lucia said. “This scares me as much as anything that’s happened. This little… thing. What if we can’t fix it?”

“We probably can,” Elvi said. “And then we’ll fix the next one. And the one after that. It’s tricky and it’s hard, but everything’s going to be all right.”

Lucia lifted an eyebrow. “You really believe that?”

“Sure. Why not?

“You aren’t scared at all?”

Elvi paused, thinking about the question. “If I am, I don’t feel it,” she said. “It’s not something I think about.”

“Take what blessings you can, I suppose. What about the third side?”

Elvi didn’t know what Lucia was talking about, and then she heard Fayez’s mocking voice in her memory and her heart leaped. She hated it a little that her heart leaped, but that didn’t stop her.

“I’ll tell him,” she said. “I’ll tell Holden.”

In the commissary, Holden sat hunched over his hand terminal. He’d shaved and his hair was combed. His shirt was pressed. Cleans up pretty, a voice in the back of her mind said, and she pushed it away.

A woman’s voice came from the terminal, crackling and sharp. “—squeeze all the balls I can get my hands around until someone starts crying, but it will take time. And I know you’re thinking of taking this public, because you’re fucking stupid, and that is what you always think of. You and publicity are like a sixteen-year-old boy and boobs. Nothing else in your head. So before you even begin—”

Amos lumbered up from the side. His smile was as open and friendly as ever, but Elvi thought there might be a little edge to it. His broad, bald head always made her think of babies, and she had to restrain herself from patting it.

“Hey,” Amos said. “Sorry, but the captain’s a little busy.”

“Who’s he listening to?”

“United Nations,” Amos said. “He’s been trying to get your boss to let our XO out.”

“Not my boss,” Elvi said. “Murtry’s security. It’s a whole different organizational structure.”

“That corporate stuff’s not my strong suit,” he said.

“I just needed to…” she began, and Holden drew himself up, looking into the hand terminal camera. His lips formed a hard little smile, and she lost her train of thought.

“Let me make it clear,” Holden said, his voice low and solid as stone, “that this was done on my orders. If Royal Charter wants to put me on trial when I get back because I ordered my crew to disable their illegally weaponized shuttle I would be happy to—”

“Doc?” Amos said.

“What? Sorry. No, it’s just that there are some things going on that I thought he needed to know about.”

Amos shook his head in something that almost passed for sorrow. “No. Nothing’s happening until the XO’s clear.”

“No, it is, though,” Elvi said. “Not just one thing either. I found more artifacts waking up today. Some of them are passing for local animals, I think. If we’d been here long enough to build a catalog, we could tell which were which, but as it is, everything looks new. So we don’t know.”

“So some of the lizards are protomolecule stuff?” Amos asked.

“Yes. Maybe. We don’t know yet. And there’s more, because the local biome is starting to find ways to invade us. Exploit our resources. And the perimeter dome never got set up, and so all of our microfauna are just wandering around mixing with the local ecosphere and there’s no way to get it back so we’re contaminating everything and everything’s contaminating us.”

She was talking too fast. She hated this. When—if—she ever got back to Earth she was going to take some communications classes. Something that would keep her from rattling on like a can rolling down stairs.

“It’s all accelerating,” she said. “And maybe it is a reaction to us or to something we’re doing. Or maybe it’s not. And I know we’re having trouble figuring out the politics and getting along with each other, and I’m really sorry about that.” There were tears in her eyes now. Jesus. What was she? Twelve? “But we have to look at what’s happening, because it’s really, really dangerous and it’s happening right now. And it’s all going to hit a crisis point, and then something really, really bad will happen.”

And then Holden was there, his eyes on her, his voice soothing. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand and wondered whether any of Jason’s invading blindness-fungus had been on her hands when she did it.

“Hey,” Holden said. “Are you all right?”

“I am,” she said. “I’m fine. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Holden said. “You said something about a crisis?”

She nodded.

“All right,” he said. “What would that look like?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I won’t know. Not until it’s happened.”