Leviathan Falls

Chapter Fourteen: Elvi

Elvi missed gravity. She wanted to be able to sit by Cara’s medical bay and feel the weight of her exhaustion bearing her down. The long, slight stretch along the back of her neck when her head hung forward. The heaviness in her arms and legs. She understood intellectually that she was near collapse, but the familiar somatic cues weren’t there on the float. The only one that seemed to remain was the trembling in her large muscles, and by itself that felt like fear.

Cara was strapped into the bay with wide, white bands that kept her from drifting. Her eyes were closed, her mouth relaxed and slightly open. Her lips were pale and bloodless as carved wax, with the tips of white teeth and a dark purple tongue behind them. Her breathing was deep, steady, and slow. Sedatives still worked on her and Xan despite the changes that the repair drones had made to their bodies. The drugs did metabolize faster, but that was fine. Their supplies were ample.

The autodoc was custom built with decades of Cortázar’s observations of Cara’s and Xan’s baselines. The screens were crowded with real-time blood analysis and neural activity profiles as the system tried to match Cara now with Cara where she usually was, and look for ways to bring those two datasets together. A standard bed would have been baffled, but this one showed Cara slowly returning to her standard range of function as Elvi watched and drank tea from a bulb and trembled.

They’d been in the middle of another dive, sifting through the hallucinatory sensations and inhuman memories for pieces to the puzzle of how the gates had been built and if they could be made safe. Elvi was fairly sure they’d reached the part of the alien species’ development where they’d become aware of a broader universe beyond the ice shell of their world. She’d expected Cara to get there, and that it would open the door to some of the practical answers they needed. But then Cara had started screaming that she’d been shot, or if not her, that someone had. The monitors had spiked, and her brain activity lit up like someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail into her mind.

They had restrained the panic, Harshaan Lee barking the steps of the shutdown checklist over Cara’s screams and vomiting. By the time they’d shut the dive down, Cara had lost consciousness. She hadn’t regained it until now.

Cara’s lips moved, and she swallowed. Her eyes shifted under closed lids, and then opened. Black on black, Cara’s gaze found her, and the girl tried out a weak smile.

“Hey, Doc.”

“Welcome back,” Elvi said. “How are you feeling?”

Cara paused, but it wasn’t one of the eerie, alien frozen moments. It only seemed like she was trying to find the right answer to a difficult question. “Wrung out. I’ve never been drunk, but maybe hung over? This feels like what a hangover’s supposed to feel like.”

“Extrapolating from the literature?” Elvi said, taking Cara’s hand. It felt fever-hot.

“Something like that.”

“Do you remember what happened? What went wrong?”

“It wasn’t the grandmothers, I don’t think,” Cara said. “They felt the same as always. Deeper, maybe, but the same. It was… one of the others.”

“All right. Tell me about that.”

Cara frowned and shook her head the way she did when she was searching for some very precise word. “I’m not just myself when I’m in there. I mean, I am, but I’m not just Cara. There’s more of me?”

“Like the aliens.”

“No, like me watching the aliens. I feel aliens too, but that’s like I’m watching a feed. Seeing something that’s already recorded. These others are like being everyone in the room who’s watching?”

“Like the connection you have with Xan.”

“Yes, but more. There are more of them. Only I think something happened. Something bad. I don’t know if they died. And then another one of me was trying to calm me down.” Cara’s eyes went wide, and her grip on Elvi’s hand squeezed hard enough to hurt. “Xan? Is he all right?”

“Fine,” Elvi said, not flinching. “He’s worried about you, but that’s all. He was in the isolation chamber when it happened, and it didn’t seem to affect him one way or the other.”

Cara relaxed. “Okay. Okay. All right, that’s good then.” She took a breath, settled into herself. “I saw them see stars for the first time.”

“We don’t have to do a debriefing now. You can rest first.”

“Let’s talk a little. Please. While it’s still fresh in my head.”

Elvi felt a little wave of pleasure, then guilt at the pleasure. “Only a little. Then you rest.”

Cara settled into herself, remembering the memories of others. There was a joy in her when she did. Or no, that was wrong. Not joy, but a relief. Like Elvi was pouring cool water over a burn.

“They were changing. The sea slugs or jellyfish or whatever? They were taking other bits of life, animals or plants or whatever was down at the hot core of that icy cold world. They sent them down into the vents so that they could change. Or it could change.”

“That’s been a consistent point. And, judging from how the protomolecule functioned, they kept that strategy for a long, long time,” Elvi said.

But Cara wasn’t listening. Her voice had a faraway, almost dreamy quality. “The important thing was the light.”

“You were saying that. I’m thinking that was the creation of mind.”

“A hive mind.”

Elvi shrugged. “I’ve never understood that term, really. I mean, there was an electrochemical structure with a lot of semi-independent bodies. Describe it like that, and we’re hive minds of neurons. But did it find a way to build an emergent cognitive analogical system? Yeah. I think so.”

“And when they saw the stars, it was like hearing God talking in a language you could almost understand. But not quite. The BFE wanted to show me more. It didn’t want me—us, whatever—to go. It was trying to hold on. And then the thing happened, and… If they weren’t Xan, I don’t know who they were, but they feel right when I’m in there.”

Cara let go of Elvi’s hand. She focused on something Elvi couldn’t see, like she was hearing music that only played for her.

“Don’t worry about it,” Elvi said. “Not for now. We’ll have plenty of time for the full debrief after you’ve rested. I’m going to let the team know you’re all right, and Dr. Sanders wants to come by and make sure you’re solid. Once we hear what he has to say, we’ll make some plans for moving forward.”

“I don’t want to wait. I want to go back in.”

Elvi took a sip of her tea. “I want that too. But right now, rest.”

Cara nodded and closed her eyes. Elvi waited until she was sure Cara had fallen asleep before she slipped out of the bracing on the foothold and pushed herself toward the door.

Cara spoke at once, her voice perfectly lucid and awake. Not slurred at all. “Can Xan come see me?”

“Of course, if you want.”

“He does,” Cara said, and lapsed back into silence. Elvi left the medical bay.

All around her the Falcon was subdued. The crew that ran the ship and the scientific staff that worked in it all knew what had happened, and their unease made for whispered conversations in the corridors and hallways, tight mouths and hunched shoulders. Elvi made her way to the ops deck, forcing herself to smile and nod and greet people. She hoped she was being a good leader and projecting optimism. She was afraid that she just seemed fake.

Harshaan Lee was in ops, reviewing the dataset from Cara’s aborted dive. She moved beside him, looking over his shoulder. He shifted to the side, giving her a better view.

“She says there was someone else in there with her,” Elvi said.

“Hallucinogenic presences are very common. It can be induced with a few magnetic impulses to the temporoparietal region of the right lobe.”

“Of course, we weren’t doing that,” Elvi said.

“That doesn’t mean something else wasn’t.”

“Or maybe her right temporoparietal region was firing off because someone was in there with her. Sometimes you see your grandmother because you’re dreaming. Sometimes you see her because you’re at Grandma’s house.”

“It is a conundrum,” Lee said dryly. Then, “May I touch on a less pleasant subject?”

Elvi didn’t say no. Lee took it as consent.

“I don’t mean to step out of my place, but I think we’re starting to have a morale issue with the crew. I was hoping you’d consider making an address.”

“What kind of issue?”

He shook his head like he was apologizing for his own words, and he kept his voice low. “We are the only ship in a solar system. Half a dozen tightbeam boosters, couple of repeaters at the ring gate itself, and an alien artifact big enough that if we stood on it, the gravity would crush us. That’s all there is. There isn’t even a dust cloud we could mine for ice.”

“Are we short on supplies?”

“No. But when something… odd happens with the research protocol, there is a kind of multiplier. It reminds us just how tenuous our position is here. If the water recycler broke down in a way we couldn’t fix… It would be a long, hard burn getting someplace that could give us aid before we died of thirst, and we might not make it. If it was the air recycler, we’d die. There is no one who can reroute to our aid. We all understood that when we began the mission. But some days, we understand it more clearly than others, if you see what I mean.”

She reminded herself again that the vibration in her body wasn’t fear. She was just tired, with one critical thing more that she needed to do. “Of course, I’ll address the crew. Just let me think about what to say. And thank you for bringing this to me.”

“Of course, Doctor.”

She hadn’t started in physics. It was possible to spend a whole lifetime in the biological sciences and only have a nodding acquaintance with pure physics. It wasn’t possible to be the head of the Laconian Science Directorate without getting her feet wet, if wet meant abstract high-energy physical dynamics. One of the things she’d known without fully appreciating was that the second law of thermodynamics was the only one that cared about the direction of time. The heat death of the universe had mostly been a joke about how long her thesis was taking. The idea that heat was intimately related to time hadn’t seemed strange, and some aspects of the high weirdness of the alien rings had escaped her.

The man on her wall screen was David Trujillo, and at four hours into his presentation, three and a half of which had been a careful and painstaking walk through a forest of explanations and justifications for which mathematical techniques his team had used in interpreting the data, he was getting to the phase she thought of as dumbing it down for the biologist.

“The key is the difference between the reactions provoked by the magnetic field generator in Sol system and the lack of provoked response in the ring space itself. We’ve been aware of the energetic amplification effect of ring gate technology. For example, energy sent into the ring station causes a release of high-energy particles through the gates, and the energy of this release is orders of magnitude greater than the initiating event. This asymmetry was exploited in the design of the field generator. The assumption was that this was a borrowing of energy from someplace else within complex local space-time. If, as these results suggest, that’s not accurate, and if the ring gate space is a bounded membrane within an alocal, acontiguous space-time—”

“Is he saying something?” Fayez asked from the other side of the cabin. “Because he sounds like he’s just barking.”

Fayez was exercising, strapped against the wall by resistance bands and pushing against them the way she should have been. When this was over, her bone density was going to be a problem. That was for another day.

“I’m sorry. I’ll listen on private.”

“No, no. This is me starting a conversation. Getting attention from my sweetheart. Mocking the guy she’s paying attention to by saying how he’s barking.”

“He’s barking about something.”

“Are you sure?”

She stopped the report playback and stretched.

“When the Tempest destroyed the defenses on the alien station in the ring space,” Elvi said, “the enemy didn’t respond. When it destroyed Pallas Station, everyone in Sol system lost consciousness, and one of the bullets showed up on the Tempest. Trujillo thinks it shows that the ring space isn’t part of our universe.”

Fayez relaxed, the bands pulling him back against the wall. He pushed out again, grunting. “I didn’t know there was an option.”

“The field generator uses antimatter as a primer, but there’s not enough power in a couple handfuls of antimatter to spaghettify a station. The design was developed based on the half-built ship or whatever it was that was in the construction platforms when they were turned on.”

“The one they called the Proteus?”

“Basically, it makes a tiny, transitory ring gate, which releases just a lot of energy for free. And apparently, it’s violating entropy. Which means time.”

“Entropy only runs one direction. Primary school physics requires three hours of barking?”

“He’s saying wherever it’s getting that energy from doesn’t play by our rules.”

“We knew that, though.”

“We suspected it.”

“Do we know it now?”

“We suspect it harder,” Elvi said. “We’re scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we’re wrong.”

Fayez chuckled, strained, relaxed. He was waiting for her to laugh with him, but she didn’t have it in her. Worry bloomed on his forehead and the angle of his lips. “Are you all right?”

“There were two more.”

He stopped, looked at her, and shrugged off the straps. “Two more what?”

“Events. Galbraith system saw a transitory change in lightspeed.”

“How long did it last?”

“Literally an unanswerable question, but about an hour. Bara Gaon lost consciousness for eighteen minutes. The people who went through it said there was no halo effect, no visual disturbances, just”—she snapped her fingers—“eighteen minutes later.”

“That’s new.”

“It’s all new. It’s all experiments, and none of them are mine. And those are just the ones we know about. If the poking and prodding wasn’t someplace we know to look for it, it could be happening much more often. It could be happening right here, right now.”

He pushed off through the cabin. She was ready to bristle at his touch, too tense for the extra burden of physical contact. He only braced beside her and looked at Trujillo’s face, paused on the playback.

“How’s Cara?” Fayez asked.

“Fine. She seems fine. I’m a little concerned about these others she’s talking about. I know she and Xan are connected somehow at the back, and there are other things back there. Amos Burton went through the same thing they did, and if she’s connected with him through the same bridge that’s… That man’s head isn’t a place I’d want to live. But…”

He didn’t push. He let the silence do it for him. Elvi sighed.

“I’m getting a picture,” she said. “I’m starting to understand what built the rings, and how their minds worked. Or mind. Even when I don’t understand how their technology works, I’m starting to see the obstacles they were trying to overcome, and that’s actually a pretty good starting point. But…”

“But you’re wondering how that can be good enough, when the thing they were fighting against killed them and is coming for us.”

“There’s so much about that I don’t understand. What the bullets are.”

“Scars where their attempts to break us permanently fuck up part of reality?”

“Sure. Maybe. But how? What does it do? How do they work? Can we use them to get back to wherever these things are? And how come sometimes they black out one system at a time, and then other times, it’s everywhere? Why do they blow off locality and then leave a scar or bullet or whatever it is that’s in a place and tied to a local frame of reference?”

“And how do you stop them?”

Elvi wiped away a weary tear. “And how do I stop them. Everything’s riding on this. Earth, Mars, Laconia, Bara Gaon, Auberon… They all die if I don’t solve this.”

“If someone doesn’t solve this,” Fayez said. “We’re one ship, and we’re on a very promising track. But we’re not the only ones looking.”

They were silent together, only the hum of the ship around them. She shifted, putting her head against his arm. He curled toward her, kissing her ear. “When was the last time you slept?”

“What’s this sleep you speak of? Sounds nice.”

He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her gently through the cabin to the sandwich board where she slept when a sack against the wall wasn’t enough. She didn’t undress, just slipped between the slabs of gel and let them clamp gently down on her, holding her in place like a giant hand. It was the closest analog to climbing into bed under a pile of blankets, and as soon as he dimmed the lights to a sunset red-gold, she felt sleep rushing up for her like she was falling. Like she was capable of falling.

“You need anything?” he asked, and his voice was soft as a sand dune washed by a breeze. Despite everything, Elvi smiled.

“Stay with me until I fall asleep?”

“My mission in life,” Fayez said.

She let her eyes close and her mind wander. She wondered what it would be like to have Fayez in her private mind the way Xan and Cara, and maybe Burton, were in each other’s. It had to have some physical element, some center or locus of control that used the same alocal effects that let the gate builders stay connected, neuron analog to neuron analog, through whatever strange dimensions they’d traveled. Maybe if she compared brain morphology, she could find it. Real-time communication between systems would change everything. Assuming anyone was still alive to talk.

She was on the edge of dream, half convinced that the Falcon had a university campus in it and that she was preparing to give a lecture, when she roused and chuckled.

“Yes?” Fayez said, still there.

“Lee wants me to give the crew a pep talk. Help shore up morale. I told him I would.”

“Any idea what you want to say?”

“No clue,” she sighed.