Leviathan Falls

Chapter Twenty: Elvi

San Esteban system was one of the first wave of colonial settlements, surveyed and studied by her old employer Royal Charter Energy. It had one habitable planet, and a moon around a gas giant with a breathable atmosphere. It had the first parallax station that had mapped out the relative locations of the ring systems through the galaxy. Eighteen million people spread across ten cities, a semi-autonomous aquafarming platform the size of Greenland, and a research station in the stagnation zone of the heliosheath, 110 AU out. It had reached the technical specifications for self-sufficiency three years ago, but it still imported supplies from Sol, Auberon, and Bara Gaon.

Which was why the Amaterasu, a freighter out of Sol system with a cargo of high-purity industrial reagents and refining equipment, risked the transit and passed through the San Esteban gate.

Elvi shifted through the images the ship’s traumatized physician had sent back. She’d seen them all a dozen times before, listened to the recordings he’d made, and read the field autopsies.

The dead man on her screen was in a bag somewhere right now, heading to Laconia and the Science Directorate for a more thorough examination. Elvi tilted her head and considered the wetness along the back of the corpse’s jumpsuit, the tightness where death bloat had pressed the fabric smooth, the way eyes had sunken as they’d given up their moisture to the air. According to his ID and the genetic sample, he’d been an engineering intern at a supply station, and one of the first corpses they’d recovered. He had once been a man named Alejandro Lowry. He was just SanEstebanCadaver-001 now.

The voices that played as she reviewed the dead weren’t from San Esteban. She’d listened to the captain and physician of the Amaterasu enough to know there wasn’t much they could tell her. She’d gone farther to find insight. She was listening to James Holden and a woman with a long, slow accent that Elvi thought of as Mariner Valley but was a kind of Laconian now.

Tell me about the systems going dark, the interrogator said.

It was just one at first, Jim replied. And the… group consciousness? Consensus? I don’t know the right word for it. The chorus. They weren’t even particularly worried. Not at first.

Elvi switched to an exterior. An older woman—gray, swirling hair—lying in sunlight. An animal Elvi didn’t recognize lay beside the human corpse. It looked something like a small, insectile pig. Compound eyes on either side of a long skull-like structure. A prey species, then, and it appeared to have died at the same time as the woman. She pulled up an article on the species and what was known of the anatomy and physiology of San Esteban’s tree of life.

Then there were more. Just a few. I mean, like three or four. Even then, it wasn’t more than a curiosity, Jim said.

What was left in the system? Were there bodies? Did the aliens just disappear? the interrogator asked.

It wasn’t like that, Jim said. The systems just went dark. Like losing a comm channel.

Then how were they certain the systems were dead?

They were all connected. If someone cuts off your hand, is it dead? So yeah, the systems were dead.

Because, Elvi thought, the builders or the Romans or the space jellyfish—the beings of light—hadn’t known what it was to be alone since they’d learned to glow in that ancient, freezing ocean. They were individuals and they were a unity. A superorganism, connected as intimately as she was with her own limbs and organs. She found a paper speculating about the internal signal transfer in the bug-pig animal and let her eyes flow over it, catching the gist without diving down on details.

But they decided based on just that to destroy whole systems? the interrogator asked.

It was like cutting mold off a block of cheese. Or a clump of cancer cells on your skin. There was a bad spot, and so they burned it off. They didn’t need it. They thought it would stop.

What would stop, exactly?

The darkness. The death.

“Hey,” Fayez said, and Elvi stopped the recording just as the interrogator started her next question.

“Hey,” she said, making it a sigh.

He floated in the door of her office. He looked tired. He looked fragile. Everyone did now. Everyone was.

“The relief drone from Laconia just popped through the gate,” he said. “Another couple weeks for it to match orbit, and we’ll be eating pretty much the same thing we’re eating now, but with different atoms in it.”

“Good. Hope we’re here when it is.”

She’d meant it to be funny. A morbid joke. The words tasted like chalk. The distress in her husband’s eyes was brief, and after it, he chose to smile.

“What’re you listening to?”

Elvi looked at the speakers mounted in the cloth of her office walls as if it would help her remember. “Um. James Holden. Some of his debriefing from when he was on Laconia. I’m trying to get the recordings from after the gates opened too. I know there’s an archive of them at Alighar Muslim University, but I haven’t gotten an answer from them yet.”

“Something in particular you’re looking for?”

“Memories change over a few decades,” she said. “I just want to see if what he says here matches what he said then.”

“See if you can figure out why we aren’t all dead already?”

“I have a couple theories on that.”

He pushed himself across the room, grabbed a handhold, and settled at her side. Pale stubble dusted his cheek like light snowfall. She took his hand in her left, and pulled up the water purification data from San Esteban with her right. The efficiency graph wasn’t subtle.

“What am I looking at here?” he asked.

“An uptick in salt precipitates that matches when everyone died,” Elvi said. “It looks like the mechanism the dark gods figured out is to make ionic bonds just a tiny bit stickier. It lasted just long enough to shut down neurons. The local fauna are also using ionic channels for signal propagation even though it’s more like vacuum channels than nerves. It would still mess them up pretty good. You can tell it’s not taking out the microbiota, though.”

“How can I tell that?”

“Bloat,” she said. “The trapped gasses are microbe farts.”

“I find that story horrifying, but since it ended in a fart joke, I’m not sure how to react.”

“Not a joke, but as soon as the event was done? Water recycling started up again. And the Amaterasu transited in just a few hours after the event. All the decay in these images happened while they were getting to a landing pad.”

“Which says?”

“I don’t think the enemy knows it worked. Listen.” She found the tagged audio and played it.

It wasn’t like that. The systems just went dark. Like losing a comm channel.

Then how were they certain the systems were dead?

They were all connected.

She stopped it. “The builders didn’t go look. They didn’t have to. They were already connected. When they lost a system, they knew there was no one there anymore. They used the gates to shove matter around when they needed to, but that was like us moving food through our guts. It was barely even conscious for them anymore. It wasn’t something they scheduled or had trade routes for. So if there was nothing in a system to support, there’s no traffic to support it.”

“Traffic?”

“Like the Amaratsu,” she said. “The enemy did a thing, and then the traffic stopped. What if that’s how the enemy knew the thing worked. But with us? The traffic didn’t stop. I think we may be as hard for them to see and make sense of as they are for us. So part of what we can do is dirty up their data. All our random, uncoordinated transits are what they’re feeling. It’s like hearing rats in your walls and putting out different poisons until the noise stops. The noise stopping is how you know what worked. And since we’re still making transits in and out of that gate? As far as they know, their poison didn’t work.”

“That’s a hell of a theory.”

“Yep. Or.”

“Or?”

She popped to another audio mark. It was just one at first.

“Or this is inside the error bars for how they work, and they’ll be murdering us all shortly.” She couldn’t keep the despair out of her voice. Even if she had, he would have heard it. They’d known each other too long for secrets. “We have to push harder for answers.”

“Harder than we have been?”

Elvi took her hand back and pressed her fingers into her eyes, rubbing from the center out to the sides. There was grit in her eyelashes. Tears that had dried there.

“I’ll talk to Cara,” Elvi said. “I’ll see if she’s up for it.”

“Talk to Xan too. He’s the one locked in the catalyst’s chamber for a zillion hours. And he doesn’t talk about it, but it’s freaking him out.”

We’re all fucking freaked out snapped to the front of Elvi’s mind, but she didn’t say it.

When Fayez spoke again, the careful cheerfulness was gone. He sounded worn and broken. He sounded more like she felt. He sounded real. “I’m not telling you what to do. It’s just…”

“Say it.”

“Cortázar kept them in a cage for decades. He ran tests on them with no concern for them.”

“I have Cara’s consent—”

“All these dives are changing her, and we don’t have a clear idea what the changes are. The fact that she enjoys it doesn’t reassure me at all.”

Elvi bristled, but it was Fayez and she was short on sleep and long on whatever adrenaline broke down into. Some kind of mandelic acid, she thought. She wasn’t sure. When he went on, she tried to listen and not just react.

“I know I’m not my sanest self right now. We’ve all been stuck on this ship for way too long, and everyone’s fraying, and it’s all scary as shit. I get that. I do. But that’s why we have ethical standards. So that when things get murky we have something to show us the way through.”

“And you think I’m violating ethical standards?”

“Yes. I love you, but yes you totally are. Absolutely.” He grimaced his apology.

Elvi took a long breath and let it out slowly through her nose. The Falcon hummed around them like it was also waiting for her to speak.

“I know,” she said, and it was actually a relief to say it out loud. “I am.”

“So what do we do about that?”

She crossed her arms. “Do you remember Dr. Negila?”

“That’s a name from a long time ago. She taught at the University of Calabar?”

“I took an ethics seminar with her as part of my postdoctorate work. There was a story we read about this beautiful, utopic land where everything was wonderful and enlightened and pleasant and good and just, except for one child who had to live in confusion and misery. One child, in exchange for paradise to everyone else.”

“I know that one. Omelas.”

“This isn’t that,” Elvi said. “I’m working for an authoritarian dictator in a system where people are suffering and screwing each other over and killing each other. I’m compromising my safety and the safety of the people who work for me by smuggling my research to my boss’s political enemies. We’re not doing anything here to make a beautiful, gracious, pleasant utopia. If we win, the lives we save will be the same mix of shit, frustration, and absurdity that they’ve always been.”

“True.”

“The child in the story was being sacrificed for a quality of life. If I’m sacrificing Cara, and I acknowledge that I may be doing that, it’s not for quality. It’s for quantity. If I have to lose her in order to keep the quantity of human life from going to zero? It’s cheap. If it costs everything, it’s still a good trade.”

It landed on Fayez. He lowered his head, not a surrender to gravity but a surrender all the same. “Yeah. Okay.”

“If you can’t do this, that’s all right,” Elvi said. “I can arrange transport back to the Science Directorate for you. You can do your work there as easily as you do it here.”

“Sweetie. You know I’m not doing that.”

“I’d understand if you did.”

“Yeah, no. I just wanted to make sure we were doing what we meant to do. If doing the wrong thing is the right thing, then I’m still planning to wake up next to you while we do it. Kind of my life’s work, really.”

They floated together in silence for a moment, not touching.

“You should come to bed,” Fayez said. “It’s very late, and we’re both very tired.”

“In a little bit,” Elvi said. “I have to make my report back to Trejo about San Esteban, and Ochida is waiting for some resource reallocations based on the new plan moving forward.”

“Oh, and Dr. Lee wanted to talk to you too. If you have time. Personnel issue.”

Elvi nodded her query.

“I think there’s a dysfunctional love triangle in the physics group. They may need a talking-to from the boss.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

Fayez spread his hands. “Every miracle we’ve pulled off, we’ve done it using primates. Just because we’re capable of mind-blowing wonders doesn’t mean we aren’t still sex-and-murder machines. The organism doesn’t change.”

“All right. I’ll stop by the bridge. Do me a favor, though?”

“Anything.”

“The relief pod was supposed to have updated menus. See if the download taught the galley how to fake up some sag paneer?”

“If it did, I will have it waiting in the cabin.”

He pulled himself in and kissed her before heading out to the hall. She turned back to the San Esteban images. Now, every corpse she saw, she imagined as Fayez. Or herself. Or James Holden. Or Anton Trejo. Or Winston Duarte.

She started a recording. “Admiral Trejo. I understand that San Esteban is yet another first priority. All I can give you right now is our overview, some speculation, and my plan moving forward…”

It took half an hour to get the version she liked best, and she made a copy with a different routing header to send to Naomi and the underground. They were all allies in this, whether they knew it or not.

By the time she’d sent her reallocation plan to Ochida and talked to Harshaan Lee about how to keep the social drama on the Falcon from spiraling out of control, two hours had passed. Fayez was in their cabin, asleep. A tube of sag paneer was waiting for her, a bulb of decaffeinated tea beside it. She ate and drank and pulled herself into the sleeping harness.

When she dreamed, she dreamed she was in an ocean teeming with sharks, and if she moved too fast, they would kill her.

Cara floated in the lab while the technicians went through the adjustments to the sensor arrays on her skull like a cap. Everything was bustling around them, but Elvi felt like the two of them—she and her test subject—were still. The eye of the storm. On the screens, Cara’s brain function shifted and stuttered as the expert systems matched what they were seeing now to what they had seen before. “Norming,” it was called. As if norms were still a thing for them.

“How are you feeling?” Elvi asked.

Cara’s perfect black eyes clicked to her, went still for a moment, and then Cara grinned. Elvi wanted to see it as genuine, and maybe it was. Maybe the extra processing delta between stimulus and response only read as inauthentic and studied because Elvi was trying to read the girl as if she were the same as other people. As if she were a primate. The organism doesn’t change, Fayez said in her memory, but now it felt like a warning.

The organism had changed.

As if she’d heard her thinking, Cara’s expression shifted. “Are you worried about something?”

“I was thinking… about the cognitive changes you and Xan went through. Do you remember what it was like before?” Elvi asked.

“Before?”

One of the technicians touched the sensor leads, and the displays clicked over to green across the board. Good to go.

“Before the change. Before all this,” Elvi said. Before you died, she didn’t say.

“I don’t know. Just like anyone, I guess. It was a long time ago.”

Elvi forced a little smile, trying to think where she would have been when Cara had run into the wilderness of Laconia for the last time. Who had she been when Cara had been human?

“Long time for me too,” she said, then gathered herself. “Okay, we’re going to try something a little different this time. We need to refine the search. Try to get some specific answers about how the ring gates came to be. We’ll want to shift the BFE from lecture mode into more Q and A. If we can.”

“Because of San Esteban?”

Elvi tried to think of some softer way to say yes, and failed. “Yes.”

“I can try,” Cara said. “I don’t know if it’ll like that, though.”

“If you’re uncomfortable or things feel wrong, say the word, and we will pull you back up. I’ll be watching your stress levels. If they get bad, even if you can’t speak, I’ll call it. Okay?”

“I can take it,” Cara said. “I want this.”

Elvi took the girl’s hand. It felt so thin and fragile. “Me too.”