Babylon’s Ashes

Chapter Twenty-Four: Prax

The morning routine was the same. Prax got up first, padded to the kitchen still wearing his robe and slippers. He started brewing the tea and making breakfast for the family. Pancakes and bacon for the girls. Red rice and eggs for him and Djuna. He played music on the system. Usually something calm and wandering, what Djuna called his getting-a-massage music. And about the time the rice was cooked and the bacon crisped, he heard the sound of Djuna’s shower and the voices of Mei and Natalia. This particular morning, the girls were gabbling pleasantly to each other. Other mornings, they would snap and argue.

When Djuna’s shower water stopped, he poured the first pancake onto the grill, two eggs beside it. They took almost exactly the same time to cook, so that he could turn them both, one with either hand. It was showing off, but when Mei saw it, it always made her laugh. Djuna’s hectoring voice came from the hall, moving the girls through their morning rituals—washing faces, combing hair, getting dressed. When they all came to the table, Prax would be the only one not wearing his work clothes. The girls made fun of him for lazing around in his robe, even though he’d been the one to do the most, and he pretended to be offended even though he really wasn’t.

After breakfast, Djuna would take the girls to school on her way to work, leaving him alone to clean away the dishes, take his own shower, and prepare for the lab. It wasn’t something they’d ever discussed. It was just the way their own particular domestic habits had formed. Prax liked it like that. He’d had more than enough adventures in his life. He got more work done when things were predictable.

He sweetened his tea with the same syrup he drizzled over the pancakes, put the plates and glasses filled with food in their places, and was just sitting down with his rice and eggs when Djuna came in, driving the girls before her like a cattleman in the tradition of mothers all through history.

Mei was a little quieter than usual, Natalia a little brighter, but both within the error bars. Djuna turned down the music while they ate and talked. When the conversation turned dangerous, Prax didn’t notice.

“What does resistance mean?” Natalia asked. Her face was serious and sober, and on so small a person, vaguely comic.

“It’s a measure of how electrons flow through something,” Prax said. “You see, we think about current flowing through wires kind of the same way we think of water flowing through pipes. It’s actually more complicated than that when you get down to quantum levels, but it’s a very, very good model.”

“And models are how we make sense of things,” Natalia said. Proud of herself for remembering the catchphrase that he and Djuna had been using with the girls for so long. He didn’t think Natalia was old enough to understand it yet, but she would be. And Mei sometimes surprised him with her insights.

“Yes,” Prax said. “Exactly. So resistance is about how hard or easy it is for electrons to flow through something.”

Natalia’s little brow furrowed. Mei was looking away and Djuna had gone very still. Which was odd. But he could tell he wasn’t making sense to the girls, so he tried again.

“So imagine you’ve got a big straw,” he said, demonstrating with his hands. “And when you put it in your juice, it’s really easy to drink. But then you take a teeny little skinny straw, you have to try really hard to get the same amount of juice up out of the glass. The big straw is like something without much resistance, and the little straw is like something with a lot of resistance.”

Natalia nodded very seriously. It was like he could see her trying to solve the puzzle of it. “Is it a good thing or a bad thing?” she said.

Prax laughed. “It’s not good and it’s not bad. It’s just part of how the universe is. Now, if you had a circuit where you wanted really low resistance and you didn’t have it, that wouldn’t be a very good circuit. But only because it didn’t do what you wanted. If you had something where you wanted high resistance, maybe that very same circuit would be perfect. It’s not about right and wrong. Just how things work.”

“It’s time to go,” Djuna said, and her voice seemed sharp. It was the voice she used when something was bothering her. And there were still almost fifteen minutes before they really needed to be out the door. Maybe something was going on at the biofilms lab he didn’t know about.

When they’d left, he turned his music back on, cleared the dishes, showered, dressed himself for work. The rooms seemed wrong without them, and the extra time by himself empty and somehow ominous. All the way to the tube station, he worried about whether Mei had remembered to take her medicine. He’d planned to use the tube ride to review the new datasets on the harvester yeast, but his eyes kept skipping off his hand terminal and up to the screens across from him. A newsfeed was spooling, but he couldn’t hear the words over the rattling of the tube and the voices of the other commuters. Ships were fighting, but he couldn’t tell where. Earth. Iapetus. Pallas. Ceres. Mars. In the void between places, far distant from everything. They were all possible. The only thing he could be certain of was it wasn’t here, and that only because there weren’t any alerts blaring.

At the central station, half the passengers shuffled off into the vaulted transfer chamber, making way for another flood coming on. A half dozen men in Free Navy uniforms were among them. The Free Navy had started wearing sidearms openly now, and they walked with a swagger. Two civilian girls seemed to be with them, laughing and flirting. The oldest of them didn’t look much past her twenties. Not that much older than Mei. Not really. Prax turned his attention back to the newsfeed, and then his hand terminal. He still wasn’t able to concentrate on it, but something about the Free Navy men made him feel more comfortable with his eyes cast down. His heart was pumping a little faster, his back felt tight. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but the sense of being threatened and the experience of guilt were so closely related that it was hard to feel one without the other.

When he’d been a student at lower university, he’d had to take a humanities class—literature, drama, art appreciation. Something to make him well rounded. He’d opted for philosophy in hopes that it would have something like rigor to it. Most of the experience had been forgotten, the memories washed away in decades of neuroplastic adjustments. What he did still recall was dreamlike and fragmentary. But sitting there, pressing deeper into the seat as the tube car shifted up toward the surface, the hum and rattle of the tube vibrating up his spine, listening to the too-loud laughter of the soldiers, one moment came back to him vividly. His professor—an overweight, balding man with an alcoholic’s complexion and an air of intelligence so profound it seemed to bend space around him—lifting a hand and speaking a phrase: the terror of the normal. Prax was almost sure it had been something about Heidegger, but here and now, he thought he understood it better than he had back then.

This was how things were now. This had become normal.

He’d hoped to spend the morning on his own research, but Khana and Brice didn’t even let him get as far as his lab before falling into step beside him.

“I was looking at the open partition, and I think there may have been a problem with the data transfer,” Khana said. “The datasets directory only had Hy18 through the ninth run.”

“No, no,” Prax said. “I know. I didn’t get around to transferring them yet. I was going to, but I got distracted.”

Brice made a small sound in the back of her throat. Prax understood it, and he didn’t envy her. Ever since Karvonides’ death, Brice had been in the unenviable position of doing her own work and covering for her dead supervisor. Every day, Prax had intended to move all the critical data out to the open partition. He couldn’t even say why he hadn’t gotten around to it. It was just that something always seemed to come up.

“Boss,” Khana said, “we need the latest on Hy1810 unless you want us to push the new run.”

“You can’t push the new run,” Prax said.

They reached the door of Prax’s lab. Khana shoved his hands into his pockets, his jaw set, his eyes focused off somewhere about ten centimeters to Prax’s left. “I know. But …”

“I’ll do it now,” Prax said. “Give me half an hour.”

He ducked into his lab and pulled the door closed behind him. Khana and Brice hovered for a long moment on the far side of the frosted glass and then walked away. Prax sat at his desk. He wanted to check the water levels and pull new samples from the hydroponics. He was tempted to just do that for a few minutes, put off going through Karvonides’ partition. But he’d said now, and they really did need to get the animal trials going.

He pulled up the staff directory, keyed in his access code, and let the system do its ritual biometric check. Then, with a deep sigh and a sense of growing dread, he went into the dead woman’s partition. It was his job to do this. There was nothing to be anxious about.

Two of the datasets were in editing lock, so he had to close them down before he could move them. Not hard, but it took a few more seconds. He would need to go through her messages too. Make sure anything that needed attention was passed down to Brice or up to McConnell. Anything personal for her, he could ignore. He didn’t need to pry, and he probably didn’t want to know. Except that one of the messages had James Holden in the subject. NEW JAMES HOLDEN FEED FROM CERES, it said. James Holden, who’d saved Mei. And Prax himself. And everyone. Prax didn’t intend to open the feed. It was more like a reflex. This looks interesting—what is it?

On the feed, just as promised, James Holden looking earnestly into the camera. On the one hand, it looked professionally produced. The video didn’t stutter or shake. The colors had the carefully modulated look of a newsfeed. Holden’s voice when he spoke was clear and sharp without being spiky. But Holden’s demeanor had an awkward authenticity that was so familiar and unrehearsed, it was like seeing him in the flesh again.

“This is James Holden from Ceres Station. Today, we’re doing the third in this open ended series thing, and I’m really hoping you’re all looking forward to this. Especially all my friends and family back on Earth and Mars. I say this every time, but we’re doing these clips and interviews so that the folks back home can put faces and voices to the real people out in the Belt. And … yeah. So, let me introduce—”

The image cut to a tall Belter girl sitting in the galley of the Rocinante. Prax leaned forward. He’d sat exactly where she was once, during the worst part of his life. He felt a wave of nostalgia like seeing his apartment from upper university—someplace familiar that had been important to him once—that broke against the novelty of this new girl.

“Alis Caspár.”

“Great. Okay, and where do you live?”

“Ceres Station. Salutorg District.”

Prax watched the whole feed. The clap-juggling of shin-sin that seemed to delight and fascinate the Earther. The way the girl was embarrassed for him and he didn’t seem to notice. The older woman they called Tía flirting with him. It was … charming. With all the news of war and death, with all the images of ships chewing each other to shavings of metal and ceramic, the body bags of Earth, Holden’s video was nothing. Pleasant. Meaningless. Sweet, even.

The feed ended. Prax, surprised, found he’d been tearing up. He wiped his cheek with the cuff of one sleeve, and was startled when the next message opened its own feed automatically. A thin-faced woman with skin darker than Djuna’s but with the same deep hazel eyes smiled into the camera. The image shook a little and the colors weren’t as professionally toned as Holden’s had been.

“This is Fatima Crehan, sending back to James Holden and all the good people of the Belt. We’re in the refugee camp opened by the governor of Arequipa, and today I want to introduce you to a woman whose causa has been turning heads and filling bellies for, it seems like, everyone in the city.”

Prax watched, fascinated. And when it was over, another video feed, this one from Shanghai, where an old man in a yarmulke interviewed a musical band of ethnic Han boys about their music and then watched them in an alleyway with mud-colored clouds churning above them. Prax couldn’t look away.

A soft knock came at the door. Brice leaned in. “I’m sorry to interrupt, sir, but—”

“No no no, it’s fine. I’m transferring them now.” Prax grabbed Karvonides’ data reports—none of them edit-locked now—and shifted them into the open partition. “You should be able to access all of them now.”

“Thank you, sir,” Brice said. And then, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Prax said, wiping his eyes again. “Carry on.”

She closed the door. Two hours had gotten away from him somehow, and he was going to have to hurry in order to get all the samples pulled before lunch.

We could save lives. One message.

Prax shut down the dead woman’s partition, put it under administrative lock. There wasn’t time to think about anything more. He had work to do. In order to catch up, he ran the samples during his lunch hour, grabbing a few mouthfuls of rice and mushroom before the management team meeting. Afterward, it was time to go and retrieve Mei and Natalia from school, but he sent a message to one of the other parents in his parenting coop. The girls could go play with the other kids until Djuna got home. He stayed, checking in with Brice and Khana. Seeing that everyone who needed access to the datasets could get to them.

Everything felt weirdly dreamlike and light. As if he was watching someone else doing it. In his office, he rechecked the day’s sample run. How much dissolved CO₂ in the water, how much nitrogen, calcium, manganese. The plants were doing well, but until the stats were all fed through, he wouldn’t know what he was looking at. That was fine.

He resisted the urge to reopen Karvonides’ partition. To find the other feeds Holden had made or inspired. It was a bad idea. Instead, he waited, worked, watched through the glass. Only Brice remained, and her workstation was down a long and curving hallway. He closed his terminal, clocked out, went to the men’s room, and waited. Washed his hands. Waited. Then casually stepped out to the main floor, swinging by one of the gang stations, opening a terminal with a guest account, accessing the datasets and protocols that Supervisor Praxidike Meng had carelessly put in the open partition without permissions set. The screen showed a pale blue logo, the flag of Ganymede. He sent copies to Samuel Jabari and Ingrid Dineyahze on Earth and Gorman Le on Luna. The only message was PLEASE CONFIRM THESE RESULTS.

Then he shut down the terminal and made his way out to the common corridors. Everything seemed brighter than it should have been. He couldn’t tell if he was tired or restless. Or both.

He stopped at a noodle stand between the tube station and home. No-Roof for him and Djuna. Fried tofu for the girls. And—a luxury—rice wine. And a round ceramic container with green tea ice cream for dessert. When he got home, Natalia was whining about having to drill her times tables and Mei had shut herself in her room to trade messages with her friends from school and watch entertainment feeds of boys three or four years older than her. Other nights, he would have insisted that they all come to the table for dinner, but he didn’t want to disturb anything.

He served the noodles into recyclable ceramic bowls with a pattern of sparrows and twigs on them, brought one to Natalia at her desk, another to Mei sprawled out on her bed. She was so big these days. Soon, she’d be bigger than his shoulder. His little girl, who no one had expected to live, and look at her now. When he kissed the crown of her head, she looked up at him quizzically. He nodded her toward her screen of soulful-looking young men.

He and Djuna sat at the table together, almost like they were dating again. He looked at her: the curve of her cheek, the little scar on her left knuckle, the gentle fold of her collarbone. Like he was saving it for some coming day when she wouldn’t be there. Or else when he wouldn’t.

The rice wine bit at his mouth. Maybe it always felt like that—chill and warming at the same time—and he just didn’t usually notice. Djuna told him about her day, the office politics and palace intrigues of biofilms, and he took in her words like they were music. Just before he cleared their dishes and broke out the ice cream, she reached across the table and took his hand.

“Are you all right?” she said. “You’re acting strange.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Bad day at work?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think maybe it was very good.”