Cibola Burn

Chapter Thirty-Five: Elvi

Holden blinked, shook his head, and then he laughed. Elvi was torn between worry that he thought she was joking and a kind of glowing admiration. She’d been afraid that he’d be angry. She’d heard about people laughing in the face of danger, and that was exactly what this was. She smoothed her hands against her jumpsuit, uncomfortably aware of how dirty she was, how dirty they all were.

“This day just keeps on giving,” he said. Then, “Blind why?”

“It’s the clouds,” Elvi said. “Or really, what’s in them. They’re green. I mean, when they’re not—” She nodded toward the window at the low gray overcast sky. “Normally, they’re green. There’s a photosynthetic organism that spends part of its life cycle in the clouds, and apparently it’s a pretty successful organism all around the planet, because all of this that’s come down has some in it. It was a very dry climate before this, so there probably wasn’t much opportunity for exposure. But with the rain and the flood, pretty much everyone’s come in contact. And it’s salt tolerant.”

The chemical deck chimed, and Elvi moved toward it automatically, her eyes still on Holden. But Fayez, Lucia, and one of the other squatters were already lifting out the sack of clean water and fitting a new bag in place.

“Is that a problem?” Holden said. “How does salt figure into it?”

“We’re salty,” Elvi said, and was immediately uncomfortable with her phrasing. Her hands seemed too large and awkward in a way they usually weren’t. “What I mean is, we’ve seen infections with this organism before. It does well in tears and tear ducts. And then eyes.”

“Eyes,” Holden said.

“Lucia saw one case before the… the storm? Once the organism got into the vitreous humor, it’s in a novel environment that seems to suit it really well, and exponential growth’s pretty normal in those conditions. So that winds up blocking the light from hitting the retina, and—”

Holden held up his hands, palm out. She found herself moving in toward him, ready to put her palms against his. She stopped herself.

“I thought the things that lived here had a whole different biology. How can they infect us?”

“It’s not an infection like a virus,” she said. “It’s not hijacking our cells or anything. We’re just a new, nutrient-rich environment and this little guy found a way to exploit it. It’s not trying to make us blind. It’s just that the extracellular matrix is a really easy path into the eyeball for it, and it’s really happy when it gets there. Explosive growth is something you see in any kind of invasive species coming into a new environment. No competition.”

Holden ran a hand through his hair. When he spoke, his voice was soft, like he was speaking mostly to himself.

“Apocalyptic explosions, dead reactors, terrorists, mass murder, death-slugs, and now a blindness plague. This is a terrible planet. We should not have come here.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, putting her hand on his arm. He had a very solid arm. Muscular. He put his own hand over hers and her heart picked up a little. She hated feeling like a schoolgirl with her first crush, but she also thrilled to it. Just stay focused, she thought, a little dignity.

“Okay, Doctor Okoye.”

“Elvi.”

“Elvi, I need you and Doctor Merton to do whatever you have to do to take care of this. I think I’ve found a way to get supplies down from orbit, but I don’t see any way to get anyone up the well, or where to put them if we did. So if I’m right, I can get you whatever supplies we have up there. But I need you to fix this.”

“I will,” Elvi said, nodding. She didn’t have any idea how she could keep that promise, but her heart was full to bursting with the determination that she would.

“Anything you need,” Holden said, “you just tell me.”

Elvi had a sudden, intrusive, and surprisingly graphic thought. She felt a blush crawling up her neck. “All right, Captain,” she said. “I want… um… if I could get a spare sampling bag from the Israel? I think it would really help.”

He let go of her, and she regretted the absence immediately. She shoved her hands into her pockets. He nodded to her, hesitated for a moment as if he were waiting for her to say something more, then moved away into the crowded main room. Elvi bit her lip and swallowed a couple of times until the thickness in her throat subsided. She knew she was being silly and even borderline inappropriate, but the knowledge did nothing to change it.

She stopped at the window, looking out at the gray rain. It was hard to believe that every drop of it contained something that would colonize her body the way that humanity had New Terra. It looked peaceful out there. Vast and rich and beautiful. Even the slow river of floodwater carried the calming, majestic, beautiful sense of nature playing out.

Most of Earth was covered in cities or managed nature preserves about as untamed as a service dog. Mars and the Belt were studded with colonies that had been built and designed to carve a human place in inhuman and lifeless circumstances. This, she realized, was the first place she’d been in her life where she could see true wilderness the way it had been for millennia on Earth. Red in tooth and claw. Deadly and uncaring. Vast, unpredictable, and complex as anything she could imagine.

“You all right?” Lucia asked.

“Overwhelmed,” Elvi said. “Fine.”

“I’ve harvested a new sample run from the water purifier,” the doctor said. “Help me with the assaying?”

“Of course,” Elvi said. “When the sampling bag comes, it’ll be easier to send the data back home. Maybe they’ll be able to help.”

“Well, if they find anything, make sure they send it in an audio file,” Lucia said. “I don’t know that we’re going to be reading much.”

“How are we going to do it?” Elvi asked.

“Do what?”

“Do any of it. Eat, rebuild, make clean water, keep the death-slugs out? How are we going to do any of that when none of us can see what we’re doing?”

“At a guess,” Lucia said, “poorly.”

The long New Terran day and the darkness of the clouds made time feel strange. Elvi sat hunched in the little side chamber that Fayez had appropriated for their research lab. The walls were curved in ways that left her thinking of bones. The only opening was high on the wall, and Fayez or Lucia or Sudyam had put a sheet of clear plastic over it to keep the death-slugs out. A bank of white LEDs splashed a cold light across the deep red wall and ceiling. The small green sludge in her makeshift Petri dish could have been algae or fungus or the remains of a salad left weeks too long in the back of her dormitory refrigerator back in upper university. But it wasn’t any of those things, and the more she looked at it, the more aware she was of the fact.

There were some similarities to the more familiar kingdoms of life she’d studied before. Lipid boundaries around cells, for instance, appeared to be a good move in design space just the way eyes were, or flight. They seemed to do something similar to mitotic division, though sometimes the cells divided in threes instead of pairs, and she didn’t know why. There were other anomalies too, concentrations of some photon-activated molecules that didn’t quite make sense.

And what was worse, she couldn’t think about it. Couldn’t concentrate. Whenever her focus slipped, it slipped onto James Holden. The sound of his voice, his despairing and undaunted laughter, the shape of his ass. He haunted her. She realized that she’d gone through four pages of chemical assay data without having any idea what she’d seen, sat back on her heels, and cursed.

“Problem?” Fayez said, stepping through the doorway. His hair was tied back, his face gray with fatigue and streaked with old mud. She wondered, looking at him, how long it had been since he’d slept. She wondered how long it had been since she’d slept. Or eaten for that matter.

“Yes,” she said.

He squatted down beside the arch that led back toward the main rooms. The plastic was dark. It was nighttime, then. She hadn’t been paying attention.

“What’s the rumpus?” Fayez asked. “Is there some new oh-my-god-we’re-going-to-die, or are we still coming to appreciate fully the list we’ve already got.”

“I have to find Captain Holden.”

Fayez put his head in his hands. “Of course you do.”

“I have to clear the air.”

Fayez’s neck stiffened, and his eyes were wide. “No, Elvi. No, you don’t.”

“I do,” she said. “I know it’s inappropriate, but the fact of the matter is that I’m in love with him. It’s a distraction, and it’s affecting my work. I’ve tried ignoring it, and it’s not helping. So I’ll go to him, and we’ll talk it through. Just to resolve it and—”

“No no no,” Fayez said. “Oh no. That’s a terrible, terrible idea. Don’t do that.”

“You don’t understand. I don’t want to, but I have to be able to concentrate, and my feelings… my feelings about him—”

She rose. Now that she’d said it, it was obvious what had to happen. He’d be sleeping in one of the side rooms like this. Amos would probably be there too as a guard. She could just ask to see him there, in private. And she could unburden herself. She hadn’t understood that term before, but she did now. She could unburden herself to him, and he was so kind and so gentle and so thoughtful, he wouldn’t laugh at her or turn her away. She would—

“Elvi!” Fayez said again. “Please, please, please do not do this. You aren’t in love with James Holden. You don’t know James Holden from Adam. You have no idea how close his persona is to the real man, and you’ve never met the real man. He’s on the newsfeeds and he works here. That’s all.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Of course I do,” Fayez said. “You’re scared as hell, you’re lonely, and you’re horny. Elvi listen to me. You’ve been in one of the most stressful environments possible for the last two years. First, we were coming to an unknown planet. Then it was an unknown planet with a bunch of people on it who tried to kill you. And then it blew up. And now we’re trying to fend off tiny little things that can kill you because you brush up against them while you try to figure out how to keep things from growing in our eyes. No one stays sane in a situation like this.”

“Fayez—”

“No! Hear me out. You always cope by ignoring how scared you are and focusing on work, and that’s great. Really, whatever gets you through the night, I am absolutely for it. But you’re a mammal, Elvi. You’re a social animal that derives reassurance from touch, and since we’re not a cuddle-puddle culture, that means sex. For two years you’ve been avoiding workplace romances while all the rest of us have been pairing off and changing partners because we were lonely and scared and that’s one way primates reassure themselves and each other. Everyone’s been doing this but you.”

“I don’t—”

“So here you are, freaked out so badly you aren’t even clear that you’re freaked out, and here comes James Holden, savior of the universe, and of course it all comes out sideways. But it’s not about him, it’s about you. And if you go clear the air with him, either you’ll wind up in bed together or you’ll be back here weeping into your tissue samples.”

Elvi felt her jaw sliding forward, her hands forming fists. Fayez rose to his knees, but not more than that. He reached out an arm to block the archway, grimaced, and pulled it back. When he spoke again, Fayez’s voice was softer, gentler.

“Please, we have fucked up everything about coming to this deathtrap of a planet. We have hauled every tribalist, territorial, monkey-brained mistake humanity ever made through the gate and made soup with them here. This thing you’re about to do? Please let this be the one mistake we don’t make.”

“You’re telling me,” Elvi said, her voice equal parts outrage and ice, “that I just need to get laid?”

Fayez slumped back against the wall, defeated.

“I’m saying you’re human, and humans take comfort from each other. I’m saying you don’t want Holden for the person he is, because you don’t know him, and you’re making up a story about him so that you feel okay about taking the thing you need because God forbid you should have a need that isn’t all twinned up with romantic love. And…”

He lifted his hands, shook his head, and looked away. The rain pattered against the sheet plastic, tapping like fingernails on stone. Someone far down the hall shouted, and a voice even more distant called back. Elvi crossed her arms.

“And?” she said. “Go on. I don’t see why you should stop now.”

“And.” Fayez sighed. “And I’m right here.”

It took a moment for her to understand what he was saying. What he was offering. Her laughter was as unstoppable as the storm had been. He pursed his lips and shrugged, his gaze fixed on the wall behind her. She couldn’t stop grinning, even though the force of it made her cheeks hurt. And then the hilarity faded a bit. She caught her breath. A flash of distant lightning brightened the window, but no thunder followed it.

She looked down at Fayez. After a moment, he looked up.

“Okay,” she said.

Fayez snored when he slept. Not deeply. Not a buzzsaw. Just a soft purring at the back of his throat. Their mud-caked clothes were folded into pillows under their heads. She lay on her back, her knees bent, considering the ceiling and the softness of her own flesh. He was on his side, curled against her for warmth, his legs folded under and around hers. His breath tickled the skin of her collarbone. She wondered what she would do or say if someone walked through the archway, but it was night, and the nights here were very long. There was room in them.

She considered his body, the color of raw honey, with more hair on his chest and legs then she’d expected. Like a caveman, only without any Neanderthal brow ridge. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, just to see how it felt. She’d always made a rule of not sleeping with her coworkers. She hadn’t so much as held someone’s hand since the Israel had started its long burn for the gate. She’d almost forgotten what sex felt like. And its aftermath.

Fayez coughed, shifted, and she took the chance to draw herself away from him. He sprawled on the floor, face pressed against her clothes, eyes shut. She thought about James Holden, her mind touching gently at her heart, half afraid of what it would find.

“Huh,” she said to the room, softly so as to keep Fayez from waking. “I wasn’t in love with Holden.”

Fayez’s breath shifted and his eyes fluttered but didn’t open. She thought about trying to get her jumpsuit from him, but he looked so peaceful, she decided to wait. She had expected to feel embarrassed by her nakedness. Ashamed. She didn’t.

She sat cross-legged by the chemical assays. In the dish, the green smear from the water sample had shifted a little, throwing off hair-thin runners, exploring its environment. She pulled up the chemical information and started going through it again from the start. When she came to the strange reading of light-activated compounds, she coughed out an impatient sigh. They were chiral, and this was a bi-chiral environment. She was seeing both conformations, and probably for completely different functions. That made sense, then.

She stretched, her spine popping between the shoulder blades, and folded herself forward, her eyes skimming though the data. She took notes of questions to ask Lucia or send back home. She fell into the data, not noticing when Fayez woke, dressed, and left until he draped a blanket over her shoulders. She looked up. Her jumpsuit was still in a pile on the floor. Fayez put a cup of hot tea beside her and kissed the top of her head.

“Good morning, sunshine,” he said.

Elvi smiled, leaning back against his shins. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“You okay?” he asked gently.

Elvi frowned. Was she? Given the circumstances, maybe so.

“I’m looking at this organism,” she said, “and, you know, I think I’m beginning to understand it. Here, take a look at these numbers…”