Cibola Burn

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Elvi

The data and analysis came back in a disorganized lump, some from the expert systems on the Israel, some from the RCE workgroups back on Luna, Earth, and Ganymede. There was no synthesis, no easily digested summary of the findings. Instead it was opinion and speculation, suggested tests—only some of which were remotely possible with the equipment she had—and data analysis. Between Lucia’s medical reports of the early cases among the squatters and Elvi’s observations from after the deluge, there was just enough information to fuel a thousand theories and not enough to draw any real conclusions. And Elvi was the head of the local workgroup, and the only person in the universe with access to test subjects and new information.

The death-slugs were relatively simple. The toxic compound was a complex carbon ring with a nitrogenous sheet coming off it that looked superficially related to tetrodotoxin, and appeared to be part of the slug’s motility system rather than an anti-predation adaptation. How exactly it crossed into the blood was still mysterious, but the slime had a half dozen r-chiral elements that no one had yet bothered to examine extensively. Whatever new knowledge arose from later study, for Elvi’s purposes the answers were all there: neurotoxin, no antidote, try not to touch them. Done.

The eye flora, on the other hand, was more complex. The labs on Luna and Ganymede were working with algal models, treating the growth as if it were an invasive species that had entered a naïve tide pool. The Earth workgroup was arguing that the better model was actually a photosensitive mineral structure. Working from what little medical data had survived the storm, the Israel’s expert system suggested that the blindness was less from the foreign mass in the vitreous humor and more from the way that the living organism scattered light. That was very good news because it suggested that killing the organism and breaking down the optically active structures would lead to a fairly rapid return of function. There would be floaters in all their eyes, but most people had those, and the brain was decent at compensating for them.

How to go about killing them, though, was obscure. And time was at a premium. There was a decided spike in white blood cells, so their bodies were trying to clean the invaders out. It just wasn’t working.

For her, the symptoms had started with just a little scratchiness around her eyelids no worse than seasonal allergies back at home. Then there was a little whitish discharge and mild headache. And then, seven hours after she first noticed it, the world began to blur a little and take on a greenish hue. That was when she knew for certain that she was going to be blinded by it too.

Fear and practicality were changing the shape of the refugee camp even within the physical constraints of the ruins. People who had gone to the farther parts of the structure were pulling back in now. The need for space and privacy were giving way to the fear of the slugs and the weather and the dread of their growing impairment. The increased density mostly showed itself to Elvi as a change in the ambient sound. Louder voices in conversation that ran together until she felt like she was doing research in the back of a train station. Sometimes it was comforting to have all those human sounds around her, sometimes it was annoying. For the most part, she ignored it.

“Are you doing all right, Doctor?”

Elvi turned from the chemistry deck. Carol Chiwewe stood in the arch that passed for a doorway. She looked tired. And blurry. And vaguely green. Elvi rubbed her eyes to clear them, even though she knew intellectually it wouldn’t make any difference. Rain pattered softly against the plastic sheeting. Elvi almost didn’t notice it anymore.

“Fine,” she said. “You have the new count?”

“We caught forty-one of the little fuckers today,” Carol said. “That’s an uptick, isn’t it? I thought if things dried out a little, they’d start going away.”

“Is it drying out?”

“No. It’s raining less, though. I hoped.”

“Too early to call it significant,” Elvi said, entering the data in its field. Tracking the number of death-slugs was just one more of a dozen studies she was juggling now. “The overall trend is still down, and there may be a cycle within the next few days.”

“It would be good if they slept at night. Probably too much to hope for, though.”

“Probably,” Elvi said. “They’re normally subterranean. They’re not likely to be diurnal.”

“We’re running out of food,” Carol said. Her voice didn’t change its inflections.

“The drops are helping,” Elvi said.

“The drops won’t last forever. There has to be something on this planet we can eat.”

“There isn’t,” Elvi said.

Carol said something obscene under her breath, and it sounded like despair. She sighed. “All right. See you again next hour.”

“Thank you.”

Behind her, Fayez yawned and stretched. She’d meant to nap with him, but she hadn’t quite gotten away from the deck. She squinted, checking the time. Fayez had been asleep for three hours.

“Did I miss anything?” he asked.

“Science,” she said. “You missed science.”

“Well, damn. Can I borrow your notes?”

“Nope, you’ll just have to hire a tutor.”

He chuckled. “Did you remember to eat?”

“No.”

“At last. A way I can be useful. Stay here, and I’ll come back with a bar of undifferentiated foodlike product and some filtered water.”

We’re running out of food.

“Thank you,” she said. “And while you’re out there, see if you can find Yma and Lucia. They were going to be doing ocular assessments of everyone.”

“The blind studying the blind,” Fayez said. “It’s like graduate school all over again. I’ll track them down. You should take a break. Rest your eyes.”

“I will,” Elvi lied. Her eyes—all their eyes—would soon be getting plenty of rest. Growing up, Elvi’s aunt had been blind and still perfectly functional, but she’d been living in a farming arcology in Trento. Elvi was on a planet with no sustainable agriculture, an inedible ecosystem, and where touching the wrong thing would kill her on the spot. Context was everything. Her hand terminal chimed. A new batch of reports and letters from the Ganymede group. She opened them with a sigh. If she took time to read all the suggestions they were coming up with, she wouldn’t have time for anything else. She picked one at random and opened it. She had to increase the font to read it, but switching to bright red lettering on a black background helped a little. If the invading organism followed the same growth curve as yeast…

“Success!” Fayez said. “I have returned with sustenance and Lucia. And you aren’t even pretending to have taken a break.”

“Nope,” Elvi said, taking the hard, palm-sized cake of emergency rations from him and turning to the doctor. “What have we found?”

“Good news and bad. Almost a hundred percent infection rate,” Lucia said, sinking to the floor beside her. “The progression is slower in children than adults, it seems, but only slightly.”

“What about RCE versus First Landers?”

“I haven’t seen all the data Yma collected. She was working with your people mostly. My impression is that there’s no difference. Also in the bad news column, it appears to be much more aggressive than the earlier, isolated cases.”

Elvi took a bite of the bar. It tasted like unsweetened fruitcake and smelled like potting soil and it sucked up all the saliva in her mouth like a sponge.

“Higher initial load?” Elvi said around the puck of food in her mouth. “It was so arid before, there might not have been as many infectious particles.”

“Few enough that our immune systems could identify them as foreign and kick them out,” Lucia said.

“Can they do that?” Fayez asked. “I thought these things were a completely different biology. Do our immune systems even work on them?”

“Not as efficiently,” Lucia said. She sounded tired. “But if the storm was loaded with them, they’d swamp what defenses we do have.”

“And then,” Elvi said, “everyone gets it.”

“Yes,” Lucia said. “Only no.”

Elvi opened her eyes again. Lucia was smiling. “Good and bad, remember? We have one man with no growth.”

“None?”

“Even if it were only massively delayed growth, I know what the early signs should look like. Nothing.”

“Could he… could he not have been exposed?”

“He was exposed.”

Elvi felt a bubble of pure joy open in her chest. It was like getting an unexpected present. A flash of lightning brightened the room for a moment, and she wondered why it was green until she remembered.

“So we’ve got the one-eyed man who’s going to be king?” Fayez said. “I mean, better one than none, but I’m not seeing the long-term solve here.”

“We’ve found treatments and vaccines for any number of diseases by studying people who were naturally immune,” Elvi said. “This is a toehold.”

“Right,” Fayez said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m sorry. I may not be at my best right now. I’ve been under a little stress lately.”

Elvi smiled at the little joke. “Will he consent to testing?” she asked.

“Do we care?” Fayez said.

“I haven’t had the chance to ask yet,” Lucia said. “It was hard enough getting the initial screening done.”

“Why?” Elvi asked. “Who is it?”

Holden was at the entrance to the main room. Whatever hues his clothes had been, they were the color of mud now, same as for everyone else; mud, exhaustion, tears, and fear were the new uniform for the RCE and the citizens of First Landing alike. His hair was slicked back and greasy. The beginnings of a spotty, moth-eaten beard mottled his cheeks and the top of his neck. Her failing vision softened away the lines of age and stress and left him a pleasant-enough-looking but unremarkable man. She remembered all the times she’d generated excuses to spend time in his company. It hardly seemed plausible that it was the same person.

She steeled herself and crossed the room.

“Captain Holden? Can I have a moment?”

“I’m really busy right now. Is this something that can wait?”

“It isn’t,” she said.

Holden grimaced, the expression there and gone again almost too quickly to register. “All right. How can I help you?”

Elvi licked her lips, thinking about how to present the explanation. She didn’t have any idea how much background he had in biology, so she figured it was better to start low.

“Captain, you are a very special, very important person—”

“Wait.”

“No, no, I—”

“Really. Wait. Look, Doctor Okoye. Elvi. I’ve been feeling a kind of tension between us for a while now, and I’ve just been pretending not to. Ignoring it. And that was probably a bad call on my part. I was just trying to make it all go away so we wouldn’t have to say anything, but I’m in a very committed, very serious relationship, and while some of my parents weren’t monogamists, this relationship is. Before we go any farther, I need to be clear with you that nothing like that can happen between us. It’s not you. You’re a beautiful, intelligent woman and—”

“The organism that’s blinding us,” she said. “You’re immune to it. I need to get blood samples. Maybe tissue.”

“I’ll help any way I can, but you have understand that—”

“That’s why you’re special. You’re immune. That’s what I was talking about.”

Holden stopped, his mouth half open, his hands out before him, patting the air reassuringly. For three interminable heartbeats, he was silent. And then, “Oh. Oh. I thought you were—”

“The eye assessment that Doctor Merton did—

“Because I thought… Well, I’m sorry. I misunderstood—”

“There was. The tension? You were talking about? There was some tension. But there’s not anymore,” Elvi said. “At all.”

“Okay,” Holden said. He looked at her for a moment, his head turned a degree to the side. “Well, this is awkward.”

“It is now.”

“How about we never mention this again?”

“I think that would be fine,” Elvi said. “We will need you to come let us take some blood samples.”

“Of course. Yes. I’ll do that.”

“And as my vision starts failing, I may need you to come read some of the results to me.”

“I will do that too.”

“Thank you.”

“And thank you, Doctor Okoye.”

They each nodded to the other two or three times, apparently unable to break free of the moment. In the end, she spun on her heel and headed back, navigating between the knots and clusters of people camped on the floor of the ruins. One of the squatters was weeping and shaking back and forth. Elvi stepped past him and trotted back to the lab. Yma had arrived in her absence, sitting cross-legged on the floor with Lucia as they compared data. Elvi didn’t think her eyes were getting markedly worse until she tried to look over their shoulders. Yma’s hand terminal was a blur of white and blue, as empty of usable information as the clouds.

“Did he agree?” Yma asked, her voice tense as stretched wire.

“He did,” Elvi said, sitting down at the chemistry deck. The water bag needed to be refilled. A time was going to come—and soon—when the little deck was going to have to stop generating drinking water so that she could use its full resources to run her tests. It wasn’t yet. She swapped out the water bags.

“Did you get a history?” Lucia asked.

“A medical history? No. I was thinking perhaps you could do that.”

“If you’d like,” Lucia said, levering herself up from the ground. “He’s back in the main room?”

“He is,” Elvi said, kneeling at the deck controls. A smear of mud darkened the readout, but when she wiped it away, she could still make out the letters. “I’ll set up a few screenings for his blood.”

“Lachrymal fluid too?”

“Probably a good idea,” Elvi said. “Just see if there’s anything out of the ordinary.”

“All right then,” Lucia said. When she walked toward the door, her steps had a little hitch in them. A hesitation. Elvi wondered how much longer the doctor would be able to function. The same question for all of them. There wasn’t time.

“Anything new in your data?” she asked.

“Consistent,” Yma said. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t draw a distinction between us and the squatters.”

“Well, it’s the only one.”

The hours passed without Elvi being aware of it. Her mind and attention had taken her outside the world of minutes and hours to a place defined by test runs, transmission lag, and slowed only by her failing sight. Even before Holden’s test results came back, she was prying what information she could from the samples of the organism, categorizing it only to find analogies with other plants or animals or fungi. The sense of time running short was a constant, and so, like a noxious smell over an extended period, before long it stopped being something she noticed. And instead, she felt the simple joy of doing what she did best. They had chosen her for the assignment because biological systems made sense to her, working through knotty problems was what she did for fun. For months now, she had been doing a long run of data collection. It had been lovely to see this new world, to watch its first secrets unfold, but it had also been easy. A graduate assistant could have gathered all the same samples she had.

This work was hard, and it was her. And while the life or death of everyone on New Terra resting on it scared her, it didn’t take away the essential joy of her work.

“You need to eat,” Fayez said.

“I just did,” she said. “You gave me that bar.”

“That was ten hours ago,” he said gently. “You need to eat.”

Elvi sighed and leaned back from the screen. She’d been bent almost double trying to make out the results. Her back ached and there was a headache building all across the front of her skull. Fayez held something out. Another bar of emergency cake. When she took it, his fingers stayed with hers.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Elvi said.

“You’re sure?”

“Well, apart from the obvious. Why?”

“You seemed a little distant.”

“I’ve been working.”

“Sure. Of course. I’m sorry. I’m just being stupid.”

“I don’t understand,” Elvi said. “Haven’t I been acting the same way I always do?”

“Yes, you have,” Fayez said, letting go of her hand. “That was kind of my point. After… after, you know—”

“The sex?”

He shifted. She imagined him closing his eyes. Wincing a little bit. With her eyes as bad as they were, it wasn’t much more than a guess, but it filled her with a surprising glee. Who would have guessed? Fayez with tender feelings.

“The sex,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure that we were okay. That things were all right between us.”

“Well,” she said, “orgasm does release a lot of oxytocin, so I’m probably more fond of you than before.”

“Now you’re teasing me.”

“That too,” she said, and took another bite of the cake. It really was awful stuff.

“I wanted to make sure that I knew where we stood.”

“I haven’t really thought about it,” Elvi said, gesturing at the chemistry deck. “You know. Busy.”

“Of course,” Fayez said. “I understand.”

“Once we’re not all going to die, though, maybe we could talk about it? Would that be okay?”

“That would be fine.”

“All right, then. It’s a date,” Elvi said, and sat back down at the deck. Her back hurt. Especially between the shoulder blades. She went through the tools screen, trying to find a way to bump the font up another level, but the deck’s options were very limited. She was going to need help, and soon. In the main room, someone called out sharply, and a dozen voices rose in an answering chorus of complaint.

“Okay, that wouldn’t be fine,” Fayez said. “Elvi, listen. You are the smartest woman I’ve ever met, and I’ve been at some of the best universities there are. If there’s anyone, anywhere that can get us out of this, it’s you, and I would very much like to grow very, very old and decrepit and probably incontinent and senile in your company. So if you could save my life and everyone else’s, I’d very much appreciate it.”

That’s sweet and Please don’t put more pressure on me right now and I’ll try warred in her mind. Somewhere at the edge of the ruins, someone shouted. She hoped it wasn’t a slug, that it wasn’t another death. That it wasn’t something else that had gone wrong.

“Okay,” she said.