Cibola Burn

Chapter Forty-Six: Elvi

Elvi thought her eyesight’s return was like coming out of a fog. The green that had enveloped the world was just as vivid at first. It lasted long enough that she was afraid she’d been wrong, or that the long-term use of the oncocidals had made some other change to Holden’s physiology that short-term use wasn’t having. And then the shadows had lines around them again, little zones of definition. And then within hours, she could see the doorway arch and the shape of the chemistry deck. By the time she’d been able to see clearly enough that she could tell Holden for certain that they’d solved the problem, the man had been in what looked like a sleep-deprivation psychosis. It made her feel a little guilty that she hadn’t figured it out earlier. But he’d gone off to talk to Amos, and she was fairly sure that the big man would be able to take care of his captain. And Elvi had too many other things to do.

The chemistry deck’s slowed water purification turned out to be a bigger issue than she’d expected. The distillation filters were exhausted; material that had gone in as white, puffy pads of spun glass embedded with ionic scrubbers came out slick and green. But the other people from the science team and the survivors of First Landing were all starting to get function back too. It took almost four hours, but Elvi and Fayez and two of the mining technicians had rigged a still just outside the ruins that was converting the fallen rainwater to something potable at nearly three gallons an hour. It tasted like fake spearmint flavoring and alfalfa, but it would sustain life.

When Elvi found Lucia, the doctor looked as bad as Holden had sounded. Her skin had an ashy tone and the whites of her eyes were so pink Elvi was surprised they weren’t bleeding. Jacek was following his mother around, carrying her medical scanner and a little sack of bandages. Elvi watched them check on the patients. Everyone was covered in mud and grit. The differences between RCE and squatters were buried under the layers of filth and the shared joy in their returning sight. When Jacek caught her gaze, she smiled. He hesitated, then nodded almost shyly and smiled back.

“Clouds are starting to thin,” Lucia said. “I saw a patch that was actually white.”

“Really?” Elvi asked.

“Still looked greenish to me, of course, but it was actually white,” the doctor said. When she shook her head, it seemed to take her a fraction of a second to start. “You did good work. I’ve only got three people the treatment’s not working on.”

“Why isn’t it working for them? Maybe we should—”

“This isn’t science,” Lucia said. “It’s medicine. A success rate this high on a new treatment for a novel illness? We’re doing brilliantly. None of us are back to baseline yet, though. If it happens at all, it will take time.”

“Time,” Elvi said. “Strange to think we’ve got any of that.”

“We’ve traded up from dying in the storm to dying from the slugs to dying of hunger in a few weeks.”

“We’re pushing the crisis point back. If it’s not winning, at least it’s a way not to lose.”

“If we can keep pushing it back.”

But we can’t. The words hadn’t been said, but they didn’t need to be. With the ships fighting each other and falling out of orbit and the native ecology basically inedible, extending the group’s horizon past a few weeks of starvation was going to be difficult. Maybe impossible. The stress was showing in the people, RCE and First Landers both. Elvi saw it, the segregation into tribes again now that the immediate danger had passed. She wondered whether it would come back when the food ran out.

“You need rest,” Elvi said, and a hand touched her shoulder. Wei and Murtry were behind her. Wei’s expression was bleak. Murtry, on the other hand, was smiling his customary smile. Of all of them, the coating of mud on his skin and in his hair looked almost natural. Like he was in his native element.

“Doctor Okoye,” Murtry said, “I was hoping we could have a private word.”

“Of course,” Elvi said. Lucia nodded curtly and turned away. Elvi felt a little pang of disappointment. After all the trials of the storm and the blindness, the political divisions between the RCE and First Landing were still there, just below the surface. Murtry was still the man who’d burned a building full of terrorists. Lucia was still the wife of a man who’d conspired to destroy the heavy shuttle. It seemed like it should have mattered less now, like the rains should have washed something clean. Anything.

“I was wondering what you could tell me about the last conversation you had with Captain Holden,” Murtry said. His voice sounded perfectly calm and reasonable. It was like they were back on the Israel and he was asking her to think back to the last time she’d used some tool she couldn’t find.

“Well, he was very, very tired. Exhausted. It seemed to be having some real cognitive effects.”

“Cognitive effects like what, please?” Murtry asked.

“He was babbling,” Elvi said. “Bounding from jokes about mind-controlling aliens to Charles Dickens to insisting that he had some way to shut down the defense network. He was really all over the place. I tried to get him to rest, but—”

“Do I understand you that he intended to disable the alien technology presently functioning on this planet?”

“Yes. I mean, why wouldn’t he?”

“Doesn’t belong to him. Did he say how he intended to accomplish this?”

“He didn’t. But I don’t think there really was anything. It was just his brainstem attaching to his vocal cords. I’m pretty sure he was only half aware that he was talking at all.”

“Did he mention going north?”

Elvi blinked, scowled, shook her head.

Murtry pulled up his hand terminal, tapped it three times, and held it out to her. A rough map of Ilus’ only continent showed on the screen with two dots. One, she knew, was the location of First Landing, or where the place had been, anyway. She assumed it indicated where they were. A second dot was almost an inch and a half away.

“I took the liberty of tracking the captain’s hand terminal signal,” Murtry said. “Signal’s patchy and intermittent, but it seems he’s been traveling north at an average of two hundred klicks an hour. I find that very interesting.”

Elvi handed the terminal back to him. “He didn’t say anything about it. Just that he had something to do. He talked to Amos afterward. I thought that was probably what he meant. Honestly, I’m surprised he can even drive a cart.”

“He isn’t driving a cart,” Murtry said. “We’ve only got two carts, they’re both right outside, and one of them doesn’t even have a power cell.”

“I don’t understand,” Elvi said. “Then how is he…”

“Going two hundred kilometers an hour?” Murtry said. “That would be one of many, many questions I’d like to have answered. Thank you for your time, Doctor.”

Murtry nodded, turned, and walked toward the archway that led outside. Elvi watched him go, scowling. Had Holden said anything else? She couldn’t think of anything. But maybe he’d said something to Amos.

She found the big man standing in the mud outside the work tent where the carts were parked, arms folded across his bare, mud-streaked chest. He had a nasty scar across his belly and a tattoo of a woman over his heart. She wanted to ask about them both, but didn’t. The one working cart was rolling out, Murtry and Wei at the controls. The big silica-gel wheels made wet smacking sounds in the mud, but the cart picked up speed quickly, bouncing along the ruined landscape in the soft rain.

“Was there a drop?” Elvi asked.

“Nope,” Amos said.

“Is there going to be a drop?”

“If there is, they’d better get it in walking range. Unless I can get another fuel cell up, that right there was our one working set of wheels.”

“Oh,” she said. And then, “Did Holden say anything to you before he, ah, left?”

“Yep,” Amos said, still scowling after the cart.

“Was it about going north?”

“Not in particular, but I knew he was going someplace in case he could get Miller to turn the fusion reactors back on for us.”

“Miller?” Elvi said with a shake of her head.

“Yeah, that’s a long story. Pretty much all the cap had for me was to make sure that one”—Amos nodded at the retreating cart—“didn’t get uppity and start killing folks again.”

“He’s going after Holden.”

“Hmm. Don’t know if that makes my job harder or easier.”

The big man shrugged and walked into the repair tent. The remains of half a dozen fuel cells were laid out on a thin plastic tarp. Amos squatted beside them, then started arranging the cells by size and the extent of their obvious damage.

“This’d be a lot easier if the Roci could just drop me down a fresh cell,” he said.

“You’re going after Holden too?”

“Well, the way I figure it, I’m supposed to make sure Murtry doesn’t hurt anyone. He ain’t here, so all these folks are looking pretty safe. Might as well go where he is, make sure he don’t hurt no one there either.”

Elvi nodded and looked north. The cart was a small dot near the horizon throwing up a plume of spattered mud. She couldn’t judge how quickly they were going, but she was sure they’d be beyond the horizon soon.

“If you get that working, can I come too?”

“Nope.”

“Seriously, let me come with you,” Elvi said, kneeling beside him. “You’ll need backup out there. If anything goes wrong. What if you go blind again? Or if something stings you? I know the ecology out here better than anyone. I can help.”

Amos picked up a fuel cell, squeezing the casing until the metal bowed out a degree, and slid the internal cell out into his hand. A slurry of green-yellow mud came with it.

“Holden was talking about aliens. Like living, thinking, communicating, mind-controlling aliens,” Elvi said. “If that’s true, I could talk with them. Document them.”

Amos wiped the mud from the cell with his palm and squinted at it, sighing. He put it down and picked up the next one.

“We’re going to die here,” Elvi said, her voice soft, gentle, pleading. “The food’s going to run out. You go out there, and you’ll be passing through a whole biosphere no one’s ever seen before. There are going to be things you and I haven’t even imagined. I want to see those before I die.”

The next cell opened. There was no mud, but the acrid stink of melted plastic filled the air, stinging her nose and eyes. Amos closed it again.

“You need to get electricity to drive that cart,” she said. “If I tell you how to do that, will you take me with you?”

Amos turned his head to her, his gaze fastening on her like he was noticing her for the first time. His smile came slowly.

“You got something you want to tell me, doc?”

Elvi shrugged. “The alien moon defense grid thing shot down the shuttle with the fusion drive and the drop with batteries and fuel cells in it, but it let the food and medicine come through. It also isn’t busy shooting the clouds, even though there are a bunch of organisms living in them that are made of complex organic compounds. It doesn’t care about chemical energy inside compounds. You could have the Rocinante drop you a chemical fuel source. Acetylene, maybe. You’ve got acetylene tanks up there, don’t you?”

“Hell, I got acetylene right here. But these here don’t run on fire,” Amos said.

“They don’t have to,” Elvi said. “The chemistry deck has a combustion chamber that runs assays by converting exothermic reactions into current and then measuring the output. It’s not much of a chamber, but if you take that out and build a decent-sized combustion chamber—maybe a ten-centimeter surface—you could probably capture enough of the chemical energy from the burn to make the same current coming out of one of those things. We might need to build a transformer to get the amps and volts just right, but that’s not actually hard.”

Amos scratched his neck and rocked back on his heels. His eyes were narrow.

“You just come up with that on the spot?”

Elvi shrugged. “Does that mean I can come with you?”

Amos turned his head and spat on the ground. “Sure,” he said.

“I just want to know why,” Fayez said.

“Why what?” Elvi asked, walking through the main chamber of the ruins. She had two thick plastic sacks of fresh-ish water. Potable, at least. And a box the size of her hand with protein rations in it. It was supposed to be enough for one person for one day, and it was all they were going to have until they came back to the camp in the ruins. She’d also found a satchel with a wide fake-leather belt to strap it closed.

“Why you’re chasing after Holden again,” Fayez said, ducking around a passing woman.

“I’m not chasing after Holden,” Elvi said, then stopped and turned, putting her palm against Fayez’s chest. She could feel his heartbeat against her fingertips. “You know I’m not chasing after Holden, don’t you? Because that’s… I mean, no.”

“Then why?” he said.

The organisms still dying in Elvi’s eyes had lost all their green tinge, but they left the world a little blurry. She felt like she was seeing Fayez through a filter that softened his features, smoothed his skin. He looked like a media star in some particularly unflattering role that involved a lot of mud and not many showers.

“Because I want to see,” she said. “It’s why I came out here. It’s why I’ve been spending all my time taking samples and running assays. I love what I do, and what I do is go look at things. Holden said he was talking to aliens, and that he might be able to turn off the defense grid, and it means we’re going to drive through the wilderness—”

“What’s left of it,” Fayez said.

“And because I’m going to die,” Elvi said.

Fayez looked away.

“We’re all going to die,” Elvi said. “And we’re all very probably going to die very, very soon. And my choices are to go out and look at this amazing, strange, beautiful, ruined world or else stay in the camp and watch everyone around me die by centimeters. And I’m a coward and a hedonist and I’m sometimes very, very selfish.”

“You know. Between the two of us, I always thought of myself as more along those lines.”

“I know.”

Outside, Amos’ kludged cart was roaring, the constant burn of the combustion chamber was like a synthesizer stuck on a particularly ragged and unpleasant G under middle C. Amos was in the cab, sitting at the controls. Fayez walked with her to the side of the cart and then helped her scramble up into the cab. When he stepped back, he had his hands shoved deep in his pockets. She couldn’t see quite well enough to know if there were tears in his eyes too.

“Those the supplies, doc?” Amos asked.

“They’re what we’ve got to work with.”

“All right then. I got the signal from the captain’s hand terminal locked in. We got maybe a week’s worth of gas, and the guy I’m after’s got a day’s head start.”

“I wish we had sunglasses,” she said. “Or a pizza.”

“Fallen fucking world, doc.”

“Let’s go.”

The cart lurched once, the tires spinning in the mud for a moment, then catching and lurching again. The rain made tiny dots on the windshield, and a wide, smeary wiper cleared them away. The world before her was a vast plain of mud. She checked Amos’ hand terminal. The path toward James Holden would take them through territory that had been forestlike, past the shoulder of a massive freshwater lake, through a maze of canyons that defied any standard geological explanation. She was going to see a world in the aftermath of utter disaster, but she would still see it. And the state of nature was always recovering from the last disaster.

“Stop,” she said. “Could you please stop. Just for a minute?”

“You need a potty break, you should have thought of that before we started,” Amos said, but he stopped the drive. She couldn’t even hear the electrical motors winding down over the roar of the acetylene-powered generator. She opened the door of the cab and leaned out. They’d only gone a hundred meters. She could still see Fayez, even though he was mostly a dark, fuzzy blot. She waved, and he waved back. She gestured that he should come toward her, and he did. She watched him trot across the mud field, looking down and watchful for slugs.

When he reached the cab, he looked up at her. She was sure there were tears in his eyes now.

“Chances are I’m not coming back,” she said.

“I know.”

“Kind of need to get a move on, doc,” Amos said. “Don’t mean to be a buzz-kill or nothing.”

“I understand,” Elvi said. She looked down again. Her gaze met his dark eyes. “Are you getting up here?”

“Is he what?” Amos asked at the same moment Fayez said, “Of course I am.”

Elvi scooted across the seat, making room for him. Fayez climbed up beside her and slammed closed the door. Amos looked at them both, his eyebrow lifted. Elvi smiled at him and pulled Fayez’s arm over her shoulder.

“Don’t remember this was part of the deal, doc,” Amos said.

“It’s kind of like our honeymoon,” Elvi said. She felt Fayez stiffen for a moment, and then almost melt against her.

Amos considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “Whatever floats your boat.”