Leviathan Falls

Chapter Eight: Elvi

Fayez, floating at her private desk, scrolled through the notes. Whenever he was confused or skeptical, a little line appeared between his eyebrows. “So does this make any fucking sense to you? Because I’m baffled.”

The notes had the scans of Cara’s brain and body and the ones of the BFE, but the important part for Elvi was the interview and subject report with Cara. It had taken them hours to complete, Elvi asking questions and Cara answering verbally or writing out her reply, and while it was the least objective thing in the report, it was also the thing that excited her most.

“It does. I mean, I think it does,” Elvi said, and paused. “I have some ideas.”

He shut down the window and turned his attention to her. “Maybe you better tell me, then. Because I don’t know what I’m looking at here.”

She gathered her thoughts. Exobiology hadn’t been Elvi’s first field of concentration. Back in the dim and ancient times that were really just a few wild and change-filled decades before, she’d gone to Sejong World College because it had the best medical genetics program that she could afford. When she was being honest with herself, it wasn’t even that she loved medical genetics all that much. When she was fifteen, she’d seen Amalie ud-Daula play a medical geneticist in Handful of Rain, and she spent the next year trying to get her hair to look the same. She never really managed. The weird alchemy of adolescent imprinting transformed her unconsidered identification with an entertainment feed actor into an interest in how strands of DNA turned into pathologies.

The idea of a flaw as tiny as a missed base pair translating itself into a slightly different curve on a protein and then into a leaking heart valve or a nonfunctional eye was compelling and creepy in more or less equal degrees. She thought that it was her passion, and she’d followed it with the dedication of a woman who believed she was on the path the universe wanted for her.

She’d taken a course on non-terrestrial fieldwork because her advisor had pointed out how many more postings there were for newly graduated medical geneticists on Mars and the stations on Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons than there were on Earth. Elvi had taken the hint.

Lectures had been held in a small room with yellow, water-stained carpet and a wall screen with a burned-out pixel that made it look like there was a fly on it. Professor Li was three years into his retirement, and only came back to teach the class because he liked it. Maybe his enthusiasm had been infectious, or maybe it had all been the universe’s way of putting her in the right place at the right time. Whatever the reason—or lack of reason—Professor Li had done a section about the first explorations for extraterrestrial life in the oceans of Europa, and Elvi’s brain had lit up like someone had put euphorics in her breakfast cereal.

To the dismay of her mother and her academic advisor, she changed her focus to the then-purely-hypothetical field of exobiology. Her advisor’s exact words had been From a work perspective, you’d be better off learning to tune pianos.

And that had been true right up until Eros moved. After, everybody in her program had jobs for life.

She was older now than Professor Li had been when he told her about Europa and those first tentative efforts to show that Earth’s tree of life wasn’t alone in the universe. She’d seen things she hadn’t dreamed of, been places she hadn’t known existed when she was a girl, and found herself—thanks to chance and James fucking Holden—at the razor’s edge of the most important research projects in human history.

Strange then, how it all cycled back to Professor Li’s lecture about Europa. Cold dead Europa, which had turned out to never have had any life in it but opened up the universe to her anyway.

Elvi steadied herself with a handhold. She’d been on the float enough that it came almost naturally now. She still missed being able to pace. “Okay. How much do you know about the slow life model?”

“I am now aware that there is something called a slow life model.”

“Right. Basics. Okay. So, there’s a range of metabolic rates. You can see that in animals. You have something fast with a high reproduction rate like rats or chickens on one hand, and tortoises with a really long lifespan and a much slower metabolism on the other. The whole tree of life is on that spectrum. It predicts that you’d see things evolving in very low-energy environments that, y’know, needed very little energy. Low metabolisms, low reproduction. Long lifespan. Slow life.”

“Space turtles.”

“Ice turtles. Actually, very cold saltwater slugs. Or jellyfish. Probably something pretty near neutral buoyancy. That’s not the point. You could in theory have something evolve in an environment with very little available energy, and with a very… let’s call it ‘leisurely’ sense of time. It’s what the Tereshkova missions were looking for.”

“And that’s awesome,” Fayez said, blankly.

“Tereshkova One and Two were the first long-term crewed surveys of Europa? They were looking for extraterrestrial life.”

“Which they didn’t find.”

“Some amino acid precursors, but no life.”

“So the space turtles weren’t from Europa.”

A brief flash of annoyance rose in her and faded. They were both tired. They were both in the only ship in an unpopulated solar system with help weeks away at best. And she wasn’t explaining herself that well. She swallowed, set her shoulders, and went on.

“They weren’t. But maybe they were like what we were looking for. And here’s the other thing. The other form of life the Tereshkova missions were looking for was deep vent organisms.”

“Those I know. Worms and things that live near volcanic vents. They use the energy from the vent instead of sunlight.”

“And they also get a bunch of biologically interesting minerals, but yes.”

“Start talking vulcanism, and I know my way around,” Fayez said.

“That’s what Cara’s describing. That biome. Look. She talks about the cold above and the heat below. Like the ice shell of a water moon with a hot core. And free water in between. The part where she says she felt it starting to make more of itself. That’s… I don’t know. Some kind of reproduction. Mitosis or budding.”

“And the thing where she tasted stones,” Fayez said. “Minerals and nutrients floating up from below. You’re thinking they’re both there. These slow life turtles—”

“Jellyfish.”

“—and vent organisms too, but lower down.”

“Like what we were looking for on Europa.”

The line on his forehead erased itself. She wanted to keep going, but she knew her husband’s rhythms. He was working something through, and if she talked now, he wouldn’t hear her. The hum of the ship around them and the ticking of the air recycler were the only sounds until he laughed once, like a cough.

“Okay, I know what I was thinking of,” he said. “The part about the thing in the water.”

“The handhold?”

“Yeah, that. It happened after the… fuck… tasting stone? Seriously, I feel like we should have brought a poetry grad student along. This is bullshit as data.”

“You were thinking of something?”

“Right, sorry. If that was some kind of impressionistic, experiential description of iron uptake leading to magnetic navigation. Maybe that’s the handhold in the water?”

“And that thing at the end,” Elvi said. “When something went down into the heat and came back up scarred, but with this… revelatory whatever it was? If that’s the slow life intentionally reaching for a nutrient-rich environment for the first time. Seeking out food instead of just bumping into it. I think Cara is experiencing this organism’s evolutionary history. The diamond—”

“Thank you for not calling it an emerald.”

“—is showing her how they came to exist. Like if we were explaining life to something that had never seen anything like us by pushing down to organic chemistry and building the story up from there so that we’d have a common context.”

Fayez went quiet. The line on his forehead came back. Elvi pushed off the wall, turning to take the edge of her desk in her fingers and pull herself to a stop. He saw her expression and shook his head.

“No, it makes sense. Sort of. I see why that would be the best information-sharing strategy and all that. It’s just. Okay, say the protomolecule engineers have gotten us up to the part of their story where they were like hamsters avoiding the dinosaurs. I don’t mean to be an asshole, but… so what?”

Elvi didn’t know exactly what she’d been expecting him to say, but it hadn’t been that. “So we know something about what they are. This could be the origin of the species that established a vast galactic presence and overcame a bunch of things we always thought were laws of physics? That’s a big deal.”

“It is. I hear you. But it’s so far back, sweetie. If Cara could ask the diamond maybe the top five ways to keep vast monsters from beyond time and space from killing everyone, that might be a better place to start.”

“Only if she can understand the answer.”

“And if they knew. Which evidence suggests they didn’t. I mean that elaborate gamma-ray burst trap in Tecoma system was just them wiring a shotgun to a doorknob. Even if we know everything about the space jellyfish, is that going to be enough?”

They fell silent. Elvi knew the solid feeling at the center of her gut. It was always there these days. The only thing that changed was how aware of it she was. She anticipated what he would say next—What are we doing here?—and her own reply—The best we can. But he surprised her.

“It’s going to be okay.”

She laughed, not because she believed it but because it was obviously untrue. And because he wanted to comfort her, and she wanted to be comforted. He took her arm, drawing her across the open desk, and pulled her beside him. His arms enfolded her, and she let herself curl against him until they were floating together, his head at her shoulder, his thighs under hers, like twins in the same amniotic sac. It wasn’t an image she thought other people would find heartwarming, but she did. And when she was alone with Fayez, other people weren’t important. His breath smelled like smoky tea.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

“For what?”

“All of it.”

“It’s not your fault.”

She pressed her cheek to his head, felt the scratch of his hair against her cheek. Tears were sheeting across her eyes, making the office swim like she was underwater. “I know. But I don’t know how to fix it, and I’m supposed to.”

She felt the subtle expansion and collapse of his sigh. “We are hailing an awful lot of Marys, aren’t we?”

“We’re making progress. We already know so much more.”

“You’re right. I’m frustrated. I didn’t mean to piss on the project,” Fayez said. “If the answer’s anywhere, it’s here.”

She nodded, and hoped that was true, and that the growing sense she felt that there was something important—critical—in her notes that she’d missed was right. And that whatever it was, she could find it in time.

Later, when Fayez had gone to get some sleep, she went through a packet of reports from Ochida. The high-energy physics workgroup had their most recent data ready for review. The latest complex modeling outputs mapped possible connections between the attack on the Typhoon, the uptick in virtual particles in Tecoma system, and the initial loss of consciousness after the Tempest had destroyed Pallas Station. A surveying company that usually did mining operations around Jupiter was trying to find the weird magic bullet that had been frame-locked to the Tempest when it was destroyed. Her own computational biology group was setting up a distributed study that would put subjects in NIRS imaging around the clock in every populated system in hopes of catching good data the next time the enemy flicked consciousness off. And all the reports were being dumped through massive virtual pattern-matching arrays on Earth, Mars, Laconia, and Bara Gaon in hopes that machine intelligence might catch something the humans had overlooked.

It was the broadest, best-funded research effort in the history of the human race. A million people searching through a haystack the size of 1,300 planets and hoping there was a needle in there someplace.

She sometimes wondered if this had been Duarte’s plan all along. Push and push until solving the ring entity problem was forced into first position for all humanity. He’d always held that it was a problem they’d have to solve sooner or later, and humans did tend to do their best work when survival was on the line. But whether it had been the high consul’s intention or not, humanity had one problem it was trying to solve now. And James fucking Holden had somehow managed to put her in charge of it.

She didn’t know whether looking over the vast effort calmed her or keyed her up. Maybe both.

When she reached the end of the packet, she closed down her screen. There were a couple dozen things that she, as head of the Laconian Science Directorate, needed to authorize or comment on, and she would. But after she’d had some food and maybe a nap. If she could sleep.

She pulled herself through the ship, floating down the corridors. Cara and Xan were in the galley with Harshaan Lee and Quinn de Bodard, and Elvi watched them as she decanted herself a bulb of lentil soup.

“Major,” Harshaan Lee said, nodding to her as she floated over.

“Doctor,” Elvi said, and took a mouthful of soup. The Falcon made good food. The lentils tasted almost fresh—like nutrition and mud and comfort—even though they were probably made from textured fungal proteins.

“We were just talking about Koenji Wizard,” Quinn said. “It’s an entertainment feed out of Samavasarana system.”

“I don’t know it,” Elvi said, and Xan, spinning slowly about his z-axis, launched into a description of the story. It involved a hidden space station built by angels that were also human desires in physical form. And apparently there were a lot of songs, one of which Xan sang. Cara joined in for the chorus. Elvi listened and, to her surprise, felt herself beginning to relax. Xan’s enthusiasm and the benign, childlike narcissism that drove him to the center of every conversation were actually a joy. For a few minutes, Elvi was out of her own head. It was easy to forget that he’d been a seven-year-old for over forty years now.

She almost regretted coming back to herself.

“Cara?” she said, nodding toward the other side of the common room. “Could I borrow you for a second?”

The girl who wasn’t a girl froze the way that she and Xan did sometimes, suddenly going as still as stone. It only lasted a moment, but it was eerie every time. Then she nodded and pushed gently off in the direction Elvi had indicated. Elvi tossed her empty bulb in the recycler and floated over to meet her. Xan, still with Quinn and Harshaan, blinked anxious black eyes at them, and Elvi waved what she hoped was reassuringly.

“What’s on your mind, Doc?” Cara said. Her casual informality left Elvi feeling warm toward the girl every time she heard it. For someone who’d been imprisoned and experimented on for decades by an induced sociopath, Cara had given her trust to Elvi quickly.

“Couple things. I wanted to see how you were feeling. The last dive was… There were some interesting readings. It looked like you were in a different kind of sync with our big green friend. It was looking more like a nonlocal reaction than something with light delay.”

“Yes,” Cara said, so quickly it was almost interrupting. “I felt like that too.”

“And since we don’t know what this is, I need you to tell me how you feel. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Cara said. “Going in there like this seems… I don’t know. It feels good. It feels right.”

Which Elvi knew already. She’d seen the scans and knew what the connection was doing to Cara’s endorphin levels. It was anthropomorphizing to say that the BFE wanted Cara to come back. There was no reason to think it had any will or intentions. But it wanted the girl to come back.

Somewhere deep in her mind, Elvi knew that what came next was a mistake. And that she’d chosen to make it.

“Given that,” she said, “I’d like to consider accelerating the session schedule. If we could take a day or two less between the dives—”

“That would be great,” Cara said. “I don’t think there’s any reason not to. I can handle it.”

Her grin was so genuine—so human—that Elvi couldn’t help grinning back. “All right then. I’ll talk with the team, and we’ll get a new protocol schedule out. Maybe we can try another run as soon as tomorrow?”

Cara gave a little shiver of excitement, and from across the common room, Xan frowned and looked anxious. More than anxious. Melancholy. Elvi took Cara’s hand, squeezing her fingers, and Cara squeezed back. A human gesture of connection, as old as the species.

“It’s going to be all right,” Elvi said, not realizing until she heard herself that she was echoing Fayez. That she hadn’t believed it when he said it.

“I know,” Cara replied.