Leviathan Falls

Chapter Ten: Fayez

Planetary geology wasn’t the sort of degree people usually went into looking for a career as a kingmaker. There wasn’t a lot of crossover between freshman analysis of sedimentary patterns and having people vie for your influence over issues of life and death. Add in political sway over a galaxy-spanning empire, and the overlap was pretty narrow.

But without intending to, Fayez had stumbled into it.

He was floating in Lee’s private cabin with a bone-colored bulb of whiskey in one hand. It was a thick, peaty distillation that was too harsh for him when they were under thrust. A couple weeks on the float did something to deaden his taste buds, and so at times like this, it was perfect. Lee, Elvi’s second-in-command, was queuing up a message from home. Or, at least, from Laconia. Which despite having lived there for years, Fayez still didn’t think of as home.

“Here,” Lee said, pushing back from his station.

“Okay, who am I looking at?” Fayez said.

“His name is Galwan ud-Din,” Lee said. “He’s a senior researcher in extrapolative physics.”

“Right. So I’m not going to understand this at all, am I?”

“I told him to give you the educated layman’s version.”

The screen flipped to an image of a thin-faced man with a vast and well-trimmed beard and a collarless formal shirt. He nodded to the camera in not-quite-a-bow. “Thank you for your time, Dr. Sarkis. I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”

Since it was a recording, Fayez sighed.

“I wanted to share with you some thoughts my workgroup has put together. I think you will find them very promising,” the thin-faced man said, then visibly gathered himself. His expression settled into the thing Fayez expected on grade-school teachers who were trying to be approachable. “Light, as I’m sure you know, is a membrane phenomenon on the surface of time.”

Fayez drained the bulb of the last drop of whiskey and put his hand out for another. Lee had it ready.

For half an hour, ud-Din made what in the end was a surprisingly comprehensible case that Elvi’s slow-life jellyfish had ended their evolutionary arc as a complex, vastly distributed brain-like structure that relied on the counterintuitive truth that time dilation put photons in a state of instantaneous emission from a distant star and absorption by an observing eye even if they seemed to outside observers like Fayez to travel for years in between. The rate-limiting step on a system like that would always be mass, and so technologies for moving mass—inertia manipulation, “shortcut” ring gates—would be prioritized, which evidence suggested they had been.

By the end of the presentation, Fayez felt almost as excited as ud-Din seemed to be, and he hadn’t even finished his second whiskey.

“You see, I hope,” ud-Din said, “why I am so hopeful for this path of research. Which is why I need to ask your help. The new orders from the Science Directorate putting us at the beck and call of Colonel Tanaka… I don’t dispute that the high consul has the absolute right to direct our efforts as needed, but you have his ear. If you could encourage him to refrain from interrupting our research unless it is critical to the empire. I… I only say it because I feel we are on the verge of a breakthrough, and I would hate for the high consul to make his decisions about our workgroup without a full understanding of our situation. Thank you. Thank you for your time.”

Ud-Din licked his lips anxiously and the message ended. How charming to pretend there’s still a high consul running this bumblefuck, Fayez thought, but didn’t say aloud. Some things were too dangerous, even for a kingmaker.

“I have half a dozen like this,” Lee said. “Workgroup and research leads who got the message to do whatever Tanaka asks. Several of them, she has already retasked.”

“They know we can’t do shit about it, right? Because we literally can’t do shit about that. You got the brief about what Tanaka’s doing?”

“I did,” Lee said, and then pointedly didn’t expand on it. “We have a great many absolute top priorities. We can’t do them all.”

“I get that,” Fayez said. “But Elvi’s not the one setting them. She’s been very open about letting expertise place the goalposts.”

“But she is the adoréd saint to Duarte’s Holy Ghost,” Lee said. “People want her to intercede for them.”

“And so they ask you to ask me to ask her,” Fayez said. “No, one more. So that she’ll ask him. Or, functionally, Trejo.”

“Yes.”

“The way we do things, it’s amazing humans ever figured out shoes. I’ll talk to her, but you know how she is right now.”

“I do. Thank you, Dr. Sarkis.”

“Keep plying me with drink, and you’ll wind up turning my head, Dr. Lee.”

Lee’s thin smile was as close to emotional intimacy as the man got. Fayez liked him.

The halls of the Falcon hummed and glowed. He navigated his way through them from handhold to Laconian-blue handhold. Some of the younger members of the crew launched themselves like Belters, zipping from intersection to intersection without touching a wall in between. He wasn’t that guy. Getting where he was going with all his cartilage intact had become a more interesting prospect in the last couple decades.

The thing about expertise was that it wasn’t actually transferable. Winston Duarte had cut his teeth in the MCRN’s logistics department, where he had apparently been an underappreciated genius. It was easy to see how his brilliance there had helped build his breakaway empire. He’d pulled it off, and by grabbing up samples of the protomolecule and the experts who could use it, he’d tamed enough of the alien technology to put all humanity under his heel. For a while, anyway.

Being good at something—even the best that humanity’s billions could offer—didn’t make him good at everything. It just made him too powerful to say no to. And so when he decided to make himself into an immortal god-king, not for his own benefit, but to selflessly provide the human race with the continuing stable leadership that it needed in order to storm heaven and kill God, he’d already talked himself and everyone around him into thinking he was as impressive as the story about him claimed.

Only a few people officially knew how badly that plan had gone. Elvi was one. Fayez was another.

He heard Elvi and Cara talking as soon as he came into the corridor for her lab. The door to Elvi’s office was open, and Cara was floating in the open space between the workbench and the medical scanners. The young woman’s—girl’s—face was bright with excitement, and she gestured as she spoke, as if she needed to stuff more meaning into the words than mere syllables could hold. Elvi was strapped into her crash couch, taking notes as they spoke. Except for the part where they didn’t look even vaguely genetically related, they reminded Fayez of a grandmother and granddaughter bonding through solving some great puzzle. Even before he could make out what they were saying, the tones of their voices told the story. Giddy and enthusiastic was the good spin. Fevered and manic also fit.

“Then there was this sense of… of light?” Cara said. “Like we were eating eyes and it made me able to see.”

“That actually fits,” Elvi said.

“It does?” Fayez said. “What does it fit into? Because I just learned a lot about light, and it was really weird.”

Elvi’s smile wasn’t annoyed at all, and Cara’s was only a little. “I think our sea slugs hit a milestone,” Elvi said. “They already had a method of exchanging information through direct physical transfer, like bacteria trading plasmids. If we’re getting this right, they formed a mutualistic relationship or successful parasitism with a little goo cap that could go down to the volcanic vents and come back up.”

“Ooh. Dirty,” Fayez said, pulling himself fully into the room. With all three of them, it was a little tighter than comfort, but Cara grabbed the wall and made space for him. “How did the eyeballs come into it?”

“They harvested evolutionary innovations from the faster ecosystem. Something down by the vent figured out a rudimentary infrared eye so that it could navigate the vent. The slugs got it, put it on the signaling protein mechanism, and all of a sudden they didn’t need to stick plasmids into each other to share information anymore. They could do infrared semaphore.”

“No, it was light,” Cara said.

“Maybe bioluminescence,” Elvi agreed. “At that point, the very slow things started being able to talk very very fast. And they start looking a lot less like jellyfish and a lot more like free-floating neurons. Plus we already see the deep strategy of sending out semi-biological runners to inhospitable biomes and implanting instruction sets into whatever life they find there. Which—I’m stretching here—starts sounding a lot like the protomolecule’s mission on Phoebe…” Her voice trailed off. Her smile shifted to something more rueful. “But that’s not what you came to talk about, is it?”

“There’s a briefing you should totally listen to, but no,” Fayez said. “I needed to talk about something else.”

“Cara? Could we take a quick break?”

The black eyes were still for a fraction of a second, then flickered up to Fayez and away. “Sure. No problem.”

Cara pushed herself to the doorway and out into the corridor, closing the office door behind her as she went. Fayez drifted to the medical scanners. Cara’s readouts were still on the screens. He traced the curve of her stress metabolites. He wouldn’t have known what they were, except Elvi had explained them.

“They’re not as high as they look,” she said, a little defensively. “We don’t even really know what the upper boundary is for someone who’s been modified like her.”

“I didn’t know you were doing another dive today,” Fayez said.

“She felt up to it. That’s not what you came for either, is it?”

He shut down the screens, rotated back to face Elvi, and braced on a foothold. “The Tanaka thing is a problem.”

She had looked tired before he said it. She looked worse now. “What are we seeing?”

“She’s reallocated and retasked four workgroups. Instead of doing deep background scanning, they’re searching for an artifact that may or may not have left from Laconia and doing deep brain scans of Trejo looking for… I don’t know what.”

“Traces of manipulation,” Elvi said. “Something that would show evidence that he’d had a direct neural link like the one James Holden and the remnants of Miller did on Ilus.”

“So you know about this?”

Elvi made a vague, helpless gesture. “She outranks me.”

“But you’re the administrator of the Science Directorate.”

“And that used to matter,” Elvi said. “Not anymore. Right now, her orders might as well say, ‘from the desk of God.’”

“These scientists want you to protect them from the bureaucracy.”

“What they want is for me to talk Duarte into overriding Trejo and getting her clearance pulled,” Elvi said. “There’s a problem with that plan.”

“That Duarte doesn’t exist?”

“That Tanaka will need to find him before I can ask him any favors, yes.”

Fayez was quiet for a moment. He didn’t want to go to the next place, but he had to. “Do you think that’s really what’s going on?”

Elvi’s sigh meant she’d had the same thoughts and suspicions. “You mean do I think Tanaka’s really searching for a version of Duarte that came out of his coma and disappeared?”

“Or is Trejo feeding us a story and seeing if it leaks out to the underground? This could all be a test. Duarte could be back at the State Building right now contemplating his oatmeal. We wouldn’t know until Dr. Lee gets a quiet order to put a bullet in the backs of our heads. We’re high in the food chain, but Trejo’s still an authoritarian despot, and there’s a lot of precedent for shit like that.”

“I can’t care about it,” Elvi said. “I can’t play the game. I don’t have the focus or the energy.”

“You can stop feeding our results to Jim and Nagata.”

Elvi nodded, but not in the way that meant she agreed.

Fayez pressed his fingertips into his closed eyelids. “Babe,” he said, but she stopped him.

“It’s happening more than we thought.”

“What? What’s happening?”

“The incidents. Like Gedara. We’ve only been seeing the near misses. We always catch the ones that turn off consciousness, but I had Ochida run through pattern matching for other anomalies like Gedara’s lightspeed thing? They’re happening all the time.”

“What do you mean, all the time?” Fayez said, but his gut had gone suddenly cold.

“Changes in virtual particle annihilations in Pátria, Felicité, and Kunlun systems. Lightspeed variations in Sumner and Farhome. Electron mass changed in Haza system for almost two minutes. Electron mass. Sanctuary system had gravity increase by a tenth of a percent throughout the system for six seconds.”

“Okay, every single thing you just said fucks me up.”

“This was one twenty-four-hour period. The things that are doing this are rattling all the windows looking for the way to make us die, and I don’t know how we guard our physical fucking constants against attack. It’s just a matter of time before they figure out how to trigger vacuum decay or something. So I’m going to keep doing exactly everything I can, and yes, that means sharing data. Because if that’s how we catch a break on this, it will be worth it. And if poor Dr. Lee needs to assassinate me because of it, at least it won’t be my problem anymore.”

“Okay. I get it.”

“Trejo’s fighting to hold on to an empire. I’m fighting to have something that’s recognizable as the universe with living things in it.”

“I get it,” he said again, but now that she’d started, she couldn’t stop. Not until the pressure was vented.

“If there’s a chance—one chance in a billion—for me to figure this out, I’m taking it. If there’s a price that I have to pay, that’s fine. Not even going to think about that. Just opening my wallet, and whatever the universe needs to take from me, it’s welcome to. That’s what we’re playing for. So yes, I really, really hope that Duarte snapped out of his fugue state and ran off to do whatever the fuck half-protomolecule former emperors do in their retirement, because that would mean Trejo wasn’t playing court intrigue games with me while I’m at work. But who knows? I don’t.”

She went quiet, still shaking her head in a tight, angry motion. Fayez steadied himself on the handhold.

“How do I help?”

“Just keep doing what you’re doing. Help me keep doing what I’m doing. Hope that we catch a break in time.”

“All right,” he said. “Can do.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“I do not accept your apology. You’re right. I get it.”

She took his hand. She felt cold. Her skin was dry. She’d grown thin enough that he could feel the individual tendons shifting over her bones. “I’m so sorry I pulled you into this.”

“It’s hellish, that’s true. But the company’s good.”

“No one I’d rather face the end of everything with than you.”

“It’s because I have a cute ass, isn’t it? That’s my secret power.”

She managed a smile. “You got me.”

“I can crack a walnut with these cheeks,” Fayez said. “I mean, you wouldn’t want to eat it afterward, but—”

“I love you,” she said. “Stop cheering me up. Send Cara back. I need to get some work done.”

He found Cara in her quarters with Xan. They were floating together in the space between their bunks, with Xan chattering excitedly about something from his entertainment feeds. Cara’s face was the polite boredom of older siblings throughout history. It was weirdly reassuring to see something normal, given their context. When Fayez cleared his throat, the pleasure on the girl’s face was as clear as the disappointment on her brother’s.

“Is Dr. Okoye ready?” Cara asked, and there was a hunger in the question that left Fayez a little uncomfortable. He swallowed it.

“She is. Sorry I interrupted. Just had some stuff I needed to talk with her about.”

“It’s okay,” Cara said. “But I should go.”

Fayez pulled himself aside and let the girl haul herself out. As she floated down the corridor, he had one of those moments he had sometimes where his sense of balance tried to wake up. For just a moment, Cara wasn’t floating away to the side, but falling headfirst down the hallway. He grabbed the handhold to steady himself, and after a few breaths, the feeling passed.

“Is something wrong?” Xan asked.

“No. I just… I’m never going to get used to living on the float. Spent my formative years down a gravity well, and some things are baked in.”

“I’ve heard that,” Xan said, then turned and touched the ceiling to press himself down toward the floor. It was hard to read his expression. The kid had been a little boy for several decades now, and between his child-stuck brain and the depth of his experience, he wasn’t really one thing or the other. His sister was like that too. It was impossible to see them as children, and it was impossible not to. Xan’s mag boots locked onto the deck, and he turned almost like he was walking in gravity.

“What about you?” Fayez said. “All well in your world?”

“I’m worried about Cara,” he said without hesitating. “She keeps coming back different.”

“Yeah? Different how?”

“Changed,” Xan said. “The thing that’s teaching her? It’s making her too.”

The chill that ran through Fayez had nothing to do with temperature. He kept his tone light and jovial. “What’s it making her into, do you think?”

Xan shook his head. An I don’t know motion. “We’ll find out,” he said.