Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Elvi

Elvi sat in the back of the car. The driver was a young man with close-cut, tightly curled hair. Mostly what she saw of him was the back of his neck. As the State Building fell away behind them, the city itself spread out. She could still remember the first time she’d seen it, brought in by soldiers with the scrupulous politeness of a concierge at a luxury hotel, only with sidearms. The streets were wider than anywhere she’d ever been, with greenways along the sides. Buildings rose up, tall and beautiful, with solar collection windows and rooftop gardens like Frank Lloyd Wright had been reborn and made skyscrapers. The scale of the place was massive and boastful. She remembered being overwhelmed by it, the first time.

Now, it seemed weirdly brittle. Millions of people lived in the capital city, and almost none of them had been there longer than a decade. The traffic was stopped for her motorcade, and she saw the normal people—civilians and citizens and military with status lower than hers—craning their necks as she passed, trying to figure out who she was and whether they should be excited to see her. There were no monuments, no billboards, no old neighbor-hoods. She sort of hated it.

“Would you like some water, ma’am?” the driver asked.

“No,” Elvi said. “Thank you.”

He nodded without looking back at her. She leaned back into the plush seat and tried to straighten her leg. It didn’t help the ache.

The labs were massive. Technically it was part of the University of Laconia, but it was run like a military camp. The gate guards waved them through without checking, and the car took a looping path through campus, heading toward the pens. She fidgeted with her cane. As they made the last turn, a man came into view, clearly waiting for her. The relief that flooded her when she saw that it wasn’t Paolo Cortázar was telling.

“Dr. Ochida,” she said as she levered herself up out of the car.

“Dr. Okoye. It’s good to have you back. I heard about your fieldwork. I have to say, you aren’t selling me on it over nice safe labs.”

“Well, the data was interesting,” she said as they started down the path to the Pen. It was a dark, windowless cube, hardened against attack even in the heart of the empire, where attack seemed impossible. They said God didn’t play dice, but if He did, they’d look like the Pen. Huge, square, and inscrutable.

“I hear they’re sending you into the holy of holies,” Ochida said. “Paolo’s very close with his senescence project.”

“It wasn’t my choice.”

“The high consul does what the high consul does,” Ochida said as they reached the guards. Elvi handed over her ID badge and submitted to the verification scan. It was just a touch on her wrist, but it felt more invasive than that.

“With the rich and powerful, always a little patience,” she said. The guards stood away and let them through. There was a little pop when the door opened, and the air pushed in with them. Inside, the next set of security protocols blasted them with air and scanned every millimeter of their bodies before the inner door opened.

Inside, the Pen was almost more reassuring. It looked like the kind of lab she’d been in for decades, on and off, at half a dozen universities and research institutions. Safety procedures were posted on the wall in bright fonts and six languages. The air smelled of phenol soap and air scrubbers.

“Come on,” Ochida said with a smile. “I’ll walk you over.”

Don’t get comfortable, Elvi told herself. This isn’t your home court. You aren’t safe here.

“I just had the most interesting conversation,” Fayez had said back on the day she’d first been assigned her task.

“I could say the same. But mine’s classified, so why don’t you go first.”

“Well, he was being awfully cagey. But I think our old friend Holden just told me Cortázar’s plotting murder.”

Elvi had laughed because it was a statement too horrifying to match the pleasant setting, and sometimes being overwhelmed was kind of funny. “I’m not sure I can deal with that right now,” she said. And then, “Did he really?”

Fayez shrugged. “No, he didn’t. He very carefully and specifically didn’t. We had a perfectly lovely conversation about the importance of teaching children about negative space as a tool of political analysis. Then we talked about everyone at the head of the science effort except Cortázar while he made significant eye contact. And then made a weird segue into the history of political power struggles on old Earth, with a focus on Richard the Third.”

“That’s … obscure.”

“Not that obscure. Shakespeare wrote a play about him.”

“What was it called?”

“Richard the Third,” Fayez said. “Are you feeling all right?”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. He was warmer than usual, but it wasn’t strange to run a low-grade fever when a limb was regrowing. “I wasn’t a theater major, and I’ve had a long day. What was the point of it?”

“Richard was an asshole and killed a bunch of people, but specifically a couple of kids. Heirs to the throne or something.”

“You weren’t a theater major either.”

“I was not.”

Far above them, a thin sheet of clouds moved across the stars, blotting some and revealing others. She wanted to close her eyes and fall asleep right there and wake up in their shitty apartment back on Ceres before she’d ever heard of Laconia or Duarte at all. All the things she’d learned, all the money and status and discovery could vanish like a dream, and she’d still have been happy as long as all the rest of it went too.

“So negative space and then everyone but Cortázar, and a king who killed some kids.”

“Well, technically a prince who clawed his way to power by killing some kids. I think.”

“Spiffy,” she said.

“Wasn’t Cortázar one of the ones that worked for Protogen back before Eros?”

“Back during Eros,” Elvi said.

“I’m just saying it wouldn’t be his first time.”

“He created the catalyst,” Elvi said. “For me. Doesn’t mean I’m a murderer.”

“Yeah,” Fayez said, but he knew she was thinking, Except that it kind of does. That was what decades of marriage were for. Intimacy and pattern matching as a kind of telepathy.

He sighed, shifted, and put an arm around her. “I may have been reading more into it than was there. It just seemed strange and kind of pointed.”

“He meant something by it,” Elvi said. “Maybe not what you got, exactly. But something.”

“You’re thinking about tracking him down and asking him?”

“I am.”

“If he was being oblique because Duarte’s got an eye on him, he won’t be straight with you any more than he was me.”

Unless I let him know that Duarte isn’t watching anything right now, Elvi thought. The idea left a cold mark that could have been fear or excitement or something of both. She wondered what Trejo would think, and if Holden was even on the new, secret emperor’s radar.

“Maybe I can come up with something,” Elvi said.

And maybe she could have if they hadn’t discovered Amos Burton and his pocket nuke that night and Holden hadn’t been thrown in a cell before morning.

Cortázar smiled when he saw her like it was something he’d told himself to remember to do. Elvi felt like her answering nod was equally fake, but she didn’t know if he’d notice or care.

“Anything else I can help with, Paolo?” Ochida asked.

“Thank you, no,” Cortázar said. “We’ll be fine.”

Ochida stepped away. Everything about it was perfectly normal and polite. It all felt like a threat. Cortázar turned and started walking toward a set of metal doors. She had to trot to catch up with him.

“I’m sorry we had to push this until after lunch,” he said. “I’ve been at the security office all morning going over the things they took from the spy.”

“Amos Burton,” Elvi said. “Kelly briefed me. It’s a little weird. I knew him. We were both on Ilus at the same time. He saved my husband’s life.”

“Well, he had a pocket nuke with him in that cave, so …” Cortázar wagged his hand in a so-so gesture. “I was with the analysis team. Trejo’s looking at the communication deck pretty carefully. It looks like the bastard’s been out there for quite a long time.”

“Do we know what he wanted?”

“Not yet, but we may still get to ask him.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“Oh my, yes. Very much so.”

“Then how?”

He presented his lanyard to a locking mechanism, and the doors cycled open. She followed him into a darker corridor. The walls were thicker. Reinforced. It was a little sobering to think that the raw protomolecule of the Pen wasn’t the most dangerous thing in the lab.

“Ilich fucked that whole thing up badly,” Cortázar said. “Not his fault. He didn’t know not to leave the body behind.”

The doors closed behind them with a deep sound. Like a prison. The corridor acted as an airlock.

“After they shot the poor fucker in the head, Ilich pulled everyone back to protect the little princess,” Cortázar said. She heard the sneer in his voice, and thought of Richard III. “He should have left someone guarding the body. Or burned it before he left. Not his fault, really. He knows the rules about the repair drones, but he doesn’t know the reason behind them.”

A second set of doors opened, light spilling into the hallway. “I don’t understand,” Elvi said.

“You will,” Cortázar said lightly as he walked into the private lab. He’d been teasing her.

This lab was smaller than the Pen. She recognized some of the equipment from her own exobiology labs—array sequencers, proteome sample analyzer, NIR and low-resonance scanners. Other things were as strange as any of the alien artifacts she’d come across. Cortázar ignored them all, stepping across to a transparent polymer cage the size she’d seen used for simian and large-animal studies.

“Trejo thinks having a new set of eyes on all of this will help, but the truth is you’re going to be playing catch-up for months just to get to the point you can ask intelligent questions,” he said. “But to get you started? These were the original cases. The seed grit in our oyster.”

Two children were in the cage, a boy maybe seven or eight years old and a girl on the edge of adolescence. Their eyes were perfectly black, like the pupils had eaten iris and sclera alike. The girl stood up and walked toward the front face of the cage. Her skin was grayish. She moved almost normally, but when she stopped, there was a terrible stillness about her.

“What … ,” Elvi said, and then didn’t know how to finish the question. She’d heard the phrase It made my flesh crawl, but she’d thought it was a figure of speech until then.

“They were Alexander and Cara Bisset when they were alive,” Cortázar said. “Children of the initial scientific expedition that was on Laconia before the high consul relocated his loyalists here. The boy died in an accident. The girl was poisoned trying to eat local flora in the wilderness not long after. This is what happens when you have a dead body around the repair drones. Or, well. Sometimes. They don’t always take it upon themselves to fix things, but when they do …” He nodded toward the dead children. This is what happens.

“I don’t know you,” the girl said.

“My name’s Elvi.”

“I’m Cara. Are you going to hurt us too?”

Oh, Elvi thought. Oh, fuck this. I don’t care what it takes. As soon as I get out of here, I will find a way to never, ever come back.

“The original bodies died twenty years ago, more or less,” Cortázar said. “These artifacts that were built from them have been static since their recovery.”

“So they’ll always be young?”

“Well. They’ll always look like immature human beings,” Cortázar said. “That’s not exactly the same thing. They have, for the most part, similar structures and chemistry to the original bodies, only very stable. Telomeres don’t shorten. Mitosis can run indefinitely. There’s no buildup of senescent cells or plaques. The immune response has a couple additional pathways and structures that are interesting. Really very nice work.”

“That’s amazing,” Elvi said, and the words felt like dropping a stone down a well. Deep and kind of hollow.

“The high consul’s interest in personal immortality came from them. He thought that if we could learn the differences in structure and function from these samples and reverse engineer them into a living body instead of a corpse, sort of the way carbon-silicate lace plating was based on long-lived architectural structures … well, that would be interesting. I tried a few animal models first, and made enough progress that I felt comfortable with a human trial.”

She leaned on her cane and fought back the dizziness. “Duarte agreed to that?”

Cortázar turned to look at her. He seemed confused. “Of course he did. It was the answer to his biggest problem. How do you hold a galaxy-spanning empire together over generations? Have someone running it who doesn’t die. Well, here they are. Things that have all the traits you need not to age and die.”

“Wasn’t he worried something might … I don’t know. Go wrong?”

“He understood there was some risk, but he thought it was justified by the possible return. We went very carefully, and the high consul had a great deal of faith in my abilities.”

“All right,” Elvi said. “Okay.”

“It was fine until you triggered that—” He gestured at her injured leg. “It was working. It may still work, with some adjustments and a new subject.”

“I didn’t trigger anything. That was Sagale, following orders,” she said, but what she thought was: A new subject like Teresa. It didn’t sit right. Cortázar turned his attention back to the children in the cage. No, he wants it for himself.

“I have complete records, of course,” Cortázar said. “I have them set up for you on the system here. Take as long as you want looking over them.”

“In here?”

“The project doesn’t exist outside of this room. The high consul was very clear on that, and I can’t imagine Admiral Trejo would want to reduce security.”

The private lab was smaller all told than her office back at the State Building. The younger one, the boy, came to stand beside what had been his sister. Elvi was going to be under their eyes the whole time she was here. She wondered whether Cortázar had set it up like that to make her uncomfortable. And whether the information he showed her would be anywhere close to complete …

“Wait,” she said. “Amos Burton’s body was missing.”

“They’re out looking for it now,” Cortázar said. “It will be very useful having an adult subject to compare with. I mean, it would mean more if I had complete scans and medical records of him from before the corpse was modified. That’s what we really need to move forward. But I’ll enjoy this all the same. There’s a restroom just outside the hall. And if you need food, you should probably have it outside. We’ve only ever had one unintentional protomolecule contamination, but—”

“Understood,” she said, and sat at the low monitor. The chair squeaked.

“I’ll come check in on you later,” Cortázar said. He forgot to smile this time. The doors closed behind him, and Elvi turned to the reports and the data. Her head felt like it was full of bees. There was too much, and it left her unsettled and jumpy. She expected Cortázar’s work to bounce off her brain and puddle on the floor. Actually engaging with it was too much to ask.

But once she’d started looking through it, her focus started coming back, and a familiar calm came over her. Other people might take reassurance in a lover’s hand or a cup of herbal tea—really a tisane since it didn’t have tea leaves, but tea was the term people used anyway, which Elvi had always thought interesting. Elvi only had room in her mind for learning or panicking. She couldn’t do both, and she didn’t like panic.

The thing that struck her first was how small the differences really were. Cortázar wasn’t a biologist. His background was nanoinformatics, which had a huge overlap when it came to things like genetics, epigenetics, and heritable cytoplasmic proteins, but missed basics like anatomy. The way the kids’ hearts had changed to adjust for a different viscosity in their plasma, the way that their blood had changed to a more efficient, non-cell-bound hemoglobin analog, all the other tweaks and modifications weren’t really changes in kind. They were just improvements.

Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies’ gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered a lot more close-enough-is-close-enough than actual design.

When she looked up and saw the children looking back at her, it was five hours later, her leg ached like hell, and the fear was gone. The grayness in their skin was an artifact of the oxygen transport. The blackness of their eyes was an optical structure that was better at capturing light. Whatever was going on with the new kind of neurons in their brains and the extra layer in their neocortexes, all the old, purely human structures were there too.

The process of re-creating all that using tools out of the protomolecule’s toolbox was an act of hubris that took her breath away. If anyone besides Duarte and Cortázar had been part of that conversation, there would have been prosecution. Two men, each convinced of their exceptionalism, were capable of leapfrogging over vast chasms of maybe-this-isn’t-a-great-idea and this-is-totally-illegal. Elvi had become convinced that Cortázar was jealous that Duarte intended to feed his own daughter into the same grinder instead of his pet scientist.

She levered herself up on her cane and walked to the transparent cage. The boy stepped back, like he was afraid of her. The girl—Cara—stood her ground.

Development into a mature form wasn’t the same as aging and death. Maybe the drones hadn’t understood that. So that meant something about how the protomolecule designers had functioned, didn’t it? That their designs didn’t take growth and maturation into account suggested that the original designers only had mature forms. Adults making adults. She tried to imagine what that would be like.

“Can I ask you something?” Elvi said.

For a moment, Cara was still as stone. When she nodded it felt like watching a statue come to life.

“Did you and your brother lose time?”

“When the thing happened, and we could see the air?”

“Yes, then.”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t give us a clock to look at.”

“You’re conscious, then. You’re not … You aren’t just … You and your brother are sentient? Self-aware?”

The huge, black eyes changed. Glimmered. A thick tear rolled down Cara’s cheek. Elvi put her palm against the cage.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am so, so sorry.”