Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Elvi

Elvi’s hand terminal chimed again. It was past time for her to go, but she couldn’t pull herself away. Also, the girl in the glass cage didn’t have a chair, and so Elvi had chosen to sit on the floor beside her. The prospect of getting back up with her aching leg wasn’t pleasant.

“So,” she said, “it wasn’t a change in cognition?”

There was a moment of eerie stillness, the off-putting pause that they always seemed to have, and then Cara shook her head. “I mean, it’s hard to be sure what it was like really, but I didn’t have the feeling of being any different. Except for the library, you know.”

The library was what Cara and Alexander—whose nickname in the family had been Xan—called the information that they carried with them after their re-creation by the repair drones. It was, according to them, like knowing things without having to learn them first. Sometimes the information was straightforward, like details about the local environment. Sometimes it was inscrutable, like the fact that substrate-level entities were difficult to refract through rich-light. That was the most interesting example, because Cara understood what the substrate was, and what refraction meant in that context, and the nature of rich-light, but the whole body of knowledge didn’t connect to anything. There was no shared context with anything like food or trees or water. Any human knowledge. It was, Elvi thought, like finding a sea turtle who thoroughly understood Godel’s incompleteness theorem, but didn’t have any sea-turtley application for it.

That kind of cognitive artifact was a large part of why Cortázar had drawn the conclusion that Cara and Xan weren’t actually the children they’d been before they were “repaired,” but alien technology created using human corpses. It was a deep question, and one that Elvi struggled with. The children had clearly been transformed. The fact that they weren’t aging or developing was evidence enough of that. The blackness of their eyes and the grayness of their skin dropped them straight into an uncanny valley that still made something in Elvi’s hindbrain recoil.

But then sometimes when no one was observing them, Xan would put his head in Cara’s lap so she could ruffle his hair. It was a moment that primates had been sharing back to the Pleistocene, deeper and more recognizable than mere humanity. Or Cara would crack a joke about something Elvi asked, and then smile almost shyly when Elvi actually laughed. Elvi’s opinion shifted on them. Sometimes she was sure they were puppets of inscrutable alien technologies. Sometimes it seemed obvious that Cortázar had built his case that they weren’t human just so he could keep them in a cage for a few decades and run tests on them. Elvi wasn’t sure if she liked them or if they scared the shit out of her. If they were passing their Turing test, or if she was failing it.

But it was interesting that none of Cortázar’s work on Duarte seemed to have resulted in the high consul’s getting access to the library, and the weird turning-off of consciousness hadn’t broken Cara and Xan the way it had Duarte. There was a clue in there somewhere. She had the dataset. She just needed the right grid to put over it, and the pattern would make sense. She could feel it.

Her hand terminal went off again. This time with a message. Her transport had arrived. She was late for the briefing. She muttered something obscene and started levering herself up to standing. “I have to go.”

“We’ll be here when you get back,” Cara said, and after a pause, Xan laughed. Elvi smiled too. It was silly to treat them like she’d been having lunch with friends and had to go too soon, but there she was. Sometimes she was silly.

She leaned on her cane as she made her way out through the labs to the fresh and open air. Her leg hurt. The regrowth, as simple as it was, was going slowly. Poorly. Fayez’s new foot was already in place, the skin a little paler and softer, the new muscles still prone to cramp if he walked too much. But he’d regrown bones and tendons and nerves, and she was still leaning on a cane.

The difference, she knew, was the stress. Fayez was almost ornamental in her present life. He slept in, ate at the State Building, visited with whoever came through the gardens or read books or watched old entertainment feeds. He recuperated. Elvi was diving through Cortázar’s data when she wasn’t examining Duarte’s condition or trying to keep Teresa from being murdered in the name of curiosity or going over her own data from the Falcon. She was barely sleeping, and when she did, it was just rolling the dice to see what flavor of nightmare was taking its turn.

There would be a point when it was all too much. When the intrusive image of Sagale with a part of his head missing wouldn’t let itself be kicked down the road for her to think about later even one more time. When she’d break. It hadn’t come yet, though, so she didn’t have to deal with it. She was very aware that she was working on what Fayez called fuck-it-if-it’s-not-happening-right-now protocol.

Worse than that, she was coming to a place where she enjoyed the intensity. She had never been under more stress in her life, except maybe once, back on Ilus. Everyone had been going blind, and there were neurotoxin-covered slugs crawling up out of the ground, and alien artifacts coming to life, and people murdering each other over political issues and personal pride. Everything had depended on her talent and the sharpness of her mind. And now it did again. And part of her loved it like it was sugar. Probably not a healthy part.

The driver waiting for her had an umbrella up to shield her from a light, misty rain. He didn’t speak. When she got to the car, she leaned toward him. “Let Trejo know I’m on my way.”

“I already have, Doctor,” the driver said.

Drivers, Elvi thought as they pulled away, were a strange kind of affectation. It would have been easier to have a transport just pick her up and take her without another human involved. Having someone there whose job was to be deferential to her actually slowed things down. An extra layer of processing. Like that pause the children had. She wondered if it was like a stutter. She had to read up on that. Maybe there was something useful in it.

The State Building was wreathed in mist. The car’s heater wasn’t quite enough to push back the cold that radiated from the window. Early winter on Laconia—on this part of Laconia anyway—seemed to involve a lot of chilly days and bitter nights. As soon as the sun went down, all the mist would turn into an all-encompassing layer of ice. The local trees had all retracted their leaves. The imported ones had seen all their chloroplasts die out and were in the process of dropping red and yellow and brown remnants.

Inside, the climate was warm and dry, as controlled as a ship’s, but the light from the windows was muted and gray. It still smelled like rain. A different servant took her jacket and asked if she wanted a snack or a cup of tea delivered to the briefing room. She said yes out of habit. Her attention was already divided between the past—sitting with the children or alien child-corpse puppet things—and the future—her report and analysis of the most recent mass blackout event. There was literally no room in her awareness for the present.

The briefing room was beautiful. Walls of polished rosewood with a subtle gold inlay, and lights set behind frosted glass that left the place shadowless. Trejo and Cortázar and Ilich were already there, seated around a malachite-topped table. Trejo looked as bad as she felt, and Ilich maybe even a little worse. Cortázar was the only one of them who was bearing up well under the stress. She was pretty certain that was because he didn’t care whether any of the rest of them lived or died.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I’m sure you understand.”

“We’ve all been busy,” Trejo said, and either it was a subtle dig or it wasn’t. She couldn’t tell which. “Regardless, we’re all here now. And we have to make a statement about this … latest event. What can the high consul say about it? What do we know? Colonel Ilich? Would you like to begin?”

Ilich cleared his throat. “Well, we experienced another event that appears to have simultaneously affected everyone in the system. And by simultaneous, again, I mean that it appears to have been a single, nonlocal event that happened … everywhere. We have reports that it also occurred in at least two other systems.”

Cortázar raised his hand like a kid in grade school, and Trejo nodded at him.

“What happened in the ring space?” Cortázar asked. “Was it the same as in the systems?”

“We don’t know,” Ilich said. “We didn’t have any of our ships in the ring space at the time. There’s some indication that ships in the ring space may have been … um … eaten, if that’s the term. The same way the Typhoon and Medina were. But I don’t have confirmation. The event doesn’t seem correlated with anything we did, but we only have an active naval presence in about one hundred and twenty systems right now. If something happened outside of those, we might not know.”

“Seriously?” Trejo said.

“I can’t overstate how devastating it’s been to lose Medina Station, sir. Controlling that choke point was the leash we had on the empire. Without it …”

Trejo leaned back in his chair, scowling. He opened his hands to Elvi and Cortázar, giving the floor to them. Cortázar didn’t seem to care, but Elvi found herself sitting forward to speak as if she owed the admiral something.

“If I can try to put this all in a wider context?”

“Please do,” Trejo said.

“It’s about the nature of consciousness.”

“That may be a wider context than I was looking for, Major.”

“Bear with me,” Elvi said. “Unless we’re reaching for religious explanations, which I’m not the person to comment on, consciousness is a property of matter. That’s trivial. We’re made out of matter, we’re conscious. Minds are a thing that brains do. And there’s an energetic component. We know that neurons firing is a sign that a particular kind of conscious experience is happening. So, for instance, if I’m looking at your brain while you imagine something, I can guess reliably whether you’re imagining a song or a picture by seeing if your visual or auditory cortex is lighting up.”

“All right,” Trejo said.

“There’s no reason to believe that a brain is the only structure capable of having that combination of structure and energy. And in fact, there’s a fair amount of evidence that the gate builders had a conscious structure—a brain-like thing—where the material component wasn’t at all the same kind of thing we use. Anecdotally, we’ve found at least one brain-like structure that was a diamond the size of Jupiter.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Trejo said.

“Like we don’t have a steel chamber in fusion reactors. We have magnetic bottles. Magnetic fields that perform the same basic function as matter. The older civilization appears to have developed its consciousness in a form that relied more on energetic fields and maybe structures in unobservable matter than the stuff we made a brain from. There’s also some implication that quantum effects have something to do with our being aware. If that’s true for us, it was probably true for them.

“My thesis—the one I was working on before I came here—explored the idea that our brains are kind of a field combat version of consciousness. Not too complex. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but takes a lot of punishment and keeps functioning. Our brain may actually have a kick-starting effect, so when the quantum interactions that underlie having experiences break down, they’re easier to start up again. Does that make sense?”

Trejo said Barely at the same time Cortázar said Of course. The two men looked at each other. Elvi felt annoyed at both of them, but she went on.

“So, the scenario that James Holden brought back from the alien station in the ring space was of something systematically destroying the consciousness of the older civilization. Killing it. The previous civilization tried getting rid of systems. Inducing supernovas. That didn’t help. They eventually closed all the gates, and that didn’t fix the problem either, because whatever it was killed them all anyway.

“And that’s where we came in. We found—and I have directly observed—things that we call bullets or scars or persistent nonlocal field effects. Basically a place where whatever hates the ring gates has done something to collapse consciousness on a planet or in a system. Or in all the systems at once. What I suspect—and I don’t have any data for this—is that the enemy figured out how to snuff out all the systems at once, whether the gates were active or not. I believe that our travel through the gates is irritating to these beings. Maybe even damaging in some way. When that damage gets high enough, they react.”

“So when I killed Pallas Station in Sol … ,” Trejo said.

“You also hit some weird, aphysical dark god in whatever passes for its nose,” Elvi said. “And they did what you’d expect them to do. If you get sick and a penicillin shot makes you better, then the next time you get sick, you try another shot. Only it turns out we aren’t the same kind of conscious system as the gate makers. We don’t break as easy, and we recover better. What slaughtered their civilization just lost us a few minutes of time.”

“How disappointing for the dark gods,” Trejo said.

“Right? But then they’re not done. Especially, and no offense here, when we start dropping bomb ships into wherever they are. Playing tit for tat. And the way this one felt different? Light and shapes instead of that kind of hyperawareness?”

“I did notice that, yes,” Trejo said dryly.

“I believe that the enemy, whatever it is, is experimenting with new ways to break conscious systems. Brains. I think we’re the equivalent of a penicillin-resistant infection, and the last event we experienced was an attempt at tetracycline.”

“And the trigger?” Trejo asked.

“There doesn’t need to be a trigger,” Elvi said, “if the enemy has gone past being purely reactive. Maybe we just convinced them to take us seriously.”

Trejo sank a little as the implications unfolded in his mind.

“Is this new information?” Cortázar said. “I feel we’ve covered this all before. I mean, nothing in this is really new, is it?”

Trejo and Ilich exchanged a look.

“It’s useful to me,” Trejo said, “to have Dr. Okoye’s summary. So yes. Do we have any progress on healing the high consul?”

“It would be helpful,” Cortázar said, “if I could examine Ilich’s castoff. I don’t suppose there’s been any new word on finding it?”

Trejo’s effort to hold his temper was visible. “Before we move on to that, if we could address the health of the high consul?”

“He’s stable,” Cortázar said. “Very stable. Perfectly fine.”

“Improving?”

“No.”

Ilich broke in, his voice tense. “Is there no way we can get him back?”

Elvi wasn’t going to let Cortázar bullshit this one anymore. Either he had a plan he’d been holding back for his own reasons or he didn’t. She leaned forward and put her hands on the desk, palms down, like she was revealing a hand at a poker table. “I don’t see any realistic path toward returning him to his previous state.”

Trejo nodded to her and shifted to Cortázar. “Do you disagree?”

Cortázar squirmed. “His previous state? Probably not. But moving him forward into a new state is much more plausible. Easy, even. And more than that, instructive.”

Trejo went terribly still. A soft tapping came at the door, and the servant came in with Elvi’s snack. She’d forgotten all about it. When the door was closed again and privacy restored, Trejo hadn’t moved. His eyes weren’t focused on anything in the room, and his skin was pale. It took Elvi a moment to understand what she was seeing.

All this time, Trejo had hoped. He’d believed that his leader would return, that the righteous king would rise and retake his throne. Despite everything Elvi had said, the admiral had believed Cortázar could Merlin his Arthur back from madness. She was watching Trejo realize he had just been letting someone play with the corpse. She was someplace between horrified for him and relieved that he’d finally heard what she’d been saying all along.

“All right,” Trejo said. And then again, more slowly, “All right. The high consul is going to have to make a statement all the same. We’ll draft something.”

“We can say that the event was a test,” Ilich said. “The high consul’s elite team has made a breakthrough. A new weapon against the enemy.”

“Or we could tell them the truth,” Elvi said.

Trejo stood, his hands clasped behind his back. The anger and irrationality in his expression were grief. Grief made people crazy. When he spoke, his voice buzzed with barely controlled rage. Not at Cortázar either. At her.

“I don’t think you understand exactly how precarious our situation is here, Dr. Okoye. I have a two-front war with no fronts. This is not a moment to undermine and degrade the confidence of our troops or embolden separatist terror. You have just outlined war on a cosmic scale. I can’t prosecute a battle against your dark gods while guerrillas degrade our forces. We have to unify humanity for this. We have to strike with one will. We can’t afford to fuck around knocking each other’s comm relays down anymore. That is going to get us all killed. Do you hear what I am saying?”

“I do,” Elvi said, and she was surprised by the steel in her own voice. Trejo heard it too. “I’m hearing you say you can’t handle this. You want the fight with the underground over with? Easy to do. Surrender.”

“Your jokes aren’t funny,” he said.

“They aren’t when they’re not jokes.”