Life Beyond Us, page 24
part #1 of European Astrobiology Institute Presents Series
“Exec asked me to investigate,” she said shortly, referring to the executive committee governing this colony, usually called Bubblewrap, and Edenderry, the mining colony some fifty kilometers away. “Not the accident itself. The crash is a separate inquiry. They just wanted to know if it was safe to rebuild. Any fractures hidden under the regolith, the compaction, geochemical changes, whether the aquifer’s been affected, get samples. Soil, air, water, debris. That’s what the boy was doing. Him and the other kid they gave me—what’s her name. Garnet. And Dr. McLaren, of course.”
The doctor nodded. Bubblewrap consisted of ten domes, of which two were residential; losing a full crop-producing dome was devastating. Naturally Exec would want to rebuild and replant as fast as possible. Sybil didn’t think people would go hungry, but it might be a near thing for a while, which irritated her. In her original design she had emphasized redundancy, resilience, inefficiencies, again and again. Have backups. Have doubles of everything. Find storage, cross-train, save everything. Don’t run too close to the bone; leave some flesh. You never know when you’ll need it.
“Sampling,” the doctor said, lifting his head. His eyes were large and brown, and seemed panicked despite his casual tone. “Dr. Bellerose, did you happen to see whether Christiansen’s helmet lost integrity before he fell? Or after?”
She stared at him. The window behind him framed domes glistening like gems in the early light: green, pale blue, amber. Her heart was pounding for no reason. The boy had become overheated somehow; the suit just hadn’t recorded it. Or gotten dehydrated. That was all. Food poisoning probably.
And yet: “I knew you were going to ask that,” she said.
Sybil left the hospital three hours later, thoroughly out of sorts. They hadn’t quite threatened to detain her if she didn’t comply with the testing, but they hadn’t not, either. “Of course it’s not me, you bloody idiots,” she’d said loudly into the recording gear. “You just give me one mechanism, one exposure pathway, and I’ll shut up. Hm?”
“Please remain still,” the imaging robot said.
“Up yours, creep.”
McLaren had messaged her an hour into the process to say he’d sent Garnet back to the lab, and had himself gone for a quiet pint at the Slippered Fox in Seven Dome, since Bellerose clearly intended to play the hero and stay with the fallen scientist.
She hadn’t been allowed to reply, which was probably for the best. Now her irritation had faded to a hum behind the increasingly more urgent internal alarm that something was really wrong, something so large she suspected she glimpsed only its barest edge. She thought of the crash site, the slices of razor-sharp nanoceramic driven into the thin soil on impact, so that only a finger’s-width of danger showed instead of the tons below.
She entered the pub.
McLaren sat by the window, his broad face tinted green by a panel filled with chlorella capsules that bobbled hypnotically up and down and veiled the interior of the pub from passers-by. She slid into the booth and ordered a pint of the first thing in the table-top menu, not bothering to look at the name.
“You look like you need something stronger than a beer,” said McLaren. He was a big man, about Sybil’s age, but with the subtly weathered, shop-worn look that distinguished planetside folks from those who lived in the station. His hand engulfed his pint glass.
“How many of those have you had?” she said.
“Why?”
“I need you to be useful,” Sybil said. “Not falling over. Christiansen’s in a coma.”
McLaren raised his gingery eyebrows, the disdain falling from his face at once. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. Bodies aren’t my specialty. And before I had even left that doctor’s office, a nurse was ill too, then one of the blood techs. They threw us all into haz-suits—you know the ones, those disposable blue ones with the gel. Disgusting. And then they scanned me from top to toe and poked me in a hundred places. Confiscated the rover to scan too. I had to take a public belt here.”
Her beer emerged from its porthole; she peeled back the top, dropped the algal disc into the compost hole, and gulped half of it at a go. She’d been allowed to see Christiansen just once and now she regretted it. His face had been sunken, grayish beneath the warm golden-brown skin, instead of laughing and eager and alive. She’d barely known him, but it would be terrible if that were her last memory of him.
“They think you brought something down from Two?” McLaren said, filling in the blank as she wiped her mouth. “Ridiculous.”
“I know. Let alone that all the native microflora here is from the station. I was scanned before I left, I was scanned on the shuttle, I was scanned twice after I landed. Everything checked out. And yet . . .”
She rolled the glass between her hands, aware that they were shaking. The hospital wasn’t set up for epidemiological tracing. They didn’t have the networks, the equipment, the staff. And was it truly an epidemic? They had analyzed Christiansen to within an inch of his life, and nothing had come up. No pathogens, nothing unusual chemically, biologically, genetically. “They must have missed something,” she said.
“Or,” McLaren said.
“No.” Sybil finished her beer—bitter, over-hopped, a side effect (she knew from chatting to Christiansen and Garnet) of Five Dome’s many breweries and their escalating bespoke hops race. Garnet had complained: In a world where you can make plants do whatever you want, why are they getting grosser by the day?
“I’m just saying,” McLaren said, tapping the panel for another drink.
“Don’t you use that tone on me, Red.”
“You don’t think it’s justified?”
“I think it’s unhelpful.”
Sybil looked away, steadying her nerves. Through the wavering green bubbles, a group of kids in black-and-navy school uniforms clustered in a small park across the street. The smaller children wore light polyfoam masks printed to resemble animals they’d never seen in their lives: foxes, bears, tigers. Others manipulated control decks, sending tiny drones humming overhead, the bee-sized bodies swarming to form shapes of other animals.
A lunar new year celebration? She couldn’t tear her eyes away from their small lively bodies. All those kids. Supposing a contagious disease . . . and the other colony, Edenderry, that was mostly families. Twice as many as Bubblewrap.
It’s not possible, she wanted to say. Meaning the decade she’d spent studying Celerem-57, this promising planet: analyzing every aspect from the ragged atmosphere to its encouragingly molten core, from the exact composition of its mineral coating, to the hollows in the bedrock, the dissolved salts in its water, the astonishingly complex regolith chemistry, the temperature, the gravity, the magnetic field, everything. She and dozens of others, she would have reminded him. Including McLaren himself. It wasn’t just me looking at that data. So if you’re suggesting we missed something, and something deadly at that, then we all did.
But they hadn’t. They had made certain that nothing would answer the door when humanity came knocking. There was nothing here from the smallest scale to the largest: not bacteria, prions, viruses, even molecular precursors. A clean slate. In fact, if you were being pedantic, the absence of a door to knock on proved the cleanness of the slate. Sterile.
Trust McLaren to find the soft spot of her self-doubt and twist a knife into it. He’d been doing it for years.
“They would have found something by now,” Sybil added. “People have been here for almost twenty-five years, I don’t need to remind you.”
“Twenty-five exactly,” McLaren said, gesturing out the window. “There’s going to be a celebration for it. Next solweek.”
Sybil’s heart sped up again. Not something she’d brought, not something indigenous. What then?
Her suit monitor beeped peevishly, warning her about her heart rate. Along her forearm monitor, a small scrolling text from the doctor had appeared, pale blue against the violet screen: Three more down. Calling for quarantine.
“Drink that.” She pointed at McLaren’s half-full glass. “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this, and right quick. Rent another rover. Call Garnet.”
“What’s the damn rush?”
“Whatever it is,” Sybil said coldly, “moves at a sprint. We’ve got to outpace it.”
“You know,” McLaren said as Sybil stood, “you don’t run the show down here. Technically, I’m head of the investigation. I decide whether we go back or not.”
“Yes, I saw it on the paperwork,” she said. “But I’m headed back out there. Arrest me if you want. Help me or don’t.” She turned her arm to make sure he could read the message, watched his face change. “You choose.”
Sybil had visited Paris once as a child and had never forgotten the quality of the light over the ravaged city: golden, forgiving. Even when it rained, the water came down through swathes of endless sunset. Here the light was the same, making her think of Paris while the rover roared across the trackless, gritty soil outside the domes. The black hole of the crash site, and the gold of the light from its tiny, hot, distant star.
“There’s nothing here,” McLaren said peevishly after they had walked several circuits.
Sybil shrugged. Maybe whatever it was had been on the supply ship already. Maybe it . . . oh Hell, who knew. Flew through a cloud of something. Had been taken over by aliens. Little green men.
The screen in the lower corner of her helmet said: One Dome and Three Dome now quarantined. Quarantine level is: Complete.
The residential domes. How much air did they have, how much food, water? Oxygen flowed from the other domes, the ones growing the carefully chosen and bioengineered crops she’d selected. The miniaturized vegetables and petite fruit trees, the vines and berry shrubs, the algal bioreactor vats. Sybil had planned for everything but this.
Her companions had received the same message; Garnet straightened, cupping a sample jar in either hand. McLaren exhaled sharply, a huff through the helmet com. Neither dome was visible from here unless they went over to Nine Dome and climbed to its summit, but Sybil could imagine it all too easily: the blaring announcements, everyone running to their home or dorm. The clinics preparing for the worst. One small blessing was that the hospital to which Christiansen had been brought was the biggest facility and was outside both residential domes.
Garnet dropped her empty jars and squeaked in her helmet. “Dr. Bellerose!”
“What is it? Are you all right? Do you feel sick?”
“I . . . I’ll send it to you, hold on.”
The younger woman punched frantically at her suit computer and managed to forward the message to Sybil.
People are collapsing in 9D! Stay out there!
“Who’s that from?” Sybil said, sending it quickly to the hospital.
“My friend Jen. She works in the biogas plant. I . . .” Garnet frowned, just visible behind the protective sheen of the glass. “She says . . . some of the bees are falling to the ground too. Dying. Some seem fine. I don’t know . . .”
“There’s nothing that infects both humans and bees,” McLaren said exasperatedly. “It’s got to be something else. Chemical. A gas leak that penetrated Christiansen’s suit . . . maybe a fracture line under the hospital . . . it could be a physical coincidence. Not a pathogen.”
Sybil wasn’t listening. Nine Dome had been damaged in the crash, the report had said. About two hectares of crops had burned. The engineers had pumped in fresh air, put in the replacement panels—they were modular, designed (by Sybil’s own hands! Was this her fault?) to be installed and re-sealed in minutes. Minutes.
Something about the crash. Something . . . but burning only meant death under certain circumstances, didn’t it? Plenty of plants on Earth needed fire to germinate their seeds. None of them had been brought here, but . . .
“No one is safe,” she said out loud; McLaren and Garnet turned to stare at her. “We might be next in line.”
“What should we do?” Garnet said.
Sybil didn’t know. She took a deep breath, kicking in the suit’s filters, and said, “I need data. Red, can you and Garnet set up a monitoring network out here?”
“Out here? But—”
“Yes, I know there’s plenty inside the domes,” she cut him off, frustration threatening to strangle her voice into a squeak. Why couldn’t he just listen to her? It had been his constant needling and double-checking that had driven her to live at the station, though she’d never tell him that; they had once worked so closely together they’d seemed to share a single mind, and then he’d begun to resent the fame he thought she was accruing, the way his name had seemed to vanish from the paperwork . . . and yes, all right, had she been happy to take the spotlight? A few times. But he had become intolerable, and so had she. And now when she needed a second pair of hands, he withdrew his out of doubt and old hurts.
There was no time to talk it out. Sybil could see what was happening inside Nine Dome and pointed: the draped swathes of greenery inside twisting as if in a high wind, inside that windless place. Writhing across the transparent panels like they were looking for something. And changing: green to blue, even black, violet. Blinking patterns, forming a signal or a call to something. Not to Sybil. Not to a human at all, she suspected. The patterns themselves said only: You were right. This is bigger than you knew.
“Set up a perimeter around the burn mark,” Sybil said breathlessly. “It’s going to move from dome to dome. Dig in sensors for anything, everything. Set them to alarm at any changes, no matter how small, in seismic, moisture, temperature, molecular fragments, pH. And imaging, anywhere on the spectrum we’ve got equipment for. Infra-red. Ultra-violet. Visible. Micro-wave. Whatever.”
“And where will you be during this?” McLaren crossed his arms, already sulking, Sybil thought, as if once again she planned to be the hero, leaving him in her dust.
“Back to the hospital,” Sybil said.
“We need the rover.”
“Keep it. We’ve got much, much bigger things to worry about.”
“But you have a plan,” Garnet said tentatively. “Right?”
“I don’t know, kid.” Sybil took off across the thin hardpan, hoping she was not drawing the attention of anything under her boots. As she ran she ignored the suit’s angry beeping, and thought of Christiansen and Garnet, who were so young, who had been born here, and had seen very little of life.
The hospital was locked down; Sybil triggered a dozen alarms simply stepping onto the painted line that marked off the rover parking. But no one emerged to drive her off. She stood in front of the tightly-sealed nanoceramic doors and shouted, “Let me in!”
“Are you experiencing a medical emergency?” an artificial voice replied from above her head, making her jump; she looked up at the small silvery drone and thought again of the kids across from the pub. Their masks, their toys.
She thought with the clarity of fear: Something else on this planet is not what we thought it was. Something else has used something small to create the illusion of size. Of a dangerous animal. A tiger. Even though it may not know what it is creating.
“I need to talk to Dr. Qadib. He was there this morning. Let me in!”
“No entry except for medical emergencies,” the drone said primly.
“Hang on,” Sybil said, “I need to find a rock.”
Her suit screen crackled: a voice call. “Are you going to let me in?” she said.
“Yes, one moment,” Qadib said; he sounded exhausted. “I’m sorry, several staff are ill—”
“Don’t apologize. Do you still have people in pathology?”
“One person, but—”
“Good,” Sybil said, setting her jaw. The doors opened a crack, so that she had to turn sideways to enter, and at once two automatic arms swathed her in another gel-filled haz-suit. Her helmet overcompensated and made everything vibrate unpleasantly, as if she were underwater. She was dry-mouthed and dizzy, and hoped it was from the run alone.
Qadib met her in the eerily silent hallway. “What is it, Dr. Bellerose?”
“Christiansen,” she said. “I need to see him.”
“But the spread—”
“I know,” she said grimly. “But I think we’ve all been exposed. Every one of us. I’ll have to risk it.”
“Risk what?”
It took the pathology tech ten tries to get the sample Sybil was demanding, and she would have felt bad if Christiansen hadn’t been unconscious and anesthetized; perhaps, Sybil thought, he’d brag about the neat row of ten punch-marks along his arm one day.
“This is bizarre,” Qadib whispered as Sybil supervised attempt number ten. “You’re using . . . soil sampling techniques on human . . .”
“Quick,” Sybil whispered. “Now!”
The tech slipped the little disc of muscle into the bottle Sybil held out. This time instead of running down the hallway to the lab, Sybil capped it and thrust it into the canister of dry ice on the bedside table. A white cloud ballooned upwards, quickly sucked away by the overhead vents; the minuscule catalytic disc inside the bottle’s lid had fallen into the liquid polymer it contained, generating enough reaction heat to fill the room with clouds for several minutes. Sybil glared at the canister through the blue haze of her helmet.
Nothing yet, said the message at her wrist; she glanced cursorily at it as they headed down the hall. She didn’t bother replying to McLaren; she’d suspected the sensors wouldn’t detect anything. Their foe would not show itself unless it were caught by surprise.
