Aurora - Страница 33

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It was Euan, in Hvalsey. “Euan?” Freya said. “What is it?”

“Clarisse died,” he said.

He didn’t have his camera on, or was sitting in the dark; it was just his voice, the screen was dark.

“Oh no!”

“Yes. Last night.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know. Looks like she had some kind of anaphylactic shock. As if she ran into something she was allergic to.”

“But what is there to be allergic to?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. She had asthma, but that was controlled. They gave her epinephrine four times, but her blood pressure dropped, her throat seems to have closed up on her, the ventral part of her heart went arrhythmic. The scans are showing empty heart…”

Long pause.

“She was still in isolation?”

“Yes. But of course she wasn’t when we brought her back in.”

“But you were all in your suits.”

“I know. But we took them off inside. We all helped her.”

He didn’t say more, and Freya didn’t speak either. They were in trouble down there, if what had happened to Clarisse had been caused by her accident. They wouldn’t be able to go out on the surface until they understood what it was. And if they determined that some local life-form had infected and killed her, they wouldn’t be able to go out ever again without massive precautions.

Nor would they be able to associate with each other freely, until it was demonstrated that whatever had killed her wasn’t contagious.

Nor could they come back up to the ship and risk infecting it.

So now they were confined to a biome much smaller than any on the ship, and maybe an infected one at that. Maybe a poisoned building, in which everything alive in it was already doomed.

All these possibilities were no doubt occurring to Freya, as they must have already to Euan. Thus the long silence.

Finally she said, “Is there anything I can do?”

“No. Just… be there.”

“I’m here. I’m sorry.”

“Me too. It was… It was beautiful down here. We were… I was having fun.”

“I know.”

She woke Badim and told him, then lay down on the couch in their living room, while Badim sat at their kitchen table making calls.

In between his calls she said to him, “I miss Devi. If she were alive, none of this would have happened. She would have insisted that we test the surface of the planet completely before anyone landed.”

“Hard to do by robot,” Badim remarked absently.

“I know. Years would have passed, everyone would have been furious with her. She would have been furious with them. But this wouldn’t have happened.”

Badim shrugged.

Later Euan called them again.

“I’m going out again,” he said.

“What!” Freya cried. “Euan, no!”

“Yes. Look. We all have to go sometime. So, maybe we’ve been fatally poisoned, maybe not. We’ll know soon enough. In the meantime, as long as your suit integrity is good, there isn’t any difference between staying in the compound or going outside. So I’m going to damn the torpedoes and go. I don’t see why not. Either way it’ll be okay. I mean, either I’m already infected, and I might as well spend my last days having fun, or I’m not, and I won’t be, as long as I don’t cut my suit open. Silly woman, I wish she hadn’t gone off the path, that was obviously quicksand she went off into, I don’t know what she could have been thinking, what she was going after. A blink on the water, she said. But really? Well, we’ll never know now. And it doesn’t matter. I’ll stay on hard ground. Maybe I’ll stay out of the estuary and up on the sea cliffs, that’s the best views anyway. Go out and see the dawn. No one here will stop me. We’re all sequestered anyway. Everyone’s locked in a room somewhere. No one could stop me without endangering themselves, right? And no one wants to anyway. So I’m going out to see the dawn. I’ll call you back in a little while.”

Life in the ship went silent, and took on the nature of a vigil, or a death watch, or even a wake. People murmured about the situation down on the surface, in theory speaking hopefully, in fact frightened and assuming the worst. Of course the woman could have died from shock, or asthmatic attack, or from an opportunistic growth of bacteria she already carried in her, part of the bacterial stock from the ship itself, which was by no means entirely benign, as they had often learned. As Aurora was or seemed to be inert, this last was even the likeliest explanation.

But was Aurora inert? Was it a dead moon, as it seemed to be? Was the oxygen in the atmosphere a result of abiologic processes, as had been assumed by the chemical signatures, and the lack of evident life on the moon? Or was there some kind of life they weren’t seeing, perhaps there in the mud of Half Moon Valley’s estuary?

But if it was in one place, it would be in more. So the ship’s biologists shook their heads, in frustration and ignorance. Euan went back out into the field, and since he was willing to do it, there were people who wanted him to bring back samples of mud from the region where Clarisse had fallen, to get as close to that quicksand as he dared, dig down and secure some mud in a safe flask, then bring it back to Hvalsey for study under the hoods. They already had the mud from Clarisse’s suit, of course, and they had her body, so the extra samples weren’t absolutely necessary, but some of the microbiologists wanted them anyway, to be able to check the local matrix uncontaminated by all that had happened since Clarisse had fallen into it.

Euan was happy to do this. Some of the other people in Hvalsey were also, and they went out in little groups, staying on trails and descending to the estuary in short expeditions, very unlike their previous trips. They hiked in silence, as if walking across a minefield, or making descents into hell. Raids on the inexpressible. Euan alone among them sang little ditties to himself, including a tune with the refrain “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego”—an old spiritual or faux spiritual, ship determined, with a biblical reference to prisoners of Babylon, surviving time in a fiery furnace by way of a protective intervention from Jehovah.

Euan sang these songs off the public channels, speaking only to Freya on their private channel. Some of the other explorers were behaving similarly, speaking only to people they knew well. On the ship, word of their various expeditions then spread by word of mouth. Those on the surface seemed to feel a new distance from those on the ship. It was all different than it had been before.

Jochi stayed in his car, sealed away from all the rest of the settlers, eating dried and frozen food. One night he suited up and went to one of the other expedition cars and took all the food and portable air tanks in it back to his car.

He had requested permission to return to the ship; every day’s communication from him to the ship began with the same request. So far the ship’s governing council had only refused his request once, and after that, left their refusal unspoken. No one was to be returned for now. The settlers were under quarantine.

So Jochi spent his time in his car, looking at his screen. He was able to operate some of the robotic medical devices under the hoods in the clinic lab where Clarisse had died, and he spent some of his time investigating the mud Euan and the rest had brought back in, making use of the clinic’s electron microscope. His training with Aram and the math team had been in mathematics, but as part of that team he had sometimes worked with the biophysicists, and in any case he was now investigating as much as he could, so Aram expressed the hope that he might find something helpful. Aram was sick with worry that Jochi was down there; he spent many hours in Badim and Freya’s kitchen, hunched over and wan, looking at the screens like everyone else.

For a long time Jochi said nothing about what he was finding. When Freya asked him about it, he only shrugged and looked out at her from her screen.

Once he said, “Nothing.”

Another time he said, “Mathematics is not biology. At least not usually. So, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Should I send you more of the medical archives from the solar system feed?” Freya asked.

“I’ve looked at the index. I don’t see anything that will help.”

A week later, more than half the people in Hvalsey had fevers. Jochi stayed in his car. He didn’t ask to return to the ship anymore.

Euan started going out into the estuary again, or the sea cliffs. He slept out there, and seldom came in to eat. Everyone in Hvalsey behaved a little differently, and it wasn’t clear they were talking to each other very much. One day a few of them arranged a dance, and they all wore something red to it.

Jochi called Aram one morning and said flatly, “I think I may have found the pathogen. It’s small. It looks a little like a prion, maybe. Like a strangely folded protein, maybe, but only in its shape. It’s much smaller than our proteins. And it reproduces faster than prions. In some ways it’s like the viris that live inside viruses, or the v’s, but smaller. Some seem to be nested in each other. The smallest is ten nanometers long, the largest fifty nanometers. I’m sending up the electron microscope images. Hard to say if they’re alive. Maybe some interim step toward life, with some of the functions of life, but not all. Anyway, in a good matrix they appear to reproduce. Which I guess means they’re a life-form. And we appear to be a good matrix.”