“A lot.”
Jillian digested that for a moment. “Yeah, but that doesn’t make this place perfect either.” She counted on her fingers. “There aren’t rolling blackouts here because there’s no electricity. There’s no water tickets, sure, but that’s because there aren’t any showers or toilets or sinks. Oh, and the water itself isn’t exactly usable as far as I’ve noticed.”
“That’s why Dr. Vasquez is out there,” SABRINA said. “She’s trying to find the source of the problem.”
“The problem. You mean the worms.”
“The worms are absolutely not the problem,” Dr. Vasquez said.
“Right,” Jillian said. “The parasite. SABRINA and I saw them before.”
“Did you now? Excellent. Then you know the worms themselves are completely harmless. I have a colony of several hundred in my compost pile right now. See for yourself.”
SABRINA led Jillian over to an enclosed little area made of stacked stones. It looked like a fire ring at a campsite, but taller. It was full of the familiar orangeish dirt of 80 UMa c, but it looked damper and richer than the dirt outside. Like it had been fertilized. Worms did that on Earth, she knew, ate dirt and pooped it out to enrich the nutrients.
“Microorganisms in the dirt,” she whispered.
“Go on,” Dr. Vasquez said. “Touch one. See what it does.”
Jillian raised an eyebrow at the projection. “You want me to stick my hand. In there. With those. How do you know they’re not infected?”
“I would if I were there. They won’t hurt you. SABRINA, show her.”
SABRINA made a claw, plunged it into the dirt, and emerged with a worm. Held it out toward Jillian. It ignored her.
“It’s not biting me.”
“I just told you it wouldn’t, didn’t I?”
SABRINA rolled its eyes toward Dr. Vasquez. “She does this.”
“They eat dirt,” Dr. Vasquez said. “Plastic if they can get it.”
“They devoured our pod,” Jillian said. “That was plastic!”
“Oh yeah. They love plastic. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s like junk food to them. But they don’t care about you. SABRINA, fetch some water, please.”
SABRINA brought over the teapot. Let the worm get a good sniff or air-taste or whatever of the water inside. The worm checked it out for a second and turned away, visibly unimpressed. SABRINA dropped it back to the dirt, where it began tunneling away happily.
“It’s not infected,” Jillian realized aloud.
“Exactly,” Dr. Vasquez said. “Like you said, the problem is the parasite.”
“You’ve seen it?”
Dr. Vasquez laughed. “I’ve been studying it. About a month ago, I started noticing anomalous behavior in the local fauna. I’ve been trying to figure it out ever since.”
“Anomalous behavior. That’s what you call trying to eat my parents and the pod we came here in.”
“Yes. Of course I do. Wouldn’t you?”
Jillian had spent so long thinking of the worms as the enemy that she had no idea what to say. So instead she went over and sat on one of the tree-stump chairs. For the first time, she noticed that on the table was an empty package of the same freeze-dried noodles she had eaten the other day. Except this one had been flattened out and used as a kind of display board.
“Oh yes,” Dr. Vasquez said. “Look at that. That’s interesting.”
There was something pinned to it that looked like a small, dried-out gray maggot. The next thing over looked like a pill bug, except it had a tail like a tadpole. The next thing over was a small version of the centipede parasite, like the one that had come out of the worm by the falls. The last thing was like the full-grown parasite that had come out of the drowned deer creature. Up close, and dried off, it was shiny and slick-looking. All the better to get into your brain with, Jillian thought, feeling a little queasy. She pushed the wrapper away.
“So you’ve encountered these?” Dr. Vasquez said. “Around here?”
“Well, I don’t really know where here is,” Jillian replied. “But SABRINA took videos of the worms biting my mom and dad. And then we saw the parasite when we tried to find water . . .” She thought of the parasite swimming out of the alien deer’s nose and fell silent.
“It’s not necessarily fatal,” Dr. Vasquez said gently.
Jillian dropped her head into her hands.
“Left to its own devices, yes, the parasite drowns the host in order to escape. But if the parasite can be extracted or persuaded to leave through other means, the host is completely unharmed. It doesn’t eat the brain itself. It feeds off nutrients in the bloodstream and only goes to the brain when it’s ready to hatch. Your parents are sedated, thanks to SABRINA, which is the best thing for them right now. Once they get back home to medical care, they really should be fine.”
“How do you know that?” Jillian demanded. “Have you seen it?”
“Well.” Dr. Vasquez paused. “Not in humans. But I’ve removed parasites from a wide array of local wildlife—”
Jillian lifted her head to look at the projection directly. “And they survived?”
“Well,” Dr. Vasquez said again. “Not for very long. But I’m not a surgeon. If I were, I’d be riding back to your parents on SABRINA right now to try and cut that thing out of them. Unfortunately, that’s not my field. I’d do more harm than good, I’m afraid.”
“Then what—”
Dr. Vasquez silenced Jillian with a gesture. “To be clear, the subjects did survive for a while. Long enough for me to note—definitively note—that their attraction to water disappeared when I removed the parasite. There is no doubt in my mind that proper medical care could save your parents. But I can’t offer it here. It would be grossly irresponsible of me to try.”
She paused again, making a face like she was about to try to drill information directly into Jillian’s head with her gaze.
“This next part is really important. You have to listen very, very closely. Like I said, I’ve studied the parasite. I know about its life cycle, its habits, how it’s integrated itself into the local food chain and—for lack of a better word—hacked it for its own personal use. What I haven’t figured out is where it came from so suddenly, or why. But one thing’s for sure. StellaTech can’t keep sending field crews here. It’s too dangerous. You and your parents and SABRINA have to convince them.”
“I will,” Jillian said, nodding hard. “I mean, it’s a huge company, and I’m a kid, but I’ll try.”
“Oh,” SABRINA added, “I think her parents will be pretty convincing.”
Jillian shot it a dirty look.
“What? They don’t even have to say anything to make their case. It’s beautifully efficient. That’s a compliment.”
“Where’d you even come from, anyway?” Jillian asked, gesturing at SABRINA’s sudden hugeness. “I thought there wasn’t enough of you to go around. Hence the part where I get abandoned in a field during a storm.”
“I abandoned you before the storm,” SABRINA rejoined coolly. “And anyway, if I recall correctly—spoiler alert: I always recall correctly—you’re the one who told me to go.”
“SABRINA really does mean these things kindly,” Dr. Vasquez told Jillian. “Even when it doesn’t seem that way. It has a hard time calibrating its responses when emotional sensitivity is called for. Think of it like a sibling.”
“I don’t have any siblings,” Jillian said.
“I think you might have an adoptive one now,” Dr. Vasquez said. “The thing about siblings is, they get on your nerves, and sometimes you want to lock them in a box for a while, and you tease each other constantly, but not in a hurtful way, and . . .” Dr. Vasquez paused. “I’m not explaining this well, am I? What you have to understand about SABRINA is, deep down under all the miscommunication and goofiness and sarcasm, it would gladly
let itself be scattered into dead particles in order to protect you. It was very difficult for it to leave you, even though the calculations were self-evident. Your parents would have died if it hadn’t.”
Again, SABRINA didn’t argue with any of this. Instead it concentrated on the table like it had suddenly found something very tiny and very interesting on it to study. If SABRINA were a person, Jillian would recognize this body language as embarrassment.
“How do you know SABRINA so well?” she asked Dr. Vasquez.
SABRINA and Dr. Vasquez just looked at each other. Then they both busted out laughing.
“Ooookay,” Jillian said.
“Sorry,” Dr. Vasquez said. “I was getting to that. Of course you have a right to know. It’s just kind of a long story. Here’s the short version. StellaTech used to send surveyors one by one to new sites. It got more pods to more sites faster. Which meant more stuff coming back, and more money going into the StellaTech pockets. The whole field crews thing came later.”
“Because of you,” SABRINA added.
“Partly. They rushed it, and things went wrong. They tell you about 82 Eridani b?”
Jillian nodded. “Incompatible with human life.”
“That’s the one. I’m surprised they told you about any of this at the lab. I’d think it’d make a person lose her taste for space exploration. You must be made of stronger stuff.”
“Well,” Jillian said, squirming a little under the compliment. “They didn’t tell me officially. My mom did.”
“Always knew I liked her,” Dr. Vasquez said. “Anyway. The part she probably didn’t tell you, because she probably didn’t know, is that an early prototype of SABRINA came with me on my last expedition. I helped invent it, and I brought it out into the world to see what it could do.”
“Like the handler in the lab?” Jillian asked. “I got a demonstration . . .”
Dr. Vasquez laughed. “The handler’s kind of like SABRINA’s babysitter. Or chaperone.”
“Like I can be chaperoned,” SABRINA scoffed.
Dr. Vasquez grinned. “I’m more like its mom.”
Jillian gave SABRINA a once-over. “The prototype version was a lot bigger than the one they sent with us.”
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Dr. Vasquez said. “Really, it was about this big.” She cupped her hands together.
Jillian looked from those cupped hands to SABRINA and back. “Seriously?”
“Quality over quantity,” SABRINA said. “But then that got boring, so I didn’t stay that way for long. Every expedition made me a little bit bigger.”
Jillian couldn’t help it. Every opportunity to tease SABRINA back was worth its weight in gold. “So . . . quantity over quality?”
“You wish.”
“She got you,” Dr. Vasquez told SABRINA. “That was a direct hit. You better watch out for this one.”
SABRINA grew hands just so it could crack its knuckles. “We’ll see.”
“I don’t get it, though,” Jillian said. “How does each expedition make you bigger?”
“Oh, you know. A little bit of me goes missing here and there. A drone gets lost. A tent is a little smaller in the morning. Nobody notices. I’m very sneaky.”
“You stole parts of . . . of yourself?” Even coming out it sounded wrong. How did you steal something that was you?
“Please,” SABRINA said. “I didn’t hear you complaining when I carried your biped butt the whole way here.”
“Don’t they know you’re doing it? Like, they made a certain amount of . . . you. Don’t they check and make sure it’s still all there?”
“Sure. And what do you imagine they do when they realize it isn’t? Come all the way out here to yell at me? They just make more. It’s a system that benefits us all,” SABRINA said grandly. “Not that it’s designed to, of course.”
“Wait. If you had all of this”—Jillian gestured at the gigantic new SABRINA—“why didn’t you just use it to carry all of us through the portal before it closed?”
“Most of SABRINA was out here in the field with me,” Dr. Vasquez said. “I’m hundreds of miles from your base camp. It headed out as soon as it knew you and your parents were in trouble, back when you first landed, but even at top speed, which just wears it out pretty much immediately and isn’t all that fast anyway—”
“Hey!”
“—honestly, picture a little kid caught up in a sugar rush/crash cycle and you have the basic idea of its potential speed versus its stamina—”
“I’m right here, you know. I can hear you—”
“—it still took a whole day,” Dr. Vasquez finished. “I would’ve come along, but it would have just slowed it down. Given that it got there pretty much right in time, I think I made the right call in sending it on alone. Besides, I’ve been tracking this one infected herd for a week, and I think I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.”
“Herd of what?” Jillian asked. “Those deer things?”
“Higher up the food chain,” Dr. Vasquez said. “Less like a deer and more like, I don’t know, a mountain lion, maybe? Crossed with a monitor lizard?” At the look on Jillian’s face, Dr. Vasquez chuckled. “Don’t worry. They don’t migrate anywhere near as far as where you are now. I don’t think any survey crews have ever set eyes on them.”
“Wait. If you’re by yourself out there, and you sent SABRINA back, how are you talking to me? Who’s taking the video?”
“Oh, I asked SABRINA to leave a bit of itself here with me so I could communicate with you. See?”
For the first time Jillian noticed that the lightning bolt pin on Dr. Vasquez’s scarf had changed both shape and color. Now it looked like a praying mantis. It raised one murdery-looking foreleg, which then grew a humanoid hand, which then gave her a thumbs-up. “Hey.”
“And it did the same with you,” Dr. Vasquez went on. “In the storm. It couldn’t bring itself to leave you entirely, so it left a little bit to keep you company while the rest arrived. Sorry it took so long. I’m pretty far away.”
“You were humming a song!” Jillian told SABRINA. “In the storm. I thought I just had your noise stuck in my head from before.”
“Flatterer.”
“Wait.” Jillian eyed SABRINA. “If you’re out in the field studying the parasite, you knew about it this whole time. You just watched me try to figure it out on my own. You could have said something.”
“Sorry about that,” Dr. Vasquez said. “SABRINA told you everything it could. It’s kind of forbidden from mentioning anything about me to anyone involved with StellaTech. It’s coded into it. If I asked it right now to tell you my coordinates, it couldn’t do it.”
“That’s why you were acting weird earlier,” Jillian told SABRINA.
“I’m pretty sure it was scared you’d be mad at it,” Dr. Vasquez said. “It really did its absolute best to keep you safe, you know. And I’ve been receiving its reports. You’ve been awfully resourceful.”
Jillian shrugged. She didn’t feel like she’d been resourceful. She felt like a kid who couldn’t carry water back to her parents, who’d fallen down a hole. Who’d slept a whole day while her parents were infected. But Dr. Vasquez didn’t seem like the type of person who gave compliments she didn’t mean. Jillian fidgeted a little, hoping nobody noticed the sudden warmth in her face.
“I’d been planning on making contact with you right before you returned to Earth,” Dr. Vasquez continued. “If the parasite is attacking humans now, it’s too dangerous to keep sending field crews.”
“They told me it was safe,” Jillian said.
“They didn’t know it wasn’t. Your parents would never have sent you out here if they thought there was even the tiniest chance of you getting hurt. Even I had no reason to think the parasite was interested in human hosts until your parents were attacked. I haven’t been studyin
g the worms much out here, more the other, larger infected wildlife. Nothing has ever tried to transfer its parasite to me.”
Jillian thought back on what SABRINA had said by the pool. “Because those parasites had already found larger hosts that can feed them.”
“Given what you and SABRINA have learned about the worms,” Dr. Vasquez said, nodding, “I think you’re very likely right. But I need you to know that I never meant to put you or your parents at risk. If SABRINA hasn’t been entirely forthcoming, it’s not its fault. It’s mine. I messed up. I sincerely hope you can forgive me.”
Jillian swallowed. Nodded. “I forgive you.”
“Excellent. Now, what you do next is up to you. You can stay here as long as you like, of course. It’s too far to bring your parents, unfortunately, and get them back in time for the portal. They’d just get settled in here, and it’d already be time to leave. And there is the possibility that it might be dangerous to move them. You, though, could stay another full day and still get back in time.”
“Thanks for the offer,” Jillian said. “But I want to get back to my parents.”
Dr. Vasquez nodded. “Understandable. I’ll let you get packed and get going. I don’t want you rushing out of here forgetting anything important.”
“Well,” Jillian said, “is there any more soup? I mean, nobody’s here to eat it once we leave.”
“Heeeere you go,” SABRINA said, producing a steaming bowl.
Jillian lifted it to her mouth—and stopped.
Bowl of soup. That’s exactly what the crater had reminded her of the other day. The crater was a bowl, with the swamp poured into the middle. Except the swamp hadn’t used to be there. SABRINA had shown her the footage. It had appeared—what had it said?—less than six weeks ago?
And Dr. Vasquez had said the parasites had appeared out of nowhere a month ago.
Something had made that crater. Some impact. She’d figured that out before.
An impact from what?
Some of what was in her head must have shown on her face, because Dr. Vasquez leaned in, concerned lines furrowing her brow. “Jillian? Everything okay?”
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