by M. R. Carey
Be done before they realise. Before they ask.
He retracts the drill, unscrews the bloody, clogged drill bit and drops it into the freezer cabinet. There is no time to clean and disinfect it, and he doesn’t want to explain what he has used it for. Selecting the widest of the biopsy needles, he slides it into the excavated space and takes his sample.
Just as Dr. Khan—Rina—steps into the lab and comes up behind him.
He can tell her by her tread, although right now it is heavier than usual (because of the baby) and more uneven (no hypothesis as yet). Greaves doesn’t turn to face her. Reaching up to switch off the fan, he slides the freezer cabinet shut with his knee. He hopes that Rina won’t track the movement with her gaze.
Now he turns. “Wow,” Khan says, wincing. She waves her hand in front of her face with exaggerated disgust. “Who burned the toast?”
It’s a joke, not a real question, so he is not meant to answer it. But still, the pressure builds. Greaves casts around for something he can use to fend it off. Rina does not look well. Her eyes are shiny with unshed tears and her posture is rigid. These are signs he has learned to interpret, at least up to a point. “Why are you upset?” he asks her. “What’s happened?”
Rina shakes her head. She touches his forearm for a moment—one fingertip, their agreed and minimalistic hug—then takes a step back to compensate for the dangerous intimacy. “I’m fine,” she says. “It’s fine. Dr. Fournier has decided to cut the mission short. We’re going home, a little earlier than expected.”
“Home?” Greaves is confused, and then alarmed. “But we haven’t made all the stops on the schedule. There are still two more samplings before we—”
Rina is nodding. “I know, I know. But if there are junkers up here, it changes everything. It’s just not safe to keep going when we don’t know what’s in front of us. And it’s not as though we’re finding anything different. Anything we can actually use.”
Greaves swallows hard. “What if we were?” he asks. There is a tremor in his voice.
But Rina doesn’t seem to notice it. She shrugs, almost dismissively. “Well, even then, I think I’d vote for going home.”
“But the mission …” Greaves protests again.
Rina laughs, but the laugh has a catch in it. “The mission needs some fresh thinking,” she says. “And I need to get back home and have this baby. I wish it hadn’t happened like this, but I’m still glad to be going back. It just feels terrible to be relieved about something that’s so …” A vague motion of her restless hands picks up where the words leave off.
Greaves interprets: she is happy on her own account, but unhappy because Private Lutes is dead. The disparity between these two emotions makes her uneasy. He is amazed to find his own experience—the mingled guilt and excitement he feels—reflected in hers. It doesn’t happen to him often.
He wants to explore the similarities, but he is afraid to. He is still holding the biopsy needle close against his side. The longer the conversation goes on, the more chance there is that Rina will see it and ask him about it. Or else that she will want to know what he was doing off by himself in Invercrae.
As though his thought has triggered hers, Rina looks over her shoulder into the crew quarters. “They’re not very happy with you,” she tells him. It’s not entirely clear who she means. The crew quarters have emptied out. The soldiers have gone outside, most probably to replace the motion sensors and perimeter traps now that Rosie is stationary again. The colonel has gone up front and Dr. Fournier has contrived to disappear too, leaving only Akimwe, Sealey and Penny. Despite this, Greaves decides that Rina’s words must apply to all the crew, irrespective of uniform.
He wants to say he’s sorry, but that will invite further discussion. He says, instead, “I won’t do it again.” It’s a reckless promise, but the future tense pulls them both away from the dangerous waters of the recent past.
Almost.
“You can’t, Stephen,” Rina tells him gently. “Not any more. You’re not responsible for what happened back there, but if there’s a junker cadre somewhere close by then we’re in real danger. You know it was probably junkers who got Charlie.”
“We don’t know that,” Greaves points out. But he’s being pedantic. The commander of the Charles Darwin talked in her last transmission to Beacon of being pursued by a large group of junkers riding battle-trucks to which hungries had been harnessed like oxen. She said she would avoid engaging as long as she could, but would fight back if attacked. Her last words were, “They’re flanking us.”
“They’re really dangerous,” Rina insists. “People think of them as savages because they choose to live out in the wild rather than in Beacon. But they live by scavenging and they’re really good at it. They have to be, or they wouldn’t have lasted this long. They look at Rosie and they see guns, ammunition, equipment, food. All kinds of things they need. We’re worth a lot of effort, in their eyes.”
Greaves nods cautiously. He is agreeing with the explicit meaning of her words (the junkers are a serious threat) rather than with their secondary implication (there are junkers here). It’s not a lie, because he hasn’t opened his mouth, but once again he is allowing someone to believe a thing that isn’t true. His mind itches and an iron bar of tension presses against his shoulders.
But Rina seems satisfied with his reaction. Possibly she mistakes his tension for a salutary fear. “So when Dr. Fournier decided to turn us around,” she continues, “he was doing the only thing he could do. We’d have to be crazy to carry on all the way to the coast, with the junkers behind us.”
She is looking at Greaves expectantly. He nods again. “Yes,” he says. But this time he is compelled to add, “If there were junkers here, that would be bad.”
“So we’re doing the right thing. Everybody thinks so. Everybody agreed with the decision.”
Greaves glances into the crew quarters again. He finds it very hard to parse emotion, but the cues he has learned to associate with celebration are notably absent. Dr. Akimwe is sitting in silence at the table, his chin resting on his fist, his eyes wide but unfocused. Dr. Penny rubs her pursed lips with the knuckle of her thumb. Dr. Sealey talks to them both in low tones, striking matches from the box above the kitchen unit and letting them burn down in his hand before dropping them, one by one, into the sink.
These are not the behaviours Greaves would expect to see if everyone is really comfortable with Dr. Fournier’s decision. But then, agreeing with something is a cognitive rather than an emotional response. Rina has already told him what the dominant mood is.
They’re not very happy with you.
Greaves can’t make this right. Private Lutes is dead. The mission is over. There is nothing that he could put on the opposite scale that would be big enough to balance these huge, remorseless facts.
Nothing except a new and radically important discovery. A cure.
A cure for the hungry plague.
Rina tries to temper what she has already said, to spare him further pain. “Stephen,” she tells him, “they’re mostly unhappy because the mission is a washout. Today was bad, but even without today … We weren’t getting anywhere. You know that. The whole point of the sampling runs was to find an inhibiting agent. Something that makes Cordyceps grow more slowly, or stops it from growing altogether. But we haven’t managed to do that because there isn’t one. We’re going home empty-handed. That’s what hurts.”
She leaves him to it. She has done what touch can do, and what words can do. The only other variable is time.
Greaves watches her rejoin Dr. Sealey and the others. The weight and import of the moment make her forget herself enough to reach out and take Dr. Sealey’s hand. They look into each other’s eyes, enjoying some wordless communion. Greaves would find that combined touch and gaze unbearable, but he knows that for lovers, meaning people who share physical intimacy, such things are an important means of overcoming the isolation of monadic consciousness. Or seeming to.
We’re going home empty-handed. He replays the words in his mind, three times over. It was true yesterday, but it’s not true now.
The contents of freezer cabinet ten.
The slender cylinder of cortical tissue in the biopsy needle.
He can still make this right.
23
Dr. Fournier is afraid that he may have overreached his authority.
In the engine room, with the door closed and locked, he tries once again to raise Brigadier Fry on his secret radio, which despite its tiny size has always out-performed the main cockpit radio in terms of reach and signal strength. But yet again the brigadier fails to pick up.
Fournier wishes very fervently that he had been able to ask her before he gave the order to turn around.
It wasn’t fear. He didn’t do it because he was afraid, although he is. Afraid of dying, and even more afraid of not dying—of being bitten and left abandoned up here in the north while Rosie rolls home; a living but Cordyceps-ridden scarecrow standing out in a field for ever while the seasons wheel and turn.
But it was anger, in the end, that pushed him over the precipice of decision. He is going to be judged on what the expedition has achieved, and he will be judged harshly because they have achieved nothing. They left Beacon to cheers and fanfares, bottles of bootleg liquor smashed across their bows. The twelve of them in their tin can, carrying the blessings of the million and a half they were meant to save. Now they will sneak home through the back door and be forgotten. Suddenly, seeing that shame and blame vividly in his head, he found in himself an unexpected eagerness to face it full on and answer it. You could have done no better. Nobody could have done better. We didn’t find an answer because there isn’t one!
And perhaps there was a part of him that was thinking: Lutes is probably only the first. He’s proved that it’s eminently possible for us to die out here. And after the proof, you can expect to find more and more instances that support it.
Perhaps, yes. But it doesn’t really matter now.
He found his voice. He found his authority. He made his decision and he carried it. This—squatting over the radio, teasing its tiny frequency controls with cold and clumsy fingers, waiting once again to be put in his place—is the price he has to pay for that.
After three failed attempts to raise the brigadier, he decides to wait a while. Rosie is stationary, of course, so there is no chance of moving into an area with better reception, but the fall of night sometimes sharpens the signal all by itself.
This digging in was at Carlisle’s insistence, and Fournier didn’t argue. For Rosie to move at night is a hazardous proceeding. Most of the roads are blocked with rusting cars, the poignant remains of a ten-year-old exodus. The going is hard, even with full visibility. The colonel has decreed that they will bivouac for the night and move out in the morning.
It seems to be so easy for the colonel to constitute himself as an authority when other authorities fail. For Fournier it’s very hard. His natural mode is submission.
His relationship with Brigadier Fry fits very well into this pattern, and always has since the first time he ever met her. It was before his status as civilian commander was officially confirmed. He had been interviewed by three representatives of the Main Table and he felt he had done well, portraying himself as a safe pair of hands, a man who would stick to his orders no matter what. But then the brigadier, as senior officer in the Military Muster, asserted a right to interview him, too. After some toing and froing, she won her point.
In her command tent between the second and third of Beacon’s seven perimeter fences, she welcomed him without using his name and poured him a whiskey without asking him whether he drank. She had some questions about his relevant experience, both as a scientist and as a team leader, but they were generic enough that they didn’t even prove she had read his file. She seemed a lot more interested in talking about Colonel Carlisle. “The colonel is an important man, and he’s going to be away from Beacon and the Main Table for a long time. He’ll be missed here.”
Fournier had no opinion about this, but he nodded emphatically. “Oh yes. I’m sure of it. The mission will be lucky to have him.”
That seemed to him to be the answer that was required, but the brigadier didn’t appear overly enthused by it. “I would like to think,” she went on with cold and careful emphasis, “that the civilian and military commanders will form a mutually supportive team. Watching each other’s backs, as it were. Assessing each other’s competence, even, and stepping in as necessary to provide whatever assistance or corrective might be needed.”
This time Fournier said nothing, but only nodded. A safer bet all round.
“We here in Beacon—in the Muster, I mean—are quite keen to keep track of the colonel while he’s outside the fence. Not just where he is, but what he’s thinking and feeling. We’re concerned for his well-being.”
Dr. Fournier chewed this over for a few tense seconds. Would another nod be enough of a response? He was pretty sure that it wouldn’t.
“May I be frank?” he asked, too late to keep the pause from becoming noticeable.
“By all means.”
“Are you asking me to spy on the colonel?”
Fry breathed in and out, audibly. Not quite a sigh, but most of the way along. “Morale here in Beacon is volatile at the moment,” she said, which seemed to Fournier to be no answer at all. “The Muster works at the behest of civilian authorities who often don’t entirely understand our workings, or share our priorities. Hence the double command for this mission, and hence our being allowed to vet you, even though your role—if you were accepted—would be civilian commander.”
“I understand that,” Fournier said.
“I’m glad. The candidate we interviewed before you—and if I may return your frankness, the preferred candidate for the position—didn’t. She seemed determined to misunderstand us, and to define her role entirely in terms of the mission’s scientific objectives. We felt that this was too narrow a point of view. That to ignore the political dimensions of what’s happening here was obtuse.”
Fournier tried to hold back, but couldn’t. The feminine pronoun was a deliberate tease, dangled in front of him to see whether he had enough self-control to keep from guessing. He didn’t.
“Caroline Caldwell? Caroline Caldwell was your first choice for this?”
Fry affected to be surprised at the question. “I said she was the preferred candidate overall, Doctor. I didn’t say she was my choice. In fact, I would much rather have someone in post whom I could rely on to see, and serve, the bigger picture. Science and politics are not two worlds; they’re two hemispheres.”
Fournier, who had never seen himself as a politician but now at least had an inkling of the job description, agreed. Two hemispheres, yes. Very aptly put. Very insightful.
Caroline Caldwell in the Rosalind Franklin, and him left behind in Beacon polishing other people’s test tubes, other people’s reputations? No no no. This was the future, if there was to be one. The forge on which the future would be made. He knew very well that he was a competent researcher rather than a great one, but still. He couldn’t choose irrelevance when greatness was on the table. Surely nobody could.
With the stakes clearly established, he continued to agree with every proposition the brigadier put to him.
Fry suggested that he might need to form a judgement on the robustness of his staff. Their morale. The clarity of their motives. He said he was good for that.
She demonstrated the operation of the radio, emphasising that its existence must remain a secret. He promised her that he would be the soul of discretion.
She indicated that the Muster might wish to give him additional orders in the course of the mission, depending on how certain events in Beacon itself fell out, or failed to fall out. He said that he would not object to that.
When he left her office, he was brimming with self-disgust, his stomach sloshing and griping with it. He wanted to be sick.
Now, seven months on, he feels that the scalpel is at his throat. The mission was already a shambles, even before the death of Private Lutes. In despair of finding anything of value, wearied to death with this confinement and cowed by two strained, awful weeks of inexplicable radio silence, he jumped at the chance to turn the car around and head for home.
Brigadier Fry’s last words to him: “You may be tempted at some point to renege on our agreement, Dr. Fournier. With everyone calling you commander, it would be easy to fall into the trap of actually trying to command. But that’s really not what you’re there for. As far as your scientific expertise goes, I won’t presume to advise or direct you.
“But everything else is mine.”
24
McQueen sits up in the turret while the sun sets and the stars come out.
In his mind, he identifies and names the constellations he can see. The Dragon. The Little Bear. Cepheus. Mostly he learned them for their use in orienteering, but he is struck too by the beauty and profligacy of their display. The daytime burns with a single fire, and a lot of the time it burns fitfully. The night is a million suns exploding all at once, igniting the whole sky. With no man-made lights to dim them, they have reclaimed the glory, the pre-eminence they had back in the dawn age when humans lived in caves. Even through the distorting curve of the turret glass, they make McQueen feel as though he is about to fall off the tilted world into the immensity beyond.