by Scott Rhine
Lou said, “And now the medical-monitoring committee.”
“I don’t know,” Red said. “I think we should talk about how the limited number of pods affects our colony’s strategy.”
Mercy’s husband growled in frustration while Zeiss picked up on the cue. “True. We have about fifty-one pods left. Each is good for a single decontamination. If we launch both probes, we’ll need a minimum of three astronauts for each task. Using three for each return to Olympus will leave us with only forty-five for the rest of the mission.”
“So we have the launchers wait up in the landing bay until we decide where to launch probe two,” Lou said.
“Harsh,” Red replied.
“A couple weeks. Herk can take it in exchange for new skin.”
“Still might not be enough. What happens when the pods run out? Is anyone left outside unable to return? Are they forever banned from paradise? We have about 315 L weeks until our scheduled jump home. That means we can only send a pilot out with the shuttle every seven L weeks or so.”
Zeiss shook his head. “We should decide later when we know more. I’m not comfortable with Ascension landing anywhere until it has fuel available to lift off again on short notice.”
“Now . . .” Red paused, forcing Lou to lean forward in his seat. “The medical-monitoring committee has three questions to address before we can approve the injections. One: did the Magi tamper with Mercy’s treatment after Toby created it?”
“If Snowflake did anything like that, it would be for Mercy’s benefit,” Lou replied.
Auckland added, “Dr. Baatjies placed a sticker over each sealed test tube with his signature and the lot number. I saw no extraneous needle marks.”
“Fair enough. Two: did Toby do anything malicious?”
Again Lou replied in the negative. “He’s no saint, but I really do think the Ethics reformatting made our favorite psychopath honest. He could’ve escaped at any time. Toby had to live off recycled urine after his water ran out. That’s bloody dedication in my book. If he wanted to hurt her, he’d have left on day one.”
“Unless it was a particularly subtle side effect,” Auckland suggested.
Red tried not to grin. “Like being attracted to people who look like Toby.”
“Thank you for that pleasant thought,” Lou said with a grimace. “If he’s capable of harming Mercy, he could do the same to any of us. In that case, he would’ve done it here or in the Hollow already. I think he’ll stay a good boy as long as there’s any remote hope that Yvette will forgive him. If she ever divorces him and he goes rogue, I don’t want to be in the same star system as that twisted fuck. I’ve bought yellowcake uranium from blokes that scare me less.”
“Amen,” Red agreed. “So we’re left with only question number three to stand in our way. Did Toby make a mistake?”
Auckland interjected, “The documentation for the procedure is well done. The steps are simple, and the theory is sound. If there is a problem, I’m not smart enough to see it. This biochemistry is years beyond anything I’ve ever attempted.”
“If you had to assign a number to the chances for a side effect, what would it be?” Zeiss asked.
The doctor sighed. “With Mercy, 90 percent. She’s hypersensitive to even normal medications. Now how severe that reaction will be, I can’t predict. No one can. We can only hope that she can endure it until we can send her through the deep-cleaning pod cycle to fix it.”
Lou pointed to Auckland. “That, my friends is why we must do it. Without her, there is no orbit and no super-healing magic wand. If Mercy had a vote, she’d tell you to do it. Any opposed?”
The doctor raised his hand. “We need more testing.”
“Will every guinea pig on this habitat tell you what you need to know beyond a shadow of doubt?” asked Lou.
“No.”
“Then we’re wasting time. I need my gravity sense back soon, Doc, or we’re all cooked.”
“We don’t know about interactions. What if the new injection prevents the suppression drugs from leaving her system? What if she never gets her talents back?”
“No offense to Yuki, but Mercy would cut off any limb or sense of your choice to have that baby. You know that.”
Auckland’s shoulders slumped. He looked like the old man Yuki always accused him of being. “The rest of the committee already outvoted me. I just thought you should hear my side. First, do no harm.”
“We thank you for your role as conscience, doctor,” Lou said sincerely.
The planners voted unanimously to perform the experiment and adjourned the meeting to the stasis chamber immediately thereafter.
The actual injections were targeted by a medical scanner and took only a minute apiece. No effects manifested for the first twenty-four hours, after which Lou’s gravity sense improved steadily. Soon after, Mercy’s glucose and white-blood-cell counts began returning to normal. When he heard this news, Lou responded, “Bugger. Now I have to go to church every Sunday in the barn.”
“You?” Red said with disbelief.
“It was sort of a deal I made with God,” Lou explained.
“This is October twenty-fourth. Thirteen weeks till we can hold Stewart,” Mercy whispered. “We can make it.”
****
At the end of the first L week of orbit, the women of the crew held a Halloween baby shower to present Mercy with a maternity gown, a cotton print covered with tiny flowers. That evening she wore it to the planners’ meeting. Both Mercy and Yuki reclined in padded chairs, attended by their nervous men and Auckland. Each had a presentation to make about recent discoveries.
Mercy won the coin toss and spoke first, although she remained seated. “Snowflake has been evasive about the pods we use to reenter Sanctuary. The primary purpose is to maintain a sterile ship, but a special feature can be triggered by rotating the pod so that the occupant descends headfirst. During the initial cleansing, Sanctuary took a kind of baseline for each of us. By activating the return to baseline feature, we can theoretically restore things we’ve lost.”
“Regeneration—like my arm?” Yuki asked. She was wearing a new honey-colored kimono with her hair in a traditional bun. The scars appeared to be healing nicely, and only the small bandage on her forehead was visible.
“Yes. I’m not sure I trust the pods for more than a day before negative effects accrue, but in that amount of time, Snowflake assures me you could regrow the existing bone. Although anatomy isn’t his strong suit, he insists fixing the original would have been far easier.”
“Anti-aging treatments?” Zeiss asked. He wore his usual dress uniform with new socks that improved leg circulation.
Mercy nodded. “To the age you were at the snapshot. You may have to soak a while to get there depending on the damage.”
“Weight loss?” asked Red. “What? It’s hard to stay fit in zero g.”
“Yes.”
“Could you use it for your pregnancy?” asked Auckland.
“No. That would be two occupants, and Stewart has no initial snapshot.”
“If you went through afterward, would it make you a virgin again?” asked Lou.
Several women hit him.
“I suppose, if that were my worst injury,” Mercy said with a blush. “It concentrates on the worst problem first.”
“I know you asked about Lou’s eyesight,” Red said.
Mercy looked at the floor. “They’re not good at fine manipulation with living brain structure. With Z it was just removing blockage and reducing swelling. Repairing the optic nerve would be . . . tricky. They would risk resetting his neurons in the area to the snapshot setting, and the repair might not be successful.”
Red said, “Losing all memory of this journey and your marriage for a maybe? Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
“Snowflake said that eight to ten lighter cycles may do gradually for Lou what a single deep cycle could not.”
Zeiss asked, “Any other limitations?”
&n
bsp; “You can’t use the reentry shower till the cycle is complete.”
“I meant power, minerals, or other resources,” Zeiss clarified.
“All of that, I’m sure. Though, other than spending the pod and the time, it’s unclear. Snowflake is more evasive than the head of the Federal Reserve Bank at a press conference.”
“Thanks, we know a lot more than we did, and none of us could even get him to talk,” Zeiss said. “Anything else?”
“Um . . . freezing the control room took a great deal of fuel to initiate, but could be held indefinitely for a small additional overhead—less air and water than we’d consume awake.” Mercy was uncomfortable with this trade-off, but Lou had insisted she share it with the team.
“At what point does it make economic sense?”
“It’s really only for dire emergencies.”
“I know you already plotted the graph. Where do the curves intersect?”
“At almost five weeks.”
Zeiss nodded. “If things go poorly, everyone not on Labyrinth can take shelter in the command center for a year at a time. We pop our heads out like a groundhog, and if things didn’t improve, we could go back in our hole.”
“We’d need someone to monitor the radio for distress calls that could wake the sleepers at a moment’s notice,” Lou said.
“Prince Charming protocols,” Zeiss said.
“I’m not kissing a groundhog on the lips,” joked Sojiro.
“No, you’d be the Wicked Queen,” Lou countered.
“Boys,” Red said in a threatening tone. “If you don’t stop heckling, no dessert.”
“Probably apple strudel,” mumbled Lou.
Grinning, Zeiss said, “Now Yuki is going to sum up her gravity scans.”
Park stood to film her presentation. He still watched Yuki’s tour video and thought a travel video of an inhabited planet would make a nice sequel. At his signal, she began.
“First of all, we’re dealing with an extremely small data sample, given that it takes Daedalus twenty-five of our years to circle the sun once. There’s no way to predict all the cycles and variations from such a tiny slice. A serious uplifter would probably observe for a century before deciding an approach. To complicate matters, we get so close to Labyrinth with the lens that we can’t see the entire range pole to pole.”
“So we’re going with the singles’ bar technique of first contact. Got it,” Lou summarized. “We won’t hold it against you if something changes.”
The Japanese woman smiled at the analogy but didn’t continue until Yvette encouraged her nonverbally with a wave of peace through the Collective Unconscious. A picture of a globe appeared with color-coded, thermal graphs. “Right. We’ll give you the centerfold data sheet. At the north pole, gravity is 1.2 times Earth standard, and about 10 percent less at the equator. And this girl likes it hot. Over the span of the globe, temperatures are about seventeen degrees Celsius warmer than Earth counterparts, that’s thirty degrees Fahrenheit to you Americans. Water only gets to the freezing point in extreme areas, while everywhere else is hotter than hell—up to 140 Fahrenheit in the desert. Worse, we can see areas that have been blasted by violent radiation. We theorize that everything between these two latitudes eventually gets punished by these surges from Daedalus.”
Auckland gasped. “Nothing could live there.”
Lou shrugged. “You’d be surprised how much you find in a desert: bugs, night snakes, some cacti. No mammals in the daylight, though.”
Yuki said, “Toby theorized that there may be some radiation-resistant bacteria or underground life, but we filmed an interesting adaptation this morning on our first high-resolution sweep.” She changed the picture to an aerial close-up. “We decided to zoom in on this area first because these rock formations have a sensor signature similar to coral reefs. We thought it might be evidence of a former ocean. On time-lapse comparisons, we actually detected movement in these formations.”
The picture resembled a cluster of giant termite mounds with fronds undulating at the upper rims. Leaning closer to the screen, Park said, “So the plants sheath themselves in enough rock to guard against the radiation storms?”
“No clue. I’m not a xenobiologist. Maybe they just use the radiation and high winds to spread seeds like certain conifers after a forest fire. All we know for certain is that these coral plants accrete into mounds over several cycles, and we suspect other life shelters beneath them.”
“What’s the ground temperature?” Red asked. “At home it’s 53 Fahrenheit even in winter.”
“Our models and thermal imaging predict cave interiors would be about room temperature. We won’t know for sure until we send down our probe.”
The scientists chatted among themselves, ignoring the lecturer in their excitement. When Zeiss restored order, Yuki said, “If you’ll excuse the thermal malapropism, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
“Because of the extreme heat, Labyrinth has very little exposed water. We’ve seen a few great lakes, but nothing we’d call a true ocean. We estimate under 20 percent of the surface is liquid water. We might locate more underground. Sensors pick up a lot of seismic activity, from tremors to active volcanoes. Daedalus is trying to slow Labyrinth’s rotation over time as it elongates more. The tidal forces cause cracks in the crust and frequent eruptions, as well as strong winds and dust devils. All this violence actually works in our favor. The ash blows into cracks and adds fertilizer. In some cases, lava pouring into water in these seams has made jagged land formations similar to Hawaii.”
She shifted slides to a close-up of the maze-like cracks. The others could see white mist with the occasional fleck of green. “We’ve barely scratched the surface. Cracks may start as tectonic activity, but water shapes them. This thermal overlay is the size of the Amazon River Basin and ideal for life. True night is the coldest it gets on Labyrinth, and we could get by with a long-sleeved shirt. At peak season, the canyons in this area should only get as hot as an Arizona summer.”
“Atmosphere?” asked Zeiss.
“The cracks are so deep they sometimes have their own weather. Those white puffs there are actually clouds.” She zoomed the image so they could see the proof. She dazzled the camera with her best tour-guide smile. “The green here is chlorophyll.”
“Find the area with the highest density of green and concentrate our next flyby there,” Zeiss ordered.
“Yes, sir.”
****
Yvette buried herself in nursing duties, gradually desensitizing herself to traumatic memories of Olympus because people who were worse off needed her. She only screamed once, when Auckland shook her awake in a sick-bay chair.
Since Mercy and Yuki couldn’t walk to the chapel the next Sunday afternoon, Yvette arranged a commemorative ceremony for the whole crew on the Olympus patio. Zeiss asked the nurse to open the event with a brief speech. Surrounded by her peers, including Toby, Yvette kept the keynote brief. “We’ve come together this morning to celebrate our discovery of life on another world. Our last gathering on this patio was to honor our dead and their sacrifices. Now, through our windows, we can see the fruit of many lifetimes worth of labor—the promised land.”
“The promised land,” the others repeated as they toasted with apple juice. Even Rachael, the only Jewish crew member, echoed the words with a smile.
A well-groomed Lou handed Yvette a basket of tiny flowers. Confined to bed, Mercy had missed the ceremony due to vomiting caused by a gallbladder attack. The doctor ordered her to eat more rice and scheduled her for weekly endocrine tests. They had left the doors open in Olympus so she could hear the speeches. “I picked these for Mercy as a symbol of renewal after the winter. Hope always returns. She’d like you to place them in the chapel.”
Auckland nudged his wife, Mayor Pratibha, to make her own toast. “Actually, I came to see Lou act like an adult.” Others laughed, but Auckland glared.
Pratibha took a breath and swallowed her pride. She, too, laid a bouquet in
Yvette’s basket. “We’re grateful for Stewart and the promise of new life he represents for all Actives. I owe Mercy a debt for her bravery in this matter.” For the first time in Yvette’s memory, the mayor began to cry. “You all don’t know this, but I’ve miscarried on this voyage. If Mercy is able to deliver, my husband tells me that I should be able to carry to term as well.”
Auckland raised his glass and choked out, “To life.”
Several people, including Rachael, wrote private messages to stick in the cracks of the chapel walls. After a wonderful brunch worthy of the Ritz (if the Ritz still used wooden spoons), Yvette carried her brimming basket back to the well-decorated barn.
Offering a brief prayer of her own, she began arranging the offerings on the altar. One folded paper caught her eye because the name ‘Yvette’ had been glued on in multiple sizes and fonts. It looked like a ransom note made of shredded paper from the recycle bin. Anyone other than Lou could have slipped the document into her basket. Whoever it was didn’t want to be identified—by the humans or the aliens? She pocketed the missive so she could open it somewhere safe from any observation.
Her next chore was in Nadia’s chicken coop. The birds refused to lay near the places that had been stained by Yuki’s blood, and the predators seemed attracted by the scent. Yvette pulled the tainted boards up with a crowbar so that Herk could cut the replacements needed. The blood-soaked boards would be burned beneath the kitchen oven. Risa refused to perform any carpentry duty until Nadia used the word ‘please.’ Once Yvette knew she was alone, she opened the mysterious letter. Inside, most of the message was pasted together from whole words that had been cut from various documents.
Ask yourself: if Mercy’s freezer idea could work for our command crew, what about the Magi? While we observe the aborigines, are living Magi in a secret room sleeping? Do they watch a summary of our lives once a week like a soap opera? Is this the superior society we strive to attain? I cannot declare this publicly, but I wonder: who is watching the watchers?
Plato
Her new ally was a coward with a disturbing imagination. It was suddenly very chilly in the shadows, and Yvette fed the note to the kitchen fires herself in an effort to keep warm.