On cursory review, Anderson’s deprivation was the simplest to evaluate. He had passed out just as full oxygen was being restored and was revived shortly thereafter. Nothing particularly noteworthy there.
Davis’s case had a ready explanation. Everything he accomplished, from the time he left via the personnel portal to the time he succumbed, had consumed no more than three minutes. Another three minutes elapsed while atmosphere was fully restored and he was revived. Other than a few bruises, he showed no ill effects from the ordeal.
Imholtz’s experience was, in her estimation, worthy of further study. On its face, it added to a growing mystery. Adhering to the principal that the most valuable opinion is often that which is at variance from one’s own, Ellis sought out Stewart. “How are your patients?” she asked.
“Anderson?” Stewart said, treating the Commander with a knowing smile. Both were acutely aware of how Davis took him down. “The man suffered a major shock to his belief system upon discovering that not only you can be a ball buster. Other than that, he’ll be fine. Imholtz—I suspect he’s the purpose of your visit—has a concussion. Very treatable. He can resume light duty in a few hours.”
“Since you seem to know where I’m headed with this, have you given it any thought?”
“Sufficient to tell you there is nothing here to sway me. We can approximate the time Imholtz was lying unconscious, breathing in Murkor’s low oxygen: Several minutes. Uncertain is just how much oxygen his body needed while in an unconscious state. Typically, it’s less. Unlike you—and you were hallucinating—he had no sense of a presence. I asked him.”
“Why would he? He wasn’t lucid.”
“True enough.”
“You find nothing strange about the disparate incidents?”
“Oh, they’re strange alright,” Stewart responded. “Just not alien-strange.”
Ellis persisted. “Mindstor. Evaluate Nadir and Zenith files for possible intrusion of unclassified organism, agent, or substance into base Nadir.”
As before, three seconds elapsed.
Low probability. Adequate detection and decontamination procedures are currently in place and fully functional at both facilities. Forty-three Standard Earth Years since last reported detector failure. Cross-reference and further review of incidents involving L. Jensen, A. Cruz, R. Allawi, J. Ellis, B. Imholtz is indicated.
A minor victory, Ellis thought. One more name added to the growing list. Frustrated, she decided to tweak the mindstor with one more inquiry.
“Mindstor. Review last response. How many incidents are required before a high probability value is assigned to your answer?”
A very short delay ensued.
A number in excess of thirty-six, the restrictive parameter of the inquiry.
“That’s the combined population of Nadir and Zenith,” Stewart said, trying hard not to gloat. “And while I’m stating the obvious, if I’m wrong, if there really is some thing out there that can evade a detector, then our full-body protective garb will be useless. To save time and room, I suggest we leave such gear behind.”
***
Ellis had put off updating Garcia as long as she could, hoping for answers which had never come. Even the exact time of departure was uncertain. When the com link to Nadir was restored, she noted that her counterpart’s appearance had deteriorated further.
“I wish I had better news as to the problems besetting you, Comandante. We have no special insight.” Great way to build trust, she thought to herself.
“I understand,” a disappointed voice replied.
“We also had a setback here,” Ellis continued. “The vehicle capable of reaching you is undergoing repair. We shall be delayed a few hours.” If roles were reversed, and she were told the same, what would she believe?
“You have taken on a lot. I sincerely hope it has not inspired internal discord.”
“Whatever troubles we have encountered are minor compared to your own. Once you and your crew are safely in the CAM-L, my Lieutenant will troubleshoot your ailing environmental system. If he can affect repair, the option to remain at Nadir shall, of course, be yours.” One shaky assumption built upon another.
“We will be in a very bad way when you arrive—” Garcia’s voice faded away, but the dire implication was clear. He struggled to begin again. “I have entries in my log acknowledging this—one entry, in particular, you should be aware of—”
“Yes, Comandante?”
“Our stored supply of fresh water is yours.”
12. We Don’t Die Alone
THE BEST A COMPROMISED Garcia could manage was to reduce the baffling nature of their illness down to the simplest possible explanation. That it was one small part of humanities’ continuing lesson in humility that began a millennia ago when Galileo proved Earth was not the physical center of Creation, and extended to the life discovered on Orb and BranxA. Namely, the universe does not spin to our consciousness.
We are constantly reminded of our limitations. What is embraced as an unassailable fact in one age is often discredited in the next: Martian canals; spontaneous generation; flat Earth; that all of creation is composed of four elements, earth, fire, air, and water. Ideas touted by the most brilliant minds of their times now ridiculed.
The misconceptions science admits to have become more sophisticated, not necessarily fewer. Centuries ago, a widely held theory, oddly named Goldilocks Zone, espoused that life was restricted to a predefined “comfort zone” around a star. A theory found to have the same basis in reality as the fairy tale it was named after.
A frown came to Garcia’s face. In defense of science, if hindsight is twenty-twenty, it’s because science pointed exactly where to look.
Where was he not looking?
Fatigued, he pushed back from his desk, chastising himself for wasting time on what he believed to be another of his futile intellectual exercises. He was no closer to finding a solution to the life-threatening crisis that he and five other souls were confronting.
Leaving the letter of condolence to the shuttle pilot’s widow unfinished, he rolled his desk chair to the viewport and, for what he knew might be the last time, gazed out at the tortured landscape, muted of life and color. Several hours earlier he had stood here unassisted.
Out there a battery of monitoring stations were coated in grit. Those few surviving the harsh environment were registering the nearby fumaroles as abnormally active. To Garcia, the sounds of their tumultuous expulsions were muted. Readings from a particle counter signaled a significant reduction in atmospheric aerosols relative to the prior day. But to Garcia, the expansive views of lava to the south, where previously he could easily resolve an intricate web of cracks and crevices, appeared obscured in a perpetual haze.
Looking outward, he lamented, was becoming as murky as looking inward.
Not long ago, when he could still see and hear well, he had divided the remainder of his term of service into Earth days. Now, helplessly watching his and his crews’ accelerating decline, the future could be measured with the brevity of Murkor hours. An irrational thought seized hold of him—that the planet’s wobble had altered the fabric of time, an hour becoming a year. That the waning of their strength and the diminishment of their senses, was the end stage of life, accelerated. Another lesson it seems, this time in human mortality. An unwelcome preview of advancing age and the inevitability of death.
This was the dire state of affairs when he notified his fellow crew members that Ellis had, of necessity, postponed their evacuation from Nadir. With their lives hanging in the balance, the news took them down, stunned silence at first, followed by expressions of fear and a return to the suspicion of Coalition’s motives that never really left. Repeating Ellis’s pledge of assistance, which he believed to be sincere, was of little avail: The distrust ingrained by decades of Unión-Coalition animosity could not be defeated by the mere utterance of words.
Of his crew, the least affected by the unhappy disclosure was Carlos, already inured to
the worst outcome in all things related to The Enemy. “I wish I had been wrong,” he had said, barely able to raise his head from the bed where he laid resting.
Most troubled was Amanda, desperately avoiding tears, uttering “I look old” then retreating without further word to the solitude of her quarters. Had she heard him say, “No, you shall always be beautiful”?
When two hours elapsed, and she had neither returned to the L2 common area nor responded to her com link, Garcia took worried notice. Pushing aside uncertainty as to the type of welcome he would receive (it was impossible to forget their prior intimacy) he proceeded to her cabin, where he found her draped across the bed.
“I was hoping you would come,” she said.
“How are you faring?”
“Well enough,” she said, the strain of speaking evident in her voice as she methodically enunciated each word. More telling was the disheveled appearance of the clothes she wore.
“Anything you need?” Garcia asked. He was the only person who could move freely about the base, though that luxury was drawing to a close.
“I’d like to talk,” Amanda replied, patting the bed next to her. “Talk,” she repeated, anticipating his hesitancy, though the fact of the matter was that nothing other than an emotional supplication was feasible.
Garcia, without reservation, sat. If he was a bad judge of character he doubted that he could do no worse than how he had misjudged his own.
Amanda was not inherently a dishonest person. Rather, and at an early age, honesty had been supplanted in importance by vanity and pridefulness. Accordingly, it took her that much longer to identify the poor decisions she had made and to share the revelation with the one person to whom it mattered most. She arrived at this particular juncture by admitting to herself that she had exploited another’s weakness.
“I wanted to tell you what happened when I went to visit Carlos in his quarters. Do you remember? It was that night I left you and Mariana—”
“You don’t have to—”
“Please. Let me. I must—before we all—well, you know,” Amanda said, struggling to stay composed. “He turned me away. You should know why. You see, he told me he didn’t want to disappoint you again.”
“Again? I’m not sure I understand.”
“I didn’t myself at the time. I was too angry. Later though—don’t you see, Carlos believes the problem with the Nexus was the first time he failed you.”
Garcia shook his head in dismay, hoping that this was not the impression he conveyed.
“You didn’t make him feel that way,” Amanda said in response. “Not deliberately. It was in his own mind. Eating at him. When he saw I was only trying to use him to get to you, he refused me—even if you’d never know that’s what he did.”
“He said nothing about it,” Garcia said, verifying that Carlos kept the incident to himself.
“He rejected me because he respects you. He didn’t realize that you and I were over—perhaps we never should have started.” Amanda took Garcia’s hand in hers. Their first meaningful touch. “I accept that now. I should have much sooner.”
It was a lot for Garcia to process: A young man’s respect for him evidenced by his willingness to turn an alluring and available woman away; how she, seeing the value of true affection, found the strength to make herself vulnerable and let him go. The three of them emotionally connected.
It was this singular thought that Garcia seized onto when he gently squeezed the soft hand he was holding and said, “Amanda, don’t be sorry. However ill-conceived the actions leading to this junction, they have been turned into something redeemable. A fresh start.”
“I would like that,” Amanda replied, and then, surrendering to her fear of an uncertain future, voiced what they both were thinking. “But will they come, Comandante?”
“I am certain that they will try,” Garcia replied.
“You seem so sure. It’s not that easy for me.”
“Nor for me,” Garcia admitted. “The only reasonable choice is to have faith in human nature—keeping a tight focus on the better half of it.”
Amanda returned a small smile and then, acquiescing to the malady pursuing them all, slowly started to close her eyes.
The crews’ sleeping quarters, six small compartments, were situated on the first level. Once prized for offering a small measure of privacy, they had now turned into cells effectively isolating them from each other.
Garcia was determined to prevent that from happening. “Can you raise yourself?” he asked. Not waiting for an answer, he reached behind Amanda’s back to prop her up, alarmed at how cold and listless she was in his arms.
“I was a bit shaky making it down here,” she warned.
“You’ll have my arm,” Garcia said, helping her rise from the bed. “We should all be together when the rescue team from Zenith arrives.”
What Garcia kept to himself as they shuffled to the spiral stairs leading to L2 was not the fear that Ellis would refuse to come. She would arrive too late.
***
The words “less mass, less cost,” which were emblematic of Nadir’s design and construction, had been repeated so frequently, and which such fervor, that they took on the aspect of a mantra. The same two guiding principles were applied to the base’s austere furnishings, inclusive of the crew’s modest microfoam beds. Compressible to less than a tenth their expanded size, they could easily be rolled and carried tucked under the arm. As a bonus, the beds just happened to be comfortable. Spares were kept in a storage compartment in expectation of accommodating guests or visiting dignitaries who had never come.
Roya and Gustavo, aware of the dimming prospect of a timely rescue, and finding themselves incapable of making the descent to their respective quarters, were resting side-by-side on two such beds placed in the middle of L2.
The cozy arrangement displeased neither of them. They had spent most of the last years trapped inside a structure the size of a house (its “yard” giving a passable depiction of hell) during which time they were treated to a full measure of the other’s sometimes less-than-ingratiating imperfections, personal habits, and idiosyncrasies. In the end, neither was the worse for wear. One manifestation of a close friendship is the freedom in which two people go about teasing each other. Brought closer together by their incapacity, they were doing so now—each trying to comfort the other by putting on the face of courage in the face of danger.
“Care to trade?” Gustavo inquired in a raised voice. An anomaly of the affliction they were experiencing was the inconsistent and partial effect it produced on the five senses. “My loss of vision for your loss of hearing?”
“What’s to be gained by that?”
“I won’t have to hear your insults.”
“Deal. With your poor eyesight I wouldn’t have to see your ugly face.”
“I aim to please.”
“Are you as frightened as I am?” Roya asked suddenly, turning on her side to look directly at Gustavo, alarmed at the effort it took to accomplish the simple motion.
“Of my own face?” Gustavo remarked, adding an incredulous tone to his voice in the hopes of making Roya laugh.
“Seriously.”
“Wouldn’t be half as scared if I could find some meaning in this.”
“I have a scientist’s brain,” Roya said. “I feel like what’s happening to us is part of some grand experiment—only we won’t get to see the results.”
“Kinda like life in general,” Gustavo reflected, looking up at the blur of the ceiling. “One big experiment. The final result being death.”
“Nothing more?” Roya asked, responding to the skepticism. “You don’t believe something follows?”
“I’m at an impasse. The devout believer devises his own God, the atheist denies a secret hope to be proven wrong. What other choice is given us?” Gustavo let out a cynical laugh. “To pray?”
“Perhaps. I would get down on my knees in front of the whole world, not because I believe prayers are a
nswered, I don’t. Because it is what we pray for that defines us.”
“And what—pray tell—would you be praying for?”
“Joy.”
Roya’s response had come quickly. Accepting the unexpected simplicity of the word, Gustavo faced her and said, “Then it would be my eternal pleasure to kneel down beside you.”
“That would be a sight—if only we could manage.” And with that Roya, exhausted from the conversation, closed her eyes, let out a shallow breath—and fell asleep. As she slept, she unconsciously shifted her body a centimeter closer to Gustavo and draped an arm across his chest.
This was the touching scene encountered when, struggling to support Amanda, Garcia alighted from L1.
“Is that you, Comandante?” Gustavo asked as they approached. “I see you’ve gathered up Amanda. Good.”
“Roya?” Garcia and Amanda, simultaneously inquired in alarm. With vital signs critically low, there was a growing inclination to expect the worse.
“Resting,” Gustavo assured. “I tired her out by blabbing too much.”
“How many beds are left in storage?” Garcia asked.
“Three, I believe.”
With great effort, a weary Garcia retrieved the beds from storage, Amanda settling on one. In seconds she had joined Roya in sleep.
“It’s been a long time that I had lovely women lying on either side of me,” Gustavo commented. “It’s a damn shame I can’t move.”
“I should imagine that’s a comfort to them,” Garcia, heading for L1, pointed out.
“Come back and tell us a bedtime story,” Gustavo said, his eyes trying to follow the Comandante as he headed away.
***
Never in Mariana Perez’s exceptional medical career did she feel so utterly helpless.
Not that she hadn’t lost patients before. Hazardous assignments, of which she had more than her fair share, had an unfortunate way of making casualties seem inevitable.
In every instance, before a patient expired (an advanced doctorate in interplanetary medicine helped keep fatalities to a merciful few) she had been able to diagnose the ailment and render a measure of final comfort.
The Symbionts of Murkor Page 21