by mikel evins
I looked up and imagined people on the balconies standing outside watching the sky, waving to one another, cooking out on little grills. I saw lonely nets strung across poles for ball games and thought of the teams that would never play them anymore.
The habitat was a town made for walking. There were shops and cafes on the corners we passed. Where the streets crossed were big round squares with garden plots in the centers, now withered and dead. I saw a work glove crumpled in the dry stalks of one planter.
Before long we glided past taller buildings with more shops and other businesses in them. There were pigmented signs in front of most of them with many different styles of writing and dozens of pictograms, icons of the businesses they represented. Looking around I could see the ghost of the bustle that had died out on Angel of Cygnus.
“Just a little farther,” said ‘Iris Wallace.’ “Oleh awaits you in the town hall.”
She bumped precariously around a corner to the right, jiggling her dead hands gruesomely, and we followed her onto a wide lawn shaded by a dozen big dead trees. There was a brick building on the lawn with a tall tower. At the top of the tower was an old-fashioned analog clock. In the darkness it looked ominous. Random shadows suggested rooftop gargoyles watching us. The long hand was just to the left of the top center. The short hand pointed right at it.
A balcony ran around the second floor of the building. The wall behind the balcony was a row of glass doors. A pair of them stood open. In front of the open doors, a man-shaped shadow floated between two more corpse-bedecked arbeiters. Chief Verge led us up toward the waiting man and to the level of the balcony. As we came within ten meters or so, he pushed himself backward toward the doors and eyed us warily. The arbeiters moved together in front of him.
“Oleh Itzal?” said the Chief. “The Cold Ones sent us to answer your call for help.”
Oleh Itzal was ragged and filthy. A strip of dirty cloth was wrapped around his lower face. His hair was matted and stuck out in all directions. He wore rags that were frayed and threadbare and so soiled that their original color was a mystery. His skin was dirty and I couldn’t have guessed his age, though in this environment he was probably younger than he looked.
He pulled the cloth down off his mouth and rasped something at us. After a moment, Translation gave it as, “I asked for help. You’re not what I asked for. I said human beings.”
We drifted a little closer to the railing and he moved back again.
“I’m human,” said Yarrow. “And so are lots of the people on our ship.”
Oleh Itzal hesitated and squinted at Yarrow, craning his neck forward, but then he backed away again.
“You don’t look human to me,” he said. “You look like a damned robot. And what are those voices? Every time you say anything I hear other voices.”
“There’s no need to be rude,” Yarrow said quietly. “And I am human.”
The Chief said, “The extra voices you hear are Translation. It makes our speech understandable to you and yours understandable to us. Your environment is dangerous for unprotected biological persons. Our captain and many of our crew are quite human. Most of them are as purely biological as you are. We simply wished to avoid exposing them to danger unnecessarily.”
“Sure you did,” said Oleh Itzal. “Nice try. If you want me to believe you’re not some kind of lousy trick, bring me some real humans.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “What kind of trick do you mean? What reason would we have to try to trick you?”
In answer he just snarled and turned away. He rasped out something else to the zombie robots on either side of him and pushed off to float back into the building.
“Mister Itzal,” said the Chief. “Suppose we return with persons who satisfy your definition of human. What then?”
He caught himself on the lip of the door and looked back. For a moment there was an expression of exquisite longing on his face. The moment stretched. He moved a little toward us and opened his mouth. It looked like he was tearing up. Then his expression changed to one of bitter anger. He snarled something else and pulled himself into the building.
We watched him go, and watched the arbeiters close the doors and take station in front of them.
“Strange,” said the Chief.
“Poor guy,” said Yarrow.
“What now?” I said.
“I suppose we have no choice,” said the Chief. “We go back to Kestrel and form another rescue party, this time with human flesh in it.”
6.
We said farewell to ‘Iris Wallace,’ the animatronic corpse that had guided us to Oleh Itzal, and glided back the way we had come. On the way back, Chief Verge led us to a higher altitude so that we could look down on the town below us.
The inhabited areas stood out. They had toys and small vehicles around them. The grass showed signs of care. There were garden plots and pools and outdoor cooking apparatus and customized landscaping. There were waste containers and storage sheds and fences. The uninhabited neighborhoods were pristine.
The signs of life interrupted were poignant, but the bigger areas of houses and apartments that had never been used were what spoke to me. This was a world made my people for people. It was the hopes of a generation transmuted to physical reality. Those rows of empty homes had been made for people who would never be, for children who would never grow up. The crew of Angel of Cygnus had worked together, built together, adventured together, dreamed together and, it seemed, died together.
We reached the end of the footpath, and Yarrow said with mock enthusiasm, “Who wants to go back through the other module?”
“Yarrow,” said Verge severely.
“I know,” said Yarrow. “But there’s only so much gloom a person can take.”
“Please just open the hatch, Yarrow,” said the Chief.
Emerging from the airlock was like escaping from prison. The infinite night was liberation. My vertigo was gone. I looked over at Kestrel, hanging bright and welcoming, and felt a surge of relief.
The trip back across felt endless, but then we were alighting on the gasherd and pushing through it into the quarantine bay. In our absence the rest of the crew had been in and turned it into a respectable, if bland, apartment. Fabbed partitions and furnishings divided it into a bedroom, a privy, a galley, and a living room. Against one bulkhead was a corridor that connected the living room to the open bay doors, making of them a sort of back porch—one with a spectacular view.
“Hey,” said Py. “Did the gasherd seem slower than usual?”
“I imagine it’s the quarantine membrane,” I said, “Analyzing us for contaminants and pathogens.”
“Oh,” said Py. “Did it find any?”
“We’ll know in a few minutes,” I said. “You can ask Kestrel what it found.”
“I have the results already,” Kestrel said.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, there you are. What did you find?”
“A long list,” said Kestrel. “Judging by the Captain’s choice of vocabulary, he’s likely to want to meet and discuss it with you right away”
“I see,” I said.
“Yeah,” said the Captain. “There’s a lot. I mean…a lot.”
“Microbes?” I said.
“There are at least a hundred viruses on this list,” he said, “and most of them are engineered.”
“Engineered?” I said. I blinked. “Did you say ‘engineered viruses?’”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Are you sure?” I said. “Because that makes no sense at all.”
“Ask Kestrel,” he said.
“I have no doubt about it,” said Kestrel. “The evidence is clear.”
“On a spacecraft? I said. “In the crew environment? Really?”
“Yeah,” said the Captain. “And that ain’t all.”
“Okay,” I said dubiously. I tried to dismiss the feeling that I was being set up for a practical joke. They sounded completely serious. “Sounds like we’d better meet as soon as
quarantine clears us.”
“Strike that,” said the Captain. “We’re going to do it right now.”
“Now? I guess I assumed we would meet in your mess, as usual.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Just a second,” he said. “Let me show you. If I tell you, you won’t believe me. Okay, here we go.”
Kestrel opened a large display volume on the inboard side of the bay. In it were life-sized images of the Captain, Jaemon, Chief Engineer Burrell, and Doctor Yaug. We automatically arranged ourselves to face them.
Yaug wore his new face and hands and looked as wizard-like as I had been expecting. His golden face, so much like Yarrow’s, had its own character, marked by a conspiratorial air, as if you and he shared some great and amusing secret. His new black velvet hands were steepled in front of him.
Burrell said, “Is this strictly necessary? I have preparations to make if we’re going to deal with this stuff adequately.”
“Chill, Burrell,” said Jaemon.
Burrell was a Jovian woman who looked just like what inner system people thought a Jovian should look like. She had smooth, bone-colored skin and black almond-shaped eyes that glittered with a hard intelligence. Her nose was long and pointed, and so were her ears. Her black eyebrows were arched, and her black hair grew into feathery clumps that stood up. Burrell kept them brushed back from her long, narrow face. She was taller than Jaemon and slimmer than Esgar. She was the reason that Martians liked to call Jovians ‘elves.’
“Okay,” I said. “What’s the bad news?”
The Captain gestured and a second display volume opened between us. It showed, as he had suggested, over a hundred glyphs. I touched one at random with my attention, and it filled my mind with details about an engineered virus with some original code and some taken from viruses native to Earth. I touched another, and then another, and each time found similar information.
“Who’s crazy enough to cook up homemade viruses on board a starship?” said Burrell indignantly, “Much less release them into a closed environment?”
“That’s what I want to know,” I said. “I’m still half thinking this is all some elaborate practical joke.”
“No joke, Lev,” said the Captain, “Take a look at this.”
The display volume cleared and then filled with a new set of glyphs.
“That’s a computational virus,” I said. “And so is that one. These are all dangerous malware. Are you telling me the quarantine membrane somehow found these on us?”
“Stored in spores collected from your carapaces,” said the Captain.
“Spores?,” I said. I swore as colorfully as I knew how.
“That’s why we’re meeting like this,” I said. My tone sounded the way Captain Rayleigh looked. “We can’t leave this room.”
“What?” said Py and Yarrow together.
“We’re in quarantine,” I said. “We’ve been exposed to pathogens. Until we’ve been thoroughly examined and decontaminated, we have to assume that we’re infected with about a hundred kinds of engineered pathogens, both biological and cybernetic.”
“We’re infected.”
7.
The four of us were still in the quarantine bay several hours later. We had kept ourselves busy trying to find a set of colors and textures with which to decorate the apartment. This is the sort of work that quickly turns the company of good friends into hell. We had tried taking turns proposing decorating schemes and voting on the results. A subtle pattern had rapidly emerged: one of us proposed colors and textures, then Chief Verge made a disdainful noise, leading the rest of us to discard the scheme and start over.
Currently we were back to beige everything.
“I have analyzed the pathogens,” said Kestrel.
After a couple of hours of carefully reviewing other people’s tastes in interior decoration, this was riveting news. A large display volume blossomed before us showing a grid of twenty-four viruses.
“All of these are derived from a terrestrial pathogen called rabies,” Kestrel said.
“Ugh,” I said. “I’m familiar with it.”
Twenty-three of the viruses disappeared, and the one remaining grew larger. It was a greenish lozenge covered with tiny spikes.
Kestrel said, “Now, this is just one of the rabies-derived viruses, but I think it’s reasonably representative of the rest. In fact, I think it’s fairly representative of the general type of engineering that has been done with all of the viruses we’ve found.”
The lozenge split in half lengthwise. The half facing us disappeared, leaving us a view of what looked like a long string of beads that had been folded up, slipped into a membrane bag, and stuffed into the lozenge. The bag slipped out of the lozenge and disappeared. The string of beads unfolded.
“This is the genome of the engineered virus,” Kestrel said. “Most of it’s just rabies, but there are some interesting changes.”
Seven of the beads changed color, becoming red. The other beads faded away. Those remaining swelled to fill the display volume.
“These portions of the genome contain common library code. Notice the duplications.”
The seven beads became circular windows on close-up views of the genome. Within each one, sequences of nucleotides were highlighted, showing us identical sequences in widely-separated parts of the genome.
Kestrel said, “The Fabric tells me that this is a hallmark of genetic engineering. Common utility code from libraries is reused in various places. The pattern of regularity and duplication is unlike anything in naturally-evolved organisms.”
“Do we know what the library routines do?” I said.
“Some of them. Not all of them,” said Kestrel. “We can make reasonable guesses. But let me show you something even more interesting.”
Kestrel zoomed out and picked a dozen other places in the genome, magnified them, and highlighted several long sequences. I scanned them attentively.
“I’m not seeing the same kind of duplication,” I said.
“These aren’t simple library routines,” said Kestrel. “They’re edited copies of code from a different organism.”
“A different virus?” I said.
“No, an organism,” said Kestrel. “This code is from Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.”
I waited for the Fabric to fetch and unfold the knowledge in my memory.
“Zombie ant fungus,” I said.
“Eeeew,” said Yarrow.
Chief Verge said, “Interesting. A fungus that infects ants and reprograms their behavior, causing them to die while hanging from strategically-chosen leaves, then produces a fruiting body that feeds on the body of the dead ant.”
“That’s not a real thing,” said Py. “Is it?”
“Eeeew,” said Yarrow again.
“It sounds implausible,” I said.
“Yes,” said Kestrel. “To me, as well. But it exists.”
“Why would anyone have made such a thing?” I said.
“Apparently it evolved naturally,” said Kestrel, sounding skeptical.
“What’s its genome doing in a virus?” said the Chief.
“That’s the question,” said Kestrel.
I hesitated, then said, “I’m guessing it’s the parts of the genome that code for implanting new behaviors.”
“That was my thought as well,” said Kestrel. “I’m still checking that assumption.”
“A mind-control virus,” said Py. “Go figure.”
“Eeeew,” said Yarrow.
“Yarrow,” said Chief Verge darkly.
“Sorry, Chief,” said Yarrow. “But this is really unpleasant.”
The Chief said, “For what it’s worth, I agree with you.”
“Kestrel,” I said, “You said this virus was ‘reasonably representative’ of the others. Are they all ‘mind-control viruses?’”
“Perhaps. The amount and content of the inclusions differ, and some have additional original code. All of them seem t
o show signs that the designer tried to alter the virulence of the pathogen, as well.”
“To make it more virulent? Or less?”
“Both.”
I thought about that. It didn’t make any sense to me. On the other hand, none of the rest of it did, either.
“Okay, altered the virulence how?”
“In several of the rabies variants it seems that the designers tried to lower the pathogen’s infectiousness, but raise its rate of replication once it was introduced into the right medium.”
“What’s the right medium?” I said.
“Human nervous tissue.”
I thought it over.
“So it’s less infectious. That means it’s harder to contract the virus accidentally. But it replicates faster once established. So it does its job faster once it’s been used. Somebody tried to make it into a more convenient tool or weapon?”
“Possible,” said Kestrel. “More weapon than tool, I’d say. All variants are still lethal.”
“All right,” I said. “What else?”
“There is a great deal more,” said Kestrel, “So much more that I would like to suggest a different way to approach the information.”
“Go ahead,” said Chief Verge.