Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

The habitat hadn’t needed an infirmary, but Lante already had procedures in place. Lortisse had been dragged through in his suit, puncture included, and hauled out of that for emergency treatment, so the quarantine she had imposed later was probably worthless, but for now the patient was entirely cut off from the rest of them, on his own filtered air supply, and Lante only went in suited up, and disinfected afterwards. Even then it fell short of what an infectious diseases ward should have been. They just didn’t have power and raw materials for the constant destruction of components. From her studies of the invasive fluid, Lante was confident that it was too dense to travel by air.

Baltiel was well aware of the gaps in those studies, the fact that they were encountering an alien threat. The damn stuff might shift to some spore-like form without warning. It might become something their filters couldn’t detect. They didn’t know. His fascination with the alien ecosystem at their doorstep had soured in an instant when Lortisse was hauled in.

But now Lortisse was awake.

With the virtual eye of his cybernetic HUD, Baltiel watched the suited Lante speaking to him. Lortisse’s skin made him look like a burn victim who’d been beaten with sticks, from the heat of his fevers and the extreme tissue swelling he’d undergone at the height of his allergic reaction, his body clenching cell against cell until the walls burst. And yet they could fix that. He was pumped full of regenerative catalysts and nanomachines. The mere physical trauma was eminently repairable now he wasn’t in danger of death at any moment.

Lortisse’s eyes moved, and his mouth, his tongue seeming too large. The ends of his fingers twitched. Grander movements were beyond him, especially with the ruin of the leg that had been ground zero for the attack. Baltiel tried to sift meaning from his slurred replies. Lante was going over an inventory of how he felt, hunting errant symptoms. And obviously Lortisse felt like hell, but Lante seemed to be satisfied that all his actual complaints were attributable to damage done, not damage still underway. Eventually she finished up, gave Lortisse some brisk bedside manner about being back on his feet in ten days, and came out.

The wait for decontamination was frustrating then, because Lante refused to be interviewed while she was about it. It was safe to say that Yusuf Baltiel was not her favourite person since the whole business had kicked off. Out of her makeshift ward space she regarded him without love.

“You’ve seen the checklist. You’ve seen the prognosis,” she told him.

“I have,” Baltiel agreed. Ten days was not just sugar for the patient. Even with the habitat’s limited medical technology they’d have major tissue function restored, though Lortisse would be confined to a powered exoskeleton for a while after that. “Well done for saving him.”

Lante’s sour expression did not brighten. “Well done Lortisse’s body for kicking the damn stuff while I kept him steady,” she said.

“So he’s…”

“Some of it came out in fluids and solids during the ordeal, all of it in a broken form, the individual cells no longer intact or apparently active.” She had sealed everything up, though, just in case. Alien meant you couldn’t know how dead it was, and doubly so for some kind of microorganism. “The rest I think he must just have broken down and buried somewhere. I’m going to keep a monitor on his liver and kidneys for unusual element concentrations, because most likely that’s where everything will end up. Even if the actual organism has gone, the chemical balance of Nodan life is toxic to us, so I’m anticipating some knock-on effects as his body works through it.” She rubbed at her hands as though still trying to disinfect herself. “The truth, Yusuf? I thought that would probably be the end of it. I was all ready to scrub out every litre of his blood, to take out organs one by one and repair them. Because even whatever was left in him after the organism died should have been lethally toxic. But so far…”

Baltiel was going over the blood tests in his mind’s eye. “Seriously, nothing of it?”

“Not after he sweated and pissed out the last lot,” Lante said flatly. “His blood’s clean, of the thing itself and any lingering traces it might leave behind. He’s in more danger right now from what we pumped into him. That’s where most of my work is going, cleaning up my own mess.”

“And his verbal responses…?”

Lante grimaced. “Too early to say for sure but there are no obvious signs of decreased function. He seems sharp. We have had a very narrow escape, Yusuf.”

Baltiel nodded. “Let me know if anything changes.” The words came out even as he was instructing the habitat system to do exactly the same thing, and Lante would know that, but it seemed like treading on her toes if he didn’t at least say it in person.

She nodded curtly. “I’m going to tell Kalveen. She wanted to hear it from me.”

Baltiel blinked at her for just too long before recalling that the three of them had a physical relationship going. “Of course,” he said. The thought suddenly made him feel excluded and oddly lonely—not that he wanted to be part of their couplings and/or triplings, but that nobody had asked, expressed an interest. It wasn’t usually something that got to him: he could indulge his body himself efficiently enough. It made him think of Senkovi, though, for whom he had harboured the odd pang, on a purely physical level. Except Senkovi was entirely asexual, a man whose dealings with his fellow human beings simply did not extend on that axis in any direction. It had made him an ideal long-range terraformer, and Baltiel had often watched him and wondered at the man’s ability to simply not feel any part of that turmoil and conflict. Lucky Senkovi. Unless he’s pining for the unrequited love of one of his molluscs, or something.

Lante had gone, and Baltiel noted, not for the first time, that his internal trains of thought were pulling in at dark stations, meaning he had lost track of the world around him for valuable seconds or even minutes. I should up my prescriptions. Lante had him on a set of meds to keep anxiety and stress in their cupboards, but she’d warned him that the pressure would start to leak out in other ways. He composed a brief note to her, asking her to review the situation, but marked it non-urgent to show he was a reasonable man.

****

Over the days that followed—the long Nodan days his biorhythms had not grown used to—Baltiel kept loose tabs on Lortisse’s progress, but left the details to Lante. Work on studying the local life had stalled, and each time he woke he told himself that he would get the project underway again, only to find himself consumed with a lethargy he couldn’t shake. Easier to piece through minutiae of the maintenance logs, to watch their habitat renew itself and the hundred checks and balances that ensured it continued to give them a slice of Earth on this distant world. Easier to delve into the library and pick over plays and books and films that felt like the bones of human thought stranded on this alien beach. A bleakness had hold of him, its hands on his shoulders. The gravity, that fractional additional drag to every action, seemed to have intensified in ways that affected only him.

Sometimes he spoke with Senkovi or watched the man’s progress over on Damascus. Much of the logs were incomprehensible because the man was no longer writing the manual of the terraforming project. He seemed to be abandoning more and more of it to… what? To his pets? That was his claim but Baltiel chose to disbelieve it. Disra Senkovi was just mad, that was all. Mad in a quiet and useful way, as he always had been, as they all were in their own fashion. And now he was mad and unsupervised and small wonder if he was drifting steadily out of reason’s orbit. Each day Baltiel told himself he would speak severely to Senkovi, get the man back on track. Except he couldn’t see the track himself. He felt as though the mists that cloaked the salt marsh every morning were creeping inside the habitat, too.

Lante sent him notifications that he needed a new balance of medication, upping his antidepressants, adding different mood stabilizers. He had glanced disinterestedly over her diagnosis. Lortisse’s accident, apparently, had affected him, Yusuf Baltiel, more than the others. He was feeling guilt because it was his mission and so his responsibility; he was feeling a lack of purpose because the ecosystem had fought back, however unthinkingly; and he was feeling depression just because depression was a thing that happened to people even without those problems, and his regular cocktail of medication couldn’t keep up. Baltiel couldn’t find the motivation in him to accept her recommendations. Eventually she’d insist, as medical officer, and he’d take his medicine and wake up a slightly different person, but something in him rebelled at the thought just now. Another thing that he said he’d deal with each day, and didn’t.

Rani had her own madness. She wanted to move. They had a whole planet, didn’t they? The long-range drones had brought them a hundred hours of recordings from elsewhere on Nod. There were other ecosystems, each stranger than the last. There was a world of radial animals out there, crawling, drifting, rooted and turning leaf-like fronds towards the red-orange sun. So the marsh had unlooked-for hazards? They could get the Aegean to fabricate a new habitat and take the shuttle to elsewhere. They could have a winter palace on the desert plateaus, a summer home on the northern coast. Or they could go to Damascus, which by now had the oxygen to sustain them and was free of alien life of any kind. They could dabble their feet in the water and live on a boat and eat Senkovi’s pets if they wanted. She even had recipes.

And Baltiel heard her, and told himself he would consider her detailed proposals today, or tomorrow, or some day, and hadn’t, yet. The intent was defeated by each day, by the crushing weight of spiritual gravity that pushed down on him.

He was aware that this was not just Lortisse and his injury. That had just become more boulders in the great slow-motion avalanche of the end of human history, all of which had been bearing down on him since the comms had shut off. No word from home. Possibly fragmentary transmissions from other extrasolar projects that never came to anything. Only him, Lante, Rani, Lortisse and Senkovi, thirty-one light years from a dead civilization. And he had done his best to keep the wheels turning, to generate meaning through some kind of philosophical spontaneous generation. Hadn’t they made the most exciting discovery known to humankind? Hadn’t they finally found life amongst the stars, just as everyone always dreamt? But what use, if there was nobody left to show it to? And so Lortisse had just been the final storm surge against a dam that had been failing for decades.

Twelve days later, with Lortisse now ambulatory in a medical exoskeleton, cracking weak jokes with Rani and eating solids, Lante sent Baltiel a priority request to speak, all the urgent flags up, requires immediate Overall Command action. And that’s it, then. The thought of someone remaking him into a decisive commander was only slightly abhorrent, but it was still a gradient he had to overcome, a gravity well to escape, even momentarily. He was only surprised she hadn’t just acted, and asked forgiveness of the new man of purpose her altered prescription had created. Perhaps she, too, felt something of his lethargy.

The Lante that greeted him had no lethargy in her, though. Instead she looked terrified. That sight sent a shock through Baltiel, enough ersatz purpose to cast off the weight and spread his wings a little.

“What is it?” Even as he spoke he was accepting the secure files she passed to him, opening them up with rusty clearance codes and looking at the medical scan data revealed.

“It’s Lortisse,” Lante told him. “He’s not all right. He didn’t metabolize the fluid. It’s still there.”

Baltiel stared at the scans for as long as he felt he could, without quite understanding what he was looking at. “Does he know?” was his eventual response, a proper Overall Command sort of thing to say, to cover for his frank bafflement.

“Nothing, as yet,” Lante confirmed. They were squirrelled away in what had been the isolation ward before Lortisse had recovered and isolation had been declared unnecessary. Lante was apparently recanting her position on that, stable door and horse notwithstanding. At the same time she was keen to keep it a private matter between herself and her superior, segmenting off-system space for them that Rani and Lortisse would not be able to access.

Baltiel rubbed at his eyelids. He wanted to retreat from this. He didn’t get it, and he didn’t want to admit that he didn’t get it, and staring at the walls of the inside of his mind had become a hard habit to break. For a moment he wavered, because what did it matter, now? But the call to arms got through to him and he shook himself, clawing for motivation.

“Erma,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I can’t deal with this as is. I need you to clear my head. Give me whatever’s necessary.”

She gave him the works, and thirty minutes for it to kick in, and when they reconvened he felt a new man, bright and crisp and fragile like ice. Beneath that ice the old abyss still yawned; he felt the hungry pull of it past the slightly manic flicker that frizzed at the edge of his vision. His brain was cut loose to dart and soar, though, and to admit he didn’t understand what he was looking at.

“It went to his brain,” Lante explained, guiding him through the scans. “It’s adopted some kind of encysted structure.” Here, here, here, picked out on the images, the boundaries of a new and potentially hostile nation. “I don’t think it’s active. Certainly its structure has changed from its initial mobile form so it’s no longer triggering Lortisse’s immune system. If it were, he’d be dead of cerebral inflammation faster than I could do anything, or at least irreparably damaged. But look…” She flagged up more areas, cross-referencing different scan angles. “It’s… past the blood-brain boundary. It’s between the hemispheres, in a kind of a clot.”

“Explain ‘between the hemispheres’.” Baltiel felt he knew, but at the same time the thought was appalling. “How can that be possible? I spoke with the man today.”

“And that’s the thing. Through some miracle this hasn’t actually damaged the functioning of his brain.”

“That’s a neat distinction,” Baltiel pointed out. “So what has it damaged?”

“I thought at first it had formed a ring around the corpus callosum that connects the left and right hemispheres, but there’s no corpus left. There’s just this, replacing it,” Lante said helplessly.

“Wasn’t this something people use to do once, as…” Baltiel dredged his memory, failed, then picked the information from the ship’s library, laying it out for Lante. Epilepsy treatment: sever the hemispheres of the brain. Effective, but leading to unusual circumstances where the two sides fell out of step, reacted to different stimulus, couldn’t talk to each other. The files were tagged with recent access by Lante; he wasn’t bringing up anything she hadn’t already been over.

“I’ve tested him,” she said. “The old-fashioned stuff: different information in each eye, get each hand to select answers. He hasn’t got the symptoms of a severance patient. There’s still communication going on, somehow, even though the neural machinery is gone. Somehow that stuff is filling in for what it’s consumed.” Lante looked pasty and unwell but, in his current state, Baltiel had no time for that.

“Prognosis?” he barked out.

“How can I possibly say?” she said. “This stuff could be active again tomorrow or next year or in a decade’s time, if this is just some part of its life cycle that’s interacting with human biology somehow. Which it can’t be. There’s nothing on this planet like a human, on so many levels. It can’t… parasitize us. Parasites are the most specialized of specialists!”

“So, prognosis,” Baltiel prompted.

She clenched her fists. “Most likely it’s just reacted to the hostile environment of Lortisse’s body. Perhaps in its regular host, or if it was without a host, this would persist until it encountered something more appealing, which in this case must mean never. And so Gav will be fine, he will be. But how can I know?”

She had modelled removal strategies, Baltiel saw. Most of them simulated at under twenty per cent chance of success. Above that, the probability of damaging Lortisse’s brain and irrevocably degrading who he was scaled in tandem with their ability to attack the infection. And that was assuming the stuff didn’t wake up and try to defend itself…

“He needs to be told. We need to understand the situation, all four of us.” Five, but Senkovi can catch up on the news when he’s done playing God to molluscs. And, at Lante’s trembling wince: “And like you say, most likely it’s just encysted there, harmless. We can hardly keep twenty-five per cent of our number in quarantine forever for something that’ll never happen, can we? But to be safe we should consider—” And in their shared virtual space he flagged up her removal simulations.

Lante’s expression was saggingly grateful.