Aurora (25 page)

The only solution was to hurry every project in Hvalsey, and be patient on the ship. Those in both places most aware of the logistical problems talked to the rest, reassured them, encouraged them; and hurried more.

Badim and Freya were among those counseling patience on the ship, although Freya also said she was on fire with the desire to descend. She watched Euan’s adventures on Aurora during most of her spare time, clutching Badim’s arm in the evenings before the screen and swaying a little, as if dizzy. She was in fact a little feverish compared to her normal temperature. She wanted down. But she spent her days doing what needed doing to keep Nova Scotia going, focusing on problems the way Devi would have, trying to deal with each problem in order of a priority of needs that ship helped her establish. She worked on the Gantt programs that Devi had left for her, stacking priorities like houses of cards. Risks averted, problems dodged, enough food grown to keep them all fed. It was never a simple calculation. But the Gantt programs were displayed on the screens in blocks of color, and she found she could manipulate the problems well enough to keep things going.

By working with this system, she saw that although they were losing volatiles in every launch of the ferries down to Aurora, now this problem could be solved by shipping compressed gases back from the moon up to the ship, and even water. What a relief to have relief at hand, after so many years of interstellar isolation! The resources of the Tau Ceti system were lovely to contemplate. Every meter of bamboo grown in Hvalsey was another plank in the floor they were now building under themselves.

This was the comfort Devi had never had.

One night as they watched the photos from Hvalsey on Badim’s screen, they discussed this aspect of their new situation, and Aram stood to recite one of their kitchen couplets:

On the morning of 170.144, A0.104, Euan came on Freya’s screen and asked her to get Badim to join their conversation. Freya called to Badim to come into the kitchen, and after seven minutes he blundered in, looking asleep on his feet, and sat next to her and slumped against her, looking curiously at the screen. “What?”

After a few seconds, it was clear he had appeared on Euan’s screen, and Euan nodded and said, “That woman we got out of the quicksand, Clarisse? She’s sick. She’s running a fever.”

Badim sat up straight. “Get her under the hood,” he said.

“We did.”

“She’s in the isolation clinic?”

“Yes.”

“How fast did you get her in there?”

“As soon as she mentioned that she felt bad.”

Badim’s mouth was pursed tight. How often Freya had seen this look. It was not Devi’s look, exactly; somewhat like it, but calmer, more sympathetic. It was as if he were imagining what he would do if he were in Euan’s place.

“Is she cooperating? Is she being monitored?”

“Yes.”

“Can you show me her readouts?”

“Yes, I’ve got them up here on my monitor. Have a look.”

Euan shoved his room camera sideways, and then Freya and
Badim were looking at the isolation clinic’s medical screen, with Clarisse’s vital signs bumping and trembling as they trolled left to right, with flickering red numbers arrayed below. Badim leaned closer to their screen and pushed his lips this way and that as he read.

He took a deep breath.

“How do you feel?” he asked Euan.

“Me? I feel fine.”

“You and the others who were out there with her should also isolate yourselves, I feel. Also anyone who tended to this woman when she got back into your shelter.”

“Because she cut her shin?”

“Because she cut her suit. Yes.” Badim’s lips were a tight knot. “I’m sorry. But it makes sense to take every precaution. Just in case.”

No reply from Euan. His camera stayed trained on the monitor.

“She’s got quite a fever,” Badim said quietly, as if to Freya. “Pulse fast and shallow, a little a-fib, T cell counts high in the bloodstream. Cerebellum working hard. Looks like she’s fighting something off.”

“But what?” Freya said, as if for Euan.

“I don’t know. Maybe something a little toxic, there in the mud. Some accumulation of some metal or chemical. We’ll have to analyze for that.”

“Or maybe there’s some bug going around in Hvalsey that she caught,” Freya said. There were, of course, many viruses and bacteria in the ship, and therefore in Hvalsey too.

“Yes, maybe so.”

“Or maybe she’s gone into shock,” Euan said from off his screen.

“It’s slow for a shock reaction to that cut,” Badim said. “But you’re right, we should look at that. You should look at all that, but keeping her in iso. Do it by extensions. And really, the rest of you who came in contact with her should get into iso as well. Just to be safe.”

Again no reply from Euan.

Well, it was rubbish news, no doubt of that. Anyone would be
disturbed. But for Euan, taking such obvious delight in his excursions on the surface, arguing vehemently for the opening of their helmets and the breathing of the open air of Aurora, it hit particularly hard. One could feel it in his silence.

When their call ended, Badim stood and shuddered, then just stood there for a long time, his head down.

“Better call Aram,” he said at last. “And Jochi. He should probably be in iso too. The problem is, they all should be isolated from all the rest, and they can’t do that.”

As it turned out, Jochi had been out in one of the expedition cars when the news of Clarisse’s fever came, and when he heard the news, he stayed in the car, locked inside. He acknowledged to the others in Hvalsey he was there, but refused to discuss his situation any further. There was air, water, food, and battery power to keep him out there for three weeks. People in Hvalsey spoke angrily to him, but he didn’t reply. The people up in the ship didn’t know what to say. Badim just shook his head when Freya asked him what he thought.

“He might be right,” Badim said. “I wish there was a car for everyone. But there isn’t. And no one person can stay isolated for long, there or anywhere.”

It was the middle of the night on 170.153, A0.113, and Freya was sleeping restlessly, when her screen spoke to her, quietly at first, so that Freya first muttered things, in what sounded like a dream conversation with her mother; but as the voice from the screen repeated “Freya… Freya… Freya,” in a way that Devi never would have, she finally woke, groggily.

It was Euan, in Hvalsey. “Euan?” Freya said. “What is it?”

“Clarisse died,” he said.

He didn’t have his camera on, or was sitting in the dark; it was just his voice, the screen was dark.

“Oh no!”

“Yes. Last night.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know. Looks like she had some kind of anaphylactic shock. As if she ran into something she was allergic to.”

“But what is there to be allergic to?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. She had asthma, but that was controlled. They gave her epinephrine four times, but her blood pressure dropped, her throat seems to have closed up on her, the ventral part of her heart went arrhythmic. The scans are showing empty heart…”

Long pause.

“She was still in isolation?”

“Yes. But of course she wasn’t when we brought her back in.”

“But you were all in your suits.”

“I know. But we took them off inside. We all helped her.”

He didn’t say more, and Freya didn’t speak either. They were in trouble down there, if what had happened to Clarisse had been caused by her accident. They wouldn’t be able to go out on the surface until they understood what it was. And if they determined that some local life-form had infected and killed her, they wouldn’t be able to go out ever again without massive precautions.

Nor would they be able to associate with each other freely, until it was demonstrated that whatever had killed her wasn’t contagious.

Nor could they come back up to the ship and risk infecting it.

So now they were confined to a biome much smaller than any on the ship, and maybe an infected one at that. Maybe a poisoned building, in which everything alive in it was already doomed.

All these possibilities were no doubt occurring to Freya, as they must have already to Euan. Thus the long silence.

Finally she said, “Is there anything I can do?”

“No. Just… be there.”

“I’m here. I’m sorry.”

“Me too. It was… It was beautiful down here. We were… I was having fun.”

“I know.”

She woke Badim and told him, then lay down on the couch in their living room, while Badim sat at their kitchen table making calls.

In between his calls she said to him, “I miss Devi. If she were alive, none of this would have happened. She would have insisted that we test the surface of the planet completely before anyone landed.”

“Hard to do by robot,” Badim remarked absently.

“I know. Years would have passed, everyone would have been furious with her. She would have been furious with them. But this wouldn’t have happened.”

Badim shrugged.

Later Euan called them again.

“I’m going out again,” he said.

“What!” Freya cried. “Euan, no!”

“Yes. Look. We all have to go sometime. So, maybe we’ve been fatally poisoned, maybe not. We’ll know soon enough. In the meantime, as long as your suit integrity is good, there isn’t any difference between staying in the compound or going outside. So I’m going to damn the torpedoes and go. I don’t see why not. Either way it’ll be okay. I mean, either I’m already infected, and I might as well spend my last days having fun, or I’m not, and I won’t be, as long as I don’t cut my suit open. Silly woman, I wish she hadn’t gone off the path, that was obviously quicksand she went off into, I don’t know what she could have been thinking, what she was going after. A blink on the water, she said. But really? Well, we’ll never know now. And it doesn’t matter. I’ll stay on hard ground. Maybe I’ll stay out of the estuary and up on the sea cliffs, that’s the best views anyway. Go out and see the dawn. No one here
will stop me. We’re all sequestered anyway. Everyone’s locked in a room somewhere. No one could stop me without endangering themselves, right? And no one wants to anyway. So I’m going out to see the dawn. I’ll call you back in a little while.”