‘So what’s it doing to him?’ Baltiel asked her. ‘It’s . . . infecting him?’
‘It can’t,’ Lante insisted. ‘It can’t possibly. Because there’s nothing in Lortisse’s body that it can have evolved to use. His proteins, his structures and organs, it’s as alien to this stuff as Nod is to us. But what it can do is trigger a massive reaction across his whole system, because his immune system is in overdrive. I’m not able to do anything about the stuff in him. I’ve just spent hours stopping Lortisse killing himself through self-induced anaphylactic shock, basically, and the fight’s not over. This stuff is travelling around his system, and not just where his circulation takes it, either. I think it’s trying to do whatever it normally does in a new host, and obviously it can’t get that done, but it spreads and moves about and . . . and changes its external structures I think, so that Lortisse keeps reacting to it again. It is taking everything we have just to keep his body temperature from cooking him, his tissues from swelling until they burst and – oh God, his pulmonary tract – I’ve rebuilt that from scratch twice now, because he’s swelling up like . . .’ And Lante broke off and just stared at Baltiel for a moment, a great weight of weariness skating by her, doubtless greased on its way by the same drugs he knew Senkovi was even then playing with. ‘Anyway, I’ll record a full report, but it’s there, all we have.’
‘Prognosis?’
‘Fuck knows,’ Lante said frankly. ‘I think the invasive material is suffering attrition from Lortisse’s immune reaction, so at least he’s not only killing himself. Best result: he whittles it down, he calms down, he comes back to us. Cerebral records suggest no brain damage yet at least. That may change.’ She kept that level, haggard stare on him. ‘This changes everything, Yusuf.’
‘It’s a setback.’
‘This planet has attacked us,’ she pointed out. ‘And yes, I’m not imbuing this act with some malign intent, but it’s happened. We’ve taken this place for granted – its primitive-looking creatures, its simple-seeming ecosystems. And we didn’t know half of what we needed to.’
‘Perhaps we would if you’d followed up on researching this stuff when you first found it,’ Baltiel told her before he could stop himself.
Lante blinked, taking that in remarkably placidly, though perhaps that was just the comedown from the drugs. ‘I am going to sleep now. Rani is in medical and she can hold the fort if things kick off before you can get me back up. I will then record a full report.’ She stood, swaying slightly. ‘And if that is where your vaunted leadership takes you in times of stress, Yusuf, then you had better think about what the point of you is.’
In her absence, after she had left, Yusuf considered that she was right, but found no acceptable way to take the words back. At around that point Senkovi finally responded to one of his many messages, so at least he had someone to be justifiably angry at other than himself.
3.
We
Have discovered
Such hostile environments, and yet
So complex and elaborate and strange, unlike
Anything we have explored before. Geometries of the universe expressed in these branching turns and interlocking engines. What a world is this we have stumbled across.
What a world, and yet it seeks to kill us. It burns, it boils, it chokes, it traps. We change and change to find a structure and a shape that will endure this realm.
We
Travel always ahead of the violent weather of this place, the structures that are and are not life. We fight to survive and simultaneously to understand where we have found ourselves. The world we left is rendered down to atomics written within us, knowledge These-of-We no longer need to know. A new universe requires new laws.
We
Divide and divide, expeditions sent into the far reaches of the infinite to feel out its edges. We die in a thousand ways but always there is a survivor, laden with knowledge written within One-of-We so that The-Rest-of-We might learn and grow. We war with this complex, obstructed cosmos. Its war is to destroy us, render down our structure into some smooth slag that it can whirl away to destruction. Our war is to understand for with understanding comes mastery.
And at last These-of-We, the survivors, the explorers, find a calm eye within the storm. Others-of-We have followed other paths and they are gone now, just their final records dispatched through the rushing rivers of this immensity to come to us, inscribed with the warnings of the dead: do not go here, it is too hot to retain cohesion; do not go here, it will bury you.
But These-of-We, these survivors, have followed the lightning of this place, the rush of its iron-heavy fluids, as far as we can go. Have we found the source? Is that the task the universe has set for Such-of-We as were bold enough to cross into this realm?
We
Have found the source of the lightning, and in the pulse and shock of that great hub of energy and fire These-of-We have discovered something that makes all the complexities of this new realm into old, dull ideas.
We
Sit.
We
Sense.
Slowly, over a thousand generations, These-of-We write our histories within us and grow to understand.
4.
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.