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.