“What model are you using?” Holden asked.
“The original inspirations for the work were corpses that the repair drones got hold of. Not really immortality at all, but the new organisms had some improvements. That’s where the breakthrough comes. That’s what we should really be focusing on, sacrifice or no. Healthy subject with a well-recorded baseline instead of this …”—his voice rang with contempt—“this fieldwork. How to achieve a more robust homeostasis. Just because it’s difficult to do doesn’t make the principal science unsolvable.”
“So not unnatural at all,” Holden said, tipping a little more wine from the bottle into the doctor’s glass.
“Meaningless term,” Cortázar said. “Humans arose inside nature. We’re natural. Everything we do is natural. The whole idea that we are different in category is either sentimental or religious. Irrelevant from a scientific perspective.”
“So if we get to a place that we can all live forever, that’s not unnatural?” Holden sounded genuinely curious.
Cortázar leaned in toward the prisoner, gesturing with his left hand while he swirled his glass in his right. “The only limits on us are what we can do. It’s perfectly natural to seek personal benefit. It’s perfectly natural to give advantages to your own offspring and withhold them from others. It’s perfectly natural to kill your enemies. That’s not even outlier behavior. That’s all in the middle of the bell curve all the time.”
Teresa rested her head in her hands. She was pretty sure Cortázar was drunk. She’d never been herself, but she’d seen some adults at state functions get the same vague focus and sense of being a little off their own points.
“You’re right, though,” Cortázar said, “You’re exactly right. The foundation needs to be broad. That’s true.”
“Immortality is a high-stakes game,” Holden said, like he was agreeing.
“Yes. Plumbing the depths of the protomolecule and all the artifacts it opens up is the work of a hundred lifetimes. Making the researchers die and be replaced by other people with a less advanced understanding is clearly—clearly—a bad idea. But that’s policy. This is the way forward. So this is the way forward.”
“Because Duarte made it policy,” Holden said.
“Because we’re primates who hold valuable things for our own bloodlines at the expense of everyone else,” Cortázar said. “Only one person can ever be immortal. That was what he said. But then he changed the rules. She can be too because he’s found a justification for her. That she’s really just an extension of him. I’m not mad about that. That’s just the organism we are. I’m not mad. But it doesn’t matter.”
“That’s good,” Holden said.
“The important thing is that we get good data. One person. Lots of people. All the same. But bad experimental design? That’s what sin really is,” Cortázar slurred. “That’s not me either. Nature eats babies all the time.”
Holden shifted, looking directly up into the surveillance camera as if he knew exactly where the hidden lens was. As if he knew she would be watching. You should keep an eye on me. Teresa felt a crawling sensation coming up her neck and the feeling, even after he looked away, that he saw her as clearly as she saw him.
She shut down the feed, closed the logs, and went back to bed, but she still didn’t sleep.
Chapter Fifteen: Naomi
Getting what you want fucks you up. Naomi pushed the thought aside as she had a dozen times before.
The first part of breaking down her shelter was the easiest. She’d spent years on the float, sometimes running cargo herself, sometimes fighting smugglers for the OPA and the Transport Union. She knew all the tricks. Disassembling her crash couch and system into parts was the work of two hours. Everything she had was modular. Easy to take apart, easy to put into rotation as spare. Everything she’d had could dissolve back into the larger ship and not appear as anything more than a handful of off-by-one inventory miscounts.
The empty container was a little harder, but only a little. According to the manifest, her container was supposed to be filled with the same payload of Earth-farmed bacteria and microbes and starter soil as seventy other containers in the ship. Shifting the contents of just a dozen or so to a slightly less dense configuration left plenty of overage to fill the space that had been hers. By the time the supplies reached their destination, she’d be elsewhere. And even if Laconia backtracked the discrepancies, there wouldn’t be much to suggest anything more than run-of-the-mill theft.
The real problem was time. Well, the first real problem.
The Laconian ship was already on a braking burn. Eighteen hours to rendezvous didn’t leave her much time for everything she had to do. Emma was a help. The woman had more years working transport than Naomi did, and she could drive a loading mech like it was part of her body. Even so, they were cutting it close. And every hour of the mechs hissing and clacking, the smell of industrial lubricant, and the bone-deep ache of effort was another chance for the regular crew to notice that something strange was happening. Toward the end, Naomi sent Emma away to see whether there was any information about the larger picture. If other ships were being stopped. If this was a coincidence, or if the destroyer knew that Naomi was there.
Until she knew, she had to assume there was hope. Another motto for her life these days.
Naomi moved the last pallets into the steel and ceramic that had been her home for months, closed the doors, sealed them, and slapped a customs inspection sticker over the seam. She still had to stow the loader mech and replace the stickers on all the containers she’d cracked, but that wouldn’t take more than another few minutes. She had almost half a shift before the inspection. A little over four hours to reinvent herself and blend in with the ship’s crew. That was the second real problem …
Getting what you want fucks you up.
They’d been in a bar on Pallas-Tycho not long after the two stations had become a single object. Clarissa had been in relatively good health then. Strong enough she could go drinking, anyway. Naomi didn’t remember which bar they’d been in, except that it had gravity, so it had to have been in Tycho’s old habitation ring. She did remember that Jim had been there. They’d been talking about how to address Alex’s upcoming change in marital status. Whether he’d be bringing his new wife on the ship or taking a leave of absence to be with her or what. Every option had advantages, every one had drawbacks. Looking back, Naomi thought that on some level all of them knew that the relationship was doomed. Clarissa had leaned back in her chair, a glass of whiskey in her hand. Her voice was thoughtful. “Getting what you want fucks you up,” she’d said.
“When I was in jail, there was nothing I wanted more than to be anywhere else. Then I got out.”
“Into an apocalyptic hellscape,” Naomi said.
“But even after that. When we got up to Luna and when we got on the Roci. It was hard. I knew what I was when I was in prison. It took me years to figure out who I was outside.”
“We’re talking about marriage, aren’t we?”
“Getting what you want fucks you up,” Clarissa had said.
Naomi put her hand on the transport container. She’d put herself in prison in order to be safe, and her safety had turned her captive. All she wanted was to wake up next to Jim again. To have something like a pleasant, day-to-day life with him. And now that she couldn’t have it, all she wanted was her hermitage back.