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.”
Jochi called Aram one morning and said flatly, “I think I may have found the pathogen. It’s small. It looks a little like a prion, maybe. Like a strangely folded protein, maybe, but only in its shape. It’s much smaller than our proteins. And it reproduces faster than prions. In some ways it’s like the viris that live inside viruses, or the v’s, but smaller. Some seem to be nested in each other. The smallest is ten nanometers long, the largest fifty nanometers. I’m sending up the electron microscope images. Hard to say if they’re alive. Maybe some interim step toward life, with some of the functions of life, but not all. Anyway, in a good matrix they appear to reproduce. Which I guess means they’re a life-form. And we appear to be a good matrix.”
“Why us?” Aram asked. He had linked Badim into the call, given its significance. “We’re alien to the place, after all.”
“We’re made of organic molecules. Maybe it’s just that. Or we’re warm. Just a good growth medium, that’s all. And our blood circulation moves it around in us.”
“So they’re in that clay from the estuary?”
“Yes. That’s the highest concentration. But now that I’ve found them, I’ve seen a few almost everywhere. In the river water. In seawater. In the wind.”
“They must need more than water.”
“Yes. Sure. Maybe salts, maybe organics. But we’re salty, and organic. And so is the water down here. And the wind rips the salts right into the air.”
The wind whistled down the cleft. Higher up the cleft narrowed, and the walls to each side steepened, looked impassable. Rather than climb up there and investigate, Euan walked right through the beach stream, splashing fearlessly, though at its middle it was knee deep. His fever was quite high at this point. The numbers from his suit were there at the bottom of his screen, glowing red.
Freya hunched over, arms across her stomach, in a position she had often taken when Devi had been ill. She got up and went to their kitchen and got some crackers to eat. She chomped on the crackers, drank a glass of water. She inspected the water in her glass, swallowed some more of it, returned to her chair and the screen.
Euan continued south and came to a broader part of the beach, with some wind-sculpted dunes sheltered under the cliff. He scrambled to the top of the tallest dune. Tau Ceti was a blaze too bright to look at, pouring its light over the top of the cliff and onto the ocean. Euan sat down.
“Nice,” he said.
The wind was still at his back. As one looked down at the waves, it was clear that the wind held them up for a time as they tried to break; they swept in toward the land, then reared up and hung there with a vertical face as they moved onshore, trying to fall but getting held up by the wind; then finally the steepest section would pitch down in a roiling burst of white spray, some of which whiteness launched upward and was caught on the wind and hurled back over the wall of white water. Quick fat ehukai crossed these tails of spray.
“I’m feeling hot,” Euan said. He walked off the edge of the dune and glissaded down the sand facing the sea.
Freya clutched her stomach under both forearms, put her mouth down on the back of one fist.
Euan looked out at the waves for a long time. The dark gray strand between beach pool and ocean was crosshatched with black sand streaks, far to each side of the shallow runnel of water pouring down into the breakers.