Danner acknowledged that she was hoarding resources; she was laying a communications network as widely as she could, despite conditions. She had told Marghe, bluntly, that a SEC rep could be useful for long‑term relations with the natives. Mirrors were making their own clothes and decorating their mods, like colonists. The Mirrors did not expect to leave Jeep.
Chapter Three
MARGHE WOKE FROM a nightmare of drifting off the ground, spinning away from a planet with a gravity low enough to allow the muscle jerk of a sneeze to provide escape velocity.
The wind had died to a whisper and the night was quiet and inky soft. Dry ting grass scratched against the spun fibers of Marghe’s nightbag as she wriggled onto her back. The cloud cover was thin and veil‑like, allowing tantalizing glimpses of the moons and what might be stars, or satellites.
She closed her eyes. Meet Jeep, she told her senses, a new planet. One by one she sorted out the Earth smells: the grass‑stained rubber of their shoes; the hot rotor and ozone of the sled; the thin perfume of shampoo and insect repellant; the dyes of their clothes; the metal and plastic of coiled cable. She tuned them out. The rest, the mineral‑rich water vapor in the clouds, the hollow, juiceless ting grass, the sharp chalky soil under her back, was Jeep. Jeep, with its animal musk and light spice. She listened to the wind, and to the faint burrowings of unknown insects tunneling around the roots and bulbs and pods of next spring’s flowers: to the breath and heartbeat of another world.
She opened her eyes again. The cloud cover over the moons had deepened, but even so their light was of a visibly different spectrum. Away from the Earth‑normal artificial illumination of Port Central, her eyes would adjust in a few days. Without looking at her wristcom, she tried to judge how many hours there were until dawn. The twenty‑five‑and‑a‑half‑hour diurnal cycle was just abnormal enough to be confusing. This latitude and time of year meant only eight or nine hours of full daylight; like dusk, dawn would be a lengthy affair. At least the year was shorter; winter would not last as long.
She listened to the steady breathing of the cable technician, Ude Neuyen, to the double breath of Sergeant Lu Wai and Letitia Dogias, the communications engineer, and wondered how it had been for the first colonists: listening to the breath of someone close by, waiting for the onset of the cough that meant a lover or child was going to die. How had it been–how was it–living on a world without men? From test results, she knew that the first colonists had been adept bioengineers: genetic material from Earth flora and fauna was present in indigenous species, and vice versa. The colonists had created viable crops and livestock. How long had it taken them to find the answer to their own reproductive puzzle?
From the other side of the sled, Lu Wai or Letitia sneezed and Marghe jumped, then jumped again as a pale seed drift floated by. Here, any movement in the corner of her eye flooded her with adrenaline and slicked her hands with sweat; she could not name or recognize a thousandth of the plants or animals. Or insects. She scratched the bites around her ankles, cursing under her breath as a scab came off and leaked blood. At least the insects she had encountered so far were not dangerous. As far as anybody knew.
She pushed her nightbag down around her waist to let the light breeze dry her sweat and watched the clouds scudding overhead. Gradually her heartbeat slowed, and her breathing. She slept.
She woke at dawn to a spiderweb, prismatic with dew, hanging across a clump of ting grass a handspan from her face. It was large, more than three feet across, and the strands were too thick for a spider’s web: like fine, peach‑tinted glass tubes. She sat up slowly, looking for the spider.
A mustardfly, whining over the tips of the ting grass, came too close. The web rippled slightly, and a strand touched the fly’s triple wing. The fly struggled, and wherever it touched, it stuck. Then it stopped fighting and seemed to collapse in on itself. Marghe squinted in the cool light: the fly was dissolving, shriveling. The strand against which it was caught darkened and swelled. Within four minutes, the fly was subsumed: nothing but a glutinous lump.
The web convulsed, splitting the dark patch into hundreds of peach‑colored corpuscles that pulsed in different directions down the hollow strands.
Digestion. The strands were both the spider and the web.
Cautiously, Marghe touched one of the outer strands with a fingertip. It stung. Some kind of acid, or alkali. She wiped her finger on the wet grass and wondered what would have happened to her face if she had rolled over into it while asleep. She went to wake the others.
The morning was heavy and still and the sled hummed over a carpet of ivory olla flowers. The wind of their passage churned up a perfumed haze of golden green pollen; they all wore scarves wrapped around their noses and mouths. Marghe sat in the flatbed playing chess with Lu Wai on the Mirror’s traveling board. Ude was at the stick and Letitia scanned the horizon for the cloud of kris flies that the pollen made inevitable. Marghe found herself looking, too.
“Your move.”
Marghe studied the board, thinking about kris flies. Their stings were unpleasant, and some people were allergic. She moved one of her pawns. Lu Wai made a small sound of satisfaction and reached out for her rook; she nearly dropped it when Marghe’s wristcom beeped a reminder.
Marghe took out the vial of FN‑17 from her thigh pocket, popped the cap, and swallowed one.
“Can I take a look?”
Maighe hesitated, then handed them over. Lu Wai tipped one out onto her palm. “Such little things,” she murmured through the scarf. She rolled it back into the vial, closed it, handed it back. She watched Marghe slide it into her pocket and double‑check the pocket seal. “I’m glad to see you’re being careful. Just make sure you’re at Port Central when that stuff runs out.”
“You think it would make that much difference?”
“With a one in five chance of not surviving, you need any edge you can get.” She tapped the medic flashes on her shoulder. “Someone like me can make a difference. Your move.”
Marghe moved her bishop.
Lu Wai sighed. “You’re not concentrating. Check.”
Marghe pushed the board aside. “Tell me about the virus.”
“You’re resigning?”
“I’m resigning.” She felt restless and it was hard to breathe. Her head itched. She pulled her scarf off, let it hang loose around her neck. “Tell me about the virus.” She wanted to know how the Mirror felt when she tried to heal people and they died; she wanted to know how it was to get sick and not know whether or not you were going to die. She needed to know what to expect.
Instead of switching off the board’s field and pushing the pieces flat to close it up, Lu Wai pulled each piece free one by one and laid them down carefully in some pattern Marghe could not follow. “The virus has a long incubation period, very long,” the Mirror said, intent on the little pawns and castles, “so we’d all been down here a while and settled in before anyone got sick. The first one I saw was called Sevin. He was a plastics engineer. Started coughing one day out by the perimeter, and didn’t stop. I gave him, tried to give him, emergency CPR, but he died. Took just six hours. His death was the easiest I heard of.” She examined the pieces critically, closed the box, ran her finger along the seal, and slipped it into a belt pouch. She untied her scarf, began to fold it into smaller and smaller triangles. “The next one I dealt with was a woman, named Margaret. She liked to cook, she told me. I remember that because I hate to cook. That’s all I could think of, how I hate to cook, while she coughed and her eyes swelled up and she screamed with a headache not even mycain would help. She survived, though.” She tried to smile. “Made me a thank‑you dinner.