She’d taken a course on non-terrestrial fieldwork because her advisor had pointed out how many more postings there were for newly graduated medical geneticists on Mars and the stations on Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons than there were on Earth. Elvi had taken the hint.
Lectures had been held in a small room with yellow, water-stained carpet and a wall screen with a burned-out pixel that made it look like there was a fly on it. Professor Li was three years into his retirement, and only came back to teach the class because he liked it. Maybe his enthusiasm had been infectious, or maybe it had all been the universe’s way of putting her in the right place at the right time. Whatever the reason—or lack of reason—Professor Li had done a section about the first explorations for extraterrestrial life in the oceans of Europa, and Elvi’s brain had lit up like someone had put euphorics in her breakfast cereal.
To the dismay of her mother and her academic advisor, she changed her focus to the then-purely-hypothetical field of exobiology. Her advisor’s exact words had been From a work perspective, you’d be better off learning to tune pianos.
And that had been true right up until Eros moved. After, everybody in her program had jobs for life.
She was older now than Professor Li had been when he told her about Europa and those first tentative efforts to show that Earth’s tree of life wasn’t alone in the universe. She’d seen things she hadn’t dreamed of, been places she hadn’t known existed when she was a girl, and found herself—thanks to chance and James fucking Holden—at the razor’s edge of the most important research projects in human history.
Strange then, how it all cycled back to Professor Li’s lecture about Europa. Cold dead Europa, which had turned out to never have had any life in it but opened up the universe to her anyway.
Elvi steadied herself with a handhold. She’d been on the float enough that it came almost naturally now. She still missed being able to pace. “Okay. How much do you know about the slow life model?”
“I am now aware that there is something called a slow life model.”
“Right. Basics. Okay. So, there’s a range of metabolic rates. You can see that in animals. You have something fast with a high reproduction rate like rats or chickens on one hand, and tortoises with a really long lifespan and a much slower metabolism on the other. The whole tree of life is on that spectrum. It predicts that you’d see things evolving in very low-energy environments that, y’know, needed very little energy. Low metabolisms, low reproduction. Long lifespan. Slow life.”
“Space turtles.”
“Ice turtles. Actually, very cold saltwater slugs. Or jellyfish. Probably something pretty near neutral buoyancy. That’s not the point. You could in theory have something evolve in an environment with very little available energy, and with a very… let’s call it ‘leisurely’ sense of time. It’s what the Tereshkova missions were looking for.”
“And that’s awesome,” Fayez said, blankly.
“Tereshkova One and Two were the first long-term crewed surveys of Europa? They were looking for extraterrestrial life.”
“Which they didn’t find.”
“Some amino acid precursors, but no life.”
“So the space turtles weren’t from Europa.”
A brief flash of annoyance rose in her and faded. They were both tired. They were both in the only ship in an unpopulated solar system with help weeks away at best. And she wasn’t explaining herself that well. She swallowed, set her shoulders, and went on.
“They weren’t. But maybe they were like what we were looking for. And here’s the other thing. The other form of life the Tereshkova missions were looking for was deep vent organisms.”
“Those I know. Worms and things that live near volcanic vents. They use the energy from the vent instead of sunlight.”
“And they also get a bunch of biologically interesting minerals, but yes.”
“Start talking vulcanism, and I know my way around,” Fayez said.
“That’s what Cara’s describing. That biome. Look. She talks about the cold above and the heat below. Like the ice shell of a water moon with a hot core. And free water in between. The part where she says she felt it starting to make more of itself. That’s… I don’t know. Some kind of reproduction. Mitosis or budding.”
“And the thing where she tasted stones,” Fayez said. “Minerals and nutrients floating up from below. You’re thinking they’re both there. These slow life turtles—”
“Jellyfish.”
“—and vent organisms too, but lower down.”
“Like what we were looking for on Europa.”
The line on his forehead erased itself. She wanted to keep going, but she knew her husband’s rhythms. He was working something through, and if she talked now, he wouldn’t hear her. The hum of the ship around them and the ticking of the air recycler were the only sounds until he laughed once, like a cough.
“Okay, I know what I was thinking of,” he said. “The part about the thing in the water.”
“The handhold?”
“Yeah, that. It happened after the… fuck… tasting stone? Seriously, I feel like we should have brought a poetry grad student along. This is bullshit as data.”
“You were thinking of something?”
“Right, sorry. If that was some kind of impressionistic, experiential description of iron uptake leading to magnetic navigation. Maybe that’s the handhold in the water?”
“And that thing at the end,” Elvi said. “When something went down into the heat and came back up scarred, but with this… revelatory whatever it was? If that’s the slow life intentionally reaching for a nutrient-rich environment for the first time. Seeking out food instead of just bumping into it. I think Cara is experiencing this organism’s evolutionary history. The diamond—”
“Thank you for not calling it an emerald.”
“—is showing her how they came to exist. Like if we were explaining life to something that had never seen anything like us by pushing down to organic chemistry and building the story up from there so that we’d have a common context.”
Fayez went quiet. The line on his forehead came back. Elvi pushed off the wall, turning to take the edge of her desk in her fingers and pull herself to a stop. He saw her expression and shook his head.
“No, it makes sense. Sort of. I see why that would be the best information-sharing strategy and all that. It’s just. Okay, say the protomolecule engineers have gotten us up to the part of their story where they were like hamsters avoiding the dinosaurs. I don’t mean to be an asshole, but… so what?”
Elvi didn’t know exactly what she’d been expecting him to say, but it hadn’t been that. “So we know something about what they are. This could be the origin of the species that established a vast galactic presence and overcame a bunch of things we always thought were laws of physics? That’s a big deal.”
“It is. I hear you. But it’s so far back, sweetie. If Cara could ask the diamond maybe the top five ways to keep vast monsters from beyond time and space from killing everyone, that might be a better place to start.”
“Only if she can understand the answer.”
“And if they knew. Which evidence suggests they didn’t. I mean that elaborate gamma-ray burst trap in Tecoma system was just them wiring a shotgun to a doorknob. Even if we know everything about the space jellyfish, is that going to be enough?”
They fell silent. Elvi knew the solid feeling at the center of her gut. It was always there these days. The only thing that changed was how aware of it she was. She anticipated what he would say next—What are we doing here?—and her own reply—The best we can. But he surprised her.