Fayez drained the bulb of the last drop of whiskey and put his hand out for another. Lee had it ready.
For half an hour, ud-Din made what in the end was a surprisingly comprehensible case that Elvi’s slow-life jellyfish had ended their evolutionary arc as a complex, vastly distributed brain-like structure that relied on the counterintuitive truth that time dilation put photons in a state of instantaneous emission from a distant star and absorption by an observing eye even if they seemed to outside observers like Fayez to travel for years in between. The rate-limiting step on a system like that would always be mass, and so technologies for moving mass—inertia manipulation, “shortcut” ring gates—would be prioritized, which evidence suggested they had been.
By the end of the presentation, Fayez felt almost as excited as ud-Din seemed to be, and he hadn’t even finished his second whiskey.
“You see, I hope,” ud-Din said, “why I am so hopeful for this path of research. Which is why I need to ask your help. The new orders from the Science Directorate putting us at the beck and call of Colonel Tanaka… I don’t dispute that the high consul has the absolute right to direct our efforts as needed, but you have his ear. If you could encourage him to refrain from interrupting our research unless it is critical to the empire. I… I only say it because I feel we are on the verge of a breakthrough, and I would hate for the high consul to make his decisions about our workgroup without a full understanding of our situation. Thank you. Thank you for your time.”
Ud-Din licked his lips anxiously and the message ended. How charming to pretend there’s still a high consul running this bumblefuck, Fayez thought, but didn’t say aloud. Some things were too dangerous, even for a kingmaker.
“I have half a dozen like this,” Lee said. “Workgroup and research leads who got the message to do whatever Tanaka asks. Several of them, she has already retasked.”
“They know we can’t do shit about it, right? Because we literally can’t do shit about that. You got the brief about what Tanaka’s doing?”
“I did,” Lee said, and then pointedly didn’t expand on it. “We have a great many absolute top priorities. We can’t do them all.”
“I get that,” Fayez said. “But Elvi’s not the one setting them. She’s been very open about letting expertise place the goalposts.”
“But she is the adoréd saint to Duarte’s Holy Ghost,” Lee said. “People want her to intercede for them.”
“And so they ask you to ask me to ask her,” Fayez said. “No, one more. So that she’ll ask him. Or, functionally, Trejo.”
“Yes.”
“The way we do things, it’s amazing humans ever figured out shoes. I’ll talk to her, but you know how she is right now.”
“I do. Thank you, Dr. Sarkis.”
“Keep plying me with drink, and you’ll wind up turning my head, Dr. Lee.”
Lee’s thin smile was as close to emotional intimacy as the man got. Fayez liked him.
The halls of the Falcon hummed and glowed. He navigated his way through them from handhold to Laconian-blue handhold. Some of the younger members of the crew launched themselves like Belters, zipping from intersection to intersection without touching a wall in between. He wasn’t that guy. Getting where he was going with all his cartilage intact had become a more interesting prospect in the last couple decades.
The thing about expertise was that it wasn’t actually transferable. Winston Duarte had cut his teeth in the MCRN’s logistics department, where he had apparently been an underappreciated genius. It was easy to see how his brilliance there had helped build his breakaway empire. He’d pulled it off, and by grabbing up samples of the protomolecule and the experts who could use it, he’d tamed enough of the alien technology to put all humanity under his heel. For a while, anyway.
Being good at something—even the best that humanity’s billions could offer—didn’t make him good at everything. It just made him too powerful to say no to. And so when he decided to make himself into an immortal god-king, not for his own benefit, but to selflessly provide the human race with the continuing stable leadership that it needed in order to storm heaven and kill God, he’d already talked himself and everyone around him into thinking he was as impressive as the story about him claimed.
Only a few people officially knew how badly that plan had gone. Elvi was one. Fayez was another.
He heard Elvi and Cara talking as soon as he came into the corridor for her lab. The door to Elvi’s office was open, and Cara was floating in the open space between the workbench and the medical scanners. The young woman’s—girl’s—face was bright with excitement, and she gestured as she spoke, as if she needed to stuff more meaning into the words than mere syllables could hold. Elvi was strapped into her crash couch, taking notes as they spoke. Except for the part where they didn’t look even vaguely genetically related, they reminded Fayez of a grandmother and granddaughter bonding through solving some great puzzle. Even before he could make out what they were saying, the tones of their voices told the story. Giddy and enthusiastic was the good spin. Fevered and manic also fit.
“Then there was this sense of… of light?” Cara said. “Like we were eating eyes and it made me able to see.”
“That actually fits,” Elvi said.
“It does?” Fayez said. “What does it fit into? Because I just learned a lot about light, and it was really weird.”
Elvi’s smile wasn’t annoyed at all, and Cara’s was only a little. “I think our sea slugs hit a milestone,” Elvi said. “They already had a method of exchanging information through direct physical transfer, like bacteria trading plasmids. If we’re getting this right, they formed a mutualistic relationship or successful parasitism with a little goo cap that could go down to the volcanic vents and come back up.”
“Ooh. Dirty,” Fayez said, pulling himself fully into the room. With all three of them, it was a little tighter than comfort, but Cara grabbed the wall and made space for him. “How did the eyeballs come into it?”
“They harvested evolutionary innovations from the faster ecosystem. Something down by the vent figured out a rudimentary infrared eye so that it could navigate the vent. The slugs got it, put it on the signaling protein mechanism, and all of a sudden they didn’t need to stick plasmids into each other to share information anymore. They could do infrared semaphore.”
“No, it was light,” Cara said.
“Maybe bioluminescence,” Elvi agreed. “At that point, the very slow things started being able to talk very very fast. And they start looking a lot less like jellyfish and a lot more like free-floating neurons. Plus we already see the deep strategy of sending out semi-biological runners to inhospitable biomes and implanting instruction sets into whatever life they find there. Which—I’m stretching here—starts sounding a lot like the protomolecule’s mission on Phoebe…” Her voice trailed off. Her smile shifted to something more rueful. “But that’s not what you came to talk about, is it?”
“There’s a briefing you should totally listen to, but no,” Fayez said. “I needed to talk about something else.”
“Cara? Could we take a quick break?”
The black eyes were still for a fraction of a second, then flickered up to Fayez and away. “Sure. No problem.”
Cara pushed herself to the doorway and out into the corridor, closing the office door behind her as she went. Fayez drifted to the medical scanners. Cara’s readouts were still on the screens. He traced the curve of her stress metabolites. He wouldn’t have known what they were, except Elvi had explained them.
“They’re not as high as they look,” she said, a little defensively. “We don’t even really know what the upper boundary is for someone who’s been modified like her.”