Elvi took her hand back and pressed her fingers into her eyes, rubbing from the center out to the sides. There was grit in her eyelashes. Tears that had dried there.
“I’ll talk to Cara,” Elvi said. “I’ll see if she’s up for it.”
“Talk to Xan too. He’s the one locked in the catalyst’s chamber for a zillion hours. And he doesn’t talk about it, but it’s freaking him out.”
We’re all fucking freaked out snapped to the front of Elvi’s mind, but she didn’t say it.
When Fayez spoke again, the careful cheerfulness was gone. He sounded worn and broken. He sounded more like she felt. He sounded real. “I’m not telling you what to do. It’s just…”
“Say it.”
“Cortázar kept them in a cage for decades. He ran tests on them with no concern for them.”
“I have Cara’s consent—”
“All these dives are changing her, and we don’t have a clear idea what the changes are. The fact that she enjoys it doesn’t reassure me at all.”
Elvi bristled, but it was Fayez and she was short on sleep and long on whatever adrenaline broke down into. Some kind of mandelic acid, she thought. She wasn’t sure. When he went on, she tried to listen and not just react.
“I know I’m not my sanest self right now. We’ve all been stuck on this ship for way too long, and everyone’s fraying, and it’s all scary as shit. I get that. I do. But that’s why we have ethical standards. So that when things get murky we have something to show us the way through.”
“And you think I’m violating ethical standards?”
“Yes. I love you, but yes you totally are. Absolutely.” He grimaced his apology.
Elvi took a long breath and let it out slowly through her nose. The Falcon hummed around them like it was also waiting for her to speak.
“I know,” she said, and it was actually a relief to say it out loud. “I am.”
“So what do we do about that?”
She crossed her arms. “Do you remember Dr. Negila?”
“That’s a name from a long time ago. She taught at the University of Calabar?”
“I took an ethics seminar with her as part of my postdoctorate work. There was a story we read about this beautiful, utopic land where everything was wonderful and enlightened and pleasant and good and just, except for one child who had to live in confusion and misery. One child, in exchange for paradise to everyone else.”
“I know that one. Omelas.”
“This isn’t that,” Elvi said. “I’m working for an authoritarian dictator in a system where people are suffering and screwing each other over and killing each other. I’m compromising my safety and the safety of the people who work for me by smuggling my research to my boss’s political enemies. We’re not doing anything here to make a beautiful, gracious, pleasant utopia. If we win, the lives we save will be the same mix of shit, frustration, and absurdity that they’ve always been.”
“True.”
“The child in the story was being sacrificed for a quality of life. If I’m sacrificing Cara, and I acknowledge that I may be doing that, it’s not for quality. It’s for quantity. If I have to lose her in order to keep the quantity of human life from going to zero? It’s cheap. If it costs everything, it’s still a good trade.”
It landed on Fayez. He lowered his head, not a surrender to gravity but a surrender all the same. “Yeah. Okay.”
“If you can’t do this, that’s all right,” Elvi said. “I can arrange transport back to the Science Directorate for you. You can do your work there as easily as you do it here.”
“Sweetie. You know I’m not doing that.”
“I’d understand if you did.”
“Yeah, no. I just wanted to make sure we were doing what we meant to do. If doing the wrong thing is the right thing, then I’m still planning to wake up next to you while we do it. Kind of my life’s work, really.”
They floated together in silence for a moment, not touching.
“You should come to bed,” Fayez said. “It’s very late, and we’re both very tired.”
“In a little bit,” Elvi said. “I have to make my report back to Trejo about San Esteban, and Ochida is waiting for some resource reallocations based on the new plan moving forward.”
“Oh, and Dr. Lee wanted to talk to you too. If you have time. Personnel issue.”
Elvi nodded her query.
“I think there’s a dysfunctional love triangle in the physics group. They may need a talking-to from the boss.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Fayez spread his hands. “Every miracle we’ve pulled off, we’ve done it using primates. Just because we’re capable of mind-blowing wonders doesn’t mean we aren’t still sex-and-murder machines. The organism doesn’t change.”
“All right. I’ll stop by the bridge. Do me a favor, though?”
“Anything.”
“The relief pod was supposed to have updated menus. See if the download taught the galley how to fake up some sag paneer?”
“If it did, I will have it waiting in the cabin.”
He pulled himself in and kissed her before heading out to the hall. She turned back to the San Esteban images. Now, every corpse she saw, she imagined as Fayez. Or herself. Or James Holden. Or Anton Trejo. Or Winston Duarte.
She started a recording. “Admiral Trejo. I understand that San Esteban is yet another first priority. All I can give you right now is our overview, some speculation, and my plan moving forward…”
It took half an hour to get the version she liked best, and she made a copy with a different routing header to send to Naomi and the underground. They were all allies in this, whether they knew it or not.
By the time she’d sent her reallocation plan to Ochida and talked to Harshaan Lee about how to keep the social drama on the Falcon from spiraling out of control, two hours had passed. Fayez was in their cabin, asleep. A tube of sag paneer was waiting for her, a bulb of decaffeinated tea beside it. She ate and drank and pulled herself into the sleeping harness.
When she dreamed, she dreamed she was in an ocean teeming with sharks, and if she moved too fast, they would kill her.
Cara floated in the lab while the technicians went through the adjustments to the sensor arrays on her skull like a cap. Everything was bustling around them, but Elvi felt like the two of them—she and her test subject—were still. The eye of the storm. On the screens, Cara’s brain function shifted and stuttered as the expert systems matched what they were seeing now to what they had seen before. “Norming,” it was called. As if norms were still a thing for them.
“How are you feeling?” Elvi asked.
Cara’s perfect black eyes clicked to her, went still for a moment, and then Cara grinned. Elvi wanted to see it as genuine, and maybe it was. Maybe the extra processing delta between stimulus and response only read as inauthentic and studied because Elvi was trying to read the girl as if she were the same as other people. As if she were a primate. The organism doesn’t change, Fayez said in her memory, but now it felt like a warning.
The organism had changed.
As if she’d heard her thinking, Cara’s expression shifted. “Are you worried about something?”
“I was thinking… about the cognitive changes you and Xan went through. Do you remember what it was like before?” Elvi asked.
“Before?”
One of the technicians touched the sensor leads, and the displays clicked over to green across the board. Good to go.
“Before the change. Before all this,” Elvi said. Before you died, she didn’t say.
“I don’t know. Just like anyone, I guess. It was a long time ago.”