“Make us more conscious.”
“I suppose. In a sense.”
“Do you dare?”
“Our bodies sing,” she said, quoting him.[2] “Thousands of songs inaudible to us.”
“For good reason,” he said. “We’d be paralyzed if we heard them all. We’d go deaf. Or mad.”
He was already hearing too many. Shoulder, back, knees, heart. The songs of age, from the symphony of life.
“The ones we hear are usually the ones we’d rather not,” he observed.
“That’s the point,” she replied.
There wasn’t a line on her face. She stood tall and erect, which even in micrograv he was unable to do. She was supple, bright-eyed, energetic. Being with her was like being with a supercharged particle. Simply watching her could be exhausting.
“You’re not hearing any, I assume,” he said.
“Songs? No. Not a one.”
He nodded. Youth was silent that way. In other ways not so much.
“I can imagine what this song of yours will be like,” he said.
“Can you? What?”
“Something extremely annoying and impossible to ignore.”
“It better be.”
“A new line of research for you. A new adventure.”
“Not wholly new. But why not?”
The probe was only the second of its kind. Deep-space mining was in its infancy. Kinks were still being ironed out. So far Eurydice had performed without a hitch. Her lengthy approach was nearly at an end.
Currently, she was in the process of matching her orbit to theirs, close enough that they could see her distinctive dragonfly shape. Her thrusters were pointed away from them, her cone forward. Beneath the cone, held by two robotic arms, like a bee holding pollen, was a large black rock.
Carbon? thought Cav.
All at once there was a glint of light. Then nothing. Then another.
He felt a pounding in his chest. “Is it signaling us?”
“Eurydice?”
“No. The thing on the asteroid.”
“It’s a reflection, Cav. From the sun. When the probe tilts to the side.”
He felt chastened, but not much. “Ice, you think?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
She left the viewing port and pulled up the program that controlled the station’s external camera array. A few minutes later she had Eurydice on-screen. She repositioned and magnified the image. The asteroid chunk was wide in the middle and tapered at both ends, dolphin-shaped but angular, especially in its lower half, with sharply defined ridges and ledges, likely where it had broken off. Its upper half was more rounded and rippled, as though it had been subjected to weathering of some sort. It looked like a jumbled line of rolling hills. Tucked in the basin between two of them was a lighter-colored shape.
She magnified this.
“Hello,” said Cav, who’d been watching.
It looked like a jellyfish with stumpy arms, each of them a different shape and size, irregularly spaced around its circumference. It was dull yellow in color with a hint of green, like week-old celery. It was roughly two hands across, about a finger’s thickness. Its surface appeared smooth, fixed, and hard.
“Ameboid,” said Cav.
“It’s not an ameba.”
“I’m not saying it is. I’m saying the appearance. The shape.”
“Maybe it was liquid once. Molten. Hardened into that.”
“Lava?”
“Why not?”
He knew a bit of geology. Just enough to be dangerous.
“Metamorphic?”
“Possibly.”
“Starfish attach to rocks like that,” he said, thinking aloud.
Something clinging to something, that’s what had popped into his head. Obviously, they weren’t looking at a starfish.
“Is it attached?” she asked.
“It wouldn’t come off.”
“Precisely. It’s wedded to the rock. Part and parcel. It is a rock.”
“But so different.” He searched for an explanation. “Could there have been a collision? Say the asteroid was hit by something. This is the impact point. The force of the collision, the heat of it, created what we’re seeing.”
Her knowledge of geology was about on a par with his. Her knowledge of astronomy, somewhat more advanced. Their expertise lay elsewhere, broadly speaking in the field of human biology, the field of living things. Since living things depended on nonliving things to exist, and since nonliving things obeyed the laws and conditions of physics, it helped to have a broad education, a wide base of knowledge, and an inquisitive spirit.
“Collisions hardly ever happen. And when they do, they’re catastrophic. The asteroid would have been annihilated.”
“A small collision. With a tiny particle.”
“Tiny is right.”
“Yes?”
“An impact metamorphosis?” She turned the idea over in her mind. In biology the concept certainly applied. Sperm and egg the obvious example, and thousands more. “Is there such a thing?”
“Why shouldn’t there be?”
This was Cav in a nutshell. Firing salvos, broadsides against dogma and gospel, reality be damned. Flaunting his ignorance, wearing it like a medal of honor. Impertinent. Irreverent. What she loved about him, and what at other times infuriated her. He called it thinking big.
“It’s a big universe,” he said, right on cue.
They studied it further.
“You know what it looks like?” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Puke.”
It did have a sheen. And a lumpiness. And a kind of ordered chaos, like a glob, or splat, of something.
“You’re right,” he said. “That’s exactly how it looks. Wonder how it smells. If it smells.”
“Everything smells,” she reminded him, quoting herself.[3]
“To us,” he clarified.
“Like puke, I’m afraid.” Referencing the power of language, which was the power of suggestion, in this case by a single four-letter word. A mortal blow, or at least a complication, to someone priding herself on objectivity. This was always the risk of thinking. Worse with speaking the thought aloud.
“I’ve contaminated myself. Have I contaminated you, too?”
“Not a bit.” He felt the opposite, as though a gate, or a door, had been opened. “Puke implies a mouth. A mouth implies a living thing.”
“I was free-associating,” she said quickly.
“Yes. Good. We should.”
“It’s not living, Cav. How could it be living?”
“Exactly. That’s the question. How?”
She could see what was coming. The man just loved getting his head in the clouds, the higher the better. Up where the air was thin, and reality was a long way off. Where you could spin whatever story you liked.
It was a luxury to think like that. Not one she’d had, or allowed herself, growing up. She was a practical, orderly thinker, already highly regarded and successful when she and Cav met. He had shown her it was possible to think differently without being: one, completely boring; two, completely self-absorbed; and three, completely useless. He was perceptive. He saw things other people didn’t. He wasn’t always right, but he was always, or almost always, interesting.
Besides, this thing, whatever it was, was out of the ordinary. Soon they’d have it on board and know much more. For now she’d lose nothing by letting him speculate. She’d even join the party, within limits.
“Rivers have mouths,” she said.
“Different kind of mouth. Not what I was thinking.”
2
In his vaulting, early years Cav had written a textbook in the form of an epic poem—rhyming no less—an energetic, unruly saga entitled
3
From