“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll get back in bed.” What was she even doing, standing up? She couldn’t leave. She carried the infection inside her body. “But I… I need to see Ambassador Smith. Right now, here. Please have someone tell him it’s the highest possible priority. Please.”
The visit to his mother upset Noah more than he’d expected. She’d looked so small, so fragile in her bed behind the quarantine glass. Always, his whole life, he’d thought of her as large, towering over the landscape like some stone fortress, both safe and formidable. But she was just a small, frightened woman who was going to die.
As were Elizabeth, Ryan and Connie and their baby, Noah’s last girlfriend Emily, his childhood buddies Sam and Davey, Cindy and Miguel at the restaurant—all going to die when the spore cloud hit. Why hadn’t Noah been thinking about this before? How could he be so selfish about concentrating on his delight in his new clan that he had put the rest of humanity out of his mind?
He had always been selfish. He’d known that about himself. Only before now, he’d called it “independent.”
It was a relief to leave the Terran part of the Embassy, with its too-heavy gravity and glaring light. The extra rods and cones that had been inserted into Noah’s eyes made them sensitive to such terrible brightness. In the World quarters, Kayla’s little boy Austin was chasing a ball along the corridor, his energy suit a faint glimmer in the low light. He stopped to watch Noah shed his own suit.
Austin said, “I wanna do that.”
“You will, some day. Maybe soon. Where’s your mother?”
“She comes right back. I stay right here!”
“Good boy. Have you—hi, Kayla. Do you know where Mee^hao¡ is?”
“No. Oh, wait, yes—he left the sanctuary.”
That, Noah remembered, was what both Kayla and her sister called the World section of the Embassy. “Sanctuary”—the term made him wonder what their life had been before they came aboard. Both, although pleasant enough, were close-mouthed about their pasts to the point of lock-jaw.
Kayla added, “I think Mee^hao¡ said it was about the attack.”
It would be, of course. Noah knew he should wait until Mee^hao¡ was free. But he couldn’t wait.
“Where’s Llaa^moh¡?”
Kayla looked blank; her Worldese was not yet fluent.
“Officer Jones.”
“Oh. I just saw her in the garden.”
Noah strode to the garden. Llaa^moh¡ sat on a bench, watching water fall in a thin stream from the ceiling to a pool below. Delicately she fingered a llo flower, without picking it, coaxing the broad dark leaf to release its spicy scent. Noah and Llaa^moh¡ had avoided each other ever since Noah’s welcome ceremony, and he knew why. Still, right now his need overrode awkward desire.
“Llaa^moh¡—may we speak together?” He hoped he had the verb tense right: urgency coupled with supplication.
“Yes, of course.” She made room for him on the bench. “Your Worldese progresses well.”
“Thank you. I am troubled in my liver.” The correct idiom, he was certain. Almost.
“What troubles your liver, brother mine?”
“My mother.” The word meant not only female parent but matriarchal clan leader, which Noah supposed that Marianne was, since both his grandmothers were dead. Although perhaps not his biological grandmothers, and to World, biology was all. There were no out-of-family adoptions.
“Yes?”
“She is Dr. Marianne Jenner, as you know, working aboard the Embassy. My brother and sister live ashore. What will happen to my family when the spore cloud comes? Does my mother go with us to World? Do my birth-siblings?” But… how could they, unaltered? Also, they were not of his haplotype and so would belong to a different clan for lllathil, clans not represented aboard ship. Also, all three of them would hate everything about World. But otherwise they would die. All of them, dead.
Llaa^moh¡ said nothing. Noah gave her the space and time to think; one thing World humans hated about Terrans was that they replied so quickly, without careful thought, sometimes even interrupting each other and thereby dishonoring the speaker. Noah watched a small insect with multi-colored wings, whose name did not come to his fevered mind, cross the llo leaf, and forced his body to stay still.
Finally Llaa^moh¡ said, “Mee^hao¡ and I have discussed this. He has left this decision to me. You are one of us now. I will tell you what will happen when the spore cloud comes.”
“I thank you for your trust.” The ritual response, but Noah meant it.
“However, you are under obligation—” she used the most serious degree for a word of promise “—to say nothing to anyone else, World or Terran. Do you accept this obligation?”
Noah hesitated, and not from courtesy. Shouldn’t he use the information, whatever it was, to try to ensure what safety was possible for his family? But if he did not promise, Llaa^moh¡ would tell him nothing.
“I accept the obligation.”
She told him.
Noah’s jaw dropped. He couldn’t help it, even though it was very rude. Llaa^moh¡ was carefully not looking at him; perhaps she had anticipated this reaction.
Noah stood and walked out of the garden.
“Thought,” a famous poet—Marianne couldn’t remember which one—had once said, “is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.” Lying in her bed in the quarantine chamber, Marianne felt an epidemic in her brain. What Elizabeth had done, what she herself harbored now in her body, Noah’s transformation, Evan’s death—the thoughts fed on her cells, fevered her mind.
Elizabeth, studying the complex layout of the Embassy: “Where do the Denebs live?” “Behind these doors here.”
Noah, with his huge alien eyes.
Evan, urging her to meet the aliens by scribbling block letters on a paper sushi bag: CHANCE OF SIX THOUSAND LIFETIMES! The number of generations since Mitochondrial Eve.
Herself, carrying the deadly infection. Elizabeth, Noah, Evan, spores—it was almost a relief when Ambassador Smith appeared beyond the glass.
“Dr. Jenner,” the ceiling said in uninflected translation. “I am so sorry you were injured in this attack. You said you want to see me now.”
She hadn’t been sure what she was going to say to him. How did you name your own child a possible terrorist, condemn her to whatever unknown form justice took among aliens? What if that meant something like drawing and quartering, as it once had on Earth? Marianne opened her mouth, and what came out were words she had not planned at all.
“Why did you permit Drs. Namechek and Lloyd to infect themselves three times when it violates both our medical code and yours?”
His face, both Terran and alien, that visage that now and forever would remind her of what Noah had done to his own face, did not change expression. “You know why, Dr. Jenner. It was necessary for the research. There is no other way to fully assess immune system response in ways useful to developing antidotes.”
“You could have used your own people!”
“There are not enough of us to put anyone into quarantine.”
“You could have run the experiment yourself with human volunteers. You’d have gotten volunteers, given what Earth is facing. And then the experiment could have had the advantage of your greater expertise.”
“It is not much greater than yours, as you know. Our scientific knowledges have moved in different directions. But if we had sponsored experiments on Terrans, what would have been the Terran response?”
Marianne was silent. She knew the answer. They both knew the answer.
He said, “You are infected, I am told. We did not cause this. But now our two peoples can work more openly on developing medicines or vaccines. Both Earth and World will owe you an enormous debt.”