Festina gave me a pained look. "A hole in reality? Bollocks. Couldn’t it just be dark matter? Last I heard there were sixteen known dark particles and at least that many dark energy quanta."
"Why would human skin cells contain dark matter? And how could dark matter be assembled the way I’m seeing? I’ve never heard anyone suggest you could make dark molecules. Especially not complex biological modules like DNA. These are chromosomes, Festina. Chromosomes made of dark matter? How is that more rational than holes in reality?"
Instead of answering, Festina came to look at the Bumbler’s scan. I’d magnified a single cell nucleus to fill the entire display screen. It was easy to see the chromosomes, each real one accompanied by a shadow: a cutout, an absence, unfilled by the nucleus’s liquid interior. The pseudochromosomes drifted lazily across the screen, just like their real-matter counterparts. Finally, Festina said, "Okay, that’s disturbing, no matter what the hell those things are." She stepped away. "I can’t help but notice the mutant skin flakes are all beside this one stasis sphere."
The sphere she indicated was the biggest in sight, almost as tall as me. The human/shadow hybrid cells were directly around its base. In fact, when I scanned with the Bumbler, I could find a line of such cells from the entrance door straight up to the sphere. The trail was too small to see with the naked eye, except for those marks near the sphere — as if someone had dribbled cells all across the floor, then stood long enough in one spot for the accumulation to become visible.
"Oh, Mom," said Tut, "I got a nasty idea what’s in that sphere."
"We all have the same idea," Festina told him. She turned to me. "You like kicking things open, Youn Suu. You want to do the honors on this stasis field?"
"No thanks. My foot has had enough excitement for one day."
She raised an eyebrow. "Are you all right? You weren’t limping."
"I’ll be fine. But no more kicking for a while."
Festina held my gaze a moment longer. Then she shrugged and turned away. After a quick search of the room, she found a tool for popping stasis bubbles: a short wand with a barb on the end, like a miniharpoon. She fetched the wand and tapped it on the sphere’s mirror surface.
‹BINK›
The room filled with screaming — a scream begun the previous morning and now resumed as if no time had passed. On the floor, where the sphere had been, a man lay howling in agony. Flakes of whitish skin drifted off his body like snow.
The man’s skin had not been white to begin with. His features and bone structure were clearly African, not so different from Ubatu; but his once-dark skin had lost its pigmentation, turning paper-pale and as fragile as ash. As for his life force… I didn’t wholly trust my Balrog-given sense, but when it told me this man was dying, I had no reason for doubt. The man exuded an aura of contamination: a body at war with itself, literally ripping its tissues apart. Flecks of dry epidermis continued to shake off him onto the floor — falling from his face and hands, through the gaps between buttons on his shirt, and in powdery puffs out the bottom of his pant cuffs, as if both his legs had turned to talcum and were dispersing themselves across the concrete.
As for the man’s clothes, they were cut in the style of Unity warm-weather uniforms, but their color was unique to Muta: a multihued motley of reds, blues, and oranges, matching the rainbow riot of local vegetation. It was obviously intended to provide camouflage when survey team members moved through the brush… but it made the man look like a clown.
A leprous clown close to death.
Tut stepped toward the man, but Festina pulled him back. "No! He might be contagious. Youn Suu, what’s the Bumbler say?"
I looked at the Bumbler’s display. "Shadow chromosomes in all his cells. Not just his skin. His hair, his nails, his eyes… the Bumbler can’t find a single cell that’s normal. And the cells are changing shape. The blood corpuscles are so deformed they’re clogging his veins and arteries like logjams. His heart isn’t strong enough to maintain circulation — it’s barely beating."
The man screamed louder. I couldn’t tell if he was reacting to my words or some new thrust of pain.
"If his blood vessels are obstructed," Festina said, "there’s no point in CPR?"
"The best hospital in the galaxy couldn’t save him. Every cell in his body is…"
I had no words to finish my sentence. Festina did. "Every cell in his body is fucked."
"That pretty much sums it up," I said.
Tut had slipped out of Festina’s grip. Now he crouched near the moaning man — staying slightly beyond the man’s reach, but directly in his sight line. If the man had a sight line. With the cells of his eyes and his optic nerves so dramatically mutated, who knew if the man could see?
"Hey," Tut murmured. "Hey." Then he spoke in a language I didn’t recognize: a fluid language with no harsh consonants, like linguistic honey.
"Is that the Unity’s secret tongue?" Festina asked. "I thought they didn’t teach it to outsiders."
"I told you, Auntie, they liked me. Now shush."
Tut spoke again to the dying man. The language was soft and beautiful — purposely designed that way. Three centuries ago, the Unity’s founders created a private language… partly to separate themselves from the Technocracy, partly as social engineering. The structures of language influence the structures of thought: not simplistically, but subtly. The way you’re trained to speak predisposes you to patterns in the way you think. It isn’t that you’re incapable of thinking in other ways; it’s just that you find some thoughts easier to articulate than others. Also, growing children hear more talk about easy-to-express topics than topics the language makes difficult. Inevitably, this affects their social and intellectual development — some thoughts are "normal" while others aren’t. By constructing a new language with a certain philosophical slant, the Unity had tried to make it harder for people to be bad citizens.
Or so the rumor went. One should never entirely trust Technocracy gossip about the Unity… any more than one trusts divorced spouses talking about their exes.
Tut only spoke a sentence or two. The Unity man replied with a torrent of incomprehensible words. His life force contorted with the effort. He was using his dying energies to tell what had happened: a dedicated survey team member delivering his final report. Though I could see the emotions that drove him — relief at having survived long enough to tell his story, mingled with the pain of his incipient death — my sixth sense couldn’t translate what he was saying. I could see his feelings but not his message.
Even Tut couldn’t follow it all. Tut’s aura showed him straining to understand. The dying man spoke quickly, gasping for breath, reciting details in a language Tut hadn’t heard in years. Quite possibly, the man was also using sophisticated scientific terminology; he was an elite survey team member, giving his last technical report. Tut did his best to comprehend the words, nearly inaudible, in a language only half remembered from his youth… but I could see he was failing to catch what might be vital details. Frustration showed on Tut’s face and deeper down in his heart.
Festina saw the frustration too (at least on Tut’s face), but she did nothing. Asking questions would only make it harder for Tut to hear the mumbling man; and this was obviously our only chance to catch what the man had to say. A deathbed data dump. It would be a small miracle if this survivor of Team Esteem lived long enough to get it all out… but at last he fell silent, his aura showing triumph despite the torment of his flesh. He’d said everything he needed to. His head slumped back, his eyes drooped shut…