When the doors opened and the guards appeared carrying our morning meals of textured yeast protein in the spun-starch boxes that we ate as dessert, a spike of cold horror split me, and I came to my decision. Brown trotted toward them, beaming. I ran across to him, waving my arms to catch his attention, and coincidentally the guards’ and Fong’s as well. That my action aided Quintana’s plan only became clear later. It wasn’t my intention.
“I was wrong,” I said plucking Brown’s sleeve like a child imploring his father. “It came to me last night. I was wrong.”
“No, you weren’t,” Brown said, his tone impatient. “I went over all of it.”
“Not all. There’s more. I know more. I can show you.”
A tall woman with hundreds of tiny black moles dotting her face led the guards. I knew her as I knew all the Belter guards: as a force of nature imposed on us. Still, I’d seen her enough for the familiarity of her face to let me read the curiosity in her. I plucked Brown’s sleeve more anxiously, trying to draw him away, out of her earshot. The conviction that the Belters would give the Martian the worst, not the best, of research seemed self-evident now. I feared letting her hear me say something that might suggest I knew the truth. Brown didn’t move, so I leaned in closer to him.
“It’s not an egg,” I hissed. “It’s the support frame for a stable nonlocality. Something to pass information. Maybe even mass. It only looks biological because it co-opted biological material.”
For the first time, I saw doubt flicker in Brown’s eyes. I hoped that truth would be enough to sway his certainty. “Bullshit,” he said. I’d done my work too well.
“Do an implicit structure analysis,” I said. “Look at the membranes as pathways, not walls. See how the resonances reinforce. The protomolecule opened something. It’s not an alien, it’s a way for the aliens to talk to us. Or to get here. Don’t trust me. Look at the data.”
Brown looked deeply into my eyes, as if he could measure my sincerity from my pupils. A voice behind us rose in a weirdly strangled cry, and I turned toward it.
That is the last clear memory I have for a time.
I had never been stabbed before. It wasn’t at all what I would have guessed. My recollection is of a sudden impact driving me up and off my feet. Very loud shouting, very far away as multiple voices barked conflicted orders, though to whom I couldn’t say. The unmistakable and assaulting noise of gunfire. Lying on the deck, looking up at the empty row of observation windows, convinced that I’d been hit or kicked hard enough to break one of my ribs, then putting my hand to my side and finding it bloody and reaching the conclusion that, no, I’d been shot. Quintana, four meters away, his head and chest mutilated by bullets. I have a vivid image of Fong standing over his body with a pistol in her hand, but I’m almost certain of that memory’s falsehood. I can’t imagine the Belter guards suffering us to be armed, even if we shared a common enemy.
Other shards of my memory of the attack, though more plausible, have nothing I can attach them to. Alberto with his hands in bloody fists. The Belter guards pressing their bodies over mine, to protect me or subdue me or stanch the bleeding. The smell of gun smoke. The gritty feel of the floor against my cheek and hands. Perhaps normal people take these things and weave them into a coherent narrative, like making sense of a particularly surreal dream. For me, they simply exist. The prospect of a discontinuous cognitive life holds no terror for me, or, I suspect, for anyone in research.
Afterward, I heard the story told: Quintana’s battle cry, his rush toward us. According to Navarro, he pushed Brown out of the way in order to reach me. The Belter guards shot Quintana to death, and afterward the mole-speckled woman stood over his body cursing in the incomprehensible argot of her people and shouting into her radio. Brown, they rushed away, out the door and into whatever rooms they used to protect and isolate him from us. The medical team that treated me arrived quickly, but didn’t evacuate me. I lay first on the floor and then one of the crash couches. Quintana’s improvised knife, a length of steel pried from the base of a couch, inserted just below my ribs on the right, angling up toward my liver. A few more centimeters and my chances of survival would have fallen drastically, but they didn’t. I found it difficult to focus on things that might have happened, knowing as I did that they hadn’t. But that came later.
At first I slept in a narcotic cloud like a physical memory of university. When I woke, Alberto lay curled beside me, his body feeling oddly cold, though in fact it was my fever that made it seem that way. For two more days, I rested and slept, Belter medics coming both with and between meals to switch out supply packs on the autodoc they had strapped to my arm. When I asked them where Brown was, what was happening with him, they answered with evasions or pretended I hadn’t spoken. The only information I gleaned in those terrible days was once, when I demanded to know, weeping, if he’d gone, and one of the medics twitched her head in an almost subliminal no. I told myself she’d meant that he was still on the station rather than the equally plausible negatives that she didn’t know or she wouldn’t answer or I shouldn’t ask. Hope survives even stretched to a single molecule’s thickness.
The room spoke of nothing but the attack during all the time Brown remained absent, even—perhaps especially—when they spoke of something else. Just before lights-out, Ma and Coombs fought, shouting at each other for the better part of an hour over whether Ma had taken too long a shower. Bhalki, who usually kept to herself, approached Enz, talking tearfully for hours on end, and wound up in the hotel with loud and unpleasant-sounding intercourse. Navarro and Fong put together patrols that, in a population now under three dozen, felt both ridiculous and threatening. All of it was about the attack, though I didn’t understand the complexity of it until Alberto held forth on the subject.
“Grief makes people crazy,” he said. We were sharing a container of white kibble that looked like malformed rice and tasted like the unholy offspring of a chicken and a mushroom.
“Grief?” I must have sounded outraged at the thought, and in fairness, I was a little. Alberto rolled his eyes and waved the heat of my reply away.
“Not for Quintana. Not for the man, anyway. It’s the idea of him. We were thirty-five people. Now we’re thirty-four. Sure, the one we lost was an asshole. That’s not the point. It was the same for Kanter. Every time one of us dies, it will be the same. We are all less in ourselves because we’re less together. They aren’t mourning him. They’re mourning themselves and all the lives they could have had if we weren’t stuck in here. Quintana’s just a reminder of that.”
“For whom the bell tolls? Well, that’s a thought. Thirty-six,” I said, and Alberto frowned at me. “You said we were thirty-five down to thirty-four, but there were thirty-six of us.”
“No one counts Brown anymore,” Alberto said. He took a mouthful of kibble using his index and middle fingers as a spoon, then sucked the food between his cheek and his teeth, pulling out the broth before swallowing the greasy remnant. It was the best way to eat Belter kibble. “They would be mourning you, if you’d gone,” he said, and turned to me. There were tears in his eyes. “I would be.”
I didn’t know if he meant gone the way they assumed Brown to be already apart from the group, or dead like Quintana, but I didn’t ask for clarification. Perhaps leaving the room by dying out of it or being traded to the Martian were interchangeable for the people left behind. I guessed that was Alberto’s point.