Chapter Seventeen
HANA
Fenn stares at me with the strangest expression. It’s something like defeat and relief mixed together.
Which is a good thing. Because I didn’t know if I could stand up to him or anyone else much longer. My hands are balled in fists at my side from the excitement of learning my first efforts actually worked. I did it. But it’s not enough. Fenn is willing to help, and if I have help, there is hope to save Cyclo. To save all of us.
“Okay,” I say. “The first thing we need to do is find out if Cyclo has any stem cells. If she does, then maybe we can harvest them. I mean, we have gestational chambers. They’re only human-sized, but if we can grow her cells in one of them, then there’s hope we can repair some parts of the ship.”
He turns on his holofeed and switches the settings to his drone-driving application. He starts gesticulating on the 3D display bubble in front of him before his own eyes take over. I can see there’s a progress bar on the right of his feed. It’s only one-third green. There’s a tick mark at the middle that shows he ought to be halfway done with his work. Not good. “All right,” Fenn says. “I’m at your command.”
I grin back. I’ve read and reread about Cyclo’s own birth and creation in the Annals of Astrobiophysics. Since Mother would happily chat away about all the intricacies of how she creates the human embryos for the ship’s crew and matures them to birth, I know how to do it all, in concept. I just don’t know how to work the machines. And judging from the content of her diary, she didn’t document that for my benefit now. But perhaps Fenn and I can figure that out together. Right now, we just need to find stem cells.
“Okay,” I say. “Stem cells are going to have very specific cellular markers on them that set them apart from other tissues. We need to program the bots to find these markers and tell us where to harvest them.”
Fenn grins suddenly. “Oh. This is on Portia’s list. It green-lights this as one of our collective objectives if we contribute to other crewmembers’ research.”
“So this won’t sabotage your work?”
“No. It’s good!”
Together, Fenn and I prepare to launch a dozen nanobots. Fenn sends out a cadre of a whole separate dozen set to gather info according to Doran’s schedule for him—measurements of the tritium and chlorine-16, plus other compounds I’m less familiar with. But for me, we’ll zone in on Cyclo’s stem cells. I ask, of course, ahead of time, if Cyclo can simply point them out to us herself. But she garbles the information when she responds.
“Her communication neural network is one of the first things we have to fix. It will make everything easier,” I say.
“Noted,” Fenn says, but he’s got that glassy stare again, which tells me he’s flying his bots, concentrating mostly on navigating. “Hey, this is good news. Cyclo hasn’t destroyed a single one yet. She’s cooperating.”
“Well, we’ll see. She may not cooperate, depending on whether her memory and understanding are okay in different parts of the ship. She doesn’t have a central nervous system—it’s like a sea star’s. It’s distributed throughout her body.”
“So she may be reasonable in some parts of the ship and more erratic in others?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell by just looking at her?” Fenn asks.
“Yes.” Looking around, I see a faint shimmer of the ultraviolet color that Fenn said he couldn’t. “In my spectrum of vision, I’ve noticed some differences. She’s…duller in the areas where she communicates poorly with me. Where she doesn’t seem as conscious, I guess.”
Fenn nods and then goes silent for a while. While he drives the drones, I tinker with Miki’s equipment, reading the info from the drones driving deeper into Cyclo’s matrix. So far, the readings are normal. Interestingly, some areas of Cyclo are showing a burst of normal activity after previously failing. Like Portia said, the hormones seemed to have worked for a little while.
Throughout our data gathering, I surreptitiously watch Fenn, his fingers and hands moving deftly here and there, orchestrating and conducting moves and turns that I can’t see because I don’t understand how to read his holofeed well. It’s replete with numbers floating around intersecting lines and planes that look so foreign. It makes me a little sad, to see a beautiful creature like Cyclo distilled down to numbers and vectors and graphs. It’s not the Cyclo I know.
Fenn’s sleeves are rolled up so he can move his arms more freely. The muscles of his forearms are taut and beautiful. I study his face, too, carefully, without staring. His eyes are so large and brown, and his cheekbones have grown very slightly sharper since he first set foot on the ship. He’s gotten thinner and looks older. Wiser.
Miki’s data is still coming in at a steady clip, so I walk around the gestational lab, studying the different containers and machines. If there is a chance I can save Cyclo, I need to use these. I turn on one of the filtration machines—just to see if the energy source is still good—and the monitor lights up. I turn on one of the incubation chambers, too, a small one. This lights up, too. It looks like the levels of all the nutrients and liquids are still good. I don’t ask Fenn for help here because I’m sure the Selkirk crew never needed to know how to gestate anything as part of their protocol.
On the wall monitor, I search for tissue culture programs. Everything is for human and humanoid, but under an obscure “other” option that I find after looking at every program, I find a drop-down menu of non-humanoid species. I clap my hands.
There. Amorfovita potentia, subspecies cyclonica.
And under the species name, a list of a thousand types of tissue and embryo programs, from larval to polyp stage and even juvenile medusas. I find a mantle tissue program and feel utter relief. Maybe if we can fix her mantle—the outer part of her body that looks like a ballerina skirt twirling around the ship, the part that produces energy from starlight—Cyclo’s immune system will improve because it will have the energy to repair. It’s somewhere to start.
“Whoop! I found something,” Fenn says suddenly.
“What is it?” I run to his side.
“Inside some of the older endoskeleton, near the delta ring, there are some islands of cells that are still dividing. They’re diffusion cells—not stem cells, but as close as we’ll get to stem cells.”
“Can you harvest them?”
“Already done. Next two micro drones coming back to us have your samples.” He looks past me through his holofeed. “Don’t get too excited, though. They may not grow, or might die soon, or…”
“I know. Can’t hurt to try, though, right?”
He nods. I wait like an expectant auntie for the drones to arrive through the matrix. After some time, I hear a slight popping sound, and two tiny drones the size of ants come buzzing toward me. Fenn lands them beautifully on my outstretched palm.
The bots actually look like tiny ants. One of the gestational chambers has a tiny tissue upload chamber, and Fenn helps release the microscopic samples into a blob of liquid, and suddenly a huge feed of numbers and data start spilling onto the screen. It’s overwhelming. But what I’m reading is that the cells have been accepted. Fenn puts his drones on autopilot and calls Portia.
“Can you come to the gestational labs?” Fenn asks, on a private channel so no one, especially Doran, can hear our request.
“We have data for you!” I say, popping my face next to Fenn’s.
Portia rolls her red eyes. “Lucky I’m close by. Be there in a bit.”
When she arrives, her spear in hand and a shifty look around the corner, she’s shocked but impressed at our enterprise.
“I’m doing this,” I say. “Not Fenn. Please keep the data off your holofeed. I don’t want anyone else to know. But I need your help. I don’t know the first thing about reverse stem cell engineering, only the theory.”
Reverse stem cell engineering. I’d never thought this lesson would come in handy, but I remember it from my studies a year ago. You take a cell that’s already destined to be something—a nerve cell, or blood cell, and make it turn back into a cell that’s more immature, and with the potential to be anything. It’s like taking a space pilot and saying, hey, we’re turning you back into a baby so you can start over again and become a farmer instead.
In this case, we want these cells of Cyclo to turn into mantle cells, so she can make energy again, and with the energy—make part of her systems function again.
I wait for Portia to say this is not possible, but she doesn’t. Instead, she walks over to the monitor, and her fingers fly over the program so fast, I can hardly understand what she’s doing. Towering over me, she’s silent. After a few minutes, she steps back.
“Assuming your materials don’t run out and the machines don’t stop working, this will reverse engineer an embryonic stem cell from your diffusion cell, and then forward into a large culture of mantle cells capable of photosynthesis.” She pivots and crosses her arms. “The only reason I’m helping you is that this took only five minutes of my life, and I honestly don’t think it’ll work. Too many problems can happen.”
“Thank you! Oh, thank you, Portia! And please—”
“Don’t tell Doran? I won’t. But don’t ask me to do anything like this again.”
I nod, and she leaves. I watch the readouts for the next several hours, until it’s time to follow Fenn’s nanobots as they delve deeper into Cyclo’s matrix. The information they’re collecting is massive, so many readouts that a single glance of it on Fenn’s visor makes me dizzy. We don’t even eat until we’re done, and by that time, everyone on the crew is exhausted.
Back at the bridge, everyone’s ready for a meal and sleep, but Doran insists on a data review. I’m buzzing with excitement over my cell culture rebellion, but of course stay quiet, as do Fenn and Portia. Nutrient bars and drinks are handed out, but no one eats much. Portia takes a bite and forces it down, and Gammand sniffs it and eats three at once, but he doesn’t look like he’s enjoying the process.
“Okay,” Doran says, showing up in our holofeeds. “This is what we know so far—not that we need to know, but we can use the info to maximize our mission days here on the Calathus—”
Which, after a sidelong glance from Fenn, I deduce must be code-speak for our very survival.
“Possibly up to a week.”
One week. The crew perks up a little. A week of extra life is nothing to sneeze at, as my mother would say, except that the idiom never made sense to me, and I never asked. Anyway.
“An extra week! That’s great,” Fenn says.
“No, I mean, a week total.”
Wait. What?
“What did you say?” Gammand says, standing. “We have a week? We had three weeks when we landed. Then two. It’s only been… We should still have eleven days left! Now only seven?” He turns to Portia. “I thought that hormone experiment extended us by a day!”
“It did,” Portia says. She doesn’t look shocked at all by what Doran just said. She stands to her full height and uses a portable holo projector to display a complicated graph in the center of the room.
“Everything I’m gathering involves the symbiotic relationship between humans and Cyclo, as well as the plethora of microorganisms within and on the surface of the matrix. Her microorganism biome is nonpathogenic by nature, and—”
“English,” Fenn says. “Speak English, Portia. Please.”
“I am. Get a translator or a dictionary or an education, I don’t care.” She turns to me instead and keeps going. I can see Fenn rolling his eyes next to me. “As I was saying, the bacteria that live naturally within Cyclo don’t hurt her or us. But Cyclo has changed so much in only the last forty-eight hours. Many of these natural, healthy bacteria have died, and in their absence, other dangerous strains have become aggressive.”
“So you’re saying she’s becoming a petri dish of infectious soup,” Fenn says.
Portia bares her black gums at him. I tap quietly on Fenn’s back.
... - --- .--. .. -
Stop it.
He presses his lips together and settles down. Good.
“Can they affect us?” I ask. “These bacteria?”
“Possibly. You should try not to break skin when possible. We don’t need new routes of infection, as we have limited first aid supplies.”
“What about how Cyclo is dealing with us on board?” Gammand asks.
“So far, so good. Since no one is hibernating or sleeping within her matrix anymore, we’re losing some data there—but Fenn’s stay inside her matrix showed that hibernation was relatively safe at one point on the graph. Otherwise, she’s accepted us like her previous crew.”
“Are there any updates on what happened to Miki?” I ask.
“No,” Doran says. He looks pointedly at me from Fenn’s holo. “We still don’t understand who did it, or why. I had Fenn run a DNA diagnostic, and at least in the areas where he’s searched so far, there are no traces of Miki’s DNA on the ship.”
“You did?” I whisper to him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Doran’s orders,” he whispers back.
“What about another passenger on the ship? Someone hidden, who might have killed her?” Fenn asks Doran.
“There’s so much leftover DNA scattered throughout the ship from the previous passengers that we can’t verify another living life form.”
Gammand stands to show us the data downloads he’s been packaging into different forms—but he loses me quickly with his talk of quantum data binders and respooling DNA drives. Fenn stands and illuminates the center of the room with a structural model of Cyclo. Vast swaths of her body are color-coded. Not the Cyclo language I know, but the crew’s own designations. About one quarter of her is bright red, but not all in the same places. He goes through the colors—which zones are safest for us, and which ones are too toxic. On the map, red is very bad.
“How toxic are we talking?” Portia says.
“Not compatible with organic life,” Fenn says. “The info I’ve picked up, from drones sent through about seventy percent of the ship, shows that the toxic levels in these red zones mean we’d die within seconds. Temperatures there have plummeted to below freezing, and some of the radiation leaks are bad. But the worst is southeast delta, gamma, and a few small sections of beta. Her ability to make and store light energy in her mantle was bad before. Yesterday it got a last surge of energy input, now it’s completely shot.”
At this, I look out the window of the bridge and see Cyclo’s filmy, ethereal mantle spreading out into space. It’s a deep, dark blue, and I can barely see the edge of it as it thins out. I wish I could have seen it when it was brilliant orange and red, capturing light far into the UV spectrum from the nearby stars. Gammand coughs, and I remember to listen to him.
“The Calathus’s energy stores are slowly depleting. She recycles waste very well, but she’s running out of recyclables. So her burst vacuoles in the core are sealed for now, and Cyclo added another layer of protection in the last twelve hours. But the chemicals there are incredibly toxic. Even the hardiest organisms known in the universe couldn’t survive this.”
“Oh. You mean Quintifia sporolirus,” I say. “It can survive temperatures on both ends of the spectrum beyond any living thing, extremes of pressures and radiation levels, too.” Portia nods appreciatively at my words. There is a camaraderie, I’m finding, between people who understand small units of information that perhaps no one else finds interesting. I’ve felt this way about Fenn. But it also makes me want to spend a whole day with Portia talking about impossibly strong, small things. I am finding that I may be one of them.
Gammand turns to all of us. “All of your holofeed units will have constantly updating info on where you can work safely. In the meantime, it’s time to sleep.”
“Too hungry to sleep,” Portia says, groaning.
“You have your food ration,” he says.
“I’m so sick of our rations,” Portia says.
“I can get something different,” I say. “In my room. I’ve a supply.”
“Does it look like a lump of mud, in brick form?” Gammand asks.
“Well, no…” I say.
“Then I’m going with you.” He stands up and heads for the door. “I’d prefer not to live my last days eating bricks.”
“It’s just reconstitutes and freeze-dried food, though. Nothing fresh,” I warn.
“As if we’ve eaten anything fresh in the last year,” Portia says. “Come on. Let’s go to your little room. I’m so hungry I could trzlia grookna.”
I don’t know what that means, but I think perhaps I shouldn’t be anywhere near her mouth when Portia is hungry.
“I’m coming, too,” Fenn says. “Starving.”
Gammand actually laughs. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him laugh out loud, and the sound is grand and bright. The corners of my mouth twitch, bewitching and asking me to smile. Portia and Fenn grin at each other. I get the feeling that these glimpses of Gammand are rare and precious, and they all seem cheered up beyond their usual selves.
I don’t have a right to smile, not while so many terrible things battle to keep me lead-heavy with sadness. Mother, Cyclo, Miki. The inescapable feeling that I am losing a game that I never agreed to play.
But there is Fenn’s laugh, tempting me now, right now, to find even the smallest quark of joy.
What am I waiting for?
Will I be a terrible person for feeling joy again?
Custom says I should be sad. Sad for a long time.
But I am tired, so tired of falling in neat lines, and staying inside boundaries that have been defined by everyone but myself.
I grin irreverently and laugh, too. It sounds like a bird chirping in my own ears. “Let’s go.”