That’s enough, someone says. All right, people. By the numbers and by the book.
Chapter Eight: Elvi
Fayez, floating at her private desk, scrolled through the notes. Whenever he was confused or skeptical, a little line appeared between his eyebrows. “So does this make any fucking sense to you? Because I’m baffled.”
The notes had the scans of Cara’s brain and body and the ones of the BFE, but the important part for Elvi was the interview and subject report with Cara. It had taken them hours to complete, Elvi asking questions and Cara answering verbally or writing out her reply, and while it was the least objective thing in the report, it was also the thing that excited her most.
“It does. I mean, I think it does,” Elvi said, and paused. “I have some ideas.”
He shut down the window and turned his attention to her. “Maybe you better tell me, then. Because I don’t know what I’m looking at here.”
She gathered her thoughts. Exobiology hadn’t been Elvi’s first field of concentration. Back in the dim and ancient times that were really just a few wild and change-filled decades before, she’d gone to Sejong World College because it had the best medical genetics program that she could afford. When she was being honest with herself, it wasn’t even that she loved medical genetics all that much. When she was fifteen, she’d seen Amalie ud-Daula play a medical geneticist in Handful of Rain, and she spent the next year trying to get her hair to look the same. She never really managed. The weird alchemy of adolescent imprinting transformed her unconsidered identification with an entertainment feed actor into an interest in how strands of DNA turned into pathologies.
The idea of a flaw as tiny as a missed base pair translating itself into a slightly different curve on a protein and then into a leaking heart valve or a nonfunctional eye was compelling and creepy in more or less equal degrees. She thought that it was her passion, and she’d followed it with the dedication of a woman who believed she was on the path the universe wanted for her.
She’d taken a course on non-terrestrial fieldwork because her advisor had pointed out how many more postings there were for newly graduated medical geneticists on Mars and the stations on Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons than there were on Earth. Elvi had taken the hint.
Lectures had been held in a small room with yellow, water-stained carpet and a wall screen with a burned-out pixel that made it look like there was a fly on it. Professor Li was three years into his retirement, and only came back to teach the class because he liked it. Maybe his enthusiasm had been infectious, or maybe it had all been the universe’s way of putting her in the right place at the right time. Whatever the reason—or lack of reason—Professor Li had done a section about the first explorations for extraterrestrial life in the oceans of Europa, and Elvi’s brain had lit up like someone had put euphorics in her breakfast cereal.
To the dismay of her mother and her academic advisor, she changed her focus to the then-purely-hypothetical field of exobiology. Her advisor’s exact words had been From a work perspective, you’d be better off learning to tune pianos.
And that had been true right up until Eros moved. After, everybody in her program had jobs for life.
She was older now than Professor Li had been when he told her about Europa and those first tentative efforts to show that Earth’s tree of life wasn’t alone in the universe. She’d seen things she hadn’t dreamed of, been places she hadn’t known existed when she was a girl, and found herself—thanks to chance and James fucking Holden—at the razor’s edge of the most important research projects in human history.
Strange then, how it all cycled back to Professor Li’s lecture about Europa. Cold dead Europa, which had turned out to never have had any life in it but opened up the universe to her anyway.
Elvi steadied herself with a handhold. She’d been on the float enough that it came almost naturally now. She still missed being able to pace. “Okay. How much do you know about the slow life model?”
“I am now aware that there is something called a slow life model.”
“Right. Basics. Okay. So, there’s a range of metabolic rates. You can see that in animals. You have something fast with a high reproduction rate like rats or chickens on one hand, and tortoises with a really long lifespan and a much slower metabolism on the other. The whole tree of life is on that spectrum. It predicts that you’d see things evolving in very low-energy environments that, y’know, needed very little energy. Low metabolisms, low reproduction. Long lifespan. Slow life.”