“Space turtles.”
“Ice turtles. Actually, very cold saltwater slugs. Or jellyfish. Probably something pretty near neutral buoyancy. That’s not the point. You could in theory have something evolve in an environment with very little available energy, and with a very . . . let’s call it ‘leisurely’ sense of time. It’s what the Tereshkova missions were looking for.”
“And that’s awesome,” Fayez said, blankly.
“Tereshkova One and Two were the first long-term crewed surveys of Europa? They were looking for extraterrestrial life.”
“Which they didn’t find.”
“Some amino acid precursors, but no life.”
“So the space turtles weren’t from Europa.”
A brief flash of annoyance rose in her and faded. They were both tired. They were both in the only ship in an unpopulated solar system with help weeks away at best. And she wasn’t explaining herself that well. She swallowed, set her shoulders, and went on.
“They weren’t. But maybe they were like what we were looking for. And here’s the other thing. The other form of life the Tereshkova missions were looking for was deep vent organisms.”
“Those I know. Worms and things that live near volcanic vents. They use the energy from the vent instead of sunlight.”
“And they also get a bunch of biologically interesting minerals, but yes.”
“Start talking vulcanism, and I know my way around,” Fayez said.
“That’s what Cara’s describing. That biome. Look. She talks about the cold above and the heat below. Like the ice shell of a water moon with a hot core. And free water in between. The part where she says she felt it starting to make more of itself. That’s . . . I don’t know. Some kind of reproduction. Mitosis or budding.”
“And the thing where she tasted stones,” Fayez said. “Minerals and nutrients floating up from below. You’re thinking they’re both there. These slow life turtles—”
“Jellyfish.”
“—and vent organisms too, but lower down.”
“Like what we were looking for on Europa.”
The line on his forehead erased itself. She wanted to keep going, but she knew her husband’s rhythms. He was working something through, and if she talked now, he wouldn’t hear her. The hum of the ship around them and the ticking of the air recycler were the only sounds until he laughed once, like a cough.
“Okay, I know what I was thinking of,” he said. “The part about the thing in the water.”
“The handhold?”
“Yeah, that. It happened after the . . . fuck . . . tasting stone? Seriously, I feel like we should have brought a poetry grad student along. This is bullshit as data.”
“You were thinking of something?”
“Right, sorry. If that was some kind of impressionistic, experiential description of iron uptake leading to magnetic navigation. Maybe that’s the handhold in the water?”
“And that thing at the end,” Elvi said. “When something went down into the heat and came back up scarred, but with this . . . revelatory whatever it was? If that’s the slow life intentionally reaching for a nutrient-rich environment for the first time. Seeking out food instead of just bumping into it. I think Cara is experiencing this organism’s evolutionary history. The diamond—”
“Thank you for not calling it an emerald.”
“—is showing her how they came to exist. Like if we were explaining life to something that had never seen anything like us by pushing down to organic chemistry and building the story up from there so that we’d have a common context.”
Fayez went quiet. The line on his forehead came back. Elvi pushed off the wall, turning to take the edge of her desk in her fingers and pull herself to a stop. He saw her expression and shook his head.
“No, it makes sense. Sort of. I see why that would be the best information-sharing strategy and all that. It’s just. Okay, say the protomolecule engineers have gotten us up to the part of their story where they were like hamsters avoiding the dinosaurs. I don’t mean to be an asshole, but . . . so what?”
Elvi didn’t know exactly what she’d been expecting him to say, but it hadn’t been that. “So we know something about what they are. This could be the origin of the species that established a vast galactic presence and overcame a bunch of things we always thought were laws of physics? That’s a big deal.”
“It is. I hear you. But it’s so far back, sweetie. If Cara could ask the diamond maybe the top five ways to keep vast monsters from beyond time and space from killing everyone, that might be a better place to start.”