“Traffic?”
“Like the Amaratsu,” she said. “The enemy did a thing, and then the traffic stopped. What if that’s how the enemy knew the thing worked. But with us? The traffic didn’t stop. I think we may be as hard for them to see and make sense of as they are for us. So part of what we can do is dirty up their data. All our random, uncoordinated transits are what they’re feeling. It’s like hearing rats in your walls and putting out different poisons until the noise stops. The noise stopping is how you know what worked. And since we’re still making transits in and out of that gate? As far as they know, their poison didn’t work.”
“That’s a hell of a theory.”
“Yep. Or.”
“Or?”
She popped to another audio mark. It was just one at first.
“Or this is inside the error bars for how they work, and they’ll be murdering us all shortly.” She couldn’t keep the despair out of her voice. Even if she had, he would have heard it. They’d known each other too long for secrets. “We have to push harder for answers.”
“Harder than we have been?”
Elvi took her hand back and pressed her fingers into her eyes, rubbing from the center out to the sides. There was grit in her eyelashes. Tears that had dried there.
“I’ll talk to Cara,” Elvi said. “I’ll see if she’s up for it.”
“Talk to Xan too. He’s the one locked in the catalyst’s chamber for a zillion hours. And he doesn’t talk about it, but it’s freaking him out.”
We’re all fucking freaked out snapped to the front of Elvi’s mind, but she didn’t say it.
When Fayez spoke again, the careful cheerfulness was gone. He sounded worn and broken. He sounded more like she felt. He sounded real. “I’m not telling you what to do. It’s just . . .”
“Say it.”
“Cortázar kept them in a cage for decades. He ran tests on them with no concern for them.”
“I have Cara’s consent—”
“All these dives are changing her, and we don’t have a clear idea what the changes are. The fact that she enjoys it doesn’t reassure me at all.”
Elvi bristled, but it was Fayez and she was short on sleep and long on whatever adrenaline broke down into. Some kind of mandelic acid, she thought. She wasn’t sure. When he went on, she tried to listen and not just react.
“I know I’m not my sanest self right now. We’ve all been stuck on this ship for way too long, and everyone’s fraying, and it’s all scary as shit. I get that. I do. But that’s why we have ethical standards. So that when things get murky we have something to show us the way through.”
“And you think I’m violating ethical standards?”
“Yes. I love you, but yes you totally are. Absolutely.” He grimaced his apology.
Elvi took a long breath and let it out slowly through her nose. The Falcon hummed around them like it was also waiting for her to speak.
“I know,” she said, and it was actually a relief to say it out loud. “I am.”
“So what do we do about that?”
She crossed her arms. “Do you remember Dr. Negila?”
“That’s a name from a long time ago. She taught at the University of Calabar?”
“I took an ethics seminar with her as part of my postdoctorate work. There was a story we read about this beautiful, utopic land where everything was wonderful and enlightened and pleasant and good and just, except for one child who had to live in confusion and misery. One child, in exchange for paradise to everyone else.”
“I know that one. Omelas.”
“This isn’t that,” Elvi said. “I’m working for an authoritarian dictator in a system where people are suffering and screwing each other over and killing each other. I’m compromising my safety and the safety of the people who work for me by smuggling my research to my boss’s political enemies. We’re not doing anything here to make a beautiful, gracious, pleasant utopia. If we win, the lives we save will be the same mix of shit, frustration, and absurdity that they’ve always been.”
“True.”
“The child in the story was being sacrificed for a quality of life. If I’m sacrificing Cara, and I acknowledge that I may be doing that, it’s not for quality. It’s for quantity. If I have to lose her in order to keep the quantity of human life from going to zero? It’s cheap. If it costs everything, it’s still a good trade.”