He stopped going to school, gave up his bed at the orphanage. He laid out a bedroll on the floor of Dr. Khan’s lab each night, and stowed it in a corner each morning. Rina’s presence became his peace. Her voice told him ceaselessly—whatever else she might be saying—that he was home.
Greaves’ memory is eidetic and perfect, a complete record of his past to which new information is added at a steady rate of one second per second. It isn’t possible for him to forget. But sometimes when he remembers his mother (her hands washing his face, her face smiling down into his crib, her body cooling beside his on blood-soaked gravel) she has Dr. Khan’s face. His brain has performed a semantic substitution between two nearly identical signs.
So if there were a feasible way to give her what she wants—a promise that he will not expose himself to unnecessary danger—he would do it. He would very much like to offer her that reassurance. But he can’t.
Because unless he can find some new insight in the remaining months of the mission, the mission will fail. Unless
Middle level:
Unless the girl is what she seems. Different from the human baseline and from the hungries. New. Fitting into a space whose shape I can’t define yet or even hypothesise. And that’s good. That’s very good. If known factors permit of no solutions, any solution must come from a space beyond what is known.
Focus.
The priorities haven’t changed. It’s only that the list of variables has lengthened. Lengthened in a way that shows promise.
Top level (but is it the top level any more, or is she?):
Summary of environmental factors found to inhibit or retard the spread of the hungry pathogen.
NONE.
Greaves pauses, staring at the word with the top of the pencil pressed hard against his lower lip. There are thousands of pages of mission logs and experimental notes in the double-reinforced filing cabinet underneath the lab’s main centrifuge, but their substantive findings can be factored down to that single word. Dr. Fournier’s team has studied, tabulated and graphed the effects on the hungries of temperature, sound, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, relative and absolute humidity, light (duration and intensity), presence or absence of fifty-three trace elements in air and soil, thermoperiod, acidity and alkalinity, macro-and micro-nutrients and the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. They have done this both through their own sampling and through extensive study of the specimen caches left for them by the crew of the Charles Darwin.
The hope was to find an inhibitor. A weakness they could seize on and weaponise. If the pathogen was adversely affected by any of these things, Beacon and its inhabitants could adjust accordingly. They could make themselves as inhospitable an environment as possible for the disease to take root in.
But Cordyceps is robust and hardy. Its onset and progress are the same in every case. Human tissue suits it well, and anchors it against all trials and tribulations. Human blood nourishes and waters it.
Which, as far as Greaves can see, leaves only two options. One is to synthesise a vaccine or a cure, and the team are nowhere on that. He has seen Dr. Akimwe’s reports, knows that they’re years away from a means of countering the infection or guarding against it.
The other option is what he has been working on all this time: behavioural observation of hungries in the field. He is trying to build up a map of how the fungus shapes and repurposes the mammalian brain. A human body is not the environment Cordyceps was originally designed for, however much it has made itself at home there. It started out as a parasite on insects. So perhaps the fit isn’t perfect. Perhaps it’s loose enough that he can find an exploit—a behavioural trigger that will make the hungries damage themselves or swerve away and find some other prey.
Middle level:
Was she real?
He hates to think that thought, let alone write it, but he doesn’t flinch because you can’t rule any hypothesis out until you’ve disproved it.
It has occurred to Greaves before now to wonder about his own sanity (defined as the accuracy of the assessments he makes of the world around him and its processes, of the men and women around him and their behaviours, and of course of himself as separate from all of the above, a unique system that he observes from the inside). He knows his brain isn’t like everyone else’s. He is painfully aware that people in general take pleasure from things that terrify him, are afflicted by things that fascinate him. On the whole, he has learned to live with those differences. But suppose they are indications of some deeper difference that amounts to damage? Dysfunction?
To go mad, to lose your mind, which is the only thing that’s really yours because it’s really you … That would be an inexpressibly terrible thing. And at the same time it would be nothing, because you yourself would be unable, from within that damaged state, to recognise or reflect on it. Greaves considers this paradox. He is afraid of something that may already have happened.
No, he is afraid of its consequences. Of the queasy, unsettling possibility that he has lost touch with reality and can never re-join it.
He is sure that the anomalous girl was real. Almost. Almost sure. She had the fearsome clarity of a hallucination, but still …
A thought occurs to him. He undoes the buttons on his jacket, pulls up his T-shirt and examines the flesh beneath. In one small area, roughly ellipsoidal, with a long radius of three centimetres and a short radius of two, his skin is yellow deepening to blue. He is bruised in the place where she touched him. Where her heel kicked off from him.
Greaves nods, satisfied.
Top level:
The hungries have night behaviours and day behaviours. But all my observations have taken place during daylight. The use of thermal sensory organs or organelles for hunting by night was confirmed by Caldwell et al in the third and last of their WHO reports. The absence of a normal sleep cycle has been argued by Selkirk and Bales. But the evidential base is slender. A few hours of observation in each case, from a camouflaged hide whose armour and defences restricted vision and kept the hungries at a distance.
To see them at night, up close, might yield valuable insights.
But Greaves can’t lie, even to himself.
If I go into Invercrae, and if she’s there, I might find her. Study her in situ, in her habitat. Further observation of behaviours, esp feeding. Possibly find some clue to where she lives. If successful in this, tissue sample from shed skin or hair cells might be obtained.
Of course, leaving Rosie at night exposes him to a new set of potential dangers. Moving in a nocturnal environment will be slow and difficult, while at the same time it will be easier for the hungries to locate and hunt him.
It’s time to test the suit.
10