Cibola Burn

The boy sitting on the clinic table was six years old. His skin was the same deep brown as Elvi’s own, but with an ashy color to it. Not dryness, but something deeper. His eyes were bloodshot like he’d been weeping. Maybe he had been. His mother stood in the corner, her arms crossed and a vicious scowl on her lips. Lucia’s voice was crisp and calm, but her shoulders rode high up beside her ears.

“So I’m seeing this here,” she said, as her finger pulled down on the boy’s cheek, opening a thin gap between the lower lid and the roughened surface of the eyeball. The discoloration was almost invisible in the redness, but it was there. The faintest hint of green.

“I see,” Elvi said. She smiled at the boy. He didn’t smile back. “So, Jacob —”

“Jason.”

“Sorry. Jason. How long have you had trouble seeing things?”

The boy shrugged. “Right after my eyes started hurting again.”

“And everything looks… green?”

He nodded. Lucia touched Elvi’s arm. Silently, the doctor shone a light into the boy’s eye. The iris barely reacted, and Elvi caught a glimpse of something in the fluid behind the boy’s cornea, like a badly maintained aquarium. She nodded.

Lucia stood up, smiling at the woman. “If you’ll wait with him here, Amanda. I’ll be right back.”

Amanda nodded once, sharply. Elvi let Lucia draw her through the examining room door and down a short hallway. Outside, a stiff breeze had picked up, rattling the clinic’s doors and windows.

“He’s the only one I’ve seen like this,” Lucia said. “There’s nothing in the literature.”

“His mother doesn’t seem to like me very much,” Elvi said, trying to make it a joke.

“Her wife was shot and killed by RCE security,” Lucia said.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

The testing array was good, but it was old. Ten years, maybe fifteen. A long scar ran across the bottom of its screen where something had gouged at it. Elvi could believe it had made the long trek from war-torn Ganymede to come here. She was surprised it still worked, but when Lucia thumbed in her access code, the screen came to life. The sample was beautiful in its way. A branching of elegant green like a pictogram meaning tree.

“It began in the extracellular matrix,” Lucia said. “Low-level inflammation, but nothing worse than that. I hoped it would clear up on its own.”

“Only now it’s in the vitreous humor,” Elvi said.

“I was wondering…” Lucia began, but Elvi had already taken out her hand terminal and started syncing it to the array. It only took a few seconds to find a match. Elvi tapped through the data.

“All right,” she said. “The closest match is some of the rainwater organisms.” Lucia shook her head, and Elvi pointed up. “You know how the clouds are greenish? There’s a whole biome of organisms up there that have found ways to exploit the moisture and high ultraviolet exposure.”

“Like plants? Fungi?”

“Like them,” Elvi said. “It’s not where we’ve been burning most of our cycles. But it looks like a pretty crowded niche. A lot of species fighting for resources. I’m guessing this little fella was in a raindrop that dropped into Jason’s eye and found a way to live there.”

“He’s had several eye infections, but they all came from familiar organisms. This thing. Is it contagious, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t guess so,” Elvi said. “We’re just as new to it as it is to us. It evolved to spread in open air through a water cycle. It’s salt tolerant if it’s living in us, and that’s interesting. If his eyes were already compromised, he may have been vulnerable to it, but unless he starts throwing his tears at people, wouldn’t think it would go too far.”

“What about his eyesight?”

Elvi straightened up. Lucia looked at her seriously, almost angrily. Elvi knew it wasn’t directed at her, but at the terrible ignorance they were both struggling under. “I don’t know. We knew something like this was bound to happen sooner or later, but I don’t know what we can do about it. Except tell people not to go out when it’s raining.”

“That isn’t going to help him,” Lucia said. “Can you ask the labs back home for help?”

A hundred objections filled Elvi’s mind. I don’t control the RCE research teams and All the data analysis is planned out and running months ahead of where we are now and I just got another sample of a third biome this morning. She tapped at her hand terminal, saving a copy of the array’s data, then translating it into RCE’s favored formats and sending it winging through the air back to the Israel, and then the Ring, and then Earth.

“I’ll try,” she said. “In the meantime, though, we need to let people know it’s a problem. Has Carol Chiwewe heard about this?”

“She knows I’m suspicious and that I wanted to bring you in on it,” Lucia said.

Elvi nodded, already trying to think what the best way would be to bring the issue to Murtry’s attention. “Well, you let your side know, and I’ll tell mine.”