The Vital Abyss

Officially, my mother died of pneumonia. I had learned enough to understand what each of her drugs did, to read her fate from the pills that arrived. I knew by their shapes and colors and the cryptic letters pressed into their sides when the vast bureaucracy that administered basic health care had moved her from palliative care to full hospice. In the end, she was on little more than sedatives and antivirulence drugs. I gave them to her because it was what I had to give her. The night she died, I sat at her feet, my head resting on the red wool blanket that covered her wasted lap. Heartbreak and relief were my soul’s twin bodyguards. She moved beyond pain or distress, and I told myself the worst was over.

The notification from basic came the next day. With my change in status, the rooms we had been in were no longer appropriate. I would be reassigned to a shared dormitory, but should be prepared to relocate to São Paulo or Bogotá, depending on availability. I thought—mistakenly, as it turned out—that I wasn’t ready to leave Londrina. I moved in with a friend and former lover. He treated me gently, making coffee in the mornings and playing cards through the empty afternoons. He suggested that it might be less that I needed to stay in the city of my birth, the city of my mother, and more that I needed some control over the terms of my departure.

I applied to apprentice programs at London, Gdansk, and Luna and was rejected by all of them. I was competing against people who had years of formal schooling, political connections, and wealth. I lowered my expectations, searching for uplift programs that aimed specifically for autodidacts who had been living on basic, and six months later, I arrived in Tel Aviv and met Aaron, a former Talmudic scholar who had researched his way to atheism and was now my dorm mate.

The third night, we sat together on our little balcony looking out over the city. It was sunset, and we were both a little high on marijuana and wine. He asked me what my ambitions were.

“I want to understand,” I told him.

He shrugged only his left shoulder. “Understand what, Paolo? The mind of God? The reason for suffering?”

“Just how things work,” I said.

* * *

It became clear immediately that Brown had become the most important person not only among the nanoinformatics group or even research in general, but in the entire room. Over the following days, Fong, who had never treated anyone in research as better than suspicious, deferred to him when the guards brought food. Drexler sat near him before lights-out, laughing at anything he said that might pass for a joke. When Sujai and Ma fell into one of their singing mock competitions, they invited Brown in, though he demurred.

Speculation ran in all directions: We would be extradited and tried for the dead Martians on Phoebe; the company had found diplomatic channels to negotiate for our release; the Outer Planets Alliance and the Martian Republic were at war and our fates were going to be part of the settlement. My own theory—the only one that really made sense to me—was that the experiment had been running all this time and something new had happened. Grave or miraculous, it carried a weight of importance and inscrutability that brought us back from our forgotten place in a Belter prison and into the light. The Martian had come because he needed the things that only we knew, and possibly needed it badly enough to overlook our previous sins. In the observation windows above us, guards appeared more often now, usually with their attention fixed on Brown. It was not only the prisoners who found his new status of interest.

Brown himself changed, but not in the way others might have. While I believe he made use of the opportunities his new status afforded him, he did so rationally. He didn’t hold himself more grandly, did not deepen the timbre of his voice. He did not hold court or bask in the new attention given to him. Humanity is social, and the self-image of humans is built from the versions of ourselves we see and hear reflected in others; that this is not true of the research group—of Coombs or Brown or Quintana or me—was, after all, precisely the point. Instead, Brown balanced his new power with the new risks it carried. He made an unofficial alliance with Fong, staying near her and her people so that, should Quintana or I try to take the hand terminal by force, there were others who could interfere in an attempt to curry favor with him.

Van Ark responded by eating and sleeping closer to Quintana and Alberto and myself. He’d had no love of Brown, and treated his elevation as an insult. The room was pulling itself apart like a cell preparing to divide. Brown and the Martian’s hand terminal formed one locus. Quintana and I, the other.