I feel a lot better once we are outside again. The suns are shining, slanting lower in the mid-afternoon. There’s a hint of miasma in the air—not enough to endanger my companions, but enough for me to feel. Down the hill in a different direction from the construction site, a wolf beetle scurries into a line of thick brambles. I catch the brief iridescent gleam of a shimmerfly. And I am not going to be buried alive.
Below, the work crew is leaving the tents, headed back to the excavator. Shu-Fen, however, meets us at our rover. “Everything go okay?” she asks.
“That was a very disturbing place,” I tell her.
“What was it?”
“It was a prison. And the prisoners were still in their cells. All just skeletons.”
“What were they like? They weren’t human right? Something crazy?” I flip open my sketchbook and show her my drawing. She regards it with interest, and I offer to produce another quick copy, since I don’t want to tear the page out. I start working on that, using a loose sheet of paper from her clipboard, and she continues asking questions. “So there were skeletons. Do you have a sample?”
“I did not go anywhere near the skeleton,” I tell her with a shudder.
Cleve surprises me by producing the requested sample. He pulls a small bag out of his backpack and taps it against his palm. A few pieces of bone land there, surprisingly fragile given the size of the skeletons themselves. My sketch was not going to be able to communicate their delicate nature, so it’s a good thing that Cleve thought ahead.
“What about tech?” Shu-Fen asks.
“There’s this radio kind of thing,” I say, handing over Cleve’s find. It occurs to me that word might not mean much to a Chiron native. “Er, a transmitter? I guess maybe you don’t have them…”
“I’m aware of the concept, even if they don’t work on this planet,” she says, looking over the device. She’s almost entranced with it. “It’s a weird thing for them to have on this planet,” she murmurs. “Interesting…”
“Well, maybe they had a way to make them work,” I suggest. “Do you want a pillowcase? It’s an example of their textiles.”
“And soap?” Cleve holds out the wrapped bar. “But don’t touch it.”
That makes Shu-Fen look up from the radio. “Don’t touch it?” she echoes, incredulous. Cleve holds up his other hand, showing off the new rash, and she takes his point.
Shu-Fen isn’t suspicious of us. We’ve been plenty cooperative, so she holds up her end of the deal, providing us with the hard drives from the cryopods. She gives us three. “What about the fourth cryopod?” I ask, curious what she’ll say. We woke up in that room; clearly we knew there were four. I think it would be suspicious not to ask.
“Don’t ask about the fourth cryopod,” Shu-Fen says. “Pretend it never existed.” That tells me everything I need to know. I don’t push any further.
As I finish up my drawing, adding in rough dimensions, she asks if there was anything we couldn’t bring out. She’s clearly frustrated that she can’t go down and see for herself, but she wants to know nonetheless. “There was a terminal mounted in a pedestal. Also the floor was very, very magnetic,” I share.
“Interesting. I wonder if that’s why it pulled your cryopod module there when you crashed.”
“Oh!” That thought had not occurred to me.
It reminds Cleve of something else below. “Beds,” he says, describing the only other major installation we observed down there.
This is a far more civil conversation than the last one we had with Shu-Fen, and it’s probably our last chance to gather information out here in the wild, so I casually turn the conversation in the direction of our next destination. “Since we’re so recently awoken and have been blundering around out here, what can you tell us about life in the bright dome we’ve seen glowing at night?” I ask.
“Frankly, I’m impressed that you all survived these four weeks,” she says.
She’s had a look at the data, then, to know how long we’ve been awake. “It’s hard to keep track of time here on this strange, alien world,” I say, “but that sounds about right.”
“And thirty years before that,” Cleve mutters, still sore.
Shu-Fen gives us directions to the main Morgan dome. “It’s the safest place to go. We have filtered air there. You should go—” she glances down at her watch, checking the date. “Actually, it’s almost the anniversary of Planetfall.”
“Is that a holiday or something?” I ask.
“Yeah! Of course it’s a holiday. Didn’t some countries back on Earth celebrate the day they were founded?”
“Yeah, but some countries also had sad memorial celebrations on those days,” I tell her. From what we’ve heard so far, there are plenty of people dissatisfied with how the Unity Project turned out.
“Well, it’s not sad that some of us got to exist,” she argues back. “Planetfallers!” she mutters under her breath, but I hear it quite clearly. She’ll carry her anti-planetfaller bias whichever way is convenient for her, I see. An hour ago she was angry about being born here without a choice, and now she’s defending the party thrown about it. I don’t engage; I’m not looking to have more arguments with her. When her barb fails to garner a response, she continues, “Anyway, the Morgan dome is where you want to go. Whatever your official jobs were, you’re thirty years late for them, so you probably won’t be able to do them anymore. But someone there will be able to extend you credit, I’m sure.”
What I really want is a lead to help us find Arx, but I can’t exactly come right out and say that. This woman works out in the field; she must go in for regular miasma checkups like Yushi mentioned. “So, we’ve been out here a while, and you’ve indicated that’s pretty unhealthy. We should probably get checked out somewhere. Is there someone you recommend?”
“Oh, yes, in the Biosciences Division, there’s a miasma unit. I saw a flyer that there’s a new treatment. You might be good candidates, though I really have no idea.” Her manner changes abruptly, and she continues more encouragingly, “You know what? Yes. Definitely check that out. All three of you would be excellent candidates. I’m sure they’d love to have some planetfallers there for the latest and greatest experimental treatments.”
I wonder what she has to gain from this. Is there a finder’s fee? Or would she just rather have planetfallers suffer from such experiments than her fellow Chiron-born? “So, we volunteer for these treatments and they extend us credit, or something?” I prod her.
“You can get a discount on them. I don’t know the exact details.” Shu-Fen produces a pamphlet and shows it to me. “Yeah, look here, this gives you an extra ten percent—ah, it says debt repayment ratio, that’s just like credits. Think of it like dollars, denarii, whatever currency you used to use, think of it like that.”
“Do you have a contact there?”
“Yeah, talk to Dr. Bingyi Khan. She’s one of the researchers at the miasma unit. And definitely tell her that I sent you because then I’ll get a referral bonus.” Ah, so there it is, what Shu-Fen can get out of sharing this information. “You should head there right away,” she encourages us. She describes generic effects of miasma poisoning to underline the threat, and it all tracks with what we’ve heard—and in some cases personally experienced.
I ask about parking in the dome, and Shu-Fen laughs off the question. There’s no way we would be able to afford it. Generally speaking, most individuals don’t have vehicles, just official units like Morgan Prospecting and the repo squads. “So do you have any advice for us so that our rover doesn’t get confiscated, property rights being what they are around here?” I press her.
“If it were me and I had a car, I’d find a safe place outside where no one’s going to look. Just hide it. That’ll be the safest thing you can do. But there are some outlying farms that are undomed—make sure not to park it around there.”
I’m surprised to hear about this, and Shu-Fen explains that crops can grow outside, even if people can’t. These aren’t native crops, though, they’re imports from Earth like corn and wheat. Shu-Fen doesn’t know if the plants have been modified in any way to thrive here. A ton of time and effort is spent spraying fungicide on these farms. This discussion leads her to warn us about xenofungus, which she says can infect equipment. She reiterates her warnings about miasma, too, and then she includes Cor’s favorite animal. “And wolf beetles? Not always cute, okay?” Cleve and I both chuckle at this, given how many other people have brushed off our experience with them. “Some of them have a little bit of snap,” Shu-Fen cautions us. “One bit me once. They’re fiercer than you’d think.”
I commiserate with her. “There was a wolf beetle nest here before this hillside caved in. We passed through it on our way out.”
“Good to know,” Shu-Fen says. We part ways amicably.