Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Yorrik glanced at the hanar, still floating, still sleeping. “Dejected: I am not sure it matters whose fault it is now. And it certainly will not change what is happening to you. Delicate request: Please… tell me how you feel, as often as you can. It will help. Correction: It will help other people.”

  “I feel like I just got fired out of the back end of a Hensa cruiser, that’s how I feel. I’m boiling hot, my head is pounding, and I’m just so… I’m so fucking hungry, elcor. Is there something to eat in there? Anything?”

  Yorrik glanced at the creeping frost at the corners of the medbay glass. The ship’s temperature controls had not improved. “Gentle tone: Unfortunately, the Si’yah has limited food supplies on board. It was presumed that the Nexus would feed us when we arrived, having already begun cultivation on several habitable planets. Statement of sympathy: I am also hungry.”

  “You may be hungry, but I need to eat, you fat cretin. I’m starving.”

  “Genuine regret: I am sorry.”

  The quarantine chime sounded softly every minute on the minute.

  The first sores appeared three hours later.

  So did the captain.

  Small, hard, dark blue, all over the batarian’s throat and jawline, rising up from the rash like toxic islands in a river of pus. Yorrik’s scent glands released a musk of relief and joy as Captain Qetsi’Olam stumbled into the medbay though a small access panel near the floor, breathing heavily through her facemask. Her black-and-purple suit was stained with oil and other, unmentionable industrial filth.

  “Concerned query: Where is Senna’Nir?”

  The captain collected herself quickly. “As you may have noticed, we are having issues with the networked systems. The trams stopped. We split up somewhere back there in the maintenance tunnels. He went to lock down the cargo bay. I came here. Unless you’d prefer I go to assist my colleague?”

  “Overenthusiastic interruption: No, no, please stay. I have results. You are interested in results. You want results. You will not leave us here alone while there are results to be had.”

  “I gotta scratch, Doc,” Jalosk Dal’Virra wheezed, clawing desperately at his sores.

  “Do not scratch,” Yorrik said for the hundredth time.

  His four black eyes bulged with the effort, but he stopped.

  “Kindly suggestion: If you depress the button on the wall next to you, a medi-gel mist will dispense from the ceiling. It may offer some relief.”

  The batarian jammed his fingers against the wall, moaning loudly as the mist hit his swelling neck.

  The captain looked over the afflicted colonist dispassionately. “You should kill him,” she said softly. “Now, while he is still himself and has a little dignity left. It’s only kindness. You have your results. Surely you know all you need to.”

  Yorrik sighed through his olfactory slats. “With ethical ambivalence: It would be better to see it through. Besides, I might yet heal him.”

  Qetsi put her hand on the medbay glass. “Heal him? Is that even possible? Have you found a cure already?”

  “With deep self-loathing: No. But I might.” He shifted his gray bulk miserably. “He has children. I have to try.”

  Dal’Virra coughed. “Ungrateful shits, children. No greater debt than the one owed to the fools who gave them life. Yet they refuse to pay it. They just refuse. It’s extraordinary. Everything else you make in this life, you own outright. Yet I am expected to allow my children to do as they please, and if they leave that debt unpaid all their lives, I have no recourse to collect what I am owed.”

  “And what are you owed?” asked the captain with what seemed like genuine curiosity. She turned her whole body toward him, every microgesture seeming to communicate that there was nothing in the world so important as what this one batarian scratching himself to death on a lonely ship was going to say next. It was quite extraordinary. Yorrik could not help wanting her to pay so much attention to him. No wonder Senna couldn’t let her go.

  A large tear welled up in the corner of Dal’Virra’s lower left eye. “Love, I suppose. Unconditional love.”

  “That’s not the answer I expected from a batarian,” Qetsi said. “I like that answer very much. There were so many who told me I should not even consider letting your kind aboard my ship. But, Jalosk, I believe very strongly that all people should be given a chance to become great. It is everything, I believe. That chance is the most important thing in the universe. My people were denied that chance so often, by so many. I couldn’t deny it to you, just because you are not like me. I could not carry that into the new galaxy.” This was the old Qetsi’Olam. The one who could inspire a speck of dust if she got it alone for long enough. When she spoke again, her voice was thick and melodious with sincerity. “Thank you for proving me right.”

  Jalosk grunted. “Yes, love. And affection. And undying loyalty. And a ten-to-fifteen-percent share of their profits, no less than a brokering agent would receive. I brokered them into existence, after all. And they should… they should stay where I put them. They should stay nearby. Generous terms, by any bank’s measure. But of course love. Did you really think batarians don’t love their children? No race can evolve without that trait. Otherwise, we would all eat our young alive for the trouble they cause us. Would it surprise you to know I nursed my little son Grozik back to health when he fell from our habitat roof? Always going where he shouldn’t, my little warrior. And Zofi, when she cried because the other children were cruel to her, would it shock you to know I—yes, I! A batarian!—wiped her tears and kissed her wounds? And why do you think we’re monsters? Because we keep slaves? Because we sell things?”

  “With deep disgust: You sell weapons, narcotics, and people. That is what your species did with your chance.”

  Jalosk shrugged. “Someone buys them. If rainbows, smiles, and cuddles brought the highest prices, we’d be selling those instead. Back home, I had asari customers, salarian, turian, even human. Yet you do not hate their entire races for purchasing and using what the batarians sell. Yes, yes, slavery. It is so terrible. I have heard it all. Yet my father was a slave. He bought our freedom. He bought us a future. You can buy your freedom from a batarian slaver. Good luck trying that with anyone else. On Khar’shan, slave is a position. Everywhere else, it is a condition. And again, I must point out, we do sell slaves to someone, and those someones are only sometimes other batarians. You had it so easy on your garden worlds, with your fruits and your vegetables and your fresh summer rains and nice, tidy Prothean artifacts tied up in a bow for you to find. We clawed our way to the stars. We made an economy out of slime, muck, thirty-year dry spells, and an alien slagheap that made no more sense than a moron’s scream in the dark. So we had to do it selling all your worst instincts back to you at a steep markup. That says more about you than us. I lifted my entire family out of the laborer caste and into the merchant caste—what greater love can there be than that?”

  “With cautious curiosity: And their mother? Is she not also owed a debt? Borbala said you took your children from her.”

  Jalosk grimaced. Another large, heavy tear welled up in his eye, this time the lower right. “Their mother was an imbecile. What the mother of worms says of me is actually true of Ukiro Dal’Virra. She left me and married a male of the military class.”

  “Embarrassment: I am sorry.”

  Jalosk knuckled a tear away. “No, no, you misunderstand! I am proud of her! It was a daring match, and allowed our offspring a path into the elite, perhaps even the Khar’shan ruling classes. I never loved her more than the day she succeeded in seducing him. I could have burst with admiration and personal satisfaction. She was an imbecile because, even with the access her new rank afforded her, she insisted on staying on Camala, even after… even after. They struck the eezo refineries first, those things, gigantic and black as nothing you can imagine. Like insects… but made of space itself. They turned people into… husks. Into withered, dried-meat shadows of themselves. Hungry shadows. Ukiro though
t she could keep them safe. But something like that… doesn’t care about caste. I took my children to keep them safe. They still haven’t forgiven me. I guess they never will, now. But at least… At least whatever was happening to Camala, even if it happened everywhere else in the galaxy, at least it is six hundred years over now and Grozik and Zofi are far beyond it. There. That is the idiot dolt that scion of Ferank told you could never do anything worth doing. Well, I did something. I did something. My father was a slave, and his father was a red sand addict suckling at the teat of whoever would get him his next fix, and now my children will be among the founding families of a new galaxy, a caste beyond castes. Her father was an oligarch, and she is an oligarch. Who scored better, between the two of us?” Jalosk coughed viciously, and for some time. Tears trickled down his cheeks, darkening the teal spots there. “Dammit, this is intolerable. It is humiliating to weep in front of an alien. I do not even know why I’m crying.”

  “Regretfully: That is because you are not crying. Those are not tears. You are weeping cerebral spinal fluid. Most likely one of the abscesses on your neck has collapsed into a fistula, forming a passageway between your spinal column and your mucus membranes.”

  “Oh,” said Jalosk Dal’Virra. Another tear splashed onto the floor. “So I am going to cry myself to death. I can’t imagine a more un-batarian way to go.”

  “Comforting bedside manner: No, no, do not worry, other things will kill you first.”

  “Perhaps it’s time you gave me that report, Yorrik,” said the captain. And then her attention was on him fully, like the light of a red giant, like no one else existed, and she had never spoken to anyone else in all her life. It was uncanny that she could do that. Yorrik wondered if it could be taught. A wonderful skill for the greatest actor in the Andromeda galaxy, if he could get hold of it.

  “Depressive quotation: ‘Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio,’” the elcor said to the hooded quarian suit hanging beside the autopsy table, its hips and torso wrapped in violet fabric and brown belts, like all quarian suits.

  Horatio had much to say.

  The virus that was dead and frozen in the cryopod victims was screamingly alive in Jalosk Dal’Virra’s veins. It was also alive inside the quarian suit. The suit was doing what all environmental suits were supposed to do—identify the intruder and neutralize it without harming the suit’s fragile occupant. Horatio had no occupant, of course, but the suit itself didn’t know that. It only knew something inside it was sick. It was applying all quarian technology to the problem, isolating the puncture points where Yorrik had injected the batarian’s blood and various other fluids into the mesh musculature in pressurized plasto-bubbles, washing the samples with an array of antivirals, antibiotics, aerosolized medi-gel, painkillers, DNA and RNA unhelixers, nanoanalyzers, antigens—anything that might alleviate symptoms, identify the virus, or prove effective in killing it. So far, none of it had helped. If they were on a quarian Flotilla ship, Horatio would interface with the medical mainframe and cross-reference other case studies and plague histories in order to locate other victims and begin to paint a picture of just how bad the situation was. But there was no mainframe here. Just a poor four-eyed bastard crying himself to death.

  Something flashed in the upper-left corner of Horatio’s upturned faceplate, just above his fluorescent-painted eyebrow. It looked like an equation, but it wasn’t. Those numbers worried Yorrik more than any of the rest of it. He hated those numbers. Why couldn’t they be other numbers? Safer numbers? No matter how the elcor tried to focus on something else, those numbers kept dragging his eyes back, taunting him, telling him to just give up now.

  As an ear, nose, and throat doctor, Yorrik was not at all unfamiliar with viruses. The elcor lip slats might look like simple orifices, but they were terribly delicate sensory organs, prone to infection. If this were a case of ochreous rhinophage, or Thunowanuro megafluenza, or even the vicious Hunno plague that had torn through the settlements on Sangel a few decades ago, Yorrik would have felt very much in his element. If he could not be on stage, then second best was stage managing the body’s greatest performance: healing. But this pathogen was not anyone’s element, because this pathogen had almost certainly never existed anywhere before it existed on the Keelah Si’yah. Horatio had just finished a rough genome sequencing of the virus. A three-dimensional model turned slowly on the faceplate, its deadly anatomy glowing in helpfully differentiated colors.

  “Is that the thing that’s killing me?” rasped Jalosk. His voice sounded like someone had ground it up and shoved it through the ship’s engines. Those blue abscesses were not only on the outside. His words echoed in the lab, but Ysses only rippled in its sleep and did not wake.

  “In sad agreement: Yes. That is the Yoqtan virus. Pedantic insistence: Although we must stop calling it that. It is not… It is not precise. And it seems to hurt Irit’s feelings. With bashful hesitation: I am thinking of calling it the Fortinbras Plague.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to call it anything, shall we?” said the captain. “I would very much like to look back on this in a few years as an example of the efficiency of my crew in a crisis, rather than… anything more.”

  “I’m so tired. So fucking tired. But it hurts to sleep.” The batarian watched the diagram revolve slowly on Horatio’s face. It looked so alien, like its own creature, which, in truth, it was. A crystal impaled by a long, vicious screw and delicate arachnid legs. It inspired the same revulsion in organic beings as certain insects did.

  “It’s kind of pretty, isn’t it?” Jalosk said. “You really should name it after me. I’m the one dying.”

  “With bitter fatalism: It is prettier than you can imagine. It is what we call a chimera virus.” The elcor indicated one illuminated section of the virus’s RNA with his thick gray forefinger. “Professorial tone: That is Yoqtan. Emphasis: Only that is Yoqtan. You can see it acts like a tailor’s dressform. It gives the virus a basic shape. Something to build on. But then there is all this silk, Qetsi’Olam. All these horrible ribbons.” One by one, other RNA sequences lit up in a series of colors: blue, pink, yellow, purple, green. “With horror and wonder: This is Asari Cyanophage,” the elcor said, pointing at another stretch of the pathogen’s genetic code. “And this is a strain of salarian proto-syphilis called Ayalon B. This is called the Titan’s Tears, a rare turian hemorrhagic fever. This is the human disease known as measles, and this…” A much smaller piece of the genome lit up an angry red. “This is a trash compactor of junk RNA from a dozen different sources, including Kepral’s Syndrome, Varren Scale-Itch, Ardat-Yakshi, and, as far as I am willing to guess, a viral form of the bubonic plague which ravaged Earth in the fourteenth century.”

  “Ardat-Yakshi? Isn’t that the thing that kills you if you fuck the wrong asari?” the captain asked. She sat down on the deck floor cross-legged, listening intently.

  “I’ve never even touched an asari, Doc!” Jalosk protested. “Believe me, I’d have liked to, but I haven’t. They make a big noise about genetically diversifying their species, but have you ever met a batarian-asari girl? No, you have not, because they are arrogant and racist.”

  “He has a fair point there,” Qetsi chuckled. “The proximity of death has made you quite the comedian, Jalosk.”

  “Patient explanation: You do not understand. This is junk RNA. Pieces of dormant information that are not currently actively coded in the virus. They are merely… there. I do not know why. Although they may ‘switch on’ at some point as replication accelerates, we cannot know until it happens. You do not have Ardat-Yakshi. Or Kepral’s Syndrome, or bubonic plague. But the virus you do have contains elements of them. If we return to the metaphor of the dress and the dressform, you can think of junk RNA as decorative pockets that do not really hold anything.”

  “What’s a metaphor?” grumbled Jalosk. “Is that a new symptom?”

  “Incredulously: Never mind.” Perhaps Borbala was not entirely wrong in her assessment of Jalosk’s intell
igence. Yorrik hurried on. Talking about it helped somehow. Talking about it made it real, which was awful, but real things had real solutions. Sometimes. “With nervous hesitation: The junk RNA is also how I know, at last, that this is an artificial disease. Someone has done this to you. Ayalon B is not a naturally occurring virus. The salarians engineered it in their station on Erinle, but it proved too volatile for mass manufacture and all samples were process-bleached and incinerated. And yet it is here. It is there. It is in you. Helpful exposition: A chimera virus is just this. A virus which combines aspects of many other viruses. This one, whatever we decide to call it, is in the Metastolizomai family. It is highly mutagenic.” Yorrik thought better of his choice of vocabulary and started over. “Viruses are living creatures. Not like us. Not like synthetics. But living creatures all the same. Their only goal is to survive and reproduce, just like us. Viruses are simply much more ruthless in their methods.”

  “I like ruthless,” coughed Jalosk.

  “Sharp correction: No you do not,” Yorrik replied. “Please try to focus. Viruses have personalities. Correction: They do not have personalities like ours. But they have something like personalities. Family traits. Some are very conservative and averse to risk; they may not even kill their host. Others are reckless and disorganized; they may kill the host long before it has a chance to spread the infection. Ours is… opportunistic. You could call it nimble, if you wanted to. When it encounters an obstacle, such as a strong immune response or a treatment or an already weakened system of the body that could not support significant replication… that doesn’t have enough ‘food’ to keep the virus going, Fortinbras has so many other viruses spliced onto it that it can very easily mutate instead of dying off.