James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

When he’d been a student at lower university, he’d had to take a humanities class—literature, drama, art appreciation. Something to make him well rounded. He’d opted for philosophy in hopes that it would have something like rigor to it. Most of the experience had been forgotten, the memories washed away in decades of neuroplastic adjustments. What he did still recall was dreamlike and fragmentary. But sitting there, pressing deeper into the seat as the tube car shifted up toward the surface, the hum and rattle of the tube vibrating up his spine, listening to the too-loud laughter of the soldiers, one moment came back to him vividly. His professor—an overweight, balding man with an alcoholic’s complexion and an air of intelligence so profound it seemed to bend space around him—lifting a hand and speaking a phrase: the terror of the normal . Prax was almost sure it had been something about Heidegger, but here and now, he thought he understood it better than he had back then.

This was how things were now. This had become normal.

He’d hoped to spend the morning on his own research, but Khana and Brice didn’t even let him get as far as his lab before falling into step beside him.

“I was looking at the open partition, and I think there may have been a problem with the data transfer,” Khana said. “The datasets directory only had Hy18 through the ninth run.”

“No, no,” Prax said. “I know. I didn’t get around to transferring them yet. I was going to, but I got distracted.”

Brice made a small sound in the back of her throat. Prax understood it, and he didn’t envy her. Ever since Karvonides’ death, Brice had been in the unenviable position of doing her own work and covering for her dead supervisor. Every day, Prax had intended to move all the critical data out to the open partition. He couldn’t even say why he hadn’t gotten around to it. It was just that something always seemed to come up.

“Boss,” Khana said, “we need the latest on Hy1810 unless you want us to push the new run.”

“You can’t push the new run,” Prax said.

They reached the door of Prax’s lab. Khana shoved his hands into his pockets, his jaw set, his eyes focused off somewhere about ten centimeters to Prax’s left. “I know. But …”

“I’ll do it now,” Prax said. “Give me half an hour.”

He ducked into his lab and pulled the door closed behind him. Khana and Brice hovered for a long moment on the far side of the frosted glass and then walked away. Prax sat at his desk. He wanted to check the water levels and pull new samples from the hydroponics. He was tempted to just do that for a few minutes, put off going through Karvonides’ partition. But he’d said now, and they really did need to get the animal trials going.

He pulled up the staff directory, keyed in his access code, and let the system do its ritual biometric check. Then, with a deep sigh and a sense of growing dread, he went into the dead woman’s partition. It was his job to do this. There was nothing to be anxious about.

Two of the datasets were in editing lock, so he had to close them down before he could move them. Not hard, but it took a few more seconds. He would need to go through her messages too. Make sure anything that needed attention was passed down to Brice or up to McConnell. Anything personal for her, he could ignore. He didn’t need to pry, and he probably didn’t want to know. Except that one of the messages had James Holden in the subject. NEW JAMES HOLDEN FEED FROM CERES, it said. James Holden, who’d saved Mei. And Prax himself. And everyone. Prax didn’t intend to open the feed. It was more like a reflex. This looks interesting—what is it?

On the feed, just as promised, James Holden looking earnestly into the camera. On the one hand, it looked professionally produced. The video didn’t stutter or shake. The colors had the carefully modulated look of a newsfeed. Holden’s voice when he spoke was clear and sharp without being spiky. But Holden’s demeanor had an awkward authenticity that was so familiar and unrehearsed, it was like seeing him in the flesh again.

“This is James Holden from Ceres Station. Today, we’re doing the third in this open ended series thing, and I’m really hoping you’re all looking forward to this. Especially all my friends and family back on Earth and Mars. I say this every time, but we’re doing these clips and interviews so that the folks back home can put faces and voices to the real people out in the Belt. And … yeah. So, let me introduce—”

The image cut to a tall Belter girl sitting in the galley of the Rocinante . Prax leaned forward. He’d sat exactly where she was once, during the worst part of his life. He felt a wave of nostalgia like seeing his apartment from upper university—someplace familiar that had been important to him once—that broke against the novelty of this new girl.

“Alis Caspár.”

“Great. Okay, and where do you live?”

“Ceres Station. Salutorg District.”

Prax watched the whole feed. The clap-juggling of shin-sin that seemed to delight and fascinate the Earther. The way the girl was embarrassed for him and he didn’t seem to notice. The older woman they called Tía flirting with him. It was … charming. With all the news of war and death, with all the images of ships chewing each other to shavings of metal and ceramic, the body bags of Earth, Holden’s video was nothing. Pleasant. Meaningless. Sweet, even.

The feed ended. Prax, surprised, found he’d been tearing up. He wiped his cheek with the cuff of one sleeve, and was startled when the next message opened its own feed automatically. A thin-faced woman with skin darker than Djuna’s but with the same deep hazel eyes smiled into the camera. The image shook a little and the colors weren’t as professionally toned as Holden’s had been.

“This is Fatima Crehan, sending back to James Holden and all the good people of the Belt. We’re in the refugee camp opened by the governor of Arequipa, and today I want to introduce you to a woman whose causa has been turning heads and filling bellies for, it seems like, everyone in the city.”

Prax watched, fascinated. And when it was over, another video feed, this one from Shanghai, where an old man in a yarmulke interviewed a musical band of ethnic Han boys about their music and then watched them in an alleyway with mud-colored clouds churning above them. Prax couldn’t look away.

A soft knock came at the door. Brice leaned in. “I’m sorry to interrupt, sir, but—”

“No no no, it’s fine. I’m transferring them now.” Prax grabbed Karvonides’ data reports—none of them edit-locked now—and shifted them into the open partition. “You should be able to access all of them now.”

“Thank you, sir,” Brice said. And then, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Prax said, wiping his eyes again. “Carry on.”

She closed the door. Two hours had gotten away from him somehow, and he was going to have to hurry in order to get all the samples pulled before lunch.

We could save lives. One message.

Prax shut down the dead woman’s partition, put it under administrative lock. There wasn’t time to think about anything more. He had work to do. In order to catch up, he ran the samples during his lunch hour, grabbing a few mouthfuls of rice and mushroom before the management team meeting. Afterward, it was time to go and retrieve Mei and Natalia from school, but he sent a message to one of the other parents in his parenting coop. The girls could go play with the other kids until Djuna got home. He stayed, checking in with Brice and Khana. Seeing that everyone who needed access to the datasets could get to them.

Everything felt weirdly dreamlike and light. As if he was watching someone else doing it. In his office, he rechecked the day’s sample run. How much dissolved CO2 in the water, how much nitrogen, calcium, manganese. The plants were doing well, but until the stats were all fed through, he wouldn’t know what he was looking at. That was fine.