Cibola Burn

Elvi sat in the high meadow, her legs stretched out before her, and watched quietly. The plant analogs – she couldn’t really call them plants – lifted up above the dry, beige soil, straining toward the sunlight. The tallest stood hardly more than half a meter with a flat corrugated top that shifted to follow the sun and glittered the iridescent green of a beetle’s carapace. A gentle breeze shifted the stalks and cooled Elvi’s cheek. She didn’t move. Four meters away, a mimic lizard cooed.

This time, the answering coo was closer. Elvi fought not to bounce with excitement. She wanted to wave her hands in glee, wanted to giggle. She stayed still as a stone. The prey species waddled closer. About the size of a sparrow, it had a soft rill of something like feathers or thick hair that ran down its sides. It had six long, ungainly legs, each ending in a doubled hook. She wanted to see them as fingers or toes, but she hadn’t seen any of the little things use the hooks to manipulate anything. It cooed again, a soft guttural chuffing halfway between a dove’s call and a tambourine. The mimic lizard waited a moment, its wide-set eyes shifting toward the little animal. Elvi watched for the tremor in the lizard’s side, an almost invisible fluttering of its scalelike skin.

With the speed of a gun, the lizard’s mouth unhinged and a mass of wet pink flesh shot out. The prey animal didn’t so much as squeak as the lizard’s inverted stomach drove it to the ground. Elvi’s fists wriggled in delight as the mimic lizard began hauling its internal organs back across the dry ground. The prey species was dead or paralyzed, adhering to the pink flesh. Dirt and small stones stuck to the stomach too. Eventually the whole mass reached the mimic lizard’s too-wide jaw, and it began the long process of drawing the messy complex back through its mouth. From her previous observations, Elvi knew it would take the better part of an hour before the mimic lizard’s newly concave sides filled out again. She stood up, dusting herself off, and hobbled over.

Her foot was still in the cast she’d gotten on that terrible first night. The pain from the broken bone was only a dull ache now, more an annoyance than a problem, but the cast made mobility an issue. She opened her satchel, the black lattice fabric ticking under her fingers, then gently lifted the feeding lizard into it. Its gaze flickered across her, untrusting. That was fair.

“Sorry, little one,” she said. “It’s in the name of science.”

She closed the satchel and triggered the collection sequence. The lizard died instantly, and the internal assay sequence began, cataloging the gross structures of the animal’s body, firing hair-thin needles through the corpse to gather samples at every boundary between tissues and feeding the data up to the dedicated system in the satchel’s strap. By the time she got back to her little hut and took the corpses out for storage and cataloging, the mimic lizard and its prey would be modeled in her computer, terabytes of information ready to stream up to the Edward Israel and from there back to the labs on Luna. It would take the signal a few hours to travel the distance that had taken her eighteen months, but for those hours, she and her workgroup would be the only people in all the billions of humans scattered throughout the planets who would know this little being’s secrets. If God had come and offered her the Library of Alexandria in exchange, she wouldn’t have taken the trade.

As she tramped down the gentle slope toward her hut, the mining village spread out before her. It was tiny. Two parallel streets with a gap in the middle that passed for a town square. The buildings were cobbled together from the supplies they’d brought and what they could find on the planetary surface. Everything stood at slightly wrong angles, like a handful of dice had been scattered there. She was used to the strict rectilinear architecture that came from living where space was precious. That didn’t apply here, and it made the little town seem more organic, like it had simply grown there.

Fayez was sitting on the small porch outside her hut. His skin had darkened in the weeks since the crash. The preliminary hydrological study had kept him and several of the others from the team out in the field for almost two weeks.

“You know what I love about this planet?” Fayez said instead of hello.

“Nothing?”

He scowled at her, feigning hurt feelings. “I love the period of rotation. Thirty hours. You can get in a full day’s work, stay up getting drunk at the saloon, and still get a full night’s sleep. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this back home.”

“There are advantages,” Elvi said, unlocking her door and stepping into the hut.

“Of course it means we’ve been here almost six weeks in the past month,” Fayez said, “but thank God we didn’t get one of those little spinning tops with sundown every six hours. Now if they can just fix the gravity.”