Ammonite

She pushed her nightbag down around her waist to let the light breeze dry her sweat and watched the clouds scudding overhead. Gradually her heartbeat slowed, and her breathing. She slept.

She woke at dawn to a spiderweb, prismatic with dew, hanging across a clump of ting grass a handspan from her face. It was large, more than three feet across, and the strands were too thick for a spider’s web: like fine, peach‑tinted glass tubes. She sat up slowly, looking for the spider.

A mustardfly, whining over the tips of the ting grass, came too close. The web rippled slightly, and a strand touched the fly’s triple wing. The fly struggled, and wherever it touched, it stuck. Then it stopped fighting and seemed to collapse in on itself. Marghe squinted in the cool light: the fly was dissolving, shriveling. The strand against which it was caught darkened and swelled. Within four minutes, the fly was subsumed: nothing but a glutinous lump.

The web convulsed, splitting the dark patch into hundreds of peach‑colored corpuscles that pulsed in different directions down the hollow strands.

Digestion. The strands were both the spider and the web.

Cautiously, Marghe touched one of the outer strands with a fingertip. It stung. Some kind of acid, or alkali. She wiped her finger on the wet grass and wondered what would have happened to her face if she had rolled over into it while asleep. She went to wake the others.

The morning was heavy and still and the sled hummed over a carpet of ivory olla flowers. The wind of their passage churned up a perfumed haze of golden green pollen; they all wore scarves wrapped around their noses and mouths. Marghe sat in the flatbed playing chess with Lu Wai on the Mirror’s traveling board. Ude was at the stick and Letitia sca

“Your move.”

Marghe studied the board, thinking about kris flies. Their stings were unpleasant, and some people were allergic. She moved one of her pawns. Lu Wai made a small sound of satisfaction and reached out for her rook; she nearly dropped it when Marghe’s wristcom beeped a reminder.

Marghe took out the vial of FN‑17 from her thigh pocket, popped the cap, and swallowed one.

“Can I take a look?”

Maighe hesitated, then handed them over. Lu Wai tipped one out onto her palm. “Such little things,” she murmured through the scarf. She rolled it back into the vial, closed it, handed it back. She watched Marghe slide it into her pocket and double‑check the pocket seal. “I’m glad to see you’re being careful. Just make sure you’re at Port Central when that stuff runs out.”

“You think it would make that much difference?”

“With a one in five chance of not surviving, you need any edge you can get.” She tapped the medic flashes on her shoulder. “Someone like me can make a difference. Your move.”

Marghe moved her bishop.

Lu Wai sighed. “You’re not concentrating. Check.”

Marghe pushed the board aside. “Tell me about the virus.”

“You’re resigning?”

“I’m resigning.” She felt restless and it was hard to breathe. Her head itched. She pulled her scarf off, let it hang loose around her neck. “Tell me about the virus.” She wanted to know how the Mirror felt when she tried to heal people and they died; she wanted to know how it was to get sick and not know whether or not you were going to die. She needed to know what to expect.

Instead of switching off the board’s field and pushing the pieces flat to close it up, Lu Wai pulled each piece free one by one and laid them down carefully in some pattern Marghe could not follow. “The virus has a long incubation period, very long,” the Mirror said, intent on the little pawns and castles, “so we’d all been down here a while and settled in before anyone got sick. The first one I saw was called Sevin. He was a plastics engineer. Started coughing one day out by the perimeter, and didn’t stop. I gave him, tried to give him, emergency CPR, but he died. Took just six hours. His death was the easiest I heard of.” She examined the pieces critically, closed the box, ran her finger along the seal, and slipped it into a belt pouch. She untied her scarf, began to fold it into smaller and smaller triangles. “The next one I dealt with was a woman, named Margaret. She liked to cook, she told me. I remember that because I hate to cook. That’s all I could think of, how I hate to cook, while she coughed and her eyes swelled up and she screamed with a headache not even mycain would help. She survived, though.” She tried to smile. “Made me a thank‑you di

“By then we knew it was some kind of virus that integrates with human cell DNA, a bit like a retrovirus. People, mainly men, were dead all over the planet. Communications were bad, still are, so we couldn’t call everyone in for medical attention. Lots of people are still officially missing, that’s how we lost such a lot of equipment, sleds and such, but we know that most of them are dead. We tried everything against that virus we could think of, but none of the usual nucleoside analogues made a dent in its multiplication. We tried the interferons and synthetic analogues of 2' ,5'‑oligoadnylate; nothing worked. When we figured out that the female mortality rate was around twenty‑three percent–”.

“I thought it was less than twenty.”

Lu Wai smiled again, but this time it was a hard sliding of muscles like tectonic plates. “Officially it is, if you don’t count those ‘missing.’ ” She paused. “You want me to go on?”

Maighe nodded. Her skin was tight and cold, as though someone had rubbed her down with a handful of ice. It was different down here, in the close, perfumed air, with the clouds massing overhead; Lu Wai had seen it on a scale Sara Hiam could not even imagine.

“So, we saw that more men than women were dying; we tried hormones. Didn’t work. Maybe it’s some kind of estrogen metabolite that inhibits the virus, but we don’t know which one. There might even be more than one. We were desperate. We tried isolation. It didn’t work, of course–Jeep’s a hard, mean little virus, uses everything and anything as a vector: air, water, saliva, sperm, food, feces… everything.”

“Does it affect animals?”

“Doesn’t seem to.”

“So where does it come from?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. If we had the records of the first settlers, maybe it would turn out that it was a genetically altered virus that got transferred from an animal to a human, and became something else.”

“It would have to have had much more than one crossover point. That seems to preclude accidents.”

Lu Wai smiled, that hard sliding of muscle again. “You haven’t seen a man stuck out in the boonies for weeks on end. He’ll fuck anything after a while.”

Marghe wanted to believe this was Mirror humor, but Lu Wai did not seem amused. “I didn’t know there were any large animals here.”

“I haven’t heard tell of any. Maybe they all died, too. But it doesn’t matter to me where the virus came from. I’d just like to know how to kill it so we could all get off this planet.”

“I didn’t think you were so unhappy.”

“I’m not. I’d just like to be able to go home, leave this place where so many friends died.”

There was nothing Marghe could say to that. She thought about the Kurstriding in orbit, some young officer with her or his finger on the button that would detonate Estrade. If Hiam was right, none of them would ever go home.

“You haven’t told me how it felt when you went down with it,” she said.

Lu Wai leaned back against the side of the sled and stared at the clouds. “Everyone’s symptoms are different. Mine started with a rash on the underside of my arms. A couple of hours after my arms started itching, my eyeballs began to hurt, then I knew. I didn’t bother with the medical station; I went to my mod instead. I figured if I was going to die, it may as well be in peace, away from all that hustle. It’s only about a mile from the station to my mod, but I had difficulty walking those last few yards, it hits that fast. My joints ached, knees and hips mostly, though they didn’t swell up like some people’s do, and then the headache started, and the itchy eyes and throat. Then the cough.”