When their call ended, Badim stood and shuddered, then just stood there for a long time, his head down.

“Better call Aram,” he said at last. “And Jochi. He should probably be in iso too. The problem is, they all should be isolated from all the rest, and they can’t do that.”

As it turned out, Jochi had been out in one of the expedition cars when the news of Clarisse’s fever came, and when he heard the news, he stayed in the car, locked inside. He acknowledged to the others in Hvalsey he was there, but refused to discuss his situation any further. There was air, water, food, and battery power to keep him out there for three weeks. People in Hvalsey spoke angrily to him, but he didn’t reply. The people up in the ship didn’t know what to say. Badim just shook his head when Freya asked him what he thought.

“He might be right,” Badim said. “I wish there was a car for everyone. But there isn’t. And no one person can stay isolated for long, there or anywhere.”

It was the middle of the night on 170.153, A0.113, and Freya was sleeping restlessly, when her screen spoke to her, quietly at first, so that Freya first muttered things, in what sounded like a dream conversation with her mother; but as the voice from the screen repeated “Freya… Freya… Freya,” in a way that Devi never would have, she finally woke, groggily.

It was Euan, in Hvalsey. “Euan?” Freya said. “What is it?”

“Clarisse died,” he said.

He didn’t have his camera on, or was sitting in the dark; it was just his voice, the screen was dark.

“Oh no!”

“Yes. Last night.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know. Looks like she had some kind of anaphylactic shock. As if she ran into something she was allergic to.”

“But what is there to be allergic to?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. She had asthma, but that was controlled. They gave her epinephrine four times, but her blood pressure dropped, her throat seems to have closed up on her, the ventral part of her heart went arrhythmic. The scans are showing empty heart…”

Long pause.

“She was still in isolation?”

“Yes. But of course she wasn’t when we brought her back in.”

“But you were all in your suits.”

“I know. But we took them off inside. We all helped her.”

He didn’t say more, and Freya didn’t speak either. They were in trouble down there, if what had happened to Clarisse had been caused by her accident. They wouldn’t be able to go out on the surface until they understood what it was. And if they determined that some local life-form had infected and killed her, they wouldn’t be able to go out ever again without massive precautions.

Nor would they be able to associate with each other freely, until it was demonstrated that whatever had killed her wasn’t contagious.

Nor could they come back up to the ship and risk infecting it.

So now they were confined to a biome much smaller than any on the ship, and maybe an infected one at that. Maybe a poisoned building, in which everything alive in it was already doomed.

All these possibilities were no doubt occurring to Freya, as they must have already to Euan. Thus the long silence.

Finally she said, “Is there anything I can do?”

“No. Just… be there.”

“I’m here. I’m sorry.”

“Me too. It was… It was beautiful down here. We were… I was having fun.”

“I know.”

She woke Badim and told him, then lay down on the couch in their living room, while Badim sat at their kitchen table making calls.

In between his calls she said to him, “I miss Devi. If she were alive, none of this would have happened. She would have insisted that we test the surface of the planet completely before anyone landed.”

“Hard to do by robot,” Badim remarked absently.

“I know. Years would have passed, everyone would have been furious with her. She would have been furious with them. But this wouldn’t have happened.”

Badim shrugged.

Later Euan called them again.

“I’m going out again,” he said.

“What!” Freya cried. “Euan, no!”

“Yes. Look. We all have to go sometime. So, maybe we’ve been fatally poisoned, maybe not. We’ll know soon enough. In the meantime, as long as your suit integrity is good, there isn’t any difference between staying in the compound or going outside. So I’m going to damn the torpedoes and go. I don’t see why not. Either way it’ll be okay. I mean, either I’m already infected, and I might as well spend my last days having fun, or I’m not, and I won’t be, as long as I don’t cut my suit open. Silly woman, I wish she hadn’t gone off the path, that was obviously quicksand she went off into, I don’t know what she could have been thinking, what she was going after. A blink on the water, she said. But really? Well, we’ll never know now. And it doesn’t matter. I’ll stay on hard ground. Maybe I’ll stay out of the estuary and up on the sea cliffs, that’s the best views anyway. Go out and see the dawn. No one here will stop me. We’re all sequestered anyway. Everyone’s locked in a room somewhere. No one could stop me without endangering themselves, right? And no one wants to anyway. So I’m going out to see the dawn. I’ll call you back in a little while.”

Life in the ship went silent, and took on the nature of a vigil, or a death watch, or even a wake. People murmured about the situation down on the surface, in theory speaking hopefully, in fact frightened and assuming the worst. Of course the woman could have died from shock, or asthmatic attack, or from an opportunistic growth of bacteria she already carried in her, part of the bacterial stock from the ship itself, which was by no means entirely benign, as they had often learned. As Aurora was or seemed to be inert, this last was even the likeliest explanation.

But was Aurora inert? Was it a dead moon, as it seemed to be? Was the oxygen in the atmosphere a result of abiologic processes, as had been assumed by the chemical signatures, and the lack of evident life on the moon? Or was there some kind of life they weren’t seeing, perhaps there in the mud of Half Moon Valley’s estuary?

But if it was in one place, it would be in more. So the ship’s biologists shook their heads, in frustration and ignorance. Euan went back out into the field, and since he was willing to do it, there were people who wanted him to bring back samples of mud from the region where Clarisse had fallen, to get as close to that quicksand as he dared, dig down and secure some mud in a safe flask, then bring it back to Hvalsey for study under the hoods. They already had the mud from Clarisse’s suit, of course, and they had her body, so the extra samples weren’t absolutely necessary, but some of the microbiologists wanted them anyway, to be able to check the local matrix uncontaminated by all that had happened since Clarisse had fallen into it.

Euan was happy to do this. Some of the other people in Hvalsey were also, and they went out in little groups, staying on trails and descending to the estuary in short expeditions, very unlike their previous trips. They hiked in silence, as if walking across a minefield, or making descents into hell. Raids on the inexpressible. Euan alone among them sang little ditties to himself, including a tune with the refrain “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego”—an old spiritual or faux spiritual, ship determined, with a biblical reference to prisoners of Babylon, surviving time in a fiery furnace by way of a protective intervention from Jehovah.