White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Nineteen

"So they're scouts," I say.

"Pretty much."

Which means that every time we've seen a butterfly here, it's likely been a scout of sorts. Their behaviour, though, is a far cry from "normal scavenging activity." I'd believe someone more if they told me Mahaha used them to scout us itself.

Krüger pushes the laptop back to Liu, who returns to the Mahaha cross-section. Her laser pointer dances around its perimeter. "We think it's a fair assumption that the butterflies we've been seeing are consciously controlled, given how they act. But there's something else on Mahaha that moves like it's conscious—or consciously directed." The pointer's red dot stops on the moon-diagram's icy crust. "The ice." I think I know her ultimatum before it drops. "We think the ice is a demighost, too."

I mentally take back everything I've ever said about these two and their hypothesizing. I don't want more hypotheses right now. I want something I can know. Something I can react to: fight, or hide from, or protect us all against.

Liu takes my lack of response as a lack of full comprehension, which is both absolutely correct and not the problem at all. "Say we assume Mahaha is conscious. If a butterfly can control a demighost its own size, why couldn't a conscious moon, too? If Mahaha can control the ice, that would explain how it's been doing everything we've already seen. From attacking the Isoptera to moving whole glaciers around. "

"Then what's the host?"

"Its core," says Krüger. "Qalupalik's gravity is so huge, it warps the rock and gives its moons an artificial warm core just from the friction. It's called tidal heating; you see it all over the UIS. If there was a large-scale demighost system going on, there could be a linkage between that movement and the surface."

"And what it couldn't do with the core as a host, it could do with wind," says Liu with an air of finality. She clicks to the next picture in the little deck they've put together. It's a beautiful shot of the snow formations we found around the downed Isoptera. "So long as there's natural wind somewhere on its surface, it could copy that anywhere."

"I don't like how versatile this is sounding," I say. "Something with that kind of power over its own surface could crush us in a heartbeat if it wanted to. Why hasn't it?"

"Well," says Krüger, "for one thing, the core wouldn't actually give much control at all. Its motion would be mostly random, which is what we've seen on the surface, too. That's probably why most of the probes stayed untouched for a while before they got destroyed; Mahaha needed to wait for the right internal blip to copy."

"It still has the wind."

"Only marginally less random. And even more restricted around the dark side of the planet, or during the ecliptic cycle when everything's calm, or probably across any significant distance. Wind is a pretty incorporeal thing to try to copy, and once it gets moving, it also moves on its own."

"And those formations around the Isoptera?"

"There was a storm less than twenty kilometers from us that night," says Liu. "Storms close by probably give it the best wind control."

I add that to my already intimidating list of reasons I hate this moon's storms.

Liu twists her spinning lab stool from side to side. "The other thing we don't know is what it wants. Or what it thinks of us. Or if it 'thinks' at all."

Kwon gives a dry chuckle. "We know that it does not like our probes."

"That could be instinct," says Krüger. "Or fear. Even if it's gotten used to us here, it could be scared of any new things we put out. Or scared of things the first team here did—they ran a lot more field experiments, if I recall correctly." And he wonders why I restrict those. "Or maybe it's territorial, and we're fine so long as we stay in our corner. It hasn't done more than rip up our probes and infiltrate our instruments so far, so we can use that as a starting point."

"Unless the probes were warnings," I say. "With the end result being the same one the last team suffered. If there's a consciousness behind all these events, it's been ramping up its activity: the Isoptera went faster than any of the probes before it, and even the iced instruments have been on the uptick. You've been tracking it yourself."

"I know it doesn't look good. I'm just saying we shouldn't jump to conclusions. If we attack and Mahaha takes it as a threat, that might only put us in more danger."

And we're back to the scientific fatal flaw.

"I think we should contact it," says Liu, and the whole room goes silent.

I think Liu knows the magnitude of what she's just proposed, because she swallows nervously before continuing. "This might be the first conscious moon or planet anyone's ever found. We don't know anything about it, and if we're going to live on it for the next five months, it might be a good idea to make friends. Or to at least find out what level of intelligence it has."

I can hardly believe I'm hearing this. I turn to Krüger first, just to be diplomatic.

"I agree with Lingmei," he says. "I think we should make contact with it."

Liu I could dismiss: she's never been on a real field mission before. But hearing Krüger agreeing with her is a slap in the face of a whole other magnitude.

Krüger continues before I can recover from the shock. "Let's say all these theories are correct. That Mahaha is controlling the ice and the wind anomalies, and that it doesn't like our probes. I can name another planet right now where something like this could put more than our four lives at risk."

He's going to bring up Jenu again, isn't he.

"Jenu has all the same patterns," he says. "That's why we're here, and if this is what's behind them, the situation there is far more serious than anyone knows. Not to mention that this makes several more things Jenu and Mahaha have in common. Jenu has proven demighosts. It's a candidate for planetary consciousness. And it has dust storms increasing in number and severity, some of which have now compromised a human settlement. Believe me when I say Lingmei and I have started looking at those to learn about Mahaha as much as the other way around."

"We are not making contact with whatever this is."

I can tell he was expecting that. "Then at least let us keep measuring it."

"We are not going outside again unless absolutely necessary. We will move the Pod when we have to. Nothing else."

"Let me maintain our bank of instruments outside, if Mahaha hasn't wrecked them. If we don't have those running, we're blind, deaf, and have both our hands tied. That puts us in danger. You can come with me every time I go out. I can even scale it back to once a day, instead of twice."

He's completely calm, his jaw set and his hands laced together. He's going to keep at this until I relent. Keep making good points and sharpening my own words against me. I focus on breathing for a moment and try to untangle the logic of what he's saying from the raw fear clawing at my chest. It keeps getting harder the worse the situation gets.

"Once a day, and I come with you," I say. It takes so much out of me just to say those words. "But the moment it shows aggression towards any one of us personally, or towards the Pod as a structure, I am instituting lockdown and I will not take objections. Understood?"

It's his turn to take a breath. I expect him to blow up at me, but he's clearly weighed this compromise and what he's willing to sacrifice for it. "Understood," he says, and that is that.