They say it’s tough for women in academe, but it can be tough for guys, too. I’d only known Dr. Brando for a year, but he seemed like a great dad, and a smart, super-dedicated researcher caught between two unforgiving planes—science and justice—with edges so sharp there was no way around them without getting cut, maybe to ribbons. The justice part of Dr. Brando’s life he called “Commissioners Court” aka Family Court, a harmless name for what I decided was a peculiar hell, known only to its asylum seekers—divorcing moms and dads and kids—and its border patrol agents: lawyers, kinda-sorta judges known as “commissioners,” court-appointed “advocates,” guardians ad litem, and other Latinate incarnations. Given the English origins of our legal system, I shared this Dickens quote with Brando on one of his bleaker days.
“The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.”
“Hell yeah,” Brando responded, eking out a smile. “Who said monsters come from outer space?”
If Crimsy turned up alive and well, we had Mike Brando to thank. He formulated the microbiological version of astronaut space food for Crimsy’s long trip home, a gelatinous goo that tasted “like the saltiest caviar you never want to eat,” he said. “Think anchovies on steroids.” He offered me a bite on the tip of plastic spatula in his lab—“it’s perfectly edible”—and ever the curious, inquisitive scientist, I extended the tip of my tongue.
“You can only taste sweet things there,” he said.
“That’s a myth,” I said. Surely he knew. A couple Harvard psychologists—men—devised a “taste map” that depicted different regions of the tongue responding to sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. But it took a woman, Virginia Collings, to debunk that idea, as a student in her Ph.D. dissertation to boot. All parts of the tongue sense all tastes equally, as I was about to find out.
My mouth almost caught fire. “That is nasty,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “Crimsococcus will love it.” He looked at the wall clock. “And now I have a soccer game.”
“Arsenal or Manchester United?”
“Who?” he asked.
“Football teams. Soccer teams. I’m a Gooner, myself.” An Arsenal fan, aka a Gunner.
“It’s my daughter’s team,” he said. “Lexi’s good; really good, actually. But her mom wants a doctor in the family, not a soccer player. So I’m the cheering fan.”
“Her mom doesn’t go to her games?”
“Nope. I’ve decided it’s a form of passive-aggressive protest.”
“Sounds weird.”
“It is weird.”
“My mom never cared what I did for a living,” I said. “That is, until I started doing it.”
“Melissa micromanages some parts of Lexi’s life but ignores other parts,” Brando said. “Go figure.” He hung up his lab jacket and headed for the door.
“She’s a CFO, right?”
“She is,” he said. “A Curtailer of Fun Opportunities.”
“We’ve got more good news,” Dr. Shonstein said at our weekly staff meeting, this time in Lecture A, with the best projectors and biggest screens. “Crimsococcus appears to have qualities of both Archaeon and Bacterium,” two of the big three “Domains” of life.
“Are you kidding?” Levitt said. “How is that possible?”
“Answering that is above my pay grade,” came the reply from Captain Gillory. “But it does suggest a Mars Unique.”
Domains may be familiar from high school biology, as part of the way we classify living things: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. An Archaeon is simpler than a Bacterium, but both include salt-and-cold-loving extremophiles like Crimsy. We humans are in the third Domain, Eukaryota, which roughly translated means we have “true cells,” the basic building blocks of most living things. For Crimsy to be part Archaeon and part Bacterium would be a biological first.
“Unless past forward contaminants have evolved into something this unusual in the few years since our first probe landed, I’d say Crimsy is not a contaminant,” Shonstein said.
Two types of probes have touched down on Mars: “Landers” and “Rovers,” two of the four general Mars mission types. Flybys, as their name suggests, flew by the planet without stopping. Orbiters orbited Mars and did some of the early surface mapping. Landers landed on the planet, sent back pictures, but didn’t travel around; and Rovers like MarsMicro traveled on tracks, wheels, and now air. JPL had added hovercraft capability to MarsMicro, along with retractable tracks and tires. The first successful landings started in the 1970s, so if a forward contaminant did evolve into the new breed of bug Crimsy represented, it happened awful fast.
“So do we have a new Domain on our hands?” Dr. Cooper asked. “Or some kind of hybrid?”
“That’s Brandy’s bailiwick,” Levitt said. “I can’t believe he’s missing this.”
On “this,” the most beautiful image in biology appeared in glorious high def on the screen in back of Dr. Levitt. Crimsy had undergone some staining tests called “gram negative” and “gram positive.” Her green-red coloring had given way to a color that resembled a Martian dust devil.
“She looks to be gram negative, boys and girls,” Captain Hightower said, as we stared at Crimsy and kin under a microscope. “Kind of fitting, that reddish tint.”
Dr. Shonstein approached the screen. I’d never seen the look on her face: She was a classic stoic, rarely breaking a smile unless Malachi was on her lap or that time her husband had the biggest Spring bouquet I’ve ever seen delivered to her post-doc seminar. The value of flowers increases exponentially with workplace delivery, where everyone sees how much someone somewhere else loves you. Dr. Shonstein’s look now was a cross between “holy shit,” and “I’m speechless.”
“That is one unusual-looking bug,” she said. “How can that not be be a Mars Unique?” She turned to Dr. Levitt. “Marcia, can you believe this?”
“I can’t believe it,” she said in a breaking voice. “I’m trying to. This can’t be happening. It’s all a fluke. There’s no way we discovered life on Mars. Life on Mars? Life on Mars? It’s just an elaborate contamination.”
“Unlikely,” Dr. Marcum said.
“I agree with Dr. Shonstein,” Cooper said, staring at the screen. “That’s one weird-looking germ.”
“What about pathogenicity?” Dr. Shonstein asked. “Any progress?”
Pathogenicity—as in would Crimsy infect we Earthlings and start a deadly pandemic that threatened to wipe out all life, or turn us into zombies? I thought we should let that question ride for a while, build some media buzz, secure some movie rights, and definitely our patents, when my cell vibrated with a text message.
“Mom’s missing.” It was David, and this was a new thing.
I furiously typed under the table. “Wat u mean mom’s missin?”
“Call me. ASAP.”
I excused myself and stepped into the hallway.
I walked away from Lecture A dialing David. “What’s going on?” I asked in a whisper.
“Last night. Mrs. Lukins stopped by to return some dishes and said the door was open and the lights were on in the living room and kitchen but no mom. She called around, went upstairs, into the garage, back yard, everywhere.”
“That’s definitely not mom,” I said. “Her car there?”
“Yeah.”
“You call the cops?”
“They won’t do anything until it’s been 48 hours. No sign of a crime, no sign of a struggle. It’s like she just walked away.”
“Shit,” I said. A familiar knot was tying itself in my stomach. “Do you need me to come home?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not. Aunt Marjorie, Uncle Ron and several friends are looking for her. I’ve got a sub for tomorrow.”
“Are you sure don’t want me there? I can get a flight quick. I finally got chipped.”
“What about your ears?” he asked.
My ears are shit on airplanes. Started after my accident. Probably related. “I’ll live.”
“You almost didn’t last time,” David said. “If it’s any consolation, cops don’t think mom was the victim of any crime.”
“How do they know?”
“Long story,” David said. “We’ll talk.”
“What about?”
“I can’t get into it now. I’m over at Marjorie’s. I’ll call you later. K?”
I wanted to scream at my brother just then. I hated how calm he would get when the world crashed around our heads, like after the accident. Our accident. Dad and me. But I relented.
“K,” I agreed.
David said he’d update me about mom that evening and I slipped back into the “It’s Alive” meeting. I know I shouldn’t be that way—I like to think of Crimsy as a she, like my first born in some career-relevant ways—not an “it.”
But I suddenly felt tired, and Lecture A was awash in a lot of complicated, exhausting emotions, as Crimsy loomed on screen.
I stayed in my office later than normal, working on my diss, catching up on reading, and I guess, nodding off. An odd, high-pitched whimper awakened me and I thought an injured dog had found its way into the building. “What is that?” I tried the door to the stairwell and the janitor’s closet (locked) and to the only place in our now-empty building that might create an echo, Sparks Hall, with its stadium seating and the most amazing three-dimensional projection system in Seattle, which meant in the world.
No dog.
I followed the intermittent cries to Dr. Brando’s office, where his door was ajar. I stood torn between bursting in—what if he was injured?—and pushing his door slowly so it wouldn’t squeak, allowing me a discreet peek. I opted for a hurried adaptation of the latter. I saw him crouched against the wall on the floor, head in his arms on his knees, next to the elaborate book case that lined his walls. He had the largest collection of real, palpable books among our team, ever fearful of a repeat of Fahrenheit 2031, the day that year, named for Ray Bradbury’s famous novel about tyrannical book burners, when Avalon “turned off” every Ember and Ember Flame and Ember Blaze e-reader in the world, and left the digital compendiums off for three whole days. The company’s publicity army rushed to call it, first a hacking, then a “cloudburst,” a massive failure of the servers that host Avalon’s cloud computing infrastructure that “would never happen again.” But Mike Brando would have none of it.
“This,” he told me, proudly displaying his voluminous wall, “is my book shelter.”
I wanted to enter, ask him what was wrong. But I stayed near the door, heard him sniffle, and saw him move his head. I don’t know if he saw me. I didn’t linger. I didn’t want to embarrass him. And my secret selfish side didn’t want to hurt me, either. Embarrassing a high-ranking male colleague, even in the throes of compassion, always threatened negative consequences for the subordinate, especially a female subordinate. Had I been one of the guy post-docs, I probably could have just marched in and said, “Hey bro? Get your ass up. Let’s grab a beer.” But that option was not one of mine.