Chapter Forty-Eight

APPARENTLY, IT REALLY had been obvious because no one else shared my surprise. In time, I too came to terms with the fact that one of the smartest women I knew had chosen a glorified jock for her partner. There was, after all, no accounting for tastes of the heart. A point that Caspersen noted the one—and only—time I broached the topic, “very much to my benefit.”

I would have said choosing Matt was the one time I’ve seen Caspersen exercise poor judgment. But I’d never seen her so happy, or him for that matter. So, though I couldn’t begin to understand what she saw in him, I guessed it was the right choice after all.

Anyway, other matters soon eclipsed my surprise on that score. The first was the news that the professor would keep his leg. There had been some concern among Kayleigh and Marge that the wounds, in combination with the onset of infection, might necessitate amputation. But they’d been able to get the latter under control, which enabled them to better deal with the former.

As the professor’s fever receded, it fell to us to raise his spirits. This was done in shifts, not of a natural congeniality but out of a sense of duty. So reluctant were we, in fact, that Caspersen threatened to assign visits if we didn’t manage it on our own.

So we did, and each shift turned into an exercise in restraint and self-punishment. The professor was in constant pain due to his injuries, and of course, Carter being Carter, his pain became our pain. Despite the heavy use of bitter root, he claimed to be in constant and indescribable agony—which he spent a considerable amount of time attempting to describe every time we saw him. And he missed no opportunity to remind us how it might all have been avoided had we been quicker.

Still, he seemed to enjoy the visits as both a distraction from his pains and the boredom of sick bay. I suppose the opportunity to berate a captive audience was simply a happy plus.

As for the second development, we first heard whispers of cannibal spottings about a week and a half after our return. Scouts reported they’d returned to the site of their defeat and, under cover of night, carted away the bodies of the dead.

Not only their own dead, but ours as well.

Gat’s fury blazed red-hot. He wanted nothing short of absolute vengeance. Now, finally, he agreed with Caspersen’s plan to destroy the cannibal raiders once and for all.

We were drawing up plans to strike when the weather turned foul. For three days and nights, ice storms raged on. A bitter chill settled on the forest. We were loath to venture out of our homes any more than strictly necessary, much less travel along the ice-covered roads.

So we put the plans on hold, temporarily at first, and finally, when the temperature showed no signs of improving until spring.

But we didn’t have to wait that long. We didn’t have to strike at all. The cannibals did themselves in, and in the end, Connor and Cohen got the last laugh.

Infighting, hunger, and, of course, our skirmish had diminished the survivors’ numbers considerably. The windfall of food—the corpses they’d retrieved from the lake—might have been enough to carry them through the winter. Enough to give them a second chance.

Might have been, had they only preyed upon the Keplerites. But Connor and Cohen were the only hint of victory they’d had over us. It was no wonder they took their bodies too.

No wonder, but a deadly mistake. Three thousand years separated us and men and women of Kepler-186f—cannibals and vegetarians alike. Our blood and flesh still carried the myriad traces of bacteria and viruses of our mother planet—bacteria and viruses that had undergone thousands of years of transformation if they had survived at all on this planet. Our immunities, some developed throughout generations of humanity, others by the genius of vaccines, protected us. But not so the Keplerites.

Our friends encountered these new organisms, too, but slowly and by degrees as they came into contact with us. Sometimes, illnesses resulted, but they were incidental and, between our antibiotics and the herbalists’, manageable. The cannibals, by contrast, directly and violently immersed themselves in the germs of Earth, circa 2093.

And that choice—that awful, disgusting celebration of Connor and Cohen’s death, that inhumanity—spelled their own end.

Sickness ravaged their camp. Unlike the volcano, they couldn’t outrun this invisible death. One by one, they succumbed until, by midwinter, no one remained.

In the end, it wasn’t our efforts or the Nation’s that destroyed the Lava Dwellers. It wasn’t even the collapse of the Mountain. Three thousand years after its first appearance on Kepler-186f, cannibalism itself spelled the end of the cannibals.

Inhumanity had afforded humanity a second chance.