:Probably, yes, and that may not hold as it grows. Leareth - was hopeful that it would be more possible to cooperate, not less, if it were more capable of understanding us. He…has extensively studied the concepts behind communicating with superintelligent but deeply alien entities. I am not enough an expert in this field to explain his position, though: 

It might be possible to get narrow biological results out of it while it's small, though? If you've had some successes already?

:Possibly. It - is confused about some very basic concepts, though - anything not related to its primary purpose as an engineering system. It...does not really seem to understand death. Or that multiple people exist separately from one another. Also, obviously its sensory perceptions are very different from ours, and it is often confused by spatial representations, for example, but that is more feasible to work around: 

Its creators - evidently didn't expect it to be operating in a context with other intelligent life. 

He's not sure what that says exactly about their ability to get along with it, where it does exist. On the other hand, it's been two billion years; probably the creator species has changed, if it still exists at all (and probably there'd be signs in the skies, if it were transforming lots of worlds still...)

:Evidently not: 

Leareth...probably explicitly had that realization, that if the protomolecule's creators had continued to be around for two billion years, there ought to be a LOT of wormholes by now. This seems like something that ought to be noticeable in the night sky even at Velgarth's technological level, and certainly at Earth's... 

- Maybe he didn't reason it through. He normally would, and Nayoki feels slow and behind and helpless in comparison, but he's in bad shape.

She's so worried and scared and she...doesn't know what to do, if he doesn't get better than this. 

However, it's not like she has a lot of choice. For now she'll just have to do her best. 

Leareth returns to the surface with the Healer and shuttle escort, and is extremely relieved to be helped back into his hospital bed. He needs a lot of help for it; he's too weak to even stand, right now. Also he's kind of having trouble breathing again - this seems like only half the protomolecule's fault, and half because his ribs HURT. And he's not actually feverish but his entire body aches and he's shivering. 

The Healers put him back on oxygen and get him an extra blanket and get him more painkillers. Leareth falls asleep while they're still in the middle of doing things to him. 

Emril settles herself in next to him and pesters the scientists with a thousand questions about Earth medicine. She'll happily trade it for lots of intel on how the protomolecule is currently interacting with Leareth's body and the progress she's made and still making on teaching it to use its imitation Healing-Gift. The scientists are pretty all right to talk to as long as it's about intellectual topics that are relevant to them.

They have APPALLING bedside manner but that's not their fault, and besides, she works for Leareth, some of his scholars are just kind of like that even without the artificially-induced brain damage. 

...

The other Healer who learned how to do kidney transplants before would be delighted to help with Julie's lung transplant once that's ready to go. 

Julie makes a point of not asking about her dad but she's not sure anyone is paying enough attention to her to appreciate this. 

She puts on the VR glasses for her lung transplant.

It's WAY less stressful for the Healers this time! With the combination of Earth medical tech and monitoring equipment, actually trained doctors, and magical Healing powers - which this is a pretty damned good opportunity to demonstrate and prove - they should be able to get through it very smoothly and efficiently, and then give Julie a massively accelerated surgical recovery. 

How's the other infected human test subject doing? 

He's not that sick from the protomolecule yet but he's incredibly miserable and confused and is mostly huddled in a corner crying.

Emril wants to be comforting but they're really busy and don't exactly have a lot of spare personnel. She spends a couple of minutes talking to him, giving an extremely simplified summary of what's going on, and then maybe she can encourage him to watch something engaging on one of the VR headsets so he's at least distracted? 

He's DYING of an ALIEN PARASITE he doesn't want to watch calming movies!

Leareth sleeps for fourteen hours straight, not even waking up when the Healers turn him. When he can finally be roused again, he's still incredibly groggy from all the anti-epileptic drugs they've loaded into his system, and he spends most of the next day drifting in and out. Emril's found some sort of basic language-instruction program that he can watch on the VR headset, but his concentration is terrible and he keeps dozing off in the middle of lessons. He can't even manage more than very simple math thoughts for protomolecule small talk, it's intensely frustrating.

They're making headway, though. None of his organs are in great shape but none are threatening to quit either, and Emril is making a lot of progress on getting the Proto to mess with his brain function less, now that she has access to things like NEUROSCIENCE VIDEOS which is AMAZING. They start weaning down the drugs. 

It's still not until almost three days after his meeting with Jules Pierre Mao that he feels well enough to even attempt the careful strategic thinking which he so badly needs to do. 

He wants a report from Nayoki first. One that Mao can't intercept, ideally. They have a private cipher they've used for written messages in the past, and no one on Mao's ship even speaks much less reads any of the Velgarth languages it would be encrypting, so that seems adequate, probably, if she's allowed free access to their computer comms? 

Nayoki sends him a summary. 

Jules Pierre Mao has communicated with Thoth - a separate secret research program, siloed from the lab on Io, previously involved in the plans for infecting Eros - that they should continue the search for the Anubis and otherwise stand down. They've been warned that the plan to attack Eros is known to another faction, now, and ordered to dismantle all possible ties to them; this apparently involves some security people recruited from gangs on another station called Ceres? Nayoki has a bunch more context on the previous plan for Eros, now, most of which is no longer relevant since Mao isn't stupid and isn't going to use a compromised plan. 

He's contacted Errinwright at the UN, the man who works for him, to alert him that there's a 'change of plans' due to 'another faction involved.' It sounds like, in fact, Errinwright has not been entirely forthcoming with anyone else at the UN on the spy's report, which is unfortunate. It at least seems like the report sent hasn't clued Mao in that Holden's ship, the one that the spy-report was sent from, is the same as the "OPA" ship lurking by Io now. Mao's very busy and the connection is tenuous since the spy didn't really have context on Leareth at all when he sent his report. 

Mao is still not sure that Leareth and Nayoki aren't just making up literally everything about Velgarth's existence. This is inconvenient, and it's hard to prove it conclusively given that Nayoki doesn't want to go around showing off the full extent of her abilities. She's demoed a Gate for him, and there's obviously the Mindspeech aspect, but from his perspective it's not absurd that this could all just be related to the protomolecule somehow. He's done some thinking through it but...mostly isn't fully propagating any new beliefs based on that evidence, while he's still unsure how much to trust it. 

She's absorbed a bit more context on the UN and Martian governments, since Mao has been doing a lot of thinking through whether to contact one or both of them and come clean about the protomolecule's existence. There's no one in the Martian hierarchy who seems an obviously good candidate for Leareth to try to loop in directly. Avasarala is still seeming like - not a bad option? But literally all Nayoki knows about her is filtered through the thoughts of people who aren't going to be unbiased on her trustworthiness or ethics. 

This is very exhausting to process. 

Leareth argues the Healers into letting him take a stimulant. He asks for paper, and Emril brings him that plus one of the fancy high-tech tablets they use here, in case he wants to try using that for note-taking. It...definitely has a learning curve, and Leareth isn't in the best state for it, but it's not hard to do better than paper and he's pleased. 

He thinks for a while. 

...Hmm. Information relevant here: how smart is the protomolecule seeming, right now? They've fed it more bacteria and the scientists are talking to it a LOT. 

It's happy to talk to the scientists! It's a lot more limited than when it let them leave Velgarth, but well ahead of when Leareth first met it.

All right. He...has been mostly operating on reflexes and very short-term planning, during their time so far in the Earth system. He needs to take a step back, think from first principles about - well, to start, what does he want, here? What's his endgame, which possible resolutions are happy endings? And what are the bad outcomes that need to be steered away from? 

Obviously he wants there to not be a war. Especially not a stupid war that Jules Pierre Mao started half by accident, overconfident that it would never go that far... 

...That's just the most urgent bad outcome to be avoided, though, and it's not, actually, the most important piece here.

He wants Earth and Velgarth to travel to the stars. He wants them to work with the protomolecule, learn what it knows - learn as much as they can of what its creators knew, they were clearly capable of so much - if they could do this, the same general capability applied to different problems could - just solve energy and resource constraints. A world without scarcity - where no one ever had to die, at least not forever... 

He wants that so badly it hurts. 

...And then there are the real tail risks, here. 

What if he's wrong, and they can't work and cooperate with the protomolecule at its full strength? 

What if there is something on the other side of the wormhole that it so desperately wants to build, and that something is an existential threat? 

- The civilization that built the Proto is almost certainly gone. The rock where they found it, in orbit around an outer planet, had been frozen there for two. billion. years. It's not that a civilization couldn't in theory last that long - they wouldn't even be limited by the life of their sun, obviously - but. If they had those abilities, and were reshaping the galaxy, someone would have noticed. 

What could end a civilization with no scarcity and a general solution to death? There are boring explanations, like 'two billion years is a long time to maintain political stability', but...there are worse answers too. 

What if they were wrong about the protomolecule being alignable, and it finished its first Work and then kept going and ate them too? 

What if they built a bridge through space to the wrong other world, and found something bad enough that it destroyed them? 

Leareth...isn't sure what he's supposed to do about that. 

Convince the protomolecule not to do its Work, even once it's big enough? That seems...hard. It's very focused on it. And it would leave so, so much upside on the table. 

...Sacrifice Velgarth, let the protomolecule do its Work there but not here? It risks a vastly smaller total number of lives. The problem is, in order to ever find out what happened there, the protomolecule needs to get them back, and for that it needs to be big enough that it will be impossible to contain if it doesn't want to cooperate.

The other problem with that plan is that he very, very badly would prefer not to risk sacrificing his world. 

Vanyel lives there. 

All right. Focus. 

The thing he actually needs, as a next step, is a smart, sane, responsible ally. Ideally a lot more than one of them. 

Jules Pierre Mao...is someone whose language Leareth speaks. Far more than is true of any of the others he's met up until this point. And he's someone who sees the upside, too. He's...not even wrong, necessarily, that the cost of Eros would have been worth it. 

He's also - well, probably approaching this with a lot of the same blind spots that Leareth's younger self would have had. 

...It would help his aims a LOT, here, if Mao trusted him, and was willing to take his advice. Advice from a fellow doer of ambitious, audacious plans to transform the future of the world - but one who's a lot older than him. Who's tried and failed over and over and over. 

He could, if he wanted to, make a pretty convincing case for his qualifications. If he were willing to show his hand substantially more than he has so far. But he doesn't right now have a good enough sense of Jules Pierre Mao as a person to confidently predict how he would respond. 

All right. The obvious smart thing to do first is to talk to Julie. Tell her everything, see how she reacts - that'll be informative as to how Earth's cultural background filters how his life story gets perceived - and then lean on her knowledge of her father. Julie probably won't want to have that conversation at all. He can make the case for why it's so important, though. 

Other priorities: he should think some more about specific tests to try with the protomolecule, if only as a hedge against Mao doing his own thinking and coming up with plans that involve a lot of unnecessary murder.

Also he...needs to check his immortality method. He's very unsure what would even happen, if he dies here - both the sheer distance from Velgarth and the protomolecule infection could affect it - and it's important to know. Unfortunately it's not clear whether doing magic is safe for him. He...could bring Nayoki in on it fully? Not something he's ever done before, with anyone, but. Desperate times. 

- there's a copy of him, back there on Velgarth, inside an alien entity currently eating the moon. He has no idea how to think about that. 

The stimulants are wearing off and Leareth's head is starting to hurt rather badly. 

He makes sure everything is down in his notes - loose end to tie up, he really needs to tell someone about the protomolecule on the moon back in Velgarth, probably he should tell Mao even if he doesn't land on the side of seeing the man as a potential sane and reasonable ally - and then takes a nap, which ends up being close to six hours of nap because he has no stamina right now for anything including lying in bed thinking. 

After that, though, he checks with Emril how Julie is doing now. 

Her lung transplant recovery has been going very smoothly, what with all the magic. She's still on a lot of pain meds but she's conscious and watching the news.

:Julie? I - need your advice, as a local. On a somewhat complicated matter, and…not one you will find pleasant to discuss, I expect. Are you up for that?:

Unpleasant? What a change of pace. Yeah, I can talk. Might be a bit loopy, they have me on the good stuff.

:It is about - our situation, and my plans. And your father, most of all. I...know you feel that he deserves punishment for what he has done, and what he wished to do. I cannot say you are wrong, and in the long run I do not intend to let the world forget what he did to the Cant and the Donnager, and I am sure neither does Holden. However. In the short run, he is at least skilled and competent at what he does, and he has the connections here that I lack. And I...understand how he thinks. We are not dissimilar people, in many ways. I need to understand him better, though, if I wish to play the game of - of earning his trust so that he will take my advice. And so I need your help: 

He waits for Julie's reaction. He doesn't read her mind. Mostly because using his Gifts hard is risky, but also it's - not the kind of thing it makes sense to do sneakily. Not with an ally. And, so far, Julie is the best ally he has.