So That a Marigold Might Live Free

by Brian S. Wheeler

  "What are you going to do?"

  Hanson plunged his shovel back into the ground. "I'm not entirely sure. But I'm certainly not going to let any doctor from the United Systems shoot poison into Maggie's blood."

  "But what if it's a medicine like they say? What if it's a cure?"

  Hanson shook his head. "I don't trust any of it. I'm not like those people living in the Systems. None of us are, Linda. We're followers of old Zeb. We're not like those science people."

  Linda frowned. The fear the blight delivered to her that morning when she saw patches of the orange in her fields remained too fresh. She couldn't stomach the thought that upon the next morning she would find that blight on Quantum's fur. Perhaps her fear was the reason she failed to understand Hanson.

  "What do you mean we're not one of those 'science people?' It's not like we get to pick and choose the scientific principles we want to follow, Hanson. Physics keeps us from hurling off this rock into space. The spinning planet produces the gravity that anchors our feet to the ground. None of us objected to any of the Systems' science when we willingly stepped aboard their starliners and trusted our lives to the mathematics that powered those ships' engines. We accept the genetically-modified seeds the Systems sends us to increase the odds of our crops thriving in Geralt's soil. How can we not think we're not 'science people' just like they are?"

  Hanson tossed his shovel away from him. "You're sounding more like a man from the Systems than a good follower of Zeb."

  Linda silently counted in order to maintain her composure after such an insult. "I only want to remind you that you've got a hard choice, Hanson Potts. No matter how you try twisting it, your decision is going to involve lots of people other than just you. Other than just your family. And you can't live behind any excuse to try to convince yourself otherwise."

  "I'm a student of Zeb Griffin, and I'm obliged to follow no law other than my own."

  Linda nodded. She said nothing more before returning home. There, the control burn's flames devoured what remained of her acres' grasses without threatening her home. She worried those flames may have missed a patch of the orange blight, worried if some bit of the disease had come into contact with Quantum, if her dog may have slipped out of the door to run through those fields while she had been looking the other way. Linda watched the flames' remnants until darkness fell. She had enough to worry about, and she certainly didn't envy Hanson Potts, who had a family, who had that precious Marigold for a daughter. Linda worried Hanson Potts might prove an unwavering disciple of that old ghost of Zeb Griffin.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 3 - Monster in the Grass

  "It's beautiful country, country that could help feed our aging home world," Dr. Ken Rhodes stared outside of the window of his humming magcar. "They'll squander it of course. Those settlers of Zeb are going to ruin the first planet we've found that's so close to Earth."

  Dr. Rhodes dared not drive another mile until the starliner far overhead in the stars orbited closer to his coordinates. The settlers may have met every stipulation of their construction contract, but they had failed to erect a sufficient number of beacon towers to provide a steady stream of net coverage. Dr. Rhodes wondered if those settlers had chosen to skip building those towers hoping their absence would secure their privacy. Those settlers were foolish enough to do just that. Without those towers, too many swaths of Geralt remained off the map. One mile looked the same as any other with the tall grasses surrounding the roadways, and Dr Rhodes feared losing his way. He did not have time to be lost in the grass.

  He stared out of his windshield at the golden grasses swaying in the wind. He didn't dare step out of his vehicle while he waited. The orange blight lurked in those swaying fields.

  "How do the biology guys know there are no predators in the middle of all that grass? There's not enough of a signal to drive by, and the bio guys claim they've mapped every sector for life. The least they could've done is supply me with a gun. Send me to vaccinate Zeb settlers, and they don't even give me a gun. It's as if they want me to fail. What treason did I commit in a past life to deserve such work?"

  Dr. Rhodes knew that every home he would visit with his medicine and his needles would be stocked with weaponry. The followers of Zeb never claimed to be a part of any formal, official religion. Those who followed Zeb's teachings couldn't accept any hierarchy, no matter how divine, that separated the priest from the layman. That was not to say those who followed Zeb did not possess faith. They revered their guns as others might worship their icons. And yet Dr. Rhodes had been sent to stave off the blight with no means of defending himself as he asked those followers of Zeb to spit on all the teachings they held dear so that he could vaccinate their children.

  "Why should they train me with a laser pistol?" Dr. Rhodes smirked as he tried not imagine monsters lurking in the grass. "The men with all the ribbons on their shoulders will likely be just as happy to see the Geralt colony fail like all the rest founded by Zeb's students. Let all the settlers die out so the generals can descend and inherit all the resources Zeb’s pupils leave behind. I have my terrible pictures to help convince the settlers. And if they aren't enough, well a doctor isn't too much of a price for conquering a planet without firing a shot."

  The magcar's navigational system chimed before glowing back to life as the starliner drifted overhead, washing Dr. Rhodes' vehicle in its strong signal. Dr. Rhodes no longer had an excuse to linger, and so he steered the magcar down the roads cutting through the grasslands. Sooner than he hoped, he spotted smoke rising from a control burn from one of the settlements. He would be considered a monster. They would consider him something more sinister the moment he asked to vaccinate their sons and daughters with medicine supplied by the United Systems.

  Dr. Rhodes wished those settlers would believe him when he told them that, in truth, the United Systems didn't much care one way or the other if they took that medicine.

  Dr. Rhodes didn't believe the United Systems would lose any planet simply on account of blight.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 4 - A Kite Rising Above

  Quantum's barking chased Maggie and her yellow kite onto the artificially green grass behind her home. Ms. Wells had chained Quantum to a stake in her yard to prevent the dog from bounding into the ashes of the burned fields. So Quantum pulled against his leash and barked plaintively, doing his best to lure Maggie to walk down the road to him, to release him so that they might play as they once had before the blight fell upon Geralt.

  Maggie hated that she couldn't untie Quantum so that he could run beside her. But her father had sad that she needed to ignore the dog so that both of them would be safe until the blight that made adults afraid faded away. So Maggie retreated behind her home. She could not run away from Quantum's pleading, but behind her home, Maggie at least didn't have to look at the sad dog.

  The wind was perfect that morning for kite flying - strong enough to give the kite a soft lift into the air, not so weak that Maggie would lose her breath trying to generate the wind needed to send the kite aloft. Nor was the wind so strong as to make Maggie struggle to keep the string from tangling as it flew off of the spool. The wind was gentle. Maggie didn't have to move at all, and the kite would not pull her into the large hole her father had dug in the backyard.

  To Maggie, the world of Geralt seemed so large and open, a world covered with swaying grasses of gold, a world still untamed by fences and barbwire. Yet Maggie felt confined. She felt as trapped as she had during those long months floating upon the starliner to her new home. Golden fields surrounded her, and her parents told her that she could touch none of those grasses. She was told the blight waited in the grass, that in order to be safe, she could no longer run through the fields with Quantum, that she could no longer feel the grass tickling her face, that she could no longer construct mazes through the prairies. They told Maggie she must stay close to the home, no matter that the world was so large.

  "Stop your yelping, Quantum!"
Maggie shouted in the direction of Ms. Wells' property. "You can see the kite just fine from where you're at! You just have to look up in the sky!"

  Quantum's barking stilled as the kite climbed into Geralt's lavender sky. Maggie grinned as wind pulled yarn from the spool. She had seldom felt so proud as she did when she watched the kite dance. The pink and green ribbons her mother had sewn to the tail looked marvelous. Her father had helped her construct the kite's light frame, and had helped Maggie stitch its yellow fabric to the skeleton. The result was wonderful. Maggie might have been trapped on all sides by the grasses, but the kite rose above the fields her parents claimed to be tainted with the orange sickness.

  The yellow kite celebrated in that sky for much of the morning, but the winds eventually turned weak, and the kite struggled to find the power to sail.

  Maggie, however, was not ready to stop her play when the winds faltered. She fought the inevitable as she could. The kite fell repeatedly onto the grasses, but Maggie found she did not have to disobey her parents' warning to retrieve her kite. She merely gathered the string and dragged the kite through the fields and back to her hands. The wind would return, the kite would again rise, and the kite would again fall. And time and time again, Maggie pulled that kite through the golden fields and back into her hands.

  Thus Maggie occupied the remainder of her morning until mother called her to the lunch table.

  Maggie was proud. She was happy for such a pleasant morning. She had not disobeyed her parents' will and had not taken a step into the fields. She had kept her distance from the orange blight.

  The kite, however, had not.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 5 - Undesired Science

  The cosmos likely never saw a bureaucracy as guileful and cunning as that of the United Systems. Like any effective bureaucracy, the United Systems understood the best way to curb random, unplanned potential was to swiftly punish the smartest and most innovative of its members with their own success.

  Dr. Rhodes was the man who had traced the orange blight to its source. Debate raged that in doing so, he had discovered a strange new form of extraterrestrial life.

  The source of the blight was no virus or bacteria. Those were names of Earth monsters, and the origin of the blight resided somewhere in the stars. Perhaps those microscopic beasties that tainted Geralt with orange ruin had been delivered by a passing comet. Perhaps the beasties had for eons drifted upon the solar wind. Or perhaps those tiny monsters had always been trapped in Geralt's orbit, only to be dispersed by something as simple as a starliner before the planet's gravity pulled them onto the golden fields.

  Dr. Rhodes discovered that what those settlers witnessed before their celebratory fireworks was the burning spores that housed those blight as it fell through the atmosphere. The angels had not delivered those streamers of silver, pearl and gold.

  It was an alien form of the specter, but it was death all the same that fell from the heavens. The blight emptied two of Geralt's three spaceports, their crowded populace mustering little resistance against the rapidly spreading blight. Dr. Rhodes still shuddered when he thought of that doom, still trembled each time he looked at the photographs showing the blight's ravages upon its victims. The blight was a parasite. It seeped through the pores of plant and man to mingle with its host's genetics. The blight commandeered the genetic code, rewrote that language as it delivered alien compounds into the host to quicken the pace of cell reproduction. The blight needed only a short time to incubate, and then the blight raged to transform its host into an alien form of life.

  In the thriving plant life upon Geralt, in both the native and transplanted species growing on the planet, the blight's first symptom was the orange splotches that developed on the leaf. The native golden and Earthen green plants, if not immediately set to flame, quickly turned into a vibrant shade of orange. A short time later, giant blossoms swelled atop the fields, bursting at the slightest touch of wind to spread their spores. Thus the orange quickly flooded any field. Settlers reported inspecting their fields and finding them untouched by the blight before stopping for supper and for bed, only to wake the next morning and see their homes trapped by the orange plague when they peeked out of their windows. In an instant, they knew the fire had to put to their investment they planted in those fields.

  Dr. Rhodes felt certain that the blight gained a first foothold in the fields before jumping across biologies to infect the animals the settlers brought to Geralt. It was a short jump then to the settlers as well. A bull in the pasture might brush against a plant tainted with the orange. That bull might return to taint the herd, and in less than a day, the orange blight might spread to appear on the chickens and goats, on the cats and the dogs. And by night, that blight might appear on every member of that farm's family.

  Animals, and men, infected with the blight moaned while they possessed the energy to do so. Yet the sounds of their suffering didn't last long against that alien from the stars that worked to conquer the planet through the blood of its host. The body bloated. Eyes and orifices constricted and closed. The blight replaced original organs with new sinews. Flesh and muscle became sustenance for the new creature emerging from the original host. Skin and hide cracked open, and a thick stalk would rise from what the infected had been. A few hours later, that bright, orange flower would blossom atop that stalk, expanding until it popped like a balloon to shoot its spores into the air to find a new host to claim upon that new world.

  The photographs Dr. Rhodes displayed to those settler families who first attempted to hide their children from his vaccination were terrible. None of the other transformed species looked as terrifying as the human body conquered by the blight - swollen and exploded, with that awful, alien stalk growing out of a broken abdomen, or perhaps up the throat and out of a gaping mouth, topped with that flaming orange flower that pulsed and waited for the slightest touch before covering its environs in additional spores. Dr. Rhodes feared those photos would forever haunt his nightmares.

  Adults held some resistance to the blight, but the children proved to have little power with which to defend against the invader. No one had the courage to take a photograph of what the blight did to the children.

  Yet they found hope no matter that their enemy was so terrible. Much of the cities were burned by the time Dr. Rhodes stepped upon the planet to begin his vaccination campaign. Few in the city escaped the blight, but Geralt was still very rural. The farms founded by the settlers forced the blight to travel, and that had given Dr. Rhodes enough time to discover a vaccine with which to resist the spreading of the blight - a vaccine of cutting-edge antibiotics and nano-bots designed to speed through the blood and annihilate any cell cursed with the blight's genetic revision.

  Only, Dr. Rhodes feared that the United Systems didn't share his desire to eradicate the intruder.

  Dr. Rhodes believed the United Systems should have provided him with an army to make sure no child was prevented from receiving the vaccination that would save a world. The stakes were too high. But the United Systems hadn't even provided him with a gun.

  The United Systems had given him no army nor any weapon, and thus Dr. Rhodes suspected that those generals watching from the sterile command centers of their starliners were content to simply wait for the last settler of Zeb to perish, so that the United Systems could cleanse the blight with terrible fire delivered from the safety of orbit before starting the colonization of Geralt anew.

  And Dr. Rhodes feared those generals had no plans for him.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 6 - Pieces of a Plan

  Dr. Rhodes didn't like the look of the burned acreage so close to the Potts family home. Records showed the Potts home included a young girl named Maggie, age seven. Seven was an age that was very susceptible to the blight, and the ashes of the fields told Dr. Rhodes that the orange sickness had been close.

  "Mr. Potts. Allow me introduce myself."

  The wide-shouldered man who greeted Dr. Rhodes the mome
nt after he stepped from the magcar wore a laser pistol at his hip, and the man took no effort to conceal the weapon.

  "I know who you are," Mr. Potts growled, "and I know why you've driven all the way out to my home."

  Dr. Rhodes nodded. The man was not the first to boldly display that laser pistol on his hip when the doctor from the United Systems arrived at his home. Many fathers had greeted Dr. Rhodes with their guns drawn, their sights leveled squarely upon the doctor's forehead. At least Mr. Potts kept his gun holstered. Zeb's followers were a hard and unforgiving people, and a gesture as simple as keeping a weapon holstered upon the hip was about the only token of good will Dr Rhodes could expect.

  "Then I hope I haven't wasted any time making it this far out into the country," Dr. Rhodes quickly grabbed his black bag from the front seat of the magcar. He believed it served him well before the settlers of Zeb to always move with quick confidence. "I see your neighbor has burned her field. I'll be sure to check in on Ms. Wells. Can you tell me how long it's been since she set the flame to her acreage? How long has been since the blight showed up in her grasses?"

  "How do you know Linda burned her fields because of blight?"

  Dr. Rhodes wasted a moment staring at Mr. Potts, trying to gauge the degree of the man's distrust. "Half of this planted has burned on account of the blight, Mr. Potts. What other reason remains for burning the fields?"