“So it just clings and then what, takes vids of how the cell works?” asked Quara.
“Sarcasm isn’t helpful,” said Ela, “especially since you don’t know any more than the rest of us.”
Quara was temporarily stilled.
“Can we take a series of time-lapse images and see if they’re changing?” asked Ender.
“I think that anything under the slide, being dead, won’t show any movement,” said Carlotta.
“And a living sample won’t hold still,” said Ela.
“How about a brand-new sample that doesn’t know it’s dead yet?” asked Sprout
“Here goes,” said Carlotta. She swabbed the inside of her wrist with disinfectant, then used a scalpel to scrape an infinitesimally thin patch about a half-centimeter wide from the inside of her wrist. She showed no pain, though it must have hurt. When Sprout suggested a fresh sample, he didn’t expect Carlotta to act so quickly.
Ela had the patch of skin between two slide plates and into the imager within five seconds.
“Mother,” said Sprout, reaching out with a gauze pad for Carlotta’s wrist.
She pressed it in place while Miro bound it down with tape. “Thulium doesn’t have much time,” said Carlotta. “If I have anything she needs, it’s hers, without hesitation. We all feel that way.”
Sprout wondered: Would Thulium’s own father have taken a patch of his own flesh, without flinching and without hesitating? It was a good thing to know Mother’s courage and stamina when she was needed by someone she loved.
They took repeated images, at first ten per second, then one per second, then one a minute until an hour had passed. The computer, instead of printing them, made them into a sequence. Ela displayed it on all the screens in the room at once, so everybody could get a close look.
The slightly thicker patch moved. It was sliding along very slowly in the ten-per-second sequence. In the one-per-second, it moved quickly and left several parts of itself behind. Each of those parts grew, not thicker, but wider on the inside of the cell wall.
“Is it doing anything other than reproducing? Does the cell wall still function?” asked Miro.
“Without blood circulating, we can’t really test that,” said Carlotta.
“We can’t test absorption, but is the cell still secreting waste?” asked Ela.
“Yes,” said Sprout. “Just like normal. As if there were nothing there.”
“Well, if it does nothing,” said Ela, “if it interferes with nothing, what’s causing the pustules on the skin, the fever?”
“Auto-immune? Hyper-immunity?” suggested Little Mum.
“All possible,” said Quara. “But I’ve been scanning through older samples, blood samples, and they all have those patches.”
“So what is it?” asked Sprout. “It’s too small to be a one-celled creature—there’s no room for a nucleus. But without one, how does it reproduce? If it’s dividing, what gets passed to each new iteration?”
“Such fine questions,” said Ela. “Let’s divide that sample, and look at the old samples, and see if we can isolate them and get greater magnification.”
Everyone set to work, assigning themselves to a task unless somebody said, “Mine already,” and after everybody had called out what they were working on, Ela mentioned a couple of other things to be explored. “Just look for these along the way. Be alert to them.”
After six hours of intense close work with slides and images, hypotheses and discussions and arguments, they had learned a few things.
First, viewed from above, the objects emerged as wormlike, wriggling slightly as they moved across the inside of the cell wall. Yet they were nowhere thicker than two atoms deep, and they weren’t particularly complex molecules, though they were all carboniferous.
“It’s like worms with amino acid blocks as segments,” said Quara.
“A parasite, then,” said Miro, “not a virus or bacterium or fungus.”
“It’s making its new copies out of the available materials in the cell,” said Ender. “What do they do, kill the cell by using up everything inside it?”
“If so, where are the dead cells?” asked Little Mum.
“Do they shrivel away to nothing?” asked Sprout. “Do they burst? Do the worms propagate themselves to other cells without breaking the original host cell?”
It was midnight when Jane finally said, “We know far more than we did this morning. But do we know yet how it kills? How it makes us sick?”
Nobody had the answer. “Just speculation without evidence,” said Sprout.
“Good speculation, though, Sprout,” said Miro. “You gave us the kick we needed, got us unstuck.”
A few murmurs of agreement.
But Jane held out her hands for their attention. “The Hive Queen wants to see Thulium before she dies.”
“You can’t take Thulium or any of us, not even yourself, into the hive house,” said Miro. “We don’t know if this bug will infect Formics or not.”
“The Queen has asked me to meet her in the open air out in the meadow beyond the fence,” said Jane.
“Why can’t she just communicate with Thulium’s mind, the way she does with you?” asked Sprout.
“Thulium’s mind isn’t very coherent just now,” said Jane, “and anyway, I don’t know why the Queen wants her. Maybe it’s not a conversation.”
“Surely you don’t think the Hive Queen has a cure,” said Quara scornfully.
“I don’t think anything,” said Jane. “But remember that she can alter her own genes during egg-laying to bring forth hundreds of different kinds of creatures, suited to one particular purpose or another. She does things at a genetic level inside her eggs that we need machinery to do.”
“Going outside might kill Thulium,” said Sprout.
“Leaving her inside while we continue to fail to find a treatment probably will kill her,” said Jane.
And without further discussion, Jane, Thulium, and the examining table Thulium was lying on were gone from Q-Bay.
A couple of seconds later, though nobody noticed at the time, Sprout was also gone.
* * *
“I didn’t invite you here,” said Jane, when Sprout appeared a few meters away and trotted toward them.
“Are you bringing the Queen,” asked Sprout, “or is she coming on her own?”
Jane didn’t answer, because no answer was necessary when the Queen appeared on the lawn under the starlight. Talker was with her, as were two of the sluglike helpers that tended to the eggs in the hive house.
“This is so dangerous to you,” said Jane.
Talker replied, “Don’t distract me.”
The Queen lifted both slugs up onto Thulium’s body. One writhed down her leg, the other up across her chest. Here and there they left holes in Thulium’s clothing, small ones, with the skin bleeding a little under them. Biopsies, thought Sprout. We’re seeing Formic surgery.
Then, long before the slugs had traversed Thulium’s whole body, the Queen pulled them off and attached them to her abdomen. She stood upright for a few moments, then bent and curled herself into a ball on the ground.
“Patience,” said Talker. “I now speak my own words. The Mother is scanning the new creature, the tiny one inside the cells of the body.”
“What is she looking for?” asked Sprout.
“What I felt of her intentions was first, to see what the intruder was doing, second, how it was doing it, and third, how to render it harmless or kill it without harming the host cell.”
“That’s the whole project we were working on back in the quarantine building,” said Sprout.
“The Mother uses different tools and different senses.”
The Hive Queen uncurled herself, but remained lying on her side on the ground. Then she rolled over on her back. The two slugs were changing somehow—with slight undulations, like a snake swallowing a mouse, they were growing, and patches of their surfaces seemed to be changing color.
“What
are they doing?” Sprout asked.
“Hush, Sprout,” said Jane.
“I don’t know,” said Talker. “The Mother is filling them with the substance of her own body, shaped for whatever purpose she has conceived of.”
The two slugs suddenly were free of their connection to the Hive Queen. They slid off her abdomen into the grass.
Talker reached out to Jane and Sprout. “She is exhausted. Will you pick up the carriers and put them back on Thulium’s body?”
Jane instantly picked up the near one, while Sprout ran around the Hive Queen to pick up, in trembling hands, the slug on the far side.
“On bare skin,” said Talker.
Jane pulled up Thulium’s shirt far enough to expose her stomach. Jane held out her carrier over the skin, but Sprout hesitated. The carrier was heavier than he had expected. And he was afraid of doing it wrong.
“At the same time,” said Talker. “Each is useless alone.”
Using all the strength and stamina of his arms, Sprout held out his carrier and then, looking at Jane’s eyes, he mirrored her action. As near as he could tell, the two carriers attached themselves to Thulium at exactly the same time.
The carriers didn’t move across Thulium’s body. They just sat there, undulating very slightly.
Sprout wanted to ask, to demand, How long is this going to take? But he already knew that even the Hive Queen didn’t know. Whatever was happening to Thulium, if it was going to be curative, if it was going to remove all the microworms from her cells, it would take time. There were so many cells to reach.
Sprout reasoned that the carriers couldn’t possibly be cleaning up one cell at a time—the sun would probably turn into a brown dwarf or something before they could finish that job. So most likely the carriers were either releasing some kind of toxin or anti-parasite that would chemically destroy the worms, or they were releasing hunter-killer organisms born of the Hive Queen’s eggs, which would move through Thulium’s body killing or removing or disabling worms as they went.
He remembered a story about how on the planet where Ender Wiggin was governor, they had discovered that one group of the Hive Queen’s children had survived. Not warrior Formics or even workers. But rather sluglike creatures, about like the carriers, Sprout realized now, that would eat into the rock and inside their bodies separate gold from everything else. They gave out pellets of gold, and then much larger deposits of earth. They moved like earthworms through the stone, ingesting and egesting. This was how the Hive Queen created machinery for mining. She created workers—or larvae—that could selectively separate rock into its constituent parts. Sprout had read that there was some controversy about whether this meant that Formics were not actually tool-using creatures, until somebody pointed out that they came to Earth in starships much more sophisticated than the ones humans were using. Definitely toolmakers and tool users. But among the Formics, miners were born, not made.
So had these carriers been born for a new purpose? Or was this their job with all the hatching eggs in the hive house? Did they come to an egg, deposit something in it, and then the egg would hatch a larva all set to become what the Hive Queen had determined that it should be?
The Hive Queen didn’t change the eggs inside her ovaries, thought Sprout. She changed them after she laid them. Their destiny was injected, not inborn.
Or I’m completely wrong, Sprout reminded himself.
The first hint of dawn was appearing in the east. Talker said, “Thulium’s situation was very bad.”
“Yes,” agree Jane.
“I don’t know why she wasn’t already dead,” said Talker.
“We wondered the same thing,” said Jane.
“Every cell of her body is strong, and many were adapting to the invasive tissue, building new cell wall material around it, isolating it,” said Talker. “This would not have saved her, but the adaptation slowed the progress of the disease.”
“Without your intervention, what would have happened?” asked Sprout.
“Death,” said Talker. “But I see that you are asking how death would come. I believe that at a single time, all the worms at once would have torn open every cell wall. There would not be enough of Thulium left to call her remains a dead body. She would be a pile of cellular garbage, a molecular wastebin, and all the worms would dissolve into spores that would float away, ready to be inhaled by another host.”
“Vicious,” said Jane.
“A deliberate creation,” said the Hive Queen. “This did not arise by natural selection or random mutation. It was adapted from a life-form unrelated to Earth life, so it must have been found on Nest and changed into this lethal form.”
“So they were trying to kill her. To kill us,” said Sprout.
“I think they might also have been gathering information,” said Talker. “I think perhaps the people of Nest might have been trying to discover how she was able to transport herself instantaneously.”
“They wouldn’t have found it,” said Jane.
“No,” said Talker. “The worms could never have found the aiúa.”
“Still,” said Jane. “I don’t marvel that she lacked the strength to transport herself back to Q-Bay. By the time she knew she was sick, she was already weak.”
Talker said nothing for a long moment. “She didn’t transport herself?” Talker finally said.
“Well, I didn’t take her,” said Jane.
Then Talker looked at Sprout.
“I did it,” said Sprout. “Jane, you told me to. You said, Take her.”
“I said nothing of the kind,” said Jane. “I reached out to all of our party, but she was already gone. With you.”
“Then I—Jane, I heard you, even though you said it softly.”
“You heard your own mind telling you what must be done to save Thulium,” said Jane. “You’ve done well today.”
Sprout knew that he should be bursting with pride. But all that was on his mind was this: “Talker, is the treatment working? Does the Mother know?”
“You should call her the Queen,” said Talker. “She is my mother, not yours.”
“From this day on she is my mother and my queen,” said Sprout, “if she saves Thulium’s life.”
“She doesn’t need more children,” said Talker, “especially not children as uncontrollable as you leguminids. But she can always use friends.”
“Then she is my friend,” said Sprout.
“She knows now what that word means, when spoken by you,” said Talker, “and she welcomes your friendship and gives hers to you in return.”
Jane raised an eyebrow at Sprout. “I hope you realize that a serious pact was just made.”
Talker made a sound like a hoarse laugh, or gravel spilling on tin. “Sprout understands it every bit as well as you, Jane.”
* * *
The sun had not yet risen when the carriers slid off Thulium’s stomach and onto the grass beside the examining table.
“Take the carriers into the quarantine building,” said Talker. “They will do their work much more quickly on people who are not as infected as Thulium was. When everyone is free of the parasite, leave the building for an entire day, and the carriers will cleanse every surface.”
“Then we return them to you?” asked Jane.
“There will be nothing left of them,” said Talker. “Now the Mother asks you to carry us home.”
“You won’t be bringing the infection into the hive house?” asked Jane.
“The Mother knows how to take care of her own.”
The next moment, the Hive Queen and Talker were gone.
Sprout picked up his carrier from the grass. Jane picked up hers.
Then they were back inside Q-Bay.
Thulium opened her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have come down to Nest with the rest of you.”
“Yes, you should have,” said Jane. “But we all understood and forgave you at once, even those who thought they were angry at you. And we’re all happy that yo
u’re alive.”
“Can we take her vital signs?” asked Ela, from out in the laboratory.
“No,” said Jane. “Instead, one at a time you will lie down and receive the treatment the Hive Queen created.” She held her carrier up where they could see it. Sprout also raised his.
“Ick,” said Little Mum. “Do we have to swallow that?”
“Or does it swallow us?” asked Blue.
“It rests on your skin and injects you with the treatment the Hive Queen prepared.”
“A magic potion,” said Miro.
“As far as our science is concerned, yes,” said Jane.
“Shouldn’t we keep samples of the parasite to study?” asked Quara.
“Do you plan to create a version of your own? Are we beginning a cycle of biological warfare?” asked Miro sharply.
“Of course not,” said Quara. “But this is a different principle of life here and we—”
“Abstract science must make way for survival,” said Jane. “If you work with these parasites, someone will be infected someday and it will spread throughout the world. We had to study the descolada—but we also had it contained. This can never be contained. Do you understand?”
“She didn’t actually say that,” said Sprout.
“She didn’t say it to you,” said Jane.
Jane insisted that Sprout receive the treatment first, to show others how it worked. She probably figured that Sprout would have fewer trepidations about receiving the creatures, since he had already seen it work and had handled one of them himself.
So he lay on a table in Q-Bay and Jane and Miro put the carriers on his bare stomach. He could feel that something was passing through his skin, but there was no pain, as if the darts piercing him avoided all the pain-generating nerves. Instead of taking half the night, his procedure was done within a half-hour. “I really wasn’t as sick as Thulium, was I,” he said, when the carriers slid off him.
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