“What are you?” I asked.
Botjolo, said a sad voice in my head. Cursed. Self-destructive.
The language was Oolom but the voice was my father’s. Dead these twenty-seven years.
A moment later, the Peacock was gone.
Festina came toward me, a blob of gooey-jell cradled in both hands. “I’ve got an egg!” she announced. Her hair was speckled with snow, her eyes bright.
“You know you’ve got to keep that in water,” I said. “Otherwise, it won’t hatch.”
“Hatch?” She looked down in surprise at the lump in her hands. “Right. It’s going to hatch. I’d been thinking…” She broke off. “I only collect eggs. Just the eggs. I’ve never had…what happens when it hatches?”
“The owl-pole eats the egg jelly,” I told her. “That’s what the baby lives on for the first few days. Till it’s ready to swim on its own. There’s nothing left of the egg after.”
“Oh,” Festina murmured. “Oh.” She lifted the handful of jelly up to face level and stared at it. Eye to eye.
“They make nice pets,” I said. “If you handle them gentle right from the first, they get fair affectionate. They’re a snuggling kind of species.”
“I’m sure,” Festina answered. “But no.” She looked at the egg again. “I’d better put you back.”
Slow walk to the hole in the ice. We went together…or maybe Festina went alone, and I just walked beside her. She knelt and slipped the egg back into the water; it bobbed on the surface, the way a snowball floats when you drop it in a creek. “Is that what it’s supposed to do?” she asked.
“It’ll be fine.”
“I want to tell it to grow up big and strong,” she said, “but that’s so damned maudlin.”
“What’s wrong with maudlin? Weep bitter tears of loss, and I’ll never tell a soul.”
She was kneeling, I was standing beside her. I bent over and gave a quick kiss to the top of her head. Her hair. She tilted her head around to look at me, her face, my face…
Then a skimmer flew overhead. The Medical Threat Team arriving.
“We’d better get back,” Festina said. My mouth was open to say the same thing.
At least I think that’s why my mouth was open.
By the time we got back to the others, the Medical Threat folks were lumbering around in bright orange tightsuits, half of them plodding into the mine while the rest set up shop outside—quite the impressive pathology lab, laid out under a dome field, where we all got examined for the disease.
Simple summary of the next three hours: we were clean, Iranu was not. The deceased was hot, hot, hot—infected from ear-lids to toenails with our old friend Pteromic Paralysis. Or rather our friend’s newly arrived cousin, Pteromic B…kissing close to the original microbe, but with enough differences that it could now affect Freeps.
We prayed to all the saints this variant was different in other ways too. The original, Pteromic A, had turned out to have a latency period of six months, during which carriers showed no symptoms but were oozing contagious; that’s how the disease had spread to every Oolom on the planet without anyone noticing. Iranu had been down in this mine at most three months…so if the old pattern held, he could have been infecting people three months before he vanished from sight.
That meant all the Freeps at the trade talks. The Ooloms and humans too. Every blessed soul on Demoth could have been exposed, depending on how many species Pteromic B affected.
“If I were a Freep,” Yunupur whispered to me, “I’d buy a shitload of stock in olive-oil futures.”
He laughed. I precious near smacked him. “One more word like that,” I said, “and I’m telling your mother.”
Even if you’re young, some things aren’t jokes.
Though the med team pronounced us germ-free, we still got shipped to Bonaventure General and put into quarantine for a day. No one wanted to take the teeniest chance, even if the disease might already be romping through the populace. Our clothes were incinerated. Our bodies were full-immersion-baptized in three types of disinfectant, then irradiated with UV lamps hard to the edge of sunburn. (“Warm!” Festina cried. “I’m finally warm!” Easy for her to say—with that gorgeous cocoa-cream skin, she didn’t have to worry about freckles.)
And, of course, we drank so much olive oil our pores oozed with it. Pustulated with it. Like bodybuilders slathered in lotion.
Tic and Yunupur were singled out for special attention: led off to some Ooloms-only section of Bonaventure’s isolation unit and subjected to unknown indignities over the following 26.1 hours. The next time I saw Tic, he had sticky-plasters patched over his arms, legs, and torso; his only comment was, “No comment.”
We humans got off lucky—no one considered us susceptible to the plague, even if the Peacock had worried about me touching Iranu’s corpse. A disease-jump from Oolom to Freep wasn’t a big step; they were different breeds of the same species, not much farther apart than Chihuahuas and Great Danes. Homo saps were utterly different, with biochemistries so alien we were closer kin to terrestrial amoebas than Divian lifeforms. Three different doctors told me the quarantine was only because we might carry the microbes, not that we could be affected by them.
I wondered who to trust: the doctors or the Peacock.
We all had to give statements: full-scale interrogation by investigators in disease-resistant tightsuits. I gave my report four times, to teams from four different agencies…and each team was shadowed by proctors from outside the city, seeing everything, hearing everything, scrutinizing everything. The Vigil was in high gear now, pulling in proctors from the Oolom playground communities to make sure nothing got missed or messed.
When the questions were over, Festina and I retired to her room in the isolation unit. She had a new uniform, a new stunner, a new Bumbler, all flown in from Snug Harbor when her old equipment got impounded by health authorities; so naturally she had to field-strip the gadgets, clean them, program her favorite settings into the Bumbler, and generally fuss to get everything just so.
“This plague is a wimp-ass disease,” she told me as she worked. “A latency period of six months? In the Explorer Corps, anything that doesn’t kill within twelve hours is a low-grade nuisance. The med-techs hand you a tube of salve, then send you back to work.”
Words saying one thing, eyes the opposite. I could tell she knew the enormity of death. The absences it made. How it got into your eyes and ears and head, so that everything you saw of the world was shaded darker, crueler, bitter indifferent.
Christ Almighty, I didn’t want to go through that again.
Time on our hands and we talked, Festina and me…about true things and trite, present business, past desperations, where we were and who we’d once been.
What it was like to have a link-seed in the brain.
What it was like to have a flaming red birthmark on the face. Being considered “expendable” because of it. The Explorer Corps called themselves ECMs—Expendable Crew Members. And their rallying cry, if you could call it that, was the thing they said whenever one of their number died: “That’s what ‘expendable’ means.”
Festina told me she’d once killed her best friend. So I showed her my freckle scars. And my scalpel. Which had been returned to me, unlike everything else I’d been carrying. Hospitals are good at baking scalpels clean…especially as a favor to a woman who fondly keeps a memento of her sainted doctor father.
Festina wanted to touch my scars. So I let her. And she let me touch her cheek…which felt precious soft…
But mostly we just talked. Doctors and nurses right outside the door.
I didn’t understand Sperm-tubes. Festina explained what she knew.
“Each one is a spacetime outside spacetime. A self-contained pocket universe that can travel through the real universe faster than light, without relativistic or inertial effects. The colored tube is the region where the two universes touch each other…where you get spontaneous generation of photons and other particle
s because of boundary effects. And don’t ask me to explain boundary effects, because it’s all just double-talk for something we don’t understand. Four hundred years since the League of Peoples gave us star drives, and we still know fuck-all about them.
“If you want another boundary effect,” she went on, “it’s that weird-shit hallucination you get as you pass down a Sperm-tube. Supposedly the sensation only happens when you pass from the outside universe into the tube universe and when you go back out again; but it sure as hell feels like you’re experiencing every twist of the tail as you travel along, not just at beginning and end.” She gave me a curious look. “What did you feel when your arm went in one end and your hand came out the other?”
“Not much,” I replied. “Like everything was connected normally, except my fingers were on the far side of the room.”
Festina shook her head in wonder. “Admiralty manuals say that once you start entering a tube universe, you have to go all the way inside before you can try to leave again. You aren’t allowed to straddle universes for more than a quantum second. There’s some sort of exclusion principle…which probably means as much as ‘boundary effect,’ considering what you did this morning.”
“I didn’t do it,” I said. “The Peacock did.”
“Who’s the Peacock? Whoever generated the Sperm-tube?”
“I’m pretty sure the tube itself is intelligent…which probably means the universe inside. It’s a conscious entity. It, uhh…”
I stopped myself from saying the Peacock had talked to me. Festina was looking dubious already.
“Sentient universes make nice stories,” she said. “There’s a tradition of such tales going back centuries: sentient stars, sentient planets, sentient galaxies of dark matter…but that’s all crap for the fic-chips. It’s dangerous to believe in fictions, Faye. Stupid beliefs get people killed.”
“So if you were in a haunted house,” I said, “you’d be the one who goes into the attic to prove there aren’t ghosts?”
“No,” she answered. “I’d be the one on the front lawn with a flamethrower. Shouting, ‘Anything sentient better come out fast, cuz I’m burning this place to cinders.’ I don’t believe in ghosts…but I really don’t believe in taking chances.”
An attendant came to the door—a human female in her late twenties, who should have been a woman but was still dragging her heels back at girl. Too goddamned chirpy by half. “Lights out in fifteen minutes, ladies! And here, your last olive oil for the day.”
“It doesn’t even taste like olive oil,” Festina grumbled. “There’s a strange aftertaste. You put something extra in it, right? Antibiotics or immunoboosts.”
“What a sourpuss!” the attendant said. “This oil came straight from the synthesizer. I poured it myself. And before you go making harsh remarks about hospital food, all our synthesizers download their recipes straight from the world-soul’s databanks. This is one hundred percent pure olive oil. Extra virgin.” She tittered at the word. She would.
Festina muttered, “Your world-soul doesn’t know dick about olive oil.” She glanced at me. “Your people were originally colonists from Come-By-Chance, right? How much do you use olive oil in your cooking?”
“Not at all,” I admitted. “Our cuisine tends toward cod cheeks, potatoes, and kidney pie.”
“Oh but in fancy restaurants,” the attendant said, “in the fancy restaurants…well, in fancy restaurants you still get cod cheeks, but they’ve got a parsley garnish.”
“Hmmph.” Festina glared at the midget beaker of oil she was supposed to swallow. “On Agua, we understood olive oil. Good olive oil. Fried in it, poured it over salads, dripped it into every batter, made olive bread…and our synthesizers never produced crap with this aftertaste. If you ask me, your recipe database has a bug in it. And you unenlightened clods don’t know olive oil well enough to tell the difference.”
All right, Festina-girl, those are fighting words. I reached out with my link-seed up to the North Orbital Terminus, to the ships docked there. Greetings in the name of Xé. Might I converse with a ship-soul not native to Demoth?
A dozen yes’s—not the spoken sound of ship computers saying, “Yes,” but an amiable knowledge of ships willing to talk. Xe’s name opened doors…something to think about another time.
I want to compare your recipe for olive oil with the one used by Demoth’s world-soul. Is that acceptable?
More yes’s—I wasn’t asking for confidential information, was I? Every ore-hauler and passenger liner in orbit had its synthesizer database programmed from its home planet; and the planetary databases themselves would have been initialized from the master one on New Earth, official reference point for synthesizers throughout the Technocracy. On a staple like olive oil, the databases should all agree. Then I could rag on Festina she was just being a baby. That our olive oil was the same as everyone else’s, down to the last molecule, and let’s have no more of this “Agua cooks better than Demoth” malarkey.
Download and compare, I ordered our own world-soul.
A pause. From the world-soul. Not for processing but for something else. I got the queerest impression the world-soul was deciding whether to lie to me…like when you catch kids making a mess, and you can see on their faces, they’re wondering if they can fib their way out.
Then the responses on the comparison. Different. Different. Different.
The Demoth formula for olive oil didn’t match a single ship in orbit.
Holy Mother of God.
Quick comparisons: the foreign ships all agreed with each other. Demoth was the odd recipe out. It had unexpected extra ingredients, several long-chain organic molecules the world-soul claimed were not indexed in the biochem database.
Lord thundering Jesus.
Sometime since Homo saps came to Demoth—since human foods got added to the Oolom computer banks— the recipe for olive oil had been corrupted. Or reprogrammed. And our ways of cooking used so little olive oil, no one had ever raised a fuss.
Coincidence? Not blessed likely.
Access backup archives, I ordered the world-soul. The yearly backups we took of all standard databases. Find the year our olive-oil recipe deviated from initial settings.
The answer came back bolt-fast…too quick for the world-soul to have loaded and checked the off-line backups. It already knew the answer.
The change came the year of the plague.
What caused the change? I asked.
The answer appeared in my head, almost as if it’d been spoken aloud in cover-your-ass computerese.
The database was reprogrammed by a user with sufficient permissions to make the modification. Dr. Henry Smallwood.
I left Festina without spilling a word of what I’d just learned. One mumbly good night, then I scuttled off toward the isolation room that held my assigned bed. Me thinking all the while.
Dads was a humble country doctor. He didn’t have permissions to tamper with standard databases. That took passwords, retinal identification, secondary confirmation from government authorities, oversight by a team of programmers and biochemists. Synthesizer recipes had diamond-hard security, tighter than any other data on the planet…because if a fumble-fingered programmer accidentally changed the formula for sugar into strychnine, you could kill a million people in the time it took to make supper.
But.
Suppose the world-soul was telling the truth. That somehow, twenty-seven years ago, Dads had reprogrammed the formula for olive oil. Changed it to include something extra, with the teeny aftertaste Festina noticed.
Something that cured the plague.
So when synthesizers all over the world produced olive oil, they manufactured the cure.
And olive oil got chosen specifically because our cooking never used it. If it changed, no one local would notice the difference.
My father hadn’t tripped over a cure. Somehow, he’d imposed a new medicine on the world.
Wow. Way to go, Dads.
And I believe
d it, pure as gospel. It felt like the truth…even if it didn’t make sense.
With thoughts jumbling as I entered my room, I nearly didn’t notice there was already someone lying on my bed.
“Hi,” said Lynn. She picked up a bottle from the nightstand. “Fancy some wine?”
“The family drew lots,” Lynn explained as she poured. “Who would keep poor Faye company in quarantine? I won.”
“You always win when I’m not there to watch you.”
“Not always. Only when I want to.”
Now that we’d gone all respectable, my other spouses seemed to forget Lynn was a dab hand at picking pockets back in Sallysweet River. Show-off stuff, not actual theft—she’d lift someone’s wallet, then give it back. “Oh, you dropped this.” She learned to do it to impress me, at a time when I was only ready to laugh at rudeness. Lynn was still precious good at sleight of hand and could cut to the ace of spades in any deck…or draw the short straw whenever she felt like it.
“So how are you doing?” she asked.
“Uninfected, thanks. Which means you got lucky. How could you be so witless, sneaking into hospital when I might have the plague?”
“How do you know I sneaked in?”
I just gave her a look.
“Fine, I sneaked in.” She handed me a glass, filled with what smelled like a nice ice wine. My favorite. “We figured you’d need company.”
“You wanted to check up on me.”
“Of course. We worry.”
I held up my glass in a toast. She did too, then we both took a sip. Lovely stuff…which I know is not the proper way to describe wine, but I leave that “Impulsive, with overtones of blackberry” talk to Winston. He was the one who made the wine we were drinking; in the bad old days, Winston brewed a wicked bathtub gin.
“So how’s it going?” Lynn asked.
“The plague’s back, I’ve got a pocket universe following me around, and my father was not what he seemed. How was your day?”
“Vicki washed the cat in the toilet.”
The League of Peoples Page 86