Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  Finding her way home took less time than she thought it would, so unfortunately she was still crying when she arrived at the entrance to the Kolas clan’s quarters. Steeling herself, she wiped her eyes and cheeks on her sleeve. She had no doubt that her face was blotchy and eyes red. She pushed open the door, imagining the whole clan sitting at the lengthy trestle table. In her mind, they would all turn to stare at her disapprovingly as she entered, but it didn’t happen. There were only a few Timcree in the room, and most of them were entrenched in watching a game of the four-person style of chess that intrigued the men of the Kolas household.

  Ducking her head, Jo let her hair hang down over her face to hide her tearstained cheeks and bolted for her room. She locked the door behind her and set the lights down to emergency levels. In the dim, she made her way to the bed and flopped down on her back. Tears wouldn’t come. They didn’t help anyway, so Jo decided that was okay. She lay there for a while fidgeting. She wanted something to do, anything.

  The image of the Timcree rifling through her medkits passed through her mind again, and desperate for any action, Jo decided to catalogue them just to make sure that nothing had gone missing. Some little voice in the back of her head called her paranoid, but reason was quickly shunted away because at least her paranoia would give her some release from the encasing blackness of lying on her bed.

  Having gloved up, she was making her way through the first kit, comparing everything with the manifest, when she came across the laser scalpel and stopped. Drawing the device out of its foam case, she held it up using only her thumb and forefinger. Perfectly balanced, the device turned on with a snap. Holding it before her face, Jo looked intently at the four-inch-long beam of light.

  Such a precise tool, she thought. I wish I could be so precise—just a precision machine made for doing one thing.

  For a moment, Jo contemplated the release the device could provide. A command from her heads-up to turn off her own nanites and then a simple, precise, cut down one of the basilic veins.

  Jo rolled back her sleeve, moving with intention.

  Gritting her teeth, she turned down the dial on the cutter, setting it to the right depth, and then without hesitation—for fear that she wouldn’t have the courage if she hesitated—she drew a line down her forearm from the middle to the wrist.

  Pain and immediate bright blood, but along with these new sights and sensations, Jo watched with fascination as her nanites sped to her rescue, closing the wound in only matter of seconds. Within a minute, the pain subsided. Jo held her arm in front of her face.

  She cut herself three more times in a similar fashion before she knew what she was doing. When she came to her senses, Jo threw the scalpel across the room and fell back onto her bed, suddenly terrified. Her heart pounded. Forcing herself to be still, she gripped the thin cover of her bed in her fists, trying to anchor herself to the world around her.

  She didn’t cry. Crying and self-pity were long gone, replaced by shame and loathing—and awe. She felt somehow better, more secure, more knowledgeable. She knew that she didn’t want to die.

  When she felt safe enough to move, Jo stood from the bed, stumbled back to the med kit, and took one dose of the generic sleeping pills inside. She fell asleep half an hour later.

  7

  Behind Glass

  The next day, Tanith and Jo sat together over midday, broth-filled bowls of noodles. The cankerous darkness metastasizing in Jo’s soul hadn’t gone away. Rather, since her incident with the scalpel, it had merely gone dormant and dull, as if the polish had worn off its surface. If anything, this felt worse, because Jo’s shame lay piled on top, but at least the darkness wasn’t actively trying to kill her. The best option that Jo could see was to put all the bad feelings behind her, to put all her effort into keeping them at bay and move forward with life, which was why that morning she had taken her weekly bath, got dressed, and helped Tanith set up the clinic. She still thought the clinic would fail, but the sooner it failed, the faster they could get on to a real cure.

  As was often the case, a young female from the clan served them their meal. Jo suspected the woman had a thing for Tanith—a guess further supported by the dark look she gave Jo as she left the room.

  It was the first moment they had together since Jo had made her way back from the isolation ward. As Jo expected, Tanith had created no drama or even acknowledged her total system failure the day prior. For once, she felt grateful for the Timcree’s laconic culture.

  Now, as Jo twirled her noodles around her chopsticks, she tried to carefully articulate her question so as not to offend Tanith. “If your healers use Gravlander medicine to do the work of healing, why do they read dice and pray?”

  Tanith watched her with his usual blank look for a moment. Then he purposely turned his eyes to the broth in his bowl. Lifting the vessel to his lips, he said in halting English, “Life is more than the psychics.”

  At first Jo wasn’t sure what Tanith meant, but then she had a guess. “Life is more than physics?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes, physics.” Tanith nodded at her correction of his word.

  Jo had no desire to argue metaphysics with Tanith, but with the Timcree, something other than the physical world seemed to lurk around every corner. So far Jo had done her best to avoid those dark corners, to keep her opinions to herself, but this time she couldn’t help it. Perhaps it was the darkness in her own soul that led her to pick on another. Whatever the reason, she decided to draw Tanith out. “Wasn’t it physics that healed that Timcree’s arm?”

  Tanith put down his bowl. A slight widening of his eyes told Jo that she had intrigued him with this conversation. “Can you say this? Physics healed? Physics or healer, who is to say?”

  Jo warmed a little and ventured an opinion of her own. “I think I can say for sure that physics regenerated the skin on that man’s arm.”

  “This is a difference besides Gravlander and Kree. Life is not so for Kree. We do not experience life as only physics. Life is the…” Here Tanith struggled for words. He thought for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders slightly. “For Kree, life is the Kree pa—the altogether, the everything. Life is physics—yes. Life is healer—yes. Life is Kree—yes. Life is Korg Haran—yes.”

  Clearly Tanith desperately wanted Jo to understand what he was trying to communicate. She had never seen him so animated, and Jo thought she understood what he was trying to say—she just didn’t buy it.

  “I don’t know, Tanith. I’m not sure that I agree with the Kree way. It seems to me that everything we experience and feel has a physical explanation. All of it comes back to physics.”

  The comment seemed to deflate Tanith, and Jo regretted it almost immediately.

  He picked up his rapidly cooling noodles with his chopsticks and said, “You miss your Ghost Fleet, pa?”

  Jo nodded, acknowledging her ever-present loneliness. Jo had to admit that right now she would even be grateful to see Evans again.

  “This not physics. With physics, Gravlander think she no longer need trust and hope or people. She think that physics and her all she need. With physics, Gravlander try to control the universe and everything in it, but she can’t. This make unhappy. Gravlander need Kree pa—physics, yes, and healer, yes. Gravlander need more than physics. You see?”

  Jo thought about explaining to Tanith that both the Timcree and the humans had little circuits wired in the ancient parts of their brains that rewarded and punished them. Her loneliness—and even her despair—were only a byproduct of her brain deciding that her life with the Timcree was less safe and beneficial than if she were with her own people. Thus it punished her for her choice to be here instead of there. If she went home, the same circuitry would reward her—at least until some jackass officer was telling her what to do again.

  She almost opened her mouth to argue with Tanith but thought better of it. Feelings and emotions are just physics, after all, she thought, but there’s no way he’ll understand.

  Si
nce she didn’t speak, an animated Tanith went on. “For Kree, pa means more than yes. Pa means trust. Pa means hope. Kree pa. You see?”

  Jo didn’t quite understand what he was driving at, so she didn’t answer at all, but instead just nodded her head. Apparently satisfied, Tanith went silently back to his meal.

  From behind the one-way glass, Jo watched Tanith pass among the patients in the now full isolation ward. Every once in a while, one of them would glance nervously toward the window at the front of the room.

  It’s not like they don’t know, Tanith. What are we hiding from them?

  Jo had been sitting behind the one-way glass in the abandoned sweat-ship for just over a week. Part of her still wanted to quit, but for now she was trying to provide the best possible care, given the circumstances. She kept telling herself that if she did just what the Timcree asked, someday they would come to trust her. Her buried frustration vented its fury on her stomach, which vacillated between dormant volcano and flowing lava.

  Well, at least I’m a little protected from the disease, whatever it is, Jo thought, desperate to find any positive. She knew it to be a false hope. She’d lived with Kolas and his clan in tight quarters. If this disease were transmitted by any of the usual means, she was already exposed. Her real hope was that the disease wasn’t transmittable to humans, but that seemed ridiculous, considering the similarities between the Timcree and Gravlander genomes.

  Near the door in the small cordoned-off waiting area, Jo caught sight of a young girl staring openly at the bronzed window.

  Jo frowned. Yes, I’m here, little girl. I’m here to give you the besh. The Gravlander witch is coming for your soul.

  As if the girl had heard her thoughts, she seemed to shiver and lean in closer to her mother. Even through the tint between them, Jo could tell that the girl looked pale. When she coughed, her mother wiped a bit of something that Jo suspected to be blood from the corner of her mouth. For a moment, the girl’s eyes lost focus. Jo’s instincts kicked in. She’s in trouble.

  Standing in another part of the room, Tanith finished taking the pulse of a patient and surveyed his domain. Seeing the new family, he walked in their direction.

  Jo whispered into the microphone of her visor, “Tanith, that girl is really sick. I think she’s in trouble.”

  Jo adjusted the dials on her visor-cam. Blocking out the world in front of her, she saw what Tanith saw as he walked up the aisle of beds.

  The visor-cam system hadn’t turned out to be quite as insane as she thought it would when he first proposed it, but Jo still wasn’t convinced that she could do any real good with it. She really needed feedback from her own senses—the sound of a heartbeat, the feel of a broken bone. A modern heads-up would have had the necessary brain interface to allow her to feel what Tanith felt, but no such luck with these devices, which turned out to be little more than a screen and a communication mechanism.

  If the shackles of Timcree taboo weren’t enough, the disease seemed to be a disease of a thousand symptoms. Some patients ran high fevers, others only mild ones. For some, the disease acted as a virulent flu, usually leading to death through pneumonia. For others, it seemed to cause severe abdominal cramping and diarrhea. A third group just seemed to die without an apparent cause. Jo had been grappling with the possibility that there were several diseases involved.

  Jo watched through Tanith’s eyes as the young mother wept while her daughter went through another coughing fit. The open display of emotion from the mother—a gesture not all that common in Timcree society—drew Jo to the young child even further.

  As the number of deaths rose, panic was beginning to set into Timcree society, and because the disease seemed to lack any clear pattern, some parents were sending any child with the sniffles to isolation wards that were popping up all over Korg Haran. Considering that a good number only had a run-of-the-mill illness, Jo thought it a cowardly act. When she made the mistake of mentioning her opinion to Tanith, she watched him take a long deep breath with both his hands clenched before he turned away without saying anything. After that, Jo kept her opinions about Timcree society to herself.

  Tanith approached the child and greeted her mother. They had a short conversation in Kree from which Jo was able to divine that the child had been sick for about a week. There was something in the middle that Jo didn’t understand, something about the girl’s father. She did catch the word hize, pronounced heeza, the Timcree word for witch, so whatever she missed probably had something to do with her. Before they stopped talking, Jo was able to figure that the girl had only taken a turn for the worse in the last twenty-four hours.

  Jo was desperate to take a look at the girl. In fact, she was moving to take off the visor-cam before she even realized what she was doing. Touching the device, she stopped. She couldn’t. Taking a deep breath, she let it out in ragged spurts and forced her body to relax in her seat.

  You’re going to have to do it his way for a while, Jo. You have to find a way to show these people that you can do them good before they will trust you.

  Jo could see through the heads-up that Tanith had started to examine the girl, but she wasn’t paying full attention. Her mind seemed stuck on finding some way to move forward. In exchange for the tritium, the Ghost Fleet had given Kolas—or rather, sent with Jo—enough medical nanites to treat about a third of the population of Korg Haran. At this point, there were nowhere near that many people sick, but Jo was becoming concerned that this outbreak might quickly surpass that number if she wasn’t able to slow it down somehow.

  The standard method for treating an emerging infectious outbreak was to use a mobile lab or the like to find the infectant that was causing the problem. Then the nanites were programmed and trained to fight that particular disease before they were deployed.

  Yet Jo didn’t have the capability to make that happen. When she’d asked Tanith for blood samples from the Timcree, he flat-out refused. Timcree blood—and all the information it carried—had been used by the corporations long ago to enslave them. It didn’t surprise Jo that there were major taboos around letting a Gravlander—especially a Gravlander doctor—handle Timcree blood.

  Jo turned her attention back to the mother and daughter. Watching the mother’s obvious tenderness caused something in Jo to snap. She could convince herself all she wanted that if she just went along, eventually Tanith would relent, and she could get on with treating the Timcree, but that wouldn’t do at all for the little girl. She would be dead long before then.

  Tanith was taking the girl’s vitals—her pulse was up near 160, and her blood pressure was high, all the while her oxygen levels were very low. Her breath sounded almost like a chorus of toy trumpets.

  “Screw it,” Jo mumbled to herself. Then louder, “Tanith, come see me right away. Tell the mother that you’re going to get some medicine that will help her daughter breathe.”

  Jo turned off the visor and rummaged in the small med kit she had brought with her from her room. It took her a moment to find what she needed. By that time, Tanith was standing in the doorway silently. Jo handed him the inhaler she had retrieved from the medical kit.

  By the instant stiffness in his posture, Jo knew that he only took it because she shoved it into his hand. He looked at it with distaste. “No, Meeta, Timcree cannot take gift from Gravlander.” Tanith moved to set the inhaler down.

  Jo wrapped her hands around his to stop him.

  Tanith flinched.

  Jo wanted to pound her head against the table in front of her, but she had to find a way. “You have to! Without it, that girl is likely to die in the next few hours. If we’re going to even try to save her, she has to have that medicine.”

  “No.”

  “Tanith, there are nanites in there. You already own nanites from the Gravlander. These can be part of them.”

  Clearly uncomfortable, Tanith didn’t respond. He tried again to put the inhaler down.

  “Buy it from me or trade me something! I don’t care.” />
  At the word “buy,” Jo felt the tension go out of Tanith’s hands. She slowly let go, and Tanith held on to the inhaler.

  Voice cracking, Jo continued. “Sell it to the girl’s mother. If we are going to help, she just needs the medicine.”

  Tanith nodded and left the room to return to his patient. By the time he did so, Jo was once again standing at the darkened glass, listening on the visor-cam as Tanith explained to the woman that she must buy this medicine to help her daughter. The woman glanced toward the mirrored window and by chance looked straight at Jo.

  Stroking her child’s dark hair, the woman brought a few of the strands to her nose and smelled them. Eyes brimming and steeled hard against sorrow, the mother turned to Tanith and said only, “Pa.”

  Jo turned off the visor, reached over to the table near her, and turned on her medical tablet, then put on her own fleet-issued heads-up. She stood and looked out the window. She wasn’t at all sure that Tanith would have approved of this part of her plan, but she decided that there was no need for him to know.

  Jo watched through the glass as Tanith gave the girl two puffs from the automated inhaler, filing her lungs with activated nanites, all of which were now sending out little signals trying to connect to some nearby medical device. Jo took it to be a measure of the severity of the girl’s condition that eight percent of the nanites were already registering contact with foreign bodies when the swarm finally connected to the tablet four seconds later.

  At this point, Jo acted as a cheerleader, or maybe a better comparison was a traffic guidance system for the swarm, isolating the infectant among the agents encountered and sending the swarm to the areas of the lungs that needed them most. For the next ten minutes, Jo lost herself in the emerging picture of the bronchi inside the girl’s lungs.

  She had at least two different organisms contributing to an acute case of pneumonia. The bacteria seemed pretty run of the mill, the standard streptopneumoniae superior. However, the associated virus was something wholly new to Jo and her tablet. If it hadn’t been so clearly an engineered virus, she would have thought it to be part of the corona family.