The Paradise Game

by Brian Stableford

  ‘It’s a bit late now, anyhow,’ she said regretfully.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t easy,’ she told me.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  But she didn’t believe that. She didn’t see how I could know. She didn’t know how I was surviving untouched by the Paradise bug, but she was sure that because I was, I couldn’t understand. I think she resented the fact that she’d caught it but I hadn’t. She’d been associating with the Aegis people—it was more or less inevitable that she’d pick up a little of their way of thinking. She saw this affair as a sort of testing ground—she thought that infection was a sign of weakness, of badness. A sort of stigma. I realised that she was jealous of me.

  ‘They’ll have the cure soon,’ I told her, but my voice was weak. Not because I didn’t believe what I was saying—I was pretty sure they would have the cure soon. But because I knew it wasn’t what she was thinking about. She thought that she ought to have been able to hold out.

  It was a dangerous mood for her to be in.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you why it hasn’t got me. I’ve been cheating. I’ve been taking shots to keep my spirits floating. I had one earlier today—if I hadn’t I’d be with you right now. If we’d thought there was any danger, we’d have given you shots too. But we thought you could hold out on your own. We had confidence in you.’

  Her eyes searched my face, looking for some traces of evidence that I was lying. I don’t know what she expected to see.

  ‘It would never have got Michael,’ she said levelly. I knew that was the core of the problem. That was the thought that was haunting her.

  ‘It would have had him on the first day,’ I told her, and I wasn’t saying it just to try to make her feel better. It was true. ‘Your brother was a great guy. He was as good a man as I’ve ever met. But he wasn’t equipped for this sort of a fight. Your brother was brimming over with anger, just as he was brimming over with every other kind of emotion known to man. He couldn’t have got by without it. He was what he was because he reacted to things, and his reactions were honest. He hadn’t anything like the self-discipline that he would have needed to stay clear of this thing. It would have got him. Only stage one—just the aching gut and the runs, just to remind him, just to keep him in check. It wouldn’t have killed him—he didn’t have that much aggression in him. But he was only human.’

  ‘And you’re not?’

  I was frightened by the bitterness that was obvious in her voice.

  ‘Hell,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. Maybe not. But Nick’s human. And you’re human. Nobody’s going to start drawing any lines between you. Hell, Johnny’s human. This bug doesn’t mean a thing, in human terms. That’s what we all keep forgetting. It’s alien, is this thing. It comes from outside.’

  ‘It’s objective,’ she said.

  ‘It’s arbitrary,’ I corrected her. ‘This world is not Paradise—surely we’ve all realised that by now. It’s not God’s own heaven, set up to sort out the just from the unjust. That’s not St Peter’s flaming sword that’s nagging away at your gut. It’s a disease. For God’s sake, what does it matter whether your brother would have fallen ill here or not? He’s dead, damn it. Neither of us is him. Neither of us owes anything to him. He didn’t die because of me, and there’s no need for you to try to be him because he did die. This is two years later. More than two years. We’re on Pharos. It’s nothing to do with him.’

  I needn’t have gone on so long. The bitterness had already died in her. She knew that I was right.

  ‘Shall I try to wheedle Charlot into giving you a shot?’ I asked her. ‘We’ve got plenty, and that relief ship will probably bring a lot more. This tight rationing is only getting us into trouble.’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ she assured me.

  ‘You’d better be,’ I said. ‘I’ll never forgive you if you die.’

  And I meant that. I honestly don’t know how much of the total conversation I had meant, but I certainly cared. The Paradise bug was making me care.

  At this rate, I said to the wind, as we climbed back to the control room, I’ll soon be caring enough to be hating this world along with the rest. You must be doing one hell of a job in there.

  Don’t worry, he said. It’s only a matter of time. I’m sure now. Dead certain. It’s the echo currents in the autonomic nervous, system. It has to be. They have the right simple patterns. They’re amenable to observation—the life-system would have had to learn the patterns that correlated with aggressive behaviour, don’t forget.

  Learn? I queried.

  It didn’t tailor this bug by intuition, he told me. Or telepathy. This life-system isn’t sentient—just very highly organised. And very highly sensitive.

  You aren’t kidding, I said.

  I settled myself into the cradle and I put the hood on. There was nothing I had to do at the control panel. I just wanted to get a look at the universe in its proper perspective. I get separation anxiety if I can’t look through a hood once in a while to reassure myself that what my senses tell me is by no means the whole story.

  I looked, almost reflexively, for the relief ship from New Alexandria, but she wasn’t anywhere in the system. She wasn’t due for a day or two yet. In any event, I decided, I wasn’t mad keen on seeing her. If what Charlot said was true, medical supplies might not be the only kind of relief she was carrying.

  I began checking through the stages in the call circuit. Merani was still manning the equipment at the camp, taking shifts with a couple of other men—the camp still had a relatively high proportion of healthy individuals. The mysterious Powell, whom I’d never seen, was still periodically involved at the town end, but he was ill. The town had decided that communications didn’t have the priority to demand healthy personnel. The army still maintained a separate link in the circuit, despite the fact that it was only a hundred yards across the field. Military pride and protocol, I presumed. They, too, were using sick men to man that particular station.

  There were no more deaths to report, and few more casualties. Everything had settled into an almost-equilibrium. We were used to the situation by now. Discipline in the army’s ranks was, however, reported to be very slack indeed. After this, some said, this particular arm of the Caradoc organisation would never function with military efficiency again. There was open conjecture as to whether the pacifists generated by the experience would revert to type the moment their guts stopped aching, and it was generally and cynically agreed that they probably would. But on the other hand, the consensus of opinion was that every man on Pharos would have been taught a permanent lesson in self-restraint and consideration, and that that in itself was sufficient to impair military psychology.

  To a certain extent, that was a nice thought.

  It led on, in fact, to lots of other nice thoughts. We had already considered what this disease could do to the galaxy if it got loose and went on the rampage. But there was a wholly different picture which emerged from the ideas about what this thing would mean to the galaxy if it could be harnessed and controlled. I didn’t like to get too far ahead of events, but it did occur to me that these viruses were a great deal more valuable than the worms we had found in the caves of Rhapsody. They had great potential. Even my limited imagination was quite able to see that in the hands of New Alexandria and New Rome the Pharos viruses could change the face of civilisation.

  It was a bit of a pity, I thought, that if we did find a cure, and a way of controlling these things, that the Caradoc Company would have it too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The relief ship from New Alexandria arrived on the eighth day after the warning. It was not alone. Tracking it into the system was an armed ship from New Rome.

  The newcomers weren’t mad keen to be angels of mercy. They were apparently prepared to spend a good long while in orbit ascertaining the exact position on the ground. They wanted everything we knew and everything we thought, and to think about it themselves as well. />
  There was trouble almost from the first minute, when they were told that Charlot wouldn’t talk to them himself and that Markoff could spare no one. Nick talked to them to begin with, having been briefed to a certain extent by Charlot, but Merani soon took over the main burden of reportage with occasional interjections from the other points on the open ground circuit. The men in the sky weren’t happy about it, but several of the on-planet people were only too willing to tell them that if they wanted more details, then they were perfectly entitled to come down and have a look for themselves.

  Eventually, after some hours of listening, talking, and thinking, several of them decided to do just that. They brought a boat down from the New Alexandrian ship. Once they were down, they wanted to see Charlot—and they weren’t going to take ‘no’ for an answer. Eventually, Nick and I had to lead them to Markoff’s headquarters.

  Everything therein was deathly quiet. Every time I had been in that particular copter previously the place had been a hive of activity—everybody had been doing something, not necessarily in a hurry, but in a way that suggested they were fully occupied and not to be interrupted. Not this time. All was still.

  Markoff was sitting down, Charlot was reclining in one of the beds. There were not many other people in evidence, and those who were in the centre of operations were obviously just waiting.

  I didn’t get a chance to exchange more than a few words with Charlot before I had to leave him to the relief team. But a few words sufficed.

  ‘You’ve got it?’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘How long before we know?’

  ‘An hour.’

  ‘You tried it on yourself?’ I asked.

  He smiled the first time I’d seen him smile in weeks.

  ‘Among others,’ he said. ‘I’m too old not to be expendable.’

  I knew that wasn’t the reason. He thought he had a cure. When Titus Charlot thought he was right, he was willing to back himself. All the way.

  The New Alexandrians took over, but he was in no mood to let them call the tune. These might be pretty big men on the Library world, but there was no one who outranked Charlot, and he wasn’t about to cede any sort of authority to them in this matter. I stood around and listened to him while he browbeat them and threw the relevant information at them as if he were hurling spears. Watching him, I knew we were safe. He was in command of the situation. It would go the way he wanted it to go.

  Well before the hour was up, the technical staff began to filter back and make ready for the crucial explorations. We were all herded out, then, while the medical staff: got on with their job. We might just as well have gone back to the Swan, or even gone sightseeing, but we remained outside Markoff’s copter, waiting.

  We were joined by other men, alerted by the grapevine that affairs were coming to a head. After an hour or so had passed we were no longer a group but a crowd. By the time two hours had slipped by we were a very anxious and disturbed crowd. The doctors seemed to be in no hurry to put us out of our misery. There wasn’t a man present who wasn’t sick in his stomach at the thought that the supposed cure might not have worked. But we all continued to wait, constantly recharging ourselves with hope—hope that inside the copter they were merely sweeping away the last shreds of doubt—making absolutely certain that when someone appeared to give us the news it would be the goods.

  We were well into the third hour, really feeling the heat of the sun through our clear plastic suits, when we were finally and irrevocably released from our misery. It was Markoff who made the announcement.

  All he said was: ‘It works.’

  The crowd broke up just like that, and scattered. Everyone wanted to be first home with the news. Nobody but Nick and myself had come out from the Hooded Swan, and we both knew there was no point in making a race of it. We went back together, exchanging no words. We got into the airlock together, and when the inner door swung open, I waved him through. He was better equipped to deliver the release than I was.

  It was me that had to tell them how, though. That was the task for which I was singularly well equipped, in that it was my mental parasite who had made the crucial suggestion. The Aegis people only wanted to know that everything was OK, but Just, Eve, and Johnny hung around while I showed off.

  ‘It’s quite simple,’ I assured them, ‘once you’ve thought of it. The viruses are initially carried into your body cells by bacteria. Once there, however, they invade cells in the gut lining, and ultimately establish themselves in nerve cells of the autonomic nervous system. The bacteria, of course, remained infected and potentially capable of infecting others, but they weren’t any real problem to deal with, using ordinary antibiotic measures.

  ‘The viruses, however, were more difficult. They existed in two forms—one, a dormant ring-form in the cytoplasm of the cell, caused no trouble at all. But when the ring-form broke and attached itself to the chromosomes in the nucleus, there was minor trouble caused by malfunctions of the autonomic nervous system. This happened in ninety percent of us. The symptoms weren’t serious—just the sickness and general debility associated with minor infections. But this was only cocking the gun.

  ‘The viruses also had a trigger which could make them subvert the entire energy of the cells, replicate themselves vastly, and re-infect millions of other cells throughout the body. We assumed to begin with that this trigger would be activated by chemical changes associated with aggressiveness and anger. But the glandular effects aren’t the only physiological evidence of emotion—there’s quite marked electrical activity in the brain: The mass currents in the brain are always confused with all sorts of other electrical activity, but the mentality of an organism isn’t wholly confined to the brain and the central nervous system. For every gross change in the electrical activity of the brain, there is a distinct echo current in the autonomic nervous system. It was a certain breed of echo current that was supposed to trigger the chromosomally-located virus, just as it was a certain breed of echo current that caused the ring-form to break, migrate to the nucleus and locate in the first place.

  ‘This two-level activity was what initially offered the hope of a cure. The Pharos life-system as a whole has a far higher level of total organisation than do terrestrial-type life-systems, and its evolution at a molecular level has produced an extremely high level of electrical sensitivity about the molecular organisations employed in living tissue. Once Markoff had obtained a computer-model of the electrical patterns in the viruses—which was far easier than trying to build an absolute electrochemical model—it was only a matter of plotting the electrical interchanges which would take place between the viruses and various external charge-patterns. Echo currents can also be induced in the autonomic nervous system externally, by stimulating the hypothalamus, or even the inner ear. Eventually, Markoff and Charlot discovered a pattern which will not only deactivate the trigger but dismantle the virus. They can set up that pattern quite easily—they’ll use the implanted electrodes in your case, Eve, and in mine. Other people will have to accept a little more discomfort, but they have the choice of .electrode treatment and subsonic treatment.

  ‘We’ve already done almost everything necessary to exterminate the bacteria that carry the viruses—once our insides are clean as well we can all go home. There’ll be quarantine, of course, but it will only be a matter of a few weeks on a space station or on a dead world somewhere. The Caradoc people have agreed to abandon the world, and I think it’s only a matter of time before New Rome proscribes it. They’ll put a ship in orbit around it, to maintain a watch over the world, but that’s all.’

  ‘Where do we start lining up?’ Johnny wanted to know.

  ‘It’ll take time,’ I told him. ‘There’s a lot of men with bellyaches down here. We can bring Merani’s people back now, and the Caradoc people can start dismantling their town, provided that Holcomb and his excitable friend left them enough equipment to do it with. It’ll be several days before everyone’s been treated, and you can’
t expect to feel better instantaneously. But we’ll be off this world in less than a week. All of us.’

  ‘What are they going to do with the virus?’ asked Just. I had been talking quite long enough for him to get over the burst of elation which must have accompanied the news that he was going to live to enforce the law on some other innocent world. He was from New Rome, and while he wasn’t the brightest peace officer I’d ever encountered he knew about the cold war that was brewing between the current aristocracy and the companies.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘Your guess is probably a lot better than mine.’

  ‘People are going to want to use this stuff,’ he said.

  ‘Dead right,’ I agreed.

  ‘On criminals,’ he said.

  ‘And slaves,’ I said. ‘And political enemies. And on a lot of other people.’

  ‘It could solve a lot of problems.’

  ‘And create a lot more.’

  He turned away. I knew he had a lot of thinking to do. But most of it would be personal. The ship that had come out from New Rome hadn’t come for the ride.

  I realised that it was time to start being frightened of Caradoc again. It was time to resume worrying about that battleship and the way it had spewed troops out all over the sky of a world where it had no business to be.

  It was over—on Pharos. But it would continue, somewhere else.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Quarantine was a welcome rest. It would have been far more welcome had we not had to share the facilities with twelve hundred Caradoc men. Mostly soldiers. But I did manage to join that card game, ultimately, and I didn’t do too badly out of it.

  The man who benefited most from the days with nothing to do but warm our backsides was Titus Charlot. It was probably the first time in years he’d taken a real rest, and it gave him a chance to recover as much as possible from the deterioration of his health which had afflicted him on Pharos long before we discovered the viruses. He would never be young again, that was sure, and he would probably never recover even the fitness and vitality that he’d had before we went to Pharos, but the period of quarantine set him up with a good chance of living a good few years yet.