In the Shadow of Lazarus

by J. J. Keller

“Ogonaovan, this is serious! Something is in our heads! It is interfering with us, taking out inhibitions from us! We need to find out why the morran died!”

  At length, Ceril said, “I will be able to find out more in the lab. I admit there is nothing like this I have seen before and nothing I can find on the Nimrod’s computer. I will search the galactic network, but without the ship’s tachyon array working I will have to rely on radio transmissions to the nearest hub, and there will be a delay.”

  “Good. Then let’s take the morran to the lab.” Reigo crouched and bore up Na’Athril awkwardly, settling its head upon his shoulder.

  Chapter 4

  In the medical bay, Reigo stood still while Ceril passed the head of his staff up his right hand side, over his head, and down the left. The snakes’ eyes finished flashing. Ceril withdrew the rod and leaned on it.

  “Well, you and Ogonaovan both have UV-type burns from your incident on the observation deck,” said Ceril. “The same UV radiation that killed the morran. I’ve no idea why you did it, but fortunately for you these burns are rarely fatal, at least to men, and they should heal by themselves after a few days. What worries me more is that both you and the morran seem to have psychoactive substances in your blood.” Ceril poked at the dead morran lying on the dissection table. “Morrans and men share similar chemical profiles so far as proteins and amino acids are concerned, but their genetic material is incompatible with ours. Bacteria can infect both men and morrans, but viral particles for the one cannot affect the other. That suggests that it is a bacterial infection, which would appear to be on the skin and would be shared by skin contact between affected individuals. Yet I can find no unusual bacteria on the skin of this morran.”

  “Could it be the worms?” Reigo suggested. He turned to Ogonaovan. “Did you give Na’Athril a worm?”

  Tiorné sighed. “I sincerely doubt it was the worms. They’ve been used as food for millennia, and I’ve never heard reports of such effects afore. Ceril, have you completed your analysis and got your search results back from the network at the facility?”

  Ceril ran his tongue across his lips. “Yes.”

  “Well, what are they?” said Hectar.

  “Seven years ago, the Perseus arm spoke of a leprosy, a mysterious green death infecting a circumfercirc around a B-type star. The morrans were all dead within days. The men, they lasted longer, although it appeared to vary between individuals. Their minds became possessed and they refused all medical aid. They captured those who tried to treat them and infected them too.”

  Aspera shook her head. “A whole circumfercirc.”

  “Ten billion, at least.” Tiorné’s face was impassive. “Let us not concern ourselves with that. How was the disease cured?”

  Ceril strode to the wall and put his hand to a light control there. The lighting in the room dimmed, but the shape of the morran on the dissection table remained visible, a ghostly greenish-white glow delineating the sprawl of tentacles and legs in the dark room.

  “It’s glowing in the dark,” Reigo said. “That’s why they called it the green death.”

  “Phosphorescence.” Ceril nodded vigorously. “The thing is, beyond the phosphorescence and what we have seen here, nothing is known. The men on the circumfercirc would not accept medical assistance, and the plague was spreading so rapidly that the whole circumfercirc was declared irrevocably contaminated. Clan hortica razed it and the whole thing was destroyed.”

  Aspera shook her head. Hectar stood with his mouth hanging open. A long silence ensued.

  “It’s Naral, isn’t it?” said Reigo. “He’s given this thing he’s diseased with a name. He calls it Lazarus, and he worships it reasonlessly like it’s some kind of god. He’s contaminated the ship somehow. We’re all infected.”

  Tiorné put a finger under her jaw and regarded the dead morran. “Either Naral escaped the circumfercirc and carried the disease here, or it has been passed on from man to man until it reached Phlygema with him as the carrier.”

  “Where the fuck is he?” said Ogonaovan. “He might know how to cure it!”

  Tiorné gave a dismissive wave. “Presumably this Lazarus disease infects the mind as it does the body. That is why he came here intending to infect the ship, and if he does know how to cure this affliction, he is not going to tell it to us.”

  Ceril flourished a hand. “From a purely scientific view, this is fascinating--a disease of the most deadly contagion, all because it has evolved the ability to influence man’s conscious thoughts. Bacteria hijack the host’s biochemistry. Viruses hijack the host’s genetic machinery. This disease, it has evolved beyond that. It targets a sentient mind. And I have no idea what the vector is. It may not be a virus or a bacterium. It may be something new, that no one has seen before.”

  Aspera glanced at Ogonaovan, then at Reigo. “It’s already affecting us. The morran, your radiation burns.”

  Thoughts moved like fish against the current in Reigo’s mind. “Then the light...it was not the cause, but an effect?”

  The memory of the words flashed before Reigo. Come into the light! Tiorné was not looking at him, but staring past him at something else.

  He turned toward the lab doorway and the sight there stopped his breath in his throat.

  Naral stood on the threshold of the room, his eyes and wheezing open mouth dark shadows in the unearthly glowing green of his face beneath the steri-suit. His phosphorescent fingers groped for the fastenings on the front of his tunic and tore them apart. Beneath the plastic he was naked, and his festering skin glowed with a light of its own.

  Naral’s robe dropped to the ground, and he raised scrawny arms, his face a rictus of ecstasy. “My time is come,” he rasped. “But Lazarus does not take the unwilling, and now is my time to be reborn!”

  Tiorné pulled her neutron pistol from her belt and fired. The front of Naral’s steri-suit exploded into a mist of blood, and he fell back and lay still on the bridge floor.

  “Cover the body!” Tiorné pulled a sheet from the cupboard and Reigo seized the other side of it and helped her to conceal the glowing shape beneath it. What had Naral been thinking? Come into the light... That light, it was not like the light that had shone in the observatory. His mind was a vortex and he could make no sense of any of it.

  Ceril hefted his staff and moved it over the length of the body, snake eyes flashing in succession. Lines creased his forehead as his implant changed color. “There are still no particulates coming from the body. No out-of-the-ordinary bacteria or viruses. The only thing different is the phosphorescence.”

  Tiorné turned her head, stepping over the corpse to look down on it. “He’s not removed the suit all the time he’s been here. It’s secure?”

  Ceril nodded emphatically. “It was secure before he came aboard, and it doesn’t appear to have been tampered with. I can’t have made a mistake!”

  “If that is the case, the only thing that has got through the suit is the light.”

  “Could light be a communicable medium for a disease?” Reigo interrupted.

  They both faced him. “I do not see how it could,” said Ceril.

  “It’s just...” Reigo upturned his palms. “If the suit is secure and permits only light to pass, then the only logical deduction I can make is that it is the light that is the mode of contagion!”

  Ceril was shaking his head. “How can a light cause a disease?”

  “A light can damage skin! It can kill a morran! Certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation can cause changes to DNA can they not? And messages can be transmitted by light, in fiber optics and suchlike!”

  “Reigo is right,” Tiorné said. “His words are Steel and Flame. This disease is not Steel and Flame. It’s chaos. It is evolved to spread itself as fast and as far as possible, and to make its hosts do whatever it takes to ensure this.”

  Reigo remembered the strange euphoria he’d felt when he’d been down in the last sections with Ogonaovan, and the trepidation he’d felt upon ente
ring the darker corridors of the ship. Already he was feeling an urge to go back out there into the mellow warmth of the sun. “It’s something to do with the light. It has to be.”

  Tiorné set the report she’d been examining on the dissection table. “It can be assumed from the recent behavior that everyone aboard is already infected with this...whatever it is.”

  “Lazarus,” said Reigo.

  “If it’s true this disease resulted in the destruction of an entire circumfercirc and its populace, then the Nimrod has a responsibility to ensure it does not reach places of habitation. I will continue the braking arc to the gas giant, but I will radio the settlements there to inform them the ship is under quarantine and poses a risk under the contagious illnesses protocols, and must not be allowed to dock under any circumstances. If Lazarus affects the mind strongly enough for...” Tiorné’s voice broke off as her gaze fell upon the sheet-wrapped corpse on the floor. “It could be that one of us will attempt to lie and board in order to spread the infection once the disease takes hold. Ceril, I want both these bodies dissected. We need to find out as much as we can about what it is we are dealing with. I want you to investigate how light interacts with samples and anything else you think may be significant. At the very least, if the ship is doomed, we can radio our findings to the habitations here, and they will serve as a warning and perhaps a starting point for those who would stand in our stead and find a cure.”

  “Yes,” said Ceril. “If we are beyond help, it is at least in our power to make sure this spreads no farther.”

  Chapter 5

  The tremors running through the ship began to lessen and eventually subsided as the Nimrod shed its momentum. Reigo tried to sleep in his cabin, but he could not. He tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate. His face and neck itched with a burning heat. His skin hurt when anything touched it. Why had he not seen that the light in the observation deck was dangerous? Had he not felt its glare eating into his flesh? He could not remember.

  Tiorné alerted him that Ceril had finished his analysis. He wanted them to meet up in his laboratory again. Reigo arrived to find everyone else already assembled. Outside the window of the medical bay, a gibbous slice of a great ringed planet showed, its atmosphere a rich orbit-spun blend of soft chalky pastels, its rings sharp and crisp.

  “This disease is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” Ceril looked at Reigo, then at Tiorné. “Reigo, your hypothesis was correct. The light being emitted by the corpses of Naral and the morran comes from complex molecules on the skin. It is of an uncommon wavelength, and it does transmit something, and it triggers otherwise benign bacteria that live on our skin. That’s why my scans couldn’t detect bacteria, because the bacteria there still appeared normal. That’s how it’s spread so quickly. The signal seems to cause dormant genes to become activated. These genes cause the bacteria to start producing the phosphorescent molecules via some sort of photosynthetic mechanism, along with the psychotropic substances and a prion, which pass through the skin and into the blood.”

  “A prion?” Reigo queried.

  Ceril gesticulated with his hands. “A prion is a protein that causes disease. The morran had the prion and the psychoactive molecules in its blood, and so did Naral, but I also found genetic abnormalities. His DNA was full of random insertions of the same sequence of code--DNA that codes for the prion and the psychoactive substances--and his skin cells were full of genes for the production and secretion of the phosphorescent substance. It looks as though this is the effect of the prion in the body. Now, these sections of code are all inserted randomly into the DNA, so the original code cannot be read correctly. That’s the reason Naral was suffering from skin disease and multiple organ failure. Effectively the result is the same as radiation poisoning in that the DNA is destroyed. His body was unable to repair itself or function properly because his genetic material was being slowly eaten away and replaced with code for this disease.”

  “Hold on,” Tiorné said. “If it’s a type of bacteria where the process begins, surely antibiotics can be used to treat it?”

  Ceril shook his head. “The broad-spectrum antibiotic medicines I have on board won’t work. This is a mutant of a symbiotic bacterium that normally lives on the skin of men. It will almost certainly be immune to anything in common use. It may be possible, if we could reach a research facility before the disease becomes too severe.”

  “No,” Tiorné said firmly, raising both hands with the palms toward Ceril. “I will not bring this where others will be put at risk.”

  “But there may be another way.” Ceril’s eyes became intense, and his mouth moved with animated fervor as he spoke. “What Reigo said about the light from the sun, I looked into that further. Phlygema here is a B-type sun, as was the sun of the doomed circumfercirc. B suns emit strongly in the blue side of the visible spectrum and into the ultra-violet region. That’s why Reigo and Ogonaovan suffered burns so quickly. I carried out some investigations.” Ceril paused while he went to a cupboard in the wall and took out some transparent plastic dishes. “I made up these agar plates.” He spread them upon the dissection table and dimmed the room’s lighting. Immediately, wavy lines and scratches of phosphorescence became visible on the jelly in the dishes.

  “The bacteria haven’t proliferated on these plates?” Tiorné said.

  “No. In fact, the bacteria have died.” Ceril smiled abruptly. “These plates were kept in the dark. The others were exposed to normal light.” Ceril indicated the ones with the scratches. “This one.” He pointed to one where the whole surface was thickly coated with the green glow. “That one was kept under blue light. The mutations induced in the bacteria cause them to synthesize the prion and the other chemical agents via a photosynthetic route requiring blue light. Remove their source of light, and it seems they waste away without it.”

  Tiorné rose quickly from bending over the table. “How long an exposure to darkness would it take for the disease to be cured from a man?”

  “Twenty-four hours should do it.”

  “Let’s make it forty-eight, to be sure.” Tiorné motioned to the samples. Keep whichever of these you consider to be important. Prepare whatever is left of the morran and the man for burial. I want them in sealed containers that light can’t escape from, you understand?”

  Hectar interrupted. “Honor the morran with a funeral if that’s what you want, but that man doesn’t deserve one, not after he brought this...evil aboard. Desecrate what’s left of his corpse and dump it in the void! It’s all that’s fitting.”

  A sneer came upon Ogonaovan’s face. “For once, this fucking idiot has said something I agree with!”

  “No!” said Tiorné sharply. “Naral as he came aboard this ship was infected with the Lazarus disease. His actions were the actions of the disease, not those of a free man. We don’t know what sort of a man he was before the disease took him. Indeed he may have felt just as you do when he stood where we stand now. We should honor the man he was, whoever that was, by disposing of his body in the duly respectful way, and then making sure the disease that killed him does not leave this ship.”

  Hectar said nothing more, but his face still carried the tension of disgust and anger.

  “Reigo, come with me.” Tiorné stepped to the door. “We will set a course by non-countermandable order that will take the ship into orbit behind the gas giant for forty-eight hours. That way, we will be safe from any psychotropic effects the disease may have on us. Then, all we can do is wait and see if Ceril’s cure works.”

  A hesitant smile played briefly at the corners of Ceril’s mouth.

  “What do you mean, psycho-bollocks effects?” said Ogonaovan. “He just said the light is bad. We stay out of the light, everything’s fine.”

  “What you’re trying to imply is that surely a rational, conscious human could fend off such ridiculous notions as craving light?” Tiorné considered Ogonaovan, her eyes penetrating in the shadowy room.

  Reigo’s breathing seemed loud. Alr
eady the darkness of the medical bay was beginning to weigh on him. “I should not be so sure.”

  “Come,” said Tiorné.

  Reigo nodded in acquiescence.

  On the bridge, the two of them faced the bank of navigational equipment. An image of the Phlygema system with the orbits and positions of its planets appeared. The schematic of the large planet grew on the screen, revealing itself to be a gas giant with a ring system and innumerable moons. A course line appeared, taking the Nimrod between the umbra of the planet and the largest shepherd moon at opposition, and dropping it into an orbit which would keep it between moon and planet for forty-eight hours.

  “Why are there no small planets between the gas giant and the sun?” Reigo asked.

  Tiorné glanced at him in a derisive sort of way. “If you’d bothered to read up on B-type suns, you’d know why.”

  She inhaled deeply through her nose. “Confirm course, non-countermandable. All systems locked.”

  “Second in Command Reigo. I confirm.”

  The lighting on the bridge faded, the lights on the consoles flickering out to leave only the navigational and basic life support maintaining their vigil. “I hereby sever interface.” The dull green light of the interface bolt on Tiorné’s forehead diminished to inscrutable obsidian. “I will remain here. See that the crew understands.”

  The door reopened to let Reigo pass, but as it closed behind him he knew it was locked.

  Reigo spoke briefly to the others to confirm what had happened on the bridge before he went back to his cabin. At last he found he was able to close his eyes and release into sleep.

  Chapter 6

  Reigo awoke in darkness in his cabin. His bedcover clung to his skin with a febrile heat and his neck and shoulders ached. He gave the thought-prompt for the light, but it didn’t work. He remembered what had happened, and how the darkness was to stop him becoming infected with the Lazarus disease.

  There seemed little point in rising and standing about doing nothing, and he felt tired and ill at any rate, so he rolled onto his other side and tried to go back to sleep. The fabric of his pillow was rough and sticky against his torrid cheek. He pushed his bedcover down to his waist and turned onto his back. Breathing deeply, he tried to distance himself from the throbbing in his temples and lose himself once more in the peace of sleep, where time would pass, and the disease would depart, and he would be Reigo once more.