“So? Why do they always have to pick on us?”
Benoit exasperated her. He got more adolescent every day. He had a Ph.D. in xenonutrition, for heaven's sake!
No, it wouldn't be worth seducing him, even if he were one of the few nondisgusting men on the station she hadn't bedded. “Listen, Benoit, they're coming through the front airlock. Could you entertain them? I have to go back to my apartment and change.” What was in her closet? The red frock with the keyhole above the derriere. Perfect.
* * * *
When she got back, nicely turned out in the black faux tux since the red frock had a bigarade sauce stain near the plunge of the neckline, she found Benoit and three strangers in the reception room off the main airlock. Benoit's hands were jammed in his pockets, his eyes narrowed with paranoid hostility. The three strangers—two dowdy-looking women, and a slender youngish man with chopped-off hair and depilatory burns on his cheeks—were still in environment suits, shrinking away from the clowder of cats weaving in and around their legs.
The man pulled off his glove, strode forward to shake hands with Lucile, faltered as if he had changed his mind about touching her, then finally seemed to conquer his squeamishness and held his hand out like a Ping-Pong paddle. “I'm Godfrey Worcester,” he said. “You're the head of the station? Martialle Lafayette?” He used the feminine of the Martian formal title for citizen.
Lucile took his hand and held it in both of hers. “No, no, Jean-Marie took a personal day. I'm in charge in his absence.” What a shame Jean-Marie liked his wine so much, especially before lunch.
“Jean-Marie? A man? We really need to talk to Martial Lafayette.” He switched to the masculine form. “You would be?”
“I would be Lucile Raoul. I'll send for Jean-Marie.” She gazed into Godfrey's hazel eyes. He was a handsome, trim fellow despite the fact that his barber apparently hated him. She liked these naive types.
She turned to the two women. “May I take your suits? Your suitliners? We have some chic little dusters you can change into while you're in the station.” She tried not to roll her eyes. Both women apparently had been victimized by the same barber as Godfrey, and she shuddered to think what they wore under their suitliners. Neither of them seemed to have the imagination to go naked underneath, although you never could tell.
Benoit sprang to attention. “I know what you're after, and we will resist to the death.”
Lucile let go of Godfrey's hand and went to Benoit. “Benoit, dear, let these nice people have their say. But first, may I offer coffee and a pastry?”
“Where do you get real coffee?” asked the frumpier of the two women suspiciously.
“But my dear, we didn't get it. We manufacture it. Alain, our head molecular gastronomist, is just a genius with esters.”
“He's the one that concocted the wine you sent us?” the tall woman asked. She was wriggling out of her suit, revealing a suitliner in a ghastly shade of pink that she apparently thought she could pass off as station daywear. Lucile tried not to look.
“No, no, we have a special vintiniere. But—”
Benoit interrupted. “We won't reveal his name. Your goons will kidnap him and lock him up in some forced labor laboratory.”
Lucile looked daggers at Benoit. His eyes flashed, but he shut up.
Lucile escorted the trio (their clumsy gait in Mars gravity betrayed their recent arrival from Earth) to a patisserie on the upper level. The proprietor had coaxed a container of violets into bloom in the center of the room, under the mirror-maze skylight. The air smelled of cinnamon, coffee, and butter.
“Where's this Jean-Marie Lafayette?” the taller woman asked. Dr. Kermilda Wrothe was her name, Lucile had managed to find out. The shorter woman, who resembled a starved gerbil, was Dr. Hilda Wriothesley. “We can't be wasting time. This is a matter of public health.”
Just then, two of the station cats—both wore purple bows around their necks, so Lucile concluded they belonged to the proprietor—started fighting, snarling, hissing, shrieking. The larger cat was apparently trying to mount the smaller, or maybe it was the other way around.
“I sent a message to his apartment. He'll be here as soon as he wakes up. Monsieur, may we have coffee all round and a tray of your pastries?”
The coffee and pastries arrived and the three strangers eyed them with suspicion and desire.
Benoit said, “You can just forget it. You can't make us kill the cats. They are our soul.”
Godfrey sat up straighter and said, “Oh, come now. Not only are you overrun with cats, but you are all infected with Toxoplasma gondii, and it's destroying your personalities as well as probably causing birth defects.”
Benoit jumped up and leaned over the table, nose to nose with Godfrey. “That's slander, punk. First of all, impugning our personalities is tantamount to admitting that you want to enslave everybody on this station, take our proprietary secrets for wine and cheese making, and then wipe us out. Second, no child has been born on this station for over fifteen Mars years.”
It was the longest speech Benoit had made in the entire time Lucile had known him. She stirred her coffee and sipped daintily. Under the table, she drove her spike heel into Benoit's instep.
He turned to her, bewildered.
“What Benoit is saying,” she purred, “is that we are well aware of the issues involved in Toxoplasma gondii infection, but we feel that you are, shall we say, trying to impose your cultural values on us. I mean, as non-toxoplasmotic people.”
Hilda spoke up for the first time. “Surely you can't mean that you enjoy the cultural values, as you call them, of being infected by a parasite?”
“That's exactly what she means, you constipated hag!” Benoit half rose and yelled in her face.
Lucile kicked him again, harder, and he sat down, deflated. She continued, “We prefer to think of Toxoplasma gondii as a kind of beneficial symbiont.”
“That is just outrageous!” said Dr. Hilda Wriothesley. “We've monitored your communications. Analysis shows that your men are paranoid, poorly organized, and brain-damaged, while your women are—well, they're—”
“Stylish and attractive to the opposite sex?” Lucile purred. Her gaze traveled over the gaudy, shapeless coveralls the two women wore.
Godfrey stared at her, openmouthed.
She flicked a smile at him, as if they shared a delicious secret.
Godfrey cleared his throat, then started up a presentation from his finger computer, flashing the slides on the tabletop. “Top scientists at Utopia University have developed a virus that kills Toxoplasma gondii while leaving the host unharmed. It works very well with humans, and while there have been minor side effects in feline subjects, we feel that it is a viable solution to a public health problem that could otherwise spread beyond Gari Babakin Station and infect all of Mars.”
She let him drone on. She'd heard it all before, but she enjoyed watching his lips. She'd love to get better acquainted with him, but there might not be time before he had to return to Borealopolis. And then there was the problem of Hilda and Kermilda. Entrusting them to the tender mercies of Benoit was out of the question, but maybe when Jean-Marie woke up, he could take them on a tour of the greenhouse vineyards.
When Godfrey turned off the presentation, she put her hand lightly on his wrist. “Dr. Worcester—Godfrey—you do make a point, but we really like our lifestyle here. We could put this to a referendum—but would we force the cure on people who didn't want it?” She had revolting images of herself dressed as badly as these two victims of the cult of sensible shoes.
“You're willing to forgo the joys of parenthood, then? True, you've enforced strict birth control via the air supply, but surely your women must yearn at times for motherhood.”
She sighed. Now he was playing to her weak side. A charming little baby girl, to dress in pretty little frocks, to feed greenhouse strawberries and tidbits of pastry, to teach charming songs, to love, love, love—but Toxoplasma gondii could cause great harm to
fetuses: blindness and encephalitis.
However, on the bright side, she was already seropositive with the parasite, so she reasoned that her future offspring was safe. She was sure. Almost. She need only protect the child from infection until its immune system was fully developed. She could surely arrange that.
However, she hadn't yet met anyone she trusted to father her adorable child. She smiled lingeringly at Godfrey, and he flushed slightly.
Benoit's eyes flicked warily from her to Godfrey. “You part of that Mars-needs-more-babies movement?”
Godfrey's lips turned white and pinched. “No, no! We just feel—well, your station's culture has—problems conforming to the overall community values of Martian life.”
“And our culture deviates how?”
Hilda threw up her hands. “People sleeping until midday! Bed hopping! Nobody cares whether the filing and maintenance are done properly, or at all! Not meeting planetwide quotas! You put it kindly by saying the parasite makes women more gregarious, albeit at the expense of domestic tranquility, but the men, the men here—”
“Are more original,” Lucile said.
“They have intellectual deficits!” Kermilda barked.
“They think outside the box. They aren't intimidated by common so-called wisdom,” Lucile continued smoothly.
“Like cats,” said Benoit.
And in fact the two squabbling cats were now a picture of cuddly affection, purple ribbons and all, under a table grooming each other. Lucile suppressed a smile, imagining Hilda and Kermilda doing the same. Except of course they would be repulsed by saliva.
She returned her gaze to them. “Gari Babakin station excels in contributing innovative ideas to the greater Martian civilization.”
Godfrey made a show of turning off his data ring. “Well, none of this means anything at all, because NutriTopia Ares, which I must remind you owns every molecule in this station, has authorized me to release the virus as soon as feasible.”
He and the two women drained the last drops of their coffee, got up, and left.
After a stunned moment, Benoit leaned over. “Did they already release the virus, without talking to Jean-Marie?”
Lucile glanced at his worried face. “That's not the question you should be asking, Benoit. The issue is, what will the virus do?”
“Turn us into impotent zombies.”
She sighed. “I don't know if the personality effects can be reversed once the Toxoplasma gondii takes root. The question is whether their virus will kill the cats. Or,” she added, “us.”
* * * *
Lucile was not as worried as she sounded. In fact, she wasn't even sure the scientists of NutriTopia Ares had a technology to destroy Toxoplasma gondii oocysts. Previous attempts, with sulfadiazine and pyrimethamine-type drugs, had been unsuccessful, although they had certainly made enough people nauseated and anemic. Still—
Everybody at Gari Babakin Station knew their universal toxoplasmosis infection came from an infected pregnant cat named Miguet. They even accepted the evidence that it might raise women's intelligence and lower men's.
There had been a problem with the water filtration system early on in the history of the station, and unfortunately it kept getting recontaminated by oocysts shed either by cats or by humans. The citizens had stopped trying to fight it.
Lucile had arrived at the station at the age of eight and stayed when her parents left to go back to Earth when she was twenty-three. She had no idea what she'd be like if she'd never ingested the oocysts, but she did, if she were honest, think herself more attractive and better dressed than the average Martialle.
As to Benoit, when he had arrived at the station three years ago he had been meticulous in his habits. He kept tidy notebooks of his experiments in food engineering and wore his hair and mustache short and neat. He had planned to stay only a Martian summer, but somehow he'd abandoned his original plans. His neatness quotient had gone all to hell after four months; Lucile remembered him suffering a brief episode of the flu, and afterward his attention span went south.
He had known about the toxoplasmosis infection before he came; he thought he'd be immune. He had no logical reason for believing this, so no surprise that he wasn't.
NutriTopia officials were saying infected people were almost three times as apt to get into a work-related accident, and schizophrenia, hitherto unknown on Mars, was making a comeback as a result of the infection.
The other issue had to do with the need for Martian population growth. Not only were toxoplasmosis-infected women endangering their future offspring's health, they statistically doubled or tripled their chances of bearing a boy rather than a girl.
Lucile suggested this might be NutriTopia's hidden agenda. Because of early immigration practices (only post menopausal or infertile women were allowed in the initial immigration, due to fears of genetic damage to developing infants), men outnumbered women. A disease that perpetuated that ratio would be unwelcome to the corporations that ruled Mars. That included NutriTopia Ares, which, as Godfrey had pointed out, owned every molecule of Gari Babakin. Mars needs babies. NutriTopia wants more workers.
Life, Lucile believed, was too short to dance with stupid guys, but intelligence was in the eye of the beholder, and she found the infected men of Gari Babakin—Benoit in particular—amusing, if not father-of-her-future-child material.
Of course she was careful not to override the station's contraceptive measures. She didn't want to hurt her theoretical future child.
* * * *
Godfrey congratulated himself he had been careful not to take a chance with any of the pastries or cheeses, although they smelled and looked divine. The coffee was hot, so that wasn't a danger, and wine was okay because the oocysts couldn't survive in alcohol.
At least they hadn't offered him any of that raw meat dish, that steak tartare made of hamster meat! How could they—
Headquarters had given Drs. Wrothe and Wriothesley and him very particular instructions about releasing the virus. He was to shake hands with the head elected official, this Jean-Marie Lafayette. Lafayette, his team had discovered, was linked by less than five degrees of separation to every single person on Gari Babakin Station. The virus had been engineered to outlive at least three hand-washings.
Hilda and Kermilda were also to shake hands with as many people as possible, but it seemed the uptight women scientists had been afraid of being infected by the parasite.
He would have to speak to them.
It would work anyway. He had anointed several railings and door handles around that pastry shop and the airlock.
Ah, my my, this Lucile Raoul was a charmer. He had no doubt she was even closer than five degrees of separation from most of the station. He regretted having to return home so precipitously. Oh, to match wits with her!
He also regretted not being able to sample the cheese and pastry. Gari Babakin cuisine was considered exquisite. Their exports to the rest of Mars were irradiated to kill off the oocysts, but two problems remained: one, Martian health officials feared that particularly robust oocysts might live through the irradiation, and the descendants would be harder to kill, thus infecting the entire planet with an unstoppable plague.
Second, the irradiation killed some of the flavor. Godfrey knew this not because he had personally tried a comparison taste test, but because a food scientist from Utopia had done so several Mars years ago and swore there was no comparison.
That food scientist, one Fred Remaura, had lived in quarantine until recently, when he had been the human test subject for the virus that killed the parasite.
Now, profit motive drove Godfrey's supervisors to sanitize Gari Babakin so that their products would be safe without the flavor-dulling irradiation.
Those little jam tarts—the unaltered fragrance of butter and raspberry jam. And that Rocamadour cheese—yes, yes, very stinky, but what a seductive stink!
Maybe the cheese had some overtones of human sex pheromones.
He smiled
at Hilda Wriothesley, but she only shuddered and said, “That woman is a human sewer.”
* * * *
Jean-Marie LaFayette lumbered around the mayor's office, blundering into cabinets and knocking stacks of files off display modules. Every third lap he would haul up in front of Lucile and say, “Do you feel any different? Do I look different?”
“Jean-Marie, just check your biometrics. I don't know if they've even released the virus yet. I don't think we'll know until it's much too late.”
“Filthy tight-asses,” Benoit was curled in fetal position in the mayor's desk chair. “They've singled us out for destruction.”
Lucile went to him. “Benoit, be wise, poor baby. They are misguided, but they tested the virus on humans, so the damage will probably be minimal. And look at the bright side. Maybe you'll be able to remember the multiplication tables again.”
Benoit sprang out of his chair at her, but she smirked her gotcha smirk.
Jean-Marie was accessing some database he had suddenly remembered.
“Jean-Marie, darling, turn on your monitor so we can see too.”
Jean-Marie tongued on his projector. A scientific paper from some long-forgotten minor Terran journal projected against the wall above the office door.
“Antivirals!” She clasped Jean-Marie's arm joyfully. “But where can we get them?”
Jean-Marie grinned. “Pascal LeBoeuf, our vintiniere extraordinaire, my little cabbage.”
* * * *
Hilda tucked her pesticide spray into a pocket in her environment suit and polished the faceplate of her helmet. Godfrey could tell that she was nervous about the passenger cabin in the rocketplane. She preferred to keep her environment suit inflated and her helmet on when she was not inside a clean hab. Her work with infectious disease had made her paranoid. She hunched in one corner of the cabin, a rodentlike figure of terror, not touching anything, not even sitting down.
Analog SFF, April 2009 Page 15