by S MacDonald
The visit continued with that same cheerful confidence. Arlit had a lot of questions, mostly along the lines of ‘What’s that? What does that do?’ and ‘How does it work?’ as Davie led him through the quarantine zone. Alex himself was waiting to meet him, to thank him for volunteering for the medical tests. Rather to his relief, he was greeted with a handshake, Davie having taught his friend the shipboard courtesy and advised him that the skipper didn’t really do hugs. All the same, Arlit’s greeting was wholehearted, a fervent grip and radiant grin.
‘Thank you for letting me come,’ he said, and span around, waving at all the marvels around him. ‘So exciting – and I’m the first person to see it!’
There was a crow of triumph in that, and Alex grinned back. He was remembering how it had felt when he’d stepped out into the Gider encounter craft, the first human aboard one of their ships. He would never forget the thrill of that moment as long as he lived. Only training and his Novaterran heritage had kept him outwardly calm – Arlit, clearly, had no such restraint on expressing his own feelings.
‘It is,’ said Alex, ‘an honour and a pleasure to have you here. But please, allow me to introduce Rangi…’
This was unnecessary, as Davie had made sure that Arlit had already spoken with the medics, getting to know them as well as being talked through exactly what the medical tests would involve.
Arlit went off with Rangi, then, Davie going with him to the quarantine zone sickbay. It was small, not much bigger than a single cabin, and had nothing like the range of equipment in the main sickbay on the decks above. It was, though, specifically equipped as a pathogen laboratory, with isolation facilities second to none. Davie had been intending to stay, to give Arlit friendly support in case he found the tests alarming. He was out, however, in a couple of minutes.
‘He’s fine,’ he told Alex, with a grin. ‘And Simon kicked me out, says there isn’t room for an audience.’
The tests were, indeed, conducted in privacy, not just for the modesty of the subject but with the results kept to closed files. This was contrary to the way the Fourth normally worked – it wasn’t treatment of a patient, after all, but research of a kind which would normally be reported live to data screens.
Simon, though, had laid the law down. He wasn’t, he said, going to have a lot of amateurs second guessing results from half-understood and incomplete data. He and Rangi would present their findings, properly, once they had finished their tests and analysis.
Alex hadn’t argued. For one thing, arguing with Simon was invariably pointless, and for another, he too felt that it would be more dignified, more respectful to Arlit, to have the results presented by the medics. It just didn’t feel right somehow for them all to be looking on, gawping, oohing and ahhing over discoveries.
So the medical examination was conducted in strict privacy, while Alex and Davie waited outside. Both were uncomfortable – full decontam had left them scoured, reeking of chemicals and with every orifice plugged up with bungs. For Davie, too, there was the ordeal of going without food for nearly two hours, as they were in survival suits and not even allowed to consume the suit-drinks which could be fitted to a sip-straw in the helmet. Two hours was a long time for Davie to go without food. They were so used to him on the Heron that it was just automatic for the crew to feed him everywhere he went. If they were giving him the diet Rangi had laid down that would be healthy, high protein, high carb meals with an extra slug of vitamins. If they were giving him what he liked it would be pizza, cookies and cake. He had stoked up before decontam, but even so his blood sugar levels were dropping fast – he was burning more energy just sitting there than an athlete would during a hundred metre sprint.
Alex could see that he was getting tired by the time Arlit emerged from sickbay. Davie looked like a weary child, his dark eyes developing a sooty, smudged look and his shoulders drooping. He was still alert and enjoying himself, though, giving Alex a game of triplink while they waited. When Arlit emerged he got up with lithe grace and spent several minutes talking to him with no hint at all that he was so famished he was feeling nauseous.
‘I wish I didn’t have to go,’ Arlit said, looking around wistfully as they were escorting him back to the airlock.
‘You can come again,’ Davie promised.
He went home with gifts – a very carefully thought out gift basket containing light spheres and a personal comm to be given to Arak.
A considerable amount of effort had gone into those lights, starting with a huge debate over the issue of culture bombing. It was well known that when a technological culture met one which lacked that technology, a blast of invasive tech could all but wipe out the indigenous culture. On the other hand, denying them access to amenities taken for granted everywhere else was a form of oppression, too, compelling them to stay in a living museum. Getting the balance right, offering appropriate tech with sensitivity to culture, was vital.
The lights, the first offworld tech to be offered to Carrearranis, had been designed specifically for them and manufactured by the Fourth themselves. They were extremely simple, little squishy spheres with a pearly exterior. They were activated by squeezing them, and the longer you squeezed the brighter they became. A single short squeeze would turn them off again. Everything down to the wavelength of light produced had been debated and decided – should it be like the firelight the Carrearranians were used to using for illumination, or a daylight frequency? They had settled for something in between, a warm yellow light which could be pushed up to day-bright radiance. In all, more than fifty hours of research and planning had gone into them, as well as the hours and resources used to manufacture them. They would, it was believed, make a significant improvement to the Carrearranians’ living environment.
Sadly, the lights were not received with the enthusiasm the Fourth had been hoping for. They were evidently regarded as novelty items, to be laughed over and played with for a while, but then set aside; toys for children. Arak’s com, on the other hand, was a great success. He was extremely proud of it, calling all his friends and even more importantly his rivals, to show it to them. For the rest of that day, too, he was prowling over his island, finding obscure places to go and calling Alex with an eager, ‘Can you hear me now?’
Alex took the first of these calls during the briefing called for Simon and Rangi to present their findings. There’d been a longer delay than expected, the quarantine sickbay door remaining shut for more than an hour after Arlit had departed, and not even a trickle of data.
When they did eventually emerge, it was clear that they had important news to deliver. And Simon, for once, let Rangi do the talking.
‘I would like you to meet…’ Rangi put up a half life-size display of a figure shown with skeleton, muscles and organs, alongside screens containing detailed medical data, ‘Homo Carrearransis.’
There was a rush of surprise and a few exclamations of satisfaction from about the ship from those who’d had their dollar on that outcome. Alex himself would have had his dollar on homo sapiens, had skippers been allowed to join such shipboard sweepstakes.
‘Not human, then?’ he asked, just to make it absolutely clear for the record.
‘No,’ Rangi confirmed. ‘It’s close, right on the edge.’ He drew a line in the air with one finger. ‘But no doubt about it, skipper, they’re on that side of the line.’ He planted a little dot in the air, close to where his line had been. ‘Superficially, very similar.’ He said. ‘We share 99.3% DNA – forty six chromosomes, same organs and in more or less the same positions and proportions. But the proteins – the way the body forms cells – are outside the homo sapiens range. And there are differences, significant differences. For a start, these guys are tough. Their bone density is so high that they could fall off a cliff without much risk of breaking anything, which is why we see their kids just bounce up from tumbles that would put our kids in casualty. And their immune systems, wow. High powered doesn’t go anywhere near it. You could flood that world with plague pathogens and the
y would bounce right off them.’ He caught Simon’s eye and became rapidly more medical professional. ‘Their vulnerability even to the most virulent pathogen we have is less than 4%,’ he stated, ‘Resistance is 82:15:3 and mortality comes out at one in two hundred and fifty thousand. 101…’ he could see that coming in Alex’s look, the request that he explain that in terms not only that he and the crew could understand but which would be clear to the many civilians who’d see this footage later.
‘We used Barthold’s Scenario,’ Rangi said, ‘A classic virology scale – imagine a room with a hundred people in it, a sealed environment. To evaluate the likely impact of a viral pathogen on the population, you simulate releasing it into that room and circulating it so that everyone there is equally exposed. Technically, everyone is now infected, they’ve all breathed in the virus. Vulnerability is the number of people who will develop symptoms. To help make sense of that, one of the tests we used was of the ZX47 flu virus which caused a major epidemic on Mandram about forty years back. ZX47 holds the top spot in the virulent pathogens list and is very definitely a deadly plague. More than a third of the population went down with it at some point in the five months it was running at Mandram. Vulnerability, on the Barthold scale, is recorded as 36.4% for the population of Mandram and goes very much higher still for worlds which have a lower immunity to that type of infection. On Carrearranis, despite their never having been exposed to that type of virus before, the ferocity of their immune systems means that only four out of a hundred would experience symptoms, most would just shrug off the infection without even noticing they had it. Resistance is the ratio of how severely symptomatic patients will experience the disease – the first number gives the ratio of patients who’ll be uncomfortable but get better on their own, few days under the weather, kind of thing. The second number gives the ratio who’ll need medical treatment, strong anti-virals. And the third number is those who are liable to develop complications, secondary infections or organ failure, of such danger to life that they’ll need to be hospitalised. Mortality, obviously, is the number of people who’ll actually die. Again, for comparison, the Mandram epidemic had a resistance ratio of 42:37:21, meaning that twenty one per cent of patients were so ill they needed hospitals, overwhelming hospital facilities unable to cope with that level of demand. Here, just three out of a hundred symptomatic patients – already a small group in the population – would need hospital treatment, and those are generally the ones with pre-existing health issues, the very frail elderly. Mortality on Mandram was 17%, a shocking death toll – more than forty million people died. Here, mortality even amongst the most serious cases is one in a quarter of a million. Given the population of Carrearranis, therefore, if you flooded the planet with ZX47 or even injected all of them with it, fewer than five thousand of them would experience any symptoms at all. Of those, around four thousand one hundred would experience mild cold-like symptoms and be fine within a few days, around seven hundred and fifty would need treatment for fever and roughly a hundred and fifty would need hospital care, and statistically, nobody would die from it, nobody, not one. Their immune systems are ferocious, skipper, tougher than anything we’ve seen before.’ He gave a little grimace. ‘Unfortunately, that does come at a cost – their metabolisms run hot and as we know, that does impact on lifespan. We thought their low life expectancy was due to environment and lifestyle, lack of medical care and so on, but it turns out that they are already quite close to their natural maximum – we may be able to add perhaps fifteen to twenty years to average life expectancy, but their natural lifespan will always be significantly shorter than we consider normal – normal for humans, that is. Because they’re not, obviously. They’re a new species, Homo Carrearrensis, genetically akin, but under the terms of the Homo Sapiens Identification Act, definitely not human.’
It was at this inopportune moment that Alex took his first call from Arak.
‘Hello Alex!’ Arak had climbed over the hill to be out of sight of the singing stone and out of yelling range of the village. He was raising his voice, delightedly self-conscious.
‘Hello, Arak – yes, I can hear you,’ Alex assured him. ‘You can talk to me from anywhere on the planet with that, even from a boat in the middle of the ocean.’
They chatted for a couple of minutes, Arak confirming that he’d had no problem using the comm. It too had been designed specifically for Carrearranian use and manufactured by the Fourth themselves – a very simple looking device which actually contained classified telemetry chips and complex programming. It was a thin pad, gently suction adhesive to skin, tap-activated, currently set to function purely as a comm with a control screen identical to that displayed on the singing stones. Once shown how to put it on their wrist and tap it, any Carrearranian could use such a comm. Later, as their needs and wants became more sophisticated, a lot more functions could be unlocked. For now, though, Arak was happy with being able to call Alex from outside the village.
‘I’ll find out how well it works!’ he told Alex, and went off cheerfully to find somewhere more difficult to call him from.
There was a short silence after the call had ended, during which a voice could be heard telling someone, conversationally, ‘I had an uncle died in that ZX47 epidemic.’
‘We have to tell them,’ Martine said, taking no notice of this.
‘We will,’ Alex said, and corrected himself, ‘I will. But I don’t think,’ he looked back at Rangi, ‘you’ve finished, have you?’
‘No, skipper.’ Rangi picked up quickly from where he’d left off. ‘The really interesting part is brain function,’ he said. ‘There are significant differences in both structure and neurology – the details are in the report, but basically their brains do not work in quite the same way ours do. As far as raw reasoning IQ goes the range of ability appears to be compatible with the general human population – Arlit is at the very highest end of the scale and in terms of reasoning and learning quotients that puts him in the gifted and talented range. His IQ is actually at genius level, but he isn’t a genius because to be categorised as a genius you need to have extraordinary abilities across the board. And he doesn’t, they don’t. Their creative capacity is very low – Arlit can learn quickly, recall things and solve problems logically, but he has next to no imagination, no intuitive abilities, he isn’t capable of thinking outside the box. We believe that to be general throughout the population, which explains why they have no visual arts, no fiction, no poetry, no musical instruments, only a very simple drone-based singing. The most creative people in their population will be well under the human average. And that, evidently, has major implications for their future. They’re not a people you can give the basic building blocks to and leave them to figure it out, invent and create things for themselves. We’re going to have to rethink what we give them and make it far more use-specific. It will be really interesting, for instance, to see what they do with the lights… my guess is, not much.’
He was right. The thinking behind the lights had been that if they were supplied as simple spheres the Carrearranians themselves would take that basic thing, a little ball of light, and use it to make all manner of lights for themselves for a variety of purposes. The project team, in fact, had asked for suggestions to help them compile a list of ‘101 Things to Do with a Globelight’ and had hit more than two hundred valid entries in a matter of hours. These had ranged from the most basic – tucking a globe into a split stick to turn it into a lamp or torch – to the most sophisticated, using quartz prisms to create a focussed beam capable of functioning as a lighthouse.
As night fell on Arak’s island, hopes in the Fourth were running high. Okay, they hadn’t shown much interest in the lights in the daytime, but surely they’d be very much more interested when they saw how useful they were at night.
The islanders, however, were not impressed at all. Arlit was keen to demonstrate his own knowledge and show off the tech, and he set about showing them how the lights could make the village as bright
as if it was day. Some of the older people objected to this, one old man demanding querulously why they would want to turn night into day while another got quite cross about it being unnatural.
Arlit, however, got his way. Holding three globes together, he squeezed them until they were at maximum brightness and then held them up on his open hand so that the village was illuminated. The result was not at all what the project team had anticipated. The light was not like either fire or sunlight and it made colours look wrong to the islanders. It certainly made the village look weird, as parts were lit up powerfully by that eerie light while dark shadows loomed and shifted with Arlit’s moving hand. They were not an imaginative people so it didn’t spook them, but things did not look right at all and they didn’t like that. Calls came at Arlit to turn it off.
He did so, and almost at once gave a cry of panic.
‘I can’t see!’
He wasn’t the only one. The Carrearranians understood well enough that staring into a bright fire made the pupils contract and that it could take a couple of minutes to adjust if you went outside. They had never, though, experienced anything like the blackout effect of a light so bright being shone in their eyes and then turned out. For a little while, many of them thought they were blind.
They were reassured on that point as their night vision returned, and Davie explained, too, promising that it had done them no harm.
All the same, the villagers wanted no more to do with the horrible things. And they passed the word, too – the lights, they told their friends, might just be useful in an emergency, but they certainly weren’t something you’d want in your home. They made everything look weird, and they made you go blind for a bit when you’d used them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no demand from the other islands to have some of the lights. There was just one little pulse of hope next day, when the village children were seen to be heading off into the forest with all but the three lights Arlit himself had kept.