The Wellness Plague

by Robert R. Chase

Illustration by Dell Harris

I.

“Why are you traveling to Far Edge?” the pilot asked.

Reynolds Morrill Landers kept his eyes glued to the window, unable to turn away from the empty immensity outside. Wind rushed across the Sunbird’s metal skin, which seemed no thicker than foil With each gust of wind, with each course adjustment, the whole craft creaked and groaned in protest. Above, wispy clouds of ice crystals broke the sunlight into muted rainbows. Below them lay layer after layer of clouds. You could look down through the gaps, sometimes all the way down to the lush darkness of the world jungle that was the floor of Skylandia.

Fear of heights, he told himself, was an absurd emotion on a world where humans could live only on mountain tops. In the past, though, he had always had solid rock beneath his feet. Now there were only struts and metal skin and absurdly long glider wings, their dark topsides drinking in sunlight and converting it to electricity for the lifting fans. An experimental craft whose pilot was a girl no older than he had been when he had been first admitted to the College of Apollo, who could fly legally only because her craft did not exist in the registry of vessels requiring certification.

Belatedly, he realized that Regan Lee was still waiting for his answer.

“Research,” he said. “I’m a medical master. The local practitioner has been sending some interesting reports to the College of. Apollo in the Terraces. I’m here to see what I can make of them.”

“Really?” Regan asked. “The people of Far Edge seem pretty healthy to me.”

“Well, that’s the problem,” Rey said, almost apologetically. “In some ways they appear to be too healthy.” She looked at him skeptically. “Do you have allergies?” he asked.

Her laugh was high-pitched and musical. “Who doesn’t? That’s the reason I learned to fly. Up here I’m not battling headaches or fighting for breath.”

“Right,” Rey agreed. “Most of our communicable diseases burned up with the rest of Earth, and our population densities have been low enough to keep new ones from generating. But ever since our great grandparents landed on Far Edge, we have been plagued by allergies. Despite the cordons surrounding the colonies, dust and pollens still blow up from the jungle below. Since we never evolved with these, it’s no wonder we react to them. About twenty deaths a year can be traced back to some sort of allergic reaction. Even without the deaths, there are hundreds of thousands of man-hours lost.

“Except on Far Edge. Since it has the lowest elevation of any of the colonies, it should have the worst allergy problems. The records show that it did when it was first settled. Then, gradually, the incidences decline. The local practitioner eventually recognized what was happening and mentioned it as an aside in her reports. I queried her a few months ago, but she has no idea of the cause. I thought that if I could find out, it would make a good enough paper for my doctorate.”

Not to mention that if he were able to formulate a general treatment based upon what he discovered, he would probably be a moderately rich man for the rest of his life.

The craft lurched suddenly. Rey clenched the armrests, wondering if the struts were screeching in a different key. Regan was tacking across contrary wind streams, fighting the seasonal easterlies which made Far Edge inaccessible to cargo zeppelins. Noting his concern, Regan said “Just a little clear air turbulence. If you had your visor on, it wouldn’t take you by surprise.”

Her own visor masked the upper half of her face. A confusion of bright yellow lines played across its inner surface, totally obscuring her eyes. His visor was hooked onto the arm rest. He had worn it for the first ten minutes of the flight. Air currents had been given form and color. With it, he could tell their extent, their speed and direction relative to the Sunbird. Thermals boiled upwards, suddenly visible elevators which might carry them most of the way to their destination with hardly a touch of the craft’s solar-powered fans. At the touch of a button, while the left side of the visor continued to display the winds in whatever direction you were looking, the right side would provide a satellite weather map of the pressure gradients and frontal systems in their flight path.

Information overload. Without Regan’s training, there was just too much data displayed for him to comprehend it all. More than that, it obscured what he could appreciate. When he took it off, he saw mountain peaks near the horizon which seemed to be floating on a sea of clouds. The Sun fell behind them. High in the gathering dusk, the bright moving dot that was the Ark appeared orbiting outside Skylandia’s shadow, a reminder of all their ancestors had lost, a promise of what they might one day achieve again.

He had never seen much of the sky while studying at the College of Apollo. Studies forced you into a sort of tunnel vision during the day. At night, the bulk of the main mountain blocked out half the sky, while path lighting washed out much of the rest. It was as if the Terraces had decided to ignore as much of the planet as possible.

If so, they had made an unpardonable mistake. Hanging in the middle of the sky, Rey could almost wish himself a Naturaler, sustaining himself solely on the untouched beauty of the planet.

“Do you often fly out this far?” he asked, feeling a twinge of envy.

“Not very, but you have to remember that Sunbird is still in its testing phase,” Regan answered. “Last month was the first time I’ve ever flown to Far Edge. Picked up a cargo of kids going to the Old Earth Days Ball at the Terraces. Their parents didn’t have the money to rent or the clout to commandeer a VTOL. Had a hold full of Rhett Butlers and Scarlet O’Haras in absurd dresses.”

Perhaps it was his imagination, but there seemed to be a trace of wistfulness in her voice, as if she could see herself in something less practical than aviator’s overalls.

She spotted Far Edge an hour later. While she talked to ground control about wind speeds, he peered out his window, vainly searching for their destination. From the maps he had studied, he remembered that there should be a central crater serving as a reservoir. Below that would be two smaller craters, partially filled in so that they could grow rice. The mine entrances would probably not be visible. On the other hand, he should be able to see the orange groves which clung to the south side of the mountain. In the Terraces, only the rich could afford the arboretum-grown oranges.

“Over there,” Regan said, pointing. “About four o’clock.”

Twin handgrips controlled wing attitude. She twisted them now and the wings mimicked her movements, spilling air. Sunbird banked, losing altitude. Suddenly, a wedge of land appeared below them which seemed to plunge through the cloud deck like an ancient ocean ship through high seas. Regan brought the craft around in order to land into the wind. Unfortunately, that also meant heading straight over the cliff, trying to land in an area designed for VTOLs and zeppelin moorings.

Light dimmed suddenly as they fell into the clouds. Rey strained for a glimpse of the ground. It appeared suddenly, less than four meters below them. Just ahead, the earth dropped away to jagged nothingness.

Regan pulled on the grips and twisted. Obediently, the wings tilted to vertical, cupping the wind. Forward motion stopped abruptly. The Sunbird dropped like an elevator whose cable had been cut. Lifting fans roared to life. Sudden deceleration pressed Rey down into his seat.

The pressure eased, the noise of the fans decreased and then whispered away into silence. To his surprise, Rey realized that they were on the ground. They were not going to crash after all.

Regan was grinning at him.

“What would have happened if we had missed the pad?” he asked, feeling obscurely defensive.

“I would have brought us around for another approach,” she answered.

“So we were never in any real danger.”

She cocked her head, as if considering this thought for the first time. “Well, I don’t suppose I would go that far. Wind gusts along the cliff face tend to be strong and erratic. I would hate to have caught a wing on the rocks.”

“Right,” he said.

Following Regan’s example, Rey pulled the latch at his side. The wall fell outward to the ground, becoming a makeshift gangway. He took two unsteady steps and hopped to the ground. A warm fog was blowing up from the cliff edge. More than once, older acquaintances in the Terraces had described the odor of the world jungle as an affluvium of rottenness, as if the entire world were decaying. This was not at all like that. It was a smell of openness, accented by traces of spice and mint.

Rey reached out to steady himself on the Sunbird, his sense of balance deceived by the gusting fog. His nasal passages were already beginning to close off. He reached for the box of antihistamines he kept in his shirt pocket.

Figures loomed out of the dimness. Rey turned on them quickly. Luckily, nobody could see the flush of embarrassment which immediately followed. Even in the gloom, he could see that none of them had the star-burst manes of the White People. If the White People actually existed. It had been nearly five years since the Bainbridge child had been stolen and a Changeling left in his place. Efforts to retrieve the child had been thwarted by the planet itself as much as by his captors, who had come to be known as the White People. Their existence was officially denied. Rumor and a rapidly growing folklore had mushroomed to fill the gaps.

Regan had already opened the cargo hold and was lifting out packages to the ground crew. Rey went to help her. As he placed the last of the boxes onto a hand trolley which, like the people, seemed to have just materialized out of the mist, he became aware of someone standing nearby, examining him.

“Dr. Morrill-Landers?” A woman’s alto voice, low and hoarse. The way she pronounced his name made it sound like “mer-landers.” So much, he thought, for all the families struggling to preserve the old names and lineages. Human laziness warred and won against the ever-increasing number of syllables.

“Not yet,” he said, straightening and offering his hand. “Medical Master only. You must be Practitioner Mazio-Carr.”

She shook his hand absently. Martina Mazio-Carr was a big-boned woman, with hands as rough as her voice. “I asked for a full doctor. Can you tell me why they sent you?”

The irritation was not directed at him, Rey realized, but at the bureaucracy of the Terraces. “I have no idea,” he said mildly. “The fact is, though, that nobody sent me. I came to do research.”

“Research?” The concept seemed to astound her. “Much time you will have for that. There are the sick to be taken care of.”

Rey located his duffel bag and shouldered it. “Really? I was told people here were unusually healthy on Far Edge.”

“Were you indeed?” she asked. “Well, there may be something to that. I’m not talking about people. I’m talking about the livestock.”

II.

Mazio-Carr got him installed in the Murchisons’, a rambling building, or series of buildings, which had originally been a Freehold but now served as a boarding house for colony singles and young families. It was half-buried in the side of the central crater for protection from the storms which blew up from the jungle depths. High winds could do tremendous damage at one and a half standard atmospheres. Rey was shown to a comer room that was little more than a bed and a small desk with a horizontal slit window above each.

During dinner that night, he met his fellow roomers. Juanita Buergher-Murchison owned the house and ran it with the assistance of her daughter, Katarina, and her teenaged son, O’Donnel. Don was a good-looking boy with the reputation of being something of a Romeo. Dinner table conversation had it that he and Andrea Calley-Li, the governor’s youngest daughter, had been a hot item during Old Earth Days. But despite all the kidding, Don appeared to be friendly and hard-working, if not overly bright.

When not insisting that he take overly-generous portions of her cooking, Juanita wanted to know whether any more children had been kidnapped by the White People. Her eyes, as she asked the question, kept straying to her own children.

“None,” Rey assured her. “There are always rumors, but they are never confirmed.”

“Well, they wouldn’t be,” said a burly man with a mustache seated across from Rey. He introduced himself as Garrard Ryn-Rosenberger, a mechanic in charge of the robots which continually sanitized the cordon surrounding Far Edge. “After all, the government would just use the Public Safety laws to suppress that sort of news.”

Rey chewed a slice of lamb as he considered that, suddenly acutely aware that he had paid almost no attention to politics for the past three years. “I don’t think they could do that successfully,” he said after a moment. “Oh, they might try, but from what I’ve seen, the government really isn’t all that efficient. If more children were kidnapped, there would be a hue and cry that they would never be able to quiet.”

They seemed to accept that, yet for the rest of the evening Rey was aware that behind their questions was a lingering doubt that the satellite news feeds were telling them the whole story. Chandler and Linda Karatnycky-Sullum were newlyweds, both working two jobs in hopes of putting enough money together to establish their own freehold. Linda wanted to hear all about the Naturalers. Rey amused the whole table by relating how one had become deathly ill after sneaking though the cordon surrounding the Terraces to gorge on the fruits of a native bush. The Alienist poets had been especially harsh, comparing this to a reversion to bestiality.

“But, of course, the Alienists suffer from enough of their own contradictions,” Rey added. “Their incessant whining about how we can never be at home on this world is bad enough, even without declamations to the effect that the only completely free act is suicide.”

Chandler was more interested in the Technics. He confided to Rey that he had once dreamed of joining the Astronaut Corps, that he had wanted to help maintain the Ark for the day when it could be used to explore their solar system and, perhaps, even reclaim its heritage as a starship.

“From what I hear, the Technics have been coming up with grand plans to make the rest of the planet habitable,” he said.

Rey nodded cautiously. “There was some discussion of nudging an asteroid out of orbit and directing it so that it would impact in an uninhabited portion of the planet, the idea being that the explosion would blow off enough of the atmosphere to make the surface pressure approximately one atmosphere.”

“Then we wouldn’t be confined to mountain peaks any more,” Chandler said, his eyes shining.

“Quite so,” Rey agreed. “However, the Naturalers produced calculations demonstrating that any such impact would raise the temperature of the atmosphere by ten degrees. Only temporarily, to be sure, but long enough to destroy most of the oxygen-producing biosphere at the lower levels. Not to mention the fact that such an abrupt lowering of the atmospheric pressure would make our mountain colonies completely uninhabitable.”

He slept that night, listening to the wind whistling about the eaves. He dreamt that he had been taken to the most secret place on the planet, a Freehold basement where the Changeling, which had been exchanged for the Bainbridge boy, was kept. It talked of Alienists and Naturalers and Technics, its approximately human face contorted with an almost pathetic earnestness. Rey listened intently, but when he woke, all he could remember was a low growling, like that of a sick dog.

Martina’s practice was as varied as it was large. The first assignment she gave Rey was the thrice weekly first-aid course. It was conducted in the school before classes started in the morning. There were usually between five and twelve in the course. At first, Rey thought he had been given this task because Martina considered it drudgery and did not trust him with anything more complicated. He soon realized that it might be the most important part of the practice. The colonists on Far Edge were spread too far apart for even the two of them to be able to provide timely medical care in emergencies. So he taught everything from the Heimlich maneuver to CPR to setting broken bones to delivering babies.

Afterwards, there were patients. A large number of these had “women’s problems”: fertility had been a major concern since humanity had come to Skylandia, and the lack of a major satellite had distressed the menstrual cycles of every generation of women since then. There were drugs which could be used to regularize the cycles, and in households which included several women of child-bearing age, having only one of them on drugs was often enough to regularize them all by pheromone entraining.

Marty’s diagnoses and treatments clearly went beyond the guidelines established for practitioners, and were arguably even illegal. That they were necessary was beyond argument. The nearest actual doctor was in Jump Off; the nearest hospital, fifty kilometers beyond that in New Geneva. During the winter, all that distance was against the prevailing winds.

As Marty had warned him, a large proportion of his time was devoted to livestock problems. Sheep especially drew bloodbird attacks. Marty maintained two marrow machines with no other use than to continually produce fresh sheep blood to be used for transfusions. At least twice a week, Rey would find himself ministering to an exsanguinated sheep, its dirty fleece stained red at the punctures. Sometimes the bloodbird would still be attached, its ten-centimeter beak buried in the sheep’s flesh, its stomach distended as it gorged. Removing the bird was tricky. It could be killed easily enough, but the backward pointing barbs made it impossible to pull out without tearing a sizable chunk of flesh along with it.

Marty showed him a trick of breaking a bag of blood from the marrow machines over the beak at its entry to the wound. The beak closed in apparent disgust, disengaging most of the barbs. With one swift, fluid motion, Marty pulled out the beak and snapped the creature’s neck.

“Why does that work?” Rey asked.

Marty shrugged. “They don’t seem to like what comes out of the machines.” Her manner said that it was a useless question as long as it was effective.

“They’re stupid beasts,” she added. “If they had any brains, they would have realized a long time ago that we’re no good for them.” Except, of course, that a million years of evolution had taught the bloodbirds that anything of a certain size which moved was almost certainly good for them. They flew too high to be disturbed by alien scents. Human beings were recent interlopers; it would take the native fauna a while yet, perhaps aided by adolescents with homemade lasers, to associate this set of smells and colors with non-nourishing amino acids.

One week when he had seen more sheep than people, Rey found himself staring at his office data screen, wondering just how many of the creatures there could possibly be on Far Edge. The morning had been spent treating part of a flock owned by Freeholder Paabo Bhagwati. He connected with the municipal registry and had it display the extent of the Freehold. Another query brought up the size of Bhagwati’s flocks as of the last quarterly reporting period. Rey frowned at the number, surprised that it was so large. On a hunch, he called up the carrying capacity ratio established by the Ministry of Agriculture and plugged in the figures.

Marty had come back from lunch and was standing behind him, regarding his screen intently.

“Something’s wrong with the data base,” he explained. “Bhagwati claims to have almost twice as many sheep as his farm will support.”

“Maybe he’s inflated his figures to impress the bankers,” Martina suggested. She sounded distinctly unhappy. “As a general rule, the greater your collateral, the better your loan terms.”

Rey chewed his lip, thinking about that. “No,” he decided. “Any advantage would be more than offset by his higher tax rate. Besides, any bank would run the same sort of check, and would determine that he was overgrazing his land, which would make him a bad credit risk, in addition to being illegal per se.”

The phone chimed. An eleven-year-old who had been playing outside the fence near the airport cliffs had fallen and suffered a compound fracture. Rey strapped a new filter over his nose and mouth and jumped into the office’s dragonfly flitter. It was the end of the day before he returned to the clinic. A VTOL stood on the landing pad across from the entrance. Rey recognized the markings of the Bhagwati Freehold. As he stepped out of the dragonfly, he saw Paabo Bhagwati walking toward him.

“Not another bloodbird attack?” Rey groaned, feeling exhausted.

Bhagwati permitted himself a miniscule smile. “No. I am not in need of your professional services. Rather, it appears that I am still in your debt. I have heard that you are perplexed about certain aspects of my freehold.”

Marty was standing in the doorway of the clinic, her face unreadable.

“I wasn’t meaning to pry—” Rey began.

Bhagwati shook his head. “Of course not. It is just that your intelligence is not confined to your work. Come with me. I shall make things clear.”

Rey glanced quickly at Marty. She nodded. He climbed into the cockpit of the VTOL and sat next to Bhagwati. It was a large craft, smaller only than the lumbering cargo carriers which were the backbone of trade among the colonies. Its hold smelled of hay and sheep and dirt. Bhagwati touched the controls and it surged up fifty meters, where it caught the easterlies. It seemed to Rey that Bhagwati, rather than pilot the craft, simply let the winds blow the VTOL across Far Edge to his freehold. He set it down in a pasture close to the cordon, an area Rey had never seen before.

He handed Rey paper booties to protect his shoes. “It is not really dangerous if you just walk through,” he explained apologetically, “but people do tend to get nervous.”

Rey tied the string above his ankles, then followed Bhagwati out of the VTOL. The freeholder headed down the slope and stepped without hesitation into the cordon.

Rey winced and forced himself to follow. He stepped carefully over the fluorescent orange plastic tubing which extended all along the cordon’s higher, inner edge. It was Ryn-Rosenberger’s job to make sure that the poison flowed at an even rate through that tubing, that it soaked through to the bedrock and extended the mandatory fifty meters width. This had caused problems in some colonies. Stripping the slopes bare of vegetation increased erosion, sometimes drastically. The cordon, which prevented the encroachment of native fauna, would seem to become a noose pulling ever tighter.

That was not the case here, however. The land sloped gently, not to a cliff as on the airport side, but to a ridge. Rey moved quickly, telling himself that the poison was dangerous to humans only in accumulated dosages. Even if the booties were to tear, what adhered to his soles should not be unsafe. As long as he did not fall and cut himself….

The cordon gave way raggedly to groucuh, which extended itself like grasping fingers into the surrounding sterility. Rey frowned and bent down to pull up a clump. Groucuh was only a contraction of “ground cover,” an all-purpose term for the smaller sort of natural flora; that is, what should be easily killed by the cordon poisons. Like most of his fellow humans, Rey had little idea what it was like. The one thing he did know, however, was that it was substantially different from Terrestrial grasses and grains.

In his hand he held a coiled mass of vegetation, in more shades of yellow and purple than he could count. It seemed to grow like an insane slinky toy. As far as he knew, it was like nothing which came from Earth.

Yet, inextricably tangled in this mass, were grass blades identical to those which grew in the inner quadrangle of the College of Apollo. They should not be able to grow in the same soils. They certainly should not be so intertwined as, say, lichen.

Bhagwati was waiting for him patiently. Rey dropped the clump, filing it away as a mystery to be examined if he ever had time.

Ahead of them rose what was, at this distance, clearly an artificial embankment. It was high enough to shield whatever was behind it from the view of anyone walking the cordon. Hearing the almost soporific bleating punctuated by a few barks, Rey realized he had no need to see what lay beyond.

Nonetheless, they both crested the rise and paused while Rey assessed the view. The ridge widened to the size of a small meadow. Low fences marked the beginning of the steep incline. A dog ran along one of the fences, yapping excitedly at sheep careless enough to wander too close.

“How many are there?” Rey asked.

“About five hundred in this meadow,” Bhagwati said. “Nearly four hundred each in the two beyond. You can’t see them from here because they are about fifty meters lower.”

Rey looked down at his feet. The grass-groucuh was thick and springy, coiling up above his ankles. “It’s amazing that the groucuh doesn’t just crowd out the grass. And that you can feed this many sheep on what grass manages to survive.”

Naturalers to the contrary, the first generation had conclusively demonstrated that Skylandia’s biochemistry was too different for it to be nourishing to anything which had evolved on Earth.

Bhagwati shrugged. “I did not have nukes,” he said, almost apologetically. “At first, I feared my incomplete clearing would doom my efforts. As you see, they did not. I am told the fleece of these animals makes wool cloth especially prized, even on the Terraces.”

Rey looked around at the meadow and beyond. It was such a clear day that he would have been able to see all the way down to the world jungle, had advancing night not already cloaked it in shadow. On the far horizon, a line of clouds was growing that looked as dark and solid as the planet’s crust.

“Why?”

It was really two questions. Bhag-wati answered the first.

“Far Edge was cleared because there were getting to be too many people in the other colonies. The Terraces took nearly a decade to establish the colony, pleading lack of resources. By the time it was declared safe for habitation, the number of those who had signed up for emigration had nearly doubled. It seemed good politics to accommodate all. Only, the size of the plots was then too small for economic viability. Many failed, like the Murchisons. Most others, like the Karatnycky-Sullums, have no realistic chance of success.

“I did not want to fail. I saw this land, just beyond the cordon. I thought, if I had just a little more, I would be able to survive. So I planted grasses, and moved sheep across the cordon. Some went hungry, and I was very afraid. But then others started to thrive, and soon the whole herd was doing well.”

“Nobody has noticed this from the air?” Rey asked.

“The airfield is at the opposite end of Far Edge,” Bhagwati answered, “and much of the time fog covers the land.”

“But the satellite photographs!” Rey insisted.

Bhagwati shrugged. “They do not look so different from the surrounding lands. In the Terraces, where they study those pictures, they know nothing can lie out here, so they do not look closely.”

“Why are you showing me this?” Rey asked. He was acutely conscious that there were only the two of them out there, that only one other person knew where he was. He knew enough to ruin Bhagwati, both legally and financially. If he were to be pushed over the side, he would probably never be found.

Bhagwati nodded, as if aware of his thoughts. He stood apart from Rey, hands down at his side, as if trying to demonstrate his harmlessness.

“You were asking intelligent questions,” Bhagwati said. “If I did not answer them, you might raise them with your friends on the Terraces. The government might feel forced to do something were this brought to its attention.”

“They can run the numbers as well as I can,” Rey objected.

“They have chosen not to,” Bhagwati answered. “Or if they have, they have dismissed the result as business puffery.”

“It would have been much simpler if you had reported only your herds within the cordon,” Rey said, exasperation giving an edge to his voice.

“That would have been a lie,” Bhagwati said simply. “I owe the taxes on my true wealth. Anything else would cheat my neighbors and my friends. Also, I think that at some point, someone would wonder how I could maintain my cash flow from such a small resource base. I have broken one law. That is enough.”

The wind freshened. Even through his allergy mask, it seemed to bring up scents from the jungle far below, odors at once disturbing and enticing.

Bhagwati waited patiently.

“All right,” Rey said at last. “I am not going to turn you in to the proctos.” And that may be the end of any hope of ever obtaining a doctorate, if they ever catch you and decide that I was a co-conspirator.

“As far as I can tell, what you are doing has resulted in no damage to the agriculture or the health of the colony. I suppose if this violation is considered serious, it is a matter for Mr. Ryn-Rosenbeiger and his superiors.”

Bhagwati flashed a smile as dazzling as the setting sun. “Thank you,” he said, bobbing his head slightly. “Let us go back now. I believe a storm is coming.”

III.

The storm swept over Far Edge during the night. Lying in his bed, it seemed to Rey that the whole building swayed under the hammer blows of the wind. The next morning he was awakened by the sound of all the VTOLs in Far Edge chopping the sky in a search pattern. O’Donnel Buergher-Murchison and four friends had flown out to a mountain called the Claw for a day of hunting bloodbirds and rock climbing. Their VTOL had not returned before the storm’s onset. There were no distress calls.

O’Donnel’s mother maintained a ghastly cheerfulness which Rey found more distressing than hysterics. She was sure the boy and his companions had suffered only a minor mishap, and that they would be found in a matter of hours. As the hours became a day, two days, and then a week, Rey felt the tension building to a breaking point.

Marty agreed. “None of the families are in what you’d call good shape, but Juanita is probably under the most strain. First her husband dies, then they lose all their freehold lands and manage to retain their home only by turning it into a boarding house. Nothing against Katarina, but all her mother’s hopes were on that boy. I don’t know how she’d be able to live with his loss.”

Given the contrary winds, there was little the other colonies could do to help with the search. Not that they seemed over-inclined to be of aid. There was almost a querulousness to the messages from the Terraces, a sense that the unauthorized flight beyond the cordon was of more concern than the possible loss of lives.

First-aid classes were suspended so that more of the colonists could aid in the search. Rey discovered to his surprise that he had free time. He used some of it to go over the notes he had made on allergies.

Even in the supposedly air-cleaned homes of the freeholders, his head throbbed and his eyes watered. Often, the families he visited would discover to their surprise that the filters had not been working for a year or more. It did not matter to them. They showed no allergic response to their environment.

Or at least most of them did not. Babies did. All babies, until about the age of three. It made no sense. Usually a child would benefit from his mother’s immune response transferred through breast milk. Here, you could almost imagine that the mother was somehow suppressing a natural immunity.

If something like that was the case, where did the immunity come from? It did not seem to have anything to do with the genetic make-up of the colonists. They had come in nearly equal mix from most of the then-established colonies, usually, though not always, from the lower end of the economic scale. The immunity had developed gradually. In retrospect, you noticed that fewer and fewer antihistamines were used. Now, only visitors, newcomers like himself, and the newborns needed medication.

It was an acquired immunity. Babies might require three years; adults seemed to acquire it in a matter of months. So how was it acquired? What was different about Far Edge? First answer: it was lower in elevation and consequently wanner than any other colony. Problem: none of the literature on allergies suggested any possible correlation with air pressure or temperature. If anything, there should be an inverse correlation. There should be more dust and pollen at the lower levels. If the flora of the world jungle produced pollen. It was astonishing how little was known about the natural lifeforms on this planet.

What about diet? Research, and his own experience, disclosed that Edgers ate pretty much the same stuff as other colonists. They had a greater amount of exotics, like oranges and grapefruit, because they were locally grown. And, as he had noticed since his arrival, they tended to eat a lot. He had put that down to the difference between their active, outdoor lives and the sedentary, enclosed life with which he had been familiar in the Terraces. If his figures could be believed, however, adults on Far Edge consumed up to 50 percent more than settlers on similar frontier colonies.

Feed a cold, starve a fever, Ben Franklin had said, hundreds of years ago and light-years away. Only allergies were not colds.

Regan Lee had flown the Sunbird, specially modified with new search gear, back to Far Edge to join in the search. Rey was still thinking about the allergy problem when his communicator chimed with a priority message: Regan had spotted wreckage near the base of a ridgeline. It was almost certainly the VTOL flown by O’Donnel and his friends.

IV.

Lopez Vega snapped the cable onto Rey’s harness and tugged hard to make sure it was secure. Rey looked doubtful.

“We use these cables for lifting everything from livestock to heavy machinery,” Lopez said, shouting to make himself heard over the roar of the VTOL’s engines. “You don’t have to worry about that.

“Keep an eye on the time, though. Ting Lim can’t hold us here for more than half an hour. If you need more than that, you’ll have to unhook and let the Canberra Freehold VTOL take you back. It’s on its way now.”

Rey nodded to show he understood. As clean and safe and simple as it was to obtain hydrogen from water, it was still not as energy-intensive a fuel as Earth’s petrochemicals had been. Having come this far, the time they could spend on station was strictly limited.

“Ready, Doc?” Ting-Lim Chan’s voice came over Rey’s earphones. As pilot, he would have to hold the VTOL steady as the combination of his reflexes and electronics allowed. Breezes were light. On the other hand, the higher air pressure gave an unexpected force to even low wind velocities. Ting-Lim was trying something never done before.

“Ready,” Rey said, his mouth so dry the word came out as a croak. Then, because he feared he might freeze if he did not move immediately, he stepped to the cargo door, leaned out, and kicked off.

The first five meters were almost free-fall. “Want to get you beyond the worst of the prop wash,” Ting-Lim had explained. His descent slowed abruptly. The world rotated around him, back and forth in 270 degree arcs. Rey closed his eyes, waiting for his rotation to damp out. When he opened them, he was just above the trees.

There are no trees on Skylandia. That was what they taught you in school. Real trees, Earth trees, have xylem and phloem, bark and leaves or needles. Local flora have none of these. But there were organisms drawing water and nutrition from the soil, organisms extending sunlight-absorbing surfaces from strengthened central stalks many times longer than a man is tall. And since that was the common, if not the scientific, definition of a tree, all the school definitions went for naught.

The ridge slanted away below him, a canted field of pinkish-white puffballs. His feet brushed the upper branches, seeming to sink into a huge ball of cotton.

“Slowly,” he said, hoping this throat mike was working. “I don’t want to get tangled.”

“Roger that.”

He moved branches aside as they came within reach. What had looked like a vine coiled around one branch vanished in a sudden flurry of sinuous motion. Startled, Rey let go of a branch, which whipped away his breathing filter.

The branches thinned as he descended, the leaves changing from white to greenish-yellow to nearly black. A dimly-lit dome seemed to open around him. The VTOL motors sounded very far away.

In school, he had watched a film titled Memories of Earth. Children in a field, playing with a dead plant called a dandelion, blowing its seeds to the wind. The tree seemed to have a similar structure. Branches extended from the top of a central stalk in all directions, forming a sphere.

“Can you see anything?” Lopez’s voice was unexpectedly loud in Rey’s earphones.

“Not yet.” Rey looked around, squinting at shadowy, unidentified forms. Sunlight poked small holes in the canopy. There was an intermittent rustling, which might have been the wind.

“There it is!” he said. “Right between my legs. No wonder I couldn’t see it at first. Great job, Ting-Lim.”

“Any movement?” Lopez asked.

“No,” Rey said. On the other hand, there were no bodies visible, either.

The VTOL had apparently crashed through the canopy and broken several branches, which slowed its fall before hitting a limb strong enough to stop it.

“It’s caught in the cleft between some of the main limbs. One of the rotors came off in the crash. The door to the cargo bay must have popped off at the same time. The whole frame is leaning over. Getting in is going to be tricky.”

Rey stopped his descent when he was even with the open cargo bay. The upper edge of the craft extended about a meter beyond the floor.

“I’m going to try to swing in.” Rey pumped the cable back and forth. His arc carried him into the cargo bay. After two unsuccessful attempts, his scrabbling hands grabbed one of the ring mounts used for lines to secure whatever was being transported. His feet found the floor. Very carefully, he unhooked the cable from his harness and attached it to the ring mount.

“The cargo bay is empty,” he reported. “I’m going forward to check the cockpit.”

As he moved forward, the VTOL groaned and tilted in response to his shifting weight. Rey held his breath, wondering how far it was to the ground. Nothing happened. After a minute, he began to edge forward more cautiously.

A figure sat slumped over in the pilot’s chair. Small food cartons, the type that made up part of any VTOL’s emergency kit, formed a pile in the comer. Already knowing what he would find, Rey felt for a pulse. He sighed as he let the wrist fall.

“Belkom Michaels-Nye. There are splints on both legs. Dead a little more than a day, as far as I can tell. We just missed him.”

“Anyone else there?” Lopez asked.

“No.” Rectangles on the wall showed where the emergency kits had been. At least one other member of the party had survived, had done his or her best for Belkom, and then… what? Climbed down the trunk to attempt to walk back to Far Edge? Stupid, stupid, stupid! “Stay with your craft” in case of accident was drilled into you from the time you could walk. It had been hard enough to spot the VTOL. Individuals would be invisible under the jungle canopy.

“Excuse me.” Ting-Lim’s voice. “I can hold here for only about ten more minutes.”

“Right,” Rey acknowledged. He reached around to detach a body bag from his backpack. “We’ll be right up.”

He sat across from the open cargo door on the flight back to Far Edge. The jungle skimmed by beneath them. O’Donnel and his other three friends might be anywhere below. It was even conceivable that they were still alive.

There was nothing more anyone could do except arrange for the memorial service.

Two nights later there was another storm. Paabo Bhagwati awoke, listened to the pounding of the rain and the roar of distant thunder. There had been something else—there! From the front of the house, a sound midway between a scratching and a tapping. It was not loud, compared to the other storm sounds, but it should not have been there at all. He got up, wondering if something had been tom loose by the wind and was now battering his door. Or if somehow one of the sheep had somehow escaped the adjoining bam and was now scraping at the door for shelter.

The wind nearly tore the door from his hand as he opened it. A man stood before him, face dark with at least a week’s growth of beard. His clothes were tom. Three other figures huddled behind him under the overhang.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” O’Donnel Buergher-Murchison said hoarsely, “but my friends and I have had a bit of trouble. May I use your comm set to call my mother, please?”

O’Donnel Murchison. Judith Speigelman-Fromm. Anderson Perry-Barlow. Maria Castillo-Schmidt. They had done something no one else had done since the first landing. They had crashed in the jungle and walked out on their own.

V.

The screen above the bed gave most of the basic facts: blood pressure, pulse rate, body temperature, white blood cell count, respiration, oxygenation levels, metabolic rates, fluid input and output. Most of the facts and none of the answers.

“When can I go home?” O’Donnel asked.

Rey followed the IV lines down to his patient. “When you are well enough.”

“I just did a hundred-kilometer hike in the jungle. Doesn’t that mean I’m in pretty good shape?”

“Considering what you went through, you are in astoundingly good shape,” Rey answered. “You should be ready tomorrow, or the next day for sure. After all, you were in the jungle more than two weeks. Even the Bainbridge expedition was beyond the cordons little more than one week, and they started fully outfitted, and were resupplied on their way. The fact is, a lot of people can’t understand why you and your friends are alive at all.”

“I’m almost sorry to disappoint them,” O’Donnel murmured.

“No need to be,” Rey replied, “but there are some questions which need answering. You were on minimal rations, on a trek which must have required a great deal of endurance. You seem to have lost some body fat, and you may have the beginnings of a few deficiency diseases. Yet Belkom, who had most of the emergency rations, died of starvation.”

O’Donnel’s face clouded. “None of us wanted to leave him,” he said, “but there was no way he could!ve walked. The emergency packs were supposed to contain enough rations for all of us for five days. We took three days’ rations for ourselves and left the rest for Belk.”

Rey thought back to the pile of cartons in the VTOL. “Why did you split it up that way?”

“We figured we weren’t that far from Far Edge, so three days should do it.” He shrugged. “Big mistake, huh? Even though we tried to keep to the ridge, the tree cover was so thick we a lose sight of me sun. Every two or three hours, one of us had to climb a tree to see if we were still walking in the right direction. Lots of times, we weren’t.

“And the rations weren’t nearly enough! Each of them was supposed to last you a day, but we’d eat one during a stop and be hungry two hours later.”

Which suggested one line of investigation: if the contractor who packaged the emergency rations had shorted the contents, it might explain why Belkom had died. Although, as Marty had remarked, it was odd that anyone should die of hunger in a week even if he had had no food at all. In Belkom’s case, the additional factors of trauma and blood loss must have gready weakened him.

“Why did you leave the VTOL?” Rey asked.

O’Donnel shook his head, aware of the implied criticism. “We didn’t think you’d ever find us. All the radios had been destroyed by the crash. We waited two days before starting the trek. We could hear VTOLs both days, but nobody ever spotted us. I figured we were just too deep below the canopy, and that we would have to save ourselves.”

That was close enough to the truth. Regan Lee’s friends had mounted an experimental infrared sensor array and metal detectors on the Sunbird’s wings. That, and the fact that the Sunbird was able to stay on station longer than the VTOLs and so make a more thorough search, were the only reasons the downed craft had ever been located.

“Fair enough,” Key said. “I guess the main question now is how the four of you managed to survive as well as you did. Your exploits have made you the heroes of the news net.”

O’Donnel looked skeptical.

“No, really,” Rey insisted. “What’s important, though, is to learn whatever we can from your experience. If your rations were inadequate, then we want to establish that and have someone swing for it. On the other hand, if you discovered some way of improving the odds of surviving in the jungle, it is important that everyone else on the planet learn of it.”

O’Donnel nodded. “There isn’t much to tell. We just discovered that we could live off the land. At least, a little bit.”

It was Rey’s turn to look skeptical.

“It started with water,” O’Donnel continued stubbornly. “The ration packs made us thirsty. There weren’t any streams on the ridge, but I was afraid we would become completely lost if we went lower. Then we looked around, and discovered that in between the trees there was ground cover which looked like leaves as big as your arm. Lot of these leaves contained little puddles.

“So we tried to drink them while spilling as little as possible. One way was to put your mouth on an end and slurp. That’s how we found that the leaves tasted good. So we started eating them.”

“The leaves as bulk would have been somewhat filling,” Rey said judiciously, “and your body may well have been able to extract water from the leaf tissues as well as what was lying on the surfaces. Did you eat anything else?”

O’Donnel nodded. “There were these things Judy called pine cones ’cause they resembled something she’d seen in the Terrace’s big arboretum. They were scattered all over the ground. Had kind of a nutty smell. I don’t know why she started eating them, but she did and told us they tasted good. We’d stuff our pockets, then eat as we walked.”

“You are lucky you didn’t poison yourselves,” Rey said. “Were there any adverse reactions?”

“We all had cramps,” O’Donnel admitted, “at least, at first. I may have had a fever part of the time.”

“You still do,” Rey confirmed. “It’s coming down slowly. Any other problems?”

“No.” O’Donnel thought a moment. “Y’know, it’s strange. We were tired and hungry and scared that we wouldn’t make it all the time we were in the jungle, but in some ways it was really neat. Maybe it was just that there was more oxygen at a higher pressure than I’m used to. But all my life I’ve been told how awful and dangerous the jungle was, but when we were there it was, well, pretty.

“I’d like to go back sometime.”

“Maybe,” Rey said, “but only after you are completely recovered.” Lots of luck getting permission from the Committee on Colonial Security. “In the meantime, I’d like to run more tests. This will mean getting poked and prodded, and submitting to the additional indignities of giving blood and stool samples.”

“You make it sound irresistible,” O’Donnel muttered.

“On the other hand, we may be able to learn something from you and your friends that will save lives in the future.”

O’Donnel rolled his eyes to the ceiling with a sigh. “Let’s get on with it, then.”

The answer came early that evening. He had sealed his samples into their small plastic dishes and placed the dishes in the trays of the automated microscopes, there to be cared for by the medical AI programs until he could make time to conduct an examination.

An alarm went off. It was a soft-spoken, almost deferential alarm. Instead of screaming a strident warning, it seemed to say “Take a look over here; this may interest you.” What it most likely meant was equipment failure or a mistake in programming parameters.

“Computer: alarm visuals, please.” Then he kicked himself mentally as he remembered that voice activation was one of the many frills the clinic did without. Muttering, he punched in the proper command.

The screen glowed to life. Strange shapes moved like shadows, elongating, their trifurcated ends grasping for nourishment, then curling up into balls for no apparent reason.

“What the hell?” His tone was almost reverent. He tapped a series of keys.

ACCESING MICROORGANISM DATABASE.

Twenty seconds elapsed, no match FOUND.

“That’s what I thought.” Another series of commands established a satellite link to the Terraces.

“Security authorization.” The voice was tired and more than slightly irritated.

Rey frowned. “Since when does a colony clinic need a security clearance to access a medical database? I thought that was what our taxes were for.”

“Who—? Is that you, Rey? How are things on the frontier?”

“Mongosuthu?” Rey guessed. “You used to have a real job as a researcher. What’s going on back there?”

“Things are even crazier than usual,” Mongosuthu grumbled. “Natu-ralers got into a lot of the systems two weeks ago, looking for evidence of some grand conspiracy to suppress ‘the Truth,’ whatever that might be. Colonial Security had a fit, thinking they might crash the databases. My part-time job as gatekeeper is one of the results.

“Here’s what we do. When you hear someone request your authorization, you say ‘Medical priority.’ Say that now a few times, so we can put your voiceprint into memory.”

Rey did so.

“Good. Try to sound as natural as you can when you call in. The program is supposed to evaluate stress in case you’re being coerced. So far it’s shut out three docs calling in for emergency support.

“Now that that’s all taken care of, what can I do for you?”

“I have some beasties for you to look at,” Rey said. “They are not in the standard references.” He keyed in the visual from the microscope.

“Hmm. Bizarre looking,” Mongosuthu said. “Where do they come from?”

“The intestines of one of my patients.”

“Any symptoms?”

“None I can be sure of. He was in the jungle for a couple of weeks, and is about as tired and exhausted as you might suppose.”

“Ah! So this is one of the missing rock climbers. Wait—” Five seconds elapsed. “The AI diagnostic suggest some sort of parasite. No match in the records, though. Those trifurcations are a pretty dammed distinctive morphology. If it were anything terrestrial, it should be in the database. But if it’s native, it shouldn’t be able to exist in a human gut. Any idea how he became infected?”

“He says they ate some of the native plants,” Rey said.

“Well, that explains it. Your boy ingested some of the local fauna, which not only came with assorted bugs, but also created an intestinal microhabitation which was not immediately fatal. He’s lucky it didn’t kill him.”

“I’ve already told him that,” Rey agreed.

Rey readied himself for bed, mind awhirl with thoughts which went nowhere but would not settle down. He pulled the sheets up, enjoying the scents which had permeated them as they hung outside to dry. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, reveling in the simple act of breathing.

And stopped. He had left a breathing mask high in a tree more than three days earlier. In the excitement, he had forgotten to unwrap a replacement. He had even forgotten his antihistamines. And never in his life had he breathed so easily.

He sat up, suddenly wide awake.

“Mind telling me just what the hell you’re doing?” Marty asked sleepily. It had been her night to sleep in the clinic, in order to take emergency calls. Rey had tried to move around quiedy, but obviously he had not been quiet enough.

“Research,” he said. “I got an unexpected lead on why nobody here has allergies.”

“Really?” Martina asked skeptically. “Like what?”

“Like I suddenly remembered an old theory that allergies were the result of an underworked immune system. Take a look at that first screen.”

“I see it,” Marty said. “What is it?”

“You are looking at a stool sample from O’Donnel. The things you see wriggling around have been tentatively identified as native parasites, though they aren’t on any database. Now, it’s an odd thing, but the archives note that back on old Earth, human population that was infected with any of the local parasites rarely if ever suffered from allergies. That was a disease of what you might call the overly-hygienic. The theory was that a substantial part of the human immune system had evolved to deal with parasites, and that when they were absent, the system went into overdrive, reacting against basically harmless dust and pollen particles.

“Conversely, if parasites were present, allergies would disappear.”

Marty sat down heavily on a stool and blearily regarded the monitors. “Excuse me for being dense this late at night. Or this early in the morning. But doesn’t it occur to you that whatever your explanation does for O’Donnel and his friends, it has no relevance to the rest of us?”

“Take a look at the second screen,” Rey suggested. “How would you say it differs from the first?”

She squinted uncertainly from monitor to monitor. “Not at all that I can see.”

“That second screen is from a sample I provided,” Rey said. “I’m willing to bet that everyone on Far Edge is infected.”

VI.

Six days later, Rey woke to learn that the Committee on Colonial Security had placed Far Edge under interdict. Neither people nor goods would be allowed into or out of the colony.

“Big deal,” he muttered at the breakfast table. “There hasn’t been any contact to speak of with the other colonies since I came here.”

Ryn-Rosenberger frowned. “The winter winds should cease by the end of the month. We need the zeps for heavy machinery, for new satellite dishes and fiber-optic cable. For that matter, do you plan on culturing your own drugs when you run out of your current supply?”

Rey grimaced, acknowledging the sense of that statement. He shoveled food into his mouth, resolving to wake up more fully before taking the next opportunity to make a fool of himself.

“Rey, excuse me.” Juanita Buergher-Murchison stood by his side, holding a small handset that was part of the building’s communications system. “Councilor Mercer-Konare needs to see you at the Town Hall. He has been trying to get through to the Terraces. They say… they say you are the reason for the Interdiction.”

The Town Hall was a single-story rectangle less than a half a kilometer from the clinic. Its hollowed center was a courtyard which, in good weather, was used for public ceremonies. The outside walls were braced and insulated by sod. Three of the wings were offices, usually vacant. The fourth was a theater, sometimes used for town meetings and amateur dramatic productions.

Rey had to push his way inside past the knots of people who were rapidly filling the theater. On all sides, voices were raised in argument, some angry, some fearful. As he shouldered his way through one of these groups, someone recognized him.

“Hey, Doc, what’s the story?” A strong hand reached out and grabbed him. “You haven’t been snitching on your friends, have you?”

Rey turned, trying to shake the hand off. “Of course not. Now let me go and—”

Another arm reached across, grabbed the hand strongly enough to elicit a grunt of pain, and shoved it away.

“You take it easy, Bart.” Mercer-Korare usually had the self-assurance which went with being the largest Freeholder in the colony. Now his face was flushed and shiny. He might have been afraid. Yet this made him seem more formidable, like a large wounded animal. Rey’s assailant seemed to recognize this, and drew back, muttering.

“Glad you could get over here, Rey.” Mercer-Korare spoke close to his ear in order to be heard over the din of voices. “I don’t know what those morons at the Terraces have—”

“Dr. Reynolds Morrill-Landers.” The voice came over the loudspeakers with a whipcrack of authority. The commotion dwindled away to silence. Looking around for the speaker, Rey noticed for the first time that the curtains at the front of the theater had been drawn aside to reveal a huge video screen. An austere face, wispy white hair framing an oddly delicate skull, seemed to regard him with the disdain he might have reserved for a substandard laboratory specimen.

“I am not a doctor,” Rey said, in the sudden silence. “I am a medical master.”

“You’re the closest thing on Far Edge,” Governor Calley-Li replied, in a voice which would brook no argument. “Except for your research, we might not have discovered the danger until it was too late.”

“Is identification of this great danger too much to ask?” Mercer-Konare queried.

“Years ago, when the establishment of Far Edge was being debated, I spoke against it,” Calley-Li said. “I felt that, at such a low elevation, even the protection of the best cordons would be problematic. Two years ago, the child of one of our most prominent Freeholders was stolen by the so-called White People, and an alien changeling left in his place. Soon thereafter I became governor and began instituting measures for the public safety. The strengthening of our police forces, the passage of the data access law, the formation of the Committee on Colonial Security were all part of my—”

“We know all that!” someone shouted.

“Yeah,” another voice agreed. “Save this for the election. Just explain why you’re screwing with our shipment schedules.”

“Quiet!” Mercer-Konare commanded. To Rey it seemed that he was not really displeased with the outbursts.

“Thank you, Councilor,” Calley-Li said, as the shouting subsided. “A few days ago, Master Morrill-Landers reported through medical channels the existence of a parasitic infestation which has apparently infected every member of your colony. We cannot take the risk that it will spread to the other colonies. For this reason, all contact with Far Edge is prohibited until it can be proven that the infection has been eradicated.”

“My reports were protected by physician-client privilege,” Rey protested. “Any violation of that is actionable.”

The governor blinked, surprised. “You mustn’t worry about that. The data access laws specifically provide that such files may be opened in the case of state emergency. By definition, no privilege exists under such conditions, and therefore it cannot be violated.”

“Governor, with all due respect,” Mercer-Konare interposed, “do we look like plague victims? I assure you that I am in the best of health. And so are my fellow citizens.”

“There have been many diseases with long incubation periods, such as AIDS and cancer,” Calley-Li answered. “They were no less fatal for that.”

“Just how are you going to enforce your decree?” a woman behind Rey asked. “We have our own VTOLs. Once the winds shift, we’ll be able to trade with the nearer colonies on our own. Are you going to have them shoot us down?”

“If it is necessary to contain this plague,” Calley-Li said, his voice quivering, “I will have Far Edge replaned.”

The room fell silent. Videos from childhood replayed themselves in Rey’s imagination: frozen mountain peaks vaporized by an instant, eye-searing glare. Thermonuclear fury creating a plateau which, when it cooled, would be seeded with Terrestrial microbes to produce soil.

“You wouldn’t,” Mercer-Konare whispered.

“I will do whatever is necessary to preserve the human race on this planet,” Calley-Li said. “This may well be the first attack of the White People. It cannot be allowed to succeed. Ask Morrill-Landers if I am exaggerating the danger.”

Heads turned toward him. A simple “You sure are,” is not going to suffice, Rey thought.

“I think,” he began, and paused to swallow so that his voice would sound like something more than a squeak. “I think it is a tremendously selfless statesman who is willing to sacrifice his daughter for the good of the community.”

Calley-Li’s eyes blazed. “What does that mean?”

“I’m talking about the Old Earth Days Ball several months ago,” Rey said. “Your daughter, Andrea, was paired a good deal of the time with O’Donnel Buergher-Murchison. The first parasites I discovered came from O’Donnel.”

“This is entirely irrelevant.”

“The parasite exists throughout the entire digestive systems,” Rey continued doggedly. “The spores are found in the intestines, the stomach, the throat, even the mouth. Little more than casual contact is required for transmission.”

“My daughter has not—”

“—Done anything wrong or even unusual,” Rey said. He spoke more rapidly, afraid Calley-Li would cut him off before he could finish. “A simple kiss would be enough. All she would notice would be an increase in appetite which wouldn’t show up on her waistline. And maybe that her allergies didn’t bother her any more. Ask yourself: has she been careless about wearing her breathing mask? Has there been a recent weight loss? Has she stopped taking allergy pills?”

“I don’t have to listen—” The image cut off abruptly. Rey stood staring at the blank screen. The swell of voices rose around him. The room seemed suddenly uncomfortably hot. He shouldered his way through the arguing groups. Stepping outside, he was nearly blinded by the daylight. The intensity of the early morning sun was a shock. For an instant, he imagined the detonation of a thermonuclear bomb. He wondered if there would be time for anything other than instant annihilation, whether he would sense the flash and feel the pain as his skin turned to ionized gas.

“You have an interesting way of dealing with authority,” Mercer-Konare said.

Rey looked around, surprised to see that the councilor had followed him outside. He shrugged. “I had to do something to get his attention. You know, they make a big deal about being the repositories of human culture, Homer, Socrates, Augustine, Lao Tzu… Yet sometimes, it seems that all they really study are Dr. Who episodes where some alien virus turns everyone into stiff-legged monsters. This planet, which has been our home for generations, fills them with fear.

“It’s almost funny. Calley-Li thinks the Alienists are depraved and defeatists, yet all they do is put into art everything he believes.”

“How did you learn about his daughter?” the councilor asked.

“I don’t know anything about his daughter, except that she was Don’s date,” Rey said. His lips twitched. “I don’t know that she was infected, or even that you can be infected by person to person contact. I haven’t gotten that far yet. But then, I don’t know that you can’t. And Calley-Li certainly doesn’t know that you can’t. I’m hoping it’ll give him pause.”

A man was approaching them. With a sinking feeling, Rey recognized Bhagwati. He’ll never believe I kept his secret.

But it was Mercer-Konare to whom he wished to speak.

“Councilor,” he said, his voice shaking with agitation, “I fear that I am the cause of this plague.”

Mercer-Konare stared at him. “How so?”

“My sheep,” he said, sounding miserable. “As I listened to the governor, I realized that my sheep, grazing beyond the cordon, must have ingested the parasite and then spread it to the rest of the colony.”

Mercer-Konare turned to Rey. “Is that possible?”

“I suppose,” Rey said doubtfully. The parasite’s presence might explain why bloodbirds persisted in attacking sheep. They would taste or smell something familiar which had, in the past, been associated with nourishment. It might also explain why breaking a bag of blood caused bloodbirds to release their hold, since the artificially cultured blood supplies would lack the parasitic traces. Yet…

“The problem is, I don’t think we can establish that everyone on Far Edge has eaten your sheep,” Rey said. “Most of what you raise is for export. Most of the local consumption comes from the herds of the other Freeholders. As far as I know, their sheep graze on the legal side of the cordon.”

He said the last sentence slowly, giving both of them ample time to contradict him. Bhagwati nodded sadly. Mercer-Konare, however, looked suddenly excited.

“Maybe there are several modes of infection,” he said. “Maybe sheep grazing beyond the cordon is only one. Nonetheless, I bet those sheep are infected. And if they are, then so is everyone who ate them. You’re right in supposing that most of Freeholder Bhagwati’s sheep are exported. In fact, most of them go to the Terraces.”

His gaze turned inward. “I suppose I must communicate this to the Terraces, as well as to any other colonies which may have received infected sheep. It would not do to have the governor’s efforts to contain this plague thwarted by a failure to appreciate just how widespread it is.”

The councilor walked back to his office, humming happily to himself.

VII.

Days of anticlimax stretched into a week. An underlying tension ate into the pit of Rey’s stomach. He would wake up wondering: Is this the day some maniac is going to blow us to hell? Then he would push it out of his consciousness and get on with the day’s work. But it stayed just beneath the surface of his thoughts, gnawing at him.

Mercer-Konare asked everyone to prepare a list of those vital supplies which were in short supply, presumably in order to set up a rationing system. Rey and Martina printed out their inventory of medical supplies, then went over it to see what could be made locally. Bandages and splints could be fabricated from cloth and plastic scraps. Alcohol for disinfectant use could be distilled. Very simple tissue grafting could be done in the clinic.

On the other hand, antibiotics and immune system enhancers were both in short supply. There were no resources to support serious surgery or any kind of gene therapy. That sort of work had always been done in the Terraces.

They turned in their lists, revised a few of the clinic procedures to stretch out supplies as far as was consistent with patient safety, and continued on their rounds. Martina spent as much free time as she had with O’Donnel and his three friends, trying to devise new tests to determine why they had not starved to death.

A few guesses were confirmed. All of Bhagwati’s sheep were infected with the parasite. As were all other flocks, and all humans except newborn babies. Analysis of the oldest records indicated that the infection had originally spread west to east. Since that was for most of the year the direction of the prevailing winds, Rey began to suspect that something like airborne spores might be the mechanism of contagion. If so, then no cordon could provide protection. No colony this close to the world jungle would ever be safe.

On the seventh day, a comm call woke Rey while it was still dark.

“Santa Claus is coming to pay a surprise visit,” Mercer-Konare informed him. “You should be on hand to greet her at the airfield.”

A small group of men and women had already assembled by the time Rey reached the communications shack. A mug of hot coffee was pressed into his hand to ward off the pre-dawn chill. He sipped it gingerly, trying to keep it from scalding lips and mouth as his eyes quartered the sky.

There was an exclamation behind him, and an arm pointed to the east. Rey squinted in the direction indicated. At first, he could make out nothing against the featureless dark blue expanse. Then a flash caught his attention. It was the Sunbird, bathed in the advancing light of Tau Ceti. It was dropping quickly to the landing pad. To Rey’s eyes, its movements were sluggish; it seemed to wallow in the air.

“…Hope she didn’t overload…” a woman behind him muttered.

The Sunbird came straight in, hard and fast. Its wheels smacked the pavement and bounced. Wings quivered like an angry butterfly. The fans came to life with a sudden roar, twisting the craft around so that it stopped with its tail brushing the fence at the edge of the cliff.

Regan Lee jumped unsteadily onto the pavement and waved to the crowd which had run up to greet her. Seeing Mercer-Konare, she reached back into the cabin for a large envelope and handed it to him.

“Here’s the manifest. And a few letters from people who don’t want to trust the satellite links for privacy. ”

The councilor thanked her. He examined the manifest, grunted, and began calling out names of those he wanted to help with the unloading. Regan spotted Rey and walked over to him.

“Hi, Doc. You’ve really stirred people up since I dropped you here.”

“Not intentionally,” he mumbled, feeling oddly tongue-tied.

For some reason, her face split in a wide grin. “C’mon. I’ll show you your presents.”

There were three large boxes. Each had its contents listed on a sheet taped to one side. The first contained immune system boosters and pheromone regulators. A quick check disclosed that, at the normal rate of usage, these would last perhaps three months. Most of the second box was filled with a laser scalpel set, complete with spares, and attachments for local nerve deadening.

The third box was the most interesting. Instead of antibiotics, they had received an antibiotic culturing kit. More than thirty basic antibiotics could be grown in the glass trays from the dehydrated sample bags. It was not nearly as convenient as receiving pills or nasal sprays. With proper care, however, it could last decades.

Rey considered the implications. “I guess we’re getting ready for the long haul.”

“Maybe,” Regan agreed. “It sure never hurts to be prepared.”

“Are you prepared?” Rey asked. “Won’t you get into trouble for breaking the embargo?”

Her smile was as dazzling as the morning sun. “The orders were very specific. All classes of VTOLs and zeps were prohibited from flying within fifty kilometers of Far Edge. No mention was made of powered gliders or any other type of experimental vehicle.”

“Calley-Li will not let you get away with that for long,” Rey warned.

“I may not have to,” Regan said, tossing her head.

Rey was about to ask her what she meant by that when Mercer-Konare came over and invited them to breakfast at the Town Hall. Realizing abruptly that he was famished, Rey secured the boxes to the struts of his dragonfly, then joined the crowd ascending the twisting walkway to the hall.

Inside, there was a mood of restrained celebration. Happiness at having the embargo broken was tempered by the understanding of just how small the break was. From the scraps of conversation he picked up as he made his way to Regan’s table, Rey learned that everyone else’s shipments had been as limited as the clinic’s. New chips and circuit boards had been provided when needed, but replacement parts for broken mining equipment or harvesters had been too large and massive for the Sunbird. If they could not jury-rig replacements, they would have to do without.

Rey felt irrationally pleased that the seat across from Regan was unoccupied. As the last of the unloading crew took seats, Mercer-Konare stood and tapped his tea cup. Silence fell, except for the servers bringing in the breakfast trays on roll carts.

“Before we start eating, I think we want to show our appreciation to the brave young woman who was willing to ignore the dictatorial decrees of the colonial governor and who, at great risk to her own safety, has brought us back into contact with the rest of humanity on this planet. She has brought with her a number of communications that I don’t have time to summarize but which prove that we have many supporters throughout all the colonies. For that alone, she deserves our gratitude.”

The applause was loud and prolonged. Regan’s blush was surprisingly visible despite her skin coloring.

She stood and made a slight bow to her audience. “While I have your attention, I have one more communication which I did not provide the councilor, because it was not addressed to him. I would like you all to hear it.”

She opened an envelope and extracted a large, formal looking document. “By the authority invested in me by the School of Apollo, I hereby grant to Reynolds Morrill-Landers the degree of Doctor of Medicine.”

She leaned over, handing the parchment to Rey and giving him a quick kiss. More applause, followed by some laughter at his dumbfounded expression.

“Ah, but I haven’t presented a thesis yet.”

“Your adviser, Dr. Mongosuthu, wants you to know that ‘An Analysis of Some Effects of Indigenous Parasites on Human Allergic Response,’ is scheduled for the summer issue of the Apollo Journal of Medicine. He urges you to clean it up for publication as soon as possible.”

Breakfast,trays were placed before them and all talk was replaced by a reverent hush, broken only by the occasional clatter of silverware.

“That is our other long term problem,” Mercer-Konare said at length, regretfully regarding his empty plate as he put down his knife and fork. “We’ve made it through the winter largely on stored goods. Those vegetable gardens nearly everyone grows were meant to supplement our diets, not sustain them. We will need to see if we can cultivate enough acreage to sustain the entire colony. If we can’t—”

“If we can’t, we may have to live off the land, just like the Naturalers have always wanted,” Martina Mazio-Carr said.

She pulled a chair around to join them and leaned on its back. “How can we do that?” Rey asked.

“The same way O’Donnel and his friends were able to,” she answered. “For that matter, it’s the same way Bhagwati’s sheep have been able to thrive on fields which are mostly native vegetation.”

The table fell silent. Satisfied that she had their attention, she continued. “Rey has already given you most of the pieces of the puzzle. Through the process of convergent evolution, a native variety of protozoan has modified itself sufficiently to live in our digestive systems. It hasn’t had the severe effects terrestrial parasites used to have, probably because it has not been able to completely adapt to its new host. A fair amount of our diet must be useless, if not actually detrimental, to it.

“But if our diet is not completely nourishing, much of the local fauna is. The effect of that is—”

“That these aren’t parasites at all,” Rey interrupted excitedly. “I let myself be misled by the allergy response. What we have is… symbiosis?”

“Looks like,” Martina agreed. “Or at least something reasonably close. It’s hard to say because we are trying to identify something while it’s still trying to change to adapt to us. If it were a successful parasite, we might find ourselves devoured from inside. If it were a fully evolved symbiote, on the other hand, our immune systems wouldn’t attack it and we would still have allergy problems.

“Most of the native plants have starches and sugars too complex for our digestive systems. The symbiotes break these down into human-usable form.”

“Then that’s how O’Donnel’s party was able to survive,” Rey surmised. “Despite everything we’ve always been taught, they were able to metabolize a fair proportion of what they ate.”

“It is also the reason Belkom Michaels-Nye died,” Martina said somberly. “Normally, the symbiotes are not dangerous to us. Aside from reducing allergies, their effect is to increase our appetite. Put another way, there is a caloric price for allergy reduction. Belkom was stranded with supplies apportioned for uninfected humans. When they were gone, the symbiotes became parasitical, deriving nourishment from what was closest at hand. Which was Belkom.”

Rey dropped his eyes, feeling embarrassed. He put his certificate on the table between them. “I think they awarded this to the wrong person.”

“Probably so,” Martina agreed, “but I’ll get my recognition soon enough.

Provided, of course, that the governor and his friends don’t vaporize us in a fit of panic.”

VIII.

As it turned out, they had nothing to worry about. That afternoon, a news flash reported that Governor Calley-Li had been found dead in his study. The laser pistol held in his hand had been the cause of death.

Two hours later, a shaken Acting Governor Normana Girouard-Sime announced a partial lifting of the embargo against Far Edge. All goods would be allowed into the colony. Manufactured goods could be exported. If the School of Apollo determined that the infection was basically harmless (as it was expected to do shortly) all further restrictions would be lifted.

Darkness swept up from the jungle far below and shadowed the sky in ever deepening shades of blue. Stars appeared, pinpricks of cold fire.

Rey felt, rather than saw, Regan beside him. “What are you looking for?”

He pointed. “That bright star up there is Arcturus. If you look just to the right of it, you’ll see a dim little star.”

“Sol,” Regan said. “Manhome.”

Rey nodded. “My advisor pointed it out to me my first year at Apollo. He told me how, for nearly a century, humanity thought it knew everything about the nuclear reactions that made it shine. Then, in the latter part of the twentieth century, experimenters realized that there were too few neutrinos being produced for their model to be true. Just by itself, that should have been enough to demonstrate that they knew nothing. Yet for years they questioned their data, concocted extravagant theories, and almost until the end had no idea how quickly doom was racing down upon them.

“ ‘Whenever you look at Sol, think of how little you know,’ he said, ‘And consider how much of what you do know may not be so.’ ”

“Then you should be happy,” Regan said in a slightly reproving tone. “You’ve done a good job decreasing the circle of ignorance.”

Rey shook his head. “It took me forever to see the obvious. When I started putting things together, I still had no idea what sort of reaction my findings would provoke. Then when I tried to get our sanctions lifted, I pushed a man into suicide.”

“There is no point in feeling sorry about Calley-Li,” Regan said sharply. “The man was a victim of his own fears. He panicked because he thought this plague, which never did anything except make people healthier, was going to subvert our humanity.”

“He was right,” Rey said.

Even in the darkness, he felt the weight of her regard. “If you believe that,” she said at length, “then why haven’t you done everything in your power to eradicate it?”

“Because even before the plague, Calley-Li’s efforts were doomed to failure.” He took a deep breath, trying to sort through a welter of facts and emotions. “Did you ever notice how much effort is devoted in other colonies to raising the various tea crops? When you consider that we derive no nourishment from them, it’s quite extraordinary. But we do it because for a lot of people it is important that we have teas and tea times. More important than actually having food to eat.”

“So what?” Regan asked. “We can raise both.”

Rey shook his head, frustrated that he was doing such a poor job of expressing what he could see so clearly. “It’s the reason that’s important. We want to have tea ceremonials like our Japanese ancestors did; we want to have tea times like the British. We want to pretend that we are nothing more than an outpost of human empire and that everything will stay the same forever if we dress for dinner and keep the Old Earth Days traditions alive.

“The problem is that it can’t work. First of all, any isolated population soon begins to show genetic drift. The College of Apollo has statistics to show that is already happening. Because they are disconcerting, they aren’t widely known.

“More than that, though, we are evolving to fit the planet. Read the old diaries if you can’t remember the stories your grandmothers must have told you. It was very difficult for women to conceive and bring children to term during the first two generations. All that remain of that now are problems with irregular menstrual cycles. We have adapted successfully.”

“I don’t consider that a problem,” Regan said.

“I don’t either,” Rey admitted, “but Calley-Li saw further. He recognized that it is only a matter of time before we drift so far that we won’t be able to breed with humans who have settled around other stars. We will have become a separate race.

“What he learned from me was worse, though. Not only were we adapting, but the biosphere was adapting to us. Something strange and alien was making its home within us. He couldn’t have known what Martina would discover about being able to digest some native plants, but I think he imagined it. And in his imagination, humans became as ghostly and strange as the White People. We would lose our culture, our beliefs, all the memories and mental disciplines which made us human.”

“That does not have to happen,” Regan protested.

“No,” Rey agreed, “it doesn’t have to happen. But it could, very easily. I rubbed Calley-Li’s nose in it, and it was too much for him. Especially when he discovered that his own daughter was tainted by the alienness he so feared.”

He found that his eyes were wet. He wept for Calley-Li, for the dream of safely cordoned island societies, for the Old Earth they had tried so diligently to resurrect. Regan put her arm around him, comforting him.

The path had taken them to the edge of the cliff. Scents floated up from the jungle far below. It was going to be their world, Rey realized. They would change it, and it would change them, and it would be as exciting and as dangerous as it had been on Earth.

Regan was startled by his sudden laugh.

“All this time, the Naturalers said we would have to learn to live off the world to come to terms with it,” he explained. “Instead, we have become part of the world because it has learned to live off us.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is a sequel to “The Changeling Hunt,” which appeared in our July 1987 issue.

Content

The Wellness Plague
by Robert R. Chase

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.