Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 12 / Chapter 14 –>

The yellow sign taped to the door of Ilam’s room announced his status as a medical quarantine in large black letters. Visitors were instructed to consult Dr. Liston or “station administrative personnel” before seeking access. There were no other preventative measures, but in a social system as small and insulated as Persia’s, Brett doubted anything else was needed. No one would be approaching Ilam any time soon unless he happened to be wearing a sign just as big as the one on his door declaring him safe for consumption.

If Cassandra hadn’t given him this piece of the puzzle to pursue next, he wouldn’t have approached either.

Brett knocked once. A clatter of activity, a pair of muffled curses, then a loud, resounding crash answered from the other side. The door sprang open, and Ilam stood behind it holding his palm flat against his forehead and covering his left eye.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s just you.”

“That would be ‘it’s just you, sir’.” Beneath Ilam’s hand was a spreading patch of bright red swelling. “What did you do to your face?”

“I smacked it on the table when you knocked. Too much of a hurry, you know. Thought you’d be Liston telling me I was cleared to rejoin the human race.” Ilam rubbed his fingers against what had now become a fairly pronounced knot above his eye. “There are arguments to be made for the value of a television connection for remote space outposts. I believe that’s something you could bring up at your next administrative brouhaha.”

Brett pushed into the room, moving Ilam out of the way with his elbows. He closed and locked the door behind him.

“We have television.”

“We have decade old telly that even the BBC would have the taste not to broadcast.”

“There are movies in the library which you can access from your terminal.”

“All of which I’ve seen twice in the last five years, thank you.”

Brett crossed his arms over his chest. “You’ve only been quarantined for four hours.”

“And it’s driving me batty.” Ilam spread his hands imploringly toward Brett. “You’ve got to talk to Liston, Chili. Really, before I go raving mad. I haven’t had any of the symptoms the others have displayed. I’m as fit as a fiddle. As healthy as a horse. Hell, I’m as hale as an ocelot for that matter. There has to be some test he can perform to get me out of here.”

There was a small chair opposite Ilam’s desk, and Brett dropped into it. Ilam collapsed onto the rumpled bed as though a weight of dejection had leveled him. Ilam’s room constituted a carefully managed shambles. The bed was indeed rumpled, but the blankets and sheets appeared an aged gray which suggested they hadn’t been laundered in recent memory. Both the writing desk and bedside table were buried beneath jumbles of electronic and mechanical offcasts: long coils of multicolored wires, broken processor boards, a snapped-handle micrometer and similarly dismembered pair of pliers. The surfaces beneath shimmered beneath a coating of silicon lubricant.

Brett raised his eyes to Ilam’s face. “I don’t think you really want to be outside right now.”

“Oh, you can say that, Mr. Station Commander. Serve you right if you get quarantined as well. Did you clear this visit with Liston?”

“You don’t understand what’s going on, do you?”

“There’s nothing to understand. Tappen and Ritter and a few others have caught a bit of a bug. Liston will shoot them full of antibiotics and everything will be back to normal by next week.”

“Tappen will be dead by this evening. Ritter may or may not pull through. We’re hopeful about the others.” Brett slipped some steel into his tone. “That doesn’t sound like a touch of the flu to me.”

Ilam sat up sharply. He stared at Brett, his jaw hanging.

“Liston said it was treatable meningitis.”

“Liston thought he knew what he was talking about this morning, and he hasn’t told anyone the truth about Tappen because he didn’t want to start a panic. He’s spent his morning providing antibiotic boosters to the entire station crew to help allay their fears.” Brett leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees and attempted to put a weight of seriousness into his gaze. “But what the crew sees is four of the five members of your little card party seriously ill and by extension bearing contagion. Everybody but you, and they’re assuming that you’ll go down any minute. Even if you were cleared, you’d be ostracized.”

“I’m not ill,” Ilam said.

“I know that.”

Ilam watched him through slit-lidded eyes. “What are you getting at, Chili?”

“Liston is wrong. He doesn’t know it yet because I’ve just started to put the pieces together.”

“And what pieces are those?”

“It isn’t a rampant bacteria. It isn’t spinal meningitis. It’s something else–probably the same something that shredded the screens on Nine.”

Now Ilam stared, his eyes wide and round. “You’re talking about. . .what? Aliens?”

The conclusion spilled off Ilam’s tongue much more readily than it hadd Brett’s. He tried to smile, but it was grim.

“Little green men. Not exactly, but non-terrestrial life. I don’t have any proof of that hypothesis, but we’re working on it. That’s one of the reasons I’m here. I believe Ritter brought back an unknown species of native bacteria from that geothermal vent.”

“And then he brought it back here? He infected Tappen and Sievers and Jervis?” There was a note of horror in Ilam’s voice.

“Possibly others. If we make the assumption that this species is a terran cognate bacteria, the gestation period for an illness would depend on the time of transmission, the frequency of contact and variations in individual immune systems.”

“You think there will be others. Regardless of the antibiotics.”

Brett clenched his fists. “I think we’re all at risk. Every one of us. We could all end up like Tappen.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Ilam whispered, his voice harsh. “Why me first when you haven’t told Liston?”

Brett leaned back again, made certain he held eye contact. “I think you can answer that question yourself.”

There was no response.

“What do you think, Ilam? You’ve had as much or more contact with Ritter than the others, but look at them. They’re starting their slow and irrevocable slide into the grave while you’re sitting here perfectly healthy and whining about the lack of entertainment options. All things being equal, I’m sure Sievers would be more than willing to swap you any time you cared to ask.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Then I want you to submit to a spinal tap, and we’ll see what’s so special about you that you can resist this infection while the other can’t.”

Ilam blanched, then paled. “That’s going a bit far, isn’t it? I mean, those procedures hurt an awful damned lot. It could just be that I have a natural immunity.”

“A natural immunity to a non-terrestrial organism,” Brett mused. “That would be highly unlikely. On the other hand, you could just tell me what it is you’re doing that the others weren’t, and that would save us both time and you more than a little pain.”

Ilam sealed his lips and fixed his gaze on the floor by his feet.

Brett continued, “I’ve been talking with Cassandra. Here’s a curious factoid for you to mull over. Only twelve percent of the alien organisms currently residing in Persia are present in the ambient air. The rest are inside the known victims. Without fail, every room, every corridor, every lab has been breached. The air I’m breathing now is probably contaminated. The air you’re breathing. Oh wait, except Cassandra has scanned this room and informed me that there aren’t any organisms here. In the rest of the station, they’re becoming ubiquitous, but not here. I want to know why that is.”

Ilam whispered, “I can’t tell you.”

“Because you don’t know, or because you don’t want to?”

Ilam lifted his face, his eyes wide and full with unspoken pleas. “You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

Brett slammed his fists against the table, scattering pieces of electronic detritus. Ilam jumped back from the sudden violence.

“I do know,” Brett grated at him, “that if you don’t tell me, people are going to start dying. They’ll be dying very soon. First the ones we know about, then maybe Liston will go next and we won’t have any kind of doctor left to ease the pain of those who remain. The rest of us will go miserably, slumped in corners and alcoves, bleeding from our mouths and ears and noses. And you’ll be the one who has to watch it all. And in the end, you’ll be left alone. Abandoned here. Assuming you don’t simply go mad, Ilam, what will you tell the year-freighter captain when he arrives? Or let’s assume you break the administrative coding on the sat relay and get a help team from one of the other stations–what are you going to tell them, and what are they going to believe? Or will they be infected as well the first time they take off their helmets in the second sub airlock? Then you’ll get to go to Gobi or Malibu or Sahara and watch it all over again.”

It wasn’t a pleasant picture that he described, but Brett knew it was an accurate one, except for one piece. No one would come to rescue the lone survivor of a contagion. The risk of spreading an unknown virus or bacteria along the shipping lanes and back to Earth had been covered from the very beginning. Once the outbreak had been confirmed, once it was clear that no cure was forthcoming, Earth Forces Terraform Command would pursue a course of extreme measure against Persia. She and all known survivors would be purged by nuclear fire from low-space orbit. He’d give Ilam that image to sleep with as well if it came down to it.

“Promise me you’ll tell no one,” Ilam said.

“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

“No one has to know. I can tell you how and it can look like you tested it on me first.”

“Ilam–”

Ilam thrust his hands out. “You can’t even be certain! I can’t be certain!”

“Tell me,” Brett growled.

Ilam seemed to sag. His back bowed and his arms drooped toward the floor. His neck bent as though his skull had filled with concrete. When he spoke, his voice was very small.

“Nanomechs.”

Though Brett had expected it, he still shook his head in disgust. “You think the Kurzweil Convention ceased to be applicable beyond the Sol system?”

“They have legitimate pharmaceutical uses.”

“When prescribed by a legitimate physician.” Brett ground his teeth. “Christ, Ilam! Are you really that stupid? What’s the programming? Revvers for your midnight card games? Nocturnes? Or was it something even more banal? Maybe just pleasure center stim?”

Ilam frowned. “I’m not a simpering addict, Chili.”

“Then what was it?”

“Straight synaptic enhancement. Nothing more, and I swear to that.”

“Why? You’re not a sub-functional.”

“Not in the normal round of things, no. But here? Think about it, Chili. Think about what I do. I’m the mechanical guy. I’m the equipment and electronics guy. I learned my trade in workshops by taking apart folk’s digital players, then graduated to PC’s. I didn’t go to the university. Then I take this job, something I thought would add some zing to the personal resume while rolling up a tidy little roll besides.” Ilam glowered at him as he spoke, his voice rising. “Everyone here has degrees. Everyone jack man among you has accumulated little letters after his name and high titles and consequence, while I diddled about with broken consumer toys.”

“And you thought that if you raised the voltage and picked up a few tricks you’d be more respected.”

Ilam smiled weakly. “Better a general handyman than just an auto mechanic. That’s what my father would have said.”

“You knew you could go to jail if you were caught.”

“Who was going to catch me? The mechs can only be detected when they’re in place. It’s not something we scan for–I checked that. I ran a series of tests against Cassandra to simulate a catastrophic nanomech release. It wasn’t a function she would perform. Requires too much processing power to scan the entire station integrity a micron unit at a time.” Ilam shrugged. “Certainly, she would have noted a mismatch between cerebral imagings if I was doping, but I wasn’t doping. I made certain I deactivated and flushed the mechs when I knew I had an imaging due.”

“And did it work, this big risk you took?”

“I could do your job.”

“Any monkey with the brain of an orange could do my job.”

“And Ritter’s. Djen’s. Micah’s. I can understand the duties of every specialist on station. I might not be able to perform the actual motor functions. I wouldn’t automatically know how to do certain fine tasks, but I can comprehend their meanings and their purposes. I can analyze the data that they come up with. But I’m not any smarter than I ever was, Chili. My IQ wouldn’t have changed. I merely remember more. I can correlate packets of data because I’ve kept those connections vivid, and that’s really what intelligence is, don’t you think? The ability to correlate seemingly unrelated facts, to see on a grander scale, and to instantly access memory in an eidetic fashion.”

Brett shook his head. “Cassandra can do that, but we don’t think of her as particularly ‘intelligent’.”

“She has exquisite recall and rapid processing, and if she was a living, breathing woman, we’d fall at her feet and worship her. If Cassandra was human, she’d seem as wise as a goddess.”

Brett ignored him. “Tell me how. Exactly how it was done.”

Halting at first, then more readily as he saw that Brett was beyond judging him, Ilam began to explain.

<– Chapter 12 / Chapter 14 –>