“If you could hear them, you wouldn’t ask,” said Rillibee. “They think we’re deaf. They shout.”
“I wish they could shout loud enough for me to hear them,” Sylvan said.
“Then the rest of us would have our brains fried,” Tony said irritably. While he had immediately warmed up to Rillibee, Tony wasn’t at all sure he liked Sylvan, who had a habit of commanding courses of action. “We’ll go over there.” “We’ll stop for a while.”
Now Sylvan said, “Someone in the port will give us transport to Grass Mountain Road. We’ll speak to the order officer there.” He moved toward the port.
Though Tony felt arguing wasn’t worth the energy it would take, he wanted to get Stella to a physician quickly. “The doctors are at the other end of town?” he asked.
Sylvan stopped, then flushed. “No. No, as a matter of fact, the hospital is just up this slope, near the Port Hotel.”
Rillibee said, “Then we’ll go there,” admitting no argument. He picked Stella up and staggered up the slope toward the hospital. “Can I help you carry her?” Tony asked.
Stella had slipped into a deep sleep, and Rillibee wondered if she would even know who held her. Still, he shook his head. He was unwilling to give up the burden to anyone else, though he had become exhausted by carrying it. Though he thought of her as a child, she was not a small girl. He had been holding her on the foxen for hours. She was his heart’s desire, so he thought, without trying to figure out why.
“I’ll manage,” he said. “It’s not much farther.” It was at the top of a considerable slope, a long climb for men already weary. They came at the place from the back, where blank walls confronted them on either side of a wide door. A white-jacketed person stuck his head out, saw them, and withdrew. Others came out, with a power-litter. Rillibee handed over his burden with the last of his strength, then leaned on one of the attendants to get himself inside.
“Who is she?” someone asked.
“Stella Yrarier,” Tony said. “My sister.”
“Ah!” Surprise. “Your father’s here as well.”
“Father! What happened?”
“Speak to the doctor. Doctor Bergrem. In that office. She’s there now.”
Minutes later Tony was staring down at his father’s sleeping face.
“What’s wrong with him?” He asked the doctor.
“Nothing too serious, luckily. We wouldn’t be able to do systems cloning and replacement here the way they do elsewhere. We have no SCR equipment.”
Cloning! Systems replacement! The mortality rate for systems replacement was high. Besides, Old Catholics were prohibited from using cloned systems, though there were always backsliders who had a system cloned and confessed it later.
The doctor frowned at him. “Don’t get into a state, boy. I said not too serious. Some cuts and a bit of bruising on the brain. All that’s taken care of. Some nerve injury, his legs. That’s healing. All he needs to do is stay here and simmer quietly for a day or two more.” The slight, snub-nosed woman hovered over dials, twitching at them. Her plentiful dark hair was drawn back in a tight bun and her body appeared almost sexless in the flapping coat.
“You’ve got him sedated,” Tony commented.
“Machine sleep. He’s too nervous a type to leave conscious for long. He frets.”
That was one way of saying it, Tony thought with an ironic twist to his lips. Roderigo Yrarier frets. Or fumes. Or roars.
The doctor went on, “Your sister, now, that’s something else. Mind reconstruction, I wouldn’t doubt the Hippae have been at her.”
“You know about that!”
“Seen a bit of it when the bons come in with broken bones or bitten-off appendages. They don’t respond normally, so I tell them I’m testing their reflexes when I’m actually looking at their heads. Strangeness there, usually, though I’m not allowed to do anything about it. Not with the bons. They choose to keep their warps and twists, however strange it makes them.”
“We don’t want Stella twisted!”
“Didn’t think you did. Didn’t think so for a moment. May not be able to straighten her totally, though. There’s limits to what we can do.”
“Should we ship her out?”
“Well, young man, at the moment I’d say she’s safer here, warped or not, than she may be out there. You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”
“What do you mean?” He stared, unwilling to understand.
“Plague,” she said. “We’re getting a pretty good idea of what’s going on out there.”
“Do you know anything about it? What causes it? Do you know if there’s any here?”
“None here. That I can be almost sure of. Why didn’t you ask us medical people? Didn’t you think we’d be capable of doing anything? Me, for instance. I’ve got degrees in molecu-bio and virology from the University at Semling Prime. I studied immunology on Repentance. I could have been working on this.” She turned an open, curious face toward him. “The word is you’ve been trying to find out in secret.”
“It was secret,” he whispered. “To keep the Moldies from knowing. If they knew…”
She considered this, her face turning slowly white as she realized what he meant. “They’d bring it here? Purposely?”
“If they found out, yes. If they once knew.”
“My God, boy!” She laughed bitterly. “Everybody knows.”
16
Everyone knew, the doctor said, and it seemed she told only the truth. Everyone knew there was plague. Everyone knew there might be Moldies already on Grass. Everyone knew there was a trail half a mile wide out there in the grasses, ending next to the swamp forest, which all at once seemed a fragile and penetrable curtain rather than the impassable barrier they had always relied upon. Hysteria mounted as the talk gathered both volume and speculative intensity, here and there, about the town.
Among other topics was much discussion of whether Grass’s seeming immunity to plague meant anything. Foremost among those who thought it did was Dr. Bergrem She had seen one or two people arrive on ships with filthy gray lesions. After a week or two on Grass, they had departed cured. Once there had even been a man in a quarantine pod…
Roald Few challenged the doctor to explain herself. “You mean more than that the disease isn’t here, doctor. You mean it can’t
To which she nodded and said she thought so, in her experience, from what she’d seen, turning to Tony and Rillibee for their opinion.
“No, that isn’t it,” Tony told them wearily. “It isn’t that it can’t come here. It isn’t that no one gets it here. The disease started from here. Somehow. The foxen think.”
This was a statement requiring more than a little explanation. Since when had the foxen been talking to people? And where were these foxen? Tony and Rillibee told what they knew to Roald and Mayor Alverd Bee while dozens of other people came and went. They tried to describe foxen, unconvincingly, and were greeted with skepticism, if not outright disbelief.
Ducky Johns and Saint Teresa were there with an outlandish scenario of their own: Diamante bon Damfels, sneaking around naked in the port. Diamante bon Damfels now occupying a room in the hospital next to ones already taken by her sister, Emeraude, who had been beaten, and by Amy and Rowena, who refused to return to Klive. Sylvan, hearing this, went off to see his mother and sisters. Commoners looked after him, pityingly. A bon, here in Commons. Useless as a third leg on a goose.
“How did Diamante get here?” Tony demanded of the assembled group. “We’ve just come through the swamp forest, and if it’s the same everywhere as the parts we saw, there is literally no way through! There are
