“You’re not supposed to beat up the natives, Mia,” Kenin said. “God, she’s not afraid of us at all. How can that be? You nearly gave her a concussion.”
Mia was as bewildered as Kenin, as all of them. She’d picked up the girl, who’d looked bewildered but not angry, and then Mia had backed off, expecting the girl to run. Instead she’d stood there rubbing her forehead and jabbering, and Mia had seen that her sarong was made of an uncut sheet of plastic, its colors faded to a mottled gray.
Kenin, Lolimel, and two guards had come running. And
Mia said, “I’m going with her.”
Instantly a guard said, “It’s not safe, ma’am,” and Kenin said, “Mia, you can’t just—”
“You don’t need me here,” she said, too brusquely; suddenly there seemed nothing more important in the world than going with this girl. Where did that irrational impulse come from? “And I’ll be perfectly safe with a gun.”
This was such a stunningly stupid remark that no one answered her. But Kenin didn’t order her to stay. Mia accepted the guard’s tanflefoam and Kenin’s vidcam and followed the girl.
It was hard to keep up with her. “Wait!” Mia called, which produced no response. So she tried what the girl had said to her: “Ej-es!”
Immediately the girl stopped and turned to her with glowing eyes and a smile that could have melted glaciers, had Good Fortune had such a thing. Gentle planet, gentle person, who was almost certainly a descendent of the original dead settlers. Or was she? InterGalactic had no record of any other registered ship leaving for this star system, but that didn’t mean anything. InterGalactic didn’t know everything. Sometimes, given the time dilation of space travel, Mia thought they knew nothing.
“Ej-es,” the girl agreed, sprinted back to Mia, and took her hand. Slowing her youthful pace to match the older woman’s, she led Mia home.
The houses were scattered, as though they couldn’t make up their mind to be a village or not. A hundred yards away, another native walked toward a distant house. The two ignored each other.
Mia couldn’t stand the silence. She said, “I am Mia.”
The girl stopped outside her hut and looked at her.
Mia pointed to her chest. “Mia.”
“Es-ef-eb,” the girl said, pointing to herself and giving that glorious smile.
Not “ej-es,” which must mean something else. Mia pointed to the hut, a primitive affair of untrimmed logs, pieces of foamcast carried from the city, and sheets of faded plastic, all tacked crazily together.
“Ef-ef,” said Esefeb, which evidently meant “home.” This language was going to be a bitch: degraded
Esefeb suddenly hopped to one side of the dirt path, laughed, and pointed at blank air. Then she took Mia’s hand and led her inside.
More confusion, more degradation. The single room had an open fire with the simple venting system of a hole in the roof. The bed was high on stilts (why?) with a set of rickety steps made of rotting, untrimmed logs. One corner held a collection of huge pots in which grew greenery; Mia saw three unfired clay pots, one of them sagging sideways so far the soil had spilled onto the packed-dirt floor. Also a beautiful titanium vase and a cracked hydroponic vat. On one plant, almost the size of a small tree, hung a second sheet of plastic sarong, this one an unfaded blue-green. Dishes and tools littered the floor, the same mix as the pots of scavenged items and crude homemade ones. The hut smelled of decaying food and unwashed bedding. There was no light source and no machinery.
Kenin’s voice sounded softly from her wrister. “Your vid is coming through fine. Even the most primitive human societies have some type of art work.”
Mia didn’t reply. Her attention was riveted to Esefeb. The girl flung herself up the “stairs” and sat up in bed, facing the wall. What Mia had seen before could hardly be called a smile compared to the light, the sheer joy, that illuminated Esefeb’s face now. Esefeb shuddered in ecstasy, crooning to the empty wall.
“Ej-es. Ej-es. Aaahhhh,
Mia turned away. She was a medician, but Esefeb’s emotion seemed too private to witness. It was the ecstasy of orgasm, or religious transfiguration, or madness.
“Mia,” her wrister said, “I need an image of that girl’s brain.”
It was easy—too easy, Lolimel said later, and he was right. Creatures, sentient or not, did not behave this way.
“We could haul all the neuro equipment out to the village,” Kenin said doubtfully, from base.
“It’s not a village, and I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mia said softly. The softness was unnecessary. Esefeb slept like stone in her high bunk, and the hut was so dark, illuminated only by faint starlight through the hole in the roof, that Mia could barely see her wrister to talk into it. “I think Esefeb might come voluntarily. I’ll try in the morning, when it’s light.”
Kenin, not old but old enough to feel stiff sleeping on the ground, said, “Will you be comfortable there until morning?”
“No, but I’ll manage. What does the computer say about the recs?”
Lolimel answered—evidently they were having a regular all-hands conference. “The language is badly degraded International, you probably guessed that. The translator’s preparing a lexicon and grammar. The artifacts, food supply, dwelling, everything visual, doesn’t add up. They shouldn’t have lost so much in two hundred fifty years, unless mental deficiency was a side-effect of having survived the virus. But Kenin thinks—” He stopped abruptly.
“You may speak for me,” Kenin’s voice said, amused. “I think you’ll find that military protocol degrades, too, over time. At least, way out here.”
“Well, . . . . Kenin thinks it’s possible that what the girl has is a mutated version of the virus. Maybe infectious, maybe inheritable, maybe transmitted through fetal infection.”
His statement dropped into Mia’s darkness, as heavy as Esefeb’s sleep.
Mia said, “So the mutated virus could still be extant and active.”
“Yes,” Kenin said. “We need not only neuro-images but a sample of cerebrospinal fluid. Her behavior suggests —”
“I know what her behavior suggests,” Mia said curtly. That sheer joy, shuddering in ecstasy . . . It was seizures in the limbic system, the brain’s deep center for primitive emotion, which produced such transcendent, rapturous trances. Religious mystics, Saul on the road to Damascus, visions of Our Lady or of nirvana. And the virus might still be extant, and not a part of the vaccine they had all received. Although if transmission was fetal, the medicians were safe. If not . . .
Mia said, “The rest of Esefeb’s behavior doesn’t fit with limbic seizures. She seems to see things that aren’t there, even talks to her hallucinations, when she’s not having an actual seizure.”
“I don’t know,” Kenin said. “There might be multiple infection sites in the brain. I need her, Mia.”
“We’ll be there,” Mia said, and wondered if that were going to be true.
But it was, mostly. Mia, after a brief uncomfortable sleep wrapped in the sheet of blue-green plastic, sat waiting for Esefeb to descend her rickety stairs. The girl bounced down, chattering at something to Mia’s right. She smelled worse than yesterday. Mia breathed through her mouth and went firmly up to her.
“Esefeb!” Mia pointed dramatically, feeling like a fool. The girl pointed back.
“Mia.”
“Yes, good.” Now Mia made a sweep of the sorry hut. “Efef.”
“Efef,” Esefeb agreed, smiling radiantly.
“Esefeb efef.”
The girl agreed that this was her home.
Mia pointed theatrically toward the city. “Mia efef! Mia eb Esefeb etej Mia efef!”
Esefeb cocked her head and looked quizzical. A worm crawled out of her hair.
Mia repeated, “Mia eb Esefeb etej Mia efef.”
Esefeb responded with a torrent of repetitious syllables, none of which meant anything to Mia except “Ej-es.”
