Last Shadow (9781250252135)

by Card, Orson Scott

  Eventually he’d find out what she did. She would tell him. He would be proud of her for her accuracy and audacity. He would be resentful of her for having such contempt for the rest of the group. But he would only show the pride in her. The admiration he felt for her. Because he was quite sure that others would express their anger at this stunt. He would not need to be part of that chorus.

  A man of the Folk, wearing an elaborate headdress, stood beside Thulium’s chair and spoke. His voice was amplified and every word was clear—there wasn’t any reverberation. “Our dear friend Thulium has brought her friends to us as she promised she would. Thulium, please tell us all their names.”

  Thulium stayed in the chair, and her voice, too, was amplified clearly. She named each of them in turn, and to Sprout’s surprise, a spotlight shone on each of them, as if the light operators already knew who was who. Maybe they did.

  “Come join me at the high table,” said Thulium. “All things delicious and healthful await you here.”

  They must have given her that script. She would have scorned such flowery and overformal verbiage, unless she was trying to be diplomatic.

  Wouldn’t that be nice, if Thulium had learned to be tactful?

  The whole party walked toward the front and stood where various men and women directed them. Everyone had a chair, though nobody but Thulium had one of the finely decorated thrones.

  Except that as soon as Sprout got on the dais, he slipped behind the thrones and stood directly behind Thulium’s seat. He gave her no sign that he was there—he figured he was small enough that nobody out on the main floor of the place would notice him. Any attempt to communicate with Thulium would make him visible and obvious to the audience.

  But then curiosity got the better of him. He stepped between two thrones and looked right at Thulium. She didn’t turn her face to look at him at all—maybe her peripheral vision didn’t see him.

  They had her face thickly caked with makeup that looked chalky, far too white. Her features had been painted over the white, so that it seemed a miracle that Sprout had recognized her.

  Then he looked more closely. There was an unevenness to the white substance, or maybe it had been applied over seriously bumpy skin. But Thulium didn’t have any bumps on her skin. She had a very clear complexion.

  Instead of dismissing his worried thought, Sprout immediately took action to see what was really happening with her skin. He flashed out his hand and with his fingernails scraped away the layer of white on her cheek.

  The white stuff flaked and fell off. And underneath it, Sprout could see what looked like dozens of small blisters. His fingernails had opened some of them, and a clear fluid had burst out of them. Was this just an allergic reaction to the white face paint?

  Or was the white face paint there to conceal the pustules?

  Sprout called out, “Jane!” as he turned Thulium’s face so the bare place on her cheek faced Jane.

  A few people were moving to try to intercept Jane, but that was useless. And Sprout noticed that others, including the ones who seemed to be the highest officials, were cheerful enough about Sprout’s discovery.

  As if they had already won a war that wasn’t supposed to start.

  “Take her,” said Jane to Sprout. Then, more loudly, she reached out her arms to all of the party. “To Q-Bay,” she called. “Now.”

  In a moment everyone who had gone up onto the dais was packed into Q-Bay—not just the isolation chamber, but the offices just outside it as well.

  “Silence,” Jane commanded. “Ela, roll call.”

  In a moment, Ela answered, “All here.”

  Quara spoke up. “I’ll send a message to all the staff—don’t come inside. This whole building is now quarantined.”

  “Good,” said Ela.

  Sprout saw that Jane was standing directly in front of Thulium. Fearing that the onslaught would be terrible, Sprout immediately went to Thulium and held her hand.

  But Jane was not rebuking her. “How many hours were you there, my love?” asked Jane.

  “Yesterday afternoon,” murmured Thulium. Sprout was relieved that she could answer at all. She looked weak and frightened.

  “When did the pustules appear?” asked Jane.

  “This morning when I woke up. They sting badly when they break.”

  “Other symptoms,” said Jane.

  Thulium told her of a blinding headache, sparks dancing like comets across her vision, congestion that made her short of breath, and violent diarrhea since she got up.

  “Everyone was very kind,” said Thulium.

  “They give you a fatal disease,” said Jane, “against which all of them have been inoculated, and then treat you kindly as you die.”

  “Will she die?” asked Sprout.

  “It’s what I deserve,” said Thulium. Then she gasped for air.

  “Oxygen,” said Jane, and at once Ela had an oxygen mask over Thulium’s face.

  “Should we intubate you?” asked Jane. “So you can breathe?”

  Thulium pulled her face away from the mask. “Not yet,” she said. Then she pushed her face back into the mask.

  “I don’t know how long we might have stayed,” said Jane, “if we hadn’t had Thulium there early to show us the symptoms of the Folk’s biological weapon.”

  “Do you recognize the disease?” Miro asked Ela.

  “No,” said Ela. “But we’ll be looking at her blood and tissues and find ways to treat the symptoms, at least, and the underlying disease as soon as possible. Whatever is happening to Thulium will happen to the rest of us in twelve hours.”

  Blood and tissue samples were taken and placed in the various microscopes. Team members knew how to read the samples, and quickly identified the two microorganisms that were savaging Thulium’s body. One of them attacked the red blood cells; the other was encasing the nerve cells in her limbs and face. “Progressing inward,” said Quara, who was administering the internal examination. “But so far, nothing shows up in her internal organs.”

  “So maybe we still have time,” said Jane.

  “Thulium,” said Ela, “we’re going to have to experiment on you. We’ll try every treatment that seems to have a reasonable chance, and we’ll be attacking these little beasts outside your body to see what kills them. But you’re our test case.”

  Thulium nodded. “Don’t let it escape from this building,” she whispered.

  “We’ve already got negative pressure everywhere,” said Miro.

  Everything moved so quickly that Sprout couldn’t keep track of who was doing what. But while everyone else was busy at various tasks, Sprout found that Uncle Sergeant sat beside Thulium’s bed, holding her hand.

  Everyone spoke their findings aloud, and Sprout had no problem understanding everything that they learned. Which mostly consisted of treatments that would not work.

  Every now and then Thulium herself made a suggestion. Sometimes Ela replied by saying, “Do it,” to one of the others. Sometimes Ela replied to Thulium, “Already tried it. Dead end.”

  Through it all, Sprout did nothing useful. With Thulium’s father holding her hand, even that job was unavailable to him. But he had never worked on pathology, and now was not a good time for him to get someone to train him.

  So he leaned against a far wall and tried to tell if his own symptoms were appearing yet. Whatever is happening to Thulium will happen to all of us. Find a cure, please.

  Did the ravens and keas know the plan? The Engineers? Were they complicit, or were they deceived as the Lusitanian party had been?

  This could not have been known to Dog the Raven or Royal Son or Phoenix or Ruqyaq. But Ruqyaq might know the principles underlying this disease—it was surely part of Engineer science. If they could only talk to him, they might make faster progress toward a cure.

  But this was war. Just because you liked someone before the war started didn’t mean he was still your friend now that hostilities had begun. If Sprout went to Nest now, no one would lead
him to Ruqyaq. The people of Nest might well assume that, having been betrayed himself, Sprout would readily betray anyone who helped him.

  Sprout was as helpless as he felt. He wondered if the heat he felt in his face was rage or fear or the first onset of the fever.

  Thulium, please live. You’re the best of us. If all the rest of us are saved, but you die, then the people of Nest would have scored a terrible blow.

  If Thulium dies, thought Sprout, I’m going to make sure that every starmap and atlas in the Hundred Worlds shows the exact location of Nest, and what the underground people of Nest did under pretense of hospitality.

  21

  Peter: If the disease is manufactured, or if our people were deliberately infected, it’s an act of war.

  Queen: As it was when your people killed the Formic worldshapers who were merely carrying out their duties.

  Peter: Our visitors to Nest never killed anybody. We were doing our best to make it clear that we were not colonizers.

  Queen: We never killed anybody, either. We just brushed aside interfering animals that never answered our efforts to communicate.

  Peter: I am not blaming you or your sisters. I’m saying that we have been bending over backward not to give offense.

  Queen: But do they believe you?

  Peter: Why shouldn’t they?

  Queen: Because you can travel instantly between worlds. Because your sophisticated starship is an airtight box with a life-support attachment. And because they are also human, so they will judge your honor and integrity and compassion by their own.

  Peter: Oh. Yes, that makes sense.

  Queen: I traveled with … Ender Wiggin long enough to learn of all the trickery that humans use on each other, all the backstabbing, all the lying. We Hive Queens cannot lie to each other, because our only communication is total communication.

  Peter: So are we at war with the humans of Nest or not?

  Queen: That’s your decision. But I think it’s quite likely that they’re at war with you.

  Peter: That’s what we’re most afraid of.

  Queen: Why? Do they have ships that can reach Lusitania? Do they even know where Lusitania is? As long as you don’t go back there, then there cannot possibly be war.

  Peter: So we’ll try to cure this disease, and never return to Nest.

  Queen: You will return once. You know why.

  Peter: Because we weren’t attacked—well, not in a serious way—by the birds or the Engineers.

  Queen: You have given us multiple worlds, and the pequeninos, too, so that we can’t be wiped out in a single disaster.

  Peter: Yes. We have a duty to offer that to them, too. They can’t live here, though.

  Queen: Nothing for them to eat. And nobody willing to put up with the keas.

  Peter: Not even you?

  Queen: Come back to me if you can’t find a cure for the disease. Especially if you think Thulium might die. I want to speak to her one more time. It is important to me.

  —Memorandum of conversation: Peter Wiggin and Hive Queen as cited in Demosthenes, “Boundaries of War”

  Thulium was wide awake the whole time. She kept wishing she could sleep, but her mind kept racing. How could they fool me? How could they see me, a child, and choose to infect me with a deadly disease? How did I give them offense? Why didn’t I sense their hostility? Why did I believe all their flattery and phony honors? What did I care about sitting on a throne at a great banquet?

  They thought I was a child and I was, an ignorant, trusting child.

  These thoughts repeated again and again. She tried to empty her mind and sleep, but she never slept, even as she felt sicker and weaker, as if something was eating every cell in her body from the inside out.

  Time passed. Sometimes the room was bright with outdoor light, and sometimes with the ceiling lights. Sometimes there were people in the room with her, talking about her but making little sense. Sometimes she was poked with needles, and now she had a tube down her throat so she could breathe, but speech was impossible. That was fine, she had nothing to say. The only thing that came to mind was, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. And, now and then, Let me die, study my cadaver, and learn to beat this disease before anybody else dies.

  One time, and only once, she decided to transport her father to Nest. The twins, too. If anyone could figure out a way to wreak vengeance upon them for Thulium’s death, they would do it.

  I don’t want vengeance. She drove away the thought of transporting Father anywhere. She was too weak anyway. She’d probably leave him stranded Outside, and then she would be as much a murderer as the Folk of Nest.

  * * *

  “Isn’t there something productive you could be doing?” asked Miro. His words were challenging, but Sprout detected no malice in his voice—not even irritation. “I think you’ll feel better, Sprout, if you do something to help us with this thing.”

  “Since we’re all going to die soon anyway,” said Sprout, “what will my poor skills do to advance our case?”

  “We won’t know until you do it,” said Miro.

  “And your contribution is to look for idle team members and goad them to keep working,” said Sprout.

  “I couldn’t find anything better to do,” said Miro.

  “I’m not doing nothing, Miro,” said Sprout. “My best friend in the universe has the most advanced case of this plague, and so I’m sitting here trying to think of how these supreme breeders and geneticists would go about giving us a disease that we couldn’t cure.”

  “How would they know what we could cure?”

  “We sent back genetic codes from the Box, in answer to the codes they sent us. They know a lot about the kind of genetics we know.”

  “Do you think they created something that has no DNA or RNA or anything familiar?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sprout. “But since they probably didn’t start developing this until after the Box first appeared—or maybe not till after Peter and Wang-Mu first went to the surface—it is most likely based on something they’re familiar with. Here’s what I think. It’s not based on any Earth-born species. Not a virus, not a bacterium, not a fungus, not a protozoan—nothing from Earth. They’ve had thousands of years to study the microorganisms of Nest. Maybe there was one that caused them a plague a thousand years ago, and now every baby on Nest is born with the altered gene that gives complete resistance to the disease. So they could freely infect us because everybody else in that room was born immune to it.”

  “I think you’ve been using your time better than I have,” said Miro. “I’m going to play back our conversation with the others. It’s possible we’re looking in the wrong places for the wrong things.”

  “Or it’s also possible that I’m delusional in the throes of this disease.”

  “But as a leguminid, even your delusions are probably informative.”

  * * *

  Peter and Wang-Mu accompanied the dinner team when they brought food to the quarantine building. They set it outside in the open air, then walked back many yards. They watched two or three of their friends come out in hazmat suits and bring the food inside. Disposable containers were used. The concrete pad where they laid the bags and baskets was disinfected after they went inside.

  Meanwhile, Peter tried to understand how the study of the disease was progressing. He couldn’t enter the quarantine building, and Jane, talking to him through the jewel, would say useless things like, “They’ve eliminated thousands of possibilities.” To which Peter would reply, “If they eliminated them, then they weren’t possibilities after all.” And she would say, “They know which avenues are not worth exploring. That’s progress.”

  Then the most important question: “How is Thulium?”

  “She doesn’t know she’s delirious,” said Jane. “When she’s conscious, she constantly apologizes, but doesn’t seem to hear us telling her that she’s completely forgiven.”

  “Because she knows she isn’t,” said Peter. “She knows p
eople are only saying that because she’s going to die.”

  “We don’t know what the course of this disease is supposed to be,” said Jane. “The incubation period is only about twelve hours. But her exposure must have been more intense, because the rest of us are all progressing much more slowly than she did. Yet she also continues to live. Her heart is beating a little faster, her blood pressure fluctuates weirdly, but no organ has failed.”

  “Is it possible they didn’t intend it to be fatal?” asked Peter.

  “How can they guess how this much stress on the body will affect different people? Thulium might have been swept off immediately. Instead, it may be that the leguminids have far greater strength than the Folk of Nest could have guessed at. Sprout also seems to have great resistance—or perhaps just a weaker infection.”

  “What can I do?” asked Peter.

  “Keep bringing us food,” said Jane.

  “The Hive Queen wants to see Thulium before she dies. She says it’s important to her.”

  “So we take Thulium, sick as she is, on a parade across the open meadows of Lusitania?” asked Jane.

  “Come on. You only need to ask the Hive Queen where she and Thulium should meet, where there’s no risk of infecting the Formic workers,” said Peter.

  “Thulium is not clear of mind,” said Jane. “Communicating may be hard.”

  “Is there any chance of her mind getting clearer before she dies?” asked Peter.

  “It seems unlikely,” said Jane.

  “I’ve given you the message,” said Peter. “I’m surprised she told me and not you. But now you know, and the next move is yours.”

  * * *

  When Miro told others about Sprout’s suggestion, some of them rolled their eyes; Quara said, “That’s the only possibility I’ve been exploring”; and others responded by sitting there thinking for a while.

  It was one of that third group that came up with the first real progress. They all gathered around Carlotta’s station. “It’s been visible all along,” said Carlotta. “Look, here, here, here.” She laid down printouts of images of the infected cells that were taken within the first hour. “This spot here, and then here, hugging the surface, only an atom or two in thickness would be my guess. And nothing like genetic material in it.”