The Galactic Circle Veterinary Service

by Stephen Benjamin

The comm crackled with clicks and hisses before the translation came through. “Who you? In vehicle.”

  Fur and I exchanged glances, and I responded. “We’re from the Galactic Circle Veterinary Service. We’ve responded to your distress call. Can you tell us what the problem is?”

  “Galactic Circle, can help?”

  “I’m Dr. Cy Berger. My companion is Furoletto Cohen. We need more information to know if we can help.”

  “We die. Need help.”

  “Again, please tell us the nature of the problem.” I would not put us at risk until I knew what we were dealing with.

  “Unknown disease. Us not infected. You safe.”

  Right. Like I would accept that as gospel. “Come out where we can see you.”

  Two figures stepped out into the harsh sunlight, one a head shorter than the other. Like those we had seen already, neither wore clothing other than some sort of tool belt hung with unidentifiable implements.

  The taller figure raised an upper arm, palm toward us, a universal gesture of greeting and nonviolence. “I named Kraznit.” It pointed to the smaller figure with the other upper hand. “Offspring, Kraznit A. Not ill. See?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “You could be sick and not show it.”

  “No. When ill, see. Stagger—become crazed.” It performed a pirouette and had its kid do the same. “See? Balance good.”

  “Very pretty,” Fur said.

  I was not convinced. “Any more of you in there?”

  He motioned, and three more Pronacians emerged. All pirouetted gracefully and seemed to be fine; at least they didn’t stagger about and club each other. I could not sense anything from them on the emotional level from within the vehicle.

  Fur turned to me with a sardonic grin. “Your turn. I’ll stay in the drone. They don’t seem to be nuts—right now.”

  I grimaced at him as I moved toward the airlock. I knew we could not show a willingness to help if we stayed locked in our land drone, but I did don my suit and take a stunner. When I stepped out onto the smooth gray pavement, my heartbeat did a drum-roll of apprehension. This was my first face-to-face meeting with an alien, after all.

  Krasnit towered over me, as tall as Fur, but rather scrawny, like me. At their invitation, I followed them into the bubble house they had come out of, despite my nervousness. They displayed no aggression, and their emotional state seemed calm as far as I could interpret it, but I caressed the weapon at my side as I walked through the doorway.

  Multiple walled compartments subdivided the structure, although the walls did not reach the ceiling. The inside of the building was as gray as the outside. Benches rimmed two walls of the first compartment. Above them were shelves covered with containers marked with alien glyphs. The Pronacians sat. The benches were too high for my comfort, so I stood. The climate-control unit of my suit kicked down a notch. The Pronacians liked it hot.

  The Pronacian beside Kraznit spoke. “I Kraznit’s gryllfrt, Zlech.”

  The last two words did not translate. “Damn it, Ruthie, you can do better than that.”

  “She is his mate, Cy. Her name is Zlech.”

  I could see no evidence of gender-specific anatomical differences and guessed they had internalized functional sex organs like Terran reptiles. No doubt the three smaller Pronacians, including Kraznit A, were Kraznit and Zlech’s offspring. Were the others Kraznit B and C?

  “Our people die. Can help?” Zlech asked.

  Krasnit nodded. I supposed that was a universal sign of agreement—if you had a head.

  “I need information before I know that,” I replied. “Tell me what has happened.”

  “Plague first in jungle town,” Kraznit said. “Spread rapid. Villagers die. No cure. You first help to come.”

  The first? Maybe the dumbest. This planet could mark our graves, as well.

  Kraznit continued. “Victims stagger, crazy, become raged. Attack anyone approach. Then sleep, death.”

  The first part matched what we had seen, but it sounded like nothing I had ever heard of. Ruthie’s search of the medical encyclopedia did not help.

  I addressed Kraznit and Zlech. “I’m not aware of any disease that matches the description you’ve given us. What we need is to get samples from some patients.”

  I flinched as Kraznit’s eyes rolled back and forth and up and down while his nose and ear slits vibrated. “Danger. Sick homicidal maniacs.”

  At least that was how Ruthie translated it to me through my comm.

  A wave of fear swept through Kraznit, and despite my shields, my stomach lurched in response.

  Kraznit clacked his mouth a few times, perhaps for emphasis, but all those teeth just made me more apprehensive. “Perhaps our only chance is to find someone in the final, comatose stage of the disease,” I said.

  Kraznit said, “Medical facility two flurgs—center city. Go.”

  Ruthie added, “One flurg is approximately 2.5 kilometers, Cy.”

  As I parted from the family, I heard some sort of lock clack in the entry behind me. That sound made me move a bit faster to get inside the securely locked land drone.

  CHAPTER 8

  Fur had listened in on the proceedings, so after I climbed aboard, he took off as per Kraznit’s directions. I called to fill in Levi. The rebbe’s image onscreen resembled the color of a Pronacian by the time I reported what we had learned.

  We rolled up to the medical facility. The building was white, rather than the uniform gray of everything else. A dozen red, interlocking rings formed a triangle above the dome’s doors. Both Fur and I put on isolation suits, locked the land drone behind us—it had some nasty anti-theft devices—then approached the entry. We peered through transparent panels, but saw little.

  Fur tried the door, but it was locked. He knocked, and after a few minutes, a figure approached. This Pronacian wore a filthy sleeveless gray smock. I was not sure this represented an improvement over the usual nakedness.

  The doors muffled its voice, but Ruthie translated. “Who?”

  “We’re medical personnel. We heard your call for help. Can we come in?”

  A brown-smocked figure appeared out of the gloom. After an extended conference, Dirty Gray approached the door and a lock clicked. Both Pronacians moved back from the door. They were fearful, but not aggressive.

  “I’m a doctor.” I did not emphasize the veterinarian part, and was annoyed at myself for letting Levi affect my confidence. “We spoke to a family earlier and they told us of the plague. Do you have patients here? Can we get samples? Our ship has sophisticated medical equipment to analyze them. We might be able to help.”

  The Pronacians conferred again. Both were Healers, they said, although with different specialties, denoted by the color of their garb. Neither was an infectious disease expert.

  Dirty Gray repeated the information on the plague we had gotten from Kraznit, and added, “Medical capabilities overwhelmed. Exhausted drugs first weeks. Antibiotics, antivirals not cure.”

  Brown said, “Try grow agent, but fail. Expert growers sick—all dead.” A surge of grief came through clearly.

  “What about survivors?” I asked. “We met a family who survived.”

  Fur added, “The survivors, do they get the disease and recover? Become immune?”

  The Healers conferred again. Brown spoke. “Get disease not survive. Any who leave plague area killed so can’t spread.”

  God, how barbaric. Then I recalled that ancient humans had done much the same in the face of plagues and lack of understanding. I had to watch myself. I might begin to sound like Levi.

  “Did you get sick?” I asked.

  “No sick. One in ten not sick.”

  “If there are survivors of the disease, we might be able to test them for immunity and find a protective antibody. We have the facilities to produce that in our ship. But we need samples from live patients and survivors.”

  Dirty Gray turned his lower pair of hands downward. “All patients confined secure—cou
ld not harm. Now long dead.”

  “We need samples.” I spoke to Fur on our private circuit. “Healthy, as well as sick. If we start with these two, that will give us a baseline. We can assume that they have whatever it is that protects them from the infection.”

  “Or don’t have something that makes them susceptible,” he added.

  I turned to the Healers. “Would you have a problem if we took some samples from you two? That will get us started.”

  We took blood, skin, saliva, and oral epithelial samples from the two healers. I let Fur do the latter two. Those teeth...I shuddered.

  The blood was green.

  ***

  When we returned to the ship, Levi blasted us with a five-minute harangue on aliens and the danger we put him in. I kept my shields on maximum and let him run down without comment as we got to work. Purged, he stood in the background and watched. A scowl never left his face. His consternation colored my own thoughts, but at least he was quiet.

  Fur’s brow wrinkled as he examined the data. “No iron. All the active molecules are copper-based. A hydrated form of copper carbonate is what makes the blood green, but it’s a stable compound and doesn’t carry oxygen. A different molecule does that.”

  “Let’s run a genetic scan,” I said. “We need a full genomic pattern of healthy Pronacians. Then we can recognize foreign DNA from any agent against that background when we get samples from patients with the disease.”

  A transmission lit up the comm, and Ruthie’s translation came through.

  “Offworlders. You help? Come five hundred kilometers northeast. Disease here now—dying soon.”

  “Ah, two hundred flurgs,” I said, and detected a wave of confusion from Levi. “Let’s go there and see if we can get any more information.”

  “And samples from patients,” added Fur.

  ***

  Ruthie flew over jungle and broad brown rivers interspersed with small gray settlements. We inspected several villages through the viewscreen, but saw no evidence of life even at the highest magnification. When we arrived, the Pronacians who had contacted us guided the GCVS in. A contingent waited as we landed in a small field near a group of domes.

  “Follow,” the foremost Pronacian spoke. Then they all turned and moved toward the buildings. They had an odd, double-jointed gait that ate ground. Fur and I could not keep up in our isolation suits on the yellow, foam rubber-like turf in the lower gravity. Fur caught me once when I nearly did a strangely graceful face-plant in the moss. Levi, of course, stayed in the ship, unwilling to face unclean aliens.

  Inside the first dome stood two red-robed Pronacians, the first bright color we had seen on or around these beings. I presumed they were Healers.

  One spoke. “Healers in Gpblglph say need patient samples. Can provide.”

  I assumed Gpblglph was where we had just been. “We took samples from the healthy Healers but we need fresh samples from patients afflicted with the disease.”

  The second Healer said, “Disease new here. Few dead. Many die soon. Cannot stop.” Desperation tinged his words. “Have tissue, blood, from patients died today.”

  “You’ve performed autopsies? That’s great.” I wondered if Pronacians could interpret the relief in my voice at not having to deal with homicidal patients. “May we have those samples to analyze? And may we take more from any of you here who are healthy? The samples might help us pinpoint the cause of the plague.”

  I explained what we could accomplish with our equipment and they agreed. We took the samples we wanted from our healthy hosts, and they gave us several additional vials and bottles that contained blood and tissue from plague victims.

  ***

  When he completed the new analyses, Fur looked up from his work. “There are several strange things here. There’s a gene complex that’s absent in the disease victims, but it’s present in the first two healers we met.”

  “Do you think that could be the reason the first two didn’t have the disease?”

  “I thought so at first, but it’s also absent in the healthy volunteers we just sampled. I’m not sure what that means.”

  “Why wouldn’t all the healthy Pronacians have the genes? We would need a full epidemiological study to understand that.”

  “The second thing is a protein sequence in the infected patients that’s not in any of the healthy ones. That’s likely to be associated with the organism. Third, there’s no unusual genetic material. I’m not sure I understand that.”

  “We can code the protein, at least,” I said. “That may lead us backwards to the nucleic acids. But we should also try to isolate the organism.” I thought for few moments. “Our isolation media are unlikely to support its growth. We’ll have to use local ingredients. Let’s see if our friends can help with that.”

  The Pronacians already had facilities and reagents for isolation of copper-based organisms, but they previously had no success along that line. Neither did we. They did tell us that infected tissue injected into the local equivalent of laboratory rats caused disease similar to that in the sentient reptilians.

  ***

  Fur twiddled the dials of the positron microscope and grunted. “This thing is bizarre. It’s not a typical virus or bacterium. It’s not a cell, and it does not have any coat like a virus. It looks like a copper-based enzyme, but one that can reproduce. No wonder no one could grow it.”

  I looked. It was not like anything I had seen before, not even like the self-replicating prion proteins that caused spongiform encephalopathies like mad cow disease. Even Levi wanted a look.

  I grabbed the proteomic readout and examined it. “This fits the signature we saw only in the plague victims. This could be our bug, but it’s weird. I’m not surprised that antibiotics and antivirals don’t work. They wouldn’t on an enzyme. We need to prove that it is the cause and figure out how it replicates, and then find a way to kill or deactivate it.

  “Next, we need to determine what organ systems are affected and how it causes injury—what it does to the Pronacian physiology—if we are going to treat the symptoms. We can assume the nervous system is targeted, but there could be others.”

  Fur added, “It would help to know how the thing is transmitted. It’s in saliva and blood, so spread could be by contact with secretions.”

  Levi’s voice quavered. “Is this thing dangerous to humans?”

  Fur and I looked at each other and shrugged.

  I felt Levi’s pulse of angst. He left the laboratory with alacrity.

  Fur said, “We can start with studying those experimental animals that get the disease.”

  “We can’t grow the enzyme but we can concentrate it from the blood of the plague victims.”

  When we had the concentrated enzyme, the Pronacian healers supplied us with reddish-green lizard-like creatures with a body about a foot long and a similar length muscular tail. One hissed at me showing a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth.

  I loaded a syringe with the enzyme in saline solution and told Fur, “Grab that sucker and we’ll inject it.”

  He scowled at me. “Can’t you calm it down?”

  “I’m trying, but it’s not responding. Sometimes animals’ reactions are just the opposite from what I want. My empathic talent isn’t perfect.”

  Fur grimaced and reached into the cage. The lizard was a blur as it moved. Fur grabbed a towel and threw it over the scurrying form, then pinned the edges. “Can’t you stick it through the cloth?” he yelled. “Quick.”

  “Hell, no. I can’t even tell where the head and tail are.”

  “So be it.” He let go of the towel. “Your turn.”

  The towel lay in one corner of the cage and the lizard in the other. I gave Fur the syringe, and donned a pair of gloves eminently suited for extra-vehicular space walks. I took a deep breath, grabbed the lizard, and pinned it to the bottom of the cage. It was surprisingly strong for such a little creature, but at least the teeth did not reach my skin as it munched on the gloves.

 
“Stick him,” I yelled.

  Fur jabbed downward just as the beast squirmed out of my grasp and I lunged for it.

  I screamed and pulled my left hand back toward my body and grabbed it with my right. “Shit. You got me, not the goddamned lizard.”

  The look on Fur’s face brought home what had happened. The pain of the jab paled to insignificance with the realization that he had injected me with the plague.

  For long moments, neither of us said a word. Then Fur cleared his throat. “Cy, I...um, don’t think that the disease will be transmissible to humans. After all, the organisms are copper-based. I mean, it won’t—”

  “Quiet,” I said. “It’s not your fault. If I hadn’t flinched...”

  “I’m so sorry. I can’t begin to—”

  “Grab that alcohol and disinfect the puncture.” I pulled off the gloves. I had little hope that this would do any good. The organism already inhabited my subcutaneous tissues and no amount of surface cleansing would be worth a damn, but it gave us both something to do. I squeezed the puncture area on the back of my hand and generated a drop of blood. I envisioned the organism crawling through my bloodstream.

  Fur started to say something, but I waved him to silence. I thought about what we knew of the disease’s course. In the Pronacians, it took less than twenty-four hours from exposure to death. One day.

  Fur looked like a kid who had just lost his favorite puppy. My head and gut couldn’t stand the abject guilt that leaked from his huge form like radiation from a pulsar. I retreated to my cabin.

  Now, I’m not a hypochondriac. Back at our university, veterinary and human medical students went through much of their first two years of the curriculum together, covering common subjects like physiology, pharmacology, microbiology, and pathology. I had friends on the human medical side of the aisle. I did not develop, as some students did, the symptoms of just about every disease that we studied. I couldn’t help but be amused by the panic that took hold of students who were convinced they had everything from amoebic meningitis to Zarathustran jungle rot.

  Now, as I lay on my bunk, I was not amused. I took note of every muscle twitch, every minor pain that coursed through my skinny frame. When one catalogs these, there is hardly a space of ten minutes when something untoward does not occur, whether it is a grumbling stomach, colonic gas movements, a twitching eyelid, a minor muscle cramp. With each of these, my cardiac rhythm lurched. Surely the onset of...something?