By the time the responsible agent was identified and isolated (but not traced to its origin), seventy-two had died and more than two hundred were affected.
Arnal Lepovsky was desperate. It was a fight to the death against time, which, for once, he was losing. The incubation period was unknown, the disease was undetectable until the first symptoms presented, and then it was too late. Cultures showed that the cause was a twisted aerobic bacterium that was transmitted by simple contact, spread through the blood stream, and simultaneously affected several organs of the body, but especially the spleen. All efforts to find an antidote, a vaccine, anything to beat it, were fruitless.
Five days after the appearance of the plague there were 650 dead, more than 3,000 affected, and it kept growing.
Veronica Julia felt overwhelmed by what was happening. The plague spared neither men nor women, old nor young. Two of her best friends had fallen victim to the disease in the last five days, and nobody in the pyramids talked of anything else. An atmosphere of unbearable depression hung over the whole colony.
On the third day she went outside to get away from the oppression.
She didn’t take Claudia Antonia with her. She didn’t go to her story room. She wanted to be truly alone, so she hid in a twisted corner of the mountainside, far from everything, then sat down and sank into her thoughts.
She didn’t know how long she’d been there when she became aware of the roller’s presence. The ball of gold-brown fur sat completely motionless in front of her, without even the slight sway they sometimes adopted when they wanted to attract attention or seemed to be waiting for something.
“Go away,” she said harshly. “I don’t want to play with anybody today.”
The roller didn’t move. For a long time it stayed that way, as if looking at her through those little slits that everyone said were their eyes when they adopted their ball shape. Then, very slowly, it advanced to a position right in front of the girl, not rolling, but floating just above the ground.
Without knowing why, Veronica Julia was more convinced than ever that, of all the rollers, this was her Pffft, her friend, the one who had opened up to her the first time.
It did it now too. But this time it wasn’t she who hugged it, but the roller who extended its short arms, closed the space that separated them, and practically hung from her neck. It rested its face against the girl’s cheek, as if to console her, and Veronica Julia felt a sudden relaxation, a profound relief, an overwhelming peace. She let out a deep, inaudible sigh.
The roller imitated it.
Surprisingly, during the whole time they were together, no other rollers appeared, which was most unusual. Veronica Julia could fully enjoy that moment of intimacy, which seemed to last much longer than usual, as if the roller wanted to give her something but hadn’t quite managed to do so. Finally, the animal gently released its embrace and rolled back up into its usual spherical form, waited a few moments, a ball of soft gold-brown fur that pulsed slowly as with a calm heartbeat deep within, and finally disappeared with its usual burst of speed that made it seem to vanish into thin air.
And Veronica Julia felt a sudden inner peace that seemed to fill her to the depths of her being.
That night there was an enormous commotion in the pyramids. A roller had slipped into the interior of the structure! Its presence was noticed not only by the detectors but by many people as it darted from one side of the pyramid to another as if looking for something. It never stopped for more than a few seconds in one place, and its apparent ubiquity made many people think there were several, or many, that had invaded the structure. But there was only one.
Arnach Orenstein, one of Arnal Lepovsky’s main assistants, was in the virology lab when the roller appeared there. He was examining a series of plague cultures under a microscope, fighting sleep and exhaustion, and at first he didn’t know what was happening. It was the exclamations of the other three assistants in the room that alerted him. He barely saw the furry ball that launched itself directly toward him. He was holding a slide with a culture sample that he was about to put under the microscope. He almost didn’t realize that the roller was opening up on the tabletop before him. But the little animal’s lenticular pupils weren’t fixed on Arnach Orenstein but seemed to be intently studying the slide he held between his fingers. Before Arnach knew what was happening, the roller raised his little forepaws (Orenstein would later tell anyone who would listen that they did have opposable thumbs), grabbed the edge of the slide, and spat on it.
Before anyone could react, the roller had disappeared, and was not seen again anywhere in the pyramid.
From then on, that would be known as the miracle of the rollers.
The roller had spat on that culture specimen, and to all appearances had done it deliberately. Arnal Lepovsky, notified immediately, hastened to do a series of tests. The roller’s saliva (a small pink globule, an almost insignificant quantity) quickly proved to possess almost magical antiseptic properties. It contained a broad-spectrum cocktail of natural “antibodies”—a virtual panacea, it would later turn out—effective against the planet’s endemic infections and contaminations. Within thirty seconds the specimen on which the roller had spat was dead, consumed by the saliva, and the small amount of that saliva seemed to have grown, as if nourished by the culture. After isolating it, Lepovsky hurried to give a small, dilute dose to one of the most critical patients, a woman. And the miracle happened: In fifteen minutes the patient’s blood was completely free of the pathogen, and the woman, though weak, had recovered almost completely.
Two hours later, after a marathon session of preparing a large quantity of miracle-doses and giving them to the colony’s patients, everyone affected by the plague was out of danger. Arnal Lepovsky, after several sleepless days and nights of exhaustively testing the drug’s undeniable benefits, hastened to make enough of it to inoculate all the colonists as a preventive.
The night after the roller’s visit to the pyramids, Veronica Julia returned to the place of her last encounter with her roller. She wasn’t really surprised to find a single roller waiting for her. Pffft—there was no doubt at all that it was her Pffft—opened up as soon as it saw her, and Veronica Julia ran toward it and embraced it impulsively.
“Thanks,” she murmured through tears. “Infinite thanks.”
The roller may not have understood the girl’s words, but its big f lat eyes with lenticular pupils, perhaps because of ref lection, also seemed to fill with tears.
From that moment the relationship between humans and rollers took a new turn.
The rollers stopped snubbing adults. They still didn’t fraternize with them, but they didn’t run away from them; they simply had little to do with them, though they didn’t hesitate to open before them, depending on circumstances. They soon became assiduous and inquisitive visitors to the pyramids, though they still didn’t let adults touch them; only children had that privilege. For lack of anything better, Melo Spiegel tried to take what advantage he could of the new situation. The rollers’ contact with children and objects left traces on the skin and clothing and objects that they touched, like hairs and secretions. Following the path started when the first roller opened up to his daughter, the chief zoologist dedicated himself to collecting the organic residues left by the rollers wherever they could be found. The result was an often incoherent and sometimes contradictory puzzle, but one that at least let him form a general idea of the rollers’ basic nature and their place in the planet’s evolutionary scheme.
Naturally, and despite the historic visit of the roller (of Pffft, Veronica Julia stubbornly insisted to anyone who would listen) to the pyramids to share with the colony the immunity with which their species was endowed, the problem of interspecies communication was much harder than science-fiction stories would suggest. Nevertheless, Melo Spiegel was inclined to come to blows with anyone who said the rollers were not at least as intelligent as humans.
A position with which Veronica Julia agreed comp
letely.
And finally came the first anniversary of the descent and claiming of Earth Two in the name of humanity.
The plague and all that followed had somewhat overshadowed the theme of the celebration and the planet-orbit schism; when something completely occupies all our thoughts, everything else takes second place. But the ship did not forget; it is not within a machine’s capacity to forget. And it knew that the time had come to make a decision. I t s decision.
And really, it had already made it.
The celebration began with a solemn religious ceremony, elaborately planned by the ship to encompass all the colony’s trends. Diaspora had never stopped maintaining its own religion, but since its arrival at the planet it had not minded incorporating the new heterodoxies arising among the colonists. The god of the ship was still its god, but Yahweh was now the god of the colonists, or at least many of them: an anthropomorphic, accessible god whose features were purely semitic and who coexisted without problems with all the other more abstract gods that surrounded him. The ceremony became a conglomeration of images and references that tried to satisfy everybody. For the most part it succeeded, and the assemblage was satisfied with the result.
After the pomp of the liturgical ceremony came Rhina Solomon and her staging of the ultimate symbolic step of the change: her ritual descent, accompanied by the ship’s Caretaker, to the planet, as the ship’s ultimate representative of the transformation of pilgrims into colonists. The elaborate ceremony was superbly orchestrated and produced a lump n the throat of many attendees.
Then came the ritual meal, all kosher, all correct, with the servants transformed for the occasion into cooks and waiters. For many—for those who had forgotten their distant origins, which was almost everybody—the ultimate significance of that meal had been lost. But for Zebulon Levi, for example, with his 101 years of age—the oldest pilgrim on Diaspora, who was proud of being the ship’s only representative of two of the legendary twelve tribes of Israel, through his first and last names—everything evoked homesick memories of old texts read at one time or another.
“And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for,” the surface Caretaker said to the diners, once the dinner and ritual ablutions were completed, with a silent ship’s Caretaker as a mute witness at his side. “The ship wishes to speak to you.”
There was a prolonged general murmur. The ship never spoke directly to its wards; for that there were the Caretaker and servants. But on this occasion the ship thought a direct contact was necessary. For that it had arranged the central pyramid’s great festival hall so the concentric circles of tables left an ample free space in the center as its stage. And Diaspora appeared, personified, there.
It did that with an elaborately scaled hologram, real as life itself, realistic down to the smallest detail of its external structure, spinning slowly so the entire assemblage could appreciate it from all angles, suspended a couple of meters off the floor, impressive but not disturbing, majestic but not overwhelming. Around the pyramid’s great hall, identical in every way to the great hall of the ship itself, the ring of screens began to show varied images of space, of the planet seen from orbit, of the system’s sun, of the planet’s two moons. It was the ship’s way of showing everyone where they were, where they had come from, and what their present situation was.
And now it was its turn to speak of their future.
Its voice sounded an octave lower than the Caretaker’s, giving it an undeniable authority. It began without preamble.
“Things have changed greatly since the first descent to the planet,” it said. “Some pilgrims have adapted to Earth Two, others have not. And now everyone wants to follow his own destiny.
“But one cannot always choose his own destiny.” It paused, almost imperceptibly, but enough to let its words penetrate deeply into its hearers’ consciousness. For a moment it stopped turning, then resumed its slow motion.
“My original mission was to bring you to a planet where you could settle, a Promised Land that would fulfill the desires of the people of Zion.” Hardly any of the congregants knew anything of Zionism, but it was a good thing to be reminded of their roots. “Once this goal was achieved, I was to consider my mission completed, and from then on it was up to you to continue on your own path.”
There was another general murmur, almost immediately hushed. All eyes were fixed on the turning hologram, which seemed to scrutinize them one by one with blind eyes, as if wanting to hypnotize them. Everyone held their breath.
“I recognize that this first year has been hard for all of you. So it has been for me as well. Some of you have succeeded in adapting to the new environment, others have not. And there are many who still hesitate.
“But it is necessary to make a decision, and I realize that I am the first who must do so. My presence up there in orbit no longer makes sense. In these moments after Captain Rhina Solomon’s final descent, I am no more than an empty shell, stripped of all purpose. What is it that some of you want from me? That I keep nominally watching over you from high in orbit, distant and inaccessible, little more than a symbol of your past? That I keep making myself part of your lives and micromanaging them as when you were in my care? Perhaps you’d like to make me a refuge for cases of extreme need? A last resort for desperate situations? Or a commodity always at your fingertips? I was not created for any of those things.”
Its turning seemed to accelerate slightly, as if impelled by some inner agitation, as if for a moment it doubted what it was going to say next.
“I have thought very carefully about all this. And I’ve concluded that from now on there are only two roads open to you—and to me. One is that you settle fully onto the planet as was planned from the beginning: I will disconnect from my Caretakers and servants, deactivate myself, and finish my days as a pile of scrap metal in orbit, forgotten by everyone or perhaps viewed as an arcane symbol, while you create and develop your own life down here, far from my ancient teachings.
“But things don’t have to be that way. There is another solution. No, it is not what some of you suggest, though it will suit you well. My staying in orbit now has no meaning. But I can continue my journey. Earth Two does not have to be the end of the line, the only Promised Land. For many of you Diaspora is still your home, and can remain so—even forever.
“So I invite you to return to the ship if you wish. I invite you, all of you who wish it, to continue our pilgrimage.”
The gathering went on through the night. The discussion was tense and heated, and for the first time in more than seven hundred years the colonists spoke intimately with the ship.
Ostende Malech, one of the staunchest representatives of the orbital faction, was among the most active in the debate. He was young, not even forty, and he and his wife were one of the few couples who, because of their genetic makeup, had been authorized, when the ship was in mid-flight, to conceive not one but two children. He was one of the principal chroniclers of the voyage of Diaspora 32, and his wife, Varsovia Tenenbaum (they both belonged to the generation that took their first names from cities of Old Earth), was also an energetic orbital activist, no less enthusiastic than her husband and much more extremist. They both immediately embraced the ship’s second alternative, though they had to recognize that Diaspora’s focus was even more radical than Varsovia’s.
In mid afternoon the rollers began to arrive. They entered the pyramid with no shyness and positioned themselves discreetly all around the room, next to the ring of screens, mingling with the servants—who, in accord with the animals’ new status, did nothing to eject them.
The rollers didn’t keep their spherical shape; one by one they opened up, and stood motionless through the rest of the assembly, firmly upright on their hind paws and tails, as if listening attentively to everything that was said. When the meeting was over they returned to their habitual ball shape and left, not with their usual speed but deliberately, as if taking a stroll.
The ship’s last words, before its holo
gram faded into the air like a fine silvery mist, were: “You have one month to decide on your future. I will base my decision on yours.”
It also had one month to consider its own destiny.
It was a month of great public debates and small private discussions, of affirmations and doubts and confidence and vacillation, of uncertainty and reconsideration. Some knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives, but most were full of indecision.
As if following instructions from the ship, the Caretaker (the one of the surface, its double having returned to orbit) and the servants withdrew to an unoccupied section of one of the seven pyramids and simply deactivated themselves. For the first time the colonists were completely on their own.
In the long run, it was a good thing for them.
Veronica Julia was surrounded by rollers. Lately they had been coming in growing numbers to her meetings with Pffft; they gathered around her, and all of them opened before her and stayed upright on their hind paws and sturdy tails and listened to her. They listened attentively to her words, swaying lightly to their rhythm, and the girl was sure they understood everything she said. So she talked and talked in the midst of their general attention.
“Everyone’s all in a tizzy in the colony,” she told them. “People don’t know what to do. They’ve never had to choose before; the ship always did it for them. It’s hard to do it and not make a mistake. We’re not used to it.”
And: “I know exactly what I want to do. I’m staying on the planet. I’ll never leave you. My father’s staying, too, and I’m sure there’ll come a time when you let him study you and we’ll learn to understand each other as species. I can’t wait for that. But my grandmother says as captain of Diaspora she belongs to the ship; her place is there. I’ll miss her.”
And: “Some people don’t accept you because they say you eat insects. That’s silly. Daddy says insects are good food, pure protein. In fact, since there are so many of them on the planet, we should make them our main food, too. I wonder what a bug pie would taste like.”
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