Bitter Medicine

by Dave Galanter

  Lense materialized into the EVA suit, which took a little extra time than a normal beamdown because the computer checked to make sure the suit was upright, hadn’t been compromised, and so on. It didn’t give her extra time to think, because of the nature of transporting, and yet stuck in her mind was Corsi’s accusation that she’d not been very scientific of late. And on a personal level, it was true. She’d allowed herself to get involved with her patient, and he wasn’t even supposed to be a patient. Her mission was to find out what had happened to the Allurians, not to cure a disease in a week that had destroyed two ships and an entire planet.

  She was a doctor, however, and her urge to cure this poor boy had been too strong, and in ignoring her better judgment and promising what she couldn’t deliver, she’d perhaps broken the cardinal rule of medicine: do no harm.

  Did she believe, when she told Dobrah that she would cure him, that she actually could? After all, she was Elizabeth Lense, valedictorian of her class in Starfleet Medical, beating out the legendary genetically enhanced Julian Bashir, and savior of Sherman’s Planet.

  Was it confidence? Or worse, overconfidence? Or was it just shallow compassion, as when a doctor must sometimes hold dying patients’ hands and assure them everything will be fine.

  Really, it didn’t matter what was in her head. She’d done it, and Corsi and the captain and her own con-science were all right that she’d made a very big mistake.

  Once she took a step, having fully materialized, Dobrah turned away from where he was watching Gomez and ran to her.

  “You are healthy?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she replied, kneeling down to him as best she could. “I’m healthy. I got some rest. Where did you go? To eat?”

  “No, I sometimes walk the ship. I visit…” His voice trailed off.

  “Where, Dobrah?”

  “I visit my mother.”

  “I understand.” His mother had died, probably in whatever room she’d kept quarters. It made sense that Dobrah sometimes visited her and had long ago gotten used to the idea that the bones left were nothing to be afraid of. “Why don’t you go eat? I’ve got some work to do, okay?”

  “Can I bring it back here and eat with you?” the boy asked.

  It was interesting that after so many years alone, Dobrah had quickly slipped back into needing and seeking the authority of an adult. Of a parent figure. “Sure.”

  Once he’d moved off in a way that could probably be described as a scamper, Gomez looked after him, then turned toward Lense. “He adores you.”

  “I’ve spent more time with him than anyone has in over a hundred and fifty years. He’d adore you, too, if you’d done the same.”

  “Maybe. But he doesn’t stop talking about you.”

  Lense wasn’t surprised, but hearing it wasn’t making the truth of the circumstances any easier. “Are you done?”

  “I’ve been done. It’s just off to preserve power. I can bring it back online when you’re ready.”

  “You’ve linked in the universal translator?”

  “Of course,” Gomez said.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  With a few stabs at a control console, Gomez lit up a series of monitors above them. Alien symbols were replaced by familiar letters and words as Gomez input a translator algorithm. “You’re online.”

  Nervous tension tightened Lense’s shoulders. She hoped against odds that whatever data had sat dormant for decades on the computer banks before her would lead to an answer, for her…or Dobrah. In the moments it took to learn the logical system of the computer interface, Lense had managed to talk part of herself into the idea that all the Shmoam-ag had been missing was some little piece of medical knowledge. Some small shred that she possessed but Dobrah’s people had missed. Something that would fall into place and allow her to find a cure.

  Dobrah had returned with his dinner and fallen asleep by the time she found answers to all her questions. Placing an isolinear storage chip into an access port of her tricorder, Lense collected the log entries of Dobrah’s mother and father—the two lead scientists who’d studied the Pocheeny and tried to cure it.

  Tears welled in her eyes, and one rolled down her left cheek, but the EVA suit kept her from wiping it away. Lense now understood whom the Shmoam-ag were trying to save…and it had not been Dobrah.

  “Is this data correct?” Captain Gold asked. “Are we sure?”

  “Soloman said it’s probably a spy satellite, sir,” Carol Abramowitz said as she snugged a strand of hair behind her ear. With her other hand she gestured to the screen to her left and leaned back into the science station chair so the captain had a better view. “The databanks were shielded and there’s little degradation. It collected media and government broadcasts from all the various Shmoam-ag nations. And when the governments were gone, and the media broadcasts stopped, it continued to collect visual and scanner data.”

  “So they created this virus themselves?”

  “One of the nations did,” Abramowitz said somberly. “But it spread quickly, possibly before it could even be used as a weapon. The translation isn’t clear on that, and it will take further investigation.”

  “Only the children were left?” Gold shook his head with disbelief.

  “All carriers. I assume by design. Dr. Lense will be able to confirm, I’m sure.”

  Lense was a sore subject with the captain, and his neck knotted with the mention of her name. He wasn’t sure what to do with her yet—the second time in a year he’d been in that position with her. At least this time, she’d broken no regulations, but she’d acted irresponsibly and it didn’t sit well with him.

  “And after the adults were gone?”

  “That’s when the broadcasts end, but sensor data that was collected suggests widespread violence, probably other disease, too. What if our children were left to run a highly technical society? How would they survive?”

  Gold shook his head. “They wouldn’t.”

  Chapter

  7

  When Lense got the call that the da Vinci had returned to the area, she’d actually been finished with her final report and calculations for over two hours. With the computer restored, Dobrah was showing her a game he used to play with his father, and sometimes his mother, but he was very clear that mothers didn’t often play it. Lense had slipped into being a mother figure to him, and she knew that, but wished he wouldn’t keep making it so clear.

  Nonetheless, watching him have fun was contagious and lightened her heart, even if she knew their time together was now limited and soon she’d have to leave him.

  When Gomez hailed her to let her know they were ready to beam back to the ship, Lense promised she’d be back after a while, and she and Dobrah would have to have a long talk.

  “About what?”

  “The future,” she said quietly.

  He rolled his head in his nodlike way and said he understood as he continued to play his game.

  Lense beamed out, once again leaving her empty EVA suit behind with Dobrah.

  When back on the shuttle, she did several scans that confirmed there were no stray virions that had contaminated any of them, or the shuttle itself, and it was safe to return to the da Vinci hangar bay. When they would need to beam back to the Shmoam-ag ship, they could do so from the main transporter room.

  After an additional decon and a quick change of clothes, Lense was meeting with Gold and Gomez in the captain’s ready room. Those ice-blue eyes of his bore down on her.

  She didn’t even know where to begin. How could she explain getting so lost in this one particular patient? And how could she keep herself from slipping back into the emotional pit that she’d felt herself falling into?

  “Doctor? Gomez says you’ve learned a lot. So have we. I don’t suppose you’ve found a cure for your young friend.”

  “No, sir. He’ll cure himself.” She handed him the padd with her full report and findings. “Dobrah’s mother understood, and logged in her journal, that the
Pocheeny virus uses children as incubators and homes for viral colonies.”

  “We found the same—evidence that the adults on the boy’s homeworld all died, leaving the children to fend for themselves. They were either unable to, or the virus killed them when they reached adulthood.”

  “It wouldn’t have killed them. Upon reaching puberty, the virus would have died off. It rewrites the child’s DNA to allow it to survive, and then rewrites its own to die upon production of certain enzymes and glandular secretions. It’s a very sophisticated virus, meant to destroy an entire world of people, but leave their children so that anyone prepubescent could be saved, educated, and taught not to hate their enemy.”

  “An enemy that would have killed their parents?” Gold asked.

  “Secreted onto an enemy planet, how would anyone have known what happened until it was too late? And what would children understand except that all the adults are dead, and these new adults have arrived to help?” The doctor shook her head at not just the waste, but the perverse morality. “The problem was, the virus was incomplete before it got out of containment. Dobrah’s parents never knew exactly which of their planet’s governments meant to use it on any of a number of enemies, but they saw where the genome was supposed to be coded to not infect any animal with Shmoam-ag DNA, but could have been coded only to affect one person with a very specific DNA. They perfected the latter, and not the former.”

  The captain nodded and sank a bit into his office chair. “Why were they on the ship?”

  “The crew and scientists lived on the ship—they were the equivalent of our Starfleet, from the way it looks, and I got the impression that other ships in their fleet had been infected already.” Lense gestured out the captain’s office window and toward the Shmoam-ag ship visible nearby. “This vessel was their last hope—no infection. Dobrah was the only child aboard, and…it’s not really mentioned, but I got the impression that his parents infected him once they knew he would survive eventually. They isolated him in their sickbay and only came into contact with him in suits like ours. They didn’t understand that eventually the virus would work its way in anyway.”

  Gold rose, looked out the port window, and still turned away from Gomez and Lense, asked, “How long before he reaches puberty?”

  “From the medical texts in the database, the Shmoam-ag have an average lifespan of over two thousand years. Dobrah is a little over two hundred years old, I believe. He’ll no longer be a carrier of the virus at perhaps three hundred years old, maybe three hundred fifty.”

  “And then?”

  “Soon after the viral colony dies, the virions that surround him won’t have anyplace to return, and it will die out. By now, the Shmoam-ag homeworld, if no one is still alive there, is probably safe.”

  “Gomez?” Gold turned and looked at his first officer. “Can that ship last another hundred and fifty years?”

  She nodded confidently. “With my full team, and another week or so of work, it can. So long as regular maintenance is done.”

  He gazed at Lense. “They’ll be safe?”

  “So long as EVA suits are changed out every week, and always left on that ship.”

  “See to it,” Gold told Gomez. “Dismissed.”

  Both began to leave, but the captain motioned Lense back to her seat. “Not so fast, Lense. You don’t get off that easy.”

  Of course not, Lense thought glumly. Nor should I. “Aye, sir.”

  “I’ve cooled down some since we last talked.”

  Lense had nothing to say to that, so she merely nodded.

  “My concern was that you thought you could cure this disease, and blithely told him so. Maybe you were just trying to comfort him. But if you put the idea in his head that he can leave that ship now…”

  “I didn’t. At least, I hope I didn’t. But we’ve not talked about it.”

  “Gomez tells me that he looks up to you. If you’re thinking of staying, you’d have to resign your commission. And eventually you’d run out of EVA suits on your own.”

  “I know that, sir. I wasn’t planning on resigning. I wish I could stay. It might be possible to find a cure, still. Certainly Dobrah’s mother thought so.”

  Suddenly Gold’s tone of voice shifted from annoyance to something softer. Maybe it was pity. “First you beat yourself up because you couldn’t heal and cure everything. Then you thought—after a run of admitted successes—that you maybe could. Now you realize you can’t again.”

  “You’re playing counselor again.”

  “In a way. It takes a certain amount of ego to do what you and I both do—make life or death decisions. It’s not a sin to believe in yourself.”

  Lense cast her gaze downward. “And what if I convince someone else to believe in me as well, and I’m wrong?”

  “It’s not a sin to be wrong, either.” The captain knocked on the table and she looked back up at him. “It’s not.”

  “Begging the captain’s pardon, that’s not how it feels.”

  “Well, part of that may have been the talking-to I gave you. Part of it is that the bottom fell out of your dream.”

  “This job…this ship…” She shrugged, unsure how she could express her disappointment—both in herself and in life in general. “We overcome so much, and always come out on top. On Sherman’s Planet, they were talking about building a statue to me. I guess I figured I’d always find the answer.”

  “You did find the answer, Doctor, it just wasn’t what you wanted. Life’s like that sometimes.”

  “I didn’t want to lose this one.” She felt another one of those tears coming, but only a bit, and it probably just moistened her eye rather than rolled down her cheek.

  “You didn’t. He’ll be cured, someday.”

  “Years after we’re dead,” she said somberly.

  “You lose patients sometimes. It happens. This one will outlive you. Certainly there’s some comfort in that.”

  “He’ll be all alone.”

  Gesturing toward his door, Lense rose as Gold continued to reassure her. “Well, I think we can manage to stop back from time to time, when we’re passing by this way. And I have no doubt you won’t be giving up your search for a cure, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And…I have an idea about what we can do regarding the boy’s loneliness.”

  She stopped, turned and looked at her captain. “Sir?”

  “Let’s go have a talk with some of our illustrious corps of engineers.”

  Dobrah’s mother smiled down at her son, dropped to one knee, and embraced him so tightly that the boy made a happy grunt. She took his head in her hands and put it under her chin in what Dobrah had told Soloman she’d often done.

  Lense couldn’t help but take the Bynar’s arm and give it a squeeze through their EVA suits. “I can’t believe you did this all in two weeks.”

  “The holo-emitters are only in this room. It should be…sufficient for now.”

  “It’s fantastic.” Lense felt her face tighten with a wide grin.

  Dobrah pulled the hologram of his mother toward the two Starfleeters. “Mother, this is E-liz. She’s a doctor like you. And this is Soloman. He looks a little like Uncle Lintemuth, doesn’t he?”

  Switching the external speakers off, Lense asked Soloman privately, “He does understand this is a hologram, yes?”

  “He does,” Soloman replied discreetly, then put his externals back on. “Pleased to meet you. I have heard much about you.”

  Dobrah pulled his mother back to the computer console where they’d been playing, and Soloman turned completely to Lense. “He’s just pretending. He said he enjoys how interactive it is.”

  “To get such a good representation of her, I guess there was a lot of data in her computer?”

  Soloman nodded. “Yes. Personal logs, physical profiles because of her work. For the father, too.”

  “He played a game with his father already,” Lense said, and had to try not to beam so much—the smile was beginning
to hurt her cheeks. “I got to ‘meet’ him, too. Right now I think he’s pretending his father is fixing the engine.”

  “It’s good to see we’ve made him so happy.”

  “What if it breaks down?”

  Soloman seemed unconcerned. “We will be notified of any ship’s problems via subspace alert. And there will be frequent visits by other science or engineering vessels.”

  “I told him he’ll eventually be cured,” Lense said, continuing to watch Dobrah interact with the hologram. “That someday, when he’s older, he’ll be able to leave this place. When he’s closer to being an adult.”

  “How did he react?”

  “It’s hard to tell. I think, being so long-lived, he might even sense time differently. Our visit here for the last three weeks might be a blink of an eye in his lifetime.”

  “If I may…I think some of us have made an emotional impact.” Soloman could sometimes be cryptic, and so Lense didn’t ask him how he knew that or what he meant. She just assumed Dobrah had said nice things about his Doctor “E-liz.”

  “He’s very happy with the holograms of his parents,” she said.

  “We asked him exactly what holograms he’d like, and how they should act,” Soloman told her. “I am not surprised he is happy.”

  “It makes me happy as well.”

  “Do you want to say good-bye to him?” Soloman asked.

  She thought a moment about getting a second good-bye, but it might be too emotional for him. Or for her. “We said our good-byes once. I think I’d just like to beam out watching him this happy, with family.”

  “Very well.” Soloman led the way the few steps to the transport point.

  “Lense to da Vinci. Two to beam out.” She kept focused on Dobrah for a last moment, wished him a silent good-bye, and then closed her eyes. “Energize.”

  Once the transporter effect had faded, all that remained were two EVA suits.

  Dobrah looked back to them and frowned for a quick moment before smiling and running to the computer console he’d been taught how to operate by one of the nice Starfleet people.