[Jan Darzek 03] - This Darkening Universe

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  Supreme sent a dermatologist here?"

  He studied her gravely. "No. That hadn't occurred to me." "Then think about it."

  "What about your children?"

  "I'm sure Miss Schlupe would be delighted to look after them, and she'll do it very capably. It'll be a rewarding experience all around. The children have no close relatives, and she's never had young children in her family. They're calling her 'Auntie Effie,' and she reacts as though she's been awarded a medal."

  "There really is a good possibility that the children would be orphaned a second time. What about that?"

  Was it foolish of her to feel completely indifferent about the danger?

  E-Wusk was fond of saying, with his booming laugh, that Gul Darr was indestructible. No doubt Darzek's reaction would be explosive if she told him she would feel safe because he was along.

  "The question," she said slowly, "is whether this is genuinely important. I undertook to do a job when I came here. If this is the job, and there is as much at stake as you say, then there should be no other consideration than the fact that it's got to be done."

  "Let's go see Schluppy," Darzek said.

  "Not now. I want to see if I can teach Arluklo to apply this spray. When were you planning on leaving?"

  "There's the question of how the kloatraz will react to being unrooted - that's its term, unrooted. Then there's the problem of transmitting it to the ship. Once there, we should conduct some tests to see how it will react to low gravity and the artificial environment of a spaceship. And then we'll have to evaluate this ailment it has, if it is an ailment. I'd say that when we leave is entirely up to the kloatraz's personal physician."

  21

  In the Kloa Common, the transmitter frame was poised at the top of its tracks, ready to plunge to the bottom. In the ship, the receiving frame surrounded a bed of soil that had been placed in the bottom of the largest hold for the kloatraz to rest on.

  Malina was watching from the cargo master's control room, which was crowded with engineers. They consulted their instruments, the word "Ready" was spoken, translated through several languages, and finally relayed to the mart.

  Suddenly the kloatraz loomed before them. It looked unchanged and none the worse for being unrooted and snatched into space. The rippling lights flashed as Malina remembered, but there were far fewer of them. Without an army of kloa and a trading empire to direct, the enormous vegetable mind had much less to do - for the kloatraz had turned its unfinished business over to other members of the gesardl, and the Kloa Common was closed.

  Malina went into the cargo hold to scrutinize the pigmented patches, and Darzek followed after her and waited patiently while she conducted her examination. The spots she had treated seemed unchanged. Some of the others obviously were enlarging, and each time she looked there seemed to be more of them.

  "The cargo master's living compartment is adjacent to his control room," Darzek said. "You can take it over, if you like, since you'll be the cargo master on this trip."

  "Thank you. May I have Arluklo?" She felt silly in asking. Now that she knew the kloa were robots, there was no reason to prefer one of a category to another, but Arluklo's real or fancied personality appealed to her.

  "Of course," Darzek said. "He'll be permanently assigned to you.

  We're taking a hundred kloa along. If the kloatraz is able to help us, each scientific project will need a direct link with it, and we want plenty of spares on hand in case of mechanical failure. As soon as you're ready, we'll try some experiments."

  "I'm ready if the kloatraz is."

  Darzek had the temperature, air pressure, and gravity moderately raised and lowered, and the kloatraz seemed not to notice. "Tomorrow we'll do it more drastically," he told Malina.

  With her patient restored to her, she spent hours circling the massive form and making sketches. No system of photography available at the mart was able to delineate the spots to her satisfaction, so she produced her own map and divided it into zones so she could test and compare the effectiveness of different medications. While she worked, the rippling lights continued to wax and wane. All of the recordings Darzek had brought with him were being shown in· a special scientific common in the forward part of the ship. The kloatraz had asked to see them, and it was viewing them through the eyes of a circle of watchful kloa.

  When Malina finished her drawing, she initiated her first therapeutic regimen. She carefully instructed Arluklo in the application of sprays and ointments, and as soon as she was satisfied that he could proceed without supervision, she returned to the mart. She wanted to spend as much time as possible with her children before she left. She also wanted to visit the Kloa Common again and see the roots left behind by the kloatraz.

  She took Brian and Maia with her, and the three of them prowled about the mammoth excavation. Darzek's scientists had been there ahead of them to lay bare the upper ends of the roots and study them. The central root was a gigantic protrusion some ten meters across, and the center one third of all the roots was hollow and lined with clusters of fine filaments.

  Maia said suddenly, "What smells, Mama?"

  Malina bent over and took a careful whiff. Then, with the children scrambling after her and asking what was wrong, she dashed off to find Jan Darzek. "Those roots have started to rot!" she exclaimed.

  He scratched his head perplexedly. "Does it matter? The kloatraz won't be needing them again. It says it can grow new roots when it gets back."

  "Don't you know what happens to vegetables when they're picked? Sooner or later, if they aren't preserved in some way, they rot."

  Darzek pursed his lips to form a long, silent whistle. "Bu1 wouldn't the kloatraz be aware of that and tell us if there was any danger?"

  "How could it know? It's never been picked before. I'd suggest no more experiments with high temperatures. As quickly as possible we should establish a low-temperature environment for it."

  Darzek said slowly, "Of course it's true that most bacteria would be inhibited by cold, but that doesn't mean - "

  "It means we'll play the odds," Malina said. "There isn't time to study all of a kloatraz's bacteria, and even if there were I wouldn't know how to begin. I have a couple of fine collections, grown from skin scrapings, and if those specimens had heads and tails I still wouldn't be able to make head or tail of them. Most bacteria are inhibited by cold temperatures, so we'll play the odds."

  "All right. But remember - the condition you're trying to treat was present before the kloatraz unrooted itself."

  "I'll remember. Let's not do anything to make it worse."

  The arena no longer seemed the same. The kloa, so easily overlooked when they were numerous, now were startlingly conspicuous in their absence. Malina had to take Miss Schlupe with her everywhere, as an interpreter. The two of them prowled about the arena seeking out life forms that professed to have smatterings of medical knowledge and quizzing them about products available at the mart that might have medicinal qualities. Darzek had given Malina a special cargo compartment for medical supplies, and she laid in huge stocks of everything she or anyone else could think of that might be useful. The quantity of her own medical supplies, which had seemed so lavish back on Earth, already was proving sadly inadequate. When she'd made her selections, she hadn't considered the possibility of having to experiment on acres of epidermis of unknown structure.

  Between speculations in extraterrestrial herbal medicines, pondering the strange bacteria that continued to grow in her pseudosalami cultures, and enjoying her children, she made regular visits to the spaceship Behemoth. A series of careful experiments established the kloatraz's preference for a temperature a few degrees above freezing and an atmosphere of twenty per cent Monturan normal.

  "Its range of tolerance must be highly unusual for a life form," Malina observed.

  "The highly unusual shouldn't be surprising in a creature we already know is unique," Darzek said.

  Suddenly it was ti
me to leave. Her patient was neither better nor worse for its change of environment, and Montura Mart could offer nothing more that seemed of any possible use. Malina took her children for a last romp in the park and was both delighted and pained at the brave manner with which they parted from her. Miss Schlupe embraced her and wished her luck, and E-Wusk fluttered his limbs at her in what she assumed was a benediction.

  While they were meeting the Udef head on, E-Wusk, with URSDwad's assistance, would direct the operation planned to alert a galaxy. Miss Schlupe would continue to run her refreshment stand. It was an invidious comparison. If it hadn't been for the children, Malina thought, Miss Schlupe certainly would have insisted on coming along.

  She put Montura and its mart behind her and moved into the cargo master's living quarters; and she was already at work on her patient when the ship made its first transmitting leap.

  She quickly settled into a routine. In the low gravity she could have inspected much of the kloatraz's surface by leaping, but tabulating conditions while floating past the patient was not her idea of how to conduct a medical examination. The ship's crew ingeniously rigged a chair for her that was suspended from an oblong spiraling track at the top of the hold. Once she had mastered the controls, she could raise and lower herself and move completely around the kloatraz. She had a small staff of crewmen and scientists, life forms with varying physical and mental talents, to call on when she needed them, but she preferred to work alone with Arluklo. Bundled up heavily because of the low temperature, wearing a special oxygen mask because of the thin air, she spent most of her waking hours in the cargo hold.

  The kloatraz was constantly alert, its lights rippling and flashing, and in each of the rooms with transparent walls overlooking the cargo hold, Malina could see an assortment of diligent monsters hard at work - presumably in response to instructions originating in some part of the pattern of flashing lights as interpreted by the klo that worked with each group. These scientists, and others Malina could not see, were producing working drawings of mysterious, horrendously complex and incomprehensible instruments. These were to be translated into unlikely looking gadgetry in the ship's instrument shop, and once the kloatraz had approved them they would be produced in quantity for distribution to the ships of Darzek's fleet.

  When Malina stood at her own transparent wall brooding over her patient, she could see engineers and scientists in some of the rooms on the opposite side of the hold also looking out at the kloatraz and performing their own brooding. But what they were brooding over did not concern her, and on the infrequent occasions when she saw Jan Darzek, she was not interested enough to ask him what=progress he was making.

  Her patient's spots were slowly enlarging, and it had begun to slough skin. The discard, a parchment-like membrane of dead cells, quickly became putrefied in the cargo control room, which she had converted to a laboratory. The kloatraz's stoic, almost non-committal acknowledgments that it felt discomfort in the sloughed areas came more and more frequently - and no wonder, since the sloughing left raw, denuded areas that oozed a strongly acid, colorless fluid.

  She still had no inkling whether the disease centered in the outer epidermis or whether the condition she was treating was only a symptom. She systematically concocted sprays and ointments with which to treat the spots. These she tested experimentally, several at a time, in different zones of her map, and several at a time she rejected them. The spots continued to enlarge and slough alarmingly.

  With a human patient, she would have inquired into his diet. She began to wonder about the kloatraz's diet. Since it had roots, it must have derived its nourishment from the soil - but what nourishment, and how could it survive now, without roots?

  She asked Arluklo and learned that Jan Darzek already had investigated this point. The kloa had been adding nutritional supplements to the soil the kloatraz rested on for longer than anyone could remember. They would continue to do so. Once every ten days, Monturan time, several bags of a powdery substance would be spread about the base of the kloatraz on its bed of soil and thoroughly soaked with water. When Malina asked Darzek what the substance was, he answered, "Fertilizer." She asked Darzek's scientists for a chemical analysis, but their terminology and symbols were incomprehensible to her. At least she had the assurance that there had been no recent change in her patient's diet.

  The one positive thing she learned was something she should not do. She applied a steroid compound to a spot, and the gigantic form instantly blazed with light while Arluklo suddenly shouted at the top of his piping voice, "No! No!"

  She worked frantically with swabs and sprays to dilute the compound and remove it, and the light gradually subsided. Darzek came and watched her and said nothing at all, for which she was grateful. The brown spot she had been treating turned a flaming red and the following day was encrusted. When: the scab detached, the spot had vanished, but she did not know whether she had cured it or merely eradicated it by permanently damaging the tissue.

  She had learned a lesson. After that she never tried anything without having several countermeasures on hand and ready to use.

  She continued to perform experiments. She would ask Arluklo to shout the moment the kloatraz felt anything, and then she would apply medication in small quantities: a drop of oil to a sloughed area; a drop to a nearby unaffected area. The kloatraz seemed to feel nothing at all unless the reaction was violently painful. If anything eased the discomfort it felt in the increasingly hideous, raw, oozing sores left when the skin sloughed, she was unable to find it.

  Scientists and members of the crew came occasionally to watch her work, sometimes arriving in the cargo control room by transmitter, and sometimes entering the hold by way of a door on the opposite side. Her own routine centered on the kloatraz, and she went nowhere except the cargo hold, the cargo control room, and - to eat and sleep - her living quarters. She had brought a stock of the Earth canned goods with her. She hastily prepared a light meal when she felt like eating; she slept only when exhausted.

  Otherwise, her patient obsessed her. For hours at a time she sat on a hassock in the cargo control room, worrying; or, bundled up and wearing her oxygen mask, she slowly circled the kloatraz at a dizzying height in her suspended chair or stared long at one particular spot, trying to think of some new experiment to perform. She had to have a piggyback seat made for Arluklo so he could ride aloft with her - she could not hear his piping responses from so far below.

  As she worked, she questioned Arluklo incessantly: Did the kloatraz feel anything when she applied this spray? Had it ever tried to move an area of epidermis? Did it have muscles or anything comparable that could control a part of its body? Could it feel the swab she was using? Could it light its lights at will?

  This last question so intrigued her that she pretended to need more light for a special experiment she was conducting and asked the kloatraz to light up the hold for her, but it could not or would not.

  They were traveling across the Large Magellanic Cloud in enormous transmitting leaps; her own progress seemed non - existent. Having failed utterly with ointments, she returned to sprays with an equal lack of success until it occurred to her to try a heated buffer solution. For the first time the sloughing seemed to be arrested, and the sloughed areas very slowly began to form crusts.

  Then Jan Darzek came and asked her, "Have you been doing anything different lately?"

  She described her new technique and its results. She thought she had succeeded in stabilizing the kloatraz's condition in the test areas, and she was about to try the technique on a larger scale.…

  "It's virtually stopped working for us," Darzek said. "What do you mean?" she asked.

  "It was evolving an interlinked instrumentation, stage by stage, and my scientists thought they were finally on the way to something really significant. Suddenly it reversed itself and started redesigning what it had done earlier."

  Malina withheld her special treatment. To her complete mystification, the hea
ling process she thought she had started spread to untreated areas. To Darzek's mystification, the kloatraz seemed unable or unwilling to return to its grandiose instrumentation project. "It seems to have lost interest," he said.

  Malina was in the cargo hold meditating methods of applying heat directly - was there, anywhere on board, the equivalent of a kloatrazsized hot water bottle? - when Darzek, bundled up and wearing his own oxygen mask, joined her. He was carrying a focused-beam handlight, and he stepped back and aimed its spot illumination at a point midway up the kIoatraz's side.

  "Don't say anything," he said. "See that place?"

  “I - "

  "Don't say anything! Are you looking where the light points?"

  She nodded.

  "Keep watching that place." He switched off the light. "Now - say something."

  She spoke resentfully. "What do you want me to say?"

  "Did you see it? No? Then say something more. Recite a poem”. She said, feeling ludicrous, "Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece - " Now she saw it. When she spoke, light flashed dimly in the area