by Kathy Tyers
Seriously ill, they’d said. Her well-stocked medical imagination furnished the boy-faced CCA with terrible disease symptoms before she squelched it, gripping the stool harder with both feet. The notion of one sick man didn’t have to draw out all her frustrated maternal instincts. Particularly that man. To the mental image she added his pigtailed wife, waiting white-faced with two small daughters in an HMF hallway.
She turned abruptly to Trev. “We should get to work. I have a culture from Varberg you need to grow out. I’ll give you a list of media we’ll need.”
She let him spread out the project there in the communal lab, close to the vidnet terminal.
About an hour later, as she was flicking a sedimentation tube, a sharp tone from the power box made her jump. FreeLand’s face came on-screen again. “Please stand by for a priority announcement,” he said, then vanished.
Graysha glanced around the lab and couldn’t spot Libby or Trev. She pushed up her sleeve, feeling vaguely unwell. Her button said tissue oxygen wasn’t the problem. “Trev?” she called. “Libby, did you hear that?”
Trev leaned out from behind racks of breeding cages, rubbing gloved hands together. “Libby punched out.”
Why hadn’t she told Graysha? “Do me a favor,” she said. “Tell Paul and Jirina—and Dr. Varberg—that the station’s going to run something important.”
“I don’t know why they’d care,” he said, but he strode out through the door.
They clattered in together, as if they’d been talking. Graysha relayed Vice-Chair FreeLand’s fanfare but said nothing about her darker fears. If Goddard did face an epidemic, the microbiology floor would start losing sleep soon enough.
Paul took a seat beside her and peeled off his transparent gloves. “Would you like dinner tonight?” he murmured.
Before she could answer, the screen went from black to full color. “Wait a minute,” she whispered back.
This time, the screen showed a medical station and an HMF staff member leaning against a countertop. Graysha pursed her lips. Surely, if the HMF were preparing to announce a sudden death, its spokesperson would be more formal in posture and location.
“I have been asked to give an update on Chairman DalLierx’s condition,” he said. “The initial diagnosis of acute hypoglycemia has been proved false by pancreatic scan.” The man gripped one hand with the other. “Chairman DalLierx, who has no history of hypoglycemia, remains unstable. Symptoms suggest insulin poisoning, but no insulin source has been identified. Further information will go out over the conventional net.” The spokesman looked aside.
In his silence, Paul rested a hand on the edge of Graysha’s stool, nearly touching her hip. Over a soft pounding in her ears, she heard someone off-camera say something unintelligible. A woman walked into vidi range, and from the strip of cloth tape over her shirt pocket, Graysha recognized her as a D-group squad leader. “Security forces,” she said, “both colonial and Gaea, are being alerted. An investigation will begin immediately.”
The screen went dim again.
Will Varberg threw back his head and laughed. “Now it’s begun!”
“Someone was very stupid.” Paul shook his head, and hair flopped over his ears. “There is nowhere on Goddard for a poisoner to hide. They’ll watch every lift-off for weeks.”
“Remains unstable,” Varberg came back. “Did you catch that? It sounds like maybe they got him. Maybe we’ll be watching elections sooner than we thought.”
Trev looked from one Gaea man to the other, dangling his gloves from one hand. “What jumps you to the conclusion somebody poisoned him?”
“You have some reading to do, LZalle,” called Varberg. “Look it up.”
“Trevish, if his pancreas is normal, then the insulin that’s got him in hypoglycemic shock came from some . . . where . . . else.” Jirina drew out the last words, wagging a finger.
Graysha pulled away from Paul’s hand. Had this kind of callous banter gone on behind her back, too, when she arrived and promptly fell sick? “So we don’t have a mutant virus on our hands,” she choked out in Jirina’s direction.
“No,” she answered. “No, thank the goddess. We figured these people were going to start cockfighting sooner or later. But insulin? We’re talking pre-transplant era.”
“Some people can’t take a graft, just like some can’t take a joke.” Varberg’s nose twitched.
Graysha didn’t follow. “His poor wife,” she murmured.
Jirina tapped one foot. “What have you heard that I haven’t, Blondie?”
“Didn’t someone tell me he had two daughters?”
“Wife’s dead,” said Varberg. “The daughters are baby-farmed.”
“Simple solution,” Paul said, slipping off the stool. Either he’d forgotten dinner or he realized Graysha’s appetite had gone south.
Before she could ask him to explain that statement, Trev yanked his gloves back on and stalked toward the animal cages. “This is crazy,” he said. “It’s inhuman, the whole business. I’ll spend my time with the yabuts.”
“They suit you,” Varberg called.
Trev spun around. “What was that?”
Varberg heaved up out of his big deep chair. “They suit you, LZalle.”
Trev lunged before Graysha could react. Jirina caught Trev just short of contact, one arm back, his lips pulled wide in a grimace. “Easy, Trevish,” she said. “Watch your temper. Varberg, back off. He’s just a kid.”
Trev struggled to pull lose, losing one glove. Jirina held him with no visible effort, but Paul seized his other arm.
Nothing, Graysha decided, was going to go right today. They might as well all go back to the housing wing for naps.
Varberg took one step closer to Trev. Without so much as a backswing, he brought up a fist. It contacted jawbone with a soft thump. Trev crumpled jelly-legged.
Graysha squeaked surprise and ran to kneel beside the youth. A trickle of blood started from his chin. He shook his head.
Jirina stood above them with her arms stiffly extended. When Varberg sidled closer, she kicked toward his thigh but pulled back centimeters from striking. “All right, Varberg, we all know he’s been asking for discipline,” she said in a knife-bladed voice. “But next time, don’t take him when I’m holding him for you.” Graysha felt the wind when Jirina turned and strode out. Varberg rolled his eyes, then followed her.
Paul snatched a towel off the clean pile, bent down, and pressed it against Trev’s bloody chin. “It’s just a cut from Varberg’s ring,” Paul said softly. “Let me take care of him. I don’t think he’s going to want mothering.”
He had a point. Graysha used a countertop to pull herself back up. Biting her upper lip, she reached toward a coffee cup, then changed her mind. Pouring coffee into her churning stomach could give her an ulcer. Out one corner of her eye, she saw Paul help Trev to his feet and guide him out of the lab.
If Varberg had a submerged personality, that agonized specter had just surfaced to breathe.
Half an hour later in the solitude of her office, she dimmed the window so she would not see the dark sky, then sat down on her desk chair, curled her body forward, and stayed there. God, if you exist, don’t let that man die. She’d expected hazardous duty. She hadn’t expected to land in the middle of a war zone.
She shut down her computer, hung her lab coat on the inside of the door, and strode to the elevator. Crossing the chilly hub’s corner toward Gaea housing, she eyed the bright red Health Maintenance Facility door. On impulse, she walked in.
Ethanol and phenol—she wouldn’t forget that smell.
A man at the front desk looked up.
“I’m Dr. Brady-Phillips,” she said, not quite sure how to do this. “I’d . . . like to leave a message for Chairman DalLierx, if I might.”
“He’s not allowed visitors.” The man looked professionally emotionless, from his firmly folded hands to his blank stare.
“I’m sure he’s not.” Graysha tugged an
itchy side seam of her pants. “Can you say . . . is he any better?”
The man unbent enough to purse his lips. “Hard to tell, Dr. Brady-Phillips.”
Staff not allowed to give information except to family members: standard procedure.
Those poor little girls. Mother dead, father . . .
She mustn’t think dying. No one had said that.
Still, insulin poisoning sounded serious. “May I leave a goodwill message?”
“By all means.” The receptionist gestured toward a concrete desk along the nearest wall.
Graysha took the hard seat, stared at the keyboard, and wondered what she wanted to say. That she would pray for him? She didn’t want to affront his mysterious Lwuite religion by using an inappropriate term. She stood again. The man glanced in her direction.
“I’ll send something on the net,” she said.
From her rooms, she gave it a try. Her first attempt to compose a note sounded condescending, the second, cold. The third filled her screen twice but showed only ineptitude at communicating with strangers.
Then be brief, she thought.
She shook out her hands and tried again.
Chairman DalLierx:
My prayers for your health.
Illegitimati non carborundum.
Get ’em.
Sincerely,
Graysha Brady-Phillips
She hoped he would know the old Latin joke. At least she might make him understand she didn’t wish him ill. Deciding she was unlikely to do better, she touched the Send button. With the deed done and the HMF holding the message until he was able to read, she had the rest of the afternoon with nothing to do.
She curled around Emmer on the bed, stroked her long enough to wake her up, then fed her a crumb of cheese. The little creature delicately lipped the crumb, then wrapped a pink tongue around it and sucked it down, clicking the whole time.
Graysha sighed. She had no desire to return to work, not until the men settled their differences. Her apartment felt bare and confining, though.
If Varberg’s hold on sanity was slipping, had he tried to murder Chairman DalLierx? The entire micro floor knew DalLierx had sentenced Varberg to serve an additional half G-year at the end of his triannum—during which time his salary would be sent to Mahera’s family as compensation.
But that was only a hand slap. G-years were brief, just over 190 circadays.
She pulled on a short jacket, arranged Emmer on the collar and opened her door again. The corridor was empty. Graysha turned right, toward huge barrier doors between Housing and the cool hub. Passing through, she inhaled the damp, soil-rich odor of the central parkland. She hadn’t taken samples from planters here, and she ought to check their microbial pops.
Beside a slender willow beginning to bend from its own weight, she sank onto a bench, hands in her jacket pockets. She thought about showing Emmer the truly warm water-purification sanctum, so different from the barren wilds outside Axis Crater, but she didn’t feel like walking all the way to Wastewater. Emmer would only sniff, nibble, and sleep some more.
She crossed her ankles under the bench and reminded herself that solitude was better company than the wrong people. Eyeing the north arch, she wished a crèche couple might bring through a troop of young noise-makers. In a way, the hub represented Goddard’s future, full of warm fertility and promise.
And above, now, it was all barren ground. Graysha rubbed her stiff neck. At times like this, with her spirits low, she felt like barren ground herself, all potential—and useful, in her way—but would her body bear fruit or go as cold as Goddard’s uplands?
Paul Ilizarov had an easy answer for that question. For the moment, she didn’t want it. Pushing off the bench, she cast a last look around the hub and then marched back toward her apartment.
She had reading to do for Duncan and Crys.
―――
Dr. Yael GurEshel frowned down at the patient lying on her ICU cot. Unconscious, DalLierx looked pitiably young, even with a faint black shadow stubbling his cheeks and chin. A muslin sheet draped him from chest to toes. Drip packets of IV glucose and several drugs lay taped against his left arm. A blood-sugar sensor in his other arm fed data to a wall readout. A series of red dots on that wall screen gleamed like tiny drops of blood on a black background. Over the ten-minute period just past, blood sugar had crept upward almost to the normal range—but his condition seesawed wildly, letting him wake and then nearly killing him, over and over.
Come on, she urged the reading, get up there.
DalLierx shook his head and slit one eye open.
The last time, he’d been conscious eight seconds. She braced her arm against the bedstead. “Lindon,” she said sharply, “do you have access to insulin?”
“Insulin,” he murmured. His eyes closed.
He’d winked out again. Hope faded as red dots curved downward one more time.
She bit back unprofessional language, desperate not to lose Axis’s Chairman for Colonial Affairs. His parents had caught a track-truck over from Center, and they waited in an HMF lounge. “Blood insulin,” she said briskly.
A young nurse leaned over, drew blood for the test board, then shook her head. “It’s rising again.”
Yael slapped her palm with a diagnostic imager. Insulin readings were peaking in waves, suggesting an infection of some kind of insulin-producing organism that doubled its population every so often. Under Yael’s direction, the room nurse and lower-floor medtech had run preliminary microbial DNA checks over every accessible centimeter of his body, turning up nothing but normal flora.
If he was fighting an infection, it was going to kill him, because broad-spectrum antibiotics, antivirals, and antifungals weren’t touching it. If it wasn’t an infection, she thought wearily, it would probably take him anyway, because they’d exhausted the med-op database, and though they had several treatments going simultaneously, none of them was breaking the cycle.
What else could she do?
“Medtech,” she called into her intercom, “give me a complete genetic scan of every organism we’ve isolated from Lindon DalLierx in ICU.”
“Complete?” The voice paused. “Yes, Dr. GurEshel. You know that will take six hours.”
Yes, she knew. “Send up each individual scan,” she ordered, “instantly.” Red dots continued to drop.
“I have something,” offered the unit nurse from her station near DalLierx’s cot. “Not much, but something.”
Glad for a distraction, Yael took two steps aside to the terminal.
“I cross-checked records for colonists licensed to maintain insulin-producing colony kits,” said the nurse. “We have a short list—three females with diabetic graft-rejection syndrome. All are members of one family.”
Yael read over her shoulder. “Hmm. Ling HoTung, Chenny HoNin, and Asabi HoLonge. Ling’s the mother—”
“They all live at Hannes Prime,” the nurse pointed out. “It’s extremely unlikely they are involved.”
“Let me . . . Excuse me.” Sitting down on the nurse’s high stool, Yael switched lines and ran a different check. This one alarmed her: Chenny HoNin had recently visited Axis, and upon returning to Hannes Prime, she had reported her medical kit missing. A replacement was cultured from Ling HoTung’s organisms.
“That’s it!” Feeling triumphant, Yael dropped off the stool and pressed an intercom button. She’d worry later about repercussions. “Medtech, I want colony typing for genegineered staphylococcus 6-ICZ. Have Pharm send up any antibiotic specific for it, full dose, stat.”
She looked down at DalLierx again. Surely he would last the five minutes it would take for that antibiotic to arrive, if they had one. The next supply ship would be too late.
Now, with the antibiotic ordered, she could think about forensics. If this antibiotic broke the infection cycle, that would confirm Chenny’s kit as the assailant’s means. But—trying now to work out a means-motive-opportunity triangle—how c
ould she narrow down opportunity to a single occasion? Lindon DalLierx spent time in nearly every locale at Axis Plantation.
As for a motive: Ari MaiJidda, she thought instantly, his newly declared political rival. But that makes no sense. Why would Ari MaiJidda attack Lindon DalLierx when she hoped to beat him in a fair political fight?
Besides, Ari wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to use a bacterial kit to threaten a man’s life. That called for medical knowledge . . . or microbial.
Two people on Gaea’s microbiology floor had reason to resent him. One was Will Varberg, though truly, DalLierx had let him off easy.
The other was Yael’s former patient, the microbiologist who shouldn’t have been hired. If Novia Brady-Phillips’s daughter was a Eugenics Board nettech, she might have come not as a spy but as an assassin.
Insulin Kit
Chenny HoNin agonized over the message on her terminal. Ari’s news floored her. Her lost medical kit had been used for a murder attempt? It was inconceivable she’d been so stupid as to lose the kit. Evidently antibiotic therapy had turned the tide for Lindon at the last possible moment, and for that she breathed a sigh of relief. He would, however, be confined to the HMF for days, to regain some strength.
She flicked at a short braid. Where did she leave the thing? It had been over ten days since she left Axis. She shook her head, trying to remember.
Ari’s last message gleamed. +Give me a list of every place you spent time, even routes you traveled.+ Ari promised to convey that information to D-group personnel assigned to investigate the incident. Chenny had started a list. She reread it, hoping each item might spark one more memory.
+Paul Ilizarov.+ Evidently she’d done Comrade Blue Eyes no favor by keeping him company that evening. He would be under suspicion.
+My temporary quarters were northeast corridor #25.+ The room would be searched, along with housekeeping records of whoever cleaned up after her.
+Business, CA complex.+ That had taken the greater part of her day. Then, +Dinner, Ari MaiJidda.+ At least Ari would be above suspicion. Then, the next morning, +Gaea building. Spoke with Dr. Brady-Phillips.+ That was where I saw Dr. Brady-Phillips, wasn’t it? she wondered.
