by Jean Lorrah
“Why, if this lady of the lovely eyes showed ‘er entire face, you might not be the prettiest girl here anymore,” answered a male voice, speaking English with an accent that reminded T’Pina slightly of Dr. Corrigan’s, but yet was not the same.
“Then how could you be my best girl?” the voice continued. T’Pina turned as Ziona shot past her to jump into the arms of a man who appeared to be Human, but …
He was not quite a head taller than T’Pina, somewhere around average for a Human male. His hair was black, close-cropped, but thick and fine—as if, were she to touch it, it would feel like fur. His face was rather ordinary, except for his eyes, which were the darkest, most vivid blue she had ever seen, and fringed with thick black lashes.
It was his skin that suggested he was not fully Human; he was clearly not ill, and yet his skin was pale, utterly unblemished, almost translucent, with just the slightest hint of green.
Then he smiled, and his face was no longer ordinary at all, but mobile and charming. “Beau Deaver,” he introduced himself, “and unlike you, I’m in here because I have to be.” At her raised eyebrow, he laughed. “Half Human, half Orion, and how me mum ‘n dad arranged the technology for that’s such a well-kept secret even I don’t know. But here I am. There’s them as say I’m the worst of both worlds, especially when it comes to a weakness for beautiful women.”
“I am T’Pina,” she replied, uncertain how to respond to his strange introduction, “and I am Vulcan, although I have lived most of my life on Nisus. How is it I have not met you before?” she asked, certain she would not have forgotten such a unique individual.
“Only been here two years,” he replied, sitting down at one of the tables, Ziona on his lap. “Bumped all over the Federation as a boy. Me dad was a free trader.”
T’Pina understood that common euphemism: smuggler. “But you are a scientist,” she said, taking the opportunity to sit for a moment. Why else would he be on Nisus?
“Mathematician—inherited me dad’s ability to juggle numbers, it seems. Woulda followed in his footsteps, ‘cept that when I was fourteen or so we had an unexpectedly protracted stay on the planet Sofia. You know Sofia? You wouldn’t want to know Sofia,” he continued, not giving her a chance to reply.
As Ziona was now sitting happily on Deaver’s lap, listening to him in fascination, T’Pina did not attempt to interrupt his monologue. It was the first time the child had stopped crying all morning.
“Me mum got work as a dancer,” Deaver continued, making T’Pina realize that “protracted stay” meant his father had been incarcerated, “but the truant officers rounded me up and made me go to school—first time in me life, an’ a grand time I had of it too! Not that my teachers had such a good time, mind you. But me mum and dad had only taught me to read an’ count an’ inveigle whatever I wanted out of a computer. On Sofia I found great stuff to learn —’specially numbers.”
As he spoke, Deaver bounced Ziona on his knee, making her giggle. Other children were watching now as he told her, “That’s right—found out numbers are fun. Want me to show you?”
“Yes!” said the little girl, nodding her head vigorously.
Deaver held up his hands. “How many fingers do I have, Ziona?”
“Ten,” she responded, “same as me!”
“No,” he said, “I have eleven fingers.”
“Do not!” Ziona protested.
“Yes I do.”
“Do not!” Ziona insisted. “I c’n count that good!”
“I can prove it. Shall I show you?”
“Yeah!”
First Deaver counted all his fingers, starting with his right-hand thumb and ending with his left-hand smallest finger. “—eight, nine, ten. You see ten fingers, right?”
“Right!” Ziona nodded eager agreement. By this time there was an audience of boys and girls gathered around them. T’Pina realized that Deaver was well known and popular with all the children.
Now he held up his right hand. “How many fingers on this one?”
“Five!” Ziona said triumphantly.
“All right. Now, we just counted the ones on the other hand—but let’s make sure.” This time he began with the small finger. “Ten … nine … eight… seven … six”—which brought him back to his thumb—”and five on this one.” He held up his right hand again. “How much is six and five?”
Ziona’s eyes widened in utter bewilderment. “Eleven!”
“What did I tell you?” Deaver asked.
“How did you do that?” Ziona demanded, her bewilderment turning to delight. She grasped his hands, examining them as if she truly expected to find an eleventh finger lurking somewhere.
“Here,” Deaver replied, “I’ll teach you on your hands, and then when you go home you can tell your mum and dad that while you were in hospital you grew an extra finger.”
It took Ziona three tries before she got the trick right, but when she did she burst into a fit of giggles. “I gotta show Dominic!” she said, sliding off Deaver’s lap and running off to find her friend. The other children who had been watching also hurried away, and T’Pina knew the trick would be played on every child there before evening.
When the children had scattered, T’Pina asked, “Is that what you learned on Sofia—children’s games with numbers?”
“Nah, that was one of me dad’s old tricks. On Sofia I discovered mathematics—the inside of everything in the universe. By the time I got into calculus and quantum mechanics, I didn’t have time for pickin’ locks or booby-trappin’ the principal’s desk chair anymore. We was stuck there for two years—nor nobody was as surprised as me when I won the quadrant maths prize! Got me a full scholarship to any university in the Federation; they was fightin’ over me!” He laughed. “You coulda knocked me dad over with a feather. He always said I’d amount to nothin’, that I was just something to keep me mum occupied.”
“What university did you choose?” T’Pina asked.
“Always wanted t’see Earth—me dad had enemies in that neck of the Federation—so I tried MIT first. Spent two years there, one term at Oxford, where the tutors kep’ raisin’ objections to the way I talk, an’ then I went off to Corona, to the Royal Academy, where I finished my degree—to me own surprise as much as the faculty’s!”
T’Pina was impressed: if there was any institution in the Federation to rival the Vulcan Academy in the areas of science and mathematics, it was the Royal Academy of Corona.
But Deaver was saying, “Beware of mathematics, Lady T’Pina. Tis an addiction gets in yer blood and don’t let go. I find a corollary to T’Prol’s Functions —just playin’ around for me own amusement, you understand—and next thing I know I’ve got a teaching fellowship at the Vulcan Academy!”
“You’ve taught at the Vulcan Academy?” T’Pina suddenly wondered if he was lying—perhaps everything he had said was a lie, or a trick of language such as he had shown Ziona.
But Deaver answered her question. “For a year. Kinda fun bein’ on the other side of the desk.”
“I have been at the Vulcan Academy for the past three years,” said T’Pina. “I just graduated.”
“It was before your time, then—seven Federation Standard Years ago. I liked the people there—you Vulcans keep a man on his toes, and there were folks from all over the galaxy, just like here. Tell me something,” he added, looking her up and down as if he could tell all about her appearance, swathed as she was in protective gear, “does the Vulcan Academy have a beauty requirement for the women it admits?”
“What?”
“Listen, all the time I was there, I never saw a woman who wouldn’t win best of breed. Even the Tellarite females were, um, not ugly, anyway. And every last one of ‘em’s got a brain—thinkin’ man’s paradise! If I could’ve took the heat and the gravity, I’d be there yet.”
“Indeed,” T’Pina said flatly. She did not approve of the turn the conversation had taken. “If you will excuse me, Mr. Deaver—”
“Beau,�
� he said. “And please, sit back down, Lady T’Pina. Some kid’ll be screamin’ for attention soon enough.”
“The children who scream are not always the ones requiring attention,” she said, walking over to the soft-sided pens near the windows, where toddlers played in the sunshine. She laid a thermometer patch on each child’s forehead, checking his tag to determine his normal temperature, for each of these children was unique. “And if you spent a year on Vulcan, you should know that it is not proper to address me as ‘lady,’“ she added as Deaver followed and knelt beside her.
“Ah … not yet. You are younger than I thought, then,” he said, touching the cheek of a sleeping child with the back of his hand. “That means you are even braver than I thought. Why have you volunteered to work in here, among us pariahs?” Automatically, he collected toys the children had thrown out and dropped them back into the pens.
“The work needs to be done,” T’Pina explained. “I do not have the experience to be useful in the laboratories under these emergency conditions. Therefore—”
“Therefore you doubly risk your life?”
“I am protected.”
“Ziona almost pulled your mask off today.” A little boy who looked to be mostly Tellarite held out his arms and pleaded with soft cries. Deaver picked him up, bounced him a little, laid his cheek against the child’s, then tickled him into helpless giggles before he put himback down in the pen.
“A thermometer is a much more accurate way to check for fever than touching a child,” T’Pina told him.
“Not to my mum. Three different temperatures, her, me dad, an’ me—an’ she could always tell when t’start cookin’ up chicken soup. Plomeek soup to you, ma’am.”
“I am familiar with the Human dish,” T’Pina told him. “Like plomeek soup, folk wisdom traditionally endowed it with great curative powers—and modern medicine has shown that it is similarly antibiotic and symptom specific. However—”
“T’Pina!”
Leyne Sweet, called “Sugar” by her Human friends, was hurrying across the cafeteria, her posture and the fact that she ignored the children who tried to attract her attention telling T’Pina that she brought important news. Like T’Pina, Sugar was a volunteer here because she didn’t yet have the experience to do the other work of value in trying to stop the plague. And, like T’Pina, she was willing to do anything she could to preserve her home.
A lock of dark hair had escaped from beneath Sugar’s protective cap and was falling into her eyes.
Just as she reached them, her hand rose automatically to tuck the hair back. Both Beau Deaver and T’Pina exclaimed, “No!” and reached to capture the errant hand just before it touched her bare forehead.
Deaver’s hand closed over T’Pina’s on Sugar’s wrist. Even through the protective glove, she felt his alien coolness—and with it an almost electric shock.
They stared at each other for one moment.
Sugar didn’t notice. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, staring at her hand, spreading her fingers as T’Pina and Deaver let their hands drop away. “Thank you,” she said. Then she looked at T’Pina, whom she had known all her life. They had grown up neighbors. “T’Pina, it’s your mother. She collapsed at her work —they think it’s the first or second strain, not the third. She has a good chance of recovery, but—”
“I will go to her,” said T’Pina, every other thought gone instantly out of her mind.
The disease was now attacking T’Kar—the only family T’Pina had left.
Chapter Twenty-four
Sorel ran his medscanner over T’Kar. She had a soaring fever, but otherwise her readings were normal. “Do you have pain?” he asked.
“I can control,” she replied.
“We will administer a broad-spectrum antiviral agent, and then I will help you achieve healing trance.”
T’Kar nodded weakly. She was a nurse; she understood the dangers of the trance under these conditions.
There were no diagnostic beds available; they were all in use by patients currently in critical condition. If it turned out T’Kar had contracted Strain B, she would not be in any danger for three more days, and her strength would be enhanced if she spent those days in healing trance.
Without the diagnostic bed, however, there would be no warning if she went into systemic failure before the time it was to be expected. AH patients in this wing would be routinely scanned every hour; there were not enough nurses or technicians to do it more often.
If her heart or lungs failed, though, T’Kar would die in minutes, for no Vulcan could come out of healing trance by himself. For that reason, healers always putpatients in healing trance into automatic diagnostic units.
And … what if T’Kar’s illness were not Strain A or B as it appeared? She had been working for days among the Nisus residents of mixed heritage—what if this were some new strain, masking itself in the early symptoms of less dangerous ones? The pathology laboratory was hopelessly backlogged; it would be hours before any report came on T’Kar’s culture.
Sorel found that logic did not govern his reaction to T’Kar’s illness. He had come to know her better on the journey here, found her interesting and intelligent, seen her handle her daughter’s newfound maturity with wisdom and sensitivity. He liked the daughter, too: well controlled for one so young, yet neither cold nor distant.
Sorel’s own youth was long past—but as time healed the wound of T’Zan’s death, he rediscovered feelings he had once known with his wife. They focused on T’Kar. She was not an ordinary patient to him; he was as concerned as if she were a member of his family.
If T’Kar had lived on Vulcan, and if these had been ordinary times rather than the middle of an epidemic, it would have been entirely logical for Sorel to pursue his acquaintance with T’Kar. A healer, a nurse; a widower, a widow; both from Ancient Families; both with their children grown and educated. It was an entirely suitable match. In ordinary times, if both had been residents of Vulcan, their friends and families would have been arranging every possible means of bringing them together.
But the times were not ordinary.
More important, T’Kar would stay here where her work was, where her daughter was, on Nisus. Eventually, Sorel would return to Vulcan.
And … he had other patients, and other duties beyond patient care. He stood, saying, “I will be back as soon as all your tests have been completed.”
But before he could leave, T’Pina entered, swathed as Sorel was in protective garb. But so had T’Kar been.
If it were Strain A or B, chances were she had caught it while off-duty, indicating that their precautions within the hospital were sufficient. But if it were not—
“Healer,” T’Pina politely acknowledged Sorel, but her attention was on T’Kar. “I am here, Mother.”
“I am pleased thou hast come, child. I am comforted by thy presence,” T’Kar said.
Sorel had been about to leave them to their privacy, but at T’Kar’s tone and language he turned. The formal phrasing indicated that T’Kar gave great importance to the simple words—as if they might be her last. Something was wrong.
Long years of medical experience told Sorel. Filial affection told T’Pina; he saw it in her eyes as she looked at him, then back to her mother.
The younger woman put her gloved hand on her mother’s arm. “Healer!” she exclaimed. “Scan her!”
He was already halfway across the room, scanner out.
T’Kar’s temperature was four degrees below Vulcan normal and dropping! Her eyes had lost their fever brightness, and their blue seemed to drain away to gray even as he watched.
“Mother!” T’Pina gasped.
The scanner showed her heart laboring, faltering.
They could see her gasping for breath, growing weaker—
Sorel hit the Code Blue button on the wall, then turned to his patient, pushing her onto her side so he could gain compression, as he had not so much as a portable stimulator. CPR was much more difficult on a
Vulcan than a Human, for the heart did not lie conveniently beneath the sternum.
The green flush had died out of T’Kar’s face; it paled to waxen yellow. She passed out and stopped breathing.
“No!” T’Pina cried. “Mother! Mother, don’t die!”
With the hospital so overcrowded and equipment limited, patients like T’Kar, who appeared noncritical, were placed in rooms with minimal equipment. Sorel had routinely taken inventory of the room’s supplies when he had entered; he already knew there was no breathing mask. T’Pina wasted no time searching elsewhere: she tore off her protective mask and put her mouth to her mother’s, forcing air into her lungs even as Sorel exclaimed, “T’Pina—no!”
Between breaths, T’Pina raised her head and said, “I won’t let her die!”
It was too late. T’Pina had exposed herself to this new strain of the plague. Sorel continued to pump T’Kar’s heart while T’Pina breathed for her.
The resuscitation team arrived. A Human, a Vulcan, and a Tellarite, they grasped T’Kar with the ease of long practice, laid her in the unit, and while the Human and the Tellarite attached the controls, the Vulcan calibrated the instrumentation to Vulcan norms.
T’Kar lay still, the machine now breathing for her and forcing her heart to beat. But was she alive?
There was only one way for a healer to know, and for that he had to touch his bare hand to her face.
But her daughter would know. Sorel looked to T’Pina, whose whole face he could now see. She looked serene, content. “T’Pina … ?”
“No, Healer. My mother’s katra did not pass to me. She lives.”
Indeed, within half an hour T’Kar’s own system began to struggle against the life-support system. They moved her to a diagnostic bed that became available when another patient died, and within an hour she regained consciousness.
“Where is T’Pina?”
“Unfortunately, in saving your life she was exposed to your illness,” Sorel explained. “She is being examined—and once the symptoms start she will immediately be placed on life support. We won’t be caught off guard again.”
