The Visitors (short story)

by Matthew Holley

cautiously placing the morsel in their mouth and anticipating the worst but, to their surprise and delight, it was very sweet and had a delightful taste. Toomol smiled when he saw the pleasure on each of the visitor’s faces as they ate.

  “Auchoo!” One of the visitors sneezed.

  “They’re not so different from us, are they? They sneeze like we do,” Talamorsa said to Toomol.

  “Yes, but our littlest son sneezes louder than that!”

  “Well, they have such little noses. You can’t expect them to sneeze very loud.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Where are you taking them next?” Talamorsa asked.

  “I’ll show them the rest of the village and then tomorrow I’ll show them the village of Wasache since it’s so much bigger than this village; more there to show them.”

  After they ate, Toomol did as he said he would and showed the visitors the rest of the village of Chechala. He then escorted them back to their craft and explained to them the best he could that he would return when the sun starts to rise again.

  The next day, the visitors were taken on a tour of Wasache. They were shown medical facilities, farms, parks, schools, and everything the village had to offer. In return, the visitors gave Toomol and a few elders a tour of the inside of their craft. Toomol was elated at seeing the visitor’s engineering technology and wished to himself that the elders might become as excited and perhaps be inspired by this new technology as he was and allow him to start researching it and build similar technology. But alas, the elders were set in their ways and still forbade Toomol from building such “wasteful things”. Meanwhile, Charlas continued to teach the female visitor how to read and write their language.

  Four days had passed since the visitors had arrived. Talamorsa was busy at her medical facility when she heard her name being urgently called from outside.

  “TALAMORSA! TALAMORSA!” cried Nuz as he rode up to the facility.

  Talamorsa rushed outside to see who was crying her name. “Nuz, what's wrong!?” she asked as Nuz was jumping off his owachi and running towards her.

  “There’re a bunch of folks sick in Chechala! Their skin is real hot and some of them won’t wake up!”

  “I’ll get my bag and meet you there. Let them know I’m on my way.”

  “Okay,” Nuz said and jumped back on his owachi and rode as fast as he could to the village of Chechala. Talamorsa and a couple of her assistants were not far behind.

  After arriving in Chechala, Talamorsa stepped inside of a make-shift infirmary where she saw over thirty people, mostly children, lying in cots. The sight of so many patients stunned her for a moment for sickness was very rare among her people. Talamorsa barely treated thirty patients annually and most of those were injuries from accidents. She took a deep breath and began triage of all the patients trying to determine which ones needed her attention first.

  “How many patients do we have here?” Talamorsa asked one of the nurses.

  “We had thirty six but, sadly, we lost three this morning….three children!” the nurse said with a broken voice and tears in her eyes.

  Just then a family brought in two of their children, both obviously very sick and too weak to walk on their own without assistance. The faces of the parents were full of fear and worry. Word had already spread throughout the village that three children had died. Talamorsa immediately began diagnosing the two children.

  All the patients were running very high temperatures, ached all over their bodies, and eventually fell into unconsciousness as their body temperature continued to rise. Talamorsa suspected this increasingly rising body temperature resulted in the death of the three children and if she did not figure out what was causing it, they would not be the only victims.

  Talamorsa ordered five of the worst patients to be taken to her medical facility in Wasache which was better equipped to diagnose the cause of this outbreak. On they way back to her village, she passed more villagers with stories of other victims. She realized this thing was spreading and quickly turning into an epidemic.

  She worked feverously to find the cause of the sickness that was sweeping across the nearby villages, causing panic and grief for the inhabitants. She ran every test she could think of, but with no results. It wasn’t until she began to look at blood samples from the victims that she discovered something she had never seen before.

  Within the samples of blood were miniature organisms wreaking havoc on the blood cells. As a medical physician, she had never seen such “creatures” as these. Talamorsa quickly began taking other samples from her patients such as saliva samples and skin samples and found, to her horror, they too all contained these miniature creatures. After further study, she concluded that these foreign creatures were destroying her patient’s immune system. There bodies simple could not fight off the invaders.

  The nearby mountainous village of Yod grew a powerful herbal plant which was used centuries ago to cure all sorts of diseases. The plant, called Sethian, was ground into a powder, dissolved in liquid, and drank. After its discovery and wide spread use, there had been no more diseases or sickness for centuries.

  Talamorsa began rummaging through her back room storage shelf where she knew she had a sample of Sethian which was given to all medical personnel, whom passed the required test to become a physician, as a symbol of health and good luck. After several minutes of frantic searching, she finally found the container of powder glued to a congratulatory plaque. She hoped it was still good after all these years.

  She mixed the powder in a saline solution and administered the medicine through an intravenous line to her patients. She then placed them into an ionic shower to destroy all the organisms living on the outside of their bodies. After reexamining the patients, she found the ionic shower had worked at killing the external organisms. She now had to wait to see if the herbal properties of the Sethian plant would work internally.

  After four hours, the high temperatures of all the patients returned to normal and after five hours the patients began to regain consciousness. Talamorsa reexamined her patients and found them to be in excellent health with no side effects from the invasion of the organisms. The Sethian plant had worked its magic as it had with their ancestors. Talamorsa sent word to all medical personnel through each village to go to the foothills where the Sethian plant grew, collect them, and administer them to all residents. She then ordered everyone to go to the nearest medical facility and use their ionic showers.

  While Talamorsa was preparing her facility for the country wide inoculations, several elders entered the facility.

  “Do you know what caused this deadly outbreak?” one of the elders asked.

  “It was caused by several different kinds of small organisms.”

  “Where did these organisms come from?” another elder asked sternly.

  “I’m not certain, as of yet.”

  “But you have your suspicion, don’t you?”

  “Of, course. The same one you obviously have; that the organisms came from the visitors. I will send for the visitors and examine them if they are willing.”

  “If they are willing! You will examine them if we have to tie them down! This outbreak caused the death of twenty one people, fifteen of whom were children, in just four days! If you hadn’t found a solution, this outbreak would have killed us all in a few weeks! And I don't have to tell you that Sethian is a rare plant, only growing in one place. Another outbreak like this one and it would all be used up,” one of the elders argued with an anger that Talamorsa had never seen an elder demonstrate.

  Another elder jumped in to allow the first elder a chance to calm down. “We would never want to force anyone to do anything against their will, but this problem is greater than our beliefs. We must act quickly for our whole society may be at risk.”

  Just then all twelve visitors were escorted into the room with confusion and apprehension showing on their faces.

  “We already anticipated the need to examine the visitors and had them
sent here," An elder informed Talamorsa. "Please start running your test.”

  The elders stayed in the room during the whole examination process of the visitors. Talamorsa took hair samples and skin samples and found the same miniature organisms as were found on her patients. She then took blood and saliva samples and also found organisms in them.

  “They’re the cause of the outbreak, are they not?” one of the elders asked.

  “Yes,” Talamorsa reluctantly said.

  “Inoculate them!” the angry elder ordered.

  “But we don’t know what it might do to them!”

  “We can’t risk another outbreak! Inoculated them for the sake of our people; for the sake of our children!”

  Talamorsa did as she was ordered. Harming another creature was against all of her beliefs and convictions but an order from an elder was the law. It must be obeyed for the consequences for disobeying could be great.

  She gave each of the visitors a vile of the Sethian powder mix to drink and then ran each of them through the ionic shower. The visitors showed concern and a little fear but they were cooperative and seemed to understand how imperative it was to stop this spread of death. After the ionic shower, Talamorsa searched for organism on their bodies and found none and, after a day of observation, the organisms inside each of the visitor’s bodies had died as well.

  The visitors were then quarantined inside their craft by order of the elders