23
Almost as if the Universe had intended to offer a counterpoint to our contemplations of wealth and privilege, this run offered a glimpse of the Union’s decidedly less wealthy and privileged. I was about to be thrust into this alien utopia’s seedy underbelly, the kind of place that might spawn either hard-boiled detective novels or tedious “message” fiction.
We’d been called to a colony ship, an ancient one by Bjorn’s reckoning. It had been in transit for centuries, built long before gravity drives and almost-light-speed travel. Technology had leaped ahead generations by the time the travelers were even halfway to their destination, yet they’d elected to stick with the bucket of bolts they’d first set out in.
Imagine this: The Mayflower sets sail for the New World, but instead of a two-month trip, it takes a couple of centuries. Entire generations are born, grow old, and die aboard ship, all the while being isolated by thousands of miles of ocean in all directions. Meanwhile, the Native Americans in New England and the Viking descendants in Newfoundland grow into industrial societies and become friendly. They eventually set out across the ocean in steamships and come across the decrepit Mayflower somewhere in the North Atlantic. They offer to bring its passengers and crew aboard their steamers for a quick, comfortable trip to America, but the hardheaded Pilgrims decline. We’d like to stick to the plan, thank you very much, but we’re happy to partake of some of that wonderful food and medicine you offer.
Imagine being aware the rest of the world has leapfrogged ahead of you, from sailing ships to steam power to internal combustion to nuclear power, and you elect to not participate. It sounded like bad reality-TV fodder: Space Puritans. Amish Aliens. But maybe it is such a cultural shock that it’d be natural to decline that first-class upgrade out of simple fear of the unknown.
It seemed so unlikely in this present case, yet there they were. They’d been at the nuclear stage when they’d left their home star, Tau Ceti, centuries earlier on a quest to settle the galaxy. They’d had the ability back then to identify stars with promising worlds and build ships big and powerful enough to move hundreds of people, along with the ability to grow food. Technology shouldn’t have been a stumbling block for a species capable of building something this big.
And it was indeed a big ship. It was made of six spheres, each one nearly a half-mile in diameter and strung end-to-end, like beads on a necklace. At one end was an enormous device that resembled a mechanical tulip; Bjorn told me it was a fusion rocket engine. Way more advanced than anything humans had ever built, it was still antiquated tech to the Union.
We were close now. Every viewscreen was filled with the Cetan colony ship. I still didn’t know a lot about spaceships, but I knew old and worn-out when I saw it and this one had been put through the wringer. The skin of its six spherical hulls had been battered by slamming into cosmic dust at high speed and were bleached white by centuries of solar radiation. I was afraid we’d break it if Needa took us in too close.
I hovered behind her at the pilot’s station. “I can see that tub wasn’t built with us in mind. How do we get aboard?”
Needa pulled up a diagram of the colony ship. “This is not the first time the Medical Corps has been called to this vessel. They have a landing bay which is large enough to accommodate us, in the central sphere.” She pointed to a series of rectangular openings along the sphere’s equator. “Their terminal guidance is antiquated. But it works.”
I had no doubt that “antiquated” to Needa would be wildly advanced for a human pilot. Outside, the stack of battered white spheres rotated as she pivoted us to align with an open landing bay. Yellow light shone from within, and we were soon inside.
The bay was more like a big garage or airplane hangar on Earth: a little messy, with instructions painted on walls and safety lanes painted on the floor. Equipment cabinets and massive bottles of compressed gasses lined its walls. Wheeled carts trailing power cables and air hoses were scattered around the bay. It all smelled faintly of lubricating oil.
If that all sounds very human, the Cetans themselves resembled us closely enough to give me the willies. They had elongated limbs and torsos, with exaggeratedly large frontal and parietal bones—in essence, big heads for big brains. The Cetans were no dummies, so I had to accept they had their reasons for declining the Union's superior technology.
The call was for what, in humans, superficially sounded like a nuisance condition that didn’t need an ambulance run: fungal infection. Xeelix informed me that this was not going to be a simple case of crotch rot or athlete’s foot. They called it phoetima, which roughly translates into “zombie fungus.”
It worked similarly to the cordyceps fungus that could infect certain insects, taking over the host’s bodily functions as it hollowed them out from inside. Eventually it would kill off the host and use its body’s decomposition to disperse more spores. It was dreadful to see, even in a spider. And I hated spiders.
We all wore environment suits again; there’d never been any such infection in Xeelix’s species, but he wasn't taking any chances with me or Bjorn.
We’d been led from the landing bay to a lift that ran through the center of the sphere, leading to decks that grew smaller as we neared the top of the sphere. The rest of the Cetan colony ship didn’t look much better than the hangar. It was dank and cluttered, the result of generations of use, repair, and reuse. Dents and scrapes, multiple layers of paint, corrosion and mold around the air recyclers gave it the “lived in” feel befitting a ship which in fact had been lived in for centuries.
Our Cetan escorts communicated telepathically like Reticulans, so Xeelix took the information on our patient’s condition and translated for us. I could hear the Cetan’s “voice” in my head, but at this point my translator still couldn’t make heads or tails of it, just random words that didn’t make sense without context. I could tell he was gravely concerned, though. He wore all white with a sunburst crest on his collar, I guessed that signified he was some sort of physician. But that didn’t make sense—if they had their own docs, what did they need us for?
The answer came when he led us to what I gathered was a quarantine room, with two doors to get in and out, basically an airlock. The Cetan opened the outer door and led us into an antechamber, then closed it behind us. He remained conspicuously outside.
“He seems a little jittery. Is he a doctor?”
“Roughly equivalent,” Xeelix said. “And yes, he is ‘jittery’ with good reason. I am familiar with variants of phoetima in other Union races. It is fast-acting, and invariably fatal to Cetans.”
“I don’t understand. Why are we here, if they have their own doctors?”
“This was until recently a novel infection for the Cetans. They did not bring it with them inadvertently, nor did it evolve naturally among them.”
“Where did it come from, then?”
“The Thubans, quite by accident. They were the first Union race to encounter the Cetans. Phoetima is a minor irritant to Thuban scales, but it mutated into something radically different among Cetans. The original outbreak was contained early, before it could infect their entire population. This is the first case they have seen in a generation.”
Xeelix slid the inner door open to what looked amazingly like a hospital room on Earth: a little more advanced, but still wholly recognizable. In the center of the room was a bed surrounded by plastic curtains hung from the ceiling. There was a humanlike silhouette within, a little rough around the edges.
Xeelix stood with a hand on the curtain and studied me with those big almond eyes. “I must warn you, Melanie. This could be unpleasant. You must promise that you will keep your composure and do whatever is necessary.”
How bad was this going to be? I swallowed. “Promise.”
Cordyceps is pretty disgusting just to observe among insects on a nature show. To see something like it in a being approximating a human was nothing short of horrifying.
When Xeelix pulled the curtain aside, we stood before a naked Cetan male strapped into the bed. His skin was discolored in mottled shades of violet, as if his entire body had been bruised from within. Toenails and fingernails had turned into spongy gray masses. And the less said about his genitals, the better. Looked like a mushroom garden, and I’ll leave it at that.
Xeelix pointed at his hands and feet. “The parasite spores first take root in the nail beds, then spread across the body through touch.”
Once he explained that, the pattern of spread was obvious: rubbing his eyes, picking his nose, scratching his junk. The effects on his face were shocking. His eyes had been completely covered (replaced?) by strands of gray fungus. More of the stuff grew out of his ears to encircle the back of his head. Speaking of which, his already large parietal bulge was easily twice its normal size, judging by my embed files and the Cetans we’d passed on our way here. That strongly suggested the fungus was growing inside his brain. He was in the final stages of infection.
I clenched my fists, hard. I was not going to lose my cool. “You said this is their first case in a generation. How did they contain it before?”
“Physical isolation,” Xeelix said. I could sense his remorse. “The outbreak was isolated to the ship’s aft sphere, their engineering section. It thrived in the damp conditions around their air and water recyclers. They were forced to shut off the entire structure until the infection burned itself out.”
“Closing off their engineering section seems drastic. We call it cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
Bjorn considered that. “An apt analogy, but in this case it was their only recourse. The fungus could have killed off their entire ship’s complement, had they not moved so quickly. They would not have lasted for long on secondary and tertiary systems.”
I stared at our patient in grim astonishment, imagining hundreds more like him all confined to one of these spheres. “They left an entire section of their ship to die.” It was that, or expose the whole population. Still . . . “Then what are we here for? I assume it’s because they don’t have a treatment regime.”
“There is no treatment regime once the infection reaches this stage,” Xeelix said. “We were called to make a final assessment and deliver a fungicide. Do you understand the effect this will have on the patient?”
I looked at the infected Cetan, bruised and bulging from the invaders multiplying in his body, waiting to burst out. I didn’t have to consult the embed files; I knew what this would mean. “The fungal infection’s reached his nervous system. It’s probably already taken over, otherwise they wouldn’t need the restraints. If we administer a fungicide at this stage, it’ll kill the host.” I was revolted by my own rationalization—calling our patient a host made it easier to think about.
Xeelix reached into his bag and pulled out a jet-injection syringe. “Do you recall our protocols for administering euthanizing agents?”
I’d hated that class. I detested the whole concept of mercy-killing patients in the field. Yes, we’d learned it in vet school but that had been different—we weren’t putting down sentient creatures. At least we hadn’t thought so; one other accepted truth that was blowing up in my face here among Union civilizations. “Yes,” I finally answered. “Senior medic on scene administers, junior medic monitors.”
“Correct.” Xeelix was an actual doctor by GU standards, so he’d be the one to do the deed. I’d set up the transducers and watch vital signs.
Knowing what the outcome would be, the process of setting up was less rushed and more somber than treating a patient in the field might normally be. Xeelix carefully loaded the vial of fungicide, calibrating its dosage based on the volume we estimated to be eating its way through our patient.
I placed scanning transducers on either side of his head and torso, like setting up an EKG on a human. As they started talking to each other and feeding data to our visors, my translator started chattering at me in a muffled, confused mess of almost-syllables. Xeelix seemed unaffected. I angrily smacked one ear with the palm of my hand—because if you don’t know how to reboot something, just beat on it, I guess—and shot a glance at Bjorn. “I think my implant’s gone screwy.”
Bjorn looked as troubled as I felt. “Your translator is working properly.” He was subdued, his tone detached as if he could somehow keep the awful truth at bay. “The invading fungi has taken root in his nervous system, as Dr. Xeelix suspected.”
That sounded awfully certain coming from someone at the same level of Med Corps training as me. “You’ve seen this before, haven’t you?”
“I have.” He lowered his eyes, focusing on the data crystal recording our patient’s vital signs instead of the patient himself. “After contracting this malady from the Thubans, the Cetans became especially uncomfortable around non-humanoid races. I accompanied the medical response team as their translator. It was a most unpleasant experience, for a number of reasons.” He met my eyes. “I was exposed.”
I considered our patient, a grotesque humanoid caricature of molds, tendrils, and folds of organic matter that belonged on a forest floor—anywhere but in his ears and eye sockets. I turned back to Bjorn, unable to hide my revulsion. “You caught this?”
“I was fortunate that it came after our cohorts had identified the pathogenic mechanism and before it could spread to my nervous system. As I said, it was most unpleasant.”
“Melanie.” Xeelix interrupted our little campfire horror story. “Have you established contact with the patient?”
I turned back to what I should’ve been doing in the first place. “Not certain. It sounds as if he’s trying to get through to us, but I’m having trouble identifying anything.” It didn’t help that our patient was telepathic in a language my implants hadn’t translated into English before.
“That is another sign of late-stage infection, I’m afraid. The spores are competing for dominance over his neurological system.”
“They’re talking?”
“Mimicking, to be precise. Even as a collective organism, they are incapable of independent thought. They are simply imitating characteristics of the host.” Xeelix paused sadly. “The disjointed voice you are hearing is the patient trying to speak.”
Now that was horrifying, an infestation right out of a zombie movie. I screwed my eyes shut, listening anew for anything intelligible from my translator implants.
A disembodied voice formed in my ears: Me . . . help. Late.
My eyes widened. I shot a look at Xeelix. “You heard that too, right?” He answered with a grim nod of his head.
I heard the voice again, weak and muffled, like speaking through a filter as our patient fought to assert control over his own nervous system. “He keeps repeating ‘late’ and ‘help.’”
Xeelix acted as if he’d fully expected it. “Yes, I heard that as well.”
Then there was a single, chilling word: Kill.
I heard it again, in that sickly muffled timbre, like he was trying to speak through a mound of dead leaves. Kill.
I fought to keep my eyes from tearing up as I searched our patient for any remaining shred of his essence beneath the invading growth. I focused my thoughts on him: We understand. This will end soon. Please try to relax. It sounded so pointless—what do you say to someone whose body has been hijacked, and the only way out is death?
Still, he understood. Will try. Must do. Help. Save others.
I gulped. Xeelix seemed to be watching my reaction as closely as he was our patient. “He knows what we have to do. He said to ‘save others.’”
Xeelix locked the vial in place, activated the injector, and pressed it into the fungal mass growing out of our patient’s left ear. “That is precisely what we are doing.”
I watched as the fungicide went to work. Right away, the mass began to change color. Its edges turned gray before disintegrating into black dust. Without being told, Bjorn pulled a handheld vacuum out of his bag and began sucking up the dead spores with what amounted to an alien dustbuster. “We will follow up with a portable sterilizing boom. It is vital that all traces of contaminant be removed.” Again, he didn’t need instruction. It was obvious he’d done this before, perhaps many times. That he’d been here for the first outbreak a couple of generations earlier made me wonder exactly how old Bjorn was.
As the fungicide progressed through our patient’s body, his vitals responded in kind. There was a brief, encouraging jump, but I knew it was a false hope. His heart and lungs had responded happily to their newfound freedom, only to be stopped in their tracks by a nervous system that had been so thoroughly corrupted by parasitic spores that it could not survive their removal. Minutes later, he flatlined.
Xeelix dutifully recorded the time of death, but we weren’t finished. We had to wait for the fungicide bots to root out every trace of infestation.
I rested my hands on my hips and studied the Cetan’s isolation ward. “Do I understand this right—we have to decon the room, too? They don’t have the tools to do that?”
“They are unprepared and unwilling. They are afraid,” Bjorn said. “Understand, an isolated population such as this responds differently than their larger civilization might. The Cetan colonists tend to be risk averse.”
That made me furrow my brow in frustration. Thousands of them had committed themselves—and their offspring, which introduced a whole other moral question—to being isolated aboard a multigenerational ship going who-knows-where. Seemed like they’d be a little more risk tolerant. “So they treat this like humans treated the Plague in our Dark Ages.” I poked my head outside of the isolation curtains and studied the room in more detail. It was musty and damp, with flaked paint and traces of corrosion around the joints and seams of the environment filters embedded in its ceiling. It was especially appalling for what was supposed to be a medical ward. “Seems like they can do a lot better, given their technology level. Are these conditions typical?”
Bjorn nodded. “I’m afraid so. A single vessel can only endure for so long before it requires major overhauls.”
I’m pretty sure he intentionally left out or gets scrapped. “How long until they reach their destination?”
Bjorn’s eyes darted about as he did the math. “If memory serves, another three decades by your time reference.” He looked to be as skeptical of their chances as I was. A whole other generation would pass before then.
“Then they’ve got bigger problems. Maybe we can do something to help.” I wasn’t about to try talking the Cetans into taking the Union’s offer to get them there faster. If an Emissary couldn’t do it, what hope did I have? But still . . .
Bjorn’s cautious demeanor didn’t change; I’d only given him something new to be skeptical about. “What are you thinking?”
I tapped my foot on the floor, trying to put a plan together. “They’re committed to going the distance in this ship?”
Xeelix answered this time, just as frustrated by Cetan obstinance. “Very much so.”
I turned to Bjorn. “But they accepted Union help during the first outbreak. They’re not above taking charity.”
“If you’re thinking of supplying them with antifungals, they are reluctant to accept our standard preventative treatment.” He finished with a glance at Xeelix.
This was only getting more confusing. Were the Cetans closer to being Space Amish than I’d thought? I looked around the empty medical bay and considered the rest of this massive ship and the absolute faith they’d have had to put in it. “Why is that? People this comfortable with technology shouldn’t be averse to basic medical care.”
Xeelix answered. “You are correct. They are comfortable with more traditional standards of care, such as the invasive surgeries and chemical-based treatments you are familiar with.” He reached into his bag and pulled out yet another silvery, cigar-shaped implement.
I rolled my eyes. “Can’t blame them. What is it with you guys and the anal probes, anyway?”
Xeelix’s big eyes narrowed. “Their distrust is not about the delivery mechanism. It is about the nanobots.”
“I still don’t get why they couldn’t be persuaded. It weirded me out a little at first, too, but I dealt with it.” Despite my ribbing, releasing millions of microscopic machines to root out infections and repair tissue was a lot more effective than cutting someone open or administering a barely understood vaccine. Bad outcomes from either were rare, but they did happen. Nanobot treatments had driven the GU’s “adverse event” rate down to almost zero, but the Union was oblivious to exactly how much of a running joke their delivery system had become among UFO-skeptical humans. If either side ever knew the truth . . .
“Despite their utter dependence on technology for survival, the Cetans are what your race might call ‘Luddites.’” Xeelix swept his arms in an expansive gesture. “Being confined to this vessel, however large, has confined their development to whatever materials are aboard. There is very little margin for experimentation or growth. Without realizing it, over the generations their culture became insular. Parochial. Almost cultlike.”
Bjorn interjected. “If the Cetans didn’t bring it with them, or have the ability to replicate it themselves, they don’t trust it.”
“Not invented here.” I grunted my disapproval. “Cultural isolation will do that to you.”
“Quite so. It made for an interesting anthropological exercise . . . after the initial outbreak had passed, of course.” Bjorn studied me. “You know, their technological level is not much more advanced than your own. Perhaps a hundred years.”
“Only a hundred years?” I scoffed. “An awful lot can happen in that time.”
Xeelix inserted himself back into the conversation. “Technologically, yes. A hundred years can mark the difference between coal power and nuclear fusion. Any changes that may impart to cultural norms is largely superficial. Changing a society’s fundamentals takes much longer, unless it is compressed by extreme enough conditions.”
It made me think about the people back on Earth who were obsessed with colonizing Mars: Would they end up in a similar cultural straitjacket? This place was living proof that just because you could do something didn’t mean you should.
A chime sounded from our crystals; the nanobots had finished their work. A quick scan around the room showed no active spores; the nanobots had gone about their business like microscopic ninjas.
It was time to finish what we’d started. As Xeelix and Bjorn lifted the deceased Cetan off the bed, I pulled a tightly rolled bag out of my kit and unrolled it beneath him. We zipped him up inside and ran decon wands above and below. The whole process was silent and solemn, as familiar as if we’d been doing the same thing on Earth.
As we cleaned up the scene, stuffing bedspreads and clothing into hazmat bags, I considered everything they’d told me about this strange cult of expatriate Cetans. No one aboard had any personal memory of what home had been like. This aging colossus they lived in was their home, and would be for the foreseeable future. The end was theoretically in sight, a star still so far away that it was no more real than the light at the end of a long tunnel. They were a culture on a perpetual journey. What would it do to them when they finally made landfall? Would they embrace their new home, or cling to this artificial world in fear? If Cetan nature were anything like humans’, too many of them would opt for the latter.
Maybe this ship wouldn’t give them a choice. Maybe it’d be too far gone by that point. In the meantime we had a more immediate problem, and it was laying in the body bag before us. “If they’re as insular as you say, how quickly do you think word of this will get around?”
“Their medical service will no doubt attempt to suppress it,” Xeelix said. “And they will no doubt fail. An infection which terrifies their populace like phoetima is bound to lead at least one person to slip. Perhaps even intentionally.”
Especially intentionally, if they were anything like humans. “Word’s gonna get out. I think we all know it. And it’ll probably lead to a full-scale panic, in a confined space.”
“Yet they will not accept our prophylaxis regime,” Xeelix said. “What would you suggest?”
I rested my hands on my hips and gave the ward a final once-over. “This place needs a glow-up.”