Strangers. Part 6

"Don't take too long to make up your mind. If you pay your taxes, he leaves you alone -- until he decides to raise the tax." His face twisted. "Declare for us, and we'll probably be too late to protect you when Solante's people come to burn you out."

"What will you do if you win?"

"Call for an interim council to run the city until a proper parliament is elected under the planetary charter."

"With you as its head?"

He actually blanched. "No," he said shortly. He stood. "I've unsettled things here. Give my regrets to the Ms. Charmmeses please, Ms. Annia." He bowed -- a strikingly un-native gesture -- and jerked his head at the duffel on the deck beside Maycee and Cho'en's shelter. "The bag is clothes for you. My lieutenant Dess said you'd want to get out of the FS coverall before somebody got ideas about collecting a bounty. Consider it partial payment for helping Mr. Conrad today. See what's there for the clones, too, and what doesn't fit, you can send back to the clinic with Cho'en."

Maycee returned from the waterfront as the gate clacked behind Baldwin. The bells on her ears made regretful sounds. "We behaved rather badly, didn't we? Cho and I can't seem to talk to Baldwin without quarreling."

"What will you do if this one-planet crime lord starts demanding money?"

Maycee sat down, cross-legged on the deck in front of her shelter. "It isn't worth talking about."

"Cho'en thinks you should pay?"

Maycee made a wry gesture with her hand. Silver bells tinkled on her black-scaled wrist. "She thinks we ought to throw in with Baldwin and his rabble and make a stand for justice. Gaeans." She rolled her eyes.

A pair of gaily-colored catpils swarmed up the foundation posts of the platform and bundled together in Maycee's lap. She scratched their muzzles, and they clicked approval.

Annia glimpsed a flash of luminous white from the corner of her eye, an early sneakdilly flapping on downy wings in search of prey. The cousins had warned her about the winged predators. She hoped the catpils hadn't stuffed themselves insensible on mudrimples.

As the sun doused its last orange drop behind the trees, the sneakdillies tracked human pheromones to the shelter and began to swarm. Cho'en paced up the boardwalk from the water shaking her crest to discourage the flesh-hungry predators. The male clone jogged behind her with his head down.

Catpils galloped, clicking, up the hill at Cho'en's feet. The big grey reared almost a meter into the air with only its last two sets of toe-feet gripping the moss. It swayed for a moment, waving its long mouthpart. It sprang into the air like a whip and came down on all thirty toes with a sneakdilly trapped in its flexible mouth. Bony mandibles concealed behind the proboscis crunched, and the flying predator was gone.

Cho'en mounted the deck and squatted on the planks. Puffy climbed up her tail and over her back. It settled on her shoulders and peered about for flapping, white wings.

Annia started to rise as the clones approached the deck.

Maycee stopped her. "Don't put them to bed yet. We entered all the catpils in their "friends" database and the sneakdillies under "enemies." I want to see how they deal with the new programming."

Three catpils from Annia's lot followed the others up the supports to the deck and waved their long, flexible proboscises. The red-and-white striped catpil stood on its hindmost toe-feet and swayed until Annia picked it up and laid it across her shoulders. It turned to track a sneakdilly that flapped too close to Annia's head.

Two more animals curled nervously together and tested the air with their mouth parts. Finally, the larger of the two, sky-blue with green, leaf-shaped markings, inch- wormed hesitantly closer to the XY. It leaned against his knee.

The clone peered at the three-eyed face.

The catpil dug its toe-feet into the fabric of the male's trousers and rippled warily upward.

The clone watched the catpil climb his s.h.i.+rt and turned his head to watch it settle across his shoulders.

The last catpil curled in a blue-and-orange polkadot bundle and cried.

Maycee winced. "The clone attacked poor Dot three times this morning. Dot's afraid to climb up."

Cho'en picked up the spotted catpil, stroked it with one bronze-skinned, disconcertingly human hand. As it uncurled, she set it on the female's lap.

The female accessed her crystal and looked down at the three-eyed face.

The catpil climbed warily to the clone's shoulder. It achieved its post and stretched its proboscis. It clicked.

Maycee sighed. "Let's all hope they don't make any sudden moves. The crystals don't cover that, and I don't know what we would use to condition them."

Annia said, "It's really my problem to deal with."

Cho'en blew through her nostrils. "Problem for efferyone near thehm." Annia was becoming accustomed to her lipless speech.

Maycee said, "They're interesting company for us. I haven't had a really challenging logical problem since we left Firstep."

The catpil on the XX's shoulder spied a sneakdilly fluttering near the clone's head. It squeezed itself into a short, fat tube and tensed to spring.

Maycee sat up. "Look out, Dot's going to..."

The catpil shot up at its fluttering prey, elongating to almost twice its resting length.

The XX recoiled, swatted the catpil from her shoulder and leaped off the deck. She lunged at the catpil, then stopped. She frowned.

Maycee looked pleased. "She found Dot in her database. If we could just get her to store long-term memories, she would get used to the catpils hunting."

"Barracks," Annia said. She got the male up and set him in motion toward the other shelter.

Maycee said a little sadly, "You don't have to go. Come back and sit with us when you've put them to bed."

"I need to get up early tomorrow." Annia could think of no particular reason to do so. She had nothing to do, nowhere to go, no more resources to try. The crystal with the century plague data might as well be useless.

"Sleep cycle," she said to the clones.

They accessed their crystals in tandem -- identical head tilts -- and went to their shelter.

As Annia mounted the deck behind them, Candy, the red-and-white striped catpil, jumped from her shoulder to the deck and joined Dot in a swaying, upright dance. They waved their flexible mouth parts in the air sensing for sneakdillies. The blue-and-green catpil left the male's shoulders and galloped ahead of him into the shelter.

In the closed s.p.a.ce of the sleeping cabinet, Annia tuned out the breathing of the clones and focused instead on sounds outside the shelter: the catpils clicking, the thump and tack when they jumped for prey, the velvet bat of sneakdilly wings on the roof of the shelter. Further away, mudrimples sang in bubbling squeaks.

She curled on her side and bundled the blanket against her forehead. There was very little century plague data available without top level clearance, but she had been able to find a list of symptoms. The fever and violent immune response came first. Within six hours, the victim's immune system would collapse, giving the virus free reign. The virus would attack and colonize the unprotected host cells, use them to replicate itself. Eventually, the replicated virus would rupture the cell wall and expand into the host's lungs and skin where it could spread to fresh hosts. The whole sequence lasted barely thirty hours from the initial symptoms to inevitable death.

The disease was supposed to have evolved in response to extensive use of anti- viral drugs, and it replicated faster than the human immune system could adapt. By the time the victims realized they had a serious infection, they would already have pa.s.sed the plague to their families, colleagues, even some of their pets. She'd seen history recordings of death camps stretching as far as the recorder could focus. She knew of ten planets in the Federated Systems alone that had been quarantined and interdicted ever since the first outbreak two-hundred years ago, twenty more after the second outbreak a century later.

Century plague research had been made illegal after the last outbreak for fear that even a controlled laboratory strain might escape and eradicate human life in the habitable universe. Even to study it in computer-aided simulation was punishable by death under some circ.u.mstances. That was why the medical review board on Ifni had suppressed her discovery and a.s.signed her to Indentured Service where private research of any kind could earn her execution. They hadn't even notified her that her application for a research grant was denied. There'd been a frantic three days trying to track down the right officials because surely the indenture notice in her mail file was a mistake; she wasn't due for the lottery for at least another half-year. In the end, she had barely time to secure and conceal her data before a press gang showed up at her door on the university research campus and informed her that she had been selected by lottery for indentured service to the Federation.

Annia had lived the last seven years driving away everyone who offered her friends.h.i.+p. It hadn't been difficult. Growing up in the peer dorms on Ifni, privacy was the invisible wall she had learned to build around herself, and she was used to isolation. It was necessary. As long as she continued her research, she was at risk of discovery. It would be too easy to let herself trust someone, to share the burden of her secret in a moment of weakness. There was no loyalty among indentured personnel. The other doctors and indentured staff could get a better placement or years reduced from their indenture for reporting her.

She could have been executed just for registering the anomalous gene sequence in the first place. Eighty years had not been long enough to rob the specter of century plague of it lasting terror.

What no one realized despite its telling name was that century plague had a hibernation period of four generations so that it emerged approximately every hundred years. They thought quarantine had stopped it. They were wrong. The plague had simply killed every living soul on a hundred planets and gone into hibernation again. If she was right, the disease was due to come out of hibernation in less than twenty years.

Now she had freed herself and saved her data, and she couldn't get the few weeks of lab time she needed to prove her theory

Chapter 5.

The child had run into a nest of sneakdillies. Bleeding bites marked her arms and legs and the back of her neck. Sneakdillies had sharp, four-part mandibles that cut millimeter bites of flesh from their prey. Catpils kept the pests away, but the catpils themselves wouldn't stay or spore in crowded, noisy or dirty quarters -- exactly the kind of places that attracted sneakdillies.

The mother was young, hardly out of her teens. "I'm sure glad to have a real doctor. I never did like having some kind of lizard look at my kids." Her long, brown hair was clean and closely braided. She wore a dress of thin fabric with a faded floral print, but it was clean and neatly mended. The worn-soft texture of her face was out of place on such a young woman.

The child had probably put on a clean smock that morning. This afternoon, it was stained with blood and dirt. She was thin and looked like she would benefit from a vitamin supplement, but she didn't have the dreary expression of poverty. When Annia had anesthetized a critical ma.s.s of the painful bites, the child stopped sniffling and began to point out bites she thought Annia might have missed.

The mother said, "I never understood why they let an alien work here anyway. It stands to reason an alien wouldn't know as much about treating humans as a human would."

Annia said, "The clinic belongs to Cho'en, and she has more than a hundred years of experience treating humans."

The woman stared. "What does she want out of it?"

"To be of use to her neighbors, I suppose," Annia said.

The woman shook her head. "There's something to it. An alien doesn't start a hospital for humans unless she has some kind of ideas. You'd better take over now you're here. Let the alien go back to her own kind."

Human-chauvinism was the most obnoxious facet of procreationist theology. The other tenets of their belief system were merely silly. They believed the universe had been created in a great explosion by an omnipotent being they called the Big Bang. The emphasis on large families had attached itself to the movement around the time of the last outbreak of century plague. The woman's face dropped when Annia demanded seven credits for the treatment. "The alien never charged so much."

"Cho'en is half gaean," Annia said.

"That's true," the woman said. She paid in Union currency and counted each coin into Annia's palm. "Is it always going to be so much?"

"You're paying for medical supplies like gel and antiseptic as well as my services. Cho'en may charge a different rate. Gaean medicine is different." Cho'en rarely charged anything at all, though she took goods in trade if her patients could afford it. Annia let the woman and her child find their own way out.

The clinic's lab had been a storage s.p.a.ce before Annia took it for her work. There was room to stand and turn around and a shelf that served as a desk and worktable. Annia propped the door open for fear she might suffocate over her sequencer. From her corner, she would be able to hear the bells if the front door opened.

She changed crystals, ran the gene mapping program on another sample. She'd been running just such a program on reproductive tissue of certain isolated gene pools for her graduate research project when she first saw the anomalous virus reconstructed on her monitor. Thinking she had a contaminated tissue sample, she had deleted it and tried the next sample in the series. The same series formed in the field. At first, she'd only been mildly curious. A virus had spliced itself into a human chromosome and gone dormant. It wasn't a remarkable occurrence. This was an unusually complete sequence, but that was not alarming in itself. It was strange that the sequence appeared only in the reproductive cells and nowhere else in the host, but that explained why it hadn't been tagged before.

Standard procedure in such cases was to run the sequence through a pattern- matching program and tag it for the database. However, instead of identifying the virus, or -- more rarely -- cla.s.sing it as a previously unrecorded sequence, the computer had returned, "Restricted data. Cease inquiry."

"Why?" Annia asked.

"Restricted data."

She almost flushed the sample and forgot about it. Then she reconsidered, saved it to a crystal with the idea that she might look it over in her spare time.

Annia had, in her first week at Cho'en's clinic, become so conditioned by the bells on the street door that when she heard their flat jangle, she automatically rose from her seat.

The two men in the admissions room weren't patients. Blue belts circled their hips and trailed fringed ends nearly to the buckles at their knees.

She hadn't been long in Murrayville, but she'd learned to recognize the sashes as the uniform of Solante's police. General Baldwin's militia had brought two more of their victims to the clinic with fractures and contusions in the last week. She said, "You don't look injured or ill."

The lieutenant in the blue cap had led the gang beating Mr. Conrad on Annia's first full day in Murrayville. He crossed his ankles and bobbed. The gesture lost its charm when he did it. "We're sent to fetch you."

"I don't make sick calls."

The one with the cap bobbed again, a starkly ironic gesture. "We're sent to fetch you."

The menace in their shoulders and curled hands reminded Annia of her clones in an anxious mood. Suddenly, she wanted their company.

"Do you suppose it would help if I brought a fie