Robert Chase: The Wellness Plague

“ ‘Whenever you look at Sol, think of how little you know,’ he said, ‘And consider how much of what you do know may not be so.’ ”

“Then you should be happy,” Regan said in a slightly reproving tone. “You’ve done a good job decreasing the circle of ignorance.”

Rey shook his head. “It took me forever to see the obvious. When I started putting things together, I still had no idea what sort of reaction my findings would provoke. Then when I tried to get our sanctions lifted, I pushed a man into suicide.”

“There is no point in feeling sorry about Calley-Li,” Regan said sharply. “The man was a victim of his own fears. He panicked because he thought this plague, which never did anything except make people healthier, was going to subvert our humanity.”

“He was right,” Rey said.

Even in the darkness, he felt the weight of her regard. “If you believe that,” she said at length, “then why haven’t you done everything in your power to eradicate it?”

“Because even before the plague, Calley-Li’s efforts were doomed to failure.” He took a deep breath, trying to sort through a welter of facts and emotions. “Did you ever notice how much effort is devoted in other colonies to raising the various tea crops? When you consider that we derive no nourishment from them, it’s quite extraordinary. But we do it because for a lot of people it is important that we have teas and tea times. More important than actually having food to eat.”

“So what?” Regan asked. “We can raise both.”

Rey shook his head, frustrated that he was doing such a poor job of expressing what he could see so clearly. “It’s the reason that’s important. We want to have tea ceremonials like our Japanese ancestors did; we want to have tea times like the British. We want to pretend that we are nothing more than an outpost of human empire and that everything will stay the same forever if we dress for dinner and keep the Old Earth Days traditions alive.

“The problem is that it can’t work. First of all, any isolated population soon begins to show genetic drift. The College of Apollo has statistics to show that is already happening. Because they are disconcerting, they aren’t widely known.

“More than that, though, we are evolving to fit the planet. Read the old diaries if you can’t remember the stories your grandmothers must have told you. It was very difficult for women to conceive and bring children to term during the first two generations. All that remain of that now are problems with irregular menstrual cycles. We have adapted successfully.”

“I don’t consider that a problem,” Regan said.

“I don’t either,” Rey admitted, “but Calley-Li saw further. He recognized that it is only a matter of time before we drift so far that we won’t be able to breed with humans who have settled around other stars. We will have become a separate race.

“What he learned from me was worse, though. Not only were we adapting, but the biosphere was adapting to us. Something strange and alien was making its home within us. He couldn’t have known what Martina would discover about being able to digest some native plants, but I think he imagined it. And in his imagination, humans became as ghostly and strange as the White People. We would lose our culture, our beliefs, all the memories and mental disciplines which made us human.”

“That does not have to happen,” Regan protested.

“No,” Rey agreed, “it doesn’t have to happen. But it could, very easily. I rubbed Calley-Li’s nose in it, and it was too much for him. Especially when he discovered that his own daughter was tainted by the alienness he so feared.”

He found that his eyes were wet. He wept for Calley-Li, for the dream of safely cordoned island societies, for the Old Earth they had tried so diligently to resurrect. Regan put her arm around him, comforting him.

The path had taken them to the edge of the cliff. Scents floated up from the jungle far below. It was going to be their world, Rey realized. They would change it, and it would change them, and it would be as exciting and as dangerous as it had been on Earth.

Regan was startled by his sudden laugh.

“All this time, the Naturalers said we would have to learn to live off the world to come to terms with it,” he explained. “Instead, we have become part of the world because it has learned to live off us.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is a sequel to “The Changeling Hunt,” which appeared in our July 1987 issue.