Robert Chase: The Wellness Plague

He slept that night, listening to the wind whistling about the eaves. He dreamt that he had been taken to the most secret place on the planet, a Freehold basement where the Changeling, which had been exchanged for the Bainbridge boy, was kept. It talked of Alienists and Naturalers and Technics, its approximately human face contorted with an almost pathetic earnestness. Rey listened intently, but when he woke, all he could remember was a low growling, like that of a sick dog.

Martina’s practice was as varied as it was large. The first assignment she gave Rey was the thrice weekly first-aid course. It was conducted in the school before classes started in the morning. There were usually between five and twelve in the course. At first, Rey thought he had been given this task because Martina considered it drudgery and did not trust him with anything more complicated. He soon realized that it might be the most important part of the practice. The colonists on Far Edge were spread too far apart for even the two of them to be able to provide timely medical care in emergencies. So he taught everything from the Heimlich maneuver to CPR to setting broken bones to delivering babies.

Afterwards, there were patients. A large number of these had “women’s problems”: fertility had been a major concern since humanity had come to Skylandia, and the lack of a major satellite had distressed the menstrual cycles of every generation of women since then. There were drugs which could be used to regularize the cycles, and in households which included several women of child-bearing age, having only one of them on drugs was often enough to regularize them all by pheromone entraining.

Marty’s diagnoses and treatments clearly went beyond the guidelines established for practitioners, and were arguably even illegal. That they were necessary was beyond argument. The nearest actual doctor was in Jump Off; the nearest hospital, fifty kilometers beyond that in New Geneva. During the winter, all that distance was against the prevailing winds.

As Marty had warned him, a large proportion of his time was devoted to livestock problems. Sheep especially drew bloodbird attacks. Marty maintained two marrow machines with no other use than to continually produce fresh sheep blood to be used for transfusions. At least twice a week, Rey would find himself ministering to an exsanguinated sheep, its dirty fleece stained red at the punctures. Sometimes the bloodbird would still be attached, its ten-centimeter beak buried in the sheep’s flesh, its stomach distended as it gorged. Removing the bird was tricky. It could be killed easily enough, but the backward pointing barbs made it impossible to pull out without tearing a sizable chunk of flesh along with it.

Marty showed him a trick of breaking a bag of blood from the marrow machines over the beak at its entry to the wound. The beak closed in apparent disgust, disengaging most of the barbs. With one swift, fluid motion, Marty pulled out the beak and snapped the creature’s neck.

“Why does that work?” Rey asked.

Marty shrugged. “They don’t seem to like what comes out of the machines.” Her manner said that it was a useless question as long as it was effective.

“They’re stupid beasts,” she added. “If they had any brains, they would have realized a long time ago that we’re no good for them.” Except, of course, that a million years of evolution had taught the bloodbirds that anything of a certain size which moved was almost certainly good for them. They flew too high to be disturbed by alien scents. Human beings were recent interlopers; it would take the native fauna a while yet, perhaps aided by adolescents with homemade lasers, to associate this set of smells and colors with non-nourishing amino acids.

One week when he had seen more sheep than people, Rey found himself staring at his office data screen, wondering just how many of the creatures there could possibly be on Far Edge. The morning had been spent treating part of a flock owned by Freeholder Paabo Bhagwati. He connected with the municipal registry and had it display the extent of the Freehold. Another query brought up the size of Bhagwati’s flocks as of the last quarterly reporting period. Rey frowned at the number, surprised that it was so large. On a hunch, he called up the carrying capacity ratio established by the Ministry of Agriculture and plugged in the figures.

Marty had come back from lunch and was standing behind him, regarding his screen intently.

“Something’s wrong with the data base,” he explained. “Bhagwati claims to have almost twice as many sheep as his farm will support.”

“Maybe he’s inflated his figures to impress the bankers,” Martina suggested. She sounded distinctly unhappy. “As a general rule, the greater your collateral, the better your loan terms.”

Rey chewed his lip, thinking about that. “No,” he decided. “Any advantage would be more than offset by his higher tax rate. Besides, any bank would run the same sort of check, and would determine that he was overgrazing his land, which would make him a bad credit risk, in addition to being illegal per se.”

The phone chimed. An eleven-year-old who had been playing outside the fence near the airport cliffs had fallen and suffered a compound fracture. Rey strapped a new filter over his nose and mouth and jumped into the office’s dragonfly flitter. It was the end of the day before he returned to the clinic. A VTOL stood on the landing pad across from the entrance. Rey recognized the markings of the Bhagwati Freehold. As he stepped out of the dragonfly, he saw Paabo Bhagwati walking toward him.

“Not another bloodbird attack?” Rey groaned, feeling exhausted.

Bhagwati permitted himself a miniscule smile. “No. I am not in need of your professional services. Rather, it appears that I am still in your debt. I have heard that you are perplexed about certain aspects of my freehold.”

Marty was standing in the doorway of the clinic, her face unreadable.

“I wasn’t meaning to pry—” Rey began.

Bhagwati shook his head. “Of course not. It is just that your intelligence is not confined to your work. Come with me. I shall make things clear.”

Rey glanced quickly at Marty. She nodded. He climbed into the cockpit of the VTOL and sat next to Bhagwati. It was a large craft, smaller only than the lumbering cargo carriers which were the backbone of trade among the colonies. Its hold smelled of hay and sheep and dirt. Bhagwati touched the controls and it surged up fifty meters, where it caught the easterlies. It seemed to Rey that Bhagwati, rather than pilot the craft, simply let the winds blow the VTOL across Far Edge to his freehold. He set it down in a pasture close to the cordon, an area Rey had never seen before.

He handed Rey paper booties to protect his shoes. “It is not really dangerous if you just walk through,” he explained apologetically, “but people do tend to get nervous.”

Rey tied the string above his ankles, then followed Bhagwati out of the VTOL. The freeholder headed down the slope and stepped without hesitation into the cordon.

Rey winced and forced himself to follow. He stepped carefully over the fluorescent orange plastic tubing which extended all along the cordon’s higher, inner edge. It was Ryn-Rosenberger’s job to make sure that the poison flowed at an even rate through that tubing, that it soaked through to the bedrock and extended the mandatory fifty meters width. This had caused problems in some colonies. Stripping the slopes bare of vegetation increased erosion, sometimes drastically. The cordon, which prevented the encroachment of native fauna, would seem to become a noose pulling ever tighter.

That was not the case here, however. The land sloped gently, not to a cliff as on the airport side, but to a ridge. Rey moved quickly, telling himself that the poison was dangerous to humans only in accumulated dosages. Even if the booties were to tear, what adhered to his soles should not be unsafe. As long as he did not fall and cut himself….