Robert Silverberg - The Trouble with Sempoanga

That night she asked him to her room. Two themes marched through his mind as they undressed. One was his admiration for her beauty, her warmth and intelligence, her desirability. And the other was zanjak , zanjak , zanjak .

What to do? By dimmed light he came to her. He imagined himself saying, “Forgive me, Marbella, but I need to know. That terrible parasite—that monstrous disease—” And he could see her turning bleak and furious as he blurted his tactless questions, demanding icily whether he thought she were the sort of woman who might deliberately hide from him anything so ghastly and shoving him into the hall, slamming the door, screaming curses after him—

He faltered. She smiled. Her eyes were bright with desire and refusing her was absurd. He drew her into his arms.

They were inseparable, night and day, the rest of the week. He had no illusions: this was only a resort-planet romance, and when his time was up he would go back to Waldemar and that would be the end of it. But it was wondrous while it lasted. She was a fine companion, and she appeared to be altogether in love with him, sincerely and a little worrisomely so. He was already rehearsing the speech he was going to have to make after breaking the news to her that business responsibilities would not permit him to extend his Sempoangan holiday beyond the five days that remained.

Then one drowsy morning as they were lying in bed he felt a dismaying internal twitch, as if some tiny supple creature were trying to swim downsteam in his urethra.

He said nothing to her. But after breakfast he invented the need to put a call through to his firm on Waldemar and, in terror, got himself off to the hotel medical office, where a blandly unsympathetic doctor processed him through the diagnostat and told him he had zanjak . “You see those little red flecks in your urine? Just a couple of microns in diameter. They’re symptomatic. And this blood sample—it’s loaded with zanjak excreta.”

Helmut shivered. “I can’t have had it more than a couple of days. Perhaps because we’ve detected it so soon—”

“Sorry. It doesn’t work that way.”

“What do I do now?” he asked tonelessly.

The doctor was already tapping data into a terminal. “We put you on the master list, first. That slaps a hold on your passport. You know about the quarantine, don’t you? If your home world is covered by the covenant, your government will pay the expenses of transferring your funds and a certain quantity of your possessions to Sempoanga. You can live in the hotel as long as you can afford to, of course. After that, you’re entitled to a rent-free room at the Quarantine Center, which is on the southern continent in a very pleasant region where the fishing is said to be superb. You’ll be asked to take part in the various test programs for cures, but otherwise you’ll be left alone.”

“I don’t believe this,” Helmut muttered.

“These harsh measures are absolutely necessary, of course. You must realize that. The parasite has passed through your genitourinary tract and has taken up residence in your bloodstream, where it’s busy filling you with threadlike reproductive bodies known as microfilariae. Whenever you have sexual relations with a woman—or with another man, for that matter, or with any mammalian organism at all—you’ll inevitably transmit microfilariae. If the organism you infect is female, the microfilariae will travel in a few weeks to the ovaries, infiltrate unfertilized eggs and impose their own genetic material by a process we call pseudofertilization, causing the eggs to mature into hybrids, part zanjak and part host-species. What appears to be a normal pregnancy follows, though the term is only about twelve weeks in human hosts; offspring are born in litters, adapted quite cunningly to penetrate whatever ecosphere they find themselves in.”

“All right. Don’t tell me any more.”

“No need to. You see the picture. These things could take over the universe if they ever got beyond Sempoanga.”

“Then Sempoanga should be closed to interplanetary travel!”

“Ah, but this is a major resort area! Besides, the quarantine is one hundred percent effective. If only new tourists were not so careless or unethical as they seem to be, we would isolate all cases in a matter of weeks and after that—”

“I thought I was being careful!”

“Not careful enough, it seems.”

“And you? Don’t you worry about getting it?”

The doctor gave Helmut a scathing look. “When I was a small child, I learned quickly not to put my fingers into electrical sockets. I conduct my sexual activities with the same philosophy. Good morning, Mr. Schweid. I’ll have your quarantine documents sent round to your room when they’re ready.”

Numbed, staggering, Helmut wandered in a lurching dazed way over the hotel’s vast grounds, looking for Marbella. He felt unclean and outcast; he could not bear to look at any of the other guests who amiably greeted him as he went by; he yearned to thrust his fouled body into a vat of corrosive acid. Infected! Quarantined! Exiled, maybe forever, from his home! No. No. It went beyond all comprehension. That he, that precise and intelligent and meticulous man, with his insurance policies and his alarm systems and his annual medical checkups, should—should have—

He found her watching a game of body-tennis, caught her by the wrist from behind and whispered savagely, “I’ve got zanjak!”

She looked at him, startled. “Of course you do, love.”

“You say it so casually? You let me believe you were clean!”

“Yes. Certainly. I knew you were already infected, even if you didn’t. Since you apparently didn’t know it yourself then, you’d never have gone to bed with me if I admitted I was carrying. And I wanted you so much, love. I’d have told any kind of harmless little lie then for the sake of—”

“Wait a minute. What do you mean, you knew I was already carrying?”

“That blonde bitch from Rigel, the night before you and I met—I saw the two of you together at dinner. I had my eye on you even then, you know. And I could tell that that unscrupulous little tramp would conceal from you that she was carrying. When I saw you go off to her room with her, I knew you’d be joining the club.”

Icily he said, “I didn’t sleep with her, Marbella.”

“What? But I was sure—”

“You were, were you?” He laughed bitterly. “I walked her home and she told me she was a carrier and I kissed her goodnight and went away. You can’t catch it from a kiss, can you? Can you?”

“No,” she said in a very small voice.

“So you knowingly and shamelessly gave me a hideous incurable disease because you had decided I had been dumb enough to sleep with someone who was carrying it. I guess you were right about that, in a way.”

She turned away, looking stricken. “Helmut, please—if you knew how sorry I am—”

“No sorrier than I am. Do you realize I’m quarantined here, and maybe for life?”

She shrugged. “Well, yes. So am I. There are worse places to spend one’s life.”

“I ought to kill you!”

She began to tremble. “I suppose I’d deserve it. Oh, Helmut—I was so completely fascinated by you—I didn’t want to take the slightest risk of losing you. I should have waited until the infection I thought you got from her had showed itself. Then it wouldn’t have mattered. But I couldn’t wait—I tried, I couldn’t—and I figured that we’d fall in love and by the time your zanjak showed it would be all right for me to admit that I had it, too.”

He was silent a long moment. Then he said, “Maybe you figured that even if I didn’t have it, you’d give it to me, by way of making absolutely sure I’d be stuck here on Sempoanga?”