Rob Chilson - Refuge

“I don’t know, Doctor. She said,” he gulped, “it could be fatal if it crossed the blood-brain barrier. It’s-it’s affecting her mind. She’s had th-this low-level fever and lethargy, with occasional muscular aches and pains, for a long time.”

“Vomiting? Night sweats?” asked Dr. Li tensely.

“I don’t know. She-she didn’t want to worry me.”

They looked outraged; he should know.

“There’s a number of things it could be,” said Dr. Li unhappily. “I have a few ideas, though-”

“So do I!” said Dr. Powell sourly. “Look here, young fella, I don’t doubt that accent caused you many a pain, but you’d better doff it in here. It antagonizes too many people.”

“He can’t,” said Dr. Li expressionlessly. “He’s a real Spacer.”

Dr. Powell and the nurse goggled. “Impossible! A Spacer running around on Earth? He’d drop down dead of -”

The doctors whirled to look at Ariel. Frowning, the nurse stepped out. “It could be any of a hundred common and harmless diseases!” said Dr. Powell.

“Yes! Harmless to Earth people!”

“How about yourself, young man? Do you feel all right?”

Derec nodded. “Never better.”

“Why, then?” Dr. Powell exploded. “You should be sick a dozen times over!”

“I’ve been given a prophylactic regimen-so has Ariel,” said Derec, hoping they wouldn’t ask too many questions. “I don’t know too much about it.”

“Apparently it didn’t take in her case,” said Dr. Li somberly. “You let us know the moment you feel unwell, young man.”

“They can’t be Spacers,” said the nurse grimly, holding Ariel’s ID tag in her hand. “How could they be, and travel around Earth? Without ration cards, ID, and so on? This is perfectly ordinary Earth ID, City of St. Louis-”

They looked at him, frowning harder, and Derec felt himself hot…not to mention sweating. “That’s all arranged, sir. It’s part of a trade agreement…we’re doing sociological research…”

“So young?”

“Who notices a kid?” he countered swiftly, feeling the hair clammy against his forehead. “Young eyes see more sharply…and so on.”

“Hummph! No child of mine would take such a risk-”

“Maybe we’d better query the Terries,” said Dr. Li reluctantly.

They all looked concerned.

Derec questioned them with his eyes, but finally had to break down and ask. “The who?”

“The Terries-Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation,” said Dr. Powell. He polished his panes unhappily.

“They cause more trouble than-” muttered the nurse.

“Still, best to take no chances. If the girl is in a bad way, it could cause trouble with the Spacers-there’s enough bad blood between us already.”

Derec thought swiftly, appalled. The “Terries” would find no record of them, would query whatever Spacer representation there might be on Earth, find no record there, and the reactor would flash over. But he couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“Look-”

Ariel moaned and turned partly on her side; only the straps kept her from falling. If she’d been listening, she couldn’t have timed it better. All three Earthers leaped to her, and Derec pocketed the ID tag the nurse had put down.

He thought quickly. The doctors were concerned and totally focused on Ariel. Derec looked around. As he recalled R. David’s work, the ID tag merely gave name and ID workup. Not address. Medical care was on an as-needed basis, not rationed, so nobody cared about place of residence, and in fact they hadn’t been required to enter that. (Or was that because Ariel’s tag gave her rating as Transient? He needed to know a lot more about Earth.)

In any case, he thought, the only thing they knew about Ariel was what the computer recorded from the ID tag.

Leaving them working over her, he slipped out and strolled around, speaking to no one, trying to look like a worried, expectant father pretending to be nonchalant. A couple of people looked at him sympathetically, but most didn’t seem to notice him at all, for which he was grateful.

There it was. An office. He slipped in, looked at the terminal. It was probably dedicated to a single function, but he could try. He had watched R. David coding ID tags of a dozen kinds, and had a good grasp of what was implied. And frankly, these computers were simple after programming positronic brains and restructuring the programming of the central computer of Robot City. It took him a mere half hour to get through the programming, retrieve the record on Ariel, and erase it.

Now let’s hope there isn’t a backup memory somewhere, he thought gloomily.

They caught up with him in the interior waiting room, standing aimlessly about and unobstrusively slipping toward the outer waiting room, where he supposed he belonged.

“There you are,” said the nurse. For the first time, he noted that her jacket had a name label imprinted Korolenko, J . “Why didn’t you wait in the Friends’ Lounge?”

He didn’t bother to tell her they hadn’t shown him to it. “Had to go to the Personal,” he said, not knowing if Earthers could mention the Personal so openly.

She got ideas, frowned, put something warm from her pocket against his head. Apparently his temperature was all right. “Very well. But come in here. The doctors will need to speak to you.”

Within ten minutes Dr. Li entered the room briskly, sat down, exhaled heavily. “She had us worried, but it was mostly exhaustion of the body’s resources. Starvation, to put it crudely. She must have been going on nerves and caffeine for weeks.”

“She hasn’t been eating well,” Derec admitted. He’d been blind not to see how little she’d been eating. “What does she have?”

“We’ll know for sure in a day; we’ve done a culture. But our best guess is amnemonic plague.”

“Ay…nuhmonic…?”

“From medieval mnemonic, meaning memory. Amnemonic means no memory. It’s a mutation of an old influenza virus, first reported on one of the Settler worlds-sometimes called Burundi’s Fever, after the discoverer.” She looked at him sharply, but clearly that name meant no more to Derec than the first.

“Will she-get better?”

Dr Li sighed. “When Burundi ‘s crosses the blood-brain barrier, it isn’t good. We’re giving her support-nourishment and so on-and antibiotics that eventually will cure the disease. Our anti-virals are fairly effective, except where the virus has crossed the blood-brain barrier. Antibodies will help a little,” and we’re administering them. We’ll be able to stop the infection in all but her brain within a day or two.”

Derec had the illusion that his chest had turned into a block of wood. His heart pushed once, hard, against its unyielding surroundings, and gave up. He felt it stop moving. “Her…brain?”

Dr. Li sighed and looked four hundred years old. “There’s hope. It’s by no means over. I do wish we’d gotten at her sooner…Well, try not to feel guilty; and I’m sorry if I made you feel worse. You couldn’t have known. All kids are heedless, think they’ll live forever…” She brooded on her capable hands for a moment. “Then you think she’ll live?”

“Let’s say, I have a good hope of it. Saul-Dr. Morovan -is a specialist on viruses and has treated amnemonic plague three times, twice successfully-and the third time was a patient whose disease had advanced much farther than your wife’s.”

Derec suspected that the symptoms of the other two had been much less advanced than Ariel’s, but said nothing. It was something, he acknowledged, that they knew the disease, had a cure for it, and had hope for her. Of course, he thought, we were fools-chauvinistic fools-to assume that the Spacer worlds were the only ones that knew anything about medicine. Who but Earth, incubator of virtually every disease known to mankind, would know more about medicine? Among the Spacer worlds, he supposed, amnemonic plague was invariably fatal when it crossed the blood-brain barrier…